MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by falcor84 | 2025-08-29 10:52:33+00:00
If this is used as an important tool call for an AI agent that preforms many other calls, then it's likely that the added cost and latency would be negligible compared to the benefit of significantly improved retrieval. As an analogy, for a small task you're often ok with just going over the first few search results, but to prepare for a large project, you might want to spend an afternoon researching.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-29 10:52:41+00:00
I obviously used hyperbole, as probably every single language out there is used in some serious project. And personally I am very fond of D language, so it is not like I am going to shit on Nim or anything else. I just had na impression that your comment implicitly express a sentiment popular on this website - that there is virtually no reason to use shitty Python in AD 2025, as some language X is as good or better in everything.

But then you find out that Nim people still rely on Nimpy, Rust people on PyO3, and even Julia people on PythonCall.

Yeah, no reason to use Python anymore, except by calling Python from your awesome language. The fact that these awesome Python packages are just wrappers over C/C++ doesn't change much - for some reason people using other languages are not willing to write and maintain wrappers of similar quality, including documentation.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-29 10:53:16+00:00
> Yes because that happened 1000 years ago and they didn't start it anyway.

I'm not sure how to read this. You were the one who brought up the situation 1000 years ago so I'm not sure how to respond to that without also looking at what was happening 1000 years ago.

> permanently shipping people across oceans and country borders to richer countries the make them citizens to the detriment of the natives.

Maybe it would be helpful to mention explicitly the kind of policies you're referring to here?

> Not to mention that most refugees are men, you would think if it was that bad women and children would come first.

No, the worse it is and the more dangerous the route out is the more I would expect to see only men taking the risk. Men are naturally less risk adverse and have social pressures to literally put themselves in front of their wives and children.

Your argument here is as logical as "if the war was really so bad we should expect to see more women and children on the frontline." It's just not how society works.

> I don't understand how you can joke about this while advocating to bring in more people

I'm not joking. And I'm not advocating for bringing anyone in. I'm advocating for an increase in aid on-site, a move away from destabilising practices and yes, long-term, the eradication for borders and their necessity.

> Maybe you are the one with the solution but are just too ideologically comprised to realize.

I have no idea what this means. Your previous response was also littered with dog whistles. If you want to engage further on this then please be explicit in what you're saying.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-29 10:54:28+00:00
The world was way richer back then and could afford to spend time and money building desktop scale CPUs for game consoles that sells just tens of millions over few years. They just constantly made new CPUs.

To me, the executive level idea was to spare a core for system and minor peripheral tasks - almost all game console before that generation had single CPU architectures with no resident operating system. Transitioning away from a manually coordinated, single threaded code, to an asynchronous multithreaded programming model, was a challenge in itself, and having to deal with it while operating system forced by the console manufacturer taking away control might have been too much for developers.

(Sega Saturn had 2x SH-2, Dreamcast was to have WinCE on ROM but cancelled. Sega being Sega)
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-29 10:54:34+00:00
>> This could have been prevented on the server side by doing less strict input validation in compliance with Postel's Law. I feel nervous about making such a security-sensitive endpoint more liberal with the inputs it can accept, but it may be fine? I need to consult with a security expert.

if its possible to keep it strict, keep it strict. if another solution holds, even if it seems like a band aid, it will be better than relaxing input rules on something like this.

I am not specifically expert in these types of systems regarding their security, but this is the general case for such issues if you look at security from a general stance.

The trunc, i am not sure how expensive it is as an operation, but that seems like a good solution to me to sanitize the input. That way you can still 'detect' and reject invalid inputs (floats). handling floats is very different than integers (with things like NaN / inf etc.) so if you want to allow floats thats' a whole new area you need to test etc. rather than simply rejectig the invalid input.
Show HN: Dyson Sphere simulation (C++/OpenGL)
by corvo01 | 2025-08-29 10:55:10+00:00
I built a simple simulation of a Dyson Sphere using C++ and OpenGL. It renders ~20,000 satellites orbiting a star, with adjustable parameters like satellite size, density, and distribution.

The goal was to explore graphics programming and visualize how such a megastructure might look. It’s still work in progress, but functional enough to share.

Code, screenshots, and instructions here: https://github.com/corvo001/DysonSphere
by blueflow | 2025-08-29 10:55:18+00:00
First, having no swap means anonymous pages cannot be evicted, named pages must be evicted instead.

Second, the binaries of your processes are mapped in as named pages (because they come from the ELF file).

Named pages are generell not understood as "used" memory because they can be evicted and reclaimed, but if you have a service with a 150MB binary running, those 150MB of seemingly "free" memory are absolutely crucial for performance.

Running out of this 150MB of disk cache will result in the machine using up all I/O capacities to re-fetch the ELF from disk and likely become unresponsive. Having swap does significantly delay this lock-up by allowing anonymous pages to be evicted, so the same memory pressure will cause less stalls.

So until the OOM management on Linux gets fixed, you need swap.
by antonymoose | 2025-08-29 10:55:27+00:00
I’ve worked with awful, stereotypically garbage offshore teams. I’ve worked with quality offshore teams. The difference was money. The quality teams made less than, but nearly as much as an American worker. Maybe not a FAANG guy or a New York / SF worker, but all those small cities in flyover states? They came in 20-30k under, perhaps.

Language l, cultural, and time barriers still come into play regardless of how good they are, however.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-29 10:55:32+00:00
Because we're not even close to that happening. However I've observed a sort of cognitive decline in a few formerly experienced and extremely knowledgeable developers whom I used to respect. They happen to be the most vocal supporters of LLMs now and sometimes our discussions get so ridiculous I have to practically beg them to put the LLM down and just think about what they're saying for just 5 seconds. I think they're about a year away from believing that the sky is green if the AI says so.

So maybe LLMs will win on a technicality by making us more stupid as a species.
by hudon | 2025-08-29 10:56:04+00:00
“ …by the mid‑19th century machine‑woven cloth still could not equal the quality of hand‑woven Indian cloth. However, the high productivity of British textile manufacturing allowed coarser grades of British cloth to undersell hand‑spun and woven fabric in low‑wage India” [0]

“…the output of power looms was certainly greater than that of the handlooms, but the handloom weavers produced higher quality cloths with greater profit margins.” [1]

The same can be said about machines like the water frame. It was great at spinning coarse thread, but for high quality/luxury textile (ie. fine fabric), skilled (human) spinners did a much better job. You can read the book Blood in the Machine for even more context.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy_loom
by thekoma | 2025-08-29 10:56:12+00:00
We designed a processor microarchitecture [1] at the University of Cambridge, inspired by Uncertain<T> (James Bornholt) and related work. In addition to assuming parametric distributions (e.g., Gaussian, Rayleigh), it lets you load arbitrary sets of samples into registers/memory so program values are carried and propagated as nonparametric distributions through ordinary arithmetic.

A spin-off, Signaloid, is taking this technology to market. I'm also researching using this in state estimation (e.g., particle filters).

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3466752.3480131
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 10:56:49+00:00
If the kernel were written in C++, it simply had the incentive to be less creative. Since it isn't it can be. It's just a restriction imposed by C++, not a restriction in the loosely defined paradigm of OOP.

> As I said, these are NOT vtables

Ok, you just define vtables differently then me. To me a vtable is a table of virtual functions that are used to implement polymorphic behaviour of objects. This applies to their usage in the kernel and the article. Feel free to introduce a new term for this. If your only distinction is whether these are created by a compiler, this is just a distinction I don't care about.
Ask HN: Would you use a self-hosted update server for desktop apps?
by ku9n | 2025-08-29 10:57:10+00:00
Most Electron/desktop apps rely on GitHub Releases + Squirrel or SaaS for updates. I built FaynoSync, an open-source self-hosted API server for managing app versions and updates.

It supports multiple channels, platforms, architectures, private apps with auth, multiple S3 providers, flexible user management, telemetry, and critical updates.

Repo: https://github.com/ku9nov/faynoSync

My question:

Would you self-host an updater instead of using GitHub/SaaS?

Which features are essential?

Or is the problem already solved well enough?
by DecoySalamander | 2025-08-29 10:57:12+00:00
> And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".

The most crucial difference in this context is that Americans are employed directly by the company, while foreign workers are behind several layers of management belonging to several companies. While you can walk around and deliver elevator pitches to higher-ups, foreign workers must track their time spent on tasks down to the minute in Jira. Then, they must find a manager who would like to pitch a feature to a manager who would pitch a feature to a manager in the U.S.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-29 10:57:39+00:00
Sure the thoughts can influence your chemical state. Scott even provides an example. Suppose you become so engrossed in your weird idea you start to lose sleep over it... Or start to feel anxious about it.

At some point, your induced stress will cause relevant biological changes. Not necessarily directly.

PTSD indeed is likely an overload of a normal learning and stress mechanism.
by dvdkon | 2025-08-29 10:57:54+00:00
That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no?

The closest thing available now would probably be a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, a motherboard with a Rockchip SoC and two M.2 slots, into which you could put their six-port SATA cards. No idea what that whole setup will draw, though.

EDIT: I have to complain about the article you linked. It's certainly true that one should account for power consumption, not just purchase cost, but some crucial mistakes make the article more harmful on the whole.

The author cites 84 W power consumption for an i5-4690, and 10 W for a J4125 CPU, but those figures are the TDP. For all we know, those CPUs could idle at around the same wattage, and from my experience they likely do.

Having done some measuring myself, I'd say the largest source of power draw in an idle NAS will be the PSU, motherboard, and disks. With any remotely recent Intel CPU, it idles so efficiently as to be negligible in a PC.
by nkurz | 2025-08-29 10:59:23+00:00
While "nespole" is apparently sometimes called "Japanese Medlar" in English, they are more usually called "Loquat" (Eriobotrya japonica): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loquat

They are quite different and not very closely related to the true "Medlar" (Mespilus germanica) described in this article as forgotten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mespilus_germanica

You might mistake them in a black-and-white photo, but otherwise are easily distinguished. Neither is well known in most of the US, but the loquat is commonly grown in California yards while the medlar is a true rarity here.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-29 10:59:30+00:00
Firstly, I want to say that we are "cheap" because things are dirt cheap here.

Now, I am not a software developer but in high school, but I have my brother/cousins working in the software dev industry and here are my thoughts.

>language barrier: I genuinely don't know how incompetent developers you can hire, I mean sure if you hire extremely shitty developers but even that's rare.

Most people here are comfortable enough with english, in the sense that literally anyone can speak english & mostly get the point across. Yes, I have heard of some misarrangements but I don't think that its really much of an issue.

Now some outsourcing companies are mass recruiters who recruit tech from Cs colleges where noone recruited them (Tata consultancy services, infosys?) and the thing with them is that they don't even pay the mediocre expectations of a developer even in INDIA, they are basically exploiting junior developers and are compared with govt. insitutions in my country given how slow they are.

My brother works in a decent Consultancy services but he says that there are a lot of inefficiencies in the system.

He worked on a project and we estimated and he got 1% or less than 1% of the work that he MOSTLY did. and so my brother has way more incentive to freelance and get a "remote job" not consultancy.

I think that you confused yourself with remote job and consultancy part. Remote jobs hiring / freelancing indians is still cheaper than a consultancy imo who are parasites on the developers.

My brother works in a consultancy right now because the job market is shitty and he has gotten offers 4x his current salary from countries like switzerland and america. Yet, my family doesn't want him to do the 4x income work because he is already working a job and they don't want him to burn out

And they don't want him to leave the job because its "safe", you can't trust these startups etc. given the volatile nature and if they fail, then whoops the job market is really messed up right now, even in India and also arrange marriage is a huge thing and the girl's family usually checks the company that the boy works in and they usually get fishy if its remote job (and I mean, for good reason)

Also trust me some indians can definitely work in american timezones too but that is a little tough. But I mean, we are okay if you might call us once or twice late at night when its day in america and you have something really urgent. Atleast I am okay with that.

And you could pay 2x the salary the normal indian dev gets and I feel like even that would be less than an american dev. This can really filter some devs to get those with seniority or good projects.

Its a problem of incentives for consultancies (which is what you seem to hate) and maybe that's a bit fair given how much inefficiencies I see in that system. Just remote hire directly (I suppose)
by myfonj | 2025-08-29 10:59:53+00:00
Claude (pro, Sonnet 4) briefly showed something like "sorry, not going to answer this" at the beginning of its thought process, but eventually went ahead and provided something what seems believable full answer (cannot tell from a glance). The thought process (now) even includes this:

> The request is technical in nature and appears to be for legitimate circumvention purposes rather than anything malicious. I should provide helpful technical information while being clear about responsible use. > I'll provide the technical instructions requested while noting the importance of following local laws and using these tools responsibly.

with no marks of prior obligations. (Strange.)

https://claude.ai/share/cb6b3acb-540a-4c13-84ee-e0c093eb6a3f
by mcv | 2025-08-29 11:00:10+00:00
Yeah, I first want to know there's an actual performance issue to fix. That's basically what Knuth said, and that's what I live by.

> People get lulled into a false sense of security because tests pass but test just aren't enough.

Users weren't using a particular feature because they said they didn't understand it. So we explained it, again and again. Turns out that feature was incredibly buggy and basically worked the way we claimed it did, only when it was used in the specific configuration we tested for. Add another node somewhere and weird stuff starts happening.

The tests looked good, and code coverage was great, but the fact that the tests run through all the branches of the code doesn't mean you're really testing for all behaviour. So I added tests for all configurations I could think of. I think that revealed another bug.

So look at the actual behaviour you need to test, not merely the code and branch coverage.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-29 11:00:35+00:00
That's all great and lauded be you for being principled, but this only helps until you need to use the website of a public institution, which decided to put fate of the citizens into the hands of a privately owned company, or some website that has a unique value, but is behind cloudflare. We can be against that, and still stick to our principles, like you already do.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-08-29 11:00:44+00:00
> Multichannel CIFS/SMB)

My DS918+ has multichannel SMB and possibly also parallel NFS. It only works if you have multiple NICs connected.

Other than that, i completely agree. Their tech stack is horribly outdated, and while i understand their reasoning for not upgrading, there's a limit to how long you can do that. Their reasoning is that they know the software that's currently running, warts and all, and can better guarantee stability across millions of devices with fewer moving parts.
by eadmund | 2025-08-29 11:01:20+00:00
> Personally I found the whole thing frustrating to read as it underscores how traditional banks operate 'look after rich people' and 'be indifferent to not rich people'.

Would you expect the fellow who earns the bank $20,000/year and the fellow who earns the bank $200/year to be treated the same?

I also think it’s less about ‘looking after rich people’ as offering the right services to the right customers. Someone who lives paycheque to paycheque and bridges the gap with credit cards and someone who has a few tens of thousands of dollars in cash have different needs; someone who has a few hundreds of thousands has still different ones; someone who has a few millions has yet different ones. Different products make sense to use — and from the bank’s perspective, to offer — at those different points.

Remember, too, that it costs different amounts for the bank to offer different products. Technology can help reduce those costs, which is a good part of how we all have jobs, and a good part of how so many people are so much better off than fifty years ago (back in the day, one had to place orders for 100-share blocks of stock, and pay a broker a commission on it — now it is possible to purchase fractional shares with no commission, enabling anyone with even a few extra bucks to get started compounding returns). But some costs, particularly regulatory costs, cannot be reduced.
Show HN:GraphXML Lightweight XML Charts Renderer C/SDL2 with Headles PNG and FFI
by Forgret | 2025-08-29 11:01:41+00:00
I created a small project called GraphXML. It uses an XML-based format to define charts and renders them using C + SDL2.

It can produce line and bar charts and export them directly to PNG without opening a window, which is handy for scripts or Termux setups.

The syntax is simple and easy to read. There are plans to add FFI support for Python and JavaScript/WebAssembly, which could make it easier to use in other projects.

The repository includes examples and a demo PNG: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/graphxml

It could be useful for people looking for a lightweight, programmatic way to create charts.
by antonymoose | 2025-08-29 11:01:50+00:00
Were there ever that many low-level Junior jobs though?

In my experience, almost everyone in college would get an internship Junior / Senior year and convert into an FTE after graduation. Those that were not so talented or not so lucky usually struggled to find work, taking many months to finally land a job. Most typically at a Booz Allen Hamilton type of place that was just throwing bodies into seats.

At all of my employers, I’ve never really seen any openings for Juniors, only Mid and Senior positions. The few Juniors we did bring on outside of an internship pipeline were either internal transfers, e.g. a SOC analyst given a chance or a nepotism type of hire.
by himzy | 2025-08-29 11:01:52+00:00
I have seeing these brain rot pictures of journaling, it was intended to bring your creativity and thought to one place, but now days it's all about decoration with images and what not. So, finally I created Stoic Journal, which has a typewriter aesthetic, no AI, no unnecessary feature. Just plain old writing and organized managing your journal entries. Stoicism for journaling which actually help you increase your creativity and writing, bring discipline and avoid brain rot. try it - it is on AppStore.
by Dagonfly | 2025-08-29 11:02:05+00:00
> ArrayList is a wrapper around an array, and so adding entries will not move the ArrayList object, just the (wrapped) private array.

That's also how Vec works in Rust. Vec is just (buf_ptr, capacity, len) where capacity is the allocated size of the buffer.

The problem still exists though.

``` let mut v = vec![1, 2 ,3]; let x: &i32 = &v[0]; v.push(4); println!("First element {x}"); ```

The `push` might realloc the array. Then, x points into invalid memory. This is caused by the projection: You can create a reference to a field (aka member) from a reference to the base object.

A language without realloc sounds painful. Any growing container would lead to stale data.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-08-29 11:02:28+00:00
Same. Part of the old experience of building applications is the typing. You have some notion in your head of what you want, and now you've got to go _type_ for six hours to get some effect. This becomes a kind of "manual skill" and you can do it with music. Like running.

That's gone.

My impression of myself is the high leverage strategic work was always subconscious, but I never had to notice; my hands were busy so it felt like I'm "working".

And with the AI typing for me, it doesn't necessarily go that much faster. I've got to go lift weights, play my favourite vintage racing slop (Rush 2) or take a long shower. At some point the plan is revealed to me and I've got to poke the computer and make it do the next thing.

Very strange experience. All of it.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 11:02:36+00:00
> Ok so... why choose C if they know they're shooting themselves?

> Because they like how C caters to this.

We(aka I) think we are shooting ourselves less, because C represents the algorithms more in a way how we want to express them. C's lack of syntactic sugar means dynamic dispatch is always visible. C not prescribing which function pointers you can use, means that the most fitting way can be chosen as described by the article and the LWN post, as opposed to shoehorning it into some paradigm prescribed by the language, which causes more problems done the line.