MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by huimang | 2025-04-29 10:03:23+00:00
We did do those kinds of things. For example, speaking with a partner or having to give a 5 minute talk to the teacher on something.

The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise, and the content of "conversations" was always very, very simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.

I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our essays.

It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.

Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or another environment to speak/practice the language will yield much greater results much faster. You can study the same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at times to fill in gaps.

I think if you're a college student it's fine since you have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of any language), but as an adult where time is significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a sibling comment I went over what I do use.
by jstimpfle | 2025-04-29 10:04:06+00:00
Having gone full-in on this approach before, with some good success, it still feels wrong to me today. Contiguous storage may work for reasonable numbers of elements, but it's potentially blocking a huge contiguous chunk of address space especially for large numbers of elements.

I probably say this because I still have to main 32-bit binaries (only 2G of address space), but it can potentially be problematic even on 64-bit machines (typically 256 TB of address space), especially if the data structure should be a reusable container with unknown number of instances. If you don't know a reasonable upper bound of elements beforehand, you have to reallocate later, or drastically over-reserve from the start. The former removes a pointer stability guarantee, the later is uneconomical, it may even be uneconomical on 64-bit depending on how many instances of the data structures you plan to have. And having to reallocate when overflowing the preallocated space makes operations less deterministic with regards to execution time.
by berkes | 2025-04-29 10:04:24+00:00
In one project, we had an ENV var (a few actually) for timeouts of network requests. Most places would raise an exception if they hit this timeout.

In test and CI we had this set to a very low number. In acceptance (manual testing, smoke testing) to a very high number.

This was useful because it showed three things:

- Network- and services- configuration bugs, would immediately give a crash and thus failing test. E.g. firewalls, wrong hosts, broken URIs etc.

- Slow services would cause flickering tests. Almost always a sign that some service/configuration/component had performance problems or was misconfigured itself. Quick fix would be to increase the timeout, but re-thinking the service - e.g. replace with a mock if we couldn't control it, or fixing its performance issues, the proper- and often not that hard- fix. Or re-thinking the use of the service, e.g. by pushing it to async or a job queue or such another fix.

- Stakeholders going through the smoke-test and acceptance test would inevitably report "it's really slow" showing the same issues as above but in a different context and with "real" services like some external PSP, or SMTP.

It was really a very small change: just some wrappers around http-calls and other network calls, in which this config was used, next to a hard rule to never use "native" clients/libs in the code but always our abstraction. This then turned out to offer so much more benefits than just this timeout: error reporting, debugging, decoupling.

It wasn't javascript (Ruby, some Python, some Typescript) but in JS it would be as easy as `function fooFetch(resource, options) { return fetch(resource, options) }` from day one, then slowly extended and improved with said logging, reporting, defaults etc.

I've since always introduced such "anti-corruption" layers (facades, proxy, ports/adapters) very early on, because once you have "requests.get("http://example.com/foo/bar")' all throughout your python code, there's no way to ever migrate away from "requests" if (when!) it gets deprecated, or to add said timeout throughout the code. It's really a tiny task to add my own file/module that simply imports "requests" and then calls it on day one, and then use that instead.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-29 10:05:18+00:00
Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language.

And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro.

Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).
by everdrive | 2025-04-29 10:05:19+00:00
I thought you were going to go the other direction. All I ever read is that the west relied on Islamic science and math, but "no one" will acknowledge this. Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is. On the other hard, vanishingly few sources do seem to acknowledge that the Islamic sources "stood on the shoulders" of Greeks and others. Ibn Khaldun states this directly in the Muqaddimah: "The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts."

The full quote:

"The subject here is different from that of these two disciplines which, however, are often similar to it. In a way, it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines by anyone. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it, but there is no reason to suspect them (of having been unaware of it). Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs! Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors! The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts. (His efforts in this direction) were successful, because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection. Of the sciences of others, nothing has come to our attention."
by dns_snek | 2025-04-29 10:05:47+00:00
Let's assume they were planning to create concentration camps, do you naively expect them to publicly admit that in plain language or how do you think that would look?

Even the Nazis didn't have the political capital to plainly admit to their own atrocities. They tried to keep it secret for as long as they could, then they denied the camps' existence, denied the abuse in those camps, denied the genocide, falsified medical records to make it appear that people died from pneumonia and unfortunate medical complications.

In reality they were injecting children with pathogens, experimenting on them, torturing them, starving them and ultimately killing them. In the end they even tried to make their families pay for their "care". Officially, nobody knew anything terrible was happening. Unofficially, everyone was complicit.
by the_third_wave | 2025-04-29 10:06:52+00:00
You must have read different sources from the ones I read. There is no shortage of mentioning the "Islamic golden age" and the role it played in bringing knowledge from "the east" to "the west" as well as preserving knowledge from and of classical Greece by means of translations to Arabic. There seems to be doubt about the veracity of the latter though as this claim may have been a strategical device to promote 'anti-Byzantinism':

The claim that philosophy and the sciences died out in Christian Byzantium and were transferred to the Islamic world can be found in a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic sources, edited and translated from the 19th century onwards and mostly taken at face value since then. However, Dimitri Gutas has explained that, during this time of bitter military struggle with Byzantium in which the Arabs were losing ground, emphasizing the Muslim appropriation of the pagan Greek heritage and claiming that Byzantium destroyed it because of the ideological and political break represented by Christianity was a form of anti-Byzantinism expressed as philhellenism. Gutas has also clarified that Abbasid society appropriated Greek philosophy and science in order to address its own needs: negotiating a canonical version of Islam [1].

Wherever the truth lies I do not see any dearth of mentionings of the role played by Islamic scholars.

[1] https://brill.com/previewpdf/display/book/edcoll/97890043490...
by jventura | 2025-04-29 10:07:09+00:00
Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other canned food.

All gas stations closed because they could not sell gasoline/diesel. Today there are lines on all gas stations, people filling their car tanks and bottles..

Oh, let me tell you about electric cars! Many people had to spend the night somewhere away from home because they could not charge their cars.. My sister (with her job's electric car) had to stay the night some 200km away from home, and since the ATMs (Multibanco) didn't work, she didn't have physical money to pay for food. Luckily a stranger paid for the food (yogurt and some cookies). Petrol cars, because of their range, had better luck!

Pure fear and panic..

I can only blame the authorities (Portuguese/European) for not having contingency plans for keeping people informed, and thus letting fear spread like wildfire.
by nexo-v1 | 2025-04-29 10:07:12+00:00
Looks cool, but a bit of a bummer it's not open source. These days when I need to sketch out SQL/database diagrams, I usually have an LLM generate Mermaid code for me — good enough for quick drafts.

If I want something cleaner or a little more "presentation ready," I switch to d2 (https://d2lang.com/tour/sql-tables/#basics). It's got really simple syntax and does a great job laying out entity-relationship diagrams without much tweaking.
by saagarjha | 2025-04-29 10:07:30+00:00
No, I'm going to let 'jchw do it for me, because they are more patient than I would have been and make me thankful I didn't go down that route. I don't really want to engage with someone whose argument is "there's no harm because the harm is plagiarism and according to OpenAI plagiarism is OK".
by tatersolid | 2025-04-29 10:07:58+00:00
We had this happen to one of our apps which redirected to a third-party identity provider which used a different domain name. Basically the app looked like a phishing site to those who clicked on the email links and ended up on a login page on a domain they didn’t recognize. So these users reported the email as phishing in outlook. Microsoft confirmed these user reports were the source of the blocking.

The fix was our own MSFT support case opened via our own E5 subscription which took two weeks to get the app unblocked. To prevent future reports we put a custom hostname on the IdP. So app.example.com now redirects to login.app.example.com
by tsukikage | 2025-04-29 10:08:10+00:00
Running bytecode directly on hardware has certainly been tried (e.g. ARM's Jazelle).

In today's world this is generally not great.

Interpreted languages often include bytecode instructions that actually do very complex things and so do not nicely map to operations that can be sanely implemented in hardware. So you end up with all the usual boring alu, branch etc operations implemented in hardware, and anything else traps and runs a software handler.

Separately, interpreted language bytecode is often a poor fit for hardware execution; e.g. for dotnet (and python) bytecode many otherwise trivial operations do not explicitly encode information about types, and therefore the hardware must track type information in order to do the right thing (floating point addition looks very very different from integer addition!)

A lot of effort has been spent on compiler optimisation for x86 and ARM code. JIT compilers benefit massively from this. Meanwhile, interpreted language bytecode is often very lightly optimised, where it is optimised at all (until relatively recently, explicit Python policy as set by Guido van Rossum was to never optimise!) Optimisation has the side effect of throwing away potentially valuable high level / semantic information; optimising at the bytecode level hinders debuggability for interpreted code (which is a primary goal in Python) and can also be detrimental to JIT output; and the results are underwhelming compared to JIT since your small team of plucky bytecode optimisers isn't really going to compete with decades of x86 compiler development; and so the incentive is to not do much of that.

So if you're running bytecode in hardware, on top of all the obvious costs, you are /running unoptimised code/. This is actually the thing that kills these projects - everything else can ultimately be solved by throwing more silicon at it, but this can only really be solved by JITting, and the existing JIT+x86 / JIT+ARM solution is cheap and battle tested.
by TonyTrapp | 2025-04-29 10:08:13+00:00
A HTML color hex code does not use all available bits in a byte but has a strict format. It's of the form #abc, where # is fixed and abc are hex digits (0-9 A-F), one for R, G, and B. Thus, each channel has 4 bits of precision.

PS: ASCII is a 7-bit encoding. "8 bits minimum" sounds like you are thinking in UTF-8.
by amos-burton | 2025-04-29 10:08:24+00:00
As an outsider i am surprised by the fact that all along this very good writings nowhere is questioned the cost of change. Getting a totally new belief, one that is not dissonant, needs zero analysis, is costless and easy to integrate. Think children they believe everything they are told right ? Lack of criticism or simply lack of already existing dissonant fragments ? Being grown up, we accumulated a tons of fact, and we grow strong bond with them because we experimented them IRL, intuitively, they work, hard stuff. To question those believe must require a ton of energy, because if it happens this is true, it become a matter of survival, which is very important to each and one of us. But then we also always consider the cost of change. Fact X might be true, but acting might cost twice more, therefore, the body (or the brain if you like) has zero incentive to spend additional energy updating the belief and acting accordingly.

Though, do i believe what i wrote, or was i already hardwired to write this reading that ? mind twisting is a fun activity
by Tor3 | 2025-04-29 10:08:30+00:00
I and my wife used an LLM to translate something she had written, she could have done that herself but she doesn't feel up to a task like that yet (due to the target audience). And I myself am far away from being able to translate that kind of text to my native language.

In general the translation was good, but the wording felt a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and also using pronouns where a native never would - where it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a better translation, and after that refreshing the translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).
by piecelyJohn | 2025-04-29 10:08:35+00:00
I’m convinced that the cybersecurity and security research industry is largely a pass-the-blame market. And honestly, that's not a bad thing — it's smart and even necessary. If a publicly traded company suffers a security breach, they can say, "We hired [security firm] to harden our systems — if something went wrong, it’s on them." This way, the company deflects blame, protects its reputation, and keeps shareholders satisfied. All-in-all not a bad strat
by tellarin | 2025-04-29 10:08:57+00:00
My team and I are working on embodied AI. More specifically, focusing on humanoid legged robots for long horizon tasks combining navigation and manipulation/interaction.

We've recently put a paper out in arXiv (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12533) and the project page is: https://beingbeyond.github.io/being-0/

BAAI is also hiring! No fully remote positions though. :-/
by thaumiel | 2025-04-29 10:09:11+00:00
The ToS for the site goes against what the whitepaper says. WP * "Every human has access to WLD tokens simply for being human."

ToS * "You are not located in, under the control of, a national, or resident of: Syria, the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, or any other country or region with whom the United States, the European Union, or any other country or jurisdiction has restricted the access of the Features"

No where does it state how much an orb cost. People need to own a phone to be able to use this. I'm pretty confident in being able to say that not every human alive owns a phone, and probably not every human alive wants to own a phone.

A majority of people are able to use it technically.

What protection does this system have against CMEs? It is not a question of if a Carrington-class CME will hit Earth again, it is a question on when it will hit earth again.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-29 10:09:14+00:00
> Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country

You can replicate the experience between Caltrain and BART.

To my knowledge, the HSR will share tracks with other trains. That makes the sort of scheduling problems that make Amtrak a pain more of a possibility. Not a reason to shoot down the project. But a decent reason to take OP's concerns seriously.
by Lio | 2025-04-29 10:09:17+00:00
Ruby isn't standing still in terms of performance either. YJIT is getting better all the time and ZJIT is on the horizon too.

For concurrency, async fibres are brilliant but not the only game in town.

Using good old processes works really well in Pitchfork or alternatively JRuby and TruffleRuby both have true non-blocking parallelism right now using Threads.

If anything TruffleRuby shows that there is nothing inherient in the Ruby language that means it cannot catch up in performance terms.
by shatnersbassoon | 2025-04-29 10:10:05+00:00
IANAL (L=lumberjack) but it's clearly going to be cheaper if you can just chop it down, right? Quicker and less equipment required, less danger to life from having to climb and wield a chainsaw in an elevated position. Also, if you are interested in getting long planks out of the trunk, you would not want to cut it down progressively.
by j1elo | 2025-04-29 10:12:44+00:00
And I myself didn't mean that I happened to have a measly 10€ note at home, I normally have around 300 minimum, to spend organically on purchases.

Of course I get that carrying coins and notes is cumbersome, but if we've managed to live all through the 80's and 90's with it, I think we can manage to keep doing it. 100% digital money is giving up on a huge level of self-determination and privacy that I wouldn't feel comfortable with, but I guess as newer generations grow up already pre-adoctrinated and not being able to compare the before-and-after, in the end society will end giving up.
by glimshe | 2025-04-29 10:12:54+00:00
There is nothing wrong with your point of view. But does it scale? We got here after thousands of years of societies shaped by religion and its various concepts of family.

Can your alternative produce a strong society that can survive external threats? Maybe it can, but intuitively I think it can't. And what would happen, then, is that a society based on polyamory would be destroyed and/or conquered by others who believe in traditional families.

I'm not saying that societies that preach traditional families are good or bad, just that they have a long history of surviving.
by pron | 2025-04-29 10:13:03+00:00
> While it might be Turing complete, it can't express equivalent behavior to a C program.

Neither can safe Rust! But this is easier to see in my example because parity is a very functional, as opposed to technical property.

> This is one of those quotes like "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

I am not calling for perfect. Quite the opposite. I am saying that software correctness is extremely complicated, and even the biggest researchers in the field have been surprised by outcomes that were counterintuitive to them. Yet you seem to have decided that Rust gives the best results of everything that's available, while I have my doubts, especially because I see how people are turning away from Rust and how much it struggles to capture a significant portion of the low-level programming market even at its quite advanced age. I don't think there's a single language in the top ten that's had such low adoption at Rust's current age, and that's not the kind of thing you expect to see with a technology whose excited but small fanbase claim to hit an excellent pragmatic sweet spot.

> We have empirical evidence that Rust has measurable impact on bugs, especially memory safety ones.

Compared to C, yes. That's exactly what you expect if more sound guarantees help and then hurt -- a language with some sound guarantees to be better than a language with virtually none. But that is not to say that other languages with either more or less sound guarantees aren't an even better sweet spot.