MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-09-14 15:10:50+00:00
> Do you have a source for that claim? Genuinely curious.

Hmm, no real source for the claim, just a general interest in the two VMs. JVM for work and V8 partially for work. AFAIK, those are two of the VMs that are getting the highest amount of research in due to how they are positioned.

If you want more general information on V8, I suggest reading about the turbofan design docs [1].

The JVM first started doing a lot of these optimizations with Hotspot. Google poached the engineers that did Hotspot and put them to work on V8. That's why the two VMs tend to share similar optimizations.

> I’ve grown more and more convinced that managed languages are the right move for most code.

I tend to agree, to an extent.

The JVM is very fast, but it's also memory hungry and doesn't give up the memory it claims easily. That's due to the nature of the GC algorithms it employs and some historical constraints which bloat object size. One thing you get out of non-gced languages is much lower memory usage and much better live memory density (when done correctly).

[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sOEF4MlF7LeO7uq-uThJ...
by trinsic2 | 2025-09-14 15:11:08+00:00
Thanks for posting this. I listen to this YouTube Channel called Futurescapes. I think the YouTuber generates sci-fi futuristic soundscapes that help me relax and focus. Im a bit hesitant about AI right now, but I can see some of the benefits like this. It's a good point. We shouldn't be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-14 15:11:19+00:00
These are mistaken arguments. The automation of imagination is not imagination. Efficiency at this stage is total entropy. The point of AI is to make anything seemingly specific and render it arbitrary to the point of pure generalization (which is generic). Remember that images only appear to be specific, that's their illusion that CS took for granted. There appears to be links between images in the absent, but that is an illusion too. There is no total, virtual camera. We need human action-syntax to make the arbitrary (what eventually renders AI infantile, entropic) seem chaotic (imagination). These chasms can never be gapped in AI. These are the limits.
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 15:11:24+00:00
Just as a data point, as a Canadian I had never heard this name before, and I couldn't possibly name a single other WNBA athlete, whereas I could name international female athletes from many other sports. Here in Toronto, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_League_(women%27s_football) (which infamously included a former mayor's niece) is probably better known than the WNBA.

By contrast, the mere words "United States Marine" paint a clear picture of a very particular sort of individual that is instantly legible, internationally.
Show HN: Probably the simplest Reddit-style site you'll ever use
by lakshikag | 2025-09-14 15:11:35+00:00
i built nooki because most community platforms today feel noisy, bloated, and optimized for ad revenue instead of people. reddit’s recent changes pushed me to create something simpler.

current features:

- no ads, no tracking

- text-only posts (no images/media yet unless heavily requested)

- no algorithms. posts in plain chronological order (with hot/new/top sorting)

- communities you can create and moderate yourself (mods can only control their own communities)

- voting + threaded comments

- points system that gives active users a stronger voice

- customizable notifications (decide exactly what you want to be pinged for)

it’s still barebones, but functional. the goal is to keep it simple: a space for conversations without all the noise. i’m soft-launching this today and would love some feedback on what to improve or add next.

i’m working on making nooki open source too as transparency and community involvement are the goal.
Show HN: I Built a Free Site for Students to Test Their Knowledge on Their Notes
by PictureRank | 2025-09-14 15:11:37+00:00
As a former student I created PDFToQuiz to solve I problem I had in college, how could I be sure I knew and understood all the material in the notes if I couldn't test myself.

That's why I built PDFToQuiz, it helps students test thier knowledge on their own notes.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-14 15:11:59+00:00
Yep. There's shit lite and ultra shit where some bet on ultra shit accelerating towards less shit and other believing ultra shit is really a fragrant utopia that smells like roses. Ultra shit really wants permission to start a civil war purge while shit lite is worried about magazine capacity and the "scary look" of forward grips while a flood of diarrhea is already ankle-deep.
by mindslight | 2025-09-14 15:12:11+00:00
It's disingenuous because you're bringing up the lunacy as if its one of your primary concerns while invoking the concept of "integrity". But then you're not actually living out that concern, rather assuaging your own ego by imagining that "the left" is still somehow worse in this measure. You don't get to bemoan societal decay when you're directly contributing to that decay.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-14 15:12:43+00:00
IBM didn't create an innovative product though. If you look at the era, there were dozens of machines of a similar style on the market, either z80 or 8080, 8088, even 8086... but they ran CP/M. PC-DOS was effectively a kind of fork / rip-off of DR's CP/M, but clean room and customized for 8086.

IBM created a rather generic machine using off the shelf components, and someone else's operating system.

Innovation factor was almost zero.

The only advantage it had was it had IBM's name on it, and IBM was still a Really Big Deal then. It brought "respectability" to a thing that before was still a weird subculture.
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-14 15:13:14+00:00
Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.

What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.

Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.
by Mordisquitos | 2025-09-14 15:13:16+00:00
A significant proportion of the administrative area of Madrid is covered by fenced-off forests. Plus it covers other swathes of non-developed land and even most of its airport. The administrative area of Paris proper, on the other hand, is fully urbanised. See here for comparison:

+ Madrid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5326784

+ Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7444

London is a whole different animal. While Madrid and Paris are arguably "similar" cities in terms of urban design and residential density, London and UK cities in general are completely different.
by staplung | 2025-09-14 15:13:29+00:00
Not knocking the method described but I find the name richly ironic since Socrates was not exactly a fan of writing.

""" your affection for [writing] has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. """
by ben_w | 2025-09-14 15:13:40+00:00
Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable.

For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing next to him was pointing a handheld scanner at his belly which revealed he was pregnant with a cat.

Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no recollection of what it was selling.
by WASDAai | 2025-09-14 15:14:18+00:00
1-) Gemini hit #1 on the U.S. App Store off the viral “Nano Banana” editor (10M+ new users, 200M+ edits).

2-) xAI shipped Grok 4 Fast (beta) — ~10× quicker replies via an “early access” toggle, trading depth for speed.

3-) ChatGPT (GPT‑5) rolled out improved reasoning/guardrails — far fewer naive “gotcha” prompts land now.

4-) Claude added auto‑memory (opt‑in) and weekly usage caps; Max ≠ unlimited Opus; user feedback is mixed.

5-) Safety/ops: cross‑chat memory has sparked “delusional” cases; even big labs get hit (e.g., Anthropic’s X hack).

Takeaway: virality + speed tiers now drive adoption more than benchmarks; the app‑store wars are real, and AI is shifting from novelty to consumer infrastructure.
by vidarh | 2025-09-14 15:14:27+00:00
You were half right which is something for stuff this old. I'd entirely forgotten about the font servers, and looking at them, at least xfsft does use FreeType/Xft. It's just that it's still rendering to monochrome bitmaps.

It'd have been a logical extension to figure out the changes to support AA for them as well, so it's a reasonable assumption, especially given the short cutover before Xrender took over and we started getting AA most places. Indeed, Xrender provides all the server-side infra that'd have made it easy-ish to do, by allowing glyph sets with depth...

In retrospect it's also surprising that it wasn't done, because it wouldn't instantly given AA to a lot of applications "stuck" on server side font rendering...
by cvanelteren | 2025-09-14 15:14:35+00:00
Fair points. Behind the scenes there are changes from matplotlib. For example our `GridSpec` assumes a flat layout and does not allow for nesting. This simplifies the alignment when using (nested) panels, colorbars (which are aligned by default) and legends. Additionally it dispatches the plotting over multiple plots by default. We also attempt to make the plotting process a bit more pydanctic by moving `colorbars` to the axis or figure objects and allowing direct plotting for geo plots.

You can consider as a bunch of tools that ease the publication making process but is by no means a panacea, but offers a different flavor to the scientific plotting stack.

Check out our docs or more visual examples.
by groby_b | 2025-09-14 15:14:35+00:00
While the reason is not stated, Occam's razor demands we look for the simplest explanation that ties together all actions of this administration.

And that seems to be dismantling the US as a military and technological superpower - a self-inflicted Morgenthau plan, if you will. We are left to speculate why a US government would want to dismantle the US, and who would benefit.
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-14 15:15:02+00:00
its an interesting take i guess. if you put a lot of love and energy into something, even code, it will give a lot back. easy come easy go is my experience vibe coding. interesting in its own right, but perhaps not an evolution or enhancement. a different way to explore a solution space.

on the flipside i look around, making infinitesimally small steps on my own work, and seeing a lot of people making big strides using agentic AI.

maybe its not for everyone, or maybe not everyone is looking to get the same from what they apply it to. (personal satisfaction and joy vs personal gain)
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-14 15:15:34+00:00
> Your response is you don’t understand it so nobody else should.

Ah I see. I misinterpreted the _you_ in this sentence (to mean me).

My main points still stand though:

1. weather is well understood to exhibit chaotic behavior (in the technical sense, not the colloquial sense) 2. there is an upper bound to accurate (edit: precise) weather forecasting the farther you predict into the future

As an aside, there was no need to get personal. I wasn’t the downvoter but that is very likely why the comment got flagged.
by lapsed_lisper | 2025-09-14 15:15:55+00:00
I don't know about the Unix certification process itself, but the Single Unix Specification explicitly mentions case-insensitivity among non-conforming file system behaviors that are allowed as extensions (in 2.1.1 item 4, third-to-last bullet):

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

So a conforming OS has to make case-sensitive file systems available (which MacOS does: you can create case-sensitive HFS or APFS volumes). But I'm not sure if a conforming OS instance (i.e., running system) has to have any case-sensitive mount points, and either way, AFAIK there's no practical and race-free way for a conforming application to detect whether any particular mount point behaves case-sensitively.

So I believe that as far as the standard goes, a conforming application might run on a conformingly-extended OS where no portion of the the file namespace behaves case-sensitively. IOW, a conforming application cannot rely on case-sensitivity for file names.
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 15:16:26+00:00
> This is a strawman.

No, someone who says "you probably think" is not thereby strawmanning. This is an attempt to guess what someone else's position is (granted, guesses like this are often not very charitable, but that in turn often results from a genuine inability to understand the other side). A strawman is when someone goes on to argue against that position without waiting for confirmation. GP's argument goes on to justify the quote. The justification does not depend on whether the guess about GGP's position was correct.

> The statement is otherwise implying that a pot smoker should be denigrated, and a WNBA player should be denigrated, and a black person should be denigrated, and a lesbian should be denigrated

No, it is not.

It is lamenting that a WNBA player may be (in Kirk's view) praised more than a USM despite (in his view) a lesser achievement, and in spite of smoking pot, because of a system that (in his view) treats black people and lesbians preferentially.

I give thanks here to GP for the context, which makes it entirely clear why Kirk would hold this view and give this specific object example. It also makes it obvious why my view of the statement is correct, but I already knew it would be something like this anyway before seeing the context. In fact, I wrote the above before reading GP. (In fact, I also realized this going in; qv https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45233308 .)

It's very easy to understand things like this by understanding the fundamentals of the arguments being made and policies being proposed (here, something like an objection to "DEI") and considering the speaker's statement within the speaker's own evidenced framework of morals and values, rather than your own. You appear to think, fundamentally, in terms of whether groups are being "hated" or described as superior or inferior. Someone like Kirk thought, from what I could tell, fundamentally, in terms of whether rules are being applied consistently and fairly to groups, and about whether the rules are acceptable in the abstract.
by timeinput | 2025-09-14 15:17:02+00:00
I can't.

I have a go to list of positive things to think about.

I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.

It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).

The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.
by lelandfe | 2025-09-14 15:17:24+00:00
Zeldin in March[0], announcing climate change rule rollbacks:

> "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more"

Does any of that list look like the goals of an Environmental Protection Agency?

[0] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregu...
by dsign | 2025-09-14 15:17:27+00:00
I write the sort of science fiction where people disregard science for absolutely stupid reasons, but reality has a way of undermining me. So, I'm reading that cancer research is being de-funded because people didn't like the science that brought vaccines and kept so many from dying, and they rather use that money for... way less humane causes, to put it mildly. The cultured reptilian part of my brain that I use to write dystopias sort of understands what's going on. But cancer? Damn. Is anybody out there who sincerely wants that scourge on them or their families? What excuses do we make?
by mallowdram | 2025-09-14 15:18:56+00:00
There is no benefit to AI, not one bit, the barrier to entry grows steeper, rather than is accessed. These are not "hobbies" but robotic copies.

This is demented btw, this take: >>Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help!

CS never examines the initial conditions to entry, it takes short-cuts around the initial conditions and treats imagination as a fait accompli of automation. It's an achilles heel.

edit: none of these arguments are valid, focusing on metrics, the broken window problem. These are downstream of AI's mistaken bypassing of initial conditions. Consider the idea of automating arbitrary units as failed technology, and then examining all of the conditions downstream of AI. AI was never a solution, but a cheap/expensive (its paradox) bypassing of the initial conditions. It makes automation appear to be a hobby. A factory of widgets that mirages as creativity. That is AMAZING as it is sequestered in the initial arbitrariness of language!

How did engineering schools since the 1950s not notice, understand, investigate the base units of information; whether they had any relationship direct or otherwise to thought, creativity, imagination? That's the crux.
TX-10k Salvage Ship
by Ziggy_Zaggy | 2025-09-14 15:19:06+00:00
"TX-10000 is the largest heavy-lift vessel ever built in the United States"

Link: https://www.pnj.com/story/news/local/2025/09/08/what-is-the-huge-vessel-in-gulf-at-pensacola-port-is-tx-10000/86046856007/

Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914151032/https://www.pnj.com/story/news/local/2025/09/08/what-is-the-huge-vessel-in-gulf-at-pensacola-port-is-tx-10000/86046856007/

Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914151612/https://www.pnj.com/picture-gallery/news/2025/09/08/massive-yellow-structure-in-port-of-pensacola/86048124007/
by steveklabnik | 2025-09-14 15:20:04+00:00
In general, there are three reasons to avoid whole program analysis:

1. Complexity. This manifests as compile times. It takes much longer.

2. Usability. Error messages are poor, because changes have nonlocal effects.

3. Stability. This is related to 2. Without requirements expressed in the signature, changes in the body change the API, meaning keeping APIs stable is much harder.

There’s really a simple reason why it’s not fully feasible in C++ though: C++ supports separate compilation. This means the whole program is not required to be available. Therefore you don’t have the whole program for analysis.
by the__alchemist | 2025-09-14 15:20:18+00:00
I don't understand why the left puts up with it. They are too easily distracted by hot-button issues. These are some of the most important issues facing the present and future of our civilization and biosphere. I wish I had a solution, or knew the step to take. I suspect one of the root causes is the narrative, e.g. from news agencies, is being controlled by the propagators of the problem.
by 1gn15 | 2025-09-14 15:20:19+00:00
Biased TL;DR: Reddit (notable for having a high stock value from their "selling data" business [1]), Medium, Quora, and Cloudflare competitor Fastly created a standard to restrict what the reader can do with the data users created, called Really Simple Licensing (RSL). Basically robots.txt but with more details, notably with details on how much you should pay Reddit/Medium/Quora.

While this likely has no legal weight (except for EU TDM for commercial use, where the law does take into account opt-outs), they are betting on using services like CloudFlare and Fastly to enforce this.

[1] https://www.investors.com/research/the-new-america/reddit-st...
by somenameforme | 2025-09-14 15:20:53+00:00
Calling a WNBA player famous is very arguable, but I want to take a more fundamental approach to this. I really like Kirk's style of simply asking questions that make people accept their own views. There are two reasons to this - the first is because you may not even realize what you believe, and the second part is because my assumptions about what you believe may simply be wrong.

Do you approve of Biden doing everything he could, including ultimately trading one of the most well known arm's dealers alive (and the person who Lord of War was based on), for her? Would you approve if the same was done for William Elliott Whitmore, in the case where he was busted bringing drugs into Russia? For context he's a random celebrity (excellent musician), mostly the equal but opposite of Griner, but certainly at least as famous.

[1] - https://www.wnba.com/news/wnba-delivers-most-watched-regular...
by Daishiman | 2025-09-14 15:20:58+00:00
Im sorry if you’re naive about life but the Republican Party has shown nothing but contempt for life in general. Ideological coherency is not something they have cared about, hence debating them as if their arguments has any weight whatsoever is not useful.

Whenever they propose something, just ask yourself which lobbyist stands something to gain. That will be a sufficient explanation.
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-14 15:20:59+00:00
It actually is a case study from the Innovator's Dilemma:

Yet IBM’s success in the first five years of the personal computing industry stands in stark contrast to the failure of the other leading mainframe and minicomputer makers to catch the disruptive desktop computing wave. How did IBM do it? It created an autonomous organization in Florida, far away from its New York state headquarters, that was free to procure components from any source, to sell through its own channels, and to forge a cost structure appropriate to the technological and competitive requirements of the personal computing market. The organization was free to succeed along metrics of success that were relevant to the personal computing market. In fact, some have argued that IBM’s subsequent decision to link its personal computer division much more closely to its mainstream organization was an important factor in IBM’s difficulties in maintaining its profitability and market share in the personal computer industry. It seems to be very difficult to manage the peaceful, unambiguous coexistence of two cost structures, and two models for how to make money, within a single company.
by p_ing | 2025-09-14 15:21:21+00:00
Apple calls out case-sensitivity as a change they made to pass certification. [0]

> 3. APFS file systems can be formatted as either case-sensitive or case-insensitive. Always format as case-sensitive for UNIX Conformant behavior.

[0] https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=...