MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dottrap | 2025-05-16 19:14:00+00:00
One of Lua's goals has been extreme portability, and the main implementation works on anything that has a C compiler, going to the extreme of compiling cleanly on C89, C99, and even compiling as C++ (no extern "C"). Remember that Lua is popular in the embedded space too, so this is a big feature.

Pallene isn't designed to be a new native language on its own. Pallene is designed to be a companion language for Lua, specializing in a subset of performance.

But as importantly, Pallene isn't just compiling to C. Pallene is generating C code that directly manipulates the underlying Lua internals, which are in C.

The research thesis is that many bottlenecks are due to boxing and unboxing going through an FFI. Memory safety also incurs overhead. Python is an extreme example of how excruciatingly slow this can be, but even Lua incurs costs for this. A core tenant of the Pallene compiler is that it can generate C code that gets to cheat like crazy. Pallene gets to directly access Lua internals and things like arrays directly manipulate underlying C arrays deep inside, which sidesteps boxing/unboxing. The compiler can do the analysis to make sure it doesn't cheat in a way that is unsafe. Finally, the C optimizer now also has a chance to perform optimizations. And now operations such as crunching math on arrays of numbers may get much faster because now you get generated code that is more CPU friendly and may benefit more from prefetching and cache locality.

Pallene is built from the the extreme compatibility goals as Lua since it is designed to work with it. It it only depends on any C compiler and Lua itself. If you get Lua compiled, then you can get Pallene working. That means any existing project that uses Lua (5.4) could start adding Pallene modules to their project for new features or to try to improve performance in key areas. Since Pallene just outputs a Lua modules, it looks like any other Lua module implemented in C, so it won't create new portability constraints that you didn't have before. This is different than say LuaJIT, where not all platforms may allow JIT or you may be targeting a new CPU architecture that LuaJIT does not support.

Both Teal and Pallene were started by grad students of Roberto's. Since Roberto has started giving talks himself on Pallene, I'm assuming they are joining in.
by jmull | 2025-05-16 19:14:00+00:00
This seems much worse than the typical pre-AI mechanism of navigating to and clicking on a "Change Delivery Address" button.

I don't know why you wouldn't develop whatever forms you wanted to support upfront and make them available to the agent (and hopefully provide old-fashioned search). You can still use AI to develop and maintain the forms. Since the output can be used as many times as you want, you can probably use more expensive/capable models to develop the forms rather than cheaper/faster but less capable models that you're probably limited to for customer service.
by sam0x17 | 2025-05-16 19:14:04+00:00
Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhere and the company will hire their next batch of juniors. Now no one does this, everyone wants a senior no matter how simple the task. This has caused everyone in the industry to stuff their resume, so you end up in a situation where companies are looking for 10 years of experience in ecosystems that are only 5 years old.

That said, back in the early 00s there was much more of a culture of everyone is expected to be self-taught and doing real web dev probably before they even get to college, so by the time they graduate they are in reality quite senior. This was true for me and a lot of my friends, but I feel like these days there are many CS grads who haven't done a lot of applied stuff. But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s because if you knew JS/HTML/CSS/SQL, C++ and maybe some .NET language that was pretty much it you could do everything (there were virtually no frameworks), now there are thousands of frameworks and languages and ecosystems and you could spend 5+ years learning any one of them. It is no longer possible for one person to learn all of tech, people are much more specialized these days.

But I agree that eventually someone is going to have to start hiring juniors again or there will be no seniors.
by rayiner | 2025-05-16 19:14:08+00:00
I’m talking about social structures, not policies. The endgame is to develop social structures where non-whites, and especially black people, have moral superiority while whites have moral culpability. These social and moral norms are already developing: https://www.aol.com/news/james-carville-calls-ilhan-omar-135....

The risk is not to the material interests of white people—they have a plurality of the population so you won’t get a situation like South Africa. Instead, you’ll get a breakdown of racial egalitarianism. Half the country will feel comfortable being openly racist against whites—and each other—even if they don’t have the votes to act on that animus. Meanwhile, most whites raised in that environment—the ones who don’t have economic privilege to fall back on—will develop a racial animosity we haven’t seen since the 1950s. The result will be ethnic conflict that cripples our ability to do anything (just as in virtually all multi-ethnic societies).
by xp84 | 2025-05-16 19:15:29+00:00
I suspect Apple has little incentive to fix it since if an app stores a bunch of data in ~/Library/Application Support and then you Trash the app, then your 256GB SSD (still standard even on a 'professional' laptop, in 2025) is that much more filled, eventually prompting you to curse yourself for not spending $400 in nearly-pure-profit to upgrade that to 1TB.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-16 19:15:35+00:00
> What other tools in software sometimes work and sometimes don't that you find remotely acceptable?

Other people.

Seriously, all that advice about not anthropomorphizing computers is taken way too seriously now, and is doing a number on the industry. LLMs are not a replacement for compilers or other "classical" tools - they're replacement for people. The whole thing that makes LLMs useful is their ability to understand what some text means - whether or not it's written in natural language or code. But that task is inherently unreliable because the problem itself is ill-specified; the theoretically optimal solution boils down to "be a simulated equivalent of a contemporary human", and that still wouldn't be perfectly reliable.

LLMs are able to trivially do tasks in programming that no "classical" tools can, tasks that defy theoretical/formal specification, because they're trained to mimic humans. Plenty of such tasks cannot be done to the standards you and many others expect of software, because they're NP-complete or even equivalent to halting problem. LLMs look at those and go, "sure, this may be provably not solvable, but actually the user meant X therefore the result is Y", and succeed with that reliably enough to be useful.

Like, take automated refactoring in dynamic languages. Any nontrivial ones are not doable "classically", because you can't guarantee there aren't references to the thing you're moving/renaming that are generated on the fly by eval() + string concatenation, etc. As a programmer, you may know the correct result, because you can understand the meaning and intent behind the code, the conceptual patterns underpinning its design. DAG walkers and SAT solvers don't. But LLMs do.
by jkingsman | 2025-05-16 19:15:52+00:00
> the tapiest tape to ever tape, "bi-filament tape"

An excellent description. Fiberglass reinforced, adhesive that's closer to a resin than a tape adhesive. You can use it like it's cargo strapping — around sharp corners, to reinforce things (product descriptions describe reinforcing steel drums with it), etc. — wild stuff.
by olalonde | 2025-05-16 19:15:55+00:00
Bitcoin can handle just as many transactions per second as fiat currencies when used over the same centralized payment networks (e.g., credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers). The key difference is that Bitcoin also provides a permissionless, decentralized settlement layer - something fiat currencies fundamentally lack. If you're comparing base layers directly, it's arguably 7 TPS (Bitcoin) vs. 0 TPS (fiat).
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-16 19:16:12+00:00
Those signs aren’t just for whether you can go around a curve comfortably. It is if you can see and/or stop safely if something happens. If there is a broken-down car in the lane, you will see it way off at 65 mph, but if you are going around a blind curve comfortably at 65 you might plow into it or skid off the road.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-16 19:16:19+00:00
A long time ago, I was working on a team that sorta misused Postgres as a data processing pipeline, so a lot of temp tables were involved. As the article said, COPY was by far the fastest way to get data in from outside. But the next problem after that was INSERT (SELECT ...) statements going from one stage to another.

These queries had many joins and sometimes aggregates on huge tables, which took hours. Surprisingly, for most queries, I got nearly a linear speedup wrt core count (on a 32-core server) by running a separate query in parallel for separate ranges of pkeys. It was best to pick a table to shard that the query planner picked as the inner or outermost when you EXPLAIN the original query, cause that wouldn't change the query plan.

Postgres at the time had no kind of parallelization for a single query. It later got it, but limited to seq scans and other things later. So this method might still be advantageous today. It's not too useful for typical app backends where you want to query your data at one consistent timestamp, but I wonder if Postgres could build some feature that uses parallel queries at the same MVCC timestamp.
Show HN: Inconveniently operating my computer with voice and hand gestures
by getToTheChopin | 2025-05-16 19:16:31+00:00
Introducing Iron OS: it's like a regular computer, but much more inconvenient

Created with threejs, rosebud AI, web speech API, and mediapipe computer vision

Any feedback would be appreciated! I've been having fun experimenting with computer vision and voice control lately.
by diegof79 | 2025-05-16 19:16:38+00:00
As someone who works in UX, I admire all the work the Google UX team puts into Material: tons of documentation, UI kits, theme generation tools, a lot of thinking on systematizing the color combinations, etc.

However, this article has a lot of "Pepsi Logo" vibes (https://www.scribd.com/document/541500744/Pepsi-Arnell-02110...). I never confirmed if this was a hoax, but it was made into many news websites at the time.

Many design justifications they put on the page don't make much sense: yes, a big send button increases the metric of people finding the button, but it also takes space from the screen, and your daily phone UI is not a kiosk. "New users" become "experienced users", so the big button quickly becomes annoying. Even the M3 documentation site is terrible on mobile: the tab switch at the headers of some docs is so big that just two tabs don't fit into the screen.

By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language. It may present creating emojis as a huge feature or inflate some of its claims a bit, but in general, they let the product do the talking.
by pavlov | 2025-05-16 19:16:39+00:00
Roman numerals in software versioning should make a comeback.

The Cicero-approved desktop of MS-DOS programs from this moricons.dll set would include these:

Applause II 1.5

Framework III

Crosstalk-XVI 3.71

PC Paintbrush IV Plus

And of course you’d want dBase III+ and Deluxe Paint II Enhanced.
by oytis | 2025-05-16 19:16:59+00:00
I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior engineers either as capabilities evolve.

But also, I think this underestimates significantly what junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a university - and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart.

The market is tough indeed, and as much it is tough for a senior engineer like myself, I don't envy the current cohort of fresh grads. It being tough is only tangentially related to the AI though. Main factor is the general economic slowdown, with AI contributing by distracting already scarce investment from non-AI companies and producing a lot of uncertainty in how many and what employees companies will need in the future. Their current capabilities are nowhere near to having a real economic impact.

Wish your kid and you a lot of patience, grit and luck.
by _QrE | 2025-05-16 19:16:59+00:00
It sounds like you might be looking at the wrong place. There's services like bunny.net and cloudflare CDN (I'm not affiliated with either, but I use the former) that are really easy to set up and configure, if you've built your site properly (edit for clarification: if you have clearly defined static content, and/or you're using some build system). You don't want to 'run' a CDN, you want to use one.

Configuration depends a lot on the specifics of your stack. For Svelte, you can use an adapter (https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/adapters) that will handle pointing to the CDN for you.

Cloudflare's offering is free, bunny.net is also probably going to be free for you if you don't have much traffic. CDNs are great insurance for static sites, because they can handle all the traffic you could possibly get without breaking a sweat.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-05-16 19:18:00+00:00
I may have some of the terminology wrong (but I think they are also using it sloppily?) but that's the basic idea yeah. The "captains list" is the officers eligible to be posted in the role of captain of a ship, which is not quite the same as the rank of captain.

Officers with the actual rank of captain would normally be permanently posted to a ship's command, and only large, prominent, or prestigious warships were captained by captain-rank officers. So it was highly desirable to at least attain that rank. You could get there by achievement on a temporary command which is part of why they were so sought after. Or simply through politics and patronage: the naval officer corps being intimately tied up with both the waning aristocratic and emerging modern nation-state systems.

Officers on the lists were necessarily "gentlemen" in a technical legal-social sense, and were mostly free to pursue their social, family and business interests when not posted to a command. Depending on their resources and connections outside the navy, they could have quite excellent alternatives to a command that was unlikely to make them much money. Or, like younger sons of small or declining holdings would take anything they could get.

Anyway this is what I remember from all the external reading I did trying to make sense of the politics of command in the aubrey-maturin books which is I think the normal way to learn it these days.
by fellerts | 2025-05-16 19:18:09+00:00
You just clarified something I’ve unknowingly wondered about for years! Hardware stores here sell duct tape as you describe it, but it’s commonly referred to as «gaffer tape» in my native tongue (Norwegian: gaffateip). I’ve never come across the cloth tape you describe, but I now realise it’s not a skill issue when I can never seem to tear clean strips of the stuff. I’ll keep my eyes open for proper «gaffer's tape» from now on.
by proberts | 2025-05-16 19:18:15+00:00
That's correct, it could take at least 10 years through sibling sponsorship. The E-2 visa isn't available to everyone, it depends on the individual's country of citizenship, but if it was available to him, then an investment of $100k could be enough. But definitely consult with an immigration attorney because there are a number of requirements for the E-2 visa.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-16 19:19:18+00:00
> will he be able to find some sort of white-color work in the future or will he be condemned to retail or food-service employment.

Lay low for a year, work on some start-up-ish looking project, then use his middle name to get hired at one of the many AI startups? (only half joking)...
by YZF | 2025-05-16 19:20:44+00:00
I agree with you about the dishonesty of saying yes (as I replied in another comment).

That said this is a choice you're making from what sounds like more religious reasons. Your company and your choice but it's not hard to employ TNs in a startup (and I know because I had TN status with two startups so I'm a little ahead of "brief reading of reddit posts").

TN status can also be applied for in advance by the way, doesn't have to be at the border. This wasn't an option when I had TN status but now it is.
by xp84 | 2025-05-16 19:20:51+00:00
Sadly though macOS never has and still doesn't do any magic for ~/Applications, such as showing your apps mixed in with the rest just by looking at "Applications." But yes, it does mix in the locked system apps such as Settings and Photos with the ones you have dropped into /Applications as though they're all in /Applications as they once were. I usually just add both folders to the sidebar, and forget which is which daily.
by alganet | 2025-05-16 19:20:55+00:00
I don't understand your concern. You're afraid to not get a job, so you won't even try? I am sorry, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

Also, about the age stuff, sounds like youve been drinking the wrong kool-aid. Almost all markets in tech still have great opportunities for 40-years-olds.

You're not sure if you want to go solo or not? That seems unclear to me as well. There are all sorts of investors. If you have the drive to build things and talent, you can definitely attract good investment opportunities.

Harsh criticisms, I know. But you need to think what really is making you hesitate and confront that.
by rurp | 2025-05-16 19:21:06+00:00
Popular packages are regularly being used and vetted by thousands of engineers and that level of usage generally leads to subtle bugs being found and fixed. Blindly copy/pasting some LLM code is the opposite of that. It might be regurgitating some well developed code, but it's at least as likely to be generating something that looks right but is completely wrong in some way.
by frabonacci | 2025-05-16 19:22:23+00:00
Yes, it should be possible: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/709453

Lumier does not expose the capability but the underlying Lume CLI does.

lume run <VM_NAME> --recovery-mode true: https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lume#usage
by nailer | 2025-05-16 19:22:36+00:00
This can affect regular engineers that receive a token allocation as part of their work. Even if you’ve given a bank account, you may be denied a mortgage.

This doesn't just mean NFT scammers. You can literally be a ZK cryptographer with a pure mathmatics degree working on a privacy program, recieving some ownership of what you produce, and boom, you can't buy a house.

More detail on Operation Chokepoint by the WSJ (as another poster points out, the NYT is omitting a lot of detail here):

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/debanking-and-the-return-of-oper...
by asdefghyk | 2025-05-16 19:22:43+00:00
Its certainly a complicated problem.

Big tech companies have their own agenda ( Facebook, Google etc )

Apparently its been determined that some of these social media services can harm children, (and I have seen articles where it is claimed children have been manipulated by some services when it is claimed they are in a certain emotional state .)

Maybe these media companies should offer a service specifically aimed at under 16s - however Im not sure how it would work.
by ac29 | 2025-05-16 19:22:48+00:00
I am amused that one of the handful examples they chose to use is wrong:

"The best way to get to Stanford University from the Ferry Building in San Francisco depends on your preferences and budget. Here are a few options:

1. *By Car*: Take US-101 South to CA-85 South, then continue on CA-101 South."

CA 85 is significantly farther down 101 than Palo Alto.
by haunter | 2025-05-16 19:23:15+00:00
>There is a new film in the works, The Way of the Wind, about the life of Christ. Géza Röhrig plays Jesus, Mark Rylance is Satan. It was shot in 2019. The word is that it will open at Cannes in May. But I’m not sure they said which year.

Sadly not this year either :(

Probably my most anticipated film of the decade, I loved all the Terrence Malick films I've seen so far.
by proberts | 2025-05-16 19:23:43+00:00
Broadly, an E-3 visa holder can pursue a green card and we sponsor a lot but there are potential issues, most notably, when seeking to renew an E-3 visa while in the green card process. Alternatives to the PERM (labor market test) based green process are the national interest waiver and extraordinary ability paths, which are not tied to a specific job/employer but require a high level of achievement.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-16 19:24:51+00:00
These are at most trivial civil matters.

The net effect is your talking about putting non criminals in detention facilities rife with human rights violations.

As a hypothetical, if you can visit two countries and one offers the risk of indefinite detainment , which is roughly dependent on how behind the customs officials are on their quotas. Or another country that at most will just send you home, I think most will pick the country that just sends people home.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-16 19:25:29+00:00
> Our understanding is that only authors of papers appearing on arXiv can submit withdrawal requests. We have directed the author to submit such a request, but to date, the author has not done so.

Between this and the subtle reference to “former second-year PhD student” it makes sense that they’d have to make a public statement.

They do a good job of toeing the required line of privacy while also giving enough information to see what’s going on.

I wonder if the author thought they could leave the paper up and ride it into a new position while telling a story about voluntarily choosing to leave MIT. They probably didn’t expect MIT to make a public statement about the paper and turn it into a far bigger news story than it would have been if the author quietly retracted it.
by 01100011 | 2025-05-16 19:25:46+00:00
Not surprising. Whenever you have a project like NR or HA you have a ton of barely working glue code written by people who just want to get it working and move on without any sort of commitment to maintenance. It allows these projects to rapidly expand their support but then that support quickly rots unless the core team assumes responsibility for maintenance. I really want to mess with home automation again but this sort of low software quality and resulting instability and maintenance hassles makes it not worth the effort.
by ilyagr | 2025-05-16 19:25:53+00:00
Ah, apparently with real t-strings, `t"SELECT {a-1}"` should be allowed while `t"SELECT {}"` is not.

Here is Python master branch:

Python 3.15.0a0 (heads/main:ea2d707bd5, May 16 2025, 12:20:56) [Clang 16.0.0 (clang-1600.0.26.6)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> t"Hello {a}" Traceback (most recent call last): File "<python-input-1>", line 1, in <module> t"Hello {a}" ^ NameError: name 'a' is not defined >>> a=3 >>> t"Hello {a+5}" Template(strings=('Hello ', ''), interpolations=(Interpolation(8, 'a+5', None, ''),)) >>> t"Hello {}" File "<python-input-6>", line 1 t"Hello {}" ^ SyntaxError: t-string: valid expression required before '}'