MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrbonner | 2025-04-18 14:57:47+00:00
The polonaise is a dance for those curious about classical forms. J.S. Bach included this elegant, fast-paced, stylized dance in several of his suites. Though rooted in folk traditions, the polonaise evolved into a refined court dance. For those interested, composer Sara Schumann also wrote an entire suite of polonaises, though she remains relatively unknown.

To any music experts here—especially pianists—why are these called "stylized" dances? I understand they’re based on folk dance forms, but I often struggle to connect the music to the original dances. Some, like the slow and distinct sarabande, are easier to recognize. But how do you tell the difference between something like a minuet and a polonaise?
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-18 14:58:28+00:00
If I am understanding, you were in United Arab Emirates (UAE), but your phone was logged into an account set to a different region?

If that is the case I am surprised that is the first time you ran into a geo locked app and didn't already have another Apple account for that region that you could log into. This was one of the first things I quickly learned to do if I wanted my iPhone to be useful at all when I spent many months living in a (non-Western) country. (using apps for their services)
by gibbitz | 2025-04-18 14:58:40+00:00
This is depression. I wrestle with it too and it feels just like this. It led me to seek career change and put my livelihood at risk at one point with no noticable effect on my motivation. I've been seeing a therapist and it has been helpful to have more awareness of the underlying feels that lock me up. I hope this validation helps you to work this out. It's not like flipping a switch, but it helps to be able to see there's a way through.
by boricj | 2025-04-18 15:00:01+00:00
The following comes from the complete opposite side of computing, microcontrollers. I've been working on an embedded system where the heap is about 256 KiB and the biggest stack has 4 KiB. I do write idiomatic modern C++ for the most part (even if I hate C++ metaprogramming with a passion), but not all tricks are suitable in all situations:

- CTRE is fine as long as you don't overflow the stack. I tried once to validate a string for a HTTP proxy configuration with an exhaustive regex, CTRE tried to allocate 5 KiB of stack 40 call frames in and therefore crashed the embedded system with a stack overflow. I've had to remove port validation from the regex (matching a number between 1 and 65535 was a bridge too far) and check that part by hand instead. I've also had to dumb down other CTRE regexes too in my code for similar reasons.

- Several constraints and design decisions led me to mostly ditch JSON internally and write my own BSON library. Instead of the traditional dynamically-allocated tree of nodes approach it works directly in-place, so I can give it a std::vector with a chunk of reserved memory upfront and not worry about memory allocation or fragmentation later on. One major benefit is that since there are no string escape sequences, I can return directly a std::string_view for string values. There are downsides to this approach, mostly revolving around modifications: one needs to be very careful not to invalidate iterators (which are raw pointers to the underlying buffer) while doing so and adding/removing entries towards the beginning of a large document is expensive due to the memmove().

- I ditched newlib for picolibc and exterminated anything that pulled in the C/C++ standard library locale code (that was over 130 kilobytes of Flash altogether IIRC), which includes among other things C++ streams (they are bad for plenty of other reasons too, but mine was program size).

You seem to have mostly aimed for throughput and raw performance in your benchmarks, which is fine for a generic desktop or server-class system with a MMU and plenty of resources. Just wanna point out that other environments will have different constraints that will mandate different kinds of optimizations, like memory usage (heap/stack/program size), dynamic memory fragmentation, real-time/jitter...
by Jonovono | 2025-04-18 15:00:06+00:00
If you have built an app with Electron, you know how annoying dealing with IPC can be.

This provides an alternative way to build powerful UIs in electron without having to go through the IPC layer by instead treating your main process like a "server" that just sends HTML directly to the renderers. That way your views can directly make use of any node module or data on the main side. All without actually starting a server!

Let me know if there are any side by side examples youd like to see!
by foobiekr | 2025-04-18 15:00:10+00:00
I work for a company that made a big deal about how well it worked. The CEO and chief people officer both made a lot of public statements about it, during and just after covid. They did this claiming they had the numbers to back it up and said numbers but they basically made them up. It was PR and they were using it to aid recruiting into what was and is a company that young people avoided. What numbers they did have were mostly inertia and a side effect of lockdowns (people had little else to do); new projects and new teams floundered very visibly.

Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it.

I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-18 15:00:34+00:00
One of the coolest parts of Obj-C is that it's the only "dynamic" language that includes header files (AFAIK). This means you can use agentic coding tools way more effectively. Instead of having to shove the whole implementation into context, it can just work off the interfaces. Result is that even with just a few hundred K of context, the agent can reason about an entire large codebase. And because all interop between objects is based on interfaces and protocols, refactoring of implementations becomes trivial.
by photochemsyn | 2025-04-18 15:00:35+00:00
Imagine if police and fire emergency services operated like this - you had to get private fire and police insurance, and if your home was on fire you would need to have an app on your phone telling you which fire departments were 'in-network' in order to ensure you weren't accidentally bankrupted (if the out-of-network service would even respond, once they checked your economic credit score).

The real takeaway here should be that life-or-death outcomes should never depend on some buggy app installed on your phone and maintained by a for-profit company that's more interested in protecting shareholder profits and executive salaries than in providing the critical service in question.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-18 15:00:52+00:00
A beautifully written piece.

And to some degree I echo the sentiment as well. While I was never in search of the divine programming language, I too felt that as Objective-C was being sunset and Swift was in ascendency, perhaps it was my time to also step out of my career — sunset myself so to speak.

Swift was something of a hard sell for me. It seem(s/ed) to borrow everything from every popular language allowing two different code bases to look as though they might have been written in two different languages (depending on the preferences/style of the two coders).

To be sure, a lot of the young engineers seem to have been drawn into the Apple ecosystem not because, like me, they grew up worshiping the user-interface brilliance of the Mac but because they are fans of the Swift language.

And like the author of the piece, I say, "Knock yourselves out, kids. Sayonara."
by causal | 2025-04-18 15:00:52+00:00
I suspect that a lot of people show genuine symptoms of trauma from the 24-hour news cycle telling them to be afraid. This person may not have been affected personally by Obama, but if they watched Fox News throughout his presidency they probably felt traumatized by the end of it.

This "traumatizing media" effect certainly applies to the left, too, and I think social media is the common accelerant.
Show HN: I vibe coded an AI powered Career Coach
by freeslave | 2025-04-18 15:01:24+00:00
I wanted to test out Gemini and was able to "vibe code" a web app in a few hours. I used 2.5 Pro experimental and was really impressed. Though it was mainly an experiment, I think the result is pretty good and I'd love to hear feedback on ways to improve the app.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-04-18 15:01:26+00:00
So, if my maths is right that’s about 1 second extra slower every 500 days, which means a day will take 48 hours in about 43 million years

That seems very very fast on galactic time scales - we would get tidally locked (rotate at speed of orbit?) in about 150x43 million … oh about 3 billion years … yeah never mind

Edit A slightly different way of looking at it is we add a leap second every 2 or so years on average (27 in past 53 years). This seems about right with the above maths - it just amazes me

What amazes me more is they are going to stop using leap seconds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second by 2035
by hwillis | 2025-04-18 15:03:02+00:00
Definitely more problematic. And Webb only made it more confusing :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

> Depending on the Planck energy cutoff and other factors, the quantum vacuum energy contribution to the effective cosmological constant is calculated to be between 50 and as many as 120 orders of magnitude greater than has actually been observed, a state of affairs described by physicists as "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science" and "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics".
by toast0 | 2025-04-18 15:03:10+00:00
> The even stranger case was when there was a Linux box doing forwarding that had segment offload left on. It was taking in several 1500 byte TCP packets from one side, smashing them into ~9000 byte monsters, and then tried to send those over a VPNish network interface that absolutely couldn't handle that. Even if the network in the middle bothered to generate the ICMP too big message, the source would have been thoroughly confused because it never sent anything over 1500.

This is an old Linux tcp offloading bug; large receive offload smooshes the inbound packet, then it's too big to forward.

I had to track down the other side of this. FreeBSD used to resend the whole send queue if it got a too big message, even if the size did not change. Sending all at once made it pretty likely for the broken forwarder to get packets close enough to do LRO, which resulted in large enough packet sending to show up as network problems.

I don't remember where the forwarder seemed to be, somewhere far away, IIRC.
by ashvardanian | 2025-04-18 15:04:00+00:00
I was also surprised about CTRE and I can imagine it being a viable tool for implementing parsers for 99% of use cases, where you may not need all the SIMD bells and whistles.

A word of caution, though: I remember the throughput differing vastly between GCC and MSVC builds. The latter struggles with heavy meta-programming and expression templates. I don't know why.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-04-18 15:04:10+00:00
I find it hard to believe that you're still doubling down but only selectively detecting unsupported "claims of fact" without support especially since I made weaker, more situational claims. The original poster commented:

> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could, uses less water, and doesn’t dry out your hands

"Ever could"? "1000 times"? And yet you have a problem with me saying hand-washing CAN be better when have dishes with corners or need to wash both sides of the dish. The next commenter said:

> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with

I invoked being a microbiologist to make the point that I'm already aware of the fact that looking clean doesn't equal being clean. None of my arguments rely on my authority as a microbiologist. Anyone with decent reading comprehension can evaluate the broken logic: he's mixing up the fact that cleanliness is not just what something looks like with the idea that the dishwasher must do a better job than hand-washing because you can't tell if something is really clean or not. That makes no sense, and seems to be some kind of appeal to technology or modernity.

> I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well

This is the exact point that the guy was saying is NOT the case, and as a microbiologist I agreed with him even though it's irrelevant to the argument since neither of us has tested the dishes.

>The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.

My whole point was that soap and mechanical washing trump heat. My faucet sprays water, and I can evaluate the cleanliness without waiting 2 hours to see if the probabilistic machine jet spray left residue on my dishes or not.
by gear54rus | 2025-04-18 15:04:11+00:00
FWIW when sth like this happens, you can try to go to a place like APKPure and actually download the damn thing without anyone telling you that you can't.

Also works for pinning versions of apps that ship some malware (like safetynet detection) with a new update. Apps installed from there are not linked to play store by default and so updates are not checked.
by CalRobert | 2025-04-18 15:04:45+00:00
As bad as W was (and I started considering leaving after the 2000 election, but I was a minor) it didn’t seem likely that there would no longer be reasonably fair, even if flawed (with minorities disenfranchised), elections. I am no longer confident there will be a fair election, even in the midterms. And even W respected when the courts forced respect for habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-18 15:04:49+00:00
> Memory is cheap

If you're running on commodity hardware, sure; if you happen to be a $1T company that solders 3x marked-up RAM then that's definitely not true https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space... is the entry model, and clicking the 48GB option dials the price up to $3k
by ivm | 2025-04-18 15:05:19+00:00
The hate Objective-C has received for its syntax is unreal. It’s a minimalistic, easy-to-navigate language, but people assumed Swift would be easier just because it looks more like Java and C#.

Meanwhile, Swift is such a mess that even its own creator said the following in an interview:

“Swift, the original idea was factor complexity (…) massively failed, in my opinion (…) Swift has turned into a gigantic, super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff”

https://x.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1812238141496934738
by eightysixfour | 2025-04-18 15:05:33+00:00
I really feel like the software model is going to start to break in a couple of ways in the near future.

Instead of vertical software slices, many people are going to want their single “horizontal” agent that they pay for (e.g Gemini Advanced, Claude) and connectivity to all of their other services.

MCP (which I personally think is a mediocre protocol, so it will probably win) as the glue for a bunch of services we OAUTH against and choose when our agents do/do not have access to certain tools.

The idea of a “GPT” App Store from OpenAI was sort of right, but just wrong enough. We are going to have an App Store inside of our preferred AI platform and subscribe/connect our other services from there.
by enriquto | 2025-04-18 15:05:57+00:00
There is this beautiful single-header library to write simple graphical programs in C, portably to standard unixes, macos, and windows:

https://github.com/ColleagueRiley/RGFW.git

It was discussed recently around here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42217535

The macos backend is a neat hack, written in pure C.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-18 15:06:47+00:00
I would say that the "system" of organised religion is very broken and goes against the teachings of Jesus. As far as I can tell, Trump is probably the closest figure to the anti-christ in terms of his greed and lack of charity.

Personally, I don't think that the organised Catholic church was about following Jesus' teachings, but more about consolidating wealth and power. It's disingenuous to call it "Christianity" if it just chooses convenient parts to follow. I mean, Jesus was very specific about not amassing wealth.
by maebert | 2025-04-18 15:06:54+00:00
So the tetany in breathwork is generally caused by the decreased CO2 concentration causing respiratory alkalosis (ie blood gets more alkaline and has a ph balance of > 7.5), which in turn causes the protein albumin to bind more strongly to calcium and not release it as it's supposed to, and calcium is an important regulator in voltage gated ion channels in neurons.

Long story short, your neurons get just a tad bit more excitable because calcium that usually acts like the bouncer to the hot club is busy snogging albumin. That has very little effect in places in the body, but in motor neurons that control your smallest muscles (face and hand), and in sensory neurons under your skin it does move the needle — that causes the muscles to contract and your skin to feel tingly, both exactly the same cause.

This is the reason people with epilepsy should _NOT_ do breathwork, but for otherwise healthy adults there are no negative long term effects of respiratory alkalosis — a few normal breaths to balance out your co2 and the symptoms will go away.
by photonthug | 2025-04-18 15:06:55+00:00
I think it’s worth amending this to just “apps can kill”. I volunteer with search and rescue sometimes and have seen several people get into bad trouble due to reliance on phones for maps. Sometimes it’s dead batteries or just breakage without a backup plan, but no doubt other times it’s changing behavior in the app itself, OS decided to wipe cache, app has bad info, whatever.

You can say that people should know better but sometimes dead tree maps are not available, and anyway there’s no doubt that they are on the way out. The “safe/reliable” way might even seem to be up for debate, since phones can be more waterproof than paper, less likely to blow away when you’re on top of a mountain, serve as a backup flashlight/emergency comms, etc. But all it takes is a company that decides to force auto update and a PM that decides feature churn increases engagement and creates job security, and who knows what will break?

It is kind of like packaging that’s a choking or asphyxiation hazard.. if you’re doing anything that affects millions of people, it’s almost ALWAYS a safety issue even if you don’t usually think of it that way. No big audience or big user base without big responsibilities. Sure you’ll probably not be held liable in law suits, but on the other hand you should probably feel bad if you’re killing people due to indifference /negligence when thinking through edge cases.
by dahart | 2025-04-18 15:07:11+00:00
A lot can be said about Apple and walled gardens for sure, but is it fair to mostly blame Apple for the region locked insurance app, rather than the app developer? That was the developer’s choice to do, not Apple’s. Hopefully Anees’ insurance also has an website and contact numbers for emergencies. Android supports region locking and has some region locked apps too, it appears, according to Google. Is the Android version of the app in question not region locked on Android? We don’t know since he used an emulator. Maybe region locking is easy to get around if you’re technical, but in an emergency for most non-technical people, the outcome will be the same on Android as it is on Apple, no?
by pansa2 | 2025-04-18 15:07:14+00:00
> somebody decided that with Python 3.13 there would be no more precompiled wheels of numpy < 2

Wow. NumPy 2.0 was released less than a year ago and they're already starting to drop support for 1.x?! It only supports Python versions up to 3.12, all of which are themselves either unsupported or in "security fixes only" mode.

The developers plan to end-of-life 1.x entirely in less than six months time. Do they not know their target audience at all?

> it's much harder to get promoted and get acknowledgement for judicious tending of a language than it is to ship a bunch of new features

Yes - as Mark Lutz (author of "Learning Python") puts it [0]: "[Python's] evolution is largely driven by narcissism, not user feedback" and "Python remains a constantly morphing sandbox of ideas, which is great if you just want to play in the sandbox, but lousy if you're trying to engineer reliable and durable software".

[0] https://learning-python.com/python-changes-2014-plus.html#se...
by mdaniel | 2025-04-18 15:07:31+00:00
Any product that uses etcd is immediately off my radar[1]; it is nice of them to have a whole page dedicated to how to babysit the PoS https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/skywalking-banyandb/next/...

1: yes, I'm a huge k8s fanboi and yes I long every day for them to allow me to swap out etcd for something sane
by tempest_ | 2025-04-18 15:07:38+00:00
This often just feels like bad management.

They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff.

Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
by nicce | 2025-04-18 15:07:49+00:00
There is also rasn library for Rust that now supports most of the codecs (BER/CER/DER/PER/APER/OER/COER/JER/XER).

Disclaimer: I have contributed a lot recently. OER codec (modern flair of ASN.1) is very optimized (almost as much as it can be with safe Rust and without CPU specific stuff). I am still working with benchmarking results, which I plan to share in close future. But it starts to be the fastest there is in open-source world. It is also faster than Google's Protobuf libraries or any Protobuf library in Rust. (naive comparison, no reflection support). Hopefully other codecs could be optimized too.

[1] https://github.com/librasn/rasn
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-18 15:08:08+00:00
Your priorities are in the wrong place. I understand your need to work on your full time business because we all have an addiction to food and shelter. But instead of having a goal to spend more time with family and friends, you want to spend more time on computer based problems?

When you were going through your family issues, were you thinking that you should be spending more quality time with your family or your side projects?

The culture of “I always need to be spending time on my computer and doing side projects after work” is one of the most toxic things about our industry.

Work on your main business for reasonable amount of time, shut your computer down and live your life, enjoy your family and friends - “touch grass”
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-18 15:08:38+00:00
Even much shorter fasts help you to understand how unimportant and fleeting a lot of feelings of hunger are. You get hunger pangs and feel like you need to eat, but in a hour it has passed and you go another 8+ hours just fine. When I eat some crappy food, I know it is going to make me feel very hungry in a few hours, but when it happens, I know it isn’t a real need and it helps stop the cycle of bad eating/overeating.
by maebert | 2025-04-18 15:08:48+00:00
yeah in a medical setting it's usually never good, but afaik it's not the tetany that doctors are worried about about but rather what's causing it.

I did a longer write-up on the physiological effects which you might find interesting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RuDv_E9osM1CCFWZMywMru9J...