MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisislife2 | 2025-06-03 12:20:00+00:00
I agree with you that it certainly hurts the strategic wings (one of the 3 components of the nuclear triad) of the Russian military. But does it change the war in favour of the Ukrainians in any meaningful way? The answer is no because Russian airpower still outguns Ukrainians airpower. Russia still has enough tactical bombers, strategic bombers, fighter jets and drones to launch lethal attacks that Ukraine cannot completely thwart (because of the lack of air defence and its crippled airforce). It also hasn't distracted the Russian military to slow down their offensive.

And the Ukrainians still don't have the ability (or are apprehensive) to launch a meaningful counter offensive, while the Russians keep advancing slowly.

As for the bombers being "irreplaceable" that's the western media fudging with the facts - yes, Russia is no longer manufacturing these particular old but operational strategic bombers any more and hence they cannot be replaced. But Russia has been able to revive production of the TU-160 (and its variants TU-160M, TU-160M2 - the largest operational bomber in the world) and has started manufacturing these new / revised supersonic strategic bombers since 2022 (Full production of Russia's Tu-160 bomber restarted after 30 years - https://newatlas.com/military/russias-tu-160-bomber-restarts... ). It has also developed prototypes of a new stealth bomber, the PAK-DA. So it is ignorant and incorrect to say that Russia doesn't have an industrial base any more to manufacture such kind of bombers. (I will however concede that sanctions are definitely interfering with Russians progress in this domain, and hindering fast production and research effort).
by rwmj | 2025-06-03 12:20:09+00:00
I highly doubt it's useful these days on general purpose computers, where even the very smallest ones can easily implement C (or better) or even run a whole operating system like Zephyr or Yocto.

However if you're creating your own computer from scratch or have other artificial constraints (like it needs to fit into a boot sector[1]), and if you want to really understand precisely how your language works down to the lowest level detail while still having high-ish level constructs, then Forth is the ideal small language for that.

[1] https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth
by jajko | 2025-06-03 12:20:15+00:00
Hard capitalism doesn't care about long term perspectives, the only yard stick is current performance and stock maximization. Otherwise US would a bastion of stellar public education for example, the investment in long term future of whole nation instead of few richest ones sending their kids to private schools, to stay above the rest.

So while I fully agree with you, this is not a concern for a single decision maker in private company world. And state such as US doesn't pick up this work instead, quietly agreeing with this situation.

Well, think for a second who makes similar budget and long term spending focus. Rich lawyers who chose to become much more rich politicians, rarely somebody else and almost never any more moral profession.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-06-03 12:20:41+00:00
People may not know it but at some point in the nineties you'd enter a bookstore and 95%+ of all the books and magazines were typeset using QuarkXPress.

Then Adobe's InDesign showed up in 1999 and things began to change.

FWIW I both wrote and typeset books myself (for a traditional publisher): I did most of them using QuarkXPress but I managed to sneak one I made with LaTeX (it was a hard sell to the publisher / printing press guys who were only ever using QuarkXPress). Also I was forced to heavily modify LaTeX templates to match exactly the one the publisher was using with QuarkXPress.

So yup when I read "Quarkdown is a modern Markdown-based typetting system" the first thing I think about is QuarkXPress: great memories of MacOS (8? then 9?, pre OS X for sure) and my Sony Trinitron monitor.
by wltr | 2025-06-03 12:20:48+00:00
Am I? I was born under Russian occupation, before my parents migrated. I know all this very well, and much better than I’d want to. As much as I can fluently understand and speak Russian. As much as I can blend in, even despite the fact I haven’t been there for a very long time. Their culture didn’t change much for generations.

Everyone else reading this nonsense, go read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, where he writes exactly that very time frame. You’d learn a lot of new things about the USSR and its attitude towards minorities.
by kragen | 2025-06-03 12:21:08+00:00
Acid-free paper has a lot to recommend it: an archival lifespan of about 1000 years, low cost, and widespread equipment for printing it en masse very cheaply. Other media are superior in one or another way, but all are far more expensive.

It's probably worth mentioning https://github.com/za3k/qr-backup/ which is tested in practice rather than merely theoretical. It doesn't achieve very high density, though.

The theoretical information capacity of an uncoated 600dpi laser-printed page ought to be close to 600×600 bits per square inch, 23.6×23.6 bits per square millimeter in modern units. This is 33.7 megabits per US letter page or 34.8 megabits per A4 page. The bit error rate of a laser printer is quite low, under 1%, and the margins are maybe another 5% at most. So modest ECC ought to be able to deliver most of that channel capacity in practice. QR codes and OCR apparently don't come close.

As an exercise, 13 years ago, I designed a proportional 1-bit-deep pixel font for printable ASCII, based on Janne Kujala's work, that averages about 3½×6 pixels. This is about 20 bits per character, so a letter-sized page should hold almost a megabyte of human-readable ASCII text. I generated the King James Bible in it at 600dpi. It comes to about four pages. Printed out in a half-assed way at double size (300dpi) on a 600dpi printer, you can read it pretty easily with a good magnifying glass. I have not yet been able to get an even partly readable printout at full resolution. If someone else tries it, I'm interested in hearing your results.

http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns.png (warning, 93+-megapixel image, 4866×19254)

http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns-320x200.png (small excerpt from the above)

http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/6-pixel-1... (the font as a 374×7 image)

http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/propfontr... (the image generation program I regret having written in Python because it won't run in current Python)

http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bible-pg1... (test input text, public domain everywhere except the UK)
by Curll | 2025-06-03 12:21:29+00:00
Preview and feedback: https://tally.so/r/3qMlPd

Essentially, a lab admin and a researcher affected by the Federal funding cuts teamed up with an entrepreneur neighbor and we created BioShift as a way to help laid off lab workers keep earning money, keep skills fresh, and prevent brain drain. For labs facing funding cuts, it helps reduce on-boarding costs and keeps science happening.

MVP is built out, we're going to try to get a few more pilot labs, get scientists signed up, and launch a public pre-alpha/alpha later on in the summer.

So, yeah, give us your feedback and let's keep our labs running! Thanks!
by os2warpman | 2025-06-03 12:21:37+00:00
> with instant boot from ROM

This was a mistake. It slowed upgrades. The several second's worth of speed increase was irrelevant when to upgrade an Amiga you had to ship out 2x 40-pin DIPs and floppy disks as opposed to just floppies.

And due to incompatibilities it was common to install a ROM switcher in your system, especially in Amigaland when kickstart 2.0 came out and you wanted to keep 1.3 so your games would still run. So you had to buy and install a switcher like a MultiStart AND buy and install new ROMs and manage two sets of floppies. This led to a schism in the market where normal people were stuck with an A500 running 1.2/1.3 and its 1980s featureset and power users who wanted space-age luxuries like IDE hard drives were running 2.0.

Practically every word uttered or printed by Commodore about compatibility between the two was an outright lie.

Microsoft had an obsessive focus on backwards compatibility so MS-DOS 5.0 was adopted by practically everybody: just insert the disk, switch to a:, type "install". Done. There were compatibility issues, but they were on a scale that was irrelevant compared to the Kickstart disaster.

Could you imagine in 1992 having a PC and having to install a PCB in the BIOS sockets so you could have both versions 3.02.111 and 4.84.1932 of your BIOS and keep DOS 3.3 and 5.0 boot disks on hand so that you could run Commander Keen and use the newest version of WordPerfect?

I did all of that on the non-PC side of the house, and many others did too. I had (and still have) an A2000 with hard card, flicker fixer, accelerator, ram expansion, rom switcher, and other upgrades. I spent thousands of hours tinkering and having fun with the system.

Tinkerers don't make for successful ecosystems.

Fun, yes.

Sustainable, no.
by 4ad | 2025-06-03 12:22:14+00:00
Comparison with TLA+ doesn't make any sense as TLA+ implements a very different sort of logic, but the property that it is a real programming language is shared by virtually everything in this space.

Lean/Adga are real programming languages, while Coq (Rocq), F*, ATS, Isabelle/HOL all extract to various other programming languages.

Frankly, it's TLA+ that is the odd one here.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-06-03 12:23:09+00:00
> Have you considered that quality tends to cost the same everywhere as it is fairly rare? It’s not commoditised.

That's not really the case though. You can get access to very highly educated, talented folks in India for cheaper than you can get access to similar resources elsewhere because labour markets aren't equal and cost-of-living differences are a factor.

> The problem is crap people are cheaper in India than crap people elsewhere. And that looks good on the balance sheet.

True, I'm not arguing that India isn't cheaper, and it is true that if you want to hire crap people, you might as well hire cheap crap people compared to expensive crap people.

I don't want to put the cart before the horse though: you're assuming that a company outsourcing to India prioritises cost over quality, which simply isn't true.
by libertine | 2025-06-03 12:23:46+00:00
Didn't the current president of the US say that his 2016 election was stolen and triggered an insurrection, and then proceed to pardon those who attacked democratic institutions? Isn't he now seeking to dismantle all the checks and balances, all while doing crypto dumps, enabling him to receive money from undisclosed sources?

This is your democratic reference?

> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council.

What's with the cult of personality? Why do you need someone worth talking about? For example, everyone talks about Trump for all the wrong reasons, does that mean that's worth it?

It just sounds like you don't know much about the EU.
by foobar10000 | 2025-06-03 12:24:06+00:00
It used to be the library one wrote to solve them at once - the solution being isomorphic that is, not the problems. I.e. given problems a b c d, f(a) solves a, g(b) solves b, … j(d) solves d - turns out if you can write a common function F instead of f g h j separately, then clearly F is isomorphic to f g h j under our constraints.

I guess in this case the morphism is the similar or same prompt to generate f g h j.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-03 12:24:17+00:00
It's always been this way. Here's an article from 2017 complaining about "secret law making taking over Brussels":

https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630

Jean-Claude Junker, despite his flaws, was one of the most honest heads of the EU Commission. He had this to say on the matter of secret lawmaking in 2011:

"I'm ready to be insulted as insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious. I am for secret, dark debates."

... and in 2007 ...

"Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"

Other EU leaders said similar things at the time (in the context of the Lisbon Treaty):

“Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly” … “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.” (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing)

“They decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception… Should you succeed in understanding it at first sight there might be some reason for a referendum, because it would mean that there is something new.” (Giuliano Amato)
by rxtexit | 2025-06-03 12:24:52+00:00
IMO this is exactly the wrong mental model.

You can't hammer a nail a 1000 times and pick the best hammered nail.

You can have the hammer iterating over the structure 24/7, finding imperfections in previous hammered nails.

This is imposing arbitrary constraints on the model and that when you give a human just a hammer, they tend to start to view everything like a nail.
by Tycho | 2025-06-03 12:25:58+00:00
I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in the reference text — without scanning for hours.
by giorgioz | 2025-06-03 12:26:31+00:00
I love the sentence "After 10 years of hard work, it was an overnight success". The great paradox of spending years working without an audience/product market fit and suddenly an overnight success. So it's very true that since you will be ignored for a long time, you can only build something that you love even with no-audience. Ikigai is also a complementary concept to this.
by blenderob | 2025-06-03 12:26:31+00:00
Is the comparison table accurate? - https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison

Surely LaTeX has full scripting ability even though I wouldn't wish such a punishment on anyone.

Surely Quarkdown's gibberish like syntax is not more concise and more readable than Typst?

And surely the learning curve is not easier than Typst? I'd say the learning curve is more or less the same as Typst.

Surely LaTeX can also produce HTML with tex4ht?
by andrewd18 | 2025-06-03 12:26:32+00:00
Professional tech writer here: We use GitHub and a tool called OxygenXML to write docs-as-code in an XML DTD called "DITA". It's a hefty IBM invention from the early aughts, but it covers every use case I've thrown at it, from small documentation sets to multi-thousand-page monsters. Supports PDF, HTML, Word, and many other output types.
by rob_c | 2025-06-03 12:26:52+00:00
Sorry to break it to you. That's not about luck. You've asked for something which is nonsense if you want to "recycle" compute used to checksum records.

If you want them to store the checksum of the POSIX object as an attribute (we can argue about performance later) great, but using the checksums intrinsic to the zfs technology to avoid bitflips directly is a bad call.
by blacksharkAI | 2025-06-03 12:26:54+00:00
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by roenxi | 2025-06-03 12:27:10+00:00
Yes and that even seems to be missing the key issue - if a system's legislative body is hostile to basic tenants of liberal democracy then expecting the courts to act as a protective buffer is at best a stalling tactic to delay the inevitable by a few years. It is almost pointless fighting once that sort of law gets in, the powers that be think mass spying is OK and are committed to finding a way. The courts can't protect people from that sort of pressure, the only way to resist is to have people in power who think mass spying is bad. The US failed that test and it looks like Europe will too - very distressing for the prospects of the liberal project.
by lvales | 2025-06-03 12:29:13+00:00
Hey there, this is Lourenço! Right out of the bat, I just want to say: I'm not the typical application, as my background is in Economics, Philosophy and Farming. IT was always my hobby, and that's why I've recently decided to convert. I've already had entry-level positions in the industry, and I'm more than willing to continue to work at that level.

Location: Kraków, Poland Remote: Yes, hybrid is also fine. Willing to relocate: maybe (in the EU). Technologies: GNU/Linux, Golang, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, AWS, Zabbix, Kubernetes (CKA certified), Docker, Postgresql, Elasticsearch, Git, and a few more CV: drop me an e-mail! E-mail: lgavales (małpa) gmail (kropka) com Links: https://lourencovales.github.io/ + https://github.com/lourencovales
by sanderjd | 2025-06-03 12:29:27+00:00
They have definitely replaced jobs! There are tons and tons of sites and applications now that have been built with these tools and otherwise would have been built by software developers using wordpress or drupal or rails or whatever.

But that doesn't mean the developers who would have otherwise done that work were just disemployed by the success of these tools. No, they just worked on different things.

And I think that is a valuable lesson that can be applied (though I think not perfectly) to this LLM era.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-03 12:29:28+00:00
> I would be surprised if this is true as it might cause missed wakeups in an ABA scenario.

More importantly, what could "unchanged" even mean? For FUTEX_WAIT we provide val, a value we're saying is the value stored at the futex address, and the kernel can check that's true. But for FUTEX_WAIT val is filled out with a count - typically 1 meaning "Only wake one" or its maximum positive value meaning "everybody" although in principle if you can find a reason to wake up to 7 waiters but no more that's allowed.
by zamadatix | 2025-06-03 12:29:30+00:00
I think a good balance for a markdown syntax is something you can write nearly naturally on the fly (very low syntax needed for basic use) but can continue to mark up in more detail when you want to turn something into a complex use case (very high syntax ceiling for the complex cases). HTML+CSS almost gets there except the tags are a bit awkward for simple things like just <strong>bolding</strong> a word.

Regarding Notepad, keep in mind they dumped an entire separate app (WordPad) by merging the ability to format into Notepad. This kind of mirrors what I was talking about above: one app with a very low floor but a flexibly high ceiling when you want to go there with it rather than two separate apps you need to pick from up front.
by rofo1 | 2025-06-03 12:29:44+00:00
I have yet to see a single communist that can discuss like a rational human being. They have no problem with contradiction, non-sense, things that plainly do not work, things that are false, things that are false sometimes (when they need them to be) but are otherwise true.

Not once, not in any debates, online, or in real life. It's truly a virus of the psyche. It is remarkable.
by _ncyj | 2025-06-03 12:30:44+00:00
> Nearly everyone outside of US/UK in the younger generation speaks at least two languages pretty well, while the older ones often don't.

Interestingly, the opposite seems to have been happening in Malaysia. The older generation tend to be able to speak a ton of languages (Malay, English, Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien, maybe more), my generation has mostly settled on just English. I have gone out of my way to learn Japanese but even then, I can only understand 4 languages and speak 2 vs the 5 languages my parents/grandparents are essentially native speakers of.
by Ensorceled | 2025-06-03 12:30:56+00:00
I've been using LLM's pretty regularly for just over a year (my PyCharm AI license just renewed). My experience before that was pretty mixed and fell into the "sort of worth it" category.

It's improved to the point where the summary that I would email a junior developer is a pretty good prompt that produces code pretty close to want I want.

I had a weird project recently where I needed a stand alone event handler that would send an email receipt to the customer, another email to customer service, log the event in an accounting system via an API. I wrote up a proposal for the rest of the management team and, once accepted, pasted the proposal into ChatGPT (and a few others, but ChatGPT gave the best results).

I basically got a full recipe for setting up AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and SES, the Python Lambda function with api calls to SES, suggestions on using AWS SAM, etc. etc. Tweaked the prompt a couple of times and then took over from there. I had this into the hands of the testing team in less than a day.

I'm pretty sure this would reduce my team size in ANY role I've had in my career. Maybe not halve the teams, but it would eliminate a lot of the junior or journeymen developers.
by derbOac | 2025-06-03 12:31:04+00:00
This is a real problem now. It's not pessimistic hand wringing, and the US could easily see its scientific infrastructure collapse. I don't think the general public really comprehends what's at stake — some do but others do not.

The other side of the coin is that foreign academics, with maybe the exception of China, has its own financial problems. A lot of the initiatives getting attention in the news are much smaller than they are being hyped, and they're nowhere near enough to capture the US academic system. That could easily change though.

My sense is a lot of people are kind of holding their breath to see how things turn out, but I think it could be really bad. As the article points out, it's probably the junior scientists most at risk of leaving. But those are also probably the people you want to have stay, or attract.

There are a ton of problems in academics that have needed remedy for a long time, but what is happening now is making things much worse. It's certainly not in good faith, and not actually intended to help science in the US — if anything it's maliciously intended.