MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SoleilAbsolu | 2025-12-03 01:15:13+00:00
I've had about 400 Windows HP laptops/200 desktops through my hands running IT for a nonprofit. They are not perfect, but the different models (from cheapo plastic-case 12/13 inch to top-of-the-line metal cased "16 inch desktop replacements" lappies and low to mid-level desktops) have been better built, and more easily serviced, than comparable Lenovo, Dell & Acer models I've had my hands on in the same time. Our new MSP pushed Lenovos on us for a batch of 25 or so computers including my latest laptop, and I regret it.

They just didn't have a 15" metal case in the price range so I got a plastic 16". Overall performance is lower than comparably spec'd HP Z-Book Fireflys I was using, when this Thinkpad T16 G4 hits the upper limits of RAM, it feels like it's using swap on a slow platter drive. Even on lower-spec HP Pro & EliteBooks, they slow down at max RAM but don't just freeze. Our staff thrashes the shit out of gear, so finding decently-priced lower-spec metal-bodied laptops is essential.

Even on latest HP laptops I am able to replace RAM, batteries, SSDs without dealing with epoxied sockets. Haven't had to often, but displays and keyboards could be swapped if absolutely needed last time we had to several years ago. That said, the performance of onboard HP Bluetooth sucks compared to others I've used and their stock bloatware is terrible.

Specific to Lenovo, when I was shopping for a bunch of laptops about 3 years ago there were weird gotchas like "I can get every spec I need EXCEPT backlit keyboard, which kicks me up to the next model, at least $300 more/unit" and "Gee, they solder in a low amount of RAM on this one to make you...yup, spend at least $300 more/unit"...
by nodja | 2025-12-03 01:15:14+00:00
> Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model?

The same way everyone else fails at it.

Change some hyper parameters to match the new hardware (more params), maybe implement the latest improvements in papers after it was validated in a smaller model run. Start training the big boy, loss looks good, 2 months and millions of dollars later loss plateaus, do the whole SFT/RL shebang, run benchmarks.

It's not much better than the previous model, very tiny improvements, oops.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-03 01:15:48+00:00
>but instead invests that money in poaching.

give a big enough raise and they won't want to be poached. You won't retain everyone, but your goal probably isn't to compete with Google to begin with. So why worry of the scenario of boosting a good junior from 100k to 150k but losing them to a 250k job?

In some ways you will also need to read the room. I don't like the mentality of "I won't hire this person, they are only here for money", but to some extent you need to gauge how much of them is mission-focused and how much would leave the minute they get a 10k counter-offer. adjust your investments accordingly and focus on making something that makes money off that.
by labcomputer | 2025-12-03 01:16:00+00:00
The app notes and data sheets of related parts suggest that the target application is large conversion ratios, where the duty cycle in an inductive converter is close to 0 (or 1). That forces tradeoffs, like a lower switching frequency (lower efficiency), a larger inductor (more weight and/or cost) or very short T_on for one of the FETs (lower efficiency because transition times become important). So you can use the charge pump as the first stage of a hybrid converter to get a higher system efficiency.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-03 01:17:12+00:00
If I remember correctly, some kind of highly efficient (and low cost) voltage halver (not sure if this design or a different one) is AFAIK used with the PPS ("programmable power supply") protocol to let phones charge efficiently:

2x the battery charge voltage is requested from the power supply, e.g. 8.6V if the phone is trying to apply 4.3V to the battery. This way, the phone doesn't need to run any complicated and heat-generating voltage regulation, just the halver, while still being able to request more than the standard 5V over the cable (allowing it to draw more than 15W of power over a standard cable).
by array_key_first | 2025-12-03 01:17:25+00:00
Being an insane brand means literally nothing if people can trivially switch to competitors, which they can.

There isn't even a tenth of enough money if you group together all of advertising. Like, the entire industry. Ads is a bad, bad plan that wont work. Advertising is also extremely overvalued. And even at it's overvalued price tag, it's nowhere near enough.
by BuckRogers | 2025-12-03 01:17:34+00:00
The comments here amuse me because there's a strong scent of resentment towards people using AI, along with people who copied from SO. I am a mid level developer that started using AI about 4 months ago, and view it as justice against unreasonable and constant micromanagement through estimates on every single task. You want a robot? You're getting your robot now.

Not to mention I'm the only white person on my team other than the owner/operator. They already brought in bots of sorts from overseas. The constant drive to cheaper labor and gutting of the American middle class has been vast compared to the suffering the industry will have under junior developers using AI. It's definitely made my job easier. And I really don't care. No one cared about me. I have relatively low pay, no health insurance, and no 401K. When the last person left, management replied to his goodbye email saying he'd be replaced in a week. And then they proceeded to try to hire someone in Mexico City. Maintain the same time zone, but pay 3rd world wages and likely to have coercive control over them through desperation. Never found anyone.

I have no love for this industry or any of the "woes" it'll have with AI. Overall it's going to lead to lower wages and less jobs. For those out there producing "AI slop", I support you. It's hardly what they deserve, but they've earned it.
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-03 01:18:10+00:00
Ouch! Man this is a terrible take on the world. I know you mean well and that the majority of the world agrees with this, but to be honest, I have been having real thoughts about letting the make it till you break it mentality go myself. things are getting more expensive and I dont think im willing to live a life running from paycheck to paycheck... Not sure why I am going to do about it, but I know that feeling is there.
by shuckles | 2025-12-03 01:19:09+00:00
> I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build"

This is false. People will want to build more on the margin, but that doesn't mean they want to build. If the profitability requirement (hurdle rate for getting investment from institutions) is greater than the the market rent, people will not build even if market rent is high. Indeed, that's what's happened in the last 5 years as costs have increased much faster than rents.
Ask HN: Why don't buildings have dry warm up rooms for your laptop in winter?
by amichail | 2025-12-03 01:19:39+00:00
In winter, a laptop can get cold enough during a long walk or commute that it picks up moisture as soon as you enter a warm building. Powering on a damp laptop can cause damage, so a simple solution came to mind.

Public buildings like malls or libraries could offer a small dry warm up room where people take their cold laptops for ten to twenty minutes. The room would be warm with low humidity so the device can reach indoor temperature without collecting moisture.

Would you use these dry warm up rooms to protect your laptop from water damage during winter?
by vel0city | 2025-12-03 01:20:09+00:00
I opened up the Gemini app and asked:

Who are the Dallas Stars playing tonight? Is there anyone that will be out of the lineup for the Stars? What have their recent injuries been like? Can you get the current score?

It's response:

The Dallas Stars are playing the New York Rangers tonight, Tuesday, December 2, 2025, at Madison Square Garden.

Here is the information available regarding the rest of your questions:

Out of the Lineup & Recent Injuries *Lian Bichsel (Defenseman): He suffered a lower-body injury (ankle) in the recent game against the Senators and is expected to miss 6-8 weeks and require surgery. His absence will be felt on the blueline.

*Jake Oettinger (Goaltender): He is dealing with an illness and is not expected to start tonight; Casey DeSmith is projected to start in his place. Oettinger is expected to play tomorrow night in New Jersey.

*Thomas Harley (Defenseman): He remains week-to-week with a lower-body injury and is not with the team on their current road trip.

Other injured players who will likely be out of the lineup include Matt Duchene (Upper Body - on IR-LT, but joining the road trip), Adam Erne (Lower Body - on IR-LT), and Nils Lundkvist (Lower Body - on IR-LT).

Current Score The game is in progress, and the score is currently New York Rangers 1 - 1 Dallas Stars.

Would you like an update on the final score later, or news on a specific player's status?

I ask it things like updates on teams all the time, and it usually pulls the right information.
by rchaud | 2025-12-03 01:20:21+00:00
Got anything vis-a-vis the message as opposed to the messenger?

I'm not sure these examples are even the gotchas you're positing them as. Xerox is a dinosaur that was last relevant at the turn of the century, and IBM is a $300bn company. And if it wasn't obvious, the Apple II never made a dent in the corporate market, while IBM and later Windows PCs did.

In any case, these examples are almost half a century old and don't relate to capex ROI, which was the topic of dicussion.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-12-03 01:20:21+00:00
Those GPUs don't just die after 2 years though, they will keep getting used since it's very likely their electricity costs will be low enough to still make it worth it. What's very dubious is if their value after 2/3 years will be enough to pay back the initial cost to buy them.

So it's more a crisis of investors wasting their money rather than ewaste.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-03 01:20:37+00:00
Because they lock you in. ChatGPT has no lock in, in fact none of the LLMs do just because of how they work.

Salesforce doesn't make a good product, and certainly not the best product. It doesn't matter, you don't need to if you can convince idiots with money to invest in you. And then the switching cost is too much, too late.

That business model is a dying one and all the software companies know it. That's why Microsoft has spent the last 15 years opening up their ecosystems. As automation increases, switching cost decreases. You cant rely on it.
by defrost | 2025-12-03 01:20:48+00:00
People have many tastes; some like Steve Reich, others Wim Mertens, Michael Nyman, or even Shostakovich.

If Guthrie does it for you (with or without Elizabeth Fraser?) perhaps The White Arcades also fits the bill, it's a Guthrie, Eno, Budd collaboration.

One thing to admire about Eno is just how deeply and broadly connected he was as an engineer and contributor to so many artists and albums.

David Bowie owes much to Fripp, Eno, Belew, ... etc.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-03 01:20:49+00:00
I once used one of their services (I forget which, but I think it was there serverless product) that “supported” Java.

… but the official command line tools had show-stopper bugs if you were deploying Java to this service, that’d been known for months, and some features couldn’t be used in Java, and the docs were only like 20% complete.

But this work-in-progress alpha (not even beta quality because it couldn’t plausibly be considered feature complete) counted as “supported” alongside other languages that were actually supported.

(This was a few years ago and this particular thing might be a lot better now, but it shows how little you can trust their marketing pages and GUI AWS dashboards)
by krackers | 2025-12-03 01:21:06+00:00
The visual system can patch over tiny defects (see: blindspot) and visual field tests have not been part of standard yearly eye exams I've been to. And possible longer-term risks (say increased risk of cataracts) would be harder to conclusively show. And the sample size involved would skew heavily towards young healthy adults instead of people with pre-existing eye conditions.

I realize it's not easily possible to prove the negative, but when you're exposing the public the burden must be on the company to be transparent and rigorous. And from what I see it's difficult to even find certification documents for the lidars used in commercial self-driving vehicles, possibly because everything is proprietary and trade secret.
by kelipso | 2025-12-03 01:21:18+00:00
Gemini has been in Google search for a while now. I use it somewhat often when I search for something and want follow up questions. I don’t see any ads in Gemini but maybe I would see it if I search for ads relevant things idk. But I definitely use google search more often because Gemini is there and probably that goes for a lot of people.
by tzs | 2025-12-03 01:21:24+00:00
What he said was:

> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.

That makes it sound like this is the minimum that you have to pay to get a smartphone and service to get by in modern life.

$200/mo is definitely high for that. An iPhone 17 Pro Max with maxed out storage (2 TB) is under $85/mo for 24 months.

A Visible+ Pro prepaid plan is $45/mo ($37.5/mo if you pay for 12 months at once) if you don't use one of their frequent promo codes to get a discount.

That includes unlimited premium data on Verizon's 5 G UWB, 5 G, and 4 G LTE networks, support for a cellular smartwatch, 4K UHD video, and unlimited mobile hotspot. By "premium" data they mean no deprioritization. Visible users get the same priority as user's of Verizon's own postpaid plans.

The hotspot is only 15 Mbps, so you probably wouldn't want to rely on it if you have frequent or long internet outages, but I've found for the occasional short outage it was fine for email, HN/Reddit/etc, and YouTube videos.

This will be massively more than enough to cover the smartphone hardware and service needs for everything probably 99% of the US population needs to get by, at $130/mo.

Note that includes getting a new top of the line iPhone every 2 years. With a more modest phone and keeping it for 5 years we are looking at more like $60/mo.
by Multiplayer | 2025-12-03 01:21:38+00:00
The math here is mixing categories. The token calculation for a single 1-GW datacenter is fine, but then it gets compared to the entire industry’s projected $8T capex, which makes the conclusion meaningless. It’s like taking the annual revenue of one factory and using it to argue that an entire global build-out can’t be profitable. On top of that, the revenue estimate uses retail GPT-5.1 pricing, which is the absolute highest-priced model on the market, not what a hyperscaler actually charges for bulk workloads. IBM’s number refers to many datacenters built over many years, each with different models, utilization patterns, and economics. So this particular comparison doesn’t show that AI can’t be profitable—it’s just comparing one plant’s token output to everyone’s debt at once. The real challenges (throughput per watt, falling token prices, capital efficiency) are valid, but this napkin math isn’t proving what it claims to prove.
by BanazirGalbasi | 2025-12-03 01:21:58+00:00
The GPUs, sure. The mainboards and CPUs can be used in clusters for general-purpose computing, which is still more prevalent in most scientific research as far as I am aware. My alma mater has a several-thousand-core cluster that any student can request time on as long as they have reason to do so, and it's all CPU compute. Getting non-CS majors to write GPU code is unlikely in that scenario.
by wolrah | 2025-12-03 01:22:01+00:00
For the same reasons as forcing companies to do it.

1. Revocation is a clusterfuck. Microsoft is currently failing to revoke tens of thousands of defective certificates for over seven months (the Baseline Requirements state that they should have been revoked within five days). Entrust was distrusted over repeated failures to revoke. Many TLS clients don't even bother to check revocation lists, or if they do they do it in a "fail-open" manner where inability to load the list does not prevent access which largely defeats the purpose. Short certificate lifetimes make revocation less important as both defective and compromised certificates age out rapidly, but without automation any meaningful reduction in lifetime directly translates to an increase in required effort which makes it a balancing act. With automation, however, reducing lifetimes is effectively free.

2. Automation is mostly a one-time cost. Manual renewal is a repeating cost. I started using LE to add HTTPS to my personal site when it first became available to the public in 2016 and then started using it for my work systems when our GoDaddy certs came up for renewal a bit less than a year later. Since then out of roughly 50 systems pulling around 70 certs I've had to "babysit" two of them once each, both because they were using wildcard certs which I was a very early adopter of and something about how I had set them up was technically wrong but worked in the initial version. Compare this to the "old world" where every couple of years I had to generally engage vendor support on both our server platforms and our CA because it had been long enough that things had changed on both sides so doing things manually required learning new things. Mandating short lifetimes is good for everyone. This is part of why LE has used a short lifetime since the beginning, to strongly encourage people to not try to do it without automation.

3. It's super easy. Lots of platforms have ACME support built in. For those that don't, packages like acme.sh are damn close to universal. If your system is able to expose a web server on port 80 it's basically trivial. If it's not, it's slightly harder. There's just not a good reason not to do it other than stubborn insistence. "Handcrafted TLS Certificates" just don't matter.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-12-03 01:22:14+00:00
The incentive for CEOs is announcing the plan to do something, they have no idea if they will actually be able to do it, and it probably won't matter.

This happened in the dotcom too btw. Companies built out fibre networks, it wasn't possible to actually build all the physical infra that companies wanted to build so many announced plans that never happened and then, towards the end, companies began aggressively acquiring stakes in companies who were building stuff to get financial exposure (an example was BT, which turned itself briefly into a hedge fund with a telephone network attached...before it imploded).

CEOs do not operate on the timescale of waiting and building. Their timescale is this year's bonus/share options package. Nothing else matters: announce plans to do X or Y, doesn't matter, they know they will be gone long before it happens.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-03 01:23:01+00:00
They're not selling a service, they're selling access to a service. You can access a more or less equivalent service from multiple companies.

The value of an LLM isn't an LLM. That's entirely 100% fungible. The value is exclusively what it produces.

If other people can produce the same thing, your LLM value approaches 0.
by andrewf | 2025-12-03 01:23:16+00:00
Also all the sound stuff was outsourced! id hired Bobby Prince to make the music and licensed a playback library which seemed to have enough problems already with the supported sound cards. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DMX

So they'd have had to extract this feature from a vendor where the relationship is already breaking down, or ditch it all and start from scratch with a new vendor, or inhouse code.
by skissane | 2025-12-03 01:23:46+00:00
> In 1977, Apple, a young fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business.

IBM released the 5100 in September 1975 [0] which was essentially a personal computer in feature set. The biggest problem with it was the price tag - the entry model cost US$8975, compared to US$1298 for the entry Apple II released in June 1977 (close to two years later). The IBM PC was released in August 1981 for US$1565 for the most basic system (which almost no one bought, so in practice they cost more). And the original IBM PC had model number 5150, officially positioning it as a successor to the 5100.

IBM’s big problem wasn’t that they were disinterested in the category - it was they initially insisted on using expensive IBM-proprietary parts (often shared technology with their mainframe/midrange/minicomputer systems and peripherals), which resulted in a price that made the machine unaffordable for everyone except large businesses, governments, universities (and even those customers often balked at the price tag). The secret of the IBM PC’s success is they told the design team to use commercial off-the-shelf chips from vendors such as Intel and Motorola instead of IBM’s own silicon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100
by paxys | 2025-12-03 01:23:48+00:00
I think we are finally seeing the effects of the steady stream of departures of top researchers and leaders from OpenAI since last year. Sure you can declare a "code red", but who is going to lead the effort? Set the direction? Do the heavy lifting? Chart the path forward? Sam Altman is a salesman, not a researcher. Ilya is no longer around. Most of the other top brass has been poached by Google/Meta/Anthropic or left to start their own thing. The people left behind are probably good at iterating, but can they really make the next leap forward on their own?
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-03 01:25:15+00:00
Wasn't houston's "approach" to buy bus tickets to California from a company that just resold commodity bus tickets and was owned by the governors friend and charged 10x market price?

The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process).

>in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State.

If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year?

The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population.

Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?
by krackers | 2025-12-03 01:25:42+00:00
If you find anything, please let me know. The least obtrusive option I've found is this Zeiss lens coating ("Thermo Force") which claims to block 90% of IR "between 780 and 2000 nm", which covers the NIR used in both types of lidar. It only seems to be available as part of sunglasses though.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-03 01:25:50+00:00
>> Support engineer ran customer query through Claude (trained on our public and internal docs) and it very, very confidently made a bunch of stuff up in the response.

> Yeah, LLMs are not really good about things that can't be done.

From the GP's description, this situation was not a case of "things that can't be done", but instead was the result of a statistically generated document having what should be the expected result:

It was quite plausible sounding and it would have been great if it worked that way, but it didn't.