MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by happymellon | 2025-07-03 08:05:39+00:00
> Oh, you think sex work should be decriminalized? I was under the impression you feminists thought sex work was exploitative?

They aren't mutually exclusive. I can think that sex work is exploitive and at the same time not want sex workers to go to jail.

In the same way I can think drugs are bad, but locking up drug abusers is also bad.

It doesn't solve any problems and people I view as victims are the ones getting punished.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-03 08:07:21+00:00
I use:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/compiler/src/dmd/ba...

It's pretty minimalist on purpose. I don't much care for kitchen sink types.

The BetterC is the no-gc version. Use the -betterC switch on the compiler.

Or, if you want a string result,

import core.stdc.stdlib; string concat(string s1, string s2) { const length = s1.length + s2.length; char* p = cast(char*)malloc(length); assert(p); p[0 .. s1.length] = s1; p[s1.length .. s1.length + s2.length] = s2; return cast(string)p[0 .. length]; }

I tend to not use this sort of function because it doesn't manage its own memory. I use barray instead because it manages its memory using RAII. D provides enormous flexibility in managing memory. Or, you can just leave it to the gc to do it for you.
by apgwoz | 2025-07-03 08:07:52+00:00
I started working at startups in 2009… in my late 20s.

If you’re not already financially stable at 60 and hoping to win the startup lottery to retire… well…

So yeah, obviously age plays some role here.

I didn’t go work at startups because I thought I was gonna get rich. I worked at startups because I expected to learn waaaaay more than at Big Co, and have wayyyy more fun while doing it. This panned out.

Money has never been my motivation in computing—interesting problems are.

It wasn’t until I turned 42 that I realized I did it all backwards, though. I should have started by working at Big Co and saved/invested every penny to seek early retirement, and then do whatever I wanted with no financial pressure, later.

I could have stayed at a Big Co for 4+ more years and racked up more RSUs, and bonuses, but my job became boring, and I started to resent it. What can I say?

Curious about the 2001 failure… but am guessing the amount of free money in the dotcom boom led to you trying to build something not well thought out or with ang real hope for viability. (not throwing shade, but lots of mud was thrown and very little stuck)

It happens! It’s OK!
by esskay | 2025-07-03 08:08:18+00:00
> But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a

>"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"

You write up meeting notes, tasks, etc right?

If you've got engineers who are unaware of functionality because of a verbal meeting being missed you've got deeper problems to address.
by cma | 2025-07-03 08:08:53+00:00
Under the first Bush and continued under Clinton, Haitian asylum seekers were interdicted at sea and sent to Guantanamo to avoid due process, which set the stage for its use in the war on terror. However, in these earlier uses it was for additional processing to give a chance at asylum for those claiming persecution and others not seeking it were deported back to Haiti directly.

But it was still used to avoid full due process. Under treaties that are supposed to be law of the land under the constitution, we are supposed to accept legitimate asylum seekers.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-07-03 08:10:32+00:00
> XOR is commutative, meaning we can change the order in which we apply XOR. To prove this, we can check the truth table for both x ^ y and y ^ x

This is nonsensical, where does the second truth table come from? Instead you just observe that, by definition, 1^0 == 0^1.
by niemandhier | 2025-07-03 08:10:52+00:00
Regarding sparse, nonlinear systems and our ability to learn them:

There is hope. Experimental observation is, that in most cases the coupled high dimensional dynamics almost collapses to low dimensional attractors.

The interesting thing about these is: If we apply a measurement function to their state and afterwards reconstruct a representation of their dynamics from the measurement by embedding, we get a faithful representation of the dynamics with respect to certain invariants.

Even better, suitable measurement functions are dense in function space so we can pick one at random and get a suitable one with probability one.

What can be glanced about the dynamics in terms of of these invariants can learned for certain, experience shows that we can usually also predict quite well.

There is a chain of embedding theorems by Takens and Sauer gradually broadening the scope of applicability from deterministic chaos towards stochasticly driven deterministic chaos.

Note embedding here is not what current computer science means by the word.

I spend most of my early adulthood doing theses things, would be cool to see them used once more.
by dworks | 2025-07-03 08:10:57+00:00
Sure, we cannot agree on the correct interpretation of the instructions. But, we also cannot define what is correct output.

First, the term “accuracy” is somewhat meaningless when it comes to LLMs. Anything that an LLM outputs is by definition “accurate” or “correct” from a technical point of view because it was produced by the model. The term accuracy then is not a technical or perhaps even factual term, but a sociological and cultural term, where what is right or wrong is determined by society, and even we sometimes have a hard time determining what is true or note (see: philosophy).
by jbverschoor | 2025-07-03 08:11:10+00:00
Exactly my experience. The mental model is easy once you understand that it’s just a key on your device/app.

It’s just really hard to wrap around your head that this is the actual implementation with so many drawbacks given most people have 2+ devices, and different OSes to provide it.

I won’t use them.. although I’d have loved to use them.

When they worm they work, but I can’t trust them completely, so what’s the point? There’s no difference with a password, except that the sign-in process can be streamlined when everything works
by ben_w | 2025-07-03 08:14:00+00:00
That a Ukraine loss is seen as the end of a free Europe (because Russia wouldn't stop at least until at least DDR Germany borders), is why the other European nations are collectively increasing military spending.

For a sense of scale (only scale, money is definitely not the most important criteria), the EU currently spends twice as much on their military as Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...

So if (when) American support disappears, I expect Russia to continue to not go anywhere fast while wasting a lot of lives in the process. I also expect this to surprise Putin, as he thinks Russia is a Great Power and therefore can only be stalling if Ukraine is supported by another Great Power and doesn't recognise that (1) Russia isn't, and (2) the EU kinda is, sort of, when it feels like acting with unity rather than as 27 different nations.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-07-03 08:14:04+00:00
As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.

Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
by nchmy | 2025-07-03 08:14:27+00:00
Yes, I assume that otter etc are vastly faster, but I suspect there's people who are not aware of that and, consequently, don't have such a layered approach. So, the idea was to show how much faster to further promote adoption of such tools.

And, to clarify, I was only thinking about localhost/Unix sockets to mostly eliminate network latency. Anything external to the server would obviously be incomparably slower.

I also suppose that it would be perhaps even more interesting/useful to compare the speed of these in-memory caches to Golang caches/kv stores that have disk persistence, and perhaps even also things like sqlite. Obviously the type of "disk" would matter significantly, with nvme being closer in perf (and probably sufficient for most applications).

Anyway, it was just a thought.
by Doxin | 2025-07-03 08:14:41+00:00
> using function syntax for methods

hmm, yeah fair enough I suppose. I don't think I've found a good use-case for that yet. I guess having the symmetry there makes the feature easier to explain at least? I dunno.

> Furthermore, I don’t think it necessarily makes sense for all functions that happen to take, say, a string as their first argument, to be listed in the code completion for method invocation on a string variable.

All functions in scope that happen to take a string as their first argument. If this turns into an actual problem in practice it's quite doable to refactor things such that it's not an issue.

I find that when I use autocomplete I'll be typing the first bit of the method name in any case. I never "browse" autocomplete to look for the thing I need.

Extension methods are another way to do the same thing yes, but that feels like special-casing behavior, where UFCS is more general. With extension methods you need to think of how to implement it wrt things that don't usually have methods attached. With UFCS that just works the way you'd expect it to.
by dworks | 2025-07-03 08:14:48+00:00
It's the opposite.Every use case needs its own distinct workflow ("context engineering"). We need a massive amount of engineers in order to implement LLMs in real-world business environments.

But in most cases, LLMs will be prompted by practitioners, i.e. designers who mockup designs in Figma, engineers who generate code in their IDE - and then invariably need to correct it.

All in all, LLMs will cause an employment boom if widely adopted.
by MindSpunk | 2025-07-03 08:15:22+00:00
DXIL has other issues beyond being an orphaned fork of LLVM-IR. LLVM is ill-equipped to represents shaders, and there have been real bugs in the wild because of how not-a-shader-language LLVM-IR is. See this [0] post under the 'The classic subgroup breakage – maximal convergence gone awry' section. Read the whole series really if you haven't, it's a fantastic dive into how awful this stuff is.

DXIL is also a useless intermediate representation because parsing it is so bloody difficult nobody could actually do anything with it. DXIL was, and still is, functionally opaque bytes. You can't introspect it, you can't modify it or do anything of use with it. SPIR-V is dead-simple to parse and has an array of tools built around it because it's so easy to work with.

I don't really see how the OpenCL history is relevant to Vulkan either. Khronos losing the OpenCL game to Nvidia, certainly no thanks to Nvidia's sabotage either, doesn't change that SPIR-V is a much more successful format.

[0] https://themaister.net/blog/2022/04/24/my-personal-hell-of-t...
by uallo | 2025-07-03 08:15:34+00:00
Fully agree. With Multi-Account Containers [1] and the recent addition of tab groups [2] / vertical tabs [3], Firefox got even better.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/vertical-tabs-and-the-fi...
by lou1306 | 2025-07-03 08:16:03+00:00
There are subtle sources of nondeterminism in concurrent floating point operations, especially on GPU. So even with a fixed seed, if an LLM encounters two tokens with very close likelihoods, it may pick one or the other across different runs. This has been observed even with temperature=0, which in principle does not involve _any_ randomness (see arXiv paper cited earlier in this thread).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-03 08:16:18+00:00
Pre-commit hooks are client-side only and opt-in; I've always been a big proponent of pre-commit hooks, as the sooner you find an issue the cheaper it is to fix, but over time pre-commit hooks that e.g. run unit tests tend to take longer and longer, and some people want to do rapid-fire commits instead of being a bit more thoughtful about it.
by cma | 2025-07-03 08:16:29+00:00
Horses can be blindfolded at birth and when removed do basic navigation with no time for any training. Other non-visually precocious animals like cats, if they miss a critical development period without getting natural vision data, will never develop a functioning visual system.

Baby chicks can do bipedal balance pretty much as soon as they dry off.

Wood ducks can visually imprint very soon after hatching and drying off, a couple hours after birth with very limited visual data up until then and no interspersed sleep cycles.

We as humans have natural reactions to snake like shapes etc. even before encountering the danger of them or learning about it from social cues. Babies
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-03 08:17:44+00:00
I skip meetings in order to play Mario Kart. Why? Two reasons:

1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.

2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.

It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
by dspillett | 2025-07-03 08:18:14+00:00
Anything that makes the repo less private later (deliberate public release, hack (not just if the repo bit of anything that can connect to it), etc) means the secret is now in the open.

Always cycle credentials after an accident like committing them to source control. Do it immediately, you will forget later. Even if you are 100% sure the repo will never be more public, it is a good habit to form.
by Zardoz84 | 2025-07-03 08:18:28+00:00
Part of the problem it's trying to do too many things in too many fronts. They try to implement a borrow-checker a la Rust. But feels very poorly compared against the Rust version. It haves a "optional" GC, but it's a subpar GC. And lacks a way to use alternative GCs.

And funny, C++ has been copying many features that DLang have for many time ago. Beginning with the type inference (ie using "auto" to declare vars). And now, contractual programing and static reflection.

I really loved the language, but it's very sad that never manages to take off and become more popular and well maintained.
by easyThrowaway | 2025-07-03 08:18:53+00:00
In a game-theory-prisoner-dilemma kind of situation, yeah, maybe. In the real world, those guys were always sure to point their to guns to those they knew very obviously couldn't retaliate back. And I'm not strictly talking about minorities, by the way. Simply, those who weren't part of their circle had a rough time and the police made very clear that they would act in their defense if anyone tried something funny.

I've only seen shit like this in sicily in the early 90s, when the mob controlled much of the big cities.
by defrost | 2025-07-03 08:19:16+00:00
We all make mistakes, as the Dalek said climbing off the dustbin.

FWiW .. here's mine (or is it?)

One Tsar Bomba ~ 50 megatonne. One Hiroshima bomb ~ 15 kilotonne.

One Tsar Bomba ~ 50,000 / 15 ~ 3,333 Hiroshima bombs.

1,040 x Tsar Bomba ~ 3,466,667 Hiroshima bombs.
by jajko | 2025-07-03 08:20:55+00:00
If it would be so bad, Earth's polar regions (experiencing aurora borealis) would be inhabitable too. Earth's magnetic field is not magically neutralizing all charged particles from the Sun, just diverts them (some maybe away, but many simply towards poles).

And clearly even our mag field (and Sun's heliosphere) is not enough to shield us from those crazy cosmic rays.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-07-03 08:20:59+00:00
>Decent hypothesis, but fails when we compare America to other capitalist countries. (Or non-capitalist countries, extant and historically, with extreme wealth inequality.)

What countries other than the US have the sheer extreme wealth inequality the US does?

Really the only other comparison is China. Which went from an existing authoritarian state to an authoritarian state using its working class as effective slave labor for western capital. It's "state capitalism"
by lambdaone | 2025-07-03 08:21:04+00:00
The (final version of the) physical Phoenix computer still exists, but the disks are missing - see https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/IBM3084.html

A backup was taken before shutdown: https://web.archive.org/web/20041115131602/http://www.cam.ac...

I would be surprised if someone, somewhere, didn't still have a copy of what would nowadays be considered to be an absurdly small amount of data. If they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they read HN.
by rallyforthesun | 2025-07-03 08:21:35+00:00
SplatAM is an interesting new way to generate 3D Gaussians in real-time. It relies on RGB+D data and doesn’t need COLMAP at all. I am not related to it but am using it for a project with a robot, as its main purpose is to do SLAM. As far as I understand, it uses the point cloud for the alignment of the images

edit:typo
by deaddodo | 2025-07-03 08:21:51+00:00
If by "mental model" you mean "low-level" programming, sure. But you might as well conflate "religion" with "Southern Baptist protestantism" then. You're working with the same building blocks, but the programming style is drastically different.

The vast majority of PSX games were done completely in C, period. Some had small bits of asm here and there, but so do the occasional modern C/C++ apps.

To your last point, before there was GOAL there was GOOL (from the horse's mouth itself):

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/tag/lisp-programming/

And it was used in all of Naughty Dog's PSX library.
by Fendy | 2025-07-03 08:21:51+00:00
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
by dale_huevo | 2025-07-03 08:22:12+00:00
The downfall of passkeys is that - as was inevitable - they are horrifyingly implemented webshit.

For example, nearly every visit to my Amazon orders page I am now greeted with a nearly full screen modal browser popup letting me know about passkeys and why I should switch to them RIGHT NOW. I politely declined - the first thousand times. I don't know if this is a site or browser issue and frankly I don't care anymore. It's spam at this point and I want nothing to do with it.

My hesitancy was rooted in concerns about potential issues pretty much what you just described so glad to know I was right.

Seems like passkeys use a very simple model where you are using a single device with a single browser or are somehow syncing across devices with some cloud service - and from your description it sounds like that doesn't even work.

No thanks - I'll stick with passwords. Did everyone forget about hardware tokens which are device and OS-independent and rely on no external infrastructre?
by bound008 | 2025-07-03 08:23:48+00:00
he's incredibly nice and a passionate geek like the rest of us. he's just excited about what generative models could mean for people who like to build stuff. if you want a better understanding of what someone who co-created django is doing posting about this stuff, take a look at his blog post introducing django -- https://simonwillison.net/2005/Jul/17/django/
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-03 08:24:01+00:00
I suppose they refer to a more detailed mental model. For example, I know that it's a key in my device, but I don't have a detailed enough model to know if it will work if transferred to another device or stored in the cloud, or what I'm supposed to do at a cybercafe/hotel/airport/borrowed computer. So my mental model is not good enough. With passwords, the answers to questions like that are obvious.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-03 08:25:23+00:00
> Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.

Pinning this on human psychology is ignoring how the game is set up. If you structure something in such a way that the person who gets the most points wins and gets a prize, a move that causes you to lose one point but causes your only opponent to lose two points will put you ahead. That's arithmetic, not psychology.

The issue, then, is when we allow things to be structured that way -- as zero sum games. Instead what we should be doing is stamping out anything that fosters artificial scarcity.

Moreover, as the paper points out, that's what happens in dyadic systems. Which is to say, two party systems. If you have the option to cost yourself a point but cost one of your opponents two points, that's an advantageous move in a two-party system, but not in a five-party system even with a zero-sum game, because then you've cost yourself a point against three of the four other parties. So if you want to get rid of that, have your state adopt score voting (specifically score voting, not IRV or any of that mess) instead of the existing voting system which mathematically constrains us to a two-party system.
by figmert | 2025-07-03 08:25:48+00:00
I think the difference between Airbnbs and couchsurfers is huge. Couch surfing is a voluntary yet free service provided by someone out of the goodwill of their heart. Airbnb is provided for profit. Leaving such reviews is fine for an Airbnb (assuming it's deserved ofc), but certainly not okay for couch surfing.

It does depend what they've reviewed though. Is the person hosting living in a in a gross apartment vs the towel designs are not nice.
Show HN: Open Dog Registry – free, open-source API for 200 dog breeds
by chase-manning | 2025-07-03 08:26:00+00:00
Open Dog Registry is a public JSON API that returns detailed data for 200+ dog breeds.

• Website: https://registry.dog/ • One-call endpoint: https://registry.dog/api/v1 • Returns general info, personality traits, care stats, plus indoor/outdoor/studio images • MIT-licensed, zero auth, free for personal or commercial use • Cache-friendly: please cache where possible to keep the service fast • Built with TypeScript, hosted on Cloudflare Workers (cold start ≈15 ms)

I built it to simplify pet-finder projects and vet apps that need structured breed data. Feedback, pull requests, and GitHub stars are welcome!

Repo: https://github.com/chase-manning/open-dog-registry
by dataflow | 2025-07-03 08:28:00+00:00
I used "scripting" loosely (Python source files are frequently called Python scripts), I wasn't referring to shell scripts specifically. Feel free to pretend I said Bash or data science or whatever you want.

Re: your first sentence: I neither understand the logic nor do I understand how insulting the developer is going to help D succeed here even if the logic was sound.
by richardw | 2025-07-03 08:29:17+00:00
Interesting. I’m only a user of them but not had one second of trouble. I save them on my device in the native saving place (iOS/mac) and it just works. I didn’t know this issue existed and I’d like to avoid it. Is the issue when you save them in a password manager?

I have Bitwarden for personal and now 1Password for work, so might hit the issue at some point.