MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by caditinpiscinam | 2026-03-12 20:59:38+00:00
Respectfully, I disagree.

If NaNs were meant to represent unknown quantities, then they would return false for all comparisons. But NaN != NaN is true. Assuming that two unknowns are always different is just as incorrect as assuming that they're always the same.

I'd also push back on the idea that this behavior makes sense. In my experience it's a consistent source of confusion for anyone learning to program. It's one of the clearest violations of the principle of least astonishment in programming language design.

As others have noted, it makes conscientious languages like Rust do all sorts of gymnastics to accommodate. It's a weird edge case, and imo a design mistake. "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules."

Also, I think high level languages should avoid exposing programmers to NaN whenever possible. Python gets this right: 0/0 should be an error, not a NaN.
by O1111OOO | 2026-03-12 20:59:46+00:00
Also the use of the word "elite" that ties into the same kind of wordplay training that's used in cult-like subservient thinking. Are we suppose to bow? Come on!

The word is ruling class - not elite, not special, not more important. The current ruling class is everyone tied to the epstein file, including a malignant foreign government and some members of our own intelligence agencies. Not elite!
by namibj | 2026-03-12 20:59:54+00:00
Because DDR3/4/5 dies are made to a price with half to three quarters of their IO pins shared between the dies in parallel on a rank of a channel, and for capacity often up to around 6 ranks per channel. E.g. high capacity server DDR4 memory, say on AMD SP3, may have 108 dies on each of 8 channels of a socket.

So if you can move complexity over to the controller you can spend 100:1 ratio in unit cost.
So you get to make the memory dies very dumb by e.g. feeding a source synchronous sampling clock that's centered on writes and edge aligned on reads leaving the controller to have a DLL master/slave setup to center the clock at each data group of a channel and only retain a minimal integer PLL in the dies themselves.
by glkindlmann | 2026-03-12 21:00:01+00:00
I like this justifiation of NaN != NaN; it emphasizes that NaN has representional intent, more than just some bit pattern.

We take for granted that (except for things like x86 extended precision registers) floating point basically works the same everywhere, which was the huge victory of IEEE 754. It easy to lose sight of that huge win, and to be ungrateful, when one's first introduction to IEEE 754 are details like NaN!=NaN.
by arjie | 2026-03-12 21:00:14+00:00
Much of what people say has always been strange about politics. It doesn't seem to be rooted in fact so much as in wanting to dunk on someone.

I remember when Roe v Wade was being overthrown and people would talk about how this was how "Men try to control Women's bodies" or something like that. The reality around that time was that the gender differences were a few percentage points[0]. Since then a gender gap has widened[1] but notably among Republicans. Voters for the Democratic party barely differ on abortion attitudes based on gender.

0: http://pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion...

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/03/12/do-abortion-...
by throw0101d | 2026-03-12 21:00:24+00:00
> It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.

I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:

* https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html
by thegrimmest | 2026-03-12 21:00:59+00:00
For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god?

To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms. The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person, group, or majority has the right to dictate to another. What axioms do you propose that would constrain The Engineer? How would you prevent enslaving him?
by kennywinker | 2026-03-12 21:01:32+00:00
Sure. People go for the cheapest option that fits their requirements, mostly.

But we’re the shoemakers, not the consumers. It’s actually our job to preserve our own and our peers quality of life.

Cheapest good option possible doesn’t have to be the sweatshop - tho the shareholders of nike or zara would have you believe that.
by markus_zhang | 2026-03-12 21:01:47+00:00
Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a pic with text, but I could be wrong.

Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-12 21:01:54+00:00
If I could change one thing in computing, it'd be how SQL handles NULL. But if I got a second thing, it'd be how IEEE handles NaN. I probably wouldn't even allow NaN as a representation. If some mathematical operation results in what would be NaN, I'd rather force the programming language to throw some sort of interrupt or exception. Much like what happens when you divide an integer by 0. Heck, I'd probably even stop infinity from being represented with floats. If someone did 1/0 or 0/0, I'd interrupt rather than generating an INF or NaN.

In my experience, INF and NaN are almost always an indicator of programming error.

If someone want's to programmatically represent those concepts, they could do it on top of and to the side of the floating point specification, not inside it.
by hudtaylor | 2026-03-12 21:02:02+00:00
I run a ClawdBot (Claude on a Mac Mini) as a 24/7 AI Chief of Staff for my company. 7 email accounts monitored, 16 daily crons, code deployments, content pipeline — the whole operation.

The thing nobody tells you is it doesn't make you less busy. It makes you more busy. Your mind enters this constant state of orchestration. But for someone with ADHD, that's the unlock. I used to generate 10 ideas and execute on maybe 1 before the next wave hit. Now every idea has a catcher's mitt.

My background is all over the place — synthesized a novel organic compound in grad school that nobody had built before, went to brew science school, spent 15 years building laboratory databases and information systems. That multidisciplinary wiring is exactly what makes orchestrating an AI agent feel natural. You're not writing code, you're designing workflows — same thing I did in the lab for years.

I have ADHD and honestly struggle with reading and writing sometimes. Sounds ridiculous for someone running a tech company. But I genuinely feel like I have a superpower now. The disability became the competitive advantage.
by elzbardico | 2026-03-12 21:02:14+00:00
> where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally.

Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.

Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-03-12 21:02:31+00:00
Chrome had no official arm64 build. There are distro specific builds from debian, fedora etc for arm64 chromium, but google had no official arm64 build.

There were actually some paid services that provided a distro-agnostic chromium arm64 builds mostly targeting people running puppeteer on AWS ARM lambda. You can see some discussion here https://github.com/alixaxel/chrome-aws-lambda/issues/241

edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment.
by troymc | 2026-03-12 21:02:37+00:00
I've used it to create little one-off tools that I needed for some specific tasks, without any care whether it's "of substance" or "investable." In the past, I might have Googled around to see if there was an existing app or open-source package to do the job. Quite often, the AI agent will use some existing software packages, but I didn't have to find them and figure out how to use them.

A real example from today: I got tired of the Looney Tunes way-too-colourful screensaver options on my Mac mini, so I asked Claude how to get a screensaver that is a nearly-black uniform monochrome grey. Surprisingly, that's not actually an option in macOS System Settings. So Claude just wrote a little Python script to generate the images I need for my two displays, saving them to the right place on my Mac mini. It used the Pillow package, but I didn't have to spin up a whole Python project and install Pillow; it just used PEP 723 inline script metadata to tell uv to use Python >=3.12 and to install Pillow. Then Claude gave me the uv one-liner to run the script (uv run ~/make_screensaver.py) and instructions for how to tell my Mac mini to use the generated files. The whole process took about 15 minutes from when I started writing the first prompt to the time I had my new screensaver working.
by jrapdx3 | 2026-03-12 21:02:40+00:00
I've long regarded the great variety of chilis as its own distinct food group. But wonderful as they are for flavoring food, quite often in my home, I'm not sure how much of an effect orally consumed capsaicin has on memory functioning.

Conceivably parenteral capsaicin has different effects on hippocampal integrity or physiology than achievable with ingestion. I'm not familiar enough with disposition of capsaicin in the gut to comment further. My question is whether capsaicin passes from gut into the circulation in any appreciable quantity. I suspect it doesn't but I couldn't say I know for sure. I'll have to add it to the already long list of things I need to look up.
by CapricornNoble | 2026-03-12 21:02:45+00:00
>Israel started the war in response to the genocide of Oct 7. So all the legitimate collateral victims and damage from Israel's actions here is responsibility of the perpetrators of Oct 7.

>You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.

The world did not start on October 7th, and it's completely disingenuous to suggest otherwise, which shows YOUR colors. I could equally state " all responsibility lies with the perpetrators of the Nakhba".

>Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.

If the number can't be trusted, why is the IDF acknowledging it?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...

> There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.

If this is your position no further discussion is needed. There is nothing meaningful to be gained from engaging with you. I don't know if you guys realize how insane you appear to every other human being on the planet when you try to gaslight us into thinking the piles of evidence of dead women and children either doesn't exist or is somehow accidental.
by westurner | 2026-03-12 21:03:15+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954012 :

> Isn't there a curved photonic beam method that technically, in space, can send a photon around the world at least once?

> Airy beams curve

Does this already implement airy beams? That could workaround photonic waveguide space constraints; it's lossy to cross photons on a bus because photons do interfere and there's not room for that many layers of fiber in a chip.

But still a free space photonic computer doesn't have gates; though there are at least some operators in photon-photon interactions.

(It's become unacceptable to post AI generated comments on HN and I'm annoyed at the level of work required to paraphrase and I don't owe anyone my time or my work and I don't want to uncitedly suppose LLM AI-supported research as anything but, and I would just link to the chat but so here's this just:
Polaritonic Airy Beam
by terryf | 2026-03-12 21:03:16+00:00
The speed limit example is a great one. Consider a road that has a 35mph limit. Now - which of the following scenarios is SAFER:
a) I'm driving on the road in a brand new 4x4 porsche on a sunny day with great visibility and brand new tyres. Doing 40mph.
b) I'm driving on the same road in a 70s car with legal but somewhat worn out tyres, in the dark, while it's raining heavily. Doing 35mph.

Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.
by degamad | 2026-03-12 21:03:31+00:00
If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects?

High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market?

I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued.

(I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
by rwmj | 2026-03-12 21:03:44+00:00
passt (the network stack that you might be using if you're running qemu, or podman containers) also has no dynamic memory allocations. I always thought it's quite an interesting achievement. https://blog.vmsplice.net/2021/10/a-new-approach-to-usermode... https://passt.top/passt/about/#security
Show HN: Codelegate, keyboard-driven coding agent orchestrator GUI for Mac/Linux
by brucehsu | 2026-03-12 21:03:50+00:00
Do we really need another agent orchestrator? Probably not. But I couldn't find one that matched how I actually work with coding agent CLIs, so I built my own.

Codelegate is a desktop app (Tauri 2 + React + xterm.js) that organizes agent sessions into a keyboard-first workspace. I built it to solve a few specific frustrations:

1. I want to navigate everything with both hands on the keyboard. Sessions switch with `Alt+1..9`, panes with `Alt+A/G/T`. No mouse required.
2. I work on the same repo in parallel using Git worktrees. Codelegate has a built-in worktree flow: create an isolated branch per agent, auto-cleanup on session end.
3. I want to keep using my CLI tools (zellij, etc.) alongside agents, not replace them.
4. I need it on both macOS and Linux.

Each session gives you three panes: Agent, Terminal, and Git. The Git pane handles diff review with syntax highlighting, bulk stage/unstage, commit, and amend. Sessions are grouped by repository in the sidebar.

Currently supports Claude Code and Codex CLI, but anything that runs in a shell can work.

This is v1.0.0 and it only covers the agent CLIs and features I use the most. It's licensed under GPLv3, so it's meant to be forked and shaped into your own workflow.

Hope you enjoy using it or making it your own!
by whatthe12899 | 2026-03-12 21:04:27+00:00
wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?

maybe i'm a bot.

anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.
by nyrikki | 2026-03-12 21:04:28+00:00
For binary operations, NaN values compare as unordered.

The IEEE 754 Specification requires that >,<,= evaluate to False.

Saying that two incomparable objects become comparable let alone gain equally would break things.

We use specific exponents and significands to represent NaNs but they have no numerical meaning.

I am actually surprised python got this correct, often NaN behavior is incorrect out of convenience and causes lots of issues and side effects.
by themafia | 2026-03-12 21:04:38+00:00
> payload propagation isn't guaranteed

Yes and no:

`If an operation has a single NaN input and propagates it to the output, the result NaN's payload should be that of the input NaN (this is not always possible for binary formats when the signaling/quiet state is encoded). If there are multiple NaN inputs, the result NaN's payload should be from one of the input NaNs; the standard does not specify which.'
by zahlman | 2026-03-12 21:04:48+00:00
Yes. The CPython hash algorithm for floats (https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Python/pyhash.c#...) special-cases the non-finite values: floating-point infinities hash to special values modeled on the digits of pi (seriously! See https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Include/cpython/...), and NaNs fall through ultimately to https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Include/internal... which is based on object identity (the pointer to the object is used rather than its data).
by NexusCore | 2026-03-12 21:05:08+00:00
Nexus.Pulse. Why We Killed the Serialization Tax!
How NEXUS.Pulse achieves 1M entity ingestion in 11.8µs by bypassing the modern web stack.

The Thesis:
"Modern software architecture is drowning in overhead. Between JSON serialization, reflection-based parsers, and heavy HTTP headers, we are wasting 99% of our CPU cycles just moving data before we even process it. At Intelligent Audio, we decided that 'industry standards' weren't fast enough. So we built the NXP. protocol(nxp://)"

Key Technical Pillars:
Memory-Symmetrical Design: "NXP (NEXUS Exchange Protocol) uses a strict 24-byte frame layout. There is no 'parsing' stage. We map raw memory directly to the wire using C# unsafe pointers and ReadOnlySpan<T>. If it's in RAM, it's ready to broadcast."

Zero-Abstraction Ingestion: "By utilizing Memory-Mapped Files (MMF), NEXUS and Pulse share the same physical memory space. We've eliminated the context-switching and buffer-copying that plagues traditional API layers."

Hardware-Aligned Throughput: "Our 24-byte alignment isn't an accident. It’s designed to fit the L1/L2 cache lines of modern CPUs, ensuring that 1 million entities can be ingested with deterministic latency—measured in nanoseconds, not milliseconds."

The Conclusion:
"NEXUS.Pulse isn't just a service; it’s a rejection of the status quo. We’ve traded compatibility for raw, uncompromising performance. The results speak for themselves: 11,858ns. or less."
by tonymet | 2026-03-12 21:05:25+00:00
in 100 years ipv4 will be recognized as one of the great discoveries like calculus. ipv6 is a misnomer really. It's a separate, and lesser protocol. Much like other second systems, it was too ambitious and not pragmatic enough.

Rather than looking down on IPv4 , we should admire how incredible it's design was. Its elegance and intuitiveness, resourcefulness have all led to it outlasting every prediction of it's demise.
Show HN: I rebuilt the "similar movies/TV shows" algorithm on TasteFinder
by tastefinder_io | 2026-03-12 21:05:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I posted TasteFinder here before - it's a movie/TV discovery tool where you rate titles with Tinder-style swipes ( / / ) to train recommendations.

One thing people kept asking for was better “similar to this” results. So I recently rewrote that part of the system.

The new similarity algorithm tries to match titles across multiple signals instead of just genre overlap. Things like:
- tone / vibe
- pacing
- narrative structure
- themes
- audience preference patterns

The goal is simple: when you search for movies or shows similar to something you love, the results should actually feel close, not just share a genre tag.

Example use case:
You finish a show you liked and want something with a similar atmosphere — not just “another sci-fi”.

If you're curious how well it works:
https://tastefinder.io

I’d really appreciate feedback on the similar titles results specifically. If you find cases where they’re great or completely wrong, that’s especially useful.
by xenadu02 | 2026-03-12 21:05:30+00:00
> It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.

That's quite the assumption.

There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-12 21:05:50+00:00
Fortunately whenever I have been involved in hiring, it was someone we knew was qualified or had references from people we trusted.

Years ago, I hired people at closer to entry level. If they had experience that was a bonus but if they didn't we trained them. If they didn't respond to the training, they were let go after a probationary period.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-03-12 21:05:55+00:00
A guy who was local to me, when I was a kid, wrote multi-user BBS system (called "MUBBS" originally-- I don't remember what the name was changed to later) in Turbo Pascal that had a preemptive multitasking loop running in x86 real mode to handle multiple lines simultaneously. The coolest part was the console was just a "line" so you could logon to the board and interact while somebody was online with the BBS, too. Most other DOS BBS packages were only available for the SYSOP or the caller individually.

Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was more like 1989 or 1990.
by siscia | 2026-03-12 21:05:59+00:00
Yes it is passable.

Good enough that I don't review it.

Granted, it is a personal project that I care only to the point that I want it to work. There are no money on the line. Nothing professional.

I believe that part of the secret is that I force CC to run the whole est suites after it change ANY file. Using hooks.

It makes iteration slower because it kinda forces it to go from green to green. Or better from red to less red (since we start in red).

But overall I am definitely happy with the results.

Again, personal projects. Not really professional code.
by superjan | 2026-03-12 21:06:11+00:00
IEEE 754 prescripes, for better or worse, that any mathematical comparison operator (==, <, > ….) involving at least one NaN must always return false, including comparison against itself. This is annoying for something like dictionaries or hashtables. C# has a solution: if you call a.Equals(b) on two floats a and b, it will return true also if both are NaN. I think this is a cool solution: it keeps the meaning of math operators the same identical with other languages, but you still have sensible behavior for containers. I believe this behavior is copied from Java.
by Jtsummers | 2026-03-12 21:06:34+00:00
https://archive.is/yCaVV - Archive link to get around the paywall.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/tennessee-gr... - Another article on this without a paywall.

It's annoying that both articles are calling this AI error. This was human error, the police did the wrong thing and the people of Fargo will end up paying for this fuckup.
by scuff3d | 2026-03-12 21:07:39+00:00
A relatively small service that should be deployable independent of the rest of your system. They're usually event driven.

But 99% if the time people think "it's in a container" means it's a microservice. So instead of getting reasonably sized, fairly well isolated, independently deployable services, you get 150 glorified function calls spread out across a Kubernetes cluster.