MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by holowoodman | 2025-07-27 14:22:06+00:00
I'd like to see those numbers please. While there have been improvements, Java performance work seems to have stopped after 2011 or so. Mobile CPUs became fast enough for Android, so no movement there. And commercial software got stuck on numerous proprietary Java VMs that didn't improve after the Oracle takeover of SUN. Alterative VMs improved, but didn't get adopted, fragemented and in the end didn't really raise the bar a lot.

To this day, Java applications are the slowest and most memory hungry long-running server applications by far. Only some scripting languages are worse, but only by performance, almost never by memory.
by ndiddy | 2025-07-27 14:22:07+00:00
Frankly it's bizarre that a Linux focused vendor thinks it's better to keep their device drivers outside of the kernel. Why would I buy a rebadged Clevo laptop from Tuxedo where I'm stuck either running their special Tuxedo distro or fiddling around with compiling kernel modules on other distros, when I could buy a much better laptop for the same price from a vendor who doesn't even advertise Linux support and get full out of the box hardware support on any distro I choose?
by narcraft | 2025-07-27 14:22:08+00:00
We've come a long way in those 266 years: global population 10x'd, meanwhile the share of the population living in extreme poverty went from over 80% to nearly 8%, so not all optimism was misguided. Also there's a lot of room between despair and a Panglossian caricature, and I don't think acknowledging that a lot of good has happened in the past (and not necessarily suggesting it was all inevitable or automatic) rises to that caricature.
by 9rx | 2025-07-27 14:23:01+00:00
> CoL is primarily driven by supply and demand, not willingness to pay

Right. Supply and demand. Not supply alone. And demand is characterized by the willingness to pay.

> not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...

These are already encompassed in supply and demand. Why mention them twice?

>[...] is the worst economic take i've heard in a while

Maybe so, but given that, it is curious that, in the end, you decided to repeat the exact same thing in your own words. A "worst take" is usually taken to mean that you see things differently, not see things exactly the same.
by reactordev | 2025-07-27 14:23:09+00:00
There was a time in the 90s when you actually could breeze through a book and know the language. Not Perl, obviously ;)

I won’t attest to the quality of your mental software architecture, but you’ll know the language…

It was around the time C++03 came that things no longer fit in a single book and you need a bookshelf of books to know a thing.

The web circa 2001 was easy enough to build entire sites from scratch in a week with no frameworks. The web circa 2021 was a complicated mess of frameworks on frameworks rediscovering server side rendering (the OG method) again.

I’m a fan of the books that take you through a project start to finish and not chunk it up into mini exercises.
by al_borland | 2025-07-27 14:23:15+00:00
The point of PowerPoint isn’t to have a bunch of detail, it’s basically to provide the outline, visuals, and key points, while the presenter fleshes that out with all the details by presenting it. A PowerPoint deck on its own isn’t that valuable. The value comes from pairing it with the speech.

If you have an excessive amount or technical details, then having everything writing down and distributed to similarly technical people is probably the better way to go.

It’s important to know your audience and what you’re trying to convey to them. Adapt as needed to best solve for that.
by ednite | 2025-07-27 14:23:17+00:00
Trying not to do a shameless plug, I just wanted to share a few lessons I’ve learned that might resonate with anyone who’s ever launched something and expected the hard part to be over.

I recently started blogging and quickly realized that hitting “publish” is just the start. The real challenge comes after sharing it, reaching people, and staying consistent despite the silence.

It reminded me of shipping a product and learning that launch isn’t the finish line, it’s practically the beginning of the process.

I’m working on part II of the journey now, but curious if anyone else has hit that wall, whether with a side project, startup, or just putting your ideas online. How do you keep going when the interest is quiet?

TL; DR: Coding Is Easy. Blogging Is Hard. Part I

• The hardest things often offer the most growth, but only when they’re meaningful.

• Silence and setbacks are signals, not reasons to quit.

• Focus on consistent effort, not quick wins.

• Whether you’re building an audience or training for a marathon, remember that discomfort is part of the deal.

• Choose authenticity over speed. It lasts longer.
by perihelions | 2025-07-27 14:23:49+00:00
Congress expressly directed NASA to create SLS, and expressly structured it to maximize job creation in designated Congressional districts—a goal obviously in tension with getting shit done*.

I don't think it's correct to blame the NASA, the agency, for management decisions made by their overseer!

*(Imagine what SpaceX would look like if Starbase were split into 50 pieces in 50 states—nosecones from Alaska, winglets from Senator Shelby's district in Alabama... Imagine, if their senior executive wasn't breathing down everyone's necks to build things faster, but instead prioritized employee headcount as his objective function (maximizing–not minimizing). The way Congressional lawmakers run their pet projects is quite ridiculous).
by worthless-trash | 2025-07-27 14:24:02+00:00
In Emacs

(add-hook 'janet-ts-mode-hook #'ajsc-interaction-mode) (add-hook 'janet-ts-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key "\C-c\C-x" 'ajsc))) (add-hook 'janet-ts-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key (kbd "C-x C-e") #'ajsc-send-expression-at-point)))

In the janet itself:

(def repl-server (netrepl/server "127.0.0.1" "9365" (fiber/getenv (fiber/current))))

If you have tight main loop, make sure you have something like:

(ev/sleep 0)

To allow the netrepl server to take time.

Start janet (usually i do it via jpm)

$ jpm -l janet -d main.janet

Then m-x ajsc and localhost:9365

This should be default.

If you dont start it in debug mode, you can't redefine functions as they are running.

I have an example using it for live web stuff here: https://github.com/wmealing/janet-joy-live
by Towaway69 | 2025-07-27 14:24:28+00:00
But on the other hand it makes business sooooo much simpler: have an idea, create much hype and excitement using marketing and social media, hire some influencers to promote your product, create website that promises a life changing difference if you use my product, hire a bunch of people to build something, wait and the sell to the highest bidder.

Being caught at a concert with the head of HR can be easily turned into a PR success, just add money.

No long term goals necessary, no employee retention programs, no social responsibility. Just pure and beautiful monies in the bank.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-27 14:25:29+00:00
Are there mechanisms which make learning programming significantly easier which don't have marked limitations? (e.g., the limitations of BASIC (esp. early imprlementations) vs. C)

I find it striking that this article references

Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p. 10-19.

but doesn't cite one of the more notable responses:

https://drdobbs.com/there-is-a-silver-bullet/184407534/

where that language (Objective C) coupled with the NeXT libraries/objects made possible Steve Jobs' "5-minute Word Processor Demo"

Do Swift (and SwiftUI) change this calculus?
by AIPedant | 2025-07-27 14:26:10+00:00
I would say that using a high-pollution method of cooking when cleaner options are easily available, simply because it's more enjoyable, is aggressive and uncalled for.

"Yes, this is bad for kids with asthma who have the misfortune of living in my neighborhood, but it's great for quesadillas! So you have to look at both sides."
by 9rx | 2025-07-27 14:27:12+00:00
> They are written to share knowledge, new discoveries. We hope that they are replicated.

If they aren't replicated, no new knowledge is gained. Not really.

> it's a failure of the publishing system.

What failure? Again, the "publishing system" is to submit the "best of the best" research to the world in order to invite replication. While nothing is perfect, we don't want people to have to sift through papers that have effectively no reason to be replicated in a quest to find something that is. That would make things infinitely worse.

The internet was created for the minor-leagues. If you are willing to put in the effect to document your "less than the best" research, put it up on a website for all to see already. There is nothing stopping you. But who wants to put in the effort?

> We are not judging anyone

How do you define "shameful" if it isn't related to judgement of someone?
by brandonb | 2025-07-27 14:27:17+00:00
There's a clinical trial for a new drug, lepodisiran, which lowered Lp(a) by 93.9%.

Outside of that, if your Lp(a) is high, then the first strategy would be to choose a lower ApoB target than you would otherwise. (Every Lp(a) particle is also an ApoB/cholesterol particle, but 6x more atherogenic. So by lowering ApoB, you are compensating for the effect of high Lp(a))

Summary of the current research/evidence is here: https://www.empirical.health/blog/lipoprotein-a-blood-test/#...
by em-bee | 2025-07-27 14:27:43+00:00
it's not technical infeasibility, it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that, so if i want them to share things with me i have to make it easy for them. the alternative is facebook (or something else like it).

and i am not talking about hosing for your own private use but for shared use. family photos for example, chats, other family stuff. there isn't going to be a warrant because i see everything that is posted. if he needs different software he can still host that himself, that's besides the point. i am not running a hosting service, i am running a platform for the family to use. a private facebook alternative.

i don't know about your family relationships, but for me family means to support and stand by each other.
by monsieurbanana | 2025-07-27 14:28:10+00:00
Now you lost me. Expecting one server per person in a household is unrealistic. Even if software becomes perfect, what about the hardware aspect? Expecting a family of 5 to have 5 servers all available and reachable from anywhere sounds like a nightmare, and just a waste of electricity.

Your whole premise is that self hosting software can become a one-click deploy, if they can achieve that I'm sure different settings per user is possible. If who is legally responsible about what your brother does with the family serve is really such a big question, then let's just accept widely adoption of self hosting is not going to happen.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-27 14:28:34+00:00
The best part about living under the Sword of Damocles is that when it falls on someone else I can lecture them about how they deserved it. I can't imagine it would ever fall on me, because I don't deserve it.

> "you’re acting irresponsibly"

If things were arranged so that you didn't need the savings to cover the constant worry of being fired, then not having the savings wouldn't be acting irresponsibly. Americans need health insurance, not having health insurance is irresponsible. In countries where healthcare is free at the point of use, not having health insurance is not irresponsible. You're arguing a logical tautology.

> "(Also, mortgage term is irrelevant here, I’m not sure why you mention it."

As an example illustration that people do not live life in 1-day or 1-week increments, but in decades. People want to - and do - put down roots and settle in for a long time.
by physarum_salad | 2025-07-27 14:29:04+00:00
This is a very misleading narrative. Wikipedia is now a popularity contest and subject to commercial pressures. As Larry Sanger (co-founder of wikipedia) noted:

"Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist ..., it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)."

Compare it with scholarpedia which is expert edited and of a much higher quality (although in a much narrower domain).
by john-h-k | 2025-07-27 14:29:41+00:00
The whole first analogy feels a bit backwards.

Crocodile tries to kill human, human kills it as the stronger animal. That seems very natural.

Crocodile tries to kill human, human decides it’s natural for crocodile to do so and lets it live due to complex human morality. That feels much more “human exceptionalist”!
by DocTomoe | 2025-07-27 14:29:56+00:00
But of course. For you, it's all about engagement - that darling coin of the petty court jester, who sets the salon ablaze not to warm the room, but simply to watch the tapestries curl and blacken. What care has the arsonist for architecture, so long as the firelight flatters his silhouette?

You brandish your self-critique like a silken fan: ostentatiously self-aware, artfully tousled, and utterly disconnected from the soot you scatter. A noble affectation, perhaps - if not for the peasantry scorched beneath your rhetorical fireworks. While the rest of us trudge back to our manuscripts, redrafting not for clarity, but to appease the ever-shifting inquisitions of those who declare to sniff out AI like perfumed bloodhounds.

Pretentious? No, Monsieur. Not your prose - which prances nicely enough in its embroidered slippers. What is pretentious is your Marie-Antoinette shrug whispering "Why can't they write more like pastry?" while your courtiers cheer.

Your writing is not the crime. Your indifference is.
by mrob | 2025-07-27 14:30:08+00:00
The main preservative for processed meats, and the one that reacts with other compounds to form carcinogens, is nitrites not nitrates. Nitrates are sometimes used too, especially for meats that are cured for a long time, because some bacteria will reduce them to nitrites, making them effectively work as a sustained release form of nitrite. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curing_salt
by brandonb | 2025-07-27 14:30:13+00:00
Eric Topol has a cool post on "machine eyes" -- using deep learning to identify subtle signals in ECGs and medical images that would be invisible to the naked eye: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-amazing-power-of-machin...

There are still regulatory/deployment/reimbursement barriers to cross, but this is happening.
by f1shy | 2025-07-27 14:30:24+00:00
To which extent can a man go to not accept is wrong in an argument… DB9 and RJ45. Period. I have never once in 45 years of working with open system had somebody misunderstand what you mean with RJ45 or DB9.

That kind of pedantry can be saved for worst errors, like “baud-rate”. There is no such a thing. Baud is a unit [symbols/s]. It could be symbol-rate. I do have seen it bite a team, because symbolism rate was different as bit-rate. And still, I do not think is critical 99% of the time
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-27 14:30:24+00:00
> However, when you hit a failure that SSD becomes a single root cause of data loss from several disks when losing that SSD (unlike a read cache).

In theory you can massively reduce this risk by keeping a copy of the journal in memory so it only corrupts if you have a disk loss and a power outage within a few seconds of each other. But I don't know if the tools available would let you do that properly.
by uvas_pasas_per | 2025-07-27 14:30:42+00:00
Lisp is very cool. But one thing I do not like is that the syntax style `(fun a b c)` loses out to the less-symmetric "OO" style `a.fun(b, c)` when it comes to IDE auto-completion. And for me the IDE help is important to provide a smooth developer experience and minimize wasted brain energy. I'd like to find a way to make the editing and auto-completion work better. I think the way IDEs (and maybe our brains) work is: "here is a thing X, now what can I do to/with it?". That translates to typing in your editor: "X.[cursor here]", and then the IDE lets you see and search the things you can "do" with X. But if, in Lisp, you write "([cursor here]", you are immediately confronted with: "what is the signature of that function again?", but the IDE has nothing to go on. Maybe there is different style of editing, where we could type the arguments, and then trigger the auto-complete.
by john-h-k | 2025-07-27 14:30:58+00:00
> No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”

Orthogonal. I said it doesn’t imply it, and it doesn’t. It may suggest it’s likely - and it does - but it does not imply it.
by Quarrel | 2025-07-27 14:30:59+00:00
> AFAIK, the UK forced the big porn tech giants to hide explicit images and videos from the public unless users verify their age. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit and other companies failed to do that. These US businesses turned a blind eye to porn just to make more money.

Until just now, no, they had not forced them. They had repeatedly delayed and denied, just trying to win electoral points.

I think you underestimate how easy these regulations will be to get around. I was once a teenage boy with some tech-nous. This would have been a walk in the park then, and kids these days know a lot more than I did back then, not to mention all the bad-actors that will happily help them. It isn't as simple as "oh no, so IDs will be leaked".

Also, if you think you can understand the depth of the people behind the porn sites, you're in for a new awakening. Of course, you can't trust them- but if you could, then there would be new porn sites the next day that you could not. Which sites will implement these changes? Which ones will not? The answer to this is half the battle being faced ..
by SunlitCat | 2025-07-27 14:31:32+00:00
> a public alternative with private transactions

This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.

If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?

And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?
by lynx97 | 2025-07-27 14:31:34+00:00
I've had too many incidents to fix / work around since "stable" interface names were introduced. Sorry that you are offended. But the fact of the matter is, most of these issues would not have hit me if we'd just kept the old ethX naming scheme.

I do change ifupdown to systemd-networkd on every server I care about. Matching on MACAddress is a great imprvement. It doesn't help that Debian still insists on keeping ifupdown.
by samrus | 2025-07-27 14:33:10+00:00
I understand wanting to make the organization more efficient, but i don't think this is what's happening here. I think this is the classic republican strat of gutting federal agencies, pointing to the inefficiencies caused by the loss of institutional knowledge, and using that as an excuse to privatize to their friends.

The fact that Elon's DOGE suggested these cuts lines up
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-27 14:33:42+00:00
> "A dynamic economy benefits everyone"

Everyone is equal, just some are more equal than others. It benefits people who are highly skilled, clever, healthy, wealthy, young, with market-desirable skills in a market-desirable area, with no external family or life problems or responsibilities, and those who own and run companies, more than 95% of everyone else.

> "where I can be laid off with zero notice (and I have been a couple times). This makes it faster and easier to find a new job."

I don't see that follows; jobs can have probationary periods where employers can reject new hires quickly, while still having notice periods.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-27 14:34:43+00:00
I think this is actually a bad idea, especially the language and tone part.

You can not detect AI writing by the language and tone, all LLMs are trained and prompted to write in a very particular style. You can just tell them to write in a different style and they will. What is worse that the default LLM writing style is actually quite common. If you read through that list you will also see that many of these are very much human errors.

Trying to detect what is and isn't LLM generated text will only lead to people chasing ghosts, either accusing innocent people or putting faith in text which is the result of more careful prompting.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-07-27 14:35:02+00:00
We have a RAG powered product in production right now used by thousands of users.

RAG is part of the solution, it provides the required style, formatting and subject matter idiosyncrasies of the domain.

But it isn't enough to do (prompt + RAG query on that prompt) alone, we have a handwritten series of prompts, so the user input is just one step in a branching decision tree of deciding which prompts to apply, in sequence (prompt 1 output = prompt 2 input) and also composition (deciding to combine prompt (3 + 5, but not prompt 4)) for example.
by Balgair | 2025-07-27 14:35:34+00:00
Hot Take:

Maybe this DOGE approach of sledgehammering the bureaucracies is all there is left to do?

Look, I have family that works for the Feds. I have also collected money from federal programs. I know the pain that is coming and is here. It really really sucks, and it will suck for me too, though not as badly.

But the 'scalpel' approach where you go in, understand the system, take out the bad parts, leave the good, don't get rid of the best people and programs; yeah, it doesn't work very well either. I've seen it tried in a few organizations, some have had a little success, most have not. What usually happens is that the most politically connected programs and people stay and the least are cut, and only after years of twaddling and overspending anyway. THe people that are there to cut things get swamped in meetings and smoke blown up their ass from every direction; they are made incompetent by design, and so the cuts are incompetent too.

I'm not about to say that I have any idea of the history of NASA spending cuts or those of the US gov in general. I know SLS is a dumb program but only because I know people that say that.

But, again, Hot Take, maybe the only thing left to try is the sledgehammer?
by Robotbeat | 2025-07-27 14:36:56+00:00
FWIW, this is the brainworm faction that fought the techbro faction and got them kicked out of the throne room. Think Russell Vought and the OMB, not Elon. Elon registered his disapproval of the huge science cuts in the President’s budget request. The nominated techbro NASA administrator was cancelled because he wasn’t anti-science enough.