MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foundry27 | 2025-04-22 02:20:52+00:00
tl;dr for anyone who may be put off by the article length:

OP built an arena allocator in Go using unsafe to speed allocator operations up, especially for cases when you're allocating a bunch of stuff that you know lives and dies together. The main issue they ran into is that Go's GC needs to know the layout of your data (specifically, where pointers are) to work correctly, and if you just allocate raw bytes with unsafe.Pointer, the GC might mistakenly free things pointed to from your arena because it can't see those pointers properly. But to make it work even with pointers (as long as they point to other stuff in the same arena), you keep the whole arena alive if any part of it is still referenced. That means (1) keeping a slice (chunks) pointing to all the big memory blocks the arena got from the system, and (2) using reflect.StructOf to create new types for these blocks that include an extra pointer field at the end (pointing back to the Arena). So if the GC finds any pointer into a chunk, it’ll also find the back-pointer, therefore mark the arena as alive, and therefore keep the chunks slice alive. Then they get into a bunch of really interesting optimizations to remove various internal checks and and write barriers using funky techniques you might not've seen before
by ncr100 | 2025-04-22 02:22:51+00:00
Hahahahah this sounds very much like what Microsoft did to one of my employers.

Meet for a week. Bring in one of their grey beards. Learn all our deets in anticipation of acquisition. Then silence...according to my understanding, not being privy to executive level discussions.

A bit later, release their own take on the problem area ... tragic.

It was very bad for us.
by escescesc | 2025-04-22 02:23:18+00:00
It is super-annoying to work with someone who is super-pompous and arrogant.

At times I attempted to share “wisdom” with the super-pompous and arrogant, which has ended poorly each time, devolving into a bitter war where I lose my patience, and then self-isolate.

These people are almost unavoidable, though. Maybe one day we’ll be able to just work with others whenever we want to, but until then, good luck.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-22 02:24:37+00:00
Previously: (19 points, 5 days ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705726

(32 points, 3 days ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43732469

Related: Palantir Admits to Helping ICE Deport Immigrants (49 points, 2020, 68 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638267

Palantir forced out of job fair after outcry over ICE contracts (113 points, 2019, 178 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20809184

The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees (133 points, 2019, 222 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20769646
by dkrich | 2025-04-22 02:25:01+00:00
I think uber is different though. It hasn’t been founder led for several years and the current ceo was hired to cut out all r&d spend and maximize profits and revenue.

They report things like foreign currency transactions and stock based compensation as free cash flow.

The hope with uber is that they become an aggregator of AVs which belies an assumption that autonomous vehicles will essentially be a commodity. Or perhaps that AVs take much longer to become practical at scale than people think.

But one of the biggest red flags to me with this company is how they aggressively buy back stock and publicly announce that they believe it’s undervalued. You’re in the midst of an extremely competitive emerging market and your best idea for your cash is to… buy stock?
by lupusreal | 2025-04-22 02:25:43+00:00
Your other comment was flagged before I could submit my response, so here it is:

> or you think women should not be in control of their bodies in some situations.

In almost all countries where abortion is broadly legal there are still limitations. For elective abortions without committee approval or medical necessity there's a limit of 24 weeks in the UK, 12 in Germany and Italy, 14 in France, 20 in Sweden... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#Grounds_for...

Opinion polling in the US mirrors this nuance:

> "The same poll found that support for abortion being generally legal was 60% during the first trimester of pregnancy, dropping to 28% in the second trimester, and 13% in the third trimester."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#...

Clearly there is plenty of room to quibble over the details without being some sort of Victorian boogieman. Having no limitations at all is a fringe position which most pro-choice people don't agree with.

[End of pasted response.]

By the way, this ties in with what I'm saying about both sides presenting the worst possible arguments of their opponents. Extremists on one side say that the others all want to perform "partial birth abortions", killing babies mere seconds before it is fully born (this is a lie.) Extremists on the other side frame all of their opponents (including anybody who supports abortion in principle but not unrestricted) as being religious extremists who want to lock up women and turn them into breeding cows.

The reality is that most of the population is in between these two extremes, and if our democracy wasn't so dysfunctional, undermined by extremists on both sides we could compromise on abortion being legal for somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 24 weeks, as it is in most of Europe, and that would make most of the American public reasonably happy. But you wouldn't accept that, because any compromise is " controlling women", and antiabortion people wouldn't accept it because its "killing babies."

End result is we're doomed to have these fruitless arguments from now until a comet puts us all out of our misery.
by eqvinox | 2025-04-22 02:25:50+00:00
I'm not actually sure 10base-T1S (which is the closest equivalent to CAN) uses more power than CAN. The maximum current rating for some random T1S PHYs is actually lower than that of some random CAN PHYs, but actual power consumption depends on bus usage patterns…

Regarding being expensive and complicated… I'd say that's a question of proliferation. And the non-multidrop SPE variants are actually simpler than CAN in some regards I'd argue.
by stevenwoo | 2025-04-22 02:26:07+00:00
To be fair, those are three very long books, in my reading more about the people and how politics might play out in that situation with competing ideas and factions vying for power. My interpretation of the ending is not optimistic - they had to go to the stars to try again, but they did persevere in a way on Mars.

The automated robots and factories able to make copies of themselves by harvesting raw materials is not as far fetched as some speculative fiction (the jaunting in The Stars My Destination or instant transportation pads in Ringworld come to mind off the top of my head) but though conceptually I see the steps it is several technological leaps ahead of us at present.
by valenterry | 2025-04-22 02:26:36+00:00
It's actually pretty good at that, especially layout/design.

The problem is, the code it produces is usually not great and inconsistent and has subtle bugs. That quickly becomes a problem if you want to change things later, especially while keeping your data consistent and your APIs stable and backwards compatible. At least that's my experience.

But for building something that you can easily throw away later, it's pretty good and saves a lot of time.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-22 02:26:59+00:00
I would probably call this "charge discrimination", which gives a clear indication which side of the party is empowered with this concept.

Still, wildly volatile pricing is also an excellent reason to avoid taxi apps. Why politicians have no desire to rein them in is baffling. I guess the stock market is really all that matters at the end of the day....
by levodelellis | 2025-04-22 02:27:20+00:00
That's one reason why I implemented it so it wouldn't lose information.

Hmm. I plan to implement a diff. The way I have it, you could copy the current source, hit undo to a version you want to compare again than use the clipboard as the version to diff with (vscode calls this "Compare Active File with Clipboard".) If you mess up you can still hit undo to go through all the previous edits you made since it's not lossy. Would this be as good for your usecase?
by paxys | 2025-04-22 02:27:23+00:00
Going by that theory why doesn't Visa just jack up their prices by 10x? After all what are merchants going to do, not accept Visa? Turns out yes, that's exactly what they will do. Look at the number of business that don't take Amex for example for the same reason. Large companies especially have enough leverage to negotiate their own deals with credit card operators, like Costco does with Visa.
by btilly | 2025-04-22 02:27:41+00:00
The Schwarzschild solution is the unique distribution in GR for nonrotating mass in a small area, in a universe that is asymptotically flat at a long distance from the mass. This is not a flat universe, but most of it is pretty darned close to flat.

As for describing the shape of space-time, that's what GR does. What we can think of as the "shape" is actually described by something called the metric. GR says that the metric satisfies a differential equation. If the universe starts close to flat, things are moving slowly, and there is a low density of mass, the solutions to this equation create an effect that, to first order, matches Newtonian gravity. But the full theory has solutions with all sorts of bizarre things in it, like waves traveling through space, made up of fluctuations in the very structure of space-time. We call those gravity waves.

And yes, those solutions do include things like expanding universes. And the effect of gravity within an expanding universe is to slow the rate of expansion.
by throwawayb299 | 2025-04-22 02:28:40+00:00
Have you considered, you may be working in a dysfunctional organization, spending only 5% on the activity that translates into actual value to the end user?

That's why these AI companies are racing to build a replacement for you and me, something that will spend 100% of its time actually building out functionality the customer is looking forward to.

I know, I know, spending 100% of our day coding is ridiculous because that all-hands conference call to get everyone onboard with which microservice is responsible for storing button colors absolutely has to happen first.
by jonaustin | 2025-04-22 02:29:12+00:00
On a M4 Max 128GB via LM Studio:

query: "make me a snake game in python with pygame"

(mlx 4 bit quant) mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat@4bit: 26.39 tok/sec • 1681 tokens 0.63s to first token

(gguf 4 bit quant) lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat: 22.72 tok/sec • 1866 tokens 0.49s to first token

using Unsloth's settings: https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/tutorial-how-to-run-and-fine-...
by robotbikes | 2025-04-22 02:29:15+00:00
Nice. I leverage the strengths of AI in a way that affirms the human element in the collaboration. AI as it exists in LLMs is a powerful source of potentially meaningful language but at this point LLMs don't have a consistent conscious mind that exists over time like humans do. So it's more like summoning a djinn to perform some task and then it disappears back into the ether. We of course can interweave these disparate tasks into a meaningful structure and it sounds like you have some good strategies for how to do this.

I have found that using an LLM to critique your writing is a helpful way of getting free generic but specific feedback. I find this route more interesting than the copy pasta AI voiced stuff. Suggesting that AI embodys a specific type of character such as a pirate can make the answers more interesting than just finding the median answer, add some flavor to the white bread.
by m463 | 2025-04-22 02:30:28+00:00
Regexes are powerful, useful and needlessly hard to use.

But not because of the regex idea itself.

It is quoting.

The reason people don't properly learn how to use a regex is because they are insulated from it by whatever language they are using.

It's literally like those surgeons who do heart surgery starting at a vein in your leg.

I use regexes all the time, in emacs, python, perl, bash, sed, awk, grep and more...

and just about every time the regex syntax is mixed with single quotes, double quotes, backslashes, $variable names and more from the "enclosing language or tool".

If I have a parenthesis or $, I'm always wondering if it is part of the enclosing language, or the matching pattern, or the literal. Also, the kind of regex adds to the confusion (basic or extended regex?)

I think it would be nice to have a syntax highlighter that would help with this, independent of language. green for variable or other language construct, red for regex pattern, white for matching literal.
by eqvinox | 2025-04-22 02:30:35+00:00
Short answer: yes.

Long answer: you need to choose appropriate connectors and fibre types. There's more to fibre than just OM5 and OS2 on LC connectors. Disaster recovery agencies as well as militaries use fibre cabling in temporary camp / communication infrastructure setups too, with ruggedized cables and connectors. There's 50+ years of history and experience to source from.

"Counter" answer: copper cables in cars also break.
by ryao | 2025-04-22 02:31:06+00:00
I was responding to this:

Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files. Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.

I said it is not legally necessary to have that in every file in the previous comment solely to contradict the idea that his project level LICENSE file did not constitute a license for the individual files. I did not at any time suggest that it was not a good idea to put notices in every file. In fact, if you look at my other comments, you will see that I said that he should have put copyright notices into every file multiple times. I even said it at the root of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750850
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-22 02:33:14+00:00
i.e. The first picture you see of the machine is running Microsoft Flight Simulator. The First. They knew this was the standard for compatibility.

My question would be Jet by Sublogic, and ... most unfortunately Xenix x86. Which leads me to believe that... you need a very low power cMos CPU, to have that battery life.

There are 12Mhz Harris cMos 286s but they are collector items, and the next step is 486slcs, which may run Xenix 386 w/ TCP/IP stack, rather well.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1994/ERL-94-65....
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-22 02:33:21+00:00
Sure, you and I can "know this" intellectually, but the end result is that there are conscious machines lurking in every public restroom, and they await our presence, and upon our arrival they awaken and they spring to life and perform their service for the hu-man whose body temperature is somewhat normal.

So it matters not whether it's one pixel or 50 megapixels doing the work there, what matters is that everyone who attends a baseball game or eats at a restaurant is accustomed to a conscious machine that can "see" their buttcheeks well enough to know exactly when to activate the flusher without any pesky hu-man touching it.

And that there is electrical power and, probably, networking available in the restrooms so that the conscious machines can stay alive and discuss buttcheek sightings with one another and their mothership.
by scottfalconer | 2025-04-22 02:33:59+00:00
One of the things I found helpful about getting out of the specific / formulaic feedback was asking the LLM to ask me questions. At one point I asked a fresh LLM to read the book and then ask me questions. It showed me where there were narrative gaps / confusing elements that a reader would run into, but didn't realy on the specific "answer" from the LLM itself.

I also had a bunch of personal stories interwoven in and it told me I was being "indulgent" which was harsh but ultimately accurate.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-22 02:35:57+00:00
I don't think generating images would be faster than generating code, plus you lose all the interactivity. Many designers tell us where they get the most value out of Magic Patterns is that the designs are interactive by default, unlike traditional vector-based design tools.

I'm with you that the first reaction is not "let's look at code output." In fact, for most of our users, they never look at the code. It's abstracted away from them and just an implementation detail to unlock interactivity.

P.S. You might enjoy our /Inspiration command, which gives you 4 variations at once. Demo video: https://www.magicpatterns.com/docs/documentation/editor/edit...
by btbuildem | 2025-04-22 02:37:40+00:00
R1 would be the reasoning model - as in, the initial part of the output being the "train of thought" revealed before the "final answer" is provided. I was able to deploy a heavily quantized version of that locally, and run it with RAG (Open Webui in this instance) -- with web search enabled, sure, but it's still a far cry from an actual "research" model that know when and how to seek extra data / information.
by smackeyacky | 2025-04-22 02:38:11+00:00
The ‘bee was how a lot of us Australians of a certain age got into computers. The only real competition it had was the C64 as other things like the Apple II and IBM compatibles were just too expensive in comparison to that $399 intro price.

It was a bit weird to program for, as you said the basic was not quite the same as the popular platforms. It did mean you learned a lot about the machine itself, how memory was laid out, how to get those PCG graphics right.

It’s funny now to be able to see very similar cultures sprang up around less successful machines in other countries.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-22 02:40:34+00:00
I suppose if what you don't like about twitter is the people there (or the moderation), bluesky would make a lot of sense. I can't help but feel like the combination of catering towards businesses (verification) and people who don't like conflict (moderation) is recreating the same problem with a different demographic.

Am I anti moderation? No, not really. But the attitude blue sky users have towards it feels very much like wanting to be validated for not liking twitter('s users) rather than a forum for adults who enjoy seeing content from people wildly unlike themselves, which is what drew me to twitter 15 years ago.
by andai | 2025-04-22 02:42:25+00:00
Super cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate.

There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates?

For me the main benefit of a device like this would be reading and writing without distractions, so having it run DOOM smoothly would not help me! But I do really want low latency typing...
by akra | 2025-04-22 02:43:42+00:00
Agree with most of what you said except for the "big bucks" part. Why would I pay for your product when I can ask the AI to do it? To be honest I think I would rather use that money for anything else if I can spend a little bit of time and get the AI to do it. This is quite deflationary for programming in general and inflationary for domains not disrupted all else being equal. There's a point where Jevon's Paradox fails - after all there's only so much software most normal people want and at that point tech workers value relative to other sectors will decline assuming unequal disruption.

The ability to earn the big bucks as you state is not a function of the value delivered/produced, but the scarcity and difficulty in acquiring said value. That is capitalism. An extreme example is clear air that we breathe - it is currently free, but extremely valuable to most living things. If we made it scarce (e.g. pollution) eventually people would start charging for it; potentially at extortionary prices depending on how rare it becomes.

The only exception I see is if the software encodes a domain that isn't as accessible to people and is kept secret/under wraps, has natural protections (e.g. a government system that is mandatory to use), or is complex and still requires co-ordination and understanding. This does happen, but then I would argue the value is in the adjacent domain knowledge - not in the software itself.
by ern | 2025-04-22 02:43:56+00:00
Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun

Many of those media outlets are known for being low quality, with the exception possibly of the Telegraph.

I feel like readers should be able to think critically about their news sources, and expect and discount low quality content from tabloids, rather than blindly believing everything that's fed to them, either by gatekeepers in the traditional media, or on social media.
by colonial | 2025-04-22 02:44:01+00:00
> Clean, firm, dispatchable power

Besides the examples you listed, there's also synthetic fuels. I don't know if they'll pan out, but the concept is intriguing.

Essentially, the argument goes that there's a critical solar price point at which synthesizing methane from atmospheric gas capture becomes cheaper than drilling. Said methane can be burned for power in existing plants (forming a closed cycle) or refined into heavier liquid hydrocarbons for vehicles and polymers.

The advantage here is that you don't need batteries or inverters - just dirt cheap panels - and the synthesis plants can be engineered to be productive despite only operating during the day.

I know one company is working on this with industrial scale in mind (Terraform Industries), and I believe SpaceX is also pursuing it on-site for Starship (which consumes ~1000 T of methane per launch, all of which currently has to be trucked in at great expense.)
by creatonez | 2025-04-22 02:44:04+00:00
Using a runtime doesn't automatically mean it's bloat. I mean, do you uninstall Python from your system immediately after installing a distro?

I would much rather an editor provide as many runtimes as possible for plugins, so that developers from all walks of life can contribute. This is largely the success story of Neovim, which lets you interface with it in 7 different languages. Most editors that are constrained to only one language for plugins have a completely barren ecosystem.