MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jancsika | 2025-12-16 19:18:07+00:00
> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.

Your efficiency gain in the size and complexity of the policies and procedures handbook would be unparalleled.

But why might the crime rate shoot up on day two of your short tenure as police chief?

Hint: a metric is distinct from a target.
by underlipton | 2025-12-16 19:18:16+00:00
I would argue that the Apple Vision Pro is a rare example of something that WAS inevitable BECAUSE of the misbehavior described. Every large VR company COULD have just created and iterated on the basic design that Palmer Luckey (aside: who is also a villain here, too; don't read to much into the name-drop) forced everyone to recognize as viable, slowly developing the technology in the organic way other computing platforms came about. Instead, they all played a decade-long game of chicken, trying to bait their rivals into being the Xerox or Rio of the technology, to their... well, Apple. That is, letting them do all the hard work in standing up the tech's basic user experience, use cases, etc., then swooping in with a polished product offering.

None of these companies wanted to get Apple'd, and they (particularly Facebook) did everything they could to pay lip service to developing VR without funding anything really groundbreaking (or even obvious). Apple finally had to release something after years of promising shareholders that they weren't going to get left behind in the market, and with nothing material to skim off of competitors, the AVP is what we got.

Until Apple figures out how to dig up and purify its deep-rooted cultural rot, and learn how to actually innovate independently, every halfway-aware competitor is going to hold back development on anything they might want to appropriate. In the meantime, we all lose.
by suryao | 2025-12-16 19:18:43+00:00
With these changes, three things hold:

1. Services like WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.

2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!

3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.
by ArkhamMirror | 2025-12-16 19:19:53+00:00
For sure - "conspiracy theorists" are just another group of people trying to find truth, patterns in the world and trying to connect the dots. The cork board feel was very much intentional in some of the visualizations. Specifically, the "lie web" visualization that uses "red yarn" visuals to connect detected contradictions across different entities and documents.

If I had the skills, I would totally map that onto a cork board.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-16 19:20:01+00:00
Van's aren't sexy and cool, and there is no marketing as TOUGH and REAL MEN and COUNTRY MUSIC the way there is for trucks.

The bourgeoning Van Life movement that is picking up steam on places like TikTok and YT may do more for that, but in a lot of ways it's a statement about doing without, as opposed to being country rich and tough the way trucks are.
by gpderetta | 2025-12-16 19:20:19+00:00
> [re weak vs strong cas] But, while that’s the guidance you’ll find all over the internet, I don’t actually know which CPUs this would affect. Maybe it’s old news, I dunno. But it does still seem to make a shade of difference in real-world tests

A CAS implemented with LL/SC (ARM, POWER) is weak as LL/SC an spuriously fail. So it always needs to be retried in a loop. Such a weak CAS might only be lock-free, not wait free as it might not provide global progress guarantees ; in practice some platforms give stronger progress guarantees as they might convert an LL/SC to a strong CAS via idiom recognition.

A strong CAS (x86, SPARC I thnk) is implemented directly in the architecture and it is typically strong. It also usually gives strong fairness guarantees.

If your algorithm needs to CAS in a loop might as well use a weak CAS to avoid a loop-of-loops. Otherwise a strong CAS might generate better code on some architectures.

> 32 bits is not enough space for the epoch if we are building something general-purpose.

Note that as long as your buffer can contain less than 31*2 items, 32 bits is usually enough (that's how TCP works for example) as even after overflow you can sequence before and after, unless you can have stale flight messages of more than one overflow ago.

>However, the num_cells field and last_slot field are not tagged _Atomic. That’s because these should be set by one thread during initialization, and then never changed. As long as the memory has synced before other threads start to use these fields, we definitely don’t need them to be treated specially. Usually, if we do initialization in a proper function, the call boundary is going to be a memory barrier that makes sure they’re sync’d when other threads start getting a handle on our ring.

Your threading library likely guarantees that anything sequenced before the start of your thread happens-before the first instruction of the new thread is executed. So you do not need explicit memory barriers. In any case, a function call is at best a compiler barrier, not a full barrier as required on many architectures.

[sorry, I wasn't really going to do a review, these were my notes when reading the algo].

The algo is quite interesting, a lot of corner cases covered. The biggest issue is that the ticketing system is a single memory location where all producers and consumers attempt to write, so it is never going to scale.

If you really really need a lock-free MPMC queue that guarantees a total order, then it can be useful, but outside some hard-realtime scenarios, I can't really see the benefits. Wouldn't a collection of SPSC queues work for the logging scenario given in the introduction?
by martin-t | 2025-12-16 19:20:33+00:00
1) Your lack of proper punctuation makes some sentences hard to read and it comes off as disrespectful.

2) Generally, people use the > character for quotes. You use " and that's fine but your third quote is not an actual quote from my message. This case is harmless but it's generally rude to put words in other people's mouths and mislead anybody else reading this into thinking I said a particular thing I did not.

3) Since "You paid with your data" is actually your phrasing, you admit that data is a form of currency. And since as you said, I paid, it cannot by definition be free.

4) Your insistence that state-issues currencies (or only the dollar) are the only valid currencies is wrong. People commonly perform other forms of exchange of both goods and services, surely you wouldn't claim e.g. somebody is performing work for free when he asks you for a counter-service or non-monetary compensation. I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration , it is closely related.

5) Disadvantage means one side of the negotiation has more information it can leverage to make a more beneficial deal to it at the expense of the other party. Since I don't know how much money my attention and data makes the company, I can't negotiate a fair price for me to pay in monetary terms instead of attention and data.

6) I am clearly important enough that my data, time and attention have monetary value.

7) What if I belong to a minority which would be targeted under a different regime? My data can be used to profile me. If the data can be sold or published today, there's nothing stopping a future government or even non-governmental organizations from using it. The right to privacy and the right to control my data is just as important as free speech for maintaining a free society.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-16 19:20:42+00:00
It's because the term itself got overapplied by people critical of LLMs -- they dismissed all LLM-assisted coding as "vibe coding" because they were prejudiced against LLMs.

Then lots of people were introduced to the term "vibe coding" in these conversations, and so naturally took it as a synonym for using LLMs for coding assistance even when reading the code and writing tests and such.

Also because vibe coding just sounds cool.
by stuffn | 2025-12-16 19:20:50+00:00
I don't see why you're being downvoted. Aside from being a little inflammatory your premise is correct.

It's not a secret companies do not want to hire Americans. Americans are expensive, demand too many benefits like fair pay, healthcare, and vacations. They also are (mostly) at-will. H1B solves all these problem. When that doesn't work, there's 400 Infosys-likes available to export that labor cheaply. We have seen this with several industries, the last most prominent one being auto manufacture.

All that matters is that the next quarters earnings are more than the last. No one hates the American worker more than Americans. Other countries have far better worker protections than us.

I see no reason H1B couldn't be solved by having an high barrier to entry (500k one time fee) and maintenance (100k per year). Then, force them to be paid at the highest bracket in their field. If H1Bs are what it's proponents say - necessary for rare talent not found else where - then this fee should be pennies on the value they provide. I also see no reason we can't tax exported labor in a similarly extreme manner. If the labor truly can't be found in America the high price of the labor on tax and fee terms should be dwarfed by their added value.

If it is not the case that high fees and taxes on H1B and exported labor make sense then the only conclusion is the vast majority of H1Bs and exported labor are not "rare talent" and thus aren't necessary. They can come through the normal immigration routes and integrate into the workforce as a naturalized American.
by j_seigh | 2025-12-16 19:21:01+00:00
I did a lock-free MPMC ring buffer with 1 128 bit CAS and 1 64 bit CAS for enqueue and 1 64 bit CAS for dequeue. The payload is an unrestricted uintptr_t (64 bit) value so no way to avoid the 128 bit CAS in the enqueue.
by hoten | 2025-12-16 19:21:12+00:00
I wonder how much they made from engineering practices such as https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792.

To spell it out: jobs can hang forever because of some ridiculously bad code on their end, they have a 6 hour cap, so that's 6 hours of billable $$$ per-instance of the bug (assuming it wasn't manually canceled). I know I've seen jobs hang forever regularly over the course of my years using GitHub for work.

Note: pretty sure this has been resolved.
by ghaff | 2025-12-16 19:21:18+00:00
You probably need to be more granular. I got lucky, but in 2000 anything tech-related was nuclear winter. A lot of people just left the industry. 2008 was more broad-based and, while it wasn't a great market for tech (I held off making a change for a couple of years for that reason), I'm not sure it was terrible for a lot of tech.
by esafak | 2025-12-16 19:21:21+00:00
Any official Github action today:

"Thank you for your interest in this GitHub action, however, right now we are not taking contributions.

We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in."
by bitexploder | 2025-12-16 19:21:29+00:00
I started building ALPR and speed detection systems for my house based on RTSP feed. I kind of want to finish this with an outdoor TV that has a leaderboard of the drivers that drive the fastest and their license plate in public display on my property, but visible to the street. In part to make my neighbors aware of how powerful ALPR technology is now, but also many of my neighbors should slow the heck down. I am not sure how popular this would be, but also I kind of like starting the right kind of trouble :)
by BurningFrog | 2025-12-16 19:21:44+00:00
As a Swede, I've always been confused by these results. The self image of Swedes is that we're fairly miserable on average, and don't know how to enjoy life as much as some people in warmer climates.

That said, note that both things mentioned in here will raise average happiness:

> But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.
by impossiblefork | 2025-12-16 19:21:55+00:00
Maybe, and you really believe that, then you do believe in capitalism as Louis Blanc defined it, even though he invented it as a way to characterize something which he regarded as bad.

But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.

I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
by wslh | 2025-12-16 19:21:56+00:00
I see a fallacy in their arguments, even at that level of understanding: you can't be sure you are measuring all the variables when comparing/diffing "both brains". I am not tired of mentioning the book "Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons"[1]. There is a parallel HN thread about fMRI issues that adds more food for thought [2].

Not saying than other topics he is talking about are not fascinating, just saying that making arguments about AGI is a stretch. Super intelligent people such as Newton also worked on alchemy, and he thought it was possible at that time.

It is also odd, even for basic computer scientists, when he talks about Turing machines limitations and putting too much faith in their thinking capabilities. It's impossible to not mention the halting problem there. Happy he mention later the possibility of quantum effects in the brain though.

[1] https://christofkoch.com/biophysics-book/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288415
Show HN: Dev Tools – 24 browser-based utilities with no signup or tracking
by ghdj | 2025-12-16 19:22:01+00:00
I built a collection of developer tools that run entirely in the browser. No accounts, no server-side processing, no tracking. Includes: JSON formatter/validator, CSV to JSON/SQL converter, Regex tester, Base64 encoder, Hash generator, UUID generator, JWT decoder, Cron parser, Timestamp converter, Diff checker, and more. Tech: Plain HTML/CSS/JS. Intentionally kept it simple for fast loading and easy maintenance. Open source: https://github.com/GhDj/dev-tools Looking for feedback on what tools would be most useful to add next.
by acituan | 2025-12-16 19:22:06+00:00
> I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not.

You might be conflating determinism with causality. Determinism is a metaphysical stance too because it asserts absence of free will.

Regardless of the philosophical nuance between the two, you are implicitly taking the vantage point of "god" or Laplace's Demon: infinite knowledge AND infinite computability based on that knowledge.

Tech people ought to know that we can't compute our way out of combinatorial explosion. That we can't even solve for a simple 8x8 game called chess algorithmically. We are bound with framing choices and therefore our models will never be a lossless, unbiased compression of reality. Asserting otherwise is a metaphysical stance, implicitly claiming human agency can sum up to a "godlike", totalizing compute.

In sum, models will never be sophisticated enough, claiming otherwise has always ended up being a form of totalitarianism, willful assertion one's favorite "framing", which inflicted a lot of pain in the past. What we need is computational humility. One good thing about tech interviews that it teaches people resource complexity of computation.
Show HN: Community Site for WebGL / WebGPU
by FarhadG | 2025-12-16 19:22:23+00:00
____

Link: WebGL.com / WebGPU.com

____

Hello everyone,

This is a long time coming but I've just launched a very lean (MVP) community site for all things WebGL/WebGPU. As a long-time developer and an author in this space, I'm genuinely excited to help bring the community (i.e. creators, developers, designers, etc.) together in shaping the future of the web.

At the moment, the site's all about connecting with creators and highlighting their demos. Over the coming months, I want to add:

- News: latest and greatest info happening in this space

- Tutorials: Short-form articles and end-to-end courses teaching graphics, math, and AI/ML

- Deep Dives: Long-form interviews/posts on select demos/projects to go deeper into techniques, tools, and author

Would love to know what would make this as an experience you'd enjoy coming back to regularly.
by theamk | 2025-12-16 19:22:26+00:00
The process is pretty informal, so there are no hard requirements. that said:

- Failures per day: let's say 0-100

- How long to retain records: no hard requirements? I guess a few months at least, some failures are pretty rare

- What's the lifecycle of a failure? Scripts record it, team members investigate it and assign to "root cause".

- Custom scripts:

(1) create ticket per failure

(2) create failure reports (to prioritize work - for example if there were 50 failure reports with root cause of 'github was down' , the priority of "set up github mirror" will get bumped up)

(3) mass-update tickets (for example if github.com is down, there will be few dozens of failed processes because of that)

(4) handle rules for automatic classification (again, if github.com is down, it'd be lovely if I can have a rule: "for the next 48 hours, every ticket which mentions github.com and 503 is auto-assigned to 'github was down' root cause")

- SSO, audit, compliance: nice but not required

- JIRA problems: search sucks. "Find similar ticket" sucks. Rules are missing (or need admin). Even something as simple as "close those 20 tickets and link them all to ABC-1234" is impossible.

- Google sheets: not enough automation. At least I can do "filter rows, copy-paste the 'root cause' field into all of them", and it is pretty fast, but: multi-line outputs don't look good and there are no automation (we did not explore App Script, maybe we should have...)

And yeah, I am getting the feeling this would be a custom job. We have resources in house to do so, but I was hoping there was an existing product. Surely there are people out there who run batch-like jobs and want them to be reliable? Something like data conversion jobs, CI builds, training jobs, etc...

Perhaps it's a good thing for generative AI, I've heard it's pretty good at making websites (and security/availability is not an issue, as this will be internal website not exposed to internet). Or I may revisit Google's App Script...
by kylegalbraith | 2025-12-16 19:22:29+00:00
Founder of Depot[0] here. I'm disappointed by this change and by the impact this is going to have on all self-hosted runner customers, not just us. In my view, this is GitHub extracting more revenue from the ecosystem for a service that is slow, unreliable, and that GitHub has openly not invested in.

We will continue to do our best to provide the fastest GHA runners and keep them cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners.

[0] https://depot.dev
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-12-16 19:22:35+00:00
Just be clear, it is not a case of I don’t want to learn anymore. That’s actually pretty far from the case. As an example and sticking to programming languages, I am currently putting Koka and Eff through their paces and learning a decent amount about the incorporation of algebraic effects into languages at scale, I’m also working my way through Idris 2’s adoption of Quantitative Type Theory. I genuinely enjoy learning, and particularly enjoy learning in the comp sci field.

But, that doesn’t have any bearing on my lack of desire to learn Rust. Several other comments basically demand I justify that dislike, and I may reply, but there is nothing wrong with not liking a language for personal or professional use. I have not taken any action to block Rust’s adoption in projects I use nor do I think I would succeed if I did try. I have occasionally bemoaned the inclusion of Rust in projects I use on forums, but even that isn’t taken well (my original comment as an example).
by voxl | 2025-12-16 19:22:44+00:00
Yes.. yes.. sure, of course... You neglect this one little detail: theorem proving IS programming. So if an AI can be "better than a fields medalist" (a laughable claim akin to basically calling it AGI) then it will be better than all software engineers everywhere.

But see you neglect something important: it's the programmer that is establishing the rules of the game, and as Grothendieck taught us already, often just setting up the game is ALL of the work, and the proof is trivial.
by shagie | 2025-12-16 19:23:10+00:00
When you see 6.1% unemployment for computer science new grads, that invariably comes from

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

Computer Science is tied for fourth lowest underemployment and is the 7th highest unemployment... and is also the highest early career median wage.

That needs to be compared to the underemployment chart https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... and the unemployment chart https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (and make sure to compare that with 2009).

Computer science is not getting wiped out by AI. Entry level jobs exist, though people may need to reset their expectations (note that median job being $80k) from getting a $150k job out of college - that was always the exception rather than the average.

There are average jobs out there that people with a "want to be on the coast and $150k" or "must be remote so I don't relocate" are thumbing their nose at.
by vidarh | 2025-12-16 19:23:12+00:00
Really, this. You still need to check its work, but it is also pretty good at checking its work if told to look at specific things.

Make it stop. Tell it to review whether the code is cohesive. Tell it to review it for security issues. Tell it to review it for common problems you've seen in just your codebase.

Tell it to write a todo list for everything it finds, and tell it fix it.

And only review the code once it's worked through a checklist of its own reviews.

We wouldn't waste time reviewing a first draft from another developer if they hadn't bothered looking over it and test it properly, so why would we do that for an AI agent that is far cheaper.
by mNovak | 2025-12-16 19:23:19+00:00
>> Seeing an image of their brain with some colors overlayed ... is highly convincing

Indeed, there's been quite a few studies [1] that find just including any old image of a brain with stuff highlighted will cause a paper to be perceived as more scientifically credible.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17803985/
by tigranbs | 2025-12-16 19:23:19+00:00
As a US person, I have lived in Finland for 3 years, and I can assure you that the Finns are the most content people you can imagine! They can go months without talking to anyone and still consider themselves "happy", but the correct word in English is "content".

That report is correct, it just they advertise with the wrong word in the headline, I guess because it is more click-bate title than having it as "The most content country"