MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Youden | 2025-12-28 21:18:09+00:00
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop."

I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-efficient software? The trend for the last couple of decades has been that nearly all consumer software outside of gaming has moved to browsers or browser-based runtimes like Electron. There's been a vicious cycle of heavier software -> more RAM -> heavier software but if this RAM shortage is permanent, the cycle can't continue.

Apple and Google seemed to be working on local AI models as well. Will they have to scale that back due to lack of RAM on the devices? Or perhaps they think users will pay the premium for more RAM if it means they get AI?

Or is this all a temporary problem due to OpenAI's buying something like 40% of the wafers?
by Sharlin | 2025-12-28 21:18:24+00:00
f * g is a symmetric difference (all zeros remain zeros, the new internal points are those that are inside exactly one of f and g: (-, +) -> -, (+, -) -> -, (+, +) -> +, (-, -) -> +).

f * g + x for some small constant x makes the symdiff smoother, depending on the sign of x it makes the components either meld together or "repel" each other. If the original components are disjoint (or if it's 3D solids and the internal surfaces are irrelevant) and x < 0, it functions as a smooth union.

f / g has the same inside/zero/outside behavior as f * g, but is of course very pathological for all values of g close to zero. I don't think it has any good uses.
by gleenn | 2025-12-28 21:18:24+00:00
Sad to see an important project's core maintainer leave but their justification seems very understandable. It is sad so much of OSS is maintained by very few as they alluded to in the XKCD comment, an especially given they felt the JVM ecosystem was causing them pain with limited support or feedback possible. I think it is always a little irresponsible to cause a great deal of breakage and not be there to support those who you break downstream of your project.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-28 21:19:10+00:00
Source availability is what makes a chain of trust possible that simply isn't meaningfully possible with closed source software, even with dynamic analysis, decompilation, reverse engineering, runtime network analysis with TLS decryption, etc.

Both you and the preceding commenter are correct that just running binaries signed and distributed by Alphabet (Google) and/or Apple presents room for additional risks beyond those observable in the source code, but the solution to this problem isn't to say "and therefore source availability doesn't matter at all for anyone", it's to choose to build from source or to obtain and install APKs built and signed by the developers, such as via Accrescent or Obtanium (pulls directly from github, gitlab, etc releases).

There's a known-good path. Most people do not take the known-good path. Their choice to do so does not invalidate or eliminate the desirable properties of known-good path (verifiability, trustworthiness).

I genuinely do not understand the argument you and the other user are making. It reads to me like an argument that goes "Yes, there's a known, accurate, and publicly documented recipe to produce a cure for cancer, but it requires prerequisite knowledge to understand that most people lack, and it's burdensome to follow the recipe, so most people just buy their vials from the untrustworthy CancerCureCorporation, who has the ability to give customers a modified formula that keeps them sick rather than giving them the actual cure, and almost nobody makes the cure themselves without going through this untrustworthy but ultimately optional intermediary, so the public documentation of the cure doesn't matter at all, and there's no discernable difference between having the cure recipe and not having the cure recipe."
by docmars | 2025-12-28 21:19:15+00:00
Thanks for explaining! I was mainly curious what viable alternatives there would be for the average user, and I think your suggestions are sound. Even technical folks wants things to feel as frictionless as possible.

The nice thing about recovery codes is being able to store them securely in a password manager alongside any other entries for the service.

The downside is they're easy to leak (or lose), so the added factors in requiring access to email (also with its own 2FA) are lost in a system like this, if whatever you're managing is mission critical. I wouldn't want to make that kind of bet, personally.
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-28 21:19:24+00:00
poured way too many hours into this game long back before it became too painful to play. this almost made me go back and check on the madness but unfortunately the servers are taken offline.

while i don't agree with how devs and the publisher works on community feedback, it is still miles better than what EA does. not that it is a high bar to clear.
by sowbug | 2025-12-28 21:19:45+00:00
Ketosis is your body using fat as an energy source when glucose isn't readily available. So if you deprive yourself of dietary glucose (carbs, simple sugars, etc), but keep eating fat and protein, you'll enter ketosis while eating as much sustenance as you want. Use ketone strips to tell when it happens.

The breath thing is unavoidable as far as I know.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-28 21:20:29+00:00
What models are you using? I'm using whatever's built into Firefox 140.6.0esr (some Bergamot derivative, iirc), which gives me:

> This can avoid the taste of AI, but it may be very bad to read, I first used machine translation translation, many parts become very wordy, and at the same time puzzling.

Perfectly clear and comprehensible. It's not fluent English, there are comma splices everywhere, and it translated "machine translation翻译" as "machine translation translation", but I understand it – and I'm confident it's close to what you actually meant to say. I can spot-check with my Chinese-to-English dictionary, and it seems like a slightly-better-than-literal translation. My understanding of your comment:

> This can avoid the smell of AI, but it may be a struggle to read. I originally used a dedicated machine translation system, but many parts became verbose (/ very wordy) and incomprehensible.

Generative models don't solve the 令人费解 problem: they just paper over it. If a machine translation is incomprehensible, that means the model did not understand what you were saying. Generative models are still transformer models: they're not going to magically have greater powers of comprehension than the dedicated translation model does. But they are trained and fine-tuned to pretend that they know what they're talking about. Is it better for information to be conspicuously lost in translation, or silently lost in translation?

Please, be willing to write in your native language, with your own words, and then provide us with either the original text, or a faithful translation of those words. Do you really want future historians to have to figure out which parts of this you wrote yourself, and which parts were invented by the AI model? I suspect that is not the reason you wrote this.
by xp84 | 2025-12-28 21:20:32+00:00
I think people are already used to inconsistency. Whatever Apple thinks, and honestly even in spite of what any users think, only the very largest companies have the appetite to mess around making bespoke SwiftUI things, so that they have to build their app twice. So, actual “native” stuff is mainly the realm of passionate indie developers and everyone else will always use cross-platform tools.
by logicprog | 2025-12-28 21:20:52+00:00
> As for selling data: have look at this table from Mozilla Org, particularly the table where they list the worst offenders re. privacy: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...

That doesn't contradict what I was saying, really. They can do all the things the table checkmarks them as doing and it doesn't mean they're selling data to any third parties. It just says they collect a lot of data, use it, have a bad track record with employees accidentally leaking parts of it, and so on.

My whole overall point is that this guy is making specific claims that are either outright false (e.g. the reason Tesla is doing better than VW EVs is that they make money off selling user data as a sideline, and in general bolster their business with cloud capital) or misleading / not correct in the way he needs them to be true.

> Tesla is not uniquely bad - however, it is one of 5 companies that actually already maintains a kill-switch functionality: https://daxstreet.com/list/275984/5-cars-with-factory-kill-s.... The other 4 are BMW, GM, Ford and Chrysler. The tech is there and ready and can be used.

This article is formatted in a way that makes me strongly thing it is AI generated, but more problematically (since that's an imperfect indicator), when it makes claims like "[Tesla has] disabled vehicles used in crimes" or "The system includes redundant communication methods and can execute complex shutdown procedures that safely manage the vehicle’s transition from operation to immobilization.

Unlike simpler kill switches that merely cut ignition, Tesla’s system can coordinate with the vehicle’s autonomous driving features, regenerative braking, and battery management systems to ensure safe shutdown," it just says these things — it doesn't actually link to any news articles, primary sources, anything to substantiate them, and when I look them up, I don't find anything, as I said. So it seems to me as if you've found just another uncited tertiary resource saying the same things, but no meaningful evidence.
by osiris88 | 2025-12-28 21:21:18+00:00
By error accumulation, I mean a tree of errors, not a simple chain. The chain is only useful at the very lowest level.

The tree allows you to say e.g. this function failed because n distinct preconditions failed, all of which are interesting, and might have lower level details. Or, I tried to do X which failed, and the fallback also failed. The error chain thing doesn’t capture either of these semantics properly.

Check out `rootcause` which is the first one I’ve seen to actually try to do this.

I’ll respond to the backtrace comments shortly.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-28 21:22:06+00:00
It's always like this with authoritarians. They become the arbiter of truth, and so they don't hear the actual truth very often. They become the giver of power, and so those who want power do whatever they have to in order to get the big man to give it to them.

So the only surprises are 1) how fast this happened, and 2) that "American titans of industry" are just power hungry rather than actually men of talent and brilliance.
by goldsteinq | 2025-12-28 21:22:46+00:00
> Say more. Plenty of people use Signal as a serious communication tool.

I did say more already. Maybe you believe in serious communication tools that can’t synchronize searchable history between devices, but I don’t.

> They, and other communities that use GPG-encrypted emails are LARPing, and it’s only fine because their emails don’t actually matter enough for anybody to care about compromising them.

Are we talking about the same Openwall? Are you aware what Openwall’s oss-security mailing list is? Please, do elaborate how nobody cares about getting access to an unlimited stream of zerodays for basically every Unix-like system.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-28 21:22:58+00:00
As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.

But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...

I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...
by delusional | 2025-12-28 21:23:18+00:00
> However I do think I’ve seen a subtle shift in phrasing in both him and other critics as it has become more obvious and undeniable that experienced and highly skilled experts in various domains

I'd caution that you separate the underlying opinion from the rhetoric in those cases. Personally I'm a huge skeptic, including of claims that it's "obvious and undeniable" that "experienced experts" are using it. I don't lead with that in discussions though, because those discussions will quickly spiral as people accuse me of being conspiratorial, and it doesn't really matter to me if other people use it.

As the assumptions of the public has changed, I've had to soften my rhetoric about the usefulness of LLMs to still project as reasonable. That hasn't changed my underlying opinion or belief. The same could be the case for these other critics.
by cyberax | 2025-12-28 21:23:56+00:00
> So the core problem is that cars are enormously space inefficient. The system simply doesn't scale and eventually reaches break down.

Houston, TX is the same population as NYC. Except that it has faster commutes and vastly better housing cost (especially on a per sq.ft. basis).

So we KNOW that sanely-designed people-oriented cities like Houston can scale.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-28 21:24:46+00:00
There's plenty of scope for local AI models to become more efficient, too. MoE doesn't need too much RAM: only the parameters for experts that are active at any given time truly need to be in memory, the rest can be in read-only storage and be fetched on demand. If you're doing CPU inference this can even be managed automatically by mmap, whereas loading params into VRAM must currently be managed as part of running an inference step. (This is where GPU drivers/shader languages/programming models could also see some improvement, TBH)
by eoskx | 2025-12-28 21:25:23+00:00
As someone who has been out of Java for close to 10 years now, you certainly could do without Mockito, but you'd be writing a lot of boiler plate code repetitively. There's also the case of third-party libraries that you don't control and Mockito has decent facilities for working with those, especially when you're working with a codebase that isn't pure DI and interfaces.
by pron | 2025-12-28 21:25:33+00:00
> They become the arbiter of truth, and so they don't hear the actual truth very often

Yes, but they're rarely that stupid. The world sees a man say five times that he's lowered drug prices by 400-1500%. And that was just last week. For many Europeans it's remarkable to even come across a person that stupid.

> that "American titans of industry" are just power hungry rather than actually men of talent and brilliance.

I never thought they were brilliant. I just thought they wouldn't sell themselves so cheaply or would be so easily intimidated.
by canucker2016 | 2025-12-28 21:25:34+00:00
from NY Post, https://nypost.com/2025/12/27/us-news/nyc-woman-driven-to-su...

But on Sept. 13, 2024, she attempted suicide again with the same lethal drug “citing the shame she felt at being fired by MongoDB,” according to the lawsuit.

Surman apparently regretted the decision and called 911 herself — but died on the way to the hospital.

Mongo later backtracked on an offer to retrieve Annie’s life insurance policy for the family, who believe the company fired Annie right before a mass layoff to avoid paying her severance, according to the suit.

MongoDB's behaviour just seems more and more callous...
by mindcrash | 2025-12-28 21:25:50+00:00
I'm heavily interested into things like UX, natural language interfaces and open source / libre computing environments.

One of the things I am currently experimenting with is building out my own agentic/assisted computing environment which instead of extending into Google/Microsoft/Apple owned cloud based services, extend into services which run on my homelab environment instead.

As a simple example: A local model which can hook into a MCP service making it understand calendars and appointments which hooks into my own locally hosted Radicale CalDAV service, enabling me to quickly make a appointment through text (or possibly even STT later). I'm curious how much I can get something like Thunderbird to disappear.

A somewhat advanced example: Another thing which recently popped up as a idea, I'm quite excited about and I hope will work out is that I can teach a model the concept of a "package repository", a "package manager" and "systems", which (hopefully) means I can install, uninstall, update and track the status of software packages on my Linux systems without using the terminal or shelling into a system myself.

Summarized: I think some things Big Tech wants are pretty neat, but I would like something without heavy involvement of Big Tech (and/or subscription based computing) instead.
by burntsushi | 2025-12-28 21:26:16+00:00
I don't see any reason for something like `rootcause` to become foundational. Most errors are a linear chain and that's good enough for most use cases.

It's correct to say that `std::error::Error` does not support a tree of errors. But it is incorrect to say what you said: that it's pointless and doesn't allow error accumulation. It's not pointless and it does provide error accumulation. Saying it doesn't is a broad overstatement when what you actually mean is something more precise, narrow and niche.
by krackers | 2025-12-28 21:26:58+00:00
Mocks make it easy to record and assert on method invocations. Additionally spys (instance mocks) are really useful when you need to forward to the real method or rely on some state.

At the moment I can't see anything Mokckito gives that you technically couldn't implement yourself via subclassing and overriding, but it'd be a lot of boilerplate to proxy things and record the arguments.
by runjake | 2025-12-28 21:27:09+00:00
This is my shining moment! I just happened to setup a new Dell. It was far more cumbersome than dealing with a new Mac.

Here's some of the stuff I had to do on my new Dell, from memory:

- Uninstall all the bloatware apps that come installed with Windows 11. They nag and beg you not to uninstall them, but after several prompts, they mostly seem uninstalled?

- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.

- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).

- Remove the O365 stub apps.

- Remove the McAfee antivirus payware.

- Remove Dell SupportAssist from the laptop.

- Then, just reinstall Windows 11 from scratch, because of all the remaining detritus left after performing the above steps. And uninstalling SupportAssist caused some instability and weird errors upon login.

- Uninstall all the bloatware apps the come installed with Windows 11 again.

- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.

- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).

- Remove the O365 stub apps.

Compared to on my Mac:

- Remove apps from the Dock

- Go into /Applications and uninstall about 6 Apple apps I don't use.
by wincy | 2025-12-28 21:27:23+00:00
I have an M1 MacBook Air and do a once weekly virtual D&D session with some friends. I hook it up to my 4K monitor, and I assumed it had to do with that. It kept becoming a slideshow (unless I put an ice pack under it!) and I realized it’s because the battery life is so good it’s the only time of the week I charge the thing, so charging the battery was making the poor laptop a hot mess that was thermal throttling like crazy. This is with a nice dock that can push around 100W, so it isn’t necessarily an underprovisioned charger.

I started charging it an hour or two before our session, and the issues stopped.
by jonathan2353 | 2025-12-28 21:27:52+00:00
“I welcome an “AI kill switch”, a way to turn it all off (despite the name of this post). (…) However, I think there's more to the backlash than people personally wanting to turn it off.

The larger issue is this: that AI functionality is forced on people, while it undeniably does a lot of harm (see below) and doesn't always work as advertised.”
by gs17 | 2025-12-28 21:27:59+00:00
> Why do LLMs always become so schizo when chatting with each other?

I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine there's a lot of examples of humans undergoing psychosis in the training data. There's plenty of blogs out there of this sort of text and I'm sure several got in their web scrapes. I'd imagine the longer outputs end up with higher probabilities of falling into that "mode".
by xp84 | 2025-12-28 21:28:08+00:00
>short the stock

The frustrating part is that even if you take the position that iOS 26 is just as awful, their incentives are so decoupled from what you’d hope they would be, that ruining your product isn’t really bad for the business! After all, Apple can just point to Windows 11’s embedded ads, three or four layers of different generations of overlapping settings panes, and inferior hardware and dare you to switch. Most of the customer base has only those two realistic options.
by teiferer | 2025-12-28 21:28:47+00:00
That's such a great use of an LLM! Thanks for sharing!

Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere.

It's so sad because the tech could really bring people together. Creating almost seemless translations. That's why your work is such a great example for the good this could bring if we'd not have so many greedy people among us.
by tripple6 | 2025-12-28 21:29:14+00:00
Mockito uses declarative matching style of specifying what should be mocked. You don't need to implement or even stub all of interface methods since Mockito can do it itself. It may be extremely concise. For example, interfaces may have tens methods or even more, but only one method is needed (say, java.sql.ResultSet). And finally probably the most important thing, interaction with mocks is recorded and then can be verified if certain methods were invoked with certain arguments.
by andrepd | 2025-12-28 21:29:29+00:00
> Unless somehow these are compromised at the time of download, I will never have to worry about them again.

But this is exactly what rust does x) `cargo add some_crate` adds a line `crate_name = "1.2.3"` to your project config, downloading and pinning the dependency to that exact version. It will not change unless you specifically change it.