MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by resfirestar | 2025-09-03 19:58:30+00:00
I can't see what you're talking about. In my account, in the General tab of Gmail settings on the web, under "Manage Workspace smart feature settings", I see a toggle for "Smart features in Google Workspace", followed by this paragraph:

>When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace. Workspace includes apps for businesses and schools, such as Gmail, Chat, Meet, Drive, and more. To learn more, visit the Workspace website. Smart features include:

The setting for the listed features is above the "you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace" intro, not below. The setting below is for features in non-Workspace services.
by spauldo | 2025-09-03 19:58:48+00:00
150 years ago, the buildings where I live were made of wood or sod and there were no cities. Fifty years before that, there were no buildings at all. The native people lived in tents, followed the buffalo herds, and the sky was their temple.

The churches that have been built since were built by denominations that place less value in visual and architectural art than, for example, the Catholic or Orthodox churches. The single Catholic church in my town does look nicer than the others, although the inside looks just as fake as everything built since the 1950s.

I have visited the church at Rota and the cathedral at Càdiz, and they are beautiful. We do not have churches like these where I live. But it wouldn't matter if we did. It is neither the blandness of my churches or the beauty of yours that cause me to dislike the church, but the way the church is used to spread hate for people who are different than them.
by egman_ekki | 2025-09-03 19:59:02+00:00
I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.

There was even a joke about this:

⸻

In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.

Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.

On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.

The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.

And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”

⸻

Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU
by jibal | 2025-09-03 19:59:18+00:00
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.

Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
by card_zero | 2025-09-03 19:59:18+00:00
It's more or less OK, thank you for asking. Recently I felt:

Disappointed when I went somewhere and there wasn't any tea,

Enthralled by a story about someone guarding a mystical treasure alone in a remote museum on a dark and stormy night,

Sympathetic toward a hardworking guy nobody likes, but also aggravated by his bossiness to the point of swearing at him,

Confused due to waking up at 7 pm and not being sure how it happened.

You probably don't entirely understand any of those. What is it to entirely understand something? But you probably get the idea in each case.
by turbo_wombat | 2025-09-03 19:59:31+00:00
The original version of Ultima I was written in a mixture of BASIC and assembly. BASIC is pretty slow, but most BASIC implementations let you call into optimized assembly routines.

Though, past a certain point of complexity, performance aside, assembly might be more readable than BASIC because BASIC relied on line numbers for jumping around, whereas assemblers offered named labels.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-03 19:59:33+00:00
So much this!

Straight-up copy-paste from my development notes...

* what pivots in current db vs temporal db?

What is the difference between these pictures?

#+BEGIN_SRC text

("Current" DB) CRUD records ^ | v [ current view ] -- update --> [ facts log ] --------------------------------------------------------- [ current view ] <-- update -- [ facts log ] | ^ v | READ records WRITE records (as facts) ("Temporal" DB)

#+END_SRC

- Hint: It is /not/ the schema. It is /what/ "pivots".

- In both cases the current view can be understood to be a pivot table of the facts log.

- BUT in the current DB, we must "pivot" the /process/, i.e. take a CRUD op and transform it into an audit log. This /must/ be done synchronously in in real-time. Whereas in the Temporal DB's case, we must "pivot" the stored data, which we can do at any point in query time, as of any point in time of the log.

- The complexity of Current DBs derives from /live process management/ challenges. Whereas the complexity of Temporal DBs derives from /retroactive process management/ challenges.

/now/ is /never/ cheap. It is the most expensive non-fungible thing. Once it's gone, it's gone. Fail to transact an audit trail for the CRUD operation? Too bad. Better luck next time. Whereas disk space is cheap, and practically infinite which affords Temporal DBs greater opportunity to find a better trade-off between essential complexity and DB capabilities. At least as long as disk space remains plentiful and cheap.

This is why if we are modeling a Temporal DB over a Current DB, it is preferable to write all tables as /fact/ tables and query their auto-generated 'current view' versions, for normal query needs. For audit / analysis needs, we can snapshot the facts tables and operate on those out-of-band (detached from the live app). Impedance mismatch occurs when trying to run /both/ current CRUD tables (writing to audit logs) for some parts of the schema, in parallel with a "main" facts table for all fact-records. In a given data system, it is better to do either one or the other, not both at the same time.
by zitterbewegung | 2025-09-03 19:59:35+00:00
Hrm, this makes sense their new model Alex was okay but due to XCode having Chatgpt and Claude access if Chatgpt wants people that have more experience with Swift / SwiftUI and all of the platforms. I have used Alex codes for a long time and was already planning to move to XCode's integration with Claude since I find Chatgpt 5 to be lacking. I also wouldn't see how viable the app is long term expecially with the power users who pay $200 for it not breaking even since they are still proxying another service (but they did create their own LLM which IMHO was worse than claude).
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-03 20:00:31+00:00
How much extra time do you think it takes to summarize what you did at the end of a project? I do that anyway on the job during working hours to prepare for performance reviews and put it in our performance tracking system.

The banal “thought leadership” posts I’ve done on LinkedIn was also done during working hours. It’s encouraged at my level as marketing for the company and it also helps me.

I work remotely, do you really think I don’t do all this during working hours?

> Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

We get $1000 per completed professional AWS certification and a few others the first time and renewal and have time to study between projects. Even when I didn’t work in consulting and working in product companies - the last one as the lead architect - I took time during working hours to study.

You did see where I said I haven’t done a side project outside of work for my entire 30 year career?

> The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

My interview at AWS was one full day and five rounds of behavioral questions. But all of my other interviews were two rounds and then an offer. The last two companies I worked for before AWS, it was talking to the director and CTO about business outcomes and strategy and my previous experience. Do you really think high up people in their 40s are going to ask another 49 year old to balance an AVL tree?
by briacd | 2025-09-03 20:00:34+00:00
The author of this article is a glorified right conspiracist who uses the "previously liberal but turned right" trope. At best it's a grifter, at worst he believes what he writes.

Shellenberger already downplayed the climate change urgency and said himself to be skeptical of scientific "consensus". Despite Shellenberger insists on the independence of the authors of this particular paper, you should know this paper uses cherrypicked data (it excludes satellite data and it literally cherrypicked specific area excluding others) and it's written by a 65 yo entomologist and a "engineer" who is also a consultant that frequently speaks at events funded by fossil fuel lobbyists (CLINTEL). Yes, "independent".
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-09-03 20:00:35+00:00
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-03 20:01:54+00:00
I'm going to guess that you've never written, and perhaps never read, any unsafe Rust, because you (in common with several Rust critics) seem to be imagining it like a switch you can turn on somehow to disable the safety rules, and that's not what it is at all.

This Odin feature flag just allows me to write what I meant in Odin, I can write it all out by hand using make and so on without the feature flag, but it's more annoying to spell that all out which presumably was the impetus for this feature flag in the first place. The flag didn't somehow "cause" the unsafety, that's an insane take.

Odin isn't very well documented, so as somebody who was writing Odin just to explain the problem here, the easier option avoids trying to guess which of a dozen undocumented functions with names that may be related to hash maps is the "right" function to do what I meant, I can just write what I meant and turn on the feature flag to acknowledge that it involved allocation.
by harmmonica | 2025-09-03 20:05:15+00:00
The sources are reliable. There are prescribed sources for lumber products, fasteners, etc. in residential construction, at least in the US, that are just as accessible to you and me online as they are to structural engineers. Those same sources are what the engineers themselves rely on to do their work, or, more likely, most engineers rely on software that has those sources built in and don't ever reference the primary sources. All the information you need to make concrete, empirical decisions about things like posts in residential construction are available online and don't require an engineering degree to figure out. LLM's are great at taking the uncertain language you input and finding all the sources, and the calculations, for you so you don't have to spend hours digging around on Google to find a "document" you didn't know how to search for, that then has 600 numbers on it that you have to spend more time discerning which number is the right one to use. Or which calculation out of the infinite number out there is the right one for your case. Kind of like a skeleton key or maybe a dictionary that equips you with the language you don't yet know to get to the bottom of something you don't yet fully understand.

Btw, I would not trust an LLM to tell me how to build a suspension bridge. First, I'm unfamiliar with that space. Second, even if I was familiar, the stakes are, as you say, so high that it would be insane to trust something so complex without expert sign off. The post I'm specifically talking about? Near-zero stakes and near-zero risk.

<stepping on the soapbox> I beg folks to always try and pierce the veil of complexity. Some things are complex and require very specialized training and guardrails. But other complexity is fabricated. There are entrenched interests who want you to feel like you can't do certain things. They're not malicious, but they sometimes exist to make or protect money. There are entire industries propped up by trade groups that are there to make it seem like some things are too complex to be done by laypeople, who have lobbied legislators for regulations that keep folks like you from tackling them. And if your knee-jerk reply is that I'm some kind of conspiracy theorist or anarchist all I'm saying is it's a spectrum. Suspension bridge with traffic driving over it --> should double, triple, quadruple check with professional(s); a post in a house supporting the entire house's load (exaggeration for effect) --> get a single professional to sign off; a post in a house that's supporting a single floor joist with minimal live and dead load (my case!) --> use an LLM to help you DIY the "engineering" to get to good enough (good enough = high margin for error); replace a light switch --> DIY YouTube video.

I am the king of long-winded HN posts. Obviously the time I took to write this (look, ma, no LLM!) is asymmetric with what you wrote, but I'm genuinely wondering if any of this makes you think differently. If not, that's cool of course (and great for the engineers and permit issuers!).
by johannes1234321 | 2025-09-03 20:05:19+00:00
> You don’t need notes or a script, you just need appropriate practice.

Especially inexperienced speakers should prepare notes or script to give it a structure and transmission from topic to topic.

Else one quickly ends up with a talk like "uh, now what's on this slide, oh, yeah" which takes out any flow and doesn't present a good flow of thought.

How much those notes are used and how much one can deviate makes the expert. But the better talks are well prepared.

You need to know what you want to talk about. What the key points are.
by networked | 2025-09-03 20:05:27+00:00
VB6 is as stretch, but I'd love to see Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 for MS-DOS open-sourced. It is the only DOS version of Visual Basic. What is remarkable about VB for DOS is that it's a complete text-mode RAD IDE [1] for TUIs. There is no TUI builder that I know of like it. It is obscure and barely discussed by retrocomputing enthusiasts. Your best resource outside of early-1990s books and magazines is a 2020 blog post [2] that demonstrates building a "Hello, world!" project with screenshots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface_build...

[2] https://www.cloudwisp.com/exploring-visual-basic-1-0-for-ms-...
by bondarchuk | 2025-09-03 20:05:31+00:00
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.

I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.

(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
by aengelke | 2025-09-03 20:05:51+00:00
In AoT compilation, unoptimized code is primarily useful for debugging and short compile-test round trips. Your point on C++ is correct, but test workloads are typically small so the cost is often tolerable and TPDE also supports -O1 IR -- nothing precludes using an -O0 back-end with optimized IR, so if performance is relevant for debugging/testing, there's still a measurable compile-time improvement. (Obviously, with -O1 IR, the TPDE-generated code is ~2-3x slower than the code from the LLVM-O1-back-end; but it's still better than using unoptimized IR. It might also be possible to cut down the -O1 pass pipeline to passes that are actually important for performance.)

In JIT compilation, a fast baseline is always useful. LLVM is obviously not a great fit (the IR is slow to generate and inspect), but for projects that don't want to roll their own IR and use LLVM for optimized builds anyway, this is an easy way to drastically reduce the startup latency. (There is a JIT case study showing the overhead of LLVM-IR in Section 7/Fig. 10 in the paper.)

> And if a project is not large one then build times should not be that much of a problem.

I disagree -- I'm always annoyed when my builds take longer than a few seconds, and typically my code changes only involve fewer compilation units than I have CPU cores (even when working on LLVM). There's also this study [1] from Google, which claims that even modest improvements in build times improve productivity.

[1]: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2023/04/10176199/1...
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-09-03 20:06:24+00:00
Honest feedback - I was really excited when I read the opening. However, I did not come away from this without a greater understanding than I already had.

For reference, my initial understanding was somewhat low: basically I know a) what embedding is basically b) transformers work by matrix multiplication, and c) it's something like a multi-threaded Markov chain generator with the benefit of prior-trained embeddings
by DrillShopper | 2025-09-03 20:06:32+00:00
I cannot recommend enough Ben Eater's 6502 computer build on YouTube[1] if you want to play with a 6502 computer from the ground up. It is meant to be accessible to the ambitious amateur. It is roughly Apple 1 compatible, and he has videos on how to add new commands in Microsoft BASIC as well as how to modify Microsoft BASIC to support the computer.

Seeing him git clone Microsoft BASIC and make the changes atop it was definitely a weird but awesome moment.[2]

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXNR0z1...

[2] https://youtu.be/XlbPnihCM0E
by lazide | 2025-09-03 20:08:09+00:00
The issue here is you still don’t know what you don’t know. But you think you do.

The reason you hire a structural engineer is because they do - and they are on the hook if it goes wrong. Which is also why they have to stamp drawings, etc.

Because the next person who owns the house should have some idea who was screwing with the structure of it.

You might be 100% on top of it - in which case that structural engineer should have no problem stamping your calcs eh?
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-03 20:08:24+00:00
> An additional reason is frat hazing, for the sake of frat hazing. When easy upper-middle-class money entered the field, it attracted some baggery.

I don't think it was money that caused this, but that many beloved tech giants were intentional built as fraternities by college dropouts and recent college graduates, many of whom did not themselves join a fraternity in college but got soaked in a lot of the atmosphere of them. It's most obvious in the case of Facebook, as publicly documented in things like the movie The Social Network, but it's a foundational DNA strand in Microsoft and Google and nearly any other big tech company that still prefers to call its headquarters/office park a "campus". (It's kind of a through line in the HBO show Silicon Valley too, how much tech companies intentionally copy the "pizza and beer and all-nighters and weird dorm room living" college vibe.)

(The presumption that most of these company executives never were themselves directly involved in college fraternities is that fact that they allow/encourage/build hazing rituals. Fraternities have had somewhat strict anti-hazing education requirements since the 1990s and most Universities have also had strict No Hazing Policies since around then. Since 2024, that education and policy enforcement has spread outside the Greek System to all students at most major Universities that get federal funding directly or indirectly, but before that it is certainly easy to understand how many might have missed the messages and education if they only saw fraternities from the outside.)
by jslaby | 2025-09-03 20:08:33+00:00
There is some truth to this. One of the fails we had was pricing our product too low, where it was looked at as a stepping stone to something more expensive, even though it provided the same exact functionality minus the fancy looking ui. There were businesses that wanted to get out of their existing application suite, but are hooked in due to management perception and the sunk cost fallacy. The company who overpriced considerably is reaping millions per year on that application. If I could just go back in time..
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-03 20:08:46+00:00
It's b/c when Chomsky invented the theory of formal grammars he was studying natural languages & the universality of abstract grammar¹. Computer scientists realized later that they could use the same theory as a foundation for formalizing the grammatical structures of programming languages.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
by thenaturalist | 2025-09-03 20:09:12+00:00
Comments like yours remind me that while HN is a competent technological forum, it's best to never, ever, engage in serious macro-economic/ int. politics discussions as the average user engaging in the latter topics is so far off base with common knowledge in these areas, any insider wouldn't find common ground.

Overconfidence bias is real.

Knowing your circle of competence is a gift.
by etler | 2025-09-03 20:09:52+00:00
Very good questions! I still need to flesh out the patterns. While streams of streams are common in functional programming environments, I simply haven't seen them in class based streaming patterns anywhere so they're things to figure out.

Of course, more streams means more resource utilization, there's not getting around that, but that's the cost of parallelism. The use of `yield*` should keep the overhead to a bare minimum. Since the streams are being left alone and aren't consumed until needed, that should preserve some of the back-pressure behavior, although I do need to look into that more deeply.

How the system handles errors probably doesn't have a single solution that works for all frameworks, so I think it should be up to the specific requirements of each use case, but there's also definitely more work to do to explore the options and the patterns.

These are all things I definitely want to hear ideas for as well!

The next thing I'm exploring is applying these patterns to web rendering which will be a real stress test for how they can be used.