MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akerl_ | 2025-11-17 17:15:13+00:00
There have been plenty of browsers that were not part of a big company, either for part or all of their history. They don't tend to have massive market share, in part because browsers are amazingly complex and when they break, users get pissed because their browsing is affected.

Even the browsers created by individuals or small groups don't have, as far as I've ever seen, a "servant-oriented mindset": like all software projects, they are ultimately developed and supported at the discretion of their developer(s).

This is how you get interesting quirks like Opera including torrent support natively, or Brave bundling its own advertising/cryptocurrency thing.
by withzombies | 2025-11-17 17:15:21+00:00
Yeah, I think it's because none of the compilers are obligated to support the standard and things get added that never get implemented.

A good example is the C++11 standard garbage collection! It was explicitly optional but afiak no one implemented it.

https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/cpp11-library#gc-abi
by emschwartz | 2025-11-17 17:15:50+00:00
Very interesting! I especially appreciated the test of running models against the same benchmark from the following year and the point about the per-token discount being negated by models needing more tokens to get to the answer.

Generalization:

> Maybe Chinese models generalise to unseen tasks less well. (For instance, when tested on fresh data, 01’s Yi model fell 8pp (25%) on GSM - the biggest drop amongst all models.)

> We can get a dirty estimate of this by the “shrinkage gap”: look at how a model performs on next year’s iteration of some task, compared to this year’s. If it finished training in 2024, then it can’t have trained on the version released in 2025, so we get to see what they’re like on at least somewhat novel tasks. We’ll use two versions of the same benchmark to keep the difficulty roughly on par. Let’s try AIME:

> Almost all models get worse on this new benchmark, despite 2025 being the same difficulty as 2024 (for humans). But as I expected, Western models drop less: they lost 10% of their performance on the new data, while Chinese models dropped 21%. p = 0.09.

> Averaging across crappy models for the sake of a cultural generalisation doesn’t make sense. Luckily, rerunning the analysis with just the top models gives roughly the same result (9% gap instead of 11%).

Cost-effectiveness:

> Distinguish intelligence (max performance), intelligence per token (efficiency), and intelligence per dollar (cost-effectiveness).

> The 5x discounts I quoted are per-token, not per-success. If you had to use 6x more tokens to get the same quality, then there would be no real discount. And indeed DeepSeek and Qwen (see also anecdote here about Kimi, uncontested) are very hungry.
by buu700 | 2025-11-17 17:16:08+00:00
To be fair, that promise of fission made sense from a purely scientific and mathematical perspective, before running into the practical realities of how its externalities interact with real-world politics. Fission is expensive because in practice it turns out we care quite a lot about proper waste management, non-proliferation, and meltdown prevention.

In a world where anyone could just YOLO any reactor into production with minimal red tape, consequences be damned, fission energy would actually be extremely cheap. Hence the optimism around fusion. The promise of fusion is an actualization of last century's idealistic conception of fission. It can be a silver bullet for all intents and purposes, at least once it's established with a mature supply chain.
by gspencley | 2025-11-17 17:16:15+00:00
> But it ultimately doesn't matter either way. A major selling point/part of the "contract" the web platform has with web developers is backwards compatibility.

The fact that you put "contract" in quotes suggests that you know there really is no such thing.

Backwards compatibility is a feature. One that needs to be actively valued, developed and maintained. It requires resources. There really is no "the web platform." We have web browsers, servers, client devices, telecommunications infrastructure - including routers and data centres, protocols... all produced and maintained by individual parties that are trying to achieve various degrees of interoperability between each other and all of which have their own priorities, values and interests.

The fact that the Internet has been able to become what it is, despite the foundational technologies that it was built upon - none of which had anticipated the usage requirements placed on their current versions, really ought to be labelled one of the wonders of the world.

I learned to program in the early to mid 1990s. Back then, there was no "cloud", we didn't call anything a "web application" but I cut my teeth doing the 1990s equivalent of building online tools and "web apps." Because everything was self-hosted, the companies I worked for valued portability because there was customer demand. Standardization was sought as a way to streamline business efficiency. As a young developer, I came to value standardization for the benefits that it offered me as a developer.

But back then, as well as today, if you looked at the very recent history of computing; you had big endian vs little endian CPUs to support, you had a dozen flavours of proprietary UNIX operating systems - each with their own vendor-lock-in features; while SQL was standard, every single RDBMS vendor had their own proprietary features that they were all too happy for you to use in order to try and lock consumers into their systems.

It can be argued that part of what has made Microsoft Windows so popular throughout the ages is the tremendous amount of effort that Microsoft goes through to support backwards compatibility. But even despite that effort, backwards compatibility with applications built for earlier version of Windows can still be hit or miss.

For better or worse, breaking changes are just part and parcel of computing. To try and impose some concept of a "contract" on the Internet to support backwards compatibility, even if you mean it purely figuratively, is a bit silly. The reason we have as much backwards compatibility as we do is largely historical and always driven by business goals and requirements, as dictated by customers. If only an extreme minority of "customers" require native xslt support in the web browser, to use today's example, it makes zero business sense to pour resources into maintaining it.
by zetafunction | 2025-11-17 17:16:20+00:00
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/451401343 tracks work needed in the upstream xml-rs repository, so it seems like the team is working on addressing issues that would affect standards compliance.

Disclaimer: I work on Chrome and have occasionally dabbled in libxml2/libxslt in the past, but I'm not directly involved in any of the current work.
by leetrout | 2025-11-17 17:16:34+00:00
Just as an aside for the fargate convo... we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI that has our container images (which are larger than I like) pre-baked and we went from a ~3 minute startup in fargate to ~30 seconds with the ASG when it's not triggering a scaling action.

We're using prefect not Temporal and each prefect flow launches in a discrete ECS task so the waiting added up.
by dboreham | 2025-11-17 17:16:39+00:00
Note that the rise of Linux was caused by the rise of low cost, high performance x86 CPUs. There was a period of time when it was obvious you could get much more bang for the buck from x86, but there wasn't a viable OS to use (for servers). Yes NT existed, and we shipped binaries for NT but it was always an awkward fit to run server software on NT. So Linux, which at the time was kind of crappy (unreliable, didn't have threading) was improved by various vendors' efforts to the point where they could re-target their server products into PC-class hardware. Sun was sunk by the people who were downstream in the value chain leading back to Sun's revenue working hard to design Sun out of the loop, by means of PC-class hardware and the Linux OS.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-17 17:18:08+00:00
You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.

I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what

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

is for cars. On the other hand, Intel is doing everything it can to keep the x86 platform from advancing which will let even the laggards catch up.
by arjie | 2025-11-17 17:18:12+00:00
A decade or so ago, after an interview that didn't go that well, a candidate reached out asking for feedback. I gave him some algorithms and data structures advice and where to read what and stuff like that and he responded really positively then reached out to me months later to tell me he went and learned all the stuff and got a job at some now-famous startup (Airbnb? I don't remember). I was early in my career back then and was happy for him. Now, if I were to do that I'd be like "Damn, this guy is capable of taking the feedback and actioning on it. I should have somehow found a way to hire him!"

Haha, I hope he's doing well wherever he is :)
by mccoyb | 2025-11-17 17:18:42+00:00
I don't believe it, otherwise why not just compile a static but generic version of the method with branches based on the tags of values? ("Can't figure out the types, wait until runtime and then just branch to the specialized method instances which I do know the types for")

Perhaps there is something about subtyping which makes this answer ... not correct -- and if someone knows the real answer, I'd love to understand it.

I believe that this answer is because of performance -- if I can JIT at runtime, that's great -- I get dynamism and performance ... at the cost of a small blip at runtime.

And yes, "performant Julia code" -- that's the static subset of the language that I roughly equated to be the subset which is trying to be pried free from the dynamic "invoking the compiler again" part.
by saghm | 2025-11-17 17:18:44+00:00
I haven't seen Interstellar, but to be fair to Jurassic Park, there's literally a character who tells everyone else that the park is a terrible idea, even if his "scientific" basis for it isn't very coherent. (He might still be an idiot in other ways; I haven't seen it in a while, but I think it's an overstatement to say it's about everyone being an idiot rather than some specific people with enough money to find enough other idiots to execute their vision).
by mareksotak | 2025-11-17 17:19:58+00:00
I get the revenue point, but it doesn’t entirely feel that way from the outside. Google does try to sell Workspace as a coherent, modern collaboration suite, yet some of the decisions make it look like the product direction isn’t really thought through end-to-end.

What adds to the confusion is how often Google seems to re-surface or re-announce features that have been in Workspace for years, even though they’re not really polished for what teams need today or anywhere near on par with the competition. The recent “shared inbox” announcement is a good example: it’s basically mailbox delegation with a new coat of paint, but still not viable for real shared workflows.

And I keep seeing comments from people saying things like: “We’re looking for this feature so we can finally move off Microsoft 365.”

So there is demand. And not just for this feature alone. There are multiple areas where users clearly want functionality that keeps them inside Workspace instead of pushing them toward third-party tools or competitors’ ecosystems.
by dpark | 2025-11-17 17:20:04+00:00
Sure. I wasn’t responding to your statements but I can understand what you mean. If your code manipulates the physical world (and not in a “sets this bit on a disk” sort of way) then you have to validate that action. Whether that valuation should be decoupled from the business logic that drives that piece really depends on the complexity of the system. At some point you are going to do full integration valuation so it’s a question of balance. How much is tested that way vs more isolated.

Tests that work and verify the system works are the Pri0 requirement. Most of the conversations about how best to test are structured for the benefit of people who are struggling with meeting the Pri0 because of maintainability. With enough effort any strategy can work.

> However in my domain we have lots of little data stores and nobody else needs access to that store.

If the little data stores are isolated to small individual areas of code then you probably already have the necessary isolation. Introducing the lightweight data store isolation layer might be useless (or not, context dependent). Now if these individual areas are doing things like handing off result sets to other code then I would have something different to say.
by dfabulich | 2025-11-17 17:20:18+00:00
XSL is a Turing-complete functional programming language, not a declarative language. When you xsl:apply-template, you're calling a function.

Functional programming languages can often feel declarative. When XSL is doing trivial, functional transformations, when you keep your hands off of xsl:for-each, XSL feels declarative, and doesn't feel that bad.

The problem is: no clean API is perfectly shaped for UI, so you always wind up having to do arbitrary, non-trivial transformations with tricky uses of for-each to make the output HTML satisfy user requirements.

XSL's "escape hatch" is to allow arbitrary Turing-complete transformations, with <xsl:variable>, <xsl:for-each>, and <xsl:if>. This makes easy transformations easy and hard transformations possible.

XSL's escape hatch is always needed, but it's absolutely terrible, especially compared to JS, especially compared to modern frameworks. This is why JS remained popular, but XSL dwindled.

> It gives a low-effort but fairly high power (especially considering its neglect) on-ramp to templated web pages with no build steps or special server software (e.g. PHP, Ruby) that you need to maintain. It's an extremely natural fit if you want to add new custom HTML elements.

JavaScript is a much better low-effort high-power on-ramp to templated web pages with no build steps or server software. JavaScript is the natural fit for adding custom HTML elements (web components).

Seriously, XSLT is worse than JavaScript in every way, even at the stuff that XSLT is best at. Performance/bloat? Worse. Security? MUCH worse. Learnability / language design? Unimaginably worse.

EDIT: You edited your post, but the Custom Element API is for interactive client-side components. If you just want to transform some HTML on the page into other HTML as the page loads, you can use querySelectorAll, the jQuery way.
by weitendorf | 2025-11-17 17:20:42+00:00
If you (or others here) are truly interested in email+tcp proxying+workers-like-computing, then I have work to offer you in the build out of my company’s network/computing platform.

This is something that you can or could already do with Envoy proxy with the right amount of polish, knowhow, and elbow grease (which we have).

What Cloudflare doesn’t have are good general computing products and multitenancy supprt. But we have those, something like D1, and something like a remote tunnel that runs in your browser. So users can launch Stalwart instances painlessly and use our secret magic to render it in actual browsers without special middleware or extra state (or we could offer shared/default Stalwart to do it completely out of the box). So that would take you the rest of the way from platform-level email to application-level and user-level/managed email.

What we don’t have is the time to spare in productizing that and handling the email-specific routing in envoy, or finding capable/knowledgeable people who know all the email-specific content and skills. So hit me up if that's you, and otherwise, feel free to run wild with the knowledge that you can configure Envoy Proxy with an L4 network filter or HTTP filter that delegates to dynamically loadable/configurable wasm if you want a hackable Cloudflare workers or even a platform-level alternative (hint: store wasm code in FUSE). The L4 filter should work for email filtering.

[0] https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overv...

[1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-versions/v0... (where you'd start implementing email filtering logic)

[2] https://mail.mplode.dev (demo/test Stalwart instance we're running in our dev environment. Platform magic would allow us to render an email client directly embedded in https://brilliant.mplode.dev via remote IMAP/POP3)
by blueflow | 2025-11-17 17:20:58+00:00
My sentence continues:

> ..., and if you complain about these bugs to the systemd project, they will consider you a bump in systemd's way of greatness that must be purged

The sentence is not about systemd having bugs, its about how the devs handle bug reports.

In the /run/lock situation that i linked, Boccassi unilaterally declared WONTFIX towards the users whose applications he broke. If i did this at work, I'd get fired.
by kakacik | 2025-11-17 17:21:09+00:00
> Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of naming the problem, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot makes it impossible to ignore.

That's the core of most of real world issues be it at work or relationships of any type. I can also personally attest most of issues of any type in my megacorp are caused by bad communication. How many times you see a barely functional marriage where unspoken things hang around and one party is afraid to tell them to the other side, and subtle hints are ignored. How many folks from older generations had a good talk about their true sexual preferences for example. Some nationalities have issues speaking frankly, ie British circle around issues with too much politeness. Good luck getting any Indian (in India) telling you "no" or "I don't know" (spent so much time wandering in wrong directions in good ol' times before smart phones).

Remove this issue and psychologists lose 95% of their work. Perfectly clear communication is an exception in this world.

I'd say movies gradually found this topic since many people will find themselves in those movies and identify with struggles of protagonists. Then logically frequent ending resolving many if not all issues allows people to have a little dream of resolving stuff they struggle with (subconsciously or consciously) in their lives.
by nchmy | 2025-11-17 17:21:23+00:00
Yeah, it forked from sphinx when sphinx died or rugpulled or something like that. Seems to be very actively maintained.

I think one of the main draws is that it is a single binary rather than the complexity of ES/OS, JVM etc... And if you have a mysql/mariadb database, it just connects and automatically ingests extremely quickly. They also use Galera for replication, but I also think its not as explicitly shareded, which simplifies things.

Yeah, their benchmarks are astounding, so much so that it is hard to believe. yet, I have seen them be quite open to feedback, collaboration etc so

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts and insights!
by freedomben | 2025-11-17 17:21:41+00:00
This is great news. I look forward to a day when I never have to talk to a salesperson again.

> Forty-eight states have laws that limit or ban manufacturers from selling vehicles directly to consumers

Why on earth is this a law? (I mean besides the obvious lobbying efforts and likely scare-mongering from powerful auto dealers) Is there an actual reason/benefit for this though for consumers?
by sigwinch | 2025-11-17 17:21:47+00:00
History shows periods of opaque infighting within a closed circle of security barons. The west did not know Khrushchev was positioned for power until that ring met with Eisenhower for arms talks, and Khrushchev was the one standing next to Eisenhower at the buffet.

I think the West now expects a complex and probably mortal fight for succession, with the Patruchevs being favored right now.

I’ve heard people talking about factions: one ensuring Putin’s physical security; another ensuring a continuity of their power so that oligarchs and siloviki are indivisibly secure.
by kerkeslager | 2025-11-17 17:22:03+00:00
I think that a blanket should/shouldn't recommendation for arenas isn't right. Arenas are a tradeoff:

Pros: preallocating one arena is likely faster than many smaller allocations.

Cons: preallocation is most effective if you can accurately predict usage for the arena; if you can't, then you either overshoot and allocate more memory than you need, or undershoot and have to reallocate which might be less performant than just allocating as-needed.

In short, if you're preallocating, I think decisions need to be made based on performance testing and the requirements of your program (is memory usage more important than speed?). If you aren't preallocating and just using arenas for to free in a group, then I'm going to say using an arena for stuff that is going to be freed by the OS at program exit is adding complexity for no benefit--it depends on your arena implementation (arenas aren't in the C standard to my knowledge).

In general, I'd be erring on the side of simplicity here and not using arenas for this by default--I'd only consider adding arenas if performance testing shows the program spending a lot of time in individual allocations. So I don't think a blanket recommendation for arenas is a good idea here.

EDIT: In case it's not obvious: note that I'm assuming that the reason you want to use an arena is to preallocate. If you're thinking that you're going to call free on the arena on program exit, that's just as pointless as calling free on a bunch of individual allocations on program exit. It MIGHT be faster, but doing pointless things faster is still not as good as not doing pointless things.
by marssaxman | 2025-11-17 17:22:26+00:00
I used to work on procedural graphics, and to me the clear difference is that all the training involved happened inside my brain. This author's article describes a similar process. He's not throwing a lot of existing examples into a black box, letting it learn their features, then driving it to emit new images with similar features: he is learning, himself, what those features are, inventing a process which fits those bounds, then automating it with code.
by kjs3 | 2025-11-17 17:22:43+00:00
Z80 mode to run cpm

8080 mode, not Z80. Did run CP/M, and I used 22nice for probably longer than needed. Unfortunately over time lots of cool software assumed a Z80, sooo...

Xenix was just pollute and delute - system V with some BSD thrown in

Which Xenix? It was originally V7 based, and 'upgraded' to System III around version 3. I forget what it looked like between version 3 and version 5.x, where it became System V based (+ stuff).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-17 17:24:09+00:00
> whoever decides the GHC release numbers should be pulled aside and given a quick talk about how version numbers are supposed to work.

9.10.3 is a patch for the 9.10 version which was published after 9.12.1 but relates to an older version. Haskell keeps maintaining multiple versions of the toolchain.
by RealCodingOtaku | 2025-11-17 17:24:12+00:00
I have got only two annoyance on Gemini, lack of inline links and _font styling_, and they are by design (https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi#44-questions-about-t...)

It's fine for something like HN, but I heavily rely on named links and emphasis on all my blogs and is a dealbreaker.