MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by koiueo | 2025-09-08 12:23:16+00:00
I'm sorry for my candor, but your argument is so silly, it rubs me the wrong way.

Laws are how society operates.

If you need traffic rules (those are defined by laws fyi) then clearly individual's ability to drive isn't worth much. Let's abolish car ownership, make Apple operate all ground transportation and prohibit anyone else from deciding where Apple-operated cars go, what are operational hours and where the stops are.
by lesuorac | 2025-09-08 12:23:32+00:00
The article really does a great job of setting up Survivorship Bias and then completely drops the ball.

Of course chronic complainers complain about stuff out of their control. They've fixed (at least in thier eyes) the items within their control. Asking them "what would they do" is but itself entirely ineffective unless anybody is going to act on it.
by TuxSH | 2025-09-08 12:24:59+00:00
Indeed, LLMs cannot do truly novel thinking, and the laundering analogy is spot-on.

However they're able to do more than just regurgitating code, I can have them explain to me the underlying (mathematical or whatever) concept behind the code and write new code from scratch myself, with that knowledge.

Can/should this new code be considered as derivative work, if the underlying principles were already documented in literature?
by awongh | 2025-09-08 12:25:37+00:00
From an outsider perspective these kinds of insights make me think: Is it just a coincidence that a lot of the recent innovations in the space look very common sense in hindsight:

- if we train the model to "think" through the answer, we get better results - if we train the model to say "I don't know" when it's not sure we get less hallucinations

Is it just confirmation bias or do these common sense approaches work in on LLMs in other ways?
by MereInterest | 2025-09-08 12:26:01+00:00
> Corollary: hats off to Red Hat for supporting their distro releases for such a lengthy period of time.

This has been my bane at various open source projects, because at some point somebody will say that all currently supported Linux distributions should be supported by a project. This works as a rule of thumb, except for RHEL, which has some truly ancient GCC versions provided in the "extended support" OS versions.

* The oldest supported versions in "production" is RHEL 8, and in "extended support" is RHEL 7. * RHEL 8 (released 2019) provides gcc 8 (released May 2018). RHEL 7 (released 2014) provides gcc 4.8 (released March 2013). * gcc 8 supports C++17, but not C++20. gcc 4.8 supports most of C++11 (some C++ stdlib implementations weren't added until later), but doesn't support C++14.

So the well-meaning cutoff of "support the compiler provided by supported major OS versions" becomes a royal pain, since it would mean avoiding useful functionality in C++17 until mid-2024 (when RHEL 7 went from "production" to "extended support") or mid-2028 (when RHEL 7 "extended support" will end). It's not as bad at the moment, since C++20 and C++23 were relatively minor changes, but C++26 is shaping up to be a pretty useful change, and that wouldn't be usable until around 2035 when RHEL 10 leaves "production".

I wouldn't mind it as much if RHEL named the support something sensible. By the end of a "production" window, the OS is still absolutely suitable as a deployment platform for existing software. Unlike other "production" OS versions, though, it is no longer reasonable as a target for new development at that point.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-08 12:27:08+00:00
A language community which so prizes the linked list is in no position to go throwing such stones.

Linux lucked out, when you're doing tricky wait free concurrent algorithms that intrusive linked list you hand designed was a good choice. But over in userland you'll find another hand rolled list in somebody's single threaded file parser and oh, the growable array would be fifty times faster, shame the C programmer doesn't have one in their toolbox.
Show HN: I Rewrote printf – Now 10x More Powerful (v1.3)
by Forgret | 2025-09-08 12:27:18+00:00
After months of development, I'm excited to release uprintf v1.3 - the ultimate platform-independent printf replacement that works everywhere from bare-metal microcontrollers to modern OSes.

What's new in v1.3:

-Template System

-Now with {{variable}} substitution like modern template engines

-Multi-Output Streaming

-Broadcast to multiple destinations simultaneously (UART, files, network)

-String Builder - Dynamic string building with efficient memory management

-Text Transformation

-Built-in uppercase, lowercase, capitalize, reverse, and ROT13 transforms

-Advanced Formatting

- Text alignment, wrapping, and pattern-based formatting

-Event System

- Hook into output streams for monitoring and processing -Stream Processors

-Real-time character transformation pipelines

-State Machine

- Lightweight state management for complex workflows

And it's still:

-Zero dependencies

-Header-only

-Fully portable

-MIT licensed

Perfect for embedded systems, CLI tools, and anywhere you need powerful formatting without bloat.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/Uprintf
by c0l0 | 2025-09-08 12:27:37+00:00
It's not that dire as you make it out to be :)

Both the 8700G and the 8700G PRO are readily available in the EU, and the PRO SKU is about 50% more expensive (EUR 120 in absolute numbers): https://geizhals.eu/?cmp=3096260&cmp=3096300&cmp=3200470&act...
by IanCal | 2025-09-08 12:27:59+00:00
As a counter I've found that the iOS app is insanely unreliable. I've lost chats, it messes up and says there has been no response, connection lost and more. It's been really bad. Often when it's reported no result and failed, I go to the site and everything is fine. If things fail I no longer retry as that's how I've permanently lost history before (which is insane, don't lose my shit), and go and check the website.

Insane ratio of "app quality" to "magic technology". The models are wild (as someone in the AI mix for the last 20 years or so) and the mobile app and codex integrations are hot garbage.
by mothballed | 2025-09-08 12:28:00+00:00
It's not terribly unusual to end up with random government officials if you're a white guy going into a non-touristy part of the 3rd world. I went to a village in Paraguay, first thing locals did was take me to some government project creating an industrial cow milking operation where I was promptly offered an engineering job.

Low-level 3rd world officials love showing off whatever they're doing to whoever will listen. They usually don't have much else to do. It is best to accept their offer and drink the tea with them or whatever, get on their good side and talk about how modern their little village is, and get on their good graces.
by aa-jv | 2025-09-08 12:28:46+00:00
I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it.

The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.

Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.

Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.

(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
by matwood | 2025-09-08 12:28:57+00:00
> The thing is, is it slower to code with LLMs if you already have the knowledge?

Maybe if all you do is code, but that’s not how most people work. Being able write I need these things done in this way and then attend a meeting or start researching the next thing is valuable. And because of my other obligations there’s no way I could do more without Claude.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-09-08 12:29:14+00:00
Had to "phone a friend" on that one:

"In Nepal, “jhola” (bag) turned into “jholay” is slang. It usually refers to people—often students, activists, or intellectual types—who carry a cloth bag (jhola) and are associated with being overly “bookish,” pseudo-intellectual, leftist, or idealistic. Depending on tone, it can be affectionate, neutral, or dismissive (like calling someone a “hippie” or “armchair intellectual” in English)."

EDIT: sounds like "my friend" is hallucinating. Thanks, actual people for helping me understand jholay. It seemed lazy though to simply ask in the comments, "What's jholay?"
by flessner | 2025-09-08 12:31:43+00:00
Vibe coding by itself isn't a problem.

The problem is vibe coding AND negligence. Good software practices like testing, code review, documentation are bound to catch the LLM-isms.

No offense on the author, the project specifically calls out that it's a "young" project in the footer, so I personally wouldn't expect it to be quite up to spec yet.
by mothballed | 2025-09-08 12:32:13+00:00
It was close to "New Italy" (in Spanish), somewhere within 50 miles of Asuncion.

I don't know much about Agriculture Engineering but there were a bunch of big milk vats, a couple electricians, and then a bunch of officials sitting around drinking the cold Yerba Matte stuff.

I assume they brought me because they heard I was an electrical engineer and I saw they were wiring the place up.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-09-08 12:32:26+00:00
> Studies show that the most important thing about criminal punishment is certainty of being caught and prosecuted.

This might lead someone to wrongly conclude that high order societies are a matter of policing. It's not. It's a matter of culture. Japan doesn't have more cops per citizen than your average 1st world country. But they do have a culture that deeply condemns crime and values honor.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-09-08 12:32:30+00:00
The Provisional IRA destroyed the center of my home city (Manchester) with a bomb in the back of a lorry that weighed over 1,500kgs. While growing up in the years before that attack, I was regularly evacuated from shops and other buildings in the center so that controlled detonations could take place of smaller devices.

ISIS-attributed cells conducted attacks with bombs in London and Manchester over many years, starting with the 7/7 attacks on tube lines and bus routes I happen to use sometimes.

On the 22nd March 2017, my partner crossed Westminster Bridge on her way to the theater about 30-45 minutes before an ISIS-affiliated attacker used a car to mow down pedestrians (and because she'd made it to the theater and had her phone off, I wasn't able to contact her for the first hour or so).

A month later (to the day), a suicide bomber detonated a device at a pop concert in my old home city, killing 22 people - many of them children. The bomber had made the bomb while living in an address about 40 feet from my old address when I lived in Manchester. A few weeks after that, another attack happened on London Bridge and Borough Market, on streets and in pubs where I had been socialising the week before.

I was fortunate that I, and those I care about, were not hurt or killed in these incidents. But that was fortune, not skill - a slightly delay here, or a decision to "not go this week, let's go next week", and I would have been in the middle of it all.

And these, I should point out, are not isolated incidents. The full list on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... - is quite a thing. It's quite likely that most people living in a major city (or even large town), in the UK today of a similar age to myself (late 40s), will have memories of nearby terrorist attacks in their lifetimes.

Yes, there are fables of child safety at play, and since 2021 the mood has switched so perhaps there is a lesser sense of urgency, but we're now seeing the hard right starting to be responsible for more terrorist attacks and the sense of fear and paranoia is rising again.

Do I like that the price of the Manchester bombings is that the city center is now absolutely drowning in CCTV? No. Do I like that the price of the bridge attacks in London is the huge barriers to protect pedestrians on Westminster, Waterloo and London Bridges? No. Do I like that every time I go into a concert hall or sports venue, I have to have my bags checked and a metal detector is run over me? No. Do I like that there hasn't been a proper rubbish bin in a train station or bus station since the 1980s, lest it is used to place a bomb - as was a favoured technique of the IRA on many occasions? No. I hate all of it.

But would I rather all that, than have to bear the misery of more actual deaths of innocent civilians? Yes.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-08 12:32:43+00:00
> I don't use it to create entire features.

I actually do this now. That's one of those things that went from impossible to doable under some circumstances. Still a bit of a coin flip but it can work well in some code bases. I still have a mental block even asking for these things under the assumption it would not work anyway. But I've been pleasantly surprised a few times where this actually works.
by gidellav | 2025-09-08 12:32:43+00:00
Hi! I started using Helix about 1 month ago, jumped from Emacs, and I have to say that I really prefer this minimalist approach where I have just two tabs on my term emulator, one for Helix one for git/compiler/etc, and I honestly don't feel the absence of plugins, except for maybe a better find/replace symbols like in VSCode could be nice.

Well, thanks for your article!
by bgwalter | 2025-09-08 12:32:47+00:00
Yes, Google with udm=14 is much better than "AI". "AI" might work for the trivia-type questions from this article, which most people aren't interested in to begin with.

It fails completely for complex political or investigative questions where there is no clear answer. Reading a single Wikipedia page is usually a better use of one's time:

You don't have to pretend that you are parallelizing work (which is just for show) while waiting three min for the "AI" answer. You practice speed reading and memory retention. You enhance your own semantic network instead of the network owned and controlled by oligopoly members.
by kragen | 2025-09-08 12:32:49+00:00
Hey, this is awesome! I'd never heard of adaptive quadrature before. Thanks for the tip! Here's what I hacked together from your description and looking up the Newton–Cotes formulas to get a reasonable order of convergence:

local function q(f, start, fstart, mid, fmid, stop, fstop, ε) -- Scaled approximation of integral on 3 points using Simpson’s -- rule. -- <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas#Closed_Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas> local Q3 = (1/6)*(fstart + 4*fmid + fstop) -- Scaled approximation of integral on 5 points. local mid1, mid2 = (1/2)*(start + mid), (1/2)*(mid + stop) local fmid1, fmid2 = f(mid1), f(mid2) -- Boole’s rule, giving exact results for up to cubic polynomials -- and an O(h⁷) error. This means that every additional level of -- recursion, adding 1 bit of precision to the independent -- variable, gives us 7 more bits of precision for smooth -- functions! So we need like 256 evaluations to get results to -- 53-bit machine precision? local Q5 = (7/90)*(fstart+fstop) + (32/90)*(fmid1+fmid2) + (12/90)*fmid --print(mid, Q3, Q5) -- Approximate the error by comparing the two. if (stop - start)*math.abs(Q5 - Q3) <= ε then return (stop - start) * Q5 end -- Recursively subdivide the interval. return q(f, start, fstart, mid1, fmid1, mid, fmid, ε) + q(f, mid, fmid, mid2, fmid2, stop, fstop, ε) end function adaquad(f, start, stop, ε) local mid = (1/2)*(start + stop) -- In some quick testing, ε/2 seems to work okay. return q(f, start, f(start), mid, f(mid), stop, f(stop), (1/2)*ε) end return adaquad

http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/adaquad.lua

It's kind of insane that 16 lines of code can do this!
by amonith | 2025-09-08 12:33:15+00:00
Yeah but we're mentioning the performance of the language. People do have a baseline level of accepted performance, but this is about perceived performance and if software feels slow most of the time it's just because of some dumb design. Like a decision to show an animated request to sign up for the newsletter on the first visit. Or loading 20 high quality images in a grid view on top of the page. Or just in general choosing animations that just feel slow even though they're hitting the FPS target perfectly without hiccups.

Get rid of those dumb decisions and it could have been pure JS and be 100% fine. C has no value here. The slow performance of JS is not harmful here. Discord is fast enough although it's Electron. VS Code is also fast enough.

But I'd also like to respond to the food analogy, since it's funny.

Let's say that going full untyped scripting language would be the fast food. You get things fast, it does the job, but is unhealthy. You can write only so much bash before throwing up.

Developing in C is like cooking for those equally dumb expensive unsustainable restaurants which give you "an experience" instead of a full healthy meal. Sure, the result uses the best ingredients, it's incredibly tasty but there's way too little food for too much cost. It's bad for the economy (the money should've been spent elsewhere), bad for the customer (same thing about money + he's going to be hungry!) and bad for the cook (if he chose a different job, he'd contribute to the society in better ways!) :D

Just go for something in the middle. Eat some C# or something.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-09-08 12:33:28+00:00
There were actual Wikipedians arguing not to take a wiki with a grain of salt? If I was in that discussion, I must have missed those posts. Can you link an example?

If you mean whether Wikipedia is unreliable? That's a different story, everything is unreliable. Wikipedia just happens to be potentially less unreliable than many (typically) (if used correctly) (#include caveats.h) .

Sources are like power tools. Use them with respect and caution.
by brucehoult | 2025-09-08 12:33:54+00:00
> Both the RISC-V and Thumb code here are no longer recursive fib

If the programmer wrote a doubly-recursive fib() and the compiler transformed one to tail-recursion, then that's a doubly-recursive fib() as far as I'm concerned. If you don't want that to happen then use a benchmark that isn't so easily optimised, such as maybe Ackermann.

Note that this optimisation doesn't change the calculation performed or the execution time from being exponential, it merely saves some stack manipulation.

Having access to good compilers is part of the attraction of using a real ISA instead of a made-up one.

Changing the algorithm to an iterative linear-time form one is not an optimisation I'd expect a compiler to do.
by lloydatkinson | 2025-09-08 12:34:05+00:00
Interesting, I’d never heard of that ICE. Seems that it could be considered a very very early idea in line with ActivityPub, which I also don’t really know much about.

I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.

Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?

Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
by ubermonkey | 2025-09-08 12:34:18+00:00
So did Twitter pre-Elon. I moved a number of "public personalities" with high-volume feeds from my follow list to my RSS reader. I liked what Merlin Mann, or Parker Molloy, or John Green had to say, but I wasn't going to interact with them, and their loquaciousness made it hard to keep up with people I followed there that I actually knew and interacted with.

Then I remembered that Twitter was once referred to as "micro blogging," so I put those folks in my blog list on Feedbin, and was happy again.

I do miss the glory days of Twitter, tbh.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-08 12:34:27+00:00
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, our country now having a right majority with a Nazi party in the mix, makes me really sad.

How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears.

Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
by netsharc | 2025-09-08 12:34:36+00:00
It's awkward isn't it, because following local laws could mean being a helping hand of the oppressor... For an extreme example, an email company that is forced by a new law to reveal all emails of citizens of country X, or a payment app that has to upload all transactions to the government (and where the supreme court has ruled in favour of the surveillance state). The "moral" company would probably rather shut their operations, but even trillion-dollar companies relent... And who has the last word on what's moral?
by pandaman | 2025-09-08 12:34:51+00:00
I think the confusion here is over "visa" vs "status". The OP in this thread is talking about getting a new visa stamp (a card with a picture glued onto a passport page), the USDOS link you post talks about extending your status in the country (they use "visa" term because most people confuse the status and visa, but the form I-539 on that page is the EOS form and does not do anything to the visa). The latter is possible anywhere, the former is only in a consulate.
by anonzzzies | 2025-09-08 12:35:12+00:00
I have 5 E450s, 20 sparcstations 5s, about as many ultra 5s + 10s and a few of those square older boxes. They all still work and i'm waiting for something. Such a nice machines, especially the E450s were dreamy at the time. I gave a demo where we should a 'cluster of EJBs', indestructible(...) software dev on 2 E450s. It was impressive, but stupidly overpriced... We made nice money but for me that era was about the hardware, after that everything because just 'PCs'.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 12:35:15+00:00
> Protests are rarely effectual

False

“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].

Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].

[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)

[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...
by 542354234235 | 2025-09-08 12:35:36+00:00
But the Current Forerunner 165 is $250 and still does most of those things (everything the 235 did), while having upgraded sensors and GPS from the 235. Garmin still makes excellent entry level fitness watches for most people and when I look around my run club, that is what most people buy.

Edit Corrected to 165, not 265.