MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by monster_truck | 2025-07-27 00:17:32+00:00
This matches my experience with Zen in basically any generation. Once you've used all of the tricks and exhausted all of the memory and storage bandwidth, you'll still have compute left.

It's often faster to use one less core than you hit constraints at so that the processor can juggle them between cores to balance the thermal load as opposed to trying to keep it completely saturated.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-27 00:17:44+00:00
Yes. If a function contains the yield statement, calling that function returns a generator instead of executing its body. For example, here's defining and calling a regular function:

>>> def foo_function(): ... print('In a function!') ... return ... >>> foo_function() In a function!

And here's defining and calling a generator:

>>> def foo_generator(): ... print('In a generator!') ... return ... yield ... >>> foo_generator() <generator object foo_generator at 0x10321aa40> >>> next(foo_generator()) In a generator! Traceback (most recent call last): File "<python-input-6>", line 1, in <module> next(foo_generator()) ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ StopIteration

Notice that the generator's body isn't evaluated until you consume the generator. StopIteration isn't actually an error in usual cases. It just says that the generator doesn't have any more values to return and has exited. For example, that's how Python's for-loop works:

>>> for _ in foo_generator(): ... continue ... In bar!

Here it executes the generator's body (including the print() call) until it gets to the return statement. Because it's a generator, it returns as normal and then raises a StopIteration exception, which tells the loop to stop looping.
by apitman | 2025-07-27 00:19:01+00:00
Those red Xs represent libraries that only work on Nvidia GPUs and would represent a massive amount of work to re-implement in a cross-platform way, and you may never achieve the same performance either because of abstraction or because you can't match the engineering resources Nvidia has thrown at this the past decade. This is their moat.

I think open source alternatives will come in time, but it's a lot.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-27 00:19:50+00:00
> Note that not having runtime-known stack allocations is a key piece of the puzzle in Zig's upcoming async I/O strategy because it allows the compiler to calculate upper bound stack usage for a given function call.

That’s a genuinely interesting point. I don’t think known sizes for locals are a hard requirement here, though threading this needle in a lower-level fashion than Swift would need some subtle language design.

Fundamentally, what you want to do is construct an (inevitably) runtime-sized type (the coroutine) out of (by problem statement) runtime-sized pieces (the activation frames, itself composed out of individual, possibly runtime-sized locals). It’s true that you can’t then allow the activations to perform arbitrary allocas. You can, however, allow them to do allocas whose sizes (and alignments) are known at the time the coroutine is constructed, with some bookkeeping burden morally equivalent to maintaining a frame pointer, which seems fair. (In Swift terms, you can construct a generic type if you know what type arguments are passed to it.) And that’s enough to have a local of type of unknown size pulled in from a dynamic library, for example.

Again, I’m not sure how a language could express this constraint on allocas without being Swift (and hiding the whole thing from the user completely) or C (and forcing the user to maintain the frames by hand), so thank you for drawing my attention to this question. But I’m not ready to give up on it just yet.

> At a fundamental level, runtime-known stack allocation harms code reusability.

This is an assertion, not an argument, so it doesn’t really have any points I could respond to. I guess my view is this: there are programs that can be written with alloca and can’t be written without (unless you introduce a fully general allocator, which brings fragmentation problems, or a parallel stack, which is silly but was in fact used to implement alloca historically). One other example I can give in addition to locals of dynamically-linked types is a bytecode interpreter that allocates virtual frames on the host stack. So I guess that’s the other side of being opinionated—those whose opinions don’t match are turned away.

Frankly, I don’t even know why I’m defending alloca this hard. I’m not actually happy with the status quo of just yoloing a hopefully maybe sufficiently large stack. I guess the sticking point is that you seem to think alloca is obviously the wrong thing, when it’s not even close to obvious to me what the right thing is.
by mcphage | 2025-07-27 00:20:07+00:00
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company has absorbed a bunch of ex-Biden staff, says one scenario is that most entry-level white collar jobs disappear. "Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced,” he said, “and 20% of people don't have jobs."

I could imagine AI taking a lot of peoples' jobs. Two problems with this statement, though:

(1) If AI replaces all of the entry level jobs, but does them badly—like it does—then how will that help the economy grow 10% a year? Is the biggest drain on the economy having to pay entry level white collar workers?

(2) If AI does replace all of the entry level white collar workers because it's cheaper, then why would it continue to be cheaper? Even if AI did those jobs as well as actual humans—which it won't—it only has to be slightly cheaper, and the AI companies who spend billions developing their models, and the chip designers who power those models, will just raise prices as much as they can. After that, it won't even be cheaper, not really.

So... where's the gain?

All that's to say that, I agree with the author of this article. AI isn't going to take all of the jobs—or if it does, the economy won't grow because of it.
by westurner | 2025-07-27 00:21:21+00:00
Setting PS4 gets decent error reports with `set -x` (and `set -x -v`; `help set`).

Here's an excerpt that shows how to set PS4 from a main() in a .env shell script for configuring devcontainer userspace:

for arg in "${@}"; do case "$arg" in --debug) export __VERBOSE=1 ; #export PS4='+${LINENO}: ' ; #export PS4='+ #${BASH_SOURCE}:${LINENO}:${FUNCNAME[0]:+${FUNCNAME[0]}()}:$(date +%T)\n+ ' ; #export PS4='+ ${LINENO} ${FUNCNAME[0]:+${FUNCNAME[0]}()}: ' ; #export PS4='+ $(printf "%-4s" ${LINENO}) | ' export PS4='+ $(printf "%-4s %-24s " ${LINENO} ${FUNCNAME[0]:+${FUNCNAME[0]}} )| ' #export PS4='+ $(printf "%-4s %-${SHLVL}s %-24s" ${LINENO} " " ${FUNCNAME[0]:+${FUNCNAME[0]}} )| ' ;; --debug-color|--debug-colors) export __VERBOSE=1 ; # red=31 export ANSI_FG_BLACK='\e[30m' #export MID_GRAY_256='\e[38;5;244m' # Example: a medium gray export _CRESET='\e[0m' export _COLOR="${ANSI_FG_BLACK}" printf "${_COLOR}DEBUG: --debug-color: This text is ANSI gray${_CRESET}\n" >&2 export PS4='+ $(printf "${_COLOR}%-4s %-24s%s |${_CRESET} " ${LINENO} "${FUNCNAME[0]:+${FUNCNAME[0]}}" )' ;; esac done

This, too:

function error_handler { echo "Error occurred on line $(caller)" >&2 awk 'NR>L-4 && NR<L+4 { printf "%-5d%3s%s\n",NR,(NR==L?">>>":""),$0 }' L=$1 $0 >&2 } if (echo "${SHELL}" | grep "bash"); then trap 'error_handler $LINENO' ERR fi
by trod1234 | 2025-07-27 00:21:43+00:00
There is no possible outcome where AI makes the world's economic growth explode.

The only thing that will happen under AI is jobs will continue to diminish, and eventually, society will hit a self-sustaining deflationary spiral, sometimes from a hyper-inflation whipsaw collapse, sometimes directly to deflation.

Economies can't move without purchasing power flowing from producer to consumer to producer.
by hasanhaja | 2025-07-27 00:22:15+00:00
Why does this have to be the baseline architecture when you can render the HTML on the server with the template and data? Why send the data and the JavaScript to parse that data and transform it into HTML in a users browser when you can do it on the server?

For requests after the first, you can still continue to send the rendered HTML to be placed into the document. Here's an example using HTMX: https://htmx.org/examples/lazy-load/
by throw0101d | 2025-07-27 00:25:04+00:00
> The article cites the availability of air conditioning as a major factor in vacation home trends. Prior to AC, escaping heat was the main purpose to have a vacation home.

One of the (main?) reasons why the Bretton Woods Conference [1] (that determined the post-WW2 financial/currency regime) was held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire [2] was because no one wanted to be in Washington, DC, in July when it was schedule to take place because of the oppressive heat and humidity that tends to occur in DC during the summer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods,_New_Hampshire
by lesserknowndan | 2025-07-27 00:25:21+00:00
I think that it is important to keep in the mind the context of the software being developed. For example, developing software for Cochlear hearing implants is considerably different to developing a web application.

Sometimes some words just don't apply to what you, yourself, are doing. And we should resist the urge to redefine words to match what we are doing. To paraphrase Brie Larson, "that word is not meant for you".

I would say that "Software Maintenance" doesn't relate to, say, web development as much as it does to other types of software because often -- especially when developing bespoke systems for clients -- there are additions based on changing business requirements.

But that said, there are activities that are best classed as "Software Maintenance". These are often changes required because of changes to software dependencies or 3rd party services. I agree with the article -- I think -- in that additional features shouldn't really be classed as maintenance.

That all said, I think the main point of Software Development vs Software Maintenance -- especially when discussing the Waterfall model of development -- is that there should be an expectation of ongoing cost after the software is initially considered finished.
by kop316 | 2025-07-27 00:25:25+00:00
Sorry just saw this. Standby is 15 hours or so. If I am active with it, it drops closer to 4-5 hours.

It's reasonably stable. The 3 GB limitation is kind of annoying, because a lot of apps like to use 400-500 MB each, so I really can only have one app open at a time.

I don't use too many apps (the only social media I have is Mastodon), so there isn't much tradeoffs to me. Ironically, most of the tradeoffs I used to have to make, I helped fix. I made a meshtastic app, I helped to get GPS working with geoclue for navigation, I made a voicemail app. The main tradeoff for me is the battery really. But in a day to day scenario, I do sit in an office or at home, so it really just sits on one of two chargers.
by wingspar | 2025-07-27 00:25:29+00:00
MOSAIC is Done! >> Ninety days from now, about three-quarters of the general aviation fleet will be accessible to sport pilots and those exercising sport pilot privileges. One year from now, new and modern aircraft will begin entering the fleet with minimal certification costs.

https://www.eaa.org/eaa/news-and-publications/eaa-news-and-a...
by apothegm | 2025-07-27 00:27:00+00:00
CAC is the right test for people who already have identified that they have major risk factors such as metabolic syndrome/T2D, high cholesterol, etc. It identifies whether heart disease has already advanced enough that the risk factor has become a risk.

Some of the tests you list (like A1C) are baseline things everyone should get checked every year. Agreed that the others could provide value for those who want to know more about their risk level; however, it’s uncommon for those tests to turn up positives without one of the baselines having already raised at least a yellow flag.

None of the tests you listed will tell you whether you have any soft plaque buildup. They just tell you more about your risk factors. However, there are ultrasound tests that can detect increased blood pressure in major arteries, which IIRC does reflect soft plaque buildup.
by ridgeguy | 2025-07-27 00:27:02+00:00
Two points just FYI in thinking about the sudden shift to synthetic diamonds from natural stones:

• Scale: I'm aware of one company that operates over 700 CVD systems that each make 25 stones/run - there are at least 3 others of similar volume;

• Cost: the variable cost of making a 1ct finished brilliant (D-E,F-VVSI) is <$30US. Obviously, that cost is for ex-US production. See, for example, the recent demise of de Beers' Lightbox growth center in Oregon.

Naturals simply can't compete. They are forming a completely separate market involving a much smaller, extremely wealthy clientele.

The business case for synthetics is deteriorating as production costs bottom out and margins decline in an ongoing race to the bottom.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-27 00:30:48+00:00
I have a visceral hatred for the diamond industry, and its based on nothing except my shock at how expensive a shiny rock is and the effectiveness of the advertising campaign around them. I remember going to buy my wife an engagement ring and just being incredulous at the price. I completely understand supply and demand but a lot of the supply limitation is artificial. Its one of the few things I am emotional about, I simply loath the diamond industry and the entire sham that you have to spend x number of months salary on a rock to prove to the world that you love someone. They built such an incredible narrative where people would judge each other based on the size of a rock or that it had to be of X clarity or you had to spend so much to prove whatever.

To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-27 00:31:21+00:00
This test is also being heavily misused and misinterpreted in some online communities. There are a lot of people posting CAC scan results after something like a year of keto dieting in their 20s or 30s and using that to conclude that the saturated fat connection to atherosclerosis is a myth or that high cholesterol is fine.

These tests don’t have perfect accuracy and resolution, so low or zero results don’t mean that a lifetime of high cholesterol won’t catch up with someone in their 60s and 70s, yet a lot of podcasters and social media influencers are making those claims.
by westurner | 2025-07-27 00:32:22+00:00
"Exploring ultraweak photon emissions as optical markers of brain activity" (2025) https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00279-2 :

> Highlights:

> [...]

> - Optical readouts correlate with evoked neuroelectric oscillations across tasks

> - Label-free photoencephalography represents a novel method for brain monitoring
by santaboom | 2025-07-27 00:33:26+00:00
See figure 1 in [0] operation execution is just 0.1pj of 70pj required for a 32 bit int addition… how do you think I was applying amdahls law? Edit: I was using amdahls law as it applies to parallel processors. However in terms of energy usage …

See amdahls laws and use your imagination [0] https://semiengineering.com/more-data-drives-focus-on-ic-ene...
Show HN: Convert from MIDI file to ASCII tablature (and more)
by ycombiredd | 2025-07-27 00:35:46+00:00
Hi folks,

About seven months ago, via HN, I got nerdsniped into a silly guitar transcription problem and made a bunch of really senseless code but what came out of it was what I thought at the time could potentially be pretty useful - a guitar fretboard mapper and fingering scoring algorithm.

So as of yesterday morning I've finally put those bits of code to "good" use, creating gtrsnipe to convert between MIDI files (.mid) and ASCII tab (as well as VexTab and ABC notation) and any combination/direction among the set of formats.

gtrsnipe tries to intelligently find the best neck and fingering positions using a note to fretboard mapper and a scoring algorithm that is unavoidably shaped by my subjective opinions and skills as a player but it does its best to avoid objectively impossible fingerings.

See the example tabs and usage in the README and please, try your own transcriptions from MIDI and if you love or hate the arrangement it gives you, I'd love to hear about it so I can further refine the scoring algorithm.

Thanks!
by rob_c | 2025-07-27 00:35:49+00:00
Basically NATO partners are only suffering from less sales info the US pocket. The US pocket is weakening to allow the US to begin manufacturing. The tarrif "war" for what it is will see an excess of products not sold to the US markets. The US will not invade. It's a pr move. Frankly if you're bothered with that let's talk about Hawaii and Alaska (or several international trade routes).

There's plenty of opportunity that doesn't involve bowing to the petrol dollar and becoming subservient and maybe that can even be done without importing half of the developing world.

Don't call people pathetic unless you're actually equipped to engage in conversation. It's demeaning to yourself and is no better than demanding things change for your feelings.

Being absolutist is just giving up your ability to take action and control your own life. The biggest victim is yourself and it only hurts others. Take action. Do something and move on with life. Stop being paralyzed by the media left/right/alt/mainstream/pink-lizard-bunny. Go touch grass and be happy.
by chris_engel | 2025-07-27 00:36:57+00:00
Sure, in theory Hetzner could pull the plug or access the data on my VPS. But that’s true of any infrastructure... just like someone could break into my house and steal my self-hosted server.

In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring.

It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.
by panarky | 2025-07-27 00:38:19+00:00
>> non-participation

> flip over to something else

A flow state is possible with 100% focus at any level of abstraction.

If you just "flip over" to HN while the agent thinks, then you're not 100% focused.

But if you're managing three agents at the same time on the same codebase, and while Agent 2 is thinking you "flip over" to Agent 3, you're still fully participating, just at a higher level of abstraction.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-07-27 00:40:17+00:00
The name has to be ugly, new names in C are always taken from the set of reserved identifiers: those starting with an underscore & a capital letter, or with two underscores. Since they didn't reserve any "normal" names, all new keywords will be stuff like `_Keyword` or `__keyword`, unless they break backwards compatibility. And they really hate breaking backwards compatibility, so that's quite unlikely.
by xerox13ster | 2025-07-27 00:40:26+00:00
Why is this back on the front page of the site? It was posted several days ago and has little to nothing to do with the content and context of the site.

Why didn't the aunt think to just go get her instead of calling you over to say "Hey so I know you told her to stay away from the fountain, but what about her walking around the rim of it, is that dangerous or not?"
by mbac32768 | 2025-07-27 00:40:59+00:00
FP is great but not necessarily at all costs.

OCaml is immediate by default instead of lazy, and allows imperative code with side-effects. Both escape hatches from the pure FP world.

So, performance is easier to reason about and you can interact with your side-effecty real world stuff without having to reorganize your whole program around the correct monad.

Most of the time you want your loops to be higher order functions but once in awhile you want to just build a vector from a for loop. OCaml let's you do it without it being a whole intervention.
by thrance | 2025-07-27 00:46:17+00:00
That's an obvious flat out lie, crypto consumes much more power than the banking system, because of course it does. It literally relies on proof of work, through arrays of GPUs pointlessly crunching numbers. And that's just to handle a fraction of the number of transactions the banking system does.

It's estimated that Bitcoin alone uses up as much power as an entire country: https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/energy/bit...

And how many people use crypto again?

As for the thievery part: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com
by mptest | 2025-07-27 00:47:18+00:00
>A public alternative with private transactions

Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-27 00:47:19+00:00
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion.

We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.

As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-27 00:48:05+00:00
Given that (the better) EVs are cheaper to operate, cheaper to maintain, accelerate faster than ICEVs, and don't create as much net pollution, these should be the preferred option rather than using the sky as a sewer. The problem right now is most of America is fixated upon ancient and harmful technologies and isn't do enough to incentivize buying EVs. And it's actually limiting consumer choice by slapping giant tariffs on international EV options that are surpassing the capabilities of domestic ones. EVs should be (re)incentivized such that they are significantly cheaper to buy than ICEVs.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-27 00:49:50+00:00
My argument was about how value is decreasing. No one is arguing that these websites have zero value to begin with.

A more interesting thought experiment is where that threshold is before the lack of value invigorates the energy needed to migrate. That's part of why I put the boiling frog metaphor there. Rate of change definitely has impact on perceived value.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-27 00:50:13+00:00
Can’t support MOSAIC enough. I’ve owned a composite LSA called a Flight Design for about 5 years, been in arguments with a lot of old timers about the safety aspects but I consider revolutionary and far safer than a certified aircraft than the statistics will tell you.

For example it has a ballistic parachute that will bring the entire aircraft to the ground. Unlike the Lycomings and Continentals the engine wasn’t designed in the 1950s. It’s equipped with real time satellite weather, GPS autopilot, Avionics that would cost you $15-20k to put in a Cessna due to all the red tape.

I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people. If pilots had low cost access to things like glass cockpits, satellite weather, inexpensive autopilot, and a healthy ecosystem of cheap, modern aircraft with modern engines (Basic things like fuel injection) a lot of pilots might still be alive right now.