MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by immibis | 2025-10-24 15:47:32+00:00
Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse. Not surprised to hear it's similar in other fields. AI in general, just like drugs, makes people feel good but without any actual substance behind the feeling.

(If feeling without substance is all you need, then it's okay to use AI. AI Dungeon, for example, was pretty cool. Or slide backgrounds that would have otherwise been solid colours because they're worth $0 and you wouldn't have paid a designer.)

This first chart should be absolutely damning: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by lucideer | 2025-10-24 15:47:37+00:00
I'm absolutely not an expert of any kind on protocol details, so pardon my ignorance here but this surprises me: is this true?

High-level spec changes have been infrequent, with long dual support periods, & generally seen pretty slow gradual client & server adoption. 1.1 was 1997 & continues to have widespread support today. 2 & 3 were proposed in 2015 & 2016 - almost 2 decades later - & 2 is only really starting to see wide support today, with 3 still broadly unsupported.

I'm likely missing a lot of nuance in between versioned releases though - I know e.g. 2 saw at least two major additions/updates, though I thought those were mostly additive security features rather than changes to existing protocol features.
by Gormo | 2025-10-24 15:47:40+00:00
> You can't put a corporation in prison. But a person you can. This is one of the big problems.

It really isn't -- we're talking about a category of activities that involves only financial liability or civil torts in the first place, regardless of whether the parties involved are organizations or individuals. You can't put people in prison for civil torts.

Prison is irrelevant to 98% of the discussion here. And the small fraction of cases in the status quo that do involve criminal liability -- even within organizations -- absolutely do assign that liability to specific individuals, and absolutely can involve criminal penalties including jail time. Actual criminal conduct is precisely where the courts "pierce the veil" and hold individuals accountable.

> Even when Boeing knowingly caused the deaths of hundreds (especially the second crash was entirely preventable if they would have been honest after the first one), all they got were some fines.

All anyone would ever get in a lawsuit is some fines. The matter is inherently a civil one. And if there were any indications of criminal conduct, criminal liability can be applied -- as it often is -- to the individuals who engaged in it regardless of whether they are operating within an organization or on their own initiative.

The only real difference is that when you sue a large corporation, you're much more able to actually collect the damages you win than you would be if you were just suing one guy operating by himself. If the aim of justice is remunerative, not just punitive, then this is a much superior situation.

> Those just end up being charged back to their customers, a big one being the government who fined them in the first place.

Who would be paying to settle the matter in your preferred situation? It sounds like the most likely outcome is that the victims would just eat the costs they've already incurred, since there'd be little chance of collecting damages, and taxpayers would bear the burden of paying for the punishment of whomever ends up holding the hot potato after all the scapegoating and blame deflection plays out.
by perplex3d | 2025-10-24 15:47:41+00:00
I’m with you. The dichotomy between public and private needs to change. I should still have a degree of privacy even when I’m out in public. What has changed is the ability of others to “see” everyone everywhere at every moment with less and less friction, whether through pictures or videos shared on social media, facial recognition cameras, or location trackers like license plate readers. Historically, no one has had this ability, and now we don’t even know the degree of that ability that some have.
by defanor | 2025-10-24 15:47:43+00:00
It looks a bit messy to me, neglecting usage of hyperlinks, but at the same time highly legible (does not mess with fonts, colors, or the layout too much), lightweight, works without JS, does not geo-block me or require to solve captchas, not paywalled, not blocked here, is straight to the point. So perhaps still more easily readable than most of the other submissions found on the HN front page.
by waffletower | 2025-10-24 15:48:11+00:00
For instance VST3 does not support many to one, and only awkwardly supports two to one -- via second-class "side-chaining" -- sound processing architectures. But the need for such possibility may not be clear to those who only know the primary one-to-one audio flow architecture ubiquitous in digital audio workstation ("DAWWWWWWW") designs. VST3 neatly fits into this architecture. In 2025 I don't think more of this is particularly innovative. In contrast, the AudioUnit spec is open ended and has an internal graph audio flow design that can readily facilitate other signal processing architectures. If you don't want to think outside the "DAW", you don't have to, but some of us musicians do.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-24 15:48:14+00:00
If you know your data is UTF-8, then bytes 0xFE and 0xFF are guaranteed to be free. Strictly speaking, 0xC0, 0xC1, and 0xF5 through 0xFD also are, but the two top values are free even if you are very lax and allow overlong encodings as well as codepoints up to 2³² − 1.
by maxbond | 2025-10-24 15:48:24+00:00
For this type of thing I think property testing would work well. It would take a fair about of work to write a proptest for the entire input space of the tool. But it's achievable and as durable as the CLI arguments (so for this specific case, very unlikely to change in a backwards incompatible way). And this kind of rote work with good reference materials (namely the man pages) is amenable to being generated.

Whatever language you're working in there is probably a port of Hypothesis or quickcheck. For Rust I use the `proptest` crate, but for differential testing of a CLI I would probably use the Python Hypothesis package and invoke the commands externally.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-10-24 15:48:31+00:00
I launch startups. At least one every 5 years since I was 17. I am very passionate about whatever I do or don't do it. I'm approaching 50 years of breathing.

You may dislike my tone but remember the context of the post - If you have nothing outside work for someone else to offer for your accomplishments it is you who are young or have done very little with your life.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-24 15:49:08+00:00
No casino gambling. Casino gambling is not gambling. It's putting $1.00 into a machine and getting $0.80 back, but the exact refund amount after every dollar put in is arbitrary. There's absolutely no risk to the casino, the casino is not gambling. The only gambling being done is by individual bettors, and they have an expected massive loss.

I don't care very much if people gamble with each other, and expect $1 back for every $1 they put in.* But casino games and lootboxes are specifically designed for consistent losses to the house. It's simply another tax, but on the addicted, desperate, and/or innumerate. The weakest people at their weakest moments; and if we're not protecting them, the government has no purpose.

* I actually think that it is good for people who have the same wealth levels to gamble with each other, as long as the outcomes are largely random. The problem is with vigs, and with pots that get too large to cover against a house that can endlessly extend itself.
by NorwegianDude | 2025-10-24 15:50:31+00:00
Nobody cares if I can do it a million times faster, everyone can. It's cheating.

The whole reason you have to account for the time you spend setting it up is so that all work spent processing the data is timed. Otherwise we can just precomputed the answer and print it on demand, that is very fast and easy.

Just getting it into memory is a large bottleneck in the actual challenge.

If I first put it into a DB with statistics that tracks the needed min/max/mean then it's basically instant to retrieve, but also slower to set up because that work needs to be done somewhere. That's why the challenge is time from file to result.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-24 15:50:32+00:00
The two applications were developed on quite different computers and with quite different toolchains.

Interestingly, Knuth has stated that his development of Literate Programming:

http://literateprogramming.com/

was more important than TeX --- fortunately, his publishing _TeX: The Program_:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/499934.Computers_Typeset...

has been very helpful to folks developing successors and add-ons and new versions, facilitating the creation of web2c and change files which made tools such as pdftex and omega and xetex and luatex possible).
by scottlamb | 2025-10-24 15:51:59+00:00
Nice find. That going nowhere seems like classic consequence of the cyclical nature of these things: user-managed concurrency was cool, then it wasn't, then Go (and others) brought it back.

I think the more recent UMCG [1] (kind of a hybrid approach, with threads visible by the kernel but mostly scheduled by userspace) handles this well. Assuming it ever actually lands in upstream, it seems reasonable to guess Go would adopt it, given that both originate within Google.

It's worth pointing out that the slow major page fault problem is not unique to programs using mmap(..., fd, ...). The program binary is implicitly mmaped, and if swap is enabled, even anonymous memory can be paged out. I prefer to lock ~everything [2] into RAM to avoid this, but most programs don't do this, and default ulimits prevent programs running within login shells from locking much if anything.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/879398/

[2] particularly on (mostly non-Go) programs with many threads, it's good to avoid locking into RAM the guard pages or stack beyond what is likely to be used, so better not to just use mlockall(MCL_CURRENT | MCL_FUTURE) unfortunately.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-24 15:52:14+00:00
> All presidents before him were just as corrupt as him

Is that so? Please list the ways in which former presidents have violated the Emolument clause, profited directly from their office (i.e., issuing their own cryptocoin), and increased their family's net worth by billions while in office.

Either put up the facts, or stop with the "whataboutism" nonsense.
by aborsy | 2025-10-24 15:52:14+00:00
No, it was serious!

He complained about the difficulty of installing an application. He didn’t complain about establishing a personal data center.

That one line will give you the Nextcloud. Exactly one more line in snap will give you a self sign cert. Alternatively, the line below will give you remote access, a domain, and a valid certificate for your application:

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

You will have a functioning personal Drive on a VPS or a computer at this point!

Toggle snapshots on VPS for backups.

Setting up services with public clouds also takes some steps.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-24 15:52:37+00:00
We'll see, but call me skeptical. These things happen from time to time (remember Vista?), and the most common attitude seems to be that Linux is going to reap some windfall from Windows users frustration, without having to do anything. And when it doesn't happen, nobody considers if Linux needs to change to benefit from these events. Instead, there's just as much hype for the next one. This time, we'll get the users!

I think something like SerenityOS or Haiku have a better chance of someday capturing users from these Windows mistakes than Linux ever does. Yeah, really.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-24 15:52:40+00:00
> That'd be much more likely to happen on an American road with its 40000/yr fatalities that everyone casually accepts as a pragmatic trade-off worth having ;)

India’s traffic fatality rate is 12.6 per 100k, which is about the same as the US’ at 14.2. India has a very low car ownership rate, and US a very high one, so I dunno that I’d be so quick to judge in your shoes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
by e10v_me | 2025-10-24 15:53:03+00:00
I was thinking about the labor market congestion problem and came up with a solution that is often used in service marketplaces: pay to apply. Then I asked myself what this solution has that AI doesn't. That’s how I arrived at the analogy that prices act as model weights: they encode market information. An important difference: prices incorporate signals from dispersed, hard-to-observe data that an AI/ML model may not access.

P.S. Paying to apply may sound provocative and require thoughtful consideration and careful testing. Payments can be made with platform-issued virtual points, available in a limited supply. But here, I focus on why price signals may address this problem better than AI-based screening.
Show HN: A high-performance Rust based MCP server
by ManfredMacx | 2025-10-24 15:53:20+00:00
Many projects I've had involve spreadsheets in various forms. Agent's are good at navigating through them but often are doing so via ad-hoc python scripts, which are both clunky and have poor performance characteristics.

This includes both basic spreadsheet functionality like `list_sheets`, `sheet_page` as well as useful features like recursive formula precedent/dependent tracing.
by hexomancer | 2025-10-24 15:53:24+00:00
Yeah I got exited thinking this is about traffic lights. I use a bike to commute to work and recently I was thinking if I could adjust my cycling cadence so that I never hit a red light, but unfortunately the timing of the traffic lights in my city is not constant. If there was a publicly accessible API to get the current timing info, I could write an app to do that.
by ndiddy | 2025-10-24 15:53:36+00:00
The project is currently mainly focused on upstreaming as many of their patches as possible, and maintaining the existing code. M3/4/5 have a completely different GPU instruction set from M1/2, so they would need a large amount of new reverse engineering to get the GPU support where it is on M1/2. I don't believe there's anyone working on GPU support for those newer platforms.
by immibis | 2025-10-24 15:54:11+00:00
Inducing segmentation faults is literally how the kernel implements memory mapping, and virtual memory in general, by the way. From the CPU's perspective, that page is unmapped. The kernel gets its equivalent of a SIGSEGV signal (which is a "page fault"=SIGSEGV "interrupt"=signal), checks its own private tables, decides the page is currently on disk, schedules it to be read from disk, does other stuff in the meantime, and when the page has finished being read from disk, it returns from the interrupt.

(It does get even deeper than that: from the CPU's perspective, the interrupt is very brief, just long enough to take note that it happened and avoid switching back to the thread that page-faulted. The rest of the stuff I mentioned, although logically an "interrupt" from the application's perspective, happens with the CPU's "am I handling an interrupt?" flag set to false. This is equivalent to writing a signal handler that sets a flag saying the thread is blocked, edits its own return address so it will return to the scheduler instead of the interrupted code, then calls sigreturn to exit the signal handler.)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-24 15:54:19+00:00
I think he seems to explain that in the situation that you had presented between multiple different countries, every other country doesn't even give you the freedom/opportunity to be the powerful person without requiring some same set of ideologies (communism good, or the NK example)

Whereas, in a capitalist system with no matter how much of its flaws, as long as you can produce value (whatever that is in current society), you have power and can actually be your own boss in that sense.

I am worried how much of that can change in recent year but still, I feel like socialism can be good for generating extreme amounts of money /value because as a society on whole, people are willing to take on more risks if there is something to fall back on (like not having to worry that you or your family will starve if you fail)

Sweden has more amounts of billionaires per capita than america (source wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...)
by _wire_ | 2025-10-24 15:54:20+00:00
My god, don't code like a surgeon!

Code like a programmer.

This article further emphasizes the obvious point that as programmers are well on the way to destroying their own profession and their work is poised to wreck the entire world, that it's time raise awareness that programmers work with much less discipline and responsibility than other professional, accredited, licensed trades, like say... doctors.

But for now, sure, why not just compare yourself to surgeons, as you already anoint yourselves as "engineers".
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-24 15:54:28+00:00
Consider doing a hybrid workflow. The equipment for developing film is quite compact. I keep all of my film development chemicals and equipment stored in a small tupperware under the bathroom sink. You can also buy a lightproof bag, so you don't even need a light tight room to load the film.

The second half of my process is to "scan" my film using a macro lens and my DSLR. It takes about 2 hours to go from exposed film to developed and scanned film. Only about 30 minutes of that time is active, most of it is waiting for the film to dry since I don't have a drying a cabinet.
by Glyptodon | 2025-10-24 15:54:35+00:00
I'd add a #3 to the "explainable with" list: the trend towards relentlessly outsourcing work, often in situations where you get 1/2 the quality on 2x the timeline, because it's still cheaper than good engineers and the ostensible relentless time pressure turns out to not exist if offshore workers are cheap enough.
by dugidugout | 2025-10-24 15:54:46+00:00
While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements.

I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position.

Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-24 15:55:14+00:00
Around here, they usually set up, high in a tree. You often can’t see the nest, until fall.

Yellowjackets, on the other hand, dig holes; often quite near houses. They are also quite aggressive. You can easily disturb their nests.

Also, I don’t think hornet stings are as venomous as yellowjacket stings (they probably don’t need to be). Being swarmed by yellowjackets really sucks.

I’d pick hornets over yellowjackets, any day.
by djhworld | 2025-10-24 15:55:23+00:00
Interesting and fun

> Workers download, decompress, and materialize their shards into DuckDB databases built from Parquet files.

I'm interested to know whether the 5s query time includes this materialization step of downloading the files etc, or is this result from workers that have been "pre-warmed". Also is the data in DuckDB in memory or on disk?
by LilBytes | 2025-10-24 15:55:28+00:00
That's the thing. Even when you consider the hardware benefits. Let's say they're 10% better (I feel but happy to be corrected, that feels understated).

There isn't a single machine out there that's even moderately close in terms of build quality. Either at the dollar cost for an entry series MacBook Pro or Air with 36GB (38?) memory.

I don't think there's an OEM Linux or Windows laptop with Linux as a first class citizen laptop out there even moderately close for value, performance and build quality.

Shit I'm not sure if there's even one out there if you spent considerably more than on a MacBook. MacBook Pro's are pretty good value now.
by walkabout | 2025-10-24 15:55:28+00:00
We're on track to be a much-richer Russia. Which is a lot better than being like Russia, and also as poor as Russia. But it's a lot worse than being rich and also not like Russia.

I expect most of the pain will be from lost potential growth rather than an actual decline in real terms, and that it'll take a while for most people to realize how stagnant we've become—because line will continue to Go Up thanks to an inflation-based debt reduction strategy, plus the US is such a giant player in the global economy that our slowing way down will also slow the global economy for quite a while, until it adjusts, so we'll still seem to be doing relatively OK for potentially another decade or more.

Of course we could also derail into something even worse than Russia. Or capital flight might hit us harder and faster than I think it will (anyone who can't see a way to, or can't stomach, getting on the good side of our rulers, will want to get out so they don't lose all their shit, including possibly their lives in extreme cases)
by pvitz | 2025-10-24 15:56:24+00:00
Thanks for your reply and advice! I guess what you describe as "impossible" is the case I am mostly interested in, though more for non-executable binary data. If I am not mistaken, this goes under the term "file fragment classification", but I have been wondering if practitioners might have figured out some better ways than what one can find in scholarly articles.

And yes, searching for the reimplementation beforehand would have saved me some hours :D
by immibis | 2025-10-24 15:57:01+00:00
IMO the phrase "legitimate investment" should be reserved for situations where you spend money something (e.g. kitchen equipment) that allows you to create new real-world value (e.g. food) which you can hopefully sell for a profit (it's still a legitimate investment if that fails). It should not be used for Ponzi schemes, gambling, outright fraud, or anything of the sort. Buying something and then hoping its price goes up before you sell it should not be called investing, but gambling - unless it fits in the category I just described.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-24 15:57:13+00:00
All that mainly because some streaming services are willing to pay a more competitive amount of money for single (albeit national) weekly game broadcasts to sweeten their offering and get more subscribers.

Of course the NFL isn't gonna turn down $1B per year from Amazon for TNF. They get ~$2B from CBS and Fox each for the combined 10 Sunday games, then another couple billion from NBC for one Sunday night game, and another couple billion from ESPN for Monday night.

I think it's unlikely a single broadcaster would spend $12+B/year for exclusive rights to all games.
by sandworm101 | 2025-10-24 15:57:29+00:00
A car chassis is essentially immortal: 30, 40 or even 100+ years. Modern steal is franky amazing compared to cars of the past. Tesla batteries are nowhere near chassis life numbers.

I was stuck in traffic behind an 87 caddy yesterday. It was not a collector car. That chassis is still on the road, seemed to be taking kids to school.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-24 15:57:40+00:00
There's no sandbox of any kind, at least on Linux, and the permission system is self-defeating. The agent will ask to run something like `bash -c "npm test"` and ask you to whitelist "bash" for future use. I don't use it daily because I don't find it useful to begin with, but when I take it for a spin it's always inside a full VM.