MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cryptonector | 2025-10-24 03:22:03+00:00
Well, I do disapprove of the RPC-centric nature of both, XDR and DCE RPC, and I disapprove of the emphasis on "pointers" and -in the case of DCE- support for circular data structures and such. The 1980s penchant for "look ma'! I can have local things that are remote and you can't tell because I'm pretending that latency isn't part of the API hahahaha" research really shows in these. But yeah, at least they ain't TLV encodings, and the syntax is alright.

I especially like XDR, though maybe that's because I worked at Sun Microsystems :)

"Pointers" in XDR are really just `OPTIONAL` in ASN.1. Seems so silly to call them pointers. The reason they called them "pointers" is that that's how they represented optionality in the generated structures and code: if the field was present on the wire then the pointer is not null, and if it was absent the then pointer is null. And that's exactly what one does in ASN.1 tooling, though maybe with a host language Optional<> type rather than with pointers and null values. Whereas in hand-coded ASN.1 codecs one does sometimes see special values used as if the member had been `DEFAULT` rather than `OPTIONAL`.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-24 03:22:56+00:00
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia.

The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three.

There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term.

Another issue: art and philosophy have very limited or zero dependence on a material substrate. Computation has overwhelming dependence on the performance of its physical substrate (by various metrics, including but not limited to: cpu speed, memory size, persistent storage size, persistent storage speed, network bandwidth, network scope, display size, display resolution, input device characteristics, sensory modalities accessibly via digital to analog conversion, ...). To assert that the way problems were solved in 1970 obviously has dramatic lessons for how to solve them in 2025 seems to me to completely miss what we're actually doing with computers.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-24 03:22:57+00:00
I think we're coming at this from different point of views and possibly different backgrounds.

My perspective is that ideas need to earn their keep. You have said a few times that I'm "dismissing" ideas, whereas the way science works is that you have to make a case for why your idea should be valued.

Tallis is a clinical psychologist and as I mentioned the clinical (which above I called applied but really I mostly meant clinical) psychologists have been trying to revive Freud for a long time. Tallis is also an author and as even he points out Freud is studied more in literature than in psychology. So yes there is a whole literature of clinical psychologists trying to revive Freud's reputation, and it goes back decades and possibly centuries. I have no problem with you agreeing that literature, but I do want to point out that I already indicated above that it existed.

But clinical psychologists are not trained in research, which is the branch of psychology that conducts the science. So they usually don't have the background to understand whether his contributions count as scientific research. The article also makes at least one factual mistake -- Koller discovered the anesthetic properties of cocaine, Freud did not suggest them. It doesn't seem to make a case for any science Freud did.

Galileo is a good scientist because he did science. We don't include his horoscopes as science. Same with Newton and his alchemy. Freud has just the horoscopes and alchemy so he hasn't achieved the same status.

Most of what people typically say they value in Freud predates him by thinkers whose reputation is stronger. The idea that the mind does a great deal of unconscious work goes back to the 1700s with people like Kant and Hume in philosophy. William James started writing about the unconscious mind in 1890, a few years before Freud. Ramón y Cajal was doing his neuroscience work around the same time as Freud. We sometimes think of Freud as one of the first psychologists and as inventing some famous concepts like the unconscious. But that's not actually true. There were other psychologists who predated him or were working at the same time who are considered today to have made lasting empirical contributions in a way that Freud hasn't. So it's not about his being early it's about the way he chose to go about things.

> their individual-centric approach and reasoning

I'm not sure what you mean here, but if by individual-centric approach you mean case studies, then yes this is very relevant. An individual experience is an anecdote or one datum. You need to systematically study lots of data. Freud dealt in case reports, so units of individual anecdotes. There's not enough information and not enough systematization to extract useful signal from the noise.

> I strongly disagree with your statement that psychological disorders are distinct in terms of etiology. That's just not true, and frankly, unscientific to make up such a claim.

Under your view, how would you explain why the disorders have different rates of heritability, different genetic markers, different fMRI patterns, and different treatments?
by vivzkestrel | 2025-10-24 03:22:59+00:00
Amazing, lots of questions if you don't mind answering 1) is this written in python 2) if yes, does it use feedparser 3) how are you storing these feeds in the database 4) how are you handling CDATA or html based feeds that return lots of html, do you sanitize before storing or store directly in the database as a CDATA string? 5) how do you handle edge cases and anomalies across different feed providers?
by kragen | 2025-10-24 03:23:56+00:00
Maybe you should figure out how to do without some of it. You don't need MPPT optimization if buying more panels is cheaper. You don't need much battery if you run the washer in the daytime and use thermal storage to heat or cool the house at night. You don't need a transfer switch if you don't connect the solar to the grid outlets. You don't need inverters if you run things on 48V DC, which also greatly reduces the safety risks of wiring problems. I think Joey's house has DC appliances, though I don't remember.
by Nition | 2025-10-24 03:24:00+00:00
To be clear re my original comment, I've noticed that LLMs behave this way. I've also independently read that humans behave this way. But I don't necessarily believe that this one similarily means LLMs think like humans. I didn't mean to anthropomorphize the LLM, as one parent comment claims.

I just thought it was an interesting point that both LLMs and humans have this problem - makes it hard to avoid.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-24 03:24:06+00:00
> Some people's principals

Another (more charitable?) explanation is they just never make the connection:

> It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, “When it comes to love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other.” Soon afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched “Birds of a feather flock together when it comes to love.” High [Right-Wing Authoritarian scorers] typically agreed with both statements, even though they responded to the two items within a minute of each other.

-- https://theauthoritarians.org/ (2006 ebook)
by chipsrafferty | 2025-10-24 03:24:25+00:00
In my experience, it's not "maybe" but "almost certainly" which is why I stopped doing this. Every time I get a new system I would have to set everything up again, it's not cross platform, doesn't work when using someone else's computer, suddenly breaks for some reason or another, or you forget it exists...

The annoyance of all these factors for outweighs the benefits, in my experience. It's just that the scripts feel good at first and the annoyance doesn't come until later and eventually you abandon them.
by cyberax | 2025-10-24 03:24:26+00:00
I ran the numbers on that, and it just doesn't work. Stone has rather lousy specific heat capacity (less than 1kJ/kg/K, compared to 4.2kJ for water).

A typical house in Midwest needs around 22,000kWh (7.913×10^10 J) over the winter (75 million BTU - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=57321 ).

If we assume the delta of 550 degrees (600 down to 50), you'll need: 7.913×10^10 J / (550K * 1000Jkg^-1K^-1) = 143,872,727 kg of material in your pile. This is a ridiculously stupid number. And I don't see any obvious mistakes?
by dasefx | 2025-10-24 03:24:46+00:00
My workflow is simple, step 1) THINK hard about the problem by yourself, 2) Define rough sketches of function names, params, flow, etc. adapt to your problem 3) Iterate with any LLM and create an action plan, this is where you correct everything, before any code is written 4) Send the plan to one the CLI LLM thingies and attack the points one by one so you don't run out of context.

So far has been working beautifully for real work stuff, sometimes the models do drift, but if you are actually paying attention to the responses, you should be able to catch it early.
by toast0 | 2025-10-24 03:25:34+00:00
> Why wouldn’t the OS itself default to this behavior? Could it fall apart under load, or is it just not important enough to replace the legacy code relying on it?

Mmap and read/write syscalls are both ways to interact with files, but they have different behaviors. You can't exactly swap one for the other without knowledge of the caller. What you likely do see is that OS utilities likely use mmap when it makes sense and a difference.

You also have a lot of things that can work on files or pipes/etc and having a common interface is more useful than having more potential performance (sometimes the performance is enough to warrant writing it twice).
by albert_e | 2025-10-24 03:27:04+00:00
But that sounds like an assertion without evidence and underestimates the competence of everyone involved in designing and maintaining these complex systems.

For example, take airline safety -- are we to believe based on the quoted assertion that every airline accident and resulting remedy that mitigated the causes have made air travel LESS safe? That sounds objectively, demonstrably false.

Truly complex systems like ecosystems and climate might qualify for this assertion where humans have interfered, often with best intentions, but caused unexpected effects that maybe beyond human capacity control.
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-10-24 03:27:08+00:00
It's okay to acknowledge that you missed something in your literature search. Everyone does. It's not okay to sweep it under the rug or pretend that it's novel after having having the prior work pointed out to you, especially when a central part of your thesis is that "AI" discovered a novel algorithm and it's very likely that this algorithm was part of the LLM's training data.
by cyberax | 2025-10-24 03:29:29+00:00
> China installed 277GW of solar in 2024, capacity factor corrected that's 55.4 GW of solar power.

The problem is not just the mean capacity factor, but the capacity factor in _winter_. It's terrible for China, less than 15%. And more importantly, you can have _weeks_ with essentially zero solar power when you need it most.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-24 03:29:45+00:00
In particular one thing that needs to be stated is that the primary alternative to SSA is CPS (continuation passing style) transformation. The two are roughly equivalent (at least in so far as both can be used to build compilers for the same languages), but with CPS you have to do more work to avoid ending up with lots of closure allocations that are really not necessary, so SSA feels more natural. I like to think about CPS though.
by kristjansson | 2025-10-24 03:29:54+00:00
This is quite cool, but I must note that the 5x reported in the headline is the _runtime_ of the load balancing algorithm itself, not the load factor or throughput of the system or what have you.

> On average, it takes about 540 ms to re-balance the experts and achieves a load balance factor of 0.66 (calculated as the ratio of average to maximum tokens generated per GPU).

> ...

> We also consider a non-public reference implementation from a frontier lab that we have access to. This implementation avoids explicit iteration and reduces the rebalancing algorithm runtime to 19.6 ms while achieving the same balance factor as the open-source algorithm.

> ...

> The resulting algorithm matches the load balance factor of the other baselines while reducing runtime to just 3.7 ms, yielding a 5.0x speedup over the internal reference implementation.
by theptip | 2025-10-24 03:31:09+00:00
It’s not a good safety valve though - sure, in a 2-party system, one of the parties can be taken over from within. But it’s uncommon and hard to achieve, and risks alienating voters while the civil war is going on.

On the other hand, with IRV or preference voting, second parties can form without spoiling the vote for their ideologically most aligned alternatives. This allows for a much more seamless shift.

Really in the US there should be at least 4 parties formed from the corpses of the big two, if not more.
by LPisGood | 2025-10-24 03:31:50+00:00
I have never felt that way, and I’ve worked on a variety of projects at a variety of companies.

Everyone has a bespoke mishmash of nonsense pipelines, build tools, side cars, load balancers, Terragrunt, Terraform, Tofu, Serverless, Helm charts, etc.

There are enough interesting things here that you wouldn’t even need to make a tool heavy project style software engineering course - you could legitimately make a real life computer science course that studies the algorithms and patterns and things used.
by username223 | 2025-10-24 03:32:09+00:00
I had forgotten about prog21, and I'm impressed how he wrapped up his blog:

> I don't think of myself as a programmer. I write code, and I often enjoy it when I do, but that term programmer is both limiting and distracting. I don't want to program for its own sake, not being interested in the overall experience of what I'm creating. If I start thinking too much about programming as a distinct entity then I lose sight of that.

Programming is a useful skill, even in the age of large language models, but it should always be used to achieve some greater goal than just writing programs.
by vee-kay | 2025-10-24 03:32:27+00:00
The short lifespan is an issue only for species with a fast metabolism. Advanced alien species could have some unique biology (maybe capable of withstanding extreme environmental conditions), and they may have a slower metabolism that allows them to live longer.

On Earth itself, some animals or birds such as Greenland Shark, Bowhead Whale, some species of Tortoises (e.g., Galapagos Tortoise), Macaw, Arctic Tern, Koi Fish can live a long time (more than a hundred years).

Ocean quahogs are bivalve mollusks known for their impressive lifespans, often exceeding 500 years.

The immortal jellyfish, scientifically known as Turritopsis dohrnii, is a unique species capable of biological immortality. It can revert to its earlier life stage after reaching maturity, effectively allowing it to avoid death and potentially live indefinitely. This unique ability is due to a process called transdifferentiation, where its cells transform back into a polyp state. Despite its ability to revert to an earlier life stage, Turritopsis dohrnii is not truly immortal. In nature, it can still fall prey to predators or succumb to disease. Thus, while it can theoretically avoid death through regeneration, individual jellyfish can and do die under various circumstances. Researchers are fascinated by Turritopsis dohrnii for its potential insights into aging and cellular regeneration, which could have implications for human health and longevity.
by collingreen | 2025-10-24 03:32:34+00:00
In uni we had a semester long group project with the stronger coders as project leaders. Group leaders controlled pass/fail for the group members and vice versa. After the leaders put together project plans for their teams and everyone was supposed to start working WHOOPSIE reorg and all the leaders got put on random teams and new people got "promoted" into leader (of groups they didn't create the plan for). If the project didn't work at the end the entire group failed.

I've never been taught anything more clearly than the lessons from that class.
by markus_zhang | 2025-10-24 03:32:45+00:00
> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Discuss and dissect historically significant products, including VisiCalc, AppleWorks, Robot Odyssey, Zork, and MacPaint. Emphases are on user interface and creativity fostered by hardware limitations.

Definitely would love that. Reading source code is pretty hard for newbies like me. Some guidance is appreciated.
by achierius | 2025-10-24 03:32:54+00:00
Great, but what about the people who still starve to death? The ones who are left to die on the streets? Yes, those homeless now have phones, but I imagine that does little to mask the hunger pains. And unlike housing, food has not gotten significantly more expensive -- so what gives? The fact that we let this happen, even in the very heart of the richest nation on Earth, the richest nation in history, is proof positive that regardless of how rich the world gets, there's no guarantee that those riches will be used equitably. I agree that we've made massive strides; as such, making more massive strides is unlikely to change this dynamic.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-10-24 03:34:22+00:00
Every time I see a bait and switch like this, I'm thinking for myself "well, this could have been easily covered by AGPL...if they were actually interested in keeping it Open Source".

Oftentimes the company is worried about not being able to make revenue by providing hosted services, which is fair and I understand it. But please if you do this, don't do a bait and switch like this. Relicense it as AGPL which covers hosted services just the same as GPL would cover binary builds.

Anyways, thank you very much for this. As a former early adopter of snowplow in my infrastructure I really appreciate the fork and its new life!
by bhickey | 2025-10-24 03:34:59+00:00
Reminds me of phage work.

For growing up phage you start by mixing different dilutions of phage with the host and a thin top agar, then plate it. On those plates with a countable number of plaques you work backwards to your plaque forming units (PFU) per mL. Once you know this you can produce "lacy plates." You add enough PFUs so that you expect the plaques to just touch. This produces a plate that has the appearance of lace. The web of surviving bacteria provide evidence that it actually grew, while delivering a high yield. Finally you scrape off the top agar, suspend it and run it through a filter. Good times.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-24 03:35:45+00:00
I think it would be a good idea, especially CSCI 3300. (Learning them in a course is not the only way to learn computer and other stuff, but is (and should be) one way to do.)

(However, CSCI 2100 shouldn't be necessary if you should learn stuff other than OOP the first time, even if you also learn OOP.)
by itake | 2025-10-24 03:36:22+00:00
Your premise has the false dilemma: "If we can't perfectly block fraudsters from by-passing security checks, then we might as well have no security checks."

Another simple test is we can compare the amount of malware running on closed ecosystems with open systems. Which system hosts more malware: linux/windows or iOS?

I want to clarify that I'm not saying there are no financial benefits for Google/Apple. I am saying there ARE financial benefits to users and businesses on these platforms.
by kragen | 2025-10-24 03:36:41+00:00
(I completed my parent comment since you wrote your response, which may make it confusing to read your response; sorry about that.)

I agree that local dirt is much cheaper than trucked-in construction sand, but I think my design sketch above shows that a "sand battery" whose only moving parts are fans will be about 30× cheaper than a real battery at household scale, even though the sand is still most of the estimated cost. A "sand battery" designed to power a steam turbine is a much more difficult problem to solve, but in this case the stated problem is just that it's 24°F (-3°) outside, so I think much cheaper solutions are fine, with no pressure vessels, stainless steel, insulated silos, sand conveyors, or heat transfer fluids other than garden-variety air.

Do you have a good handle on the pressure (and therefore power) requirements for getting air to flow upward through sand? I feel like you ought to be able to get a pretty decent amount of thermal power out of half a tonne of sand with a really minimal amount of pumping, but that's only a gut feeling. Definitely as you go to graded-granulometry gravel the required head drops off to almost nothing.

Thanks for the link to the Olds device! That's utterly astounding. Archimedes could have used it for raising sand, although making a sturdy enough tube out of wood might have been a bit of a chore.
by cwp | 2025-10-24 03:36:51+00:00
The code example is very similar to Ray.

Monarch:

class Example(Actor): @endpoint def say_hello(self, txt): return f"hello {txt}" procs = this_host().spawn_procs({"gpus": 8}) actors = procs.spawn("actors", Example) hello_future = actors.say_hello.call("world") hello_future.get()

Ray:

@ray.remote(num_gpus=1) class Example: def say_hello(self, txt): return f"hello {txt}" actors = [Example.remote() for _ in range(8)] hello_object_refs = [a.say_hello.remote("world") for a in actors] ray.get(hello_object_refs)
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-24 03:37:22+00:00
Never took a political science class I see. Of all the major political ideologies, the one that is the least like fascism would be libertarianism. Now if a specific person or party is actually libertarian, that's another story. In case you wondered why people just ignore your talking points, that's why. In Spain, you might have a point. In the US, you are just showing your ignorance.

PS There is a reason why political scientists never talk about left or right. Those terms only have meaning in one place at one time. They change meanings between places.
by nerdsniper | 2025-10-24 03:37:22+00:00
This blog post has more accessible writing and diagrams: https://www.sigops.org/2025/barbarians-at-the-gate-how-ai-is...

From TFA: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06189

> We term this approach as AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), which iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines solutions.

> The central thesis of this paper is that a new class of AI-driven approaches, which we term AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), is beginning to show promising results in automated algorithm discovery, and will ultimately prompt a re-evaluation of the traditional role of systems researchers.