MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 827a | 2026-03-13 19:56:27+00:00
Maybe I'm alone in this camp, but I really value the idea that my phone is an ultra-stable bedrock experience that, sure, I have to sacrifice some freedoms on but ultimately they're not exactly freedoms I care to express on a 5.8" display whose more critical purpose is things like "my car keys", "my door keys", "maintaining contact with family" etc. Versus, my linux desktop feels like its always in a state of nearly falling apart, and that's what makes it fun. I'm constantly pushing it to the edge, installing 550gb LLMs, four different package managers, right now its got a totally dissected USB cable coming out the front that's attached to a small circuit board for some project, all that's ok because that's what I want out of it. I don't want that out of my phone. I want my phone to ALWAYS turn on and ALWAYS be able to get EVERY text or phone call that's sent to me.

I think anyone who has devoted their life to computing, in all its forms, over the past 20 years should agree: There doesn't exist an operating system that I feel adequately does all of that under one roof. The closest is Android. And that's what I don't get out of posts like this: Android does exist. What do you want out of Android that Google/etc are keeping from you? Samsung has Dex. It kinda sucks. Google allows free-range application installations (and fortunately that recent effort to block it is dead); that's great. I guess there's no real/root UNIX terminal? Bro, I struggle to envision a world where any device I have that has a root shell is also one that I don't inevitably fuck up, even if only temporarily, its ability to receive phone calls from my doctor about the results of a colonoscopy.

The bigger problem that I see right now is that, at least from the perspective of the iPhone: Apple is dropping the ball on their stewardship of this bedrock experience.
by thegrimmest | 2026-03-13 19:56:30+00:00
Same way everyone has earned value from the beginning of time: negotiate with others. We are all born naked and without possessions. Everything we get, from the first day of our birth, is given to us by someone else. Our very first negotiations are simple, we are in turns endearing and annoying. As we grow older they become more complex. All I’m saying is that these interactions should be maximally voluntary and nonviolent.
by kstrauser | 2026-03-13 19:56:57+00:00
Very cool, thanks!

In a similar vein, I've been using SteerMouse (https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/) in the same way for many years, for the same reasons. Logi's hardware is nice, but their software just freaking sucks the electrons out of a battery. It's awful. I refuse to run their driver aka mini-OS just to do the right thing when I click a button with my thumb.
by littlestymaar | 2026-03-13 19:57:21+00:00
> The snide around "clicking on links is dangerous" and locking down the bootloader is unwarranted, because for most people a phone is not a toy (or at least, not just a toy) - it has their communications history, their bank information, their passwords, any many more.

And so is their god damn computer!

The ONLY reason why we treat phones differently from computers has no relationship at all with what's at stake, it's purely because Apple felt they could get away with it for phone, while they estimated that people would stop buying macs right away if they did the same thing for computers.
by linkregister | 2026-03-13 19:57:29+00:00
I wonder which LLM model has the tic of saying individual words in their own sentence for emphasis.

The outcome of this technique is the same as just bolding all the text.

I understand why the author, an apparent native Dutch speaker, has an LLM write his prose.

The actual content is information-lite; the author never explains anything beyond deciding to no longer consider google.com referrers when deriving success metrics. Maybe the author got more engagement through email? More business offers? It's left as a mystery to the reader.
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-13 19:57:30+00:00
> great artists steal.

That quote is about inspiration, not just using others' work or style.

T. S. Eliot's version from 1920 put it best imho:

> Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
by webglfan | 2026-03-13 19:57:33+00:00
A few years ago I worked for a tech company that had many senior ex-Googlers engineers, with 30+ years of experience in SWE, and they were able to imbue into our team a culture of engineers writing and reading Design docs.

There was even a design doc for design docs. This CAN help, but one of the problems that happened as the company grew in size and age, was that there was a plethora of design docs, and no real summary.

So we supplemented the documents with recurring presentations to new engineers, who could get a glimpse of the design decisions, without being overwhelmed with design doc reading.

Oxide (Bryan Cantrill's computer company) does something similar with their RFDs (Requests for Discussion), but publicly. Their "design doc for design docs" is RFD 1, and you can read it here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001
by bloblaw | 2026-03-13 19:57:38+00:00
This sounds to me like the "No True Scotsman" argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I break down what you said as:
"Sure, he's released code with an open-source license, but that's not real open source in the sense that matters."

I happen to disagree. OSS is OSS. AGPL is OSS. MIT is Open Source. Unlicense is OSS.
by paxys | 2026-03-13 19:58:12+00:00
Desktop computers being as open as they are is an anomaly. It only came to be because the systems originated from research labs and hacker cultures rather than rent-seeking corporations. And even though corporations (like IBM and Microsoft) did push them, there was a lot more emphasis on business rather than consumer use at the time.

Vendors keep them open today only because there is a historical exception, but make no mistake if the laptop computer was first introduced to the masses in 2008 you would be downloading apps through official stores and paying a 30% fee on all transactions and would only be able to do a tiny fraction of what is possible on them today.

To me the surprise isn't that the phone is locked down, but that Apple allows MacBook Neo to do so much. Just look at its iPad counterpart.
by Isognoviastoma | 2026-03-13 19:58:16+00:00
Copyleft is copyright held in smart way. Nobody can take code under GPL and make its _copy_ proprietary because it would be violation of copyright.

In the other thread you argued that AI output is not copyrighted.

Do you think I can take proprietary code and lauder through AI to get a non-copyrighted copy of it, then modify to my needs? How can I obtain the proprietary code legally in the first place?
by davorak | 2026-03-13 19:58:40+00:00
> Nobody is going to stop using grammarly extensions to post to HN, nobody is going to be able to detect its usage.

I do not think the new rules or for this use case or at least not target at them.

None of the examples I looked at from Dang's post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616
look like gramarly edits that are hard to notice.

> This thread just lets a certain kind of people put on their best condescending hall-monitor voice and lecture other people about how they should behave.

I think it is, at least mostly, about the blatant cases that are often already down voted and flag and make it official.

> And the rule is arguably less useful than speed limits and will be broken about as often (at least speed limits have a very real link to physical safety via kinetic energy).

I often see the rules in:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
broken, mostly small ways, I still think we are better off with them or something similar rather than having nothing.
by danielEM | 2026-03-13 19:59:06+00:00
Why would you allow your phone to be a computer if you can sell a computer AND a phone? Allowing "random" OS to be installed on your phone would mean loosing control over your phone (including spying, gathering statistical data to influence major decisions, ability to paralyze communication of your country etc etc)

Android phones are nothing but linux phones and video output (DP over USB-C, earlier MHL) is for many years already included in many phones. I would love to carry one device with everything on it. I would be very happy if that device was like a laptop with detachable core, that acts as phone.
by movpasd | 2026-03-13 19:59:54+00:00
Regarding LLM's performances on brownfield projects, I thought of Naur's "Programming as Theory Building". He explains an example of a compiler project that is taken over by a team without guidance from the original developers:

> "at [the] later stage the original powerful structure was still visible, but made entirely ineffective by amorphous additions of many different kinds"

Maybe a way of phrasing it is that accumulating a lot of "code quality capital" gives you a lot more leverage over technical debt, but eventually it does catch up.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-03-13 20:00:09+00:00
I have such crushing sadness that this is part of why I can't use the supercomputer in my pocket as an arbitrary general purpose computer.

I get that Apple wants their sweet, sweet 30% and the goodwill that comes from cosplaying caring about end user privacy. I expect that behavior from them.

It just kills me that technical people want to be in bondage.

Google did it right on the Chromebooks w/ the physical switch to put them into dev mode. Apple could totally do that, but they won't.

Maybe the Moto GrapheneOS phones will be a good thing.

I suppose none of it will matter because the twin spectres of age/ID verification and copyright infringement police are still coming for general purpose computing anyway.

I got to live in a time when I could own a computer. I guess I can be happy for that.
by ghaff | 2026-03-13 20:00:34+00:00
I'm always reluctant to do non-standard stuff for presentations. There's enough that can go wrong even with a direct HDMI out. I've done it in a pinch but pretty much always carry a laptop with me when I'm presenting along with local copies of my presentations. I've actually gotten a text in the middle of the night asking me if I can fill in for another speaker who forgot and are in a different country :-)
by tzs | 2026-03-13 20:00:58+00:00
The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 (HPA) required it. It passed to House on a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent and was signed by President Clinton.

After sales paid off the debt that has been incurred from the expansion of scope of the helium program in the 1960 Helium Act, which was one of the main points of the HPA, it was update by the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 (which passed the House 394-1, and the Senate 97-2, and was signed by President Obama).
by dang | 2026-03-13 20:01:09+00:00
All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by lambda | 2026-03-13 20:01:53+00:00
I've got a 128 GiB unified memory Ryzen Ai Max+ 395 (aka Strix Halo) laptop.

Trying to run LLM models somehow makes 128 GiB of memory feel incredibly tight. I'm frequently getting OOMs when I'm running models that are pushing the limits of what this can fit, I need to leave more memory free for system memory than I was expecting. I was expecting to be able to run models of up to ~100 GiB quantized, leaving 28 GiB for system memory, but it turns out I need to leave more room for context and overhead. ~80 GiB quantized seems like a better max limit when trying not running on a headless system so I'm running a desktop environment, browser, IDE, compilers, etc in addition to the model.

And memory bandwidth limitations for running the models is real! 10B active parameters at 4-6 bit quants feels usable but slow, much more than that and it really starts to feel sluggish.

So this can fit models like Qwen3.5-122B-A10B but it's not the speediest and I had to use a smaller quant than expected. Qwen3-Coder-Next (80B/3B active) feels quite on speed, though not quite as smart. Still trying out models, Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B just came out, but looks like it'll be a bit slower than Qwen3.5 while not offering up any more performance, though I do really like that they have been transparent in releasing most of its training data.
by skeledrew | 2026-03-13 20:01:53+00:00
Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.
by htx80nerd | 2026-03-13 20:02:05+00:00
I spent ~6hrs with Claude trying to fix a web worker bug in a small JS code base Claude made. In the end it failed and I ran out of credits. Claude kept wanting to rip out huge blocks of code and replace entire functions. We never got any closer to a solution. The Claude hype is unreal. My 'on the ground' experience has been vastly different.
by juancn | 2026-03-13 20:02:11+00:00
I use it to hide Zoom's screen sharing controls so they don't come back when pressing Esc:

-- Hide Zoom's "share" windows so it doesn't come back on ESC keypress
local zoomWindow = nil
local originalFrame = nil

hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl", "alt"}, "H", function()
print("> trying to hide zoom")
if not zoomWindow then
print("> looking for window")
zoomWindow = hs.window.find("zoom share statusbar window")
end

if zoomWindow then
print("> found window")
if originalFrame then
print("> restoring")
zoomWindow:setFrame(originalFrame)
originalFrame = nil
zoomWindow = nil
else
print("> hiding")
originalFrame = zoomWindow:frame()
local screen = zoomWindow:screen()
local frame = zoomWindow:frame()
frame.x = screen:frame().w + 99000
frame.y = screen:frame().h + 99000
zoomWindow:setFrame(frame)
end
else
print("> window not found")
end
end)
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 20:02:33+00:00
My guess is that places like AirGas aren't really supplying many weather or research balloons. I suspect the easier answer is 'Balloon Time is low grade crap aimed at people who don't know any better and just want to pick up some balloon gas while grocery shopping.' It's like the difference between people who go to a gas station to refill propane tanks, and people who swap them at Home Depot. (though the smart fellers do swap at Home Depot occasionally, if they need a fresher tank...)

Definitely worth knowing what you're getting, in any case, so you don't get ripped off, and so you can actually get that lawn chair contraption into the sky.
by Hizonner | 2026-03-13 20:03:31+00:00
They can remove him from all his committees, including the ones that give him access to this stuff to begin with. If they really work at it, they can freeze him out to the point where he can't get anything done on this or any other issue. And they can use him revealing the information as an excuse to avoid blowback from their own constituents. It's not as bad as in the House, but it's pretty bad. Oh, and they can probably deprive him of the floor the second he starts to say anything "interesting".

Yes, there are serious problems with the way Congress is organized, but there's probably a reason that practically every parliamentary body on the planet has similar problems.
by query_demotion | 2026-03-13 20:03:40+00:00
You're right. FISA courts are not sufficient oversight. Even Judge James Robertson resigned from the FISA Courts (FISC) in 2005 because:

>On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance,[11] and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.[12] The government's apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests. In 2011, the Obama administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases.
by zdw | 2026-03-13 20:03:40+00:00
The cost to make a digital copy from film stock has gone way down, to the point that fan groups [1][2] frequently encode and clean up old copies of film:

[1]: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/c/kinekovideo

This of course has various IP implications...
by kholiflower | 2026-03-13 20:04:14+00:00
cathy horyn, vanessa friedman, and robyn givhan: three living icons and critics whose analysis has the power to both ruin lives and provide hope. i'm bored to death of the masses offering opinions without real insight or wit; it has sparked a need in me to do more with my pen. i critique fashion and personal style daily on my instagram stories, but i need more space to flesh out my ideas. i want to create a community where healthy, constructive, yet honest discourse is celebrated. let’s cut sh!t up.
by overflowy | 2026-03-13 20:04:26+00:00
I use this to remap app keys:

local appHotkeys = {}

local function remapAppHotkey(appName, fromMods, fromKey, toMods, toKey, delay)
if not appHotkeys[appName] then
appHotkeys[appName] = {}
end
local hotkey = hs.hotkey.new(fromMods, fromKey, function()
hs.eventtap.keyStroke(toMods, toKey, delay or 0)
end)
table.insert(appHotkeys[appName], hotkey)
end

local appWatcher = hs.application.watcher.new(function(appName, eventType)
local hotkeys = appHotkeys[appName]
if not hotkeys then return end
for _, hotkey in ipairs(hotkeys) do
if eventType == hs.application.watcher.activated then
hotkey:enable()
elseif eventType == hs.application.watcher.deactivated then
hotkey:disable()
end
end
end)

appWatcher:start()

-- Remap app hotkeys
remapAppHotkey("Finder", { "cmd" }, "q", { "cmd" }, "w", 0.5)
... etc ...
by kpw94 | 2026-03-13 20:04:39+00:00
People complaining about how hard to get simple answer is don't appreciate the complexity in figuring out optimal models...

There's so many knobs to tweak, it's a non trivial problem

- Average/median length of your Prompts

- prompt eval speed (tok/s)

- token generation speed (tok/s)

- Image/media encoding speed for vision tasks

- Total amount of RAM

- Max bandwidth of ram (ddr4, ddr5, etc.?)

- Total amount of VRAM

- "-ngl" (amount of layers offloaded to GPU)

- Context size needed (you may need sub 16k for OCR tasks for instance)

- Size of billion parameters

- Size of active billion parameters for MoE

- Acceptable level of Perplexity for your use case(s)

- How aggressive Quantization you're willing to accept (to maintain low enough perplexity)

- even finer grain knobs: temperature, penalties etc.

Also, Tok/s as a metric isn't enough then because there's:

- thinking vs non-thinking: which mode do you need?

- models that are much more "chatty" than others in the same area (i remember testing few models that max out my modest desktop specs, qwen 2.5 non-thinking was so much faster than equivalent ministral non-thinking even though they had equivalent tok/s... Qwen would respond to the point quickly)

At the end, final questions are: are you satisfied with how long getting an answer took? and was the answer good enough?

The same exercise with paid APIs exists too, obviously less knobs but depending on your use case, there's still differences between providers and models. You can abstract away a lot of the knobs , just add "are you satisfied with how much it cost" on top of the other 2 questions
by dang | 2026-03-13 20:04:45+00:00
You've been a good HN user for many years, but lately your comment history has swerved towards ideological battle generally, and unsubstantive flamebait like this post. Can you please swerve back? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: before someone pounces, no, I'm in no way defending either E. Just trying to hold up HN.
by cyberax | 2026-03-13 20:05:25+00:00
These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves.

So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical panels.
by hrimfaxi | 2026-03-13 20:06:00+00:00
Florida House Bill 945 would create a statewide “counterintelligence and counter-terror” unit with authority to analyze “patterns of life,” gather “actionable intelligence,” and even execute arrests—all while defining an “adversary intelligence entity” so broadly it can include any person whose “views or opinions” are deemed harmful to the interests of the state.
by kennywinker | 2026-03-13 20:06:09+00:00
Are you using 7/8b models for coding? I keep getting the impression from what i read that 8b is only good for autocomplete. Also, it seems like an 8b model will run on a $100 2nd hand gpu (e.g. an 8gb gtx 1050/1060/1070 kind of thing) - why would you need to quantize?
by overfeed | 2026-03-13 20:06:17+00:00
> And guess what, direct voting is just fine and fast enough for such thinks as ... economic focus, foreign policy, immigration, ...

How would 2 countries wirh direct voting negotiate a trade treaty that requires give and take? Have a referendum on each proposed clause modification? How long would that take? Even though you dislike it, representative democracy is a necessary optimization, which is why every surviving polity uses it to a degree. Even coops like Mondragon appoints officers for say to say operations.

Can you name a single entity with more than 500 members, and operates daily that uses direct voting?
by D-Machine | 2026-03-13 20:06:22+00:00
If you read the section "Richer attention mechanisms", you can see, no, the mechanism is not generally useable (it requires significant modification to become differentiable). They later speculate:

While we do not yet know whether exact softmax attention
can be maintained with the same efficiency, it is easy to
approximate it with k-sparse softmax attention: retrieve
the top-k keys and perform the softmax only over those

but if you have played around with training models that use e.g. topk or other hard thresholding operations in e.g. PyTorch (or just think about how many gradients become zero with such an operation) you know that these tend to work only in extremely limited / specific cases, and make training even more finicky than it already is.
by layer8 | 2026-03-13 20:06:37+00:00
That’s just incorrect. “Open source” can mean the licensing as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been associated with the development model since The Cathedral and the Bazaar [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar