MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-16 17:57:19+00:00
>That truck would sell gangbusters.

Nope.

Live in Texas, where there are plenty of people with top level F150s, Raptors, 250s, 350s and so on. Ive seen maybe like 5 Lightnings total since they came out, despite them being the same price. Full size trucks is a different market.

Car frame Trucks like Rivian or Maveric make sense because they are trucks for car people that like the idea of a truck. People don't really carry much in those trucks, and don't really drive that much.

With full size trucks, outside the negligible market that buys them for the size factor, people buy them because the utility value goes through the roof. Quite a lot of people who use the trucks end up putting a lot of miles on them, or using them for carrying lots of stuff (and there is a difference between full size truck bed size and even mid size like Tacoma, namely with what you can carry with tailgate up a and also the depth of bed to prevent things from falling out).

EV in fullsize truck doesn't work that well because a) aero drag is insane, so you are limited in how fast you can go for any real range, and b) any extra battery weight takes away from total payload capacity.

So long as XLT is available (which makes up for 33% of the sales) and gas stations are a thing, you are never going to compete with any equivalent EV.

The easiest thing for Ford to do is make a good plug in hybrid. They already have the hybrid F150 (although reliability issues are still there), but the thing can power your house in power outage, and go like 600+ miles on a tank of gas. Just give it a bigger battery and make it plugin, and pair it with the tried and true 3.5 ecoboost, and you have a winning combo, and people will pay $70k for that thing.
by pygy_ | 2025-12-16 17:57:27+00:00
There is a difference between having an opinion and spending money to promote it.

Also, beside the direct murders as @ceejayoz mentioned, the social exclusion of LGBT folks drives far too many of them to many of them to suicide.

The legalization of same sex marriage cause a noticeable drop in their suicide rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBTQ_people#:~:...).
by D-Machine | 2025-12-16 17:57:45+00:00
Sorry if I was unclear, but GP is correct, you are misreading quite deeply.

I am saying that because it is much harder to find good documentation on using MATLAB on HPCs, a lot of computations on HPCs that use MATLAB are highly wasteful compared to if they had been written using a language and/or tools that make it much easier to use HPC resources more efficiently. I was NOT in any way saying that "universities are wasteful".
by gpderetta | 2025-12-16 17:57:45+00:00
My understanding is that there is no global ordering anyway: allocation of a node has a total order, but actually writing data to a node can be arbitrarily delayed. At this point might as well use separate queues for each writer.

edit: the author claims the algorithm is linearizable, so I'll keep reading the article.

edit2: Right, writer acquires ticket, when done attempts to set the done flag on node. Reader acquires ticket, attempts to consume the node. On failure the writer will retry. Even if you have one producer and one consumer, might not you, theoretically, end up in a scenario where the writer never make progress? I guess as technically no node was produced, this is still technically lock-free, but still... ... oh, I should have read it further, the single writer scenario (even in the dynamic case) is special cased! It will still produce the node.

Nice, but it seems exceedingly complex.
by jlawson | 2025-12-16 17:57:51+00:00
From experience, there is a huge shortage of human talent.

Some people really are exceptional and there are very few of them.

How many Einsteins do you think are just kicking around? How many Robin Williams's or Tom Hanks's?

How many Kobes? We know not many because there's a huge search to find more.

There aren't 20 more Elons waiting in the wings there. Or 20 more Jensens. And so on.

It's actually far more rational as a society to pay the one guy who can create 100B his 10B for it.
by hearsathought | 2025-12-16 17:58:13+00:00
> Not sure how common at what are considered top schools without looking at course catalogs.

I am fairly certain 100% of the top CS programs ( and 99% that every CS program ) in the country have an intro to programming class for incoming freshman with no background in programming - usually Python, Java or C. MIT does. Besides, there are tons of material online to learn programming on your own.

> I expect if you're really new to programming, jumping into a CS program at an elite school could be a bumpy ride given 90% of the class will have a fair bit of experience and the class will be pitched to that level.

Agreed. But the challenge isn't insurmountable.
by jeffbee | 2025-12-16 17:58:20+00:00
All but literally every crime in my city (in the categories of, say, burglary, robbery, assault, etc) are committed by people who drive into town in stolen cars with no plates. It's totally ridiculous. If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
by jgalt212 | 2025-12-16 17:58:46+00:00
> Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps

To me, living in US Northeast, this is astounding. I've read heat pumps lose efficacy below 25F. My family would never forgive me if I made our house cold. But then I see 70% of the Nordics's house are "warm enough", or dealing colder than room temperature houses.

I've asked half-dozen contractors and HVAC people in my area, and none of them have recommended a heat pump. But, I'm just as suspicious of their motives as I am of the science and environmental populizers on YouTube.
by rapier1 | 2025-12-16 17:58:58+00:00
More than 2 decades at this point. The primary reasons is that the full patch set would be a burden for them to integrate and they don't prioritize performance for bulk data transfers. Which is perfectly understandable from their perspective. HPN-SSH builds on the expertise of OpenSSH and we follow their work closely - when they make a new release we incorporate it and follow with our own release inside of a week or two (depending on how long the code review and functionality/regression testing takes). We focus on throughput performance which involves receive buffer normalization, private key cipher speed, code optimization, and so forth. We tend to stay clear of anything involve authentication and we never roll our own when it comes to the ciphers.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-16 17:58:58+00:00
> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.

Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
by cpburns2009 | 2025-12-16 17:59:12+00:00
My contributions tend to be reproducible bug reports, fixing typos in documentation, and the rare bug fix. I submit them usually because I'm actively trying to use a library or tool for a problem I have. I rarely try fixing a bug because I really don't want to waste a lot of time learning each project's testing framework. And I don't really have time to become a regular contributor to the many projects that would interest me.
by sodality2 | 2025-12-16 17:59:17+00:00
I can opt out of that, by not carrying a phone. I cannot opt out of public surveillance. Plus at least the gap between police -> tech companies typically adds some resistance, maybe a warrant, etc. With ALPR's police have immediate access without warrants to the nationwide network. It's far more ripe for abuse, yet is exactly what the police departments want; the only chance is local governance.
by chihuahua | 2025-12-16 17:59:43+00:00
This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 fonts in the world: serif, sans serif, and weird fonts (Papyrus, the 70s groovy font, the Tron font, etc.)

I read HN articles about some company being shaken down for using an unlicensed font on their website, draconic font licensing agreements, paying per page impression for fonts. And I do not understand why anyone would even bother specifying a non-standard font that requires a license and payment for their website. None of your customers are going to care one bit either way. Except perhaps for the 0.000001% of the population that care about fonts. But even those, are they going to say "I'm not going to order my RAM from you, because you have a bad font on your site?" That seems unlikely. If using some non-free font costs even $1, or takes even 1 minute of your time, it's already a losing proposition.

What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Helvetica is, or how terrible Arial is ("Microsoft bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle notes of citrus and leather in the kerning, the sublime genius of the hinting.
by rrradical | 2025-12-16 17:59:48+00:00
Well it was definitely a bug. It worked in some cases (I think it even worked in google at first, and then a few days later it manifested). And the feature was advertised, even though, again, they never claimed the software to be release quality.

But my point is that, similar to security, you don't want to build this kind of feature piece meal. Either the containers are fundamentally walled off or they aren't.
Show HN: QKV Core – Run 7B LLMs on 4GB VRAM via surgical memory alignment
by broxytr | 2025-12-16 17:59:57+00:00
Hey HN, OP here.

I built this because I was frustrated with constant OOM crashes trying to run Qwen-2.5-7B and Llama-3 models on my local GTX 1050 (4GB).

I realized that standard GGUF quantization tools often add unnecessary padding to tensors, pushing VRAM usage just over the 4GB limit due to fragmentation. QKV Core solves this via what I call "Surgical Alignment"—it analyzes layer entropy to switch between dictionary coding and raw storage, and then trims padding bytes to strictly adhere to block boundaries (e.g., 110-byte alignment for Q3_K).

This approach shaved off enough overhead to fit 7B models comfortably into 4GB VRAM and resulted in a ~34% improvement in I/O load times thanks to the aligned memory blocks and Numba-accelerated kernels.

The project is open source (MIT). I'd love to hear your feedback on the quantization logic or answer any questions about the implementation!
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-16 17:59:58+00:00
Thing is though, most of the high level languages have that part "solved" via libraries... Hence lots of people don't see the need to test it, as they expect the library to have sufficiently tested already. That leaves your tests mostly centered around your domain/business logic

Personally I'm just doing web api dev/backend atm and have to say that at least in this domain, pretty much everything actually hard is solved.

The only difficulty is the "interesting" architecture decisions people like the OP introduce, making inherently trivial problems into multi week endeavors which need coordination between dozens if not hundreds of devs
by leoc | 2025-12-16 18:00:40+00:00
It's also nakedly hypocritical behaviour on Stallman's part. Hoping (whether in vain or not) that GCC being Too Big to Fork ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 ) will keep people from having access to the AST interface really isn't substantially different from saying "why do you need source code, can't you just disassemble the binary hahaha".
by fragmede | 2025-12-16 18:00:52+00:00
Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-16 18:01:09+00:00
Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/

https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/
by lab700xdev | 2025-12-16 18:01:13+00:00
Fair point on the terminology overlap with "Zip Bombs" (resource exhaustion). I used "Pickle Bomb" colloquially to describe a serialized payload waiting to detonate upon load, similar to how "Logic Bomb" is used in malware. "Malicious Pickle Stream" is definitely the more precise technical term, but it doesn't quite capture the visceral risk of "I loaded this file and my AWS keys are gone" as well as Bomb does!
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-12-16 18:01:17+00:00
I work with stats. I think even very honest people with high incentive to tell an accurate story and good data have trouble with stats. Now add politicians and police and bad data into that mix with winner-takes-all politics at stake and the stats get gamed.

Also I believe my eyes and when I see crimes happening in my neighborhood I don't rush to "the stats" to ask them what I saw.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-16 18:01:33+00:00
You are using the dictionary definition of monopoly, not the legal definition according to any particular nation’s laws or looking at how it has been enforced/on what basis, which is the only version that really matters in this discussion.

I imagine everyone on HN knows that simply linking Wikipedia is generally considered little more than a snarky, passive aggressive response. I don’t need the dictionary or Wikipedia definition of a monopoly for this conversation. I didn’t ask for it and you know that it wasn’t necessary or productive.

If you want to have an actual discussion I’m all ears.
by Silhouette | 2025-12-16 18:01:39+00:00
Not all banks, government services, travel and ticketing systems, and the list goes on.

The unfortunate reality is that we have a duopoly in the mobile device market and having one of those devices are now a practical necessity to live a normal life for most people. Without regulation to force the market to open up there's little to stop organisations that want ever more control over the devices you can use to access their systems. Trying to go outside the two big players just means you're going to get a substandard or completely pointless experience. And even governments are in on it.

Which is going to be interesting when both the huge US corporations that form that duopoly and/or the government of their home nation decide to do something that goes against what the government or laws in other places want to happen.
by Kydlaw | 2025-12-16 18:01:51+00:00
I have a love-hate relationship with GitHub Actions. Love because they are right there in my GitHub repository. Hate because they are very brittle once you move out of the happy path.

It seems GitLab has a much better experience in this department, but their pricing is hard to justify for us...

Genuinely curious if folks here had better experiences or recommendations for a smooth CI/CD experience.
by jpc0 | 2025-12-16 18:02:41+00:00
This.

I agree that you will probably just end up writing ASM but it was a trivial example, there are non-trivial examples involving jump tables and unrolling loops etc.

Effectively weird optimisations that rely on the virtual machine the compiler is building for vs reality, there's just more abstractions with rust than with C++ by the virtue of the safety mechanism, it's just plain not possible to have the one without the other.

The hardware can do legal things that rust cannot allow or can allow but you need to write extremely convoluted code, C/C++ is closer to the metal in that regard.

Don't get me wrong I am all for the right abstractions, it allows insane optimisations that humans couldn't dream of, but there is a flip side.
by nickcw | 2025-12-16 18:02:45+00:00
Here is some speculation:

SFTP was designed as a remote file system system access protocol rather than transfer a single file like scp.

I suspect that the root of the problem is that SFTP works over a single SSH channel. SSH connections can have multiple channels but usually the server binds a single channel to a single executable so it makes sense to use only a single channel.

Everything flows from that decision - packetisation becomes necessary otherwise you have to wait for all the files to transfer before you can do anything else (eg list a directory) and that is no good for your remote filesystem access.

Perhaps the packets could have been streamed but the way it works is more like an RPC protocol with requests and responses. Each request has a serial number which is copied to the response. This means the client can have many requests in-flight.

There was a proposal for rclone to use scp for the data connections. So we'd use sftp for the day to day file listings, creating directories etc, but do actual file transfers with scp. Scp uses one SSH channel per file so doesn't suffer from the same problems as sftp. I think we abandoned that idea though as many sftp servers aren't configured with scp as well. Also modern versions of OpenSSH (OpenSSH 9.0 released April 2022) use SFTP instead of scp anyway. This was done to fix various vulnerabilities in scp as I understand.
by mothballed | 2025-12-16 18:02:57+00:00
>If you compare DC against other major metropolitan statistical areas, the leadership disappears -- see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...

No it doesn't, not according to the linked data you're proposing. I sorted by per-capita income of MSAs on the second table of that page, it shows DC MSA blowing the other metropolitan areas away. Might not still be accurate as that's a 2010 census, but you're the one insisting on it.

Looks like you're the one, distorting your own citations, mate and you "know it." Methinks this a case of psychological concept known as 'projection'.
by adolph | 2025-12-16 18:03:07+00:00
> The fastest protocols are the TLS/HTTP based ones which stream data.

I think maybe you are referring to QUIC [0]? It'd be interesting to see some userspace clients/servers for QUIC that compete with Aspera's FASP [1] and operate on a point to point basis like scp. Both use UDP to decrease the overhead of TCP.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_and_Secure_Protocol
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-16 18:03:47+00:00
"The seeming double down makes no sense to me."

One of the findings Google shared as evidence in the DoJ's antitrust litigation was that Google's users consume "AI"-generated results more readily than "non-AI" results

Mozilla gets paid by sending search query data to Google

More user-facing "AI" potentially means more search data will be generated by (from) Mozilla's users

The number of gratuitous HTTP requests generated by mobile Firefox is, to me, nothing less than astounding. All this traffic is blocked from reaching the internet on the computers and networks I own but I would imagine most Firefox users allow this traffic to escape. I suspect "AI" will only increase the number of automatically-generated HTTP requests even further

"It won't suddenly make Firefox more popular."

Perhaps the goal is not necessarily to increase the number of Firefox users but to "extract" more data from existing users

"I really want to see it do better and succeed"

For Mozilla's CEO and senior management it looks like Mozilla is succeeding

Look at the steady increase in pay for Ms Baker

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-fo...

Primarily, Mozilla serves website operators, advertisers and Google

Generally, Firefox users are data sources and ad targets
by wrs | 2025-12-16 18:03:47+00:00
Exactly, so it seems like a category error to say (as the article does) “generics and lifetimes are tightly intertwined in Rust”. I mean, would you say “generics and types are tightly intertwined in Rust”? If anything, types and lifetimes are intertwined — by generics!

Rust tutorials introduce lifetimes and stick them into the brackets, but I don’t remember one that explains genericity in a general way first, then applies it to both types and lifetimes. Lifetimes come across as a special thing that happens to be in the same brackets. (Or maybe that was just me!)

I believe the model in the compiler isn’t quite so pure in reality (IIRC, struct lifetimes can affect type unification), but most of the time this is the easiest way to understand it.
by cnewey | 2025-12-16 18:03:52+00:00
I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).

It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.

Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.
by dpark | 2025-12-16 18:04:02+00:00
> smoking is not an appropriate analogy at least insofar

Missing the forest for the trees.

The point isn’t that neglecting to mask is exactly the same as smoking. Obviously these are different. The point is that in both cases the person in question is advising one thing and doing another. The fact that a doctor smokes or doesn’t mask up in a pandemic does not mean that their advice to not smoke or to wear a mask is not good advice.

If a person regularly snacks on lead paint but tells you not to eat paint, the advice is still good even if it’s coming from an idiot.

> it is not ad-hominem to try to understand a person's motivations

Sure, but claims of hypocrisy are still not a rebuttal.

No doubt it was hypocritical for Dr Mike to tell others to social distance and then hop on a boat with a dozen people unmasked, just as it was hypocritical for Gavin Newsom to attend a dinner at The French Laundry while telling others to stay home.

This isn’t actually relevant to whether the advice to socially distance was sound, though.
by rapier1 | 2025-12-16 18:04:27+00:00
Yeah, it's an issue because there is also the per channel application layer flow control. So when you are using SFTP you have the TCP flow control, the SSH layer flow control, and then the SFTP flow control. The maximum receive buffer ends up being the minimum of all three. HPN-SSH (I'm the dev) normalizes the SSH layer flow control to the TCP receive buffer but we haven't done enough work on SFTP except to bump up the buffer size/outstanding requests. I need to determine if this is effective enough or if I need some dynamism in there as well.