MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by floren | 2026-02-03 19:48:48+00:00
I've seen this explanation multiple times through the years, but as I said it's entirely possible it was just a post-hoc thing somebody came up with. But as you said, it's fun to argue/think about, so here's some more. I'm talking about the ASR-33 because they're the archetypal printing terminal in my mind.

If you look at the schematics for an ASR-33, there's just 2 transistors in the whole thing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1acB3nhXU1Bb7YhQZcCb5jBA8cer...). Even the serial decoding is done electromechanically (per https://www.pdp8online.com/asr33/asr33.shtml), and the only "flow control" was that if you sent XON, the teletype would start the paper tape reader -- there was no way, as far as I can tell, for the teletype to ask the sender to pause while it processes a CR.

These things ran at 110 baud. If you can't do flow control, your only option if CR takes more than 1/10th of a second is to buffer... but if you can't do flow control, and the computer continues to send you stuff at 110 baud, you can't get that buffer emptied until the computer stops sending, so each subsequent CR will fill your buffer just a little bit more until you're screwed. You need the character following CR (which presumably takes about 2/10ths of a second) to be a non-printing character... so splitting out LF as its own thing gives you that and allows for the occasional case where doing a linefeed without a carriage return is desirable.

Curious Marc (https://www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/teletype-asr-33) built a current loop adapter for his ASR-33, and you'll note that one of the features is "Pin #32: Send extra NUL character after CR (helps to not loose first char of new line)" -- so I'd guess that on his old and probably worn-out machine, even sending LR after CR doesn't buy enough time and the next character sometimes gets "lost" unless you send a filler NUL.

Now, I haven't really used serial communications in anger for over a decade, and I've never used a printing terminal, so somebody with actual experience is welcome to come in and tell me I'm wrong.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-03 19:48:50+00:00
Far right to me is advocating for things that discriminate based on protected traits like race, sex, etc. So if you’re advocating for “white culture” above others, that’s far right. If you’re advocating for the 19th amendment (women’s right to vote) to be repealed (as Nick Fuentes and similar influencers do), that’s also far right. Advocating for ICE to terrorize peaceful residents, violate constitutional rights, or outright execute people is also far right.

Near right to me is advocating for things like lower taxes or different regulations or a secure border (but without the deportation of millions who are already in the country and abiding by laws). Operating the government for those things while still respecting the law, upholding the constitution, defending civil rights, and avoiding the deeply unethical grifting and corruption the Trump administration has normalized.

Obviously this is very simplified. What are your definitions out of curiosity?
by creamyhorror | 2026-02-03 19:49:06+00:00
> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop

Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
by TZubiri | 2026-02-03 19:49:11+00:00
Ah, got it, you mean in the "development tools" category.

I'd say that such a category, first is very small, and second there's almost no companies that exclusively offer development tools (JetBrains?). It's a product category where the competition is either individuals/OSS/academic or tech companies that as a side quest release their dev tech.

For the even more specific tool of "LLM development tools" or "agentic coding" OpenAI is the first of its kind, the term VibeCoding emerged from a Karpathy tweet one year ago, and back it was just ChatGPT through the Chat Interface.

It wasn't a coincidence either, they explicitly train their models on code production, mainly out of a need to do useful tool calls, and to do even simple tasks like multiplying a couple of numbers, but it grew into its own product category starting with the supervised Cursor,Windsurf, then the autonomous Devin, then back to supervised with Claude Code/Codex

So yeah, I wouldn't say it's a random vendor in that narrow sense of the specific product. But I get that it's a random vendor if you zoom out and think of a "development tools" category. It's subjective, but I think the nascent field that's clearly changing and hitting Trillion dollar market size is a bit more important than a field that only ever ever had a single company at all in that field (JetBrains?).
by leoc | 2026-02-03 19:49:20+00:00
> The article presents wishful thinking. The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. For the majority of its existence, it had only one meaning - 1024 bytes. Now it has an ambiguous meaning. People wish for an unambiguous term for 1000 bits, however that word does not exist. People also might wish that others use kibibyte any time they reference 1024 bytes, but that is also wishful thinking.

> The author's wishful thinking is falsely presented as fact.

The meanings of SI prefixes aren't set by convention or by common usage or by immemorial tradition, they are set by the SI. We had several thousand years of setting weights and measures by local and trade tradition and it was a nightmare, which is how we ended up with the SI. It's not a good show for computing to come along and immediately recreate the long and short ton.
by ngrilly | 2026-02-03 19:49:22+00:00
I think the comparison between native apps and Electron apps is conflating two things:

- Native apps integrate well with the native OS look and feel and native OS features. I'd say it's nice to have, but not a must have, especially considering that the same app can run on multiple platforms.

- Native apps use much less RAM than Electron apps. I believe this one is a real issue for many users. Running Slack, Figma, Linear, Spotify, Discord, Obsidian, and others at the same time consumes a lot of memory for no good reason.

Which makes me wonder: Is there anything that could removed from Electron to make it lighter, similar to what Qt does?
by infecto | 2026-02-03 19:49:55+00:00
I definitely modulated my tone to match yours and some of your killed comments. Sorry you don’t like what you see. Happy to have a discussion but not be told I am someone from Reddit. Low effort and low class. You are consistently being rude and you just need to reflect on some of your comments. Your right my comment back to you was definitely not nice but look at some of your killed comments. Ick.
by ryanrasti | 2026-02-03 19:50:28+00:00
> It doesn't prevent bad code from USING those secrets to do nasty things, but it does at least make it impossible for them to steal the secret permanently.

Agreed, and this points to two deeper issues:
1. Fine-grained data access (e.g., sandboxed code can only issue SQL queries scoped to particular tenants)
2. Policy enforced on data (e.g., sandboxed code shouldn't be able to send PII even to APIs it has access to)

Object-capabilities can help directly with both #1 and #2.

I've been working on this problem -- happy to discuss if anyone is interested in the approach.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-03 19:50:43+00:00
> I said it was to attack one binary blob abstraction while embracing another.

You didn't say that but even if you meant that systemd is an open source project and it has multiple components. It is not just a binary blob. It is a coherent framework for basic system services. It is pick and choose for the most part. Most distro choose to use all of it.

I still disagree that liking systemd and disliking windows is incompatible. Windows is a closed source project, developed without much external input that has a clear monetary incentives that are often user hostile. The way it's system api works is rarely the reason for criticizing it.
by cjflog | 2026-02-03 19:50:44+00:00
I'm working on https://laboratory.love

Laboratory.love lets you fund independent plastic chemical lab testing of the specific foods you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.

Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly.

This project was inspired by Nat Friedman's PlasticList.org and we use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology they did, testing three separate production lots per product (when possible) and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.

I just published new results today! Turns out Muir Glen's caned Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes are incredibly low in plastic chemicals. Yay!

Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love
by aragoss | 2026-02-03 19:50:51+00:00
Yes, absolutely.

You can fine-tune the sensitivity via the PII_ENTROPY_THRESHOLD environment variable.

If you consider UUIDs to be sensitive in your context (or if you are getting false positives), you can adjust the threshold. For example, standard UUIDs have lower entropy density than API keys, so slightly tuning the value (e.g. from 3.8 to 3.2 or vice-versa) allows you to draw the line where you need it.
by quadrifoliate | 2026-02-03 19:51:27+00:00
Sure, but at least you have homegrown car companies. They make cutting edge cars that are mainstream, and even popular abroad.

You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.

Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.
by paulfitz | 2026-02-03 19:51:56+00:00
I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.

Grist https://www.getgrist.com/

A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
by eptcyka | 2026-02-03 19:52:01+00:00
> Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.

It’d be cool if Anthropic were bound by their terms of use that you had to sign. Of course, they may well be broad enough to fire customers at will. Not that I suggest you expend any more time fighting this behemoth of a company though. Just sad that this is the state of the art.
by bombcar | 2026-02-03 19:52:01+00:00
Wirespeeds and bitrate and baud and all that stuff is vastly confusing when you start looking into it - because it's hard to even define what a "bit on the wire" is when everything has to be encoded in such a way that it can be decoded (specialized protocols can go FASTER than normal ones on the same wire and the same mechanism if they can guarantee certain things - like never having four zero bits in a row).
by Gibbon1 | 2026-02-03 19:52:32+00:00
I'm curious about using a hybrid system where you have multiple electric fans. For instance 2 turbines and 4 fans. Advantage is smaller diameter for the same mass flow. And more redundancy. A negative is the weight of the electric motors and generators. If you added a battery you have some other advantages. Less pucker when you lose an engine. And better throttle response.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-03 19:52:47+00:00
> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim

Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.

The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."

My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").

EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).

The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
by panick21_ | 2026-02-03 19:53:53+00:00
What nonsense. As if there was a desperate need for land in rural Britain. Southern England is densely populated compared to countries, but its still incredibly rural.

In most places it barley effects people at all and when it does 99% of the time its a minimal visual impact.

> therefore unable to use the line, by the way.

This is a complete misunderstanding on the system effects of these lines. The point is that all other train lines can be used much more efficiently because the high-speed trains don't have to use those lines anymore. Making it much easier to run more rural trains.

And it will also reduce car use on these routes, meaning the much, much worse highways will be used less.

So in actual fact, the new lines are massively positive in terms of overall impact for rural areas.

And I say this living in a country with some of the most dense rail networks in the world.

> We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.

Another bunch of nonsense. Rail lines are very small and highly efficient. If you didn't build rail lines, you would almost certainty have to extend highways and those are infinity worse for wildlife.

Railways and specially high-speed rail have the best impact vs effect calculation of almost anything you can build.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-03 19:53:57+00:00
The spec sheet being written in English is politics. The spec sheets of the most advanced microcontrollers, the cheapest microcontrollers, and the most widely used microcontrollers are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics.

Microcontroller is a broad category of electronic components. Maximum I/O current is orthogonal to microcontroller. Spec language is orthogonal to microcontroller. Politics is orthogonal to microcontroller, and orthogonal to maximum I/O current. The letter "x" is orthogonal to all of the above.

If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.

Saturated fats pervade foods (but not all of them), the Flemish letter "a" pervades foods (but only 1/26 of them), electrical concepts pervade microcontroller spec sheets (all microcontrollers, but not all documents describing them) and politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-03 19:54:06+00:00
I've mentioned this before but over 40 years ago the periodical R & D was originally known as Industrial Research, and the R & D 100 was the IR100, showcasing the most promising companies they picked out every year in their opinion.

It wasn't too much like an academic publication, there were plenty of those, but lots of times a breakthrough would be reported anyway, and everything was more commercially oriented by far.

You know how trade publications can be kind of uninteresting for non-insiders, IR could be so boring that college professors wouldn't even read it.

But you could tell when an author had recently left academia and joined industry though because their papers appeared more academic than very seasoned ones.

It's still a challenging transition to make, but I'll never forget how it was addressed one time in the back pages. Where you get the occasional cartoon comic like you would in consumer media.

There's two scientists in lab coats working at their benches, the boss comes on the intercom and they look at each other as he blasts from the overhead speaker:

"Hey you guys in Research, get off your butts and invent something that's habit forming".
by dsign | 2026-02-03 19:54:20+00:00
> but also child assassins and bombs right now

Yes, "interesting" is the right word. The government is talking about suspending cell phones for kids in connection to that. But honestly, what's really scary right now is how many kids and young adults seem to be "zombified" (for lack of a better word), and how bad this turns out later in the job market. Tomorrow I need to have a serious talk with my boss about how we should not hire a prospect because of total lack of in-person interactivity. Immigrants from war and poverty-stricken countries are over-represented in our "successful hires" pool because they still know how to speak.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-03 19:54:51+00:00
Right now that’s not the case. Satellites just store whatever fuel they need for orbital adjustments and by default, they fall back to earth and burn up at the end of their life. All the Starlink satellites are configured to fall back to earth within 5 years (the fuel is used to re-raise their orbit). The new proposed datacenters would sit in a higher orbit to avoid debris, allegedly, but that means it is even more expensive to get to them and refuel them, and the potential for future debris is far worse (since it wouldn’t fall back to earth and burn up for centuries or millennia).
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-03 19:55:34+00:00
I don't think so? The behavior of these auditors is not speech in any meaningful sense; they're not trying to communicate any message, they're just trying to make people around them uncomfortable. It's just hard to draw a clear line that would prohibit their behavior without chilling lawful speech.

Right now I don't think there are that many First Amendment auditors around, so there's not much point in passing new laws to deal with them. But if they became more common, it might be necessary to draw the line, as we did in the 90s with stalking.
by eptcyka | 2026-02-03 19:55:35+00:00
Claude Code from the terminal is servicable enough. Yet I cannot open the same project from different versions of Xcode without some manual finnagling. Xcode is at no existential risk for it is the only tool you are allowed to use to reach your audience on the app store. Don’t be ridiculous. The reason Xcode is as broken as it is today is because of the same exact reason. The developer experience need not be great, as long as you can coax the trash fire of a toolchain to upload a signed app to AppStoreConnect, there is 0 incentive for Apple to put any time into the tool.
by AlbinoDrought | 2026-02-03 19:55:50+00:00
This model does not fit in 12G of VRAM - even the smallest quant is unlikely to fit. However, portions can be offloaded to regular RAM / CPU with a performance hit.

I would recommend trying llama.cpp's llama-server with models of increasing size until you hit the best quality / speed tradeoff with your hardware that you're willing to accept.

The Unsloth guides are a great place to start: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-coder-next#llama.cpp-tu...
by deathanatos | 2026-02-03 19:55:58+00:00
It's not even really prescriptivist thinking… "Kilobyte" to mean both 1,000 B & 1,024 B is well-established usage, particularly dependent on context. But a word can be dependent on context, even in prescriptivist settings.

E.g., M-W lists both, with even the 1,024 B definition being listed first. Wiktionary lists the 1,024 B definition, though it is tagged as "informal".

As a prescriptivist myself I would love if the world could standardize on kilo = 1000, kibi = 1024, but that'll likely take some time … and the introduction of the word to the wider public, who I do not think is generally aware of the binary prefixes, and some large companies deciding to use the term, which they likely won't do, since companies are apt to always trade for low-grade perpetual confusion over some short-term confusion during the switch.
by quadrifoliate | 2026-02-03 19:56:38+00:00
From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.

We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.
by fsckboy | 2026-02-03 19:56:39+00:00
musicians use numbering systems that are actually far more confused than anything discussed here. how many notes in an OCTave? "do re mi fa so la ti do" is eight, but that last do is part of the next octave, so an OCTave is 7 notes. (if we count transitions, same thing, starting at the first zero do, re is 1, ... again 7.

the same and even more confusion is engendered when talking about "fifths" etc.
by sharadov | 2026-02-03 19:56:40+00:00
A friend owned farm land in India, he moved to Canada.
The property deed was in his name.

Someone in India, with fraudulent documents "sold" his land.

He only came to know about it when he next visited India. Unfortunately he could not do much.
There are people who will actively look through property records - if the person is not a local resident ( lives internationally ), then they are prime targets.

This was a decade ago - things have gotten a lot better with digital records and India's Universal ID system. But I did not realize, something like this was possible in the US.
by mothballed | 2026-02-03 19:56:48+00:00
Constitutional right of access, which as you say doesn't exist, isn't the same as allowing access but conditioning it upon you relinquishing your bill of rights.

If the difference between access and not having access is relinquishing your civil rights, then the reason for denial is your civil rights, not otherwise codified law. Those are explicitly protected. So while you're right they could make a law that says 'no one on the plane' they cannot make a law that says "everyone on the plane except those who won't give up their 4th or 5th amendment rights not to answer additional questions."

There have been prior SCOTUS cases allowing asking name, DOB, addresses, as well as inspection of your items during certain inspections, but this is something entirely different beyond that asking further probing questions about your identity.
by derektank | 2026-02-03 19:56:55+00:00
>For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does

I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.

The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.