skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"sentient" is often used casually when "sapient" is meant

don't whether that's country-level language variation, an example of language evolution ;), or just sloppiness.
I don’t think calling Palmer a run-of-the-mill enthusiast does justice to his passion/obsession. Last I checked he had the largest HMD collection in the world. His passion (more than anduril) has been to bring VR/AR to the masses, and if he feels like the Apple headset is a step towards that then I’m inclined to accept his interpretation.
dang failed to have hacker news running in 1999 I suspect
Bing is as capable as Chatgpt while being up to date, I don't know why people skip it, IMO its the best option with the best features.
One could argue that one of the reasons why SIMD instructions, and indeed GPUs, are popular, is because they amortise the (transistor and power) cost of decoding over more compute units, in the case of GPUs over many more.

There are also other considerations, like rolling back state in OOO machines, or precise exceptions. All this becomes more complex with an x86-style instruction set.
The web I want has fun, interesting, healthy applications that make the world a better place to live in.

Who cares what technology is used to build it. That’s an implementation detail for us builders.

Pragmatism > Idealism
>That’s bonkers and unacceptably high.

Well, that's your opinion.

My estimate of my risk of death is 100/100, so 1/100 does not seem that high to me.

What I think could legitimately be called "bonkers and unacceptably high" is the prevalence of medical errors as a cause of death in the US.

"Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S."

https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-...

Since I don't drive drunk, and usually miss rush hour, I do think it's reasonable for me to consider going to the doctor the most dangerous thing I do.
Not at all. Fires are survivable, and the vast majority of aviation fires have ended without total airframe loss.

Remember: everybody in a small captive space is a firefighter. And the chief firefighters are the people who we call "flight attendants". Their man job is to prevent the scenario you describe; they are nice enough to serve us drinks when that job is not required of them.

Flight attendants and air traffic controllers have saved many, many lives in the past century and are barely recognized for it.
I’m not sure why that commenter who observed these claims get surfaced all the time yet nothing has changed, got flagged/downvoted. I was about to say the same thing. I’ll add a genuine question here in hopes to spur some discussion:

It is clear the web is turning into trash or is already there, depending on your view. What genuine efforts have been made to rebuild the web without starting on the web/browser? We could just start over and not allow the same things that made the web today turn to to shit.
A Guardian review that dove deep into the science behind the headphones would be a worse review, in that it would be less useful to its target audience (who mostly don't know or care about that).

Maybe your objection isn't with such a review appearing in the Guardian but rather with it appearing on HackerNews. That's fair, however, to me, what is interesting about this post is that the Guardian (again, a widely-read, general interest newspaper) is reviewing the Fairbuds (a new product pushed by a fairly niche company focused on repairability and sustainability). And the review is largely positive. That is, the post is interesting as a reflection of social acceptance of this product and not as an exploration of the science behind the product.
This is off topic, but thinking about portable desktop apps, why didn’t JavaFx become more popular? What is JetBrains using for its sophisticated GUIs? Is it just Swing? It would be great if Rust could be used to write portable high quality desktop apps.
I might be less favorable for OP but for me it looks like projects stop being interesting when any real challenge comes up.

Making up name and setting basics for project sound like OP does only easy stuff but has no interest to go into details.

Just like my nephew when playing games, he could “get bored” by 5 games in 1 hour. What I noticed was — he was switching because he was bad at these games but would not admit that - so he would call game boring or silly without trying to actually getting to be good.
I agree with this in principle and my own personal site is basically "just" a website, but the lack of _any_ styling to make things look just a little nicer always turned me off to this rant in particular. I am not good with CSS, but there's plenty of essentially drop-in CSS files out there that would take a text heavy barebones site like this from "basically a text file open in notepad" readability to something a normal person would actually want to read. It's so easy that there's really no excuse not to grab one and drop it in.

edit: looks like I'm not the only one, there's a collection of <adjective>motherfuckingwebsite URLs floating around: https://github.com/lyoshenka/awesome-motherfucking-website
I live in the Lansing area and if you'd asked me which city had the highest amount of remote workers I'd have chosen San Francisco or New York City. But I think the reason those two city's weren't competitive was because so many of those working remotely decided to move away.

Lansing does have a relatively low cost of living and with Michigan State nearby has the culture some other towns lack.
I guess we just gave up the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics because Rick and Morty is cool?
These benchmarks suggest arm has been at single threaded performance parity on server since 2020:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

(Apple Silicon blows them away on laptops, of course.)
> Most websites are about delivering and exploring content. HTML is amazing for this, and you don't need JavaScript.

This is the fundamental misconception that most "get off my lawn" people like the author have, which leads to a variant of this exact post getting voted to the top here every single day.

The web is not about delivering big blobs of text and images. It may have been at one point, but we are far beyond that. Instead:

1. The web is now first and foremost an application delivery platform. The web browser is an OS. The website is an executable program.

2. The web is not a niche hobby for nerds like it was "back in the day", but a $15+ trillion global business.

The sooner you can accept both of these, the more sense everything will make. What you did as an early adopter of the internet 30 years ago is irrelevant. You are not getting that time back. The party is long over, and everything is only going to get more commercial as time goes on.
Does this F500 employer have mind that you'd be working multiple FT jobs? Or just the occasional (low-impact) consulting gig?
Why the Fuss about Conversational Programming
As an end-user, what software you choose to use is a form of advocacy for that software and its license. So it does matter, but you can choose to not care.
Not only is it type inference, it's limited to locally declared variables.
Not only are many successful open source projects run as cathedrals, but often it turns out that hunchbacks are in charge of crucial parts of the cathedrals.
Maybe you are much better at prompting it than me, but I’ve gotten absolutely no value out of it in regards to my professional coding. Not for lack of trying either. I’ll give you a few examples of what I mean.

Friday we decided to split our EF migration into multiple context files, something we should’ve done from the beginning to be fair. Anyway, we deploy with Azure DevOps and we migrate for our more permanent testing, staging and production slots through a VM agent on our VNET. We don’t have a DevOps engineer, and we don’t completely know what we’re doing but it works. I figure I could copy paste the code four teams, giving us 5, one for each context, but I didn’t want to do that. So I asked ChatGPT and it gave me an answer involving Bash, which doesn’t work in our DevOps pipeline, as in, it doesn’t exist in the context. I told GPT this, and fed it more information and it proceeded to give me the exact same code four times before it gave me something different, but also unusable code. That’s one of the good examples of it failing. Because it made things up and they didn’t work. So no harm done, aside from the wasted time.

A few months back we tasked it with writing something for our Odata client library, and it did. It also worked, only, it didn’t reaaaaalllyyy work because it was flawed in a way you might not notice if you weren’t an experienced developer. Basically what it had build wouldn’t scale effectively, or at least not in a cost efficient manner. It would have been efficient enough to run for a long time without anyone noticing, however, but it would have been rather expensive and it would’ve broken down completely under “normal” loads, if we ever grow to twice the size we currently are. But it worked and it looked fine, and that’s sort of the scary scenarios. Or maybe they aren’t scary because we’ll likely be well paid to clean up those messes for years to come.

I do think it’s likely to become more and more useful as time passes. I mentioned documentation in my GP, and I am genuinely amazed at how good it is at writing code documentation. You obviously don’t feed it sensitive code, but it’s been able to accurately describe functions from their name, input and return values alone. Seriously, it’s taken a function name and written a piece of JSDoc that was miles better than what I had written, accurately guessing complex context (which it only saw maybe 10% of) from the function and variable names alone.
Microcode is often attributed to [1] from 1952.

[1] M. V. Wilkes, J. B. Stringer, Micro-programming and the design of the control circuits in an electronic digital computer.
Here's an option: have a browser set up to defer all "onload" Javascript until the user clicks on something. Then you see if you want to do anything on the page. If nothing happens until you let Javascript run, the page looks silly and the user goes elsewhere.

Pages can still load CSS, so they can do formatting.
I think this is a fine ideal for some websites but not a universal truth. For example I love the plaintextsports.com website and check it near daily on my phone, and it does a perfect job. And of course I agree that there is a lot of bloat especially around marketing / tracking snippets that slow things down and don't provide the end users with any upside.

But there are also plenty of times when I don't want the minimalistic approach the author argues for. Not everything on the web needs to be the equivalent of a printed black and white pamphlet. Modern web offers so much potential for unique interactive experiences, storytelling, media sharing, etc that isn't available in print or other content mediums.

Often I want to watch high res videos, or see detailed photos that I can zoom in on and appreciate the details. I want interactive JS experiences like the wonderful ciechanow.ski explanation tools. I want dynamic pages like a tip calculator or the daily wordle or a Photoshop like webapp, that I can save and use entirely offline. Sometimes I want a heavy gif filled homage to GeoCities, or a hypertext comic that blends in micro games and animations as part of the storytelling. I might want to check out a cutting edge 3d experience that only works with a special Chrome beta flag turned on. Sure, a subset of users on old hardware might not be able to enjoy it the same, but at the same time we have more computing power and faster connetions than we've ever had before, and to not use any of it would be a waste. The web I want is full of unique and different experiences, even if they're "suboptimal" in some way.

There may be times when a SPA is heavy or unnecessary, but there are also plenty of times when it makes almost no noticeable difference to me if there's a couple extra megabytes on a blog page. If their vision or workflow is built around client-side heavy React rather than HTMX that's fine, that's what they were comfortable working with, and they were still inspired to make the site and share it with me often for free (and of course there would be tradeoffs to any other approach, like more round-trips to the server for minor interactions, or not being able to do fun page transitions, or whatever else).
As a long-time LLM enjoyer I think the 'simulators' take is by far the best one https://generative.ink/posts/simulators/
As did I, particularly because Fairphone do actually offer in-ear earbuds: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/true-wireless-stereo-earbuds
> What's true in it isn't interesting (... "release early release often")

This feels like 20/20 hindsight to me given that "release early release often" was definitely not the "axiom" that we think of today, and one could argue the contrary opinion was more widespread in 1997.

I can easily remember some debates at a large consumer web company in the mid 00s, where at the time we released once per quarter. We were struggling with product quality, and a large, significant portion of the software dev team argued that the way to improve our product quality was to reduce the number of our releases to something like only 2 per year. The argument was that we needed more QA time, needed more time to run integration tests, needed more time to ensure changes from all the different teams wouldn't break each other before releasing.

In our current world of CI/CD, a web company releasing only twice a year sounds absolutely insane. Fortunately the loud "slow down our releases" contingent lost (which is evident simply by the fact that this large tech company still exists - if they had reduced their release cycles as some desired I firmly believe the company would have died long ago). But I just bring this up because the mantra of "release early release often" was definitely not blatantly self-evident in 1997, and I'd argue it only became "axiomatic" after tooling support for CI/CD got much better.
This post itself offers nothing concrete to criticize; I guess you're just supposed to read it and vibe? Why did the site load 35 MB of content, what are those chat channel requests, etc etc.

Look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852516 made the front page 5 days ago and is another blog post saying the same thing. The problem is, without actually surveying a bunch of sites and looking at what they load and why they load it we won't know where the bloat comes from. I'm not convinced that JS is the issue because a simple JSON payload response (sans TCP overhead and connection establishment) is a matter of bytes.
Do you happen to know the name of said historian? I am curious to read what his specific reasoning was!
The Icon Sets Proposed in the Icon Contest 2006
"Sapient" is a stupid term because a Denisovian or Neanderthal were likely able to produce a piece of research with some assistance, while being a Homo {not Sapient}.
It's funny, then, that meth is a prescription drug given to children (and adults) to increase their tolerance for existence within academic/corporate hierarchies.
Yes, and obviously ARM didn't chose the instructions in its reduced set optimally, if the best implementations require those instructions to be split into smaller ones. But that doesn't really speak to if that's because it's just better to pack instructions that way, or because these implementations of ARM and x86 just need to do it to be performant in spite of deficiencies in their instruction sets.
I feel the frustration, and the core of the frustration is that the requirements for the web were fundamentally wrong. Thus, we keep adding new things to the browser to enable new things.

The JavaScript hate is justified for large websites where you download MBs of javascript. I'm discovering that a lean JavaScript framework and streams are a much better idiom.

If I could go back in time, then I would love to long-lived sockets to be used rather than short-lived request-response.
European Hospitals still work with-in a capitalist market. I am a little jealous that you guys try to do things over there: https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/eu-bars-baile...
2 years ago (20 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918399
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

- Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

A friend gave me this quote a while back, and I find myself thinking about it constantly with regards to the state of tech. The web this author wants sounds great, but probably won’t exist because major economic forces drive the exact pressures that cause these problems.
> "No animals were killed for this product."

Then this isn't leather. Let's just call things by their names.
You probably still can, if you have the chops.
If you’re a skilled x builder, you’ll build x with or without a degree
This blog post itself nearly practices what it preaches. But I don't see why it even needs htmx.js since it's entirely a static site, as far as I can tell.
Debunking Noam Chomsky?
I'm working with historical documents from the 18th century, and will likely be the last person to look at them for a decade or so, and consequently need to be correct. I translate them quickly manually, then use ChatGPT to check my efforts. It tends to catch my errors (about 1 in 20) and I catch its predictable mistakes (easy to see), which occur about 1 time in 10. The type of mistakes it makes (inventing a number in the 1000s position instead of using a 0) are ones I am unlikely to make, and vice versa (I am usually off by one due to a typo). So a strange, but serviceable team.
By "huge old school connectors" I assume you mean the 1/4 inch TRS connector? Which is still totally normal on non-cheap headphones?
That's why you have playtesters.
How Would WW3 Be Fought? [video][25 mins]
You could take the original motherfuckingwebsite's approach and allow the user to set a default CSS in their browser.

This is basically how programmers use terminals. But somehow we thought that "users" want things differently ...
Wait til you find out where people thought barnacle geese came from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth
Here's a question this group might know the answer to: are lithium battery and lithium-ion battery being used interchangeably by airlines? When they say "lithium" do I need to read that to also mean li-ion as well? Am I the dummy who thinks they mean two separate things and everyone else knows they mean the same thing?
It's a trade-off between problems. Variable length instructions are not as trivial to decode wide, so you need more cleverness here. However, fixed length instructions decrease code density, which asks more of the instruction cache. Note Zen4 has a 32 KB L1 instruction cache while the M1 has a 192 KB L1 instruction cache, requiring extra cleverness here instead to handle the higher latency and area. Meanwhile, micro-op caches hide both problems.

The are ripple effects to consider as well. The large L1 caches of M1 (320 KB total) put capacity pressure on L2, towards larger sizes and/or away from inclusive policy. See the 12MB shared L2. Meanwhile, the narrower decode of Zen4 puts pressure on things like branch prediction accuracy & mispredict correction latency - if you predicted the wrong codepath, you can't catch up as quickly. See the large branch predictors on Zen4.
A couple gifting their 18 (or 38) year old kid a car is unlikely to exceed the gift tax exemption.
Given the subject, it seems ironic that the page is loading htmx.min.js (40kB/15kB transferred). Can anyone tell if it's doing anything whatsoever on this page? I suspect it wasn't there at the time this was published but the author later added it to all pages on their site.
This isn't the point of the article.

The article is commenting on CPU design: area efficiency, power efficiency, design cost, etc. They're proposing that the reason x86 CPUs have historically beat ARM CPUs in performance, and the reason ARM CPUs have historically beat x86 CPUs in power efficiency, has nothing to do with the design of the ISA itself. You could build an ARM CPU to beat an x86 CPU in high performance computing, or vice versa. They're saying that the format of the instructions and the particular way the operations are structured isn't the driving factor. Instead, it's just a historical arteract of how the ISAs were used.

In other words, yes, there are plenty of ecosystem reasons that these two (and potentially, more) families of chips are better for some things vs. others, but if the two companies swapped their ISAs 30 years ago we might see exactly the same ecosystem just with different instruction formats.
One factor with informal blaming is it makes it easier for it to be done to whoever has less power or whoever is less popular, etc. And this naturally leads to people just acting defensively rather than making an effort to avoid a given problem. At worst, people can incentivized to make other people screw-up, 'cause when other people are being blamed for X, you can't be blamed for Y.

A formal blaming process means that the question of who to blame is decided objectively and people have more of an incentive actually act correctly.

And as others mention, blaming the process itself is reasonable.

And you're right that the article itself only presents accountability as essentially greater politeness.
The margins on VRAM are pretty bad for them since they don't manufacture it themselves. And every memory module they add needs additional power delivery and memory controller muscle to drive, so adding that memory is going to raise the cost of the card significantly. Most games and consumer workloads won't use all that extra memory.

Keep in mind video cards don't use the same kind of RAM as consumer CPUs do, they typically use GDDR or HBM.
"Enthusiast" undersells for sure, but is still a true statement.

The fate of all VR at large defines what his ultimate legacy will be. In this, I think "enthusiast" is perhaps a less apt choice than "promoter." What he is doing here is promoting VR.

It's probably pretty well deserved. But I remain skeptical VR could get even 25% stake of the computing market (that'd be great!), and Apple certainly seems to have less than zero mass market ambitions. The question remains of what software really works & makes sense here, & we barely have guesses it feels like. The product might be excellent, and Luckey is lucky to have such an excellent company with such cachet shooting so stratospherically high market. Of course he'll promote this. Hopefully we figure out the use cases, some day.
>> I have an AMD CPU. Zen CPUs come with a fairly wide backend. But the frontend is what it is...

Zen 5 is widening the front end. My guess is with scaling coming to an end, one nice tweak with Zen 6 should be darn near the end of the performance road for a bit. Not saying the actual end, but it should be one of those sweet spots where you build a PC and it's really good for years to come.

I'm still running Raven Ridge and have no need to upgrade, but I will when I can get double the cores or more at double the IPC or more, and maybe at lower power ;-)
Is it really? Going from CPU to GPU, I would have expected a much better improvement.
At this point I view it as mostly a political signal more than anything else.