MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by II2II | 2025-06-29 21:47:25+00:00
Judging from the rest of the thread, they were referring to setup and configuration. For the most part, I consider this to be one of the strengths of Linux.

On the other hand, the operating system is the means rather than the end to most people. If a person is transitioning from Windows to Linux, they will probably have a substantial number of new programs to learn in the process. That is going to factor into most people's impressions of the operating system as a whole.
by simonask | 2025-06-29 21:47:48+00:00
They always have. The present isn’t super special, and I think Europeans (speaking as one) realize this a bit easier, because we see populist governments rise and fall again, over and over, in different countries.

Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.

But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.
by slau | 2025-06-29 21:48:00+00:00
A Parquet file compactor. I have a client whose data lakes are partitioned by date, and obviously they end up with thousands of files all containing single/dozens/thousands of rows.

I’d estimate 30-40% of their S3 bill could be eliminated just by properly compacting and sorting the data. I took it as an opportunity to learn DuckDB, and decided to build a tool that does this. I’ll release it tomorrow or Tuesday as FOSS.
by johanneskanybal | 2025-06-29 21:48:12+00:00
It’s very obvious in 2025, have deleted all my social accounts, (maybe still a bit of reddit). Kids are definitly not allowed even close to it.

100% correct it’s about the business model/funding. Just make it in your basement and don’t take vc capital and let it take a decade and you’ll be the only used social network.
by FredPret | 2025-06-29 21:48:27+00:00
You can't just ban all unpopular or unpleasant things without incurring some side-effects. This particular regulation will simply raise the price floor for the cheapest flights.

What about students flying somewhere for the weekend on Ryanair armed with only a credit card and (maybe) an extra pair of underpants? Do they now have to subsidize my carry-on bag?
by mattmcknight | 2025-06-29 21:48:44+00:00
I would pay for a reserved spot to store my bag. Now that most US airlines are charging ordinary customers for checked luggage, there is insufficient overhead bin space on almost every flight. This has resulted in a secondary effect of a great rush to be the first one onboard, to be able to claim the limited overhead space without having to check your bag. This means I end up spending more time crammed into a tiny seat. If they let me reserve the spot above my seat, I'd be willing to spend the $25. However, if they force you to pay for it, how do they guarantee the space will be open?
by throw0101c | 2025-06-29 21:49:27+00:00
> It's part of the Administration's war on ... Florida?

The administration of Florida has a war on the idea of climate change:

* "Ron DeSantis signs bill scrubbing ‘climate change’ from Florida state laws": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/desa...

* "Florida Officials Barred from Referencing “Climate Change”: https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/florida-officials-b...

This allows (certain) Florida politicians to put their head in the sand even more than they already have.
by general1726 | 2025-06-29 21:50:31+00:00
> You can easily carry 2 weeks of clothes in a backpack.

As somebody who was recently 2 weeks abroad, no you can't. My backpack would have laptop, chargers and 2 weeks of underwear and would be full. Unless you are talking about some huge hiking style backpack, but that won't get into cabin because personal will force you to check it in.
by marcuskaz | 2025-06-29 21:51:17+00:00
I finally compiled and expanded on all my various blog posts, tutorials and other Python goodness into a book: Working with Python. It is available as a free pdf download at: https://mkaz.blog/working-with-python/

It's grown over a dozen or so years and when I finally decide to compile into a book, everyone now uses AI and no longer read and learn from books but instead through LLMs.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-06-29 21:51:20+00:00
I've been building an interactive nuclear reactor scoping tool to help people build intuition about how different types of nuclear reactors work and cost at different sizes. I ran a bunch of simple reactor simulations and this basically interpolates between them. https://whatisnuclear.com/neutronics-scoping-tool.html

I did a screenshare demo of it yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQzDfrdf71Y
by dijit | 2025-06-29 21:51:35+00:00
Because accountability?

Either you’re suggesting jail is too punitive a punishment or that being fired should never be a viable option.

I’m not saying we should jump to extremes, I’m saying that the option should be on the table if you violate the core principles of the company, especially in a way that causes loss of consumer trust.

Whats the difference between defrauding Ford out of $200M and causing $200M in damages because I decided that every new Ford will include the word “I solemnly swear I will shit on the American flag when requested”?

In essence, in either case I am putting my own needs above the needs of the company and above the needs of the consumer - in a way that undermines future sales for the company too.
by gbin | 2025-06-29 21:52:17+00:00
Because of the general enshitification : of course companies will have that on font 3 then at the last minute when you have invested 30 minutes of your clicking through "no I don't want an insurance", "no I am sure I don't want an insurance", "no I don't want to upgrade", "no I don't want a new credit card" then btw it is $20 for your onboard luggage and $10 administrative free to add it...
by IshKebab | 2025-06-29 21:53:01+00:00
No. That's not how pricing works. The price of a ticket might go up slightly, but it won't go up by the same amount as the fees cost.

This is due to supply and demand. Basically the price of something depends partly on how much people are willing to pay for it. On average, people don't value the extra cabin baggage at the price the airline charges, so they can't charge everyone that fee. It would be inefficient and they would lose money if they tried.

They might increase prices a little... But the most efficient price increase might be surprisingly small.
by sodality2 | 2025-06-29 21:53:11+00:00
After 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:

* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)

* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc

* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)

* Market research for products

* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.

Plus a few more with more imagination.

So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.

[0]: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
by dheera | 2025-06-29 21:53:15+00:00
I took a break from a toxic big tech job.

I spent a couple months travelling.

Then I spent a couple months trying to use transformer-based models of sorts to detect short-lived inefficiencies in the stock market to try to create a passive income trading bot. I know short-term quant trading is super hard to be profitable, but Rentech did it, so I figured I'd throw a couple months at it.

Then I spent another couple months on AI for science, robotic lab automation, and trying to get AI to do AI research inside a Docker container.
by samiv | 2025-06-29 21:53:33+00:00
Thats because the state basically printed money and handed it out.

Ask yourself when you have a normal working class person who roughly breaks even on their income vs. their spending where does all that money go?

They pay rent. And then what? They pay mortgage, they car insurance, they utilities.

One way or another the money ends up to the top of the pyramid, i.e. the wealthy individuals who own capital assets, properties, businesses etc.

You had high inflation because the government essentially printed money. But what if instead of printing that 1 trillion dollars (or however much it was), the state had actually taxed the that money off of the rich individuals and corporations and then handed that out.

The same money would again flow through the system back to the same rich people where it could be taxed again and handed out and put back into the circulation. This would not cause inflation by itself since the monetary value of the money would not be devalued.

It would require a government that actually gave a damn about its citizens and had balls to tax people and corporations and when the said corporations and individuals run the government its of course not going to happen.
by quotemstr | 2025-06-29 21:53:43+00:00
> Yes. Macros are a hammer, but not everything is a nail.

Overuse of macros is a symptom of missing language capabilities.

My biggest disappointment in Rust (and probably my least popular opinion) is how Rust botched error handling. I think non-local flow control (i.e. exceptions) with automated causal chaining (like Python) is a good language design point and I think Rust departed from this good design point prematurely in a way that's damaged the language in unfixable ways.

IOW, Rust should have had _only_ panics, and panic objects should have had rich contextual information, just like Java and Python. There should also have been an enforced "does not panic" annotation like noexcept in C++. And Drop implementations should not be allowed to panic. Ever.

God, I hope at least yeet gets in.
by mauvehaus | 2025-06-29 21:54:29+00:00
Our staining our log home project has evolved into a replacing some logs project after demolishing the sketchy balcony that came with the house and discovering a bunch of rot.

Frankly, I'm astonished that it hadn't collapsed out from under me when I was shoveling snow off of it this past winter. Behind the ledger that tied the balcony to the house was a mess of pressure treated lumber scabbed into a cavity in the logs formed by rot, none of it well-fastened or fastened into truly sound wood.
by godelski | 2025-06-29 21:54:53+00:00
I think the problem with the quote is that everyone forgets the line that comes after it.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. vvvvvvvvvv Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. ^^^^^^^^^^

This makes it clear, in context, that Knuth defines "Premature Optimization" as "optimizing before you profile your code"

@OP, I think you should lead with this. I think it gets lost by the time you actually reference it. If I can suggest, place the second paragraph after

> People always use this quote wrong, and to get a feeling for that we just have to look at the original paper, and the context in which it was written.

The optimization part gets lost in the middle and this, I think, could help provide a better hook to those who aren't going to read the whole thing. Which I think how you wrote works good for that but the point (IMO) will be missed by more inattentive readers. The post is good also, so this is just a minor critique because I want to see it do better.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640 (alt) https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/356635.356640
by Nasrudith | 2025-06-29 21:54:56+00:00
The bigger relative risk is precisely why the billionaire is so rich - their surplus wealth may be wagered against longer odds when it would be suicidally reckless to yolo your life's savings into a start-up. Those sorts of bets are the Venture Capital strategy.

The relative value of money being lower is what enables riskier investments and essentially what 'justifies' inequality in a bloodless utilitarian sort of way. You know how in economics trades may be net positives due to different valuations between individuals? The same applies in current certain money vs future risky unbound returns. That taking such bets is consistently a successful strategy breeds inequity even without any winner-takes-all effects or high barriers to entry.

Hypothetically if the VCs kept on 'gambling' on failed start-ups and always losing without any offsetting huge wins, not quitting because they think a win is just around the corner, it would be a trend that reduces inequity. As it puts money into the pockets of employees and smaller suppliers of neccessary capital production goods.

I am afraid you would find it harder to get larger groups of people to agree to the high growth potential, high risk enterprises because they tend to lack the spare capital to be able to afford to risk it. I think ironically the most probable tolerable risk profile for larger groups (who are presumably more precarious) is something big and secure being sold out of by larger players. (Small traders panic buying and selling and doing worse is its own separate problem.)

One form of company structure that technically does paying labor well better are partnetships typically used by law firms. It works for them because they have no real capital requirements and have high per hour productivity and labor expenses as the lion’s share of profits go to the lawyers whose names are in the company name.
by bluGill | 2025-06-29 21:55:26+00:00
If you have benchmarked something then optimizations are not premature. People often used to 'optimize' code that was rarely run, often making the code harder to read for no gain.

beware too of premature pessimization. Don't write bubble sort just because you haven't benchmarked your code to show it is a bottleneck - which is what some will do and then incorrectly cite premature optimization when you tell them they should do better. Note that any compitenet languare has sort in the standard library that is better than bubble sort.
by zahlman | 2025-06-29 21:55:27+00:00
I've been more actively developing PAPER, and expect to push to GitHub and publish wheels on PyPI tomorrow although it's really still not ready for a Show HN. My work there has also led me to developing some side utilities:

* a library for filesystem tree operations (and other trees, if you're clever enough swapping in components)

* a utility to identify and extract wheels from pip's cache (so that they can be dumped into other installers' caches, for example)

I also hope to return to bbbb soon, if only to make sure that it can build PAPER's wheels smoothly (and with a few other basic conveniences implemented).

Oh, and I wrote an article for LWN recently and have plans for a few more....
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-29 21:56:10+00:00
The problem with the user hostility is that, in the long term, people don't use it.

As a web dev I see so many things that are lights-on-nobody-home about Meta. The Meta app on my phone generates numerous notifications, when I get one that says a game that looks really cool is 50% off, clicking on it doesn't send me to the landing page in the their app store, it sends me to the senseless home page of the app which seems to have the message "move on folks, nothing to see here"

The Instagram web application fails to load the first time I load it on my computer and I have to always reload. On either Facebook or Instagram I am always getting harassed by OnlyFans models that want me to engage with them... on the same platform where I engage with my sister-in-law.

When they say they are "careless people" I wonder if they are not just careless about sexual harassment and genocide but careless about making money because we're in a postcapitalist hell where Zuck could care less for making money for his shareholders but rather gets a squee from sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and hires people with $100M packages not because he wants them to work with him but because he doesn't want them to work with someone else.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-06-29 21:56:14+00:00
I wrote a simple app last year that put all my Apple Watch workout routes on a simple map, so I can see how much of the city I’ve covered (all existing options were paid, and I was too cheap for it). Now I have some time, so rewriting it properly that’s based on neighbourhood, completion %s, achievements and etc. It’s weirdly fun, because I’m not a mobile engineer, but satisfying to see hundreds of users per month using my app.

Also, every region has different ways of representing a “neighbourhood”, so I get to learn how to extract viable data from each city. Lots of map stuff, I’m genuinely enjoying it!
by benjaminbenben | 2025-06-29 21:56:21+00:00
I've been working on https://stacks.camera - it's an idea about overlaying the previous picture when you're taking a photo so you can create a timelapse or animation.

For example, you can scroll through 60 pictures from my window https://stacks.camera/u/ben/89n1HJNT

Most of the challenges are around handling images & rendering, but I've also been playing with Passkey-only authentication which I'm finding really interesting.
by pizlonator | 2025-06-29 21:56:31+00:00
> You've made a language that is at least 20-50% slower than C and has a garbage collector. That's not what people use C for.

Says who?

Most software written in C is not perf sensitive. My shell could be 4x slower and I wouldn’t care.

That’s also true for most of the GUI stuff I use, including the browser.

> you've got a more fine-grained ASAN.

The difference between Fil-C and asan is that Fil-C is memory safe while asan isn’t.

This has nothing to do with “fine grained”.

> it's not blowing away the whole narrative.

The narrative is that C is not a memory safe language. That narrative is false.

If the narrative was, “C is only memory safe if you’re willing to pay perf cost” then like whatever. But that’s not what folks are saying

> For running unfixable legacy C code there are already lower-overhead solutions. They're not as precise, but that's either not necessary for safety (e.g. where there's a right sandbox boundary), or the performance is so critical that people accept incomplete hardening despite the risks.

No there aren’t. Fil-C is the only memory safe solution for C code.

Hwasan, mte, etc aren’t memory safe. Asan isn’t memory safe (and probably also isn’t cheaper). Don’t know what else you’re thinking of.

> There's already CHERI that takes a similar approach to pointer tagging

Neither Cheri nor Fil-C use pointer tagging. Both use pointer capabilities. Fil-C’s capabilities are safer (they actually protect use after free).

Fil-C is faster than Cheri because I can run Fil-C on fast commodity hardware. Fil-C in my x86 box is orders of magnitude faster than the fastest Cheri machine ever
by mrtksn | 2025-06-29 21:56:42+00:00
Is there a cost for it though? They don't carry cargo when someone chooses not to buy carry-on baggage right and they don't charge people per kg anyway.

It's not even like one of those tricks for upselling as for most people 0 baggage doesn't make sense and it turns into a hidden fee.

So I guess they will increase the prices of 20 + 40 tickets to 50 to compensate for all the lost cabin baggage sales and some people will be really upset that they can't have the 20 tickets anymore. Meanwhile people will be able to compare the full cost of their flight with the cost of a train or bus alternatives.

IMHO they should make it compulsory to display the minimum cost of transfer to the airport. Often those 9EUR Ryanair tickets actually cost 100EUR+ because they fly to airports that don't have reasonable transfer options and you pay multiples of your flight for transport to and from the airport.

When you put in all the costs you realize that 9EUR plane tickets is more expensive than 100EUR+ train ticket.
by 999900000999 | 2025-06-29 21:57:09+00:00
You don't have to justify your personal situation to me.

If you feel like buying a 80k truck, that's cool.

The issue with America is the vast majority of truck buyers really can't afford an 80k truck.

This isn't the best source, but it says here the average truck buyer is only making 82k or so.

https://www.myautoconcepts.com/blogdetails?id=4049

From experience talking to friends and sales people plenty of folks with 60 to 80k incomes find themselves in 50k plus vehicles.

I suspect for the majority of truck buyers, if credit wasn't as easily available, they'd find alternatives.

The only reason the typical person can buy an 80k truck is they can get a loan.

Let's say their was a hypothetical car loan limit of 1/4th of your annual income. A lot of people would find out really fast they don't need a massive truck.

Manufacturers would in turn adjust accordingly. A 15k car, maybe without a bunch of touch screens, is possible.

This is probably why cars are cheaper in China, credit isn't as available.
by layer8 | 2025-06-29 21:57:49+00:00
> Usually people say “premature optimization is the root of all evil” to say “small optimizations are not worth it” but […] Instead what matters is whether you benchmarked your code and whether you determined that this optimization actually makes a difference to the runtime of the program.

In my experience the latter is actually often expressed. What else would “premature” mean, other than you don’t know yet whether the optimization is worth it?

The disagreement is usually more about small inefficiencies that may compound in the large but whose combined effects are difficult to assess, compiler/platform/environment-dependent optimizations that may be pessimizations elsewhere, reasoning about asymptotic runtime (which shouldn’t require benchmarking — but with cache locality effects sometimes it does), the validity of microbenchmarks, and so on.
by me_bx | 2025-06-29 21:57:58+00:00
Some airlines (looking at you, Ryanair) really exploit the system. Cabin luggage can cost triple the price of the actual ticket, and that extra fee only pops up later on during the booking process.

What’s worse, you’re forced to buy a bundle with ‘Priority Boarding’ just to get cabin luggage - no option to buy it alone.

The ‘priority boarding’ option is a scam in itself: you pay extra just to stand around in a crowded corridor for about 30-40 minutes while the last passengers get off and the plane, then the cleaning crew takes the trash out of the plane. Ryanair planes don't seem to get cleaned anymore between two flights, no time for that.
by Grimblewald | 2025-06-29 21:58:19+00:00
I feel like we could make our operating system more secure and make things easier for researchers by simply making a normal OS look like a virtual machine. Any program that needs to access resources in a non-virtualized way would have to ask for permission first. If granted, it could then see the relevant information or access the necessary APIs.

This way, malware authors would have to choose between making things easier for researchers or targeting far fewer people.

Either way, everyone except the malware creators wins.