skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Monolithic systems are faster to design and implement. Systems with decoupled components require more time to design, implement and iterate. A lot more time.

This doesn't just apply to kernels. It applies to anything in software; writing a huge monolith of intertwined code is always going to be faster than writing separate components with clear API boundaries and responsibilities.

Of course, monolithic software ends up being less safe, less reliable, and often messier to maintain. But decoupled design (or micro-kernels) can take SO MUCH longer to develop and implement, that by the time it's close to being ready, the monolithic implementation has become ubiquitous.
Great game! Curious what design decisions you would change if you were starting from scratch.
Constant current is more expensive and does not scale to a lot of LEDs or high power LEDs well. The scale wouldn’t be an issue with the tail lights, but the power kind of is. Take a look at modern taillights sometime, they all have heatsinks on them. I’m sure there are some; but I am not aware of any constant current taillights.
Endless.downward.spiral – is this the beginning of the end of What3Words?
That's very interesting! I just remembered that I instinctively turn on syntax highlighting at every chance that I get. The highlighting pager bat is one of my most frequently used tools. Despite that, my sight never registers the colors as long as they have good contrast. All I see is structure - as if the colors convey meaning the same way as text does. The colors make occassional typos and syntax errors very obvious. One peculiar case is of 'else if' statements. It's alternatively elsif and elif in other languages. I recollect it in most cases based on the color - again almost involuntarily.

The fact that you get all that with plain text and that color is a distraction for you is fascinating. This difference demonstrates how complex and deep human perception is.
While humans can and do make mistakes, it seems to me like there is a larger problem here that LLMs make mistakes for different reasons than humans and that those reasons make them much worse than humans at certain types of problems (e.g. OCR). Worse, this weakness might be fundamental to LLM design rather than something that can be fixed by just LLM-ing harder.

I think a lot of this gets lost in the discussion because people insist on using terminology that anthropomorphizes LLMs to make their mistakes sound human. So LLMs are "hallucinating" rather than having faulty output because their lossy, probabilistic model fundamentally doesn't actually "understand" what's being asked of it the way a human would.
Being free as in beer and compatible enough with the incumbent UNIX ecosystem to gain initial traction is a big chunk of why Linux won. Giving something of value away for free is extremely hard to compete with.

The other part is the UNIX server manufacturers falling behind on performance versus Intel and their fab prowess and AMD with their x86-64 architecture. Sun Microsystems went from being the second highest market cap in tech in 2000 to being bought by Oracle in 2009.
Vista moved graphics mostly out of kernel even if part of GDI was still handled internally, but essentially the driver model changed heavily and enabled restartable drivers and by Windows 7 IIRC the new model was mandatory.

In "classic" Windows and NT 4.0 - 5.2 GDI would draw directly into VRAM, possibly calling driver-specific acceleration routines. This is how infamous "ghosting" issues when parts of the system would hang happened.

With new model in Vista and later, GDI was directed at separate surface that was later used as texture and composited on screen. Some fast paths were still available to bypass that mainly for full screen apps, and were improved over time.
Sure, there are trade offs and risks to everything and everything new. Cars made us move faster, but can pollute and cause injury or death. But summing all of those things together, I would not pick any other time before now to live. And same with software development.
Unknown and unknowable. This is a philosophical and intellectual question that is very personal to the person feeling it. One might consider it akin to the meaning of life or why the universe exists.
That used to be the case, of course.

We PWM those now because the PWM drivers are there anyhow, and with a filament, it’s still lit and bright during the off pulses. It’s cooling, but you really can’t detect it.
If you are not interested in the edges, only painting the sites with different colors, you can use a variation of flood fill starting with the seeds and only stacking the pixel if that color has distance lower than the one already painted that pixel.
A lot has changed since 2019. That "do nothing" script can be fed to an LLM and it's going to be a pretty good starting point for automating it. For example, feeding the script to ChatGPT o3-mini-high produced this for one of the steps:

class CreateSSHKeypairStep(object):
def run(self, context):
keyfile = os.path.expanduser("~/{0}_ssh_key".format(context["username"]))
pubkey = keyfile + ".pub"
if os.path.exists(keyfile):
print("Key file {} already exists. Skipping generation.".format(keyfile))
else:
print("Generating SSH key pair (no passphrase) in {} and {}.".format(keyfile, pubkey))
cmd = ["ssh-keygen", "-t", "rsa", "-f", keyfile, "-N", ""]
subprocess.check_call(cmd)
# Save the key filenames in the context for later use.
context["keyfile"] = keyfile
context["pubkey"] = pubkey
wait_for_enter()
The BMW M3 CSL Intimidated Me, Until I Drove It
Just get a bus pass and you'll be in the biggest passenger vehicle on the road.
It is not a security problem if you know what you are doing and trusting the source. As a general way of installing software is is problematic because it is a risk when careless users execute untrusted code from the internet. Using this in cases where it could be seen a safe encourages such unsafe behavior and undermines efforts to train users not to do this. There is also the issue that websites are generally less safe than dedicated infrastructure of distributions. Those also typically ensure some level of quality control and auditing.
they scheduled the trial for 2026. Congress hasn't stopped or done anything since.
Nuget is .Net, no?
Tennessee was the most stark example, but not the only one. And the fact that education is often sub-standard isn't a good case for more of it.

The point: it isn't blindly obvious that devoting even more of our children's lives to an education institution is necessarily best for them, in all cases.
With a non-compliant cookie banner to start with...
The XDG specification (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/) is

1. short and easy to read,

2. good for users, and

3. can be implemented in five minutes.

If we can't have programs follow this simple decades-old convention, we have no hope whatsoever of voluntary consistency in our computing world. It's literally because of the mentality espoused in this article that we can't have nice things.

Unfortunately, we have nothing but social pressure and incensed HN comments to get developers to follow it. That's why the mobile world adopted a "you shall" model: a developer won't spent five minutes to save a million years of user time unless there's some social or technical guardrail forcing his hand.
Lucky you.

Took me a month to port an existing driver to me cheaper unknown brand sound card, in 1995.

Got the CD from an OS book. Kernel internals maybe? Doesn't matter, the book was enough to understand enough of the kernel to, by trial and error, stumble upon the correct way to talk to the sound card.
They are still general very easy to install. Also, C programmers don't seem to use any package managers other than the default system package manager and maybe git sub-modules (at least, not that I know of).
Social Security is advertised as an "insurance fund", rather than a transfer payment.

If it was advertised as a handout, then many of the recipients would be asking for a broom; provided they were able.
How is that burning you out? Treat your job as a transaction. You trade your 40 hours of labor for money and go home and leave your live your life.

Because of - life - I also don’t see myself retiring until I’m 65 in 15 years. But, I’m okay with that. I work remotely, I wake up in the morning, open my computer, do my job and close it at night. I was able to “retire my wife” when she was 44 and I was 46 so we could travel extensively - of course after Covid lifted.
It’s not as bad as United Health group letting 100 million patient’s info be stolen and refusing to even tell victims what was stolen.

But still bad. There have been many medical hacks recently.
They have c++ packages too
Bitcoin is not Good Enough
You can not use a DH key exchange, and create the symmetric key by some procedure that is predictable, or encode the symmetric key with the government's public key and send it to them.

It doesn't stop being end-to-end when you add another end. We often do group chats that way.

Or you can create a side-channel and send al the data there. That would stop it from being end-to-end.
Yeah C programmers tend to be stuck in the late 90s
99%+ is terrible in the OCR world. 99.8%+ on first pass, and 99.99%+ (1/10k characters error) at the end of the process - which includes human reviewers in the loop - is ok, but the goal is higher fidelity than that. If we are throwing billions at the problem, I would expect at least another 9 on that.
Another big factor is conceptual simplicity, rather than implementation simplicity. Linux is conceptually simple, you can get a good mental model of what it's doing with fairly little knowledge. There is complexity in the details, but you can learn about that as you go. And because it is "like the unix kernel, just bigger" there have always been a lot of people able and willing to explain it and carry the knowledge forward.

Windows in comparison has none of that. The design is complex from the start, is poorly understood because most knowledge is from the NT 4.0 era (when MS cared about communicating about their cool new kernel), and the community of people who could explain it to you is a lot smaller.

It's impressive what the NT Kernel can do. But most of that is unused because it was either basically abandoned, meant for very specific enterprise use cases, or is poorly understood by developers. And a feature only gives you an advantage if it's actually used
Linus was just an unremarkable undergraduate at the time and Andrew Tanenbaum was (and still is) a renowned researcher and author of widely used textbooks on computer architecture and networking. If Linus had been sassy, things would have ended very, very badly for him.
> I think a bifurcation is likely.

Surely Apple has some other OS used internally for debugging/testing hardware prototypes. I heard rumours that it's Linux, but it might just be something else built on their BSD core. Whatever it is, it's kept secret and not available to the general population.

> I think in the not too distant future you'll have to choose between being able to run a debugger and hack the OS vs. being able to watch shows, play video games, and access your bank account.

This is already the case on Android. Technically on iOS too; you can't run a debugger there at all.
In my country, you can be reimbursed on substance prescribed by a nurse (or any medical practitioner, including physical therapist) if its effect is proved, but only doctors can prescribe regulated substances, and this kind of prescription are typically monitored (and stats are made on those prescriptions. Why, i don't know yet, we set up the big data infrastructure like 5 years ago, so probably nothing yet).

And there is another tier of regulated substance that you can only be prescribed at a hospital (rarely-used antibiotics, you must stay under surveillance while you take them to avoid creating resistance), and another tier that can only be prescribed by a specialist (methadone, lithium, probably a ton of others), but i would hope this is the same in the US.
> Would only be interesting with Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. support.

Big statement, maybe for you but for plenty people it seems to be interesting enough without those.
Sun's Solaris 2.1 x86 version in 1993 predated that, and Wabi allowed running 16-bit Windows applications, but certainly AMD64 led to the sort of high power workstations that had previously been proprietary, and basically ended their reign while stopping Itanium in its tracks, for the most part.

Another thing that led to their rapid disappearance is that even though used UNIX workstations could be found, parts were often difficult to find, obsoleted, incompatible with other brands, or notably more expensive than PC types.
The same way we track how much electricity households use from the grid. By using a (smart) meter.
Imagine weighing the right of privacy of everyone in the world against the right of safety of 0.8% of the world population.
Will do! My wife and I love Harry Potter so I’m motivated to show her my investment in the tablet actually got me Tom Riddle’s diary.

I don’t use discord much but I’ll find you somewhere around here!
The Chernobyl mini-series is highly recommended. It is a classic example of how arrogance and stupidity are closely related. (Where stupidity is defines as knowing the correct thing to do, but ignoring the facts or available infomation.)
No Way Home
We built Harvest to reduce the pain of gathering web data by clicking through websites to copy data into excel sheets, databases, and CRMs. Something millions of people do everyday.

We recognize it as an unrewarding, tedious, and time-consuming thing humans have had to do until the latest abilities of browser agents.

As we built and learnt more about the industry we started to understand the underlying problems. For 99% of web sites web scraping isn’t the problem, the lack of compensation is.

We think there’s actually a better way to do this. If there’s enough demand, we can facilitate a rev share between agent scrapers and websites. Scrapers will pay less than what they pay for proxies and websites get a new revenue stream.

These are our thoughts at least so far. We aren’t ashamed of what we’ve built by any means in the way your comment implies lol. We want to see if we can benefit both parties in a win-win marketplace.
Because people are upset with the process, as in there doesn’t seem to be any transparency, oversight, or methodology, and essentially no concern for whether what they’re doing is legal. Just flat assertions.

Rooting out waste is a laudable goal but it’s easy to use “waste reduction” as a pretext for waging an ideological purge.

I thought we all agreed ideological purges are bad on the basis that you will disagree when the purge eventually comes for you?
Warning: website terrible for mobile.
> Democracies around the world are increasingly looking to surveil and expose private data of their citizens, and introducing laws where simple act of defiance will become criminal.

Yes. Democracies around the world are increasingly stopping being democracies.
Journalists having an opinion in a news article, or even printing an opinion in an op-ed page, is not the same as—or even close to—social media brigading. It’s also a practice as old as the press itself. Brigading is about harassment and intimidation, not about possessing or publishing an opinion.
This is a really cool effect. How do you envision this being used?

Thinking about it as a product, I’d want a way to easily slip in and out of “LLM please respond” so it wasn’t constantly trying to write back the moment I stopped the stylus - maybe I’d want awhile to sketch and think, then restart a conversation. Or maybe for certain pages to be LLM-enabled, and others not.

Does it require any sort of jailbreak to get SSH access to the device?
Hurd failed not because of microkernel design, in 1994 multiple companies were shipping systems based on Mach kernel quite succesfully.

According to some people I've met who claimed to witness things (old AI Lab peeps) the failure started with initial project management and when Linux offered alternative GPLed kernel to use, that was enough to bring the effort even more to halt.
What do you mean by "ideatic space" and "optimal ideatic equation" -- I'm not sure what "ideatic" means in these contexts.

(assuming the OP is the author of the blog)
I think this is an important data point, too:

Gunthorpe [nvidia]: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250130154646.GA2298...

Basically, there is concern that even with a declaration that Rust-for-Linux devs will maintain this (and potentially every other) cross-language API translation layer file, the demarcation point between C and Rust isn't sufficient, and is causing C developers lag or headaches by having PRs rejected because of Rust-side failures. I don't see how that can be fixed without wholesale buy-in to Rust of enough kernel devs that they can fix whatever Rust problems are created by C API changes. Or Linus will have to accept PRs that break Rust-enabled builds. The R4L devs, by themselves, don't have the bandwidth to keep up. Even if they can rapidly fix problems, that adds potential friction to every C API change.

Hellwig may not be communicating in a good way, but he might be right, unfortunately. Linux may need to stay as a C-only codebase until an AI language-translation tool is good enough to do things like maintain the Rust API translation layer itself. Or until basically all maintainers learn and accept Rust.
What Lurks in This Flower's Large Y Chromosome?
conan also works with C language, not just C++
QED seeds $9.9M in Cedar Money, a stablecoin payment platform
Hi, sorry this might not seem appropriate but anyway time is a bit of a factor for me so here goes and I will keep it short:

-I'm browsing this site -> finds your profile -> I find most comments on your profile very thought provoking -> you seem like a good man -> currently I need advice on something (personal and career wise) which you might be very well versed in (related to math and machine learning) and might have some different avenues of thought that hasn't occurred to me yet. Again, sorry seems a bit creepy and stalker-ish but whatever. My mail is ameen.sidhique@protonmail.com, so if possible could you hit me up?
Yeah these lines from Tanenbaum stuck out to me as well. To be fair this response only comes after Linus delivers a pretty rude rebuttal to Tanenbaum's initial points which were still somewhat arrogant but civilly stated.

In the grand scheme of things, the whole thread is still pretty tame for a usenet argument and largely amounts to two intelligent people talking past each other with some riffing and dunking on each other mixed in.

Makes me come back and appreciate the discussion guidelines we have on this site.
What three words seemed like a great idea but not something that was enough of an idea to monetize directly. They needed to make this an open and distributed model to share the burden of hosting and so forth but have a different thing that relied on this technology to actually monetize their business.

Additionally the usefulness over GPS or apps that can just send a pin location to another user wasn't enough. The real benefit of this seemed like it would be something that Grindr would want to use. Maybe they don't want to be associated with something like that but anonymous meetups and anonymous locations sounds like the perfect use case for this. Infotainment systems in vehicles seems like not the use case.

A long time ago I did have an idea for using what three words in a project. Looking at their cost structure for actually leveraging it made it totally unviable because this was a hobby project and not some fully funded thing with capital behind it. I expect there were other projects that might have been something that could have bolstered this but never did due to their cost structure.
I'd like to second the recommendation of ncdu.

If anything can be taken home from this article, it's that perhaps desktop environments need to do a better job helping users to understand disk utilisation.

The article's own recommendation would just make things worse. Application authors should stick to XDG standard directories.
One problem is that there's too many to choose from, so there might just as well be none from a library author's point of view.

It's the same problem with putting build system files into your library source distribution - which build system to pick?

Libraries that come as a header, or a small number of headers and source files have none of those problems because they are trivial to integrate without requiring package manager or build system magic.

E.g. only top level projects should pick a specific build system and package manager, but not libraries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979056
The biggest hold up in automation for me usually are things that need to be done via a gui.

I tried automatizing those with some tools intended for gui testing, but those solutions tend to be brittle and I just don’t feel well if I cannot get a real success report.

I’d be fretful for somthing that solves that problem.
Is it not written in Java?
I had yet another experience. Before Chrome existed, I learned thousands of words by hearing them before I could read them.

A lot of the pain I see in foreigners learning Chinese is that they try to tackle the written language too early. Actually, I think that's sub-optimal in any language, but it's even more expensive in a language like Chinese or Thai where word segmentation isn't a part of the writing system. I totally get it since characters are cool and curiosity about them draws many learners to the language, but it's a lot easier to take on one challenge at a time!
It’s a loss making endeavour, just like all the remnants of empire.
Well, that's part of the point, it somewhat resembles the thoughts, which should be enough of a kindling to ignite the thoughts of anyone with experience or imagination.

Now, what do you think Nietzsche would really say? You seem to be familiar with his thinking.
You haven’t really refuted his point though?

Which is that you are complaining about something you claim to be perfectly capable of yourself.

It’s not about how much you contributed elsewhere. It’s about how much you contributed to the thing you take issue with.

I get your point though, but maybe a discussion instead of an out of the blue pull request would work better.
We should be so lucky…
Accetta means accept. You can visit in incognito if you don't want to retain cookies
They can if it's their ship.
XDG_CACHE_HOME, as mentioned by numerous other posters, is a good remedy to deal with this kind of cached-artifacts-sprawl - but it does need a will to cooperate and care from the original software developer in the first place, which ain't a given.

So does another standard that I've come to appreciate in all software that supports it: CACHEDIR.TAG (https://github.com/LineageOS/charter/blob/main/device-suppor...) - I'm just here to spread the word! ;)
Here's a master list of most libraries like this: https://github.com/r-lyeh/single_file_libs
I have no idea what the criteria would need to be like. Sorry
Managing Project Dependencies
Based on our experience many of the potholes around us (in Gloucestershire) get fixed
If the GPU driver crashes, your kernel does not crash on Windows still, right? It continued working fine on Windows 7.
C on Unices is very well served by pkg-config[1] and its reimplementations[2,3]. (The last of these should also work well with MSYS2 on Windows, but it’s not—yet?—widely used in that environment.) The nice thing is that it has no opinions on your build system or even package manager, it’s purely for package discovery at build time.

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/

[2] http://pkgconf.org/

[3] https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/01/18/