MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dredmorbius | 2025-11-02 18:24:17+00:00
Thanks, that was on my list. And itself could fairly easily be addressed through a window manager or contained environment which served touch-only apps.

Other factors so far as I can read them:

- Insanely good power management, particularly relative to features. A dumb/feature phone can of course see much better battery life, but offering a small fraction of the services of a smartphone. (Whether or not this is a reasonable trade-off is another question.) Much of this is through chip hardware optimisation (meaning that emulated Android environments would perform poorly), and aggressive culling of background processes (which means that a full-featured desktop OS would perform much more poorly on its own as well).

- Various HW phone features, particularly display quality and cameras. To a lesser extent, audio output.

- Extreme wireless data dependency, whether cellular networking (4/5G) or WiFi.

- Cloud-based storage of virtually all data, largely implemented/enforced at the app level. Corrolary is that it's quite difficult/challenging to share data or files between applications, not to mention that it's often a bad idea to do so.

- Identity attestation, including at the network (SIM) and hardware level. I'd think that an NFC chip, identity token (e.g., Yubikey), or worn identity token (e.g., NFCRing) could stand in for this.

- Generally an update/upgrade model that the mass public seems to find acceptable (though I ... have my doubts).

And, though I said I'd exclude it: the apps ecosystem, both in terms of popular social networking tools, and a rich market for developing highly-specific applications for particular niche needs, whether commercial, institutional, activity-specific, or recreational.

The touch-based environment really seems like it should be possible to meet within a desktop/laptop context, and given existence of AndroidOS (or similar/compatible) emulators / environments, I suspect is.

Battery life is probably the biggest direct technical challenge. While reading your reply the thought occurs that with SoC/SBC systems, it might be possible to run a low-power mobile module which is independently active when mobile-only services are required, with data sharing through storage to the main system.

Further offloading comms load (4/5G networking, voice comms) to external devices (mobile hotspot, dedicated feature phone) could provide yet further optimisations.
by yalogin | 2025-11-02 18:24:58+00:00
In my experience using these supposed expert models, they are all more or less the same given they all are trained on the same internet data. The differentiation and value is in the context window management and how relevant info from your session is pulled in. So it’s the interface to the model that makes all the difference. Even there the differences are quite minimal. That is because all these companies want to toe the line between providing functionality to keep the users engaged and pushing them to sign up for the subscription.

All this to ask the question, if I host these open source models locally, how is the user interface layer that remembers and picks the right data from my previous session and the agentic automation and others implemented? Do I have to do it myself or are the free options for that?
by pizza234 | 2025-11-02 18:25:23+00:00
> You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.)

There's no doubt that one can convert C into unsafe Rust - C2Rust can automatically convert an entire C codebase into unsafe Rust

The problem is that after such step (which is certainly valuable), converting the code to safe Rust is typically a lot of work, which is the point of the academic research in question. Half baked code, using safety workarounds, doesn't provide any value to a project.
by hunterpayne | 2025-11-02 18:26:28+00:00
So you never read what Marx wrote then I take it. His ideas were even more unworkable than what the Communists tried. For example, he didn't understand specialization and thought people could just change jobs each day based upon whim. This is a big reason why the Marxists have never been able to convince the working class and why their support always came from the bureaucracy and not from people who actually did the work.
by dataflow | 2025-11-02 18:26:31+00:00
I dispute that? There are plenty of e.g. countries that don't bomb others, especially not for "no reason". (!) And the whole point here was about individuals behaving differently when part of the collective, not about the collective having been set up with different incentives and rules than the individuals were in the first place. You can have collectives with better incentives set up and achieve more humane outcomes. Like I said, such examples really exist, they're not hypothetical.
by ceroxylon | 2025-11-02 18:26:39+00:00
It is good to be skeptical, but there is a large amount of detail in the paper itself that would have taken quite a bit of effort to fabricate (for no good reason): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...

There is enough detail there to book a trip to Germany and set up infrared cameras if we are so inclined, repeatability is a large part of science.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-02 18:26:41+00:00
That narrative is still popular with LLMs themselves. If you ask an LLM whether it can code Rust, it will tell you that it can but not very well.

They're good at web languages, python, and C/C++. As far as I can tell Rust works if you're already good at Rust and you can catch its screwups and strange architecture choices quickly.
by bentcorner | 2025-11-02 18:27:57+00:00
> If you truly care about making more semantic history, split the work into multiple PRs.

This exactly - if your commit history for a PR is interesting enough to split apart, then the original PR was too large and should have been split up to begin with.

This is also a team culture thing - people won't make "clean" commits into a PR if they know people aren't going to be bisecting into them and trying to build. OTOH, having people spend time prepping good commits is potentially time wasted if nobody ever looks at the PR commit history aside from the PR reviewers.
by scotty79 | 2025-11-02 18:28:25+00:00
I think it's perfectly sensible to charge it at work to full, then partially discharge in the evening after coming back home. Especially since that energy could mostly power your own home. If you have enough left in the morning to drive back to work it would be fine.

Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.
by rectang | 2025-11-02 18:28:50+00:00
I wish this was easier. I have a workflow that I use to create stacked PRs which involves changing the target branch of the next PR to `main` after merging its predecessor, but it is too fragile to institute as a policy.

However, this is also just a more specific version of the general problem that long-lived, elaborate topic branches are difficult to work with.
by tejohnso | 2025-11-02 18:28:52+00:00
I gave helix a serious shot for a week, converting shortcuts and adapting to helix's way. In the end I couldn't find any advantage to it over my vim setup. It was not plug and play it was not configuration free, it was not noticeably faster. It was just full of negatives. Little gripes like the one you mention. Vim just seems to do everything better with fewer popups and selection flashes.
by wtetzner | 2025-11-02 18:29:14+00:00
Bit that is more like standardizing on a language, not a syntax across languages.

I also don't think syntax is even a problem worth worrying about. It takes very little time to become accustomed to a new syntax. It's the semantics that are hard to learn. Difficulty syntax can often be helpful when learning a new language, as it serves as a reminder that the semantics are different.
by TuckerBMorgan | 2025-11-02 18:29:35+00:00
Hey HN! I am back with an update on my ML Lib, can-t github.com/TuckerBMorgan/can-t

Since I last posted I have poured a lot into the library, we now support all the operations needed to run GTP2. I am currently working on supporting GPT-oss, topk and einsum have been holding my attention as of late.

I wanted to start writing about what I had learned and so this is the first in a series of posts about that subject.
by anthomtb | 2025-11-02 18:30:01+00:00
Binary searching your commit history and using version control software to automate the process just seems so...obvious?

I get that author learned a new-to-him technique and is excited to share with the world. But to this dev, with a rapidly greying beard, the article has the vibe of "Hey bro! You're not gonna believe this. But I just learned the Pope is catholic."
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-02 18:30:47+00:00
> It's so called because pathing through a non-Euclidean map is very difficult for a human but trivial for a computer or a kobold.

That sounds like an artifact of the display. Pathing through a non-Euclidean map is, for example, a major game mechanic of Super Mario Galaxy; it's not difficult at all.
by orionblastar | 2025-11-02 18:30:57+00:00
I am 57 years old, and I figure I was 7 when the Apple Computer company was founded. I remember from documentaries that nobody wanted to carry the Apple I computer in their computer stores, so Apple took out an ad in a magazine for $666.66 for an Apple I computer. They sold out and paid off their loan with money left over.
by hammock | 2025-11-02 18:31:12+00:00
That’s not how markets work though. For instance, just because one share of AAPL sold at $270 does not mean all 15 billion outstanding shares can be sold for that price. If a sell order was put in for even 10k shares you’d quickly find out that you might find a 270 bid for some of that but not all. Order flow is an important tool , bid/ask is misleading without it
by neom | 2025-11-02 18:31:20+00:00
I don't think that is possible in practice? Rats and Bats diverged some 60 million years ago, they're far too host specific for anything new, and they have the same coevolution as bats to paramyxo and coronaviruses, I would presume that makes them immunologically resistant and ecologically poor hosts for any strains.

Edit, in fact the paper you link says exactly what I said I think? Rodent coronaviruses already evolved to use furin long ago. I think this paper just makes it even less likely tbh.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-11-02 18:31:23+00:00
The only problem with this is its defeatist framing.

What most women who use dating apps are looking for, in a profile on that dating app, is essentially what you described, or at least a set of similarly rare attributes. Even worse, is the set of attributes that she is looking to avoid.

Dating apps are nothing but attributes. That's their core problem, and their core success. If you can get a small percentage (probably male) of users to attract a less-small percentage of (probably female) users, you end up with an infinite churn of "success" (read engagement).

The natural incentive in this situation is to show that small percentage of popular male profiles to as many users as possible. This gives you both profitable engagement and actual success metrics that you can brag about!

---

So now that we understand the problem a little more, can we start working to solve it?
by boshomi | 2025-11-02 18:32:28+00:00
Base load becomes very expensive under free and fair market conditions. The reason is simple: wind and PV are extremely cheap, and surplus capacity costs little. PV module price in EU is just 0.086 UDS/W fob. Wind turbine price in China ~2200Yuan/kW inclusive tower.

In a free market, this leads to attractive conditions for batteries, and that is where the problem of base load begins: there is a lack of real demand, and base load then remains unused because its OPEX cannot compete with wind and PV.

There's just one problem. There is virtually no free and fair market in the electricity market. Utilities lobby very successfully for highly regulated markets to protect their monopolies. Nuclear power requires massive government protection from competition, which makes it attractive to utilities.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-02 18:32:40+00:00
Both sides are confirmed to have violated the ceasefire within 24 hours of it being signed, now.

It's just like I tried telling you a few weeks ago: Trump cannot control either side. The Israelis won't listen to him and neither will Hamas, so what kind of moron would expect peace from his deal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45599108
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-11-02 18:33:58+00:00
You can just inspect merge commits, you can also just bisect over merge commits.

Splitting work into multiple PRs is unnecessary ritual.

I have never reasoned about git history or paid attention to most commit messages or found any of it useful compared to the contents of the change.

When I used git bisect with success it was on unknown projects. Known projects are easy to debug.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-02 18:34:43+00:00
How would you violate one of the other four?

Postulate 1 defines what a line is.

Postulate 2 defines what a direction is.

Postulate 3 defines what a circle is.

Postulate 4, in modern terms, doesn't say anything at all. (We aren't even sure why the Greeks felt it was necessary to state it!)
by pizza234 | 2025-11-02 18:35:00+00:00
> Each PR being squashed to 1 commit is nice and easy to reason about. If you truly care about making more semantic history, split the work into multiple PRs.

I don't argue with your point (even if I am obsessive about commits separation), but one needs to keep in mind that the reverse also applies, that is, on other end of the spectrum, there are devs who create kitchen-sink PRs which include, for example, refactorings, which make squashed PRs harder to reasons about.
by aster0id | 2025-11-02 18:35:12+00:00
I relate to this. I started building side projects last year, and being used to all the bells and whistles of CI/CD, serverless/containers and amazing monitoring and dashboarding tooling, I defaulted to those patterns even for my tiny projects. To make matters worse, I tried building everything on top of free tiers of various services, which made configuration and setup even harder as I was trying to glue things together in non standard ways just to make free stuff look like the stuff I have at my job.

I quickly learned that I needed none of that crap. Now I usually just have one dev environment (my local machine) and one prod, usually a free cloudflare worker. DB is almost always a free tier postgres instance. Testing and prod deployment happens on git precommit and postcommit hooks instead of inside a CI pipeline. No docker is usually necessary as I just build typescript services which have native support on most platforms. DB migrations are run directly from my local machine when I need them to run, instead of having specialized config in a CI pipeline.
by travisjungroth | 2025-11-02 18:35:20+00:00
The things that make sense in a 1,000 person company don’t really make sense for 1 person’s hobby. At the same time, the imitation is sometimes the point.

It’s like building a model railroad and realizing this isn’t the most efficient way to get a can of soda from the kitchen to the living room. “I actually don’t need to meet the US standards for track switches.” Yeah, you don’t really have to do any of this. I thought you were just having fun.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-02 18:35:31+00:00
> Why would they not be homogenous?

Why would a business have the power to decide what should and what shouldn't be homogeneous about the property of others? A transaction took place, property has legally changed hands and the former owner is exerting control over property that isn't theirs any more.

How about if the builder of your house comes into your home via an access route unknown to you, and starts rearranging where things are placed, or where you and your wife are placed, etc. in order to maintain homogeneous layout?
by array_key_first | 2025-11-02 18:35:41+00:00
I think the bank teller's systems and processes are deterministic, but the teller itself is not. They could even rob the bank, if they wanted to. They could shoot the customers. They don't, generally, but they can.

I think, if we can efficiently capture a way to "make" LLMs conform to a set of processes, you can cut out the app and just let the LLM do it. I don't think this makes any sense for maybe the next decade, but perhaps at some point it will. And, in such time, software engineering will no longer exist.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-11-02 18:36:04+00:00
You are describing rules that pertain to non-citizens. U.S. citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship ever and they can't legally be arrested or detained for this. The most that legally ICE can do to a citizen is briefly stop them to ask questions. Anything beyond that is an illegal arrest, full stop.

There is a lot of constitutional law here, not a lot of ambiguity. While mistakes happen, and ICE is clearly becoming more eager to violate the law (see TFA), that doesn't mean we should be unclear about what the law says. In particular, prioritizing the (incorrect) results from an app over any sort of claim or presentation of proof is illegal.
by zellyn | 2025-11-02 18:37:00+00:00
This is my annual plug for the little-known bundlewrap: https://bundlewrap.org

It hits a really nice sweet spot, letting you automate things, without making everything too complex.

Recently, I've taken to just asking Claude Code to do things via bundlewrap. It seems to be about as easy for it to create bundles and templates that update systems, etc. as it would be to just update systems, etc. except you're left with something you can check in.

Here's the result of me asking it to set up Caddy to serve a website from my little Lenovo box in the laundry room: https://github.com/zellyn/bundlewrap-config/commit/d5f92ebb0...
by vkou | 2025-11-02 18:38:43+00:00
1. It's not entirely unlawful. This is a power that he has. This has been done in the past - multiple times without the consent of the governors in question. [1]

2. Because it's not clearly and entirely and immediately unlawful, and would take a court to rule about it (the courts are also fucked - SCOTUS recently ruled that lower courts are expected to defer to whatever batshit version of reality the government's lawyers are peddling) people in the chain of command can't clearly tell if the orders they are receiving are obviously illegal, and don't have good grounds to disobey them.

3. Also, that's, like, the way to civil war.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine - When integration began on September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students.[4]
by OmarAssadi | 2025-11-02 18:39:58+00:00
Yeah, I haven't yet taken a serious look into it from that perspective yet, but similar came to mind; while, outside of bootstrapping the JDK from GCJ, Boehm GC hasn't been super relevant to me for "release" builds of anything, it's been useful in leak detection mode on occasion.

I figure even if you cannot use, or do not want to use, something like Fil-C in production, there's solid potential for it to augment whatever existing suite of sanitizers and other tools that one may already build against.
by hammock | 2025-11-02 18:40:03+00:00
We call those “specialty chemicals” and it’s smaller volumes but much higher profit margins. Evonik (Germany) is another example.

Things like- not the asphalt shingle, not the granules on the asphalt shingles, but a COATING ON the granule on the asphalt shingle that provides weather protection.

Or, not the memory foam mattress, and not the liquid precursors that are combined to create the foam in the mattress, but an ADDITIVE to the precursors to the foam in the mattress which regulates/ensures a consistent size of foam bubbles during manufacture.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-02 18:40:10+00:00
At least in Angband, the game explicitly tells you that you pass through a maze of staircases. The level you just left still notionally exists, but you can never find it again.

(This is also true of the recall effect, for no reason stated by the ingame text. But then again, the ingame text never claims anything other than that you'll recall to a particular depth, as opposed to a particular place.)
by riskable | 2025-11-02 18:41:55+00:00
Don't rule out laziness! I'm a very experienced senior dev (full stack, embedded, Rust, Python, web everything, etc)... Could I have spent a ton of time learning the ins and outs of Yjs (and the very special way in which you can integrate it with TipRap/prosemirror) in order to implement a concise, collaborative editor? Sure.

Or I could just tell Claude Code to do it and then spend some time cleaning it up afterwards. I had that thing working quite robustly in days! D A Y S!

(Then I had the bright idea of implementing a "track changes" mode which I'm still working on like a week and a half later, haha)

Even if you were already familiar with all that stuff, it's a lot of code to write to make it work! The stylesheets alone... Ugh! So glad I could tell the AI something like, "make sure it implements light and dark mode using VueUse's `useDark()` feature."

Almost all of my "cleanup" work was just telling it about CSS classes it missed when adding dark mode variants. In fact, most of my prompts are asking it to add features (why not?) or cleaning up the code (e.g. divide things into smaller, more concise files—all the LLMs really love to make big .vue files).

"Writing most of the code"? No. Telling it how to write the code with a robust architecture, using knowledge developed over two decades of coding experience: Yes.

I have to reject some things because they'd introduce security vulnerabilities but for the most part I'm satisfied with Claude Code spits out. GPT5, on the other hand... Everything needs careful inspection.
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-11-02 18:42:31+00:00
Weirdly I find Silverblue to be much more relaxing _because_ I can't fuck up my laptop one night while trying to get something to "just work". I _have_ to spin up a container or a VM, but then I can just delete it again. Before Silverblue I would always eventually land up in a place where I was scared to upgrade because of some weird thing I did a few months back which I only half-remember, leading ultimately to a rebuild.

With that said, I applaud the goal here. If it's not fun then you'd better be making a lot of money - and even then, it should be at least sort-of fun!
by thelastgallon | 2025-11-02 18:42:36+00:00
The utility. The utility operates a 24/7 electricity marketplace that perfectly matches supply and demand. Supply must follow demand. If demand decreases, pricing becomes negative until supply decreases. This is problematic because we aren't utilizing all the excess energy generated by solar and wind. Which is all free.

Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r... (https://archive.is/nFsOk)

Regional clusters emerged, for example, in the Permian Basin in western Texas, and in Kansas and western Oklahoma in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), negative prices accounted for more than 25% of all hours. Negative electricity prices result either from local congestion of the transmission system leading supply to exceed demand locally or due to system-wide oversupply. :https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/plentiful-electricity-turns...

Edit: This is called curtailment. It is now ~20% and increasing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)