MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-17 12:55:32+00:00
Ha ha, the rich kids when I was in high school Physics had these calculators. It was the first I had seen them. At over $100 (as I recall) they were completely out of reach for me and half the class.

(Ands they had to either have an extra set of batteries handy or access to an outlet to plug in the cord since the possibility of the batteries dying during a test was a real likelihood.)
by bofadeez | 2025-11-17 12:55:36+00:00
Warnings today are mainstream and widely understood, unlike late‑90s dot-coms where Buffett was largely ignored. Buffett explicitly says he doesn't invest in complicated businesses, finances aside. Plus, core AI players are profitable and funding capex from real earnings, valuations are concentrated in a few mega-caps, revenues are real, and financing is healthier. So while parts of AI may be overvalued, it’s structurally very different from the 1999 bubble.

And is it really overvalued if AGI is achieved? Sounds like risk:reward profile is already priced in the gamble, and the valuation is appropriate....But I guess if you take it to the logical conclusion... if AGI is achieved, everyone will be out of a job, so scarcity-based economics, based on scarce labor input, itself will have to be redone. Wild speculation there.
by andrewaylett | 2025-11-17 12:56:01+00:00
One might push that analogy past its limit, and suggest that you probably wouldn't try to build a road-legal car out of Lego :).

More seriously, I'm not expecting that most people will want to use the underlying language features, nor indeed that those who do should actually do so commonly. They're there to provide for a clean separation between control logic and business logic. And that helps us to create cleaner abstractions so we can test our control logic independently of our business logic.

Most of the time I should be using the control logic we've already written, not writing more of it.
by tpoacher | 2025-11-17 12:56:01+00:00
Yes that's what I understood. But it'd still be insteresting.

Amazon was once a bookstore. There's nothing stopping Steam from adapting to a "Steam Business Machines" / "Steam OS Business Edition" once it has a foothold in the business market. After all, the store already distributes software, they're just not as popular as games. So if this scenario were to happen, and Microsoft failed to react, I'm sure Steam would adapt very quickly to take advantage of it rather than sit and wait for the bankruptcy.
by cachius | 2025-11-17 12:56:06+00:00
A recent superpower was added by Fil aka the pizlonator who made C more Fil-C with FUGC, a garbage collector with minimal adjustments to existing code, turning it into a memory safe implementation of the C and C++ programming languages you already know and love.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133938

https://fil-c.org/
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-17 12:57:08+00:00
I would compare the recent Rust Android post [1], where they have a 5000x lower memory vulnerability rate compared to traditional C/C++ with the number of segfaults found in Bun. [2]

In my opinion Zig does not move the needle on real safety when the codebase becomes sufficiently complex.

[1]: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

[2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=segfault%20OR%20segm...
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-17 12:57:38+00:00
This comment assumes you're familiar with LLM training realities. Preference is transferred to the model in both pre and post training. Pretraining datasets are curated to an extent (implicit transfer), but they're simply too vast to be fully controlled, and need to be diverse, so you can't throw too much out or the model will be dumb. Post-training datasets and methods are precisely engineered to make the model useful and also steer it in the desired direction. So there are always two types of biases - one is picked up from the ocean of data, another (alignment training, data selection etc) is forced onto it.
by Qwuke | 2025-11-17 12:58:03+00:00
It's interesting to me to see how easily you can reach a much safer C without adding _everything_ from C++ as a toy project. I really enjoyed the read!

Though yes, you should probably just write C-like C++ at that point, and the result sum types used made me chuckle in that regard because they were added with C++17. This person REALLY wants modern CPP features..
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-17 12:58:13+00:00
While snarky, I see where you're coming from. Sometimes a lot of the fun is in the building of a thing to understand how it works. Learning how a thing works from the user-facing side of the control panel is, for some of us, less rewarding.

If anything though, I want to go build a physical relay computer mechanism myself now (if even just a 4-bit adder or something).
by watwut | 2025-11-17 12:58:17+00:00
Except it seems to me more that American adults sort of want kids not eat that and fish for anecdotes of kids not eating normal food.

The issue in post is kids who just want a snack in addition to lunch. Kids that are getting lunch as lunch eat it.

Frankly, free lunch dont have to come with free snack pizza for those who dont eqt lunch.
by graemep | 2025-11-17 12:58:30+00:00
> Systemd includes more functionality than merely init-stuff, so any comparison here was always biased and unfair.

The real argument about systemd is whether you want an init system, or what is effectively an additional layer in the OS. It provides more standardisation, vs more diversity. The strongest argument for systemd is that it is not just an init system, which is also the strongest argument against systemd.
by dominicrose | 2025-11-17 12:59:38+00:00
> Most programming languages hide complexity from you

A garbage collector isn't "hidden complexity". We all know they exist and use memory and CPU.

How Zig is better than Ruby:

- it has a linear performance gain

- the IDE has more information

That's great if you absolutely need it, but in a lot of cases:

- you don't need linear performance gains or you need the gains to be more than linear

- the linear performance gains come at a huge cost: code readability (assuming you managed to write it and it compiles)

- relying too much on the IDE won't make better programs and won't make you a better programmer
by Earw0rm | 2025-11-17 12:59:47+00:00
We did, but some kids got killed or badly injured as a result. It was pretty common where I live.

And while speeds are a bit lower now, the median driver attitude and aggression level seems to be a lot worse. I'm not sure whether that's because of phone distractions, or they're stressed out by exploitative employers, or have cooked their brains online, or some demographic change in who does the most driving, but when I'm on foot, being driven AT is not an uncommon experience at all.
by intended | 2025-11-17 12:59:49+00:00
That’s essentially true of the whole Internet.

All the content is derived from that which is the most capable of surviving and being reproduced.

So by default the content being created is going to be click bait, attention grabbing content.

I’m pretty sure the training data is adjusted to counter this drift, but that means there’s no LLM that isn’t skewed.
by lnsru | 2025-11-17 13:00:14+00:00
Every morning I see dozens of kids sitting (this week in unpleasant cold) on pavement or standing somewhere in the rain with their smartphones on the way to school. No phones in/around school building! It’s a plague and doesn’t look normal at all for me. I would expect some regulations from government regarding this insanity. There are phone-watches and dumb phones to reach kids if really needed. It must be profitable to someone to hook kids like that. Weirdest poses in rain, cold just to have quality time with their smartphones. I want scream when I see this every day. In most discussions with adults I end up as a luddite, because I don’t support technology. In my times modern technology was messing with autoexec.bat and we learned something from that for later.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-11-17 13:00:15+00:00
Why should developers be on the hook indefinitely for content? Why can’t they just make a good game and sell it? If a game needs continuous ‘content updates’ to remain good, it simply wasn’t meant to be played forever. Not all games are.

Your argument seems to be “won’t someone please think of the poor defenseless billion-dollar international megacorporations?”.
by tripzilch | 2025-11-17 13:02:45+00:00
Related, GPT refuses to identify screenshots from movies or TV series.

Not for any particular reason, it flat out refuses. I asked it whether it could describe the picture for me in as much detail as possible, and it said it could do that. I asked it whether it could identify a movie or TV series by description of a particular scene, and it said it could do that, but that if I'd ever try or ask it to do both, it wouldn't do that cause it'd be circumvention of its guide lines! -- No it doesn't quite make sense, but to me it does seem quite indicative of a hard-coded limitation/refusal, because it is clearly able to do the sub tasks. I don't think the ability to identify scenes from a movie or TV show is illegal or even immoral, but I can imagine why they would hard code this refusal, because it'd make it easier to show it was trained on copyrighted material?
by btbuildem | 2025-11-17 13:03:46+00:00
Here's [1] a post-abliteration chat with granite-4.0-mini. To me it reveals something utterly broken and terrifying. Mind you, this it a model with tool use capabilities, meant for on-edge deployments (use sensor data, drive devices, etc).

1: https://i.imgur.com/02ynC7M.png
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-17 13:03:50+00:00
Slapping a police state on top of shortsighted policy failings doesn't make them not policy failings. Heck, it might even cost society more than scooping up the illegally dumped trash.

This isn't a problem that jurisdictions with competently run waste logistics have. When you hear about illegal dumping in the NYC area it's not literal mountains of trash like this. It's tires or hazmat or something that's genuinely expensive to get rid of for good reason.

Take a step back and think about the economics of bulk material hauling whether it's dirt or trash, the fact that the risk-reward calculation here pencils out should throw a massive "something deeper is wrong" red flag.

I propose we kick all of the people who talk like you out, and then find a solution in peace, without all the screeching and "something must be done"-isms. I bet we not only solve this in short order, but a whole other bunch of issues too.
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-11-17 13:04:13+00:00
I think you might be looking at the film through rose tinted glasses without the broader context. Kubrick's films had been nominated for 9 Academy Awards and won 1 (he was personally nominated 3 times) by the time Barry Lyndon started filming. (He had also directed a certain Spartacus.)

Warner Brothers were keen to bankroll whatever he wanted to do, even tolerating moving the country of production due to the Troubles.

He was given some artistic freedom due to previous commercial success - ie. a "data- and money-driven approach". He also really wanted to be making a Napoleon biopic, but financing was pulled when a similar film failed at the box office, so he didn't get it all his own way.

Barry Lyndon was only a modest commercial succes. So much so that Warner Brothers hooked him up with a much safer bet for them for their next venture. He was given unfinished manuscript of The Shining, from the wildy popular best seller King for his next project, which was also simpler to produce ie. "relentless pursuit of revenue".

TLDR Making films is expensive and needs to be a commercial activity, but every now and then there's a fortunate crossover of quality and funding. This still happens but you need to look out for it.
by acyou | 2025-11-17 13:04:43+00:00
Algal blooms with limited mixing sounds like a pretty good carbon capture mechanism!

I wonder if there is oil and gas at the bottom of any of these deep lakes? /s

It would be interesting to know the gas balances for these lakes, in particular how reduced mixing affects methanotrophy and methanogenesis. If its talking about climate change, this article really should discuss methane, I think that's a bigger deal.
by liveoneggs | 2025-11-17 13:05:26+00:00
You also need a version of the go compiler, possibly one new enough to handle some //go:magic:comments.

I agree that static linking is great and that python sucks but I was trying to say I can, very easily, mkdir new-py-program/app.py and stick __main__ in it or mkdir new-perl-program/app.pl or mkdir my-new-c-file/main.c etc.

For 2/3 of the above I can even make easy/single executable files go-style.
by hirako2000 | 2025-11-17 13:05:27+00:00
1. chatgpt is the publisher, Google is a search engine, links to publishers.

2. LLMs typically don't produce content verbatim. Some LLMs do provide references but it remains a pasta of sentences worded differently.

You are asking for gpt to publish verbatim content which may be copyrighted, it would be deemed infringement since non verbatim is already crossing the line.
by udev4096 | 2025-11-17 13:06:13+00:00
Using luks to encrypt all partitions (incl. /boot) and it's only unlocked using yubikey. I have secureboot enabled (sbctl to enroll keys) and TPM PCR values to avoid tampering. systemd-boot (a lot more secure than grub) doesn't have password to lock the kernel editor so I have disabled the editor altogether. I use fapolicy for "whitelisting" apps. Unfortunately, coreboot doesn't have BIOS password feature so it's unlocked
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-17 13:06:31+00:00
> It’s facile and frankly uninteresting to put the blame on the critic, in this case my comment.

Well in that case your critique failed at the gates.

If your problem is that other people don't like the things you think they should like, or that movie theaters shouldn't show "soulless" movies, then say that then.

> In fact this ‘meh it is what it is, just ignore it’ is another manifestation of this culturally-low point we find ourselves in

That's the exact opposite of what I was saying. There's good stuff out there being made. Seek it, support it.
by samirillian | 2025-11-17 13:07:00+00:00
Common problem in man-made lakes. When you create a lake by damming a river it creates perfect conditions for lamination, deep narrow and filled with agricultural runoff. When they pull the plug on these dams all the de-oxygenated water flows out the bottom, basically just dumping unbreathable water into the river killing off the more sensitive fish, eg trout die catfish live, and smelling like a million firecrackers.
by tovej | 2025-11-17 13:07:01+00:00
This is interesting, but I wonder about how the threshold will be interpreted.

First, the revenue is a fixed number, this is usually a bad idea in contracts that will last a long time. There should be some adjustable indexing going on.

Second, the revenue number is in USD, this is probably less of an issue, but still creates ambiguity. What if revenue is reported in a different currency? Do we use an exchange rate? Which one? At what point in time do we choose the exchange rate? At the time revenue is reported? At the time the license comes into effect? Unclear.

Third, there are probably ways of skirting thresholds by artificially manipulating your corporate structure through subsidiaries etc., changing both revenue and headcount. How would that be solved?

Fourth, how is labor measured? By average salary? By specific salary? What counts as labor on the project? Who approves the labor? This also adds management and accounting overhead to the open source project, which isn't great.

I applaud the efforts, but I see some challenges in using the license. I hope these issues can be answered!
by pjmlp | 2025-11-17 13:08:14+00:00
Given how C was seen in the past, before there was a change of heart to add C11/C17, minus atomics and aligned memory allocators (still between experimental or not going to happen),

https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-an...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-atomics-in-visual...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/comp...

And the new guidelines regarding the use of unsafe languages at Microsoft, I wouldn't bet waiting that it will ever happen, even after 2040.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-secur...

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/11/19/windo...
by mrweasel | 2025-11-17 13:08:26+00:00
Yeah, you're sort of swapping in one issue for another. I agree that micro dependencies needs to be tackled, but perhaps not using LLMs.

I could fear that rather than keep pushing for a Javascript standard library, which would encompass all these smaller function, we now just get more or less the same defective implementations generated by LLMs, but hidden in thousands of repos, where tools won't find security issues. At least with NPM we can pull in updated versions with NPM tells us that we're running an outdated version. Who is going to traverse your proprietary code base and let you know that the vibe coded left-pad Claude put in three years ago is buggy?
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-17 13:09:09+00:00
Yes, but getting a visa was never the main overhead involved in moving to Europe. That's why in practice very few British people ever used that ability outside of retirees going to Spain, and why it didn't play a part in the debate. Some people liked the idea that they could in theory live in France or Germany, but moving to the US, Australia or Canada has always more popular for British workers despite being harder.

I'm one of the few Brits that actually did move to Europe, specifically to Switzerland at a time when being in the EU didn't help, so I went through the usual immigration process. The paperwork wasn't an issue. 99% of the work was language learning and social integration. Hence why Anglophone countries get the bulk of the UK emigration.
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-17 13:09:18+00:00
First, if we're talking about practicality, and not just theoretical considerations, then the numbers should not be stored as Peano integers a.k.a. base 1 in the first place. Use lists of 8-tuples of bools or native machine integers or whatever, otherwise, you will suffer from O(n) complexities somewhere in your arithmetic, that's just how base 1 works. Fretting over which particular basic operation has to house this linear-over-logarithmic overhead is IMO unproductive: use better data structures instead of counting sticks.

Second, if we're talking about other data structures, especially recursive ones, e.g. lists, then having easily available (and performant) structural recursion is just more useful than having right folds out of the box: those can be recreated easily, but going in the other direction is much more convoluted.
by freehorse | 2025-11-17 13:09:21+00:00
Because it never works like that in practice.

People have the illusion of reviewing and "owning" the final product, but that is not how it looks like from the outside. The quality, the prose style, the errors that pass through due to inevitable AI-induced complacency ALWAYS EVENTUALLY show. If people got out of the AI bubbles they would see it too, alas.

We keep reading the same stories for at least a couple of years now. There is no novelty anymore. The core issues and problems have stayed the same since gpt3.5. And because they are so omnipresent in the internet, we have grown to be able to recognise them almost automatically. It is no longer just a matter of quality, it is an insult to the readers when an author pretends that content is not AI generated just because they "reviewed it". Reviewing sth that somebody else wrote is not ownership, esp when that sth is an LLM.

In any case, I do not care if people want to read or write AI generated books, just don't lie about it being AI generated.
by SuperNinKenDo | 2025-11-17 13:09:31+00:00
Ironically (at two levels) I learned about globstar through PowerShell. Why is this ironic on two levels? Because I discovered it while researching the best way to perform a recursion in a specific situation and ran into a bunch of threads of people bemoaning globstar's absence from pwsh. So, now I know about its presence elsewhere.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-11-17 13:09:53+00:00
I think I know what's going on: iputils[1] ping can't ping IPv6-mapped IPv4 addresses, but inetutils[2] ping can. And look inside the parens:

$ ping ::ffff:127.0.0.1 PING ::ffff:127.0.0.1 (::ffff:127.0.0.1) 56 data bytes

says the non-working one,

$ ping ::ffff:127.0.0.1 PING ::ffff:127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes

says the working one. In Wireshark, the latter appears as ICMPv4 packets on the lo interface, whereas the former does not appear at all(?..). So overall this makes some amount of sense: you can write a TCP-using program that's agnostic to whether it's running on top IPv4 or IPv6, but you have to use different ICMP versions for IPv4 and IPv6. I actually don't know why it has to be that way.

(My initial confusion was because I thought 'o11c was saying they could ping ::ffff:127.0.0.1 but not .2. It makes much more sense for either both or neither to be pingable.)

[1] https://github.com/iputils/iputils (the one that comes with the bizarre tracepath thing)

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/inetutils/
by jorvi | 2025-11-17 13:11:09+00:00
It really depends. If it's the occasional request and I can bang out a solution in 30 minutes, I'll help. But I'll also weigh how much maintenance burden it'll be going forward. And if I won't do it myself, I'd always give some quick pointers.

Maintenance demands (your library X doesn't work with Python Y, please maintain another version for me) I'd shrug off. Wait for me, pay me, or fix it yourself.
by quapster | 2025-11-17 13:12:24+00:00
Snark took off around the same time the web did because it solves a specific problem of the attention economy: how do you signal intelligence, distance, and in-group membership in as few characters as possible. Earnestness is expensive, it takes context and charity, but a snarky aside is cheap and instantly legible to your tribe. Once media, then social media, got rewarded for engagement over accuracy, snark became a kind of default compression algorithm for opinion: less argument, more vibe. The irony is that the word itself has this long, meandering, almost quaint history, while its modern use is basically an optimization for ad-driven feeds and quote-tweet culture. We didn’t just get more “snarky” because we got more cynical, we got more snarky because the systems that surface speech pay better for sharp edges than for careful thought.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-17 13:13:44+00:00
More…?! :)

I totally feel you - the one reservation is that I’m using (gasp) not the original Minivac Relay sound. I need to go to a Computer Museum that will let me record one to offer a more authentic simulated experience.

So tldr - let me get a clean real sound and then we can come back to this question :)