MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jakobnissen | 2025-10-01 19:27:40+00:00
I've been using Julia for seven years, four years as my main language at work.

It's my view that all the major points in the blog post are true, and the problem persists. It's slightly better now, because Julia has more usage in industry and less usage by hobby hackers.

I'm convinced it's caused by two factors: The first is the duck-typed, dynamic nature of the language, which, like Python, gives the developer no tools to check or enforce correctness.

More fundamentally, the culture of Julia is a cowboy hacking culture where we just start writing, and then we can always kick the code around once bugs appears. There seem to be an almost complete disinterest in careful documentation of behaviour and edge cases, or even actual descriptions of what some abstraction is supposed to do. The natural result is that people interpret all kinds of meaning to any abstraction and use them in slightly different ways. It's madness.

As an example, consider [the definition of Base.seek](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/base/io-network/#Base.seek). There is no description of what the position is, what type is can be or operations it's supposed to support. Nor that the seek position is typically zero-indexed. There is no description of what should happen for out of bounds seeks, or how it differs for files open in reading and writing mode. Nor any description of the errors it can throw.

I must emphasize that this kind of documentation is the norm, not the exception.

This kind of indifference towards actually specifying behaviour is not a foundation you can build a language on. And it's very hard to change in retrospect, because by now, seek means a bunch of different things in Base Julia and the ecosystem, and it would be breaking to change.

I've several times seen a core dev change some behaviour of some code because they clearly thought the behaviour was always meant to be X, even though it actually did Y, arguing that Y was an implementation detail. No shit - everything is an implementation detail when nothing is documented.

I think Julia needs to grow up and begin taking it's documentation and interfaces seriously.
by eitland | 2025-10-01 19:28:23+00:00
With me I know:

I know if I close my eyes now there is nothing visible.

I also know if I have a good night's sleep and wake up late on Saturday I might be able to see images of things I am working on in the garden or elsewhere.

So I know seing nothing is my default and I know that seing something vividly can be possible.
by Animats | 2025-10-01 19:28:43+00:00
The underlying work is something called "Flamingo".[1] This is a system for understanding interleaved text and images in sequence. So it can process two "modalities" that are both sequential. This new work seems to put some kind of time token in one "modality" channel, leading to more awareness of time.

(The web site is too cute. Applying a left to right gradient on text is a bit much.)

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.14198
by almosthere | 2025-10-01 19:28:57+00:00
UBI would only pay for people that don't have rent/mortgage and is growing their own food and would only pay for half their property taxes.

If it goes mainstream in some communist country, it would definitely be less than what is necessary to live. It would also be a non-stop inflationary driver because the only way the government would be able to afford to give everyone the amount, is to basically just print fake money.
by kllrnohj | 2025-10-01 19:29:23+00:00
Interesting charts, but this is all completely meaningless without image quality comparisons. I can easily use 50% less bandwidth than Netflix's H264 streams as well, with H264 even, by just cranking up the compression & dropping the bitrate.

Presumably nothing jumped out at the author as being worse, but come on how can you have a whole section on why AV1's regression on Bojack is actually a good thing because the quality is way higher, and then not show any quality comparisons?
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-01 19:29:51+00:00
> I didn't find a way to do this in plain C

Not sure what you were running into. I routinely do this just fine.

> This didn't even use constexpr, just preprocessor trickery.

Isn't the preprocessor shared between C and C++?

> in C++ you can initialize a global struct and it gets statically linked into the output

That sounds to be doable just the same in C?
by smmx | 2025-10-01 19:29:53+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | CET Location: around 46/14 In past 20 years did many different projects, mostly worked with teams 1-5. 60% of projects were related to sport and TV, for example recording and archiving thousands of videos, creating encoding and playback pipeline, rest was various other fields. I was jumping between leading, architecting, designing, programming and things in-between :)

I have most experience mwith C# (web services, aspnet, razor, ...) also desktop apps (WinForms, WPF, Avalonia), JS/Typescript (mostly for gui, I enjoyed mithril and now SolidJS). I also did some c++ for various small integrations (for example some plugin for Godot, some ffmpeg. Last year I focused heavily on Rust, and created user space network bonding protocol, now audio intercom. I mostly worked with GPC 70% , AWS 20%, other (like Hetzner) 10%.

I like to make GUI/backends that makes sense, are easy to understand (test with users) and performant/fast. Also to last years, with minimum dependencies. I also have experience with live events setup for broadcast of events, have experience with networks.

I also did tons of remote support with people around the world, also know how to use this information to make better programs (or design...).

Looking for 20-100 hours per month.

Last year I started solo career and am now slowly building better references/page etc.

hellohn@smmx.dev
Show HN: Butter, a muscle memory cache for LLMs
by edunteman | 2025-10-01 19:29:58+00:00
Hi HN, Erik here. Today we launch Butter, an OpenAI-compatible API proxy that caches LLM generations and serves them deterministically on revisit.

Since April, we’ve been working on this concept of “muscle memory,” or deterministic replay, for agent systems performing automations. You may recall our first post in May, launching a python package called Muscle Mem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988381

Since then, the product has evolved entirely, now taking the form of an LLM Proxy. For a deep dive into this process, check out: https://blog.butter.dev/muscle-mem-as-a-proxy

The proxy’s killer feature is being template-aware, meaning it can reuse cache entries across structurally similar requests. Inducing variable structure from context windows is no easy task, which we cover in a technical writeup here: https://blog.butter.dev/template-aware-caching

The proxy is currently open-access and free to use so we can quickly discover and work through a slew of edge cases and template-induction errors. There’s much work to be done before it’s technically sound, but we’d love to see you take Butter for a spin and share how it went, where it breaks, if it’s helpful, if we're going down a dead end, etc.

Cheers!
by btilly | 2025-10-01 19:29:58+00:00
It would be more accurate to say that most mathematical CS fits inside of constructivist foundations. Of course it also fits inside of classical foundations. So someone with constructivist inclinations may be drawn to that field. But participation in that field doesn't make you a constructivist.

As for what exists means, here are the three basic philosophies of mathematics.

The oldest is Platonism. It is the belief that mathematics is real, and we are trying to discover the right way to do it. Ours is not to understand how it is to exist, it is to try to figure out what actually exists. Kurt Gödel is a good example of someone who argued for this. See https://journals.openedition.org/philosophiascientiae/661 for a more detailed exploration of his views, and how they changed over time. (His Platonism does seem to have softened over time.)

Historically this philosophy is rooted in Plato's theory of Forms. Where our real world reflects an ideal world created by a divine Demiurge. With the rise of Christianity, that divine being is obviously God. This fit well with the common idea during the Scientific Revolution that the study of science and mathematics was an exploration of the mind of God.

Formalism dates back to David Hilbert. In Hilbert's own description, it reduces mathematics to formal symbol manipulation according to formal rules. It's a game to figure out what the consequences are of the axioms that were chosen. As for existence, "If the arbitrarily posited axioms together with all their consequences do not contradict each other, then they are true and the things defined by these axioms exist. For me, this is the criterion of truth and existence." See page 39 of https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/17600/1/bde.pdf for a reference.

In other words if we make up any set of axioms and they don't contradict each other, the things that those axioms define have mathematical existence. Whether or not we can individually describe those things, or learn about them.

Over on the constructivist side of the fence, there are a wide range of possible views. But they share the idea that mathematical things can only exist when there is a way to construct them. But that begs the question.

Finitism only accepts the existence of finite things. In an extreme form, even the set of natural numbers doesn't exist. Only individual natural numbers. Goodstein of the Goodstein sequence is a good example of a finitist.

Intuitionism has the view that mathematics only exists in the minds of men. Anything not accessible to the minds of men, doesn't exist. The best known adherent of this philosophy is Brouwer.

My sympathies generally lie with the Russian school, founded by Markov. (Yes, the Markov that Markov chains are named after.) It roots mathematics in computability.

Erret Bishop is an example of a more pragmatic version of constructivism. Rather than focus on the philosophical claims, he pragmatically focuses on what can be demonstrated constructively. https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Constructive-Analysis-Err... is his best known work.
by bradlys | 2025-10-01 19:30:07+00:00
I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.
by eitland | 2025-10-01 19:30:13+00:00
I don't say I draw nice drawings. I am referring to this art/experiment:

https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...

I don't draw impossible bikes. Because I know what bikes are. That is what I mean. Not that I can make nice or even photographically correct images of them.
by rictic | 2025-10-01 19:30:20+00:00
I love spreadsheets for casual stuff, but my concerns with using them for anything heavy duty are twofold: change management and correctness testing.

Other software that I use and write is version controlled and has tests to catch errors, mistakes, typos. Those tests regularly find and prevent problems! Likewise version control.

Could we get the same with spreadsheets? Seems difficult but not conceptually impossible, particularly with LLM assistance.
by Cuuugi | 2025-10-01 19:30:36+00:00
The full saga is humourous. from wiki.

Gary Larson cartoon incident

One of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"[114] Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste and had its lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which they described the cartoon as an "atrocity". They were stymied by Goodall herself: when she returned and saw the cartoon, she stated that she found the cartoon amusing.[115]

Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have gone to the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5, detailing her version of the controversy, and the institute's letter was included next to the cartoon in the complete Far Side collection.[116] She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals. In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.
by penteract | 2025-10-01 19:30:40+00:00
2.2 × 10⁻⁸ radians is 0.0045 arcseconds [1]. That answer is off by 3 orders of magnitude.

[1] https://frinklang.org/fsp/frink.fsp?fromVal=2.2*10%5E-8+radi...
by xp84 | 2025-10-01 19:30:48+00:00
No DHCP doesn't mean public IPs nor impact the need for NAT, it just means the hosts have to be explicitly configured with IP addresses, default gateways if they need egress, and DNS.

Those IPs you end up assigning manually could be private ones or routable ones. If private, authorized traffic could be bridged onto the network by anything, such as a random computer with 2 NICs, one of which is connected eventually to the Internet and one of which is on the local network.

If public, a firewall can control access just as well as using NAT can.
by sgarland | 2025-10-01 19:31:18+00:00
Tbf, this is a natural consequence of companies doing premature optimization / cargo culting. There are many, many reasons to NOT go into microservices. Kelsey Hightower had some thoughts on this [0] back in 2020.

You can run a hell of a lot off of a small fleet of beefy servers fronted with a load balancer, all pointing to one DB cluster.

[0]: https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the-future
by mrtksn | 2025-10-01 19:31:41+00:00
Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.
by almosthere | 2025-10-01 19:31:44+00:00
> What if governments are 100% transparent and democratic in the most ideal sense?

Then bad actors would immediately kill all the leaders of said government because they made their location data available. (you said 100% transparent).

Also there are too many definitions for "ideal sense". It could mean it's 100% allowable to kill, steal, rape, etc... Since in a 100% direct democracy everyone will vote for the thing that's 100% good sounding to them.
by justicz | 2025-10-01 19:31:53+00:00
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by BinaryIgor | 2025-10-01 19:32:06+00:00
I don't know, there is a very important tradeoff here:

"The potential improvement in the experience an individual has with their government could be substantial. When procedural complexity serves as a gatekeeper, government services become less accessible to those who may need them most. Agentic services could, if implemented thoughtfully, democratize access by removing these procedural barriers without compromising program integrity."

True, but at the same time it disincentives governments from simplifying these processes - that's the root cause of the problem. I highly doubt whether agents will be capable of automating these kind of interactions any time soon, but if they prove to be, they might cement overly complex processes pretty much forever - why improve and simplify them when we have agents to hide the accidental complexity?
by AliClarkDevyce | 2025-10-01 19:32:08+00:00
Devyce (YC S22) | UK (remote/onsite/hybrid) | Senior Frontend/Fullstack/Backend Developers | Full Time We're redesigning the business phone network from the ground up. Starting with mobile apps and a softphone, we're losing the jargon (who cares what an IVR is?) and building features customers actually want. We're getting big enough to start splitting into more focused teams and there's a few different areas that we need; our infra needs a lot of work, we have big dreams for some cool AI agent/pipeline work and there's still a lot of more fundamental phone system specific problems we need to solve.

We try to be flexible around work and don't believe in regular 60-hour weeks. One key aim of our product is to help employees maintain a healthy work/life balance (who wants to be disturbed by business calls on the weekends?) in an age of remote and hybrid work. The founders lead by example, with all of us having worked 4-4.5 day weeks at times in order to spend time with our children.

We're looking for full stack software engineers - doesn't matter if you're much stronger in either the front or back end, but you do need to be able to build all the parts of a feature - there's no "front end team" once the backend is done. There is naturally work that's much more one sided, so you won't be stuck for months on the front end if you prefer the backend, but we're still a small startup so we expect you to get stuck in and help out where you can!

You'll need to visit our London office roughly once a month.

Email alistair.clark@devyce.co.uk and mention that you saw this on Ask HN: Who is hiring?
by jorangreef | 2025-10-01 19:32:09+00:00
> In general, in very tangible terms, what are the real benefits for choosing TigerBeetle over another distributed database?

Transaction processing at scale. The world doesn't need another string database. TigerBeetle is an integer database designed for (double-entry) counting, even under extreme write contention.

See also our 1000x talk going into what only TB can do (and why stored procedures still suffer from concurrency control in the internal storage engine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKgfk8lTQuE

> Do you mean to say that Oracle, MSSQL, MariaDB, Postgress, ect, can't detect when a file is corrupted?

Yes. cf. https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/rebello and https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast18/presentation/alagap...

Also read the Jepsen report on TigerBeetle (to see the new storage fault injectors that Kyle Kingsbury added): https://jepsen.io/analyses/tigerbeetle-0.16.11

> with no tangible deliverable that has a demonstrated market.

TigerBeetle is already being integrated into national payment systems. We also have a few enterprise customers. Some pretty large brokerages, wealth managements, exchanges and energy utilities. Granted, the company is only 3 years old, so we still have some market to demonstrate.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-01 19:32:34+00:00
I'll accept accusations of being too cynical, but I come at it from the "(lack of) past consequences" side.

For the past ~25 years I've paid attention, and in particular since 2008, virtually no scandal has cost the GOP any tangible support.

I see no reason to expect that anything in these files would have different results, so I see no reason for republicans to think differently and fear the release based on the contents of said files.

Whatever comes out would get brushed off with the mix of "deep state", "lying victims", "locker room talk", "circumstantial means nothing", etc, we've already seen, and it would be effective.
by top256 | 2025-10-01 19:32:34+00:00
Thanks for engaging. I think you meant it's obvious rather than shallow? If so, yes I agree but a lot of my friends disagree so I wrote this as rigorously as possible to explain why this is obvious.

That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence despite having voted for it. The Montreal Protocol solved ozone depletion despite classic tragedy of the commons dynamics.

My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. When tech leaders invoke inevitability via game theory, they're choosing to accept those constraints rather than working to change them.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-01 19:33:02+00:00
Monkeys are just the simiiformes minus the apes. That's just a paraphyly, which is totally fine.

If you don't like paraphyletic labels for aesthetic reasons, just include the apes to make it monophyletic. The main reason we don't is that many people have strong, visceral reactions to being called a monkey.

You can't do that to fish or trees without including a bunch of things that are obviously not trees and fish.
by Traster | 2025-10-01 19:33:29+00:00
Just to be clear, the UK system is much simpler than the US system. There is just a bad law. That law could be repealed with a majority in parliament tomorrow, until it is repealed (spoiler it absolutely will not be repealed) the regulator can and will file these law suits. The best we can hope for is that the regulator (Home Office) just don't bother trying to enforce the law.

The core problem is the people writing the laws are know-nothing busy bodies who write crap laws and then cause massive problems, and we've demonstrated over the last 18 months that you can fire literally 70% of the UK Parliament, replace them all and still end up with the same rules written by the same know-nothing busy bodies.
by pdyck | 2025-10-01 19:33:36+00:00
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