MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pizlonator | 2025-09-19 20:33:48+00:00
I don't support vfork(2) right now, only fork(2).

I have some super crazy ideas about how to make vfork(2) work, but I don't particularly like any of them. I'll implement it if I find some situation where vfork(2) is strongly required (so far I haven't found even one such case). The closest is that I've found cases where I have to add the CLOEXEC pipe trick to do error handling the fork(2) way rather than the vfork(2) way.
by archdang | 2025-09-19 20:34:18+00:00
It is very far from excellent. Did you read it?

The Free Beacon piece feels like it’s arguing against a caricature of the UN report rather than the report itself. The Commission wasn’t trying to do a military balance sheet of Hamas vs. Israel. It was a legal analysis under the Genocide Convention. That means it asked: do Israel’s actions and official statements check the boxes for genocidal acts and intent?

And on that front, the report isn’t just “repeating Hamas numbers.” It leans thoroughly on interviews, satellite imagery, verified video, medical testimony, etc. The ICJ already said there’s a plausible genocide case and ordered Israel to let in more aid months ago. Fast forward: famine is now confirmed in northern Gaza, which really undercuts claims of “unprecedented humanitarian relief.” The UN verdict is a very detailed legal case that can’t just be waved away with “what about Hamas tunnels.” Your "excellent" article doesn't budge the needle at all on this.
by dbish | 2025-09-19 20:34:44+00:00
The fee should help ensure that only higher paying jobs or truly hard to find roles would be worth paying for as well (not that this is the right option, but playing it out). You would gladly pay 100k if the role already is high paying, it will be a small fraction of the cost, you won’t do that if it’s a couple year salary. It will also help curb abuse through multiple applications. I agree hard to find jobs for highly talented people (who are paid well) should be brought in.
Show HN: PlantDiagrams – AI-powered PlantUML editor
by ivonellis | 2025-09-19 20:34:48+00:00
Hi HN! I couldn’t find a truly user-friendly PlantUML editor, so I set out to build one.

PlantDiagrams lets you describe a diagram in plain English; it generates the PlantUML and renders it instantly. The goal is to shorten the path from idea → diagram without fighting the editor.

Tech: - Next.js / Supabase / FLy.io / Vercel

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Try it: https://www.plantdiagrams.com
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-09-19 20:34:49+00:00
For sure, they are so .. serviceable .. yet also so .. inaccessible, nevertheless.

Not inaccessible in a modern “can’t de-cap that chip without killing the machine” kind of a way, but more of a “so many bespoke parts which are just not replaceable any more, unless you wanna Frankenstein the thing with 3D printed parts .. eventually ..”

I’ve since been directed towards the manuals I might need, by other HN’ers, so I’m going to have a renewed attempt at getting this old Sony and the Red/Black TV up and running. I do retro computing exhibits in my region (Vienna, Austria) so if I do end up getting these TV’s working again, they’ll be featured for sure. Recent efforts on my part have introduced over 40,000 people to retro computing platforms at a local museum, so it’ll be really fun for me to introduce the Sony TV, which is delightful bit of technological history, to the exhibit manifest.

When I think of all the folks with great stuff in the attic, potentially being lost to the landfill, it just motivates me harder to get all my own junk in good shape that will make sense for someone to maintain for decades after I’m gone ..
by suriya-ganesh | 2025-09-19 20:34:51+00:00
I agree but in these cases the genetic variance that is being accumulated, is only limited to a few individuals who more or less don't interact with the world, except through their workers. But the workers themselves have no way of accumulating or passing on the genetic variation.

In some sense the genetic feedback loop for ant population is designed in such a way that, it makes sense when looking at each ant colony as a singular organism

Unlike the giraffe, or elephants, who are individually capable of accumulating genetic variations.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-19 20:35:21+00:00
> Polling for the safepoint signal adds overhead to tight loop

The usual trick, which Fil-C doesn't do yet, is to just unroll super tight loops

Also, the pollcheck doesn't have to be a load-and-branch. There are other ways. There's a bottomless pit of optimization strategies you can do.

Conservative scanning wouldn't be sound in Fil-C, because the LLVM passes that run after FilPizlonator could break the fundamental assumptions of conservative scanning
by nucleardog | 2025-09-19 20:35:21+00:00
> Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable

If we can't come up with something a little more scientific I'm happy to send my wife over to do some cooking!

The effectiveness of the range hood directly impacts how close you can be to the stove before your eyes start burning and watering and you start coughing a lung out because you've effectively been hit with pepper spray.

In the worst case scenario (no range hood or ventilation), you'll probably want to evacuate the house.

As the person you replied to says as well, the popularity of "open concept" spaces contributes too. Even with poor ventilation, a kitchen with a door you can close helps limit how far the cooking byproducts reach.
by lawlessone | 2025-09-19 20:35:35+00:00
I agree they, Altman, Elon etc. amplify it as a kind of marketing. In the same way deodorant companies like to talk about how their deodorant can last 48 hrs, when most people will usually never go that long without showering. But that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous, it doesn't mean the deodorant can't actually last 48hrs.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-19 20:36:04+00:00
If you get scammed by a box on wheels being rolled down the road or someone repeatedly saying HTML5 then...you had it coming and it is probably best that someone else uses your money.

Also, CEOs of public companies lie persistently, huge lies that directly cause people to lose money. Nothing happens because that is the part of the game: they lie, you try to work out if other people will believe it for long enough. For startups, because there is no existing revenue, the lies are criminal. There is no distinction in reality.
by randomwalker | 2025-09-19 20:37:12+00:00
Thanks! HN was part of the origin story of the book in question.

In 2018 or 2019 I saw a comment here that said that most people don't appreciate the distinction between domains with low irreducible error that benefit from fancy models with complex decision boundaries (like computer vision) and domains with high irreducible error where such models don't add much value over something simple like logistic regression.

It's an obvious-in-retrospect observation, but it made me realize that this is the source of a lot of confusion and hype about AI (such as the idea that we can use it to predict crime accurately). I gave a talk elaborating on this point, which went viral, and then led to the book with my coauthor Sayash Kapoor. More surprisingly, despite being seemingly obvious it led to a productive research agenda.

While writing the book I spent a lot of time searching for that comment so that I could credit/thank the author, but never found it.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-19 20:38:36+00:00
>The mass makes the car stop slower, makes it corner worse. 100% of the time.

Adding weight increases stopping distance under most circumstances. Who said anything about that? Corning "worse" is a dumb metric, this is not about performance in a sports car, but about the characteristics of a consumer vehicle. They are designed for comfort, not to corner fast, obviously.

>Less weight makes everything function better.

Completely false. A heavy car is generally more comfortable.

Why you are brining up sports car is a mystery to me. Every single sports car would make a horrible and painful 500 mile drive. Obviously the engineering tradeoffs for speed on a track and a desirable consumer car are radically different. Sports car reduce weight for track performance, applying the same principle to a family SUV would be lunacy.

>Potholes are less disturbing, that is true, but that's because the car is so heavy it won't dip into the hole as quickly. It's still harder in your whole suspension.

Wrong explanation. The weight of the unsprung mass makes the difference. Higher unsprung mass means moving slower into the pothole.

>They rode great, but nobody ever said they handled well or were fast.

Sure. Engineering tradeoff.
by ajross | 2025-09-19 20:38:51+00:00
> Extortion doesn't count for much if the FCC had no leg to stand on.

What on earth are you saying here? It worked. Obviously it "counts", it actually happened! The show was pulled from the air! You're saying that censorship isn't "technically censorship" if in some alternative universe Disney fought back and won? They didn't!

As for your opinion about the reach of the FCC's powers or the risk to broadcasters of regulatory action, clearly Bob Iger's lawyers disagree with you, and I'm going to bet they're rather better at their jobs than median HN commenters.

Edit: I'm going to call it here. The final reply below seems like 100% apoloigsm to me. The argument seems to be that somehow this is all a mistake, that Disney just got the wrong idea and torpedoed their own show by no fault of the government. And we all know that's not what happened. I don't know how to reply, so I won't.
by snake_doc | 2025-09-19 20:38:56+00:00
Oh? And taxes can’t be used to buy influence and votes? How naive… Money is fungible… one pocket into another

Exhibit 1: Tariff revenues to bail out American farmers: https://www.ft.com/content/0267b431-2ec9-4ca4-9d5c-5abf61f2b...
by didibus | 2025-09-19 20:39:11+00:00
It's not brute force search, more like stochastic sampling of random variants. It's a directed search where feedback from the environment prunes and weights the search space, and reproduction is a stochastic process biased by fitness. And fitness is defined by the survival and chances of successful mating, aka reproductive success.

Basically, your sex drive is the main search optimization :p

Edit: This is essentially how genetic algorithms in computer science work. They’re often remarkably effective at finding good solutions without needing brute force.
by cuttothechase | 2025-09-19 20:39:14+00:00
As a side effect, this could reduce the pipeline of foreign students coming in on F1 with plans to transition to a work visa over time.

F1 -> OPT -> H1 bridge is way more expensive now.

Universities are bound to lose a ton of money due to this. Those outside of the top 50 will likely get hammered.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-19 20:39:19+00:00
Who would have a harder time? The company that wants to bring in employees? Sure. But I'm also sure that the top experts would be lining up to take such a job. The companies wouldn't struggle to find someone abroad.

The percentage could be reasonable, but I think it's too easily gamed. You just know the company would try and say they are bringing in entry level people for whatever they want and use whatever lowest median they could find. There needs to be a fairly significant minimum salary to avoid such monkey business.

An H1B job should be cushy. Otherwise, the company should simply raise salaries to find local workers.
by esafak | 2025-09-19 20:39:31+00:00
Given his experience, I'm surprised that the author is surprised that companies don't know how much time they spend on hardening. Nobody gets paid to do that unless necessary for compliance; companies prefer to build features, and don't track this stuff. Don't even think about asking them to quantify the benefit of hardening.

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+to+Measure+Anything+in+Cyber...
by frogblast | 2025-09-19 20:39:35+00:00
IMO the problem is that H1B employees are stuck at the employer for the duration of their green card process, and so end up both paid lower and unable to escape abuse.

I think a very high application fee is actually part of a good solution, but is useless by itself.

A flawed proposal:

* Dispense with the 'need to search for a qualified American' which just complicates the process without achieving the stated goal, and includes a ton of legal and bureaucratic expense and time.

* A large application fee paid from the company to the federal government.

* The worker's relocation expenses must also be covered by the company.

* The worker gets a 10 year work authorization on the day of their arrival.

* The worker gets to leave their sponsoring employer on the day of their arrival, if they choose to. The employment contract may not include any clawbacks of anything.

The latter bullet is the key one. That's the one that uses market forces to truly enforces this person is being paid above market wages, and is being treated well, at their sponsoring employer. (which in turn means they don't undercut existing labor in the market).

It also means that employers don't really look abroad unless there really is a shortage of existing labor. But when there is a true shortage and you're willing to spend, the door is open to act quickly.

The obvious defect is that it creates an incentive for the employee to pay the federal fee themselves (hidden) plus more for the privilege of getting sponsored, and the company basically being a front for this process. Effectively buying a work authorization for themselves. I'm not sure how to overcome that. Then again, the current system could also suffer that defect (I don't know how common it is).
by messe | 2025-09-19 20:39:47+00:00
Reminds me of exokernel architectures[0.5][1.5][2.5]. How is non-CPU resource multiplexing handled, or planned to be handled?

[0.5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel

[1.5]: https://wiki.osdev.org/Exokernel

[2.5]: "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." — Stan Kelly-Bootle
by consumer451 | 2025-09-19 20:40:01+00:00
Yeah, this is one of those things where the abuses have real negative consequences for our country.

However, when used by people that we (theoretical, rational economic actors) actually want here… those truly exceptional people who may not look exceptional on paper… Well, getting those people here has been one of the magical things about the United States of America, so far.

Messing with that is dangerous. It needs to be done, but it needs to be done very surgically.
by roughly | 2025-09-19 20:40:08+00:00
I think there’s plenty of interesting debates to be had about immigration policy and its effects on the labor market, but one thing worth noting here is that the primary problem that damn near every other country on earth has isn’t immigration, it’s brain drain.

A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so. You can argue how well that’s worked out for us - having worked with a great many extremely talented H1bs in an industry largely built by immigrants, I’d consider it pretty positive - but it damn sure hasn’t worked out well for the countries those talented folks came from.
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-19 20:40:27+00:00
> Not startups. 100k is like 75%

I dont know of a single person here on a visa making less than 150k salary. They get the same stock, bonus and benefits that every one else gets.... it's well over 300k to have that staff member when all is said and done.

You're not adding on 100k a year, you're adding on 100k for a 3-6 year employee.

Even if that works out to 20k a year, it's pocket change in the grand scheme of things.
by suriya-ganesh | 2025-09-19 20:40:47+00:00
Maybe.

The workers are involuntary but willing participants, in a grand scheme where the queens and males get to create new generations. But this is possible only if we anthropomorphise a lot.

because at the level of ants/bees I'm not even sure what "individual" even means.

But genetically they originate from the same individual, live for the betterment of the whole, and have very minor say in what happens to themselves or their genes. Much similar to cells in a human being does.
by tuatoru | 2025-09-19 20:41:26+00:00
This all sounds like it has been covered in detail by the "AI as a Normal Technology"[1][2] guys (formerly AI Snake Oil - they decided they preferred to engage rather than just be snarky).

Invention vs innovation vs diffusion - this is all well-known stuff.

It's a completely different episteme than the one IABIED guys have ("If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies").

I don't think there can be any meaningful dialogue between the two camps.

1. Substack: https://www.normaltech.ai/ book: https://www.normaltech.ai/p/starting-reading-the-ai-snake-oi...

2. "Normal technology" like fire, metals, agriculture, writing, and electricity are normal technologies.
by TJTorola | 2025-09-19 20:42:16+00:00
Existing social platforms are built for profit, which modulates emotion for engagement (something kind of like entertainment, but I wouldn't say I'm entertained exactly by the rage bait I'm often fed by algorithms). Users of an open protocol might select for the same experience, or they might not, I think that's yet to be seen. This also assumes that this fantasy open protocol could also escape the pressures of maximizing profit.
by dismalaf | 2025-09-19 20:43:11+00:00
Do you have a source for this?

Also, do you watch his podcast? His host (who's literally also one of his employees) is a black woman. Not proof he's not racist, but suggests probably not.

Unless you just assume anyone to the right of you equals racist, which lots of leftists do. Which is one of many reasons why the global right is rising...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-19 20:43:18+00:00
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025 (68 comments)

OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469124 - July 2025 (370 comments) [15 year amortization required for international R&D]
by throwaway0236 | 2025-09-19 20:43:47+00:00
The book has some valid points when it states that the government has too much money and does not need to make the hard prioritizations.

It has however been heavily criticized. It seems like he had a point to prove and found numbers that fit with his view, and not a neutral description. He also seems to ignore that the trends he points to, also exists in other countries.

That said, he does raise some valid concerns. The number of employees in the public sector grows, even under conservative governments. Part of the reason is that Norway can afford it at the moment. Another reason is that the number of rules and regulations increases, and the government needs more people to enforce them.

The latter is mostly a political issue, and something that also happens in countries that are not wealthy. The author's solution is to reduce taxes and cut public spending.
by consumer451 | 2025-09-19 20:44:40+00:00
Since we have relatively reliable economic data on median income per industry, it would be really stupid not to use that data in a formula such as the one you suggested.

To go further, I believe there’s good data on cost of living, geographically. It would probably be wise to use that in the formula as well, so as not to disadvantage smaller areas, where cost-of-living and salaries are lower.
by erulabs | 2025-09-19 20:44:53+00:00
Do you have any statement from ABC or Disney that they pulled the show due to FCC comments?

Per PBS.org:

> ABC, which has aired “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” since 2003, did not immediately explain why it suspended the show on Wednesday. But its announcement came after both Nexstar and Sinclair said they would stop airing Kimmel’s show on their ABC-affiliated stations.

Until we get any indication that the FCC chair's comments were the source of the cancelation, I maintain that while what Carr said was stupid and bad, and what the FCC mostly does is stupid and bad, and while what Disney mostly does is stupid and bad, that this is not some new form of fascism.

It's clear you think I'm an idiot, so I'm quite sure my words will mean nothing to you, but please, hear this: A megacorporation took an action that has caused you to have strong animosity towards a fellow citizen based on perceived but not actual happenings. Resist the urge to be pissed off. I will happily march with you when and if the federal government actually attacks freedom of speech.
by adolph | 2025-09-19 20:44:58+00:00
If you look at how a CO2 sensor works [0], you see that it is tuned for a specific material. Characterizing any possible material would be the job of a gas chromatograph [1], which are typically an industrial/scientific instrument as opposed to a more limited mass produced device. Maybe one day the cost (both material and ongoing maintenance) will be low enough to have in one's home.

0. https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/co2-carbon-dioxide-detec...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography%E2%80%93mas...
by cogman10 | 2025-09-19 20:45:00+00:00
Well, again, I don't really care about prioritizing local hires. The 100k fee really only penalizes the company from hiring abroad.

I'd much rather push everything into the salary of the person being hired. Both because it ends up raising the median salary for local workers and because it stimulates the local economy where that person is brought in. It's also a yearly fee. I think there's value in getting a very capable person working in your company and having a high salary is one way to make such roles highly competitive. A highly capable person will ultimately make everyone they work with more capable.
by jpadkins | 2025-09-19 20:45:01+00:00
hard disagree on the 'search for qualified citizen' or something to replace it. American policy needs to put Americans first.

Your other points are a good start. The main thing I would add is a floor on salary. H1B for a >$200k job makes some sense, it shows it's essential, the employer really wants to fill it and is having a hard time finding a US citizen. H1B for average or below average salaries is where the real abuse is. It's basically a form of indentured servitude.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-19 20:45:43+00:00
AI is the same. I am pretty sure at any company you have executives saying things about AI that not only aren't true, they can never be true. However, this is the story that people are willing to believe.

Also, just generally, the question is wrong. Perpetrating a massive fraud is very time-consuming and, ultimately, requires a level of self-deception that most people don't have the energy for. Milton, SBF, etc. did the things they did because they wanted to believe they were someone other than who they were. There is nothing wrong with knowing who you are and just being that person. To say this another way, Milton was clearly unwell, he is now unwell with more money than can be actually used, being unwell is not an example for anyone particularly when you trade it for something with extremely limited marginal value.
by RealityVoid | 2025-09-19 20:45:45+00:00
You care about that, and you say that's the problem with H1B but I think that, really, a lot of tech workers in the US, and even a lot of the HN crowd _really_ care about protectionism. They want to suppress competition for their jobs, they want to keep their salaries high. I think this is myopic, but... What the heck, your country is speed running some interesting trajectory, this measure is the not even the biggest one on the radical measures pile.