MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 02:46:49+00:00
I'm not deriving who had the pagers from first principles. They were military pagers, on a military network that Hezbollah fought an actual civil war to establish and maintain, with subverted devices that Hezbollah itself acquired directly. There's a lot of reporting on this. Israel did not booby trap the whole supply of pagers into Lebanon. The Hezbollah combatants carrying these pagers did not acquire them at a Beirut Cellular Retail Outlet.

Another way to say this is that if you have evidence/reporting suggesting that Israel did in fact set explosives in pagers that were broadly available to Lebanese civilians, my argument falls apart.

I think Hezbollah is inexcusably evil, far worse than Israel is, but I'm not particularly interested in defending Israeli governance; I have no commitment to the proposition that Israel doesn't commit atrocities (in fact, I think they commit rather many of them). So I'm fine with my argument collapsing; I'm just waiting for evidence to topple it. The trouble the preceding commenter is having with me is that I can't find a story that squares the circle of the numbers they're trying to present.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-11 02:47:20+00:00
What's the downside of having one API to pre-allocate memory to be used by the GC, and a second API to suspend/resume GC operations? When you run out of pre-allocated memory, it will resume GC operations automatically.

I'm naively thinking, the performance bottleneck is not with tracking allocations but constantly freeing them and then reallocating. Let the GC track allocations, but prevent it from doing anything else so long as it is under the pre-allocated memory limit for the process. When resumed, it will free unreferenced memory. That way, the program can suspend GC before a performance sensitive block and resume it afterwards. API's don't need to change, because the change at all that way.
Show HN: I'm building a game engine that transpiles game scripts to Rust
by TiernanDeFranco | 2025-12-11 02:47:21+00:00
Over the past couple months I've been building Perro, a game engine that takes your C#, TypeScript, or Pup (engine DSL) scripts, and outputs a valid Rust script.

The Rust script is what the engine core (written in Rust) directly calls from script.init() and script.update()

My main thought behind this was that instead of dealing with scripting layers and indirection and intepreters, I would leverage Rust's performance and LLVM optimizations to allow devs to make games the same way they would in Godot or Unity, but with the speed of Rust.

Right now the repo IS open source and public, but there's no editor and there's only basic 2d and 3d rendering. The core of my work has been getting the main things setup with the difference between building scripts in dev with loading a DLL, and statically linking the scripts together with the entire project to create an optimized binary.

This is either very stupid or very smart, as the transpiler is what allows for the use of multiple languages without supporting different runtimes and compilers.

Everything is just Rust under the hood.

Let me know what you think.
by shagie | 2025-12-11 02:47:51+00:00
> And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously.

... and libressl. https://web.archive.org/web/20140625075722/http://www.libres... (and the talk - https://youtu.be/GnBbhXBDmwU?si=gMlhb2Xis5V8sR6K&t=2939 )
by voidhorse | 2025-12-11 02:48:36+00:00
Yes. And the article is a perfect example of the dangerous sort of automation bias that people will increasingly slide into when it comes to LLMs. I realize Karpathy is sort of incentivized toward this bias given his career, but he doesn't even spend a single sentence even so much as suggesting that the results would need further inspection, or that they might be inaccurate.

The LLM is consulted like a perfect oracle, flawless in its ability to perform a task, and it's left at that. Its results are presented totally uncritically.

For this project, of course, the stakes are nil. But how long until this unfounded trust in LLMs works its way into high stakes problems? The reign of deterministic machines for the past few centuries has ingrained a trust in the reliability of machines in us that should be suspended when dealing with an inherently stochastic device like an LLM.
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 02:49:03+00:00
> Compilers are not AI

They are if you define them as such. But there is already a silly semantic thread going on if that's what you are looking for.

> and code in high-level languages is still code in the proper sense.

Sure. As is natural language (e.g. criminal code).

> It is highly dishonest to call someone who is not a competent software engineer a "developer" even if their job consists entirely of telling actual software engineers or "coders" what to do.

Okay. But coders, as spoken of earlier, were not software engineers. They were human compilers. They took the higher level instructions written by the software engineers and translated that into machine code. Hence the name. Developer in the above referred to what you call software engineer. It seems your misinterpretation is down to thinking that software engineer and coder were intended to be the same person. That was not the intent. Once the job of coding went away it has become common to use those terms synonymously, but the above was clearly written about the past.

Again, if you're looking for a silly semantic discussion, there is already another thread for that.
by chrismorgan | 2025-12-11 02:49:49+00:00
Very little 3D stuff on the web involves less than a couple of megabytes of JavaScript. The “hello world” of Three.js results in a bundle size of almost half a megabyte (484 kB, 122 kB gzipped), and it used to be a lot bigger—it’s been a hard slog for them to get it even that low. You just can’t seem to do much with WebGL without spending a few hundred kilobytes of code. The “hello world” of VoxCSS is just under 40 kB (12 kB gzipped). No idea if any effort has gone into shrinking it.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-11 02:49:49+00:00
Public politics, and private company politics are very similar, although private company politics are less open to scrutiny.

The issue with the lottery is the need to ensure that the candidates both want the role, and are capable of doing it.

The latter, who is the right person to say "X is unqualified because.. " (and the Peter Principle suggests that just because someone was good at a lower job, eventually they're going to be put into a job they are unqualified for)

The theory with the current style that the person who puts themselves forward most definitely desires to win the job, and, as they rise up through their party system, have some level of competence, as adjudged by the people they have convinced to put them forward as a candidate.

Further, the adversarial nature is supposed to then mean that that person's opponents can call out the reasons that that person isn't suitable for the job.

Unfortunately, this ends up being a muck raking exercise, and the complaints might not amount to anything more than innuendo, further, there's no guarantee that they will even be heard (the supporters will provide evidence that the opponents themselves are not qualified to make any criticism)

Unfortunately a lot of elections these days, US or otherwise, tend not to end up being "This candidate is awesome, let's vote them in", but, instead "the incumbent is terrible, get someone, anyone, to replace them" - in the US Biden was voted in because Trump 1.0 was deemed a failure, and then Trump 2.0 was voted in because Biden was deemed a failure. Right now the Democrats appear to be on the rise again because Trump 2.0 and the Republicans are being deemed a failure. This isn't to diminish the wins by some actually good candidates though (although how good they are remains to be seen, and is a matter of... opinion).
by stego-tech | 2025-12-11 02:49:51+00:00
The memo itself is an excellent walk through historical bubbles, debt, financing, technological innovation, and much more, all written in a way that folks with a cursory knowledge of economics can reasonably follow along with.

A+, excellent writing.

The real meat is in the postscript though, because that's where the author puts to paper the very real (and very unaddressed) concerns around dwindling employment in a society where not only does it provide structure and challenge for growth, but is also fundamentally required for survival.

> I get no pleasure from this recitation. Will the optimists please explain why I’m wrong?

This is what I, and many other, smarter "AI Doomers" than myself have been asking for quite some time, that nobody has been able or willing to answer. We want to be wrong on this. We want to see what the Boosters and Evangelists allegedly see, we want to join you and bring about this utopia you keep braying about. Yet when we hold your feet to the fire, we get empty platitudes - "UBI", or "the government has to figure it out", or "everyone will be an entrepreneur", or some other hollow argument devoid of evidence or action. We point to AI companies and their billionaire owners blocking regulation while simultaneously screeching about how more regulation is needed, and are brushed off as hysterical or ill-informed.

I am fundamentally not opposed to a world where AI displaces the need for human labor. Hell, I know exactly what I'd do in such a world, and I think it's an excellent thought exercise for everyone to work through (what would you do if money and labor were no longer necessary for survival?). My concern - the concerns of so many, many of us - are that the current systems and incentives in place lead to the same outcome: no jobs, no money, and no future for the vast majority of humanity. The author sees that too, and they're way smarter than I am in the economics department.

I'd really, really love to see someone demonstrate to us how AI will solve these problems. The fact nobody can or will speaks volumes.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-11 02:50:35+00:00
There is "early exit after the first swap", which actually makes his algorithm closer to insertion sort than bubble sort. If the list couldn't change between each pass, it would be a very inefficient insertion sort in O(n^3) as you are constantly scanning the part of the list that is already sorted.

But this is a case where theory doesn't count as much as having an acceptable result. It is typical in video games, if it plays well and looks fine, who cares if it is incorrect. Here I guess that sometimes a sprite appears on top of another sprite when it should have been behind it, because of the early exit, but while playing, it turned out not to be noticeable enough to change the algorithm.
by webbuidlr | 2025-12-11 02:50:43+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Webb, founder of Flowdrop. I tried to learn to code four times. Failed every time. But I still needed to automate stuff for my business. So my cofounder John and I built Flowdrop. You literally just chat with it like you're texting a friend, and it builds your automation. No drag and drop. No nodes. No trying to figure out which webhook goes where. Want to sync your Google Sheets with Slack? Just say "Hey, when someone adds a row to my sheet, send me a Slack message." Done. We're live at flowdrop.com and have a free tier to try it out. The big idea: if you can explain what you want in plain English, you should be able to build it. Period. Most automation tools make you feel dumb when you can't figure them out. We think that's backwards. The tool should feel dumb if it can't understand YOU. We just launched and would love your feedback. What workflows are eating up your time? What makes other automation tools so painful? Drop a comment or try it out and let me know what breaks (or what you love).
by rznicolet | 2025-12-11 02:51:42+00:00
You joke, but, alas, there is a _real_ company kinda trying to do this. Reflect Orbital[1] wants to set up space mirrors, so you can have daytime at night for your solar panels! (Various issues, like around light pollution and the fact that looking up at the proposed satellites with binoculars could cause eye damage... don't seem to be on their roadmap.) This is one idea that's going to age badly whether or not they actually launch anything, I suspect.

Battery tech is too boring, but seems more likely to manage long-term effectiveness.

[1] https://www.reflectorbital.com
by arihant | 2025-12-11 02:52:15+00:00
I think now the Google One AI Pro subscription directly works for raising limits on the CLI? But otherwise, there is an Individual subscription. The problem is it doesn’t work out of the box. You have to create a whole Google Cloud project and attach the API to it to get it to work. Otherwise the CLI would stop logging you in, which it did when the account was free. The worst part is if that cloud project had any code in it, CLI will use it as context on every prompt.
by Aqua0 | 2025-12-11 02:52:18+00:00
"The TBD group is using several third-party models as part of the training process for Avocado, distilling from rival models including Google’s Gemma, OpenAI’s gpt-oss and Qwen, a model from the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the people said."

LOL. Distillation doesn't count as plagiarism, or you should call Meta out on it. They're distilling the Chinese model.

Ref: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/inside-meta-s-piv...
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-11 02:52:23+00:00
> "Just don't support the majority of consumer displays" isn't really an acceptable solution for an organization attempting to be a player in the home entertainment industry.

I would recommend Valve to create an official list of consumer displays that ("certified by Valve") do have proper support for the most recent version of Display Port with support for all features relevant to gaming.

This way gamers know which display to buy next, and display vendors get free advertising for their efforts that is circulated to an audience that is very willing to buy a display in the near future.
by firesteelrain | 2025-12-11 02:52:25+00:00
I have seen it in several articles. (I don’t work for HashiCorp or Red Hat subsidiaries so no idea what is said or done inside those subs)

1. https://business.adobe.com/customer-success-stories/red-hat....

2. https://www.openpr.com/news/4100338/linux-operating-system-m...
by jackling | 2025-12-11 02:52:34+00:00
I agree with your last point, but tbh, the exact idea of "targeted" is splitting hairs IMO. I'm not arguing that civilians were the primary target, but not caring that they were around, and being fine with their death as long as the combatant was dead, in my view makes it seem that Israel's enemies are not the combatants of Hezbollah, but generally just the Lebanese people.

If someone droped a nuke on a city to kill 1 person, does it matter who that person was specifically targeting? Does the distinction if his intended target matter at all? I would think you and I would agree that obviously it doesn't matter at that point, but then I ask, at what point does that distinction matter?
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-11 02:52:44+00:00
Since 1996, Ken Perlin has published a whole bunch of extremely cool Java applet demos on his web page, which he uses to teach his students at NYU and anyone who wanted to learn Java and computer graphics. One of his demos was a procedural planet generator!

I learned a lot from his papers and demo code, and based the design of The Sims character animation system on his Improv project.

https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/ (expired https cert)

https://web.archive.org/web/20001011065024/http://mrl.nyu.ed...

Here's a more recent blog post about a new one using WebGL, Dragon Planet:

https://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=12821

Here's another blog post about how he's been updating his classic Java applets by rewriting them in JavaScript:

https://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=27980
by MallocVoidstar | 2025-12-11 02:52:53+00:00
Pirates are generally slow to transition formats, but AV1 is also not better than H.265 (in practice) at the high-bitrate encodes.

Scene rules say to start with --crf 17 at 1080p, which is a pretty low CRF (i.e. it results in high bitrates): https://scenerules.org/html/2020_X265.html

AV1 would most likely result in slower encodes that look worse.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-11 02:53:06+00:00
> the social media companies have such a grip on their kids

We are talking about US companies in particular. Everything that was being done to try to mitigate the vileness and toxicity has been forcefully rescinded in the name of US profiteering.

There is only one viable option, and that it for countries that reject poisonous US social media to choose/identify/build a better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself.
by protocolture | 2025-12-11 02:53:15+00:00
It has to be read in sequence with other changes in Australia.

The government has been working tirelessly for more than a decade to prevent growing dissent from sweeping the major parties from power.

The government has wrapped itself in the dual flags of nationalism and protecting kids to shield themselves from an enormous volume of rational criticism on this topic.

Changing a law, in and of itself, isnt worrying. Its that minor parties these kids could have supported are facing a triple whammy, kids will be less likely to engage with them online, they have a steeper threshold to pass when accessing the senate, and they have had a large funding changes that disadvantage them.

Godwinning is perfectly appropriate imho.
by HumanOstrich | 2025-12-11 02:53:31+00:00
I was glancing around and landed on the page for the flyweight pattern.[1]

It looks like `addBook` is using the spread operator, which always creates a shallow copy of the book instance properties, thus nullifying any benefits of the flyweight pattern. It also attaches extra arbitrary properties, but still assigns the result to a `book` variable. I don't think this is a great example.

[1]: https://www.patterns.dev/vanilla/flyweight-pattern/

Edit: I forgot to give you kudos for all the effort it must have taken to create all this content, and I appreciate that you're making it available for free.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-11 02:54:06+00:00
I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my biometric data with multiple 3rd parties, who will then lose and leak my private data, every time I drive a car.

This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.
by seabass | 2025-12-11 02:55:01+00:00
Love this! Just wanted to note that I think there’s a mistake on the flyweight pattern page’s example. You’re using getting a boolean with Set.has but treating it like a Book (as if you had used Set.get). I also don’t really understand how this saves memory if you’re spreading the result into a new object, but maybe someone here can enlighten me!
by some-guy | 2025-12-11 02:55:35+00:00
Are they rejecting the driver because of it being open source? There are specific modules I use in my AMD card that require closed proprietary driver add-ons for example such as AMF.

Not defending the HDMI forum here, but perhaps Valve / AMD have a way of including a proprietary blob in SteamOS (I don't think most gamers would care)
by rat87 | 2025-12-11 02:55:37+00:00
The idea that only criminals or terorists have pagers is ridiculous(you mentined doctors). But Israel didnt target pagers in Lebanon. They sold equipment for Hezbollah internal use om their own network (they convinced Hezbollah to pay a front company for the walkies).

That is the opposite of indicrimante.

as for

> white Judeo-Christian variety

Judeo Christian is a silly concept. Either say christian or say Abrahamic. While most casulties were affiliated with Hezbollah and therefore overwhelmingly Shia Muslim enough of the general public of Lebanon is Christian that they would make at least some of civilian bystanders injured. Also Lebanese people aren't any whiter in average skin color then the average Israeli
by rtkwe | 2025-12-11 02:55:44+00:00
It may look better but it's harder to read basically across the board for anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters. Sans serif fonts are easier for people with dyslexia without going all the way to a dyslexia specific font. They're also generally far better for people with all sorts of poor vision.

It really comes down to the fact that it's better to be functional, forms don't need to /look/ good they need to work well. For aesthetic things we can still use the pretty fonts.
by protocolture | 2025-12-11 02:56:32+00:00
>I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

The law could instead prohibit scams and violence?

>These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.

Irrelevant.

>but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe)

Almost every other avenue, including doing nothing, has more merit than that which has been implemented.

>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.

Theres some basic negative freedom implications from those, but they dont intend to ban a class of person from accessing a mundane element of human society.
by Centrino | 2025-12-11 02:56:53+00:00
> internationally recognized government

Countries not recognizing the current government of Venezuela as legitimate:

- US

- all 27 EU member countries

- UK, Canada, Australia

- Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay

- Israel, Japan, Morocco, South Korea

- Switzerland, Norway, Iceland
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 02:58:31+00:00
> Go just isn’t the tool we thought for some jobs

Go made it explicitly clear when it was released that it was designed to be a language that felt dynamically-typed, but with performance closer to statically-typed languages, for only the particular niche of developing network servers.

Which job that needs to be a network server, where a dynamically-typed language is a appropriate, does Go fall short on?

One thing that has changed in the meantime is that many actually dynamically-typed languages have also figured out how to perform more like a statically-typed language. That might prompt you to just use one of those dynamically-typed languages instead, but I'm not sure that gives any reason to see Go as being less than it was before. It still fulfills the expectation of having performance more like a statically-typed language.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-11 02:59:53+00:00
Rush Limbaugh started broadcasting in the 80's. Fox News in the 90's. Prior to that you had decades of propaganda against "communists" and anti-war protesters. Prior to that you had blatant lies about what would happen if black people got civil rights. Before that you had blatant lies about women's suffrage. The bullshit has always existed in very large quantities. The common uniting thread for the vast majority of the bullshit is conservative beliefs. They are always doing their most to make the world a worse place for some group or another.
by kingstnap | 2025-12-11 02:59:59+00:00
Supposedly its the L-arginine.

> In particular, peanuts contain high amounts of L-arginine, a precursor for nitric oxide synthesis, which is essential for vascular function and blood flow regulation [6,11]. Therefore, this may represent a mechanism by which peanut consumption could positively influence cognitive performance through improvements in CBF. Furthermore, peanuts are a rich source of unsaturated fatty acids and polyphenols, both of which have been shown to support vascular health [12].

And there do seem to be papers that associate these two according to a quick google search (plus it's cited of course).