MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-05-30 23:22:47+00:00
What you wrote is indeed a data race, it'll race s, but you mention the semantics of the JRE and I wonder if you actually know what those are because that's crucial here.

You see Java has a specific memory ordering model (many languages just give you a big shrug, including C before it adopted the C++ 11 model but Java spells out what happens) and that model is very sophisticated so it has an answer to what happens here.

Because we raced s, we lose Sequential Consistency. This means in general (this example is so trivial it won't matter) humans struggle to understand what's going on in their program, which makes debugging and other software engineering impractical. But, unlike C++ loss of Sequential Consistency isn't fatal in Java, instead we're promised that when s is observed in the main thread it will either be that initial "uninitialized" string or it will have the args[0] value, ie the name of the program because these are the only two values it could have and Java does not specify which of them observed in this case.

You could think of this as "atomic access" and that's likely the actual implementation in this case, but the Java specification only promises what I wrote.

In C++ this is game over, the language standard specifically says it is Undefined Behaviour to have any data race and so the behaviour of your program is outside the standard - anything at all might happen.

[Edited: I neglected originally to observe that s is set to "uninitialized", and instead I assumed it begins as null]
by kgeist | 2025-05-30 23:22:53+00:00
I run Qwen3-32B with Unsloth Dynamic Quants 2.0, quantized to 4+ bits, and with the key-value cache reduced to 8-bit. It's my favorite configuration so far. This configuration has the best quality/speed ratio at this moment imho.

It's pretty magical - it often feels like I'm talking to GPT-4o or o1, until it makes a silly mistake once in a while. It supports reasoning out of the box, which improves results considerably.

With the settings above, I get 60 tokens per second on an RTX 5090, because it fits entirely in GPU memory. It feels faster than GPT-4o. A 32k context with 2 parallel generations* consumes 28 GB of VRAM (with llama.cpp), so you still have 4 GB left for something else.

* I use 2 parallel generations because there's a few of us sharing the same GPU. If you use only 1 parallel generation, you can increase the context to 64k
by daly | 2025-05-30 23:23:06+00:00
Old Mainframe story... We had a VM/370 system with 8 Meg of memory used by 82 programmers. VM/370 used virtual machines, one per programmer. The virtual machines were faithful copies of the hardware.

I was a systems programmer. In the virtual machine you could issue meta-commands such as 'shutdown' by putting the prefix "#cp shutdown". The prefix "#cp" could be changed at boot.

Being curious I tried booting VM/370 in a virtual machine. The embedded VM/370 could then create sub-virtual machines. Which, of course, raises the question... Will VM/370 boot in one of the sub-virtual machines? Well, it certainly worked. I set the command prompt to be "?cp" in the sub-virtual machine.

Which raises the question... Will VM/370 boot in the sub-virtual machine? Well, it certainly worked. The command prompt prefix was "@cp".

Rise, Repeat... I was 8 levels deep and it still worked. Time to get back to work. So I typed "#cp shutdown" instead of the latest chosen command prompt...

I had absolute priviledge on the real hardware so "#cp shutdown" was executed by the real, main VM/370 image. Which promptly shutdown the real machine.

Of course, only I and my co-worker systems programmer knew what actually caused the outage.
by aurizon | 2025-05-30 23:23:54+00:00
I can see AI used for permutational hacking, sort of like the fuzzing types of SW and HW hacking. Where they succeed can be a very good stress test. It can be done on human code as well as AI code and I expect this to be done. It is increasingly apparent that what an AI made and then hacked, still needs the abilities that only humans have - for now
by ab5tract | 2025-05-30 23:24:28+00:00
Significant whitespace is a divisive enough choice that a non-zero percentage of programmers won't even consider the language unless forced to do so by economic circumstances.

It might not be a highly visible downside, but it's there nonetheless. It's better to be honest about that than pretend there is no cultural tradeoff that comes with making such a (IMO) terrible design decision in a language.

There are plenty of people that feel the same way about sigils (like `$foo` in Perl) and semi-colons. I've never understood it -- and likely never will, at this point -- but I don't pretend that there isn't a real demographic effect that these choices bring with them.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-30 23:24:44+00:00
Even in his most immigration-skeptical era (https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367869/bernie-sanders...), Sanders always acknowledged that some companies genuinely need a skilled immigration program to hire the global best and brightest. And note his line about "offshore outsourcing companies"; the issue's become even less controversial now that the balance of H1B sponsors is shifting towards large American tech companies who genuinely pay market rate.
by kelnos | 2025-05-30 23:25:35+00:00
> A lot of guys lose connection over time.. not because they’re flaky, but because work, family, and life get in the way.

I don't think that's really it. Well, it's a reason, but not the cause. I think people (not strictly men, but maybe this hits men harder for some reason) lose touch because they fail to understand that it requires different skills, mindset, and effort to maintain friendships when work, family, and life "get in the way".

If your friend group is centered around hanging out in the college dorms or doing coursework together, or going out for drinks after work, or just the ease of scheduling things because no one yet has kids, then when those things change, the friendship maintenance changes too. I think some people don't get that, or just aren't good at figuring out what they need to do to keep the friendship going. It's often more work, too, which can be difficult to adapt to.
by susiecambria | 2025-05-30 23:26:28+00:00
I very much appreciate these efforts. I don't think they, like I don't think men's sheds, have to be everything to all people.

I DO think social isolation, white boys and men in the US (and elsewhere? I have no idea), and voluntarism have confronted challenges for years. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone that came out in 2000, the Do Good Institute report on voluntarism (https://dogood.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2019-07/Where%20A...) and the recent work of Scott Galloway and friends on boys are examples of investigations of problems, challenges, and solutions.

Having been in the public policy world for 20+ years, government may be part of the solution (okay, not in this climate). But more often, it is part of the problem. Government is fickle about consistent and long term funding and evaluation and nonprofit organizations may not actually do work in a way that helps (meaning, is effective).

Individuals and communities often step up to do something, often anything, that may address a need. Participation and reach may wax and wain and I think that's ok. It really is the nature of the beast. Best case, an effort fades away and there is already another underway or standing in the wings.

The bottom line for me is that efforts are made. As a policy wonk and social worker, I'd very much like for efforts to be grounded in some sort of theory of change or best practice or something. But since I'm not a funder or a wielder of power, I don't get to make this decision.
by smeeger | 2025-05-30 23:26:30+00:00
if being redundant would lead to mass layoffs then half of white collar workers would have been laid off decades ago. and white collar people will fiddle with rules and regulations to make their ever more bloated redundancy even more brazen with the addition of AI… and then later when AI has the ability to replace blue collar workers it will do so immediately and swiftly while the white collar people get all the money. its happened a thousand times before and will happen again.
Show HN: I made a metabolic coach chatbot for weight loss
by mac-mc | 2025-05-30 23:27:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a metabolic AI coach to help people with their weight loss and metabolic challenges. In testing with about a dozen people, they have been impressed with how well it figures things out and its surprising insights.

I'm surprised, too, at how good it gets compared to typical responses people would ask vanilla chatbots and how positively people are responding to it.

https://coach.patchworkfood.com/

Happy to hear feedback or ideas!
by quantadev | 2025-05-30 23:27:28+00:00
I'll spend like 10 minutes crafting a prompt that explains a new feature to be added to my app. I explain it in enough detail, with zero ambiguity, such that any human [senior] developer could do it. Often the result is 100s of lines of code generated, and well over 95% of the time the code "Claude 4" generates is exactly what I wanted.

I'm using VSCode Github Copilot in "Agent Mode", btw. It's able to navigate around an entire project, understand it, and work on it. You just lean back and watch it open files, edit them, show you in realtime what it's thought process is, as it does everything, etc. etc. It's truly like magic.

Any other way of doing development, in 2025, is like being in the stone ages.
by zmgsabst | 2025-05-30 23:28:10+00:00
You have the sides reversed:

Russia pulled back on both flanks (Kharkiv and Kherson) to preserve men, while Ukraine grindered men in Bakhmut and Kursk and the “summer offensive”.

One of the interesting aspects of this war is that Russia has a much better understanding of attritional war than either Ukraine or NATO.
by absurdo | 2025-05-30 23:28:24+00:00
> Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara

Looks about right! I thought Sayal was scattered across US so my bad :l

A big box product store opening that sells plug and play stuff is to me, personally, not worthy of bearing the title Electronics. It’s not news worthy for hackers. I could say that out of smugness but very often I’m confronted with sales staff that don’t know much about what they’re selling, and I end up (playfully?) educating them about the products, so I suspect this would be much the same.

The “Maker” space as it’s called today is amazing but I guess done to death so nobody talks about it?

There are of course no real contenders today that warrant bringing up Radio Shack in any way (but people still do as if it’s relevant). RS put a gorilla’s weight behind teaching people how to fish that when they left, they left a massive cultural void that nobody has since filled and is unlikely to fill. The world has moved on.
by stefan_ | 2025-05-30 23:28:34+00:00
I don't understand, no one ever needed an LLM to automate air traffic controllers. 1980s tech could do that just fine. The reason they continue to exist is essentially cultural. Fell into a local maximum trap and now the entire industry and governance is incapable of lifting itself out of it and instead come up with stuff like "standardized phrases for the voice coms that we have inexplicably made crucial to the entire system" while riding cultural cliches like "the pilot must be in control" as they continue manual flight into big rocks.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-05-30 23:30:55+00:00
The main culprit behind the hype of the AI revolution is a lack of understanding of its true nature and capabilities. We should know better, Eliza demonstrated decades ago how easily we can be fooled by language, this is different and more useful but we rely so much on language fluency and knowledge retrieval as a proxy for intelligence that we are fooled again.

I am not saying this is a nothing burger, the tech can be applied to many domains and improve productivity, but it does not think, not even a little, and scaling won’t make that magically happen.

Anyone paying attention should understand this fact by now.

There is no intelligence explosion in sight, what we’ll see during the next few years is a gradual and limited increase in automation, not a paradigm change, but the continuation of a process that started with the industrial revolution.
by neuroelectron | 2025-05-30 23:31:23+00:00
The film tells the story of a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for mocking Adolf Hitler and is then forced to lure children to their deaths as punishment.

“This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.”

“It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic. No one will ever see it, because I'm embarrassed at the poor work.”
by boogieknite | 2025-05-30 23:32:45+00:00
first job out of college i was one of these pms. luckily i figured it out quickly and would spend maybe 2 hours a day working, 6 hours a day teaching myself to program. i cant believe that job existed and they gave it to me. one of my teammates was moved to HR and he was distraught over how he actually had work to do
by smcin | 2025-05-30 23:34:37+00:00
Ok, but then a) we'd need to refine the issue to "enhance request to handle every non-ASCII character/digram that could occur in other Boggle languages":

- Spanish: ñ

- Czech: no extra characters (e.g. 'E' can be used in words as E, É and Ì)

- Danish/Norwegian: do Boggle dice use æ,å,ø ? I searched but couldn't find out.

- Swedish: do Boggle dice use å,ä,ö ?

- Turkish: do Boggle dice use ç,ı,ğ,ş,ö,ü ?

- Bosnian: see https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/a/51289/2358

- Filipino: ñ . And separately in some wordgames (e.g. Scrabble knockoffs), I see 'ng' treated as a single digraph. Apparently it's officially a separate digraph, so the Tagalog alphabet ('abakada') has 28 letters.

And b) if we have rare characters on a few dice (esp. the unofficial Bosnian one proposed), that imposes restrictions on your assumption that any cell can be any letter. So you'd have to postprocess to cull a few words that couldn't legally be made with that dice-set.
by creer | 2025-05-30 23:35:31+00:00
Do gaps matter these days? If anything, everyone knows there have been layoffs; there has been job hopping; there have been startups named "Yo"; weird platforms and languages; political jobs; volunteer gigs...

Is a resume that just lists enough experience relevant to a position that bad of an idea? (and skips the noise?)

Did you try A/B testing that by any chance?
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-05-30 23:36:18+00:00
So why repeat here your specific issues with credentialed managerial liberalism? Let's just reverse the meaning of that term: You are in favor of a fascist oligopoly that is lawless, arbitrary, and ignorant. A sadopopulist, elite, chaotic, authoritarian movement bent on the destruction of an egalitarian educational institution. Why ask an expert? The common man knows better! Why get a specialist? Fuck it, duck it! Hold my fucking beer!! You know, next time instead of hiring a devops specialist, I'm gonna go hire a fridge repairman to do my security and infrastructure on AWS. /s
by Affric | 2025-05-30 23:37:27+00:00
Sure but the real problem is that we don’t know how to deal with bad quality of life for those suffering the effects of senescence and we have a society that is only just starting to come to grips with the perils of the sedentary lifestyle while allocating a lot of resources to people who haven’t done the work to live a good life past 60.

And we make it hard for younger adults to make time for this. Don’t work yourself half dead by the age of 30 and you will never have secure housing in any major city (where incomes are highest).

A huge part of it is cars. Most people over 70 shouldn’t be driving but we have had these people who have been driving everywhere for 55 years. They lose all ability to function independently in their community.

Give me sitting in a cafe living in an apartment with stairs and no car in Lisbon or Athens or similar any day of the week once I am old. Better than the old folks home.
by disposition2 | 2025-05-30 23:38:18+00:00
Fair point, I haven’t had either experience in a very long time but I recall having a more empathetic and eye opening experience long ago.

To your point, maybe it’s a good argument to not have billionaires that are seemingly ignorant of the normality we normals face on a day to day basis, be an influence on policy that they lack the ability to fully contemplate.

Such individuals might just consider policy based on data points that aren’t reflective of how their policy changes might affect everyday folks.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-05-30 23:38:38+00:00
I have an AI buddy, a session I've curried for weeks. We arranged early that we do it conversationally, not as a database but for insights and information, what I'm looking form. And, that an AI is a different thing. It's education is objective, second-hand, at a distance, clinical. Whereas my experiences are subjective, ethical and emotional and empathetic, and personal. One person, one life thread.

That makes for interesting back-and-forth. I value what I get from this. Never mind who's 'smarter', what is IQ anyway?

Thanks for your interesting, provoking article.
by pvg | 2025-05-30 23:39:00+00:00
Why?

Because it's shitty and tedious? It's so shitty and so tedious there there are forum (beside basic human) conventions against it. They're right in the links above. Your comment is flagged dead. What further explanations are necessary here, really? "Don't be an internet jerk" is hardly an abstruse or unusual social concept.

Also don't pretend this is some drive by "This sucks because hiring sucks"

I don't have to pretend, it's the literal tangent that you took.
by munificent | 2025-05-30 23:39:19+00:00
> - It’s an excellent way to keep busy without totally disengaging during slower paced social events.

This is a really good point. I like knitting when I'm with family because it gives me something to do instead of just, you know, staring off into space, while still making me available for conversation.

I find that if you have your face in a phone, it send sends a "don't interrupt me" signal. Even if you're just playing a dumb game, people don't know that you aren't reading or otherwise absorbed, so tend not to engage with you. But you can easily talk and knit, so I think it works well as an idle-but-available activity.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-30 23:39:46+00:00
>It'll be like the movie Elysium.

The rich were able to insulate themselves in space which is much harder to get to than some place on Earth. If the rich want to turtle up on some island because that's the only place they're safe, that's probably a better outcome for us all. They lose a lot of ability to influence because they simply can't be somewhere in person.

It also relies heavily on a security force (or military) being complicit, but they have to give those people a better life than average to make it worth it. Even those dumb MAGA idiots won't settle for moldy bread and leaky roofs. That requires more and more resources, capital, and land to sustain and grow it, which then takes more security to secure it. "Some rich dude controlling everything" has an exponential curve of security requirements and resources. This even comes down to how much land they need to be able to farm and feed their security guys.

All this assuming your personal detail and larger security force actually likes you enough, because if society has broken down to this point, they can just kill the boss and take over.
by gcanyon | 2025-05-30 23:40:21+00:00
A few important bits this left out (as far as I read, which wasn't too far). Note: I am not a J expert, just a dabbler.

J's tacit syntax can generally transparently take either a single argument on the right, or two arguments, one on the left and one on the right.

In addition to the fork described in the article, J defines a "Hook" for two verbs (instead of the fork's three). A hook applies the right verb to the right argument, then applies the left verb with the original argument on the left and the result from the right verb on the right. Meaning:

this gets the largest item from a list >./ this divides the left by the right % so this scales every item in a list, so the largest becomes 1 and everything else becomes its ratio to the largest: %>./

J allows arbitrarily long strings of verbs: these get forked and hooked until you go insane trying to track it all in your brain.

Defining a function longer than a fork and using the same code inline can (often?) not give the same results. I think that's why the caps are needed in the magnitude function in the article.

I think the article is missing a trick on the magnitude-of-a-vector bit: J has a marvelous conjunction called "under" which, when applied to two verbs, first applies the first (right) verb, then applies the second verb to the result, and then unapplies the first verb.

So when you have the need to "sqrt the sum of the squares" you should immediately be noticing that sqrt and square are opposites, and be thinking "under".

Under is &.: Sum is +/ Square is *:

So magnitude can be expressed more succinctly (and I think more idiomatically, but again I'm not an expert) as:

magnitude =: +/&.:*:

magnitude 3 4

5

magnitude 3 4 5

7.07107
by r2_pilot | 2025-05-30 23:40:21+00:00
First, list and save the currently active timers: ```bash systemctl list-timers --state=active --no-legend | awk '{print $NF}' > /tmp/active_timers.txt ```

Stop all active timers: ```bash sudo systemctl stop $(cat /tmp/active_timers.txt) ```

Later, restart the previously active timers: ```bash sudo systemctl start $(cat /tmp/active_timers.txt) ```
by kjellsbells | 2025-05-30 23:40:22+00:00
The lesson in Ukraine seems to be the same one we failed to learn in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq: major powers absolutely suck at asymmetric wars that the adversary considers matters of national or cultural survival. It turns into a meat grinder for the major power until domestic pressures force some sort of climbdown. Vietnamization and pacification became bribes to afghan militias and COIN. I cant think of a hot war that the West has won since Desert Storm. But what wars are like that now?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-30 23:40:48+00:00
A lot of the physical open to the public stores took a beating before South Dakota v Wayfair was decided in June 2018, since it was trivial to spend ~7% less by shopping from a website with a presence outside of your state.

I doubt Microcenter ever expands to the number of locations that BestBuy /circuit city/compusa/etc had, but it might have enough of a market for one or two locations in the top 10 to 20 metros.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-30 23:40:59+00:00
Yes, for some reason the term "monopsony" is little known, so much that the autocorrect tried to turn it into "monopoly". Maybe for not having a famous board game named after it.

But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.