MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
MyRobot, a Venture Capital Pitch
by daly | 2025-12-20 05:29:14+00:00
Wrap yourself in a personal robot called Ava (homage to Ex Machina).

A perfect morning coffee is waiting as you wake up. The house robot brings it to you as you awake.

Suppose you want to get breakfast at a restaurant. The car shows up. You get driven to the restaurant. As you get seated your order arrives. Ava knows that you like an omlette, lightly cooked, with ham and bacon. You like your homefries crisp. You like a small orange juice. It is all ready for you moments after you walk in the door because Ava told the restaurant what you want and when you will arrive.

Ava also knows that you want to keep your weight at a certain number. She tracks your calorie intake and creates food proportions and choice to meet your calerie requirements, tuned to the day's activities based on likely calorie burn.

Ava reads books to you through the embedded speaker in your ear, tuning your book choice to the day. Is the weather bad; then a nice story. Is your interest in comedy; then a newly released (LLM-written) comedy special. Are you in the mood for music; then a newly released (LLM-written) song is available.

Feeling like you want some personal attention? Ava arranges your morning with a manicure, pedicure, and massage. Your favorite haircut is next. Time at the gym and access to your usual workout equipment is arranged.

Want to talk to Susan? Your embedded "phone" connects you to her. The "MyPhone" has microphone pickups and even a brain-embedded thought sensor. Your current physical look (post haircut) is transmitted to her brain-embed so she can "see what you look like" and "see what you see". It is like being in the same room together.

Meanwhile, clothes are chosen. Laundry is done. Shopping is done. The water heater repair is scheduled. Doors are unlocked as needed. The garden is watered. The rooms are cleaned. The pool is cleaned.

Ava learned YOUR preferences and adapts in real-time to what you want. Surely all of this will come into a coordinated whole within a very short time. All the the parts exist.

Ava, your personal servant MyRobot.
by conductr | 2025-12-20 05:29:17+00:00
Demand for software has been tied to demand for software engineering labor. That is no longer true. So demand for software may still go up while demand for labor goes another direction.

Also I do hold a belief that most tech companies are taking a cost/labor reduction strategy for a reason, and I think that’s because we’re closing a period of innovation. Keeping the lights on, or protecting their moats, requires less labor.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-20 05:30:10+00:00
Bots and influencers are minimal concerns if there's no money to be had - since that's ultimately the driving force between those.

But trying to make a 'non-monetizable' internet is an oxymoron. If it has the ability to allow people to communicate, then it can be used to sell things.

You can't have an exchange of information without that information potentially containing garbage designed to make someone else money. You can only eliminate spam calls if you decide to get rid of the invention of the telephone.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-20 05:30:33+00:00
Medical evidence costs money. What would look convincing costs sums few can pay. If you use only that medicine you basically use only Big Pharma. And they are set to produce only specific type of medicine: something you have to buy, preferably for life. A breathing technique is not like that so it will never amass that much "proof".
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-20 05:32:20+00:00
I do agree that NPR is less neutral than PBS but if you want to hear what harder left political commentary sounds like, listen to an episode of Chapo Trap House. NPR isn’t sharply left— they’re very on the very mainstream end of liberal centrist with an occasional smattering of “I was a socialist for a semester in college” liberal in their editorial content— they’re just not shy about it.

PBS on the other hand— while obviously coming from an institution that exists because of things liberals value— clearly puts a lot of effort into representing most mainstream views charitably. It’s almost like if Reuters had a daily news hour.
by a2fz | 2025-12-20 05:32:27+00:00
Decentralisation.

Almost all the traffic on the internet goes to one of like, five companies. They're the ones psychologically experimenting on your kids and intentionally making their services addictive and mental illness-inducing. The other 99% of the internet is still mostly fine. If you simply blocked access to the top 1% most visited websites, I suspect that would solve most of the issues people see with "the internet".

Build wholesome small-scale services just for you and the people you care about. I run a little private photo-sharing/messaging service for me and my friends, along with other nice things like a Jellyfin server for media. There's just no incentive to introduce anything bad like you inevitably get with massive for-profit companies. And, these corners of the web are never realistically going to be subject to all the recent regulation like the Online Safety Act, if it's just a small invite-only space.

We shouldn't have tens of millions of people on one platform arguing over what sort of content should and shouldn't be allowed, ruled by big tech oligarchs. Build an area of your own that you can share with your friends!

Unfortunately I think the mobile app store model significantly increases the barriers to random people making their own things. You can teach a young teenager to make a little website that they can stick on GitHub Pages and show off to their friends in an afternoon. A mobile app? Not so much. Especially if it requires possibly buying a Mac to run XCode, and then an Apple Developer account (maybe not that expensive if you're in the tech industry, but if you're a kid who just wants to try it out and show stuff to your friends, it's a pretty big barrier + there's the id verification stuff). It's unsurprising that such a small amount of the software for iOS is free/open-source, compared to platforms where the costs to develop are lower.
by mmooss | 2025-12-20 05:32:36+00:00
> When a university program is not profitable they close the program.

That's moving the goalposts. Universities are not for-profit organizations (with a few exceptions).

By insisting on focusing on 'profit', the enemies of liberal education and liberalism can shut down much of it. Business school is of course profitable, and science has patents. What about the history department?
by dagmx | 2025-12-20 05:33:43+00:00
I’m very curious how Tim Sweeney will react to this. This is very much not the victory lap he was hoping to take (nor are the Apple rulings)

1. I think uptake of third party stores is quite low and there’s a strong incentive to stay available on the primary store

2. The App Store model has very much been that the paid apps are subsidizing the free ones. So it’s somewhat fair to charge for using the infrastructure, if you’re not contributing into the pot (and are siphoning away from it)

3. Those per install costs are brutal. I was thinking they’d do a dollar , but at almost $4, they’re outside what most people would spend. This is a strong way to keep F2P games from instituting external payment processing.
by Sytten | 2025-12-20 05:34:26+00:00
I have been banging on that drum for like 2 years now, glad the community has figured a way around it. Still utterly ridiculous that this is not native.

They even closed the immutable action issue as a "wont fix" cause you know when it's too hard we all know the best way is to give up. Not like there wasany major security incident this year due to this /s
by grog454 | 2025-12-20 05:35:06+00:00
> One way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.

I don't have much in the way of critique or judgement to offer on this political philosophy, just an observation: it sounds tribal or even pre-civilization. Out of curiosity I asked an LLM what present day countries most closely implement it. It came back with Somalia and a label: anarcho-libertarianism, with the caveat that it isn't an exact match. Historical examples were also interesting. I'm curious whether you think that's a good example or not.

If the world had more unsettled land I think your ideal would be a lot easier to implement. The U.S. was borne out of people fed up with their current situation (legal or otherwise) deciding to start something new. The fact that it's made up of 50 states, each with their own set of laws and relatively high internal mobility, suggests that its already a mild compromise away from pure democracy and toward your ideal.

To me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable, especially in the face of power imbalances and conflicting choices, and I suspect it would inevitably evolve into something else. As far as I can tell history supports that view.
by musicale | 2025-12-20 05:35:08+00:00
Graduate student violence is more common that it should be. For example, you hear about suicides every year.

I can't help but suspect that sometimes it may be related to graduate school itself, which can be stressful and unforgiving, with minimal support, and where supervisors often hold both academic power over their students' futures and financial power over their livelihoods. (And switching supervisors, even at the same institution, typically requires restarting research from scratch.) It can't be good when, after a lifetime of top-tier success, you are facing failure for the first time, with no preparation for handling it and no obvious path forward.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-20 05:35:50+00:00
Somewhat unrelated, but I just looked at the RustFS docs intro[1] after seeing it here. It has this statement:

> RustFS is a high-performance, distributed object storage software developed using Rust, the world's most popular memory-safe language.

I’m actually something of a Rust booster, and have used it professionally more than once (including working on a primarily Rust codebase for a while). But it’s hard to take a project’s docs seriously when it describes Rust as “the world’s most popular memory-safe language”. Java, JavaScript, Python, even C# - these all blow it out of the water in popularity and are unambiguously memory safe. I’ve had a lot more segfaults in Rust dependencies than I have in Java dependencies (though both are minuscule in comparison to e.g. C++ dependencies).

[1]: https://docs.rustfs.com/installation/
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-20 05:38:37+00:00
"one third the cost of AWS" is just AWS with savings plans enabled

> if you're [...] a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price

The AWS egress fee is $0.08/GB, whereas Hetzner has $0.00/GB. So, why pay $0.0225/GB?

These companies are the worst kind of scam. If you could really provide a product on par with the big boys but somehow lower than commodity prices, you'd corner the entire hosting/cloud market. But you can't, because they already made things hyper-efficient.

It's like trying to sell someone a $5 hamburger by advertising that some other restaurant sells a $15 hamburger. It turns out that other restaurant also sells a $5 hamburger, it's just not at the top of the menu, because cheap isn't always a sales leader.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-20 05:38:56+00:00
It is really difficult to ascertain motive and suspects when it’s a chronic homeless case getting murdered. It could be a thing from drugs to just looking at a crazy guy wrong one night, you literally have no leads unless there is a video or some other piece of hard evidence. It isn’t really about caring, judt that the environment they live in is so chaotic and uncontrolled that you’d have a suspect pool that is too big to reasonably investigate.
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-20 05:39:44+00:00
I think the only way to avoid surveillance is to not use their system that enables that.

No baseband modem, no arbitrary blobs, no OS that sends data. And should be obvious: no messenger apps that can't be verified.

The problem though is not your phone if you set it up right: it's your contacts. Your opsec is worth a shit if any (and I mean _any_) of your friends uses iOS or not Graphene or LineageOS. And this _any_ also means _any_ security bug that is unfixed which alone by itself is not guaranteeable.

Humans are bad at time awareness, and that's the strength of surveillance systems.

I'm currently working on porting Mobian (or Nix, haven't decided yet) with Plasma to the Hackberry Pi device. In my opinion that's the first untrackable device due to it relying solely on Wi-Fi. Combined with an Atheros Wi-Fi USB stick this has the potential to avoid surveillance altogether, well, given the right tools for enforced randomization, tunneling, scattering etc.

[1] (not ready yet) https://github.com/rogueberry

[2] (there's more alternative versions) https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-20 05:40:35+00:00
> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective

I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.)

It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent.

The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not a random act of cruelty, but a result of his heroism. And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.
by bitstrategist | 2025-12-20 05:41:01+00:00
heyy i am rachel Joseph , i am bit strategist A seasoned blockchain strategist with a decade of experience working across crypto markets, DeFi ecosystems, Web3 , and token-based business models. and my currently running bit strategist where i provide useful insights and analysis and prediction for crypto block chain and web 3 here's my acc twitter : https://x.com/bit_strategist/ cmc : https://coinmarketcap.com/community/profile/BitStrategist/
by orwin | 2025-12-20 05:41:53+00:00
Last time France allowed a huge merger/acquisition without asking to read the books, it was Alstom/GE, and GE books were so cooked it isn't even funny. Lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of the tech edge got lost, and now China is close to be a market leader.

So personally I think that finance guys should move their head from their asses and allow for inquiries, because their lies and deceit are damaging the society they live in. Maybe we should hold board members and C-suite all responsible when books are cooked, and maybe, when they're proven trustworthy, the red tape might decrease.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-12-20 05:41:57+00:00
Anyone know if it's possible to bandwidth-limit the sync operations? I'd love to set up garage instances across my families' houses to act as a distributed backup, but I don't want to hose their (or my) down/uplink during awake hours. Having redundant selfhosted S3like storage would solve many problems for me, but I really need that capability.
by barchar | 2025-12-20 05:42:38+00:00
I am aware reserving excess memory doesn't commit said memory. But it does reserve memory, which is what we were talking about. The point was that because you can have a lot of threads and restricting reserved stacks to some small value is annoying all systems overcommit stack. Windows initially commits some memory (reserving space in the page file/ram) for each but will dynamically commit more when you touch the guard. This is overcommit. Linux does similarly.

Idle threads do increase the amount of committed stack. Once their stack grows it stays grown, it's not common to unmap the end and shrink the stacks. In a system without overcommit these stacks will contribute to total reserved phys/swap in the child, though ofc the pages will be cow.

> Windows employs a distinct process/thread design, making the UNIX concept of a process foreign. Threads are the primary construct in Windows and the kernel is highly optimised for thread management rather than processes. Cygwin has outlined significant challenges in supporting fork(2) semantics on Windows and has extensively documented the associated difficulties. However, I am veering off-topic.

The nt kernel actually works similarly to Linux w.r.t. processes and threads. Internally they are the same thing. The userspace is what makes process creation slow. Actually thread creation is also much slower than on Linux, but it's better than processes. Defender also contributes to the problems here.

Windows can do cow mappings, fork might even be implementable with undocumented APIs. Exec is essentially impossible though. You can't change the identity of a process like that without changing the PID and handles.

Fun fact: the clone syscall will let you create a new task that both shares VM and keeps the same stack as the parent. Chaos results, but it is fun. You used to be able to share your PID with the parent too, which also caused much destruction.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-20 05:43:14+00:00
I’ve used RocksDB for this kind of thing in the past with good results. It’s very thorough from a data corruption detection/rollback perspective (this is naturally much easier to get right with LSMs than B+ trees). The Rust bindings are fine.

It’s worth noting too that B+ tree databases are not a fantastic match for ZFS - they usually require extra tuning (block sizes, other stuff like how WAL commits work) to get performance comparable to XFS/ext4. LSMs on the other hand naturally fit ZFS’s CoW internals like a glove.
by kmeisthax | 2025-12-20 05:44:49+00:00
I honestly don't understand the court rulings regarding all of this. Like, "you need to allow someone to install your software for free" is easy to understand. And "you can ban software that doesn't pay you your chosen cut" is also straightforward (even though I'm a dirty OS Commie that wants that shit for free). Both of those follow clear-cut legal principles based in antitrust and intellectual property law (respectively).

But it seems to me that the court is trying to enforce some kind of middle ground, which doesn't make sense. There's no legal principle one can use to curtail the power of an IP holder aside from mandating it be given away for free. Indeed, the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it. Apple was told "you can charge for your IP" and said "well all our fee is actually licensing, except for the 3% we pay per transaction". The courts rejected this, so... I mean, what does Apple do now? Keep whittling down the fee until the court finds it reasonable? That can't possibly be good faith compliance (as if Apple has ever complied in good faith lol).
by momoschili | 2025-12-20 05:45:12+00:00
Best is a bit of an overstatement. It's middle of the pack (performing akin to a 7700, but significantly worse than AMD Zen 5 and the Intel 13th/14th gen). I think the main thing is that it is still plenty capable in 2025 if you're running at a reasonable setting for most games.

Certainly there are situations where it is still among kings like MSFS, but definitely not a leader in most games.
by Skunkleton | 2025-12-20 05:47:59+00:00
Over commit is a design choice, and it is a design choice that is pretty core to Linux. Basic stuff like fork(), for example, gets wasteful when you don't over commit. Less obvious stuff like buffer caches also get less effective. There are certainly places where you would rather fail at allocation time, but that isn't everywhere and it doesn't belong as a default.
by mothballed | 2025-12-20 05:48:31+00:00
Yes it was sort of done in Somalia. That's how xeer law works -- there is a great book by Dutch lawyer Michael van Notten[0] that explains how polycentric law works in Somalia. It was found by most objective measures to be more stable and prosperous than democracy there [1] -- the researchers called it 'anarchy' but actually the period of 'anarchy' in somalia wasn't so much anarchy but decentralized legal system.

This allowed Somalia to be one of the few regions in sub-Saharan Africa that had a fairly smooth negotiation between interacting with various tribes while preventing any majority tribe from crushing the minority tribes. Tribes could still live in the same regions and practice their own laws while allowing feuds to be appealed up intertribal 'courts.' Thus even if it was just a guy and a camel and another guy and a camel, you still had law and you could even dish out the consequences yourself but still be held accountable up the chain.

I do agree the 50 states was an interesting and helpful idea. Under the constitutional form of the federal government, which narrowly restrains the federal government via the 10th amendment, there was a lot more room for states to 'compete' yet free travel and trade between the states.

You could probably get a lot closer to a hybrid of ideals by pulling the powers of the federal government way back into what the constitution authorizes. It wouldn't be polycentric law but it would make the monopoly far less onerous, as the cost of moving between jurisdictions is pretty cheap. There were a lot of challenges with racism and sexism in early USA but overall the restraints on the federal government were very good at giving the states a close approximation of polycentric law. Most of this started to get crushed in the very early 1900s and completely crushed by the 30s, although the civil war's elimination of any notion of a right to secession pretty much sealed the deal that the feds could gain an iron grip and the states couldn't check those powers by seceding so they had no real teeth to stop it.

>o me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable

Yes this is the story of the history of man. Hardly any theoretically pure form of governance has been able to exist in the history of man, let alone be stable in that form.

[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/67872711

[1] https://www.peterleeson.com/better_off_stateless.pdf
by Retr0id | 2025-12-20 05:49:53+00:00
There are also deflate-specific tricks you can use - just spam empty non-final blocks ad infinitum.

import zlib zlib.decompress(b"\x00\x00\x00\xff\xff" * 1000 + b"\x03\x00", wbits=-15)

If you want to spin more CPU, you'd probably want to define random huffman trees and then never use them.
by pjjpo | 2025-12-20 05:49:56+00:00
Had been running a coffee lake refresh 4 core for several years and as interested as I was in new platforms, especially AM5, the work of replacing motherboard never felt worth it. Now with the ram wars heating up, I just committed to that by picking up a used top-end 8 core coffee lake for $50 to cut a few seconds off my vulkan shader compiles with minimal replacement effort.
by mingus88 | 2025-12-20 05:50:40+00:00
I’m old enough to remember when blogs were bad news for the culture at the time, which was forums, IRC and static sites (you know, with under construction banners)

It seems the prevailing pattern is that removing barriers to entry means things get worse. In 2025 there are no barriers left and everyone is online all the time. It’s the end stage of the internet we loved.

In fact the barriers have been destroyed so utterly that we are awash in AI generated content now. The dead internet theory is real. Why are we still here?