MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-08-12 01:29:38+00:00
Tail recursive functions are loops when tail calls are jumps.

Tail calls being jumps is the key insight.

Not all tail calls are recursion!

Students are confused by recursion. Some may be confused by tail calls.

Don't mix two confusing things together when teaching.

(Tail calls get mixed up with recursion because recognizing and treating/optimizing recursive tail calls to create loops an important highlighted category. In a compiler that doesn't optimize tail calls, optimizing self tail calls is an important priority (if that is easier to do than a general treatment). Many common algorithms are expressible in just one function that calls itself, and there are cases in which some or all of those calls can be tail calls; e.g. binary tree traversal.)

The order should probably be: teach recursion first. Then when students have firmly wrapped their heads around it, introduce tail calls. Students will gain the skill of knowing what is a tail call and why it is important, and recognize which calls tail calls. Secondly, the harder skill of taking recursion that uses non-tail calls and restructuring it to make tail calls instead.
by o11c | 2025-08-12 01:30:28+00:00
Also the fact that pre-SP2, Windows XP actually crashed (and permanently broke in "interesting" ways) more than Windows 98 in practice, theory be damned. I became so familiar with how to install Windows during this time ...

Yes, SP1 wasn't horrible if you could get it (but who can download something that big on dial-up?), but it still was not great.
by nradov | 2025-08-12 01:30:33+00:00
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
by corytheboyd | 2025-08-12 01:31:13+00:00
GitHub was such a cool product of its time, the complete epitome of ridiculous SV tech companies. The Oval Office. The whiskey library. A room full of swag. A product ubiquitously known by every nerd in the bay, then, world. I didn’t work there, but it was cool to be around it in SF at the time. Always sad to see them fall apart (yes yes I know it’s been happening for a long time)
by userbinator | 2025-08-12 01:31:55+00:00
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern".

Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
by saranyan | 2025-08-12 01:32:04+00:00
Historical Bias Explorer – Chat with AI from different eras, trained on documents from 1850s-2020s

I built this to have better conversations with my kids about AI bias. Instead of abstract discussions, they can now chat with AI personalities that think like people from different historical eras.

Each AI is powered by GPT + RAG, trained on curated document collections from its era:

1850s: Medical journals, religious texts promoting slavery/phrenology 1920s: Eugenics literature, immigration restriction papers 1950s: Cold War psychology, suburban conformity guides 1990s: "Colorblind" era welfare reform, cultural explanations for inequality 2020s: Algorithmic fairness papers, data-driven decision making docs

The technical challenge was curating ~1M words of historical documents while balancing authenticity with educational value. The RAG system retrieves period-appropriate sources to generate responses that feel genuinely from each era.

What emerged was disturbing: every era's AI is absolutely confident it represents peak human understanding. The 1920s AI discusses eugenics using identical rhetorical patterns to how modern AI discusses "evidence-based optimization."

My kids immediately grasped something that took me years to understand: we're not getting less biased over time, we're getting better at hiding bias behind increasingly sophisticated justifications.

Try it and please let me know what i can do to make it better: saranyan.com/projects/historical-bias The conversations are uncomfortable. That's the point.

Details are in the blog https://www.saranyan.com/blog/the-ghosts-of-our-machines Tech stack: Next.js, GPT-4, custom RAG implementation, 30 curated document collections spanning 175 years.
by rjzzleep | 2025-08-12 01:32:42+00:00
Georgi gave a response to some of the issues ollama has in the attached thread[1]

> Looking at ollama's modifications in ggml, they have too much branching in their MXFP4 kernels and the attention sinks implementation is really inefficient. Along with other inefficiencies, I expect the performance is going to be quite bad in ollama.

ollama responded to that

> Ollama has worked to correctly implement MXFP4, and for launch we've worked to validate correctness against the reference implementations against OpenAI's own. > Will share more later, but here is some testing from the public (@ivanfioravanti ) not done by us - and not paid or

leading to another response

> I am sure you worked hard and did your best. > But, this ollama TG graph makes no sense - speed cannot increase at larger context. Do you by any chance limit the context to 8k tokens? > Why is 16k total processing time less than 8k?

Whether or not Ollama's claim is right, I find this "we used your thing, but we know better, we'll share details later" behaviour a bit weird.

[1] https://x.com/ggerganov/status/1953088008816619637
by abhiyerra | 2025-08-12 01:33:25+00:00
Bring back cursive!

I remember when I was a kid people would just copy other people’s essays and just reword the sentences. So people who want to cheat will figure out ways to cheat on homework, etc. AI is just the new vehicle.

I think grades should be based 90% on exams, and 10% or less on homework. Homework should be practice not what your grades are based on.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-12 01:33:42+00:00
I use the same application for my to-do list as I use for my "scattered everything" documentation: Noteself[0] (not affiliated, just a happy user for many years). It's a modification to TiddlyWiki that allows for the use of couchDB for essentially 'cloud hosting' (which I self-host).

I have a Calendar for appointments, which provides reminders as notifications and or email. That's outside my scope for a to-do app, although it's complementary.

I have two 'tiddlers' that open up front by default, one is the regular weekly schedule of things (with some calendar overlap) and the other is my (now very long) bullet pointed to-do list. It doesn't matter (to me) how long the to-do list is because the more important things are very near the top - merely by the passage of time if they haven't been done yet then they weren't important enough. But I keep them on the list as reminders of things I wanted to do and may still pursue at some point in the future (retirement perhaps?).

It's essentially a text file, but I can access the current version from any browser anywhere in the world (maybe not China) as long as I remember the URL, username and password. (It's more like multiple organised text files)

[0]: https://noteself.org/
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-12 01:34:30+00:00
lol I was actually thinking of the setting app in my comment. I agree, it bugs me every time I pick up my phone.

It's gotten to the point where I resist looking at my iPhone because I'm going to have to take up my brain space with the unwanted notifications. I'm not sure what it is but on Android it's less pushy and I can clear all notifications with a single click. So most of the time my new iPhone sits in a drawer and I use my old Android as I go about my day.
by prophesi | 2025-08-12 01:34:31+00:00
Yeah it's been hard for it to leave the news cycle when there are new developments still happening all the time. Latest one being a federal judge denying the request to unseal the transcripts for cases relating to Ghislaine Maxwell. And at least going by Ground News, seems to have been widely covered by outlets today.

https://ground.news/article/judge-rejects-unsealing-ghislain...
by bobbiechen | 2025-08-12 01:34:34+00:00
I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.

I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
by _spduchamp | 2025-08-12 01:36:16+00:00
I just got back from a 3 week driving/camping trip in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI. Saw one big plume of smoke from a forest fire in New Brunswick, and the skies were tinged red with smoke in NB, Quebec, and Ontario. The forests are extremely dry. My friend's well is going dry and ground water is low. Two days ago in NB, standing outside in a breeze, it felt like a hairdryer blowing, hot and dry. If the peat lands start burning, that will burn underground and they can't stop it.

To me, having just been there, and witnessing some asshole behaviour from some of the campers, it makes total sense to close down the parks. There are not enough resources to deal with more fires there. Keep in mind these are not heavily populated provinces, so there are less resources to deal with out of control fires.
by 6yyyyyy | 2025-08-12 01:36:33+00:00
You can use KeePassXC for passkeys. It will generate completely unidentifiable public keys, and save the the private keys to a portable KDBX file.

It's unfortunate that passkeys have been such a disaster. Attestation should never have been part of the spec, it should never have been presented as a replacement for hardware U2F keys, and a private key file format should have been defined on day 1. But there is useful functionality buried under all the noise and confusion.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-12 01:36:49+00:00
At least in Germany at the time of the release of the various Zune generations, Zune was both hated by hipsters for not being "fashionable" (these users strongly preferred iPods), and by free software advocates (who were very vocal at the time, and also had at that time much more influence on the sentiment and feelings of "average users" than today) for its in-built DRM system.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-12 01:36:58+00:00
He can, of course, almost completely stop crime in Washington D.C. Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it. Boom, big win and look at how crime-free the empty streets are, aside from the dozen police on every corner, snipers on every roof.

Is there anything to learn from that? Of course not. Aside from the liberty for security trade, should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-12 01:38:26+00:00
It is, in part, a distraction, from (particularly) discussion of the Epstein files, but the one thing the Trump regime is efficient with is using elements of their real authoritarian agenda as their distractions when they need one. So, sure, DC is a distraction, but its also a part of a fairly overt broad campaign against the homeless (not against homelessness as a social condition, against homeless people as subhuman enemies), that is itself tied into the national campaign of ethnic cleansing and the national campaign against the mentally ill (again, not against mental illness), and the DC operation is also part of the progressive militarization of civilian law enforcement.

If this sounds like things that occur together in fascist regimes, well, there's a reason for that.
by alexpotato | 2025-08-12 01:38:28+00:00
My grandmother was born in 1912 and therefore lived through:

- World War 1

- The Spanish Flu (she caught it and survived despite being only 6)

- A rural Pennsylvania childhood with no antibiotics and where multiple family members were injured by livestock or heavy equipment

- Prohibition

- The Great Depression

- World War 2

I often wonder if this gave that generation a VERY different attitude towards risk. e.g. one of your kids having a broken arm may not seem that big a deal when you might know a family that lost multiple sons in WW2? Or a bad cut compared to someone you know losing a leg in a tractor accident?
by zmmmmm | 2025-08-12 01:38:48+00:00
> instead of it working the way you want, you have to work they way it wants

You can use these tools in lots of different ways. You don't have to go all the way to the vibe coding extreme. You can go down to individual functions and have it write them and adjust them step by step if you want, approving every diff. Or even just have it on the side to chat with about your code (Aider is great for this in /ask mode). You can guide its behaviour with CONVENTIONS.md / CLAUDE.md and get it to work how you want as well. I find it handy just asking Aider to write comments for my functions.

It's definitely early days but I'm expecting we'll pretty quickly evolve to having standard "profiles" you can apply to work in different ways, and projects will start shipping with them out of the box (a bit like lint config). This will relieve a lot of the friction at the moment where you spend the first hours / days just corralling it to work the way you want.
by spauldo | 2025-08-12 01:39:16+00:00
org-mode is basically better Markdown with a bunch of automated things that don't get in your way unless you specifically put them in there.

The only unwanted feature you're likely to encounter is automatic sub/superscript conversion, and that's documented and easy to turn off.

I'm not recommending org-mode. I personally don't care if you use org-mode or not. I never understood that mentality. But the type of software you're describing is crap, and org-mode doesn't fall into that category.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-12 01:39:49+00:00
>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.

Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."

There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.
by autoexec | 2025-08-12 01:40:17+00:00
I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.

Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.

Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-12 01:40:17+00:00
I think I could also survive in a similar way.

My to-do list just helps a bit with my ability to be productive. If I'm at a loose end, I can refer to it and remind myself of X, Y, or Z that either should be done or that I'd like to have a bash at.

Without it, I'd 'float unproductively' more.

(And it's not necessarily about productivity, more about purpose, where I'll feel much better having completed a task that I'd previously set myself - like mulching the dead leaves or tidying the study or weeding the vege patch that I'd otherwise have not done in favour of 'floating' scrolling HN or whatever).
by al_borland | 2025-08-12 01:41:13+00:00
I’ve had similar issues. I don’t think it’s productivity, but rather purpose. People need to feel some kind of purpose in life. If your job is all you have in your life, a lack of purpose in it hits hard. If you have a family, friends, and hobbies, in addition to the job, there is more balance. A lack of purpose in one area doesn’t lead to an overall feeling of unhappiness, because there are other areas where you can draw purpose to prop yourself up with.

I say this mostly academically, as I have had almost singular focus on my career, which has had its ups and downs (it’s still be stable and I make money, but I don’t know what it’s all for… I lack purpose). I know rounding out my life would help this, but dealing with my career is easier than facing those other parts of life I’m less adept at navigating. I’ve had nearly 20 years at the same company. I’m really not sure what would happen if that went away tomorrow, when I don’t have another stable area of my life to lean on.
Ask HN: AI Era Project Naming Strategies, by devs and tech creatives
by mockingloris | 2025-08-12 01:42:23+00:00
I visited a blog from a HN thread and observed the site's links and title were very well named; links had shorter names and the titles were not too long and managed to express the link's content/context.

This got me thinking about how my own naming conventions have gradually shifted. I collaborate with AI on more of my projects.

(I have my own process for feeding context but, on specific; TODO#N.gemini.md/TODO#N.v0-dev.md/)

(I use sublime text as my daily editor - I use a used Lenovo Thinkpad running Ubuntu 24.04; 16.04, 2 years prior.)

For context, I code primarily in JavaScript. What are other naming conventions/observations you have stumbled on - on the job?

│

Segue: v0.dev is now v0.app; they noted that a good number of users aren't devs and the TLD had to reflect.

│

└── Yarn me; Let's talk
by bluGill | 2025-08-12 01:42:31+00:00
The problem is this discussion is too abstract. There is a big difference between a 10 pack of cheap pens and a custom made pen - depending on which we are talking about different things make sense. Likewise it could be a sheet of paper or replace all the printers in the office. Some things call and we will figure out pricing make a lot of sense, while for others it doesn't. When you realize all of the above exists with call us prices but they are sold differently it starts to make sense why the signal is both good and bad to different people - we are thinking of different situations and so the signal means different things.
by Sidsaladi | 2025-08-12 01:44:11+00:00
The Product Manager's AI Model Selection Guide: Which Tool for Which Task?

Your AI toolkit breakdown after $4,000 of testing

Claude 3.5 Sonnet → Deep analysis and structured thinking powerhouse Gemini 2.5 Flash → Lightning fast and crazy cheap for high-volume work

Grok 3.0 → Real-time info and uncensored brainstorming Perplexity Pro → Research with proper citations ChatGPT → Your main work partner that remembers everything

My current workflow: • Monday strategy sessions: ChatGPT (remembers our product context) • Quick competitive research: Perplexity Pro • Deep user data analysis: Claude with MCP integration • Real-time market updates: Grok • Technical feasibility: Claude Opus • Document processing: Gemini (handles 750,000+ words)

Think of it this way: ChatGPT is your main work partner. Others are specialized consultants you call for their superpowers

Pro tip: Start with the cheapest model that handles your task. Only upgrade when you hit limitations.

Which model do you rely on most for product work?

Read the complete guide in the comments below
by derefr | 2025-08-12 01:44:14+00:00
Some hardcore Greenpeace types might argue that this is a special case where such a person is literally using their system "wrong" — as in unethically. In the sense that they are deliberately wasting [i.e. "turning into waste heat"] a nontrivial amount of power, by keeping however-many monitors they use always powered on, never allowing any of them to enter sleep.

It's a sort of attitude that isn't really that problematic when one person does it; but becomes problematic if it becomes a popular thing to do.

Anyone here who lived through the 1990s might remember that the ENERGY STAR certification initiative — that today measures all sorts of things — began specifically to grade computer monitors on their ability to be put into a low-power sleep state by software control.

Everyone back then loved the computer personalization aspect of screensavers — I had After Dark installed myself! — and what resulted was an energy-waste tragedy-of-the-commons of a large-enough scale that the EPA had to get involved.
by isatty | 2025-08-12 01:45:23+00:00
I happened to come across some of this recently and after an independent review, decided to stop donating to them.

There’s just no way to donate to just Wikipedia (to specially only the server costs or upkeep) but ignore whatever else the organization is up to.

Same story with Mozilla, there’s no way to donate to just the development of Firefox.

It’s all good though, there’s loads of other charities that I can donate to.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-12 01:45:38+00:00
I have multiple times had the thought that it's not actually possible to "get ahead" because it takes 110% of available time (because no one gets enough sleep) just to tread water.

Investments and Property I see as kind of essential to having much of a retirement, but these things need knowledge and research to get a handle on initially and to closely manage going forwards, such that they could be a part-time job on their own.

How does that fit around a full time job plus kids school and sports plus maintaining a healthy diet and exercise?

The one thing that all of the above does teach a person, though, is: filtering of bullshit; ability to say no.
by physix | 2025-08-12 01:46:17+00:00
This reminds me of when I was a physics undergrad way back in the mid 80s. We used to spend nights drinking beer and hacking some simulations from the Computer Recreations section of Scientific American.

Once we wanted to simulate the dynamics of galaxies. I don'it think it was an SA article, but we did it the slow way by calculating the force on every star individually from each other star. It was excruciatingly slow and boring.

Then some time later, I don't recall where I picked that up, I updated the simulation to just model the force on each star coming from the galaxy's centre of mass.

I could simulate many more stars, have galaxies collide and see them spin off with their stars scattering around.

What struck me was that they looked like real galaxies we see out there.

I wasn't aware of the postulations made in the 60s/70s about there being supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, but to me, this simplified simulation was kind of like a smoking gun for that... from an 80286 IBM PC AT.