MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LegionMammal978 | 2026-03-13 19:34:40+00:00
One reason I've found in practice to use iteration even in cases when recursion makes lots of sense (e.g., divide-and-conquer algorithms): the ability to periodically save the state of the computation to disk, and resume it later. Every time I write a big recursive routine and set it running for days, I end up cursing my lack of foresight for not implementing checkpoints. (Of course, there's the brute-force workaround of using CRIU, but it is extremely painful to get all the file descriptors set up just right on restore.)

Given that turning an active call stack into a serializable form is such a rare feature even in functional languages, iteration with an explicit stack ends up as the only practical choice for this use case.

(Also, for this particular problem, we can implement a much simpler iterative routine: create an explicit stack of forests, initially containing the initial forest. While the stack is not empty, pop a forest: if it is not nil, push its tail, then if its head tree is not empty, then accumulate the value and push the sub-forest. If you're starting with a tree, then stick it in a synthetic forest. This all comes out to ~15 LOC, with no mutability except for the accumulator and stack.)
by shimman | 2026-03-13 19:34:44+00:00
Thank you, I get so confused when people think a $5/vps shouldn't be able to do much. We're talking about 99% of small business that might have 5 concurrent users max.

2 gigs of ram should be considered overkill to cover every single business case for a variety of tools (analytics, mailer/newsletter, CRM, socials, e-commerce).
by heraldgeezer | 2026-03-13 19:35:01+00:00
Tidö have been going strong and are just starting to clean up our country. I hope they win again but I fear we have another disaster government next election.

I have a job and money so I will not be personally affected but if the left wins MP and V will dictate and it will be 2015 all over again. I do hope their voters take the brunt of the damage up close and personal that is to come from their own votes to this country.
by AzN1337c0d3r | 2026-03-13 19:35:19+00:00
Most workstation class laptops (i.e. Lenovo P-series, Dell Precision) have 4 DIMM slots and you can get them with 256 GB (at least, before the current RAM shortages).

There's also the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 that has 128GB unified in laptop form factor.

Only Apple has the unique dynamic allocation though.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-13 19:35:24+00:00
> A meaningful percentage of videos on the internet are never watched in the first place [...] We're able to prune unwatched renditions, and if they happen to be requested years later, they're still playable.

I worked on something similar a while back, and the data that helped me make a call on whether or not we should transcode on the fly or store renditions was looking at analytics for how often the files are accessed.

I figured out that a large file being transcoded and stored would use more compute resources in ~15 minutes than it was likely to use over the span of _several years_ if it was transcoded on the fly. In a situation where you don't know if the company will exist in several years... You opt for the choice which allows you to stack on the storage later if it's necessary.

That's probably one of very few times I've ever applied YAGNI properly. That was ripe for over engineering
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-13 19:35:51+00:00
> Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered.

A major economic crash as the only consequence would be the good ending.

The real societal risk here is that software development is not just a field of primarily white men, it was one of the last few jobs that could reliably get one homeownership & an (upper) middle class life.

And the current US government is not, shall we say, the most liberal. There is a substantial risk that when forced with the financial destitution of being unemployed while your field is dying, people will radicalize.

It takes a good amount of moral integrity to be homeless under a bridge and still oppose the gestapo deporting the foreigners who have jobs you'd be qualified for. And once the deportations begin, I doubt they'll stop with only the H1Bs. The Trump admin's not exactly been subtle about their desire to undo naturalizations and even birthright citizenship.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 19:35:55+00:00
I own too many Apple devices, so I may unintentionally qualify as one of those Apple Faithful, but even so I can't really find a place for the iPad in my life. I've tried, I do own an old iPad Pro, but it is semi-permanently mounted to my treadmill as the only use case I've ever had that sticks. As a practical matter I either want my phone, or a real desktop computer.

Something like that Samsung DEX with a real Linux OS and maybe I'm getting a new phone.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-13 19:36:05+00:00
There are too many things for a short explanation.

A nice feature of ALGOL 68 that was new at that time was the fully bracketed syntax (like later in the Ada language) with different kinds of brackets for different purposes, i.e. not just one "begin" and "end" pair (or "{" and "}" pair). Having different kinds of brackets for loops, conditional statements and blocks greatly improves the readability of a program, while avoiding the verbosity of commenting the brackets to achieve a similar effect, like it would be needed in languages like Pascal or C.

Compared with the languages of Wirth, ALGOL 68 had more methods for creating data types, e.g. it had tagged unions that worked correctly, not like the crippled and buggy variant records of Pascal. Moreover, the various kinds of defining types could be used in an orthogonal way, which was not the case in the Wirth languages. Also, ALGOL 68 did not have defects like that of the array type from Pascal, where the size of the array was a part of the type and there was no way to declare arrays whose sizes are known only at run time.

ALGOL 68 could allocate variables dynamically, either in a stack or in a heap. This feature had appeared for the first time in the language IBM PL/I, but while in PL/I the heap variables had to be managed manually, with allocate and free, the ancestors of C malloc and free, in ALGOL 68 the heap was managed with a garbage collector like in LISP.

ALGOL 68 had a FOR and WHILE loop syntax that was equivalent with that of PL/I, and both of them were significantly improved over the loop syntax of ALGOL 60 and over the loop syntaxes used in ALGOL W or Pascal or any other of the Wirth languages.

Later, the C language introduced a syntax for the FOR loop that allows the writing of some very complex actions in the loop header, more complex than those that can be described in the PL/I or ALGOL 68 loop syntax. However, I consider that the C FOR was a mistake. While in rare cases its generality allows a more elegant writing of some unusual loops, for the 99.999% of the loops that are simple the C FOR syntax forces the programmer to write superfluous boilerplate. This can be simplified at writing if you configure your editor to insert complete FOR templates whenever needed, but the verbosity of the C FOR still hinders program reading in comparison with the simpler syntax of ALGOL 68.

This has not existed in ALGOL 68 at the beginning, but a dialect of ALGOL 68 was one of the first languages that has implemented a kind of FOR EACH loop, which is preferable for the large fraction of the loops that can be expressed in this way (the first language with a FOR EACH was LISP, where several kinds of MAP forms were equivalent with a FOR EACH iteration). Nowadays, in C++ one can avoid most classic C FOR loops by replacing them with simpler FOR EACH loops, but their syntax is much less clean than in languages like ALGOL 68.

There are many other features, one would have to write a full-length article to describe them. There are some ALGOL 68 features that have been inherited by the C language, e.g. the operation-and-assignment operators.
by supern0va | 2026-03-13 19:36:24+00:00
>I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

I've noticed this thing where people who have decided they are strongly "anti-AI" will just parrot talking points without really thinking them through, and this is a common one.

Someone made this argument to me recently, but when probed, they were also against open weights models training on OSS as well, because they simply don't want LLMs to exist as a going concern. It seems like the profit "reason" is just a convenient bullet point that resonates with people that dislike corporations or the current capitalist structure.

Similarly, plenty of folks driving big gas guzzling vehicles and generally not terribly climate-focused will spread misinformation about AI water usage. It's frankly kind of maddening. I wish people would just give their actual reasons, which are largely (actually) motivated by perceived economic vulnerability.
Show HN: Interview scoring app because our feedback was just Slack vibes
by xaviair | 2026-03-13 19:36:33+00:00
Built this because every company I've worked at had the same problem: engineers doing technical interviews with zero tooling. Feedback was a Slack message like "strong typescript, communicates weirdly." Comparing candidates across interviewers? Forget it.

It scores candidates across 6 categories, each with 4 sub-competencies rated 1-4. Export a markdown scorecard when you're done. No backend, no signup, nothing leaves your browser.
The categories are opinionated — curious if they match how other people evaluate technical candidates or if I'm missing something.
by bitwize | 2026-03-13 19:36:48+00:00
gVisor's architecture is fascinating. Years ago I wrote an essay that was kind of a response to all the cracks about "systemd-kerneld" that have been made over the years. Written in character as "Fake Lennart Poettering", it proposed a strategy, using techniques inspired by NetBSD's rump kernel libraries, to turn systemd into a kernel, which would then load a Linux image and "pass through" all system calls to it except those systemd wanted to intercept. Which is kinda the opposite of what gVisor does!

Some guy on a German Linux forum thought my idea was an actual plan by the systemd team, and another poster had to correct him that the author was "FAKE Lennart Poettering", so the joke either didn't land or landed all too well, depending on your perspective...
by inaros | 2026-03-13 19:36:50+00:00
"An overview of the different common grades of helium" - https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...

Grade 6 (6.0 helium = 99.9999% purity)
The closest to 100% pure helium, 6.0 helium is used in the manufacturing of semiconductor chips –
Grade 5.5 (5.5 helium = (99.9995% purity)
Like 6.0 helium, 5.5 ultra pure helium gas is typically considered “research grade,” also used in chromatography and semiconductor processing

Grade 5 (5.0 helium = 99.999% purity)
This high purity grade helium is also widely used for gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and specific laboratory research when higher purity gases are not necessary, as well as for weather balloons and blimps.

Grade 4.8 (4.8 helium = 99.998% purity)
The highest of the “industrial grade” heliums, 4.8 grade helium is often used by the military. The rest is classified...

Grade 4.7 (4.7 helium = 99.997% purity)
A “Grade-A” industrial helium, 99.997% helium is mostly used in cryogenic applications and for pressurizing and purging

Grade 4.6 (4.6 helium = 99.996% purity)
Grade 4.6 industrial helium is used for weather balloons, blimps, in leak detection

Grade 4.5 (4.5 helium = 99.995% purity)
Often the grade most commonly referred to when people say “industrial grade,” 99.995% helium is most commonly used in the balloon industry

Grade 4 (4.0 helium and lower = 99.99% purity)
Any helium that is 99.99% and down into the high 80 percents is within the range of purities referred to collectively as “balloon grade helium.”
by skeledrew | 2026-03-13 19:36:57+00:00
I said it just recently[0] and I'll say it again: those who're big on open source (or at least copyleft) should be jumping hard on the AI opportunity. The core purpose of copyleft is to ensure the freedom of users to do whatever they want with the covered works, chained ad infinitum. Letting AI at said works (and more) now means even more freedom, as now users can trivially (compared to previously) update that code to fit their use case more precisely, or port it to another language, or whatever.

I really can't see a valid reason to be against it, beyond something related to profiting in some way by restricting access, which - I would think - is the antithesis of copyleft/permissively licensed open source.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259850
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-13 19:37:05+00:00
Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models .

For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.

At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
by purplehat_ | 2026-03-13 19:37:18+00:00
I really don't understand the argument here. That the product is locked down by design is a feature, not a limitation.

Yes, this has the side effect of making them more money and allowing a walled garden to form, but given that the vast majority of users wouldn't do anything different with their phones if a shell was present, this is in my opinion not that large of an effect.

The snide around "clicking on links is dangerous" and locking down the bootloader is unwarranted, because for most people a phone is not a toy (or at least, not just a toy) - it has their communications history, their bank information, their passwords, any many more. And it's really easy to steal people's phones on the subway. This isn't about freedom of computing, this is about the fact that an iPhone in BFU is nearly as secure as a GrapheneOS phone.

There are many problems with Apple software. It's buggy, uses proprietary formats that you can't export, and interoperable with open standards. It's bad, and is the primary reason why I won't buy another iPhone, but Macs have that same problem. On the other hand, being cryptographically locked-down is an optional feature. If you don't like it, buy a computer without that feature. It's harmful to us, to tinkerers and people who want to see how things work, but the average person does not care at all and just wants to be able to open LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs without having their 401k get drained.
by godelski | 2026-03-13 19:37:28+00:00
What would really help is for people to understand that that's the "spirit of the law" and the "letter of the law".

People don't want the letter of the law enforced, they want the spirit. Using the example from above, speed limits were made for safety. They were set at a time and surprise, cars got safer. So people feel safer driving faster. They're breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit.

I actually like to use law as an example of the limitations of natural languages. Because legalese is an attempt to formalize natural language, yet everyone seems to understand how hard it is to write good rules and how easy it is to find loopholes. But those are only possible if you enforce the letter of the law. Loopholes still exist but are much harder to circumvent with the spirit of the law. But it's also more ambiguous, so not without faults. You have to use some balance.
by overfeed | 2026-03-13 19:37:59+00:00
> I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.

Lots of ex-Bitcoin-bros turned AI hypemen went all-in on maga for Trump II. Even the silicon valley C-Suites and VC-class went mask-off around February 2025. Some have tried to walk it back since then, after realizing the kind of administration they had hitched their wagons to - thankfully, the internet ever forgets.
by arjie | 2026-03-13 19:38:41+00:00
Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.

I think if people want a revshare on things then perhaps they should release under a revshare license. Providing things under open licenses and then pulling a bait-and-switch saying "oh the license isn't actually that you're not supposed to be doing that" doesn't sit right with me. Just be upfront and open with things.

The point of the Free Software licenses is that you can go profit off the software, you just have certain obligations back. I think those are pretty good standards. And, in fact, given the tendency towards The Revshare License that everyone seems to learn towards, I think that coming up with the GPL or MIT must have taken some exceptional people. Good for them.
by Jare | 2026-03-13 19:38:45+00:00
I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit.

If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves.

For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".
by awestroke | 2026-03-13 19:39:03+00:00
@grok is this real?

@grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of commits per day

@grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under the influence of large amounts of Ketamine

I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But it's rarely good news.
by chriswarbo | 2026-03-13 19:39:32+00:00
I do that with my Pinephone (a powered USB-C hub with ethernet, HDMI, keyboard and mouse; I also plug a proper set of speakers+subwoofer into headphone jack).

Both Phosh and PlasmaMobile turn into a "proper" desktop when "docked" (Gnome-like and KDE-like, respectively).
by jesperwe | 2026-03-13 19:39:52+00:00
This is sooo true. I have multiple computing ideas that I want to do just for fun but I am not doing because each requires buying a mini-pc, sometimes with a screen too, and put Linux + my app on it.

At the same time I have multiple old phones laying around, Pixels, iPhones, Galaxy that are out of date, have cracked screens or worn out batteries.

Each one of these old phones have same or more computing power than a $300 mini-pc, but I can't use them because I can't just ssh into them and install an app...

Sad, really.
by bearjaws | 2026-03-13 19:40:07+00:00
Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.

Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.

I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
by dvitjazevs | 2026-03-13 19:40:10+00:00
Claude Code doesn't have a UI for managing tasks. You hold everything in your head or scatter it across notes. runnrr gives you a visual layer, a lightweight personal Kanban board where you can see all your tasks, drag them between columns and attach .md files to each one.

Each card can carry Markdown docs with background, decisions and constraints. When you dispatch a card to Claude Code, all that context goes with it. From Claude Code, say "add this to runnrr" to push tasks back to the board, or "mark X done" to update status. The board is always current.

No team features, no built-in AI, no bloat. Just a clean drag-and-drop board that makes your AI workflow visible and organized.

Source: https://runnrr.io
by the_af | 2026-03-13 19:40:11+00:00
> Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about'

The right way to reply to that is: not everything that's legal must be public.

You probably don't want the rest of the world to see you poop, or pick your nose, or listen to every word you say. Almost everyone has things they'd be embarrassed to disclose to other people.
by countWSS | 2026-03-13 19:40:12+00:00
Sure, is there anyone nostalgic for debugging bash files by hand?
Any sense of grief for writing C++ template headers, with all boilerplate?
Hmm, does anyone like manually re-writing makefiles these days?
I suspect the enthusiasts of coding craft will struggle to maintain their wonder
after ~4h deep in any of these magical adventures, which surely
involve inventing ad-hoc duct tape and novel, never-before-seen algorithms.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-03-13 19:40:35+00:00
I understood this stance more 10 years ago, but now we have many layers of fairly well documented exploit tactics and none of them rely on the app store. However forcing users to use an app store was supposed to benefit us has clearly failed.

And, somehow, the indignity of being forced into paying apple a 30% tax for a market they wholly own never comes up alongside other paternalistic arguments....
by klodolph | 2026-03-13 19:40:47+00:00
> Either the price is higher than your bid, and your order won't fill (so why place it?) or the price is lower than your bid, and you should expect the market knows something you don't.

There is no risk-free way to trade. You can place a market order and guarantee execution, bearing the risk that you get a bad price. You can place a limit order, and guarantee price, bearing the risk that your trade doesn’t execute.

It sounds like you’re starting with the assumption that you don’t know whether the options are undervalued or overvalued, and if you start with that assumption, yes, the correct answer is don’t buy or sell the option (barring some other reason to buy or sell). Duh. But the reason the market “knows something you don’t” is because it’s full of people doing research. Sometimes, the person doing the research is you, and you have an idea of where the price will go. That’s what an edge is. When you have an edge, you can make money, but maybe not very much and not very reliably.

Where it gets ridiculous is when people speculate with SPY options or dumb shit like that. The reason why speculating with SPY is so ridiculous is because it’s just so unlikely that you could get an edge with SPY. But in general? Yes, it’s possible to get an edge.
by eclectic_mind05 | 2026-03-13 19:40:48+00:00
Thanks! Yeah, expanding the collection is the priority right now.

Re: transparency - PNGs are still the most universally supported. WebP has better compression but inconsistent support in design tools (Photoshop, Figma, etc.). SVGs don't work for photographic specimens.

Could potentially offer WebP alongside PNG for modern browsers, but PNG is the safe default for now.