MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-05-10 04:08:35+00:00
> The only real solution I can think of to deal with this long term is ultra-fine-grained symbols and dependencies. Every function, type, and other top-level language construct needs to declare the set of things it needs to run (other functions, symbols, types, etc). When you depend on that one symbol it can construct, on demand, the exact graph of symbols it needs and dump the rest for any given library. You end up with the minimal set of code for the functionality you need.

Or you have ultra-fine-grained modules, and rely on existing tree-shaking systems.... ?
by skulk | 2025-05-10 04:11:55+00:00
The Thought Emporium, a YouTube channel, has some videos that demonstrate how something like this could be built:

Growing Rat neurons to play DOOM (unfinished): part 1 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw; part 2 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-pWliufu6U

Growing human neurons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
by jcelerier | 2025-05-10 04:12:27+00:00
> The workflow is, I set up Vec3x8, and Quaternionx8, which wrap a simd instrinsic for each field (x: f32x8, y: f32x8...) etc.

The point is why do that in a human, error-prone way every time (in the current software I work on, I would have hundreds of those structs for instance) when you can program your compiler to do it once for you
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-05-10 04:14:17+00:00
Most books are read for entertainment. I've known many people who have read tons of books but couldn't remember most of what they've read. Every once in a while, a book sparks some interest but most will be read for entertainment.

I used to think that a well-read individual was a well informed and smart. No, they just read books for entertainment. It's not a bad thing but let's be clear about that. It's just entertainment.
by NewJazz | 2025-05-10 04:15:02+00:00
Out of curiosity I ran toeki a tool for counting lines of code, and found a staggering 3.6 million lines of rust. Removing the vendored packages reduces this to 11136 lines of rust.

Tokei hasn't had a stable release in over 4 years and misreports lines of code in some instances. The author in the past has basically said they would need to be paid to backport one line fixes with no merge conflicts that fix real accuracy issues in their software... Bad look in my book.

https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei/issues/875
by jcalvinowens | 2025-05-10 04:15:07+00:00
It's important to emphasize it only changes the default behavior: unprivileged programs can still use setsockopt(..., IPPROTO_IPV6, IPV6_V6ONLY, ...) to override it. That's not a terribly uncommon thing to do, since different distros have historically used different defaults for the sysctl: you'll have to handle it either way.
Ask HN: State of the Commerce of AI Coding
by init7 | 2025-05-10 04:17:05+00:00
Advising a founder to use AI to code, I introduced him to replit.com

Our initial understanding was that if humans will cost $100 we can code this via replit in $1 and faster.

After prototyping I have realised that it has a somewhat shallow model at backend and keeps reverting to what it wants to do. If there is a challenge with react native it is not being able to fix but reverts to "a simpler htmlcss" approach after few attempts.

I wanted to zoom out a little and ask if there is an equally simple, but better coding assistant than this. Ideally I hope there is something that makes this mobile first and encourages me to not write any code and move really fast.

Asking because I now realise we might have to spend not $1 but $10 with replit. Just hoping this isn't a yak shaving journey I've embarked on.

Could this be salvaged by a good mother prompt that programmers use? Wondering because most of these frontends must be finally connected to similar deepseek/gemini/chatgpt apis no? Any other suggestions that worked for you are also welcome.
by hbbio | 2025-05-10 04:17:18+00:00
Glad to see this trending on HN! As I was born in France, I had the pleasure to read it. Just thought the multiple translations available on the site seem like a good corpus to see if frontier models could improve the translation.

Below is o3 take on "Le Chat", given as prompt the French original and all existing translations. I am not an expert in poetry and maybe not versed enough in English poetry specifically, but it looks suboptimal: It changed the structure, some verses seem overlong and I don't find the original beauty in "barbed claw's art".

https://fleursdumal.org/poem/132

Le Chat

Come, lovely cat, upon my ardent breast;

Sheathe in your velvet paw the barbed claw’s art,

And let me drown in eyes where, coalesced,

Cold agate gleams within a molten heart.

--

While idle fingers roam and fondly chart

Your supple head and sinuous arched spine,

My hand grows drunk on thrills that softly start

Across your vibrant body’s living line.

--

Then, in my mind, my woman’s gaze is mine:

Like yours, dear beast, it pierces—deep, serene.

From head to foot a perilous airs combine;

A subtle scent swims round her dusk‑brown sheen.
by int_19h | 2025-05-10 04:18:43+00:00
> I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years.

Why do you think these people will let us do so in 4 years? Whatever else they have in mind, none of them want to go to prison afterwards, and I think it's virtually guaranteed that by the end of this term, they will all have a rap sheet long enough to seriously worry about that.

(Trump will surely do blanket pardons, but he can only pardon federal crimes, not state.)
by never_inline | 2025-05-10 04:19:20+00:00
Size issues and bloat can be solved by tree shaking which is orthogonal to granularity of the package ecosystem. It doesn't matter for server side (at least people don't care). On client side, most ecosystems have a way to do it. Dart does it. Android does it with proguard.

The more pressing issue with dependencies is supply chain risks including security. That's why larger organizations have approval processes for using anything open source. Unfortunately the new crop of open source projects in JS and even Go seem to suffer from "IDGAF about what shit code from internet I am pulling" syndrome.

Unfortunately granularity does not solve that as long as your 1000 functions come from 1000 authors on NPM.
by const_cast | 2025-05-10 04:19:46+00:00
DEI is not affirmative action.

DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.

> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups

I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.

Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.

It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.
by gryfft | 2025-05-10 04:20:08+00:00
Seems like another step change. The first time I ran a local LLM on my phone and carried on a fairly coherent conversation, I imagined edge inference would take off really quickly at least with e.g. personal assistant/"digital waifu" business cases. I wonder what the next wave of apps built on Llama.cpp and its downstream technologies will do to the global economy in the next three months.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-05-10 04:21:23+00:00
Amazon tried to disrupt this with their Kindle Singles program with books in the 75-100 page range. It is still technically around but consumers clearly voted against it.

Despite constant complaints about the padding in many non-fiction books (not just business) there's clearly a silent majority who feel like "If I'm going to bother, ugh, opening a book then I want it to be as thick as possible".

For that matter, you see a similar dynamic on the fiction side too with novellas and short stories bring far distant in popularity to novels. (Even though those same people have zero issues watching 22 minute TV episodes.)
by SllX | 2025-05-10 04:21:29+00:00
> Sure. And you can do that with taxes, rather than charging at point-of-use.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. As I addressed way above this comment chain:

> 1) it’s a funding source for transit agencies which are already facing shortfalls and at the mercy of voters for any tax increases or bonds.

Having a funding source tied to use is also pretty nice if you want to financially justify further BART expansions in e.g. the directions of Tracy/Stockton, Santa Cruz, Vallejo or an in-fill Diablo Valley run from Martinez to Pleasanton and provide more comprehensive coverage. It’s also nice to keep it segregated from having to compete within the legislature and on the ballot with highways.

> I mean, we (very wisely) subsidize the absolute hell out of road construction and maintenance, and noone bats an eye. Folks get weirdly up in arms when the method of transportation being subsidized doesn't require a (typically) many-thousand-dollar up-front investment to use.

We also subsidize the hell out of BART and public transportation. There isn’t a single mode of transportation within and between cities that isn’t heavily subsidized by the government. Maybe a smattering of fully private roads somewhere.

Those subsidies are also not mutually exclusive with direct fees for service and direct fees and taxes (e.g. vehicle registration and fuel taxes), nor do they justify removing fee-for-service from BART.
Show HN: Papyrus Font Designer – Create Beautiful Text Designs Online
by zhangchengzc | 2025-05-10 04:21:37+00:00
I built a web-based tool that lets you create stunning text designs using the iconic Papyrus font. Features include:

- Real-time text customization (color, size, background) - Advanced effects (shadows, outlines) - PNG export with transparency support - Mobile-friendly interface - Available in English and Chinese

Built with Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS.
by rashunain | 2025-05-10 04:21:39+00:00
Read current affairs of 10 May 2025 in English to improve your performance in the general awareness section of the government exams and become a government officer. Daily Current Affairs are very important for the preparation of the government exams like SSC CGL, SSC CHSL, RRB NTPC, SBI PO, UPSC, State PSC, Defence exams.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-10 04:22:33+00:00
i think "using comptime" as a definition of metaprogramming is not really accurate... for example, i think calling this metaprogramming is really stretching it:

var x: [sqrt(LENGTH)]f32 = undefined

i think calling "instantiating a generic type" meta-programming is weak, since you're not doing any of the metaprogramming yourself, though i would concede that if debugging is the concern there is a point there.

same goes for "using std.debug.print"
by adamwk | 2025-05-10 04:24:11+00:00
There are lazy collections, but they’re not default.

Why the protocols are designed the way they are is until very recently all types were implicitly copyable, but most of the collection types like array and dictionary were copy on write; so the copies were cheap. I think in general, though, there are a lot of performance footguns in the design, mainly around when copies aren’t cheap. The future protocols will hopefully rectify these performance issues.
by 1auralynn | 2025-05-10 04:24:17+00:00
The same Unity jerk targeted my small educational software company and shook us down for $5000/year industry licenses because we have a grant. I had to let one of my devs go.

When I originally wrote the grant, we had budgeted for $80/month Pro licenses (what I was paying at the time). I've had a Pro license since 2011. It's alarming that they're in such a bad spot to try to draw blood from a stone in this way.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-10 04:24:34+00:00
Aberdeen's proxy is essentially an object of nested signals. In general:

proxy({ name: "Foo", email: "bar", });

is semantically equivalent to

new Signal({ name: new Signal("Foo"), email: new Signal("bar"), });

The syntax for getting a value will look different in each case, but using Javascript proxies you can fairly easily wrap the latter in such a way that it looks like the former. That's what happens with SolidJS's createStore utility, and I assume it's what's happening here as well.

Aberdeen looks like it's taking Vue's approach of making the proxy/automatically nested case the default, which is typically more convenient as nested reactivity is the thing that makes signals really sing. But it's still just signals, and the same behaviour can always be replicated using manually nested atomic signals.

EDIT: I've just realised you're OP, so you probably know more about your reactivity system than I do! But at least the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's working the same way as signals do, just with an emphasis on the nested signal case by default.
by gammarator | 2025-05-10 04:24:44+00:00
This is wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. Here is the chapter and verse for what can count as "Broader Impacts" for NSF grants:

> Such outcomes include, but are not limited to: full participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); improved STEM education and educator development at any level; increased public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology; improved well-being of individuals in society; development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce; increased partnerships between academia, industry, and others; improved national security; increased economic competitiveness of the U.S.; use of science and technology to inform public policy; and enhanced infrastructure for research and education. These examples of societally relevant outcomes should not be considered either comprehensive or prescriptive. Proposers may include appropriate outcomes not covered by these examples.

https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-2-proposal-prepar...

Only the first is "DEI" in any form, and you can (and I have) successfully get funded using any of them.
by zahlman | 2025-05-10 04:25:17+00:00
> This was linked from the top comment on the Rust subreddit: https://wiki.alopex.li/LetsBeRealAboutDependencies

It was also posted here, shortly before this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43934343

(And several times in the past, too.)

> I think it makes a good point that some of the difference here is just perception due to dependencies in C/C++ being less immediately visible since they're dynamically loaded.

The point wasn't so much about the loading mechanism, but about the fact that the system (especially on Linux) provides them for you; a good amount come pre-installed, and the rest go through a system package manager so you don't have to worry about the language failing to have a good package system.
by ptorrone | 2025-05-10 04:28:14+00:00
@nja - this is a very good overview, i made a chart, is this somewhat a way to look at the "process" ? https://cdn-blog.adafruit.com/uploads/2025/05/tariff_process...

will check back here later & we are pt at adafruit dot com & limor at adafruit dot com ...
by hakfoo | 2025-05-10 04:30:44+00:00
You'd think the biggest win would be in the middle:

We have an interstate highway system that's fairly well-maintained and understood, and is a finite space to map. Hypertrain on that, and you can offer an experience of 10 minutes hands-on-wheel at the start and end of the journey, and 3 hours of doomscrolling in the driver's seat. The highway miles are the most boring, both from a surprise-hazard standpoint and from a driver's-attention standpoint (there's nothing cool or interesting to see except the trunk lid of the car in front of you)

It offers a nationwide level of service that Waymo's city-by-city rollout lacks, and the chance for route-specific hueristics that Tesla's cameras-and-local-compute might miss.
by 1123581321 | 2025-05-10 04:30:49+00:00
Are you thinking of a certain study? Meta analysis is mixed on your proposals. There have been some countries where more leave and financial assistance increases births, but causality is unknown. And those births were in some countries among older parents more financially established, not the young couples who would benefit the most. In other countries there’s been no found correlation. The infamous Spanish study found more paternity leave to decrease fertility. :)

State-provided benefits not driving fertility makes some intuitive sense. The countries with high birth rates are not the wealthy and comfortable ones.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-10 04:31:10+00:00
A big one that I feel is under appreciated is how Swift has rooted out nearly all passing around of untyped data, untyped dictionaries, casting without checking, etc in Apple platform projects.

I don’t mind Objective-C when I’m the one writing it and can ensure that the code is responsibly written, but it wasn’t unusual to have to work on existing Obj-C codebases littered with untyped data, casts, etc some amount of which was inevitably erroneous and only seemed to work correctly. Chasing down the origin points of data, fixing a laundry list of method selectors, and adding in checks always sucked with the compiler doing little to give you a hand. With Swift, even in codebases with poor hygiene fixing things is easier since the compiler will yell when something’s wrong.
by jwmcglynn | 2025-05-10 04:31:27+00:00
After using it, I think this is a great start. As I mentioned in the previous comment, I really like the UX, and this is specifically about:

- The Pen tool feels intuitive.

- I like how the Objects panel shows previews of each layer.

- It is nice to see clip-path support integrated well, and features such as converting text to outlines, and boolean operations - these seem like rare features.

Here's some critical feedback after using it:

- Keybindings to switch between tools would be useful, and they should be annotated on the tooltips

- I'd like to see zoom/panning supported with Ctrl +/- and panning when holding space and clicking/dragging.

- When editing groups of shapes, it is hard to select individual shapes in the group. Double-clicking switches to the Nodes tool, which is not exactly what I want. I'd like something where double-clicking a group goes into some sort of "Group Isolation" editing mode.

- When using the Pen tool, I'd like to be able to go back to tweak the previous points, such as adjusting the control points, etc.

- Undo in Pen mode does not undo the insertion of points in the path, instead of Undoes operations from before the shape was started.

- Text support seems limited, for example an embedded @font-face did not render correctly. Similarly for filter support. If the editor doesn't support these features I'd expect them to at least be rendered correctly by the browser, but it seems like SVG rendering here is independent.
by arp242 | 2025-05-10 04:32:48+00:00
3.6M lines of code seems so much that it sets off my "are you sure that's counted right?" alarm.

I'm not very familiar with Rust, but all of Go is 1.6M lines of Go code. This includes the compiler, stdlib, tests for it all: the lot.

Not that I doubt the sincerity of the author of course, but maybe some irrelevant things are counted? Or things are counted more than once? Or the download tool does the wrong thing? Or there's tons of generated code (syscalls?)? Or ... something? I just find it hard to believe that some dependencies for web stuff in Rust is twice all of Go.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-10 04:33:52+00:00
The proxy object is a fairly classic way of doing signals (see Vue, SolidJS), and the whole thing about functions rerunning whenever data that was accessed inside that function changes is pretty much the definition of signals.

It looks like the author is trying to avoid making direct comparisons with signals and existing signal frameworks, which makes sense - depending on your target audience, it can be a bit "inside baseball" - but it's definitely using some sort of signals-like mechanism under the hood.
by zahlman | 2025-05-10 04:37:24+00:00
It does happen - after a deprecation period, usually small changes, but frequently (i.e. in every minor version there will surely be someone directly affected). More recently there were entire swaths of modules removed - still a conservative change, because we're talking mainly about support for obscure file formats and protocols that hardly anyone has used this century (see https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/ for details - I may be exaggerating, but not by a lot).

Historically this process has been mostly informal; going forward they're trying to make sure that things get removed at a specific point after their deprecation. Python has also now adopted an annual release cadence; the combination of that with the deprecation policy effectively makes their versioning into a pseudo-calver.
by mindslight | 2025-05-10 04:37:43+00:00
Fear mongering? This kind of postmodern trolling lost its plausibility on January 21st. We've now got a concentration camp, a blockade preventing imports of necessary supplies, government institutions being destroyed and parted out to the coziest briber, other government institutions turned into skull crackers for a wanna-be dictator, and a deep breakdown in the rule of law as courts' sternly worded letters are simply ignored.

If at this point you're really still in post-reality denial that our country isn't in the process of being destroyed by a mentally ill mobster autocrat backed by an anti-constitutional corporate totalitarian movement, then you're the one that needs help. Serious help. We can still defend our country together, but first you've got to join the rest of us in reality.
by UltraSane | 2025-05-10 04:37:47+00:00
" the extraordinarily long time periods necessary. (Nowhere is....)"

This is the the lie that I'm really tired of people repeating. Nuclear waste isn't THAT dangerous and doesn't have to be kept perfectly isolated for THAT long.

"In the future, 600 generations from now, when the poisons we lay down now are bubbling up,"

You should really be more worried about the 36 billion tons of CO2 we are spewing into the atmosphere every year instead of a TINY amount of nuclear waste many thousands of years in the future.

You are like someone with a malignant tumor worrying about the risks of radiation therapy.
by kev009 | 2025-05-10 04:38:09+00:00
Marc Laidlaw had a number of novels published before and after going to work for Valve and doing the Half Life thing.

"The Third Force" novel and the associated game "Gadget" are probably not well known - but if you liked Myst you might like them. It's a bit more of a visual story than a puzzle game - a bizarre psychological/psychedelic story with stunning for the time graphics (1993 or 1997 depending on the version).