MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sshine | 2025-10-28 04:45:16+00:00
The gods have spoken.

I have reached “intro to assembly” in my C course this week and had decided on RISC-V to bridge the gap that everyone has different CPUs and that x86-64 is a little harder to learn than MIPS32, but MIPS32 isn’t as relevant.

And here’s someone who made my course material for the subject entirely.

Thank you so much.
by salawat | 2025-10-28 04:45:51+00:00
No it doesn't. We've got so much cruft and deadlock because we've operated in a Madisonian regime. With that cruft comes selective enforcement, and with that both contempt, and loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. It is enough that the younger generations feel hemmed in by a gerontocracy to see that something has gone horribly wrong, and that the direction we've been going is part of what got us to the current situation.
by derektank | 2025-10-28 04:45:56+00:00
AI should help people achieve their ultimate goals, not their proximate goals. We want it to provide advice on how to alleviate their suffering, not how to kill themselves painlessly. This holds true even for subjects less fraught than suicide.

I don't want a bot that blindly answers my questions; I want it to intuit my end goal and guide me towards it. For example, if I ask it how to write a bubblesort script to alphabetize my movie collection, I want it to suggest that maybe that's not the most efficient algorithm for my purposes, and ask me if I would like some advice on implementing quicksort instead.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-10-28 04:46:22+00:00
> How do CVEs get issued? Where do I apply, who makes decisions

For most (but certainly not all) projects, you fill out a simple form [0]. I've done it before and it's fairly easy.

> and what software is covered by them?

All software is covered by someone, usually by the vendor themselves or MITRE.

> Can a CVE be issued in retrospect?

Absolutely, but it's fairly uncommon.

[0]: https://cveform.mitre.org/
by dahart | 2025-10-28 04:47:25+00:00
A bummer, sorry to hear it, that sounds frustrating. The big difference might be that I found my bike for sale in the local classified ads (a couple weeks after it was stolen), and I had the thief’s phone number, before I called the cops. They recognized the phone number. My PD might also do little to nothing if I just report something missing. I do think I got lucky, yes. And I was extra lucky that the thief listed my bike for a completely ridiculous amount of money, more than the original purchase price for a bike that was like 15 years old and not as well maintained as it should have been. His list price meant nobody else jumped on buying it right away. (But I do know now that my chances of recovery go way up if I register a bike.)
by TheDong | 2025-10-28 04:47:57+00:00
It's more complicated than that though. For security, the whole context has to be considered.

Like for example, look at the linked CVE-2025-12200, "NULL pointer dereference parsing config file"...

Please, explain a single dnsmasq setup where someone is somehow constructing a config file such that it both takes in untrusted input where this NPE is the difference between it being secure and being DoSd or insecure somehow, if you can even conjure up a plausible hypothetical way this could happen, I'd love to hear it, because this just seems so impossible to me.

This seems firmly in the realm of issuing CVEs for "post quantum crypto may not be safe from unknown alien attacks"
by js8 | 2025-10-28 04:49:46+00:00
"Generic core, specific shell."

Your advice is the opposite of "functional core, imperative shell". The FCIS principle has IS which is generic, to be simple, because it's usually hard to test (it deals with resources and external dependencies). So by being simple, it's more unit testable.

On the other hand, FC is where the business logic lives, which can be complex and specific. The reason why you want that "functional" (really just another name for "composable from small blocks") is because it can be tested for validity without external dependencies.

So the IS shields you from technicalities of external dependencies, like what kind of quirks your DB has, or are we sending data over network or writing to the file, or does the user inputs comands in spanish or english, do you display the green square or blue triangle to indicate the report is ready, etc.

On the other hand, FC deals with the actual business logic (what you want to do), which can be both generic and specific. These are just different types of building blocks (we call them functions) living in the FC.

FCIS is exemplified by user-shell interaction. The user (FC) dictates the commands and interprets the output, according to her "business needs". While the shell (IS) simply runs the commands, without any questions of their purpose. It's not the job of IS to verify or handle user errors caused by wrong commands.

But the user doesn't do stuff on her own; you could take her to a pub and she would tell you the same sequence of commands when facing the same situation. In that sense, the user is "functional" - independent on the actual state of the computer system, like the return value of a mathematical function is only dependent on the arguments.

Another example is MVC, where M is the FC and VC is the IS. Although it's not always exactly like that, for variety of reasons.

You can think of IS as a translator to a different language, understood by "the other systems", while the FC is there to supply what is actually being communicated.
by fragmede | 2025-10-28 04:51:58+00:00
Loneliness pandemic is a topic because one author wrote a book on it and is pushing and agenda to generate sales for his book.

The biggest article about the loneliness pandemic was one in the New York times and oh just to happened to mention said book. Countless articles followed on from there. If the book were sound, it would be less sad, but the studies it cites have problems so this is all built on a huge heaping of confirmation bias.
by fuzztester | 2025-10-28 04:52:51+00:00
>But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least.

They did a lot more than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

From the first paragraph at the above page (just for starters):

>As a former subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Bell Labs and its researchers have been credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others, throughout the 20th century. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[1]

Also see the section titled Discoveries and developments.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-28 04:53:11+00:00
This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane.

Go for your plan B.

I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there.

If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.
by squigz | 2025-10-28 04:56:35+00:00
A person's trustworthiness has always been based more on perception though, even if you were familiar with more of their history - that's how you end up with members of a community who are perfectly kind people but are ostracized because they're perceived as strange and untrustworthy in some way; it's also how you end up with members of a community who have demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness continuing to be trusted, because they can appear trustworthy and persuade others to trust them despite the prior evidence.
by smohare | 2025-10-28 04:58:22+00:00
You’ll notice that most people arguing against DEI rarely perform meaningful analytics. Because when you do look at the data it tells the tale that the same centuries old systemic biases are still in play.

This is obvious to any adult in the room. But the benefactors of said biases do not want to acknowledge it since it lays bare their utter mediocrity.
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-10-28 04:59:18+00:00
You write the requirements, you write the spec, etc. before you write the code.

You then determine what are the inputs / outputs that you're taking for each function / method / class / etc.

You also determine what these functions / methods / classes / etc. compute within their blocks.

Now you have that on paper and have it planned out, so you write tests first for valid / invalid values, edge cases, etc.

There are workflows that work for this, but nowadays I automate a lot of test creation. It's a lot easier to hack a few iterations first, play with it, then when I have my desired behaviour I write some tests. Gradually you just write tests first, you may even keep a repo somewhere for tests you might use again for common patterns.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-28 05:00:58+00:00
I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way.

That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them.

Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.
Show HN: Production-ready Zig template for Flipper Zero apps
by cat-whisperer | 2025-10-28 05:01:23+00:00
If you've debugged a null pointer exception on a Flipper Zero, you know the pain - the device crashes, you reflash, add print statements, repeat. Memory bugs in embedded C are brutal because they only surface at runtime on the actual hardware.

This template lets you write Flipper Zero applications in Zig, giving you:

- Memory safety and compile-time error checking

- Bounds-checked arrays and explicit error handling

- Clean build system that works cross-platform

- Integration with UFBT for packaging and deployment

- No special IDE required - just Zig, UFBT, and your editor

The interesting technical challenge was bridging Zig's build system with the Flipper SDK's ARM Cortex-M4 target. The two-stage compilation process (Zig -> object file -> UFBT packaging) required careful handling of calling conventions and ABI compatibility. The compile-time safety catches issues before they become device crashes. Optional pointers and explicit allocator tracking eliminate entire classes of bugs that C would miss entirely.

Feedback welcome, especially on:

- SDK coverage (I manually declare some functions Zig's C translator can't handle)

- Optimization strategies for binary size

- Debugging workflow improvements
by NathanKP | 2025-10-28 05:01:24+00:00
I'm right behind you on the escape to the mountains idea. I've actually already moved from the US to New Zealand, and the next step is a farm with some goats lol.

That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity.

Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive.

I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.
by zeroq | 2025-10-28 05:01:30+00:00
Correct.

You have to pass theory exam - when I was doing it it was 30 questions with four possible answers out of ~500 pool [1] now the pool is 3700. If I'm not mistaken you could make two mistakes and still pass the test. The questions are either road diagrams, ie. intersection with three cars, road signs and/or lights and you have to tell in which order cars will go or a picture from drivers POV and a question what you should do in such situation - like three lanes, car on the middle, the right is a bus lane and the question is if the driver is allowed to take the left lane.

Once you get that done you can take practical driving test.

It starts on a training yard where you have a series of tasks, like said driving forth and back on a curve in one sweep motion, starting a car on a incline without going back or losing your engine - mind you we're driving manual - parallel parking between cones [2], etc.

If you ace them instructor will take you for a 30-45 minutes ride around town. Apart from normal driving he will ask you to few random tasks like parking in normal conditions.

Any mistake will end the trial with a fail and you have to start all over again. Three failures and you need to redo your theory exam.

[1] I have really good memory and when I taking my exam I went through all questions few times - they are publicly available - and when I had my exam I only looked at the picture and double checked if the question ended up with question mark or period as some images were reused and I knew my answer. I don't think I would be able to do that again with that 3700 question database lol.

[2] before taking exams you go to a private driving school and my instructor gave me a cheat code for parallel parking - which is extremely tight, but also, as pointed by my instructor, government regulated, so all the cones have to be in very precise spots. Not only that, but you take the exam in government selected car (whoever won current bids). So he told me to back up until I saw a cone lining with door post, then full stop, rotate the steering wheel by a exact amount of degrees, etc.

PS. gun permits are given on similar grounds, plus you are required to have a regulated gun safe at your premise and it has to be permanently attached, so given the fact that many of our apartments are smaller than your garages and most people are renting significantly reduces access to guns :)
Ask HN: Are there any people still holding on to HTML4?
by GaryBluto | 2025-10-28 05:03:05+00:00
I've been thinking recently about the sheer amount of what I consider "bloat" in HTML5 - how back in the 2000s, browser engines were (with the exception of a few annoying engine-dependent quirks) much slimmer. Didn't want Flash/Java and all the potentially unneeded functionality that comes with it? You didn't install it, and your experience felt a lot smoother.

This had me wondering about whether there are any who still refuse to use the HTML5 standard, whether it be for web design or software development.
by tcmart14 | 2025-10-28 05:03:54+00:00
Would be totally a guess since as mentioned, they are not being too forth coming. But chances are, the inclusion of GPT into the products probably did not make those products any more profitable than before, and just make them more expensive to run. Everyone who would buy Sharepoint/dynamics 365 already has it. I doubt they saw a massive influx to the user base of these tools due to GPT. Have you heard of a massive influx of new Windows license being bought because og co-pilot? No, its just the normal churn of people upgrading their machines they were probably gonna upgrade soon anyways.

The exception might be Azure with their LLM services.
by crabmusket | 2025-10-28 05:04:18+00:00
I was going to add to your comment with some snarky rejoinder like "brain, is that a new agent from OpenAI?" or "we are all vibecoders now" or simply "ain't nobody got time for that".

But then I got to wondering about the OP's statement that they would specifically like someone to create this with AI. It strikes me both as silly as saying "if you're good at using Visual Studio, could you do this?", because AI tools are just tools now, and those who want to use them don't need to be prompted... but also somehow fundamentally different.

OP, what was on your heart that caused you to phrase it that way?
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-28 05:06:23+00:00
It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.
by solid_fuel | 2025-10-28 05:07:27+00:00
Forget different towns being 5 minutes ahead, from the other linked qntm post [0]:

> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. At latitudes closer to the poles, the effect is amplified, although but not by more than an order of magnitude in the realistically habitable parts of the world.

Even a row of servers would all have different times.

[0] https://qntm.org/continuous
by ilius2 | 2025-10-28 05:07:47+00:00
This does not conflict with Andrew Kelly's point! The software is not your js code!! Your js code is s tiny fraction of the software. The rest of it (including node) has serious design issues. JavaScript is an messy interpreted dynamically-typed language with a week type system that was designed for browser 30 years ago and even its creator discourages you from using it now.
by crabmusket | 2025-10-28 05:07:47+00:00
This really makes me want to try fiddling with some low-level stuff again. I studied mechatronics at uni and programmed microcontrollers in C and assembly, but have gone the webdev direction since then. Does anyone have any trusted quality resources for getting into RISC-V hardware? I'm especially interested in using Rust for this if possible - I've wanted an excuse to learn it in more depth for a while.
by cyberax | 2025-10-28 05:08:17+00:00
Basically, I'm trying to just create a protected MCP server that works with ChatGPT. That's it. Nothing fancy.

So far, I was not able to do it. And there are no examples that I can find. It's also all complicated by the total lack of logs from ChatGPT detailing the errors.

I'll probably get there eventually and publish a blog...
by LeFantome | 2025-10-28 05:09:15+00:00
While I agree with you, the original comment was still valuable for understanding why RISC-V has evolved the way it has and the philosophy behind the extension idea.

Also, it seems at least some of the RISC-V ecosystem is willing to be a little bit more aggressive. With Ubuntu making RVA23 the minimum profile for Ubuntu, perhaps we will not be waiting a decade for it to become the default. RVA23 was only ratafied a year ago.
by btilly | 2025-10-28 05:09:31+00:00
Case studies support this. Which is a fancy way to say, "We carefully documented anecdotal reports and saw what looks like a pattern."

There is also a strong parallel to manic depression. Manic depressives have a high suicide risk, and it usually happens when they are coming out of depression. With akathisia (fancy way to say inner restlessness) being the leading indicator. The same pattern is seen with antidepressants. The patient gets treatment, develops akathisia, then attempts suicide.

But, as with many things to do with mental health, we don't really know what is going on inside of people. While also knowing that their self-reports are, shall we say, creatively misleading. So it is easy to have beliefs about what is going on. And rather harder to verify them.
by time4tea | 2025-10-28 05:11:02+00:00
Not a single person in this thread commented on the use of Date.now() and similar - surely clock.now() - you never ever want to use global time in any code, how could you test it?

clock in this case is a thing that was supplied to the class or function. It could just be a function: () -> Instant.

(Setting a global mock clock is too evil, so don't suggest that!)
by protocolture | 2025-10-28 05:11:06+00:00
>Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."

Ok but is the issue the information, or is the issue the presentation?

I am an outlier, but I used to cure insomnia with excessive reading. I reckon if I had no other outlet, I would probably choose information over sleep.

But we know that the 5 websites put a lot of energy into making them extremely desirable to cruise for hours, regardless of content. It feels like everyone has my unique problem, but its not really "information" they are after, its this one giant never ending pit of despair and bullying.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-28 05:11:53+00:00
> To me, this sounds awfully similar in construction to [...]

I am not sure why you are replying to an opinion, with even heavier opinion, but treating yours as if it means more.

There are trillions of planets in the galaxy. Uninhabited and highly uninhabitable planets everywhere we look in the sky. Life on the other hand, is apparently incredibly rare. Certainly vastly more rare than uninhabited planets.

Not using our closest, most potentially habitable, planet for the continuity of life and civilization, it is by far most suited to over any other location, would be a ridiculous waste.

Where would we go instead? Just wall ourselves in?

Mars is going to become habitable, by some combination of us adapting simple life to it, adapting ourselves, our life support technologies, and/or Mars. Probably all the above. With the only caveat if humans manage to help themselves into extinction first. But if we go instinct due to AI, or AI survives despite another catastrophe, AI won't hesitate to use Martian resources either.

And Mars it turns out, doesn't have an opinion on this at all.
by ryangibb | 2025-10-28 05:12:39+00:00
The MirageOS project [0] is a great collection of functionality pure OCaml libraries that are useful outside of unikernels. I've used the DNS library with an effectful layer for various nameserver experiments [1].

[0] https://mirage.io/

[1] https://ryan.freumh.org/eon.html
by NathanKP | 2025-10-28 05:13:25+00:00
You'd be surprised how technical farming can be. Us software engineers often have a deep desire to make efficient systems, that function well, in a mostly automated fashion, so that we can observe these systems in action and optimize these systems over time.

A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long.

Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).