MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tmoertel | 2025-11-09 04:32:33+00:00
In short: Syntax defines the textual forms that the language allows. Semantics define how each form is interpreted.

Consider a simple calculator language that lets you add positive integers.

The syntax might give grammar rules like:

expr ::= digits (EOF | ' + ' expr) digits ::= ('0' | '1' | ... | '9')+

This grammar admits expressions like 33 and 2 + 88 + 344. That's syntax.

But how the language interprets those expressions is semantics. Continuing our calculator example:

1. Every expr evaluates to an integer value.

2. An expr of the form `<digits> EOF` evaluates to the integer given by interpreting the digits in <digits> as an integer in base 10.

3. If <expr> evaluates to the value x, then an expr of the form `<digits> + <expr>` evaluates to the value y + x, where y is the integer given by interpreting the digits in <digits> as an integer in base 10.

Of course, specifying semantics in human language is tedious and hard to make precise. For this reason, most programming languages give their semantics in a more formalized language. See, for a classic example, the R5RS specs for Scheme:

https://conservatory.scheme.org/schemers/Documents/Standards...
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-09 04:33:57+00:00
American submarines and aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered. They can sustain over 30 knots without stopping effectively indefinitely. They make their own water and, where needed, breathing air. The only thing they need to stop for is food, and they have enough aboard to circumnavigate the globe easily.

It would be really hard to sustain an average speed of 30 knots in a sailing vessel for the entire journey. Certainly you'd need the assistance of the wind deities of your choice. Central to commercial travel by wind is the predictability or lack thereof with wind power. It would be tough to run a tight supply chain when you don't know when one's ship will arrive within a reasonable window. For that reason, I think the future can't really be purely wind-powered for most commodities, it's just not predictable enough to build schedules around.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-09 04:35:12+00:00
That really depends on what formal verification means in context. I don't see any interesting specifications in the repo, just basic stuff like this MD5 spec [0] that doesn't verify whether the MD5 implementation is correct. This is one of the areas where formal verification is listed as completed/gold level.

It's common for the interesting OS proofs to take more code than the kernel itself. Take a look at the seL4 proofs [1], or those for CertiKOS as examples.

If you're actually interested in alternative OSes in memory safe languages, you might like TockOS, which is more production-ready at this point. Formal verification work of the isolation model is still ongoing, because it's difficult work.

[0] https://codeberg.org/Ironclad/Ironclad/src/branch/main/sourc...

[1] https://github.com/seL4/l4v
by tzs | 2025-11-09 04:38:43+00:00
As someone who isn't much of a sports fan but will occasionally watch, I've found Premier League more interesting than US major leagues because of the promotion/relegation system.

With US leagues once it becomes clear what teams are in contention for winning the championship that year, games between the rest teams become a lot less interesting.

With Premier League, teams are fighting for the championship, just like in US leagues. The team that finishes #1 is the champion.

But they are also fighting to get into the next UEFA Champions League season. UEFA Champions League is a league for the top clubs from several European country top leagues. The top 4 Premier League finishers make it (so the Premier League champion and the next 3 teams).

There's also a fight for the #5 spot, because that team gets into the Europa League group stage.

Meanwhile the teams at the bottom of the Premier League are also fighting. The teams that finish in the last 3 places get kicked out of the Premier League!

They get moved to the the EFL Championship League. (Not to be confused with UEFA Champions. UEFA Champions is the league with the best teams from Europe. EFL Championship is a league for UK teams that are not quite good enough for Premier League).

Those 3 teams that get kicked down to EFL Championship League are replaced with the 3 top teams from EFL Championship League. (And it doesn't stop there...there are 7 more levels of leagues blow EFL Championship League, with promotion/relegation between each adjacent level).

Premier League has 20 teams and with 5 top spots to fight for and 3 bottom spots to fight to avoid you can get a long way into the season with 3/4 of the teams still having either a realistic shot of making the top 5 or in danger of not staying clear of the bottom 3.
by helicone | 2025-11-09 04:38:45+00:00
It will always be true that the best you can do is hustle 24/7 as long as your bosses have the ability to collectively replace all of you with immigrants from areas with lower levels of material comfort who are willing to accept worse conditions than you.

For this process to reverse, one of two things must occur: 1. Scab immigration is completely stopped. 2. Every society on earth normalizes to the same level of material comfort.

We didn't re-invent mental misery, globalization created the conditions to allow your bosses to impose it on you. The good news is it is likely temporary.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-09 04:38:53+00:00
4get.ca is just another "metasearch engine" that anyone can "self-host", like https://searx.github.io/searx/ for example

There is no reason one has to use any particular remote instance

https://web.archive.org/web/20250801194307if_/https://git.lo...

Nor does one have to use a browser in order do "metasearch". For example, I have a script that queries over 60 search engines directly, from the command line, and returns SQL. I can combine results from many sources into custom SERPs comprised of simple HTML for text-only browser, no Javascript, CSS, etc.

Unfortunately, pooled search proxies have a finite lifetime, like scroogle.org
by ofalkaed | 2025-11-09 04:38:53+00:00
Small sail boats do not need to go around wind farms, they can just sail right through them assuming the weather is agreeable. The problem is more that if you are caught up in a storm anywhere near a windfarm (within range of the storm carrying you into it) it makes everything very dangerous for you; instead of dropping sail and letting the boat find its way through the storm from the safety of below decks you have to stay on deck and fight the storm. To put this into metropolitan terms, it would be like routing the main pedestrian path through the most dangerous part of town for the sake of a highway.

Either way, to repeat myself again, I did not say I was right or better and plainly stated my mixed feelings.
by mlhpdx | 2025-11-09 04:39:32+00:00
That’s correct, but look up the Gitana 17.

> The Gitana 17 is a 100ft trimaran designed to foil offshore at sustained speeds of 45 knots or more.

Also, 1964, the all-nuclear Task Force One, including the USS Enterprise, completed a high-speed circumnavigation in 65 days.

The winner of the Vende Globe did it in 64. And that was solo (one person on board).
by ckz | 2025-11-09 04:43:20+00:00
Just a note for those in the market (as someone with the unusual distinction of owning ~30 Alphasmarts), a few hundred $ is more like a top of the line, NIB/serviced Alphasmart Neo 2 with bag, manual, etc.

If you just want to try out distraction-free writing with USB a used AS3000 is easily found <$50 (YMMV re. battery corrosion).
by lurk2 | 2025-11-09 04:43:37+00:00
> The US is currently attacking foreign citizens outside the United States without due process.

This is how Osama Bin Laden justified 9/11. To be clear, virtually all of those being deported do not have a legal right to reside in the United States. The number who are deported erroneously measures in the tens, not the hundreds, but even if it were in the tens of thousands, that would not morally justify the extrajudicial killings of law enforcement personnel unless you could somehow demonstrate that these deportations were part of a concerted effort to murder people.

> Israel has multiple government members currently with warrants for arrest for genocide.

The deportation of foreign nationals residing in the United States illegally is not even remotely comparable to what is happening in Gaza.
by toast0 | 2025-11-09 04:43:46+00:00
You ship me money, I ship you product. I don't need presence in your country, you don't need presence in mine. If your country doesn't like my product, they can enforce against you (or block it at the border).

I broadcast radio from my country, according to the rules of my country. If you tune in, and your country doesn't like it, they can enforce on you or broadcast something else on the same frequency if that's allowed by their rules.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-11-09 04:44:48+00:00
Is there a plan to keep this updated? There are a number of projects like curl-impersonate[1] and the like, but these are rarely updated any more.

OTOH, I'm curious if people are actually getting by running old versions for production use cases.

[1] https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate
by hilbert42 | 2025-11-09 04:45:47+00:00
"Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's a bad norm."

Perhaps "Extraterritorial regulation" is bad wording. A country can regulate whether an extraterritorial website is distributed and or viewed within its borders but it has no legal authority force another country to close down a website that's operating legally within its jurisdiction.

The only remaining options are diplomatic action—request the site be taken down or war/by force. Whether we like it or not the only practical action is for a country to geoblock offensive websites at its borders.

Sadly, given the current state of world affairs, it seems to me geoblocking will become the norm almost everywhere.
by scoofy | 2025-11-09 04:47:04+00:00
When states choose nullification as a policy to ignore federal law, it’s an overt act of escalation.

I don’t think these raids are good policy, but I won’t pretend that it’s happening in isolation. What they are doing, in large part, seems to be legal. Dressing detention up as kidnapping isn’t treating the issue in good faith.
by nynrathod | 2025-11-09 04:47:07+00:00
Thanks for valuable feedback. Yeah definitely will add more examples projects.

And really make sense your point to have usp or any unique or good feature doolang should have. As this is just starting point of doolang, and honestly i never started this as hobby project I want this to be mature over years not to replace any languge but to have simplicity for writing servers and apis. after few months I will definitely integrate this with my own production note taking app once i improve this language.

Reference counting i Introduce for auto memroy mgmt only, as rust ownership and borrow method will be extreme complex to implement as solo dev i feel.

But now im clear now language should have any special feature or target which is lacking, idk what to find for this, but it will be valuable if you can suggest, im also thinking to have new post to ask feedback from community what they want in such language. Any suggestion?
by YZF | 2025-11-09 04:48:29+00:00
Just saw a bunch of funny videos with people asking NYC bus drivers if the busses are free already and they all having a good laugh at that. Supposedly the MTA has $48.4B or so debt: "The MTA's long-term debt was around $48.4 billion in late 2023, a figure that has grown from $25.8 billion in 2010."

Looking at the financials they are already subsidized to the tune of >50% : https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... ... So the city needs to find at least $7.5B a year just to keep growing their debt at the same rate. But that's ok- if every person in the city just pays another $400 or so a year in taxes they'll get that covered. Socialism...
by brontitall | 2025-11-09 04:49:02+00:00
This almost IS the tar format. It’s just a 512 byte header with metadata per file then the file data. Repeat for each file. The cpio format is similar but the header is shorter. Details of the contents of the headers vary, hence the different flavours. And I believe POSIX added extensible extra metadata fields that are saved as a kinda pseudo file
by mabster | 2025-11-09 04:49:08+00:00
I'm the opposite - I really like checked exceptions in Java because it's very easy to see how developers are handling errors and they also form part of the function signature.

Most functions will just pass on exceptions verbatim so it's better than error return values because with them the entire codebase has to be littered with error handling, compared to fewer try catch blocks.

setjmp, etc. are like unchecked exceptions, so I'm also not a fan, but I use this occasionally in C anyway.
by gtowey | 2025-11-09 04:49:23+00:00
What would be the point? Ships are complex machines and the ocean is an incredibly harsh and unforgiving environment. You would need crew to simply maintain the ship while underway and fix things that break (which pretty much always happens).

Next, these ships can be downright dangerous for other, smaller ships. It has happened before that large cargo ships have killed people on sailboats when they didn't keep an adequate lookout. I wouldn't trust an autonomous system to have enough accuracy to avoid running over other boats.
by Freedumbs | 2025-11-09 04:49:36+00:00
What's really insane is GOP literally sent all these immigrants on buses and planes to places like Chicago. Now they've hired all the proud boys, patriot front, etc, paid them during shutdown, gave them camo and military gear, and authorized them to terrorize everyone. There's no legal path to justice. It's an impossible situation constructed by people who hate their neighbors and want to literally kill them. It's so much worse than this blog post can capture or any comment. This shit is heinous.
by charintstr | 2025-11-09 04:50:17+00:00
China has already recognized that computer manufacturing is a national security concern for them. So they will continue investing in Huawei regardless of whether Nvidia sells to them or not. Huang knows this pretty well and just wants to sell to China while Nvidia is still in a prime market leader position. It makes sense from his angle to say “sanctions are useless” and “were going to be caught by China anyways, so might as well make a buck while we can.”
by testing22321 | 2025-11-09 04:50:30+00:00
> Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary.

They were trying hard to make a TBM that was faster than the current literal snails pace and cheaper than existing ones. It doesn’t appear they’ve had much success, though I’d rather they tried than just sticking with the status quo forever.

> The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.

They can, regulations just don’t allow it yet. Coming soon (tm)
Show HN: PyNIFE. 400-900× speedup for embedding-based retrieval pipelines
by stephantul | 2025-11-09 04:50:47+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been playing around with ways to make retrieval pipelines faster, and ended up building something I'm calling PyNIFE (Nearly Inference-Free Embeddings).

The idea is simple: train a static embedding model that's fully aligned with a bigger "teacher" model, so you can skip expensive inference almost entirely. In practice, that means 400-900× faster embedding generation on CPU, while still working with the same vector index and staying compatible with your existing setup.

You can even mix and match: use the original model for accuracy when you need it, and PyNIFE for ultra-fast lookups or agent loops.

It's still early, and I'd love feedback, especially on where this might break, what kinds of workloads you'd test it on, and any ideas for better evaluation or visualization.

Repo: https://github.com/stephantul/pynife
by rdtsc | 2025-11-09 04:50:58+00:00
Use it for luxury goods! "Why _my_ iphone arrived in Baltimore on a clean cargo ship, so yeah, ..."

I am only half joking. Anything luxury of vanity related, just add the fact they've gotten to the consumer on a clean ship and you'll find some people to pay extra for it. The more expensive the better. They can brag about it to each other.
by behnamoh | 2025-11-09 04:51:41+00:00
Who here actually uses Grok? It's sad to see Elon's arc but when he doubled down on some of his political ideas he had it coming with the Tesla sales going down and x.ai not taken seriously.

I've always tried to remain apolitical and unbiased but it's hard to overlook who's behind a technology you wanna buy. Not that sama and others are saints either, it's just Elon's very obvious and vocal about it.

It's a shame, really, because Grok is a good model. But Elon promised to open source the previous model and it took them forever to do that with Grok 3. Sorry, but I wanna buy from someone who keeps their promises ("FSD by next year").
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-11-09 04:51:45+00:00
This is a valid take, but I also wonder if there’s anything to be gained by chastising those who complain about the musk company. Nobody does a thing about any company being shitty, a company is singled out by the mob for critique in a way that may (?) lead to some kind of consequence, and my thinking is you may as well join in to get something rather than nothing done. The real issue is that public outrage does absolutely nothing most of the time.
by ckz | 2025-11-09 04:52:37+00:00
Surprised my fellow typewriter folks haven't shown up yet! [paging @ebruchez]

If you want the writerdeck experience I'll echo the recommendations here for an Alphasmart. The brute-force autotyping file transfer it uses is quaint but always amusing. Gave one to a screenwriter friend and it's now gotten regular use for years. PDAs are a solid choice as well that may resonate with the HN crowd.

Don't sleep on owning an actual typewriter though. I have a small collection and use one daily. There's a rabbit hole of ~150 years of makes & models (most of which continue to function fine today) that will give any mechanical keyboard enthusiast much to chew on. :)
by keeda | 2025-11-09 04:53:00+00:00
That makes sense, and I agree with your assessments about the voting population's priorities. But maybe the inflation / immigration aspects were much more intertwined than we realized.

Maybe (being very generous to him) Biden didn't do a tradeoff between inflation vs employment... maybe the gamble was that increased immigration would boost the economy enough that citizens were not as bothered by the immigrants.

In other words, the very valid "its' the economy stupid" theory would imply that if people can comfortable provide for themselves and their families, they'd be less bothered by what they saw as competition for jobs.

Unfortunately time was not on their side, and inflation did not drop fast enough.

But there might be another angle. An interesting aspect of the economic sentiment and inflation hysteria preceding the election was that data showed that the majority of Americans thought they themselves were doing well, but other Americans were suffering. So the statistical reality was much better than the statistical perception.

This is one reason that led to the term "vibecession" -- data belied the sentiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession

Many have credibly attributed this phenomenon to all the algorithm-driven ragebait content on social media, and certain news media channels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession#Media_influence_an...)

But maybe we still underestimate the size of that effect: it exploited a critical flaw in an otherwise successful economic strategy -- its reliance on "the outsiders." During the time things were improving but still painful, the perception of these outsiders could be exploited to distract from the improvements happening and foment a backlash.

Note it could very well have just happened by accident, but if not... that shows the power of mass perception. The events happening with media platforms leading up to the election may have been (and still are) much more consequential than we realize.
by kelnos | 2025-11-09 04:54:44+00:00
If this was one thing in isolation, I'd easily believe that many/most other companies are just as bad, and get slapped with small fines like this that they treat as a cost of doing business (and ends up being cheaper than the cost of doing the right thing in the first place).

But it looks like they were, in total, fined for 800 or so environmental violations, which feels like a lot of violations: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
by nynrathod | 2025-11-09 04:54:58+00:00
Hi, thanks for pointing this out. Yeah struct and enum are alredy in pipeline. memroy mgmt and codegen work pending for those 2. Planning to release in 0.3.0 but let me see if possible on next release of 0.2.0

Struct enums are base of any type safe language will surely add in upcoming releases.
by Freedumbs | 2025-11-09 04:55:07+00:00
wtf are you talking about? they've shot us citizens, they continually beat an kidnap us citizens for no reason. care to explain any of the actions in this blog post? are you aware of the attack they carried out on an apartment building where they took everyone, mostly US citizens into custody in the middle of the night? kidnapping is the best way to describe it. it's 100% accurate. there's no way to distinguish these terrorists as they drive unmarked cars and refuse to identify themselves. anyone could dress up like them and kidnap people.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-09 04:57:03+00:00
> history has shown that companies will bleed the commons dry and they need to be legally strong-armed into contributing back to the free software projects they make their fortunes off of.

Software is not a scarce good. Let companies use free software without contributing back as much as they wish; it doesn't affect others in the least. There is no bleeding of the commons here, because even if companies take as much as they can without giving back, it doesn't reduce the resources available for others.
by nynrathod | 2025-11-09 04:58:01+00:00
True, it takes years. And as a solo dev its really hard. Turning into product really makes sense, i understood now i need something unique or specific feature. but as of now only writing apis routers and server with super simple syntax with speed and security only having in my mind. but I value your point, do you have any suggestions or recommendations? I'm also thinking to start new post to take ideas and suggestion from community.
by reasonableklout | 2025-11-09 04:58:09+00:00
Most attention implementations can work across an arbitrarily long context.

The limiting factors are typically: 1. Often there are latency/throughput requirements for model serving which become challenging to fulfill at a certain context length. 2. The model has to be _trained_ to use the desired context length, and training becomes prohibitively expensive at larger contexts.

(2) is even a big enough problem that some popular open source models that claim to support large context lengths in fact are trained on smaller ones and use "context length extension" hacks like YaRN to trick the model into working on longer contexts at inference time.
by Freedumbs | 2025-11-09 04:58:51+00:00
Have you been ignoring the reports? This is a small slice of the carnage the government has unleashed. They've detained at least 170 US citizens so far for hours or days, shot numerous US citizens, killed US citizens, killed tens of people in detention, the detention center conditions are torture so people intentionally self deport, the people who are deported disappear, are never heard from again ...............