MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cesarb | 2025-11-27 11:40:04+00:00
> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.

Are you sure it's the center tongue which takes all the stress, and not the round shell?

AFAIK, USB-C is designed so that the cable breaks before the port, because the parts which wear the most with use (the contact and retention springs) are in the cable, not on the device.
by pSYoniK | 2025-11-27 11:40:20+00:00
It is however very patronising to tell people to "Go full vegan, abandon all possessions, and all that".

It also isn't useful to reduce the conversation and assume that critique directed at the idea of necesarily going out and buying new hardware is a critique against technology or ownership, but, myself included, we do seem to read what we want. You also missed the point I made when I did clearly say voting with your wallet doesn't work. You didnt address the other, more salient point I was getting across, but obviously failed to do so - when starting out, don't worry too much, just get whatever and start learning. Questions will be easier answered when you already have some hardware.

Anyway, enjoy your day
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-27 11:40:55+00:00
> if I look away and mute, which is perfectly allowed, versus use an ad blocker, what's the difference?

The difference is you still see the beginning of the ad and some people see a big part of it because they don't have the habit of muting and looking away out of fear of missing the beginning of the video for example.

> The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.

You still see the beginning of the ad. Whether you buy something or not is not always what the ad is trying to do sometimes it's just raising awareness
by lapcat | 2025-11-27 11:40:57+00:00
Is there a HN convention for links to books?

This book appears to be available only for preorder now, not yet published. Nobody here has read it, nobody here can read it, and even if they could, this submission will disappear off the front pages before commenters have a chance to order and read the book. Thus the comments section here is going to be useless (or at least more useless than usual).
by codingdave | 2025-11-27 11:41:49+00:00
On your key points, you have a web site that says you do all those things. But so would a malicious actor. You'd need some 3rd party audit to validate you, or even better, do not sell this as B2C, create a B3B version so that banks are your direct customers, and individuals access your product through their existing online banking. Basically, fix the feature gap in banking by selling them the missing parts.

(Or, as the other comment says as I'm writing this - just have it run locally. That works quite well, too.)
by Yizahi | 2025-11-27 11:41:56+00:00
a) money make up for a lot of systemic deficiencies, adding here taxes, which are insanely high all across EU, salaries are several times lower here too

b) English language as a first class language. For example, while there are many job offers promising English only requirement, in reality a significant part of these unofficially presume you will speak local language at proficient level in the team, and hiring process filters for that.

c) EU countries have a lot of their own bureaucracy hell regarding immigration. For example I'm now on a Blue Card status in EU, that's a high skilled immigration program. I need to renew my card for the next 1 to 3 year period, I've started process in Sep 2025 and best case scenario will get card around next winter 26/27. Worst case scenario, add half a year more to that. If I want to get a passport, originally I had to dance through these hoops for at minimum 9 years. Just recently it increased to 11 year. And right now there is a law proposal in the parliament, increasing this term to minimum 17 years (among other inane requirements). If that passes, they may increase it even more in the future, making all immigrants live on the flimsy status for decades. USA at least makes the process faster, even if unpredictable.

tl;dr - EU is nice, just like USA is nice in it's own way, but in both countries immigrants have to put up with a lot of legal BS.
by Brybry | 2025-11-27 11:43:15+00:00
Looks like paper tablets even predate that 1902 use. This source has newspaper ads for "Pencil Tablets" and "Writing Tablets": bound ruled and un-ruled paper with and without covers from 1894-1895: https://www.kristinholt.com/archives/3205

I wonder if binding at the top was necessary to be called a tablet? Or perforation to easily tear off sheets?

I was looking to see how long ago marble composition notebooks (which are side-bound) were created and what they were called and it looks like they existed in the mid-1800s but I couldn't find any evidence they were called tablets.
by technothrasher | 2025-11-27 11:43:30+00:00
> RAF

On a trip I took with my father-in-law, the first morning he waltzed right into the little hotel room bathroom while I was showering (in a glass shower) and proceeded to sit on the throne and take a crap. I was confused at his lack of basic respect for privacy, and then remembered he'd been a US Navy guy for many years. Military folks just get used to no privacy in such matters.
by edu | 2025-11-27 11:44:01+00:00
Code absolutely belongs there. Like any technology (be it printing presses, weapons, or algorithms) code is neutral by design, but not by impact.

It can bolster democracies or undermine them. The real agency lies with those who wield it. And it's rarely the coders. It's the leaders, the platforms, the systems that choose how code is deployed.
by Fargren | 2025-11-27 11:44:13+00:00
Any mass that it fires would have a starting velocity equal to that of the probe, and would need to be accelerated an equal velocity in the opposite direction. It would be a smaller mass, so it would require less fuel than decelerating the whole probe; but it's still a hard problem.

Be careful with the word "just". It often makes something hard sound simple.
by GJim | 2025-11-27 11:44:23+00:00
> the biggest one is probably the total lack of principles and common sense possessed by the median voter.

Hard disagree.

The biggest problem is a misinformed electorate.

An accurate, honest and truthful press is vital for democracy; how else do people know whom to vote for! The fact this is being dismantled (often supplying deliberate misinformation) is truly worrying.

After all, the electorate is entitled to have a lack of principles and no common sense; nobody ever said democracy was perfect. However the electorate needs to be provided with an honest set facts on which they can base their decisions without cries of "fake news". Whatever their political leanings.
Show HN: Litterbox – Somewhat Isolated Development Environments
by Gerharddc | 2025-11-27 11:44:30+00:00
Have you ever worried about supply chain attacks (or even rogue AI agents) possibly compromising your entire development system? To minimise damage in such a scenario, I've built https://litterbox.work/ (https://github.com/Gerharddc/litterbox) as a way to have somewhat isolated Linux development environments without sacrificing too much convenience. It's still in the very early stages with plenty of rough edges so any contributions or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
by bhattisatish | 2025-11-27 11:45:10+00:00
Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose.

I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the index, find the tape and load the same for retrieval.

NAS can be used for continuous backup (aka timemachine and timeshift). And archival at a weekly level.
by lpcvoid | 2025-11-27 11:46:10+00:00
>The word "fascist" now has positive connotations for me

Spoken like somebody who never had to endure real fascism.

>I realise a lot of you will want to call me fascist for this comment, or more likely something a bit snider and less direct. Just know that I genuinely don't care. It's just a word now.

No, you may not be a fascist, but it's opinions like yours that helped make it possible. Mitläufer.
by tim333 | 2025-11-27 11:46:23+00:00
I can see where Sutskever is coming from.

We are in a situation where the hardware is probably sufficient for AI to do as well as humans, but in terms of thinking things over, coming to understand the world and developing original insights about it, LLMs aren't good, probably due to the algorithm.

To get something good at thinking and understanding you may be better rebuilding the basic algorithm rather than tinkering with LLMs to meet customer demands.

I mean the basic LLM thing of have an array of a few billion parameters, feed in all the text on the internet using matrix multiplication to adjust the parameters, use it to predict more text and expect the thing to be smart is a bit of a bodge. It's surprising it works as well as it does.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-27 11:46:58+00:00
All else being equal, most people prefer to own things that are valuable and exclusive to things that are cheap and mass produced, and the fact that care and effort has been put into making something affects the perceived value of the product.

This is why affects like 'limited run', 'hand-made', 'artisanal' tend to imply a higher price than the equivalent temu slop.
by mlrtime | 2025-11-27 11:47:57+00:00
For every anecdote here about a (very) bad experience with US immigration policy, there are 1000s daily that go on fine. It is a very large complex system that has issues, but for the majority it is working.

Find the specific issues and fix them.

Counter Anecdote: My wife won the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, aka Green Card lottery. Came here with close to nothing and not speaking more than a sentence or two of English.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-27 11:49:20+00:00
Java Minecraft (the old version, moddable, self-hostable) and Bedrock Minecraft (windows/console only, no self-hosted servers) are quite different.

The sad thing is that Bedrock is super simple. You can get it on any tablet, pay like 5-6€ a month to Microsoft for a "realm" and you can play with 3-4 friends online. They can join even if they don't pay, any mobile device, console or windows PC will work.

With Java you need someone to host the server or pay for hosting, then you need to give the address to your friends and have them connect. Then you need to worry about whitelists, because there are multiple services scanning for open Minecraft servers and people WILL come in and fuck your world up (happened to me).
by seec | 2025-11-27 11:49:38+00:00
When it comes to freedom, France definitely has it backwards. Now that it is in deep trouble economically, the bureaucracy is claiming for even more soft communism in a very totalitarian way. One needs to understand that the system made some people quite rich, way more than they would have been able on merit alone, thanks to the politics of bureaucracy.

Funnily enough the "far-right" is brandished as a fascist boogeyman when it would be a challenge to actually become more totalitarian.

For those reasons the "state of rights" is losing its legitimacy and criminality is on the rise unsurprisingly. When what you can expect to get out of the system becomes too disconnect from merit, it doesn't make sense to participate as a good actor.

So we now get rising commissars that tries to police speech and behavior any way they can. The police is basically a state militia that spends more time annoying mostly law-abiding citizens for minor offenses that just tow the line, in order to extract as much money out of them as possible. Meanwhile real criminals are out of control and receive laughable sentences from the corrupted justice system when they get caught. Following far-left ideals, criminals are victims that can be given more chances. One elected parliament member got caught buying drugs and basically nothing happened to him. Hard to not see some collusion.
by imtringued | 2025-11-27 11:49:51+00:00
>People pulling their heads out of their ass as to how to actually deploy these systems at scale (AKA to do this effectively, you need to do more than just throw pallets of GPU's at it)

Yeah something people don't understand is that the models have become so big it can take minutes to load them from SSDs. If you need to restart a CUDA process for whatever reason, you'd rather want to load the model files from RAM. This means for every GB of VRAM, you also need a GB of system RAM. Then there are things like prefix caching and multi user KV caching. Users generally don't do all their requests one after the other in a short window of time. This means you are better off freeing up VRAM after a minute has passed. If the user sends another request, using the system RAM as cache is still more energy, time and VRAM efficient than recalculation. DDR5 based DRAM is incredibly cheap.

>Regarding the hype of the day: AI specifically, part of it is the rise of wrappers and agents and inference in general that can run on CPU's/leverage system ram.

It has more to do with the dominance of mixture of expert models. Due to expert sparsity the required memory bandwidth drops quite significantly. It is possible to run gpt-oss 20B on a computer with 32GB RAM, a segment that used to be reserved for enthusiasts and developers has now become the mainstream amount of RAM on desktop PCs and mini PCs.

Yeah so if I had to summarize, the problem is that DDR4 is EOL, shifting demand to DDR5. AI demand means people want more than 16GiB RAM (there is actually a flood of used 2x8 GB kits in the laptop DDR5 market). DRAM manufacturers switch to supplying AI data centers and stopped resupplying retailers. Retailers are running out of inventory, leading to a sharp rise in prices. Early production of DDR6 will be out in 2026 with consumer availability in 2027, so there is zero incentive to expand production for DDR5.
by burntsushi | 2025-11-27 11:49:58+00:00
Yes, we are lacking information.

But the operative point in this sub thread is whether unwrap() specifically is load bearing.

If instead they bubbled up the error, printed it and then exited the program---without ever using unwrap---then presumably they still would have had a denial of service problem as a result of OOM.

And even if unwrap were load bearing here, then we would be in agreement that it was an inappropriate use of unwrap. But we are still nowhere near saying "unwrap should literally never be used in production."
by anonnon | 2025-11-27 11:50:15+00:00
> it's very weird they're calling this "lambda-reduction"

That was my reaction as well, only ever having heard of β-reduction, α-conversion (to prevent variable collisions), and η-reduction (the logical equivalence of a β-redex of a term and a bound variable with the term itself, provided the variable does not occur free in said term). Sloppy use of nomenclature is absolutely a red flag.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-27 11:50:38+00:00
> Marvel

One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids, (b) inherently a bit fascist even if you make it textually anti-fascist, and (c) ultimately like popcorn, something that should be only a small part of a more varied diet.

Now, that's not a terribly strong opinion, and I know it'll make a lot of people mad, but I have personally got fed up with the oversupply of superhero stuff and believe that there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like. Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions. Probably the problem is that audience has now fragmented, moving the genders further apart.
by podgorniy | 2025-11-27 11:51:12+00:00
Fascism is a form of ultranationalism based on a myth of national rebirth (“we must purge decadence and be born again”), which seeks to create a new, regimented society through authoritarian power and mass mobilization, often embracing violence.

==

Facism is a very appealing form of organizing society, so no surprise that people would like to have it. The same way many europeans though that facism is an answer to many problems of those times.

But wait, why, beyond shallow demonisation, such seemingly great idea could be considered undesired? Thoughts?
by javawizard | 2025-11-27 11:51:39+00:00
That pissed me off so much.

I was one of the backers and I was sooooo looking forward to an affordable home SLS printer. They'd done some incredible engineering, too, in service of getting the price point down to where it was.

Scaling up was going to be a massive challenge for them, but damn, I wish they'd tried instead of phoning it in early.

(Mind you, I'm sure Formlabs paid them handsomely. Would I make the same decision under the same circumstances? I honestly don't know. So far be it from me to judge them, but man do I wish someone would do something about Formlabs' ridiculous prices and monopoly over that space.)
by pas | 2025-11-27 11:51:49+00:00
pointing out that the basics matter is a valuable insight

if this comes with the side-effect of some random blogger getting "easy" credit then so be it

the same thing happens in economics, where the bitter lessons have to be learned again and again, and nowadays in politics (and even in ethics) too

and of course here people very correctly immediately started talking about the trade-offs involved in making sure that these aforementioned basics are really taken care of, and whether are there low-hanging fruits (does having a better DB schema provide enough benefit for it to worth it? or do you need to couple it with this or that compiler too? but isn't that simply too much? when the critical infrastructure provider should transition to the mindset that most people expect from a critical infrastructure provider? and so on...)

whereas in ethics (and intersectional politics) for example there's an unfortunate bitter denial of trade offs
by grumpymuppet | 2025-11-27 11:52:22+00:00
I have been curious about this. Where can you find definitions for the basic operations to build up from?

IEE754 does a good job explaining the representation, but it doesn't define all the operations and possible error codes as near as I can tell.

Is it just assumed "closest representable number to the real value" always?

What about all the various error codes?
by moritzwarhier | 2025-11-27 11:52:23+00:00
> The problem with NPM isn't any one young package. The problem with the NPM is that any time you run 'npm install', you download potentially thousands of packages, and you get the most recent patch release from all of them.

Isn't this simply wrong?

Last I checked, lock files work. They didn't for a long time, until a couple of years ago, as far as I know.

If you delete your lock file or explicitly run a package upgrade, sure, you get the latest versions compatible with your semver ranges.

> Installing one 1-day-old NPM package to forever avoid day 1 releases of thousands of packages seems like a worthwhile trade.

If you want to be extra sure, you can simply not use semver ranges in your package.json, or only for select packages.

As far as I know, this is recommended anyway.
by nickpp | 2025-11-27 11:53:15+00:00
> And then? I'll compensate the loss of thousands of dollars I don't earn anymore every month with the profits of a $100 investment in some ETF?

Probably most of it at least, because under your supposition that the AGI will replace labor we'll get incredibly cheap products and services as a result.

> Property has inherent value.

You weren't talking about inherent value when you wrote "Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless." which is what I replied to.

> None of this has any connection to anything I've written. I'm talking about the concept of a resource curse.

And my point was that the wealth of a nation does not come from its resources but its entrepreneurs. Resources are a course usually when monopolized and administrated (looted) by corrupt governments, not when exploited by private entities. AIs controlled by governments would scare me indeed.

> Other rich people can buy their products and services.

> He could still sell his cars to Altman

Are you joking?! How many cars do you think Altman can buy?! Do you really think the rich people can be an actual market?! How many rich people do you think there are out there?! Are you talking about middle class by any chance?

> Why do you think rich people would like to buy your labor if using AI/robots is cheaper?

Because labor evolves too, just like it evolved when automation, IT and outsourcing came around. Yes, I can't sell my dirt digging services in the age of digging machines but I can learn to drive one and sell my services as a driver. Maybe I can't sell coding in the age of AI but I can sell my ability to understand, verify and control complex systems with code written by AIs.

And so on, you get the idea. Adaptation, creativity and innovation is the name of the game.

> You're proving my point

> The point is: Because rich and powerful people still have to pay for labor their incentives are at least somewhat aligned with the incentives of the average person

Not at all. My point was that Elon and rich people are interested in you as a customer, not for your labor. That is the old mindset and the one we need to evolve from. See yourself as selling and buying products and services, not your labor, and the world will be full of opportunities. "The rich" won't seem like a separate class from you, but regular people you can interact and profit from (while mutually benefiting).
by cons0le | 2025-11-27 11:53:32+00:00
This is why corporations love this LLM shit. Its not about using AI, it's about "capturing" AI.

Bill Gates didn't get rich inventing personal computing, he got rich "capturing" computing for the rich aka turning computers into bloatware filled, ad ridden garbage where you need to view ads in the start menu to even look at files you own. Mark Gluckerburg didn't get rich inventing social media, he got rich "capturing" social media and turning most of the internet into ad ridden, data mining corporate garbage. Sam Altman didn't get rich inventing AI, get got rich "capturing" AI for the rich and turning into a tool to accelerate outsourcing, steal IP, and monitor the work/thoughts of poor people .
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-11-27 11:53:54+00:00
1. Consider preordering the book if you're already reacting to part of its premise; it should be a juicy read.

2. Regarding the power of billionaires vs the power of the median voter, consider that each lever in a system deserves attention before pulling on it or reconfiguring it. How can one determine "the biggest threat to democracy" without digging into the details?
by feketegy | 2025-11-27 11:54:11+00:00
This is from their privacy policy page:

> 9.2. Trademarks: “c100”, “Caligra” and all associated logos and trade dress are registered or unregistered trademarks of Caligra Ltd. You may not use any of Caligra Ltd’s trademarks without express written permission.

"Computer for Experts" may be trademarked, but it's unlikely
by _heimdall | 2025-11-27 11:54:32+00:00
I don't know if you will find a time in US history where the press was accurate, honest, and truthful.

I agree with GP that a primary missing feature is a principled public - without principles people swing wildly in opinion depending on the topic and popular rhetoric.

I see this with much of my own family. They mostly consider themselves conservatives and Republicans of the small government and balanced budget era. Those presumed values go out the window though and when a particular political topic of the day comes up they seem to completely contradict it. The most egregious example in my family is a Ron Paul libertarian that somehow still holds those opinions while supporting virtually everything Trump does.