MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HelloImSteven | 2025-05-06 17:06:04+00:00
I have a negative perception of both LinkedIn and OKCupid, and of matchmaking services in general.

The strength of these platforms is the same as their weakness: they aim to eliminate suboptimal outcomes. While that is beneficial on the surface, I take issue with how it effectively rules out any chance of unlikely matches somehow working out. The question of “Do I give them a chance based on just a feeling?” never needs to get raised. Considering how significant both personal and professional relationships are in people’s lives, to me it’s akin to deciding someone’s fate on the basis of a prediction. It doesn’t leave much room for people to exercise free will, or it at least doesn’t prioritize it.

From the standpoint of optimization above all else, these services are immensely valuable, so it makes sense to at least consider them for various purposes. However, for me, the benefits are outweighed by the feeling of infringing on people’s free will.
by brulard | 2025-05-06 17:06:11+00:00
While your use case is valid, it's nowhere near as annoying to have to wait 1 second for a button to enable than it is to call random person from your contacts because his name appeared under your fat finger. Maybe there can be a distinction between expected layout change and ad-hoc elements appearing, like notifications, list updates etc. I would probably go too far asking for a setting of "time to enable after layout change"
by zahlman | 2025-05-06 17:06:52+00:00
Dependency metadata is published within packages - both for wheels (prebuilt) and sdists (source that requires a build step - these projects often include non-Python code, but you can still request an entirely pointless build step for a Python-only project. But please read https://pradyunsg.me/blog/2022/12/31/wheels-are-faster-pure-... and don't do that.)

PyPI even extracts it in most cases, to my understanding, so that installers can solve for the right versions of dependencies without downloading entire packages. (But the metadata for the project is still fragmented across multiple per-distribution files.)

However, source distributions are still allowed to have metadata - including dependencies - marked as "dynamic" (i.e., declaring that they'll be determined during the build process). This is rarely necessary (and probably happens much more often than is necessary), but a very complex project might for example have different dependencies based on specific details of the user's environment that aren't currently expressible in the existing environment markers (see https://peps.python.org/pep-0508/).

My experience with the Python ecosystem has been that it tries a bit too hard to make absolutely everyone happy (despite all the times that quite a few people end up unhappy). Today's concessions to backward compatibility always seem to make tomorrow's even harder to implement.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-06 17:07:07+00:00
Historically, it was a decision to avoid cognitive load for GUI applications. To be fair, it's been a while since I've heard anyone complain about it - most servers and containers run with both an en-US locale and/or the invariant globalization set to true. It may sometimes be an issue when debugging locally but it can be quickly addressed, if the solution for some reason does not pass the culture explicitly or does not set the invariant globalization.

I think before there was a global toggle it was a pretty bad default, but nowadays it's not a practical challenge at all. It's a "solved problem". As for .NET Framework applications - they have bigger issues to worry about. The teams willing/forced to stay with it know what they sign for.

Also, why the downvotes?
by sneak | 2025-05-06 17:07:21+00:00
No, you’re conflating two things: subsidizing the poor (eg food stamps) and subsidizing education.

We don’t subsidize the education of children for just the poor - we subsidize the education of children for EVERYONE, including families that can afford to pay for their own luxury choices like having children.

This isn’t about letting children go without. This is about who out of two families, one with kids and one without, both of whom can afford what is needed, pays for the choices of the family that opted to have children.

It’s all too easy to obscure the moral issue here, which is that people who don’t have or want children are being forced to pay for the education of the children of parents who very well can pay for their own children. That’s like making everyone in a city, regardless of car ownership, pay into a public automobile insurance fund that covers anyone with a car (including luxury cars).
by roxolotl | 2025-05-06 17:07:56+00:00
My point though is that simulated suffering, if simulated effectively, is as real as nonsimulated suffering. The important part of suffering is that it’s experienced. The inverse of fake people experiencing real suffering is that if you put a real person in a torture machine but you somehow prevent them from experience suffering they would not be suffering. So it does not matter whether or not the people are real.

I fully understand some people disagree as you’re saying. But I believe they aren’t being intellectually honest with themselves and are actually just trying to excuse the reality of simulated suffering.
by kibwen | 2025-05-06 17:07:59+00:00
> Everyone whining about the downfall of society seems to forget that it didn't actually work for everyone before.

I'm not presenting this as either a good thing or a bad thing, only pointing out that the mechanisms by which people ensure social adherence have changed. And yes, that's "changed", and not "gone away". For all the things the cryptobros got wrong, they did accurately identify that, in a transactional society, the only thing required to exclude someone from society is to take away their ability to perform financial transactions.
by camasaki | 2025-05-06 17:08:00+00:00
Since vibecoding is meant to bring the results of programming to the masses and not meant to replace good programmers I don’t feel threatened by it. It’s for quick prototyping and throwaway ideas and allows Jack the carpenter to spin up an app for “free” which might work. As a basis for communicating ideas and quick prototyping it will find its place.
by swivelmaster | 2025-05-06 17:08:22+00:00
Honestly, I used to focus much more on how objectively interesting music was. I got into Frank Zappa and started down the very deep rabbit hole of his discography, and eventually realized that I really loved some of it and the rest was just... not enjoyable.

Speaking as someone who has been writing music for quite a long time, writing something that is objectively interesting (by being complex or unusual) is much, much easier than writing something that is just plain entertaining.

I think there's always something to be said for pushing boundaries, and I love experiencing any art or entertainment that makes me think "oh shit, I didn't know you could do that." But even then, that doesn't make it good or enjoyable, just interesting or thought-provoking. They're not mutually exclusive, but they also aren't necessarily correlated either.
by derriz | 2025-05-06 17:08:30+00:00
> It is completely reasonable for Russia to not want NATO on their doorstep.

There must be a name for this sort of false argument.

What Russia "wants" with respect to its neighbors is not the problem. It's the large scale ground invasion, indiscriminate killing of civilians, kidnapping children, torturing journalists, shelling cities to rubble.

There's absolutely nothing reasonable about Russia's attitude. You don't get to pick what clubs your neighbors decide to willingly join. Does Poland get to demand that Belarus not join CSTO? Does the US get to demand that Canada leave the IPCC?
by pmontra | 2025-05-06 17:08:58+00:00
That seems to be a Mediterranean thing. Pitch black shutters are common also in Italy and (AFAIK) Spain. No idea about the eastern and southern Mediterranean.

Rolling shutters are the norm in Italy. Old houses or country houses have traditional shutters, in the latter case mostly because of aesthetics. They come in two varieties: they open like the doors of wardrobe or they slide on a rail on the outside of the wall. All of them used to be made of wood, they are PVC or aluminum now. Windows with only heavy dark curtains inside basically are not a thing.

No idea about the reason. Some random ideas. 1) no need to protect against excessive cold and wind (curtains are very useful for that) and it's ok to open a window and open or close shutters. 2) hail can break glass windows and shutters protect them. Are hail storms historically common also in northern Europe? Maybe not.
by KerrAvon | 2025-05-06 17:09:13+00:00
One common use case is remote debugging over serial or ssh.

edit: and a reason you would do this locally using ssh is debugging the UI layer itself. if you have to step through the window server, you can't be using the window server at the same time. Remote lldb/gdb debugging is often just flaky. I don't know why they're so unreliable, but they are.
by selenography | 2025-05-06 17:09:17+00:00
> It's again, unofficial and unwritten and unstudied American English.

Hm? Where'd you get that impression?

It's certainly unofficial -- English has no official governing body, so essentially _all_ English is unofficial. However, zero-derived denominal verbs are quite common in even formal written English [0], are well studied [1], and aren't at all limited to American English [2].

----

[0] As seen in this very thread.

[1] It took me almost no time to find a random academic paper [1a] and two Wikipedia articles [1b][1c].

[1a] https://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/PDFs/HarleyDenominalV...

[1b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denominal_verb

[1c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

[2] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/the-pedant-noun...
by opwieurposiu | 2025-05-06 17:09:20+00:00
The labor for this many nails is intense. They had to first smelt the iron, cast the pigs, "puddle" the cast iron to remove carbon and make wrought iron, hammer the wrought into rod, and THEN they could start making the nails.

800,000 nails × 3 minutes = 2.4 million minutes = 40,000 hours = 20 Years of labor
Show HN: Mid-level Node.js helpers for building a front-end website
by sbjs | 2025-05-06 17:09:32+00:00
Hi HN. I can't stop trying new ways to write my websites, and the web world is ever evolving. For both reasons, I stopped trying to write a build tool for developing front-ends, and wrote some helpers for Node.js that ideally would be part of any front-end build tool. They're high-enough level that you could use them directly, and low-enough level that you could build a framework on top of them (Vite could refactor itself to use them and remove a lot of its own code).
by johnjungles | 2025-05-06 17:09:57+00:00
If you want to try out mcp (model context protocol) with little to no setup: I built https://skeet.build/mcp where anyone can try out mcp for cursor and dev tools. We did this because of a painpoint I experienced as an engineer having to deal with crummy mcp setup, lack of support you have no idea how hard it is to set up SSE, deal with API keys and scope issues, and then to find things like the tool that you want isn’t even coded yet. And so one of the areas we found it to be useful was to do the soft communications with tools like Jira linear slack - updating stakeholders and all that friction that engineers hate doing. Some other areas people use a lot of tools with sequential thinking Mostly for workflows that I like: * start a PR with a summary of what I just did * slack or comment to linear/Jira with a summary of what I pushed * pull this issue from sentry and fix it * Find a bug a create a linear issue to fix it * pull this linear issue and do a first pass * pull in this Notion doc with a PRD then create an API reference for it based on this code * Postgres or MySQL schemas for rapid model development Everyone seems to go for the hype but ease of use, practical pragmatic developer workflows, and high quality polished mcp servers are what we’re focused on Lmk what you think!
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-06 17:10:01+00:00
The city of London is Metropolitan London. The Big-C City of London is the little bit mostly fascinating to those of us who go down Wikipedia rabbit holes. I didn't capitalize it for a reason; I emphasize its being a city because it's useful in the "well that's because the stats are for entire countries" aspect of things.

Big cities in Europe are largely safer statistically than even the low-crime areas of the US.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-06 17:10:04+00:00
Why people voted for someone is different from why the winner was chosen from the votes cast. The former is impossible absent forcing everyone to write justifications, the latter though does have a range of understandability.

A lot of voting systems, mostly ranked systems, are essentially black boxes. These can't easily be understood because often, one can't publish intermediate voting tallies without compromising anonymity. These systems can't be easily audited, independently validated or manually recounted. Answering why someone won from the votes cast in these is exceptionally difficult (which of course makes them wonderful targets for election rigging).

That said, FPTP isn't the only easy to understand voting system. Approval voting is just as easy to grasp since aggregate intermediate tallies can be released like with FPTP.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-06 17:10:04+00:00
This is solid insight. Particularly the part about letting go. For software, if one decides to solve a problem, it's easy to transition from making a birdhouse to becoming deeply invested in the mating habits of swallows.

In addition, I find when I start these projects from a place of hubris ("there couldn't possibly be a reason we transfer 10MB before every build"), I find myself consistently humbled. It's Chesterton's Fences built out of other, smaller Chesterton's Fences. The shape of the system is arbitrary but not meaningless.
by freedomben | 2025-05-06 17:10:09+00:00
> I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.

Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous. Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora
by Aurornis | 2025-05-06 17:10:28+00:00
> It is also great they speak to the chronic lyme condition because many people get accused of it being psychosomatic or even false (similar with long Covid).

I have a friend who worked in research for rare, chronic, and misunderstood diseases for a few years. Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS or just PTLD) is well accept by now.

The problem they encountered was that so many of the people who presented with "Chronic Lyme" diagnoses were either self-diagnosed from the internet or diagnosed by uninformed primary care doctors who used it as a catch-all for symptoms they couldn't diagnose. Many had never received positive test results, or they had received positive test results from cash-pay alternative medicine labs who used their own in-house alternate tests.

It was really depressing to hear stories about people who had been misled into spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on things like year-long courses of expensive, IV antibiotics for a condition they most likely did not have. Even the idea of a persistent infection hasn't held up to scrutiny. The current line of thinking is shown in this article, where persistent particles of past infection might cause ongoing immune-related symptoms. Those symptoms would not respond to the high-dose, long-term antibiotic therapy pushed by the alternative medicine Lyme treatment providers, obviously.

So while it's a difficult topic, having some better mechanism to separate the verified Lyme cases from the self-diagnosed or those wrongly diagnosed is actually very important for improving acceptance of the condition. It's tragic that many with persistent symptoms of true Lyme infections have been dismissed, but it's also tragic that many with non-Lyme conditions have been misled into thinking that "Chronic Lyme" is the explanation for all of their problems contrary to the evidence. Getting the latter group out of the "Chronic Lyme" mindset and on to a path where their true underlying condition can be addressed, whatever it may be, is a win for them.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-06 17:10:28+00:00
> Why don't you compare the US to Nigeria, Brazil, or Pakistan?

Because we are in the developed world, and "at least we're better than Pakistan" is probably not the highest of bars we should aspire to as a country?

> Those are more in-line with US population size than Germany, London, or China

The EU, if you prefer - similar size, population, state+federal(ish) makeup, developed world, mix of wealthy and poorer jurisdictions, etc. - has a 0.86/100k rate.
Show HN: ByteNite – Distributed compute meets serverless for AI and data
by fabcairo | 2025-05-06 17:10:58+00:00
Hi HN, I’m one of the creators of ByteNite (https://bytenite.com).

We built it for developers running compute-heavy containerized workloads (AI, ETL, batch jobs) who are frustrated with the limitations of traditional serverless platforms: timeouts, cold starts, orchestration complexity, and limited runtime control.

ByteNite is a serverless platform that lets you submit distributed jobs packaged as Docker containers.

You define simple or complex fan-out/fan-in logic, set your hardware requirements, and we handle the rest—distributing execution across warm cloud runners (CPUs, and soon GPUs). No cluster setup, no YAML, no orchestration tools needed.

We offer a CLI for developing and versioning your apps, an API for programmatic job submission, and a web platform to monitor jobs, logs, and usage.

Our pricing is usage-based and significantly cheaper, thanks to partnerships with multiple cloud providers and a patented orchestration system.

We’re launching today and would love your feedback—especially from folks building distributed systems or working with large-scale compute. AMA
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-06 17:11:09+00:00
My kid contracted it from a tick bite while camping in Ontario; it showed as joint pain in the legs that would come and go for like a week at a time. Made it tough to explain to the doctors as by the time we'd get there, he'd be fine again.

In the end it was four weeks of doxycycline— that was several months ago and it doesn't seem to have recurred, thankfully.
by roskelld | 2025-05-06 17:11:17+00:00
One Little Ghost (2012) [1] [2] for the ZX81 is one version I only recently found out about. Figured it was worth mentioning here given how impressive it is for a game on the humble ZX81 machine that's well over 40 years old.

[1] https://bobs-stuff.itch.io/one-little-ghost

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq2hOlC97SQ
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-06 17:12:18+00:00
> This is the actual C++ translation of the opening code in TFA:

No, it isn't: this is iterating over references, not moving. This is equivalent to

fn main() { let x = vec![1, 2]; for y in &x { println!("{}", y); } println!("{}", x.len()); }

in Rust. Note the &, just like in your C++.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-05-06 17:12:22+00:00
The hell it doesn't. They didn't accommodate his new disability. The foreman on the crew had to make the same climb in the same gear, they just weren't doing the cleaning. This is a guy who tore and broke every joint and bone in both legs and had two separate locations where they had to fuse his spine.

They wanted to offer him the job so they could fire him for not performing because they didn't want their premium to increase.
by rollcat | 2025-05-06 17:13:20+00:00
And I want 192.168.1.1 as the IP of my workstation on corporate LAN. Both requirements are completely arbitrary.

I guess if you really need that information, you could wait4 and dump pid/rusage to syslog. Nothing more to see here; these are zombies, orphans, by definition these processes have been disowned and there's nobody alive to tell the tale.
by redox99 | 2025-05-06 17:13:44+00:00
Yes. You could ask for factual information like "Tallest building in X place" and first it would answer it did not know. After pressuring it, it would answer with the correct building and height.

But also things where guessing was desirable. For example with a riddle it would tell you it did not know or there wasn't enough information. After pressuring it to answer anyway it would correctly solve the riddle.

The official llama 2 finetune was pretty bad with this stuff.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-06 17:14:11+00:00
Just for the curious, Ada is used in these industries:

- Avionics

- ATM

- Space

- Rail

- Automotive

- Defense

- Security

- Medical

https://www.adacore.com/about-ada

You can find lots of resources here to learn Ada / SPARK: https://learn.adacore.com or just to see what is up. Alternatively, there are good blog posts, too.
by dmje | 2025-05-06 17:14:12+00:00
My (probably naive) take on this is that America / the American Dream is founded on this principle of individualism / "boy done good" / "everyone can make something of themselves", and thus maybe a deep fear of collectivism? So:

1) wide dislike of any sort of social support mechanism (no public healthcare, poor support for the elderly / infirm / etc)

2) long history of anti-socialism and major fear of anything more radical, "reds under the bed" etc etc

3) little funding going towards big public infrastructure projects - I had a link to a well researched article - but can't now find it - talking about how US roads, powergrid, etc, is all crumbling away because nothing has been invested in significantly for decades

4) things like private prisons, all with profit-making as motive rather than anything wider such as societal good being considered

As a lefty, this all makes me chuckle - the idea that anyone could be foolish enough to think they can do anything alone without a huge lifelong support network just seems ridiculous. Even the most "self-made" founder who "came from nothing" has had to lean heavily on buses, trains, schools, universities, medical aid, electricity, their families, friends, the internet...

As someone once said, no man is an island - or I guess "it takes a village to raise a child" - so paying it forwards or backwards in taxes is a no-brainer if you think about it rationally.

Here endeth the socialist lesson.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-06 17:14:16+00:00
It's a lot simpler than you're making it: PMs don't want to pay for those things.

If you tell them what tests are, they will say that's a waste of time and we need to ship features. If you tell them there's a huge security vulnerability that will take 15 hours to fix, they will get vaguely angry with you in a way that directs you to another task, to avoid explicitly saying "we're not working on security." They are very good at this malicious misdirection. Their goal is to not understand their own liability and make it your choice to work overtime for free.

I'm dealing with this right now, a company with multiple data breaches who is trying to blame us, the new guys, for a breach that happened before we joined the project. They refuse to notify their customers because they "don't know how much data was leaked" (because they turned off the logs to save money). They have been so disgustingly negligent through this process I am considering leaving my job just to not deal with this one client.

There are developers that don't care, but many that do. And they have stories similar to mine. They are told not to care by managers. I've never met a good PM. I'm sure they are out there, but I'm convinced this position is a magnet for the scummiest snake oil salesman on the planet.