MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danudey | 2025-07-09 21:20:34+00:00
Tar files also have the miserable limitation of having no index; this means that to extract an individual file requires scanning through the entire archive until you find it, and then continuing to scan through the rest of the archive because a tar file can have the same file path added multiple times.

That makes them useful for transferring an entire set of files that someone will want all or none of, e.g. source code, but terrible for a set of files that someone might want to access arbitrary files from.
by dolmen | 2025-07-09 21:20:36+00:00
HATEOAS might make a come back as it might be useful to expose an API to AI agents that would browse a service.

On the other hand, agents could as well understand an OpenAPI document, as the description of each path/schema can be much more verbose than HATEOAS. There is a reason why OpenAPI-style API are favored: less verbosity of payload. If cost of agents is based on their consumption/production of tokens, verbosity matters.
Show HN: I made ChatChain, a chrome extension, auto adds timestamps to ChatGPT
by tzvipi | 2025-07-09 21:21:22+00:00
Hey all!

I built a chrome extension that automatically adds timestamps to your messages sent.

Test it out yourself:

User: yc@chatchain.chat pw: 1a3g5b7g

ChatGPT is smart enough to pick up on it, and it can actually respond to things like "What did we talk about yesterday at 2PM?", or "Summarize everything we discussed since 4PM"

Enjoy! Please leave a review, it means a lot to me!
by recursivedoubts | 2025-07-09 21:21:47+00:00
From wikipedia's article on API[1]:

> An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software.[1] A document or standard that describes how to build such a connection or interface is called an API specification. A computer system that meets this standard is said to implement or expose an API. The term API may refer either to the specification or to the implementation.

The server and browser are two different computer programs. The browser understand how to make an API connection to a remote server and then take an HTML response it receives (if it gets one of that media type) and transform it into a display to present to the user, allowing the user to choose actions found in the HTML. It then understands how to take actions by the user and turn those into further API interactions with the remote system or systems.

Because the browser waits for a human to intervene and make choices (sometimes, consider redirects) doesn't make the overall system any less of a distributed one, with pieces of software integrating via APIs following a specific network architecture, namely what Fielding called REST.

Your intuition that this idea doesn't make a lot of sense for a script-client is correct:

https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
by moron4hire | 2025-07-09 21:22:08+00:00
Ice cream trucks are a weaponized guilty trip against parents. The kids whine and complain about wanting ice cream and I'm already having a hard enough time modeling good food habits for them. If it were once a month I wouldn't mind, but it's been every day for the last month. Like, dude, nobody needs ice cream that much. Please stop starting an argument in my house.

Incidentally, we just replaced all the windows in our house, and now the kids can't hear the ice cream truck coming, so chalk up one disproportionately expensive W, please.
by dekhn | 2025-07-09 21:22:25+00:00
One of the best lessons I learned was during a hard financial constraint.

Roughly around 1994 I had a new compute- a 486/66MHz with 4MB of RAM. I got LINUX and installed it, and was able to run X windows, g++, emacs, and xterm- but if I compiled while emacs was running, the system would page like crazy (especially obvious in those days when harddrives were very noisy).

I had to work really hard to convince myself to pay the $200 (as an undergraduate, I had many other things I would have preferred to spend money on) to double the ram to 8MB, and then another $200 to 16MB a year later, and finally a last $200 to max out the RAM at 32MB.

Once the system had 32MB of RAM, it performed quite well, with minimal paging, and it greatly increased my productivity. I learned that while RAM can be expensive, making sure your processor is not waiting for disk is worth it.

I probably also spent $1,000s of dollars on modem upgrades (1200->2400, 2400->9600, 9600->19200, 19200->48000, 48000->56K and then switching to DSL and later fiber). Each time was "worth it" but it was expensive and so I really thought hard abotu the upgrade and the value it brought me (a high level of job opportunities in areas I find interesting).
by jcranmer | 2025-07-09 21:22:57+00:00
Take anything Linus says about compilers with a grain of salt--he writes OS kernels, not compilers, and those are pretty different domains.

Alias analysis is extremely important for getting good performance these days--but it should also be remembered that the biggest benefits accrue from the simplest heuristics (like two loads that use the same SSA value as the pointer must alias each other). In LLVM terms, that's BasicAA: a collection of very simple heuristics that primarily amounts to "if we can track down the allocation sites of objects, we can definitively resolve these alias queries; otherwise, we don't know."

The real question that you're trying to ask, though, is what is the value of alias analyses that go beyond the most basic, obvious tests. At the point where the alias queries are no longer trivial to solve, then it's generally the case that what you can do as a result of those queries also shrinks dramatically, pretty much to looking for code motion hazards, and the benefits you get from that are much reduced. One of the experiments I would like to do is measure the total speedup you'd get from a theoretically perfect alias analysis, and my guess is that it's somewhere in the 20% range even on non-HPC code like the Linux kernel [1].

[1] This doesn't account for the heroic optimizations, such as data-layout transformations, that you wouldn't attempt to write without a very high-quality alias analysis. But since we already know that alias analysis doesn't exist in practice, we're not going to attempt those optimizations anyways, so it's not worth including such stuff in prospective speed gains.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-09 21:23:02+00:00
Good point, and surely a valid concern... one that Apple has forgotten in some places today. Look at the utterly useless icon/thumbnail view in Finder: Contents don't wrap within the window. There could be dozens or hundreds of files off-screen in limbo, and you'll never know.

There are, of course, ways to indicate "more controls this way" with an arrow or other affordance when there's a toolbar or menu overflow, though.

Anyway, the point is that by the time OS X came along, other platforms had solved the problems but Apple rejected those widely-accepted solutions.
by rplnt | 2025-07-09 21:23:09+00:00
On the other hand, functional app returning http errors clouds your observability and can hide real errors. It's not always ideal for the client either. 404 specifically is bad. Do I have a wrong id, wrong address, is it actually 401/403, or is it just returned by something along the way? Code alone tells you nothing, might as well return 200 for a valid request that was correctly processed.

(devil's advocate, I use http codes :))
by trackmysitemap | 2025-07-09 21:23:33+00:00
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by deepdarkforest | 2025-07-09 21:23:51+00:00
Interesting. It's just an agent loop with access to python exec and web search as standard, BUT with premade, curated, 150 tools like analyze_circular_dichroism_spectra, with very specific params that just execute a hardcoded python function. Also with easy to load databases that conform to the tools' standards.

The argument is that if you just ask claude code to do niche biomed tasks, it will not have the knowledge to do it like that by just searching pubmed and doing RAG on the fly, which is fair, given the current gen of LLM's. It's an interesting approach, they show some generalization on the paper(with well known tidy datasets), but real life data is messier, and the approach here(correct me if im wrong) is to identify the correct tool for a task, and then use the generic python exec tool to shape the data into the acceptable format if needed, try the tool and go again.

It would be useful to use the tools just as a guidance to inform a generic code agent imo, but executing the "verified" hardcoded tools narrows the error scope, as long as you can check your data is shaped correctly, the analysis will be correct. Not sure how much of an advantage this is in the long term for working with proprietary datasets, but it's an interesting direction
by Aloisius | 2025-07-09 21:24:37+00:00
Looking up the grave robber, Leandro Benedicto Rivera Sarmiento aka Mario, brings up some very interesting articles.

At least according to this news article, Peruvian authorities claim the remains and that were modified at St. Louis Gonzaga University with university officials using various animal parts and charges were made against the grave robber for, among other things, fraud.

https://elbuho.pe/2023/07/ica-fiscalia-incautara-falsas-momi...
by throw0101d | 2025-07-09 21:25:13+00:00
So nuclear waste is stored in casks:

* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-used-nuclear-fuel/how-is-it-stor...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask

Are you telling me it's unsafe? Someone better tell Madison Hill:

* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...

* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856

* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

Or Paris Ortiz-Wines:

* https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
by nichochar | 2025-07-09 21:25:16+00:00
disclaimer: building a competitor (https://getmocha.com)

Lovable and bolt took a massive shortcut: they outsourced the backend to a third party (supabase).

This makes their ceiling to build "useful" software incredibly low.

The right approach takes a lot more time: pick an opinionated framework (think ror) and build up a full stack app builder from the ground up.

Took us months and months of work to get it working, but now people _can_ build "useful" software (thats our bar)
by retooth | 2025-07-09 21:25:45+00:00
Since xenharmlib is written in python it is not suitable for real-time audio because of the latency that an interpreted language introduces.

I think if someone was willing they could port the library to C or Rust rather easily, because apart from Exceptions the coding style is functional and stateless. AFAIK Rust has some libraries that provide a VST interface.
by kgwgk | 2025-07-09 21:26:16+00:00
You wrote "If the librarian's 'call for' meaning was indeed the one originally intended"

I doubt that "the librarian's 'call for' meaning was indeed the one originally intended" (not that you say it!).

Or maybe there is no difference between what you mean by "call for" and what the first quote meant by "call in". The subroutine is called / retrieved - and control is transferred to that subroutine. (I wouldn't say that when doctors are called to see a patient, for example, they are called in the librarian's meaning.)
by gnat | 2025-07-09 21:26:49+00:00
Ugh. Each of these points is a classic reliability precaution – yet all were missed simultaneously. As one analyst put it, Google had “written the book on Site Reliability Engineering” but still deployed code that could not handle null inputs. In hindsight, this outage looks like a string of simple errors aligning by unfortunate chance.

Yes, that's how major outages happen. By this stage of maturity any single failure generally doesn't break things dramatically. When things go this wrong, it's ALWAYS a combination of failures: failure of recovery system, omission in detection systems, gap in automated review, oversight in ...

The vacuous gotcha language is indicative of the low quality of the whole article. As Metalnem says in comments here, see the official incident report for a better writeup and more insight. https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-07-09 21:26:58+00:00
You can configure Zigbee devices to interact directly to each other, without using the hub as a middle-man for all their communication (the hub only does the configuration itself).

This doesn't work when mixing Zigbee+NonZigbee devices.

See: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/usage/binding.html
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-09 21:27:52+00:00
Yes. I'm saying the first HN post was a great signal, but a probability. It could have flopped from there. But sales from a cold HN post to me is good pot odds, so stay in the game!

The rear view mirror thing is of course true: you can only know the market by testing it by trying to sell your thing to it. Anything forward looking is a prediction.

You are always making decisions that are like bets.
by hughw | 2025-07-09 21:28:23+00:00
The promise of REST and HATEOAS was best realized not by building RESTful apps like say "my airline reservation app" but by building a programming system, spiritually like HTTP + HTML, in which you'd able to declaratively specify applications, of which "my airline reservation app" could be one and "my sports gambling service" could be another. So some smart person would invent a new application protocol with rich semantics as you did above, and a new type of user agent installed on desktops understands how to present them to the user, and the app on the server just assembles the resources in this rich format, directing users to their choices through the states of hte program.

So that never got done (because it's complex) and people started building apps like "my airline reservation app" but then realized to to build that domain app you don't need all the abstraction of a full REST system.
by caim | 2025-07-09 21:28:33+00:00
The main point of Affine logic is that it doesn't allow contraction, and the Rust type system does allow different forms of contraction. How exactly is Rust an "affine language"?

Also, the claims about Curry-Howard correspondence are wrong. It does not prove that rust is an affine language: https://liamoc.net/forest/loc-000S/index.xml

But Swift DOES have affine types with the "Non copyable" types that doesn't allow contraction.
by blibble | 2025-07-09 21:28:57+00:00
it's fine as long as it doesn't get out of its flask

which it will do eventually, if it's left out in the open

it needs to be buried

reducing the volume via reprocessing helps

assuming you can do something with the 97% of "useful" stuff extracted (which the UK has mostly failed at, and now stores it in a warehouse)
by adolph | 2025-07-09 21:29:06+00:00
The article links to a photographer of the phenomena which arguably has better info than the article.

https://paulmsmithphotography.com/pages/what-are-red-sprites...

Sprites get their characteristic red color from excitation of nitrogen in the low pressure environment of the upper mesosphere. At such low pressures quenching by atomic oxygen is much faster than that of nitrogen, allowing for nitrogen emissions to dominate despite no difference in composition. As the atmospheric pressure increases in the lower atmosphere, the red emissions are quenched and blue emissions from atmospheric nitrogen excitation dominate. . .
by mrguyorama | 2025-07-09 21:29:50+00:00
>This is what less filtered looks like

It's so "less filtered" that they had to add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide

This idea that "less filtered" LLMs will be "naturally" very racist is something that a lot of racists really really want to be true because they want to believe their racist views are backed by data.

They are not.
by wduquette | 2025-07-09 21:30:16+00:00
The "Sirius microcomputer" pictured as "The Book Machine" is in fact a Victor 9000, as you can see in the picture. The same unit was branded as "Sirius" in Europe and as "Victor 9000" in the U.S.

I spent quite a lot of time with the Victor 9000 in 1983-1985, as my college bought a bunch of them, and I was the student computer lab guy who supported them. It was a fascinating machine with some really cool specs: built-in 800x600 pixel monochrome graphics, redefinable keyboard and character set layouts, built-in serial and parallel ports, high-density floppy drives, and an 8086 processor. It ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS. Its closest competitor was the original IBM PC, which at that time had low-density floppies, no graphics, no built-in ports, etc.

The downfall of the Victor 9000 was that it pre-dated the rise of the "PC-clone": third-party PCs that could run exactly the same shrink-wrapped software as the IBM PC did. In the CP/M-80 8-bit world, every manufacturer had its own disk formats, screen sizes, and so on, and you had to buy shrink-wrapped software for your own specific hardware, and the Victor-9000 folks assumed that the 16-bit world would work the same way. As a result, they produced a much better machine than the IBM PC...that wasn't fully compatible.
by ddingus | 2025-07-09 21:32:33+00:00
Yes and no.

Parasolid is happy to work to whatever precision it is asked to use. The system driving it is where the choices are.

Sloppy tolerances really equal dynamic tolerance based on model geometry size.

Really, there have been a few different ways to approach this:

Some systems use a well defined tolerance and that results in a bounded model space.

Others do not put a boundary on the model space, but then the tolerance varies by size.

And the third way is to just set a loose tolerance on difficult blends and expect the troubles to come along for the ride. User does that when a blend fails.

With fillets specifically, a relaxed tolerance allows many of them to complete, but there can be downstream problems.

Gaps and slivers can appear in models output to STEP, STL and so forth.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-07-09 21:32:53+00:00
> moving the goalposts

I'm really not (honestly!) trying to invalidate anyone's point or win any argument - my post is more of a question-in-disguise: the GP post I was replying to concerns message-read tracking; whereas my post invokes the entirely separate matter of external actors being able to determine the validity or existence of a gmail address.

I'm not moving the goalposts; you guys are talking about the NFL game's goalposts; I'm talking about the FIFA world cup game goalposts.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-09 21:33:30+00:00
Nondeterminism before "finite automaton" is how the concept is developed in the theory of computation, which later develops into nondeterminism before "turning machine", and eventually before "polynomial time".

You seem to be misunderstanding the role automata theory plays in the larger framework of the theory of computation. It is not a "special case" of nondeterminism, it is the foundation for how all of the theory of computation is built.

Additionally, I'm also demonstrating how that exact same concept plays out in the other framework of computation, functional programming, and it works fundamentally the same way.

I have to say it's a bit surprising to need to defend the fundamental principles of computer science on HN. The topic is "how LLMs compute things" so using the computational definition of nondeterminism seem entirely relevant.
by michaelt | 2025-07-09 21:34:15+00:00
> If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it.

I don't think you become the CEO of any major company by believing that "social responsibility" exists. Doesn't the job pretty much select for the type of person who thinks the world owes them $20+ million a year?

With that said - it's dumb to blame the puppet for the acts of the ventriloquist.
by maxglute | 2025-07-09 21:34:28+00:00
Bottleneck for PRC likely equipment now. Shortly after US export controls, SMIC poached Jian Shanyi TSMC R&D Chief, he got SMIC to 7nm in like 2 years from mediocre 14nm - full node leap, i.e. 2 ~generations, before Intel and when Samsung 7nm was barely competent. This was before heavier equipment controls. In terms of producing "master craftsmanship" PRC seems fully capable, a lot of their fab technicians trained by TSMC/Samsung have taken over by now, and doing reasonable job of clawing their way to 5nm with DUV, i.e. they have the technical chops and east asian work ethic. Ultimately since raising semi to first-level dicipline, PRC currently the only major semi power without projected 100,000s talent shortfall in coming years. They have all the capable people... lots of state capacity to buy talent and espionage processes. They just need the machines.
by theultdev | 2025-07-09 21:34:57+00:00
I don't really see any need to take parental advice from a blog.

Not going to give advice either as we all have our own methods, but it's more or less the opposite of what this person is saying.

Doesn't mean letting them sit mindlessly in front of screens, but screen time is okay as long as they are creating, not consuming.

That has nothing to do with their noise levels though. There's a time and place. Outside with friends, yeah sure be loud within reason. In public around strangers? You better shut the hell up.
by godelski | 2025-07-09 21:35:03+00:00
There's multiple reasons for noncompetes[0]

You're right, it is about protection. A nondisclosure only goes so far. You have to prove in court that the nondisclosure was violated. Because how do you prove that a prior employee gave that knowledge as opposed to Pepsi just reverse engineering it?[1] A noncompete is an extra layer of protection because the barrier for proof is lower. You don't have to prove they violated the NDA, you just have to prove they work for the competition.

You recognize that these are different things, right? I stressed that it can be subtle, but if you're having a hard time recognizing they are different then please give it a little more thought.

A noncompete *also* means your previous employee isn't taking institutional knowledge and training with them. These won't be covered by a NDA! As an employer you invested in an employee by training them, right?[2] So you lose that investment?

The reason I put so much stress on this second part is because it is exactly what the above conversation has been about. The employer is thinking in the instant and narrowly, not more broadly. Yes, you lose employees you invested in, but you can also get employees you didn't invest in. That's the bigger picture. Plus, you can... you know... pay your existing employees more than you pay new employees with similar skills. Instead of threatening them against leaving incentivize them to stay. You get a bigger return on your investment anyways

[0] personally, I don't think it justifies having them but we can still understand the reasoning, right?

[1] this is something most people with an undergraduate education in chemistry could probably do. So good luck

[2] I stressed this above