MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryao | 2025-05-30 02:06:32+00:00
What you wrote about C versus C++ is largely untrue. C++ is not faster than C, even when “using library functions which use void pointers”. There is nothing about a void pointer that prevents inlining in either C or C++. There is also no “optimized on actual types” for C++ and not C, since everything is compiled into a low level intermediate language in the compiler (typically three-address code). All of the C++ types are absent at that point. The low level intermediate representation is then what receives optimization.

For example, GCC will outright inline both bsearch() and the provided comparator in cases where it can see the definition of the comparator, such that there are no function calls done to either bsearch() or the comparator. C compilers will do this for a number of standard library functions and even will do it for non-library functions in the same file since they will inline small functions if allowed to do inlining. When the functions are not in the same file, you need LTO to get the inlining, but the same applies to C++.

That said, I have never seen assembly output from a C++ compiler for C++ using C++ specific language features that was more succinct than equivalent C. I am sure it happens, but the C++ language is just full of bloat. C++ templates usually result in more code than less, since the compiler must work much harder to optimize the result and opportunities are often lost. It is also incredibly easy for overhead to be hiding in the abstractions, especially if you have a thread safe class used in a single threaded context as part of a larger multithreaded program. The compiler will not optimize the thread safety overhead away. You might not believe that C++ language features add bloat, so I will leave you with this tidbit:

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/122307740466037145...

Tim Sweeney’s team had C++ code that not only did not use exceptions, but explicitly opted out of them with noexcept. They got a 15% performance boost from turning off exceptions in the compiler, for no apparent reason. C, not having exceptions, does not have this phantom overhead.
by Tasboo | 2025-05-30 02:06:38+00:00
Male loneliness talk aside, why wouldn’t you start a Facebook group to get a gauge for actual interest? I know you mentioned deliberately not using Facebook and Meetup, but spinning up a whole new site just to connect with people seems like a lot of work for something that is largely a solved problem on those platforms. Facebook groups are very popular because so many people are already connected into it. Getting people onto and engaged with your club, regardless of topic, is one of the hardest parts of something like this, not the actual website part. A Facebook group would allow you to get people connected ASAP.
by conradev | 2025-05-30 02:07:51+00:00
The world is going to be a very different place because this is going to be possible soon.

There’s a startup doing this at substations. They can network these batteries and then use the utilities’ extra wire capacity to redistribute energy throughout the grid.

The other flipping points are when these outcompete the all-in cost of making a new gas peaker plant and then the cost of bothering to turn existing plants on.
by nswizzle31 | 2025-05-30 02:07:59+00:00
You're definitely on to something. Although early 30s doesn't seem so old, the intense nostalgia of college has definitely waned. I would say I'm more grappling with the reality that it really won't ever again feel like that. I know it's true from a time perspective... I'm married and have a full-time job. But I figured I couldn't let the dream die that easily :)

Do you really develop lasting friendships on the course or in rec league sports? I just haven't had that experience and the popularity of those activities is sky rocketing (see: running clubs) while the problem doesn't seem to be getting any better.
by informal007 | 2025-05-30 02:09:08+00:00
On the one hand, it's helpful to join a new friendship club if we truely admit that most of friendship is going to disappear as we are getting old.

On the other hand, some people are shamed to admit this point, as a result, joining this kind of club will make them look more shamed. It's just nature of humanity.

I think there should be a better idea for the second type of people.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-30 02:09:11+00:00
> LLMs are a decent search engine a la Google circa 2005.

Statistical text (token) generation made from an unknown (to the user) training data set is not the same as a keyword/faceted search of arbitrary content acquired from web crawlers.

> The problem is that the conversational interface, for some reason, seems to turn off the natural skepticism that people have when they use a search engine.

For me, my skepticism of using a statistical text generation algorithm as if it were a search engine is because a statistical text generation algorithm is not a search engine.
by supplied_demand | 2025-05-30 02:10:13+00:00
== What experience can adult men (25+) go through that is enough to build a lasting friendship?==

Maybe fatherhood. I’ve had some of that experience with friends I’ve made through my kid’s preschool.

This week I read an article about a local club for new fathers in Chicago. Kinda of a similar concept, friendship through shared experience.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment-culture/2025/05/2...
by prisenco | 2025-05-30 02:10:39+00:00
I recommend everyone watch the series Lodge 49. It's free to watch with ads now.

Not only is a great show that touches on relationships and loneliness and modern alienation with a touch of magical realism and esoterica and alchemy but it focuses on a fraternal (in name only, women are members) order that your grandfather might have been a member of but have disappeared due to rising individualism, rising rents and displacement.

But there's no reason we couldn't start building them again. Not high end exclusive clubs like Soho House but just a place with books and a reasonable membership fee and a bar with cheap drinks for added revenue and occasional "open to the public" events.

There could be ones for software devs, ones focused on philosophy or great literature, ones for musicians or artists.

I've run the back-of-a-napkin numbers and even in expensive cities it doesn't seem impossible if your goal is to just break even and foster a community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2p1osv0jj8
by Grimblewald | 2025-05-30 02:10:54+00:00
It's not just about library availability. Python wins because it lets you offload the low-level performance work to people who really know what they’re doing. Libraries like NumPy or PyTorch / Keras wrap highly optimized C/C++ code—so you get near-C/++ performance without having to write or debug C yourself, and without needing a whole computer science degree to do so properly.

It's a mistake to assume C is always faster. If you don’t have a deep understanding of memory layout, compiler flags, vectorization, cache behavior, etc. your hand-written C code can easily be slower than high-level Python using well-optimized libraries. See [1] for a good example of that.

Sure, you could call those same libs from C, but then you're reinventing Python's ecosystem with more effort and more chances to shoot yourself in the foot. Python gives you access to powerful, low-level tools while letting you focus on higher-level problems—in a language that’s vastly easier to learn and use.

That tradeoff isn't just convenience—it's what makes modern AI R&D productive at scale.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41365723/why-is-my-pytho...
by zug_zug | 2025-05-30 02:11:27+00:00
I like the idea, on principle, any attempt to build community should be supported.

I'm may not be the target audience if this is recently post-college, but the thing that strikes me is these activities feel a bit performatively male.

I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.

My experience has always been if somebody says "Come over for poker night," it's gonna be much more awkward than if somebody says "Come over because I'm gonna play video games on the couch and smoke a joint and it'd be fun to have somebody to chat with while I do that." [I'd be curious to hear where other people fall on that topic]

Anyways, not to discourage your current tack, nor even say you should do a blunts and video-games event, but I just think some of the activities on the website seem branded to a very narrow type of guy (business majors? for lack of a better stereotype)
by dzink | 2025-05-30 02:12:56+00:00
Flash made it ridiculously easy to animate and export to the web. One tool and you could make an animated video, or an interactive app, or a game. There were fantastic competitive showcases of work, which made kids excited to learn and do it. It was low threshold multimedia and it on-boarded a lot of people into tech, including me. I worked on the Flash apps behind CNN and other Turner properties. The flipper tickers during the Obama election on CNN and Time inc, the Times Square billboard, all flash. My first visit to Silicon Valley was by invitation from Apple. Steve Jobs brought the developers from all major media sites (NY Times, Turner, ESPN, etc) to show us how to run non-flash video on safari. We had to redesign the video players on CNN and a dozen other big sites so jobs could demo the upcoming unveil of the iPad and have enough content to show without “ipad doesn’t support flash” boxes. That was beginning of the end.

The reality was that since Flash wasn’t indexable, search engines couldn’t index it but also you could pre-screen the content either. There could be really bad stuff hiding into easy to release apps. Plus if people could make cross-platform games on flash, why would they make them for app stores.

It was also too energy intensive and would have made battery life much smaller on iDevices.
by arcticbull | 2025-05-30 02:13:20+00:00
> I once tried to book a flight with the same-day return; the price for the return flight was mad expensive. The same return flight was a few hundred euros cheaper if you booked the initial flight a day earlier.

Minimum stay durations, like advance purchase restrictions, are a common part of fare construction.

> That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.

A surcharge for X vs a discount for ~X is the same thing, it's just how it's presented.

Technically all of this is advertised, it's published in GDS. People just don't really want to read the fare rules because it's boring and a ton of reading.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-30 02:14:25+00:00
The problem with operating a natural gas plant only 0.1% of the time is that you have to cover its fixed costs over whatever time it is run, and if that's only 0.1% of the time then the fixed contribution per kWh becomes enormous. Worse, people like to point out that a high proportion of the cost of a natural gas plant is fuel, but the fuel cost also includes fixed costs. If you're using only 0.1% as much natural gas at scale then you have to recover the costs of all the pipelines and other infrastructure over 0.1% as much sales volume.

You end up paying a significant fraction of the cost of having the generating plants producing power 100% of the time, but only get power 0.1% of the time.

The main advantage of not running them all the time is that then you're not emitting CO2, but nuclear plants have that advantage even when you do run them all the time.
by mbirth | 2025-05-30 02:14:59+00:00
You might be interested in Sky, which is supposedly coming later this year:

https://sky.app/

(Check the link to the MacStories article at the bottom to get a great overview of the capabilities.)

Also, Siri / Apple Intelligence is bound to the local processing power as everything is handled on-device - compared to other AIs that can use the computing power of a whole datacentre.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-30 02:15:21+00:00
> I've had this same thought that it would be nice to have an AI rubber ducky to bounce ideas off of while pair programming (so that you don't sound dumb to your coworkers & waste their time).

I humbly suggest a more immediate concern to rectify is identifying how to improve the work environment such that the fear one might "sound dumb to your coworkers & waste their time" does not exist.
by atum47 | 2025-05-30 02:15:26+00:00
Back in the 90s I used to host my websites on geocities. We had this trick of displaying the website in a two frames layout, 0% top 100% bottom. That way the publicity banner would be invisible. Unfortunately none of my websites got archived successfully, part because of that.

I made a fan website for the movie Matrix, I wish I could see it today. It was awesome. Lots and lots of effects.
by fiforpg | 2025-05-30 02:15:52+00:00
I'd like to offer a contrarian view.

Much of the NYT article can be explained away by the Gell-Mann effect. During most of human history it was hard to maintain multiple strong bonds anyway; long distance communication pre-internet was hard too. There are plenty of modern opportunities for finding friends based on interests: conferences, concerts, sports bars etc. How much of this discussion is a moral panic caused by imprecise notions which by definition cannot be described by hard data?
by fn-mote | 2025-05-30 02:16:07+00:00
> If points systems caused losses then nobody would have them. They’re money makers, and that money is coming from someone’s pocket.

It sounds like you believe the losses are coming from the people who _have_ the points? That doesn't seem likely to me.

It would be a better analysis to say "it's complicated" -

* Business travelers earn personally-owned points on their company spending. In this case, the company might be paying higher prices but the individual is being incentivized to continue that because the miles are essentially a kickback.

* Personal travelers have an incentive to travel with the same airline for more points, so a kind of lock-in for either (1) those who are not as sensitive to price differences or: (2) those for whom the benefits of the points are high enough to outweigh some higher costs acquiring them.

* In the same vein, a points system that encourages a traveler to stay with the same airline can give _that airline_ greater profits from _that consumer_, even if on a per-flight basis the airline might hypothetically be making less. It's like Costco selling stuff for a cheaper unit price.
by tdb7893 | 2025-05-30 02:16:19+00:00
"if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of" -> is this a concern for many men? It's never crossed my mind or been a problem for anyone I've known.

"they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them in the breakroom or geographical space" -> I've always talked to people at work and also I joined the most socially awkward hobby I've ever seen (historical sword fencing) and people are still very chatty. I also recently started volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitator and find myself just constantly chatting.

"Can't have real ties or any strongly held beliefs, that would make you religious (or worse, Religious on an actual religion), those people are bad" -> I've been friends with a lot of religious people but also non-religious people have strongly held beliefs (I hang out with a lot of vegans and I cannot imagine claiming they are afraid to publicly hold strong beliefs).

I think your post just goes to show how different mens' experiences can be because, while I'm sure a lot of men probably can connect with this, my personal experiences could not be more opposite. I think it depends a ton on the sorts of crowds you run in, it almost sounds to me like the people you meet are generally judgy and antisocial but I've found people I'm around to be generally friendly (though I've found many people are happy to chat but are often hard to actually organize to otherwise hang out since people in their 30s are busy and some of my friends have kids now).
by pconte | 2025-05-30 02:16:40+00:00
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s just a “you’re in your 30s, deal with it” thing. A lot of guys lose connection over time.. not because they’re flaky, but because work, family, and life get in the way.

To me this doesn't feel like some cheesy attempt to fix loneliness with tech. It’s just creating a space for something that’s clearly missing for a lot of people. Writing it off feels like part of the problem..
by wvenable | 2025-05-30 02:17:24+00:00
I almost never bother using Google anymore. When I search for something, I'm usually looking for an answer to question. Now I can just ask the question and get the answer without all the other stuff.

I will often ask the LLM to give me web pages to look at it when I want to do further reading.

As LLMs get better, I can't see myself going back to Google as it is or even as it was.
by nswizzle31 | 2025-05-30 02:18:07+00:00
I think the concept clearly resonates with people. There is an article every week NYT, etc about how like most men have at most one friend. It seems you think the execution is off, which I wouldn't disagree on.

Happy to hear what you have to say - email is in my bio - although I doubt we'd have a meaningful conversation if you write me off as trying to sell something instead of taking the more gracious interpretation that I want to help other guys build strong friendships (and build them for myself).
by bionhoward | 2025-05-30 02:18:32+00:00
Mostly what I do is make animations, so a minimalist set for this would be like

- load mmCIF / PDB - zoom camera out to show everything - show spheres - remove solvents - color by chain or element - take screenshots - rotate molecules - translate atoms

Rust would be wayyy better than pymol, I’m trying to minimize my Python
by nyrulez | 2025-05-30 02:18:46+00:00
"Mastering" is a strong term and is even misleading, especially when talking about tools that give you leverage. I mean if someone masters running, does it mean you never use a car? There are thousands and thousands of instances in everyday programming where AI is going to be 10x-100x faster than any human, especially at the function level and even file/script level.

I can give you a concrete example since things sometimes can be so philosophical. The other day I needed a LIS code (Longest Increasing subsequence) with some very specific constraints. It would've honestly taken me a few hours to get it right as it's been a while I coded that kind of thing. I was able to generate the solution with o3 in around 10 minutes, with some back and forth. It wasn't one shot, but took me 2-3 iteration cycles. I was able to get highly performant code that worked for a very specific constraint. It used Fenwick trees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_tree) which I honestly hadn't programmed myself before. It felt like a science fiction moment to me as the code certainly wasn't trivial. In fact I am pretty sure most senior programmers would fail at this task, let alone be fast at it.

As a professional programmer, I deal with 20 examples every day where using a quality LLM saved me significant time, sometimes hours per task. I still do manual surgery a bunch of times everyday but I see no need to write most functions anymore or do multi-file refactors myself. In a few weeks, you get very good at applying Cursor and all its various features intelligently, like an amazing pair programmer who has different strengths than you. I'll go so far as to say I wouldn't hire an engineer who isn't very adept at utilizing the latest LLMs. The difference is just so stark - it really is like science fiction.

Cursor is popular for a reason. Lot of incredible programmers still get incredible value out of it, it isn't just for vibe coding. Implying that Cursor can be a net negative to programmers based on an example is a lot of fear mongering.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-30 02:18:53+00:00
> It's not called "escaping" anything, it's just... an empty URI fragment: a link to the top of the article?

It’s an escape from pedantry.

I appreciate your gentle needling, as imprecision in my words reflects an imprecision in my rhetoric, making it vulnerable to nitpicking. It’s okay to be wrong if it allows me to make a larger point in favor of my position, but at a cost to readers’ time and patience.

Thanks for your close reading and feedback, it helps.
by lovich | 2025-05-30 02:18:57+00:00
> I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.

Brah that's just your experience. The activities that you described as `socially acceptable stereotypes for males` haven't been popular for longer than any ancestor you've spoken to has been alive as a conspiracy theory.

Some people legitimately like these activities and have the same reaction to `improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing` as you do to the stereotypically male activities
by abletonlive | 2025-05-30 02:19:06+00:00
But if it doesn't and you're not using it now then you're gonna be behind and part of the group getting laid off

the people that are good at using these tools now will be better at it later too. you might have closed the gap quite a bit but you will still be behind

using LLMs are they are now requires a certain type of mindset that takes practice to maintain and sharpen. It's just like a competitive game. The more intentionally do it, the better you get. And the meta changes every 6 months to a year.

That's why I scroll and laugh through all the comments on this thread dismissing it, because I know that the people dismissing it are the problem.

the interface is a chatbox with no instructions or guardrails. the fact that folks think that their experience is universal is hilarious. so much of using LLM right now is context management.

I can't take most of yall in this thread seriously
by billy99k | 2025-05-30 02:19:47+00:00
"but it doesn't feel like when I was in college and hung out with a crew of 10+ people on a weekly basis. "

I'm in my 40s and in my 20s (shortly after college), I created a meetup group and regularly met with a group of 10-12 people weekly (parties, hangouts, dinner, activities).

We are all married now (some with kids) and now meet once/month and the meetup group disbanded before covid. As I've gotten older, I realized that some friends don't make it to a new phase of life. Sometimes because it was a friendship of proximity (like a neighbor or co-worker) and other times because you are doing something different with your life.
by yosito | 2025-05-30 02:20:02+00:00
Airline ticket prices have been highly individualized for at least a decade. I live a nomadic lifestyle and I'm often traveling with friends from various countries. We can sit next to each other in the same café and search for the same plane tickets on the same website at the same time, and get entirely different price offers. This is one of the reasons that I never buy plane tickets without using incognito mode or some sort of private browsing, but even doing that affects the price that you're offered.
by atum47 | 2025-05-30 02:20:38+00:00
http://pagina.de/dr.enigma - apparently was indexed, but badly (I believe because of the frame tricks)- https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/pagina.de/dr.eni...

http://i.am/supermatrix - was not. =(

I don't have the original URL, just the redirects. GeoCities had weird URL patterns, thus the redirect links. Man, I would pay money to get access to those websites.