MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-11-01 14:19:45+00:00
Who is still using these machines? Genuine question, not trolling.

It looks like the last machines of each architecture were released:

Alpha in 2007

HP-PA in 2008

m68k in pre-2000 though derivatives are used in embedded systems

sh4 in 1998 (though possible usage via "J2 core" using expired patents)

This means that most are nearly 20 years old or older.

Rust target triples exist for:

m68k: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support/m68... and https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support/m68... both at Tier 3.

(Did not find target triples for the others.)

If you are using these machines, what are you using them for? (Again, genuinely curious)
by Balgair | 2025-11-01 14:20:50+00:00
I'll make a bet here:

By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.

We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.
by yawpitch | 2025-11-01 14:21:04+00:00
Well I’ve worked in photography and cinematography, and some of that has involved legal and forensic contexts, and I’d say that for most purposes, pre-AI, there’s not really a gap that is about authentication… there’s a need to know of image B was derived from image A, but usually that’s a qualitative decision based on chain of custody (usually whomever has the earliest / rawest / highest quality original or primary reproduction master wins) not a quantitative thing based on hashing, especially as the hash changes from capture to use (especially when hashing the image + metadata and not just the image data itself). There’s more need for copy-robust steganography (for example, a watermark that’s invisible to humans but which AI cannot fail to introduce would be a trillion dollar technology) than there is a known and exploitable gap around who captured an image and what chain of images derived from that. If you work with raw data from original camera file and DNG for your various intermediate works (easily done with Lightroom / Darktable etc) you’re already able to maintain what is effectively a Markov chain through the simple act of keeping all your files backed up. Admittedly walking back from a low resolution copy on some Chinese t-shirt to the original camera file isn’t exactly easy, but it’s also relatively rare that it needs to happen.

I would say there probably is a gap in some areas I don’t know well… medical and forensic imagery, for instance, and law enforcement evidentiary chains. If your system was ubiquitous and free could the FBI coming across a WebP of apparent CSAM on the dark net be connected back to a specific camera file, with a specific date and time stamp, establishing quantitatively that the subject and the photographer and the consumer are all tied by a verifiable chain of possession? If so, well there’s societal good (and potential bad) arguments for it, but for it to be really useful it would need to be mandated inclusion in the cameras themselves.

For commercial photography I think you’ve got the problem that this is already relatively addressed. For a post-generative AI world it’s not clear how proof of authorship of what would have to be training data would be discernible from the deepfake content (absent that robust watermark idea, which would already make you rich beyond need). But in certain extremely specific workflows where chain of custody is really and ubiquitously important (medical records, legal evidence, educational materials, museum reprophotography, etc) there may be a market, but it would be very hard to validate without finding narrow experts.
by delichon | 2025-11-01 14:21:24+00:00
The libertarians I know are all authoritarian with regards to their own property, including their shares of stock. They object to centralized control, not to control. They see authoritarian control of their own company as an example of a decentralized locus of control. If there are libertarians who disdain detailed control of their own property I haven't met them.

If they leverage their property to help centralize control, they're something other than libertarian.
by roxolotl | 2025-11-01 14:21:38+00:00
> This is going to be a huge pain.

I struggle a lot when I see comments like this. The point is to be a pain. The point is to empower a national police force to subjugate the populace. The people in charge don’t care if it is “ able to cope with the complex realities of real people.”

I don’t understand why people, especially those like you who have complex realities, significantly more complex than me a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA, are still giving any benefit of the doubt to these actions.
by the__alchemist | 2025-11-01 14:22:12+00:00
Rust slaps on embedded too; I think that's one of its core competencies. But you have to do a lot of leg work for each piece of hardware because manufacturer support isn't there, and the OSS libs are usually not great. If your requirement is "Use only the most popular language in this domain", that's fine, but there's no point in evaluating or discussing other languages if so; the outcome is predetermined.

I think the linked requirement, the hype you see, and rust's own material is misleading: It's not a memory-safety one-trick lang; it's a nice overall lang and tool set.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-11-01 14:23:00+00:00
Someone I know is in a similar situation. She doesn't have the "naturalization documents". She has a passport, a ssn, and became a citizen before she turned 18.

Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for months with poor conditions, with an administration that does not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or call out for help?

This site likes to do the cowardly take of avoiding politics as long as it's advantageous. I'm going to look into these companies that produce this tech, and memorize the company names. If a resume ever passes my desk with a significant time at any of these companies, it's going to be a "no" from me. That's the small bit of power I hold.
by nkrisc | 2025-11-01 14:23:57+00:00
Even abusive crawlers and scrapers are acting as agents of real humans, just as your browser is acting as your agent. I don't even know how you could reliably draw a reasonable line in the sand between the two without putting some group of people on the wrong side of the line.

I suppose the ultimate solution would be browsers and operating systems and hardware manufacturers co-operating to implement some system that somehow cryptographically signs HTTP requests which attests that it was triggered by an actual, physical interaction with a computing device by a human.

Though you don't have to think for very long to come up with all kinds of collateral damage that would cause and how bad actors could circumvent it anyway.

All in all, this whole issue seems more like a legal problem than a technical one.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-01 14:24:03+00:00
It varies heavily by state. In some places you can buy alcohol anywhere anytime it's open. On the other end there are limited stores that can only sell just beer or just liquor, and their hours are short and days limited. Some local areas are still "dry" and have no place to get alcohol.

It can be a real pain to get alcohol without planning in these places.
by dap | 2025-11-01 14:24:23+00:00
Your confusion is very natural:

> It's more typical in my experience that the act of granting the lock to a thread is what makes it runnable, and it runs right then.

This gets at why this felt like a big deal when we ran into this. This is how it would work with threads. Tasks and futures hook into our intuitive understanding of how things work with threads. (And for tasks, that's probably still a fair mental model, as far as I know.) But futures within a task are different because of the inversion of control: tasks must poll them for them to keep running. The problem here is that the task that's responsible for polling this future has essentially forgotten about it. The analogous thing with threads would seem to be something like if the kernel forgot to enqueue some runnable thread on a run queue.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-11-01 14:24:43+00:00
I doubt it was common. But, for example, there is such thing as Schematron: this is a special notation that checks that an XML document follows business rules and the final tool that it produces is a custom XSLT that transforms the document into the report.

(I'm also doing this currently; I need to prepare a sort of an annotated patch to an XML document, so I concocted a notation that describes edits and use it to generate both the documentation that highlights differences and also the patch itself; the patch comes out as XSLT.)
by clanky | 2025-11-01 14:25:16+00:00
This transition isn't unique to Silicon Valley but rather is baked into the imperatives of libertarianism/liberalism itself. Once the fiction of gains for the broad working class cannot be upheld, the resulting unrest has to be quelled. At that point anyone in a position of influence has to either abandon liberalism (the economic side of it at the very least) or embrace authoritarianism.
by kibwen | 2025-11-01 14:25:34+00:00
Your assertion is that it was "rushed". And yet here we are today, talking about how much we wish were implemented. That's not rushed--that's the polar opposite of rushed. Almost nothing about what we currently have on stable would have been better if it was still percolating on nightly, and would have the downside of having almost no feedback from real-world use. I remember the pre-async days, nesting callbacks by hand. What we have now is a great improvement, and just needs more niceties stacked on top of it, not any sort of fundamental overhaul.
by sillyfluke | 2025-11-01 14:25:37+00:00
Not defending the parent, but this kneejerk whataboutism might be due to Dem senator Cory Booker being cornered on Gaza in an interview and trying to sidestep it by saying "What about Africa? No one is talking about Sudan!" despite him himself rarely allocating significant time during his 25-hour marathon monologue in the senate to talk about the issue (Sudan) in detail.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-11-01 14:26:41+00:00
Where else would an English speaker go? In terms of employment, European countries seem unwelcoming to non-fluent native language speakers.

Australia discriminates based on age and has limited prospects.

There’s Canada, but that’s kinda it.

Seems weird with so many countries the realistic options are so few…

Only the cunning linguists thrive…
by brightball | 2025-11-01 14:26:56+00:00
This is quite literally the opposite of what is happening.

Republicans started going after CDL drivers who were issued licenses when they can’t read road signs in English.

The result is basic economics…truckers who speak and read English get paid more now.

Whether we are talking about healthcare, student loans, public school or even housing…everywhere the federal firehose gets aimed in the name of helping things get more expensive and hurt the middle class.

The disaster that is the ACA was easy to see coming before it was even formed. The Ben Carson plan is the only economically viable plan that could have reduced the cost of healthcare, but we got ACA instead and costs have skyrocketed every since.
by spankibalt | 2025-11-01 14:26:59+00:00
> Its only good at basics and cannot handle complex information well.

Poppycock! Because of MediaWiki's multimedia capabilities it can handle complex information just fine, obviously much better than printed predecessors. What you mean is a Wiki's focus, which can take the form of a generalized or universal encylopedia (e. g. Wikipedia), or a specialized one, or a free-form one (Wikipedia, in practice, again). Wikipedias even negotiate integration of different information streams, e. g. up-to-date news-like information, both in the lemmata (often a huge problem, i. e. "newstickeritis"), in its own news wiki (Wikinews), or the English Wikipedia's newspaper, The Signpost.

And to take care of another utterly bizarre comment: Encylopedias are always, per defintion, also repositories of knowledge.
by hartymagic | 2025-11-01 14:27:11+00:00
I had Wise ask for my tax documents when I was in South America! I couldn’t access any documentation so I just ignored that account and used another one. That is the second time I have refused to use Wise. The first, they closed my account because I sent some money to my son and referenced a trust a/c. Ai carumba! Why do they make it so difficult when they only exist for overseas functions?
by filoeleven | 2025-11-01 14:29:20+00:00
There’s a mismatch between your assumptions coming from C and GP’s assumptions coming from a language where arrays are not fixed-length. Having a garbage collector manage memory for you is pretty fundamental to immutable-first languages.

Rich Hickey asked once in a talk, “who here misses working with mutable strings?” If you would answer “I do,” or if you haven’t worked much in languages where strings are always immutable and treated as values, it makes describing the benefits of immutability more challenging.

Von Neumann famously thought Assembly and higher-level language compilers were a waste of time. How much that opinion was based on his facility with machine code I don’t know, but compilers certainly helped other programmers to write more closely to the problem they want to solve instead of tracking registers in their heads. Immutable state is a similar offloading-of-incidental-complexity to the machine.
by dap | 2025-11-01 14:30:33+00:00
Don't do ... what, exactly? The RFD answers this more precisely and provides suggestions for alternatives. But it's not very simple because the things that can cause this are all common patterns individually and it's only the confluence (which can be spread across layers of the program) that introduces this problem. In our case, it wasn't a Mutex, but an mpsc channel (that was working correctly! it just got very briefly saturated) and it was 3-4 modules lower in the stack than the code with the `tokio::select!` that induced this.
by shiandow | 2025-11-01 14:31:04+00:00
I think the short names aren't anywhere near as bad for readability as using (ri,i) as a table index.

If you're going to use short names at least make it clear which belong together. Especially don't use different lengths when things ought to be similar.

data.forEach((row,i) => row.forEach((ele,j) => ... ))
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-01 14:32:38+00:00
I think this is something like a "delayed cargo culting", or "cargo culting based on outdated facts". I think it's basically the same as the hypothesis from the "Monkey Ladder Experiment", where monkeys got punished when trying to get a banana, and eventually all the monkeys were replaced with monkeys that didn't realize why the banana was off-limits, yet persisted in trying to "help" other monkeys trying to prevent them from getting the banana.

I'm not sure if I read that that specific experiment was debunked or not, but it certainly sounds familiar to how some developer trends get propagated even though the ground truth as changed.
by pron | 2025-11-01 14:33:11+00:00
> it's simply not interesting from a safety perspective

The reason memory safety is interesting in the first place (for practical, not theoretical reasons) is that it is a common cause of security vulnerabilities. But spatial memory safety is a bigger problem than temporal memory safety, and Zig does offer spatial memory safety. So if Rust's memory safety is interesting, then so is the memory safety Zig offers.

I'm a rabid software correctness advocate, and I think that people should acknowledge that correctness, safety (and the reasons behind it) are much more complex than the binary question of what behaviours are soundly disallowed by a language (or ATS advocates would say that from that their vantage point, Rust is just about as unsafe as C, and so is completely uninteresting from that perspective).

The complexity doesn't end with spatial vs temporal safety. For example, code review has been found to be one of the most effective correctness measures, so if a language made code reviews easier, it would be very interesting from a correctness/security perspective.
Ask HN: What Have Been Your Biggest Regrets In Life?
by sarimkx | 2025-11-01 14:33:45+00:00
Inspired by this post a few days ago:

Ask HN: Turned 25, Give Me Your Best Advice for the Next 25 Years? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711816

--

Please share your mistakes so other people can avoid the same pitfalls! This can be in your life, career, business and/or relationships.

I am sure many people will find this post valuable.

Thank you!
by Lindby | 2025-11-01 14:35:15+00:00
It would be hard to find manufacturers to use it. None of the existing Android phone manufacturers would be able to release phones with this fork without also abandoning the official Android platform on all markets. Google are very strict with this in their tos. You cannot release devices using non official Android builds without losing your right to use GMS and Android Brandice on your other Android devices.
by Measter | 2025-11-01 14:35:52+00:00
There's already upstream rust support in GCC, so I don't reckon it's that far off from being usable, at least for projects choosing to target it specifically.

The GCCRS project can't even build libcore right now, let alone libstd. In addition, it is currently targeting Rust 1.50's feature set, with some additions that the Linux kernel needs. I don't see it being a useful general purpose compiler for years.

What's more likely is that rustc_codegen_gcc, which I believe can currently build libcore and libstd, will be stabilised first.
by daveguy | 2025-11-01 14:36:01+00:00
It was exfiltration -- copying or moving data from an internal system to an external system. They insisted on and bragged about full access because now it would be "efficient". But it was clearly just simple opportunity for theft by a bunch of shady assholes. They also touted the ability to link data across multiple department to mine data on US citizens. The libertarian, "don't make databases of us" folks sat around with their thumbs up their asses because reasons. See also the Krebs link.

Why are you defending this crap? They also destroyed the departments that were actually making digital services more streamlined and easier to use 18F by dissolution and US Digital Services by capture.

doge was a fucking disaster.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-01 14:36:50+00:00
> Hopefully, the responses to this have highlighted the kind of people you are dealing with.

You know I'm right here, if you have an actual rebuttal and not just dismissive hand-waving.

> No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves.

I think a lot of people would be measurably better off if not for social media that algorithmically fucks with their brains.

> Socialise the losses.

I mean that's kind of the point of a society yeah? We pool our efforts to enable greater labor specialization and to achieve things no individual can. Like an electrical grid or a highway system. And when parts of those systems break down, we all contribute a little to sorting them out.
by vivekburman | 2025-11-01 14:37:13+00:00
Not quite exactly,

dbt - code is done via VSCode and managed via git, Job Orchestration is done via Airflow or Dagster

Fivetran - its more of an ELT cloud hosted solution only, and not near real time cases.

Talend, Alteryx - Its a drag and drop first solution. Then comes IDE

My personal work experience - In my current job I was tasked to build dashboard platform which supports near real time sync. I've Postgres as main DB, Elastic search for dashboarding. Due to this near-real time requirement I had to choose a very niche library `pgsync`. Then immediately I rewrote the library again why because pgsync doesn't detect granular change and is tied to redis. Whereas I had rabbitmq as the middle layer for CDC.
by foofoo12 | 2025-11-01 14:38:33+00:00
Yes, and the reason for why that's OK is that the context is just few lines. But this is borderline due to the amount of variables.

In just 4 lines you have r, row, t, ri, l, i and c.

The full variables names are so short anyway that personally I'd write them out. Code does evolve and there's a risk of this suffering as a result.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-11-01 14:38:57+00:00
> But can users really call it an "update" if you could view an XML/XSLT document in Internet Explorer 6 or Chrome 1 but not the newest version?

Yes. Just like we don't have Flash everywhere or ActiveX. Good riddance to them and to XSLT and, fingers crossed, XML in the future.
by dv35z | 2025-11-01 14:39:57+00:00
Curious if anyone has strategies on how to perform parallel writes to an SQLite database using Python's `multiprocessing` Pool.

I am using it to loop through a database of 11,000 words, hit an HTTP API for each (ChatGPT) and generate example sentences for the word. I would love to be able to asynchronously launch these API calls and have them come back and update the database row when ready, but not sure how to handle the database getting hit by all these writes from (as I understand it) multiple instances of the same Python program/function.
by bluGill | 2025-11-01 14:40:21+00:00
Some people do. It is silly and childish. However they do find some good things to speak up about once in awhile and they are least are not shy about those things. What we need though are people who will speak up about important things but have the gut so keep quiet otherwise - very few of those exist.

It is my firm belief that it isn't likely to find a the flaws in anything important (except for the obvious flaws intentionally left that other posters have mentioned) in the scope of a meeting. Once in a while you will by chance, but even if there is a flaw it needs some to look and think. People who think out loud often drive the meeting in the direction they are thinking and if there happens to be something in that direction they will find it sooner - but they miss the other directions others would have gone thinking in because they directed the thoughts of everyone.
by gxd | 2025-11-01 14:40:39+00:00
This is really important work.

Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.