MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by loeg | 2025-12-20 18:32:51+00:00
Some discussion in the FragPicker paper (2021) FWIW: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483593

> Our extensive experiments discover that, unlike HDDs, the performance degradation of modern storage devices incurred by fragmentation mainly stems from request splitting, where a single I/O request is split into multiple ones.
by miiiiiike | 2025-12-20 18:32:51+00:00
I get what you're saying but making interminable arguments and keeping the "debate" going is a tactic. There's that CIA sabotage manual with the section about meetings and conferences, it can feel like that. The duration of these debates aren't usually measured in hours, days, or weeks, but years. And the people who dragging them on and staying in the fights are employed full-time to do exactly that.

It got to the point where I believed that subgrid was dead. FF implemented it but absolutely no one else did, for years.

Is it our fault for tuning out of the debate? Yep. But tactics were employed to achieve that exact outcome. I'm fine admitting that I tuned out. But it was a battle of attrition waged by people who were fine holding up progress indefinitely.

Is that how you want decisions to be made?

Ultimately I'm not too concerned what you call the masonry feature. However the debate over what to call it was an extreme case of bikeshedding. I would have rather given up the fight over semantics to resolve the non-issues and ship the feature years ago. As it stands we're still years away from actually being able to use the feature in production.

I've stopped waiting for companies, committees, or projects to change course. I don't have an incentive to build consensus within a group of people who fundamentally disagree that the thing I need should exist. Why bother? I have an incentive to spend my time building features that users will use.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-20 18:33:31+00:00
> Zephyr blows away Arduino

Zephyr is basically "let's have the nice things from Linux on small MCUs" and it sucks. Yes, it is numbers of magnitude better than vendor-specific not-quite-RTOS crap. It blows away Arduino because Arduino is an educational environment just a step above Scratch. Zephyr still sucks. And there is no hope of fixing it because it doesn't suck because the authors did a bad job. They did a fantastic job and it still sucks because the approach fundamentally doesn't work.

Zephyr loves to reuse Linux tooling but it simply doesn't fit. Kconfig silently disabling options because of missing dependencies sucks. No, I'm not using menuconfig, thank you very much, navigating a million of menus is the last thing I need. DTS to C macros abomination sucks. Tons of CMake scripts scattered over every directory suck.

The build in-drivers? What is implemented and tested directly by SoC vendors works, the rest is unusable for anything but example project. Want to use an external SPI flash? Too bad the driver doesn't implement any power management, program it all yourself or accept a constant 12mA draw (fine for many projects, absolutely unacceptable for some). Want to read this I2C sensor once an hour? Too bad, the build-in driver can only poll it constantly in a dedicated thread, just write one yourself. Not like that's a big job, but the build-in driver would be infinitely more useful if it just defined the register map in a header.

And worse yet, Zephyr doesn't do anything to actually solve the silicon lock-in problem, because it's not something that can be solved by new abstractions. Peripheral interconnect, interval timers and basically any peripheral that isn't I2C or UART is simply impossible to abstract over in a useful way. There is no common denominator like there is on desktop.

IMHO, FreeRTOS is a much better system simply because it doesn't tries to be a HAL. It switches between threads and that's it. And HAL for MCUs is simply a pipedream. If you can afford a HAL, go with Linux on a SoC large enough for that.
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-20 18:33:42+00:00
> The main difference therefore between error and warning is, "We didn't think this could happen" vs "We thought this might happen".

What about conditions like "we absolutely knew this would happen regularly, but it's something that prevents the completion of the entire process which is absolutely critical to the organization"

The notion of an "error" is very context dependent. We usually use it to mean "can not proceed with action that is required for the successful completion of this task"
by fatal94 | 2025-12-20 18:33:44+00:00
Driving towards a solution of "imprisoning more people" as punishment rather than other punishment have never succeeded. Many states already have first time drug offender and strike programs, people are already imprisoned over a weekend for things even as simple as misdemeanor possession until they can get a bail set. Rehabilitative forms of punishments such as severe fines, community service or mandatory classes and broadcasting them is much more effective in actually driving down rates of impaired drivers.

Whats more, police officers already have a wide authority of judgement when considering these factors around marijuana impairment currently. Relying on subjective evaluation from FST and physical presentation will only result in a higher rate of non impaired drivers being imprisoned.
by floating-io | 2025-12-20 18:33:50+00:00
Yes. The "official release" is just so old as to be useless at this point. They should either update it or take it down and point people at github or something, IMO.

I use the latest version all the time. The newer renderer ("manifold", IIRC) is much faster, and there are newer facilities that make it possible to build 3MF files containing multiple objects for multi-color printing, though that takes a bit of thought to do correctly.
by master_crab | 2025-12-20 18:34:17+00:00
I haven’t seen driving behavior change in NYC over the past two decades.

Also, NYC has a different driving attitude than, say, Dallas. What people call aggression is often a difference in expectations. Drivers change lanes and merge far more assertively than in other parts of the country. As long as you aren’t causing the car behind you to panic brake, it’s considered acceptable. Hesitation from drivers tends to get more opprobrium than tight merges.

People block bike lanes and the box all the time. It’s annoying and you shouldn’t do it. But a lot of the rage is often unjustified. That FedEx truck needs to park somewhere and they aren’t going to roll over a fruit stand to do it.

It’s a dense, packed city. If you can’t give and take, you are going to hate it here.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-12-20 18:34:28+00:00
You may log that or count failures in some metric, but the correct answer is to have a health check on third party service and an alert when that service is down. Logs may help to understand the nature of the incident, but they are not the channel through which you are informed about such problems.

The different issue is when third party broke the contract, so suddenly you get a lot of 4xx or 5xx responses, likely unrecoverable. Then you get ERROR level messages in the log (because it’s unexpected problem) and an alert when there’s a spike.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-20 18:34:37+00:00
I'm not even sure why you're trying to argue this. It's well established that Time over Fiber is 1-2 orders of magnitude more accurate and precise than GNSS time. Fiber time is also immune to many of the numerous sources of interference GNSS systems encounter, which anyone who's done serious timekeeping will be well acquainted with.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-20 18:35:04+00:00
The satellite clocks are designed to run autonomously for a few days without noticeable degradation, and up to a few weeks with defined levels of inaccuracy, but they are normally adjusted once a day by the ground stations based on the timescale maintained by the USNO. That, in turn, uses an ensemble of H-masers.
by roughly | 2025-12-20 18:35:05+00:00
> A few well known AI scientists believe that what happened with Transformers can happen again, and better, following different paths, and started to create teams, companies to investigate alternatives to Transformers and models with explicit symbolic representations or world models.

I’m actually curious about this and would love pointers to the folks working in this area. My impression from working with LLMs is there’s definitely a “there” there with regards to intelligence - I find the work showing symbolic representation in the structure of the networks compelling - but the overall behavior of the model seems to lack a certain je ne sais quoi that makes me dubious that they can “cross the divide,” as it were. I’d love to hear from more people that, well, sais quoi, or at least have theories.
by watwut | 2025-12-20 18:35:55+00:00
> the only reason family ends up ratting these people out is because of the high pressure it ends up on the family.

That is not true. There was no pressure on unabomber brother - he "ratted" him out entirely on own will. Also Elliot Rodgers parents called police after they read the manifesto - before any pressure happened. Ex wife of DC shootings had restraining order on him, feared him, and when police asked whether she thinks he is capable of violence like that her first answer was "yes".

The thing also is, these people are often assholes in their own lives, toward relatives too. They tend to have track record of domestic violence and abuse.
by user3939382 | 2025-12-20 18:36:07+00:00
It’s fine. The public pays for sci-fi clocks used by NIST and the Navy and we get shit latency over NTP and a WWVB signal that barely reaches a huge chunk of the country. CLOCKS WE PAID FOR. Jane Street gets lightning access to clocks and our pension managers get their NTP trades front run. NTP is a disgrace and an insult when it is working.
by charlie-83 | 2025-12-20 18:36:10+00:00
Just started using OpenSCAD recently and love it. While most CAD tools have a million features to learn, OpenSCAD is completely described by a cheat sheet you could print on a piece of A4 (like most programming languages).

I would really recommend using the git master than the latest release though. The last release was 2021 but they are still actively working on it and it's much faster now.

I also have to recommend the BOSL2 library which means you don't have to implement all of those one million features from typical CAD software yourself. Its definitely got a bit of a learning curve but the fact that you can always default back to vanilla OpenSCAD and that you can actually see how stuff is implemented makes it much more satisfying to me to learn than learning what all the traditional CAD GUI buttons do.
by hackernudes | 2025-12-20 18:36:29+00:00
If you have flip flops, it's not "no memory".

If you have a ROM, it's not "no memory".

Needlessly pedantic!

I thought this was pretty cool but the first video didn't play. All this write up and I really just want to see the damn demo in action first! (Edit: reloaded the page and it worked. I still would like to see it on rela hardware!)
by Rygian | 2025-12-20 18:36:31+00:00
They belong in the same category: the end user has zero agency over how their privacy is impacted, and is at the whim of the wishes/agency of whoever is serving content to them.

Whether the one serving the content is exploiting data at the present moment has very little relevance. Because the end user has no means to assert whether it is happening or not.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-20 18:36:36+00:00
> By finding smarter ways to divide a large matrix multiplication operation into more manageable subproblems, it sped up this vital kernel in Gemini’s architecture by 23%, leading to a 1% reduction in Gemini's training time.

The message I replied to said "if I have some toy poorly optimized python example". I think it's safe to say that matmul & kernel optimisation is a bit beyond a small python example.
by Robdel12 | 2025-12-20 18:36:36+00:00
OpenSCAD has become my go to with my 3-D printer for dumb little things. And the best part is LLMs are getting decent / pretty good with it!

My favorite thing I’ve printed is a little downsize coupler for the cool shirt system I built for my spec miata. It’s realllly silly & small thing, but it saved me!
by bko | 2025-12-20 18:36:40+00:00
There's probably some of this, but I think it's driven by district attorney not prosecuting people. We see people that have 20+ prior arrests. How many times can a cop arrest the same person and do the paperwork if he's not going to be prosecuted? I don't think people are pushing police to arrest more people.

> Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.

Not clear if that's only in 1 year, but 6,000 arrests for the same 327 people means 18 arrests per person on average. Maybe if you see the same person shoplifting more than 5 times you put him away for some real time. 10 times? Hell even 20 strikes and you're out would make a real dent and serve as a deterrent.

https://archive.is/VCKkk#selection-473.0-473.379
by mind-blight | 2025-12-20 18:36:45+00:00
I think a big piece missing from these conversations is compliance frameworks and customer trust. Of your selling to enterprise customers or governments, they want to go through your stack, networking, security, audit logs, and access controls with a fine toothed comb.

Everything you do that isn't "normal" is another conversation you need to have with an auditor plus each customer. Those eat up a bunch of time and deals take longer to close.

Right or wrong, these decisions make you less "serious" and therefore less credible in the eyes of many enterprise customers. You can get around that perception, but it takes work. Not hosting on one of the big 3 needs to be decided with that cost in mind
by MattRix | 2025-12-20 18:36:45+00:00
It actually renders things incredibly fast if you get the nightly version and set the backend to Manifold. It is probably 100x faster (!!). In fact it renders so fast that I put a render() command at the top of my hierarchy so that everything just renders all the time, it’s faster and more performant. I make incredibly complex models with it too, with hundreds of holes, complex svg files with text in them, etc.
by moefh | 2025-12-20 18:37:49+00:00
We don't know that. We don't even know if there's selection bias.

The article says the research was "focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC", and that the test usually happens when autopsies are performed. It doesn't say if autopsies are performed for all driver deaths, and it also doesn't say what exactly is "usually".

If (for example) autopsy only happens when the driver is suspected of drug use, then there's a clear selection bias.

Note that this doesn't mean the study is useless: they were able to see that legalization of cannabis didn't have impact on recreational use.
by analog31 | 2025-12-20 18:38:10+00:00
This can be hard to explain to both engineers and laypeople because there's Arduino, then there's Arduino, and then there's Arduino...

For instance, "Arduino" could mean the Arduino branded boards, and the cloud based development stack.

On the other hand, "Arduino" has become almost a generic term for any microcontroller board that happens to support the (open source) Arduino API. As in: "Just throw an Arduino in there."

For instance I've got several ongoing projects using third party boards such as Teensy, where my entire relationship to Arduino is represented by a single line of code:

#include <arduino.h>
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-12-20 18:38:26+00:00
> Skeptic here: I do think LLMs are a fad for software development.

I think that’s where they’re most useful, for multiple reasons:

- programming is very formal. Either the thing compiles, or it doesn’t. It’s straightforward to provide some “reinforcement” learning based on that.

- there’s a shit load of readily available training data

- there’s a big economic incentive; software developers are expensive
by disease | 2025-12-20 18:38:26+00:00
I gave it an image of my crappy art and asked what steps I could take to make it look better. It gave me specific advice like varying the line widths and how to use this on specific parts of the character. It also pointed out that the shading in my piece was inconsistent and did not reflect the 3d form I was representing and again gave me specific fixes I could implement. I asked for it to give me an updated version of the piece with all of its advice implemented and it did so. I was pretty shocked at all of this.
by MattRix | 2025-12-20 18:38:58+00:00
Yes everything this person said is correct. The Manifold backend is no joke, probably 100x faster.

To do multi-color printing it’s pretty easy now, just turn on the poorly named feature in preferences called “lazy-unions”. This will make it so that each top level object in your file gets exported as a separate subobject in the 3mf file.
by emp17344 | 2025-12-20 18:39:03+00:00
You seem to think the debate is settled, but that’s far from true. It’s oddly controlling to attempt to discredit any opposition to this viewpoint. There’s plenty of research supporting the stochastic view of these models, such as Apple’s “Illusion” papers. Tao is also a highly respected researcher, and has worked with these models at a very high level - his viewpoint has merit as well.
by carlmr | 2025-12-20 18:39:23+00:00
>it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year

To me the answer is quite simple for any of these. Treat repeated small infractions like bigger and bigger infractions. E.g. double the cost every iteration if it happens within a specific time frame.

Ok, you speed once? $100. Twice $200. Thrice $400. And so on. We only reset if you don’t reoffend for any speeding in 5 years. If you want to speed 20 times in 5 years, ok, go ahead. You pay $52,428,800.

Bonus points for making it start at something relative to your salary. People will stop at some point out of self-preservation.

If you don’t believe high fines work, drive from Switzerland to Germany. In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. While south of the border they behave very nicely on the street.

You could extend this to other crimes. Google and Microsoft happily pay fines, since it’s cheaper than what they make from breaking anti-trust regulations. If you doubled it on each infraction they would at some time start feeling the pain.
by anfractuosity | 2025-12-20 18:40:07+00:00
It's super useful, been using with my 3D printer to print things such as an adapter to connect a Canon EF lens to night vision tube and parts to link motorised linear stages together.

Currently I'm playing with a gear library which is part of BOSL2 (https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki/gears.scad), to make something to rotate a polariser in my microscope.
by murukesh_s | 2025-12-20 18:40:08+00:00
I disagree - having worked on backends most of the time, I find modern frontend much more complex (and difficult to test) than pure backend. When I say modern frontend - its mostly React, state management like Redux, Zustand, Router framework like React Router, a CSS framework like Tailwind and component framework like Shadcn. Not to mention different versions of React, different ways of managing state, animation/transitions etc. And on top of that the ever increasing complex quirks in the codebase still needed to be compatible with all the modern browsers and device sizes/orientation out there.
by hinkley | 2025-12-20 18:40:33+00:00
Any robust system isn’t going to rely on reading logs to figure out what to do about undelivered email anyway. If you’re doing logistics the failure to send an order confirmation needs to show up in your data model in some manner. Managing your application or business by logs is amateur hour.

There’s a whole industry of “we’ll manage them for you” which is just enabling dysfunction.
by blincoln | 2025-12-20 18:41:02+00:00
I've been assessing systems that use cryptography for about 20 years as part of my work in information security, and I've never seen a customization that increased the security of a cryptographic algorithm over following the best practices.

Usually, non-specialists fiddling with cryptographic algorithms makes them much less secure. Developers who aren't cryptographic mathematicians should generally use a well-respected algorithm, follow current best practices, and treat that component as a magic box that's not to be tampered with.
by murukesh_s | 2025-12-20 18:41:32+00:00
>Isn’t frontend more complex? If my task starts with a Figma UI design, how well does a code agent do at generating working code that looks right, and iterate on it (presuming some browser MCP)? Some automated tests seem enough for an genetic loop on backend.

Haven't tried a Figma design, but i built an internal tool entirely via instructions to agent. The kind of work I could easily quote 3 weeks previously.
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-20 18:42:10+00:00
> This individual was holding it as if it were a weapon

When asked to clarify the communications officer provided the following evidence:

"As you can see in this image the student is squinting a little bit, exactly what you would do if you were aiming."

"Also, you can see by his stance that he is trying to create stability with one foot a little forward."

"I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was actually a trial run and he is testing the AI for weaknesses."
by chiffaa | 2025-12-20 18:42:55+00:00
After using projects named like "slurp", "eww" (combined with "yuck"), "yay", "honkers railway", "jason" and many many others, I personally kind of gave up on any attempts to judge projects by their titles. Partly due to many developers being whimsical nerds, partly because even marketable names say nothing about the product half the time so what's the point anyway
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-12-20 18:43:35+00:00
Docker Compose (ignoring Swarm which seems to be obsolete) manages containers on a single machine. With Kubernetes, the pod that hosts the database is a pod like any other (I assume). It gets moved to a healthy machine when node goes bad, respects CPU/mem limits, works with generic monitoring tools, can be deployed from GitOps tools etc. All the k8s goodies apply.
by oofbey | 2025-12-20 18:43:58+00:00
At scale the rare events start to happen reliably. Hardware failures almost certainly cause ERROR conditions. Network glitches.

Our production system pages oncall for any errors. At night it will only wake somebody up for a whole bunch of errors. This discipline forces us to take a look at every ERROR and decide if it is spurious and out of our control or something we can deal with. At some point our production system will reach a scale where there are errors logged constantly and this strategy Durant make sense any more. But for now it helps keep our system clean.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-20 18:44:03+00:00
This post is a bait for enthusiasts. I like it.

> Chain of thought is now a fundamental way to improve LLM output.

That kinda proves _that LLMs back then were pretty much stochastic parrots indeed_, and the skeptics were right at the time. Today, enthusiasts agree with what they previously said: without CoT, the AI feels underwhelming, repetitive and dumb and it's obvious that something more was needed.

Just search past discussions about it, people were saying the problem would be solved with "larger models" (just repeating marketing stuff) and were oblivious to the possibility of other kinds of innovations.

> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction.

That is a low level sick burn on whoever believes AI will be economically viable short-term. And I have to agree.