MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thedufer | 2025-05-11 17:29:37+00:00
> But you'll never get a test that can prevent errors like name@gnail.com, name@gmaip.com, nane@gmail.com etc. So is it really worth doing any checks at all?

You can do quite well at this, if you're willing to not restrict yourself to regexes and commit to some amount of hackery. One system I worked on used a simple regex (just what is described here IIRC - assert the existence of an @ sign), plus did an MX check on the domain, plus warned (not errored) if the domain was within 1 or 2 Levenshtein distance of any of a list of most common email domains (yahoo, gmail, etc). Statistically it seems like we saved people a lot of grief with this simple filtering.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-11 17:30:24+00:00
I'm sorry, whiny? Why don't you take a look at the HN guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

And there are things you can critique about Chrome, but it's certainly not "crappy". It's also the most popular by far, even on devices where it's not default.

So please don't tell people not to complain, and please don't call them whiny. It's entirely inappropriate, and not helpful at all. HN is not the place for these things.
by pacbard | 2025-05-11 17:30:26+00:00
Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is more likely to be hired and receives higher wages (initially) than a non-CTE program completer. My 2-minute Google Scholar search hasn't found anything on the topic.

At the end of the day, a 3-course sequence in a CTE pathway (which is the CA requirements for a high school CTE certificate in California) doesn't prepare you for a career in the same way as being in journalism class prepares you to be a journalist or being in theater prepares you to be an actor. Students will most likely need to pursue some form of post-secondary training (either through a community college or on-the-job) to become somewhat competent in their field.
by johnmaguire | 2025-05-11 17:30:32+00:00
While permanent changes to a brain are a thing, I don't think being addicted to smoking means you are addicted to drinking so I don't follow the "logic." You're stating that nicotine is not addictive unless you were previously addicted to nicotine in the presence of MAOIs, in which case nicotine on its own is addictive now?

I fail to understand how nicotine on its own would satisfy an addictive craving created by a different chemical or combination of chemicals, if it isn't addictive itself.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean about a previously emphasized counterexample either. Could you elaborate?
by benoau | 2025-05-11 17:30:49+00:00
This isn't exclusively or particularly solved by VC-funded or giant tech companies - Dropbox once deployed a bad build that accepted any password, Apple accidentally had a blank root password, I'm sure there are many more embarrassing tales like this.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-...

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/temporarily-fix-macos-high-...
by asadotzler | 2025-05-11 17:31:20+00:00
Maybe 30-40 years ago it was finance, but by 1996 with the Netscape IPO, it was clear to anyone coming out of school (as I was then) that tech was the future and finance was already old and tired after 15 years of dominance.

There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago.

Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.
by CM30 | 2025-05-11 17:31:46+00:00
They can be useful, though you have to use them carefully.

For instance, one of the best ways I've found to learn a new language or framework or technique is to find a working example of something, then take it apart piece by piece to see how it all fits together. LLMs can work really well here. They can give you a super basic example of how something works, as well as an explanation you can use as a jumping off point for further research.

And those basic examples can be surprisingly hard to find elsewhere. A lot of open source systems are designed for people with no programming knowledge whatsoever, and in a way that they can handle 52 million possible use cases with all the caveats that brings along. So when you're trying to learn from them, you end up having to untangle hundreds of conditions and feature flags and config options and other things designed for use cases you simply don't have. LLMs can provide a simple, customised example that avoids that.

That said, you have to be willing to try things yourself, and put in the effort needed to figure out why the code the LLM returned does what it does, and how it works on a technical level. If you're just throwing problems at the tool and letting them do all the work (like many vibe coders now), you're not really learning anything.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 17:32:02+00:00
> Did you see the magisterial quotes I linked to? Do you think they're wrong?

The very recent official Vatican document I referred to elsewhere here explained that, while the Church has utilized Aristotelian explanations of Catholic theology, especially as used by St. Thomas Aquinas, even in official Church documents such as the Council of Trent, this in no way officialized this theology, but was only used as a convenience.

> If you don't hold to a classical metaphysics, your understanding of transubstantiation will be different from the Church's. (The word only makes sense in an Aristotelian context.)

Right, the Catholic Church says that if you use St. Thomas Aquinas's explanations of Catholic theology through the framework of Aristotle, then yes, his explanations are correct. However, it also says you do not need to use his framework, and in fact new ways of explaining Catholic theology should be sought out, in much the same way the Early Church Fathers did.

> And so on and so on. Metaphysics affects everything.

> because persons and facts would be mere artifacts of the mind.

These two things you said are clearly showing me that you're not understanding me.

You're thinking of everything I'm saying through the eyes of some metaphysics. You're presuming it.

I'm not. I'm looking at reality in a common, everyday way, experientially, in the same way practically every person does all the time in their daily lives.

The difference is depth.

When we examine any aspect of reality, you seem to take it as far down as you concretely can. (I wonder if it's all just turtles for you.) You go depth first.

Whereas I myself go breadth first, and only as deep as needed to resolve a given question.

So when we talk about the multiplying of the loaves, you've already brought metaphysics in. You've presumed some kind of framework.

Whereas when I think about it, there is a point A and a point B. The point A is the historical facts as laid out by the gospel authors. The point B is some question, such as "how did they end up with more bread?" or "where did the new bread come from?"

For me, I don't need to go beyond answering the concrete questions. I draw in whatever external questions and answers are needed to answer the question I'm faced with. That may result in me pulling in a framework.

For St. Thomas Aquinas, it did. He pulled in Aristotle, patched it up, married it to Catholic theology, and used that.

I don't have to. I go through this process much more shallowly. The best analogy is that I use lazy evaluation of such questions, and you seem to think with fully eager evaluation. Almost as if it were an inherent necessity.
by elmerfud | 2025-05-11 17:32:19+00:00
It's simply inconsiderate folks and no change in boarding logistics will fix inconsiderate people. Certain people get on the plane and they don't realize there's a line of people behind them and no matter how many announcements are made they do not step out of the aisle in order to situate themselves. So they clog up the aisle and try and build a little nest in their tiny seat with all of their bags and accoutrements.

I suspect these are the same people that go to a Chipotle and can't decide what they want to order or what toppings they want on it. Even though they've been there a hundred times and they order the exact same thing on their burrito bowl each time for them is a brand new experience of toppings discovery.

People often complain about those in first class or business class, I rarely find them to be the problem. They want to get seated and get that plane moving as fast as possible. It's those who have no concept of how their actions affect and delay others and because they're not in a hurry no one else should be in a hurry.

We've all worked with these people. They're the same kind of people where they're told a feature deadline is in 3 days. They understand that they have some work to complete and three others have work to complete on that same feature. You have plenty of meetings so they know that their work needs to be completed first so the others can complete their work and everyone can hit the deadline in 3 days. All they seem to hear was their work needs to be completed in 3 days and it's not their fault that the other people couldn't make the deadline.
by evantbyrne | 2025-05-11 17:32:39+00:00
Building for scale is something that should usually be done incrementally. For systems where the speed at which workers pick up jobs isn't super important, let's be real, almost anything durable can work. Simple queues are easy enough to swap out in my experience that making the sub-optimal choice at first is probably fine, so long as you remain flexible to the idea of switching to something else later. Peace of mind comes from observability. The one thing I would caution is that it is a lot more difficult to evolve complex systems into simpler ones (e.g., going from a tool meant for event streaming to one just focused on queuing).
by pixl97 | 2025-05-11 17:32:56+00:00
I don't have the answer here. Open source is the base of a lot of secure software. And at the same time open source software gets pulled into other functional software that has wide spread and potentially dangerous outcomes.

OpenSSL for example. Any security flaw in this package has worldwide effects, but we would be lessor without it.

Another example is the xz software that was attacked and then pulled into distributions. We were just lucky it was caught relatively early.
by sph | 2025-05-11 17:33:44+00:00
FWIW I have spent the weekend testing out C-replacement languages and their interop (linking to libsdl3 and libtcl) with D, Go, Rust, Odin and C3. My quick impressions:

- D is featureful, but too much so. It feels an unfocused kitchen sink worse than C++. Overall the actual dev experience was nice.

- Go I know pretty well, but saddened that CGo is very slow, so I cannot consider it truly a C replacement

- Rust I also know decently well, but writing types and lifetimes isn’t my idea of fun. I’d rather have less safety when playing with code, I’m not always writing mission critical apps. Overall walks the fine line between excellent and unergonomic; pulls half a gig of dependencies just to include SDL3 which is pure madness.

- Odin I have played with before, excellent for the gamedev world, but some features seems like they have been added just because the author liked them. Having to explicitly set up the context variable in cdecl callbacks feels bad. I dislike the whole context thing actually, because it is rigid though convenient.

- C3: documentation is bad but feels the closest to a better C. Still in the breaking phase, I sent a PR this morning to adapt the SDL3 library to the latest release. Has macros which I haven’t tested but it’s a big plus. Some syntax makes no sense, like block labels and generic in {braces} but it’s the one I will keep playing with for this project. No one seems to use or know about it, which doesn’t bode well for its future.

- Zig I haven’t used this weekend, I loathe that unused variables are errors and it is very verbose. Docs and stdlib are way undercooked. comptime is a brilliant idea. Could be decent past 1.0 release.

- Jai: I’d love to try it, if I had access to the beta.

A lot of paper cuts and small issues, nothing is really worthy of being called a C replacement, but I do not want to write another header file again so these will make do for now.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-11 17:35:29+00:00
> But my wife gets headaches and stomach pains if she ingests it. No doubt psychosomatic, right?

No, it is quite possibly MSG sensitivity, which seems to be a very real thing that effects ~1% of the population. Plenty of things aren’t “harmful to the human body” in the general sense, but still have some portion of the population with a negative reaction, either an allergy or sensitivity.

Every person isn't the median person.
by spit2wind | 2025-05-11 17:36:40+00:00
There's also the Emacs Widget Library[1] (which I hoped this posted would be about). It's a plain text widget library that's quite powerful. Unfortunately (and surprisingly for Emacs), the documentation for it could use some love.

My understanding of the Widget Library is that it attaches various keywords and plists to a symbol which is considered the "widget". The library otherwise consists of functions that expect certain keywords on the "widget" symbol in order to perform actions or to be drawn on the screen.

The challenge is, the documentation doesn't clearly lay out what the keyword API is. This makes it hard to compose widgets in ways beyond what's shown in the docs.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/widget.h...
by johnisgood | 2025-05-11 17:36:59+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I think there is hope for C3, if they do not mind breaking backwards compatibility, which I hope they do not, for now!

We have similar experiences I would say. I do like Go a lot, but I rarely had to touch CGo though. The language does not get in the way of being productive. Rust seems like it does.

I would give Jai a try, too!

Have you tried Zig, or perhaps even Nim? Curious about your thoughts.
by anthk | 2025-05-11 17:37:36+00:00
Ob VB, performance wise, giving how 'fast' some C64 written in VB ran, I think it was on par of TCL/Tk, if not worse for some cases and better in a few obvious cases (Direct Draw/Direct X), but Unix people wrote the core in C and they put a Tk UI on top giving great speeds.

And, on people praising VBA integration under MS Office, that gave us security disasters with macros and millions of dollars lost because of Excel parsing genomics as dates.

It's better to decouple data and algorythms as separate files. Keep your raw data in a file, transform it and set the output in a separate process and file. You know, a proper pipeline. Something the Unix folks understood since the very beginning 50 years ago.

But "performance" fanboys don't care, until the shit hits the fan as it happened in Science with bioinformatics. Tons of studies, papers and research were just void because of shitty software.

Meanwhile, some Unix users with Slackware with discrete tools for every process (and not just a self-updating XLS file for everything) did it fine as they followed a basic reproducible chain.

https://slackalaxy.com/2019/03/15/slackware-and-slackbuilds-...

Harder? Yes, OFC. But, can you bet that your initial data will be the same on every process? For sure.
by andrehacker | 2025-05-11 17:38:15+00:00
Myeah, C and C++ have the advantage that the compilers support compile for old versions of the language. The languages are in much flux partly because of security problems, partly because features are added from other languages. That means that linking to external libraries using the older language version will fail unless you keep the old version around simply because the maintainer of the external library DID upgrade.

Python is not popular in ML because it is a great language but because of the ecosystem: numpy, pandas, pytorch and everything built on those allows you to do the higher level ML coding without having to reinvent efficient matrix operations for a given hardware infrastructure.
by riffraff | 2025-05-11 17:38:25+00:00
Matt Levine (financial columnist) often makes the point (or joke) that in fund management there a tendency to reward (as in: they get more money to manage) people who lost a lot of money, on the basis that they did manage to have a lot of money to start with, make bold bets, and should at least have learned something at this point.
by evanharwin | 2025-05-11 17:38:42+00:00
I wonder if social media could actually be a really positive push for the “small stakes big thinkers” type, in some cases.

There’s loads of great content on YouTube for example, with channels doing genuine and interesting science and experimentation in public. Channels like Breaking Taps, Journey to the Microcosmos, The Thought Emporium, all come to mind, for me. I’m sure you can think of others.

More hackernews-coded, perhaps, there’s also lots of cool small blogs positing some pretty neat ideas… although, sites like YouTube might arguably provide easier access to finance for sustaining these people!
by etherealG | 2025-05-11 17:39:03+00:00
Imagine this as a voice chat interface between 2 human beings. This is basically pretending like the interaction of thought and perception of what is on screen is somehow gated by a “I have fully consciously absorbed everything on screen and decided my next action” perfect modeling where both the human ability to perceive and the computer ability to represent information are prefect.

No. That’s not how humans interact with computers. It’s not how humans interact with each other either.

Turn based games can be fun. They are not how we want to interact for day to day life.

Sorry but your idea comes across as one that makes the job of making the computer good to interact with easier, but not as one that makes the computer better to interact with as a human.

Please stop over simplifying a complex system. Humans are complex, the solution is t to be less human. It is for computers to become better at human interaction on human levels.
by bitwize | 2025-05-11 17:39:46+00:00
Tcl/Tk mentioned. Let's goooooo!

I have never, for the life of me, found a quicker way to go from zero to GUI than Tcl/Tk. Even VB requires a lot of rat wrestling to set up a UI. Some people think that's how it should be done, but compared to just telling the machine what you want and letting it take care of layout, to me it's still cumbersome. Plus, Tk has had hierarchical, relative positioning and sizing, no need for doing layout in terms of absolute pixels or "dialog units", from the jump.
by zernie | 2025-05-11 17:40:08+00:00
PostgreSQL is quite terrible at OLAP, though. We got a few orders of magnitude performance improvement in some aggregation queries by rewriting them with ClickHouse. It's incredible at it.

My rule of thumb is: PG for transactional data consistency, Clickhouse for OLAP. Maybe Elasticsearch if a full-text search is really needed.
by djha-skin | 2025-05-11 17:40:25+00:00
> ... Gooogle has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.

I wish I had more elaboration on this paragraph. It seems like a real change happened of which Ian took notice.
by dingnuts | 2025-05-11 17:41:21+00:00
> In what country is there actually a "right to private, encrypted communication"?

I recognize that this is not a popular opinion, but IMHO IT SHOULD BE covered by the "secure in their papers" section in the 4th Amendment in the US, and/or with established precedent regulating encryption export as armaments, by the 2nd & the Heller decision granting the rights afforded by the 2nd to the individual

at least that's the correct interpretation of the founding document as far as I can tell. not that it matters anymore.
by mchannon | 2025-05-11 17:41:51+00:00
Just wow.

I think it's an uncomfortable truth that there was some good in Theranos in terms of the unfulfilled needs of society and the potential of diligent work toward realizing those needs with technology.

I don't know how often it's been said by others, but I often think that Theranos would have had an easier time if they hadn't falsified anything. Faking things takes effort too, and aiming a little lower and being less secretive would have been a better outcome. Maybe a different tack is possible through this reboot.

Mr. Evans' silver spoon is worth $10M, so raising $20M against that in such a fraught area is eye-opening. Whether he sees this as part of Elizabeth's redemption arc or just can't quit the hair of the dog that bit him, I guess we'll see.

Elizabeth Holmes' crime wasn't defrauding people, it was defrauding people richer than her. Change my mind.

Most VC's are taking it in the shorts right now anyway, because they're addicted to free money and there's no more free money, and most of them quite frankly suck at spotting good deals. So for the intrepid souls who cast their lot in with Mr. Evans, maybe only Nixon could go to China, and maybe they'll fare better than the stodgy fat-dumb-and-happy B-tier VC's who are not long for this brave new world anyway.
by rsync | 2025-05-11 17:41:52+00:00
"Any account in the world can be proven human by making a debit/credit card transaction from a card with a matching name."

A reminder: neither the Visa nor Mastercard payment networks have any ability to match, or authenticate, cardholder name.

We pretend that they do and we're used to merchants and operators (and web forms) insisting on exact matches of cardholder name ... but it's all a fiction.

As long as you get the digits - and the supporting number/zip portions - correct, the transaction will run with "Mickey Mouse" ... or even "A B" (initials).

This is in contrast to AMEX whose network does have cardholder name verification.
by oooyay | 2025-05-11 17:42:42+00:00
Rather than focusing on Holmes and her lover, I'd like to posit some other questions I have with this approach. Let's assume for just a minute that Holmes wasn't trying to rug pull and that she genuinely wanted Theranos to succeed in it's stated mission.

Wouldn't a foundational invention like this 20-30 years ago come out of a university lab? It feels like VC funding is not the right vehicle for the kind of development that takes a lot of time and must work the first time. Those VCs are going to be looking for returns.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-11 17:42:44+00:00
They have been dug up already. IIRC they have undergone extensive scanning over the years - X-Ray, CT etc - while not being unrolled.

So they have the scans of the rolled up scrolls, this is "just" (ha!) using the scan data with lots of algorithms and compute (AI? I presume so) to virtually unroll the scrolls and read the ink off the page.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-05-11 17:43:11+00:00
wow I fully missed your bsky post, I'm sorry

it was extremely fun organizing that QR Show. it's actually very fun organizing events/jams in general (I'm also thinking of https://wambamjam.recurse.com/ ) -- you put out an invite, get it to interesting people, and then step back. (and, like, get snacks).

that QR Show was truly a success because of people like you who brought original works -- a lot of these pieces were made in the last weeks! and days! leading to it. it was just astonishing to see.

I've shared with some friends that I'd be afraid to repeat that show because it went so well (like - should there be a yearly? qr show??). I'm still mulling this over.

thanks again!
by Michelangelo11 | 2025-05-11 17:43:22+00:00
Yes, but in that example, he specifically says the ugly surgeon has to be as high-profile as the carefully-coiffed, megawatt-smile, could-have-just-walked-off-the-Chicago-Hope-set surgeon you're comparing him to. It's a heuristic for choosing between experts of roughly the same rank.