MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ubermonkey | 2025-08-20 12:35:31+00:00
It's been shown, repeatedly, the writing things down by hand aids both retention and understanding. I didn't know this was a Thing generally through school, but I also definitely took copious notes in classes that I never actually studied, and good excellent grades anyway, so I guess I was living it.

I still do this professionally; in meetings I take notes longhand, and then summarize back into orgmode for a searchable record. It feels like a superpower.

(Protip: if you're at all curious, experiment with fountain pens. Super fun, and if -- like me -- your handwriting is terrible, the imposed slowdown and added intentionality may help your penmanship.)

Also, and not for nothing, but I just moved cross-country and as a part of that did a big sift and purge of 25 years worth of STUFF in our Houston house. This turned up a box of the first 5 years of WIRED, which made me sad, because back then the magazine was doing interesting long-form journalism and not clickbaity crap like this piece. Sic transit gloria mundi & all that.
by em-bee | 2025-08-20 12:35:46+00:00
XSLT is code. code written with XML syntax. let me give you an example:

in order to create a menu where the current active page is highlighted and not a link, i need to do this:

<a> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="@name='home'"> <xsl:attribute name="class">selected</xsl:attribute> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:attribute name="href">/</xsl:attribute> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> home </a> | <a> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="@name='about'"> <xsl:attribute name="class">selected</xsl:attribute> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:attribute name="href">/about.xhtml</xsl:attribute> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> about </a> |

XSLT is interesting because it has a very different approach to parsing XML, and for some transformations the resulting code can be quite compact. in particular, you don't have an issue with quoting/escaping special characters most of the time while still being able to write XML/HTML syntax. but then JSX from react solves that too. so the longer you look at it the less the advantages of XSLT stand out.
by HumanOstrich | 2025-08-20 12:35:58+00:00
Where are they hidden that you are having trouble with? I've had an alias for `ls` that always includes dotfiles and `shopt -s dotglob` in my bash profile for decades. Mac Finder is a little more obnoxious with having to do `Meta+Shift+.` to reveal dotfiles.

Other than that, modern tooling like Git and IDEs do not "hide" dotfiles.

These days, a `.` in front of a file or folder in a repo is more to indicate it is metadata/config. Although I am in favor of putting all that stuff under `.config/`.

> Maybe robot_docs?

No thanks.
by danaris | 2025-08-20 12:36:33+00:00
In this case? "Porn censorship [at a governmental level] destroying the internet".

No amount of individual resilience can restore the lost privacy, the lost users & revenue for various sites (including some that have very little to do with porn), the lost websites (including some that have very little to do with porn), the lost dignity for sex workers and queer people...

Do I really need to go on?

Like, this is a governmental action that changes the rules for entire categories of content and websites. How can you think that any degree of individual action or attitude can compensate for that...?
by pizlonator | 2025-08-20 12:36:52+00:00
> Going back to the original futuex paper in 2002, it was immediately clear that the futex was a huge improvement in highly concurrent environments. Just in that original paper, their tests with 1000 parallel tasks ran 20-120 times faster than sysv locks..

I think this is a misunderstanding.

The baseline isn’t sysv locks. The baseline isn’t even what Linux was doing before futexes (Linux had a very immature lock implementation before futexes).

The baseline is all of the ways folks implement locks if they don’t have futexes, which end up having roughly the same properties as a futex based lock:

- fast path that doesn’t hit kernel for either lock or unlock

- slow path that somehow makes the thread wait until the lock is available using some kernel waiting primitive.

The thing futexes improve is the size of the user level data structure that is used for representing the lock in the waiting state. That’s it.

And futexes aren’t the only way to get there. Alternatives:

- thin locks (what JVMs use)

- ParkingLot (a futex-like primitive that works entirely in userland and doesn’t require that the OS have futexes)
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-20 12:36:56+00:00
I really need to emphasize winget is way, way different than a Linux software repository. Debian's repository is carefully maintained and packages have to reach a level of notability for inclusion. Even the Microsoft Store uses overseas reviewers paid by Microsoft to review if store apps meet their guidelines.

winget has none of that. winget is run by one Microsoft dude who when pressed about reviewing submissions gave some random GitHub users who have not been vetted moderator powers. There is no criteria for inclusion, if you can pack it and get it by the automated scanner, it ships. And anyone can submit changes to any winget package: They built a feature to let a developer restrict a package be only updated by a trusted user but never implemented it. (Doing so requires a "business process" but being a one-man sideshow that winget is, setting that up is beyond Microsoft's ability.)

winget is a complete joke that no professional could stand for if they understand how amateur hour it is, and the fact it is now baked into every Windows install is absolutely embarrassing. But I bet shipping it got that Microsoft engineer a promotion!
by mwexler | 2025-08-20 12:37:08+00:00
This one wasn't the one that converted me (Gibson ftw) but Mirrorshades expanded what I thought the genre could be.

Not every story is a winner, but enough try to stretch a bit that it's worth the read.

Helps to put your mind in the time, just before the 90s, before The Matrix but after Blade Runner, before "the metaverse" but after "the net" and "going online" were starting to enter conversations.
by Flaaaaanders | 2025-08-20 12:37:12+00:00
The article resonates a lot with me. I've been seeing the transition from Jenkins to Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions (same thing more or less) in the company I'm working at and came to very similar conclusions. The single big Jenkins machine shared by 10+ teams mixing UI configuration from 20 plugins with build systems and custom scripts wasn't great, so it was the right decision to move away from it. However, neither great is the current workflow of write->commit->wait->fail->write... while figuring out the correct YAML syntax of some third party GitHub Action that is required to do something very basic like finding files in a nested folder by pattern.

Take a look at Prefect - https://www.prefect.io/ - as far as I can see, it ticks a lot of the boxes that the author mentions (if you can live with the fact that the API is a Python SDK; albeit a very good one that gives you all the scripting power of Python). Don't be scared away by the buzzwords on the landing page, browsing the extensive documentation is totally worthwhile to learn about all of the features Prefect offers. Execution can either happen on their paid cloud offering or self-hosted on your own physical or cloud premises at no extra cost. The Python SDK is open source.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Prefect in any way.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-08-20 12:38:03+00:00
Please share what the right fountain pen, ink and paper would be for a left-handed person to avoid smearing everything to kingdom come! (Asking with honest curiosity as a fellow leftie who would love to be able to use a fountain pen).

I swear by uniball jet stream pens, they feel much nicer than a ball point and dry fast enough for me to use them but would love a true fountain pen setup instead!
by throw0101a | 2025-08-20 12:38:21+00:00
A few years ago the province of Ontario (Canada) put it back on the curriculum:

> Cursive writing has been added to the Ontario curriculum because research shows fluent handwriting ”provides students with more opportunities to express their thinking,” the Education Ministry says. It also helps to develop fine motor skills, increases word retention and a child’s ability to understand words. As well, it increases the speed at which a child can write, says Bill Tucker, a professor in the education faculty at Western University and a former director of education for the Thames Valley board.

* https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting...

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...
by bayindirh | 2025-08-20 12:38:29+00:00
I agree. I still design my algorithms and software architecture on paper, and keep "lab notebooks" for serious projects.

I find it's beneficial for my memory, concentration and general brain fitness. Also, as a result, I write less code. What I write lands closer to optimal for the case at hand, so I debug and tune less.

All in all I enjoy designing software more and write better software at the end . Win-win.

Plus, fountain pens are nice.
by cyocum | 2025-08-20 12:38:54+00:00
I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time.

I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved. Additionally, I have only ever used cursive for signing my name to documents.

I find it baffling because I have an advanced degree in medieval Celtic Studies. I study manuscripts in depth and I have seen some of the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine on the very expensive vellum manuscript page. In some cases worse than mine. Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old. Compared to the history of manuscript writing, cursive is very young so I am baffled that people are worried about it.

I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something so I understand if we continue to teach that. Cursive, however, should only be done by those who want to use it. If you want to have an after school cursive club, great, have fun! Otherwise, leave the rest of us alone and let us have recess.
by gpderetta | 2025-08-20 12:39:15+00:00
one option is to use a non-blocking algorithm that by definition will maintain consistency at instruction boundary. In fact you won't even need robust mutexes this way.

But of course consistency is only maintained if the algorithm is implemented correctly; if you are trying to robustly protect against a process randomly crashing, you might not want to rely on the correctness of that process (or that process randomly writing to shared memory on its way to a segfault).
by zzzeek | 2025-08-20 12:39:47+00:00
Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded).

All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.
by swader999 | 2025-08-20 12:40:23+00:00
The advantage with using multiple agents is in context management, not parallelization. A main agent can orchestrate sub agents. The goal is to not overwhelm the main agent with specialized context for each step that can be delegated to separate task focused agents along the way.

Test runner sub agent knows exactly how to run tests, summarize failures etc. It loads up all the context specific to running tests and frees the main agent's context from all that. And so on...
by mettamage | 2025-08-20 12:40:48+00:00
My view is as infantile as yours. We're all armchair <insert_topic> here with these types of topics.

> all language is communication, but not all communication is language

Yea, good point!

> Any suggestions of further reading?

Other than this and people now trying to study animal communication through AI (having seen a few videos on it), I don't know much more than that, haha.
by colingw | 2025-08-20 12:40:49+00:00
This was also my impression when reading the article, as someone who uses Sly heavily, every day. I can't imagine not having in-editor access to functionality like recompiling the function at point, or live evaluation of testing forms directly from the buffer. As Stew (the Clojure guy) pointed out in a video from a number of years ago, nobody should be typing anything raw into the in-editor REPL prompt; you should be sending forms directly from the code buffer.

How do I maintain that workflow if I'm to use native REPLs?
by somenameforme | 2025-08-20 12:40:49+00:00
Definitely, our children do not learn so much from our words as much as from our behaviors and actions. Religious individuals like to claim that the decline in religiosity drove a decline of morality in society. I think it's rather the opposite - that a decline of morality in society drove a decline in religiosity.

It's like a parent trying to teach their child about healthy eating while they down cokes, chips, and sweets every day. That kid is going to be much more likely to, himself, end up downing cokes, chips, and sweets than he is to eat healthy. And for his own kids, he may not even bother with the pretext of healthy eating.
by thrance | 2025-08-20 12:41:44+00:00
Went through school in France too, was forced to use a fountain pen too, had my hands soaked in ink at the end of every day too. Except it never went away, and my handwriting is still awful.

Years of every teacher I had writing in red at the top of every test or homework "Applique-toi!", as if this injunction was all that was required for me to finally realize I had been holding the pen wrong for over 15 years. Fuck that, I'm glad it's over.

I will gladly celebrate the death of handwriting when it comes, that we may focus on more important matters and stop judging books by their covers.
by robertkoss | 2025-08-20 12:41:59+00:00
I would love to have a React Copilot that has access to the console, network logs, the actual html elements, computed styling etc. + my code.

This would be such a game-changer. I am also convinced that monorepos will become the de facto standard, since it is way easier for LLMs to navigate / implement features across the whole stack.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-20 12:43:00+00:00
Musk fixed what wasn't broken by eliminating them.

Now just return essential data (like speed) to the center of the dash so it can be easily viewed without taking your eyes off the road. This could be done with a small digital display at minimal cost.

Putting everything on one big touchscreen bolted to the center of the dash wasn't innovative --- it was just dumb.

Thankfully most other manufacturers have properly recognized it as such and not followed suit.

Hey Musk, want to do something truly innovative, useful and futuristic? Project this data onto the windshield the way some fighter planes do it.
by emanuele-em | 2025-08-20 12:43:20+00:00
Hey all,

we are trying to understand how people actually deal with papers and the tools around them (Zotero, Mendeley, Connected Papers, etc.). Honestly, I get overwhelmed myself, so I could use your input.

We put together a short anonymous 5-min survey.

It’s part of a project we’re working on, but mainly I just want to hear real experiences from the community.

Thanks a lot
by nrclark | 2025-08-20 12:44:04+00:00
Agreed with this sentiment, but with one minor modification: use a Makefile instead. Recipes are still chunks of shell, and they don’t need to produce or consume any files if you want to keep it all task-based. You get tab-completion, parallelism, a DAG, and the ability to start anywhere on the task graph that you want.

It’s possible to do all of this with a pure shell script, but then you’re probably reimplementing some or all of the list above.
by kdavis | 2025-08-20 12:44:19+00:00
This paper introduces Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO), our stable, efficient, and performant reinforcement learning algorithm for training large language models. Unlike previous algorithms that adopt token-level importance ratios, GSPO defines the importance ratio based on sequence likelihood and performs sequence-level clipping, rewarding, and optimization. We demonstrate that GSPO achieves superior training efficiency and performance compared to the GRPO algorithm, notably stabilizes Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) RL training, and has the potential for simplifying the design of RL infrastructure. These merits of GSPO have contributed to the remarkable improvements in the latest Qwen3 models.
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-20 12:45:08+00:00
From the article:

Why is Intel manufacturing an Arm SoC as a reference platform? Probably because it's trying to attract external customers, and there's a whole lot more companies building Arm SoCs than there are firms pitching x86-64 processors.

They're not trying to build the next best thing. They're trying to attract customers.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-08-20 12:45:11+00:00
I mean, I'm in Toronto Canada, a fairly big city and market, and have an open seat for a couple of good senior Oracle DBAs pretty much constantly. The market may have reduced over decades but there's still more demand than supply. And the core DBA skills are transferable to other RDBMS as well. While I agree that some niche technologies are fleeting, it's perhaps not the best example :-)
by mannykannot | 2025-08-20 12:46:43+00:00
As far as I know, compatibilism takes no position on whether the universe is deterministic. It is, rather, an antithesis to the thesis that determinism is logically incompatible with free will (or, from a more deflationary perspective, it offers an explanation for how we could feel we have 'classical' free will even in a deterministic universe.)
by lsaferite | 2025-08-20 12:46:54+00:00
Maybe for new schools. Old schools don't have the luxury of being able to force adjacent road design changes in most cases. Also. I've frequently seen the school zones extended out in several directions away from the school to make heavily trafficked intersections feeding towards the school safer. Safer for pedestrian and motorist alike. The real world is generally never so black and white. We have to deal with that gray nuance all the time.
by bluehatbrit | 2025-08-20 12:47:41+00:00
I've been using the tidewave plugin for a bit now, this browser addition seems pretty cool. I'm curious about the pricing though. It says we need to provide our own github copilot or anthropic keys, but there's then a limit on the number on usage before you need to pay.

Is this because data is going through a tidewave server or something, or is it just a way to create a bit of a free trial vs "now you need to pay us"?
by datadrivenangel | 2025-08-20 12:47:53+00:00
my vibecharts [0] site got 35k views a few weeks back. Made it feel worth spending $22 on a domain for a joke.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830684

What was really interesting is seeing how many people are scraping the front page of hackernews and storing their data in public github repos. Dozens of them.
by gusfoo | 2025-08-20 12:47:56+00:00
> The cavity magnetron, one of the first practical microwave transmitters, was an invention of such import that it was the UK's key contribution to a technical partnership that lead to the UK's access to US nuclear weapons research.

No, that's not correct at all. The Tube Alloys project[0] was the key, codified in the Quebec Agreement[1], giving the USA access to UK nuclear weapons research.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Agreement

It is an item of some irritation to me that many people think the USA was the nation which started nuclear weapons development first. "In July 1940, Britain had offered to give the United States access to its research, and the Tizard Mission's John Cockcroft briefed American scientists on British developments. He discovered that the American project was smaller than the British, and not as advanced."
by oddthink | 2025-08-20 12:48:14+00:00
I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, but those smeared, so I eventually switched to pilot v5 or muji pens.

But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-20 12:49:21+00:00
I wonder if ARM instructions could be translated to Intel’s uOps. Then everything except that translation could be shared. And, since programs consist entirely of one type of instruction for the most part, we could imagine that the chip should be able to stick to just doing one type of translation for the duration of a program run, rather than having to figure it out for each instruction.

I’m not saying I want this, but it might be surprisingly not totally impractical.
by alixanderwang | 2025-08-20 12:49:33+00:00
Yeah that one's a community plugin vs an officially maintained one, which can have a range of activity from graveyard to some being maintained better than many of our official ones. That maintainer seems active on GitHub though and the d2-emacs plugin is his top pinned repo (https://github.com/andorsk), I think he'd be receptive if you let him know your interest!
by mettamage | 2025-08-20 12:49:58+00:00
Why study anything? So far I've found the broad strokes to be, because of:

1. Satisfying curiosity / because it's fun

2. To build new technology

By virtue of that, my stance on whether I think we are or aren't exceptional is irrelevant.

I don't have any hope that any of this will be researched thoroughly enough in my lifetime though.
by scott_w | 2025-08-20 12:50:18+00:00
> I don't understand why you think tracking user access rights would be infeasible and would not scale.

Allow me to try to inject my understanding of how these agents work vs regular applications.

A regular SaaS will have an API endpoint that has permissions attached. Before the endpoint processes anything, the user making the request has their permissions checked against the endpoint itself. Once this request succeeds, anything that endpoint collects is considered "ok" ship to the user.

AI Agents, instead, directly access the database, completely bypassing this layer. That means you need to embed the access permissions into the individual rows, rather than at the URL/API layer. It's much more complex as a result.

For your bank analogy: they actually work in a similar way to how I described above. A temporary access is granted to the resources but, once it's granted, any data included in those screens is assumed to be ok. They won't see something like a blank box somewhere because there's info they're not supposed to see.

DISCLAIMER: I'm making an assumption on how these AI Agents work, I could be wrong.
by em-bee | 2025-08-20 12:50:58+00:00
finding projects for freelancers is hard. if only because many freelancers struggle at the networking side of it. anything helps. also most freelancers are not interested in long term commitments. this service therefore solves the problem for a subset of freelancers for both sides. i am in the market for exactly what it offers: part time long term engagements.