MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chpill | 2025-09-12 16:36:10+00:00
When you have a really good JIT, as Java does, this tradeoff is gone

Is there a way to visualize the machine code generated by the JVM when optimizing the same kind of code as the examples shown in the talk you mention? I tried putting the following into godbolt.org, but i'm not sure I'm doing it right:

public class DontForgetToFlush { public static void example(java.io.BufferedWriter w) throws java.io.IOException { w.write("a"); w.write("b"); w.write("c"); w.write("d"); w.write("e"); w.write("f"); w.write("g"); w.flush(); } public static void main(String... args) throws java.io.IOException { var os = new java.io.OutputStreamWriter(System.out); var writer = new java.io.BufferedWriter(os, 100); example(writer); } }
by not-a-cat | 2025-09-12 16:36:39+00:00
Tufalabs | COO & Senior research/engineers | Full Time | Zurich, Onsite | 100-130k CHF | https://tufalabs.ai/

Tufalabs is an independent AI research lab in Zurich, focused on high-impact academic-style AI research and large-scale LLM development. We care about compute (currently, 6× DGX B200, 2× NVL72 GB200 incoming). Our mission is to push the frontier of AI science while open-sourcing results and building the engineering muscle to pre- and post-train cutting-edge language models. The ultimate goal is automating AI research, with a strong focus on alignment and safety.

I am looking for a COO to help scale from ~10 to ~15 people.

Ideally you care about AI research, you are excited about the idea of helping us move faster, you like to keep red-tape low, you are a technical person who can create automated processes, and have experience owning and running operations at a startup.

We are also open to senior researchers, comp negotiable

If interested, email me at benjamin at tufalabs.ai
by bluefirebrand | 2025-09-12 16:36:48+00:00
If the culture was "if a methhead tries to stab you, you can and should use any force necessary to stop them" that might be different

But no, the culture in Canada is "Check your privilege and let the poor methhead stab you"

No joke, people in Canada genuinely do not think they can or should use force to protect themselves from dangerous threats
by ekelsen | 2025-09-12 16:36:51+00:00
I like "between each power of 2, there are the same number of numbers."

So between 1/2 and 1 there are the same number of numbers as between 1024 and 2048. If you have 1024 numbers between each power of 2, then each interval is 1/2048 in the first case and 1 in the second case.

I reality there are usually:

bfloat16: 128 numbers between each power of 2

float16: 1024 numbers between each power of 2

float32: 2*23 numbers (~8 million) between each power of 2

float64: 2*52 numbers (~4.5 quadrillion) between each power of 2
by s0nali19 | 2025-09-12 16:37:24+00:00
In this tutorial, we’ll cover:

What Azure DevOps pipelines are and how they work Step-by-step instructions to create a pipeline (both Classic UI and YAML) Advanced features such as multi-stage pipelines, approvals, and gates How to integrate code quality tools (e.g., SonarQube, CodeAnt.ai) Common pipeline errors and fixes Whether you’re new to Azure Pipelines or looking to migrate from Classic to YAML, this guide will help you set up efficient, reliable CI/CD workflows.
by munksbeer | 2025-09-12 16:37:31+00:00
> the price of allowing a population to arm themselves

It is very hard for someone living in the UK to understand things from the US context. It just comes across as bizarre that people accept that school children will relatively frequently die for this. I do not feel impelled at all to own a gun. It isn't something that I ever think about.

So when you say things like the phrase above, it is very alien to most people from the UK. We just don't understand what the benefits are of owning guns that justify the negatives.

By the way, this isn't an attack, it is just me sharing a state of mind with you.
by aynyc | 2025-09-12 16:37:45+00:00
I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground. Ukraine right now needs to invest in offensive capability, not defensive capability. If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.

In simplest term, it's like your neighbor parks their car on your driveway, you get police to issue fines, or maybe even get it towed. But your neighbor has money, so they keep paying fines, etc.. Your whole neighborhood supports you, so they would call the cops for you, go to town hall and all of that. In the end, you'll never win and get your parking space back. The only way is to park your and all your supporters' cars in their driveway, give them a taste of their own medicine.
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-12 16:37:50+00:00
I have also lost a friend to heroin (well, probably fent... it was the early days of that, and we suspect that nobody knew how to dose properly...) and so I appreciate your tangent.

One of the things we've learned up here in Canada over the last couple decades is the need to understand that some people just cannot be sober. They will not be, and they will do anything to not be, ranging from the familiar drugs to whatever they can find (gasoline, inhalants, etc). Obviously, there are worse and better choices in this range of options, and there are more and less self destructive outcomes. Harm reduction has become a key strategy; what can we do that will help keep these people from hurting themselves and others?

We've achieved some manner of success helping prevent people from OD'ing, getting needle-transmitted drugs, etc. which helps them and helps all of us at large (in the most utilitarian sense, it keeps social healthcare costs lower). What we've failed at is preventing them from hurting others, unfortunately.

In the long run, I think that what we're going to need is better drugs. We have to find something that makes people feel as good as they need to feel, without all the massively negative side effects of heroin, meth, etc. that result in wrecked lives. Healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry should seriously be looking at it this way; not just working on antidepressants and other clinical meds that are trying to get people to a stable "normal", but drugs that actually make you feel good so that they can displace heroin / fentanyl, without the downsides.

Yes, we would still see people addicted to that.... <sips coffee> <watches guy across the street smoking>
by esbranson | 2025-09-12 16:37:53+00:00
This is wrong. Many US colleges don’t get the “top students” from other countries but on the contrary get absolutely horrible students from other countries, but they pay more than mediocre-but-better American students. American students do not see any discount for it, savings are not passed to students. A majority of US universities are not top-tier Ivy League schools. It may be different for those schools and for PhD programs.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-12 16:38:08+00:00
> why should I pay "market rate" German salaries when I can hire someone in Cluj, Lodz, Brno, or Sofia in the €20k-40k range, and be given a €5k-20k per head tax holiday along with fairly low corporate taxes from these countries.

It's not all about labor cost. For example some big companies opened large offices in Germany not because labor there is cheaper or smarter, but because they're the biggest regulator in Europe so hiring a lot of people there is a good way to gain political favoritism at EU level.

But yeah, if you want bang for the buck workers that take Jira tickets as input and churn out git commits, you can't beat eastern Europe.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-12 16:39:15+00:00
> They replaced that with ease by issuing work visas to whoever wanted.

Generously setting aside the broader general question of factual accuracy of your statement...

Work Visa is not the same thing as freedom of movement

Let us revisit the example of seasonal farm labour:

Picking is a skilled task. You are paid by the piece, ergo to make good money you have to pick many pieces, and you have to pick every single one in a suitably skilled manner to avoid undue damage.

During the season, skilled pickers, mostly of Eastern European origin, would travel on coaches through Europe from farm-to-farm to pick and earn good money before returning home at the end of the season.

No prior visa application required, just turn up and leave when done.

Pre-Brexit, this "picking tour" would include the UK of course. And it would be double win-win for the pickers because GBP was traditionally strong against their home currencies. So earning in GBP gave them a standard of living boost back home.

Now post-Brexit, no UK citizen wants to be a seasonal picker. And nobody from abroad is going to go through the time (and expense !!) of getting a visa for seasonal picking.
by garrettgarcia | 2025-09-12 16:39:23+00:00
> and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.

Agreed. No matter which side of the issue one is on, the fact you and everyone else who explains the incentive structure is getting downvoted to hell and receiving eloquent responses like "Bull fucking shit dude" is really pathetic.

Is HN really just another emotionalist monoculture echo chamber now? We're downvoting everything we disagree with whether it's true or not? Count me out.
by s20n | 2025-09-12 16:39:27+00:00
Speaking from personal experience, Scheme looks deceptively simple but it is one of the hardest languages to write a compiler for.

I say this mainly because of 2 things:

1. Hygienic Macros (You practically have a whole another language inside the language)

2. First Class Continuations (There is no good way to achieve this other than doing a CPS transform on the AST)
by TheGRS | 2025-09-12 16:39:31+00:00
I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"

I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-12 16:40:16+00:00
Similarly, in carnivore circles... doctors will try to put you on metformin or other medications when you hit 5.7 even though you do emphatically not have elevated glucose levels. The working hypothesis is that the cells are living longer so seeing slightly higher total glycation.

Of course this is similar to ongoing lack of understanding in terms of cholesterol health. I've learned to pretty much only care about my TG/HDL ratio.

Aside: my mostly carnivore/keto diet is pretty much the only course of diabetes treatment that has worked well for me over time... Trulicity/Ozempic ruined my life, and I've responded badly to very badly to almost every medication I've ever been given.
by fpoling | 2025-09-12 16:40:28+00:00
Russia has started to fly Shahed drones much higher after Ukrainians became effective with shooting low-flying ones with mobile low cost AAA guns. This made drones easier to detect with radars and shoot with missiles, but missiles cost like 10-100 times more then drones and is not sustainable.

Russia also started to deploy mobile anti-drone guns and there a lot of vides that show their effectiveness but Ukraine still fly drones low as Russia still willing to use expensive missiles against them on massive scale.
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-12 16:41:19+00:00
Yeah, projecting onto a plane instead of a... spherical dome? means that things at the border of your screen are more visible than the things at its middle which definitely not how eyes usually work.

It's especially glaring when the far plane serves as the place where the view-distance limiting fog is rendered: if there is some thing barely visible before you, turn 45% to the side, and you'll see that thing very clearly at the side of your view.
by ImJamal | 2025-09-12 16:41:21+00:00
> decried Democrats (and anyone not straight white) as non human enemies, and you don't see violence

I haven't seen any statement where he said they were non-humans? Care to provide a source?

> Before it was reported he died, the MAGA cult leader guy explicitly called for violence in his name.

Who is the MAGA cult guy? Are you talking about Trump?
by diggan | 2025-09-12 16:41:23+00:00
> I don't like straight displays, things at the corners are a different size than things in the middle, because they are further from my head.

Are you sitting really close or have a really enormous monitor? Measuring how I'm sitting right now, my nose is exactly 61cm from the center-center of my monitor, and ~72cm between my nose and any of the corners, and it's a 32" monitor.

I'm usually sensitive to things not being 100% straight/level/aligned, and if I create five identically sized windows and put them in the middle and one in each corner, I see no difference between them.
by 3vidence | 2025-09-12 16:41:46+00:00
Honestly in day to day programming I find data types & associated APIs are so so much more important than algorithms.

I would rather work with a flexible data type with suboptimal performance than a brittle data type that maybe squeezes out some extra performance.

Your example of in-place array mutation feels like a good example of such a thing. I feel like there should be a category of interviewing questions for "code-safety" not just performance.
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-12 16:42:12+00:00
> It is not at all proven that a free market will naturally devolve into a monopoly.

I think it comes down to the category of item being offered in the market. Some things naturally lend themselves to monopolies; it feels like perhaps it's based on factors like the difficulty of entering the market with a new product at all, the amount of coordination and manpower required to field it, and the cost efficiencies of having a singular producer vs. many.

There are certainly cases where we see duopolies or triopolies etc. where one really-well-run company might be more efficient, from a labour standpoint; but then, in turn, we all benefit from having a redundant array of supply chains.

There are other cases where we absolutely want a monopoly, such as with policing, or (in many countries) with healthcare, because they apply to everyone and being a consumer of the service is not exactly optional.
by w10-1 | 2025-09-12 16:43:13+00:00
Yes, it is a death spiral; if you are to lead them, you have to know what to fix when, to avoid making things worse.

The solution is typically not just to fix their code. They got in over their heads by charging ahead and building something they'll regret, but their culture (and likely the interviewer personal self-regard) depends on believing their (current) tech leaders.

So yes, the interviewer is most comfortable if you chase and find the ball they're hiding.

But the leadership question is whether you can relieve them of their ignorance without also stripping their dignity and future prospects.

I've found (mostly with luck) that they often have a sneaking suspicion that something isn't right, but didn't have the tools or pull to isolate and address it. As a leader if you can elicit that, and then show some strategies for doing so, you'll improve them and the code in a way that encourages them that what was hard to them is solvable with you, which helps them rely on you for other knotty problems.

It's not really that you only live once; it's that this opportunity is here now and should have your full attention, and to be a leader you have to address it directly but from everyone's perspective.

Even if you find you'd never want to work with them, you'd still want to leave them feeling clearer about their code and situation.
by kragen | 2025-09-12 16:43:22+00:00
But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.

Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?

> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.
by sippeangelo | 2025-09-12 16:43:58+00:00
I like my curved ultra-wide. I didn't at first, but my brain has very noticeably adapted to where curved things on it appear straight just fine. I noticed this when I went back to the office after a few weeks absence, where I have a regular flat pancake screen in 16:9, and straight text looked CURVED in the opposite direction!

Brains are weird.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-12 16:43:59+00:00
> Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.

I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-12 16:44:02+00:00
>Generously setting aside the broader general question of factual accuracy of your statement...

Spare me your generosity, because I'm bringing receipts.

| Year | UK Immigration (K/000s) | |------|-------------------------| | 2014 | 630 | | 2015 | 630 | | 2016 | 650 | | 2017 | 617 | | 2018 | 580 | | 2019 | 677 | | 2020 | 616 | | 2021 | 1,100 | | 2022 | 1,200 | | 2023 | 1,326 | | 2024 | 948 |

If you'll notice, immigration virtually doubled after Brexit thanks to the government opening the doors and rubberstamping visas till 2024.
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-12 16:44:15+00:00
> a market that is controlled by a monopoly is not a free market.

In other words, the thing you are talking about _does not exist_ except in libertarian fantasies. Without a government (the monopoly on force in a region, that controls the markets within) providing the backbone for this - i.e. with features such as courts, police, mint - there is no freedom, because an aggrieved party has no recourse other than violence.
by labcomputer | 2025-09-12 16:44:16+00:00
> It's also weird to think that someone with a rare, degenerative illness should have to evaluate whether their quality or length of life is "worth" the money that a specific specialist will cost.

But all countries do that cost-benefit analysis all the time.

Not every procedure or medication will be administered to the patient, even when those procedures and medications have been approved for use in a particular country.
by binarymax | 2025-09-12 16:45:00+00:00
A loonnngggg time ago when I was green, and wasn't taught about constraint solving in my State University compsci program, I encountered the problem when trying to help a friend with his idea.

He wanted to make an app to help sports club owners schedule players for the day based on a couple simple rules. I thought this was going to be easy, and failed after not realizing what I was up against. At the time I didn't even know what I didn't know.

I often look back on that as a lesson of my own hubris. And it's helped me a lot when discussing estimates and timelines and expectations.
by rat_on_the_run | 2025-09-12 16:45:17+00:00
This website looks terrible on mobile. It shows a horizontal scroll bar any time I do a vertical scroll and there's no space for horizontal scroll in the first place. It has very large floating header and footer such that the actual content occupies little space. The footer is "ask AI" and I expected to be able to close it. When I select some text, the floating menu appears above the header and not at the place I long pressed.

While writing this comment, the website went to a screen saver state, displaying meaningless animations. I also want less white space but this website is not doing that. I honestly don't want to visit that website for a second time.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 16:45:50+00:00
> The fact that you bring up paid work shows you're happy to accept idea that support for things is only worth what people will pay for it. Consider how that fits with corporatization, and consider how that fits with open source in general.

No, I bring up paid work because somebody needs to do the work. Either do the work yourself, or pay someone to do the work.

If you are not willing to do either than shut up: you get no voice. While you can ask someone else to do something, you don't get to force them.

I'm not willing to develop X11. Thus I'm going to let the people who are doing the work do that work even if I don't agree.
by buu700 | 2025-09-12 16:46:09+00:00
I understand where this "exponential backoff" idea is coming from as much as anyone. Chat Control would have been an effective continent-wide ban on my own startup, Cyph, and it's been dismaying to watch the consistent background erosion of civil liberties due to the world's inability to maintain a constant state of SOPA-style blackouts and and similar massive grassroots influence campaigns.

That being said, I agree that it probably isn't the most practical approach. It feels too vague to have any teeth, and if we were to collectively spend political capital to implement something like that, we may as well be more direct and push to constitutionally enshrine digital bills of rights that nip all this nonsense in the bud for good. No more E2EE bans, VPN bans, mandatory backdoors, age verification laws, undermining of Section-230-style protections, or criminalization of online speech — throw it all out, and roadblock any such future attempts.
by startupsfail | 2025-09-12 16:46:14+00:00
That's an interesting argument, about believing in something greater than themselves. But what, if that belief happens to be outdated? This had happened before.

I'm not into demographics planning. But I do have two kids, girls. I certainly want them to have as much autonomy as they could have. A religious argument regarding "fertility rates" that need to be increased is not aligned with that.

I love green spaces. So I simply want to see churches gone, because they compete for the same (very limited) resource. Using the privilege of being grandfathered in.

If they'll move their activity online, it'll not be the case. So I'm happy to see this happening.
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-12 16:46:31+00:00
> a code smell

Smells are changing, friend. Now, when I see a program with 20000 library dependencies that I have to feed into a SAST and SCA system and continually point-version-bump and rebuild, it smells a hell of a lot worse to me than something self-contained.

At this point, I feel like I can protect the latter from being exploited better than the former.
by daft_pink | 2025-09-12 16:47:26+00:00
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.

I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.