MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altfredd | 2025-09-22 15:36:24+00:00
> this is where most of the speed up comes from

I might be mistaken, but the brief look at code shows that the speed up appears to come from combination of async architecture (the selling point of Mold) and intelligent usage of PUNCH_HOLE/INSERT_RANGE fallocate() operations.

Surprisingly enough PUNCH_HOLE and friends have already matured to be production ready, with viable support from ext4 and xfs filesystem. The possibilities!
by mcswell | 2025-09-22 15:36:27+00:00
Another skeptical take on Langer's experiment (https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/06/hotels-and-houseplants-wh..., June 2024):

"...this widely-cited and influential work was never published in a peer-reviewed journal. The findings were instead reported in Langer’s 2009 book ‘Counterclockwise’. Despite the intriguing results, this study was never peer-reviewed or replicated. In 2019, a protocol for a replication was published, but at the time of writing the results are still pending."

Indeed, she appears to have a history of doing experiments that never get published in peer-reviewed places, but citing them in her books.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-22 15:36:32+00:00
The US has used civil law to remove all kinds of rights. A person can make a plea deal (civil/contract law) that supersedes the government having to observe that persons constitutional rights and can erase all of their constitutional rights.

The government shouldn't be able to threaten you with 50 years in prison if you don't give up your rights. And they definitely shouldn't be able to tell a just that the agreement/plea wasn't coerced. But here we are.
by beder | 2025-09-22 15:36:48+00:00
A very pedantic point, but merge keys are not part of the YAML spec [1]! Merge keys are a custom type [2], which may optionally be applied during the construction phase of loading. I definitely wouldn't say that merge keys are integral to anchors.

(Also, as a personal bias, merge keys are really bad because they are ambiguous, and I haven't implemented them in my C++ yaml library (yaml-cpp) because of that.)

[1]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

[2]: https://yaml.org/type/merge.html
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-22 15:36:59+00:00
Well, I have three devices I would like to work with depending on what I am holding in my hand - my phone, tablet and computer. I want all of my devices to be in sync.

Right now, I can throw my phone in the ocean, go to the Apple Store, sign in and my new phone looks and acts like my old phone with all of my data available, my apps and my icons being in the same place.

My wife and I can share calendar events, spreadsheets, photo libraries etc.

That’s not to mention work.
by btreecat | 2025-09-22 15:37:08+00:00
> It's funny that you chose to use this analogy because most people improve old buildings by blowing them up and rebuilding everything

It's not funny, it's practical.

Even if we were to demolish and rebuild first there's cleanup. Then there is a survey. And then planning, input design and then after all that, construction.

If you were going to do all those tasks inside that building you already destroyed, it's now much harder to rebuild.

Order of operations matter.
by ritzaco | 2025-09-22 15:37:12+00:00
This seems to be mainly aimed at existing PlanetScale customers.

> To create a Postgres database, sign up or log in to your PlanetScale account, create a new database, and select Postgres.

It does mention the sign up option but doesn't really give me much context about pricing or what it is. I know a bit, but I get confused by different database offerings, so it seems like a missed opportunity to give me two more sentences of context and some basic pricing - what's the easiest way for me to try this if I'm curious?

On the pricing page I can start selecting regions and moving slides to create a plan from $39/month and up, but I couldn't easily find an answer to if there's a free trial or cheaper way to 'give it a spin' without committing.
by dragontamer | 2025-09-22 15:37:28+00:00
Intel tells you this in their optimization manuals and white papers.

They want you to write code that takes advantage of their speedups. Agner Fog is a better writer (a sibling comment already linked to Agner Fogs stuff). But I also like referencing the official manuals and whitepapers as a primary source document.

Hard to beat Intels documents on Intel chips after all.
by jayd16 | 2025-09-22 15:37:34+00:00
Why do we think an arbitrary language is easier to reason about? If it was so easy you could just do it now. The yaml could be extremely simple and just call into your app, but most don't bother.

I'm certainly willing to believe that yaml is not the ideal answer but unless we're comparing it to a concrete alternative, I feel like this is just a "grass is always greener" type take.
by bbourn | 2025-09-22 15:38:02+00:00
Digikey's parametrics were the best in industry prior to ours, but they were still really painful to use because of the strings. But to even get to the parametrics, you first have to know in advance the category and subcategory names of the part you're looking for. There are over 3000 different categories, so even once you're pretty good, you're always asking yourself "is what i'm looking for in the logic category or the amplifier category". With Zenode, all this is handled using natural language! And we did a huge overhaul on the parametrics, we turned the strings into structured values and built modern filters that are just waaay easier to use.

Octopart is a bit of a different beast from us. They're crushing the pricing and availability data, which is actually hard to get (a LOT of business development to get access to the realtime values from the distributors themselves). Plus they have a really massive catalog, definitely broader than ours, but they don't have the depth (i.e. the detailed spec and documentation data) that we do because we went to the manufacturer websites to obtain that.
by bxparks | 2025-09-22 15:38:04+00:00
Ah I see, this is peeling back a few layers of obscurity about the Forth interpreter for me. Let's stick with a Forth interpreter because that seems easier to think about for me.

Are you saying that the Forth interpreter is a 2-pass interpreter? Or does the interpreter go into a special IMMEDIATE mode upon hitting the IF keyword, then it just consumes subsequent tokens without doing any dispatching, until it hits the THEN token? It sounds like nested IF-THEN-ELSE becomes tricky to handle.

How does the FORTH interpreter handle loops? Does the interpreter hit the WHILE token, goes into IMMEDIATE mode, remembers the location of the WHILE, then dispatches all the subsequent code, until it hits the REPEAT token, then branches back to the WHILE?
by leakycap | 2025-09-22 15:38:10+00:00
Incredible writeup with nice infographics! If I only glanced at it, I'd want to read this part:

> "Wolbachia is a tiny bacterium that naturally occurs in around half of all insect species, including fruit flies, bees, beetles, moths, dragonflies, butterflies, and some mosquitoes [...] when these mosquitoes are bred to carry it, they are much less likely to transmit viruses from person to person. This doesn’t just apply to dengue fever but also to other diseases such as yellow fever, Zika, and chikungunya."

(emphasis mine)
by JeremyNT | 2025-09-22 15:38:21+00:00
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.

This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.

When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.

Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
by coldpie | 2025-09-22 15:38:44+00:00
Yeah, I was waiting for "how are they going to shove AI into this?" and boom there it is halfway down the page. No content here (obvious problem: how does paying Reddit Inc to allow scraping result in money going to the person who created the content? shrug). Just more AI hype to get investor cash before the bubble bursts. Woopie.

Edit: Re-read it and just noticed this:

> assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them

Lolllllll. Y'all are gonna love my pitch for an airline startup. It begins, "assuming we can turn off gravity..."
by falcor84 | 2025-09-22 15:38:46+00:00
> Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I admit that I thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he is an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.” ... “When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed.”

- "Foundation", Isaac Asimov
by jdefr89 | 2025-09-22 15:38:58+00:00
Professional Security Researcher here.. I haven't really seen any models reliably find and exploit a 0day. Folks are are at least TRYING to develop such models internally at the MIT lab where I work, but not sure how far along they are coming yet.. If a model is developed that can find a 0day or two (like Big Sleep which I think maybe found some) I won't be surprised but keep in mind fuzzers find thousands of real 0days with far less compute... These capabilities are of course something worth looking into, but too many people are promising 0day oracles already and that simply just isn't where we are right now (or ever? ). Sorry for bad grammar typing quickly from phone here.
by woodruffw | 2025-09-22 15:39:36+00:00
No; GitHub shouldn't support YAML anchors because it's a deviation from the status quo, and the argument is specifically that the actions ecosystem doesn't need to make analysis any harder than it already is.

(As the post notes, neither I nor GitHub appears to see full compliance with YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys, and I'm sure they don't support all kinds of minutiae like non-primitive keys that make YAML uniquely annoying to analyze. Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing; sometimes good engineering taste dictates that only a subset should be implemented.)
by Xylakant | 2025-09-22 15:39:47+00:00
Even if this were the case, it would still skew the statistics in favor of Tesla: The Autopilot gets to hand of the complicated and dangerous driving conditions to the human who then needs to deal with them. The human to the opposite cannot do the same - they need to deal with all hard situations as they come, with no fallback to hand off to.
by castillar76 | 2025-09-22 15:39:57+00:00
Yeah, call me overly cynical but I'm waiting for this cycle to play out:

- CA bans face-masks for law-enforcement

- White House issues executive order requiring face-mask use for all federal law enforcement

- Both are placed on hold pending litigation, allowing the status quo (face-masks) to continue

- Litigation eventually winds up at the Supreme Court

- Supreme Court once again confirms White House can do whatever the hell it wants, Constitution be damned.

I really hate this timeline. Like, a lot.
by angelarudolphs7 | 2025-09-22 15:40:07+00:00
My husband has Parkinson’s disease, adding PD-5 to his nighttime Parkinson’s meds has completely changed his sleep issues. He slept all day and up all night, we had to hire care nurses. Now using this PD-5 medicine for the last four months and a normal routine he sleeps almost completely through the night and may get up once to use the restroom. It’s improved so much we were able to let go of the night nurses. This medicine also helps a ton with memory. we got the treatment from www. limitlesshealthcenter. com I am absolutely confident that this program offers a viable solution. I hope someone find this helpful, We feel very fortunate to have learned about pd-5.
by ritzaco | 2025-09-22 15:40:31+00:00
I guess this is the 'meat' of the article. Interesting that they regard reddit as a 'niche' quirky corner of the internet. To me they are well over the peak of their enshittification journey with mainly bots and overzealous mods and pay-to-play accounts. Just like digg and others before something else will take their place soon enough as the place where enthusiasts share valuable content before businesses poke their nose in and we repeat the cycle again.

> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old. For those of you old enough, think back to the Internet not of the last 15 years but of the last 35. We’ve lost some of what made that early Internet great, but there are indications that we might finally have the incentives to bring more of it back.

> It seems increasingly likely that in our future, AI-driven Internet — assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them — it’s the creative, local, unique, original content that’ll be worth the most. And, if you’re like us, the thing you as an Internet consumer are craving more of is creative, local, unique, original content. And, it turns out, having talked with many of them, that’s the content that content creators are most excited to create.
by leakycap | 2025-09-22 15:40:38+00:00
Good deal - I was using voice to text and didn't check it closely when I posted, which is why it seemed like a question, but I'm glad you knew what I meant by my comment!

I clicked around the site & liked the illustrations and idea but didn't actually figure out what I was supposed to do... is the current CTA to sign up for the newsletter?
by btbuildem | 2025-09-22 15:40:42+00:00
Colour me cynical mauve, but you would have to pry the current business model out of advertisers' cold dead hands.

What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner.

The Open Letter reads naive at best, asking us to imagine an Internet where creators are rewarded for "filling the holes in human knowledge". We all know that is not what sells, and that the opposite of this will continue to inundate the infosphere.
by basisword | 2025-09-22 15:41:39+00:00
This can't be true. We have thunder and lightning on a regular enough basis. The lightning is rarely of the fork variety though. And although the 'named' storms usually pass without much damage, it's not uncommon for people to be killed by falling trees etc. and large numbers of people to lose power. We're very lucky when it comes to lack of dangerous natural phenomena or animals but thunder is incredibly common.
by parineum | 2025-09-22 15:41:51+00:00
You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty.

Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.

Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.

Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
by skybrian | 2025-09-22 15:42:11+00:00
I haven’t seen any signs that Apple will abandon Safari, have you? Also, a browser that uses Chromium could put a halt to Google’s plans if they wanted. The easiest way would be to stop upgrading and just port over security patches. (Sure, it brings progress to a halt, but this is unlikely to matter to web developers in the short run and it would get people’s attention.)

They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-22 15:42:48+00:00
https://archive.ph/ozpEj

It's that weird kind of California politics that antagonizes the socialist left which would agree with:

Steve Veres, a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, said the district has opposed such bills because it would rather connect students to providers that can offer housing. “We’re not going to just let them park in a parking lot, we are going to give them a room,” said Veres, adding that every student who asks for emergency housing will get it.

but it is also giving Fox News content that will portray Democrats in blue states as out of touch and make it harder for Democrats to succeed nationally in this dangerous situation.
by alexliebscher0 | 2025-09-22 15:42:49+00:00
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and collaboration issues.
by VGHN7XDuOXPAzol | 2025-09-22 15:42:50+00:00
This is something that a custom parser library could figure out, no? The same as how you have format-preserving TOML libraries, for instance.

I think it makes way more sense for GitHub to support YAML anchors given they are after all part of the YAML spec. Otherwise, don't call it YAML! (This was a criticism of mine for many years, I'm very glad they finally saw the light and rectified this bug)
by reaperducer | 2025-09-22 15:42:51+00:00
Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.

Ditto. Reading HN through Lynx helps, though. As with a lot of things in life, adding a little bit of friction can make everyone happier.
by andrewla | 2025-09-22 15:42:51+00:00
A million times this. The syntax is not difficult to see, but the action seems mysterious.

The article gives an example

> : buzz? 5 mod 0 = IF ." Buzz" THEN ;

Seems to work okay.

What about immediate mode?

> 10 5 mod 0 = IF ." Buzz" THEN ; action is not a function

Well, I guess that does it for me.

Factor, another stack-based languages, has a more legible version of this, where you can push an anonymous lambda onto the stack. As I recall from my days of programming HP-48's, that used a similar mechanism. (Not checking my syntax here)

> 5 mod 0 = << "buzz" print >> if

Would have a similar effect. Each entry makes sense -- the << switches from immediate mode to store mode (or some similar concept), and everything ends up on the stack. "If" is just a function that takes a boolean and a closure:

> 10 level: 0 ; stack: [10] > 5 level: 0 : stack: [10 5] > mod level: 0 ; stack [0] > 0 level: 0 ; stack [0 0] > = level: 0 ; stack [true] > << level: 1 ; stack [true] [] > "buzz" level: 1 ; stack [true] ["buzz"] > print level: 1 ; stack [true] ["buzz" print] > >> level: 0 ; stack [true pointer_to_function] > if "buzz" level: 0 ; stack []

But I don't understand what Forth is doing.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-22 15:42:55+00:00
Labeling them "anti-X" kind of makes them sound negative, which is not how I see all of those things at all. This HN comment might eventually be published by me or not, but even if I don't hit "add comment" after writing all of this, doesn't mean it was a bad comment or I didn't value the time spent writing it, it just meant I myself didn't figure out the point of actually publishing it.

But all those websites, apps, blog posts and what not that I've created/written but never published, are still useful and was time well spent. People have almost an obsession with "finishing" and "shipping" something, otherwise it was worthless time spent on it. Calling those things "AntiApps" would make me feel bad about it, instead of feeling like I feel about them now, that in the moment they were "done" and I completed whatever I wanted to complete with it, it just wasn't the typical final artifact other people would need to have in order to feel like something is "finished".

Sometimes doing things just to do it is better than forcing yourself to reach some "completed" state you didn't even aim for when you started out.
by Romario77 | 2025-09-22 15:42:55+00:00
In the case the author presents there is one solution - last write wins. Which while simple to implement is not really satisfactory for many use cases.

Someone could write a whole slew of changes locally and someone else can eliminate all their work because they have an outdated copy locally and they made a simple update overriding the previous person's changes.

That's why git has merges and conflicts - it doesn't want to lose changes and it can't automatically figure out what should stay in case of a conflict.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-22 15:42:57+00:00
There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them.

The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise.

Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
by btreecat | 2025-09-22 15:43:03+00:00
> No; GitHub shouldn't support YAML anchors because it's a deviation from the status quo, and the argument is specifically that the actions ecosystem doesn't need to make analysis any harder than it already is. > > (As the post notes, neither I nor GitHub appears to see full compliance with YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys, and I'm sure they don't support all kinds of minutiae like non-primitive keys that make YAML uniquely annoying to analyze. Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing; sometimes good engineering taste dictates that only a subset should be implemented.)

That's a long way to say "yes, actually"
by dang | 2025-09-22 15:43:22+00:00
I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 is the comment? Barring some catastrophic bug that we never heard about, those posts wouldn't have subtracted more than a few points from your account karma. Your other posts in the thread also got some downvotes, so they would have added a few more. But it couldn't have been a thousand or even a hundred because there were only a few dozen votes on those posts in total, and many were upvotes.

I don't think you should have been downvoted for that post though! It was an interesting comment. (Though perhaps it was more provocative before the edit you mention there.)