MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by peanut-walrus | 2025-04-25 07:40:44+00:00
Object storage for Kafka? Wouldn't this 10x the latency and cost?

I feel like Kafka is a victim of it's own success, it's excellent for what it was designed, but since the design is simple and elegant, people have been using it for all sorts of things for which it was not designed. And well, of course it's not perfect for these use cases.
by sunng | 2025-04-25 07:41:19+00:00
Yes, this is a common confusing point between structured logging and wide event. The Wide Event 101 article I referenced has clear explanation:

> Structured logs could be wide events, but not all structured logs are wide events. A structured log with 5 fields is not a wide event. A structured log with no context is not a wide event.

And these also why it requires no code changes to extract more metrics from wide event. The context can carry enough information and you just write a new query to retrieve it. In current metrics tooling, you will make code change to define new labels or add new metrics for that.
by captn3m0 | 2025-04-25 07:42:05+00:00
GitHub uses fairly long-lived sessions. "sudo mode"[0] on GitHub, where it asks for a verification of the 2FA is only for sensitive actions, which PR merges are not. So a cookie-stealing attack can easily merge PRs for quite a while.

And 2FA isn't a requirement for a PR merge afaik, Except via org-wide enforcement? So the guarantee is lower - the commit was merged with a valid session token.

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...
by Nition | 2025-04-25 07:43:13+00:00
Grok 3

Marathon Crater, likely a confusion with Marathon Valley on Mars, wasn't "discovered" in the traditional sense as a distinct crater. Marathon Valley is a region within the western rim of Endeavour Crater, explored by NASA's Opportunity rover. The valley itself came to prominence when Opportunity arrived there in July 2015, as it was targeted for study due to clay mineral detections by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s CRISM instrument in 2009. Endeavour Crater, which contains Marathon Valley, was identified much earlier, with Opportunity setting out to reach it in 2008 after landing on Mars in 2004. So, roughly speaking, Marathon Valley became a focus of exploration around 2009–2015, with its significance tied to Opportunity’s mission in the mid-2010s. If you meant a specific "Marathon Crater" elsewhere, could you clarify?

Grok 3 with Think on

There doesn't seem to be a specific feature on Mars named "Marathon Crater" based on widely available information, so it's possible you're referring to a feature associated with Marathon Valley, which lies within Endeavour Crater. Marathon Valley was identified as a region of scientific interest when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's CRISM instrument detected clay minerals there, a discovery that took place around 2009. Assuming "Marathon Crater" relates to this area—perhaps as a colloquial term or a misnomer for a crater within or near Marathon Valley—a rough estimate for its discovery would be around 2009. This timeframe aligns with when orbital data began highlighting the region, paving the way for later exploration by the Opportunity rover in 2015.
by tmountain | 2025-04-25 07:44:09+00:00
I’ve been writing software for 25 years and am “vibe coding” a fairly complex game in my spare time. It saves time on boilerplate but it is absolutely not capable of doing all the work. There’s still some assembly required and doing so requires domain knowledge and expertise. Also, prompting properly requires the same. If I were to compare the experience to building a house, I’m now the foreman—and no longer doing the manual labor. There’s a real risk of systems making it to production that nobody understands, but we have that today.
by codedokode | 2025-04-25 07:44:38+00:00
> Which still means you have to write your code at least thrice, which is two times more than with a variable length SIMD ISA.

This is a wrong approach. You should be writing you code in a high-level language like this:

x = sum i for 1..n: a[i] * b[i]

And let the compiler write the assembly for every existing architecture (including multi-threaded version of a loop).

I don't understand what is the advantage of writing the SIMD code manually. At least have a LLM write it if you don't like my imaginary high-level vector language.
by sebstefan | 2025-04-25 07:44:59+00:00
I keep seeing that `args = process.argv.slice(2)` line to skip past `node script.js`

I ended up settling for it as well (I couldn't find anything better, nor make it break) but I'd be really surprised if it was the way to go

Like `node --enable-tracing script.js --name=John --age 30 --verbose`

This works because node seems to hide --enable-tracing to the underlying script

But would it work with Bun & Deno...? Is that standard...?
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-25 07:46:46+00:00
>There was no threat of losing Sevalstopol, which was leased until 2049 in non-aligned and then substantially pro-Russian Ukraine.

This is not correct. Kharkov agreements in 2010 extended the lease until 2042 in exchange for gas price discounts, but they would start working only in 2017 and Ukraina could cancel them (and may have cancelled them if anti-Russian opposition would be back in power - the threat of losing the base was real). After annexation of Crimea Russia itself cancelled the agreements and they effectively were never in place.

>You build your whole chain of reasoning on a faulty premise.

That was not the premise for the whole chain of reasoning. Premises do not start with "may". :)
by bsder | 2025-04-25 07:47:59+00:00
VSCode garnered such a significant market share that supporting VSCode almost immediately becomes your #1 editor (see Rust surveys: 2016-3%, 2017-30%, 2018-45%, 2020-54%, 2023-62%--note: VSCode was only released in 2016!).

Since the LSP was the only effective way that you could support syntax highlighting in VSCode, languages had to create an LSP or they didn't exist to VSCode users. Once the language supports VSCode, anyone not already steeped in the editor wars switched.

At that point, the editors had to support the LSP or get left behind.

With JetBrains, the issue is that they would have almost certainly considered an LSP as a competitive advantage. It would have taken some amazing foresight to release something like that as OSS and not be afraid of losing market share if you get vim/neovim to adopt it (you can ignore emacs market share--the editor wars are all but over and emacs lost badly).
by smatija | 2025-04-25 07:49:09+00:00
I like chess, so mine is: "Isolani structure occurs in two main subtypes: 1. black has e6 pawn, 2. black has c6 pawn. What is the main difference between them? Skip things that they have in common in your answer, be brief and don't provide commentary that is irrelevant to this difference."

AI models tend to get it way way wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41529024
by bravetraveler | 2025-04-25 07:50:16+00:00
> think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.

They're likely right, too. Turns out... employers minds are elsewhere. The degree no longer serves as a useful signal.

In nearly two decades I still haven't found cause to finish my degree. Hell, I don't even have to practice what I was hired for.

Can often find the job is 'whatever we decide'. Education, in some/several senses, is undesirable. Instead of falling for it, may find it better to be too dumb to notice or too tough to care about hoodwinking.
by nitwit005 | 2025-04-25 07:50:22+00:00
> When producing a record to a topic and then using that record for materializing some derived data view on some downstream data store, there’s no way for the producer to know when it will be able to "see" that downstream update. For certain use cases it would be helpful to be able to guarantee that derived data views have been updated when a produce request gets acknowledged, allowing Kafka to act as a log for a true database with strong read-your-own-writes semantics.

Just don't use Kafka.

Write to the downstream datastore directly. Then you know your data is committed and you have a database to query.
by woolion | 2025-04-25 07:51:23+00:00
He effectively predicted all the paradigm shifts that the internet entailed. I've thought about his interviews many times as it was a very optimistic view compared to the alternatives -- one being the internet as a generalized tiktok (or what is called brainrot) and the other being the internet being totally subsumed by existing media corporations. While these exist to a large extent, they have not been able to stop the change in relationship between artist and audience, the meaning of "critique", the status symbol of culture, etc. It has also been argued that he anticipated cryptocurrencies and NFTs with his Bowie bonds. Similarly, even if you strongly dislike the current state of this tech, they complete the puzzle of this positive worldview.
by nullc | 2025-04-25 07:52:02+00:00
Because they have been pressured by the US Government to engage in censorship which is unlawful for the government to perform. See also: Operation Choke Point and Operation Choke Point 2.0.

Even in cases where it might be lawful for the government to restrain the target's speech, they'd be entitled to due process and the state (or at least components of it) have found it unacceptably inconvenient to allow their targets access to due process. This 'issue' is resolved by censoring through proxy actors, and particularly through also restricting access to the relevant facts that the target would need to establish standing.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-25 07:52:09+00:00
I fail to see the problem with this, to be honest. Microsoft provides a free IDE for everyone to use on any platform, but it's not good enough because the language runtimes and proprietary third party tools aren't completely free?

Maybe Microsoft should've made VSCode source-available. Sure, companies taking Microsoft's free labour would need to develop an IDE of their own (or maybe someone can hack Eclipse to work as a browser project?), but at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-25 07:52:19+00:00
The EU is still fairly new. It's only been around in its current form for a few decades or so.

EU countries still have:

- their own laws and constitutions

- their own foreign policy, embassies, intelligence services, armies, etc.

- their own taxation; there actually is no EU tax (though there is some pressure to create such a thing)

- their own policies for education, healthcare, social security, taxation, trade, etc.

- their own currency in some cases (e.g. Denmark, Sweden, Poland and many other eastern European countries)

- border disputes like Cyprus, the Balkans (several former Yugoslav countries are members or aspiring to be). And though not part of it, you might count Greenland here as it is Danish with a special status.

As a trade block, the EU is pretty large. And the sphere of influence also includes former soviet states not part of the EU, Turkey, Northern Africa, etc. But it doesn't speak with one voice like the US and China tend to do. Also there is a lot of division on topics like e.g. the Ukraine war, energy, and a lot of other topics.
Ask HN: If AI is intelligent, why do we still need programming?
by alwinaugustin | 2025-04-25 07:53:14+00:00
There's a lot of talk about "AI code generation," but if AI were truly intelligent—able to understand and solve problems autonomously—would we still need programming at all?

Programming is how we translate understanding into instructions. If AI had intelligence, wouldn’t it just solve problems directly, without needing prompts or code?

Current tools still depend on human guidance and structured inputs. So is this really “intelligence,” or are we anthropomorphizing what’s essentially pattern-based automation?

Should we start calling it what it is—statistical code synthesis—rather than framing it as "intelligent" code generation?
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-04-25 07:53:45+00:00
I wish there is a global file system with node local disks, which has rule driven affinity to nodes for data. We have two extremes, one like EFS or S3 express which doesn't have any affinity to the processing system, and other what Kafka etc is doing where they have tightly integrated logic for this which makes systems more complicated.
by InfinityByTen | 2025-04-25 07:53:47+00:00
> Nevertheless, mathematical notation has serious deficiencies. In particular, it lacks universality, and must be interpreted differently according to the topic, according to the author, and even according to the immediate context.

I personally disagree to the premise of this paper.

I think notation that is separated from visualization and ergonomics of the problem has a high cost. Some academics prefer a notation that hides away a lot of the complexity which can potentially result in "Eureka" realizations, wild equivalences and the like. In some cases, however, it can be obfuscating and be prone to introducing errors. Yet, it's a important tool in communicating a train of thought.

In my opinion, having one standard notation for any domain/ closely related domains is quite stifling of creative, artistic or explorative side of reasoning and problem solving.

Also, here's an excellent exposition about notation by none other than Terry Tao https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911903
by codedokode | 2025-04-25 07:53:58+00:00
> load and increment address register in a single instruction is extremely valuable here

I think this is not important anymore because modern architectures allow to add offset to register value so you can write something like, using weird RISC-V syntax for addition:

ld r2, 0(r1) ld r3, 4(r1) ld r4, 8(r1)

These operations can be executed in parallel, while with auto-incrementing you cannot do that.
by rurban | 2025-04-25 07:54:09+00:00
And how would you type a string vs byte array then? C doesn't even have proper string support yet, ie unicode strings. Most wchar functions don't care at all about unicode rules. Zero-terminated byte buffers are certainly not strings, just garbage.

C will never get proper string support, so you'll never be able to seperate them from zero-terminated byte buffers vs byte-buffers in the type system.

So annotating vars is perfectly fine.

The problem was that the PM and Release manager was completely unaware of the state of the next branch, of its upcoming problems and fixes, and just hacked around in his usual cowboy manner. Entirely unprofessional. A release manager should have been aware of Kees' gcc15 fixes.

But they have not tooling support, no oversight, just endless blurbs on their main mailinglist. No CI for a release candidate? Reminds us of typical cowboys in other places.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-04-25 07:54:35+00:00
The musicians of the 19th century were free to produce anything they liked. They were free to write a "Missa Solemnis" where the very silence is breathtaking, where one does not merely hear that God has died, but where one feels His rebirth. And what have they done? Have they produced in their liberty anything grander or more beautiful than the scrawling of the deaf composer? Have they summoned sounds more jubilant than those conjured by the consumptive Romantic, the limping Dresden Kapellmeister? We know that they have produced only a few forgetful tunes.

Whether cultural libertinism be better than cultural rigidity may be discussed, but that the cultural libertinism of the 20st century amounted to less than the cultural rigidity of earlier century will be difficult to deny.

People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music because his music is as hollow and unmeaning, by design. He believed the world is an unmeaning wilderness, or at least that he was the most meaningful thing in it, at least in the sense that the only meaning of it derived from himself. But an egoist in a mere unmeaning wilderness is not impressive.

In Bowie's theology, life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole. If his cosmos is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.

Bowie could not make any music that was joyful because he could not understand joy. The modern philosopher has told Bowie again and again that he was in the right place, and he had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But those that came before him had heard that they were in the WRONG place, and their souls sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
by int_19h | 2025-04-25 07:54:42+00:00
It's not necessarily different people.

I like active listening. I can easily spend two hours sitting or lying down comfortably in my headphones, eyes closed, so that I can focus on the music alone. The kind of music I want for that is not (yet) something that AI can generate.

But that same kind of music is also distracting when I'm actually trying to do something, because I keep overfocusing on it. So when I work, I listen to different kind of music. Having AI generate that doesn't feel wrong or insulting in the slightest, nor is it relevant to the other kind of music.

Although I will say that if and when AI is actually able to generate music good enough for active listening, I wouldn't be insulted by that, either.
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-25 07:54:49+00:00
I think he refers to Microsoft auditing a business' licence compliance. Have you aquired the correct amount of licenses for all the instances you are running and accessing. Microsoft licensing is so insanely complex that even if you ask 2 MS sales reps what licenses you need to cover a certain scenario, you will get a different answer each time. This is also why an audit almost 100% results in finding non-compliance.

https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-04-25 07:55:26+00:00
> I dont love the idea of Apple eco system for server side development.

100%! Everyone repeat after me: "macOS Is Not A Server OS"

macOS is approximately the worst OS you can run a server on:

1. It is buggy. We had a bug in Sonoma where our CI machines would freeze on some filesystem access. The bug was fixed during Sonoma's lifetime... but only released in Sequoia. Before that we had a rare bug that plagued us for years (once every few months across several CI machines) where a process would fail to execute with "/bin/sh: cannot execute binary file", indicating an erroneous ENOEXEC from the kernel (that bug quietly disappeared)

2. It has no LTS version. See above filesystem hang. Want a fix? Cool, it comes only in the next major OS version, along with a host other changes you didn't want, and new bugs! (see point 4 below)

3. It is just poorly documented. Apple's doc are awful, poorly searcheable, they will change things and not document it, you're left with the community trying to reverse-engineer everything (I cannot recommend eclecticlight.co enough!)

4. It's just bloated with cruft for consumers. Upgrade to Sequoia 15.3? You got a free download of "Apple Intelligence" models, there go a few GBs! Again rely on the community to come up with the magic settings to disable stuff.

Ask me how I feel about macOS as a server.

(I lament the death of XServe, which could've driven more server-focused software quality)
by pgc-algorithm | 2025-04-25 07:56:12+00:00
We have developed a Polymorphic Graph Classifier that aims to improve flexibility, and interpretability of neural networks.

Code: https://github.com/cloudcell/prj.pgc-paper-code-public Paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15744.55041 Podcast (AI generated from the paper): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axJjPfKU-U4

Would appreciate your thoughts or any feedback.
by int_19h | 2025-04-25 07:56:28+00:00
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.

“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”

He agreed that the table was clean.

“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”

“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”

“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”

“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”

(Iain M. Banks, "Use of Weapons")
by nosianu | 2025-04-25 07:57:36+00:00
> I want Al to do my laundry

Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago.

This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-ma...

"Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home."

One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more.

The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space...

The original Polish book was first published in 1957.