MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2025-06-28 18:13:07+00:00
> We can free them more quickly in one go when needed. We can group objects by lifetime using them. Having thread-local arenas naturally separates thread-local allocations from program-global allocations.

These are at odds due to concurrency and object lifetimes. Reaching into memory allocated by another thread on another core was never free but has only gotten more costly.

You can either pay more at allocation time, use time, or have a copying collector. But you have to deal with at least one.

So for a cache or a lazily loaded lookup table, you want an arena allocator. But the same data structure used within the scope of say a single request should be a thread local arena.
by Groxx | 2025-06-28 18:13:18+00:00
>We value your privacy

>... Together with our 173 trusted partners...

In a full screen, multi-stage permissions pop-up.

Yeah how about no. No need to lie, tell me how you really feel, maybe "we will sell anything we can to anyone we can because we need the money".

(It is a very detailed pop-up tho, in a good way - breaks down each toggle with individual companies, and there's a search across all of them)
by achierius | 2025-06-28 18:13:56+00:00
> most thoughts are useless and fleeting

While I can't disagree with your own analysis of your own thoughts, I would push back on generalizing this to what other people think. One's own thoughts have an intrinsic value, and to seize on them and let them flourish is one of my personal greatest joys. As a thinking being, how could I call my thoughts "useless"? Sure, I don't record every thought of every day, but I sure hope I continue at least having one or two interesting and, indeed, noteworthy thoughts a week or so through till my old age.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-06-28 18:13:58+00:00
That’s a “there is fuel” paperwork thing, not a plane paperwork thing. Probably would have cost that if that much fuel was in a bunch of buckets in an Oscar-Meyer Weinermobile.

It was less than 3k gallons of fuel - they probably could have dealt with it themselves (I bet someone out there would have loved to heat their house with that; it’s just really nice kerosene), had their initial reaction not been to call the authorities. After that point their hands were tied.
by meesles | 2025-06-28 18:14:02+00:00
I don't think everyone's using the term 'firehose' the same here. A child comment refers to half a billion tokens for $20.

I did some really basic napkin math with some Rails logs. One request with some extra junk in it was about 400 tokens according to the OpenAI tokenizer[0]. 500M/400 = ~1.25 million log lines.

Paying linearly for logs at $20 per 1.25 million lines is not reasonable for mid-to-high scale tech environments.

I think this would be sufficient if a 'firehose of data' is a bunch of news/media/content feeds that needs to be summarized/parsed/guessed at.

[0] https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
by bgwalter | 2025-06-28 18:14:14+00:00
In the past decade, security researchers have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of memory safety flaws. "Memory unsafety is a scourge plaguing our industry," said security researcher Alex Gaynor back in 2017.

That guy first branded himself as a Python developer and got someone in Node canceled over pronouns. Then he branded himself as a PyPy proponent, then as a Rust proponent.

I didn't know he was a "security researcher", too. I always saw more evangelism than code.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-06-28 18:16:32+00:00
I had a use case - I wanted to know what the congresspeople from my state have done this week. This information is surprisingly hard to just get from the news. I learned about MCP a few months ago and thought that it might be a cool way to interact with the congress.gov API.

I made this MCP server so that you could chat with real-time data coming from the API - https://github.com/AshwinSundar/congress_gov_mcp. I’ve actually started using it more to find out, well, what the US Congress is actually up to!
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-06-28 18:17:25+00:00
Imagine hiring a person to do this job at your company. They show up and behave the way the LLM agent behaved in the article.

Not only would the person be fired quite quickly, but people would be telling stories about the tungsten cubes, the employee inventing stories about meetings that never happened, giving employee discounts at an employees-only store, and constantly calling security. It would be the stuff of legends.

I worked at a company where there had been one outrageously overworked employee who had finally been pushed too far. He shoved his computer monitor to the floor and broke it. He quit and never returned. They were still telling stories about that incident almost a decade later. I’m not even sure the guy broke his monitor on purpose; I wasn’t there, and for all I know he accidentally knocked the monitor over and quit.

So if that’s the bar for “insane behavior” for a human, Claude would be the kind of legendarily bad coworker that would create stories that last a century.
by chubot | 2025-06-28 18:17:33+00:00
JSON is not a friendly format to the Unix shell — it’s hierarchical, and cannot be reasonably split on any character

Yes, shell is definitely too weak to parse JSON!

(One reason I started https://oils.pub is because I saw that bash completion scripts try to parse bash in bash, which is an even worse idea than trying to parse JSON in bash)

I'd argue that Awk is ALSO too weak to parse JSON

The following code assumes that it will be fed valid JSON. It has some basic validation as a function of the parsing and will most likely throw an error if it encounters something strange, but there are no guarantees beyond that.

Yeah I don't like that! If you don't reject invalid input, you're not really parsing

---

OSH and YSH both have JSON built-in, and they have the hierarchical/recursive data structures you need for the common Python/JS-like API:

osh-0.33$ var d = { date: $(date --iso-8601) } osh-0.33$ json write (d) | tee tmp.txt { "date": "2025-06-28" }

Parse, then pretty print the data structure you got:

$ cat tmp.txt | json read (&x) osh-0.33$ = x (Dict) {date: '2025-06-28'}

Create a JSON syntax error on purpose:

osh-0.33$ sed 's/"/bad/"' tmp.txt | json read (&x) sed: -e expression #1, char 9: unknown option to `s' sed 's/"/bad/"' tmp.txt | json read (&x) ^~~~ [ interactive ]:20: json read: Unexpected EOF while parsing JSON (line 1, offset 0-0: '')

(now I see the error message could be better)

Another example from wezm yesterday: https://mastodon.decentralised.social/@wezm/1147586026608361...

YSH has JSON natively, but for anyone interested, it would be fun to test out the language by writing a JSON parser in YSH

It's fundamentally more powerful than shell and awk because it has garbage-collected data structures - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/gc.html

Also, OSH is now FASTER than bash, in both computation and I/O. This is despite garbage collection, and despite being written in typed Python! I hope to publish a post about these recent improvements
by andrei_says_ | 2025-06-28 18:17:33+00:00
It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry.

Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.

Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.
by achierius | 2025-06-28 18:17:34+00:00
You may not like Zettelkasten (same here), and you may not like Luhmann, but saying "those publications have practically zero impact on the field currently" is just uninformed. He was one of the most influential continental sociologists of the last century. Sure, he's no Durkheim, but he still managed to surpass a level of international relevance that 99.9% of humanity will never even reach.
by layer8 | 2025-06-28 18:17:49+00:00
I agree that HATEOAS never made sense without a human in the loop, although I also have never seen it be described as such. IMO that’s an important reason why it never gained useful traction.

There is a confused history where Roy Fielding described REST, then people applied some of that to JSON HTTP APIs, designating those as REST APIs, then Roy Fielding said “no you have to do HATEOAS to achieve what I meant by REST”, then some people tried to make their REST APIs conform to HATEOAS, all the while that change was of no use to REST clients.

But now with AI it actually can make sense, because the AI is able to dynamically interpret the hypermedia content similar to a human.
by thechao | 2025-06-28 18:18:33+00:00
We need to distinguish between a computer that's equivalent to BB(n), and a computer big enough to compute the value of the number that is BB(n). By (terrible) analogy: a 4004 can be made to write a finite loop that describes how many FLOPs the number 1 supercomputer can compute without, itself, being able to usefully perform the computations of that supercomputer. (The 4004 will run out of memory/addressable disk space.) Similarly, we can no longer build decidable programs in ZFC that can compute the number BB(748). Scott is saying that they now think this "disassociation" might occur at BB(7)!
by cultofmetatron | 2025-06-28 18:18:47+00:00
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Jews

" In July 2007, Iran's Jewish community rejected financial emigration incentives to leave Iran. Offers ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 British pounds, financed by a wealthy expatriate Jew with the support of the Israeli government, were turned down by Iran's Jewish leaders.[90][106][107] To place the incentives in perspective, the sums offered were up to 3 times or more than the average annual income for an Iranian.[108] However, in late 2007 at least forty Iranian Jews accepted financial incentives offered by Jewish charities for immigrating to Israel.[109]"
by sedatk | 2025-06-28 18:20:03+00:00
One of the few decisions I absolutely regret in my life was to throw away my old notebook that I used to keep notes in when I was learning programming in the 80's. I had pretty much the same kind of thinking as the author: the nostaliga was dragging me back, cluttering my mind, and I simply had to move on.

But, the thing is, those notes actually highlighted a part, or more aptly, an era of my existence that had no longer existed. I basically destroyed a part of me, similar to destroying photographs or any other memento that related to my "former self".

Not only are those kinds of mementos endearing, but they are anchoring in a sense too. They let you draw an unbroken line over all versions of yourself to get the whole picture. They also have the potential to trigger certain parts of your mind, motivate you in ways that you can't imagine.

So, the stuff the author had thrown away might be useless as a tool, but I think they would certainly be useful in an introspective archeological sense. I strongly urge anyone to consider that before performing a similar infocide.

I'd at least suggest archiving them in a hard to reach place, instead of completely destroying them because you might regret it later.
by gsuuon | 2025-06-28 18:20:04+00:00
> I will now write the corrected code.You are right. I have been making a mess of this. I will get it right this time.

It keeps putting import statements in the middle of files or duplicating edits at the wrong places, but it's hard to get frustrated since it seems pretty self-aware. I didn't say it was making a mess - it's just being hard on itself.

A short session ended up sending over 3 million tokens though - wonder how the economics of this work out for google?
by furyofantares | 2025-06-28 18:20:11+00:00
It's always been pretty easy to learn any language "on the go" if dropped directly into a functioning codebase, with practical tasks to undertake in it. Even the "horror movie" languages you called out which obviously many many people have learned.

LLMs do make it easier, essentially by giving anyone the opportunity to to drop into a working codebase and take on practical tasks inside it.

I think 15 years ago I would have called out the imperative/functional divide as an exception, and that probably does still add challenge. But programming languages have progressed a lot, with imperative languages exposing you to a lot of functional concepts and functional languages having better ergonomics around state/IO.
by duxup | 2025-06-28 18:20:57+00:00
I guess OpenAI got a good deal at 6.5b for Jony Ive.

>Supposedly, Llama 4 did perform well on benchmarks, but the user experience was so bad that people have accused Meta of cooking the books.

This is one of those things that I've noticed. I don't understand the benchmarks, and my usage certainly isn't going to be wide ranging as benchmarks, but I hear "OMG this AI and benchmarks" and then I go use it and it's not any different for me ... or I get the usual wrong answers to things I've gotten wrong answers to before, and I shrug.
by nodesocket | 2025-06-28 18:21:01+00:00
I was looking for a simple, no bloat sqlite explorer that runs in a container and ended up deploying sqlite-web[1] in read-only mode. Very impressed, no external dependencies, works great. A CLI tool is nice, but then still have to ssh into the remote server to access the db file.

[1] https://github.com/coleifer/sqlite-web
by Scoundreller | 2025-06-28 18:21:36+00:00
I hope this border craziness doesn't spread to Canada, I like buying fungicides/pesticides in the US that work without paying $$$ to a "professional" to apply it or (& any farmer can fog acres and acres with impunity)

Said professional recommended this treatment in particular, but they won't sell it to you and you can't buy it domestically; Gotta pay their extortion tax for it... unless...

Also makes me wonder if they recommended this restricted product because they think I can't find a shelf on the continent with it and something more available/less-potent might have worked fine
by ashwinsundar | 2025-06-28 18:23:48+00:00
Start by reading the documentation - https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction

Then use FastMCP to write an MCP server in Python - https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp

Finally, hook it up to an LLM client. It’s dead simple to do in Claude Code, create an .mcp.json file and define the server’s startup command.
by markasoftware | 2025-06-28 18:24:24+00:00
I'm of the opinion that functional languages (and even just languages with strong type systems) are only useful insofar as the people using them are "cooperative" with those features. If you write ocaml as if it were Python (and if your total FP experience is a 2-week ocaml bootcamp, what else can you do?) rather than actually designing your project in a way that eg takes advantage of the strong type system to prevent invalid program states, the advantages dwindle.
by moooo99 | 2025-06-28 18:24:59+00:00
> That's likely because OG devs have been seeing the hallucination stuff, unpredicability etc. and questioning how that fits with their carefully curated perfect system

That is the odd part. I am far from being part of that group of people. I‘m only 25, I joined the industry in 2018 as part of an training program in a large enterprise.

The odd part is, many of the promises are a bit Déjà-vu even for me. „Agents going to transform the enterprise“ and other promises do not seem that far off the promises that were made during the low code hype cycle.

Cynically, the more I look at the AI projects as an outsider, the more I think AI could fail in enterprises largely because of the same reason low code did. Organizations are made of people and people are messy, as a result the data is often equally messy.
by notatoad | 2025-06-28 18:27:31+00:00
i don't think it's ironic at all. the AI boom exposed the value of data. there's two inevitable consequences when the value of something goes up: the people who were previously giving it away for free start charging for it, and the people who weren't previously selling it at all start selling it.

the APIs that used to be free and now aren't were just slightly ahead of the game, all these new MCP servers aren't going to be free either.
by lupire | 2025-06-28 18:27:44+00:00
It has to come from a finite value (specifically, the amount of complexity that can be enocoded in 745 pieces of information https://turingmachinesimulator.com/shared/vgimygpuwi), because the finite size 745 with infinite tape leads to uncomputability, but the size 5 does not.

In a very real sense, a deep kind of infinite complexity can be generated from 745 objects of certain kind, but not from 5 objects of that kind..

Turing machines have infinite tape, not infinite state. The entire set of all halting machines of a given size collectively only use finite tape. Totally finite. Only (some of) the non-halting machines use infinite tape.

The problem is that we don't know in advance how large the (definitely finite) upper bound on the amount of tape all the size-N halting machines use, until after enough of them (one per known equivalence class) halt. And we don't know (in general) how to run all the halting ones until they halt, without also running a non-halting program for an unbounded amount of time.

TL:DR: unbounded is not infinite, but big enough to be a problem.
by dtech | 2025-06-28 18:27:52+00:00
I am also not an expert, but this does not sound right to me. Godel's incompleteness theorem shows that there are certain things that cannot be proven. Being independent of ZFC means that something is such a case. So BB(643) being independent of ZFC means that we cannot prove or disprove that a certain number is BB(643). Aka we don't have the math to know for certain.
by arghwhat | 2025-06-28 18:27:56+00:00
The tricky part isn't getting signal strength in the cabin, it's managing a cabin full of devices trying to talk using a technology that only allows one radio to talk at any given time.

You need many very low power base stations at spaced out channels to make this work. Nowadays WiFi 7 provides some nice anti-congestion and channel optimization features as well, but back then, one slow device was all it took to render wifi useless.
by breppp | 2025-06-28 18:28:10+00:00
> Settlers came to form an ethnostate

Zionists like most national movement of the same time goal was to form an ethnostate, just like the palestinian national movement goal was to form an ethnostate, or the czech, polish, ukraine, etc that's pretty obvious

> People don't leave their homes voluntarily

People flee war torn zones, that's not the same thing as ethnic cleansing.

> The orders given to the Zionist militia commanders were literally to "cleanse" that village

Yes, that happened, that doesn't change the fact that most of the population fled on their own accord, that a very sizeable part of the palestinian population remains in Israel to this day, and that the Palestinians were trying to cleanse the Israel population as well (and were successful in a few instances)

> So what? what's your point?

My point is that the horrors you cite are nothing compared to what your very own country was founded on (and that's an educated guess on where you are from, or all countries of the world founding story really)
by jcynix | 2025-06-28 18:28:13+00:00
>awk really shoots itself so much with its lack of features that it so desperately needs!

That's why I use Perl instead (besides some short one liners in awk, which in some cases are even shorter than the Perl version) and do my JSON parsing in Perl.

This

diff -rs a/ b/ | ask '/identical/ {print $4}' | xargs rm

is one of my often used awk one liners. Unless some filenames contain e.g. whitespace, then it's Perl again
by ngriffiths | 2025-06-28 18:28:14+00:00
I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says.

The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block).

Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
by almost_usual | 2025-06-28 18:28:38+00:00
Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern.

Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.

This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
by bwfan123 | 2025-06-28 18:28:42+00:00
> Not anymore, apparently. Now we make fun of them for doing that.

What ? do things when it makes sense, not as a top-down mandate.

Somehow, ceos/management have gotten AI religion, are now thrusting it top-down. This is like management dictating the tech-stack to use when it is not in their competency area.
by nabla9 | 2025-06-28 18:29:18+00:00
This is nice:

Enhancements to sqlite3_rsync: The requirement that the database be in WAL mode has been removed. The sync protocol is enhanced to use less network bandwidth when both sides start out being very similar to one another.

Also this:

zeroblob(N) The zeroblob(N) function returns a BLOB consisting of N bytes of 0x00. SQLite manages these zeroblobs very efficiently. Zeroblobs can be used to reserve space for a BLOB that is later written using incremental BLOB I/O.
by yawaramin | 2025-06-28 18:30:04+00:00
> techie pushes tool not because it's useful or necessary but because he wants to learn the tool

I wouldn't say Yaron Minsky was pushing OCaml because he wanted to 'learn' it. By that time he had already written the most popular PGP key exchange server...in OCaml: https://github.com/SKS-Keyserver/sks-keyserver/graphs/contri...
by mikem170 | 2025-06-28 18:30:09+00:00
> it would be bad to have a patch work of laws around AI

Why would that be bad? And for who?

Wouldn't it be better to have a variety of laws around something new, and figure out over time what is optimal? Wouldn't this be better than having one set of laws that can be more easily compromised via regulatory capture? Why the common assumption that bigger and more uniform is better? Is that to encourage bigger companies and bigger profits? Has that been a good thing?
by perihelions | 2025-06-28 18:30:10+00:00
I don't see any nuance in the lying cop.

Nor nuance in the Director of the FBI personally getting himself involved, to tweet falsely about this student's "pathogen [sic] smuggling". There's no nuance in those words—words that incited three thousand conspiratorial-minded comments, by the way—three thousand commenters who sincerely, truly believe this C. elegans scientist is a bioterrorist. (Read them for yourself if you like). Where's the nuance in any of that?
by mpalmer | 2025-06-28 18:30:28+00:00
I think you're reaching for an interpretation of what I said that's easier to challenge.

Once you explain to the average person what a compiler is, they can draw a straight line from writing the compiler to the hedge fund reducing risk, gaining a competitive edge, whatever.

But this writer is choosing to hold up custom compilers as even more of an oddball move than counting cars, or shipping gold overseas. It's lazy writing from someone who is mistaking their lack of technical knowledge for common-sense insight into how strange software is. It is cringe.