MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thayne | 2025-11-16 18:21:16+00:00
> Apple, like every other vendor, does not have a choice but to implement this as a proprietary characteristic. Pre-BLE, other vendors copied Apple's de-facto `HFP

They could publish the details, and not block other manufacturer details, so that it is easier for other platforms to develop drivers for them. Or develop a new standard that works for their earbuds.
by websap | 2025-11-16 18:21:16+00:00
> Users simply do not want to type out “hey, can you increase the font size for me” when they could simply hit “ctrl-plus” or click a single button3.

I would def challenge this. “Turn off private relay”, “send this photo to X”, “Add a pit stop at a coffee shop along the way” are all voice commands I would love to use
by missedthecue | 2025-11-16 18:21:42+00:00
I don't see how it can be a bubble (or at least a risky one) without much debt. Places like Google and Meta profit $100B a year from operations and are funding most of this from cashflow. The risk is that they have to write down a bunch of overbuilt data center assets in a few years, but lenders won't be going under because there aren't any lenders involved. And without lenders being at risk, the system isn't at risk.

*There is some leverage. Coreweave has borrowed a bit for example. But none of this is really systemic and no one is levered to the eyeballs in the AI space.
by shmerl | 2025-11-16 18:23:15+00:00
To have flexibility and not being tied to CPU choice due to simply lacking software side. Besides, such kind of project would be beneficial to more scenarios than their immediate need.

They didn't need to back a bunch of projects they backed (radv / aco are a big example where you could claim there was redundancy so they weren't strictly necessary), but results paid off even to the point where AMD is dropping their amdvlk in favor of using radv/aco.

They didn't need to strictly speaking back zink either (OpenGL on Vulkan), but they decided to and it gives them a long term ability to have OpenGL even if native drivers will be gone, as well as an upside of bringing up OpenGL on any Vulkan available target out of the box.

It's just something in their style to do when there seems to be an obvious gap.
by yetihehe | 2025-11-16 18:23:21+00:00
From what we know, universe is not deterministic. For example even trying to calculate motion of two massive objects with gravity with good precision runs up against heisenberg limit. For massively complicated systems like out bodies, there is just too much uncertainty. Also from neurobiology we see that our brains operate at the limit of noise in neurons. We are as close to total noise on our neuronal links as possible, while still operating properly. And thanks to better neurons than animals, we can operate with lower signal-to-noise ratio. It's not like we use some special quantum effects as a base of our consciousness, we just use quantum noise as a base and amplify it so that we actually respond properly to stimuli.

As for being only shaped by circumstances - IIRC there were experiments with cloned fish, where all of them were kept in conditions as similar as possible and those fish still had behavioral differences. Having deterministic universe is meaningless for agency.
by jeremy_flox | 2025-11-16 18:24:06+00:00
Jeremy from Flox, here, I want to chime in here so Ron can be with his family, even though he will no doubt be right back on here:

Re: Relationship to nix-snapshotter and prior art This is original work, though very much built on prior innovations. Our approach hooks into the upstream containerd runc shim to pull the FloxHub-managed environment and bind-mount the closure at startup. The key distinction is that we use how Flox environments are rendered to avoid Nix evaluation entirely, making it safe and fast for a k8s node to realize packages directly on the node. Less about images and containers, per se, and more out bringing the power of Flox and Nix at the buildtime end to the runtime end of SDLC.

The cache story is surprisingly strong: nix store paths effectively behave like layers in the node’s registry, but with dramatically higher hit rates -- often across entirely unrelated pod deployments. Because all pods rely on the same underlying system libraries drawn from the “quantized” Flox catalog, different environments naturally share glibc, core utilities, and common dependencies, where traditional containers typically share nothing.

Tools like nix-snapshotter, Nixery, and others have pioneered this space and we're grateful for that work. This rising "post-Docker" tide raises all ships.

Re: Open Source The software is brand new -- only slightly older than Ron’s baby -- and currently in alpha. KubeCon was our first opportunity for broad feedback, and we uncovered a few issues we’re still addressing. Our intent is to open-source the project once we’ve fully vetted the approach, ideally in the coming weeks.

Yes, we launched early and the product is imperfect, but we’re doing so transparently and with a commitment to getting it right and releasing it to the community, we will continue to release early and often.

Re: Abstraction depth concerns I appreciate @rootnod3’s point about deeper abstractions complicating debugging. We’re thinking hard about how to keep things simple for people who need to run and fix systems quickly. It’s encouraging to see the broader ecosystem—like FreeBSD—lean further into reproducibility, especially as AI-centric stacks make this increasingly important.

Re: Nix vs traditional approaches Skilled Dockerfile authors can achieve great caching results -- and you can pin and you can prune registries, etc -- but our goal is to make these best practices the default. Nix enables finer-grained caching and a universal packaging format for building and consuming open source software.

We see intrinsic value in Flox environments -- whether on the CLI, k8s, Nomad down the road, or other platforms. Our aim is for Flox environments to be as universal and natural as Nix packages themselves -- essentially extending “flox activate” into the k8s world.

We likewise got a ton of valuable feedback at KubeCon, most of which was validating, all of which was very inline with this conversation.
by CharlesW | 2025-11-16 18:26:33+00:00
Correct. Flock sells cameras and platform access, but gives data from their shared, nationwide surveillance utility to ICE and law enforcement.

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-massachus...

https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-com...
by jeremy_flox | 2025-11-16 18:28:00+00:00
Totally valid - we buried the lede here. Quick version:

Not nix-snapshotter because we skip Nix eval entirely and get way better cache sharing across unrelated workloads (quantized catalog means everything shares base deps). On "environments": these aren't devshells-as-prod, they're the actual runtime; same as 'flox activate' works everywhere. You're shipping a declarative, hash-pinned runtime that happens to also work great in dev/CI

And yeah, we should have been upfront that this is alpha and we're planning to open source it after vetting at KubeCon.

You're right that we're doing ourselves a disservice not being transparent with the technical crowd. What specific technical details would help you evaluate this?
by ekidd | 2025-11-16 18:28:02+00:00
This is my experience as well: Writing parsers for complex file formats in Rust often leaves a few edge cases which might cause controlled panics. But controlled panics are essentially denial of service attacks. And panics have good logging, making them easy to debug. Plus, you can fuzz for them at scale easily, using tools like "cargo fuzz".

This is a substantial improvement over the status quo.

Tools like WUFFS may be more appropriate for low level parsing logic when you're not willing to risk controlled panics, however.
by xienze | 2025-11-16 18:28:09+00:00
> I'm struggling to understand how something like this can be reproduced consistently across environments. How would you package this inside a Git repo?

Very easily. At the end of the day, quadlets (which are just systemd services) are just text files. You can use something like cloud-init to define all these quadlets and enable them in a single yaml file and do a completely unattended install. I do something similar to cloud-init using Flatcar Linux.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-16 18:28:14+00:00
> macOS is still good.

> yet, I think Cook did okay.

Kindly, I think your reality is being distorted. macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8. It's got live tiles, radical acrylic accents, constant cloud service nags, and preinstalled advertisements everywhere across the system. OCSP won't let you launch certain apps unless your DRM API is online, for crying out loud!

It is insulting.

Tim Cook, in his wisdom, pivoted Apple harder into services. AppleTV, App Store, all the kinds of meaningless high-margin slop that can be created without direct competition. This has damaged macOS and iOS perennially, they are feature-poor operating systems when compared with desktop Windows and Android today. Can you imagine how much Apple would be worth if they didn't refuse to sign Nvidia compute drivers right now? Or how iOS would look with Vulkan 1.2 compliance and the Steam Deck's Proton stack? Apple is the #1 party holding Apple back, here!

I daily drive Linux now, but the state of macOS is so ad-ridden and walled-off that I would rather do Linux development with WSL than bother setting up a Mac. It's that bad.
by mdorazio | 2025-11-16 18:28:26+00:00
The uproar over AI data center resource use has been rather bizarre to see and feels vaguely luddite. As this article points out, frivolous things like golf courses are far worse users of fresh water (and land) than any amount of AI. And on the electricity side, forcing the US to actually build more power generating capacity and infrastructure is a good thing in my book. Once the AI hype dies down we can use that for BEVs and other useful things.
by yetihehe | 2025-11-16 18:28:35+00:00
> And after getting hit by it, you do not go "if only the asteroid had had more willpower it would not have hit us.

I don't understand this. You tell me that not having agency is not applicable to asteroids?

> (But reality is only ever one way, disregarding quantum mechanical magic for a minute)

I think we can't really disregard quantum mechanics when talking about very complicated systems operating on the edge of being too noisy for any recognisable transmission in our neurons.
by UltraSane | 2025-11-16 18:28:38+00:00
The use of the term Nazi is deeply stupid. But Israel does need to chill a bit and care more about their global PR. But they are surrounded by countries that really DO want to destroy them so I can understand why they are so trigger happy. The way they destroyed Hezbollah was brilliant. The Hamas charter is a giant Islamist Jew-hating rant.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-11-16 18:29:10+00:00
Changing the Integer to Int in the Haskell program (use machine integers instead of bignums) speeds the 6 minutes to 35 seconds, fwiw. But that was only ok to do after knowing that the result would fit in a machine int. This is on an i5-3570 which is a bit over half the speed of the M1 Pro (Passmark score 2042 vs 3799). So it scales to around 18 sec on similar hardware. Not too bad given the list-based implementation, I guess.
by graemep | 2025-11-16 18:29:17+00:00
Not really a problem for users. Only for people who want to redistribute a fork. It matters if you are Apple or Sony, but not for most people.

incidentally, the requirement of the GPL is not to upstream your stuff, but to offer to make the modified source available to anyone you distribute the code to. Often the same in practice, but does not have to be.
by k0tan32 | 2025-11-16 18:29:23+00:00
Some HNers already mentioned that the internet has not been a safe haven for a long time. All these vulnerability scanners and parsers were pinging my localhost servers even in mid 2k. It has just become worse, and even OSS and usually captcha-free places are installing things like Anubis [1].

All of this reminds me of some of Gibson's short stories I read recently and his description of Cyberspace: small corporate islands of protected networks in a hostile sea of sapient AIs ready to burn your brain.

Luckily, LLMs are not there yet, except you can still get your brain burnt from AI slop or polarizing short videos.

[1] - https://anubis.techaro.lol/
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-16 18:29:32+00:00
I mean if you are a normal user and most people are, you absolutely do not need to care about both Wayland and X11. Distributions ship with working configurations. It just works.

Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.
by Aldipower | 2025-11-16 18:30:13+00:00
So, what are their strengths then? I've fed it with a detailed, very well documented and typed API description. Asking to construct me some not too hard code snippets based on that. GPT-5 then pretend to do the right thing, but actually is creating meaningless nonsense out of it. Even after I tried to reiterate and refine my tasks. Every junior dev is waaay better.
by killme2008 | 2025-11-16 18:30:30+00:00
I didn’t mean SQL over PromQL — they’re designed for different layers of problems. SQL has a broader theoretical scope: it’s a general-purpose language that can describe almost any kind of data processing or analytics workflow, given the right schema and functions.

PromQL, on the other hand, is purpose-built for observability — it’s optimized for time‑series data, streaming calculations, and real‑time aggregation. It’s definitely easier to learn and more straightforward when your goal is to reason about metrics and alerting.

SQL’s strengths are in relational joins, richer operator sets, and higher‑level abstraction, which make it more powerful for analytical use cases beyond monitoring. PromQL trades that flexibility for simplicity and immediacy — which is exactly what makes it great for monitoring.
by api | 2025-11-16 18:30:31+00:00
It’s hard for me not to have a “black pilled” view of this region. They’ll never have peace until they actually want it. There’s too many nuts on every side whose whole purpose for living is to see anyone who isn’t just like them dead.

Unfortunately the regular civilian who live in this region suffer for it. The only way out I can see would be some kind of cross border cross culture mass uprising against all the fanatics and those who fund and enable them.

It should also serve as a warning for us. We can have peace and prosperity because we have, as a culture, managed to restrain these kinds of impulses. We flirt with hyper polarization and fanatical ideologies at our own peril. Those who promote this stuff for short term political or economic gain should be compared, maybe, to people playing around with dangerous gain of function research on disease organisms. This stuff takes hold and our countries will look like the war zones of the Middle East.
by t-vi | 2025-11-16 18:30:54+00:00
- I don't think it hurts to learn PyTorch (and having learned JAX is good, too). I don't know if JAX + triton is as impossible as you make it out, but it seems that PyTorch integration is quite good for many things. - For pallas, triton and CUDA/C++, you probably want to know a bit about how GPU works. There is the GPU-Mode discord / lectures / ressources if you are looking for material https://github.com/gpu-mode/ . - In my experience how well Triton works varies depending on what you want to do (depending on the how well the programming model fits the task). If it does, it is quite nice to get something reasonably fast reasonably fast. PyTorch (in the inductor torch.compile backend) has made many things work well, so you could check that out if you run out of examples elsewhere).
by t_mahmood | 2025-11-16 18:30:59+00:00
IntelliJ shines when you use the command pallet, keyboard shortcuts, and IdeaVIM

Double shift, to bring up the pallet, and start typing. Though it also have a ton of shortcuts, and shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command.

Try this: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x/

Whenever you don't use keyboard shortcut for any action, this suggests you the available keyboard shortcut.
by hermannj314 | 2025-11-16 18:31:11+00:00
Data centers don't create jobs, pit municipalities against one another in a race to the bottom, and typically demand abated taxes and almost never deliver a net positive for where they operate.

But if you create a "water" monster, pivot the conversation on water being the issue, you can then show water consumption isn't a big deal. Water is the framing the data centers want because they can win the fight on that topic.

Don't let your enemy choose the terrain.
by speedgoose | 2025-11-16 18:31:16+00:00
I don’t think so. Hetzner sees some growth but they are still very small.

DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned and use ssh and journalctl.

I wouldn’t attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare metal, that won’t happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or similar can get you pretty far.
by fragmede | 2025-11-16 18:31:58+00:00
Taylor Swift is the problem. In terms of the system design and architecture, it's an interview question for a distributed systems engineers. You've got a superstar user, with 89 million followers, how do you scale every aspect of your system to handle when she posts? Naturally you're object and say that Taylor Swift isn't going to moving to TekMolTwitter, but pwg said it won't work after a certain size and you said why not, and the short answer is that it doesn't scale past N users, and you can just cheat and say N is higher than you want to care about. We could do a bit of back of the envelope math to see that notifying 15 million users will saturate the gigabit link on you're $5 VPS if each notification packet is 64 bytes, and then design all sorts of queues and caches and redis and and and. It's a fun interview question (and practical problem for Twitter/X) but at the end of the day, if you believe in it, just go build it and get all of your friends and family to join TekMolTwitter (or Mastodon). It's entirely within your capabilities in 2025 to just go out and make something like that, so the thing is, if this is a something that you believe in you can just go do it. No one's stopping you.

https://highscalability.com/the-architecture-twitter-uses-to...

The reality is people aren't gonna bother when Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter/TikTok/Substack/etc is right there.
by levocardia | 2025-11-16 18:32:01+00:00
Very obviously missing the mundane agentic work. I think the following things are basically already solved, and are just waiting for the right harness:

- Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted.

- Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am

- Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.

- I want to apply a posterizing filter in photoshop, take control of my mouse for the next 10sec and show me where it is in the menu

- Call that gym I never go to and cancel my membership
by baby_souffle | 2025-11-16 18:32:28+00:00
Ooof. When I heard "android things" I knew they had a problem. It was a google project that had little adoption and was killed only a few years after it was announced (so, better than average for google, then?).

I wonder what they estimate the "replace with newer" cost to be versus the "figure out how to deploy $modernAndroid fleet wide" costs. Bonus points if you express it as a percentage of CEO's compensation / company wide revenue.
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-11-16 18:32:31+00:00
As the CEO of Flock, don't you feel you have more information to offer this community outside of the "we do not sell data" statement you've made over and over? The fact that you do not engage here in the ethical aspects of your product doesn't look good for you and only deepens suspicion that something darker is going on behind your doors.
by mindslight | 2025-11-16 18:32:57+00:00
"Learning is fun" for the right type of person is a far cry from an assertion of "fun is learning" that implies whenever someone is having fun, they're learning. The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower, which can easily be short circuited by things that are fun but not learning.
by peatmoss | 2025-11-16 18:33:09+00:00
Tunable transparency mode sounds great, and I wish Apple would do something like this as first-party support.

As a casual trombone player, who often plays in louder settings, the airpods pro are almost excellent hearing protection. Passive (even "audiophile" or "concert") earplugs make me feel like I'm under water. Airpods Pro attenuate a lot of sound but don't feel so unnatural.

Unfortunately, they tend to drop my own sound out of the mix when sounds around me get louder.

I'd love a mode that selectively let in more trombone frequencies, or better, that mixed noise cancellation and transparency to give me more of a studio monitor effect. Maybe the airpods could figure out which sounds were mine via the buzzing sounds that propagate through my head from my lips.
by topaz0 | 2025-11-16 18:33:17+00:00
This is a big oversimplification. First, the 20% (of all datacenter usage being LLMs) is based on 2024 estimates, while meanwhile all of the LLM players are putting billions of dollars into building more and larger datacenters. This number undoubtedly already gives an underestimate for total LLM power usage, and if all of the planned datacenters actually materialize (which is a big if), it will be an underestimate by an order of magnitude or maybe two.

Second, water issues are localized, and building datacenters in dry areas (like Texas), where aquifers are already being depleted, is going to be an issue there, even if it's a drop in the bucket of the great lakes or whatever.
by wging | 2025-11-16 18:34:12+00:00
> The operational tempo achieved proves the use of an autonomous model rather than interactive assistance. Peak activity included thousands of requests, representing sustained request rates of multiple operations per second.

The assumption that no human could ever (program a computer to) do multiple things per second, nor have their code do different things depending on the result of the previous request is... interesting.

(observation is not original to me, it was someone on Twitter who pointed it out)
by water-data-dude | 2025-11-16 18:34:23+00:00
Absolutely. It's probably worse than you think though. I work with some groundwater conservation districts in Texas. Texas has some aquifers that they rely heavily on, and they're being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Efforts to regulate the rate at which groundwater is consumed are met with mixed results because of state laws that make it very difficult to regulate pumping.

One particularly depressing example from the recent past is what happened in Hays County. The groundwater situation in Hays County is bad, to the point that springs are going dry.

Hays County managed to push something through the state legislature that'd give the Hays Trinity Water Conservation District more power to manage groundwater use (it passed overwhelmingly), but then Greg Abbot vetoed it - likely at the behest of Aqua Texas, a big water utility company that pumps a TON of water and has been pretty blatant about ignoring pumping caps and generally acted in bad faith.

Source: https://archive.is/b1bp1