MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wanabeunknown | 2025-11-05 18:47:47+00:00
In large-scale datacenter environments, traditional BIOS-based automation quickly becomes a bottleneck. This post explores how I automated server provisioning and RAID configuration directly through UEFI, without using a live OS. From building a bootable ISO with xorriso to embedding BOOTX64.EFI from EDK2, we’ll walk through each step — creating startup scripts, managing RAID controllers, and understanding UEFI’s limitations like missing log-transfer tools. This guide demonstrates how firmware-level automation can simplify provisioning across clusters while minimizing wasted storage and deployment overhead.
by phkahler | 2025-11-05 18:47:59+00:00
>> > attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V

>> Is this real? Or FUD?

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/risc-v-dese...

Somebody trying to influence Washington seems to want it shut down.
by rangestransform | 2025-11-05 18:48:18+00:00
At a "rich world" company that wants to make money, it's completely rational to not give a shit about "poor world" people that won't make you much money (relatively speaking) anyways. It basically only makes sense to milk the top leg of the K-shaped economy.

Conversely, it opens up a niche for "poor world" people to develop local solutions for local challenges, like mobile payments in India and some of Africa.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-05 18:48:36+00:00
Lots of us HAVE tried using a TV as a primary monitor, I did for years.

Then I bought a real display and realized oh my god there's a reason they cost so much more.

"Game mode" has no set meaning or standard, and in lots of cases can make things worse. On my TV, it made the display blurry in a way I never even noticed until I fixed it. It's like it was doing N64 style anti-aliasing. I actually had to use a different mode, and that may have had significant latency that I never realized.

Displays are tricky, because it can be hard to notice how good or bad one is without a comparison, which you can't do in the store because they cheat display modes and display content, and nobody is willing to buy six displays and run tests every time they want to buy a new display.
by dingnuts | 2025-11-05 18:48:50+00:00
honestly I think these things cause a form of Gell Mann's Amnesia where when you use them for something you know already, the errors are obvious, but when you use them for something you don't understand already, the output is sufficiently plausible that you can't tell you're being misled.

this makes the tool only useful for things you already know! I mean, just in this thread there's an anecdote from a guy who used it to check a diagnosis, but did he press through other possibilities or ask different questions because the answer was already known?
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-05 18:48:54+00:00
dang made a comment on an Ask HN whose topic was "Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?" a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628) that said "They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there." So it seems that submissions and posts that are clearly LLM generated without any content of value can, if I understand it correctly, be legitimately flagged as not being allowed the HN guidelines.
by hitekker | 2025-11-05 18:49:22+00:00
A bit of a tilted take.

Zig's BDFL was an early major supporter of Rust. It was Rust's core maintainer group who excluded him and warred against his language. The leaders decided any "memory unsafe" language was against "consensus"; first C, then Zig. They even posted on Twitter, calling Zig a "step backwards". This Language Supremacism was even worse in conferences and in private.

Today, you can see a lot of the core ex-leaders still sniping at at other language and even successful OSS projects based in those languages. The Zig community has its faults but Rust takes the cake for relentless gamesmanship.
by dragontamer | 2025-11-05 18:49:30+00:00
Theta changes with time.

If you want to minimize loss of time value, you buy 2 year LEAPs, and then as their 1-year approaches, you sell the LEAPs and roll them back into 2-year LEAPs. Theta rapidly changes as you grow closer to expiration.

No one should be buying and holding just one option. Anyone who understands Black Scholes will be selling/buying and exchanging options as time goes on.

-------

Buying puts is a bull-bet on Volatility and bear-trade on the underlying stock, while losing Theta (largely based on expectation date. Longer means less Theta decay).

Selling calls is a bear bet on volatility, bear bet on underlying while gaining Theta in value each day.

And then there are the many combination trades that are available.

In any case, I don't think any sophisticated trader does the strategy you are assuming here. The sophisticated strategies involve selling and renewing your options as time moves forward / and or the stock price changes (to keep Delta withing appropriate levels).
by WalterBright | 2025-11-05 18:49:36+00:00
> A large part of the labor was women's labor which history doesn't record much of

Women spent much of their lives making textiles. It likely wasn't recorded much because it was so ubiquitous.

For example, my family photographs when I was growing up were nearly all about documenting unusual events, like birthdays, holidays, and vacations. The humdrum ordinary things were not photographed. For example, there was only two photos with the family car incidentally in the frame. No photographs of the neighborhood. One photo of the school I attended. No pictures of my dad at work. No pictures of my mom cleaning the house. And so on.

It gives a fairly skewed vision of life then.
by tonyarkles | 2025-11-05 18:50:04+00:00
I think they’re referring to the flash plugin itself. It enabled a vast amount of creative work and it enabled vast exploitation of users’ browsers. I worked as a tech at a consumer-focused computer store from about 1999-2005. It was a wild wild world back then. The vast majority of our time was spent removing viruses, browser toolbars, Bonzi Buddy and friends, and helping people understand how their online banking passwords got stolen by the shady porn site they like so much.
by Tor3 | 2025-11-05 18:50:04+00:00
"But it could also have been that they put the entire bus in a giant Faraday cage"

And that's what they did. If that was necessary for the conclusions is not said in the article. Only that the remote access could

- Update software (well, that's pretty common) - Diagnosis (ditto), and - Manage the control system for battery and power supply.

The conclusion by the team was that the buses can be remotely stopped or bricked by the manufacturer.
by numpad0 | 2025-11-05 18:50:05+00:00
USB-C can't readily carry everything. There are specific and expensive electronic switch things on host side that has to be handled with gloves by experienced mixed signal experts. It's standardized and allowed, but you're on your own in terms of making it work.

Getting HID through HDMI is nothing compared to that. Just Arduino level stuff. It only has to be standardized for interoperability. Car brands that seek to disinfect cars of Apple/Google disease will benefit a lot from that.
by imiric | 2025-11-05 18:50:13+00:00
> XSLT isn't going anywhere

XSLT as a feature is being removed from web browsers, which is pretty significant. Sure it can still be used in standalone tools and libraries, but having it in web browsers enabled a lot of functionality people have been relying on since the dawn of the web.

> hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away

So why not switch to a better maintained and more secure implementation? Firefox uses TransforMiix, which I haven't seen mentioned in any of Google's posts on the topic. I can't comment on whether it's an improvement, but it's certainly an option.

> The people doing the wailing/rending/gnashing about the removal of libxslt needed to step up to fix and maintain it.

Really? How about a trillion dollar corporation steps up to sponsor the lone maintainer who has been doing a thankless job for decades? Or directly takes over maintenance?

They certainly have enough resources to maintain a core web library and fix all the security issues if they wanted to. The fact they're deciding to remove the feature instead is a sign that they simply don't.

And I don't buy the excuse that XSLT is a niche feature. Their HTML bastardization AMP probably has even less users, and they're happily maintaining that abomination.

> It seems like something an extension ought to be capable of

I seriously doubt an extension implemented with the restricted MV3 API could do everything XSLT was used for.

> and if not, fix the extension API so it can.

Who? Try proposing a new extension API to a platform controlled by mega-corporations, and see how that goes.
by miltonlost | 2025-11-05 18:50:26+00:00
Good. Techies need to stop thinking that an LLM should not be immune from requiring licensing. Until OpenAI can (and should) be sued for medical malpractice or lawyering without passing the bar, they will have no skin in the game to actually care. A disclaimer of "this is not a therapist" should not be enough to CYA.
by FaradayRotation | 2025-11-05 18:50:38+00:00
I nearly spit my drink out. This is my kind of humor, thanks for sharing.

I've had a decent experience (though not perfect) with identifying and understanding building codes using both Claude and GPT. But I had to be reasonably skeptical and very specific to get to where I needed to go. I would say it helped me figure out the right questions and which parts of the code applied to my scenario, more than it gave the "right" answer the first go round.
by 827a | 2025-11-05 18:50:54+00:00
Their services revenue this quarter was their second largest business segment (iPhone #1), but experienced more growth than any other segment (~15% iirc, iPhone was more like 6%). Many onlookers see "Services" and think "Oh wow Apple TV and Apple Music must be doing really well", and that's exactly what Apple wants you to think. In reality, these services are doing good, but my understanding is: that category is utterly dominated by tolls. Their toll-taker position in controlling App Store sales, the fees they charge on Apple Pay transactions, and their revenue from their part in the Apple Card system.

Their genuine services, other than maybe iCloud storage, are small businesses. Consider this: Apple reports $28.7B in quarterly services revenue. Spotify reported $3.8B in quarterly revenue directly from their 281M premium subscribers ($4.3B total) (AM has no free tier). Spotify is, in all likelihood, quite far ahead of AM in subscriber counts; estimates put AM at ~100M. AM also gives away a ton of subscriptions likely at a bulk discount (its included with some Chase credit cards, Verizon Wireless plans, etc); it would surprise me if total AM revenue is higher than $1.5B/q.
by clickety_clack | 2025-11-05 18:51:26+00:00
I had a summer job in a place with one of these. When I started, I was like “how does this guy know the 15 digit number for these screws?” By the end, I know the code for screws in general, the code for popular types, metric/imperial, and then it was like length and size. The numbers flashed up as well, so you wouldn’t have to memorize anything, but you quickly didn’t need to see the numbers for popular items.
by jmort | 2025-11-05 18:51:26+00:00
Yep, you could run an anonymization workload inside the OpenPCC compute node. We target inference as the "workload" but it's really just attested HTTP server where you can't see inside. So, in this case your client (the wearable) would send its data first through OpenPCC to a server that runs some anonymization process.

If it's possible to anonymize on the wearable, that would be simpler.

The challenge is what does the anonymizer "do" to be perfect?

As an aside, IMO homomorphic encryption (still) isn't ready...
by dangoor | 2025-11-05 18:51:29+00:00
This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it.

I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to the task.
by neilk | 2025-11-05 18:51:52+00:00
XSLT is being exploited right now for security vulnerabilities, and there is no solution on the horizon.

The browser technologies that people actually use, like JavaScript, have active attention to security issues, decades of learnings baked into the protocol, and even attention from legislators.

You imagine that XSLT is more secure but it’s not. It’s never been. Even pure XSLT is quite capable of Turing-complete tomfoolery, and from the beginning there were loopholes to introduce unsafe code.

As they say, security is not a product, it’s a process. The process we have for existing browser technologies is better. That process is better because more people use it.

But even if we were to try to consider the technologies in isolation, and imagine a timeline where things were different? I doubt whether XML+XSLT is the superior platform for security. If it had won, we’d just have a different nightmare of intermingled content and processing. Maybe more stuff being done client-side. I expect that browser and OS manufacturers would be warping content to insert their own ads.
by avereveard | 2025-11-05 18:51:57+00:00
Glad you asked

1929 – Sino-Soviet Conflict (Chinese Eastern Railway) — ROC authorities moved to seize the CER in Manchuria; the USSR responded militarily. (Initiation: ROC seizure.) 1954–1955 – First Taiwan Strait Crisis — PRC began large-scale shelling of Kinmen/Matsu and amphibious operations (e.g., Yijiangshan). (Initiation: PRC artillery/offensives.) 1958 – Second Taiwan Strait Crisis — PRC opened intense bombardment of Kinmen/Matsu. (Initiation: PRC artillery.) 1962 – Sino-Indian War — PRC launched major offensives in October after a series of frontier incidents. (Initiation: PRC large-scale attack; India calls it unprovoked, PRC says “counter-attack.”) 1967 – Nathu La & Cho La clashes (India border) — Firefights erupted while India was fencing the pass; Chinese forces are generally assessed to have fired first at Nathu La. (Initiation: PRC fire in initial clash.) 1969 – Sino-Soviet Border Conflict — PLA ambushed Soviet troops on Zhenbao/Damansky Island in March; further clashes followed. (Initiation: PRC ambush.) 1974 – Battle of the Paracel Islands (vs South Vietnam) — PLAN/PLA forces expelled RVN units and took full control of the Paracels. (Initiation: PRC naval attack in contested area.) 1979 – Sino-Vietnamese War — PRC invaded northern Vietnam in February. (Initiation: PRC cross-border invasion.) 1984–1989 – Sino-Vietnamese Border War (post-1979 phase) — PRC mounted periodic offensives and artillery duels (e.g., Laoshan/Johnson Mountain). (Initiation: multiple PRC attacks in a protracted conflict.) 1988 – Johnson South Reef Skirmish (Spratlys, vs Vietnam) — PLAN engaged Vietnamese forces and seized the reef. (Initiation: PRC assault during standoff.)

Internal (civil/unification campaigns) 1926–1928 – Northern Expedition — ROC (KMT) launched a national unification war against warlords. (Initiation: ROC campaign.) 1930–1934 – Encirclement Campaigns against the Chinese Soviet — ROC initiated successive large operations against CCP base areas. (Initiation: ROC offensives.) 1949–1950 – Hainan & Zhoushan/Coastal-Islands Campaigns — PRC amphibious operations against ROC-held islands during the civil war endgame. (Initiation: PRC landings.) 1950–1951 – Tibet (Chamdo campaign → occupation) — PLA entered eastern Tibet and compelled the Seventeen-Point Agreement. (Initiation: PRC invasion; PRC frames as “peaceful liberation.”)
by zejn | 2025-11-05 18:52:46+00:00
Also, it was a very very different landscape.

You were commonly given a network uplink and a list of public IP addresses you were to set up on your box or boxes. IPMI/BMC were not a given on a server so if you broke it, you needed to have remote hands and probably brains too.

Virtualisation was in the early days and most of the services were co-hosted on the server.

Software defined networks and Open vSwitch were also not a thing back then. There were switches with support for VLANs and you might have had a private network to link together frontend and backend boxes.

Servers today can be configured remotely. They have their own management interfaces so you can access the console and install OS remotely. The network switches can be reconfigured on the fly, making the network topology reconfigurable online. Even storage can be mapped via SAN. The only hands on issue is hardware malfunction.

If I was to compare with today, it was like having a wardrobe of Raspberry Pies on a dumb switch, plugging in cables when changes were needed.
by andrehacker | 2025-11-05 18:53:17+00:00
When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub second response time. I often think about that when I am waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in many cases.
by rustybolt | 2025-11-05 18:53:27+00:00
Ouch, this hurts to read. It's not novel and lacks a very basic understanding of math.

The graph of y/(x^2+y^2)=(x+1)/(x^2+y^2) by definition contains the points that satisfy this equation. This is exactly the set of points for which y = x + 1.

The "fuzzy" graph is just coloring the difference between the left hand side and right hand side. This is very basic, not new, and it's definitely not "the graph of y/(x^2+y^2)=(x+1)/(x^2+y^2)".
by daveguy | 2025-11-05 18:53:39+00:00
I'm not going to the mat for anyone. I'm just saying AI use in spreadsheets is a terrible idea because AI just isn't that good.

Currently I'd put it worse than tearing things up for ${hotLanguage} because at least ${hotLanguage} is deterministic and debuggable.

Honestly, I'm not sure why you're going to the mat for AI in spreadsheets, or why you think it's a good use case, or why you seem to think "automation" doesn't come with overhead of its own. Current iterations of AI are recommendation engines. Even then you better have version control.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-05 18:53:56+00:00
the entire philosophy of Smalltalk was to think of software artifacts as living entities. You can just find yourself in a piece of software, fully inspect everything and engage with it by way of a software archaeology. To do away with the distinction between interacting, running and writing software.

They wanted to get away from syntax and files, like an inert recipe you have to rerun every time so I think if you do away with the image you do away with the core aspect of it.

Computing just in general didn't go the direction they wanted it to go in many ways I think it was too ambitious of an idea for the time. Personally I've always hoped it comes back.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-05 18:54:36+00:00
XSLT seem like it could be something implemented with WebAssembly (and/or JavaScript), in an extension (if the extension mechanism is made suitable; I think some changes might be helpful to support this and other things), possibly one that is included by default (and can be overridden by the user, like any other extension should be); if it is implemented in that way then it might avoid some of the security issues. (PDF could also be implemented in a similar way.)

(There are also reasons why it might be useful to allow the user to manually install native code extensions, but native code seems to be not helpful for this use, so to improve security it should not be used for this and most other extensions.)
by pjmlp | 2025-11-05 18:54:43+00:00
The user experience, in commercial Smalltalks, like Cincom Smalltalk, is just like any other compiled application.

The application packager removes everything that is related to Smalltalk as developer environment, and possibly other classes that are also not used by the application, so you get a slimmed down image.

Then you have the VM boot code, as native executable, that is responsible for starting the image execution.

Thanks to the way executable files work in most platforms, the packing tool merges that boot loader and the slimmed down image into a single executable.

When the executable starts, the loader locates the image inside the executable, loads it, and transfers execution to the runtime.

Java and .NET also have similar techniques available, see jlink, or Single-file deployment respectively.
by jrmg | 2025-11-05 18:55:24+00:00
ML, at least historically, has been considered a subset of AI, not a superset.

Until the rise of LLMs recently using human-designed deterministic algorithms to perform ‘intelligent’ tasks (like image processing, and especially image recognition) has absolutely been considered AI.

AI encompasses (encompassed?...) everything that uses computation to produce intelligence-like results.

I fear the terminology battle has been lost, though, and nowadays most people consider at least neural networks - perhaps also non-determinism of output - to be a prerequisite for something being “AI” - which is actually _less_ meaningful to the end-user.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-05 18:56:03+00:00
Also, you should be able to still search for Raymond Chen's blog process posts, but part of why he has nearly a blog post every work day for quite so many years is that he built up a huge queue, adds to the queue only during relatively free time, and has automated the posting of that queue. It's also seems to relate to why so many are multi-part deep dives. (This post also ends with a tease for the next post.) It was often probably only one root investigative journey related to a Windows support question investigation or user story writeup or documentation was needed to be written or some other TIL rabbit hole was found, but breaking it into multiple parts keeps each part easy to read individually and also keeps the queue full for weeks where things are much busier.
by semi_sentient | 2025-11-05 18:56:16+00:00
Follow-up posts for context (same series):

Part 2 – Data Layer (feature store to prevent online/offline skew; vector DB choices and pre- vs post-filtering): https://www.shaped.ai/blog/the-infrastructure-of-modern-rank...

Part 3 – MLOps Backbone (training pipelines, registry, GitOps deployment, monitoring/drift/A-B): https://www.shaped.ai/blog/the-infrastructure-of-modern-rank...

Happy to share more detail (autoscaling policies, index swaps, point-in-time joins, GPU batching) if helpful.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-05 18:56:20+00:00
>Is this proof that the "democrats" are indeed extreme left? If not, in what percentage does or does not?

I'm not a geopolitical scientist, but I'm sure if we compose North American, South America, Europe, and Asia's countries and apply a spectrum on major policy points, you can in fact make an nigh- objective statement here.

But if you want a better lens, sure. The US is center right compared to the EU spectrum, which already congregates 20 other countries to compare to. It's likely center left libertarian when compared to many Asian countries.

I don't think the rest of my analysis is impacted by these lines drawn in the sand since the rest talks about policy and not hard definitions of spectrums.