MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bendtb | 2025-04-23 12:36:00+00:00
We are fairly AI positive, have pro chatgpt licenses for all and have our own software division building custom tools. So we feel ready to "take the next step".

There is also other elements: it sounds fun, offer great inspiration, support collaboration across teams, and help build a shared language around digital opportunities in the company.

Could we go to XYZ place in England, yes. Will it create the same magic, I doubt it.

Please note it is the Cowners idea, so he is willing to spend money on this out of his own pocket.
by Retric | 2025-04-23 12:36:00+00:00
Trusting in the power grid for both is obviously not redundant, but it’s cheaper to get independent power for a furnace than heat pumps. Actual redundancy means you want completely independent systems so you shouldn’t then use the same heat delivery loops/pumps/fans either.

Wood stoves require you to physically be home and are kind of a pain to use thus make a poor backup on their own, though a solid 2nd backup.

PS: Most areas are better off with solar thermal + heat pumps. Solar thermal however requires sunlight which not everyone gets in the depth of winter.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-23 12:36:30+00:00
Yes. It's a "scorched earth" approach to prevent the project being revived.

Something similar happened to the RAF Nimrod: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12294766 , although I think the safety case was much stronger there after one caught fire in the air.

It's very Trumpian. Perhaps the steelman argument might be "if we leave this thing in limbo, people will continue to advocate spending more money on it". Sometimes institutions or individuals in them will have a pet project that they keep pushing beyond economic sense, and the only way to get them to stop is to shoot their pet.
by nuthje | 2025-04-23 12:37:03+00:00
> Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.

This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/index/fines_en#:~:te...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-23 12:37:12+00:00
I didn't know anyone was splitting hairs as to whether the phrase was to be applied to the helpless.

Regardless, it always seems to be used as a cudgel against those whom the invoker believes is lazy or undeserving of God's help.

(As an atheist though the phrase always seemed like a justification for why prayers were not being answered.)
by nashashmi | 2025-04-23 12:37:23+00:00
Honestly, Google should sell Search to OpenAI. And keep Chrome and the rest of Google. It will be contrary to what the DOJ intended. But it makes sense for Google and Open AI.

By making search an AI first experience, both behemoths will signal the new dawn of AI is here.

Google’s greatest advantage is the use of AI in drive and docs and presentation and excel and cloud services.
Show HN: Convenient Containers – ergonomic generics in C
by JacksonAllan | 2025-04-23 12:37:46+00:00
Hello Hacker News :)

I'd like to share my C generic data-structure library Convenient Containers (CC). The library's main advantages are summarized in the Rationale section of its README.[1] In short, using some novel techniques, the library is able to provide a range of fully typesafe data structures with a generic API agnostic to both container type and data types, without requiring the user to make any boilerplate pre-declarations for every container/data type combination. In other words, CC containers look and function much like containers in languages with native support for generics:

#include <stdio.h> #include "cc.h" int main( void ) { vec( int ) our_vec; init( &our_vec ); push( &our_vec, 5 ); printf( "%d\n", *get( &our_vec, 0 ) ); cleanup( &our_vec ); map( int, float ) our_map; init( &our_map ); insert( &our_map, 5, 0.5f ); printf( "%f\n", *get( &our_map, 5 ) ); cleanup( &our_map ); }

CC is the only C data-structure library that offers such ergonomics, to the best of my knowledge.

Of course, performance is also important. To this end, CC's hash tables (i.e. its maps and sets) have performed well in benchmarks both by me[2] and by others.[3] Its red-black trees (i.e. its ordered maps and sets) have also been benchmarked and proven to perform on par with their C++ Standard Library counterparts.[4]

Some of the techniques upon which CC relies are explained briefly in its FAQ[5] and more thoroughly in a series of Reddit comments that I made back when the library was first released.[6] I am working on a series of articles to describe these techniques more systematically, the first of which I published earlier.[7]

Thanks for reading!

[1] https://github.com/JacksonAllan/CC#rationale

[2] https://jacksonallan.github.io/c_cpp_hash_tables_benchmark/

[3] https://gist.github.com/attractivechaos/6815764c213f38802227...

[4] https://github.com/JacksonAllan/CC/releases/tag/v1.3.0

[5] https://github.com/JacksonAllan/CC?tab=readme-ov-file#how-do...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/zvubfb/comme...

[7] https://github.com/JacksonAllan/CC/blob/main/articles/Better...
by blitzar | 2025-04-23 12:38:07+00:00
> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard

They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".
by exceptione | 2025-04-23 12:38:36+00:00
When I researched Tanstack, it looked flexible. But a recurring theme with users was that some options are not compatible with each other, while the documentation is silent about what functionalities are compatible with each other. Did you experience that?

For me such a thing is a red flag: incomplete documentation, feature gaps and unpredictability. Also, how difficult is it too fill the feature gap. Even if one succeeds, how maintainable would it be if changes are not accepted upstream.
Ask HN: What is going on with cloudflare?
by jFriedensreich | 2025-04-23 12:38:47+00:00
I hoped after the shitstorm cloudflare received a few months ago, about their sales tactics and treating their sales team (the viral firing tikok video, extortion attempts of customers big enough to buy enterprise plans), things would be improving but i don't see any significant changes and am growingly concerned about the state of the company.

While the core engineering side seems to still develop the platform into new heights and also have found a very convincing AI and general computing strategy (eg. the upcoming container platform), their billing platform is faulty for 6 months now (https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/gnl2dp153485) with the salesforce based ticket system broken for weeks sending most filed tickets into a black void.

Suspiciously plan upgrades seem to be less affected compared to plan downgrades and cancellations, is this a pure evil play of scale?
by mrweasel | 2025-04-23 12:39:12+00:00
It saves money on the government budget... or so they think. I doubt that there's anything sinister going on. It's just numbers in a government spreadsheet, and the Trump administration sees money going to projects that benefit people outside the US, regardless of their internal value, and just assumes that it's the US money spend on other nations.

They are not smart enough, well informed enough, nor do they particularly care to educate themselves or listen to other smarter people, they just see a number in the budget which they don't understand, so it can go. I suppose the assumption is that if it's truly important enough, someone will turn it into a business.
by insin | 2025-04-23 12:39:57+00:00
Chrome: unilaterally disables uBlock Origin

Mozilla response: mess around with Firefox's privacy notice in such a way that it generates _negative_ press

Potential future Chrome: gets bought by OpenAI

Estimated future Mozilla response: "every time a user installs Firefox, a healthy tree is chopped down, the wood is used to create bats with the user's name engraved on them, and the bats are used to hit endangered animals"
by fidotron | 2025-04-23 12:39:59+00:00
The problem is European users are too cheap, and European regulators too short sighted. It makes them hilariously prone to product dumping, where WhatsApp is "free" of course, except it isn't. They then mass adopt the "free" option and act surprised pikachu when it's not actually free.

What you are advocating is forcing a market option to change what it is, when a critical mass of their customers have chosen it precisely because of what it is.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-23 12:40:24+00:00
I think it's just the lifecycle of craftsman tooling in general.

When everyone has experience with a tool, everyone can enumerate its downsides in unison, but we can't do that with new/alternative tools.

Whether we confuse that for the new tool having no drawbacks, or we're just tired of dealing with the trade-offs of the old tool, or we're just curious about different solutions, we get a drive to try out new things.

React always had gotchas, but the question is how tolerable are those gotchas compared to the gotchas of what you were doing before. And how tolerable are Solid's gotchas going to be once you discover them. Sometimes it's a better set of gotchas and sometimes it isn't.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-23 12:40:37+00:00
Chrome is already FOSS, and there is no shortage of forks, including Edge.

The only part that isn't is the brand, and the ties with Google. And I am not a fan of the idea of a (foreign in my case) government browser, I'd rather have Google. At least, Google has a presence in my country and is bound by its laws,
by Tepix | 2025-04-23 12:41:21+00:00
For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.

I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.

And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.

Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.

As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.

Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
by nic547 | 2025-04-23 12:41:59+00:00
In my understanding it's a complete ETCS L2 system, so it needs a "Euroradio" for GSM-R, a bunch of redudant sensors for Odometry, a balise transmission module, an interface to the train to interact with the brakes and a central computer with a black box. And I assume everything needs to be certified to reach some level of correctness.
by mst | 2025-04-23 12:42:06+00:00
Once you get as far as FDIC insurance being involved, the bank generally ceases to exist (ideally via a fire sale to another, more stable bank) and the shareholders generally get (all but) wiped out, at best.

Competent risk management so that doesn't (generally) happen is a core competency for a bank, and if regulators think you're doing it wrong they will come down on the bank's leadership like a ton of bricks.

If anybody reading this comment would like to learn more from people who understand the area far better than I do, I would recommend patio11's 'Bits About Money' and Matt Levine's 'Money Stuff.'
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-23 12:42:06+00:00
Opencage is pretty decent value if your use case fits within what it can do. It has some limitations (e.g. limited support for house numbers and commercial place names) but it has some redeeming features and a generous free tier and rate limits. If it's good enough, the price/performance/quality ratio might be hard to beat. If it isn't, there are more expensive alternatives.

Ed Freyfogle (the founder) is a nice person, very knowledgeable about all things geo, pretty approachable and co-runs the geomob podcast (worth checking out), associated meetups (worth going to). If you are unsure, get your free API key and just give it a try. His documentation is awesome and the API is really easy to get started with.

Disclaimer, Ed's a friend and I'm a user of his product.
by fidotron | 2025-04-23 12:42:45+00:00
McDonalds are not responsible for what people do outside of McDonalds. If the entire potential customerbase decides to show up at McDonalds and exclusively eat there for five years bankrupting everyone else and McDonalds had behaved legally throughout then how are they the problem?

As I mentioned elsewhere, just look at the idiotic way Europe embraced WhatsApp. They genuinely believed it was free, and a huge proportion of users still don't understand it's attached to Meta and Facebook. They are so susceptible to product dumping by tech companies because they are astoundingly cheap and short sighted, and they will not pay for an alternative when the "free" version exists.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-23 12:43:07+00:00
That's it, if Chrome goes independent and / or is opened up for purchase, it's a very attractive target for companies for data harvesting. I mean I'm sure Google does as well (and got in trouble for e.g. incognito mode not being as incognito as advertised), but they keep it under wraps and make sure to not scare people off.
by hackrmn | 2025-04-23 12:43:18+00:00
To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
by mdhb | 2025-04-23 12:43:34+00:00
The EU made a serious point that these are the first time they are issuing those fines as as such have capped them as a signal to show that they are serious but also that they aren’t taking the maximalist approach some in the US are accusing them of.

They can legally go for 10% of global revenue if I’m not mistaken as the top level of fines and both Apple and Meta would be wise to not find themselves as repeat offenders as a result.
by sussmannbaka | 2025-04-23 12:43:46+00:00
It’s not about being shown ads, it’s about collecting (and sharing to third parties) private information that goes beyond the technically required amount to use the service. GDPR says companies need to get my consent in order to do that, that I am free to not give this consent and that a service can’t not be provided to me just because I don’t give this consent. Facebook and a bunch of other companies said “aha! We’ll just create a paid alternative!” but this doesn’t comply with the law. It just took a while to take this through the courts but if you read the law it’s clear they just stalled for time on this one.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-04-23 12:43:56+00:00
Love this Sussman quote: “ In fact, this is an engineering model, in the same way that, [for an] electrical resistor, we write down a model V = IR—it's approximately true, but it's not really true; if I put enough current through the resistor, it goes boom, so the voltage is not always proportional to the current, but for some purposes the model is appropriate”
by greenie_beans | 2025-04-23 12:44:13+00:00
there was never a northern president committed to abolition. lincoln only freed the slaves because it was politically strategic. there is a lot of his writing to support this. slaves joined the union army, against his wishes, and that actually helped them win the war. so then he became an abolitionist, but he didn't rush into it. most northerners were trying to protect the union, not end slavery, because their economic system was very profitable due to southern cotton production.

just read foner if you want something easy or read black reconstruction in america by dubois if you want the key text.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-23 12:44:15+00:00
> Are you getting MinGW mixed up with Cygwin?

I think you're right, this is probably the BSD equivalent of Cygwin.

That being said... I feel the distinction is very blurred, and even more so with the inclusion of MSYS. It seems very few people use naked MinGW, despite a few distributions[1][2] being available.

For instance, MinGW also provides `unistd.h` and `pthread.h` on top of `windows.h`. Certain distributions of MinGW provide lib{std}c++ instead of MSVC STL. Where does 'build native Windows executables from source files that are already targetted at Windows' stop, and 'allows compiling source code intended for *nix to native Windows binaries' begin?

Also, based on my comment above, MinGW doesn't do a great job at 'already targetted at Windows', because some very core libraries that rely on fundamental Windows-y constructs don't work. Personally I avoid it because of its incompleteness, and just use straight `clang++.exe` from the Windows LLVM release[4], aside a full install of the Windows and MSVC SDKs.

[1]: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

[2]: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw

[3]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmo...
by iwontberude | 2025-04-23 12:45:04+00:00
Consumers should have greater and greater access to markets with more favorable conditions. It’s not acceptable to have consumer hostile markets in many respects e.g. healthcare. It would behoove us as consumers to demand access to markets as mundane as cellular phones. Accepting market manipulation by oligopolistic companies to reduce choice and walking away from phone ownership altogether seems counter productive for everyone.
by fidotron | 2025-04-23 12:45:34+00:00
> If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.

Neither the App Stores or McDonalds have any control over what you do outside of them. That's your problem, individually and collectively.
by mst | 2025-04-23 12:45:39+00:00
I got redirected to history.co.uk/ (the root, so lol, no article for you)

There's a (just about readable, the background is greyed out due to a popup) archive at https://archive.ph/3HvjM - far from perfect, and I understand if people would rather not bother than deal with the low contrast ick of the archive, but I found it interesting enough to maximise my screen brightness and read it anyway.
by ryao | 2025-04-23 12:46:06+00:00
My mother has invoked it at various points in my life to try to motivate me to do the bare minimum to help myself when she did not think I was doing even that much (and was capable of doing it). I suppose that could have seemed like a cudgel to observers, but it was not.

As for prayers being unanswered, there are two tragedies in this world. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it. Interestingly, the Mouse Utopia Experiment showed that giving everyone everything that they could ever want is ultimately bad for them. That is perhaps a major reason why various prayers are unanswered.
by edwardjxli | 2025-04-23 12:47:02+00:00
Hey yall! Original author of the blog here!

I did not expect to wake up at 4am seeing my post on front page HN, but here we are nevertheless :D

As the intro mentioned, these started off as 14 small tweets I wrote a month prior to starting my blog. When I finally got that set up, I just thought, "hey, I just spent the better part of two weeks writing these nifty Python tricks, might as well reuse them as a fun first post!"

That's why the flow might seem a little weird (as some pointed out, proxy properties are not really a Python "feature" in of itself). They were just whatever I found cool that day. I tried to find something more esoteric if it was a Friday, and something useful if it was a Monday. I was also kinda improving the entire series as it was going on, so that was also a factor.

Same goes with the title. These were just 14 feature I found interesting while writing Python both professionally and as a hobby. Some people mentioned these are not very "advanced" per se, and fair enough. I think I spent a total of 5 second thinking of a title. Oh well!
by smjburton | 2025-04-23 12:47:04+00:00
Some of these newer features don't seem like improvements to the language (e.g. the Walrus operator):

'''

# ===== Don't write this =====

response = get_user_input()

if response:

print('You pressed:', response)

else:

print('You pressed nothing')

# ===== Write this instead =====

if response := get_user_input():

print('You pressed:', response)

else:

print('You pressed nothing')

'''

The first implementation is immediately clear, even if you're not familiar with Python syntax. If you don't know what the ":=" operator does, the code becomes less readable, and code clarity is traded away in favor of being slightly more concise.
by kubb | 2025-04-23 12:47:13+00:00
The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.

There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.

You can have any opinion you want but if you don’t ensure the quality of it, people will call it out for what it is.

In some circles you can defend lack of intellectual rigor with „any opinion is valid” and „you just don’t like my politics”, but that’s useful for electoral politics, not for intellectual inquiry.
by LunaSea | 2025-04-23 12:47:20+00:00
> The problem is European users are too cheap, and European regulators too short sighted.

This seems to be a common issue for all countries, the US included.

(See the Chrome spin-off talks currently taking place.)

> What you are advocating is forcing a market option to change what it is, when a critical mass of their customers have chosen it precisely because of what it is.

Incorrect, users have chosen it for what it precisely was. After a certain size that choice does not exist anymore and the option is also very different compared to the initial choice (between the different app stores available at the time) made by users.

You're also mistaken in thinking that the hardware should automatically imply a specific software. This is not the case and we're going to slowly move to a place where the hardware is independent of the software and vice-versa for smartphones.
by simonw | 2025-04-23 12:47:30+00:00
This document mentions attribution requirements, doesn't touch on the questions I'm most interested in with respect to geocoding APIs:

- Can I store the latitude/longitude points I get back from the API in my own database forever, and use them for things like point-in-polygon or point-closest-to queries?

- Can I "resyndicate" those latitude/longitude points in my own APIs?

I've encountered quite a few popular geocoding APIs (including Google's) that disallow both of these if you take the time to read the small print. This massively limits how useful they are: you can build a "show me information about this location right now" feature but if you have a database of thousands of addresses you can't meaningfully annotate data in a way that's valuable in the medium-to-long-term.

The API thing matters because it's not great having location data in your database that you can't expose in an API to other partners!

I really like OpenCage for exactly this reason: https://opencagedata.com/why-use-open-data

"Store geocoding results as long as you like. Keep results even after you stop being a customer."