MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by srean | 2025-12-22 10:58:13+00:00
Depends on the details of how you define calculus. Archimedes was doing integration, Descartes was evaluating slopes and tangents of algebraic curves. Isaac Barrow had a good grasp of fundamental theorem of calculus -- that differentiation and integration are inverse operations. Brook Taylor did Taylor series before Newton.

Newton and Leibnitz get credit because they placed calculus as a general technique that is immensely broadly applicable not just for extrapolating the tangent function or the sin function as a series, but to any function that's smooth in some sense.

They worked out the details that do not depend on the specifics of the function and called them out as rules/results of broad applicability. Especially how to push the differential and integral operations through +,-,×,÷ and function composition sign. It did not matter what the function was as long as it was built up from those operations.

I am familiar with the work of Kerala school and also of Aryabhatta's work on using differential coefficients to extrapolate the sin function (this being much before Kerala school), his work on difference equations.

Rather than getting caught up with us versus them narratives , spend some time learning about the beauty of math and how different cultures have thought about them in such creative ways. Otherwise you risk sounding ignorant and rageful conspiracy monger.

The inaccuracies in the Hindu calendar is and was a lot more than the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar assumed that a year was 365 1/4 the day. This is slightly inaccurate and therefore there was a need to correct for the leap day that's added every 4 years by skipping it every 100 years, adding it back every 400 years. At time of Gregorian correction it was off by 10~11 days because of an error of 10 minutes in their estimate of the length of an year.

Hindu civilization's estimate of the length of an year, although remarkably accurate for its time, was less accurate than the estimate of 365 1/4th. Usually the length of an year has been overestimated, making the Hindu calendar lose accuracy quicker. These errors were order of a day per year versus off by about 10 minutes like the Julian calendar.

This was less of a problem historically because Ujjain observatory would correct the calendar time time using accurate observation of the Equinox. Since the fall of Ujjain observatory the Hindu calendar has been accumulating drift error for centuries.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-22 10:58:18+00:00
> The algorithm isn’t single-pass in the sense of Adaptive Huffman Coding: it still uses the normal Huffman algorithm, but the input is transformed in the same traversal that builds the tree to transform it.

Limited understanding here too. Sounds like it's not really single pass anyway so it's not usable to process a stream in real-time either, before having all the data?
by freakynit | 2025-12-22 11:00:24+00:00
"none of those stand out as "memory safety without GC" to me" ... can you explain why you believe they are not memory safe without GC? Im more interested to know the points in relation to autofree.

Regarding the details, here is a pretty informative github discussion thread on same topic: https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/17419

It is also accompanied with a demo video (pretty convincing in case you would like to watch).

V-lang is not shiny as other languages are, but, it does have a lot to learn from.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-12-22 11:00:51+00:00
The mask mandates weren't to protect you, they were to protect others from you. If everyone did this, the spread would have been massively reduced, and super-spreader events wouldn't have happened anywhere near as much.

Unfortunately, a great many people simply refused to distance and wear a mask, and then when they became infected, spread it far and wide, sometimes not even aware that they were doing so. Approximately 40% of those infected were asymptomatic, meaning they would feel fine but still make others around them sick (or end up killing them).
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-22 11:01:04+00:00
I'm ok with the honorary Dr thing but the article says he completed graduate studies. He actually quit grad school (MIT theoretical physics) for personal reasons and focused on software after that.

Taking about physics still always seemed to make him happy. I was once tempted to invite him to a study session for a QM class I was taking. He helped me with a problem set and his explanations were WAY clearer than the professor's or TA's. I think his understanding of the subject was simply better than theirs.

GCC was surely worth a non-honorary CS PhD all by itself. I can say that because the guy who wrote LLVM got one for doing basically the same thing 30 years later.
by MindSpunk | 2025-12-22 11:01:37+00:00
That's not at all what dynamic rendering is for. Dynamic rendering avoids creating render pass objects, and does nothing to solve problems with PSOs. We should be glad for the demise of render pass objects, they were truly a failed experiment and weren't even particularly effective at their original goal.

Trying to say pipelines weren't a problem with OpenGL is monumental levels of revisionism. Vulkan (and D3D12, and Metal) didn't invent them for no reason. OpenGL and DirectX drivers spent a substantial amount of effort to hide PSO compilation stutter, because they still had to compile shader bytecode to ISA all the same. They were often not successful and developers had very limited tools to work around the stutter problems.

Often older games would issue dummy draw calls to an off screen render target to force the driver to compile the shader in a loading screen instead of in the middle of your frame. The problem was always hard, you could just ignore it in the older APIs. Pipelines exist to make this explicit.

The mistake Vulkan made was putting too much state in the pipeline, as much of that state is dynamic in modern hardware now. As long as we need to compile shader bytecode to ISA we need some kind of state object to represent the compiled code and APIs to control when that is compiled.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-12-22 11:03:17+00:00
Also working on a language / runtime in this space.

It transpiles to Zig, so you have native access to the entire C library.

It uses affine types (simple ownership -> transfers via GIVE/TAKES), MVCC & transactions to safely and scalably handle mutations (like databases, but it scales linearly after 32 cores, Arc and RwLock fall apart due to Cache Line Bouncing).

It limits concurrent complexity only to the spot in your code WHERE you want to mutate shared memory concurrently, not your entire codebase.

It's memory and liveness safe (Rust is only memory safe) without a garbage collector.

It's simpler than Go, too, IMO - and more predictable, no GC.

But it's nearly impossible to beat Go at its own game, and it's not zero overhead like Rust - so I'm pessimistic it's in a "sweet spot" that no one will be interested in.

Time will tell.
by dcminter | 2025-12-22 11:03:53+00:00
It depends a lot on the domain. I've mostly worked in high compliance/regulation worlds. It can be kind of stifling, honestly, but "oops maybe we had the feature flag turned on" is not going to cut the mustard.

Most startups can ignore all that at least until they get to a scale where "run out of money, go bust" is not the biggest risk to their business :)
by EdwardDiego | 2025-12-22 11:03:55+00:00
> I already felt immense pain and anger by the decision of my husband to suddenly end our marriage. And now I feel a double sense of violation that the men who design and maintain and profit from the internet have literally impersonated my voice behind the closed doors of hidden metadata to tell a more palatable version of the story they think will sell.

That's a bit dismissive of women, does she think that women aren't capable of designing and maintaining software too?
by ayewo | 2025-12-22 11:04:34+00:00
In practice, how does switching between Claude and GitHub Copilot work?

1. Do you start off using the Claude Code CLI, then when you hit limits, you switch to the GitHub Copilot CLI to finish whatever it is you are working on?

2. Or, you spend most of your time inside VSCode so the model switching happens inside an IDE?

3. Or, you are more of a strict browser-only user, like antirez :)?
by KronisLV | 2025-12-22 11:04:39+00:00
In regards to the review part:

What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).

So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.

Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).

When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
by kqr | 2025-12-22 11:05:24+00:00
It's good for another reason too: it decouples releases from deployments. Both deployments and releases are high-risk activities. Performing them together increases the risk multiplicatively.

Separating them does also create some incidental complexity (permutations of configurations, feature flag management) but in my experience that complexity is easier to analyse and deal with. (Dealing with feature flag complexity involves retiring them promptly, differentiating between feature flags and kill switches, etc.)

Of course, TFA knows this. They've moved the goalposts by making an extreme claim ("every" change behind a flag) and then argued against it.
by famahar | 2025-12-22 11:05:31+00:00
I do the same with language learning. Makes me actually enjoy commuting to work since I find it hard to study at home. I just pop in the headphones, take a seat, and sit for 40 mins twice a day. Sometimes I even intentionally take the non-rapid so I can study a bit more (plus the train is less packed so I'm always guaranteed a seat)
by Vinnl | 2025-12-22 11:05:33+00:00
Obviously I am putting words in the author's mouth here, so take with a grain of salt, but I think the reasoning is something like: such LLM-generated content disproportionately negatively affects women, and the fact that this got pushed through shows that they didn't take those consequences into account, e.g. by not testing what it would look like in situations like these.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-22 11:05:33+00:00
Weird, that's exactly how I feel reading Go:

func (lst *List[T]) Push(v T) {
if lst.tail == nil {
lst.head = &element[T]{val: v}
lst.tail = lst.head
} else {
lst.tail.next = &element[T]{val: v}
lst.tail = lst.tail.next
}

}

And this one doesn't even have the infamous error-checking.
by audunw | 2025-12-22 11:07:30+00:00
Pumped hydro is just not a valid comparison. I wish people would understand that already… it’s only good for long term storage in certain key geographical regions. Its use case is very limited.

You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.

In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs. The costs for pumped hydro are generally reported with their target application in mind. It’s not as applicable to dedicated short term storage and certainly not applicable to frequency regulation.
by Swizec | 2025-12-22 11:08:41+00:00
My favorite lens on this comes from Hamming:

> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.

Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.

I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/
by Roark66 | 2025-12-22 11:09:17+00:00
I found the winning combination is to use all of them in this way:
- first you need a vendor agnostic tool like opencode (I had to add my own vendors as it didn't support it out of the box properly)
- second you set up agents with different models. I use:
- for architecture and planning - opus, Sonet, gpt 5.2, gemini3 (depending on specifics, for example I found got better in troubleshooting, Sonet better in pure code planning, opus better in DevOps, Gemini the best for single shot stuff)
- for execution of said plans (Qwen 2.5 Coder 30B - yes, it's even better in my use cases than Qwen3 despite benchmarks, Sonet - only when absolutely necessary, Qwen3-235B - between Qwen 2.5 and Sonet)
- verification (Gemini 3 flash, Qwen3-480B etc)

The biggest saving you make is by making the context smaller and where many turns are required going for smaller models. For example a single 30min troubleshooting session with Gemini 3 can cost $15 if you run it "normally" or it can cost $2 if you use the agents, wipe context after most turns (can be done thanks to tracking progress in a plan file)
by constantcrying | 2025-12-22 11:09:28+00:00
It fills me with joy to know that those are irreconcilable. It lifts the burden of having to reconcile these things and I know that my self expression can be directed elsewhere.

Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements.
If you turn a fighter plane into an art project, then it will be inherently ridiculous. It will make a mockery of its own purpose, looking at it will be like looking at a cripple.
by mywacaday | 2025-12-22 11:10:53+00:00
Thanks for posting that, there are a lot of quotes that resonated with me. I've had a personally and professionally tough year and will be losing my job in the new year, 50/50 my own fault for disengaging after a reorg at that start if the year. I'm not overly worried and will be taking the payoff to throw my hat in the small startup ring but this quote still struck a chord and made me feel more positive:

“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” (Miles Davis)

Enjoy the holidays everyone and remember to look out for each other, we lost a close family member to suicide and new born nephew that only lived a few precious hours this year. Family and friends first, and no more letting others decide my future are my goals for 2026. If anyone is struggling, even if you can't see it people want to help, take that hard first step and ask for help, friend/family/doctor/helpline/anyone, it gets easier after that, it's a step I took myself a few years ago when in a bad place mentally and it turned my life around, my only regrets are I didn't ask for help sooner and I kept my struggle and recovery largely private, I will regret to my dying day that I wasn't more open to my extended family and maybe if that person saw someone else recover they might have taken another road. Apologies for the ramble, the quotes and typing this comment caused a small unplanned reflection on 2025, I was going to delete all this but thought it might help someone. Thanks HN for keeping things interesting and once again pointing me at something that made a difference!
by RossBencina | 2025-12-22 11:10:59+00:00
One flock-to is Lattice ICE40 series. Decent support from Yosys for hobby stuff at least. Possibly Go-win. You can develop for many of the affordable FPGAs with free versions of the proprietary tools. As for "closed architecture" it depends what you mean, the architecture of all FPGAs that I know of is documented, the tools show you how your design was mapped onto the hardware. The proprietary stuff includes the timing model that drives the static timing analysis and timing-aware place and route.
by murukesh_s | 2025-12-22 11:11:19+00:00
>Most modern backend is building consistent distributed state machines, you need to cover all the edge cases, deal with concurrency, different clients/contracts etc. I would say getting BE right (beyond simple CRUD) is going to be hard for LLM simply because the context is usually wider and hard to compress/isolate.

Seeing the kind of complexity that agents (not standalone llm) are able to navigate - I can only start to believe - just a matter of time it can do all kinds of programming, including state of the art backend programming - even writing a database on its own - good thing with backend is its easily testable and if there is documentation that a developer can read and comprehend - an llm/agent would be able to do that - not very far from today.
by arethuza | 2025-12-22 11:12:37+00:00
For Orkney the difference in day length between winter and summer solstices is about 12 hours?

December: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/kirkwall?month=12&year=20...

June: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/kirkwall?month=6&year=202...
by casey2 | 2025-12-22 11:13:11+00:00
Why should people in the sustainable areas keep feeding the cancerous growth of worthless degenerate parasites? Serious question, as city folk keep ratholing into more and more socially destructive technologies, technologies designed to hamstring people, they lose the relative value.

Look at youtube, tiktok. Fine that's entertainment (set aside the issue of infotainment that has already infected public education). Then look at so called "productivity apps", or language learning apps. It's one thing to waste billions of collective man-hours it's another thing to lie and tell people they are learning or being more productive when you are wasting their time.

There are no mass assembly lines in the US, city GDP has been paper GDP for a long time now. On-shoring won't work without a total collapse of every culturally-enriched city, people need to learn hardship again.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-22 11:13:15+00:00
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-22 11:13:19+00:00
> Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.

It's sad to see people so deep in the consumerist rat race that giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet.

Weirdly enough people who actually don't have money are the one having the most kids. And people who lived pretty much from 300k years ago until the ~1950s had it worse than you yet they had more kids. People making 1m a year have less kids than people working in fucking coal mines 100 years ago.

We don't have less kids because we're poorer than 50 years ago, we have less kids because we drunk way too much capitalist kool aid and put traveling, buying shit, careers, money in front of everything else on our list of priorities: https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values...
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-12-22 11:13:44+00:00
Hi HN readers, Due to a service disruption that unfortunately occurred again, both the Cloud API and the Hetzner Console were temporarily unavailable for some users. We regret the delayed communication regarding the disruption.
The issue has since been resolved, and no further occurrences are expected. For more details, please refer to the incident report:
https://status.hetzner.com/incident/90db7d39-6940-4808-9b66-...
Sorry for any troubles this may have caused. --Katie
by haritha-j | 2025-12-22 11:14:25+00:00
Oh wow, you're absolutely correct. In my head i recall this being different, I think i've confused myself about either when I was trialling antigravity, or the system they had earlier in this year where you would get notifications that you've used up a given model, at least for a limited time. I feel like the latter was a thing, but you've now made me question my memory, so wouldn't swear by it.
by defrost | 2025-12-22 11:14:37+00:00
bauhaus in 1925 has been linked in a peer comment.

i've got a 1926 print book is 5 by e e cummings who famously often used lowercase in his prose and poems ... going back earlier than the collection i have.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_5

* my sweet old etcetera - https://web.archive.org/web/19991008163420/http://www.geocit...

still, as you're a fan of that 1960's show ... here's a few samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dm_iq5OicM (1985)
by tannhaeuser | 2025-12-22 11:15:09+00:00
These days new uses are mostly for public interfaces (business-to-business services like orders/invoices), services in regulated markets (energy, telco, medical) and eGovernment (tax statements and other financial reporting eg based on ISO 20022), as opposed to internal microservices. Other than that, it's kind of a "boomer" thing in the sense that it was the wire format to choose around 2000 when most businesses went online, and it just prevailed. Same thing with EDIFACT which was established earlier and still rules logistics.

The actual point of using a markup language for service payloads that aren't intended to be read by humans in the SOAP times was just that you can simply style it up (using CSS or XSLT back then) without having to go all the way to bring a full frontend toolkit/JavaScript into the stack along with insular know-how for merely viewing messages when your primary backend language was eg. Java.
by baubino | 2025-12-22 11:15:31+00:00
Someone created a tiktok account using my email address. Tiktok won’t let me delete the account without first verifying it with my phone number. I refuse to give tiktok my phone number because I don’t want my phone tied to social media. I don’t have tiktok (or any other social media accounts) and don’t look at it. But I’m stuck getting several email notifications a day from them.

Not quite what you’re saying, but a couple of steps in that direction.