MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-09-20 15:16:05+00:00
Yeah, I could see it being better without that portion of the final sentence. At the same time, I think opening "What a terrible way to take constructive feedback" is at least equally as grating a way to engage about it - but at the end of the day we're all humans, not saints, and it seems clear to me both comments are well intentioned and decently put as a whole. Same as me, I'm sure if I look back at these comments in 3 days there will be parts I would have changed, but overall I'd probably thing they were decent instead of terrible.

I'm glad you made the note about that part though, I agree with it and we can always do better.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-20 15:16:10+00:00
I will leave this here for the future:

$ ldd /usr/bin/git linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007f69c2d64000) libpcre2-8.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpcre2-8.so.0 (0x00007f69c2c81000) libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007f69c2c67000) libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f69c2616000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f69c2d66000) $ ls -alh /usr/bin/git -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0M Aug 25 11:40 /usr/bin/git

I did not measure but it does not take long on my old hardware to compile git from scratch either, for now.
by bitexploder | 2025-09-20 15:16:17+00:00
That all seemed pretty adult and tame. Maybe slightly stand-offish at worst. And I tended to agree with Andrew in that thread. A project like Zig is an absolutely massive undertaking. I can cut Andrew some slack. Not everyone is perfect all the time, and his behavior there was nowhere close to BS I have seen in other open source projects. Ahem, Linus.
by jwally | 2025-09-20 15:17:21+00:00
I'm not as concerned with preventing kids from accessing adult materials. Thats what parents are for. My main driver here is to offer a free counter punch to tx sb 1181.

Making adult sites verify age with expensive and leaky third parties. Bad. My proposal is free, and helps to take the sting away from being required to perform age verification.

And, its shovel ready now.
by nirav72 | 2025-09-20 15:17:38+00:00
I can't see this lasting. This could go two ways - either large organizations pay up in some other ways to this administration or this is used as a leverage to force India to come to the table. Also that India receives $36 billion in remittances from overseas Indian workers. The current ruling Party in India is going to feel some pressure from its citizens over that alone.
by didibus | 2025-09-20 15:18:03+00:00
I'd say the only issue what the "too dumb, but whatever" comment.

That should have been removed and it would have been totally reasonable.

Edit: Oh actually, the author has another blog post titled "I'm too dumb for Zig ...". With that context, it makes sense and I agree it's a reasonable response. I'm sure other readers like me didn't know that context though.
by geophile | 2025-09-20 15:18:15+00:00
Disappointingly shallow article.

One point though: It is not necessarily the case that visual imagery is the only alternative to an inner dialogue. In both cases, that dialogue, or those images, are things you are aware of. There is something going on behind the scenes to generate those experiences. An alternative to dialog/images is just nothing being generated. I.e., there is something going on subconsciously, but there is nothing related to that activity that breaks through to awareness.

We all experience this, in which some "inspired" breakthrough just suddenly appears in your mind. That breakthrough must have come from somewhere in your subconscious mind.

Anecdotally, this is a conversation that my wife and I have occasionally, about our different mental landscapes. She is a very organized person, with lots of lists and internal (and sometimes external) dialog. I need to let problems just simmer in my mind, without paying attention to them, and I eventually get an answer. She believes that my mind is usually empty. My view is that both of us think subconsciously, but the different is that she has some mental dialog/imagery accompanying her subconscious thinking.

More generally, maybe the real thinking is always subconscious, and what we call thinking (the awareness of reasoning) is just accompanying imagery.
by soulofmischief | 2025-09-20 15:18:31+00:00
Until the government labels the use of Graphene as suspicious behavior, dragnets all alternative OS supporters, and wiretaps communications solely based on the fact that "'terrorists' use GrapheneOS".

Eventually we see a Chat Control esque law outright banning unapproved operating systems or unlocking devices. The authoritarian ratchet turns slowly but steadily, even as you sleep.

And all of the big tech corps support this vision of the future. Apple, Google Microsoft, Meta... They all release locked-down hardware and software, and have so far been on board with the convergence towards unmodifiable trusted computing. This may accelerate as local AI inference becomes commonplace and CorpGov demands unmodifiable safety controls that mediate the use of onboard models.
by JoeCortopassi | 2025-09-20 15:18:37+00:00
Just like writing normal software: have it work on different parts of the codebase that don't have overlap, or do the work sequentially. AI is a time compressor, but it's still constrained by the same problems as normal engineers.

If one task changes the button to green, and the other one changes it to red at the same time, something will have to decide how to reconcile that difference
by 9question1 | 2025-09-20 15:18:40+00:00
I think it's likely that both the blog poster and the maintainer are being perceived as more negative in tone than the intent / reality. They both included disclaimers "I must be doing something wrong. And if I am, I'm sorry." and "whatever, it’s their blog so they can do what they want." They're also both giving critical feedback "But, if I'm not, this is a problem right?" "Kinda wish the author would attempt to collaborate rather than write stuff like this" but in both cases the criticism is extremely mildly worded compared to most toxic online discourse. This seems... great? Isn't it good we're able to disagree so politely? It's not toxic to have a disagreement or to give critical feedback. We don't need to all pretend to agree with each other all the time or be happy with each other in order to have a civil discourse.
by comrade1234 | 2025-09-20 15:18:53+00:00
I moved to Switzerland about 15 years ago and seeing some specific stories about assisted suicide did weird me out a bit. Specifically stories about people doing it because they are the last living person in their family or because they're just tired and done with life. But now it no longer bothers me. If they're done with life then so be it. It's not my business.

(Also it's not exactly assisted. They set everything up for you but you're the one that pushes the button)
Show HN: MyLocalAI – Enhanced local AI chat interface
by ravi9884 | 2025-09-20 15:19:09+00:00
I built a local AI chat interface that I'm planning to enhance with capabilities like web search and file processing.

Demo: https://youtu.be/g14zgT6INoA

This was my first real project (mostly vibe coded while learning), but it's functional and I'm excited about the roadmap. The goal is to create a more capable local AI experience that goes beyond basic chat.

Current: Clean local AI interface, complete privacy, self-hosted Planned: Internet search integration, file upload/processing, custom tools

Built with Node.js. Completely open source.

Looking for feedback and feature suggestions from the community!

GitHub: https://github.com/mylocalaichat/mylocalai
by logicchains | 2025-09-20 15:19:20+00:00
It's a powerful alternative to Rust and C++ for writing ultra low latency code when safety isn't important, like games or HFT. Its standard library and ecosystem have excellent support for passing around allocators and no hidden dynamic allocation (every function that allocates takes an allocator as a parameter), which makes it much harder to hit the latency pitfalls common to Rust and C++. It also encourages the latency-optimal approach of using local bump-a-pointer arena allocators where possible rather than the slow global allocator. And finally, the superior metaprogramming support makes it more convenient to use high performance techniques like struct-of-arrays.
by begueradj | 2025-09-20 15:19:32+00:00
"the world has been replaced by graphics (more generally, images)"

Humankind started to record its history by images (google for instance about the city of Sefar, Algeria). Nowadays, even in tech we use graphics (diagrams and so on)

This is not my field but even the first letter of the latin alphabet is simply the image of the head of a cow rotated a bit to the left.
by Luker88 | 2025-09-20 15:19:47+00:00
AFAIK git already uses multiple languages, github says its 50% C, 38% shell, 4% perl, then 4% TCL python 1%

So "another language" here probably does not weigh as much, especially considering perl/TCL are the weirder one there.

But for big projects like linux and git, this could actually be a consolidation step: you spent decades growing, hacking things on top of each other.

You have mostly figured out what this project is and where it is going, it's time to think about safety, performance and remove old hacks.

Rust feels like a good fit, imho.
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-20 15:20:14+00:00
"The only thing we seem to be forgetting is that the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people."

Looking at various intellectual and artistic hotspots in history, be it Bell Labs or ancient Athens or Florence in the Renaissance or even Silicon Valley today, what seems to matter is the ability to find the smartest people, put them together and let them stimulate one another.

And plenty of such people come from the peripheries. How many Ramanujans lived and died at Fleming's time while not being discovered?
by jmclnx | 2025-09-20 15:20:15+00:00
Plus there is another consideration, probably more so in the US.

If you are terminal, do you want all your savings to go to health care, or would you want to ensure you children or spouse get what you had saved over the years.

To me, if terminal and needing lots of healthcare, I think you are better of tossing in the towel. Trying to stick it out could put your family into poverty.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-20 15:20:17+00:00
The claim isn't you should shut down your blog and only talk on GitHub to be engaged with the community. Zig has tons of communities https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community and, of course, blogs also play a part in the overall community too. Picking a single engagement option is probably always a poor choice, but that option being your personal blog alone would be one of the poorest. That's where the feeling of lack of collaborating with the community is coming from, not that they specifically don't engage in GitHub alone.

Make blog posts, it's great!, but if you don't think you're the expert then they'll go a lot farther for everyone if you put 5% of the work of doing so into engaging with the community about it for additional insights first. That's a fair note to make, though I agree the ending could be less passive aggressive about those who don't want to engage with the community.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-20 15:20:58+00:00
You always have variables. Not just at the function level, but at the class level, object level, etc. And it's not about symbol completion, it's about remembering all the obscure differences in built-in function names and which does what.

And no, off-by-one errors and edge cases are firmly part of coding, once you're writing code inside of a function. Edge cases are not "todos", they're correctly handling all possible states.

> Sometimes the best design is done by doing.

I mean, sure go ahead and prototype, rewrite, etc. That doesn't change anything. You can have the AI do that for you too, and then you can re-evaluate and re-design. The point is, I want to be doing that evaluation and re-designing. Not typing all the code and keeping track of loop states and variable conditions and index variables and exit conditions. That stuff is boring as hell, and I've written more than enough to last a lifetime already.
by dahart | 2025-09-20 15:20:58+00:00
If the author is here, have you tested and can you comment on the precision of these different methods? I see the code uses some fast-math style approximations for a few operations. How does that compare to Newton-Raphson? And what was the termination criteria for Newton-Raphson… can the runtime be increased or decreased significantly by adjusting the threshold a little?
by jacquesm | 2025-09-20 15:21:31+00:00
I've seen my life upturned a couple of times on short notice, I was merely being very practical, it is you that should 'read the room', in the most immediate sense there is fuck-all that will come out of being frustrated and shouting 'injustice', you need to act because the clock is ticking. Get your money out as fast as you can, try to find a way to give someone power of attorney so you don't end up losing everything over an unpaid bill, start thinking of how to go up from where you are right now rather than back to the way things were because there is no 'back'.
by thisisit | 2025-09-20 15:21:40+00:00
I see this point being made a lot.

Lets be clear - the election was won on inflation. While a lot was said about 47th's previous record it was often brushed aside with - Sure, this was said last time too and he didn't do any of this. Its the same thing all over again, people crying wolf etc. There was even consternation about Project 2025 and many well minded people didn't believe it would be enacted.

Now the approval rating on handling of economy continues to fall day by day. Immigration was the strongest suit at +10 is now under water at -4.5.

That means while voters might have wanted something to be done about immigration but they might not wanted more of this. This will become clear only during the midterm elections. With all the efforts being made to gerrymander and gain as many seats as possible, it is good guess to say GOP also realize that people didn't want more of this - and the only way now is to hold on to power by any means necessary.

So, that it allows others to say - This government was elected in Nov 2024 and if they are doing this terrible thing then surely people have voted for this.
by ajross | 2025-09-20 15:22:59+00:00
> Look I don't even pretend to know the truth. But the sitting governor of Utah, the highest authority on the investigation (which is being done by Utah state investigators), said the shooter had a "leftest ideology".

Curious as to whether you've revisited this (surprisingly strongly-held) prior given todays reporting: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/no-evide...
by Intermernet | 2025-09-20 15:23:01+00:00
Collaborating would be contacting the Zig team through one of the many channels available and asking questions, offering suggestions etc. Posting critical blog posts without doing this first is counter-productive, and can even be seen as self promotion. After all, we're now discussing the blog posts, and not the actual issues. Would this have happened if the author had just sent an email to the mailing list or asked on Github?
by mallowfram | 2025-09-20 15:23:07+00:00
We're symbol sleepwalkers, their arbitrariness is a meaning sink. Literacy is essentially mind-control by severely limiting the semantic resources words and narratives provide. Literacy makes us into minions. Post-literacy should have arrived with Chinese or Mayan glyphs (900BC/800AD) and conformed the West's sense of individualism with the concatenation capabilities of the East/MesoaAm, but the West's valuation of the arbitrary extractive processes and potentials of symbols and metaphors for economic and political control were much too addictive and sedative. Our only chance is to overthrow symbols and literacy to engage in direct perception of reality. This is a postcard from the edge by a medieval scribe.

..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..

Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

..when the tools for creating the content of the virtual world become good enough, all of a sudden you have a new, shared objective world where people can co-create the interior with a facility similar to language. And this is what I call post-symbolic communication, because it means that instead of using symbols to refer to things, you are simply creating reality in a collaborative conversation, a waking-state, intentionally shared dream. You're going directly to the source, avoiding the middleman of the symbol and directly apprehending the craftsmanship of that other person combined with your own, without the need for labels.

Jaron [interview with Jaron Lanier] Wired 1.02 1993
by velcrovan | 2025-09-20 15:23:45+00:00
I had fun writing a Racket version:

#lang racket/base (require net/base64 threading) (define FIRST-INVISIBLE-CHAR 917760) (define (invis-encode str) (list->string (for/list ([c (in-list (string->list str))] #:do [(define cnum (char->integer c))] #:when (<= cnum 127)) (integer->char (+ cnum FIRST-INVISIBLE-CHAR))))) (define (invis-decode str) (list->string (for/list ([c (in-list (string->list str))] #:do [(define plaintxt-c (- (char->integer c) FIRST-INVISIBLE-CHAR))] #:when (> plaintxt-c 0)) (integer->char plaintxt-c)))) (define (hide secret plain) (~> (string->bytes/utf-8 secret) (base64-encode #"") ; use #"" vs #"\r\n" to prevent line-wrapping (bytes->string/utf-8) (invis-encode) (string-append plain _))) (define (unhide ciphertext) (~> (invis-decode ciphertext) (string->bytes/utf-8) (base64-decode) (bytes->string/utf-8))) (module+ test (require rackunit) (define secret "this is a s3cret message. ssh") (define plaintext "Hey you, nothing to see here.") (define to-share (hide secret plaintext)) (check-equal? (string-length to-share) 69) ; count of bytes (check-equal? (string-grapheme-count to-share) 29) ; 29 actually-visible graphemes (check-equal? secret (unhide to-share)))
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-09-20 15:24:49+00:00
This is a very verbose essay that i don't feel quite says much. I want to put question the presented statistics a bit in particular.

The essay quotes studies showing the leisure-reading prevalence among teens and adults dropping. I do not see how this is relevant at all to "death of intellect and reason". Reading fiction can give a person new perspectives on life, but so could a movie or a manga or radio-show. It's a leisure activity. I'm far more worried about drop in reading and writing *proficiency* overall. Writing proficiently is dropping with LLMs in school, and reading proficiency is worse than the early 2000s. But i don't think this tells the whole story either.

I think the average person reads and writes as much as always thanks to the prevalence of technology. Keyboards, instant messaging, blogs, social media. Writing is easier than ever, and reading is more worthwhile than ever. But the *format* and media has shifted. This shift in format is not reflected when asking people "how often do you read" (people read constantly, but much fewer books).

And to question the very premise further; Reading isn't that brought the revolution in science and intelligence; better storage, spreading and access to knowledge is. That this came in the format of text should matter. If people engage with thought provoking reason through audio or visuals instead of text, what does that matter?

now, i AM worried about some of this. In particular the decline of news quality and consumption, rise in (seemingly) acquired ADHD, and a drop in writing proficiency (which i think is vital for deep thought and contemplation), but this article really does not discuss the issue fairly or well.
by dira3 | 2025-09-20 15:25:02+00:00
Democracy isn't supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner. There are supposed to be checks and balances.

One reason we are in the current situation is because we have discarded these checks and balances, allowing for the president to behave more like an autocratic monarch. If the other branches of government were performing their constitutional function, and if the executive observed the norms it's supposed to that's when you would have a democracy not just in letter but in spirit.

(Ironically I myself am an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, yet I find I know more about American civics than most US-born.)
by andai | 2025-09-20 15:25:14+00:00
The issue we have is that websites (including small websites) are getting hammered by bots. Apparently ChatGPT makes 2000 http requests per web search.

I think the real problem here is answering the question. But there's no way to intelligently get information out of the internet. (I assume Google is building one, but it apparently hasn't yet, and if they did, it's not what OpenAI would use.)

Hammering every WP site with infinite queries every time someone asks a question seems like the wrong solution to the problem. I'm not sure what the right solution looks like.

I got an 80% solution in like ten lines of python by doing "just Google it then look at the top 10 search results" (i.e. dump them into GPT). That works surprisingly well, although the top n results are increasingly AI generated.

I had a funny experience when Bard first came out (the original name for Gemini). I asked it a question, it gave me the precise opposite of the truth (the truth but negated). It even cited sources. The sources were both AI blogspam. That still makes me laugh.
by Fricken | 2025-09-20 15:25:33+00:00
>Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, began his academic career as a scholar of Medieval history, but his attention soon turned to the Gutenberg press and the rise of literacy (over 3 centuries), and how it changed the way we think. He then applied his theories to radio, film, TV etc.

In the 1960s McLuhan was invited to tour the skunkworks at IBM, Xerox Parc, and Bell Labs where they were working on the early iterations and basic building blocks of what would become the internet we know today.

They showed him their vision for "Peer to peer electronic media", and McLuhan applied his theory of media to the not-yet-realized notion of social media.

He definitely saw it as something that would bring a death knell to the literary age, and recognized that social media was inherently tribalistic. According to McLuhan we would all be "marching to the beat of the tribal drums". And that brings us to today, wherein America is officially under the spell of state sponsored tribalism, and reading in the literary sense no longer holds court as the driver of our discourse and thinking.

The dude skated to the puck a good 30 years before it arrived, and he was extremely pessimistic. Mark Zuckerberg has claimed to be a McLuhan fan, but if he actually understands what McLuhan was saying, that's scary:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
by kinow | 2025-09-20 15:25:35+00:00
I also think the same. While in Java the stdlib lacks a few functions, long ago Apache Commons became the de-facto complement for the Java stdlib, being replaced/complemented by other libs over time, and eventually even becoming obsolete with newer versions of Java. But I always had the impression that having Apache Software Foundation components (with a good release/security process) helped Java to mitigate a lot of attacks.