MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goku12 | 2025-04-29 07:08:51+00:00
What do you mean by 'a mix of Haskell and Rust'? Is that a per-project choice or do you use both in a single project? I'm interested in the latter. If so, could you point me to an example?

Another question is about Clash. Your description sounds like the HLS (high level synthesis) approach. But I thought that Clash used a Haskell -based DSL, making it a true HDL. Could you clarify this? Thanks!
by gary17the | 2025-04-29 07:08:55+00:00
> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages

I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.

The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.
by freetonik | 2025-04-29 07:10:24+00:00
Which course?

The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".

In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).
by branko_d | 2025-04-29 07:11:21+00:00
> It's not about cars but speeding in cars.

That's like saying "it's not about guns but killing by guns".

If we could only identify those pesky people that will kill with their guns before they do it, we could solve our problem! Just as if we could separate out only the drivers that will crash before they actually do it.

Alas, while you can probably speed many times without serious consequences, shooting someone without serious consequences is far rarer! This means we at least have a chance to catch the repeated speeders before they do irreparable harm, but we rarely have the same luxury with shooters.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-29 07:11:23+00:00
> If I had just gotten a job offer to come to the US this kind of thing might give me pause

For me it was the active shooter drills in schools. I just didn’t want my daughter to (then about five years old) go through any of that. If I were younger and had no kids, I’d consider, but I’d need to price many things into the compensation package.

The last few months made me decide not to visit the US in the next four years at least. It’s not a decision made lightly, but a needed one.
Ask HN: SOR for Busy DevOps Team
by odbo | 2025-04-29 07:11:41+00:00
Hello. I found myself working in a very busy new devops team. Now the problem is we get a lot of work from various channels (email, chatops, meetings) and we need a way to organize all that.

Moreover there are events that we need to take note such as "this server will need to renew cert key in this specific date in future".

Chaos. How do you manage? What kind of tools or system of records do you use and have made your lives easier?

TIA
by matkoniecz | 2025-04-29 07:13:03+00:00
But according to production data it has never dropped to zero? Why it would be a black start?

It dropped from about 32GW to about 8GW

source: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

though admittedly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start mentions that partial shutdown may be also requiring a black start?
by spookie | 2025-04-29 07:14:46+00:00
You can manipulate texture coordinate derivatives in order to just sample a subset of the whole texture on a pixel shader and only shade those pixels (basically the same as mipmapping, but you can have the "window" wherever you want really).

This is something you can't do on a compute shader, given you don't have access to the built-in derivative methods (building your own won't be cheaper either).

Still, if you want those changes to persist, a compute shader would be the way to go. You _can_ do it using a pixel shader but it really is less clean and more hacky.
by barry-cotter | 2025-04-29 07:15:19+00:00
As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.

I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.

Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
by josephg | 2025-04-29 07:15:23+00:00
To me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write.

Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug.

There was a similar bug at facebook years ago where the user's notification count would say you had notifications - and you click it, and there aren't any notifications. The count was updated by a different code path than the code which inserted notifications in the list, and they got out of sync. They changed the code so both the notification count & list were managed by the same part of the system, and the all instances of the bug went away forever.
by aborsy | 2025-04-29 07:15:27+00:00
The results achieved by the policies of the liberal party of Canada have been disastrous in the past decade. I can’t imagine people voted for them again. It’s counterintuitive.

What’s the reason people vote for those outcomes?

I know trump played a role, but it’s hard to believe that he reversed the outcome so drastically.

I think the conservatives in Canada don’t have strong leaders. You couldn’t have a better hand.
by lelanthran | 2025-04-29 07:16:00+00:00
> If your C is faster than your C++ then something has gone horribly wrong. C++ has been faster than C for a long time.

In certain cases, sure - inlining potential is far greater in C++ than in C.

For idiomatic C++ code that doesn't do any special inlining, probably not.

IOW, you can rework fairly readable C++ code to be much faster by making an unreadable mess of it. You can do that for any language (C included).

But what we are usually talking about when comparing runtime performance in production code is the idiomatic code, because that's how we wrote it. We didn't write our code to resemble the programs from the language benchmark game.
Ask HN: Advice for Marketing and Lead Generation?
by keepamovin | 2025-04-29 07:16:14+00:00
I know I could just ask Grok or ChatGPT or search online. But there's a lot of noise. I have skills as a technical founder, but I've never done much marketing besides "post to HN" and the occasional "post to ProductHunt". This is my year to market and grow a lot of what I've built.

My main product is a B2B remote browser. All sales so far have been in bound. I don't mind long sales cycles of corporate, and I've gotten used to people flaking out, and learned to read red flags for shady behavior, are better are reading contracts.

My business has no debt, and no lawsuits, and no outside funding - and (for now at least) I want to keep it that way!

I put the code on GitHub, but use license keys and telemetry (like Andris from EmailEngine). The product is largely stable and works across many platforms.

Marketing and sales are the two biggest areas I can improve. I know there are folks out there with similar experiences and backgrounds, who are absolute GTM masters, and I want to build that skill this year.

What is yer advice to me, good folks?
Show HN: Wrap Notes – One big text file with multiple projections
by sliam | 2025-04-29 07:16:37+00:00
Hi HN, I'm working on a notes app and am keen to gauge interest.

The core idea is being able to re-arrange the note hierarchy: Date -> Topic -> Note for timeline view Topic -> Date -> Note for topic view

I believe these two projections add significant value to a solid markdown note app foundation, without unnecessary bloat or distraction.

Thanks!
by pastage | 2025-04-29 07:18:10+00:00
> due to young people not taking an interest in COBOL and Mainframes

Having only fleeting professional experience with COBOL during a summer my view of it is that it is a mix of dataanalyst job and programming. Where the programming is horrible and the report making is ok though archaic. As long as you modify processes already available it is not so bad, but the developer experience was horrible.

With all that said I actually liked ideas in COBOL but it is an extremely niche language that does not serve you at all in the real world.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-04-29 07:18:50+00:00
I just watched a YC video about vibe coding. He says he used Claude Sonnet 3.7 to configure his DNS servers & Heroku hosting. What could possibly go wrong?!

"How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School " => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJjsfNO5JTo&t=494s

I like his advice on downloading relevant documentation and putting it in the code base. That makes sense to me for targeted use cases.
by udev4096 | 2025-04-29 07:20:06+00:00
A true depiction of someone who has no clue what he's talking about. Google play services are the major source of telemetry exfiltration from major android devices. It runs as a highly privileged process which can collect data in extremely intricate manner and is the main reason google sells it's gapps bundle to scamsung and other chinese phone manufacturers.

> go no proprietary apps (ie. most apps people actually use)

That is the whole point of my argument. You either make sacrifices and improve your privacy or be stubborn and refuse to improvise which a lot of people still do. If privacy were that convenient, we wouldn't be talking about it. It's not by default and never will be
by goku12 | 2025-04-29 07:20:14+00:00
I'm not going to deny your experience. But is Rust really that hard? It's a very smooth experience for me - sometimes enough for me to choose it instead of Python.

I know that the compiler complains a lot. But I code with the help of realtime feedback from tools like the language server (rust-analyzer) and bacon. It feels like 'debug as you code'. And I really love the hand holding it does.
by qalmakka | 2025-04-29 07:20:18+00:00
I don't know, AI seems quite antithetical to what Duolingo supposedly stands for. AI raison d'etre is to allow people to do stuff they cannot do themselves or replace human skill with automated processes. Duolingo literally sells language courses, in a world where translation jobs are getting less and less necessary thanks to AI being especially great at translating stuff.

Also "AI first" is BS, until AI has a 100% accuracy it is only useful as long as there are still competent people around that are able to understand what the AI does. A level of competence that gets harder and harder to get in a world where AI assistants allow you to get by by just pressing enter and producing poor quality slop.

Companies and management want to _replace_ human labour because just they don't understand that AI works best _alongside_ people. This doesn't surprise me; one of the worst problems in IT right now is that IT is both pervasive and extraordinarily sector-specific. Capital is in the hands of people that not only don't understand how IT and computers work in detail, but don't even understand how little they understand in the first place
by covoeus | 2025-04-29 07:21:05+00:00
Summary:

Klaus argues that while it is very easy to write unsafe C++ due to language defaults, modern tools and language features, such as

- ranges over loops,

- strong types with concepts over primitives, and

- value semantics over references

provide a safe abstraction over a fast core. He also urges people to use constexpr wherever possible and write consteval tests to catch undefined behaviour at compile-time.

In his opinion, the "People problem" of C++ is that developers are not disciplined enough, or simply don't know any better, as even most books about C++ don't keep up with recent developments and cultural shifts.
by tossandthrow | 2025-04-29 07:21:05+00:00
This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.

If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.

The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.
by coreyh14444 | 2025-04-29 07:23:25+00:00
Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.

And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
by baridbelmedar | 2025-04-29 07:23:40+00:00
It's pretty common for business contracts to just end up stuck on mainframes or scattered across various systems from vendors like Oracle (the paper trails are often thrown away long time ago).

And let's be honest, a lot of folks in IT aren't exactly top performers and don't seem to care all that much. It's really the developers you find on forums like this who are genuinely passionate. You're not likely to bump into the people actually buying those big Oracle or IBM systems around here though :)
by jongjong | 2025-04-29 07:25:48+00:00
From my perspective, as someone who is not good at marketing and sales, this is going to be positive because the playing field will have to focus more on product. Currently, I'm being out-competed by people who can sell well. A landing page with nothing behind it is out-competing my fully working product.

If outbound sales becomes ineffective, people will have more opportunities and time to think about their inherent needs, as opposed to being funneled into all their decisions by a salesperson.

It's frightening how much stuff people are buying that they don't need. While there exist stuff which they need that they don't know exists.
by baruz | 2025-04-29 07:26:25+00:00
I assume you’re joking, but θεωρίᾱ does mean a “looking at” or “a beholding” or “contemplation” from the verb θεωρέω, “to look at” or “observe.” Aristotle liked to use it for speculation or “theorizing” in the mental sense, but apparently that was due to Pythagoras’s influence.

Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”
by hbbio | 2025-04-29 07:26:55+00:00
I also have a benchmark that I'm using for my nanoagent[1] controllers.

Qwen3 is impressive in some aspects but it thinks too much!

Qwen3-0.6b is showing even better performance than Llama 3.2 3b... but it is 6x slower.

The results are similar to Gemma3 4b, but the latter is 5x faster on Apple M3 hardware. So maybe, the utility is to run better models in cases where memory is the limiting factor, such as Nvidia GPUs?

[1] github.com/hbbio/nanoagent
by ohgr | 2025-04-29 07:28:18+00:00
As much as I'd like a machine like that, my 5 year old random Lenovo 10500 desktop is probably more useful as a daily driver machine than an older workstation class machine at the sacrifice of no ECC RAM. I bought it when it was 3 years old and will use it for 4 years then get rid of it before it hits the tail end, the power supply dies or something else goes wrong. You avoid all the weird problems, the depreciation, the energy costs running like that. And you gain things like relatively competent NVMe slots, USB-C and other luxuries. And the single core performance is better than Xeons of the era and earlier.

win11 ltsc works perfectly on it. With a solid background :D
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 07:28:51+00:00
As discussed multiple times, I see automatic resouce management (written this way on purpose), coupled with effects/linear/affine/dependent types for lowlevel coding as the way to go.

At least until we get AI driven systems good enough to generate straight binaries.

Rust is to be celebrated for bringing affine types into mainstream, but it doesn't need to be the only way, productivity and performance can be made into the same language.

The way Ada, D, Swift, Chapel, Linear Haskell, OCaml effects and modes, are being improved, already show the way forward.

There there is the whole formal verification and dependent type languages, but that goes even beyond Rust, in what most mainstream developers are willing to learn, the development experience is still quite ruff.
by laurentlb | 2025-04-29 07:28:53+00:00
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach.

One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau...

It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books.

Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed.

It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org
by lorinab | 2025-04-29 07:29:07+00:00
This release introduces important improvements for the definition of wiki macro parameters and provides a new mechanism for faster macro execution. It also contains a redefinition of the real-time editing toolbar for better user experience. Further, it is now possible for users to resize the panel columns on the right and left of the content. This release contains security fixes, with the highest severity being 9.3/10.
by internet_points | 2025-04-29 07:29:33+00:00
> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach

That's not better than Duolingo, no.

Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to

* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)

* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)

* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly

* lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons that give more control over subtitles, eventually only foreign subtitles or none)

* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now

You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.
by yyyk | 2025-04-29 07:29:44+00:00
Right, it depends on how far one wants to go to avoid allocations. structs and spans are safe. But one can go even deeper and pin pointers and do Unsafe.AsPointer and get a de-facto (unsafe) union out of it....

>https://em-tg.github.io/csborrow/

Oooh... I didn't know scoped refs existed.
by AnonC | 2025-04-29 07:29:47+00:00
I found this in the app’s description:

> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone locked.

> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings
by weakplayer9 | 2025-04-29 07:29:48+00:00
I'm dedicating everything I have to a project that means the world to me.

It's called iTensor, a free, open-source scientific platform created to empower students, researchers, and curious minds everywhere. It's designed to explore deep concepts like symbolic tensors, spacetime curvature, Einstein equations, and magnetic simulations—all directly in your browser, completely free. No barriers, just genuine curiosity and learning.

But here's my honest situation:

I'm currently living with my parents, pushing forward with barely enough to survive. I've invested all my savings into servers, hosting, and domain fees—simply because I believe this tool deserves to exist. I've sent out over 30 job applications after graduating with a degree in technical physics and showcasing iTensor and my other projects... but the silence has been deafening. Almost every day, I work late into the night—usually until 11 pm, midnight, or sometimes even 2 am—handling everything myself: frontend, backend, symbolic computations, and complex C-based simulations. Recently, I've even lost access to some essential tools that were helping me speed things up.

Still, I'm not ready to give up.

My dream is clear: complete iTensor and keep it free and accessible to everyone.

But right now, I genuinely need support to keep going.

Here's how you can help:

Support me with a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/itensor Hire me for tutoring or freelance work (math, physics, software development)—even short-term tasks make a huge difference Join forces with me—I'm open to collaborators passionate about open science and meaningful projects Even a simple message of encouragement or feedback means the world to me

This isn't just about software—it's about proving that a single person, driven by passion and determination, can create something valuable for everyone.

Thank you deeply for your attention. If this resonates with you, please consider sharing it.

https://itensor-docs.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/Klaudiusz321
by ajjenkins | 2025-04-29 07:29:53+00:00
I agree. I generally support the EFF, but I disagree with them on this. I read through the bill and the language is very specific to revenge porn (although I’m not a lawyer). I think it would be very difficult for Trump or anyone else to abuse this law and use it for censorship.

I have friends who were the victim of revenge porn and I think this law would help them. I’m looking forward to this becoming a law.