MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anentropic | 2025-04-02 10:17:36+00:00
(writing all the below while being aware you likely know much more about OCaml than I do...!)

Possibly `eval $(opam env)` is something that should just go in your ~/.zshrc

The OCaml folks have done some work recently to improve the onboarding documentation, which I think is going in a positive direction

e.g. https://ocaml.org/docs/installing-ocaml (the eval as a one-off post install command)

And then guiding people to use 'switches' https://ocaml.org/docs/opam-switch-introduction, which I totally missed when I started with the language.

> Local switches are automatically selected based on the current working directory.
by rapind | 2025-04-02 10:17:44+00:00
> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.

Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.
by hobofan | 2025-04-02 10:17:44+00:00
Yes, buying pre-founded companies is/was also a thing here.

I think in Berlin there was quite a demand for that in the ~2017 crypto wave, where a lot of companies were being founded and at the same time notaries/district courts were backlogged and the normal founding process could take a few months.

I doubt there is as much demand for it right now. I just founded a GmbH and the full process took 4 weeks (of that 1 day of active work). It would have been 2 weeks if I hadn't missed a letter regarding application fees, and it also helped a lot that I was flexible regarding notary appointments.

So with all of that, there is little value in using a pre-founded company, especially since you will very likely need a notary appointment anyways (for ownership transfer and/or adjusting the bylaws).
by noneeeed | 2025-04-02 10:19:47+00:00
Cruise ships certainly used to moore up in the Greenwich stretch of the river at the and a few years ago there was quite a lot of coverage of the issue around it. Cruise ships require a lot of power while docked, and unless they connect to the grid they used to create a lot of air quality issues.

If there are a lot less docking then that's great, but there do still seem to be a number that dock there https://blackheathandbeyond.wordpress.com/2024/03/27/fairly-...

I know there was a push to develop a big new cruise port in the Greenwich stretch which was strongly opposed by locals for that reason.
by codingdave | 2025-04-02 10:20:23+00:00
Lotus Notes did that. The database held the code, the data, the UX, the security. There was a standard UX for accessing different types of code, design elements, and the data.

On the positive side, DevOps was a breeze - push a DB to a server and everything just worked. Pushing new code to all the DBs was a breeze. Any dev could immediately jump into an app and have a sense of where they would find elements of the app. All apps ran the same way, so it was realistic for small shops to deliver large products.

On the downside, source control was sub-optimal. That was a weakness in the platform even 25 years ago when it was modern, and never quite improved... although there are ways to import/export the code to make it work with modern source control like git. It also made each app heavier than it needed to be - instead of sharing centralized code, each app had its own copy. Your infrastructure footprint got big, fast.

For a modern take on it, I think other comments are hitting the key point - you might want to have fuzzier definitions of what a database and a file system are. At the end of the day, they are both ways of storing data to disk with different access methods. But it sounds like you are more concerned about DX. To get to your vision, I'd focus more on an IDE that lets you navigate code how you desire, while leaving the actual code storage as a DevOps exercise where they can focus on whatever solutions optimizes delivery and reliability.
by rowanG077 | 2025-04-02 10:20:34+00:00
I don't think it's useful to think like this when writing software. Sure you must do more work when going multi threaded. But that doesn't mean you are slower in wall clock time. And wall clock time is the cool kid.

I mean if you go this route then you may as well say zero-copy doesn't exist. Everytime you move things between registers things are copied. I guess OP also disables all their cores and runs their OS on a single core. It's more efficient after all. I take the other view. The more effective CPU time you can use the better for a ton of non UI use cases. So I would say it is more efficient to use 2x the CPU time to reduce wall clock time by 10% for example. In fact any CPU time that is unused is inefficient in a way. It's just sitting there unused, forever lost to time.
by hummerbliss | 2025-04-02 10:21:36+00:00
I have very similar experience.

After seeing how people like Andrej Karparthy used vibe coding to generate applications https://x.com/karpathy/status/1903671737780498883?s=61 I realize that

you need to be clear on what you want the LLM to do break down the tasks and give byte sized tasks to llm to do specific thing and sometimes I had to tell it not go and change random files because it found the need to refactor them.
by nurettin | 2025-04-02 10:22:14+00:00
Younger me tried saturating CPU cores with event loops for a few years. Then I grew up and started using long living threads and queues to consolidate everything on the main thread and it works a whole lot better for me. Async/await shit show is gone, synchronization primitives you still somehow need for some reason with an event loop are mostly gone, all interfaces use the same synch stack, it is paradise. It almost feels like you have to play around with async to really appreciate the simple and solid thread safe queue approach.
by tobyhinloopen | 2025-04-02 10:22:16+00:00
Every time I try to increase the performance of my software by using multiple cores, I need a lot of cores to compensate for the loss of per-core efficiency. Like, it might run 2-3 times as fast on 8 cores.

I'm sure I've been doing it wrong. I just had better luck optimizing the performance per core rather than trying to spread the load over multiple cores.
Show HN: Open-Source Hide My Email Extension (With Cloudflare)
by risyachka | 2025-04-02 10:22:54+00:00
Hi HN!

I've been using Apple's Hide My Email feature for a long while but I was really frustrated by its loading times and in general the UX of creating and using a new anonymous email, so I created a chrome extension to do that for me.

It uses Cloudflare Email Routing under the hood and solves a few issues like long route sync time by generating all emails during initial setup - and instantly allocating them when you need one.

When you create a new email all its metadata like Label is stored in Name field (it is not visible in Cloudflare dashboard) so the extension is stateless and data is synced between multiple clients without cloud.

It doesn't collect any analytics, etc. 100% client-side with MIT license.

Hope someone finds it useful!
by pjc50 | 2025-04-02 10:23:52+00:00
> A CPU with 4 cores is going to have the capacity of executing 4 seconds of CPU-time per second. It does not matter how much “background idle threading” you do or don’t. The CPU doesn’t care. You always have 4 seconds of CPU-time per second. That’s an important concept to understand.

> If you write a program in the design of Node.js — isolating a portion of the problem, pinning it to 1 thread on one CPU core, letting it access an isolated portion of RAM with no data sharing, then you have a design that is making as optimal use of CPU-time as possible

This is .. not true as written? You get one second of CPU time per second, not four. Now, it may be quite hard to reach your full four seconds of CPU time per second, usually because of RAM bandwidth issues despite all the caching, and a hyperthreading fake "core" absolutely does not count the same as a separate die core, but the difference is real.

Author does have a point that slicing the work too small has significant overheads. But they've overstated it.

And this is before we get into the real source of parallel FLOPS, the GPU.

(edit: note that there may also be thermal issues and CPU frequency scaling going on; it is usually impossible to run all cores of a modern CPU at their max rated frequency for more than a very short time! But if you've bought a 64-core Ryzen and are only using one core, there's a huge gap there which you're not using)
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-02 10:24:00+00:00
1. using [] drops context-freeness. what is: foo[1]? is that foo type array with one element? or accessing the foo array at index 1?

2. how do you feel about array initialization in C?

3. you can think of {...} as defining memory regions, curlies around code are defining "a memory block of instructions"
by iJohnDoe | 2025-04-02 10:24:32+00:00
So many Val Kilmer movies I have watched over and over that have brought joy, passing idle time, providing comfort after a tough day, helping to get through the flu while being miserable on the couch, helping my younger imagination run wild.

It’s interesting how one person can have such an impact on us. Many thanks to Val Kilmer for giving us wonderful movies.
by invalidname | 2025-04-02 10:25:35+00:00
Multi-Threading is the worst solution, except for all the other solutions.

Avoiding multi-threading doesn't remove concurrency issues. It just moves them to a different point in the application execution. A point where you don't have debuggers and need to create overly fault-tolerant behavior for everything. This is bad for performance but worse for debugging. With a regular synchronous threaded application I have a clean, obvious stack trace to a failure in most cases. Asynchronous or process based code gives me almost nothing for production failures or even regular debugging.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-02 10:25:53+00:00
It's cobalt chloride—the same stuff that used to be used on those little weather indicators where a little man or woman would pop out to indicate whether it was going to be wet or dry. They usually had a spot of blotting paper about 2cm round soaked in it. Cobalt chloride is blue when dry and pink when damp.

All ionic cobalt salts are toxic so cobalt chloride is not used as an indicator in silica gell packaged for use with food. That said, it's an excellent indicator for telling whether your silica gell is still working or not.
by Peritract | 2025-04-02 10:25:55+00:00
I'm convinced that people who complain about this don't use recipe sites very often. There are loads without any preamble, and many of those with narrative provide a 'jump to recipe' button. Even if it is a long article with no jump (rare), it's still not a big deal

1. Some people do want the narrative 2. It's not that much of a hardship to scroll
by Sagar_Panchal | 2025-04-02 10:27:03+00:00
Smartly reduce shipping related tickets by No-code Estimated Delivery Date App! Automate real-time shipping estimate (EDD), dispatch times, and ETAs across product pages, cart, checkout & order emails in any language. Add specific order delivery message for product, collection, country, inventory, zip code, vendor, tag, warehouse & shipping. Expected delivery date app calculates and shows delivery timeline like delivery date & time as per your visitors' local time zones.
by ronreiter | 2025-04-02 10:27:16+00:00
Come on. This is a "mongo web scale" type of article.

CPU bound applications MUST use multithreading to be able to utilize multiple cores. In many cases, the framework knows how to give an API to the developer which masks the need for him to deal with setting up a worker thread pool, such as with web applications frameworks - but eventually you need one.

Learn how to be an engineer, and use the right solution for the problem.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-02 10:27:16+00:00
It's not wrong, it's just over-simplified.

It is true that you can only squeeze 100% of the maximum possible useful compute out of a NUMA system with methods like the article author was suggesting. The less coordination there is between cores, the less cross-core or cross-socket communication is needed, all of which is overhead.

Caveat: If a bunch of independent processes are processing independent data, they'll increase cache thrashing at L2 and higher levels. Synchronised threads running the same code more-or-less in lockstep over the same areas of the data can benefit from sharing that independent processes can't. In some scenarios, this can be a huge speedup -- just ask a GPU programmer!

Where the process-per-core argument definitely stops being a good approach is when you start to consider latency.

Literally just this week, I need to help someone working on a Node.js app that needs to pre-cache a bunch of very expensive computations (map tiles over data changing on an interval).

Because this is CPU-heavy and Node.js is single-threaded, it kills the user experience while it is running. Interactive responses get interleaved with batch actions, and users complain.

This is not a problem with ASP.NET where this kind of work can simply run in a background thread and populate the cache without interfering with user queries!

For similar reasons, Redis replacements that use multi-threading have far lower tail latencies: https://microsoft.github.io/garnet/
by stephenr | 2025-04-02 10:27:25+00:00
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I currently work remotely from Thailand, on a reasonably flexible schedule (I can schedule work hours to get overlap with most other timezones when required) but on-site visits to pretty much anywhere are a possibility if required too.

Contact me via email (in my profile) if you want to have a chat about what you’re working on!
by cies | 2025-04-02 10:27:47+00:00
> Say what you want about Node.js. It sucks, a lot.

I don't think so. V8 is a marvel of engineering. JS is the problem (quirky-to-downright-ugly language that is also extremely ubiquitous), not Node.

> But it was made with one very accurate observation: multithreading sucks even more.

Was it made with that observation? (in that case I would like a source to corroborate that) Or was it simply that when all you have is hammer (single thread execution) then everything looks like a nail (you going to fix problems within that single thread).

The evented/async/non-blocking style of programming that you will need when serving a lot of requests from one thread, was already existing before Node. It was just not that popular. When you choose to employ this style of programming, all your heavy IOing libraries need to be build for it, and they usually were not.

Since Node had no other options, all their IO libs were evented/async/non-blocking from the get go. I don't think this was a design choice, but more a design requirement/necessity.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-02 10:29:29+00:00
> It's simply not beneficial to society for small groups to accumulate disproportionate amounts of power.

Power and money aren't the same thing. Someone who can throw you in jail or stop you getting on a flight can be on a very low wage indeed.

> But as always, we have some "future billionaires" rushing to defend them.

This would be considered one of those attacks you just mentioned.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-04-02 10:29:40+00:00
Could be relevant to Conformal cyclic cosmology

> In 2010, Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan published a preprint of a paper claiming that observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the BOOMERanG experiment contained an excess of concentric circles compared to simulations based on the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, quoting a 6-sigma significance of the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-02 10:29:49+00:00
> This article is about the entire first amendment, not just FOIA or transparency in general.

yes, i read the whole thing. as a general strategy in a persuasive essay you shouldn't include an argument with such a weak association, much less lead with it, because it makes me question the author's judgement and devalues the arguments downpage. if i were less patient i would have quit after the FOIA part.

> Certainly to the point where it requires a higher standard than "the rest of us".

success requires a higher standard. but curtailing the right to redress (the right to initiate the complaining suit) is problematic: eventually someone will extend the curtailment to people with less power.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-02 10:30:52+00:00
Microserfs has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and really did a great job capturing the zeitgeist of working in tech in the 90s. It was more about the early 90s than the late 90s when I started in tech, but not much really changed until the dotCom bubble burst in 2000. A lot of us who didn't happen to work for GiantTech in the 90s shared the existential anxieties described in earlier chapters of the book, but without the upside of lucrative stock options. It's worth a read if you haven't. A lot of it is still relevant today.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-04-02 10:31:07+00:00
In the United States, if you buy "Denatured Alcohol" at a big box store, it will be a toxic brew of often 50-60% methanol as well as smaller amounts of MEK, MIBK, and even acetone in addition to the ethanol. However, you can order "Specially Denatured Alcohol (SDA)" from various chemical suppliers or even Amazon. "SDA 40B 200" will be 99.5% ethanol with 0.1% tert-butyl alcohol and 0.0005% denatonium benzoate. It's what I use for camp stove fuel since I refuse to carry methanol in my pack with food.
by ChrisRR | 2025-04-02 10:31:10+00:00
https://www.recipeninja.ai/assets/index-B7TAGfYd.js

Not 35k lines, but there's one line that's about 48,000 characters long. So either they've intentionally obfuscated it, or chatgpt just churned out one long line

Edit: Running it through a prettifier the code comes about 33k lines
by trhway | 2025-04-02 10:31:24+00:00
>To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.
by vaxman | 2025-04-02 10:31:48+00:00
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/01/g-...

The worst of what Billy ever did was cause some people to lose their will to live by destroying their life's work (like pulling wings off a fly) with bullshit marketing, investment and employment strategies; he's been doing a Carnegie ever since to make up for it all.

How ironic is it that Musk is helping to destroy what Carnegie helped build? What could Musk possibly do to make amends for being the public face of an effort likely to kill millions of America's elderly before it gets sorted? (Because people over a certain age don't do well when they don't get their daily Meals on Wheels, or the social interaction that goes with it, or when their housing subsidy forces them to move from familiar surroundings beyond an age when they can adjust or if they're stuck in a for-profit nursing home that suddenly loses its regulators. Changes like these have to be made so they only impact future generations unless there is an instant emergency and even then, every precaution has to be taken or manslaughter will occur as Andrew "people die" Cuomo found out in NY during the Pandemic.)
by victorantos | 2025-04-02 10:33:54+00:00
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by bartread | 2025-04-02 10:34:18+00:00
I get the sense that the financial motivations - such as they are - may only be part of it; perhaps only a very small part of it.

I’d bet a lot of people do it for the status, because they want to be able to describe themselves as investors.

Whether or not that makes them chumps to people who actually do make real money as investors doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the target audience for the status message.

Less cynically, there’s also a motivation, at least amongst some, to help people building startups.
by brandonsalt | 2025-04-02 10:34:49+00:00
Hey, Brandon here from Kagi's marketing team. Happy to answer this! It's certainly something we thought about, but have yet to have any issues from customers "forgetting" that they were signed up to Kagi since launching our fair pricing policy. Some users could forget, and "accidentally" use it but I believe that will be incredibly rare. If the customer is confused by this, we are more than happy to assist with reimbursement or to cancel their account etc. We're very open with this and want to take care of our customers as best as we can.
by rapind | 2025-04-02 10:35:02+00:00
> Governments giving money as science grants ?

I think there's a place for government to invest and incentivise startups for sure, but man do you ever need to watch it like an eagle or it will quickly devolve into malignant opportunism on the tax payers dime.

As an example, up here in Canada, we have the Scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentives program. Basically a significant business tax reduction that any company could get (including those that shouldn't), but it required a ceremony / lengthy and annoying process that was quickly outsourced for a percentage of the gains. So now we have businesses who's sole purpose is to get SR&ED for your startup.

So SR&ED is now mandatory for Canadian tech businesses since it saves you 30-50% in tax. We're talking big boys like Shopify too.

Implementation really really matters, and you need to constantly review these things for abuses or they quickly devolve into a transfer of wealth.