MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by themafia | 2026-01-05 00:11:04+00:00
> Why do we even have linear physical and virtual addresses in the first place, when pretty much everything today is object-oriented?

Maybe it's because even though x86-64 is a 64-bit instruction set, all the CALL and JMP instructions still only support relative 8-bit or 32-bit offsets.

> Translating from linear virtual addresses to linear physical addresses is slow and complicated, because 64-bit can address a lot of memory.

Sure but spend some time thinking about how GOT and PLT aren't great solutions and can easily introduce their own set of security complications due to the above limitations.
by thundergolfer | 2026-01-05 00:12:00+00:00
This has been posted to HN about a half dozen times now and never taken off, so apologies but this needs an editorialized title.

"Dude comes out of nowhere, posts one of the most impressive tech demos/environments ever seen, refuses to elaborate and leaves"

"This is beyond insane. A lot of work must have went into making the underlying system, but the developer experience looks absolutely stellar. Taking deterministic execution to a whole new level."
by zahlman | 2026-01-05 00:12:55+00:00
> The dupe is what I linked. The orig is

Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me.

> The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe

IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert.
by Veserv | 2026-01-05 00:14:15+00:00
You are describing a memory protection unit (MPU). Those are common in low-resource contexts that are too simple to afford a full memory management unit (MMU). The problem with scaling that up, especially in general-purpose environments with dynamic process creation, is fragmentation of the shared address space.

You need a contiguous chunk for whatever object you are allocating. Other allocations fragment the address space, so there might be adequate space in total, but no individual contiguous chunk is large enough. You need to move around the backing storage, but then that makes your linear addresses non-stable. You solve that by adding a indirection layer mapping your "address", which is really a key/ID, to the backing storage. At that point you are basically back to a MMU.
by phil21 | 2026-01-05 00:15:03+00:00
I definitely agree that a big part of it is how immobile people are these days.

What I meant by hyperscheduled is that typically these activities revolve around setting a schedule in advance for everyone to commit to and plan around. This sort of thing simply does not work for me. At all. Maybe once every couple months or so.

For example my local makerspace requires at least days (if not weeks) advance booking for most tools. When I’m in a project mood or want to meet up with friends to hack on something it will be more of a “hey let’s go figure this out, meet you there in an hour!” situation.

What I personally miss are the social clubs/spaces - heck even neighborhood pubs - that used to exist as simple meeting points. Whoever was there happened to be there and you’d tend to slowly make more social connections over time. You show up when you felt like showing up, and probably find a handful of casual friends there no matter when you’d go.

There is an extreme dearth of such impromptu meeting points/gathering hubs at least where I live. If you want to meet with friends you typically are going to schedule it a few days out - even if it’s meeting up for drinks after work. With work from home that’s even far less of a thing since even coworkers are geographically dispersed vs. cutting out of work 30 minutes early to go grab drinks at the bar around the corner.

By the time I get through my exhausting work calendar each week all I want is some control over my day back - and let the day go by feels vs a calendar. This is the largest difference other than social media I’ve felt over the past few decades.
by conradbez | 2026-01-05 00:16:02+00:00
Thanks for checking out

Couple tips on audio front:

1. gemini has native audio understanding so I would recommend checking out uploading there and playing with the prompt to get it's output matching what you are after

2. for audio over 1-hour I found chucking it into 45min segments made it easier for Gemini to give back reliable timestamps

3. you do need to check the LLM outputs for valid timestamps - it can go off the rails

I'll add search with the existing vector embeddings used for recommendation system and audio waves to the feature list - great idea!
by ctoth | 2026-01-05 00:16:05+00:00
I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?

Consider "Uber, but for X"

This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.

I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???

Maybe something like (just spitballing)

The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?

Hmm

Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
by true_religion | 2026-01-05 00:16:33+00:00
I recently had the pleasure of reviewing some of my oldest production code from when I had first left college.

It worked, no issue there, but the amount of commentary I included definitely surprised me.

I guess I really needed the support structure of comments to keep my logic on track back then, whereas now even convoluted map-reduce one liners are things I see as just obvious literate programming.

I did go a long while in my career still writing code that way when I had to share it with people. I don’t think I stopped until the only people reading my code were senior engineers with way more qualifications than I had.

So, I wouldn’t say just from this code that the creator is an LLM.
by nl | 2026-01-05 00:17:04+00:00
Not quite the same thing, but I wrote my own agent (as in a replacement for Claude Code) that uses SSH for all operations. That means I can run a very minimal VM (like 4GB RAM Oracle free tier), run the agent locally, and the agent only operates on remote files.

The limitation is that some Typescript builds run out of RAM (even with swap) and I can't use playwright, but still it's been useful.

It's fun writing an agent, too.
by axm997 | 2026-01-05 00:17:26+00:00
To get YouTube videos offline on your phone/tablet for flights:

1. Create a playlist called “download” and add the videos you want.
2. Use yt-dlp (playlist URL) or this tool to pull that playlist to a folder.
3. Run the downloader on your Plex box on a schedule (cron/launchd).
4. Add that folder to Plex as a library.
5. Enable downloads for that library in Plex, then sync to your device.
by ghostpepper | 2026-01-05 00:18:12+00:00
I can sort of understand this. There are certain songs, eg. a song from my wedding, that hit like a (good) ton of bricks every time I hear them, but I wouldn't want to listen to it every day because I feel like I would have more and more banal experiences cumulatively associating with the song until the wedding feeling becomes just one of many and starts to lose its association.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-01-05 00:18:16+00:00
It's ultimately a trust issue and understanding motivations.

If I am taking to a salesperson, I understand their motivation is to sell me the product. I assume they know the product reasonably well but I also assume they have no interest in helping me find a good product. They want me to buy their product specifically and will not recommend a competitor. With any other professional, I also understand the likely motivations and how they should factor into my trust.

For more developed personal relationships of course there are people I know and trust. There are people I trust to have my best interests at heart. There are people I trust to be honest with me, to say unpleasant things if needed. This is also a gradient, someone I trust to give honest feedback on my code may not be the same person I trust to be honest about my personal qualities.

With LLMs, the issue is I don't understand how they work. Some people say nobody understands LLMs, but I certainly know I don't understand them in detail. The understanding I have isn't nearly enough for me to trust LLM responses to nontrivial questions.
by chunkmonke99 | 2026-01-05 00:19:14+00:00
I am not seeing any evidence of China "replacing teachers with AI" anywhere (did some googling/geminiing). Are there any sources on this? Seems like they are trying to introduce students to GenAI/ML principles and creating "AI literacy guidelines" without just "replacing teachers with AI". Their current guidelines outright prohibit the use of AI to replace teachers' responsibilities.

What is the point of asking it to teach you something to "understand it" if Claude can just do it for you? This is the real question everyone should be asking beyond just employment (employment will definitely change in the coming months, no doubt). I would pivot away from programming personally.
by Induane | 2026-01-05 00:19:41+00:00
On the topic of crime,no, I don't necessarily disagree there. I'm sure your statistical data is correct.

The way societal traumas manifest is tied to the types of trauma each demographic experienced and experiences (including their own self-perceptions of the ways in which they have been victimizes).

Poverty is often a stressor that squeezes out behavior we tend to identify as criminal, but it just a common factor in exposing the wounds.

Depending on the group in poverty, it may manifest as gun violence, physical violence without guns, domestic violence, theft, stimulant abuse, opiate abuse, and a myriad of other things.

i.e. if your cultural wound is to feel powerless, a gun may make you feel powerful; in charge.

If the wound is anxiety, you might choose to numb out.

Controlling for wealth only gets you so far because it is a single dimension.
by themafia | 2026-01-05 00:19:46+00:00
> That includes the discipline to be ruthless about exterminating complexity and saying no. That’s institutionally hard.

You need to make a product that out-performs your competitors. If their chip is faster then your work will be ignored regardless of how pure you managed to keep it.

> We may be past the window where rethinking architectural choices is possible.

I think your presumption that our architectures are extremely sub-optimal is wrong. They're exceptionally optimized. Just spend some time thinking about branch prediction and register renaming. It's a steep cliff for any new entrant. You not only have to produce something novel and worthwhile but you have to incorporate decades of deep knowledge into the core of your product, and you have to do all of that without introducing any hardware bugs.

You stand on the shoulders of giants and complain about the style of their footwear.
by william1872 | 2026-01-05 00:20:16+00:00
Creator here. Thanks to whoever submitted this!

C-Sentinel came from 30 years of UNIX systems work and one frustration: monitoring tools tell you what happened, not why it matters.

The idea is simple: capture a system "fingerprint" (processes, configs, network, audit events), let an LLM reason about the combination of signals, and surface non-obvious risks.

Some design choices that might interest HN:

Pure C99, 99KB binary - no runtime dependencies, runs anywhere
Privacy-first - usernames hashed, no PII in output
Auditd integration - who accessed /etc/shadow and why
"Why this score?" - explainable risk factors, not black box

Built as a wee project, launched on LinkedIn, somehow hit 23K impressions. Now here. Wild.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the C choices, or why I didn't use Rust (short answer: portability and simplicity).

Repo: github.com/williamofai/c-sentinel
Live demo: sentinel.speytech.com
by vineyardmike | 2026-01-05 00:22:03+00:00
> kidnapped by the US Army.... You just can't defend against everything

Of course not.

The litmus test IMO should be "what would a normal intelligent human do in this situation?"

A human would copy every file it could, maintaining a list of issues. When you were available to address concerns, it'd present the options to you. The human would give up if the US Army showed up, but a human would restart a TCP connection automatically without asking for permission again (or more analogously, redial a phone call). A human would save their work automatically, and when you showed back up, would find that work for you.

(In 2026, things like "retry" should be automatic outside some very specific limitations too, because of course a human would try again if they failed).
by Induane | 2026-01-05 00:22:51+00:00
(making two replies to separate topics) ... So as for switching topics... maybe? I meant that the comparison of black people moving from a ghetto isn't a good comparison just because they're literally moving away from a black community. They're not moving away from blackness, they're escaping a physical location tied to all kinds of negative risks.

I think I would call the act racist because what makes it racist is tied to intent. But one could argue otherwise I suppose. That's just my take.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-05 00:23:49+00:00
This... Actually might be the first AI product I'd ask my work to look into. I've had only one schematic reviewer out of the group catch that a part I'd re-used elsewhere in a design I inherited to reduce complexity + increase configurability actually didn't meet the voltage I needed for it. That example at the start is exactly what was needed and how it was found+fixed. Check the datasheets, check the schematic.

Only concern is the datasheet limit. We tend to have bigger designs than that. Also we're not using KiCAD but maybe it could export.
by nathanlied | 2026-01-05 00:23:50+00:00
As someone who suffered from deep depression, but never alcoholism - the way alcoholism is described by alcoholics always rings true with how I experience (and hear described by others) depression. I am no longer suffering from depression actively; the symptoms of it are essentially gone. But there's life events, certain situations, certain moments of deeper vulnerability, that feel like I might slip back into it.

Surprisingly enough, although there seem to be parallels with how people experience 'life after' both things, I find it curious that alcoholics I talk to often use the "caged animal" metaphor, whereas depressives tend to describe it more as walking "a tight rope" or "at the edge of an abyss" metaphor.
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-05 00:23:58+00:00
I fully agree with the article, and I have experienced the exact same pain with resin printing, which has been collecting dust since my first printing streak.

But I have to say that the comparison between the time investment in resin printing and preparing official Warhammer models for painting is very incomplete.

Ultimately, if everything goes well with the printing (and it usually does), the whole process will take around an hour of active time (preparing + post-processing) a plate of 20-30 models (however many you can fit). It will DEFINITELY take longer than this to get the same level of quality from plastic sprues. Removing the pieces from the sprues, removing the mold lines, filling the worst ones, etc. is extremely time consuming, and it is really the most boring part of the hobby.

It took me at least 20 hours to prepare around 100 models (small ones), when it would take only 4 or 5 when printing them. This time saving is time you can reinvest in painting.

I also still believe that at some point, with advancements in printers (which happen consistently year over year), but especially in resin formulations, we will reach a state where it will be safe (or at least much safer than it is now) to 3D print models using resin, at which point it will indeed have a large impact on Games Workshop's business.
by cryptica | 2026-01-05 00:24:26+00:00
Yet my comment which you responded to, which was Gemini-generated, got more responses and engagement than my handwritten one!

Yes, I actually did this as an experiment.

From my perspective they are both different ways to communicate the same idea (with different effectiveness, different level of detail, to different audiences). I don't regard my Gemini-generated one as being any less 'my own work' as the one I painstakingly wrote by hand.

It gets to the core of what writing should be about. It should be about substance, not form. LLMs are equalizers when it comes to form. Time to focus on substance now!
by gerdesj | 2026-01-05 00:24:56+00:00
I think we can agree that they are awful examples!

The problem is, that when you try to reduce an example of "bad" english to the bare bones (for clarity), you often end up with quite legitimate language.

Even in Latin the occasional transgression is sort of allowed: "Alea iacta est" - that is of course "idium". I studied Latin via "Civis Romanus", "mental" and "idiot" (Mentor and Idium).

An englander would of course say something far more erudite, than a course roman general, such as: "Fucking 'ave it, you twats".
by didgeoridoo | 2026-01-05 00:25:01+00:00
The problem is that critical theory at the foundational level (Adorno, Foucault, even Butler) is an extremely useful and coherent way of thinking about power and situated perspective.

Unfortunately the revolutionary praxis that emerged from it is what we typically see in the academy under the label of “critical theory”, which smuggles in a lot of “liberation” ethics under the guise of critique — so it’s no longer “this is how to think about power”, but rather “power is evil and should be destroyed, or even better given to me”. Foucault literally called these people “saviors” and he didn’t mean it nicely.

(It doesn’t help that this praxis is simplistic, ties into friend/enemy emotions, and gives people “something to fight for” in an era where meaning is hard to come by.)

No matter how contaminated the bathwater, though, I think the baby is probably worth saving.
by lrvick | 2026-01-05 00:25:03+00:00
When a kid is old enough to pay for their own apartment and bills and has money left over for a smartphone, drugs, alcohol, or other poisons, that will be their choice to make.

Until then, they are not an independent adult, and it is absolutely the responsibility of a parent to keep them away from poison they are clearly not emotionally mature enough to regulate yet.

> she’s currently uninterested in and actively hostile to understanding anything about AI architecture or underlying systems.

Same answer. Most adults cannot moderate proprietary social media algorithms and AI tech so why would we expect a teen to?

When one permits kids to access to things literally purpose built to ensure humans think less, it should not be surprising when they think less.

Burn ChatGPT and Tiktok with fire. Every home would be better off banning things like these.
by rasz | 2026-01-05 00:25:51+00:00
>Why is this a problem now if it wasn’t in the 90s?

I dont think his answer is correct. Real reason is there was no stupid bitrates and unrealistic bit depths craze back then. /insert mandatory Monty Montgomery from xiph explaining how A/D D/A and hearing works.

>hardware that hit these sample rates and bit depths was mostly used by professionals

professionals used Firewire audio interfaces, USB latency wasnt good enough
by tehlike | 2026-01-05 00:26:00+00:00
Yeah - I don't have macs, but i use older Lenovo tinys. They run at around 10watts, and plenty of compute for what i need.

I also have a monster epyc 7200p, a 1G poe switch, a 56G mellanox optics switch, another server with HBA connected to a DS4246.

Everything I absolutely positively need.
by Rapzid | 2026-01-05 00:26:35+00:00
SNAT is often a feature built on a network stack that also provides other "firewall" functionalities like filtering packets. Configuring SNAT is configuring a firewall? Or is only dropping packets a firewall? Or does the device need "firewall" printed on it? Does a device that has "firewall" printed on it still count as a firewall if it's not configured to filter packets? What type of filtering makes it a firewall? If an SNAT implementation drops packets is it a firewall? Is a linux/windows/bsd box with multiple interfaces a firewall? What if I slap "firewall" label on the box; a firewall now?

SNAT can be used to mask source IP and that can absolutely be utilized strategically as a layer of "security".
by ImPleadThe5th | 2026-01-05 00:27:01+00:00
I enjoy when:
Things are simple.
Things are a complicated, but I can learn something useful.

I do not enjoy when:
Things are arbitrarily complicated.
Things are a complicated, but I'm just using AI to blindly get something done instead of learning.
Things are arbitrarily complicated and not incentivized to improve because now "everyone can just use AI"

It feels like instead of all stepping back and saying "we need to simplify things" we've doubled down on abstraction _again_
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-05 00:27:20+00:00
I have my very fast macbook pro at my desk in my office, and I use tmux and tailscale and git worktrees and I’ve built a notification setup like this author.

Thanks to tailscale and ssh I can vibecode on the go from my phone with this setup.

While it’s great to leave a task running, no matter what I do I can’t achieve the type of high quality work on the go that I can when I’m sitting at my desk.

For me working on a full SaaS.. I just can’t do quality work on my phone.

The only way I can do quality work is to sit at my desk where I’m focused on the work. To play with the result of a prompt, take copious notes, feed them back to the agent, not ship until the thing is polished to a shine. To feature flag the changes, review all code in excruciating detail as though it was written by a dyslexic intern, add all the metrics and logs one can think of (VictoriaMetrics), add user-behavior logging (Amplitude/Posthog) and monitor the thing like your livelihood depends on it. Because it’s a product and you have pride in your work.

All of that needs loads of screen real estate and a keyboard.

So I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-05 00:27:24+00:00
I still have one too! A 712/80 IIRC. Pretty light box but the good thing is that it's physically light as well. It doesn't even have a CPU cooler and the HDD bracket is made of styrofoam lol. But it still works.

I also still have a 68000 HPUX box too!