MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcalvinowens | 2025-08-24 14:22:43+00:00
Yeah, close() can't fail, but it can return an error. It's kind of odd.

How could one fix that though? It seems pretty unavoidable to me because write() is more or less asynchronous to actual disk I/O.

You could add finalize() which is distinct from close(), but IMHO that's even more confusing.
by nadermx | 2025-08-24 14:23:23+00:00
Actually the berne convention gives you right to sue in the jurisdiction where your rights are being violated.

Given there is some sort of fair use in most jurisidictions, and its compeltly with in even europeans rights to save entire movies for personal use, the parent comment to you is right. Tools exist for them to enforce them by going after the domain registrar or hosting provider.

All site blocking does is trample on rights over "alleged" infrignment.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-24 14:23:40+00:00
It's not, sadly, because technological choices are ethical choices.

Your site uses technologies that make it trivial for large entities (like Google) to know that person X living in Atlanta just posted a certain racially-charged diatribe.

This might come back to bite them in the rear-end in the future, in ways that they don't suspect today, because this data is never getting deleted and might be available to untold numbers of private and state actors in the future.
by tim333 | 2025-08-24 14:24:30+00:00
I'm not sure any countries have totally free speech, for example "I'll pay $x million to have politician $y killed" will get you into trouble most places. It's a question of where you draw the line.

Even in the US the constitution says the government can't pass laws against free speech, not that you can say anything without getting into trouble. See Rumeysa Ozturk for example detained for six weeks for writing an op ed criticising Israel.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-08-24 14:24:53+00:00
The reason these tools haven't achieved greatness yet is because 99% of us are struggling at work with domain knowledge - how does this special project work in the frame of this company. If an AI tool is unable to "learn the ropes" at a specific company over time, they will never be better than a mid-senior developer on day 1 at the company. They NEED to be able to learn. They NEED to be able have long-term memory and to read entire codebases.
by beardyw | 2025-08-24 14:24:58+00:00
I remember sitting, as I did so often at the time, in an airport lounge. This was Rotterdam on a dark evening, in the single story building on the edge of an airfield. I looked around and there were 5 or 6 men, all sitting alone in disheveled suits looking lost and miserable. I thought "poor sods". Then I looked at myself.
by jonesjohnson | 2025-08-24 14:25:13+00:00
It's a fun little project and I appreciate the effort you put in, but I found it hard to "consume".

As already written, the text takes too long to show up. Why not have a mouse-over and show a full block of text?

I think it would have been great, if the effort went into something more "useful", like improving/cleaning up something like Sheldon Brown's collection, which is already great.

Furthermore, so many things are missing and unclear

- you seem to show only a ahead stem. I'm missing the spacers.

- you're missing the Dunlop valve and the new Schwalbe Click Valve

- your selection/explanation of wheel sizes also leaves much to be desired. Having someone finally explain the ETRTO sizings to me ( and that both 28" and 29" wheels use 622mm rims ) was eye-opening

I know that it's hard to draw the line somewhere and that this should be a site for beginners. but still
by petertodd | 2025-08-24 14:25:22+00:00
My name is Peter Todd. I am a Canadian.

Tell me, where am I right now? I traveled there recently.

Governments certainly can find out that information, as my recent flights are recorded in lots of databases accessible to the. But it's much harder for non-government entities not directly involved in the travel to find this out due to privacy laws (particularly in the EU).
by Twirrim | 2025-08-24 14:26:49+00:00
AI, block chain, rust, go, serverless, nosql, ruby on rails..... The list goes on and on :-)

Some of it gets really annoying on the business side, because companies like Gartner jump on the trends, and they have enough influence that businesses have to pay attention. When serverless was a thing, every cloud provider effectively had to add serverless things even if it made zero sense and no customers were asking for it, simply to satisfy Gartner (and their ilk) and be seen as innovating and ahead of the curve. Same thing happened with block chain, and is currently happening with AI.
by westurner | 2025-08-24 14:26:52+00:00
Is there a good way to verify self-modifying code - in Lisp, or Combo (MOSES), or Python - at runtime against a trusted baseline at loader time?

Dynamic metaprogramming is flexible but dangerous. Python is also "dynamic", meaning that code can be changed at runtime instead of only being able to accidentally pass null function pointers.

Python's metaclasses function similarly to Lisp's macros but in a consistent way: most Python code uses the standard metaclasses so that the macros don't vary from codebase to codebase. The Django "magic removal" story was about eliminating surprise and non-normative metaclassery, for example.

Does this tool monkey patch all copies of a function or just the current reference? There are many existing monkey patching libraries with tests
by losvedir | 2025-08-24 14:27:03+00:00
Can someone confirm my understanding of how tool use works behind the scenes? Claude, ChatGPT, etc, through the API offer "tools" and give responses that ask for tool invocations which you then do and send the result back. However, the underlying model is a strictly text based medium, so I'm wondering how exactly the model APIs are turning the model response into these different sort of API responses. I'm assuming there's been a fine-tuning step with lots of examples which put desired tool invocations into some sort of delineated block or something, which the Claude/ChatGPT server understand? Is there any documentation about how this works exactly, and what those internal delineation tokens and such are? How do they ensure that the user text doesn't mess with it and inject "semantic" markers like that?
by jcalvinowens | 2025-08-24 14:27:12+00:00
If the tape drive failed close() in a way that did not deallocate the file descriptor, that was just straight up a bug.

Retrying close() is dangerous, if the file descriptor was successfully deallocated, it might have already been re-allocated by another thread. I'd guess the program you're describing was single threaded though (it can still bite there though)
by galangalalgol | 2025-08-24 14:27:16+00:00
You can take their word for it, but yes, that is unreliable. I don't typically have an internal narrative, it takes effort. I sometimes have internal dialogue to think through an issue by taking various sides of it. Usually it is quiet in there. Or there is music playing. This is the most replies I have ever received. I think I touched a nerve by suggesting to people they do not exist.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-08-24 14:27:40+00:00
Lololol

> ITA Software by Google Airfare search engine and airline scheduling software. Cambridge, MA. Common Lisp is used for the core flight search engine. The larger Flights project is roughly equal parts CL, C++, and Java.

Read the last sentence AND this company got acquired by Google like 15 years ago. So ya my question still stands.
by exe34 | 2025-08-24 14:27:58+00:00
for me it's not that I think faster, it's just that I will check 10 things really fast and exclude the "no it can't be there" things - because that's usually where it is. So if somebody else is holding the mouse and keyboard, I would then have to convince them that these things that they are convinced are fine need checking.

I really hate this work of convincing them, because it's much faster to check it first and explain why it was a good idea later once I've fixed the problem.
by tsevis | 2025-08-24 14:28:28+00:00
I’m a White, Greek man, 58 years old, living in Southeastern Europe between Greece and Cyprus. Until my 40s, the world - at least in Europe - didn’t feel divided by trivial issues like “what counts as hate speech.” There was always a small racist minority, but the majority of people generally respected a politically correct language—not as oppression, but as a way not to harm others. Nobody felt “silenced” by avoiding harmful words. Then came the hyperboles and the rigid rules you describe. To me, these are very similar to the poor-quality AI filters I discuss in my article: they judge without context. But judging requires more than scanning words—it requires understanding how, why, when, and under what circumstances something is said. What you’ve experienced—and thank you for sharing—is the result of bad, simplistic policy created by people who haven’t truly tried to understand or adapt. Human beings, societies, even nature itself, are complex systems. They can’t be reduced to mechanical yes/no rules. That’s the heart of my article. And what I truly believe—as an eternal optimist—is that we can get to a place of smarter filters and smarter ways to coexist. It will take time, patience, and sincere effort. But it’s possible.
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-24 14:28:41+00:00
Perhaps you've misread my comment.

I found the same Reuters story and quoted it above. If NPR were a bit less partisan, I wouldn't feel the need to look further afield to find the rationale. The omitted specifics around "national security" suggested that perhaps there was more to the story. From there I looked towards Reuters. If NPR's editorial stance were different, perhaps I wouldn't have needed a second opinion.

>>The problem with these partisan sources is that even if there were a deeper rationalization for killing the project with regulations, such as a valid national security situation, we wouldn't expect NPR to cover it. Looking elsewhere I didn't find much.

Personally, I would like to see wind farms compete on a laissez-faire basis. Regulatory uncertainty is an added cost for everyone. Similarly, I didn't like the previous administration's ideological war on oil and gas. However, from NPR's editorial perspective, there weren't enough regulatory hurdles.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015581092/biden-promised-to-...
by dkdcio | 2025-08-24 14:28:41+00:00
I also find it useful to keep in mind (often more junior) people are learning new things and expressing their joy, which is a good thing. and most (junior) people learning things in tech right now are doing so in the context of AI, for better or worse

(idk if this author is “junior” per se, mostly just agreeing the shift in perspective is helpful to not get burnt out by things like this)
by physicles | 2025-08-24 14:28:48+00:00
Love the visualization, and the scenario of sharing your real-time location with anyone is important. I don’t know if Uber has that built-in, but Didi (in China) does and I use it frequently.

If anyone’s looking for a more plug-and-play option on iOS, I’ve been using Arc Timeline for nearly two years and it just dumps reasonably accurate .gpx files into your iCloud Drive without using too much battery. I use it for visualizing working locations and other activities on a weekly timeline.
by Aachen | 2025-08-24 14:29:41+00:00
While it's useful to not bother when you know it's unlikely to give good results, it does also feel a bit like a cop-out to suggest that the user shouldn't be asking it certain (unspecified) things in the first place. If this is the only solution, we should just crowdsource topics or types of question it can't do >50% of the time so not everyone has to reinvent the wheel
by TheFreim | 2025-08-24 14:30:22+00:00
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. Steam's developer services can save a massive amount of time for developers, time which is especially valuable to indie studios. I still feel that the 30% is steep, I'd prefer if Steam took a cut based on how many of their underlying services you used, but its wrongheaded to deny that Steam provides many useful features for developers that can save a lot of time.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
by mrtksn | 2025-08-24 14:31:14+00:00
Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.

I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.

I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-08-24 14:31:23+00:00
extrapolating a little, 15mph is ~<10m

Speed | Thinking + braking distance | Stopping distance

20mph | 6m + 6m | 12m (40 feet)

30mph | 9m + 14m | 23m (75 feet)

40mph | 12m + 24m | 36m (118 feet)

50mph | 15m + 38m | 53m (174 feet)

60mph | 18m + 55m | 73m (240 feet)

70mph | 21m + 75m | 96m (315 feet)

> https://www.theaa.com/breakdown-cover/advice/stopping-distan...

note that the braking distances are not for modern cars with advancements in braking tech etc.
by MrResearcher | 2025-08-24 14:32:24+00:00
Because DOS relied on BIOS interrupt 10h to handle I/O:

mov si, GREETINGS_STRING print_loop: lodsb ; Load next byte into AL, advance SI cmp al, 0 ; Check for null terminator je done mov ah, 0Eh ; BIOS teletype output mov bh, 0 ; Page number = 0 mov bl, 07h ; Light gray on black in text mode int 10h ; Print character in AL jmp print_loop done: ... GREETINGS_STRING db "Hello, BIOS world!", 0

And linux doesn't rely on BIOS for output I/O, it provides TTY subsystem and then programs use devices like /dev/tty for I/O. Run $ lspci in your console: which of those devices should the kernel use for output? The kernel wouldn't know that and BIOS is no longer of any help.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-24 14:33:33+00:00
The three companies have travel policies that apply to everyone. It also depends on who is paying I guess. I am a post sales consultant where for the most part, my company gets reimbursed by the client and in the contract, they have the guard rails as far as allowed travel expenses.

Then on the other hand, you don’t have to choose the cheapest airline possible, so you can choose the one where you have status and get automatic upgrades (Delta Platinum Medallion in my case) and a higher chance for upgrades.

Of course you can pay for the upgrade yourself. But why would I spend my own money to do so. They are so strict though that every time my receipt after flying showed I was in an upgraded seat, I had to also send in the email as proof that my upgrade was free because of status.
by glenstein | 2025-08-24 14:33:37+00:00
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.

It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.

Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-08-24 14:34:14+00:00
Fastest threadripper on the market is usually a good bet. Worth considering mini-pc on vesa mount / in a cable tray + fast machine in another room.

Also, I've got a gmktec here (cheaper one playing thin client) and it's going to be scrapped in the near future because the monitor connections keep dropping. Framework make a 395 max one, that's tempting as a small single machine.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-08-24 14:34:44+00:00
I've often wondered how a personal company budget would work for electrical engineers.

At one place I had a $25 no question spending limit, but sank a few months trying to buy a $5k piece of test equipment because somebody thought maybe some other tool could be repurposed to work, or we used to have one of those but it's so old the bandwidth isn't useful now, or this project is really for some other cost center and I don't work for that cost center.

Turns out I get paid the same either way.
by MalbertKerman | 2025-08-24 14:34:50+00:00
> MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentation

Oh how the mighty have fallen. I've only worked on one major project with a Microchip MCU (PIC32MK), but their documentation and support were terrible. No detailed documentation, just a driver library with vague, sketchy API docs and disgustingly bug-ridden code. Deadlocking race conditions in the CAN driver, overflow-unsafe comparisons in timers, just intern-level dumbassery that you couldn't fix without reverse engineering the undocumented hardware. Oh, and of course what documentation did exist was split into dozens of separate PDFs, individually served, many of which were 404 unless you went hunting for older versions or other chips in the product line. It certainly cured me of any desire to touch another Microchip product.
by pglevy | 2025-08-24 14:34:57+00:00
Mine is a much simpler use case but sharing in case it's useful. I wanted to be able to quickly generate and iterate on user flows during design collaboration. So I use some boilerplate HTML/CSS and have the LLM generate an "outline" (basically a config file) and then generate the HTML from that. This way I can make quick adjustments in the outline and just have it refresh the code when needed to avoid too much back forth with the chat.

Overall, it has been working pretty well. I did make a tweak I haven't pushed yet to make it always writes the outline to a file first (instead of just terminal). And I've also started adding slash commands to the instructions so I can type things like "/create some flow" and then just "/refresh" (instead of "pardon me, would you mind refreshing that flow now?").

https://github.com/pglevy/breadboarding-kit
by jolmg | 2025-08-24 14:35:27+00:00
I'm not into aviation, but if this is about planes broadcasting their position publicly, I would imagine it's beneficial not just for the traffic control towers, but also for other pilots flying around in the area that can receive those signals, in case they're ever not within range of a working tower. It works as a redundancy option, for safety.

It also works in case there's unlicensed, radio-silent flyers, which is bad, but you turn a bad situation worse if they can't get info on what other aircraft they might bump into.

The unencrypted broadcasting of their position is like a trailer beeping as they're backing up. It's an alert for others to pay attention to them and stay out of their way.
by soraminazuki | 2025-08-24 14:35:40+00:00
> The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BC in ancient Babylon.

> Knowledge of how to produce true soap emerged at some point between early mentions of proto-soaps and the first century AD.

Guess which came first, 2800 BC - 99 AD or 1800 AD?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap
by dahart | 2025-08-24 14:35:47+00:00
Note the date: 2016, almost 10 years ago. When I started doing actual web development in like 2014, I’d been using C++ for a couple of decades and it was somewhat of a surprise to me that JavaScript was a real language, because of the low reputation it had among C++ programmers. I didn’t even know JS had conceptual origins tied to Scheme, or I’d have been interested earlier. I hadn’t been aware how amazingly good the dev tools in the browser I used had become, with a debugger and profiler just sitting there. This was all before promises and React and Yarn. I discovered the C++ programmers were mostly wrong and JS had evolved far beyond the misconceptions many people had about it. I think today most C++ programmers are much more aware that JS is a decent functional language that is quite fast and is omnipresent in all browsers. To be fair, the NPM ecosystem was a dumpster fire in many ways. OTOH, this comedy article is just a huge list of hot takes, and language hate has been a pastime of many a web comic, but the mockery has done almost nothing to stop people from using languages.
by gruez | 2025-08-24 14:35:59+00:00
>Actually the berne convention gives you right to sue in the jurisdiction where your rights are being violated.

I don't get it, is your claim that the rightsholders can sue in German courts and get an injunction if they want sites blocked, or that site blocks shouldn't be needed at all because suing people (but not blocking the sites) is an adequate remedy for infringement?

> Tools exist for them to enforce them by going after the domain registrar or hosting provider.

What if the domain registrar or hosting provider is in another country? If some Chinese company is infringing on some German company's IP, is your response to tell them to sue them in China, rather than have the goods be blocked at the border?

>Given there is some sort of fair use in most jurisidictions, and its compeltly with in even europeans rights to save entire movies for personal use, the parent comment to you is right.

Unless there's some context that's missing from the article, the sites being blocked seems like they're straightforwardly committing copyright infringement. It's not like youtube-dl is being taken down or whatever. "movie streaming sites are fine because there's a tiny chance that it's used by someone who already owns the movie" seems like a flimsy excuse to allow such sites to continue operating.
by DuckeyDev | 2025-08-24 14:36:01+00:00
I’ve been hacking on something I’m calling NetGoat. It started because I wanted Cloudflare-style reverse proxying + basic WAF functionality, but without the lock-in or the SaaS overhead. I ended up building my own and figured it might be useful to others here.

It’s still early, and nothing works but im planning to have: Reverse proxy with domain-based routing Basic request inspection + blocking (lightweight WAF) Built to be self-hosted Uses Bun/Node under the hood Simple to extend, with an eye toward being developer-friendly Repo: https://github.com/cloudable-dev/netgoat

Happy to answer questions, share internals, or hear your pain