MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GeoAtreides | 2025-05-16 17:26:16+00:00
>I basically learned programming by ExpertSexchange, Google (and Altavista...), SourceForge and eventually StackOverflow + GitHub. Many people with more experience than me at the time always told me I was making a deal with the devil since I searched so much, didn't read manuals and asked so many questions instead of thinking for myself.

no they didn't, no one said that

i know that because i was around then and everyone was doing the same thing

also, maybe there's a difference between searching and collating answers and just copy and pasting a solution _without thinking_ at all
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-16 17:26:33+00:00
Proxy is so so slept on. There's so many realms of programming we could imagine & do via proxies, it's such a portal into the language doing and becoming so much more!

There's some usage in some core frameworks like Vue and Svelte to enable reactivity. Good, nice. Maybe sedately working behind the scene is enough, but I feel like the story of this should be more forward, that we can also be doing things like persistence and AOP with Proxies.
by sfink | 2025-05-16 17:26:45+00:00
I agree that organ transplants are a net positive, and in fact are far less susceptible to unintended consequences (there's a pretty low limit to the number of organs and operations involved, for one.)

I also think that gene repair is a net positive. I would just like us to, for once, look ahead and foresee some of the foreseeable consequences and act to mitigate them before the bulk of the damage is done.

I don't think it's necessary to slow the development; gene therapy is too desperately needed, and slowing it down so that we can prepare is not going to cause us to prepare.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-16 17:26:49+00:00
I had a friend who was asked to unlock her phone, and she did, and then… they did nothing. They watched her do it and moved on to the next question.

Seems like asking someone to do this is just a good test to see the kind of individual they’re dealing with. It’s not practical to thoroughly search phones at scale and plus they know people can just have burner phones anyway. If you’re cagey and combative they know you’re a problem.
by westurner | 2025-05-16 17:27:02+00:00
Ibis has sqlglot for parsing and rewriting SQL query graphs; and there's sql-to-ibis: https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis/issues/9529

sqlglot: https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot :

> SQLGlot is a no-dependency SQL parser, transpiler, optimizer, and engine [written in Python]. It can be used to format SQL or translate between 24 different dialects like DuckDB, Presto / Trino, Spark / Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery. It aims to read a wide variety of SQL inputs and output syntactically and semantically correct SQL in the targeted dialects.
by genewitch | 2025-05-16 17:27:09+00:00
at the very least, you've made up my mind that i need to photograph every 4 disc page in all of my cases, and label the cases. Right now it's like "MissingHandleCase" and "RightLockBrokenCase" and "LocksIntactWithStrapCase" and "LargestUnderBedCase"!

I do have discs from that era, as i have 680x0 Mac Performa OS discs - the ones that are silver and black with pixel / icon art of the mac smiley face on them. When i still had an actual SATA optical drive on a machine i was contemplating indexing all of my optical media. I started with some software on windows and it wasn't very good, i looked around for other options and came up with nothing. So i rely on my (admittedly non-perfect) memory of what i had on disc, up to ~30 years ago.

I may as well admit: I tried to "patent" an optical media "case" that mechanically held the middle of the disc, like a laptop cdrom spindle does, but with a button to release them so you didn't need to "bend" the disc to remove it. I had cad drawings and everything. But the vaultz cases are "good enough" for my usage - where i rarely, if ever, remove discs from their sleeves. As long as the cases aren't jostled regularly, and never left open and exposed to dust, and kept in a controlled environment (not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry), i don't forsee any issues from the storage of the discs. Whether or not the foil layer or glue or any of that holds up - well, my optical disc case design was actually gasket sealed, and had something like a Schraeder valve to pump air out, or nitrogen in; this probably would have made the foil and glue last longer.

I had completely forgotten i had invented that until i started commenting on the longevity of my optical media. Sorry. Amateur archivist, here. Nice to meet you.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-16 17:27:28+00:00
> Yet again you are lost in ideology

I could say the same about your arguments. Labor unions simply did not affect a high enough percentage of the population to attribute American prosperity to them.

> without those there would still be slavery

Slavery was abolished due to the Union Army, not unions. I've never heard any mention of labor unions being part of the abolishonist movement.

> legalised child labour

The abolition of child labor was not the result of labor unions.

> 16h workdays

Were only made possible by productivity improvements brought about by free markets.

> It's comically myopic

What's funny is all these learned academics who overlook the glaringly obvious and consistent correlation of free markets with prosperity, and keep coming up with other reasons for prosperity that aren't consistent at all.
by miruddin | 2025-05-16 17:27:53+00:00
Is it true that most big tech companies and possibly the startups you work with strongly prefer H-1B transfers over candidates who might have held an H-1B in the past (with an approved I-140), but are currently on a B-2? In your experience/opinion, is such a situation disadvantageous to the candidate's competitiveness in attaining employment at these coveted companies?
by penguin_booze | 2025-05-16 17:28:16+00:00
It can be useful, but only in the off chance that they're of different genders. But all this is at the expense of canonically having assigned genders to nouns, which the speaker has no way to compute or derive. In other words, even if I know the very word I want to utter, I can't legally form the correct sentence until I know its gender. All things considered, to me, the cost outweighs the benefits.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-16 17:29:10+00:00
Yes, the article goes to some length to mention this but it's worth re-stating, this is all real work, people spent a bunch of effort improving Rust's diagnostics, it's not the case that somehow the errors magically get better as the compiler's optimisations improve or something, if you did X and that can't work but the compiler said how about Y, that probably means a person like you had a similar situation and they put work into modifying the diagnostics when you can't do X so that it realises it should suggest Y.

My tiny contribution is that when you write say '$' (the dollar symbol as a Unicode char) in a context where you needed a single byte, now rustc will suggest prefixing with a b to make b'$' (the ASCII code of a dollar as a single byte) rather than just telling you that's the wrong type, and yet if you write '€' (the Euro symbol as a Unicode char) it will not suggest b'€' because that's not a thing, the Euro isn't a single byte in ASCII

[Yes in some modern 8-bit encodings € exists but those encodings aren't used in Rust, which favours UTF-8, so b'€' wouldn't make sense, in UTF-8 this symbol is 3 bytes]
by Towaway69 | 2025-05-16 17:29:22+00:00
> wish that it was not multi-processing and Erlang

Hehe - honestly I chose Erlang because I love the syntax and secondly because it is so niche. Flow based programming is niche, visual FBP is nicher, Node-RED is even nicher and Erlang is niche - it's niche all the way down ;)

Have a look at Elixir which is Erlang with Ruby syntax and also has a large community.

Also the intention is to be using the flow editor and not the lanuage underneath, so the end user won't even know that it's Erlang or NodeJS - I aim t stay compatible with Node-RED so that flows are actually interchangeable.

So to an certain extent it doesn't matter which language is used.

I did chose Erlang also because it is well suited to flow based programming being message based and flow based programming is all about passing immutable objects amongst independent processes .... that's Erlang in a nutshell.
by augusto-moura | 2025-05-16 17:30:27+00:00
The lua language service [1] supports type annotations inside comments [2]. Sure, it is not the same as having types as first class citizens, but I would say that it solves 95% of the editor support and typying problems you mentioned in your 3rd point.

But yeah, PUC-Rio Lua is not fast, but it is acceptable, and maybe one of the most performant of all non-JIT dynamic languages. If you need speed, JIT is a requirement.

[1]: https://luals.github.io/

[2]: https://luals.github.io/wiki/annotations/
by lazide | 2025-05-16 17:30:37+00:00
Because it can be, and nearly every administration has a ‘tough on illegal immigration’ stance - because the US is so desirable to go to.

A good Great Depression economic reset + insane facist government will reset that a little - but it will still be better than a huge number of places on the globe. Even if the gov’t targets immigrants.

A huge number of places with massive populations of people who would love to come over.
by abnercoimbre | 2025-05-16 17:30:47+00:00
I recently bought a Rugrats Comic Book. Re-imagined for modern times, it shows how the babies are "being watched" by some all-knowing entity while the adults are absent in their formative years.

SPOILER ALERT BELOW.

The comic is a criticism of surveillance devices on children and the smartphone addiction of adults. (Even the adults were zombified in their interactions with each other.) Tommy's solution was to rally the babies to drown all devices in water -- and to continue breaking them until their parents gave up buying new ones.
by hintymad | 2025-05-16 17:31:01+00:00
> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet companies continued offshoring, and the western lost talent and know-how, while watching our competitor you-know-who become the world leader in increasingly more industries.
by ajross | 2025-05-16 17:31:44+00:00
"Groceries" likewise make extremely poor metrics for "consistent value". Also "grocery bill" sounds like you're trying to sneak in an argument about inflation, and not value (gold inflates too!).

Also, too, no it hasn't, not remotely. Don't hyperbolize, it cheapens the discourse. Food CPI is about 1-2% higher than general CPI right now. (Or maybe you moved from CDMX to San Jose or something, likewise not a statement about value).
by abelanger | 2025-05-16 17:32:12+00:00
> I cannot think of a situation where I could convince my team to allow 100k inserts to be pooled up waiting in memory for a process to crash or a deployment to wipe it out, but having a single buffer is also amazing mistake. io_uring is a refinement of a very old idea of having a read and a write buffer that swap back and forth between two threads or tasks.

Good point! I didn't mention this in the article, but when we utilize this strategy we will either buffer messages consumed from a message queue, or if doing this from a handler the max capacity on the buffer will slow the rate of writes to exert backpressure on the client (an iteration of a strategy employed by tools like RabbitMQ that have built-in flow control) w/ a maximum context timeout.

Also, the buffers don't pool 100k rows at a time -- the 100k rows were single connection benchmarks (before adding buffers). It's important that buffers are small and unnecessary for them to be larger, like I mention later on.

Excited to try out PG 18 with built-in support for async i/o!

> What is your local machine? Max parallelism is often a function of CPU count, so knowing how many core the box has is useful, and might explain needing to do more tests between 20 and 30.

2023 MacBook Pro, Apple M3 Max chip.

There's a great Laurenz Albe article linked in the blog which gives the following formula for connections:

connections < min(num_cores, parallel_io_limit) / (session_busy_ratio \* avg_parallelism)

The article: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/estimating-connection...
by roskelld | 2025-05-16 17:32:58+00:00
Wow, yeah just tested that and it's really bad. I guess it's a strange thing to do, but a good way to test how the cursor hijacking code gets stalled when scroll is active, and I'm guessing they're doing UI updates on scroll so the thread is getting thrashed there.

Even just making a circle motion with a mouse produces a lot of stuttering. I just did the same action on HN and it's as smooth as you'd expect on a CPU from 1995 and beyond.
by kypro | 2025-05-16 17:33:02+00:00
> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

They'll probably just need to learn for longer and if companies ever get so desperate for senior engineers then just take the most able/experienced junior/mid level dev.

But I'd argue before they do that if companies can't find skilled labour domestically they should consider bringing skilled workers from abroad. There are literally hundreds of millions of Indians who got connected to the internet over the last decade. There's no reason a company should struggle to find senior engineers.
by Fnoord | 2025-05-16 17:33:27+00:00
There are counter examples, too.

The space race first astronaut (cosmonaut) was Yuri Gagarin, and Laika. Stating the space race was lost by Soviet Union is myopic at best. The Soviet Union defaulted due to being unable to compete, the costly Afghan War, and the inefficient system. But nowadays, how relevant are NASA and BMW ?

The liquidators of Chernobyl [1], to name another example. Another feat is winning the Great War. Shenzhen is also one of a kind. Where is the West's Shenzhen? China's equivalent of F-35 (J-10) shot down two Dassault Rafale a couple of days ago.

Far fetched in West? We got corruption, too. We got Boeing, and Trump.

As for train system, Russia's main transportation is via train and it is robust, but slow. That happens when your country is such a vast amount of land, without solid (direct) sea connections.

But in general, it is a myth, albeit a different one. It is part of the myth (façade) of the strongmen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators
by emushack | 2025-05-16 17:33:45+00:00
Shame is demotivating for me. I would rather frame it as behaving out the best-interest and collective excellence within our trade. Imagine if plumbers or electricians were this cavalier? Houses would burn down. People in hospitals would die because the back-up power generators gas lines would fail. The security of curl is pretty high stakes. If the obnoxious behavior is simply just for kicks, we're putting a LOT on the line.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-16 17:33:55+00:00
"Since she reported to prison about two years ago, by far the most common question people have asked me is: "Did Elizabeth start Theranos with the intention to revolutionize health care, or did she intend to commit fraud from the start?" I think the answer is neither."

It seems that some folks just cannot see Holmes as under-educated and incompetent.

Those who see the incompetence are not surprised by the outcomes: business failure and, subsequently, fraud.

"It will not work" was an educated opinion offered to her by an advisor that she refused to accept, not because she was "determined" in some "heroic" way, but because she was stupid. Another college drop out who could not finish the work to earn a degree and learn anything, e.g., humility, in the process.

If raising money and receiving valuation is in and of itself "business success", then why bother with the made-up scientific basis. Obviously in Holmes' world "it does not have to work (yet)" in order to raise capital and receive press coverage. The only "science" required is the Silicon Valley "science" of exploiting gullibility and building hype.

The more interesting question IMHO is: Why try to appear authentic?
by nineplay | 2025-05-16 17:34:20+00:00
It is extraordinary to me how easily 'politically incorrect' stories have been suppressed on HN. I've always found this site over the top in its support of free speech. Posters angrily railed against hate speech laws. Any attempt to regulate sites with immoral or illegal content was considered a attack on our fundamental rights.

Now we have a sizable contingent of posters who have decided that some stories are too dangerous for open discussion. This surprises me is that there is no large scale effort to fight back against these 'flagged' topics. Where have our free speech fighters gone?

Let us be honest in that they really only believed "free speech more me but not for thee".
Ask HN: How do you store private keys?
by max_ | 2025-05-16 17:34:34+00:00
It seems there is no standard proper way to store private keys.

I have been using AGE [0]

And I really don't like the idea of having the keys stored in the home directory in plain text.

There is also a risk of losing the keys if my laptop is damaged or gets stolen.

Is there a proper tool for storing encryption keys?
by ajross | 2025-05-16 17:35:00+00:00
> I don't know what a "simple idea" is here

To be blunt: it's whatever was in your head when you decided to handwave-away science in your upthread comment in favor of whatever nonsense you wanted to say about "Cartesian dualism".

No, that doesn't work. If you want to discount what science has to say you need to meet it on its own turf and treat with the specifics. Color is a theory, and it's real, and fairly complicated, and Descartes frankly brought nothing to the table.
by mcbuilder | 2025-05-16 17:35:14+00:00
Unfortunately the speed of AI/ML is so crazy fast. I don't know a better way to keep track other than paying attention all the time. The field also loves memey names. A few years ago everyone was naming models after Sesame Street characters, there were the YOLO family of models. Conference papers are not immune, in fact they are greatest "offenders".
by nradov | 2025-05-16 17:35:39+00:00
Right. Before Microsoft created .NET and C# they first tried to play their "embrace, extend, extinguish" trick with Java. They released a JVM and "Visual J++" language which was sort of Java, but had incompatible proprietary extensions to lock customers in to Windows. Eventually they were forced to stop that for legal reasons so they completely dropped all Java support, and built their own replacement virtual machine and associated languages from scratch.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-16 17:35:58+00:00
> I honestly think the only way they could see gains is with a well executed counter-culture statement. They are foolishly spinning their wheels going after the young iOS crowd, while alienating the people who actually buy pixel phones and on some level android, phones.

I think a well executed counter-culture statement would do well for them. Make the move Apple did with their 1984 commercial. Also double down on openness, freedom, etc.

The other problem Google/Android has with penetrating the "hip" young crowd (in the US) aside from iMessage is there's no Android brand like Apple has. There's pixel, but it's such a small market share. Most people it's a choice between iPhone or Samsung, not iOS or Android. The fact that Samsung has their own skin too means this new material UI will only apply to people on Pixels or other stock-like phones, of which there are fewer and fewer flagships for each year.

Outside of that though, Android has an app quality problem as well. I use the McDonalds app as an example - every upgrade cycle I get curious about Android and try daily driving a pixel for the return period before inevitably ending back up on iPhone. My last run with the Pixel 9 pro, the android version of apps were horrible. Performance was so bad. The McDonalds app took full seconds to navigate between panes where it was instant on iOS, my banking app was equally horrible on Android. The watch wasn't great either.

Google could have a slam dunk if they focused on the right things, but they just always keep missing the mark.
by dale_huevo | 2025-05-16 17:36:25+00:00
> And I really don't liek the idea of having the keys stored in the home directory in plain text.

so encrypt them.

or store them in a hardware token.

or on a USB stick (poor man's hardware token).

> There is also a risk of losing the keys if my laptop is damaged or gets stolen.

backups, full disk encryption.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-16 17:36:50+00:00
> Compensation: In addition to huge prizes—capturing a merchant vessel could make a captain wealthy for life—there was a wage system where officers were oversupplied and naval officers that weren’t at sea were kept at half pay. The unemployment pool that resulted from this efficiency wage made it easier to discipline officers by moving them back to the captains list. (Allen argues that a fixed-wage system would have led to adverse selection since captains on half pay weren’t permanently employees of the navy but would reject commissions that weren’t remunerative.)

I reread this three times and I can’t make heads or tails of what it’s supposed to mean. There is an oversupply of officers. They are kept at half pay. This affords opportunities to discipline officers. This is presumably because there are others willing to take his place, but all that is referenced is a captain’s list. Is this the list of officers on half-pay?

I genuinely can’t even understand the argument being made in brackets.
Simplyblock+Xata: Powering the Future of Postgres with Next-Gen Storage
by noctarius | 2025-05-16 17:36:58+00:00
Xata, a Postgres platform, and Simplyblock, a NVMe-first storage platform, announced their partnership, bringing the next-gen Serverless Postgres Platform for public/private cloud and on premises installations.

While we started the project months ago, now that Databricks acquired Neon, it becomes a new dimension of importance. The future for Neon is quite unknown and there is a good chance that it disappears the way we know it today.

The Xata Platform offers serverless Postgres with Git-style branching, ultra-fast snapshots and database clones with automatic anonymization for developement, testing, and QA. Simplyblock provides the underlying NVMe-native copy-on-write storage engine. Deploy Xata to the cloud of your choice, on premises, or use the SaaS offering.

The coolest part of it? To use Xata, your production database can stay exactly as and where it is today, no changes necessary.
by sudohalt | 2025-05-16 17:36:59+00:00
When it runs the code I assume it does so via a docker container, does anyone know how it is configured? Assuming the user hasn't specified an AGENTS.md file or a Dockerfile in the repo. Does it generate it via LLM based on the repo, and what it thinks is needed? Does it use static analysis (package.json, requirements txt, etc)? Do they just have a super generic Dockerfile that can handle most envs? Combination of different things?
by dharmspeakz | 2025-05-16 17:37:40+00:00
Hi Peter,

My I-140 was approved in June 2013 under the EB2 category (H1B). I later downgraded to EB3 and filed my I-485 when my priority date became current back in 2021. I received my EAD in 2022 and have been working on EAD since then.

According to the current visa bulletin, my priority date is expected to become current soon. However, I have a couple of concerns:

The job title I had when I filed the I-485 is different from my current role.

I have also changed employers since then.

I understand that I may need to submit a new I-485J.

Given that I was promoted and my current title is significantly different from the one in my original petition, could this pose any challenges to my I-485 application?