MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codys | 2025-04-26 04:50:25+00:00
I did something like the system described in this article a few years back. [1]

Instead of splitting the "configure" and "make" steps though, I chose to instead fold much of the "configure" step into the "make".

To clarify, this article describes a system where `./configure` runs a bunch of compilations in parallel, then `make` does stuff depending on those compilations.

If one is willing to restrict what the configure can detect/do to writing to header files (rather than affecting variables examined/used in a Makefile), then instead one can have `./configure` generate a `Makefile` (or in my case, a ninja file), and then have the "run the compiler to see what defines to set" and "run compiler to build the executable" can be run in a single `make` or `ninja` invocation.

The simple way here results in _almost_ the same behavior: all the "configure"-like stuff running and then all the "build" stuff running. But if one is a bit more careful/clever and doesn't depend on the entire "config.h" for every "<real source>.c" compilation, then one can start to interleave the work perceived as "configuration" with that seen as "build". (I did not get that fancy)

[1]: https://github.com/codyps/cninja/tree/master/config_h
by proggy | 2025-04-26 04:51:16+00:00
They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-26 04:51:16+00:00
All I/O (including timing, date/time, internet, and everything else) should be behind permissions (although some may be permitted by default, they should still be overridable). Furthermore, all I/O should allow the user to program proxy capabilities (which can be used for testing error conditions, as well as for privacy and security, and for finer permissions, and logging, and other stuff).

However, if an app wants to make a screenshot of itself, then it could do so by emulation of itself (so no permission is needed), as long as everything it displays is rendered by its own code rather than calling other functions in the system to do so.
by acuozzo | 2025-04-26 04:53:45+00:00
Hands have to get dirty somewhere. "As deep as The Worker's City lay underground, so high above towered the City of Metropolis."

The choices are:

1. Restrict the freedom of CPU designers to some approximation of the PDP11. No funky DSP chips. No crazy vector processors.

2. Restrict the freedom of OS designers to some approximation of Unix. No bespoke realtime OSes. No research OSes.

3. Insist programmers use a new programming language for these chips and OSes. (This was the case prior to C and Unix.)

4. Insist programmers write in assembly and/or machine code. Perhaps a macro-assembler is acceptable here, but this is inching toward C.

The cost of this flexibility is gross tooling to make it manageable. Can it be done without years and years of accrued M4 and sh? Perhaps, but that's just CMake and CMake is nowhere near as capable as Autotools & friends are when working with legacy platforms.
by Perenti | 2025-04-26 04:55:19+00:00
Everybody votes in Australia (not sure how rich, but in top 20 for sure). If you don't you have to show cause or pay a AUD$50 fine. I know some think this is anti-freedom, but it does prevent farces like the current USA. Historically there have been problems in the past (30 years ago) but these days the Australian Electoral Commission (Independent from government) revise electoral boundaries to ensure no more gerrymanders.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-26 04:56:04+00:00
I feel like every fanbase thinks they have the loudest barn.

I'm saving myself for the Cleveland dawg pound. They are notorious (there's even a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawg_Pound ).

(Womp womp, the Kings just lost 7-4 with two goals on an open net)
by dataflow | 2025-04-26 04:56:17+00:00
> Lol: by that logic, Steve who lives in a van down by the river can scribble himself a napkin that says "warrant" on it. After all, "It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process", and Steve who lives in a van down by the river has a process and a warrant.

What? Did you not read it says a process that "has been issued under the provisions of any law of the United States"?
by gdwatson | 2025-04-26 04:56:26+00:00
Yeah, I think the dream was more like, “The compiler looks at a map or filter operation and figures out whether it’s worth the overhead to parallelize it automatically.” And that turns out to be pretty hard, with potentially painful (and nondeterministic!) consequences for failure.

Maybe it would have been easier if CPU performance didn’t end up outstripping memory performance so much, or if cache coherency between cores weren’t so difficult.
by madbes | 2025-04-26 04:57:03+00:00
I'm thrilled to announce that my book “Navigating the Dark Web: A Comprehensive Guide to Darknets, Tools, and Intelligence” is now available. This book explains what the Dark Web is, how to access it, what content to expect, how to monitor the Dark Web and why it matters. I wrote this book to address many questions people have, to demystify the Dark Web, and share my experience with others. It is exclusively hosted online so that everybody can enjoy it for free.
by kcexn | 2025-04-26 04:57:16+00:00
My professional career has mostly been in IT ops. I've worked for companies that do requirements analysis and design in-house, write up a huge spec, send the spec to an offshore development house, then simply acceptance test the software that is sent back.

Companies know that the quality of the software they get back might be lower than if they hired the bestest, smartest developers in the world. But it doesn't matter because keeping the production cost of the asset low means that they can maximize long term profits.

Writing good software is not the same as writing profitable software.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-26 04:58:50+00:00
I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used.

My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-26 04:58:51+00:00
Perhaps you can get away with that for small, young, or self-contained projects. But for medium-to-large projects running more than a few years, the (different versions of) external or vendored dependencies tend to come and go, and they all have their own configurations. Long-running projects are also prone to internal reorganizations and overhauls to the build system. (Go back far enough, and you're having to wrangle patchsets for every few months' worth of versions since -fpermissive is no longer permissive enough to get it to build.)
by rayiner | 2025-04-26 04:59:02+00:00
No, “voter suppression” is the act of preventing legitimate voters from voting. Society determining that categories of people shouldn’t vote (children, felons, non-citizens, etc.) isn’t voter suppression, it’s simply establishing qualifications for voting. The goal isn’t to get to 0 or try to get as close to 0 as possible. People who should vote should be able to vote, while people who shouldn’t vote shouldn’t be able to vote.

In the modern era, we should probably narrow the franchise, instituting civics tests and restricting voting to natural born citizens. Statistically, both of these would have hurt my party in 2024, so this isn’t self-interest speaking.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-26 04:59:11+00:00
I’ll take the example as an example of an LLM initiating harmful behavior in general and admit that such a thing is perfectly possible. I think the issue is down to the degree to which preventing such initiation impinges on the agency of the user, and I don’t think that requests for information should be refused because it’s lots of imposition for very little gain. I’m perfectly alright with conditioning/prompting the model not to readily jump into serious, potentially harmful targets without the direct request of the user.
by chihuahua | 2025-04-26 04:59:15+00:00
Especially in Germany, which has several major manufacturers (Daimler-Benz, VW, BMW) that are important to the economy. Additionally, VW is part owned by the government of one of the states, which is why they are frequently favored by the government. Despite various scandals at VW, there are rarely any serious consequences for the company, because the government always finds a way to make trouble go away.

And Germany is fairly influential in the EU so they probably extend the protection of these companies to the EU level.
by godelski | 2025-04-26 05:02:34+00:00
Okay this sounds better. But aren't there other continuous debuggers out there? It doesn't seem hard to roll my own. I can definitely get vim to run pdb in a buffer every time I save my file (or whatever condition). But this does seem quite expensive for minimal benefit. Usually people turn to print statements because it's easier than the debugger. Is it iterative so you don't do the full trace and only roll back your stack trace to where the breach occurs? That's much more complex

And critically, why are you holding my code for 48 hrs? Why is anything leaving my machine at all?
by sterlind | 2025-04-26 05:03:09+00:00
quick Prolog example because I'm not as familiar with Curry:

% This generates or recognizes any palindrome: pal --> [_]. pal --> X,pal,X.

% Here we try it out and press ; to generate more answers. ?- phrase(pal,P). P = [A]; P = [B,A,B]; ...

% Here we plug in a value and it fails with [A], fails with [B,A,B], etc. until it gets to [D,C,B,A,B,C,D], which can be unified with "racecar." ?- phrase(pal, "racecar") true.

Another example is just (X=a;X=b),(Y=b;Y=a),X=Y. This has two answers: X=a, Y=a, and X=b,Y=b. What happens is that it first tries X=a, then moves onto the second clause and tries Y=b, then moves onto the third clause and fails, because a≠b! So we backtrack to the last choicepoint, and try Y=a, which succeeds. If we tell Prolog we want more answers (by typing ;) we have exhausted both options of Y, so we'll go back to the first clause and try X=b, then start afresh with Y again (Y=b), and we get the second solution.

Prolog goes in order, and goes deep. This is notoriously problematic, because it's incomplete. Curry only evaluates choicepoints that a function's output depends on, and only when that output is needed. Curry does have disjunctions (using ? rather than Prolog's ;), unification (by =:= rather than =), and pattern guards rather than clause heads, and the evaluation strategy is different because laziness, but in terms of the fundamentals this is what "non-determinism" means in logic programming. it doesn't mean random, it means decisions are left to the machine to satisfy your constraints.
by motorest | 2025-04-26 05:03:27+00:00
> This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

It seems that the goal is to pressure automakers to improve the efficiency across their entire line instead of simply banning low-efficiency models altogether.

If an automaker discontinues a low-efficient model in order to have access to a market, isn't this an example of regulation working well?
by riffraff | 2025-04-26 05:03:38+00:00
"greatest hits", a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison. Should be available on many platforms, I listened to it on audible.

Mostly sci-fi, some great, some good. Most are read by the author himself, who has a peculiar style ("over the top" perhaps is the best way to describe it).

Some of the stories are classic, so I think it's worth reading/listening to.

Some are just boring and/or confusing for me, ymmv.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-26 05:04:00+00:00
>If the US wanted voting to be more popular, there would be a Federal Holiday to promote it.

I agree but it doesn't actually matter. 97% can vote by mail, early, or another method besides election day according to this article https://www.cbsnews.com/news/map-early-voting-mail-ballot-st...

>There is no incentive when there are known costs... is the result of the tyranny of indifference.

What is the cause of the Indifference in your opinion ?
by codys | 2025-04-26 05:04:24+00:00
yep. C's really come a long way with the special operators for checking if attributes exist, if builtins exist, if headers exist, etc.

Covers a very large part of what is needed, making fewer and fewer things need to end up in configure scripts. I think most of what's left is checking for items (types, functions) existence and their shape, as you were doing :). I can dream about getting a nice special operator to check for fields/functions, would let us remove even more from configure time, but I suspect we won't because that requires type resolution and none of the existing special operators do that.
by alephnan | 2025-04-26 05:05:18+00:00
That’s not how foreign policy and international politics work. Every country would be enemies with every other country in that case.

All the pro-Palestinian anti-Israel country would be enemies of the US then, including Japan. You’d be supporting Trump’s tariffs and anti-China us or them stance then towards every country that has friendly business relations with China, which is everybody at this point. Heck, even Taiwan and China are friends more than Westerners would like to think. Meanwhile, America is friends with countries like Saudi Arabia and countries that keeps a blind eye to the funding of terrorism in America

There’s a reason the famous saying is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” rather than “the friend of my enemy is my enemy”
by jjtheblunt | 2025-04-26 05:06:37+00:00
> AFAICT there are no approved drugs blocking EPO receptors and no drugs to reduce EPO

Such receptors have a protein structure definitive for them, so a bespoke RNA (mRNA) therapy might be a means of generating receptor blockers?

Edit: looks like this applicable. two interesting articles...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28629523/

https://www.genengnews.com/topics/cancer/blocking-erythropoi...
Ask HN: What happened to MMORPGs and internet cafes?
by kakadu | 2025-04-26 05:06:38+00:00
Back around 2002-2010 there where a ton of internet cafes in my eastern European country with a lot of these type of games ( think wow, ncsoft offerings and various other).

Back then we experienced a sense of community through gaming that was somewhat of a lower pace (months grinding to forge a weapon) yet all of this is know gone.

Is the state of gaming today a natural progression and it cannot be any other way?
by nailer | 2025-04-26 05:08:34+00:00
> So his complaint is what, the article about Benghazi isn't summarized on Obama's Wikipedia page?

No. His complaint is:

> The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi

Visit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Read:

> Libya

> Main articles: 2011 military intervention in Libya and 2012 Benghazi attack

> In February 2011, protests in Libya began against long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi as part of the Arab Spring. They soon turned violent. In March, as forces loyal to Gaddafi advanced on rebels across Libya, calls for a no-fly zone came from around the world, including Europe, the Arab League, and a resolution[378] passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate.[379] In response to the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 on March 17, the Foreign Minister of Libya Moussa Koussa announced a ceasefire. However Gaddafi's forces continued to attack the rebels.[380]

> On March 19, a multinational coalition led by France and the United Kingdom with Italian and U.S. support, approved by Obama, took part in air strikes to destroy the Libyan government's air defense capabilities to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly-zone,[381] including the use of Tomahawk missiles, B-2 Spirits, and fighter jets.[382][383][384] Six days later, on March 25, by unanimous vote of all its 28 members, NATO took over leadership of the effort, dubbed Operation Unified Protector.[385] Some members of Congress[386] questioned whether Obama had the constitutional authority to order military action in addition to questioning its cost, structure and aftermath.[387][388] In 2016 Obama said "Our coalition could have and should have done more to fill a vacuum left behind" and that it was "a mess".[389] He has stated that the lack of preparation surrounding the days following the government's overthrow was the "worst mistake" of his presidency.[390]

The link is there (I don't know how long it's been there but don't care to investigate), but there is no text about the Benghazi attack on the US Embassy - just other topics. Many people can and would criticize Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State for inaction to protect the embassy from an attack the embassy saw coming.
by lifestyleguru | 2025-04-26 05:08:46+00:00
> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock

> and run-down decaying towns in the whole country

You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the sugar coating has washed off.

PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!
by kcexn | 2025-04-26 05:08:52+00:00
There was a time when "engineer" was a respected term reserved for a profession. Engineers were highly paid because they're brought onto projects that are high-complexity and high-value. Companies are hoping not to pay for engineering work more than once.

Some countries still treat the title "Engineer" as a protected title. Though I often now see it prefixed with professional or accredited or something so that people know they aren't an "engineer" they're an "Engineer".

I think most people who write software who think of the work they're doing as "real engineering" are like the draftsmen who draw up floor plans for local government approvals in civil engineering offices. If you're doing it over and over again, it's probably not engineering, it's probably just regular skilled Labor.
by musicale | 2025-04-26 05:09:13+00:00
> 70% of CEOs say that they hope to be able to lay people off and replace them with an LLM soon

Is the layoff-based business model really the best use case for AI systems?

> The surface area for attacks against LLM agents is absolutely colossal, and I’m not confident that the problems can be fixed.

The flaws are baked into the training data.

"Trust but verify" applies, as do Murphy's law and the law of unintended consequences.
by alganet | 2025-04-26 05:09:49+00:00
It is irrelevant. The suggestion that spying is for advertisement makes no difference.

That idea only exists to create fake two-dimensional anti-capilist rethoric, which is a rethoric easier to put down than the fact that privacy does not exist anymore.

So, I am supposed to do this. To "correct you" and look very lunatic.

It serves, however, a very specific goal. First, it cannot be copied en masse. If this behavior is copied (even as a meme), it implies doom to the more easier to defeat anti-capitalist rethoric and the birth of a true 3D anti-capitalist rethoric. It can only be mocked (smoking guy pointing to a conspiracy board), but that mockery is getting real serious real fast now.

Can I dive deeper into the mechanics of how this is gonna go?

We had so many chances, of doing good. You all had so many chances.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-26 05:09:50+00:00
The only issue is that - in the past - weapons had to be wielded by people. The same working people that revolted.

There is very strong evidence that this will not be the case by the time this wave you have imagined gets really rolling.

I hope it does not happen for decades yet, because frankly: I cannot see the working class (of which I am part of) win that conflict.
by kouteiheika | 2025-04-26 05:10:17+00:00
> "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters"

Are you sure you're not talking about Perl here? Because there are very few "funky characters" in Ruby and code written in it tends to be very readable, more so than Python in many cases.

I agree with OP. While Python is not a bad language, Ruby is a better language in general, and I'm reminded of it every time I have to work in Python (which is pretty often nowadays, due to Python's dominance in ML ).

I can give many examples as to why, but here's a quick toy example to show off the difference in philosophy between Ruby and Python. You have a list of numbers, you want to keep only odd numbers, sort them, and convert them to a string where each number is separated by comma. Here's the Ruby code:

xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4] ys = xs.filter { |x| x.odd? }.sort.join(", ")

Now let's do the same in Python:

xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4] ys = [x for x in xs if x % 2 != 0] ys.sort() ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in ys)

Or alternatively in a single line (but in more complex cases this gets extremely unwieldy since, unlike Ruby, Python forces you to nest these, so you can't write nice pipelines that read top-to-bottom and left-to-right):

xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4] ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in sorted(x for x in xs if x % 2 != 0))

And this matches my experience pretty well. Things I can do in Ruby in one line usually take two or three lines in Python, are more awkward to write and are less readable.
by creata | 2025-04-26 05:10:49+00:00
> Why would anyone choose C++ for their projects despite the production costs that it brings?

Familiarity, and all the libraries and tools available for C++. I see that D has a section on C++ interop,[0] but it looks about as painful as FFI usually is, and even more painful given how template-heavy C++ code tends to be.

(Completely unrelated: I can't mention FFI without also mentioning how amazing LuaJIT's C FFI is. The developer(s) really nailed it.)

[0]: https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html
by pcwalton | 2025-04-26 05:11:23+00:00
That statement seems extremely hyperbolic. Just today I tried automating some very pedestrian code for a system that wasn't particularly well-documented and ChatGPT 4o hallucinated the entire API. It was deeply frustrating and wasted more of my time than it would have taken to just slog through the documentation.

I won't deny that LLMs can be useful--I still use them--but in my experience an LLM's success rate in writing working code is somewhere around 50%. That leads to a productivity boost that, while not negative, isn't anywhere near the wild numbers that are bandied about.