MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-05-21 19:46:36+00:00
I wish I knew who were the anonymous authors of DoD "IRONMAN" (January 1977), especially who has written the paragraph "7.2.F. (7F.) FORMAL PARAMETER CLASSES".

"IRONMAN" has introduced a very important innovation in programming languages, which has been inherited by Ada and by its derivatives, e.g. VHDL (the innovation is that formal parameters may have 3 kinds of behaviors, "in", "out" and "in out", and that the parameter behavior must be specified, but not its implementation mechanism, like in older programming languages).

Unfortunately this innovation has remained largely unknown for the authors of most more recent programming languages, which are defective because of that.

If Bjarne Stroustrup had bothered to read carefully the Ada specification before conceiving "C with Classes", he might have understood the implication of the "IRONMAN" parameter classes for languages with constructors and destructors, like C++, which could have avoided many decades of pain for the C++ users. In a language with the "IRONMAN" parameter classes, constructors can be ordinary functions and there is no need for many features that complicate C++, like distinct copy constructors and assignment operators, or "move" semantics. Moreover, the performance problems that have plagued C++ before 2011, due to the creation of unnecessary temporaries, would have been avoided since the beginning.

It is likely that the authors of "IRONMAN" did not fully understand the consequences of their innovation, but they had proposed it only in order to make the new DoD language more similar to Jovial, which was a programming language used in several DoD projects at that time. Jovial had such formal parameter classes, but their meaning was slightly different than in "IRONMAN" and in the later Ada, enough to make them much less useful.

Before "IRONMAN", the earlier DoD requirements were to be able to specify whether the parameters are passed by value or by reference, which is an extremely wrong requirement. It is the same mistake made by C and by its derivatives, including recent derivatives, like Rust.

How the parameters are passed must be decided by the compiler, not by the programmer. For the programmer it does not matter whether a parameter is passed by value or by reference, when the passing of the parameters is implemented correctly (e.g. an in-out parameter that is passed by value is copied from the caller to the function and then back when the function returns, if that is necessary; frequently this is not necessary, e.g. if the parameter is located in a register; if the in-out parameter is so big that copying would be slow, the compiler decides to pass it by reference; in C and its derivatives, both out and in-out parameters must be passed by reference, even when that is the wrong choice; moreover, the compiler cannot flag as an error the reading of an out parameter prior to its first writing).
by godelski | 2025-05-21 19:47:43+00:00
I agree making ISOs is too cumbersome now. But I think the install is 90% there. Realistically hiding options under an advanced menu would make it no different than when you first get a windows or Mac.

Fwiw, you can get it preinstalled on System 76, makers of Pop. I'm a bit surprised Framework doesn't do it. But this seems easy to expand

**

Maybe I or someone else can help out. What's your distro, GPU, Linux kernel, and driver? Sometimes that interplay can create weird mismatches but I have rarely experienced them in the last 5 years (but extremely common prior to that!). Pop and EndeavourOS specifically target NVIDIA GPUs and can be the easiest "fix". Pop being more Ubuntu like and EndeavourOS being more Archy. Being power user I'd suggest the latter as it has a lot less bloat. Fwiw I daily drive EndeavourOS with a 4080S (previously 3080Ti) without too many problems. Only getting HDR at 60fps when trying to use my TV as a display. Other then that two issues where a kernel driver mismatch happened, solved by a rollback and avoidable by using stable releases.

I'm not much of a gamer but will play some AAA and a handful of indie games. Occasional issues like Steam not loading the GUI (right click menu bar and directly open library fixes), and occasionally sync issues because VPN, or minor like needing to launch a game twice. But FWIW, past 3 years I've never needed to touch proton. I'm really hoping SteamOS gets a broader release soon. I'm not sure if I can help much here but I do know graphics cards which might help?

I'll definitely agree UI/UX in many apps needs major improvements. I've seen a trend in the right direction though. Alongside the same improvements in OS. We need people to realize that your backend doesn't matter if people can't use it. Design is hard. The magic is the interaction between awesome backend and awesome design. I think this philosophy is growing. Hopefully. Momentum appears to be building
by joshstrange | 2025-05-21 19:47:53+00:00
I am using his track record, most people seem to only be looking at his earlier work.

Imagine I told you I had a top tier developer, they built this amazing system but in the last 5-10 years their ideas have not panned out and been actively harmful/misguided. Does that sound like someone you want to hire? Yes, they did amazing things in the past but recent history tells a different story.

It might be one thing if Ive left Apple and started turning out just amazing products, but that has not been the case.
by jotjotzzz | 2025-05-21 19:48:44+00:00
What you perceive as noise is multi-dimensional data that appears chaotic from your perspective. It's possible that we are living in multi-layered "simulations" created by [..]. There may not be such a thing as entropy or a resistance to it, since that entity is likely consciousness itself. Consciousness is essential for both creating and interpreting information. We are part consciousness (at least some of us, some are just pure data/information, they are like NPCs or 'background people' as Dolores Cannon calls them).
by Havoc | 2025-05-21 19:48:48+00:00
>pay for itself within N years

The total outlay in that calc is affected by how big of a system you need though.

If you've got no obviously inefficient gear then yes you just put in a system of whatever size is needed.

If you have easy wins on the consumption side then you do that first.

Silly example but say you could eliminate half your consumption with a once off $100 spend then you do that. You don't pay through your nose for an system twice the size just because of ""free"" power later.

Where that cutoff point lies will require calculation, but chances are old enterprise racks are on the wrong side of it.
by fsflover | 2025-05-21 19:49:31+00:00
> You will need to cite your sources that Apple is going the same way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...

https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...

> They don’t seem to make money from your data

It's changing:

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/19/apple-now-directly-sell...

And finally:

Apple's Software Quality Crisis (eliseomartelli.it)

1196 points by ajdude 79 days ago | 1213 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-21 19:49:56+00:00
I see a number of comments here misunderstanding the power of this laser. Laser facilities like this one are designed for incredibly short pulses that are femtoseconds long, and total energy per pulse is typically on the order of tens of joules, roughly equivalent to a few seconds of your phone flashlight. They can’t destroy much of anything on human scales. They are made to do physics research, and there is absolutely no pathway from a 2 petawatt laser that delivers a few joules a minute to a 2 petawatt laser that hits full output power for a few seconds: that would be 10^16 times more energy, and of course that brief pulse would use more electricity than all the US uses in a year and completely destroy the University of Michigan in spectacular fashion (very roughly equivalent to a five megaton nuclear explosion.)

If you’re interested in the most energy per pulse, you want the “most energetic” laser, which is the NIF at LLNL. That’s about 2 megajoules per pulse or half a kilowatt hour. Definitely enough to kill a mosquito, but it doesn’t even register on the scale of Death Star style lasers from fiction.

And if you want the most destructive power, those are all military lasers. Which can absolutely destroy things science fiction style, but on a fairly small scale and with some important limitations.
by elicash | 2025-05-21 19:50:53+00:00
Yes, in the video on OpenAI's website, they reference a product that Altman is testing at home created by Ive.

No, we can't see it yet. And there's not much description, either. Just that it's the "coolest technology that the world will have ever seen."

Altman: "We have like magic intelligence in the cloud. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now, about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen. I would like reach down, I would get on my laptop, I'd open it up, I'd launch a web browser, I'd start typing, and I'd have to like explain that thing, and I would hit enter, and I would wait and I would get a response. And that it as the current limit of what a current laptop can do."

The above is very r/wheredidthesoda go but it hints at the product being ambient computing related.
by godelski | 2025-05-21 19:51:19+00:00
To be fair, I can't figure out how to use OSX. I'm constantly going down the wrong menu paths. Same when someone asks me to use Windows, and in a completely different manner.

My point is that it's not like there's an objectively good way to do this. That people just get used to doing things one way or another. And frankly, with Linux you can copy those same structures and that's what I mean by "skin". You really can make it feel a lot like Windows or OSX and that really reduces the dissonance.
by addaon | 2025-05-21 19:51:20+00:00
> Legitimate bugs in hardware is probably out of scope for compilers.

But that's exactly the point. The "bug" of RowHammer was that it occurred slightly on the "allowed" side of the envelope, at acceptably-low refresh rates. The "UB" of RowHammer and a hundred other observable effects is that, on the "disallowed" side of the envelope, the behavior is undefined. The system designer gets to choose at what probability they are on each side of the envelope, and the trade-offs are very much optimization opportunities.

Writing software in C that may exhibit undefined behavior is exactly this -- it's choosing, as a software engineer, to be on the far side of the specification envelope. In exchange, you get access to several powerful optimizations, some at the compiler level, and some at the career level (if you think that not needing to learn to use understand your language properly is at time optimization, at least).
by mulmen | 2025-05-21 19:51:38+00:00
I’m not sure I would say the exhaust is wasted just because it doesn’t go into the main combustion chamber. The exhaust of the turbo fuel pump on one Saturn V F-1 engine provides more thrust than an F-16 in afterburner.

The Raptor is the first operational Full Flow Staged Combustion rocket engine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle#Full...
by Lerc | 2025-05-21 19:52:10+00:00
I must admit reading the abstract made me think to myself that I should read the paper in skeptical mode.

Does this extend to being able to analytically determine which concepts are encodable in one embedding but not another? An embedding from a deft tiny stories LLM presumably cannot encode concepts about RNA replication.

Assuming that is true. If you can detect when you are trying to put a square peg into a round hole, does this mean you have the ability to remove square holes from a system?
by jampekka | 2025-05-21 19:52:16+00:00
The situation was similar to there being a gold ETF that just decides to remove the gold peg and start diluting the shares. Whether that's essentially stealing or not is a matter of terminology IMHO.

US for sure didn't do it out of goodness of their hearts even if it led to arguably better monetary system. And US did get lopsided benefits out of it. Consistently recieving more goods than you give out is a huge benefit.
by zahlman | 2025-05-21 19:52:17+00:00
Well, mass scales as the cube of radius, and we have 15 orders of magnitude to work with, so I guess it should be an object on the order of hundreds of meters in radius. But as noted, the duration of firing matters as well. Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054239, the actual laser can only vaporize much smaller things.
by blittle | 2025-05-21 19:53:20+00:00
I'm on the dev team that built this. Happy to answer any questions!

We essentially use web components as a templating language to dynamically generate a GraphQL query to Shopify. Then render the data as text nodes inside the web components. This is powerful because the components don't include shadow roots. So you can come with your own HTML and CSS.

Most web component libraries are opinionated about design, and give you many CSS custom properties or CSS parts to customize. We tried really hard to invert that, and instead give you the design control. Most of our web components just produce a text node, with no shadow root!

There's a few exceptions, like the cart for example, where it's easier to just have an out of the box component that does it all for you `<shopify-cart>`. Though...you can actually build the entire cart component with the lower level primitives!
by xnx | 2025-05-21 19:53:43+00:00
I agree. Until about 2005 it was code-on-device and run-on-device. The tools and languages were limited in absolute capabilities, but easy to understand and use. For about the past 20 years we've been in a total mess of code-on-device -> (nightmare of deployment complexity) -> run-on-cloud. We are finally entering the code-on-cloud and run-on-cloud stage.

I'm hoping this will allow domain experts to more easily create valuable tools instead of having to go through technicians with arcane knowledge of languages and deployment stacks.
by kedean | 2025-05-21 19:54:20+00:00
>3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.

If the things I'm posting could get feedback but don't, that tells me that the things I'm saying aren't really hitting with any of my friends. That's a valuable thing to know, whether or not you choose to act on it.

Facebook in the early years was for the most part exactly like what you are suggesting, but with likes, and I at least remember it being a pretty enjoyable place for a few years there (I joined at the very end of 2006).
by pshc | 2025-05-21 19:54:28+00:00
Use of server reconciliation makes me think client-side reconciliation would be tricky… how do you preserve smooth editor UX while applying server updates as they arrive?

For example, if your client-sent request to insert a character fails, do you just retry the request? What if an update arrived in the intervening time? (Edit: they acknowledge this case in the “Client-Side” section, the proposal is to rewind and replay, and a simpler proposal to block until the pending queue is flushed)

From a frontend vantage I feel like there may be a long tail of underspecified UI/UX edge cases, such that CRDT would be simpler overall. And how does the editor feel to use while riding the NYC subway where coverage is spotty?
by supermatt | 2025-05-21 19:54:38+00:00
You don’t know what you’re talking about.

I live in the northern part of Central Europe and have spent over a decade travelling through these countries. Ive worked with log and timber frame construction and have a solid understanding of traditional and modern building methods. I know how buildings are actually made, not just how they look on googles street view...

In Sweden around 80% of standing homes are wooden. About 90% of new single-family homes are timber construction. Gothenburg is an outlier because of 19th-century laws that limited wooden buildings to two storeys, which is why you get the Landshövdingehus with a brick base and wooden upper floors.

The Netherlands is western Europe, not northern or central. That’s basic geography...

Timber is the dominant material in residential construction across Sweden, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Denmark is more mixed, and Poland leans more towards masonry, but the south has a strong timber tradition, especially in the Tatra region.

And even in places like Germany or Denmark where it looks like brick, it's often just a clinker façade over a timber or frame structure. It’s aesthetic, not structural.

Honestly, it's laughable to compare the dense inner city to the massive volume of buildings outside it. You're looking at a fraction and pretending it's the whole. It’s just not serious.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-05-21 19:54:54+00:00
> If you’re wondering why we’re only implementing this on Windows right now, it’s because the purpose of this setting is to protect your Signal messages from Microsoft Recall.

To nitpick, that doesn't tell me why you're only implementing this now. That tells me why it's more important now, but it doesn't tell me why it wasn't good before now. But the word "only" suggests that there was a reason you didn't do this before now.
by obayesshelton | 2025-05-21 19:55:28+00:00
I posted about a month ago about how [Mind Jam](https://mind-jam.co.uk/analysis/dvsfPTAfGzM?utm_source=hacke...) can do sentiment analysis... well Mind Jam just killed the language barrier for YouTube creators.

If you're a creator with an international audience, you know the problem: you can only understand and respond to comments in languages you speak. For most of us, that means ignoring 50-80% of our audience.

We now automatically translate comments from ANY language to English AND run sentiment analysis across everything. We tested it on multilingual channels and suddenly creators could see every reaction, joke, question, and critique.

There is a demo of a [Spanish iPhone video](https://mind-jam.co.uk/analysis/dvsfPTAfGzM?utm_source=hacke...) translated into English (comments at the bottom)

We've made it available to all creators FREE OF CHARGE while we go through BETA testing. Just send me a message here, request access or a demo on the website.
by deviaze | 2025-05-21 19:55:32+00:00
Yes! As an embedder you can write definition and declaration files! Declaration files are usually named like `globals.d.luau` and have a slightly different syntax than regular Luau. But it's really easy to set up global def files that you can pass to luau-lsp. Atm for my Luau runtime (seal), I have a small globals.d.luau and just bundle all the stdlib type files in a typedefs folder that gets included alongside my binary: https://github.com/deviaze/seal/tree/main/.seal

This is just because definition files don't support doc comments yet (for hovers w/ luau-lsp)
Show HN: First we did sentiment analysis now we translate all your comments
by obayesshelton | 2025-05-21 19:56:33+00:00
I posted about a month ago about how Mind Jam can do sentiment analysis... well Mind Jam just killed the language barrier for YouTube creators.

If you're a creator with an international audience, you know the problem: you can only understand and respond to comments in languages you speak. For most of us, that means ignoring 50-80% of our audience.

We now automatically translate comments from ANY language to English AND run sentiment analysis across everything. We tested it on multilingual channels and suddenly creators could see every reaction, joke, question, and critique.

There is a demo of a Spanish iPhone video https://mind-jam.co.uk/analysis/dvsfPTAfGzM?utm_source=hacke...

We've made it available to all creators FREE OF CHARGE while we go through BETA testing. Just send me a message here, request access or a demo on the website.
by ericb | 2025-05-21 19:56:48+00:00
In ollama, how do you set up the larger context, and figure out what settings to use? I've yet to find a good guide. I'm also not quite sure how I should figure out what those settings should be for each model.

There's context length, but then, how does that relate to input length and output length? Should I just make the numbers match? 32k is 32k? Any pointers?
by whalesalad | 2025-05-21 19:56:50+00:00
until you get shadowbanned. my 15+ year account is dead because I logged-out of the iOS app and logged-in to the web app on my phone, it triggered the suspicious/spam filter and boom I am dead. tried many times to get it restored, no dice.

the funny thing is the only indication that this happened was keybase alerting me that my proof was gone.

I can login and use reddit as usual, but nothing I do has any effect. It's like I am in a sandbox. Try to view my profile publicly and it does not exist.
by bsimpson | 2025-05-21 19:57:00+00:00
Sam and Elon are both ethically dubious power players who seem to be really good at inside dealing to benefit themselves, while all the other people in their companies just have to deal with it.

As I write this out, it reminds me of another polarizing leader who has been really good at being in the news every day for the last 6 months, and for a 4 year period a decade ago.
by jony1266 | 2025-05-21 19:57:17+00:00
looks cool, love how there's no sign in required.

some feedback so far:

- allow me to drag + drop video clips to add them to the media section

- allow me to trim the beginning of a clip - right now i can only trim the end of a video clip

- allow me to drag the playhead (right now i can only click to move the playhead somewhere)

- make most of the text on the page be select-none - there were many times when i tried to drag something and it selected a bunch of text on the page
by godelski | 2025-05-21 19:57:38+00:00
They're great little computers but you're kidding if you think $400 to upgrade to 1Tb (from 256G) is not priced. I can get 2Tb of gen 5 NVMe for under $300. Same issue with RAM, but at least at 16Gb most people don't need to upgrade.

Come on. You can still think they're great while admitting they're over priced. Those aren't in contention.
by Heliodex | 2025-05-21 19:58:05+00:00
I can assume that Lune (and many of the Rust-based Luau runtimes that followed it) were written in Rust mainly because of the existence of mlua <https://github.com/mlua-rs/mlua> and the bindings it provides for Luau. Binding Luau in Zig or C isn't as plug-and-play but is still relatively easy, binding Luau in Go is a nightmare. I'm working on better Luau support for Go, and some support/binding libraries for other languages are also in development, which is awesome to see and will hopefully bring more language diversity to the Luau ecosystem.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-21 19:58:13+00:00
Going off the SMA and eccentricity, part of its orbit is "relatively" close to the sun, ~ 45 AU, about 1.5x the distance to Neptune (~ 30 AU), and the other half of its orbit is very, very far away, ~ 1700 AU, over 50 times the distance to Neptune, but still less than 1% of the distance to the next star.

When it's in the faraway part of its orbit, it is moving very slowly, probably only tens of meters per second, but it's still close enough to the sun to eventually fall back in for another loop.

However, if something else dense enough got close enough out there, it would be easily perturbed and have its whole orbit altered, or even be ejected.

But interstellar space is pretty void of wandering solid bodies, so it keeps falling back towards the sun.