MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2025-06-22 17:52:36+00:00
Yeah, re: the title, the URL/path string "allocators-are-for-monkeys-with-typewriters" (including on the page) seems more clear about that "less hard than you'd think" thing than the larger-font published headline "Allocators are Monkeys With Typewriters". And of course the quote in the article is even more specific "given enough time, even a monkey with a typewriter can write a memory allocator".

I generally agree with the "memory management doesn't have to be as complicated as you might think" vibe, especially if you've read about some optimizations in fancy modern GCs and aren't aware of what a basic simple non-GC world can look like. That said, of course, you can indeed get into a lot of complexity beyond the textbook 101 examples. Like the mentioned threading...
by CaveTech | 2025-06-22 17:53:35+00:00
I think your benchmark may miss the mark a bit if this is your angle.

20m records and 9k/sec isn’t very impressive. I would imagine most prospective customers have larger workloads, as you could throw this behind Postgres and call it a day. FWIW I was interested but your metrics made me second guess and wonder what was wrong.
by modeless | 2025-06-22 17:54:14+00:00
Is there no transparent substance that is gel-like for a period of time before it cures solid so that the pieces can simply be suspended in it and nudged to their final positions manually? Like a gel suspension 3D printer but where the gel hardens instead of being washed away at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swB5-GzX3nQ

I don't know how viscous SLA 3D printer resin is, but if it could be made viscous enough then it seems like maybe you could just suspend the parts in it, tweaking their positions as much as you want until they're just right, then blast the whole thing with enough UV to cure all of it.
by rsync | 2025-06-22 17:55:21+00:00
It is deeply disappointing how poorly Apple implements privacy tools and technologies.

To wit:

It is 2025 and you cannot configure a DoH endpoint in Safari on either iOS or OSX.

Further, enabling DoH in iOS involves an experts-only plist file download which has many esoteric failure modes that are difficult to track and have poor (nonexistent ?) documentation.

Finally, any regular person (like my wife) will have an almost immediate need to toggle adblocking DNS on and off for (weird site that breaks) but, of course, that is not possible without going through the entire plist file workflow twice (once to remove (not disable) the existing profile and once to re-download it).

Ridiculous. Embarrassing.
by baxuz | 2025-06-22 17:55:47+00:00
You mean troops from occupying forces that engaged in an illegal war to overthrow the government, based on lies about WMDs, who killed over 120,000 civilians?

As far as I'm aware, you don't get to project military force 8000 miles away and then complain about killed soldiers. Which has been the US' favourite past time since the 60s.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-06-22 17:56:18+00:00
>I personally am of the opinion that if using the bombs saved the lives of a few thousand (at least) American soldiers it was worth it.

You are an evil and stupid person.

>Japan planned to continue fighting, and the Japanese Army in particular was preparing the homeland to fight to the death.

No they didn't. They didn't want an unconditional surrender, they had sued for peace multiple times and it was ignored.

So instead of us negotiating with Japanese we completely destroyed two civilian cities to put them in their place.

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons."

- Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser

"First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander

"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan."

- Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

"The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all."

- Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945

"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. "

- Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946

"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

- Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950

So we have the supreme allied commander, commander and chief of the pacific fleet, and the chief military advisor to Truman all on record saying the bomb was not necessary nor really saved American lives.

Then we have people like you on the internet saying otherwise, with no proof.

Really quite the contrast.
by gwern | 2025-06-22 17:56:31+00:00
I think writing fiction with LLMs is fine. "based on a true story" or roman à clef fiction is also fine. I would have no objection to this if it were clearer that this was a "movie treatment". (As LLM fiction goes, this isn't even all that bad.)

However... Look at this HN page! Not a single person here realized (before my still-downvoted comment) that this was a 'movie treatment', or that the 'quotes...were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well'. They all are taking it as 100% gospel, and engaging with it in good faith, as if it were genuinely a 'technical post-mortem' (as it takes pains to present itself) instead of your fiction-writing hobby,

Just make it clearer that this is a fictional story.

> I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment

Yes. This is why ghost writers are supposed to be credited as such if they are contributing non-trivial content rather than simply serving as a amanuensis or an editor, and cinematic re-enactments are flagged as such if it wouldn't be obvious to a reasonable person (by reputable documentarians, anyway).
by mgraczyk | 2025-06-22 17:56:38+00:00
I don't think they misrepresented anything. The European Commission is wrong on the facts. Technology improved in unpredictable ways.

Large public companies do not lie very often because it's incredibly easily for lies to be discovered, and the penalties are high. There are many examples where the popular narrative is the the company lied, but when you look at details it becomes clear that no lying occurred.

For example, David Rainey probably did not actually lie about the extent of the BP oil spill even though most people still believe he did. He was acquitted by a jury who had access to far more information, and more time to think about it, than anyone else.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-06-22 17:56:45+00:00
The point parent is in making is that this strike against Iran demonstrates, that yes indeed you do need nukes to be safe and that's one of the major risks of this action.

Going with your analogy, this would be the same as if police basically ignored all home invasion/trespassing laws such that the only houses that criminals entered were in fact those of undefended home owners. In this scenario, it would be demonstrated, by this policy, that yes home owners need to own guns to be safe.

To your point, if you don't want a world where it's safer for home owners to own guns, than you need to ensure there are policies in place to create a world where that was true. The lesson of Ukraine and Iran is that, if you don't have nuclear weapons, your sovereignty is always at the mercy of nations that do.

A world where every country needs nuclear weapons to remain sovereign is similarly undesirable (on a larger scale) to a country where every home needs to have guns to be safe. However we're on a path with nuclear weapons where that is unfortunately not the reality we are creating.
by yonisto | 2025-06-22 17:57:03+00:00
No. People are crazy everywhere. That is not the same as the actual leaders of the country. The one that are calling the shots making the same claims for 46 years.

Now, I don't know if you noticed, your cousins while they are not kind to Arabs (which if you had Arab cousins you would have noticed that they are not very kind to Jews), have nothing whatsoever with Iran, no more than they have anything with Napal.

1500km away!
by bigyabai | 2025-06-22 17:57:17+00:00
Operations are defined by goals. If you want to invade or launch a special forces op into your enemy territory, you need a small and attainable goal. Not "eliminate all nuclear threats" but more like "clear this area of nuclear materiel" in any areas you consider suspect. Otherwise you end up deploying troops that never come home.

Israel's state government is absolutely filled to the brim with war hawks - but they're not stupid. The situation they want to contain is too large to fix with IDF ground forces, they necessarily have to involve US force structures to seriously challenge Iran. And even then, it feels likely that we'd be looking at an Afghan War situation where guerrilla combat absolutely shreds the modern forces the further they push in.
by santaboom | 2025-06-22 17:57:56+00:00
All very informative, I had some quibbles.

While it is true that cheap and expensive FPGAs exist, an FPGA system to replace TPU would not use a $0.50 or even $100 FPGA it would use a Versal or Ultrascale+ FPGA that costs thousands, compared to the (rough guess) $100/die you might spend for largest chip on most advanced process. Furthermore, overhead of FPGA means every single one my support a few million logic gates (maybe 2-5x if you use hardened blocks), compare to billions of transistors on largest chips in most advanced node —> cost per chip to buy is much much higher.

To the second point, afaik, leading edge Versal FPGAs are in 7nm, not ancient also not cutting edge used for asic(n3).
by ImJamal | 2025-06-22 17:57:57+00:00
You are going off topic. I was only addressing the false claim that they did not have WMDs. They very much did. I am not making any statements on if we should have gotten involved, if there were false pretenses or anything like that.

I don't get why people who are so opposed to the war are the ones who can't admit they actually did have WMD. Making these false claims just makes it look like we, who were opposed to the war, are the liars.
by yongjik | 2025-06-22 17:58:00+00:00
Not sure how much we can trust this poll, but it's already happening:

https://today.yougov.com/topics/international/survey-results...

> Do you approve or disapprove of the U.S. bombing nuclear sites in Iran?

Republicans say:

Strongly approve 46% Somewhat approve 22% Somewhat disapprove 5% Strongly disapprove 8% Not sure 18%
by sodafountan | 2025-06-22 17:58:27+00:00
That's cool, I love cruises I find them fascinating although I know quite a few people who don't like them - to each their own. I've never taken a Celebrity cruise but I've been on Royal Caribbean and Disney with my family, I know they're massive undertakings and huge profit machines. They employ hundreds of people from chefs to musicians and nautical engineers... It does make you wonder about the IT part of the operation though.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-22 17:59:03+00:00
Recently related DESI Opens Access to the Largest 3D Map of the Universe Yet (133 points, 3 months ago, 19 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43418184

This is a 2D map so they can both be the largest, respectively. Strange the 3D map found 13.1M galaxies, while this has 800K.
by citizenpaul | 2025-06-22 17:59:21+00:00
> it spoke the language of memory,

We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.

Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
by impossiblefork | 2025-06-22 17:59:26+00:00
>4. There is no distinction, in my mind, between "trying to develop nuclear weapons" and "successfully developing nuclear weapons". There is no distinction, in my mind, between 60% enrichment and 90% enrichment, or whatever. Non-nuclear countries should attempt no stage of development, at all, and if they do, should see their efforts stopped by any means necessary. Very hypothetically: If a non-nuclear nation lays a single brick to build a structure destined to aid in nuclear weapons development, I would support destroying that brick; there is no stage too early to intervene. Obviously this is hypothetical and there are realistic feasibility concerns with that, but when speaking morally/ethically.

I see this as an unacceptable position. Sweden will probably develop nuclear weapons, either on its own or with EU partners. I would prefer this effort to not be resisted.

Poland probably will as well. So position 4 is I think insane.

Instead, Iran should be prevented from developing nuclear weapons because they are crazy, and should only be prevented from doing so because they are crazy. There are some current nuclear weapons states that should have been prevented from developing nuclear weapons, but that is tolerable.

Furthermore, I think position 1 is also false, since I believe that nuclear weapons actually provide deterrence and prevent conventional war.

If the Iranians weren't crazy it would be good that they had nukes, and it would stabilize the entire Middle East, reducing the belligerence of other entities.
by righthand | 2025-06-22 17:59:57+00:00
Tariffs didn’t crash the economy because he lowered them back to pretty much exactly what they were before he was in office. Had he implemented his insane plan to keep tariffs high, the economy would have crashed. All the carve outs for all the major industries…I’m not sure what you think was a success.

People ARE dying because USAID was scrapped. It will be in the millions by the end of his term. Do you understand how starvation and disease work? It doesn’t happen the day you cut off funding for a tax break for the rich.

You must be living under a rock to think any of his actions have been effective.

You do get to be held accountable for your vote when you eat the result of letting this mad man into a powerful leadership position. When prices go up, you no longer get to turn around and say “liberals did this”. When they deploy ground troops in Iran for 20 years, you do not get to blame “all of us Americans”. When you get pushed out of your social activities because people hear you support genocide in Gaza and going to war in Iran after tearing up agreements and enabling violations of cease-fires like a child, you do not get to turn around and say “I’m satisfied so you must be too. It’s not fair that I’m being socially prosecuted.”

It goes on and on because that’s how reality works if you never follow up then you will never know the effect and the rate at which it happens. Keep plugging your ears!
by masklinn | 2025-06-22 18:00:21+00:00
> Regarding change ids: I wish git itself had those, as then also the tooling would understand them. Identifying commits by their commit messages is fragile, in particular when you may update those for an MR. While commit id truly identifies the commit in a unique way, it is not a useful identifier when the same changes could be moved on top of some other commit.

Projects for which mutable changes are a unit of work are working on standardising that: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAESOdVAspxUJKGAA58i0tvks4ZOfoGf...

They don't need git support, but it might eventually become first-class.
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-06-22 18:01:01+00:00
In MWI the Born rule is a tendency of statistics of a long string of measurements. You tried to get this statistics from one measurement, which didn't work. If you want to see how MWI produces the Born rule, you should calculate statistics of a long string of measurements and see that this statistics is asymptotically close to Born statistics.

Other branches can be demonstrated indirectly by 1) quantitatively verifying unitary dynamics, 2) indirectly observing branching, 3) demonstrating that other theories are wrong. Branches are just superposition, if you want to eliminate branches, you should eliminate superposition with pilot wave or superdeterminism or something like that. This kind of unobservability isn't unique to MWI, in general theory of relativity we observe only a part of the universe, the rest being beyond event horizon and is unobservable. Do you believe only observable part of the universe exists and beyond it nothing exists?
by t-3 | 2025-06-22 18:01:20+00:00
You can find many videos of people walking around cities in Iran - not only are plenty of women not covering their hair, there's plenty of dyed hair too. Dress is a bit more conservative than western countries, but not by much, and women are obviously free - and feel safe - to leave the house unescorted. Iran has liberalized a lot compared to the post-revolutionary period.
by exmadscientist | 2025-06-22 18:01:23+00:00
Part of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get masterworks. (I decided to check The Left Hand of Darkness off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually heavier than the last three books I've read put together. The introduction. And it's about five pages long.)

Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
by bccdee | 2025-06-22 18:01:45+00:00
> explicit institutional discrimination

Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension:

> A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.]

That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia:

> In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.

If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it.

> “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln

> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...

As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.
by Timon3 | 2025-06-22 18:01:48+00:00
Again: I do genuinely hope that you're correct.

But the pattern I've seen is that it doesn't matter whether his supporters have consistently been against something, because they'll change their opinion once Trump actually does that thing. They start off by levying some criticisms, but quickly change over the coming days.

We'll see soon enough who is right. My prediction is: in one week, there'll be broad support in his base for the bombing. I'm sure enough of it that I'd be willing to bet money on it, and I'll gladly come back here and admit that I was wrong should things not turn out how I expect them to.
by abetusk | 2025-06-22 18:01:53+00:00
Aside from all the turbulence of trying to get a project off the ground, the deciding factor was that the electrical transport infrastructure (aka wires) couldn't support the desired load of 4.5MW-10MW and was slashed to 3MW, making the project inviable?

To me, the "obvious" solution is to create solar plants closer to their use and lay down new infrastructure. From my understanding, one of the major reasons to have power plants so far away from urban centers is because they were dirty or location locked (waterfalls, etc.). With solar, this need essentially goes away with the ability now to put solar plants essentially in the middle, or directly adjacent, to urban centers.

Could someone enlighten me as to why this is not feasible or if someone is already discussing this idea?
by cm2187 | 2025-06-22 18:02:10+00:00
It's not about "authorized" or "unauthorized". If Switzerland or Brazil acquired nuclear weapons, I don't think anyone would really mind. The problem is with religious extremists sponsoring terrorism getting nukes.

There was a hope that once they acquired nuclear weapons, rogue countries would become responsible, because they didn't need to worry about their own existence. Pakistan has proven this theory wrong, sponsoring terrorism in in its neighbouring countries and abroad while being immune from the consequences.