MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FractalFir | 2025-04-13 16:05:25+00:00
I am not affiliated with `cg_gcc`, but I have contributed some tiny things here and there.

Currently, `cg_gcc` is within spitting distance of being able to bootstrap the compiler. There really are only 3(!) bugs that currently stop a stage 2 build.

I know for sure, because I found workarounds for them, and have a working stage 2 build. A stage 3 build requires a bit more RAM than I have, but, besides that, it is definitely possible.

Those 3 bugs are: 1. Lack of support for 128 bit SwitchInt terminators(Rust IR equivalent of switch). This is likely caused by an issue on the GCC side, since libgccjit rejects 128 bit labels provided by `cg_gcc`. 2. A semantic difference between Rust's `#[inline(always)]` and `__attribute__((always_inline)) `. In Rust `#[inline(always)]` is a hint and works on recursive functions, but the GCC equivalent is not a hint, but a gurante, and does not work on recursive function. 3. `cg_gcc` miscompiles the Rust compiler's interner code if level 3 optimzations are enabled. The Rust compiler interner is quite complex, and does a lot of fiddly unsafe things, so it is the most likely to break. The exact cause of this issue is hard to pin down, but it can be worked around(by setting a lower opt level).

If you work around those issues, `cg_gcc` is able to successfully build the Rust compiler, at least on `x86_64 Linux`. Going from that to other architectures will still take time, but it is not as far away as some might think.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-13 16:05:58+00:00
This argument is often made, but then

- adults also use these type of control on themselves (this very site has a setting for people who just don't want to stop by themselves)

- adults use these on other adults as well, and not just for security purposes

- falling back to a binary all or nothing seldom helps when it comes to education. I like your point on open source computers, but getting to learn a proper distance with a smartphone is also important and should be part of any kid's education IMHO, the same way they learn to cross the street or use electrical appliances. We don't tell them it's too complicated and put them in a cage until they're 18.
by abbieoverflight | 2025-04-13 16:06:33+00:00
Hi, I'm the author of that blog post!

I actually used Firefox at the time of this post but I now use Librewolf. Modern day web browsing actually isn't as demanding as you think it is: I've been able to happily have Firefox open with Discord in it and FreeTube (an electron app for watching YouTube) on a Pentium T4300 with 4GB of RAM.

It was slow but it worked perfectly fine, you just have to have patience to use older hardware. Hope this clears that up :)

(As an aside, my main PC now uses KDE instead of i3wm!)
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-13 16:06:37+00:00
I was married for 11 years, had three children and am happily divorced. I’m glad I got married and I’m just as glad I was able to get a divorce.

What’s overwhelmingly changed in my lifetime (since 1980) is that young adult people would rather be alone with no children than take the risk on being unhappy or getting a divorce.

The single biggest change is that the average sentiment now in the “global-west” is “why should I risk my current lifestyle for the risk and pain of a family.”

That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons. A lot of it was structural repression and the fact that is gone is an unalloyed good.

However it does mean that the expectations for human communities and population growth that have undergirded humanity since the neolithic no longer apply.

We need to fundamentally rethink what humanity is working towards, at a global scale, if the gross population numbers had peaked for humanity.
by fsloth | 2025-04-13 16:07:12+00:00
Spot on. I think the author did not think through their argument: ""One of the oddest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is how these complex tales of apocalypse, breakdown and disfunction have been consistently misread as cutesy celebrations of domestic life.""

But that's exactly what makes domestic life worth celebrating - at best it sustains you through disaster and hardship. What better way to celebrate it than to show it's strength?
by karaterobot | 2025-04-13 16:07:59+00:00
I wish they defined what "single" means for the purpose of this statistic. From what I see on the census website, it's as though they're counting people who are divorced, widowed, unmarried and also people who are in a long term relationship in the same category, which they're calling "single". Single to me means not in a relationship at all.

I guess I also wish they defined the boundaries of Seattle: do they mean the urban core, the city limits, King County, or the metropolitan region? I know relatively few married people who live in Seattle, but that's because it's too expensive to buy a house in Seattle's city limits. You either have to inherit a house, or have both people work in a high-paying industry for this to be affordable.

I also know more than a few couples who are in very long term, committed relationships, living in Seattle with no intention to get legally married. They are 'married' in the culturally meaningful sense, just not the legal one.

My point is it seems (to my inexpert reading) like their statistic is capturing very young people, who rent apartments in Seattle but aren't ready to get married, and older people who may have houses in Seattle, but are more likely to be divorced or widowed. But, they're mostly not talking about 30-60 year olds, who are more likely to be married, bu live outside Seattle and commute into it. Weird.

I don't know how much I care about this statistic.
by jiehong | 2025-04-13 16:09:00+00:00
That's nice!

## Shameless plug

I explored a bit what older tech such as IBM's TN5250 terminals could bring to the Web [0] 2 years ago. In particular for data input scenarios.

It's designed for Desktops, not mobile.

[0]: https://jiehong.gitlab.io/web_tn5250
by bdcrazy | 2025-04-13 16:09:25+00:00
I'm always wondering about thoughts like this. Although there are likely a humongous amounts of low end devices, as a whole, how much potential return would you get from this group? This is a value judgment and I know many have low end devices for reasons other than monetary and just completely ignoring quantity may not be viable for certain investments, its just an interesting thing. It might be similar to the debate about the cost of handling credit cards vs cash. Cash has its own set of costs that are usually neglected. You could easily get more return by adding features than spending any time optimizing.
by tom_m | 2025-04-13 16:10:03+00:00
Llama will advance further just like the rest. The leaderboards for llms is just a constantly changing thing. They will all reach a maturity point and be roughly the same. That's probably something we'll see soon in the next 1-3 years tops. Then it'll just be incremental price drops in the cost to train and run, but the quality will all be equatable. Not to mention we're already running out of training data.
by fifilura | 2025-04-13 16:10:22+00:00
As a comparison, full time daycare in Sweden is $100/month for everyone.

I think this is one important reason that marriage is not as common, since the society is aligned towards that is should be possible to manage on your own if you absolutely need to.

I can't find a proper number but anecdotally I think maybe 50% of first time parents are married in Sweden.

And yes obviously this is paid by higher taxes, but seen an an investment to keep the demography (reasonably) sane.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-13 16:10:45+00:00
Raises hand.

I got engaged to my wife with the expectation of us getting married 6 months later. We pulled our marriage forward 6 months because I got laid off from my job and needed to get on her insurance. I had a contract literally the next week after getting laid off and could have paid for COBRA out of pocket. But it was her idea to go to the courthouse
by renewiltord | 2025-04-13 16:11:00+00:00
People are such predictably complainers. When Google provided lots of benefits including daycare it was because “they want you to live there and have no life outside” and “the next step is company scrip”.

Now, it’s because they want you to give up everything.

Man, you can make millions working for big tech. At some point you have to take responsibility for your own self.
by jmye | 2025-04-13 16:11:01+00:00
> in how struggling his life must be if he gets annoyed by such a detail in the grand scheme of things.

Do you have zero pet peeves? Never annoyed by anything short of the lack of world peace? Never written a comment suggesting something is annoying? Or is this just typical internet snark, desperately trying to pass for clever insight?

The dude wrote a short blog post about something that annoys him and it’s fucking weird when people like you try to make that something bigger than it is.

Speaking of sad.
by skybrian | 2025-04-13 16:11:28+00:00
The alternative would be to use a different programming language altogether. In programming languages that have built-in static types, parsing JSON works differently. It’s not possible to lie to the compiler so that a variable declared to be a string actually contains something else. You have to use a parser that will construct the specific type you want.

The closest thing to JavaScript would probably be Dart, now that it has sound types [1].

You’re right that it’s a pain in some situations.

[1] https://dart.dev/language/type-system
by mdaniel | 2025-04-13 16:12:08+00:00
I can't tell if it's irony or not given the sentiment in this thread, but that is not a declaration of a multiline Description field, that's a field of User named "Description:>-" that happens to be missing its trailing ":"

Seeing that used systemically, versus just for "risky" fields makes me want to draw attention to the fantastic remarshal tool[1], which offers a "--yaml-style >" (and "|" and the rest) which will render yaml fields quoted as one wishes

1: https://github.com/remarshal-project/remarshal#readme and/or $(brew install remarshal)
by valiant55 | 2025-04-13 16:12:25+00:00
Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly?

EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is on an insane quest to get C# to run anywhere haha, I didn't realize the C tanspiler was by the same author.
by cianuro_ | 2025-04-13 16:14:04+00:00
Yes, I agree. Some sort of check has to happen somewhere to validate the incoming payload. If you’re looking for type safety, it makes sense to use Zod for this.

To me it is bending the original tool (JS, async driven, weak typing) to fit a purpose it was not made for (hard typing, synchronous) in detriment of what it is that makes the tool good in the first place (IO performance).
by trollbridge | 2025-04-13 16:14:06+00:00
Of course, this pattern of human settlement is silly. Cities used to be hospitable to families, often with multiple generations living in them. Instead of needing a daycare and lots of miles in a car, grandparents and relatives were nearby to help with young children.

On the other hand, forcing people outside of the city to afford a family means more GDP from building roads, selling tyres, replacing cars, petrol sales, oil refining…
by mouse_ | 2025-04-13 16:14:27+00:00
Considering Microsoft puts literally everything they can get away with behind a paywall, I have to assume they know I wouldn't pay a subscription for it.

As far as I can tell, the discussion is never been whether or not AI can be occasionally useful, but whether or not it's worth trillions of dollars. Of course it's situationally useful, I can save 15 minutes here and there on small problems that don't get repeated enough to remember the magic words or make a script. But in my opinion, I still wouldn't pay a subscription for it.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-13 16:15:04+00:00
It's hard to explain to Zoomers/younger people how cool Facebook was in the late 2000s to early 2010s.

It was the de facto digital means of communication for social events--the social world in your palm so you could see what everyone was up to, where the parties were, whatever.

I signed on recently (mostly to make sure my creds still worked after at least 7 years of no use) and now it's dreadfully slow and largely just ad slop. It's a remarkable decline in a platform that basically become a joke now.
by marcusverus | 2025-04-13 16:15:45+00:00
If you took everyone with >100M in net worth, put them up against the wall, and seized every dime they own, you'd get ~30T (in a best-case scenario). Even if you used it to pay off the debt, we'd still be running trillion-dollar deficits every year.

If our debt and deficits are a revenue problem, they are objectively insoluble.
by wrs | 2025-04-13 16:17:13+00:00
I’ve been using Cursor and Code regularly for a few months now and the idea of letting three of them run free on the codebase seems insane. The reason for the chat interface is that the agent goes off the rails on a regular basis. At least 25% of the time I have to hit the stop button and go back to a checkpoint because the automatic lawnmower has started driving through the flowerbed again. And paradoxically, the more capable the model gets, the more likely it seems to get random ideas of how to fix things that aren’t broken.
by derektank | 2025-04-13 16:17:47+00:00
Seattle has a higher homicide rate than New York or LA and it is running well above its own historical rate; in 2014, the entirety of King County had fewer homicides than the city of Seattle did in 2024. It is safer than many other US cities, but US cities are quite dangerous by first world standards which is why many people opt to raise kids in suburbia.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-13 16:18:02+00:00
Interestingly, Donald Knuth created an entire new system of programming to make up for the deficiencies of Pascal in the programs he was trying to write (TeX and METAFONT):

http://literateprogramming.com/

WEB is expressive enough that there is a tool to directly transpile to C for compiling:

https://tug.org/web2c/
by danielktdoranie | 2025-04-13 16:18:17+00:00
The incel problem is now an epidemic, I feel very sorry for the young men of late millennial era and Gen Z. From what I have seen dating for these generations has become incredibly difficult. When I was a young man (I am the last of Gen X) relationships were never “easy” but dating was. There are young men out there in their 20s who are still virgins, I had a son at 18.
by betaby | 2025-04-13 16:18:19+00:00
The most recent changes were proposed (and accepted) by Coalition avenir Québec for example.

> Did 51% of the population want that?

No. But that doesn't matter. Unpopular laws are passed all the time.

> Which group wanted it and made it happen?

Such laws have support from both sides of the political parties (not really from the grand public). CAQ party sees broad government interventions as a form of 'traditionality' while PLQ party sees them as 'protection of XYZ'.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-13 16:19:03+00:00
You don’t need science fiction to imagine this; simply look at societies that just got through a brutal war that cost them a lot of their young men, although I suppose you could watch Dr. Strangelove for some inspiration.

Raising children is a lot of work. It’s twice as much work without a partner, not to mention not having the extra income. (I don’t imagine men in a 2:1 society will be interested in paying much child support.)

The number of children in advanced societies (particularly in cities) has already plummeted. And I don’t think many women are going to want to sign up to be single mums.

As far as sperm selection goes… that’s already an option popular in China and India, along with sex selective abortions. The preference is for males, though, for various reasons. I am not convinced the end result of this is wholesome.
by umanwizard | 2025-04-13 16:19:16+00:00
It makes sense in the context of a configuration language because virtually 100% of programmers and other technical computer users understand “true” and “false” as the canonical Boolean values, and as far as I know that has always been the case. It never would have made sense to invent different unfamiliar terms like “yes” and “no” because of some niche philosophical distinction between “Boolean logic” and “configuration” that almost nobody in the real world cares about.
by hesdeadjim | 2025-04-13 16:19:37+00:00
Caught me, C#. Library quality has improved a lot in ten years, the language feels modern, and one of Go's biggest advantages, single binary cross-compile, is way less relevant now that dotnet standard installs easily on every OS I care about. I was prototyping some code that needed to talk to OpenAI, Slack, and Linear and the result was.. fast and extremely readable inline async code. I've interacted with these APIs in Go as well and by comparison, ultra clunky.

We're a video game studio as well using C#, and while game programmer != backend programmer, I can at least delegate small fixes and enhancements out to the team more easily.
by barry-cotter | 2025-04-13 16:20:36+00:00
> having tight diplomatic relations and economic bonds was paramount to avoid conflicts within Europe.

The diplomatic and economic bonds between the belligerents of WW1 and WW2 were very close indeed before war broke out. The post WW2 peace in Western Europe was a function of the fact that NATO did its job “Keep the Russians out, the French in and the Germans down.”

If tight economic and other links prevented war there would still bebe a country called Yugoslavia. You need either actual broad based buy in or an imperial power willing to stop people who would like to go to war from doing so. NATO keeps Bosnia-Herzegovina from collapsing and as soon as they stop it’s done. No doubt there are other obvious examples in Europe, and it’s not as if anyone thinks NATO means much without the US.
by sramsay | 2025-04-13 16:20:39+00:00
This has more-or-less been my setup for over twenty-five years. I've used gentoo and vim that entire time, but have changed desktops a few times (i3 currently, but always something along those lines). All development -- and all writing -- is in terminals.

The difference is that I tend to to work on pretty high-powered machines (not for graphics or gaming, but for audio).

But the main reason I have this set up is that I find the minimalism . . . calming? It's not entirely distraction free, but I just find it easier to work in a kind of low-stimulation environment. I do occasionally work on way less powerful rigs (and way more powerful servers), and it's nice that the basic tools don't change. But ultimately, I think my fondness for this way of working might be aesthetic.
by tekacs | 2025-04-13 16:20:55+00:00
Over the last two days, I've built out support for autonomy in Aider (a lot like Claude Code) that hybridizes with the rest of the app:

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3781

Edit: In case anyone wants to try it, I uploaded it to PyPI as `navigator-mode`, until (and if!) the PR is accepted. By I, I mean that it uploaded itself. You can see the session where it did that here: https://asciinema.org/a/9JtT7DKIRrtpylhUts0lr3EfY

Edit 2: And as a Show HN, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43674180

and, because Aider's already an amazing platform without the autonomy, it's very easy to use the rest of Aider's options, like using `/ask` first, using `/code` or `/architect` for specific tasks [1], but if you start in `/navigator` mode (which I built, here), you can just... ask for a particular task to be done and... wait and it'll often 'just get done'.

It's... decidedly expensive to run an LLM this way right now (Gemini 2.5 Pro is your best bet), but if it's $N today, I don't doubt that it'll be $0.N by next year.

I don't mean to speak in meaningless hype, but I think that a lot of folks who are speaking to LLMs' 'inability' to do things are also spending relatively cautiously on them, when tomorrow's capabilities are often here, just pricey.

I'm definitely still intervening as it goes (as in the Devin demos, say), but I'm also having LLMs relatively autonomously build out large swathes of functionality, the kind that I would put off or avoid without them. I wouldn't call it a programmer-replacement any time soon (it feels far from that), but I'm solo finishing architectures now that I know how to build, but where delegating them to a team of senior devs would've resulted in chaos.

[1]: also for anyone who hasn't tried it and doesn't like TUI, do note that Aider has a web mode and a 'watch mode', where you can use your normal editor and if you leave a comment like '# make this darker ai!', Aider will step in and apply the change. This is even fancier with navigator/autonomy.
by n_u | 2025-04-13 16:21:11+00:00
Do you have any benchmarks for the pattern you described where channels are more efficient?

> sync.Mutex, if left to wait long enough will enter a slow code path and if memory serves, will call out to a kernel futex. The channel will not do this because the mutex that a channel is built with is exists in the go runtime

Do you have any more details about this? Why isn’t sync.Mutex implemented with that same mutex channels use?

> [we] use channels extensively in a message passing style. We do not use channels to increment a shared number

What is the rule of thumb your Go shop uses for when to use channels vs mutexes?
by amy214 | 2025-04-13 16:21:38+00:00
Exactly, the mass of the planet is squishy in this way. The next question is WHY is it question. The answer is, this planet is host to the hard metal band "Planetary Suicide", whose speakers are so powerful as to turn the planetary rock into more of a mud. At the pinnacle of their showpiece song, the planet flies into the sun. It was a great show but their 99 set was better
by aqme28 | 2025-04-13 16:21:52+00:00
It's cute but I don't see the benefit. In my experience, if one LLM fails to solve a problem, the other ones won't be too different.

If you picked a problem where LLMs are good, now you have to review 3 PRs instead of just 1. If you picked a problem where they're bad, now you have 3 failures.

I think there are not many cases where throwing more attempts at the problem is useful.
by scribu | 2025-04-13 16:22:47+00:00
From their Notion page:

> Skywork-OR1-32B-Preview delivers the 671B-parameter Deepseek-R1 performance on math tasks (AIME24 and AIME25) and coding tasks (LiveCodeBench).

Impressive, if true: much better performance than the vanilla distills of R1.

Plus it’s a fully open-source release (including data selection and training code).
by pests | 2025-04-13 16:22:57+00:00
I somehow got spared and was never forced to read Moby Dick.

I recently watched “In The Heart Of the Sea” which was an adaptation of a book which recounts the tragedy of the Whaleship Essex in the early 1800s, based on the written accounts of two of the surviving crew. I haven’t read the book, but the movie frames the story as an author interviewing the last remaining survivor in old age.

Having not read Moby Dick, I at first thought this was a movie version as the storyline kind of seemed similar but the events didn’t seem to match to what I knew.

Finally it clicked for me, and revealed at the end, that the interviewer was Herman Melville getting inspiration for his Moby Dick.

The movie has increased my curiosity and desire into reading Moby Didk.