MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Steve44 | 2025-08-12 09:35:13+00:00
> food is included in this amount

When my wife was ill a few years ago the doctor suggested Angel Delight[1] to help maintain fluids. Until then it hadn't occurred to me you're still effectively drinking half a pint of milk when you eat a bowl.

[1] It's an instant dessert / mousse that you mix up with milk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Delight
by renox | 2025-08-12 09:35:17+00:00
FWIW I'm French.

> I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work,

Yes, to all this.

> plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.

Uh? I've never heard about it in the media. The only thing vaguely similar would be the focus on minimizing our resource consumption so that our kids doesn't suffer "too much" about the man-made climate change, but usually the focus is about buying less thing, using renewable energy, not making fewer children.
by tymerry | 2025-08-12 09:36:03+00:00
*The transition is easier/possible*

In the short term AI's perceived benefit is making existing people more efficient. Engineers being more efficient means need for LESS engineers. Downsizing 100 ICs to 90 is lower risk then it is to scale a team of 1 down to 0 (or even a fractional CEO).

If you believe AI predictions to be directionally accurate then we can expect/observe that managers will start gaining more responsibilities/tasks as their efficiency goes up. A place to test this hypothesis would be management consulting companies. If we are seeing the big 3 make layoffs and decreased revenue. I think consulting companies are a valid proxy for this idea because they act as buffer capacity for the work you describe as CEO work.
by simonask | 2025-08-12 09:36:21+00:00
Basically all of those problems originate with the tradition of conflating pointers and object identity, which is a problem in Rust as soon as you have ambiguous ownership or incongruent access patterns.

It's also very often not the best way to identify objects, for many reasons, including performance (spatial locality is a big deal).

These problems go away almost completely by simply using `EntityID` and going through `&mut World` for modifications, rather than passing around `EntityPtr`. This pattern gives you a lot of interesting things for free.
by Jolter | 2025-08-12 09:37:19+00:00
It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3.

In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues:

- Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, again

Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism).

I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
by simon_void | 2025-08-12 09:37:48+00:00
I like Rust as much as the next guy, but Kotlin is the most ergonomic programming language I know. So my approach is to use Kotlin by default and should it some day become clear that the service is a bottleneck (or if the cloud cost can be lowered substancially), to only then rewrite it in Rust. At that point the service has probably already gained most of the functionality it'll ever have, which should make the Rust conversion as straight-forward as it can be.
by cjs_ac | 2025-08-12 09:37:50+00:00
If I recall, there was a dating app that showed you profiles of people you'd crossed paths with that day - so, basically a conventional dating app with a novel algorithm for choosing which profiles to show you. If I'm understanding you correctly, what you're suggesting has minimal profiles; it just notifies you that a given person is nearby and that you might want to talk to them.

I can see two problems with this. The first is enforced synchronicity: I can't scroll through profiles when I've got a few minutes; if I want to make a match, I have to act on the notification right then and there. For users who live in large cities, the overwhelming majority of their notifications will occur when they're commuting, doing a food shop, eating out with friends, etc., which aren't great times for chatting up someone. The second problem is safety: users who misbehave aren't doing anything they wouldn't have done without your app, but because your app was involved, you're the one that takes the reputational damage.

There was an entirely tech-free attempt at this sort of thing called the Pear Ring, which was a turquoise rubber ring to be worn on a finger that indicated that you're single and ready to mingle. The fact that the Pear Ring website no longer exists and web searches only return lifestyle magazine websites telling us it's the future of dating suggest that it didn't work.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-08-12 09:38:21+00:00
> Undefined behavior only means that ISO C doesn't give requirements, not that nobody gives requirements. Many useful extensions are instances where undefined behavior is documented by an implementation.

True, most compilers have sane defaults in many cases for things that are technically undefined (like take sizeof(void) or do pointer arithmetic on something other than a char). But not all of these cases can be saved by sane defaults.

Undefined behavior means the compiler can replace the code with whatever. So if you e.g. compile optimizing for size, the compiler will rip out the offending code, as replacing it with nothing yields the greatest size optimization.

See also John Regehr's collection of UB-Canaries: https://github.com/regehr/ub-canaries

Snippets of software exhibiting undefined behavior, executing e.g. both the true and the false branch of an if-statement or none etc. UB should not be taken lightly IMO...
by b112 | 2025-08-12 09:38:21+00:00
There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though.

The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit?

If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same.

(One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-08-12 09:38:50+00:00
> main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections

This isn't true most actually gain more power because once you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead of the country you can then take advantage of all the deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start actually making real money and having real influence without the eyes on you.
by swinglock | 2025-08-12 09:38:51+00:00
I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-12 09:39:04+00:00
Well, Graal is designed to compile Java and dynamic scripting languages, not C. Its flexibility means it can also compile C (=LLVM bitcode), but that's more of a tech demo than something they invest into.

I don't quite get your point though. Mine was only that it's common for single companies to develop multiple independent state of the art compilers, whereas after the 1990s video codecs tend to be collaborations between many companies. That's a piece of evidence that codecs are harder. But this is all quite subjective and I don't really care. Maybe compilers are actually harder and the trend to collaboration in video is just a cultural quirk of that subfield - doesn't really matter. The starting point of the thread was a belief that if MPEG didn't exist video codecs would have all been 100% free right from day one and I just don't see any evidence for that. The competition to MPEG in the 90s was mostly Sorensen and RealVideo if my fading memories aren't too garbled. Although the last version of Sorensen Spark was apparently a tweaked version of H.263 according to Wikipedia.
by Steve44 | 2025-08-12 09:39:13+00:00
We had an office worker who became obsessed about dehydrating, undoubtedly after watching too much social media. She carried the bottle everywhere.

She arrived at work one day in a state of panic because her water bottle spilt in the car and she was terrified of becoming dehydrated during her 15 minute commute.

And no, there wasn't anything medically wrong with her.
by jononor | 2025-08-12 09:39:17+00:00
Seems like we may get local, open, workstation-grade models that are useful for coding in a few years. By workstation-grade I mean a computer around 2000 USD, and by useful for coding I mean around Sonnet 4 level. Current cloud based models are fun and useful, but a tool that is / will be so core to the developer experience, I want to be able to run locally.
by hopelite | 2025-08-12 09:39:31+00:00
You’re dismissing something way more complicated. Many people with good names have supposedly had CP hoards. How would you even go about checking out confirming that it even is CP? You can’t, and would you even want to look into that? No, of course not.

Frankly, it could even just be made up. How would you know? I’m sure in most cases it is true and correct, but with as much corruption in every and all aspects of policing and justice, there is absolutely zero chance that when it involves something with such huge and hidden levers as CP, that there would be zero corruption. Cops still plant drugs on people even though they know they are on body cam and they still shoot people to death for no reason and are simply absolved by the system that protects itself; you don’t think that the black box of CP accusation that no one wants to or can look into is not used for corrupt reasons?

The whole system is rotten and corrupt, why wouldn’t it be corrupt in this case where there is a huge lever and no one dares look into it?
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-12 09:39:51+00:00
> Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out.

For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].

IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.

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

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...
by logicchains | 2025-08-12 09:41:26+00:00
The extrapolation doesn't work if the transformer is too shallow (too few layers) relative to sequence length, because of https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03961 . A bunch of tasks become unfeasible when the layer count is too low, and 4 layers is way too low. I.e. linearly increasing the number of layers in a model can result in a superlinear increase in performance on tasks like reasoning.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-12 09:41:49+00:00
Fil-C is interesting because as you'd expect it takes a significant performance penalty to deliver this property, if it's broadly adopted that would suggest that - at least in this regard - C programmers genuinely do prioritise their simpler language over mundane ideas like platform support or performance.

The resulting language doesn't make sense for commercial purposes but there's no reason it couldn't be popular with hobbyists.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-12 09:42:00+00:00
> She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995?

Someone born in 1995 would normally be expected to be familiar with CDs because of their parents' music collection.

(And, depending on the family, because of their use as computer media. CDs were still important in 2005 when such a person would be 10.)
by simonask | 2025-08-12 09:42:50+00:00
Not the GP, but the biggest one is dependency management. Cargo is just extremely good.

As for the language tooling itself, static and runtime analyzers in C and C++ (and these are table stakes at this point) do not come close to the level of accuracy of the Rust compiler. If you care about writing unsafe code, Miri is orders of magnitude better at detecting UB than any runtime analyzer I've seen for C and C++.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-12 09:44:24+00:00
The point is mindset. Someone willing to move not just across countries but continents will have it far easier to deal with computers and new technology in general than someone "set in their ways".

Unfortunately, our economic / labor system mostly does not reward innovation at all, which leads to many people burning out mentally and not pursuing change anywhere because they perceive that they invest time and mental effort, but run against walls of bureaucracy, intra-corporate fiefdom fights and a lack of money. And that mindset transfers to outside the workplace as well.
by yk | 2025-08-12 09:44:37+00:00
There are two scenarios I believe, first accidentally sending a (decent) password, and second the server not learning what you actually look up.

For the first case, sending a hash would prevent the server from learning a password that is not in the dictionary, something like password5 would hash to gibberish.

For the second, the server needs to know what to actually send back. I believe Google's malicious website check works (or used to) by truncating a hash an then just sending the answer for some 128 or so websites and have the browser figure out which of them the user wanted to visit. That creates some deniability over witch website you actually visited and should be also usable to prevent the server from learnering what you actually looked up.

So yes, I think you could design a more secure Protokoll. Though general security disclaimer the people trying to read your letters probably spend more time attacking than I spend writing this post.
by EE84M3i | 2025-08-12 09:44:50+00:00
Co-working spaces of all types are ubiquitous in Tokyo FWIW. Near my midsize station I had about 10 different providers in a 10 minute walking radius, some with multiple locations even!

Most have a selection of plans to choose from: hourly, daily, monthly, etc

I chose a bit more upscale one without a fixed seat. I pay ¥1100 (7.5 USD) I think for each day I use it, with a monthly minimum spend of ¥2200. It comes with free mediocre coffee/tea. It is consistently clean and library quiet as people follow the posted rules including minding the volume of their typing and headphones.

I would be surprised if the situation in Seoul was significantly different.
by ajross | 2025-08-12 09:45:29+00:00
> The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023.

Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.

Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.

[1] Here, I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-12 09:46:28+00:00
> Perplexity is still a small startup.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai

I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo

Is that small?
by indigo945 | 2025-08-12 09:47:16+00:00
On the contrary, it's precisely by "risking" the scheme that the self-promotion became effective.

It's quite unlikely for anybody to stumble upon any given English-language Wikipedia article by chance, given that there's literally billions of them now - therefore, the promotional value of having a Wikipedia article on something even in a popular language is negligible. However, by spamming all the Wikipedias, and having this "scheme" discovered, Woodard created a situation where he is widely reported on as the artist that spammed Wikipedia, and has therefore received the five minutes of fame that he so desperately wanted.

If he had stuck to spamming the English Wikipedia, would he have ended up on the frontpage of HN?
by westurner | 2025-08-12 09:47:28+00:00
I don't think that that professor was correct.

The universe is constantly doing large, scaled quantum computations.

The number of error-corrected qubits per QC will probably increase at an exponential rate.

Whether there is a problem decomposition strategy for RSA could change.

Oh, entanglement and the prize! Adherence to Bell's is abstruse and obtuse. Like attaching to a student of Minkowkski's who served as an honorable patent examiner in Europe who moved to America. We might agree that there are many loopholes by which information sharing through entanglement is possible; that Bell's theorem is not a real limit to communications or QC because there are many "loopholes to"
by tialaramex | 2025-08-12 09:50:54+00:00
It won't be a "random garbage value" but is instead a value the compiler chose.

In effect if you don't opt out your value will always be initialized but not to a useful value you chose. You can think of this as similar to the (current, defanged and deprecated as well as unsafe) Rust std::mem::uninitialized()

There were earlier attempts to make this value zero, or rather, as many 0x00 bytes as needed, because on most platforms that's markedly cheaper to do, but unfortunately some C++ would actually have worse bugs if the "forgot to initialize" case was reliably zero instead.
by acheong08 | 2025-08-12 09:51:31+00:00
> The following platforms unfortunately no longer get prebuilt binaries for download at syncthing.net and on GitHub, due to complexities related to cross compilation with SQLite:

dragonfly/amd64 illumos/amd64 and solaris/amd64 linux/ppc64 netbsd/* openbsd/386 and openbsd/arm windows/arm

I'm surprised they're dropping windows/arm considering that seems to be the direction things are moving in.

I don't understand why they chose to use github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 instead of modernc.org/sqlite
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-12 09:51:40+00:00
"Mit dem Angriff Steiner's wird das alles in Ordnung kommen" ;)

As shitty as C++ is from today's PoV, the entire gaming industry switched over within around 3 years towards the end of the 90s. 6..7 years is a long time, and a single engine (especially when it's more or less just a runtime without editor and robust asset pipeline) won't change the bigger picture that Rust is a pretty poor choice for gamedev.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-12 09:52:53+00:00
http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm still gets down-voted here, but perhaps we will finally see more people realizing that it is true, as it always has been.

You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.

Some parts quoted:

> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.

> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]

See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").

He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:

> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?

The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
by account42 | 2025-08-12 09:53:30+00:00
Those privileged interfaces cover known use cases but don't allow for novel tools - or even full functionality of existing tools in many cases.

You also underestimate how many programs make use of functionality that could be abused in some way. And unless you lock all those interfaces down it's all security theater. Who cares if the display protocol disallows copy paste snooping when there are a million different ways to get the the memory of other processes or the files that they store sensitive information in. And such a locked down ecosystem is antithetical to free and open computing.

I don't use my computer to be secure, I use it to get shit done and and to have fun. I'm not going to accept approaches to security that interfere with that any more than I will accept the same in real life. There aren't any bars over my windows because we have functioning police to deter criminals. I don't need lab tests done for all the food I buy because we have regulations that ensure food sold is generally safe to eat. I go outside without body armor and weapons even though someone could theoretically kill me. 100% security is always a tradeoff for quality of life.