MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 06:49:12+00:00
How would that be implemented on an individual basis? Force drug-induced psychosis (obviously not)? Just kick people off of support? That will have obvious, very bad downsides. And then we'll have a bigger problem with homelessness (which will get the same response).

While I don't downplay your experience; do you know of research that talks about it? The idea that people need incentives is an old one - Bill Clinton's welfare reform talked about 'a hand up, not a hand out', etc. I also remember research, though I don't know how current, that most people in welfare programs are there temporarily - they are in and out, not there on a long-term basis.

What about people who aren't going to make it on their own? Do we just let them die? A similar problem is people addicted to drugs: There is no reliable solution; rehab only works for some, not always permanently, and forcing people into it is almost certain failure (besides being a serious violation of their freedom).

There is research and experience saying 'housing first' - providing housing, which provides stability and much better access to services - helps significantly, but that may be focused on people lacking shelter.

P.S. I hope you drop the whining about downvoting. It's against guidelines and is tactical victimhood.
by yes_man | 2025-12-08 06:50:57+00:00
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.
by foxglacier | 2025-12-08 06:51:10+00:00
What's the point of all this naval-gazing? How are Adam Smith and Karl Marx relevant to anything? They're not gods writing gospel. Whatever valid ideas they had can stand on their own. Where's the modelling, simulations, experiments? It sounds like a hobby project for people who spent too much time in liberal arts where they learnt they're not allowed to think for themselves and have to cherry pick ideas from authorities and write a lot of words but in the end create nothing. Excuse me for losing it a bit there.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-08 06:51:16+00:00
Early returns makes the code more linear, reduces conditional/indent depth, and in some cases makes the code faster. In short, it often makes code simpler. The “no early returns” is a soft version of “no gotos”. There are cases where it is not possible to produce good code while following those heuristics. A software engineer should strive to produce the best possible code, not rigidly follow heuristics even when they don’t make sense.

There is an element of taste. Don’t create random early returns if it doesn’t improve the code. But there are many, many cases where it makes the code much more readable and maintainable.
by dotancohen | 2025-12-08 06:51:25+00:00
Yes.

When my database logging fails, I write a file that logs the database fail (but not the original log file).

When my file logging fails, depending on application, I'll try another way of getting the information (the fact that for file logging failed) out - be that an http request or an email or something else.

Databases fail, file systems fill up. Logging logging failures is extremely important.
Show HN: Preflight – Replace shell validation scripts in Dockerfiles
by vertti | 2025-12-08 06:53:17+00:00
I kept writing the same brittle shell one-liners in Dockerfiles to check if binaries exist, env vars are set, and config files are valid. The error messages were always terrible and the syntax inconsistent.

Preflight replaces all that with a single static binary. It handles commands (with version constraints), env vars, files, TCP/HTTP endpoints, checksums, git state, and system resources. Works in FROM scratch images since it has zero dependencies.

Happy to hear what validation patterns I'm missing.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-08 06:53:41+00:00
> so assuming internet penetration implies computer literacy is a fallacy, as most households globally instead use a cellphone as their primary computing device

I was using computer literacy as a stand-in for technical literacy.

> Steve Jobs was correct that the smartphone user experience is the best experience for non-technical users.

We’re speaking about this in retrospect; mass-market smartphones were still in their infancy when the project launched.

> Even Bill Gates called them out for this when they were trying to fundraise in the early 2000s

Gates doesn’t mention anything about smartphones in this article.
by empressplay | 2025-12-08 06:54:13+00:00
To be fair, turtle graphics is not itself Logo, Logo was originally designed for text manipulation (because all schools had at that time were teletype terminals). Then came the idea of a physical turtle robot, then the graphical turtle when schools got computers with CRT displays.

My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)
by andikleen2 | 2025-12-08 06:54:58+00:00
Early x86-64 Linux had a similar problem. The x86-64 ABI uses registers for the first 6 arguments. To support variable number of arguments (like printf) requires passing the number of arguments in an extra register (RAX), so that the callee can save the registers to memory for va_arg() and friends. Doing this for every call is too expensive, so it's only done when the prototype is marked as stdarg.

Now the initial gcc implemented this saving to memory with a kind of duffs device, with a computed jump into a block of register saving instructions to only save the needed registers. There was no boundary check, so if the no argument register (RAX) was not initialized correctly it would jump randomly based on the junk, and cause very confusing bug reports.

This bit quite some software which didn't use correct prototypes, calling stdarg functions without indicating that in the prototype. On 32bit code which didn't use register arguments this wasn't a problem.

Later compiler versions switched to saving all registers unconditionally.
by tehjoker | 2025-12-08 06:55:12+00:00
markets have existed forever. what is new since the dutch invention of capitalism is the cycle of money->commodity->money instead of commodity->money->commodity. That is, production for money instead of simple exchange.

This different cycle has massive implications, and changes how investments are made. Instead of people investing in things for themselves, they invest explicitly for production for the market and for other people for things they will never use themselves.

In China, the post-Deng consensus is to use markets in service of socialist development. People can be critical of this, but Deng's idea was that: "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it's a good cat" meaning that markets, even with some capitalist mechanics, if subservient to socialist politics, can still be used to socialist ends. Personally, I am still trying to decide how I feel about that, but it's also hard to argue with (so far) something that looks like success.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-08 06:55:55+00:00
In the end, all those battery powered ships needs to be charged. So it is their total energy consumption split between harbours over some period. And as we are talking about trickling you could pretty much average it.

It likely will depend on patterns of harbour. Like how many ships visit, what sort of distance those go. And how much of total time is spend charging some ship.

Worst case is maximum distance trips and maximum utilization that is there being ship almost always being docked. Apart from times when docked ship change.
by senderista | 2025-12-08 06:56:16+00:00
Pretty much, given that any decent pthreads implementation will offer an adaptive mutex. Unless you really need a mutex the size of a single bit or byte (which likely implies false sharing), there's little reason to ever use a pure spinlock, since a mutex with adaptive spinning (up to context switch latency) gives you the same performance for short critical sections without the disastrous worst-case behavior.
by Quothling | 2025-12-08 06:56:30+00:00
I would argue that it would be very annoying to work on a code base which wasn't like this. Having to spend so much time figuring out where your bottlenecks are and why they are there. Though you would make a fair point in regards to how much code-fascism you need when you try to make C/C++ safer than ADA. I'm sure they didn't come to this conclusion lightly, but the first thing to pop into my head is that it seems odd to do this mainly because of hiring challenges.

But C/C++ certainly did well enough for Lockheed Martin considering it's now one of their principal languages, if not the principal.
by classichasclass | 2025-12-08 06:57:20+00:00
A lot, I think. PA-RISC had a lot going for it, high performance, solid ISA, even some low-end consumer grade parts (not to the same degree as PowerPC but certainly more so than, say, SPARC). It could have gone much farther than it did.

Not that HP was the only one to lose their minds over Itanic (SGI in particular), but I thought they were the ones who walked away from the most.
by forty | 2025-12-08 06:57:59+00:00
The issue is precisely that you don't care, and as a result laptop makers have no incentive to making long lasting repairable laptop and our planet will look like a giant electric waste (not counting the problem will producing the required minerals etc).

If they were required to make things long lasting and repairable, they would put the effort into designing things this way, and you'll probably have laptops as perfect as you require, probably not much more expensive if at all in a few years but also have the required properties to f*ck our planet less.

That's the main issue with our current system, companies are only incentivised to maximize their profits, so they will happily f*ck our planet if they can save 1 cent in r&d on a 4000€ product.
by hasley | 2025-12-08 06:58:08+00:00
I have not read the whole article. But, what is shown at the beginning is not the Fourier Transform, it is the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT).

Though the DFT can be implemented efficiently using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm, the DFT is far from being the best estimator for frequencies contained in a signal. Other estimators (like Maximum Likelihood [ML], [Root-]MUSIC, or ESPRIT) are in general far more accurate - at the cost of higher computational effort.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-12-08 06:58:35+00:00
Maybe? But it also seems like you are that you are not accounting for new information at inference time. Let's pretend I agree the LLM is a plagiarism machine that can produce no novelty in and of itself that didn't come from what it was trained on, and produces mostly garbage (I only half agree lol, and I think "novelty" is under-specified here).

When I apply that machine (with its giant pool of pirated knowledge) _to my inputs and context_ I can get results applicable to my modestly novel situation which is not in the training data. Perhaps the output is garbage. Naturally if my situation is way out of distribution I cannot expect very good results.

But I often don't care if the results are garbage some (or even most!) of the time if I have a way to ground-truth whether they are useful to me. This might be via running a compile, a test suite, a theorem prover or mk1 eyeball. Of course the name of the game is to get agents to do this themselves and this is now fairly standard practice.
by mozarella | 2025-12-08 06:59:15+00:00
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section...

Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.
by kalterdev | 2025-12-08 06:59:27+00:00
The primary Stallman’s output is neither technical nor legal but moral. He condemns any entity that doesn’t grant its users four “freedoms.” And the primary disease that GPL spreads is not arbitrary legal restrictions but the moral code (altruism) that sanctions it. The fact that it’s not meant to be forced upon developers is irrelevant: it preserves the philosophy that could be weaponized in the future, possibly in an altered form.

But yeah, altruism is typically shared by both anarchists and communists. The only remaining question seems to be: who better embodies the ideal?
by Lapel2742 | 2025-12-08 06:59:58+00:00
> Does this actually replace AD and group policy effectively?

I do not know. They probably evaluated the solution before they made the decision.

In any case, continuing to use AD seems out of the question. Relying on US based software in 2025 and beyond is simply not a viable option for any administration that values its sovereignty. The US isn’t even hiding its hostility.
Show HN: Leetwrap – A "Spotify Wrapped" for LeetCode
by kumarsashank | 2025-12-08 07:01:04+00:00
Me and my friend built Leetwrap — a "Spotify Wrapped" style yearly summary for LeetCode users.

It shows your stats, problem streaks, ranking distribution, and a few fun visuals based on your LeetCode activity.

Would love feedback from the community. Still improving the logic and visuals, so suggestions are welcome!
by Knives326 | 2025-12-08 07:02:13+00:00
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You get: • Lifetime unlimited access (no subscription) • Permanent link works forever • All future updates free • Works on phone + desktop

First 50 buyers only at $79 → then price goes to $199.

Live demo (try before you buy): https://enabledone-ai-automation-empire.hf.space

NOTE Live Demo just shows application function of pulling api's and affiliate links, proof the code works. You just have to change some easy variables (2-3 min.)

Instant access after payment.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-08 07:02:52+00:00
...No, it was not meant as a hyperbole, as we were literally being told that these models will be able to do all of our work. I won't settle for the bullshit incremental wins here and there we see occassionally - I attribute those essentially to the old 'infinite number of monkeys typing on the infinite number of typewriters producing "Crime and Peace". No. that's not it - we were promised a god damn revolution, no less. Again, where is the cure for cancer and post-scarcity society ? Where is the AGI we were promised for the 2025? Let's hold the ghouls promising all that accountable for a change.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-08 07:02:55+00:00
This is going to be immediately downvoted, but whenever I see software developers mention that estimating is uniquely challenging for software it immediately calls out a bunch of red flags. Estimates in software are challenging but no more or less challenging than other industries.

Typically the people that single out software as a unique snowflake in the world of delivery and estimation really just say out loud they have no experience in project management and no experience working outside of authoring code. The things that make estimations most challenging in software are the same factors that make estimations challenging everywhere else.
by mcny | 2025-12-08 07:02:56+00:00
It would be so easy to place ads based on page contents and not based on retargeting. It would be such a breath of fresh air. You wouldn't need to know anything about the person visiting the page. You can still do programmatic ads with competitive bidding. And even according to Double click study, you would make about fifty five percent (iirc) of what you would make with all this invasive tracking.

It would be a win win for everyone.
by nurettin | 2025-12-08 07:03:37+00:00
I remember the first gentoo. On the framebuffer it had a beautiful blue/gray background with the logo and provided you with choices. You could build everything from scratch or install a bootstrapped version. I tried both, failed and gave up (my poor AMD k5 couldn't handle the heat). But the point here is: it was always easy to build a kernel within your debian installation from deb-src. You could even build it as a deb, install it and reboot into it. If my job was to manage a linux kernel, I'd have a script which took the latest sources, set kernel parameters, packaged it as deb-src and then it is just two steps to build and reboot. Then I could switch between them easily.
by npoc | 2025-12-08 07:04:29+00:00
TLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it's solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly.

https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932

> "The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me."

The answer to your question is humans' inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it's possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can't be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value.

Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect).

It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin's positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.
by lotyrin | 2025-12-08 07:04:31+00:00
As capable as they get, I still don't see a lot of uses for these things, myself, still. Sometimes if I'm fundamentally uninspired I'll have a model roll the dice, decide what I do or don't like about where it went to create a sense of momentum, but that's the limit. There's never any of its output in my output, even in spirit unless it managed to go somewhere inspiring, it's just a way to let me warm up my generation and discrimination muscles. "Someone is wrong on the internet"-as-a-service, basically.

Generally, if I come across an opportunity to produce ideas or output, I want to capitalize on it for growing my skills and produce an individual and authentic artistic expression where I want to have very fine control over the output in a way that prompt-tweak-verify simply cannot provide.

I don't value the parts it fills in which weren't intentional on the part of the prompter, just send me your prompt instead. I'd rather have a crude sketch and a description than a high fidelity image that obscures them.

But I'm also the kind of person that never enjoyed manufactured pop music or blockbusters unless there's a high concept or technical novelty in addition to the high budget, generally prefer experimental indie stuff, so maybe there's something I just can't see.
by Quothling | 2025-12-08 07:05:48+00:00
To me it would depend a lot on how US/EU relations continue to grow/break. If digital sovereignty ends up putting Palantir in a position where they won't be able to seel their intelligence tools to European secret police organisations, then it's probably overvalued. If relationships work out fine, then they'll basically be the Microsoft of mass survailance, which may make them overvalued but surely not the most overvalued company that ever existed?
by nl | 2025-12-08 07:06:26+00:00
> Large-scale exfiltration of data from ChatGPT when DeepSeek was being developed, and which Microsoft linked to DeepSeek

This is not the same thing at all. Current legal doctrine is that ChatGPT output is not copyrightable, so at most Deepseek violated the terms of use of ChatGPT.

That isn't IP theft.

To add to that example, there are numerous open-source datasets that are derived from ChatGPT data. Famously, the Alpaca dataset kick-started the open source LLM movement by fine tuning Llama on a GPT-derived dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/tatsu-lab/alpaca
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 07:07:09+00:00
It's not sufficient to make cliffs impossible, you just never want the effective marginal tax rate go above a certain threshold.

It's insane that we cap marginal tax rates for the wealthy below 50% “because they need incentives to work harder” yet the working class family is facing an effective marginal rate near 100% because of reduced benefits.

The solution would simply be to stop making benefits decrease when salary goes up.

“But it's going to be insanely expensive” one may say, but it's an accounting illusion. All we need to do to break the illusion would be to stop counting gross public spendings and taxes and instead count the net public spendings/taxes for each individual (that is, over the whole population you take the difference between what they pay and what they receive and that gives you how much they contribute or how much they cost, instead of the current accounting system where we count people paying for their own benefits).

What's really expensive is the economic inefficiency of the current system.
by jrowen | 2025-12-08 07:08:44+00:00
> Similar to how the most successful+profitable games nowadays are filled with loot boxes and dark patterns, and have nothing to do with the masterpieces from a few decades ago.

That one actually hurts. I lost touch with games a while ago but it was a good run through the golden era. The cinema is on its way out. At least we have the memories.

Every generation has their stuff, there's new things to be excited about, but the turnover is getting crazy fast.
by danielbarla | 2025-12-08 07:09:22+00:00
> Why not!

Responsive layout would be the biggest reason (mobile for one, but also a wider range of PC monitor aspect ratios these days than the 4:3 that was standard back then), probably followed by conflating the exact layout details with the content, and a separation of concerns / ease of being able to move things around.

I mean, it's a perfectly viable thing if these are not requirements and preferences that you and your system have. But it's pretty rare these days that an app or site can say "yeah, none of those matter to me the least bit".
by jabl | 2025-12-08 07:09:50+00:00
> eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric.

Diesel-electric, particularly when using Azipods, is great when you need to do a lot of maneuvering in narrow spaces like ports. But for long-haul it's hard to beat the economics of a two-stroke direct drive diesel.

Maybe a hybrid concept for a long-haul ship would be using a direct drive two-stroke main engine, but the auxiliary diesels replaced by batteries?