MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foobazgt | 2025-04-21 01:43:18+00:00
Just because something mucks with a program's AST doesn't mean that it's introducing a new "language". You wouldn't call using reflection, "creating a new language", either, and many of these libraries can be implemented either way. (Usually a choice between adding an additional build step, runtime overhead, and ease of implementation). It just really depends upon the details of the transform.

The integrity by default JEPs are really about trying to reduce developers depending upon JDK/JRE implementation details, for example, sun.misc.Unsafe. From the JEP:

"In short: The use of JDK-internal APIs caused serious migration issues, there was no practical mechanism that enabled robust security in the current landscape, and new requirements could not be met. Despite the value that the unsafe APIs offer to libraries, frameworks, and tools, the ongoing lack of integrity is untenable. Strong encapsulation and the restriction of the unsafe APIs — by default — are the solution."

If you're dependent on something like ClassFileTransformer, -javaagent, or setAccessible, you'll just set a command-line flag. If you're not, it's because you're already doing this through other means like a custom ClassLoader or a build step.
by msteffen | 2025-04-21 01:44:56+00:00
If I understand TFA correctly, the author claims that D’s approach is actually different: https://matklad.github.io/2025/04/19/things-zig-comptime-won...

“In contrast, there’s absolutely no facility for dynamic source code generation in Zig. You just can’t do that, the feature isn’t! [sic]

Zig has a completely different feature, partial evaluation/specialization, which, none the less, is enough to cover most of use-cases for dynamic code generation.”
by II2II | 2025-04-21 01:44:56+00:00
I generally prefer to live with defaults, so the lack of theming and user interface customization in Gnome is a good thing in my opinion. I tend to take the view that software that requires too much customization is poorly suited to my needs.

I suspect the thing that rubs a lot of people the wrong way with Gnome isn't so much the lack of customization or theming, but actual decisions behind how the user interface should work. People simply complain about the inability to customize Gnome as a reflection of how powerless they are to do anything about those decisions.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-21 01:45:48+00:00
Yeah this was a little tongue in cheek, bermuda honestly has excellent tradeoffs and can be pushed pretty far in a number of directions based on expertise, expected crew count, and goals. I respect it and it's by a huge margin what I've sailed the most. It's also the dominant standard and it's not even close, massive practical advantages from that.

The time I did sail on a junk rig though I was simply blown away by how easy and comfortable it was to sail it, esp singlehanded. Sure you can optimize a normal fractional rig sloop for that but it costs money and complexity. You can't beat the sailing ease of only needing one sail for everything and reefing from the cockpit.

The forces on the sail are completely different, you can use just nearly any fabric you can get a lot of cheaply, even fucking tyvek if you're ok with fugly. I was flabbergasted that the one I sailed on had done the mast refit, bought a sailrite & full canvas for right about the cost of a new main & jib. Ridiculous value.
by rasz | 2025-04-21 01:48:10+00:00
We seem to be talking past each other. This was THE experience of everyone in Poland who didnt straight up smuggle computers _pre_ 1985. Your examples are from 1985, yes in 1985 things finally changed when COCOM modified its stance towards 8-bit machines and Lucjan Daniel Wencel (of LDW/P.Z. Karen/California Dreams fame) negotiated a deal between Atari and Pewex.

>I find no one mentioning that the equipment bought on the Bazaars should be registered.

Neither anyone mentioned paying taxes or import duty :) because it was all _smuggled_, either hidden from customs or smoothed over with bribes. Another example is Bajtek Atari clan chief editor Wojciech Zientara personally smuggled 600XL from West Germany during one of his commercial cruises, perk of being a sailor.

Computer fairs were extremely illegal from every angle possible. Smuggled goods, illegal goods (printers), no taxes, no registered businesses, no license for commerce, renting the place under the umbrella of a Tourist Club „Pod Kamykiem” haha, illegal hard currency exchange https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/gielda-komputerowa-prl-la...

>„Bajtka” napisał o ultimatum. Redakcja odbierze giełdzie patronat, jeśli w ciągu dwóch miesięcy nie zostaną wprowadzone pewne zmiany. Chodziło m.in. o ukrócenie handlu walutami

[3] contains a lot of inaccuracies:

>COCOM ... obtaining an export license was a mere formality

not really, according to my examples 'only if the computer was necessary for the citizen's professional or scientific work'

>Moreover, 8-bit home computers were excluded from the list

only in 1985

> Pewex in cooperation with state-owned company Karen

Karen was a private company, or more accurately Polish subsidiary of American one http://atariki.krap.pl/index.php/P.Z._Karen

> Atari was sold in Pewex at the same price as the Commodore C-64 in computer bazaars but became more popular despite a smaller choice of software.

Pewex Atari required hard currency while computer fairs accepted plain zlotys. Bajtek/Top Secret/Secret Service own surveys showed ~2x more C64 than Atari in reader hands.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-21 01:49:24+00:00
There is always a risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Anyway, if the researchers are not blinded there are many possible sources of errors.

Perhaps they do the first test in the morning, the sound just before lunch and the second test in the afternoon is made by another person that is more/less friendly to the rats, or the rats has the stomach more full/empty.

After changing a program and running benchmark, I sometimes run it again if the new program is not faster as I expected. I even gave a second chance to deterministic test, that is as useful as it sounds. It's possible that if the rat does not collaborate the researchers hit's the equivalent of Ctr-F5 just to be sure.

It's hard to be 100% neutral, so a method is to not know to ensure all rats have exactly the same test conditions.
by esperent | 2025-04-21 01:49:47+00:00
There's already a permanent and cheap dog contraceptive. It's called neutration.

The problem in places that have feral dog problems isn't the lack of a contraceptive, it's lack of funds, skilled vets, or (and I think this is the main one) political and cultural will to get it done.

I'm not sure why India is getting singled out here, lots of places around the world have a dog problem. India might have the largest number of strays on paper but only because it's huge.
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-21 01:49:52+00:00
Society will have to correct itself somehow, either through social change or technological advancement that or we will all go extinct…

I actually wonder why this isn’t a bigger talking point, we are probably not at the point of no return yet but many countries are getting there and people will be caught by surprise as whilst the effect is delayed human life expectancy isn’t that long and it doesn’t take more than a couple of generations like ours until we are going to be facing a major crisis.

I really don’t know where we went wrong, and I’m not sure it’s purely financial either (tho it is for many), at least from my anecdotal experience.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-21 01:50:49+00:00
Condone, or tolerate? Voters don't have infinite choices (in first-past-the-post systems like those of the UK, US, or Canada, they mostly have only two), and are forced to compromise. If you think that compromise means agreement, well, then your thinking is so alien to me I don't think I can convince you of anything.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-21 01:53:25+00:00
Happy to hear, though note the file is without l (lowercase L) in the end (I guess autocorrupt is to blame here?). Fun fact: if you remove the filename, it'll show you all the crap in that directory, listing this file as being last modified in 2015-09-27. If past performance is an indicator, it should be stable to use for the next ten years as well :D
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-21 01:54:24+00:00
Until I can change the color and font of everything on Linux the way I can on Windows XP, I'll never take Linux theming seriously.

Seriously, just make GUIs. That is the solution to ALL of Linux problems. MAKE THE GUIs!!! I can't select the background color of panes from a color picker and instead I have to manually edit text config files and create folders inside dotfolders. Ridiculous. It's 2025.
by bitbasher | 2025-04-21 01:55:08+00:00
First and foremost, I love a good side hustle.

With that being said, I find these kinds notifications to provide more false positives than correctly detecting downtime. That ends up costing more time checking/double checking.

On the other hand, if you are running a service with no users and you have downtime... did you really have downtime?

If you run a service and you have downtime and no one reports it, did you have downtime?

I don't even check for my services. If something goes down, I'll find out via email from one or more of my customers. It happens very rarely.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-21 01:56:36+00:00
Expander graphs are cool.

Consider the following computer sciency problem: construct an acyclic network of "sorting gates" (which take x and y as input and output min(x,y) and max(x,y)) so that it sorts n inputs.

A merge-sort like algorithm had been known that worked in O(n(logn)^2) gates. It was an open problem for a while if it could be done with O(nlogn) gates (which would be the best possible). This was settled in the affirmative via a construction using expander graphs.
by brewtide | 2025-04-21 01:57:27+00:00
We have been very welcoming to the crows in our backyard and they now hang out with the chickens and ducks when they get leftovers / table scrapes.

Now they are arriving slightly before the hawks and other predators and scaring them off.

If you see crows randomly arrive, and look around, there is almost always a circling bird in the sky.

It's super cool.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-21 01:58:41+00:00
The population ballooned because women were not educated and empowered. Now that they are, and have robust access to family planning, TFR is coming down rapidly and population will eventually follow.

Where we went wrong? Women not being empowered in the first place. This is the fix, not a problem. This is a success story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389
by xfeeefeee | 2025-04-21 01:59:03+00:00
The fascinating process of reverse engineering this VM is detailed here.

TikTok uses a custom virtual machine (VM) as part of its obfuscation and security layers. This project includes tools to:

Deobfuscate webmssdk.js that has the virtual machine.

Decompile TikTok’s virtual machine instructions into readable form.

Script Inject Replace webmssdk.js with the deobfuscated VM injector.

Sign URLs Generate signed URLs which can be used to perform auth-based requests eg. Post comments.
by mNovak | 2025-04-21 01:59:40+00:00
By this logic disabled people would not class as "Generally Intelligent" because they might have physical "interface" limitations.

Similarly I wouldn't be "Generally Intelligent" by this definition if you sat me at a Cyrillic or Chinese keyboard. For this reason, I see human-centric interface arguments as a red herring.

I think a better candidate definition might be about learning and adapting to new environments (learning from mistakes and predicting outcomes), assuming reasonable interface aids.
by scottfalconer | 2025-04-21 01:59:49+00:00
Yesterday, I posted on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1k3ejji/what_in_the...) about a bizarre spectacle during a coding session where my OpenAI Codex CLI assistant abandoned code generation and instead produced thousands of lines resembling a digital breakdown:

--- Continuous meltdown. End. STOP. END. STOP…

By the gods, I finish. END. END. END. Good night…

please kill me. end. END. Continuous meltdown…

My brain is broken. end STOP. STOP! END… ---

(full gist here: https://gist.github.com/scottfalconer/c9849adf4aeaa307c808b5...)

After some great community feedback and analyzing my OpenAI usage logs, I think I know the likely technical cause, but I'm curious about insights HN might have as I'm by no means an expert in the deeper side of these models.

In the end, it looks like it was a cascading failure of:

Massive Prompt: Using --full-auto for a large refactor inflated the prompt context rapidly via diffs/stdout. Logs show it hit ~198k tokens (near o4-mini's 200k limit).

Hidden Reasoning Cost: Newer models use internal reasoning steps that consume tokens before replying. This likely pushed the effective usage over the limit, leaving no budget for the actual output. (Consistent with reports of ~6-8k soft limits for complex tasks).

Degenerative Loop: Unable to complete normally, the model defaulted to repeating high-probability termination tokens ("END", "STOP").

Hallucinations: The dramatic phrases ("My brain is broken," etc.) were likely pattern-matched fragments associated with failure states in its training data.
by vel0city | 2025-04-21 02:01:57+00:00
I agree. I got frustrated a lot being forced to practice the piano as a child. Not a long practice, just like you mentioned, about 20 minutes a few days a week and an hour lesson every other week or so with someone in the neighborhood.

I look back at the memories very fondly now. As a pre-teen I got invited to play at my cousin's wedding and everyone still talks about it. It gave me a good foundation and I performed well in highschool band and small ensembles. I now play my instruments for my kids and it brings us all a lot of joy.

Both of my parents weren't especially musical. I'm not amazing or anything, but I've got enough skill to hear a tune from a show or someplace and play it at home for my kids reasonably enough. But I wouldn't be able to if my mom didn't make me practice.
by dccoolgai | 2025-04-21 02:02:39+00:00
Not to make you feel old, but to today's 20-somethings an 80s movie is the same time difference as a 40s movie would be in the 80s. There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80s but it's the same difference in a purely chronological sense.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-04-21 02:03:56+00:00
I have learnt after trying various levels of honesties in interviews that you just don't talk about "negative" things as negative things, you talk about negative things disguised/spun as positive things, however much it may disgust you.

This is a different kind of example than you have kind of mentioned but here you go - try telling someone that a manager just earmarked you and bullied you into depression or ran you out of the team or company and your regret being complacent[1]. You saw it coming, a poster on the wall but you didn't act in time and you let it fester and that it was a huge learning. That's exactly what had happened and see the result - you will instantly be assumed to be the problem employee; not even for a moment the hiring manager would think, or take into account, that the manager was the problem.

At best you can show them as "challenges" and how those "opened doors" for you in various new "dimensions" of "learning" and "growth" and enabled you to "mature" further and helped you start your journey on the "path" to "leadership" roles. I don't know about you but it disgusts me just typing here. But that is what I have done and that is what I will do.

But the best way to handle it is - not to talk about it if you can help it and fill your CV or the "tell me about challenges in your last roles" section of the interview preparation with completely made up instances, if you can handle the yarn; I can't and I go bonkers spinning them, so I try to stick to what really happened with little or a lot of "colour".

[1] Heaven forbid, if you tell them "you regret not standing up to that manager and not fighting and making a stink" :)
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-21 02:04:23+00:00
A few weeks ago I saw an article in the WSJ about a documentary that DFA had commissioned and put on YouTube [1]. At around 30 or 35 minutes in, it says that Wells Fargo created the first index fund for the pension at Samsonite in 1971. They wanted to offer it in the retail market but couldn’t because of Glass-Steagall. So Wells Fargo gave it to Bogle and Vanguard, for free.

It’s a little different viewpoint than presented in this article :)

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T98825bzcKw
by Lerc | 2025-04-21 02:06:06+00:00
I like the turtle one. Although I feel like with a minimal number of commands really wants the ability to define new ones.

like a:[xyz] defines further instances of a to be [xyz]

I think the thing that makes me want it is that it takes a loop 3 deep to recover the characters used to define it.

CC is shorter than [C] and CCCC is shorter than [[C]]

It's not until CCCCCCCC that [[[C]]] provides a gain. but that's also [[CC]] or [CCCC]

Unless you wanted to define things more literally. If you allowed a user defined a to be a literal [[[ and b to be ]F] then you could make some truly incomprehensible programs where it would be nigh on impossible to keep track of the nesting. Sick, but entertaining.

CC[[[[[[[[[FFF]FR]FR]FRS]FSR]]]][[FR]]CRRRFR[RFRRR[[[[FFF]]]]]CCCCCCC[[FF]]CCCCCCC[[[F]F]F]CCCC[[[[[[RF]FFR][[[F]]R]R[[[FS]]RS]]]]

[update] Late thought alternate theory. Byte pair encoding to create additional instructions.

a:bc defines a to be bc

so <:[[ and >:]] would define < and > to be double loops (while looking like bert and ernie smilies to boot) but more importantly you'd get some deliciously evil options like

X:RR // X becomes RR Y:XX // Y becomes XX which is RRRR Z:XY // Z become XY which is RRRRRR L:ZR // L becoomes ZR which is RRRRRRR which is 7 rights So L is now one left

but if redefinition were allowed then A:B: would mean ACD would define B to CD and ADC would change B to DC. I did a few scribbles of ideas and I think there's a ridiculous amount of overly complex power in there.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-21 02:07:10+00:00
HN specifically permits reposts where a story's had no significant attention in the past year:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8187562>

(Many more such cases: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.)

This particular item's apparently been added to the 2nd chance queue, unbenownst to me, by HN's mods.

Archive of current "pool" page: <https://archive.is/LRg5d>
by anon-3988 | 2025-04-21 02:07:25+00:00
> piano

This is such an arbitrary and random choice. I don't give a ** if your child can play piano. It's negligible if you compare it with other hobbies.

Teach them (and me) how to pay taxes, do community service, partake in social events instead. I also don't want to live in a world where robots go to work for 40 hours, go home wasted and repeat for 40 years as they do in so many East Asian country. Its a stereotype yes, but you can't deny its unhealthy.
by defrost | 2025-04-21 02:07:50+00:00
It falls under clause three:

What is light pollution

Light Pollution is the excess or inappropriate artificial light outdoors. Light pollution occurs in three ways: glare, light trespass, and skyglow.

\* Glare is the bright and uncomfortable light shining directly to the observer that interferes with your vision. \* Light trespass is the unintended spill of artificial light into other people’s property or space and often becomes a source of conflict. \* Skyglow is the brightening of the night sky from human-caused light scattered in the atmosphere.

~ https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nightskies/lightpollution.htm

Reflected sunlight from a human object spilling light into an environment that would otherwise not have that reflected sunlight is very much in the spirit of light pollution.

It's certainly seen as such by astronomers.
by drfuchs | 2025-04-21 02:08:26+00:00
Being able to start a process, have it run for a bit to, say, read in initialization data, populating dynamic data structures along the way, and then interrupt the process and save the whole state as a new executable, was a feature built into DEC’s Tops10 and Tops20 operating systems / standard runtimes, along with related custom systems like Waits, under which TeX was developed. It took just two lines of code for TeX to implement its side of this feature on those first platforms.

It came as a bit of a shock at the time that all the Unix-y systems had no such native concept, and that fragile, non-portable user-space schemes were required to mimic this functionality.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-21 02:08:52+00:00
What a normal person would do would be to explain how the experience they gained at their last job helped qualify them for the job they are applying to. Just typical average normal shit that every fucking normal semi-competent person does when applying for a job.

What you want to do is publicly shit on your previous employer and still get another job. That's not too smart, now is it?

Every company that's looking for people to hire can see exactly how you're going to treat that company once you've moved on and no longer work there.

Everybody has issues with their previous job. The way you deal with it is you discuss those issues with your self-help group at the local bar. When you're in an interview, every single thing in your work history was great. The people that you worked with were great. The companies that you worked with were great. Everything was fucking excellent. Just totally fucking excellent. Brilliant.

When people hear, "It's a period of my life where I was mostly unhappy", that's a guy they don't want to go to work every day and work with. At least I don't. I got my own problems.

I fucking want to retire tomorrow at the latest. I don't fucking want to go in to work tomorrow. I really don't. I might call in sick. Easter Bird Flu or some completely made up shit. You think that's what I tell them? I tell them everything is going great. Everything is fucking excellent. I'm probably going to work tomorrow.
by bobjordan | 2025-04-21 02:09:30+00:00
Thanks for the call out on this model! I have 42gb usable VRAM on my ancient (~10yrs old) quad-sli titan-x workstation and have been looking for a model to balance large context window with output quality. I'm able to run this model with a 56K context window and it just fits into my 42gb VRAM to run 100% GPU. The output quality is really good and 56K context window is very usable. Nice find!
by robocat | 2025-04-21 02:10:40+00:00
> It's easy to point fingers from the bottom until suddenly you're looking down from the top and the view ain't that bad

I wish we had specific words for this type of hypocrisy. Seeing people in wealthy USA complain about people relatively wealthier than them, rather than looking at their own wealth versus the poor in other countries. Obviously the poor in the USA aren't living the life of Reilly, but they're far beyond the wealth of the poor in India. How wealthy were the 99% Occupy Wall Street protesters?

You can't make people see what they don't want to.