MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TuxSH | 2025-07-19 01:12:05+00:00
> Notable counterxamples (excluding e.g. Linux)

These are mostly executables/end products, aren't they?

GPL allows protecting the business logic by discouraging hostile forks: after all, forks of such projects can't relicense GPL files w/o permission, and upstream can just copy the changes back w/o having to ask.

On the other hand, permissive license favor dissemination. Would {fmt} (libfmt) be as ubiquitous as it is, if it were GPL instead of MIT?
by umanwizard | 2025-07-19 01:13:08+00:00
Well, that is a more coherent argument than “information wants to be free”. I disagree with your conclusion, but I’ll at least admit that we’ve now reframed the debate in terms I find meaningful: it depends on one’s subjective judgment of the relative importance of two competing interests: on the one hand, the tendency of state-enforced monopolies to encourage producing creative works for profit motives, and on the other hand, the tendency of free information to encourage faster progress.
by o11c | 2025-07-19 01:13:57+00:00
"Buffer" just means it is used between input and output. It does not imply mutability, and many buffers indeed only take their state at construction time and are not mutable.

In my experience, the only functions a mutable string buffer needs to provide are "append string (or to-string-able)" and "undo that append" (which mostly comes up in list-like contexts, e.g. to remove a final comma); for everything else you can convert to an immutable string first.

(theoretically there might be a "split and clobber" function like `strtok`, but in my experience it isn't that useful once your APIs actually take a buffer class).

Considering the functions from this implementation, they can be divided as follows:

Lifetime methods:

init free clear

Immutable methods:

print index_of match_all split

Mutable methods:

append prepend (inefficient!) remove replace

I've already mentioned `append`, and I suppose I can grant `prepend` for symmetry (though note that immutable strings do provide some sort of `concatenate`, though beware efficiency concerns). Immutable strings ubiquitously provide `replace` (and `remove` is just `replace` with an empty string), which are much safer/easier to use.

There are also a lot of common operations not provided here. And the ones that are provided fail to work with `StringBuffer` input.
by devmor | 2025-07-19 01:14:08+00:00
Privacy.com issues cards from the Visa and Mastercard networks.

You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.

Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.

It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.
by pbsd | 2025-07-19 01:14:37+00:00
>Even after the static variable has been initialised, the overhead of accessing it is still considerable: a function call to __cxa_guard_acquire(), plus atomic_load_explicit(&__b_guard, memory_order::acquire) in __cxa_guard_acquire().

No. The lock calls are only done during initialization, in case two threads run the initialization concurrently while the guard variable is 0. Once the variable is initialized, this will always be skipped by "je .L3".
by fsckboy | 2025-07-19 01:14:42+00:00
you misunderstood what i said about the strlen field, but we agree, yes, it's in the header where it belongs.

I explained how returning the address of the string buffer instead of the address of the struct would give you a C compatible string that you could pass to other C library functions. If those functions are "readonly" wrt the string, everything is copasetic.

if those string functions update/write the c-string (which is in the buffer) the strlen in the header will now be wrong. That has nothing to do with my suggestion, and it's already "broken" in that way you point out. My "string free bytes field" suggestion will also be broken by an operation like that, so my suggestion does not make this data structure worse than it already is wrt compatibility with C library functions.

However that strlen and free bytes problem can be managed (no worse than C standard strings themselves) and strlen and/or free bytes are useful features that make some other things easier so overall it's a win.
by ivape | 2025-07-19 01:14:53+00:00
Do we have real proof that a sizeable portion of Americans believe in the secret lizard people thing? Best I could find:

https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"

11% said yes or were unsure.

That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
by amy_petrik | 2025-07-19 01:17:10+00:00
>I guess the problem is a mismatch between detection capability and treatment capability?

the problem is you do the test for 7 billion people, say, 30 times over their life... 210000000000 tests. imagine how many false negatives and false positives, the cost of follow up testing only to find... false positive. the cost of telling someone they have cancer when they don't. the anger of telling someone they are free of cancer, only to find out they had it all along

this tech isn't that good, nowhere near it, more like a 1 in 100 or 10 in 100 rate of "being wrong". those numbers can get cheesed towards more false positives or false negatives.

as for grail, they tried to achieve this and printed OK numbers... ... .. but their test set was their training set. so the performance metrics went to shit when they rolled it out to production
by ghuntley | 2025-07-19 01:17:21+00:00
Exactly, swyx. Any flat rate pricing plan is effectively a bet against the future. It's a grab for engineers that's subsidised. Now, the problem is that GPUs are expensive; they are a costly resource to use. Inferencing is expensive.

So what happens is inevitable:

- Wild promises of unlimited usage and consumers feeling tricked when the impossible is impossible to deliver (Cursor pricing changes).

- Quasi-unlimited usage with rate-caps, but the models get quantised to all hell? [search Twitter for folks reporting Claude feels dumber around/near outages].

- Engineers sharing tools and techniques on how to squeeze pounds out of a flat-rate plan (original post), which results in more power users doing that, which puts more pressure on margins.

In goose meme format, "What are the margins?"

https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1945636266009399414
by wordofx | 2025-07-19 01:18:04+00:00
Sigh. I thought you were being genuine. Sorry. Your post perfectly explained that you don’t know how to use AI. You’re at the stage where you hear stories. You try it. Don’t get the expected result on first attempt. Then decide it sucks. You give no information on the models you’re using. Nothing about the prompts or process.

It’s like you’re asking a junior to go build a house. So he goes off and uses bricks to create 4 walls. And you turn around and get angry because he didn’t use wood. So he uses wood and you get angry cos he didn’t add windows, roof, door.

I’m sorry that you picked up a career where you struggle to use new tools and technologies.
by citizenpaul | 2025-07-19 01:20:05+00:00
It's always interesting when a company announces that it has leadership in paycheck only.

We are bankrupt of direction or ideas. Was are going to make panic knee jerk decisons in a public view.

I guess to the ultra rich owner class it looks like work. Business idiots all around the MBA tree.

I have no stake in clearlinux future or past, just observing.
by ruralfam | 2025-07-19 01:20:08+00:00
He had a biopsy a while ago. It was negative (and very painful he said). He has been working closely with his urologist who has recommended the PET. Given the PSA jump he is really worried, and cannot get what I presume is his urologist's next recommendation. He has taken all the right steps, just to be denied re: PET. (To be honest I do not know if PET is that effective, but he says it would be definitive.) He was told, though, that should he get cancer the PET would be approved to enhance the diagnosis. My heart goes out to him. RF.
by nine_k | 2025-07-19 01:21:44+00:00
From my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!"

Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-19 01:22:08+00:00
> I wish there was a modern platform (not just a hobbyist Raspberry Pi kit or something) in the Switch or DS form factor, that boots straight into a coding environment like the legendary Commodore 64 and other "computer-consoles" of that era, with a central app store for indie devs to publish to for free.

I’m not sure if this will do what you want, but it is Linux on a DS! No active developers at the moment. They have instructions to build your own images as well as some software built for it.

https://www.dslinux.org/
by sangeeth96 | 2025-07-19 01:22:57+00:00
I wish we didn't stuff being "anti-algorithm" under "minimalism". It's just not the same thing. I don't want to go minimalist even if I respect the folks who do.

I wish I could pay for YouTube and other apps and they'd stop cramming their decisions on my feed and instead let _me_ control the experience. At least, let me have reverse-chronological feeds on my home, mute/block channels I don't care about, hide content types and give me more recommendations based on the things I actually like or prefer to consume at that point. I still want to use their apps but almost all of their product leads have decided even paying for something like "Premium" wouldn't entitle a customer to having control over their experience. It's gross.
by jimbob45 | 2025-07-19 01:23:01+00:00
I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.
by ot | 2025-07-19 01:23:26+00:00
That's a nice trick, but contrary to function statics, it is susceptible to SIOF. This kind of optimization is useful only on extraordinarily hot paths, so I wouldn't generally recommend it.

> On ARM, such atomic load incurs a memory barrier---a fairly expensive operation.

Not quite, it is just a load-acquire, which is almost as cheap as a normal load. And on x86 there's no difference.

One thing where both GCC and Clang seem to be quite bad at is code layout: even in the example in the article, the slow path is largely inlined. It would be much better to have just a load, a compare, and a jump to the slow path in a cold section. In my experience, in some rare cases reimplementing the lazy initialization explicitly (especially when it's possible to use a sentinel value, thus doing a single load for both value and guard) did produce a noticeable win.
by moorow | 2025-07-19 01:23:28+00:00
Bitnami images have been problematic for a little while, especially given their core focus on security but still resulting in a CVE 9.4 in PgPool recently that ended up being used in the underlying infrastructure for a bunch of cloud hosts:

[pgpool] Unauthenticated access to postgres through pgpool · Advisory · bitnami/charts https://share.google/JcgDCtktG8dE2TZY8
by maxbond | 2025-07-19 01:23:58+00:00
I mean I wouldn't do business with them, I think the supplements industry is infrastructure for grifters, quacks, and pyramid schemes to fleece the desperate, but what's the problem for Visa? Is it a brand safety thing? My presumption would be that payment processors are amoral and have no problem processing payments for Consolidated Baby Kickers if it were legal to do so, is that a misconception?
by cam_l | 2025-07-19 01:24:09+00:00
I have been using zotero for this purpose. And I know it is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.

But it is pretty good at grabbing the book detail, and I have a bunch of custom fields and comments, and I can add other stuff into the book definition like text files and PDFs and jpgs and URLs.

You can also wholesale share libraries and create group libraries etc. But it is not very good at tracking read and unread status, let alone borrowed and returned. And it definitely doesn't give recommendations.

One of my main difficulties in moving from this to other media libraries is they are all each so focused on one kind of media. I find a lot of the things I want to keep track of, and share, and remember, are mixed media, authors who also paint, or website only books, multi media comics, films, art and literary theory. Not just the things that happen to sit on a shelf that I own. Which database does that music producer / graphic artist / film maker / author sit in my collection?
by mbreese | 2025-07-19 01:24:44+00:00
I’ve seen it most commonly thought of as using ctDNA to detect relapse earlier.

So, more like — did the tumor come back? And if that does happen, with ctDNA, can you detect that there is a relapse before you would otherwise find it with standard imaging. Most studies I’ve seen have shown that this happens and ctDNA is a good biomarker for early detection of relapse.

The case for proactively looking for circulating tumor DNA without an initial diagnosis or underlying genetic condition is a bit dicier IMHO. For example, what if really like to know (I haven’t read this article, but I’m pretty familiar with the field) is how many people had a detectable cancer in their plasma (ctDNA), but didn’t receive a cancer diagnosis. It’s been known for a while that you can detect precancerous lesions well before a formal cancer diagnosis. But, what’s still an open question AFAIK, is how many people have precancerous lesions or positive ctDNA hits that don’t form a tumor?

(I’ve done a little work in this area)
by evolve2k | 2025-07-19 01:25:25+00:00
I can’t find the quote right now; but it’s along the lines. LLM’s can help with the first 80% of coding which is introducing bugs, but terrible at the other 80% of the time which is removing said bugs.

Lean and agile theory says that quality is improved and efficiency gained by going upstream and eliminating the things that are producing poor quality in the first place.

Llm code tools may be useful to give syntax tips, but like a thoughtless dev on a team, likely introduce more work than they get done.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-19 01:26:27+00:00
The adoption rate seems driven by a race to bottom, a desire to control "the next big thing" before someone else does, executive reflex, and some real use cases.

But then we saw the same thing with Crypto, tons of money poured into that, the Metaverse was going to be the next big thing! People who didn't see and accept that must not understand the obvious appeal...
by montag | 2025-07-19 01:28:11+00:00
Wow, nailed it. I take it this is a collaborative fiction project? Not to worry, Gemini explained it to me:

> The core conceit is that you, the reader, have gained access to the internal database of a secret organization. The articles are presented in-universe as if they were written by anonymous researchers, agents, and AI constructs employed by the Foundation.
by godelski | 2025-07-19 01:28:47+00:00
To be honest, this even is mostly true in the research side of things. Granted, 99% of research has always been incremental (which is okay! Don't let Reviewer #2 put you off). Lots of papers are filled with fluff. That is, if you have a strong background understanding these systems (honestly, a math background goes a long way to genearlizing this as lots of papers are just "we tried this math idea" and if you already knew it, you'd have a good guess as its effects).

I think it is easy for it to feel like the field is moving fast while it actually isn't. But I learned a lesson where I basically lost a year when I had to take care of my partner. I thought I'd be way behind when coming back but really not much had changed.

I think gaining this perspective can help you "keep up". Even if you are having a hard time now, this might suggest that you just don't have enough depth yet. Which is perfectly okay! Just might encourage you to focus on different things so that you can keep up. You can't stay one step behind if you first don't know how to run. Or insert some other inspirational analogy here. The rush is in your head, not in reality.
by presentation | 2025-07-19 01:29:01+00:00
The USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business.

US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-19 01:30:27+00:00
Actually, it's because marketing departments rely heavily on tracking cookies and pixels to be their job, as their job is measured on things like conversations and understanding how effective their ad spend is.

The regulations came along, but nobody told marketing how to do their job without the cookies, so every business site keeps doing the same thing they were doing, but with a cookie banner that is hopefully obtrusive enough that users just click through it.
by kragen | 2025-07-19 01:30:38+00:00
That'll be fantastic! I'd be delighted to see that! That would make those TI calculators the new smallest machines with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation, and much lower power than the GBA that is the current champion there; I'd really like to get some experience with what that's like, because I've found the experience of using Uxn to be inspiring so far.

I also hadn't seen the AgonLight2 before.

One quibble, though: the vast majority of 32-bit computers are microcontrollers, and most of them have less than 64KiB of RAM. (My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 goes into more detail about the popular STM32 family.) They would be perfectly adequate for a self-sufficient personal computing experience (most of them have more total memory than the computers I used to run Turbo Pascal on, just less RAM, plus their CPUs are 1000 times faster, and they can read and write SD cards) but probably not with Varvara.
by asacrowflies | 2025-07-19 01:30:47+00:00
It's generally bad and kills local eco system with algae blooms and messing up seasonal cycles of nutrients/food. But that's just with dumping the heat into environment especially in freshwater river based reactors and a pretty raw system of dumping hot water into the river ...

Clever use of physics and cooling towers allows us to mitigate the problem..release the energy slowly over time or use the thermal for something else.but costs a lot more than just dumping it into ocean and doing lazy misleading napkin math.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-19 01:31:24+00:00
I guess I’m just missing it, I’ve re-read the thread and it still seems like you’re discussing the US? What am I missing? The parent comment you replied to is

> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper. As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
by laserbeam | 2025-07-19 01:32:57+00:00
I hope this is not a bad answer as I tried to understand what stackless coroutines even are for the past week.

1. Zig plans to annotate the maximum possible stack size of a function call https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23367 . As people say, this would give the compiler enough information to implemented stackless coroutines. I do not understand well enough why that’s the case.

2. Allegedly, this is only possible because zig uses a single compilation unit. You are very rarely dealing with modules that are compiled independently. If a function in zig is not called, it’s not compiled. I can see how this helps with point 1.

3. Across FFI boundaries this is a problem in every language. In theory you can always do dumb things after calling into a shared library. A random C lib can always spawn threads and do things the caller isn’t expecting. You need unsafe blocks in rust for the same reason.

4. In theory, zig controls the C std library when compiling C code. In some cases, if there’s only one Io implementation used for example, zig could replace functions in the c std library to use that io vtable instead.

Regardless, I kinda wish kristoff/andrew went over what stackless coroutines are (for dummies) in an article at some point. I am unsure people are talking about the same thing when mentioning that term. I am happy to wait for that article until zig tries to implement that using the new async model.
by pilingual | 2025-07-19 01:34:11+00:00
The new construction projects are sad as evidenced by the horrendous Osaka train station. What a waste of space and concrete.

If Japan insists on these projects, they should look at Sanatana Row in San Jose or the Assembly in Somerville. Offer assistance and transition help to existing small businesses. (What supermarket is planned? Don-Qui?)
by forrestthewoods | 2025-07-19 01:34:49+00:00
> For this we need a certain old, but little-known feature of UNIX linkers

STOP WRITING NON-PORTABLE CODE YOU BASTARDS.

The correct answer is, as always, “stop using mutable global variables you bastard”.

Signed: someone who is endlessly annoyed with people who incorrectly think Unix is the only platform their code will run on. Write standard C/C++ that doesn’t rely on obscure tricks. Your co-workers will hate you less.
by devnullbrain | 2025-07-19 01:35:10+00:00
My first thought is: obviously not. But if 10 years ago you'd asked me if Valve would be able to turn Linux into a serious gaming platform, I'd have answered the same.

All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.

While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.