MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kronnpp | 2025-11-25 09:04:07+00:00
I taught in the past and still like the trilogy of books

> Modern Compiler Implementation by Andrew W. Appel

It comes in three flavors C, ML (Meta Language), and Java

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/

Writing a compiler in Standard ML is as natural as writing a grammar and denotational semantics.

Compiler writing is becoming an extinct art.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-25 09:04:24+00:00
> This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization.

Just so we're clear, the coding tests are in addition to credentialisation. I'll never forget when I worked at Big Tech (from Ireland) and I would constantly hear recruiters talk about the OK school list (basically the Ivy league). Additionally, I remember having to check the University a candidate had attended before she had an interview with one of our directors.

He was fine with her, because she had gone to Oxford. Honestly, I'm surprised that I was able to get hired there given all this nonsense.
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-11-25 09:04:48+00:00
Even as someone who regularly gets pissed off at some issues that I kept having with Ubuntu. Linux is AMAZING. It's ridiculous that we have a fully functioning open source OS which not only works but is the basis for almost everything that runs a web server.

The experimental flavors are also insane in their creativity. Alpine linux is an entire OS in tens of megabytes. That's crazy!
by HPsquared | 2025-11-25 09:05:44+00:00
LLMs help a lot of users with making FOR loops and things like that. At least it's been the case for me, I'd never tried to use PowerShell before but with a bit of LLM guidance was able to cobble together some useful (for me) one-liner commands to do things like "use this CSV of file names and pixel locations, and make cropped PNG thumbnails of these locations from these images".

Stuff like that which regular users often do by hand, they can ask an LLM for the command (usually just a few lines of a scripting language if they only know the magic words to use).
by alex-moon | 2025-11-25 09:05:48+00:00
It's funny, I have never thought of it this way, but, reflecting, I realise the way I do think about it is very similar. Whenever I have to justify a subscription on JetBrains or hosting or what have you, I always just ask myself: will this bring me joy? Specifically will it bring me as much joy as e.g. a Netflix subscription? Very easy to justify then.

To be fair, I used to smoke cigs, and drink heavily, which are both very expensive habits. I've since quit those (they weren't bringing me joy) but the benchmark is the same.
by jibal | 2025-11-25 09:06:01+00:00
One could ask the same question about any trait of any organism ... and the answer is always the same. Do you have a problem with birds being able to build nests specific to their species, or cuckoo chicks instinctively pushing the eggs of the host species out of the nest? The answer is one of the best understood facts of science, and the basis of all of biology. Why would anyone expect the human brain not to be "preconfigured" by the billions of years of environmental forces that produced it?
by bolobo | 2025-11-25 09:06:19+00:00
> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.

I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful.

They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-25 09:06:37+00:00
> If the brightness cap of the HDR image is full SDR brightness, what value remains in HDR?

If you set #ffffff to be a comfortable max, then that would be the brightness cap for HDR flares that fill the entire screen.

But filling the entire screen like that rarely happens. Smaller flares would have a higher cap.

For example, let's say an HDR scene has an average brightness that's 55% of #ffffff, but a tenth of the screen is up at 200% of #ffffff. That should give you a visually impressive boosted range without blinding you.
by preisschild | 2025-11-25 09:06:42+00:00
> On May 8, 2003, Chaïm Nissim, who in 1985 was elected to the Geneva cantonal legislature for the Swiss Green Party,[17] admitted carrying out the attack. He claimed that the weapons were obtained from Carlos the Jackal via the Belgian terrorist organisation Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Communist Combatant Cells).[18][19]

Most peaceful green party member ^^
by vanviegen | 2025-11-25 09:06:59+00:00
Or just do some work/exam in a controlled setting.

Talking to students in order to gauge their understanding is not as easy or reliable as some people make it out to be.

There are many students who are basically just useless when required to answer on the spot, some of whom likely to score top-of-the-class given an assignment and time to work on it alone (in a proctored setting).

And then there are students whom are very likable and swift to pick up on subtle signals the examiners might be giving of, and constantly adjusting course accordingly.

Grading objectively is extremely hard when doing oral exams. Especially when when you're doing them back-to-back for an entire workday, which is quite likely to happen if most examination is to be done in this way.
by arethuza | 2025-11-25 09:07:10+00:00
On my home desktop PC Windows 10 is saying I can't upgrade to Windows 11 and doesn't give any explanation. There's nothing wrong with the machine and I hate Windows 11 anyway (I have to use it on my work laptop) so there is no chance that I will buy a completely new PC just to run Windows 11.

So Linux has always been getting slowly better over the years (I first used it more than 30 years ago) and Windows has been getting a lot worse - so Linux easily wins.
by gf000 | 2025-11-25 09:07:35+00:00
Java consumes memory because collecting garbage is extra work and under most circumstances it makes no sense to rush it. Meanwhile Go will rather take time away from your code to collect garbage, decreasing throughput. If there is ample memory available, why waste energy on that?

Nonetheless, it's absolutely trivial to set a single parameter to limit memory usage and Java's GCs being absolute beasts, they will have no problem operating more often.

Also, intellij is a whole IDE that caches all your code in AST form for fast lookoup and stuff like that.. it has to use some extra memory by definition (though it's also configurable if you really want to, but it's a classic space vs time tradeoff again).
by mcny | 2025-11-25 09:08:14+00:00
The idea of a mechanical license sounds perfect. Sorry to go off a tangent but my mind immediately went to healthcare as I have never heard of a mechanical license before.

can the same idea be applied to healthcare? for example, hospitals and doctors can set their own rates but these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
by nottorp | 2025-11-25 09:09:00+00:00
The thing is, on a ps5 you just open the game and it runs fine.

On a PC you may have the bright idea to open a browser along with the game for walkthroughs/hints. Or Discord to chat with your friends while gaming.

Due to javascript bloat, your working set size goes from 16 to 48-64 Gb in a jiffy.
by mort96 | 2025-11-25 09:09:16+00:00
Oh.

I don't want the ability for 10% of the screen to be so bright it hurts my eyes. That's the exact thing I want to avoid. I don't understand why you think your suggestion would help. I want SDR FFFFFF to be the brightest any part of my screen goes to, because that's what I've configured to be at a comfortable value using my OS brightness controls.
by euroderf | 2025-11-25 09:09:19+00:00
OT: This page uses the term "Learnings" a lot. As a Murrcan in tech comms in Europe, I always corrected this to something else. But, well, is it some sort of Britishism ? Or is it some weird internet usage that is creeping into general usage ?

Likewise for "Trainings". Looks weird to Murrcan eyes but maybe it's a Britishism.
by ako | 2025-11-25 09:10:32+00:00
Completely disagree, what i see agentic coding agents do in combination with LLMs is seriously mind-blowing. I don't care how much knowledge is compressed into an LLM. What is way more interesting is what it does when it misses some knowledge. I see it come up with a plan to create the knowledge by running an experiment (running a script, sometimes asking me to run a script or try something), evaluating the output, and then replan based on the output. Full Plan-Do-Check-Act. Finding answers systematically to things you don't know is way more impressive than remembering lots of stuff.
by jasode | 2025-11-25 09:11:11+00:00
>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented,

Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue.

Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform."

Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform.

E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's.

Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own.

To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything for one cheap monthly price means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue. Most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.
by mrbungie | 2025-11-25 09:12:16+00:00
> It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year.

Companies are bombarding us with AI in every piece of media they can, obviously with a bias on the positive. This focus is an expected counterresponse to said pressure, and it is actually good that we're not just focusing on what they want us to hear (i.e. just the pros and not the cons).

> If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths.

Maybe, but as long as it development is coupled to short-term metrics like DAUs it won't.
by jibal | 2025-11-25 09:13:16+00:00
Anthropomorphic language about evolution is simply a convenient metaphor that eases communication ... it has no metaphysical implications.

> You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.

This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy.

P.S. Oh dear ... -15 karma, numerous dead comments, and "philosophy" like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825

Well, I won't be engaging again.
by shegby | 2025-11-25 09:13:24+00:00
We are excited to announce the launch of Introvert, a private AI dating co-pilot, now accepting funding via Geyser Fund.

Our mission is to solve "swipe fatigue" and data exploitation by removing photos, swiping, and, critically, all persistent personal data storage. Introvert is an invite-only platform leveraging a P2P verification layer (HumanRank) to build trust without surveillance, aligning with core Bitcoin/Web3 principles.

The AI Co-pilot guides conversations between matched users, protecting them from spam while ensuring the highest level of privacy and anonymity.

Dmitrii & Anastasia, Co-founders of Introvert by Shegby
by shevy-java | 2025-11-25 09:13:28+00:00
This shows a lack of understanding. I'll skip repeating the issues with regard to systemd here, so instead on just a few points you mentioned.

- You claim that the Unix philosophy only survives to the GNUtils. Well, that shows to me a lack of understanding what the philosophy is about. Everything is a file is similar to the OOP approach of everything is an object. I recommend watching Ken Thompson when he was young here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

It does not capture all the UNIX philosophy but it does extend on the reasons why that philosophy works well. The philosophy is bigger than that of course but it helps serve as a counter-argument.

- The example of "writing your own script" is no different to a non-systemd system. Why would a script work or not work based on systemd? You mention as example FreeBSD debugging a shell script. Well, others use proper languages such as ruby or python. Everything that can be done via systemd I can do without it too and, in fact, have been doing so. Ruby essentially runs my system as the primary layer on everything (granted, it runs Linux, and thus mostly C, and ruby is at the end of the day a syntactic wrapper over C). I never understood why systemd would matter. I read the advertisement of the systemd devs - none of this applied to my use cases, so I never "embraced" systemd, simply because I never needed it. I did point out the increased complexity of it as a negative trade-off and this has been true til this day.

- Former "hater" also implies that criticism is not based on rationale and logic. This is not the case either. It's funny to me how the pro-systemd camp isn't really able to come up with compelling arguments on their own.
by DiskoHexyl | 2025-11-25 09:13:33+00:00
Finally jumped ship to a Jellyfin based home server and couldn't be happier.

The ui is surprisingly good and polished (especially for the users who don't have to manage the library), video quality is amazing (with bd source files, who would have thought, but even DVD is often better than what modern streaming provides), and I can cache the movies on my phone when needed.

It works in ANY browser under ANY os, doesn't have ads, doesn't track me, and has all the content that I could ever desire (and wouldn't be able to find in any one service. In some cases, IN ANY service).

I can have any combination of a subtitle language and a voiceover.

Overall cost was only 500 for a used m1 air and a 16TB external storage.
by gwd | 2025-11-25 09:14:48+00:00
There's a sort of joke in academia, about the "least publishable unit" for a paper: Since "how many papers produced" is much easier to measure than "impact on a field", one way to try to game the system is to figure out the smallest amount of research that can be called "one paper", and publish just that, to maximize the papers / research effort ratio.

What we're seeing now is the same thing for streaming services. Sure, you'd pay £20 for a subscription to watch 75% of all available content. But it turns out most people would pay £40 for two subscriptions, each of which would show you 35% [EDIT and even people who won't, will still pay one £20 subscription for 35% of the content]; and quite a few people would pay £100 for five subscriptions, each of which will show you 12%. The beancounters are busy experimenting to find the "least bundle-able unit", to maximize extraction.

EDIT: And as someone else has pointed out, this is not something that any Netflix -- or any potential replacement -- can unilaterally do something about. In fact it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation: If MGM and Universal Studios and Paramount and WB all license their content to Netflix (under the £20 umbrella), and Disney doesn't, then Disney gets to keep a massive amount of money for themselves, while the other rights-owners have to divide up the rest. It only takes one or two "defectors" to basically force everyone to do the same thing.
by gf000 | 2025-11-25 09:14:55+00:00
I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.

This likely would also mean that it can't be flashed, so if you care about future maintainability, this is also a negative -- it can not be updated/fixed in the future, which may or may not make sense depending on what part we are talking about.

But if there are some kind of signature validation then it gets even more complicated (like e.g. iphone screens knowing if they are from apple or not).
by InfinityByTen | 2025-11-25 09:15:25+00:00
Given how my past couple of days have gone at work, I don't like the sound of a 30 year old product manager obsessed with metrics of viral usage. Ageism aside, I think it takes a lot of experience, than pure intellect and professional success to drive a very emergent technology with unknown potential. You can break a lot by moving fast.
by yason | 2025-11-25 09:15:28+00:00
I tried it because I was less and less happy with Google and the various free alternatives never quite hit it. With them, I'd have to go back to Google every now and then to get better results. I thought I'll try Kagi for a month or two and see.

With Kagi, I think I've gone back to Google a couple of times in the early period. Then not once, since last winter. On browsers where I'm not logged onto Kagi I've gone from Google to my primary browser with Kagi multiple times. I can't really tell if Kagi is good or bad, objectively, but in relative terms it's very good. Most importantly, it's quite invisible, doesn't have irritating things to fight with, and the first two pagefuls aren't sponsored ads. It's tool-like and it certainly gives the feel of 2000's Google Search.

I don't know if I'm a fan but I still also have no reason to stop using Kagi. I like the simple concept. And I think paying for search is a good proposition because it turns the odds to my favour: the company can succeed by making me happy instead of using me to make advertisers happy.
by ricksunny | 2025-11-25 09:15:51+00:00
"Section 1. Purpose. From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.

This order launches the “Genesis Mission” as a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century. The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization. "
by shevy-java | 2025-11-25 09:16:05+00:00
It is more than merely an "init manager". And I disagree that it is the best thing ever - it is perfectly possible to operate linux without systemd.

> but I have the feeling the huge upside is often overlooked.

It is fine to objectively compare trade-offs. However had, it has to be a fair comparison; we can not start with "init manager" because systemd does a lot more, so how can a comparison to any software with less code be fair then? runit doesn't do much more than for initializing.
by euroderf | 2025-11-25 09:18:39+00:00
> Natural language is so ambiguous.

As a former tech comms guy I will say:

Natural language can be bent into arbitrary precision. Write something, then enter a read-rewrite-reread loop as the devil's advocate (this is key) until it stops being ambiguous or having multiple conceivable interpretations.

Yes with English this process can be a pain in the butt, until you get the hang of it.
by bji9jhff | 2025-11-25 09:18:49+00:00
Being put in contact with foreign contents? Disgusting! /s

More seriously, before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. I watched great series from South Korea, Turkey, Jordan, Spain,France, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavian countries and South America. I also watched quite enjoyable movies from Nigeria. I probably forgot a few places too. Do Netflix has issues? Plenty. Their originals are often blands and cancelled. They taught me to seek mini-series and completed series instead of ongoing series. The wrestling they air is shit. But the availability of foreign contents is the coolest feature they have.
by man8alexd | 2025-11-25 09:18:59+00:00
mmap'ed memory counts as that "reclaimable cache", which isn't always reclaimable (dirty or active pages are not immediately reclaimable). But Kubernetes memory accounting assumes that the page cache is always reclaimable. This creates a lot of surprises and unexpected OOMs. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/43916
by xioxox | 2025-11-25 09:19:36+00:00
With google I can't find things I know exist. For example, it doesn't find several of my github repositories with unique names that have been there for years. With old google you could drill down a couple of pages of results, but they're not there now. It also prefers worse sources for materials, for example some blog which poorly explains some API, rather than the original documentation.
by graemep | 2025-11-25 09:19:38+00:00
> It's not XOR; you can do both.

The quote I was replying to was about return on investment. Money spent on cycling infrastructure is money not spent on walking and public transport. Spending money is definitely XOR.

I am arguing that walking for shorter distances and providing public transport for longer distances is a better use of money in most places.

> Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking

Your range for walking plus public transport is far greater.

One big problem I see with cycling is low uptake in most places - in most (not all, to be fair) places I know cycles lanes are mostly empty.

> Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle

People can cycle who cannot walk or use a bus?
by skx001 | 2025-11-25 09:20:33+00:00
This comment clearly expands the point I made in my original comment above. When I say nobody regrets giving up alcohol, I don't just mean people addicted.

Even casual drinkers I know are so happy after giving up. They are more happy, sleep better, feel better etc.

The "socializing" people used to do with drinking, they are now replacing it by joining gyms, running marathons/ironmans and learning martial arts.

This is great!