MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wtallis | 2025-12-31 05:58:05+00:00
Nah, if you actually read into what's available there, it's clear that the compilers have never implemented features to make this broadly usable. You only get runtime instruction selection if you've manually tagged each individual function to be compiled with function multi-versioning, so that's only really useful for known hot spots that are intended to use autovectorization. If you just want to enable the latest SIMD across the whole program, GCC and clang can't automatically generate fallback versions of every function they end up deciding could use AVX or whatever. The alternative is to make big changes to your build system and packaging to compile N different versions of the executable/library. There's no easy way to just add a compiler flag that means "use AXV512 and generate SSE2 fallbacks where necessary".
by josephg | 2025-12-31 05:59:33+00:00
> The result: roughly 50 distinct issues uncovered across multiple kernel subsystems

> Our goal isn’t to break FreeBSD, but to highlight the systemic difficulty of maintaining strict isolation in a large, mature codebase.

50 distinct issues? That's devastating. If these researchers found 50 issues, we all know there's more that 50 issues in the codebase.

I really think we need to start seriously considering using SeL4 as a base for our operating systems. How long can we keep building on top of sand?
by octoberfranklin | 2025-12-31 06:00:32+00:00
> However, proving the negative, i.e. the code is not copyrighted is almost impossible.

Nonsense, it's trivially easy if you wrote the code yourself. You hold the copyright.

If you had some LLM puke out the code for you, well, then you have no idea. So you can't contribute that puke.
by 9rx | 2025-12-31 06:03:42+00:00
It is quite possible the tools will never improve beyond where they sit today, sure, but then usage will naturally drift away from that fatiguing use (not all use, obviously). The constant compile/wait cycle is exhausting exactly because it is not productive.

Businesses are currently willing to accept that lack of productivity as an investment into figuring out how to tame the tools. There is a lot of hope that all the problems can be solved if we keep trying to solve them. And, in fairness, we have gotten a lot closer than we were just a year or so ago towards that end, so the optimism currently remains strong. However, that cannot go on forever. At some point the investment has to prove itself, else the plug will be pulled.

And yes, it may ultimately be a dead end. Absolutely. It wouldn't be the first failure in software development.
by jksmith | 2025-12-31 06:03:55+00:00
Did you read the paper? There exists a technology that has purely enforceable property rights. What is that actually worth? I don't know.

Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean everything to humans. They literally determine whether not one is a slave (I am my own property). So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-31 06:04:02+00:00
Is that constraint fundamental to what they are? Or are they just reflecting the behavior of markets when there's low hanging fruit around?

When you look at models that were built for a specific purpose, closely intertwined with experts who care about that purpose, they absolutely propel communities to new heights. Consider the impact of alphafold, it won a Nobel prize, proteomics is forever changed.

The issue is that that's not currently the business model that's aimed at most of us. We have to have a race to the bottom first. We can have nice things later, if we're lucky, once a certain sort of investor goes broke and a different sort takes the helm. It's stupid, but its a stupidity that predates AI by a long shot.
by edgineer | 2025-12-31 06:04:51+00:00
Boston's reaction to the mooninite signs, especially in comparison to how all the other cities reacted to them, was ridiculous, and rightfully ridiculed.

The alarm clock wasn't an arduino project, the student took an alarm clock apart and put the insides into case, specifically so that it would look like a bomb, then brought it to school, and rather than receive detention and that be the end of it, the news went wild with it as a discrimination case.

These were cases of overreaction in the moment.

Maybe that's the real lesson here; these rules for the inaugural block party are not to secure the block from electronic interference, but as part of a system to manage the reactions of panicky, irrational people.
by shdwapp | 2025-12-31 06:06:24+00:00
For years, Solana optimized for speed while execution stayed fully exposed. That era is ending.

SHDW introduces private, shielded, quantum-safe execution—where strategies aren’t public infrastructure and settlement remains verifiable.
With SHDWSWAP entering beta soon, Solana is about to experience execution the way serious markets were always meant to operate.
by jader201 | 2025-12-31 06:07:09+00:00
IANAD, but that sounds like clinical mysophobia (germaphobia).

No judgement — I’m sure COVID has done this to many people. But if it’s causing you anxiety or other stress, it may be worth considering talking to someone.

I think, generally, the real risks are overblown. E.g. many people can be anxious about the bacteria on our phones. And they do contain a lot, but most of them are harmless.

As long as you wash your hands when you get home from being in public, and don’t touch your face while in public, and clean your phone if you’ve been in a high risk public area, you’re likely knocking out most real risks.

Again, I’m not an expert. But I’ve done some digging on it, and this is my take, FWIW.
by arjie | 2025-12-31 06:07:22+00:00
I'm not going to pretend datacenters are magical places immune to damage. I worked at a company where the 630 Third Street datacenter couldn't keep temperatures stable during a San Francisco heatwave and the Okex crypto exchange has experienced downtime because the Alibaba Zone C datacenter their matching engine is on experienced A/C failure. So it's not all magic, but if you didn't encounter home-lab failure it's because you did not sample the population appropriately.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/wvqxs7/my_homelab_...

I don't have a bone to pick here. If F-Droid wants to free-ball it I think that's fine. You can usually run things for max cheap by just sticking them on a residential Google Fiber line in one of the cheap power states and then just making sure your software can quickly be deployed elsewhere in times of outage. It's not a huge deal unless you need always-on.

But the arguments being made here are not correct.
by Raviteja_ | 2025-12-31 06:07:28+00:00
Great catch! Emails with spaces around @ (like "test @ example.com") slip through. This is a classic obfuscation bypass.

The current pattern intentionally matches RFC 5321 compliant emails (no spaces). Adding support for spaced variants creates a trade off. wewould catch more bypass attempts but also increase false positives on text like "send @ 5pm".
I'll add this to the roadmap.
Appreciate the feedback ! this is exactly the kind of edge case I need to hear about to make my api more better
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-31 06:07:39+00:00
There is a genetic aspect I'm sure. But I think most people don't avoid consequences of, say, drinking lots of soda while not brushing teeth. I bet there are nutritional factors too. If you are chronically malnourished, your teeth may be worse somehow.

I think regularly brushing your teeth and getting cleanings makes a big difference obviously. Gum disease or gingivitis mainly happens to people who have long-term dental care issues or certain bad habits.
by greatgib | 2025-12-31 06:08:48+00:00
Libsodium’s goal was to expose APIs to perform operations, not low-level functions. Users shouldn’t even have to know or care about what algorithms are used internally. This is how I’ve always viewed libsodium.
...
Over the years, people started using these low-level functions directly. Libsodium started to be used as a toolkit of algorithms and low-level primitives.

That is interesting to see the common fallacy of what we think users want versus what they really want.

The important point is to be able to recognize that and not coerce users into using your project only how you envisioned it and only like that. Some projects are failure on that count having switched on dictatorial direction on that aspect.
by hiyer | 2025-12-31 06:08:57+00:00
In my experience, this kind of productivity can only be seen in small startups or, if in a large company, on an entirely new product line when processes like test coverage, reviews, etc are lax. In large firms and existing code-bases, it can take weeks to even get the approach decided. Even once decided, any pull request larger than a few dozen lines will get shot down.
Things are even worse if you're working across time zones because the to-and-fro on pull requests takes several days to be completed.
by itissid | 2025-12-31 06:10:51+00:00
One (narrow) circumstance to make the process of reviewing a large contribution — with significant aid from LLM — easier to review is to jump on a call with the reviewer, explain what the change is, and answer their questions on why is it necessary and what it brings to the table. This first pass is useful for a few reasons:

1. It shifts the cognitive load from the reviewer to the author because now the author has to do an elevator pitch and this can work sort of like a "rubber duck" where one would likely have to think about these questions up front.

2. In my experience this is a much faster to do this than a lonesome review with no live input from the author on the many choices they made.

First pass and have a reviewer give a go/no-go with optional comments on design/code quality etc.
by adityaathalye | 2025-12-31 06:11:21+00:00
Just yesterday, I was wondering what if we actually made "The Internet" box from the IT Crowd. We more or less can! And, today I found Kiwix in the comments of yet another rad project (Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308 ).

Peak HN serendipity :)
by danavar | 2025-12-31 06:11:26+00:00
So much of my professional SWE jobs isn't even programming - I feel like this is a detail missed by so many. Generally people just stereotype SWE as a programmer, but being an engineer (in any discipline) is so much more than that. You solve problems. AI will speed up the programming work-streams, but there is so much more to our jobs than that.
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-31 06:11:54+00:00
Same, I used to use Office 2003 because it was so quick and the UI was exactly what you needed.

On later versions they had animated cursor positions which felt slow, the spellcheck squiglies were lethargic and menus convoluted.

That said, I've given up and mostly use Google Docs/Sheets now because of the features and cross platform support.
by willtemperley | 2025-12-31 06:14:21+00:00
Did you read my comment? I was specifically talking about publishing LLM generated code:

> I am responsible for ensuring copyright has not been violated with LLM generated code I publish

Your comment:

> If you had some LLM puke out the code for you, well, then you have no idea. So you can't contribute that puke.

That's not true. You can if it's not violating copyright. That "puke" as you put it comes in many flavours.
by arjie | 2025-12-31 06:15:37+00:00
Enjoyable read. I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs when I was younger because I'm set in my Linux ways now and simply cannot find it in myself to try them. The ZFS plus jails support seems to have been the low friction way that he managed things here.

I use podman, but I haven't ever tried ZFS on Linux, instead just relying on an LVM of the drives. I will remedy at least that last error soon since I want to set up a personal archiver and you can't realistically do timelines without the deduplication that ZFS gives.
by dwoldrich | 2025-12-31 06:17:57+00:00
I wrote a C++ implementation of the Framework for Integrated Test (FIT) called CeeFIT, and I was really proud of the way it registered fixtures at compile time.

Anyhow, I was surprised that more than one user was using CeeFIT as a sort of batch runner for C++ code, feeding in rows tabular data and executing it against their code. There were a couple bugs I had to fix to support their use cases.

I was just happy to have users.
by jeswin | 2025-12-31 06:18:03+00:00
> that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results...

The amount of data on the web crossed the threshold of organic discoverability some time before the AI boom started. AI makes it go from really bad to really, really bad (99% to 99.99%). As far as I am concerned it doesn't change anything.

The same mechanisms to find good content would work today as well - following humans and networks.
by paprikanotfound | 2025-12-31 06:18:09+00:00
I really hope tinygrad succeeds with their mission of commoditizing the petaflop. We're nearing a future where you own nothing and rent everything, and they are one of few companies pushing back. This combined with the focus on making models efficient through better architecture/training, not just throwing more compute at it, seems like the right direction imo.
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-31 06:20:16+00:00
+1

A 1:1 recreation of the Windows XP or Windows 7 user experience with the classic theme would be killer.

I say this with love, I have used KDE extensively and I still find it more janky than Windows XP. Gnome is "better" (especially since v40) in that it's consistent and has a few nicer utilities, but it also has worse UX (at least for power users) than Windows XP.
by onion2k | 2025-12-31 06:22:00+00:00
So you trust Google with the data in your google drive, but you don't trust Google (Opal Team) with the data in your drive?

Yes.

More specifically, I trust Google not to use my files to train its AI if I haven't given permission, but I don't trust Google not to use Opal as a way to get me to give them permission without realising.
by agentifysh | 2025-12-31 06:22:19+00:00
I think Google is going to do with consumer AI as they have done with search engine. Full monopolization. They own the lumberyard and the forest.

They'll just see whats popular and then clone, launch and instantly own verticals.

It's over for the little SaaS guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA
by iconidentify | 2025-12-31 06:23:06+00:00
Hey all — thanks for checking out Dialtone. I plan to open-source the server code eventually; for now I’m just having fun with it and continuing to iterate.

I’m a firm believer that a reverse-engineered system like this — especially something so historically “90s internet” — ultimately needs to exist in an open-source way.

To show I’m serious about the reverse-engineering work (and not just the nostalgia), here are two critical tools I’ve built for understanding AOL and its protocols:

• WireTap: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap
A packet-level tracing tool for capturing and analyzing the conversations between an AOL client and server.

• AtomForge: https://github.com/iconidentify/atomforge
A full-blown FDO → ATOMSTREAM compiler. FDO is the bespoke scripting language AOL used to define “forms.” Before forms are transmitted over the wire (wrapped in a “P3” frame), they’re serialized down into bytes — AtomForge handles that whole pipeline.
by childintime | 2025-12-31 06:24:27+00:00
And don't discount the negative sentiment around bitcoin as the nest of types that deserve to be completely wrecked financially, because they add no value to society, as in a Ponzi scheme. It seems inevitable to me this scheme is going to end some day and nobody is going to give a damn. It'll be the "Good Riddance Coin", filled with negative sentiment.
by bsimpson | 2025-12-31 06:25:20+00:00
I lurk in a bunch of Discords for things I'm not active in, but don't want to have to find an invite to if I need to ask a question in the future.

I always have a notification badge on Discord, and I hate it. Too many servers have channels where I get pinged, even though the channel is muting. I'm presuming someone is doing something like "hey @all, play with me"

I ought to be able to register that I will never ever care about this channel. Please ignore it for me.
by mellosouls | 2025-12-31 06:25:35+00:00
From the instructions for potential contributors:

No code golf! While low line count is a guiding light of this project, anything that remotely looks like code golf will be closed. The true goal is reducing complexity and increasing readability, and deleting \ns does nothing to help with that.

https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad?tab=readme-ov-file#cont...
by ipdashc | 2025-12-31 06:25:45+00:00
Thanks for the link - this is a cool video. Though it seems like it's mostly focusing on the performance/"bloat" side of things. I do agree that's an annoying aspect of Electron, and I do think his justifications for it are totally fair, but I was more so thinking about ease of use, especially for nontechnical people / beginners.

My memory of it is very fuzzy, but I recall VB being literally drag-and-drop, and yet still being able to make... well, acceptable UIs. I was able to figure it out just fine in middle school.

In comparison, here's Electron's getting started page: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/ The "quick start" is two different languages across three different files. The amount of technologies and buzzwords flying around is crazy, HTML, JS, CSS, Electron, Node, DOM, Chromium, random `charset` and `http-equiv` boilerplate... I have to imagine it'd be rather demoralizing as a beginner. I think there's a large group of "nontechnical" users out there (usually derided by us tech bros as "Excel programmers" or such) that can perfectly understand the actual logic of programming, but are put off by the amount of buzzwords and moving parts involved, and I don't blame them at all.

(And sure, don't want to go in too hard on the nostalgia. 2000s software was full of buzzwords and insane syntax too, we've improved a lot. But it had some upsides.)

It just feels like we lost the plot at some point when we're all using GUI-based computers, but there's no simple, singular, default path to making a desktop GUI app anymore on... any, I think, of the popular desktop OSes?
by solid_fuel | 2025-12-31 06:25:48+00:00
I've actually done a fair bit of ML work in Elixir, in practice I found:

1) It's generally harder to interface with existing libraries and models (example: whisperX [0] is a library that combines generic whisper speech recognition models with some additional tools like discrete-time-warping to create a transcription with more accurate time stamp alignment - something that was very helpful when generating subtitles. But because most of this logic just lives in the python library, using this in Elixir requires writing a lot more tooling around the existing bumblebee whisper implementation [1]).

but,

2) It's way easier to ship models I built and trained entirely with Elixir's ML ecosystem - EXLA, NX, Bumblebee. I trained a few models doing basic visual recognition tasks (detecting scene transitions, credits, title cards, etc), using the existing CLIP model as a visual frontend and then training a small classifier on the output of CLIP. It was pretty straightforward to do with Elixir, and I love that I can run the same exact code on my laptop and server without dealing with lots of dependencies and environment issues.

Livebook is also incredibly nice, my typical workflow has become prototyping things in Livebook with some custom visualization tools that I made and then just connecting to a livebook instance running on EC2 to do the actual training run. From there shipping and using the model is seamless, and I just publish the wrapping module as a library on our corporate github, which lets anyone else import it straight into livebook and use it.

[0] https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

[1] https://hexdocs.pm/bumblebee/Bumblebee.Audio.Whisper.html
by eamongordon | 2025-12-31 06:26:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this novelty for New Years Day - it does what it says (using local sys time, of course). I'm a CS student (Harvard '29) and usually work on web analytics, but I wanted to make something simple and fun to close out the year.

Source code: https://github.com/eamongordon/isit2026yet

Happy New Year!
by happymellon | 2025-12-31 06:30:29+00:00
The issue here is that this never changed for Linux.

> If I want an application to see other windows, that should be MY decision. If I want to run automation scripts, thats MY choice. If I want to accept a theoretical security risk in exchange for functionality I actually need, that should be up to ME.

They still can do all of those things if they wanted to. Unlike MacOS or Windows they can write and run whatever they want. The entire rant is just self entitled demands on on-source developers demanding that other people have to make the features they want.

Linux owes you nothing.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-31 06:30:36+00:00
> The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.

Oh boy I had thought about this too. There are only quite a few uses of the completely cheap one. Perhaps for the chinese people, it acts as a VPN

Like I thought about the use cases and they were hard for me to find when you consider all the "free" stuff that's launched too. I think to me, some aspects of lowend are for the novelty factor (oh a 2$ 1TB server sign me up!) and what ends up happening is that I didn't really use the storage much so my opinion was nice whereas someone else who used it said that, it's a bad deal

You are right about this though, but still its just fascinating to find the deals and then like the fact is, they are still pretty small and you can just go talk to them and I think this customization and more discussion (hey does your product allow my usecase) etc. are some few reason

I once asked on the forum why they aren't using hetzner,upcloud etc. and someone replied with the fact that they want to make the small one win.

I don't think its completely gambling but you may end up buying something that you don't need much (I ended up with a netcup 8 gig server I guess) in a similar way. But now I kind of know that beating hetzner,ovh, (upcloud's more expensive) is possible perhaps but that if you want ton of servers fast and cheap, there is a possibility but I might still recommend companies like hetzner,ovh,upcloud etc. for any professional use, its just I would be thrown less under the bus as compared to if I have somebody idk set up in dedirock

One of the reasons why I stopped frequenting lowendtalk, might go next black friday perhaps but I don't even know, like there are tons of services now which can offer vm's cheap and fast and just similar to what you might buy from that. There are tons of these I use so I don't really know if buying cheap servers might make sense

One of the reasons I (liked?) the idea of buying cheap servers is that one can always scale when needed and they could then use something like these lowendproviders instead of vercel who initially might be free but then is super expensive. But I think that we are seeing some options which are free but not gonna be super expensive or that expensive perhaps.

The thing is, to me, its nice knowing a place like lowendtalk exists. I might go into its rabbit hole again or not I guess but I don't really know.