MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pornel | 2025-04-15 04:36:55+00:00
I'm not trying to prove a novel concept, just explain how the C spec thinks about C:

> The semantic descriptions in this International Standard describe the behavior of an abstract machine in which issues of optimization are irrelevant.

This belief that C targets the hardware directly makes C devs frustrated that UB seems like an intentional trap added by compilers that refuse to "just" do what the target CPU does.

The reality is that front-end/back-end split in compilers gave us the machine from the C spec as its own optimization target with its own semantics.

Before C got formalised in this form, it wasn't very portable beyond PDP. C was too opinionated and bloated for 8-bit computers. It wouldn't assume 8-bit bytes (because PDP-11 didn't have them), but it did assume linear memory (even though most 16-bit CPUs didn't have it). All those "checking wetness of water... wet" checks in ./configure used to have a purpose!

Originally C didn't count as an assembly any more than asm.js does today. C was too abstract to let programmers choose addressing modes and use flags back when these mattered (e.g. you could mark a variable as `register`, but not specifically as an A register on 68K). C was too high level for tricks like self-modifying code (pretty standard practice where performance mattered until I-cache and OoO killed it).

C is now a portable assembly more because CPUs that didn't fit C's model have died out (VLIW) or remained non-standard specialized targets (SIMT).
by jpalawaga | 2025-04-15 04:36:59+00:00
that your name is tokio yoyo is sort of funny to me because if you look at shinkansen build/planning timelines, it is absolutely on the order of 2050 for extensions.

the japanese have a world-class trainsystem and it's built by putting one foot in front of the other for decades, not expecting it to be built overnight.

of course, you can build it faster, but then it is more expensive. so what's the priority? it's easier to fund high speed rail projects in developed nations by long, sustained investment that is easily planned for rather than having to suddenly come up with billions of dollars and then deal with the political fallout of inevitable cost-overruns associated with rushing things.
by graymatters | 2025-04-15 04:40:00+00:00
The business geniuses of intel bought Altera for nearly $17B in 2015. Now sold control at valuation barely half of that. After official inflation of over 30% during that time. Which means it lost over 2/3 of its value, (take into account also the lost interest on that money). Given that they gave up control for half the money, it’s effectively as if it was relinquished for 1/3 of what Intel paid for it. So far - no one of the responsible Intel execs paid any price for such atrocious loss of stakeholders’ value. They need to be in jail and lose their personal wealth to repay the stockholders.

The SEC should investigate them, see whether there was any inside trading to benefit from this horrible value loss.

This criminal lack of performance needs to be brought up during the upcoming shareholders meeting. Responsible must pay the price.

Would you hire again the Intel CEOs, head of Intel Capital, any members of Intel’s board of directors after such abysmal performance?
by jchmbrln | 2025-04-15 04:40:05+00:00
> An even more significant improvement would be electrified trains, which can accelerate roughly twice as fast as those with diesel power...

Can someone comment on why this is? My understanding is that the existing diesel trains use diesel generators to power electric motors.

My questions are: 1) Does "electrified" mean pulling power from a third rail? 2) Whatever it means, what makes "electrified" twice as fast as diesel-electric?
by throwaway657656 | 2025-04-15 04:41:22+00:00
Two weeks ago I was an excited entrepreneur/engineer and looked forward to building new products that improved peoples lives. But with an inability to estimate my product COGS and consumer confidence diminishing, I'm giving that up (edit: for now).

We went from win-win capitalism to a pump and dump economy. That happened so fast. I can't comment on your site because I find this all so vile.
by phibz | 2025-04-15 04:41:39+00:00
> That last bit -- addressing the path limitations -- is a big one. You know how you can write #include "mbedtls/aes.h", and the compiler will pull in code from the aes.h file that's in the mbedtls folder? You can't do that on a Mac! Or at least I couldn't figure out how Codewarrior defines paths.

I believe you use colon as a path separator. At least that's what I remember from working with CW back in the 90s.

I thought long long was 64bit on CW 4 on m68k. Was it not?
by killjoywashere | 2025-04-15 04:41:42+00:00
The concept of freehold tenure is pretty central to the book. Not sure you could get any more on-point for the general reader looking for a book recommendation.

But since you ask: the peasant's rights to land were exquisitely bespoke. No tax collector could figure out how much one family owed versus another in another county. The rules in one prefecture of one county may have been completely unresolvable with the rules of a county a hundred miles north. Everything was negotiated family to family over generations, with rights in one place having no corollary whatsoever with the rights in another area, making the tax man's duty a fool's errand.

So, I don't your first statement "European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today." is really meaningful. Because no generalization can be made about the rights of a European peasant. That problem is the whole reason for the systems of freehold tenure that prevail today: making the territory "seeable" by the state.
by rtpg | 2025-04-15 04:43:21+00:00
> I'm very sorry, but such timelines are extremely disheartening and sound like a joke. The problem is, factually, other countries can build out HSRs within 5-10 year horizons, from planning to finishing a route. If it takes 2+ generations to even get a single line... I'm not sure what I can say.

While there are places where the build out itself looks fast, in reality I think most any train line ever build spends decades in "would be a good idea" phase of planning. The Hokkaido Shinkansen idea was on the books since the 70s, and we're still just up to Hakodate!

The Utusnomiya rail line (a local tram line) was in the proposal phase since 2001, and launched in 2023. It's been super successful (profitable!), but was still 20+ years for a single line.

Having said all of that, plenty of ideas gestate for a while, so hooking into an existing idea and getting that actually happening feels like a very good use of energy compared to trying to come up with your own special new idea.
by cmurf | 2025-04-15 04:43:21+00:00
Abrego Garcia will now die in El Salvador’s Cecot mega-prison.

https://bsky.app/profile/judgeluttig.bsky.social/post/3lmsxj...

What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/concentrat...
by roncesvalles | 2025-04-15 04:44:31+00:00
The layoff mass hysteria that ran through the tech industry established doing less or nothing as a corporate virtue.

If the market gave your company a PE ratio of 20+ and you're flush with cash, it is borderline fiduciary negligence to be slashing projects and doing layoffs. Your shareholders didn't invest in you for the capital preservation portfolio-management skills of your finance department.
by bigomega | 2025-04-15 04:44:33+00:00
I saw a launch demo of this in Mumbai comic con last weekend. Note that they only had a pre-rendered game video running that could be paused with spacebar. There were two cameras checking the observers eyes and creates a double image for depth. The 3D didn't feel very as deep as movies with Polaroid glasses, but it was clear and evident, especially on a still image. I inquired about the tech behind it and the sales guys didn't really know much, except the keywords (eye tracking, AI tech, 2 camera). I was curious on how the AI would be able to differentiate the depth especially at that refresh rate they promise (1-2ms). They mentioned having an app which can convert ANY game or movie into 3D. After a rabbit hole of a research into this, I got some answers in the 3D tech but not how the cameras are used, and the speed of the AI remains very questionable.
by MPSFounder | 2025-04-15 04:45:38+00:00
They recently closed their Middle Eastern studies department. Absolutely insane tbh. Imagine closing a center of Asian or African studies because the president wants to make his Jewish daughter and some rich donors of his happy. How can we be okay with any of this. They caved there. The only reasoning for this response is it infringes on their sovereignty. But make no mistake, every institution rolled back DEI and other initiatives for this admin. Hoping Alan will do what is right. Reinstate that department. Double down on fighting the admin in court. America will not be held hostage by a wanna-be autocrat, a foreign power or those who swear allegiance to Isra-el over American ideals and education in these United States. Silencing dissent in institutions of learning is tyrannical.
by dabiged | 2025-04-15 04:49:25+00:00
Not from North America. But I disagree that the exceptionalism started post WWII.

How do you explain the country's ability to perform civil engineering feats prior to WWII. The Erie Canal, Trans-continental Railway, Panama Canal, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge spring to mind as feats of engineering that few other country's (if any) could rival. There are obvious examples post WWII (Manhattan project, Apollo program, Interstate highway system), but for all of the USA's pitfalls, they do have an incredible history of civil engineering projects prior to WWII.
by bsnnkv | 2025-04-15 04:49:35+00:00
It's a bookmarking service so people rarely search - they just throw stuff into a bucket that they'll probably never go back to for the rest of their lives :)

I picked MS primarily because I was impressed with the quality of search results across multiple languages - even if this were a more search-heavy service, I would probably still pick MS because high quality multilingual search results will always have the highest importance for me as a multilingual person.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-15 04:49:47+00:00
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet.

Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
by jfvinueza | 2025-04-15 04:49:47+00:00
What has actually changed in the last 13 years regarding Whatsapp? Video. And I believe that's the reason why anyone hasn't actually challenged them regarding messaging: you can build a similar application with similar features with a rather small group of people (not saying it's easy, but it's feasible). But handling those pentabytes of bandwith shared every day? Actually _promoting_ the use of DIY video as the preferred communication media? That's something you can't do as an small shop. And that's, I think, why you cannot compete. I decided to quit Whatsapp, which in Latinamerica is quite an outrageous move: that application is the communication channel for EVERYTHING: all families, all schools, all neighborhoods. I did it because I think Meta's main metric is actually hostile to their users: they want as much of your time as they can get from you, and they'll use are sorts of psychological weaponry to keep you inside. They were actually vocal about it in the past. There's zero reason to trust them. But why is it that no one has come up with a true alternative (although props to Signal)? Well, there's the network effect, for sure. They also employ very good engineers. But I believe the true reason is scale: it didn't use to be that way, but infrastructure costs are now inmense.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-15 04:50:51+00:00
I'm surprised the Chinese sellers are able to compete for fast fashion. Clothes are the one thing I don't really buy online because getting sizing right is already hard even when you're not dealing with Temu-style "well actually we said there's a +- 25 tolerance in the fine print and this is within tolerance" bullshit.

AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
by onepointsixC | 2025-04-15 04:52:24+00:00
Amtrak's ridership has been growing and hit an all time high. The Northeast Corridor is a profitable route which is held back by century old infrastructure. If it actually had real high speed spanning the whole route it's ridership absolutely go up. Moreover your comments on not wanting to go from city center to city center are very off. Going from Union Station DC to Penn Station Philly, or NYC is really nice. Have you ever rode Amtrak, specifically that route?
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-15 04:54:45+00:00
> To me, programs are “works on my machine” code.

My main takeaway from vibe-coding is that nobody cared enough to fill that niche and expectation. And it was really frustrating, yet we're getting there through convolutated, inefficient and borderline barbaric means.

People are still lamenting after HyperCard. Automation on windows or macos didn't go anywhere. Shortcuts were a better step into that direction but I feel it got stuck in the middle as Apple wasn't going to push it further. Android had more freedom yet you won't see a "normal" user do automation either.

If we're going to point the middle finger at vibe-coding, I wish we had something to point to as a better tool for the general population to quickly make stuff they want/need.

(Doing it as a professional dev is to me another debate, still with nuance in it IMHO. I'd also love better prototyping tools to be honest.)
by dangus | 2025-04-15 04:56:42+00:00
I feel like this comment and the article itself together in context have kind of a sour taste for me.

Just the fact that it takes such a great effort to experience first-hand how poorer people just help each other out because nobody has money, so they help. But for a tech bro to do that they have to engage in a self-indulgent hobby and cosplay as poor like they're on Undercover Boss.

Ironically this effort to relate to other real live humans with normal incomes is only possible by indulging in the ultimate luxury, which is taking major time off of work rather than being stuck working a shit job.

This is all done with a straight face while jamming a sentence full of words like "paraglider" and "packrafting."

This whole subject is all so stereotypical tech bro in such an unappealing way.

Maybe this sounds unnecessarily bitter, but I think a valid alternate take on this is that privileged people are taking advantage of the kindness of others to get a bunch of help they don't need to help them achieve a goal that is a frivolous luxury. It's great we all get to feel warm fuzzy gratitude but it seems like the NPCs in this main character syndrome story are the people inconvenienced by the OP.

Example: asking the fire department for a place to sleep, they probably feel bad so they let OP sleep in the fire department. But as a tech startup founder and software engineer, OP could have almost certainly afforded a basic motel each night with minimal to zero planning and effort and not resorted to inconveniencing other people.

It feels a little bit like your CEO going to the food bank doesn't it? The median firefighter earns under $60k and dude who has probably outearns that salary in passive investment income is asking for a place to crash. I bet if the firefighter knew that they'd surely still be nice on the outside but they'd probably have a negative story to tell their spouse when they got home.

I completely understand that not booking a motel facilitated human connection and all that loveliness but I sense that the benefit is very one-sided. In Zuckerberg-esque style, the tech bro gets to cosplay as a human with real emotions, while on the "normie NPC" side they get to deal with a tech bro on a bicycle asking for weird shit while they're just trying to get through a shift.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-15 04:56:51+00:00
That's better than how I was going to say it:

In one case you're looking at the system as "alphanumeric string of length N." In another, the system is that plus something like "my friend's opinion on the string".

Also, as the article says, using "entropy" to mean "order" is not a good practice. "Order" is a subjective concept, and some systems (like oil and water separating) look more "ordered" but still have higher entropy, because there is more going on energetically than we can observe.
by ucarion | 2025-04-15 04:57:09+00:00
Six-digit verification codes for something like a "forgot password" flow are OTPs -- they're only good for one login -- but they are not HOTP/TOTPs. HOTP/TOTP has a registration step, where you copy a server-generated secret to your phone through a QR-code-encoded otpauth:// URI (https://github.com/google/google-authenticator/wiki/Key-Uri-...). That doesn't happen in a "forgot password" flow.

Incidentally, if you think of TOTP as being HMAC(unix mod 30, secret), one idea would be to do public key crypto instead of symmetric HMAC stuff. That's basically what a security key is.

If you additionally made it so that you couldn't phish the security key -- by having the OS + web browser know which apps can ask for which security keys -- you'd have reinvented WebAuthn.

P.S.: Make you sure you have stuffing protection in place against these kinds of six-digit-code auth schemes. A million possibilities is often acceptable for a secondary factor, but it's useless if attackers can just try all million codes.

Since they're in the thread, nice article 'dogacel! I've never seen an article on this that also took the time to dig into HMAC internals and that gnarly DT function.
by coffeecat | 2025-04-15 04:57:22+00:00
Yes. We had $50k of taxable W2 income ($63k including pre-tax insurance premiums and HSA contributions), $13k of taxable family leave benefits, $4k of interest/dividends (mostly qualified dividends, taxed at 0%), and $9k of long-term capital gains (taxed at 0%), making our pre-tax gross income about $89k. Only $66k of that is subject to taxes; the standard deduction brings that down to $37k, on which the tax is $4k. With a $2,000 child tax credit, $400 saver's credit, and $200 foreign tax credit, our tax liability is reduced to $1400, which is 1.6% of $89k.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-04-15 04:57:23+00:00
The real problem with "vibe coding" (or any coding, or with any product what so ever) is that the end user probably is not a programmer, and therefore cannot have professional judgement on the quality of the implementation. The only thing typical end user care is the perceived behavior, not the implementation details.

As it is easier and cheaper to do anything, the result is low-quality products. This of course serves well for the real professionals, who can now sell premium quality products at premium pricing for those who know and want the quality.
by sudomateo | 2025-04-15 04:57:35+00:00
My comment is not meant to encourage removing kindness and humanity from the relationship. It's meant as a reminder that the other party in the relationship (the company) does not necessarily bring those values to the table.

I would also like to live in a world where humane values are reflected in personal and business relationships to the point where the line between personal and business relationships blurs.
by spin_fan | 2025-04-15 04:57:55+00:00
Spin is a great learning tool. Spin is so much more accessible than TLA+ Toolbox, for instance.

But for really serious work, there are much more modern approaches that exploit SMT solvers like Z3 (as TLA+ does) for vastly more powerful model checking than Spin offers.

Also, the creator of Spin has retired it seems; email to the spin list bounces. The "community" forum has not accepted registrations for several years. Basically it seems Spin was a one man show, and he has not passed the torch onto anyone else. The tool is still incredible though, and a great place to start. Just don't expect any help if you get stuck. Get the Spin book if you want to understand all the options.

Here, for example, EPR is a vastly more powerful formalism:

I just watched this video from 2017 work, and was blown away. They can model check FULL Vertical Paxos (not just a single round of Synod) in that same couple of seconds; that was done for the first time in this paper.

Paxos Made EPR: Decidable Reasoning about Distributed Protocols Oded Padon, Giuliano Losa, Mooly Sagiv, Sharon Shoham. OOPSLA 2017.

(pdf) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.07191.pdf

(video) https://youtu.be/_suyrSMJeCo

(from the first author's homepage)
by behnamoh | 2025-04-15 04:58:10+00:00
What this analysis misses is that you can't run cron jobs on your subscription plan GPT/Claude models to extract the maximum value from the subs plan. The companies are making it more and more difficult to query their clients programmatically. gpt4free was a project that tried to do it but last I checked it didn't move past OpenAI's limitations.
by bowsamic | 2025-04-15 04:58:16+00:00
I didn’t read in depth but it seems to me on first glance (please correct me if I’m wrong) but as with all articles on entropy this seems to explain everything but the classical thermodynamic quantity called entropy which is 1. the quantity to which all these others are chosen to be related to and 2. the one that is by far the most difficult to explain intuitively

Information and statistical explanations of entropy are very easy. The real question is, what does entropy mean in the original context that it was introduced in, before those later explanations?
by gorgoiler | 2025-04-15 04:59:30+00:00
It’s implied that programs are personal but product code goes through peer review, checking the premise of the change as well as the implementation.

When someone reviews vibe coded patches and gives feedback, what should the reviewer expect the author to do? Pass the feedback onto their agent and upload the result? That feels silly.

How has code review changed in our brave, vibey new world? Are we just reviewing ideas now, and leaving the code up to the model? Is our software now just an accumulation of deterministic prompts that can be replayed to get the same result?
by ptero | 2025-04-15 05:01:36+00:00
Not necessarily. Should the market action bump up a company PE very high (hello, Costco at PE 53 today) that's not a reason to splurge on projects. On the contrary, many shareholders would expect the company to behave responsibly, save cash, pause share buybacks and build up war chest for leaner times, where buying a competitor could be way cheaper. My 2c.
by wruza | 2025-04-15 05:02:37+00:00
Interestingly, when this happens on the other side of the world, these people are expected to rise and overthrow. Otoh, when it's a local soul at stake… maybe someone else can save it. As a US citizen, aren't you the hope? Not you specifically, but you get the idea. You were the hope in many countries for decades and advocated for peace and democracy everywhere. And the only ones who still have freedom, guns and visibly functioning courts all in the same place.
Show HN: Return Self – Essays on Recursive Thinking
by tinix | 2025-04-15 05:02:47+00:00
Return Self is a book for those who build, break, and rebuild systems — and begin to realize the system is building them back.

Blending software architecture, organizational theory, cybernetics, recursive epistemology, and structural poetics, this book offers essays that loop, concepts that contradict, and fragments that reflect more than they explain.

Read it once, and you’ll see systems differently.

Read it twice, and you may see yourself.

-

15 free downloads are available for y'all so I can get some feedback