skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What is happening is the C module is getting a Rust wrapper,

Yes, I understand that. I read the argument on the mailing list. The issue is that changing the DMA code will in turn potentially break the drivers written in Rust and the maintainer has no incentive to do that extra mile himself to make this not to happen. Rust devs OTOH offer say "we're gonna help you fix it" but this obviously creates an extra technical and communication burden. This also means that the future might look like "xy DMA patch didn't manage to get into this release because we didn't manage to fix all the zy Rust dependencies".

To make this work swiftly every kernel developer would need to become very comfortable with at least two toolchains and two very different programming languages. Otherwise, it's simply too complicated and it's a real issue that I do not see as ideological. I think this is a big ask.

> The ones Linus found persuasive are mostly that Rust's memory safety can bring more stability and security to the kernel

This is the tricky part - apart from the theory, we don't actually know that. We don't know if the immediate effects of kernel code written in Rust would result with X times less segmentation-faults or CVEs. This is a hypothesis that is especially tricky to be proven in the kernel-level code, a code that is destined to be using a lot of unsafe blocks.

Even if that hypothesis would have been somehow proven, from an engineering PoV, the pain that it aims to solve still needs to be quantified in order to assess if the change is worth it or not. I don't have that number but I honestly don't think that kernel developers spend too much of their time and resources fixing the memory-related bugs. If they did, then there would be a pretty convincing and strong incentive for them to switch, wouldn't it?

So, when we put the dogmatic arguments aside and put those few (big and important) things into a perspective, I think it is not unrealistic to have people oppose to the idea.
>Luckily, society broadly creates more than enough wealth and resources to provide for you, even when you are disabled or elderly.

I see no evidence to indicate this. Societies do not exist in a vacuum, they either need to import resources, or they need to defend against invaders. Therefore, the more resources that go to the non productive, the less resources there are for importing and/or defense.

Importing also includes quality of life for young, productive people, as they usually aspire for material goods rather than living life solely for the purpose of servicing the non productive.

Having large portions of society not be productive for decades, even requiring large amounts of manual, highly educated labor to sustain them, may very well cause discord and decrease global standing. Demographics and the shape of population histograms affect inputs and outputs.

The simple evidence of my claims is the continual decrease of Social Security benefits. A simple monetary wealth transfer, easily comparable over time periods, is unsustainable due to increased longevity and lower total fertility rates, resulting in multiple cuts to Social Security benefits. It is common knowledge that people paying Social Security taxes now will receive less benefits.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/nra.html

Even the UK has quite the political conundrum with needing to get rid of their "triple lock" pensions, but not having the political will to do it.
I loved Spike, back in the day. High quality rust-porn, like Gormenghast[1]. I had no idea it was still available.

Thanks for submitting this!

Edit: If you like Spike Japan b/c Japan, you may also like Ken Seeroi's memoirs[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gormenghast_(series)

2, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089WH4X7Y/
> C++ has been dead and buried for years

LOL, lmao even.
> What I need to know on a regular basis, during a given month and at the end of the month, is: how much have I spent in general, compared with how much I planned to spend? Am I overspending in a particular category that I need to correct to keep my monthly budget on track, e.g. a fixed allowance for eating out per month, have I spent it all by week three or can I afford to have one more fancy dinner with my wife or with friends and still stay within my budget?

Don't most personal finance apps have this? You can set a budget for a category per day/week/month and see how much you spent and how much you have left to spend.
Agreed. Strong abstract math skills often signal cognitive strength and discipline, predicting success in complex real-world tasks more than direct transfer of content.
This one seems to work https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stampPDF/getPDF.jsp?arnumber=628...
> But most cities have a pattern where people on average move further away from city cores as they age, and there’s a reason for that.

Yeah, it's called kids. The thing people keep having less of.
I think it's the opposite, this kind of asphalt has very rough surface.
What kind of future projection are you looking for? My main issue is not all months are the same, sometimes I might spend way more in a given month for a given category (perhaps a one-off purchase like new furniture) that I don't aim to replicate for the next month, so how would the projection work in that case?
Moscow is a severe case. The lines are going radially in all directions from the city center 250-300km away, with your stop somewhere along the first 40 min of the journey.

Well, how to decribe it... Simply put: you don't end up in a clean and cozy Japaneese town, there are few shady taxis who will be ready to propose you a comfortable trip back for around 200-300$. There is no convenience store open 24/7. If you're unlucky to end up there in the winter, then it's probably -20C outside. There is one 24/7 ATM corner which is mostly occupied by the local homeless people – so the ONLY warm option left is to go for a shining 24/7 slots machines/gambling place and try to gamble what you have for a taxi money or just to kill time. I once spent a night like this in Tver, gambling ~10$ what was left in my pockets all night with minimal bets.
It’s certainly possible that there are long term side effects from GLP-1 agonists, but we can only go with the data we have. The five year data (which definitely has limitations in terms of the kind of inferences we can draw from it) is suggesting around a 4x reduction in mortality at the 5 year mark in non-diabetics IIRC (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39171569/).

The changes in behaviour are also really interesting. Even after cessation of the drug, it seems like many patients keep healthier eating patterns and while they do put on weight, they tend to settle on a lower weight than baseline before intervention.

So we should absolutely keep an eye on outcomes as time goes on, but so far the results are overwhelmingly positive. These drugs are saving lives and the new ones in the pipeline look significantly more effective. It’s an exciting time to be alive!
Flutter, nice. How well does the syncing work? I was playing around with making my own personal finance tracker and syncing via CRDTs.

Edit: ah, it's not available on web or desktop which is a shame (looks like you can build and run it but it's more so DIY and no UI optimizations for larger screens, they say on the README), I would do more serious personal finance work on a bigger screen rather than a phone. They could easily add these platforms as it's on Flutter, not sure why they haven't already.
Why are you projecting your own feelings onto others?

There’s plenty of people who write C, there’s plenty of newcomers who start writing C and if they’re willing to, they can find guidance, mentoring, and tooling to improve their skills. If that’s not the path you want to pursue, that’s fine. But C isn’t going anywhere soon and if you go to any university/college, there’s lots of C being taught and lots of people eager to learn.
Ask HN: If building a computer, what will be good for possible local GenAI use?
My laptop¹ is slowly falling apart and I’m looking to build a desktop computer. I’m not interested in wasting money, but I’m willing to spend on what I think will be worthwhile.

I had in mind software developer basics: powerful CPU to compile code faster, plenty of RAM to appease tools, and integrated graphics only.

I was thinking something like an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X or an Intel Core i5-14600K: pretty powerful, but not going as far as 9900X or 265K, where spending more only really gets you more cores (OK, Core 14?00 → Core Ultra 2?5 is a solid single-core boost), and returns diminish.

But I’m interested in doing local GenAI, and might let that influence my part choice. The bits of GenAI I’ve used locally (up to 8B LLMs, and Stable Diffusion) have been sometimes handy and/or fun, but are all either too slow or too low quality to use particularly seriously.

The question, then: when building a machine that might be used for some local GenAI, what’s worthwhile, and what’s a waste of time? (Maybe the answer is “just wait, things aren’t ready yet” or “those online services are cheaper than you think, you’ll never break even if you run local”; I don’t know.)

A few more specific questions:

1. Is a small dedicated GPU of any value at all? (Given how speculative such uses are, my feeling is that I’d have a hard time justifying to myself even one with 8GB of VRAM. Certainly nothing like 24GB!) I’ve heard of offloading some layers to a GPU, but it’s hard to find anyone talking about concrete performance effects.

2. Are NPUs worthwhile, or completely overrated, or not even usable just yet (and is that expected to change?)? e.g. AMD Ryzen AI in an 8700G, or Intel AI Boost in a Core Ultra 245K.

3. What sorts of speeds can you get out of some of your mid-sized LLMs (say, 32B), running on CPU only? And does performance scale to more cores?

If someone who’s done stuff like this wanted to write a detailed blog post covering these sorts of things (or has already written it, and I just haven’t found it), they’d be my hero for at least three and a quarter hours (discontiguous).

—⁂—

¹ My laptop is an ASUS Zephyrus G15 (2021), GA503QM. Has an NVIDIA 3060 GPU with 6GB of VRAM at 80W TDP. I would genuinely have preferred not to have a dGPU, but no one was selling anything with good CPU and half-decent screen, without also including dGPU. Such a waste of money and weight. I’ve used it at all about half a dozen times. Dual-GPU is such a bother, especially where it involves NVIDIA and Linux, though I’m glad to see that’s improving.
In Italy (Perugia) not only huge and dangerous potholes (is a disaster overall) but sidewalks maintenance is pretty much abandoned as well. I drive a motorcycle and instead of paying attention to driving I have to put considerable effort looking at the road because I know that if a drive over one of those I'll end up in the ground for sure.
Fast and Smooth Third-Party Web Fonts
How would you take into account the converse finding by TFA?

> By contrast, children with no market-selling experience (n = 471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern. These children performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that more than one third of working children solved (β = 0.35, s.e.m. = 0.03; 95% confidence interval = 0.30–0.40, P < 0.001). School children used highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths.
Google makes a copy of your data and serves that data to users before they visit your site.

Also google cache allows users to get a copy of your site without visiting your site.

Why can they republish your data while we cannot? Why do we have to opt-out?
The fact that a lot of code doesn't even have tests, and that a lot of people don't think even writing tests is a good thing, should shock you even more.
This part is wild. Some people get in so deep they cannot see the forest from the trees.

> there is the tangible risk of stifling innovation and Linux is the only place that innovation can occur in the operating system space.

One thing I know: HN loves drama, and this stuff reads like first class drama.
SpaceX had its best fiscal year yet in 2024,

bolstered by over $3 billion in US government contracts, yet -

Elon Musk paid $0 in federal taxes in 2024.

Do you really think he's looking out for your best interests????
I think this is a conversion error. According to the ABC story about this the brain has 4800 micrograms of microplastics. That's alarming, but that is 4.8mg, which is .0048 grams. A plastic spoon is over 4g. They mixed up micro and milli and were off 1000x.
ABC news: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/brain-tissue-higher-amounts-mi...
Original study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
I'm not sure private entities are more careful with their money. More importantly, it's their money, it doesn't necessarily flow back to the public.

The danger is in monopoly. Then you're left with no choice and also no vote. At least with public infrastructure you have a vote.

The situation in the Falklands sounds like a mess, and I'm not faulting anyone for using Starlink in those circumstances. But I suspect if the island becomes dependent on Starlink they will find themselves with other problems later.

These private-public arguments are misguided IMHO because the real issue is choice versus monopoly. Public services provide choice to those who might not have it otherwise, and give a nonmonetary mechanism for feedback. But they can become monopolies as well. Private services can provide options but when they become monopolies you have no options for feedback other than to withdraw from the service, which sometimes isn't a real option. Also, the moneys aren't necessarily redistributed back to the community, which can be an opportunity cost.
Good point, maybe it comes from who's paying for the browser, hence how companies behind browsers are incentivized. Google gets money from advertiser and Mozilla from Google and users donations
Really cool. Would this run on the remarkable paper pro too?
If you wait long enough a Rust competitor will gain traction. And honestly I wonder if that might not be for the best. How many of rust’s features have only been tried a couple of times?
There is conservation of energy. Energy in strictly equals energy out.

The electrical grid is a bunch of heavy spinning motor-generators that are electrically connected to heavy spinning motor-generators and other loads like lightbulbs. The motor-generators are electrically identical, except that we expect to add energy to one side and extract energy on the other*.

So what happens if the energy added by power plants is less than the energy extracted by lightbulbs and the loads on the motor-generators? Conservation of energy means that we must get the energy by slowing down the generators, extracting their kinetic energy. That lowers the grid frequency.

The same thing can happen in reverse to increase the grid frequency. Too much power generation must increase the kinetic energy of the motor-generators.

* Many of the loads on the grid are intentional or unintentional flywheels, so they may actually add energy to the grid if the grid is slowing, increasing stability.
I love this. Large corpos should torrent more. Maybe we'll get better copyright law as a result.
Yes, that is why I wrote workers and non workers.
Most of the serialization libraries I use (Jackson, gson) ignore the Serialization interface. I think it's only used for Java's now-rarely-used native serialization functionality.
I mean a WYSIWYG text editor that focuses on minimalism and clean text formatting, likely open-source.
That's a very weird use of "subsidizing" there. The corect view is that the local government is subsidizing the maintenance of cars by investing some of its money in making the roads better. Government subsidies like this can absolutely be important and useful, especially if a majority of the population drives, but they should always be looked at conservatively and minimized when possible.
Thanks! I appreciate the suggestions, but I was specifically looking for the source code of the editor itself.
It's not the developers who did this, it's the "network security" people. If you block all outgoing ports except for HTTPS and ssh, everything is henceforth going to be tunneled over HTTPS or ssh.

This is also the reason why, if you allow outgoing HTTPS connections, you should as a general rule be allowing all outgoing connections except for SMTP. Because actually malicious traffic is just going to be tunneled over HTTPS anyway and all you're doing is inhibiting the deployment of any new protocols that don't take on the complexity and inefficiency of the tunnel.
You haven't heard of the replication crisis?
Telnyx Knows Nothing
This is s side comment, but banks don't actually pay out the ass to get people to work on COBOL. That's a myth. They actually just pay people (sometimes programmers, sometimes not) to learn COBOL. (And pay them fairly unconpetetive salaries, because COBOL is not really all that useful.)

They do pay a lot of money to the people who program COBOL and maintain their archaic IBM mainframes. But that's mostly because it's basically a giant proprietary stack (hardware-OS-softare).
That's definitely pretty easy to achieve, just change the font settings to use a particular handwritten style font [0].

[0] https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Calligraphy:%2FScr...
I hope the HN community will consider examining the alternative view in good faith. We've read quite enough of the establishment press. No outlet is free from bias.

https://xcancel.com/wikileaks/status/1888072129327083979
This looks very good and fast, congrats! One question; how are you going to achieve to appear more often in AI responses?
Free beer OS with source tapes and the Lions book made the huge following of academics and young professionals.

Had AT&T been able to sell UNIX, and naturally C, at the same price points as VMS, System 360, and many other contemporary OSes, and none of us would be talking about them today, other than history curiosities.

Instead we are left with UNIX haters handbook, and still trying to fix the security issues across the industry caused by C's adoption, the JavaScript and PHP of systems programming languages, both in adoption scale, and code quality.
Point them? Them is basically everyone on HN.
I just tried the rectangle test on 4o and it answered correctly.
Many important plugins are only in the official marketplace, and it's not allowed to use this marketplace from open source builds.

The practical effect is that open builds like VSCodium don't have access to things like the C# plugin, making them not useless, but much less viable than actual VS Code.
In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal.[1][2] The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy#:~:t...
Built my own expense tracker on top of Teable.

I’m partly lucky because I live in Taiwan and almost any receipt here comes with itemised breakdown as a QR code, so I can scan that from my phone and pipe it off to a queue for ingestion

Didn’t want to use LLMs, but wanted automated categorisation of transactions, did that with some vector embeddings and Semantic Router (https://github.com/aurelio-labs/semantic-router).

… oh and it’s run off a RPi, yes the embeddings as well
Doom kept breaking, spacemacs is just kinda annoying, and I don’t wanna go through doing my own from scratch again. I basically only use emacs for my couple literate configs because I haven’t found an equal alternative

That’s why I’ve been checking out zed/helix/kakoune lately. Zed to replace VSCode which feels bloated and the other two to replace vim. The keybindings are more intuitive to me and having auto complete of commands out of the box with a full menu showing shortcuts saved me a lot of frustration from day 0
Not true. I understand it quite well better then most people and most likely you as well.

You used the scientific method and logic in the same sentence. You're aware that they are completely different right? Science can never prove anything.
The issue is not about the agency. It's absolutely about the rate. More death = more problems for our entire society. I mean, you say "it's not about the rate," but how about you tell that to my friend who's husband was killed by a bad driver while he was just minding his business riding his bike? How about you tell that to their two kids?

We've defended ourselves with our own two hands for millennia and done just fine. Meanwhile how the hell are you gonna defend yourself when someone veers into your lane at the last second and insta-ganks you with a head on crash?
> ”People would notice very quickly if their bins weren't being collected.”

This was a constant problem at my London council. They collected our rubbish bin reliably, but never our council-supplied recycling bin. Eventually we found out that the rules had changed and recycling had to be put in specially marked clear plastic bags, but the bags were almost impossible to get. You literally had to go to the local library on a specific day of the week to get told “no sorry, the bags didn’t come in this week, try again next week”. They couldn’t make it any more difficult or kafkaesque! Eventually we just learned to take our recycling down the street to an estate building and dump it in their bins.

And at the same time this was going on, the same council was spending money on billboards and bus stop advertising encouraging people to recycle!

Tower Hamlets, you are the absolute worst!
Could the mayor have been better focusing their time and efforts on broader issues, rather than just to stop a bunch of people from repeatedly calling him?
please stop spreading such highly misleading nonsense. look at what is black and white. blindly defending such toxic people is not doing linux any good.
My country believes in this "intellectual property" thing so much that our copyright, patent and trademark act's name translates to "An Act on Intellectual and Artistic Works".
You don't need your optional to be serialized - it's just a container. You need what's inside your optional to be serialized.
My thought is what's telling is the 'rewrite it in rust'. Rust doesn't have a new business case.

C was better than assembly.
C++ was better than C for GUI applications.
JAVA has garbage collection and usually won't force you to fix your machine after a bad crash.
Python is better than Perl for quick and dirty stuff.
PHP lets you build a web service without much pain.
C# is a better Java that also gives you better integration with Windows.
Go does a good job with small quick running services.
Lua is easy to integrate into programs.

I look at existing C codebases. They're usually well worn and work okay.

C++ codebases would probably be better rewritten in Go or C#

Go codebases? Switching to Rust so you can what exactly?

PHP? Keep using it or us Go.

I also feel like Go, C#, and Python are designed to be fairly easy for a noob to come up to speed. Where Rust is the opposite.
Um... are you OK?