MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-22 19:14:46+00:00
That PDP-8 BASIC was a miracle of shoehorning as was everything else on the PDP-8.

My favorite minicomputer BASIC that I got to use was on RSTS/E on the PDP-11 which had split 64k address spaces for code and data and used fairly advanced compilation techniques. Roughly the RSTS/E experience was like having your own Apple ][ but with a hard drive and a little more oomph. I grew up in New Hampshire right next door to DEC's headquarters in Massachusetts and there were DEC minicomputers everywhere.

Microsoft had a compiled BASIC (like run a compiler, not compile interactively like Microware's BASIC09) on CP/M for the Z-80 which was a much better compiler target than the popular 6502.

I wrote a FORTH for the TRS-80 Color Computer using the OS-9 operating system which had maybe 2000-3000 lines of assembly code. FORTHs at the time often did block I/O directly to the disk but OS-9 had an API to access files that was pretty similar to Unix and my FORTH exposed that.
by stared | 2025-09-22 19:15:12+00:00
Usually are long and project-dependent, so I won't share here.

But just a copy-paste of a piece of a project of mine

## Core Principles (IMPORTANT) - **NO FALLBACKS EVER** - Fail fast, fail hard. If something is missing, crash immediately - **NO SILENT DEFAULTS** - Never use default values when files/data is missing - **NO TRY/EXCEPT WRAPPING** - Let exceptions propagate for easier debugging - **PROPER TYPES ONLY** - Use Literal types for enums, Pydantic models for structures. No tuples for structured data - **NO JAVA-STYLE ABSTRACTIONS** - Don't create pointless constants like STATUS_OK = "OK". Just use literals or proper types - **PROPER PARSING** - No regex for structured formats, use real parsers - **CRASH EARLY** - Things should crash as soon and as hard as possible for easy debugging - **NO DEFENSIVE PROGRAMMING** - Don't worry about "backwards compatibility" during refactoring - just redesign things to be better. ## Development **IMPORTANT: Always use `uv run` for all Python commands. Never use plain `python` or `python3`.** ```bash # Format code uv run ruff format . # Check linting uv run ruff check . # Type checking uv run ty check # Run tests uv run pytest tests/ ```
by n_u | 2025-09-22 19:15:27+00:00
> write only needing to be written to the binary log on the replica and not (necessarily) applied to InnoDB.

Ah. I wonder are writes in the log but not yet in InnoDB are available for reads? Then your write may succeed but a subsequent read from a replica would not see it so you lose read-after-write consistency. Perhaps that's another tradeoff.

I'll have to research a bit more but the MySQL docs [1] say "requires only an acknowledgement from the replicas, not that the events have been fully executed and committed on the replica side" which implies that it can't be read yet.

Thanks!

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/replication-semisync...
by dmitrygr | 2025-09-22 19:15:40+00:00
> Tell me, where do you live? I'd like to know what your direct experience of California is.

5 years in mountain view, CA; 1 in santa calara, CA; 4 more in mountain view, CA with frequent trips into SF proper; 1 in SF proper; 4 more in mountain view, CA. Eventually I got tired of broken car windows and police who never came to investigate. Got tired of hoboes jumping at me with knives and police not responding to calls when i reported it. I left. So the last 3 years - Austin, TX

And before you try to claim this is bullshit, i still own a house in CA in MTV and public records easily prove that and the rest of locations too.

That's the funniest/saddest part about your comment - i do not need to listen to any "fact-free news" I have the scar from the hobo knife and the voice recordings of police saying "so what do you want us to do? go file a report online, give it to your insurance". It took a while after leaving to finally understand how much I was simply putting up with and considered "part of modern life". The Stockholm Syndrome took a year or so to wear off. Now, when forced to go back to norcal, I notice it a lot more.
by kapone | 2025-09-22 19:15:47+00:00
Two words. Passive flows.

Where do you think your 401K money is going...right into the S&P 500...and who gets the lion's share of allocation out of that? The Mag7 et al.

If you chart the last 25 years, Gold (yes, that one...the useless metal) has outperformed the S&P (and it's making new highs even today). What does that say about hard assets vs these companies?
Show HN: Spatialbound – Turn any location into an interactive 3D playgrounds
by mibrahimSB | 2025-09-22 19:15:49+00:00
Think of Spatialbound as Figma for the physical world, an online platform to design, simulate, and reimagine real-world spaces in 3D. With built-in GIS tools (with global spatial data store), multiple apps, and a native Python API, Spatialbound helps you automate your spatial workflows, saving hours of work.
by jerjerjer | 2025-09-22 19:16:08+00:00
I don't think anchors' primary function is to allow global definitions (of variables or whatever), rather it's more like arbitrary templates/snippets to be reused through the YAML file.

In GitLab, where YAML anchors have been supported for years, I personally find them very useful —it's the only way of "code" reuse, really. In GitLab there's a special edtor just for .gitlab-ci.yml, which shows the original view and the combined read-only view (with all anchors expanded).

I agree that it's hard to point to the specific line of the source code, but it's enough — in case of an error — to output an action name, action property name, and actual property value that caused an error. Based on these three things, a developer can easily find the correct line.
by godelski | 2025-09-22 19:16:11+00:00
I'll note that I have a physics degree. My undergrad advisor and several people I've worked for had worked directly under those scientists, though post project. Including my time at the two labs not in New Mexico. I'm saying this to help convince you that I know what I'm talking about here:

That story is wildly overblown. No one really thought this would happen. But given the consequences of being wrong no one wanted to trust themselves. So what they did is keep asking each other to try to do the calculations independently and see if they would get the same results. The idea came from Teller who was researching stars, which do have a runaway reaction. In the movie Oppenheimer says "nonzero chance" and that's accurate. He really did mean "we aren't confident that this would get impossible" but they were very confident the likelihood was almost zero.

The reason this it's important is because it flips the story on its head. Had they thought there was a meaningful chance and moved forward then the story represents how brash they were and careless. But instead it is a story of where they were considering and taking seriously something they thought was a near impossibility and yet they took great effort to ensure that it was actually impossible. That's now a story of how careful they were. It's the exact opposite of being brash.

Mind you, this doesn't contradict what I said before. They did know the bomb would be powerful, but I doubt many knew how powerful until near or at Trinity. And I'll tell you, unless you can do the calculations then you really don't understand what those things actually do. It is so much more than an explosion. It is more than the radiation. There's a reason so many could no longer be blind to the consequences. To this day the skeletons are out of the physicists' closet because we all know we are capable of unknowingly following the same path. When you learn what that bomb does you hope you're at the center of it
by RantyDave | 2025-09-22 19:16:40+00:00
Thing is, I have stopped expecting Xcode to be any good.

Actual native macOS/iOS development got beaten senseless when the App Store made it clear that "unsustainably low" was the expected price point for third party developers; and that Apple were treating the store more or less as a market research exercise and good ideas absolutely would be stolen.

So it's an internal tool, really. And we're I-guess-lucky that they document it and release it for the proles.
by gpm | 2025-09-22 19:16:48+00:00
The US is adding significantly more solar, and slightly more wind, than natural gas every year. This doesn't have to be placed where people already are, but can be placed where energy is the cheapest, which favours solar and wind substantially more than gas (or nuclear).

The reasonable (cost effective, can be done quickly) thing to do is put this wherever you can generate solar + wind the most reliably, build out a giant battery bank, and use the grid as a backup generator. Over time build a better and better connection to the grid to sell excess energy.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-22 19:17:01+00:00
I feel like this mischaracterizes the blog. You seem to be taking this:

> People should spend less time learning DSA, more time learning testing.

And reading it as "More total time should be spent on learning testing than the total time spent learning DSA". That's one reading, another is that people are studying DSA too much, and testing too little. The ratio of total time can still be in favor of studying DSA more, but maybe instead of 10:1 it should be more like 8:1 or 5:1.
by jrussino | 2025-09-22 19:17:13+00:00
Human civilization feels so much more fragile to me since I realized how much we owe our technological progress to the accumulated effects of biological processes over geological timescales. Fossil fuels seem like the most obvious part of this story. If we had to start over "from scratch", would it even be possible? Or have we already so thoroughly exhausted the low-hanging energy stores that a second "industrial revolution" would be effectively impossible if our present civilization collapsed deeply enough?

I wasn't aware that concentrated stores of iron are also an important part of this story!
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-09-22 19:17:38+00:00
The problem with most corporate work that these managerial idiots want replaced with AI is that is all so utterly useless. Reports written that no one will ever read, presentations made for the sake of the busy-ness of "making a deck", notes and minutes of meetings that should never have taken place in the first place. Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary.

I like the quote in the middle of the article: "creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependant [sic] upon outside forces". I believe that orgs that fall back on the AI lie, who insist on schlepping slop from one side to the other, will be devoured by orgs that see through the noise.

It's like code. The most bug-free code are those lines that are never written. The most productive workplace is the one that never bothers with that BS in the first place. But, promotions and titles and egos are on the line so...

AI in its current form, like the swirling vortex of corporate bilge that people are forced to swim through day after day after day to, can't die fast enough.
by stale2002 | 2025-09-22 19:18:24+00:00
Its not just about OpenAI, though. Even though they have the biggest/flashiest deal. The other more obvious example is coreweave.

> OpenAI buys GPUs from Nvidia. And the only reason it buys these GPUs is to resell it back to Nvidia

Funny you should say this. Nvidia having those GPUs be rented back to them is also something thats happening.

https://www.kerrisdalecap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Ker...

"As detailed by The Information, in early 2023 Nvidia invested $100 million in equity and signed a $1.3 billion rental agreement through 2027, under which it rents back GPUs from CoreWeave to support internal R&D and its DGX cloud offering."

"CoreWeave is not the only neocloud to benefit from Nvidia’s strategic support. Nvidia has actively supported an ecosystem of emerging AI infrastructure providers – including Lambda, Nebius, and Applied Digital –"

They are quite literally buying GPUs only to rent them right back to Nvidia.

And these are just the public deals. Is Nvidia systematically selling GPUs and having them be rented back to, by every major GPU cloud providers?

https://www.investing.com/analysis/coreweave-nvidia-partners...

"This deep alliance culminates in the new $6.3 billion agreement. The deal’s most critical component is a strategic commitment from NVIDIA to purchase any of CoreWeave’s unsold cloud computing capacity through April 2032"
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-22 19:18:24+00:00
Oh lord. We already have TOML, which is an improvement on limited JSON when a human-readable, easily-diffable, more flexible format is needed.

We don't even need HCL (offers little value), YAML (has too many features making it inherently less secure), XML (is a mess with too many features and too much verbosity), or INI (insufficient features) except for existing and historical reasons.

In cases where a single file is attempted to be managed by multiple, competing interests, it's probably better to split the file into multiple, modular/include files like *.d/* so there would be less chances for merge conflicts.

And then there's /{proc,sys}-like configuration with one "value" per file where the path forms the heirarchy.

Please. Just. Stop reinventing wheels that were already round enough.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-22 19:18:36+00:00
I'm fine with not separating discourse.

So long as there is an open network where we can analyzer participants behaviors, and where we don't have to be subject to the moderation and algorithmic wins of a single controlling interest. So long as we can shield ourselves from people we don't like.

There seems to be very very very few places where there are the fundamentals in place for it to make sense to be there. There are very popular very large networks, but I absolutely cannot imagine how anyone is remotely ok trusting the "public discourse" to be held on such imbalanced lopsided private property, that's tilting the discourse invisibly underfoot.
by toast0 | 2025-09-22 19:18:40+00:00
OTOH, making a bunch of noise about the case gets the ad and their product seen by a different demographic than paying for the ad to be placed wherever they would have. IMHO, this is an alternate marketing campaign, costs go to the courts instead of broadcasters. There's some public benefit if the case generates precedent, so that's nice that they want to spend their ad budget on this.
by jjav | 2025-09-22 19:18:43+00:00
> Well, I have to admit that your friend has a point. Humans are bad at reacting quickly and correctly to unexpected situations, and some debris large enough to damage your car showing up from out of nowhere

I read this comment before seeing the video and thought maybe the debris flies in with the wind and falls on the road a second before impact, or something like that.

But no, here we have bright daylight, perfect visibility, the debris is sitting there on the road visible from very far away, the person in the car doing commentary sees it with plenty of time to leisurely avoid it (had he been driving).

Nothing unexpected showed up out of nowhere, it was sitting right there all along. No quick reaction needed, there was plenty of time to switch lanes. And yet Tesla managed to hit it, against all odds! Wow.

My impression of Tesla's self driving is not very high, but this shows it's actually far worse than I thought.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-22 19:18:45+00:00
> Why they chose Chromium and not Firefox? Firefox has always been independent whereas as Microsoft is corporate as is Google. At least my take on it. I'm sure some backhand deals too.

I don't have any more insight than any other commenter, but in my estimation a major factor is how practical the browser is to fork. By the time Microsoft switched to a Chromium base for edge, creating and maintaining a Chromium fork with meaningfully different UI was fairly well-trodden ground because it had been done several times already, whereas almost nobody had forked Firefox (except for toggle some flags or keep the UI frozen in time). The one countervailing example, Brave, also switched to Chromium for similar reasons.

Additionally, this was the beginning of the arc of working overtime to court web developers that it's still in the midst of. By shuttering Chakra (the old Edge rendering engine) and switching to Blink, Microsoft improved its reputation with web devs.
by dugmartin | 2025-09-22 19:18:53+00:00
As someone that grew up partly in Southern Illinois with lots of relatives in Southern Indiana I can tell you they have a great deal in common. Both regions are very "southern" culturally, with very distinct accents.

Illinois is an interesting place as it features large changes in culture from north to south. I was born in Northern Illinois and lived there until I was 10 when I moved 5 hours south. There is an enormous cultural difference. As the map shows Northern Illinois is part of the "Midlands" with a flat/generic accent whereas the Southern Illinois/Southern Indiana accent sounds a lot like Woody Harrelson's (who was born in Texas). The greater Chicagoland area is its own thing, the map shows it part of Yankeedom but I disagree - I lived in Chicago twice in my 20s and I've lived in Yankeedom (Massachusetts) for 25 years now and I don't see much similarity. I'd group far northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota in their own group, maybe called the "Opers"
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-22 19:18:55+00:00
I'm getting real "put everything on the blockchain" vibes from answers like this. I remember when folks were telling me that hospitals were going to put patient records on the blockchain. As for radiology, it doesn't seem this use of AI is as much of a "slam dunk" as it first appeared[1][2]. We'll see, I guess.

Right now I kind of land on the side of "Where is all the shovelware?". If AI is such a huge productivity boost for developers, where is all the software those developers are supposedly writing[3]? But this is just a microcosm of a bigger question. Almost all the economic growth since the AI boom started has been in AI companies. If AI is revolutionizing multiple fields, why aren't relevant companies those fields also growing at above-expected rates? Where's all this productivity that AI is supposedly unlocking?

[1] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/does-ai-help-or-hurt-human-radi...

[2] https://www.ajronline.org/doi/10.2214/AJR.24.31493

[3] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
by MantisShrimp90 | 2025-09-22 19:19:10+00:00
As someone who has been running all the components of omarchy before they made it, I agree with you in spirit especially as an arch user.

But other people need an ISO and yes all those things are kinda considered standard at this point.

People like you and I aren't the target audience, but for the people who are, this is what they have been asking for.
by xyst | 2025-09-22 19:19:12+00:00
This is awful. You should know the private companies building these datacenters often get back door deals with PUCs. They do NOT pay their fair share in their consumption and the extra cost is shouldered onto the general rate payers.

More degenerate "privatizing of the profits, socializing the profits" behavior. American public continues to get bent by billionaires and continue to elect folks that will gladly lube them up in preparation of that event.
by SalmoShalazar | 2025-09-22 19:19:43+00:00
It kind of is, though not explicitly. If you follow Andreas on X you will see a lot of his comments and replies are either a) posting about being aggrieved about users who are mean and rude on BlueSky or b) Amplifying traditional family values, right wing beliefs, etc, in a somewhat indirect way. He seems to be too cautious to outright say anything, but it’s obvious by the company he keeps.
by afiori | 2025-09-22 19:20:03+00:00
Async/await became ergonomic and widespread only recently, I am sure there were async systems in the '80 but for example nodejs focus on non blocking I/O changed how a lot of people thought about servers and concurrency (whether node was first is almost irrelevant)

Often when something is discovered or invented is far less influential[1] than when it jumps on and hype train.

[1] the discovery is very important for historical and epistemological reasons of course, rewriting the past is bad
by pdabbadabba | 2025-09-22 19:20:27+00:00
This. Lawyers can use AI tools. But an attorney is ultimately responsible for everything that goes out the door. So they had better check the output from their AI tool carefully. In most firms (at least most good ones) someone would check every citation that goes out the door, even if it was written by an experienced attorney, so it speaks volumes that someone would fail to check citations generated by an LLM.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-22 19:20:32+00:00
> OpenAI is profitable if they stop training their next generation models. Their unit economics are extremely favorable.

But OpenAI can't stop training their next generation models. OpenAI already spends over 50% of their revenue on inference cost [1] with some vendors spending over 100% of their revenue on inference.

The real cash cow for them is in the business segment. The problem here is models are rapidly cloned, and the companies adjacent to model providers actively seek to provide consumers the ability to rapidly and seamlessly switch between model providers [2][3].

Model providers are in the situation you imagine cloud providers to be in; a non-differentiated, commodity product with high fixed costs, and poor margins.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on...

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai-assistant/use-custom-model...

[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/customization/lan...
by hermitcrab | 2025-09-22 19:20:35+00:00
Yes, because it is all about status and having more money than the other guy. That is why no amount is ever going to be enough for some of these people.

But I don't really understand why they spend it on useless baubles. If you spend £50m on a fancy London house, a yacht and a some super cars, most people (British people anyway) will think you are a wanker. But if you spent some of that money on schools and hospitals in a poor country, you would probably be treated like a minor god in that country.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-22 19:21:19+00:00
This article doesn't offer any suggestions for how to make advertising work, though. It simply asserts that it's possible to do advertising in a better way.

> Alternatives that avoid these downsides are, however, possible. They are more sophisticated than the dismissive "just use contextual" ( though well-designed contextual systems do exist), and exploring them in detail would make this piece far too long.

My pet peeve is that advertising goes hand-in-hand with spying. Here, the author is dismissive of the obvious way to do advertising without needing to spy on everyone, and asserts that there are other, better ways but doesn't even hint at what those ways are.

I really want to agree with what he's saying here, but it's hard to do so just on a "trust me" basis.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-22 19:21:19+00:00
Much if not all of this is non-scientific, it doesn't hold water except as narrative, which I don't know how to engage with except reject it on basic grounds. Psychoanalysis isn't science, Girard isn't science, both are narrative. That means it's designed for sender-status. Pointless to discuss.

Scrawling memes on casings though is not brain rot, it's a general hack of mythological thought, it's a break from the overall patterns academia, intelligentsia, and plain English general interest media fool audiences into the status game inherent to narrative. Stay in line, buy more, be happier. The point of memes are to shred this causal link between the arbitrary (words, narratives, money etc). I'd look at meme culture as revolutionary, but that subverts most of what you're citing.

And I don't think considering Baudrillard's critique of the seamlessness of simulation with reality it or he is accelerationist, that's a narrative take of an analytical probe.