MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perrygeo | 2025-05-16 03:26:07+00:00
S-expressions really are the game changer. Especially in a functional lisp with immutable data structures. You can lift and shift forms around with reckless abandon and never cause a bug. You're not typing characters that eventually get parsed into a tree, you're building the tree! Programming in bespoke arrangements of ascii delimiters feels like regressing to punch cards.
by AnimeMyPic | 2025-05-16 03:26:29+00:00
Hey everyone! I’ve been working on a side project called AnimeMyPic — it transforms real photos into anime-style art using AI (Naruto, Ghibli, One Piece, and now classic cartoons too!). I just added a few new features like style likes, usage stats, and a review system to make it more interactive. Would love your feedback — especially if you're into anime or visual AI tools.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-05-16 03:28:29+00:00
> “Do you think Haemanthus intends to revolutionize health care, or do you think it’s another fraud?” Once again — neither. I think it’s just another chapter of her narrative.

This is fraud. We need far more accountability, and that means not letting people who have failed and lied about it "narrative" their way out of consequences. Elizabeth Holmes should not be allowed anywhere near healthcare ever again, and that does mean that even people who are merely close to her should be regarded with great scrutiny.
by iLemming | 2025-05-16 03:29:41+00:00
That's the proper way of maintaining the elitist status and gatekeeping the community only "for true believers". "Looky here you muggles - yep, Lisp is unreadable as shit. Don't you even think of trying..."

Jokes aside, I feel so raddled every single time I see some Lisp-mentioning post here on HN or Reddit, where inevitably someone comes to complain how "unreadable this Lisp thing is". Not you guys, this color scheme really is some "Christmas Night in a nuthouse"; I'm just unpacking my emotional shit all over, without addressing anyone specifically.

"Lisp is unreadable"... pffft. Geez, what the fuck does that even supposed to mean? Are they programmers or fucking toddlers dealing with an alphabet soup? It's as if linguists complained about semitic languages being "unpronounceable" on some specialized forums. Seriously, can you imagine, someone logs onto a professional forum of linguists and starts berating Arabic or Hebrew, saying shit like "I've been interpreting professionally since I was nine; I am fluent in twelve different languages, but this Arabic stuff, I gotta tell you... is pure bullshit. No money in the world would make me learn or even try using it..."

How can anyone still identify as a programmer with a stance "this programming language is unreadable"? I can understand if that's been said about a PL that someone just made or some ancient thing that very few still use, but how can anyone just dismiss a 65-year-old idea that is still being actively used and for which there's no good replacement?
by pansa2 | 2025-05-16 03:32:32+00:00
> How confident are you in the soundness of the type system?

Teal's types are hints, like Python's and TypeScript's, so I suspect it's not sound by design.

> Also, are there any Lua constructs that are difficult/impossible to type?

Teal includes several types that model typical uses of Lua tables, e.g. as arrays, maps etc. It doesn't look like it can type fully general use of Lua tables, e.g. using both the "array part" and "hash part" of the same table.
by chriskrycho | 2025-05-16 03:33:51+00:00
Yeah, I’ve actually been thinking about adding a toggle, because some folks really like having the slides there, and some folks do not. A better layout for talks (side-by-side, e.g.) could help, too.

I debated including XKCD 2347 in the talk but figured it was “too easy”: everyone was already thinking of it anyway!

Edit: Went ahead and added an inline toggle on the page for showing/hiding the slides. I will think about how to generalize it/tweak it in the future, but that should help for this one, at least!
by 0x1ceb00da | 2025-05-16 03:35:00+00:00
> AtomicUsize: Used for indexing and freelist linkage. It’s a plain old number, except it’s watched 24 / 7 by the CPU’s race condition alarm.

Is it though? Aren't atomic load/store instructions the actual important thing. I know the type system ensures that `AtomicUsize` can only be accessed using atomic instructions but saying it's being watched by the CPU is inaccurate.
by 1123581321 | 2025-05-16 03:35:01+00:00
Yes, that’s part of it, but it can also correctly reason the language is designed to be hard to understand. If you try this exercise, it’ll list its reasoning for what it thinks each unfamiliar piece of syntax might be, and one of its approaches is to bring in analogues to other languages, including other esoterica attempts. If you give it something more inventive, it’ll reason its way to other academic fields to come up with solutions.

It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
by _--__--__ | 2025-05-16 03:36:00+00:00
I think you are underestimating the per frame computation cost or massively overestimating the base model PS4. Remember that all fighting games have to lock 60fps, 16ms is not a ton of time for the handoff from input interpreter (SF has to parse backwards over the past several frames to see if a forward input is completing a quarter circle, double quarter circle, dash, etc) > game state update tick > graphical and sfx update pipeline. The issue with clock syncing meant that the worse your machine was, the more your opponent would roll back and the bigger the rollback windows would be because every single frame of your inputs would come late.

Here's an example of the constant one sided rollback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSB_JlJK_Ks

and an example of how players were aware that mashing caused frequent rollbacks: https://youtu.be/_jpg-ZiE70c?t=105

Eventually PC players learned that they could "fix" this by alt-tabbing out of the game, taking away dedicated GPU processing so they could be the peer that was falling behind.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-16 03:36:18+00:00
https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html I can't remember what I saw that lead me to that essay, but it got me thinking I should give flashcards another go.

Like I guess many people, I also had tried once or twice, but very much the common downloading a couple of other people's decks then stopping a couple of days later.

I'm not inplementing what he suggests very much at all in the end - but the idea is at least hinted at there, I think.
by lovich | 2025-05-16 03:37:35+00:00
Yea see the problem is that you are arguing under some implicit idea that you’ll just accept the results of the system.

Every single crypto property I’ve talked to has ended up at a point where they believes that someone cheated them outside the bounds of the system and then look to authority figures to rectify the situation, like the government.

If you are someone who actually believes that crypto transactions should be unmodifiable by any third party then what you said makes sense. I just don’t think that anyone telling me they believe that isn’t lying to themselves at best, and lying to everyone else at worst
by koeng | 2025-05-16 03:40:53+00:00
I really love teal! Here is a 10k loc project I have in it - https://github.com/Koeng101/libB/blob/dev/src/dnadesign/dnad... - Basically, I reimplemented all my synthetic biology bioinformatics from Go into teal so that LLMs can script with it better in a hermetic environment. It's got all sorts of things like cloning simulation, codon optimization, genbank parsing, synthesis fixing, reliable sequence hashing, sequence analysis, etc. I'm pretty sure it is a more complete synbio library than anything in python, actually.

A couple things I want from teal: 1. I wish there was a better way to bundle files together. I have a little build.lua, but eh, I think it could be better. I know of cyan and everything but I feel like that was developed for a different application than mine. I want to have 1 complete file that I can just give people and allow them to do synbio work in any target language with a lua machine. 2. There are some annoyances around luajit vs lua5.1 functionality 3. The compiler yelling at you gets old for integrating raw lua. I tried to port json.lua in and even with the definition file, I couldn't embed the whole json.lua without having compiler errors. So eventually I just imported it as a string that is type checked, which is bad 4. I really wish syntax highlighting on github was a thing

The good bits:

It's pretty much complete. I used it a couple years ago and there were things with generics that I just couldn't do, but now it is much better. For example, how I use generics for the different parsers (fastq, fasta, genbank, slow5, pileup, etc) https://github.com/Koeng101/libB/blob/dev/src/dnadesign/src/...

Overall, love it! It is one of those pieces of software which is nearly complete, and I love using software like that.
by pansa2 | 2025-05-16 03:41:37+00:00
> I really wish the Lua authors would add official types to Lua.

Never going to happen IMO. Adding static types would change the nature of the language completely, even more than it has in Python.

As Teal shows, it would require giving up one of Lua's core features: tables as the language's single data structure. It would significantly complicate a language known for its simplicity.

Even the implementation would need to change radically - adding a type checker would invalidate the current approach of using a single-pass source-to-bytecode compiler.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-16 03:41:46+00:00
For the specific idea, I'm experimenting with a piece of wisdom shared with me once by a friend who had an immense repertoire of Irish traditional tunes she remembered and played effortlessly. I knew a few hundred tunes, her, thousands.

I lamented the long road ahead of me, all these tunes to learn, and she said, no no, don't worry, just start by learning the tunes you already know!
by skissane | 2025-05-16 03:42:15+00:00
> That test is not available in Australia even today.

Pretty much every lab test is available in Australia if you are willing to pay for it; if they don’t have a local lab capable of running the test, they’ll send the sample overseas

The real question is whether it is covered by insurance or not, and a lot of the time the answer is “no” - I recently forked out over US$500 for genetic tests on one of our kids (which the paediatrician recommended), although the results weren’t particularly helpful (“rare variant of uncertain clinical significance”)
by dietr1ch | 2025-05-16 03:42:18+00:00
Pathfinding in general doesn't allow a lot of multi-threading. You can do bi-directional search, but it doesn't always work as good as it seems on a 2D maze[0], and adding workers beyond the 2nd requires being really good at guessing mid-points, but it's doable in domains with sub-goals.

[^0]: Not the case here, but some domains branch too much when going backwards and can easily explore states unreachable from the start.
by awesome_dude | 2025-05-16 03:42:55+00:00
I remember reading some VC or other came out and said that they picked founders that were over confident, because it was some advantage.

This is the AI result from Google

> Paul Graham and Y Combinator (YC) prioritize determination and ambition over intelligence in selecting founders, often finding success in founders who are overconfident and optimistic. This isn't a mistake; it's a calculated risk based on the belief that persistence and belief in their vision are crucial for overcoming the inevitable challenges of starting a business.

Although this piece https://paulgraham.com/founders.html only talks about the importance of determination

edit: I've just noticed at the bottom of Paul's piece a note about Sam Altman that I think is incredibly accurate - look for hackers (not crackers) - people that find ways to profit by looking at the system in a different way (but they emphasise not to be evil, just naughty)
by goku12 | 2025-05-16 03:43:43+00:00
Almost every single comment on that thread confirms it - this is a self-inflicted damage. You can rarely ask a question or answer one without being overzealously or rudely moderated. Questions are marked as duplicate if they are vaguely similar to an earlier question, even if they're not the same or if the old question is outdated. And nobody thought it worthwhile to rectify this problem despite loud complaints from the majority of its users.

And that's such a shame - LLMs and code copilots don't fully satisfy what SO can do. SO answers often contain deep insights and wisdom. I frequently add SO reference links in my code as comments. It's hard to elicit such explanations from LLMs, and it's hard to get a permalink even if I manage to ask all the right questions. SO is a good product lost to hubris.
by mrandish | 2025-05-16 03:44:56+00:00
Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-05-16 03:44:57+00:00
> eugenicism

That comes in many forms:

Black/dark one, nazi style, where you outright sterilise or even kill those with unhealthy/bad genes.

And white/peaceful one, where you‘d appeal to those with unhealthy/bad genes not to procreate and encourage those with healthy/good ones to do.

You can‘t seriously tell me it‘s not extremely unethical for people with huntington‘s disease or cystic fibrosis to have children.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-05-16 03:46:26+00:00
> Over the past few years a number of people have reached out to me saying they’ve invented “the Theranos that works,” and several of them have concepts similar to this: apply AI to a mountain of noise and get a thousand test results.

So probably if it works it'll come from someone who's got an earlier start and more than 50M in seed funding.
by cko | 2025-05-16 03:46:56+00:00
As someone who started a fully remote job (sedentary) 1.5 years ago, this worries me a bit. I've been reading that those giant bouncy balls and treadmill desks are a gimmick and that standing still for a long time gives you varicose veins.

What is a good routine? Do I switch positions (right now I'm slav squatting) and maybe throw in some short bouts of exercise every 30 minutes?
by bglazer | 2025-05-16 03:47:19+00:00
Germline gene editing is still considered risky and unethical. That is, editing cells that form eggs and sperm, thus changing the genome of some of the descendants of the edited person. This is somatic editing. These edits will not be inherited.

Somatic editing is becoming more common (see Casgevy) but there are technical hurdles that prevent its application to many cases.
by aborsy | 2025-05-16 03:47:41+00:00
Yeah. Compare

A = [1, 2; 3, 4];

x = [5; 6];

y = A * x;

with this uglier version:

import numpy as np

A = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]])

x = np.array([[5], [6]])

y = A @ x
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-16 03:47:59+00:00
Thanks for the support :)

We're currently working on benchmarks so nothing exact on Kuzu right now with regards to performance. We've had quite a few requests for benchmark comparisons against different databases, so they should take a good few days. Will return here when they are ready

When we've used Cypher in the past we didn't get on with the methodology of the language that well. A functional approach, like gremlin, suited our minds better. But, Gremlin's syntax is awful (in our opinion), and the amount of boilerplate code you need we felt was unnecessary.

We wanted to make something that was easier to read than Gremlin, like Cypher, but also have functional aspect that just made traversals feel so much more intuitive.

Another note, we're more fond of type-safe languages, and it didn't make much sense to us that out of all the programming languages that exist, query languages were the non-type-safe ones.

We know it's a pain learning a new language, but we really believe that our approach will pave the way for a better development experience and a better paradigm.

Onto the AI stuff, you're right, it isn't ideal (right now). We did make a gpt wrapper that did a pretty good job of writing queries based on a condensed version of our docs, but this isn't ideal. So, the next thing on our road map is a graph traversal MCP tool. Instead of the agent having to generate text written queries, it can use the traversal tools and determine where it should hop to at each step.

We know we're being quite ambitious here, but we think there's a lot we can improve on over existing solutions.

Thanks again :)
by jimbob45 | 2025-05-16 03:48:13+00:00
The addition of a safety design is a shift in our milestones for v0.1, and you can see the difference here. Both of these are fundamental parts of v0.1, and will take long enough that the earliest date for v0.1 is pushed out to the end of 2026

Look, no one is more excited than me for this, but this is reaching Star Citizen levels of delays.
by Sharlin | 2025-05-16 03:48:59+00:00
Look, I’m just as cynical about capitalism and perverse reward systems and all that as anyone, but nobody was talking about “saving the company blah blah zillion million dollars”, more like simply offering a helping hand to someone who feels gratitude about it. It worked 100% on an employee-to-employee basis, there was zero management structure or process involved. And it was something that anyone in the company could’ve established, just by ordering a fifty eurobuck’s worth of candy on the company credit and proposing the idea to the rest of the company which was 1) small back then 2) incredibly committed to employee wellbeing in all the right ways.
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 03:49:55+00:00
> Note that in C++, reading from a variable before writing to it is undefined behavior, so it's not particularly clear what benefit you're getting from this.

You gain the benefit that the compiler can assume the code path in question is impossible to reach, even if there's an obvious way to reach it. To my understanding, this can theoretically back-propagate all the way to `main()` and make the entire program a no-op.
by cookiengineer | 2025-05-16 03:51:22+00:00
Not if you use Chrome 135 or later, which is every browser now except Firefox/LibreWolf.

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLOC) proved that cookies aren't actually necessary to track you with 98%+ precision, which, given how the internet works, is just 2 clicks.

The only way to stay anonymous is to stay on the radar. Sandbox your browser, have multiple physical-on-the-filesystem profiles and never mix business with pleasure or banking with youtube.

If you use Linux, create a Windows 11 VM to browse anonymously. Because Linux makes you already stick out as a sore thumb due to its TCP fingerprint.
by marcosdumay | 2025-05-16 03:51:41+00:00
Take a look on the latency of a keypress on your modern keyboard to when your CPU has the chance to first process the data, you'll be surprised. Depending on how your hardware is configured, it can reach 100ms there alone.

Your mouse has an equivalent issue, except that it's not usually optimized to the same level, so the worst case is way more common. Audio has a much worse issue, and can lag a large fraction of a second on hardware alone. And there's the network, that has optional features that are emulated by adding lags proportional to the bandwidth.

All of our hardware has become more capable with time, but that doesn't mean latency has decreased. Some kinds of latency have gone down, others have gone way up.
by BSTRhino | 2025-05-16 03:53:00+00:00
Yes, all the Easel games are sharing infrastructure, which is much more cost-effective for all of us. In general it's not really something that really affects players or developers.

When a game developer chooses to publish their game, they choose either a subdomain (e.g. https://pewpew.easel.games) or a subpath (https://easel.games/@alzarath/snake). It just takes one click and then they have a URL to share with other people.

When players request to join a multiplayer game, they are matched to other players who are playing the same game, who are close to them geographically, and who are wanting to play the same game mode with the same parameters. A single game may have many lobbies running at once.

To the server, all inputs have the same format, regardless of game, so it's really efficient and just churning through relaying the inputs from one player to another. Because determinism is guaranteed for Easel, the server does not actually do any simulation at all, it just relays inputs, so I don't currently have to manage issues with one "noisy" tenant overwhelming the server and degrading the experience for others.

Not really sure if any of this answers your question!
by im3w1l | 2025-05-16 03:56:31+00:00
Disease is fuzzy word, it basically means below some made up bar for healthiness. Take dyslexia as a simple example. That disease can by definition not exist in an illiterate population. We have raised the bar and now they are diseased in need for a cure.

The more we things we cure the higher we will reach and the higher we reach the higher we will raise the bar. I don't think that's a bad thing, but its worth bearing in mind.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-16 03:56:56+00:00
I talked to some people in the industry shortly before the scandal broke, there were already rumors and the Glassdoor reviews had many warnings from clearly disgruntled former employees. Their thoughts was that the people there should have known, so either they lacked competence, they were desperate, or they were in on it.

While there are plenty of people looking for the chance to do something great and could do it if given the right environment, I expect Theranos didn’t foster such an environment.
by jlarocco | 2025-05-16 03:57:07+00:00
Coming from Common Lisp, I find both versions are pretty hard to read, and I find Clojure in general difficult to grok. Every example of Clojure I see looks like the author is "code golfing". Why the instistence on such terse, cryptic identifiers? Every other Lisp, going back to the 60s, uses readable text names, and it just baffles me that Clojure decided to go a different way.

The sentence generator in my Markov text generator CL package looked like this:

(defun generate-random-sentence (mtab &key (first (random-elt (first-words mtab)))) (with-slots (prob-table) mtab (format nil "~{~a~^ ~}" (loop :for next-word = first :then (pick-random-word (gethash next-word prob-table)) :while next-word :collecting next-word :until (ends-with-end-sentence-punctuation-p next-word)))))
by dietr1ch | 2025-05-16 03:57:57+00:00
True, but mind the search space size.

You can go through 50-80k search nodes in 10ms in a modern CPU, so even using Dijkstra seems feasible on a decent implementation as the grid used in the animations seems to have 100x80 nodes.

If I was making a game I'd focus on gameplay first, since giving the game some life by conditioning the paths seems more important to have a good game than achieving 200μs search times. Luckily, I'm not making a game :P, my current side-project is writing my own pathfinding playground to explore optimisation techniques and tools.
by gyomu | 2025-05-16 03:58:22+00:00
I always wonder what are the forces at play in those situations.

Is that the fraudsters are so charismatic/well connected/etc that their past crimes just don’t hold them back?

Or is it a “all notoriety is good notoriety” kind of thing, where even if your fame is due to having been a criminal, that built up name recognition will keep propelling you forward?

Or is it more subtle than this - ie some people have the skills required to appear convincing to smart people, raise lots of money, inspire others to follow them in their ventures, etc - but it just so happens that they also suck at not getting caught up in their own narrative and they end up breaking a bunch of laws in that pursuit?

It’s fascinating.