MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-23 14:59:36+00:00
For many, coding can be fun and it's not an external obligation like eating veggies or going to the gym (relatedly, some also enjoy veggies and the gym).

Some people want to deeply immerse into a field. Yes, they sacrifice other ways of spending that time and they will be less well rounded characters. But that's fine. It's also fine to treat programming as a job and spend free time in regular ways like going for a hike or cinema or bar or etc.

And similarly, some kids, though this may not fully overlap with the parents who want their kids to be such, also enjoy learning, math, etc. Who love the structured activities and dread the free play time. I'd say yes, they should be pushed to do regular kid things to challenge themselves too, but you don't have to mold the kids too much against what their personality is like if it is functional and sustainable.
by manoDev | 2025-08-23 15:00:33+00:00
“Horse and buggy”. How dramatic.

If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
by jamesblonde | 2025-08-23 15:01:21+00:00
We call these pushdown joins in rondb. They only support an equality condition for the index condition. Joins with index condition pushdown is a bit of a mouthful.

We also went from like 6 seconds to 50ms. Huge speedup.

Reference

https://docs.rondb.com/rondb_parallel_query/#pushdown-joins
by chasing0entropy | 2025-08-23 15:01:30+00:00
Interesting, I see this as 'testing the fence' behavior exposing an exploitable flaw in how Spotify(and I imagine a lot of other content providers) organize incoming media.

If it's that easy to poison datasets any moderate capability threat actor could conduct a coordinated attack. With use of decent effort could ddoss media providers in a way they cannot quickly (if ever) recover.
by nullify88 | 2025-08-23 15:01:32+00:00
I have an 2015 X1 3rd Generation Broadwell ticking along running Fedora KDE too. My Enter key is cracked and some of the speakers are failing, battery health at 70% was my daily driver for its initial 5 years now it primarily runs a browser and vscode. Still very capable No problems with sleep or wake, even Intel Rapid Start hibernation works although is a huge security hole.
by Arainach | 2025-08-23 15:01:32+00:00
We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.

Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-23 15:01:40+00:00
You are avoiding the point.

I ask an LLM “What is the capital of France?” and it answers “Paris.”

If you see that and say “LLMs don't provide answers.” then you have let your ideological opposition to AI overwhelm your reason and mislead you into saying very silly things that are obviously untrue, and you really need to reconsider your position so that you stop doing that.

You can say that they are unreliable all you want. You can still criticise LLMs! Just don’t get so twisted out of shape that you start speaking utter nonsense.
by gruez | 2025-08-23 15:02:04+00:00
>I'm 6'1 and 190-200lb, and I went from 130g to 80g a day of protein for the last year and have only gained more lean mass.

And everything else was held constant? Moreover the claim isn't that you need absurdly high amounts of protein to build muscle, just that it's easier to build muscle if you have higher protein intake, all things being equal.
by maxdamantus | 2025-08-23 15:02:24+00:00
But no one has demonstrated an actual operation that requires valid UTF-8. The reasoning is always circular: "I require valid UTF-8 because someone else requires valid UTF-8".

Eventually there should be an underlying operation which can only work on valid UTF-8, but that doesn't exist. UTF-8 was designed such that invalid data can be detected and handled, without affecting the meaning of valid subsequences in the same string.
by zbentley | 2025-08-23 15:02:51+00:00
I think it's not quite that bad (and I know that this has been litigated to death all over the programmer internet).

If you are forking from a language/ecosystem that is extremely thread-friendly, (e.g. Go, Java, Erlang) fork is more risky. This is because such runtimes mean a high likelihood of there being threads doing fork-unsafe things at the moment of fork().

If you are forking from a language/ecosystem that is thread-unfriendly, fork is less risky. That isn't to say "it's always safe/low risk to run fork() in e.g. Python, Ruby, Perl", but in those contexts it's easier to prove/test invariants like "there are no threads running/so-and-so lock is not held at the point in my program when I fork", at which point the risks of fork(2) are much reduced.

To be clear, "reduced" is not the same as "gone"! You still have to reason about explicitly taken locks in the forking thread, file descriptors, signal handlers, and unexpected memory growth due to CoW/GC interactions. But that's a lot more tractable than the Java situation of "it's tricky to predict how many Java threads are active when I want to fork, and even trickier to know if there are any JNI/FFI-library-created raw pthreads running, the GC might be threaded, and checking for each of those things is still racy with my call to fork(2)".

You still have to make sure that that fork-safety invariants are true. But the effort to do that is extremely different depending on language platform.

Rust/C/C++ don't cleanly fit into either of those two (already mushy/subjective) categorizations, though. Whether forking is feasible in a given Rust/C/C++ codebase depends on what the code does and requires a tricky set of judgement calls and at-a-distance knowledge going forward to make sure that the codebase doesn't become fork-unsafe in harmful ways.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-23 15:02:55+00:00
Ideally, a government or SDF holding is not a majority holding, but a controlling stake.

Generally, a SDF is expected to take decisions that help develop an ecosystem or market, and help act as a check against primarily profit-driven motives.

Assuming a stake is part of a well managed SDF similar to Temasek, Mubadala, or the Master Trust, then I'd tend to trust the decision being made.

That said, I also recognize that this administration is severely disorganized and amateur, so I wouldn't trust their choices. But, I do feel this sets a precedent to allow both the federal and state governments to build SDFs, especially in a post-Trump world.

For example, the CHIPS and IRA were able to be pushed thru by the Biden admin because of the trade norms the Trump 1 admin created and upended.
by unleaded | 2025-08-23 15:03:16+00:00
Roblox preservation has pretty much been a solved problem since around 2016. The clients all have built-in network servers and many people have built launchers to let you easily play a server with your friends. A lot of the knowledge is unfortunately gatekeeped inside Discord communities of crazy people but there are a few "good names" out there (Novetus is the big one)
by senko | 2025-08-23 15:04:34+00:00
Not OP, but many technologies nowadays push users to use a server-side component when not needed.

An example is NextJS where you're strongly encouraged[0] to run a server (or use a platform like Vercel), even if what you're doing is a fairly simple static site.

Combine inconsiderate crawler (AI or otherwise) with a server-side logic that doesn't really need to be there and you have a recipe for a crash, a big hosting bill, or both.

[0] People see https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/static-exports#unsupporte... and go "ah shucks I better have a server component then"
by goyagoji | 2025-08-23 15:04:34+00:00
There's the need to dust fans and then there's the possibility that OS computing requirements have risen which isn't often a Linux thing on old hardware.. OsX had exactly the same problem and had to make a minimizing release IIRC.

Computing kind of stagnated since 2010 and plenty of hardware since then still works fine today and is usable enough for many tasks. Apple was nice for needing not all that many different drivers but its statnge integrations like drive fans to bios are obnoxious.
by rs186 | 2025-08-23 15:05:18+00:00
I "learned" vim and used to spend time on setting up a vim environment. But it took way too much time to customize these things. Plus installing plugins is nowhere as easy as with vscode.

These days I just use vim plugin in VSCode and I'm very happy about the setup.

P.S. I am also an experienced VSCode extension developer. You just get much more exposure with a vscode extension compared to vim -- that's where everybody is. And of course it makes sense for me to dogfood the extension.
by rramadass | 2025-08-23 15:05:48+00:00
Nobody who had not done Win16/32 SDK C programming ala Charles Petzold can ever understand what a paradigm shift in programming that Visual C++ with MFC was. I still remember having my boss get the Visual C++ software (around 1995/1996 ?) along with David Kruglinski's two-volume books on programming it, following the tutorial clicking through wizards and being gobsmacked at getting a full-blown ready-to-go app with much of the hard-work done for you in seconds. We rewrote our Win16/32 C app in VC++/MFC and it took us only a few months rather than years.

It was a revelation for me on the power of OOD/OOP in practice and a defining educational moment on Software Design, Frameworks and Libraries.
by conradev | 2025-08-23 15:06:15+00:00
So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical.

Emulators often require handling copyrighted materials like games or firmware, whereas APIs are not copyrightable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America...
by CosmicShadow | 2025-08-23 15:07:10+00:00
You, good sir, have made the mistake of thinking people can and will read!

We've put warnings for things on every single page, step of the checkout, and emails, and people still complain that things are a surprise, even after checking a box acknowledging the facts :(

The sad fact you learn after shipping 10k+ orders is that you can't prevent issues by preparing and telling people about them. It really sucks and defies all logic.
by Jepacor | 2025-08-23 15:07:16+00:00
> > One thing I've wound up feeling from all this is that the current web is surprisingly fragile. A significant amount of the web seems to have been held up by implicit understandings and bargains, not by technology.

This is something I've been pondering, and honestly I feel like the author doesn't go far enough. I would go as far as to say a lot of our modern society has been held up by these implicit social contracts. But nowadays we see things like gerrymandering in the US, or overusing the 49-3 in France to pass laws despite the parliament voting against them. Just an overall trend of only feeling constrained by the exact letter of the law and ignoring the spirit of it.

Except it turns out these implicit understandings that you shouldn't do that existed because breaking them makes life shittier for everyone, and that's what we're experiencing now.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-23 15:08:09+00:00
> To be fair I cannot trust your shape in your jsonrpc, I am not sure if id is truly an integer or if you sent me an integer by mistake, same as params or even the payload of the params' param

In practice, it doesn't matter.

If the JSON payload is in the wrong format the server rejects it with an error.

If the server sends an integer "by mistake" then the purists would argue that the client should come to a halt and throw up an error to the user. Meanwhile the JSON users would see an integer coming back for the id field and use it, delivering something that works with the server as it exists today. Like it or not, this is why JSON wins.

Schema defined protocols are very useful in some circumstances, but in my experience the added overhead of keeping them in sync everywhere and across developers is a lot of overhead for most simple tasks.

Putting the data into a simple JSON payload and sending it off gets the job done in most cases.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-23 15:08:36+00:00
I'm not sure they're saying it's wrong more that the change was imposed externally by the victorious union rather than actually being arrived at so the question was never really settled. Looking at the history it looks clear it was. After reconstruction was halted and southern states weren't forced to allow black politicians and voting you get the decades of segregation, Jim Crowe laws, etc that followed until the civil rights act forced equal treatment under the law. Civil rights were never willingly given by the southern states.
by adithyassekhar | 2025-08-23 15:08:56+00:00
I like this article. It's not that detailed, just an opinion piece, an opinion I agree with.

I am happy that I could read things like these in a centralized website in a world where written media is either dying or behind a paywall. There are personal blogs, but who's keeping track of them?

I remember bookmarking techradar, ghacks and others, and reading it religiously every morning. Both went to shit. Don't know if Martin is on here.
by crote | 2025-08-23 15:09:11+00:00
The unique selling point here is that you don't need to trust the hypervisor or operator, as the separation and per-VM encryption is managed by the CPU itself.

The CPU itself can attest that it is running your code and that your dedicated slice of memory is encrypted using a key inaccessible to the hypervisor. Provided you still trust AMD/Intel to not put backdoors into their hardware, this allows you to run your code while the physical machine is in possession of a less-trusted party.

It's of course still not going to be enough for the truly paranoid, but I think it provides a neat solution for companies with security needs which can't be met via regular cloud hosting.
by gtowey | 2025-08-23 15:09:21+00:00
> But these seem like pretty reasonable arguments? At the very least you should retort with a study that at least tried to control for confounders.

I disagree. The fundamental premise here is that regular exercise has profound health benefits. Tennis is simply one example.

The rebuttals to tennis here ignore the obvious truth -- there are limitless ways to get regular exercise; you just have to have some time and be willing to put some effort in. With very few exceptions there is nobody in the world for whom it's not a realistic goal.

People who simply do not want to can come up with endless excuses to rationalize it.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-23 15:09:23+00:00
Fwiw this absolutely works amazingly well with modern coding assistants. “I want a diagram of equation X morphing into Y” or similar is always a one shot success for me.

Part of it is the simplistic syntax and the sheer amount of open source manim examples to train on but it’s a pretty great demonstration of ai coding agents time saving. Especially since the output video looking correct is all you care about here. Ie. I don’t actually care about the specifics of how my explanatory videos were created, just that they were created via a simple prompt and it gave me what i wanted.
by mythrwy | 2025-08-23 15:09:57+00:00
It's kind of a fine line with tomatoes because they really really do not like cool nights nor cool soil.

But if it's too hot they will not set fruit. You get blooms but they just drop.

Some tomatoes are more adapted to cool and others to heat. I have found Roma and cherry tomatoes set in hotter temperatures (generally) than many others.
by zbentley | 2025-08-23 15:11:12+00:00
Eh, not really. Async (in this semantic context) is generally about cooperative concurrency and also often about concurrent or multiplexed I/O. Pthreads aren't async by those definitions, though you can run async code within a given pthread as usual.

Goroutines are an unusual case, in that they don't have cooperative concurrency--they're pre-emptive--but the Go runtime does perform I/O using concurrent multiplexers under the hood.

So goroutines are kind of both: computation execution and code semantics look like pthreads, but I/O operations look like NodeJS on the backend.

Now, I'm not sure what "async runtime" means in the GP. If they're referring to I/O multiplexers, then they should say that. If they're referring to something else, then I'm not familiar with other uses of that term that would accurately apply to Golang.
by eszed | 2025-08-23 15:12:10+00:00
Yes, indeed. In my (at the time) sister-in-law's 17th c. two-up two-down stone cottage an oil-fired Aga was, in fact, the sensible choice. Not to say running it wasn't costly, but electric heat would have been far more expensive. It was also lovely to cook with. Put the drying rack in front of it, and clothes dried so thoroughly they didn't mildew after you put them away; also, you could throw your shoes into the low oven before you went out (amazing!), and again after you came in to get them dry.

My then-partner and I lived in an even older house, whose only sources of heat were a defective boiler and a coal-burning grate in the (genuinely medieval) fireplace in the living room. Our experience was, shall we say, authentic to the time-period in which it was built.

People underestimate how miserable the British climate is in winter, and how energy-intensive those old homes are to heat. An Aga wasn't invented as a status symbol, but as a practical item for a particular circumstance. Moving it outside of its original context is what changes its meaning.
by deltarholamda | 2025-08-23 15:12:14+00:00
I set up some Thinkpads from (I think) 2004 to use during Covid when some employees were doing work from home. Replaced the rust drive with an SSD and they used VNC to get onto their work desktops. It's a CAD shop with most everything on the server, so it's not feasible to do WFH with a laptop (not enough grunt, moving data over the Internet is slow), and it made much more sense to just do VNC.

This worked quite well. The Thinkpads were even (just) fast enough to do YouTube.

The point is that it really quite depends on what your workload is. If I made them use AutoCAD on these machines from 2004 they'd quit. This particular workflow was not ideal, but doable.

I have a 2020 M1 MB Air that I would love to replace, but it would be daft to. I don't bump up against any limitations. One of my kids uses my old 2011 MB Pro for his school, which granted I did upgrade to an SSD as well, but even so it's quite usable.

Mac hardware has been pretty consistently good for a very long time. They've had some stinkers (hello MacTV), but otherwise you can usually depend on them.

Like others I'm not thrilled with some of the OS changes, but the alternatives aren't a lot better. Windows keeps shooting itself in the foot, and chasing the Linux desktop is an exercise best left to those young enough to have the patience. I'm so done with distro-hopping.
by mikestew | 2025-08-23 15:12:34+00:00
Conversely, as a life-long resident of the U. S, I've never seen a tennis court that required payment to play, and I've seen plenty of tennis courts. I know paid tennis clubs exist, I've just never stepped foot in one.

Now that I think about it, many decades ago I lived in apartment complexes (Indianapolis, as if it makes a difference) that had tennis courts. I don't know if that's a thing anymore or not.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-23 15:13:19+00:00
I think a useful analogy is to think of AI as equivalent to the Steam Engine. Instead of making muscle power obsolete, it provides cognition on an industrial scale.

The hype cycle is real, and there will be, as there was with railroad construction in the 1800s, overshoot of production. Unlike with railroads however, demand will meet supply, and just eat up the compute that's available, voraciously.

The profit margins will likely be lower for the suppliers, and higher for those using AI to build things, in the long run, if they satisfy an actual market need.
by CosmicShadow | 2025-08-23 15:14:17+00:00
I also don't bother advertising to Canada anymore as it's just more valuable for me to sell to the US in USD. I've spent a lot of time working on getting shipping as cheap as possible to make it alluring for the US and it currently is cheaper for me to send to California from near Toronto then it is to send something in my own city, let alone anywhere else in Canada. It is getting better here with these new cheap providers like Intelcom, but it's still not worth it when dealing with 10x the people paying me in a currency that's 1.38x mine.

I also sell something that has a max value people would be willing to pay, so if that number is $6, then I'd rather get $6 USD than $6 CAD.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-23 15:14:41+00:00
I just don't see it. The main connection I see is with calorie intake being slightly above vs below maintenance. How does "easier" quantify? What if it's a technically true statement but you're just talking about 2%?

It's like when you hear that steaming vegetables retains more nutrients than boiling them so everyone repeats this bit of trivia, but then you find out it's talking about a 7% difference so who cares.
by joe463369 | 2025-08-23 15:14:48+00:00
I think with Waymo we're probably at the point where an insurer could have decent stab at what their liability would be if asked to cover AI-related accidents. In fact, given that these cars are on the road and have reportedly been in accidents, I would imagine this is past being a hypothetical concern and now well into the territory of 'solved problem'.
by i_k_k | 2025-08-23 15:15:24+00:00
Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair.

As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term.

C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates.

Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing.

I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.