MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-11-11 08:26:21+00:00
Governments should represent the needs and desires of humans. Corporations are algorithms designed to make their value go up - if not restricted by governments, they will crab-bucket eachother by any means necessary, including slavery. See: factory towns.

Therefore, corporations should have exactly 0 influence in governments, and billionaires should have the same influence as any citizen: one vote, and whatever influence they can peddle from a soapbox in a park.

This is obviously impossible because billionaires can buy TV spots. This is why governments under capitalism almost inevitably become extensions of corporations, which is what the OP comment means. In a system where capital = power, then, accumulation of capital means accumulation of power. You accumulate power, you use it to allow you to accumulate more power, you use it to allow you to accumulate more power... and so on.

I'm skeptical there's any solution to this within capitalism - I don't think highly socialized capitalism will work long term since the profit generating algorithms (corporations) will play within the rules to accumulate just enough of an edge to wedge their foot into government enough to get a smidge of influence, which they will leverage to weaken restrictions on corporations, which will allow them to get more influence, which will lead to them weakening restrictions further, and so on.

So long as capital can be converted into any power at all, I think the system will inevitably trend towards late stage capitalism / corpotocracy / plutocracy.

Do you believe billionaires should have more say in government policy than you do? Why? Why wouldn't a billionaire use more say to help themselves even more at your expense? They clearly love hoarding wealth and power, so, would it not be fair to say they'd like to do more of that?
by vanderZwan | 2025-11-11 08:27:19+00:00
I don't know if this is still true, but I know that in the 2000s the vinyls usually were mastered better than the CDs. There even was a website comparing CD vs vinyl releases, where the person hosting it was lamenting this fact because objectively CDs have a much higher dynamic range than vinyls, although I can't find it now. CDs were a victim of the loudness war[0].

Allegedly, for a lot of music that is old enough the best version to get (if you have the kind of hifi system that can make use of it) is an early 80s CD release, because it sits in a sweet spot of predating the loudness war where producers actually using the dynamic range of the CD.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
by mettamage | 2025-11-11 08:29:09+00:00
In a concrete sense, what actually happened came out of the blue. I fully agree with that. That's not what I mean.

> We have been told to expect the unexpected.

But this didn't.

What happened is unexpected. And we've been told to expect that.

I understand that that's very broad, but the older people teaching me had a sense of how fast technology was accelerating. They didn't have a tv back in the day. They knew that work would change fast and the demands of work would change fast.

The way I've been taught at school, it's to actually be that wary and cautious. You need to pivot, switch and upskill fast again.

What are humans better at than what AI isn't? So far, I've noticed it's being connected to other humans. So I'm currently at a job that pivots more towards that. I'm a data analyst + softwar engineer hybrid at the moment.
by bob1029 | 2025-11-11 08:29:12+00:00
I am impressed with the extent of the effort here. I struggle with the notion of working with just one other person on a game. Building an entire hiring pipeline and documenting it seems like something that would immediately kill the dream for me at this scale.

There is something that feels very cursed to me about a team of size 2~10 for game dev. At this point I'd much rather go solo or join a team of 100+. Zero structure or a lot of structure. A medium amount of structure seems to bring the maximum amount of entropy.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-11 08:30:46+00:00
It's doing something novel in the systems programming space, and makes a bunch of different trade-offs compared to Rust. That's interesting, even if you might reasonably conclude that Rust is still a better language to use in most cases. It's good to explore different corners of the programming language design space.

Every single commonly-used programming language has a couple red flags, often much more than a couple. Javascript, C, C++, Go, Python - these languages all have serious flaws and are nonetheless used by extremely large numbers of people for all sorts of tasks.
by comex | 2025-11-11 08:31:00+00:00
And you will find similar reasoning in the Citizens United decision with respect to corporations:

> If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the antidistortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form.
by komali2 | 2025-11-11 08:31:48+00:00
I haven't read a technical book in a long time. I read "You Don't know JS," which is very very short, in about a week. I read "Cracking the Coding Interview" in 3 weeks.

As for non fiction, I read "Anarchist Communism" (fairly short) in a week, "Delivered from Distraction" in a month, "Masters of Doom" in about 2 weeks.

It depends on my interest more than anything. I obliterated the entire Robin Hobb "Assassin's" series, 12 books, in just about two months.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-11-11 08:32:12+00:00
I still think it would be fun for a video game. Write a backstory for a whole bunch of NPCs and let the player dig as deep as they like.

I'm not sure what the bottle neck right now is. Either this idea isn't as fun as I think or we can't do it in real time on consumer hardware yet.
by fleventynine | 2025-11-11 08:32:25+00:00
When looking at the rv32imc emitted by the Rust compiler, it's clear that there would be a lot less code if the compiler could choose different registers than those defined in the ABI for the arguments of leaf functions.

Not to mention issues like the op mentions making it impossible to properly take advantage of RVO with stuff like Result<T> and the default ABI.
by pron | 2025-11-11 08:33:05+00:00
> I dunno, I think you're trying to split hairs if top 20 isn't "very popular".

It's very popular compared to Prolog or Haskell, but not compared to languages people use professionally: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

> In general, in order to convince someone to leave their current tools, you have to not only be better but a lot better.

I agree.

> So when C++ came on the scene, they had to compete against ~20 years of accumulated legacy systems and language history. Rust had to compete with 50 years of legacy systems and language history.

Ok, but Go and TypeScript are pretty much the same age, and when Java came out, it took over much of C++'s market very quickly.

I agree Rust has some clear benefits over C++, but it also has intrinsic challenges that go well beyond mere industry momentum (and other languages have shown that momentum is very much defeatable).

> Moreover, developer expectations are a lot different today.

But there are more programmers today, and many more people worked on Rust than on C++ in its early years. And besides, Rust has had all those things you mentioned for quite some time, and C++ still doesn't have some of them.

> Also, I don't know why you've chosen "very popular" as a metric. Very popular isn't something a language needs to be, it just needs to be big enough to sustain a community.

I agree it doesn't need to be very popular to survive. But popularity is a measure of the actual benefit a language brings or, at least, lack of popularity is a measure of lack of sufficient benefit, because software is a competitive business. So claims that Rust is some huge game-changer don't really square with its rate of adoption.
by District5524 | 2025-11-11 08:33:42+00:00
I agree that this is a very exciting and really crucial research and I'm glad there is funding for this. But it's very strange that Hungarian is marked as "highly endangered" at https://aidemos.atmeta.com/omnilingualasr/language-globe Highly endangered is supposed to mean "The language is used by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may still understand the language, they typically do not speak it to children or among themselves." Then why is Hungarian marked as such? Obviously not true with 14 million active speakers and being the 20th in terms of the most language resources published on the Internet. Additionally, the feedback mechanism seems also broken ("There was an error submitting your feedback. Please try again.")
by anonzzzies | 2025-11-11 08:33:58+00:00
They absolutely will, but a non-root user inside docker so far, even when asked, did not result in any damage outside the the docker container. With root it managed to break things, but as user it did not find a way. When I asked it to try more 'fishy' things, codes + claude code both refused; after prompting some more 'but we are testing a security tool ' etc, it just tried very meek things that did not manage to do anything.
by ChrisGreenHeur | 2025-11-11 08:34:36+00:00
It just depends on what architecture your computer has.

On a PC, the CPU typically has exclusive access to system RAM, while the GPU has its own dedicated VRAM. The graphics driver runs code on both the CPU and the GPU since the GPU has its own embedded processor so data is constantly being copied back and forth between the two memory pools.

Mobile platforms like the iPhone or macOS laptops are different: they use unified memory, meaning the CPU and GPU share the same physical RAM. That makes it possible to allocate a Metal surface that both can access, so the CPU can modify it and the GPU can display it directly.

However, you won’t get good frame rates on a MacBook if you try to draw a full-screen, pixel-perfect surface entirely on the CPU it just can’t push pixels that fast. But you can write a software renderer where the CPU updates pixels and the GPU displays them, without copying the surface around.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-11-11 08:36:31+00:00
I'm very skeptical about this zero commercial value claim. I don't think everyone skips past it, and even if they do, that's just the stuff they're detecting as AI. How much have they not identified? What about in a couple years?

Heck, even humans subtly trying to sell something give off a vibe you can pick up quickly. But now and then they're entertaining or subliminal enough that they get through.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-11 08:37:51+00:00
> You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy.

You can't, at least not if you want an acceptable result.

In photography, if you have a JPEG photo only, you can't do post-facto adjustments of the white balance, for that you need RAW - too much information has been lost during compression.

For movies it's just the same. To achieve something that actually looks good with a LUT (that's the fancy way for re-coloring, aka color grading), you need access to the uncompressed scans, as early in the processing pipeline as you can get (i.e. before any kind of filter is applied).
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-11 08:37:55+00:00
> "Even so, it’s a little disquieting to think that Toy Story, the film that built our current world, is barely available in the form that wowed audiences of the ‘90s."

Load it up in DaVinci Resolve, knock the saturation and green curve down a bit, and boom, it looks like the film print.

Or you could slap a film-look LUT on, but you don't need to go that far.
by bt1a | 2025-11-11 08:38:49+00:00
I wonder what incentives for adherence to the use of this meta-tag might exist? For example, imagine I send you my digital resume and it has an AI-generated footer tag on display? Maybe a bad example- I like the idea of this in general, but my mind wanders to the fact that large entities completely ignored the wishes of robots.txt when collecting the internet's text for their training corpuses
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-11 08:39:12+00:00
Maybe we should be using ATS. Or more likely, maybe we should be using some novel language that doesn't exist yet that brings the benefits of ATS to a language with good tooling and good DX that you can use to build practical system software with - that is, a Rust for ATS instead of C/C++. I think we should be designing programming languages that help eliminate as many classes of bug as possible, and Rust is not the culmination of the line here.
by coopierez | 2025-11-11 08:39:22+00:00
I'm stunned so many people here can remember details as fine as the colour grading of a film. I couldn't remember specifics like that from 6 months ago, let alone 30 years ago when I was a child and wouldn't have had the thought to watch for cinematographic touches.

Side node - I wonder if it's a millenial thing that our memories are worse due to modern technology, or perhaps we are more aware of false memories due to the sheer availability of information like this blog post.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-11 08:39:46+00:00
> A disparate drone swarm taking out power distribution stations (I don't know what they're officially called) all over the country would be devastating

I believe the military term of art for this would be a “nothingburger”.

This kind of stuff is not expected to have a meaningful impact on your ability to fight.

Yes, it’s inconvenient for civilians. Has next to nothing to do with winning wars, much of WW2 was fought in much worse circumstances than “the electricity doesn’t work”.

Focusing on things like this results in diverting resources from fighting wars, and results in losing them (or at least hinders your ability to win). The goal isn’t to preserve quality of life for civilians, but to at the very least preserve the integrity of the nation.
by jarjoura | 2025-11-11 08:40:31+00:00
I thought WASM was no_std since there's no built in allocator?

Regardless, not sure why a Rust engineer would choose this path. The whole point to writing a service in Rust is that you would trade 10x time build complexity and developer ovearhead for getting a service that can run in a low memory, low CPU VM. Seems like the wrong tools for the job.
by AdamN | 2025-11-11 08:41:32+00:00
Yeah there was this great cartoon many years back where a guy is on his computer and the FBI is looking over his shoulder at his screen. A character named 'Facebook' is pushing him aside and says "Let me show you how to do it". When you look at the cartoon for a minute or so you see in the shadow in the back of the room this robot labeled 'Google' and he's just quietly observing.
by vbezhenar | 2025-11-11 08:41:50+00:00
JSON is immediately usable without any notations.

Basically the difference is that underlying data structures are different.

JSON supports arrays of arbitrary items and dictionaries with string keys and arbitrary values. It aligns well with commonly used data structures.

XML node supports dictionary with string keys and string values (attributes), one dedicated string attribute (name), array of nodes (child nodes). This is very unusual structure and requires dedicated effort to map to programming language objects and structures. There were even so-called "OXM" frameworks (Object-XML Mapper), similarly to ORM.

Of course in the end it is possible to build a mapping between array, dictionary and DOM. But JSON is much more natural fit.
by internet_points | 2025-11-11 08:42:28+00:00
Looking forward to when we have compiler code written by llms. How hard would it be for a rogue llm provider/employee to channel the spirit of ken and inject little trusting trust attacks, if no one is reading the code any longer? (How likely is it to go off on such a tangent its own, after writing thousands of mind-numbingly boring lines of assembly code, given the existence of many such proof-of-concepts in its training set and the copious examples of temporary llm insanity?)
Show HN: Mapnitor – Lightweight server monitoring for Linux and Windows
by arlindb | 2025-11-11 08:42:48+00:00
Hey HN

I’ve been building Mapnitor, a lightweight server monitoring platform focused on speed, simplicity, and no bloat. It’s designed for small teams, sysadmins, and hosting providers who just want quick visibility — without setting up Zabbix, Grafana, or a huge stack.

What it does:

Uptime & latency checks (Ping, TCP, HTTP)

Clean dashboard with per-node performance view

Lightweight agent (optional) — or just add targets directly

Instant history and analytics view

What it doesn’t do:

No complex dashboards, plugins, or configs.

No heavy setup or long onboarding — just add IPs and go.

Why I built it: I manage multiple servers across clients and hosting environments — I was tired of setting up full-stack monitoring tools for small cases. Mapnitor started as a personal script, then evolved into a minimal SaaS that can handle 20+ devices from different companies in seconds.

It’s still in early beta, so I’d love feedback from sysadmins, hosting engineers, or anyone dealing with uptime monitoring.

https://mapnitor.com

Would love to hear:

What features matter most for small infra setups?

Should I focus next on alerting (email/Slack) or integrations?
by skissane | 2025-11-11 08:42:55+00:00
> It's so wrong in every section I saw.

Not talking about this tool, but in general-incorrect LLM-generated documentation can have some value - developer knows they should write some docs, but are starring at a blank screen and not sure what to write so they don’t. Then developer runs an LLM, gets a screenful of LLM-generated docs, notices it is full of mistakes, starts correcting them-suddenly, a screenful of half-decent docs.

For this to actually work, you need to keep the quantity of generated docs a trickle rather than a flood-too many and the developer’s eyes glaze over and they miss stuff or just can’t be bothered. But a small trickle of errors to correct could actually be a decent motivator to build up better documentation over time.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-11-11 08:44:22+00:00
> Preserves the full 80 character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability

How line wrapping interacts with readability is for the reader software to worry about, not the control-freak author. Line length higher than the device width can handle can be even worse for readability than lines wrapped in the wrong places. It's one of the reasons I loathe PDFs.

> Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end

If the reader wants to have their code in hairline-width Courier, that's their right. It's not for the control-freak with awful taste in fonts to decide.

> Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful

Forces a particular style of syntax highlighting upon the reader without giving them an easy recourse to change it. No thanks.

> Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned

The closest thing to a decent argument. Except pretty much any text input that accepts embedded images will usually also provide a monospace formatting option, so there is no need to screenshot text here either.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-11-11 08:46:16+00:00
On Windows I've been using TortoiseGit for over a decade now and in terms of Git power user features in a GUI I think it's unmatched.

People who defend the CLI as the only real way to use Git simply haven't used a decent GUI for it. I consider myself a very advanced Git user, but I barely know the CLI commands off the top of my head.

A GUI really makes a lot of sense for something like Git, most of the time what you want to do is "contextual' from something like a list of files to commit or a log of commits and TortoiseGit is pretty good about exposing whatever you'd need to do.

I find that with GitKraken (aside from not being free), I just don't feel in control of what I'm trying to achieve with Git.

Git Extensions seemed pretty decent and possibly a nicer GUI paradigm than TortoiseGit, but when I tried it I found TortoiseGit to offer more power to me.

One thing that does annoy me a bit about TortoiseGit is that it has this philosophy of a new Window for everything, which for most things is not a problem, but is in a couple of places. For example, to work on a repository you tend to have to use the Explorer context menu to do things. I tend to open the git log window once and leave it open, and from it I can do pretty much everything. If it had some sort of "main app" view with a tab per repository you have open that would be awesome, instead of my having to have multiple open log windows. Similarly, for commits and PRs I like to double check each file's diffs. Its UI opens each one in a new window, but if it would rather have a sub pane from the commit view I think it would work better.

I used to use SourceTree in conjunction with TortoiseGit because I liked its tabbed UI for the simple things like pulling/fetching/pushing, switching branches, but I stopped using it about 5 years ago, the Windows version of it felt neglected in that it would often crash or become very slow.
by lukan | 2025-11-11 08:47:05+00:00
"eat your lunch .. or militarily"

Obviously all empires want to grow and devour the independent small states/societies and this is what happened and this is why only gigantic states(and those small ones siding with them) stand a chance today.

But a often tried out concept is that of federation. Meaning (semi) autonomous entieties get together for common benefits, like military defense and infrastructure. But of course also those have a tendency to turn into empires.

(The Delian League in ancient greece comes to mind, or well the russian federation today. )

But that does not mean it must be always like this. I believe there is a sweet spot that can be achieved and stays stable. But the current Zeitgeist seems to head in another direction.
by GTP | 2025-11-11 08:49:01+00:00
Let me try one last time to put this in terms that might be easier to understand for you. If we apply the same reasoning to e.g. Mathematics, it would be something like "Either you teach Calculus to your child from day one or you don't teach them any Math at all. Not willing to teach Calculus from day one means not willing to put the effort in parenting your child".
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-11 08:49:12+00:00
British unions were so aggressive there was serious fear of a communist revolution in those times, or a military coup to prevent one. They forced a three day week, rolling blackouts and an IMF bailout. Management doesn't deserve blame here, they were trying to keep their companies afloat in the face of people who were outright promoting Marxism and a government sympathetic to that / weak in the face of it.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41931869?seq=3

Sit-ins and factory occupations were inspired by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in led by Jimmy Airlie, Sam Barr and Jimmy Reid, all leading [Communist Part] members.