MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dingdingdang | 2025-07-12 10:07:20+00:00
The frontpage needs technical details, you are not selling these retro machines to regular consumers but to nerds and the children of nerds*.

*including myself.

edit: pish-posh, I'm just not looking properly, found the specs and happy to see it's fpga based and has beefy properties for what it's doing!

edit-edit: is this related to RetroRecipes/Perifractic activities around the Commodore trademark?
by perihelions | 2025-07-12 10:07:37+00:00
I know; I mean to say they're larger file sizes—the PNG compression ratio is effectively less than one.

Take the first one, "acius.png", at 84,326 bytes. If you losslessly scale back to the original size (1/4th) and convert to 1-bit NetPBM, it's 51,851 bytes, without compression. I thought that was remarkable.
by dougseismic2025 | 2025-07-12 10:07:45+00:00
Here's some tooling to give agents direct memory access, process injection, access to your keyboard/mouse, native windows APIs, and a TS SDK so they can build themselves and use a PC like a human can.

features: → native C++ => TS Scripting SDK → direct memory access & manipulation → process injection & hooking → real-time memory scanning → complete mouse & keyboard control → window management & screenshots → visual automation & color detection → TypeScript Scripting SDK

GPL v3 licensed with extensive docs and examples. It goes without saying, be responsible and skip the dumb stuff. (I welcome the obvious salt in comments, however: I live for it.)
by andrepd | 2025-07-12 10:08:00+00:00
The internet was at least (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media.

LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
by xeonmc | 2025-07-12 10:08:42+00:00
Here's another one:

Air Canada 143

- Pilot calculated incorrect fuel due to metric/imperial unit mixup, and ran out of fuel midair.

- Said pilot performed an impossible glider-sideslip maneuver to rapidly bleed airspeed just-in-time for an emergency landing at an abandoned airfield, having to completely rely on eyeballing the approach.

- No fatalties or serious injuries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvt7hP5a-0
by danielbln | 2025-07-12 10:08:43+00:00
I review PRs/commits, not files. Given the right cage to lock the agent inside, and guardrails built around, and conventions and guidelines, and agentic flows so it can pull in what's needed.. the need to look at every line and file during implementation is significantly lessened. So then I review the final output (which is a unit of work/task wrapped in a PR).
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-12 10:11:26+00:00
What do you mean? In Flix, if a function has "Bool" as a return type then it can only return a Boolean value. That's what a type system ensures. Similarly, in Flix if a function has the "ReadsFromDB" effect then it can call operations that cause "ReadsFromDB"-- but it cannot cause any other effect. In particular, if there is also a "WriteToDb" then it cannot perform that effect.

This is not just aspirational. It is an iron-clad guarantee; it is what is formally called "effect safety" and it has been proven for calculi that model the Flix type and effect system.

To sum up: In Flix:

- If a function is pure then it cannot perform side-effects.

- If a function has the Console effect then it can only perform operations defined on Console.

- If a function has the Console and Http effect then it can only perform operations defined on Console and Http.

and so on.
by ido | 2025-07-12 10:12:22+00:00
I keep macbooks longer, but PC laptops I've had would often start breaking in ways that were too expensive to be worth repairing around that time. I had a Dell XPS whose screen had issues and replacing it (some custom touch screen that didn't have many options aside from dell's official replacements) was something like €600 (conveniently this happened shortly after the extended warranty expired), which at that point in the laptop's life was not worth the expense.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-12 10:13:22+00:00
We don't call each other cunt that much, but of course we do it now and again with a smile on our face. Right.

My point was simply that the word is much more common in places like the UK and Australia, to the point where being called that once ever is very far away from my experience, enough to be quite noteworthy. A point which your comment literally confirms.

And, as everyone is rushing to point out, yes, it can be used offensively, if used a certain way. What is this apparent difficulty accepting that words have multiple uses, even sometimes the opposite thing. English is a very contextual language, tone and intonation and familiarity and etc matter hugely.

For example, your last point - calling a woman a cunt can of course be sexist, but what if you and the woman for whatever reason both decide that you like calling each other a cunt? If you think that doesn't happen in the world, in respectful and mutually caring relationships and friendships, you are mistaken. Some people simply enjoy breaking taboos, it can be healthy and playful.
by badsectoracula | 2025-07-12 10:13:49+00:00
Not sure about the Swiss laws, but the EU AI Act and the 2019/790 digital millennium directive it piggies back on the topic, does allow for training on copyrighted data as long as any opt-out mechanisms (e.g. robots.txt) are respected. AFAICT this LLM was trained by respecting those mechanisms (and as linked elsewhere they didn't find any practical difference in performance - note that there is an exception to allow ignoring the opt-out mechanisms for research purposes, so they could make that comparison).
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-12 10:14:06+00:00
In the uncommon case, some stack frames must be heap allocated.

This is unavoidable when (a) the runtime enviroment, here the JVM, does not support tail calls, and (b) the language wants to guarantee that _any_[1] tail call does not grow the stack.

[1] Any call. Not just a call to the same function.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-12 10:16:12+00:00
No worries! We'd only ever be discussing this if governments hadn't provided a way to access their services, most of which are only available on the internet.

Can you imagine just how stupid it would be for governments not to provide another software for accessing it? If they didn't provide something, internet giants would be able to dictate their only means to communicate with citizens. Influence elections. Even lock out governments from their own countries. How moronic would a government need to be to risk that happening? Plus it would be unrealistically cruel as well, because it would of course deny access to the poor.

So no worries. Governments care about people. That's what they keep saying. So they have surely prevented something like this from happening, or provide an alternative.

Right?
by masklinn | 2025-07-12 10:17:21+00:00
> Does this mean that i can use?

They'll both trigger a runtime error, since the key you're using in the pattern (LHS) does not match any key in the dict.

Note that `'_'` is an actual string, and thus key, it's not any sort of wildcard. Using a bare `_` as key yields a syntax error, I assume because it's too ambiguous for the author to want to support it.
by autoexec | 2025-07-12 10:17:23+00:00
In a hypothetical world where people have, train and control their own LLMs according to their own needs it might be nice, but I fear that since the most common and advanced LLMs are controlled by a small number of people they won't be willing to give that much power to individuals because it will endanger their ability to manipulate those LLMs in order to push their own agendas and increase their own profits.
by EliRivers | 2025-07-12 10:17:24+00:00
A nice idea I've seen is that residential households pay a low amount per kilowatt-hour they consume until they reach some determined minimum "amount of energy this household needs to maintain a basic standard of living", and after that residential users go onto market rate.

Anyone using that energy to make a profit - that is, run a business - pays market rate from the start.
by suspended_state | 2025-07-12 10:17:49+00:00
Of course, but does it mean that my argument is flawed? You're just shifting the discourse, without disproving anything. Do you claim that the web was useful for everyone on day one, or as useful as it is today for everyone?

I could just do the same as GP, and qualify MUDs and BBS as poor proxies for social interactions that are much more elaborate and vibrant in person.
by rthrfrd | 2025-07-12 10:17:54+00:00
Well if you want to continue the analogy, I could say: Apple at least invested in a SoC architecture years ago has already put it in a different league as far as AI capabilities go.

So to say they haven't done "the same kind of homework yet" seems quite presumptive. Only Google has done anything remotely similar with TPUs and certainly not on the deployment scale that Apple has done.

FWIW I don't care either way, I don't get emotionally attached to corporations, I just think the entire framing of the original post is very reactionary and naive, and I continue to think that the comparison with Toyota is an apt way to illustrate that.
by software-is-art | 2025-07-12 10:18:09+00:00
GCs typically fall into two categories:

1. Reference counting - tracks how many references point to each object. When references are added or removed, the count is updated. When it hits zero, the object is freed immediately. This places overhead on every operation that modifies references.

2. Mark and sweep - objects are allocated in heap regions managed by the GC. Periodically the GC traces from roots (stack, globals) to find all live objects, then frees the rest. Usually generational: new objects in a nursery/gen0 are collected frequently, survivors are promoted to older generations collected less often.

In general reference counting is favoured for predictable latency because you’re cleaning up incrementally as you go. Total memory footprint is similar to manual memory management with some overhead for counting refs. The cost is lower throughput as every reference change requires bookkeeping (see Swift ARC for a good example).

Mark and sweep GCs are favoured for throughput as allocations and reference updates have zero overhead - you just bump a pointer to allocate. When collection does occur it can cause a pause, though modern concurrent collectors have greatly reduced this (see Java G1GC or .NET for good examples). Memory footprint is usually quite a bit larger than manual management.

In the case of Clojure which in addition to being a LISP also uses immutable data structures, there is both object churn and frequent changes to the object graph. This makes throughput a much larger concern than a less allocation heavy language - favouring mark and sweep designs.
by diggan | 2025-07-12 10:18:51+00:00
> But no Canadian residents is equivalent to what I put above

No? "No Canadians" is ambiguous enough that it could mean citizenship, residency, country you were born in, country you identify most with and so on.

"Canadian Residents" isn't ambiguous (you either have residency or not), and also doesn't seem to be protected at all, only national origin is.
by zinekeller | 2025-07-12 10:20:10+00:00
Some notes that I have noticed. First, why does it seem that the V8 date parser is heavily inspired by the Windows date parser (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200304-00/?p=10...)? EDIT: Apparently not, "new Date('Savvyday 29 Oatmeal 94')" is invalid both in Firefox and Chrome.

Second, I opened this in Firefox with the console open to answer these questions, and found these divergences (to summarize, Firefox is strict):

Question 14:

new Date("12.1")

> "12.1" is interpreted as the date December 1st, and as before for dates with no year the default is 2001 because of course.

Firefox returns an Invalid Date object instead.

Question 16:

new Date("12.-1")

> The dash here is ignored, so this is interpreted the same as "12.1".

Again, Firefox returns an Invalid Date object instead.

Question 19:

new Date("maybe 1")

> "may" in "maybe" is parsed as the month May! And for some reason this expression cares about your local timezone, which happens to be BST for me right now.

Seems a broken record, but this is still an Invalid Date for Firefox.

Question 20:

new Date("fourth of may 2010")

> "fourth of" is ignored, this is just parsing "may 2010" and again local timezone is important.

Ibid in Firefox.

Question 21:

new Date("May 4 UTC")

> UTC is correctly parsed as a timezone.

No, Firefox is still not accepting this one.

Question 22:

new Date("May 4 UTC+1")

> You can add modifiers to timezones and it works as you would expect.

Neither this one.

Question 23:

new Date("May 4 UTC+1:59")

> It also supports minutes!

Firefox: Not really.

Final note: It parses Question 24 as you expect in Firefox. Which honestly, it shouldn't!
by globular-toast | 2025-07-12 10:21:22+00:00
A theory that's been brewing in my mind is the success of the US can largely be attributed to having a single common language.

Even in England itself people use different words to describe the same thing, causing confusion. In many other countries they speak completely different languages!

In the US it's all the same. As an Englishman it's remarkable to me that people in Boston and people in California are really not that different at all. Some may say it's boring, but it can't be denied how easy it makes business etc. So many of the problems I have at work are due to language. It's doubly difficult when you're talking with people with a different native tongue. Some things just don't translate and even if they do it adds overhead.

So, ultimately, it doesn't matter what Americans say or how much they've "misunderstood" English etc, what matters is that every single one of them understands the same billion, the same units of measurement, the same idioms etc.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-12 10:21:44+00:00
Big tech companies do use it. Apple was advertising for Oracle DBA roles just last month. And consider that Amazon had to staff a massive multi-year project to migrate off it to their own in-house DB, which they only did because they had become a competitor.

W.R.T. unicorn type startups; yes, my argument is that they are all wrong and should be using a different database. There's competitive advantage to be had there.
by disposition2 | 2025-07-12 10:22:10+00:00
Noem is the head of DHS.

The (acting) head of FEMA, David Richardson [1], hasn’t visited the disaster area and apparently hasn’t made any public appearances for months [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Richardson_(government_o...

2. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/10/fema-leader-texas-f...
by imiric | 2025-07-12 10:22:21+00:00
Those are exactly the kind of AI slop products I would expect to be vibe coded. You've created yet another wrapper around LLM APIs where the business model is charging a premium over existing services. Your revenue depends on the ignorance of customers to not realize they can get the same or better service for cheaper from companies that actually do the hard work. I bet SEO hacking is really important to you.

It's irrefutable that AI tools can be used to create software that generates revenue. What's more difficult is using them to create something that brings actual value into the world.
by potamic | 2025-07-12 10:23:15+00:00
> On Jul 12th 2025 (UTC) India's media report that the investigation is NOT focussing on a human action causing the fuel switches to appear in the CUTOFF position, but on a system failure. Service Bulletins by Boeing issued in year 2018 recommending to upgrade the fuel switches to locked versions to prevent inadvertent flip of the switches, as well as the FAA/GE issued Service Bulletin FAA-2021-0273-0013 Attachment 2 relating to loss of control issue (also see above) were NOT implemented by Air India. The stated MN4 computer with faulty soldering, that might weaken and lose contact due to the thermal stress after a number of cycles, interprets data and commands fuel metering valves - with the lost contact attaching the MN4 processor to the EEC intermittent electrical contact, loss of signal processing and engine control faults can occur. The SB writes under conditions for the SB: "An LOTC (Loss Of Thrust Control) event has occurred due to an EEC MN4 microprocessor solder ball failure." According to discussions in the industry it may be possible with the number of cycles VT-ANB had already completed, the solder balls were weakened sufficiently to detach the MN4 from the EEC momentarily due to loads during the takeoff rotation leading to the loss of control of thrust and shut down of the engines.

Still quite early in the investigation, and so many things to consider. I don't know why online communities have been so quick to gravitate towards the murder/suicide theory. I thought aviation enthusiasts of all people would want to keep an open mind until every other possibility is ruled out, however minuscule it might seem.
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-12 10:23:21+00:00
The counter-point is the following: Functional programming is great for working with lists and trees. But functional programming (and imperative programming) struggle with succinctly, correctly, and efficiently expressing queries on graphs. Datalog, on the other hand, is excellent for working with graphs. It is simple, expressive, and (can be) very fast. It is a power tool. Most of the time it should not be used, but when it fits the problem domain its benefit can be 10x or 100x. It is also worth pointing out that Datalog is strictly more powerful than SQL (modulo various extensions).

The goal of Flix -- and typically of any high-level programming language -- is to provide powerful abstractions and constructs that make programming simple, concise, and (often) less error-prone. Here Datalog fits perfectly.

Now that said -- looking through the Flix documentation -- I think we need to do a better job at selling the use case for Datalog. Partly by adding arguments such as the above and partly by adding better examples.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-12 10:23:45+00:00
> notoriously complex pricing structure

You mean AWS?

(an AWS bill has about 10 pages of items you get charged for, with only 3 line items explained what they are, and even then, not why you get charged. GCP is better, but not by much (let's call it about 4 pages), and Azure is again better, but also not really (2 pages). AND they're all at least 10x as expensive as colo or dedicated hosting. Yes, 10x. People will deny that, and then you look at charges for data traffic, and conclude that if you use a lot of data traffic, it'll quickly start being more than 10x more expensive. And even cheap dedicated is only cheaper than a box in the corner of your closet for 6 months, maybe a year)
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-12 10:23:48+00:00
AA is less anarchic in practice than is principle.

AA being used by the justice system puts it at odds with anarchy, as anarchy is whatever you and your group want it to be, which is somewhat incompatible with state-mandated fill-in-the-blank.

Bill W. wanted to introduce LSD to AA in order to help folks understand what he meant by higher power, but the centering of Judeo-Christian ideology by other early AA members almost pushed Bill W. out of his own group.

AA was subverted long ago from within by the status quo it attempted to break free from. Whether or not it functions as an alcoholic support group is a separate issue.

I’ve written more about this before on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294352
by fosk | 2025-07-12 10:24:43+00:00
0.1% of airline pilots fly intoxicated, and probably many more fly hangover which is an undetectable condition.

There is speculation that in the Air France flight 447 that crashed into the ocean en route to Paris, one or the pilots only had 1h of rest because of partying the night before. Of course it’s all speculative, and however unlikely it is, eventually it’s bound to happen that we get pilots with poor mental clarity in charge of large Boeings with hundreds of lives on board. Unfortunately it only takes one lapse of judgement to compromise the flight profile of a large airliner, even if corrected after a few seconds.

https://generalaviationnews.com/2014/11/06/vanity-fair-the-h...
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-12 10:25:23+00:00
I'm starting to think talent is way less concentrated in these individuals than execs would have investors believe. While all those people who left OpenAI certainly have the ability to raise ridiculous sums of venture capital in all sorts of companies, Anthropic remains the only offspring that has actually reached a level where they can go head-to-head with OpenAI. Zuck now spending billions on snatching those people seems more like a move out of desperation than a real plan.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-12 10:25:31+00:00
Do you mean the same guy who perfected the high art of plugging his new AR/VR company at the end of his bombastic woman-blaming non-apology apology that his lawyer warned him not to post because all his colleagues jumped ship from his previous AR/VR company after his sexual abuse scandal sold you a huge Manfrotto tripod with a fluid head at LZ Premiums in San Jose, the one by Coyote Creek and the salt evaporator flat? Oh, do dish to me all about your huge Manfrotto! What has it seen? Tell me more! Tell me more! How's the fluid head treating you after all these years?

PS: Hello fellow Jaunter! Was it big and strong enough to support a Jaunt VR camera? Did you manage to nick one before they shut down? ;)
by mnahkies | 2025-07-12 10:28:00+00:00
It's a fun quiz, and there's a lot of surprising behaviour. However in my opinion from a practical perspective it mostly doesn't matter.

Think hard about whether your use case really cares about local time, try and find ways to make instants appropriate. Then stick to UTC ISO 8601 strings / Unix timestamps and most of the complexity goes away, or at least gets contained to a small part of your software.

I know this isn't always possible (I once had to support a feature that required the user took a break covering two periods of 1-5am local, which was obviously fun around DST boundaries) - but in my experience at least the majority of the time you can find ways to minimise the surface area that cares.

If you're passing raw/unvalidated user input to the date parser you're holding it wrong.
by Szpadel | 2025-07-12 10:29:05+00:00
the worst offender I saw is meta.

they have facebookexternalhit bot (they sometimes use default python request user agent) that (as they documented) explicitly ignores robots.txt

it's (as they say) used to validate links if they contain malware. But if someone would like to serve malware the first thing they would do would be to serve innocent page to facebook AS and their user agent.

they also re-check every URL every month to validate if this still does not contain malware.

the issue is as follows some bad actors spam Facebook with URLs to expensive endpoints (like some search with random filters) and Facebook provides then with free ddos service for your competition. they flood you with > 10 r/s for days every month.
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-12 10:31:12+00:00
Companies can sacrifice every thing for "time to market" - optimization, maintainability, security and safety even - but underestimate the costs of doing that. It is actually more a marketing choice than an economic choice.

One can be skeptical about the implied statement and leadership/management knows what it is doing beyond delivering at the (arbitrarily) set time. One definition of Quality is to satisfy a need entirely at the lowest cost in the shortest time, but more often that not, the last term gets 90% of the attention.