MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DreamFlasher | 2025-04-23 16:49:41+00:00
Highlights Torch.Compile support for Torch Function Modes NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture Support Mega Cache PyTorch Native Context Parallel Enhancing Intel GPU Acceleration FlexAttention LLM first token processing on X86 CPUs FlexAttention LLM throughput mode optimization on X86 CPUs Foreach Map Flex Attention for Inference Prologue Fusion Support in Inductor
by r1chardnl | 2025-04-23 16:49:42+00:00
I don't know how well this makes you understand your dependencies. As for C/C++ a lot of people probably depend on stb single header files libraries. There's stb_truetype but it specifically mentions not to use it on any untrusted/outside .ttf files which I do like but you have to keep in mind to bake to bitmaps or only use your own .ttf provided files, thus I would put this dependency in another place like tooling. Is there a way to do this in other languages like JS and NPM? Maybe carefully choosing which dependencies you include is better?

https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h#L...
by boxed | 2025-04-23 16:49:59+00:00
> It didn't start with the iPhone.

Disagree, but continue...

> What the iPhone brought was a different interface and user experience

Lol. Yea, that's 99% of the entire thing! It's why Android was building a Nokia clone the day before the keynote, and the day after the keynote they changed direction HARD in panic.

> They only lacked touch interfaces.

Well that's not true. They did in fact have touch interfaces too. Just that it wasn't capacitive. And the entire interaction model sucked, the APIs sucked, the graphics sucked, the screen sucked, etc.

> The behavior of people walking around with media in their phones and using their phones to consume media, capture media and access the internet on-the-go was built by those brands, not by the iPhone.

I think you're also forgetting what "the internet" on these devices was. It wasn't the real internet. You couldn't go to normal full websites and have it worked. It was enormously far from it in fact.

> but the demand and consumer behavior weren't built by Apple, not even close. They just surfed the wave with a better product.

There was no wave before BECAUSE the products before were so inferior.

It's maddening that people don't get this. The difference between utter crap and a great product isn't checkboxes on a feature list. It's a thousand tiny details that seem insignificant, and CARING about those things.

If it was just a few UX fixes, Nokia could have turned around and cloned iPhone fast. But they couldn't. Because:

1. They didn't care or understand tiny details.

2. Many many details is something you build up over a long time. You can slap a clone UX over your existing product, but that's not why the iPhone was great.
by AcerbicZero | 2025-04-23 16:50:17+00:00
Eh....cancelling a not very good design in 1959, well before most countries realized ground controlled interceptors were kind of a bad idea might be the real story here. The US (and the Soviets to a hilarious degree) went down the other path for many more years, at high cost; the USAF (Fighter side) didn't truly recover from those choices until the late 70's - early 80's IMO. (Vietnam being the real tutor here)

If you're interested in the subject, look up the performance of the beam riding missiles in use, and the limitations for deployment of the AIM-9B - those do a good job highlighting the extremely limited envelope in which these weapons could be deployed, and the difficulty in getting the aircraft in that envelope.
by ArinaS | 2025-04-23 16:50:31+00:00
Mozilla will quite literally die if the demands of the judge get satisfied - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/mozilla-....

So I guess the last resort for people who don't want to surrender to the Big Tech will be niche hard forks of Firefox, of which there are 3 - Pale Moon, Basilisk and SeaMonkey.
by bko | 2025-04-23 16:50:59+00:00
This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.

I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?

I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
by moralestapia | 2025-04-23 16:51:19+00:00
I really dislike what I now call the American We.

"We made it!" "We failed!" written by somebody who doesn't have the slightest connection to the projects they're talking about. e.g. this piece doesn't even have an author but I highly doubt he has done anything more than using chatgpt.com a couple times.

Maybe this could be the Neumann's law of headlines: if it starts with We, it's bullshit.
by buescher | 2025-04-23 16:52:06+00:00
These designs fascinate people who haven't designed antennas. I don't doubt that throwing enough computational power at optimizing antennas will produce antennas optimized for something at the expense of something else but if you're a casual what you should notice is that these papers never mention the "something elses". You can get a paper out of just about any antenna design, btw. There's also a type of ham that will tune up a bedframe or whatever. So just getting something to radiate should not be confused with advancing the state of the art.

These antennas found their way into the utterly savage "pathological antennas" chapter of Hansen and Collin's _Small Antenna Handbook_. See "random segment antennas". Hansen and Collin is the book to have on your shelf if you're doing any small antennas commercially and that chapter is the chapter to go to when you're asked "why don't you just".
by globular-toast | 2025-04-23 16:52:20+00:00
> did you know __init__.py is optional nowadays?

It's not optional. Omitting it gets you a namespace package, which is probably not what you want.

> TypeVar supports binding to enforce subtypes: "TypeVar['T', bound=X]",

Using the new generics syntax you mentioned above you can now do:

def method[T: X](...)
by Izkata | 2025-04-23 16:53:36+00:00
It's one that really bothers me because of the unnecessary confusion it adds.

As for the rest, see GGP's argument. px^2 doesn't make logical sense. When people are use pixels as length, it's in the same way as "I live 2 houses over" - taking a 2D or 3D object and using one of its dimensions as length/distance.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-23 16:54:03+00:00
> But yes, one of the reasons people use ASN.1 is because of its hard and fast commitments to backwards compatibility.

To be fair I think that's generally expected of things like it. XDR? Stable. DCE/RPC? Obsolete, yes, but stable. MSRPC? A derivative of DCE/RPC, and yes, stable. XML? Stable. JSON? Stable. And so on. All of them stable. If PB broke backwards-compat once then to me that's a very serious problem -- details?
by returningfory2 | 2025-04-23 16:54:35+00:00
I think it's a very different situation:

- Israel is composed of people from different parts of the world with different languages so as a matter of practical policy they had to standardize on some uniform language for the country. Scotland doesn't have this problem: English is already the uniform standardized language.

- Israel exists in a more "existential" position than Scotland - there is more of a sense that their country and culture could be lost. Thus there is a bigger motivation to preserve what makes them different. I think you see this play out in Ireland, actually: there seems to be more of an interest in the Irish language in Northern Ireland, where the Irish identify is seen as more under threat, than in the Republic, where it is safe.
by thmsths | 2025-04-23 16:54:35+00:00
I am not advocating for central planning. As I underscored in my comment, I advocate for something closer to the defense procurement model: where the market is failing to provide an appropriate off the shelf product and the state contracts an entity (usually a private company, but in the case of software it could be a public agency) to make it for them. This is a model that is currently in use in the US, in the EU, and actually worked well in the USSR too, their Ladas (and consumer products in general) might have been terrible but their defense industry was great.
by kmacdough | 2025-04-23 16:54:36+00:00
> And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

Agreed, but keep in mind this must be compared to the phenomenal inefficiency of the developing monopolist oligarchy to the end user. I find it interesting how much harsher people are when some fraction of government money is siphoned, when the current alternative is *most* of it being siphoned, albeit without passing through government first.

The implicit claim often seems to be that people see less value per dollar when money passes through the government. But this is pure nonsense, particularly when you compare things like the cost of healthcare in the US vs everywhere else. Or generally most cases where government managed services can be compared to consolidated markets.

Just because some government money is wasted in ways that are less applicable to private industry doesn't at all mean the private industry creates more value for the consumer.
by jug | 2025-04-23 16:55:09+00:00
Red flag nowadays is when a blog post tries to judge whether AI is AGI. Because these goal posts are constantly moving and there is no agreed upon benchmark to meet. More often than not, they reason why exactly something is not AGI yet from their perspective, while another user happily use AI as a full-fledged employee depending on use case. I’m personally using AI as a coding companion and it seems to be doing extremely well for being brain dead at least.
by xp84 | 2025-04-23 16:55:57+00:00
By the way, I agree to you that overall, more normal (market rate) housing is the only reasonable way to make more housing affordable. The absurd SF system of paying $664K (2019 figure) to build one 'BMR' unit, then using a lottery to distribute it to one lucky family, while keeping most of the city zoned for SFH and fighting every developer who wants to build anything on the scraps where density isn't outright banned, is absurd.

But I gave up on SF and left years ago because the majority of their voters apparently like the situation, since they keep electing the same set of people and supporting ballot measures to keep trying the same failed strategies. Just one more tax increase. Just one more blocked condo tower, just one more $100M bond, and we'll fix homelessness AND housing affordability. Just one more!
by Wobbles42 | 2025-04-23 16:57:18+00:00
Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length.

The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range.

Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.
by leptons | 2025-04-23 16:57:26+00:00
I don't have one but I'd definitely take a tape changer if it weren't too expensive. It would be amazing to have 72TB of storage just waiting to be filled, without needing to go out into my garage to load a tape up.

LTO tapes have really changed my life, or at least my mental health. Easy and robust backup has been elusive. DVD-R was just not doing it for me. Hard drives are too expensive and lacked robustness. My wife is a pro photographer so the never-ending data dumps had filled up all our hard drives, and spending hundreds of dollars more on another 2-disk mirror RAID, and then another, and another was just stupid. Most of the data will only need to be accessed rarely, but we still want to keep it. I lost sleep over the mountains of data we were hoarding on hard drives. I've had too many hard drives just die, including RAIDs being corrupted. LTO tape changed all of that. It's relatively cheap, and pretty easy and fast compared to all the other solutions. It's no wonder it's still being used in data centers. I love all the data center hand-me-downs that flood eBay.

And I do love hearing the tapes whir, it makes me smile.
by ianburrell | 2025-04-23 16:57:27+00:00
A long time ago, I had a phone with replaceable battery. I would much rather charge phone. I had to change the battery every few hours, partly because the battery was small to make replaceable and partly cause wireless sucked.

Battery life is much better now. I put phone on wireless charging pad and it is always charged when I need it. I use it all day and still have power. I carry power banks in bags if need it. External battery is better because it works with any device without having device specific batteries. Also, there are now batteries that magnetically attach to phone and wirelessly charge.

It would be nice if it was easier to replace battery, but don't need replaceable battery every day for something that happens in couple years.
by summitsingh | 2025-04-23 16:57:32+00:00
I wanted to share my journey going from an F-1 student visa to an EB-1A green card—approved in one shot with no RFE and no employer sponsor. I’m a software engineer (no PhD) who started as an international student at Drexel, worked at Oracle, and co-founded a startup. Figured this might help anyone eyeing EB-1A or similar paths.

I wrote up the full breakdown—criteria, evidence checklist, lessons learned in this Medium post. Not here to spam, just thought it might spark some ideas. EB-1A felt daunting at first (self-doubt was real!), but consistent impact beat needing fame or a Nobel Prize.

Anyone else gone the self-petition route? What was your biggest hurdle? Happy to swap tips or answer questions!
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-23 16:57:42+00:00
CodeSchool used to be interactive until PluralSight bought them out, then pulled in all the videos, but kept none of the interactivity. Shame.

There's also the Processing tutorial series which is insanely interactive:

https://hello.processing.org/

Sharing these in the hopes they server as inspiration for anyone who works on educational programming content.
by bluGill | 2025-04-23 16:57:50+00:00
Depending on what you mean by in control you are either right or wrong.

You cannot do everything. Specialists can get really good at one thing, so it is best for the world to specialize and get those other things from someone else. Going it alone is bad for everyone.

However you also cannot trust anyone else. So you need to have plenty of options such that if one specialist turns out bad you can cut that one off.
by f1yght | 2025-04-23 16:57:58+00:00
I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-23 16:58:07+00:00
> Anyway, I'm sorry I've distracted away from your core point

Side-tracks and tangents are the powerhouse of HN comments ;)

As for MinGW and Cygwin (and all the other *nix-on-Windows stuff), I take a bit more lower-level view than what (developer or user) environments they provide, or what tools they use.

In a nutshell, C++ binaries compiled with MinGW are binary-incompatible with C++ binaries compiled with MSVC, because they are built against different binary interfaces: x86_64-pc-windows-gnu (or x86_64-w64-mingw32, which appears to be a synonym) and x86_64-pc-windows-msvc respectively. The former is the C++ Itanium ABI, the latter is a partially-documented MSVC ABI.

Cygwin is an 'ABI' of its own too, because everything needs to be linked against cygwin1.dll, and when it is missing there is a runtime error. WSL1 and WSL2 from an ABI standpoint are indistinguishable—they are x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.

This is sort of why we can have LLVM-MinGW, which is the entire LLVM suite and only LLVM binutils (see my parent comment for a link), without nary a GNU binary. It's essentially Clang, built to target the MinGW ABI (this can be built on Windows with MSVC, oddly enough).

Speaking of Linux, every glibc upgrade is essentially a different ABI (for some functions) presented to the developer—so much for Linus' assertion of 'don't break userspace'. Even if the kernel doesn't do it, the entirely user-space C library will do it for him. Oh, and musl libc is yet another ABI.

I have delved too far into the weeds of cross-compilation, and as a result I can't help but absolutely despise everything about the C and C++ ecosystem.
by dahart | 2025-04-23 16:58:43+00:00
Eh, calling it infinitely small is at least as misleading as calling it a square. While they are both mostly correct, neither Monty’s explanation nor Alvy-Rays are all that good. Pixels are samples taken at a specific point, but pixel values do represent area one way or another. Often they are not squares, but on the other hand LCD pixels are pretty square-ish. Camera pixels are integrals over the sensor area, which captures an integral over a solid angle. Pixels don’t have a standard shape, it depends on what capture or display device we’re talking about, but no physical capture or display devices have infinitely small elements.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-23 16:59:15+00:00
Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.

Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.

But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
by bigyabai | 2025-04-23 16:59:22+00:00
I don't think this is an Apple-exclusive phenomenon. Even if it was, the media would be pretty well-justified in reporting on a lifestyle product with diminished demand. I remember similar news coverage for the PS3, Shamwow, Google Glass, Juicero, Zune, Fire Phone, and so much more.

It feels more like Apple users aren't used to acknowledging Apple's own failures. Because Apple refuses to admit certain products don't succeed (see: iPhone Mini, 12" Macbook, Butterfly Keyboard), their users come to believe that Apple is beyond reproach. If Vision Pro was good enough for the public, it's genuinely hard to imagine how much worse the Apple Car and Airpower could be.
by michaelulin | 2025-04-23 16:59:31+00:00
You're absolutely right that using a robust calendar/date library (like dateutil in Python) is the standard approach and often the best one. It's definitely easier to debug and test in the traditional sense.

The potential value of the LLM approach comes in when:

The natural language input is very fuzzy or varied, potentially going beyond what standard libraries parse easily out-of-the-box. You want to simplify the application code that interprets the user's intent before calling a date library function. The LLM handles the interpretation step. Regarding edge cases like leap years: That's a valid concern for any date logic. However, capable LLMs (even models like GPT-3.5-Turbo or GPT-4o mini), when given the proper context (like today's date, as shown in the example prompt), handle standard date calculations including leap years quite well. More importantly, the validation layer (using Pydantic/Instructor in the example) is crucial here.

Caching is also possible for the LLM responses (based on input text + date context) if needed. It's definitely a different set of trade-offs compared to using a library directly!
by Molitor5901 | 2025-04-23 16:59:45+00:00
I believe the media deserves criticism for its tendency to avoid uncomfortable stories; regardless of which political party they involve. News organizations often reflect a bias, and that bias tends to extend to the journalists they hire. It's difficult to trust the industry when I can’t tell whether a story is being reported because it's true, or because it aligns with someone's personal beliefs.

With so much of the media landscape controlled by large corporations I don’t trust, I find it nearly impossible to confidently assess the accuracy or intent behind what I’m being told. That leaves me with few options beyond relying on my instincts—which, admittedly, aren't always fully informed.

In my opinion, mainstream outlets should have scrutinized President Biden’s son and the president’s cognitive health more aggressively. While there are certainly outstanding journalists, it seems that many pursue stories that support their own political leanings rather than challenge them. I can only guess this is happening because journalism no longer attracts the best talent; declining financial incentives?

I wish I knew how to fix this.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-04-23 16:59:55+00:00
I'm using SQLAlchemy, Alembic, and FastAPI. Either this is for someone much more advanced than me, or it could use some examples showing "This is clunky in SQLAlchemy and easy in Advanced-Alchemy." When you look at SQLModel[1] from FastAPI, which I did adopt, it does a much better job at promising "this will make your life easier".

1. https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-04-23 17:00:01+00:00
I wonder if the people that struggle with decorators have a fundamental struggle with seeing functions as objects that can be redefined or modified.

A decorator basically just does something when a function is defined. They can be used to do something when a function is defined (such as register the function with a list of functions), or modify the function's behavior to do something before and/or after the function is called (like create a poor man's profiling by timing the function call).

You can do all that without decorators, of course, but the code looks a lot cleaner with them.