MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-11-01 15:49:10+00:00
I am French and we cont extending our fingers from a closed fist. Typically to 2x5=10.

When I was a kid I relized that I can count the fives on the right hand (1 finger for each 5 on the left), which brought me to 25.

It is only when I was traveling in Asia and watched people on markets that I realized that I can use my thumb to count my 12 other finger phalanges, which brought the total to 144. You just need to know your multiplication table of 12 :)
by raddan | 2025-11-01 15:50:16+00:00
The problem with an endorsement scheme is citation rings, ie groups of people who artificially inflate the perceived value of some line of work by citing each other. This is a problem even now, but it is kept in check by the fact that authors do not usually have any control over who reviews their paper. Indeed, in my area, reviews are double blind, and despite claims that “you can tell who wrote this anyway” research done by several chairs in our SIG suggests that this is very much not the case.

Fundamentally, we want research that offers something new (“what did we learn?”) and presents it in a way that at least plausibly has a chance of becoming generalizable knowledge. You call it gate-keeping, but I call it keeping published science high-quality.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-11-01 15:50:35+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem

Because when you require 1 thread per 1 connection, you have trouble getting to thousands of active connections and people want to scale way beyond that. System threads have overhead that makes them impractical for this use case. The alternatives are callbacks, which everybody hates and for a good reason. Then you have callbacks wrapped by Futures/Promises. And then you have some form of coroutines.

Keeping in mind that what Zig is introducing is not what languages call async/await. It's more like the I/O abstraction inside Java, where you can use the same APIs with platform threads and virtual threads, but in Zig, you will need to pass the io parameter around, in Java, it's done in the background.
by echelon | 2025-11-01 15:51:02+00:00
I can't stand this aversion to async/await. It's not a big deal.

I don't understand why async code is being treated as dangerous or as rocket science. You still maintain complete control, and it's straightforward.

Now that we know about the "futurelock" issue, it will be addressed.

I'm sure Rust and the cargo/crates ecosystem will even grow the ability to mark crates as using async so if you really care to avoid them in your search or blow up at compile time upon import, you can. I've been asking for that feature for unsafe code and transitive dependency depth limits.
by csande17 | 2025-11-01 15:54:30+00:00
Your comment is downvoted as I write this, but I kind of think Zig's new design agrees with you. It uses the terms "async" and "await", but the API design looks more similar to traditional threading (like Rust's thread::spawn and join() APIs). With the fun distinction that you can choose whether your program uses actual threads, or coroutines, or just runs everything synchronously without changing any of your code.
by gcr | 2025-11-01 15:54:55+00:00
Respectfully, this is also bullshit for my use case. For me, the M1 purchase was a step up compared to Intel; the rest is diminishing returns for now.

It’s also not true if you care about certain workloads like LLM performance. My biggest concern for example is memory size and bandwidth, and older chips compare quite favorably to new chips where “GPU VRAM size” now differentiates the premium market and becomes a further upsell, making it less cost-effective. :( I can justify $3k for “run a small LLM on my laptop for my job as ML researcher,” but I still can’t justify $10k for “run a larger model on my Mac Studio”

See https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4167#discu...
by kylecazar | 2025-11-01 15:54:58+00:00
The invasion of privacy is the obvious problem. But it isn't going to be functionally very useful to me either.

You're going to capture hours of walking and/or seemingly doing nothing, exchanging pleasantries/small-talk/banter. Without access to my thoughts, this is stuck in some superficial layer -- useless other than to maybe surface a reminder of something trivial that I forgot (and that's not worth it). Life happens in the brain, and you won't have access to that (yet).
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-11-01 15:55:07+00:00
Before Citymapper existed, there was OneBusAway, a Ph.D. student project at the University of Washington.

It still exists and powers millions of transit rider trips every day all around the world in Seattle, Washington DC, New York City, Poznan Poland, Buenos Aires Argentina, Adelaide Australia, and who knows where else.

If you’re interested in hacking on something like Citymapper, or setting up an OBA server for your own city, you can find everything you need on our GitHub organization: https://github.com/OneBusAway

That includes docker images, an iOS app and a trip planner framework, android app, Sveltekit web app, and even a next generation OBA server written in Go.

As far as the data to power this, you can get GTFS for every US transit agency from https://mobilitydatabase.org/

(nb I’ve been involved in the OBA project since 2012)
by leetrout | 2025-11-01 15:55:30+00:00
Haha, my term. Somewhere between a data lake and warehouse - still unstructured but not _everything_ in one place. For instance, if I have a multi-tenant app I might choose to have a duckdb setup for each customer with pre-filtered data living alongside some global unstructured data.

Maybe there's already a term that covers this but I like the imagery of the metaphor... "smaller, multiple data but same idea as the big one".
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-01 15:56:19+00:00
> It's insane that x86 Debian is still compiling all software targeting Pentium Pro (from 1995!).

Debian 13 raised the x86 requirement to Pentium 4 because LLVM required SSE2 and Rust required LLVM.

The target before was not Pentium Pro in my understanding. It was Pentium Pro equivalent embedded CPUs. Servers and desktops since 2005 could use x86-64 Debian.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-11-01 15:56:28+00:00
> At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

I've actually found Christians in America quite to be forcing their beliefs quite loudly upon everyone. Pretty wild to be personally offended by the tiny fraction of a percent that is the trans population (of which an even tinier amount is vocal as you say they are).
by pedro_caetano | 2025-11-01 15:56:47+00:00
Yes one should write flesh out rather than flush out. However, as someone who uses English as a second language, the concept of phrasal verbs is the single most non-intuitive thing (with the very real risk for severe faux pas).

From your own words, to flesh out implies to me as a non-native that I remove flesh from said thing, when in reality the expression is to mean that you "add" flesh to bones. Very confusing.
by mickeyp | 2025-11-01 15:57:24+00:00
"performance optimisation" --- yeees, well, if you don't care about data integrity between your reads and writes. Who knows when those writes you scheduled really get written. And what of rollbacks due to constraint violations? There's we co-locate transactions with code: they are intertwined. But yes, a queue-writer is fine for a wide range of tasks, but not everything.

It's that we need to contort our software to make sqlite not suck at writes that is the problem.
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-01 15:57:37+00:00
The incredible part is how that's only a tiny fraction of the profits the owners of that gambling operation are extracting from the citizens of maryland. Gambling addiction is a big in the human firmware, and we shouldn't allow private businesses to benefit from it, to the extent stem bwe can reasonably prevent it. Make the state the only source for gambling, make it low-dopamine, and get all the benefit for the state, with a sizable chunk devoted to treating gambling addiction.
by roywiggins | 2025-11-01 15:58:04+00:00
deportations are up among other groups too (this isn't meant to suggest they aren't racially profiling):

> The number of Irish citizens deported from the United States has risen by more than 50% so far in 2025 compared to the previous year, figures released to BBC News NI show.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o
by Balgair | 2025-11-01 15:58:06+00:00
I mean, in my little part of the world if you go up to any sub 24 year old male and say: " What's the line?" you'll get the betting numbers for the 'largest' local team playing that day.

It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-01 15:58:33+00:00
These architectures were for were high end machines at the time, universities and government agencies would indeed been the only ones buying these, and they probably migrated to commodity hardware long ago; if migrating to a PC-compatible architecture had been off the table for them, so had been keeping these things running after their EOL.

(In my second-tier university at my developing country, the Sun workstation hadn’t been turned on in years by the late 2000s, and the the minicomputer they bought in the 1980s was furniture at the school)

Edit: As for big businesses, they have support plans from IBM or HP for their mainframes, nothing relevant to Debian.
by robmccoll | 2025-11-01 15:59:07+00:00
In single threaded scripting languages, it has arisen as a way to allow overlapping computation with communication without having to introduce multi threading and dealing with the fact that memory management and existing code in the language aren't thread-safe. In other languages it seems to be used as a away to achieve green threading with an opt-in runtime written as a library within the language rather than doing something like Go where the language and built-in runtime manage scheduling go routines onto OS threads. Personally I like Go's approach. Async / await seems like achieving a similar thing with way more complexity. Most of the time I want an emulation of synchronous behavior. I'd rather be explicit around when I want something to go run on it's own.
by zahlman | 2025-11-01 15:59:21+00:00
> In practice, many built distributions contain binary artifacts (e.g. builds of CPython extensions). This differentiates them from source distributions

This seems like a good opportunity to mention that that the wheel isn't required to contain any non-Python content, and indeed it's strongly preferred to provide one even (I would say "especially") when there is no meaningful "build step" (https://pradyunsg.me/blog/2022/12/31/wheels-are-faster-pure-...). There are of course abandoned legacy projects around from before the option was available, that may never get fixed. But developers of new code in pure Python should ensure they understand the system.

(I would strongly prefer if we could have a single type of package artifact with an optional post-install hook for building any needed non-Python content. Alas....)
by fph | 2025-11-01 15:59:38+00:00
I am not debating what tranq_cassowary and the other two users are writing: it seems all correct (from what I can verify) and useful. I am just suggesting that they disclose their affiliation, if there is any, as a good transparency practice.

I myself am not affiliated in any way with their "infamous competition", not even as a user of their software, so I have nothing to disclose. (Actually, I am a Graphene OS user.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-01 15:59:56+00:00
We’re in a general economic decline masked, in some key aggregate measures, by the AI bubble. That’s the reason for the job cuts.

Shuffling money around between AI adjacent companies may (but I doubt it) be enough to keep the AI bubble going through the downturn, in which case stockholders in those key companies manage to ride it out without pain, and executives too because they serve their constituency well.

More likely, it just delays the reckoning.
by The_President | 2025-11-01 16:00:14+00:00
The depreciation of marquee and blink wasn't necessary; it's web developer's choice whether to use these and the visitor's choice whether to be repulsed. Marquee should have been improved for use as ticker elements for specialized application. The depreciation of nobr misses the point - the alternative is more complex. Hope the standard continues to keep the legacy elements: small, i, em, hr... etc.
by vessenes | 2025-11-01 16:00:22+00:00
Needs - who knows? Chooses to? Apparently.

That said I wouldnt be surprised if he makes more at substack annually than he did for the prize - about $1mm.

As to his own investment returns we don’t know, but early as 2016 he cautioned that apple google and Microsoft might be overvalued. If you imagine that diversification/defensive portfolio construction mindset stuck with him and he therefore underperformed the nasdaq since then we might expect something like 3xing his grant, meaning at 10% annual yield if he converted to using it for income he’d see 250-350k a year in income from the prize.

To be clear, I generally like Krugmans writing, I’ve learned a lot reading his essays, and I think he should make as much as he wants to make doing what he wants to do. But I’d like some intellectual rigor from him even when he’s talking about people he dislikes.
by ghaff | 2025-11-01 16:01:23+00:00
Both "everyone" and "to fund AI" are doing a lot of work there. There probably was a lot of hiring in excess of requirements in tech over the past five years or whatever--and a bunch of people who jumped on board the ship primarily to capitalize on the gold rush are going to end up suffering as a result. Doesn't mean that tech generally isn't still a big opportunity going forward but may very well mean that outsized tech money opportunity on the west coast of the US declines. (And cost of living declines will lag) It's happened before with respect to the other coast (and the Midwest to some degree).
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-01 16:01:51+00:00
> The alternatives are callbacks, which everybody hates and for a good reason. Then you have callbacks wrapped by Futures/Promises. And then you have some form of coroutines.

The event loop model is arguably equivalent to coroutines. Just replace yield with return and have the underlying runtime decide which functions to call next by looping through them in a list. You can even stall the event loop and increase latency if you take too long to return. It's cooperative multitasking by another name.
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-11-01 16:01:53+00:00
I am very much inclined to agree with you, but do you have any sourcing for a claim that spatial is a bigger problem with regards to security vulnerabilities? Every time I feel like posting similar sentiments I just know that a reply linking to an article about how Microsoft and/or Google claim 70% of bugs are memory safety issues will be posted. Both of the ‘studies’ (code surveys) seem to claim use-after-free make up the majority of those bugs.
by jayd16 | 2025-11-01 16:02:43+00:00
I don't really know Zig. How does it handle the common GUI thread pattern where you get lock free concurrency by funneling the async GUI code through the GUI thread?

When you know what functions and blocks are synchronous, you know the thread will not be yielded. If you direct async tasks to run on a single thread, you know they will never run concurrently. These together mean you can use that pattern to get lock free critical sections. You don't need to write thread-safe data structures.

If a function can yield implicitly, how do you have the control you need to pull this off?

It's a really common pattern in GUI dev so how does Zig handle that?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-01 16:02:58+00:00
There are cases in systems-y code where it is not safe to unwind the stack in the ordinary way and it is difficult to contain the side-effects. These can be non-obvious and subtle edge cases that are often difficult to see and tricky to handle correctly. C++ today is primarily used in code contexts where these kinds of issues can occur. This is why it is a standard practice to disable exceptions at build time i.e. -fno-exceptions.

With the benefit of hindsight, explicit handling and unwinding has proven to be safer and more reliable.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-11-01 16:02:59+00:00
While there are points here that I agree with, I do not agree with the premise that they are firing people to fund AI. Funding of AI (keyword funding, not usage) I would say is an adjacent relation, but not the reason people are being let go.

I think it's a combination of factors including:

- Overhiring in the past, most of these companies were/are still employing way above the pre-pandemic numbers when overhiring was the norm. Many of these companies legitimately probably have more people than they need still.

- No matter what you think, AI is certainly already capable of improving productivity enough to make up for many of the jobs lost. Just look at how much AI can do today compared to even just a couple years ago. Practically every engineer who is worth their salt can put out way more than they previously could. Yes there is the question of quality and whether that's going to keep up, but you simply cannot argue at this point that AI is not able to increase productivity enough for the decreased headcount. Theres a reason junior hiring has fallen, they expect senior engineers to both output more using AI and to have the capability of effectively reeling it in and reviewing.

- As much as I hate to say it because it gets people angry and political: offshoring. Every company that I've worked on or worked at in the last few years has increased headcount of offshore employees and contractors.

- And lastly is simply expectations. Executives can see that other companies that have let go of people are able to still effectively run much slimmer.
by neilv | 2025-11-01 16:03:02+00:00
Someone flagged this interesting discussion that a lot of people need to hear, and is especially relevant to tech industry. I emailed hn@.

[flagged] Gilded Rage – Why Silicon Valley went from libertarian to authoritarian (paulkrugman.substack.com) 56 points by adamors 2 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-01 16:04:27+00:00
If chat control is a good-faith effort to stop crime, why can't Android developer verification be a good-faith effort to stop cybercrime?

If politicians are not all power-hungry caricatures, is it possible that the same is true for businesses?

Android has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are far less computer-literate than HN users. I think it's very reasonable for Google to put speed bumps in front of malware developers trying to distribute through the Play Store. If you're a half-decent dev, $25 is nothing compared to the opportunity cost of your time in developing your app.

This whole thing seems to be a fairly recent announcement on Google's part, so it's unsurprising they're still hammering out details for hobbyist devs? How about making constructive suggestions for ways that Google can protect ordinary people without stopping power users?
by vessenes | 2025-11-01 16:04:31+00:00
It’s sad when such a brilliant credentialed economist starts criticising things he’s either uninformed about or pretending to be.

It matters because there’s a pervasive voice in American media that denigrates change makers; hackers if you will. I think denigration of people like that is toxic at scale for our country as a whole, and lazy to boot when it comes from great thinkers. There’s plenty of real things to complain about for almost any given tech titan; this was lazy incorrect journalism and it’s beneath Krugman.
by soared | 2025-11-01 16:04:43+00:00
The poster is kind of missing the point. If I see a tool that could make a lot of my employees 20% more efficient today, and maybe more than that in the future, I’m going to bet big on it.

Layoffs aren’t just to “fund AI” - layoffs (a) always happen and (b) likely genuinely make sense at some scale due to efficiency gain from AI.

It’s not “cut employees, send they money in circles to prop up stock prices” it’s “cut employees, like we always do (but more than usual since we have actual AI efficiency gains).” Separately, let’s yeet excess money in circles to prop up our stock price and AI is a great hype cycle vehicle for that.

Yeah layoffs always suck, especially big ones, but they literally always happen and IMO are not caused by AI circlejerking at the c level.

Also, for anyone curious about “AI gains”. In my role at bigtech company I need to have a high/medium level understanding of like 30 products and teams. LLM summaries of docs, tickets, slack, etc mean I can get a basic understanding and history of any topic in seconds, rather than spending hours reading all those sources. My role is not unique or special
by ben_w | 2025-11-01 16:04:44+00:00
Re #3: They're fairly likely to follow best practices going forward (if you "hold them right" they already can), but bugs are an important thing even when the models are better than any individual human.

Reason being: memetic monoculture.

Everyone has some blind spots, same for LLMs: No matter how much you use any particular model (or ask a particular human), when you hit a blind spot, they can't reflect on it and actually resolve it — even if you ask them to, they'll make a new "solution" with the same flaw, whatever that flaw happens to be.

Code review gets an extra pair of eyes to check for such things (or at least can, I have experienced coworkers who were write-only-read-never for any criticism of their code or architectural choices).

In chess, this is "being a centaur" (human + AI hybrid working better than either alone); people have been arguing that this is no longer true since about 2013, but given that was 16 years after Deep Blue finally beat Kasparov, even that is an economically useful delay for those of us who want to keep getting paid.

(Was the Ask HN itself AI generated? The trouble is, humans copying each other is also a way to get a memetic monoculture, and we also copy LLMs…)
by dylan604 | 2025-11-01 16:04:53+00:00
> a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA

and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come from? right, you're an immigrant, you should be detained. the 1600s detail is just smoke. the only key thing you said was white. everything after that is just fluff for telling the story.
by ncruces | 2025-11-01 16:04:53+00:00
SQLite, for the most part, uses polling locks. That means it checks if a lock is available to be taken, and if it's not, it sleeps for a bit, then checks again, until this times out.

This becomes increasingly inefficient as contention increases, as you can easily get into a situation where everyone is sleeping, waiting for others, for a few milliseconds.

Ensuring all, or most, writes are serialized, improves this.