MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-23 06:21:20+00:00
Here in Germany, you used to be able to buy chemicals at pharmacies. Then, the EU plus the usual German compliance-by-the-letter came along... the EU imposed serious controls on chemicals because many can be used to make bombs (e.g. acetone plus hydrogen peroxide yields APEX/TATP) or various illicit drugs. That legislation now not just requires a bullshit amount of paperwork for each transaction but also requires pharmacy staff to pass and renew a certification for dealing with chemicals. No, the actual doctor in pharmaceuticals that one needs to pass to open a pharmacy is not enough.

As a result, nearly all pharmacies here dropped the entire lines of making medication on-site and selling chemicals, because only the latter kept the former financially viable.

So, your only options left are either: a) buy from Amazon or eBay sellers that outright don't care about the German peculiarities or b) if you manage to qualify, buy from the usual selection of lab supply wholesalers. But something like "start a German NileRed channel", that's completely out of the question. The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
by troupo | 2025-06-23 06:22:01+00:00
Humanity's Fire by Michael Cobley

Lightspeed Trilogy by Ken MacLeod

Revenger by Alastair Reynolds (the first book started off quite well, but the other two became a boring slog)

Rise of the Jain by Neal Asher. This one is just so egregiously bad, I don't know how I managed to finish. If I ever have to read another "erstwhile ship" I'll barf.

etc. etc.

Since I'm reading a lot of sci fi, I've ran out of top 1% or so of books an authors pretty quickly. Now I feel like I'm running out of middle-of-the-road authors, too.

---

Edit. I'll add that most sci fi is incapable of even writing characters that have more distinction than "she's a woman, he's a man". They all talk and behave the same.
by lucyjojo | 2025-06-23 06:23:30+00:00
All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable. This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they have plenty, but they register as little more than noise to my brain; to which i prefer silence...

That said, I do enjoy some classical music. For instance, I deeply enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvxx9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lz...
by repsiace | 2025-06-23 06:24:30+00:00
It's just one way of working. In reality, I only need a few thousand lines of effective code out of it. If I were to do it all on my own, it would likely take two to three times longer—perhaps with better or worse quality. While LLMs generate code incredibly fast, the full process of trial, error, and debugging takes more time. Additionally, since this involves multiple projects and contexts, a lot of junk code inevitably gets generated along the way.
by anitil | 2025-06-23 06:24:35+00:00
I found this interesting because it reflects my experience that companies in tech seem to hire for a list of skills, but the actual job rarely reflects that.

As to _why_ this happens, I think it's probably more boring structural reasons (the person writing the job post likely isn't the direct manager of the role) rather than malice or incompetence.

In any case it's worth a read. I found this via a webring [0] which I haven't come across in a while!

[0] https://akols.com/ also contains Ludic, who has featured on here a few times
by rybosome | 2025-06-23 06:24:45+00:00
I was wondering if it is function overloads of the same name, defining it non-variadically:

add_function(PythonObject)

add_function(PythonObject, PythonObject)

add_function(PythonObject, PythonObject, PythonObject)

There was a similar pattern in the Guava library years ago, where ImmutableList.of(…) would only support up to 20 arguments because there were 20 different instances of the method for each possible argument count.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-23 06:26:32+00:00
Given that NVidia now decided to get serious with Python JIT DSLs in CUDA as announced at GTC 2025, I wonder how much mindshare Mojo will managed win across researchers.

"1001 Ways to Write CUDA Kernels in Python"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XW6Yu6VBQE

"The CUDA Python Developer’s Toolbox"

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtc25-S72448/

"Accelerated Python: The Community and Ecosystem"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IcvKPfNXUw

"Tensor Core Programming in Python with CUTLASS 4.0"

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nvidia-ai_python-cutlass-acti...

There is also Julia, as the black swan many outside Python community have moved into, with much more mature tooling, and first tier Windows support, for those researchers that for whatever reason have Windows issued work laptops.

https://info.juliahub.com/industries/case-studies

Mojo as programming language seems interesting as language nerd, but I think the judge is still out there if this is going to be another Swift, or Swift for Tensorflow, in regards to market adoption, given the existing contenders.
by HenryBemis | 2025-06-23 06:26:37+00:00
In those good old days my Uni was giving away those bulky Unix "manuals" (after every major upgrade they were refreshing the documentation/dossiers) and they would leave on a table a few dozens of the 'outdated' ones. Everyone would grab one and it was a first-come-first-served, and you could end up in a 'useless' dossier, but still they were amazing reads.
by benrutter | 2025-06-23 06:26:51+00:00
You're right- I probably should have said something like "part of its sell" or "one of its selling points" or something.

I didn't mean to undermine the ambitious goals the project has. I still wish it was a little bolder on syntax though, Python is a large and complex language as is, so a superset of Python is inherently going to be a very complicated language.
by PaulShin | 2025-06-23 06:26:57+00:00
Great point context switching hurts more than app switching when the tools don’t enforce a single source of truth.

Role clarity: Slack = capture, Notion = synthesize, Jira = track.

Reality: Decisions still leak out of channels, tasks lose owners, docs go stale.

Unifying everything in one mega-app can create new clutter, unless the app itself preserves context automatically. That’s the angle we’re exploring: keep roles clear, but let the hand-off happen inside the flow so people don’t have to think about it.

Curious how does your team make sure a Slack decision doesn’t die before it reaches Jira? Any workflow tricks that actually stick?

P.S. We’re prototyping a tool that tries this “context-in one flow” idea (still private beta). If anyone’s curious—or has horror stories about chat→task hand-offs—happy to swap notes. DM or reply here.
by motorest | 2025-06-23 06:29:04+00:00
> Is blindly copying the same diagrams (...)

Do you see any evidence that candidates are blindly copying stuff around?

Also, you fail to offer any explanation on why studying systems design topics is supposedly inferior to not studying and just expecting to wing it at job interviews. You only assert that hypothetical candidates indeed have a broader technical background than you, but their knowledge and expertise are useless when compared to your uneducated improvisation skills.

Explain why you expect it to make sense?

> I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. I don't disagree that you should be aware of these things, but drawing out the same system diagram as Netflix without actually having measured a real system to understand where the hotspots are is ultimately just guessing, at best following a known pattern without evidence it's required.

Why do you believe this hypothetical scenario is a concern? I mean, either this approach is useless and candidates have no advantage in following it, or this approach is enough to get candidates to outperform you at job interviews. In both scenarios, why do you think that others regurgitating information is a problem?
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-06-23 06:29:15+00:00
> and have to but a biopolymer or LDPE bag.

As long as those still exist, that's fine. I'm talking about the scenario where they have been regulated away (or companies have removed them to look more "green" and make more profit on more expensive bags), so each time this happens, you have to buy a new "reusable" bag. Which quickly nullifies the benefit.

The LDPE bags also have the advantage of being quite awesome for (limited) reuse. They certainly are no "bag for life" but they can be reused a couple of times, and fold down much more compactly than many of the other types.

> unaware of any Green Party pushing a ban on plastic straws

The EU actually passed that as legislation in 2018 or 2019, which also makes it hard to find sources for who pushed it (the final agreement was a compromise so it passed with wide support, and the initial proposal came from the commission which isn't very transparent).

The best I can give you is this press release by the Greens/EFA (the EU parliament fraction encompassing many of the green parties) https://www.greens-efa.eu/en/article/press/single-use-plasti...

This is directly related to the ban that is now in effect.

In Switzerland, I've not seen attempts to ban straws, likely because they've seen how unpopular it is and it would likely get overturned by a referendum, but the Greens repeatedly show up with demands or attempts to ban plastic bags.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-23 06:29:29+00:00
It's actually the opposite. Humans, for all their faults, are amazingly safe drivers. Depending on exactly how you choose to measure things, we achieve anywhere from 5-8 9s of reliability or more.

It's statistically unlikely that we'd see an issue like this on the first day of a limited deployment if FSD was hitting those numbers.
by TMWNN | 2025-06-23 06:29:34+00:00
>I assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s.

I could have worded that better; I had Europe more in mind for Tandy and Apple's absence. I am aware that Tandy and Commodore had significant presence in Canada; Radio Shack stores were almost as much a presence in small towns there as in the US, and the PET began a long tradition of Commodore computers being more popular outside the US than at home. (Commodore even began as a Canadian company, back in its office-furniture days.)

(I know the article we're discussing here mentions a Tandy store in Europe, and TRS-80 was actually among the very earliest microcomputers of any kind available in Britain, but it disappeared almost immediately from the market for whatever reason. As for Apple, again, despite the Apple II Europlus, the Cork Apple factory, and Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry being the first two Mac owners in the UK, Apple was almost completely absent from the market compared to other US companies until the 1990s.)

>Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.

6809 definitely contributed, but that still does not change Tandy going out of its way to discourage third-party products sold outside its stores. As for Z80, not at all. Tandy could have 100% dominated the CP/M market from the get-go had the TRS-80 been out-of-the-box compatible, but instead it foisted TRSDOS onto its users, so incompetently written that Tandy eventually gave up and licensed one of the many third-party replacement OSes it spawned as the official TRSDOS 6.
by TinyMomentum | 2025-06-23 06:29:34+00:00
MakeImageBlackAndWhite.com – Free Online Black and White Image Converter

MakeImageBlackAndWhite.com is a free and privacy-friendly online tool that allows you to convert any color image into black and white instantly — directly in your browser. No account required, no software to install, and no image uploads. All processing is done locally, ensuring your files stay private.

Key Features:

Works with JPG, PNG, WEBP, BMP, and other common formats

Drag and drop your images for instant grayscale conversion

Fast and lightweight, with real-time preview

Completely free to use, with no ads or watermarks

Ideal for photography, design, printing, documents, and creative projects

Convert images to black and white in seconds at: https://www.makeimageblackandwhite.com/
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-06-23 06:30:19+00:00
> 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.

You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}.

> 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic line breaks and version control should work equally well with both LaTeX and Typst.

(I agree with all your other points though)
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-23 06:31:27+00:00
This is a really easy problem to solve.

Step one: add log severity to your log messages (pretty much every log library supports this out of the box).

Step two: add a log archive (you should have this anyway so that logs can be retained past the initial retention period of your log querying tools. Eg you might have a compliance requirement to keep logs for two years but you obviously wouldn’t want anything that old stored in your expensive fast log search)

Step three: create a way to ingest your archived logs (again, something your business should have, otherwise what’s the bloody point in having an archive)

Step four: have a rule that pushes logs of high severity straight into your log ingestion pipeline, and logs of lower severity into your archive.

Step four seems to be the piece that most people are oblivious too. But it’s generally really easy to implement. Particularly so if you’re using a reputable observability platform.

People who think “log everything” means “log PII” or “stick everything in the same log ingestion pipeline” are simply doing logging wrong. I’m not normally one to say “you’re doing it wrong” but when it comes to logging, these tools are long since mature now. The problem isn’t the tooling, it’s people’s awareness of it.
by chrismorgan | 2025-06-23 06:31:35+00:00
Look at https://github.com/EbodShojaei/bake#basic-formatting. It starts with a horribly contrived example¹ including this²:

.PHONY: clean all: $(TARGET) $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $^ .PHONY: install clean: rm -f *.o

And changes it to this with a consolidated .PHONY, but still no install target. Surely it should complain “there is no install target, what are you marking it as phoney³ for?”

.PHONY: all clean install all: $(TARGET) $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $^ clean: rm -f *.o

I will not say that this way of writing it is unreasonable; users unfamiliar with the available targets can benefit from such a thing up the top (though in practice there’s normally a block of other stuff first, and other ways of achieving it). But this is also a reasonable way of writing it, with strong advantages of its own:

.PHONY: all all: $(TARGET) $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $^ .PHONY: clean clean: rm -f *.o .PHONY: install # Um… where’s the `install:` line?

Treating .PHONY as more an inline attribute like this rather than a target of its own makes it much more obvious that the install target is missing, and makes desynchronisation of .PHONY and the actual targets much less likely.

—⁂—

¹ The first atrocity is that it’s not even a legal makefile: barring a .RECIPEPREFIX override, recipes must be indented by one tab. Running make with this file produces “Makefile:10: ** missing separator. Stop.” Taking invalid code and making it valid is not the domain of a linter or formatter. The Markdown is also abysmal because it doesn’t use tabs, but rather a single space in the output. Given that tabs are structural in makefiles, this is an astonishing lapse.

The second atrocity is the mismatching of .PHONY targets, despite joining the lines (by not having a blank line after the .PHONY line), which is completely unrealistic. Or at least I find it so.

² I have normalised whitespace so we can focus on the .PHONY changes. Assume tabs are where they need to be. Unfortunately HN hates interesting whitespace.

³ Ah, the number of times I’ve written .PHONEY… stupid americentric software.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-23 06:32:00+00:00
People who rob you with baseball bats and axes, and don't even think about the possibility that you'll have a gun, don't feel the need to kill you at any suspicious twitch. The axes and knives and baseball bats are there to have clear superiority, and they know you can't really harm them. So, unless you actually try to fight, you're quite safe from a physical perspective.

Conversely, if people with guns think there's a decent chance you have a gun too, they'll be terrified of any move you make and have a high chance of misinterpreting any gesture you make into violence. So there is much higher tension.

Of course, there is a possibility that you're being attacked by a crazed murderer - in which case you're probably going to die either way. But this happens vastly, vastly less often that robbery.

You can take a look at crime stats from even the poorest European countries. The proof that lack of gun ownership in no way causes more violent crime is evident. Everything I just added above is an explanation of why this happens, but the fact it happens is not up for debate.
by shiroiuma | 2025-06-23 06:32:28+00:00
>I once saw a city employee get off their riding lawn mower to move one of these signs out of their way, cut the grass, then get off the mower again to put the sign back!

Why wouldn't they? It's not their job to remove the sign and dispose of it. By leaving it in place, taking up space, eventually enough of these signs will pile up and cause such a problem that the powers-that-be will be forced to deal with the situation.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-23 06:32:57+00:00
While true, just like everyone on Rust land rarely thinks about configuring their projects without clippy, C and C++ developers should learn static analysers for C and eventually C++ exist since 1979.

It doesn't fix everything, yet it fixes more than those that don't use them at all.

I have been using such tools since mid-1990's when coding in either C or C++, and sadly it is still a discussion point regarding adoption.
by close04 | 2025-06-23 06:33:26+00:00
I know populism is a thing but speed limits aren’t formally set for people’s preference but for safety and environmental reasons. “Most” people choosing to break the law doesn’t change that, and adjusting the law becomes a populist thing.

Accidents on the highway do not happen because people don’t agree on the speed to drive at, more than they happen because “cars exist”. They happen because drivers drive faster than their capacity to avoid danger. This capacity differs from hour to hour and day to day. Agreeing on a speed doesn’t make one less drunk or sleepy or unskilled, and so on. More accidents happen on the day after summer time switch when drivers have less sleep and it’s not like everyone just changes opinions.

You’re missing the elephant in the room. Not everyone is equally capable of buying laws or fighting the enforcement of those laws. When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer). He can afford it, but how much of this can taxpayers take? These are the people who can buy a law to make your life harder if you try to catch them red handed with something. They’re the ones who can see that you get fined when you say something that’s false or just inconvenient or not yet decided by a judge (like that most accidents caused by disagreement on speed, or that Musk’s DC pollutes more than declared) while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.

Making free money sounds awesome. But coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior, no matter how much you think this time it’s a worthy cause, it just opens the door up to abuse against the weaker members of society, and almost everyone becomes weaker as a result. You don’t see where this goes because you’ve never seen it with your eyes and don’t trust reading a book.
by simoncion | 2025-06-23 06:33:30+00:00
> ...so you can convey the intent without limiting the users. It can still be using keywords like public, protected, private. Just make them non-binding.

Yeah, the users aren't likely to be really limited these days.

1) A huge number of widely-used languages have reflection, so you can get at internal members if you really try.

2) For those languages that don't, just remove the keyword and recompile. Someone who's willing to take on the maintenance burden of directly using parts of the software marked by their author as "internal only do not use" is clearly willing to maintain such a minor fork.
by anon-3988 | 2025-06-23 06:33:35+00:00
Can Zig recompile itself if I change a config in production? I am talking about this

``` python program.py --config <change this> ```

It is basically a recompilation of the whole program at every execution taking into account the config/machine combination.

So if the config contains no keyword for lookup, then the program should be able to be compiled into a noop. Or if the config contains keyword that permits a simple perfect hash algorithm, then it should recompile itself to use that mechanism.

I dont think any of the typical systems programming allows this.
by mittensc | 2025-06-23 06:34:25+00:00
I am in the same boat.

I don't need AI to generate code.

Pipelines are non existant (who wants useless code?, just make better abstractions)

Copy-and-paste code is non existant - taboo to duplicate, just find libraries to reuse within the project or write them.

I don't need it to write tests, I want to write tests myself to force myself to think of the problem.

Code base is large enough that it's generally useless for search (and old tools work much better)

And I don't see what else it would be useful for though I'm trying. (writing a class skeleton?, maybe?, but then, I can do that fast as well)
by vidarh | 2025-06-23 06:37:36+00:00
> Basically because physical laws obviously allow more than algorithmic cognition and problem solving.

This is not obvious at all. Unless you can prove that humans can compute functions beyond the Turing computable, there is no basis for thinking that humans embody and physics that "allow more than algorithmic cognition".

Your claim here also goes against the physical interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis.

Without rigorously addressing this, there is no point taking your papers seriously.
by sailingparrot | 2025-06-23 06:38:04+00:00
> The market is a bit tighter but still fine.

Telling others how “the market” is when you only have your very limited subjective and anecdotal experience to share is a bit bold, and probably dispiriting to read for others that do not have the same experience. Do you really have a stat sig number of interviews and offer to say that the market merely tightened a bit?

Are all the people here reporting a shift in their ability to get a job in the last year not even good enough to pass the bar in a normal team ?

I share your experience of having had no issue, but we have to recognize that our specific role, history, location, network, sales skills and luck all play a role, and may not be a general rule.
by zorobo | 2025-06-23 06:38:32+00:00
No morals here. (save for the hanging homosexual parts and supreme leader for life parts). The thing is, they can do whatever they want in their own countries. Different cultures and traditions. Iran installed Hezbollah in Lebanon, Russia foments coups in Africa…and yes, KSA, Qatar have sponsored terrorism.

Did Ukraine do such things to Russia?

US has intervened at times but it is a democracy, administrations come and go. They shook off McCarthyism. To my knowledge, the US has not expressed the will to wipe off a population.