MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-01 17:10:29+00:00
What's your point? Passports are essential in todays globalist world. I read once that British people travelling through revolutionary france were incredulous and derisive of their insistence that everyone should have a passport. I do believe that the British historically had a much stronger sense of personal liberty as opposed to Europe and you can see remenants of that to this day and that they passed on this culture to the US who are the strongest believers in it.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-01 17:10:39+00:00
She was lying, is what I meant. She is a liar.

Re: Stafford Beer, we're beyond that in so many ways —- what in ordinary times might be considered an emergent, unthinking consequence of this system is what it was actually designed to do: the terror and arbitrary quality or even the perception that the USA is hostile to foreigners, is not an accidental, emergent quality of the operation. It's Stephen Miller's intent.

If you were to take a truly Stafford Beer approach to this, then you might say the purpose of this system is to desensitise Americans to the arbitrary and/or violent expression of presidential power.

But when you combine that with blowing up boats that contain no combatants and could have been interdicted, the use of selective prosecution, and the confidence with which they say, look, that is exactly what we're doing, even that feels like it is pretty close to text, certainly not unconscious subtext.
by rglover | 2025-11-01 17:11:06+00:00
100% this. The culture has shifted toward normalizing lying to such a degree that now, most people will stare you in the eye and lie to your face for the sake of self-preservation. Low-trust is now the default, high-trust is a rare luxury. Most people are just demi-Barnum's now (and if they're not, their brain has been so utterly cooked by the spectacle that they may as well be running a scam relative to the lack of actual value they produce).
by bee_rider | 2025-11-01 17:11:46+00:00
Thiel is a successful web company startup investor guy, right? So about as far away from semiconductors as one can get while still working vaguely with computers.

“Smart,” I mean, who knows. Sometimes our talents, expertise, and opportunities line up in a way to make us look smart, other times they don’t.

He’s also fairly politically connected and this seems to be a pretty… politically connected project.
by me-vs-cat | 2025-11-01 17:12:24+00:00
> the line is ... arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.

This is the real problem. They use vague statements to make decisions based on loyalty with just enough merit as distraction.

Everything will get much worse for everyone, and they will probably set back the progress of causes they use as vehicles in their loyalty crusade. I increasingly see other outcomes becoming less likely.
by dathinab | 2025-11-01 17:12:45+00:00
I think this is a you problem

as in that "isn't the style of code you are used too"

I don't think "how well people not familiar with you language can read it" is a relevant metric for most languages.

Also IMHO while C feels readable it isn't when it matters. Because it very often just doesn't include information you need when reading. Like looking at function header doesn't tell you if a ptr is nullable, or if a mut ptr is a changeable input value or instead is a out ptr. which is supposed to point to unitialized memory and if there is an error how that affects the state of the validity of any mutable ptrs passed in. To just name some example (lets not even get started about pre processor macros pretending to be C functions). In conclusion while C seems nice to read it is IMHO often a painful experience to "properly" read it e.g. in context of a code review.

As a side note: The seemingly verbose syntax of e.g. `chrono::DateTime` comes from there being 2 DateTime-types in use in the module, one from the internationalization library (icu) and one from a generic time library (chronos). Same for Sender, etc. That isn't a supper common issue, but happens sometimes.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-01 17:12:48+00:00
It does, to some extent. These projects wouldn't have the support they had if they didn't have a plausible way to deliver some improvement along the metrics they market. It's the outsized harmful impact that's usually just left unspoken.

Also, I'm not saying Chat Control is dual-use, I'm saying crypto is. Chat Control actually needs working crypto to be properly implemented.
by hinkley | 2025-11-01 17:12:51+00:00
Lack of sleep exacerbates existing medical conditions to a substantial degree. Cortisol levels and inflammation markers start to rise after around two days.

And in particular if you abuse epinephrine enough. Caffeine blocks the sensation of fatigue, epinephrine does it even moreso, and up until I was in college, when my roommate told me about it, could be purchased from truck stops as an “allergy medication” but truckers use it to pull double shifts. If you keep taking it you will feel fine right up until you keel over.

South Korea has places you can rent a computer. Some are 24 hour. There was a case a while back where a middle aged man stayed awake for around 50 hours and died at his computer. Officially he died from lack of sleep.
Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?
by weakfish | 2025-11-01 17:13:04+00:00
Hi all,

I’m a longtime Neovim user who’s been EMacs-curious. The hold up for me has been that I’ve been unable to find a source of truth for what’s top-of-the-line as far as plugins are. With Neovim, it’s a safe bet to look at what folks like Folke are doing, but I have struggled to find a similar figure in the Emacs community who gives insight into what’s-what. I know Doom exists, but I want to fully “own” my config and not over complicate it.

Thanks!
by elashri | 2025-11-01 17:13:09+00:00
I have a userscript to actually hide my own karma because I always think it is useless but your point is good actually. But also I think that karma/comment ratio is better than absolute karma. It has its own problems but it is just better. And I would ask if you can share the userscript.

And to bring this back to the original arxiv topic. I think reputation system is going to face problems with some people outside CS lack of enough technical abilities. It also introduce biases in that you would endorse people who you like for other reasons. Actually some of the problems are solved and you would need careful proposal. But the change for publishing scheme needs push from institutions and funding agencies. Authors don't oppose changes but you have a lobby of the parasitic publishing cartel that will oppose these changes.
by jonway | 2025-11-01 17:13:55+00:00
Well, in the 90s through the late 2000s there was a LOT of paranoia from the right, especially the evangelical right, as well as the milieu that is sorta called the "patriot movement" which includes minutemen militias, sovereign citizens, conspiracy theorists, separatists etc. regarding Government goons coming for them, "Mark of the Beast" stuff, and New World Order global cabals and what not. They even had magazines.[0] This is the precursor to the Obama FEMA Camp conspiracy theories (Which is ironic, since we are now building camps, just you know, for those people.)

Early 90's 2nd amendment anxiety, Ruby Ridge, assault weapon bans/Brady Bill and McVeigh's terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City propelled this stuff, and when we tried to impliment the national id (REAL ID Act) they very much flipped out, so they leaned on States Rights to shatter this notion, basically letting any state just not do it. 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane.

It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act. This is worth reflecting on.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060702184553/http://www.nonati...
by wging | 2025-11-01 17:13:58+00:00
You can use document.createElement and document.appendChild to create every last <th>, <tr>, and <td> if you want. Those functions are not specific to tables, unlike the one mentioned in the blog post. They can be used to create any elements and place them in the DOM. But if you know what you are doing you can get a perfectly fine table out of that. (Not that you should.)
by porridgeraisin | 2025-11-01 17:14:29+00:00
Yes, if journal_mode was not sticky, a new process opening the db would not know to look for the wal and shm files and read the unflushed latest data from there. On the other hand, foreign key enforcement has nothing to do with the file itself, it's a transaction level thing.

In any case, there is no harm in setting sticky pragmas every connection.
by baobabKoodaa | 2025-11-01 17:15:04+00:00
> Would you believe that the founder—who could not make an alarm clock for $70 M, but who has allegedly beaten ASML for under $100 M—has also found time to solve nuclear fusion?

Oof. Before this point in the article I wasn't sure if it's fraud, but comparing the money raised for a (failed) alarm clock vs money raised for supposedly-successful ASML competitor was a good of putting things in perspective. And the nuclear fusion thing... oh god.
by wrs | 2025-11-01 17:15:25+00:00
Doing select on tasks doesn’t really make sense semantically in the first place. Tasks are already getting polled by the executor. The purpose of select is to run some set of futures the executor doesn’t know about, until the first one of them completes. If you wanted to wait for one of a set of tasks to do something, you don’t need any additional polling, you’d just use something like a signal or a channel to communicate with them.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-01 17:16:27+00:00
It’s possible ASML is the best to do this. But the fundamental research behind ASML’s modern tech is actually from a DARPA project if you go back far enough. While certainly ASML did years of work to bring the tech to commercial readiness, I wonder if they’re able to completely rethink their approach or if they’re too invested in one way of doing things.
by dang | 2025-11-01 17:17:12+00:00
Recent and related:

US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45745536 - Oct 2025 (4 comments)

Can Substrate disrupt ASML using particle acceleration? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732431 - Oct 2025 (11 comments)
by hinkley | 2025-11-01 17:17:40+00:00
Practically, you have to parcel out points of contention to a larger and larger team to stop them from spending 30 hours a week just coordinating for changes to the servers. So the servers divide to follow Conway’s Law, or the company goes bankrupt (why not both?).

Microservices try to fix that. But then you need bin packing so microservices beget kubernetes.
Nvidia GPU Boost: My Stock RTX 5080 Is Consistently Beating Advertised
by ArchitectAI | 2025-11-01 17:18:38+00:00
I’ve been running AI workloads on a fully unlocked RTX 5080 for the past few weeks. Not overclocked, not spoofed — unlocked.

When I bought the 5080, I realized NVIDIA’s driver stack was silently rejecting the new sm_120 (Blackwell) architecture. PyTorch and CUDA would fall back to sm_89, throttling tensor dispatch and compute units. Benchmarks looked great on paper, but real workloads — matrix ops, UNet training, fused kernels — were running at maybe 70 % of what the silicon could actually do.

So I tore apart the driver.

Inside libcuda.so, there’s a function that checks architecture capability and sets a status byte before dispatching. On the 5080, that byte was hard-coded to return “unsupported.” Patch that flag, rebuild, and suddenly the card lights up like a supercomputer.

I rebuilt PyTorch 2.10 from source, recompiled for sm_120, and the difference was immediate:

GPU compute: 23,529 (PassMark 11.1)

3D Graphics Mark: 46,214 — 99th percentile globally

Stable 51 °C under 100 % utilization

No overclocking

BF16 training speed: equal to or faster than a retail 5090

I’m currently using it to run GSIN — a global seismic forecasting AI that trains autonomously on cached physics grids and predicts stress-field changes before earthquakes happen. The GPU finally isn’t the bottleneck.

Why this matters: NVIDIA’s driver locks don’t just gate performance; they gate innovation.

Developers and researchers lose months of compute potential because the architecture IDs are throttled in software for “product segmentation.” It’s not about safety or stability — it’s market control.

I’m not selling anything. I’m not distributing NVIDIA’s code.

Just proving that the silicon you already paid for is capable of a lot more.
by jeffbee | 2025-11-01 17:19:07+00:00
I'm late to the thread, but it should be well-known that nothing in Ubuntu enjoys substantial testing, in any release. They squander the entire release cycle, then they "freeze" the release, after which they pile a huge amount of changes into the release in contravention of widely-held definitions of the word "freeze", then they cut the release before anyone has even tried it.

The above is absolutely what happened in this case. The package was at revision 0.1 throughout the release cycle, then 12 days before the final release, 6 weeks after the freeze and after the beta release, they changed the package to 0.2 with no notes other than "new upstream release". Nobody had time to try it, they just shipped it out to everyone literally without even trying it once.
by uses | 2025-11-01 17:19:14+00:00
As a Magic player, yeah some people definitely have a compulsive addictive gambling relationship with the product. And Wizards has been leaning into that recently with more rare versions of mechanically identical cards.

However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.

And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
by denysvitali | 2025-11-01 17:19:26+00:00
During university, we've built OptiTravel (https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel) to do something similar. We couldn't use Google Maps APIs (project requirement), so we wrote a custom routing algorithm based on A* and I've created a Rust server to host GTFS data (https://github.com/denysvitali/gtfs-server) à la Transitland (https://transit.land/).

Performance wasn't great since everything had to run locally and do network roundtrips, but it found routes in my hometown that Google Maps didn't show. Pretty cool discovering hidden connections in the transit network and being able to customize your own params (https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel/blob/master/src/ma...)
by impossiblefork | 2025-11-01 17:19:29+00:00
Yes, but it's a lot of money.

Thiel apparently 'only' has 27 billion USD, so if this is mostly his investment it's 1/27 of all the money he has, and I think when you're spending those sums on highly technical stuff involving physics and precision, you'd have the person representing the project you're planning to invest in, some physicists you know and trust, some people from a relevant industry, and then you sit down and think about the idea as you do when you read a paper, and you'd sit in this seminar for hours and use the blackboard, and my assumption is that you'd go away very close to knowing for sure whether it would work or not.
by Someone | 2025-11-01 17:19:41+00:00
That’s not a good example. Wrapping an integral value into a struct works exactly the same in C and (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40629989/pros-and-cons-o...)

In C++ you can even add overloaded operators to make using math on such structs ergonomical.

Compilers know of the idiom, and will optimize the struct away.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-01 17:19:42+00:00
The entitlement of so many modern vibe coders (or as we called them before, script kiddies) is absolutely off the charts. Just because there is not a rule or law expressly against what you're doing doesn't mean it's perfectly fine to do. Websites are hosted by and funded by people, and if your shitty scraper racks up a ton of traffic on one of my sites, I may end up on the hook for that. I am perfectly within both my rights and ethical boundaries to block your IP(s).

And just to not leave it merely implied, I don't give a rats ass if that slows down your "innovation." Go away.
by cptroot | 2025-11-01 17:19:49+00:00
> which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion

I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.
by jraph | 2025-11-01 17:20:02+00:00
Add "assumptions that became wrong" to "intended" and the perspective radically changes, to the point that omitting this part from my comment changes everything.

I would even add:

> the client wanted the server to deliver content it had intended for a different client

In most cases, the webmaster intended their work to look good, not really to send different content to different clients. That later part is a technical means, a workaround. The intent of bringing the ok version to the end user was respected… even better with the user agent lies!

> The difference is that people don't want companies to profit off of their content.

Indeed¹, and also they don't want terrible bot to bring down their servers.

1: well, my open source work explicitly allows people to profit off of it - as long as the license is respected (attribution, copyleft, etc)
by pstuart | 2025-11-01 17:20:22+00:00
The real fork is DuckDB in a way, it has SQLite compatibility and so much more.

The SQLite team also has 2 branches that address concurrency that may someday merge to trunk, but by their very nature they are quite conservative and it may never happen unless they feel it passes muster.

https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/begin-concurrent/doc/begin_co... https://sqlite.org/hctree/doc/hctree/doc/hctree/index.html

As to the problem that prompted the article, there's another way of addressing the problem that is kind of a kludge but is guaranteed to work in scenarios like theirs: Have each thread in the parallel scan write to it's own temporary database and then bulk import them once the scan is done.

It's easy to get hung up on having "a database" but sharding to different files by use is trivial to do.

Another thing to bear in mind with a lot of SQLite use cases is that the data is effectively read only save for occasional updates. Read only databases are a lot easier to deal with regarding locking.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-01 17:20:27+00:00
> investments are often justified as a cost of running a VC firm

> But yes, you’d expect more due diligence from investors, but a lot of times it’s just about how likeable you are and who you know.

I think both of these can be true simultaneously. The limits of due diligence and the practical ability to evaluate an investment opportunity (quickly and at low cost) mean you sometimes do make mistakes, even “stupid” ones. But also, access and networks and old boys clubs are rampant in the VC ecosystem.
by oconnor663 | 2025-11-01 17:21:05+00:00
To be clear, if you restrict yourself to `async`/`.await` syntax, you never see any of this. To await something means to poll it to completion, which is usually what you want. "Joining" two futures lets you poll both of them concurrently until they're both done, which is kind of the point of async as a concept, and this also doesn't really require you to think about scheduling. One place where things get hairy (like in this article) is "selecting" on futures, which polls them all until one of them is done, and then stops polling the rest. (Normally I'd loosely say it "drops the rest on the floor", but the deadlock in this article actually hinges on exactly what gets "dropped" when, in the Rust sense of the `Drop` trait.) This is where scheduling as you put it, or "cancellation" as Rust folks often put it, starts to become important. And that's why the article concludes "In the end, you should always be extremely careful with tokio::select!" However, `select!` is not the only construct that raises these issues. Speaking of which...

> But it seems like an absolutely absurd exercise for code running in userspace on a "real" OS like Linux

Clearly you have a point here, which is why these blog posts are making an impact. That said, one counterpoint is, have you ever wished you could kill a thread? The reason there are so many old Raymond Chen "How many times does it have to be said: Never call TerminateThread" blog posts, is that lots of real world applications really desperately want to call TerminateThread, and it's hard to persuade them to stop! The ability to e.g. put a timeout on any async function call is basically this same superpower, without corrupting your whole process (yay), but still with the unavoidable(?) difficulty of thinking about what happens when random functions give up halfway through.
by dap | 2025-11-01 17:21:27+00:00
I definitely hear that!

To keep it in perspective, though: we've been operating a pretty good size system that's heavy on async Rust for a few years now and this is the first we've seen this problem. Hitting it requires a bunch of things (programming patterns and runtime behavior) to come together. It's really unfortunate that there aren't guard rails here, but it's not like people are hitting this all over the place.

The thing is that the alternatives all have tradeoffs, too. With threaded systems, there's no distinction in code between stuff that's quick vs. stuff that can block, and that makes it easy to accidentally do time-consuming (blocking) work in contexts that don't expect it (e.g., a lock held). With channels / message passing / actors, having the receiver/actor go off and do something expensive is just as bad as doing something expensive with a lock held. There are environments that take this to the extreme where you can't even really block or do expensive things as an actor, but there the hidden problem is often queueing and backpressure (or lack thereof). There's just no free lunch.

I'd certainly think carefully in choosing between sync vs. async Rust. But we've had a lot fewer issues with both of these than I've had in my past experience working on threaded systems in C and Java and event-oriented systems in C and Node.js.
by jorangreef | 2025-11-01 17:21:46+00:00
Joran from TigerBeetle here!

This is a “walking sim” real visualization of our Deterministic Simulation Testing harness, the VOPR.

Typically we do DST headless in the terminal but this is a visualization, more or less the same thing but with a gaming engine on top.

It’s running real TigerBeetle code, but with simulated network/storage and fault injection, and multiple replicas in a cluster, all compiled to WASM and running in the browser, and you can interact with the simulation to poke it and watch the consensus recover.

Here’s the full background context and explanation from our talk, TigerStyle, for which we developed this sim: https://youtu.be/w3WYdYyjek4

See also a shorter explanation: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023-07-11-we-put-a-distributed...
by davemp | 2025-11-01 17:22:24+00:00
My point is that it’s easier to write correct Zig code than correct unsafe Rust. Raw pointers can be null in rust so you should use NonNull<T> but there’s aliasing rules that are easy to mess up. And difficultly with the stdlib as you mentioned.

I don’t actually mind Rust when I was able to write in safe user land, but for embedded projects I’ve had a much better time with Zig.