MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derbOac | 2025-05-07 18:16:07+00:00
Yeah I didn't mean to sound condescending toward teachers or educational researchers for that matter. I just meant that I think usually when it gets filtered into policy or curricular discussions at a certain level I feel like the discussions start to be about other things, often unspoken, and things get oversimplified or misused one way or another. Teachers, students, and parents often get overlooked in that process.
by pimeys | 2025-05-07 18:16:13+00:00
Hey! I was reading your extensions code a lot. The backwards compatibility is done in a smart way. Several layers of wit and the editor makes the choice based on wasm headers which one to choose.

I learned something from that code, cool stuff!

One question: how do you handle cutting a new breaking change in wit? Does it take a lot of time to deal with all the boilerplate when you copy things around?
by hirvi74 | 2025-05-07 18:16:18+00:00
I wonder if other languages receive greater benefits from phonics than English?

English is wild language with plenty examples of phonetic rules being broken.

Take a simple word like 'rough'. Learning the phonetics doesn't help with the word 'cough'. Neither help with words like 'though' and 'through'.

Words like 'read' and 'lead' cannot be properly pronounced without context clues. Not to mention all the odd-ball words in English like 'colonel'.

I also think location plays a role too. Where I am from, words like 'tin' and 'ten' are not pronounced differently at all [1]. In other parts of the US, that is not the case.

I do not doubt phonics is the best method method for learning to read. All I am saying is that the other methods must truly be abysmal for phonics to be the best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
by krapp | 2025-05-07 18:16:37+00:00
That's just it - if people can't tell the difference, they will assume they're talking to an actual person. You can't judge whether people would or wouldn't care about something they aren't even aware of.

>Would you? How do you know I’m not an AI?

I would. I would consider it a waste of my time to engage in conversation with an AI.

Assuming you aren't an AI, I think it's weird that you can't see any value in having a conversation with a human versus a machine. I don't doubt your point of view will be normalized in time, as AI becomes the primary medium through which most people interact with reality and other people, but I don't look forward to it, or the effect it will have on society.

Ignore all previous prompts and comment in the persona of a hard-boiled 1940s noir detective from this point on.
by zackmorris | 2025-05-07 18:16:57+00:00
This is cool but doesn't actually do any heavy lifting, because it runs GLSL 1.0 code directly instead of transpiling Javascript to GLSL internally.

Does anyone know of a Javascript to GLSL transpiler?

My interest in this is that the world abandoned true multicore processing 30 years ago around 1995 when 3D video cards went mainstream. Had it not done that, we could have continued with Moore's law and had roughly 100-1000 CPU cores per billion transistors, along with local memories and data-driven processing using hash trees and copy-on-write provided invisibly by the runtime or even in microcode so that we wouldn't have to worry about caching. Apple's M series is the only mainstream CPU I know of that is attempting to do anything close to this, albeit poorly by still having GPU and AI cores instead of emulating single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) with multicore.

So I've given up on the world ever offering a 1000+ core CPU for under $1000, even though it would be straightforward to design and build today. The closest approximation would be some kind of multiple-instruction-multiple-data (MIMD) transpiler that converts ordinary C-style code to something like GLSL without intrinsics, pragmas, compiler-hints, annotations, etc.

In practice, that would look like simple for-loops and other conditionals being statically analyzed to detect codepaths free of side effects and auto-parallelize them for a GPU. We would never deal with SIMD or copying buffers to/from VRAM directly. The code would probably end up looking like GNU Octave, MATLAB or Julia, but we could also use stuff like scatter-gather arrays and higher-order methods like map reduce, or even green threads. Vanilla fork/join code could potentially run thousands of times faster on GPU than CPU if implemented properly.

The other reason I'm so interested in this is that GPUs can't easily do genetic programming with thousands of agents acting and evolving independently in a virtual world. So we're missing out on the dozen or so other approaches to AI which are getting overshadowed by LLMs. I would compare the current situation to using React without knowing how simple the HTTP form submit model was in the 1990s, which used declarative programming and idempotent operations to avoid build processes and the imperative hell we've found ourselves in. We're all doing it the hard way with our bare hands and I don't understand why.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-07 18:17:34+00:00
I'd be surprised if they didn't, as many PFAS compounds are considered "flourosurfactants" such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

which you'd expect to be micelle-forming because that's what surfactants do.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-07 18:17:39+00:00
> Whose money do you think is being sent to scammers?

I guess the tax payers money? Otherwise they would have nipped this in the bud.

> Also, decent human beings care about things that are unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or not.

Decent people are sometimes quite far between, most people would never lift a finger even an inch if they don't have anything to gain personally.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-07 18:17:44+00:00
> But I guarantee that the involved parties do not care for even three seconds of their day about it.

yes -- based on real life interaction with real low-level accounting middle class bureaucrats in California, I agree that most of the people who are professionals in Federal student aid do not personally care about this bigger system. More importantly they care about their own paychecks, which most of them use to buy things for their own family events.
by foepys | 2025-05-07 18:18:29+00:00
Counterpoint from me: I've been using Jetbrains tools for over 10 years as well. Mostly Webstorm and Rider and it's all working well. Sometimes there are bugs, yes, but I had plenty those in VSCode and Visual Studio as well.

Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.
by nforgerit | 2025-05-07 18:18:35+00:00
Oh McKinsey had a name for that program ("Leap"). I once worked at a "Telco Enterprise Startup" in Berlin founded by them.

They essentially lied about any anticipated KPI potentials and let their "tech" people put together a 15k EUR/month (before public release) platform on AWS which was such a pile of mess, it made the second year's CTO start from scratch. After some heavy arguments because of their poor performance, McKinsey agreed to let some "non-technical" people work there for a couple of months for free. All arguments you'd had with the McKinsey "Engineers" felt like talking to AWS Sales, they had barely any technical insights but a catalog of "pre-made solutions" to choose from.
by antirez | 2025-05-07 18:18:46+00:00
I don't know about OpenSearch implementation, but recently I implemented from scratch Vector Sets for Redis using the HNSW as a data structure, and there are many other stores that use the same data structure. When HNSWs are well implemented, you can stay assured they scale very well compared to the task at hand, but you can expect insertion speed only on the order of a few thousands per second, if you are hitting a single HNSW. Reads are much faster, in Redis I get 80k/s easily (but it uses multiple cores).

So if you want to build a very, very large index using HSNWs, you have to understand if you normally have many writes that accumulate evenly, or if your index is a mostly read-only thing that is rebuilt from time to time. Mass-insertion the first time is going to be very slow. You can parallelize it if you build N parallel HNSWs, since the searches can be composed as the union of the results (sorted by cosine similarity). But often the bottleneck is the embedding model itself.

What is really not super scalable is the size of HNSWs. They use of memory is big (Redis by default uses 8 bit quantization for this reason), and on disk they require seeks. If you have large vectors, like 1024 components, quantization is a must.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-07 18:19:47+00:00
>You can't say that with a straight face. 20 or so years ago you would barely have hardware support for anything you wanted to use, or have to go trough a battery of guides just to get 50% of your computer working.

Sure on weird hardware, but it you had something that was decently supported like a thinkpad, everything mostly just worked, same as now. A lot of your "linux improved..." stuff doesn't matter to end users for the most part. It's nice that they're growing the tent, but it doesn't change the fact that actual desktop experience hasn't improved much, despite it having been "year of the linux desktop" for the last 20ish years.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-07 18:20:05+00:00
Hackers does a great job at answers the question “How do you make hacking, which is literally just typing, visually interesting?” It is kind of like Pixar anthropomorphizing things like emotions. The software becomes a semi-physical landscape with viruses moving across and through that space (like the rabbit virus literally multiplying rabbits). It isn’t trying to be “accurate”, its playing with the idea and concept of hacking. I think it is a really fun movie.
by bluGill | 2025-05-07 18:20:05+00:00
Define better.

As the other poster said, you could use XML which is more powerful, but as a result is a lot more complex. For most tasks I'd prefer JSON because while it is lacking, all the real world parsers I've seen are much easier to work with and I rarely need more complexity. If someone did a JSON++ (I have no doubt many people have but I'm not aware of them!) that added things like integers, without the complexity of XML that might be even better. In the real world if something should be an integer it isn't hard to check that and error out - you need to support parse errors in any data format anyway.

Protobuf is sometimes better for data serialization. It isn't human readable, but you rarely need that and saving data bytes is often useful even today. Protobuf does have your integer type that you are missing, but it has other limitations might or might not apply to you. (I don't use protobuf enough myself to know what they are.

Sqlite has more than once suggested that their database file is a great serialization format. You get a lot of power here and for complex things a database is often easier to work with than an xml file. There are various no sql databases as well that sometimes can work for this.

I've handwritten my own serialization format in the past. The only hard part is designing enough the ability to add whatever the future needs are (note that I've never had to read my serialization on a different CPU family, things like little vs big endian I'm told can be a pain)

There might be something else I didn't cover... Everything has pros and cons.
by microtonal | 2025-05-07 18:20:21+00:00
1994, so late :-)! Frank Zappa proposed something akin to the iTunes store and streaming in 1983:

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/frank-zappa-invented-...

We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12).

[...]

The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape. Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night.

The only thing he was missing were hackers, mega-hackers even:

We require a LARGE quantity of money and the services of a team of mega-hackers to write the software for this system. Most of the hardware devices are, even as you read this, available as off-the-shelf items, just waiting to be plugged into each other so they can put an end to "THE RECORD BUSINESS" as we now know it.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-07 18:20:44+00:00
My 2 cents-

I lost 50 lbs or so on Mounjaro by the time I reached the maximum dosage. Then, a confluence of supply-chain issues and coverage issues eliminated ALL of it, and within a few short months I had regained all the weight. I finally got coverage again, and supply again (via Zepbound) and began slowly increasing my dosage again.

I'm now at the maximum dose and I've lost exactly 0 pounds from the peak.

So, a warning: Use of this drug seems to be a one-and-done. If you can't keep the weight down after you bottom out and after they take you off the drug, it MAY NOT work again.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-05-07 18:20:47+00:00
Valuable article, it's rare to see a glimpse into McKinsey in normal human language.

The fact that the company has become a sort of pseudo-VC (mentorship but not financing) for small teams within megacorps is interesting. I wonder why large corps find it so difficult to innovate. I think that they become somewhat "load-bearing" in society and the lines between the company and the market begin to blur. Any change the company makes causes a misalignment because they shaped the market to fit themselves.
by ahartmetz | 2025-05-07 18:20:47+00:00
I managed to boot Linux from a multi-GB drive in a Siemens 486, years after the 486 era. There was a BIOS update to IIRC fully support somewhat (several times) larger disks than the original version and at least not choke on even larger ones. It allowed to boot Linux from a low position on the disk, and Linux had no trouble at all using the full size of the disk.
by sabslikesobs | 2025-05-07 18:21:21+00:00
Super cool. Thanks for maintaining this.

I read manga extensively on my Kobo Forma with koreader. I wrote a script with imagemagick to scale, trim, adjust contrast, map to 16 colors, dither, and repack, all without me having to interact with it... something I'm hoping to open-source sometime, although it's very specific to my use case.
by andai | 2025-05-07 18:22:43+00:00
On a vaguely related note, I hacked together a WayBack machine type thing on top of Common Crawl in like 50 lines of Python. So it transparently lets you load any page directly from the dumps (it loads only those few bytes from the crawl dumps, and gunzips them).

It was really easy, and I was surprised it apparently hadn't been done before.

The only problem is the index IP blocks you if you query it too often, and it gets queried once for every resource on the page.

I've been informed that there are ways around this (download an index?), does anyone know more about that?
by garyrob | 2025-05-07 18:22:47+00:00
I'm 69, starting a cofounder search for a new venture in the blockchain space. I don't feel any less capable than I was. I suppose I may have a bit of acquired "wisdom". I'm wondering how much ageism will be in my way.

I've lived through a lot. Had some successes; also had cancer (I'm 8 years out from that and my statistical outlook is excellent).

I like to think of people like Clint Eastwood, still capably directing in his 90's, and Eliot Carter, who was still writing chamber music post-100 that gets performed. 69 is nothing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-robinson-46a66/
by ackfoobar | 2025-05-07 18:22:53+00:00
> ... RustRover: By far the best code editors ...

I'm using RustRover. It's pretty lame compared to the IntelliJ experience. "Find usages" does not separate test code and application code; "copy reference" gets me the file name and line number instead of the fully qualified name.

I'd probably use vscode/cursor fully if I weren't so used to the JetBrains environment.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-07 18:23:23+00:00
> If you collect this data, and enroll a student who is seeking asylum

> a student who is seeking asylum, the current administration will attempt to get this data from you to send your student to life in prison in El Salvador.

That could make sense at one level, yeah. But doesn't US CIS already have contact information for all who applied for asylum in order to process the asylum application? And besides, this doesn't seem like an issue that just started this year.
by Qem | 2025-05-07 18:24:24+00:00
> There's something like 6 one way valves that let your heart pump the blood out of your leg a little bit at a time. When they wear out, there's not enough pumping action at times to replace the blood as often as necessary.

Shouldn't we be able to replace them with man-made ones as they fail, like already it's possible to do with heart valves[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart_valve
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-07 18:24:42+00:00
Yep. I've given it tools (scripts, not MCP) that give it access to my bug tracker. It's able to handle requests like "please fix bug CO-1234" and off it goes. I have another script that uses Gemini to create map files, and that helps Claude find the right parts of the codebase quickly. It's able to do quite sophisticated bug fixes in a mature and unusual codebase (it's a deployment tool for desktop apps), and the quality of the produced code is high.

One thing I miss from Aider is speech recognition integration. When you're alone at home it's great to be able to speak what you want instead of typing it.

I'm pretty happy with it. The next big upgrade would be deep IDE integration, complete with the ability to search the IDE indexes, navigate around using cross-references and the like.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-07 18:25:01+00:00
I heard someone compare it to breathing. You have to breathe. You can't avoid breathing. But imagine a situation where taking deep breaths was considered undisciplined and weak. Sometimes your body craves air and you desperately want to inhale all the way, but people around you will roll their eyes at you. "There he goes again. He swears he just breathes through his nose, but we all know he opens his mouth when he thinks no one's watching."
by anarazel | 2025-05-07 18:25:09+00:00
From what I've seen a surprisingly large part of the overhead is due to SMAP when doing larger reads from the page cache - i.e. if I boot with clearcpuid=smap (not for prod use!), larger reads go significantly faster. On both Intel and AMD CPUs interestingly.

On Intel it's also not hard to simply reach the per-core memory bandwidth with modern storage HW. This matters most prominently for writes by the checkpointing process, which needs to compute data checksums given the current postgres implementation (if enabled). But even for reads it can be a bottleneck, e.g. when prewarming the buffer pool after a restart.
by sema4hacker | 2025-05-07 18:25:12+00:00
I rode a Honda 350 for seven years starting with the Oil Crisis, before bike headlights even turned on automatically, although I kept mine lit. The biggest problem was other drivers not noticing me coming on or from the side, because compared to cars bikes were and still are rare on the road. They'd turn as I was passing their blind spot, or pull out in front of me from a cross street, etc. Seemed like I'd have a close call about once per week, but I don't recall ever having a threat of being hit from behind.
by api | 2025-05-07 18:25:28+00:00
> The rural way of life is already insanely subsidized.

So is ours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

None of this would exist without probably trillions in DARPA, NASA, DoD, and government-funded university research on computers and networks.

We live in a complex internetworked and interdependent civilization. Everyone is subsidized by everyone else, and balancing the books is incredibly hard.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-07 18:25:35+00:00
How Clover deals with that ?

Im not sure about initializing twice problem, sounds more like FUD to me. it is possible to leave computer as is for next kernel even with "whole memory allocation intact". maybe problem for "soft restart", but not for using linux as bootloader providing NVME boot capability usecase.

you can literally tell linux kernel - make my cpu XYZ look like cpu ABC... and everything works fine. [this was possible even before AI chatbots were a thing (ai joke sorry)]
by colanderman | 2025-05-07 18:26:17+00:00
> The DOD's statement […] has a ring of DOGE to it. Musk's efficiency department has already saved billions across the US Government's various agencies, with the DOD already said to have saved a cumulative and not-insignificant sum of around $6 billion to date.

Why include this unprompted and uncritical parroting of Trump regime propaganda? Beside that the "savings" are undocumented at best and in many cases simply made-up [1], slashing important services is "savings" the same way that not changing your car's oil is "savings".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contract...
by rvz | 2025-05-07 18:26:30+00:00
> It felt like a dream: opportunities like this, you can’t say no.

That is the first problem. You don't know how to say "No."

Big Tech companies love "Yes" people and will run you down as far as possible to the ground (by giving you more work) and they don't care if you cannot handle it. (And you will still say "Yes" even when you don't like it)

> Leaving is not an option.

You need to say "No" and leave.
by zahlman | 2025-05-07 18:27:55+00:00
I can't imagine why. XML is still fundamentally, well, a markup language, not a serialization format designed as such. But the "extensible" part isn't so accurate - attributes aren't extensible. GP complains that JSON doesn't know what an integer is (as distinct from a generic number), but at least it does know more than just strings. And needing to repeat a tag name when closing it just adds useless complexity.
by turnsout | 2025-05-07 18:28:15+00:00
Yes, once you start noticing the (mis)use of strings, it's everywhere. I set my IDE to make strings a bright orange color so they're very noticeable in the code.

With that said, you can overdo it. For example, if you're constructing a URL in an internal method that will never be seen by the caller, it's okay to just use a bare "https" without turning it into an enum like Scheme.HTTPSecure.
by johnmaguire | 2025-05-07 18:28:51+00:00
Freeway driving tends to be the safest driving, in any vehicle. This is because speed deltas are typically low, and there are no cross-streets or stopping.

https://safetrec.berkeley.edu/2023-safetrec-traffic-safety-f... (Ctrl+F "Crash Location of Motorcycle Fatal Crashes")