MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-05-09 13:42:56+00:00
FEMA has nothing to do with insurance. They do grants, cover temporary gaps in coverage time for insurance, and coordinate repsonses across regions (multi-state).

You are thinking of programs like the NFIP (national Flood Insurance Program)...

Unfortunately, programs like this create perverse incentives. People keep building homes where none would be if disasters were priced in.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-09 13:44:36+00:00
> Also, do you have an example for such "opportunistic" usages?

The simplest example would be copying a small number of bytes (like, copying structs). Vector instructions generally have a higher setup cost, like setting so it can't really be used for this purpose. Maybe future vector instructions have no such caveats and can be used as like SIMD, but AFAIK it's not yet the case even for RISC-V's V extension.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-09 13:45:06+00:00
If you could package this up in a motivational poster, it belongs in every company meeting room. Speed and quality are not two opposing forces to tradeoff. We can have both.

But we need to get rid of this silly, infantile, unwavering attachment to our source code files. Throw code away. All. the. time. The first version of code is, by definition, being built in the absence of critical information. Why on earth would we get so attached to that which was built in ignorance? In this case we're not "reusing code", we're throwing away knowledge!

Why would you discard everything valuable you learned in favor of a code artifact written before you learned it? Throw away the code instead! Surely the code written AFTER gaining the knoweldge will be both faster and better quality. (and more clear, less tech debt, etc)
by immibis | 2025-05-09 13:45:35+00:00
Most generally, it's a place you can buffer a frame. Old-school computers usually have an area of memory set aside and they're continually reading this area and sending its contents to the TV screen, so if you set bytes in this area they instantly appear as pixels on the TV.

Even with modern graphics cards there's a global framebuffer for the entire desktop. It's updated every frame by the operating system sending commands to the graphics card to copy data from all over the place from different programs.

Linux's fbdev API (/dev/fb0) provides a framebuffer that looks like a file - you can read, write and mmap it. This is deprecated, not because it's obsolete functionality, but because the API is obsolete as they want to replace it with DRM dumb buffers (that's Direct Rendering Manager, not the evil thing). You have to use the whole DRM system, which lets you select which graphics card to use, which video ports to use if your card has more than one, which resolution, etc. You can then allocate a frame buffer and tell it to display that buffer. You can also allocate more than one buffer and tell the card when to switch to a different one (i.e. double-buffering).
by jmclnx | 2025-05-09 13:45:46+00:00
She is a better person than me. I would call my credit card company and dispute the purchase. I very much doubt the child's name is on the Cred Card used. That means it was illegal use of a Credit/Debit Card.

As others said, in the EU this would be against the law, we need laws like this in the US.
by throwawaymb | 2025-05-09 13:46:19+00:00
Blue starts at Saskatchewan not MB. Please stop spreading this idea that everyone on the Prairies is analagous to a bible-thumping Albertan. Rural Ontario also goes mostly conservative ; just like every other province, the split is urban and rural. Alberta and Sask buck this trend by having much higher consistent Con representation in the big cties. Manitoba does not. Only 2 Winnipeg ridings went Con and one was due to heavy vote splitting. Northern Mb is a consistent safe riding for the ndp or libs which is unheard of for a rural riding in AB or Sk.
by memsom | 2025-05-09 13:46:57+00:00
I don't really see any cross platform framework hitting "critical mass". React Native is very accessible to web developers. Are you sure that is not just information bias from your own situation? For me, most cross platform solutions are a race down to the lowest common denominator (and this is from someone who has used Xamarin Forms and MAUI in production apps.) Sure, you get to use your favourite tech stack (for us it was .Net) and you get familiar tools and metaphors, but the overall results are very uncanny valley unless you put a lot of effort in to styling for each platform.
by pc86 | 2025-05-09 13:47:16+00:00
> Or maybe they plan to have an army of agents fuzzing and creating hotfixes 24/7

There are absolutely people who plan to do exactly this. Use AI to create a half-baked, AI-led solution, and continue to use AI to tweak it. For people with sufficient capital it might actually work out halfway decent.

I've had success with greenfield AI generation but only in a very specific manner:

1. Talk with the LLM about what you're building and have it generate a detailed technical specification. Iterate on this until you have a good, human-readable explanation of the entire application or feature. 2. Start a completely new chat/context. If you're using something like Gemini, turn temperature down and enable external search. 3. Have instructions¹ guiding the LLM, this might be the most important step, even moreso than #1. 4. Create the base/blank project as its own step. Zero features or config. 5. Copy features one at a time from the spec to the chat context OR have them as separate documents and say things like "we're creating Feature 3A.1" or whatever. 6. Iterate on each feature until you're happy then repeat.

¹ https://www.totaltypescript.com/cursor-rules-for-better-ai-d...
by punnerud | 2025-05-09 13:47:24+00:00
A more simplified version:

Synchronous code is like a single-lane road where cars (tasks) must travel one after another in perfect sequence. If one car stops for gas (waiting for I/O), every car behind it must stop too. While orderly and predictable, this creates massive traffic jams as tasks wait unnecessarily for others to complete before they can proceed.

Pure asynchronous code (with callbacks) is like dispatching multiple cars onto independent routes with no coordination. Cars move freely without waiting for each other, but they arrive at unpredictable times and following their progress becomes chaotic. It's efficient but creates a complex tangle of paths that becomes hard to maintain.

Async/await combines the best of both approaches with a multi-lane highway system. Cars follow clear, synchronous-looking routes (making code readable), but only wait at strategic "await" exit ramps when truly necessary. When a car needs data, it signals with "await", pulls off the highway temporarily, and other cars continue flowing past. Once its operation completes, it merges back into traffic and continues. This gives you the logical simplicity of synchronous code with the performance benefits of asynchronous execution - cars only wait at crossroads when they must, maximizing throughput while maintaining order.

The genius of async/await is that it lets developers write code that looks sequential while the runtime handles all the complex traffic management under the hood.
by awkward | 2025-05-09 13:47:34+00:00
Contempt is corrosive, and if you're fixing debt in response to business needs that's putting the turnaround on real business needs at risk.

Goldbricking and polishing turds are definitely pitfalls, but the benefit of a low debt codebase is insanely fast turnaround. If you want to optimize for that, you need to do some fixes in anticipation of need, and sometimes those will be wrong.

Rewrites should bring a lot of skepticism, and are often worse than turd polishing. If it's gotta happen people should be able to take that on evidence rather than respond because they've developed feelings for the turd.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-09 13:47:43+00:00
May I add:

* People willing to do maintenance (testing, debugging, upstreaming patches etc).

For a many-platform OS like Linux it's probably not that hard to keep an arch supported once the plumbing is in place. It's not like there's new 486 based IC's coming out regularly. But still... someone's gotta do it.

I suspect much "supported" was already in the form of: platform-specific drivers in-tree, arch support in place, all that stuff compiled, done. But at the same time, if you'd take result & run it on real 486 hardware, expect loads of issues.

Software in source format tends to bitrot after testing/use on physical hardware goes away. Binary, less so (but of course other issues there).
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-05-09 13:48:34+00:00
I guess we just disagree on what's important. $2.9B for 3,000 children. That's 967K per child. What in the actual fuck? https://www.fpds.gov/common/jsp/LaunchWebPage.jsp?command=ex...

Edit: the contract was 3.3B, so that changes the calculus to 1,109,966.78 per child. Haven't seen the facility, but i highly doubt they are staying in million dollar condos, but if they are... there are better ways to do that.

$1,136,436,294.65 for paying their legal services... Why are we paying a billion dollars for legal services of a program we have discontinued?

1,021,000,000 to eradicate polio... Of which that last case in the united states was in 2022... Polio is all but irradicated here in the united states.

We just seem to disagree with what's important and what's wasteful. You could build a brand new city for those amounts in the private sector.
by watwut | 2025-05-09 13:48:42+00:00
Dictators around the world have supporters who do not rise against them, because they are completely on board with their agenda.

Trump and his policies are to large extend logical extension of what republican party pushed for and wanted for years. Conservatives wanted exactly this, pressed for exactly this, made this happen. Plus, they are not just tolerating, they are actively defending it, sane-washing it more then mainstream media.

And yet also, they all have choices. They are not at risk the same way people living under dictatorship are. They made choice to support this party again and again, because they agree with it.
by immibis | 2025-05-09 13:49:21+00:00
I've thought that if I did this, the one thing I'd like to change is the intermixing of command and output. The command line should be an entirely separate part of the GUI from the output area. Possibly separate output areas for different commands, if they're running concurrently. There's no reason anything other than my input should ever need to appear in the middle of my input box.
by naythaniel | 2025-05-09 13:49:49+00:00
I both read and understand the article.

Let's imagine for a moment that it was instead of Andor and sexual assault, an article about Harry Potter and violence against children. And instead of claiming that anyone who writes a story in which an attractive woman is sexually assaulted has a secret attraction to sexual assault against women, she claimed that J.K Rowling secretly wanted to murder children because one of her characters wanted to do that.

Would that be a good argument?

I'm simply disagreeing with the underlying premise of the article, which is that the things that happen in a storyteller's stories illustrate some internal desire of the storyteller.
by hdivider | 2025-05-09 13:50:05+00:00
"In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards."

I wonder if doge is using ML systems to do this kind of review in a far more centralized way across all of government. With the kind of data they have -- obtained by extra-legal means, a.k.a. theft -- they could exert a lot of control over crucial funding decisions.

The system is a Wild West almost by design. It evolved to prevent misuse. Not perfect, but hard to control quickly by a single authority. To me it seems doge is doing a centralization play so it can implement any directive from the great technoking.
by Garlef | 2025-05-09 13:50:06+00:00
From the requirements - or rather desired properties.

> Subskills cover skills

Isn't this requirement a common fallacy in education?

First, just because you know skill A and skill B does not mean you can automatically do both A and B together. (Of course it helps!)

Assume you're learning a to play piece of music. If you learn a given sequence [A, B] and start with individually learning the parts A and B you'd still have to practice the transition.

Second, just because you know a composite skill does not mean you can do each part individually.

Again assume you've learned to play a part of a piece of music and the notes constituting this part can be decomposed as [A, B]. Then you'd not directly know how to play B on it's own because you've propably learnt to enter B transitioning from A.

Still: I think the overvall approach is interesting. Just the details might be a bit off.
by lazyhummingbird | 2025-05-09 13:50:12+00:00
The most egregious and unforgivable part of their failed redesign is that they forced adoption by redirecting and walling mobile visits and attacking third party apps.

And the sole motivation for the redesign? Monetize the content users created. More ads. Force you to see images automatically so ad images and videos show up with the “this is an ad” text below the scroll instead of needing to earn your interest and permission first.

As bad or worse than the shift to algo vs time based social content.
by cge | 2025-05-09 13:50:20+00:00
You are referring to the applicability in general for reporting. I was referring specifically to the change in the exception for privileged communication:

> Except for members of the clergy, no one shall be required to report under this section when he or she obtains the information solely as a result of a privileged communication as provided in RCW 5.60.060.14.

Here, the change in this bill specifically was to add the “except for members of the clergy“.

The tendency on this site to immediately leap toward assuming someone is simply wrong, without first considering that they may be saying something different, is rather dismaying.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-09 13:50:36+00:00
This is a bad take to have, because it blinds you to the reality that is happening. LLM's are auto complete for pros, but full on programmers for non-tech folk. Like when GUI's first came out, the pros laughed and balked because of how much more powerful the CLI was. But look were the world is today.

At my non-tech job, I can show you three programs written entirely by LLMs that have allowed us to forgo paid software solutions. There is still a moat, IDE's are not consumer friendly, but that is pretty solvable. It will not be long before one of the big AI houses is doing a direct code to offline desktop app IDE that your grandma could use.
by Mistletoe | 2025-05-09 13:50:59+00:00
I became disillusioned when I learned that 5x3=15 was the largest number that has been factored by a quantum computer without tricks or scams. Then I became even more disillusioned when I learned the 15 may not be legit…

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/w...
by immibis | 2025-05-09 13:51:42+00:00
This feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?
by Panoramix | 2025-05-09 13:51:43+00:00
Looking at the paper, cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO, but it's certainly something they should have disclosed. I bet this happens all the time with these kinds of exotic devices that take almost a year to manufacture only for a single misplaced atom to ruin the whole measurement.

Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot weaker "there might be something here".

All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.
by neilv | 2025-05-09 13:52:15+00:00
In the past (not in Rust, but other languages), for important systems, I've instituted policies of minimizing dependencies from these language-specific package repositories, and for the ones you do use, having to copy it to our own repos and audit each update before use.

But that's not practical for all situations. For example, Web frontend developer culture might be the worst environment, to the point you often can't get many things done in feasible time, if you don't adopt the same reckless practices.

I'm also seeing it now with the cargo-culting of opaque self-hosted AI tools and models. For learning and experimenting, I'd spend more time sufficiently compartmentalizing an individual tool than with using it.

This weekend, I'm dusting off my Rust skills, for a small open source employability project (so I can't invest in expensive dependency management on this one). The main thing thing bothering me isn't allocation management, but the sinking feeling when I watch the cast-of-thousands explosion of transitive dependencies for the UI and async libraries that I want to use. It's only a matter of time before one of those is compromised, if not already, and one is all it takes.
by abouthn | 2025-05-09 13:52:17+00:00
Remember that checklist meme from /.? The “You seem to be advocating/here is why it will not work”?

Well, you’ve burned a bit of time on HN with the karma you’ve accrued. The non-conspiratorial truth is that if you go back and read HN over a longer period of time, it amounts to people parroting other people’s unhinged takes. Least offensive is tech, which is merely juvenile. But the other topics, especially medical ones, are dangerous. Political ones, with zero verification are the worst from a board culture/health perspective.

HN has turned itself into slop in large part due to the voting and flagging mechanisms, because the community was never mentally equipped to use either tools responsibly. And pg/dang never set the tone. So now you see how far it has fallen.

My advice: don’t come here to read comments seriously. Yes, from time to time someone of good taste shows up to a topic they have first hand experience with and they have to educate the rest as to why their takes are completely wrong (and sometimes dangerous, see above).

Instead, come here to get the news, laugh at the shit flinging if you must, and move on.

I’ve been contemplating doing an HN-without-HN filter board; show just the tech stuff, have commentary without voting or flagging. Because while you’re just seeing how things are now, I am afraid to say they’ve always been so.
by shepmaster | 2025-05-09 13:52:19+00:00
I agree with your general point, but for this specific functionality, I’ll point out that setting environment variables of the current process is unsafe. It took us a long time to realize it so the function wasn’t actually marked as unsafe until the Rust 2024 edition.

What this means in practice is that the call to invoke dotenv should also be marked as unsafe so that the invoker can ensure safety by placing it at the right place.

If no one is maintaining the crate, that won’t happen and someone might try to load environment variables at a bad time.
by memsom | 2025-05-09 13:52:21+00:00
Would it be the classes Java has always had that sit inside a parent class and can access the instance fields/properties of the parent? These are very Java, and hard to recreate in a language that doesn't support that type of embedding. C# really struggles with it. Using the Android API via Xamarin was always very much harder to do anything with because of this symbiotic relationship. I have done a little Kotlin, but I don't remember if it support that or not.
by thrance | 2025-05-09 13:53:06+00:00
I had the same concerns when I started using Rust, but then I eventually embraced it, for better or worse. Cargo makes it so your build almost never breaks (it's happened maybe twice for the 8 years I've been doing Rust). Plus there are still way less vulnerabilities with Rust projects than non-Rust projects, in spite of the crazy number of dependencies.

If I was to design a Rust 2.0, I'd make it so dependencies need permissions to access IO, or unsafe code, etc.
by fabian2k | 2025-05-09 13:53:51+00:00
As the article mentions, this is part of a 55% cut in budget. So this is not a reorganization but a cut to research funding of at least half. It's potentially an even harsher cut as grants are only part of the budget and they might have to cut even more grants to still finance other obligations from less than half the budget.

The goal seems to be simply to destroy the current research system, and to have the bit that remains forced to adhere to an ideologically pure "anti-woke" course.
by kasey_junk | 2025-05-09 13:54:15+00:00
Well for one, your staff is likely already gone. They are cancelling approved grants. As soon as they do that the universities that employ the staff funded by those grants quickly eliminate the job.

So even if you can retool, get a new politically correct grant, believe that it will last long enough to do anything, you’ll find your lab already decimated and incapable of continuing its work.
by corysama | 2025-05-09 13:54:21+00:00
Yep. We’re in a situation where C-like languages couple layout and access interface very tightly. But, now cache is such an overriding issue in optimization, you really want to rapidly experiment with different layouts without rewriting your whole algorithm every time. AOS, SOA, AOSOA, hot/cold data for different stages, etc…

Jon Blow’s Jai language famously added a feature to references that allowed you to easily experiment with moving data members between hot/cold arrays of structs.

https://halide-lang.org/ tackles a related problem. It decouples the math to be done from the access order so as to allow you to rapidly test looping over data in complicated ways to achieve cache-friendly access patterns for your specific hardware target without rewriting your whole core loop every time.

Halide is primarily an about image processing convolution kernels. I’m not sure how general purpose it can get.
by mjr00 | 2025-05-09 13:54:31+00:00
> juniors stop building real intuition because the LLM handles all the hard thinking. You get surface-level productivity but long-term skill rot.

This was a real problem pre-LLM anyway. A popular article from 2012, How Developers Stop Learning[0], coined the term "expert beginner" for developers who displayed moderate competency at typical workflows, e.g. getting a feature to work, without a deeper understanding of lower levels, or a wider high-level view.

Ultimately most developers don't care, they want to collect a paycheck and go home. LLMs don't change this; the dev who randomly adds StackOverflow snippets to "fix" a crash without understanding the root cause was never going to gain a deeper understanding, the same way the dev who blindly copy&pastes from an LLM won't either.

[0] https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...