MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crowcroft | 2025-05-09 13:54:51+00:00
I have a hypothesis for this.

1. Developers are building these tools/applications because it's far faster and easier for them to build and iterate on something that they can use and provide feedback on directly without putting a marketer, designer, process engineer in the loop.

2. The level of 'finish' required to ship these kinds of tools to devs is lower. If you're shipping an early beta of something like 'Cursor for SEO Managers' the product would need to be much more user friendly. Look at all the hacking people are doing to make MCP servers and get them to work with Cursor. Non-technical folks aren't going to make that work.

So then, once there is a convergence on 'how' to build this kind of stuff for devs. There will be a huge amount of work to go and smooth out the UX and spread equivalents out across other industries. Claude releasing remote MCPs as 'integrations' in their web ui is the first step of this IMO.

When this wave crashes across the broader SaaS/FAANG world I could imagine more demand for devs again, but you're unlikely going to ever see anything like the early 2020s ever again.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-09 13:54:51+00:00
>Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.

That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered.

The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
by nextos | 2025-05-09 13:55:03+00:00
> Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.

Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.

It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-09 13:55:31+00:00
> the philosophy in Rust is to pull many small package

I'm not sure it's a philosophy, more a pragmatic consideration for compilation speeds. Anyone who's done a non-trivial amount of Rust knows that moment when the project gets too big and needs to split into separate crates. It's kinda sad that you can't organize code according to proper abstractions, many times I feel forced to refactor for compiler performance.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-05-09 13:55:41+00:00
In 2001, a pure quantum computer using Shor's algorithm correctly gave the prime factors of 15. In 2012 they managed to find the prime factors of 21. Since then, everyone has given up on the purely quantum approach by using lots of traditional CPU-time to preprocess the input, somewhat defeating the purpose.

Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what the prime factors of 34 are.
by satvikpendem | 2025-05-09 13:55:50+00:00
Okay, well you do realize you're not the average programmer right? I'd even say this is junior level if you are not really creating your own code and components, so it's not accurate to say that HTML and CSS are not "necessary" unless you're doing what seems to be very basic work. And Tailwind is still CSS, again, so without knowing what things like flex actually do, you can't use Tailwind either. I'm beginning to suspect you may just use AI to build much of your code for you.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-09 13:56:10+00:00
There isn’t much publicly-available information with hard numbers (probably on purpose), but it appears that you need a huge amount of unrealized gains for buy-borrow-die to make sense. This implies that it is a very expensive scheme to run.

If you pay 50 cents to a financial service provider to avoid paying 1 dollar to the government, you’ve definitely come out ahead and the government has definitely lost. But the real winner is probably the financial service provider that is mostly pushing paper around rather than figuring out how to create the multi-billion dollar business that is needed to start the whole process in the first place.
by csomar | 2025-05-09 13:56:29+00:00
> when checking a rust security advisory mentioning that dotenv is unmaintained

This is a problem with all languages and actually an area where Rust shines (due to editions). Your pulled in packages will compile as they previously did. This is not true for garbage collected languages (pun intended).

> Out of curiosity I ran toeki a tool for counting lines of code, and found a staggering 3.6 million lines of rust .... How could I ever audit all of that code?

Again, another area where Rust shines. You can audit and most importantly modify the code. This is not that easy if you were using Nodejs where the runtimes are behind node/v8 or whatever. You compile these things (including TLS) yourself and have full control over them. That's why Tokio is huge.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-09 13:56:44+00:00
If everything is automated then where do people work?

If only some things are automated, then yes those places will have an advantage when it comes to labor costs, but they will use it to pad their profit margin.

Factory X employs humans ands sells widgets for $100, but their costs are $90, so profit is $10.

Factory Y is automated and they have costs of $10. Do they sell their widget at $30, thus earning a handsome profit of $20? No, they charge $90 and earn an obscene profit of $80. The worker gets screwed, the shareholders get richer.

This whole thing only works if workers have ownership in the corporation, but that's gasp socialism and we can't have that.
by ourmandave | 2025-05-09 13:56:46+00:00
Last week, staff were briefed on a new process for vetting grant proposals that are found to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),...

In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards.

So they're going to install gatekeepers to shoot down anything that even hints at DEI. I assume members will be hand picked by the Emperor from a Moms for Liberty short list.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-09 13:57:04+00:00
A key problem with extracting article context is that there are so many distinct sources.

That said, power laws and Zipf functions apply, and a large fraction of HN front-page articles come from a relatively small set of domains. There's further aggregation possible when underlying publishing engines can be identified, e.g., Wordpress, CMSes used by a large number of news organisations, Medium, Substack, Github, Gitlab, Fediverse servers, and a number of static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, Gatsby, etc.).

I suspect you're aware of most of this.

I have a set of front-page sites from an earlier scraping project:

(For the life of me I cannot remember what the 3rd column represents, though it may be a miscalculated cumulative percentage. The "category" field was manually supplied by me, every site with > 17 appearances has one, as well as several below that threshold which could be identified by other means, e.g., regexes on blogging engines, GitHub pages, etc.)

Rank Count ??? Site :::: Category ------------------------------------------------------------- 1 7294 5.175 n/a :::: n/a 2 3803 7.873 nytimes.com :::: general news 3 3495 10.352 techcrunch.com :::: tech news 4 1580 11.473 arstechnica.com :::: tech news 5 1344 12.426 bloomberg.com :::: business news 6 1288 13.340 wired.com :::: tech news 7 1171 14.171 wsj.com :::: business news 8 1099 14.951 youtube.com :::: video 9 1026 15.678 wikipedia.org :::: general info (wiki) 10 921 16.332 bbc.com :::: general news 11 911 16.978 bbc.co.uk :::: general news 12 893 17.612 theguardian.com :::: general news 13 866 18.226 washingtonpost.com :::: general news 14 846 18.826 reuters.com :::: general news 15 829 19.414 economist.com :::: business news 16 781 19.968 theatlantic.com :::: general interest 17 631 20.416 arxiv.org :::: academic / science 18 628 20.862 npr.org :::: general news 19 622 21.303 nature.com :::: academic / science 20 614 21.738 newyorker.com :::: general interest 21 505 22.097 eff.org :::: law 22 475 22.434 stanford.edu :::: academic / science 23 471 22.768 ieee.org :::: technology 24 456 23.091 reddit.com :::: general discussion 25 448 23.409 amazon.com :::: corporate comm. 26 445 23.725 microsoft.com :::: technology 27 416 24.020 theverge.com :::: tech news 28 410 24.311 venturebeat.com :::: business news 29 408 24.600 quantamagazine.org :::: academic / science 30 407 24.889 cnn.com :::: general news

17,782 sites in total, if I'm reading my past notes correctly.

More on that project in an HN search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

(Individual comments/posts seem presently unreachable due to an HN site bug.)
by panstromek | 2025-05-09 13:57:07+00:00
Hm.. I would honestly try to avoid relying on finalization mechanism of a garbage collector like this. It sounds brittle from the start. Even without the bug, I can imagine you can get into a situation where some unused JS object holds a reference to a giant thing in wasm memory, but engine doesn't run the GC, because it technically doesn't know that, it only sees the little pointer object which seems small.

I think WASM had historically had some problem with freeing memory, so I'd probably rather rely on some pooling or arena with explicit memory size limit (for the whole allocated wasm memory).
Ask HN: Monorepos for Data Engineers?
by bradhe | 2025-05-09 13:57:18+00:00
Hey folks, I'm working with a data engineering team trying to consolidate all their misc projects into a single monorepo. I'm used to working on monorepos in the context of regular software engineering (e.g. at my company, our monorepo is Golang, Rust, and Next.js and we use moonrepo to manage everything); however, not so much in the context of data engineering. It doesn't help that I'm not as Pythonic as I should be :). Wondering if there are known best practices I should be aware of for managing Python monorepos in the context of data engineering?
macOS Malware Development II
by 0xf00sec | 2025-05-09 13:57:22+00:00
This article is a deep technical dive into custom macOS malware development, centered on building a self-mutating loader using Mach-O internals and native Darwin APIs. It details the architecture of a polymorphic engine divided into two phases: a parent process responsible for payload mutation and re-encryption, and a mutant process that executes the evolved code. The piece explores techniques such as fileless execution, runtime mutation, in-memory encryption, and command-and-control via dead-drop, all implemented entirely through native APIs and low-level Mach-O manipulation.

https://0xf00sec.github.io/0x22
by gitremote | 2025-05-09 13:57:24+00:00
> That said, the previous failing effort also unearthed a ton of unspoken assumptions that I was able to leverage. Without providing those assumptions to the AI, I couldn't have produced the app they wanted. Extracting that information was like extracting teeth so I'm not sure if we would have really had a better situation if we started off with everyone having an OpenAPI Pro account.

The hardest part about enterprise backend development is understanding the requirements. "Understanding" is not about reading comprehension, and "requirements" are not the written requirements somebody gives you. It's about finding out what requirements are undocumented and which parts of the requirements document is misinformation. LLMs would just dutifully try to implement the written requirements with misinformation and missing edge cases, not the actual requirements.
by dogleash | 2025-05-09 13:57:40+00:00
The problem isn't that the technical challenges aren't addressed. The problem is that no amount of tech can un-do a design that forces in a "just trust me bro" control relationship.

For some people it isn't a concern and that's fine, just so long as we acknowledge that it is a real and legitimate concern for other people, and that's also fine.
by jerf | 2025-05-09 13:58:06+00:00
A true enough statement, but "Rust" is unnecessarily specific. Dependencies are getting scary in general. Supply chain attacks are no longer hypothetical, they're here and have been for a while.

If I were designing a new language I think I'd be very interested in putting some sort of capability system in so I can confine entire library trees safely, and libraries can volunteer somehow what capabilities they need/offer. I think it would need to be a new language if for no other reason than ecosystems will need to be written with the concept in them from the beginning.

For instance, consider an "image loading library". In most modern languages such libraries almost invariably support loading images from a file, directly, for convenience if nothing else. In a language that supported this concept of capabilities it would be necessary to support loading them from a stream, so either the image library would need you to supply it a stream unconditionally, or if the capability support is more rich, you could say "I don't want you to be able to load files" in your manifest or something and the compiler would block the "LoadFromFile(filename)" function at compile time. Multiply that out over an entire ecosystem and I think this would be hard to retrofit. It's hugely backwards incompatible if it is done correctly, it would be a de facto fork of the entire ecosystem.

I honestly don't see any other solution to this in the long term, except to create a world where the vast majority of libraries become untargetable in supply chain attacks because they can't open sockets or read files and are thus useless to attackers, and we can reduce our attack surface to just the libraries that truly need the deep access. And I think if a language came out with this design, you'd be surprised at how few things need the dangerous permissions.

Even a culture of minimizing dependencies is just delaying the inevitable. We've been seeing Go packages getting supply-chain-attacked and it getting into people's real code bases, and that community is about as hostile to large dependency trees as any can be and still function. It's not good enough.
by ddahlen | 2025-05-09 13:58:14+00:00
I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self deport, and at my last institute many people's funding now no longer supports travel for attend conferences (a key part of science!).

One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. At one point I was paid from a government grant to do high power laser research. Of course there were goals for the grant, but the grant was specifically funded so that the US didn't lose the knowledge of HOW to build lasers. The optics field for example is small, and there are not that many professors. It is an old field, most of the real research is in the private industry. However what happens if a company goes out of business? If we don't have public institutions with the knowledge to train new generations then information can and will be lost.
by X0Refraction | 2025-05-09 13:58:31+00:00
This was linked from the top comment on the Rust subreddit: https://wiki.alopex.li/LetsBeRealAboutDependencies

I think it makes a good point that some of the difference here is just perception due to dependencies in C/C++ being less immediately visible since they're dynamically loaded. To some degree that is a plus though as you likely trust the maintainers of your OS distribution to provide stable, supported libraries.

As other commenters have said, perhaps this is an area where the Rust maintainers could provide some kind of extended standard library where they don't guarantee backwards compatibility forever, but do provide guarantees about ongoing fixes for security issues.
by quelup | 2025-05-09 13:58:39+00:00
I'm gonna have to read up more on this one. I have a hard time grasping how this is possible:

> "Edible robots could be used to deliver food to endangered areas, to deliver medicines in innovative ways to people who have difficulty swallowing or to animals"

Given the main anecdote:

> "two completely edible robotic teddy bears...when air is injected through dedicated pathways, their heads and arms move."

Seems like there's a long way to go here.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-09 13:58:44+00:00
This is again an issue of terminology. A PG cluster is at best one write master and then some full read replicas. You don't necessarily need a fast interconnect for that, but your write traffic can never exceed the power of the one master, and storage isn't sharded but replicated (unless you host all the PG files on a SAN which would be slow).

A RAC cluster is multi-write master, and each node stores a subset of the data. You can then add as many read caches (not replicas) as you need, and they'll cache only the hot data blocks.

So they're not quite the same thing in that sense.
by perplex | 2025-05-09 13:58:52+00:00
I've been using LLMs as learning tools rather than simply answer generators. LLMs can teach you a lot by guiding your thinking, not replacing it.

It's been valuable to engage with the suggestions and understand how they work—much like using a search engine, but more efficient and interactive.

LLMs have also been helpful in deepening my understanding of math topics. For example, I’ve been wanting to build intuition around linear algebra which for me is a slow process. By asking questions to LLM I find explanations make the underlying concepts more accessible.

For me it's about using these tools to learn more effectively.
by loganmarchione | 2025-05-09 13:58:55+00:00
If you're not looking to sail the high seas, I highly recommend Libro.fm. They have had almost any audiobook I have ever wanted (e.g., Andy Weir's books in English are only available on Audible), and you can choose a local library to support with your purchase.

I subscribe to their monthly plan, $14.99/month, which gets me 1 credit per month. If you buy one audiobook a month that's $14.99, using that credit, it pays for itself. I really like using my credits on expensive audiobooks, like $25 or something (I'm basically getting the book at a discount) and then I buy cheaper audiobooks using my credit card.

You can stream your purchased books with their app, but I download the files (everything is DRM-free) and move them into Audiobookshelf. Most of their older books are just ZIP downloads of MP3s, but newer books come in M4B format (one large file with chapter markers). Both work flawlessly with Audiobookshelf.

If you buy an audiobook on Audible (e.g., Andy Weir), you can download the AAX file from Audible and use a converter to convert the file to M4B (this strips the DRM and makes it work with Audiobookshelf). This is in a legal gray-area, depending on your jurisdiction.
Show HN: Hyper – Standards-first React alternative
by tipiirai | 2025-05-09 13:59:06+00:00
Author here. This is an attempt to simplify frontend development:

1. Standards first: User interfaces should be assembled with HTML, styled with CSS, and enhanced with JavaScript.

2. Less abstractions: UI composition should be easy and require as few idioms and abstractions as possible, both on client and server.

3. Design Systems: Design should be a separate subsystem, easily accessible for developers who care about and understand design.

4. Scalability: Complex UIs should retain simplicity as the application grows.

Eager to hear your thoughts!
by drweevil | 2025-05-09 13:59:11+00:00
>"Though the program was off this time, experts say its approach could eventually be useful in predicting other types of electoral contests."

This was interesting in a "'cause we can" sort of way, but the word 'useful' begs the question: why? And what are the dangers presented by models such as this to the electoral process? The papal conclave could remain relatively immune, since the electors are sequestered. But other types of electoral contests aren't so protected.
by djha-skin | 2025-05-09 13:59:13+00:00
> Cilium is the superpower of Kubernetes networking, with so many convenient functionalities. In the upcoming release, version 1.13, Cilium will include a functionality called LoadBalancer IP Address Management - LB IPAM This functionality will make it possible to get rid of MetalLB by pairing it with the already existing functionality of Cilium BGP Control Plane.

This would be a step backward for most home lab setups. MetalLB already implements BGP and has done so for a decade. Why would I want to install a network overlay just for that? Now I have to deal with a network overlay.

Of course, if you already need such an overlay because you're doing this for work, this could make sense.
by naythaniel | 2025-05-09 13:59:58+00:00
What?

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say?

How exactly does one "judge a work in its own merit?"

How do you determine whether a movie is good or not? In a vacuum? Measuring its traits against itself?

How can anything at all be judged "on its own merits" without considering the scope of other things related to it?

How does this person writing the article judge the story against itself when they make the claim that this story is bad because men are never sexually assaulted in stories. I can name 2 popular movies off the top of my head (Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption) that had graphic depictions of men being raped and sexually assaulted.

The writer measured the story they were reviewing against the broader world. Not against itself. Therefore, considering the broader world, there's nothing particularly miscreant about a story portraying violence against a human being (male or female).

The writer's incorrect belief that men are never sexually assaulted in film and TV shows is simply limited by their immaturity and lack of knowledge of the many stories that have been told in different mediums for decades.
by Hilift | 2025-05-09 13:59:58+00:00
This isn't about science, issues, or voting. The message is: "We don't like you and it would be better if you weren't around".

Also, why is NSF fielding 40,000 proposals per year? That is 110 proposals per day. Is there really that much science to perform and not enough universities to host it? Not at all. It exists because every state and local government and educational institution is incentivized to solicit federal aid. Even if a school is located in Beverly Hills, federal aid will be solicited at all levels in K-12 and higher education. Republicans are saying they don't want anything to do with that level of centralized government.