MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gyniiggh6656 | 2025-11-25 08:45:50+00:00
It seems you’ve read too much general OpenBSD hype material and too little specific information about details like the filesystem. The OpenBSD filesystem notoriously lacks journalling support. It used to support soft updates, but that got removed too. There are no seatbelts. If you suddenly lose power, there is a high likelihood you lose data. OpenBSD is notorious for it.
by intended | 2025-11-25 08:48:32+00:00
Increase spending on schools by an order of magnitude and it would be possible.

All of schooling breaks down to costs and society’s willingness and desire to invest in child nutrition, education, and training.

We simply do not even have the wherewithal to have the conversation about it, without getting blackholed by cultural minefields and assumptions of child rearing, parental responsibility, morality and religion.
by fsloth | 2025-11-25 08:48:54+00:00
I get the feeling author would just like to use a better language, like F# or Ocaml, and completely misses the point what makes C++ valuable.

C++ is valuable, because the existing tooling enables you to optimize the runtime peformance of a program (usually you end up with figuring out the best memory layout and utilization).

C++ is valuable becaus it's industry support guarantees code bases live for decades _without the need to modify them_ to latest standards.

C++ is valuable because the industry tooling allows you to verify large areas of the program behaviour at runtime (ASAN etc).

I simply don't understand what type of industrial use this type of theoretical abstraction building serves.

Using the metaprogramming features makes code bases extremly hard to modify and they don't actually protect from a category of runtime errors. I'm speaking from experience.

I would much rather have a codebase with a bit more boilerplate, a bit more unit tests and strong integration testing suite.

The longer I use C++ the more I'm convinced something like Orthodox C++ is the best method to approach the language https://bkaradzic.github.io/posts/orthodoxc++/

This keeps the code maintainable, and performant (with less effor than metaprogramming directed C++).

Note: the above is just an opinion, with a very strong YMMV flavour, coming from two decades in CAD, real time graphics and embedded development.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 08:49:07+00:00
Tons. Top of my head: native OpenStreetMaps (with offline maps, support for GPS and compass, turn-by-turn navigation), every single transit app, banking apps, and - of course - the camera app.

The point about online banking is a bit dubious, but all my banks have decided that the Android app may conduct online banking alone, and it may verify a desktop session; but not the other way around.
by lxgr | 2025-11-25 08:49:21+00:00
Wrong layer.

SSDs know which blocks have been written to a lot, have been giving a lot of read errors before etc., and often even have heterogeneous storages (such as a bit of SLC for burst writing next to a bunch of MLC for density).

They can spend ECC bits much more efficiently with that information than a file system ever could, which usually sees the storage as a flat, linear array of blocks.
by laughing_man | 2025-11-25 08:50:52+00:00
When I bought a new Windows 11 machine I foolishly copied over my data from the last machine without doing any research. It was only after I was done that I realized by default Windows copies my user directory to Microsoft's "cloud", so all my tax returns and other personal data are bouncing around Microsoft's servers somewhere. I sure hope their security is good.

By default Windows shows ads in my start menu. It also shows me ads in my notifications. I guess I could understand if it was free, but it's not.

And then there's Copilot...
by michaelanckaert | 2025-11-25 08:51:31+00:00
Personally I find the information density of text to be the "killer feature". I've tried voice interaction (even built some AI Voice Agents) and while they are very powerful, easy to use and just plain cool, they are also slow. Nothing beats skimming over a generated text response and just picking out chunks of text, going back and forth, rereading, etc. Text is also universal, I can't copy-paste a voice response to another application/interface or iterate over it.

My personal view is that the search for a better AI User Interface is just the further dumbing down of the humans who use these interface. Another comment mentioned that the most popular platforms are people pointing fingers at pictures and without a similar UI/UX AI would never reach such adoption rates, but is that what we want? Monkeys pointing at colorful picture blobs?
by hapless | 2025-11-25 08:51:55+00:00
I just today deployed an $800 mikrotik in my house that can route 10 gbps at wire speed. on the CPU. with firewall and nat rules applied. no joke. 4 million packets per second is, like, a lot, post-filtering and with any substantial packet size.

This was doable back in 2008 with about $15k of x86 gear and a Linux kernel and a little trickery with pf_ring. The minute AMD K10 and Intel Nehalem dropped, high routing performance was mostly a software problem... Which is cool as hell, compared to the era when it required elaborate dedicated hardware, but it does not make it cheap or easy. Just, commodity. Expensive commodity.

Now you can buy a device off the shelf for $800 that will do it on the CPU, to avoid the cost of Cisco or Juniper, and it has a super simple configuration interface for all the software-based features. Everything you could do in L3/L4 on a Linux platform in 2008, for like, 1/16th the price, with vastly less engineering effort. It is just like, a thing you buy, and it all kinda works outta the box.

No pf_ring trickery, no deep in-house experience, just a box you buy on a web site and it moves 10 gbps with filtering for $800

There's no real magic here: they use absolutely shockingly enormous ARM chips from Amazon/Annapurna. You can build an $800 commodity platform that rivals a $15k commodity platform in 2008, and both of them replace what used to cost $500k.

Is it as good as Cisco or Juniper? oh, certainly not. Will it route and filter traffic at much greater rates, for $800, than anything they have ever been bothered to offer? ABSOLUTELY
by fsflover | 2025-11-25 08:52:03+00:00
Actually, yes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816

And this one got cancelled after a huge public outcry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202. Also, Apple never said that it's fully cancelled.
by tippa123 | 2025-11-25 08:52:30+00:00
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but wouldn’t this be similar to an instinct that is preprogrammed from natural selection? For example, sea turtles know they need to move from the beach toward the ocean, and spiders know how to spin their species specific web pattern. No-one teaches the sea turtles or spiders how to do this. Wouldn't this be the same for our thoughts and thinking?
by elliotec | 2025-11-25 08:53:31+00:00
My honest review - Kagi is really, really great. Been using it almost a year now.

The search results are much more relevant, there are no ads or hallucinated BS AI summaries at the top, and you're not giving Google your data (and money) to further enshittify the world.

There are features I haven't tried yet so can't speak to them, but that's my very general take on the default kagi experience.
by stingraycharles | 2025-11-25 08:53:36+00:00
Skills are good for context management as everything that happens while executing the skill remains “invisible” to the parent context, but they do inherit the parent context. So it’s pretty effective for a certain set of problems.

MCP is completely different, I don’t understand why people keep comparing the two. A skill cannot connect to your Slack server.

Skills are more similar to sub-agents, the main difference being context inheritance. Sub-agents enable you to set a different system prompt for those which is super useful.
by xboxnolifes | 2025-11-25 08:53:39+00:00
> At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts. You can't gamify your way out of education, despite our best attempts to do so.

I don't know if we'll ever be successful, but the entire point of gamification is to make the rote parts more palatable. A lot of gamification techniques try to model after MMO gaming for a reason, as that's a genre where people willingly subject themselves to a lot of rote tasks.
by trashtester | 2025-11-25 08:53:47+00:00
Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this.

The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work.

Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school.

But students that are worried that they will be targeted can also do this themselves, by setting up their phone to film them while working.

And if they do this, and the teacher tries to punish someone who can prove they wrote the essay themselves, either the teacher or the school should hopefully learn that such tools can't be trusted.
by sieve | 2025-11-25 08:54:01+00:00
The issues with subscriptions to streaming services are manifold (if you ignore the gargantuan waste of time that mindless TV-watching is):

- the UI is deliberately crap

- the library is deliberately incomplete

- accessing content is deliberately complicated

I had an experience recently where my phone provider bundles 20+ OTT services in a single plan within a single app that runs on your TV/phone/browser. The kicker: you can add stuff to a watch list, but the watch list is never exposed anywhere. While they want you to pay for stuff, they do not want you to be choosy about it.

YT has, to my mind, the best user interface of all the services I have tried.
by gf000 | 2025-11-25 08:54:13+00:00
This is not true in the general case. E.g. setting a field to true from potentially multiple threads can be a completely meaningful operation e.g. if you only care about if ANY of the threads have finished execution.

It depends on the platform though (e.g. in Java it is guaranteed that there is no tearing [1]).

[1] In OpenJDK. The JVM spec itself only guarantees it for 32-bit primitives and references, but given that 64-bit CPUs can cheaply/freely write a 64-bit value atomically, that's how it's implemented.
by csomar | 2025-11-25 08:54:25+00:00
The earth is flat until you have evidence of the contrary. It's you who should provide that evidence. We had physics, navigation and then space shuttles that clearly showed the earth is not flat.

We are yet to have a fully vibe-coded piece of software that actually works. The blog post is actually great because LLMs are very good are regurgitating pieces of code that already exist on a single prompt. Now ask them to make a few changes and suddenly the genie is back in the bottle.

Something doesn't math out. You can't be both a genius and extremely dumb (retarded) at the same time. You can be, however, good at information retrieval and presenting it in a better way. That's what LLMs are and am not discounting the usefulness of that.
by jltsiren | 2025-11-25 08:54:44+00:00
That system already exists. It's called the industry. It spends an order of magnitude more on R&D than the academia, and it also pays you better. And if you are young, the career options are less risky.

Academic research is mostly about topics that don't make sense in other contexts. Maybe they are too exploratory or too unpredictable, or the applications are too far away. Or maybe there is no plausible way to extract value from the applications.
by dilawar | 2025-11-25 08:54:59+00:00
Something similar: Kolmogorov complexity.

There is a finite size program that can generate infinite digits of pi (in infinite time). Kolmogorov's complexity of pi is finite even when the object is infinite.

It's not very surprising that it takes a few GB of a program to encode conscious 'us'. Humbling to think about it though...
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-25 08:55:32+00:00
The parent post is getting flack, but it’s hard to see why it is controversial. I have heard “women want a man who will provide and protect” from every single woman I have ever dated or been married to, from every female friend with whom I could have such deep conversations, and from the literature I read in my anthropology-adjacent academic field. At some point one feels one has enough data to reasonably assume it’s a heterosexual human universal (in the typological sense, i.e. not denying the existence of many exceptions).

I can believe that many women are having a hard time under modernity, because so many men no longer feel bound by the former expectations of old-school protector and provider behavior. Some men, like me, now view relationships as two autonomous individuals coming together to share sublime things like hobbies, art or travel, but don’t want to be viewed as a source of security. Other men might be just extracting casual sex from women and then will quickly move on. There’s much less social pressure on men to act a certain way, which in turn impacts on what women experience.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 08:55:59+00:00
I can conceive a couple of ways.

GrapheneOS-style sand-boxing for every app is long overdue in Linux. I'd love to have it's granular permissions for every single service. I'd love to have the battery management, the unified settings UI, the effortless disk encryption UX and key management.

Could you build it with SE Linux and a lot of glue? Yes, but nobody has. And doing it well, everywhere, would take a lot of hours.
by general1465 | 2025-11-25 08:56:02+00:00
Same for me, I remember trying to configure cron to run a task periodically and it just did not budge. No error but also did not work. Systemd was working on first attempt with basic debugging when timer will be triggered again and what is the log of executed process after it has been triggered. Also manually triggering something to test if command is correct? Awesome.
by avidiax | 2025-11-25 08:56:50+00:00
Why not put a resistor (for heating) and a bit of foam insulation on the crystal?

This is way more direct than spacebar heating.

You could also add a transistor attached to the resistor and a GPIO and use the clock drift as a proxy for temperature. PID is probably enough but since you have a 24 hour cycle you could calculate a baseline heating schedule.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-25 08:58:21+00:00
> He said "Entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid need to be eliminated."

The only thing on the internet that search engines turn up for that exact quote is your post. Here's the actual quote:

> “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe six, 700 billion,” Musk said on Monday in an interview with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow. Musk’s comments came in response to a question from Kudlow about whether there would be a report on targeting waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending.

Medicare is around a trillion dollars by itself, so those numbers don't make any sense as the removal of entire programs, but total entitlement spending is several trillion in total and a reduction in those amounts would make sense in the context of targeting waste, fraud and abuse in entitlement spending, which is the thing he was being asked about.
by signa11 | 2025-11-25 08:58:30+00:00
> ... Cathedral is a better model than the Bazaar ...

well, for the desktop possible choices from the `Cathedral` are:

- windows, and - macos

of late, both seem to have gone in directions that are antithetical to what $random user wants f.e. pushing ai-features, tahoe ui snafu respectively etc. etc.

in `Bazaar` mode, xfce has been an *excellent* choice for quite a while now, and should probably serve `Cathedral` refugees quite well.

all in all, not super convinced of the argument that you seem to be proffering here.
by benrutter | 2025-11-25 08:59:43+00:00
I used Kagi for a few months, it was the best search experiemce I've seen, but in the end I decided I didn't value that enough. I use Ecosia now, it's fine- worse, but free.

I guess it's down to you how much you value web search. Kagi does have an AI tool as well, but I didn't use this and don't use AI search anyway, so can't comment on how it compares.
by idiomaddict | 2025-11-25 09:00:13+00:00
The longer I think about it, the worse it gets.

It’s not foolproof, but I can easily transmit a huge amount of information to someone by saying “Titanic prow king of the world scene.” In seven words, which could be fewer if I were really trying, the recipient has a moving image and sound in their head (as long as they’re the right age group- every example I could think of made me feel old).
by windward | 2025-11-25 09:00:21+00:00
ZSTs are a choice, if you're not benefiting from them in development time or correctness, why are you making that choice?

Rust isn't just C++ with static analysis. The safety is only about 1/3 of what makes me enjoy working with it. Even if I just consider the effort taken before I present something to a compiler, the trait system means I don't spend anywhere near as much time writing copy/copy assignment/move/move assignment constructors.

Some of that 2/3 will be me making choices like ZSTs, but I believe that's a result of it being necessary to grok the whole language and style and the idioms. If I just try to write C in Rust, it will be bad Rust and I'll have a bad time - but the same goes for just writing C++ as C with classes. I deliberately didn't say 'C/C++' in my ancestor post, because I think it's terminology that undermines claims of authority.

I do happen to have embedded experience, but avoid drawing conclusions from it because it is so different to more 'standard' systems development. If you can forgive a tangent: I avoid the whole domain now, because it feels like a ghetto. Standards are poor, tools are poor, pay is seriously poor. If you want to write embedded software, you probably have to work for a hardware company with hardware company's engineering culture and revenue model. That's a pretty crap place to write software in the west. I can't comment on comparing what like to do embedded development in Rust. Frankly, I hope I never can.
by whstl | 2025-11-25 09:00:31+00:00
Thanks to special backroom deals with the three majors, Spotify only really pays to a small majority in the Top N.

It doesn't matter if you only listen to one artist the whole month, your money is still going to Taylor Swift.

There is no point in paying for streaming. Just pirate it and give your money to your favourite artists by buying merchandise or vinyl.
by cons0le | 2025-11-25 09:00:46+00:00
They could also consider making manual youtube playlists and setting up a media computer with something like TubeArchivist. Selfhosting youtube is the only actually useful thing in my "homelab".

I'm only mentioning this because for years I've been making music playlists and archiving them. When you come back to them on youtube a few years later a few songs are always gone/ unavailable. Some of my favorite songs don't exist on yt anymore
by littlecranky67 | 2025-11-25 09:01:22+00:00
You can have any subtitle track be "blurry" in language reactor and only show it on keypress or mouse hover. Depending on your learning level, listening comprehension etc. you might not need a first or second subtitle, or configure the subtitle to be "blurry" by default.

Having 2 subtitles is only helpful in the beginning, where you do not understand entire sentences or sentence constructs sometimes, but you want to understand that entire sentence to continue to follow the storyline (and continue to be engaged). Very quickly I switched to having only the spanish subtitle and lookup individual words.

IIRC, Languagereactor also enables all the subtitles (netflix somehow filters the list of available subtitles based on the country you are in). But I should add that I am actually living in spain, so all the content has spanish subtitles available (and english, which I used as a reference instead of german).
by Huppie | 2025-11-25 09:01:49+00:00
I real life if someone with an administrative job would jot 50 * 3,000 in a calculator and not notice the answer 1,500,000 is wrong (a typo) I will consider them most definitely at fault. Similarly I know some structural engineers who will notice something went wrong with the input if an answer is not within a given range.

A calculator can be used to do things you know how to do _faster_ imho but in most jobs it still requires you to at least somewhat understand what is happening under the hood. The same principle applies to using LLMs at work imho. You can use it to do stuff you know how to do faster but if you don't understand the material there's no way you can evaluate the LLMs answer and you will be at fault when there's AI slop in your output.

eta: Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-25 09:02:14+00:00
A lot of animals are born "hardcoded" with most of the instincts they need to survive, so some behaviors are clearly innate.

And "how the brain learns from the incoming data streams" is, in part, driven a set of behaviors too.

A baby's eyes are trying to detect and track certain preset features long before the primary visual cortex learns to make sense of them. That's a behavior, and it exists for a reason. As the baby develops, the baby would try to seek out certain experiences to learn from them, which is a behavior that exists for a reason too.

There's a hypothesis that certain mental disorders are caused by this innate learning process going off course, but it's just a hypothesis, of the kind that's hard to prove conclusively.
by hapless | 2025-11-25 09:02:21+00:00
The user interface is literally 1000x better. That's all

Linux is enormously higher performance but it is a huge pain in the ass to squeeze the performance out AND retain any level of readability

which is why there are like a dozen vendors selling various solutions that quietly compile their proprietary filter definitions to bpf for use natively in the kernel netfilter code...
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-11-25 09:03:16+00:00
>That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.

Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?

I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?

In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.

That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!
by liendolucas | 2025-11-25 09:03:32+00:00
No one tech-savvy wants this. We are already sick of Google's Android lockdowns on mobile phones, and now coming after laptops and desktops?

What's that going to be like? Will developers have to beg to have control over devices they own? Will we be locked down on the store and have to manually install "unverified" software? Will I be able to take screenshots at will on MY computer, or get a black screen because Google decides so?

The list can go on and on ad nauseam. Given what Google has done on the mobile space I have zero interest in having the same autocratic experience to be replicated on the last type of devices (PCs and laptops) where we can really have true open choices and alternatives. Screw them.