MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sph | 2025-06-18 07:54:00+00:00
> I write mine all by hand. It's the easiest part of a compiler to write, by far. It's also the least troublesome.

It's also the most annoying if you're writing a new language. You want to iterate on its ideas, but can't do so until you have a parser done.

I've been designing a few language concepts over the past year, and it feels 80% of this time has been writing and debugging parsers; by the time I get to the meat of language design - the shape of its AST, the semantics of it - any small syntactic change means going back to update the lexer and parser stage. Doesn't help that I can't settle on a syntax.

BTW I first started with PEG, which are nice in theory, but I feel the separation of lexing and parsing stage to very helpful to reduce boilerplate (handling whitespace in PEG is obnoxious). Later, I hand-wrote my parsers (in C), but it's gotten so repetitive I've dedicated a weekend to just learning lex/yacc (actually flex/bison). Even if parsers are easy to write, it's good to have higher level tools to reduce the tedium of it.
by noname120 | 2025-06-18 07:55:24+00:00
That comment was of course for a given nit level. The question doesn't make sense otherwise. Your iris expands when the overall ambient lighting is low. If there is no backlight then there is less ambient lighting so your iris are stretched to the maximum and a jump to a given luminance level blinds you more than the same luminance would on a screen with a backlight.
by writebetterc | 2025-06-18 07:56:00+00:00
>How long are you realistically "waiting for the compiler and linker"? 3 seconds? You're not recompiling the whole project after all, just one source file typically

10 minutes.

>If I wanna use a debugger though, now that means a full recompile to build the project without optimizations, which probably takes many minutes.

Typically always compile with debug support. You can debug an optimized build as well. Full recompile takes up to 45 minutes.

The largest reason to use a debugger is the time to recompile. Kinda, I actually like rr a lot and would prefer that to print debugging.
by jajko | 2025-06-18 07:56:22+00:00
This is splitting hair, at the end his navigation skills (him + whatever tool he used) were NOK and could result in dangerous situations (been there so many times in the mountains, although it was mostly about "went too far in a bit wrong direction and don't want to backtrack that far, I am sure I will find a way to that already close point..." and 10 mins later scrambling on all 4 on some slippery wet rock with no room for error)
by camillomiller | 2025-06-18 07:56:42+00:00
>> For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as humans do, but I do think we’re at least one more AI winter away from that, especially considering that today’s AI moguls seem to have no capacity for nuance, and care more about their tools appearing slick and frictionless than providing responsible output.

Fantastic closing paragraph! Loved the article
by theodric | 2025-06-18 07:56:44+00:00
We'll definitely need people who can do the hard stuff still!

If we're lucky, the tendency toward random hallucinations will force an upswing in functional skepticism and and lots of mental effort spent verifying outputs! If not, then we're probably cooked.

Maybe a ray of light, even coming from a serious skeptic of generative AI: I've been impressed at what someone with little ability to write code or inclination to learn can accomplish with something like Cursor to crank out little tools and widgets to improve their daily life, similar to how we still need skilled machinists even while 3D printing has enabled greater democratization of object production. LLMs: a 3D printer for software. It may not be great, but if it works, whatever.
by lcnielsen | 2025-06-18 07:57:45+00:00
The problem with those are the iffy headless support. For Gnome it kind of works as long as you don't run into keyring issues (you will, the credentials management for gnome-remote-desktop is terrible compared to eg xrdp), don't need more than 1 desktop per user (you might need to support this for eg HPC, though there are workarounds), and you don't try to do hardware acceleration, headless, Wayland and Xwayland at the same time (which is a Mutter capabilities bug I have raised with them).

For KDE headless Wayland just doesn't work. Unfortunately they are only considering a narrow range of usecases, this has kind of always been the case since the whole "1 graphical session per user" thing, which doesn't map to a lot of use cases (though you can work around it it's very unintuitive).

I hope the XFCE devs can come up with something and that we can get good RDP support for that at least.
by account42 | 2025-06-18 07:57:58+00:00
I don't think you can make the conclusion you make.

In this case the service started as free (and thereby training people that it costs nothing) and and only later tried to pull the rug out under people after locking them in via network effects. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to financially reward such tactics.

It's also that people already pay ridiculous amounts of money for their own internet connection. There is no reason why with A paying for internet and B paying for internet that A and B should pay again just to be able to talk to each other. Of course the technical reality is different but that's at least partially due to how WhatsApp designed their system.
by ryao | 2025-06-18 07:58:00+00:00
I wonder how the DRM used in some video games that calls Windows system calls directly handles these changes. We know that some of it uses windows system calls directly because both Linux and Wine had to be patched to support it:

https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/syscall-user-dispatch.ht...

If I recall correctly, Jurassic World Evolution’s DRM is one of those that needed this to work.
by orwin | 2025-06-18 07:58:42+00:00
Well, MKultra did happen. The fact that it didn't work don't mean they never tried :D

Concerning the WW2 lies about the start of the war, my principal issue with them are that they are quite easy to disprove, you just need to read _english_ cables sent to Poland which are publicly available, where they asked Poland to accept Germany ultimatum on Danzig and polish borders. I fact, Chamberlain Guarantee of polish independence explicitly didn't guarantee its borders. It was clearly an attempt to prevent another Czekoslovakia. Thus people believing them have to be idiots, I don't see another solution.

Also if you want to check Poland response, it's translated already. They said in late May 39 they tried to get a hold on German chief diplomat (not Ribbentrof, the second one) to accept most of Germany's terms, but couldn't. They surrendered by press, pushed articles in the free city to explain they removed border checks with Germany by July 39.
by boston_clone | 2025-06-18 07:58:50+00:00
Well, here's Schopenhauer channelling his American millennial in 1850s Europe: "If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?"

The wikipedia article from where I snagged that quote has a few more examples that go back to like, ancient Greece. Check it out!

P.S. it does sound like you have at least a mild disdain for millennials and also an opinion on the matter - share your thoughts, tease out those details! dismissing a topic as a generational "odd thing" isn't fun, and is definitely a common and unoriginal idea.
by pbiggar | 2025-06-18 07:59:07+00:00
This is no surprise. I raised the flag last year on Whatsapp being used as part of the genocide in Gaza [1] following the +972 article [2] on Lavender.

This was an opportunity for Meta to signal that it wasn't in support of its technologies being used this way, to do top-to-bottom public audit of how this came to be and to prevent it from ever happening again.

Instead, Meta had an incredibly scummy response [3]. They said that "WhatsApp has no backdoors". A "backdoor" and a vulnerability are different, and Meta at the time knew [4] that it had a vulnerability which could have been used in that exact situation (since all Gazan telecoms are surveilled by Israel).

Given Meta's senior leadership is pro-Israel, with their CISO being former Israeli intelligence, and with them massively putting their thumb on the scales to shut down pro-Palestinian activism [5][6][7][8] (including shutting down dissent of it internally [9]).

Now, Meta is aligning with the US military [10], and with the Trump administration [11] which is trying to support a war against Iran that Israel started.

Literally any country which is not US/West aligned should be actively moving their citizenry off Meta.

[1] https://blog.paulbiggar.com/meta-and-lavender/ [2] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ [3] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240418-israel-using-meta... [4] https://theintercept.com/2024/05/22/whatsapp-security-vulner... [5] https://7amleh.org/storage/meta/Erased%20and%20Suppressed%20... [6] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti... [7] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo [8] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/report-a... [9] https://7amleh.org/storage/Advocacy%20Reports/Delete%20the%2... [10] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-army-tech-executives/ [11] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-18 07:59:15+00:00
That's the core misunderstanding found in every discussion of UBI. Welfare doesn't create something out of nothing, it redistributes wealth by taking it from those who created it.

UBI is fundamentally different to welfare at a conceptual level. It posits that everyone receives money unconditionally. This is technically possible if you don't care what that money buys - just inflate the currency - but that's merely an accounting trick and doesn't achieve anything by itself (it makes things worse). If you replace the word money with wealth, which is what people mean, it isn't possible at all. It's the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

The lower overhead argument also doesn't work. You can't eliminate most of the overhead of welfare distribution by using UBI. Any UBI scheme would still need at minimum:

1. A strong ID verification scheme to verify that each person only receives UBI once.

2. Bureaucratic systems for ensuring people's births and deaths are always found and tracked correctly, and cannot be forged.

3. Management of name/address changes, immigration, emigration etc to ensure the above.

And so on. Look at the stuff DOGE has been doing to the existing US social security system and notice that none of the problems identified are at the level of means testing going wrong. They're all the absolute basics, like "do dead people keep receiving money". UBI doesn't fix that. You would still have a massive bureaucracy.
by KronisLV | 2025-06-18 07:59:52+00:00
That’s a nice analogy! Though one might argue that the walk in of itself would be good for your health (as evidenced by me putting on some weight after replacing my 30 minute daily walk to the office with working remotely).

One could also do the drive (use AI) and then get some fresh air after (personal projects, code golf, solving interesting problems), but I don’t thing everyone has the willpower for that or the desire to consider that.
by tephra | 2025-06-18 08:00:03+00:00
I like Rust and have an ambition to learn it as well (I've had a few false starts...). One of my issues that I have is that every (slight exaggeration) library that I seem to come across is still at version 0.x.y. Take this library as an example. 0.1.0 was released in 2014 and it still hasn't had a 1.0.0 release, is there an aversion to get to 1.0.0 in the rust community?
by adrian_b | 2025-06-18 08:00:34+00:00
A pure orange contains only light with a single wavelength.

A mixture of light with different wavelengths that is perceived as orange cannot be distinguished from a mixture of some pure orange with a certain amount of white light.

So any orange, of a flower or of anything else, has the hue of a single wavelength, but it may be more or less saturated, appearing like light with a single wavelength mixed with some white light.

Low-pressure sodium lamps emit a pure color that belongs to the yellow-orange range, so you could describe it as a yellowish orange.

High-pressure sodium lamps have a desaturated orange color, i.e. light that looks like a mixture of orange and white lights.

The orange of any kind of sodium lamp is much more yellowish than the reddish orange of neon lamps with cathodic light, like those used in neon indicators.

Most sodium lamps contain some neon for starting, so when they are switched on they may emit a reddish orange light for a short time, then change to a yellowish orange light, when the sodium vapor takes over from neon.
by chneu | 2025-06-18 08:01:26+00:00
There are detriments to this as well.

Exercise is good.

Being outside is good.

New experiences happen when you're on foot.

You see more things on foot.

Etc etc. We make our lives way too efficient and we atrophy basic skills. There are benefits to doing things manually. Hustle culture is quite bad for us.

Going by foot or bicycle is so healthy for us for a myriad of reasons.
by eqvinox | 2025-06-18 08:01:49+00:00
Metaphors are fun, they "feel" meaningful, but… you still need to back that up.

> mechanized farm equipment

Sure, that could be a valid analogy.

Or maybe we invented CAD software for mechanical engineering, where we were making engineering drawings by hand before?

And that doesn't quite ring the same way in terms of obsoleting engineers…
by thih9 | 2025-06-18 08:02:06+00:00
Note that this is a very simple library and not very efficient. E.g. for the code that filters an array, it would run N prompts[1]:

`You are a filter agent.\nYour job is to return whether an item matches the criteria: ${criteria}\nRespond only with true or false.`

It's a cool demo, but I wouldn't use that in production; IMO having that code in a separate library offers little benefit and increases the risk of misuse.

[1]: https://github.com/montyanderson/incant/blob/73606e826d6e5b0...
by ineedaj0b | 2025-06-18 08:02:09+00:00
i really tire of people always asking for studies for obvious things.

have sword skills declined since the introduction of guns? surely people still have hands and understand how to move swords, and they use knives to cut food for consumption. the skill level is the same..

but we know on aggregate most people have switched to relying on a technological advancement. there's not the same culture for swords as in the past by sheer numbers despite there being more self proclaimed 'experts'.

100 genz vs. 100 genx you'll likely find a smidgen more of one group than the other finding a location without a phone.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-06-18 08:02:22+00:00
This study is methodologically poor: only 18 people, SAT topics (so broad and pretty poor with the expectation of an American style “essay”), only 20 minutes of writing so far too little time to properly use the tool given to explore (be it search engine or LLM).

With only 20 minutes, I’m not even trying to do a search. No surprise the people using LLM have zero recollection of what they wrote.

Plus they spend ages discussing correct quoting (why?) and statistical analysis via NLP which is entirely useless.

Very little space is dedicated to knowing if the essays are actually any good.

Overall pretty disappointing.
by zokier | 2025-06-18 08:02:39+00:00
Yeah, this is the way to do this. I'm pretty sure that if you for some reason do not want to run wireguard on all your servers you could fairly easily adjust this recipe to have a centralized wg gateway on your local network instead.

I think I've seen some scripts floating around to automate this process but can't remember where. There are lots of good related tools listed here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
by Unbanshee | 2025-06-18 08:02:48+00:00
True, Obsidian lack of native local encryption is absurd in 2025. Standard Notes, Joplin, OneNote, even Apple Notes support this. Obsidian people will keep replying you have to protect your whole filesystem. This is absurd. Zero Trust is one of OPSEC main principle. Sounds crazy to me to externalize security for a note-taking app in 2025.
by rendall | 2025-06-18 08:02:59+00:00
That’s a helpful reference. Thank you. But I understand pharmakeia to refer more to sorcery or deception, not to altered states or chemical use in general. Otherwise, wouldn’t every medication also fall under this condemnation?

If someone undergoes an experience that results in greater love, joy, peace, patience, etc., the very fruits listed in this same passage, then how do we weigh that against the method of arriving there?
by fercircularbuf | 2025-06-18 08:03:35+00:00
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442...

The first paragraph of the conclusions section is also stimulating and I think aptly applies to this discussion of using AI as a tool.

> it is important to mention the bidirectionality of the relationship between GPS use and navigation abilities: Individuals with poorer ability to learn spatial information and form environmental knowledge tend to use assisted navigation systems more frequently in daily life, thus weakening their navigation abilities. This intriguing link might suggest that individuals who have a weaker “internal” ability to use spatial knowledge to navigate their surroundings are also more prone to rely on “external” devices or systems to navigate successfully. Therefore, other psychological factors (e.g., self-efficacy; Miola et al., 2023) might moderate this bidirectional relationship, and researchers need to further elucidate it.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-18 08:04:08+00:00
A culture isse, as in the C++ world, of Apple and Microsoft ecosystems, shipping binary C++ libraries is a common business, even it is compiler version dependent.

This is why Apple made such a big point of having a better ABI approach on Swift, after their experience with C++ and Objective-C.

While on Microsoft side, you will notice that all talks from Victor Ciura on Rust conferences have dealing with ABI as one of the key points Microsoft is dealing with in the context of Rust adoption.
by arethuza | 2025-06-18 08:04:35+00:00
No - on both occasions it was the same scenario - descending from a peak in bad weather and picking the wrong ridge to descend - I was confident I "knew" which was the right ridge and with the app I use bearings for the right route are pretty difficult to distinguish - so completely my fault.

I'm now aware of that problem and haven't had that problem since but I was pretty shocked in retrospect that I confidently headed off in the wrong direction when the tool I was using was by any objective measure much better.

I agree with this:

"the key to navigating successfully is being able to read and understand a map and how it relates to your surroundings"

https://www.mountaineering.scot/safety-and-skills/essential-...
by ssl-3 | 2025-06-18 08:05:13+00:00
Are you sure you mean "halogen"? *

Halogen headlights have been the most common (and relatively cheap!) kind on the road for many decades. They're just like the tungsten filament incandescent space heaters we used to use at home, except they burn at a somewhat higher color temperature. (And the way they work is really really neat, but I digress.)

Halogens, while higher-temperature than regular tungsten headlights (which haven't really been used at all in many decades) are generally "yellow"-ish compared to modern HID (aka "xenon" or "metal halide") or LED headlights.

Anyway, I'm also bothered by lights when driving at night, and I find the yellower corner of the spectrum to be the least-bothersome of common lighting colors. The glaring ~6000k white of modern HID and LED is much worse, for me, apparently because of the extra blue spectrum.

But if it really is yellow-ish halogen lights in your side mirrors that bother you most*, then I can't tell you that you're wrong.

And if that is then case, I can potentially offer some constructive advice: I've owned a couple of cars (specifically, a 4th gen Firebird and an E36 BMW -- both products of the middle 1990s) that came from the factory with side mirror glass that was tinted a pale blue.

The slightly-blue tint attenuated yellow halogen lights, by design. It's a clever bit of optical filtering.

During the day, in the sun where there's tons of light, they worked mostly-normally: Reflected images had little bit of blue tinge, but whatever.

And at night, the halogen headlights that were nearly-ubiquitous in the 1990s had their reflected intensity turned down automatically. Compared to cars with mirrors that used clear glass, I could still see the lights of the cars behind me just fine. They were simply less-blinding.

It worked great around the times those cars were produced.

If that's really the problem you're experiencing*, then a very pale blue window tint on the mirrors may be exactly what you want for that issue.

* (I asked for specificity because it's important. That Firebird and E36 both became increasingly-annoying for me to drive at night as HID and LED lights became increasingly-common, and towards the end of my time driving them I was seriously considering having clear glass mirrors cut and swapping over to that. Not because the blue tint wasn't effective at filtering out halogen light (it was great at that!), but because it seemed to magnify the problems I experience with HID and LED headlights. The world was changing, and the unchanged spectral filtering became a burden instead of a boon.)
by trod1234 | 2025-06-18 08:05:24+00:00
Exactly...

Unless there is a physical process preventing an incentivized company to not raise the price in bait and switch manner, it will happen; and the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because they know people are paying attention right now. Once that buzz disappears, then the corruption begins.

The problem also with messing with the food supply, even when it is for profit, it is also a national security issue when people can't get food.

History has a long memory of such things where corrupt profiteering people ended up facing a brass verdict.
by whoisyc | 2025-06-18 08:05:56+00:00
This is why emoji responses on Slack are so useful. You can ask others to affirmatively confirm that they have read a message and they can make the confirmation without clogging up the channel with tons of text messages.

And no “read receipt” as it is usually implemented would not cut it, because it only means “this message showed up on the recipient’s screen once” not that they have actually read it.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-18 08:06:14+00:00
This and the comments highlight how bad many ISPs in North America and Western Europe are at IPv6, still, in 2025, and the lengths to which people will go to treat that as damage and literally route around it.

One of the biggest ISPs in my country has been promising IPv6 since 2016. Another, smaller, competitor, advertised on "World IPv6 Day" in 2011 that it was way ahead of the competition on supplying IPv6; but in fact does not supply it today.

One of the answers I see given a lot over the years is: Yes, I know that I could do this simply with IPv6. But ISPs around here don't route IPv6, or even formally provide statically-assigned IPv4 to non-business customers. So I have had to build this Heath Robinson contraption instead.