MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dankwizard | 2025-09-05 04:49:07+00:00
Sure, 100% of piracy wouldn't translate to sales but from my own perspective - I pirate. A lot. Hypocritcal for arguing about this? Yes definitely. But if there is a movie I really wanted to see, such as Tom Cruise's last Mission Impossible entry, and the concept of downloading a movie for free didn't exist - I would pay for it (Whether it be a cinema screening, a digital purchase, DVD, or specific streaming service). Otherwise I could never see it [Maybe on Free TV at some down the line?]. However, I do know that we live in an age where every bit of media can be stolen so I am less likely to pay, and know at some point after threatrical release it will be available online. And I was right. I kept my $20 and enjoyed the movie.

And I'm not arguing it's killing the industry. Shoplifting exists today but brick and mortar isn't dead (Well, it is dying but that's because of online shopping). But stores would see a little less profit due to shop lifting. Very similar to piracy.

It is stealing, and using an out dated definition to try and paint it as anything else is a wild take.

I hope you do make it as a developer one day, and create a hit game, and you have some telemetry showing 10000 people playing and check your Sales to see 200 copies sold and you tell me if you think you haven't been robbed.
by lynx97 | 2025-09-05 04:49:46+00:00
I refuse to use streaming services since they exist. Pay per month to listen to everything? No thanks. These days, I buy everything I like on BandCamp. I have a "mirror script" for BandCamp sites I find interesting, to be able to listen into the stuff, and decide if it is worth buying.

I use a MPD based setup on a rpi at home. Built a small web interface to control the thing (MPD clients are plenty but rarely sufficiently accessible). Even wrote my own AI based presenter[1], which will make a description of the cover art part of its moderation. Nice for me, since I am blind. A simple feature (took me a few hours to write) that a proprietary vendor will actually never offer. In this particular case, if I don't scratch my itch, nobody else ever will.

When I am mobile, I use the "Shuffle All" button in the BandCamp app to play through the things I've hand-selected over the past 10 years.

[1] https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd
by cycomanic | 2025-09-05 04:50:09+00:00
> The question is why "so many real-world systems are governed by differential equations" and "so many real-world systems involve periodic motion". > > Well, stable systems are can either be stationary or oscillatory. If the world didn't contain so many stable systems, or equivalently if the laws of physics didn't allow so, then likely life would not have existed. All life is complex chemical structures, and they require stability to function. Ergo, by this anthropic argument there must be many oscillatory systems.

I would say that the it's very difficult to imagine a world that would not be governed by differential equations. So it's not just that life wouldn't exist it's that there wouldn't be anything like the laws of physics.

As a side note chaotic systems are often better analysed in the FT domain, so even in a world of chaotic systems (and there are many in our world, and I'd argue that if there wasn't life would not exist either) the FT remains a powerful tool
by photochemsyn | 2025-09-05 04:51:33+00:00
Fourier's fundamental discovery was that the most natural building blocks for periodic functions are complex exponentials. These in turn were based on Euler's identity, linking complex exponentials to sines and cosines, and which is algebraic (easy to differentiate, integrate, manipulate) and also encodes rotations and waves. So, a good reason to study complex analysis and include it in the engineering maths program.

This setup then allowed Fourier to take the limit of the Fourier series using a complex exponential expression. But keep in mind, this is all in the context of 19th century determinisitic thinking(see Fourier's analysis of the heat equation 1807, and Maxwell's treatise on 'Theory of Heat' c. 1870s), and it ran into real-world limits in the late 19th century, first with Poincare and later with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. . Poincare showed that just because you have a deterministic system, you don't automatically get predictability. Regardless this Fourier transform mathematical approach worked well in astronomy (at least at solar-system scale) because the underlying system really was at least quasiperiodic - essentially this led to prediction of new planets like Neptune.

But what if you apply Fourier transform analytics to data that is essentially chaotic? This applies to certain aspect of climate science too, eg, efforts to predict the next big El Nino based on the historical record - since the underlying system is significantly chaotic, not strictly harmonic, prediction is poor (tides in contrast are predictable as they are mostly harmonic). How to treat such systems is an ongoing question, but Fourier transforms aren't abandoned, more like modified.

Also, the time-energy quantum mechanics relation is interesting though not really a pure QM uncertainty principle, more like a classical example of a Fourier bandwidth relation, squeeze it on one axis and it spreads out on the other - a nice quote on this is "nothing that lives only for a while can be monochromatic in energy." Which sort of leads on to virtual particles and quantum tunneling. (which places a size limit of about 1 nm on chip circuitry).

The bottom line is that if you're applying elegant and complex mathematical treatments to real-world physical problems, don't forget that nature doesn't necessarily follow in the footsteps of your mathemetical model.
by majormajor | 2025-09-05 04:52:13+00:00
> I enjoyed the linked post; it's really interesting to see how far things have come. I'm surprised nobody has built 'talk to your customers at scale', yet - this feels like a far more interesting problem than 'avoid talking to your customers at scale'.

This sounds hard to pull off in a very similar way to getting good data through surveys.

I generally don't want to talk to my tools. If I'm motivated to talk to you, it's probably because something went wrong. And even if I talked to you when not annoyed, I'd struggle to articulate more than "it's working good" at any given moment - when what you really want as a product person is to know "it's working good, but I had to internalize this workaround for something for my use case that no I don't even think about but originally I found offputting and almost bounced because of" or whatever.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-05 04:52:31+00:00
There is a difference between recommended and max achievable.

Zen 5 can hit that (and that's what I run), and Arrow Lake can also.

The recommended from AMD on Zen 4 and 5 is 6000 (or 48x2), for Arrow Lake is 6400 (or 51.2x2); both of them continue increase in performance up to 8000, both of them have extreme trouble going past 8000 and getting a stable machine.
by protocolture | 2025-09-05 04:53:33+00:00
Steelmanning this.

If its goal is to act like Cisco or Juniper and create a robust certification platform that helps identify legitimate experts in the field, helping to exclude people who talk big on AI but cant deliver, its a very good idea.

If its just a tick a box exercise however it will have zero value.

>OpenAI is committing to certifying 10 million Americans by 2030

I reckon they would have a better time certifying 10 million foreigners tbh. India and the Philippines have a lot of people who pass through IT certification.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 04:54:00+00:00
I’m not claiming only 2x slowdown. It’s 4x for some of the programs I’ve measured. 4x > 2x. I’m not here to exaggerate the perf of Fil-C. I actually think that figuring out the true perf cost is super interesting!

> All code is perf-sensitive.

That can’t possibly be true. Meta runs on PHP/Hack, which are ridiculously slow. Code running in your browser is JS, which is like 40x slower than Yolo-C++ and yet it’s fine. So many other examples of folks running code that is just hella slow, way slower than “4x slower than C”
by acomjean | 2025-09-05 04:54:02+00:00
I think about music albums on cassette that I listened too in the car. I enjoyed some of those deeper tracks after repeated listening.

Also Sony India is posting older movies on YouTube. I don’t know if there are gems in the rough there but they don’t seem to attract a lot of viewers.

https://youtube.com/@sonypicturesindia-english?si=G20TZ6NnVk...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-05 04:54:08+00:00
> Would it not be better to be consistent in your position, or reconsider it?

Didn’t mean to deflect. Current and former IDF members as well as reservists are absolutely valid military targets.

As for detention, absolutely, an Israeli citizen in Iranian or proxy territory should expect to be detained. (They would not be valid military targets.)
by kragen | 2025-09-05 04:55:22+00:00
Hmm, Fil-C seems potentially really important; there's a lot of software that only exists in the form of C code which it's important to preserve access to, even if the tradeoffs made by conventional C compilers (accepting large risks of security problems in exchange for a small improvement in single-core performance) have largely become obsolete.

The list of supported software is astounding: CPython, SQLite, OpenSSH, ICU, CMake, Perl5, and Bash, for example. There are a lot of things in that list that nobody is likely to ever rewrite in Rust.

I wonder if it's feasible to use Fil-C to do multitasking between mutually untrusted processes on a computer without an MMU? They're making all the right noises about capability security and nonblocking synchronization and whatnot.

Does anyone have experience using it in practice? I see that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134852 reports a 4× slowdown or better.

The name is hilarious. Feelthay! Feelthay!
by thayne | 2025-09-05 04:56:04+00:00
XML isn't great for exchange/interchange either due to security problems and inconsistencies in implementations. A big part of the problem is that xml has a lot of complexity, which leads to a bigger attack surface when parsing and processing untrusted data. And then xml entities are just inherently insecure, unless you disable some of their capabilities (like using remote files, and unlimited recursion).

That said, creating a format that can convey rich untrusted data is a hard problem.
by rezmason | 2025-09-05 04:56:15+00:00
The other day I realized that holding down the Option key in the System 7 Desktop Patterns control panel changes the button text from "Set Desktop Pattern" to "Set Utilities Pattern". Does anyone here happen to know what that means?

edit: holy crap, I just figured it out: "Set Utilities Pattern" replaces the background pattern of every desk accessory, such as the Calculator and Scrapbook apps, Find File, Key Caps, Puzzle— with the pattern you chose. What a different time that was!
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-05 04:56:19+00:00
While there are certainly other reasons C/C++ get used in new projects, I think 99% not being performance or footprint sensitive is way overstating it. There's tons of embedded use cases where a GC is not going to fly just from a code size perspective, let alone latency. That's mostly where I've often seen C (not C++) for new programs. Also, if Chrome gets 2x slower I'll finally switch back to Firefox. That's tens of millions of lines of performance-sensitive C++ right there.

That actually brings up another question: how would trying to run a JIT like V8 inside Fil-C go? I assume there would have to be some bypass/exit before jumping to generated code - would there need to be other adjustments?
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 04:56:50+00:00
I think that worst case 2x, average case 1.5x is attainable.

- Code that uses SIMD or that is mostly dealing with primitive data in large arrays will get to close to 1x

- Code that walks trees and graphs, like interpreted or compilers do, might end up north of 2x unless I am very successful at implementing all of the optimizations I am envisioning.

- Code that is IO bound or interactive is already close to 1x
by joegibbs | 2025-09-05 05:00:16+00:00
Same here. I'd never seen parts of it on TV or anything until I watched it for the first time, since I'd seen it was ranked #1 on IMDB. There wasn't anything about it that made me feel like it was the best movie ever. The plot was very conventional, the shots were fine, the performances were pretty good - it seemed like a 7-8/10 movie, there are lots like it. Then I watched Lawrence of Arabia and 2001 and I got the "best movie ever" kind of feeling from them - great cinematography, big themes, bombastic soundtracks. But I can see why Shawshank could be the least controversial movie of all time, it's fine at everything and that helps when there are so many people ranking it.
by charleslmunger | 2025-09-05 05:00:25+00:00
>and they seem to get annoyed that people run fuzzers against SQLite, even though application file formats should definitely be fuzzed.

I think that's an unfair reading. Sqlite runs fuzzers itself and quickly addresses bugs found by fuzzers externally. There's an entire section in their documentation about their own fuzzers and thanking third party fuzzers, including credit to individual engineers.

https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

The tone of the CVE docs are because people freak out about CVEs flagged by automated tools when the CVEs are for issues that have no security impact for typical usage of SQLite, or have prerequisites that would already have resulted in some form of compromise.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-05 05:00:37+00:00
> The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005.

Not saying it's perfect, but Qobuz is paying[1] ~3.5x that.

I've been trying it out as a Spotify alternative, fairly pleased so far, though the "radio" feature in Spotify is better at finding new tracks I like.

That said I buy albums on Bandcamp for stuff I really enjoy.

[1]: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...
by greggman65 | 2025-09-05 05:00:50+00:00
Your summary of the reception of The Shawshank Redemption doesn't seem to fit the wikipied article you linked to

> Leading up to its release, the film was test screened with the public. These were described as "through the roof", and Glotzer said they were some of the best she had seen

> nominated for several Oscars in early 1995

> It went on to become the top rented film of that year
by Disposal8433 | 2025-09-05 05:01:02+00:00
I had the same reaction. It's a big stretch to call a "tool" 500 lines of JS that could be replaced with a few Bash calls, a regexp, or a small self-contained Python+UV script. Even worse when it's limited in functionality.

We failed at creating automation tools for the users (even if Apple tried that with AppleScript or Automator), but vibe coding throwaway scripts is not the answer.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 05:01:35+00:00
You are posting on HN in a browser presumably. I am familiar with the stack of C/C++ code involved in that because I was a browser dev for 10+ years. Most of that code is definitely not perf sensitive in the sense that if you slowed it down by 4x, you might not notice most of the time

(Browser performance is like megapixels or megahertz … a number that marketing nerds can use to flex, but that is otherwise mostly irrelevant)

When I say 99% of the C code you use, I mean “use” as a human using a computer, not “use” as a dependency in your project. I’m not here to tell you that your C or C++ project should be compiled with Fil-C. I am here to tell you that most of the C/C++ programs you use as an end user could be compiled with Fil-C and you wouldn’t experience an degraded experience if that happened
by ChadNauseam | 2025-09-05 05:02:15+00:00
I like crypto (I'm formerly in the industry), but that's not quite a fair comparison.

1. Running a validator is inexpensive in terms of compute, but there are 1,000,000 validators or something, which adds up to a lot of CPU usage. Of course, I think it's insanely awesome that you can run some code on Ethereum and it'll be replicated on 1,000,000 independently-operated machines, but it's not a very CPU-efficient strategy. 2. Banks doing those batch jobs probably had much higher TPS than ethereum.
by derangedHorse | 2025-09-05 05:04:25+00:00
It's important to note that FDIC doesn't kick in for instances of scams or other unauthorized transfers. It only gives assurances to deposit holders. Stablecoins under the GENIUS Act requires 100% backing and is more stringent than banks since reserve requirements are still 0%[1]. I think it's also useful to focus on stablecoins in a conversation like this rather than crypto at large.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-05 05:04:52+00:00
> Iran made targeted strikes against military installations

And civilian targets [1].

You didn’t hear about this because this category of war crime is happening in every currently-active war zone. If a population chooses war, this is essentially part of what they’re consenting to doing and potentially have happen to themselves.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/04/iran-missile-strikes-on-...
by balder1991 | 2025-09-05 05:04:54+00:00
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message.

When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary.

The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 05:05:10+00:00
> I wonder if it's feasible to use Fil-C to do multitasking between mutually untrusted processes on a computer without an MMU?

You could. That said, FUGC’s guts rely on OS features that in turn rely on an MMU.

But you could make a version of FUGC that has no such dependency.

As for perf - 4x is the worst case and that number is out there because I reported it. And I report worst case perf because that’s how obsessive I am about realistically measuring, and then fanatically resolving, perf issues

Fact is, I can live on the Fil-C versions of a lot of my favorite software and not tell the difference
by kcsrk | 2025-09-05 05:05:10+00:00
You are right that the dynamic arrays story does not read like a straightforward “how to inspire contributions.” But part of what I wanted to do in the talk was to show things as they actually unfolded. In OCaml compiler development, there is a very strong emphasis on correctness and long-term stability. That can make contributions, especially to core language features, feel harder than they might in faster-moving ecosystems.

The dynamic arrays case is a good illustration. What began as a small PR grew into years of design iterations, debates about representation, performance, and multicore safety, and eventually a couple of thousand lines of code and more than 500 comments before it landed. From one perspective, that looks discouraging. From another, it shows the weight we place on getting things right, because once a feature ships, it is very hard to undo.

That tension, between wanting to be open and encouraging contributions but also needing to protect stability, is something I think we should be talking about openly. My hope is that by making the process more visible we can demystify it and help contributors understand not just what happened, but why.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 05:07:34+00:00
Most C/C++ code for old or new programs runs on a desktop or server OS where you have lots of perf breathing room. That’s my experience. And that’s frankly your experience too, if you use Linux, Windows, or Apple’s OSes

> how would trying to run a JIT like V8 inside Fil-C go?

You’d get a Fil-C panic. Fil-C wouldn’t allow you to PROT_EXEC lol
by greggman65 | 2025-09-05 05:07:53+00:00
people are different people at different times in their live as well.

In my mid 20s I saw Casablanca and was not impressed.

In my mid 50s I saw it again and cried until I trembled. The 20 something me didn't get what the 2 main characters were giving up. The 50 something me with life experience of loves lost by choice and circumstance had a very different reaction.
by wahern | 2025-09-05 05:08:03+00:00
My first thought is that what's different here isn't async, per se, but parallelism. io_uring uses a kernel thread pool to service I/O requests, so you actually end up with multiple threads running in parallel handling bookkeeping work. AFAIU, SSD controllers also can service requests in parallel, even if the request stream is serialized. These two sources of parallelism is why the I/O results come back out-of-order.

Generic readahead, which is what the mmap case is relying on, benefits from at least one async thread running in parallel, but I suspect for any particular file you effectively get at most one thread running in parallel to fill the page cache.

What may also be important is the VM management. The splice and vmsplice syscalls came about because someone requested that Linux adopt a FreeBSD optimization--for sufficiently sized write calls (i.e. page size or larger), the OS would mark the page(s) CoW and zero-copy the data to disk or the network. But Linus measured that the cost of fiddling with VM page attributes on each call was too costly and erased most of the zero-copy benefit. So another thing to take note of is that the io_uring case doesn't induce any page faults at all or require any costly VM fiddling (the shared io_uring buffers are installed upfront), whereas in the mmap case there are many page faults and fixups, possibly as many as one for every 4K page. The io_uring case may even result in additional data copies, but with less cost than the VM fiddling, which is even greater now than 20 years ago.
by roncron | 2025-09-05 05:09:12+00:00
And also a simple fact, that current EVs are simply bad products from a UX perspective.

Getting a new car has felt like a step up in quality of life, but not so with EVs. You get an overall worse experience.

A part from already mentioned issues like, charging infrastructure, range and charge times there are everyday things of living with a car.

Removing stocks and buttons for essentials controls like drive select, turn signals, door locks and opening the glove box.

Inability to fix small issues like replacing a light bulb or fixing a lock. Aging software that becomes unsupported by manufacturer a few years in. But is much more essential to car operation, than before.

And low resale value that makes these very expensive to buy vehicles, essentially single use appliances with planned obsoletion embedded.

Living with EVs is tougher than ICE cars. And until that at least equalizes, what regular consumer would want that?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-05 05:10:23+00:00
> Let's say Hamas returned the hostages. What would happen next?

The international terms of the debate would change. The domestic political situation in Israel would change.

Netanyahu’s hand would be significantly weakened by losing hostages as a justification to his electorate and even the IDF. Hamas, however, would face pointed questions over why it didn’t recognise that the hostages were a liability sooner (I frankly question if they were ever an asset at all—Sinwar’s purpose, to draw in Iran, was a dud).

If you want to get conspiratorial, consider that the one red line Netanyahu has respected is Hamas’ leadership’s security in Doha.
by ajdude | 2025-09-05 05:10:44+00:00
I use Outlook to compose emails at work, and outlook's grammar system is constantly telling me to remove certain words from my sentences.

For example, I would send an email saying something like "there's actually another permission I need to grant you so you can see this, so I'm submitting the form real quick to take care of that."

Outlook will request that I change it to "there's another permission I need to grant you so you can see this, so I'm submitting a form to take care of that."