MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by picture | 2025-11-10 17:38:51+00:00
There are modular dot shaped led matrix blocks that are basically LEDs under a cast piece of resin that guides light. They're tillable and you can drive them with an FPGA and a smart shift register based constant current driver. They're generic so you can look around online.

For example: https://www.jameco.com/z/SBM-2388ASRG-RG-Super-Bright-8x8-Do...

However this is assuming your installation will be reasonably large. If it's too big, I recommend making your own array out of discrete LEDs. They sell LEDs with a built in milky diffuser that are suitable.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-10 17:38:52+00:00
Eh, I wouldn't be so hasty:

1) This still has raster hardware, even ray tracing cores. It's not technically an "AI focused card" like the AMD Instinct hardware or Nvidia's P40-style cards.

2) It kinda does have a stack. ARM is the hardest part to work around, but Box86 will get the older DirectX titles working. The GPU is Vulkan compliant too, so it should be able to leverage Proton/DXVK to accommodate the modern titles that don't break on ARM.

The tough part is the price. I don't think ARM gaming boxes will draw many people in with worse performance at a higher price.
by dmitrygr | 2025-11-10 17:38:55+00:00
> nan is equal to itself

> The result of division by zero is nan

This is all a mistake!! IEEE put a lot of thought into making NaN != NaN and having Inf and NaN be separate things. As it stands 1e130 / 1e-10 == 5 / 0 == 0 / 0. Should that be the case? No. Why might this come up accidentally without you noting this? Imagine each of the following funcs is in a separate module written by separate people. frob() will be called errorneously with DEC64 and will not with float or double

int main(int, char**) { //[...] rateOfThisThing = getRateOfThing1(); rateOfThatThing = getRateOfThing2(); if (rateOfThisThing == rateOfThatThing) { frob(); } //[...] } void frob(void) { //[...] } DEC64 getRateOfThing1(void) { return calculateRate(mThingOneProgress, getTime() - mTimeWhenThing1started); } DEC64 getRateOfThing3(void) { return calculateRate(mThingTwoDone, getThingTwoRuningLength()); } DEC64 calculateRate(DEC64 done, DEC64 time) { return (done + time / 2) / time }
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-10 17:38:56+00:00
> return is not a single statement.

It is a single statement. It's just that executing it contains of two parts: evaluating the expression, and the non-local transfer of control ― and the weird part is that this control transfer can be hijacked. And it is weird, you can't do this with e.g. "if": if the test condition is evaluated successfully, then the control will go into one of the branches, and you can't mess with that... but with "return", you can abort this transfer of control. Which is, again, weird: all other expression-evaluating statements can go haywire only if the evaluation of the expression inside them throws an exception — but if that doesn't happen, the control transfer is completely trivial, with no special rules about try-catch blocks.
by xlii | 2025-11-10 17:39:38+00:00
For me, personally, it is nice because it's bare metal where I want it and not bare metal when I don't.

C is very basic and (especially when you stick to something like C99), can be very tedious to write. In C, if I hope for smarter things I need to write them by hand; usually there are no ways of achieving some goals without just crunching out the code. Zig preserves C qualities but also gives some extra tools that are completely optional and makes it less tedious than C.

I believe that Zig's popularity is also caused by general tendency of some people. Some prefer to fix a segfault than spend half a day refactoring something that was supposed to be easy but is causing half of the codebase to be rewritten.

(Oh, and Zig is also an escape hatch to easy CGo :))
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-10 17:40:05+00:00
The problem is that you just don't know.

Some of these bans are a matter of political operatives stoking vague fears for personal or ideological gain. That was almost certainly the story about the TikTok ban. And some of it is actual intel that will get declassified in 50 years. That may be the story behind Huawei.

Given that this administration likes to use the threat of bans and tariffs pretty liberally, it's probably the former, but look at it this way: the US govt is known to have shipped backdoored networked hardware to overseas customers they wanted to snoop on. In China, the govt is more authoritarian and more integrated in the industrial supply chain; I'm sure they do that shit too, because why wouldn't they.
by metada5e | 2025-11-10 17:40:06+00:00
I recommend reading the book 'For Profit' for deeper knowledge on this topic - the book covers the origin of corporations and the ideas lying behind legal personhood. It sounds like a dry read but it is surprisingly well written and as much about history as about law. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60568507-for-profit

Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.

Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.
by aljgz | 2025-11-10 17:40:22+00:00
My reasons for not choosing an Apple product for such a use-case:

1- I vote with my wallet, do I want to pay a company to be my digital overlord, doing everything they can to keep me inside their ecosystem? I put too much effort to earn my freedom to give it up that easily.

2- Software: Almost certainly, I would want to run linux on this. Do I want to have something that has or eventually will have great mainstream linux support, or something with closed specs that people in Asahi try to support with incredible skills and effort? I prefer the system with openly available specs.

I've extensively used mac, iphone, ipad over time. The only apple device I ever bought was an ipad, and I would never buy it, if I knew they deliberately disable multitasking on it.
by aseipp | 2025-11-10 17:40:25+00:00
It's very, very good as an ARM Linux development machine; the Cortex-X925s are Zen5 class (with per-core L2 caches twice as big, even!) and it has a lot of them; the small cores aren't slouches either (around Apple M1 levels of perf IIRC?) GB10 might legitimately be the best high-performance Linux-compatible ARM workstation you can buy right now, and as a bonus it comes with a decent GPU.
by yencabulator | 2025-11-10 17:40:43+00:00
> due to conflicting models

The big one is this, and this will wreck a lot of pre-io_uring APIs:

Historically, you pass in a buffer to read(2). There is one buffer per pending read. (And this is a scalability limitation.)

With io_uring, you have a pool of buffers and a read completes by grabbing a buffer from the pool and putting the data there.

io_uring highest-performance API is fundamentally at odds with the historical read API that was inherited from POSIX to just about every stdlib.
by nine_k | 2025-11-10 17:40:49+00:00
Logical separation, the modules, is what allows to preserve developer sanity. Physical separation, the (micro-)services is what allows you to ship things flexibly. Somewhere on the distant high end, microservices also play a role in enabling scalability to colossal scales, only needed by relatively few very huge companies.

The key problem of developing a large system is allowing many people to work on it, without producing a gridlock. A monolith, by its nature, produces a gridlock easily once a sufficient number of people need to work on it in parallel. Hence modules, "narrow waist" interfaces, etc.

But the key thing is that "you ship your org chart" [1]. Modules allow different teams to work in parallel and independently, as long as the interfaces are clearly defined. Modules deployed separately, aka services, allow different teams to ship their results independently, as long as they remain compatible with the rest of the system. Solving these organizational problems is much more important for any large company than overcoming any technical hurdles.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
by rootnod3 | 2025-11-10 17:40:55+00:00
So far it works pretty good. Minor edits I just quickly edit and tangle, otherwise I open the source block in a buffer (C-c '), and from there I can just use the usual C-c C-c shortcut to send it to the REPL.

But as the first stage bootstrap in CL is mostly done at this point, I have to hot-reload anyway.

At some point it might be nice to have my own REPL running in Emacs, but that is a worry for way later when I actually get something usable. For now this is purely for personal entertainment.
by salamanderman | 2025-11-10 17:41:04+00:00
I think the post gives an answer to this with "due to Zig's fairly minimalistic nature; it lacks a lot of features that one would otherwise use to solve problems. Of course, this is the appeal for many, but still". I have a lot of C/C++ experience, and they're what I reach for, but I often want C to be a little more like C++, and I often want both to have slightly better memory management, and I've never liked the different syntax for the main language, templates, and pre compiler macros. I also agree with Zig's dogmatic stance on no hidden control flow; I have been bitten by "magic" too many times.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-10 17:41:23+00:00
Wouldn't personal property in the US fall under the same criteria, in the sense that the government can sue the property itself (civil forfeiture)?

But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.

This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-10 17:41:41+00:00
As soon as functions were invented, we had modules. And as soon as we had the ability to call those over a network, people started building the same stuff over and over again. It's eery how much of the stuff that Kubernetes does maps almost one to one to the same kind of stuff that for example CORBA used to do. Naming, discovery, security, events, configuration etc. You'll find CORBA specific ways of doing all that. Except that stuff dates back 35 years. There is probably a bunch of stuff before CORBA that could be added to this list but that's before my time.

DCOM (MS) replicated some of that but never really caught on. You'll find quite a bit of that kind of stuff in OSGI (Java) that was somewhat popular in the early 2000s. And there was of course the whole SOAP / Web Services / SOA mess that people got into around the same time. Docker emerged early 2010s and Kubernetes soon followed and fast forward ten years and we're neck deep into the same shit all over again via micro services.

Part of this is just stuff you kind of need if you want to do a distributed system (like service discovery, auditing, security, etc.). And part of that is a lot of complexity resulting from that. Especially when you are distributing for organizational rather than technical reasons (Conway's law). Which is a major driving force in larger organizations.

The point here is that none of this is new. Also this stuff did not really fail but just seamlessly morphed into the next thing. People keep on making the mistake of believing that buzzword compliance makes things better/easier when in reality you are paying a largish price in terms of complexity and overhead for not that much gain. There's a lot of wheel reinvention happening here as well. And a lot of the exact same naivity being projected on the latest and greatest framework or thing. The same type of people that are cheer leading microservices now would have been cheer leading web services twenty years ago. In some cases these literally are the same people. Or companies. There's a reason IBM is all over this stuff, for example.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-10 17:42:06+00:00
It's not. It's kind of bonkers to pursue that when you have a lot of traffic, but it's a perfectly sane starting point until you know where the pain points are.

In general, the vast number of small shops chugging away with a tractably sized monolith aren't really participating in the conversation, just idly wondering what approach they'd take if they suddenly needed to scale up.
by sai18 | 2025-11-10 17:42:43+00:00
Thank you!

The decision makers we work with are typically modernization leaders and mainframe owners — usually director or VP level and above. There are a few major tailwinds helping us get into these enterprises:

1. The SMEs who understand these systems are retiring, so every year that passes makes the systems more opaque.

2. There’s intense top-down pressure across Fortune 500s to adopt AI initiatives.

3. Many of these companies are paying IBM 7–9 figures annually just to keep their mainframes running.

Modernization has always been a priority, but the perceived risk was enormous. With today’s LLMs, we’re finally able to reduce that risk in a meaningful way and make modernization feasible at scale.

You’re absolutely right about COBOL’s limited presence in training data compared to languages like Java or Python. Given COBOL is highly structured and readable, the current reasoning models get us to an acceptable level of performance where it's now valuable to use them for these tasks. For near-perfect accuracy (95%+), that is where we see an large opportunity to build domain-specific frontier models purpose built for these legacy systems.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-11-10 17:42:45+00:00
Facts! #1 is not insane as long as you keep your internals modular (all-in-one deployment doesn't mean ball of mud... you can avoid putting service calls into your domain objects or your data plane code). And you can go from #1 to #2 once you see the need and slice the services out that need it (such as decoupling async batch processing into a 2nd service that shares the domain and the data plane code and does not include the front-end).
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-10 17:43:26+00:00
Thought provoking. Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. The thing with temples stems ultimately from fairly practical matters if they hold such treasure, but it's a magnet for strife, and actually kind of surprising that in the case-study mentioned they resisted the opportunity to justify abuse of power. What is a lawyer really but a kind of priest or magician, changing material reality with obscure incantations of dubious origin?

Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.
by pyrolistical | 2025-11-10 17:43:47+00:00
The authors section on comptime makes me believe they have not used zig anything non trivial.

I don’t think comptime as just some macro system. It is closer to a reflection system. I use comptime to access types. You can create specialized paths depending on type.

Also imo generics are “first class” in zig. Comptime is first class and thus generics are too.
by taylorallred | 2025-11-10 17:44:12+00:00
I have admired many parts of Zig and its philosophy but I've never seen it as a language that I want to use. What I've noticed is that Zig users care most about explicitness, simplicity, and minimal indirection. This leads to a lot of syntax that is cumbersome to read (albeit unambiguous) like casting and a lack of "convenience" features. I can't help but think that maybe they're right and that this philosophy probably leads to better software because nothing is "hidden". But, I also think that there's a level of abstraction/indirection that makes code clearer and less error-prone. It's a tricky balance to achieve, and past languages have succeeded and failed at it to different degrees. Either way, I echo the OP's sentiment: if Zig is your jam, great, go make some awesome stuff with it. It's just not my go-to today.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-10 17:44:20+00:00
Look into iPaaS products.

Workfront Fusion, Workato, Boomi, Power Apps, OutSystems

Basically the evolution of BPEL, doing orchestration with any kind of microservices exposed via APIs, which can themselves be exposed via API endpoints.

Now with MCP, tools and agents, some of those diagrams can be further automated.
by mackid | 2025-11-10 17:44:32+00:00
I’m building A2Fusion [1], a dual RP2350 expansion board for the Apple II to provide, storage, hdmi video and other functions in one card. The PoC is currently a big mess of wires. Waiting on JLCPCB for first prototype boards.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/permalink/101664026...
by dfabulich | 2025-11-10 17:45:28+00:00
They're discontinuing the Facebook Like button on third-party sites. That's pretty wild! The Like button used to be Facebook's major initiative back in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_like_button

Media sites in particular used to try to drive people to click the Like button, causing their articles to appear prominently on Facebook. And since it was an <iframe> running on every site, Facebook would automatically know what articles you viewed, data that they could use to target ads to you.

How/why did that die out, I wonder?
by salamanderman | 2025-11-10 17:45:47+00:00
Yes, after the ship was already screwed, they moved the ship to the far side of a small island where the winds would be slowed and the waves would be smaller. Unfortunately, their depth maps were inaccurate and the water wasn't deep enough such that they bashed the hull. If it weren't for the extreme winds, they wouldn't have moved the ship to try to get out of them.
by leptons | 2025-11-10 17:45:58+00:00
None of that has ever, in 40 years of programming, been very important to me. Again, the only thing that really matters to me is the state of the code today, and the direction the code needs to go in. Where the code has been simply doesn't matter very much to me (YMMV). Git commit history has had so little value to me in practice that it's almost completely pointless to worry about. But again, YMMV.
by opazazzyzen | 2025-11-10 17:46:01+00:00
The media narratives that work for startups change fast.

In 2020, everything was “the future of work.” Now, it’s “IRL is better.”

I wrote about how Sweatpals, a social fitness startup, used this shift to time their $12M seed announcement perfectly and land coverage. (They also used this opp to deploy investors to talk about them, publish a launch video, and roll out new branding. I don’t talk about this in the post, but a reminder to all of you about the importance of landing media and leveraging owned channels.)

Sharing the post with you all, as I discuss how YC companies “joined” the conversations centering around the pandemic to land coverage—and now, if you’re a startup building in wellness, social, or community, now’s your moment to make yourself part of the story.
by Izkata | 2025-11-10 17:46:48+00:00
If you go all the way to where the cleaned-up version is a squash merge, as so many unfortunately do, we already have that: regular, non-squashed merges.

If you don't go that far, you could mimic something like it with sub-branches and merge commits for each one into your working branch, but I imagine it would be annoying to handle at that granularity.
by vablings | 2025-11-10 17:46:49+00:00
I disagree. The advent of high-speed internet in poorer countries is only something that has taken place in the past 10 years and it's only going to get worse.

This is almost like a second stage of the manufacturing revolution that happened with the advent of computer numerical control and generally the digitization of the so-called engineering "stack"

Right now, the pipeline is looking super gross for anyone apart from hyper-capitalists, but then again what meat is left to pick off the bone? Pretty much everything is overseas nowadays anyways

- Engineering Prototype is done domestically

- Verification is offshored to low-rate engineers

- Final CAD drawings are offshored

- Final Assembly instructions are offshored

- Production line is designed domestically

- Production line is assembled offshore

- Production is manufactured and shipped domestically at the lowest rate

- Said product is handled in a warehouse that is operated by offshored teleoperators

- Customer support for the end user is offshored

- RMA process is non-existent therefore replacement is offshored
by atourgates | 2025-11-10 17:47:12+00:00
Ever since I discovered Gypspy nearly a decade ago (now Guidealong https://guidealong.com/) - I've been dreaming of an open source app that'd pull local history from sources like Wikipedia, those roadside historical signs, etc., and narrate as you drive.

https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.

It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.

Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.
by fragmede | 2025-11-10 17:47:12+00:00
Are you saying this based on experience or are you projecting? In my experience (tho not asking how to italicize text using * characters) Dang and tomhow are happy to answer all sorts of questions. Sometimes they do get bogged down by the reality of running a site of this site manually, as it were, but I can't remember a question that didn't eventually get answered. I'll even tell them I vouched for this bunch of dead comments, was that the right thing to do? And one of them will write back saying mostly, but just fyi comment xyz was more flamebaity than idea, but thank you for asking and working on calibrating your vouch-o-meter.
by nickcw | 2025-11-10 17:47:20+00:00
Very clever image and caption (right at the bottom of the page)

> Header image by me: Alan Turing memorial, Manchester, where he reminds you why keeping data private can be a matter of life and death.

The image shows a close up of a statue of Alan Turing, his hand holding an apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death
by beefnugs | 2025-11-10 17:47:21+00:00
Yes absolutely relevant, especially in this software case. There is no requirement for mass-amounts of boilerplate code to be written here, just supposedly smart and correct cryptography and as little code as possible to do the job right... so if someone is using AI... that is a huge red flag.

An obvious sign that something is going horribly wrong in this project.

In fact i think this kind of news is enough to garner a huge influx of international hackers all targeting this package now, if they weren't already. They will be looking closely at the supply chain, phishing the hell out of the developers, physical intrusions where they can, its a hint that the developers might be stressed and making poor decisions, with huge payoff for infiltrating
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-10 17:47:21+00:00
What? Myself?

Are you still talking about the battery starting a fire, and saying that it's my fault rather than the battery's fault? Because that's not an "indeed". I'm talking about non-battery fires.

If you're on the same page as me, and talking about non-battery fires... What makes it my fault?? Are you saying any possible fire is my fault? With the implication that insurance shouldn't pay out for any fires ever??