MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-10-18 19:09:10+00:00
"Lifetimes" didn't exist before. Region typing did, but it was not accompanied by a system like Rust's borrow checker, which is essential for actually creating a usable language. And we simply did not have the tooling required (e.g. step-indexed concurrent separation logic with higher order predicates) to prove a type system like that correct until around when Rust was released, either. Saying that this was a solved problem because Cyclone had region typing or because of MLKit, or people knew how to do ergonomic uniqueness types because of e.g. Clean, is the sort of disingenuous revisionist history I'm pushing back on.

> But it seems kind of random why they picked Rust. I do not think there is anything which makes it particularly good and it certainly has issues.

Like I said, they picked Rust because there was literally no other suitable language. You're avoiding actually naming one because you know this is true. Even among academic languages very few targeted being able to replace C++ everywhere directly as the language was deemed unsuitable for verification due to its complexity. People were much more focused on the idea of providing end to end verified proofs that C code matched its specification, but that is not a viable approach for a language intended to be used by regular industry programmers. Plenty of other research languages wanted to compete with C++ in specific domains where the problem fit a shape that made the safety problem more tractable, but they were not true general purpose languages and it was not clear how to extend them to become such (or whether the language designers even wanted to). Other languages might have thought they were targeting the C++ domain but made far too many performance sacrifices to be suitable candidates, or gave up on safety where the problem get hard (how many "full memory safety" solutions completely give up on data races for example? More than a few).

As a "C++ guy" Rust was the very first language that gave us what we actually wanted out of a language (zero performance compromises) while adding something meaningful that we couldn't do without it (full memory safety). Even where it fell short on performance or safety, the difference with other languages was that nobody said "well, you shouldn't care about that anyway because it's not that big a deal on modern CPUs" or "well, that's a stupid thing for a user to do, who cares about making that case safe?" The language designers genuinely wanted to see how far we cold push things without compromises (and still do). The work to allow even complex Linux kernel concurrent patterns (like RCU or sequence locking) to be exposed through safe APIs, without explicitly hardcoding the safety proofs for the difficult parts into the language, is just an extension of the attitude that's been there since the beginning.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-18 19:09:34+00:00
A lot of those studies work very hard to split apart the genetic (and sometimes including epigenetic) factors at point of sperm meets egg, the environmental factors in the womb, the parenting factors, and/or the rest of the post-birth environment. They're not doing a simple ratio.

And to the extent that research successfully isolates the genetic factors, we know it's not some outside factor causing a correlation, and we know it's not IQ causing genes. Anything isolated there is genes causing IQ.
by sjducb | 2025-10-18 19:10:06+00:00
This article is not making a good comparison.

Most EVs are luxury vehicles. Luxury vehicles depreciate much faster than regular cars. Luxury car buyers care if the car is new or not.

Tesla should be compared to BMW not Ford. Teslas depreciate at similar rates to BMWs.

EVs like the leaf are depreciating fast because their technology is becoming obsolete.

I think it is too early to be sure that EVs depreciate quickly.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-18 19:12:32+00:00
Pretty well-established that targeted advertising works better than untargeted advertising, all other things being equal.

I think you should put things in your bookshelf or collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who did.

I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or used.addall.com at a price under $150.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-18 19:12:50+00:00
mdfind is a built-in with macOS. It's similar to find (should be on your *nix system if you have one) which can be installed with Cygwin on Windows. On Windows, you'd use Powershell and Get-ChildItem (I don't think it's case sensitive, but I don't use PS much).
by dehugger | 2025-10-18 19:13:37+00:00
Our solution to this was two cars, with one being a tiny well used EV (2015 Fiat 500E) where the range boils down to "dont leave town". Its a fantastic city car. 50% to full is about 3 hour on a 120v wall charger, and that's enough juice to run around our town for a ~week for all kinds of errands.

The other car is a 2023 Leaf with the extended range trim, which is sufficient to get us all around the PNW, although I would hesitate to take it east of the Cacades.
by AfterHIA | 2025-10-18 19:13:43+00:00
A few more that young developers need to read:

Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush

https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...

Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing."

https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask

Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."

https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...

Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...

Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.

https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11

Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?
by ack_complete | 2025-10-18 19:14:56+00:00
Some do, some ARM-based devices have tightly coupled memory (TCM). The RP2040 in the original Raspberry Pi also has a 4K bank for each core intended for stack and per-core variables, though it is not limited to access only by that core.

The main disadvantage of such dedicated memory is inefficient usage compared to using that same amount of fast local memory to cache _all_ of main memory.
by pmahoney | 2025-10-18 19:15:57+00:00
If that phrase "for individuals" means "for individuals only", then it isn't GPLv3, but some bespoke non-free license.

My speculation: it was intended to mean: use it under terms of GPLv3 (for commercial purposes or not), OR contact to negotiate different terms.

But there's a built-in assumption that no commercial entity would _want_ to use it under GPLv3 terms.
by gprok | 2025-10-18 19:15:57+00:00
Just to add a bit more context on the personal motivation behind this project: For years, I've felt this low-grade friction using macOS. I live on the keyboard, but managing windows always felt like a mouse-first task. Cmd+Tab is great until you have more than couple of apps open, and then it's just this endless, frustrating cycle. Mission Control is a visual puzzle that offers no keyboard-driven way to filter the chaos, forcing you back to the trackpad every time.

Coming from tools like the terminal and code editors where you can jump between anything instantly with a few keystrokes, the OS layer felt slow and inefficient by comparison.

That's really where the ideas for Macscope came from. The "tap vs. hold" mechanic was born from wanting to keep my Cmd+Tab muscle memory but add more power on top. The "Scopes" feature came directly from my frustration of manually rearranging the same 5-6 windows every single time I started working on a specific project.

It started as a tool just for me, but I'm hoping it resonates with others who feel the same way about their workflow. I'm really curious to hear if others share these frustrations and what your own workarounds have been.

Thanks again for all the feedback so far!
by cubefox | 2025-10-18 19:16:26+00:00
I wonder which method Apple is using for their recently introduced Bézier curve primitives for real-time 3D rendering in Metal. From their WWDC 2023 presentation [1]:

> Geometry such as hair, fur, and vegetation can have thousands or even millions of primitives. These are typically modeled as fine, smooth curves. Instead of using triangles to approximate these curves, you can use Metal's new curve primitives. These curves will remain smooth even as the camera zooms in. And compared to triangles, curves have a more compact memory footprint and allow faster acceleration structure builds.

> A full curve is made of a series of connected curve segments. Every segment on a curve is its own primitive, and Metal assigns each segment a unique primitive ID. Each of these segments is defined by a series of control points, which control the shape of the curve. These control points are interpolated using a set of basis functions. Depending on the basis function, each curve segment can have 2, 3, or 4 control points. Metal offers four different curve basis functions: Bezier, Catmull-Rom, B-Spline, and Linear. (...)

1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10128/?time...
by kragen | 2025-10-18 19:18:08+00:00
A few years back I visited an old water mill called Itaipú. It has forty water wheels still in operation, providing a total of 14 gigawatts peak. At the time I visited, one of the water wheels was providing 95% of Paraguay's electricity, and the other 39 were providing 25% of Brazil's electricity. It turns 50 years old next year. In 02020 its average production was 8.7 gigawatts. They did have to replace one of the water wheels a few years after I visited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thcIrM31tZ4

Brazil uses more electricity now, some 80 gigawatts, so this one water mill only produces about 10% of it now.

It is true that many older water mills are no longer in use, though. Maybe 50 years to you is not old!
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-10-18 19:18:18+00:00
This really depends, doesn't it? A GOO billionaire now owns the largest voting machine network; the GOP has a case in front of SCOTUS asking if they can intentionally racially segregate voting districts; Trump is deploying the military against US citizens with made-up cause while building an unaccountable secret police that require no warrants or habeus corpus.

If any of those are "fruitful" so-to-speak, Democrats may never have power again.

Remember, Donald Trump has tried:

1. A lightweight coup on J6 through supporters, but also by attempting to have secret service whisk away the VP before ratification of the election results.

2. To demand election officials "find" votes in Georgie.

3. Habitually denying the results of the election, including ones he won.

4. Claiming constitutional limits can be subverted by technicalities to allow lifelong rule with plenary authority (unitary executive + vice president handoff).

Now his head of the Department of Justice is outright stating that the majority of Democrats are criminals, Hamas terrorists, or illegal immigrants without evidence or even meaningful pushback. Which sounds an awful lot like what you say before using your gestapo to prevent them from winning elections...
The SS-50 bus, an early modular standard for 6800 micros
by drex91on | 2025-10-18 19:18:59+00:00
The SS-50 bus was an early computer bus designed as a part of the SWTPC 6800 Computer System that used the Motorola 6800 CPU. The SS-50 motherboard would have around seven 50-pin connectors for CPU and memory boards plus eight 30-pin connectors for I/O boards. The I/O section was sometimes called the SS-30 bus.

Southwest Technical Products Corporation introduced this bus in November 1975 and soon other companies were selling add-in boards. Some of the early boards were floppy disk systems from Midwest Scientific Instruments, Smoke Signal Broadcasting, and Percom Data; an EPROM programmer from the Micro Works; video display boards from Gimix; and memory boards from Seals. By 1978 there were a dozen SS-50 board suppliers and several compatible SS-50 computers.

In 1979 SWTPC modified the SS-50 bus to support the new Motorola MC6809 processor. These changes were compatible with most existing boards, and this upgrade gave the SS-50 bus a long life. SS-50-based computers were made until the late 1980s.

The SS-50C bus, the S/09 version of the SS-50 bus, extended the address by four address lines to 20 address lines to allow up to a megabyte of memory in a system.

Boards for the SS-50 bus were typically 9 inches wide and 5.5 inches high. The board had Molex 0.156-inch connectors, while the motherboard had the pins. This arrangement made for low-cost printed circuit boards that did not need gold-plated edge connectors. The tin-plated Molex connectors were only rated for a few insertions and were sometimes a problem in hobbyist systems where the boards were being swapped often. Later systems would often come with gold-plated Molex connectors.

The SS-30 I/O bus had the address decoding on the motherboard. Each slot was allocated four addresses (the later MC6809 version increased this to sixteen addresses). This made for very simple I/O boards, as the Motorola peripheral chips connected directly to this bus. Cards designed using the SS-30 bus often had their external connectors mounted such that they were accessible outside the computer chassis when installed in SWTPC motherboards.
by garganzol | 2025-10-18 19:19:03+00:00
Far Manager on Windows, and Midnight Commander on Unix, work wonders for terminal-based development nowadays. Not only they allow you to have OS commands at the tips of your fingers, but also they allow you to navigate freely in the file system structure of a project while viewing/editing files with built-in or external editors.

UI/UX of those tools is pretty close to Borland IDEs, they have steep learning curve (at least 10x easier than vi/emacs).
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-18 19:20:17+00:00
I spent some time in the academia.

The person with whom an idea ends up associated often isn't the first person to have the idea. Most often is the person who explains why the idea is important, or find a killer application for the idea, or otherwise popularizes the idea.

That said, you can open what Schmidhuber would say is the paper which invented residual NNs. Try and see if you notice anything about the paper that perhaps would hinder the adoption of its ideas [1].

[1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/SeppHochreiter1991ThesisAdv...
by rubyfan | 2025-10-18 19:21:04+00:00
I bought a new treadmill with a 24” screen on it. The screen should have been the red flag I guess. They want $40 a month to use the screen if I want to watch Netflix while I run, or sync my running data to Apple Health. There is no way to change this as far as I can tell and if they went out of business I’m sure my equipment would become a brick.
by lolc | 2025-10-18 19:23:53+00:00
I like comments about intent, about the why. The generators are really bad at intent, they just write dross comments about the how. The worst part is how they're not accustomed to comments about intent and tend to drop those!

Say I wrote a specific comment why this fencepost here needs special consideration. The agent will come through and replace that reasoned comment with "Add one to index".
by stingraycharles | 2025-10-18 19:24:36+00:00
In light of all the skepticism around the current AI bubble, I figured this post by DHH was interesting: a lot of skepticism back then around Facebook’s valuation, and how it could ever become profitable if it already has half a billion of users yet still is churning through huge chunks of money.

I don’t know how the current AI bubble will work out, but what I do know is that I’m often wrong when it comes to these types of predictions. People are currently calling out OpenAI for Sora 2 (“if an AI slop clone of TikTok is the best they can do…”, but who knows what the future holds?), so I thought this would be relevant.
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-18 19:24:54+00:00
> I have a feeling I would need 0 minutes to learn the basics of turbo c++.

Well, Turbo C++ (at least the one in the article) does use common conventions but those were conventions of 1992 :-P. So Copy is Ctrl+Ins, Paste is Shift+Ins, save is F2, open is F3, etc. Some stuff are similar to modern editing like Shift+motion to select, F1 for help, F10 to activate the menu bar, etc. And all shortcut keys are displayed on the menu bar commands so it is easy to learn them (some of the more intricate editor shortcut keys are not displayed in the menus, but are mentioned in the help you get if you press F1 with an editor window active).
by jcmfernandes | 2025-10-18 19:25:13+00:00
> It doesn't matter why you break into your former employer's server.

Arko already stated that he didn't know he had been fired. Geez.

> You know Arko didn't even start working on Rubygems until it was nearly 10 years old, right?

The project was stolen from a set of maintainers, not just Arko. Let's stick to the facts: someone with admin rights over the repos revoked the access of other admins without their consent. What do you call this?

> One of the original authors is in here and on X saying he supports it being taken over by RubyCore. Which matters much more than whatever the maintainers who were locked out think.

How in the world is that relevant? I have a lot of respect for Rich, but he wasn't a maintainer.
by username223 | 2025-10-18 19:25:30+00:00
"Programmers" exist on a (not always "the") spectrum. At one extreme, there are frontend developers changing JS/Ruby frameworks every few months. New stuff is fun to play with. At the other, there's there's Tony Hoare's quip that "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." (https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computing...). In 2025, quite a few of the numerical routines powering LLMs are built on top of BLAS, LAPACK, and other frightening FORTRAN IV code that shouts at you using very short words like SGEMM and DGESV. It's a big tent; get comfortable.
by runjake | 2025-10-18 19:27:07+00:00
Related question: Can I buy a desktop Zen 5 CPU and something like an RX 7600 XT and some RAM and have a high shared memory bandwidth situation between the system memory and the GPU ala Strix Halo and Apple Silicon without spending a ton of money?

And get pretty reasonable local LLM performance on some of the larger models for hobbyist use?

Edit: I don’t have a good grasp on this but I’m thinking I can only do shared memory when I’m using an APU and not a discrete GPU. Is this correct?
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-18 19:27:09+00:00
I actually assume that we'll never Crack FTL

The answer isnt AI'S solving the unsolvable for us. The answer is admitting that large, fragile humans straped to big bombs isn't an answer and serves no purpose. Small power efficient AGI's can boldy go where it is impossible for us go and report back.

Maybe we'll eventually crack human upload, which would also work.
by addaon | 2025-10-18 19:27:26+00:00
> we want code that's expressive enough to do what we want, while being constrained enough to not do what we don't

I don't think that's an ideal mental model. Code in any (useful) language can do what you want, and can not do what you don't want. The question is how far that code is from code that breaks those properties -- using a distance measure that takes into account likelihood of a given defect being written by a coder, passing code review, being missed in testing, etc. (Which is a key point -- the distance metric changes with your quality processes! The ideal language for a person writing on their own with maybe some unit testing is not the same as for a team with rigorous quality processes.) Static typing is not about making correct code better, it's about making incorrect code more likely to be detected earlier in the process (by you, not your customers).
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-10-18 19:27:50+00:00
I suspect your comment references Allie Stuckey, who wrote a book "Toxic Empathy" and was viral in a video with this idea recently.[1] To the unfamiliar reader, her concept of "toxic empathy" can be boiled down thus-

-Empathy becomes "toxic" when it encourages a person to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies

-Truth over feelings. Biblical love does not blindly affirm an individual's feelings or choices if those choices violate moral truth

For a tangible example of these ideas and their connect to the Gospel (what "the founder" taught), watch the video.

[1]https://youtu.be/BUjeVodnbzA?t=2978
by cortesoft | 2025-10-18 19:28:13+00:00
It sounds like we are actually in agreement, then. You can absolutely achieve more things than seem possible, but you can’t achieve everything. I don’t think it is a bad idea to try things that seem unlikely to succeed, or to believe you can achieve something that is rationally very unlikely. You are right, having some irrational belief in yourself will often lead to more positive outcomes.

I just think you shouldn’t conclude that you just didn’t work hard enough if you don’t achieve every dream. As Captain Picard put it, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life."
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-10-18 19:28:24+00:00
But to be accepted by people, it has to be better than humans in the specific ways that humans are good at things. And less bad than humans in the ways that they're bad at things.

When automated solutions fail in strange alien ways, it understandably freaks people out. Nobody wants to worry about if a car will suddenly serve into oncoming traffic because of a sensor malfunction. Comparing incidents-per-miles-driven might make sense from a utilitarian perspective, just isn't good enough for humans to accept replacement tech psychologically, so we do have to chase those 9s until they can handle all the edge cases at least as well as humans.