MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-25 20:44:51+00:00
> EDN also has no builtin 'raw bytes' type.

That was my complaint too.

> I am working on a format consisting of serialized B-tree. It is essentially a dictionary, but serialized

I had wanted something a bit similar; a serialized B-tree (or a similar structure) but with only a 'raw bytes' type, for keys and values (I will use DER for the values; I have my own library to work with DER already), and the ability to easily find all records whose key matches a specified prefix.
by bogota69 | 2025-11-25 20:45:02+00:00
Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.

I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.

The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.
by nullc | 2025-11-25 20:45:10+00:00
> Also, the privacy and the finding are in direct opposition to each-other, which isn’t always a comfortable system dynamic. ... or some sort of group key sharing

Perhaps you might consider a pinsketch in the manner proposed for cryptographic biometric security. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0602007

I contributed to a fast implementation of the underlying algorithim: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/minisketch

With it two peers could compare their BSSID environments and learn ~nothing about each other unless they were nearly matching.

I can see how one could use it for location based key agreement for mutual authentication-- not as obvious to me how to apply it to privacy preserving location.

The latter would probably just best be accomplished by downloading the whole database, or (less optimally) using PIR to probe for the locations of single BSSIDs.
by stouset | 2025-11-25 20:45:30+00:00
That “battle-tested code” is often still an enduring and ongoing source of bugs. Maintainers have to deal with the burden of working in a 20+ year-old code base with design and architecture choices that probably weren’t even a great idea back then.

Very few people are forcing “rewrite in rust” down anyone’s throats. Sometimes it’s the maintainers themselves who are trying to be forward-thinking and undertake a rewrite (e.g., fish shell), sometimes people are taking existing projects and porting them just to scratch an itch and it’s others’ decisions to start shipping it (e.g., coreutils). I genuinely fail to see the problem with either approach.

C’s long reign is coming to an end. Some projects and tools are going to want to be ahead of the curve, some projects are going to be behind the curve. There is no perfect rate at which this happens, but “it’s battle-tested” is not a reason to keep a project on C indefinitely. If you don’t think {pet project you care about} should be in C in 50 years, there will be a moment where people rewrite it. It will be immature and not as feature-complete right out the gate. There will be new bugs. Maybe it happens today, maybe it’s 40 years from now. But the “it’s battle tested, what’s the rush” argument can and will be used reflexively against both of those timelines.
by inanutshellus | 2025-11-25 20:45:43+00:00
I read the quoted sentence as "25 of the 52" -- not an additional 25 of the 87 -- because of the word "these".

52 pairs similar schooling 25 of these had very similar schooling

Thus the math becomes "87-52=35". 35 data points. Not spectacularly high regardless.
by SwiftyBug | 2025-11-25 20:45:46+00:00
Really cool project. To be honest, I think I don't fully understand the concept of a content addressed language. Initially I thought this was another BEAM language, but it seems to run on its own VM. How does Unison compare to BEAM languages when it comes to fault tolerance? What do you think is a use case that Unison shines that Erlang maybe falls short?
by geodel | 2025-11-25 20:45:49+00:00
Hehe. Great point. I have lived and worked in 2 Delhi and Mumbai in India. With such terrible living condition, traffic, pollution and so on it sucked the soul out of me. At least I found it so bad in Mumbai that many a times while leaving from work to hostel, I would literally cry on train platform with massive crowd pushing and shoving from all directions while trying to get into bursting at seams trains.

And this all is 20 years back. During this time thing have gone worse many times over.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-25 20:46:07+00:00
> Browser idiosyncrasies, horrendous security vulnerabilities, the blood sacrifices to do basic things with CSS,

...

> There are many good things about this world. 2005 web dev is not among them.

Maybe, but the 2005 process will work better now, because the current process was started as a way to paper over all those

> Browser idiosyncrasies, horrendous security vulnerabilities, the blood sacrifices to do basic things with CSS,

Now that those things are smaller issues, "Write JS, copy it to the server" is not so stupid. Especially if you've got mostly web components.
by wffurr | 2025-11-25 20:46:38+00:00
We had orals for graded programming assignments in graduate school. You had to present your solution to a panel and defend it. Some of my classmates really struggled with anxiety in front of the panel and took any question, however mild, as intense personal criticism.

Maybe this is a case for "learning styles", but it's probably logistically prohibitive to offer both options.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-25 20:47:32+00:00
Sure, the sheer volume of trial, error, and feedback that’s gone on in evolutionary history is mind boggling, but human intelligence is relatively recent and has had only a few hundred thousand turns at that wheel with a population of maybe a few million.

To be fair, we have few traits that are truly unique, but even going back along our branch of the tree of life all the way to the first recognisable mammals is not as many generations as you’d think. Certainly nothing like what goes on with fast breeding life like bacteria!

The enormity of effort also doesn’t explain how the end result works.

The way our genes encode for high level instinctual behaviour is akin to controlling the specific phrasing of a company’s quarterly report next year by changing out the coffee beans at the cafe that the accountant’s roommate frequents.

Even if I told you that I’m Doctor Strange and that I tried this ten million times before I got the exact right varietal of bean, you’d still be impressed and have a long series of follow questions!
by jfengel | 2025-11-25 20:47:35+00:00
That's a bit ironic: Avatar was best known for its 3D effects, which you generally can't see at home.

That may not outweigh the rest of the problems with theaters: the price of tickets, the cost of concessions, the noise, the inconvenient times, not being able to pause, etc. But if there was one movie that benefitted specifically from being seen in a theater, it was Avatar.
by rlmark | 2025-11-25 20:47:46+00:00
The tool you use to interact with the code database keeps track of the changes in an append-only log - if you're familiar with git, the commands for tracking changes echo those of git (push, pull, merge, etc) and many of them integrate with git tooling.

The projects in a codebase can absolutely be shared and versioned as well. Here's a log of release artifacts from a library as an example: https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/releases.
by ayaros | 2025-11-25 20:48:21+00:00
Generally speaking, HTML doesn't have the constructs necessary to actually compute things. There's no way to declare variables, and there are no conditionals, jumping, or mathematical operations. All you can do is specify a fixed set of page elements.

Embedded JS within HTML doesn't count here, as that's essentially no different than a linked script file.

To be fair, there are some exceptions to this; there are some very hacky and convoluted ways you might be able to get some programmatic behavior out of pure HTML (I remember hearing about a weird example in part of Wikipedia's codebase).

HTML literally means hypertext markup language. It's more like TeX or Markdown, in that it's used to store and represent data, not to manipulate it.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-25 20:48:29+00:00
That’s a good way to put it - eliminating other factors ends up deceptively making it look like genetics are the only difference. On the topic of IQ, the importance of those other factors is implied by things like the Flynn effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Proposed_explanat...)? It’s also evident in how IQ varies by country. In developing countries, average IQ can measure low due to issues like malnutrition, access to education, etc. Those differences change as those countries develop or across different parts of those countries or when you track immigration populations from those countries.

Oddly, denial of these other variables has become core to scientific racism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism). For example, a Danish white supremacist named Emil Kirkegaard went so far as to create a fake journal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych) to publish flagrantly incorrect papers on IQ that try to deny these factors and paint the IQ of non-white countries as low, with the only explanation being their “inferior” race/genetics. In fact, he just recently wrote a new “paper” (https://openpsych.net/paper/85/) that has been widely retweeted by supremacists on X.
by Humorist2290 | 2025-11-25 20:48:29+00:00
One thing that especially interests me about these prompt-injection based attacks is their reproducibility. With some specific version of some firmware it is possible to give reproducible steps to identify the vulnerability, and by extension to demonstrate that it's actually fixed when those same steps fail to reproduce. But with these statistical models, a system card that injects 32 random bits at the beginning is enough to ruin any guarantee of reproducibility. Self-hosted models sure you can hash the weights or something, but with Gemini (/etc) Google (/et al) has a vested interest in preventing security researchers from reproducing their findings.

Also rereading the article, I cannot put down the irony that it seems to use a very similar style sheet to Google Cloud Platform's documentation.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-25 20:48:46+00:00
After Musk broke bad I always thought that he was going to hurt Tesla sales because women (1) have a big influence on car purchasing decisions and (2) would think that guy was an asshole. There are some men who would wish they could be a man like Musk or Trump and be attracted by that posturing but it gets you nowhere with women.
by goku12 | 2025-11-25 20:49:21+00:00
PC is one of the last remaining platforms where you don't have to choose one evil or the other. There are multiple other fair options which all are honestly better at this point, despite the incessant complaints by those who are never satisfied by them. The only thing needed to lose that refuge as well is for the consumers to simply ignore all those options and concede the market to a new overlord. Soon, we will have another locked down platform under a duopoly.

This is the utterly predictable path it's going to go down, if the consumers continue to behave like this. Yet, some people are very uncomfortable when this is mentioned. I wonder who's so excited about yet another walled platform.
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-25 20:49:39+00:00
In no way was I a neglected kid. Parents still spent a huge deal of time with me, dad taught me drawing, astronomy, English, played guitar for me, we listened to music together, played games, walked together, printed photos, rode snow slegde downhill in the winter. Me being allowed to spend time outdoors with my friends was perfectly a part of their caring, not an attempt to get rid of me.

This is in stark contrast with the way parents want their children to be near and observed, but separated with black mirrors.

Now, please don't think that I blame every modern parent out there. There are enough good parents around even today. What I talk about are the trends in general.
by munk-a | 2025-11-25 20:49:45+00:00
There were several generalizations in that statement that align with my similar fears to the OP. Most firmware should minimize the charge cycling, most batteries should be stable at constant charge... most isn't great for something that I want to sit in the corner undisturbed for a decade just chugging along - I have a few old desktops I use whenever I need a stand alone server or to host something web-live for a while. They'll eventually have hardware failures, but I have a lot more confidence that when they fail it won't be dramatic or destructive - ditto with old laptops, the serviceability expectations are much higher than phones so I have yet to meet a laptop I can't pop open and just pull the battery out of to run on AC alone - in the case of a power failure the UPS can't cover I'd rather the machine just power off rather than needing to deal with the possibility of dramatic failure.

I think if you're considering re-harvesting old devices to use for hosting and get far enough down your list to get to phones then you've likely got enough constant maintenance costs in overseeing things that the additional worry of fire risk just isn't worth it.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-11-25 20:50:12+00:00
It's not particularly difficult to start a new city.

The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive.

The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough.
by ch2026 | 2025-11-25 20:50:14+00:00
> admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.

Have you ever played online games? "Contacting several kids a day" is how internet chat works. I'm sure if it was up to you kids would only be able to play single player games and stay inside, god forbid they get struck by lightning or eaten by a polar bear.

What do you want gaming to do? Have a checkbox where you swear you're not a pedophile or something? That's on-par for most of these idiotic suggestions of how people seem to fucking think the internet and gaming works, and what sort of actual solution is viable.

Roblox tracks all the chat and hands it over to law enforcement and NCMEC. They restrict chat for . They give ample parental controls to limit chat/friends/interactions. Now they're adding AI-powered age validation (which I think is a terrible idea) just to appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk, nor apparently have the ability to teach your kids "hey maybe don't talk to creepy strangers who want you to send them images and give them your home address?"
by fmjrey | 2025-11-25 20:50:21+00:00
OOP certainly has some early roots in trying to be more efficient with code reuse, organization, and clarity of intent. Later on Java tried to alleviate serious productivity and security issues with garbage collection and cross platform portability. It certainly increased the distance between the hardware and the developer because there are more levels of indirection that can now degrade performance.

However with hardware progress, performance is not the only critical criteria when systems grow in size, in variety of hardware, with internet volumes, in the number of moving parts, and of people working on them. Equally if not more important are: maintainability, expressivity so less lines of code are written, and overall the ability to focus on essential complexity rather than the accidental one introduced by the langage, framework, and platform. In the world of enterprise software Java was welcomed with so much cheers that indeed a "code culture" started that grew to an unprecedented scale, internet scale really, on which OO rode as well.

However not all control is lost as you say. The JVM that also runs more advanced langages with a JIT that alleviates some of the loss of performance due to the levels of indirections. GC are increasingly effective and tunable. Also off-heap data structures such as ring buffers exist to achieve performance comparable to C when needed. See Martin Thompson video talks on mechanical sympathy, which he gave after working on high frequency trading on the JVM, and check his later work on Aeron (https://aeron.io/). As usual it's all about trade-offs.
by beeflet | 2025-11-25 20:50:25+00:00
The real-world conditions are beneficial to israel. I don't think yapping about it will resolve the conflict any more than it did for tibet.

What more can be said about the matter? Some pro-palestine organization will accuse Israel of genocide, and Israelis will continue bulldozing inch by inch.

As for "uncomfortable concerns about the state of the industry", those are on the front page and top of /active regularly
by anon84873628 | 2025-11-25 20:50:53+00:00
It's good you are so self aware and can accept your situation to find a level of contentment.

No partner is perfect so being in a relationship requires evaluating tradeoffs and deciding where you can compromise compared to your ideal. To do otherwise or expect someone (or yourself) to change is unfair to them. Unfortunately sometimes we think we can deal with something but ultimately can't - that's part of the self discovery and vulnerability/heartbreak of relationships (because we can of course be on the receiving end too). Really you have to be willing to embrace a person's flaws and take long term joy in doing so, and also have gratitude for them doing the same.

So if you know all that's not really for you, then good move on your part.
by mk89 | 2025-11-25 20:50:57+00:00
No but whatsapp was built by 2 guys that had previously worked at Yahoo, and they picked a very strong tech for the backend: erlang.

So while they probably didn't bother scaling the service to millions in the first version, they 1) knew what it would take, 2) chose already from the ground up a good technology to have a smoother transition to your "X millions users". The step "X millions to XYZ millions and then billions" required other things too.

At least they didn't have to write a php-to-C++ compiler for Php like Facebook had, given the initial design choice of Mark Zuckeberg, which shows exactly what it means to begin something already with the right tool and ideas in mind.

But this takes skills.
by xmddmx | 2025-11-25 20:51:34+00:00
There is something wrong with this article, possibly just copyediting mistakes but it makes me question the whole thing.

For example, check out this mess:

> “Unfortunately, there is one significant issue with the aforementioned data: schooling. Seeing as the majority of work to date includes only aggregate data, it is impossible to account. The first concerns small N: seeing as most publish studies only include a handful of TRA data, there is a lot of room for error and over.

Unfortunately, there is a largely unaccounted for confound in this aggregate data which may make generalized analysis questionable: schooling.”
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-11-25 20:51:52+00:00
Cool stuff. Interestingly, I responsibly disclosed that same vulnerability to Google last week (even using the same domain bypass with webhook.site).

For other (publicly) known issues in Antigravity, including remote command execution, see my blog post from today:

https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/security-keeps-goo...
by lurk2 | 2025-11-25 20:52:25+00:00
They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).

It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).

Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.

You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
by mikepurvis | 2025-11-25 20:52:36+00:00
The western approach would almost certainly be a public-private partnership; we do that with all meaningful infra projects, where multiple industry consortia put together proposals and then one is selected to move forward. For example, for the ION Light Rail in Waterloo Region (~$1B), the winning consortium was composed of engineering and construction firms/consultants, a operations company that would run the system, plus a financier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandLinq

That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later.
by collinmcnulty | 2025-11-25 20:52:51+00:00
I am reminded of Eisenhower's Chance for Peace Speech: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech
by lorenzleutgeb | 2025-11-25 20:52:51+00:00
What is the data you actually store when caching a successful test run? Do you store the hash of the expression which is the test, and a value with a semantics of "passed". Or do you have a way to hash all values (not expressions/AST!) that Unison can produce?

I am asking because if you also have a way to cache all values, this might allow to carry some of Unison's nice properties a little further. Say I implement a compiler in Unison, I end up with an expression that has a free variable, which carries the source code of the program I am compiling.

Now, I could take the hash of the expression, the hash of the term that represents the source code, i.e., what the variable in my compiler binds to, and the hash of the output. Would be very neat for reproducibility, similar to content-addressed derivations in Nix, and extensible to distributed reproducibility like Trustix.

I guess you'll be inclined to say that this is out of scope for your caching, because your caching would only cache results of expressions where all variables are bound (at the top level, evaluating down). And you would be right. But the point is to bridge to the outside of Unison, at runtime, and make this just easy to do with Unison.

Feel free to just point me at material to read, I am completely new to this language and it might be obvious to you...