MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mek6800d2 | 2025-10-20 05:36:16+00:00
With great respect to Doug McIlroy (in the CACM article), the shell pipeline has a serious problem that Knuth's Pascal program doesn't have. (I'm assuming Knuth's program is written in standard Pascal.) You could have compiled and run Knuth's program on an IBM PC XT running MS-DOS; indeed on any computer having a standard Pascal compiler. Not so the shell pipeline, where you must be running under an operating system with pipes and 4 additional programs: tr, sort, uniq, and sed.

McIlroy also discusses how a program "built for the ages" should have "a large factor of safety". McIlroy was worried about how Knuth's program would scale up to larger bodies of text. Also, Bentley's/McIlroy's critique was published in 1986, which I think was well before there was a major look into Unix tools and their susceptibility to buffer overruns, etc. In 1986, could people have determined the limits of tr, sort, uniq, sed, and pipes--both individually and collectively--when handling large bodies of text? With a lot of effort, yes, but if there was a problem, Knuth at least only had one program to look at. With the shell pipeline, one would have to examine the 4 programs plus the shell's implementation of pipes.

(I'm not defending Pascal and Knuth, Bentley, and McIlroy are always worth reading on any topic -- thanks for posting the link!)

Bringing this back to Forth, Bernd Paysan, who needs no introduction to the people in the Forth community, wrote "A Web-Server in Forth", https://bernd-paysan.de/httpd-en.html . It only took him a few hours, but in fairness to us mortals, it's an HTTP request processor that reads a single HTTP request from stdin, processes it, and writes it output to stdout. In other words, it's not really a full web server because it depends on an operating system with an inetd daemon for all the networking. As with McIlroy's shell pipeline, there is a lot of heavy lifting done by operating system tools. (Paysan's article is highly recommended for people learning Forth, like me when I read it back in the 2000s.)
by vaxman | 2025-10-20 05:37:22+00:00
For Mac/Linux/Hybrid-Cloud shops -> "Incus" (can also host macOS and Windows instances) for most work and "Firecracker" for specialized appliances.

For Windows shops (you sick bstrds :D) -> Hyper-V

RE: Proxmox, not a hater, but errtime I read that name, I picture "Mike Myers Dieter". Seriously tho, the best they could do for themselves would be to make ProxMox into a UI for the Incus REST API (and their legacy backend) then repackage their enterprise offerings as add-ons for Incus (for email, DRS, etc.) BTW, the first person to release an "I use this exclusively everyday for months before releasing it on Github" gesture-controlled WebGL/Audio and WebXR based UX with agentic Incus REST API sensor analysis and settings controls, will win a valuable prize.

https://aws.plainenglish.io/why-even-google-is-rethinking-ku...

-> Mind earlier warnings that many people in the Industry these days tend to follow each other around on forums creating a sort of "feedback loop" so bad trends (eg, PHP) takeover the game. <cue https://youtu.be/uPWQfAv_qBQ>
by hambes | 2025-10-20 05:37:31+00:00
I would argue that if the pre-commit hooks come in the way of rebasing, either the commit hooks are doing way too much (which is one of the points of the article) or you are creating broken commits during rebasing. If any of the commits you are rebasing is e.g. breaking formatting rules, they shouldn't have been committed that way in the first place.
by anon291 | 2025-10-20 05:39:08+00:00
All of these are biases that relate to intelligences of a particular sort. Incredibly dumb automaton-like life-forms also seem to 'want' to own things. Why on earth should an AGI be thought to require the same sort of 'desires' that worms have? This is just bias. AGI is already here, we have systems that, given their sensory limitations, far surpass the ability of the vast majority of humans. Any other take is simply shifting the goal posts.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2025-10-20 05:40:59+00:00
Sometimes you we just have to look backwards at some old designs.

There are still significant tradeoffs though when living that close to nature.

For example, I've stayed in cement/stone homes that are more dome-shaped. Completely surrounded by trees and a garden.

Water ponds all around that catch rain and feed under stone canals to different areas of the land and grey water systems feeding bamboo.

Wonderful, genius water retention system. But cold and rainy weather means you're surrounded by the cold and humidity of those same beautiful ponds.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-10-20 05:41:28+00:00
LLMs are great at stripping propaganda out of articles like this. Tommy Flowers created Colossus. Alan Turing created Bombe. Colossus was classified for a long time. Bombe was not. Turing ends up being well known, Flowers not. Both men were humble and didn't make a big deal out their work.

To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention. Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised.

Edited: Bombe not Enigma.
by lutusp | 2025-10-20 05:42:04+00:00
> As a child, I really was amused by the demo of GraFORTH on Apple ][, which included 3D wireframe animations, which at the time were magical.

I originally wrote GraFORTH (https://archive.org/details/a2_GraFORTH_1981_Lutus_Paul) to escape the slow world of integer BASIC on my first computer (an Apple II). Because it relied on large blocks of assembly code to produce nice graphics, it perhaps misled people about what Forth could do on its own.

Later I wrote a variation I called TransFORTH (https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...) that supported floating-point. I intended to combine GraFORTH and TransFORTH, but my computer didn't have enough RAM.

Innocent times, different world, before the personal computing tail began wagging the dog.
by imoverclocked | 2025-10-20 05:42:51+00:00
> Higher cyclomatic complexity requires more lines

Often true; That's why cognitive complexity wins over cyclomatic complexity.

eg: Embedded logic doesn't add linearly.

fn() { // 1

if(...) { // +1 if(...) { // +2 if(...) { // +3 ... } } }

} // cognitive complexity of 7 vs cyclomatic complexity of 4

It's been a while since I've implemented anything around this and was remembering cognitive complexity while writing cyclomatic complexity in the previous response. They both have their place but limiting cognitive complexity is vastly more helpful, IMHO. eg: The above code might be better written as guard-clauses to reduce cognitive complexity to 4.
by ofalkaed | 2025-10-20 05:47:05+00:00
From what I have seen, AI's use of the em-dash always falls into the technically correct "semicolon like" usage that is ambiguous and confusing when semicolons are also used. Most people who use em-dashes this way do it to "fix" their serial comma use and the difference is generally easy to spot and they often forget to remove the comma they meant to replace as ggm did;

> before AI emerged, -- it would be very plausible

Not criticizing ggm, posting on the internet is closer to spoken language than written with punctuation being more about replacing the lost verbal cues than structuring a carefully composed thought.
by xlii | 2025-10-20 05:49:22+00:00
I didn't know about kkp package. Need to try it out - especially on MacOS there are still performance issues (that I work on) so having workable terminal with all the keybinds available would be helpful.

By the way, recently Kitty introduced variable sized text, which probably could be integrated in Emacs, too, to have my favorite feature - font resize per frame :)
by Tor3 | 2025-10-20 05:49:51+00:00
I use ssh -X all the time (actually I have -X permanently enabled so it's always there - for the targets where I want to use it). However, if there's any combination of latency and heavy X traffic (which can be found in surprising places), ssh doesn't cut it. Then a VNC is necessary. The difference can be as much as ten minutes of waiting for the GUI to come up, or nearly instantly if I have a VNC running.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-10-20 05:49:58+00:00
> over-engineering in Rust is incredibly fun.

TLDR this is the real reason

Anyway I don't use Rust and I just learned that writing generic code is more complicated. It's interesting because in Julia generic code is the simple path: just don't add types and it's generic. Multiple dispatch is a powerful idea and I wish more languages adopted it.
by sthlmb | 2025-10-20 05:50:18+00:00
If you could share a little more on what you actually mean, that would help a ton. I’m not a developer, I put this together as I went, learning along the way. It’s not perfect, and I’m aware of some issues, but if you’d be so kind to expand on “pretty terrible” then maybe I can see if it’s already known, or something I should add to the list.
by socalgal2 | 2025-10-20 05:50:30+00:00
I'm not entirely sure this is different from other languages but I believe a common complaint about lisp is every solution ends up writing a DSL for that solution, making it hard to understand for anyone else. So it's a super power if you're a small team and especially if you're a team of 1. But if you're a large team it doesn't scale.
by zwnow | 2025-10-20 05:51:09+00:00
These AI apologists are also totally ignorant about the actual usefulness of these models. The tech billionaires have been building bunkers while pumping up the bubble. Tell me, why would one need a bunker if AI brings us that utopia? Non rich humans are just consumers to them, they will exploit the planet until it's uninhabitable for their own "gain". We are a waste product for those who hold power. They are showing this to us openly and all the time... how can people be so blind?
by Caius-Cosades | 2025-10-20 05:52:50+00:00
What other options are there for Nvidia? EU as a whole is largely non-viable due to the schizophrenic nature of EU regulations. AI development has been made de-facto illegal in EU, auto industry is being ran to the ground, so there are hardly any customers for GPU's. Now mainland China certainly would be an interesting option, but State Department would throw a shitfit.
by arjie | 2025-10-20 05:54:16+00:00
Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam.

This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-20 05:54:27+00:00
The paper generally agrees with what I'm saying. There's some impedance mismatch because I'm doing a sort of translation I do when explaining things to tech coworkers rather than using the words I'd use for another archaeologist, but quoting their conclusion:

This research supports a broader reconceptualization of medieval frontiers—not merely as static defensive barriers, but as dynamic administrative infrastructures. The Gobi Wall exemplifies a mode of Xi Xia statecraft that used architectural investments to manage re-sources, population movement, and territorial boundaries. This understanding aligns with theoretical models framing frontiers as zones of control and interaction, rather than rigid dividing lines [57], and invites broader comparative analysis across Eurasian contexts.

Basically, I'm saying "what many people think in private discussions" vs "this is what's written in the most cited works". Those can diverge pretty far in small fields like Mongolian archaeology.

That doesn't really matter to the question of whether travelers attempting to cross it risk getting lost and dying if they go offroad. They're not traveling with a herd of sheep. They can't eat the odd patch of dusty grass, or find water.

One slightly fun perspective is that livestock are mobile refrigerators. Living like that is actually why nomads are able to do well in Mongolia.

As for getting lost, basically not an issue for various reasons. More of an issue for non nomads.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-20 05:55:13+00:00
Sadly our industry carries mostly about brick layers and usually tries to go into technologies that make it easier to deal with employees like replaceable servants at low wage prices.

The large scale salaries SV style isn't something that you will find all over the globe, in many countries the pay is similar across all office workers, regardless if they are working with Git, or Office.
by alex43578 | 2025-10-20 05:55:37+00:00
I just bought a RTX 5090 at MSRP. While expensive, it's also a radically more complicated product that plays a more important role in a modern computer than old GPUs did years ago.

Compared to my CPU (9950X3D), it's got a massive monolithic die measuring 750mm2 with over 4x the transistor count of the entire 9950X3d package. Beyond the graphics, it's got tensor and RT cores, dedicated engines for video decode/encode, and 32GB of DDR7 on the board.

Even basic integrated GPUs these days have far surpassed GPUs like the RTX 970, so you can get a very cheap GPU that gets power through the CPU socket, at MSRP.
by vitorgrs | 2025-10-20 05:55:45+00:00
Depends the price of the generics, of course. But I wouldn't doubt if the governament itself would manufacture it. Fiocruz (federal gov lab) already manufacture several drugs.

Also, Rio mayor already said he will just give to everyone basically lol

You also need to remind that on a public health care system, having less obese people means you'll spend less on health care.
by jibal | 2025-10-20 05:57:22+00:00
No, it's not misunderstood that way by literate logical people.

Note that he wrote

> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.

... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct, but you have a lot to say about that.

> Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.

This comment is a strawman and extremely rude and offensive.

I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.

> There was no need for you to involve yourself in the discussion to begin with given that you misunderstood every single comment that has been made, it's for the best that you refrain from further involvement.

There are evil people here.
by vintermann | 2025-10-20 05:58:00+00:00
> “Here we have a late-12th-century sermon deploying a meme from the hit romantic story of the day,” Seb Falk, a historian at the University of Cambridge, says in a statement. “This is very early evidence of a preacher weaving pop culture into a sermon to keep his audience hooked.”

One of the oldest pieces of writing I have from my ancestors is a dedication in a family bible, to my great-grandfather from his parents. It quotes a popular hymn. But when I looked it up, that was a quite recently written text at the time they quoted it, and it wasn't technically even a hymn, but a song from a play (Christian Richardt's version of the fairy tale sleeping beauty). Looks at first glance like they're quoting an old hymn, but it's more like me quoting a Disney film from 20 years ago.
by klempner | 2025-10-20 05:58:02+00:00
> That would be 100 watts!

The point is that power dissipation in a cable is a function of the current going through it. The cable will get exactly as hot carrying 5 amps with a voltage of 5 volts as it will carrying 20 or 48.

(now, that is more *wasteful* -- you lose the same amount of power to heat carrying 25W at 5V5A as you do at 100W 20V5A, but that's 4x the relative waste in power)

> Many people just grab any usbc cable, and solder it directly to GPIO power pins.

You're not going to get *any* 5 amp mode out of a standard PD power supply unless the cable indicates it is 5 amp capable, which isn't going to happen unless that "any usbc cable" has the right emarker on it.

> limit for 5 volts is 3 amps.

There is no such limit.

What there is is two things: 1. There are a standard set of PDOs a standard "X watt" PD power supply is supposed to provide. 5V3A 9V3A 15V3A 20V5A, (then 28, 36, and 48 volts for EPR) with the highest one limited to the power limit of the supply. These only go up to 3 amps until you get to 20 volts. 2. Devices are supposed to support those standard PDOs.

Anything other than those standard PDOs is optional (at least before 3.2 which starts introducing AVS as a requirement at 27W+). 12V support is common, as for that matter is PPS support. 5A support below 20V in fixed PDOs is 100% allowed but is super rare.

(5A lower voltage PPS is a different story, but unfortunately the RPi5 doesn't know how to negotiate 5V PPS. That is a shame because it would 100x its power supply compatibility because most chargers targeting higher end Samsung phones support it.)

A power supply is 100% allowed to support 5V5A. It just isn't required to. It would have been 100% legitimate for the RPi5 to have a buck circuit to handle a standard 27W 9V3A power supply and then turn that buck off if the power supply and cable support 5V5A.

> Initial batches of Pi4 did not even had a resistor, to request 3.0 amps!

To be precise, it had *a* resistor (connected to the shorted together CC pins) when it was supposed to have one separate resistor for each pin, and that broke cables with emarkers.
by zovirl | 2025-10-20 05:58:07+00:00
I was lucky, early in my career, to work at a place which used a lot of Perl and to read Damian Conway’s book, Object Oriented Perl. It was an amazing, mind-expanding book for me. It was filled with examples of different approaches to object-oriented programming, more than I ever dreamt existed, and it showed how to implement them all in Perl.

So much power! And right in line with Perl’s mantra, “there’s more than one way to do it.”

Unfortunately, our codebase contained more than one way of doing it. Different parts of the code used different, incompatible object systems. It was a lot of extra work to learn them all and make them work with each other.

It was a relief to later move to a language which only supported a single flavor of object-oriented programming.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-10-20 05:58:26+00:00
Unlikely to be either it's too high. Drones that can fly that high are typically the size of a small aircraft. And there are no bird bits stuck to the plane, no blood either.

It could be parts of a weather balloon, or small meteor fragments, or even something that came off another plane flying slightly higher, but that would probably have been discovered already. Could be space debris as well, more likely if there was a launch around the same time.
by 0123456789ABCDE | 2025-10-20 05:59:13+00:00
it's the tools. if they're slow people disable them or shift them right. you want your defect-detection and fixing to shift left

if you're not running auto-format on file-save, your auto-formatter is slow

if you're not running a code checker with auto-fix on pre-commit, your code checker is slow

if you're not running the test-suite on pre-push your tests are slow

if your tooling is slow you need to pick better tooling or make them fast

you want to keep that loop tight and active
by flowerthoughts | 2025-10-20 05:59:26+00:00
There's a lot of application of methods in this paper.

However, they're mostly saying there wasn't much in terms of artifacts to be discovered. And it's a wall made from unpolished stones, sand and maybe some wood. There' basically nothing here. They find some coins from 160 CE and then go on to attribute the wall to being built in the 10-13 CE centuries, as was already established.

> This research supports a broader reconceptualization of medieval frontiers—not merely as static defensive barriers, but as dynamic administrative infrastructures. The Gobi Wall exemplifies a mode of Xi Xia statecraft that used architectural investments to manage re-sources, population movement, and territorial boundaries. This understanding aligns with theoretical models framing frontiers as zones of control and interaction, rather than rigid dividing lines [57], and invites broader comparative analysis across Eurasian contexts.

Yeah, they _maybe_ used a big wall they had built for defensive purposes to charge customs.

There are no answers here. I'm sure it's interesting for other archaeologists to study the methods used, but there are no interesting rigid conclusions to be had from reading it.

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/5/1087
by jibal | 2025-10-20 05:59:44+00:00
No, I'm not mistaken.

> their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.

Certainly it's disapproval, but this is a non sequitur that doesn't contradict my statement.

Note that he wrote

> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.

... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.

I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.

P.S.

> Have you considered the distinct possibility that you might be honestly wrong also?

Good grief ... I certainly won't deal with this sort of extremely bad faith offensive whataboutism. Of course I consider whether I might be wrong, on every single occasion.

> HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.

Is it even possible to be more hypocritical than this?
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-10-20 06:01:40+00:00
> The injustice [done to Minsky] is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X. (…)

> The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.

> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

> I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.

This seems a very reasonable thing to say. Also useful concept "accusation inflation" thanks for linking.

> "sex with someone under 18 is rape”, “sex with a prostitute under 18 is enslavement”, and “making a nude photo of someone under 18 is a sexual assault.”

What is happening here is law being repurposed. Rape already has big sentences, and we want to give under 18s extra protections, so let's redefine what the word rape means so we can reuse the rape law.

> Efforts against the business of making and distributing images of that are justified — but these must not be done by dangerous methods.

Dangerous methods meaning redefining words.