MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nativeit | 2025-07-04 18:58:45+00:00
Assuming for the sake of argument this were a real service checking for matches, the chances of a hash collision with SHA256 is effectively 0.[1] I entered the limit for BIGINT (9223372036854775807), and the approximation of the probability of a hash collision after generating 9223372036854775807 items in SHA256 is zero. The exact probability would probably take eons to calculate, but it's vanishingly close to zero.

1. https://kevingal.com/apps/collision.html
by VTimofeenko | 2025-07-04 18:59:04+00:00
IME(living in almost rural area, coyotes live in/near stormwater ponds and are abundant) they will follow you if you get too close to the den to try to drive you away, but won't engage.

Coyote pups are adorable though. A couple of them made a lair in a drain about a month ago but have relocated since. Still see one of them around the neighborhood with his distinctive tail.
by 082349872349872 | 2025-07-04 18:59:07+00:00
Hey, sorry to not be on HN much these days, but beyond all the distractions in the world of atoms, I was chatting with DeepThink about ways to convert 大鬧天宮 to 连续天宫 (using Scott domain theory to enforce "as below, so above" semantics), and boy did it ever riff on the synaesthetic combination, producing an outline of a cantonese opera in the language of topos theory...

Anyway, reminded me I should check in on what you've been up to, here!
by cardanome | 2025-07-04 18:59:47+00:00
No, that case would be fine if the side business would be being self-employed. No one cares how many hours you work if you are self-employed. (Mostly, I am simplifying here)

What is an issue is working employed for two jobs and going over the 48 hour limits.

Working that much is very unhealthy so the state needs to protect people from being exploited. People should be able to live from working full time. Having to work multiple jobs and to destroy your own health is morally abhorrent.

Under German law being employed by a company and being self-employed are legally very distinct things. If you are employed you get protection from being fired, you have to have health care, pay into the retirement fond and so on.

If you are self-employed you are on your own. You can decide if you use public or private health care, you need to figure out how to save up for retirement yourself and so own. You get more freedom but less protection. That is because the law realizes that working people need protection from exploitation but also wants to give freedom to those that want to try their own business.
by thegrim33 | 2025-07-04 19:00:22+00:00
It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.

In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.

I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-07-04 19:00:29+00:00
> If the likelihood of occupants burning alive doubles, then I think it's safe to say that saving the money is unethical.

Okay, but what if that means the car has to be $300k USD more expensive?

And suppose that price increase means 20,000 persons who otherwise could afford some car, no longer can afford any car. And then, as a result, those 20,000 persons collectively lose 10,000 person-years of lifespan because of poorer access to good jobs, inability to quickly get to a hospital during emergencies, etc.

At that point was the $300k USD pricetag better than, say, allowing 30 individuals to die in a car fire?

I'm not saying I know the answer. But if we can't answer that, I'm not sure your "safely" agree with the point you were making.
by koverstreet | 2025-07-04 19:00:46+00:00
No, the assertion is that the proper response to a bug often (and if it's high impact - always) involves a lot more than just the bugfix.

And the whole reason for a filesystem's existence is to store and maintain your data, so if that is what the patch if for, yes, it should be under consideration as a hotfix.

There's also the broader context: it's a major problem for stabilization if we can't properly support the people using it so they can keep testing.

More context: the kernel as a whole is based on fixed time tables and code review, which it needs because QA (especially automated testing) is extremely spotty. bcachefs's QA, both automated testing and community testing, is extremely good, and we've had bugfix patchsets either held up or turn into flamewars because of this mismatch entirely too many times.
by hoistbypetard | 2025-07-04 19:01:32+00:00
Get ready to start having some fun in your interviews. Start including things like redirection of focus through general statements, unrelated (and false) trivia, and misleading suggestions in your interview questions. Most of the humans you'd like to hire will ignore those or ask you about them.

Many LLMs will be derailed into giving entertainingly wrong answers:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01781
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-04 19:02:22+00:00
I also think it's the extended "adolescence" that permeates many modern western countries. I know young people who are approaching 30, barely out of their parents' house, own nothing, and still have not really engaged with being the owner of their lives. The idea of having kids is nowhere on their radar; it's just something they see as totally daunting in the amount of work they imagine it would require.

I think the time to have kids is when you are young and full of energy and still have youthful fearlessness about the future. Fertility for women starts dropping at around age 25 and certainly by 30. Then you're dealing with seeing doctors trying to get pregnant, the stress of careers, approaching middle age, and declining energy levels.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-04 19:02:24+00:00
That's a tough row to hoe --- classic example of that is a pencil (see Thoreau and his family's history/business), though interestingly, there is a specialized tool now for making one (from components):

John Economaki's "Pencil Precision" from Bridge City Tool Works:

https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision

I have the preceding "Chopstick Master v2" and it is a delight to use (and probably if there was a suitable set of instructions for collecting the materials for making a pencil lead and baking them, I'd probably have the successor).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-04 19:02:45+00:00
Fair point.

I should say that I wasn't particularly interested in a "good-paying" job. I was set, already.

I wanted something that I found interesting.

The places that would hire me, had crappy work.

The places with the interesting work, had no interest in hiring me. Saying that it's because oldtimers are expensive, is a red herring. I would have happily taken half of what they pay people with half my expertise.

In any case, it's all good, now. I have no interest in returning to work. I'm having way too much fun, working harder than I ever did, without managers pissing all over my work.
by geocar | 2025-07-04 19:03:05+00:00
Don't be afraid.

Look at qmail, which has the best track record of any piece of software I am aware of in wide distribution, and it was written in C.

Also: Memory leaks go away when you exit(), so they are actually more common in dynamic languages in my experience, although they manifest as fragmentation that the interpreter simply lacks the ability to do anything out.

Buffer overflows seem pretty common to people who do a lot of dynamic memory allocation: I would recommend not doing that in response to user-input.

The result is that your C-based guestbook CGI is probably written very differently than a PHP-based guestbook. Mine basically just wrote to a logfile because since 2.6.35 we have been able to easily make a 1mb PIPE_BUF and get lock-free stores with no synchronisation and trivial recovery, and thus know exactly where each post began and end. I'm not sure I want more than 1mb of user input back in those days, but the design made me very confident there were no memory leaks or buffer overflows in what was like 5 system calls. No libraries.

You could do this.

You can do this.

But you want more? That C-based guestbook also only ever needs to write to one file, so permissions could be (carefully) arranged to make that the only file it can write to. A PHP-based guestbook needs read (and possibly write-access) to lots of files. Some of those things can be shared objects. It is so much easier to secure a single static binary than a dynamic language with dynamic loading that if you actually care about security, you could focus on how to make those static binaries easier.
by alwa | 2025-07-04 19:03:20+00:00
That’s a delightful concept to think about! I’m not sure what conceptual information the translation layer would add to the LLM’s internal representation of the state space.

But the broader concept of asking it to translate something structurally to a different domain, then seeing how the norms of that domain cause it to manipulate the state differently… that tickles my fancy for sure. Like you said, it sounds cool even in an art-project sense just to read what it says!
by EliasWatson | 2025-07-04 19:03:41+00:00
I've been working on something just like that off and on for a couple months. It's a MUD where all the NPCs are controlled by LLMs that interact with the world with the same commands that players use. I got it to the point where the NPCs can navigate the world, interact with each other, and even create things. But they often get on rabbit trails and forget their original task, so I need to build a memory system and something like the task list in Claude Code. My goal is to have a fully simulated town that the player can interact with.
by bhouston | 2025-07-04 19:03:54+00:00
I am currently running a 8 4TB NVMe NAS via OpenZFS on TrueNAS Linux. It is good but my box is quite large. I made this via a standard AMD motherboard with both built-in NVMe slots as well as a bunch of expansion PCEi cards. It is very fast.

I was thinking of replacing it with a Asustor FLASHSTOR 12, much more compact form factor and it fits up to 12 NVMes. I will miss TrueNAS though, but it would be so much smaller.
by 0x445442 | 2025-07-04 19:03:57+00:00
What does this buy over all the other terminal emulators? I see why the component is in IDEs so the developer doesn't need to switch apps to get to the terminal. Now a full fledged JVM shell that supports most of the commands we come to expect in a shell and also has the JVM and it's whole ecosystem at its fingertips, that might be something.
by jfengel | 2025-07-04 19:05:06+00:00
We've been doing this for decades. LLMs may have automated it, but the plain human version was pretty cheap and plenty effective.

So we're not going to act. Actions are hard enough when everyone is in touch with reality. All potential solutions have trade-offs and everyone wants somebody else to pay the costs.

Add in a smallish but highly influential set who are convinced that the entire thing is a hoax, and progress maxes at zero. You'll be lucky if the problem doesn't accelerate. (Which is indeed what it seems to be doing.)
by j_timberlake | 2025-07-04 19:05:33+00:00
In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime.

I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated anywhere.
by jhide | 2025-07-04 19:05:33+00:00
There have been less than 10 (Wikipedia says 2) fatal coyote attacks in recorded history. A conservative estimate of the number of native birds and small mammals killed by feral cats since unix time began counting on 1/1/1970 is 1 trillion. Literally 20 billion a year. That’s a grotesque ecological sin against the ecosystems which keep us alive. Artificially supporting an invasive species which eats your petsmart kibble and then ravages (often as play) whatever vestige of the native wonder that existed in North America before we turned it into lawns is an ecological sin. Not caring for it and trying to leave it a better place than we found it for the next generation is an ecological sin.
by M4v3R | 2025-07-04 19:06:21+00:00
> If I can do in 2 hours of prompting or 2 hours of doing it manually I’d rather just do it manually.

100% agree, if that was the case I would not use LLMs either. Point is, at least for my use case and using my workflow it's more like 2 hours vs 10 minutes which suddenly changes the whole equation for me.
by ajb | 2025-07-04 19:06:26+00:00
Yeah.. the thing is, suppose Kent was 100% right that this needed to be merged in a bugfix phase, even though it's not a bug fix. It's still a massive trust issue that he didn't flag up that the contents of his PR was well outside the expected.

That means Linus has to check each of his PRs assuming that it might be pushing the boundaries without warning.

No amount of post hoc justification gets you that trust back, not when this has happened multiple times now.
by doodlebugging | 2025-07-04 19:06:38+00:00
Probably suitably air-gapped so that none of us plebes can remote into it and spin for a random date to kick off a global reboot.

I wonder whether it uses a joystick, scrolling wheel, or a user-selectable date and whether the user can pick their spawn point. What is the date format? Gregorian calendar or earlier? Is the machine bright enough make date corrections based on where you want to go on that date if the location doesn't use a standard European calendar?

It would really suck to pick a date where you know something important was gonna happen and find out you rolled it all back to a different continent because you glitched the part where you were supposed to end up in Atlantis and found yourself treading water in the middle of the Atlantic because of a spelling error.

Too many questions here. The unknownable unknowns are a real drag.
by jghn | 2025-07-04 19:08:28+00:00
I hated EQ for me the reason was it was not UO nor was it even trying to recreate the vibrancy & real world that UO's designers had gone for. *BUT* I also recognized that EQ represented a game that was much more aligned to what a normal gamer would want, one could already see that path being forged in UO as time went on. And then of course WoW came along and perfected the art.

I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.
by cardanome | 2025-07-04 19:08:41+00:00
I am a bit confused why you think it is not easy. In fact you have the right to reduce your hours from full time to part time if your company employs more than 15 people. So you can easily make time for a freelancing job on the side.

Also you don't really need to track your hours when freelancing other than maybe for billing purposes so you really don't need to worry about hours anyway. Generally you are considered part-time self-employed when doing less than 18 hours per week.

Earning a bit on the side is really not an issue in Germany. In fact the combination of having a part time employed job and then doing freelancing is very popular.

What doesn't work is being full time employed at two companies but that would make no sense even if you could as you would earn much less and pay insane taxes.
by madmask | 2025-07-04 19:11:10+00:00
The point is what value can the common man reasonably provide in the free market to support a family when most of white collar work is also automated?

The industrial revolution automated a lot of blue collars, AI is starting to seriously automate white collars to the point less people are needed.

They are automating the mind, there’s not much else to compete with to provide value. Which color people should pivot to?
by blueblimp | 2025-07-04 19:12:15+00:00
The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.

I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.
by grg0 | 2025-07-04 19:12:29+00:00
Yeah, I don't understand what the "liability" here is. I never claimed it was going to be optimal, and I already pointed out C/C++ as the only reasonable choice if you actually want to run games on the thing and get as much performance as possible. But manipulating the machine state in Haskell is otherwise perfect. Code will look like equations, everything becomes trivially testable and REPLable, and you'd even get a free time machine from the immutability of the data, which makes debugging easy.
by habinero | 2025-07-04 19:12:36+00:00
Nah, you're managing to miss the point going both ways lol. It's both.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that your statement is true, that you do, in fact, somehow get 10% more useful results.

The two points are:

1. That doesn't make the system better in any way lol. You've built a tool that acts like a slot machine and only works if you get three cherries. Increasing the odds on cherries doesn't change the fact that using a slot machine as a UI is a ridiculous way to work.

2. In the real world, LLMs don't think. They do not use logic. They just churn out text in non-deterministic ways in response to input. They are not reliable and cannot be made so. Anybody who thinks they can is fooling / Clever Hansing themselves.

The point here is you might feel like the system is 10% more useful, but it feels like that because human brains have some hardware bugs.
by trhway | 2025-07-04 19:13:00+00:00
>You’re probably aware that in North America alone for all cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year

and how many of those birds and mammals were old and ill and would be killed by other predators in similar situation in non-developed areas? Why didn't you specify that comparative number? May be because that would have shown that the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans?

Btw, the cats kill up to 4 billion birds annually. At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings. Cats kill old/ill. The birds hitting building aren't majority old/ill. Thus killings by cats are mostly beneficial to the bird species while glass buildings make tremendous damage to the bird species.
by pininja | 2025-07-04 19:13:12+00:00
It’d be great to have contributors join our collaborator summit [0] in the Seattle area this fall!

It’s a free event, supported by the OpenJS Foundation, kepler.gl’s host foundation.

We’re expecting to have a session from Shan, the creator of Kepler.gl as well as Ilya, the creator of SQLRooms. We’re still accepting session proposals as well [1]!

[0] https://deck.gl/events/seattle-summit-2025/ [1] https://github.com/openjs-foundation/summit/issues/450
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-04 19:14:29+00:00
Something you've gotta understand is that the majority of English-language scientific journal articles are written by authors who aren't native English speakers/writers.

> https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202333/publication-output-by-r...

In the past, just after they submit a poorly-written paper, the sleazeballs at Wiley/Elsevier/Springer would "encourage" said authors to employ their "Author Services" who would edit and rewrite their paper for them, and resubmit it for publication. This didn't come cheap.

Today, everybody just uses LLMs. LLMs are masterful translators of language and concepts. It's a win-win for everybody but Author Services.

Admittedly, word choice and sentence structure are much more limited. (This is not necessarily a bad thing. LLM-written scientific papers can be clearer, and are often more tidy, than human-written scientific papers.) I don't like seeing LLM-written text in journalism, literature, and other media, but I don't mind it so much in scientific literature -- if there's no fraud involved, that is.
by fallinditch | 2025-07-04 19:15:05+00:00
I both like and dislike the writing style of LLMs.

I like the clarity and easy-to-read usability, but at the same time I find the stylistic tics and overusage of words and phrases often grates.

I wonder if this stylistic failure is something that will get fixed or if it's the inevitable consequence of LLMs.
by sandreas | 2025-07-04 19:15:40+00:00
Well, if you would like to go mini (with ECC and 2.5G) you could take a look at this one:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html

Not totally upgradable, but at least pretty low cost and modern with an optional SATA + NVMe combination for Proxmox. Shovel in an enterprise SATA and a consumer 8TB WD SN850x and this should work pretty good. Even Optane is supported.

IPMI could be replaced with NanoKVM or JetKVM...
by aftbit | 2025-07-04 19:16:49+00:00
I have Ctrl-p bound to use `fzf` to fuzzy find files by name, just like in VSCode or Sublime. \a uses `rg` to search file contents. I don't use rust much, but if I wanted to go to a specific line in a file, I would probably just use C-p to open it with fuzzy find, then :(lineno) to navigate to the correct line.

I do tend to just run tools in another terminal, rather than keep my terminal in vim. If I'm on a remote machine, I sometimes use tmux to run multiple panels, but I'm more likely to just open two instances of alacritty and ssh in twice. With ControlMaster set up, the second ssh session gets multiplexed over the first connection, so there's very little additional latency to open a terminal with C-<return> and then ssh in with `C-r ssh <return>`, which uses fzf to search my history in most-recent-first mode.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-04 19:16:51+00:00
I have been waiting for a good story how to sell D for adoption, since Andrei published his book.

Most of the stuff that interested me back in 2007, is now available across in C#, F#, JVM languages, Swift, OCaml, Haskell, with a better ecosystem and IDE tooling.

And then there is C++26 and Rust 2024.

You achieved a lot as language designer, but it is still not clear how the community would keep the language going forward in lets say 10 years from now.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 19:16:53+00:00
Generated text seems to work because so few people read and even fewer think as they read.

AI writing often creates a firehose output of sing-songy, long, over styled text -- which is a lot to ask a reader to get through and really comprehend.

I'm guilty of forming my own conclusion or just believing what I see when I'm in a hurry or unfamiliar or don't care a ton. I'd rather read a human's rough output than a polished generated text version.