MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-10 14:44:42+00:00
That's a good point - recursive descent as a general lesson in program design, in addition to being a good way to write a parser.

Table driven parsers (using yacc/etc) used to be emphasized in old compiler writing books such as Aho & Ullman's famous "dragon (front cover) book". I'm not sure why - maybe part efficiency for the slower computers of the day, and part because in the infancy of computing a more theoretical/algorithmic approach seemed more sophisticated and preferable (the cannonical table driven parser building algorithm was one of Knuth's algorithms).

Nowadays it seems that recursive descent is the preferred approach for compilers because it's ultimately more practical and flexible. Table driven can still be a good option for small DSLs and simple parsing tasks, but recursive descent is so easy that it's hard to justify anything else, and LLM code generation now makes that truer than ever!

There is a huge difference in complexity between building a full-blown commercial quality optimizing compiler and a toy one built as a learning exercise. Using something like LLVM as a starting point for a learning exercise doesn't seem very useful (unless your goal is to build real compilers) since it's doing all the heavy lifting for you.

I guess you can argue about how much can be cut out of a toy compiler for it still to be a useful learning exercise in both compilers and tackling complex problems, but I don't see any harm in going straight from parsing to code generation, cutting out AST building and of course any IR and optimization. The problems this direct approach causes for code generation, and optimization, can be a learning lesson for why a non-toy compiler uses those!

A fun approach I used at work once, wanting to support a pretty major C subset as the language supported by a programmable regression test tool, was even simpler ... Rather than having the recursive descent parser generate code, I just had it generate executable data structures - subclasses of Statement and Expression base classes, with virtual Execute() and Value() methods respectively, so that the parsed program could be run by calling program->Execute() on the top level object. The recursive descent functions just returned these statement or expression values directly. To give a flavor of it, the ForLoopStatement subclass held the initialization, test and increment expression class pointers, and then the ForLoopStatement::Execute() method could just call testExpression->Value() etc.
by 542354234235 | 2025-12-10 14:44:42+00:00
I don’t think business and rich people will use it either. The Concorde worked because you were in a black hole while you crossed the Atlantic, unable to work and unplugged from what was going on. So saving 5 hours was extremely valuable. Now, we have laptops and in-flight wifi, so you don’t miss much on the plane like you used to. Combine that with ultra luxury first class cabins that make the flight extremely comfortable, and saving some time while having to sacrifice all the amenities that come with a good first/business class cabin on a full sized airplane just doesn’t make sense.

Even private planes just don’t feel like they would make sense. Most private jets are used for regional and transcon, and the time savings would be much less significant at those distances. I feel like most wealthy individuals would rather upgrade to a larger, more comfortable, and/or longer-range jet than to sacrifice comfort, size, and range for supersonic. Only the truly ultra-wealthy seem like they might pick up a few, but that is such a vanishingly small market.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-10 14:45:01+00:00
"I'm authoring a new Golang based firmware for a retrocomputer I literally pulled out of the trash that nobody will use"

HN: "Ah you're sweet"

"I'm authoring a new Golang based game engine that doesn't have the featureset of things with $100 million to $3 billion of product development"

HN: "Hello, human resources?"
by pfdietz | 2025-12-10 14:45:06+00:00
The best technologies there are (IMO) e-fuels and extremely low capex thermal.

There are interesting engineering problems for sources that are intended to operate very infrequently and at very low capacity factor, as might be needed for covering Dunkleflauten. E-fuels burned with liquid oxygen (and water to reduce temperature) in rocket-like combustors might be better than conventional gas turbines for that.
by cestith | 2025-12-10 14:45:09+00:00
In Texas the electric grid is regulated by ERCOT and gas pipelines are regulated (by accident of history) by the Texas Railroad Commission. ERCOT has a big network of producers who put energy into the grid, local companies like CenterPoint Energy who distribute it to customer sites, then retail electric companies sell the power and pay a line usage fee to the line owner (which tends to be a fixed monthly cost to the customer, listed separately on the bill from other fees or usage bills). The TRC deals with companies that own their own pipelines and bill the end customer directly.

A lot of the natural gas in the US is in Texas, and a lot of it is flared while pumping out crude. Putting data centers on turbines near the extraction fields out in the Permian Basin makes sense for power. You can build short pipelines or hook into the ones already there.
by vidarh | 2025-12-10 14:45:23+00:00
Do you have an actual point that doesn't involve me divulging private information of people who are not part of this conversation? My identity is on my profile; identifying the people in question would be rather easy.

If what you're suggesting is that the US is not being more draconian than most, you're free to make an actual claim about how.

I'll note that this article is about people eligible for the visa waiver program, which does not include any African countries - travelling to the US from African countries is also far more draconian than what is outlined in the article, so it's unclear why you think the comparison is relevant.
by SirMaster | 2025-12-10 14:45:29+00:00
I guess my argument is that turning $1000 into 1 million was probably a significantly more probable outcome than winning 1 million in a lottery which is specifically why I decided to put my money into bitcoin instead of lottery tickets.

I just don't see the equivalence in comparing it to buying a lottery ticket.

There are way way way more bitcoin winners than there are lottery winners.
by stackedinserter | 2025-12-10 14:45:32+00:00
Why do Rust developers create so much drama everywhere? "Rewrite everything to Rust", "Rust is better than X" in all threads related to other languages, "how do you know it's safe if you don't use Holy Glorious Rust".

I'm genuinely not trolling, and Rust is okay, but only Rust acolytes exhibit this behaviour.
by mrob | 2025-12-10 14:46:20+00:00
Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool)
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-12-10 14:47:28+00:00
Yes, but also it’s not an employer’s job to provide entertainment during work hours on a factory floor where there are machines that can kill you if you’re not careful.

There’s a famous fable where everyone is questioning the theft victim about what they should’ve done and the victim says “doesn’t the thief deserve some words about not stealing?”

Similarly, it’s a corporate network designed and controlled for work purposes. Connecting your personal devices or doing personal work on work devices is already not allowed per policy, but people still do it, so I don’t blame network admins for blocking such connections.
by excalibur | 2025-12-10 14:47:58+00:00
> Also is “doubling down” the new “deep dive”?

Similar, but I think it might actually be dumber. When you take a deep dive you're jumping headfirst into things you don't understand, with the outcome largely unknown to you. When you double down on something you're already aware that it isn't working, but you persist anyway under the delusion that doing the same thing more aggressively will make your bad plan succeed.
by pta2002 | 2025-12-10 14:47:59+00:00
Yep, that's what I'm referring to.

For now there aren't many popular drivers that use Rust, but there are currently 3 in-development GPU drivers that use it, and I suspect that when those get merged that'll be the real point of no return:

- Asahi Linux's driver for Apple GPUs - https://rust-for-linux.com/apple-agx-gpu-driver

- The Nova GPU driver for NVIDIA GPUs - https://rust-for-linux.com/nova-gpu-driver

- The Tyr GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs - https://rust-for-linux.com/tyr-gpu-driver

I suspect the first one of those to be actually used in production will be the Tyr driver, especially since Google's part of it and they'll probably want to deploy it on Android, but for the desktop (and server!) Linux use-case, the Nova driver is likely to be the major one.
by psychoslave | 2025-12-10 14:48:13+00:00
In French we call that kind of practices "affabulations". Maybe fraud, deception or deceit are the closest matching translations for this context.

That is what the LLM are molded to do (of course). But this is also the insistence by informed people to unceasingly use fallacious vocabulary. Sure a bit of analogy can be didactic, but the current trend is rather to leverage on every occasion to spread the impression that LLM works with processes similar to human thoughts.

A good analogy also communicate the fact that it is a mere analogy. So carrying the metaphor is only going to accumulate more delusion than comprehension.
by toss1 | 2025-12-10 14:48:19+00:00
A SciFi book I read decades ago where the premise was that aging had been broken, had insights that still stick with me. The character of a young woman 28 years old who pretended to be 105 to seem more interesting to people. That when people got to be 400-500 years old and had been through a dozen careers, they started getting bored and taking up high-risk activities (skydiving, etc.).

I remember little else (I wish I could to find it and read it again), but those shifts of perspective seem entirely plausible and revealing of how we look at life.

The biggest reason we need to die, or create entirely different power structures, is to ensure no one can amass resources and power to rule forever. However bad a psychotic despot is, at least now, death will come collect him. Imagine an effective eternity with Putin and the oligarchs as your country's leader, just getting better and better at impoverishing the country for their own gain.
by immibis | 2025-12-10 14:48:22+00:00
I don't understand your defense of Instagram. It's not even a very good defense. The fact that Facebook removed the code as soon as they were caught means they also think they would be in serious trouble.

Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
by liotier | 2025-12-10 14:48:29+00:00
InfoReseaux remarked that this data is suspicious, to say the least: CC BY-NC 4.0 but contains ODbL licensed data coming from Openstreetmap - but also from Microsoft.

Thread on the Openstreetmap forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/is-globalbuildingatlas...

Christian Quest sent the following message to the authors:

"I’m writing to you because I’m surprised by the choice of data license you’ve set on the GlobalBuildingAtlas dataset.

As mentioned and explained in your paper, at least two data sources you’ve been using to create this dataset are under the Open Database License (ODbL): OpenStreetMap and Microsoft building datasets.

I’ve downloaded the extract of data you’re proposing to have a look at the final dataset, and it confirms that building polygons from OSM (and Microsoft) are present in the resulting dataset in a substantial portion.

In such case, your dataset must be published under the ODbL licence (see 4.2), because it is a derivative database (see 1.0 of ODbL license for definition).

A copy of this message has also been sent to the Legal Working Group of the OSM Foundation.

Thanks in advance to fix quickly the license of the dataset you published. This will also allow OpenStreetMap contributors to use it to improve OpenStreetMap, which is not possible with the CC-BY-NC you choose."
by sandworm101 | 2025-12-10 14:49:06+00:00
Everyone used whatever currency was locally availible, with every merchant in border regions being very aware of conversion rates. Throughout history there was also a cronic shortage of smaller-denomination cash, stuff for normal people to buy normal things. Today, we see "clipped" coins as evidence of forgery when in fact much of that was likely related to a lack of loose change. Nobody in town able to break a gold crown? Well, maybe you buy a horse with a slice of gold from that crown.
by abbefaria27 | 2025-12-10 14:49:28+00:00
I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.
by brontosaurusrex | 2025-12-10 14:49:58+00:00
At least solver seems faster (if not better) in later versions? p.s. My try at 'flag in the wind' in Blender from around 2022: https://0x0.st/s/aJ6DNj2pEHzRdBiscEIsbQ/KCsK.mp4 I do remember it took me all day to get somehow realistic motion.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-10 14:50:06+00:00
> The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic

That's very much not true, and it's also a tale as old as HN at this point. Since I started commenting on HN in 2010 sometime, the quality had stayed more or less the same, and hasn't drastically dropped in quality like Reddit has done as it grew. Also, the amount of comments that complain that HN is turning into Reddit seems to have stayed at the same level of frequency too, fwiw.
by piva00 | 2025-12-10 14:50:22+00:00
Define inefficiency, I'd much rather pay for local inefficiency which is still money changing hands in my local economy rather than paying a bit less for my money to be siphoned out of my local economy with increased efficiency.

Losing to Uber means my money is not being used in my economy, it goes away, it pays a few devs/local staff while it's stashed away in other financialised assets that do not help my neighbours (well, perhaps it helps the richest ones).
by timerol | 2025-12-10 14:50:24+00:00
Yes, this was in fact an explanation of a joke. "In Soviet Russia, Rome is a poor city" requires both a currently-existing Soviet Russia, and Rome to be a part of it. Both of those are far-fetched. "Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future" is a bad explanation, since they are currently invading a country geographically in Europe.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-10 14:50:27+00:00
For one: the US is way more permissive than the EU when it comes to visa duration.

Common to get a 10 year US visa. Schengen visa? For the duration of your visit (for which you have to have bought plane tickets and accommodation before showing up for a visa appointment). The EU also charges pretty hefty fees for a Schengen visa, which I view as a racket and/or xenophobia.

Don’t even get me started on the requirement to hand over your passport at hotels in Europe!

My point is that characterizing the US as “more draconian than most” is quite far from reality, which is a lot more nuanced.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-12-10 14:50:28+00:00
They hit every one of the neoliberal memes:

* Prosperity gospel (as if developed economies have slow growth for want of just one more tax break on the wealthy. Just one more! That'll fix it right up!)

* Laffer curve invoked without any attempt to determine where on it current policy lies

* Saving the whales is killing the economy (they were spiders in this example -- point for satire?)

* Trying to sneak financial deregulation under the skirts of the above

* Opaque economic growth model with self-serving result presented as factual

* The rich will leave (as if the pressure isn't coming from their pumped assets and a firesale wouldn't fix this)

* Tut-tutting about debt to pretend at fiscal conservatism

* 100% attention on upper class concerns, 0% on lower class concerns

* Upper-class conservative-coded hobby talk free of any concern that it might give away the above

I think they were earnest and just wildly out of touch, though, given all the allusions to 15 year old economic discussions. That's when these memes were at their peak. They simply don't understand the credibility hit they have taken since then. I'd love to see a conversation between them and Gary Stevens. These memes are his origin story.
by graemep | 2025-12-10 14:50:30+00:00
> It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.

If they reported verifying my ID to the government every time I bought a drink I would complain about invasion of privacy.
Ask HN: Is there a design term for deliberately making a UI more frustrating?
by morellt | 2025-12-10 14:51:44+00:00
Context: This applies to functions such as email newsletters making you click as many times as possible before finally unsubscribing or Instagram deterring people from removing all of their likes by not including a "select all" button. When I google this concept, the only results I get are "Planned Obsolescence".
by gaigalas | 2025-12-10 14:51:49+00:00
> Altman argued that future AI competition will be won through devices

What this really signals is the intention (which might be sincere or not) of getting some sort of OEM deal with some device manufacturer.

And yes, if the path to profitability is in shipping devices with OEM AI features, Microsoft and Google are clearly ahead.

It seems all venues to profitability are offensive to OpenAI current users. Ads, OEM, etc. This is a problem for them.

And yes, Apple can include lots of undesirable things in their products and still keep their cult following, that's why he mentions them.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-10 14:52:09+00:00
Like I thought the whole point of these stupid things was that any John Q off the street could make awesome videos?

Have you played around with stuff like sora 2 or veo 3 or seen the work of regular John Q's who have? In general, the quality of marketing for AI tools is far better than the quality of AI-generated video. These tools are also kinda expensive for the average John Q off the street...

I also think most people greatly underestimate just how much creativity is required to make a good movie, or how hard it can be to direct.
by nathan_compton | 2025-12-10 14:52:18+00:00
I'm pretty sure that wealth accumulated by the very rich at the expense of the poor is bad for total economic development because we drastically under-estimate the value of properly developing human beings.

We see enormous flourishing in society whenever labor is given more power for whatever reason (usually mass deaths) because this increases the amount of resources which flow towards raising children, who then become productive members of society. In times of weak labor power, average people are squeezed tight and less resources flow to children, which fucks shit up.

I think we are seeing that right now in the U.S. - education is nickle and dimed to shit, wages aren't enough to support children, let alone let them flourish, and the general "vibe" is so bad that people don't even want to have kids.

Meanwhile rich people are richer than ever.
by dijit | 2025-12-10 14:52:51+00:00
it used to be that EV certs had higher insurance if there was a leak of the intermediate private keys and lost data.

Since nobody ever actually leaked an intermediate private key for a CA, people don't recognise the value.

If we had lost payment card information through MITM, we would have been liable for a lot more money.

That was the business justification for EV back when I was doing major ecommerce stuff.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-10 14:53:40+00:00
> If the LLM is accurately reflecting the training corpus, it wouldn’t be considered a hallucination. The LLM is operating as designed.

That would mean that there is never any hallucination.

The point of original comment was distinguishing between fact and fiction, which an LLM just cannot do. (It's an unsolved problem among humans, which spills into the training data)
by Eikon | 2025-12-10 14:54:18+00:00
I'm mostly interested in being able to interact with the vfs and build a 9p rust client (in addition to the current v9fs) to support my 9p server [0].

Does anyone know what's the current state / what is the current timeline for something like this to be feasible?

[0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-10 14:54:47+00:00
It is true [1][2]. I don't know how the graph you quote is calculated (no inflation?) but clearly the GDP hasn't grown 30% since 2020 (31,516 to 41,184), LOL. 6% growth a year would be a wet dream anywhere in the developped world. The GDP grew only 1.3% over the last 12 months and the population had grown 1.1% over the preceding 12 months... So at best economic growth barely exceeds population growth but overall it's flat to down.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/times...

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita

> However, trade with the EU was declining as a proportion of total trade even before Brexit

Yes, it has slightly declined, probably because of Brexit. The point is that it is one thing to say that we are "free" to do as we please, but the reality is not so simple if that means taking a massive hit on 41% of our exports! This is the whole Brexit story.
by coldtea | 2025-12-10 14:55:44+00:00
>You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working. The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was providing something that leisure alone can't replace. People who stop pursuing things often just... decline.

There's a popular cope answer to this "that wont be the case with me".

But unless you already have either a concrete footing in enjoying the small things in life just for themselves, or a greater mission that falls outside the line of work you'll retire from (like being an activist, or a hobbyist programmer or musician or something), then it absolutely will be the case.
by bgro | 2025-12-10 14:55:46+00:00
1. All tech discussion is irrelevant unless it’s leetcode. Don’t fill my brain with any other useless, unproductive information.

2. How much time (points) will this presentation take to get to prod. Then how many points (time) will it take to deploy to prod. Do we need a spike for this presentation. I’m going to put it in the backlog and close it out since we’ll never get to it.
by ghaff | 2025-12-10 14:55:51+00:00
I agree with that. I do experiment with different slide styles and may use a quick fade-out/in but I don't use Powerpoint any longer and keep things pretty simple. Sometimes slides are more graphically heavy than other times. But rarely use much of the Powerpointish slide chrome. And I'm not really a designer and will mostly mess things up if I try to get too cute.