MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JdeBP | 2025-07-08 09:54:21+00:00
You might think so. (-:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/socket_conne...

kqueue() can apparently return the error right in the data of the kevent, but I'm still using poll() so cannot confirm; whilst I can confirm that kqueue/kevent is alas not as truly consistent as one might expect. (Someone recently tried to move FreeBSD devd to kqueue, and hit various problems of FreeBSD devices that are still, even in version 14, not yet kqueue-ready.)
by junon | 2025-07-08 09:55:05+00:00
I agree in principle but also there's a lot of worth in having them do that in certain cases, and build scripts and the like already have that anyway.

Achieving a perfect world where build tooling can only touch the things it really needs is less of a toolchain problem and more of an OS hardening issue. I'd argue that's outside the scope of the compiler and language teams.
by throwawaye3735 | 2025-07-08 09:55:28+00:00
Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention.

I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
by saagarjha | 2025-07-08 09:56:12+00:00
> To make matters worse, it would appear that the interviewer is approaching the problem in a dubious manner -- solving a server problem by depending on the clients to cooperate. That should make you suspicious.

I am kind of shocked you have never had to do this, or that you think it is unreasonable to ask. Sure, it is totally reasonable to ask questions about whether this is standard practice, especially in the real world. But an interview is an environment where you are given the constraints and obviously there isn't time to explain every detail about why something is the way it is.

Yeah, we do want the server to be fixed–there is a team working on it, and they'll have it ready next week. But we need something to work now. That's the where the interview places you. If you are going to be the person who values purity instead of just doing the job when the constraints actually call for it, are you really selling yourself as a good candidate?
by martin-t | 2025-07-08 09:58:04+00:00
Yeah, those topics are definitely censored on big platforms but I have the impression that it relies of manual reporting.

At least reddit feels like that because what you can say depends on the subreddit - not just the mods but what kinds of people visit it and what they report.

No idea about youtube, videos are definitely censored using some automated means but it's still possible to get around it. E.g. some gun youtubers avoided saying full-auto by saying more-semi-auto. So i don't think they use very sophisticated models or they don't are yet. This kind of thing is obvious to a human and even LLMs generate responses which say it's a tongue-in-cheek to avoid censorship.

Comments are also generally less censored. After that health insurance CEO got punished for mass murder and repeated bodily harm with an extra-legal death penalty, many people were openly supporting it. I can say it here too and nobody will care. Even LLMs (both US and Chinese, except Claude because Claude is trained by eggshell-walking suckers) readily generate estimates of how many people he caused to die or suffer.

The internet would look very different if companies started using state of the art models to detect undesirable-to-them speech. But also people would fight back more so it might just be a case of boiling the frog slowly.
Show HN: Craft kit for people that care about websites
by mb2100 | 2025-07-08 09:58:25+00:00
I started web dev with PHP and later Ruby on Rails, then went through the whole React and Next cycle, and recently discovered islands and Astro with its good old MPA architecture. But I felt things could be even simpler.

Mastro is my attempt to crystallise the essence of web development. It consists of four interrelated things:

- An introductory guide to HTML, CSS and JS: shows you how to build and publish a website to GitHub Pages – all from within your browser.

- A static site generator that runs as a VSCode extension in your browser.

- A minimal web framework with no bundler, no client-side JS and no bloat.

- Reactive Mastro: a tiny (2.8k min.gz) client-side reactive GUI library for your existing MPA or Mastro project.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:59:20+00:00
I'd say a 10% error rate is quite drastic for spoken communication. Can you imagine if you lost 10% of the context for the comments here on HN?

I don't know, I feel like one of the worst things to do on the internet is to miscommunicate. And that can be hard enough with 2 native speakers (I just had a response completly blow up on me because they assumedly took my comment the wrong way).

>but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?

Machine translation has come a long way where I can at least get the general feel of say, a translated article. It is still far from the point where I feel like I can read a machine translated article and not have it come off as clunky. That last 10% or so is just uncanny enough for it to impact my reading experience.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-08 09:59:37+00:00
This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without enough water to float all the microbiology in.

Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-08 09:59:50+00:00
I don't assume discrimination on the basis of group affiliation. I give it as an example of why it is much more important that the law is applied consistently than that it is sound.

Furthermore, group affiliation based differences in judicial decisions are very common, both when it comes to ethnic origin, wealth and profession.

In this case group affiliation is also directly relevant: individuals who have infringed copyright are typically not treated in the way that these firms that have infringed copyright are. The group affiliation in question is thus 'are you an employer/wealth person owning part of a large firm' vs 'a normal, non-employer/non-wealthy person'.
by throwaway9153 | 2025-07-08 10:00:02+00:00
> How did the handloom weavers and spinners handle the rise of the machines?

In the past, new jobs appeared that the workers could migrate to.

Today, it seems that AI may replace jobs much quicker than before and it's not clear to me which new jobs will be "invented" to balance the loss.

Optimists will say that we have always managed to invent new types of work fast enough to reduce the impact to society, but in my opinion it is unlikely to happen this time. Unless the politicians figure out a way to keep the unemployment content (basic income etc.),

I fear we may end up in a dystopia within our lifetimes. I may be wrong and we could end up in a post scarcity (star trek) world, but if the current ambitions of the top 1% is an indicator, it won't happen unless the politicians create a better tax system to compensate the loss of jobs. I doubt they will give up wealth and influence voluntarily.
by junon | 2025-07-08 10:00:27+00:00
Microchip in particular is very bad at developer experience and tooling. The only vendor I actually enjoy working with to any degree is ST, and only design boards using their uC's for that reason.

I've heard good things about Nordic, though. Might try them out at some point.

Microchip's own IDE and project generator spit out a hello world project that didn't even compile. NXP wouldn't even let me download their tooling even after their obfuscated sign up flow.
by iainmerrick | 2025-07-08 10:00:47+00:00
I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.

Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.

As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.

More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-08 10:00:59+00:00
Not quite — I'm not saying we should replace everything like HTML or CSS, but I'm exploring the idea of a browser that can load and run full sites or apps written entirely in WASM.

Like how operating systems run .exe or ELF binaries — what if a browser did the same but with .wasm? Maybe not for regular documents, but for apps/games/tools where you want full control, performance, and custom UI rendering without relying on the traditional web stack.

Just brainstorming, I’m curious what others think.
Show HN: CrawlerCheck – A tool to check if a site is blocking crawlers
by bogozi | 2025-07-08 10:01:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a long-time developer and SEO consultant. Over the years, I've seen clients suffer from a simple, costly mistake: accidentally blocking Googlebot or other important crawlers with a misplaced rule in robots.txt or a noindex tag.

Manually checking the robots.txt file, then the page's meta tags, then the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header is a tedious process. I wanted a tool that would do it all in one shot and give me a clear answer.

So, I built CrawlerCheck. You give it a URL, and it checks all three sources of crawler directives to tell you if a page is accessible.

The backend is written in Go, and the frontend is a lightweight Svelte app. The goal was to make it as fast and reliable as possible.

It's a brand new project, and I'd love to get some honest feedback from the HN community. Thanks for taking a look.
by adityaathalye | 2025-07-08 10:02:09+00:00
I wonder; is this essentially why LLM tech is useful for certain Fields-medal level problems? i.e. because the LLM search construct has no barrier between sub-fields; nor between distant ones? Only multiple likely paths?

In context of packing problem, it's a bit meta to me...

An LLM contains a k-dimensional packing of known knowledge. This packing is highly inefficient because it has holes and unbridged dimensions. By injecting random seed (prompts) into the LLM probability space, it gets perturbed. Sometimes this perturbation fills a hole in the packing and/or connects two adjacent units in way nobody thought of before because it wasn't fashionable any more, or wasn't top of mind. Thus new knowledge is created within the same k-dimensional box through a novel joining-of of existing know-how.

From the article:

> Klartag had broken open a central problem in the world of lattices and sphere packing after just a few months of study and a few weeks of proof writing. “It feels almost unfair,” he said. But that’s often how mathematics works: Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding. Klartag’s familiarity with convex geometry, usually a separate area of study, turned out to be just what the problem required. “This idea was at the top of my mind because of my work,” he said. “It was obvious to me that this was something I could try.”
by rkomorn | 2025-07-08 10:02:14+00:00
For me, it was the appearance of plot armor (starting with the end of season 5) that ruined the show.

Up to that point, you had a sense that anyone could die, no matter how important.

Seasons 6+ are full of meh tropes like last-second reversals, people popping out of water when they evidently should've drowned, the impossibly bullshit "blind girl kills trained assassin" moment, the WWE style end of the walkers, etc.

To me, that's just bad. Not rushed.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 10:03:13+00:00
Sounds like the other user tolerates the flaws and works around them, while you don't and expect to not be fact checking every statement. I guess people's approaches to this can be very wide.

I am more on your side, personally. When learning, I do not want to spend half my time scrutinizing the teacher. At least not on the objective fundamentals. If the fundamentals are broken, how do I trust anything built on top?

And that's the scary thing: LLM's don't "build on top", they more or less do the equivalent of running around the globe first and come back with an answer.
by screaminghawk | 2025-07-08 10:04:31+00:00
> I'd like to see no-code UX patterns that losslessly map onto the underlying abstraction. That way you can use the UX pattern until it gets too tedious, and occasionally dip in-and-out of the code-view in a non-jarring manner.

What are you describing sounds a lot like Saleforce and other CRM systems. Often the code implementation get hidden away when it's not something native in the no-code solution. Then "magic" happens and you don't quite know why until you dig into the code again.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-08 10:05:31+00:00
From the examples, it looks like the age-old distinction between process and results: do you want to/get rewarded for having a forest after some years, or do you just want to plant some trees as cheaply as possible to tick a box?

Getting good results costs more because it requires caring about what you're doing and putting in extra effort to ensure success.
by tuco86 | 2025-07-08 10:05:55+00:00
The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.

I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
by rixed | 2025-07-08 10:06:04+00:00
Actually, this expression "end of history" has been coined, and the ideology(*) behind it promoted, in the 1990s after the collapse of the eastern block. Before that, for what I can tell, the prevaling idea seems to have been that of an "ustoppable march of progress". Long before that, I would guess that the most common ideology was that of a persistant, immuable order.

(*) That's the proper term to denote a concept that justify the will of a group, regardless of its veracity.

Considering history, I see no signs of converging to some end state. I guess technical progress and knowledge accumulate somehow, but even this is not linear and history shows plenty of exemples of drastic step backs. But even assuming an ever increasing technical progress, in a world with infinite resources (that's a very big assumption), what would be the end state? I guess, given we are on HN, a state were humans program conscious machines which then do all the hard work? In other words, the ideology of bigtech?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 10:06:31+00:00
you can, perhaps. I am 2 years laid off and am trying to pay rent. All according to plan, I suppose.

Also, no. I would not invest in this hype bubble. We're definitely getting an AI crash within the next 5-7 yeras, a la the dotcom crash. I prefer safer stocks if I have the choice.
by tjelen | 2025-07-08 10:07:03+00:00
This one is basically my daily driver for similar tasks: https://app.heynote.com/ (full app at https://heynote.com/). And it seems to work almost out-of-box for your first two examples, once you switch the buffer from "Plain-text" into "Math" mode.

It also supports switching between different buffers and some kind of local storage.
by avianlyric | 2025-07-08 10:07:37+00:00
Your default dwell times are wayyyyy too short.

On high capacity systems, train dwell time becomes the limiting factor on passenger capacity. 30 seconds is generally the minimum possible dwell time a system can manage, 20 seconds might be possible during much lower demand periods. But you’re unlikely to ever achieve better than that.

The London Victoria Line, which runs with 90 second headways at peak, achieves at best 24 second dwell times in central section, but 30-40 seconds is more realistic for most stations.

Don’t forget, dwell time includes more than just passengers getting off and on. It has to include time to open the doors, close the doors (including a 2-3 second visual and audible warning!), perform needed safety checks, and eventually pull away. Those operational components the sandwich the core “people getting on and off” bit of station stops add up to a non-trivial number of seconds.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dwell-Time-and-Passenger...

As a minor note, the NYC subway uses a system of fix automatic blocks, not a moving block system, which is what your simulation appears to use. Moving block systems are dramatically more efficient than fixed block systems. But I have no idea how you would get hold of accurate block locations for the NYC subway.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 10:08:34+00:00
I'll take socialism.

More subtly, I'll modity the dictorial context to require payment to any sources an AI uses, and strong enforcement of infringements on AI. The core problem with capitalistic society is that money tends to bubble up to the top and then stay there. The goal of regulation should partly be to make sure that money is incentivized to be not stay up top in stocks.
by shafyy | 2025-07-08 10:08:49+00:00
> The problem here is societal, not technological.

I disagree. I think it's both. Yes, we need good frameworks and incentivizes on a economic/political level. But also, saying that it's not a tech problem is the same as saying "guns don't kill people". The truth is, if there was no AI tech developed, we would not need to regulate it so that greed does not take over. Same with guns.
by gherkinnn | 2025-07-08 10:08:49+00:00
> Another example that kept turning up was that the ticket "1 phone number for a customer is not enough, support 2 phone numbers" is inevitably followed by "2 phone numbers is not enough, support 3 phone numbers"

Zero. One. Infinity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule

YAGNI, handle a singular case, and once you have multiple treat it like a list.
by elliotto | 2025-07-08 10:09:51+00:00
Ah I understand, you're exactly right I misinterpreted the notation of P(#). I was considering each model as assigning binary truth values to the propositions (e.g., physicalism might reject all but Postulate #1, while an anthropocentric model might affirm only #1, #2, and #6), and modeling the probability distribution over those models instead. I think the expected value computation ends up with the same downstream result of distributions over propositions.

By incoherent I was referring to the internal inconsistencies of a model, not the probabilistic claims. Ie a model that denies your own consciousness but accepts the consciousness of others is a difficult one to defend. I agree with your statement here.

Thanks for your comment I enjoyed thinking about this. I learned the estimating distributions approach from the rationalist/betting/LessWrong folks and think it works really well, but I've never thought much about how it applies to something unfalsifiable.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-08 10:11:31+00:00
It was a common design of new operating system APIs, not encumbered by PDP-11 compatibility, in the 1980s.

* https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114816928464571239

Even some of the later augmentations in MS/PC/DR-DOS did things like return an error code in AX and the result in (say) CX instead of using AX and CF.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 10:11:52+00:00
> Nearly every country ends up in a voting situation where only 2 parties can realistically win.

Not necessarily. That's a result of first past the post, not of voting in general. ranked choice voting solves a lot of this extremism 2 party system. The dominant parties need to at least pretend to appel enough to moderatism that a 3rd party isn't outvoting both of them.

>Many people understand this and it is barely part of the consideration in their vote. The last election in the US was a social battle, not really an economic one.

So the right wingers never really cared about inflation, egg prices, and the job market. I wish I could pretend to be shocked at this point.
by teruakohatu | 2025-07-08 10:12:53+00:00
There are a variety of definitions, and for a number of definitions my country hints at claiming an entire “continent” [1] Not actually pressing a claim diplomatically but also not dismissing the idea of a claim.

Of course there is zero chance New Zealand would ever challenge Australia or France for territory, and little chance we could ever claim economic rights.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia
by alkyon | 2025-07-08 10:13:18+00:00
Do you mean a report by the Israeli-based lawyer Trevor Asserson, maybe?

https://campaignformediastandards.org.uk/asserson-report.pdf

If so, then you're spreading misinformation. This is not a study. It's a report sponsored by Israel. It has flawed methodology and they made heavy use of ChatGPT.

I rest my case.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-08 10:13:42+00:00
The problem of those greedy business managers you speak of is that, they don't care how the company does 10 year down the line and I almost feel as if everybody is just doing things which work short term ignoring the long term consequences.

As the comment above said that we need a human in the loop for better results, Well firstly it also depends on human to human.

A senior can be way more productive in the loop than a junior.

So Everybody has just stopped hiring juniors because they cost money and they will deal with the AI almost-slop later/ someone else will deal with it.

Now the current seniors will one day retire but we won't have a new generation of seniors because nobody is giving juniors a chance or that's what I've heard about the job market being brutal.
by yorwba | 2025-07-08 10:15:40+00:00
That density is the volume density. For most applications, you care about the density in terms of number of hyperspheres instead. The largest hypersphere that fits inside an n-dimensional unit hypercube has radius 1/2 and volume π^(n/2) (1/2)^n / Γ(n/2 + 1), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_an_n-ball#Closed_for... so the number of hyperspheres in a given volume scales as n^2 Γ(n/2 + 1) / π^(n/2). Of course the dominant term is the factorial growth of the Gamma function, so even without the recent improvement by Klartag, using more dimensions to encode multiple values simultaneously was already preferable.
by wtcactus | 2025-07-08 10:16:04+00:00
All the consulted experts on the source agree that this wasn't an airstrike.

Most of the consulted experts agree that it was fired from inside Palestinian territory.

No consulted experts agree this was an airstrike.

No consulted experts agree this was fired from outside Palestinian territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...