MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Elecktrike_ | 2025-12-24 16:34:59+00:00
import time
from collections import deque
import sys

def pezzotti_sliding_window(n_nodes, k=4):
"""
Sliding Window Solver for Streamed Graphs.
Optimized for high throughput and minimal memory footprint.
"""
start_time = time.time()
errors = 0

# Circular buffer: keeps only the last 6 nodes in memory
# This allows O(1) memory usage regardless of N
history_buffer = deque([-1]*6, maxlen=6)

print(f"Starting processing on {n_nodes:,} nodes...")
print("Mode: Sliding Window (Low-RAM)")

# Available colors (k=4)
base_phases = {0, 1, 2, 3}

for i in range(n_nodes):
# --- CONSTRAINT LOGIC ---
# We look back in the buffer to check relevant neighbors.
# For this topology, relevant neighbors are at (i-1) and (i-5)

relevant_neighbors = []

if i > 0:
relevant_neighbors.append(history_buffer[-1]) # i-1
if i > 5:
relevant_neighbors.append(history_buffer[-5]) # i-5

# --- SATURATION ---
possible_phases = set(base_phases)

for neighbor_val in relevant_neighbors:
if neighbor_val != -1:
possible_phases.discard(neighbor_val)

# Deterministic Greedy Choice
if possible_phases:
choice = min(possible_phases)
else:
choice = 0 # Conflict handled
errors += 1

# Push choice to buffer
history_buffer.append(choice)

# --- VISUAL FEEDBACK (Every 500k nodes) ---
if i % 500_000 == 0 and i > 0:
elapsed = time.time() - start_time
speed = i / elapsed
perc = (i / n_nodes) * 100

# Progress Bar
bar_len = 20
filled = int(bar_len * i // n_nodes)
bar = '' * filled + '-' * (bar_len - filled)

sys.stdout.write(f"\r[{bar}] {perc:.1f}% | Processed: {i:,} | Speed: {speed:,.0f} nodes/s | Err: {errors}")
sys.stdout.flush()

duration = time.time() - start_time
sys.stdout.write(f"\r[{''*20}] 100.0% | Processed: {n_nodes:,} | COMPLETED.\n")
return duration, errors

if __name__ == "__main__":
# Test with 100 Million Nodes
n_nodes = 100_000_000
duration, err = pezzotti_sliding_window(n_nodes)

print(f"\n--- FINAL RESULTS ---")
print(f"Total Time: {duration:.2f} seconds ({duration/60:.1f} mins)")
print(f"Constraints Broken: {err}")
by Aurornis | 2025-12-24 16:35:10+00:00
From the paper:

> Methods:

> We used a mixed methods approach. First, qualitative data were collected through 41 exploratory, in-depth interviews (women: n=19, 46.3%; men: n=21, 51.2%; prefer not to disclose sex: n=11, 2.4%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years) with university students who had experience playing Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi. Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey…

So interviews with a biased sample (students with experience playing the game) and then a survey.

Also, try adding up those n= numbers. They don’t sum to 41. The abstract can’t even get basic math or proofreading right.

If the body of the paper describes something different than the abstract, that’s another problem
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-24 16:35:36+00:00
Dealers choice.

The world is too interesting for me to be happy to limit myself to one thing.

Additionally, I listen to a wide variety of music, read not a very wide variety of books (mainly hard sci-fi), consider myself a connoisseur of film and television, take an interest in at least two other sports (have season tickets to the local teams games), run a slightly more than simple homelab (in a room I built myself in the shed, complete with backup battery power and rudimentary climate control), including hosting my own email server, amongst other parental and husbandly duties.

One of the reasons I'm awake at 3am on Christmas Day.

Everything is interesting. Limiting oneself to one thing is exceedingly boring.

Disclaimer: personal opinion. I see and live off the benefits to the world provided by the single minded. But I'll never pretend I could live like that.
by andrewflnr | 2025-12-24 16:35:39+00:00
It's not about "unique court cases". Surely you must have noticed that whenever someone asks online whether it's legal to do some apparently reasonable but tricky thing, the answer is almost always "ask a lawyer"? How many of those people can actually afford a lawyer?

Do you actually think it's ok for freedom to only exist for people who can afford lawyers?
by aworks | 2025-12-24 16:35:50+00:00
I'm a retired software manager. Email was inherent to the job as the primary way to communicate with people in far-flung countries. I'm guessing I spent 20% of my time in my inbox. Unfortunately, it wasn't in consecutive, large blocks but minutes of time interspersed with meetings, reading, etc. I tried and failed to read email only in larger sessions (although I did sit next to a manager on a plane once who plowed through their email in a single 3-hour session).

When I retired, it took me several years to refine my email use. I finally figured out Google inbox with Primary, Update, etc. tabs were my friend. I had to give up the habit of treating each email with intent. Maybe 1% require a thoughtful response, 10% are worth reading and the rest can be ignored. That was not true for work email, though.
by bena | 2025-12-24 16:36:17+00:00
I think it's more that the analogy is broken.

If I have a sheet of paper and I color a section black. That's it. It's black. No going back.

So I can see people thinking the same for PDFs. I drew the black box. It's black. Done. They don't realize they aren't dealing with a 2D sheet of paper, but with effectively a 3D stack of papers. That they didn't draw a black box on the page, they drew a black box above the page over the area they wanted to obscure.

The fact that this happens a lot is an indication that the software is wrong in this case. It doesn't conform to user expectations.
by jokoon | 2025-12-24 16:36:24+00:00
I use the strict cookie policy on firefox, and set cookies to be deleted at shutdown. I just save credentials and login to platforms each time.

I joined the mozilla matrix, and ironically, this caused the auth system to completely break down for some reason since I would log in each time.

It suggested to reset the whatever login data cookie thing because it did not want to trust me anymore, displaying red warning or whatever.

I asked around, and apparently they disagreed about that strict cookie policy, which felt quite ironic coming from the mozilla community.
by mxuribe | 2025-12-24 16:36:44+00:00
Now that i'm looking back at xmpp, i agree that i wish we would have doubled down on xmpp - either to make some things easier for hosting, etc. And, yeah, its funny that you mention about the hatred of xml...i never loved it, but never hated it. Same with json, etc....To me they're just data formats...but so much dislike seemed the cool thing to do back in the day. Ah, well.
by fulafel | 2025-12-24 16:37:08+00:00
Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's already had 40 years to try already.

Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base.
by ggauravr | 2025-12-24 16:37:16+00:00
Thanks for this. This is exactly the spirit in which I wrote it.

You hit on the key constraint: time. The point isn't that the use of LLMs specifically provides agency, but that it lowers the barrier, allowing us to build things that bring it. "Perfect software" is perfect not just because of what they do, but because of what it lacks (fluff, tracking, features we don't need).
by convolvatron | 2025-12-24 16:37:29+00:00
its really possible to top out on some of these things. once you're at the point where you're like 'I could try to do this professionally, but that would ruin the fun of it and its a really tough market'

plus, dont forget about the substantial benefits from cross-training

if you find something thats really your thing, thats great, but the goal is to interest and engage yourself. why is it that important to demand the time to to eek out that last 5%

its also possible to actually blow through a field. the scope of coding projects I can just spit out as rote are well past what anyone is willing to adopt. what would be the point of training any further. there's really a lot more to learn about machining.
by maqp | 2025-12-24 16:38:58+00:00
>Unlike any other existing messaging platform, SimpleX has no identifiers assigned to the users

Lies by omission. SimpleX doesn't mask your IP-address by default. It leaks to the server. The ENTIRE public SimpleX network is hosted by two companies, Akamai and Runonflux. Metadata of two conversing users running on the same VPS can be detected with end-to-end correlation attacks, so pray that the two are not PRISM partners or whatever has replaced that program.

I'd be fine with SimpleX if they

1) bundled Tor and had a toggle switch during initial setup.

2) were transparent about what the toggle switch does (lag/bandwidth vs IP masking)

This is crucial as they already have Tor Onion Service server infra set up, but they're not making it easy for a layperson to use those. Instead they lie by omission. Their

"SimpleX has no identifiers"

only means

"SimpleX does not add additional identifiers"

They don't give a damn about your router gluing your IP address, that's increasingly becoming a unique IPv6 address, to every TCP packet header.
by mdhb | 2025-12-24 16:38:59+00:00
Listen spending all of your free time to defend the worlds richest company no matter the circumstances is strange behaviour, I don’t know how else to put it. I think you’re odd and I’m not trying to be impolite but you’re going to have to accept the fact that people find your hobby weird.

You have once again however just done the exact same thing I accused you of where you are responding to an argument that nobody actually made and then pretending you’re somehow victorious which again is odd behaviour.

Please explain to me how you’re reconciling the idea of:

1. Apple and Firefox decided not to implement Web USB

2. The chart is measuring something entirely different.

In the web USB example that doesn’t show up in that chart precisely because more than one browser fails those tests.

The fact of the matter is that the world richest company makes the worlds shittiest browser and has some of the most unusual fans.
by CrossVR | 2025-12-24 16:39:04+00:00
> VW was caught, by US authorities, violating EU laws, and it transpired that EU officials had been lobbying to enable VW and other EU champions to continue to do so.

X was caught, by EU authorities, violating EU anti-trust laws, and US officials are lobbying to enable X and other Big Tech companies to continue to do so.

> My root reply in this thread was flagged, despite being stunningly milquetoast, in a transparent attempt to hide any inconvenient dissenting view, which is precisely what the EU are trying to do.

To the contrary, the DSA would've likely protected your comment. It requires that if content was flagged or removed a clear reason has to be stated for its removal with the ability to appeal it. Neither of which is offered by Hacker News because the DSA does not apply to it and so your comment was removed without a stated reason nor the ability to appeal it.

Big Tech companies don't want to protect free speech, they just want to maintain their unchecked moderation power on their platforms.
by azuanrb | 2025-12-24 16:39:20+00:00
I've been dealing with this in 2 ways:

1. Put bunch of bank statements pdf in a folder, give a deterministic output for each pdf. Then ask Claude Code to do whatever I want. Good enough.

2. My preferred approach is similar to above but ask it to write a script instead, eg in Ruby. That way I have proper test, 100% guarantee it'll work and no regression. AI is non deterministic by default so asking any kind of agent to give a deterministic output seems unreliable to me. In the end I've turned it into a CLI, and been using it till now.

That's how I use AI. Indirectly to get what I want. Chat, CLI, it's all just a medium.
by nickysielicki | 2025-12-24 16:39:40+00:00
Whether they get the question exactly right and can pinpoint the specific compiler passes or algebraic properties responsible for reductions like this is totally irrelevant and not what you’re actually looking for or asking about. It’s a very good jumping point for a conversation about optimization and testing whether they’re the type of developer who has ever looked at the assembly produced in their hotpath or not.

Anyone who dumbly suggests that loops in source code will always result in loops in assembly doesn’t have a clue. Anyone who throws their hands up and says, “I have no idea, but I wonder if there’s some loop invariant or algebraic trick that can be used to optimize this, let’s think about it out loud for a bit” has taken a compiler class and gets full marks. Anyone who says, “I dunno, let’s see what godbolt does and look through the llvm-opt pane” gets an explicit, “hire this one” in the feedback to the hiring manager.

It’s less about what they know and more about if they can find out.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-24 16:39:59+00:00
This is an extremely interesting perspective. I haven't really heard it before, but I once worked for the state in a technical capacity and watched as they spent entire workdays and scheduled multiple meetings with the sole purpose of figuring out ways to slow down or narrow FOIA requests.

I didn't really know how they slept at night, but I don't know how a lot of people sleep at night. I only had to be involved because I had to do the actual trawling through the emails. They spent their time trying to narrow the keywords that I'd have to search, and trying to figure out new definitions of the words "related to."
by ThePowerOfFuet | 2025-12-24 16:40:11+00:00
>the company who could not make better cars and instead limits them citing “safety”.

They say:

>The problem with speeding is that above certain speeds, in-car safety technology and smart infrastructure design are no longer enough to avoid severe injuries and fatalities in the event of an accident.

And, frankly, they're right: you cannot engineer your way out of the laws of physics.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-24 16:40:15+00:00
Could it be that you were on 60Hz AC at the times? That is near enough to produce something called a "Schwebung" when artificial lighting is used. Especially when using flourescent lamps like they were common in offices. They need to be "phasenkompensiert" (phase compensated?/balanced), meaning they have to be on a different phase of the mains electricity, than the computer screens are on. Otherwise even not so sensitive people notice that as interference/sort of flickering. Happens less when you are on 50Hz AC, and the screens run at 60Hz, but with flourescents on the same phase it can still be noticeable.
by jetrink | 2025-12-24 16:40:22+00:00
> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.

A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-24 16:40:23+00:00
Sure. You’ll notice no libraries, no CI, no issue tracker, written in C, no landing page, no dashboard.

So much of the discussion here is about professional practice around software. You can become an expert in this stuff without actually ever learning to write code. We need to remember that most of these tools are a cost that only benefits for managing collaboration between teams. The smaller the team the less stuff you need.

I also have insights from reading his C style but they may be of less interest.

I think it’s also impressive that he identifies a big and interesting problem to go after that’s usually impactful.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-24 16:42:01+00:00
I was still completely mystified until your last sentence. And now I'm just mostly mystified. I, too, keep hearing Tailscale Tailscale Tailscale from HN commenters but have no idea why I'd need it. For anything I need to access on (or from) my home network I just use a VPN I've hosted in my home for the last decade or so.
by underlipton | 2025-12-24 16:42:53+00:00
I think this misrepresents the situation. Many of these people are well-educated and affluent. In fact, such efforts wouldn't be possible without the support of the wealthy and academic elite, including on the left. Stooge-of-the-month Ezra Klein is decried as a woke liberal by certain segments of the political sphere, and yet he's running interference against those who support forcing the affluent to give back some of their recent outsize gains (through his "abundance" tripe). It's not poor, rural red-staters listening to his message.
by maxerickson | 2025-12-24 16:42:53+00:00
The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data:

https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf....

That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-12-24 16:42:59+00:00
Utterly boring.
7,8kWh/100km for a single seater.

* Take an Ioniq 6.
* Rip everything comfy (except the front row) out.
* Stuff the rear with extra batteries.
* Use the smallest tires still able to carry that weight.

I would bet 10k€ that would surpass 1000km as a two seater with the same average speed (102.?? km/h =~ 63.5 mph)

The unchanged road worthy version is already good for 430-450miles @90km/h under optimal conditions.

Using ultra-slim tires (drag reduction) that can hold that weight would lead to an estimated 500miles/810km range (ChatGPT says 505miles best case).
Thats _before_ adding a custom battery pack.

For a 1000km+ run that would mean adding another ~20kWh (97kWh total, ~110kg extra) -- that's not exotic. And easily doable without modification of the chassis.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-24 16:43:00+00:00
> Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day

This statement is technically correct if you let the word “many” do the heavy lifting and ignore the people doing the work (slaves, etc)

Claiming that average life in the past was easier is just false, though. If it was easier to shelter, feed, and clothe yourself in the past then those methods wouldn’t have disappeared. You’d be able to do them now if you wanted to. Easier than before, in fact, because you can walk to the store and buy some wood instead of chopping down trees by hand and letting them dry for a few seasons before building, and so on.
by citizenpaul | 2025-12-24 16:43:11+00:00
I think there is a growing online mix up of "leisure" time in the past. 99% of people were farmers, farming season is 3-4mo a year. That doesn't mean they had 9mo to do whatever they wanted. The time off was technically not their job but they were doing work on other survival tasks. If you consider re-roofing your shelter leisure time then yeah past people had more leisure time.

We have much more non-survival leisure time now.
by metabagel | 2025-12-24 16:44:36+00:00
> Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.

Absolutely. They know this is confusing, and they're bound and determined not to fix it. At the least, they need a pop-up to let you know that it's not doing what you might think it's doing.
by ezst | 2025-12-24 16:45:30+00:00
https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/comments/qdmzio/dif...

or anything that touches array ops (concatenating, map, etc…). I mean, better and more knowledgeable people than me have written thousands of articles about those footguns and many more.

I am not a webdev, I don't want to remember those things, but more often than I would wish, I have to interop with JS, and then I'd rather use a better behaved language that compiles down to JS (there are many very good ones, nowadays) than deal with JS directly, and pray for the best.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-24 16:45:31+00:00
Is it? Chaotic, certainly. But if you proposed in 2021 that there was a way to:

* make white nationalism acceptable on Twitter

* while increasing the US government's dependence on it

* at the same time that the US president owns a competing social media app

I think nearly anyone would have told you that's impossible. Strategic chaos in service of a bad goal just looks stupid from a distance.
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-12-24 16:45:53+00:00
>where do they get these weird alternative explanations from?

Surely you're aware of cable news in the US, like Fox News, etc. but before that, for about 40 years now[0], AM talk radio has played a huge part in developing this messaging. I grew up with this as my main channel for awareness of current events, hearing about everything that happens through this lens.

I'm not sure if this [1] is accessible outside the US, but give a listen between 3 and 9 pm EST (GMT-5) though certainly not limited to these hours. You'll learn a lot about the American right wing mindset, and how the middle class is effectively messaged to. Talk radio is a lot more free form and ephemeral, so you'll hear a lot more improvised and extreme ideas than you would in a TV broadcast. It's quite a spectacle.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

[1]https://710wor.iheart.com/
by georgemcbay | 2025-12-24 16:46:14+00:00
> The only thing that makes a senior are years of experience

The only thing that makes you a senior in software is whatever titles the companies you've worked for happen to give out (which may be inflated for various political or hiring reasons) while you work there and there are basically completely arbitrary criteria from company to company.

In terms of official job titles, I was a "Senior Software Engineer" like 2-3 years after I started writing code professionally, and I mention this not to toot my own horn in any way but to point out how arbitrary titles can be (and we won't even get into the debate over the 'Engineer' bit).
by docjay | 2025-12-24 16:46:26+00:00
Humans do indeed drive into floodwaters like fools, but a critical point that’s often missed when talking about how self-driving cars will make the roads safer: you don’t. Self-driving cars can potentially be safer in general, but not necessarily for you in particular.

Imagine I created a magic bracelet that could reduce bicycling related deaths and injuries from 130,000 a year to 70,000. A great win for humans! The catch is that everyone would need to wear it, even people that do not ride bikes, and those 70,000 deaths and injuries would be randomly distributed among the entire population. Would you wear it?
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-24 16:46:33+00:00
>Video is really fiddly.

But it's really not! Not for "Tweak a few of the default knobs for your use case".

It takes five minutes to play around with whatever FFMPEG gui front end (like even OBS) to get some intuition about those knobs.

Like, people stream coding all the time with OBS itself.

Every twitch streamer and Youtube creator figured out video encoding options, why couldn't they?

They are using a copy of a game streaming code base for this, which is entirely the opposite set of optimizations they should have sought out.

Like, this is rank incompetence. Your average influencer knows more about video encoding than these people. So much for LLMs helping people learn!
by nebezb | 2025-12-24 16:46:33+00:00
https://www.npopov.com/2023/10/03/LLVM-Scalar-evolution.html

“basic and essential” are interesting ways to describe the field of compiler optimization research.

Are you suggesting that the discovery and implementation of SCEV in LLVM is basic and essential? Or that summing integers in a range is basic and essential?