MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthk | 2025-12-21 17:18:39+00:00
It has very few RAM to emulate PC's/higher end Classic Macs. You understimate 90's computing. A Pentium 2@333MHZ or a P3 at 500 MHZ was a beast and an RP2350 can't do nil. Maybe some very early computers like the Amiga and the m68k Macs could be emulated under it.

You can play DivX movies under a Pentium II. And a Pentium III at 600 can run Icewm, modern dillo, TLS 1.3... with ease, even post into HN.
by nheer | 2025-12-21 17:18:44+00:00
Thank you for your comment.

> > a silly little experiment

> This I don't like.

What do you mean with that?

To explain what I meant. I knew that that in the end this was a microbenchmark. It can certainly give you some clue about a language, but it doesn't tell you the whole picture. In the end it tells you how good a language is (or can be) at loops and floating point math. That's what I meant. I hope that makes it clearer.
by queenkjuul | 2025-12-21 17:18:49+00:00
Not getting the "didn't go over the speed limit" award when you did in fact go over the speed limit shouldn't be a big deal to anyone.

Nobody is preventing the studio from working, or from continuing to make (ostensibly) tons of money from their acclaimed game. Their game didn't meet the requirements for one particular GOTY award, boo hoo
by troupo | 2025-12-21 17:19:09+00:00
> I am sure that they will come back and optimize, but tbh this is not the priority with a new site where the hits will top out at ~ 10k / hour.

You don't need to "come back and optimize" if you don't start with needing a progress indicator for a "transform: scale" animation to display a single static download link. The number of hits is not relevant.

Neither do you need to do three separate fetch requests for static plain text examples that you then laboriously dump into the DOM by creating dummy elements, putting content in there, then looking up and cloning `code` tags to then dump those code tags on the page.
by nativeit | 2025-12-21 17:19:57+00:00
I remember when “browsing the WWW” literally involved scrolling through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape. At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked. There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the OnLine Guitar Archive.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-21 17:20:31+00:00
(repeating an earlier comment). The team behind Outlines has repeatedly provided evaluations that show constrained decoding improves the outputs:

- https://blog.dottxt.ai/performance-gsm8k.html

- https://blog.dottxt.ai/oss-v-gpt4.html

- https://blog.dottxt.ai/say-what-you-mean.html
by nytpu | 2025-12-21 17:20:33+00:00
Because attaching a debugger to the Linux Kernel is so convenient and easy :P

But yeah, I was just being lazy and dumb. I solved it within ten minutes of someone saying "why don't you just go through the binfmt_elf code?" A debugger would've probably been more tedious than reading the relevant code directly, but would've been just as effective.
by coryrc | 2025-12-21 17:20:57+00:00
Consider making a standoff: a hollow cylinder. You take a cylinder primitive and subtract a cylinder primitive with a smaller radius. If they have the same height, the top and bottom faces of the cylinders are exactly the same plane, which the Preview gives odd effects. The old recommendation is to name your subtracting cylinder taller and shift it down a little, so those faces don't share a plane. Manifold doesn't care.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-21 17:21:08+00:00
"I'm surprised home many technically knowledgeable people on Internet forums still think IPv6 is some niche, unreliable thing."

Where can we read some examples of this

I've read commentary about pros and cons of IPv6 over the years but never anything that suggested IPv6 was "niche" or "unreliable"
by pjmlp | 2025-12-21 17:21:30+00:00
You are right, hence my "in a certain sense", because I was too lazy to point out the differences between a motherboard having everything there without pluggable graphics unit[0], and having everything now inside of a single chip.

[0] - Not fully correct, as there are/were extensions cards that override the bus, thus replacing one of the said chips, on Amiga case.
by tguvot | 2025-12-21 17:21:33+00:00
i well familiar with macsec. we use it between datacenters and for aws directlink. it de-facto standard for this kind of stuff. i even worked on hardware that provided macsec support

a couple of years ago I tried to use it inside datacenter during fedramp implementation. it crashed and burned for a couple of reasons:

- linux wpa_supplicant was crashing during session establishment

- switch had a limit on number of macsec session per port
by newppc | 2025-12-21 17:24:46+00:00
This is spot on. I was an impressionable young male that loved that book and took to heart the ideas. Looking back it’s a mixed bag - the ideas teach you about delegation and thinking like an owner, but the bigger message that work sucks and you should figure out how to avoid it kinda hurts people who would be more ambitious.

An OG “digital nomad blogger bro” that took it all the way to the top!

At the end of the day his voice is a refreshing twist and a net positive but with a ton of caveats.
by ben_w | 2025-12-21 17:25:57+00:00
> He made some racist remarks, a mistake he could’ve recovered from if he wasn’t famous.

My knowledge of the USA is imperfect. Certain stereotypes of the USA from the perspective of Americans do make it across the Atlantic to here. Are they correct or incorrect when they say the worse part of Thanksgiving is having to meet the racist in-laws?

Unless that stereotype is completely invented (and I accept that it might be, after all the UK had Boris Johnson), then "could've" doesn't imply "would've".
by Aurornis | 2025-12-21 17:26:51+00:00
I was once in a high up position for a somewhat popular project. I can confirm that it attracts obsessive people with anger issues.

It scales with popularity and changes with demographic. I’ve known non-famous CEOs who needed security details when visiting any conference or public event because they had stalkers who would reliably appear and try to get close to them.

Even on HN I had a stalker. With a previous handle I wrote a long comment about a subject that someone found insightful. They scanned my whole comment history until they found a comment where I mentioned a company I had worked for, then did a process of elimination to figure out who I was, then started contacting me through email and other channels demanding more conversation and writing on the topic to answer their questions. It was very unsettling. I’m now more careful to leave out any identifying facts on HN.
by thwarted | 2025-12-21 17:28:37+00:00
> It won't scan cards with AI - you manually enter the barcode, which I think makes it less prone to error.

This is a very interesting sentence.

I interpret this sentence as saying that manually entering a barcode is less error prone than letting AI do it, that AI would have an unacceptable margin of error (and this is probably an accurate assessment).

But you don't need AI to find or read barcodes. Finding and reading barcodes is a reasonably mature technology that has existed long before AI.

Barcodes exist as a fast, machine readable data transfer format meant to avoid data entry errors by avoiding manual data entry, and yet you've implemented manual entry in order to avoid errors?

Now, if one of the constraints you've put on your implementation is that it work only in the browser and you don't want to have to download a large barcode scanning library to the browser, then it makes sense to implement manual entry. But that has nothing to do with AI.

That being said, there are some barcode reading apps that can be used to prompt for a scan from a web page, and you get the barcode payload back. I've used an app called "bineye" on Android (source on GitHub) that works like this. This helps avoid error prone manual entry and gets the full barcode payload (many barcodes store/encode more information than the human readable text printed next to them).
by ziofill | 2025-12-21 17:28:48+00:00
When I was living in Paris I had a 20 min ride from home to work each day. I picked up the habit to read during those 40 total minutes and I was going through books like I had never been able to, because while 40 min is not a lot, it’s about 150h per year. One easily underestimates the power of consistency.
by altmanaltman | 2025-12-21 17:28:52+00:00
> You’re essentially forcing the model to express the actual answer it wants to express in a constrained language.

You surely aren't implying that the model is sentient or has any "desire" to give an answer, right?

And how is that different from prompting in general? Isn't using english already a constraint? And isn't that what it is designed for, to work with prompts that provide limits in which to determine the output text? Like there is no "real" answer that you supress by changing your prompt.

So I don't think its a plausible explanation to say this happens because we are "making" the model return its answerr in a "constrained language" at all.
by kyboren | 2025-12-21 17:29:10+00:00
Obviously faulty logic. This isn't a zero-sum game. In fact, the whole point is to increase our combined combat power.

For too long European NATO countries have kept token militaries lacking any substantial combat power. They have centered their national defense strategies around holding off Russia for just long enough for Uncle Sam to swoop in, fight the Russians, and save the day. But the US does not have the combat power to fight both Russia and China. So our total combat power must increase. Should the US bear this increased burden alone? Or should the rest of NATO finally get serious about funding and fielding effective militaries?

European states have been freeloading, and US defense budgets are not going to decrease just because Europe finally starts to take some responsibility for its own defense.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-21 17:29:21+00:00
> But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.

Doesn't stop anyone with DMCA... DMCA is coming up on almost three decades of being a law, and requires statements made under penalty of perjury.

However many millions (likely billions) of DMCA takedowns issued, who knows how many false/bad faith... I wonder how many have led to prosecutions for perjury, even when filing tens of thousands, en masse...

No need to wonder, the answer is simple. Starts with a "Z" and ends in "ero".
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-21 17:29:30+00:00
> outsource their work to low paid overseas assistants

Literally every business is based on the idea of tacking on a margin onto someone else's work and profiting from it. Markets are based on imperfect information distribution at the end of the day.

It's likely the very company he'd be doing that too is already doing the exact same thing with their customer support (or "success" as they call it now), and their subcontractors themselves outsource various jobs. But I guess we've been conditioned to accept that as good because the boss is pocketing the difference, vs the lowly employee.

> only responding to your coworkers once a week

I struggle to think there is a company in the world where this kind of behavior would fly, but if there is then they must be satisfied with the work (or lack thereof I guess) and so in that case is it any worse than just slacking off at work and browsing HN for that matter?

---

Now should you do this? No, but not because you should feel bad for anyone. You should not do it because it's really hard to find someone good enough (and cheap enough) to deliver the same kind of quality you do and worthy of trusting them with your reputation. But if you know a magical place where to find such unicorns, go right ahead!
by Aurornis | 2025-12-21 17:30:37+00:00
I haven’t followed everything he has produced, but he has a history of identifying rising topics and riding their popularity. He leaned into the psychedelic self-help movement heavily when it was first becoming popular.

The last time he popped up on one of my feeds he was talking to someone about the benefits of sobriety and moderating alcohol consumption, so he might be pivoting toward the next wave of reducing drug and alcohol use, though I don’t know.
by tgtweak | 2025-12-21 17:31:04+00:00
As someone who self hosted mysql (in complex master/slave setups) then mariadb, memsql, mongo and pgsql on bare metal, virtual machines then containers for almost 2 decades at this point... you can self host with very little downtime and the only real challenge is upgrade path and getting replication right.

Now with pgbouncer (or whatever other flavor of sql-aware proxy you fancy) you can greatly reduce the complexity involved in managing conventionally complex read/write routing and sharding to various replicas to enable resilient, scalable production-grade database setups on your own infra. Throw in the fact that copy-on-write and snapshotting is baked into most storage today and it becomes - at least compared to 20 years ago - trivial to set up DRS as well. Others have mentioned pgBackRest and that further enforces the ease with which you can set up these traditionally-complex setups.

Beyond those two significant features there isn't many other reasons you'd need to go with hosted/managed pgsql. I've yet to find a managed/hosted database solution that doesn't have some level of downtime to apply updates and patches so even if you go fully hosted/managed it's not a silver bullet. The cost of managed DB is also several times that of the actual hardware it's running on, so there is a cost factor involved as well.

I guess all this to say it's never been a better time to self-host your database and the learning curve is as shallow as it's ever been. Add to all of this that any garden-variety LLM can hand-hold you through the setup and management, including any issues you might encounter on the way.
by drweevil | 2025-12-21 17:31:22+00:00
Of course it was; but it's also a valid observation that the capitalist aspect has jumped the shark. Qatar was my shark, but I was also dismayed by the South Africa finals, when the organizers banned private street food vendors near the venues, because they supposedly competed with Official World Cup Sponsors. Those vendors had always done business in those locations. More to the point of this story, tickets to live events in general have become exclusionary to anyone who is not wealthy, and now those live events also have become difficult to find on the air.
by oxzidized | 2025-12-21 17:31:26+00:00
> I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...

To some this could imply they wanted to continue doing business with Amazon, so accepted the theft. Not losing access is, in a way, continuing to do business. Not sure if that's what they meant, but I can see it being interpreted as such.
by revision17 | 2025-12-21 17:31:42+00:00
Maybe it's improved since I last used it (seems to still be an issue per a 1 minute google search), but OpenSCAD doesn't really have easy support for dimensioned drawings.

While it was very handy for my programmer brain to create a few 3D printed things, when I wanted to create a drawing for something I'd make myself, adding dimensions seemed very unwieldly. I used a different CAD program for those projects (maybe Autodesk Inventor?).
by tormeh | 2025-12-21 17:32:17+00:00
Yeah, photography (editing aside) is about having taste and getting lucky. A good photographer can of course raise their odds of getting lucky, but still. There's some technique in there too, but that's really not all that complicated. That said, I think few things match a good photo. There's something about a photo subject being real that I find fascinating. A photo exhibition does not display the imagination of the photographers, but rather the incredible in the real world.
by saagarjha | 2025-12-21 17:32:39+00:00
I used to do work on Caltrain, which used to be like 3 hours of my commute and didn't have any internet, so I would carefully plan what I could do beforehand. My code deploys to a machine that's very different from my laptop, but I had a Docker container set up to cross compile things and loaded up the docs beforehand, so as long as I planned out what I wanted to do.

These days Caltrain is faster and has occasionally frustrating, but fairly good Wi-Fi, so now my constraints are that I don't have a large monitor but not really much else.
by _ache_ | 2025-12-21 17:33:03+00:00
The problem with AI is privacy.

Firefox should be the browser that respects you privacy (the only one...). Integrating AI undermining the efforts of making it the privacy oriented browser.

For now the AI is forced and ridiculously complicated to disable (with new options in about:config poping in each new version). The promise to have an "disable all IA features" is still a promise.
by armcat | 2025-12-21 17:33:26+00:00
I really like BAML but this post seems a little too much like a BAML funnel. Here are three methods that worked for me consistently since constrained sampling first came out:

1. Add a validation step (using a mini model) right at the beginning - sub-second response times; the validation will either emit True/False or emit a function call

2. Use a sequence of (1) large model without structured outputs for reasoning/parsing, chained to (2) small model for constrained sampling/structured output

3. Keep your Pydantic models/schemas as flat (not too nested and not too many enumarations) and "help" the model in the system prompt as much as you can
by pjsousa79 | 2025-12-21 17:34:15+00:00
I put together a small, SQL-backed dashboard comparing the S&P 500 with several "Main Street" indicators: retail sales, construction spending, bank credit, and industrial production (manufacturing, mining, utilities).

The question I wanted to sanity-check was simple: markets seem to be pricing a strong AI-driven growth narrative — do broad macro indicators show a similar acceleration?

The dashboard is fully grounded on public data, and every chart is traceable to the underlying SQL query and datasets.

I’m not pushing a conclusion here — genuinely curious how others interpret the divergence (or lack thereof), and whether there are indicators you’d add or remove.
by nheer | 2025-12-21 17:34:41+00:00
Author here — yep, you understood the repository correctly.

My Python version is a good example of the structure: read rounds.txt, run the loop, print the result, exit. I’m timing the whole program with hyperfine.

I agree that for a “pure compute” microbenchmark you could remove file I/O and console output. I kept them mainly because:

- It gives every language the same simple interface (same input, same output) and acts as a basic correctness/sanity check.

- The benchmark runs 1 billion iterations. The file read and a single print happen once per run, so that overhead is tiny compared to the loop, and the results stay comparable in practice.

That said, I’m not against a compute-only / quiet mode. Since hyperfine already handles timing externally, the real work is implementing and maintaining a consistent --quiet / --no-io variant across 50+ languages.

If someone wants to contribute that (even starting with a subset), I’m happy to review PRs.
by a1k0n | 2025-12-21 17:34:43+00:00
CORDIC is more accurate, but takes as many iterations as you have bits of precision in your angle. Another demo called Warp in this contest used pipelined CORDIC to do atan2 on every pixel to create a tunnel, which is super impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mu3getxhU&t=780s
by executive | 2025-12-21 17:35:14+00:00
- trains all look to be arriving/departing in hundreds of minutes when you click a random station, even near active trains. Assuming a bug. Regardless, consider changing this to hour/minute display if over 60|90m

- train icon looks like standard metro icon but is easily mistaken for a bus

- train detail panel fixed to bottom is awkward on desktop breakpoints. consider floating or integrating to a single sidebar

- consider having main sidebar fixed to bottom for mobile breakpoints
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-21 17:35:48+00:00
Good question! CORDIC and HAKMEM Item 149 are both hardware-friendly, but have different trade-offs:

CORDIC: - Iterative algorithm (needs multiple clock cycles) - Accuracy improves with more iterations - Generates both magnitude and phase - Typical hardware implementation: 12-16 iterations for decent precision

HAKMEM (Item 149): - Single-cycle computation (just two adds per step) - Uses the recurrence: x' = x - εy, y' = y + εx - Accuracy depends on word width and epsilon choice - Numerically stable in exact arithmetic if ε² < 2
by the_lucifer | 2025-12-21 17:35:59+00:00
This is such a quick and neat way to get a pass for all the random codes in your wallet.

I've had a long shelved project (>8 years now?) where I was working on a solution to doing this from a mobile device but with loads more customization (including image options for different slots), but the cost effectiveness thanks to the PKPass signing as you noticed, put me off to provide it as a public utility as I was a student then. This gives me motivation to revisit it.
by Cloudly | 2025-12-21 17:36:57+00:00
I have been through a huge over supply of AI generated CVs using similar tools this year. I am sure this will help people so not bashing the tool per se, but bare in mind that you will be joining the robots.

I don't know what the solution really is, but as much as I hate it, a verified Linkedin Profile is a huge signal now. Otherwise a real personal site with care and history. I am guilty of being bad with the second so - no easy answers. Maybe even a wacky looking CV would make me notice a candidate more. Powerpoint 90s style.
by alentodorov | 2025-12-21 17:37:15+00:00
Apple Wallet passes use CMS signatures. you're right that only hashes are signed. but Apple requires an official Developer certificate ($99/year) with a private key that can't be exposed to browsers. for true privacy, each user would need their own cert. and defeats the "free" goal. and if you have a dev certificate it's trivial to generate one on your own machine.
by AaronAPU | 2025-12-21 17:37:15+00:00
Interesting read. In modern life almost everyone experiences at least a brief if perhaps isolated/niche version of fame. We are just so heavily connected in so many different networks, it just statistically is likely to happen at some point.

It is a mixed bag for sure, but in terms of risk/reward it is best to have an accurate understanding of both sides so you can make damn sure you are optimizing for the right thing.