MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-03-13 16:38:05+00:00
Dijkstra was wrong about ALGOL 68. ALGOL 68 was much better than the ALGOL W proposed by Wirth, or than its successor, Pascal, or than any of the languages designed later by Wirth.

Moreover, even the report about ALGOL 68 was not bad as a tool for a compiler designer who must search through it which is the correct syntax for various language features. The ALGOL 68 report even contained some subtle humor.

However where ALGOL 68 was a complete failure was that Van Wijngaarden and his collaborators did not publish any other document about ALGOL 68, except the Report.

The Report was completely unsuitable as the first document used by someone who wanted to know what ALGOL 68 is and what it does.

The only way in which ALGOL 68 could have succeeded as a language would have been if Van Wijngaarden would have published at least 3 documents to be read before reading the Report: a tutorial presenting programming examples of using ALGOL 68, a rationale for the design choices of the language (like the designers of the Ada language have published at its introduction) and a document explaining how the Report with the formal specification of the language has to be read.

Without these preliminary documents, the Report about ALGOL 68 looked too alien and it required too much effort to reverse engineer how it is supposed to be understood that even people with the experience of Dijkstra did not bother to make the effort to understand it, so they never knew whether there actually is something valuable in the report or not.

Many years ago, when I have seen for the first time the ALGOL 68 Report, my first thought was also that this must be some kind of useless garbage, and I did not read it. Only years later I tried again and that time I read most of it, so I could see that actually many important programming language features were described there for the first time, and some of them were actually better in ALGOL 68 than in later languages.

I really cannot understand what was in the mind of Van Wijngaarden, how could he believe that publishing this report alone, without accompanying it with a set of explanatory documents, would be enough for other people to learn what ALGOL 68 is. His reputation has certainly suffered after the publication of this report, so whichever was his reason to not write and publish more at that time, it was a wrong decision for his career.
by sisve | 2026-03-13 16:38:06+00:00
Even with e/os/ or another u
De-googled version of android?

Not directly to you but in general: I do not think (most) of Europe is going the same direction as US. I actually see a lot of hope in response to EU leaders about digital infrastructure, communication & security. we have started to stop realing on America, but it will take 10-20 years before you see the entire crash trump made
by pessimizer | 2026-03-13 16:39:59+00:00
You're being silly, the missile thing was hyperbole. Your computer will direct the thugs to your door.

> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.

This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.
by a24venka | 2026-03-13 16:41:09+00:00
Spot on. The persistence layer is a huge part of what makes the canvas work.

For failures, we handle it at multiple levels: first, standard retries and fallbacks to alternate models/providers. If that fails, the agents look for alternate approaches to accomplish the same task (e.g. falling back to web search instead of browser use).

For completeness, you can also manually re-run or edit individual blocks if they fail (though the agents may or may not consider this depending on where they are in their flow).
by dnhkng | 2026-03-13 16:41:12+00:00
I stick with models I can run on VRAM, but DeepSeek Speciale have the best reasoning capabilities of the models I can actually run (https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale). What hardware can you access?

I have Deepseek etc, but inferencing on DDR5 would take about 2-3 weeks for a simple scan. I think this works best with dense models, but it also seems ok with MoE.

@everyone: Can someone hook me up with Nvidia sponsorship?
by kotaKat | 2026-03-13 16:41:17+00:00
Geekbench 6 was around ~2600 single-core with the VM overhead for me. That's still punching above single-core power in its class for Windows machines and it makes me giggle.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17011372

This was the latest UTM in the App Store, so native Hypervisor.Framework access for arm64 Windows acceleration.
by randusername | 2026-03-13 16:42:08+00:00
Not just governments, though.

I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale.

With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate the user experience, selectively showing notifications, content, advertising to coax users towards "retail therapy".
by nobleach | 2026-03-13 16:42:10+00:00
Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.
by random3 | 2026-03-13 16:42:17+00:00
IDK what Dijkstra believed in terms of how programmers should have looked like, bu the did seem to have a sense (and taste) of a direction of programming that was lost within practicing software engineering and their prefered PLs.

My own incomplete opionion is that the net effect is that we ended up writing orderd of magnitude more code than necessary to solve the problems at hand. It's the equivalent of doing the computations manually instead of using a calculator. This has led to an industry that has served us well, but strictly speaking it was never necessary and much more could have been achieved with a fraction of the resources.
by bitwize | 2026-03-13 16:42:18+00:00
I gotta hand it to the toy, it was prepping the kid for today's social world.

> What kind of person is giving an AI toy to a toddler?

Grimes. When I read she's involved, I thought "that tracks". She's... a character. Think Björk, only not as smart, and a real pick-me girl for the techbro set. Anyway I don't think she entirely gets how humans work.
by bloudermilk | 2026-03-13 16:42:28+00:00
I’ve been an M1 Air fan since I got mine in 2020 but recently things have become unusable. Playing 4K videos often drops frames, even at 30fps. And I can’t reliably run Notion’s transcription AI on Zoom calls, even though it’s not running locally. I’m going to do an OS reinstall soon to see if that helps, otherwise it will be time to upgrade…
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-13 16:43:23+00:00
Hysteria would be if all had an issue like the keyboard gate, but this isn't an issue, it's a design limitation for certain uses cases which not everyone has. Some users will wear out faster than others due to usage patterns. If their M1 dies after 6 years of heavy usage, do you think they'll investigate if it was the NAND that died and go online to tell the news, or will they chuck it and buy new one?

NAND is still the same wearable part that regular X64 laptops have, Apple doesn't use some magic industrial grade parts but same dies that Samsung, Micron and SK ship to X64 OEMS, and those are replaceable for a reason, because they eventually fail.
by kjkjadksj | 2026-03-13 16:43:26+00:00
Any family history? I would speak to a genetic counselor if you are concerned. I’m not sure how your data are presented if you actually have lynch syndrome or things associated with lynch.

The idea with lynch is that you are heterozygous for having a working mismatch repair mechanism that corrects certain DNA errors. And in the tumor sometimes you get a ‘second hit’ mutation to this, taking out your only good copy of mismatch repair, creating a different sort of tumor as a lot of DNA error isn’t getting repaired. This sort of tumor responds well to pd1 therapy.
by epiccoleman | 2026-03-13 16:43:35+00:00
Sometimes, it's nice to just sit down and watch something without needing to make repeated decisions about what's on.

I typically share your mindset, but I can see the appeal. There was something nice about the TV that just, ya know, already had something going when you turned it on. I spent many happy evenings in hazy basement rooms enjoying whatever Adult Swim decided was going to be on the TV that night.
by christoph | 2026-03-13 16:43:40+00:00
"Emails from October 2005 show that after Mandelson complained to Epstein about a lack of British Airways air miles, Epstein offered to pay for his plane tickets to the Caribbean."[1]

The biggest shocker to me has been just how "cheap" a lot of people are to buy off. Mandelson is complaining about air miles FFS. So much of this is a few thousand here, some fancy tickets there, a jet ride elsewhere, etc. In my mind it was always much, much bigger sums that people were selling their countries & souls out for, sadly, it turns out a lot of people, even in really high positions, are shockingly cheap.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelso...
by aabhirb | 2026-03-13 16:43:46+00:00
Regal.ai | Sr. Software Engineer | NYC Hybrid | Full-Time | https://www.regal.ai/

Regal is the AI Agent Platform — we power millions of outbound/inbound calls, SMS, and email interactions for enterprise customers like Google, AAA, and Coursera. $82M raised, $7B in revenue driven for customers, 250M+ calls completed.

We're hiring a Senior SWE to own backend systems end-to-end. You'll directly contribute to our voice agent infrastructure, build tooling to evaluate agents via simulations and enhanced observability, and ship cutting-edge AI features fast to large, active user bases.

5-12+ years of experience with production web-scale platforms. Python expertise required. AI/LLM experience a big plus.

Stack: Python, TypeScript/Node.js, React, NestJS, GraphQL, Postgres, Redis, Kinesis, DynamoDB, AWS

Apply: https://jobs.lever.co/regalvoice/c8d4f421-4c8d-43b9-ae6d-16d...

Happy to answer questions here.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 16:44:27+00:00
Every thread about Windows on Hacker News includes claims about apps taking 30 seconds to launch, web pages taking 20 seconds to load, simple applications being unusable, and other extreme performance problems. These are puzzling for anyone (like me) who uses Windows at home without all of these extreme performance problems.

That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
by ryanrasti | 2026-03-13 16:44:50+00:00
> We need fine grained permissions per-task or per-tool in addition to sandboxing. For example: "this request should only ever read my gmail and never write, delete, or move emails".

Yes 100%, this is the critical layer that no one is talking about.

And I'd go even further: we need the ability to dynamically attenuate tool scope (ocap) and trace data as it flows between tools (IFC). Be able to express something like: can't send email data to people not on the original thread.
Show HN: Re-imagine photo albums with NanoBanana
by hmartin | 2026-03-13 16:44:53+00:00
My wife and I have our Apple TV screensaver set to favorites photo album. Except we don’t update it much so it was getting boring.

Enter the solution to any and every problem (can you guess?) —em dash— AI!

Introducing imagemine → →

Try it by running `uvx imagemine path/to/photo.jpg`

At its heart, imagemine is a simple “ask claude for a short surrealist story based on the input photo” then “have nano banana generate a new image from the story and source image” script.

imagemine has 35+ built-in style prompts included that get selected at random or you can add your own (one-off cli flag or added to store).

Sure it might be slop, but it's your slop, curated with your magnificent taste.

The kicker is that you can configure an input and output Photos album (if you’re on a Mac) so that my old favorites album is source material and my TV is now set to the new album.

imagemine includes optional launchd (Mac’s cron, to oversimplify) so this whole thing can be run automatically on a schedule. Set it, forget it, give Anthropic and Google your money on autopilot.

If you use it, I’d love to hear feedback!
by lapcat | 2026-03-13 16:45:09+00:00
I think one of the reasons politicians can be bought so cheaply by interest groups is that the opponents of the interests groups have practically no money. The interest groups don't need to spend a ton as long as they spend more than their opponents.

The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this: do Palestinian groups have any money to spend on US elections? Try fundraising in Gaza right now.

Likewise, business interest groups have a lot more money to spend on elections than, say, environmental groups. The latter have to beg for small donations from individuals just to stay afloat. Thus, it's relatively easy for business groups to outspend environmental groups. To win an auction, you just have to be the highest bidder.
by afavour | 2026-03-13 16:45:11+00:00
I view Doctor Who as part of a great tradition of sci-fi that pushes boundaries. Tennant's era was a primetime TV show that featured gay characters (Captain Jack in particular) without treating it like it was a big deal. When at the time it really wasn't that common (particularly in kid-friendly TV).

These attempts overshoot at times, like when Star Trek TNG put male crew members in "skants"[1] but they can always course correct. If you let minor things like that ruin your viewing of the show then that's on you, not them.

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(2350...
by happytoexplain | 2026-03-13 16:46:01+00:00
`NaN == NaN` vs `NaN != NaN` forces us to pick which idea to violate:

1. A value of a given type, either a literal or a value in memory, should represent a single concrete value, semantically (`5` represents the number five).

2. Classical logic (if A = B is true, then A != B is false).

I vote for violating #1, because we control those terms better. Is it weird that we invented a value that represents "unrepresentable" (as opposed to representing "no value")? Yes, but there are practical reasons for why we did it. It would be much more weird/surprising to violate classical logic.
by rbtms | 2026-03-13 16:46:15+00:00
As always, it's hard to implement child protection measures that don't impact the general population in any way. Either it doesn't need to know the age of the person and hides the contents by default (thus leaving the general population without access and serving as a way of censoring contents) or it resorts to privacy-invasive methodologies to try to know the age (which often involve behavioral analysis or personal data).

What politicians should be promoting are campaigns and tools that help educate children and their parents.
by cf100clunk | 2026-03-13 16:46:55+00:00
First, formation flying is difficult under most circumstances, let alone with giant fuel tankers in a combat zone. White knuckle stuff if you watch enough air-to-air refuelling videos. Any tanker-jet drivers out there to comment?

Second, one of the aircraft had a second crew aboard in training, which is unsettling given the above, and that there are numerous non-combat theatres in which trainees could be accomodated rather than in a combat zone.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-03-13 16:47:21+00:00
This lacks a whole lot of mobile GPUs. It also does not understand that you can share CPU memory with the GPU, or perform various KV cache offloading strategies to work around memory limits.

It says I have an Arc 750 with 2 GB of shared RAM, because that's the GPU that renders my browser...but I actually have an RTX1000 Ada with 6 GB of GDDR6. It's kind of like an RTX 4050 (not listed in the dropdowns) with lower thermal limits. I also have 64 GB of LPDDR5 main memory.

It works - Qwen3 Coder Next, Devstral Small, Qwen3.5 4B, and others can run locally on my laptop in near real-time. They're not quite as good as the latest models, and I've tried some bigger ones (up to 24GB, it produces tokens about half as fast as I can type...which is disappointingly slow) that are slower but smarter.

But I don't run out of tokens.
by robotresearcher | 2026-03-13 16:47:28+00:00
Is it character mapped, designed to run in a tty terminal? TUI.

Is it pixel or vector mapped, designed to run in a graphics terminal? GUI.

Of course strictly speaking TUI is a subset of possible graphical user interfaces, but the term GUI was coined to denote interfaces other than the already-ubiquitous text terminal interfaces.

TUIs have since absorbed GUI interface elements like buttons, checkboxes, and even pointer input, which I think is causing the terminology complaint here. Classical TUIs like Norton Commander are more about keyboard input and navigation. But being text-mapped is the identifying feature of a TUI, I think most people accept.
by jandrese | 2026-03-13 16:47:29+00:00
I've been working with notcurses recently and it is a full TUI that handles mouse events just fine. Runs over slow SSH connections and everything. The nice part is that you can fully operate applications built on top of it with the keyboard if you so choose, the mouse is just a shortcut.

Sadly the project is not really in a usable state at the moment. The documentation is incomplete riddled with errors, the code has some pretty glaring bugs, and it's close to abandoned. It's a shame because you can do some really amazing stuff with it.
by jksmith | 2026-03-13 16:48:43+00:00
Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that.

But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.
by Ygg2 | 2026-03-13 16:48:43+00:00
> That is exactly why the term "object-oriented" was originally coined for Smalltalk.

Sure but your definition doesn't cover it. If language for which the term was coined, it's a bit meaningless, ain't it.

Problem with making encapsulation and polymorphism essential to OOP definition, is that it then starts garbling up functional languages like Haskell and imperative like C.

I can see them being necessary but not enough to classify something as OOP.

> And when you look you'll soon find out that there is no commonality here.

Perhaps, but broadly speaking people agree that C++ and Java are OOP, but for example C isn't.

Same way when people say and give me a fruit (as in fruits and vegetables), you'd be looked oddly if you gave a cucumber, rather than an apple.

Same way can be thought of OOP. The common definition is basically covers Message-passing-languages, and inheritance/prototype based languages.
by mesmertech | 2026-03-13 16:49:05+00:00
I've found that there is just not really any "general" advice for doing FB ads. Most of the advice out there is usually for dropshipping, or some sort of physical product.

So just going through my journey from the beginning with FB ads. Still new to YT so pls bear with my (non-existent) editing but I wanted to go into as much detail as possible because a lot of the content online is very deceiving in terms of how doing ads actually work. It gives you a feeling that all you need is one viral thing with low CPC and somehow magically even if your product's price is low, churn is high etc, everything will be fixed and you'll be a millionaire if ROAS = >2x.

No one really goes into detail about sucking on their first few ads, how to improve, how long you should wait for FB to optimize before pausing an ad, how much you should wait before killing a concept if its not bringing you sales, if you should keep an ad running with negative ROAS(if your product is a SaaS) and so on.

tldr; start with image ads. target immediate pain points nothing generic, calculate your breakeven beforehand. and finally your first 200-400 USD will likely be wasted on learning, both for FB and your own skills.
by orbital-decay | 2026-03-13 16:49:12+00:00
I think you're making it sound like they're forced to build Linux from scratch while walking knee deep in the snow, uphill both ways. That's way too detached from reality and certainly it's not a "tragedy". Kids are not doing specialized things that only have future value, they tinker with everything. Usually on what's available, yes.

>and MacOS has more quality software than any other platform

This is simply untrue, and not something a tinkerer cares about on a general-purpose machine anyway (with my niece and son as n=2).
by withinboredom | 2026-03-13 16:49:32+00:00
I’m not interested in contributing to go. I tried once, was basically ignored. I have contributed to issues there where it has impacted projects I’ve worked on. But even then, it didn’t feel collaborative; mostly felt like dealing with a tech support team instead of other developers.

That being said, I love studying go and learning how to use it to the best of my ability because I work on sub-ųs networking in go.

When I get home, I’ll dig it up. But if you think it’s a fair scheduler, I invite you to just think about it on a whiteboard for a few minutes. It’s nowhere near fair and should be self-evident from first principles alone.
Show HN: We built a billion row spreadsheet
by breckognize | 2026-03-13 16:49:52+00:00
We're former AWS S3 engineers. Row Zero is "Google Sheets on steroids". We built it because we were frustrated with Excel's 1 million row limit and poor integration with cloud data sources like S3, Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.

Under the hood, the spreadsheet engine is a columnar key-value store written in Rust. We built it from scratch because SQL engines like DuckDB only work well for structured tables. The unstructured nature of spreadsheets make them a bad fit for SQL. The engine also needs to be 100% Excel compatible so you can import existing xlsx files.

The front-end is a big React app with hand-rolled canvas rendering. We virtualize scrolling to handle 2 billion+ row data sets. All workbook state runs in the cloud (located in a data center close to you to keep things snappy).

We launched on HN 2 years ago and got lots of great feedback. Since then, customers have pulled us towards the enterprise. Today we're launching Row Zero 2.0 with support for all the enterprise bells and whistles: OAuth database connections, SSO, SCIM, workspaces, private link on AWS and Azure, bring your own AI key, and private storage. Excited to hear what you think.