MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-12-15 02:05:13+00:00
She won the Turing Award. That's hardly being forgotten.

Is this an interview with her, purportedly made five years after her death?

Yes, apparently. At the very end, it says:

> This interview transcript is a work of dramatised historical reconstruction. Frances Allen died on 4th August 2020, and cannot speak. The words, reflections, and responses attributed to her in this document are constructed from historical records, published interviews, biographical materials, technical papers, and documented accounts of her life and work – but they are not her actual words, spoken in real time.

> What preceded this was a fictional dramatisation, constructed with the intention of being historically responsible and intellectually faithful to what is known of Frances Allen’s thinking, her work, her values, and her reflections on her career. The interview format was used to explore her contributions, challenges, and insights in a narrative form – one that aims to capture the nuance, personality, and candid self-reflection that archival records alone rarely convey.

> This is an imaginative reconstruction of what Frances Allen might have said, had she been able to sit down for an extended conversation in December 2025, with the benefit of hindsight and the perspective of someone reflecting on a complete career arc. It draws on: ...

> This is not a transcript of actual words she spoke. It is not a formal biography. It is not an attempt to present speculation as fact or to invent details about her life that are not grounded in historical evidence.

But how many people will read far enough to spot that note?

This stinks of AI slop.

There's an actual 75-minute interview with Allen made in 02008 at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270196..., with an 18-page transcript.
by prawn | 2025-12-15 02:05:37+00:00
A friend has a robot vac and just puts it in a room, closes the door, and leaves it for a couple of hours. Avoids the issue of worrying about which areas don't have kids' toys around, Lego, cords, etc. Higher touch than is ideal, but if you're already working from home and the kids are at school, it can work.
by boondongle | 2025-12-15 02:05:38+00:00
A big reason for that is it comes from the CEO. Other providers have a team and then at least 2 to 3 layers of management above them and a dotted line legal counsel. So the goal posts randomly shift from "more information" to "no information" over time based on the relationships of that entire chain, the customer heat of the moment, and personality.

Underneath a public statement they all have extremely detailed post-mortems. But how much goes public is 100% random from the customer's perspective. There's no Monday Morning QB'ing the CEO, but there absolutely is "Day-Shift SRE Leader Phil"
by ghaff | 2025-12-15 02:05:59+00:00
The big thing for me was that hauling out a canister vac was just a big PITA. But I concluded that a 10 minute job with a broom vac (Dyson) dealt with 80% of the headache (and I had a monthly housekeeper anyway). A robovac just didn't really do anything for me and would have had various issue with cords or random stuff on the floor.
by lmz | 2025-12-15 02:07:00+00:00
> This interview transcript is a work of dramatised historical reconstruction. Frances Allen died on 4th August 2020, and cannot speak. The words, reflections, and responses attributed to her in this document are constructed from historical records, published interviews, biographical materials, technical papers, and documented accounts of her life and work – but they are not her actual words, spoken in real time.

Might be good to put that up top next time.
by jmclnx | 2025-12-15 02:10:17+00:00
>A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns.

I never understood why the US objected to this. Amazon was not in that business.

But you see acquisitions like Paramount that will eventually turn US media into a near monopoly with probably 2 or 3 players. Now we have a fight over who will pick up WB, I am sure who ever wins the fight will have the merger approved. But Amazon, denied.

FWIW, I have no love for Amazon, but they were not trying to buy a company like Walmart which will be far worse then buying iRobot.
by kown7 | 2025-12-15 02:10:58+00:00
I'm in the progress of open-sourcing (and extending) my static-site generator "CMS" (with big air-quotes).

The idea is to add dynamic content, i.e. reservation tool, to what is essentially a statically hosted web page.

Demo: https://astro-booking.pages.dev/booking/

A bit more details: https://www.nordstroem.ch/posts/2025-01-15-to-the-stars.html
by smj-edison | 2025-12-15 02:11:52+00:00
https://github.com/smj-edison/zicl

Porting/reimplementing a Tcl interpreter from C to Zig, based on the design of Jimtcl. This is one of those sub-projects that started due to another project (folk.computer in this case). The biggest difference is thread-safe value sharing, and (soon to be) lexical variable capture.

But why? Right now folk.computer has about a 20% overhead of serializing and deserializing values as they get sent between threads, and it's also meant we can't sent large amounts of data around. I previously attempted to make the Jimtcl interpreter thread-safe, but it ended up being slower than the status quo. So, I started hacking on a new interpreter.

Commands evaluate, basic object operations are in place, but there's still a ton of work to do in order to implement core commands. It may even be good enough to swap in some day!
Show HN: web app to match with people nearby on 7 dimensions of needs
by arthurstarlake | 2025-12-15 02:11:58+00:00
"deep union web" is a web tool that facilitates requesting and offering generic help from nearby people that you may not even know yet. It does so by gathering your requests, offers, generic visual appearance and coordinates. Both the requests and offers are in these 7 dimensions: Preservation, Gratification, Definition, Acceptance, Expression, Reflection, Knowledge. You could consider them as increasingly subtler needs. They are somewhat general intentionally but each need has a more concrete example next to each one if you click the "?" button. Then users can find each other in a map, see what they match in, and if they decide to approach, they can see how others have visually described themselves and where they are (i.e. the selected user is 0.03 km North).

How it works 1. Submit your requests, offers, visual description and current coordinates (e.g. grab it from Google Maps). They all stay local to you. 2. You can choose to post everything in our database so others can find you. (All posted data is automatically deleted at midnight Pacific Standard Time every day.) 3. Select other users in the Map section to see how well your requests and offers match. 4. If you choose to approach them, you can see their visual description so you know how they look, and their distance and direction from your location so you know where to go.

19 out of 22 data points are input through checkboxes so it's very quick.

Feel free to use it as an icebreaker, to improve relationships, or to grow your network in a targeted manner!

Why did I do this? I traveled by bus many times during my Masters degree and was surprised at how little people chatted in the bus. I've always felt particularly hopeful and energetic about us humans. I keeps me going joyfully and smoothly. I though aboout how people naturally had many needs and many skills or resources that they would love to share. I also noticed that many people near me spend too long pursuing some of those needs unnecesarily. So this was my effort in making other needs more explicit and to facilitate deeper conversations with people nearby. If those other people were strangers, and also in order to deliberately not store some types of sensitive information, I designed a manner to visually identify yourself with a few visual characteristics you are anyways broadcasting when you're present anywhere.

The first really valuable uses of this kind of app may be in circumstances where people already feel some trust with those around them (retreats, company, family, friends, etc.). Eventually, strangers!
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-15 02:12:10+00:00
Whether or not every historical detail in the story is perfectly accurate, the pattern itself feels familiar. Tesla ended up as the name of a car company, and hardly anyone pauses to think about the scientist anymore. Some contributions succeed so completely that they dissolve into the everyday and fall off the list of things we consciously praise. That disappearance is, in its own way, evidence that the work was gold.
by tguvot | 2025-12-15 02:12:11+00:00
i watched via camera 12 years ago roomba spreading my dogs diarrhea all over living room (thanks god to tile floors). I connected to camera first time in a months just few seconds before roomba took first swipe over the poop. Still remember feelings of paralysis, despair and lack of control.

Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.

latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-15 02:12:14+00:00
I disagree. I think it should be indexed by bytes. One reason is what the other comment explains about not being constant-time (which is a significant reason), although the other is that this restricts it to Unicode (which has its own problems) and to specific versions of Unicode, and can potentially cause problems when using a different version of Unicode. A separate library can be used to deal with code points and/or EGC if this is important for a specific application; these features should not be inherent to the string type.
by etherfirma | 2025-12-15 02:13:04+00:00
I don't agree with the author on most of this. GraphQL is far better than REST in almost every way and I disagree that the server side resolvers are somehow difficult to write. In a true enterprise setting, the federation capabilities are fantastic.

There are plenty of things to dislike about GraphQL that he doesn't touch on, like: * lack of input type polymorphism * lack of support for map types * lack of support for recursive data structures (e.g., BlogComments) * terrible fragment syntax
by duxup | 2025-12-15 02:13:06+00:00
When I used to work with abused kids long ago I recognized that a lot did not make sense when I talked to them. I realized later in life that remained the case for many in adulthood. Outside those who completely disconnect from their families I think it's hard for most of us to understand.

I always assume humans, even those abused, still have those same experiences, and even positive connections to family even within the cloud of abuse ... it makes things confusing for the rest of us I think but I think humans are driven to find those bits of connection regardless how our parents behave.
by pikuseru | 2025-12-15 02:13:33+00:00
I remember being idealistic when I first started. Now I’m just jaded and cynical. Don’t try looking for meaning in any of it, you won’t find any. The system just churns along. And everyone with it. Play the game and nod along. Your job doesn’t define who you are. Just be thankful because you could be in a worse situation.
by theamk | 2025-12-15 02:14:06+00:00
Some BSDs have concept of "securelevel" - a global setting that could be used to permanently put the system up into the mode which restricts certain operations, like writing to raw disks or truncating logs.

The idea is if you want to modify the the system, you reboot into single-user mode and do what you need. It does not start up ssh / networking by default, so it is accessible to local console only.

And of course plenty of smaller MCUs (used in IoT devices) can be locked down to prevent any sort of writing to program memory - you need an external programming adapter to update the code. This is the ultimate security in some sense - no matter what kinds of bugs you have, a power cycle will always restore system into pristine state (*unless there is a bug in settings parser).
by hapticmonkey | 2025-12-15 02:14:37+00:00
My LG TV has been offline for the past 2 years (since I got it). I'm so much happier using the Apple TV.

I know people want "dumb" displays, but the reality is that these OLED panels offer industry-leading image quality and benefit from economies of scale, where most users want some form of built-in OS. A signage board cannot compete on price or quality. As long as TV manufacturers let me run it offline without issue, I'm fine with that.

Also fwiw, you can use apps like Infuse on the Apple TV for playing your own media files over the network. No Need for USB drives, just connect direct to the shared folder.
by simpaticoder | 2025-12-15 02:15:02+00:00
Maybe I can help with one or two conceptual things. In classic E&M a field describes the potential (or force, if you prefer) a test charge would experience at that point. Note that the general case is impossible to visualize, as you're associating 6 numbers (3 for E 3 for B) with every point in space, so we normally think of simple setups and slice them up. Accelerated charges make waves in the field which are WAY more complex than people think. The way you model matter is dependent on the frequency of light. For visible light you normally think of it (especially metal) as a crystalline lattice of some characteristic length, electrons that can jump discrete energy levels, with molecules forming some sort of dipole that has more degrees-of-freedom (wobbling, twisting). I don't know about VHF, but the wavelengths are huge, like kms, and therefore way too low energy to cause electron shell jumps, so you'll probably model matter according to some very general characteristic like permittivity and conductivity. For seawater (which is a good conductor) subs use ELF, which is 100s of kms in air and can only communicate at bits/s. It's a fascinating topic, and very niche. Good luck!
by Lerc | 2025-12-15 02:15:52+00:00
There is totally something you can do. There are so many things you can do. The only thing that you can't do is go back to the way things were.

That technology advances and that causes issues is inevitable, but we can't go back. What we can do is work towards adapting the world as it develops into something we want.

If you took my post to mean there is nothing we can do then perhaps you missed the phrases "address the problem of job loss" or "we will need a societal change" or "this needs to be addressed".
by claytongulick | 2025-12-15 02:16:14+00:00
It's such a lovely and simple stack.

No Lit Element or Lit or whatever it's branded now, no framework just vanilla web components, lit-html in a render() method, class properties for reactivity, JSDoc for opt-in typing, using it where it makes sense but not junking up the code base where it's not needed...

No build step, no bundles, most things stay in light dom, so just normal CSS, no source maps, transpiling or wasted hours with framework version churn...

Such a wonderful and relaxing way to do modern web development.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-15 02:17:25+00:00
> We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers. When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines.

Is this… right?

I thought some of the earliest mechanical computers (as opposed to human computers) that had much real uptake were “fire control computers,” for things like naval guns (for example). You move around dials and cranks to put the measurements in. I’d call this essentially graphical… it isn’t a series of text based commands that you issue, but a collection of intuitive UI elements, each of which is used to communicate a particular piece of data to the computer. Of course the GUI of the past was made of gages and levers instead of pixels, but that’s just an implementation detail.

I much prefer the command line to a gui, but I think we should call it what it is: an improvement. A much more precise and repeatable way of talking to the computer, in comparison to cranking cranks and poking dials. And a general, endlessly flexible channel that can represent basically any type of information, at the cost of not necessary being intuitive or glance-able.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-15 02:17:32+00:00
Literally terabytes of Word and PowerPoint documents displaying and debating various ways to build big bird cages. In Milpitas.

I noticed the nonsense due to an alert that my OneDrive was over limit, which caught my attention, since I don’t use OneDrive.

If I prompted a half-decent LLM to run up billables, I doubt I could have done a better job.
by popalchemist | 2025-12-15 02:18:11+00:00
I am aware, I've trained my own models. You're being obtuse.

The big companies - take Midjourney, or OpenAI, for example - take the feedback that is generated by users, and then apply it as part of the RLHF pass on the next model release, which happens every few months. That's why they have the terms in their TOS that allow them to do that.
by phil21 | 2025-12-15 02:18:14+00:00
Modern society has gotten so “efficient” and expectations so insane that yeah, anyone at that level of a professional career - especially with a family - I would in no way expect to have time to read anything. Every last inch of their life is going to be hyperscheduled to oblivion.

We have systematically removed any chance for “unproductive” downtime for any high performers if they want to continue to be seen as a high performer.

Not surprising in the least to me, and society as a whole is worse off because of it. Good luck when this person needs to make a hugely impactful and thoughtful decision for society while in their position of power.
by spartanatreyu | 2025-12-15 02:18:43+00:00
Not that person, but is there an easy way to write something like a basic semver?

export type SemVer = `${number}.${number}.${number}`;

Could you extend it to work with regex groups like:

export const SemVerRegex = /^(?<major>0|[1-9]\d)\.(?<minor>0|[1-9]\d)\.(?<patch>0|[1-9]\d)(?:-((?:0|[1-9]\d|\d[a-zA-Z-][0-9a-zA-Z-])(?:\.(?:0|[1-9]\d|\d[a-zA-Z-][0-9a-zA-Z-]))))?(?:\+([0-9a-zA-Z-]+(?:\.[0-9a-zA-Z-]+)*))?$/;

Could the groups be extracted so you the type back if you ran the regex on a string like: "1.2.3", or "1.2.3-prerelease"?
by mfedderly | 2025-12-15 02:18:57+00:00
I had the privilege of taking two classes with Dr Shapiro while I was in undergrad. The second class revolved around a related operating system named Coyotos. One of the most memorable classes was a 3 hour session where we worked through the boot sequence step by step [1]. The single lecture helped us all appreciate the delicate dance to bring up an x86 processor, a history lesson in the various features that had been bolted onto x86 over time, and a bunch of helpful debugging tips when your options are limited (it prints "Co" "yo" and "tos" in different stages!).

This was easily one of my most memorable lectures from undergrad, and it really helped to show me that even your operating system is just more software that you can read and understand.

1. https://github.com/vsrinivas/coyotos/blob/c68719b851e253aa11...
by rlayton2 | 2025-12-15 02:20:05+00:00
How much do you babysit claude, and how much do you just "let it do its thing"?

I haven't had anything as severe as OP, but I have had minor issues. For instance, claude dropped a "production" database (it was a demo for the hackerspace, I had previously told claude the project was "in development" because it was worried too much about backwards compatibility, so it assumed it could just drop the db). Sometimes a file is dropped, sometimes a git commit is made and pushed without checking etc despite instructions.

I'm building a personal repo with best practices and scripts for running claude safely etc, so I'm always curious about usage patterns.
by coldtea | 2025-12-15 02:20:29+00:00
>I am also now aware of time stolen: I have been told that post-op I was interviewed for 10-15 minutes (research project related). Time spent conscious, communicating. Somebody was there, but as far as I am concerned, it wasn't "me" - I have zero awareness of this lucid episode. It's like theft of time.

Doesn't need anesthesia for that. Amnesia after some shock, or just being heavily drunk and having no recollection of what you did, will also achieve that.
by Desafinado | 2025-12-15 02:20:30+00:00
If you want truly, truly heavy and thought-provoking you need to get away from brick-and-mortar bookstore, commercial, non-fiction, and get into work that's produced within and for academia.

For example, I've learned more from Anthony Giddens, Crawford Young, and Peter Berger in a handful of books than almost everything I've learned from pop books combined. The real stuff you want to read is in academia and fairly hidden from public view.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-15 02:20:31+00:00
Actually, the myth is still that plastic is safer. That "debunking" you linked is extremely biased and poor, uses very dated and selective sources, and at least one of the papers it cites is irrelevant nonsense (testing for contamination from raw chicken without even washing the boards: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1472-765X.2011.03039.x) and the conclusion is broadly contradicted by numerous modern reviews (see [1-3] below) and other papers, including ones that look at actual epidemiological data and find no difference or more safety from wooden boards [2]. Biofilm also generally takes days or 24 hours minimum to form, and requires constant moisture, so claims that any kind of cutting board develop "more biofilm" are immediately suspect as well, and clearly do not reflect any kind of sane real-world usage.

It is trivial to search Google Scholar for this topic and see that, in most cases, there are no meaningful practical differences for bacterial safety between wood vs. plastic boards, and, if anything, the anti-microbial properties and self-healing nature of wood boards probably in general do make them safer than plastic boards, which quickly get permanent gouges that harbor more bacteria.

Wood cutting boards can also be rapidly sterilized in a microwave, which is more convenient for cooking dishes with multiple ingredients than e.g. the dishwasher for plastic boards, or dilute bleach, for either. And in fact the whole argument is moot precisely because the real clear factor is obviously proper washing and sterilizing. Given the astounding lack of evidence for plastic superiority, and the clear evidence that cutting boards produce non-trivial micro-plastics [4], it is still quite reasonable to prefer wood overall, at least in the home.

References:

[1] Aviat, F., Gerhards, C., Rodriguez-Jerez, J.-j., Michel, V., Bayon, I.L., Ismail, R. and Federighi, M. (2016), Microbial Safety of Wood in Contact with Food: A Review. COMPREHENSIVE REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND FOOD SAFETY, 15: 491-505. https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4337.12199

[2] Dean O Cliver, Cutting Boards in Salmonella Cross-Contamination, Journal of AOAC INTERNATIONAL, Volume 89, Issue 2, 1 March 2006, Pages 538–542, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaoac/89.2.538

[3] Boursillon D, Riethmüller V (2007), "The safety of wooden cutting boards: Remobilization of bacteria from pine, beech, and polyethylene". British Food Journal, Vol. 109 No. 4 pp. 315–322, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/00070700710736561

[4] Özuluğ, O., Şarlak, İ., Sarcan, F., … Yürekli, Ö. D. (2025). Health Risks and Environmental Threats of the Food Prepared on Plastic Cutting Boards. Turkish Journal of Bioscience and Collections, 9(2), 65-75. https://doi.org/10.26650/tjbc.1745221