MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-11-23 10:11:36+00:00
The "natural inverse" relationship between "address-of" and indirect addressing is only partial.

You can apply the "*" operator as many times you want, but applying "address-of" twice is meaningless.

Moreover, in complex expressions it is common to mix the indirection operator with array indexing and with structure member selection, and all these 3 postfix operators can appear an unlimited number of times in an expression.

Writing such addressing expressions in C is extremely cumbersome, because they require a great number of parentheses levels and it is still difficult to see which is the order in which they are applied.

With a postfix indirection operator no parentheses are needed and all addressing operators are executed in the order in which they are written.

So it is beyond reasonable doubt that a prefix "*" is a mistake.

The only reason why they have chosen "*" as prefix in C, which they later regretted, was because it seemed easier to define the expressions "*++p" and "*p++" to have the desired order of evaluation.

There is no other use case where a prefix "*" simplifies anything and for the postfix and prefix increment and decrement it would have been possible to find other ways to avoid parentheses and even if they were used with parentheses that would still have been simpler than when you have to mix "*" with array indexing and with structure member selection. Moreover, the use of "++" and "--" with pointers was only a workaround for a dumb compiler, which could not determine by itself whether it should access an array using indices or pointers. Normally there should be no need to expose such an implementation detail in a high-level language, the compiler should choose the addressing modes that are optimal for the target CPU, not the programmer. On some CPUs, including the Intel/AMD CPUs, accessing arrays by incrementing pointers, like in the old C programs, is usually worse than accessing the arrays through indices (because on such CPUs the loop counter can be reused as an index register, regardless of the order in which the array is accessed, including for accessing multiple arrays, avoiding the use of extra registers and reducing the number of executed instructions).

With a postfix "*", the operator "->" would have been superfluous. It has been added to C only to avoid some of the most frequent cases when a prefix "*" leads to ugly syntax.
by orwin | 2025-11-23 10:12:41+00:00
People shouldn't let the facts distract them from their feelings and opinions I guess then?

People should base their opinions on reality, not invent a reality that conform to their opinions. Not only because intellectual laziness is bad, but because if we can't at least agree on the material facts, we will never be able to agree on solutions, or understand other people point of view.
by sparkie | 2025-11-23 10:14:09+00:00
The primary focus of Lions/seL4 is security, and formal verification of it. It's a necessary project for a world where CVEs are frequently published for the Kernel and other underlying system services, in part because they're still using a 1970s OS design which didn't have internet-connected computers in mind.

The seL4 kernel uses an Object-Capability system (ironically which have also been around since the '70s) in place of Access Control Lists used in POSIX systems. The idea behind capabilities is "don't separate designation from authority" - the capability is both a designator of a resource and the authority to use it - there are no separate ACLs. Separation of designation from authority leads to confused deputies - where one process with lower privileges can trick a higher-privileged process to use the higher privileges on its behalf, which very often leads to privilege escalation vulnerabilities (ie, RCE as root).

Each process has a "cspace" (Capability Space), which holds the capabilities the process may use. When the process performs a system call, it references a capability slot from a set of tables in its own cspace where the capability is held, and the Kernel verifies that the capability is valid in order to perform the syscall. The capabilities can be revoked at any time, and importantly, they cannot be forged - only delegated.

Additionally, seL4 is a microkernel design which is intended to have a small attack surface. It provides only a small number of system calls like `Send`, `Recv`, `Yield`, and combinations of, such as `Call`, `Reply`, `ReplyRecv`. It's a generic interface where an IPC buffer is passed along with a set of delegated capabilities, but there's no specific calls such as `SYS_write` or `SYS_mmap` - these are built on top of the `Send`/`Recv` syscalls and their services are provided by other user-space daemon processes.

One of the best developments of seL4 is the "Mixed-criticality system" support, which provides capabilities for processing time - to enable some processes to have real-time support without becoming CPU hogs.

seL4 can also be seen as a hypervisor which can virtualize other kernels, and part of the Lions effort is to be able to utilize Linux drivers using isolated Linux guests.

To learn more, the seL4 manual is a good place to start: https://sel4.systems/Info/Docs/seL4-manual-latest.pdf. There's some videos on Youtube by Gernot Heiser discussing the MCS support.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-11-23 10:14:22+00:00
Mondragon is often used by people who don't know much about the subject as a counter example, but if you look under the hood, you'll see it doesn't even compare: Less than half the workers own shares and the majority of shares is held by a small circle of executives in the richest branches. That's basically a standard capitalist pig with some socialist lipstick to give pseudo-Marxists an argument in these discussions, when there is none to be had in the first place. In fact Nvidia has a higher percentage of employees owning shares than Mondragon. Would you call that "worker-owned" too?

None of this should be surprising either, because anything that truly benefits workers will be at odds with things that benefit the business. In society there are always people who primarily get paid and people who primarily work. Even the real Marx realized that. If you really want to defeat capitalism, then you have to do more than just play pretend.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-23 10:14:52+00:00
And what is this processor and how does it work?

How does it determine next step from raw non structured content?

Let's imagine for example that it's a message from a potential customer to a business. The processor must decide whether to e.g. give product recommendations, product advice, process returns, use specific tools to fetch more data (e.g. business policies, product manuals, etc), or current pricing, best products matching what the customer might want etc.

If it's an AI agent it could be something like:

1. Customer sends message: "my product Y has X problem". (but the message could be anything from returns to figuring out most suitable product)

2. AI Agent uses "search_products" tool to find info about Y product in parallel with "send_response" to indicate what it's trying to do.

3. AI Agent uses "search_within_manual" tool to find if there are specific similar problems described.

4. AI Agent summarizes information found in manual, references the manual for download and shows snippet of content it based its answer on.

AI Agent itself is given various functions it can call like

1. search_products

2. search_business_policies

3. search_within_documents

4. send_response

5. forward_to_human

6. end_action

7. ... possibly others.

How would you do it in the traditional workflow engine sense?
by metalman | 2025-11-23 10:15:19+00:00
it will likely come as a double wammy, polinator/benificial/comensual insects will be reduced past self sustaining number and destructive bugs will increase to uncontrolable levels. plants have been managing this for millions of years, needing polinators and preditory insects, but fighting destructive and seed eating bugs the fight is older in animals, where there is a direct connection in the amount of abrasive silica in plants, and the development of teath and dental enamil is parellel in the fossil record we humans, fucking with shit big time is not going to go good, nature negotiates in ways and time frames that quite clearly exclude our direct partisipation, with nature ready, at any time, for a complete reset.
by domenicd | 2025-11-23 10:15:57+00:00
This is an excellent insight.

I think there is still some hope that technical solutions could be developed so that only the "Business Internet" gets access to verified identity, with the user somehow understanding this, while the "Fun Internet" doesn't have such capabilities. This is what stood behind, e.g., Google's proposed WEI [1] that got such huge backlash, or Apple's Private Access Tokens [2] which are essentially the same thing but quietly slipped under the community radar.

Other proposals are Google's in-limbo Private State Tokens [3], or the various digital-wallet/age verification proposals (I think Apple and Google both have stuff in that space).

But even basic stuff, like IP protection, can really throw off the anti-fraud and anti-botnet mechanisms. Your Lego fan site wants to be behind a CDN for speed and protection from DDOS? Well, people using VPNs or in Incognito mode might end up inconvenienced, because the CDN thinks it's dealing with bots. Rough stuff.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k

[3]: https://privacysandbox.google.com/protections/private-state-...
by bigmealbigmeal | 2025-11-23 10:18:19+00:00
What you're saying is a very common "poptimist" trope of the last decade or two. To say that, actually, these vocalists are highly intelligent and largely responsible for their own success.

Charli XCX, like nearly all popstars, was propped up by the producers and writers who shaped her sound and composed large parts of the music. Producers have been there the whole way. In particular, her blowing up was highly influenced by the stylistic direction, composition, production and sound engineering of people associated with the PC Music record label. The statement that she had good enough taste to have been around these people is rather unfair -- she was around artistic innovators like Sophie, yes, but THEY are the ones that pioneered the sound.

The most common refrain is that popstars often write their music. This is misleading: they write the lyrics, suggest a general vibe, and some rough melodies or chords. And even this is a stretch many times. They are not composing or producing the music in any larger sense, and this is the pivotal part of actually making music.

One famous exception that comes to mind is Grimes, who largely actually /makes/ her own music. She rarely seems to get credit for this.

This is not to say that vocalist popstars don't bring a lot to the table. They do. But what they bring to the table is incredible performance skill and charisma. I think poptimism has gone too far, to the point that we think the product was responsible for creating itself.
by nikolay | 2025-11-23 10:19:08+00:00
By the way, it's a design flaw to associate "social" logins with their emails! I've recently been in situations where a person was rehired into a different role with the same email address but a different Google Workspace ID, and their previous permissions were suddenly reinstated with a vendor. Auth0 does this correctly, though - email and user ID are separate identities. This sometimes creates headaches, but it's a top-notch security practice! I guess the only exceptions would be if your email is gmail.com, icloud.com, or me.com, with respect to Google and Apple "social" logins.
by Taniwha | 2025-11-23 10:19:17+00:00
C originally had =+ and =- (upto and including Unix V6) - they were ambiguous (a=-b means a= -b? or a = a-b?) and replaced by +=/-=

The original structs were pretty bad too - field names had their own address space and could sort of be used with any pointer which sort of allowed you to make tacky unions) we didn't get a real type system until the late 80s
by kotaKat | 2025-11-23 10:19:33+00:00
Easy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...

A lot of the Northeast US that was impacted has fairly 'fresh' copper infrastructure in the last 20 years.

... but in reality, yeah. The outdoor plant does not get taken care of well (in general), there's only so many field techs to go around to be able to re-balance an entire RF system and its nodes.
by childintime | 2025-11-23 10:20:29+00:00
I'm working on a HTML replacement right now. If I am to believe the author, it would solve her issue (I don't think so). But I don't know if I want to "share". Can I patent it? Good luck with that.

Going off-topic now, sort of.

The Open Source I see just isn't serious. We lose the right to have an opinion about a technology, to steer it, as that right is mediated by money, and it just evaporates, unless you can set the norm by being a major user, like a tech titan.

Markdown is special because we as developers are the users! Though tech titans dictate what we shall use. As developers we are seemingly in a concentration camp where others set the rules, and there is no escape, unless we surrender our work in the name of love, in the presence of those who absolutely don't, government included, and whose basic mode of operation is to make the profit on our work. It's just legalized demoralization, if not outright stealing.

If you're from a developing country you know what I'm talking about. There is no way to be creative and get paid. You are a beggar, no matter your talents. The end result is that human creativity remains untapped. That is the price we as a community pay every day. Heil the rise of AI, so we don't need each other any longer, and the abuse can stop ;-

There's crimes everyday, and we normalize them, if they are done by the trusted and verified, that talk about merit while they hire f*cks to do their bidding. As a community we are a harem, and they come to rape us, err, give us pleasure, whenever they feel like it, and expect us to love it. Well, don't you love your new toys? That is who we are. And we therefore tend to repeat the cycle in our homes, as "men".

In the end the framing as a technical issue is what marks us. It's is the safe zone, where we can deny the real issue, and cope. If you're a member of Nation Procrasti-me, you know what I'm talking about. Nation Procrasti-Me, Where Life Is Denied. And rent-seeking is the truth.

F*ck, how did we get so cooked? We shackled ourselves, duh. We are infants, or else outright dumb, dumb enough to give away our life force, for new toys to play. Worse, we dictate others do so too. That's when we stand on the side of the abuse, confidently like a toddler that just spread his shit all over the place and radiates "how good was that!".
by sallveburrpi | 2025-11-23 10:21:05+00:00
I use docusaurus as markdown renderer which adds most of what you need. Mermaid.js for figures. Never needed a data table from JSON but would be easy to add a custom component for this.

So yes for me markdown is definitely powerful enough for blogging and complex technical writing - has been for the last 6 years- with a few small extensions and I’ll eat my hat before I use anything xml based or reinvent html…
by cyanmagenta | 2025-11-23 10:25:04+00:00
I love all the unexpected twists in this. And it’s very beautifully written and sobering.

> the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else

That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation.

> he wasted his entire life, my mom said

In some ways, she did too by listening to her mother and not just getting divorced as she had wanted to. But I recognize that going against your family’s core beliefs is easier said than done.
by zkmon | 2025-11-23 10:25:04+00:00
I think you missed the whole point. Processor does not have routing logic. It's only job is to parse the request (form, text, image etc) and categorize it enough so that the workflow can do the routing for next actions. Routing is done by traditional predetermined logic, using rules. The discussion here is about whether it helps to define that routing logic at runtime (on-the-fly), instead of having it coded in predetermined logic. My view is, it doesn't help.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-23 10:26:01+00:00
"You know, may be convince everyone that dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is not a good idea? "

Compared to this, a planet-wide engineering project might be less absurd and more doable.

Even the EU is under strong internal pressure to water down its decarbonization project, because local effects have proven too inconvenient to voters. Green vote has gone down all across Europe, and that translates to reduced political influence of the ideas you are speaking about.
by stingraycharles | 2025-11-23 10:26:01+00:00
I’m very much uninterested in reading AI generated content. Your assertions seems to be “AIs only write like that because people have been writing like that”, but that’s not a great argument.

It feels like AI has suddenly given a platform for people who previously were unable to properly write blog content. But it immediately feels unoriginal and generic.

I’m just not interested in that type of content and immediately put off by it.

The only reason I mentioned this is because of the comment about Gemini 3 being in the comments.

I’m just really, really tired of all the AI content everywhere nowadays and crave some authenticity.

It just feels like cheap remakes / imitations to of original content.
by apples_oranges | 2025-11-23 10:26:18+00:00
"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged.

Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.
by oniony | 2025-11-23 10:26:40+00:00
In 1992 BBC 1 put out a live documentary programme called Ghostwatch, in which they visited a supposedly haunted house. There were many BBC documentaries at the time, and this was no different, so we all watched with half interest.

It's also important to note that there was little alternative programming at the time: just BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4. I can't remember if Channel Five had launched yet, but you get the idea. A significant slice of the UK population was watching.

Also, it's worth mentioning that back then I think significantly more people entertained the idea, if even slightly, that supernatural things loke ghosts could exist. There was many more spoon benders, clairvoyants, spiritualists in mainstream media than today.

Anyhow, the programme starts normal enough but then supernatural things start happening and all hell breaks loose just as the programme ends and the credits start rolling. We're all in shock. It's all we talk about at school the next day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch
by k_bx | 2025-11-23 10:27:36+00:00
It's a container with full os: systemd, journald, tailscale, ssh inside. No need to learn new docker world, just install the deb with your software inside

In a cluster mode, you can move container into another machine without downtime, back it up in full etc., also via one command.

In theory when using ZFS or btrfs you can do incremental backup of the snapshot (send the diff only), but I never tried it.
by jameslk | 2025-11-23 10:28:27+00:00
Music is a subjective thing, but what I like about Charli XCX is her albums have completely different sound from album to album, but are consistently fun to listen to. As if it puts you in a certain energetic mood. Listening to albums in full you can tell many tracks experiment with the genre. For example, she brought a niche thing like hyperpop to mainstream listeners in her prior 2 albums before brat.

These are some that I like from various albums:

https://youtu.be/CRYYBDG1b4Y

https://youtu.be/f-NS9hnmWN4

https://youtu.be/JsYJYUQgT7k

https://youtu.be/chSZCtLrgz8

https://youtu.be/5f5A4DnGtis
by jwr | 2025-11-23 10:28:47+00:00
LTS releases are great. I only use LTS releases on my servers. Problem is, if you need PCI compliance (credit card industry requirements, largely making no sense), some credit card processors will tell you to work with companies like SecureMetrics, who "audit" systems.

SecureMetrics will scan your system, find an "old" ssh version and flag you for non-compliance, even though your ssh was actually patched through LTS maintenance. You will then need to address all the vulnerabilities they think you have and provide "proof" that you are running a patched version (I've been asked for screenshots…).
by t8sr | 2025-11-23 10:28:57+00:00
I've worked with 5 different SCMs and I'm convinced that the reason why git repos often have such poor commit messages is because of the git commit style guide. So much of it only makes sense once you realize it's been optimized for like 5 of its original users reading it on 72 character terminal screens.

Asking people to fit a meaningful description of the change into 50 characters is silly, and it's IMO the reason why so many of them just write "fix bug" and call it a day.

Someone else has posted the Google guide for CL (change list) messages, but let me boost the signal: https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/developer/cl-d...

This is, I believe, still the best guide out there. When I'm coaching juniors, I recommend this guide, over the opinionated and outdated git "best practices" and I think the results are much better.
Show HN: SpacePigeon – a macOS workspace automation tool built on Hammerspoon
by kakmuis | 2025-11-23 10:28:59+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with a workspace automation script for macOS using Hammerspoon, and wanted to share it. I was looking for ways to do this because I found myself often opening the same apps in certain situations (phd research apps at the office and a clean workspace at home for instance) but I didn't find a tool that made this easy.

It’s extremely early (a single Lua file), but it already sets up a full “workspace” by opening apps, placing windows, and assigning them to Spaces.

Feedback welcome; planning to evolve this into a Spoon and eventually a full macOS app.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-23 10:30:31+00:00
I've been eyeing used bench multimeters recently and recently came across a discussion of Agilent vs Tektronix scopes. A comment on EEVBlog posits that the TDS still has value because the cost to upgrade to probes compatible with newer Tek scopes. I've no idea if that's even remotely true but it sounds plausible.

Likewise if a military (especially the US) standardized on an older Tektronix scope that might be enough to keep production alive (much like the Boeing 767 or Fluke 77). A high retail price would suggest that Tektronix simply doesn't care about retail sales.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/buying-scope-agilent...