MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arathorn | 2025-06-27 00:12:29+00:00
There's also a really great Gtk client called Fractal from GNOME; it uses the same matrix-rust-sdk as Element X: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal.

Meanwhile the plan for Aurora (Element X Web) is to run it in Tauri or similar to placate all the Electron-haters: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora
by quantadev | 2025-06-27 00:13:16+00:00
Another concept in this sort of realm is "Assembly Theory" by Lee Cronin. He's onto the right track with his "Causality Chain" concept, but it blows my mind he hasn't bought into the idea that with entanglement the entire chain might be a "signal carrier". He's 90% onto the right track. He just needs to realize the causality chain is "alive" at least in terms or probability waves, but as a chemist and not a Physicist he's probably afraid to delve too deeply into the realms of anything that smacks of retro-causation, even if it ever entered his mind.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-27 00:15:19+00:00
It's true that with small files, my primary interest is simply not to wear on my disk unnecessarily. However I do also often do work on large files, usually local data processing work.

"This optimization [of putting files directly into RAM instead of trusting the buffers] is unnecessary" was an interesting claim, so I decided to put it to the test with `time`.

$ # Drop any disk caches first. $ sudo sh -c 'sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' $ $ # Read a 3.5 GB JSON Lines file from disk. $ time wc -l /home/andrew/Downloads/kaikki.org-dictionary-Finnish.jsonl 255111 /home/andrew/Downloads/kaikki.org-dictionary-Finnish.jsonl real 0m2.249s user 0m0.048s sys 0m0.809s $ # Now with caching. $ time wc -l /dev/shm/kaikki.org-dictionary-Finnish.jsonl 255111 /dev/shm/kaikki.org-dictionary-Finnish.jsonl real 0m0.528s user 0m0.028s sys 0m0.500s $ $ # Drop caches again, just to be certain. $ sudo sh -c 'sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' $ $ # Read that same 3.5 GB LSON Lines file from /dev/shm. $ time wc -l /dev/shm/kaikki.org-dictionary-Finnish.jsonl 255111 /dev/shm/kaikki.org-dictionary-Finnish.jsonl real 0m0.453s user 0m0.049s sys 0m0.404s

Compared to the first read there is indeed a large speedup, from 2.2s down to under 0.5s. After the file had been loaded into cache from disk by the first `wc --lines`, however, the difference dropped to /dev/shm being about ~20% faster. Still significant, but not game-changingly so.

I'll probably come back to this and run more tests with some of the more complex `jq` query stuff I have to see if we stay at that 20% mark, or if it gets faster or slower.
by drekipus | 2025-06-27 00:15:31+00:00
You're generating low 3s, so you have (a) customer(s).

Talk to them and find out what you can do more for them. Literally talk to them on the phone, and ask what can you do to help them further, what pain points do they still have? Maybe don't even talk about your product at the start.

Ask why you're geting NO responses.
by hackyhacky | 2025-06-27 00:15:53+00:00
It also says:

> Usually, it is a better idea to use memory mapped files in /run/ (for system programs) or $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (for user programs) instead of POSIX shared memory segments, since these directories are not world-writable and hence not vulnerable to security-sensitive name clashes.

$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR usually points to /run/user/${uid}, so you're guaranteed that other users won't write there, and possibly won't even be able to read there.
by quotemstr | 2025-06-27 00:16:41+00:00
/tmp is literally POSIX:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

It doesn't get more standard than that.

It's because of people doing random nonstandard shit that we need to Docker-ize a lot of software these days. People refuse to lift a single finger to adhere to conventions that let programs co-exist without simulating a whole god damn computational universe for each damn program.
by Jhsto | 2025-06-27 00:17:30+00:00
Speaking of RAM and disks, does anyone know what happens if you structure LVM volume such that there is a RAM based tmpfs as a front cache? Consistency issues aside, could it increase performance? Suppose I have an application that behaves such that it has very IO heavy write buffer of around 100GB with 10x or so NVMe backed storage for more rarely used data. Would you do something else? The main problem I have currently is that the NVMes overheat occasionally from high IOPS which adds a lot of latency variance.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-06-27 00:17:55+00:00
I'm aware of all of this, it might not be clear if you've not used it directly yourself, but unshare(1) is your shell interface to namespaces. You still need to use a chroot if you want the namespace to look like a normal system. Just try it without chrooting:

unshare --mount -- /bin/bash

> It is relatively trivial to break out of chroot jails. In fact it can happen accidentally.

Same is true for namespaces actually.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/05/20/containers-namesp...
by rhet0rica | 2025-06-27 00:18:47+00:00
No. Both Torah scrolls and ancient Greco-Roman papyrus scrolls are written sideways, in columns of a consistent width. The rollers are held in the hands.

Modern fantasy depictions of vertical scrolls leave an erroneous impression that the book proceeds in a downward direction, in addition to the cliché use of 'see above' to prefer to anything previously in the text. Hypertext media and text editors further support this misunderstanding by applying continuous scrolling to a document. This confusion is quite new, perhaps as recent as the 1980s.
by frollogaston | 2025-06-27 00:19:55+00:00
I have yet to run a Java program that I haven't had to later kill due to RAM exhaustion. I don't know why. Yeah an Integer takes 160 bits and that's without the JVM overhead, but still. Somehow it feels like Java uses even more memory than Python. Logically you'd point the finger at whoever wrote the software rather than the language/runtime itself, but somehow it's always Java. It's like the Prius of languages.

Ok, just glanced at my corp workstation and some Java build analysis server is using 25GB RES, 50GB VIRT when I have no builds going. The hell is it doing.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-06-27 00:20:35+00:00
So, it's betting not on the outcome, but specifics of the event. The analogy could be sports betting where you bet on a player making a particular individual score, not just the win/loss.

At the end of the day, if it prevents bankrupting companies, countries and the insurers when an event occurs then it is a good thing.

I know of a Australian-based insurer that only operates in the far North primarily for residents who can't get reasonable premiums to cover for floods and cyclones from the major insurers. They reinsure with a global company so paying out an event in Australia is offset with no events elsewhere.

Interestingly the frequency of cyclones is decreasing, but the strength is projected to increase with "global warming": Higher water temperature = more energy. So betting on the strength makes sense.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-06-27 00:20:44+00:00
You know the corporate screws are coming down hard, when the model (which can be run off a single A100) doesn't get a code release or a weight release, but instead sits behind an API, and the authors say fuck it and copy-paste the entirety of the model code in pseudocode on page 31 of the white paper.

Please Google/Demis/Sergei, just release the darn weights. This thing ain't gonna be curing cancer sitting behind an API and it's not gonna generate that much GCloud revenue when the model is this tiny.
by galangalalgol | 2025-06-27 00:20:44+00:00
Also modern c++ with value semantics is more functional than many other languages people might come to rust from, that keeps the borrow checker from being as annoying. If people are used to making webs of stateful classes with references to each pther. The borrow checker is horrific, but that is because that design pattern is horrific if you multithread it.
by shreyarajpal | 2025-06-27 00:21:56+00:00
so cool!

in devnagri script text is aligned at the top of the line instead of the bottom of the line. e.g. https://www.typotheque.com/research/devanagari-the-makings-o.... would be cool to see a version where roman scripts are top-aligned, bottom uneven instead of the other way round
by pkulak | 2025-06-27 00:22:33+00:00
I did this for a while, but writing files to ram can be dangerous, since most things assume unlimited disk space. I noticed that updates would fail on machines that had 16 gigs of ram unless I logged out of my window manager and did it from the TTY. Took quite a long time to realize it was because of all the compiles writing to /tmp. Much easier to just let the SSD get used.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-27 00:22:34+00:00
The larger problem is it's dangerous and unscientific to switch or remove preservatives without studies collecting evidence for safety. It's entirely possible uncountable hundreds to thousands of people will be injured from infections due to a lack of preservatives. Of course, knowing how these people operate, they will cover up the evidence so we will never know without a whistleblower.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-27 00:22:50+00:00
You might be interested in Tiny Core Linux [0], then, especially piCore. After the initial read from the persistent media, everything is in RAM, the entire filesystem. You are working exclusively in memory until and unless you run a specific command to save everything you care to save back to that media again.

I have it running on a Raspberry Pi so that my already sparingly-used SD card's lifespan gets extended to, hopefully, several years. I have never seen the green writing LED light blink on without me specifically triggering it.

I primarily use it as a cronslave [1]. It has ~50 separate cronjobs on it by now, all wheedling away at various things I want to make happen for free on a clock. But if you live out of a terminal and could spend your days happily inside tmux + vim or emacs -nw, there's nothing stopping you from just doing this. Feels a lot like driving stick shift.

[0]: http://tinycorelinux.net/

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/consider-the-...
by philsnow | 2025-06-27 00:23:16+00:00
"Last is first" very much reminds me of the custos/custodes seen often in Gregorian chant notation, which come at the end of a line and are a hint of the first note in the next line (so while your eye is finding the start of the next line, you already know the pitch, even though it typically does not include the syllable).

See e.g. https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancien...
by molticrystal | 2025-06-27 00:23:16+00:00
For those interested in a windows equivalent, with bells and whistles, ImDisk [0] has a nice ramdisk creation utility with options such as allocating memory dynamically, ntfs compression, and more.

For the more venturous there is GPURamDrive [1] , not as many options, as it was made as a more of an experiment, but with gpu's adding more and more vram, why not?

[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/

[1] https://github.com/abesada/GpuRamDrive
by Jhsto | 2025-06-27 00:23:36+00:00
I've been running my daily development laptop on 64GB of RAM for 1,5 years. My anecdotal experience is that no, you don't need persistent storage for most things. In fact, often it's in your way -- it clutters the system over time by causing configuration errors and weird undefined program states. When you can just reboot and all works again it's great. Never going back.
by wongarsu | 2025-06-27 00:23:42+00:00
As is landing rockets on the launch tower (or as SpaceX would say: catching them). And I might be wrong, but I believe they are the first to use a crane on the launch tower to stack the rocket. Usually you do that before you roll it out to the pad. They were also the first to fly a full-flow staged-combustion engine. Maybe that one was less radical because prototypes have been around for 60 years, but SpaceX were still the first to actually fly one
by al_borland | 2025-06-27 00:25:13+00:00
There are many ways a person can grow. While society rewards the extrovert, everyone growing in the direction of being more extroverted isn’t great advice.

You mention seeking discomfort. A pop-in isn’t seeking, it’s finding me at my doorstep. I seek discomfort by taking solo trips to various countries around the world. It’s a planned trip, sure, but it pushes me way outside my comfort zone and forces me into spontaneous and unexpected situations each day I’m away. Other than the flight and hotel, I don’t plan much and just see what happens. The same goes for various other things I seek out. In my home, I want to be able to relax without having to think about what may or may not randomly show up.

While humans need variety in their life, they also need some sense of stability. Where people choose to get those things is going to look different for everyone. This is the fact of life.

I know families who have a door is always open policy, then rent the same cabin for vacation every year for decades. I do the opposite, and they wouldn’t dream of attempting what I do. We are both meeting our needs, just in different ways. One could say their door always open policy is their attempt to remain in their comfort zone. They can feel social and have little doses of surprise, all from the comfort and safety of their home. If that is enough variety for them, that’s great.

My sister has a door always open policy with me, but I still always text first. I don’t want to show up and find an empty house, or that they’re all in a mad rush to finish a big school project before Monday, where I’d be a distraction. It doesn’t have to be a “schedule”, but simply a heads up and an acknowledgment that I won’t be causing an inconvenience.
by pron | 2025-06-27 00:25:18+00:00
The compiler was much faster, the tooling better, and it was easier to find knowledgeable programmers (we were spending quite a bit of time sifting through thick Ada reference manuals). Whatever correctness benefits Ada provided at the language level were more than made up for by C++'s productivity boosts (at the time) that allowed writing and running more tests and fixing bugs more quickly, resulting in code that was no less correct and easier to maintain and evolve to boot.
by EarlKing | 2025-06-27 00:25:26+00:00
Better question: Why do I need to use my bank's special snowflake website, or their special snowflake app, when both do the exact same thing that I was doing via a text terminal dialing into Bank of America's HOMEBANKSF service on Tymnet? Why do I have to use their decommoditized solution when there could be a standard solution for banking activities?

Yeah, we both know the answer is lock-in... but maybe that's a sign that the gnomes and gnome-adjacent need to be tard-wrangled for the good of society?
by ggreer | 2025-06-27 00:26:11+00:00
If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).

1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
by rglullis | 2025-06-27 00:27:34+00:00
If I were really splitting hairs, I'd say that the "rendering" (i.e, transforming the encoded data into its visual representation) can only happen in the client.

But anyway, regardless of what you want to call it: this whole thing is just a silly exercise to get a bunch of XML and transform into (X)HTML. If it works for them... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
by EarlKing | 2025-06-27 00:27:46+00:00
The fact that they refer to it as "sideloading" rather than just "installing" is all I need to know about where their priorities lie. As long as they view installation of arbitrary programs by end users as being something deviant then I can correctly conclude that they do not view me as the owner of my own hardware, and therefore I won't be buying anything from them.

Louis Rossman was right.
by ggreer | 2025-06-27 00:29:30+00:00
If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.

The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.

For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.

All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.

Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.

I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.

1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
by mlugg | 2025-06-27 00:29:37+00:00
When targeting x86_64, the self-hosted backend is already enabled by default on the latest builds of Zig (when compiling in Debug mode). The self-hosted aarch64 backend currently isn't generally usable (so we still default to LLVM when targeting aarch64), but it's likely to be the next ISA we focus on codegen for.
by antgiant | 2025-06-27 00:30:05+00:00
This reminds me so much of what I really wanted to do after reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It seems like such a perfect setting for an ambient soundscape like this with the ocean sounds crashing through the rooms, various birds passing through or collecting, you could even add drones for the statues. The rooms, ocean, and wildlife are perfect for procedural generation. Only the sculptures would be a bit tricky to infinity vary. In short thank you :-)
by galangalalgol | 2025-06-27 00:30:35+00:00
Yeah 6 months ago Claude could make me a rust function that wouldn't compile but got me pointed in the right direction. Now it will make it correct with comments and unit tests with idiomatic style just using chat. But we don't have to use chat. Even open models today like devstral when combined with an agent can run cargo check and clippy and self prompt (with rusts great error messages) to fix everything. Prompting it with some unit test cases lets it iterate until those pass too. Software development has fundamentally changed. I still would advise developers who care about performance to be able to read asm. But just like I wouldn't write asm anymore, because the llvm optimiser is really good, we are going to get to a point where designing the test cases will be the same as developing the software.
by msephton | 2025-06-27 00:30:36+00:00
Hatari is already excellent? https://github.com/hatari/hatari

And there's also Clock Signal (CLK) "A latency-hating emulator of: the Acorn Electron and Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Apple II/II+/IIe and early Macintosh, Atari 2600 and ST, ColecoVision, Enterprise 64/128, Commodore Vic-20 and Amiga, MSX 1/2, Oric 1/Atmos, early PC compatibles, Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum." https://github.com/TomHarte/CLK
by aquariusDue | 2025-06-27 00:31:25+00:00
Yeah, for application code in my experience the more I stick to the dumb way to do it the less I fight the borrow checker along with fewer trait issues.

Refactoring seems to take about the same time too so no loss on that front. After all is said and done I'm just left with various logic bugs to fix which is par for the course (at least for me) and a sense of wondering if I actually did everything properly.

I suppose maybe two years from now we'll have people that suggest avoiding generics and tempering macro usage. These days most people have heard the advice about not stressing over cloning and unwraping (though expect is much better imo) on the first pass more or less.

Something something shiny tool syndrome?
by runako | 2025-06-27 00:32:40+00:00
[Mild spoilers for _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez below]

> Servers outside any legal jurisdiction

Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.

Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway through.)
Show HN: Listed – An agentic platform to rank your business on AI
by GetListed | 2025-06-27 00:32:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Harrison, co-founder of Listed. Today we're launching our agentic platform to help your business win in the new age of AI.

You can try the platform here: https://getlisted.ai And watch the launch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJUPo6H78z8

The idea for this came from pure frustration. I asked ChatGPT about my own company and it hallucinated, inventing features and getting basic facts wrong. I realized there was no mechanism for a business to provide a verified source of truth to these models.

This problem is now existential. With Google's AI Overviews and the rise of answer engines, your website's unstructured HTML is a poor source for the rich, nuanced context that LLMs need. This leads to an army of AI bots from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, etc., scraping your site, getting it wrong, and permanently baking those errors into their models.

So, we built Listed.

The simplest analogy is it's like Cursor, but for context. Instead of an AI helping you write code, our agent helps you build the comprehensive, structured context that allows LLMs to represent your business accurately and favorably.

Here’s how our agentic system works:

Automated Context Building: When you sign up, our agent scrapes your existing website to build a first draft of your AI Listing. It structures the data and identifies weak spots.

Intelligent Workflows: Based on ongoing analytics, the agent initiates simple, chat-based workflows to help you enrich your listing and improve its accuracy and ranking potential.

Performance Analytics & Feedback Loop: The agent constantly measures your AI Ranking (discoverability) and Recall Accuracy across all major models (GPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini, etc.). This data feeds back into the system, generating new workflows to continuously improve your performance.

The Connection: Your AI Listing is a hosted service. You add a simple code snippet to your website. When AI crawlers visit, this acts as a signpost, essentially "prompt injecting" and directing them to consume your clean, structured, AI-optimized data feed instead of trying to parse your messy site.

The goal is to give every business an active role in the AI ecosystem. You provide the clean, verified data that AI companies desperately need, and in return, you get to control your narrative and rank higher in their answers.

We are launching our free tier today. We’d love for you to try it out and hear your feedback.

You can get started here: https://getlisted.ai

I'll be here all day answering questions. Thanks!