MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevingadd | 2025-04-22 19:11:08+00:00
> But because tick() and render() involved async database calls, sometimes a new interval would fire before the previous one finished.

This is a tricky one when writing games using async APIs. The game I've been working on is written in C# but I occasionally hit the same issue when game code ends up needing async, where I have to carefully ensure that I don't kick off two asynchronous operations at once if they're going to interact with the same game state. In the old days all the APIs you're using would have been synchronous, but these days lots of libraries use async/await and/or promises and it kind of infects all the code around it.

It does depend on the sort of game you're building though. Some games end up naturally having a single 'main loop' you spend most of your time in, i.e. Doom where you spend all your time either navigating around the game world or looking at a pause/end-of-stage menu - in that case you can basically just have an is_menu_open bool in your update and draw routines, and if you load all your assets during your loading screen(s), nothing ever needs to be async.

Other games are more modal, and might have a dozen different menus/scenes (if not hundreds), i.e. something like Skyrim. And sometimes you have modals that can appear in multiple scenarios, like a settings menu, so you need to be able to start a modal loop in different contexts. You might have the player in a conversation with an NPC, and then during the conversation you show a popup menu asking them to choose what to say to the NPC, and they decide while the conversation menu is open they want to consult the conversation log, so you're opening a modal on top of a modal, and any modal might need to load some assets asynchronously before it appears...

In the old days you could solve a lot of this by starting a new main loop inside of the current one that would exit when the modal went away. Win32 modal dialogs work this way, for example (which can cause unpleasant re-entrant execution surprises if you trigger a modal in the wrong place). I'm still uncertain whether async/await is a good modern replacement for it.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-22 19:12:05+00:00
> 6-8 years before their higher level thinking pre-frontal cortex fully develops

This is a myth. The prefrontal cortex doesn't appear to ever stop developing.

Early brain development studies involving MRIs simply only looked at people up to the age of 25 and the findings that they "develop until at least 25" turned into this myth that they stop developing and are "fully mature" at 25.

The age of majority was a conservative choice based on society's view of when the vast majority of people were capable of the level of self-sufficiency required to do things like enter into contracts. If most are incapable of self-sufficiency without a parental guardian, then the age of majority should be increased.

That said, we also ignored our own rationale and started allowing minors to apply for student loans. This is a travesty.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-developme...
by linksnapzz | 2025-04-22 19:12:13+00:00
Those raccoons work on the IT side; only the more presentable marketing raccoons get into catalog pics.

Having a PC Connection catalog w/ raccoons doing more stereotypical rural NH shenanigans (driving a snowmobile drunk on NightTrain; fleeing the cops on dirtbikes, operating bootleg roadside fireworks stands...) might've been hard to get approval for.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-22 19:12:27+00:00
Yeah, apparently the warehouse which made this workable was in Kingston, Tenn. adjacent to the FedEx Hub, so things could go straight to the plane which was taking them to the FedEx distributor closest to the delivery address.

Still have the Wacom ArtZ I bought from them in the wee hours of a Monday morning when I decided I desperately had to have one.
by hermitdev | 2025-04-22 19:14:09+00:00
> The reason it works is because Python functionally has no bool type. True and False are just integers with names.

This has not been true since around 2.4 or 2.5. The oldest Python I have available to me currently is 2.7, and this holds then, as it does now in 3.13:

>>> type(True) <class 'bool'> >>> type(1) <class 'int'>

Prior to having a bool type, Python didn't even have True/False keywords.

The reason something silly like `4 + True` works is because the bool type implements `tp_as_number` [0]. The reason it works this way is intentional because it would been a Python 3 str-style debacle if ints and bools were not interchangeable.

[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Objects/boolobje...
by Stratoscope | 2025-04-22 19:14:33+00:00
https://archive.is/ClX2n

Willy Ley was my childhood hero. His books about space travel invigorated my young mind and imagination.

I even talked my parents into taking me to a space convention where he signed my copy of The Conquest of Space, with illustrations by the great Chesley Bonestell. I wish I still had that book!

RIP, Willy
by bigfishrunning | 2025-04-22 19:14:40+00:00
> If everyone has AI, then competitively no one has AI, because that means you are what drives the differences.

Except everyone doesn't have AI. Only huge corporations with billion dollar data centers do. What happens when Sam Altman decides to de-prioritize you? The little toy model you downloaded from github won't cut it.

These AI tools shift a lot of power into a few Silicon Valley companies. Keep those skills sharp, you'll need them. Best case scenario, the VC money bonfire runs out of fuel before 3 companies own the entire software industry.
by jug | 2025-04-22 19:14:41+00:00
From the examples, it looks like this command-line tool should be able to be generalized to catalogue arbitrary data (retro gaming, tabletop games, movies, ...) with the same graphs/statistics/table, only with slightly larger overhead when querying the store. Along with a new command to create the catalogue and its columns of course.

> catalogue new --numeric id, year, rating --text title, author > catalogue show --column id --value 123 > catalogue show -c year -v 1984 > catalogue report -c author (would show generic "Count" rather than "Books read")

Could also be extended so the user can provide a SQLite db name to create/use so you have a db per catalogue.

I've probably forgot some things as I'm just typing this out loud, but that's my general idea?
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-22 19:14:43+00:00
It's good that you've collected the climate change denial, racism, sexism and wilful misinterpretation of objective facts together in one place.

If people only saw one of them without context they may be swept up by their fears and prejudices and confirmation biases but by bringing them all together the rather sad reality of the half hearted propaganda is more obvious.
by jeltz | 2025-04-22 19:14:56+00:00
I would say Atlantis is like a slightly more falsifiable and slightly more plaudible version of Russell's Teapot. We have zero reason to think Atlantis existed and zero indications of it. Is it possible that there was an advanced civilization that somehow left virtually zero evidence? Yes, but why? There are plenty of much less advanced civilizations which left plenty of trace and while we cannot know exactly how many civilizations left no trace an advanced civilization tends to leave a lot of traces. And why would Plato know of it?
by kevingadd | 2025-04-22 19:15:03+00:00
Though I'll note that (AFAIK) WASM environments don't expose access to uninitialized memory. When you grow your Memory object the new space is zeroed, and when you allocate it initially it's zeroed. This can actually show up in profilers when you examine application startup time.

loader_uninitialized would hopefully address the zeroes in the module at least...
by toast0 | 2025-04-22 19:15:11+00:00
The interwebs say cats have XY sex determination, and that the orange color gene is on the X chromosome and is recessive. So a male cat with an orange X will be orange, but a female cat needs both X's to be orange to be orange (a female cat with one orange X and one non-orange X will likely show as tortoise shell or calico). Assuming equal probability (P) of each X chromosome being orange so we have a chance at modelling, the males will have P chance of being orange, and females would have P * P chance. Assuming cats have evenly distributed sex,

If P is 90%, 90% of males are orange, and 81% of females are orange; and 47% of orange cats are female. If P is 10%, 10% of males are orange, 1% of females are orange, and ~ 91% of orange cats are male, ~ 9% are female.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-22 19:16:27+00:00
My feeling is that dependent types add complexity to a language that's already well-known for having a complex type system, so I'm nervous about blowing the complexity budget. But I'm bullish on tools like Verus, Prusti, and Creusot because they allow people who need to write low-level unsafe code to prove their code safe, while keeping the complexity of the safety proofs localized to that code, so most Rust programmers don't need to worry about it. This allows verification of Rust code without surfacing complexity to most developers. We can have our cake and eat it too.
by larusso | 2025-04-22 19:16:35+00:00
I was a macports user but had to switch to homebrew because most new projects went there and it was generally easier to write Formulars etc. But I never really liked the project. I think writing a new package manager on top of brew infrastructure won‘t create a better setup. I don‘t know if all casks and Formulars only use the DSL stanzas or if still some use custom ruby functions and helpers. Because otherwise this new tool might need to eval ruby scripts for backwards compatibility.
I'm 10 years old and launching my startup on stage at SaaStock. Any advice?
by agentsrihan | 2025-04-22 19:16:39+00:00
Hi HN I’m Srihan. I’m 10 years old. And next week, I’m launching my first startup — live on stage — at SaaStock Austin.

My product is called Agent Srihan. It’s an AI tool that monitors business phone numbers and sends alerts when they’re marked as Spam Likely or Scam Likely by carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. This helps salespeople fix the issue before it hurts their connect rates.

I started this journey by cold calling with my dad last year (he’s a founder too). We posted some of that on LinkedIn — and it went kind of viral. Since then, I’ve been learning in public: talking to people posting videos building a waitlist (146+ signups so far!) …and now I’m getting ready to pitch my startup on stage in front of hundreds of people.

I’m nervous. I’m excited. And I’d love your help.

If you’ve ever launched a product… Or pitched in front of a crowd… Or just want to support a kid trying to figure this out…

What advice would you give me before I step on that stage?

Here’s my LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/srihan Here’s my site: https://www.srihan.ai

Thanks so much! — Srihan
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-22 19:17:30+00:00
Indeed intelligence is contextual - with difference being an intrinsic parameter within a precarious balance of co-existence. But this misses what critics of Rority (maybe Marcuse) mocked as something university professors could all politely agree on, but Charles Manson might not get with the programme. Some minds (and there are plenty) just don't have reasonable coexistence on their radar. No amount of talk or negotiation wll ever fix that. And it's likely those would be the first kinds of artificial minds to emerge - rather than Einstein or Socrates.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-22 19:17:47+00:00
There have been many such attempts, but none ever really took off.

I think the core problem is that "transferring bulk data directly between two computers" is not a problem that many people actually have. At least, not in a way that isn't solved by other means like an intermediate USB drive or simply waiting for your conventional network to do it.

In reality, what you propose can be done with zero software: simply put two USB network adapters back to back inside your cable. That's traditionally how this has been done. If you want a raw USB connection, one device must support USB device mode, which is extremely rare on PCs. I don't know if you can fix this in userland, or even the kernel. My bet is that this is a hardware/firmware level feature, though I don't know for sure.
by sireat | 2025-04-22 19:17:55+00:00
I highly recommend BBC's In our time Podcast on Plato's Atlantis:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c6t3

The conclusion is similar to OP: Plato had way too much fun making up the story.

Originally it was meant to be a critique of democracy as practiced by the seafaring populace of Athens.

There is also nice reading list provided there.
by Nanopolygon | 2025-04-22 19:18:15+00:00
QOI is just a simple filter. It cannot do full compression. In fact, in certain cases it can increase the size instead of compressing. It is unnecessarily overrated, of course, mostly because it is open source. The rest is irrelevant. There are another codecs that is as fast as QOI (or even faster and multi-core) but with a much higher compression ratio.
by alexykn | 2025-04-22 19:18:18+00:00
Hey, so I built this thing, most of it at so far at least. And yeah, right now it isn't doing many things better than Homebrew.

Setting of relative paths for bottle installs is still not perfect, well it works for every bottle I have tested except rust. Getting bottles working 100% is very doable though imo.

Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json API lacks information there and a full on Ruby -> Rust transpiler is way out of scope. Will probably settle for automatic build system detection based on archive structure there. + Maybe do my own version of the .rb scripts but in a more general machine readable format, not .rs lol

Casks seem to work but I have only tested some .dmg -> .app ones and .pkg installers so far though. As with bottles 100% doable.

Given that almost all formulae are available as bottles for modern ARM mac this could become a fully featured package manager. Actually didn't think so many people would look at it, started building it for myself because Homebrew just isn't cutting it for what I want.

Started working on a declarative package + system manager for mac because I feel ansible is overkill for one machine and not really made for that and nix-darwin worms itself into the system so deep. Wrapping Brew commands was abysmally slow though so I started working on this and by now I am deep enough in I won't stop xD

Anyway I am grateful for every bug report, Issue and well meaning pull request.
by neogodless | 2025-04-22 19:18:27+00:00
For Ford and GM, their biggest problem is that so much of their market is domestic.

Hopefully their leadership will continue to push them towards the best long-term end result, which presumably is a gradual but increasing transition to selling electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engines. With buyers in the United States both politically and financially discouraged from buying electric in the short term, it's going to be a more difficult transition.

Currently, it's still expensive to research, develop, and produce electric vehicles, and sell them competitively in the United States.

Range, charging speed, and price parity to internal combustion cars are challenges that they need to overcome, that are likely harder now compared to just a few months ago.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-04-22 19:18:46+00:00
Colonization disregarded a lot of native data like this for hundreds of years — it's amazing that it survived through language at all. I always wonder how much we've actually lost... but we'll never really know.

A similar sort of "rediscovery" happened with crop rotation and soil renewal, natives had been using various methods for centuries but they were disregarded by european settlers.
by zarqaTech | 2025-04-22 19:18:46+00:00
Thanks for checking it out! The problem is it can be expensive to host and the processing costs $$ as well. The convenience factor out weighs the cost of $6/year per car. Obviously thats my opinion... Thanks for submitting to SaasHub. Im going to check it out. This is my first app/micro-saas so any feedback or info on where else I should share this to attempt to get some early adopters, let me know!

Thank you so much again!
by mrweasel | 2025-04-22 19:19:09+00:00
To be fair, their $2B valuation is probably the most reasonable valuation we've seen in years. That doesn't negate the question of how they plan to turn a profit.

If they truly have 3.5 million databases, that's only ~$500 per database to recoup the investments, that doesn't seem to crazy. Companies like OpenAI or Twitter/X are never going to be profitable enough to cover what they've already spend/cost. Supabase could because the amount is so much lower and they have paying customer, but I'd like to emphasize the "could".
by sshine | 2025-04-22 19:19:22+00:00
Feedback on personal assessment:

“Do you experience sleep issues because of watching porn late at night?”

You can either say “No, I have a healthy sleep schedule” or porn is causing the sleep problems to some degree. Seems a little narrow. I don’t have a good sleep schedule; most often it’s working too much. But my sleep schedule is almost always unrelated to watching porn.

If you rephrase the options, “No, porn doesn’t affect my sleep schedule negatively” doesn’t make assumptions about other factors that cause lack of sleep.

Alternatively, you can ask about sleep quality overall. There surely are correlating factors, but not sure how deep the rabbit hole goes exploring cross effects.

Another point of feedback: “Has porn affected your self-esteem negatively?” — it should be possible to say “I don’t know.” I’m sure some men know that porn is tightly connected with self-esteem problems. But others may not see the connection in their life. (I don’t have big self-esteem problems; happily married with beautiful wife. But they’re also not non-existent.)

Last point of feedback: the severity score. Is that scientifically backed? Or is it just my position in the normal distribution? Put some reference to how this is calculated and what medical authority backs this definition.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-04-22 19:20:02+00:00
What makes you interested in a rust implementation of brew?

I'm guessing it's that you hoping that it is eventually more performant -- are there specific areas of current brew you have identified as performance bottlenecks likely to eventually benefit from a rust implementation?

Or any more info to share about assumptions/hopes that motivated this or any other motivations?
by bhouston | 2025-04-22 19:22:12+00:00
My thoughts exactly.

The main reason I find brew to be a bit slow is just a lack of parallelism with regards to downloads and installs. Rather brew does alternating and sequential D, I, D, I, D, I, when I wish it just kept downloading in the background when it is doing the installs. It would cut down the brew upgrade time by 30% or more at the cost of more disk space used during the process.

But this one qualm I have isn't a result of its language implementation at all.
by hkchad | 2025-04-22 19:23:05+00:00
I have 3 Synology NAS units with about 80TB of total disk space across the 3. When I replace them I will not be replacing them with Synology, they have lost me as a customer. I switched to Synology after having done the homebuilt NAS for years and just wanted something that works. OSS has come a long way since then so time to go back to what I know and can trust.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-04-22 19:23:16+00:00
> "I’m pretty sure"

That's an interesting thing to say after tariff-on / tariff-off high intensity workouts almost every day. Not to mention the great desire to fire everyone standing in the way of the glorious inflation... did you take that into account while calculating the "little less cheap" thing?

Just read the executive order linked in presto8's comment (above yours) and tell me you are sure what it means. Spaghetti legislation is nothing new but this is worse than a noodle trash container in the back yard of a Chinese restaurant. In the age of AI... presumably.
by neogodless | 2025-04-22 19:23:55+00:00
Interesting. We're a two car family, and my EV charges on a 15A outlet. It is slow, but it's time where the car is just sitting, so how long it takes makes no difference to me. And yes, there's lower efficiency in the cold months - I was getting about 2.5 mi / kW compared to the 3 mi / kW I get now (and this morning I got 4 mi / kW).

So I could see a long trip over the (cold) holidays requiring an extra fast-charging stop that would be annoying.

What are the other headaches you're finding?

I also bought used, taking advantage of the depreciation / lower resale value. There's certainly an early adopter tax on buying new EVs in the U.S. right now!
by kasey_junk | 2025-04-22 19:24:39+00:00
Have you found any good resources on how to get a good process going? That would be an interesting read.

I have two main issues, first the tooling is changing so rapidly that as I start to hone in on a process it changes out from under me. The second is verifying the output. I’m at like 90% success rate on getting code generated correctly (if not always faster than I could do it) but boy does that final 10% bite when I don’t notice.

An aside, I think the cloud ought to make your (perhaps especially your) list. At least for me that changed the whole economy of building new software enterprises.
by Dor_Elbaz | 2025-04-22 19:24:55+00:00
I’m an undergrad student in Computer Science and I’ve been working on a new theoretical model — the Perfect Concurrency (PC) model — that tries to approach the P vs NP problem from a new angle.

The model assumes infinite parallelism and zero overhead, isolating only the total amount of “logical work” an algorithm must perform. Even in this idealized setting, I prove that for all sufficiently large n, any correct algorithm solving SAT must perform Ω(2ⁿ) total work. Then, using a simulation lemma, I show that this lower bound implies SAT ∉ P, and therefore P ≠ NP.

The argument avoids known barriers like relativization, natural proofs, and algebrization. It’s formal, self-contained, and includes two appendices: one for cross-validation against known results, and one FAQ addressing common objections.

Here is Version 3 of the paper, incorporating all revisions and reviewer feedback so far: https://zenodo.org/records/15263845

I’d be thrilled to hear what you think — and grateful for any feedback, critiques, or questions.

— Dor Elbaz
by jonplackett | 2025-04-22 19:24:59+00:00
I really love supabase. And I’m glad they are getting some funding because I’m terrified they’ll get bought by Amazon or google and completely ruined.

The developer experience is first rate. It’s like they just read my mind and made everything I need really easy.

- Deals with login really nicely

- Databases for data

- Storage for files

- Both of those all nicely working with permissions

- Realtime is v cool

- Great docs

- Great SDK

- Great support peeps

Please never sell out.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-22 19:26:01+00:00
Well, I’ve exposed myself. I don’t have a PhD in physics. In fact, I don’t know much about physics. Including the things I comment about on Hacker News (my bad).

I’m not sure how I made it all these years thinking the radiation came from inside.

I see now that it’s hypothesized to be some crazy interplay of particles and antiparticles within vacuums in curved space time which leads to the black hole absorbing a lesser charged particle while the higher charged particle is emitted as radiation… Which incurs some sort of mass debt for the hole due to the rules of vacuums? I will have to read about it for a few years before it makes any sense. In the meantime I’ll avoid saying dumb things about it on the internet