MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-13 16:01:06+00:00
By not doing it. The ideology here is that general purpose computing took numerous wrong turns from the 1950s to the present for the purpose of embedded systems.

I thought this through back when I was doing embedded projects with the AVR-8, namely display controllers for persistence of vision displays. Something like this doesn't have an OS so you don't need to do context switching for the purposes of the OS.

It was practical to write C code for this but I didn't really like it because code like this doesn't need the stack and the affordances that C calling conventions, the data structures needed to display a scene are dynamic with the scope of the scene, you have 32 registers which is a lot, enough that you can allocate 8 for the interrupt handler and have a lot left over for the main loop.

I was wargaming my paths forward if I needed more power: the obvious route which I probably would have taken is the portable C route via ARM or STM32. Yet I liked AVR-8 a lot and also considered the route of going to an FPGA board on which you could instantiate an AVR-8 soft core clocked higher than any real hardware AVR-8 and also put an accelerator behind it.

The FPGA + TTA + co-designed software route came up at this point. Notably any kind of concurrency, parallelism and extra context can be baked into the "hardware". Adding a few registers is much cheaper than adding superscalar features, adding another MOV slot to the instructions then is pretty cheap if you want more parallelism with the caveat that it could be hard to prevent blocking. If the requirements change it's a frickin' FPGA and you can add something to it or take something away.

What would put the whole idea on wheels is a superoptimizing compiler that could design both the CPU and the code that runs on top of it.
by mindslight | 2025-09-13 16:01:37+00:00
100% this. Realtors (TM) often do everything to make the transaction happen with the least amount of their effort.

I've been in a situation with a "seller's" Realtor (TM) who would just agree to whatever logistical details the buyers were asking, and then tell us how we had to dance to their tune. The attorney set them all straight, but it never should have gotten to that point. The same Realtor (TM) bungled the one house showing that I wasn't around to facilitate, setting off the alarm system that we had warned her about multiple times - including specifically for that showing. I'm sure prospective homeowners love being greeted by a loud siren. There was some other last-minute problem too that I'm not recalling the details of, but we ended up emailing the owner of her agency and told them we wanted someone else to represent us at the closing. She was that bad, but of course she had talked a really good game to get us to sign that lock-in exclusive contract at the start. Getting that contract signed is the Realtor's (TM) chief KPI, and they know it.

Of course Sturgeon's law and all that. I'm sure there are realtors who take their duties seriously. And I'm sure some people have had the complete opposite experience with poor attorneys. The incentives for Realtors (TM) are just much poorer though.
by pydry | 2025-09-13 16:01:50+00:00
BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg752y13meo

That case was 1212:27, or 44:1.

>Reasonably neutral estimates have the military deaths since 2022 at about 80k Ukrainians, 250k Russians

You might want to reassess your measure of what constitutes "reasonably neutral" because that 80k number is off by roughly an order of magnitude.

It's also worth noting that these lopsided 44:1 casualty exchange ratios are A) a relatively recent phenomenon - only in the last ~4-5 months. They are hard to bullshit though.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-13 16:01:59+00:00
Pedantic: how do you know something is correct without proving it? How do you know you have covered all possible edge cases? /Pedantic

In all seriousness, the intersection between correctness and project delivery is where engineering sits. Solutions must be good enough, correct enough, and cheap enough to fit the use case, but ideally no more than that.
by hungmung | 2025-09-13 16:02:09+00:00
The inspections. Actually, I think it would be legal to do so, but if the builder sells the home and they don't disclose problems with the house they'd likely be opening themselves up to a civil suit, and having a contract which severely restricts the kind of inspection you do would be strong evidence that they knew, or should have known, that something was fucked up. Lennar certainly has a team of lawyers that know more about this than I do...but a lot of this sort of thing depends on legal action costing more than it's worth...and one or two odd cases they do get might just be settled out of court and chalked up as an operating expense.

Scumbags.
by back2dafucha | 2025-09-13 16:02:37+00:00
Diminishing returns is an ugly business. And thats obviously where we are at. The end not the beginning of LLM "innovation".

Any technology that creates "sysiphian" tasks, is not worth anyones time. That includes LLMs, and "Big Data". The "herculean effort" that never ends is the proof in the pudding. The tech doesnt work.

Its like using machine learning for self driving instead of having an actual working algorythm. Your bust.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-13 16:03:04+00:00
It's not a non-sequitur - people are calling for death [1] (somehow this doesn't get a mention in the NPR article - an honest oversight, I'm sure!), while the post claimed they were being fired for constitutionally protected speech. So it makes sense to ask if calls for death are protected.

To answer that question, I think it's close? It's not imminent lawless action or a true threat, which are the usual criteria for when the 1st Amendment doesn't shield speech. But it could be interpreted as instructing someone to commit a crime. But since it could be argued the posters have no reasonable expectation their instructions will be carried out [2], that means it's probably (speculating, I don't know of any precedent on this) protected. In the USA - most other countries are not nearly so permissive.

[1] https://thatparkplace.com/bluesky-users-call-for-death-of-do...

[2] Carried out specifically because they issued them, and not because someone was going to kill Rowling anyway.
by bshacklett | 2025-09-13 16:03:14+00:00
We’re in dire need of this right now. The number of people that I work with who refuse to pick up new tools and technologies is astounding. If they _do_ try something new, they seem to avoid all but the most basic knowledge of whatever it is, and look at me crosseyed if I suggest going the slightest bit deeper (`git add -p` rather than `git add .`, for example).
by vunderba | 2025-09-13 16:03:31+00:00
I really like NAQT's (National Academic Quiz Tournaments ) take on questions, where it goes from more obscure to less obscure the further you get into the text. For example:

Though he suffered from Bright’s disease, he allowed himself to be considered for his party’s nomination, but he lost to James G. (*) Blaine. Once known as a Stalwart, he declared his independence by signing the popular Pendleton Act. For ten points—name this New York politician who acceded to the presidency upon the 1881 assassination of James Garfield.

The asterisk indicates bonus points if a player correctly answers the question before the host finishes reading past that mark.

But this kind of format where you can "buzz in early" would be a pretty drastic departure for the show.
by hashmash | 2025-09-13 16:03:47+00:00
> The biggest current knock against Java I see is JNI, which unlike the core language is absolutely horrible.

JNI was only ever designed to be good enough, and it is. The new FFM API aims to replace JNI in most cases, but it's designed to be "perfect". As a result, the new API took many years to develop, but JNI was quick to develop.

It would be nice to have the FFM API much sooner, but alternatives like JNR and JNA have been around for a long time. There wasn't a rush to develop a JNI replacement.
by peterfirefly | 2025-09-13 16:03:56+00:00
A lot of them did it because they had to have a Windows version and had to interface with Windows APIs and Windows programs that only spoke UTF-16 (or UCS-2 or some unspecified hybrid).

Java's mistake seems to have been independent and it seems mainly to have been motivated by the mistaken idea that it was necessary to index directly into strings. That would have been deprecated fast if Windows had been UTF-8 friendly and very fast if it had been UTF-16 hostile.

We can always dream.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-13 16:05:08+00:00
Particularly if it this kind of of 50mm

https://findingrange.com/2022/01/14/7artisans-photoelectric-...

I had a long streak where I packed a DSLR with a 50mm everywhere I went and never took any pictures with it because I felt depressed. Switching to zoom lenses (particularly developing a protocol to get a distinct style of landscape protocols out of my kit lens) and getting into sports photography got me out of my funk, also that 7Artisan 50mm is so much more fun than any of the other 50's in my collection. Part of it is the challenge of manual focus, the other part is the extreme wide aperture which can take dreamy looking photos that are entirely different from what people have seen before.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-13 16:05:30+00:00
As a serial home owner, I don't think this would help the process overall. The home inspection I got on my first home was something like 16 pages of absolute nonsense. "Dishwasher is of unverified age and might fail soon." "Refrigerator is of unverified age and might fail soon." ... "Cosmetic scuffs on cabinets in kitchen." ... and on and on.

As a buyer, I don't need you to tell me that an $800 dishwasher or $1200 water heater might fail someday; you might as well tell me that the water coming from the faucets is wet. I want to know about the major systems. That particular inspection was "no ready roof access, so a visual inspection was conducted from the ground with nothing obvious detected; if you're concerned about roof condition, have a roofer come out." No, the roof is one of the very few things I care about from hiring you.

Most recent inspection was better, but still included a dozen pages of ticky-tack nonsense that no one should care about. I suspect that makes people feel better that they got their money's worth by someone pointing out that a kitchen floor tile had a visible crack in it, one kitchen light bulb was burned out, and an HVAC filter was overdue for changing, but that crap doesn't even need to be in the report let alone become a permanent part of the registered record of the property, nor should it be forced as part of the purchase process.

Requiring it as part of every transaction would be a massive giveaway to the home inspection industry. Adults are capable of making adult decisions, and if they want an inspection as part of the decision, they can choose to get one. Likewise, sellers can choose to go with the buyer who best fits their circumstances.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-13 16:08:30+00:00
An odd discovery I made using this lens

https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/

is that the wide angle can make distracting things like power lines look really small in context and not so bothersome the way they are with moderate focal length lenses. Also I think very wide lenses can capture some of that panorama effect: I live near a state forest that I think is strikingly beautiful but most lenses can only capture a tiny bit of it, yeah you can get a flower or a bug or something, but be it a 20mm or a 200mm any attempt to go beyond macro photography falls flat.
by marcusverus | 2025-09-13 16:08:39+00:00
This is a sorry excuse. If companies were required to hire American students, they would have a strong incentive to foster the development of American talent. It would not be a problem.

> Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.

The idea that Americans wouldn't fight tooth and nail for these jobs is just idiotic.
by Llamamoe | 2025-09-13 16:08:56+00:00
Mostly, yes, but also consider that both were exceptional circumstances that happened to outdated reactors.

IIRC Fukushima didn't actually leak enough radiation out to cause any significant environmental harm - quite possibly, most of the evacuations weren't even necessary, and the total toll among responders was only 25, with only 1 death.

Chernobyl was much worse, but other than responders and the high incidence rates of thyroid cancer in young children close to the disaster area, the total casualties were also lower than people assume. A lot of the early estimates were massively inflated.

Honestly it's quite possible that in both cases, we could have done much less relocation and evacuation, especially the fukushima response was largely driven by Japan's fear of nuclear technology.
by rpdillon | 2025-09-13 16:09:19+00:00
Two points:

Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.

The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.
by parttimenerd | 2025-09-13 16:09:31+00:00
(author here) This is part of a series of blog post. The next blog posts are: https://mostlynerdless.de/blog/2025/07/30/java-25s-new-cpu-t... (on the implementation) https://mostlynerdless.de/blog/2025/08/25/java-25s-new-cpu-t... (on sizing the queue) and a fourth on improving the performance: https://mostlynerdless.de/blog/2025/09/01/java-25s-new-cpu-t...
by arcane23 | 2025-09-13 16:09:58+00:00
>50 direct fatalities

This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.

Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.
by siva7 | 2025-09-13 16:10:39+00:00
This is about those aged over 100, not 110 which is a completely different ballpark... Besides that, all my relatives lived close to 100 and they certainly hadn't a healthy lifestyle nor are they japanese nor had they access to the current medical breakthroughs. I assume the secret is mostly genetics and it is easy for me to see how 100k are aged over 100 in Japan.
by adastra22 | 2025-09-13 16:11:16+00:00
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.

3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-09-13 16:11:30+00:00
A link to the paper on biorxiv[0], Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. A bit of the abstract:

In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

I also found an interview with the author [1], which had some choice quotes, one that popped out to me,

For example, Costa Rica, 42% of the centenarians in Costa Rica turned out to be lying about their age after the study was conducted. And once you corrected those errors, they went from world leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack, in terms of late life expectancy. And so the question I have for those researchers is how do you explain that, for example, 82% of Japanese centenarians were missing or dead in your sample? And this wasn't discovered by demographers. This was discovered by the government of Japan.

[0] http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/704080

[1] https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/09/25/the-secret-to-a-l...
by tyleo | 2025-09-13 16:13:01+00:00
Because people are afraid of the climate collapsing but they aren't afraid of mice stealing their wallets.

I don't think this is unique to climate research, I can imagine headlines, "Ground shakes beneath Mt. Rainier, alarming scientists," or "Ebola spreads unconstrained in Africa, alarming scientists."

It's fear driven because it might kill people. Unlike something along the lines of, "Mars mission fails as rocket explodes." That's sad but not necessarily causing harm across the population.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-13 16:13:29+00:00
A foundation issue might seem totally beyond reach for someone who has never owned a home before, but it's still a lot less painful than living in a bad location. Once you spend some time learning how the foundation systems work, it gets a lot less scary. There is a solution for everything.

Pier and beam foundation issues are essentially a non-event in my view. If you can literally crawl underneath your house and touch everything, it's basically like cheating.

With slab-on-grade things get more challenging, but installing piers on the perimeter and fixing internal slabs is not really a crisis situation. Concrete work has a huge advantage at repair time in that it can be polyjacked. This is easily the least intrusive form of concrete repair that is available. You can raise a slab of arbitrary weight in 15 minutes with a half inch hole. This repair technique will last ~indefinitely if you also have a tough talk with your landscapers about getting water away from the house.
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-13 16:13:38+00:00
If you're making multiples of $200k for being a smart guy, there's a decent chance you're doing something that a lot of people would be ethically uncomfortable with (HFT, ads/surveillance tech, etc.). Being happy with what you do in the world also matters, and $200k/yr is easily enough to support a family on a single income pretty much anywhere already.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-13 16:15:10+00:00
> In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet,

Depends on the person. If someone is eating such a large caloric excess and consuming highly processed calorie dense foods, changing diet is the only way out. You’re not going to out-exercise a 1000 calorie excess every day.

The average person might only be eating 200-300 calories more than their grandparents did, though. That’s actually within the range where you could overcome it with daily activity.

Really though, this isn’t a situation where you should pick or choose. Most people should be improving their diets and getting a little more activity.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-13 16:15:12+00:00
> No other science field does this

The reporting of astronomical objects is very fear/clicks driven when they find something that will come "close" to the earth.

With climate, there are the occasional "not as bad as we thought" articles when we get some new knowledge about a particular system, but the majority of it is fear driven as it's mainly bad news.
by missedthecue | 2025-09-13 16:16:01+00:00
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.

Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
by fzwang | 2025-09-13 16:16:17+00:00
I run a program for high schoolers to emphasize this skill. However, the entire K-University pipeline is designed around credentialism. Ie. do whatever you need to, cram/cheat/regurgitate, to get the rubber stamp. It's really hard to communicate the importance of self-directed education/learning how to learn when the vast majority of students' formal educational experiences tell them otherwise. Very frustrating but perhaps things are changing ...
by hu3 | 2025-09-13 16:16:43+00:00
True but TypeScript and Sorbet are magnitudes above linting and formatting PHP, in terms of challenge size.

TypeScript is a very complex language with a huge mission. From the same creator of C#.

Sorbet is trying to tame a dynamically typed language which supports monkey patching. Stripe can get away with it because they have close to infinite money and a large Ruby codebase.

Meanwhile PHP is stable and typed. Parsing AST, linting and formatting are trivial in comparison to the examples you cited. Their package manager, composer, is also boring a stable, in a good way. Prime target for a second pass if need be.
by pydry | 2025-09-13 16:17:03+00:00
>Putin was saying he wouldn't invade right up until the day before

This was seemingly in an attempt to provide a diplomatic off ramp where everybody could pretend that they didnt back down in the face of a naked threat of force.

America and Ukraine both rejected the 3 point ultimatum though - basically saying "bring it on".

Since then the deal offered by Russia has worsened relative to Ukraine's steadily declining negotiating leverage.

>I'm not sure the bet paid off much either - Russia is way down in money, human lives

They have a casualty exchange ratio of 44:1 at this point. This is why Europe is in a bit of a collective panic and Trump is flailing around trying to make a deal.

None of that would be happening if the original plan of "levy a crushing defeat" was working out.

So yes, the bet is paying off.

>And I doubt the war will develop much in Russia's favour going forward

In that case events of the next year will probably shock you.
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-13 16:17:22+00:00
The importance of "learning how to learn" has been emphasized by all of my teachers since I was in highschool, or maybe even 8th grade, decades ago.

My computer engineering professors also emphasized user centered design. For one of Google's top scientists to bring this up is an admission that they won't, or can't, design a good user experience for their tools.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-09-13 16:17:22+00:00
That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.
by eklavya | 2025-09-13 16:18:54+00:00
I have mostly heard these complaints from people who haven't used a java ide and/or do not know that jvms allow waiting for a debugger before starting execution (helps with all sorts of spring or whatever errors and boilerplate).

That said, there is a shitload of "enterprise" fuckery in Java, but those Devs would have made a mess of any codebase anyway.