MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 05:35:43+00:00
You have a good point!

First of all, I’m not advocating that people use Fil-C in places where it makes no sense. I wouldn’t want my car’s control system to use it.

But car systems are big if they have 100 million lines of code or maybe a billion. But your desktop OS is at like 10 billion and growing! Throw in the code that runs in servers that you rely on and we might be at 100 billion lines of C or C++
by bambax | 2025-09-05 05:36:45+00:00
I did the same as the OP except I use Amperfy on iOS and Tempo on Android. Navidrome is super simple to setup and finds new music immediately. Never breaks. It's not exposed to the Internet directly but via a Cloudflare tunnel (like the OP) and an obscure url that I'm the only one to use.

I also wrote a little Python script to transform Spotify playlists into Youtube lists of urls. Shazam can add songs to a Spotify playlist so it's a way to discover new music.
by godelski | 2025-09-05 05:37:27+00:00
> I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious.

Because that results in less education time. If you do homework in class then you have to give up lecture time.

Of course, the other option is to extend school time.

Here's a good litmus test: if something seems very obvious, you're likely missing some hidden complexity.

It's not a perfect test, but if it's obvious to you and not to the people closer to the problem then there really should be alarm bells going off in your head. That feeling of "this is weird" is your brain telling you "I'm missing something" not "everyone is so dumb" (well... not mutually exclusive)
by chris_wot | 2025-09-05 05:38:01+00:00
You think that's bad? I got permanently banned and I started many important things on Wikipedia - like the admins noticeboard, a number of Australia communities, and the [citation needed]. I wrote dozens of articles about Australian women - none of them gave a shit and so I'm not able to write about them any more.

They are, by and large, a bunch of horrible bullies and losers - many Wikipedians don't actually care about articles creation or actual content, they fiddle about with URL fixes and categorisation. There was one horrible human being called BrownHairedGirl who did all these things and almost destroyed the place before they got indefinitely banned also.
by nixosbestos | 2025-09-05 05:38:40+00:00
> It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.

Bro it's not that complicated. You hand waved ("wfh is somehow fine for small companies but breaks down for large companies") and *offer zero explanation for why that would be the case, or how that makes any sense*. For what size does it break down? What org structure? Is it 20 people? 200? 2000? 20000?

And no, me saying that you can manage employees, remote or not, is certainly fking not me being "unable" to "fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager". It's actually what I said in my comment, it's me calling out a made-up, unsubstantiated, hand-wavey claim, that you sure keep dancing around to reassert that devs are lazy and stealing and need to be babysat in an office.

Whatever. Idgaf, I'll never work in an office again, and anyone that you ever manage will leave soon enough anyway before that's even the issue.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 05:38:55+00:00
I'm skeptical that PCC can work in practice with existing social practices around software development, because neither users nor implementors can tell the difference between a correct verifier and one that has flaws that aren't being actively exploited yet, but they can sure tell the difference between a fast system and a slow one.

The incentives are strong to drive the runtime cost as close to zero as possible, which involves making your proof-checking system so expressive that it's hard to get right. The closer you get to zero, the more performance-sensitive your userbase gets. No part of your userbase is actively testing the parts of your verifier that reject programs; they try to avoid generating programs that get rejected, and as the verifier gets larger and larger, it requires more and more effort to generate code that exploits one of its bugs, although there are more and more of them. As the effort required to slip malicious code past the verifier grows, the secret in-house tools developed by attackers gives them a larger and larger advantage over the defenders.

Continued "maintenance" applied to the verifier drive its size and complexity up over time, driving the probability of a flaw inexorably toward 100%, while, if it is not "maintained" through continuous changes, it will break as its dependencies change, it will be considered outdated, and nobody will understand it well enough to fix a bug if it does surface.

We've seen this happen with Java, and although it's clearly not unavoidable in any kind of logical sense, it's a strong set of social pressures.

Dynamic checking seems much more memetically fit: developers will regularly write code that should fail the dynamic checks, and, if it passes instead, they will send you an annoyed bug report about how they had to spend their weekend debugging.
by ehnto | 2025-09-05 05:42:05+00:00
It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about.

Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it.

In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a spiral of reinforcing thoughts that increase my anxiety.

Paying attention to the feeling, not the thoughts, lets me break the spiral and attempt to free my thoughts. The feeling can linger for some time though, given its a chemical process to flush it all out from the body. During that period it's more likely I might end up thinking about the topic again so it's precarious still.
by nixosbestos | 2025-09-05 05:42:43+00:00
> firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs.

Do you even hear yourself?

I'm done. You are so completely entirely missing the point it's not funny.

You can say that about ALMOST ANYTHING!!!! But somehow WFH is the line where businesses should put their foot down, give up on actually managing people (at all!), and then treat every employee like a child, because "firing is disruptive"? But hey, instead, if we acted like they were conscripted property, we can force them into the office, and... Then... manage them into compliance... Right.

Regular alcohol and marijuana use directly affect employee behavior. As you say, firing is disruptive. We should probably piss test every employee, right?

This is not a serious conversation. I can't believe this is how you doubled down.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-09-05 05:44:03+00:00
$2400? Mate, I have a free GitHub Copilot subscription (Microsoft hands them out to active OSS developers), and work pays for my Claude Code via our cloud provider backend (and it costs less per working day than my morning Monster can). LLM inference is _cheap_ and _getting cheaper every month_.

> No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental model of how the code works.

This is not exclusive with AI tools:

- Use AI to write dev tools to help you write and verify your handwritten code. Throw the one-off dev tools in the bin when you're done.

- Handwrite your code, generate test data, review the test data like you would a junior engineer's work.

- Handwrite tests, AI generate an implementation, have the agent run tests in a loop to refine itself. Works great for code that follows a strict spec. Again, review the code like you would a junior engineer's work.
Show HN: My AI agent has a browser to fix hallucinated selectors
by asen_not_taken | 2025-09-05 05:44:03+00:00
Hey HN,

As the title says, I built this because AI-generated web automation scripts are often full of hallucinated CSS selectors. They’re simply guessing because they can't see the actual page.

My tool, Slash, fixes this by giving the agent a real browser.

It sees the page: Before writing any code, it loads the site and analyzes the live DOM. This leads to much more reliable Playwright scripts.

You get the code: It outputs the full script, not just a data file. This means no black boxes. You can run it, put it in a cron job, and modify it however you want.

The goal is to get the benefits of AI for automation without sacrificing control and verifiability.

Since we're here, I made a short demo of Slash scraping the HN front page: https://slash.cool/slash-demo-hn.mp4

I'm here to answer questions and would love your feedback.

You can try the tool itself here: https://slash.cool/
by delusional | 2025-09-05 05:44:38+00:00
I think I may think about it in the opposite direction. It's not that the artist makes too little, for me it's just that the platform makes too much. Spotify _should_ be taking a 5-10% cut, and anything above that is unfair.

That's not enforcable or anything, but it is why I think artist are paid too little while also thinking the subscription is expensive.
by ajb | 2025-09-05 05:44:56+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?"

Even if it worked for normal data flow, that's the sort of thing that's bound to introduce covert channels, I'd have thought. To start with I guess you have immediately disabled the mitigations of meltdown/spectre, because doesn't that happen when you switch processes?
by kouteiheika | 2025-09-05 05:45:42+00:00
> including adversarial nations like China—continue accessing our services in various ways [...] our commitment to ensuring that transformative AI capabilities advance democratic interests

Ah, right, China, the only country which actually releases open weight frontier models. Anthropic definitely doesn't want Chinese companies to use their APIs because of their commitment to "advance democratic interests", and not because they want to prevent them from distilling their models and releasing them for free for everyone to use. Definitely. Fortunately since this use case is already breaking the TOS I doubt any extra legal maneuvering is going to stop anyone.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-05 05:45:53+00:00
Thanks for telling me what my experience is, but I can think of plenty of C/C++ code on my machine that would draw ire from ~all it's users if it got 2x slower. I already mentioned browsers but I would also be pretty miffed if any of these CPU-bound programs got 2x slower:

* Compilers (including clang)

* Most interpreters (Python, Ruby, etc.)

* Any simulation-heavy video game (and some others)

* VSCode (guess I should've stuck with Sublime)

* Any scientific computing tools/libraries

Sure, I probably won't notice if zsh or bash got 2x slower and cp will be IO bound anyway. But if someone made a magic clang pass that made most programs 2x faster they'd be hailed as a once-in-a-generation genius, not blown off with "who really cares about C/C++ performance anyway?". I'm not saying there's no place for trading these overheads for making C/C++ safer, but treating it as a niche use-case for C/C++ is ludicrous.
by acchow | 2025-09-05 05:47:00+00:00
I was thinking more of gp's comment "and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging"

Wise isn't great for paying suppliers. Their business account limit for debit/credit is $2k, and for ACH is $50k. They have higher limits if you fund with wire, but then we're back at the starting problem again...

And still, you have no way of knowing that the receiving party actually got it. On a blockchain, the source-of-truth "database" is public.
by mek6800d2 | 2025-09-05 05:47:12+00:00
> Not understanding English from the early 1800's ... I can sometimes more easily understand written Greek, Spanish or French (I don't speak any of those languages) than old English.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, written in the 1790s and published in 1813, is more difficult to read than 3 languages one doesn't speak?

Yes, a modern reader may not understand a word here and there. I myself did a double take when reading a Victorian mystery novel by T.W. Speight and the detective was discussing his cup of tea while discussing the case. I didn't throw up my hands and stop reading. I understood the general drift of the scene and continued on enjoying the rest of the novel. I later confirmed that "discuss" had an archaic meaning of consuming a food or beverage, but even if I hadn't, I still would have enjoyed the book. And "whiskers" in a Dickens' novel per the article is not exactly a show-stopper.

Padding is perhaps a problem in books (especially when it takes 100-200 pages to get into a novel!), but I see a worse problem online: everyone and their brother gaming the systems (LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, Quora, Reddit, etc.) by posting articles about technical topics about which they know very little and getting the content very, very wrong. Incorrect information which then gets disseminated to countless readers who accept it as the gospel truth and who, in turn, then disseminate it in one form or another to countless others.

The enormity of the flood of information on the internet also makes it difficult to distinguish multiple perspectives, let alone decide which perspectives are credible. The reader has to rely on -- just like with books -- experience and will eventually learn to reach out to respected sources and references.
by whizzter | 2025-09-05 05:47:26+00:00
Like people mention, hugetlb,etc could be an improvement, but the core issue holding it it down probably has to do with mmap, 4k pages and paging behaviours, mmap will cause faults for each "small" 4k page not in memory, causing a kernel jump and then whatever machinery to fill in the page-cache (and bring up data from disk with the associated latency).

This in contrast with the io_uring worker method where you keep the thread busy by submitting requests and letting the kernel do the work without expensive crossings.

The 2g fully in-mem shows the CPU's real perf, the dip to 50gb is interesting, perhaps when going over 50% memory the Linux kernel evicts pages or something similar that is hurting perf, maybe plot a graph of perf vs test-size to see if there is an obvious cliff.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-05 05:47:31+00:00
> The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value.

The value from value doesn't come by default; it's not a given.

Neither of those things create value unless they are actually used.

Fixing a tractor you neither use nor trade does not create value.

Growing potatoes you will never eat does not create value.

So, sure, labour can create value, but it's not a guarantee. Trade, OTOH, always creates value.
by linvs | 2025-09-05 05:48:07+00:00
As someone that works closely with WiFi data and given their very low error (< 0.5 BMP MAE) I'd love to see them address a few key points:

- Whether train/test splits were participant-wise to avoid data leakage.

- How the system performs at elevated or highly variable heart rates.

- Results from "placebo" or empty-room baselines to rule out false positives, typically done with bags of rice/water (used to simulate mass).
by MaxikCZ | 2025-09-05 05:48:33+00:00
Its not even about clickbait for me, but I really dont want to go parse an article to figure out what is meant by "Memory is slow, Disk is fast". You want "clickbait" to make people click and think, we want descriptive tittles to know what the article is about before we read it. That used to be original purpose of tittles, we like it that way.

Its like as if youd label your food product "you wont believe this", and forced customers to figure what it is from ingredients list.
by peepee1982 | 2025-09-05 05:49:55+00:00
Your mom's boyfriend probably already knows this, but just in case: I once suffered from loose crystals in my inner ear (probably due to stress and burnout) and had such bad vertigo that I thought I was going to die. There are exercises that move the crystals back to where they belong, where they get absorbed and metabolized again. It's called Epley maneuver, and while it can be extremely uncomfortable and should preferably be done under supervision (some people throw up when doing it) it solves the issue quickly and pretty much permanently.

I've heard of people who lived months or years even before figuring this out.
by boxed | 2025-09-05 05:50:12+00:00
> Only cladistically

"Only cladistically" is a bit like saying "only in reality" imo. :P

> As far as I understand, at least the common ancestor of all fish was still a fish.

Well.. eel-like probably more I'd guess. But yea.

The issue with "fish" is that people want it to be cladistic (trout and shark are fish) AND function (whales are not fish), and potentially also another anti-function (eels are not fish). You can't have it both/all three ways.

With crabs and trees that's 100% function, and that's fine imo.
by tangled | 2025-09-05 05:50:54+00:00
This feels like one of those rather rare projects that is both sailing pretty close to research, and also yielding industrially useful results -- I love it! Normally I'd expect to see something like this coming out of one of the big tech companies, where there are enough advertising megabucks to pay a small team to work on a project like this (providing someone can make the business case...). So I'm curious: what was the initial motivation for this work? Assuming this is not a passion project, who is funding it? How many person years of work has this involved? What is the end game?
by cycomanic | 2025-09-05 05:51:08+00:00
While we are talking about fun facts of the Fourier transform, the transfer function of the DFT is a sinc. That's how OFDM works, it performs an FFT on parallel input symbol streams. If you look at the spectrum of your signal it's sinc (approximately because they are truncated) channels spaced at 1/symbol rate which don't exhibit (theoretically if they weren't truncated) any interchannel interference.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-05 05:51:51+00:00
That has been the qualm of programming since the Assembly days, unfortunately most developers aren't Ivan Suntherland, Alan Kay, Steve Jobs, Bret Victor, and other similar minded visionaries.

Most of us sadly cargo cult urban myths and only believe in what is running in front of them like Saint Thomas, as to have any kind of feeling how great some things could be like.

Hence why so many UNIX and C clones, instead of creating something new, to be honest those two guys were also visionaries despite some of the flaws, back in 1970's.
by nixosbestos | 2025-09-05 05:52:13+00:00
> People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.

> But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.

Haha oh my god, what? Whatever bro, you go for it. Lick That Boot!

Also what in the actual universe are you even talking about? I guarantee my net worth is more than yours was at my age. Also tech workers have been serially conspired against from a wages standpoint. Again, effectively you saying ~"ICs should kiss our asses they have it so good salary wise". One of the most obnoxious people I've ever talked to.
by Someone | 2025-09-05 05:53:02+00:00
> I think certainly the direction of copying is geos copying from Mac.

Given that the Mac shipped with those patterns in early 1984 and GEOS in 1986, it can’t be Mac copying GEOS.

That doesn’t mean it was GEOS copying Mac, though. Various horizontal and vertical stripes, block patterns and attempts to get a range of grays easily can be parallel evolution. 27 out of 32 seems a bit much, though.
by rwmj | 2025-09-05 05:53:16+00:00
I'm at a conference at the moment so can't give a lengthy answer, but I'm the maintainer of virt-v2v, one large open source OCaml project (large if you include all the dependencies) which generates actual multi-millions in annual revenue, but is often overlooked in all this discussion of the OCaml ecosystem. Glad to talk by email some time.

[BTW we currently have open positions for two developers]
by safety1st | 2025-09-05 05:55:40+00:00
I didn't realize this until a couple of years ago (in my 40s) but boy did it alter my perspective on life. And I've heard what you're saying here from a couple other people in their 60s too. When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."

But as you age your biology will force a choice upon you, one option is you spend progressively more time maintaining your health, in which case it drops off MUCH less than you'd expect. Or you can neglect that maintenance, in which case your quality of life WILL drop off in a big way due to health problems.

That's what it is, it's a choice, one you don't get to opt out of, but there is a path where you're in remarkably good shape for less effort than you would probably assume... for most people even just 2-3 hours a week of moderate exercise at the gym is probably a game changer.

I'm a little worried about the health of younger people today, because I read the statistics about obesity, blood pressure, ED and so on all going up for them. I'm also occasionally taking 20-30 minute walks with people in their 20s, who want to take a car, they're exhausted at the end of it, and they can't keep up with me. I get it, I was like that a couple years ago before I started hitting the gym, but really, at 25, you can't handle under a half hour of brisk walking? Oof, habits sure have changed.
by 3uler | 2025-09-05 05:55:46+00:00
This is exactly how you bootstrap payment rails to compete with Visa/MC. Merchants would do anything to reduce the 2-3% they’re bleeding to the card schemes. Everyone focuses on consumer adoption, but merchants push payment methods customers don’t love all the time - ACH transfers, store cards, cash discounts. If stablecoins can cut interchange from 2-3% to near zero, merchants will drive adoption through discounts and incentives. Gas stations where card fees destroy margins, high-volume retailers - get a few major players offering meaningful stablecoin discounts and suddenly consumers have a reason to figure out the wallets.
by nl | 2025-09-05 05:56:04+00:00
Reuters is left-leaning? How so? It's a new agency and as far as I've seen just sticks to publishing summaries of events.

I had a look at the most potentially controversial topics I could find right now, and I say they seem fair. For example: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/dozens-detained-us-immigrat... (on ICE arrests in NY) and https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-would-wider-r... (on recognition of a Palestinian state).

Indeed, Wikipedia lists it as a good source[1]. It's worth comparing that to outlets like CNN (reliable, but "... talk show content should be treated as opinion pieces. Some editors consider CNN biased, though not to the extent that it affects reliability.") or The Wall Street Journal ("Most editors consider The Wall Street Journal generally reliable for news. Use WP:NEWSBLOG to evaluate the newspaper's blogs, including Washington Wire. Use WP:RSOPINION for opinion pieces.")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... ("Reuters is a news agency. There is consensus that Reuters is generally reliable.")
by vintermann | 2025-09-05 05:57:08+00:00
> Can you do fractional reserve banking with stablecoins where you lend out the underlying dollars to people and don't have full reserves?

In a manner of speaking. You need to trust that the issuers have the reserve they claim. There's no way around this, unless the asset in reserve is equally ethereal (i.e. another cryptocurrency).

Tether, for one, almost certainly doesn't have the reserves.