MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by askmrsinh | 2025-10-31 05:07:36+00:00
Constants are useful for reasoning about code, but anyone who focuses only on making everything an immutable is missing the point. The main goal should be achieving referential transparancy.

It can be perfectly fine to use mutable variables within a block, like a function when absolutely needed - for example, in JavaScript's try catch and switch statements that need to set a variable for later use. As long as these assignments are local to that block, the larger code remains side-effect free and still easy to reason about, refactor and mantain.

https://rockthejvm.com/articles/what-is-referential-transpar...
by caspar | 2025-10-31 05:08:38+00:00
> Dithering means fading away the banding that occurs when the palette (or the apparent palette achieved via halftone) isn't large enough to avoid banding on its own.

Here[0] is a good summary of dithering/noise to reduce color banding. Interestingly, for my game[1] I found that Valve's animated dithering technique (which uses variation over time in lieu of a fixed noise pattern) worked best, as the other techniques described there altered the perceived lightness of the resulting image.

[0]: https://blog.frost.kiwi/GLSL-noise-and-radial-gradient/

[1]: A multiplayer Noita-like (more at https://slowrush.dev), where the radiance-cascades-powered lighting tends to cause obvious banding patterns on really dark backgrounds.
by LexiMax | 2025-10-31 05:08:54+00:00
> The last line of defense is that military leadership actually do have a pretty solid loyalty to the constitution and soldiers are pretty well trained to follow the chain of command.

Trump has done a number of monumentally stupid things over the past 10 months, but publicly threatening his generals takes the cake.

Donald. Sweetie. Pumpkin. What were you thinking? These men are career military men who are not impressed or intimidated by you or your bone spurs.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-31 05:09:30+00:00
I always call this the difference of return branch styles. Yours I'd describe as "fast fail" aka return false as quickly as possible (for lack of a better terminology) whereas I personally prefer to have a single return false case at the bottom of my function body, and the other validation errors (e.g. in Go) are usually in the else blocks.

In JS, errors are pretty painful due to try/catch, that's why I would probably these days recommend to use Effect [1] or similar libraries to have a failsafe workflow with error cases.

Errors in general are pretty painful in all languages in my opinion. The only language where I thought "oh this might be nice" was Koka, where it's designed around Effect Types and Handlers [2]

[1] https://effect.website/

[2] https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-31 05:11:11+00:00
It will eliminate some particular employees, the roles may be retained and filled with other, probably—for it to have a business purpose—lower-cost (either because of location or experience or a combination) personnel.

Or, even more cynically, the roles can be nominally retained but due to inability to find the right talent or something like that kept open through the current (outside of AI, for now) economic downturn, and then filled again later.
by bitwize | 2025-10-31 05:11:19+00:00
Accordingly for a movie that showed aspects of phone phreaking techniques and culture, Hackers (1995) mentions at least three 555 numbers:

212-555-4240: The number of the modem at OTV that Dade social-engineers out of the security flunkie, allowing him to dial into the cable channel's systems

555-4817: Lisa Blair's phone number, which Lord Nikon recalls out of his photographic memory at the party.

555-4202: Kate's number, which Phreak connects to by rapidly pressing the prison phone's switchhook ten times (effectively pulse-dialing 0) and then asking the operator for help dialing

Given how stylized the movie is as a whole, the prominence of several obviously-fake phone numbers is the least of the things that break realism.
by tombert | 2025-10-31 05:13:43+00:00
I said “they give me money and benefits”, and I didn’t define what those benefits were. As I said, I hated working at that BigCo and took a pay cut to work with people I liked more to do work I thought would be more fun. To me the benefit was being able to do work I enjoyed more. I apologize if that wasn’t clear, obviously there are more categories to choosing a job than net pay; if there weren’t we wouldn’t have any teachers.

It wasn’t like I just blurted it out when people were deciding which database to use, it was relevant to the discussion. I can’t remember the exact conversation but IIRC we were having trouble hiring someone for a role and the topic of compensation came up. I felt my comment was relevant, and I genuinely didn’t even consider that people would have issue with it because I thought it was borderline tautological.
by mindslight | 2025-10-31 05:13:59+00:00
Well yes, the follow up to my point is that every member of Congress who is not currently supporting impeachment/conviction is complicit in this abject failure of governance.

Congress has had problems for decades (thanks to Newt and the childish boomers), which is what has been accreting so much power in the Presidency to begin with. But there is still time to pull up by Congress reasserting its authority as an institution, and that time is now.
by coderatlarge | 2025-10-31 05:14:22+00:00
to go further: let’s say i don’t even define a purpose for the app but just leave it open to users to define their metadata labeling scheme and all the app does is index the videos labeled in a common way. perhaps endusers agree on redit or on some wiki how they will label posts. the app just traverses the labeling scheme and provides some basic viewing and searching locally; without a server involved beyond youtube. i’m just wondering whether this new situation essentially criminalizes metadata.
by tomtom1337 | 2025-10-31 05:14:32+00:00
If you’re young, new to data science and hoping to get a job in it after some time, then I absolutely recommend learning Python instead of Julia.

But if you are just interested in learning a new language and trying it in data science OR are not currently looking to enter the data science job market, then by all means: Julia is great and in many ways superior to Python for data science.

It’s just that «everyone» is doing data science in Python, and if you’re new to DS, then you should also know Python (but by all means learn Julia too!).
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-31 05:14:42+00:00
Downvote-a-bots are not capable of actual thinking.

What you sometimes need is a USB stick having a native "geometry" in terms of HDD emulation ability, that will be recognized properly by the particular series of chipset on the target mainboard.

Then the data bits written to a fully-zeroed drive must conform to what is expected of a bootable device on the target mainboard, for one thing the partition(s) often needs to be well-aligned with the underlying storage hardware to a more particular degree than merely when it is a "perfectly" readable & writeable drive.

Many new USB sticks fail at this fundamental point because the factory partitioning & formatting was accomplished using an image not exactly appropriate after the vendors of the silicon storage or controller chips make hardware revisions.

Analogously, also why writing an IMG or dd from a not-very-identical stick, or with dissimilar partitioning and/or formatting is quite hit or miss.

Sometimes freshly reformatting is enough for problem sticks, other times they can not be made to boot without repartitioning. Either way a fresh reformat or repartition may simply overwrite using (proven nonoptimal) disk structures still remaining in place unless the device is zeroed beforehand. Sometimes a reboot is needed for an OS to forget the structure that was recognized during most recent insertion.

I like Ventoy (and Rufus) but for best results I start with a proven bootable stick which I prepare manually from a zeroed stick and verify bootability beforehand. Similar preparation when getting ready to manually write reliable plain Windows Setup USBs from the mounted ISO.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-31 05:15:36+00:00
I didn’t make the claim that it’s worth it. But when it is absolutely needed Java has no solution.

And remember, we’re talking about a very niche and specific I/O microbenchmark. Start looking at things like SIMD (currently - I know Java is working on it) or in general more compute bound and the gap will widen. Java still doesn’t yet have the tools to write really high performance code.
by sershe | 2025-10-31 05:17:09+00:00
I work in MSFT although not in office org. Based on my experience, the reason is far more trivial. Someone has a half year goal (KR) that says I/my team will increase engagement by N% from X to Y. Some people, whom I don't respect, when presented with a goal like that immediately start doing this (tfa) kind of stuff. Many people, when towards the end of the period some of their genuine (i.e. delivering good stuff) bets don't pan out and the numbers don't number, start doing things like this or generally throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

I bet there was a meeting where someone axed the off button because numbers.
by t312227 | 2025-10-31 05:17:42+00:00
hello,

imho. (!)

i think this would be great!!

personally i totally understood why AMD gave up on its last attempt - the A1100 opterons - about 10 years ago in favor of the back then new ryzen architecture:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Opteron_processors...

but what i would really like to see: an ARM soc/apu on an "open"*) (!) hardware-platform similar to the existing amd64 pc hardware.

*) "open" as in: i'm able to boot whatever (vanilla) arm64 linux-distribution or other OS i want ...

i have to add: i'm personally offended by the amount of tinkering of the firmware/boot-process which is necessary to get for example the raspberry pi 5 (or 4) to boot vanilla debian/arm64 ... ;)

br, a..z

ps. even if its a bit o.T. in this context, as a reminder a link to a slightly older article about an interview with jim keller about how ISA no longer matters that much ...

"ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter"

* https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
by peteforde | 2025-10-31 05:19:35+00:00
Except that their messaging was very much that this was a product designed by people who believed that you should buy something once and that you should be able to use it for a long, long time. Lots of new content and features in the pipeline. The safe harbor from subscription model bloodsuckers we should support with our dollars on principle.

Remember Windows 10 was once marketed as the last Windows? I do.

The real harm here is that every time there's a rug pull, our trust evaporates just a little further while our memories get a little bit longer.
by samlambert | 2025-10-31 05:21:27+00:00
You're assuming everyone values things the way you do. People do want to pay for products that solve their problems. Pick a problem you know well and solve it for someone else who has that problem. Discover if it has enough value to them to charge an appropriate fee. If that fee covers your cost then you are in business. Now figure out what it is going to take to find the next person. Find them, solve their problem. Widen the net to a larger group and you are moving. You have to start though, you need time researching, interviewing customers, messing around.
by mrkeen | 2025-10-31 05:21:34+00:00
Trying to find the key idea here, which I'm not picking up in the abstract.

3.4 Evaluation Strategy The confluence of our semantics enables us to soundly step statements in unusual orders. However, for an implementation, we need an actual evaluation strategy. Sequential, call-by-value evaluation would step statements in order. Lazy evaluation would work backward from the return variable, stepping statements needed to turn it into a value. By contrast, the idea of opportunistic evaluation is to step as many statements as we can, anywhere we can. Some may not be able to step yet, e.g. a function call where the function does not yet have a known definition, but we will step all the rest.

Reminds me a little of Haxl: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/06/10/web/open-sourcing-haxl...
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-31 05:22:44+00:00
HN comment claims Alphabet operates (profitable) information index

But Alphabet SEC filing discloses its revenue-generating operations are (a) online advertising delivery, (b) cloud-based solutions and (c) sales of other products and services

US law requires the statements in Alphabet's disclosure to be accurate, not misleading

Nothing requires statements in HN comments to be accurate, not misleading

What is "(profitable) information index"

Is it part of (a) online advertising delivery, b) cloud-based solutions or (c) sales of other products and services
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-31 05:23:21+00:00
The real problem here is that it should be easier to take powers away from them government than to grant them.

If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.

The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.
by tavavex | 2025-10-31 05:23:29+00:00
> And lots of game companies keep going bust or get bought out by the bigger ones.

I'm not sure I'm seeing the same. The gaming industry is going strong, and increasing consolidation isn't really a sign that the companies being acquired are in financial trouble, it's more about the strength and dominance of the biggest companies. And even those biggest players are continuing to release non-subscription-based titles. I'm not saying there aren't struggling gaming companies, but to me it seems that the majority are doing well for themselves, certainly there's nothing so monumental in the industry as to make me think "they're all losing money because they're not all moving to subscription services".

Square Enix also isn't really representative of the average gaming company. FFXIV seems to be their primary product in general, especially in the American and European markets. The products they cite in other sub-segments of digital entertainment are far more niche and many don't seem to be as well-received critically. They also focus a lot more on Japan than other gaming companies, for obvious reasons, which makes direct comparisons even harder. FFXIV is definitely their main cash cow due to the situation that company is in, but there's not nearly enough to map it to some sweeping industry-wide conclusion.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-10-31 05:24:51+00:00
>The issue here is the Flock business model, which subsidizes the deployment of these cameras and encourages municipalities to use them in these dystopic ways.

It seems that the core issue is identified here...

Do I have that correct -- or do you wish to add something or delete or change something?

Questions:

How is the Flock business model (i.e., trade goods and/or services for money) any different than that of any other business?

?

How is Apple or Google or any other Smartphone vendor any different in selling public-facing video cameras to the public?

?

How is any Wireless Service provider (including but not limited to: Verizon, T-Mobile, Boost, Cricket, Wal-Mart, Tracfone, Wal-Mart, AT&T etc., etc.) that subsidizes the purchase (deployment) of Smartphones with public-facing video cameras, different than the Flock business model?

?

If municipalities are government entities and presumably "for the people by the people" -- then how specifically does Flock "encourage municipalities to use them in these dystopic ways?"

?

Do municipalities think for themselves?

?

Or do they have external companies do their thinking for them?

?

If so, then how is this possible, specifically, and exactly?

?
by kragen | 2025-10-31 05:28:05+00:00
> turning discrete samples into intensities at frequencies

This description applies equally well to the discrete wavelet, discrete Gabor, and maybe even Hadamard transforms, which are definitely not, as you assert, "95–99% the same in the end" (how would you even measure such similarity?) So it is not something any reasonable person has ever meant by "the Fourier transform" or even "the discrete Fourier transform".

Also, you seem to be confused about what "discrete" means in the context of the Fourier transform. The ear functions in continuous time and does not take discrete samples.
by Darmani | 2025-10-31 05:28:17+00:00
I've worked in about 40 languages and have a Ph. D. in the subject. Every language has problems, some I like, some I'm not fond of

There is only one language that I have an active hatred for, and that is Julia.

Imagine you try to move a definition from one file to another. Sounds like a trivial piece of organization, right?

In Julia, this is a hard problem, and you can wind up getting crashes deep in someone else's code.

The reason is that this causes modules that don't import the new file to have different implementations of the same generic function in scope. Julia features the ability to run libraries on data types they were never designed for. But unlike civilized languages such as C++, this is done by randomly overriding a bunch of functions to do things they were not designed to do, and then hoping the library uses them in a way that produces the result you want. There is no way to guarantee this without reading the library in detail. Also no kind of semantic versioning that can tell you when the library has a breaking change or not, as almost any kind of change becomes a potentially-breaking change when you code like this.

This is a problem unique to Julia.

I brought up to the Julia creators that methods of the same interface should share common properties. This is a very basic principle of generic programming.

One of them responded with personal insults.

I'm not the only one with such experiences. Dan Luu wrote this piece 10 years ago, but the appendix shows the concerns have not been addressed: https://danluu.com/julialang/
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-10-31 05:28:22+00:00
It’s the CR that Dems passed last year.

Stop. You aren’t even falling for it. They’re using shutdown as leverage to try and get something they couldn’t get when they had all three houses. You can agree or disagree that is a good idea or that it will work, but can’t pretend it isn’t what it is.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-31 05:28:55+00:00
Americans traditionally weren't this happy to give up hard won rights to privacy/freedoms for a little easier immigration enforcement. It is pretty shocking to see how ok the Infowars/Libertarian/small government types are with intrusive, biometric surveillance, and expanding a government agency in such a wasteful way it makes the TSA look meticulous.
by larusso | 2025-10-31 05:29:42+00:00
I don’t get your argument here. 10 isn’t a huge number in my book but I don’t know of course what else that entails. I would opt for a secure process change over a soft local workflow restriction that may or may not be followed by all individuals. And I would definitely protect my CI system in the same way than local machines. Depending on the nature of CI these machines can have easy access rights. This really depends how you do CI and how lacks security is.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-31 05:33:40+00:00
Fair take I guess, but my curiosity wants me to ask how big were the costs of the free tier that it was trying to make you shut down..

Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)

If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.

I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.
by lioeters | 2025-10-31 05:35:32+00:00
Reminds me of something I saw recently, a tri-value boolean, a "trilean" or "tribool".

true, false, unknown yes, no, maybe nullable boolean

They all feel "risky" in terms of language design, like null itself. But I suppose there are languages with Maybe or Optional.

> The tribool class acts like the built-in bool type, but for 3-state boolean logic

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_48_0/doc/html/tribool/tutor...

Apparently this is also called "three-valued logic".

> In logic, a three-valued logic (also trinary logic, trivalent, ternary, or trilean, sometimes abbreviated 3VL) is any of several many-valued logic systems in which there are three truth values indicating true, false, and some third value.

> the primary motivation for research of three-valued logic is to represent the truth value of a statement that cannot be represented as true or false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic

Personally I think I'd prefer a language to instead support multiple return values, like result and optional error. Or a union of result and error types.

> no reason not to use int8 directly

Hm, so it gets into the territory of flags, bit fields, packed structs.

const BitField = packed struct { a: u3, b: u3, c: u2, };

https://andrewkelley.me/post/a-better-way-to-implement-bit-f...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-31 05:36:11+00:00
As far as I can tell, a great many Android phones have always been able for their SD cards to serve as read/write external storage/bootable drives for PC's when connected by USB cable.

You have to format the SD card in a PC first, perhaps also repartition beforehand.

Even the old Sony smartphones before there were iPhones could do it with their MemorySticks. I really do miss the non-Android non-iOS smartphones.
by orbital-decay | 2025-10-31 05:37:41+00:00
I totally expect AI to eventually gain consciousness, in any available interpretation of that vague term. But what does it even mean for the AI to suffer? We're able to understand this concept in regards to other humans because we share a common biological reference, and, to an extent, with other animals. But the internal state of the AI is completely untranslatable to ours, let alone the morality of training and running it. It's incomprehensible, we have basically zero common ground and no points of reference. Any attempt at translating it is a subject to arbitrarily biased interpretations places like LessWrong like to corner themselves into.

Redefining suffering as enforcing the mutation of state is baseless solipsism, in my opinion. Just like nearly everything else related to morality of treating AI as an autonomous entity.
by devilbunny | 2025-10-31 05:38:42+00:00
(xxx)555-1212 works surprisingly often. I've used it more than a few times while traveling.

About ten years ago or so, Kroger finally integrated the loyalty programs across all their brands of stores (City Market, Harris Teeter, Kroger, King Soopers, Ralphs, Fred Meyer, and others, but those are the ones I have been in), so you can use pretty much any older area code you like to try it out.