MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-11-25 07:12:02+00:00
This is the first I've read that OpenBSD's file system is "notoriously flaky", "bubblegum-and-string" (the opposite of the OpenBSD approach) or make "the least reliable device in the network". The reputation is the opposite.

> visit the console like Sam Jackson in Jurassic Park

Consoles aren't so unusual for most server admins, IME. They're the most common tool.
by emilsoman | 2025-11-25 07:12:34+00:00
> The script runs in the Code Execution tool (a sandboxed environment), pausing when it needs results from your tools. When you return tool results via the API, they're processed by the script rather than consumed by the model. The script continues executing, and Claude only sees the final output.

Anyone knows how they would have implemented the pause/resume functionality in the code execution sandbox? I can think of these: unikernels / Temporal / custom implementation of serializable continuations. Anything else?
by uecker | 2025-11-25 07:13:02+00:00
There isn't really much difference between "ignoring warnings" in C and careless use of "unsafe" or "unwrap" in Rust. Once you entered the realm of sloppiness, the programming language will not safe you.

The point is to what extend the tools for safe programming are available. C certainly has gaps, but not having proper arrays is not one of them.
by ookblah | 2025-11-25 07:13:07+00:00
the speech gets cut off. i asked it to click on a specific section and it said it couldn't show me as it wasn't a live demo. then kept trying to ask questions i didn't want to answer yet.

finally, i kept asking it to show me whatever it needs to show me to get to the point and it was like "have a nice day" and ended the call LOL.

that said, it's impressive what is there.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-25 07:13:41+00:00
Pages 22–24 of Opus’s system card provide some evidence for this. Anthropic run a multi-agent search benchmark where Opus acts as an orchestrator and Haiku/Sonnet/Opus act as sub-agents with search access. Using cheap Haiku sub-agents gives a ~12-point boost over Opus alone.

Will this lead to another exponential in capabilities and token increase in the same order as thinking models?
by karhuton | 2025-11-25 07:13:48+00:00
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.

It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.

Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.

The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.

I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.

-

Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:

These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-25 07:13:59+00:00
> I'm inclined to agree with him. I've had comments mass downvoted here and on Reddit over Rust criticism.

I mean, I'm not trying to say that (even good, unfortunately) Rust criticism will never be at risk of downvotes/flagging; I'm just saying that Rust criticism is not guaranteed to garner downvotes/flags - or at least, not to the extent implied in the particular wording. That's not to comment on your specific situation, either.

> It's not even symmetrical either, because the threshold to be able to downvote is 500 points.

If anything, shouldn't that weigh in favor of comments being upvoted, since there's no threshold to vote something up?

> The way the votes are tabulated is also confusing. It is not one to one. It's like, the downvoted posts contribute more than the sum total of the downvotes, based on the replies.

IIRC the vote display on comments has a floor of -4, but further downvotes continue to affect your karma nevertheless.

I had the impression that there's a bit of the opposite at play as well - upvotes beyond some threshold stop contributing 1:1 to your total karma. Not sure if that's just my faulty memory though.
by perching_aix | 2025-11-25 07:14:08+00:00
They said:

> Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!

The letters "gy", "ty", and "ly" are not exclusive to names, nor are they significantly more common in names.

It's not that I disagree people would struggle with these, just that it's not unique to names, so it couldn't have been what they were referring to there.
by anon7000 | 2025-11-25 07:15:55+00:00
> some secret cost cutting measure

That’s not the point — it’s just a day in the life of ops to tweak your system to improve resource utilization and performance. Which can cause bugs you don’t expect in LLMs. it’s a lot easier to monitor performance in a deterministic system, but harder to see the true impact a change has to the LLM
by rixed | 2025-11-25 07:17:54+00:00
I don't know why you single out memories.

Certainly, if some mad scientist were to stimulate via an electrode some parts of your brain to make you experience pain, you will remember it. Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that it would be equally feasible to create fake memories by stimulating other parts.

If there is a hard problem, memory is not it.
by az09mugen | 2025-11-25 07:18:12+00:00
Just to add the poor UX on Teams, confused menus, latency, random weird bugs, non-ergonomic UI. Have you tried to make a bot to send messages ? It's a nightmare compared to "curl with token to url" of any other chat app. Who designs this horrible stuff, who tests it and who validates the tests ? This looks like some inexperienced devs play with AI to make this product.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-25 07:19:34+00:00
They will keep ignoring Linux, because SteamOS plays Windows games, and everyone seems to appreciate being a second class user, that only gets to play thanks to Proton.

Even though Unreal supports Linux, studios will keep using Windows workstations, targeting Windows gamers, using kernel drivers, and let Valve do whatever they need with Proton to make it work on SteamOS.

Now if Valve actually made studios care about Linux, then yes, SteamOS would be interesting.
by rav3ndust | 2025-11-25 07:20:12+00:00
not exactly, fitbit acquired pebble in 2016, and google acquired fitbit in 2021. so while google did end up with the IP in the end, they did the Right Thing this year and open-sourced PebbleOS.

i don't normally praise google, but i am glad their open-sourcing of pebbleOS here enabled this new revival of Pebble devices.
by reincoder | 2025-11-25 07:21:13+00:00
That is surprising. I am not sure what is going on. This type of accuracy can only work if you are operating like a literal data center. Even in that case, I think meter level accuracy will involve hosting one of our ProbeNet PoPs.

For example, we know where our ProbeNet PoPs are located. If hops to your ranges are through private IPs or sub 1 MS RTT, we can pretty much confidently tell the name of the data center. However, considering that there are data centers that span thousands of square meters, we can point to the data center building, rather than the rack or the room.

To me, it is likely a coincidence.
by raphinou | 2025-11-25 07:22:19+00:00
This is an honest question, not trying to get into an argument...

> I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me.

Why not use the default provided then and take the defaults as opinionated? That's what I do actually. I might change very few options, but I generally use the defaults. It's not that you have to configure kde before it becomes usable, the defaults are pretty ok.
by hobofan | 2025-11-25 07:22:44+00:00
"What's credible" is an entirely different question to "what's human-made".

Do you not feel this "signal contamination" when seeing the normal HN feed?

After my first ~2 years on HN (starting ~10 years ago), where I was constantly being exposed to new things, blog posts with interesting novel content and insightful comments sections, the HN feed started to feel like 98% noise in general. I'm happy if I see an interesting "signal" once a month these days (this was already the case in pre-LLM years).
by travisgriggs | 2025-11-25 07:23:17+00:00
Like the author, I am saddened by systemd. I'm not rabidly opposed to it. I use it because Debian uses it and I like debian. And in some ways, I like the consistency better than the plethora of init script/run levels I used to have to deal with. But it does lack (to me) the Unix gestalt of having composable little pieces that could be pretty well put together and are each individually documentable and compose well in conceptual space as well. There was less surprises and nuanced side effects.
by sph | 2025-11-25 07:23:50+00:00
Minimal working model of object orientation, that cannot be simplified further? Look no further than Piumarta’s https://piumarta.com/software/id-objmodel/

As beautifully shown in that paper, all you need is a primitive “message send” operation and a “lookup” message, pretty much everything else in OOP isn’t necessary or can be implemented at run-time.
by jackstraw42 | 2025-11-25 07:24:06+00:00
It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are.

The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
by Smaug123 | 2025-11-25 07:24:47+00:00
Could you give an example to distinguish them? Async means not-synchronous, which I understand to mean that the next computation to start is not necessarily the next computation to finish. Concurrent means multiple different parts of the program may make progress before any one of them finishes. Are they not the same? (Of course, concurrency famously does not imply parallelism, one counterexample being a single-threaded async runtime.)
by sedatk | 2025-11-25 07:24:48+00:00
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
by laughing_man | 2025-11-25 07:25:02+00:00
Ever? No. Whether or not it's moral to support the state under which you live depends entirely on the circumstances. In the best case the state is mostly an expression of the will of the nation, and if your country is invaded you support the state.

But even if the state is parasitical, in the case of an invasion it's usually moral to support it.
Did I just break ChatGPT?
by zkmon | 2025-11-25 07:25:55+00:00
My prompt was "Please draw a simple 2D geometric diagram showing a matrix and its transpose acting on vectors".

It takes a minute and outputs a formula as an image (nothing geometric) with no description. Then for my next prompt "please explain the diagram" - it responds with "No available models support the tools in use. Try starting a new chat instead or try again later." I get same response for new chats as well.

This is consistently reproducible. What's going on?
by dijit | 2025-11-25 07:27:28+00:00
I agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time.

I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility.

Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-25 07:27:36+00:00
I certainly hold those opinions still, because the models still have yet to prove they are anything worth a person's time. I don't bother posting that because there's no way an AI hype person and I are ever going to convince each other, so what's the point?

The skeptics haven't evaporated, they just aren't bothering to try to talk to you any more because they don't think there's value in it.
by londons_explore | 2025-11-25 07:29:11+00:00
MLCC's look ready to take over nearly all uses of electrolytics.

They still degrade with time, but in a very predictable way.

That makes it possible to build a version of your design with all capacitors '50 year aged' and check it still works.

Sadly no engineering firm I know does this, despite it being very cheap and easy to do.
by dag11 | 2025-11-25 07:29:19+00:00
I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.

The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
by userbinator | 2025-11-25 07:29:43+00:00
4 times less capacity but 100x or more endurance or retention at the same price looks like a great deal to me. Alternatively: do you want to have 4x more capacity at 1/100th the reliability?

Plenty of people would be willing to pay for SLC mode. There is an unofficial firmware hack that enables it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578

1TB QLC SSDs are <$100 now. If the industry was sane, we would have 1TB SLC SSDs for less than $400, or 256GB ones for <$100, and in fact SLC requires less ECC and can function with simpler (cheaper, less buggy, faster) firmware and controllers.

But why won't the manufacturers let you choose? The real answer is clearly planned obsolescence.

I have an old SLC USB drive which is only 512MB, but it's nearly 20 years old and some of the very first files I wrote to it are still intact (I last checked several months ago, and don't expect it's changed since then.) It has probably had a few hundred full-drive-writes over the years --- well worn-out by modern QLC/TLC standards, but barely-broken-in for SLC.
by ares623 | 2025-11-25 07:29:56+00:00
If I had a magic wand I would wish for 2 parallel open source communities diverging from today.

One path continues on the track it has always been on, human written and maintained.

The other is fully on the AI track. Massive PRs with reviewers rubber stamping them.

I’d love to see which track comes out ahead.

Edit: in fact, perhaps there are open source projects already fully embracing AI authored contributions?
by medoc | 2025-11-25 07:30:58+00:00
Just as a note, and I checked that it's not the case with the GNU coreutils: on some systems, cp (and maybe cat) would mmap() the source file. When the output is the devnull driver, no read occurs because of course its write function does nothing... So, using a pipe (or dd) maybe a good idea in all cases (I did not check the current BSDs).
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-25 07:31:07+00:00
> I half wonder if adding a larger heatsink, or even putting thermal mass around the existing oscillator could also help, or if the heating is more localized in the PCB itself.

That would likely make it worse. The trick here is that the other cores are running at essentially their maximum temperature and and will dynamically reduce their clockspeed if required to keep from going above that limit. In essence, the environment becomes actively temperature controlled. If the ambient heat goes higher, the cores clock lower, if it gets colder the cores clock higher (up to a point).

If you add too much heat dissipation, the total power used by those cores might not be enough to keep well above ambient.
by verdverm | 2025-11-25 07:33:08+00:00
yeah, this generally vibes with my experience, they aren't that different

As I've gotten into the agentic stuff more lately, I suspect a sizeable part of the different user experiences comes down to the agents and tools. In this regard, Anthropic is probably in the lead. They certainly have become a thought leader in this area by sharing more of their experience and know hows in good posts and docs
by formerly_proven | 2025-11-25 07:33:31+00:00
Example: https://www.ssd.group/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/PM1733-25-S...

> Component Design Life 5 years

> TBW 14 PB for 7.68 TB drives

> Data Retention 3 months

And then 2.7.3 explains that this number applies for 40 °C ambient, not the operating/non-operating range (up to 85 °C).
by lll-o-lll | 2025-11-25 07:34:06+00:00
> My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material.

This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.
Why Hacker News UI still look like 90s?
by probeta | 2025-11-25 07:35:18+00:00
I understand its meant for simplicity, but guys aren't we in AI era now? I also know people have made lot of extensions and add ons to make it look modern, but what's stopping the admin to vibe code an elegant UI?

And look at the buttons, omg.

Cheers.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-25 07:35:52+00:00
Fair point with respect to the separate topic. My apologies.

As for the automatic cleanup bit, perhaps the article is trying to focus purely on the mutex types themselves? Or maybe they included the "when you lock" bit to emphasize that you can't forget to unlock the mutex (i.e., no reliance on unenforced idioms). Hard to say given the brevity/nature of the section, and in the end I think it's not that much of a problem given the general topic of the blogpost.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-25 07:36:02+00:00
They haven't improved at all since then in my experience. I poke at them every now and then and they still can't refrain from feeding me false info (and likely never will be able to, because they are stochastic parrots without any actual understanding). They are useless to me because I will take more time checking their output than I will just doing the task myself.
by big-and-small | 2025-11-25 07:36:44+00:00
Funny enough I just managed to find this exact post and comment on google 5 minutes ago when I started wondering whatever it's actually possible to use 1/4 of capacity in SLC mode.

Though what make me wonder is that some reviews of modern SSDs certainly mention that that pSCL is somewhat less than 25% of capacity, like 400GB pSLC cache for 2TB SSD:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/crucial-p310...

So you get more like 20% of SLC capacity at least on some SSDs
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-25 07:36:49+00:00
Amazing project, great write-up. Would love to see a temperature graph as well! I'm wondering how good the PID controller here is working.

For future improvements, a cheap but effective win might be to put a temperature sensor on the oscillator (or two or three in various places). And use that to drive the PID loop.

Even if just experimental & not long term, it would be nice to have data on how strong the correlation is between the cpu & oscillator temperatures. To see their difference and how much that changes over time. Another graph! CPU vs txco (vs ambient?) temperatures over time.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-25 07:37:11+00:00
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.

But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
by londons_explore | 2025-11-25 07:38:06+00:00
Unless I am misunderstanding the communication protocol between the flash chip and the controller, there is no way for the controller to know that analogue value. It can only see the digital result.

Maybe as a debug feature some registers can be set up adjust the threshold up and down and the same data reread many times to get an idea of how close certain bits are to flipping, but it certainly isn't normal practice for every read.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-25 07:38:06+00:00
Are about being serious? Its not 'Anti-American' to point out basic facts that literally everybody knows.

Let's just look at some basic comparison between Iowa City and my own city of the same population (mine is somewhat larger in metro city):

about 1.05 million trips

about 50.1 million trips

Its not even close. Why would you look at some tiny US city that doesn't even have actually good results if you compare it to anybody even halfway competent. Why not look for evidence in systems that are better by LITERALLY EVERY METRIC?

That's the basic issue with looking to the US cities for evidence. Their baseline is so pathetic that 'improvements' isn't really that significant.

So maybe its time to start giving a fuck, and not cherry-picking examples to confirm your bias. Actually learn from the systems that achieve the best results.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-25 07:38:54+00:00
Between the cross-licensing of hardware IP blocks and 3rd party software which never sees the light of the day, hardware manufacturers work like a secretive three letter agency to be able to control every part of their ecosystem.

I tend to understand where this comes from. It's part business, part continuation of old customs and the way they did it and being able to control obsolescence to be able push new things to the market.

However, if the periphery of the software you put out is closed source, even though this periphery is optional, it's not fair or ethical to say it's 100% open source.

From my perspective, it can be said it's open core, and it's pretty fair, and acceptable in my case, but writing 100% Open Source* (*: 100% of the open part of the software stack, exceptions apply) is not fair game. It's misleading.