MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mpweiher | 2025-05-10 09:02:43+00:00
This is not EU R&D budget. This is a small delta, extra funding specifically for attracting US scientists who are looking to move. Comparing this to the total expenditure by the US federal government seems...odd.

I asked ChatGPT:

"Combining both EU-level and national R&D expenditures, the total R&D spending across the EU in 2023 was approximately €505 billion." But that appears to be total, both government and industry.

Spending by national government was apparently around € 123 billion. In addition, the EU spent ~ € 13 billion a year. So a total of € 136 billion in government spending.

https://www.eureporter.co/economy/eurostat-economy/2024/08/0...

https://eufunds.me/what-is-the-budget-of-horizon-europe/
by gingerBill | 2025-05-10 09:03:59+00:00
It's not. However it is safer than C by default due to things like bounds-checking on arrays, slices (ptr+len), tagged unions, distinct typing for many things, an actual enum type, numerous checks for things like missing switch cases, and my more.

It's not trying to be memory safe, but rather try and catch many common mistakes that C does not catch easily.

As for use-after-free, I'd argue that is more of a problem with the memory allocation strategy in a language like C or Odin. And a change to something like an Arena like memory allocation strategy or something else reduces issues like that by a hell of a lot. `malloc`/`free` like approaches to memory allocation make use-after-free a lot more common because it making you micromanage allocations on a per-value level rather than on a per-shared-lifetime level. It's rare a single value has a unique lifetime, and I'd argue never in many projects.
by WalterGR | 2025-05-10 09:04:39+00:00
This almost certainly just shows its usual orbit. I've had no luck finding a source of real-time info.

The European Space Agency (ESA) publishes occasional updates here: https://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2025/05/07/reentry-predi... . The most recent one is from about 1h20m ago:

"10 May 09:56 CEST. As the descent craft was not spotted by radar over Germany at the expected 07:32 UTC / 09:32 CEST pass, it is most likely that the reentry has already occurred."

This was published about 20 minutes ago, but basically just quotes ESA:

"Kosmos-482: Out-of-control Russian spacecraft probably just fell to Earth, experts say" https://www.independent.co.uk/space/kosmos-482-russian-space...
by rapnie | 2025-05-10 09:05:00+00:00
For anyone working remotely in tech, even when they watched this video long ago, it is highly worthwhile to rewatch this brilliant and inspiring talk by Bret Victor. Imho my of the most noteworthy talks ever. When doing so take special note to how Bret continually challenges to the audience (us) and his urgent appeal to everyone to be open to consider new and fresh approaches that are crucial to solve the wicked problems of modern society.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-10 09:05:46+00:00
There's a limit to how "lean" a safe, low-level language can be. Rust is leaner and simpler than Swift but not by much, and pretty much all of its outward features are "load bearing" to a far greater extent than Swift's.

(People have tried to come up with simpler languages that still preserve safety and low-level power, like Austral - but that simplicity comes at the cost of existing intuition for most devs.)
by ascorbic | 2025-05-10 09:07:58+00:00
It's quite misleading to refer to them as "escaping the horrible realities of Putin's regime" like they were some kind of defectors, when according to your source they were all working as representatives of Russian labs, and most weren't based at CERN itself. It was the cooperation with the affiliated labs that was terminated. Russian citizens affiliated to non-Russian labs were allowed to stay.
by nurettin | 2025-05-10 09:08:14+00:00
Yes, protestantism is a sect, with a history of conflict with catholicism. Catholics have a huge body of literature and claim stories about tens of thousands of saints and holy/blessed people (you could get lost in those stories for years and never see the end of it, quite beautiful.) whereas the default protestant position is to be skeptical due to the self serving nature of the catholic church.

Pope Leo is obviously not going to represent any american interests, just like the earlier popes not representing german and argentinian interests as that would be blatant and absurd.
by darkhorse13 | 2025-05-10 09:10:27+00:00
Slightly unrelated maybe, but I'm really hoping that the https://once.com model would take off. That would be the change I would want to see in the software world. It's more simpler to understand than governance, public interest, etc. Just pay once and own the software. I really don't think software is that deep or has many philosophical implications.
by astrange | 2025-05-10 09:13:52+00:00
> And reference counting is exactly the right kind of GC for UIs because there are no pauses.

That's not the reason it uses reference counting. The overhead of scanning memory is too high, the overhead of precisely scanning it (avoiding false-positive pointers) is higher, and the entire concept of GC assumes memory can be read quickly which isn't true in the presence of swap.

That said, precise GC means you can have compaction, which can potentially be good for swap.
by gingerBill | 2025-05-10 09:15:06+00:00
I wouldn't like RAII, and why I didn't add it to Odin. It's not a feature C programmers want. And you've just agreed that C don't want ctors/dtors, which is necessary for RAII to work... ctors/dtors are bad for their own reasons (mainly because you cannot handle error cases except through exceptions, which many people disable too).
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-10 09:16:15+00:00
> Europe really needs to fix the funding issue and language fragmentation.

Indeed: German is the most common first language of the EU, and French is the second-most common first language of the EU. [1] Let's from now on decide that all EU citizens have to speak one of these two languages. Language fragmentation problem solved. :-)

Or are you one of the nerds who lobbies for the idea that everybody should speak Esperanto.

Concerning the idea that "everybody in the EU should speak English": since UK left the EU, there exists no EU country anymore in which English is the only official language: only in Ireland and Malta, English is one of the official languages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...
by seif_madc | 2025-05-10 09:16:30+00:00
Software is built by humans, for humans, and we should feel that, see that, when we are using it, and even when we are not using it, i mean the resposibility developers should take writing those lines of code, the moral side of things, the long term consequeces of their blind choices, genius evil algorithms, and yes developers and not managers or those people at "the top", because at the end of the day, the developer is the one giving it all to make that peace of software works, i told myself many times before that we have laready reached an era where software is built by machines for humans, long before A.I and vibe coding .
by beagle3 | 2025-05-10 09:20:05+00:00
I think Nim is much more of a pascal successor than Go ; It retains some of the syntax and feel, although it uses Python style indentation instead of begin/end.

It is by no means pascal-simple - although the subset used by 95% of programs is.

It does have everything you need including macros, unsafe access, minimal OO but these are almost exclusively used by library developers.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-05-10 09:20:05+00:00
I picked up Barbarians at the Gate the other year, but put it down when I realized all it was doing was making me fantasize about all the useless toys I could buy myself if I was really rich. A good book to read if you want to dream about being an avaricious plutocrat.

Personally I'd like to see more rich people follow the Bill Gates model of giving almost all of it away.
by atemerev | 2025-05-10 09:20:11+00:00
Russia was not a member of CERN, so most Russian physicists worked there on (fake-ish, for documents only) exchange programs with JINR Russia. Most of them were living in France or Switzerland for many years. Given the opportunity, every single one of them would have changed the affiliation, but CERN only agreed to employ them this way (unless they find an actual academic position in an actual European university on a short notice, which is next to impossible). Okay, maybe there were a few actual JINR employees, but that what screening is for.

I am a Russian scientist too (not CERN affiliated). I live in a European country since 2005. I donated many thousands dollars to Ukrainian causes, and brought hundreds of thousands of value with donations I organized. Now, my bank account is blocked just for the reason of my nationality, and my residence permit is not being renewed. Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs continue managing shadow fleets from European countries, and exchange millions of dollars freely (e.g. with Raiffeisen bank), and everybody knows that (I am not allowed, of course, to open any bank account, neither in Raiffeisen, not anywhere else in Europe). And many EU countries still pay hundreds of millions for Russian natural gas, and this money directly finance Russian military power.

I personally know Ukrainian scientists who lost their temporary protection permits too. Some of them moved back to war-thorn Ukraine, others went to other countries to try their luck there.

You can say "well, tough luck". But tough luck will be for many other people. Some Americans are now wondering why they are being turned away, asking "but we never voted for him!" And they weren't indeed. Judging people by their nationality is not good for everyone involved.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-05-10 09:23:12+00:00
But isn't that out of sync with reality? If I have to maintain software and put in more hours but only get paid once, I have to grow and grow and grow to keep getting paid. I'm actually developing a screen recording app for macos that's gonna be paid once, but will only have updates for a year. You can use it until apple changes APIs and whatever, but otherwise it wouldn't be a sustainable business model for me.

I think before we talk about being only paid once for software (which isn't a finished product like a brick anyway) we need to figure that out.
by moltopoco | 2025-05-10 09:23:57+00:00
Stuck in what way? It would have been easy for Apple to make an "Objective-C without the C", where it's still using message passing and the Foundation libraries, but without header files, raw pointers, and all the @messy @syntax. Add little goodies like auto-stringification of enums and so on. I think that kind of superficial cleanup would have been enough to modernize the language. They could have spent the rest of all the time that Swift has consumed on better dev tooling.
by anakin87 | 2025-05-10 09:26:34+00:00
I experimented with GRPO lately, since I am fascinated by models learning from prompts and rewards - no example answers needed like in Supervised Fine-Tuning.

After the DeepSeek boom, everyone is trying GRPO with GSM8K or the Countdown Game, but I wanted a different challenge.

So I opted for teaching a model to create a schedule from a list of events and priorities.

Choosing an original problem forced me to think about the problem setting, generate data, choose the base model, design reward functions, and run multiple rounds of training, hoping that my model would learn something.

A fun and rewarding experience :-)

I learned a lot of things, that I want to share with you.

---

- Blog post: https://huggingface.co/blog/anakin87/qwen-scheduler-grpo

- Code: https://github.com/anakin87/qwen-scheduler-grpo

- Hugging Face collection (dataset and model): https://huggingface.co/collections/anakin87/qwen-scheduler-g...

---

Some hot takes from my experiment

- GRPO is cool for verifiable tasks, but is more about eliciting desired behaviors from the trained model than teaching completely new stuff to it. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13837

- Choosing the right base model (and size) matters.

- "Aha moment" might be over-hyped. https://oatllm.notion.site/oat-zero

- Reward functions design is crucial. If your rewards are not robust, you might experience reward hacking (as it happened to me).

- Unsloth is great for saving GPU, but beware of bugs.
by dns_snek | 2025-05-10 09:27:21+00:00
> I think if I drank more often, my desire for it would not change.

I think that's a dangerous assumption, when you first start using any drug (or any other addictive activity), you can absolutely quit any time you want. But if you keep doing it with that mindset then you'll almost certainly get addicted eventually. The worst part is that you don't even realize that it's happening, it really sneaks up on you.

But the only serious addiction I've ever had (and quit) was nicotine so YMMV with alcohol.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-10 09:29:29+00:00
Also, the authot mention sharing power from his newly purchased generator but doesn't seem to take account of mutualization of resources and solidarity.

Peopke can talk in a neighbprhiod and plan accordingly. Not everyone need a power generator, more than one family can cook from the same gas stove, etc etc

Even when total devastation happen, the radius tend to be limited and unless you live in a small island you can always find food/water and medical supply within a day of walking/cycling from the epicenter if no one is injured. When the DANA brought devastation in an area around Valencia in Spain, people would tak their bike from the main city to bring essential medical supplies to people living in places that weren't drivable too. So sure I always keep several liters of water and a few days worth of non perishable food at home, as well as a portable gas stove and a water filter I bought for hiking trips, but I would have no issue relocating me and my family for a while if needed. Adults and teenagers can easily carry 50kg worth of stuff with something as simple as a bicycle they push by hand, like people in congo do with much more capable chukudus. Electricity would be the least of my concerns.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-10 09:30:13+00:00
The article seems to be in Spanish?

Anyway, I think this is smart. I live in Berlin and I noticed a bit of an uptick in the amount of US people coming this way lately. The politics in the US might have something to do with that. There's definitely an interest for people to leave there.

Also, the US has been leaning a lot on foreigners to keep its research departments going for decades now. Indians, Chinese, and indeed Europeans. If you look at Silicon Valley, there are a lot of immigrants running companies there. With all the madness around immigration in the US, it has become a bit less attractive as a country to move to. I think this is as much about making the EU a more attractive place to that group of people than it is about luring actual US citizens this way.

The EU has its own issues on immigration. But it's there and there are a lot of opportunities here. I noticed a sharp uptick in Indian job applications recently. There's a lot of talk about money. But most academics aren't on the huge fees you would need to sustain yourself in places with extremely high cost of living on the East and West coast.

Academics don't earn a lot in Europe. I used to be one. But you can live well on what you earn nevertheless.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-10 09:31:26+00:00
“Web server” is a pretty big use case though.

But I agree that graphics is often overlooked in std libs. However that’s a bit of a different beast. Std libs typically deal with what the OS provides. Graphics is its own world so to speak.

As for Wasm: first, that’s a runtime issue and not a language issue. I think GC is on the roadmap for Wasm. Second, Go and C# obviously predate Wasm.

In the end, not every language should be concerned with every use case. The bigger question is whether it provides a std lib for the category of programs it targets.

To take a specific example: JS isn’t great at efficiently and conveniently generating dynamic HTML. You can go far without (or minimal) dependencies and some clever patterns. But a lot of pain and work hours would have been saved if it had something that people want to use out of the box.
by zvorygin | 2025-05-10 09:31:30+00:00
The Wikipedia article you link states:

> It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951

Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.

Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?
by pqtyw | 2025-05-10 09:31:40+00:00
*that survived

There were likely many (e.g. maybe even 100s) times more documents written that didn't. Considering the survival rates of books (so if we entirely ignore various non-litterar documents) written in the Roman Empire during its more stable periods that wouldn't be far fetched at all.

e.g. we know that Carthage or other Phoenicians cities, Etruscans etc. were highly literate, the fact that effectively all written content from those civilizations was destroyed or lost doesn't change that much.

There was effectively a bottleneck in early medieval Europe if a given text survived until the Carolingian period or 900-1000 AD the likelihood of it surviving was reasonably high.
by ristomatti | 2025-05-10 09:32:10+00:00
Late to comment but this is awesome! I've been a long time user if hckrnews.com. What I'd like to see is it's option to open the links in HackerWeb. It makes reading the discussions much easier on mobile/tablet in my opinion. Another feature request would be font size adjustment. Two columns look great on a tablet but the font size is slightly too small. Keep up the great work!
by pjmlp | 2025-05-10 09:32:27+00:00
Does Modula-2 count?

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.1.0/gm2/

Or Ada,

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.1.0/gnat_ugn

Maybe C++, given that the three main C compilers are written in it?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/the-great-c-runtime-c...

https://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2013/05/moving-to-c.htm...

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/clang/
by perihelions | 2025-05-10 09:32:38+00:00
I think that the US strongly outperforms the EU by that metric too,

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246/cross-national-compariso... ("Cross-National Comparisons of R&D Performance" (2024))

In the NSF's specific definition, the US greatly outspends the EU even normalizing by GDP—3.46% of GDP in the USA, against 2.16% in the EU-27.

(Notably, China also recently surpassed the EU, at 2.43%).
by ak_111 | 2025-05-10 09:33:13+00:00
Dependency and build management is a fascinating and still unsolved problem in software engineering (in some sense it is the central problem).

I am wondering if there is a good modern reference that provides a conceptual overview or comparative study of the various techniques that have been attempted.

It is a hard subject to define as it cuts through several layers of the stack (all the way down to the compiler system interface layer), and most book focus on one language or build technology rather than providing a more conceptual treatment of the techniques used.
by darkhorse13 | 2025-05-10 09:33:33+00:00
No I totally hear you, I don't even practice what I preach because I have a subscription-based side-project: https://forms.md

I guess I would like to see someone make the Once model work to great success. I don't know how you would deal with updates and stuff, but that's what I meant. One "simple" solution is just charging the LTV (or something that's close to it) as the one-time price.
by jampekka | 2025-05-10 09:34:23+00:00
There are very few cultures with 0 tolerance for e.g. nicotine or especially caffeine.

I'm not sure new drugs are even needed. There are plenty of existing drugs, and the vast majority are less harmful than alcohol. They would of course need legal and cultural regulation. There are also some ideas for new recreational substances like David Nutt's "synthetic alcohol".
by metalman | 2025-05-10 09:35:14+00:00
As a fairly hard core enviromentalist, and long term dedicated climate/ weather junky, who was born and raised in a socialy aware and progresive family, I cant quite agree with the title, and bunch like it floating around like it tight now. The basic fact is that humans primary extraction of raw materials is now in the,(say it out load, for the thump) hundreds of billions of tons per anum range, this represents everything we do, and the unstopable momentum of our species to get some stuff, the stuff per capita that we are getting, keeps going up, and the population keeps going up, and any attempt to limit the other 8~9 billion people from getting stuff, will make them very very angry....it makes them mad, makes me mad. So this looks like an attemp to use populist anger at the elites, to squeeze the poor.
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-10 09:35:40+00:00
Checking https://issues.chromium.org/issues/340836884, I’m mildly surprised to find the report just under a year old, with no attention at all (bar a me-too comment after four months), despite having been filed with priority P1, which I understand is supposed to mean “aim to fix it within 30 days”. If it continues to get no attention, I’m curious if it’ll get bumped automatically in five days’ time when it hits one year, given that they do something like that with P2 and P3 bugs, shifting status to Available or something, can’t quite remember.

I say only “mildly”, because my experience on Chromium bugs (ones I’ve filed myself, or ones I’ve encountered that others have filed) has never been very good. I’ve found Firefox much better about fixing bugs.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-10 09:36:06+00:00
You're giving Richard Wolff as an example of someone who'll fix the problem? Listen to him for 5 minutes, he is very much a person that "would rather die than correct the mistakes". He is just on the other side of the argument.

His position can be summarized in that he is an extremist advocate of Marxism and the fact that that puts one person in control (ie. dictatorship) he describes as a positive. And he won't discuss ... see point 3.

Of course, that is not what he generally discusses, that part of his beliefs (but I'll credit him with at least not lying about it, or "failing to understand" that part). He is an expert economist and will point out every historical moral flaw in international relations in all of history AND blame it on capitalism. First, the criticism "sure, this was abuse, exploitation, but at the end of the exploitation everyone was much better off than at the beginning of it" is a point you can make about nearly every argument he makes (because he only complains about western influences which got us to our current world).

Second, he's selectively outraged. For example the Soviets, Chinese and especially Ottomans are, to put it mildly, a LOT worse than the states he complains about. In reality, exploitation is the norm in history, not the exception, but listening to Richard Wolff you will get the opposite impression.

Third, the Western societies that he complains did the exploitation are not exactly capitalist societies. They were dictatorships, in the best case mercantile societies. Capitalism had influence in these societies, but the case he makes, that capitalism controlled these societies is ridiculous.

And, of course, that the solution he advocates would take us back to authoritarian dictatorships, and it seems there is a lot of historical proof that this, to put it mildly, that won't end exploitation, is never discussed.

AND he's dishonest. There's no other word. He's making "American empire has fallen" announcements since the 90s.

Add to that that you can't listen to him for 1 minute without cringing. But hey, he's a professor, so I guess that's par for the course.