MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-26 07:16:24+00:00
"something that barely affects you at all. Why?"

First, this is often forced on people from the above. I don't like the idea of language coercion, doubly so for ideological reasons. Imagine that BBC journalists were forced to include Allah or some nationalist tropes in their work in order to increase piousness and patriotism of their readers; to some people, this actually sounds like a good idea! I don't believe you would wave it away easily.

Orwell described this well with his "Ministry of Truth". BBC (from which this article comes) isn't a ministry, but isn't a private subject either.

Second, can you think about the long term consequences? Just look around at the sorry state of Western politics and Western online discourse.

Language is one of the few cultural commons that remains. There is no chance that stuff like "people with blindness" or "LatinX" will universally prevail. Too many people react to it negatively, including in the young generation. We run a real risk of the left and the right developing mutually incomprehensible languages, which would be a disaster - once that happens, the polarization will be cemented in, because swing voters would have to be bilingual.

I've seen the split of Czechoslovakia myself, and Czech and Slovak aren't even mutually incomprehensible. Just far enough to remind the people that they are very different from each other.

Third, this construct is extremely impractical. One of the actual observations of Chomsky is that natural languages are good at chaining things. For example, you can easily talk about poor blind homeless black people. Once you enter this rabbit hole fully, you have people of color with blindness experiencing poverty and unhousedness. This is just not a reasonable way to communicate and this is also my main hope that this abomination dies out. (It reminds me of Old Norse kennings [0], but those were an art form and never considered to be an actual language of communication.)

Again, see Orwell and his newspeak (Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.) Orwell wrote his dystopias based on experience with the English intellectual far left, and it seems that those ideas live on.

===============================

Summed together, to start all this while the actual blind people DGAF, as you yourself say, is at best an experiment in futility and at worst throwing more ** into the fan that has us already deeply covered in **.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning
by neckbeards | 2025-10-26 07:16:53+00:00
How is Zig considered “90% safe”? It relies on manual memory management, its simple type system provides limited compile-time guarantees and it lacks a mature concurrency model (making safe parallelism difficult). Given these gaps, I struggle to see how Zig achieves a consistently high level of safety. It seems no safer than using AddressSanitizer at best?
by xigoi | 2025-10-26 07:17:40+00:00
> User: Question. LLM: Answer. User: Why A? Why B? LLM: Answer. User: But C. What's the tradeoff? LLM: Answer. User: Couldn't also X? LLM: Answer. User: I'm not familiar with Y, explain.

In practice it’s more like:

User: Question. LLM: Answer. User: Why A? LLM: Actually, you’re right, it’s not A, it’s B. User: Why B? LLM: Actually, you’re right, it’s not B, it’s C. User: Why C? LLM: Actually, you’re right, it’s not C, it’s D.

I’ve had this happen pretty much every time I asked an LLM a non-trivial question.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-26 07:19:35+00:00
What kind of argument is that? I don't think there are any world regions where goods and services appear out of thin air, so how exactly does a society that operates in this way survive and prosper? Do you think every bullshit, non-producing job should be kept around indefinitely to avoid a temporary discomfort of finding a new job?

Eventually for every person working the fields, manufacturing goods, and delivering them to you, there will be 5 people "working" a bullshit corporate job that doesn't create any value. Then the system will crumble under its own weight even with "100% employment" because nobody is actually producing anything. This is just the worst ideas from communism combined with the worst parts of capitalism.

Writing this might make me sound like a hardened capitalist who doesn't support labor but that couldn't be further from the truth. People who lose their jobs should be taken care of - but crucially it should be done fairly, through unemployment benefits or UBI or whatever idea makes sense. That ensures that everyone has access to the same benefits, not just the few lucky ones who land the right bullshit job at the right bullshit company.
by tasuki | 2025-10-26 07:19:52+00:00
> but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving

Don't bluff then!

I'd been trying to recommend Linux to my family for many years with no success. I stopped, perhaps a decade ago.

Some two years ago or so, my father decided he was done with Windows (updates, always trying to sell you something or another, etc) and switched to Linux. Now he keeps telling me how much better the Linux experience is. I'm rather amused by that, but also proud of him for having made the jump all by himself.

(He's into astro photography, so he spent a lot of time with raspberry pi's and learned some Linux along the way. I guess that made his desktop switch easier.)
by akimbostrawman | 2025-10-26 07:20:09+00:00
>incidents involving unarmed individuals,

Someone being unarmed doesn't mean they can't be deadly. They could be driving a vehicle or otherwise physically assault somebody which would justify deadly force.

Otherwise 1100 is actually quite low compared to the total gun death and per capita in which blacks are over represented compared to all other groups. That includes black on black and black on cops.
by cricalix | 2025-10-26 07:20:30+00:00
They also support FTP without the SSH transport, and it's not FTPS either. Various IP cameras still support FTP as a way to write files out periodically; I use this to provide a "stream" from a camera (8 seconds per frame because reasons) to the world. Actual streaming via RTSP is also available, but I could never get a stable stream to a video host (like YT or Twitch) from the camera (partially because of a poor quality network connection that can't be upgraded easily). So, FTP + credentials -> walled off directory that's not under the web root -> PHP script in web root -> web browser.
by devttyeu | 2025-10-26 07:20:47+00:00
NFS is much slower, maybe unless you deploy it which RDMA. I believe even 4.2 doesn’t really support asynchronous calls or has some significant limitations around them - I’ve commonly seen a single large write of a few gigs starve all other operations including lstat for minutes.

Also it’s borderline impossible to tune nfs to go above 30gbps or so consistently, with WebDAV it’s a matter of adding a bunch more streams and you’re past 200gbps pretty easily.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-26 07:21:20+00:00
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.

The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
by __fst__ | 2025-10-26 07:21:39+00:00
Main "killer" features for me are:

- d2 is a standalone executable compiler, I once tried mermaid-cli (mmdc) but couldn't get it to work properly plus anything I need to install with npm scares the hell out of me

- ASCII rendering: I love rendering to ASCII which I can copy-paste around.

But I do use mermaid a lot embedded in other programs (e.g Obisidian). The selection of different diagram types is amazing.
by jorangreef | 2025-10-26 07:23:42+00:00
Was this a question or a statement? :) (I appreciate both, let me add!)

But sincerely, I think we don’t share the same philosophy:

End to end correctness of software is a systems design problem, not a language problem.

I believe that if you try to shoehorn too much safety into a language (100% vs 90%) you get into trouble, and don’t solve safety end to end, like we try to do in TigerBeetle, systematically through TigerStyle, Deterministic Simulation Testing of the system as a whole etc.

I try to write about much of this in the post, to share our ideas, but it comes down to power-to-weight ratio, Zig’s essential simplicity, and recognizing (and coming to terms with) the fact that:

No language can solve end to end systems safety. For this you need systems thinking.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-26 07:24:45+00:00
I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.

Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.

In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.

The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.

Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.

We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
by saghm | 2025-10-26 07:24:46+00:00
IIRC the show runner changed at the same time that Matt Smith became the new doctor. The tone change is pretty noticeable pretty much right at the start of Season 5 in my opinion, even as someone who enjoyed pretty much all of it before and after (although I haven't kept up with it the past few years mostly due to my TV watching habits having changed due to different life circumstances).
by pogue | 2025-10-26 07:26:25+00:00
I can't speak for Meta/Facebook specifically, but other major services like Google & Microsoft absolutely previously had human customer service.

I used to do over the phone technical support for a major PC vendor in the early/mid 2000s and the goal was to solve every customer's problem (in the shortest amount of time, ofc). But that type of stuff is gone in the US. Even with major ISPs/phone companies/banks you are routed to an AI TTS chatbot to try to solve your problem or route you around in confusion until you get lost/fed up and just quit.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-26 07:26:56+00:00
Kinda missing the point of UEFI if you don't mention that it skips the first 3 sections and allows your kernel to boot directly from 64-bit mode ("long mode") with paging, a framebuffer, and a function to read files from your boot drive, already set up for you. Removes the need for GRUB entirely.
by stuffn | 2025-10-26 07:27:13+00:00
Frankly if you’re a CTO you aren’t incentivized by a salary. It makes sense in this case no different than you’d code on the weekends for your side hustle.

It only doesn’t make sense when this jackass thinks the salaried engineer needs this “grit”.

C-levels aren’t supposed to be “model employees”. The incentive structure is wildly weighted in their favor. Instead you should ask them to understand the difference, which is asking a lot of these sociopaths, but I digress.
by spwa4 | 2025-10-26 07:27:14+00:00
Actually China is far further along in "turning autonomous weaponry against one's citizens" than the US is. Ubiquitous surveillance and "social credit score" have been expanding in China since the early 2000s.

In fact one might say that what the communist parties did in the 1910s was pretty much that. Ubiquitous surveillance is the problem here, not AI. Communist states used tens of thousands of "agents" that would just walk around, listen in to random conversations, and arrest (and later torture and deport) people. Of course communist states that still exist, like China, have started using AI to do this, but it is nothing new for China and it's people.

And, of course, what these communist states are doing is protecting the rich and powerful in society, and enforcing their "vision", using far more oppressive means than even the GOP dares to dream about. Including against "socialist causes", like LGBTQ. For starters, using state violence against people for merely talking about problems, for example.
by snowfield | 2025-10-26 07:28:55+00:00
Love d2, using it for years. I use it whenever someone asks me to create a visualisation. And I regularly tell people about d2 trying to push it internally haha

Enterprise is way too expensive though. And I can't natively render it anywhere. So I'm limited to only personal use.

3000usd / year for a single TALA license is... Well, not justifiable. And I'm not sure how much d2 studio is on top...

I'd love to test TALA though, but even the personal license at 120usd is steep for drawing some stuff.

Just giving a helm chart or system description to an llm and having it one shot a perfect diagram which code I can easily view and edit is also a big gamechanger for me

Sucks to not have it just render natively anywhere, I think confluence cloud can do it. But I think the add on is a paid addon.
by ntoskrnl_exe | 2025-10-26 07:29:57+00:00
I don't think that the god-awfulness of Windows Update is in any way related to the hardware you're running when anything else on the market designed for the same purpose outperforms it.

Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.

How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.
by dakshin_k | 2025-10-26 07:30:07+00:00
I looked into this a few years ago for a personal project. One reason why BeaconDB only uses WiFi APs for geolocation, is because they are usually stationary (excluding mobile hotspots) and so their location, once identified, can be used as a reference point for triangulation.

But the BLE beacons are by design small, portable and usually attached to a moving object. Since BeaconDB doesn't know whether a specific beacon is meant to be stationary or moving, its not safe to use it as a reference point for geolocation.
by snailmailman | 2025-10-26 07:30:57+00:00
There isn’t a date in the article, but I know I had read this months ago. And sure enough, wayback has the text-to-image page from April.

But the image editing page linked at the top is more recent, and was added sometime in September. (And was presumably the intended link) I hadn’t read that page yet. Odd there is no dates, at first glance one might think the pages were made at the same time.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-26 07:31:55+00:00
It's because on a brief period of old PC hardware (1994-1998), when Linux was starting off, high-resolution video initialization (SVGA+) was easier to do in 16-bit mode, before the bootloader switched the CPU over to 32-bit mode. Because GRUB handled this transition, GRUB became responsible for video initialization. After 1998 GPU manufacturers added 32-bit support for initialization, but the long tail of users with hardware with that limitation really entrenched this responsibility in GRUB.
by vintagedave | 2025-10-26 07:33:18+00:00
> the stinking bomb Chibnall decided to launch to get few minutes of cheap thrills, nullifying over 50 years of creative contributions

For a casual viewer like me — I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — I’m struggling to find what this is referring to.

What happened with Clara and the doctors, and Capaldi, and what was this thing that nullified 50 years of the show?
by wiether | 2025-10-26 07:34:05+00:00
> 1) people with medically compromised joints who would like to engage in experiences that their bodies don’t currently allow.

They say:

> Engineered to augment natural lower leg and ankle movement

Meanwhile, most people who can't walk/run as they would like have issues from their knees upward.

Worse, having heavier lower leg means more strain on the upper leg.

Yes, there's probably a narrow niche of people with lower leg only issues that can be helped by this device, but most people have issues upward ; and this device have the potential to create issues upward on people not yet concerned by them.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-26 07:35:21+00:00
It's standard behavior for a reason; gaming on Windows blows. It was user-hostile in the DOS era, user-hostile in the Steam Machine era, and it's user hostile today.

Go look at the reviews of the Xbox handhelds - every single one always mentions how bad the OS is. Windows is no longer a selling point outside the hyper-obsessive purist niche that is waning with the proliferation of hardware-based cheats. Gaming-based hardware is getting docked points for not running Linux as a standard, Windows 11 is a liability.

Complain until the cows come home, really. It just makes you look that much dumber next to the 8-year-olds installing and playing Metroidvanias on their Steam Deck.
by soleveloper | 2025-10-26 07:35:23+00:00
Is it? I hope I won't step on somebody's else toes: GenAI would greatly help cover existing functionality and prevent regressions in new implementation. For each tool, generate multiple cases, some based on documentation and some from the LLM understanding of the util. Classic input + expected pairs. Run with both GNU old impl and the new Rust impl.

First - cases where expected+old+new are identical, should go to regression suite. Now a HUMAN should take a look in this order: 1. Cases where expected+old are identical, but rust is different. 2. If time allows - Cases where expected+rust are identical , but old is different.

TBH, after #1 (expected+old, vs. rust) I'd be asking the GenAI to generate more test cases in these faulty areas.
by deivid | 2025-10-26 07:35:50+00:00
This is amazing! I am also a little bit obsessed with fast-booting kvm for per-request isolation, and have managed to get Linux to pid1 in 3.6ms, I am starting to go a little insane because I don't know how to measure the rest of the CPU time (would love a flamegraph somehow) -- the ftrace data just... confuses me
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-26 07:36:17+00:00
Off topic, but for what it's worth I'm getting myself a rowing machine to try and alleviate my running cravings, especially as winter is coming. I'm not sure if it will be able to reproduce the feelings I get from running as I haven't done rowing enough, but running seems to be the only thing I've found that puts me into this flow state. Cycling is too limited, legs only, HR doesn't get high enough, so hopefully rowing is better due to it being full body. Rowing won't be outside and I won't be physically moving around so that may be the downside. But the metrics to achieve should be much more consistent and comparable compared to if there's many weather changes otherwise, so looking forward to seeing progress there.
by neckbeards | 2025-10-26 07:37:09+00:00
It's a bit of both! I’d love feedback from someone more experienced with Zig, especially if there’s any flaw in my reasoning here.

The programming language is part of the system design. The abstractions, invariants and guarantees the language provides define what classes of bugs are even possible to have. For example, Rust’s ownership and lifetime semantics eliminate entire categories of memory and concurrency errors that would otherwise surface as “system-design” issues in C or Zig.

When you say “power to weight ratio”, could you elaborate on how that applies relative to C++ in the context of TigerBeetle? You mentioned io_uring support being added. What makes Zig uniquely suited for that compared to a more mature language like C++, which already offers a concurrency model and a sophisticated type system you can selectively use?

You also mentioned prefetch support. That's a lot easier to implement in other languages. I’m curious what specifically made Zig the better fit for these optimizations in your experience.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my question.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-26 07:37:35+00:00
Zig makes a lot of small choices that pile up to push you towards safety/correctness in your code.

No hidden allocations is a big one. If something allocates you have to explicitly give it an allocator. This makes tracking allocations much simpler. Combined with the test allocator you can also detect memory leaks.

Allocators also simplify memory management patterns. For example, it's trivially ease to use an arena. Then all your little allocations can be freed all at once, eliminating the need to track each individual allocation/free.

The defer keyword allows you to place the free call near the allocation (same with other resources that require closing). This isn't always possible of course, but it is a lot of the time and makes it easier to track.

Bounds checking is another big one. While loops/for loops with capture groups means you'll basically always see Zig programs iterating through arrays/slices in a manner that ensures you can't go out of bounds.

In terms of general correctness you have explicit nullability. If something can be null you have to mark it as such directly in the type. Then when accessing it you have to unwrap it and deal with the null case.

Same for errors. If something can return an error it's indicated in the return type. The error has to be unwrapped and then thanks to tagged unions you have to deal with all the different possible cases.

There are language conviences like the try keyword that let you side step some of the explicit handling, but even those are easy to track. And you know you're doing something that might bite you.

All of that adds up with a dozen other design choices to produce a language that makes it a lot easier to produce correct code.

Edit: In terms of concurrency I have to give you that one. The language is still pre 1.0 so we'll have to see what happens.
by kragen | 2025-10-26 07:37:58+00:00
My house has six rooms, but the 3400-watt heat pump is only enough to heat two of them. If it costs tens of thousands of dollars in the US, say US$25000, you would expect the resulting installation to be able to heat or cool about 200 rooms rather than 2, producing 340 kilowatts of heat output (1.2 million BTU per hour) and consuming 94 kilowatts of electrical power (430 amps at 220 volts). Indeed, because houses gain and lose heat only through their surfaces, you'd expect the 100× bigger US$25000 heat pump installation to be able to heat or cool a 2000-room building rather than merely 200.

Most houses in the US have less than 20 rooms, let alone 200 or 2000, so it's not mostly because houses are bigger.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-26 07:38:20+00:00
People roll out a complex and powerful technology without understanding the technology fully, what evals are or updating process to account for the tech, and the rollout fails, news at 11.

Seriously though, "AI fucks up" is a known thing (as is humans fuck up!) and the people who are using the tech successfully account for that and build guardrails into their systems. Use version control, build automated tests (e2e/stress, not just unit), update your process so you're not incentivizing dumb shit like employees dumping unchecked AI prs, etc.