MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyjeans | 2025-07-04 18:02:15+00:00
> the treatment of things like equality and arithmetic is hacky in its own way

mlton allows you to use a keyword to get the same facility for function overloading that is used for addition and equality. it's disabled by default for hygienic reasons, function overloading shouldn't be abused.

https://baturin.org/code/mlton-overload/

> labelled arguments

generally speaking if my functions are large enough for this to matter, i'd rather be passing around refs to structures so refactoring is easier.

> polymorphic variants

haven't really missed them.

> GADTs

afaik being able to store functors inside of modules would fix this (and I think sml/nj supports this), but SML's type system is more than capable of expressing virtual machines in a comfortable way with normal ADTs. if i wanted to get that cute with the type system, i'd probably go the whole country mile and reach for idris.

> even the much-maligned object system that have their place

never used it.

> Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?

mlton is whole-program optimizing (and very good at it)[1], has a much better FFI[2][3], is much less opinionated as a language, and the parallelism is about 30 years ahead[4]. the most important feature to me is that sml is more comfortable to use over ocaml. being nicer syntactically matters, and that increases in proportion with the amount of code you have to read and write. you dont go hiking in flip flops. as a knock-on effect, that simplicitly in sml ends up with a language that allows for a lot more mechanical sympathy.

all of these things combine for me, as an engineer, to what's fundamentally a more pragmatic language. the french have peculiar taste in programming languages, marseille prolog is also kind of weird. ocaml feels quirky in the same way as a french car, and i don't necessarily want that from a tool.

[1] - http://www.mlton.org/Performance

[2] - http://www.mlton.org/ForeignFunctionInterface

[3] - http://www.mlton.org/MLNLFFIGen

[4] - https://sss.cs.purdue.edu/projects/multiMLton/mML/Documentat...
by biglyburrito | 2025-07-04 18:02:48+00:00
Yes, it's Western propaganda (/s). That's why Japan's largest business lobby is pushing hard on the government to allow married couples to use separate surnames:

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15299988

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15808567

Also, it's "kowtow", not "cow-tow".
by sandreas | 2025-07-04 18:03:01+00:00
While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective.

You give up so much by using an all in mini device...

No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.

I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.

So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...

However, Jeff's content is awesome like always
by aristofun | 2025-07-04 18:03:06+00:00
> he's actually a very skilled engineer

By that you mean more like "he is top 0.1% at leetcode and whatever broken hiring process we have" ?

Why would really top 0.1% engineer go for all the hustle with small startups. If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?

This doesn't add up at all, sorry.
by subjectsigma | 2025-07-04 18:03:18+00:00
I watched the video in the first link and it’s a pretty extreme stretch to say it was “offering food” to the human holding the camera. There was barely any indication it saw the person.

The second video looked significantly more promising, however the video cuts away before we can actually see what the whale does.

Unless I watch a third video and start seeing some very clear dog-playing-fetch-like behavior, I’m marking this one as highly implausible.
by mberning | 2025-07-04 18:03:45+00:00
Same. I had some idea that I wanted to build a basic sinatra webapp with a couple features. First version was pretty good. Then I asked it to use tailwind for the css. Again pretty good. Then I said I wanted to use htmx to load content dynamically. Suddenly it decides every backend method needs to check if the call is from htmx and alter what it does based on that. No amount of prompting could get it to fix it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-04 18:04:08+00:00
Kind of difficult to respond to each point when your opinions are being deleted by folks. =(

It takes digging into the problem to determine why there is rare scientific consensus on climate change, and how we are in the worst projected trend toward cascade collapse (where changes accelerate far faster than the world can evolve).

Most people do not resort to emotional posturing over facts.

I just happen to think that is funny. =3
by ndriscoll | 2025-07-04 18:04:14+00:00
The processors themselves all seem to be pretty efficient at idle (there's apparently no real reason to get a T processor. It just caps performance). It mostly depends on everything else. The only place I know of to get this kind of info is this thread[0] where people have been building this spreadsheet[1]. Some threads on servethehome.com also report when some pcie cards have broken power management which can destroy idle efficiency.

[0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste...

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18L...
by deaddodo | 2025-07-04 18:04:18+00:00
I've never seen the Crash source code, so was making my statements based on second hand knowledge. So thanks for that clarification. I do think it's worth pointing out that Naughty Dog and Insomnia were two companies well known for making highly optimized software for the PSX; so probably not a standard most other companies matched.

Additionally, I have written my own PSX software as well as reviewed plenty of contemporaneous PSX software. While many have some bit of assembler, it's usually specifically around the graphics pipeline. About 90+% of all code is C. This is in line with interviews from developers at the time, as well.

The point wasn't that ASM wasn't used at all (in fact, I specifically acknowledged it in my original post), it was that the PSX was in an era passed the time when entire codebases were hand massaged/tuned assembler (e.g. "the 16-bit era" and before).
by spongebobstoes | 2025-07-04 18:05:04+00:00
The division of design doesn't stop because some of the pieces can be bought at a store.

The lamp design clearly was divided -- the final designer did not design the screws, lightbulb, wiring, and perhaps many other components. Someone had to design those components that were then combined creatively into a lamp.

Dividing design into components that can be effectively reused is tricky, but it remains essential.
by coldpie | 2025-07-04 18:05:14+00:00
Update: After some email discussion with Matteo, it looks like my fears are unfounded. The EU regulations seem to require wallets to be open source[1]. Assuming that wallets do not need to pass any sensitive transaction data down to the OS libraries, then it should be possible for users to verify the behavior of their wallet software by examining the source and possibly even by building & deploying it themselves.

[1] See section 33 here https://www.european-digital-identity-regulation.com/Preambl...
by ctoth | 2025-07-04 18:05:49+00:00
I'm just a regular developer - not rich, not running a company. I used to maintain accessibility apps for blind users (QRead for ebooks, various Twitter clients back when their site was barely screen-reader compatible). Had to abandon them when I got a day job - no energy left for wrestling with deprecated APIs and broken CI pipelines.

Now with Claude Code, I've cleaned up years of technical debt, added proper test coverage, got everything building in CI again with automated release-on-tag. (Yes, CC will literally debug your GitHub Actions yaml.) My blind users are getting updates again after years of nothing.

I'm nobody special. By basic statistics, if LLMs are this useful to one random developer, they're probably useful to millions of others maintaining their own small projects.

Yes, job displacement is a real concern. But the idea that LLMs [only] help the wealthy get wealthier? I'm living proof that's not true. I'm using them to resurrect accessibility tools that the market wouldn't support. That's not exactly a venture capital use case.
by ianbicking | 2025-07-04 18:06:29+00:00
For text adventures an important kind of reasoning is Inferring Authorial Intent. Or maybe Seeing Chekhov's Gun. Or Learning The Metagame.

The game is deliberately solvable, and elements are introduced to that end. Inferring that is important to any solution. By using minimal scaffolding you are testing things like "does the LLM understand the patterns of text adventures, is it able to infer a metagame" and so on. If you tested different kinds of scaffolding I think you could tease apart some of these different kinds of reasoning. That is, distinguish between (a) does it understand text adventures, and (b) understanding text adventures, can they be solved?

I did play around with more prompting and some statefulness: https://github.com/ianb/tale-suite/blob/main/agents/llm_prom...

It wasn't that successful, but I think it could do much better, I just had to stop myself from working on it more because of other priorities.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-04 18:06:44+00:00
> CE teaches none of this and students discover in 3rd year they cannot get an internship because they share all their code as IDE screenshots in Google Docs.

Which CE program did you study at? I've worked with Waterloo, UBC, and UT ECE grads and they have similar levels of knowledge of programming fundamentals as their CS grads. I would be shocked if a first or second year BS ECE cannot use Git or some alternative VCS - that means there are more fundamental issues with your university's engineering curriculum.

> I can design a simple op-amp circuit and deploy to a Kubernetes cluster because Canada has a "Computer Engineering" degree that's a hybrid between CS/Electrical Engineering.

Same in the States, ECE and EECS programs tend to teach both fairly equally, and there are plenty of top programs with a strong reputation in this (Cal, MIT, CMU, UIUC, UT Austin, UW, UCSD, UCLA, GT, etc)

The issue I have noticed though is the decline of "CSE" programs - CS programs with an added CompArch or OS internals focus. CS programs are increasingly making OS internals and CompArch optional at the undergrad level, and it is having an impact on the pipeline for adjacent fields like Cybersecurity, Distributed Systems, Database Internals, etc.

I've harped about this skills gap multiple times on HN.
by scoofy | 2025-07-04 18:06:51+00:00
This article misuses the term Luddites, or at least references an erroneous use.

I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can do it, I'm just not going to take it very seriously.

I'm glad we use electric bulbs instead of paying the lamplighters union to light our streetlamps at night... even if those jobs are lost.[^1] If we can replace superfluous work with machines, we should. The issues of capital capturing all of those gains is obviously one we should fight against politically, but the idea that we have folks doing jobs that don't need to be done by humans pretends that humans can't do other things.

Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it. We can support redistribution of wealth and social safety nets while also trying to reduce the amount of labor needed to do mechanized tasks. To do that, however, we need an electorate that is actually interested in progress and change, rather than an electorate that wants nothing to change ever, because they are riddled with nostalgia about life before these darn kids came along with their technology.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-drawn_boat
by sosborn | 2025-07-04 18:06:53+00:00
"Feral Cats are wild-living variant of the common pet cat, introduced to Hawai‘i by Europeans. Feral cats have established populations on all eight of the main Hawaiian Islands and contribute to widespread ecological disruptions that threaten native Hawaiian wildlife. Feral cats are one of the most devastating predators of Hawai‘i’s unique wildlife. In addition to direct predation, feral cats also spread a potentially lethal parasite (Toxoplasma gondii) that contaminates terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments and has been shown to negatively impact birds and mammals – including humans."

https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasive-species-profiles/...
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-04 18:07:01+00:00
>I love to hang out with them in the park and garden,

It's good fun to watch and listen to the coyotes until one of them steals a beloved pet away right before your eyes. My family has lost a total of three cats to these things and I know people who've lost smaller dogs. Cases of them attacking kids aren't unheard of either, and the risk isn't something to laugh at when it comes to unsupervised small kids.

As far as i'm concerned, when coyotes reach the population levels that it's easy to see in metro Vancouver, it's a good time to start a culling campaign. This is not an endangered animal.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-04 18:07:08+00:00
I struggle to think of a sadder 4th of July. Quite likely none in my time, that seems nearly certain!

I went through the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence one by one, and, all this seems very very much like what this country was founded to stop. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywk.bsky.social/post/3lmfft33o...
I stopped lead gen tools and got 300M+ B2B scraped leads here's what worked
by maildoyte | 2025-07-04 18:07:21+00:00
After years of paying for lead tools that overpromised and underdelivered, I realized something:

If you're serious about outbound, you need to own the data not rent it.

I was tired of:

Paying monthly fees for outdated, recycled leads

Getting throttled by API limits

Exporting lists that needed hours of cleanup before even

launching a campaign

So I built my own system. Scraped, cleaned, and enriched a massive B2B dataset and yeah, it took time.

But now I’ve got:

300M+ leads from 135+ countries 100M+ emails LinkedIn URLs, job titles, phones, company info all cleaned and tagged

Fully structured for fast filtering and targeting (by role, size, industry, intent, etc.)

The best part? No more wasting time hunting for leads — now I just focus on messaging, testing, and booking calls.

Btw : If you’re doing lead gen at scale & tired of expensive tools.

I’ve made +300 Million lead available for one-time payment, lifetime access no subscriptions, no limits at leadady.com feel free to check it.

Happy to share the tech stack, scraping approach, or anything else that helped me get here in the next post if everyone was interested.
by praash | 2025-07-04 18:07:27+00:00
My observation is that HN intentionally downranks highly commented threads. I used to think of it as unfair, but now it truly makes sense, considering:

- Posts with high comment-to-vote ratio often have political, scandalous or other kinds of heated themes

- Highly popular/engaging posts already act as self-amplifying snowballs

- High-volume discussion triggered by emotions is hard to navigate, is repetitive, and attracts the dumbest trolls even in HN

- The truly important topics tend to become visible anyway
by CharlesW | 2025-07-04 18:08:32+00:00
> Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal?

Small/portable low-power SSD-based NASs have been commercialized since 2016 or so. Some people call them "NASbooks", although I don't think that term ever gained critical MAS (little joke there).

Examples: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-464, https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-h574tx, https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=80
by anonnon | 2025-07-04 18:10:49+00:00
> The older I get the more I feel like anything other than the ExtantFS family is just silly.

The extended (not extant) family (including ext4) don't support copy-on-write. Using them as your primary FS after 2020 (or even 2010) is like using a non-journaling file system after 2010 (or even 2001)--it's a non-negotiable feature at this point. Btrfs has been stable for a decade, and if you don't like or trust it, there's always ZFS, which has been stable 20 years now. Apple now has AppFS, with CoW, on all their devices, while MSFT still treats ReFS as unstable, and Windows servers still rely heavily on NTFS.
by s-macke | 2025-07-04 18:11:34+00:00
That’s a good point. For 9:05, I expect it would work just as well, since the game helps the user in many ways. The puzzles are of the type “The door is closed”, and you solve them with “open door.”

My suggestion concerns the poor performance DougHaber mentioned: if 9:05 can’t be solved, something else must be wrong with his experiments.

I’ve tried three dozen games, and it’s still hard to find ones suitable for LLM benchmarks. With non-linear complex text-adventure games, my guess is, that they get stuck in an endless loop at some point. Hence, I just test the progress in the first hundred steps.
by numinix | 2025-07-04 18:11:46+00:00
> Gijsbert van der Wal’s famous 2014 photograph of Dutch teenagers ignoring a Rembrandt masterpiece in favor of staring at their phones has become for many psychologists, social theorists, and concerned ordinary folks a portrait of our current Age of Digital Addiction in a nutshell.

While a great photo, to me it looks like the kids are just doing some kind of school / field trip assignment.
by nickperry12 | 2025-07-04 18:11:52+00:00
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Remote: Preferred, but open to hybrid and on-site as well

Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Python, React, Kotlin, AWS, Docker, Terraform, Kafka, Debezium, PostgreSQL, MongoDB

Résumé/CV: Available upon request

Email: nick.perry604@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Nick! I'm a software engineer with 3+ years experience developing fullstack web applications. Most recently I worked on Tumbleweed (https://tumbleweed-cdc.github.io/), an open-source framework for creating Change Data Capture pipelines, streaming captured data changes from a connected Postgres database to microservice consumers in real-time. I'm passionate about collaborating with others to tackle complex engineering problems and create impactful software. I'd love to work on a team that sets their egos aside so we can accomplish our goals, and really value great communication and empathy. If this sounds like a good fit, I'd love to hear from you!
by johnklos | 2025-07-04 18:12:00+00:00
Holy cow! Ubuntu really takes their hardware gatekeeping seriously.

Of course we'll hear from the apologists about how much extra work supporting "low end" systems is - think of the developers! think of Ubuntu's bottom line!

> Admittedly there is one big rub: the range of RISC-V devices with RVA23 support is, at the time or writing this, near non-existent.

They couldn't even wait for hardware to be available before doing this? So basically Ubuntu 25.10 only runs on hardware that doesn't yet exist. Nice.

> Focusing future Ubuntu support to devices that have more capable RISC-V profile sets will further position the distro as the de-facto OS on the platform.

...or everyone will move to something else - ANYTHING else - because we don't want to replace our brand new devices just to run Ubuntu.
by gleenn | 2025-07-04 18:12:12+00:00
"You should never, ever get back surgery" sounds like that easily could be wrong. It's annoying to have to always caveat but talking to a (good) doctor is important when making such decisions and not relying on tech forum advice necessarily. I know someone who said they went in for back surgery and walked out feeling permanently cured from the specific problem they had and the pain was completely gone. Details matter. Always consult experts when possible.
by pxc | 2025-07-04 18:12:26+00:00
> But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

Maybe it's like a pale imitation of structural editing? There are editing modes for some editors that more or less ensure the syntax is always valid as you edit, and they of course include this feature.
by rudimentary_phy | 2025-07-04 18:12:55+00:00
I loved EverQuest. I still have some great memories of it. My friends and I still go back to playing it every once in a while. EverQuest also gave me some fantastic typing skills (from having to type in a significant amount of things for activating quests and for chatting) that have turned out to be well worth all the time I invested.
by attendant3446 | 2025-07-04 18:14:26+00:00
I was recently looking for a mini PC to use as a home server with, extendable storage. After comparing different options (mostly Intel), I went with the Ryzen 7 5825U (Beelink SER5 Pro) instead. It has an M.2 slot for an SSD and I can install a 2.5" HDD too. The only downside is that the HDD is limited by height to 7 mm (basically 2 TB storage limit), but I have a 4 TB disk connected via USB for "cold" storage. After years of using different models with Celeron or Intel N CPUs, Ryzen is a beast (and TDP is only 15W). In my case, AMD now replaced almost all the compute power in my home (with the exception of the smartphone) and I don't see many reasons to go back to Intel.
by kragen | 2025-07-04 18:14:51+00:00
No, unsustainable societies like the Lykov family or the Tasmanians were also often unspecialized. I suspect that specialization improves sustainability in general, at least up to a point. But it depends on how it's structured. The Khwarezmian empire had a high degree of specialization for the time, but one bad decision by the emperor made it unsustainable.
by jghn | 2025-07-04 18:15:00+00:00
> why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate?

For one thing, the GOP have had a successful campaign over the last 50+ years to win the framing war. They're now able to present themselves as the plucky outsider who'll come in and fix things, even when they're not. Likewise, the Dems are *not* able to do this, even when they are.

Also the Dems are incompetent boobs.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-04 18:15:51+00:00
Which is a completely fair play in a globalist society when you're a nation with an outstanding capital surplus. The US did this for centuries by exporting the dollar as a reserve currency, up until the gold standard ended and the value of the dollar as fiat started deteriorating.

Imperial economics 101, really. Offer stability in one hand and demand compensation with the other.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-04 18:16:36+00:00
This gets trotted right out every time someone mentions their cat being let outside, as if it were some sort of awful sin and thus makes the cat's owner totally wrong in any worry or complaint they have about their cat's safety outdoors. It's ridiculous, particularly when there's a very easy solution to cats hunting local birds: a collar with a little bell. It's nearly guaranteed to ruin their hunting.

That aside, you yourself, as a human, are an invasive species that kills tons of animals indirectly through your habits each year, should you thus be enclosed 24 hours a day? Cats killing off random birds. The ship of human intervention in the ecosystem has long since sailed, and blaming cat owners for a relatively tiny part of it is an absurdity in badly applied blame.