MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bumby | 2025-05-16 16:42:14+00:00
>If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?

This seems like a false equivalency. The student isn’t getting dropped from their degree program, they’re missing a class. If a professor is late, especially habitually late, I may not advocate for them losing tenure, but I’d certainly expect it to have a smaller impact like being brought up in a performance review.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-05-16 16:42:17+00:00
Sure. Or USBP could just be waiting for you as your flight lands in the US and then immediately detain you. You have no rights in a US airport.

I have not ever heard of that happening, but if I did hear about it happening to normal people (i.e. people without a criminal warrant) I would probably stop going to the US.
by barbazoo | 2025-05-16 16:42:24+00:00
> This project enables an AI to act as a viewer in live streams. It captures stream data, sends it to a backend for processing by an LLM (like GPT models), and uses the AI's response to interact with the chat.

> Disclaimer

> Use Responsibly: Automating chat requires ethical considerations. Respect platform ToS and streamer rules. Avoid spamming.

Isn't this by definition spam? And how is one supposed to use it ethically if one doesn't control what is being emitted.

But then also, why at all? I'd say this is exactly what we don't need, AI messing with human discourse.
by wongarsu | 2025-05-16 16:42:34+00:00
> In contrast, no one thinks about what happens if a thread dies independently because the failure mode is joint.

In Rust if a thread holding a mutex dies the mutex becomes poisoned, and trying to acquire it leads to an error that has to be handled. As a consequence every rust developer that touches a mutex has to think about that failure mode. Even if in 95% of cases the best answer is "let's exit when that happens".

The operating system tends to treat your whole process as one and shot down everything or nothing. But a thread can still crash in its own due to unhandled oom, assertion failures or any number of other issues
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 16:42:53+00:00
It's not my responsibility, as a Stack Overflow user, to make Stack Overflow a site that gets lots of users posting and viewing lots of content.

It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.

I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.

I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.

Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.

That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.
by lelanthran | 2025-05-16 16:43:31+00:00
> Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad.

When Java got popular, around 1999-2001, it was not a close third behind C (or C++).

At that time, on those machines, the gap between programs written in C and programs written in Java was about the same as the gap right now between programs written in Java and programs written in pure Python.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-16 16:43:55+00:00
> Mexico has so many greater problems to discuss than a few people learning the ancient tongue. 2 days ago a beauty influencer was shot dead on a live stream

Yucatan ain't Jalisco. That's like saying Alaska shouldn't support indigenous Alaskan languages because there is racial animus or police brutality in Mississippi.

Mexico is a federal state like the US, that's why it's the Estados Unidos Mexicanos/United States of Mexico.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-16 16:45:07+00:00
I spent about two decades getting paid to write C before I learned Rust so I feel confident describing myself as an expert. It's true that C's abstract machine is a much stranger thing than many of its proponents believe - and that it's not very like any computer built this century so that the "portable assembler" claims are plain delusional, but I will say it's definitely less crazy than C++, more sane if you will.

This has become a bit less true in C17 and C23, but a lot of that is driven by the urge from WG21 (the C++ committee) to have WG14 (C language) do their work for them, hopefully some WG14 members will push back against that.
by panarky | 2025-05-16 16:45:10+00:00
The shared reward function from pre-training is like primary school for an LLM. Maybe RLHF is like secondary school. The governor can be differentiated from the workers with different system and user prompts, fine tuning, etc., which might be similar to medical school or law school for a human.

Certainly human judges, attorneys for defense and prosecution, and members of the jury can still perform their jobs well even if they attended the same primary and secondary schools.
by mrandish | 2025-05-16 16:45:12+00:00
For fans of "quick fix in a pinch" resources like duct tape, velcro, etc. There's another kind of tape that can be very useful: it's sometimes called 'Gaffer Tape' as it is used by Hollywood movie set gaffers (where time is literally money and everything must be temporary). It's a high-quality cloth tape with strong adhesive that generally won't leave residue when removed within 72 hours. It also (usually) won't strip off paint as long as it's removed carefully (not like ripping a band-aid). Due to the cloth weave pattern being square, the tape can be torn by hand horizontally or vertically into straight strips. Traditional gray duct tape is generally plastic coated and the adhesive will leave residue and take paint (and even wall texture) with it.

I learned about gaffer tape working on sets decades ago and the all the experienced gaffers had a couple of rolls of it on a rope loop hanging off their tool belt. White for labeling stuff with a Sharpie, black for securing or hiding stuff that might be on camera. I've had a similar loop on my tool pouch ever since because it's so useful. It's sold a lot of places but quality can vary. Studio supply houses only sell the top grade stuff.
by techguy06 | 2025-05-16 16:45:27+00:00
Hi Peter, thank you for this AMA. I've been a green card holder for 1 year as the result of working for big tech in the US, originally via getting a L1-B 3.5 years ago. I'm planning on moving back to my home country in Europe permanently. Is there any way I can keep my green card or at least keep it for longer in case I start a startup in Europe and want to also have a US presence? I'm a Portuguese citizen.
by beardyw | 2025-05-16 16:45:34+00:00
I never learned to touch type and had a successful career, now retired. Not driving would have been a big problem - in fact I got am IT job early on where they gave me 6 months to get a licence or I was out!

Oh, and yes I did start on punched cards, but was soon keying in my own code online 50 years ago.
by rayiner | 2025-05-16 16:46:21+00:00
Ironically, by flippantly dismissing the concern about the issue, you’re also dismissing the motivations of the people who championed the term and encouraged its adoption. They certainly think it’s important. Labels are very important! The term “Hispanic” was created in an effort to politically organize disparate Hispanic populations, who identified with myriad different nationalities rather than a common race (“La Raza”).

Capitalizing “black” is a political statement, not a linguistic description. In English, races aren’t capitalized, while terms referring to distinct ethnic groups are (so you capitalize “German” but not “white”). As John McWhorter persuasively explains, rationale for capitalizing “Black” is that American descendants of slaves are a distinct group bound by shared history and culture. That’s fine insofar as “Black” is used to refer to what we might call “ADOS.” But in practice “Black” is used as a racial designator. At Harvard, for example, 40% of the “Black” students are african immigrants. Obama is “Black”—that describes his race, not his ethno-cultural group.

Capitalizing “black” is a political effort to center the experience of black people in American life. Consider the term “BIPOC,” which breaks out “black” and “indigenous” as first among equals even though they’re included in the “POC.” What is the intention of that?

These labels and classifications, in turn, have real world ramifications. My daughter’s school has a segregated “black girl magic” lunch every week. There’s no “half white half bangladeshi girl magic,” and few non-black, non-white students, so she was invited to attend the weekly lunch once a month. Even at age 12, my daughter is able to perceive there is a racial hierarchy designed to invert the historical one.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-16 16:46:24+00:00
Isolation is for idiots. It is simply not a tenable approach to the modern world.

Trump has already proved it by reducing his "Liberation Day" tariffs from 145 to 30 percent.

What did China concede to make this happen? Absolutely nothing. They simply waited for some measure of sanity to prevail.

Absolutely nothing has been accomplished except higher taxes (tariff=tax) on American consumers. Otherwise, it was all just an exercise for Trump to wank his ego.
by kaliszad | 2025-05-16 16:46:31+00:00
The java.net.Inet4Address and Inet6Address could be more lightweight.

For a simple IPv4 address normally representable using 4 bytes/ 32 bits Java uses 56 bytes. The reason for it is Inet4Address object takes 24 B and the InetAddressHolder object takes another 32 B. The InetAddressHolder can contain not only the address but also the address family and original hostname that was possibly resolved to the address.

For an IPv6 address normally representable using 16 bytes/ 128 bits Java uses 120 bytes. An Inet6Address contains the InetAddressHolder inherited from InetAddress and adds an Inet6AddressHolder that has additional information such as the scope of the address and a byte array containing the actual address. This is an interesting approach especially when compared to the implementation of UUID, which uses two longs for storing the 128 bits of data.

Java's approach is causing 15x overhead for IPv4 and 7.5x overhead for IPv6 which seems excessive. What am I missing here? Can or should this be streamlined?
by beeflet | 2025-05-16 16:46:51+00:00
It's worth discussing.

This is true, you can use bitcoin to buy someone else's energy. Energy is largely fungible. But the whole economic system you are describing has a net loss of (free) energy. What is that other guy going to use the bitcoin for? Buy energy from someone else?

The bitcoin network uses energy to provide security for transactions. It's a transfer of wealth from the owners and users of bitcoin to the miners in the form of inflation and fees, respectively. Somewhat analogous to fiat currencies in some sense. In order for bitcoin to be worthwhile, the economic activity it enables must outweigh its cost of security. The energy spent on bitcoin isn't valuable itself, it just enables the security of something that is potentially valuable.

Similarly, you can use money to buy someone else's time. Unlike energy, time is not fungible, however. It's true that you can outsource parts of your life, but how much can you outsource? I enjoy cooking for myself, I don't know if I would outsource that. Many parents pay a lot for childcare when they would rather spend more time with their children if the conditions allowed. I think it's a common trap to spend your life working at something you dislike so you can pay others to do other things you don't like. There's also an upper bound to the amount of free time we can gain through this exchange. In any case it's important to appreciate the mundane things.

Investments in your health at a young age can be incredibly profitable. But there comes a time when those investments produce greatly diminishing returns.

I don't consider it a bad thing, I think it's quite beautiful. Time is the great equalizer. We're all gifted with the greatest fortune at birth and it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
by mandeepj | 2025-05-16 16:46:54+00:00
> So in the US you can replace/add hardware to your car and install some open source software on it that takes over steering and braking, and this is legal?

US is a heaven for car enthusiasts, builders, fabricators, modders, etc

As far as I know, none of the other countries allow any kind, small or big, of modification to their cars. And, any changes like engine oil must be done by a pro. Too bad for them, they've killed a multi-billion-dollar industry themselves and thousands of jobs too.
by intoamplitudes | 2025-05-16 16:46:57+00:00
First impressions:

1. The data in most of the plots (see the appendix) look fake. Real life data does not look that clean.

2. In May of 2022, 6 months before chatGPT put genAI in the spotlight, how does a second-year PhD student manage to convince a large materials lab firm to conduct an experiment with over 1,000 of its employees? What was the model used? It only says GANs+diffusion. Most of the technical details are just high-level general explanations of what these concepts are, nothing specific.

"Following a short pilot program, the lab began a large-scale rollout of the model in May of 2022." Anyone who has worked at a large company knows -- this just does not happen.
by Towaway69 | 2025-05-16 16:47:21+00:00
1. Ah sorry, indeed I forgot to add a link to J. Paul Morrison[1] the inventor of FBP - definitely add that.

2. The target audience is definitely Erlang developers who have not come across FBP before. But I didn't really ask myself that question since FBP is a hard sell at the best of times and selling Erlang with FBP is probably impossible! This is very niche ;)

3. Operators/Clients are hopefully those designing Erlang architectures. At the moment, that is really clear and it's something that has become clear for me in the last couple of months. When I started out, I was doing it as a finger exercise to see how far my Erlang skills would take me. Then I started creating test flows for testing node functionality - that turned into a testsuite[2] that can be used to test Node-RED functionality for correctness. At the moment, this is just a way of introducing the concepts of FBP to a new set of developers - Erlang developers.

4. I did actually create a in-browser-only Node-RED[3] which has some functionality and gives a feel of using Node-RED. There is also a live version of Erlang-RED[4] which is running on the BEAM.

5. Impossible :) To explain Node-RED and/or FBP to anyone outside of the IT - I keep using pipes and water hoses and sprinkles as metaphors!

6. I've made a couple of videos explaining my other visual coding idea[5] - didn't help ;) But yes, in the long term I definitely have to do something about the marketing because FBP does not sell itself...

[1] https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/index.html

[2] https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red-flow-testsuite

[3] https://cdn.flowhub.org/ (repo: https://github.com/gorenje/cdn.flowhub.org)

[4] https://ered.fly.dev/node-red

[5] https://flowhub.org
by divbzero | 2025-05-16 16:48:07+00:00
cal doesn’t offer an option to use the 1582 reform date, but looks like it does handle the 1752 adoption in Great Britain correctly:

$ cal 9 1752 September 1752 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
by dhruvrajvanshi | 2025-05-16 16:48:40+00:00
> I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.

This is a fair observation.

I think a part of the problem is that the things that make GIL less python hard are also the things that make faster baseline performance hard. I.e. an over reliance of the ecosystem on the shape of the CPython data structures.

What makes python different is that a large percentage of python code isn't python, but C code targeting the CPython api. This isn't true for a lot of other interpreted languages.
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 16:48:44+00:00
>They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions"

Because they have not shown that they understand what a good question is, or what the standards are. Or because they presume that they are the ones who should get to say what makes a question good or not.

>you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".

????? I said nothing of the sort.

>other than "we are great".

This, too, is your wording, not mine.

But, again. Show concrete examples in a suitable manner, or there is nothing to discuss.
by 0points | 2025-05-16 16:48:49+00:00
Would you care to offer some comments about their shortcomings? I'm a command-line toolings creator and are not familiar with your criticism.

I am using clap [1] for my rust projects, and I am using kong [2] for my golang projects. Both offer seemingly endless extensibility in order to handle every imaginable use-case.

1: https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/

2: https://github.com/alecthomas/kong?tab=readme-ov-file#introd...
by vunderba | 2025-05-16 16:49:21+00:00
> they will try to move users to weaker models compared to the best available

> you can't do what many of us do: have three subscriptions and use each for its best

I don't think has anything to do with whether or not AI is in the editor so much as it is the difference between a subscription (Cursor) vs. a BYOK approach (VS Codium + Cline, Zed, etc). Most BYOK plug-ins will let you set up multiple profiles against various providers so that you can choose the most optimal LLM for the given problem you're trying to solve.
by leephillips | 2025-05-16 16:49:36+00:00
“quite niche purposes”

I don’t understand this. Julia is a general-purpose language that I increasingly use to replace bash scripts. I’ve also happily used it for web scraping tasks¹, interactive web² projects³, generation of illustrations and animations, and, yes, scientific calculations. Aside from the language itself, which is fun to program in, its brilliant package system massively facilitates composing libraries into a solution.

1 https://lee-phillips.org/amazonJuliaBookRanks

2 https://www.admin-magazine.com/Archive/2025/85

3 https://lee-phillips.org/pluckit
by ijk | 2025-05-16 16:49:38+00:00
Students are typically young, and make up for their lack of experience with the energy to work longer. Not necessarily more productively--I've certainly seen people with very counter-productive intense study habits that didn't seem to help them much.

Long, sustained hours are more of a problem; in the US we routinely overwork doctors to the point of risking deadly error--in part because the standards of long hours during residencies were developed by William Stewart Halsted, a cocaine addict who worked 100+ hours per week.
by jerf | 2025-05-16 16:50:51+00:00
Prior to general travel for everyone being affordable, and broadcast media like television that can go everywhere, languages were affected by the same forces everywhere. So you'd get that effect pretty much everywhere in the world.

Even a lot of things that we think of as "the" version of a language are often effectively a particular dialect out of a complicated tapestry of local dialects being something that "everybody" has to learn because it is the language spoken by your rulers. It happened to "win" because the people speaking that dialect also won the local military conflicts and became the language of the court.
by kreetx | 2025-05-16 16:51:48+00:00
We might be coming from different backgrounds and hence not immediately understand each other, but, at least in Haskell if the types are precise in the sense that you can't construct invalid values, then using such types will make your programs more correct.

For example, if you want a program from a number to HTML, then if the HTML type is a syntax tree type of all valid HTML rather than wrapper around string, then filtering LLM output by that type will make it more correct than a string wrapper kind of type (as with the latter, any program generated by the LLM which returns a string and wraps it into HTML will do).

The actual use cases might not go as extreme as the above, but the idea is that the "tighter" your type is, the better it is on pruning LLM outputs from invalid programs.
by pico303 | 2025-05-16 16:51:54+00:00
It's so bad with my work laptop that I find myself doing work on my personal laptop and git patching it on my work laptop.

Also doesn't help that because I don't feel comfortable with all the monitoring software on my work laptop, I won't use the services I personally pay for with my work browser because I don't want the IT department scraping my personal passwords.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-05-16 16:51:57+00:00
> Tariffs were spontaneously mentioned by nearly three-quarters of consumers, up from almost 60% in April

Well, given the wall-to-wall coverage of these things, that's not surprising. But: were these consumers subsequently asked how good they felt about tariffs eliminating their income taxes? If not, I'm sure the offending pollster-and/or-media-outlet will be prosecuted for encouraging wrongthink shortly...
by deburo | 2025-05-16 16:52:51+00:00
The timers' typography is absurd. Material Design was already too space-inefficient to my taste, but this one overdoes its predecessor. The worst of it all is that this is clearly a mobile design system and yet desktops, laptops & ipads must suffer for it since the styles don't adjust much to the amount of space you have on screen.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/B4hgs-2YHv1TDxMu3VSGcx9YMs...
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-16 16:52:56+00:00
I was a big advocate of adding error codes. I don't remember specifically the timeline, but we had so much stuff to do for 1.0, it doesn't surprise me that it got pushed back a bit.

At the time, I was thinking about the big old chunky Visual Basic manuals I used to own, and how useful those were.

EDIT: okay, so I'm doing some digging: error codes were added before 1.0... https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/0e80dbe59ea986ea53c...

> This implements the minimal scaffolding that allows mapping diagnostic messages to alpha-numeric codes, which could improve the searchability of errors. In addition, there's a new compiler option, `--explain {code}` which takes an error code and prints out a somewhat detailed explanation of the error.

committed on Jul 10, 2014

I think I've figured out what happened here: the particular error that was chosen didn't have a code until 1.2. The example from this commit does show a code on Rust 1.0.0: https://godbolt.org/z/14hcb3ETG
by coolspot | 2025-05-16 16:53:32+00:00
Maybe for instant green card you have to be extraordinary, but for regular employment-based immigration you don’t have to be.

The path is H1-B -> Green Card -> US citizen (I have done it), and to get H1-B your potential employer gotta post that $60-80k/year job and show that there were no qualifying US applicants for it.