MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thyristan | 2025-11-11 11:35:07+00:00
struct packing also isn't guaranteed by the C standard, everything around that is implementation defined, as it is with bitfield packing. __attribute__((packed)) is however implemented in any sensible C compiler implementation, and things around structure layout and memory layout of data types are specified in the compiler's manual. C would be useless without those implementation-specified guarantees, because most of the appeal of C for low-level-programming comes from the ease of deserialisation through something like

char * input = receive_data();

struct deserialized * decoded = (struct deserialized *)input; // zero cost deserialization

Of course this can only work if an implementation tells you exactly what the memory layout of 'struct deserialized' and all the data types in it are.

Btw, ordering is somewhat more defined than packing, in that the usual forward/reverse/little/big-endian shenanigans are OK. But relative ordering of each field is always preserved by the C standard.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-11 11:35:21+00:00
But that does beg the question - what is it about our current system (western civilisation) that seems to reward the incredibly stupid.

Though I do wonder if you looked at all people with a net worth of over say 100M whether the proportion of incredibly stupid people would be the same as the general population or whether we just have so many incredibly stupid people some of them will get lucky.
by DuperPower | 2025-11-11 11:35:29+00:00
lol I cited this exact scene as an example of typical anglosaxon conception of art, now you are crying that art has become shit but any attempt at scientific analysis is taken as a joke when actual poetry is even harder than Code, the amount of data you can compress on a single Word and rhyimes and stuff IS the hardest thing ever, but because you dont want to think someone can do an effort you want the Robin Williams and Dead Poets society to win and make art non scientifically understandable to anyone, if you cant do scientific or technical analysis of art thats your opinión but why the obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?
by reaperducer | 2025-11-11 11:36:27+00:00
It is a very major city. The vast majority of people on the planet have heard of it.

I can only speculate that it wants to put more cops on the street, instead of paying civilians to do paperwork.

The real world isn't like TV. Like everyone else, police departments have to work within a budget. People don't just magically appear from off-screen to do more work.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-11 11:38:35+00:00
> Again, you didn’t actually do that though, did you? Instead you used the term colloquially meant to signal they are creating a “hostile” environment

> nebulous

I think you have an incorrect idea of what the word gatekeeping means.

It's not nebulous. It's saying they're doing a bad thing (being rude/synonym) by applying incorrect and artificial criteria about who is in a group (which I quoted).

Both versions of my comment had the same meaning. I wasn't hiding behind anything, just using different phrasing.

And no, my word choice was not to virtue signal. The word fit the situation so I used it.
by alickz | 2025-11-11 11:38:42+00:00
>Some skills, like framing, values, balance, etc. become even more important differentiators.

I agree. I think many artists in the future will be closer to directors/cinematographers/editors than performers

Many of the skills artists have today will still be necessary and transferable, but what will separate the good artists from the bad artists will be their ability to communicate their ideas to agents / other humans

Same with software developers I suspect - communication will be the most important skill of all, and the rockstar loner devs who don't work well in teams will slowly phase out
by donatj | 2025-11-11 11:38:48+00:00
> X equals X plus one? That’s not math. That’s a lie.

That's really interesting... My wife, who has no real mathematical background had the EXACT same reaction when I was trying to teach her some simple programming. I tried to explain that equals in that context was more of a storage operator than a statement that said line is true. She found it very frustrating and we gave up on the endeavor shortly thereafter.

I've personally always had a soft spot for languages like TI-BASIC that use a storage operator rather than overloading = so for example:

X + 1 -> X

I wonder if I should try a functional language with her.
by myself248 | 2025-11-11 11:38:48+00:00
Backup drive is my use-case. But that means a mountain of sustained write traffic, which means thermals are important, which is where this thing sucks. I had been using a regular external with a short cable, until I got a Framework and decided to try one of their "fits in the module slot" SSDs, which is perfect.

I still pop it out after the backup and store it elsewhere, but it's lovely that during the backup job (which can take a while if it's doing a fresh copy), it's completely unobtrusive and can't break off if I set the lappy down wrong.
by actionfromafar | 2025-11-11 11:39:02+00:00
You can also trick any HDMI output to believe it's connected to a monitor.

One commercial product is:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/ADP4KHEAD/

But I seem to recall there are dirt cheap hacks to do same. I may be conflating it with "resister jammed into DVI port" which worked back in the VGA and DVI days. Memory unlocked - did this to an old Mac Mini in a closet for some reason.
by Aachen | 2025-11-11 11:39:21+00:00
My (grand)parents like their FOSS launcher, gallery, and chat client just fine. I've had zero questions about how Signal works, but a bunch about how to deal with the OS' pre-installed garbage spawning notifications about this or that update. They can't tell the difference between an advertisement pushed by some commercial app they want and a smartwatch firmware update notification

From my POV, it's the commercial software that has fundamental usability issues due to misaligned incentives (not completely different either, but not as aligned as FOSS). They just have a better lobby and marketing budget. Chrome didn't become this ubiquitous on mobile by having to be downloaded from f-droid, but by making a deal that device manufacturers cannot refuse
by possiblelion | 2025-11-11 11:39:34+00:00
After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm building this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios. https://airdefense.dev/

I also wrote a longer technical post on the maths behind it: https://medium.com/p/292c755a6ceb.
by sayyadirfanali | 2025-11-11 11:39:37+00:00
designer here. thanks for the feedback. i've updated the serif in `l` after an issue raised the possibility of ambiguity with `1`. alas, that would mean i'd need to regenerate all the images, which i haven't done yet.

i didn't produce a variant for the `l` serif, please check issue #8. if you prefer the variant, please open an issue. can you elaborate on the kerning point, preferably there also?
by danb1974 | 2025-11-11 11:39:42+00:00
It's about writing good, easy to read and maintanable code, not "yet another piece of garbage that almost works... for me..."

10k lines that nobody including you understands? That's a liability if anywhere else than your home project that only you use

Use AI as a hyper-documentation system and "show me how to" guide but not to spew code that neither it or you understand
by christophilus | 2025-11-11 11:39:49+00:00
It’s a subjective thing, but when a language clicks for you, work becomes pleasant. You get into (and maintain) a flow state. It feels as if you’re crafting something beautiful and elegant and simple. It’s the same reason people love painting, drawing, or sculpting with one specific medium over an other. They just like the aesthetic and process better.

Also, some languages just really stink— slow compilation times, obscure errors, loads of footguns and require much more care and focus on things which are orthogonal to the problem you’re trying to solve.
by ofalkaed | 2025-11-11 11:41:10+00:00
I am quite impressed, even if it was not completely right and provided a few rather humorous charts, it is close enough assuming you are following along with the code. A great improvement over the alternatives for getting oriented in unfamiliar code, should save me a great deal of time.

The only issues I have with it are that they layout is not great on small screens, poor experience on my 13" laptop, and I really wish you could hide the "Ask Devin" dialog. The experience is pretty good on my tablet though, I would prefer to use the tablet for reading/annotating the code and have deepwiki on the laptop but not that big of a deal.
by Zufriedenheit | 2025-11-11 11:42:43+00:00
I don't know how much of my image of him is his public facade. But the facts that he contently lived in the first house he bought in Omaha for his whole life and stayed together with his wife for many decades, working in the same office until old age, i find very admirable. It is such a contrast to the flashy, unhinged jet-setting lifestyle that many billionaires display nowadays.
by throwaway89201 | 2025-11-11 11:43:20+00:00
You can also opt to take a small amount of N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) together with the paracetamol. It seems to be safe overall and safe during pregnancy, and will prevent any potential depletion of glutathione stores which counteract the toxic metabolites of paracetamol.

In fact, if NAC was added to paracetamol by default (which seems to be safe), it would make it nigh impossible to overdose on it, where paracetamol accounts for the most drug overdoses in Western countries and is the leading cause of acute liver failure.
by encabulator | 2025-11-11 11:43:35+00:00
Yes, one of the paradoxes of Soviet Union was that used cars were more expensive than new cars, at least in the 80s. That was exactly because of the sales restrictions. You needed a special permit for a new car. These were usually distributed by trade union, in quantities like 1 permit per year per your_workplace. Used cars, however, were sold on "free market".
by nasmorn | 2025-11-11 11:43:56+00:00
I guess I’ve got a lot of resentment for when I suddenly paid for 100k reserved errors suddenly that I didn’t remember asking for. I probably figured out I have control about it at some point and that’s why I decided to not do the Schlepp of changing the error reporting on all these small projects.

So while I can actually corroborate that your cheapest plan has not changed my takeaway is that changes to billing just make people unreasonably resentful. At least me.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-11-11 11:44:03+00:00
I'll try and answer this.

Expressiveness: I could express a solution to a problem with very few lines of code and without the clutter of housekeeping operations like memory management.

Recursion: Erlang properly introduced me to recursion whereas I hadn't encountered it before. This is again related to expressiveness. There is something strangely beautiful about seeing a problem solved using recursion elegantly.

Message passing: when I was trying to figure out how Microsoft's C++ socket classes were implemented and I dug into the code, it turned out there was a hidden window for every socket created and messages were being passed to/from it, but message passing wasn't available anywhere in Visual C++ as a first class construct (at least as far as I remember it). I was overjoyed when I discovered that message passing was a first class citizen in Erlang and how much easier it was to implement concurrent programs than using native threads in C++.

Compared to OO programming in C++ where I was never sure whether I was using inheritance correctly, whether I needed inheritance at all, memory management, difficulty with threads, writing code in Erlang was a breeze.

And the whole support for distributed programming, hot code loading, list comprehensions! I fell in love again with Erlang when I discovered list comprehensions. Man, I could go on.
by ChaosOp | 2025-11-11 11:45:02+00:00
I'm working on a local multiplayer party game platform, a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. We just won silver at the Big Indie Pitch competition!

- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.

- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)

- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs necessary to play

- The games are all action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia games!

- In the future we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers as well. We take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking coded and infrastructure.

Would love any feedback you might have!
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-11 11:45:05+00:00
EVs are on the roads right now, and most of them don't require oil changes at all. The oil in sealed in the gearbox, with no combustion to foul it, and is rated for the lifetime of the entire car.

And, have you ever seen a user? Like, an actual user, in person? 1 user in 5 is capable of swapping out toner cartridges. Kicking the can to the tech support dept (for oil changes: to the service shops) is how it's done in real life.
by Vikash_14 | 2025-11-11 11:45:56+00:00
Humanoid robots are moving from R&D into early commercial use, with estimates suggesting growth from USD 2.43B in 2023 to USD 66B by 2032. The shift is being driven by several forces: labor shortages in manufacturing, advances in AI and sensing, falling hardware costs, and government-backed robotics initiatives.

Industries piloting humanoids include automotive production, logistics, and healthcare. Bipedal systems are gaining attention for human-environment navigation, while wheeled platforms remain cheaper and simpler. Sensors such as LiDAR, depth cameras, and improved actuators are enabling more reliable manipulation and safer human-robot interaction.

Challenges remain: high upfront costs, reliability in real-world environments, uncertain regulation, and concerns about job displacement. The pace of adoption will likely depend on software maturity, battery efficiency, and scalable manufacturing.

Questions for discussion: • Which sectors will adopt humanoids at meaningful scale first? • Are bipeds necessary, or will wheeled robots dominate? • How quickly can costs fall to make general-purpose humanoids viable?

Interested in HN perspectives on whether current projections are realistic.
by foldr | 2025-11-11 11:46:18+00:00
You said:

> because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices

Unless you think Jeremy Corbyn was establishment approved (!), this is clearly not true.

I’m not really sure what to make of your latest comment. Is your preferred world one where the media never criticize your favored politicians and the left wing of the Labour Party ruthlessly crushes internal dissent? If that’s what it would have taken to make Corbyn Prime Minister, then count me out.
by dspillett | 2025-11-11 11:46:45+00:00
Tiny form factor USB drives have been around for ages¹ but only for USB-A ports, so I assume the news here is the USB-C connector (and the availability of capacity over 256Gb). This would be nice, I've been looking for something small that will go in a C port without an adaptor that stops it being so tiny any more, but the shape of these looks like it would irritate me, sitting “high” above the port and likely above the device it is plugged into.

The closest I've found are minimal size dual-port things like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B5S29JWY/ but they could be half the length (when inserted) without the A connector at all. I have no portable devices without at least as many C ports as A's, non-portable devices with only A ports I can stick a C-in-A adaptor or two semi-permanently into.

--------

[1] Examples: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07HPX38XC/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07YYMX5LQ/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08772NT1L/
by re-thc | 2025-11-11 11:47:16+00:00
> If Apple had supported open iCloud alternatives for backup and other services from day one, it woudn't even be a discussion now

Why does Apple need to do extra work and increase support? The average user really doesn't care and choices just make it more complicated.

> The UK probably wouldn't have thought of the idea of

The UK has lost the plot long ago. It's been drama after drama.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-11-11 11:47:59+00:00
From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different from a full restart.

I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.
by sayyadirfanali | 2025-11-11 11:48:51+00:00
thanks for the feedback. a few people have expressed the same criticism. i'm open to producing a variant with less-curly curly brances. please raise an issue, if you want to use it.

as is expected, all codes in the illustrations, especially the C code, are to be judged superficially, ie, by their covers, not content :)
by youngNed | 2025-11-11 11:49:08+00:00
I did something similar.

I bought a vt510 and hooked it up to my raspberry pi. My intention was to get some kind of VAX VMS OS on there, but as i played around on linux i realised something.

It really really sucks.

I had been dreaming of such a set up since i had been at the centre for computing history[1] and got so much nostalgia for the old DEC VMS setup they had. There is so much emotion brough back from just touching those machines, from the way your muscle memory kicks in as soon as you put your hands over the keyboard.

I was so damn excited for this.

but it was awful, the lag was the big one, but this wasn't from my set-up, this actually was how it was, the previously suppressed memory came back, sat in the computer lab at college, that lag was there - but yeah after years of iterm2, tmux and the advancements in the cli space - going back to vt510 really really sucked.

But it was a pretty horrible experience[2], and really affected me actually, it made me think a lot about nostalgia and how we remember the past.

---

[1]https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

[2] please, these things are relative, it wasn't that bad, it just kinda sucked
by mcv | 2025-11-11 11:50:52+00:00
Yeah, there's a difference between being a legal entity with limited rights, and being a person with full personhood. Citiziens United ignores that distinction. Just because people have certain rights, does not mean corporations should have the same rights.

It's an artificial legal construct, and its rights and obligations should be entirely subject to whatever society finds beneficial to the real people of that society.

Your slavery argument is an excellent argument. If corporations supposedly have the right to the same free speech as a person, shouldn't they also be free from the bondage of owners, i.e. shareholders?
by danjermaus | 2025-11-11 11:51:27+00:00
> In 1958, I bought my first and only home.

He does also own holiday homes and farms but for the most part he doesn't go in for the typical billionaire lifestyle. On the surface it seems less awful than Musk or Zuckerberg but to hoard that kind of wealth while people suffer is unethical. He may have pledged to give away his wealth, but now he's giving it to his children to give away. What's stopped him from giving it away for the last 30 years?
by jorangreef | 2025-11-11 11:51:48+00:00
> Selling an event out takes a long time to do frequently because tickets are VERY frequently not purchased--they're just reserved and then they fall back into open seating.

TigerBeetle actually includes native support for "two phase pending transfers" out of the box, to make it easy to coordinate with third party payment systems while users have inventory in their cart:

https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/coding/two-phase-transfers/

> Also, an act like Oasis is going to have a lot of reserved seating. Running through algorithms to find contiguous seats is going to be tougher than this example and it's difficult to parallelize if you're truly giving the next person in the queue the actual best seats remaining.

It's actually not that hard (and probably easier) to express this in TigerBeetle using transfers with deterministic IDs. For example, you could check (and reserve) up to 8K contiguous seats in a single query to TigerBeetle, with a P100 less than 100ms.

> There are many other business rules that accrue after years of features to win Oasis like business unfortunately that will result in more DB calls and add contention.

Yes, contention is the killer.

We added an Amdahl's Law calculator to TigerBeetle's homepage to let you see the impact: https://tigerbeetle.com/#general-purpose-databases-have-an-o...

As you move "the data to the code" in interactive transactions with multiple queries, to process more and more business rules, you're holding row locks across the network. TigerBeetle's design inverts this, to move "the code to the data" in declarative queries, to let the DBMS enforce the transactional business rules directly in the database, with a rich set of debit/credit primitives and audit trail.
by cbolton | 2025-11-11 11:53:31+00:00
There's a similar issue with retro video games and emulators: the screens on the original devices often had low color saturation, so the RGB data in those games were very saturated to compensate. Then people took the ROMs to use in emulators with modern screens, and the colors are over-saturated or just off. That's why you often see screenshots of retro games with ridiculously bright colors. Thankfully now many emulators implement filters to reproduce colors closer to the original look.

Some examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/bvqaec/why_and_how...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-aQMUXKPM
by sph | 2025-11-11 11:53:43+00:00
I don't think it's cycles, more like newcomers rediscovering the future.

I've learned Elixir in 2016 after a lull in my interest in programming languages, and 9 years later it's still my favourite environment by a country mile. It's not the language per se, but the BEAM, the actor model, the immutability — just makes sense, and doing things the C/Rust/Javascript/Python way is like building bridges out of cardboard.

For example, I've stepped into the world of game dev and Godot, which is fantastic and uses a regular object-oriented model. After trying to build a non-trivial desktop app with it, my thoughts are consumed by the fact that mutable state and object orientation is the silliest idea, and I'm speaking as someone that really got into Smalltalk and message-passing objects.

I don't even need actors and OTP, I just want some immutable data structures and functions operating on them. Erlang/Elixir are fantastic to build servers, but there is a sore lack of something closer to the metal within 80% the speed of a native language. I would build an entire operating system out of it. Why has no one put microkernels and Erlang into a blender? I know there's QNX, but it's still UNIX, not Erlang.