MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2026-02-03 05:25:36+00:00
> Coherence requires 2 opposing forces

This seems very basic to any kind of information processing beyond straight shot predictable transforms.

Expansion and reduction of possibilities, branches, scope, etc.

Biological and artificial neural networks converging into multiple signals, that are reduced by competition between them.

Scientific theorizing, followed by experimental testing.

Evolutionary genetic recombination and mutation, winnowed back by resource competition.

Generation, reduction, repeat.

In a continually coordinated sense too. Many of our systems work best by encouraging simultaneous cooperation and competition.

Control systems command signal proportional to demand, vs. continually reverse-acting error feedback.
by Fiveplus | 2026-02-03 05:25:48+00:00
The persistence strategy described here (mount -t msdos -o rw /dev/fd0 /mnt) combined with a bind mount to home is a nice clever touch for saving space.

I don't know if that's also true for data integrity on physical magnetic media. FAT12 is not a journaling filesystem. On a modern drive, a crash during a write is at best, annoying while on a 3.5" floppy with a 33mhz CPU, a write operation blocks for a perceptible amount of time. If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone. The article mentions sync, but sync on a floppy drive is an agonizingly slow operation that users might interrupt.

Given the 253KiB free space constraint, I wonder if a better approach would be treating the free space as a raw block device or a tiny appended partition using a log-structured filesystem designed for slow media (like a stripped down JFFS2 or something), though that might require too many kernel modules.

Has anyone out there experimented with appending a tar archive to the end of the initramfs image inplace for persistence, rather than mounting the raw FAT filesystem? It might be safer to serialize writes only on shutdown, would love more thoughts on this.
by phatskat | 2026-02-03 05:27:06+00:00
I honestly can’t recall how I even found SoftICE, but my uncle gave me a floppy with LJPEGViewer and the license was written on the disk. Eventually I lost the original but I’ll be dammed if I’m going to use Paint. I fired up SoftICE, managed to break before the “invalid key” dialog, and just did a cute little “return true” and that was that
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-03 05:27:21+00:00
I hope someone can explain the sentiment on HN to me. I don't get it, why is this popular?

I want to know how many PRs a project is getting, but more than that how receptive the maintainers are. Issues don't tell the whole picture, because work gets backlogged, and you can't expect people doing this for free to have an SLA or something. but PRs.. the work is ideally at least mostly done.

There is the one project for example, very popular in the industry it's used in. There is a specific use-case that I run into repeatedly, that it fails at. The project has lots of open issues (understandably), and there are multiple PRs to address that, but the maintainers give no good reason for not accepting it. I've been using some random guy's branch (who isn't even keeping up with the latest releases and backporting) for many years now, waiting for the maintainers to either reject it or accept the PR. Lots of people upvote, comment, and beg.

I want to see how maintainers handle that. This is really bad. I'd prefer if they stopped reporting of issues instead of PRs. Issues is providing support, PRs let other people who fixed something or added a feature attempt to contribute.

You can't just "fork it", that means you have to be the maintainer now. And how will people even find your "fork" which may have fixed things? I'd like to be able to at least find open and unmerged forks with a fix in place I could apply, even if the maintainer never got around to it.

Turning PRs off is the software equivalent of hardware makers turning off support for aftermarket parts.

Honestly, if you don't like PRs, ignore them like many already do. Does it look bad when you do that? Yes. As it should! Don't hide away from your preferences, own it. Let other people get access to fixes you either have no time to get to, or unwilling to implement.

Just the discussions alone on security related issues (or PRs as in this case) is telling sometimes.
by tombert | 2026-02-03 05:27:42+00:00
Yeah, silly as it is, I guess it didn't even occur to me that sudo had a developer or maintainer, or was even a "program"; to me it has been one of those things that has and always will exist and I had just assumed it evolved and came about alongside Cro-Magnon man.

But of course, that's silly. Of every piece of software has to be written. I should probably throw the guy a few bucks, considering his code runs in basically every big script on the planet.
by _fizz_buzz_ | 2026-02-03 05:28:18+00:00
> Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space.

LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality.
- sending raw materials up there
- service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines
- sending stuff back down

Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.
by sockbot | 2026-02-03 05:28:20+00:00
Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software.

The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.

So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.
by latchkey | 2026-02-03 05:28:24+00:00
I've had these same opinions for years. It is an under appreciated social network of some of the top minds and quality comments.

I've been collecting a long list of ideas on what you're describing. Thanks to AI encouraging me to really dive in and use it, I've been quietly working on something for what you're describing.

First step is to improve the HN UX a tiny bit and flesh out a framework for how to code it. Next will add some interesting social features I've been brewing on. Why can't I easily follow someone?

Open source. GPLv3. It isn't perfect, but this is not AI vibe slop, and there are lots of tests from day one. I want to make this sustainable over a long period of time and become genuinely useful to a community that I've gotten a lot out of.

Note, the chrome store is really slow at getting releases out (or I'm too fast), best to install from github releases. It is also buggy and I'm fixing and improving things as fast as I can.

https://orangejuiceextension.github.io/
by nkozyra | 2026-02-03 05:28:50+00:00
I think there's a scenario where that's true: one where the head of your company is collaborative and deferential to expertise.

There's another scenario, though: one where the head of your company is a bull in a China shop, whose successes have come almost exclusively through a Barnum-esque scheme of cascading bravado and marketing genius without much expertise, but a marvelous ability to sell any idea purely via unearned gravitas.

The former is less sexy: I've compiled loads of talented people, and we're going to solve very hard problems, even some that seem impossible.

The latter is very sexy: I'm a genius and we're going to accomplish the impossible in one year via sheer force of my grand will. And even if it doesn't actually happen, I'll sell you on the next vision.
by rainprincess | 2026-02-03 05:29:08+00:00
I feel like it's because of the way they are internally structured. They have some people who are machine learning trained on post-training, and other people who have nice product management resumes. The post-training people want more compute, well-formatted data, honestly more ways to try whatever technique of reinforcement learning they want.

The product people are building things, but OpenAI has literally been throwing stuff at the wall and it hasn't been sticking. They seem to be behind in terms of everything user interface. Canvas came after Anthropic had artifacts. Codex came after Anthropic had Claude Code.

Some of their researchers (okay one) have (has) stated they believe in interface work. That's because GUIs help engage the person beyond thought, and help the person work with more complexity (perception, physics, form, 3D). But they're playing catchup, or they're trying to incubate wins in science / math.
by shiroiuma | 2026-02-03 05:29:25+00:00
>I think someone should try banning absolutely everything but emergency vehicles. No cars, no taxis, no vans, no trucks. Only cargo bikes, hand carts and maybe palanquins.

This is honestly crazy. No modern city in the world could function this way. How is cargo going to get moved around? You can't stock a supermarket with cargo bikes, and even in a dense, walkable city like Tokyo where I live, lots of cargo needs to be moved around, especially to stores, but also for cargo deliveries to other businesses and homes. And with no trucks or vans, how do you do stuff like building construction and repair?

Sure, you could get rid of private cars, and even taxis, and reduce 75-95% of the traffic on the roads, then make the roads narrower, add bike lanes, etc., but you can't just keep out cargo vehicles. No one's going to build a skyscraper or large apartment building using cargo bikes and hand carts.
by gligierko | 2026-02-03 05:30:13+00:00
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Gartner hype cycles describe an exception, not a rule
by cadabrabra | 2026-02-03 05:30:39+00:00
People believe in them as a rule because they cherry pick the few cycles that conform and ignore the massive number of cycles that don’t conform. Gartner hype cycles don’t describe every hype cycle. They describe a miraculously small number of them, the ones that actually bore some fruit. But as usual, give a concept a fancy name and people will start believing in it as though it were some law of nature. In reality, it describes an exception to the actual law of nature. There are a handful of technologies that ever passed the “trough of disillusionment.”
by cubefox | 2026-02-03 05:30:43+00:00
> It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content.

Twitter also has more (not total, but more) free speech than any other social networking site. For example, you are allowed to discuss empirical research on race, crime and IQ. That would get you rate limited or banned quickly on other websites, including HN.
by deathanatos | 2026-02-03 05:30:59+00:00
> Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai so surely they can mitigate anything anyone can throw at them.

This statement makes me think you're misunderstanding the person above you.

They're saying this blog author, gyrovague, is doxing¹ Archive.is. I am wondering if you are misreading that as DoSing. To "dox" is to reveal the identity of, typically for purposes of harassment. To "DoS" is to spam with requests. Archive.is is not being spammed with requests, nor do I see anyone here suggesting they are except here: "resources and ASN's … mitigate anything anyone can throw at them" … that seems to indicate you're (mis)reading it as "DoS"?

(I.e., gyrovague is doxing the Archive.today owner¹. Archive.today is, in return, DoSing gyrovague.)

(¹I'm not trying to comment on whether that term is being appropriately applied here, or not.)
by caseysoftware | 2026-02-03 05:31:15+00:00
I did that for a long time. My favorite part is when they say "Do you have any sore or sensitive areas?"

I always say "my penis" and they say "uh.. well.. I'm not going to touch that"

Me: "When you slide your hand up until you meet resistance? That resistance is my penis. You're going to touch my penis and it's a sensitive area."
by aaronharnly | 2026-02-03 05:31:15+00:00
I concur it’s not necessarily totally absurd — but when you consider that such contraptions require large — very large! — receiving arrays to be built on the ground, it’s hard to avoid concluding that building gigantic photovoltaic arrays in, say Arizona (for the US) along with batteries for overnight buffering and transmission lines would still be massively more efficient.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-03 05:31:40+00:00
Mine are in climate zone 6. They're only a couple years old. The coldest temperatures I've run them at so far are -21°F and they kept the house adequately unfrozen. They'll maintain a COP of 2 down to 5°F IIRC. The hot water heater is an 80gal Rheem heat pump unit. No complaints there either. It would be pretty great to have some thermal storage though, temperatures in the dead of winter here are usually above 5°F during the day but drop well below zero at night. Blasting the heat pumps during the day to bank heat for overnight would be far more efficient.
by ralfd | 2026-02-03 05:32:11+00:00
> “Vaguely accurate” does not mean “untrue”

The full quote is “vaguely accurate but a disingenuous take”. And “Disingenuous” means “misleading/dishonest/untruthful/insincere/unfair”.

> Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so

Come on, from the context it is clear that Vance means the US and specifically California. He also says “we” in the sentence “In all this time we've been talking about high-speed rail” and does not mean Chinese/Japanese/French having this discussion.
by FeistySkink | 2026-02-03 05:32:40+00:00
So you don't want to maintain a fork, but want a maintainer to do it for free for you and wondering why that PR is not accepted? If you feel so strongly about the project popular in your 'industry', consider providing some incentive for the maintainer to care. And no, a coffee is not an incentive.

Edit: this probably came off quite abrasive, but I'm getting entitled comments from users with no contributions, demanding fixes for their most ridiculously niche issues almost weekly. Like stuff doesn't build with their toolchain from 2014. Seriously? Yet, they can't be arsed to even check the fixes or follow up with basic details.
by tombert | 2026-02-03 05:32:49+00:00
I guess it shows how geriatric I am with desktop app development these days, but does no one use Qt anymore? Wasn't the dream for that to be a portable and native platform to write GUI apps? Presumably that could abstract away which bullshit Microsoft framework they came out with this week.

I haven't touched desktop application programming in a very long time and I have no desire to ever do so again after trying to learn raw GTK a million years ago, so I'm admittedly kind of speaking out of my ass here.
by hellojesus | 2026-02-03 05:33:21+00:00
Fair enough. I would concede that universal programs with progressive taxation is probably the best solution if we ignore the deadweight loss.

Providing universal food, healthcare means the gov increases demand. This leads to higher prices. Maybe more producers jump in to drive supply up and the equilibrium neutralizes back at the initial level. Suddenly the capital that was redirected to increase that supply reduces supply in other markets and drives up costs. The gov has manipulated the market, and they have the power to continue doing so on a whim. Consumers, especially those who are taxed at much higher progressive levels, lose purchasing power and those markets must adjust.

Maybe this is better than the outcome where we do the same thing but force cops to lock up everyone that is stealing for free food. After all, when everyone is in jail you have the same problem of gov interference in food, healthcare, and housing markets. But the additional overhead of law enforcement administration. Plus the total loss of economic contribution from those imprisoned.

But those dollars redistributed from the wealthy hurt. They really do. Especially since the progressive taxation hits middle income earners so fiercely. For example, I pay a little over $50k/year for two kids in daycare. The state wants to tax 1% of my (married) income above $200k to let other people send their kids to daycare for free. So suddenly demand increases, raising the $50k price I already pay, and now I lose $x dollars a year from my ability to spend freely. Why? So somebody can enter the labor market and drag down wages?

Maybe it's better. It probably is. It sounds a lot nicer. I don't think I earn enough to feel good about it though. I feel like it's throwing money into the pit of dispair as my ability to pursue my life's passions slips further away from the present (e.g., fire).

But maybe society will be nicer.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the 1% tax doesn't provide free daycare to all. It's really quite selective. So a universal program would be orders of magnitude more expensive, and taxation rates would be tremendous.

I already pay a little over 30% effective rate. It's demoralizing that, of the annual income, I don't get to keep it until approximately Easter. Society would have to be much, much nicer for me to work for free until June or July without being permanently grouchy. Plus wealth taxes, apart from being bad policy, are not federally legal because wealth isn't income, so the state would have to implement it, and we all know some states wouldn't so they could attract the wealthy, which means that those low wealth, medium to high earners would be paying even more.
by sigmonsays | 2026-02-03 05:35:06+00:00
for fun try this
1. tar + nc
2. rsync
3. scp

#1 is the fastest way to send because it keeps the buffers full in a consistent stream which allows tcp windows to grow as large as possible. 2 and 3 ( scp and rsync ) do round trip acks to the remote side which drastically slows things down, even if done in parallel.
by photurion_inc | 2026-02-03 05:35:40+00:00
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by beautron | 2026-02-03 05:37:33+00:00
> Not a lot of companies allow disabling their garbage, but FF does.
>
> Can't we be happy with this nice switch?

I want my tools to keep working the way they have been working. I don't want to be paranoid that "garbage" (as you put it), or any other controversial changes, are going to be slipped into my tools while I'm not looking.
by Sparyjerry | 2026-02-03 05:39:52+00:00
First of all Twitter had basically no downtime since he bought it, so all the 'internet experts' posting their thoughts were completely dead wrong. If anything Twitter was far more reliable than Microsoft has been these past few years.

You are assuming things need to run the same way in space, for instance you mentioned fans, you won't have any in space. You also won't have any air, dust, static, or any moving parts.

You are assuming the costs to launch to orbit are high, when the entire point of Spacex's latest ship is to bring the cost to launch so low that it is cheaper per ton than an airplane flight.

Maintenance would be nice but you are saying this like Elon Musk's company doesn't already manage the most powerful datacenters on the planet.

You have no clue what you are talking about regarding cosmic rays and solar wind, these will literally be solar powered and behind panels and shielding 100% of the time.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-03 05:40:06+00:00
It's not even about the maintainer, I can't maintain a large and complex project supported by lots of maintainers on my own, as a fork. But I can make fixes available for other users as a PR..until it's merged (or not). This is about users of the software, how will taking away PRs affect them?

I'm not wondering why that PR is not accepted, maintainers have every right to ignore or reject PRs. But this discussion is about taking away the ability to even create PRs that other users of the software an discover. This is a user-hostile behavior fueled solely by laziness and pettiness.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-03 05:40:19+00:00
Needed??

It already started, freelancer developers are making a lot of money already.

I remember watching a developer having to fix the company entire code because they went full AI and now nobody knows shit anymore.
If you are a good senior developer indeed, now is the best time for you to become millionaire.

Company after company can no longer fix things, they are bringing external developers to keep afloat.
Remember the tweet popular last year with the AI bot deleting the production database setting the company back to zero???

So....