skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a distribution of submissions. I suggest you look at the actual implementations and how they stack-up performance wise and what kind of patterns each respective language enables. You will quickly find out that this statement is incorrect and they behave rather closely on optimized code. Another good exercise will be to actually use a disassembler for once and see how it goes with writing performant algorithm implementation. It will be apparent that C# for all intents and purposes must be approached quite similarly with practically identical techniques and data structures as the systems programming family of languages and will produce a comparable performance profile.

> No…? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...
A ref struct can hold a lot more than that. What’s unique about a ref struct is that the compiler guarantees it will not leave the stack, ever. A ref struct can contain all sorts of different stack-allocatable values, not just references.

Do you realize this is not a mutually exclusive statement? Ref structs are just structs which can hold byref pointers aka managed references. This means that, yes, because managed references can only ever be placed on the stack (but not the memory they point to), a similar restriction is placed on ref structs alongside the Rust-like lifetime analysis to enforce memory safety. Beyond this, their semantics are identical to regular structs.

I.e.

> C# ref structs don't seem to help here, since you can't have a dynamically sized ref struct, AFAIK

Your previous reply indicates you did not know the details until reading the documentation just now. This is highly commendable because reading documentation as a skill seems to be in short supply nowadays. However, it misses the point that memory (including dynamic, whatever you mean by this, I presume reallocations?) can originate from anywhere - stackalloc buffers, malloc, inline arrays, regular arrays or virtually any source of memory, which can be wrapped into Span<T>'s or addressed with unsafe byref arithmetics (or pinning and using raw pointers).

Ref structs help with this a lot and enable many data structures which reference arbitrary memory in a generalized way (think writing a tokenizer that wraps a span of chars, much like you would do in C but retaining GC compatibility without the overhead of carrying the full string like in Go).

You can also trivially author fully identical Rust-like e.g. Vec<T>[0] with any memory source, even on top of Jemalloc or Mimalloc (which has excellent pure C# reimplementation[1] fully competitive with the original implementation in C).

None of this is even remotely possible in any other GC-based language.

[0]: https://github.com/neon-sunset/project-anvil/blob/master/Sou... (pluggable allocators ala Zig, generics are fully monomorphized here, performance is about on par with Rust)

[1]: https://github.com/terrafx/terrafx.interop.mimalloc (disclaimer: outdated description, it used to be just a bindings library, just open the src folder to verify it's no longer the case)
They've been at it for a couple weeks, Let's see what happens. If they don't provide it, we'll start to see the results of their failures. Then we can push back. There will be legit programs impacted, we can pivot and get them back. If America didn't want this, they shouldn't have voted the way they did, but that's where we're at. He was open in doing this, it was always the case.
Stop being so pedantic, we have an idea what it is. When I say “we don’t know what it is” is a nice way of saying the things you say it is you have no proof of it being.

How about you give me an argument of why we should not have this sort of audit?

I am also willing to bet there is no situation where it could be done “right” and have the stated outcome Trump and Musk have outlined be okay. Which makes most of your arguments bad faith ones. Given the things already exposed should have all Americans upset.
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-...
Molly White, a prolific Wikipedia editor, has written a good overview of how information source reliability is handled in practice: https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war.... There's a process for how decisions about source legitimacy and reliability are made, and these "decisions aren’t made lightly and are frequently revisited: there have been over fifty discussions about the Daily Mail’s reliability, for example, with both sides being vehemently argued".
I wonder if those examples can be dumped down even further for lower age brackets. One of the "powers" of LLms
You just need to quote your identifiers with double quotes, e.g.:

SELECT * FROM "MyTable"

You can even use reserved SQL keywords in table/column names as long as they are double-quoted.
> My understanding, its significantly safer than Rust (and based on Ada) with equal performance.

Ada or Ada Spark? Ada Spark is more of a theorem prover, so the comparison to Rust is a bit weird.

It's true it's safer - it will protect you from a more programming errors, but you need more annotations to prove properties of a program.
I think you'd tell the LLM to design the pipeline, not be the pipeline. That way you can see exactly what it's done and tweak as needed. Plus should be way more cost effective.
How would you know what I've been screaming for the last 15 years? I said in the "digital world" - equating what a dumbass does with his goons thinking he knows everything.

Most of us here are software engineers, we all know that sudden change causes issues, even if it's for the good. He does this without any transparency, and just spits out like a cowboy programmer - "Here I saved it! I'm the hero! I've changed the whole `codebase` on Friday afternoon - so enjoy!"

No it doesn't work like this... Sorry
Why did he start with USAID. Also he's in all of those other organizations as well. Peanuts add up.
I wonder what will happen to millions of people with $3k+/mo mortgages when they’re all unemployed and UBI is only $2k/mo.
> AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will expect everything to be smart.

I fear this is correct, but with "smart" in the sense of smart TVs. In economic terms, TVs are amazing compared to just a few years ago - more pixels, much cheaper, more functionality - but in practice they spy on you and take ten seconds to turn on and show unskippable ads. This is purely a social (legal, economic, etc) problem as opposed to a technical one, and its solution (if we ever find one) would be likewise. So it's frightening to see someone with as much power over the outcome say something like this:

> In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect.

When capital has control of an industry, but voluntarily gives little pieces of it out to labor so that they can "share" the profit, I think we all know how that turns out. It does seem possible that AGI really will get built and really will seep into everything and really will create a ton of economic value. But getting from there to the part where it improves everyone's lives is a social problem, akin to the problem of smart TVs, and I can't imagine a worse plan to solve that problem than leaving it up to the capitalist that owns the AGIs.
Tesla Cybertruck Crash on Full Self-Driving v13
That is not how oversight works. Oversight is an unrelated non-partisan committee and transparency. Unfortunately Elon is jumping through hoops to avoid transparency like moving off any communication that would be subject to FOIA. What you describing is a crony doing his masters bidding not oversight and transparency.
This is beyond belief. It's a Whitehouse website with a list of claims of wasted money on the part of USAID. But instead of evidence unearthed by DOGE the first three claims link to a Daily Mail page. The Daily Mail is a junk newspaper in the UK!
Sounds awful. Which city?
Because the DOGE people have the proper clearances and authority. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point. The executive branch can immediately grant clearance and access to random people at their discretion, and they routinely do in every administration. You don't even need to apply for a security clearance, never mind hold one. If the DNI wants to read in a Starbucks barista on the secret space alien bunker program, they can do that.

Voting for the President is in part voting for this. They don't need to ask permission from the bureaucracy nor can they be impeded by process because it is a Constitutional authority.

Americans really do seem to know nothing about how the Federal government works. This kind of drama happens every four years, they've just never paid attention before. Every administration change brings in a coterie of poorly vetted people like this and gives them the keys to the kingdom. Dialing up the outrage media this particularly time is manipulative. I've been close enough to this action across several administration changes to be pretty blasé about what has occurred so far.
Ask HN: What do you think the future of captchas is?
Micropayments? Uselessness? I'd like to hear some thoughts.
The Linux drivers can be maintained in a downstream fork. Ultimately that seems to be what upstream wants, unfortunate as that may be.
All of those were full of traditional experts.
Apple saved me from the worst iPhone text scam I've ever seen
Leave that article open in a tab in Safari for 5 minutes, and its process RSS grows from 893MB to 1.45GB. The call's coming from inside the house...
Who are these sociopaths man like why would you create that
What the Luddites Can Teach Us about AI (2003)
Fantastic course and website, thank you professors for this valuable contribution.

I would ask for exercises and practices attached to the course that one could do to penetrate the BS - this would be invaluable as we increasingly get bombarded by ai-generated media. Indeed what is learning and education except critical thinking skills ? An un-intended consequence of LLMs is that they have triggered this conversation.
this just exposes the double standard and agism in tech industries. in tech, a lot of companies won't hire you in technical roles or as programmer because you're over 40.

a lot of doge/elon's team is from the various tech companies he owns, so of course, they're going to be teenagers and senior people are pretty much laid off.

think about the next tech layoff you hear in the news (facebook/meta, etc) and think about what portion of the layoff is younger than 20 and what portion are older than 40.
Wouldn't the otherside argue the same could be said for about the extreme viewpoints the left has held for the last decade+? Regardless of what anyone on this forum thinks, his approval ratings are only going up. If the people made a great mistake, that was their mistake to make.
Show HN: Detective Stories -Lateral thinking detective game with Deepseek player
I have had this lateral thinking game online for a while. The jist of the game is that one player asks a "host" a series of questions in order to reach a full understanding of what happened in a story, based on an initial premise.

I have tried in the past at adding AI players but could never get reliable answers. However, as AI has improved, I decided to give it another go. At the moment it is connected to deepseek v3 with some basic prompts, and it looks to handle the task pretty well. Not yet perfect but it definitely does form an impressive understanding of the stories, and the game itself.
Ah, naming things. Something about one of the hard problems in computer science...

I think consistency is more important than perfection. If you use something like vw_ as recommended in the sibling comment, that's fine, then try to apply it to all views. (Without being overly strict; sometimes there are good reasons to defy conventions. They're conventions, not laws!)

Just keep in mind that a view is both code and a data contract just like a table definition is. All the usual best practices around versioning, automated deployments, and smooth upgrade paths apply. As soon as an application or downstream view, function, etc relies on that view, changing it risks disruption or breakage. Loud breakage if you're lucky, silent data corruption if you're not!
Show HN: Bigwig – an Agentic News Site for financial markets
Hey HN,

For the last couple of months, we have been building an AI agent for continuous statistical analysis, and we're looking for feedback while it's still early in development.

We call it BIGWIG - an autonomous agent that is specialised, and very good at, performing advanced statistical analysis, through long traces of iteration and reasoning. As it builds statistical models it also "emits" outputs back to the user that you can then interact with, iterate on and schedule for follow up analysis.

While we're still in BETA, we've launched a public analysis site that showcases some of the agent's basic capabilities - a sort of "agentic news site" for financial markets:

https://www.askbigwig.com/news/

The website is the outputs of BIGWIG running continuous analysis across financial markets. This happens completely autonomously. Bigwig initiates analysis, performs it and updates the website as it finds interesting "stories".

The "news site" only shows a small fraction of what BIGWIG can do, since the analysis setup has to be quite generic to cover all of financial markets, but my hope is that it can still
1) bring some real value to people who are interested in financial markets
2) help us improve the underlying agent.

To that end, we're particularly interested in feedback around:
- the statistical analysis performed(good and bad feedback)
- people's view on the usefulness of such agentic analysis
- good examples of BIGWIG stories that people find either poor or really good, so we can train it :)

Thanks in advanced for any feedback!

P.S it has been an intense 2 months and we have learned an enormous amount building this - some of which I have partly written up and hope to share in the next couple of weeks. Building this type of agentic flows is still very much a craft and hopefully we have learned some things that will help others. So stay tuned for that :) (by writing this here I hope to pressure myself to actually do it)
The kernel doesn't really have a better system mechanism for having these sorts of decisions made unfortunately.
"Most of the legacy cruft, it would be great to have a green field implementation of the CLI interface."

This is very true.
For some reason, I feel like this is harder to implement than you expect. The way to find out would be to get a bunch of examples of people doing this “optimizations in shader code, look at the IR generated compared to the optimal version and figure out a set of rules to detect the bad versions and transform it into a good versions. Keep in mind that in the example, the addition operators could be replaced with logical OR operators, so there are definitely multiple variations that need to be detected and corrected.
Suno has select region editing now
Synthetic transmembrane DNA receptors enable engineered sensing and actuation
How does this help the students with their use of these tools in the now, to not be left worse off? Most of the points you list seem like defending against criticism rather than helping address the harm.
> you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch

These people have administrative access, and at least in some cases network and physical access.

Once you determine they are untrustworthy and potentially malicious, you can't just rebuild the VMs, since you can no longer trust the hypervisor or even the hardware.

If they were Chinese or Mossad agents, you'd start from scratch in a different DC on supply chain audited new compute, storage, and networking hardware. And you'd compile everything from audited source. And I have NFI how you'd deal with potential malicious changes to your data and backups.
This is a issue that may also affect Airbus aircraft, but so far, it has only caused problems on two Boeing planes. Like MCAS, it was not disclosed to pilots, prompting the FAA to recommend design changes and notify flight crews.

https://simpleflying.com/boeing-cfm-international-update-737...
In Rust you get panic instead. You need to wrapping add which is a separate function
It's up to the listener to apply whatever semantics they need to as justification. There is no purity test for music. The theory is just that theory.
I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.
the machine is fooling you with a mimicry of reasoning. and you are falling for it.
I know this is only a sample size of 1 but I have never heard of any C or C++ developer using a package manager like conan/vcpkg/nuget, and I am assuming those are mostly used on Windows anyways.
I highly doubt the people who voted all voted for this and the ones that did didn't vote for seizing agencies and illegally barring personnel and senators from the building.
Extractive Schema Linking for Text-to-SQL
very well done. Thank you.

btw, typo in lesson 11: "(2) understand how an LMM can help them" ..
instead of LLM

IMO, "understanding" is the notion most endangered and the one which loss is with most catastrophic consequences, from all the possibly affected ones. It has never been very favored, but now is even worse than ever - it is thinned and abandoned en-masse.

Check brothers Strugatsky's Snail_on_the_Slope [0] , there's very stringent monologue of Peretz on the topic, ~~ page 11 [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_on_the_Slope

[1] https://strugacki.ru/book_19/768.html
PCs aren’t home consoles, though.
A monarch cannot be voted out. A CEO can be voted out.

The US president presides over the executive branch of the US government.

It’s not a one to one equivalence, but commander-in-chief is pretty close to a chief executive office.
> They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities.

I don't think the argument they can act as an informer for things going on inside government agencies works. They've never been on the inside.

And I don't see what it has to do with IT security. What are they doing that's security related? Isn't what they're claiming to be doing pretty much data analysis?

The only overlapping skill I can see is a willingness to exfiltrate data, if they're doing that, without giving consideration to the rules or consequences.
Ada would count as an exotic / niche language for most of this community and those are perennially popular on HN. That's sufficient to explain the upvotes (which looked legit to me when I checked the data).

Also, these things tend to come in waves, even though we try to discourage that, and this was on the frontpage for 10 hours yesterday:

Ada Gems (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42986149 - Feb 2025 (9 comments)
Common Misconceptions About Firewalls
People have had a long time to submit better C# implementations. You are still providing no meaningful evidence.

> Do you realize this is not a mutually exclusive statement?

It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. You didn’t seem to understand why people care about ref structs, since you chose to focus on something that is an incidental property, not the reason that ref structs exist.
Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again, reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people. hacking. That's not of interest on hacker news? If, then, the subject without the political angle, would have been of interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious topic on top of that, make it of less interest to the community?
> obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever

Do you have a citation for such a claim?
This post triggered a flood of thoughts that I added to my own "knowledge garden" at https://notes.kyletolle.com/notes/Why+Do+Anything

tl;dr - The author presents multiple ways to find a reason for completing work when you're missing a reason. I've found, though, that enjoying the act of writing itself is more meaningful for me. The completed works are incidental and not the end goal that makes it worthwhile. So I'd argue that you should blog because you enjoy writing the blog. If you don't enjoy it, no amount of readership will be worthwhile.
technically, a clearance and background check have never been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says so. at least this is not new... the new thing is the low level of petty criminals being apointed.
RxDB – The Firestore Alternative That Can Sync with Your Own Back End
The left lost. If they didn't want this to happen they would have put forth a better candidate and addressed the American peoples concerns. This is what we get. It's crude and abrupt, but its what we get. I think we needed to purge a lot of the glut, so in this instance i'm indifferent to whom is doing it.
It's a new spin on an old idea. Software whiz kids are what a part of society now see as the cream of the crop.
Does anyone know whether this would also be possible with Firefox, including explicit extensions (i.e. uBlock) and explicit configured block lists or other settings for these extensions?
It is the same feature. Maybe you haven't seen it because it is less visible.

Dead submissions have a vouch link on the new page. Dead comments require clicking on the comment timestamp before the vouch link becomes visible.

In either case you need showdead enabled on your profile, and to have met the karma threshold for vouch links to appear.
You left out this possibility:

A critical subversion of cybersecurity in the United States that leads to decades of compromised computer systems throughout our society -- from infrastructure to military to banking. I heard someone refer to this as a speedrun of the fall of the roman empire, and given the lack of ethics at the top levels of this administration I wouldn't be surprised.

"giving the DNC a huge attack vector..." -- I think you're mistaking an attack vector for a realization that this regime is incompetent and against the safety and security of the United States population.
SoftBank could soon buy Renee James' Ampere chip company for about $6.5B
I say write for yourself. Not even 'future you'. The act of writing alone is rewarding which is why for ages now people have kept journals. Personally, I'd rather keep that stuff offline, but online or offline there's a lot to be gained from the process. Maybe no one else ever finds a blog beyond the AI and data brokers who will eventually scrape it, but that's no reason for people not to blog if it's something they enjoy.