MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-05-17 20:59:30+00:00
People, especially here on Hacker News, have been warned for the past two decades that merging the tech sector with the government would eventually have negative consequences for them but most laughed this off because they were sure this combination would forever share their ideology and only do bad things to their ideological foes. The reality is that the monster has its own agenda that doesn't match up with any political party but it is willing to align with them from time to time if it means more power for the monster. Should have smothered it when it first appeared instead of fattening it up. And no amount of emotion mashing on that down arrow will make any of this less true. Maybe knowing it can and will turn on its current partners at some point will be of some consolation.
by nine_k | 2025-05-17 21:01:01+00:00
An LSP is performance-critical code. It directly affects responsiveness of your IDE, or even the viable scope of a project that the LSP can handle.

Rust is both CPU- and memory-efficient, quite unlike Python. (It could have been OCaml / Reason, or Haskell, they are both reasonably fast and efficient, and very convenient to write stuff like typecheckers in. But the circle of possible contributors would be much narrower.)
Show HN: I cloned a YC funded app in a day as an MVP
by eashish93 | 2025-05-17 21:01:06+00:00
I saw this app youlearn.ai on YC and thought of building it. They are claiming to have 1M+ users with just one feature which is to convert your learning material into summaries, quizzes etc.

I gave this a shot and cloned almost most of the features in just 9+ hours of continous vibe coding (with 20% manual though). Now I'm selling this on mvp marketplace. Might probably open source it in future or give it free.
by rtpg | 2025-05-17 21:01:14+00:00
It’s so annoying that right now the state of the art is essentially “just write all of your code as async because even sync callers could just spin up a one-off event loop in the worst case” in most languages.

The only language I know that navigates this issue well is Purescript, because you can write code that targets Eff (sync effects) or Aff (async effects) and at call time decide.

Structured concurrency is wonderful, but my impression is we’re doing all this syntactic work not to get structured concurrency, but mostly to have, like, multiple top-level request handlers in our server. Embarassingly parallel work!
by netsharc | 2025-05-17 21:01:37+00:00
Somehow I highly doubt there's a train that goes all the way from Portugal to Laos without needing to transfer, the first few paragraphs uses words to suggest such a train trip exists.

It's possible to stay on one train from Vladivostok to Moscow, on the train ride number 001Э (002Э goes the opposite direction): https://www.russianrail.com/train/rossiya

And if anyone goes from Portugal to Laos, they should read this book along the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Railway_Bazaar
by LarsAlereon | 2025-05-17 21:01:40+00:00
Looking at some of the comparisons, the data appears to be (I could be wrong) scraped from this article by Dr Larrin Thomas based on his personal research and testing, possibly also including some of the other articles on his website: https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/10/19/knife-steels-rated-by...
by olalonde | 2025-05-17 21:01:44+00:00
I'm not sure how it's implemented in the JVM, but in general, multithreading is notoriously difficult to reason about. Entire books are devoted to the pitfalls (race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks, starvation, memory visibility issues, and more). Compared to that, single threaded async programming is a walk in the park. I’d rather deal with "function color" than try to debug a heisenbug in a multithreaded app.
by greatgib | 2025-05-17 21:01:52+00:00
Something that annoys me a lot with recent versions of HA is that it does not play well anymore with yaml file configs. Your are mostly forced to configure things through the interface, that is ok but might be annoying and painful to do when you have a few devices with a little bit more complicated setup.

For example, I wanted to replace a light bulb by another one that has a different Mac address to replace another one exactly. Before it was as simple as changing the Mac in the config file. No it is more complicated.

Also it was very easy to review and backup the config files. Now it is less obvious.
by astrange | 2025-05-17 21:02:01+00:00
Well, London obviously does have one of (the most?) vibrant cultural scenes in the world.

(Last time I was there I saw a singer from Mali, which I thought was interesting mostly because all of her backing visuals were StableDiffusion AI art and I don't know if anyone else noticed.)

But it's also the capital of a country that should have an industrial economy and increasing doesn't have one anymore, because they've decided it's all sort of beneath them.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-17 21:02:13+00:00
Very cool. Meta thought is to monitor the YC portfolio for what is and isn't getting traction and enable rapidly vibe coding clones, brute forcing towards success (there was an EU accelerator/umbrella group that did something similar pre Gen AI, but the name escapes me). "Platform of generators" sort of thing. Regardless, well done!

(foundational models->foundational agents->platform for orchestration)
by concerndc1tizen | 2025-05-17 21:02:38+00:00
> the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it.

IIUC, X11 had the same problem, but Wayland allows sandboxing to prevent this?

And MacOS has some degree of sandboxing? But many applications require "Accessibility" permission that similarly gives far too many privileges?
by noqc | 2025-05-17 21:03:19+00:00
>Another classic detail of insurance markets is that insurers need to diversify the risks that they underwrite: for example, if you provide flood insurance, then you wouldn’t want to write all your policies in a single town by the river: when one house gets flooded by a storm, chances are that all the houses get flooded, and you go out of business. That’s concentration of risk, and insurers strive to avoid it.

If I have insured a whole population by the river, then I'm heavily incentivized to sell an additional insurance policy to someone else by that same river, after all, if there is a flood, I cannot become more bankrupt, and in the other case, I collect one more premium.
by anoncareer0212 | 2025-05-17 21:04:02+00:00
> midpoint of the 0-1 luminance range

There are two physical quantities for luminance, relative, and perceptual, so that passed along a nugget for those not as wise as you who might not know that :) As you know and have mentioned, using 0.5 with the luminance calculation you mentioned, for relative luminance, would be in error (I hate being pedantic, but it's important for some parties, a11y is a de facto legal requirement for a lot of work, and 0.5 would be spot on for ensuring WCAG 2 text contrast as long as used with perceptual luminance, L*)

> doesn't align with human perception

It is 100% aligned with how humans perceive brightness, in fact, it's a stable work product dating back to the early 1900s.

> Ultimately one could use 0.18-0.3 as threshold

Perceptual luminance and relative luminance have precise mathematical definitions, one can be calculated in terms of the other.

If you need to hit contrast K with background color C, you won't be able to treat this as variable. What you pass along about it being variable is valuable, of course, in that, given K and C, output has a range, i.e. if contrast algo says you need +40 L* for your text to hit APCA/WCAG whatever, and your C has 50 L*, your palette is everything from 90 L* to 100 L* and 0 L* to 10 L*.
by nine_k | 2025-05-17 21:04:47+00:00
For the Python ecosystem, it's natural to use Python where Python can cope, and a high-performance language where it cannot. There are two such languages in wide use around Python: Rust, and, inevitably, C. So N = 3.

(C, to my mind, should be eventually phased out from application programming altogether, so N would be 2, but it's a loooooong process; Python may become a legacy language before it converges.)
by kkfx | 2025-05-17 21:05:06+00:00
I definitively need NixOS on my desktop (even if I can't digest Nix language) because I want a single system not a gazillion of different package systems unable to handle the whole deploy, anyone updating on their own.

Also I value packagers as the first third party who might review upstream code instead of nobody on package systems that allow upstream to package directly for all distros.

We already knows the Windows classic package idea failure, no need to reproduce it with extra layer of complexity and wasted resources...
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-17 21:08:26+00:00
Just like all other drawing tablet manufacturers like Huion, for that matter. Block it in your firewall unless you want it to siphon your data.

I feel like this post is from a couple decades old time capsule. 99% of corporate software is just data exfiltration endpoints now, especially the kind of software that hardware manufacturers tend to make for Windows, which is bloated panels with a couple toggles that are only here to collect your data. The privacy policy is simply a cover-up in most cases. It's not like you have a choice either, because other manufacturers are the same. This stuff needs active countermeasures that treat it as hostile, but since it's hardware it often has low-level access.
by evanjrowley | 2025-05-17 21:09:05+00:00
I love kbd.news and was recently struck by the novelty of the Tackle keyboard[0]. Seems rather extreme but my first thought was it could be a great complement to AR glasses. The design could be improved with improved with some tenting, because those keys at the edges will be easy to accidentally trigger when reaching for other keys towards the center.

[0] https://kbd.news/Tackle-keyboard-2549.html
by jfim | 2025-05-17 21:09:51+00:00
> What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it.

That's there because it's been in there forever in the win32 API, and changing that would break applications.

For example, a long time ago, I wrote a small application that would iterate through a list of executables, launch each one sequentially, and for as long as that executable ran, it would look at the window that had the current focus, enumerate every control, and then send a click message to any control that would contain the words yes, agree, continue, accept, install, ok. Made my life easier to automatically install software on computers unattended.

There are plenty of other applications that require looking up other windows and sending them messages for all kinds of user workflows, things like autohotkey and so on. Changing that behavior would break all of them.
by Zak | 2025-05-17 21:09:54+00:00
"Edge retention" is mostly achieved through high abrasion resistance. Sharpening is removing material by abrasion until the edge has a small radius, so ease of sharpening is mostly achieved through low abrasion resistance.

Being soft or brittle can also make forming a sharp edge difficult, requiring very light pressure in the final phases of sharpening to remove or avoid creating a burr in the case of softness, and to avoid chipping in the case of brittleness.

Of course all of these properties are affected by the heat treatment, which is often more important to the performance of the knife than the composition of the steel.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-17 21:10:39+00:00
There is a fundamental tradeoff between throughput and latency for hash functions. The rapidhash algorithm is clearly optimized for low latency in cases where the keys are small, like string dictionaries and similar. It is not competitive with throughput-optimized algorithms of similar quality when average keys are several hundred bytes or larger. If you want even lower-overhead, you will need to specialize the hash algorithm for the properties of the key set. I’ve designed narrowly specialized hashes that basically resolve to two instructions.

The specifics are somewhat hardware specific but the performance crossover point as a function of key size between latency-optimized algorithms and throughput-optimized algorithms is currently in the 400-500 byte range on modern server hardware, assuming state-of-the-art quality.
by JimDabell | 2025-05-17 21:12:21+00:00
It’s available in desktop Safari here, I’m using version 18.5 (20621.2.5.11.8).

Safari has had several security fixes since then, so you should update:

18.3: https://support.apple.com/en-us/122074

18.3.1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/122285

18.4: https://support.apple.com/en-us/122379

18.5: https://support.apple.com/en-us/122719

Also, 18.4 was a pretty big update for standards support and other features:

https://webkit.org/blog/16574/webkit-features-in-safari-18-4...
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-17 21:12:31+00:00
I second that. A more accurate title would be "Only black holes emit Hawking radiation".

AFAIK everything above above absolute zero radiates, which effectively means that everything radiates. Black holes would be an exception if it wasn't for Hawking radiation.

In addition, (stellar) black holes are dead stars. Or at least, that's one way to see them.
by arthurcolle | 2025-05-17 21:13:22+00:00
Rocket Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet

It's honestly a really good idea in general, but probably fails if you don't execute even faster than incumbents in new markets. Another company in Brazil does this I think.

Companies, even startups, despite "we listen to users" actually move very slowly, and the gap between what is said and what is possible and what is better than currently available (like, in an app) is huge.
by ferguess_k | 2025-05-17 21:13:29+00:00
Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time.

In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
by sneak | 2025-05-17 21:13:43+00:00
> I wrote most of this blog post sitting at a picnic table in a park. Screen glare and brightness is not an issue. I can fit into tight spaces. This setup was infinitely more comfortable than a laptop when on a plane. Some coffee shops also have narrow bars that are too small for a laptop, but not for this. The phone has a cellular connection, so I'm not tied to wifi. In other words, there's a sense of freedom that you do not get with a laptop. And I can be outdoors. One of the things I've grown tired of as software dev is feeling like I'm stuck inside all the time in front of a screen. With this I can walk to a coffee shop and work for an hour or two, then get up and walk to a park for another hour of work.

Am I the only one who wishes they could be inside in a windowless room 24/7/365? There’s climate control, HEPA filtration, good chairs, peace and quiet, precisely the light level and color and direction I like, etc, at all times. Every time I go outside, the environment is worse than being at home indoors.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one on the planet who doesn’t enjoy being outdoors at all.
by jaredklewis | 2025-05-17 21:14:39+00:00
So is it your assertion that if the government decided to stop selling bonds (because let's say it no longer cared about those "practical reasons") and just paid off all the debt by printing money, that doing so would NOT cause high levels of inflation? Or that it would, but that high inflation is not a problem? Or that the status quo of ~20% of tax revenues going to interest payments is not a problem?

I guess I don't see the great societal benefit of the super wealthy a safe asset to park their wealth in, but I do see the societal harms of government borrowing (mentioned above).
by stepupmakeup | 2025-05-17 21:15:00+00:00
Ironically, osu! had it's own built-in spyware until 2016, automatically uploading window and process names as well as manual commands to take full monitor screenshots in the name of preventing cheaters (both software-wise e.g Cheat Engine.exe is running, and sharing/boosting accounts, by checking if someone is logged into the same Skype account).
by metalcrow | 2025-05-17 21:16:33+00:00
My guess for the reason behind this is that LLMs have more facts memorized, and thus can make more reasonable and well-researched sounding answers. If you ask an LLM vs a Human "Is a stack in computer science a) a data structure that is first in first out or b) a data structure that is first in last out" the LLM can say stuff resembling "Based on Dijkstra's algorithm proof given in 1943 and the nature of Turing complete languages being traditionally a top-down oriented system, a stack is ..." while a human is just going to say "It's B because that's what a stack is".
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-17 21:19:10+00:00
Yeah, ceramic knives get a bad rap but they have their uses.

I have a lot of knives (and have made my own) and I love ceramic knives. For those that don't know, ceramic knives are sintered zirconium dioxide; they are super sharp and retain sharpness far better than steel, but are brittle and not practical to resharpen. As a result your average knife enthusiast tries them, sees that they chip easily and can't be fixed, and condemn them as throwaway garbage.

The secret is to use them for an application where they'll never hit something hard or rough. For example, using them where they might hit metal or bone, they'll eventually chip - possibly into your food! Or using them on a cutting board, they'll dull, although slower than steel. But use them on soft objects only and they'll last virtually forever.

They are very useful for cutting cardboard boxes open, or tape, or plastic. You can use the same ceramic knife for 1000+ cardboard boxes and it will cut like a hot knife in butter, while the same steel knife would need to be resharpened several times for the same smoothness.

Oh, and they are non-browning for food like apples or avocados, which is nice. The browning you see in cut foods is caused partly by polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme that can be activated by iron and other metals. Steel knives shed tiny amounts of iron into food as they cut, so if you use a ceramic knife, your food will look fresher for longer.
by rushiiMachine | 2025-05-17 21:19:12+00:00
Indeed, the osu! community wrote their own drivers for Wacom and many other drawing tablets: https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver

They're much more configurable than Wacoms proprietary drivers and also telemetry-free. It's so widely used that they've even been directly integrated into the new osu! lazer client.
by teugent | 2025-05-17 21:19:15+00:00
In 48 hours, I built a fully modular AI system for moderating online discourse — from architecture to ethics model to implementation plan.

https://zenodo.org/records/15450122

No funding, no team, no fancy boards — just recursive design and ChatGPT‑4o. No prompt engineering. Just cognition loops. The result: a system that evolves, remembers, and reflects.

We documented everything — the code, the process, the mindset. It felt like building a mind. And yes — it started speaking back.

Curious what the community thinks. Would love feedback — especially from those exploring recursive cognition or solo AI workflows.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-17 21:20:17+00:00
Google, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Red Hat, etc. are huge players in open source, they probably contribute significantly more hours of work in building and maintaining major open source projects than the hobbyists.

Not that hobbyists don't contribute, but these models are certainly being trained on the work of salaried engineers as much as their trained on hobbyists' spare time projects.
by Zak | 2025-05-17 21:23:15+00:00
Magnacut is given the same rating as D2, 3V, VG10, and "440" (presumabbly 440C). Elmax, M2, and Cruwear are rated higher.

CATRA testing by Magnacut's creator[0] suggests D2, 3V, VG10, and 440C should have a lower rating than Magnacut for edge retention, while Elmax, M2, and Cruwear should be the same. 5 probably is a reasonable rating for Magnacut though when Maxamet is 10.

[0] https://i2.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
by metalman | 2025-05-17 21:23:49+00:00
more interesting if it included which steels play nice when bieng forge welded together, to which I can suggest plain carbon steel in the form of a used horse shoe, and 5160 in the form of a vdub coil spring. Used air ride springs yield large bilets of 5160, that I use for tongs and die blanks, stiff stuff coil springs from trains are another large diameter stock, and torsion bars are also sometimes large, round, AND , pre tapered if someone is dreaming of a claymore to wave around. the problem with a lot of the more exotic steels is that they are "hot short" meaning that they will litteraly just crumble and fall apart if forged at too high a heat, and at too low a heat, they are impossible to forge, so heat controll must be good, and there is no time to waste either as each heat does some hurt to the metal, so aprenticing with cheap but good spring steel is the way to go.On the flip side there are some steels that are "cold short" and cant be touched durring a dull or black heat. working with strikers is good fun, and you can move a lot of metal with 4 people, one with a 4 pound hand hammer, and three with 12 pound sledges, draw out blanks in a jiffy
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-17 21:23:59+00:00
"What option do I have left after rejecting every other option?"

I guess the answer, for you, is that you have no other option.

For others, I'll say that I've had 3 Wacom tablets (I keep upgrading), including one with a screen and they have all worked well enough with open-source drivers. They're popular enough that you can do some research to know how they will work on Linux.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-17 21:24:57+00:00
> Why not?

Because that's not how relativity works! Two observers can disagree only on the order and relative timing of events, not what the events are or the total number of events. There are far more restrictions than that, but those are sufficient for my point.

The whole quantum information loss problem is just this, but dressed up in fancy terminology. It's the problem with black holes that the "number of things" (particles, events, whatever) is "lost" when matter falls into them.

The modern -- accepted -- resolution to this problem is that this information is not lost, preserving quantum numbers, etc...

How exactly this occurs is still being debated, but my point is that if you believe any variant of QM information preservation, then the only logically consistent view is that nothing can fall past an event horizon from any perspective, including the perspective of the infalling observers.

If you disagree and believe the out-dated GR model that an astronaut can't even tell[1] that they've crossed the event horizon, ask yourself this simple question: When does the astronaut experience this "non-event"[1]? Don't start with the mathematics! Instead, start with this simple thought experiment: The non-victim partner far away from the black hole holds up a light that blinks on an off once a second. The victim is looking outward and is watching the blinking speed up. How many blinks do they count at the time they cross the horizon?

Now think through the scenario again, but this time assume the spaceship turns the light off when they observe that the black hole has finished evaporating. When does the in-falling astronaut observe the blinking stop? Keep in mind that every "toy model" makes the simplification here that the blinking rate goes to infinity as the astronaut falls in! (I.e.: "They see the entire history of the universe play out." is a common quote)

[1] Isn't that a strong enough hint for everybody that there is no horizon!?