MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sealeck | 2025-09-03 10:04:55+00:00
> Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed.

Why? The salary Andrew Kelley would likely attract at a corporate is much higher than that. If you want sustainable open-source infrastructure then someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. It feels crummy to attempt to pressure people into taking super low salaries (and probably results in higher rates of burnout).

> Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?

Building programming languages is hard? Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
by gnirre | 2025-09-03 10:05:14+00:00
” The headline is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted yet”

Thats not how you need to interpret ”patents” grammatically. You could read that as ”is in the process of patenting”

Is there a good verb for ”files patent applications for”?

You want to consider readability of the headline.
by eadmund | 2025-09-03 10:05:17+00:00
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing.

And that I have a choice of phones, or even no phone at all, and none of my phone options is legally permitted to execute me.

Further down, the article argues that switching costs between private companies are ‘enormous.’ I don’t know if they are that large, but however painful it is to switch from Apple to Google, it’s orders of magnitude easier than moving between nation-states.

It notes that private systems ‘increasingly collaborate.’ Sure, and that can be a problem. But there’s a huge difference between a patchwork of systems which collaborate and a pervasive, inescapable State.

Finally, it notes that governments purchase private data. Sure, but are they using that data to restrict fundamental freedoms? They may be (Canada’s restriction of economic rights for folks who donated to protesters comes to mind — although I don’t think that was actually enabled by purchasing private ‘social credit’ data).

> Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.

Does the article contend that Americans live in a social credit system, or that none exists in America? It can’t have it both ways!

Finally, the article leads with a definition of ‘social credit’ as evolving beyond an original definition of ‘distributing industry profits to consumers to increase purchasing power.’ Whatever that might mean, it seems completely irrelevant to the meaning of the phrase under discussion, as relevant as mentioning in a discussion on O.J. Simpson that ‘O.J.’ can mean ‘orange juice’ (in Mr. Simpson’s case, it stood for ‘Orenthal James.’
by adrian_b | 2025-09-03 10:05:32+00:00
FORTRAN does not allow implicit aliasing between distinct function/procedure arguments, which helps optimization.

It allows explicit aliasing using the EQUIVALENCE statement, which declares that 2 variables of arbitrary types and names are allocated at the same memory address.

The C language has taken the keyword "union" from the language ALGOL 68, but instead of implementing true unions like in the original language (i.e. with tags handled by the compiler and with type safety) it has implemented a version of the FORTRAN EQUIVALENCE, which however is also weaker and less convenient than the FORTRAN declaration (unlike C's union, FORTRAN's EQUIVALENCE also worked for aliasing parts of bigger data structures, e.g. sub-arrays).
by skinnymuch | 2025-09-03 10:05:58+00:00
Consumers aren’t using chrome in 2025 because it’s the best. Not that the vast majority of people would know minor differences. This isn’t when Chrome came out and the differences between other browsers was large.

Monopolies usually don’t maintain their status because they are “the best” and as if consumers also are informed enough to know that. Similar arguments can be made to allow basically all of big tech.

In a better system instead of talking about allowing everything as if corporations are precious individuals, the govt should be creating funded competitors and being much more firm with monopolistic behavior (even if they aren’t legally monopolies)
by rgoulter | 2025-09-03 10:06:43+00:00
> With an LLM, it will never get annoyed, aggravated, think less of the person, or similar.

Between people, it's extremely commonly considered impolite to request excess help from other people. -- So, having an info retrieval / interactive chat which will patiently answer questions is a boon for everyone.

I guess you can try and frame all 'helping' as "you're +1 if you're being helpful", but don't be surprised if not everyone sees things that way all the time.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-03 10:08:33+00:00
> And I understand that debunking low-effort accusations is asymmetric warfare

Is the comment even that unfair? Asserting that it will never pay off because the presentation avoided mentioning anything about the payoff might be a little bit cynical, but not terribly so. It could be fairly presumed that if the project is a clear economic win, they would be proudly bragging about it; and the opposite presumption is also reasonably fair, even if it turns out to be wrong.

And what does such cynicism have to do with "MAGA"? That asserted association seems much worse than the initial cynical assertion.
by coldtea | 2025-09-03 10:09:25+00:00
In certain things it can be better.

Singapore might be a state run authoritatively with the same party in power for 60 years, but you're free to walk around at any time without fear of any crime happening to you. Or public projects that "just work" where in the "western liberal" case their deteriorate or are tied up in bureucracy.

And life if "you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble" is not roses in the west either. From murder by police (e.g. "walking while black") to having stuffed being pinned on you because you're a union activist or for civil rights, etc.

And that's not "now with Trump". That was the case under Obama, Bush, Clinton, all the way to McCarthy, and even all the way after and before the Civil War.
by t_mahmood | 2025-09-03 10:09:42+00:00
> Why don't you send WOL directly over the internet? (You'll need to set up a permanent ARP record on the router.)

Hm, so never tried something like that before actually, I think for OpenWrt I need to install arp packages. I do not have public IP any more though, was getting hammered by bot network and found Tailscale to do what I need.

> Or login into the router and send WoL from there?

Restricted outside access to the router management panel, only port forwarded to the desktop.

> Or have Raspberry always on with ssh? I do not have one, which is why used a mobile, thought to be next best thing. As, power outages happen regularly, I need something that would be able to keep on running.

> Or set a power-on timer in BIOS/UEFI once a day and a shutdown/sleep in cron? (This is also a good failsafe if WoL doesn't work.)

That's easily workable for my setup, actually!

Thank you for giving me the ideas!
by account42 | 2025-09-03 10:09:54+00:00
> I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?

The difference is that the restaurant has a human evaluate if your complaints are valid while Amazon only sees statistics and doesn't care why you might have a high number of returns. The restaurant can also only realistically ban a few worst offenders before that becomes unmanageable for them while Amazon has no such cost associated why banning you. Then there is also the scope of the impact. You likely have many more alternative restaurants you can go to but no one really competes with Amazon as a whole.

> Word travels around, does it not?

Only in extreme cases. You won't be banned from all Restaurants in town just because Bob got offended. With a centralized credit score once you get flagged then those checking it will usually not even talk to you.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-03 10:11:16+00:00
> Finland is still 25% oil for electric generation [1] (and almost 40% fossil fuel). That means a lot of the electricity to heat the sand still comes from oil.

This is not a valid conclusion. Battery projects like this are gonna charge/heat up when the electricity price is low, electricity price is low when supply/demand ratio is high and this often happens when renewable electricity is most available and makes up a disproportionate share of the electricity mix.

Edit: Your graph is not what you say it is, this shows primary energy (i.e. includes fuel/heating/...), not "electric generation". Electricity in Finland is mostly nuclear, wind, hydro and certainly not "40% fossil fuel".
by krig | 2025-09-03 10:11:31+00:00
Sorry to hear that! I haven’t had any such experience, quite the opposite.

But I’m also an old. If someone tells me my code is shit, 1) they are probably right, and 2) I don’t really care. I can probably look at their code and find flaws in it.

In the end, Odin is Bills project and he decides what goes into it, I’m fine with that.
by jfagnani | 2025-09-03 10:12:03+00:00
Thanks!

Elements are kept stable as long as the template containing them is rendered.

The template docs try to get this across by saying that Lit "re-render only the parts of template that have changed." Maybe that needs more detail.

There are details here: https://github.com/lit/lit/blob/main/dev-docs/design/how-lit...
by numpad0 | 2025-09-03 10:12:23+00:00
Those don't look like great numbers, both in each numbers itself as choice of numbers to me - those means US fraction is declining, women is likely now majority, userbase is aging, etc. Time spent for US users seems to be also much worse than other countries, like hours shorter than many developed countries.

Also, my original comment was about bandwidth, and you tried to defend Twitter by user retention figures. Which, to me, somewhat implies that Twitter is not getting the UGC it wants, and the real trends on it is going opposite of directions you desire for whoever you would be.

I'm not sure what positive things to say to whoever inclined to defend the choices it makes, with what happened here. It looks like they are just getting started with the downhill ride.
by coldtea | 2025-09-03 10:12:25+00:00
>Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt

"Eventually discarded when no longer useful" would be a more accurate phrasing. The witch hunts continued under other schemes and for other targets.

>As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.

Well, isn't that the case with every government?
by danhau | 2025-09-03 10:12:48+00:00
These depictions can probably be dismissed, just as any other depiction of Jesus. That painting has been made long after his death. The only clues to his likeness are deductions from biblical texts and historical context. For example, he most likely didn‘t have long hair (1. Corinthians 11), and he also wasn‘t European looking (should be obvious).
by johnisgood | 2025-09-03 10:13:30+00:00
From what I remember, it was supposed to land in vendor/ which is not the core standard library though. Additionally, it is one thing to say the code is shit, and another to say "too many things wrong, fuck off", all while the code did work properly! From what I recall the person said he will continue working on it anyway in his own git repository. I think he could have given pointers of these major flaws (I checked the code and I could not find anything either[1]), which could have not been too major if the code worked properly (there were test cases, it did actually work and there were no memory leaks either, FWIW).

> In the end, Odin is Bills project and he decides what goes into it, I’m fine with that.

Me too. I am just not going to contribute. No big deal.

> I haven’t had any such experience, quite the opposite.

Just to add some positive, too: I have had positive experiences with other contributors.

In any case, I follow the programming language's developers before I contribute, as you may have noticed.

[1] But then again, I do not know the language too well either. Those pointers would have helped me and many others.
by DavidWishengrad | 2025-09-03 10:13:50+00:00
This paper is open for peer and public review and rebuttal.

I am the author of the paper.

It claims to be the most important truth in human discourse.

If you have any sort of legitimate rebuttal, a higher or more important truth to present, or can find anything wrong, please present it. Thank you

I can be reached at davidwishengrad at protonmail dot com if needed.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-09-03 10:14:19+00:00
If they did, and it indicated that it's not just a money pit they would have shared it, so doubtful. As with most things in Europe it was likely done on the basis of a virtue signaling assessment alone. Europe's motto is going to keep saying "we have the resources" until it rapidly runs out of resources.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund will likely be completely gone in 20 years and will leave large swathes of the population without a pension because the Norwegian government works on the philosophy of "it's going to be okay, we have infinite money", already it's showing cracks as the only thing they actually have the money for is to make inflation skyrocket.
by krisoft | 2025-09-03 10:14:58+00:00
> The blind and visually impaired people advocating for this have been conditioned to believe that technology will solve all accessibility problems because, simply put, humans won’t do it.

Technology is not just sprouting out of the ground out of its own. It is humans who are making it. Therefore if technology is helpful it was humans who helped.

> Let’s not mention the fact the particular large language model, LLM called Chat GPT they chose, was never the right kind of machine learning for the task of describing images.

Weird. I would think LLMs are exactly the right kind of tool to describe images. Sadly there is no more detail about what they think would be a better approach.

> I fully predict that blind people will be advocating to make actual LLM platforms accessible

Absolutely. The LLM platforms indeed very much should be accessible. I don't think anyone would have beef with that.

> I also predict web accessibility will actually get worse, not better, as coding models will spit out inaccessible code that developers won’t check or won’t even care to check.

Who knows. Either that, or some pages will become more accessible because the effort of making it accessible will be less on the part of the devs. It probably will be a mixed bag with a little bit of column A and column B.

> Now that AI is a thing now, I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements.

These are all AI. They are all improving leaps and bounds.

> An LLM will always be there, well, until the servers go down

Of course. That is a concern. This is why models you can run yourself are so important. Local models are good for latency and reliability. But even if the model is run on a remote server as long as you control the server you can decide when it becomes shut down.
by skeezyboy | 2025-09-03 10:15:12+00:00
>Especially in HPC there are lots of workloads that do not benefit from SMT...So now you have a choice of either disabling SMT in the bios

Thats madness. Theyre cheaper than their all-core equivalent. Why even buy one in the first place if HT slows down the CPU? Youre still better off with them enabled.
by crote | 2025-09-03 10:15:20+00:00
Rather the opposite, actually.

Air is a pretty good insulator, we wear coats to prevent air from moving around. How do most coats keep you warm? Trapped air.

The London underground is hot because the ground is an okay-ish heat conductor: it carries heat away well enough that for a century it essentially acted as an unlimited heat sink, so during its initial construction they never bothered to build proper ventilation. In fact, it was advertised as the perfect place to stay cool during the summer! But this has gone on for long enough that a significant area around the tubes has gradually warmed up from 14C to 19C-26C, and the smaller temperature gradient from tube-to-ground means less heat is carried away, which means the tubes now stay hotter.

Had ground been a great insulator the Victorians would've had to install a proper ventilation system from the start, and they wouldn't been having this issue right now. On the other hand, had ground been a great conductor this issue would've taken far longer to pop up as the heat would've spread through the ground faster.
by specproc | 2025-09-03 10:15:56+00:00
Yeah, this is it. I've lived under governments of a variety of different stripes in some very different parts of the world, I've lived in war zones. Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.

You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.

The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.

We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.

I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.
by ptero | 2025-09-03 10:17:10+00:00
Undefined behaviors -- yes. But being able to trigger undefined behavior is not a huge foot gun by itself. Starting with good code examples means you are much less likely to trigger it.

Having a good, logical description of supported features, with a warning that if you do unsupported stuff things may break, is much more important than trying to define every possible action in a predictable way.

The latter approach often leads to explosion of spec volume and gives way more opportunities for writing bad code: predictable in execution, but instead with problems in design and logic which are harder to understand, maintain and fix. My 2c.
by eadmund | 2025-09-03 10:17:46+00:00
> But would you want the NRA to control the social credit system regulating a firearm purchase?

I prefer that to Chase controlling it: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/19617/00019768782300... (the link details an instance in which Chase was alleged to have debanked a bipartisan, multireligious charity headed by a former U.S. governor, senator and ambassador). The NRA would probably let me buy the gun, after all!
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-03 10:17:49+00:00
>They are in no way entitled to see your pay slip

They absolutely do in Germany and Austria. Renting is almost impossible without pay slips from LOCAL employers. Pay slips from your previous EU country don't count. So relocating is a huge bitch.

>Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).

It immediately becomes the landlord's problem here when they're legally not allowed to evict you once you stop paying rent. So they're trying to be 110% sure you're the ideal tenant who always pays on time. Especially since for many private landlords the rent you pay them is also their mortgage payment to the bank.

>You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.

Deposits don't mean you're able to keep paying rent since that deposit might be borrowed money or from illicit activities. Landlords want to see stable employment (well known employer, that you're past probation period, etc), not that you have a lot of random money in your pocket when you sign the contract.

I don't support this status quo, but it is what it is because it's a sellers' market and governments don't want to change that.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-03 10:17:54+00:00
With indices what you say can be implemented trivially, much simpler than with pointers, by always incrementing a reallocated index (i.e. an index extracted from the free list) with the array size and always addressing the array with the indices modulo the array size.

With the array size chosen to be a power of two, this adds negligible overhead in time and no overhead in space.
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 10:18:39+00:00
I agree with some of what you're saying; some of the well known risks of working in C are because it's a small standard. But much of the undefined behaviour was deliberately made that way to support the hardware of the time - it's hard to be cross-platform on different architectures as a low-level language.

C genuinely is easy to pick up. It is harder to master. And you're right, for many domains, there are better options now, so it may not be worth while mastering it.

Because it's an old language, what it lacks in built-in safety features, is provided by decades of very good surrounding tooling. You do of course need to learn that tooling, and choose to use it!

In the context of Magic Lantern, C is the natural fit. We are working with very tight memory limitations, due to the OS. We support single core 200Mhz targets (ARMv5, no out-of-order or other fancy tricks). We don't include C stdlib, a small test binary can be < 1kB. Normal builds are around 400kB (this includes a full GUI, debug capabilities, all strings and assets, etc).

Canon code is probably mostly C, some C++. We have to call their code directly (casting reverse engineered addresses to function pointers, basically). We don't know what safety guarantees their code makes, or what the API is. Most of our work is interacting with OS or hardware. So we wouldn't gain much by using a safe language for our half.
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-03 10:18:41+00:00
There's a big difference in precisely how the technology is applied.

Transformer models making screen readers better is cool. Companies deciding to fire their human voice actors and replacing all audiobooks with slop is decidedly not cool.

You can really see this happening in translation right now. Companies left and right are firing human translators and replacing their work with slop, and it's a huge step down in quality because AI simply cannot do the previous level of quality. (Mr Chad Gippity isn't going to maintain puns or add notes for references that the new audience won't catch.)

And that's in a market where there is commercial pressure to have quality work. Sloppy AI translations are already hurting sales.

In accessibility, it's a legal checkbox. Companies broadly do not care. It's already nearly impossible to get people to do things like use proper aria metadata. "We're a startup, we gotta go fast, ain't got no time for that".

AI is already being used to provide a legally-sufficient but practically garbage level of accessibility. This is bad.
by rollcat | 2025-09-03 10:20:12+00:00
Asbestos wasn't understood well at first, and its continued use was due to its utility. Practically all countries around the world have successfully regulated/banned it. Removing asbestos is when it becomes most dangerous.

Online banking is dead simple to secure: require a TOTP token. It's something you have (like a debit card) + something you know (PIN/password). The poison being introduced is through a third party, and entirely unrelated to the original function.
by Havoc | 2025-09-03 10:21:26+00:00
Similarly a lot of projects using gradio come with a tunnel/public proxy enabled out of the box. ie instantly publicly accessible just by running it. Behind a long unique uuid looking url which provides some measure of security by obscurity but wow was still surprised first time I saw that.

Must be a good time to be in security space with this sort of stuff plus the inevitable vibe code security carnage