MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Someone | 2025-12-15 10:06:41+00:00
Some of those could be partially fixed in hardware. Examples:

- returns can run in as good as zero time

- when calling a word, the CPU could prefetch the cache line containing the next word to be called, on the assumption that it would be called soon (an assumption that would be correct for many “almost leaf” calls)

- the top of the stack could be kept in register-speed memory.

For an example, see https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_4.ht...:

“The internal structure of the NC4016 is designed for single clock cycle instruction execution. All primitive operations except memory fetch, memory store, and long literal fetch execute in a single clock cycle. This requires many more on-chip interconnection paths than are present on the Canonical Stack Machine, but provides much better performance.

[…]

The NC4016 subroutine return bit allows combining a subroutine return with other instructions in a similar manner. This results in most subroutine exit instructions executing "for free" in combination with other instructions. An optimization that is performed by NC4016 compilers is tail-end recursion elimination. Tail-end recursion elimination involves replacing a subroutine call/subroutine exit instruction pair by an unconditional branch to the subroutine that would have been called.”

(¿Almost?) all modern hardware is designed for other language paradigms, though, so these won’t help with hardware you can buy.
by rramadass | 2025-12-15 10:07:14+00:00
You are absolutely right on all points!

Students need to take responsibility for themselves and Teachers need to point them in the right direction and help/steer as needed.

A Chinese Martial Arts saying which i keep in mind goes;

To show one the right direction and the right path, oral instructions from a Master are necessary, but mastery of the subject only comes from one's own incessant self-cultivation.

A good authoritative book can be the stand-in for a Master in which case there is more discipline and effort required of the Student.

These days different types of books/videos focusing on different aspects of the same subject are so easily available/affordable that the Teacher/Student can both work together and focus on understanding. A handful of real-world problems modeled and worked through beats pages of mere symbol manipulation. We need to start stressing quality over quantity i.e. deliberate effort via deliberate practice in the right way.
by windex | 2025-12-15 10:07:51+00:00
I dont think any opinion right now is going to be definitive. This is like mixing paint, the edges are still white, while the centre is colored.

What Iam seeing is that customers are delaying purchases of large expensive software. Prime example; SAP. ECC migrations to SaaS model RISE/GROW-PublicCloud are stalling, same with onprem S4 to RISE. I see a whole bunch of my customers instead go with retaining the core but modernize surround apps with intelligent custom apps without feature bloat. For now, SAP/oracle/whatever remains the system of record, the edges are going away. I guess the same is likely happening in other spaces.

This change is coming. Definitely. The current moats around SaaS will fall and the alternate ecosystem might not have moats at all.
by seec | 2025-12-15 10:08:10+00:00
Disagreed. You need more doctors, not useless secretaries. Generating bureaucratic bullshit doesn't make any work go faster; it actually just creates more work at best and, in general, just slows everything down.

It is perfect that the primary stakeholder is responsible of his own bureaucratic impact. This way he'll learn to generate the minimum amount that is viable to be efficient. Otherwise they don't care and generate waste by the metric ton.

Because of the French hospital bureaucratic nightmare, for a simple 15-minute intervention (cyst removal), I had 2 appointments and received 4 different letters by post. Not only did they waste more of my time than necessary (every time you need to wait about 45 minutes before anything happens), but since the physician cannot be duplicated and I had to meet him each time, nothing of value was gained as well.

With modern technologies, secretaries should barely exist. They still do because it's all about the laws and compliance; everyone is protecting his ass first and foremost. Without this, a system without the bureaucracy would be much more efficient. It's how they do it outside the western world basically.
by mcny | 2025-12-15 10:08:36+00:00
I think the simplest explanation is also the best one. Like you said, it is very difficult to tax wealth.

I think we have no option other than taxing loans and other money movements like that in sufficiently large scale as ordinary income. If I get a loan for USD 200k for a house once a year, I think it isn't income but if ElMo gets loans worth USD 20M a year, every year, he should pay income tax on all of that as if it was ordinary income. How he pays it? I don't care. Sell some assets. Oh and that sale is also taxable.
by the_other | 2025-12-15 10:09:50+00:00
> I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible.

For the record (not that I'm in any position of note or have any real impact on any of this): I _liked_ iOS7's flat design. It felt to me like it got quite close to its intention: to highlight content, and withdraw the UI only to the bare minimum to get stuff done. It was sparse and clear enough that I didn't think about much. There were some "rules" that apps applied inconsistently (or couldn't actually be rules anyone could follow), such as where the primary action button should be (the "back" button was pretty obvious, but the "new"/"next"/"go"/"submit" would move around all three of the other corners depending on app - maybe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for that.

Sure, it lacked discoverability. I don't have a ready solution that solves for the "content-first" and "discoverable options" that I can offer.

But the flatness, the tidy icons, the slide-over layers that were at sensible and consistent illusions of height above one another all "worked" for me.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-15 10:09:56+00:00
> IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering

It's worse than you state; a primary premise of the current AI expansion and investment, continuously repeated, is that computational resources are increasing for the same price-point.

So tell me, when we have these hardware gains in 5 years, why the fuck would I pay for fractionally better output on a cloud subscription when I could run on-prem GPUs for a fraction of what the actual subscription would be, giving me 24x7 agents working with no limit?

Current highly-invested AI providers are token providers - they are sitting at the bottom of the value-chain. They are trying to climb the value-chain, but the real value is in the models, and since all models have mostly converged on the same performance, running your own gives a very tiny drop in value.

Their problem is that, even at $200/m, it is not feasible to offer 24x7 access to the models - that max subscription has tiny limits: on that subscription you most definitely are not enabling even a single agent to run f/time.

You might get 3 hours per day, maybe. Best case, you get half a working day (4 hours), for five days. So double the subscription, and you're still looking at only a single simply agent that you can run f/time for $400/m.

For collaborating agents, you'll have, what, 4 - 5 diving into a large task in parallel? That's maybe $1600/m - $2000/m to solve tasks. You still have to pay the (increasingly incompetent) human operator to manage them.

That sort of workflow is what is being sold as the vision, and yet that will only be economically viable if you're self-hosting your own model.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-15 10:10:05+00:00
> Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon or a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.

I can imagine that they might go several months without usable sunlight, so yes, they'll likely need some form of energy distribution unless they plan on burning blubber for their energy needs.
by donatj | 2025-12-15 10:10:09+00:00
Oh dang. Last night before falling asleep my wife told me "some guy from Spinal Tap died" while scrolling on her phone. Didn't think much of it.

Wake up and first thing I do is read this...

Rob Reiner? Really? What a terrible shame. What a loss. His films and even his time on All in the Family really helped shape the cultural landscape.

Nothing had as large an impact on my sense of humor growing up as This is Spinal Tap. Just thinking about the movie now I chuckle to myself. Most of his other films are certified classics.

He will be greatly missed.
by prameshbajra | 2025-12-15 10:10:44+00:00
Working on a browser extension that let's you take notes right on youtube.

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-notes/phgnkid...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-notes-f...

Demo here: https://youtu.be/rOi7xQ8DLpo?si=M6pFoHqyrSGKuyIt
by Y-bar | 2025-12-15 10:11:09+00:00
Over twenty years ago there came a mandate that all places with many people gathers (both residential and commercial housing) should have a EN 54‑21 compliant alarm transmitter to automatically notify authorities in case of a fire.

I'm afraid that we are crying wolf right now and are undermining our efforts to permanently shut down Chat Control and the likes when we complain about these efforts with a history of not being misused.
by instagib | 2025-12-15 10:11:31+00:00
Please review the vulnerability list. https://support.apple.com/en-us/125885

“Access user data” “see apps user has installed” “gain root access”.

Maybe worth staying on to jailbreak or if you hate IOS Aero edition. Icons are blurry now. Slow usage. Going to beta 18.7.3 Then maybe android. Idk about these new UI changes that are forced with no absolute removal.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 10:11:50+00:00
Is this actually true? Doesn't the action of directing someone to compile this code, mean they are allowed to compile this code? Of course they are not allowed to do anything else, but this is what I want as a user. I think it is more, that the vendors want to push the user to grant them more rights than what would be strictly necessary for them to do they job they "sell".
by wheybags | 2025-12-15 10:12:08+00:00
v is double& in your example, not double. But it's not obvious that omitting the & causes a copy. If you see "for (auto v : vec)" looks good right? But if vec contains eg long strings, you've now murdered your perf because you're copying them out of the array instead of grabbing refs. Yes, you could make the same mistake without auto, but it's easier to notice. It's easy to forget (or not notice) that auto will not resolve to a reference in this case, because using a reference is "obviously what I want here", and the name of the feature is "auto" after all - "surely it will figure it out, right?"
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-15 10:12:17+00:00
I don't think all that much has changed except for the addition of meshlet and raytracing stages:

The 'descriptors are hard' article is a nice modern compagnion IMHO:

https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are...

Also the D3D12 functional spec might be useful too:

https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-Specs/
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-15 10:12:54+00:00
> It speeds up market corrections, increases liquidity, and means buyers and sellers get quicker execution closer to consensus market value.

This is the BS that Wall St says whenever people complain about them doing it. Nobody actually benefits from getting their liquidity in 8ms instead of 8.2ms, and in fact it costs them the money the high frequency trader was making compared to having the exchange's computers do it without taking a margin for itself.

> If financiers and doctors are wealthier, they have more disposable income, some of which they will spend in retail, benefiting retail clerks.

Or they'll further outbid the people in retail on things like housing, making them poorer yet.

> They will also get taxed more, benefiting other tax payers.

Only if the other taxpayers actually get taxed less instead of the government giving the extra money to cronies.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-15 10:13:33+00:00
>> 2) Vogtle is Lazard's ONLY source of data for new nuclear > Adding Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, the proposed EPR2 fleet, Virgil C. Summer ...

...doesn't broaden the data on which you base your conclusions nearly enough to make any broad predictions. Even if things were normal, a couple of hand-picked examples don't show much of anything. But things are not "normal" with that selection.

All of these projects are of just two reactor types, the Westinghouse AP-1000 and the French EPR.

One of these has even been discontinued by its manufacturer, because it was too difficult to build. Do you know which?

All of these builds were also First of a Kind (FOAK) builds. Westinghouse had submitted plans for the AP-1000 to the NRC that were not actually buildable. Do you think that generalizes to future AP-1000 builds, now that they have modified the plans to make them buildable and have, you know, built them?

Speaking of the different between FOAK and NOAK builds (Nth of a Kind): China's first two AP-1000 reactors took about 10 years to build. They are now building a slightly uprated version, the CAP-14000 (so 1,4GW electric instead of 1,0GW), in 5 years. For $3.5 bn.

Coming back to FOAK builds: Hinkley Point C had 7000 changes applied by the regulator to the design while it was being built.
by mirekrusin | 2025-12-15 10:13:45+00:00
Things like type star imports, destructured imports or satisfies operator don't work in jsdoc.

All non erasable constructs won't work as well of course but playing devil's advocate you could explicitly state that you're interested in erasable constructs only because ie. 1) that's what typescript should be doing from day 1 and/or 2) it seem to be the future with ie. nodejs adopting built in type erasure support.
by KomoD | 2025-12-15 10:16:32+00:00
> I couldn't find a K-pop API, so I built one. Kpop has millions global fans but no proper REST API for developers building fan apps, bots, or tools (like me).

Because there's really not a need for a kpop-specific API? Your API doesn't really seem to provide anything that a generic music API doesn't provide.
by stavros | 2025-12-15 10:16:41+00:00
I used Valetudo on my early Roborock model and it worked great for many years. Unfortunately, the battery gave out and it's somehow DRMed, so even though everything else works fine, the vacuum refuses to work because it doesn't like the new battery.

It's the worst kind of e-waste, it's only waste because someone decided I should buy a whole new vacuum when the battery dies, but Valetudo is otherwise good. Just never try to look for support at all.
by wannabebarista | 2025-12-15 10:16:51+00:00
> Any practical format that lowers the bar?

I've really enjoyed writing recurring posts. For example, each December, I write up lists of the most interesting books and papers I've read during the year. These usually generate a decent amount of interest and are something I look forward to writing each year.

> If you were starting today, what would you do differently?

I wish I would have started earlier. Writing a blog has kept my writing skills sharp.
by npodbielski | 2025-12-15 10:17:08+00:00
Idea for an app is quite nice. My kids would love it.

I just can't understand how can adult person be so traumatized by silly mistake in a coffee shop, so they will build an entire app to learn a language so this will not happen again.

I mean, I understand you made an error and you could not understand native speaker. Happens to me a lot of times with English and British people. But situation that you may not understand someone speaking foreign language abroad is expected. For me at least. How can you call it a humiliation? Just smile and ask politely to repeat because you do not understand. Point at you ear, which should be understand by everyone that you did not hear. Or look at register and check the price. Or just give them much more that you think it really cost and wait for a change. Awkwardly looking at your phone seems a bit rude.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-15 10:17:27+00:00
Exactly!

For example, French nuclear capacity factors are currently rising. One reason, as far as I can tell, is that they can now use intermittent renewables for at least some of the peak load, meaning they don't have to ramp their nuclear plants up and down.

Win win!

Also, PV is absolutely fantastic for hot deserts: lots of sunshine and a lot of load that correlates almost perfectly with that very same sunshine.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-15 10:17:41+00:00
> Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.

They don't, but it really is! There's different rates for different specific gravity and different processes.

Re: petrol, I note that the UK government is trying to replace this as part of the EV transition with a milage tax, which is proving controversial and fiddly.

Energy tax is a hugely fraught political issue. The "poster child" for cheap energy is a little old lady huddled over a 1kW one bar electric heater. Energy bills are a big "fixed" cost for households. Many small businesses have been affected by energy price rises - e.g. restaurants. And yet at the other end AI represents such a huge deployment of capital expenditure that it's distorting prices for everything else - energy, RAM, and so on.

I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it.
by adapptivlabs | 2025-12-15 10:17:41+00:00
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by aarol | 2025-12-15 10:17:42+00:00
I've been toying around with tree-sitter and have seen the potential for a proper, non-regex based highlighter. It's really powerful because it actually parses the text into an AST. With the AST it's possible for example to make variables the same colour everywhere. A function passed as a parameter could be highlighted as a function even in the parameter list.

I'm happy to see that tree sitter highlighting on the web is finally a thing. This seems really solid although the bundle size is a lot.
by harperlee | 2025-12-15 10:17:44+00:00
100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles your political kneejerk, explore that, but playing tax sci-fi is distracting and thus dangerous.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-15 10:17:54+00:00
I see AI replacing workers, but maybe it is my circles. Most of my SaaS selling friends; these are long term, as in 20+ year solution sellers in ERP, HRM, trading, banking in certain niches therein making very good money, removing most of their staff while delivering faster and better with the few senior core people they kept. Junior/Mediors can please go away...
by wheybags | 2025-12-15 10:18:40+00:00
And I see this argument often. People make too much fuss about the massive error messages. Just ignore everything but the first 10 lines and 99.9% of the time, the issue is obvious. People really exaggerate the amout of time and effort you spend dealing with these error messages. They look dramatic so they're very memeable, but it's really not a big deal. The percentage of hours I've spent deciphering difficult cpp error messages in my career is a rounding error.
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-12-15 10:19:22+00:00
I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction: I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat."

...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.
by VPenkov | 2025-12-15 10:20:04+00:00
> you have no appetite for a better security model

For what it's worth, there are some advancements. PNPM - the packager used in this case - doesn't automatically run postinstall scripts. In this case, either the engineer allowed it explicitly, or a transitive dependency was previously considered safe, and allowed by default, but stopped being safe.

PNPM also lets you specify a minimum package age, so you cannot install packages younger than X. The combination of these would stop most attacks, but becomes less effective if everyone specifies a minimum package age, so no one would fall victim.

It's a bit grotesque because the system relies on either the package author noticing on time, or someone falling victim and reporting it.

NPM now supports publishing signed packages, and PNPM has a trustPolicy flag. This is a step in a good direction, but is still not enough, because it relies on publishers to know and care about signing packages, and it relies on consumers to require it.

There _is_ appetite for a better security model, but a lot of old, ubiquitous packages, are unmaintained and won't adopt it. The ecosystem is evolving, but very slowly, and breaking changes seem needed.
by bluGill | 2025-12-15 10:20:09+00:00
That is the downside. you can prototype with one chip and when the concept works switch. I've worked with many projects over the years where that was done. Sometimes an intern proved it works with arduino - which wat cheap enough to buy without needing supply management, but then we did the project with 'good code' on our internal controllers. Othertimes we bought a competitor andiagain first thing switched them to our controllers. (Our controllers are designed for harsh environments which means millions of dollars spent designing the case and connectors)
by coolcoder613 | 2025-12-15 10:20:15+00:00
Well at this point the BeOS (binary) compatibility is incidental. It is it's own system, and daily drivable for a great number of people. (admittedly not for gamers, but there are working nvidia drivers (not public (yet))), Firefox and derivatives have been ported, as well as most of the big name foss apps (libreoffice, etc) have been ported.