MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jarred | 2025-07-19 04:08:35+00:00
This will ship as part of the Bun v1.2.19 release, which we are aiming for tonight.

There is a Windows-only bug in the isolated install mode blocking us from using isolated installs ourselves in the bun repo, and we need to fix that before we can release this.

If you want to try this early, you can run `bun upgrade --canary` and `bun install --linker=isolated` or put `install.linker = "isolated"` in bunfig.toml.

Isolated installs are a significant performance improvement on Windows (10x, sometimes 20x faster installs) and a minor positive or neutral performance impact on macOS and Linux. More importantly, they make using bun install in monorepos a lot more reliable by preventing dependencies from loading versions of other dependencies they did not specify in their own package.json.

Happy to answer any questions about Bun
by iJohnDoe | 2025-07-19 04:08:51+00:00
It boggles the mind that trash is being sent 8,000 miles, but this happens because profits are made at each stage of the process. Local waste collectors are paid by cities and counties to collect recycling. They sort and sell the valuable materials to whoever will buy them. Everything else is exported, because this is cheaper than sending it to local landfills or trying to process it domestically. Brokers and exporters profit by buying this waste cheaply and selling it at a markup to buyers in developing countries. Shipping companies make money by filling empty containers on return trips from the U.S., earning extra revenue with little additional cost. Overseas, small companies sort through the waste to extract and sell the small percentage that’s actually recyclable, often dumping or burning the rest.
by thisisit | 2025-07-19 04:10:14+00:00
People who keep parroting this take are the most hypocritical bunch I have ever seen. Because if the premise is true then when these institutions existed then those were also voted by taxpayers to exist, right? But that time these “taxpayers” made noise about how government can’t be trusted and majority is muzzling their right of speech and first amendment etc etc. Now they when they are in the majority they turn around and say stuff like majority rules, government can be trusted etc.

And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
by kristjansson | 2025-07-19 04:10:30+00:00
Yes of course, local impacts would be more pronounced. Wouldn’t want them near coral or anything.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument for underwater DCs. I just think it’s important to keep the scales of these things in view, so one doesn’t dilute actual causes of large scale climate change (GHGs etc.) with things like this that have basically zero chance of any even mesoscale effect.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-19 04:10:59+00:00
A dude committed cold-blooded murder on a busy street and he became a folk hero because the victim was a health insurance CEO. People are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the providers and the insurance. The providers are the ones who make you better. The insurance is the company that takes a shitload of your money and then makes you miserable if you use the service you’re paying for.
by shric | 2025-07-19 04:11:08+00:00
This is a weird post as the generated program doesn’t even output results.

I tried a similar test using Python and Claude Code and it generated something that outputted a sorted list of directory contents, like ls.

However, unlike the author, this doesn’t lead me to think this is AGI. How many posts are there out there that these models would be trained on have people explaining strace outputs and comparing code to them?
by ksec | 2025-07-19 04:11:10+00:00
That is why I stated transistor improvements what was previously known as Moore's law will continue for at least another 10 years. The Smartphone has carried us from 2008 - 2023. The money that is being used today are already invested into the next 2 - 3 years of Semi Conductor manufacturing. That is 2nm or A20 this year and A18 / 14 in two years time. There is enough momentum towards A10 and A8 by 2030, 2032. Even if things slows down by then it is enough to run till 2035 unless something catastrophic like WW3 or Market collapse happening.

That said even if we somehow reach A5 in 2035, we are only at about 12x density increase. If we include system packaging, chiplet, interconnect advancement pushing this to 30 to 40x. This is still a far cry from the 1000 to 10000x compute demands from a lot of AI companies. And that is assuming memory bandwidth could scale with it.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-19 04:11:45+00:00
the word "null term" appears in the ascii art diagram, that's where the null terminator is. the strlen field is in the portion labelled header.

the strlen field can be moved to where the word "null term" appears, except with a changed semantic of "bytes remaining" so it will go to zero at the right time. now you have a single entity "bytes remaining" instead of two entities, "strlen" and "null" giving a small storage saving (there is an additional null terminator most of the time, right at the end of the string; but this doesn't take up any storage because that storage is not used for anything else)

over and out.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-19 04:13:21+00:00
I think you can significantly save on your claude tokens if you just give the llm `head -n 1 TRACE`

execve("/usr/bin/ls", ["ls"], 0x7fff7e969540 /* 110 vars */)

Some how it figures out how to implement `ls`. That indeed shouldn't be possible. It puts an AI skeptic into believing we're in post-AGI territory here.

Edit: tbf, I did not notice they replaced `ls` with `lol` in the trace file to avoid this, but still. To think the strace of ls was never part of the training data of the LLM then to think that is enough to somehow reverse engineer what binary blob is is insane thinking https://github.com/ghuntley/strace-to-application/blob/trunk...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-19 04:13:21+00:00
std::launder should probably be used more than it is in low-level code if you care about correctness, even though it doesn’t always bite you in the ass. It is a logical no-op. std::launder is a hint to the compiler to forget everything it thinks it knows about the type instance, sort of like marking it “volatile” only for a specific moment in time.

The use of std::launder should be more common than it is, I’ve seen a few bugs in optimized builds when not used, but compilers have been somewhat forgiving about not using it in places you should because it hasn’t always existed. Rigorous code should be using it instead of relying on the leniency of the compiler.

In database engine code it definitely gets used in the storage layers.
by solraph | 2025-07-19 04:15:17+00:00
Any of the 1L PCs from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. They sip power (5~10 watts), and take up minimal space. I've got a 6 or 7 VMs running on one, and it barely breaks 5% CPU usage.

See https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... for a good list of reviews.
by const_cast | 2025-07-19 04:16:08+00:00
Because that's a short-term, individual solution. But when companies do stuff that's bad for people generally, we want that stuff no longer done, generally.

Like, sure, I could buy medicine that isn't poisoned. But better would be to have no poison medicine - and that's how we got the FDA. Obviously this is extremely different, but the principle is the same: we don't like a behavior by a company, we can make that no longer happen if we want.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-19 04:16:45+00:00
Reminds me of ye olden days when kernel transforms were merely weighted multiplicative and/or additive matrixes applied to every point in the source arriving at pixel data in the target. Blur, sharpen, color channel filter, color swap, invert, etc. An extremely diagonalizable problem suitable for massive parallelism and concurrent calculation because there is little/no dependency on prior calculations.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-07-19 04:17:26+00:00
There is a world of nuance separating "normalizing" and "banning" something though, that's simply a false dichotomy.

I'd wager most "normal" people would recoil at the idea of eating excrement and, for all my open-mindedness, it's probably not something I'd actively endorse. But banning it is on a whole other leaf. Things can and should be allowed to exist on the fringe.

Otherwise we're moving towards the subject of the T.S. Eliot quote where "everything that is not forbidden will be compulsory, and everything not compulsory will be forbidden."
Ask HN: Is clearing browser data (cookies, cache, history) enough?
by givemeethekeys | 2025-07-19 04:17:55+00:00
I'd like to stop having to accept / reject every privacy pop up that shows up.

I have an idea:

1) Find (or build) a browser plugin that auto-accepts all GDPR and tracking pop-ups.

2) Set my browser to clear all data when I close the browser.

3) Always browse in Incognito mode.

I'm thinking of following the above steps instead of spending the time to Reject All tracking on each website I encounter.

I was wondering if you think my idea is dumb, incomplete, or something else.

Thank you!
by hlieberman | 2025-07-19 04:18:27+00:00
This is a troll, right? The strace for "ls" on my system consists of 1) checking if selinux is enabled (which their re-implementation does not do), 2) openat -> fstat -> getdents64, 3) writing out the information those syscalls gave you.

Jumping from "oh my gosh you can (incorrectly) reimplement ls from a trace of syscalls" to "this means the end of binary blobs" is a level of detachment from reality I've most recently seen from Geoff Lewis. Never mind that the author mixes up eBPF tracing and strace.
by esperent | 2025-07-19 04:19:16+00:00
Regarding the Oatly ad at the top (Another ad for our oat drink providing no reason at all why you should try it), this ad does have a signal. It's a humblebrag. It's saying, our product is so well known, and the reasons for using it so obvious, that we don't need to say anything. It's cementing Oatly brand in the minds of anyone who already thinks that they should be switching to non-dairy milk for any reason (health, environment, etc).
by anonnon | 2025-07-19 04:19:58+00:00
Look, for whatever reason, he's not good at finishing what he starts: https://www.destructoid.com/he-worked-on-it-for-three-years-...

How much of that is due to the programming practices he espouses, I'm not sure. Ironically, if he went all-in on OOP with Smalltalk, I could see the super productivity that environment provides actually making it harder for him to finish anything, given how much it facilitates prototyping and wheel-reinvention. You see this with Pharo, where they rewrite the class browser (and other tools) every 2-3 years.

But his track record doesn't support the reputation he's built for himself.

> for game projects

That's the problem. Casey holds up a small problem domain, like AAA games, where OOP's overhead (even C++'s OOP) may genuinely pose a real performance problem, and suggests that it's representative of software as a whole; as if vtables are the reason VisualStudio takes minutes to load today vs. seconds 20 years ago.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-19 04:21:14+00:00
Yep. Wage suppression and insta stock bump. Publicly- and private equity-owned corporations are inherently unstable beasts. Knowledge workers and ordinary workers need to band together and start their own co-ops that stay private, partially collectively-owned, have retirement plans, high performance people, pride in their goods and services, high job satisfaction, and very low turnover because everyone is trying to join them.
by 9dev | 2025-07-19 04:23:00+00:00
Im working on a similar project, Colibri (https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri), an app to manage your ebook collection. Librari is looking really slick! Also, It’s always interesting to see how others approach schema selection and customization.

If I may, I would suggest adding support for ingesting data from open sources, for example OpenLibrary, WikiData, the LoC API, and a bunch of others. Since you’re building a for-profit project, you can probably also tap the billed services to get high-quality metadata. But even with OpenLibrary alone, you have access to a treasure trove of information that spares users from having to type off things from their books. That allows for bulk import, high-res covers, and so on.

I’m currently working on the metadata reconciliation engine in Colibri, so feel free to check out the source every once in a while.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-19 04:23:13+00:00
I was being sarcastic. The author asked an LLM to implement `ls`* and was so surprised when it did that he thought maybe he can use that insight into reverse engineering firmware blobs. Complete delusion, but chatbots have that effect on some people.

* if you don't know what `ls` is, just think like implementing the simplest possible application that's 2 or 3 lines of code.
by komali2 | 2025-07-19 04:23:17+00:00
This is a toxic masculinity form of mythology that ignores reams of historical evidence of effective ways of leading people.

If you want a good bibliography, check out the sources of any Dale Carnegie book. He went through letters, journals, biographies, and writings of leaders as far back as the ancient Greeks. His conclusion is the opposite of the one you're making here. The best leaders lift people up, not shout people down.

Others here discuss absurdities like drill instructors. None of us work on a battlefield, none of us are in life or death situations here.

We're talking about leading people in labor. It's basically a solved problem, but for some reason people keep needing to debate the effectiveness of "tough love" approaches. It baffles me.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-19 04:25:47+00:00
You seem to be making a giant leap from “human thought can probably be emulated by a Turing machine” to “human thought can probably be emulated by LLMs in the actual physical universe.” The former is obvious, the latter I’m deeply skeptical of.

The machine part of a Turing machine is simple. People manage to build them by accident. Programming language designers come up with a nice-sounding type inference feature and discover that they’ve made their type system Turing-complete. The hard part is the execution speed and the infinite tape.

Ignoring those problems, making AGI with LLMs is easy. You don’t even need something that big. Make a neural network big enough to represent the transition table of a Turing machine with a dozen or so states. Configure it to be a universal machine. Then give it a tape containing a program that emulates the known laws of physics to arbitrary accuracy. Simulate the universe from the Big Bang and find the people who show up about 13 billion years later. If the known laws of physics aren’t accurate enough, compare with real-world data and adjust as needed.

There’s the minor detail that simulating quantum mechanics takes time exponential in the number of particles, and the information needed to represent the entire universe can’t fit into that same universe and still leave room for anything else, but that doesn’t matter when you’re talking Turing machines.

It does matter a great deal when talking about what might lead to actual human-level intelligent machines existing in reality, though.
by quectophoton | 2025-07-19 04:26:23+00:00
> and they rebutted by claiming that PKs created some kind of "special" index

Maybe they were thinking about something like the "clustered indexes" from SQL Server, and mistakenly thought PostgreSQL also worked like that:

> "When you create a PRIMARY KEY constraint, a unique clustered index on the column or columns is automatically created if a clustered index on the table doesn't already exist and you don't specify a unique nonclustered index." [1]

> "Clustered indexes sort and store the data rows in the table or view based on their key values." [2]

So I'm guessing you could squeeze some extra performance for certain access patterns, maybe? I have not worked at any place where I had needed to worry about low level details like this, though, so obligatory disclaimer to take this comment with a grain of salt due to my lack of first-hand experience.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/i...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/i...
by h4ny | 2025-07-19 04:27:04+00:00
Why is this impossible? If the LLM has effectively seen all the code that could lead to that trace, all it has to do is to pick the bits out that has the highest chance to map to it right?

Is it a new marketing strategy to start by saying you're "incredibly cynical" about something that you're going to say the exact opposite about, perhaps to mask arguments with little rigor?
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-19 04:28:05+00:00
I have learned that number one rule of working in a corporation is "do not offend people". You can explain away a major delay. You can explain away an incident. You can explain away a project not being delivered at all. You can explain away all and any failure, but if you offend someone, you have a big problem. People's egos are extremely fragile, and it makes zero sense to risk even tiniest chance of conflict, unless your very job is at stake.

Seeing someone value a serious project higher than random guy's personal feelings is extremely refreshing.

> But you don't need to be mean

You don't need to be nice either
by maxbond | 2025-07-19 04:28:13+00:00
That was ten years ago, there have been tons of really objectionable games on Steam in recent years. Eg I just checked and the game where you roleplay as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors is still on Steam.

Per Wikipedia:

> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
by EasyMark | 2025-07-19 04:28:24+00:00
they still are giving ICE 4X the money as before to set up a first draft speedrun of a secret police force that can run around grabbing people off the street with no ID, masks on, and tossing them in white vans to imprison them without due process or court hearings and send them to 3rd world nations for indefinite internment. This is likely see if the public will stand against it.
by esperent | 2025-07-19 04:30:21+00:00
I'd urge you to read a book like Black Swan, or study up on statistics.

Doomers have been wrong about completely different doom scenarios in the past (+), but it says nothing about to this new scenario. If you're doing statistics in your head about it, you're wrong. We can't use scenarios from the past to make predictions about completely novel scenarios like thinking computers.

(+) although they were very close to being right about nuclear doom, and may well be right about climate change doom.
by mandeepj | 2025-07-19 04:31:53+00:00
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years.

Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
by anonymousiam | 2025-07-19 04:32:00+00:00
Did you read the article?

--

Still, the U.S. press was uninterested. Just one day after the Le Monde report, the Washington Post ran a story on March 6 that seemed to put the whole thing to rest. Headlined “Reports of Israeli Spy Ring Dismissed,” the piece, by John Mintz and Dan Eggen, opened with official denials from a “wide array of U.S. officials” and quoted Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden as saying, “This seems to be an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage.”

The Post quoted anonymous officials who said they thought the allegations had been “circulated by a single employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration who is angry that his theories have not gained currency … [T]wo law enforcement officials said the disgruntled DEA agent, who disagreed with the conclusion of FBI and CIA intelligence experts that no spying was taking place, appears to be leaking a memo that he himself wrote.”

--
by dsabanin | 2025-07-19 04:33:36+00:00
Really loving Bun these days. Was really pleasantly surprised using their shell scripting API in typescript - single file, shebang line, straightforward DSL, support for piping data here and there.

Really, really nice and ergonomic. Made a few utility scripts today and enjoyed it much better than bash.

https://bun.com/docs/runtime/shell
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-19 04:34:37+00:00
Not really. The iPhone 13 Pro non-Max was fine. If people want bigger, they can get a Max phablet. It's the 6 and 6 Plus especially that had a bendgate. They're trying too hard to make them too thin, sometimes. I'd be fine with a 5-7 mm thicker. Apple should do what's it's best at... not listening to frivolous criticism.
by tangerine_beet | 2025-07-19 04:34:41+00:00
Seems this newfound ability to detect cancers earlier than we thought possible could be used to develop better treatments to boost the body's innate ability to eliminate cancerous cells before they turn malign: 1) identify thousands of people with traces of cancerous DNA that are too weak to merit immediate action and who are willing to participate in a trial. 2) Divide them into two groups, one group gets for one month a daiiy dose of auricularia auricula fungus extract or whatever that is believed to possibly prevent cancers from developing, the other group gets a placebo. 3) Run the early-detection test again at the end of the month to see whether or not there is a difference in cancerous DNA signal strength between the two groups.
by EasyMark | 2025-07-19 04:37:17+00:00
A lot of states evidently give Medicaid to illegal aliens as well. ICE wants this data to track down those persons. I feel it's illegal and overreach, but Congress has turned into a rubber stamp for Trump and just sitting on their thumbs, albeit some have furrowed brows and "concerns". None of them do anything though. Congress should be the main power in Washington, not our new King in Orange.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-07-19 04:39:18+00:00
I completely agree with the paradox, just yesterday I posted how FOSS is not accessible to non-techies on my problem validation platform[1].

I've been thinking if a platform which connects techies to non-techies can help solve that, say like a systems integrator for individuals.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/484-foss-are-not-accessible-to-...
by Retric | 2025-07-19 04:40:36+00:00
You’re falling for the broken window fallacy, it’s inefficient as demonstrated by automation reducing the percentage of the economy devoted to financial services without any negative effects.

Banking used to really suck. Walk into an old bank building and it looks empty with spaces for a dozen tellers never actually used, this is a good thing as nobody actually wants to stand in line at a bank. People have largely stopped using cash because swiping a card is just more pleasant.

Meanwhile payment networks (Visa, Mastercard) have over a 50% profit margin, that’s a huge loss for the US economy. Financial services dropping to 1% of the overall economy would represent a vast improvement over the current system.