MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rft | 2025-11-29 11:26:35+00:00
SteamVR works ok, but last I checked it still performs worse than on Windows. If you are feeling adventurous, you can try a FOSS VR stack [1]. It works for Steam games running Proton and when it works it provides better performance. I had some troubles with it, sometimes you need to switch versions or you get some artifacts in games, or some games just don't work at all. Good thing is, switching between FOSS and SteamVR is as simple as launching either first before starting the VR game in Steam.

I guess the Linux VR stack might get a bit of love from Valve for the Steam Frame, so things might improve in the near future.

[1] https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/fossvr/envision/
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-29 11:27:50+00:00
That was my initial confusion as well. It means exactly what you guessed, "Error detection and correction". The term is also spelled out in the report. I asked Claude about it (caveat emptor) and it said EDAC is the correct name for the circuitry and implementation itself whereas ECC is the algorithm. Gemini said that EDAC is the general technique and ECC is one implementation variant. So, at this point, I'm not sure. They are used interchangeably (maybe wrongly so), and in this case, we're referring to, essentially, the same thing, with maybe some small differences in the details. In my professional life, almost always I referred to ECC. In the report, they were only using EDAC. I thought I'd maintain consistency with the report so I tried using EDAC as well.
by mikaraento | 2025-11-29 11:28:10+00:00
Nit: RDP’s roots are more in multi-user windows like Citrix Metaframe than in remote administration. I’ve found it to perform better than the alternatives (remote X11, VNC, Chrome Remote Desktop) for remote GUIs. Nomachine is the only alternative that was close to its performance.

(And before somebody jumps in to correct me - in ancient times X11 performed quite well over the network but modern Linux GUI apps are no longer designed to minimise X11 network traffic)
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-29 11:28:53+00:00
Yes, that is right. The only reason I did it this way was, because I wanted to demonstrate a naive implementation, I wouldn't commit that, but I wouldn't commit leftpad at all.

Allocating on the stack is pretty cheap, it's only a single instruction to move the stack pointer. The compiler is likely to optimize it away completely. When doing more complicated things, where you don't build the string linearly allocating on the stack first can be likely cheaper, since the stack memory is likely in cache, but a new allocation isn't. It can also make the code easier, since you can first do random stuff on the stack and then allocate on the heap once the string is complete and you know its final size.
by stuaxo | 2025-11-29 11:30:57+00:00
I've got a robot vac and only use it "manually" they do get stuck from time to time, but its just grab it and stick it down in whatever area.

The house has stairs in bits anyway.

If it was on a schedule it could only do the bit it was in if I left a door open, so why not just use it manually ?

I have never let it on the WiFi.
by tliltocatl | 2025-11-29 11:31:34+00:00
Not a DE either, haven't been thru Avro, but I have worked with PB wire format quite a lot. Here's what I've used:

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ - data transcoder pipeline, can do protobuf, among others. Very useful when you are debugging a custom encoder.

https://github.com/nccgroup/blackboxprotobuf - decodes wire format without a scheme.
by camtarn | 2025-11-29 11:32:01+00:00
Bit of a mixed bag for me. There are a lot of things that work remarkably well, but I have some issues with GPU performance (Cyberpunk 2077 just doesn't run well on Linux for me, despite running great on Windows on the same PC, and GPU-heavy apps like Insta360 Studio and Topaz Denoise run excruciatingly slow or not at all) and some things just don't work (my audio VST plugins work alright, albeit with some bugs about window position handling, but I can't get some of the licensing apps to work under WINE).
by exasperaited | 2025-11-29 11:33:04+00:00
> I presume the idea is that you don't give little Timmy the password to his own account portal, but I don't know what's to stop him getting his own SIM by himself.

Well — perhaps the toggle is only available if the account has been topped up with a credit card?

One thing that distinguishes you getting a SIM and Little Timmy getting a SIM is that you're over the age of majority and can enter into credit contracts, whereas Little Timmy can only get a debit card.

This fact is actually central to one of Ofcom's recommended age verification techniques, though the adult block on mobile phone networks is much older than these recent measures.
by salawat | 2025-11-29 11:33:05+00:00
Software Engineers cannot afford to not be politicians at some level. Once you let someone run off with the primitives to make a system, there is no taking it back. You are writing the probability space on which policymakers can build whatever nightmarish they're salivating over this week.

I want to emphasize. There is no neutrality from this. The profession is inherently political, and the more you try put your head in the sand and ignore that fact, the more you hand the reins to someone else to make that decision for you.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-29 11:34:53+00:00
> Wasn't the philosophy back then to run multiple independent (and often even designed and manufactured by different teams) computers and run a quorum algorithm at a very high level?

It was, and they did (well, same design, but they were independent). I quote from the report:

"To provide redundancy, the ADIRS included three air data inertial reference units (ADIRU 1, ADIRU 2, and ADIRU 3). Each was of the same design, provided the same information, and operated independently of the other two"

> Maybe ECC was seen as redundant in that model?

I personally would not eschew any level of redundancy when it can improve safety, even in remote cases. It seems at the moment of the module's creation, EDAC was not required, and it probably was quite more expensive. The new variant apparently has EDAC. They retrofitted all units with the newer variants whenever one broke down. Overall, ECC is an extra layer of protection. The _presumably_ bit flip would be plausible to blame for data spikes. But even so, the data spikes should not have caused the controls issue. The controls issue is a separate problem, and it's highly likely THAT is what they are going to address, in another compute unit.

"There was a limitation in the algorithm used by the A330/A340 flight control primary computers for processing angle of attack (AOA) data. This limitation meant that, in a very specific situation, multiple AOA spikes from only one of the three air data inertial reference units could result in a nose-down elevator command. [Significant safety issue]"

This is most likely what they will address. The other reports confirm that the fix will be in the ELAC produced by Thales and the issue with the spikes detailed in the report was in an ADIRU module produced by Northrop Gruman.
by deaux | 2025-11-29 11:35:05+00:00
Whoops, the European company just got bought out by a US entity. Tough luck! [1]

Is this part of the spec? If not, it's as loose as a tent. And by "part of the spec" I mean "all your assets will be forcefully nationalized the second you or a parent company of yours becomes less than X% European owned", where X is well above 50.

[1] https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/11/dutch-looking-into-conseque...
by stuaxo | 2025-11-29 11:35:10+00:00
For the smart vac to go unattended your floor must be clear, all your wires for things must be off the floor (it will eat them), your doors all open.

The vac has to not be full.

You also need to semi regularly clear the brush of hair etc.

The robot vac is useful, but turning it on by pressing the button is not hard, especially if you have areas with stairs you need to move it anyway.

There's no need for it to have cloud.
by Peteragain | 2025-11-29 11:35:15+00:00
A beautifully written paper but I do feel it missed a major point. Vygotsky pointed out that "in ontogenesis one can discern a pre intellectual stage in the development of speech, and a pre linguistic stage in the development of thought"[Kozulin 1990 p153]. The pre intellectual nature of language can be interpreted as "performative" language (eg "ouch!" or "I pronounce you man and wife") but what does pre linguistic thinking look like? The contemporary answer I'd propose is that it looks like situated action/ radical enactivism / behaviour-based robotics.(see for example Gallagher's 2020 "Action and Interaction") In terms of LLMs, the idea is that rather than "distributed representations", LLMs are indeed using "glorified auto complete" to predict the future and hence look like they are thinking symbolically to us humans because that is how we (think we) think. Paper plug: see Https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403
by numbers_guy | 2025-11-29 11:35:17+00:00
> When I look around, I see hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on hardware – GPUs, data centers, and power stations. What I don’t see are people waving large checks at ML infrastructure engineers like me and my team.

That doesn't seem to be the case to me. I guess the author wants to do everything on his own terms and maybe companies aren't interested in that.
by styanax | 2025-11-29 11:36:30+00:00
My memory is really fuzzy, but I recall back when the new IM apps were all coming out and competing for the small share of people wanting to test them, either the Wire app or using the Wire service had a hard cost ($5 USD?) (no free-to-test tier, you had to pay to use). I believe history has shown a vast majority of folks will choose free (even with ads, sadly) over a hard cost for IM. Signal talked a better game and offered everything for free.
by eqvinox | 2025-11-29 11:39:35+00:00
I kinda understand the point, but e-mail of all things… the one thing in the current tech stack that is in fact "P2P"… technically all you need is either a VPN that allows incoming connections to you on a fixed address on tcp/25, or a dyndns and any ISP with inbound tcp/25 open…

Also, E2E encryption >> "the network handles that".
by SherifM2003 | 2025-11-29 11:41:07+00:00
A Familiar Frustration You change one little piece of state. Maybe it’s a boolean toggle. Maybe it’s a tiny field from a form. Maybe it’s that checkbox you swore wasn’t connected to anything important. And then the UI freezes.

Your devtools profiler turns into a Christmas tree! Components you didn’t touch re-render. Components inside those components re-render. Vue’s reactivity panel lights up like it’s under attack. Your console starts logging updates from parts of the app you forgot existed.

You don’t know it yet, but you’ve just triggered one of the front-end world’s quietest productivity killers.
by t0mas88 | 2025-11-29 11:42:27+00:00
It's tricky to do for large public websites, because routing happens at the IP level while users want to input a domain name.

That domain could constantly resolve to different IPs, requiring updates to the routing rules, and those IPs could be shared with many other domain names that the user didn't list (for example Cloudflare IPs). So the mapping isn't clean and you're likely to miss some IPs some of the time or incorrectly intercept some traffic that the user didn't want to route through the VPN.

A proxy would not have this problem, it gets to inspect the request and hostname and then decide how to reach that host.
by qprofyeh | 2025-11-29 11:42:37+00:00
While I agree there’s a lack of attention for the impact of software engineers on near-term industry growth — rather the opposite with layoffs and agentic automation (attempts) et cetera; the mentioned Scott Gray is working at OpenAI now, so the human capital angle is I guess just flying under the mainstream radar.

OTOH garage-startup acquisitions are acquihires.
by nickjj | 2025-11-29 11:44:25+00:00
It's funny because I remember in 2014 before WSL, certain hypervisors like VMWare Player had the ability to run Linux apps in Windows using "unity" mode allowing Linux apps to be seamlessly blended in as regular Windows windows, complete with window decorations, alt tab, shortcuts, etc.. It worked well for what it did, I ran Sublime Text 2 back then in that way and other tools.

This looks like an evolution of that, but in reverse.

I wonder what the performance is like. Has anyone tried it on CPU / GPU intensive apps like video editing tools?
by rglullis | 2025-11-29 11:48:07+00:00
> the act in question is personally offensive in a way that what Google does is not.

A perceived, harmless, unintentional and nonetheless remediated offense is worse than the continuous abuse of power and anti-user practices from Google, Microsoft and Apple. It might seem justified to you, but to me it's just displaced indignation and illustrates why we will forever live in this corporate dystopia.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-29 11:48:16+00:00
The issue detailed in the linked report details why the spike happened in the first place on the ADIRU (produced by Northrop Gruman). The recalled controller is the ELAC that comes from Thales. The problem chain was that despite the ADIRU spiking up, the ELAC should not have taken the reactions it took. So they are fixing it in the ELAC.
by yakkomajuri | 2025-11-29 11:49:03+00:00
> Do many models underperform or not support non-English languages?

Yes they do. However:

1. German is one of the more common languages to train on so more models will support it than say, Bahasa

2. There should still be a reasonable amount of multi-lingual models available. Particularly if you're OK with using proprietary models via API. AFAIK all the frontier embedding and reranking models (non open-source) are multi-lingual
by rkomorn | 2025-11-29 11:50:41+00:00
Honestly don't see what this has to do with my comment, especially when I end my comment with:

> I don't have a smart vacuum and none of my smart devices are devices I want to access when I'm not home, personally, so I'm not "for" cloud-based stuff anyway.

I was giving example responses to the question:

"Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?"

So if you want to reply "you don't need the cloud", I guess go reply to that parent comment?
by chronial | 2025-11-29 11:51:05+00:00
Draw a square around Einstein's face. Call the side length of the square a and the area of the square A. We have A=a^2. Einstein takes up some portion p < 1 of that area, so Einstein has area E = pA. Now we scale the whole thing by factor f. So the new square has side lengths fa, and thus area A' = (fa)^2 = f^2×a^2 = f^2×A. Since the relative portion the face takes up doesn't change with scaling, the face now has size pA' = p×f^2×A = f^2 × pA = f^2 E.

Does that help or was that not the part you were missing?
by omnicognate | 2025-11-29 11:51:09+00:00
I've come to quite a specific definition of "bad code", at least the main form of bad code that infests corporate environments. It's overly complicated code, but people disagree on what that means too, and I have a concrete definition of that now.

Bad, over-complicated code is code that requires you to form an unnecessarily detailed mental model of it in order to answer a particular question you may have about it.

People rarely read code in its entirety, like a novel. There is almost always a specific question they want to answer. It might be "how will it behave in this use case?", "how will this change affect its behaviour?" or "what change should I make it to achieve this new behaviour?". Alternatively, it might be something more high level, but still specific, like "how does this fit together?" (i.e. there's a desire to understand the overall organisational principles of the code, rather than a specific detail).

Bad code typically:

* Requires you to read and understand large volumes of what should be irrelevant code in order to answer your question, often across multiple codebases.

* Requires you to do difficult detective work in order to identify what code needs to be read and understood to answer the question with confidence.

* Only provides an answer to your question with caveats/assumptions about human behaviour, such as "well unless someone has done X somewhere, but I doubt anyone would do that and would have to read the entire codebase to be sure".

Of course, this doesn't yield some number as to how "complicated the code is" and it depends on the question you're asking. A codebase might be quite good on some questions and bad on others. It can be a very useful exercise to think about what questions people are likely to seek answers for from a given codebase.

When you think about things this way, you come to realise a lot of supposedly good practices actually pessimise code in this sense, often for the sake of "reusability" of things that will never be reused. Dependency injection containers are a bête noire of mine for this reason. There's nothing wrong with dependency injection itself (giving things their dependencies rather than having them create them), but DI containers tend to end up being dependency obfuscators, and the worst ones import a huge amount of quirky, often poorly-documented behaviour into your system. They are probably the single biggest cause of having to spend an entire afternoon trawling through code, often including that of the blasted container itself (and runtime config!), to answer what should be a very simple and quick question about a corporate codebase.
by thomascountz | 2025-11-29 11:51:11+00:00
I do rather think it takes good engineers to successfully build around the real constraints imposed by large companies—which optimize their products around a set of business metrics. At the end of the day, engineering is all about building around constraints; bridges aren't built in thin air with idealized traffic patterns, atomically perfect metallurgy, and with unlimited budgets. Yes, bridges aren't software services, but nevertheless the things we humans build are rarely pure or serve a singular purpose.
by yakkomajuri | 2025-11-29 11:51:15+00:00
In this case do you even need a RAG? Most models will have been trained on Wikipedia anyway.

Give Jan (https://www.jan.ai/) a try for instance. You'll need to do a bit of research as to what model will give you the best perf on your system but one of the quantized Llama or Qwen models will probably suit you well.
by fschuett | 2025-11-29 11:52:15+00:00
You are looking for https://azul.rs - which I wrote to finally fix this whole "Electron" situation: https://azul.rs/reftest

It's not ready yet (it does layout HTML semi-properly, but it still needs some polishing and the desktop integration is currently not working, only the layout), I hope can get a release of it out before Christmas.
by ajb | 2025-11-29 11:52:48+00:00
As ones of the comments says, you can go to https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa... and search by "invasive" to see that several responses are the same, some identified as police.

But I don't think that's evidence of a botnet. Seems more likely a conventional letter writing campaign where people are invited to paste the same response. Could easily be within the police,which is dubious, but individual police officers may have the right to respond as individuals.
by nosianu | 2025-11-29 11:53:17+00:00
> I have never not thought in words.

You don't notice it, but that inner voice is only on the surface. It is generated from what's going on deeper. You may not notice it is very good at occupying your attention. Your "real" thoughts are deeper, then we have processes generating speech based on our deeper structures.

Language communication is not a true representation of what you know. It is a messy iterative process when we try to externalize in words what we know. We also end up with people having the same words who don't understand one another.

An instance of that is the often used (at least on reddit) bell curve meme - https://i.imgur.com/cUOiP2d.jpeg

It is not that the person on the right has the same understanding as the one on the left. It is far deeper, but you end up using the same words. The knowledge behind the words is hard to express, when you try you will not end up truly conveying your internal state. The words are iteratively and messily derived from exploring your inner state, with varying success.

For better or worse, language has the attention of the people. We end up with magical tales about "true names", where knowing an entities "true name" gives you full control. Or with magic that is invoked by speaking certain phrases, and the universe obliges. Or with heated discussions about arbitrary definitions when it rarely matters, and when you really shouldn't, because if you get to the inevitably fuzzy edges of the actual concepts behind words you should just switch to other words and metaphors that have the subject you are interested in discussing in the middle instead of at the edge. In reality, our internal models and thinking are hidden in our not that well understood (except in the minute details, those we know a great deal of) neural networks.
by ryanackley | 2025-11-29 11:53:42+00:00
It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact.

The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills.

The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-11-29 11:57:07+00:00
Large portions of this comment provides zero to negative value. You've quoted two LLMs and couched it in "caveat emptor" and "so I'm not sure". The rest of your comment has then mused over this data you do not trust using generalities ("my profession" are you a JS S/W eng? A chip design specialist at ARM? A security researcher?).

All of the value of your comment comes from the first sentence and the last two.
by sebow | 2025-11-29 11:57:21+00:00
I'm not sure that focusing on this mudslinging towards OpenAI (or any other company, for that matter) will achieve anything. It didn't work in the past and it won't work in the future. The reality is that parents, guardians, teachers and society as a whole need to be held responsible(at least morally if not legally) in order to address the core issue of suicide and similar behaviors, such as murder.

Besides the obvious compromise in quality that companies would have to make to appease the 'karens' of society (not to mention the additional compliance and regulatory burden imposed on new companies), wouldn't it be simpler to just have users take a basic 'TOS test' when creating an account? Sure, it's inconvenient, but at least the company would be legally protected. The purpose is obviously not to protect companies, but to move the spotlight towards the real causal factors.

No matter how simple the TOS acceptance process becomes, people will still find a way to blame the product or company, ignoring the core issue of how someone got into a mental state where they use LLMs to cause self-harm. I don't see people suing rope manufacturing companies for facilitating suicide.
by swores | 2025-11-29 11:59:05+00:00
Those aspects of contract law mean that if MS included "you owe us your first born child" or "if you have not uninstalled this operating system within 2 weeks of installation, you owe Microsoft an additional one million dollars" then that clause wouldn't be valid.

They don't however mean that MS choosing to put adverts all over Windows is illegal, or a breach of the contract, just because users would prefer the OS be ad-free. The EU could legislate in various ways that would mean MS had to stop doing so, but they haven't yet and there's no aspect of general contracts law currently that prevents it.