MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drdude | 2025-05-14 00:24:45+00:00
most of the takes in this articles are flat out wrong... seems like a clickbaity one to me... "Mathematical models take us down the wrong path"... quiet the opposite... I gave a few masters students some distributed systems algorithms to code, they did and they thought it was working great (only took few months for them to achieve that too).... until, I created a mathematical model, followed by a framework to put these implementations into a controlled schedulers exploration. Guess what happened? even though I had 7 years of experience working with systems in different setups, even I got them wrong at first till the model (based on the mathematical model aka operational semantics) showed me where it went wrong, then I fixed things till all these implementations work correctly. Even unintended bugs by the exploration algorithms got caught by this scheduler!

This is not to mention many (if not all) of the other headings are wrong too. Not even going to waste time reading this.

No one can deny there are things that need to be brought to a better standards in academia, but denying the usefulness and depth of these degrees based on outlier super achievers is zealous, to say the least all while claiming "arrogance" on academia.
by reify | 2025-05-14 00:25:44+00:00
Never bullshit or lie to your children.

Transactional Analysis: Games People Play,

The Game: Waiting for Santa Claus or "Waiting for Rigor Mortis"

When parents lie about santa claus for instance.

your children will always be waiting for the next big event in their little lives that will be the key to their happiness and success.

That feeling we carry through of our adult life is akin to how we felt as a child, those few weeks leading up to Christmas day, waiting in eager anticipation of the toys we’ll receive that will make us happy.

We spend those weeks “Waiting for Santa Claus.” And just like kids we spend our adult life “Waiting for Santa Claus” too.

Or simply waiting for Death instead of living life to the full
by godelski | 2025-05-14 00:25:48+00:00
> they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load

Presumably they'll put them behind the 4km2 solar panels!

I mean this is a ridiculous concept. We've never put anything remotely that size into space. To argue that this would be cheaper than putting something underwater or in the middle of nowhere is crazy. I'd rather deal with salt than deal with radiation.
by lioeters | 2025-05-14 00:25:53+00:00
The coastline paradox, also known as "How long is the English coastline?", is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal curve-like properties of coastlines.

> The prevailing method of estimating the length of a border (or coastline) was to lay out n equal straight-line segments of length l with dividers on a map or aerial photograph.

> the sum of the segments monotonically increases when the common length of the segments decreases. In effect, the shorter the ruler, the longer the measured border

> The result most astounding to Richardson is that, under certain circumstances, as l approaches zero, the length of the coastline approaches infinity.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-05-14 00:27:15+00:00
> is go faster than rust?

Depends on how you write the Go or Rust code. The most optimal Rust re-write of the TypeScript compiler would very likely be faster than the most optimal version in Go. However they didn't want to do a re-write, they wanted to port the existing compiler codebase written in TS. Go like TS (ultimately the JS runtime) also has GC which makes a 1-to-1 port much easier.
by ziml77 | 2025-05-14 00:27:36+00:00
I find Linux even more annoying when it requires elevation. I get a password prompt rather than a yes/no dialog. I don't care about defending against an attack where I left my computer unlocked while I wasn't watching it, so the password request is pointless. The only thing I need to see is that I'm elevating something and the only extra security I want is that, like on Windows, it's impossible for an application to automate clicking yes.

Last I checked there was no solution for this on Linux though. Heck I couldn't even find a way to switch it to use biometrics.
by theshackleford | 2025-05-14 00:28:19+00:00
Would you feel the same way about a disabled employee?

Is it special treatment to be asked to still be able to feed myself and put a roof over my head despite having a spinal cord injury? In my country, I must be allowed to work from home, but only if already gainfully employed, it will not assist in getting said employment.

I worry this will be me if I lose my current remote job. Pending more surgeries which may change the situation, commuting and being in a physical office is just is just not a reality and so I’ve been forced into remote work to have any kind of work.

I am not optimistic for my future. Then again we didn’t think I’d work at all again so take the good with the bad I suppose.
by jacobgkau | 2025-05-14 00:28:31+00:00
> Having someone call and ask for your SSN is a non-starter.

That's not what he said. This hypothetical robocall would simply instruct you to call a different (known good, printed on your card) number to authenticate, at which point you know who's on the line.

> And in what world is SMS not available but being able to call that same phone is?

It's a good point about the robocall notification itself, but I imagine this kind of system wouldn't even need that to work in order to function. What actually unlocks your account is calling the bank's system and inputting your SSN; you could preemptively do it from another phone if you know you lost your 2FA codes and are trying to log in.

This person's idea would replace your phone number being your authentication with your phone number simply being used for a notification, shifting the actual authentication to something the bank already knows but that someone who stole your credit card (and maybe your phone along with it) wouldn't inherently have. I got a bad whiff from it at first, but after thinking about it a little more, I think it's a good idea.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-14 00:30:13+00:00
Sorry, don't want to go back to a time where I could only edit ASCII in a single font.

Do I like bloat? No. Do I like more software rather than less? Yes! Unity and Unreal are less efficient than custom engines but there are 100x more titles because that tradeoff of efficiency of the CPU vs efficiency of creation.

The same is true for website based app (both online and off). Software ships 10x faster as a web page than as a native app for (windows/mac/linux/android/ios). For most, that's all I need. Even for native like apps, I use photopea.com over photoshop/gimp/krita/affinity etc because it's available everywhere no matter which machine I use or who's machine it is. Is it less efficient running in JS in the browser? Probaby. Do I care? No

VSCode, now the most popular editor in the worlds (IIRC) is web-tech. This has so many benefits. For one, it's been integrated into 100s of websites, so this editor I use is available in more places. It's using tech more people know so more extension that do more things. Also, probably arguably because of JS's speed issues, it encouraged the creation of the Language Server Protocol. Before this, every editor rolled their own language support. The LSP is arguably way more bloat than doing it directly in the editor. I don't care. It's a great idea, way more flexible. Any language can write one LSP and then all editors get support for that language.
by tough | 2025-05-14 00:30:15+00:00
ASTrust: Towards More Trustworthy and Interpretable LLMs for Code through Syntax-Grounded Explanations

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08983

AST-T5: Structure-Aware Pretraining for Code Generation and Understanding

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03003

CodeGRAG: Bridging the Gap between Natural Language and Programming Language via Graphical Retrieval Augmented Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02355
by phire | 2025-05-14 00:31:17+00:00
Oh, I see what you are saying. I don't consider it to be a heuristic because it's simply bruteforcing it. IMO a heuristic needs improve over brute force.

> And 4 vs 8 is a pretty sizeable difference.

True, but x86 was doing four instruction 20 years ago. As I mentioned the current state of the art (in a shipping product) is 9, and 9 is larger than 8. Importantly, this Skymont of leapfrogging decoders approach is scalable.

> whereas Apple can just decode each op independently & only decodes 8.

Apple isn't as free from serialisation as you suggest. Like X86, many instructions decode to multiple uops. According to research [1] instructions which decode to two uops are common and a few decode to as many as 12 uops.

It also does instruction fusion, two neighbouring instructions can sometimes decode into a single uop. This all means that there is plenty of serialisation within Apple's decoder. And branching also creates serialisation.

It's just not as simple as independently decoding eight instructions into eight uops every cycle. Simpler than what x86 implementations need to do, but not as brain-dead simple as you suggest.

Actually, Skymont's approach has an advantage over Apple here, because it only needs to serialise within each 3-wide decoder.

[1] https://dougallj.github.io/applecpu/firestorm.html
by Dwedit | 2025-05-14 00:33:22+00:00
If you're filling uninitialized pointers with AAAAAAAA, it might be best to also reserve that memory page and mark it as no-access.

I'm not even joking. Any pattern used by magic numbers that fill pointers (such as HeapFree filling memory with FEEEEEEE on Windows) should have a corresponding no-access page just to ensure that the program will instantly fail, and not have a valid memory allocation mapped in there. For 32-bit programs, everything past 0x8000000 used to be reserved as kernel memory, and have an access violation when you access it, so the magic numbers were all above 0x80000000. But with large address aware programs, you don't get that anymore, only manually reserving the 4K memory pages containing the magic numbers will give you the same effect.
by ednite | 2025-05-14 00:33:33+00:00
Thanks everyone for the feedback. I hope I don’t get grilled, or offend anyone for saying this: I use AI at every level of my work because it speeds things up—especially when it comes to grammar and sentence structure. And yes, I was overusing dashes even before ChatGPT was a thing.

I use AI for coding too. It definitely helps with speed and boilerplate, though I’ll admit it sometimes sends me deep down the rabbit hole. Still, the ideas, creativity, and decisions are my own.

For what it’s worth, the structure is AI-assisted, but the wording and ideas are entirely my own. I use whatever AI chat window or tool is open in my browser—Grammarly, Hemingway, Word or others.

I’m here to share and learn, and I hope that still comes through—Thanks again.
by matkoniecz | 2025-05-14 00:33:39+00:00
One joke/observation was that soviet product will either fall apart immediately or will last 70 years.

Other ones:

> What's as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.

> What is it? It doesn't glow, and it doesn't fit into ass. Answer: soviet thing to glow in the ass.

> A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, “You don’t have any meat?”

> The clerk says, “No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”

Also, exaggerated (but partially true) stories about factory fulfilling production quota for 10 tons of nails by producing single enormous 10 ton nail.
by sershe | 2025-05-14 00:33:52+00:00
They are all much more dense than the bay area, and I don't get the sense that many people want them to be denser other than, again, for affordability reasons.

I don't have data but in Moscow where I'm from the typical well to do thing was moving to a "cottage village", something between a suburb and a gated community, despite good transit and horrendous traffic. In the 90ies it was stereotyped as a nouveu riche thing but in 2010s I even knew a senior dev who did it as it became more affordable. When I was visiting Tokyo iirc most local devs I was working with lived in the city but their manager lived in an outlying less dense area, since presumably he could afford it). I get a sense that people are likely to move to have more space and privacy, unless it's locally difficult or expensive.
by Animats | 2025-05-14 00:34:29+00:00
Rust still needs a way out of that mess. It's conceptually possible to have compile time checking for this. Think of RefCell/Weak and .upgrade() and .borrow() being checked at compile time.

I've discussed this with some of the Rust devs. The trouble is traits. You'd need to know if a trait function could borrow one of its parameters, or something referenced by one of its parameters. This requires analysis that can't be done until after generics have been expanded. Or a lot more attributes on trait parameters. This is a lot of heavy machinery to solve a minor problem.
by vel0city | 2025-05-14 00:35:08+00:00
It's not the drawing an icon to a screen that takes the half second, it's querying out to hardware on driver stacks designed for PCI WiFi adapters from the XP era along with all the other driver statuses.

It's like how Wi-Fi drivers would cause lag from querying their status, lots of poorly designed drivers and archaic frameworks for them to plug in.

And I doubt any hardware you had when Wolfenstein:ET came out rendered the game that fast. I remember it running at less than 60fps back in '03 on my computer. So slow, poorly optimized, I get better frame rates in Half Life. Why would anyone write something so buggy, unoptimized, and slow?!
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-14 00:35:37+00:00
Write a CHIP8 emulator!

Bonus: do it with no heap allocation. This actually makes it easier because you basically don’t deal with lifetimes. You just have a state object that you pass to your input system, then your guest cpu system, then your renderer, and repeat.

And I mean… look just how incredibly well a match expression works for opcode handling: https://github.com/ablakey/chip8/blob/15ce094a1d9de314862abb...

My second (and final) rust project was a gameboy emulator that basically worked the same way.

But one of the best things about learning by writing an emulator is that there’s enough repetition you begin looking for abstractions and learn about macros and such, all out of self discovery and necessity.
by theGnuMe | 2025-05-14 00:36:06+00:00
Here is how it should work. When people go on vacation they want an Apple like experience where it all just works. That is what AirBnB needs to sell. The only other person who probably understands this is Richard Branson (and Disney)... call it AirBnB Concierge (or even AirBnB vacations) to blend in the AmEx style angle. It's easy peasy Chesky, make it happen.
by jacobgkau | 2025-05-14 00:36:13+00:00
> If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.

The reason I'm "discounting the vibe" is because "vibe" doesn't mean anything. It's a non-word. You need to say something specific to argue that a place is unique. What makes up the "vibe?" The fact that you heard someone playing music on the street, which you assume is indicative of the entire city and no other city? A style of graffiti that may or may not be special? Saying you got a "vibe" from a place tells me you had some experiences there that you associate with it. I only drank root beer while I visited Texas and now I remember my trips to Texas when I drink root beer, but that doesn't mean the root beer I drank and Texas would have anything to do with each other for anyone but me.

(That's why I said "beyond vibes," as in "in more depth than vibes," not just "aside from vibes." Because you could be right, the vibes could be different, but the word "vibe" is no way to explain it to someone who doesn't already know. So I can't know if your idea of a "vibe" is really unique or not without knowing what you actually mean by that.)

> I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.

I don't drink alcohol at all. Trying to see politicians act irresponsibly is probably something that's easier to do in a place where lots of politicians live/work, yeah.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-14 00:37:05+00:00
What if -- stay with me now -- what if we solved it by just writing vastly less code, and having actually reusable code, instead of reinventing every type of wheel in every project? Maybe that's the real secret to sound code. Actual code reuse. I know it's a pipedream, but a man can dream, can't he?
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-14 00:37:36+00:00
You don't need to query the hardware to know the network interface is up. A higher level of the stack already knows that along with info like addresses, routes, DNS servers, etc.

IIRC it ran at 76 fps (higher than monitor refresh, one of the locally optimal frame rates for move speed/trick jumps) for me back then on something like an GeForce FX 5200? As long as you had a dedicated GPU it could hit 60 just fine. I think it could even hit 43 (another optimal rate) on an iGPU, which were terrible back then.

In any case, modern software can't even hit monitor refresh latency on modern hardware. That's the issue.
by mindwok | 2025-05-14 00:37:58+00:00
Yep, and Rust famously goes beyond this by modelling memory ownership at compile time.

In fact, the more behaviour we can model at compile time the better when it comes to LLMs - there's some cool ideas here like transpiling Rust into languages for formal verification. See https://github.com/formal-land/coq-of-rust as an example.

Formal verification was one of those things that was previously so annoying to do that it rarely made it past academic use cases or extremely important libraries, but I think LLMs take the tedium out of it. Perhaps formal verification will have a "test driven development" type of moment in the sun thanks to this.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-14 00:38:07+00:00
> The solution is to make it illegal to do this: wiretap data, for example, should be provided in a standardized machine-readable format. There's no ethical reason for simple technical friction to be affecting the outcomes of criminal proceedings.

I can’t speak to wiretaps specifically, but when it comes to the legal field, this is usually already how it operates. GDPR, for example, makes specific provisions that user data must be provided in an accessible, machine-readable format. Most jurisdictions also aren’t going to look kindly on physical document dumping and will require that documents be provided in a machine-readable format. PDF is the legal industry standard for all outbound files. The consistency of its formatting makes up for the difficulties involved with machine-readability.

There’s not a huge incentive to find an alternative because most firms will just charge a markup on the time a clerk spends reading through and transcribing those PDFs. If cost is a concern, though, most jurisdictions will require the party in possession of the original documents to provide them in a machine-readable format (e.g. providing bank records as Excel spreadsheets rather than as PDFs).
by manquer | 2025-05-14 00:40:14+00:00
It is because OpenAI is a competitor for Google search, not because OAI is also a monopoly. YC has a conflict of interest because of their relation to OpenAI(YC research) and Sam Altman directly.

YC doesn’t after all often amicus briefs in court, the relationship was a definitely a factor in doing so. Stating that relationship clearly and disclosing financial upside they may get in the soon to be for profit conversion is relevant to this case.

The google decision could have implications for OpenAI’s business and therefore their enterprise value .
by atonse | 2025-05-14 00:40:24+00:00
I didn’t say it has to be wrapped by elixir to be “useful”, but after having been in debugging hell with an erlang OIDC library a couple years ago, I’ve been burned and won’t touch native erlang libraries unless there’s no other choice.

That’s not a criticism of erlang. That’s a comment on my personal limitations of time.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-14 00:40:59+00:00
I agree, but the way the law is applied in the United States, anything that increases prices is more likely to be seen as a monopoly from a legal perspective.

Thats a reason why Apple is so against the opening up of the App market, and wanted to die on the hill of stopping apps for letting people know about offline purchase options.

They had issues long ago with the iBooks Store, of all things. Particularly absurd given the nature of Amazon’s business.
by dang | 2025-05-14 00:41:06+00:00
We need you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all commenters here) to follow the site guidelines regardless of how bad an article is or you feel it is.

Someone else being wrong or some other post being bad isn't a reason to make things worse. Doing so just creates a downward spiral, which it's all too easy to fall into.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
by gerdesj | 2025-05-14 00:42:10+00:00
Your fingerprints are largely static according to all police forces. To me that implies that the skin on your fingers probably wrinkles in a largely constant way too when submerged in water. No evidence nor research done here - just fiat!

If this is new then CSI will probably have a new tool. I suggest investigating other areas of the body to see if the same holds.

Do we have toe prints? ... and does the wrinkling thing hold for toes?
by cypherpunks01 | 2025-05-14 00:43:09+00:00
Most biometrics aren't easily hidden from your environment, everyone's constantly leaving fingerprints and handprints all over everything, shedding skin cells and other DNA material, face and irises can be easily photographed.

So it's kind of cool that a theoretical biometric could be stable over time and not easily leaked, that could take time to produce. Like some sort of cold storage biometric in the far future once certain biometrics become less useful after they're too easily lifted and replicated with new technology. Sort of like deprecating obsolete cryptographic protocols once they're too easily broken.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-14 00:43:10+00:00
Lots of things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventi...

Still, the statement that a large (but not all) portion of them were American inventions is probably defensible.

On the other hand, the American economy was one of the few major ones unravaged by WWII conflict.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-05-14 00:43:16+00:00
> LLMs work well with any static analysis tool.

tsc error messages are so bad that every time my LLM sees one of those "SomeType is not assignable to SomeLongAssTypeDontEvenTryToUnderstandWhatsGoingOnHere<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>" it just gives up and casts to any. goes for python too.
by stephenhandley | 2025-05-14 00:43:21+00:00
If you're under the impression that all the content on here is 100% human, that's probably slightly optimistic, and the reason why I labeled it explicitly rather than regurgitating / rewording. That said, I'd rather read GPT output than skim the meta-discussion that ruins so many HN threads. Totally stoked that we're now contributing to that rather than talking about the actual content.