MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheCraiggers | 2025-07-25 01:00:16+00:00
Because they are a software project. When you're only concerning yourself with software, you have to pick some hardware and move on.

Going down the rabbit hole of secure hardware leads you down a slippery slope of eventually needing to create your own chips. And that's basically impossible these days for anybody smaller than Google or Samsung. So you do some research, pick the best you can, and hope for the best.

Perfect is the enemy of good.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-25 01:00:17+00:00
I understand that "there has to be a counter to dictatorship" and such actions are not without consequence.

But the words "critical mass" don't seem much more helpful than the definition of tyranny. The questionable boundaries apply, it's like a "you'll know it if you see it" thing.

The problem here is perception. Some people may "see" an outrage that causes them to act. While others don't. Jan 6 and George Floyd riots are two examples of people "seeing something" that caused them to act.

But if you are going up against the most well funded military in the world by some margin - well, whatever is seen had better motivate a LOT of people.
by scoreandmore | 2025-07-25 01:00:18+00:00
Intel was ~20k when I started in 1988. When we started to flirt with 100k in 1999~2004 there were so many senior people complaining what it would do to bonuses and raises and revenue… everyone started getting the executive bonus and stock options around this time, too, not just grade 7+, which added to the fear and greed. People were claiming Intel only had “5 years left” and more than a few smart people left. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I really think it was 20 years of stagnation and failure to take risks that landed them in such a fragile position to respond to disruption. Just weird looking back on the new-hire-a-phobia from 25 years ago.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-25 01:00:32+00:00
Fitness is a relative thing, especially when competing for limited resources, like institutional investor money. Everyone has to be prepared before it’s too late.

By the way, standing as workers, I wish they wouldn't resort to layoffs as the usual route when facing challenges, but sadly, excel competence is required to make it happen, and not many have it.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-25 01:00:40+00:00
I used to live near a down syndrome living facility. Essentially a house converted into a care facility in a neighborhood. ~8 - 10 people with downs lived there. Very few visitors (parents), almost all the cars belonged to the nurses. Isolated from everyone they lived around and kept away from the neighbors (I'm sure to the neighbors relief). required constant care. I don't think its a life most would choose.
by jchw | 2025-07-25 01:00:43+00:00
Aside from the type system bypass described in the article though, this is basically no different from the status quo for virtually all languages with free threading that aren't Rust. I argue that while everyone is fallible, experienced programmers usually don't make this sort of mistake directly, because they are usually well aware that sharing pointers over a closure on another thread is a recipe for disaster. Instead, I think that most of these issues are actually involving tricky circumstances that result in this happening by accident, like accidentally re-using an err variable from the enclosing function of a closure. These sorts of bugs are really bad, because they happen in spite of everyone knowing not to inappropriately share data across goroutines, and they are easy to sneak by in code reviews unnoticed. They don't intuitively look like concurrency bugs, and sometimes they're as little as one single : away from being correct. (Which I agree is a bad place for a language design to be.)

Thankfully though, people don't just throw their hands up there; a good amount of work has gone into figuring out the kinds of mistakes that often lead to Go concurrency bugs in the real world and writing static analysis tools that can help prevent them. That work, combined with Go's builtin tools and standard library, and the memory safety of individual isolated goroutines, makes most production Go concurrency bugs fairly boring even compared to C concurrency bugs, even though they theoretically have the same basic problem where you can freely share mutable data unsafely across concurrent threads.

So yes, it is still possible to write trivial, obvious concurrency bugs. The language won't stop you. However I've used Go across almost every job I've had since like 2016 and it has been rare to come across a concurrency bug this trivial. I hope I would catch flagrantly shared mutable state across threads during code review.
by Merad | 2025-07-25 01:00:55+00:00
First, in most states it is not legal to point a weapon at someone unless you are in a situation where you're legally allowed to pull the trigger. That is, you are legitimately in fear for your life. In that situation you will likely have very little time to act in self defense.

Second, racking a slide is an action that requires fine motor control. Under the pressure and adrenaline dump that accompanies a life-or-death situation, fine motor control goes to crap. If you are fumbling with your pistol, it's useless.

Third, if you don't feel comfortable with your ability to safely handle a loaded gun, you probably shouldn't be carrying at all.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-25 01:01:53+00:00
Thank you very much! So it seems like the crux of the issue still isn't clear, because:

> Had the employee taken employement with Google, it's likely their shares in windsurf would have been voided, or otherwise not vested.

That doesn't make any sense. The shares are already vested, they legally own them. How could they have been voided?

The idea of joining Google resulting in a "1% payout" doesn't seem to make any sense? Why would there even be any payout at all? And is it mandatory? How could it be?

And then it also doesn't even seem obviously terrible. If the valuation of Windsurf tanked, then is keeping the shares (now presumably converted to Cognition shares at a rate determined by the purchase?) even a better financial outcome?

I agree that Google acquiring the talent rather than buying the company seems shady. But the "1% payout" still isn't making much sense here and needs a lot more details. Because it's still not even clear if the payout is from Google (huh?) or Cognition (why?), or how it could be a mandatory condition of employment at Google.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-25 01:02:14+00:00
There is some code that wants to be generic over its executor. This is particularly true of something like parsing code, where you logically have a "get more data" call and you really don't care about the details of the call otherwise. So if the user provided a synchronous "get more data" source, you'd want the parse method to be synchronous; if it were asynchronous, you'd want it the parse method to be asynchronous.

That's basically the genesis of the idea of maybe-async. I've cooled tremendously on the idea, personally, because it turns out that a lot of code has rather different designs throughout the entire stack if you're relying on sync I/O versus async I/O, and this isn't all that useful in practice.
by niccl | 2025-07-25 01:02:16+00:00
I have a recollection that Intel used to do this when Andy Grove was in charge. There was a fair amount of noise about them 'spending through the recession': building FABs and other plant so that when the recession ended they'd be in a great place to take advantage of the increased demand. Sadly, I can't recall exactly which depression this was about.

Looking at Andy Grove's wikpedia page it could be that the above reflects his focus on "strategic inflection points"

So Intel used to do it once, but now, not so much
by kazinator | 2025-07-25 01:03:18+00:00
> The match semantics supported in RE# is leftmost-longest (POSIX) rather than leftmost-greedy (a.k.a., backtracking or PCRE) semantics. It is unclear how to support extended Boolean operators in backtracking in the first place and what their intended semantics would be – this is primarily related to that | is non-commutative in the backtracking semantics and therefore some key distributivity laws such as (|) ≡ | no longer preserve match semantics.

Non commutative A|B in regex is broken garbage. Bravo for calling it out!

The issue is that backtracking "greedy match" regex engines, when they deal with the disjunction, simply evaluate the cases left to right and stop on the first match: A|B|C|D is interpreted as "try regex A; if that matches, then stop, else try B ...". So if A matches, it's as if B, C and D don't exist.

Say we have the regex "c.r|carp.t", the input "carpet-odor" and are doing a prefix match. Greedy semantics will try "c.r" which matches "car", and stop there, declaring a three character match. Longest match semantics matches all branches simultaneously, picking the longest match. (This is closely related to the "maximal munch" principle in tokenizing.) That semantics will match see that the "carp.t" branch can match more characters after the "c.r" branch no longer matches, and report the six character match "carpet".

Longest match semantics jibes with a set-theoretical interpretation of regex, and that's why the | operator commutes. R1|R2 means the union of the strings matched by R1 and R2, and so R1|R2 is the same as R2|R1.
by transpute | 2025-07-25 01:03:28+00:00
OpenTitan has open silicon (RISC-V) and is capable of open firmware (based on Rust TockOS) and is coming to 2025 Chromebooks, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416304. Hopefully a derivative of OpenTitan will ship in future Pixel devices.

Google Pixel hardware provides nested virtualization, enabling a Debian Arm "Linux Terminal" in pKVM/AVF VM, with use of Debian package repos.
by chriswarbo | 2025-07-25 01:04:24+00:00
"Phantom types" are useful for what you describe: that's where we add a parameter to a type (i.e. making it generic), but we don't actually use that parameter anywhere. I used this when dealing with cryptography in Scala, where everything is just an array of bytes, but phantom types prevented me getting them mixed up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28059019
by TheFreim | 2025-07-25 01:04:52+00:00
> I have limited knowledge of guns. I understood that they had a physical safety switch that had to be manipulated before the firearm could be used. Is that the case?

Some handguns have manual safety switches, others don't. For example, the Sig P365 (an excellent, highly regarded sub-compact pistol often used for concealed carry), has models with or without a manual safety (you can also install a safety yourself if yours doesn't have one). Some handguns also have a "grip safety" which requires you to firmly hold the grip to disable the safety.

> If so, is the safety left off when people are carrying with a round chambered? Or have I misunderstood the purpose of the safety?

Because modern firearms have a variety of built-in safety mechanisms, separate from manual safety switches, which prevent unwanted discharges, the only thing that will cause a good firearm to go off will be the trigger being pulled. Combining this fact with modern form-fitting holsters which fully cover the trigger guard, it becomes impossible to fire the gun while it remains in the holster. This means that even without a manual safety switch you can carry safely without worrying about the gun going off until you draw and pull the trigger.

Echoing another reply to your comment, if you do have a safety on your gun you would typically toggle the safety while training to build muscle memory. This means you would practice enabling the safety, holstering the firearm, drawing the firearm, disabling the safety, and firing in a swift motion so that you always disable the safety when drawing.
by saltcured | 2025-07-25 01:04:57+00:00
Thanks. I tried it, but it doesn't feel right to me. I think there are a lot of small deviations from the font I remember.

I even found a ~30 year old screenshot with some xterms in it, so I could verify that my memory isn't just distorted. The glyphs are different. But, the screenshot also feels a little foreign to me, so my memory may also be distorted ;-)

At this point, I keep coming back to Noto Sans Mono Medium as my fallback.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-07-25 01:04:59+00:00
India has had UPI since 2016 now and recently overtook Visa and Mastercards global transaction volume with 650 million transactions per day [1]. These payment processors seem to be basically levying a 1-3% tax on a nations entire GDP and enforcing their own ideas of what transactions should or shouldn't be allowed. With UPI and Pix etc. paving the way and showing its possible, it actually sounds insane to give so much money and power to some private company that provides a worse product, for nation-critical infrastructure.

[1] https://organiser.org/2025/07/22/304055/bharat/a-fintech-rev...
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-25 01:05:31+00:00
> In exchange [for eliminating the dependency on LLVM], Zig gains these benefits:

> All our bugs are belong to us.

> The compiler becomes trivial to build from source and to bootstrap with only a C compiler on the host system.

> We stop dealing with annoying problems introduced by Linux distributions and package managers such as Homebrew related to LLVM, Clang, and LLD. There have been and continue to be many.

> The Zig compiler binary goes from about 150 MiB to 5 MiB.

> Compilation speed is increased by orders of magnitude.

> [...]

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270
by usuallymatt | 2025-07-25 01:05:34+00:00
I was tempted to use this but when I looked into the team behind it there seemed to be some issues as exposed by Louis Rossman here: https://youtu.be/Dl1x1Dy-ej4.

Instead, I installed CalyxOS and have been using it over a year now and I'm very happy with it. Check it out.
by giantrobot | 2025-07-25 01:06:40+00:00
Intel CEO: Wintel hegemony will save us! Triple down!!

Everyone under 30 reading this dreck on their iPhone with a 5G radio: What the fuck is a Wintel?

Mobile in general (SoCs, CPUs, etc) has been a major growth sector for a decade and a half. Between IoT and actual mobiles (smartphones) it's a tens of billions of units a year market. Intel has not only avoided this market but actively dropped out by selling off any offerings they had in it. They've retreated to their less than a billion units moved per year CPU market to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It's been insane to watch.

Intel is doomed. They're going to Motorola themselves. Hopefully any useful pieces end up with someone with a clue. Unfortunately the fire sale will mean a ton of negotiation for all of the long term licenses around stuff like x86. What a shit show of their own making.
by timshell | 2025-07-25 01:07:28+00:00
I think a common misconception of Moneyball is that it's about analytics. The broader lesson is that people need to systematically evaluate undervalued assets in sports/business etc.

One of the interesting 'post-Moneyball' stories is when old-school scouting methods came back onto the scene. People started overvaluing the new popularized statistics, and the market advantage was to combine the analytics and traditional approach in a cost-efficient manner.
by wpm | 2025-07-25 01:08:09+00:00
It was put best by Steve Jobs:

“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”

I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.
by robmensching | 2025-07-25 01:08:17+00:00
Yep, and now you have about half a million lines of code* to maintain as well. Have fun with it!*

* Last count the WiX Toolset had 589,719 loc but 444,936 if you skip comments and whitespace.

* This is the point, maintaining successful (and often non-trivial) projects requires a good bit of work.
by this_user | 2025-07-25 01:08:38+00:00
> Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?

Some of it is reacting to the general environment. Some of it also may be opportunism to do the thing you wanted to do anyway, like laying off people. It's easier to explain when everyone else is already doing it.

Apart from that, there is also the factor of career risk. If you are senior management and you do whatever everyone else is currently doing, and it doesn't work, then you can point to the fact that everyone else was wrong too, and you will probably be fine. But if you go against the herd, and you are wrong, you look like an idiot, and you are probably getting fired.

Of course, the truly great CEOs have the stomach to keep making bold moves. But the people who can do that - and be right most of the time - are truly rare. Those are the Jobs and Bezoses of the world, and they were able to make moves that no one else could even see at that moment.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-25 01:09:19+00:00
Faisal Islam: Tariffs are working

https://old.reddit.com/r/BoycottUnitedStates/comments/1m7baz...

The hallmark of a positive sum framework is that it's more general or accurate than the author intended. (Not original I don't recall the source)

(Gygax comes off as a proto-PG. Intention was for Joker to be "chaotic evil" but the implementation might have had other ideas. Maybe Joachim's Joker I would have his approval? )

In the case of Trump, it helps Japan to "turn far-right", which is also evil at face value. Silver lining not yet found, not by this commenter at least

(Ps: Kipling & "good intentions" rhyme in my head. Need to take a page from you and sleep on all this before continuing)

https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-anti-immigrat...
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-25 01:09:23+00:00
> No, the people aren't forced to buy any stock. They keep the money uninvested or whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it.

There's no such thing as "uninvested", unless the money is in the form of currency under a mattress but this would create such a mess that if Keynes hears about it he won't stop spinning in the long term.

And what the fresh hell is to use money for "whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it"... excluding the mattress, what else can you do with money?

You're simply throwing ideas at the wall without understanding their implications, if you're human you've got to take some econ classes and find an example that is close to what you propose - everything has been tried at some point or another - then we'll have something real to discuss.
by hankman86 | 2025-07-25 01:09:40+00:00
No. Down Syndrome leads to an objectively worse outcome for the affected individuals. And their parents, I might add.

We should not let compassion for these people obstruct some basic facts. My only consideration would be the potential risks and side effects that are to be expected for any medical intervention. But if we were expecting a child that was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, I would not hesitate for a second to give this child the chance for a normal life. And us parents the chance for normal parenthood.
by Jensson | 2025-07-25 01:10:06+00:00
To some people gender is basically sex. Simple as that. So a person can see themselves as a woman but others are free to see them as a man, because this isn't a scientific term as you say.

Its like how some call men who didn't conform to male norms "girlies" or so, these things are so ill defined that its dumb to argue over it. Of course it is rude to call something they don't wanna be called though.
by Ayesh | 2025-07-25 01:10:27+00:00
About half of the world population has access to some sort of QR based payment system nowadays.

India has UPI, China has Ali and Wechat pay. Almost everyone in these two countries can go weeks without having to use cash.

In South East Asia, Vietnam is leading QR payments. I live in Ha Noi, and I only carry VND equivalent of $15-20 with me, and it sits in the wallet for ages. Everything from gas stations to restaurants to street vendors to even paying taxes, you do it from a QR code. There is no wallet, the money is directly debited from the account.

Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia have similar systems. In Indonesia, a couple of "super apps" had their own wallets, but merged with QRIS a few years back, a lot of Indonesian people can now pay with QR codes, even across wallets and bank accounts.

South America and Asia has already started to replace card payments with the QR payments. Rightfully so.
by dsstudios | 2025-07-25 01:10:39+00:00
Totally. You could 100% use a Google Sheet for the raw numbers, and I know people who do.

For me, the motivation was purely selfish at first: I wanted to see the analytics without doing the work. I didn't want to have to mess with pivot tables or figure out a map API just to answer a personal question.

So this tool basically does all that data viz work for you. It auto-generates the map, the timeline, and charts for stats like nationalities, etc. It’s designed to surface interesting patterns automatically.
by robmensching | 2025-07-25 01:10:41+00:00
The code is owned by the .NET Foundation (long story) not Microsoft.

> but doesn't that mean that I can compile the code myself to circumvent the Maintenance Fee, and give the binaries away for free?

Yep. Now you are responsible for the ~500K lines of code. Totally allowed by the license. Enjoy your fork! :)
by matt-p | 2025-07-25 01:10:57+00:00
Because it's driven by investor/market sentiment. That's literally all. If your investors have ask you why you've not laid off 10% of your workforce due to AI efficiencies, when that's the prevailing sentiment, then you look incompetent. If in the middle of COVID the sentiment is remote work will drive more tech adoption/usage and money is very cheap then you have to start hiring as many engineers as possible otherwise you look like you're not a growth company or lack confidence. It doesn't matter if it doesn't increase your development cadence, that is not the point. The point is that "the market" is largely vibe based. Right now the vibe is AI companies are hot so as say the meta CEO you start burning a trillion dollars on GPUs, without anyone stopping to question why Facebook needs any more AI, or how it will make it ROI.
by zarzavat | 2025-07-25 01:11:42+00:00
> Some bioethics experts are concerned

I do have to wonder what goes on in the minds of these people. My sister-in-law has a child with Down's syndrome and the situation basically ruined her life. She can no longer work, so they now struggle on a single income, if her husband were to leave her she would be completely screwed. To what end is that in the continuance of ethics?