MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fallous | 2025-04-26 05:11:26+00:00
If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.

Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.
by russellbeattie | 2025-04-26 05:13:01+00:00
Browsing the code, I've never seen this form of goto:

GOTO(1100,1004,1013,1020,1004,1004)(IKIND+1)

I just looked it up. It's a multi-way branch: GOTO(label_1, label_2, label_3, etc.), integer_expression.

If the integer value is 1 (not zero), control flow transfers to label_1, if the value is 2, it transfers to the second label, etc.

Interesting! It's like a simplified switch statement.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-26 05:14:57+00:00
The laws of the United States say that Steve can scribble "warrant" on a napkin. Has this judge ruled that this ICE "administrative warrant" is any more valid than Steve's for the purposes of this case? Obviously judges, not the executive branch, are the deciders here.

The constitution (which is supreme to laws), along with common law, put restrictions on which pieces of paper that say "warrant" actually get to function as warrants, and judges, like this one, have the last word on interpreting the constitution and laws.
by lazide | 2025-04-26 05:20:11+00:00
I think it has shaken out the way it has, is because compile time optimizations to this extent require knowing runtime constraints/data at compile time. Which for non-trivial situations is impossible, as the code will be run with too many different types of input data, with too many different cache sizes, etc.

The CPU has better visibility into the actual runtime situation, so can do runtime optimization better.

In some ways, it’s like a bytecode/JVM type situation.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-26 05:20:14+00:00
The US government is also framed the same way on HN, though I don't like this metrics gathering method.

Most discussions are of the war in Ukraine which also connects to US politics. It's going to be negative and treated extremely suspect because Putin is ex KGB, lied that he wouldn't invade, the war itself, and their influence in US elections.

This is about the Russian government though. If your argument is that it's wrong in these constraints then I disagree but your generalization is valid. My original comment was about Russia as a whole but I think I wrong to try to shift to that as it doesn't come up
by inejge | 2025-04-26 05:20:41+00:00
> …where x and y evaluate in parallel without me having to do anything.

I understand that yours is a very simple example, but a) such things are already parallelized even on a single thread thanks to all the internal CPU parallelism, b) one should always be mindful of Amdahl's law, c) truly parallel solutions to various problems tend to be structurally different from serial ones in unpredictable ways, so there's no single transformation, not even a single family of transformations.
by wahern | 2025-04-26 05:22:19+00:00
C never had {} until C23. In C {0} was the only way to explicitly zero-initialize a structure in a generic manner. It works because in C initializer lists are applied to members as-if nested structures are flattened out lexically.

However, a long time ago C++ went in a completely different direction with initializer lists, and gcc and clang started emitting warnings (in C mode) about otherwise perfectly valid C code, thus the adoption of C++'s {} for C23. {0} is still technically valid C23, though, as well as valid C89, C90, C99, and C11. In fact, reading both C23 and C89 I'm struck by how little the language has changed:

C89 3.5.7p16:

> If the aggregate contains members that are aggregates or unions, or if the first member of a union is an aggregate or union, the rules apply recursively to the subaggregates or contained unions. If the initializer of a subaggregate or contained union begins with a left brace, the initializers enclosed by that brace and its matching right brace initialize the members of the subaggregate or the first member of the contained union. Otherwise, only enough initializers from the list are taken to account for the members of the first subaggregate or the first member of the contained union; any remaining initializers are left to initialize the next member of the aggregate of which the current subaggregate or contained union is a part.

C23 6.7.10p21:

> If the aggregate or union contains elements or members that are aggregates or unions, these rules apply recursively to the subaggregates or contained unions. If the initializer of a subaggregate or contained union begins with a left brace, the initializers enclosed by that brace and its matching right brace initialize the elements or members of the subaggregate or the contained union. Otherwise, only enough initializers from the list are taken to account for the elements or members of the subaggregate or the first member of the contained union; any remaining initializers are left to initialize the next element or member of the aggregate of which the current subaggregate or contained union is a part.
by parineum | 2025-04-26 05:22:45+00:00
> Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive,

Unfortunately, poor people don't have the cash on hand to hold them over until they get their Carbon Stipend on April 15th.

It's going to hurt poor people to charge them more at the counter, even if you give them more later. The stipend is just going to end up paying for less than the interest the tax created on a credit card.
by YZF | 2025-04-26 05:23:34+00:00
I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.

I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.
by JimDabell | 2025-04-26 05:23:48+00:00
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.

I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a corner from the lows of the 80s.

Since then, we’ve had the global financial crisis, local councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.

If you published that book today, the contents might be the same, but the story it tells would be quite different.
by creata | 2025-04-26 05:24:16+00:00
I can share the prompt I used:

""" Can you solve this math puzzle? > Aaron and Beren are playing a game on an infinite complete binary tree. At the beginning of the game, every edge of the tree is independently labeled A with probability p and B otherwise. Both players are able to inspect all of these labels. Then, starting with Aaron at the root of the tree, the players alternate turns moving a shared token down the tree (each turn the active player selects from the two descendants of the current node and moves the token along the edge to that node). If the token ever traverses an edge labeled B, Beren wins the game. Otherwise, Aaron wins. > > What is the infimum of the set of all probabilities p for which Aaron has a nonzero probability of winning the game? Give your answer in exact terms. """

I didn't check the working, but it did get the right value of p.
by YZF | 2025-04-26 05:27:50+00:00
I'm just curious why you think it helps the Republican cause? When I saw this reported in the media my feel was this is something Democrats are going to latch on to demonstrate the government is seeking to intimidate the judicial branch.

I guess it can have different interpretation.

Either way I'd really prefer not to see this stuff on Hacker News. We have enough things that push people buttons in other places.
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-26 05:30:02+00:00
Currently, weapons and logistics are not automated to that extent; I don’t think it’s meaningful to guess about decades from now, given the current flux.

I’d argue that your perspective means that the time to revolt is now (ie, next few years) — while the technical and social systems are in mutual flux and before a new regime solidifies. A regime that might be more autocratic totalitarian in nature (as you suggest will be the case).

People will reasonably come to different conclusions.
by safety1st | 2025-04-26 05:30:35+00:00
RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job.

Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream.

RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even worse than the reverse chronological firehose.

What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI - like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed, and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are represented as multiple small title links in a compact format. Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along with their title or something.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-26 05:31:41+00:00
> please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think!

Last time I tried to do that, I flagged a citation that went to a book saying the opposite of what wikipedia was citing it in support of as "failed verification".

This attracted the attention of an editor, who showed up to revert my flag, explaining that as long as the book exists, that's good enough.

Wikipedia could improve noticeably by just preventing the existing editors from making edits.
by nailer | 2025-04-26 05:31:42+00:00
I have trouble believing anyone with the remotest knowledge of US politics is unaware of the scandal, but https://www.britannica.com/event/2012-Benghazi-attacks . 'Reactions and investigation' has the information you apparently missed all these years.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204712904578090... - "What we now know—and still don't—about President Obama's 9/11." is pretty good too.
by bitwize | 2025-04-26 05:32:09+00:00
Probably due to the slow processing speed. That thing had like a rinky-dink Z80 and the most basic of graphics chips[0]. It probably couldn't do much besides a simple frame buffer, so you saw the CPU draw the entire screen, laying down the outline vectors and then flood-filling enclosed areas with color. There is something comfortingly "80s graphics" about watching this unfold in front of your eyes, similar to watching an old CAD drawing regen, or the effect in videos like Advanced Video Group's "Bearobics": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWMNsuIeY0Y

That said, I find it grating when I watch programs like Microsoft Teams draw themselves visibly, like old Windows 1.0 programs.

[0] The graphics logic is entirely custom, implemented in a Toshiba gate array, and it isn't something well-known like a TMS9918A or something else based on that design.
by sedev | 2025-04-26 05:33:38+00:00
You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-26 05:34:58+00:00
OK, I can't argue with that. Timothy Snyder might make a similar correction, "markets can't be free, only people participating in the market can be free" is something he says frequently.

If only people can have commitments to truth, which organization, institution, or media do you think has a leader that seems to have a commitment to truth, especially truth in their institution? Who is our gold standard of "as good as it gets"?
by bluecalm | 2025-04-26 05:35:29+00:00
It only works for simple variables where initialisation to 0 is counter productive because you lose a useful compiler warning (about using initialised variable).

The main case is about arrays. Here it's often impossible to prove some part of it is used before initialisation. There is no warning. It becomes a tradeoff: potentially costly initialisation (arrays can be very big) or potentially using random values other than 0.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-26 05:35:33+00:00
As someone that happens to also be one of those clueless people when assuming DevOps roles in consulting projects, it is a very bad day when some clever user is responsible for a security breach.

A breach can turn out into enough money being lost, in credibility, canceled orders, or lawsuits, big enough to close shop, or having to fire those that thought security rules were dumb.

Also anyone with security officer title, in many countries has legal responsibilities when something goes wrong, so when they sign off software deliverables that go wrong, is their signature on the approval.
by olyjohn | 2025-04-26 05:35:43+00:00
Yeah but look at it. It's a tall vehicle. Of course it's more likely to roll over. It's tall so that it can go over things. It has a purpose. Don't drive it like a sports car and dont haul your family in it on the daily. People bought utility vehicles and used them as family haulers and then bitched when they rolled over. It's stupid. Drive a car.

It's like complaining that you bought a boat, but the water surrounding them is dangerous and you could drown in it. So we need to make it work on land so that you can take the kids to school in it without drowning.
by smelendez | 2025-04-26 05:37:10+00:00
Great article.

This kind of humor still exists and I think it’s still most popular with young people. I followed an Instagram account in Chicago that mocks local bars and the people who go to them, but they’re all bars for people in their 20s, so I’ve rarely heard of them and don’t fully get the descriptions. There’s also that trend of “cynical maps” (Google it) of city neighborhoods, country regions, etc that peaked a few years ago and still circulates.

I don’t see this selling as a book now, but I also don’t see humorous coffee table books in general as a category the way they were 25 years ago?
by tomoviktor | 2025-04-26 05:37:31+00:00
> When you have a lot of aliases it can be difficult to remember how was the one you need named especially if you do not use it very often.

I use tmux and I use this small keybind to launch a place where I can search my aliases: bind-key a run-shell 'tmux neww -n "aliases" "source ~/.zshrc && alias | fzf"'

I like this workflow because it's quick. I always thought that if I want to shorten something I will just make and learn and alias for it and that's it.
by skissane | 2025-04-26 05:38:50+00:00
I think a competition is a great idea in theory, but in practice is unlikely given procurement regulations, cultural issues, bureaucratic fears, etc

The part that still relies on the mainframe is the entitlement calculation - all the very complex rules which determine what payments each claimant is entitled to. Other aspects have already been moved to (or at least duplicated in) non-mainframe systems, e.g. SAP CRM. Those entitlement rules are written in SOUL, Model 204’s 4GL; a team of programmers in Canberra are kept busy constantly translating legislative updates into SOUL (the government can’t resist the urge to constantly tinker with the details of social security law, so almost every year brings at least a few minor changes, and every few years major ones).

Since this is basically business rules, they decided to use a Java-based low-code/no-code business rules automation platform as a replacement, and tirelessly translated all the business rules encoded in the SOUL code into it. And they succeeded functionally - the new system produced the same results as the old one - but the performance was worse by orders of magnitude, and since it was fundamentally single-threaded (time to process a single record - maybe in theory you could parallelize aspects of it but I doubt either old or new system were) - it wasn’t a problem you could solve just by throwing more hardware at it.

Idea I have: keep the SOUL code as-is, and build a SOUL compiler for Linux (e.g. using LLVM). Or even just transpile the SOUL code into C. Totally doable, likely to give similar performance to the original mainframe system… Of course, that wouldn’t solve the problem of “system written in obscure language almost nobody knows any more”, but at least could get it on to a mainstream platform

but… people with the skill set to do this are unlikely to be interested in a government job with a rather limited salary…

And, in most countries, government agencies are strangled by procurement rules which attract firms which are adept at negotiating those rules, even if not always so adept at successfully solving the underlying problem… meanwhile, other firms which might be highly adept at the underlying problem take one look at those rules and think “this isn’t worth it”
by o11c | 2025-04-26 05:41:30+00:00
Note that there are numerous versions and forks of Colossal Cave Adventure, several of which are called "the original". For the most complete known family tree (actually a DAG in a few places), with links, see:

https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html

Some important versions: WOOD0350 (added most of the feature we know about; allegedly there was an early 250-point version in the wild but it's poorly documented), GILL0350 (C port, made it into bsdgames among others), WOOD0430 (the final version by him, what open-adventure is based on). But several other lineages are also well known (you can see .

The link submitted is a bit of a mess. src/ contains multiple versions of CROW0000 (which had been thought lost prior to 2005). But the various images are for other versions, and I haven't checked the binaries.

If you're interested in hacking your own version of adventure, the best by technical measures (reproducibility, sane file format, etc.) is:

https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure

(But the major change of file format does mean it becomes difficult to apply changes from other members of the Adventure family. This is also a problem for some others though!)
by Spivak | 2025-04-26 05:43:47+00:00
Wealthy people who could be coined liberal-tarians or just your average tech bro political grab bag largely backed Trump out of financial interest and who, imo, deluded themselves that the administration would be unsuccessful at "the bad stuff" much like his 2016 run.

No amount of shouting from the rooftops that this time was actually different convinced anyone. I can't really blame us collectively, we resoundingly voted for this— it's as much of a mandate you're likely to ever get in the US and we're in the find out stage of fucking around.

Looking back on old social media posts the theme is that everyone, supporters and not, were high on copium that Trump would do <list of things I like | aren't so bad> and the <list of truly terrible things> was just obviously crazy and wouldn't actually happen or were a joke.
by asveikau | 2025-04-26 05:43:52+00:00
> Amy Goodman

Source for that? My impression is that Democracy Now!, while it has a clear perspective and set of biases, has been fairly independent. I don't think Goodman herself would be involved with them, but I think some of her sometimes guests have been.

In general I agree with folks replying to you that RT is not trustworthy and someone being involved with it is a red flag.
by jen729w | 2025-04-26 05:45:56+00:00
My partner makes one! Go grab a copy if you're in Australia, the wonderful POP local -- started as POP Canberra -- sells them.

https://www.poplocal.com.au/product/bum-man-colouring-book/

He's 'Bum Man'. A man (actually it's asexual) who is a bum. I mean c'mon.
by dandersch | 2025-04-26 05:45:59+00:00
>rsshub

This has been one of the key programs for me to move 90% of my "timeline" into an rss reader.

If you self-host it, you can also pass it authentication tokens to RSSify things like:

- your twitter timeline

- github notifications, issues, commits

- discord messages

- youtube subscriptions

- spotify/twitch/steam/etc.
by seeg | 2025-04-26 05:46:18+00:00
The FBI tracks active shooting cases-where individuals attempt to kill people in public places, excluding those tied to robberies or gang violence. This study is the first to systematically compare how uniformed police and civilians with concealed handgun permits perform in stopping these attacks. Civilians with permits stopped the attacks more frequently and faced a lower risk of being killed or injured than police. Officers who intervened during the attacks were far more likely to be killed or injured than those who apprehended the attackers later.