MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rich_sasha | 2025-07-16 16:03:34+00:00
IME performant Cython is quite hard to write. Simply renaming your file to *.pyx speeds it up, very much finger in the air, by factor 2x on compute-heavy tasks.

Then you sprinkle some cdef around etc and you get a bit faster again. You rewrite your algo a bit, so it's more "stateful C" style, which is not so much the Python way, and it gets a little faster. But not that much.

So then to make real gains you have to go into the weeds of what is going on. Look at the Cython bottlenecks, usually the spots where Cython has to revert to interacting with the Python interpreter. You may go down the rabbit holes of Cython directives, switching off things like overflow checks etc. IME this is a lot of trial and error and isn't always intuitive. All of this is done in a language that, by this point, is superficially similar to Python but might as well not be. The slowness comes no longer from algorithmic logic or Python semantics but from places where Cython escapes out to the Python interpreter.

At this point, C++ may offer a respite, if you are familiar with the language. Because performance tradeoffs are very obvious in code right in front of you. You get no head start in terms of Pythonic syntax, but otherwise you are writing pure C++ and its so much easier to reason with the performance.

I would imagine that very well written Cython is close in performance to C++ but for someone who knows a bit of C++ and only occasionally writes Cython, the former is much easier to make fast.
by conductr | 2025-07-16 16:03:35+00:00
All I can say is people's perspectives can change, especially after the unthinkable happens.

I somewhat get the individual spirit. Some of this was clearly fueled by the uber Conservative mindset of the area. If Trump offered them the same funds for the same purpose they'd kiss his feet. Most people in the area are also not living on the river and don't really suffer consequences from flooding other than minor inconveniences (maybe more this time than usual obviously), so it's easy for them to let their political biases take reign as they personally are not at risk for the problems these funds are going towards. This is the down side to overly individual spirits, they can't see (or don't care) how this is anyone's interests if it's not in theirs.

The sample size of 180 survey responses is laughable and means nothing, hopefully that didn't sway anyone. Of course the most vocal polarized views are going to be the ones that responded.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-16 16:03:52+00:00
> https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/who-made-that-pr...

That's a 404. Archive.org doesn't even have it.

After Googling, seems the correct link is https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-pr...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140307182222/https://www.nytim...

Semi-related to progress bars and spinners, I think my newest Internet pet peeve is a page that says "No results" for a fetch action like searching while the results are loading with no indication that loading is happening.
by rclkrtrzckr | 2025-07-16 16:03:56+00:00
I am working for a medium sized Swiss company. We're coding our own ERP, based on a nightmare of a stack. We call it "security by confusion". An attacker would maybe find its way in, but he'll never find the way out. If he destroys 90% of our code, we'll still be up and running, because 95% of the codebase is obsolete.
by strcat | 2025-07-16 16:04:10+00:00
> What we're talking about is the GrapheneOS account claiming someone was conscripted, and claiming that it's an "existential and defensive" war.

Our lead developer was conscripted.

> I assume this is basically true and that it's probably Ukraine or maybe Israel

We made it clear enough it was Ukraine and later publicly confirmed it multiple times once it wasn't going to cause any issues.

> but the way they're talking about how everyone is against them and sabotaging them makes me think we may not be dealing with a reliable narrator.

We've never said everyone is against us. You're misrepresenting our statements. You appear to be alluding to ongoing harassment which baselessly claims that I'm insane, delusional, schizophrenic, etc. Phrasing it the way you did doesn't absolve you of responsibility for participating in it.

> I assume that there's truth to what they're saying and that they probably were swatted, and that's awful.

What we've said about these topics is completely accurate and your attempt at misconstruing it and sowing doubt is wrong.

> But it doesn't feel right to me.

Okay, so you have unfounded theories based on vibes.

> Being betrayed seems to be a consistent part of the narrative GrapheneOS presents about itself. It's even in the history section on their website.

The information we've provided about these topics including about Copperhead's takeover attempt on the project in 2018 is accurate. Our lead developer being a Ukrainian man is easy enough to see from GitHub. They went from by far the most active developer to completely inactive after being forcibly conscripted at the start of April. They're now able to contribute a little bit in their free time again.
by ragnese | 2025-07-16 16:04:22+00:00
Well, 4:3 is less wide than 16:9 or 16:10 or whatever else we're doing these days.

But, I do agree that this was likely never the driver. In fact, I've always thought the "obvious" explanation is simply that window controls and title bars are at the top, and since tabs are like nested windows inside a window, they would follow basically the same patterns...
by dkarl | 2025-07-16 16:04:24+00:00
I think I agree with that. It was not the first movie where I remember talking with people who said that it was a bad movie because it could be interpreted in a harmful way. However, it was the first movie where that seemed to be the prevailing opinion in my social group. People complained about toxic readings of the movie, and when I asked them how well they thought those readings were supported by the movie, and what readings they personally took away from it, they wouldn't answer those questions, because they regarded them as distractions from the more important phenomenon of toxic people enjoying the movie.
by panzi | 2025-07-16 16:04:27+00:00
Most websites handle it just fine, for the advanced interface of Mastodon the screen could be even wider! For the rare website that doesn't handle 16:9 well I have this bookmarklet:

javascript:var%20b=document.documentElement;b.style.width='900px';b.style.marginLeft='auto';b.style.marginRight='auto';void(0)
by shagie | 2025-07-16 16:04:30+00:00
In my ChatGPT customization prompt I have:

Not chatty. Unbiased. Avoid use of emoji. Rather than "Let me know if..." style continuations, list a set of prompts to explore further topics. Do not start out with short sentences or smalltalk that does not meaningfully advance the response.

I want an intelligent agent (or one that pretends to be) that answers the question rather than something that I chat with.

As an aside, I like the further prompt exploration approach.

An example of this from the other day - https://chatgpt.com/share/68767972-91a8-8011-b4b3-72d6545cc5... and https://chatgpt.com/share/6877cbe9-907c-8011-91c2-baa7d06ab4...

One part of this in comparison with the linked in post is that I try to avoid delegating choices or judgement to it in the first place. It is an information source and reference librarian (that needs to be double checked - I like that it links its sources now).

However, that's a me thing - something that I do (or avoid doing) with how I interact with an LLM. As noted with the stories of people following the advice of an LLM, it isn't something that is universal.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-16 16:04:31+00:00
Sure, but the author of TFA is well versed in LLMs and so is addressing something different. Novelty isn't the same as creativity, especially when limited to generating based on a fixed repertoire of moves.

The term "deductive closure" has been used to describe what LLMs are capable of, and therefore what they are not capable of. They can generate novelty (e.g. new poem) by applying the rules they have learnt in novel ways, but are ultimately restricted by their fixed weights and what was present in the training data, as well as being biased to predict rather than learn (which they anyways can't!) and explore.

An LLM may do a superhuman job of applying what it "knows" to create solutions to novel goals (be that a math olympiad problem, or some type of "creative" output that has been requested, such as a poem), but is unlikely to create a whole new field of math that wasn't hinted at in the training data because it is biased to predict, and anyways doesn't have the ability to learn that would allow it to build a new theory from the ground up one step at a time. Note (for anyone who might claim otherwise) that "in-context learning" is really a misnomer - it's not about learning but rather about using data that is only present in-context rather than having been in the training set.
by tart-lemonade | 2025-07-16 16:04:36+00:00
> so I asked him "what value is added to the world by having text that looks like it might have been written by Shakespeare but really wasn't" and he didn't have an answer.

Satire. For instance, "You are Alex Jones during the French revolution. Give a news broadcast in old English covering the execution of King Louis XVI at the hands of radical leftists."

But other than humor and getting inspiration for your own writing, I'm not sure what value it really holds.

> Blind worship of AI is rapidly becoming one of my biggest tells of low cognition humans. I'm just so tired of hearing about AI and I'm ready to move onto the next "big thing".

100% agree. It's like the anti-nuclear movement: the people most invested in it either have a financial stake in it (like coal and oil companies astroturfing) or favor vibes over engineering principles.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: "We're going all in on AI" is the modern equivalent to adding .com to your company name to juice the stock price. It's utterly meaningless, yet it works shockingly well.
by aftbit | 2025-07-16 16:05:16+00:00
>Even though this release was peer-reviewed by multiple engineers

I find it somewhat surprising that none of the multiple engineers who reviewed the original change in June noticed that they had added 1.1.1.0/24 to the list of prefixes that should be rerouted. I wonder what sort of human mistake or malice led to that original error.

Perhaps it would be wise to add some hard-coded special-case mitigations to DLS such that it would not allow 1.1.1.1/32 or 1.0.0.1/32 to be reassigned to a single location.
by NewCalculadora | 2025-07-16 16:05:28+00:00
Totally agree — binary search is the classic example of something that feels simple until you try to implement it robustly. The off-by-one errors, incorrect mid-point updates, and forgetting to handle edge cases (like low == high) are so easy to miss.

Bentley’s anecdote is a perfect illustration of how writing "correct" code often depends more on reasoning rigor than language syntax. Loop invariants, like you mentioned, are key here — they help anchor the logic through each iteration. It’s one of those patterns that separates surface-level understanding from deep intuition.

I also like how languages like Rust (with its strong type system) or Python (with clarity) can highlight these logic gaps early, especially in interviews or algorithmic codebases.

If you’ve got the link to your example post handy, I’d love to give it a read.
by jdlyga | 2025-07-16 16:05:33+00:00
Back in the 90s, there was fear about a population bomb. 10 billion people by 2010, mass starvation, etc. We've successfully defused the population bomb since, and now the conversation has flipped. In most developed countries, there's declining birthrates and new concerns over who will support the future economy. The problem now is that these countries do very little to support new families and children. Housing is expensive, childcare costs are crushing, expectations on parents is higher than ever, and there's less community support than ever before. So it's really no wonder why people are choosing to have smaller families or no kids at all.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-16 16:06:02+00:00
I come from a small rural place in Norway, at the lowest point the municipalities started selling old houses for next to nothing, as in equivalent to $100. No strings attached.

But of course, the person living there would have to pay (equivalent to) $1000-$1500 / year on fees related to water, waste management, cleaning of chimney, etc. And you'd probably like to have the house insured.

And these weren't nice new houses. Mostly shacks built right after ww2, some not having been lived in for 10-15-20 years. Complete renovation projects.

What would happen is that some people from out of town would buy a house, plan to renovate it, but then mostly do nothing. Then many would forget to pay the municipality fees, often times for years. Eventually the unpaid bills would be sent to collection agency, and then a forced sale on behalf of the creditors. But now the houses were in even worse shape, so no one would purchase them at all.

Eventually they'd be torn down.
by jerf | 2025-07-16 16:06:21+00:00
One of the things you need to do for this situation, as well as the stuff in the blog post, is apply what is commonly called "the time value of money" to the concept. However the concept extends beyond money into any attempt to modify the future, whether or not it involves money. Money just happens to function as a good, quantifiable example in its "score keeping" role here. Your ability to model the future and take actions based on it exponentially decays, and really quite rapidly.

Or to put it another way, everything fuzzes out into noise for me much sooner than humanity will have trillions of new members. There's no way for me to predict whatsoever what effect any action I take today will have a thousand years from now. Even in extreme cases, like, I push a magic button that instantly copies whatever you, the reader, believe is the optimal distribution of ideological beliefs out into the world (ignoring for the moment the possibility that your ideology might consider that unethical, this is just a thought experiment anyhow so no need to go that meta), you really don't know what that would do 1000 years from now, what the seventeenth-order effects of such a thing would be. I'm not even saying that it might not be as good as you think or something; I'm saying you just have no idea what it would be at all. So there's no way to hold people responsible for that, and no way to build plans based on it.
by vel0city | 2025-07-16 16:07:25+00:00
I used to run unbound at home as a full resolver, and ultimately this was my reason to go back to forwarding to other large public resolvers. So many domains seemed to be pretty slow to get a first query back, I had all kinds of odd behaviors from devices around the house getting a slow initial connection.

Changed back to just using big resolvers and all those issues disappeared.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-16 16:07:32+00:00
I think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will supercharge this.

New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books.

To a certain extent, translations which play with the presentation and complexity of the text have already been around for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the Bible.

Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology.

Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's The Road To Reality.
by gmiller123456 | 2025-07-16 16:07:38+00:00
Not really anything in there regarding the sundial. I'm guessing that was put in there metaphorically for clickbait reasons.

Knowing quite a bit about sundials I was genuinely curious about how that would work, as a typical (horizontal) sundial doesn't have enough information to make a calendar. It's a time of day device, rather than a time of year device. You could teach the model about the Equation of Time or the Sun's declination, but it wouldn't need the sundial at that point. There are sundials like a spider sundial, or nodus sundial, that encode date information too. But there's overlap/ambiguity between the two solstices as the sun goes from highest to lowest, then back to its highest declination. Leap years also add some challenges too. There are various ways to deal with those, but I think you can see why I was curious how producing a calendar from a sundial would work (without giving it some other information that makes the sundial unecessary).
by kentonv | 2025-07-16 16:07:39+00:00
> some technical decisions are absurd, such as the worker's cache.delete method, which only clears the cache contents in the data center where the Worker was invoked!!!

The Cache API is a standard taken from browsers. In the browser, cache.delete obviously only deletes that browser's cache, not all other browsers in the world. You could certainly argue that a global purge would be more useful in Workers, but it would be inconsistent with the standard API behavior, and also would be extraordinarily expensive. Code designed to use the standard cache API would end up being much more expensive than expected.

With all that said, we (Workers team) do generally feel in retrospect that the Cache API was not a good fit for our platform. We really wanted to follow standards, but this standard in this case is too specific to browsers and as a result does not work well for typical use cases in Cloudflare Workers. We'd like to replace it with something better.
by strcat | 2025-07-16 16:08:01+00:00
The posts were made from our project account based on the consensus of our team. It was written and reviewed by multiple people prior to posting it. We made it obvious we were talking about Ukraine while not explicitly saying it to avoid involving GrapheneOS in the politics of the war and conscription to the extent possible. The final paragraph of what we posted was added later due to people wrongly speculating it was about Russia or Israel to make it clearer we were talking about Ukraine while also avoiding our posts being interpreted as being against Ukraine defending themselves.

See the response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583672.
by ryao | 2025-07-16 16:08:24+00:00
You assume that the ECC is not already calculated when the data is in the cache (and the cache line is marked dirty). Caches in CPUs are often ECC protected, regardless of whether the memory has ECC pritection. The cache should already have the ECC computation done. Writes to ECC memory can simply reuse the existing ECC bytes from the cache, so no additional calculation time is needed on writes. Reads are where additional time is needed in the form of one cycle and if your cache is doing its job, you won’t notice this. If you do notice it, your cache hit rate is close to 0 and your CPU is effectively running around 50MHz due to pipeline stalls.

That said, this is tangential to whether the ECC DIMMs themselves run at lower MT/sec ratings with higher latencies, which was the original discussion. The ECC DIMM is simply memory. It has an extra IC and a wider data bus to accommodate that IC in parallel. The chips run at the same MT/sec as the non-ECC DIMM in parallel. The signals reach the CPU at the same in both ECC DIMMs and non-ECC DIMMs, such that latencies are the same (the ECC verification does use an extra cycle in the CPU, but cache hides this). There are simply more data lanes with ECC DIMMs due to the additional parallelism. This means that there is more memory bandwidth in the ECC DIMM, but that additional memory bandwidth is being used by the ECC bytes, so you never see it in benchmarks.
by masklinn | 2025-07-16 16:08:32+00:00
That's a hypothesis amongst others, but it's just that, with essentially no hard evidence backing it up.

And there's counter-evidence (if mostly circumstantial) in that the first known knitted artefacts are from centuries later, to say nothing of knitting spools which they would predate by some 1300 years.

This hypothesis also lacks a lot of explanatory power e.g. why did some of them find (and take) room in coin hoards? Why have they been found all over Gallia, Germania, and Britannia, but not Italia, Hispania, or the Oriens?
by whycome | 2025-07-16 16:08:58+00:00
Maybe there legit needs to be a third option or something. The "i dont agree with you, but this is a reasoned comment"

I think reddit got rid of awards? That was actually a cool indicator of substance/quality -- someone used their limited capital to make sure something stood out.

I don't think the comments that are "truly wrong" need to be downvoted necessarily (at least not to the point of disappearing). I think there's value in having the comment exist so that people know the opinion or though exists. And then replies can contextualize or refute it. When we just eliminate or push down things that don't align with us it just reinforces bubbles.

I have to say I really like the innovation on X of allowing 'community notes' as a crowdsourced way of contextualizing even wrong/bad posts.

I'd like to see Reddit experiment with some things. So far they're pretty opaque when it comes to their design decisions.
by jraph | 2025-07-16 16:09:01+00:00
But then, everything runs under the same Termux user app again, just with extra cumbersome steps. And I'm not sure it's possible to do this safely, you need the APK to be signed, and the only way to do this would be to share the private key. And likely to have a good chunk of the Android SDK bundled with Termux. A version that runs on Android anyway.

Not sure it would fly with Google's Play Store policies.

to your parent:

> And then runs them as the Termux app. I didn't mean to imply that it put all of the apps into itself at build time.

ok, got you
by ignoramous | 2025-07-16 16:09:08+00:00
> A cross-organizational fallback is not possible with DoH in many clients, but it is with plain old DNS.

That's client implementation lacking, not some issue inherent to DoH?

The DoH client is configured with a URI Template, which describes how to construct the URL to use for resolution. Configuration, discovery, and updating of the URI Template is done out of band from this protocol. Note that configuration might be manual (such as a user typing URI Templates in a user interface for "options") or automatic (such as URI Templates being supplied in responses from DHCP or similar protocols). DoH servers MAY support more than one URI Template. This allows the different endpoints to have different properties, such as different authentication requirements or service-level guarantees.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8484#section-3
by jncfhnb | 2025-07-16 16:09:14+00:00
Remains to be seen if the lessons of this war extend to other possible wars though.

It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains.

Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims.

I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.