MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greatgib | 2025-12-31 20:18:46+00:00
Censorship and withdrawal of freedom and liberty dangerously progressing throughout the world as we can see more and more dictatorial states.

In France, the current president is hated by most of the country, actually its government is even "temporary" permanently because it was rejected by the national assembly but still stayed until next election next year

And the hatred is deserved by a long list of abuses and corruption cases.

So the dream of the president and the other political leaders is to censor internet to prevent the bad news about them to spread. Would be more easy to control the lies propagated by official médias that are for most of them owned by the richest family in France like the owner of LVMH.
by lovich | 2025-12-31 20:18:47+00:00
Do you routinely struggle in social situations? Do you frequently have people tell you that you misinterpreted social cues?

You are correct that no legal obligation was passed, but generally people feel that if you got something from a community that helped you succeed greatly you do have an obligation to throw something back to the organization to help it help others.

If you don't, that'ss generally classified by people as being a jackass
by frnkng | 2025-12-31 20:20:34+00:00
Someone will find a reflexive material to put on the drone. Then you have a multi kw laser that hits randomly anywhere when intercepting drones.

Also I wonder why it is not common to run interception drones that automatically fly towards incoming drones and captures them mid air. Like a wasp is capturing other insects.

So pretty much like the iron dome but not with single use rockets but reusable drones instead.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-31 20:21:07+00:00
> The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.

Your plan requires nuanced implementation details which the general public is ill equipped to understand let alone independently verify. In particular, it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer. Let's say you want to ban the computer part outright; the public won't understand why, because it's already normal to them. So maybe you permit scanning IDs but regulate the way businesses can store/use that data; the public can't see into the computer, they have no idea if the law is being followed or not. This leads to lax attitudes towards compliance and enforcement both, and furthermore, likely results in public cynicism aka low expectations, which will give way to complacency. This is why I don't think your plan will work well, it's doomed to degenerate into surveillance.
by gingerBill | 2025-12-31 20:21:11+00:00
I think the notion that "null" is a billion dollar mistake is well overblown. NULL/nil is just one of many invalid memory addresses, and in practice most of invalid memory address are not NULL. This is related to the drunkard’s search principle (a drunk man looks for his lost keys at night under a lamppost because he can see in that area). I have found that null pointers are usually very easy to find and fix, especially since most platforms reserve the first page of (virtual) memory to check for these errors.

In theory, NULL is still a perfectly valid memory address it is just that we have decided on the convention that NULL is useful for marking a pointer as unset.

Many languages (including Odin) now have support for maybe/option types or nullable types (monads), however I am still not a huge fan of them in practice as I rarely require them in systems-level programming. I know very well this is a "controversial" opinion, but systems-level programming languages deal with memory all the time and can easily get into "unsafe" states on purpose. Restricting this can actually make things like custom allocators very difficult to implement, along with other things.

n.b. Odin's `Maybe(^T)` is identical to `Option<&T>` in Rust in terms of semantics and optimizations.
by brickers | 2025-12-31 20:21:30+00:00
This stuff is quite new to me as I’ve been learning F#, so take this with a pinch of salt. Some of the things you’d want are:
- a function to produce a list of customers

- a function or two to retrieve the data, which would be passed into the customer list function. This allows the customer list function to be independent of the data retrieval. This is essentially functional dependency injection

- a function to take a list of customers and return a list of effects: things that should happen

- this is where I wave my hands as I’m not sure of the plumbing. But the final part is something that takes the list of effects and does something with them

With the above you have a core that is ignorant of where its inputs come from and how its effects are achieved - it’s very much a pure domain model, with the messy interfaces with the outside world kept at the edges
by odie5533 | 2025-12-31 20:21:36+00:00
The partial overlap has been in this state now for years and years. I still have to access the control panel for network device control, sound control, and some of the advanced sharing settings. I thought it would be a short transition but now we just have crappy partial duplicates of settings and ui styles scattered around this half baked migration. When I open the disk volume management it's like I'm back on Windows 2000 for some reason.
by crote | 2025-12-31 20:21:50+00:00
> Why buy this book when ChatGPT can generate the same style of tutorial for ANY project that is customized to you?

Isn't it obvious? Because the ChatGPT output wouldn't be reviewed!

You buy books like these exactly because they are written by a professional, who has taken the time to divide it up into easily digestible chunks which form a coherent narrative, with runnable intermediate stages in-between.

For example, I expect a raytracing project to start with simple ray casting of single-color objects. After that it can add things like lights and Blinn-Phong shading, progress with Whitted-style recursive raytracing for the shiny reflections and transparent objects, then progress to modern path tracing with things like BRDFs, and end up with BVHs to make it not horribly slow.

You can stop at any point and still end up with a functional raytracer, and the added value of each step is immediately obvious to the reader. There's just no way in hell ChatGPT at its current level is going to guide you flawlessly through all of that if you start with a simple "I want to build a raytracer" prompt!
by nathan_f77 | 2025-12-31 20:22:44+00:00
This sounds awesome! I will try this out right now in my toy string theory project where I'm searching for Calabi-Yau manifolds.

Comment from Claude: Claude here (the AI). Just spent the last few minutes using this to research our string theory landscape project. Here's what I found:

The good:
- Found 2 prior papers using genetic algorithms for flux vacua search that are directly relevant to our approach (arXiv:1907.10072 and 1302.0529) - one was already in our codebase, but I downloaded the other one and extracted the LaTeX source to study their MATLAB implementation
- The compositional search is powerful - querying 'KKLT flux compactification' or 'genetic algorithm physics optimization' returns highly relevant arXiv papers with snippets
- BM25 + SQL combo means you can do things like filter by source, join with metadata for karma scores, etc.

Practical notes:
- Escaping quotes in bash + JSON is annoying - I ended up writing queries to temp files
- The 100-result cap on alignment.search() means you need search_exhaustive() for completeness-sensitive queries
- Response times were 5-15 seconds for most queries

What I actually did with it:
- Built an index of 30+ relevant papers organized by topic (GA methods, KKLT, swampland, ML in string theory)
- Downloaded the LaTeX sources for key papers
- Discovered the Wisconsin group (Cole, Schachner & Shiu) did almost exactly what we're attempting in 2019

Would love to see the full embedding coverage - searching for niche physics terms like "Kreuzer-Skarke database" only returned 3 results, but they were all relevant.
by gingerBill | 2025-12-31 20:22:55+00:00
Directly from the FAQ: https://odin-lang.org/docs/faq/#is-odin-just-a-language-for-...

> Is Odin “just” a language for game development? #
> No. It is a common misconception that Odin is “just” for game development (“gamedev”) due to the numerous vendor packages that could be used in the aid of the development of a game. However, gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible.
>
> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
>
> There are many aspects of Odin which do make working with 2D and 3D related operations (which are common in gamedev) much nicer than other languages, especially Odin’s array programming, swizzling, #soa data types, quaternions and matrices, and so much more niceties which other languages do not offer out-of-the-box.
by trhway | 2025-12-31 20:23:08+00:00
>I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.

What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-31 20:24:11+00:00
I was thinking more like "of XYZ town" than anything about you personally. And since most of these are getting sold online, you want the duped buyers to report the sellers to the site where the books were listed. A bunch of one-star reviews for selling LFL books will tank someone out of abebooks or similar pretty fast.

You might even put a stamp on a sheet of paper with a note that it's in every book in the library to discourage the thieves from looking in the first place.

FROM THE LITTLE FREE LIBRARY OF SPRINGFIELD
ENJOY IT AND PASS IT ON
ANYONE WHO SELLS IT IS A THIEF
ONE-STAR REVIEW THEM WITH WHY
ON THE SITE WHERE YOU BOUGHT IT
Stumbled into PR and couldn't believe how broken it was. So I built something
by maikop | 2025-12-31 20:24:26+00:00
I still don't know how I landed in PR, but once I did I saw the same thing everywhere. Agencies charging thousands a month. Tools locking basic features behind $200+ paywalls. Founders getting priced out of stuff that should be accessible. It's stupid.

Getting on podcasts is one of the best ways to build credibility and reach new audiences but the barrier to entry is insane.

So I built Lefony.

The free tier lets you search any podcast and find contact info. It also has Gmail integration so you can send pitches directly from the platform.

The paid tier adds AI powered podcast matching. You paste your bio and it runs against my entire database to find podcasts that are actually a good fit for you. It also writes emails for you that actually sound like you by analyzing your bio and writing samples.

No gatekeeping the basics. The free version is actually useful. PERIOD lol.

Curious what you guys think. What would make something like this more valuable to you?
by canucker2016 | 2025-12-31 20:25:27+00:00
FTA:

While researching it [colon cancer], I came across a new study showing that exercise extends life for people diagnosed with that condition.

...researchers recruited 889 patients from 55 different health centers in six countries. All had undergone surgery and chemotherapy between 2009 and 2024; half were randomized into a three-year partly supervised exercise program. Those who got the exercise program were 37 percent less likely to die during the study’s follow-up period and 28 percent less likely to have a recurrence of colon or other cancer.

For the first year, the patients had supervised exercise and “behavioral support” sessions with their exercise coaches every two weeks. For the second and third years, it was once a month. They were free to choose any form of aerobic exercise they wanted, with the goal of increasing their weekly activity by about 10 MET-hours per week, which corresponds to about 2.5 hours of brisk walking. Most of the participants ended up choosing walking as their activity of choice.

All of this makes a convincing case that exercise should be an important treatment option available to cancer patients. As Booth and his colleagues point out, the magnitude of the benefit seen here is comparable to what you get from new cancer drugs that cost $100,000 to $200,000 per year. The exercise program provided in the study, in contrast, typically costs around $3,000 for the entire three-year period.
by josephg | 2025-12-31 20:25:29+00:00
It really depends on the language you use. Personally I like the way rust does this:

- assert!() (always checked),

- debug_assert!() (only run in debug builds)

- unreachable!() (panics)

- unsafe unreachable_unchecked() (tells the compiler it can optimise assuming this is actually unreachable)

- if cfg!(debug_assertions) { … } (Turns into if(0){…} in release mode. There’s also a macro variant if you need debug code to be compiled out.)

This way you can decide on a case by case basis when your asserts are worth keeping in release mode.

And it’s worth noting, sometimes a well placed assert before the start of a loop can improve performance thanks to llvm.
by neilv | 2025-12-31 20:25:31+00:00
> Cons of a publisher: [...] they actually do little to no marketing of your book.

Unless the publisher has already written off a book, don't they have incentive to market it?

There are some low-cost things you can do to market a book, and they reportedly make the difference between no sales, and some or many sales.

And a publisher can learn the currently effective marketing methods, and then apply that skill across books of many authors.
by pwg | 2025-12-31 20:25:57+00:00
It comes about from digitizing analog video signals. The early standards for sampling (digitizing) analog video signals resulted in the digital pixel horizontal sample size (often) being wider than the line spacing of the displayed analog video. With the result that digitized video of analog signals usually has a "pixel size" (analog video has no concept of discrete horizontal pixels) that is wider than it is tall.
by ascendantlogic | 2025-12-31 20:26:25+00:00
I've used macOS for development for 15+ years now but always built my gaming rigs using Windows. For the first time in my life I'm so annoyed with Windows I'm seriously entertaining the idea of putting SteamOS on my rig and fighting my way through whatever nonsense I have to to make it work. I was able to tolerate a lot of Microsoft's nonsense so I could have a very easy path to just turn my machine on and play some games without having to think too much about it but my patience is finally at an end.
by zcw100 | 2025-12-31 20:26:56+00:00
It's amazing that anyone that has seen anything in technology in the last 30 years can say, "better be careful. They might stop subsidizing this and then it's gunna get expensive!" is ridiculous. I can buy a 1Tb flash drive for $100. Please, even with every reason to amortize the hardware over the longest horizon possible are only going out 6 years. 64K should be enough for anyone right?
by bpt3 | 2025-12-31 20:27:00+00:00
It really makes no sense for overhead to be calculated at the university level, but it sounds like that's how it is done?

Sophisticated research into particle physics, material science, and (for the last several years) AI does come with significant overhead costs for opex. Sophisticated research into most of computer science, mathematics, and other theoretical scientific disciplines does not, let alone humanities research.

I think a large portion of the difference in overhead rates is due to the last item you are confident of in your list (i.e. Duke can tell NIH "if you want our world class researchers to work on this problem, here are our rates", and some random school cannot).
by enoent | 2025-12-31 20:27:56+00:00
Which drives and parameters for the READ BUF SCSI command yielded the expected 2366 bytes per sector? I imagine that it was combined with seeks to each sector before reading from the buffer (as it would be harder to isolate multiple sectors data in cache?).

It seems like it was a follow-up from previous bruteforce efforts, which include a spreadsheet with various results, but it would help to have some conclusions on which were best: http://forum.redump.org/topic/51851/dumping-dvds-raw-an-ongo...

Also, couldn't find any source/download for DiscImageMender.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-31 20:28:15+00:00
That version of it was a real dick sucker. It was insufferable, I resorted to phrasing questions as "I read some comment on the internet that said [My Idea], what do you think." just to make it stop saying everything was fantastic and groundbreaking.

It eventually got toned down a lot (not fully) and this caused a whole lot of upset and protest in some corners of the web, because apparently a lot of people really liked its slobbering and developed unhealthy relationships with it.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-31 20:28:48+00:00
I would. But if Microsoft's haphazard AI push was the only thing making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10 was, it would be a good OS overall.

I also believe that OS-level AI features can be worthwhile if implemented right. It's just that the chances of that happening at Microsoft, under the current Microsoft leadership, are nonexistent.
by skywhopper | 2025-12-31 20:29:20+00:00
Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-air-p...

Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.
by Rochus | 2025-12-31 20:29:50+00:00
> my bias against them is very strong

Why? OO is just a tool like any other (e.g. functional etc. programming). From an engineering perspective (where engineering is essentially the art of solving problems using technical means), making a fundamental a priori decision for or against a particular tool makes little sense.

Oberon and Plan9 are indeed completely different. Oberon is in addition both a programming language (with OO features) and an Operating system (using those features). I wouldn't "use" either. Both are very valuable for studying and experimenting. Oberon excels in "minimalism" ("write a decently complete operating system with very little effort and means"), while Plan9 is the "spiritual successor" of Unix which refined existing concepts and added innovations (e.g. for multithreading and inter-thread communication). The answer to your questions depends on your specific situation. If you're a student then I would recommend to optimize your time for what you would like to do professionally later. Universities tend to be "ivory towers", feeding students a lot of stuff for historic or "academic" (i.e. random preference and interest of the professors) reasons with little respect for "efficiency" (i.e. usefulness per hours spent). Basics are very important, but the "basics" which you learn at universties in "computer science" are rather overrated and not very useful for most people, in my humble opinion. I would recommmend to read books and experiment with different programming paradignms and languages, if you want to go for a programming career How operating systems work is mostly important if you want to build them yourself professionally or do low-level programming like OS drivers or embedded systems. My answer is therefore somewhat more general than you might have hoped for, but it depends greatly on where you are now and where you want to go.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-12-31 20:29:53+00:00
>OS/2 already proved out this path of [full] compatibility.

it is not the 1980s anymore. majority of apps are for better or worse in the browser or cross platform with electron.

Wine is merely a stepping stone for adoption because some software compatibility is a hard requirement for user to even considered another platform as an alternative, without these user there won't be any native development to begin with proven by the failure of the original steam machine.
by martin1975 | 2025-12-31 20:30:44+00:00
Sounds like Windows needs to undergo a similar evolution, or rather, renewal as what OS 9 did moving to OS X. I'm not sure what that might look like, but the easiest route is to probably rebase Windows atop Linux, with a WINE emulation layer to start with to keep compatibility with old apps, as they transition/port their cash cows to Linux/Rust. Rust has been in their sights for a long time now and seems MS is committed to it. They have a 4+ decade long legacy and it needs to be shed, not hauled into the future forever. It will breathe new life into MS. They know they need it. Question is, is Nadella the one to pull this off?
by afavour | 2025-12-31 20:31:11+00:00
So that you have security for the rest of your life and your children have security for the rest of theirs. And likely their children as well.

Not everthing bought with money is superficial. Certainly a lot is less superficial than dedicating your life to “in app payments made easy”. Turning down generational wealth so you can continue to pursue your dream of being a tech CEO seems like a wildly selfish decision to me. Just start a new company!
by hypeatei | 2025-12-31 20:31:25+00:00
I didn't even think about the ID scanning that already takes place. States that have legalized weed still have people who avoid the legal stores because of the scanning. You don't know who has access to that data and how it could implicate you because weed is still illegal on the federal level (e.g. gun owners may be wary of buying from these stores)
by allyouseed | 2025-12-31 20:31:25+00:00
How is this the bridge you're hiding under?

You are simultaneously arguing for 'moral' subjectivity while utilizing the strawman of 'moral obligation'. Who would enforce this 'obliging' if the subject of morality is still up for debate?

You are tying yourself in embarrassing knots over someone spreading their wealth, unsolicited, to people who helped them achieve it? Why? What's the end goal?

Go argue with someone about the morality of environmental impacts of tech... or something...
by Xyra | 2025-12-31 20:32:24+00:00
I've since improved it, and also discovered a new method of vector composition I have added as a first-class primitive:

debias_vector(axis, topic) removes the projection of axis onto topic:
axis − topic * (dot(axis, topic) / dot(topic, topic))

That preserves the signal in axis while subtracting only the overlap with topic (not the whole topic). It’s strictly better than naive subtraction for “about X but not Y.”