MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterGR | 2025-08-12 02:20:27+00:00
Having very older parents, what an important use case!

Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.

Fortunately, I’m able to guide my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:21:25+00:00
Loops are a special case of tail recursion which is a special case of recursion [0] which is a special case of calling functions.

However, loops aren't the only use for tail recursion. Another classic example are state machines as described in the 'Lambda: the ultimate goto' paper. See eg https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda:_The_Ultimate_GOTO

[0] Well, recursion on functions. You can also have eg recursive data types or recursion in mathematics in general. But let's focus on functions.
by pdpi | 2025-08-12 02:21:43+00:00
> For example, you need to manage a stack to do iteration on your binary tree

Recursion around trees can get you into trouble with the stack. Consider:

def traverse(node): do_work(node.payload) traverse(node.left) traverse(node.right)

The second recursive call to traverse is in tail position and is a candidate for elimination, but the first one isn't and will _always_ eat stack space. This is fine if you know what you're doing, but can bite you in the arse if you're expecting TCO to save you.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-12 02:21:45+00:00
Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past.

On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.

On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
by monooso | 2025-08-12 02:21:58+00:00
Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.

Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:

> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.

It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
by mockingloris | 2025-08-12 02:22:40+00:00
ahmedallam3 A bit of a segue so bear with me. I just realized that a lot of people have a set it up once mindset. (Their API keys are probably being used without their consent and stored in multiple databases somewhere).

There is real niche here, and I'd swear to that. A ton of poorly made sites are flooding the internet.

(By poorly made, I mean Vibe Coded.)

I use AI much more now than I ever did in the last year as I have come to refine my process. (Not having it take the steering; I like a front seat buddy holding the map ha ha.)

Platforms that allow this to be done as easy as your usestrix `LLM_API_KEY: ="your-api-key", --target project-vibe-badges` can help keep this new dev/tech semi-power users, ride the AI wave with human-in-the-loop/safeties-on approach.

Sites can start earning badges; ai-slop-proof, proudly-vibe-coded, ...

Unsolicited advice:

- Have some vibe coded websites you find or vibe code some/request from users and show them live on the site how strix does it's job.

│

└── Dey well; Be well
by tootie | 2025-08-12 02:23:14+00:00
For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.

What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.

Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 02:23:14+00:00
Is the state that routinely sets records for destructive fires - in terms of dollars and people burned to death - the one that Canada should use an example? Should we take inspiration from the country that just accidentally burned down the Grand Canyon Lodge by treating a wildfire like a controlled burn?

As someone who lives in a fire zone in Canada, I can understand why this might feel like over-reach. I can also understand that when our emergency response services are stretched thin, you might make temporary civil rights restrictions to avoid a larger tragedy.

Can you enlighten me how Canada should better manage what is the largest, or second largest, forested area in any country’s territory, in areas that are so remote as to be measured in days and 100s of KMs of travel to access. There is nowhere in the lower 48 that compares to the majority of Canadian forest lands.

Have you been to Canada’s forests? There are areas that aren’t even accessible by air attack firefighters, let alone road. The fact that most of our fires are natural compared to the majority being human caused in the US is reason enough to treat fire mitigation entirely differently, and not to use the same strategies as the US.

If people (Americans especially! I’m making an assumption based on your rhetoric, and the similarity to American right wing talking points) could stop with trying to tell Canada nonsensical things about the forests, many of us would appreciate it.
by gcr | 2025-08-12 02:23:42+00:00
This is misinformation. Ollama’s supported structured outputs that conform to a given JSON-schema for months. Here’s a post about this from last year: https://ollama.com/blog/structured-outputs

This is absolutely possible to do at the model level via logit shaping. Llama-cpp’s functionality for this is called GBNF. It’s tightly integrated into the token sampling infrastructure, and is what ollama builds upon for their json schema functionality.
by foobarchu | 2025-08-12 02:23:50+00:00
Trump has repeatedly, blatantly violated the constitution, to such a degree I don't even feel the need to cite them because there are so many and you are definitely familiar with them. That is not using the same tools, it's making up new ones and co-opting old ones from fascist dictators.

The reason he gets away with it is a legislature and supreme court (note: only the supreme court, not the rest of them) who have decided to bow down.

Do not pretend this is lawful.
by edaemon | 2025-08-12 02:24:22+00:00
2020: Biden 82,284,666 votes [1]

2024: Harris 75,017,613 votes [2]

Where are you getting 14 million? The actual difference was barely even half that.

1: https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president

2: https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-12 02:24:54+00:00
If we're assuming that the galaxy is radially symmetrical, doesn't it immediately follow that the combined gravitational force on a given star is the same as if we applied the force from a combined mass at the center?

This wouldn't work for something like the Solar system with a very sparse distribution of mass, but at the galaxy level it seems right even without the presence of a black hole.
by komali2 | 2025-08-12 02:27:28+00:00
Hence scheduling, which leads to agendas, the midway point between a calendar and Todo list.

I used to use an org agenda view for this, now I just use a caldav calendar and trillium. In the morning, I check my to-do list, which has been being created for this day over the last couple weeks or months, I look at my agenda to see what meetings or appointments I have, and I slot todos in between them. I might even be doing so for the whole week or month, moving tasks around as needed. I take a look at my week and month todos and see that something is due in two days so slot it in for today. Similar to how a project manager might do with sprints and tickets I guess.

I think the critical aspect of any functional Todo system is active review, at least daily if not more so, plus regular weekly and monthly cleanups.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:27:36+00:00
> Practically the day after I learned about tail recursion in CS class, I learned that almost all recursive calls can be translated to iteration, that in many cases the iterative version is easier to scan, is as fast if not faster, and that they can usually handle much much larger inputs than recursion due to avoiding stack overflow.

What do you mean by easier to scan? I find (most) loops [0] hard to read, because they typically involve mutable state.

When properly implemented, tail calls are as fast as gotos and loops, and don't blow up any stack. (Not all languages are implemented with a stack in any case.)

However you have one point:

Most of the time, we don't use recursion directly in our programs even in a language like Haskell or Scheme. Instead we define a 'combinator' that encapsulates the specific, limited recursion scheme that we want, and then use that one. This is very similar to how people generally don't use goto directly in their programs.

You might be familiar with the combinators 'map', 'filter' and perhaps 'reduce'/'foldr'. You could re-interpret the various common loop types as such recursion combinators that weaker languages have to bake into their language, because they are not strong enough to express them as a user-defined library. And indeed, Haskell has Control.Monad.Loops (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/monad-loops-0.4.3/docs/C...) which gives you exactly the common loop types as a library.

Some examples of less common combinators are eg 'unfold' or various combinators to traverse trees or graphs.

[0] The foreach-loop over some sequence is less headache inducing than eg a while-loop.
by allpratik | 2025-08-12 02:27:52+00:00
Hopefully the deflation scenario due to technology will help with this shift gracefully. Else, it will be extremely difficult.

But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.

I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
by mandeepj | 2025-08-12 02:27:57+00:00
> I have to constantly min-max the costs between hotels on certain days, flights on certain days, and cars on certain days.

I agree it's a burdensome chore!

Just wondering - your hotel stay can't be less than the days between your flight. For car, one can manage to cut down with Uber/public transport, but still turns out to be expensive than a rental car.
by jmward01 | 2025-08-12 02:28:05+00:00
I was in a very negative space earlier this year due to the current direction the US is heading. Mostly because I am someone that doesn't want to hear problems without a call to action I can actually engage with. The things that are happening at the national level are very hard to do anything about but I did realize that I could engage at my local level so I decided to just start showing up. I now regularly attend my local city counsel meetings. I don't go and make a bunch of remarks but I have, on a few occasions, added to the public comments and, I think, I was listened to. If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up. At a minimum you will get far more informed but you may just find that you can actually make a change too.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 02:28:31+00:00
In case this isn't a rhetorical question, the homicide rate in DC is such that it beats out all 50 states by a considerable amount[0]. (The most murderous state, Louisiana, is roughly half as murderous as DC.)

There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!

Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.

If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti...

[1]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime
by hinkley | 2025-08-12 02:29:03+00:00
> I have my doubts about any CS class/lecture, that teaches, that the "iterative version is easier to scan".

Well then you’re in luck because that was not an academic statement but a professional opinion - mine.

You can’t optimize the patterns you can’t see because they’re obscured by accidental complexity. And iteration is a frequent trick I use to surface deeper pattern s.
by gcr | 2025-08-12 02:29:15+00:00
The PR you linked to says “thanks to the amazing work done by ggml-org” and doesn’t remove GGML code, it instead updates the vendored version and seems to throw away ollama’s custom changes. That’s the opposite of disentangling.

Here’s the maintainer of ggml explaining the context behind this change: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/11714#issuecomment-3...
by codeharman | 2025-08-12 02:29:42+00:00
Breaking into tech is hard enough when you’re in a major hub. It’s even harder when you’re applying from across the world.

I recently spoke with a developer from Nigeria who applied for over 100 jobs before getting her first break. No FAANG internship. No insider network. Just persistence.

What finally worked:

Building personal projects to prove she could ship

Following up after applications (almost no one does this)

Learning to communicate impact, not just list skills

Her first role was an internship via a job board — nothing glamorous, but it opened the door. Six years later, she’s a Senior SWE building global SaaS products and mentoring 200+ devs.

Her advice for people trying to land their first SWE role:

Build in public. Share your progress. Network intentionally. Create your own projects. Show how you solve problems, not just that you can code.

I wrote up the full conversation (with her detailed strategies) — I’ll drop it in the first comment for anyone who wants to read.

What about you — what was your breakthrough moment in getting your first SWE job?
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 02:29:50+00:00
>I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes.

Your understanding is incredibly confused. Yes, electors need to meet within each state to cast their ballots at a location specified by each state.

Those ballots are certified by (a) state official(s) (on or before December 12th) and those ballots are then forwarded to DC (IIRC, to the National Archives) and those certified ballots are conveyed to the capital for counting on January 6th.

So, no. The electors needn't go to Washington DC to "cast their ballots." In fact, if they did so on the appointed day for them to cast their ballot, they'd be unable to do so, as that process would be proceeding without them in the state which designated them as an elector.

I really hope you're not an American citizen.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-12 02:30:45+00:00
> Which Kentucky politician supported the tariffs?

If you think that's some kind of "gotcha", you're out of touch.

Back in March, virtually every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted to change the House rules to shield Trump's arbitrary tariffs from scrutiny. (With Massie as a notable exception, that's still a majority of Kentucky's delegation. [0])

They did this by suspending the part of the IEEPA which says any congressional action on the temporary Presidential "emergencies" needs to actually get heard and voted on within a certain number of days [1] and then just... never letting it be debated.

That's a concrete and willful pro-Trump-tariff action right there, to say nothing of spoken support, like Rep. Barr's tweet that Trump's "approach on tariffs is the right one... I stand with President Trump 100%."

> Or did you mean [Kentucky's] Democrat governor?

You're grasping at straws here. You know individual states aren't able to impose international tariffs under the Constitution, right?

______________

[0] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/KY#representatives

[1] https://www.ntu.org/publications/detail/when-is-a-calendar-d...
by yodabo | 2025-08-12 02:31:36+00:00
It looks like the bug is that there is a way for the renderer (sandboxed) process to trigger the browser (unsandboxed) process to duplicate an arbitrary windows kernel object handle. When you duplicate a handle, you can restrict access, or allow the duplicate to have full access as the original - unfortunately this one is duplicating preserving all the capabilities/access of the original handle.

Now for the POC exploit - it so happens that 0x108 is typically a thread handle for a thread in the browser process. What can you do with a thread handle? You can pause execution of that thread, set its register values (including instruction pointer), resume execution.

If kernel32.dll loads at the same address in each process, we can find some set of instructions in it that write a register's value to another register's address. If we set the instruction pointer to that instruction, we've unlocked the ability to write arbitrary memory in the unsandboxed process.

Finally, we can call other Windows APIs (by finding the address of the function to call and setting instruction pointer to it)- in the POC, they write "calc.exe" to a string, then call the system api to launch calculator.
by JojoFatsani | 2025-08-12 02:33:19+00:00
8 years in industry.. chances are you are not even 30. You’re not even a quarter of the way thru your career. Give it some more time. Ask your friends (the ones who didn’t fall bass backwards into wealth via a lucky break like nvidia) what they did to put themselves into these positions. Then stop making excuses and do it.
by jm4 | 2025-08-12 02:33:20+00:00
I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.
by hinkley | 2025-08-12 02:33:50+00:00
I’m good at spatial thinking, so on paper I should have zero issues with recursive code. But I also mentor and troubleshoot a lot and deep recursive code blows everyone’s mind. Even, it turns out, often the people who wrote it. Though they will swear otherwise.

Self recursive code takes on a fractal nature - at any call stack you cannot determine the call depth. You are in a twisty little maze.

When you layer calls horizontally, different tasks at different depths, it’s dead obvious where you are in the calculation. If all you can manage though is iteration, you still have the local variables to tell you where you are.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:34:00+00:00
> Of course, this means that the same implementation could also be directly expressed logically in a way that is mutable/iterative.

Yes, compilers exist.

> There is no real "advantage" to, or reason to "sell" anybody on tail call recursion if you are able to easily and clearly represent both implementations, IMO.

Avoiding mutation avoids headaches.

> [0] EXCEPT in practice all implementation differences/optimizations introduce observable side effects that can otherwise impact program correctness or semantics. For example, a program could (perhaps implicitly) rely on the fact that it errors out due to stack overflow when recursing > X times, and so enabling TCO could cause the program to enter new/undesirable states; or a program could rely on a functin F making X floating point operations taking at least Y cycles in at least Z microseconds, and not function properly when F takes less than Z microseconds after enabling vectorization. This is Hyrum's Law [2].

These programs are likely not standards compliant. (And that's not just true for the C++ standard but for basically any language with a standard.)

> And just like TCO, RVO is neat but IMO slightly dangerous because it relies on implicit compiler/runtime optimizations that can be accidentally disabled or made non-applicable as code changes:

Who says TCO has to be always implicit? In eg Scheme it's explicit in the standard, and in other languages you can have annotations.

(Whether a call is in tail position is more or less a property you can ascertain syntactically, so your annotation doesn't even have to be understood by the compiler: the linter is good enough. That would catch your 'accidental changes' part.

Things get more complicated, when you have implicit clean-ups happen after returning from the function. Like calling destructors in C++. Then the function call is arguably not in a tail position anymore, and so TCO doesn't apply. Whether this is detectable reliably at compile time depends on the details of your language.)
by nostrademons | 2025-08-12 02:34:40+00:00
They're not that expensive for anyone that has the tech skills to actually make good use out of them. I've been paying around with Claude Code, using API credits rather than the monthly fee. It costs about $5 per one-hour session. If you're going to be doing this professionally it's worth springing for the $100/month membership to avoid hitting credit limits, but if you just want to try it out, you can do so without breaking the bank.

A bigger question for me is "Does this actually increase my productivity?" The jury is still out on that - I've found that you really need to babysit the algorithm and apply your CS knowledge, and you also have to be very clear about what you're going to tell it later, don't let it make bad assumptions, and in many cases spell out the algorithm in detail. But it seems to be very good at looking up API details, writing the actual code, and debugging (if you guide it properly), all things that take a non-trivial amount of tedium in everyday programming.
by nozzlegear | 2025-08-12 02:34:42+00:00
> Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?

Yes I would, the people of DC should have representation, but using retrocession to get there would dilute any influence they have on their own politics and local control. I understand that the founders were worried about fairness and no state being favored over another by selecting one to be the capitol of the country, but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today – especially if that state were made up out of whole cloth from the people who had already lived there.
by mockingloris | 2025-08-12 02:34:48+00:00
These are very hard questions. Gives me the chills.

We forget how the scurry of the now keeps us in a frenzy and before you know, 2 decades have gone past and we're all playing catch up to the new world order - what world order? (I don't know and that scare me; [deep sigh])

│

└── Dey well; Be well