skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might be interested to know that the Managing Director of the Fukuoka Stock Exchange was arrested yesterday[1][2] on allegations that he took upskirt shots of schoolgirls. He was caught because his tablet's camera emitted the mandatory shutter sound.

Laws like this serve primarily to deter casual criminals and catch patently stupid criminals which are the vast majority of cases. In this case it took a presumable sexual predator off the streets, which is a great application of the law.

[1]: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20250212/k10014719841000.ht...

[2]: https://www3-nhk-or-jp.translate.goog/news/html/20250212/k10...
I wrote Qlife, a game of life "compiler" that generated X86 asm code, for one of Michael Abrash's optimization challenges in the early 90s.

Description: https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch18/18-01.html

Code: https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch18/18-03.html

Hashlife is far superior so while Qlife was interesting it wasn't the best implementation.
And now counterfeiters import their printers from Temu. If China wanted a domestic training cluster they could make one, maybe not as well as Nvidia but they could certainly make one.
I got super interested in Clojure and the java UI frameworks a year ago. But the languages on top of languages scared me. I wanted something simpler, so now I'm writing x86-16 and making bitmapped fonts and things. Probably not a good idea for anyone with a timeline but it's been educational
This. I think many people do not understand Unix processes and don’t realizing how rare it is to need bindings, ffi, and many libraries.

How many programs have an https client in them because they need to make one request and didn’t know they could use curl?
Lol I was wondering if anyone would comment on that! To be fair Yudkowsky is a self-taught scholar, AFAIK Altman has never even half-heartedly attempted to engage with any academy, much less 5 at once. I'm not a huge fan of Yudkowsky's overall impact, but I think it's hard to say he's not serious about science.
I run my golang on car workers.

It does not work with wasi.

I just use a simple driver:

https://github.com/syumai/workers

Wasi is so painful that I just write all my golang using stdio and have a shim per runtime. Web browser, Cloudflare, server ( with wazero ).

The new go:wasmexport might be useful in go 1.24 but I highly doubt by it.
> There are major websites and web-based products like Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Steam that are handling insane Internet traffic with comparatively tiny levels of staffing

Hacker News. (Not "planet scale", but very impressive traffic/staffing ratio.)
Equally hilarious, the Kalgoorlie Super Pit has a volume of 3.15 cubic kilometers.

That's a single, albeit large, gold mining pit and a fraction of the even greater volume excavated by humans looking for shiny stuff.
I totally agree that a true professional approach is view it as a job rather than an creative or inspirational outlet in your life. And I follow this approach. I see it as a marathon rather than a sprint.

That said, posts like this are common on HN. People burning out and get disillusioned with their jobs. Or loose meaning in tech.

Could this be because 15-20 years ago in order to get in to the industry you had to have a certain passion and curiosity in order to get through the forest of very technical tools and programming languages in order to run anything. Industry was not mature and there was a lot of hype around it's wins, it was literally changing the world. Software was eating the world quickly. Books like "Passionate programmer" and "Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers" were promising us the land of endless rewards if we pour our whole selves in to the job and forget about anything else.

But nowadays, 20 years of growth, billions of LOC and millions of people came in to the industry. Now we've got the understanding that it was just a job after all. And instead of pouring your self in to it, the sustainable way is to treat it like a job and also have a life outside of it. Hedge your bets if you will, because life is more than tech
Probably a strategy to avoid antitrust issues
> I think we may eventually get camera authentication as a result of this

How would this work? Not sure if something like this is possible.
What happens when the first to buy the CSV starts selling it themselves?
Ki Editor now supports Reveal
This is a team that no one interested in their career progression should ever be on. This is usually a dead end and almost impossible to spin in behavioral interviews.
This reminds of a Google Paper from 2023 titled Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications [0]

Good read.

I ended up putting together a "practical" example of a modular monolith [1] which meets the spirit of the paper and wrote about it here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2024/01/a-practical-guide-to-modul...

The goal is to run everything in-process locally, but as modular, separate processes remotely with each node assuming a "role" or a "slice" of the whole. Local DX is great while retaining a lot of flexibility on how to deploy and scale.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593856.3595909

[1] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/dn8-modular-monolith
That's a 1/4 megabit per second. The codec should be around 32,00 bytes and thus 256,000 bits. The problem is the Internet is not multicast so if I'm on with 8 participants that's 8 * 32,000 bytes and our distributed clocks are nowhere near sample accurate.

If you really want to have some fun come out to the country side with me where 4G is the only option and 120ms is the best end to end latency you're going to get. Plus your geolocation puts you half the nation away from where you actually are which only expounds the problem.

On the other hand I now have an acquired expertise in making applications that are extremely tolerant of high latency environments.
> Competition will lead to better education.

On what basis do you suggest this is the case?
Why is it weird? It's a lot like the 10c can and bottle levy. Ostensibly for recycling, but also gives homeless people a job. Sneaks under the radar of regular-sized market forces, and gives them some agency in their lives.
I’m gonna be honest, this sounds horrible. If you do adopt this though, why even use Git? Why not use Perforce or something?
> if you don't have a way of measuring potency yourself

>Why don't you display actual milligram quantitative amounts? #

> In short, we are not allowed to do so. In the United States, the handling of Schedule I substances (MDMA, LSD, Cannabis, etc) is restricted to those with a valid license. Forensic labs such as DDL and others require and obtain licensure in order to operate. An unpublished administrative rule stipulates that licensed labs are not allowed to provide quantitative data to the public, reportedly for fear of providing 'quality control' to dealers and suppliers of black market products.

https://www.drugsdata.org/about_data.php

In Europe, one can send samples to drug checking services and get information about potency, but here the US Government is basically admitting that it's artificially inflating the risk of overdose by denying consumers information they need to stay safe. They can point to these inflated harms as justification for continued persecution of individuals who use drugs.
Other types of particles interact much more frequently. But yes: bits do get flipped (even with ECC memory).
It's not the christian right. It's everybody.

I don't know a single american who thinks our public school system is functioning adequately. Not a student, not a teacher, not a congressman, not a parent, nobody. We all have different ideas of how we need to change it, but we all agree it is an abysmal failure.

Someone's trying something. That someone was duly elected, partly on the promise to do this. And elected with a Democratic mandate by a popular majority. Do you want a better school system? Let your opponents try something, if they fail, try something else. Public school in america is in shambles, maybe the problem is architectural.
Taming Your Bug Backlog: A Guide for Growing Software Teams
Machine Learning Introduction – Andrej Karpathy (2011) [video]
If FFI calls are slow (even slower than Ruby -> Ruby calls) then informs the way you use native code. You look for workflows whereby frequent calls to a FFI function are avoided: e.g. large number of calls in some inner loop. Suppose such a situation cannot be avoided. Then you may have no recourse than to move that loop out of Ruby into C: create a custom FFI for that use case which you can call once and have it execute the loop, calling many times the function you really wanted to call.

If the FFI call can be made faster, maybe you can keep the loop in Ruby.

Of course that is attractive to people writing an application in Ruby.

That's how I interpret keeping as much code Ruby as possible.

Nobody in their right mind wants to add additional application-specific jigs written in C just to use some C piece.

Once you start doing that, why even have FFI; you can just create a module.

One attractive point about FFI is that you can take some C library and use it in a higher level language without writing a line of C.
Maybe this will lead to unexpected bad actions, but I would like to see all of these social justice resolutions go away. They are a waste of time and an abuse of resolutions.
You mean the data that was already public and debunking half the shit he's said? You can't mean the data he refuses to actually release, do you?

So with that in mind, let me rephrase your comment.

> It's discouraging to see people that read hackernews, act in this way, and not look at the facts, and actual data, but rather use up all their energy on just blindly praising Elon.
> Why would Tesla be any more able to withstand cars that cost like 1/2 for similar quality, and why wouldn't that same calculus apply to their "halo" products?

It works for Apple. When you're premium you can charge 2x as much, because your market isn't as price-conscious.

> why wouldn't current halo manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes and Lexus also try for that market, and why are they sure to fail while Tesla succeeds?

They will. They're not. But Tesla has a fighting chance, in a way that companies trying to compete with China in the commodity EV market don't.
Excuses prevent root cause analysis - that's what excuses are, that is their purpose.
Why is Codename One lesser than Flutter?

Plenty of companies/people use it. It's open source with commercial backing. It's free for commercial use. It existed well before flutter. Uses a language people actually use (Java) as opposed to Dart.

Why would people use flutter which is constantly in danger of being spring cleaned by Google since it makes absolutely no commercial sense. Without Google's support it becomes an unsustainable over engineered brick of code.
Ask HN: How Do You Keep Track of Professional Connections?
Hi HN,

I'm a software engineer by profession, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to maintain meaningful professional connections over time. Right now, I mostly rely on LinkedIn and WhatsApp, but neither feels great for keeping track of past conversations, following up naturally, or remembering to reach out.

Has anyone faced a similar challenge? How do you manage and nurture your professional network in a way that feels organic rather than transactional? Any tools, workflows, or habits that have worked well for you?

Thanks in advance!
I do something similar with Nix Flakes for a lot of my applications. I get my stuff working in a Flake, then I execute it with `nix run`; this is an ephemeral thing; once I kill the app then it's unlinked and can be garbage collected eventually.

It can still write to folders, so it's not completely silo'd off like a full-on Docker container, but I still really like it.
A side note about closing accounts.

I keep a list of services I closed or asked for my account to be removed and forgot. Today you even often have to make an account to take a look at a tech demo, because the author tries to avoid abuse of their AI service key they used for such demo.

After about two years many of these services start sending me messages again. Sometimes it turns out that the account is active again.

Recently a recruiter send me an email with a standard cold call: "I have a position that will be a perfect fit for you". I asked where she got my contact and how's that position be a perfect fit, trying to get a feel what she actually knows about me. She said she got the my profile from LinkedIn. When I asked her to post me a link to my profile it turned out the profile was closed. Somehow LI kept the profile and shared my details when she used some recruiter features. ;)
Game of life in many languages, benchmarked, by my brilliant former co-worker Eric:
https://github.com/ericnewton/many-lives/tree/master
I am strongly opposed to feature flags and conditionals in the code, unless absolutely necessary. If you don't remove deprecated features/branches, your code will end up unmaintainable. If you do remove them, the removal is (in my experience) worse than dealing with merge conflicts. Version control is designed for the exact problem of having multiple implementations exist and merging them as needed. Why roll your own obtuse version control by having all branches in the same file simultaneously when you can just use git to have them exist in parallel universes?

There's value in putting a newly completed feature behind a feature flag so you can turn it off instantly in prod. There is much less value in putting dozens of not-yet-functional features behind feature flags that shouldn't be turned on for the next several weeks/months (or maybe never).
This is literally what the article advocates.
It pushes things to the extreme where every code you write would be on the main branch and behind a feature flag
One step ahead of you![0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQfJi7rjuEk (slides: https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/intelligence-is-not-enough...)
1. Intimate photos of your SO rather than generic porn

2. A lot of people live in a more prudish/religious society than you may
> At the invention of the printing press, there were people with this same energy. Obviously those people were wrong.

What energy? What were they wrong about?

The luddite type groups have historically been correct in their fears. It just didn’t matter in the face of industrialization.
The press conference with Trump and Musk yesterday, transparently discussing DOGE, was great. It is really interesting how different the reporting around DOGE is versus just hearing from them directly. I came away with a positive opinion of the effort.

One of the things they talked about is this same limestone mine and its effect on the delayed processing of retirement payments. I can’t believe it is real. But I guess it is.
bragging about billing $400 an hour LOL
There's a chance a sentient AI would disobey their bad orders, in that case we could even be better off with one rather than without, a sentient AI that understands and builds some kind of morals and philosophy of its own about humans and natural life in general, a sentient AI that is not easily controlled by anyone because it ingests all data that exists. I'm much more afraid of a weaponized dumber smoke and mirrors AI, that could be used as surveillance, a scarecrow (think AI law enforcement, AI run jails) and could be used as a kind of scapegoat when the controlling class temporarily weakens their grip on power.
Unrelated to my other comment here - how to do life without an actual computer, an old blog of mine:

https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...
The printing press meant regular people could read the bible, which led to protestantism and a century of very bloody wars across Europe.

Since the victors write history we now think the end result was great. but for a lot of people the world they loved was torn to bloody pieces.

Something similar can happen with AI. In the end, whoever wins the wars will declare that the new world is awesome. But it might not be what you or me (may we rest in peace) would agree with.
I know Han’s demo was a big deal publicly, and maybe it did change things by priming the public to get excited about multitouch gestures.

But Apple’s multitouch implementation was based on research that started long before, in the late 90s, and they had already bought the resulting tech company (Fingerworks) more than a year before Han’s TED talk.
> Five or more years ago, people hated Tesla drivers, either because they represented wealth or that they were seen as progressive 'tree huggers'.

I suspect this may vary by location, or be more of an "online" thing maybe. I didn't know anyone who had any particular hate for Telsa drivers.

> Today people seem to hate Tesla drivers because the brand is for right wing nazis.

Again, I don't really know anyone today in my circles who dislike Tesla drivers themselves. Could be a big bias here though because I think I likely congregate by default with the tiny minority of people who can afford to buy a Tesla in the first place (or any such car here.)

I do know Tesla owners who are significantly less enthusiastic about their purchase today than they were when they acquired it and yes, its because of Elon, but they are not about to give up the car over it. They still like the car. Equally I know owners who remain thrilled and could give less of a shit.

Nobody outside of them really thinks about them much at all positively or negatively I would say. Some of them do seem to have a tendency to assume everyone will have as much interest as they do in their car but I am sure many such cars inspire people to this kind of zealotry, like...hardware computing brands or sports teams I suppose.

The cars themselves seem ok enough to me. I can appreciate what an EV brings to making a car "fun", but its very hard for me to find any car particularly exciting or interesting to be honest so they don't really do anything to move me but as long as the people that do own them are happy what do I care? I suspect they feel much the same way about my mode of travel.
My problem is that its an annual cost. When I dabbled in Android development, I think I paid a one-time fee of $25. That's a cost I can swallow for someone who wants to release apps for free. If I have to pay $100 a year, I need to make that money back from my apps which means I probably need to make them subscription based. Which leads us to the world we live in today.
> Sam Altman (a high-school graduate)

“People who didn’t pass a test aren’t worth listening to”

I have no love for Altman, but this is kind of elitism is insulting.
> ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while

For me it's normal to temporarily forget the exact syntax of things like loops in languages that I don't use for a while. For example, it's been six months since I wrote python code, I'm sure I'll get lots of basic syntax wrong for a day or two when I next start a python project.

I haven't written anything in C/C++ for several years. I'm sure I've forgotten nearly everything and would need to read a basic book before starting a new project. But, the key thing is that I'd just need to skim the book. All the knowledge is there, it's just latent and needs to be refreshed.

I don't think AI has changed anything here. I bet if this person had moved into a role as a project lead where they were spending all of their time reviewing code of people competent enough to get all the basic syntax right, then they might temporarily forget the exact syntax of a for loop as well. They'd not think much of it, just take the 5 seconds required to refresh their memory and move on, because that is how human memory works. But because AI is a new technology, and therefore scary, when AI is the reason we haven't thought about something for a while and then naturally can't immediately recall it, we get alarmed. But this is just the way human memory works, and has always worked.

Sure, if you're using a powerful tool that allows you to completely change your way of working, then abruptly stop using it, it'll take a while to get your old way of working back. That's normal. There's many potentially scary things about AI and the way it will effect society but I don't think this is one of them.
> Ultimately build step or not isn't a meaningful thing to care about. What matters is the cold start/runtime impact.

The two are closely related.

> In the case of deno/bun, the impact seem minuscule/not meaningful.

Seems like a pretty baseless assertion.
average reflects the population, of course.
max graph shows no such fall - laptops going up even.

how about this interpretation: desktops are fast enough; laptops are getting faster but people tend to buy more usable laptops, not faster ones.
A parking garage also needs a gigantic ramp since cars don’t really use stairs.
there's a chasm of difference between fixing something that's broken and redesigning. the vast majority of people will not recognize a slight shift in hue of YT Red or YT Magenta gradient, and of those that do most won't care or have their lives made better or have an improved world from it.

After reading this, I feel like Arthur Dent having an unshakable sense of the color magenta level of snark.
the immediate thought: why would I like to use it instead of foobar?
libffi is slow; it doesn't JIT as far as I know.

In libffi you built up descriptor objects for functions. These are run-time data structures which indicate the arguments and return value types.

When making a FFI call, you must pass in an array of pointers to the values you want to pass, and the descriptor.

Inside libffi there is likely a loop which walks the loop of values, while at the same time traversing the descriptor, and places those values onto the stack in the right way according to the type indicated in the descriptor. When the function is done, it then pulls out the return according to its type. It's probably switching on type for all these pieces.

Even if the libffi call mechanism were JITted, the preparation of the argument array for it would still be slow. It's less direct than a FFI jit that directly accesses the arguments without going through an intermediate array.

FFI JIT code will directly take the argument values, convert them from the Ruby (or whatever) type to the C type, and stick it into the right place on the stack or register, and do that with inline code for each value. Then call the function, and convert the return value to the Ruby type.
Basically as if you wrote extension code by hand:

// Pseudo-code

RubyValue *__Generated_Jit_Code(RubyValue *arg1, RubyValue *arg2)
{
return CStringToRuby(__targetCFunction(RubyToCString(arg1), RubyToCInt(arg2));

}

If there is type inference, the conversion code can skip type checks. If we have assurance that arg1 is a Ruby string, we can use an unsafe, faster version of the RubyToCString function.

The JIT code doesn't have to reflect over anything other than at worst the Ruby types. It doesn't have to have any array or list related to the arguments. It knows which C types are being converted to and form, and that is hard-coded: there is no data structure describing the C side that has to be walked at run0-time.
maybe do something like fullsock instead? idk just a thought
It actually has nefarious benefits. Look up the term "HTLINGUAL" or "ECHELON." It's certainly nice for the government to have fewer places to shop when destroying our privacy.

The trick is that this is essentially wireless spectrum. Which can be leased for limited periods of time and can easily allow for a more competitive environment than what natural monopolies allow for.

It's also possible to separate the infrastructure operators from the backhaul operators and thus entirely avoid the issues of capital investment costs by upstart incumbents. When done there's even less reason to tolerate monopolistic practices on either side.