MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-02 22:13:09+00:00
I'm sure that's true for 5-10 year old tech, as the market has changed significantly. But I'd bet you'll be very hard pressed to find any businesses running on Alpha or HP-PA or whatever other ancient architectures might not have a Rust compiler available. Especially so if you were to look for businesses running modern Debian on such systems...
by troupo | 2025-11-02 22:13:19+00:00
It was a recurring theme throughout most of Golden Age fiction.

E.g. Clifford D. Simak mentions them as a mode of transportation in The Goblin Reservation, Asimov has them in Robots of Dawn, and I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty more.

It could be that it was Heinlein who kicked of the trend.
by mrighele | 2025-11-02 22:13:22+00:00
> - firewall? Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates. Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)

I don't use much FreeBSD these days, but pf (from OpenBSD, I know), is one of the best things since sliced bread.

In my first job I was working for a company selling a third-party vertical software and we were proving support for it. We were using a very expensive symantec vpn with most customers connecting with a 33.3kb phone connection, until we reached the license limits, and there was no money for new licenses. In a pinch, me and a coworker set up a new server with openvpn, freebsd, pf, and a ruby-based dns server that I don't remember anymore, and we grew an order of magnitudes more customers.

It's been more that 20 years, I still don't know how to use firewalls in linux, (there are many, I just pretend they don't exists) but I would still be able to setup a pf firewall if needed. I need to say it again, pf is a joy to use.

My gripe with FreeBSD right now is that I miss something like docker swarm. bhyve is fine but AFAIK it works only on a single host. Give me something that works on a bunch of hosts, and I will come back right away
by bawolff | 2025-11-02 22:14:25+00:00
Well either you care about security or you don't.

If you don't then your users should have the right know, so they can decide for themselves whether or not the risk is worth it.

Do you think that just because a project doesn't disclose something it goes away, or that if google can find the bug that much better funded groups like the NSA or malware vendors can't. Shoving things under the rug is the worst outcome.
by neom | 2025-11-02 22:14:44+00:00
Too much conflation going on at this point, feels like we’re getting to the point of talking past each other. My understanding is: crossspecies jumps need cellular compatibility, not just proximity. Resistance makes a host a dead end, not a mixing vessel. “Intermediate host” means one the virus can actually replicate in, not just be near. And parallel evolution isn’t the same thing as recombination.
I built an easier way to track personal spending
by colestriler | 2025-11-02 22:15:10+00:00
If you’re like me, you try to be smart with your money — but somehow, by the end of the month, it’s hard to tell where it all went.

So I decided to fix that for myself. I built a simple dashboard that breaks down my spending by category each month, and then shows trends across months.

I’ve been using it for a while now and it’s been a game changer — I even found a few hundred dollars in forgotten subscriptions.

After showing it to some friends, they all asked me to make it public. So I finally did. You can try it out here:

https://www.transactiontracker.xyz/
by fizzynut | 2025-11-02 22:15:43+00:00
Doing that will increase input latency, not decrease it.

There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.

It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.

In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.
by tombert | 2025-11-02 22:15:47+00:00
This has been my experience as well.

I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.

My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.
by mattmanser | 2025-11-02 22:16:11+00:00
This is mostly like high fidelity audio equipment, or extreme coffee preparation. Waste of time for most people.

I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.

Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.

I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.

But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.
by atoav | 2025-11-02 22:17:31+00:00
Could we please just agree not to use this "considered harmful" phrase to describe advice where the answer is "depends"? This kinda makes the author seem like he has lost the ability to consider what software is out there. That he is working for Kafka doesn't help.

Example: Someone writes a software that could use something simple like SQLite, and they switched to Postgres for performance reasons. Now unless what Kafka beings is the core reason they switched to Postgres not pulling in another dependency and adding a nother piece to the puzzle, can be a total legitimate engineering decision. And that renders the "considered harmful" utterly ridiculous.

Use a system like Kafka if you need what it brings (a distributed event streaming platform). If that isn't what you need or a very simple postgres solition suffices, go for that. Maybe you need event streaming but distributing it is overkill. Maybe you just need some sort of queue. Who knows? Not the author of this post.
by hecturchi | 2025-11-02 22:17:57+00:00
I used Sailfish.

Then I discovered that "encryption" for them was using Luks with the numeric unlock pin as encryption key (which most people sets to 4 digits). They marketed themselves as a secure OS.

No passphrase option. I brought up that it was trivially brute-forceable in the forums and they vehemently fought the idea. My post eventually disappeared.

They were doing government contracts in Russia etc. Iirc. I put some dots together and phone rests in a drawer ever since. I have no idea how things are now though.
by nine_k | 2025-11-02 22:18:00+00:00
HN is a specific slice, but not along the financial line. For each @pmarca or @pg or other founder who has made many millions, there is likely 10k other users, mostly engineers, but not only, all the way to people who are currently unemployed and homeless. The fact that HN has "everyone", and a uniquely relevant person would almost always show up in every thread, is one of the very attracting properties of HN for me.
by throw2312321 | 2025-11-02 22:18:24+00:00
I am a big fan of gaming on Linux, but I've been running into weird bugs with some of my favorite games.

For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)

As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.
by tmtvl | 2025-11-02 22:18:33+00:00
If I define a function foo which takes an (Array Float (10 5)) and then define a function bar which uses the result of calling foo with an (Array String (3 3)) then SBCL will print a warning. If I don't redefine foo and call bar with such an array then a condition will be raised. It's not quite the same as, say Rust's 'thing just won't compile', but that's due to the interactive nature of Common Lisp (I believe someone called it the difference between a living language and a dead language (though the conventional meaning of living language and dead language in programming is a bit different)).
by pas | 2025-11-02 22:18:42+00:00
... unfortunately what matters is that gold is a curse. Colonialism hundreds of years ago froze extractive oppressive hierarchies, and even though many places gained independence the new elite mostly took the already in-place system and started to run it to benefit themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Origins_of_Comparativ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
by throwaway89201 | 2025-11-02 22:18:51+00:00
> How many embedded devices transmit sensitive information?

Every Zigbee device uses AES keys to secure the network, although the security of the protocol is pretty weak in most deployments, especially when new devices join the network. Leaking the network key would provide access to the entire network. The ARM Cortex-M4 is often used, which the side-channel attack in the article is about.
by itchingsphynx | 2025-11-02 22:19:25+00:00
I know the feeling, having recently migrated a solid TrueNAS 13.3 to a hand-built FreeBSD 13.5. The main reason was to get OpenZFS 2.3 RAIDZ expansion as storage was getting tight. It turns out to be quite similar using Webmin for GUI and BastilleBSD for jails.

There were a few hiccups, such as learning about bootloader versions, but after a few Saturdays tinkering it has been running solid and I’m very pleased.
by hvb2 | 2025-11-02 22:19:28+00:00
That's not even unique to nuclear. Gas and coal can have them too. Typically they're only used if the other source of coolant is not sufficient.

For example, you take in cooling water from a river. When the river gets too hot in summer you want to use that cooling tower to evaporate water to provide additional cooling.

Which also explains why it's steam
by Jach | 2025-11-02 22:19:50+00:00
The survey only shows Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22 for 8.25% vs Mint's 22.1 and 22.2 at 9.21%. There's a whole 18.04% hiding in the "Other" category that I suspect contains a lot of other Ubuntu interim and older LTS releases.
by quotemstr | 2025-11-02 22:19:50+00:00
It depends. Consider DuckDB or another heavily vectorized columnar DB: there's a big part of the system (SQL parser, storage chunk manager, etc.) that's not especially performance-sensitive and a set of tiny, fast kernels that do things like predicate-push-down-based full table scans, ART lookups, and hash table creation for merge joins. DuckDB is a huge pile of C++. I don't see a RIIR taking off before AGI.

But you know what might work?

Take current DuckDB, compile it with Fil-C, and use a new escape hatch to call out to the tiny unsafe kernels that do vectorized high-speed columnar data operations on fixed memory areas that the buffers safe code set up on behalf of the unsafe kernels. That's how it'd probably work if DuckDB were implemented in Rust today, and it's how it could be made to work with Fil-C without a major rewrite.

Granted, this model would require Fil-C's author to become somewhat less dogmatic about having no escape hatches at all whatsoever, but I suspect he'll un-harden his heart as his work gains adoption and legitimate use-cases for an FFI/escape hatch appear.
by Grimblewald | 2025-11-02 22:20:40+00:00
Of course they dont, the only advantage it ever had was the willingness to destroy trust on the internet by scraping everything from everyone rules and expectations be dammed.

The underlying architecture isnt special, the underlying skills and tools aren't special.

There is nothing openAI brings to the table other than a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal. That only gives you an edge for so long.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-02 22:20:49+00:00
> Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X

Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.
by withinboredom | 2025-11-02 22:21:16+00:00
In my mind, anything that has an actual time period is bound to fail, eventually. Then again, I hang around QA engineers a lot, and when you hear about the selenium troubles of "wait until an element is on the page" stories, you realise it relates to software in general.

QA people deal with problems and edge cases most devs will never deal with. They’re your subject-matter-experts of 'what can go wrong'.

Anyway, the point is. You can’t trust anything "will resolve in time period X" or "if it takes longer than X, timeout". There are so many cases where this is simply not true and should be added to a "myths programmers believe" article if it isn't already there.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-11-02 22:21:31+00:00
I think the issue is more about how other games handle ray tracing. For games that just treat ray tracing as an "ultra quality" setting, there's no point of making a low quality ray tracing option, because then you'd just turn it off when non-RT options look just as good.

But Arc Raiders (and their previous game, The Finals) does use RTGI for good effects. And that low quality RT setting is still going to be better than no RT because of its realtime nature. https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y shows that off to good effect.

You can see this kinda performance on Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages, which have switched to workflows that require RT. Low quality RT in these games is performant enough to run on Linux AMD drivers which run RT in software on cards that do not have hardware for it: https://youtu.be/44XaGU01J84
by JoshuaRedmond | 2025-11-02 22:23:01+00:00
This seems like a good idea, but I hope it doesn't stop the recent tradition of yarn-bombing[0] the postboxes[1][2]. The ones near me are really creative, change with seasons & national holidays, and just add a bit of British whimsy to day-to-day life.

(Looks like there's already some articles on this angle [3]!)

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_box_topper

[2] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-63833983

[3] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly9q5jwv18o
by deadbabe | 2025-11-02 22:23:17+00:00
With LLMs, I think we will finally have the missing piece needed to make something like MTurk work at scale.

Bad data or false work was a big problem on MTurk, but now LLMs should be able to act as reasonable quality assurance for each and every piece of work a worker commits. The workers can be ranked and graded based on the quality of their work, instantly, instead of requiring human review.

You can also flip the model and have LLMs do the unit of work, and have humans as a verification layer, and the human review sanity checked again by an LLM to ensure people aren’t just slacking off and rubber stamping everything. You can easily do this by inserting blatantly bad data at some points and seeing if the workers pick up on it. Fail the people who are letting bad data pass through.

For a lot of people, I think this will be the future of work. People will go to schools to get rounded educations and get degrees in “Human Cognitive Tasks” which makes them well suited for doing all kinds of random stuff that fills in gaps for AI. Perhaps they will also minor in some niche fields for specific industries. Best of all, they can work their own hours and at home.
by riffraff | 2025-11-02 22:23:42+00:00
It is odd, but people often confuse Emmenthaler and Gruyere.

Even in Italian (just across the border!) it was not uncommon to hear expressions like "full of holes like groviera", and it seems in French it's the same based on the existence of this Wikipedia page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxe_du_fromage_%C3%A0_tro...

Language is just strange.
by jjcm | 2025-11-02 22:23:52+00:00
IMO the biggest barrier to linux is disappearing - the requirement to know how to use the command line. You still have to use it, but you don't have to know how to use it anymore with the introduction of LLMs.

I also have switched my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and now when I have an issue, I just ask an LLM. I play pretty fast and loose with just chucking commands it gives me into the command line. I'm pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.

I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.

There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.
by threatofrain | 2025-11-02 22:24:24+00:00
If you need some kind of event streaming system there are other choices which have less dev ops burden, such as just using any particular cloud's proprietary or managed offerings. I've seen two companies on NATS so far, I'm trying it out myself for size as well.

There are plenty of choices between PSQL & Kafka. It's not like you take one step north and you're in the "oh no you better know what you're doing" territory.
by ethin | 2025-11-02 22:24:48+00:00
And that is exactly the problem. Now things like accessibility (or, really, any feature that the maintainers of the core protocol didn't think were "necessary" because they like minimalism) have to be implemented by each and every compositor. If the compositor doesn't implement it, your screwed unless either you convince them to add it or you add it yourself. Talk about causing huge amounts of fragmentation for absolutely no reason.

The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X, then released it to the world and started acting like it's the future.
by HardwareLust | 2025-11-02 22:24:49+00:00
I completely disagree that chess has somehow reached saturation and cannot experience significant further growth.

True, we might never see another period of explosive growth like we did from the twin boosters of Queen's Gambit and COVID, I think there's still plenty of room for growth. Out of all my friends, family and coworkers, I know exactly two people that actively play chess, and one of them is me.
by raddan | 2025-11-02 22:24:50+00:00
On the other hand, you were probably also learning on the job, which meant they were paying you to learn. Not a bad arrangement, especially if they did not demand senior-level code from you.

I was also fortunate to get paid to learn web development in the 90s. This was a work-study job so I was barely paid anything (I think it was something like $100/wk). But I was thrilled to be given a computer in an air-conditioned office. The alternative was to do some other dumb work-study job like making sure students swiped their meal plan cards when they walked into the cafeteria. Although it took me awhile, that job is what set me on the path I’m still on now.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-02 22:26:18+00:00
As noted in the article, it is the cheese internationally known as Emmental, not Gruyère. Both Swiss and Gruyere cheese are regulated food names in the US Swiss (Emmentaler is an alternative name in the regs, but is a label of geographic origin in Switzerland) is defined at 21 CFR § 133.195, Gruyere at 21 CFR § 133.149.
by jjcm | 2025-11-02 22:27:34+00:00
As strange as it sounds, I think Valve is extremely well-positioned to ship what becomes one of the first true Linux desktop experiences. There's a huge demand for gaming x ai development, both of which have similar hardware requirements, and Valve is already polishing their linux experience with Steam Deck. If they launch their own desktop with a properly managed OS and hardware, I think it would legitimately become a contender among a very wide range of users.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-02 22:29:06+00:00
>Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.

Yeah, who needs to eat anyway? Lol it is perfectly fine to put this shit in parking lots. In hot climates, it's a benefit to customers to have covered parking. The wiring should be no more fragile than, say, power lines or lighting fixtures in the area. Parking lots are also better because it doesn't matter as much if water leaks between or around the solar panels. Putting them on rooftops tends to cause roof leaks and it presents problems for roof repairs.

>I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.

Higher temps around black PVs should be similar to black asphalt. Also, the thermal mass of the PVs is lower, so they will not stay as hot in the evening.

There are probably issues with PVs related to ice buildup and hail. They probably don't make sense in places with those issues.
by awesomecomment | 2025-11-02 22:29:19+00:00
When we don't have convenience and rather jump into the sea directly, we would actually learn how the stack works and not how the convenience wrapper worked. We would feel more confident in our ability to do more things without requiring somebody else's help and more. It is this reason why figuring out this phase feels really important and lovely even, yet most people feel its hardness and leave it aside since they just want something which just works

Fortunately, for them, I think with technologies like docker/podman, flatpak, appimage etc. I feel like its already easy-ish enough.

Side nit pick but I hate when apps create docker/podman containers when they can also have flatpak, I would love to see some self hosting apps which have a gui or maybe even some cli hosted via flatpak but I rarely saw cli apps in flatpak etc.
by thomascountz | 2025-11-02 22:29:35+00:00
I'm curious about the effect of "hand writing" a card for spaced repetition. It sure feels like it helps me learn more effectively when I write high-quality cards myself, but n=1 in this case. Even when I use an LLM to help, I have never find the cards to be useful by default—same goes for trying to use other's decks.

That said, what I'd really love is a better card writing UI. If I could simply edit the table when in the browse view instead of opening the form view, that'd be a big step up!