MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-12-23 16:31:25+00:00
Everything you've said here is answerable by anyone who is willing to read some of the posts I just linked to. Here's the link again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister It's essential to the operation of the site.

At the same time, we downweight such threads less when the sensational-indignant story, drama, or riler-upper happens to be about YC or a YC-related startup. Note that word less. It means we "put our thumb on the scale" in the opposite direction you're implying: to make those stories rank higher than they otherwise would.

How you get from that all the way back to the notion that we moderate HN specifically to suppress negative stories about YC strikes me as escape-artist-level logic, and citing a web page that we ourselves publish as the best (only?) supposed evidence for this is surely a bit ironic.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-23 16:32:01+00:00
A citizen of the west saying what you just said is analogous to a Soviet citizen saying:

The "existential threat to the USA's security interests" is a bit of an American propaganda thing. No one was out to attack the USA. They have the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Cuba was peaceful, hadn't joined the Warsaw Pact and wasn't formally planning to.

regarding the Cuban missile crisis. The only difference is that Cuba was more than twice the distance to DC that NATO nuclear warheads are from Moscow and nuclear missiles travelled much slower in the 1960s than they do today. You are welcome to have your perspective, just remember that your perspective is shaped by a media landscape that is just as partisan, just as biased, and just as shaped by propaganda as Russian perspectives are.

Further, consider that NATO's 2008 Bucharest declaration stated Ukraine would become a member. It's not like Russian concerns about Ukraine NATO membership came to them in a fever dream, these were concerns rooted in real, credible, public diplomatic discussions.

It is frustrating that Western audiences accept framings about US security interests that they dismiss as propaganda when applied to adversaries. It's a double standard that betrays a lack of principled willingness to apply "defense" philosophy equally and impartially. If your application of principles isn't impartial, that's not principled reasoning, that's just cheer-leading for your own team.

Of course, this isn't to deny that Russia was still wrong to invade Ukraine, or that the Russian military's actions are most accurately described as an invasion. Like I said before, two wrongs do not make a right. It doesn't matter whether Russia or the US refers to their military activity as "special military operations" rather than an invasion, it doesn't matter whether or not they have cited legitimate security interests before starting the invasion, invading another sovereign country, "firing the first shot", is a clear violation of the non-aggression principle.

As this relates back to the original discussion, I'd further add that even if you don't care about principled consistency whatsoever, the US/NATO (essentially the same thing, NATO without US troops and ISR capabilities is mostly bureaucrats disseminating .pptx files in Brussels) track record on regime change (Iraq, Libya, etc.) doesn't inspire confidence that "taking down" the Venezuelan government would even be likely to produce good outcomes. Principled reasoning, consequentialist reasoning: the logical conclusion is the same: the US should not invade Venezuela for regime change.
by lewisjoe | 2025-12-23 16:32:26+00:00
It'd be great if it supports a wasm/web backend as well.

I bet a lot of trivial text capabilities (grammar checking, autocomplete, etc) will benefit from this rather than sending everything to a hosted model.

It's possible right now with onnx / transformers.js / tensorflow.js - but none of them are quite there yet in terms of efficiency. Given the target for microcontrollers, it'd be great to bring that efficiency to browsers as well.
by wyre | 2025-12-23 16:33:46+00:00
Stalking is not "just following someone".

From Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center (SPARC): "
A pattern of behavior directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for the person’s safety or the safety of others; or suffer substantial emotional distress."

https://www.stalkingawareness.org/definition-faqs/
by patall | 2025-12-23 16:33:48+00:00
> And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.

If you take your time and read carefully. Because sometimes the colored choice is free, and sometimes it is the non-colored one. 100% dark pattern. As is disabling "paste" on check-in, forcing you to remember the 6-alphanumeric char booking code if you do not have a second device/pen&paper at hand.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-23 16:33:51+00:00
I'd like to know what more of the use cases are too, but one would be for doing renaming operations where the LSP understands the code and will tell the caller exactly what edits to make to which files. So I assume with LSP integration you could then ask Claude Code to do the rename, and it would do it per LSP instructions rather than itself having to understand the source code and maybe doing a worse job.
A SIMD coding challenge: First non-space character after newline
by zokrezyl | 2025-12-23 16:33:56+00:00
I’m working on a SIMD parser for a YAML-like language and ran into what feels like a good SIMD coding challenge.

The task is intentionally minimal:

detect newlines (\n)

for each newline, identify the first non-space character that follows

Scanning for newlines alone is trivial and runs at memory bandwidth.
As soon as I add “find the first non-space after each newline,” throughput drops sharply.

There’s no branching, no backtracking, no variable-length tokens. In theory this should still be a linear, bandwidth-bound pass, but adding this second condition introduces a dependency I don’t know how to express efficiently in SIMD.

I’m interested in algorithmic / data-parallel approaches to this problem — not micro-optimizations.
If you treat this as a SIMD coding challenge, what approach would you try?

Another formulation:

# Bit-Parallel Challenge: O(1) "First Set Bit After Each Set Bit"

Given two 64-bit masks `A` and `B`, count positions where `B[i]=1` and the nearest set bit in `A|B` before position `i` is in `A`.

Equivalently: for each segment between consecutive bits in `A`, does `B` have any bit set?

*Example:* `A=0b10010000`, `B=0b01100110` → answer is 2 (positions 1 and 5)

Newline scan alone: 90% memory bandwidth. Adding this drops to 50%.

Is there an O(1) bit-parallel solution using x86 BMI/AVX2, or is O(popcount(A)) the lower bound?
by vessenes | 2025-12-23 16:34:23+00:00
Interesting read. The paper calls this a “roadmap” and says 3d HBM is still figuring out what it can be, and what it will look like - seems right.

Hyperscalers are dealing with a pretty complex Pareto envelope that includes power (total), power (density), volume of space available, token throughput and token latency.

My guess is that there’s going to be some heterogenous compute deployed possibly forever, but likely for at least the next six to ten years, and exotic fragile underclocked highly dense compute as imagined in the paper is likely to be part of that. But probably not all of it.

Either way as a society we’ll get the benefits of at least a trillion dollars of R&D and production on silicon, which is great.
by esoterae | 2025-12-23 16:34:27+00:00
The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane. Communication needs to be positive and deliberate.

Remember that Apple SSL bug "goto fail"? That was a whitespace bug, because even if the C feature predated python, everyone's eyes had been trained to slide right off that particularly crass shortcut as python was widespread by that point.
by mpalmer | 2025-12-23 16:35:08+00:00
You can't be serious.

> When you publish something under the banner of open–source, you implicitly enter a stewardship role. You’re not just shipping files, you’re making a contribution to a shared commons. That carries certain responsibilities: clarity about purpose, honesty about limitations, and a basic alignment with the community’s collaborative ethos.

(from the second link)

You're not just writing angry screeds, you are producing slop prose and asking us to spend our time reading it.

How is this not an implicit repudiation of your entire argument? Are you not hurting yourself by avoiding learning how to write better?
by magnitudes | 2025-12-23 16:35:22+00:00
I find these really are not only condescending but also really miss the mark and ironically come off as really uneducated in my opinion, and that really is the most infuriating type of condescension. What you call slopware today is becoming less and less sloppy every six months as new coding models drop. In 2 years the “unmaintainable mess” is going to be far better and far more maintainable than anything the engineers behind these snide websites will make. Do folks realize you can also use the same coding models to ask questions and reason about the “slop” that these code models are writing that somehow is able to do something I would never have been able to do before? I don’t really care if it’s 100% accurate, hit it with a hammer until everything makes sense. Yell at Claude and learn how to wrangle it to get what you want, that skill is an investment that’s going to pay you back far more than following the advice of these folks, that’s my opinion.

Like “you will learn better without AI” is just a bad short sighted opinion dressed up in condescension to appear wise and authoritative.

Learn your tools, learn the limitations, understand where this is going, do the things you want to do and then realize “hey my opinions don’t have to be condescendingly preached to other people as though they are facts”
by xoa | 2025-12-23 16:35:36+00:00
>This is very well put, thank you (though I think you got a little needlessly aggro at the end :) ).

My apologies to GP if it came across as too personally aggro, I did mention the corps and their walled gardens to try to be clear on the focus, but the situation does really make me absolutely furious and also truly sad. This should have been such a simple, universal win/win/win that made everything better for everyone. But as you say:

>and so strongly supported by the spec authors and the passkey community, that it's hard to see it as unintentional. It completely poisons the technology, and that sucks because I really do want to use it.

Yeah, 110%. I'm one of the very few who actually tried to use certificates for web authentication back in the 00s, and it did work pretty darn well surprisingly! There were even a few commercial web services that tried it out like the now defunct StartSSL. It was just the whole flow around it was too clunky for regular people and needed some additional standardization and polish. If only the right catalyst had happened to make it a priority in the 2000s it might well have been done in a lasting good way that'd then be too sticky and entrenched to fuck with now. It's depressing to see it being hijacked and poisoned like it has been :(.
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-23 16:36:15+00:00
Same, I learned to code to build software for my business. I turned it into a SaaS and turned down investment because my original business was already profitable and making the SaaS better was making the business better.

This is why I trust software made by people who come from that industry or have some background. I’ve seen too many startups where the founders are fresh out of college and have never worked in that niche and have never been in the shoes of the people they are trying to sell to. To me, that just means they are trying to get big and get acquired, I’m just a means to that end.
by throwforfeds | 2025-12-23 16:36:29+00:00
Yes, but it does happen a lot. The case of Kalief Browder was one of the reasons for all the reforms around bail. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/nyregion/kalief-browder-c...
by lesuorac | 2025-12-23 16:37:11+00:00
Sure but most of software development is about running single-core workflows on top of a parallel environment so the experience of a SWE is very heavily single-threaded.

The ever so popular JS is explicitly singlely threaded.

The default way of programming is with code on individual lines and when you run a debugger you step from one line to the next. This is not how code actually runs within a pipelined CPU though.
by jjj123 | 2025-12-23 16:37:22+00:00
When I say “our economic system” I am not talking about capitalism generally, I’m talking about the US system specifically, where we are:

51st in percentage of the population that lives in poverty [1]

Decent but worse than social democratic countries like France and Germany in hunger [2]

Ranked below Canada, France, Germany, the UK in healthcare outcomes, which all have more socialized systems than we do [3]

So I stand behind my broader point: the culture of individualism in the US benefits a select few and hurts us as a whole.

1: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
2: https://journalistsresource.org/home/food-insecurity-health/...
3: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2024-09...
by allenleee | 2025-12-23 16:39:20+00:00
Love this one! My immediate thought for a build: just a camera with on-device VLMs and LLMs. You could point it at a normal whiteboard (or a wall of sticky notes), and the model could interpret the handwriting, track the tokens, and sync the state digitally in real-time without needing any special "smart" hardware.

It feels like a much more flexible approach than an expensive proprietary whiteboard. Would a camera-only setup cover your use case?
by tracker1 | 2025-12-23 16:39:23+00:00
I wish more SUVs had a test for, "can a couple adults actually sleep in the back of it?" I mean, it's relatively easy with most pickup trucks if you're willing to put the tailgate down, and your feet may go off the end a bit, but that happens in some beds for taller guys anyway.

A friend of mine usually does a camping trip with friends and family for his birthday... unlike some, I'm not investing in a camper as I wouldn't use it more than this once a year and I the first year I didn't want to drive to/from the nearest hotel... Trying to sleep in the back of a Buick Enclave was such a horrible experience, even by myself, I now just drive back and forth the 8 miles or so to the hotel, which is way overpriced that time of year. The irony is it wouldn't take much to have some kind of metal supported sheet that levels the surface over the middle row seats when in the "down" position.. but it's not even an afterthought.

So, I do think it's a feature that could be useful... I just don't think the Aztec executed well.
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-23 16:39:29+00:00
Brewfile is definitely the best option when in that ecosystem, but even that falls short by having no explicit versioning. You have to hack in version pinning if you run into an issue with a specific package.

If you like mise, check out devenv for the nix version of it. Its a lot of the nix benefits without a lot of the nix drawbacks (but still some)
by 1123581321 | 2025-12-23 16:39:50+00:00
That wasn’t what you were saying but they’re good observations. This behavior of Americans was observed by Tocqueville’s observations about newspapers and the role that discussing them played in our political outcomes in allowing certain types of populist candidates to bubble up. There are analogues in English politics. The article had a continental example but it was just an analogy. That said, it’s reasonable for Americans to want to understand and adjust their strategies for quirks in their culture and political process; they can’t simply transplant Chinese government and culture here to please you, can they?
by dminor | 2025-12-23 16:39:56+00:00
We've been using Dato for 5 years or so - a bit of a weird use case probably, we're driving configuration of our internal EHR with it. But it is very nice for creating a structured set of data models and then you've got a nice UI to input the data and a nice API for grabbing the data, all of which the engineering team didn't need to build.

It's been rock solid for us.
by anshumankmr | 2025-12-23 16:40:06+00:00
Without getting into specifics (just joined a new firm), we’re working with a bunch of billing data.

Management is leaning toward a deep learning forecasting approach — train a neural net to predict expected cost and then use multiple deviation scorers (including Wasserstein distance) to flag anomalies.

A simpler v1 is already live, and this newer approach isn’t my call. I’m still fairly new to anomaly detection, so for now I’m mostly trying to learn and ship within the existing direction rather than fight it.
by tjr | 2025-12-23 16:40:08+00:00
AI only hurts learning if you let it. You can still use AI and learn effectively if you are thoughtful about the way you apply it.

I think that's very important.

Never mind six months; with AI, "you" can "build" something small and useful that works in six minutes. But "you" almost certainly didn't learn anything, and I think it's quite questionable if "you" "built" something.

I have found AI to be a great tool for learning, but I see it -- me, personally -- as a very slippery slope into not learning at all. It is so easy, so trivial, to produce a (seemingly accurate) answer to just about any question whatsoever, no matter how mundane or obscure, that I can really barely engage my own thinking at all.

On one hand, with the goal of obtaining an answer to a question quickly, it's awesome.

On the other hand, I feel like I have learned almost nothing at all. I got precisely, pinpointed down, the exact answer to the question I asked. Going through more traditional means of learning -- looking things up in books, searching web sites, reading tutorials, etc. -- I end up with my answer, but I also end up with more context, and a deeper+broader understanding of the overall problem space.

Can I get that with AI? You bet. And probably even better, in some respects. But I have to deliberately choose to. It's way too easy to just grab the exact answer I wanted and be on my way.

I feel like that is both good and bad. I don't want to be too dismissive of the good, but I also feel like it would be unwise to ignore the bad.

Whoa hey though, isn't this just exactly like books? Didn't, like, Plato and all them Greek cats centuries ago say that writing things down would ruin our brains, and what I'm claiming here is 100% the same thing? I don't think so. I see it as a matter of scale. It's a similar effect -- you probably do lose something (whether if it's valuable or not is debatable) when you choose to rely on written words rather than memorize. But it's tiny. With our modern AI tools, there is potential to lose out on much more. You can -- you don't have to, but you can -- do way more coasting, mentally. You can pretty much coast nonstop now.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-23 16:40:25+00:00
I'm not disputing that among robot makers Waymo has got it right more than anyone else. Remarkably so in fact. Waymo appeared to be about two orders of magnitude safer than humans, maybe more. That's good enough to take a few percentage points of the ride hailing business and launch a relatively rapid expansion. I would much rather have a Waymo pass me on my road bike than any other vehicle or driver.

I don't think any other robots that are so deeply embedded in normal human environments are even close to this level of safety and reliability. But we don't let toddlers and people who have severely restricted mobility near traffic without supervision. Robots in the home are going to have to be much more safe than Waymos so they don't break grandma in half or fling the baby across the room. Or think of it this way: driving over a cat in the road isn't nearly as bad as crushing the cat at home.
by smolder | 2025-12-23 16:40:33+00:00
> There is absolutely no reason why software today has to be written like software of yesterday.

I get what you're saying, but the irony is that AI tools have sort of frozen the state of the art of software development in time. There is now less incentive to innovate on language design, code style, patterns, etc., when it goes outside the range of what an LLM has been trained on and will produce.
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-23 16:40:38+00:00
I mean, look at Microsoft. They're a tiny little 5 trillion dollar company and their own cloud storage software can't reliably extract zip files compressed with their own compression software on their own flagship operating system.

How dare some nobody in a third world country use AI resources to accelerate the development of some process that fixes an issue for them and occasionally ask you to buy them a coffee when a poor sad pathetic evil worthless hateful disgusting miserable useless 5 trillion dollar company that actively hates you does the same thing with worse results that makes your life more miserable while lining their pockets with every penny in the entire world?!
by dfadsadsf | 2025-12-23 16:40:40+00:00
This comes down to realism versus wishful thinking. In the real world, force is used to resolve geopolitical problems - as we’re seeing in Venezuela now and saw previously in Iraq, Serbia, Grenada and countless other countries with US. The alternative is pretending that every country can act however it wants without repercussions. Ukraine deliberately instigated conflict with hope that Russia does not react militarily instead of playing both sides like Kazakhstan, etc.

On no one was out to attack Russia - that's probably true today but Ukraine and broader Eastern Europe realignment is more of 50-100 years project and nobody knows what happens in 20-30 years. US is on a brink of invading Venezuela and blockade is already borderline act of war (that was casus belly for US declaring war on Germany in WW1) so it's not like NATO/US are some peaceful paradise.

And on “not formally planning to”: Ukraine literally wrote its intention to join NATO into its constitution. That doesn’t get more formal than that.
by pixelesque | 2025-12-23 16:41:14+00:00
As other comments have mentioned, context does matter, and as someone with a lot of 2D image/pixel processing experience, other than the 'BSR' and 'ORD4' items - which are clearly common in the codebase and in that era of computing, all that code makes perfect sense.

Also, breaking things down to more atomic functions wasn't the best idea for performance-sensitive things in those days, as compilers were not as good about knowing when to inline and not: compiler capabilities are a lot better today than they were 35 years ago...
by alsetmusic | 2025-12-23 16:41:33+00:00
When I was in high school, a friend who played drums in a band would try to pull off these super complicated fast fills. He couldn't pull them off and I always thought, "why doesn't he play something he can get right?" Well, after months of practice, he was able to pull them off. He was a great drummer, but he worked at incredibly hard to get there. It's a little tangential to what you said, but it feels appropriately related.

I guess I'm agreeing while also saying that you can get there by failing a lot at full speed first. Maybe he practiced at half-speed when he was alone and I never saw that part.