MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthk | 2025-05-11 21:49:57+00:00
On math FP emulation, by looking up the code it seems pretty close to the code from Robert F. Illyes for Forth 83.

Forth implementation in Eforth it's like this:

( FORTH-83 FLOATING POINT. ---------------------------------- COPYRIGHT 1985 BY ROBERT F. ILLYES PO BOX 2516, STA. A CHAMPAIGN, IL 61820 PHONE: 217/826-2734 ) HEX : ZERO OVER 0= IF DROP 0 THEN ; : FNEGATE 8000 XOR ZERO ; : FABS 7FFF AND ; : NORM >R 2DUP OR IF BEGIN DUP 0< NOT WHILE D2* R> 1- >R REPEAT SWAP 0< - ?DUP IF R> ELSE 8000 R> 1+ THEN ELSE R> DROP THEN ; : F2* 1+ ZERO ; : F* ROT + 4000 - >R UM* R> NORM ; : FSQ 2DUP F* ; : F2/ 1- ZERO ; : UM/ DUP >R UM/MOD SWAP R> OVER 2* 1+ U< SWAP 0< OR - ; : F/ ROT SWAP - 4000 + >R 0 ROT ROT 2DUP U< IF UM/ R> ZERO ELSE >R D2/ FABS R> UM/ R> 1+ THEN ; : ALIGN 20 MIN 0 DO D2/ LOOP ; : RALIGN 1- ?DUP IF ALIGN THEN 1 0 D+ D2/ ; : FSIGN FABS OVER 0< IF >R DNEGATE R> 8000 OR THEN ; : F+ ROT 2DUP >R >R FABS SWAP FABS - DUP IF DUP 0< IF ROT SWAP NEGATE R> R> SWAP >R >R THEN 0 SWAP RALIGN THEN SWAP 0 R> R@ XOR 0< IF R@ 0< IF 2SWAP THEN D- R> FSIGN ROT SWAP NORM ELSE D+ IF 1+ 2/ 8000 OR R> 1+ ELSE R> THEN THEN ; : F- FNEGATE F+ ; : F< F- 0< SWAP DROP ; ( FLOATING POINT INPUT/OUTPUT ) DECIMAL CREATE PL 3 , HERE ,001 , , ,010 , , ,100 , , 1,000 , , 10,000 , , 100,000 , , 1,000,000 , , 10,000,000 , , 100,000,000 , , 1,000,000,000 , , : TENS 2* 2* LITERAL + 2@ ; HEX : PLACES PL ! ; : SHIFTS FABS 4010 - DUP 0< NOT ABORT" TOO BIG" NEGATE ; : F# >R PL @ TENS DROP UM* R> SHIFTS RALIGN PL @ ?DUP IF 0 DO # LOOP ". HOLD THEN #S ROT SIGN ; : TUCK SWAP OVER ; : F. TUCK <# F# #> TYPE SPACE ; : DFLOAT 4020 FSIGN NORM ; : F DFLOAT POINT TENS DFLOAT F/ ; : FCONSTANT F 2CONSTANT ; : FLOAT DUP 0< DFLOAT ; : -+ DROP SWAP 0< IF NEGATE THEN ; : FIX TUCK 0 SWAP SHIFTS RALIGN -+ ; : INT TUCK 0 SWAP SHIFTS ALIGN -+ ; 1. FCONSTANT ONE DECIMAL 34.6680 FCONSTANT X1 -57828. FCONSTANT X2 2001.18 FCONSTANT X3 1.4427 FCONSTANT X4 : EXP 2DUP INT DUP >R FLOAT F- F2* X2 2OVER FSQ X3 F+ F/ 2OVER F2/ F- X1 F+ F/ ONE F+ FSQ R> + ; : FEXP X4 F* EXP ; : GET BL WORD DUP 1+ C@ "- = TUCK - 0 0 ROT CONVERT DROP -+ ; : E F GET >R R@ ABS 13301 4004 */MOD >R FLOAT 4004 FLOAT F/ EXP R> + R> 0< IF F/ ELSE F* THEN ; : E. TUCK FABS 16384 TUCK - 4004 13301 */MOD >R FLOAT 4004 FLOAT F/ EXP F* 2DUP ONE F< IF 10 FLOAT F* R> 1- >R THEN <# R@ ABS 0 #S R> SIGN 2DROP "E HOLD F# #> TYPE SPACE ;

the float abs function it's literally the same, operating over the same bits.

On the lack of floating point on some arch, Forth itself (even ANS Forth) encourages you to follow a fixed point philosophy unless it's absolutely neccesary, because you can always scale up the magnitudes on big 32 bit machines.

And Pi can be prise enough by using scaling with 'double' (for 16 bit machines) numbers:

100.000 355 113 m*/ d. 314159 ok
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-11 21:51:08+00:00
So as for #1: Payers were reportedly okay with paying for aducanumab, at something like $30k/year, which was approved by the FDA despite effectively zero efficacy in clinical trials.

And, besides, I think it stands to reason that if time-to-market and drug development costs are reduced, prices will inevitably drop, and there'll be more competition in the market.

Right now, small firms are effectively priced out of the pharmaceutical market. The typical business model is to develop something to preclinical/Phase I and pray for a buyer or "partner" -- a larger firm that specializes in regulatory compliance and has pockets deep enough for continued development.

As for #2:

What makes you think you need a placebo control? And have you considered that in certain otherwise-fatal diseases, a placebo control might be grossly unethical in and of itself?

There's no way to eliminate confounders, anyway. Even in clinical trials, patients aren't kept in bubbles. (Some of them might even drink grapefruit juice!)

The problem with "proving effectiveness" is that it's inordinately difficult (sometimes actually impossible) and the costs are borne by patients and society. "Golden Age" drugs like penicillin and corticosteroids, among many others, didn't need efficacy trials. Drugs don't really need them today. With enough data derived from patient populations, we can do much better -- faster, too, and more ethically.
by baobun | 2025-05-11 21:51:39+00:00
> We’re open source, see more info at our repo page: https://github.com/11cafe/local-manus

There is no LICENSE file. There is no license field in package.json. The GitHub repo metadata is empty. The README doesn't reference.

What's the license and where can it be found? You also want to add the LICENSE file and an SPDX reference in package.json - that's the main expected ways to indicate your open source license.

---

Looking at sources, it's just mocking with example data right now? https://github.com/11cafe/local-manus/blob/main/react/src/Ap...

Despite the fully-local-no-cloud pitch, I see @openai/ dependencies and what looks like the beginning of ChatGPT integration. What's the idea here?
by ianbutler | 2025-05-11 21:51:50+00:00
In short there's no actual will and people think short term.

A bit longer:

Good luck sourcing that from taxes. People vote, and those projects would A, fall to graft, B piss off many in your voter base both as a consequence of the graft and the general disagreement over their value.

The answer is you would see the people who greenlit the projects voted out and the projects would be scuttled.

People can say they know this is a problem but because its in the abstract most of your voter base just won't go for it and it's squarely in a "people don't actually vote in their best interest" type of problem.

It's a riot trying to get a few new MTA tunnels approved and needed repair and modernization for the NYC subways is always basically just out of the question.

So 50 ft sea walls? Yeah people would actually be under water and still doubting the need for them.
by ck2 | 2025-05-11 21:51:57+00:00
NCAA elite women sprinters:

https://lsusports.net/imgproxy/ODHxe4usjQ5c6Fwojf5qcwodl0mMa...

I suppose I mean distances under 400m, pure sprinting.

800m+ tends to be less muscular, at least not visibly when not racing at 100% effort
by nighthawk454 | 2025-05-11 21:51:57+00:00
This is blatantly just increasing debt load. What does a business do if they need forever growth, but can’t increase their prices further without losing net revenue? Raise prices anyway and push people to finance it.

This is broadly not good for people. Financing things like your food or your rent (seriously - that’s a thing here) doesn’t help if they’re recurring. It’s not like people are gonna need to just finance one month’s rent payment and then they’re solvent and paying off the next 4 months normally plus installments. Really, what could structurally change in someone’s personal finances over a 6-8 week term? If you couldn’t afford a burrito or rent this week, what possible belief is there that next month you can afford that plus debt service.

The loans are just gonna stack and stack. Which will drive people into more debt, and more need for continued financing. This isn’t a multi billion dollar business because people just need a temporary boost once every year or two because their paycheck timing is off. It’s a flywheel money extraction machine.

Securitizing these debts doesn’t make them a good idea for the consumers. It makes it good for the industry so it can scale it up larger. Which means more people in more debt more of the time with “investors” extracting wealth from it.

Plus then there’s the whole systemic risk of people not paying back. They bake into the rates some percentage of defaults, and the larger the pool size the safer that gets. This systemically is a bet that no more than X% of loans will default at once. Basically shorting loan defaults.

Which is cute and all until any economic situation hits where a bunch more people suddenly can’t pay at the same time. In which case the whole thing unwinds brutally. And given that the play is to literally sell financial products that increase pressure on people’s ability to pay… this is probably super unwise. Combine that with any of the major structural economic issues we have ongoing and you’re poking a sleeping pressure cooker.

The only real questions are how much can be extracted before it explodes, and who is the ultimate bag holder at the end?

“If you thought 2008 was fun, well hold my beer…” - finance, probably
by Bender | 2025-05-11 21:52:19+00:00
Question: why do courts hit DNS providers instead of domain registrars?

Most of the eggs are in one basket. Same as trying to get individual ISP's to censor something, reaching out to each of the hundreds of registrars is time consuming and prone to being ignored depending on the country. If on the other hand a government can get cooperation from even 3 of the biggest "free" resolvers then its a big win for them. It's also easier to monitor people when they choose to use corporate resolvers like Cloudflare, Google, OpenDNS, etc...
by pizlonator | 2025-05-11 21:53:55+00:00
Malloc is just a wrapper for zgc_alloc and passes the size through. "Not instrumenting malloc" just means that the compiler doesn't have to detect that you're calling malloc and treat it specially (this is important as many past attempts to make C memory safe did require malloc instrumentation, which meant that if you called malloc via a wrapper, those implementations would just break; Fil-C handles that just fine).

Not sure exactly what you mean by aliasing bugs. I'm assuming strict aliasing violations. Fil-C allows a limited and safe set of strict aliasing optimizations, which end up having the effect of loads/stores moving according to a memory model that is weaker than maybe you'd want. So, Fil-C doesn't detect those. Like in any clang-based compiler, Fil-C allows you to pass `-fno-strict-aliasing` if you don't want those optimizations.

That's right, you have to go all in on Fil-C. All libs have to be compiled with Fil-C. That said, separate compilation of those modules and libraries just works. Dynamic linking just works. So long as everything is Fil-C.

Yes you could build a distro that is 100% Fil-C. I think that's possible today. I just haven't had the time to do that.

All of the software I've ported to Fil-C is fast enough to be usable. You don't notice the perf "problem" unless you deliberately benchmark compute workloads (which I do - I have a large and ever-growing benchmark suite). I wrote up my thoughts about this in a recent twitter discussion: https://x.com/filpizlo/status/1920848334429810751

A bunch of us PL implementers have long "joked" that the only thing unsafe about C are the implementations of C. The language itself is fine. Fil-C sort of proves that joke true.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-05-11 21:53:59+00:00
I suspect this isn’t common but I have a nice memory of a desk chewer who was probably the first out of any of us to earn his own home and financial independence.

He figured out that school wasn’t working, went into heavy machinery operation, bought himself an excavator as soon as he could, and went into business for himself. Now his peers were finishing university and he was settling into his first home and buying new machines for his business.

He wasn’t an academic, but he was smart and self aware enough to pursue what made sense to him. Super humble guy, too.

When the same kinds of people who used to laugh at him were shocked that he bought a home while they couldn’t afford one for a decade or more, he was extremely modest about it.

I suspect he had some positive mentorship in the mix somewhere. But also, his struggles in school weren’t strong indicators of his overall competence and potential. Just enough to cause him to give up on school. I’m glad it worked out for him.

Many people who appeared like him superficially are likely not doing so well.
by XCSme | 2025-05-11 21:54:10+00:00
Most use-cases and people/companies don't have the traffic amount where scaling matters that much, so performance gains will be negligible (or even worse) when using a more complex "specialized" stack.

Yes, if you have a large team, building for scale in a VC-funded company, go for dedicated stacks, but if you are just building a start-up where moving fast is important and architecture quickly changes, any DB will do and will not be the bottleneck.

I use Postgres to cache some responses from APIs (max 100 different documents per month) where latency doesn't matter, so using Redis instead would provide no benefit (will actually make it worse, due to its "worse" persistency and third-party integrations capabilities)
by firefoxd | 2025-05-11 21:54:30+00:00
I spoke about this before [0]. As engineer number one in a startup that specialized in customer service automation, I can see how they were fooled by an upward trend. The problem is the arrow plateaus at ~40%.

Even humans cannot handle all requests because some don't make sense or are unrealistic. But at least a human can make that judgement and be held accountable for their decisions. I'm baffled when companies makes such drastic decisions, I'm pretty sure if they had asked (they probably did and ignored them) their AI team, they would have advised against firing their agents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880490
by jerf | 2025-05-11 21:55:26+00:00
Yup, this is all really hard, which is why it hasn't been much more than a research project up to this point.

If I had to guess, the supply chain problems that may eventually cause this to be created will need to get, oh, I don't know, call it two orders of magnitude worse before the system as a whole really takes note. Then, since you can't really write a new language just for this, even though I'd like that to happen, it'll get bodged on to the side of existing languages and it won't be all that slick.

That said, I do think there's probably some 80/20 value in creating an annotation to the effect of "this library doesn't need filesystem access or sockets" and having perhaps a linter or some other external tool validate it externally to the main language compiler/runtime. The point of this would not be to solve the capabilities problem for libraries that are doing intrinsically tricky things, because that's really hard to do correctly, but just to get a lot of libraries out of the line of fire. There's a lot of libraries that already don't need to do those things, and more that could easily be tweaked to just take passed-in file handles or whatever if there was a concrete reason to design them that way.

The library that I personally could do the most damage with on my GitHub is a supervision tree library for Go. It doesn't need any capabilities to speak of. The closest thing is that you can pass in a logger object and that is constrained to specific calls too. Even a hack that just lets me say that this library doesn't need anything interesting would at least get that out of the set of libraries that could be exploited.

Or to put it another way, rather than trying to perfectly label all the code doing tricksy stuff, maybe we can start by labelling the code that doesn't.

I'd also point out that I think the question of libraries is different than things like Chrome isolation. Those things are good, but they're for treating data carefully and limiting blast radiuses; I'm looking at the problem of "if I download this library and miss one single file is it going to upload every AWS token it can find to someone who shouldn't have them".
by intermerda | 2025-05-11 21:57:09+00:00
High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties.

Those who want education on subjects taught in high school (whatever their value is) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to high school.

Between American states rolling back child labor laws, and the current federal administration's promising vision of factory and coal jobs for children and their future generations, there will be enough jobs that don't require useless high school diplomas.

Eliminating income tax and increasing tariffs to gorillion percent is just part of the equation. Rolling back of high school education is critical to truly achieve the dream of the "good old days."
by bradly | 2025-05-11 21:57:11+00:00
As a Rails developer with no desire to work in a React codebase, I'm not qualified for about 50-60% of the Rails jobs postings. My lastest full time was at Shopify where I said over an over that I was Ruby only and not interested in a React position only to be told a few months in I needed to know React to get promoted. It is exhausting.
by gonzo | 2025-05-11 21:57:47+00:00
I own Netgate (hat tip to the haters who will comment), the company that does pfsense and tsnr.

I also own Bump It Offroad in Windsor, CO. We do some CNC (plasma table) as well. I pay welders about $70k/year plus benefits, to start. They’re both college drop-outs, but smart and willing to learn.

Though I grew up in the trades, it’s not about “dues” for me, but more work ethic and willingness to learn.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-11 21:57:59+00:00
It's unhinged.

> Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe not.

Financing your lunch means you can't pay for your lunch. And then somebody comes to search profit in that. Yep, it's societal decay.

Ah, but he draws the line at sports bets, he doesn't like that.
by aetherspawn | 2025-05-11 21:58:08+00:00
Gen Z and the generation afterwards, having had parts of their psychology destroyed by Tik Tok, ready access to AI for cheating school and such, will lack the attention span to properly learn time intensive skills such as coding and first principles engineering. Knowledge of complex maths and theorems will be lost and there will be generally no interest in things such as functional programming, proofs, math, etc.

Initially there will be a huge employment downturn as organisations follow the pattern of hiring a Gen Y expert and supplementing them with Gen Z juniors using increasingly good AIs.

After a while, the Gen Y seniors will retire and/or die and it will be impossible to source a senior developer with actual knowledge. Wages will skyrocket for a few Gen Z experts, but in general there will be a shortage and the entire industry will eventually reboot, although I am stuck to speculate how exactly.

At some point, we will lose the ability to quickly make advancement in AI because engineers will stop understanding how they work due to a lack of deep understanding in mathematics etc. and advancement will drop by 100x or 1000x.

Due to people becoming very lazy on average, capitalism will become ineffective and most governments will veer towards centralised services, or central planning/communism to cope with the lazy populous. A few people with work ethic approximate to today’s founder work ethic, or deep skills, will be worshipped.
by msm_ | 2025-05-11 21:58:36+00:00
I agree, with exception of housing. Most people can't buy home with cash, and for many this is a necessity. But homes are an appreciating asset, which cannot be said about cars or food - this is an investment, actually. But for everything else - cars, phones, electronics, food, subscriptions, jewelry - I 100% agree. Consider two people:

* One person has $10k saved, invested into something safe and liquid. Then buys something for $10k, earns and invests that $10k back, and because of investing is a bit up (let's say now they own $10.3k)

* The other person borrows $10k, and repays $11k over time.

This buy-and-earn cycle will repeat, and each time the person that fronted $10k is $1.3k up (and due to interest, this is only growing with time). The difference quickly becomes staggering. Tragic, and a classic rich-get-richer situation. And the only difference is the starting $10k and some discipline.
by adt | 2025-05-11 21:59:07+00:00
Part 1 (replicas) https://copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligen...

Part 2 (copyrightability) https://copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligen...

Part 3 (GenAI training) https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Analysis in previous and upcoming editions of The Memo: https://lifearchitect.ai/memo/
by robocat | 2025-05-11 21:59:11+00:00
I personally prefer to be given brutal honesty. Overly polite people often annoy me because they hide information or they can't get to the point or their point is hidden within layers of wishy-washy mush that I need to correctly parse and then respond correctly to.

Politeness is absolutely necessary, and I hate seeing callous impoliteness in wider society (e.g. towards service workers).

I suspect I would severely struggle in a deeply polite society (stereo-typically Asian?). I can relax the most around very direct people (Dutch?).

I am continually stressed when dealing with anyone that absolutely needs politeness. Example 1: a very close friend who can be triggered by anything reminding them of their abusive ex. Example 2: a self-centred acquaintance that needs pandering (however isn't polite in return).

There's a balance - but it's hard to find. Perhaps I'm confusing two different dimensions, politeness and honesty?

Edit: This is a wishy-washy comment. Difficult topic, straight-jacketed conflict, interpersonal stuff that is hard to understand and talk about.
by cameronh90 | 2025-05-11 21:59:18+00:00
Is it about price or reliability?

I never had a manual window winder fail to work, but electric window buttons breaking or the motor getting stuck (e.g. in icy conditions) has happened at some point in every car I've owned.

The convenience factor hugely outweighs the rare failures for me, but I could see why someone buying a Wrangler for its intended purpose might actually prefer the manual option.
by pkul | 2025-05-11 21:59:44+00:00
While I agree with your sentiment of the "old world", I'm not sure that I can entirely agree with your views here.

What I do notice and do agree on is the fact that our society has become too financialized, there are too many people working in the financial sector that spend their days studying and trading financial products that oftentimes stem from debt.

But I also can't imagine our society without debt, how will we give the chance for people to attempt to create enterprises and businesses without it? Where would you draw the middle ground here?
by rchaud | 2025-05-11 22:00:10+00:00
Billy McFarland, famed "entrepreneur" behind Fyre Fest got out of jail and immediately announced plans for raising funds for Fyre Fest 2. Apparently there are enough suckers to go around, so why not just copy/paste the original scam instead of doing the work of tweaking it to boost legitimacy?

https://www.biography.com/crime/a63917214/billy-mcfarland-no...
by Bender | 2025-05-11 22:00:35+00:00
more resilient and democratized internet

If you only said more democratized I might lean towards yes with some caveats but you included resilient and DNS is not just peoples workstations and cell phones. It is used by very big and complex systems that make vast numbers of changes every second. Trying to force all of that through blockchain would require a complete re-thinking of how blockchain and the internet work in my opinion. I would be happy to be proven wrong. Someone could try it but that someone would have to be a very big organization for any kind of canary test. The devil would be in the implementation details as to how this monster would scale and handle a myriad of failure scenarios. People would also need to be able to troubleshoot complex misconfigurations. It would take some serious battle hardening before a production revenue generating company would take a chance with it.