MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is 13" MacBook good enough without an external monitor?
by ShahinSorkh | 2025-12-10 13:30:29+00:00
I want to buy a 13" MacBook Air, but I'm not sure if I can have a comfortable development setup on its small screen without an external bigger display. I don't need to have multiple applications side by side I open everything maximized. It would be nice to be able to play some games (e.g Factorio, DF, LoL) as well.

I'm targeting 13" mostly because of its mobility as I'm planning to work on the go. As a side note: I never owned a MacBook. I appreciate any notes or tricks.

Any thoughts or advice?
by macintux | 2025-12-10 13:30:49+00:00
It seems like a statement from The Sweetshop, who made the ad, has also been pulled.

This piece links to a Futurism article[0], which in turn links to "an incredibly defensive statement"[1] from the ad agency.

> “For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote.

(Sounds more like sweatshop than sweetshop, but I digress.)

However, that "defensive statement" link is broken, and I see no sign of it on the linked site, but I did find this older lamentation[2] from The Sweetshop regarding AI, or more specifically regarding the attitude that AI should allow you to cut costs and fire people.

> Being asked to cut 20–30% of creative costs and labour under the banner of ‘AI’ is unimaginative at best, and corrosive at worst. It drains the value of human creativity and concentrates it in fewer and fewer hands, hollowing out the very industry it claims to improve.

[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-ge...

[1] https://lbbonline.com/news/melanie-bridge-sweetshop-the-gard... (missing page, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy)

[2] https://lbbonline.com/news/Damn-The-Race-to-the-Bottom-AI-Sh...
by andsoitis | 2025-12-10 13:30:53+00:00
You wrote:

> A few things that's happened to me as a citizen after invoking right to remain silent to CBP

What happened that caused you to “invoke your right to remain silent”? When you enter a country, including the US, you are asked some pretty standard questions that would be weird to refuse to answer.

What question did you not want to answer?
by stack_framer | 2025-12-10 13:31:00+00:00
I find this statement fascinating:

> All I know is that this is how I feel

It's written as if the person's feelings are an external force, descending upon them beyond their control. The feelings that emerge in their life are the feelings they have no choice but to feel.

I think it's the exact opposite: Nothing, not a single person or circumstance, no matter how they act (or don't act) upon me, can make me feel a certain way.

I choose how I feel. It's not always easy, but it's always true. I think the OP knows this subconsciously, as evidenced by the doubt in their very next sentence:

> I'm pretty sure there's no alternative

There are myriad alternatives, waiting to be chosen.
by the_pwner224 | 2025-12-10 13:31:26+00:00
Yeah, the Reddit front page (not logged in) is always 50% full of politics and raging about how much this admin sucks. Yet in real life for 99% of people it's business as usual, no observable change, you'd have no idea anything was going on.

I wonder if the raging about it online has a cooling effect that makes people less likely to take irl action. Even if you do enter the left media bubble, you can't help but think that they've accomplished absolutely nothing. The "protests" (more like "100 people had a picnic in front of the capital") were pretty pathetic.
by plakhlani2 | 2025-12-10 13:32:02+00:00
We are IT Service company with so many developers in-house. For the skill gap, we have vetted the most efficient partner companies in local area making us the most efficient to handle any tech stack.

We have scope of work in the quote. If client wants to change anything, depending on status of the task and the impact of change, we charge additional amount and record a scope of work change or additions.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-10 13:32:19+00:00
Now you know!

Yeah, it definitely seems to carry a strong ideology with it, an ideology which is not present in other countries. Germany has pretty unique attitudes towards privacy.

It actually sounds pretty humorous to me. Like if there was a country that called Toblerone a sugar-scarecrow, or BMW a pedestrian-serial-killer, and everyone thought that was normal? It kind of makes it hard to take quite seriously!
by sceptic123 | 2025-12-10 13:32:20+00:00
I think that's a very loose interpretation of Availability in the CIA triad.

This looks a lot like using the MITM hammer to crack every nut.

If this is an actual concern, why not deny personal devices access to the network? Why not restrict the applications that can run on company devices? Or provide a separate connection for personal devices/browsing/streaming?

Why not treat them like people and actually talk to them about the potential impacts. Give people personal responsibility for what they do at work.
by mutkach | 2025-12-10 13:32:21+00:00
What do you mean exactly by "error-tolerance"? Is it like, each node is wrapped into a result type, that you have to match against each time you visit it, even though you know for a fact, that it is not empty or something like that?

I suppose that one of the pros of using tree-sitter is its portability? For example, I could define my grammar to both parse my code and to do proper syntax highlighting in the browser with the same library and same grammar? Is that correct? Also it is used in neovim extensively to define syntax for a languages? Otherwise it would have taken to slightly modify the grammar.
by mothballed | 2025-12-10 13:32:24+00:00
I answered the questions on what I had to declare and anything regarding my identity and citizenship, along with presenting my passport. I also will answer the question to which countries I've been to, although I know of no requirement to do so. I will answer the question about whether I have currency and instruments exceeding $10,000. Other than that I will not answer, nor am I aware of any requirement to do so.

This caused me to be fucked with mercilessly for about 10 years. Eventually I was investigated by an HSI officer who seems to have determined I'm just a crazy libertarian or something, now I tend not to get held up terribly long.

Edit: I have tried to answer below questions but it appears I cannot post any more messages until a certain times elapses. Below commenter has repeatedly shifted his attack, it is clear only goal is to shift and attack my message through a series of moving questions that keep moving the goalposts. 'This' did not happen 10 years ago, some of the events happened 10 years ago, some of them significantly more recent, and I have pretty much fully defined what sort of questions were answered. But of course it's pointless to even reply such commenters as I know from experience they are only going to dig endlessly until a magic 'gotcha' is found as to why I deserve it.
by setopt | 2025-12-10 13:33:11+00:00
My organization also explicitly blocks access from other clients than Microsoft Outlook, even if the credentials are correct and the protocol is supported. They also refused providing an exception, citing that I can just use the web interface via Microsoft Edge on Linux. (Which I prefer not to do for many reasons, e.g. backing up my emails locally, working offline, and authoring using native tools.)

Currently, only Thunderbird with the proprietary "OWL" extension somehow manages to connect despite the block. My understanding is that they somehow abuse the web interface to do so, instead of actually going through the proper protocols, but not sure.

If someone has another way to access Exchange servers that intentionally blocks non-Outlook clients I’d love to hear about it.
by chirsz | 2025-12-10 13:33:21+00:00
I've recently been doing something similar: I have a UbiSurfer 9, a netbook using an S3C2416 chip as its CPU, running the ARMv5 instruction set, and with 128MB of DDR2 memory. Its original operating system is WinCE 6.0, and I'm trying to run Linux on it. The good news is that Debian still maintains the armel architecture, so we potentially have a large number of userspace programs available. The bad news is there's no suitable kernel and bootloader. Fortunately, a friend helped me write a bootloader and modified the kernel source code to make it work. Running a Debian system is possible, but quite slow, so I created a minimal system with only Busybox[1], and it works perfectly.

[1]: https://github.com/chirsz-ever/busybox-linux

I'm still exploring this; related information is in this repository, written in Chinese:

https://github.com/chirsz-ever/ubisurfer9
by latexr | 2025-12-10 13:33:30+00:00
It’s as much of a pattern as throwing a D6 30 times and getting “1” 5 times. It’s not meaningful, there’s no provable intentionality behind it.

The ones that are funny aren’t even particularly so. Many of them are actually plausible HN submissions which we’re only interpreting as funny because we know they’re not real.
by losvedir | 2025-12-10 13:33:35+00:00
And what did you do with them? Throw them away? I bought and used an iPhone 11 for a year last year, and it came with a perfectly functional, replaced battery.

People on HN have such a blind spot around old, used phones which thrive in secondary marketplaces. You'd think iPhones are filling dumpsters with the rhetoric here but they actually hold their value remarkably well, which means they have a much longer useful life. A replaceable battery is different from a user-replaceable battery. The former is a sustainability concern, the latter is just a feature.
by archargelod | 2025-12-10 13:34:00+00:00
One problem of Rust vs C, I rarely see mentioned is that Rust code is hard to work with from other languages. If someone writes a popular C library, you can relatively easily use it in your Java, D, Nim, Rust, Go, Python, Julia, C#, Ruby, ... program.

If someone writes a popular Rust library, it's only going to be useful to Rust projects.

With Rust I don’t even know if it’s possible to make borrow checking work across a language boundary. And Rust doesn't have a stable ABI, so even if you make a DLL, it’ll only work if compiled with the exact same compiler version. *sigh*
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-10 13:34:12+00:00
I was the under capitalized landlord with $500K worth of mortgages between my house and two rental properties in 2008 before the financial crisis and making only $70K a year. As were most real estate investors back then.

And the reason I ended up back in an apartment for four years from 2012-2016.

And during those years I was fortunately in my mid to late 30s and could afford to stay in nice apartments in an upper income suburb of metro Atlanta.
by Xylakant | 2025-12-10 13:34:19+00:00
How is the one comment from a GH account with 18 followers, no contribution to the Rust project (or any Rust based project at all) and mostly contributions to javascript projects in any way representative of the Rust community? Especially taken out of context - in context it seem like a failed(?) attempt at humor or sarcasm.

Do I treat your post from an obvious throwaway account created 13 minutes ago as somehow representative of the C community or the Linux kernel community or for that matter as representative of any community at all?

Come on, please. There's a ton of things that I consider worth of critisicm in the Rust community, but make a better case.
by clbrmbr | 2025-12-10 13:34:36+00:00
Great post. Love the writing style that is at once both casual and erudite.

I must take issue with the central point however: the machines of LLMs are very different than the machines of CPUs. While it is true that Claude writes fewer memory errors than even expert C programmers (I’ve had to fully accept this only this week), the LLM is still subject to mistakes that the compiler will catch. And I dare say the category of error coding agents commit are eerily similar to those of human developers.
by gpjt | 2025-12-10 13:34:52+00:00
OP here -- with a 112M model you should be able to get something worth playing with using 2.24B tokens. The Chinchilla heuristic is tokens = 20 x parameters. Obviously you cam get a better result by grinding through more tokens, but it will be very slow progress. It's worth noting that Andrej Karpathy is using the 20x thing for his nanochat project.

I try to explain the Chinchilla paper in the post, but your favourite AI should be able to explain it well, and has the benefit that you can ask follow-up questions.
by croes | 2025-12-10 13:35:44+00:00
For foreign people who might apply for visa the perception matters.

Did the Obama administration also had masked troops hunt down people on the street or arrested them in front of children like the current does?

So male indirect death threats to politicians for stating facts isn’t clamping down on free speech

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/20/trump-death-threats-democra...

So this is free speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprisals_against_commentators...

but similar things in Europe is clamping down on free speech?
by coldfoundry | 2025-12-10 13:36:04+00:00
I deal with the exact same mental model. I think for me, while actively gaming I do have fun. It’s only after the fact I look back on the time wasted gaming and think “wow, I really should have worked on that project I want to build instead of playing a game”. It’s also hard to rationalize time spent gaming when you have nothing to show for it afterwards.

If you ever figure out the solution to this negative thought-loop, let me know please!
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-10 13:36:51+00:00
> to catch the lowest common denominator of terrorist or foreign subversive

My guess from the outside, is that none of these actions are actually meant to "capture" or even "detect" any of those things, the methods are likely to inefficient and small to be able to do so.

What they're trying to do, is make those people not even consider going to the US in the first place, because they're scared of getting caught. Same as a lot of the ICE actions and other things going on. They're not meant to be efficiently solving some concrete issue with their action, they're meant to scare the rest of the populace into being docile and accepting more and more control over time.
by frereubu | 2025-12-10 13:37:07+00:00
"now that we ourselves have become a resource to extract"

I take your general point, but I'm interested in what you mean by "we" here - the general population or HN readers? People have been a resource to extract from since the beginning of farming, and particularly so since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is perhaps that the attention of rich, western people is being exploited now and is causing this particular concern. Read any first-person accounts of the industrial revolution and the idea that this is anything new falls apart.
by Redster | 2025-12-10 13:37:16+00:00
I've heard better things about How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North (who has some other interesting titles, too).

Also, if this is your jam, the YouTube channel [How to Make Everything](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g) is fun because the guy is actually trying to speedrun the human tech tree. He has some cheats that make it work, like once he "invents" something, he will allow himself/his team to buy cheaper/higher quality/modern versions of it, but I think that adds to the fun.
by perihelions | 2025-12-10 13:37:47+00:00
There's no right to entry at US borders; you can be arbitrarily refused (or much worse) for any subjective suspicion.

(And you are misled by assumptions of privilege, any readers who think this could never happen to you. Your social non-conformity (rejection of social media) is quirky and geeky and completely harmless; and surely the nice government man will understand this).
by crazygringo | 2025-12-10 13:38:14+00:00
That... doesn't bother me more than any other commercial.

Commercials are mostly dumb. This is another pretty dumb one. It has clunky AI just like plenty of other commercials have clunky traditional VFX.

Can't really see myself getting worked up about it?

If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
by daveoc64 | 2025-12-10 13:38:59+00:00
>Besides, why would you want to come if you don’t like it here?

There's a difference between saying that you disagree with the way that a country is being run, and wanting to be violent or pursue criminal activity against that country or its people.

What you're missing is that the former should be legal in any democracy (and is in the UK), and the latter shouldn't be legal anywhere (and isn't in the UK).

You're claiming the UK lacks "freedom of speech" because it doesn't allow people to incite violence online, while saying the USA has free speech, despite it seemingly rejecting visitors for legal political speech.

I know which side of the pond I'd rather be on.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-10 13:39:04+00:00
It's the same as when they say "the free market".

The free market is the one with the winners they've chosen. And the winner is Israel and the losers are all the other minorities.

I'm not antisemitic, I'm anti-killing-in-general; I'm anti-collateral-damage; I'm anti-kidnapping-of-anyone-especially-children. I could go on.

There's a lot of bad on both sides. Only acknowledging the bad on one side is a denial of reality, and denying reality is never a sustainable position.
by im3w1l | 2025-12-10 13:39:14+00:00
Well consider this: Two projects with the same amount of actual security issues. one project is willing to say "this bug doesn't affect security" and is willing to take accountability for that statement. Another project is not willing to do so. As a result the former has a lower count and the other a higher count. Which is better for a user valuing security?

As the actual number of issues is the same you might say it doesn't matter, but I don't agree. As a user it is easier to deal with "here are the n issues", than "here are m things any n of which are real".
by TheCraiggers | 2025-12-10 13:39:22+00:00
> And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.

I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.

The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.

I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.
by actionfromafar | 2025-12-10 13:40:15+00:00
The IQ difference is so small, and what the tests capture (there may be kinds of intelligence not so easily captured, a similar problem to KPI selection in general to model reality) and confounding factors such as boys historically culturally more encouraged to study, internal bias from expectations (giving up on a test because you think you are stupid), etc, the minor male advantage isn't very convincing to me.
by ETH_start | 2025-12-10 13:41:14+00:00
Isn't it more dangerous that people live their life out without ever trying anything, because they are beset by fear and doubt, and never had anyone give them an encouraging word?

Let's say the AI gives them faulty advice, that makes them over-confident, and try something and fail. Usually that just means a relatively benign mistake — since AIs generally avoid advising anything genuinely risky — and after they have recovered, they will have the benefit of more real world experience, which raises their odds of eventually trying something again and this time succeeding.

Sometimes trying something, anything, is better than nothing. Action — regardless of the outcome — is its own discovery process.

And much of what you learn when you act out in the world is generally applicable, not just domain-specific knowledge.
by bmicraft | 2025-12-10 13:41:16+00:00
Well, GCC 15 already ended support for the nios2 soft-core. The successor to it is Nios V which runs RISC-V. If users want us update the kernel, they'll also need to update their FPGA.

Microblaze also is a soft-core, based on RISC-V, presumably it could support actual RISC-V if anyone cared.

All others haven't received new hardware within the last 10 years, everybody using these will already be running an LTS kernel on there.

It looks like there really are no reasons not to require rust for new versions of the kernel from now on then!
by gpjt | 2025-12-10 13:41:22+00:00
Exactly! If I can get it down to an hour or two (seems very plausible on an 8x H200 with 160 GiB VRAM per GPU, though those are almost never available on Lambda Labs), I'll do the experiments with dropout and the other possible causes of issues, then see if I can bake that all into a new train on the RTX 3090 and confirm it repros there. Looks like I'll definitely need gradient accumulation there.

I assume the zero_grad would need to go in the same if block?
by wongarsu | 2025-12-10 13:42:26+00:00
I don't think we will ever reach the same accuracy simply because some languages are harder than others. Writing correct C (not just "working C") is difficult because of the number of footguns and the amount of reasoning and implicit state tracking you have to do in your head. LLMs are not free from this, if anything that's harder for them. Meanwhile languages like Java are more difficult just because they are verbose and spread information over many files. Languages that are explicit, not overly verbose and make it difficult to make subtle mistakes will always have the advantage with LLMs

I more bullish on the Python -> Rust pipeline. The two languages have a lot of overlap in philosophies, have great interop, and have similar levels of guard rails (when it comes to multithreading Rust even beats Python in terms of safety). And both languages seem well suited to being vibecoded
by mutkach | 2025-12-10 13:42:28+00:00
What would you suggest as a reference problem (a benchmark of sorts) to try to play with formal methods for someone with just a bit of formal verification background but not in the field of software verification? Can you suggest some helpful materials?

I've come across TLA+ multiple times, but it seems it was more targeted towards distributed systems (Lamport being the creator, that makes sense). Is it correct, that it would be useless in other domains?
by finaard | 2025-12-10 13:42:59+00:00
gnus had some massive IMAP performance improvements a few years (probably close to a decade now) ago. Before that it was quite painful to use it on large mailboxes without a local imap - I used to sync that with offlineimap. When they had a massive issue moving from python2 to python3, and keeping that running on a modern distro started getting painful I tried it without local imap - and realised those improvements made things fast enough that you can run it on remote mailboxes, and even do so in your main emacs instance.