MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phkahler | 2025-12-01 14:36:45+00:00
>> The zero register helps RISC-V (and MIPS before it) really cut down on the number of instructions, and hardware complexity.

Which if funny because IMHO RISC-V instruction encoding is garbage. It was all optimized around the idea of fixed length 32-bit instructions. This leads to weird sized immediates (12 bits?) and 2 instructions to load a 32 bit constant. No support for 64 bit immediates. Then they decided to have "compressed" instructions that are 16 bits, so it's somewhat variable length anyway.

IMHO once all the vector, AI and graphics instructions are nailed down they should make RISC-VI where it's almost the same but re-encoding the instructions. Have sensible 16-bit ones, 32-bit, and use immediate constants after the opcodes. It seems like there is a lot they could do to clean it up - obviously not as much as x86 ;-)
by lesuorac | 2025-12-01 14:36:47+00:00
> Popping bubbles can be contained and not blow up the entire system if we have proper regulations, for instance.

Perhaps we have a different definition of recessions but to me you cannot pop a bubble without a recession. How does the bubble deflate without a decrease in nominal GDP? The recession doesn't need have effects lingering for years/decades but one needs to occur.

> Both parties want to avoid recession

I mean in name only. Republicans pretty consistently just cut taxes while shifting government spending from poor to wealthy which really just causes a recession since the marginal propensity to spend of the wealthy is lower (hence ballooning SNP500 while weaker retail spending; wealthy's savings goes into SNP500 while non-wealthy cut back on consumption).

> its just that one of them believes in established economic theories and is successful

Which economic theory do the Democrats believe in? Any real theory has upsides and downsides and I just never either of the two major parties acknowledge or implement the downside (which is always required for the upside).

Large social nets are about redistributing wealth so everybody is (within a _very_ large range) equal but Democrats don't actually do this; they just give money to the bottom individuals without taking from the top which just means the future poor generations have less as they have to repay with interest to the original wealthy generations (and inheritors).
by Polizeiposaune | 2025-12-01 14:36:52+00:00
Ever heard of a loop that needed to keep more than 7 variables live? Register renaming helps with pipelining and out-of-order execution, but instructions in the program can only reference the architectural registers - go beyond that and you end up needing to spill some values to (architectural) memory.

There's a reason why AMD added r8-r15 to the architecture, and why intel is adding r16-r31..
by zparky | 2025-12-01 14:37:21+00:00
Benchmarks are super impressive, as usual. Interesting to note in table 3 of the paper (p. 15), DS-Speciale is 1st or 2nd in accuracy in all tests, but has much higher token output (50% more, or 3.5x vs gemini 3 in the codeforces test!).
by bluGill | 2025-12-01 14:37:23+00:00
Rejecting clients when you have enough is a sound business decision. Some clients are too annoying to serve. Some clients don't want to pay. Sometimes you have more work than you can do... It is easy to think when things are bad that you must take any and all clients (and when things are bad enough you might be forced to), but that is not a good plan and to be avoided. You should be choosing your clients. It is very powerful when you can afford to tell someone I don't need your business.
by gruez | 2025-12-01 14:37:38+00:00
>No, it is not normal for 10% of the coountry to power half the spending.

Yet, if you look at your chart, it was 40% in 1989s and have been slowly edging up. While 40% is a smaller number than 50%, you can make the same argument about 40% not being "normal", yet society has been chugging along just fine.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-01 14:38:28+00:00
It's more a lament. It used to be that no matter how crazy GNOME got, all GNOME-specific apps still worked in vague harmony with KDE apps, Motif apps, etc., because the common substrate was X11, and backwards-compatibility was a key concern. Coupled with FDO trying to bring more harmony and standards (XDG), times were good.

But FDO seems to have morphed into the replace-X11-with-Wayland club, or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.

I despair at how unfit Wayland is to replace X11, but the big guns are going to force its adoption anyway. People who wrote X11 applications will be compelled to rewrite all their work too, or their users will have to use them in the locked down X11 emulator that can't do anything more than Wayland lets it do, which will make some X11 applications become fundamentally useless, e.g. xwd will not capture your screen.

As an example of why I think this is bad, I'd highlight we're still seeing intense ideological fights on basic capabilities, today. We're rushing into replacement while even the basics aren't settled. IMO, people like Sebastian Wick don't feel the need to yield an inch to backwards compatibility, and Wayland to them is all about these greenfields that they get to control - by fighting on bug reports, or refusing to implement protocols. This is what we're all about to be dropped into.
by vanderZwan | 2025-12-01 14:38:44+00:00
Hah, we commented on the exact same paragraph within a minute of each other! My memory agrees with your memory, although I think that should be 3E 00. Let me look that up:

https://jnz.dk/z80/ld_r_n.html

https://jnz.dk/z80/xor_r.html

Yep, if I'm reading this right that's 3E 00, since the second byte is the immediate value.

One difference between XOR and LD is that LD A, 0 does not affect flags, which sometimes mattered.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-01 14:39:08+00:00
MIPS for example also has one, along with a similar number of registers (~32). So it's not like RISC-V took a radical new position here, they were able to look back at what worked and what didn't, and decided that for their target a zero register was the right tradeoff. It's certainly the more "elegant" solution. A zero register is useful as input or output register for all kinds of operations, not just for zeroing
by jjav | 2025-12-01 14:39:11+00:00
> Where does all that money go to, though?

Nearly all of it goes to grifters who hang on to the system but don't contribute anything. The obvious ones are all the insurance company employees who don't provide any healthcare, just push paperwork to try to find ways to deny coverage. And all the oberpaid administrators, and of course those multi-million bonuses to all executives involved need to be paid somehow.

If that sounds overly cynical, consider a primary care doctor visit. I get about 15 minutes of the time of a nurse assistant (some searching suggests average wage 50K) and 12 minutes with the doctor (searching suggests average wage of 250K).

So the cost of salaries to the people that actually provided me healthcare that day, is $6 + $24 = $30. Even if we double the salaries of both nurse and doctor, it'd be a $60 visit.

Of course, there's office overhead like rent, utilities, etc.

But I get billed $500 for that visit. SO where is all that money going? Obviously not to the health care professionals.

If we simply removed all the grifters from the system, health care would be quite affordable.
by cesarb | 2025-12-01 14:39:13+00:00
> It's not only xor that does this, but most 32-bit operations zero-extend the result of the 64-bit register. AMD did this for backward compatibility.

It's not just that, zero-extending or sign-extending the result is also better for out-of-order implementations. If parts of the output register are preserved, the instruction needs an extra dependency on the original value.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-01 14:39:16+00:00
I said call your representative about arbitration, not privacy. Because arbitration is everywhere -- not installing an app isn't going to make much difference.

Reps' offices absolutely tally the subjects their constituents call about, and it affects what bills they vote for and propose. Obviously it has to be lots of people calling, but those are made of individuals. There are tons of examples of successful organizing leading to change. But yes it definitely takes organizational effort.
by ghostmanmac | 2025-12-01 14:40:00+00:00
python function to give and compare the inflation adjusted gdp of any country in the world bank gdp dataset. from 1962 - 2022. input your countries, and pic a past date and it will give those countries gdp up until 2022 in that dates currency.(it subtracts inflation every year thereby giving how much the economies grew without inflation).
by jboutwell | 2025-12-01 14:40:09+00:00
Cloud and SaaS have become the default place to store and process sensitive data. They have also become the default place to lose it.

Recent years have seen the same pattern repeat: a single weakness in a cloud platform, data-warehouse service, or widely used SaaS component is exploited once, and data for many organisations and millions of users moves at once. File-transfer vulnerabilities, data-warehouse credential campaigns, and third-party SaaS breaches are no longer outliers; they are examples of a structural problem in how multi-tenant systems are built.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-01 14:40:21+00:00
> If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them?

In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila. LLM's do not either. I really tire of this handwaving 'magic' concepts into LLM's.

Qualia being difficult to define and yet being such an immediate experience that we humans all know intimately and directly is quite literally the problem. Attempted definitions fall short and humans have tried and I mean really tried hard to solve this.

Please see Hard problem of consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-01 14:40:28+00:00
That’s true. I said “top out at”. When I left AWS working in the ProServe (cloud consulting division) in 2023, I was seeing “architect” positions in Atlanta - I didn’t live there any more, but most of my network was still there - topping out at $175k. But for “senior” developers it was even less.

I obviously decided to stay in consulting and work full time for a third party consulting company.
by ajross | 2025-12-01 14:40:55+00:00
> Philosophy is a science

Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point:

> Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't

It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it.

But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results.

"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.

[1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.
by hylaride | 2025-12-01 14:41:01+00:00
Not to get into a flame war, but 99% of my issues with systemd is that they didn't just replace init, but NTP, DHCP, logging (this one is arguably necessary, but they made it complicated, especially if you want to send logs to a centralized remote location or use another utility to view logs), etc. It broke the fundamental historical concept of unix: do one thing very well.

To make things worse, the opinionated nature of systemd's founder (Lennart Poettering) has meant many a sysadmin has had to fight with it in real-world usage (eg systemd-timesyncd's SNTP client not handling drift very well or systemd-networkd not handling real world DHCP fields). His responses "Don't use a computer with a clock that drifts" or "we're not supporting a non-standard field that the majority of DHCP servers use" just don't jive in the real world. The result was going to be ugly. It's not surprising that most distros ended up bundling chrony, etc.
by BeauNer | 2025-12-01 14:41:02+00:00
OpenAI has partnered with NORAD for this year’s NORAD Tracks Santa event, introducing a set of holiday-themed ChatGPT tools. One of them, “Elf Enrollment,” invites parents to upload a child’s photo to generate an “official Santa’s helper” portrait. The feature is marketed as a harmless seasonal novelty, but it immediately raises questions about how children’s facial data is handled, retained, or used. OpenAI has faced repeated scrutiny over training data, image ingestion, and model improvement through user submissions. The idea of a government-linked Christmas program steering families toward uploading minors’ faces into a commercial AI system is triggering a wave of concern.

The other tools in the collaboration avoid biometric data, but Elf Enrollment highlights the broader issue: kids cannot consent, and parents are often unaware of how AI firms store or process uploaded images. Even if OpenAI promises limited use or deletion, the lack of transparent, verifiable guarantees remains a sticking point for many. Users on privacy-focused forums are questioning whether a decades-old holiday tradition should be repackaged into an image-upload funnel, especially at a time when regulators and security researchers are already warning about the long-term risks of building datasets involving children’s biometrics.
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-01 14:41:09+00:00
> The point is that people FEEL they benefit. THAT’S the market for many things.

I don't disagree, but this also doesn't mean that those things are intrinsically good and then we should all pursuit them because that's what the market wants. And that was what I was pushing against, this idea that since 800M people are using GPT then we should all be ok doing AI work because that's what the market is demanding.
by icy | 2025-12-01 14:41:18+00:00
Not really. It's very open for everyone to participate. Further, Bluesky has been working on standardizing AT at the IETF [0][1]. They have also made a patent non-agression pledge: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-01-2025-patent-pledge

In short, they're actively working on making AT as neutral as possible.

[0]: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticate...
by phantasmish | 2025-12-01 14:41:40+00:00
Eh, one's ability to communicate concisely and precisely has long (forever?) been limited by one's audience.

Only a fairly small set of readers or listeners will appreciate and understand the differences in meaning between, say, "strange", "odd", and "weird" (dare we essay "queer" in its traditional sense, for a general audience? No, we dare not)—for the rest they're perfect synonyms. That goes for many other sets of words.

Poor literacy is the norm, adjust to it or be perpetually frustrated.
by input_sh | 2025-12-01 14:41:44+00:00
> BirdyChat and Haiket are the first two messaging apps that will initially be interoperable with WhatsApp.

What the heck are BirdyChat and Haiket? Both of those don't seem to actually exist, they just have a waitlist on their homepage.

Literally the only post on BirdyChat's blog is how they're now WhatsApp-compatible, but their initial Google Play release happened 45 days ago (Oct 16th).

Haiket's website similarly contains only one press release, which is to say that they're accepting waitlists since Nov 11th, but they're somehow funded by the "former CEO of AT&T Communications and board member of Palo Alto Networks and Lockheed Martin".
by thomasjb | 2025-12-01 14:42:05+00:00
C, because it makes every problem into a memory management problem, which is good for you in an 'eat your vegetables' sort of way. It's also the starting point for a lot of other programming languages and related things like HDLs, which is helpful to me.

I'm plodding my way through the 2015 challenge here: https://git.thomasballantine.com/thomasballantine/Advent_of_... , it's really sharpened me up on a number of points.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-01 14:42:13+00:00
I dislike fb a fair bit, but if whatsapp effectively replicated functionality of pidgin, I would seriously consider it despite its otherwise evil behavior. If they made it open source with permissible license, I might even forgive some of fb's past transgressions. They do have the resources to pull it off.
by sentinelowltech | 2025-12-01 14:42:20+00:00
I've been working on this solo for the past several months as my entry to NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge – a $3M competition to solve one of the unsexy but critical problems of long-duration space missions: what do you do with 8 kg of trash per day when you're 384,000 km from the nearest landfill?

*The problem is harder than it sounds:*

The Artemis missions will generate mixed waste streams – food packaging, clothing, hygiene products, and most challenging: Zotek F30 PVDF foam. PVDF releases hydrogen fluoride (HF) gas when heated above 300°C. HF is immediately lethal in enclosed spaces. Most thermal recycling approaches fail here.

*Our solution (ARTEMIS-R):*

1. *AI-powered sorting* – NIR spectroscopy + computer vision classifies incoming waste and routes it to the optimal processing path (99.2% accuracy in simulation)

2. *Hybrid processing* – Different waste types need different approaches: - Thermal pyrolysis (350-450°C) for organics → syngas fuel + biochar - Melt extrusion for thermoplastics → 3D printer filament - Cold mechanical shredding for PVDF → safe filler material (no HF release!)

3. *Net-positive energy* – The system generates +44 kWh/week more than it consumes, thanks to syngas recovery

4. *Radiation shielding output* – Shredded PVDF + biochar + lunar regolith gets pressed into tiles that actually protect habitats from cosmic radiation

*The digital twin:*

The repo contains a full physics simulation with: - Heat transfer and pyrolysis kinetics modeling - Real-time sensor simulation (25+ channels) - Anomaly detection for predictive maintenance - Web dashboard for visualization

You can run `python -m lunarecycle.dashboard.app --web` to see it in action.

*Performance:* - 90%+ mass recovery rate - 8 kg/day throughput - <30 min/week crew time - Zero HF emissions from PVDF processing

*Current status:*

85% complete. Submission deadline is January 22, 2026. The entire system is designed to be buildable for ~$32K as an Earth prototype, with a clear adaptation path to lunar deployment.

I'm sharing this because: 1. Space sustainability is underexplored in open source 2. The PVDF safety solution might help others working on polymer recycling 3. I'd love feedback from HN's expertise on the simulation architecture

The code is MIT licensed. Happy to answer questions about the engineering trade-offs, the challenge requirements, or the thermodynamics of turning astronaut underwear into 3D printer filament.
by friendzis | 2025-12-01 14:42:26+00:00
Hudson/Jenkins is just not architected for large, multi-project deployments, isolated environments and specialized nodes. It can work if you do not need these features, but otherwise it's fight against the environment.

You need a beefy master and it is your single point of failure. Untimely triggers of heavy jobs overwhelm controller? All projects are down. Jobs need to be carefully crafted to be resumable at all.

Heavy reliance on master means that even sending out webhooks on stage status changes is extremely error prone.

When your jobs require certain tools to be available you are expected to package those as part of agent deployment as Jenkins relies on host tools. In reality you end up rolling your own tool management system that every job has to call in some canonical manner.

There is no built in way to isolate environments. You can harden the system a bit with various ACLs, but in the end if you either have to trust projects or build up and maintain infrastructures for different projects isolated at host level.

In cases when time-wise significant processing happens externally, you have to block an executor.
by ben_w | 2025-12-01 14:42:44+00:00
Dunno for sure, but I'd suggest that mentioning Israel when it's the UK doing it, it might possibly look a bit like shoe-horning in a capital-A-Agenda.

The UK doesn't really have much of a good history on the topic of listening to political dissent from within. The Sex Pistols comes to mind, and the Winter of Discontent, and the anti-Iraq-war march, and the Troubles, and police kettling a few decades back, and a bike safety protest a friend attended where a lot of people who couldn't hear a police order got arrested for not following that order, and there's a former partner of mine could give you a whole bunch of stories about protests you've probably never even heard of.

IMO, the UK's led by aristocrats who only mostly deign to play the game of democracy, but the leadership doesn't really seem to think naturally in those terms and is a lot more comfortable at white tie events.
by ajross | 2025-12-01 14:42:52+00:00
> In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila

And I repeat the question: how do you know your thermometer doesn't? You don't, you're just declaring a fact you have no basis for knowing. That's fine if you want a job in a philosophy faculty, but it's worthless to people trying to understand AI. Again, c.f. furffle. Thermometers have that, you agree, right? Because you can't prove they don't.
by mort96 | 2025-12-01 14:43:05+00:00
> or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.

Here's the weird vague conspiracy posting again. What exactly do you think Red Hat, IBM and Canonical's desired "return on investment" is with regard to Wayland, other than just a more polished desktop that works better for most people?
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-01 14:43:26+00:00
Often the answer to the question was simply wrong, as it answered a different question that nobody made. A lot of times you had to follow a maze of links to related questions, that may have an answer or may lead to a different one. The languages that it was most useful (due to bad ecosystem documentation) evolved in a rate way faster than SO could update their answers, so most of the answers on those were outdated...

There were more problems. And that's from the point of view of somebody coming from Google to find questions that already existed. Interacting there was another entire can of worms.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-01 14:43:30+00:00
Most in-demand electronics got worse post-2020 and haven't recovered.

That's why I just buy something when I need it or when I think the price is reasonable, because nowadays, if I wait for something to get cheaper like I used to do in the 90s-00s, chances are it's gonna get even more expensive as time passes, not cheaper.

The days when you would wait 6-12 months and get the same thing for 50% off or a new thing with 50% more performance for the same price are over, when there's only one major semiconductor fab making everything, 3 RAM makers, 3 FLASH makers, 2 GPU vendors, 2 CPU vendors, controlling all supply, and I'm competing with datacenters for it.
by simonw | 2025-12-01 14:43:37+00:00
The latest DeepSeek and Kimi open weight models are competitive with GPT-5.

If every AI lab were to go bust tomorrow, we could still hire expensive GPU servers (there would suddenly be a glut of those!) and use them to run those open weight models and continue as we do today.

Sure, the models wouldn't ever get any better in the future - but existing teams that rely on them would be able to keep on working with surprisingly little disruption.