MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleEntity | 2025-09-06 18:13:02+00:00
> Where AST parsing, transformation, and regeneration introduces overhead that makes real-time symbol conversion impractical for large codebases.

I don't really understand why you need to do anything different when using a parser than the regex method, there's no real reason to have to parse to an AST (with all the python goodness involved with that) at all when the parser can just do the string replacement the same as whatever PhiRust is doing.

I have this peg VM (based on the lpeg papers) I've been poking at for a little while now that, while admittedly I haven't actually tested its speed, I'd be amazed if it couldn't do 3Mb/s...in fact, the main limiting factor seems to be getting bytes off the disk and the parser runtime is just noise compared to that with all the 'musttail' shenanigans going on.

And even that is overkill for simple keyword replacement with all the work done over the years on macro systems needing to be blazing fast -- which is not something I've looked into at all to see how they do their magic except a brief peek at C's macro rules which are, let's just say, complicated.
by j_seigh | 2025-09-06 18:13:03+00:00
I did find some links to some of my old posts on restartable sequences for user space rcu. Looked into using unix signal handling but it was pretty problematic to put it mildly. Definitely something you had to implement in the kernel.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.development.system... https://groups.google.com/g/comp.programming.threads/c/bq61m... https://groups.google.com/g/comp.programming.threads/c/muhN3...
by doublerabbit | 2025-09-06 18:13:50+00:00
> It’s a free country, etc.

But it didn't come across a warning. "You need to stop" is a demand not a warning. And I would like to believe they would know this when post online. if not /shrug.

Maybe they're working on behalf of an organization, a country that doesn't follow CFAA; Russia, China? Maybe they're state sponsored or under protection. They're obviously not stupid if they can infiltrate Fast-Food chains and social engineer others but I've been wrong before.

> is a bad idea

I would be surprised if they didn't. If not, okay well if shit hits the fan; no sympathy for me. Unlucky. They're doing it at their own risk.

> Isn’t it better that hackers today have a way to find real vulnerabilities without going to jail?

A doubled edged sword, I personally wouldn't count them as hackers. They're not hacking, they're penetrating based on T&C of an agreement. Yes, it could be called "ethical hacking" but I still wouldn't call it hacking.

A hacker is one who gains unauthorized access to computer. Hacking isn't such when your granted restricted access on a basis of T&C.

> Isn’t it better that hackers today have a way to find real vulnerabilities without going to jail?

I don't disagree, if that's your skill then go for it. It's the safest route allowing you to harness your skills, and which may provide future prospects. A dispensary selling drugs is better than the dealer on the corner of the street.

"To hack a bank" is different then to "hack a bank based on some agreement". One carries more weight then the other. Your penetrating a bank on an agreement. Your not hacking.

Bug bounty hunters to have faced jail, lawsuits, or threats — even when acting in good faith, it doesn't make you invulnerable.

I admire the persona of who this is, their acts highlights concern to us who use such conveniences. It exposes truth and tackles the issue at hand where others may exploit you because of. It shows negative light to corporations that many folk who daily.

Their title as on their blog "Ethical Hacker" I would say suitable to describe them as that. It's not like they're siphoning money off folk from ransomware.

> Most of what you’re saying just seems like nostalgia talking.

What I was demonstrating as someone who's been in trouble due to misunderstanding computer mishaps as a teen back when, also to establish my point that I know what I am talking about.

Yeah, it turned in to a nostalgia trip. I'd call myself more of a script kiddie and one who I'd see myself as white-hat.

Black-hat can be interesting however my moral compass has caught up with me and that my life has more worth that it would be jeopardous to do such besides I don't have the time and among other things.
by sfink | 2025-09-06 18:14:04+00:00
Not to mention that I'm not sure if all photons are guaranteed to hit anything. I have no intuition for calculating how likely that is for things in our neighborhood, but if you think of the star that is closest to the edge of the universe (as in, the farthest light could have traveled from the Big Bang, taking into account expansion of space itself), it seems unlikely that there would be guaranteed to be a chunk of matter between it and the universe's edge in every direction.

So a photon emitted in such a direction takes no time (from the photon's point of view) to be absorbed by its destination... only it has no destination and never will. It gives "what if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it?" vibes. Does the universe sort of "lose" the energy of that photon in a way that it doesn't for photons that are absorbed? Is it like The Great Memory Leak of the Universe or something? Is our existence leaking out between the fingers of the hand of God?
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-06 18:14:27+00:00
A certain type of person has to get offended when Bluesky/atproto is shown to be better/worse/more popular/less popular than Mastodon/activitypub or vice versa and blogs or comments about it emotionally. So there's the appearance of a religious war where there doesn't have to be one, and for most people there isn't one.

I can't speak to the specifics, I don't follow it or give it oxygen.
by analognoise | 2025-09-06 18:14:32+00:00
The Laffer Curve is frequently cited by the same people who refuse to see the failure of conservative-style economic policy over the last 40 years, for some reason.

It’s clear all that “don’t tax the rich, they create jobs!” Is just trash. Noise. We have 40 years of data, it doesn’t work.

But still, someone ignores all that to tell me the Laffer Curve, every time. What’s also amazing is that they don’t really understand it themselves. Wild.
by h2zizzle | 2025-09-06 18:14:52+00:00
Unfortunately, America exported our car-privileging planning and policies, so those places that accepted our "expertise" buffed car travel as much as possible - traffic catches up, of course, but that's when the nerfs to public transit come in. It can be a number of strategies come to bear, including poor access to transit nodes, long wait times between service, and disruptions (American trains often have to wait for commercial traffic on rails). I can't speak for London, but if you're unfortunate enough to not live close to certain Washington, DC Metro stops, you're limited to driving to and parking at them, or to commuter options. Both are not ideal, timewise, but save you parking costs and sitting in traffic behind the wheel.
by alliegoodson | 2025-09-06 18:15:20+00:00
Location: California, US Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Not at this time Technologies: Figma, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite Résumé/CV: https://allie.goodson.dev/resume-2025-09-04.pdf Email: allie [at] goodson [dot] dev

I am Allie Goodson, a designer based in California, focused on user centered design. I communicate easily and clearly with technical teams to ensure products are usable and accessible. I am looking for opportunities with companies that provide the chance to get my hands on a variety of products at all stages of development. If you would like to know more about me, please visit my portfolio website: https://allie.goodson.dev/
by tialaramex | 2025-09-06 18:15:28+00:00
This idea that they're somehow ignoring the hard parts is very silly. The existing human drivers in San Francisco manage to kill maybe 20 or so people per year so apparently it's not so "easy" that the human drivers can do it without killing anybody.

I live in the middle of a city, so, no, in terrible weather just like great weather I walk to the store, no need to "starve to death" even if conditions are too treacherous for people to sensibly drive cars. Because I'm an old man, and I used to live somewhere far from a city, I have had situations where you can't use a car to go fetch groceries because even if you don't care about safety the car can't go up an icy hill, it loses traction, gravity takes over, you slide back down (and maybe wreck the car).
by jwilber | 2025-09-06 18:16:03+00:00
Right? Prices skyrocketed for all cars after COVID and never came down. At least some manufacturers have seen a pretty big increase in quality lately (Kia). Can’t say the same for our domestic manufacturers tbh.

I wonder how much of this language is just anti-Chinese. “Slumping” costs for price decreases. Whatever the outcome, it’s clear I’d much rather prefer to be purchasing a car in China than America at the moment. Probably nicer roads to drive on, too, if I’m being honest.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-06 18:16:42+00:00
They seem, as a class, very susceptible to dumb trends. This _kind_ of works for them, because occasionally something that looks like a dumb trend turns out to work (remember Facebook games? Still amazed that became a thing), and VCs only require a rather low success rate to operate, but usually a dumb trend is just a dumb trend.

Irritatingly, every time, people use this to claim that the dumb trend is the next big thing. A few years ago, anyone sensible could see that NFTs were bloody ridiculous, but you’d have lots of people on here proclaiming a glorious new NFT-based future, because, after all, the VCs were pumping money into it.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-06 18:17:16+00:00
> But Robotaxi shows it is very meaningfully progressing towards true autonomy.

What? They literally just moved the in car supervisor from the passenger seat to the driver seat. That's not a vote of confidence.

And I don't think you can glean anything. There are less than 20 Robotaxis in Austin, that spend their time giving rides to influencers so they can make YT videos where even they have scary moments.
by grg0 | 2025-09-06 18:17:31+00:00
I think to anyone who has used it, it is plain testament that social networks do not scale. This is a social limitation, not a technical one. What killed the Internet is the centralization of platforms compounded by the commercial interest to "engage" on behalf of both corporations and users. IRC worked because it was decentralized and had no commercial interest, nor did it cater to narcissistic tendencies. No interest to comment for points, and decentralized enforcement where you'd fuck around and simply get banned from the(that) server.
by sgammon | 2025-09-06 18:17:33+00:00
> Contrast this behavior against message types. While scalar fields are dumb, the behavior for message fields is outright insane.

The reason messages are initialized is that you can easily set a deep property path:

```

message SomeY { string example = 1; }

message SomeX { SomeY y = 1; }

```

later, in java:

```

SomeX some = SomeX.newBuilder();

some.getY().setExample("hello"); // does not produce npe

```

in kotlin this syntax makes even more sense:

```

some {

y.example = "hello". // does not produce npe

}

```
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-06 18:17:37+00:00
There's zero emotion, no need to manipulate via injecting language like that.

Companies that can benefit from these sorts of purchasing use cases don't exist at 0. And at 1, this is already a minimal need so not useful. Past 2, and you need 2 staff anyways from reasons listed and more, so AI doesn't give a cost benefit, but it does introduce all kinds of risk (there's a lot more than just comparing SKUs) and weaken relationship with supplies, which can kill a company. Just doesn't make sense all around.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-06 18:17:47+00:00
In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go

It was shut down because they had a collision that made front page news across the country which was followed by a cover-up. Their production lines were shut down, all revenue operations ceased, and the permits they needed to operate were withdrawn. It's not like the decision was random.

How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0.

Profit is a fuzzy concept for even the most transparent private companies, but Waymo's revenue is likely in the hundreds of millions. They've received around $12B in funding, not hundreds of billions.
by HiroshiSan | 2025-09-06 18:18:04+00:00
The part about good art not being about communication is just plain wrong. Good artists (and yes you can argue that art is subjective) spend thousands of hours studying the fundamentals—perspective,light,colour,value,proportion,anatomy, not to mention the dexterity to making a line—so that they can communicate to the viewer in the best way that suits the piece of art.

Sustaining the attention on an art piece unlocks things that you missed the first time due to having an untrained eye, much like reading a good book.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-09-06 18:18:34+00:00
I wouldn’t say they have turned it around. Just a few weeks ago I was at a Walmart without my wallet. Went to use my phone to pay at the self-checkout. Can’t do it, you have to pay through the Walmart app. Downloaded the app. It had my payment information saved from my account. Didn’t work, it was an old card that had expired. Tried to update it with new card information. Errored out every time. Literally couldn’t pay, and was too annoyed to ask for help, so I left what I was going to buy there and just left.
by chubot | 2025-09-06 18:20:07+00:00
It's very nice to see a small type checker in Python, for Python! This became much easier in the last 10 years, since the MyPy team basically "upstreamed" the typed_ast library they were using into the stdlib.

I found that there are not enough good teaching materials on type checkers -- e.g. the second edition of the Dragon Book lacks a type checker, which is a glaring hole IMO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38270753

Also, teaching material tends to have a bias toward type inference and the Hindley-Milner algorithm, which are NOT used by the most commonly used languages

So I appreciate this, but one thing in this code that I find (arguably) confusing is the use of visitors. e.g. for this part, I had to go look up what this method does in Python:

# Default so every expr returns a Type. def generic_visit(self, node): super().generic_visit(node) if isinstance(node, ast.expr): return ANY

Also, the main() calls visit(), but the visitor methods ALSO call visit(), which obscures the control flow IMO. Personally, if I need to use a visitor, I like there to just be a single pass

---

In contrast, Essentials of Compilation was released 1 or 2 years ago, in Racket and in Python. And the Python version uses the same typed AST module.

https://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Compilation-Incremental-Ap...

But it uses a more traditional functional style, rather than the OO visitor style:

https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse/python-student-support-c...

So one thing I did was to ask an LLM to translate this code from OO to functional style :-) But I didn't get around to testing it

(I looked at this code a week ago when it appeared on lobste.rs [1], and sent a trivial PR [2])

[1] https://lobste.rs/s/opwycf/baby_s_first_type_checker

[2] https://github.com/AZHenley/babytypechecker/pull/1
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-06 18:20:09+00:00
If your company can treat people as cogs this way, your company has zero value add/domain knowledge. A company's value is what it value adds, what domain knowledge/expertise it has, or cheapest price. If all you have is cheapest price, you will lose over time. You will be undercut. You won't have the domain knowledge to adapt, to see future changes coming down the path.

So the company you talk about is already in the entropy vortex. It has no momentum. It has no future. It just hopes it can keep doing what it is doing now.
Show HN: Built a tool that turns a keyword into an interactive research map
by SantiagoVargas | 2025-09-06 18:20:58+00:00
I needed to quickly get caught up on a research field (glioblastoma) for a large review paper, was finding it hard as the work is fragmented and hard to integrate (especially when looking at multidisciplinary approaches).

Built this tool to create semantic maps of the literature, it groups all of the papers (~180k in my study) by the overarching ideas they discuss. It was mostly useful for saving time when finding and organizing the papers.

Now I added features for my lab to be able to interact with the research once the keyword search pulls the papers in. The 3 main ones are

1. Find papers (enter research question and get the most relevant papers from the keyword search) 2. Topic dynamics (since the clusters of papers are organized, you can see what areas are emerging/other metrics) 3. Chat feature (ask questions and get answers that query and cite the database you created via keyword)

The idea behind it is you create your own database through the keyword search, and then use the workflows to navigate the literature.

It’s at the mvp stage so there’s some placeholder info around the web app. Would love to get any feedback on those 3 functionalities from the research community on here. Cheers!
by card_zero | 2025-09-06 18:21:27+00:00
Back in 1989 they (Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons) had a hunch, spent a lot of their own money, and did some experiments. Others couldn't replicate it. That much is a step forward by "visiting wrong nodes" as you put it, trying out a dead end.

Leaving money out of it, my point is that they weren't doing fusion, they were doing fusion research. Their device was for fusion, but it was not a working fusion device. Similarly, the software of AI researchers is not working AI software, and they are not doing AI, apart from semantic shift where we call it AI now anyway and created the term AGI to replace the former meaning.

It's not correct to say that an experiment, with the intent of finding out how to do a thing, is equal to the goal. It's a step.

Calling it "incremental" is misleading since all steps are incremental, and assuming you're doggedly determined and exit blind alleys and circles, you will eventually arrive, if the destination exists. But "incremental" suggests you know the distance and know how far there is to go, or at least can put a bound on it, and know in some sense which way. Like the whole thing is planned.

So saying that AI "is anything in the last 70 years utilizing a machine that could be considered an incremental steps towards [AI]" is misleading, in both those ways. The process is not the goal, and the goal is not being approached at a known rate.
by sfink | 2025-09-06 18:22:03+00:00
No, you have to zap them early. Lasers still spread out (see "beam divergence"), so you have to impart most of the momentum while they're still close enough for your lasers to hit with enough power.

Sadly, that also means you have to accelerate them hard if you want to get to a decent fraction of c before they're effectively out of range. Which means your solar sail has to be really, really tough while being really, really light.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-06 18:22:24+00:00
> Your handwriting skills are due to lack of practice.

I mean thats a broad generalisation. As someone who spent a lot of time in remedial English, I don't think thats actually true.

Typing enabled me to go to uni. It turns out that actually I'm shit at handwriting rather than english.

Ironically I have a wacom tablet as a pointer device, because its faster than a mouse.
by 1penny42cents | 2025-09-06 18:23:05+00:00
People without equity will work harder if they expect it to bring career or compensation growth.

If it’s a great company, people will work extra hours to move ahead, knowing it will pay off in their careers. “Great company” is always relative to the individual and where they are in their careers.

As people mature in their careers, they split off into “people with equity who continue to work hard for it” and “people without equity who have a good work/life balance”.

But as long as there’s the promise of a life-changing development, people will (sometimes rationally) work outside of their agreed hours.
by esafak | 2025-09-06 18:24:07+00:00
> Two is kinda useless: if they disagree, which is right?

They don't work by merely taking a straw poll. They effectively build the joint probability distribution, which improves accuracy with any number of sensors, including two.

> You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.

Any realistic system would see them long before your eyes do. If you are so worried, override the AI in the moment.
by omnicognate | 2025-09-06 18:24:21+00:00
This is awesome.

Am I understanding correctly? I don't have the necessary background for the paper, but it sounds like in 3D space they capture the x and y coordinate of each point (so like an orthographic projection, not the screen coordinates) but for the z coordinate instead of storing actual values for each point they store the difference between the z coordinates of the endpoints of each edge.

That sounds like the object would still only be viewable from one direction, but when doing things like the heat diffusion you can consider each triangle to be at whatever depth makes sense for it to be touching the triangle you're reaching it from. So the same bit of geometry could be at different depths depending how you get there when movimg along the surface (a bit like a Riemann surface, I suppose). Is that right?
by slavapestov | 2025-09-06 18:25:24+00:00
> Bidirectional constraint solving. It's bad for compile time but even worse for predictable diagnostics.

That’s really only true if you have overloading though! Without overloading there are no disjunction choices to attempt, and if you also have principal typing it makes the problem of figuring out diagnostics easier, because each expression has a unique most general type in isolation (so your old CSDiag design would actually work in such a language ;-) )

But perhaps a language where you have to rely on generics for everything instead of just overloading a function to take either an Int or a String is a bridge too far for mainstream programmers.
by evilduck | 2025-09-06 18:25:25+00:00
Their memory bandwidth is the problem. 256 GB/s is really, really slow for LLMs.

Seems like at the consumer hardware level you just have to pick your poison or what one factor you care about most. Macs with a Max or Ultra chip can have good memory bandwidth but low compute, but also ultra low power consumption. Discrete GPUs have great compute and bandwidth but low to middling VRAM, and high costs and power consumption. The unified memory PCs like the Ryzen AI Max and the Nvidia DGX deliver middling compute, higher VRAMs, and terrible memory bandwidth.
by goku12 | 2025-09-06 18:26:19+00:00
> How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

Oh! That's easy. I forgot that it is 13+ years old! XD

Added later: Your comment made me look up more details about it. It was a widely discussed comment at the time. The HN discussion about it is as interesting as the comment itself [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876
by Kye | 2025-09-06 18:26:23+00:00
When you actually look at the people doing the coolest work on both sides you see everyone's getting along and nerding out about protocols and the future of technology.

The consensus there is pretty much that there's room for different notions and the way forward is collaboration. There's a small peanut gallery on ActivityPub driven by a small number of people mad ATProto is taking off. They sound exactly like now-forgotten OStatus grognards who were mad about ActivityPub. Their agitating gives a worse impression of inter-community relations if you don't look too close.

This statement and the signatories are more or less a who's who of who's doing the coolest work in this space.