MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonfw | 2025-04-27 13:40:21+00:00
There are probably economies of scale associated with maintaining nuclear weapons. Whether you have 1500 or 3500, you need a “large scale nukes” program. You’re not going to cut costs in half by cutting nukes in half.

You also have to consider that nukes have to be distributed around the world, so that you can target enemies throughout the world, so that enemies don’t know where to target their missile defense systems, and so that you still have adequate threat if sites are attacked.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-27 13:40:36+00:00
(Edit: My comment is simply about the logistics and work involved in a very well executed filesystem migration. Not about whether ZFS is good for embedded or memory constrained devices.)

What you describe hits my ear as more NIH syndrome than technical reality.

Apple’s transition to APFS was managed like you’d manage any kind of mass scale filesystem migration. I can’t imagine they’d have done anything differently if they’d have adopted ZFS.

Which isn’t to say they wouldn’t have modified ZFS.

But with proper driver support and testing it wouldn’t have made much difference whether they wrote their own file system or adopted an existing one. They have done a fantastic job of compartmentalizing and rationalizing their OS and user data partitions and structures. It’s not like every iPhone model has a production run that has different filesystem needs that they’d have to sort out.

There was an interesting talk given at WWDC a few years ago on this. The roll out of APFS came after they’d already tested the filesystem conversion for randomized groups of devices and then eventually every single device that upgraded to one of the point releases prior to iOS 10.3. The way they did this was to basically run the conversion in memory as a logic test against real data. At the end they’d have the super block for the new APFS volume, and on a successful exit they simply discarded it instead of writing it to persistent storage. If it errored it would send a trace back to Apple.

Huge amounts of testing and consistency in OS and user data partitioning and directory structures is a huge part of why that migration worked so flawlessly.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-27 13:40:48+00:00
Ironically, as a NodeJS dev, I was going to say the opposite: I'm very used to the idea that you have a strict set of warnings that block the build completely if they fail, and I find it very strange in the C world that this isn't the norm. But I think that's more to do with being able to pin dependencies more easily: by default, everyone on projects I work with uses the same set of dependencies always, including build departments and NodeJS versions. And any changes to that set of dependencies will be recorded as part of the repository history, so if be warnings/failures show up, it's very easy to see what caused it.

Whereas in a lot of the C (and C++, and even older Python) codebases I've seen, these sorts of dependencies aren't locked to the same extent, so it's harder to track upgrades, and therefore warnings are more likely to appear, well without warning.

But I think it's also probably the case that a C expert will produce codebases that have no warnings, and a C novice will produce codebases filled with warnings, and the same for JS. So I can imagine if you're just "visiting" the other language's ecosystem, you'll see worse projects and results than if you've spent a while there.
Ask HN: Recommended resources for C++ bindings generation project?
by mog_dev | 2025-04-27 13:41:50+00:00
I'm creating a C++ binding generator for GStreamer from GIR files with full RAII memory management. Looking for books, articles, or documentation on binding generation techniques, GIR file parsing, and implementing RAII patterns in generated code. Not interested in existing solutions as I want to build from scratch, but any educational resources would be valuable. What literature or references would you recommend for someone tackling this kind of project?
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-27 13:42:14+00:00
I don't see why ZFS wouldn't have gone over equally flawlessly. None of the features that make ZFS special were in HFS(+), so conversion wouldn't be too hard. The only challenge would be maintaining the legacy compression algorithms, but ZFS is configurable enough that Apple could've added their custom compression to it quite easily.

There are probably good reasons for Apple to reinvent ZFS as APFS a decade later, but none of them technical.

I also wouldn't call the rollout of APFS flawless, per se. It's still a terrible fit for (external) hard drives and their own products don't auto convert to APFS in some cases. There was also plenty of breakage when case-sensitivity flipped on people and software, but as far as I can tell Apple just never bothered to address that.
by api | 2025-04-27 13:42:39+00:00
I am deeply saddened to say that I agree. Keep the nukes.

Creating a world that results in that conclusion may go down as one of the greatest policy failures in history, and if we do in the end have an atomic war I think that's where the responsibility lay.

Ultimately we have failed as a species to rise morally above "might makes right" and I think we are going to pay for that.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-27 13:42:42+00:00
> Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.

It’s never packet captures, reverse engineering of the app, or one of the tens of thousands of employees working for these companies blowing the whistle.

Nobody can even show that their phone app is using background CPU when they talk, utilizing the microphone, or sending packets from that app. All of which are in reach for anyone with Android and some basic skills.

It’s always an anecdote about someone who said something out loud and then saw ad for it later. That’s it. That’s the entire basis for the conspiracy. Yet it persists.

It’s a very good litmus test for people who don’t understand technology as well as they claim to.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-27 13:43:45+00:00
Hm. Tipping is not a charge, is a gratuity- which means that its amount and even whether you give it or not is up to you. You can decide to tip 20% before taxes or 16% after taxes- it's exactly the same. It all depends how much you want to risk being seen as stingy by the waiter in front of you.
by bsaul | 2025-04-27 13:43:59+00:00
wonder if active record couldn’t borrow some pattern from coredata with its managedobjectcontext property associated to every object. This lets you work with objects transparently, not having to carry a « db » property everywhere, and the framework always knowing where the object come from, it can trigger an error if you’re trying to do something unholy by mixing them.
Show HN: Swaphouse – Free home swapping for remote workers
by tsweijen | 2025-04-27 13:44:17+00:00
We built Swaphouse as a side project to help remote workers swap homes for free, instead of paying for hotels or Airbnbs.

Every home listed is remote work-friendly (reliable Wi-Fi, dedicated workspaces), and matching is based on mutual interest via a swipe system (like a dating app, but for homes).

It’s 100% free. We’re two people, bootstrapped, working on this during nights and weekends. Would love any feedback or ideas.

https://swaphouse.io
by janice1999 | 2025-04-27 13:45:33+00:00
It was earlier, in 1933, that IBM profited by helping Hitler run the German census which was used to identify undesirables.

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

Edit: The article was flagged. Here is the link: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/25/politics/doge-building-ma...
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-27 13:45:40+00:00
Koa was next gen Express when TJ Hollowaychuk made it. Used first class promises to have real middleware like “response = await next()”

Hono is basically next gen Koa: zero dependencies and made to work in additional contexts like in CloudFlare Workers.

- Express deps: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=express (lol)

- Hono deps: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=hono

Node web servers are all so similar (you write ~identical code no matter which one you use) that tie-breaking on a dep diff this big is reasonable.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-27 13:46:06+00:00
> > We can use UB to refer to both. :)

> You can, but in the context of the standard, you'd be wrong to do so. Undefined behavior and unspecified behavior have specific, different, meanings in context of the C and C++ standards.

> Conflate them at your own peril.

I think that ryao was not conflating them, but literally just pointing out, as a joke, that "UB" can stand for "undefined behavior" or "unspecified behavior." Taking advantage of this is inviting dangerous ambiguity, which is why ryao's suggestion ended with ":)," but I think that saying that it's wrong is an overstateent.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-27 13:46:31+00:00
That one is also hard and complex in the sense that it will force the country to come to terms with how much of its economy is based on ignoring its own laws and an incoherent concept of fairness. In a democracy, getting people to accept pain (in this case, higher prices) to write a moral error that they generally experience only in the abstract is known hard; it's one of the reasons America clung to slavery so long, because in addition to unpaid labor propping up the corner of the Southern economy, the northern economy benefited from cheap raw materials.
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-27 13:46:48+00:00
I love Rust, and will continue to use it. But sometimes it feels like "too much". If you have programmed in Rust, you know what I mean. I want to use and experience a language that is to Rust almost like what C is to C++.

This is primarily an educational exercise to see how people find compromises that work for them, and languages in the same space as Rust using alternative strategies.
by pavlov | 2025-04-27 13:47:35+00:00
If you were trying to convince me to build a web app in Java, you wouldn’t need to explain what the JVM is, but you’d need to make a strong argument for why Java is better than the alternatives available in 2025.

So the question is whether the target audience here is “people who want to build full-stack web apps” or “people who are already using the BHVR stack”.
Show HN: AI app that turns educational videos into articles and quizzes
by demirbey05 | 2025-04-27 13:47:46+00:00
I built Podco, an AI-powered tool that helps you learn from educational videos (lectures, podcasts, etc.) more effectively.

How it works: 1. Paste a YouTube (or other) video URL 2. AI converts the video into a structured article 3. Generates a quiz to test your understanding 4. You can also share your pods with your friends.

Would love to hear your feedbacks.
by gruez | 2025-04-27 13:48:39+00:00
>No, the common criticism of Amazon (and companies like it) is that they cut deals with governments and/or use sneaky international accounting tricks (such as the famous "double Irish Dutch sandwich") to pay very low rates of tax relative to their profit (not revenue).

>For example, Amazon UK paid zero Corporation Tax in the UK in 2023[0] despite recording £222m in profit.

But if you read the article you linked, you'd see it's a pretty straightforward investment deduction, rather than some dastardly tax evasion scheme? Amazon might be still doing the "double Irish Dutch sandwich" or whatever, but the article makes it clear that most of it is coming from investment tax credits.

>Amazon’s main UK division has paid no corporation tax for the second year in a row after benefiting from tax credits on a chunk of its £1.6bn of investment in infrastructure, including robotic equipment at its warehouses.

>The government’s “super-deduction” scheme for businesses that invest in infrastructure was introduced by Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor. It allowed companies to offset 130% of investment spending on plant and machinery against profits for two years from April 2021. Amazon booked a credit of £1.13m in 2021 under the scheme.
by anenefan | 2025-04-27 13:49:08+00:00
Yes people are creative and time to time come up with phrases, comments or sayings that catch on. It's how popular jokes start out as well.

I'm not sure if you first thought it up or just repeated the term - as I see simonw meaning-slop link was posted as a separate post at HN 2 days ago.

However it's certainly bad when some piss poor LLM starts flogging some nonce as a meaning. For example when using less well documented idioms or terminology - google sadly isn't that great any more at finding stuff, so ... not good if it just makes stuff up instead. New creative stuff, sometimes people can get the gist of it but all the same no one wants the likes of a search assistant vomiting all over it.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-27 13:49:40+00:00
ccdoom is delightfully impressive. It's a compiler compliant with the C standard, which outputs DOOM (the word, and the game) for all programs.

> ccdoom is a freestanding C implementation, as distinct from hosted implementations. The difference is that freestanding implementations need not support the full standard library, and may specify an alternative name and signature for main [2, Section 5.1.2.2].

> int math_errhandling(int argc, char* argv[]);

> Since math_errhandling is the program entry point and therefore always implicitly used, any program that fails to define it then contains a use of an undefined identifier, which is undefined behaviour [2, Section 6.9.1p5].

> On the other hand, any program which does define math_errhandling also has undefined behaviour. Per the standard [2, Section 7.12p20]:
by shakna | 2025-04-27 13:49:57+00:00
V... Overpromised, and underdelivered, on what it could do. Promised complete Type Safety, before the type checker was even implemented, for example.

As for concerns... The main developer is a concern. Hard to trust them to support the language well, with some of the... Well, tantrums. This isn't aimed at a personal attack. But it is very hard to describe their responses in another manner.

This [0] thread on HN covers some of all of the above.

But, probably also important to point out that V and its drama have had dang threaten to ban the topic altogether [1]. There's a lot of drama.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39492680

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37335249
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-27 13:50:38+00:00
V looks exactly like one of the languages I was talking about. Some controversy about the project, it seems like, but very cool nonetheless. Even if it doesn't actually work like described, the description seems quite interesting.

> But I've had a few issues with the safety aspects of the language. Breaking through the checker isn't that difficult.

What do you mean? Can you "break through the checker" outside of unsafe blocks?
by Aurornis | 2025-04-27 13:50:52+00:00
> So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious.

I also knew an entrepreneur who tried this same thing, but with TV shows.

Fingerprinting specific audio is a different algorithm problem entirely. You only need to sample a short section of audio every few minutes and then process the spectral peaks, which are fingerprinted against a database of known samples.

This is how apps that name a song work. It’s not the same as constant full speech to text.

But you’re skipping the key part of the story: They had to hand out phones specifically for this because you can’t get constant audio background processing from installing an app on a modern phone OS without the user noticing.

> That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.

Again, wake word monitoring is a different algorithm. Monitoring for a wake word is a much simpler problem. They’re not processing everything you say, concerting it to text, and then doing a string compare for the wake word. It’s a very tiny learning model trained to match on a very specific phrase, which might run at a hardware level.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-27 13:50:59+00:00
Applications that consumers use (games and desktop) work fine with the amount of memory that consumer GPUs have.

GPUs targeting more RAM-hungry applications exist, but they’re quite a bit more expensive, so people who play games buy gaming GPUs while people who need more VRAM buy cards targeting that application.

Why would a consumer want to pay for 40GB of VRAM if 12GB will do everything they need?
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-27 13:51:18+00:00
I suspect you're being downvoted because your statement is interpreted as a both sides argument, but you are correct. The thing about up taking off guard rails is that they are taken off for whoever holds the power in the future. If this Trump administration policy is allowed to stand, there isn't anything stopping a future president, Democrat or Republican, from uncitizening political opponents and shuffling them off to a prison beyond the range of the press to observe or Congress to oversee.

It's extremely dangerous, a viper striking at the heel of the checks and balances against tyranny soaking this government.
by amarshall | 2025-04-27 13:51:24+00:00
> ZFS is notorious for corrupting itself when bit flips hit it and break the checksum on disk

ZFS does not need or benefit from ECC memory any more than any other FS. The bitflip corrupted the data, regardless of ZFS. Any other FS is just oblivious, ZFS will at least tell you your data is corrupt but happily keep operating.

> ZFS' RAM-hungry nature

ZFS is not really RAM-hungry, unless one uses deduplication (which is not enabled by default, nor generally recommended). It can often seem RAM hungry on Linux because the ARC is not counted as “cache” like the page cache is.

---

ZFS docs say as much as well: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Project%20and%20Commu...
by detaro | 2025-04-27 13:51:34+00:00
When it launched it proudly claimed to do a lot of things, some of which most people would consider still open research questions. Unsurprisingly, it didn't actually do these things or have a concrete plan of achieving them, and they didn't handle people pointing that out very well. Some other language developers were unhappy about the support V gathered based on these claims vs languages that were further along but honest about what they actually had.

(I have no idea what the current state is)
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-27 13:51:59+00:00
"They think to at least some extent, that hurting their kids is a good thing, perhaps under a twisted "toughen them up" mentality."

Hurting a kid and proper discipline are two separate matters. Good discipline and training doesn't hurt kids (in fact many enjoy them). If you find that your actions are hurting a kid then you are doing things wrong.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-27 13:52:48+00:00
> ZFS is notorious for corrupting itself when bit flips hit it and break the checksum on disk

I don't think it is. I've never heard of that happening, or seen any evidence ZFS is more likely to break than any random filesystem. I've only seen people spreading paranoid rumors based on a couple pages saying ECC memory is important to fully get the benefits of ZFS.
Show HN: HEIC to PDF – Client-side conversion of HEIC images to PDF
by chenxin2 | 2025-04-27 13:53:27+00:00
I've developed a pure client-side HEIC to PDF conversion tool to solve compatibility issues for iPhone/iOS users. Tech stack: Next.js 15.2.5 React 19 + TypeScript heic2any for format conversion jspdf for PDF generation Internationalization support (next-intl) All processing happens in the browser with no server uploads required, protecting user privacy. Features include batch conversion, real-time preview, custom PDF settings, and options to convert to PNG/JPG formats. This is an open project, and feedback/contributions are welcome. If you've encountered HEIC compatibility issues, give it a try.
by watwut | 2025-04-27 13:54:06+00:00
The reality was that whites were disgusted over idea that black guy could swimm in the same pool as a white girl. It made them feel dirty. It was really that dynamic, not just abstract "who established it".

There is this knee jerk wish to constantly make that dynamic into something nicer or "normal outside of racist interactions". But, it is not. The same effect does not happen when two groups just merge.
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-27 13:54:38+00:00
The full language is indeed even further ahead of Rust on the spectrum I am looking at, but this seems like a cool effort. I love proof-based languages and dependent types, so this is an absolute win.

What intrigues me quite a bit relative to the main topic of the HN thread is Low[0]

> Low is not only a language subset, but also a set of F* libraries that model a curated set of C features: the C memory model, stack- and heap-allocated arrays, machine integers, C string literals, and a few system-level functions from the C standard library. Writing in Low, the programmer enjoys the full power of F for proofs and specifications. At compile-time, proofs are erased, leaving only the low-level code to be compiled to C. In short: the code is low-level, but the verification is not.

[0] https://fstarlang.github.io/lowstar/html/Introduction.html#t...
by paulgerhardt | 2025-04-27 13:54:41+00:00
This is one of those things I would recommend trying yourself for the full experience. I visited an exhibition on woodworking at the Japan House on high street and they were selling kits similar to this [1][2]. It was a very fun, soothing, asmr-style experience assembling them. Sadly I was unable to find more kits when I was in Japan last, but it has inspired me to get into the hobby of crafting them from scratch.

[1] https://pojstudio.com/products/kumiko-coaster-kit

[2] https://a.co/d/5zRbxp6
by yapyap | 2025-04-27 13:55:14+00:00
Yeah as mentioned in the article, if governed strong enough there will be less wealth inequality.

Problem being that in the modern day governing power and wealth are pretty much 1:1, and wealthy people don’t have any other principles than wealth, they don’t have morals or religious beliefs that go above wealth for them. So they won’t want to make everyone more financially equal.
by graemep | 2025-04-27 13:55:21+00:00
Why does the presence of multiple ethnic groups make facilities anonymous? That would only be true if people never knew anyone of a different "race".

Immigration is only relevant if immigrant communities do not integrate. If it was the cause then you would expect a strong correlation between loneliness and populations of immigrant origin. It certainly does not leap out from a quick look at the numbers: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbein...

The timing of the numbers in the paper do not match either. SOme of them happened in the last two years. A bit recent for desegregation to be a factor.

On the other hand the article does mention a lot of far more plausible possible causes: online only friendships, working hours, decline of religion etc.
by nikhizzle | 2025-04-27 13:55:27+00:00
Ex-Apple File System engineer here who shared an office with the other ZFS lead at the time. Can confirm they link to the wrong profile for Don Brady.

This is the correct person: https://github.com/don-brady

Also can confirm Don is one of the kindest, nicest principal engineer level people I’ve worked with in my career. Always had time to mentor and assist.