skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike MKBHD, James Hoffman has some slightly more objective credibility. He won some barista competitions about 15 years ago. He's been involved in the coffee industry (outside of being a content creator) for most of his life. As far as I know about Marques, his main qualification is that he was just relatively early to the tech review game.

That is not to say that I personally take all or most of Hoffman's suggestions at face value. It's abundantly clear that the level of nuance he considers in coffee is not relevant to me. But I do tend to see him applying a much more objective level of rigor to his reviews than many other content creators.
There used to be more regional diversity, though. Things had distinctive characteristics that could easily be associated with the culture that produced them. A German car looked restrained and taut and had no cupholders. A French car looked kinda unusual and Avant-garde. Now everyone is driving the same blobby thing with several cupholders decided after a customer survey among Americans driving through McDonalds.

The concept of "McDonaldization" (coined in 1993) sums it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization
> it sucks money out your pocket at insane rates

boat life hack: choose fibreglass, not wooden
> How much can the frontend really impact compile times?

Your question is addressed in this blog post - Faster compilation with the parallel front-end in nightly (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html). One the example shown there:

- Serial took 10.2 seconds in the frontend and 6.2 seconds in the backend.

- Parallel tool 5.9 seconds (-42%) and 5.3 seconds (-14.5%).

So to answer your question, parallelising the frontend can have a substantial impact.

You are right that frontend is only a subset of the total compilation time - backend and linking time matter too. Happily, that's something that's being worked on too!

There is an alternate backend called cranelift (https://bjorn3.github.io/2024/11/14/progress-report-nov-2024...) that compiles faster than LLVM, at the cost of producing slower binaries. That's a good trade-off for debug builds.

And there's work on changing the default linker to lld (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/05/17/enabling-rust-lld-on-l...).

We may see all 3 efforts land in the next year :)
Science often discovers and quantifies natural phenomena that are useful outside science. Whether pure math dealing with gazillion-digit-long primes can be of any use outside of satisfying curiosity is unclear.
Yes, jesus, swipe to text! It's 21st century! Why can't they make it recognize various basic words in the three languages I use?
I think history is worth mining for future ideas for producitvity software – especially when we finish mining everything LLMs and RAG can do, we might go back to past experiments in information retrieval. We might know the history now that we're reading this thread... but who's to say that a developer in 2030 who's never read HN has?
To be fair to them, the diagram makes it look worse than it actually was. From the user perspective, you got your Google Wallet app replaced by a Google Pay app which got replaced by a Google Wallet app. They all work the same (the last one has an extra tab for transit cards), had the same data/information (loyalty and bank cards), and even look pretty similar.

Yeah, it was dumb having your app change names and slightly looks, but materially, little changed.
Gamers Nexus review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjdCkSsLYLk
I'll echo it's worthwhile to include those who don't run javascript.

While I don't block JS, I do have a few dodgy script areas listed in my deny list, so I do run into sites that either don't load or whinge JS isn't enabled - the worst offending addition to my deny list, was a site which was supposedly just a new AI based tracking research area being way too intrusive that cropped up last year and nothing at all to do with scripts - I banned its arse and suddenly I found a bunch of sites would not display properly or were not as functional as they were, pretty stark for a no nothing area and perhaps one would think that's was the site's bread and butter was hosting scripts - but no doubt they were set up as a prerequisite. Since then I've noted a few sites that stopped functioning properly have moved to be be a bit more robust -- loss of exposure, maybe even potential customers isn't generally a smart move.
>One idea is merely a form of control flow (like 'if' or 'goto') that could jump down the call stack.

Interestingly this is more or less how Symbian handled exceptions back in the day. It was a giant mess. You basically called setjmp in a surrounding function (using a macro IIRC) and then longjmp (in the form of user::leave()) which unwound the stack without calling any destructors.

It was very fast and the source of endless memory leaks.
Only if you bought all your books from one publisher. This was Penguins distinctive brand. They also had the turquoise Pelican brand. They were cheap compared to traditional publishers.
Hackability is always at odds with physical security.

The general rule of thumb for the security-paranoid is that once you lose sight of your device, you should assume it's been owned (any imaginable variant/combination of evil maid, DMA exploit thru a physical port, etc).

In recent years there has been a steady push to raise the bar (TPM, SecureBoot, etc). Whether that's effective for protecting the median user's privacy and security is a separate matter, but the side effect is of course that this is increasingly becoming a hurdle for power users, enthusiasts, OS developers, etc.

ARM Macs are at a very weird spot on this spectrum. On one hand, we have a new, bespoke, and undocumented system architecture, and keeping a macOS partition is a requirement to continue receiving firmware updates; on the other, Apple has left a clearly labeled escape hatch for OS developers, and kept it from accidentally breaking. You can't have a fully libre boot chain, but it's not like Lenovo (or most other PC vendors) would endorse that either.
Yeah I mean if the police is going to use some software tool to do the reporting, then just release the raw footage and let the courts decide what happened. As it is police officers have way too much latitude to determine what gets written down.
Interesting. I don't consider myself an expert, but I have written my share of lock free algorithms. For which algorithms you specifically needed an "initial store" or "final read" for?

I could see these being useful for seq locks, but usually you represent them with relaxed operations and explicit memory barriers.
> can't tell if this article is trying to make it seem like a negative
or not

It left no ambiguity for me. Both the project (which is great art in
itself) and the commentary opens a door for a hard truth, and new
questions emerge,

In tech, might we learn from this?

from TFA: "Looking for freedom, we found slavery.”

Every parent. Every patrician, condescending patron. Every "elite".
Each have their idea of what "freedom" is best for others.

And the people say: "Boaty McBoatface!"

In cybersecurity we want people to be safe. But the people say;
"Give me TikTok, Microsoft...."

Would Rousseau want us "being forced to be free"?
it's always so strange to see people on the opposite side of precision spectrum

I disable auto-correct and word suggestions, always get annoyed by "drag around and find out what your mistap gave you!" features - and here I read someone _dreaming_ about "general vicinity" understand-er

fascinating
You just did! Twice!
>harities would give homeless people one-way bus tickets there from colder regions of Canada to prevent winter deaths. No return tickets in spring

This, as far as I'm aware, still happens in the US nowadays[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=048BUjNWZa8
At some point it may be more than just hardship. 80+, paralyzed from the waist down, bedridden, bed sores, muscles atrophying, all of your enjoyments gone, your friends dead, dying, or lost most of their mental facilities, and you're completely miserable.
Your argument is if we don't let the police use this novel (unreliable) labor saving tool that didn't exist until a couple of years ago, policing (as it has been done for the whole of history) would be too expensive?
but those are orthogonal. and yes, everyone is different. i am also motivated by solving problems. but i also believe in the premise of the article that deadlines can help push me forward. personally i like deadlines to be set according to the value of the project, which can be its budget or some other externally motivated limitation.
Super interesting how the example of "Rule 105 Reversible" inserts a mirror 3/4 down, but only on the right half.

I wonder how it continues.
TIL there are armchair quarterbacks for chess
Here in New Zealand they seem to be installed in every new or renovated office kitchen. Prior to that a boiling water tank that is mounted on the wall and allows instant near building water for tea.

Those boiling water tanks would be very hard for a child to access without a lot of effort. Those boiling taps are sometimes close to the cold/warm water tap.
The question is: how are you going to fund this type of thought, and find a funder that values dissemination and public engagement? Academics "pay their way" through teaching (even if it's second hand by training TAs that teach students.) Private philanthropy is often embedded in its own social context – when you have lots of money and you're interested in the social sciences, you're likely doing so not because you're engaged in the public.

I think this type of work is necessary. It's sad that we have only a handful of people who've thought about society in ways that we can quote... e.g. Chomsky et al. But, sadly, we have to fund the people somehow at least...
Regarding grinders there's actually someone else who is considered the kingmaker: Lance Hedrick [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@LanceHedrick/videos
We’re already past that point! MacBooks can easily run models exceeding GPT-3.5, such as Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 8B, or Gemma 2 9B. These models run at very comfortable speeds on Apple Silicon. And they are distinctly more capable and less prone to hallucination than GPT-3.5 was.

Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 2.5 72B are certainly comparable to GPT-4, and they will run on MacBook Pros with at least 64GB of RAM. However, I have an M3 Max and I can’t say that models of this size run at comfortable speeds. They’re a bit sluggish.
Huh. My Iron Triangle says "Fast | Good | Cheap - Pick two."

In all seriousness, I have found it is much better for me to push back on deadlines, especially those that are nothing short of arbitrary and imposed by middle/upper managers who have no understanding of the actual work involved. My results and reputation speak for themselves though and I can demonstrate that, historically speaking, I tend to produce higher quality output when I am given a blank check on time.

I would be a liar if I did not also admit that requires a healthy amount of discipline on my part and it took me years to develop that. I learned early on that the faster I complete my work, the more work I end up doing while my rewards do not increase, so moving fast is not a good strategy, to me. In fact, I work with a lot of people who have the "move fast and break things" mentality; not only are they arrogant bores that seem to only have a cursory understanding of their craft, but they leave insane messes that the rest of us have to clean up when they finally burn out.

So yeah, I'll stick with picking two
Re: PhDs... the "the system's purpose is what it does" explanation of a PhD program is to get cheap labor, without the employment conditions of standard employees, in exchange for the long-term promise of the letters after your name, sadly. There's a reason that, in the US, graduate student researchers often have union/bargaining units separate from postdoctoral academics, and it's not to benefit the graduate students.
Cloudberry Database Enters the Apache Incubator
> Perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimisation.

I think this is onto something. We're no longer designing for someone, an imaginary persona who wants something specific. We've learned to gather and analyse data in a way that makes it possible to design for everyone, and we're predictable in what we desire as a species. Individual variation gets averaged out on scales that large.

----

The bland paintings at the start were requested by nobody, or at least nearly nobody. They were not "People's Choice" in the sense that most people wanted specifically those paintings. It might even be the case that nobody requested the (blue × animals) combination. Maybe among four responses we get

- Blue × humans

- Blue × trains

- Green × animals

- Red × animals

and then we end up with a (blue × animals) painting. The same thing is going on elsewhere. When trying to offend as few people as possible on each property independently, it's hard to get anything other than what we get.
This! A big red flag to me too. The manufacturing is hard. Even if you design it properly there are million ways to fail somewhere in the manufacturing process. Hardware is for graybeards.
How did you get that credit?
> Definitely, imagine coming to game studios talking them into rewriting into Linux/Vulkan, using command line and gdb, when the culture is using Windows and Visual Studio, including the devkits plugins for Sony and Nintendo consoles.

And yet towards the end Stadia had a plethora of games from multiple big name studios (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar) and a ton of indie games.

Where Google screwed up with Stadia was expecting it to hit big immediately, being a bit slow with games, not talking enough about it and the games that were actually on it, not advertising what their shutdown plan is.

The vast vast vast majority of Stadia negative commentary was about how Google will shut it down, and "there are no games". The second point wasn't true for the majority of the platform's existence, but nobody bothered to check because they were afraid of Google killing it. If everyone knew Google will reimburse all game purchases, and they advertised stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, EA's latest hits, and they managed to bring in the big studios a bit earlier (when I started using it about a year in, RDR2 was the only big game I cared about; GTA V would have been massive to have too), it would have been a massive hit. A lot of people would game casually on a basically-no-hardware-required platform.

To this day Xbox Cloud Gaming isn't close, performance and UX wise. GeForce Now is good performance wise, but UX is meh. Stadia was a golden opportunity for Google but they just blew it.
Quanta Magazine tries to make these topics accessible for people with low knowledge regarding them, thus mentioning the Riemann hypothesis, although adequate and needed for, say, a lecture on the topic, would not really help this goal.
Resume Builder $10
Meta just announced Horizon OS (without saying what it will change) and the Quest/Horizon OS is both pretty good technically but also infuriatingly artificially limited. It really doesn’t looks like Meta is going to give up control in this platform anytime soon.
Just ordered your grinder! I'm amazed you designed your own burr type! Looks super space saving, too, with the vertical straight up tilt of the grinder.
Large primes are already useful for encryption - whether that would ever need gazillion-digit-long primes is questionable.
None of this is related to them being separate streams instead of metadata in one stream
> Stadia was just another boring game streaming service

Only it actually worked (unlike Microsoft's poor excuse of an attempt at the time, it's finally decent), and it was cheaper and with better UX than GeForce Now. For a few years it was unquestionably the best.
They're not so wildly expensive. a couple hundred bucks maybe. My mom got one years ago, and it's really convenient for quick pour-over coffee. Great if you're in a hurry. I use a moka pot at home, but the 10 minutes it takes to boil while I putter around the kitchen trying to remember my name are really the most worthless of the day.
I'd be interested in an overall energy use comparison between a kettle and a hot water tap. I know lots of people who boil far too much water for a single cup of tea or coffee (partially due to kettle designs).
This model seems to be as opened as far as possible, though (https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html):

One of the benefits of deguard for Intel MEv11 is that it sets the ME in such a state where you can run unsigned code in there. This is how the Intel Boot Guard was disabled, because it is the ME that enforces such restrictions; more information about deguard is available on a dedicated page.

The deguard utility could also be used to enable the red-unlock hack, which would permit unsigned execution of new CPU microcode, though much more research is needed. Because of these two facts, this makes the T480/T480s the most freedom-feasible of all relatively modern x86 laptops.

With deguard, you have complete control of the flash. This is unprecedented on recent Intel systems in Libreboot, so it’s certainly a very interesting port!
Wrong trees in the wrong place can make cities hotter at night, study reveals
Frankly, just Python. LLM generation is just a function call, fetching from a vector db is just a function call.

LLMs are hard to tame at scale, the focus is on tightly controlling the LLM inputs, making sure it has the information it needs to be accurate, and having detailed observability over outputs and costs. For that last part this new wave of AI observability tools can help (Helicone, Langsmith, W&B Weave...).

Frameworks like LangChain obscure the exact inputs and outputs and when the LLM is called. Fancy agentic patterns and one-size-fits-all RAG are expensive and their effectiveness in general is dubious. It's important to tightly engineer the prompt for every individual use-case and to think of it as a low-level input-output call, just like coding a good function, rather than a magical abstract intelligent being. In practice, I prefer to keep the control and simplicity of vanilla Python so I can focus on the actually difficult part of prompting the LLM well.
Once when my boss handed me a piece of work to be done for a third party and I immediately replied, like, "can have it in x minutes", he went whoa, let's not ruin the prices. IOW take your time, if we finish too fast too often then before long we'll have to run all day just to keep up with the unrealistic expectations we've unwisely set for ourselves. "Wir wollen doch nicht die Preise verderben" is one thing, the other one is "Gut Ding will Weile haben". Both underappreciated by the young eager colleague next to you.
A blue whale floats in water, does the LPT?
They're quite expensive and big. Building sized. Sure these transformers are technically also building sizes, but it's a garden shed, not a warehouse.
The standalone microcontroller in your physical keyboard can run arbitrary code, and it's been able to since we've invented keyboards attached to the computer via a port. What's there to stop the manufacturer (or a sophisticated attacker) from:

- recording your keystrokes in non-volatile memory, to be extracted later?

- exfiltrating them in real-time via Bluetooth (yay for wireless peripherals), WiFi, LoRa?

- asking the OS to install a driver, which (even if approved/signed) could have exploitable security holes?

The main hurdles are scale and sophistication, which, with an all-software "keyboard", were no longer an issue.
> We have excellent web support (DOM is 1st class)

ah I missed that... I read something about Flutter and WASM and kind of assumed it was rendering to canvas

that's very nice
he's also fair, often trashes big brands when their products are mediocre

I have great respect for his integrity and body of work
k8s API is complex, a good fit for Protobuf, IMO, a poor fit for YAML.
It is more like a race.

There are people with Neanderthal heretige living today. It is even used as a slur.
LTT and "proper review" don't really go together anymore.

Gamer's Nexus, Der8auer, Wendel from Level1Techs, Hardware Unboxed are where the "proper reviews" are these days.

What's left of LTT is a morally bankrupt entertainment channel who sometimes reviews PC hardware between reviewing sponsored products, AliEpress junk and upgrading his house or the setups of their employees for clout and monetization.
What are the chances of drastic decisions like these getting reversed, if these decisions don't take root too deeply in time?
Congrats! The design looks nice, but I'm not very fond of the website design. There isn't a single picture of Trefolo that doesn't crop-out some part of it. Also, every picture is in a "sterile" environment. It would be nice to have a picture of it on a real kitchen counter or coffee corner to put its dimensions into perspective, and also demonstrate how it "fades back into the environment".

Also, IMHO, the sustainability pitch is a nice one but needs to be put down in more precise terms. It is good as it is for people who would otherwise buy a Nespresso machine, but anyone who has bought something above that level would need more convincing.

Overall, a good espresso machine already scores pretty high sustainability-wise. Apart from the used of sustainable/premium materials, a key factor to that is the replacement parts and repairability. So, how does Trefolo do in terms of replacement parts and compatibility with 3rd party parts?

For me, the future lack of replacement parts is especially concerning for the Turbina coffee grinder. The use of bespoke grinding burrs adds a wow factor and may be functionally superior to other types of burrs. But this is the one part in the whole setup that is guaranteed to need replacement down the road. What are the provisions for that? How much would it cost? And if you decide to stop selling it, would you e.g. be willing to commit to releasing the burr design so owners or some independent manufacturer can machine replacements?
Interesting, I wonder if he also memorized all the irregular verb tenses? If so that is a serious feat.

For example, future tense in the 2nd person adds “ás” to the end of the verb. Pensar becomes pensarás. But, there are irregulars. You’d think the verb salir would be salirás (if you were memorizing), but it actually it saldrás

Seems like an incredible feat that goes beyond memorizing a dictionary. Unless Spanish scrabble maybe has specific rules around verb tenses and whatnot?
> Also it hurts me to say this but the website is trash.

Then better to not to say it at all. I don’t think anyone on HN should call someone else’s work “trash”.

I personally really liked the website on mobile. Other than missing a demo video it communicated the value proposition.
We’re really bad at handling large, complex structures.

Mathematics dealing with large primes and their complex structures is likely to find applications in other complex structures, eg in physics or computer science.

Mathematics is modern ontology: even when its self-investigation is not directly applicable, the vocabulary and semantics developed is often useful for articulating other truths.
DIY espresso machine build report