MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thomasmg | 2025-06-11 14:36:36+00:00
> using it like gperf is certainly not a special case.

Well... let's put it like this: in this survey, "parsers" (where I am one of the co-authors) are not mentioned explicitly in the "Applications" section. They are a subset of "Hash Tables and Retrieval". There are many other uses: Approximate Membership, Databases, Bioinformatics, Text Indexing, Natural Language Processing. Yes, parsers are mentioned in "The Birth of Perfect Hashing". Maybe we can conclude that parsers are not the "main" use case nowadays.

> when you compile those data structures, the load time is instant.

Well, in this case I would recommend to use a static lookup table in the form of source code. That way, it is available for the compiler at compile time, and doesn't need to be loaded and parsed at runtime: it is available as a data structure at runtime. All modern MPHF implementations in this survey support this usage. But, yes, they are not optimized for this use case: you typically don't have millions of keywords in a programming language.
by II2II | 2025-06-11 14:37:04+00:00
One thing that is rarely mentioned, but usually practiced: Unix tools rarely modify its own state. The only way to modify the behaviour of a program is to pass parameters, set an environment variable, or modify a configuration file. This lends a great degree of predictability to how programs will behave. If you pipe something into grep, sed, awk, etc. you know how it will behave. It sounds like the article's author is not just ignoring that aspect of the Unix philosophy, but contradicting it.

I'm not exactly sure what the author is arguing for. Perhaps they have a vision, and perhaps it is a vision that has utility. That said, I do not see how their words fit into a modernized version of the Unix philosophy.
by aisenik | 2025-06-11 14:37:55+00:00
"Blue lives" flags are intensely fascist, unpatriotic symbology and an explicit desecration of the American flag, that might be a good place to start your research.

State-sanctioned organized crime by white supremacist terrorists, that's the connection with Republicans. They pardoned the insurrectionists that violently captured the capital building and pay off murderers whose crimes achieve their political goals. It's mostly happening out in the open, brazenly. We're not rational machines, we're easily manipulated and it takes less energy to settle into beliefs others want us to have. "Flood the zone" works but reality is still happening.
by toast0 | 2025-06-11 14:38:05+00:00
Microsoft was burning devs on each major release, and that was a big issue. But IMHO, windows mobile 10 was a disasterous release and that doomed it.

WP7 and WP8 weren't amazing (although three of us liked it), but they offered tremendous value on the low end. You could get a $100 WP8 phone that was more responsive than a $250 Android phone. Microsoft was telling people that most WP8 devices would be upgradable to WM10, then they removed low memory devices from the list, then they released WM10 in such a state that upgrading anything was a bad idea.

In particular, (trident) Edge was so awful, it was almost unusable. Mobile IE had a terrible rendering engine, but at least the UI was responsive. Edge queued inputs, so when a page was busy loading, it wouldn't respond to the back or stop buttons or navigating to a new page until the page finished loading... Not sure what the stop button is there for when it waits to stop until after everything is done.

When you are driving developers away by launching a different development model every release, users are going to be driven to the browser, and if it sucks too, what are they going to do?

WM10 had Continuum for high end phones which is neat, but it neglected the low end market where WP7 and WP8 shone.

It wasn't until the final build of WM10 that they got performance to be good on my test phone. (Edge still sucked) But that was way too late. They needed to have WM10 come out of the gate as good or better than WP8. AFAIK, WM10 never got bigger installed base numbers compared to WP8 even though many WP8 devices were upgradable to WM10.

Perhaps moving phones into the overall Windows org wasn't the right choice for the product. Almost certainly eliminating dedicated Test engineers reduced the quality of the product.

In an alternate reality where Microsoft provided a usable WM10 base install, tested and fixed WP8 -> WM10 upgrades before release so apps didn't fail on upgrade, had an option of a reasonable browser (letting android or chrome into the store or at least offering the old mobile ie), things would have been a lot better. If Intel hadn't pulled the plug on Atom for phones days before the Continuum demo, it might have been buy a high end x86 Windows Phone and run win32 apps on it when you're at your desk... Maybe WM10 would have still failed, but it would have put up a good fight.
by therealmarv | 2025-06-11 14:38:08+00:00
Very interesting. And this is an amazing graph for small file uploading/download speed improvement. I have the feeling that all cloud drives are really not optimised for many small files like smaller than 1Mbytes in average.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peak/s5cmd/master/doc/benc...

I've implemented at work once a rudimentary parallel uploading of many small files to S3 in Python and with boto3 (was not allowed to use a third party library or tool at that time) because it's soooo slow to upload many small files to S3. It really takes ages and even if you just upload 8 small files in parallel it makes a huge difference.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-06-11 14:38:50+00:00
You're thinking ads are to advertise products. Ads are to modify behavior to make you more likely to buy products.

ChatGPT has the capacity to modify behavior more subtly than any advertising ever devised. Aggregating knowledge on the person on the other end of the line is key in knowing how to nudge them toward the target behavior. (Note this target behavior may be how to vote in an election, or how to feel about various hot topics.)
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-11 14:39:19+00:00
There is some sense to this: It's a stealth tax increase done for budgetary reasons.

Since we tried to go to a pay-as-you-go model on bills the tax code has turned into an absolute shambles as the congresscritters look at how to tweak things to "produce" (look at the IRA withdrawals--it produced nothing, just moved some money forward one year while creating a trap that many have fallen into) the desired revenue to cover whatever the bill costs without "increasing taxes."
by biophysboy | 2025-06-11 14:39:21+00:00
This is cool. Having used similar apps (e.g. wanderlog), one thing they lack that I would LOVE is timetable filtering. When I travel, I find that I'm either in logistics mode or fun mode. Here's the idea:

In logistics mode, I want a detailed, precise timetable focused on transportation and lodging. I don't even want to see my fun ideas.

In fun mode, I want a relaxed set of suggestions based on my current location, and a single timestamp telling me when I need to go back into logistics mode.

Does that make sense? Its almost like I want two travel agents: a didactic drill sargeant to get me from A to B, and a chill surfer bum that helps me go with the flow.
by Lu2025 | 2025-06-11 14:39:32+00:00
>I refused to install native versions of apps that could be used in a browser.

Same. After AT&T force obsolesced my perfectly working phone back in February 2022 (it had the bands but they simply didn't want to support it!) I kept it as a dedicated app phone. No web browsing, no stored credentials or cookies, just an app sandbox. Sending a ray of diarrhea to companies who force us to use apps instead of web. I'm looking at you, Chipotle.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-06-11 14:39:49+00:00
The person who is able to articulately and coherently able to prompt the AI, backed by a broad spectrum of knowledge of their field will easily get more out of the AI than the people who do not. An advanced education is therefore _more_ crucial in a hypothetical age of AI rather than less.

If you can get such an education out of your AI, good for you, but most will benefit from a designed program of instruction.
by rtkwe | 2025-06-11 14:39:59+00:00
That's what I got out of isodev's comment too. The data is accessible by US companies still. If it comes down to being able to sell services and phones to the US market or giving up your data to a warrant I don't think Apple would stand on principal and lose US market access. [0]

[0] To clarify preemptively I mean if it came down to that in the end. I think Apple would attempt to fight it but if they lost in the Supreme Court and had to make the choice I think privacy would lose that fight.
by crazygringo | 2025-06-11 14:40:53+00:00
Can you elaborate?

Because even with hygiene products, people buy them before they need them and stock up. And with food, you're often shopping for a week and for the whole family. You put things on a shopping list and don't buy them the same day you're using them, or even the same week.

I suspect that even if the manager thought they could determine it, their actual "results" were entirely random. After all, how is he going to check? Call two hundred of the women and ask? Also, periods are irregular. They're not a perfect 28 days each time. They vary month to month.

I don't doubt the manager thought he was doing that. I doubt it actually worked at all, though.
by vdupras | 2025-06-11 14:41:10+00:00
> Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth

You might already know it, but Dusk OS[1], which is a Forth, has a Lisp implementation[2] which includes a native code compiler for i386, amd64, arm, risc-v and m68k. You might consider it a good starting point for your project.

[1]: http://duskos.org/

[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/co...
by demosthanos | 2025-06-11 14:42:18+00:00
> Its actually a big change, as swiping up just opens the Google Maps bottom menu.

On my phone there are two swipe zones at the bottom. The one that's actually on the screen opens the Google Maps menu. But if I swipe from off screen up it works as I described. Maybe your phone doesn't have enough surface area below the screen to distinguish the two?
by karaterobot | 2025-06-11 14:42:33+00:00
I agree they'd love to do that in theory, and it seems technically feasible. What gives me hope on that front is that marketers and advertisers (let alone the companies that pay them) have never shown the slightest capacity for that level of subtlety. The most sophisticated adtech today, produced by networks of massive data collection and analysis, ultimately just tries to shove as many loud, disruptive ads in your face as possible.

I think if you had this incredible technology that could manipulate language to nudge readers in the softest possible way toward thinking a little bit more about buying some product, so that in aggregate you'd increase sales in a measurable way that nobody would ever notice, it would just quickly just devolve into companies demanding the phrase "BUY MORE REYNOLDS GARBAGE BAGS!!!!!!!!" at least 7 times.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-11 14:43:01+00:00
There was a pretty insane comment in this genre a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43951164

> If Google [had been] broken up 20 years ago [...] [e]veryone would still be paying for email.

Some people don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about. But I don't really see that as suggesting they're part of an organized campaign.
by blueflow | 2025-06-11 14:43:57+00:00
The interpolation is not the security problem, the problem is the user not quoting their data.

It's similar to curl CWE-93[1], where it was documented and in-use behavior and consequently was rejected as a security problem.

Example for ssh:

ssh host ls "$(quote "$dir")"

[1] https://hackerone.com/reports/3133379
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-11 14:44:35+00:00
This example falls apart because libraries are paid for by taxes.

I wish I could violently shake every internet user while yelling "If you are not paying money for it, you cannot complain about it"

The librarian is selling you a vuvuzela because that is the only way the library has been able to keep the lights on. They offered a membership but people flipped out "Libraries are free! I never had to pay in the past! How dare you try and take my money for a free service!". They tried a "Please understand the service we provide and give a donation" but less than 2% of people donated anything. Never mind that there is a backdoor that you can use, allowing you to never need to interact with a librarian while fully utilizing the libraries services (that the library still pays for).

The internet was ruined by people unwilling to pay for it. And yes, I know the internet was perfect in 1996, I have a pair of rose colored glasses too.
by skrebbel | 2025-06-11 14:45:27+00:00
Yeah indeed. Though I can appreciate the screwup. I mean, there was a heated thing going on, lawyers on one side and bad community PR on the other and NPM was caught in the middle. Couldnt backtrack on their maybe not so smart choice to give the "kik" package to Kik Messenger, and maybe hadn't thought through the consequences of encouraging the author to just delete all their packages. I disagree that that means they're "kids in suits" like some comments here suggest. It can just as well be an honest mistake made under pressure. People make mistakes sometimes! There's plenty precedence of mistakes by the NPM team but they also got a whole lot of stuff right!

But I do agree now that the author isn't really to blame.
by california-og | 2025-06-11 14:45:40+00:00
My wish is for a fast SVG renderer in the browser. At the moment, basic vector drawing is fast, but almost any use of filters or effects lags the browser. Theres a lot that SVG could do for (web) UI, but won't because it's so slow. Here's a small thought experiment I made a while ago for using SVG for more unconventional webdesign. Sadly it lags a lot.

https://hlnet.neocities.org/grid-drawings/grid-drawing
by deanmoriarty | 2025-06-11 14:45:46+00:00
> as long as people like you maintain such a callous attitude about those who came before them.

I think you might be barking up the wrong tree here since I just rent a very modest apartment here and I’m not going to ever buy a property, nor vote against any housing shortage policies. My suggestion was purely practical.

But what would you expect exactly? The Bay Area has a massive marketing machine that screams to the world: “come here, make big bucks quickly and easily!”, which is true. Do you expect people not to take that bargain? People will always be looking to improve their situation, I came from the other side of the world just like many others.

It should be up to the government to either limit the inflow of people (via immigration control or other means), massively increase housing inventory or any other solution (I’m not an economist so I don’t know what’s the right one).

The condo you listed just sold for less than its last 2019 sale value when accounting for the massive inflation rate of these past 5 years. Thinking that it was a bubble-driven price is really not the right attitude, in my opinion. It’s how much it’s worth, and the market confirmed it.
by vidarh | 2025-06-11 14:46:00+00:00
That sounds at least partly like a prompting issue to me. I have no problem getting scathing critiques out of either, by defining the role I want them to take clearly.

Here's part of an initial criticism Claude made of your comment (it also said nice things):

"However, the prose suffers from structural inconsistencies. The opening sentence contains an awkward parenthetical insertion that disrupts flow, and the second sentence uses unclear pronoun reference with "This" and "they." The rhythm varies unpredictably between crisp, direct statements and meandering explanations.

"The vocabulary choices are generally precise—"sycophants" is particularly apt and memorable—though some phrases like "get the concept down; don't think too hard" feel slightly clunky in their construction."

This was the prompt I used:

"Imagine you're a literary critic. Critique the following comment based on use of language and effectiveness of communication only. Don't critique the argument itself:" followed by your comment.

"Image you're a ..." or "Act as a ..." tends to make a huge difference in the kind of output you get. If you put it in the role of a critic that people expect to be tough, you're less likely to get sycophantic responses, at least in my experience.

(If you want to see it get brutal, follow up the first response with a "be harsher" - it got unpleasantly savage)
by vel0city | 2025-06-11 14:46:07+00:00
Then let me clarify, I was intending to talk mostly about illegal immigration and asylum seekers, the kinds of immigrants person I was replying to was probably mostly talking about. These are the immigrants people seem most concerned about, as they typically have a higher rate of relying on social services and welfare at least in the short term. It is these kinds of immigrants which impose the largest initial cost on society to allow in.

But sure, somewhere around 4-5 million illegal/undocumented immigrants, add another 10 million or so non-immigrant visas (which I agree, tend to have people end up staying for lots of other reasons), we're still somewhere around 15 million or so migrants with most of those having some kind of stable job lined up before they arrive. It's still less than 5% of the overall population increase with these migrants, but now a lot of these in this addition are largely economically self-sufficient from the get-go (those with work visas). You're not really changing my point at all.

In the end we're just too poor to deal with a generally pretty minor increase in population over several years while simultaneously seemingly being the wealthiest nation on the planet? How does that make sense?

Also, your claim of:

> usa issued 10 million non-immigrant visas in 2024. not counting 5 million tourist visas

is factually incorrect. The US issued around 11.5 million non-immigrant visas, of which 8.5 million were visitor visas. So not a total of 15 million visas and excluding the tourism its really about 3 million non-immigrant not-tourist visas.

> in 2024, in Fiscal Year 2024, we issued 11.5 million visas, and that’s a world record for us, breaking all previous records. Of these 8.5 million were visitor visas.

https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-s...
by fabrice_d | 2025-06-11 14:46:31+00:00
I think you are wrong on both points: - low end devices were the only ones we could start from to get official support from chipset vendors and other partners (because they segment their market). And you need that to get eg. performance fixes in their graphics drivers. On the exact same devices performance was on par with Android overall. - I don't understand how "Rust UI" would have helped with anything, since the whole UI (including the system UI) was web based. Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.
by e1g | 2025-06-11 14:46:33+00:00
FYI, you can add browser support by using noble-hashes[1] for SHA256/HMAC - it's a well-done library, and gives you performance that is indistinguishable from native crypto on any scale relevant to S3 operations. We use it for our in-house S3 client.

[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/noble-hashes
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-11 14:46:55+00:00
Yeah, there are systems. The problem is they are only as good as how we establish identity. And so long as identity theft is a widespread problem it's not going to work. Back in the 80s my mother was the victim of what I presume was this. The IRS was determined that she should either pay the taxes "owed" or get "her employer" to amend the W-2. What employer? She hadn't worked for *anybody* and couldn't find the supposed employer.

In hindsight I suspect the answer was to file that form to amend the W-2, but this was before the internet so it would have been much harder to get answers.
by LtWorf | 2025-06-11 14:48:08+00:00
In sweden you have to unpack and re-pack at the checkout. And if you have a backpack you can't place stuff inside it. No. You have to unpack, place everything on a scale and then place everything in your backpack again.

And for items like bread or so you need to navigate a number of menus to find it.

And of course you are asked if you are a member, if you'd like to become a member, if you want to do a donation, and a number of other useless questions.
by netrap | 2025-06-11 14:49:20+00:00
Electronics. Especially the concept of ADC/DACs. Connecting Analog to Digital in to an FPGA, etc. I read a document about PLLs and I barely understand the block diagrams, the math I can't even begin to understand the symbols. I'll start learning from a book, but get to a certain point, then a few days go by, then many days -- by then I feel like I have to restart from the beginning.
by robomartin | 2025-06-11 14:50:23+00:00
I understand your position. There is nothing I can say that will change it. Only time and life experience will, maybe.

Not here to yell at you or anyone. Having lived in multiple cultures and countries across the world, I bring to the table a perspective that most Americans simply do not have. I have no clue if you are American, BTW. I have had the experience of being in fear for my life while detained by military thugs as a teenager. I have seen and lived the pain and misery leftist ideologies bring to populations first hand.

Any immigrant who has actually lived these realities cannot comprehend how it is that the US does not simply laugh these people off the stage. And, to be sure, the extreme right is just as destructive, yet that is not a reality in the US at all (despite the media pushing that narrative into people's brains day after day).

So, like I said, nothing I can say to you or anyone else, that much is obvious. There are things you learn about society and ideology that can only be learned from experience. Maybe the US needs to live through a leftist utopia for a period of time for everyone to come out smarter. That would be tragic, of course, but it might also be necessary. If California does not scare the shit out of the rest of the nation I don't know what will.

Have a good one.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-11 14:50:32+00:00
Some of it is the rapid progress in fundamental research.

If in Q2 2025 a company like AAPL or AMZN decides to invest in a current top of the line neural network model and spend 18 months to develop a product, whatever they develop might be obsolete when it is released. Holds for OpenAI or any incumbent -- first mover advantage may be neutralized.

Secondly there are a lot of problems in ambient computing. Back in the early 00's I often talked with an HCI expert about ideas like "your phone (pre-iPhone) could know it is in your backpack" or "a camera captures an image of your whole room reflected in a mirror and 'knows what is going on'" and she would usually point out missing context that would make something more like a corporation that gives bad customer service than a loyal butler. Some of Alexa's problems are fundamental to what it is trying to do and won't improve with better models, some of why AMZN gave up on Alexa at one point.