MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-06 17:14:51+00:00
> Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?

There are technical reasons, but as ever the real underlying causes are incentives. Companies realized that the OS is a profit center, something they can use to influence user behavior to their benefit. Before the goal was to be a hardware company and offer the best hardware possible for cost. Now the goal is to own as large a slice of your life as possible. It's more of a social shift than a technological one. So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments? They'd be undercutting themselves.

That's not to say that attempts to build interoperability don't exist, just that they happen due to what are essentially activist efforts, the human factor, acting in spite of and against market forces. That doesn't tend to win out, except (rarely) in the political realm.

i.e. if you want interoperable mobile hardware you need a law, the market's not going to save you one this one.
by simonw | 2025-12-06 17:15:01+00:00
Yeah, I think it can. I'm reminded of the thing in the 80s when Compaq reverse engineered and reimplemented the IBM BIOS by having one team decompile it and write a spec which they handed to a separate team who built a new implementation based on the spec.

I expect that for games the more important piece will be the art assets - like how the Quake game engine was open source but you still needed to buy a copy of the game in order to use the textures.
by NewsaHackO | 2025-12-06 17:15:47+00:00
>The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed.

OK, I think I can see your point, but at best it is irrelevant. At no point did the original poster imply that ChatGPT created the phrase, or that it wasn’t in spoken or written language before then. He just said that it is traditionally associated with late-night ads, and that the explosion in use of the phrase (especially with the em-dash) is most likely attributed to increased LLM use.
by takeda | 2025-12-06 17:15:51+00:00
The term free speech is misleading. It is really freedom of speech. I.e. someone who says something doesn't have to be afraid of prosecution because of what they said.

It isn't the speech that is being protected it is the person who says it.

Using the term "free speech" creates those weird scenarios where now we have someone argue that the US Constitution mandates ads to be everywhere.
by jMyles | 2025-12-06 17:15:54+00:00
Obviously this situation can't go on.

If neither of the two major players can make an open, secure, _simple_, easy-to-understand, bloat-free OS, then we somehow need another player.

Presently (and I confess, my bias to seek non-state solutions may show here), it seems that a non-trivial part of the duopoly stems from regulatory capture insofar as the duopoly isn't merely software, but extends all the way to TSMC and Qualcomm, whose operations seem to be completely subject to state dictates, both economic/regulatory and of the darker surveillance/statecraft variety (and of those, presumably some are classified).

I'm reminded of the server market 20ish years ago, where, although there were more than two players, the array of simple, flexible linux distros that are dominant today were somewhere between poorly documented and unavailable. I remember my university still running windows servers in ~2008 or so.

What do we need to do to achieve the same evolution that the last 2-3 decades of server OS's have seen? Is there presently a mobile linux OS that's worth jumping on? Is there simple hardware to go with it?
by zkmon | 2025-12-06 17:16:12+00:00
So obviously, demand is going up while supply is running short. Why is supply failing? Because it is similar as hardhat jobs, marine job, army, tradesman, construction, mining or farming work.

People are no longer desperate to get into just any job. They get out of college expecting to get into an "office" work job, be it in marketing, front office, backoffice or middle-office (it does officially exist).
by adrian_b | 2025-12-06 17:17:01+00:00
That was because LOADALL was impossible to preserve, since the internal state of the CPU changed in the next models.

80386 also had an undocumented LOADALL instruction, but it was encoded with a different opcode, as it was incompatible with the 80286 LOADALL, by restoring many more registers.

After 1990, no successors to LOADALL were implemented, because Intel introduced the "System Management Mode" instead, which provided similar facilities and much extra.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-06 17:17:42+00:00
At least with fridges a screen is extra cost to be built in.

On other hand with TVs unless you are doing just a monitor, you need something to control it. And I mean like digital TV, selecting input, possibly show some overlay or controls. And at that point just slapping a computer in it is lot faster development cycle. And then you might as well support streaming services as general population seem to want those.
by runarberg | 2025-12-06 17:17:51+00:00
But we do know how the brain works, we have extensively studied the brain, it is probably one of the most studied phenomena in our universe (well barring alien science) and we do know it is not a computer but a neural network[1].

I don’t believe the brain is a trans-physical magic soul box, nor do I think an LLM is doing anything similar to an LLM (apart from some superficial similarities; some [like the artificial neural network] are in an LLMs because it was inspire by the brain).

We use the term cognition to describe the intrinsic properties of the brain, and how it transforms stimulus to a response, and there are several fields of science dedicated to study this cognition.

Just to be clear, you can describe the brain as a computer (a biological computer; totally distinct from a digital, or even mechanical computers), but that will only be an analogy, or rather, you are describing the extrinsic properties of the brain which it happens to share some of which with some of our technology.

---

1: Note, not an artificial neural network, but an OG neural network. AI models were largely inspired by biological brains, and in some parts model brains.
by tefkah | 2025-12-06 17:18:07+00:00
What are you talking about? No one’s writing their paper in HTML.

The problem is having the submissions be in TeX and converting that to HTML, when the only output has been PDF for so long.

The problem isn’t converting HTML to PDF, it’s making available a giant portion of TeX/pdf only papers in HTML.

If you’re arguing that maybe TeX then shouldn’t be the source format for papers then I agree, but other than Typst (which also isn’t perfect about HTML output yet) there aren’t that many widely accepted/used authoring formats for physics/math papers, which is what ArXiV primarily hosts.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-06 17:18:38+00:00
You can screech about "not a right" all you want but there's federal law (DDPA) that limits how easily states can reveal driver's PII. Usually a documented business purpose (i.e sending spam mail) is required.

This Michigan thing sounds like it walks right up to the line if not over it.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2721
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-06 17:18:44+00:00
I agree that PDF is best for things that are meant to be printed, no questions. But I wonder how common actually printing those papers is?

In research and in embedded hardware both, I've met some people who had entire stacks of papers printed out - research papers or datasheets or application notes - but also people who had 3 monitors and 64GB of RAM and all the papers open as browser tabs.

I'm far closer to the latter myself. Is this a "generational split" thing?
by kakacik | 2025-12-06 17:18:51+00:00
Nope. Something only a person benefiting from such cancer that ad business is would say that (and there are tons of those here on HN lets be honest, better half of faangs has ad-paid ultra high salaries and bonuses).

Ultimately its just another manipulation to part you with your money in other ways than you intended, nothing more and nothing less.
by denalilumma | 2025-12-06 17:18:52+00:00
Location: Bay Area Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Web and mobile apps, distributed systems, ML infrastructure, GPU systems, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, CI/CD, developer productivity, security, compliance Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denali-lumma/ Detailed approach and case studies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IeLSAc2Kj_qplfa1TabfMV3v...

Email: denali@doubling.com

Brief summary: I help teams hit delivery dates consistently, raise velocity and quality, and close hiring and fundraising gaps that block progress. Open for part time or fractional CTO roles.
by simonw | 2025-12-06 17:19:29+00:00
I definitely want documentation that a project expert has reviewed. I've found LLMs are fantastic at writing documentation about how something works, but they have a nasty tendency to take guesses at WHY - you'll get occasional sentences like "This improves the efficiency of the system".

I don't want invented rationales for changes, I want to know the actual reason a developer decided that the code should work that way.
by speiroxaiti | 2025-12-06 17:19:42+00:00
OR: How GPU primitives shape adoption, why MoE spread, and why architecture innovation is slowing down.

Ever wondered what happened to capsule networks and neural ODEs?

I was curious about what makes some architectures work, while others disapear after being hyped.

This is my first take, on what limits LLM architecture innovations from adoption.

(there are more then one reasons, as I understood afterall)
by sofixa | 2025-12-06 17:20:09+00:00
> whenever a joint EU project is formed between two countries with vendors, they inevitabely end up collapsing due to domestic political considerations such as the European MBT and FCAS - no leader wants to be the leader who shut down a factory with 1200 high paying unionized jobs for the greater good

Eurofighter Typhoon and before that the Panavia Tornado. That lineage's next up is the GCAP 6th gen plane.

Horizon/Orizonte and after that the FREMM (which is so good even the US are buying it). In general Italian/French naval cooperation is very strong.

The whole of MBDA and hell even Airbus were created for inter-country cooperation.

There are plenty of successful examples on which to build on, as well as failures from which to learn. But again, today very few military things cannot be sourced from a European supplier. BAE, Leonardo, Dassault, Thales, Rheinmetall, KNDS, Saab, Fincantieri, Naval Group, Indra, Airbus, MBDA etc. are world leaders in their respective fields.

> The reality is, if we the US make a deal with Russia over the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the next 12 months, the EU will have no choice but to accept it if you do not put boots on the ground and if you do not expropriate Russian government assets in the EU

No? US can sign whatever bootlicking deal it wants with Russia, but it's up to Ukraine what happens actually. The EU will continue backing Ukraine. Boots on the ground are highly unlikely, but exploration of Russian assets is quite probable (opposition isn't massive, and as time goes on, will only whither).

> We view the DSA as a non-tariff barrier to American services companies. This is both a Trump admin view [0] as well as a Biden-era admin view [1].

Cool, nobody cares. The US has put in sufficient actual tariffs that it cannot scream "unfair". EU leaders will try to negotiate whatever they can to lower short term economic damage, but the long term damage is done. The US is not a reliable trade or anything partner, and there's no going back on that.

Regarding your Mughal and Qing comparisons... Damn, where do I even start? EU isn't a country, so the comparison is off from the start.
Show HN: I designed my own 3D printer motherboard
by kaipereira | 2025-12-06 17:21:03+00:00
3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work!

This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes!

It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations, sensorless/endstop homing, thermistor and fan ports, parallel, serial and TFT display connectors, bed and heater outputs and USB-C/SD Card printing, all in a small 80x90mm form factor with support for Marlin and Klipper!

Because it's smaller and cheaper than a typical motherboard, you can use it for smaller/more affordable printers, and other people can also reference the journal if they're making their own board!

If I were to make a V2, I would probably clean up the traces/layout of the PCB, pay more attention to trace size, stitching and fills, BOM optimize even further, and add another motor driver or two to the board. I also should've payed a bit more attention to how much current I would be drawing, and also the voltage ratings, because some of the parts are under-rated for the power.

I'm still actively refining it and fixing up some of the mistakes, but I plan on using this board to make a tiny foldup 3D printer I can bring to hackathons and 3D print on the go!

The project is fully open source, and journaled, so if you'd like to check it out it's on GitHub (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini)!

I absolutely loved making this project and I'd love to hear what you guys would want to see in a V2!
by Groxx | 2025-12-06 17:21:51+00:00
> permission issues

as an un-solicited drive-by suggestion: see if they're owned by root? you may have sudo'd the original run.

since you're at least a few months behind though, do check for breaking changes: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions?discussions... they've pretty consistently had instructions, but you unfortunately mostly have to know to look for it. not sure why the upgrade notification doesn't make it super incredibly painfully obvious.
by varispeed | 2025-12-06 17:22:04+00:00
These targeted ads are incredibly harmful when you have to take care of someone with psychosis. They think that someone who is listening to them is sending them "messages" through ads and that feeds into paranoia. Unfortunately it is not possible to reason in such situations with the person and any attempt to explain tracking is met with hostility.

I really wish regulators stopped being corrupt, naive or both and outright made it illegal.

There is no upside for tracking of any kind for consumers.
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-06 17:23:37+00:00
Yes, but as a general attitude, this is unrealistic, like ignoring the effects of drugs because they are voluntary. All these things (food, substances, sex, social media, etc) exist on an invisible spectrum of willpower vs circumstances for each individual. In practice, there's some subjective line in that spectrum across which society can't afford to just say "it's your fault, so I don't care" (though wealthy/isolated people can!).
by xxmarkuski | 2025-12-06 17:23:44+00:00
Graphene OS provides advanced security capabilities and a thorough defense-in-depth approach including a hardened supply chain. GOS aims to provide mechanisms to protect against 0day attacks. For example Celebrite can not open up GOS. GOS relys on hardware support provided by Pixels. Graphene OS works on getting their developments upstream.

For a list of security features see here [0].

[0] https://grapheneos.org/features
by gavinray | 2025-12-06 17:24:57+00:00
> Yeah I’m definitely not going to pay a subscription for a dashcam so that some company can profit off my data.

I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but suppose this:

A dashcam is continuously recording and collecting image data. You're not "doing" anything with that data, it's just there being recycled or thrown away.

So the argument is, essentially: "Fuck you, I'd rather nobody in the world benefit than someone make a penny off of it."
by aydyn | 2025-12-06 17:25:16+00:00
This is historical revisionism.

The US saw the MAUD report before entering the war. American scientists received copies as early as October (chemist James Conant received it october 3). But the US didnt commit to entering the war until after Pearl Harbor, December 8.

You are mixing the order of events.

Second you are overstating its importance. The primary contribution of the report is scientific feasibility.

Every part of the engineering and design of the bombs was done in secret in the US without any other country collaboration. They didnt need "UK provided designs" because there was no such thing.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-06 17:25:26+00:00
Web accessibility is generally super easy, but that comes with huge caveats. If you are comfortable with HTML and JavaScript you should be achieving 80% AA conformance immediately out of the box.

1) The more abstract and frameworky the code becomes the more challenging accessibility becomes. Vanilla JavaScript applications have an insanely huge advantage here.

2) Understanding web accessibility is as straightforward as reading the conformance criteria. This remains true for non developers.

3) Developers have one additional step to really understand accessibility: using HTML correctly to describe content.

4) Finally the most challenging part of accessibility from only looking at the code is color contrast and enough space between interactive controls.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-06 17:25:37+00:00
I think this is generally only useful, if these branches don't need any other change for updating the ancestor. When they need than you need to work on the branch anyway and rebase other commits or add new ones on top, so you gain nothing compared to "rebase --onto" for each branch separately.

If you don't have anything to update then that would be somewhat pointless to me. You can also just rebase them, when you start working on the branch again or want to merge them.

--

For me branches also represent features, that should have clear boundaries, so when I work on one feature and that means, I need to rebase another one on top instead of being able to just merge them later, this indicates a spaghetti codebase where the interfaces between features are not properly defined and things depend on internals of other things.
by Groxx | 2025-12-06 17:25:46+00:00
As a counter-anecdote: literally just `docker compose up` on a spare laptop for me, and it's working great (though it's only available on the local network). There might be stuff to tune (e.g. I'm pretty sure it's not using my GPU), but it's almost totally unnecessary for just one household of people's use - the initial huge google-photos-takeout took an hour or three to finish indexing with all the features enabled, but all new stuff is done within seconds. The most I've done is to swap the actual photo storage to an external drive, which is just a "move that folder, custom mapping in the docker command" change.

On hardware that doesn't have docker, or is significantly more resource constrained somehow: yea, I completely believe it. I haven't tried that, but given the features it makes total sense that it'd be harder.
by zozzle | 2025-12-06 17:25:56+00:00
JKR has never advocated violence, never denied anyone's humanity, and never called for any group to be eradicated. Hitler did all of those things on an industrial scale.

What on earth compelled you to equate the most evil mass-murderer of the 20th century with a children's author and feminist who says sex is real and matters for women's rights and safety?
by comte7092 | 2025-12-06 17:25:57+00:00
> Foreign countries have no obligation to admit you within their borders.

This is obviously a general statement about any nation, comparing the US to its peers.

In the context of the conversation it is clearly an argument that “we don’t have to let you in, we can require whatever we want, including trampling on your rights as an individual”, which is unamerican.
by tcoff91 | 2025-12-06 17:26:20+00:00
Yeah but in jj every time you run ‘jj log’ you see all your anonymous branches and you can rebase all of them at once onto main in 1 command.

When I’m exploring a problem I end up with complex tree of many anonymous branches as I try different solutions to a problem and they all show up in my jj log and it’s so easy to refer to them by stable change ids. Often I’ll like part of a solution but not another part so I split a change into 2 commits and branch off the part I like and try something else for the other part. This way of working is not nearly as frictionless with git. A lot of times I do not even bother with editor undo unless it’s just a small amount of undoing because I have this workflow.

Git is to jj like asm is to C: you can do it all with git that you can do with jj but it’s all a lot easier in jj.
by randycupertino | 2025-12-06 17:26:42+00:00
Protect your elderly relatives!

My mom, who is computer savvy- she has a CS degree and used to code in COBOL and FORTRAN to process payroll, budgeting and inventory and fell for phone call paypal scammer and let him log into her computer. It took us three weeks to undo everything the scammer did and lock down all her accounts.

Now I have her just not pick up ANY unknown number, but it's hard because her medical offices sometimes call from new numbers.
by ericmay | 2025-12-06 17:27:32+00:00
No, that's a straw man you made up. You very well could not have gotten COVID-19. I didn't get it for about 4 years. Well, at least a symptomatic version. But the chances of getting it were quite high, and you are still neglecting the timeframe in which decisions would have been made based on preliminary data. In other words, it wasn't get vaccine or get COVID-19. It was get the vaccine and most likely prevent getting a very severe bout of COVID-19 if you did in fact get COVID, which the vast majority of Americans did get, or something similar, including those in the age range you specified. Frankly, it seems to me that just not being sick was well worth the risk.

I'm not going to pull a number out of my hat here but I bet the number of people who were in the 19-20 year old range who died from suicide or something after losing their job from getting sick from COVID-19 and not having sick days to take is higher than the number of folks who died from the vaccine.

Even if it turned out that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal for 19/20 year olds and taking the vaccine might cause negative effects, it still doesn't mean that getting the vaccine at the time wasn't the best risk-based decision.

All in all though even if we took at face value your 1:10,000 number that still would be tangential to my original post because you're focusing on one small segment of the population and as folks get older (or younger) their risk profile changes.
by davidmurdoch | 2025-12-06 17:28:05+00:00
I can't figure out an answer to why they'd do this. They're still supporting their custom Chromecast "receiver" app (for now?), which is a standard HTML app. But now they're detecting the Chromecast-capable device model, looking it up in an allowlist, then conditionally showing the device in the Netflix App's Cast UI.

This would mean if you have a new device and an old device in the same network the Netflix app might show only your old device! What?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what they've done here?
by pixl97 | 2025-12-06 17:28:20+00:00
>But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.

Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence to capitalism demands it.

You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what came before that.