MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfengel | 2025-05-17 13:37:52+00:00
Often, employees need to communicate to two sets of people. The HR people, for example, need to talk to the rank and file employees, and also each other. In house developers talk to IT and to their users.

There is an eternal cycle of bringing a function together, then decentralizing it, and repeating. No matter what you do, someone is going to find it convenient and someone else will find it inconvenient.
Show HN: Insert-tools – bulk insert with schema check and column match in CH
by castengine | 2025-05-17 13:38:55+00:00
Hi HN! I’ve built insert-tools, a Python CLI utility designed for easy and safe bulk data insertion into ClickHouse.

Features:

Inserts data via SELECT queries with automatic column name matching

Automatically casts types to ensure safe inserts and avoid errors

Supports JSON-based configuration and a user-friendly CLI interface

Comes with integration tests and basic argument validation

You can install it from PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/insert-tools/ Source code is available here: https://github.com/castengine/insert-tools

Looking forward to feedback, suggestions, and contributions!
by daxfohl | 2025-05-17 13:39:00+00:00
I like this a lot. At first, putting ifs inside the fors makes things more concise. But it seems like there's always an edge case or requirement change that eventually requires an if outside the for too. Now you've got ifs on both sides of the for, and you've got to look in multiple places to see what's happening. Or worse, subsequent changes will require updating both places.

So yeah, I agree, pulling conditions up can often be better for long-term maintenance, even if initially it seems like it creates redundancy.
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 13:39:03+00:00
That's because for EMV, they need to run asymmetric card authentication algorithms, which unfortunately exclusively use RSA. That's just not very fast to do on the type of microcontroller common in these cards.

EMV also uses faster symmetric cryptography between the card and the issuer, but the latter is not in the picture in a transit gate transaction – too much latency – so asymmetric cryptography it is.

That's also the reason some (mostly older, mostly international) cards don't work with TfL: Some don't even have the coprocessor (or just additional processing power these days, I suspect) required for RSA to cut cost, and only work for online payment transactions.
Show HN: X-RAY – A student-built tool to audit OS behavior via ISO comparison
by tangtian | 2025-05-17 13:39:10+00:00
GitHub: https://github.com/lixiasky/X-ray

I made a 3MB high-privilege system behavior auditor in Go. It compares your live Linux system to the original ISO, detects unexpected file/process changes, and can auto-eliminate anything suspicious — in real time.

It’s light enough to run on a MacBook Air (M1, Parallels VM), yet strong enough to intercept plugin installations and even kill VSCode mid-execution. Yes, that actually happened. No rootkits or malware got past it — even accidentally legit stuff didn’t survive.

The behavior chain is exported to Graphviz .dot, with full process trace. JSON/log export is still in progress (I'm learning). This is fully open source, free to fork, and made by a first-year student outside CS.

It’s not perfect — but it works. I’d love to hear what others think, break it, or build on it.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-05-17 13:39:24+00:00
So you tell me those 200-600k software engineers that can easily solve leetcode hard are so incompetent they missed using try-with-resources at such scale, they needed to introduce new AI tooling to fix it?

Hey Uber, I am from the EU, I usually can‘t even solve leetcode medium but I will write you scalable, spotless Java for a third of the salary.

Our industry and its economics are a joke.
by aikinai | 2025-05-17 13:40:16+00:00
The comparison video is kind of pointless since they're both at very slow times. If you see a Tokyo gate at rush hour with people packed wall-to-wall but moving quickly, that's what the latency was optimized for. And as others have mentioned, it's two things, speed and distance. FeliCa triggers both faster and farther away. And it never errors; you just made up that assumption. Also in Japan no one walks up to the gate and then fiddles with their wallet. Everyone knows proper transit etiquette from when they're very little.

Sometimes people will be low on balance and get rejected. People reroute quickly in normal conditions, but in rush hour that'll be a huge mess and everyone will be pissed at the culprit.
by zbentley | 2025-05-17 13:40:28+00:00
As someone who overused bullet points before it was AI-cool and doesn’t write with the assistance of AI (not due to a general anti-AI belief, I just like writing by hand) I have also started getting that feedback a lot lately.

Who knows, maybe someone accidentally over-weighted my writing by a factor of a trillion in ChatGPT’s training set?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-17 13:40:42+00:00
> it's whatever was in your head

That doesn't make anything "simple". Analysis operates on existing concepts, which means they're divisible. It's clear words are being thrown around without any real comprehension of them. This is a stubborn refusal to examine coarse and half-baked notions.

> If you want to discount what science has to say you need to meet it on its own turf and treat with the specifics.

Except this isn't a matter of science. These are metaphysical presuppositions that are being assumed and read into the interpretation of scientific results. So, if anything, this is a half-assed, unwitting dabbling in metaphysics and a failure to meet metaphysics on its own turf.

> whatever nonsense you wanted to say about "Cartesian dualism" [...] Descartes frankly brought nothing to the table

That's nice. But I haven't "handwaved-away" science. It is you who have handwaved-away any desire to understand the subject beyond a recitation of an intellectually superficial grasp of what's at stake. To say Descartes has nothing to do with any of this betrays serious ignorance.

See above [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014069
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-05-17 13:40:57+00:00
I find this a very thin argument, even thinner than the one coming from the authorities claiming rampant ticket fraud. I travel by train a shitton through all of Europe, and I have _never_ had the issue of boarding a train without knowing if I had a valid ticket for it. And even in the cities w/o gates there is some expectation that you will have to validate the ticket somewhere, at your leisure. Do you ever board street trams, for example?

For the record, I am French. I used to be proud that nothing physical prevented you from boarding a train you had no ticket for. But, IMHO sadly, people like me have lost, because now trains also have ticket gates in France, which means that I:

A) No longer can accompany my ailing relatives to their train seats if I don't have a ticket myself (/as I could twenty years ago)

B) No longer can board the train when all my hands are full with luggage (since I need a free hand to search for the ticket in my wallet/bags to go through the damn machine).
by robotracer | 2025-05-17 13:40:57+00:00
True in my experience. Back in 2019 i got a model year 2020 honda civic hatchback that was not yet supported. So as not to break the car, I purchased an oem steering motor for the car, dumped the firmware and then found the necessary data to support the car. I've been using comma since then. Other comments are correct about it being an assistant. You are the captain, now thinking more strategically about the road and vehicles ahead. The comma handles the tactical of keeping between the lines. The brain relief from all the mostly automatic constant correction is huge on long road trips. It's got a good driver attention model as well. Keep your eyes on the road. I will say a pair of glasses frames is sufficient to fool it though.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-17 13:40:59+00:00
That is true regardless of whether there is or isn't a "new or expanded market to absorb the workforce".

It's a crucial insight that's usually missed or eluded in discussions about automation and workforce - unless you're literally at the beginning of your career, losing your career to automation screws you over big time, forever. At best, you'll have to downsize your entire lifestyle, and that of your family, to be commensurate with your now entry-level pay. If you're halfway through the career that suddenly ended, you won't recover.

All the new jobs and markets are for the kids. Mind you, not your kids - your kids are going to be disadvantaged by their household being suddenly thrown into financial insecurity or downright poverty, and may not even get a chance to start a good career path with their peers.

That, not "anti technology sentiment", is why Luddites smashed the looms. Those were people who got rug-pulled by business decisions and thrown into poverty, along with their families and communities.
by raincole | 2025-05-17 13:42:37+00:00
The number of solutions doesn't matter though. You can easily design a sudoku game that has multiple solutions, but it's still easier to verify a given solution than to solve it from scratch.

It's not even about whether or not the number of solutions is limited. A math problem can have unlimited amount of proofs (if we allow arbitrarily long proofs), but it's still easier to verify one than to come up with one.

Of course writing SQL isn't necessarily comparable to sudoku. But the difference, in the context of verifiability, is definitely not "SQL has no single solution."
by jmull | 2025-05-17 13:43:28+00:00
I really don't think there is any general rule of thumb here.

You've really got to have certain contexts before thinking you ought to be pushing ifs up.

I mean generally, you should consider pushing an if up. But you should also consider pushing it down, and leaving it where it is. That is, you're thinking about whether you have a good structure for your code as you write it... aka programming.

I suppose you might say, push common/general/high-level things up, and push implementation details and low-level details down. It seems almost too obvious to say, but I guess it doesn't hurt to back up a little once in a while and think more broadly about your general approach. I guess the author is feeling that ifs are usually about a higher-level concern and loops about a lower-level concern? Maybe that's true? I just don't think it matters, though, because why wouldn't you think about any given if in terms of whether it specifically ought to move up or down?
by diggan | 2025-05-17 13:44:12+00:00
> is NixOS's problem. [...] And this is still not the distro's problem.

It seems like the author is talking to people who might consider using NixOS for desktops, not towards NixOS itself. Unless I missed something in the article, the author is not saying this is a NixOS problem, but a "I made the wrong choice for me" problem, and now they're sharing the experience of reaching that conclusion.

Don't get me wrong, I (like many) have a love-hate relationship with NixOS, where I use it for all my servers both remote and at home, but my desktop/laptops remain on Arch Linux because I too don't fit it fitting for desktop usage. But I wouldn't argue against people who want to/not want to use it for desktop use, cool that it works or not for them.

> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows

I think based on the context, the author is talking about the average developer really, not the typical end-user. They do say "someone who wants to use a computer like a regular person to do regular work" which might confuse people, but they really are talking about developers, as you can tell by the rest of the article.
by lmm | 2025-05-17 13:45:45+00:00
> even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?

There is always a choice. People could have refused, resigned, spoken out.

> second, this was 30 years ago.

Short enough for people who were complicit in it to be decisionmakers now.

> if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.

They need to be rooted out. They and their ilk are the entities that actually subverted the country. We used to have principles and care about them, or at least pretend to.

> the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?

The BBC commissions some great content from great creators - as do all British TV channels. If you look at what the BBC itself does, there's a lot of bad there.
by pshirshov | 2025-05-17 13:45:55+00:00
>"I don't want to care"

Update once per year.

> brew, distrobox, flatpak

You can have that stuff on Nix if you need it.

Nix is bad because the language is very limited and extremely hard to debug and the module system is fragile and obscure (just try to write a recursion-safe mkMerge and prove it won't magically drop some parts of your config because the values in the module system are always magic attrsets, not values), but, unfortunately, there is nothing better around.
by dangus | 2025-05-17 13:46:00+00:00
NYC parents already know this and have strollers that fold up to backpack size. The stroller market has progressed incredibly in recent years, there are strollers designed to fold with only one hand.

Ubers/taxis with car seats are no big deal as long as you’re quick about setting them up. And even then, kids are only in full blown car seats for a few short years.
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 13:46:11+00:00
> One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits.

Contactless cards manage to boot up a JVM and run bytecode with the energy provided by the field, and many also run RSA with fairly large keys. I doubt that toggling some bits in an EEPROM factors in too much.

> I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional.

Transactions are usually implemented via some form of two-phase commit, I believe, to support what's called "tear resistance". If the transaction is incomplete, the reader tells you and you just tap the same card at the same gate again.

Not sure about the implementation, but the feature is supported by all contactless stored-value cards I'm aware of.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-05-17 13:46:36+00:00
I understand why immutable systems make sense but the benefits they bring are overrated. How often will you mess up your system so bad you won't be able to recover it? I ran some sort of Arch for around 15 years and the times I needed to recover my system are few and far in between.

I ran nixos for a few years but I stopped when I started experimenting with AI. Dependencies were too out of date and running random small projects is riddled with extra pain, compared to other systems.

I also had problems during upgrades, caused by incompatible features and configurations. Instead of relying on the project documentation I had to rely on nix documentation. I have massive respect for nix maintainers (and I have even contributed) but maintaining any software for everyone is a monumental task. Distros maintainer have it hard enough.

Arch with AUR ended up being a simpler experience.
by bvrmn | 2025-05-17 13:46:43+00:00
And I didn't use it because there was no need.

Resource scoping is important feature. Context managers (in python) are literally bread and butter for everyday tasks.

It's awkward not because of Symbol, it introduces new syntax tied to existing implicit scopes. It's kinda fragile based on Go experience. Explicit scoping is a way more predictable.
by fiberhood | 2025-05-17 13:46:48+00:00
The RoarVM [1] is a research project that showed how to run Squeak Smalltalk on thousands of cores (at one point it ran on 10,000 cores).

I'm re-implementing it as a metacircular adaptive compiler and VM for a production operating system. We rewrite the STEPS research software and the Frank code [2] on a million core environment [3]. On the M4 processor we try to use all types of cores, CPU, GPU, neural engine, video hardware, etc.

We just applied for YC funding.

[1] https://github.com/smarr/RoarVM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1605Zmwek8

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDhnjEQyuDk
by proberts | 2025-05-17 13:47:52+00:00
Regarding a tax accountant, email me and I can refer you a few good ones. Regarding the TN, the employer could file a petition with USCIS and then you could present the approval notice to the moving company but this process takes longer and is a lot more expenses (and also riskier from an outcome standpoint, depending on the position and your education) than the other path, applying at a port of entry. There's no longer advance approval at ports of entry so going this route means that you will need to get the TN and commence employment, even if just for a very limited period of time, before relocating to the U.S. with your stuff and then returning to Canada to actually move your stuff.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-05-17 13:48:12+00:00
This is a bit like a scaled down (in terms of telescope size) Project Argus [1]. You could probably use the SARA ‘scope in a box’ [2] to do it, too, which is slight;y cheaper than the projected cost ($350 vs $500) assuming you have a spare r-pi hanging around. The far lower cost of entry will probably make it a lot more popular though - not to mention finding satellite dishes of that size is becoming harder by the year..

About 2 decades ago, I had a Project Argus setup taking up most of my back yard [3]. I moved to the US when Apple bought my company, and had it packed up to take with me, thinking (in my naivety) that all US dwellings would have way more space than the terraced house I was living in (in London) and I could use it there too. Gentle reader, I was wrong. That dish has remained in its packing crate since it arrived all that time ago.

I leave the US to return permanently to the UK on 4th July (yes, yes…). Once I’m settled, bought a new house, and have the kids schooling sorted out, I’ll definitely be looking to get it up and running again, to rise, phoenix-like, and stare boldly into the abyss once more.

1: https://www.setileague.org/argus/

2: https://radio-astronomy.org/store/projects/scope-in-a-box

3: https://imgur.com/pCJvp9C
by adriennhem1 | 2025-05-17 13:48:31+00:00
After struggling with inadequate screen sharing tools for customer support, I built Screendesk.io for technical teams who need to debug complex issues efficiently. Unlike generic screen sharing, Screendesk automatically captures critical technical context including console logs, network requests, and browser metadata alongside video recordings. Our browser-based solution requires zero downloads, works at up to 60fps, and integrates seamlessly with support tools like Zendesk and Intercom. We've built features technical teams actually need: AI-powered issue analysis, searchable video libraries for knowledge sharing, and secure recording with sensitive data blurring.
by AngryData | 2025-05-17 13:48:40+00:00
There are tons of dialects and accents and group slang that the joke could be done with. Doing basic generational slang would likely flop, but you could easily use something like a thick accent from Texas like Boomhower in King of the Hill, or a Louisiana Creole accent, or some deep Appalacian accent, or some Spanglish.
by BenderV | 2025-05-17 13:48:45+00:00
My 2 cents, building a tool in this space...

> Do you need an expert to verify if the answer from AI is correct?

If the underling data has a quality issue that is not obvious to a human, the AI will miss it too. Otherwise, the AI will correct it for you. But I would argue that it's highly probable that your expert would have missed it too... So, no, it's not a silver bullet yet, and the AI model often lacks enough context that humans have, and the capacity to take a step back.

> How is it time saved refining prompts instead of SQL?

I wouldn't call that "prompting". It's just a chat. I'm at least ~10x faster (for reasonable complex & interesting queries).
by password4321 | 2025-05-17 13:48:46+00:00
From the article: the Miyawaki method, a forestation technique that creates fast-growing, highly biodiverse native forests in the middle of urban areas, or even on deteriorating land. This planting style forces vegetation to compete for resources, accelerating its growth. A forest planted using this technique can grow in 30 years and requires no maintenance after three years.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki#Method_and_cond...

A dense plantation of very young seedlings (but with an already mature root system: with symbiotic bacteria and fungi present) is recommended. Density aims at stirring competition between species and the onset of phytosociological relations close to what would happen in nature (three to five plants per square metre in the temperate zone, up to five or ten seedlings per square metre in Borneo).
by TMWNN | 2025-05-17 13:48:56+00:00
> * Unless you use the Oracle plugin, but you really shouldn't, because most features from it have been moved to the GPL base.

Oh? I moved to KVM via UnRAID, but not because of any particular complaint with VirtualBox or the Oracle plugin. But then, I only used the plugin for the RDP feature. Has that been moved into the main codebase?
by gadders | 2025-05-17 13:49:11+00:00
Whatever happens, they need to decriminalise the license fee.

"Almost a third of women’s convictions are for not paying the TV licence fee, figures have revealed.

Women are ten times more likely to be convicted for not paying the £157.50 annual fee than men – with growing numbers of women then being slapped with criminal records, Ministry of Justice data shows."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tv-licence-f...
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-05-17 13:49:47+00:00
What you are describing is exactly all the problems with gates. Having them open-by-default improves somewhat. Having 100ms less reading time improves nothing. You are still limited by the speed of everyone else (cultural aspects are irrelevant as they are not improved by reader tech). If you want to improve entry throughput, have _no gate at all_ so that people do not have to bottleneck there. If you really have to put a validator, put it elsewhere.
by proberts | 2025-05-17 13:50:04+00:00
Unfortunately, the approved I-140 EB1C is no help here; for you to be able to stay past your 60 days grace period, you will need to get sponsored for another work visa (likely the O-1 but you need to have a discussion with an attorney) or file an application to change your status to B-2 visitor status during the grace period.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-17 13:50:38+00:00
Nice! A little off topic but I spent years experimenting writing AI-like natural language wrappers for relational databases that would query meta data to get column names, etc. Peter Norvig, in doing a tech review for me for the second edition of my Java AI book made a comment that the NLP database example was much better than anything else in the book, so the code I sweated over off and on for years was probably pretty good, BUT!, compared to what you can build with LLMs today, my old NLP wrappers aren't good at all.

LLMs make some things that were difficult very easy now.

Good article!
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 13:50:52+00:00
Indeed. But the primary problem with western transit gates/turnstiles is this:

Japanese IC transaction: Less than 100 ms.

EMV IC transaction: Hundreds of milliseconds.

The person in front of you in the New York subway only realizing that they might have to look for their phone or card in their bag as they're already blocking one of very few turnstiles, and your train is arriving: Timeless.