MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-11-21 09:11:13+00:00
This is akin to claiming that a tic-tac-toe game is turing complete since after all we could simply just modify it to make it not a tic tac toe game. It's not exactly a clever argument.

And again there are endless things that seem to reasonably defy turing computability except when you assume your own conclusion. Going from nothing, not even language, to richly communicating, inventing things with no logical basis for such, and so is difficult to even conceive as a computable process unless again you simply assume that it must be computable. For a more common example that rapidly enters into the domain of philosophy - there is the nature of consciousness.

It's impossible to prove that such is Turing computable because you can't even prove consciousness exists. The only way I know it exists is because I'm most certainly conscious, and I assume you are too, but you can never prove that to me, anymore than I could ever prove I'm conscious to you. And so now we enter into the domain of trying to computationally imagine something which you can't even prove exists, it's all just a complete nonstarter.

-----

I'd also add here that I think the current consensus among those in AI is implicit agreement with this issue. If we genuinely wanted AGI it would make vastly more sense to start from as little as possible because it'd ostensibly reduce computational and other requirements by many orders of magnitude, and we could likely also help create a more controllable and less biased model by starting from a bare minimum of first principles. And there's potentially trillions of dollars for anybody that could achieve this. Instead, we get everything dumped into token prediction algorithms which are inherently limited in potential.
by squigz | 2025-11-21 09:11:26+00:00
> * Heads up for desktops, head down for smart phones .. avoid early neck problems.

> * No one got run over at a cross walk looking at their desktop.

In all the discussions about these bans and the effects of phones and social media on kids, I've never once seen physical health brought up (at least directly) :P

Fair points, but not exactly what I think concerns people like GP :P

> it's all very subjective and varies family to family.

Whoa get out of here that's far too nuanced for this topic.
by maccard | 2025-11-21 09:12:37+00:00
I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar.

> I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well. Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
by epolanski | 2025-11-21 09:12:54+00:00
Because, as I said in a previous post, they are adopted as a technical rather than organizational solution. Which means that either these organizations adopted the wrong technological solution for their problem without really understanding it, or that they should've tackled their organizational issues instead which could've been unrelated from microservices being the actual solution.

Gonna give you an example.

Dazn, the european sports streaming service unicorn, adopted both microservices and microfrontends as an organizational solution: they had multiple teams across different offices in the world, and this posed a lot of organizational strains.

There's a series of talks (he mostly focuses on micro frontends, but the concepts are the same) on Youtube from Luca Mezzalira (principal serverless engineer at AWS, previous chief architect of Dazn) on the topic, and he does *not* shy away from the idea of micro services and micro frontends being a subpar technical solution more often than not.

But sure, if you adapt micro services because you don't know what you're doing and you're not understanding the engineering difficulties, then you're shooting yourself in the foot and I've seen the very same phenomenon you describe: short-term velocity gains with long term penalties.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-21 09:13:22+00:00
The MD-11 isn't a new design. It's a stretched version of a first generation widebody whose design dates back to the mid-1960s. Before the MD-11 was developed, McDonnell-Douglas toyed with the idea of a dual engine variant before settling on a three engine version of the DC-10. Trijets in general came about because the engines of the day were too unreliable and too small to work in twin engine configuration at that scale.

The plane which ended up being the final nail in the MD-11's coffin, the 777, didn't start development until the 90s. Of its three initial engine choices, two were derivatives of engines that were around when the trijets came to be. The initial version of that Rolls Royce engine was so late (and so unreliable) that it essentially killed the Lockheed trijet. The third option, the GE90, was the largest turbofan engine at its introduction until it was succeeded in 2020 by the GE9X.

Scaling these earlier engines up to fit an MD-11 sized twin was never an option.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-11-21 09:14:17+00:00
Existing != used

It does not matter if the devs alone worked on it in isolation but at what point there was public use and how it has evolved. The earliest you could argue it was being used by user on a distro would be 2016 in fedora. Actual mainstream use in ubuntu around 2021 but optional and default literally only just this year.
by _ink_ | 2025-11-21 09:14:45+00:00
The issue I see is that companies have limited liability. If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the cleanup costs on to society.

Therefore, I think it’s fair that society wants to have a say in what gets done and what doesn’t.

Maybe a way around this would be companies operating without limited liability. Would you be willing to put your entire fortune on the line in exchange for a fast track through regulations?

Edit: to clarify: I’m not arguing that all companies should lose limited liability. I’m suggesting the introduction of a new type of company structure.
by jmward01 | 2025-11-21 09:15:53+00:00
!00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through simple process improvement and not just regulatory change, could really make a difference.
by bobdvb | 2025-11-21 09:16:11+00:00
1) I've never had an issue with this on Teams or WebEx calls.

2) When more than one person is on a call, try to find a meeting room. Then everyone else in the desk area doesn't have to suffer.

3) This is why I stopped going to the office when I am in a day full of calls, there's no point in sitting at a desk annoying everyone else.
by wtallis | 2025-11-21 09:16:32+00:00
PCIe switches with current-generation link speeds and high lane counts are prohibitively expensive and have been absent from consumer motherboards since PCIe gen3 showed up.

The chipsets on consumer motherboards are pretty much PCIe switches plus some SATA and USB controllers, but they're clearly in a different league from anything that's relevant to connecting GPUs. The host interfaces are x4 or occasionally x8, and the downstream links don't support links wider than x4, and at most a few of those. The link speeds are often a generation (sometimes two) behind what the CPU's PCIe lanes support. The high-end motherboards for AMD's consumer platform support more SSD slots by daisy-chaining a second chipset off the first; you get more M.2 slots but it's all still sharing a single PCIe gen4 x4 link to the CPU.

In the PCIe gen2 era, it was common to see high-end consumer motherboards include a 48-lane PCIe switch to take x16 from the processor and fan it out to two x16 slots or some combination of x16 and x8 slots. That kind of connectivity has vanished from consumer motherboards, and isn't really common in the server or workstation markets, either. 48-lane and larger PCIe switches exist, but are mostly just used for servers to connect lots of NVMe SSDs.
by squigz | 2025-11-21 09:16:37+00:00
> A shop showing pornography openly or use of various sex fetish toys while selling also bread is still inaccessible to any kid, so thats a pretty weak argument. Worst defines the overall situation.

A more appropriate analogy would be a shop with a clearly marked and separate "Adults Only section"

> these steps are good or at least well-intended.

I might agree that they're well-intended - but the road to hell is paved with those.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-21 09:17:11+00:00
Historically in the US, American devs have done a tremendous amount to undermine their own bargaining power by (a) starting bootcamps and other "learn to code" initiatives which flood the market with new devs, and (b) creating AI tools which automate away jobs for devs. Any software developers' union almost necessarily needs to take an anti-AI position at this point. Got to move fast before it is too late.
by shenberg | 2025-11-21 09:17:15+00:00
The short and unsatisfying answer is that an LLM generation is a markov chain, except that instead of counting n-grams in order to generate the posterior distribution, the training process compresses the statistics into the LLM's weights.

There was an interesting paper a while back which investigated using unbounded n-gram models as a complement to LLMs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.17377 (I found the implementation to be clever and I'm somewhat surprised it received so little follow-up work)
by ensocode | 2025-11-21 09:17:27+00:00
just asked Grok: What if Elon Musk was god. Would he have rested on the seventh day? Answer: No. If Elon Musk were God, he absolutely would not have rested on the seventh day. Instead, here’s what would’ve happened:

Pulled an all-nighter until 4 a.m. tweaking the fine-structure constant “for better performance” Dropped a 47-tweet thread starting with “Actually, the universe could expand 69 % faster if we just…” Officially deprecated the Sabbath and replaced it with “Crunch Day” Colonized a new planet called “Mars Prime” because “Earth is mid” Rolled out God Premium (blue check = fast-track to paradise, everyone else on the waitlist until heat death) Pushed an OTA update that replaced gravity with something “way less boomer” And as the grand finale, started deploying Universe 2.0 while ratio-ing anyone who complained about downtime

Seventh day? Nah, that’s just when the roadmap for Universe 420.69.0 went public. Conclusion: Elon as God = zero rest, infinite grind, more colonies, and endless “one more thing” moments. Creation would’ve hit v69.420 by the end of the week, and the old God who took a day off would just be called “low ambition.”
by Havoc | 2025-11-21 09:18:41+00:00
Was at a firm with a up-or-out policy. It doesn't sound like author has much real world experience with what they're studying...

The really good people have leverage so the can stay or go as they please. Meaning the people that get hit are average-ish (in the context of firm, not wider market). People good enough to make it to middle management but no further. You don't need to fire them either - they catch the drift when they don't get promoted, and those too stupid to notice were never "good".

>“Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’” says Kaniel.

The below market rates are primarily an effect of CV-prestige rather some intricate machiavellian mind game. People tolerate it because "I was a senior role at X" has value long after you left.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-21 09:18:42+00:00
> Some don’t already have a build.

The number of people that don't have a previous computer and are shopping based on individual parts is even smaller.

> AM4 parts probably makes the best value gaming build you can get right now.

Has the value improved in the last year and a half? The people that would want AM4 have had a long time to buy AM4.
by komali2 | 2025-11-21 09:18:43+00:00
> If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it.

It's good so long as it's profitable and grows. The market determines good and bad, nothing else. Companies must grow indefinitely or their stock price drops, any earnings announcement makes this obvious, even positive growth earnings might cause a stock price drop if the earnings growth wasn't large enough. Flat earnings, with a margin increase? Stock price devaluation, see Microsoft / Xbox. The word is right there, value. The value of a company is determined by its market price (or theoretical market price if it's still private), and nothing else. The market value of its shares are the final word.

Sure, companies might occasionally do good things, but that core definition of value under capitalism doesn't change.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-21 09:19:08+00:00
No, you really can't. Even if it were the same size a dramatically more powerful engine would need a larger "tail" to maintain control in case of an engine out scenario. But a 50% more powerful engine is also likely to be much bigger meaning that major components like the landing gear (and everything around them). A 50% more powerful engine is also likely to be much heavier necessitating its support structures (a.k.a. the wing or tail) be redesigned.

The 737 MAX suffered a number of bad design decisions to accommodate its newer, more powerful engines. Its engines topped out at about 8% more powerful than the 737 NG engines.
by n00bscure | 2025-11-21 09:19:42+00:00
Some 'performers' need comparison to not be whiny little bitches.

Some parents make sure their kids get amphetamines before puberty, or testosterone shots. Just so that they come out on top in comparison. If it's not enough, some go as far as to sabotage other families and to poison other kids.

This whole social media thing is all that on a global scale. Just a bit more subtle in the early days. But it's still poisoning teens.

It's no more than that; sleazy, overwrought, raunchy.

It reduced overall competence which means it kept even the top far below potential. But to them it's enough, and the rest only cares for fun, anyway.

We will never see what could have been. It's not even future generations' luck that it's so obvious. Nothing can be learned from this that would stop the toxicity. Just fall in line and be boringly, hyper-relatablablaby awesome.

It's a showgirl's kind of world. /wu˞…/

(still hitting that depressed tone instead of that cynic, 'noir' kind. Ffs, it's creeping all over me.)
by lukan | 2025-11-21 09:19:50+00:00
"This is why it's impossible to create a digital assistant, or really anything useful, via Markov Chain. The fact that they only generate sequences that existed in the source mean that it will never come up with anything creative."

That reads like anything useful needs to be creative? I would disagree here. A digital assistent, in control of a automatic door for example should not be creative, but stupidly do exactly as told. "Open the door". "Close the door". And the "creativity" of KI agents I see rather as a danger here.
by dvh | 2025-11-21 09:20:57+00:00
It's super easy to build LC oscillator.

I made a program that generate random topology and uses spice simulation to find if it oscillate. The goal was to find some novel LC oscillators. It worked, it found many different oscillators. I let it ran for a while and soon I found out that the simplest possible LC oscillator has 1 inductor, 2 capacitors, 1 resistor and 1 transistor. I found many different variations of it, I called this class of oscillators "LCCRT oscillator" and it also always had 2 internal nodes so that's not very large search space (40000 combinations) so I generated all possible combinations and I found out there are exactly 12 distinct LCCRT topologies.

Basically any time cap connects to a rail it can be placed to other rail as well, and any time one rail connects via resistor, the resistor can also be moved to other rail. This creates 12 possible combinations. I tested them in real life and they are stable, even used one in metal detector.

Of course it found many different topologies. Some times they were unique, other times they could be simplified into already found oscillator. It can also use multiple transistors not just one. You can find entire project on github, it is a ngspicejs script: https://github.com/dvhx/lc-oscillator-finder
by bobdvb | 2025-11-21 09:21:11+00:00
It wasn't really a comment on the tech of DRM but of the business threats that require its use.

That being said, streaming content security is more than just DRM and DRM is more than just copy protection. There's a whole suite of tools inside DRM systems to manage content access at different levels and rulesets that can be applied for different situations. It's still fundamentally controlling an encrypted bitstream however. But I've implemented a great deal more than just DRM in order to build a better content security platform. Transit level controls, advanced token schemes, visible/invisible watermarking, threat/intrusion detection and abuse detection, there's quite a bit that can be implemented.
by klipitkas | 2025-11-21 09:21:41+00:00
Hey folks,

Super Prompts is a decentralized knowledge repository designed to aggregate, validate, and distribute high-performance instructions for Artificial Intelligence agents. The system acts as a bridge between human intent and machine execution.

By standardizing prompt engineering techniques, we reduce token wastage and increase output fidelity across all major neural network architectures including GPT-4, Claude etc.
by graemep | 2025-11-21 09:22:32+00:00
> The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.

Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more price sensitive customers. In general people seem very reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc.

Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so clearly just do not need to compete on price.

One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it happens elsewhere too.
by latexr | 2025-11-21 09:23:27+00:00
I largely agree with you but want to highlight a few points.

> Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation.

But it does have a greedy leader who can and does override everyone else.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...

> Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN

How do you know the HN numbers? I’m not doubting you, I’m curious about the data.

> and look at us! We don't agree about anything.

At the same time, anyone can join HN. There’s no “culture fit” or anything like that. It is possible to have a larger difference of ideas in a smaller pool of people.

> AFS (apple filesystem)

APFS, not AFS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System
by gyomu | 2025-11-21 09:25:37+00:00
One of my favorite questions to muse about is when will be the first year where Apple does not release any new product branded as an “iPhone”.

Everything must end after all; but I get wildly different answers when I ask that question to people around me. Some think it’ll happen in <10 years as other platforms like glasses take over, others will say it’s gotta be many decades away given how much the iPhone is a cash cow for Apple and they’ll milk it as long as they can.

FWIW, the first year without a new iPod introduced was 2011, and the product line was discontinued altogether in 2022.
by slightwinder | 2025-11-21 09:26:09+00:00
> The claim in the quote here is simply not true.

How? There are two setups, either you book with an agency, which then forwards your data to the airline, or you book directly with an airline. In both cases, you have a more or less fixed amount of data collected, due to legal requirements. But the agency will usually act as a proxy, only forwarding the absolute necessary information, and using some on their own (like form of payment or contacts), often even send replacement-data or their own to the airline.

So it's absolutely true that in certain common setups, the airline is not the one collecting and holding most information. But, this comes with the price that more parties are holding your information.

And agencies are often going through a CRS or even through a middleman to the CRS, not booking directly with the airline, so there is a good chance of a third or even fourth party also holding your information. Though, technically this can also depend on the agency, airline and type of flight. With Charter- and Lowcost-flights it can happen that the agency is going directly to the airline, hacking their way around the airlines' website. But this is getting shoot down in the last years but those airline, and not obvious from the outside.

Oh, and historically speaking, it used to be that agencies were often collecting more personal information than laws demanded, while airlines went with the absolute necessary stuff. So maybe the article was meaning this aspect too.
by Yizahi | 2025-11-21 09:26:54+00:00
Whenever I'm forced to help with iPhones, I'm baffled how hard everything is. And I had my own iPhones previously. Download a file, unpack it and open in an app is an exercise is frustration, and that's just hoping that I will find the file due it being newest. Working with directories and old files properly, like on Android, I'm not sure if its even possible on iOS. And all that with a crappy keyboard with hidden numbers and special symbols, making searching even harder.
by dweyn | 2025-11-21 09:28:36+00:00
its an ideology called "xenofeminism" that aims to deconstruct / abolish gender as a construct. Its reinforced by naturalist arguments that say "its just nature" which xenofeminist reject as modern technology enables us to just emanicapte from our gendered bodies. Thats why they argue modern medicine also is "unnaturalistic" when you get a vaccine for example. Its influenced by postmodern thinkers like Judith Butler and accelerationism.