MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-07-16 15:27:14+00:00
Go look at the resumes of astronauts, particularly before modern DEI stuff. For instance here [1] is Buzz Aldrin. A-student in school, varsity football center for a state championship team. Graduated third in his class at West Point with a degree of mechanical engineering while also competing in track and field. Enlisted in the Air Force as a combat fighter pilot where he saw plentiful [successful] combat including dog fighting. Enrolled at MIT and earned a doctorate in astronautics.

His thesis was "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous, the dedication of which read: "In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!"

He then began work as an engineer on Project Gemini. He then applied to become an astronaut and was rejected because he had not passed test pilot qualifications. He sought a waiver, and was rejected. Fortuitously for him, the next round of astronauts NASA sought required being a test pilot or having at least 1000 hours of flying time in a jet. He had more than 2,200 hours in jets alone. And at that point, he applied again, and was accepted.

---

McCain [2] - prep school (where he at least wrestled), graduated from the US Naval Academy ranked 894 of 899 students. Completed flight school where he was regarded as careless and reckless, having crashed his craft multiple times. He then requested a combat assignment. The first carrier he was on caught fire killing hundreds shortly after he arrived. He moved to another carrier and was shot down and captured a couple of months later. Not exactly "The Right Stuff."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_edu...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_edu...
Show HN: SimMS – GPU accelerated mass spectra search
by tornikeo | 2025-07-16 15:27:30+00:00
I made a GPU-accelerated tool for mass spectra search.

A mass spectrum is like a fingerprint for a molecule. It can be used to identify toxins, explosives, drugs, and more in urine, blood, and food. Organisms are made up of a mind-boggling number of different molecules. When screening a fluid for various molecules, you often need to perform up to 10^12 parallel comparisons.

I ported the comparison algorithm (a modified cosine similarity) to run on a GPU. On one of the latest GPUs, the H100, SimMS achieves a 1700x speedup compared to MatchMS.
by jonah | 2025-07-16 15:27:40+00:00
My parents property sits at the confluence of a creek and a river. They've built their house on a promontory that had signs of inhabitation by indigenous peoples. We had a "100-year flood" when I was growing up. It was quite impressive to wake up in the morning and see the water within six vertical feet of the house and 30 to 40 ft. of water the bottom field with entire trees floating Long.
by leed25d | 2025-07-16 15:27:49+00:00
""" Basically, they’re separate because Guido doesn’t care about packaging. That’s really what it comes down to. When packaging started to become a thing, we just didn’t have any interest in it, and so it never became a core dev concern. It just never came up—it was just not our thing. """

That's the way that junior programmers think. Marketers too.
by spacechild1 | 2025-07-16 15:28:01+00:00
> which isn't a problem unless you are abusing threads.

Well, some people would call this a problem (or downside). Many real-world programs need to access shared state or exchange data between client. This is significantly less error prone if everything happens on a single thread.

> If you avoid synchronization, like javascript then you also don't get pre-emption or parallelism.

When we are talking about networking, most of the time is spent waiting for I/O. We need concurrency, but there's typically no need for actual CPU level parallelism.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't use threads at all - on the contrary! -, but we should use them where they make sense. In some cases we can't even avoid it (e.g. audio).

A typical modern desktop application, for example, would have the UI on the main thread, all the networking on a network thread, audio on an audio thread, expensive calculations on a worker thread (pool), etc.

IMO it just doesn't make sense to complicate things by having one thread per socket when all the networking can easily be served by a single thread.
by MostlyStable | 2025-07-16 15:28:04+00:00
Yes, you can, and yes, among the group of people represented on HN, I have no doubt that a fair number do use it this way.....but how typical is that? How often does the average steam deck owner use it as a desktop? How often does the average user leave the steam launcher? How often does the average user think of it as anything other than a gaming console?

If all you care about is some very technical sense of "how many linux desktop environments are installed in the world", then none of these questions matter. But if the reason one is interested in the "Linux Desktop market share" is some level of interest in how people are using desktop computers, and when/if they are choosing them over competing OSs like Windows and MacOS, then these questions matter a lot. My guess is that 90% of SteamDeck owners don't think about the fact that it is Linux, barely every leave the steam launcher, and were they to be looking at getting a new desktop computer, their SteamDeck experience would not make them consider a linux distro vs. Windows or MacOS.

In case it matters, I think more people should be running Linux than do, I think people over-estimate the difficulty of switching. I want the steam deck and SteamOS to be a gateway for people to switch in more contexts....I'm just skeptical that it's actually doing that more than a trivial amount.
by whatevsmate | 2025-07-16 15:28:12+00:00
I hear you but I also don't see a ton of disagreement here either. Like, the fact that D3D12 includes _some_ usability fixes suggests that DevEx really does take a back seat to the primary goal.

I'm not arguing that DevEx doesn't exist in graphics programming. Just that it's second to dots on screen. I also find webgpu to be a lot nicer in terms of DevEx than WebGL.

Wdyt? Still revisionist, or maybe just a slightly different framing of the same pov?
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-16 15:28:22+00:00
They had a warrant for the raid. Or at least they showed me a piece of paper, but my mind was so thrown that I literally couldn't read it (I've never experienced such a thing before or since - I literally couldn't make out letters on the page, such was my state of shock at the time).

I wasn't arrested or charged, they found nothing of what they were looking for on the multi terabytes of disks they seized. No further action other than the raid.
by kemayo | 2025-07-16 15:28:25+00:00
Funnily enough, just starting your class method/variable name with __ does do magic things as a pseudo-keyword. Specifically, it mangles the name for callers outside of that class -- `self.__foo` would need to be accessed as `obj._ClassName__foo`. It's python's approach to having private methods, while remaining somewhat ideologically opposed to them existing.

This doesn't apply to the dunder methods, though. They're magically exempt from this magical mangling, so you could call them directly if you wanted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> You don't think the Python way is worse?

They seem about equivalent? I don't see any real reason to pick one or the other, beyond personal preferences.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-16 15:28:33+00:00
"And guess what's the de facto programming language for AI? Yep, that sneaky one."

Is this referring at all to to PyTorch. If not, any guesses what the author has in mind

"Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros."

Is this referring to GNU/Linux.

UNIX (UNIX-like) includes more than Linux; some UNIX distributions do not include Python in the base system

Where it is left as choice to the user whether to install it

I know this because I use such distributions and, unless some software needs it, I do not install Python

In such case, when I am done using that software I uninstall it^1

For example, he mentions retrieving YouTube channel metadata

I do not use Python for this; I use a 19-line shell script (ash not bash), its startup time is faster

Unlike Python, it is included in the base system of the UNIX distributions (both Linux and BSD) that I use

But if I need to test something using yt-dlp, then I might temporarily install Python

1. I compile Python from source and one annoying aspect of the project , in addition to the slow startup time, is their failure to include an uninstall target in their Makefile
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-16 15:28:47+00:00
You're not thinking general enough.

Once merit no longer becomes an effective moat individuals, organizations and entities turn to violence. In the modern world this means cozying up to government who has the monopoly on violence and getting competition regulated away if not in full then at least fractionally with barriers to entry.

I would be unsurprised if over the next 40yr the software industry does the same thing by adopting professional organizations that get themselves written into law the way various other professions have.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-16 15:28:55+00:00
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but let's be honest

People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.

This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.

What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.

Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
by agoodusername63 | 2025-07-16 15:29:09+00:00
The case that this is true is only if you don't have an Nvidia GPU or don't play D3D12 games.

I tried it, discovered that Nvidia has a known regression that causes anywhere up to 25% lower performance compared to Windows in GPU limited games in D3D12, and immediately went back to Windows.

I'll never understand why people keep championing Linux for gaming when it has such a severe regression on the most common gaming GPU vendor. Steam says 75%. An Nvidia employee even stated that the fix is not trivial so they're not committing to a timeline for a fix. This is a year+ old issue. They're never fixing it because it doesn't affect CUDA.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/164#issuecommen...
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-16 15:29:09+00:00
This article, and the New Yorker in general, seem like a good reason why people aren't reading.

If you want to KNOW "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever.

If, instead, you want to READ ABOUT "What's Happening to Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you.

Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy or artificially busy with social media and other things that aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 15:29:54+00:00
I know you are making it seem like this is a very cringe position, but its in fact a very valid one.

The problem in most any technology sector is that its impossible for one person in reasonable amount of time to put together systems for use. Maybe in the future when LLMs are advanced enough to where I can have it code a full OS for me to my liking this will change, but right now, I have to depend on other people doing work.

Linux happens to be in a sweet spot where the collaborative development is guided by technical decisions instead of market forces, but Linux is just an OS. It needs open hardware to run. It just so happens that laptop manfuacturers who target Windows just don't see Linux as a big enough threat to start locking things down.

But historically, along came Apple, made the iPhone, realized most people want jewelry more than functionality, realized they could monetize this, and now their Macbooks are locked down to MacOS pretty hardcore.

If Linux went the same route, you could very well see a distinct lack of hardware being made that can run open source Linux. Which then limits you to smaller manufacturers that don't have capital or bandwidth to compete with bigger ones.
by jraph | 2025-07-16 15:30:03+00:00
> Android target levels are so different in how they behave towards applications that they're practically best treated as distinct OS's to begin with

You can run applications running different target levels side by side though

> desktop Linux where even a program from the mid-1990s will run unmodified in the latest version of the OS

mhm... I wish but that's not so true for Linux. Your old program will likely be missing some dynamic library or be incompatible with your current libc. Desktop Linux userspace is awfully unstable, compatibility is broken left and right, basically no one cares except the Linux kernel itself. There's a reason people jokingly say that win32, through wine, is the most stable Linux API. If you still have the source code of your program (and the linux ecosystem is full of free software so that's likely), you can always recompile but you'll probably need to edit the code so it's compatible with the current versions of libraries).

I've heard macOS is not great at this neither.
by lostlogin | 2025-07-16 15:30:06+00:00
I live in Auckland, New Zealand and had never been in a flood until 2023. We got something like 280mm in a 24 hours, on the back of a wet month. At its peak we we getting 50mm an hour.

It was incredible. Manhole covers popping off, mildly sloped roads were rivers with rapids and flat ones were lakes, growing as you watched.

Caught completely unprepared, it was chaos.

Living near a river or flood-plain is a hard no for me, even if I had 3m thick stone walls.
by beng-nl | 2025-07-16 15:30:36+00:00
I’m a bit surprised (but interested) to read it beats cython (in performance I assume). Cython can - and for performance, should - be written so that loops and code in loops are pure C code without any Python interaction. Even the GIL can be released. Maybe I’m making too many assumptions about the two cases, but in what way do you see cython being beaten given the above?

Thanks!
by shmerl | 2025-07-16 15:30:37+00:00
> but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all

You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.

> All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it

I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).

But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.

> Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack

Why not? Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.

It works even for such intense (changes wise) cases as gaming and actual video media. Surely it works for GUIs too.
by kajumix | 2025-07-16 15:30:55+00:00
Most interesting novel ideas originate at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Profitable trades could be found in the biomedicine sector when the knowledge of biomedicine and finance are combined. That's where I see LLMs shining because they span disciplines way more than any human can. Once we figure out a way to have them combine ideas (similar to how Gwern is suggesting), there will be, I suspect, a flood of novel and interesting ideas, inconceivable with humans.
by biophysboy | 2025-07-16 15:31:08+00:00
I’ve used both. I would say nextflow is a more production-oriented tool. Check out seqera platform to see if any of the features there seem useful. It can also be useful to get out of the wildcards/files mindset for certain workflows. Nextflow chucks the results of a step into a hashed folder, so you don’t have to worry about unique output names.

That said, I do find snakemake easier to prototype with. And it also has plenty of production features (containers, cloud, etc). For many use cases, they’re functionally equivalent
by taylodl | 2025-07-16 15:31:18+00:00
Hydrogen was never practical in the consumer space, but I think it still has benefits to offer in the heavy machinery and long-haul transport space. This is why Toyota is investing heavily in the long-haul transport space and is making hydrogen-powered class 8 heavy-duty trucks. As for heavy machinery, it's likely they would license the technology to the major players (Caterpillar, Komatsu, Volvo CE) in that space.
by doodlesdev | 2025-07-16 15:31:40+00:00
Out of curiosity, what distribution have you been using lately instead of Debian?

Anecdotally, I've been using Fedora Workstation for a few years already, and my Steam + Proton Experimental experience has been fantastic with an AMD GPU using the drivers that come with the kernel.

Although I must admit, I miss having a Debian-based distribution sometimes, because in some situations I can't find rpm packages for more specific things I'm trying to do in my system. The problem is I just don't know any other distribution that's not Debian Testing that could work like Fedora Workstation but with .deb packages.
by usgroup | 2025-07-16 15:31:48+00:00
It was very influential and had all kinds of interesting stories (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...).

I'm not sure what qualifies as dead. Prolog is still around although as a small and specific community, perhaps comparable in size to the APL community at least within an order of magnitude.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-16 15:32:15+00:00
Yes he did but this was not the trigger. The trigger is much more complex with being the second in the brotherhood, needs to be different from the rest, and - certainly - influences from anime etc.

I realized how difficult it is to relate to someone's mind without being the adult who tells you everything (and therefore you do the opposite)or to try to find ways to slow down the madness.

I hope that time will help him to mature.
by runjake | 2025-07-16 15:32:21+00:00
1. Python was pretty popular well before entry-level programming courses adopted it. I think they adopted Python because it was a good general purpose scripting language, multiplatform, easy to install and get going, that taught programming concepts in a more approachable way for beginners.

2. Python on web servers was a thing long before 2012. You had Zope in 1998 or so, and it was pretty popular for a while, and hugely influential to subsequent web frameworks. Django came out in about 2005. TurboGears, Pylons in about 2005 or so. Flask in 2010... and these are just the more popular frameworks.

3. I think the author meant that PHP was also vaguely C-like in syntax, like JS. Keyword: vaguely. You had a common way of declaring stuff with curly braces and semi-colons.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-07-16 15:32:23+00:00
> They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.

This has more to do with the Syrian military being completely starved of resources, particularly money, due to the US occupying the most lucrative portions of sovereign Syrian territory for years. Not having Russian airpower on call absolutely contributed to the collapse but not being able to reliably pay/staff formerly-capable formations like the Tiger Forces or 4th Armored Division (in addition to not being able to afford reconstruction) is what really did the regime in. Watch this from 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/live/MFsFOS5Odno?si=xry8-a2_cKLIRKW-...

>This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).

The Russians have been domestically mass producing their versions of the Shahed-series drones for a while now. Interruptions in arms transfers due to Iran's own security problems are unlikely to significantly degrade Russia's drone salvos at this point.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55948 The organization calculated that Russia produced an average of 60.5 Geran drones per day, or roughly 1,850 drones per month, between February and April 2025.

https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/shahed-and-geran-the-evolut... Over time, a separate version emerged which is known as the Geran-2, which is the name given to Shaheds made in Russia. Russia now makes hundreds of these drones every week, enabling it to increase its usage to 200 per week in September 2024, and then to 1,000 per week by March 2025.

> They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within.

Who do you think will stage a revolt, with both Navalny and Prigozhin dead? There's not really any charismatic opposition leadership left that I can think of.

> They have lost their capacity to project power

Ok, I will compromise and largely agree with this statement in broad strokes. Yes, Russia's power projection capacity has diminished. That's a very different position IMO compared to "Russia can only do defense" as you stated earlier....while Russia has ~600,000 men busy invading the largest country in Europe after Russia itself. Their global power projection capacity is degraded because so much of their attention is sucked into fighting the largest land war in Europe in 80 years, but that's not the same as only being able to defend.

> Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops.

Without going too far off on a tangent, this also applies to Ukraine (regarding loyalty...Colombians are definitely considered "seasoned" as far as international mercenaries go).

https://www.nzz.ch/english/discharged-by-their-own-countrys-...

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2025/06/04/iowa...
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-07-16 15:32:26+00:00
Technically time is exponentially dilated, this introduces large relativity of synchronism: the same thing takes different time in different reference frames. You aren't completely wrong to say black holes will fly through each other, but this doesn't take the same time in all reference frames. For a distant observer it takes infinite time after their event horizons touch, and Hawking radiation evaporates everything before that.

How black holes can move is an interesting question, but as you can see, in reality there are no infinities, since stuff slows down before that. Maybe infinities could exist for an observer inside black hole, but an observer outside of black hole sees only large slow down.