MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agentultra | 2025-12-10 04:02:00+00:00
There are a ton of extremely Hard problems to solve there that we are not likely going to solve.

One: English is terribly non-prescriptive. Explaining an algorithm is incredibly laborious in spoken language and can contain many ambiguous errors. Try reading Euclid’s Elements. Or really any pre-algebra text and reproduce its results.

Fortunately there’s a solution to that. Formal languages.

Now LLMs can somewhat bridge that gap due to how frequently we write about code. But it’s a non-deterministic process and hallucinations are by design. There’s no escaping the fact that an LLM is making up the code it generates. There’s nothing inside the machine that is understanding what any of the data it’s manipulating means or how it affects the system it’s generating code for.

And it’s not even a tool.

Worse, we can’t actually ship the code that gets generated without a human appendage to the machine to take the fall for it if there are any mistakes in it.

If you’re trying to vibe code an operating system and have no idea what good OS design is or what good code for such a system looks like… you’re going to be a bad appendage for the clanker. If it could ship code on its own the corporate powers that be absolutely would fire all the vibe coders and you’d never work again.

Vibe coding is turning people into indentured corporate servants. The last mile delivery driver of code. Every input surveilled and scrutinized. Output is your responsibility and something you have little control over. You learn nothing when the LLM gives you the answer because you’ll forget it tomorrow. There’s no joy in it either because there is no challenge and no difficulty.

I think what pron is leading to is that there’s no need to imagine what these machines could potentially do. I think we should be looking at what they actually do, who they’re doing it to, and who benefits from it.
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-10 04:02:17+00:00
It’s available on more obscure platforms than Rust, and more people are familiar with it.

I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable that everything will be rewritten in Rust, at the very least this will this decades. C has been with us for more than half a century and is the foundation of pretty much everything, it will take a long time to migrate all that.

More likely is that they will live next to each other for a very, very long time.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-12-10 04:02:32+00:00
The 2.90 is even capped at $34 per week. Then there's the 50% discount for low-income NYC residents who qualify and apply for the Fair Fares NYC program, or for anyone regadless of residence who qualifies for reduced fares through age or a qualifying disability.

Both of these numbers are changing in early January to $3 and $35 respectively, but same idea.

Still, some European countries like Germany offer far cheaper than this, while others like the UK are probably pricer. NYC public transit gives very good value for the US at least.
by Hammershaft | 2025-12-10 04:03:57+00:00
We had significantly less welfare in the 60s. We also had more poverty per capita in the 60s but living standards were rising as a result of technological improvements. Clearly a private space company (spaceX) has dramatically outperformed our public space company at advancing technology, despite being a scrappy startup with a fraction of the funding 20 years ago.
by D13Fd | 2025-12-10 04:04:32+00:00
I use Alfred a ton throughout the day. I have many workflows and other settings that I set up years ago that are absolutely indispensable to me.

I deal with a huge number of different projects at work, for example. I have a workflow that imports the master excel spreadsheet and builds an instantly searchable database of every project, with links to all relevant portals and information. I can just start typing a project name or number (or other relevant info) and instantly jump to the project’s Sharepoint page, my local files directory, emails about that project, the publicly-accessible portal for it, etc etc. I use it constantly every day.

I also use Alfred to search industry-specific search engines, to draft repetitive emails for me, and to file things away. I have many little conveniences set up, like a workflow that configures various laptop settings based on location (printers, audio devices, volume level, etc).

Honestly if I had to choose between “Mac OS with no Alfred” and “Windows with Alfred,” I’d stick with Alfred. It’s such a helpful app.
by exidy | 2025-12-10 04:04:32+00:00
The person really getting written out of history in this thread is Raymond Gosling, the PhD student, who actually took the famous "Photo 51"[0] that, along with other evidence, confirmed Watson and Crick's pre-existing hypothesis about the structure of DNA.

As Franklin was leaving the lab, Wilkins became Gosling's supervisor and the rest is history. Describing it as "her data" is not accurate -- the image belonged to King's College, not Franklin personally.

Whether or not Franklin received sufficient credit for her contributions I will leave to others to debate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51
by jpalawaga | 2025-12-10 04:05:13+00:00
The quality is not suspect. It is one of the world’s few 24/7 systems, and there are many capital improvements happening constantly. For example, making more stations accessible and improving switching equipment to improve reliability and volume.

This comment is typical HN “government bad can do no right” fodder. The MTA is truly a marvel in the service it provides. The only advantage it has is age, which is why it is so expansive.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-10 04:05:25+00:00
There was a study published about how much air pollution dropped in NYC during the COVID lockdown. PM2.5 was found to have dropped 36%. However with more robust analysis, this drop was discovered to not be statistically significant. I would caution anyone reading this who is tempted by confirmation bias.

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7314691/
by credit_guy | 2025-12-10 04:06:02+00:00
> old people need to make way for new generations

The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some people will amass extreme wealth and power while living centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who will not have a fair chance in life.

The much more likely problem will be that old people will not adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and estranged. Especially with more and more people being childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will be at that point in time.

These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.
by dpifke | 2025-12-10 04:06:32+00:00
We do use gyroscopic power storage, see e.g.

https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...

https://www.activepower.com/

...and probably others.

(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)
by Fnoord | 2025-12-10 04:06:33+00:00
Products are supposed to last two years at the very least in EU (local laws may be more strict, but not less). If your product dies before that time, the customer will cite warranty, and there you go. This device is likely one of the many 'designed to last a little bit more than two years', with the emphasis on 'little bit'. It appears to be a perfect example of planned obsolescence.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-10 04:06:35+00:00
I absolutely understand the sentiment, but LWN is a second-to-none publication that on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke, and also largely plays to an audience who will immediately understand that it's tongue-in-cheek.

Speaking as a subscriber of about two decades who perhaps wouldn't have a career without the enormous amount of high-quality education provided by LWN content, or at least a far lesser one: Let's forgive.
by mannykannot | 2025-12-10 04:07:32+00:00
There seems to be a tacit premise here, that anything an LLM can do is meaningless as an exercise for a student, but that is simply not true, and if it were, it would likely be the case that we would soon run out of pedagogically-‘meaningful’ (by this standard) tasks (the author has no practical suggestions for how we could avoid this situation.)
by austhrow743 | 2025-12-10 04:07:35+00:00
World in Conflict was an interesting take on making RTS easier for casuals. Basically took the resource gathering part out of it. You got a constant drip of points you could spend on units instead.

Potentially that simplification hurts the genre too much though because then you don't have hardcore players sticking with it for years and years.

Maybe a game could have that as a "simple mode" that players can opt in to.

The potential addictive money making pattern is the same as other games imo. Skins. The units being smaller mean the developer is probably going to have to go to more effort to shove them in to peoples faces. Maybe a screen before/after the match where all the players units in their skins can be clear seen in a more zoomed in manner. Have them marching around the border of the end scoresheet or doing a little dance while waiting for players to load.
by _ache_ | 2025-12-10 04:10:00+00:00
Looks very fake. Self published (Anima-Core is NOT a journal), no academic anteriority, very strong statement, no peer-review, no public history of technical skills. Did I mention the use of Github via the interface only?

At the same time, possible since it's only classification tasks. I mean, the method explained is technically plausible, a lot of people thought about it, we were just unable to find a method to do so.

Very unlikely true, unfortunately.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-10 04:11:25+00:00
Please don't get me wrong. I'm glad the world has mostly transitioned over to HTTPS, but what are you actually concerned about with reading a blog post over HTTP? If you had to log in or post form data, or hosted binaries or something I would get it. But what is wrong with reading an article in the clear? And how would SSL prevent that?
by sgarland | 2025-12-10 04:12:06+00:00
I know this will come across as a trope, but a calculator doesn’t seem to me to be at the same level as AI in most circumstances.

If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education. If we’re talking about a high school physics exam, it probably doesn’t matter if you can show your work on converting units so much as it does that you knew which formulae to use.
by dangus | 2025-12-10 04:12:55+00:00
Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an M4 (or worse).

When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use and get some serious use out of."

The regression of the PC market is because the PC market didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones performing many times more efficiently than PCs and shrugged their arms at it.

Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the M1 lineup was released.

I say this as someone who actually moved away from Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).
by jcranmer | 2025-12-10 04:13:04+00:00
C currently remains the language of system ABIs, and there remains functionality that C can express that Rust cannot (principally bitfields).

Furthermore, in terms of extensions to the language to support more obtuse architecture, Rust has made a couple of decisions that make it hard for some of those architectures to be supported well. For example, Rust has decided that the array index type, the object size type, and the pointer size type are all the same type, which is not the case for a couple of architectures; it's also the case that things like segmented pointers don't really work in Rust (of course, they barely work in C, but barely is more than nothing).
by drdaeman | 2025-12-10 04:13:07+00:00
The part about not gaining much is questionable.

“AI” is a semi-meaningless misnomer, of course, but e.g. a natural language interface is something Apple had tried since forever (Siri) and always failed to get functional and useful. So this part of “not gaining much” is probably false.

Paired with every vendor’s love to tweak things at random - including Apple, a natural language (if done right) could be a meaningful solution to UI consistency (“Hey Siri, I dunno where the goddamn toggle is located this time but stop making music auto-play every other time phone connects to CarPlay” - real use case with real value). Yet, as usual, Siri lacks in intelligence and capabilities.

I’m pretty sure it’s not some genius wisdom of Tim, or whoever. Apple simply didn’t do any user-facing useful shit (they did some interesting stuff for developers, but that’s a different story), plastered some generative emojis to tick the “AI” checkbox, and now people praise them for that.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-12-10 04:15:16+00:00
The Italian morning caffè ritual is already extremely fast: the barista works at the speed of light and the coffee you get is pretty standard, but in exchange you get a moment to rub shoulders "al banco" with others like you about to go into work, or elders just getting out of the house, a mother taking her kid to school, a policeman taking a break. You say hi to the same few people you've been seeing at the establishment for years. It's familiar and heartwarming.

It's a sprinkling of human connection as you start your day. A small homage to the tradition of coffee culture. Your grandparents did it, your parents did it, you did it, your kids will do it, etc. You rejoice in knowing that, as everything else changes around you, maybe this one minuscule secular ritual will stand the test of time and provide a symbolic sense of continuity with the past.
by monster_truck | 2025-12-10 04:18:13+00:00
Natural gas turbines are pretty common (power plants, large on site/mobile generators) and the efficiency levels of these are the same as what you'd see in similar use cases. Turbines don't really care what they're doing (within reason), these just happen to share a lot of parts with a plane engine.

The cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed.

For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live.

In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-10 04:18:53+00:00
I have a feeling that most people imagine this. But this doesn’t sound like on the ground reality for me? Here in Tokyo, most people I’ve seen just grab brewed coffee or the usual espresso drinks and go on with their lives. When I lives in Toronto/Vancouver, that’s what I experienced over there as well. Used to frequent one down the street as it was the cheapest brewed available coffee, and the regulars would always order their normal cups to go.

It’s interesting to see these type of generalizations that I never experience in life. I’m not saying there’s no truth to it, as girls in my circles often talk about “oh, it’s PSL season, I wanna go!”. But it’s hard to believe that all of their customers go for the special drinks.
by geokon | 2025-12-10 04:19:21+00:00
That was actually fantastic. The professor is quite goofy, but he really goes over everything from first principles and goes through a real example - constructing a solution without any cheating :))

I was a bit bummed out there weren't a lot of Compressed Sensing libraries around, but it seems you just need a "convex optimization" routine (aka linear programming). And these seem to exist in every language

I'll try to play around with this! Thank you so much
by bluefirebrand | 2025-12-10 04:20:05+00:00
> To return to your previous comment that "everything is political" is a tedious worldview

It is tedious specifically because of the "in the wider sense" you put in parens

It is an overly broad definition of political to the point of uselessness and absurdity

Edit; for example, consider the case of a child throwing a ball for their dog.

The child is not political. The dog is not political. Yes, you can say that there's politics in letting people own pets like dogs. There are politics in having a public space where children are allowed to play fetch with their dogs. There are politics involved in the parents deciding to have children in the first place, or where they choose to live and work.

Yes, "everything is political" is true.

It's also just tedious
by Fnoord | 2025-12-10 04:20:46+00:00
Doordash? What does that have to do with this discussion? It is a completely different market. You use the food right away (food is perishable), and you probably could've cooked yourself a healthy meal with much less money. If you live with multiple people, it is even easier to do so due to scaling and sharing what you like. I am very much not OK with spending 50 USD per person on takeaway food (getting it here costs just 3 EUR or so). It is the amount of money I spend at a (for me) fancy restaurant.

I'll give you another example. A smart TV. A smart TV is more expensive than this ring, but yeah. So a cheap smart TV needs a soundbar for decent audio, and it needs a STB for the OS (streaming) in order to make it a dumb TV. It comes with a computer in it. A computer which you cannot upgrade. They decide to quit support whenever they want to (after 2 years you're generally hosed in EU). Planned obsolescence. We don't like that in Europe. I know, in the USA the current leadership denies climate change even exists. But here in Europe, we follow the scientific method, not BS.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-10 04:20:47+00:00
I’m not sure, I’m a bit hazy about the names, it was a dormitory, I never actually saw the school. The dormitory wasn’t on campus. We were interning at IBM Hawthorne at the time and my friend was living at a Columbia dorm and commuting. Sometimes when I took the train the nearest train line stop (to get back to Hawthorne) was Harlem.
by hinkley | 2025-12-10 04:20:47+00:00
Your dismissive tone is really discouraging me from replying with a legitimate answer to your concerns.

So you only get: people have been predicting the imminent demise of Apple every year for the last 20 and they are still the most valuable non-bubble stock in existence by a country mile.

Keep whining, I'm going to retire early on your whining.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-10 04:23:02+00:00
I think the rebuttal to the CEO today is really very simple.

a) How many of the sites you visit everyday have DV and how many have EV certificates?

b) Name any site at all, that you have visited, where your behavior or opinion has changed because of the certificate?

In truth the green-bar thing disappeared on mobile long before desktop (and in some cases it was never present.)

In truth if you polled all the company staff, or crumbs just the people round the boardroom table (probably including the person complaining) a rounding error from 0 could show you how to even determine if a cert was DV or EV.

EV could have an inspector literally visit your place of business, and it would still have no value because EVs are invisible to site visitors.
by brucehoult | 2025-12-10 04:24:11+00:00
No, not on a laptop with anything like a comparable number of cores.

Any x86 or Apple Silicon laptop that can match the DC-ROMA II in QEMU will need around three times as many cores -- if the task even scales to that many cores -- and will cost a lot more.

I tried compiling GCC 13 on my i9-13900HX laptop with 24 cores, and on Milk-V Megrez which is the same chip but only one of them (4 cores, not 8):

on Megrez:

real 260m14.453s user 872m5.662s sys 32m13.826s

On docker/QEMU on i9:

real 209m15.492s user 2848m3.082s sys 29m29.787s

Only just 25% faster on the x86 laptop. Compared to an 8 core RISC-V it would be slower.

And 3.2x more CPU time on the x86 with QEMU than on the RISC-V natively, so you'd need that many more "performance" cores than the either this RISC-V laptop has RISC-V.

Or build Linux kernel 7503345ac5f5 (almost exactly a year old at this point) using RISC-V defconfig:

i9-13900HX docker/qemu

real 19m12.787s user 583m44.139s sys 10m3.000s

Ryzen 5 4500U laptop docker/qemu (Zen2 6 cores, Win11)

real 143m20.069s user 820m26.988s sys 24m33.945s

Mac Mini M1 docker/qemu (4P + 4E cores)

real 69m16.520s user 531m47.874s sys 12m28.567s

VisionFive 2 (4x U74 in-order cores @1.5 GHz, similar to RPi 3)

real 67m35.189s user 249m55.469s sys 13m35.877s

Milk-V Megrez (4x P550 cores @1.8 GHz)

real 42m12.414s user 149m5.034s sys 11m33.624s

The cheap (~$50) VisionFive 2 is the same speed as an M1 Mac with qemu, or twice as fast as the 6 core Zen 2).

The 4 core Megrez takes around twice as long as the 24 core i9 with qemu. Eight of the same cores in the DC-Roma II will match the 24 core i9 and be more than three times faster than the 8 core M1 Mac.
by mmooss | 2025-12-10 04:24:57+00:00
Before we ask if almost all things old will be rewritten in Rust, we should ask if almost all things new are being written in Rust or other memory-safe languages?

Obviously not. When will that happen? 15 years? Maybe it's generational: How long before developers 'born' into to memory-safe languages as serious choices will be substantially in charge of software development?
by rasz | 2025-12-10 04:25:29+00:00
To the last point I would see it the other way around. Rearranging code for pipelined 0 cycle FXCH Pentium FPU speed up floating point by probably way more than x2 compared to heavily optimized code running on K5/K6. Im not even sure if K6/-2 ever got 0 cycle FXCH, K6-3 did, but still no FPU pipelining until Athlon.

Quake wouldnt happen until Pentium 2 if Intel didnt pipeline FPU.