MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisco255 | 2025-11-08 03:12:43+00:00
It's more of an in-between C and Rust than Go as it is a systems language with no built-in garbage collector for memory management. It has a lot of memory safety features, but it's not as memory safe as Rust. However, it avoids a lot of the complexity of Rust like implicit macro expansion, managing lifetimes, generics and complex trait system, etc. It also compiles much more compactly than Rust, in my experience.

In my mind, it's an accessible systems language. Very readable. Minimal footprint.
by an0malous | 2025-11-08 03:13:18+00:00
All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.
by leephillips | 2025-11-08 03:14:25+00:00
George Antheil’s autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, is quite entertaining. In it he recounts his adventures related to this patent. If I recall correctly (I read it decades ago but I think I’m right here), he describes a close and co-equal collaboration with his friend Hedy Lamarr on this invention. Therefore I think these remarks by the author:

‘Since the actual invention is a player-piano-like mechanism, and since experimental musician George Antheil had expertise in the inner workings of player pianos, and further since Hedy Lamarr evidently had no such expertise, it may be more appropriate to call the Lamarr-Antheil patent “Antheil’s patent.”’

are inappropriate and unjustified.
by qouteall | 2025-11-08 03:14:34+00:00
In my opinion the biggest issue of Zig is that it doesn't allow attaching data to error. The error can only be passed via side channel, which is inconvenient and ENOURAGES TOOL DEVELOPERS TO NOT PASS ERROR DATA, which greatly increase debugging difficulty.

Somethings there are 100 things that possibly go wrong. With error data you can easily know which exact thing is wrong. But with error code you just know "something is wrong, don't know which exactly".

See: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2647#issuecomment-1444...

> I just spent way longer than I should have to debugging an issue of my project's build not working on Windows given that all I had to work with from the zig compiler was an error: AccessDenied and the build command that failed. When I finally gave up and switched to rewriting and then debugging things through Node the error that it returned was EBUSY and the specific path in question that Windows considered to be busy, which made the problem actually tractable ... I think the fact that even the compiler can't consistently implement this pattern points to it perhaps being too manual/tedious/unergonomic/difficult to expect the Zig ecosystem at large to do the same
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-08 03:14:42+00:00
If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.

I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.

nose boops Kagi
by Animats | 2025-11-08 03:15:09+00:00
Look at the prior art. The key prior patent cited is BAESECKE, (2,134,850). This has a "wobbler" to change the transmitting frequency, which is fine, but that patent is vague as to how the receiving end stays in sync. Markey gets that syncing up transmitter and receiver is the real problem, and talks of it as a solved problem from television. (This is 1941, experimental TV exists.) Some mechanisms are discussed, borrowed from multiple player piano synchronization, which is where this technology came from.

Voice cryptosystems of the pre-WWII period included the Western Electric A-3 scrambler [1] There's one on eBay! [2] That split audio into a number of frequency bands, which were shifted and reassembled. At the receiving end, the process was reversed. The shift pattern changed periodically, on the order of tens of seconds. That was slow enough that keeping the thing in sync was possible with clockwork of the period. Note that this is working on the audio, not the RF; it's a scrambler, not a frequency hopper. This is what AT&T used for transatlantic commercial voice. Worked OK, mediocre security. Only 6 different frequency shift patterns were in use at a time. The Germans cracked it.

This is not the better known SIGSALY. That's a similar concept, but with a lot more audio channels, much more frequent changes, a one-time key for the changes, and more hardware than some mainframe computers. The A-3 was a desk-side wooden box. Neither system does frequency-hopping of the RF signal.

Hedy Lamarr's first husband was an arms manufacturer, and she apparently paid attention when visiting the factories. Hence the radio-controlled torpedo, which is close to Tesla's radio-controlled boat.

MARKEY (2,292,387) describes a cross between a radio-controlled boat and a set of synchronized player pianos. There's some handwaving around the sync problem. The trouble with syncing a frequency hopper is that you have trouble even finding the signal to get started. But if you're launching a torpedo or a bomb from a larger craft, both ends of the connection can be started in sync and will probably stay in sync long enough for the bombing run. Doing this with a player piano roll reader, vacuum pump and all, is probably not the right approach.

Trying to get things to sync up reliably has a long history. Edison's first useful invention was a way to get stock tickers to sync. There's a long history of clunky mechanisms, early ones involving flywheels or big tuning forks, and later electronic ones with too many screwdriver adjustments. Not until the invention of phase locked loops did it really Just Work. (I'm into restoring early Teletype machines, and I'm way too aware of the early days of sync problems.)

Markey was just too early. Reasonable idea, but not practical at the time due to lack of supporting technology.

[1] https://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/02/intercepted-...

[2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/205373065319
by int_19h | 2025-11-08 03:16:50+00:00
I don't think Metro died because it was bad as a matter of taste. Quite the opposite actually, I wasn't a huge fan of its aesthetics but I was surprised by how many people liked it.

No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
by chillee | 2025-11-08 03:17:23+00:00
I think unlike Gluon/CuTe/ThunderKittens (which distinguish themselves from Triton by being lower level giving you more control, thus being less performance portable and harder to write), Helion distinguishes itself from Triton by being higher level and easier to write.

IMO, this is something that makes sense for PyTorch to release, as "neutral ground" in the industry.
by nearbuy | 2025-11-08 03:17:28+00:00
Okay. I think at the core you're positing that consciousness does arise somehow from regular physical particles and the forces that attract and repel them, but that consciousness doesn't arise merely from some kind of computation or information processing.

I understand why computation doesn't intuitively seem the same as having a subjective conscious experience. But why is it any more intuitive that a bunch of protons, neutrons and electrons pushing and pulling on each other give rise to consciousness, but somehow do it by doing something other than computation?
by inavida | 2025-11-08 03:18:50+00:00
Not sure. I tend to think the "why" of things is always emergent, then applied to analogies.

Honestly I had no idea what to make of the abstract at first so I questioned duck.ai GPT5 mini to try to understand it in my own words, and according to mini, the first paragraph aligns pretty well with the abstract.

The second paragraph is my own opinion, but according to mini, aligns with at least a subset of cognitive theory in the context of problem solving.

I highly recommend asking an LLM to explore this interesting question you've asked. They're all extremely useful for testing assumptions, and the next time I can't sleep I'll probably do so myself.

Personally I haven't had any luck getting an LLM to solve even simple problems, but I suspect I don't know yet how to ask, and it's possible that the people who are building them are still working it out themselves.
by qouteall | 2025-11-08 03:19:28+00:00
I know that Zig doesn't allow attaching data to error for valid reasons. If error data contains interior pointer then it can easily cause memory safety problem. Zig doesn't have a borrow cheker or ownership system to prevent that.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2647#issuecomment-2670...
by chrisco255 | 2025-11-08 03:20:01+00:00
That's not been my experience with Rust. On average produces binaries at least 4x bigger than the Zig I've compiled (and yes, I've set all the build optimization flags for binary size). I know it's probably theoretically possible to achieve similar results with Rust, it's just you have to be much more careful about things like monomorphization of generics, inlining, macro expansion, implicit memory allocation, etc that happen under the hood. Even Rust's standard library is quite hefty.

C, yes, you can compile C quite small very easily. Zig is like a simpler C, in my mind.
by indolering | 2025-11-08 03:20:53+00:00
I am loving this level of petty nerd fighting over detergents! My co-workers thought I was joking when I told them I have HOURS of high quality dishwasher content on YouTube.

Claiming that a leading brand was being beaten by a random formula made by a contractor is a big red flag. They tend to dominate Consumer Reports testing and this is a trend across detergents and cosmetics: the big manufacturers have the money to do original research and the scale to do stuff bit players just can't. Pantene is hated in hair salons but blinded end-user tea ing shows that it outperforms everything else on the market, for example.

But it's also true that making a good enough soap for a given task isn't hard. Otherwise you wouldn't have so many damn cosmetic products out there. The delta just isn't that significant and plenty of people are fine with bar soap for everything. So I'm not surprised that the llama detergent scored well on some tests.

TC really should have partnered with a detergent scientist to check his experimental setup first.

Can't wait for the YouTube drama over something so petty as dishwasher detergent and the prewash!
by jonway | 2025-11-08 03:21:43+00:00
How is a patrolman lying about a helping himself?

It seems nuts to claim the year over year national drops in crime are all gaming stats comp. I’m positive there is some of this going on, but an effort like that to suppress crime statistics on a national level doesn’t pass the sniff test, you’re saying no cops retired and then blow the whistle? That everywhere in America is doing this and nobody notices(enough)?

Similarly some cops are actual criminals and totally corrupt. Like Taglione, or the Baltimore gun trace task force, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean everyone is.

Do you think police are systematically underreporting crime to the tune of like multiple decades lows?
by aeonik | 2025-11-08 03:26:55+00:00
A MAJOR portion of popularity was because of this xkcd comic.

https://xkcd.com/353/

It hit the front page of Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, made the rounds on Hacker news, etc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86246)

Django was also very popular at the time.

I had already learned Basic, C++, Java, and C#. I wanted to add a dynamic scripting language that was cross-platform under my belt.

A lot of my peers were in the same boat.

Python seemed at the time, to be the only general purpose scripting language that was easy to use on multiple platforms.

I had heard bad things about Perl being write only, and Ruby being tough to deploy, I also found it hard to read. (Which is a shame they are wonderful languages, though Ruby is dog slow, Python is slow too, but Ruby is worse somehow).

IIRC Google and some other large companies were pushing it as one of their official languages.

Right as Python was rocketing in popularity, Go came out, and I also heard a lot of good things about Clojure (they seemed neck and neck in popularity from my incorrect perspective at the time, lol).
by jfabre | 2025-11-08 03:27:30+00:00
Doesn't matter if SQLite is now viable with rails, no legacy rails app is using it and it's not like you're going to wake up one morning and migrate your production db from postgres, mysql, sql server or oracle just because you felt like it.

In theory the language is slow, in practice it doesn't really matter because the db is much slower unless you're github or twitter and you really need to scale.

When you choose ruby, you trade faster dev time for slower runtime. I am OK with this trade-off 99% of the time. My dev time costs way more than a couple ms lost on my production server.
by newpavlov | 2025-11-08 03:27:53+00:00
>often more performant than Rust with lower resource usage

[citation needed]

If we are to trust this page [0] Rust beats Zig on most benchmarks. In the Techempower benchmarks [1] Rust submissions dominate the TOP, while Zig is... quite far.

Several posts which I've seen in the past about Zig beating Rust by 3x or such all turned to be based on low quality Rust code with some performance pitfalls like measuring performance of writing into stdout (which Rust locks by default and Zig does not) or iterating over ..= ranges which are known to be problematic from the performance perspective.

[0]: https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/rust-vs-z...

[1]: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
by encrypted_bird | 2025-11-08 03:28:25+00:00
I agree with you.

Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.

So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
by neonsunset | 2025-11-08 03:28:50+00:00
Ref structs are hard to solve because they require, in some ways, a lot more work than the way C# solved the lifetimes as the lifetimes in F# may need to become much closer to what they are in Rust. Some constructs may not be able to consume them still (can’t move ref struct into an object with effective lifetime ‘static) and there really is no easy solution short of language editions and breaking standard library changes. A limited improvement is possible, but we’re still in the realm where the lifetimes may become a part of type identity or somehow generalized over, which is hard.
by jdiff | 2025-11-08 03:30:00+00:00
Your circles might have a little more technical literacy than most. I'm working part time in retail at a hardware store currently and the amount of people who come in looking for parts specified exclusively by a single AI overview is mindboggling. People repairing car engines come in looking for bolts with specific lengths, materials, and thread pitches that AI told them they needed. I haven't had anyone come back and explicitly tell me that AI led them wrong, but I'm sure they've had to make multiple trips back out here.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-08 03:30:16+00:00
It is a Chicken-or-Egg problem, as most commercial attempts at compilers were awful partially compliant bodges, and or expensive.

The GNU gcc groups win is rarely considered these days, but kids who were stuck with masm, risc asm, or Basic thought they were heroes to the hobby.

Slowly, the FOSS compilers grew in features, and commercial entities realized it was less risky to embrace an established compiler ecosystem, and paid people to port in an experienced user-base.

Starting from scratch is hard, as people often make the same logical mistakes. =3

"There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way, and not starting."(Prince Gautama Siddhartha)
by alyxya | 2025-11-08 03:31:42+00:00
It would be nice if there was more information provided on that page. I assume this is just the output token generation speed. Is it using speculative decoding to get to 1000 tokens/sec? Is there lossy quantization being used to speed things up? I tend to think the number of tokens per second a model can generate to be relatively low on the list of things I care about, when things like model/inference quality and harness play a much bigger role in how I feel about using a coding agent.
by d0mine | 2025-11-08 03:32:55+00:00
Idiomatic Python code can be faster than naive C/C++ code. The secret is to offload hot paths outside pure Python. Most such things are written that way already: you do not try to optimize the internal loop for a matrix multiplication in pure Python, you call numpy.dot() instead (pytorch if GPUs can help).

Otherwise, optimizing code in Python is the same as in any other language eg

http://scipy-lectures.org/advanced/optimizing/

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/developers/performance.html
by tharkun__ | 2025-11-08 03:33:35+00:00
When I search

switching to LLM based search products in droves.

it says

The shift towards LLM-based search products is significant as they offer more conversational and personalized responses compared to traditional search engines. This change is driven by users seeking quicker, more relevant answers and a better overall experience

So it must be true, right? Coz that's the only thing I searched for. I got my answer. Why would I search for the opposite? My bias was confirmed. I'm happy and will repeat the results to all my friends, who will search for the same thing to confirm and get confirmation!
by DecoPerson | 2025-11-08 03:33:42+00:00
I did this and never looked back.

It’s called a “WebView app” and you can get a really good experience on all platforms using them. Just:

- don’t make any crazy decisions on your fundamental UI components, like breadcrumbs, select dropdowns, etc

- add a few platform-specific specialisations to those same components, to make them feel a bit more familiar, such as button styling, or using a self-simplifying back-stack on Android

- test to make sure your webview matches the native browser’s behaviour where it matters. For example, sliding up the view when the keyboard is opened on mobile, navigating back & forth with edge-swipes on iOS, etc

I also went the extra step and got service workers working, for a basic offline experience, and added a native auto network diagnostic tool that runs on app startup and checks “Can reach local network” “Can reach internet (1.1.1.1)” “Can resolve our app’s domain” etc etc, so users can share where it failed to get quicker support. But this is an app for small-to-medium businesses, not consumer-facing, and the HTML5 part is served from the server and cached. I haven’t thought much about what you might need to do additionally for a consumer app, or a local-first app.
by Dwedit | 2025-11-08 03:34:58+00:00
Paint is subject to the effects of radiance. How paint looks changes depending on the surrounding lighting in the room, including the colors of other walls and objects which the light bounces off. So even if you could pick out a color from a perfectly calibrated display, then look at it under ideal white light and see that it matches, it won't look the same when painted on actual walls.
by econ | 2025-11-08 03:35:11+00:00
The other day I was reminded how SketchUp was a 3D drawing application without a learning curve. Today we get a slide show that needs a manual.

I suppose the right key is to use the space bar. But then the html moves to the next page without any js. (Shift space to page back)

Presto even loaded the "next>" link if one pressed space at the end of the page.
by BluSyn | 2025-11-08 03:35:31+00:00
I'm confused about language, as "loans" to me do not equal "bailout". The equating of the two seems odd, as many government incentives use loans that pay back with high interest, so governments MAKE money on those kinds of deals.

Also clear that the 1.4T figure includes some accounting for spend that does not come directly from OpenAI (grid/power/data infra for example). Obviously some government involvement is needed, but more at EPA/State/Local level to fast track construction permits, more-so than financial help from Treasury.

I'm confused why this generates such sensational headlines.
by cschneid | 2025-11-08 03:36:06+00:00
Yes this is the output speed. Code just flashes onto the page, it's pretty impressive.

They've claimed repeatedly in their discord that they don't quantize models.

The speed of things does change how you interact with it I think. I had this new GLM model hooked up to opencode as the harness with their $50/mo subscription plan. It was seriously fast to answer questions, although there are still big pauses in workflow when the per-minute request cap is hit.

I got a meaningful refactor done, maybe a touch faster than I would have in claude code + sonnet? But my human interaction with it felt like the slow part.
by sQL_inject | 2025-11-08 03:37:54+00:00
To not be would be utter madness. For those who can and opt not to, they are perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.

We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.

In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-08 03:39:04+00:00
Gary Marcus has a very particular view of human psychology that was popular for a while, especially in the early 2000s. Major proponents include Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor. This view was heavily influenced by symbolic computers when symbolic computers were new and so held some mental share leading into the dotcom boom. For several reasons, one of which is the replication crisis, this view is no longer nearly as popular.

One of the major beliefs of this view is that LLMs are essentially impossible because there's not enough information in language to learn it unless you have a special purpose language-learning module built into the brain by evolution. This is Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" argument.

Marcus still defends this view and because of this bias is committed to trying to prove to everyone that LLMs are not possible or at least that they're some kind of illusion. There's a sense in which they threaten his fundamental concept of how the brain works.

In proposing and defending these views he appears to me and others to be having a sort of internal crisis that's playing out publicly where his need to be right about this is coloring his judgment and objectivity.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-08 03:40:05+00:00
Before stacking supreme court, the 45th PotUS has worst record in nearly a century: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/trump-administration...

Conversely, today's stacked SCotUS has been gifting an unprecedented 90% win rate. Equally unprecedented has been the court's refusal to explain rulings and the impossibly short deliberation periods. : https://www.courtaccountability.org/shadow-docket-analysis