MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mywittyname | 2026-01-30 04:24:24+00:00
We had clusters of them in university too.

If all you needed to do was vector math, a dedicated vector processor with eight cores that are capable of running as fast as the extremely wide bus could feed them with data is the way to do it. You couldn't buy anything close to it's capabilities (for that specific task) for the money.

I remember the course we used them in being hard as hell, and the professor didn't really have any projects prepared that would really push the system.
by vimoses | 2026-01-30 04:25:38+00:00
> This might be a nitpick, but I could probably only count 5-10 SNES games that would be considered 10/10 IMO
firstly, this seems like a pretty flawed standard for evaluating a consoles library, no?
but secondly, "5-10 10/10"s seems like a pretty good amount for any consoles library anyways, unless you value a "10/10" less than i guess i would
by deaux | 2026-01-30 04:25:57+00:00
This comment instantly set off my LLM alarm bells. Went into the profile, and guess what: next comment (not a one-liner) [0] on a completely different topic was posted 35 seconds later. And includes the classic "aren't just A. They're B.".

Why are you doing this? Karma? 8 years old account and first post 3 days ago is a Show HN shilling your "AI agent" SaaS with a boatload of fake comments? [1]

Pinging tomhow

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820417

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782579
by rdtsc | 2026-01-30 04:26:35+00:00
You could first measure the perf impact of the fence instruction and then subtract that out? But yeah I guess it may not matter much for quick and dirty calibration loop.

I found somewhere (https://aloiskraus.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/why-skylakex-cpu...) that the pause instruction had this wild cycle difference between different CPU and it caused some grief, I had no idea. I stopped doing low level coding a while back.
by bhk | 2026-01-30 04:26:44+00:00
Hold on there. High fiber consumption increases the excretion of cholesterol, by reducing the reabsorption of the cholesterol in bile. The liver produces cholesterol for bile, which mixes with our food in the duodenum and aids absorption of fats. Most of this cholesterol is then re-absorbed by the small intestines. By increasing bulk, fiber reduces the amount that is re-absorbed.

Effects on but biome are real too, and apparently beneficial, and may factor in, but it isn't the only (or necessarily the primary) mechanism for reducing serum cholesterol.
by tombert | 2026-01-30 04:27:04+00:00
I’ve been playing with it on an old laptop. It took me a bit to “get it”, but once the “everything exposes filesystems” thing clicked in my brain, I grew to really like it. I would love to try daily driving 9Front but the lack of a modern browser and video acceleration is a pretty hard blocker.

I still would like to make a server with it though. Maybe that would be a good weekend project.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-30 04:28:04+00:00
I agree that in our economic system the value of efficiency gains accrue to scarce assets. However I don't agree this happens because of class warfare. It happens because the supply of productivity increases afforded by technology is growing faster than the supply of scarce assets (e.g. housing). Each additional unit of technology enabled productivity dilutes the value of some labor, but doesn't dilute the vale of scarce assets (oversimplified).

People stuck on the wrong side of this dynamic can get left behind and consider themselves a disadvantaged class, but that's an effect, not a cause, and treating it like a cause doesn't help solve the problem.
by pabs3 | 2026-01-30 04:28:40+00:00
debian.net is a domain for experimental services not run by the core Debian sysadmins on the computers they manage, usually by other Debian members and associated folks. My memory is telling me there was some sort of disruption to the debian.net service, and then Peter Palfrader of the Debian sysadmin team took on the project of converting it to an official service. You may be able to find some more info in old lists.debian.org mailing list archives.
by snek_case | 2026-01-30 04:29:21+00:00
Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit).

The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.
by josephg | 2026-01-30 04:29:51+00:00
I'm not sure I buy this from a technical perspective. Rust already meets almost all of the criteria laid out at the end of this post. By all means keep using C if you like it, but the rust team has done an excellent job over the last few years addressing these issues.

> - Rust needs to mature a little more, stop changing so fast, and move further toward being old and boring.

Rust moves at a pretty glacial pace these days. Slower than C++ for sure. There haven't been any big, significant changes to the language since async. Code that compiles today should compile indefinitely. (And the rust compiler authors check this on every release, by recompiling basically everything in crates.io to make sure.)

> - Rust needs to demonstrate that it can be used to create general-purpose libraries that are callable from all other programming languages.

Rust matches C in this regard. You can import & export C functions from rust very easily. The consumer of the foreign function interface have no idea they're calling rust and not C.

> - Rust needs to demonstrate that it can produce object code that works on obscure embedded devices, including devices that lack an operating system.

Rust works pretty well on raw / embedded hardware via #[no_std]. There's a few obscure architectures supported by gcc and not llvm (and by extension rust). But it generally works great. I'd love to know what the real blocker platforms are (if any).

> - Rust needs to pick up the necessary tooling that enables one to do 100% branch coverage testing of the compiled binaries.

Uh, I think this is possible today? Rustrover (intellij) can certainly produce coverage reports. This doesn't feel out of reach.

> - Rust needs a mechanism to recover gracefully from OOM errors.

True. You can override the global allocator for a program and use that to detect OOM. But recovering from OOM in general is tricky. I personally wish rust's handling of allocators looked more like zig.

> - Rust needs to demonstrate that it can do the kinds of work that C does in SQLite without a significant speed penalty.

Rust and C are pretty much even when it comes to performance. Rust binaries are often a bit bigger though.
by wisemang | 2026-01-30 04:30:05+00:00
Bah. I love putting a layer of frozen blueberries at the bottom of the bowl then layering on piping hot steel cut oats to thaw and warm them up. You’re probably right that I shouldn’t add dried cranberries and a tiny drizzle of maple syrup on top (occasionally with thinly sliced bananas) but I’m happy enough to be wrong about it. I also skip the milk.
by lvturner | 2026-01-30 04:30:11+00:00
I've been off and on them for years, usually my doctors seem to prefer if I'm off them and indeed treat them more as short term "stabilizers" so that my brain has a bit more space to deal with things.

This has been true across two countries (Scotland, Hong Kong) and multiple doctors, with a third country's (China) doctor suggesting I try out sleeping tablets for a few weeks - and only giving me a very limited supply of them - to try out instead.

I wonder if the "here take these" is a predominantly American phenomenon due to the weird incentives around health care costs (I'm being genuine here - maybe it's predominant in other countries too, I honestly don't know!)
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-30 04:31:49+00:00
If your Bible is your objective standard, then you have to admit it frames slavery as moral, or you're breaking one of the 10 commandments by bearing false witness.

Your Bible has passages about dashing infants against rocks (Psalm 137:9) and killing children for mocking a prophet (2 Kings 2:23-24). Is that better or worse than raping or enslaving them?

So do you also agree with Ye that slavery "sounds like a choice", and that Hitler is admirable?

Of your New Testament retro-conned all that inconvenient slavery condoning on your Old Testament, then you admit morality changes over time and is relative. Case closed.

Moral Disclaimer: I love babies! I just can't eat a whole one. ;)
by bsder | 2026-01-30 04:31:49+00:00
The general public, as a group, cannot identify quackery. People died from bleach and horse dewormer to prove this. The continuing career of Mehmet Oz also demonstrates this.

There will always be more malevolent actors looking to take advantage of people than there are benevolent actors able to protect them. Standard rules and laws are an attempt to at least protect the majority of the people the majority of the time. Like anything, rules are never perfect, and you have to weigh the limitations against with the benefits.

As someone who has literally trawled the cancer trial databases for people, lack of trials is not the main problem--finding the appropriate trials, on the other hand, is terribly difficult.

If you really want to help people, apply AI to help common people search all the public cancer trial filings to connect up the patients and the doctors. That would do far more good, far faster than changing laws and rules around last ditch experimental treatments. You won't become rich, but you'll help medical science a lot, and you might even save a life here or there.
by iterance | 2026-01-30 04:32:15+00:00
If I hire an engineer and that engineer authorizes an "agent" to take an action, if that "agentic action" then causes an incident, guess whose door I'm knocking on?

Engineers are accountable for the actions they authorize. Simple as that. The agent can do nothing unless the engineer sais it can. If the engineer doesn't feel they have control over what the agent can or cannot do, under no circumstances should it be authorized. To do so would be alarmingly negligent.

This extends to products. If I buy a product from a vendor and that product behaves in an unexpected and harmful manner, I expect that vendor to own it. I don't expect error-free work, yet nevertheless "our AI behaved unexpectedly" is not a deflection, nor is it satisfactory when presented as a root cause.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-30 04:34:17+00:00
"My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it)."

How much is "a lot of money"? Not picking on you, happy to let you want what you want, but people often seem to mention laundry, which mystifies me.

I am an adult male in the US. I do not need to dress for work in any way I would not dress anyway. Basically, I do two loads of laundry a week, one for clothes, one for towels and bedding.

This requires about one hour of actual work per week. More if we counted "waiting for the washing machine" and "waiting for the dryer" as work, but I don't.

How much would I pay to remove this hour a week of (really easy) work from my life? Almost nothing. I would not, for example, pay someone $50 to come to my house and do it for me. It's not a problem and doesn't need a solution.

So how much would you really pay for a robot that did your laundry, washed your dishes, and did other "dumb menial labor"?
by wwwtyro | 2026-01-30 04:34:24+00:00
My understanding is that:

1. When someone consumes fat, bile is released into the gut.

2. Oatmeal (and other soluble fibers like psyllium husk) capture this bile and it is excreted in stool.

3. In order to create the bile, the liver needs LDL. Because the LDL it used to create the bile was lost when it was captured, it exposes more LDL receptors and pulls LDL out of the bloodstream, thereby lowering LDL levels.

It seems to me that in order to maximize the effectiveness of this LDL-lowering approach, one must not simply consume psyllium or oatmeal, but rather consume them in conjunction with fat. Not saturated fat, obviously, which raises LDL, but perhaps unsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. My expectation is that this would trigger the bile secretion required in order to actually sequester it.
by amluto | 2026-01-30 04:34:57+00:00
Waymo’s performance, once the pedestrian was revealed, sounds pretty good. But is 17mph a safe speed at an active school dropoff area? I admit that I don’t think I ever personally pay attention to the speedometer in such a place, but 17mph seems excessive even for an ordinary parking lot.

I wonder whether Waymo’s model notices that small children are present or likely to be present and that it should leave extra margin for error.

(My general impression observing Waymo vehicles is that they’ve gone from being obnoxiously cautious to often rather aggressive.)
by wgjordan | 2026-01-30 04:35:20+00:00
It's well known that an oatmeal diet lowers cholesterol (the article itself cites a 1907 'oat cure' in its intro). The new finding here is insight into the exact mechanism- a short-term, high-dose oatmeal diet (300g/day for two days) had significantly greater LDL-lowering effect than a medium-term, moderate-dose oatmeal diet (80g/day for six weeks), and they associated the difference with increases in several plasma phenolic compounds triggered by specific changes in the gut microbiome.
by rdtsc | 2026-01-30 04:35:26+00:00
Well at that point we might as well say it's gremlins that you summoned, so who knows, there are no laws about gremlins hot-wiring cars. If you summoned them, are they _your_ gremlins, or do they have their own agency. How guilty are you, really... At some point it becomes a bit silly to go into what-if scenarios, it helps to look at exact cases.
by ares623 | 2026-01-30 04:35:39+00:00
Value is up to the receiver, not the giver.

The purse can be meaningful because of the implication that you remembered a small detail for an extended period of time. “Aww you remembered”. The AI equivalent would be to ask your personal assistant to find the purse for you and you keep it hidden for an extended period to pretend you remembered.

In both cases your mom will be touched by the gesture.
by throwaway173738 | 2026-01-30 04:35:42+00:00
Yeah for reference 54 grams is about 200 kcal, so this is 1200 kcal or so of just oats. That leaves 600-800 kcal for other food if you’re targeting 1800-2000 kcal/day which is a reasonable calorie restriction. So this isn’t really a sustainable diet in the long term.
by thundergolfer | 2026-01-30 04:36:48+00:00
Whether Nystrom realizes it or not, and I think he does, this piece is shot through with Marxist thinking on use value, exchange value, socially necessary labour time, and the general structure of capital social relations.

Capitalism has been a fantastically productive system that has also produced a great deal of labour alienation. Nystrom has a deep need to labour for those he cares about, he needs to make the scarf, slowly and badly, for his grandmother.

But the socially necessary amount of labour to make a scarf is now extremely small, and so Nystrom labours in software to earn a higher wage.

The wage doesn't fulfil him so much, because it's for labour power directed for the purpose of value valorization (aka. profit), not to help those he cares about.

He's skilled and lucky, so he has plenty of excess after labouring to poorly make a scarf. But if he does not already have plenty of capital, he has to work, and his capital has to be put to work too, on things other than badly making scarves, lest it too whither away.
by reactordev | 2026-01-30 04:38:19+00:00
This is why on Rock Band, you had to “calibrate your TV” because of input and audio lag from when the game generated it.

As a game dev, this is true. Old hardware input was very fast whereas today it’s software and it’s 50ms give or take. Add more milliseconds for your TV to refresh. It was common to see 150-250ms lag.
by grogenaut | 2026-01-30 04:38:47+00:00
I always bring a hoodie or jacket on the plane with me and wear pants when flying even when it's warm (it's air-conditioned in airports and planes) so I have pads and warmth when needed. It's often looped through my backpack arm strap. Also earplugs and noise canceling headphones/earbuds. My backpack has a nice pad in the back. He'd have been infinitely more comfortable if he had any of these things. And hell a book or something.

With the armrests you can kinda double wedge yourself on them. I got 2 decent hours in the lima airport doing this. They had the similar double seat with no armrest setup.

I got to ORD at 4am for a 7am flight and purposfully fell asleep on the ground in front of the check in desk figuring they'd wake me up. Eventually they did. The attendant woke me up and said "do you happen to be on this flight". I pointed at the first class ticket hanging out of my shirt pocket. "Good thing I checked we're closing the door now". I was like "I figured you'd maybe wake up the person in front of the desk I've been up for 38 hours." "oh you were sleeping I didn't want to bother you".

The entire flight had boarded and just walked around me. I was OUT.

Le Sigh.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-30 04:38:51+00:00
Denver! The relaxation lounges 1 floor above the actual concourses! Actual fully length loungers, pod chairs and more. Signs calling for silence or at least deep quiet.

The biggest problem? You might fall so deeply asleep you miss your actual flight, no matter how much it is delayed by.

Every airport should have these.
by tombert | 2026-01-30 04:40:23+00:00
Many years ago, I had to fly from Atlanta back home, with a red-eye flight at midnight.

I normally can’t sleep on planes, but I did have lounge access and the lounge offered unlimited whiskey shots, and it’s not like I had to work the next day, so my brilliant idea was that I would get drunk enough so that I could sleep on the plane.

By 11:45pm I am pretty toasted, so I make my way to the gate. About a minute after I arrive, they make an announcement that my flight has been delayed nine hours, so not until 9am the next morning. So here I am, with a backpack, getting progressively drunker as more alcohol is being digested in my gut, and having no idea what to do for the next nine hours.

All the lounges were closed, and I was uncomfortable sleeping in public because I was afraid someone would steal my laptop out of my bag, so for the next nine hours, I drunkenly cabotaged the entire Atlanta airport I don’t know how many times. I would walk around one terminal, then get on the little underground train and do it again, repeated for the next nine hours, with a 45 minute break to puke.

I don’t drink at all anymore and that event is a not-insignificant reason as to why.
by rasz | 2026-01-30 04:40:36+00:00
Im so happy for Polpo. Started as a janky Raspberry Pi 3 connected with a ribbon cable to ISA https://github.com/polpo/pigus, then PicoGUS https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=88440, and now its Polpotronics, a real business making great stuff for retro enthusiasts.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-30 04:40:50+00:00
I slept "overnight" (02:00 - 04:30) in the new Berlin (BER) airport a couple of years ago. Not only are the concourses completely closed to passengers overnight, but the floor in the check-in area (the only area that is open) is made of terrazzo. Your hoodie and pants would make essentially no difference on this surface. Certainly not if you were 60 years old :)
by kj4211cash | 2026-01-30 04:41:11+00:00
But we have no way of knowing whether robotaxis are safer. See, for example, the arguments raised here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-06/are-auton...

We can't blindly trust Waymo's PR releases or apples-to-oranges comparisons. That's why the bar is higher.
by rainonmoon | 2026-01-30 04:41:41+00:00
Those were always my favourite episodes too! Enough to get into a career doing social engineering and physical intrusions. It's very tense! You're right to think it's insane; the nature of these jobs is that unlike most kinds of pentesting, very few people are aware that a test is occurring. We will sometimes bring a fake "get out of jail free" card to test the very thing you mention, whether people will actually verify out of band. I've been on jobs where we've been called out and they've checked our fake details and you see people's whole body language change in those moments between them figuring out you're not who you say you are and figuring out what they're willing to do about it. You absolutely see the thought "Do I need to hurt these guys? Are they going to hurt me?" go through someone's mind. It's never come to anything truly harrowing in my experience, professionalism and good communication skills go a long way, but they also can only go so far. It's much more common to have zero issues though, because as you can surmise, social engineering is extremely effective, so getting challenged at all is pretty rare.
by JBlue42 | 2026-01-30 04:42:21+00:00
>Though I suppose an investigation into the matter would arguably have to look at whether a competent human driver would be driving at 17mph (27km/h) under those circumstances to begin with, rather than just comparing the relative reaction speeds, taking the hazardous situation for granted.

Sure but also throw in whether that driver is staring at their phone, distracting by something else, etc. I have been a skeptic of all this stuff for a while but riding in a Waymo in heavy fog changed my mind when questioning how well I or another driver would've done at that time of day and with those conditions.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-30 04:43:16+00:00
If you have something to say, say it. People don’t have the time to go investigate, but maybe you have something interesting to claim with a source.

For all I know you found a way to tie some software to a politician you want me to hate, or the guy that wrote it donated to $50 to a cause you don’t like, or they murdered beagle puppies in some horrendous way. Just spit it out.
by snek_case | 2026-01-30 04:44:37+00:00
There is the Model YL now in China, which is longer and has 3 rows of seats. Apparently they're also about to release a Model YL+.

Now that they are going away, there's maybe an opportunity to produce some more premium 3/Y models. Before now, they couldn't make the 3/Y too premium because they had to distinguish them from the S/X and keep them in a distinct price bracket.
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-30 04:44:57+00:00
I really miss classic X11 virtual panning desktops where I can get more real estate just by scrolling offscreen. I have a cyberdeck with a 1080x480 screen, and the vertical resolution is just too low to be able to display most dialogue boxes; if I could just have panning in Wayland it would be fantastic, as the guts are an RPi 5 and X11 is slow as molasses on there due to lack of classic 2D acceleration primitives.