MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by testfrequency | 2025-05-08 20:55:57+00:00
This post is particularly funny to me as well as I also had a very common name@apple.com email and I would often get sensitive emails, including travel info, sent to me - despite the fact that I had worked there longer than most peers.

I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
by gregjm | 2025-05-08 20:55:57+00:00
TCMalloc never munmaps, instead it mmap(MAP_FIXED) within unpopulated PROT_NONE regions, and then madvise(MADV_FREE) at page granularity to reduce RSS. Perhaps a similar approach for file I/O could help to dodge the cost of munmap TLB shootdowns after a file has been read, but using MADV_DONTNEED instead of MADV_FREE. There will probably be a shootdown associated with the MADV_DONTNEED, but maybe it will be lower cost than munmap?

You might also just keep around the file mapping until memory/address space pressure requires, and at that point MAP_FIXED over it.
by antognini | 2025-05-08 20:56:30+00:00
Yes, it of course happens, but when it does it is usually a signal that the new pope intends to continue with the vision of his predecessor.

(John Paul II is also something of an anomaly, because John Paul I died barely a month into his papacy and so didn't have time to put in place any real agenda. John Paul II was more commemorating John Paul I the man.)
by michaelsbradley | 2025-05-08 20:56:34+00:00
More or less, though it's such an umbrella term at this point that a self-described "evangelical" may disclaim Protestant identity, not having an awareness of the historical link and intending to convey that they don't feel aligned with a Protestant denomination such as Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc. I've met many Evangelicals who said something along those lines when the subject came up in conversation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism
by akudha | 2025-05-08 20:56:49+00:00
Good on him for giving away his fortune.

Anyone else feeling uneasy that society is increasingly dependent on a handful of ultra wealthy people's generosity for investment in certain good initiatives? We live in a time where there are individuals who have more money than many small countries, governments are cutting funding for good programs while individuals are stepping in to help. What is the point of living in a democracy if big investments depend on the mood of some billionaire?
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-08 20:57:00+00:00
meta: i really did not expect there to be such a negative opinion of people who ride motorcycles on hackernews but this is the second post in a few days where people feel a need to (and are for some reason, very comfortable) very intensely malign all motorcyclists for the perceived slights of some motorcyclists.

it's pretty gross behavior/rhetoric. i don't ride motorcycles but i know enough not to apply the specific in regards to the general.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-08 20:57:18+00:00
For over a hundred nodes? A lot, but these aren't little VMs with 4G of RAM and two vCPUs we are talking about there. Almost nobody has databases that big.

For a more realistic deployment in the cloud with 2TB of data, 4TB of backup storage and peak of 64 cores with elastic scaling it's about 6k/month. So the moment you're spending more than a third of a decently skilled SWE on working around database limitations it's worth it. That's for a fully managed HA cluster with 99.95% uptime, rolling upgrades etc.
by Animats | 2025-05-08 20:57:20+00:00
I'm currently struggling with instability in the Rust 3D graphics stack.

All this stuff has been around for about five years now, and was mostly working five years ago. The APIs should have settled down long ago. Despite this, there are frequent "refactorings" which cause breaking changes to APIs. (I'm tempted to term this "refuckering".)

Some of this API churn is just renaming types or enum values for consistency, or adding new parameters to functions. Some changes are major, such as turning an event loop inside out. Code using the API must be fixed to compensate.

Because of all the breaking changes, the related crates (Wgpu, the interface to Vulkan, etc., Winit, the interface to the operating system's window manager, and Egui, which handles 2D dialog boxes and menus) must advance in lockstep. There's not much coordination between the various development groups on this. Wgpu and Winit both think they're in charge. and others should adapt to them. Egui tries to cope. Users of the stack suffer in silence.

When there's a bug, there's no going back to an older version. The refuckering prevents that. Changes due to API breaks are embedded in code that uses these APIs.

I'm currently chasing what ought to be a simple bug in egui, and I've been stuck for over a month. The unit tests won't run for some target platforms that used to work, and bug reports are ignored while new features are being added. (Users keep demanding more features in Egui, and Egui is growing towards web browser layout complexity.)

Most users are giving up. In the last year, three 3D rendering libraries and two major 3D game projects have been abandoned. There's are about two first-rate 3D games in Rust, Tiny Glade and Hydrofoil Generation, and both avoid this graphics stack.

The "Stability by Design" article is helpful in that it makes it clear what's gone wrong in Rust 3D land.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-08 20:58:36+00:00
Not just i2p - there are established, existing projects nearly identical.

Most of these have fallen on their faces because they can't get sufficient adoption rates, and a big part of that is because they refuse to acknowledge that 90%+ of the desktop computer market isn't running Linux or BSD.

Some of them include a half-assed attempt at a Windows client and few if any support MacOS despite it having something like 20-30% of the desktop market
by hermitcrab | 2025-05-08 20:58:41+00:00
>I enjoy being a dev ... I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability

You could be massively wrong about that. Many charities are desparate for IT help. I am a developer and volunteer at a charity. I have done some IT stuff for them (mostly setting up some Airtable databases) and it has been (modesty aside) transformative for them.
by paulinecx | 2025-05-08 20:58:46+00:00
Hello everyone :)

I recently launched a side project called Feedbask with a dev friend. It’s a widget you can embed on your site to collect some or all of these : • Feedback • Bug reports • Feature requests • Testimonials

We built it because we felt existing tools were either too complex, incomplete or too expensive. It's simple, you just copy a script, customize a few things, and it's good to go.

It’s still early, so I’d love to hear your feedback – good or bad. Especially if you’ve built a product and face the need to get user feedbacks.

I got many idea to improve our with public roadmap etc, I'll add it based on... What's the most asked You can check it out here (there's a free plan to try everything): https://feedbask.com

Happy to answer any questions !

Pauline
Show HN: Woxi - A Rust-based interpreter for a subset of the Wolfram Language
by adius | 2025-05-08 20:59:13+00:00
Mathematica is an incredible piece of software, and the Wolfram Language is actually quite pleasant to use once you get used to the syntax.

Unfortunately, the high licensing costs of Mathematica make it inaccessible to many people, and therefore (in my opinion) worse solutions like Python, R, and Jupyter have become the default.

Due to the sheer size of Mathematica (over 6000 functions!), it is impossible for me to rebuild it from scratch alone. Please join me in rebuilding it one PR at a time so we can finally make it accessible to everyone!
by maxglute | 2025-05-08 20:59:13+00:00
No, I think top down plan still focuses on industrial software, i.e. Huawei working on semi software. I think ZWCAD (which has decent penetration in PRC architecture/mechanical) to catch up in BIM, 3D, complex workflows. Maybe that flows into 3d software, simulations in other domains (structural, civil), then game engine etc. But there's nothing for _serious) professional creative piplines like photoshop, illusrator, premiere, max, blender etc. Some movement on AI enhanced lightroom stuff or other AI generated workflows because that's field is new/level. But IMO there really should be more effort to chip away at professional tools, where I don't think anyone is even trying because still largely competing with free pirated adobe/autocad software.
by cyberax | 2025-05-08 20:59:51+00:00
No, it was not. If you look at the EOs by president, they were fairly stable or even trending down until Trump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...

Even in qualitative terms, the "consolidation" was incorrect. Congress abdicated its responsibilities, and the Federal agencies picked up the slack. They're not controlled _centrally_, it's not like Obama was ordering agencies to write particular rules.

We now see what the central consolidated control actually looks like.
by tylerflint | 2025-05-08 20:59:52+00:00
The short answer is that we only have to calculate the offset per go version, no expensive runtime scanning is required.

The long answer is that the offsets are the byte alignment offsets for the go structs containing the pointers to the file descriptor and buffers. Fortunately we only have to calculate these for each version where the TLS structs within go actually change, so not even for every version. For instance, if a field is added, removed, or changes type then the location in memory where those pointers will be found changes. We can then calculate the actual offset at runtime where we know which architecture (amd64, arm64, etc) with a simple calculation. Within the eBPF probe, when the function is called, it uses pointer arithmetic to extract the location of the file descriptor and buffer directly.
by samwho | 2025-05-08 21:00:14+00:00
Good question. I'm not sure how suitable this would be to then do statistical analysis on what remains. You'd likely want to try and aggregate at source, so you're considering all data and then only sending up aggregates to save on space/bandwidth (if you were at the sort of scale that would require that).

The use-case I chose in the post was more focusing on protecting some centralised service while making sure when you do throw things away, you're not doing it in a way that creates blind-spots (e.g. you pick a rate limit of N per minute and your traffic is inherently bursty around the top of the minute and you never see logs for anything in the tail end of the minute.)

A fun recent use-case you might have seen was in https://onemillionchessboards.com. Nolen uses reservoir sampling to maintain a list of boards with recent activity. I believe he is in the process of doing a technical write-up that'll go into more detail.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-08 21:00:20+00:00
If it's configurable that's very new. It definitely has been hard coded and unconfigurable by design the entire history of the project that I've known it. They just tell you to work around it, not tweak it for your app.

Transactions holding locks for too long are indeed a problem though in Oracle transactions can have priorities and steal each other's locks.
by thimabi | 2025-05-08 21:00:50+00:00
At least according to customary international law, a head of state has full sovereign immunity regardless of any nationalities that they might hold. By the way, the immunity covers not only the head of state, but also the head of government and the Secretary of State.

If the Pope were a mere diplomat, his immunities would be restricted to the acts directly related to his job in any country of which he’s a national or permanent resident. That’s because, unlike sovereign immunity, diplomatic immunity is based on a Vienna Convention full of restrictions like that.
by twothreeone | 2025-05-08 21:01:04+00:00
ITER uses HTSs, just not for the coils:

> The design operating current of the feeders is 68Ka. High temperature superconductor (HTS) current leads transmit the high-power currents from the room-temperature power supplies to the low-temperature superconducting coils 4K (-269°C) with minimum heat load.

Source: https://www.iter.org/machine/magnets
by pixl97 | 2025-05-08 21:01:15+00:00
>A person’s identity is just intrinsically part of the person.

Is it?

If I look at least somewhat like you, grab your ID, and stuff you in an incinerator then any ID system that does not take detailed biometrics will have no clue if I'm you or not.

Saying identity is intrinsic is tantamount to saying "I am that I am". I mean, that's cool and all, but that tells me nothing about who you actually are.

There is nothing intrinsic about your name for example. This can and does change for people.

Again, same with location where you live.

We spend our entire lives grown up and getting old, so how we look adapts.

Then you get down to bio markers like fingerprints or dna, but these are recent inventions when it comes to human identification and take a fair bit of technology to use successfully.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-08 21:02:07+00:00
I have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs.

I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.

But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.

Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.

I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
by esafak | 2025-05-08 21:02:56+00:00
Not quite. Complex systems can exhibit macroscopic properties not evident at microscopic scales. For example, birds self organize into flocks, an emergent phenomenon, visible to the untrained eye. Our understanding of how it happens does not change the fact that it does.

There is a field of study for this called statistical mechanics.

https://ganguli-gang.stanford.edu/pdf/20.StatMechDeep.pdf
by gwern | 2025-05-08 21:03:00+00:00
I did some searching and I'm not sure the answer you remember exists. All I can find after a bunch of keyword + date-restricted searches in Google, Quora, & HN is Ibrahim Bashir (https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-the-w...) who worked there 2003-2005 (https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-Carr...) and who writes:

> McMaster-Carr has a Systems department which handles internal software development, including the website. I actually worked on a lot of the front-end functionality (among other things) during my tenure there and we had 1 person who was essentially the UX lead (I'm sure the team / function has expanded since then). > > The design philosophy for the website was heavily influence by Edward Tufte and myself and several folks from my engineering team were enrolled in his course to familiarize ourselves with key concepts. > > When I interviewed with McMaster-Carr I distinctly remember a Director who told me about building the first version of the website himself and not realizing it would become "a real thing" one day. I cannot for the life of me remember his name, but he was a sharp guy and I'm sure he's off doing great things. We walked into work one Monday morning, and his desk was empty and his whiteboard said "poof".

Given the timing and his description of what he did, it seems unlikely any other McMaster-Carr insider would have been writing about it, and this has to be what you are remembering, if anything.

(And https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ seems useless here.)
by frereubu | 2025-05-08 21:03:35+00:00
Anecdata, but the brother of a friend was working on malaria in a SE Asian country and the Gates Foundation got interested in what they were doing, and wanted to find out more about it before possibly funding some of their work. They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget. It would have made more sense to me to either (a) fly someone from the Gates Foundation to the country so they could see things first hand or (b) conduct the investigation / interviews via the internet. Given that the Foundation's people weren't in-country anyway, (b) seems like the best option all round given the environmental costs of flying.
Show HN: Koodi – A PWA that aggregates USSD codes for African telecom users
by adagbeleonel | 2025-05-08 21:03:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a developer based in Togo, and I recently built a small tool called koodi.africa, a Progressive Web App that aggregates USSD codes (used to check balances, buy data, send money, etc.) for telecom users in Africa.

In many African countries, users rely on USSD codes for everyday mobile money actions and data purchases—but it’s hard to remember all the codes across different networks and countries (Moov, MTN, Yas, Orange, etc.).

So I created koodi.africa as a simple, installable web app that lists these codes in an easy-to-use interface. You tap a button (e.g., “Buy 500MB data”), and it launches the correct USSD code. It even handles variables if needed.

It works offline after the first load, so it’s usable without an internet connection. Great for people who travel, use dual-SIM phones, or manage multiple numbers.

This is just an MVP – built in a few hours – but I’d love feedback, feature suggestions, and contributions.

Try it here: https://koodi.africa

Happy to answer questions!
by duxup | 2025-05-08 21:04:02+00:00
>persistent harassment, blackmail and threats

I certainly think of online harassment as a real problem, but almost always I see folks talk about it a lot without going into detail about how it manifests itself. It's a real problem, but also this opaque thing people cite as a reason to do something else.

I can't help but wonder sometimes if folks count ANY negative engagement online, on twitter, etc as harassment and I worry it has become a sort of de-facto claim to make whenever you do a thing.
by segmondy | 2025-05-08 21:04:21+00:00
Is that so? Quite the speculation. USA restricted their telecom equipment because USA doesn't trust their radio and think it might have backdoors specially with their close relationship to China's military. Well, every accusation is a confession, so China feels the same about Windows, that USA might have backdoor in it too due to Microsoft's association with US military so they need something that is not windows too. This is my own speculation ...
by Macha | 2025-05-08 21:06:09+00:00
As an aside, does anyone make employment decisions on policies like promised sabbaticals after $x years of service? Everywhere I've seen them, the policies usually have something like a 5yoe cliff, and also are usually revoked in less than 5 years, so it's only really some existing employees close to the cliff that ever get to benefit. Which makes me wonder why they offer this policy in general.

(Even before the post-covid attempt for employers to reassert control, this was a commonly rug-pulled policy)
by wredcoll | 2025-05-08 21:07:12+00:00
I haven't used local models. I don't have the 60+gb of vram to do so.

I've tested aider with gemini2.5 with prompts as basic as 'write a ts file with pupeteer to load this url, click on button identified by x, fill in input y, loop over these urls' and it performed remarkably well.

Llm performance is 100% dependent on the model you're using so you ca hardly generalize from a small model you run locally on a cpu.
by vo2maxer | 2025-05-08 21:07:39+00:00
Just to clarify, the paper [0] does use both implanted electrodes and fMRI data, but it is actually quite transparent about which data came from which source. The authors worked with two datasets: the B2G dataset, which includes multi-unit activity from implanted Utah arrays in macaques, and the Shen-19 dataset, which uses noninvasive fMRI from human participants.

You’re right that fMRI measures blood flow rather than direct neural activity, and the authors acknowledge that limitation. But the study doesn’t treat it as a direct window into brain function. Instead, it proposes a predictive attention mechanism (PAM) that learns to selectively weigh signals from different brain areas, depending on the task of reconstructing perceived images from those signals.

The “thermal imager” analogy might make sense in a different context, but in this case, the model is explicitly designed to deal with those signal differences and works across both modalities. If you’re curious, the paper is available here:

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.04.596589v2....
by terinjokes | 2025-05-08 21:08:43+00:00
I just reinstalled Gentoo this past weekend on an IBM ThinkPad with a Pentium 4/M and 256MiB of RAM, and even there it's probably "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".

Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.

Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough for it to crash the whole system.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-08 21:08:43+00:00
And if you managed to go out and spend a million dollars on a computer instead, it wouldn’t be all that different from what you bought here. The CPUs would be very similar, similar RAM and storage, etc. It would be a lot more powerful, but that mostly comes from scaling horizontally. More RAM, more CPUs, more everything. But it will run the same sort of software and run most of it about as fast, just more of it at once.
by samwho | 2025-05-08 21:09:06+00:00
You're welcome! I think it's a beautiful palette, and I think people have come to associate me with it now so I don't think I'll ever change.

I view all of my posts using the various colour blindness filters in the Chrome dev tools during development, to make sure I'm not using any ambiguous pairings. I'm glad that effort made you feel welcome and able to enjoy the content fully.
by jhgaylor | 2025-05-08 21:09:47+00:00
I am not a particularly good writer, so I started using llms to help me write. At first that was by having the llm convert my rough draft into something ready for editing. As I edited a bunch of this work I found it still wasn’t something I wanted to put my name on.

Now I use llms to help me research, outline, refine vocabulary and grade my work but also have stopped letting it speak for me. I’m much happier with the result.
by biomcgary | 2025-05-08 21:09:53+00:00
Your genome only needs to store the information necessary for the lineage leading to you to survive and compete in the range of environmental variation that actually happened.

Consequently, your DNA has less information about how to survive on Jupiter or in the absence of oxygen.

However, your genome contains a fair amount of data on how to identify a mate that will maximize your reproductive success in an environment similar to the one your lineage experienced, e.g., a preference for symmetrical faces.

Until we can measure the environment of humans accurately, all the algorithmic complexity measures applied to the genome are going to be missing the relevant context.