MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oncallthrow | 2025-08-17 09:27:31+00:00
The Nick meme is a great way of encapsulating how utterly sick of the UK young professionals are at this point.

There is no way to win. I know many young people who are very comfortably in the top 5% of earners in the UK, paying tens of thousands of pounds of income tax per year, and are still locked into paying massive amounts of rent, because it's near-impossible to actually own a house here at this point. So quite honestly, what is the point any more? It's really no wonder UK productivity is dropping.

It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here.

Meanwhile pensioners sit comfortably in four-bed houses in London suburbs with triple lock pensions guaranteed by the government.
by ashvardanian | 2025-08-17 09:27:44+00:00
You can avoid hard-coding the whitespace symbols and have a generic byte-set search kernel via `vpshufb` AVX512BW-capable CPUs [1] or via `tbl` instructions on NEON-capable CPUs [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ashvardanian/StringZilla/blob/2f4b1386ca2...

[2]: https://github.com/ashvardanian/StringZilla/blob/2f4b1386ca2...
by weatherlite | 2025-08-17 09:27:47+00:00
> The 404 links are truly bizarre. Nearly every link to github.com seems to be 404. That seems like something that should be trivial for a tool to verify. reply

Same issue with Gemini. Intuitively I'd also assume it's trivial to fix but perhaps there's more going on than we think. Perhaps validating every part of a response is a big overhead both financially and might even throw off the model and make it less accurate in other ways.
by spacechild1 | 2025-08-17 09:27:55+00:00
There are certainly people like that! I just doubt that Musk is one of them.

First there are is no hard evidence for his supposedly engineering genius and second he has a long public track record of lying and gross hyperbole.

What I find more likely: Musk throws around wild ideas and his engineers figure out what might work or not. (After all, he also comes up with pretty dumb ideas.) This approach can be successful, but it doesn't make you an engineer yourself.

I am still confused why you would claim that Musk was better than many engineers you know, based on what little we actually know about his technical skills.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-17 09:29:37+00:00
Most just pack down:

epoch time + MAC Address + transaction counter (catch NTP skew) + Thread PID + new Pointer address = GUID

Then increment global transaction counter, complete some ops, and check to ensure current epoch time is in the future before the transaction frees the memory locations.

This is often robust in highly concurrent distributed systems even under network degradation, or corrupted sync states. Has other interesting use-cases too. =3
by raffraffraff | 2025-08-17 09:29:46+00:00
> You can run a perfectly fine website with zero cookie banners if you simply don’t track your users and don’t expose them to third parties that do track them.

I run an extremely simple static website with some JavaScript that lets the user keep track of their state between visits. I have no way to access their cookie, and nothing on the website sends data to me (in fact, can't, since it's a static site running on Cloudflare pages). I never really thought about whether or not I need to add a cookie banner, I just... Didn't.

Legally though... Do I need to?
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-08-17 09:29:56+00:00
The proximity measure seems to be flawed.

If you want to see how close to a non-ordinal 123456 a random generator can get, you also need to look for stuff like 923456 or 123956, etc.

Also, would 223456 be considered a closer match compared to 323456? (It shouldn't in my opinion because, again, these are non-ordinal strings).
by locopati | 2025-08-17 09:30:29+00:00
If checks & balances still existed, the Republican controlled Congress would have impeached Trump for any number of things, or the Republican controlled Supreme Court wouldn't have said it's not a crime if a Republican does it. We are beyond checks & balances at this point (unless a Democrat is elected... then I'm sure we'll see the Republicans suddenly care about rules & laws again).
by ncruces | 2025-08-17 09:31:36+00:00
> Perform a bitwise AND with 0xFB and check if the result equals 0x09. Both 0x0D & 0xFB = 0x09 and 0x09 & 0xFB = 0x09.

This explanation was a bit unsatisfying. This works because 0x09 and 0x0D differ by a single bit, and 0xFB masks that bit (and only that bit) out.

If they differed by more than one bit, the fact that they & the same would be necessary but not sufficient.
by Mentlo | 2025-08-17 09:31:47+00:00
Comments are full of people saying it’s a service thing and not a price thing.

I feel like that’s a bit disingenuous. You can rent anything on Prime for a couple £ (I focus on rent as the “buy” has the deletion problem) in multiple video qualities.

I am not disagreeing with the service issues, but a large part of the problem is people not willing to pay what studios deem as market value.

Case in point - early streamers had less fragmentation and still had the same service problem, but they could consolidate at low price due to vc subsidy. And piracy went down.

Let’s not forget Netflix and Spotify were not profitable for ages.

So my money would be on price actually being the cardinal problem.
by mike-cardwell | 2025-08-17 09:32:00+00:00
I live in the East Midlands in the UK. You can grab a reasonable first house here for less than £150k quite easily. So you'll need a 5% deposit, £7,500 for one of those. One person on an average salary for the area would be able to afford a mortgage for a house like this on their own. But Nick has a girlfriend, who can hopefully work, so should be able to afford it easily.

But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.

I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.

And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
by rustystump | 2025-08-17 09:32:03+00:00
I love self hosting but the comments i think have to do with quality issues.

Having an anime girl show up 99% of the time one visits due to AI bot protection is not the best experience no matter how much I love anime. Saying to “get over it” is dismissive to a large group of people who disagree with you.

The comments are not a cesspool but standard hn being critical.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-17 09:32:25+00:00
What do ISPs have to actually determine these issues outside of sketchy speedtest websites and vague reports or concerns from customers? What about placing probes in the correct places (e.g. in conditions where there is no additional loss or introduced latency between the end user and uplink). Also is this an actual problem that users are really having, or is it perceived because some benchmark / speedtest gave you a score.

There's a lot of issues and variables at play; this isn't a case of "it's always DNS". What tools do ISPs even have at their disposal and how accurate are they and does it uncover the actual problem users are experiencing? This is the real issue that ISPs of all size have to deal with.
by tfourb | 2025-08-17 09:33:31+00:00
"Yet you included privileges (like getting tax-funded things) in those liberties that would be affected. That's muddying the waters."

Differentiating between abstract liberties and the economic means to actually make use of them makes no sense to me. If a government guarantees the liberty to choose your profession freely, but the overwhelming majority of the population does not have the economic means to access the education required to become i.e. a doctor, does that liberty have any practical impact whatsoever?

In that sense, a free public education (including university), public health care, public pensions and even social security are not "privileges". They are fundamental rights that form the basis for the expression of liberty. And this is exactly how i.e. the German constitution frames these things. Social security payments explicitly are not a "privilege", they are a right and no government can cut social security payments below a certain threshold (though that threshold will make for a very uncomfortable living).

"I'm sure you're well aware of the escalating utilitarian thought experiments that use the same type of argument ("but many people would benefit from doing X to Y")."

Which is why it is important to build in protections. Modern/progressive democracy is not a "dictatorship of the majority", it is a rights-based system in which certain lines can not be crossed, no matter how benefitial it would be in a utilitarian sense.

"There's a right not to be harmed, but it doesn't extend to potential abstract harm."

It totally does. Again an example from Germany: We have a general prohibition on the surveillance of public spaces by public or private actors. Governmental authorities can supersede this in certain cases, but for private actors, you can't even point a fake camera at a public space, except when everyone using that space explicitly to that (which is impossible i.e. on public roads and already very hard in the common areas of apartment buildings).

The reasoning behind this is that no one should be exposed to even the abstract feeling of being surveilled in public, as this would alter their freedom to express themselves and limit control over their private information. Even employers need to limit incidental surveillance of their employees wherever possible.

"Is expectation of risk a liberty that's infringed? I don't think so."

I completely disagree. Again, it's a matter of degrees and your rights need to be weighed against mine. Often, your concrete expression of your liberties will outweigh the abstract infringement of mine. But sometimes they won't.
by jjgreen | 2025-08-17 09:36:05+00:00
There are some parts of London which are necessary and some which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason. Dave lived west of Earls Court, and this was another thing I had against him.

Iris Murdoch Under the net, Chatto & Windus, 1954
by accidentallfact | 2025-08-17 09:36:44+00:00
This is correct, except the last paragraph.

Indeed, corellation equals causation for the schizophrenic.

Which is why you often don't get neurotypical people - when they say A, they often mean to imply B, because they correlate.

You are not too strict when you're autistic, you simply hallucinate less.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-17 09:36:48+00:00
Avoiding questions just because it depends on context might be a valuable way to signal to other people that you're careful and considerate, and that definitely has value.

But quizzes like this are explicitly designed to be contextless. You're supposed to answer with your gut feeling, the first step in the random walk.

Someone who actually depends heavily on context and doesn't have a strong preference either way will answer quickly, and end up near the center on all dimensions of interest - that's where I landed:

""" You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code. Abstract ↔ Concrete: -2 Concrete Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +5 Human-Friendly """
by graemep | 2025-08-17 09:36:54+00:00
> In my country that has managed to free itself from communism just 35 years ago everyone I know opposes it.

That tends to confirm my feeling that people in countries that have not suffered from tyrannical government for a long time have forgotten the value of privacy and freedom of speech because they have not seen the consequences in living memory. This is coming when the last of the people who remember the pre WW2 era are dying. Dictatorship is no longer part of living memory.

There has definitely need a cultural change in the UK in the last few decades. People have far more trust in the system (government and big business) or have learned helplessness (in a recent discussion about privacy people told me I was naive to think I could stop my private data being collected anyway so should not bother trying). This was in the context about what people say about their kids (specifically education, mental health, family problems) on Facebook.

> Every country has to agree. So it takes only one country to put a stop to it.

A lot of pressure can be brought on bear on any one country by the rest though.

The government of a country may not have the same view as the people. When the UK was in the EU the government pushed EU surveillance regulation, IMO so they could then then say it was not their fault it was introduced, they had to follow the EU directive (many years ago when there was strong public opposition to more surveillance).
by rahimnathwani | 2025-08-17 09:37:03+00:00
How can Nick's rent be £4,500?

You can rent a nice, 2 bedroom flat with two showers+toilets, 13 mins' walk from a London Underground station in zone 3, for less than £2,000.

Even if they don't want to share with another couple, Nick and his girlfriend should each be paying less than £1,000, no?
by Roark66 | 2025-08-17 09:39:42+00:00
C'mon... 3 years have passed and only two job offers applied for? What is Nic's degree in? Babylonian history? When I was in this position I applied to 20 ads per month. In addition to applying I had alerts on my phone, if a job ad dropped that matched my cv well I'd call the recruiter within 5 minutes of posting. I scored two great jobs this way. But this was in IT... I hear every other industry is much, much harder
by pmontra | 2025-08-17 09:39:49+00:00
Because only a few people used that. The usual workflow I saw before GitHub made PRs popular was:

one local repo per developer (or more repo if they wished so),

one central shared repo,

push a feature branch to the central repo,

somebody pulls the branch, reviews the changes and poss the merge them in the preproduction branch, or go back to the developer,

some test build deploy procedure,

acceptance tests, pass or go back to development,

merge in the production branch,

test build deploy.
by hadlock | 2025-08-17 09:40:32+00:00
There's a performance plateau with training time and number of parameters and then once you get over "the hump" error rate starts going down again almost linearly. GPT existed before OpenAI but it was theorized that the plateau was a dead end. The sell to VCs in the early gpt3 era was "with enough compute, enough time, and enough parameters... it'll probably just start thinking and then we have AGI". Sometime around the o3 era they realized they'd hit a wall and performance actually started to decrease as they added more parameters and time. But yeah basically at the time they needed money for more compute parameters and time. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in those "AGI" pitches. Don't forget Microsoft's agreement with OpenAI specifically concludes with the invention of AGI. at the time getting over the hump it really did look like we were gonna do AGI in a few months.

I'm really looking forward to "the social network" treatment movie about OpenAI whenever that happens
by PickledJesus | 2025-08-17 09:40:45+00:00
As someone sympathetic to this, throwing in the culture war stuff (make jokes about LGBT etc) is a massive own goal and makes it so easy for people to discredit. This could have far more cross-party support but it's just going to amuse the people who already agreed with it and make everyone else think it's the alt-right letting the mask slip..
by komali2 | 2025-08-17 09:42:30+00:00
I wish conservative humor was actually funny.

I got a question that was about extinction rebellion blocking my bus. I chose "move them out of the way." The result:

> You and another guy chuck them off the road. The bus drives through and you run after it and jump back on. The protestors are crying.

Eugh. And everyone clapped. The other guy? Albert Einstein.
by pembrook | 2025-08-17 09:42:32+00:00
Terrible analogy.

The correct analogy would be California’s toxic substance regulations.

They’re vaguely worded and enforcement is applied randomly based on whatever company is getting bad press at the time. So virtually everything sold in California carries a sticker saying essentially that “this product may cause birth defects.”

Even companies selling products that don’t contain any of these chemicals do so, out of fear of the asymmetric power wielded by the state.

Do a majority of train passengers jump the ticket barriers because they are afraid they might get fined billions of euros if they don’t?
by TheDong | 2025-08-17 09:42:43+00:00
> I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have that under a warranty.

The warranty is not that long, and I think the parent comment is talking about 6+ year old iphones that are definitely out of warranty.

If those should get replaced, surely that means each person buys one iPhone in their life, and then just gets free replacements forever, leading to the initial cost of the phone having to go up a lot to account for that.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-08-17 09:43:08+00:00
There are two related VUS problems: (1) don’t know if the variant has a functional clinical impact and (2) not sure whether the magnitude of the impact is severe enough to cause a specific pathologic effect.

The industry needs to separate those separate inquiries, and introduce a clearer way to catalog the direct functional impact of gene variants irrespective of big-impact pathologies. For example, knowing a gene variant reduces dopamine recycling 15% is interesting and useful and completely separate from whether low dopamine recycling is clinically harmless, pathological or unknown. Such a gene is not an unknown quantity, and the current reporting protocols conflate and confuse these important topics.
by guenthert | 2025-08-17 09:43:21+00:00
> VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.

VMware released their first product in May '99. Where you thinking of Wabi?
by extraisland | 2025-08-17 09:43:55+00:00
Many people want to live in close proximity to their family. There are good reasons for this (you have a support network).

I want to move back closer to my family as they are getting older. I would like to move back so I can spend more time with my father as he is retiring this year. To afford a flat in Dorset it is 30,000 deposit. A deposits on a house would be about somewhere between £30,000-£100,000.

These aren't mansions BTW. These are normal 2-3 bed houses.

> But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.

My two bed flat (that I got cheap) is £110,000 and I am in the North-West. I've not seen any houses up here that were worth buying less than £200,000.

You typically need a 15% deposit on a flat. I managed to go with some rando building society and get 10%.

Any houses that are £150,000 are always in horrible parts of town or they are complete dumps and need complete renovation.

If you are on a minimum wage (I spent 8 years on it) it is difficult to save money and when something like the boiler goes you are screwed.
by rob_c | 2025-08-17 09:43:57+00:00
No. Honestly when you have police arresting pensioners for peaceful protest and a govt which is breaking every election promise and triggering 2 calls to hear for a new election (within 12 months of coming into power). Not too mention the population changes that have happened over the last 20 or so years. Knife crime and acid attacks on the rise, social cohesion at an all time low and a standing populace who are struggling to support a national debt over 90% of GDP. Britain is not "safe" and still continue to be getting worse.

But now I'll ask you if he's not the majority why are you attacking a minority? Do you have something against ethnically English, Scottish or Welsh people?
by testdelacc1 | 2025-08-17 09:45:27+00:00
Why does a language in which you write operating systems need a spec or a second compiler?

You have a compiler, that’s MIT licensed. It will be MIT licensed in perpetuity. It will continue to compile your code forever, with absolutely no changes needed to your code.

How precisely, does your life change if there is a second compiler or not? Or if there’s an spec? And more interestingly, why does it affect only operating systems development and not web server development?
by paolomainardi | 2025-08-17 09:46:10+00:00
MacOS has for me the best basic keybindings even thanks to the keyboard hardware design and the fn button placed on the left side, which is the right one, as it opens the door to have home/end/pgup/pgdown with fn + arrows, and high ie perfect for 65% keyboards, I’ll never understood why pc keyboard and mech ones have the fn on the right side, totally useless.

Another thing MacOS did it right, cmd+c/v for copy/paste. Anyway, I talked about this here: https://www.paolomainardi.com/posts/linux-remapping-keys-wit... and how to remap with Xremap.
by ncruces | 2025-08-17 09:46:20+00:00
But that's slower for small query sizes.

This describes a few algorithms: http://0x80.pl/notesen/2018-10-18-simd-byte-lookup.html

Both the alternative version by Geoff Langdale, and the special case for small sets, are substantially similar to the algorithms used in Hyperscan (truffle and shufti). https://github.com/intel/hyperscan

Having something hard coded for spaces can be much faster, especially since 5 of the 6 characters are a range: a wrap-around subtraction and an unsigned less-than does the first 5; an equality compare does the other.
by TheDong | 2025-08-17 09:47:17+00:00
I've been holding my breath ever since spectre/meltdown for a free cpu upgrade to make up for the slower performance that the mitigations cause.

It's intel's bug, they promised a certain processor speed, shouldn't it be their responsibility to replace it since their own security oversight resulted in the hardware not working as advertised?

Did you expect the same from intel/amd when those bugs came out? Is it different from this situation?
by rob_c | 2025-08-17 09:47:42+00:00
Probably to demonstrate that to ever actually be financially secure you should be paying off a significant part of your mortgage and not wage slave until retirement to only own 80% of the property due to inflation and rising costs.

If you're buying into the 5% you're probably so fiscally irresponsible that nothing good will come off it. The new builds aren't all magically appreciating in value by 20% every year. And if they did the better house you'd want to move into has almost certainly gone up by 30% or more.