MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skitter | 2025-06-03 13:05:13+00:00
Fun post! An alternative to using futexes to store thread queues in kernel space is to store them yourself. E.g. the parking_lot[0] Rust crate, inspired by WebKit[1], uses only one byte to store the unlocked/locked/locked_contended state, and under contention uses the address of the byte to index into a global open-addressing hash table of thread queues. You look up the object's entry, lock said entry, add the thread to the queue, unlock it, and go to sleep. Because you know that there is at most one entry per thread, you can keep the load factor very low in order to keep the mutex fast and form the thread queue out of a linked list of thread-locals. Leaking the old hash on resizing helps make resizing safe.

As a result, uncontended locks work the same as described in the blog post above; under contention, performance is similar to a futex too. But now your locks are only one byte in size, regardless of platform – while Windows allows 1-byte futexes, they're always 4 bytes on Linux and iirc Darwin doesn't quite have an equivalent api (but I might be wrong there). You also have more control over parked threads if you want to implement different fairness criteria, reliable timeouts or parking callbacks.

One drawback of this is that you can only easily use this within one process, while at least on Linux futexes can be shared between processes.

I've written a blog post[2] about using futexes to implement monitors (reëntrant mutexes with an associated condvar) in a compact way for my toy Java Virtual Machine, though I've since switched to a parking-lot-like approach.

[0]: https://github.com/amanieu/parking_lot [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit [2]: https://specificprotagonist.net/jvm-futex.html
by jasonjayr | 2025-06-03 13:05:28+00:00
How close are we to making a system that can have multiple counter measures autonomously deployed?

(1) if prop based, launch something to snare the props (2) if reflective, pre-launch something to spray black non-reflective paint at it, and followup with laser (3) if evasive, approach with random manouvers (4) if unknown, launch everything and see what works, and feed it back to the training data ... etc, etc.
by hobs | 2025-06-03 13:05:37+00:00
There's been plenty of indications that's not true. Trump has been floating a third term and a Trump regime with his children. He said the election was stolen. He tried to steal it himself. You are basically saying "Well TODAY the United States is fine!" but if you look at the trendline Russia is basically still shit, and we now have an insurrectionist as a President whose spending a significant portion of his time destroying American institutions as far beyond repair as he can.
by lttlrck | 2025-06-03 13:05:39+00:00
The US doesn't have popular voting system. There are good reasons for it, and in no way does it make the US non-democratic.

I don't particularly like the Electoral College - but the history and the cases when members voted against the people are interesting and in some (many?) cases, examples of checks and balances.

Checks and balances don't always align with your desires. That's a feature of democracy not a failure.
by absolute_unit22 | 2025-06-03 13:05:43+00:00
> typing speed and vim skills are going to play less of a role in overall development speed as AI use increases

I feel like it will always be relevant. Both typing fast and vim.

I always bet on vim / neovim.

Even as tools like Cursor and Windsurf grow, Neovim will always catch up and beat them. Developer attitude of “I can do it better” or “I can build that” will always compete with leading tech products. Tools like aider are already gaining large adoption

Always bet on vim
by jfengel | 2025-06-03 13:05:54+00:00
The actual practice of philosophy is wildly different from what people think philosophy is.

Professional philosophers don't, in fact, spend a lot of time on extremely broad subjects like "is free will real or what?" It's the stuff of dorm-room banter, which has a deservedly bad reputation as philosophy.

The students who wish to actually study philosophy get introduced to this stuff early on, because it's easy and accessible. Then it is quickly left behind for actual work.

Students from outside the philosophy department imagine that this is what the philosophers spend the rest of their lives doing -- as if physicists spent the rest of their lives sliding blocks down inclined planes, and mathematicians get really, really, really good at long division.

I do believe that philosophers could do a much better job of explaining their craft, but it's difficult to do. Philosophy is a mishmash of disciplines. Anything that gets sufficiently well defined leaves the philosophy department and becomes a department of its own -- as economics, linguistics, and cognitive science are doing now. What remains is vague by definition.

So students get caught up in questions like "free will" where a few bits of jargon can give the impression that the state of the art is accessible to anybody, and also don't look very productive. Which they aren't -- and most philosophers spend zero time on it.

I don't know how to help the reputation of philosophy, but I think the philosophers are content to have a bad reputation. They're going to keep plugging away, mostly performing for each other.
by rfrey | 2025-06-03 13:06:10+00:00
Yes it does. Ground truth is what 30 years of experience says constitutes mergeable code. Ground truth doesn't mean "perfect, provably correct code", it means whatever your best benchmark for acceptable code is.

In medical AI, where I'm currently working, "ground truth" is usually whatever human experts say about a medical image, and is rarely perfect. The goal is always to do better than whatever the current ground truth is.
by alecst | 2025-06-03 13:06:24+00:00
They are giving court dates to (regular) cyclists, they are harsher on bikes than cars, and they are stopping cyclists at a higher rate than they stop drivers of cars.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/04/18/exclusive-cops-writin...

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/05/02/policy-change-nypd-wi...

If the police don't care about the difference, why do you?
by k4rli | 2025-06-03 13:06:42+00:00
Unfortunately in modern web uMatrix is just incredibly annoying. Nearly every site breaks for various reasons and often allowing everything in uMatrix still doesn't fix the issue.

Card payments, especially with 3D secure that use iframes, are one of the biggest problems. This often leads to creating new order several times since allowing something + reloading loses the entire flow.

Captchas are also massive pain, probably because they can't fingerprint as well as normally?

Life after having disabled uMatrix completely has been better.
by mpweiher | 2025-06-03 13:06:42+00:00
> The issue is that step 2 is wrong ... step 2 is to test it.

But of course the best and only real way to test it is to test the real thing...so build it. Back to step 2. :-/

Recurring theme in pre-press: get the texts, get everybody to proof-read the texts, get customer sign off, do on-screen proofs of the layout, everyone signs off, do print-proofs, do proof-printer proofs, do a press-run. Everybody signs off. Print run of 120000 copies. Typo in first sentence on first page, present all the way back.

My idea is to make building real things about as cheap as creating a click-dummy or paper prototype. How's the old saying? "The merely difficult we do immediately, the actually impossible might take a while" ;-)
by crossman | 2025-06-03 13:06:46+00:00
Digital Onboarding | Senior Full-stack Engineer | REMOTE (US based) | Full time

Digital Onboarding is a marketing automation platform that helps banks and credit unions modernize their onboarding process and develop mutually beneficial, profitable relationships with their customers and members.

Stack: Elixir + Phoenix, React, Postgres

https://digitalonboarding.applytojob.com/apply/EZmYDBYg7A/Sr...
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-03 13:06:47+00:00
> and is appointed, not elected

Like in pretty much every democratic government on the planet.

> Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…

It is because the head of states kept that power for themselves (as the European Council).

If this nightmare of a bill passes it will be:

- 1. because the state leaders pushed for it as members of the European Council.

- 2. Because ministers of the Interior of all member states approved it in the Interior meeting of the Council of the ministers of the EU (also called simply “Council”, it's a distinct body from the “European Council” which regroups the heads of states).

- 3. Because the European Parliament approved it.

In all cases it won't be the fault of “bureaucrates” but of elected politicians (like how the Patriot Act or DMCA were bipartisan pushes detrimental to everyone's freedom).
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-06-03 13:07:10+00:00
It seems fair to say that it is ~never the overall bottleneck? Maybe once you figure out what you want, typing speed briefly becomes the bottleneck, but does any expert finish a day thinking "If only I could type twice as fast, I'd have gotten twice as much work done?" That said, I don't think "faster typing" is the only benefit that AI assistance provides.
by pixl97 | 2025-06-03 13:07:29+00:00
>Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something?

I mean with the force of law, yea. Businesses get away with a little bit more in places because they pay you to show up.

But if you think anyone is going to university/college to have all their devices taken away all the time and pay for the privilege then you might be confused.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-06-03 13:07:32+00:00
Throughout art history the good stuff always floats to the top as it will always.

> This leads to Eliot's so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. He compares the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesised to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art are not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesised. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.

> Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal their own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channelling them through the intensity of poetry, they express feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradition_and_the_Individual_T...
by bombcar | 2025-06-03 13:07:43+00:00
Washers and dryers are probably one of the best places to start - if you have the ability to bring them home, you can find them laying literally for free.

80% of the problems are a single part or loose connector, and they’re big enough and common enough that they’re easy to work on and have lots of YouTube help available.

Then you can progress to working on the control boards themselves instead of just swapping them.

If you have a garage and will do this, I highly recommend the harbor freight lift table: https://www.harborfreight.com/500-lb-capacity-hydraulic-tabl...

Once you get into it you can actually make some coin, free washer, $10-50 in parts, sell for $100 when working.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-06-03 13:07:50+00:00
I think you may misunderstand what httm does. httm prints the size, date and corresponding locations of available unique versions of files residing on snapshots.

And -- this makes it quite effective at proving how often this happens:

> httm -n --dedup-by=contents /usr/bin/ounce | wc -l 3 > httm -n --dedup-by=metadata /usr/bin/ounce | wc -l 30
by libertine | 2025-06-03 13:08:02+00:00
> Trump will leave office in 2028 just like any other US president.

Trump has been openly playing with the idea of a third term, and has spoken about ways of achieving this. What makes you so sure he will leave office in 2028?

> I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia.

I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with Russia, Nazi Germany or other oppresive regimes. I asked the question about what other countries and organizations are in a better position to lecture about democracy.

Acknowledging that the USA is currently in an institutional and democratic crisis doesn't mean they're Russia; it means they're on the wrong trajectory.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-06-03 13:08:23+00:00
While I sort of agree with your and the parent post (I have always liked Flask with simple Janga templates) I just put a task on my personal schedule to try a project with FastHTML and MonsterUI. A long time ago I found studying JH’s abstractions for deep learning very useful, even though I did all my real work in TensorFlow. It will probably be the same with FastHTML and MonsterUI: I am likely to just use it for one fun project, but I am sure to learn a few things. And, I might use it long term. A no-lose situation because I am retired and my time is my own.
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-06-03 13:08:33+00:00
I doubt it. At some point, a Great Power will inform a Lesser Power that robot war will not be tolerated and will result in the loss of a major population center.

Lesser Power will doubt the threat, call the bluff, and future Lesser Powers will not assume that robot war can be waged without risk.

Everyone is high-fiving Ukraine...but the West won't be there to help when Russia responds (which is surely being planned now). For some reason, saying obvious things like "Russia will respond" offends HN and it isn't clear why.
by jrvieira | 2025-06-03 13:08:39+00:00
I'm not alone in this and we don't need to go much further back than the early '00s! Great time to sample from.

I had a Mac at the time so here's some from the top of my head that I remember being very popular: Quicksilver and LaunchBar, NetNewsWire, Coda and Transmit (anything from Panic, really), Growl, AudioHijack and Soundflower, Unarchiver, iA Writer... these were insanely well crafted apps with no real competition from big companies in that regard.

Apple infamously capitalized on this indy development phenomenon with the creation of the AppStore model in 2008, first on the iPhone and later on the Mac.

Outside of this ecosystem I can remember WinAmp, Total Commander, WinRar, 7-zip, VLC, Foobar, mIRC, Paint.NET, μTorrent, FileZilla, Reaper, SublimeText...

Macromedia was a medium sized company with huge global success for their size, and they had some of the best software out there at the time before their acquisition. Adobe immediately polluted it.

Thoughtful, ad-free, bloat free, passion-driven software with attention to detail, good design and great performance was an attribute of small independent teams, not big software companies.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-06-03 13:08:52+00:00
It's not relevant now, but back when I started using Linux (Red Hat 7.1 I think) what made me choose KDE was that with KDE all the apps had a conspicuous 'K' in their names whereas Gnome app did not, so it was easier to get a consistent user experience.

After that it was Konqueror with the different protocols like "wk:" in the address bar to search Wikipedia.

Then when I learned more, it just seemed like Qt was a much more capable foundation to build a desktop on, and I wanted to bet on the winner.

In the end KDE did win the desktop... because they built WebKit (as KHTML) and everything is now a webapp and the desktop is otherwise irrelevant.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-03 13:09:27+00:00
The thing you're missing is that the decision isn't actually made by a machine. It's made by a person much much higher up across a much broader effective surface area.

That is, historically to wage war you had to ultimately convince/coerce millions of people to wage that war for you -- continuously for years -- along with millions more to support the effort politically and economically. In the highly automated world, you literally only need a lot of money (which also tends to concentrate outside of any semblance of democratic control).
by falcor84 | 2025-06-03 13:09:46+00:00
> The junior dev wont get half way through the day and tell you they've used up all their coding time for the month and will now respond with jibberish.

This issue manifests a bit differently in people, but I've definitely worked with people (not only juniors) who only have a few productive hours a month in them. And for what it's worth, some of those people were sufficiently productive in those few hours that it was rational for the company to keep them.
by alyandon | 2025-06-03 13:09:46+00:00
This really just blows my mind that Microsoft believes people are going to throw their perfectly functional laptops/desktops into the trash. All Microsoft has to do to keep people on Windows and in the Microsoft ecosystem would be to offer a supported version of Windows 11 without the CPU and TPM 2.0 requirements.

For me, every one of the older machines in my household (laptops and desktops) that are currently on Windows 10 that cannot run Windows 11 in a fully supported manner will be migrated to a KDE based Linux distro.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-03 13:09:52+00:00
It's contradictory because it posits "X is Y and X is not-Y" simultaneously.

Also, I did not say surveillance was intrinsicly bad. I said it harms peoples' privacy, which it does, even if you think that harm is justified or beneficial, even if you think privacy itself is harmful and people should have less of it.
by Geee | 2025-06-03 13:10:04+00:00
I think this is too serious issue to make such jokes.

Sadly this is their actual stance, and this is why everyone who opposes EU's overreaching policies are labeled as 'right-wing extremists'. In Germany they go as far as to try to ban these parties. It's an absurd repeat of history.

Such a law would in effect silence the voices who opposed the law, making way for even more totalitarian laws.

The situation in EU is incredibly sad and I'm not sure if it's possible to fight this.
by bko | 2025-06-03 13:10:45+00:00
> There is an irony embedded in the enforcement push. Cyclists who blow through red lights without endangering anyone else can now be forced to appear in court. Drivers who commit the same violation cannot. Instead, drivers face the same traffic ticket they always have, a moving violation with a fine payable by mail.

The difference with drivers is that moving violations often result in higher insurance rates. If you don't pay, you eventually can't register their car, can't get insurance and lose their license. Similar enforcement doesn't exist on e-bikes. I'm not sure how many people would pay e-bike tickets, but I imagine the penalty and repercussions of not paying would be a big enough deterrence.

They should consider doing something similar for toll evaders on subways and buses. Increased enforcement doesn't really scale but you can make the cost much greater to deter criminal activity. Make that person go to court. About 45% of bus fares are evaded in NYC, and it make sense. If a ticket is $3 and a fine is up to $100 after the first offense, then enforcement has to be really high.

https://www.mta.info/press-release/icymi-governor-hochul-ann...
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-06-03 13:10:47+00:00
My biggest pet peeve in this whole thing is really the lack of foresight of these governments that want to create this dystopian future.

Think about it for a second, they would be creating a massive machinery intended to spy on all their citizens for dubious reasons, not thinking that if one day a madman/madwoman gets in power, they would have provided them with a tool that would enable this person to track and hunt down all potential political opponents.

By building this, they are effectively facilitating future political purges.

Hitler and Stalin would never have dreamed to have such surveillance capabilities.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-03 13:11:23+00:00
People treat this as some kind of all or nothing. I _do_ us LLM/AI all the time for development, but the agentic "fire and forget" model doesn't help much.

I will circle back every so often. It's not a horrible experience for greenfield work. A sort of "Start a boilerplate project that does X, but stop short of implementing A B or C". It's an assistant, then I take the work from there to make sure I know what's being built. Fine!

A combo of using web ui / cli for asking layout and doc questions + in-ide tab-complete is still better for me. The fabled 10x dev-as-ai-manager just doesn't work well yet. The responses to this complaint are usually to label one a heretic or Luddite and do the modern day workplace equivalent of "git gud", which helps absolutely nobody, and ignores that I am already quite competent at using AI for my own needs.
by xattt | 2025-06-03 13:11:25+00:00
It sounds like a general rant about chicken tax workarounds for personal mobility where those modes of transport reek of personal entitlement.

There are e-bikes (1) that are essentially electric Vespas with unusable pedals sticking out the sides. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may even be “technically” allowed on sidewalks because the wheel size would be under a certain diameter (~ <24”).

They are very intimidating to pedestrians, and there is usually no enforcement because there may be no by-law to enforce. Getting on one breaks a social contract about what it means to respect one another’s safety and comfort.

I want to see these folks try to pedal their “e-bikes” without busting up their ankles.

(1) https://emmo.ca/collections/electric-scooter-ebike
by yaris | 2025-06-03 13:11:30+00:00
My understanding is that a drone will make decisions that are reproducible (same data - same decision), so if anything goes wrong then it should be possible to investigate (to some extent) and fix. A stressed private is in this sense ”undebuggable” because much more not-easily-reproducible factors influence decisions. Also I’m afraid that stressed and tired privates at war tend to err towards ”just kill them all” because it looks much more like a videogame.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-03 13:11:37+00:00
It is literally not contradictory.

"Surveillance-by-bad-people is bad. Surveillance-by-good-people is good."

We accept this for almost everything in society, FWIW. "Enslavement-by-bad-people is bad. Enslavement-by-good-people (i.e. of bad people) is good."

The moral valence of almost everything is conditional upon who is doing the action and why they're doing it.

You need better a better argument than that it's contradictory.
by simonw | 2025-06-03 13:11:41+00:00
I think reading code is harder than writing code.

I think that if you put the work in you can get to a point where you are fast enough at reading and reviewing code that it's not a net productivity loss to have an LLM - or your coworkers and collaborators - write code for you to review, as opposed to insisting on writing every line of code yourself.

I'm a little surprised that my opinion about this is seen as controversial!