MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What should a newcomer know to get started on Hacker News?"
by Elaris | 2025-05-14 07:49:11+00:00
Hi everyone

I’m new to this community and still trying to understand how everything works. I’ve read some posts and searched online for the rules and guidelines, but there are still a lot of things I’m unclear about!

I’d like to ask those of you who have been here for a while, what should a newcomer like me know to get started smoothly? Are there things I should pay particular attention to when posting, or any unspoken rules I should be aware of?

I really appreciate any advice or tips you can share.
by beAbU | 2025-05-14 07:49:18+00:00
Retail banks have branches. If something happens to my account and I'm locked out I can literally walk from my home to the branch and raise hell.

I, like many in my corner of Europe double-bank, with salaries, loans and mortgages sitting at a brick&mortar bank, and we only send our monthly spending money to revolut, exactly because if revolut decides to close my account for whatever reason, I might have max €2k frozen.
by jbaiter | 2025-05-14 07:49:53+00:00
As somebody traveling with small children, what's even more frustrating is that AirBnB seems to have a tag "Well reviewed by families", but refuses to allow you to search for it. Which means using more indirect filters (like "has a baby bed") and clicking through dozens of listings to find one with that tag. I get why they do it (looking at more listing is great for them), but I feel like they're wasting my time and it sucks, researching holidays is a frustrating timesink as it is, and they make it worse.
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-14 07:49:56+00:00
No, we are in the process of writing up some proper benchmarks. Our first user used us to build MuskMap and TrumpMap, which went viral on twitter. Not sure how it compared to other graph DBs at the time (bear in mind this was v1 and very bear bones), but it got latency of using Postgres >5s down to 50ms with us.
by Aziell | 2025-05-14 07:49:59+00:00
This reminds me of my time in a high-pressure work environment. Every day felt like walking on a ticking time bomb, just waiting for something to explode.

Over time, I realized that excessive stress and anxiety weren’t solving anything. In fact, they were making relationships with my colleagues tense. So, I started trying to slow down, giving myself and others some space, and holding onto those connections that I might need in the future.

Because no matter how important work is, relationships will always be the most valuable asset.
by genewitch | 2025-05-14 07:50:01+00:00
You know, I didn't really think of this till your comment: this was a vast conspiracy spanning years. You always hear, when discussions of "conspiracies" happen, things like "it would involve too many people, too many moving parts" like opsec would be impossible. And then you have the pagers.

Kinda like the old chestnut that rich people are only rich on paper and then, Musk buys twitter. Not tesla, or some DBA, Musk.

This decade might actually be the season of reveal.
by vkou | 2025-05-14 07:50:32+00:00
Vancouver has 20-person minibuses serving suburban routes. They are what make the rest of the transit system work.

I'm told (but have no idea of how true that is, since my social circles don't intersect it) that New York has a cottage industry of private bus-vans, that sit somewhere between a taxi and a vanpool that get people (usually working poor) to and from work.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-05-14 07:50:41+00:00
Personally i print everything before going. Itinerary, hotel booking, ESTA/Visa/whatever.

I also keep those documents on my phone for convencience, and will happily checkin using an app 24 hours before arriving at the airport, as well as check in using Apple Wallet or whatever the Android alternative is, but having the documents in printed form gives a certainty when you're stuck in an airport going through security and the "system" breaks down.

I have no idea what the TSA would do if you came to them and their system was down, but i assume a printed ESTA would be good enough.
by Corey_ | 2025-05-14 07:50:57+00:00
I completely agree that TypeScript is ideal for LLMs. The type system and the extensive training data make it the best choice. But as someone who's been working with TypeScript for a while, I still see LLMs struggling with complex generics or even simple types. It’s better than before, but still far from perfect.

Also, TypeScript error messages can be a pain. When LLMs encounter something like "SomeType is not assignable," instead of handling it properly, they often just cast it to any. This happens way too often.
by borroka | 2025-05-14 07:52:09+00:00
We all know what you should do, be doing, and not do. Of course, we should do our job earnestly and enthusiastically, love our families to death, and protect the weak and help the poor. All in this ethereal world in which there are no trade-offs, good and evil are separated like the ocean and the mountain, and somebody, up there, is looking pensively at our actions.

But the wise person, after reading a few inspirational books and slogans for the masses, gets annoyed at the simplistic "just be kind" that means nothing when out of context, of tough decisions to make, of mornings when everybody and everything annoy them. And so they decide to go back to looking at actions, that words are fleeting, but examples are lasting.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-14 07:52:24+00:00
Right but if it's the same as a laptop why not just use a laptop?

The only things I can think of are you really want to keep all the data on your phone and don't want to use cloud sync solutions (Dropbox etc.), or you really want to save a couple of hundred dollars getting a (probably terrible) laptop without a motherboard. Not very compelling IMO.
by hello_computer | 2025-05-14 07:54:28+00:00
> threatened by and worried

No, disgusted by the hubris and the stupidity. "De-programmed" is, in actuality, programming for a different agenda. Shouldn't be programming or de-programming anybody. If one group is de-programming with OpenAI, in time, another group will be de-programming with Tay. It is all abomination.
by BlackFly | 2025-05-14 07:54:31+00:00
I would say that RAII is very explicit: Resource Acquisition Is Initialization. When you initialize the struct representing the resource you are acquiring the resource. If you have a struct representing a resource you have the resource. Knowing this, you are also acquiring a call to drop when it goes out of scope. I would argue that the difference here isn't explicitness.

Instead, I would argue that rust is favoring a form of explicitness together with correctness. You have to clean up that resource. I have seen arguments that you should be allowed to leak resources, and I am sympathetic, but if we agree on explicitness as a goal then perhaps you might understand the perspective that a leak should be explicit and not implicit in a the lack of a call a some method. Since linear types are difficult to implement auto-drops are easier if you favor easily doing the correct thing. If you want to leak your resource, stash it in some leak list or unsafe erase it. That is the thing that should be explicit: the unusual choice, not all choices and not the usual choice alone.

But yeah, the drop being implicit in the explicit initialization does lead to developers ignoring it just like a leak being implicit if you forget to call a function often leads to unintentionally buggy programs. So when a function call ends they won't realize that a large number of objects are about to get dropped.

To answer your original question, the rationale is not in one concise location but is spread throughout the various RFCs that lead to the language features.
by tcfhgj | 2025-05-14 07:55:11+00:00
> people are told to always clone when learning, why isn't this semantics built into the language?

Because cloning as opposed to copying is expensive and it generates a new instance of a type. In C, you don't clone, you simply copy the struct or pointer, which will lead to a pointer to the same memory or a struct with members pointing to the same memory.

C++ on the other hand has a copy constructor, and you have to move explicitly, often generating unnecessary copies (in the sense of clone)

> Mojo's lifetime does not tell the compiler when a value is safe to use but when it is safe to delete,

What happens if you pass the variable mutably to a function?
by danielbarla | 2025-05-14 07:55:44+00:00
Well, if we're talking about the same thing, there are laws that the banks and fintechs are bound by. These carry hefty fines for the bank and potential jail terms for their employees if not followed to the letter, including things like providing zero context or information about why your account was blocked when suspicion of fraud or money laundering is raised. The failure to report suspicion is likewise punishable.

Do people feel that complying with the law is unreasonable, or do they feel like banks do other shady stuff in the name of compliance?
by killerstorm | 2025-05-14 07:56:06+00:00
Note that this works within a single sequence of tokens. It might be consistent with "episodic memory" metaphor if we consider a particular transformer run as its experience.

But this might be very different from what people expect from "memory" - i.e. ability to learn vast amounts of information and retrieve it as necessary.

This is more like a refinement of transformer attention: instead of running attention over all tokens (which is very expensive as it's quadratic), it selects a subset of token spans and runs fine-grained attention only on those. So it essentially breaks transformer attention into two parts - coarse-grained (k-NN over token spans) and fine-grained (normal).

It might be a great thing for long-context situations. But it doesn't make sense when you want millions of different facts to be considered - making them into long context is rather inefficient.
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-14 07:56:19+00:00
We are open-source, so you can use and self host us for free. Our plan is to create a managed service (so long as all goes well) which shouldn't be priced any differently from other databases in the space.

We chose AGPL to make sure someone can't make a cloud hosted version of our product, think MongoDB on AWS a few years back.
by chexum | 2025-05-14 07:56:20+00:00
In the UK, similar situations are common when “someone” flags any transaction to or from you as suspicious, at which point they need to freeze it, report it to an appropriate branch of an organisation, and… wait. That organisation most of the times doesn’t respond, so the hold expires in about two weeks, and then everything resumes working.

The thing is, noone can be told of this freeze/hold, that would be mean tipping off the party that made the suspicious transaction - from what I gather, it’s actually illegal to reveal it’s frozen, so they invent all kinds of meaningless/dumb reasons why the transaction (or the account) can’t be used right now.

So, lack of transparency and accountability IS the purpose of the system in that case.
by mppm | 2025-05-14 07:56:32+00:00
> Any traditional local bank will usually speak with you first before opening an account. In contrast, neo-banks open accounts quickly and then rely heavily on automated fraud prevention systems, since manual reviews are costly.

Maybe that was still the case in 2015. In 2025, a traditional bank will ask for a ton of documentation, run it through the same (probably outsourced) automated fraud prevention system and tell you that unfortunately an account cannot be opened for you. At least that is a common situation for businesses that are too small to be important to the bank, but carry some compliance risk (international consulting, app developers, digital services, etc.). And then you are back to neo-banks...

This has been a trend everywhere, recently, but the severity of the situation differs country by country, so YMMV.
by csomar | 2025-05-14 07:57:08+00:00
I once had a fintech account with a company that is EU regulated. It was a long time ago and I used it for a couple transactions that resulted in a 0.27 Eur dust balance. I didn't use it after that and a couple years before Covid they decided they need more KYC to keep the account active and I just ignored them.

To this day I still get emails about my remaining balance roughly every quarter. During this time (7 years!), I had multiple exchanges with support guys and one of them escalated. The back office guy explained that in order to access/transfer my balance, I need to do as much KYC as if I was opening a new fresh account. He also made me understand that there is a 2 Euro fee to move my 0.27 Euro balance.

So there we have it. Apparently, they can't close the account because it has a balance in it. And also they can't transfer the balance without going through KYC. As if all of that matter, it makes no financial sense for me to claim the remaining balance. Regulatory dystopia at full display.
by mvdwoord | 2025-05-14 07:57:11+00:00
I am also deterred by the never ending shady descriptions and filtering. Too many times, selecting something with two bedrooms, and when you look and read closely, it shows a couch in the living room which is the "second bedroom". This and quality issues, and sometimes even blatant cancellations from the owners.

My GF loves it though and has a bigger preference of staying somewhere more homely as opposed to a hotel. Truth be told she has found a couple of great places...
by xavcochran | 2025-05-14 07:57:48+00:00
Thanks for the kind words! At the moment the query language transpilation is quite unstable but we are in the process of a large remodel which we aim to finish in the next day or so. This will make the query language compilation far more robust, and will return helpful error messages (like the rust compiler). The other thing is the core traversals are currently single threaded, so aggregating huge lists of graph items can take a bit of a hit. Note however, that we are also implementing parallel LMDB iterators with the help of the meilisearch guys to make aggregation of large results much faster.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-05-14 07:58:05+00:00
https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_z_fold6-13147.php

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 Weight 239 g (8.43 oz)

https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_16_pro_max-13123.php

Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Weight 227 g (8.01 oz)

Ah, yes, the whole 12g difference!
by raducu | 2025-05-14 07:58:24+00:00
> but also about the other side knowing what you know

The israelis used the Spike missile for DECADES (they even had mock tanks launching it) and kept it quiet.

The ukrainians immediately uploaded videos of them using FPVs, I was sure at that time that the russians will in no time catch up and surpass ukraine in their FPV drone usage.
by supermatt | 2025-05-14 07:58:51+00:00
Google absolutely is, but through lobbying they have managed to retain an antiquated definition of what the “market” is. I.e they would say it’s the mobile market, whereas the reality is that it’s now an “android” market and an “iOS” market.

That’s exactly what the EUs “digital markets act” was created to address. In a true market there are no walled gardens, the market is accessible to all.

Personally I think it’s not enough and that they should also be split up. Ideally I feel any corporation should be restricted to a single market segment or trade category.
by arnsholt | 2025-05-14 07:59:06+00:00
That's the tyranny of Gödel incompleteness (or maybe Rice's theorem, or even both): useful formal systems can be either sound or complete. Rust makes the choice of being sound, with the price of course being that some valid operations not being expressible in the language. C of course works the other way around; all valid programs can be expressed, but there's no (general) way to distinguish invalid programs from valid programs.

For your concrete example of subdividing matrixes, that seems like it should be fairly straightforward in Rust too, if you convert your mutable reference to the data into a pointer, wrap your pointer arithmetic shenanigans in an unsafe block and add a comment at the top saying more or less "this is safe because the different subprograms are always operating on disjoint subsets of the data, and therefore no mutable aliasing can occur"?
by Incipient | 2025-05-14 07:59:52+00:00
>Australia is a good benchmark of what that looks like. Several of their states run on solar and battery most of the time with coal/gas plants only switching on occasionally now.

I'm in Australia and have absolutely zero clue this is a thing. Do you have any sources for this? As far as I was aware we only had a few batteries that didn't really last too long (at a grid scale).
by hnbad | 2025-05-14 08:00:06+00:00
This is a general problem. These things worked before those platforms became successful enough to warrant a cottage industry around them. Nowadays there are "reputation management" companies specializing in getting bad reviews deleted by any means and shady businesses will actively bribe or shame customers into giving them perfect scores. For a while everyone knew that 5 star and 1 star ratings are often fake and that you should check the ratings in between to get the real ones but nowadays those often don't exist or are just as fake (often left by shadier "reputation management" companies to score them an easy win if the business hires them).

What services like Airbnb would need would be direct partners actually testing the listings in person. But that costs money and requires hiring staff, which is antithetical to the business model of "gig economy" apps which exist in order to avoid the overhead of running a real company in that industry by instead offloading all the work to "gig workers" as independent contractors.
by diego_sandoval | 2025-05-14 08:00:31+00:00
I generally believe that markets are somewhat efficient.

But somehow, we've ended up with the current state of Windows as the OS that most people use to do their job.

Something went terribly wrong. Maybe the market is just too dumb, maybe it's all the market distortions that have to do with IP, maybe it's the monopolístic practices of Microsoft. I don't know, but in my head, no sane civilization would think that Windows 10/11 is a good OS that everyone should use to optimize our economy.

I'm not talking only about performance, but about the general crappiness of the experience of using it.
by melodyogonna | 2025-05-14 08:01:39+00:00
> What happens if you pass the variable mutably to a function?

What happens in what manner? Mojo uses ASAP memory model, values will always be destroyed at the point of its last use. Mojo dataflow analysis will track this.

In terms of safety, Mojo will enforce `alias xor mutability` - like in Rust.

> C++ on the other hand has a copy constructor, and you have to move explicitly, often generating unnecessary copies (in the sense of clone)

Mojo also has copy and move constructors, but unlike in C++ these are not synthesised by default; the type creator has to either explicitly define the constructors or add a synthesiser. In Mojo, you can have types that are not copyable and not movable, these types can only be passed by reference. You can also have types that are copyable but not movable, or movable but not copyable.
by berkes | 2025-05-14 08:02:29+00:00
This can be categorized as "spam".

Fighting spam isn't done by using unfamiliar tech, but by actually fighting the spam.

With good contributor guidelines, workflows, filters, etc.

Contributions that don't adhere to the guidelines, or cannot fit in the workflow can be dismissed or handed back.

Two random examples of things I came across in PRS recently:

"Sorry, this isn't on our roadmap and we only work on issues related to the roadmap as per the CONTRIBUTION-GUIDELINES.md and the ROADMAP.md"

"Before we can consider your work, please ensure all CI/CD passes, and the coding style is according to our guidelines. Once you have fixed this, please re-open this ticket"

That is fine, a solved problem.

Using high barrier tech won't keep intentionally harmful contributions away. It won't prevent political mess or flamewars. It won't keep ranters away. It won't help with contributors feelings of rejection and so on. Good review procedures with enough resources, help prevent harmful changes. Guidelines and codes of conduct and resources and tech to enforce, help against rants, bullying or flamewars, not "hg vs git". Good up-front communication on expectation is the solution to people demanding or making changes that can never be accepted.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-14 08:02:34+00:00
They can close it, banks have no problem closing accounts with residual balances and they just keep the money if normal fees exceed the balance.

Too much time is wasted discussing with various bots and call centre-based "customer support" these days. Normal procedure is/was to send a letter instructing them to close the account and to let them deal with it.
by masfoobar | 2025-05-14 08:02:38+00:00
I do wonder how many improvements there would be in big, popular applications if one of their developers revised commonly used data structure to (things like) an SOA pattern.

I am not talking about low-level programming like Kernels or the latest-and-greatest video game, but I also refer to Office type applications, or other specialised software in other fields.

Seriously, think of those big and/or popular applications like Teams, Visual Studio, or some other application you use regularly. Programs like these SHOULD be made with some TLC to the point that SOME AREAS SHOULD CARE about the "mechanism that manipulates bytes in flat memory"

AOS to SOA is one of various things you can do to improve performance. Some popular applications may be doing that but I do question a number of them why it take over 10 seconds to launch... and that is on a good day.

It comes back full circle for the general "regulars" like me in the web/app world, creating something bespoke for customers or staff. Sure, we use an OOP/GC language but I push for clean, easy to read code. I like my code obvious to follow but when I see code that jumps in memory or takes a while to complete, I have to investigate WHY.

Each programming language can have their tips and tricks to follow and most of time the improvements can be handled in there. However, there are other times when I break down an object (a data structure) for better processing. It still falls back to understanding the basics of memory and processing.

In short this will ALWAYS be a thing even in 2025. Also, I would love to use Odin in the workplace and have "better control" - I have been using Odin for quite a few months on personal projects and I really like it. Just like the article, it is a language that has been made for me.
by aurareturn | 2025-05-14 08:02:49+00:00
Potential hidden cameras is the #1 reason I prefer hotels over Airbnb.

I've seen Airbnb slowly get banned in many places I've visited over the last 5-6 years. Hong Kong. Banned and heavily restricted. Singapore. Same. Saigon. Same. All of China. Same. Taipei. Same.

I sold all my Airbnb stocks. I couldn't be wrong and maybe they'll find a way but it seems like the world wants less and less Airbnb and not more.
by tkgally | 2025-05-14 08:03:32+00:00
I understand. I don’t get exactly the same degree of roasting each time. The roasted beans themselves are not as consistently roasted as ideal, either; after I grind them, I notice some lighter and darker grounds mixed in. But that doesn’t seem to affect the taste, as least as far as I can tell.

Anyway, it’s for my consumption only. I’m enjoying the manual roasting process, and I think I am gradually getting better at it.
by deng | 2025-05-14 08:04:55+00:00
Yes, you'll need a little bridge to get a ParcelFileDescriptor. Lots of stuff in Android does not work directly with native code (Permissions, Camera/Media recording, HttpURLConnection, sensors/location services, ...), and storage access is now sandboxed in a similar way and needs a few lines of Java/Kotlin. I fully see that this is annoying, and Android is tiring developers with constant changes like these, but on the other hand, I guess most people would agree that securing storage access is a good thing.