MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-24 03:55:45+00:00
> Did I ever mention that ASN.1 is complicated?

The schema format is complicated, and the data format also is, but most of it is ignorable complexity, often making it simpler than it is.

I do not use the ASN.1 schema notation, since I have been able to use ASN.1 without it. (I wrote my own implementation of the data format (DER) in C.)

> On the one hand the sheer amount of possible encodings is daunting, but on the other hand it shows a certain flexbility that ASN.1 provides - you could even invent your own domain-specific encoding if needed.

It is true. My opinion is, of the standard encodings, DER is the only one that is any good (and is the one that I usually use (although most of my uses are not having to do with cryptography); X.509 (which is a common use of ASN.1) also uses DER), but I did make up my own encodings as well: DSER (between BER and DER), SDSER (like DSER but the length is encoded differently so that streaming is possible, in a (in my opinion) better way than CER does), and TER (a text format which is intended to be converted to DER).

> ANY DEFINED BY

I still effectively use it (as well as ANY), since I think it is very useful. (As I mentioned, I did not actually use the ASN.1 schema format, but I sometimes use what effectively works like ANY and ANY DEFINED BY.)

(I also sometimes use a nonstandard feature that I made up, which is called OBJECT IDENTIFIER RELATIVE TO, which is like OBJECT IDENTIFIER but it can be encoded more efficiently (using the RELATIVE OID type) if the value has the prefix that the schema expects it to have.)
by jancsika | 2025-10-24 03:56:04+00:00
If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for? :)

You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can only point to programmers having a general lack of knowledge about their incredibly short history.

(In reality my hope is some slice of devs have achieved this and I've summoned links to their projects by claiming the opposite on the internet.)

Edit: just so I get the right incantation for summoning links-- I'm talking about the whole enchilada of a visual language that runs and rebuilds the user's flowchart program as the user modelessly edits it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM
by adwn | 2025-10-24 03:56:25+00:00
Today you can already get 51.2 V, 16 kWh batteries complete with balancer and BMS from a European supplier for 1200 € (1400 US$): https://www.nkon.nl/novat/nkon-ess-eco-s-51-2v-16-1kwh-thuis...
by db48x | 2025-10-24 03:56:49+00:00
I didn’t delve very deep into it, but the program was written in Go. At this point in the lifecycle of the program we had optimized it quite a bit, removing all the inefficiencies that we could. It was now spending around two thirds of its cpu cycles on garbage collection. It had this ridiculously large heap that was still growing, but hardly any of it was actually garbage.

I rewrote a slice of the program in Rust with quite promising results, but by that time there wasn’t really any demand left. You see, one of the many uses of Reposurgeon <http://www.catb.org/esr/reposurgeon/> is to convert SVN repositories into Git repositories. These performance results were taken while reposurgeon was running on a dump of the GCC source code repository. At the time this was the single largest open source SVN repository left in the world with 287k commits. Now that it’s been converted to a Git repository it’s unlikely that future Reposurgeon users will have the same problem.

Also, someone pointed out that MG-LRU <https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/multigen_lru.html> might help by increasing the block size of the reads and writes. It was introduced a year or more after I took these screenshots, so I can’t easily verify that.
by noosphr | 2025-10-24 03:56:53+00:00
This is not an issue in China as they overprovision demand by 50 percent. Their grid can run off baseload generation alone in their 2060 plan.

Trying to explain that a grid build by electrical engineers, rather than financial engineers, has resilience build in to people whose whole idea about electricity generation is greenwashed bullshit from McKinsey and Co is at best a waste of time and at worst an excellent way to raise one's blood pressure.
by raphman | 2025-10-24 03:59:46+00:00
I'm doing this in the software engineering¹ course I teach. However:

a) Practical CI/CD requires understanding (and some practical experience) of many other concepts like Linux shell scripting, version control, build automation, containers, server administration, etc. As few students (in our degree programme) have sufficient experience in these concepts, I spend about half of the semester teaching such devops basics instead of actual software engineering.

b) Effectively, teaching CI/CD means teaching how GitHub or GitLab do CI/CD. I feel a little bit uncomfortable teaching people how to use tech stacks owned by a single company.

¹) Actually it's more a course on basic software craftsmanship for media informatics students because no such course exists in our curriculum and I find it more important that students learn this than that they understand the V model.
by notatoad | 2025-10-24 04:01:09+00:00
just from my own anecdotal experience, it's easy to prioritize apple because apple users are not only more inclined to pay for software, they're more inclined to use it.

even on web apps that are exactly the same across platforms my experience is you might more signups from windows users because somebody told them "hey, you should check this out", but the metrics on actual usuage usually favor the mac users.
by quacked | 2025-10-24 04:05:05+00:00
I just learned that term today, but I guess so. I don't know how I generate words, they're just there. I type at about 120 wpm and speak very quickly as well, but as it's coming out I'm just flashing through different images in my head, often partial images from my own memory, and the words come out without paying attention to them, like out of a lower layer of consciousness. I write a lot of 300+ word messages at work, and it's just image after image firing in my head while the words appear.

I think I have a concept-image map in my head; to test it out, I'm thinking of random words, and very well-defined images are popping into my head. "Insurance" is the impression of slate grey followed by a view into a 90s corporate office room. "Propulsion" is the bell of one of the space shuttle engines firing on full, but not centered in frame. "Gravity" is one of the rooms in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Etc. But it's harder to go the other way; if I see an image or a drawing and have to describe what it is, there's more of a lag before I can retrieve the words to describe it. It's much easier to think of other related images.
by nicohayes | 2025-10-24 04:06:34+00:00
You're definitely not alone. Social media amplifies the "AI is everywhere" narrative, but in reality? Most people are still shipping code the old-fashioned way.

I'd estimate maybe 20% of devs have actually integrated AI into their daily workflow beyond occasional ChatGPT queries. The other 80% either tried it and bounced off the friction, or are waiting to see which tools actually stick.

Not using AI doesn't mean you're falling behind - it means you're avoiding cargo-culting. The real skill is knowing when it's worth the context-switching cost and when grep + your brain is faster.
by protocolture | 2025-10-24 04:07:04+00:00
>I tried it, I have tried a very similar but still different use case. I wonder if you have thoughts around how much of this is our own context management vs context management for the LLM.

Completely subjectively, for me its both. I have several Chat GPT tabs where it is instructed not to respond, or to briefly summarise. System works both ways imho.
by Centrino | 2025-10-24 04:07:34+00:00
Unlike in many other countries, where provinces or regions are merely administrative divisions created to decentralize or streamline administration, the US emerged when states voluntarily came together and decided to create a country. The states were willing to outsource part of their autonomy to a federal level, on condition that guardrails were put in place to limit the power of that federal level. Those guardrails were: bicameralism, equal representation of states in the Senate, and the electoral college. The House is the voice of the people, the Senate is the voice of the states.

The practical consequence of this system is that it effectively prevents a majority of voters from large urban centers from imposing their will onto rural populations, at least at the federal level. It was designed that way.

I've seen comments here claiming that countries like Canada or France deliver better outcomes than the US. They are stronger welfare states, yes, but they also have become overly paternalistic nanny states, with heavy-handed regulations, and high taxes stifling individual initiative.
by vlmutolo | 2025-10-24 04:07:52+00:00
I wonder how this compares to similar initiatives by e.g. Sony [0] and Leica [1].

[0]: https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/

[1]: https://petapixel.com/2023/10/26/leica-m11-p-review-as-authe...
by andoando | 2025-10-24 04:08:01+00:00
Alot of its a push for practicality/catering to student's interests. IMO its a result of a really archaic education system. Universities were originally small and meant for theoretical study, not as a de facto path for everyone to enroll into in order to get a job.

If it were me Id get rid of statically defined 4 year programs, and/or definite required courses for degrees, or just degrees in general. Just offer courses and let people come learn what they want.

One of my favorite classes was a python class that focused on building some simple games with tkinter, making a chat client, hosting a server, because it was the first time I understood how actual software worked. Im really glad I took that class.

On the other hand Id love to have learned information theory, lamba calculus, all the early AI, cognitive science, theory of programming languages, philosophy behind all of it that got us here
by mholt | 2025-10-24 04:10:15+00:00
I believe it's being returned by the FS driver, not mmap() necessarily. I think I knew what instruction it was when I was debugging it but don't remember right now. (I could probably dig through my LLM history and get it though.)

And yeah, I knew AI is useless, I try to avoid it, but when I'm way over my head it's better than nothing (it did lead me to the workaround that I mentioned in my previous comment).
by keyle | 2025-10-24 04:11:00+00:00
This is rather expensive for what looks like a home 3D printed toy with some cute software.

Other than that it's a 16MP Sony CMOS, I'd expect a pretty noisy picture...

How do I get my photos off the camera? Coming soon. We're working on export functionality to get your photos off the camera.

It would be more interesting if the software was open source.
by psunavy03 | 2025-10-24 04:15:30+00:00
If hypothetical uber-classified goons actually existed, the Trump administration would not be inventing bullshit reasons to misuse ICE under the pretext of immigration enforcement. They'd just disappear people even more secretly.

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and at least to this point, the Executive Branch cannot get away with "classified" actions within the United States that can't be defended in court under the color of unclassified black-letter law. Even FISA is, in fact, a Federal court. And all the ooga-booga supposed uber-secret SOF units that allegedly exist are military units (to the extent they actually exist), which can't be used domestically under Posse Comitatus. Domestic law enforcement is the FBI's job. No ooga-booga secret CIA unit would have any remit to operate in the US against Americans, especially given the well-known FBI/CIA rivalry.

There are no "Men in Black." It's a fun movie premise, that's all.
by toast0 | 2025-10-24 04:15:51+00:00
2014? Ford C-MAX energi TSB 16-0105 [1] (although there's a similar TSB 22-2396 [2] with a wider range)

I'd just say, if it starts making bearing noises (loudest around 15mph), check in and get yelly. Cause apparently they keep screwing them up. HF35 is designed and built by Ford for Ford, so they really should have everything they need to do it right. sigh

I saw a picture somewhere where they had an extra hole carved through the casing from this, worked fine until it breached and the fluid came out, then it died pretty quick.

[1] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2016/SB-10092366-5448.pdf

[2] https://www.tsbsearch.com/Ford/22-2396
by adwn | 2025-10-24 04:16:06+00:00
> New grid storage batteries cost around $200-300/kWh

That doesn't sound right. You can already get high-quality, prismatic LFP cells for ~50 US$/kWh [1] from European distributors at low-volumes, so bulk from China should be even cheaper. And there's no way that balancing and BMS cost an additional 150-250 US$/kWh at scale, not even a tenth of that.

[1] https://www.nkon.nl/novat/eve-lf230-prismatic-230ah-230a-lif...
by tomhow | 2025-10-24 04:16:24+00:00
Previously:

Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127508 - Jan 2018 (4 comments)

Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13424320 - Jan 2017 (1 comment)

Computer science courses that don't exist, but should - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10201611 - Sept 2015 (247 comments)
by wpollock | 2025-10-24 04:16:30+00:00
> It is interesting that no software engineering or computer science course I’ve seen has ever spent any time on CI/CD.

It's hard to fit everything student needs to know in the curriculum. Someone else posted here they had 10 pages of proofs per week, for one course. I would have been fired for assigning so much homework!

I was a CS professor at a local college. My solution was to ignore CS1 and CS2 curriculum (we were not ABET accredited, so that's okay) in the second course of Java programming. Instead, I taught students Maven/Gradle, Git and GitHub, workflows, CI/CD, regular expressions, basic networking, basic design patterns, Spring Boot, and in general everything I thought new programmers ought to know. I even found a book that covered much of this stuff, but in the end I wrote my own learning materials and didn't use a book.

The course was a victim of its success. The school mandated the course for non-Java programmers too, resulting in a lot of push-back from the non-Java students.

If anyone is interested, I have the syllabus online still (I've since retired) at <https://wpollock.com/>. Look for COP2800 and COP2805C. I can also send the Java teaching materials as a PDF to anyone interested (book length, but sadly not publishable quality).
by moxscale | 2025-10-24 04:16:56+00:00
I built a multi-engine search bar where you can engage and search all the major engines, social media platforms, and Google services. I've also add a built-in spell checking that returns the spell-corrected version below with a copy-to-clipboard button for instant correct.

If you're a power user like me it will save you a lot of time and clicking around.

Check it out: https://instawarp.com
by bruce511 | 2025-10-24 04:17:05+00:00
Ha. You call it "history". I call it "childhood". I did that years before getting to Uni :)

Although, to be fair, while it was a helpful practice at coding, I'm not a game designer, so it was a game too terrible to play.

First year Uni though I spent too many hours in the lab, competing with friends, to recreate arcade games on the PC. Skipping the game design part was helpful. To be fair by then we had a glorious 640k of ram. Some Assembly required.
by kapone | 2025-10-24 04:17:06+00:00
Electricity prices are up everywhere. We're still way lower than many many places. There's many parts of the US (take a wild guess where all the data centers are going...) where electric rates are <$.10/kwh.

Now compare that to...

Yes, solar and wind projects are being canceled, and yes, there may be an element of ideology involved, but the reality also is that the math aint working.

If the math worked, Europe's energy prices wouldn't be where they are now, given the commitment they've made to renewables. I'd much rather see a national focus on nuclear, which is as clean as any other form of energy, and to a degree that is happening now.
by overfeed | 2025-10-24 04:17:28+00:00
> Having worked extensively with battery systems, I think the grid storage potential of second-life EV batteries is more complex than it appears.

Complex, by t very much doable. Toyota implemented such a system with enough packs to power a Mazda factory [1]

> However, you need to factor in significant integration costs (~$50-75/kWh) to build compatible BMS systems and thermal management.

Shouldn't this be a once-off cost per battery-pack version? Or was this your armortized cost for your deployment capacity. If you've written the BMS for a 2019 Model 3 Panasonic battey pack once, won't you reuse it for all the subsequent battery packs of the same model/SKU?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998010
by plorg | 2025-10-24 04:18:11+00:00
I can't say that I think it would be a saner world to have the equivalent of a teacher or hall monitor sitting in on every conversation, even if that computer chaperone isn't going to automatically involve the cops. I don't think you can build a better society where everyone is expected to speak and behave defensively in every circumstance as if their words could be taken out of context by a snitch - computer or otherwise.
by shakna | 2025-10-24 04:18:41+00:00
I don't think we've attempted to study if rats have internal monolgues all that much, yet. It wouldn't surprise me if they did, or did not. I wouldn't say it is safe to assume they don't.

About the only real animal model has shown that some species of monkey probably do. [0]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01664...
by svieira | 2025-10-24 04:18:52+00:00
> But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.

This is false, fortunately. "Human" and "sin" are not necessary to each other. Sin is not natural to man. The gift of original justice could not be passed on from Adam to his children because he threw it away. This lack of a gift is what is called "original sin" and its effects include all of the disordered expressions we find ourselves inclined to from birth. But this lack of a gift is not necessary to being human.

Which allows God to take on human nature without being in the state of sin ("like us in all things but sin"), but accepting the punishment for sin (death) to redeem us and offer a new gift of mercy that restores the original gift of justice for those who accept it. Since God is outside of time, He can even give the fruits of that gift "before" that gift is realized in time (Elijah, Mary).
by Gigachad | 2025-10-24 04:19:29+00:00
I'm pretty sure forensic cameras already exist for this purpose. And as far as I can tell, there isn't really any bulletproof way to do this other than embed a signing key in the camera and hope no one manages to extract it, rendering the whole thing pointless.

I guess you could have a unique signing key per camera and blacklist known leaked keys.
by maxdamantus | 2025-10-24 04:19:42+00:00
Just to clarify, I think the parent posts are talking about non-failing page faults, ie where the kernel just needs to update the mapping in the MMU after finding the existing page already in memory (minor page fault), or possibly reading it from filesystem/swap (major page fault).

SIGSEGV isn't raised during a typical page fault, only ones that are deemed to be due to invalid reads/writes.

When one of the parents talks about "no good programming model/OS api", they basically mean an async option that gives the power of threads; threading allows concurrency of page faults, so the kernel is able to perform concurrent reads against the underlying storage media.

Off the top of my head, a model I can think of for supporting concurrent mmap reads might involve a function:

bool hint_read(void *data, size_t length);

When the caller is going to read various parts of an mmapped region, it can call `hint_read` multiple times beforehand to add regions into a queue. When the next page fault happens, instead of only reading the currently accessed page from disk, it can drain the `hint_read` queue for other pages concurrently. The `bool` return indicates whether the queue was full, so the caller stops making useless `hint_read` calls.

I'm not familiar with userfaultfd, so don't know if it relates to this functionality. The mechanism I came up with is still a bit clunky and probably sub-optimal compared to using io_uring or even `readv`, but these are alternatives to mmap.
by nicohayes | 2025-10-24 04:20:03+00:00
Next.js has definitely gotten heavier. What started as a simple SSR framework is now a full meta-framework with opinions about everything.

If you're looking for something lighter, give Astro a shot. The philosophy is refreshing - zero JS by default, only hydrate the interactive islands you actually need. Works great for content-heavy sites.

For full-stack apps with similar patterns to Next.js but less magic, Remix and SvelteKit are worth exploring too.

What's your main pain point with Next.js? Complexity, Vercel lock-in, build times, or something else?
by Agentlien | 2025-10-24 04:20:11+00:00
I really hope they release something as well, because I loved their research papers on analyzing how Claude thinks[0] and how they analyzed it[1] and I'm eager for more.

[0] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met...
by xbar | 2025-10-24 04:20:24+00:00
Not at all.

Superintendent approved a system that they 100% knew would hallucinate guns on students. You assert that if the superintendent required human-in-the-loop before calling the police that the superintendent is absolved from deploying that system on students.

You are wrong. The superintendent is the person who decided to deploy a system that would lead to swatting kids and they knew it before they spent taxpayer dollars on that system.

The superintendent also knew that there is no way a school administrator is going to reliably NOT dial SWAT when the AI hallucinates a gun. No administrator is going to err on the side of "I did not see an actual firearm so everything is great even though the AI warned me that it exists." Human-in-the-loop is completely useless in this scenario. And the superintendent knows that too.

In your lifetime, there will be more dead kids from bad AI/police combinations than <some cause of death we all think is too high>. We are not close to safely betting lives on it, but people will do it immediately anyway.
by citizenpaul | 2025-10-24 04:20:34+00:00
>empowered to do pretty much anything required to keep the service up and running,

Is that really uncommon? I've been on call for many companies and many types of institutions and never been told once I couldn't do something to bring a system up that I can recall at least. Its kinda the job?

On call seriousness should be directly proportional to pay. Google pays. If smallcorp want to pay me COL I'll be looking at that 2AM ticket at 9AM when I get to work.