MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dachris | 2025-12-25 05:41:25+00:00
Writing this on a first-gen 13 DIY, so it's already a bit dated. I've already added additional RAM and swapped in a much bigger SSD (really underestimated how much space you need if you heavily use docker and VMs).

The 1st year was a bit bumpy with 4k monitors over a USB-C hub being somewhat flaky. Ever since a clean Ubuntu reinstall, I'm very happy, no complaints whatsoever.

Sure, it costs more, but the combo of perfectly running Linux, giving me the piece of mind of repairability and easy upgrades for me justifies a higher price.

On the other hand, I'm not willing to pay the kind of premium you have with Apple products, where for incremental steps in more RAM or SSD you pay a multiple of the off-the-shelf price of the added space.
by gnabgib | 2025-12-25 05:41:59+00:00
(2020) Popular in:

2024 (341 points, 204 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39273932

2022 (61 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31651161

2920 (564 points, 212 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25304257
by PedroBatista | 2025-12-25 05:42:05+00:00
This whole thing is hilarious.

In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize.

In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.

Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.
Show HN: Rhettilator – An exact-fraction calculator in base 360
by AllSeenEye | 2025-12-25 05:42:55+00:00
I built the Rhettilator, a web calculator that performs arithmetic in base 360 using exact rational fractions—no floating-point rounding errors, ever.Base 360 (2⁵ × 3² × 5 × 7) is divisible by all integers from 1 to 12, so common fractions like 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/7, 1/8, 1/9, 1/10, 1/11, and 1/12 all terminate cleanly with no repeating digits.This contrasts sharply with base 10 (where 1/3 repeats) and binary floating-point (where even 0.1 is approximate). It’s a playful yet serious exploration of how a more highly composite base could make certain computations inherently more precise.Try dividing 1 by 7 or 1 by 11 — the results are exact and finite.Link: https://the-rhettilator-9352543e.base44.app/Feedback welcome! Curious what the HN crowd thinks about alternative bases for computation.(This body is engaging, explains the "why" quickly, invites interaction, and avoids hype—perfect for HN's technical audience.)
by saghm | 2025-12-25 05:46:03+00:00
From the initial post:

> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases

From his follow-up:

> It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.

So either he doesn't think that Windows is written in C/C++, it's not "from Microsoft", or he doesn't know what "reading between the lines" means, because those literally are the words he said. Sure, he also said "and algorithms", but I'd argue that inferring that to be a significant difference would require a lot more reading between the lines.

I guess he could also quibble that "eliminating every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" was supposed to mean new lines of code being written rather than existing ones, but that's both not the way most people would read it (if I said I wanted to eliminate all water from the planet, most people wouldn't think I meant I was eliminating rain but leaving the oceans alone) and a bit dubious from a technical perspective (since leaving the existing Windows codebase intact would make it pretty hard not to at least occasionally need to write a new line of code in the existing language).
by Ayanonymous | 2025-12-25 05:47:44+00:00
Interesting question—thank you for raising it!

I wouldn’t mind if some information were omitted entirely, or even hidden by default, as long as the approach is transparent and users are given the option to reveal it if they want to.

What feels concerning here is that model identifiers (like GPT-5.2) are included in the DOM but hidden through CSS properties like clip-path, opacity: 0, and user-select: none. This doesn’t feel like typical UX simplification—it looks more like deliberate obfuscation.

If the goal were simplicity, a toggle or clearly labeled section would work just as well, without undermining trust. I think users generally appreciate being informed and offered choices.

From a regulatory standpoint, this kind of design could also raise questions under frameworks like the GDPR and the EU AI Act, which emphasize transparency, informed consent, and the right for users to understand how automated systems operate. Intentionally hiding relevant model information in the DOM without clear disclosure could be seen as inconsistent with those principles.
by inkyoto | 2025-12-25 05:48:37+00:00
> A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.

This isn't an issue in any way. Vendors have been routinely taking out rarely used instructions from the hardware and simulating them in the software for decades as part of the ongoing ISA revision.

Unimplemented instruction opcodes cause a CPU trap to occur where the missing instruction (s) is then emulated in the kernel's emulation layer.

In fact, this is what was frequently done for «budget» 80[34]86 systems that lacked the FPU – it was emulated. It was slow as a dog but worked.
by cyberax | 2025-12-25 05:48:54+00:00
Yeah, I get that.

But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.

I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.
by dwaite | 2025-12-25 05:49:35+00:00
The problem is you can’t regulate interoperability where it doesn’t exist.

What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.

So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:

1. The OS hijacks attempts to link to sites such as Google Maps (https://maps.google.com) and Apple Maps (https://maps.apple.com) and send them to Bing Maps instead?

2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?

What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.

So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.

The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.

It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.
by ssivark | 2025-12-25 05:50:39+00:00
If you thought a human working on something will benefit from being "agile" (building fast, shipping quickly, iterating, getting feedback, improving), why should it be any different from AI models?

Implicit in your claim are specific assumptions about how expensive/untenable it is to build systemic guardrails and human feedback, and specific cost/benefit ratio of approximate goal attainment instead of perfect goal attainment. Rest assured that there is a whole portfolio of situations where different design points make most sense.
by hugs | 2025-12-25 05:51:08+00:00
i apologize, but i'll answer your question with a metaphor.

i want to build an island resort and a bridge from the mainland to get there. do i build the island resort first or the bridge first?

here's my thinking: if the resort is popular and a fun place to be, there will be a huge incentive to build the bridge next. but we might also find out that building the bridge will ultimately be economically impractical and we should just stick to using ferry boats. at least we'll have a cool island resort to go to, though!

so for now, i'm just focusing on building the island resort at the moment. but i really, really want to build that bridge, too, asap.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-25 05:51:39+00:00
I love Wayland a lot, but as far as I can tell the available remoting solutions still cannot enable a headless LXC container to serve a KDE Plasma Wayland desktop. I spent the last couple days trying to cobble some solution together for it and failed miserably. If you know a way, I would be most grateful :-)
by casey2 | 2025-12-25 05:53:51+00:00
The only way to stop slopware is to write "good software" that solves the problem. Proponents of "good software" are usually terrible at solving problems, and will fight tooth and nail against the idea that there even is a problem.

God forbid experienced developers experience pain? What are you talking about? Experienced FOSS devs deserve eternal hellfire. Or rather, they already live in a self-imposed hell.
by thomascountz | 2025-12-25 05:54:40+00:00
+1

HTTP/2, headers are not unique if they only differ by casing, but they must be encoded as lowercase.

Just as in HTTP/1.x, header field names are strings of ASCII characters that are compared in a case-insensitive fashion. However, header field names MUST be converted to lowercase prior to their encoding in HTTP/2. A request or response containing uppercase header field names MUST be treated as malformed (Section 8.1.2.6).[1]

HTTP/1.X, headers are insensitive to casing for reasons of comparison and encoding.

Each header field consists of a name followed by a colon (":") and the field value. Field names are case-insensitive.[2]

So, if Sec-Fetch-Site is sensitive at all, it would be sec-fetch-site when sending via HTTP/2 and you're responsive for encoding/decoding.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7540#section-8.1.2

[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616#section-4.2
by 0x38B | 2025-12-25 05:54:45+00:00
My brother has a 16, and it’s been good for him. It is big and chunky, more so with the GPU module; only a few paragraphs into the blog post I felt the author was trying to fit a big square peg in a round hole, and then blaming the square peg for being big and square.

That is to say, it’s a big, heavy, expensive laptop. My brother works shifts in a remote location and from what I can tell, the 16 is great for that: you wouldn’t bring a desktop, but once the laptop comes out of the bag, it’s going to stay set up on the desk for the duration of the hitch. He tried leaving the GPU module at home, and found the AMD APU quite capable (he plays Tarkov and BF6, among others).

I support Framework’s vision and ethos and am willing to pay a premium for them. My sister uses my 11th gen Intel FW13 for school and is happy with it (only she wishes it was better for gaming), and the AMD 13 I bought was a massive upgrade in gaming capability and speed – I’m able to play Arc Raiders with my brother, one of the few online shooters who’s anti-cheat works on Linux.

Another big plus is that FWs play very well with Linux. The Wayland window manager Niri is amazing – so smooth and fast, now with alt-tab in the latest release. And I see there’s Dank Material Shell (1), which bundles things like a bar, launcher, and control center that one normally has to assemble piece by piece in WMs like Niri and Sway (which I used before).

1: https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell
by qingcharles | 2025-12-25 05:55:01+00:00
Hiring developers is half lottery, half dark art. Best guy I ever hired was when I was tech lead for a large streamer. I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.

I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.
by refurb | 2025-12-25 05:55:33+00:00
But this topic is directly linked to the Chinese political system.

China has an authoritative political system. That doesn’t mean that all China are “brainless automatons” but it does mean the government maintains tight control on political discourse, with certain areas being “no go” to the point repeated violations will land you in prison.

As such, when you ask AI “What happened at Tiananmen Square? The government wants to make sure the AI doesn’t give the “wrong answer”. That has impact on AI development.
by brightmood | 2025-12-25 05:56:18+00:00
Year for year, I try to find out how to get each post in HN a different color for the number so that I can easier navigate.

Grey
Red
Grey
Red
...
It helps me same as a table with different row/column colors.
Because when I need to callback information, I can remember, hey this was red!
Next clue is I need to find a red label and a greyed out text.
I wished there were more clues, but this is the best I know at the moment.

Could you please support me and possibly others?
I got Autism.
by garganzol | 2025-12-25 05:56:36+00:00
It is not that clarity as in a "positive happy life". It is the clarity that frees you from perceptual distortions - if everything can be faked, one starts to question themselves what kind of information they are consuming.

Programmers willingly put their projects to the open source, and it's their consent by default unless there is a prohibitive license that explicitly denies AI training.

Artists, designers, musicians - I agree here, but this is the point where inflated egos usually enter the room.

When was the last time you have heard a song without autotune? If it was a machine all along for the last 20 years, why we should care now? Why we should care if 99% of artists do not care about us by pushing subpar materials down our throats to "make it" (for them, of course)?

AI rebalances those asymmetries by bringing them to ground 0. Some people consider it as destruction, but some see a breeding ground for the future.
by maxdamantus | 2025-12-25 05:57:00+00:00
> Per-display DPI settings

fwiw, Xorg already had this, since you can set the DPI for each display through RandR/xrandr. In both X11 and Wayland it's up to the toolkit to actually detect the setting and rasterise accordingly.

Wayland actually went backwards in this respect by using "integer scales" (eg, 1, 2, 3) instead of fine-grained DPIs (eg, 96, 192, 288), so using a scale of 1.5 would result in downscale blur (toolkit sees scale as 2, then the compositor scales it down to 75%), whereas in Xorg you could just set the DPI to 144, and the toolkit could theoretically render at the correct resolution. As far as I know Qt was the only toolkit to actually do this automatically, but that's not X11's fault.

Wayland has at least since fixed this in the form of "fractional scaling", but here's [0] an old thread on HN where I complained about it and provided screenshots of the resulting blur.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32021261
by j-o-m | 2025-12-25 05:58:21+00:00
That is true, there is a lot of emphasis being placed on his post as though it were the embodiment of Microsoft’s goals and policies going forward. I was a little surprised that he is just a lead on a research team from the bombastic tone of the post.

I’ll own up to not considering that when I wrote my comment, still think discussing Microsoft’s seemingly head first dive into massive AI generation of code is entertaining, even if it is not really as important (or important at all) as it would be if this was a post from the CEO.
by eru | 2025-12-25 06:00:29+00:00
Maybe, but then that calls into question the whole premise:

> The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me.

If you value your family so much, you are effectively working for them, not for the little rest at the end of your life.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-12-25 06:00:55+00:00
Is there an enemy invader actively performing military operations inside the country? In that case, I believe it’s typical for a nation to suspend its normal procedures, we don’t need our principle to hold in case of active invasion.

Otherwise, just don’t do war. It’s pretty simple. Especially when you have zero need for land.

Witness protection is a compensation for an inadequate and overly soft criminal justice system. If the person calling the hit fully expected to die by hanging for calling the hit, he would not call the hit.
by refurb | 2025-12-25 06:01:32+00:00
The problem is less with specific historical events and more foundational knowledge.

If I ask AI “Should a government imprison people who support democracy?” AI isn’t going to tell “Yes, because democracy will destabilize a country and regardless a single party can fully represent the will of the people” unless I gum up the training sufficiently to ignore vast swaths of documents.
by eru | 2025-12-25 06:02:00+00:00
> They already know how to. But you have to tell them that's the way you want them to operate, tell them how to keep track of it, tell them how to determine when each step is done. You need to specify what you want both in terms of final result but also in terms of process.

I found Google Antigravity (with the current Gemini models) to be fairly capable. If I had to guess, it seems like they set up their system to get that divide-and-conquer going. As you suggest, it's not that hard: they just have to put the instructions in their equivalent of the system prompt.

Well, when I say 'not that hard', I mean it's an engineering problem to get the system and tooling working together nicely, not really an AI problem.
by nl | 2025-12-25 06:04:13+00:00
The reason they are called "world models" is because the internal representation of what they display represents a "world" instead of a video frame or image. The model needs to "understand" geometry and physics to output a video.

Just because there are errors in this doesn't mean it isn't significant. If a machine learning model understands how physical objects interact with each other that is very useful.
by 20after4 | 2025-12-25 06:04:26+00:00
I think the specific language in question - perl - is really the source of OP's frustration. Perl is kind of like Regular Expressions - much easier to write than it is to read. I would expect LLMs to struggle with understanding perl. It's one of the best languages for producing obfuscated code by hand. There are many subtleties and context-dependence in perl, and they aren't immediately apparent from the raw syntax.

Edit: I totally agree with your point about not wanting to learn a language. That's definitely a situation where LLMs can excel and almost an ideal use case for them. I just think that Perl, in particular, will be hard to work with, given the current capabilities of LLM coding tools and models. It might be necessary to actually learn the language, and even that might not be enough.
by nemothekid | 2025-12-25 06:05:53+00:00
Video Streaming has surprising little overlap with Video Codecs. Once you choose input/output options, then there's little to change about the codec. The vast majority of options available to ffmpeg aren't supported in the browser. Streamers don't have options for precisely the same reason OP doesn't have options - you are limited entirely into what the browser supports.

I've built the exact pipeline OP has done - Video, over TCP, over Websockets, precisely because I had to deliver video to through a corporate firewall. Wolf, Moonlight and maybe even gstreamer just shows they didn't even try to understand what they were doing, and just threw every buzzword into an LLM.

To give you some perspective 40Mbps is an incredible amount of bandwidth. Blu ray is 40mbps. This video, in 8K on Youtube is 20Mbps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ

There's really no explanation for this.
by monocasa | 2025-12-25 06:05:54+00:00
> For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.

That hasn't been nearly the same goal for decades now.

For instance, Crysis literally won't run on win10 or later anymore.

On top of that, security bugs aren't the kind of thing you can automate away during a rewrite that no one has the bandwidth to actually review.
by casey2 | 2025-12-25 06:06:03+00:00
Because open source "devs" can't make an actual product. LLMs are there direct competition, both competing for user attention.

The idea that code gluers understand the code better than a chatbot (that admittedly totally lacks the ability to understand) isn't clear.

Just like an LLM they can only create very ill-thought-out ripoffs of software from the 70s and 80s (they have yet to reach the level of ripping off 90s Microsoft.)
by attractivechaos | 2025-12-25 06:07:25+00:00
This doesn't explain why so few people of Fabrice's generation have reached his level. Think about violin playing. Many players can become professionals if they have the obsession, but 99% of them won't reach the Heifetz/Hadelich/Ehnes level no matter how hard they try. Talent matters. Programming is not much different from performing art.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-25 06:07:59+00:00
The only reason CSRF is even possible is because the browser sends (or, well, used to send) cookies for a particular request even if that request initiated from a different site. If the browser never did that (and most people would argue that's a design flaw from the get go) CSRF attacks wouldn't even be possible. The SameSite attribute makes it so that cookies will only be sent if the request that originated them is the same origin as the origin that originally wrote the cookie.