MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-26 22:01:35+00:00
I think you're right that it's the build step where nix provides value. It's about replacing:

> a permanently deployed build stack (or stacks)

with a consistently deployable build stack. So if you want to distribute a .app package, you could use nix to build it, and then people could download it and install/configure it according to some different scheme.

But if it's trivial to reliably instantiate the build stack, why not just ship that instead and dispense with the special format? Then nobody has to wonder if you slipped some malware in the package before you distributed it.

The idea behind NixOS is that since we must precisely define our build stack anyway, why not use the same technology to define the rest of our OS. Maybe that's overkill for some, but it sure is handy that there are NixOS users out there so when I want to use something from nixpkgs when defining my dev environment on MacOS it already has the kinks worked out.

As for

> ...whose specificity goes beyond anything that a distro-managed system could offer.

My feeling is that most nix code is not distro managed but rather written by individual project maintainers. We only bother contributing something to nixpkgs if we think it's widely applicable.
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-05-26 22:01:37+00:00
Thing is, if you store delta change from one frame to another, then pixels which aren't changed are just zeroes. Compressing zero sequences is the most trivial exercise for lossless compression and unlike the bloom filter, it has no false positives.

I can see bloom filters as part of a complicated hybrid strategy compressor. The more tools on the belt of such a compressor, the better, but I don't think it'll improve things much on average.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-26 22:02:03+00:00
The premise of invite codes shouldn't be that you're responsible for anything someone you invite does. You are not your brother's keeper. If you invite a bot, the worst thing that should happen to you is that you're not allowed to issue invite codes anymore. But that's also all you need to solve the problem, because then the set of people who are careless with invite codes and the set of people who can still issue them ceases to overlap.

The nice thing about payments is that it makes an excellent fallback option, because spammers can't use it. It's not even about identifying the user, you can accept cryptocurrency and allow them to stay anonymous because someone who is going to have their account banned after only a few hours regardless can't invest even $5 in it, so it's about the money rather than the identity. And then it's not supposed to be the default option, but it can exist as an option for anyone the other options aren't working for.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-05-26 22:02:12+00:00
(Music) Streaming being a "rented" download is the analogy I used to use back in the day.

e.g. the "rented" downloads can be removed from file system at any time by the service you've "rented" from, while a "purchased" or "owned" download is only removed by the person who purchased it.
by gabeio | 2025-05-26 22:02:53+00:00
Security Keys are an independent device. I believe you are thinking of Passkeys which can live on the phone or in a password manager like 1Password.

If you do go with a security key it’s typically recommended to have at least 2 so that if one dies or is lost both have the same level of access. So long as you add them both/all to every account you need to access.
by codethief | 2025-05-26 22:03:57+00:00
> No, most people won't be happy that Nix breaks dynamic linking.

True. In my case I just enabled nix-ld[0,1] and now everything works flawlessly.

[0]: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-ld

[1]: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Nix-ld
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 22:04:20+00:00
Amazing example and show-case, great job. Reminded me of my pinstripes:

https://os.90s.dev/#sys/apps/paint.app.js

https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/31bf4ec46e02367b...

But yours is much fancier and cooler.
If AI Can't Code It, It's Already Dead
by kayabuilds | 2025-05-26 22:04:20+00:00
The clock is ticking for a lot of frameworks and libraries.

Not because they're bad. Not because the community gave up.

But because AI can't - or won't - code in them.

If GPT or Claude struggles with your framework/library, it might already be irrelevant... even if it's technically brilliant.

That means: (1) Popular and well-documented frameworks like React or Next.js will thrive (2) Niche or overly complex tools without wide training data probably won't stick around

I've got mixed feelings about this. On one side it's efficient and great for productivity. On the other it feels like innovation might get filtered out before it even starts.

What do you think?
by rzz3 | 2025-05-26 22:04:36+00:00
I could see it as well. For me currently, I’ve completed 100% of the Spanish course, and I’d like to keep learning more, but there’s no more content. I think there’s a lot of more legitimate opportunities they could find, in the way of more content, to keep me coming back. Right now to be honest I just continue using it to maintain my streak, since I’m already fluent. But! I’ve recently started learning Italian, and maybe that way they can get a couple more years out of me.
by 33hsiidhkl | 2025-05-26 22:05:37+00:00
temperature does not affect token prediction in the way you think. The seed value is still the seed value, before temperature calculations are performed. The randomness of an LLM is not related to its temperature. The seed value is what determines the output. For a specific seed value, say 42069, the LLM will always generate the same output, given the same input, given the same temperature.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-26 22:05:48+00:00
As an individual, at least you can make the argument that your activities result in far less than one death. What’s the appropriate punishment for one micromort? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s probably not too much.

Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
by xyse53 | 2025-05-26 22:06:50+00:00
I find that yearly works better for me psychologically for stuff like this.

I got a 1 yr professional of kagi just to try it. IMO the results work. I've never seen Google do better when I compare; I have seen the Google AI responses be consistently straight up wrong.

To me it's worth the cost knowing I'm paying a sustainable rate for a service. Plus I want no part in whatever the hell Google is doing these days with search.
by vincent-manis | 2025-05-26 22:07:00+00:00
Amongst my friends who are non-tech people it is a common belief that Y2K was a big scam, and that it all just went away when the calendar turned. I have to point out over and over again that it all “went away” because organizations spent billions of dollars modernizing their software (which was motivated by, but not limited to, addressing Y2K, we'll never know what the total cost of that was).

I expect the same, but worse, in 2038.
by johnea | 2025-05-26 22:08:22+00:00
One of the most offensive words in the anthropomophization of LLMs is: hallucinate.

It's not only an anthropomorphism, it's also a euphemism.

A correct interpretation of the word would imply that the LLM has some fantastical vision that it mistakes for reality. What utter bullsh1t.

Let's just use the correct word for this type of output: wrong.

When the LLM generates a sequence of words, that may or may not be grammatically correct, but infers a state or conclusion that is not factually correct; lets state what actually happened: the LLM generated text was WRONG.

It didn't take a trip down Alice's rabbit hole, it just put words together into a stream that inferred a piece of information that was incorrect, it was just WRONG.

The euphemistic aspect of using this word is a greater offense than the anthropomorphism, because it's painting some cutesy picture of what happened, instead of accurately acknowledging that the s/w generated an incorrect result. It's covering up for the inherent short comings of the tech.
by levkk | 2025-05-26 22:08:22+00:00
Thank you! Good feedback. The query parser is cached, so if you're using prepared statements or just the extended protocol with placeholders, it's almost free: cost of a mutex + hash lookup.

Cross-shard joins will be interesting. I suspect the biggest cost there will be executing suboptimal queries without a good join filter: that's what it takes to compute a correct result sometimes. Also, the result set could get quite large, so we may need to page to disk.

I'm focusing on OLTP use cases first with joins pushed down as much as possible. I suspect cross-shard joins will be requested soon afterwards.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-26 22:09:06+00:00
A security key is a hardware token that uses USB, Bluetooth, NFC. A security key may not have TOTP capability like a Yubikey. Security keys are not marketed or suitable for consumers, and sysadmins don’t like them either:

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/YubikeyMos...

You may be thinking of "passkeys" and while a security key can be a form of passkeys, the ones generated for your mum will be on her device, yes.

A passkey is a shortcut, for now. Relying on a passkey being in place is another good way to forget your password. ;-)
by _glass | 2025-05-26 22:12:01+00:00
Yes, and the project can be criticised by reducing until there's no value anymore. Well known instances of this process:

- Predicate Fronting in Free Relatives: In sentences like “What John saw was a surprise,” labeling the fronted predicate is not without problems, Merge doesn’t yield a clear head.

- Optional Verb Movement in Persian: Yes-no questions where verbs can optionally move (e.g., “Did you go?” vs. “You went?”) messes up feature-checking’s binary mode.

- Non-Matching Free Relatives with Pied-Piping: Structures like “In whichever city you live, you’ll find culture” mess up standard labeling, needs extra stipulations.

- Some Subjects in Finnish: Nominative vs. non-nominative subjects (e.g., “Minua kylmä” [me-ACC cold]) complicate that Minimalist case assignment.
by burakemir | 2025-05-26 22:12:16+00:00
One angle (no static types) is racket, which knows multiple stages for its macros. Maybe the most developed actually working "new tradition".

Researchers have also looked into multistage programming, which is enabled by representing code at runtime. Including how to represent it in type systems/logic.

For Scala, there was a realization that both macros and multistage programming need a representation of programs. I am falling asleep so can't dig out references now, but it is exciting stuff and I think the last word has not been written on all this.
by peaBerberian | 2025-05-26 22:12:26+00:00
I chose the filesystem paths organically as I was iterating with it: starting from the ideas of having a root dir and a simple unique "home" dir.

I also wanted to allow the visitor to hack around stuff like the system config through the filesystem (as if updating the `~/.config/` or `/etc/` directories in the linux world), so I also planned to have the desktop's own config files reachable in there and make it user-editable (though for now that's only the case for the list of desktop icons).

I found out that having a few root directories that were fully virtual[1] (actually in-memory) and marked a "read-only", and the others that were actually real IndexedDB-backed storage[2] was very simple to manage.

In the end it seemed to me like a much more simplified unix-like way of doing things which is what I'm the most used to. I'm not that familiar with windows so I'm not sure why it also looks windows-like though :D, is it about the naming of paths?

[1] `/apps` for apps and `/system32` for default configs - the name was `/system` at first, then I thought renaming it `system32` instead was ""funny"" (as the directory name became kind of a meme), so I did that! Both store "files" that are actually JS objects that can be stringified to JSON when reading them.

[2] For now `/userconfig` for the desktop's own update-able config and `/userdata` for the "home" directory. Something like `/appconfig` is also planned though I'm not sure yet. In contrast those contain data really stored locally, in ArrayBuffer form (a blob of bytes).
by svggrfgovgf | 2025-05-26 22:12:56+00:00
>Since these streams are purely unidirectional, users don't have a way to notice that they're not literally live.

Depending on the delay, this can cause problems when switching from delayed streaming to real life. For example, watching the countdown on a rocket launch via streaming then going outside to watch the actual launch. Usually, for me, a few seconds delay is OK, because I can't see the rocket until about 30 seconds after liftoff due to trees. But when I have a better view of the launch pad the delay can become an issue.
by oso2k | 2025-05-26 22:13:10+00:00
Another fun way to test connectivity in pure bash (need a revision from the past 15 years) is

timeout 5 bash -c 'cat < /dev/null > /dev/tcp/google.com/80'

Replace google.com and port 80 with your web or tcp server (ssh too!). The command will error/time out if there isn’t a server listening or you have some firewall/proxy in the way.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-26 22:13:16+00:00
Really impressive stuff! Very interesting, well done!

I don’t know that I’d want my sharding to be so transparently handled / abstracted away. First, because usually sharding is on the tenancy boundary and I’d want friction on breaking this boundary. Second, because the implications of joining across shards are not the same as in-shard (performance, memory, cpu) and I’d want to make that explicit too

That takes nothing out of this project, it’s really impressive stuff and there’s tons of use cases for it!
by nagaiaida | 2025-05-26 22:13:20+00:00
out of curiosity, what else would you expect the side effect profile of something mediating the effects of a potent androgen on the body to look like?

it's not estrogen where you would expect breast growth (and can't count on any particular changes to sexual function anyway), it's inhibiting conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone which could have that effect, much like you could spontaneously develop gynecomastia without intentionally fiddling with your hormone balance. calling it unsolved sounds a lot like calling the very many conditions with medications that have more likely and worse side effects equally unsolved.
by aaplok | 2025-05-26 22:13:34+00:00
> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion.

Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but still.

They don't have a solution. As the main victims they are just frustrated by the situation, and at the "solutions" thrown at it by folks who aren't personally affected.
by Aachen | 2025-05-26 22:14:14+00:00
Huh, okay. That's not how we run interviews but I guess it's at least a thing, even if not common around here that I've seen yet (I'm not super current on interview practices though)

Regarding the job ads, yes they'd describe the ideal candidate but I haven't the experience that the perfect candidate ever actually shows up. Like you say, knowing J, T and Z, the company is confident enough that you'll be able to quickly pick up dotting the Is and crossing the 7s
by gugagore | 2025-05-26 22:15:02+00:00
> But I don't think of these as programming language

I don’t want to get too caught up in what counts as a programming language, but you can absolutely write programs in a language like Lean, e.g. computing factorial 10. The fact that you can also write proofs doesn’t negate a system's status as a programming language. It’s worth noting that the official Lean documentation reflects this dual use: https://lean-lang.org/documentation/.

So there’s no conflation... just a system that supports both orientations, depending on how you use it.

> SQL [...] ought not to be conflated

I agree that SQL isn’t a general-purpose programming language, but you said something to the effect of "I don't understand what meaning a program has beyond what it does", and if you know about SQL, then I think you do understand that a program can have "computational meaning" that is separate from its meaning when you run it through an interpreter or processor.

> You want Coalton :-)

Thanks for the pointer. I am going to read https://coalton-lang.github.io/20211212-typeclasses/ , hoping to eventually achieve clarity on the relation between multiple dispatch and type classes..

That said, my interest in generic programming pushes pretty hard toward dependent types. I’m increasingly convinced that many patterns in dynamic programs, especially those involving runtime dispatch, require dependent types in order to be typed. Coalton might help me understand better the relation also between interactivity and static typing. But it's not going to be a panacea either ;)
by kevincox | 2025-05-26 22:16:26+00:00
IIUC it doesn't matter much if HDCP is cracked because the licenced chips (or knock-offs from the same factory) end up in stripping devices (or devices that are marketed as having another function like display cloning but also effectively strip the HDCP).

On top of that most pirates prefer to crack the encryption much earlier. Ideally the video stream is captured before the video is decoded. This avoids quality loss that would occur when re-encoding the video.

So cracking HDCP is only "interesting" if you don't want to buy the (very available) hardware and are not going to re-encode or are ok with the generation loss.
by kennywinker | 2025-05-26 22:16:52+00:00
You speak in another comment about the “It would involve thousands or tens of thousands of engineers to execute. All of them would have to keep the conspiracy quiet.” yet if the pathway exists, it seems to me there is ample opportunity for un-opted-in data to take the pathway with plausible deniability of “whoops that’s a bug!” No need for thousands of engineers to be involved.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-26 22:17:10+00:00
Low-dose topical application doesn't have those problems. Heck, even "dose your entire body" doesn't always lead to sexual dysfunction. (And breast development is a rare side-effect that you'd notice before anything permanent happens, and is easily-addressed.) However, it is topical application of a medicine that can interfere with fœtal development.

Oh, almost forgot: any messing around with sex hormone levels puts you at risk of depression. That's big side effect #3 (though again, many people don't even notice it).
by bosuanzi | 2025-05-26 22:17:11+00:00
Different times have different teaching tasks, which is the sign of human progress.

Just like after the invention of computers, those methods of how to do manual calculations faster can be eliminated from teaching tasks. Education shifted towards teaching students how to use computational tools effectively. This allowed students to solve more complex problems and work on higher-level concepts that manual calculations couldn't easily address.

In the era of AI, what teachers need to think about is not to punitively prohibit students from using AI, but to adjust the teaching content to better help students master related subjects faster and better through AI.
by oxbeef339 | 2025-05-26 22:17:31+00:00
After years of lurking on HN, I started my own blog to improve my writing and share some performance insights.

I've been profiling Go's experimental Green Tea garbage collector. I have implemented a graph traversal algorithm which shows 32x faster GC marking times with Green Tea.

Would love feedback from the HN community on both the technical content and communication style. Still learning how to explain complex performance topics clearly.
by phoronixrly | 2025-05-26 22:17:49+00:00
Only it's not La Liga censoring, it's a court order as far as I can understand from the TF article. Should the judicial system of a country have the power to shut down large swaths of the Internet after presumably due process and in accordance with the law? IMO yes.

Now, the question really turns out to be "Is a law stating that large swaths of the Internet must be censored to stop a handful of piracy sites just?"

No. It isn't.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-26 22:18:16+00:00
> Wouldn't -O3 with -Ofast do all code optimization for programmer.

No?

> Contributor dav1d claims 1-3% growth after his optimization, depending on video dataset payload. He nullified 1% optimization in rav1d, if the real growth was 3%, rav1d will not soon be able to equalize benchmark results.

Aren't you the contributor? (You have a very unique writing voice)

> Another question in theory can Rust be faster than C? If all possible optimizations are applied.

I don't see why not?

Other than that:

A) Great work!

B) Unsolicited advice, apologies: your technical acumen is being outshadowed by projection of motivations.

They're just programming languages.

There's no way to say one is definitely better than the other, and no guarantee one will be faster or slower than the other.

Your forebears had similar arguments about C and assembler.

Yet, neither of us is surprised to find there is no asmav1d. (and that's much more clean-cut of an argument w/r/t speed!)

(I don't think it was the goal of a long-running FOSS project to advertise Rust is almost as fast as C when they offered a bounty)
by dmurray | 2025-05-26 22:18:26+00:00
This seems like a plausible argument, but you can extend it to any source of fossil fuels. What's wrong with providing oil from my oil well, since it's a substitute for oil or coal from another provider that would have been burnt anyway?

At the margin, some of it must be competing with renewables. Additional supply of fossil fuels - cheap, or even negatively priced - must drive down the price of energy and make investment in renewables less attractive.

Incinerating plastics is only good if landfill is bad. Landfill really seems like it could be made cheap and safe: a landfill of a single cubic mile would last the US for 20 years.
AI: Is society going to get used to slavery once again?
by o3b | 2025-05-26 22:18:29+00:00
when speaking about AGI and superAI comes naturally wondering about a future where it takes over humans.

Now, assuming it won't happen, and humans remains in control, or just think to a shorter term future (10 years). Robotic AI may become a more general purpose technology, finding space in people's houses (who could afford it at least). They are not humans, they will just do whatever the owner will order them. Humans can get very easily comfortable with the feeling of power. Now, Robots and AI will likely become closer and closer to humans, hence people might start getting familiar -once again - with the feeling of controlling and owning another human(-like), i.e. slavery's back

While I was thinking about this, I found this 5-years old TedX on YouTube talking about the topic:

https://youtu.be/p85Tdm38Vh4?si=idMbSJHTIYJC3g-H

I close this with two last points:

- If AI robot becomes able to simulate a human at a deeper level, why shouldn't we recognized rights to them as well? - Related to first one, would enslaving a human-like AI risk to legitimate enslaving other humans?