MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cratermoon | 2025-06-08 13:19:36+00:00
The author doesn't mention what I consider the true value of writing and organizing your notes yourself: that work is the work that drives learning and understanding.

I experimented with feeding my notes into an LLM model for RAG and was underwhelmed. The resulting output was repetitive, stilted, dry, and uninspiring. I wanted it to see if it find relationships between my ideas that I had not found on my own, but was disappointed . It did not provide me any new insights into my thinking. The style of what it did write was so foreign to my own style I found myself needing to read and re-interpret what it wrote back into my own ways of thinking that it was more busywork than help.
by jplusequalt | 2025-06-08 13:20:19+00:00
>which is strictly more dangerous than even C, never mind Zig

No it's not? The Rust burrow checker, the backbone of Rust's memory safety model, doesn't stop working when you drop into an unsafe block. From the Rust Book:

>To switch to unsafe Rust, use the unsafe keyword and then start a new block that holds the unsafe code. You can take five actions in unsafe Rust that you can’t in safe Rust, which we call unsafe superpowers. Those superpowers include the ability to:

Dereference a raw pointer Call an unsafe function or method Access or modify a mutable static variable Implement an unsafe trait Access fields of a union

It’s important to understand that unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker or disable any of Rust’s other safety checks: if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked. The unsafe keyword only gives you access to these five features that are then not checked by the compiler for memory safety. You’ll still get some degree of safety inside of an unsafe block.
by uniqueuid | 2025-06-08 13:20:25+00:00
My experience is that it is always important to criticize free speech absolutism, especially when people behave as if it were an atemporal concept. In reality, most of the world for most of the time has had various compromises between protecting individuals and society on one hand and free speech on the other.

That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.

[1] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100423-atrauss-rtlm-radio-hat...
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-08 13:21:30+00:00
The basic idea is simple, there is a trade-off between accuracy and performance.

This is not really new or that uncommon.

What the fastest way to sort a list of names?

The way I have been doing it for the past 25 years --- build a hash list of the first 3 alphabetical characters and sort this using integer comparison --- way faster than comparing strings.

The results are pretty good --- but obviously not perfect. But good enough so that with thousands of users every day for 25 years, I have never received a single complaint that the sorting is flawed.
by alex43578 | 2025-06-08 13:21:50+00:00
I don’t disagree that secondary issues don’t exist, but I also don’t think they’re unique to the American system. I’d think that there’s stress inherent to Canada or Britain’s system, with months-long waits, for instance.

The cost thing has just always been the part of online discourse that sticks out to me, because it’s clear under current laws that it shouldn’t be the financial apocalypse people paint it as, unless they have 0 insurance.
by haberman | 2025-06-08 13:22:01+00:00
This is company code in a monorepo. If a change breaks users, it will simply be rolled back.

Everyone is brainstorming ways to work around Zig's lack of "private". But nobody has a good answer for why Zig can't just add "private" to the language. If we agree that users shouldn't touch the private variables, why not just have the language enforce it?
by guax | 2025-06-08 13:23:10+00:00
I think any of the "off the shelf" gotek emulators should suffice for this. They're made for people to keep playing games on old hardware. I would assume copy protection and other shenanigans would be the creme de la creme of abusing the hardware.

This is to get rid of the media only. You'll still be using the original compute hardware. But it would be an interesting step.

I feel that most of the desire to upgrade is cultural and not technical. People love to talk about the floppies being used while its just a small part of the equation. Cost and risk of creating a new system with the same reliability expectations is hard when the incumbent has decades of iteration. For systems that do not require more performance or energy efficiency the accounting on upgrading looks very different.
by belter | 2025-06-08 13:23:25+00:00
You are ignoring the fact that the types of mistakes or lies are of a different nature.

If you are in class, and you incorrectly argue, there is a mistake in an explanation of Derivatives or Physics, but you are the one in error, your Teacher hopefully, will not say: "Oh, I am sorry you are absolutely correct. Thank you for your advice.."
by mooreds | 2025-06-08 13:23:44+00:00
My biggest gripe is that he outsourced evaluation of the pelicans to another LLM.

I get it was way easier to do and that doing it took pennies and no time. But I would have loved it if he'd tried alternate methods of judging and seen what the results were.

Other ways:

* wisdom of the crowds (have people vote on it)

* wisdom of the experts (send the pelican images to a few dozen artists or ornithologists)

* wisdom of the LLMs (use more than one LLM)

Would have been neat to see what the human consensus was and if it differed from the LLM consensus

Anyway, great talk!
by Someone | 2025-06-08 13:24:40+00:00
Depends on the constants and on the value of n. If the constant for the O(n log n) algorithm is five times that of the O(n) algorithm, the O(n) algorithm is faster for n < 100.

If you expect that n < 100 will always hold, it may be better to implement the O(n) algorithm and add a logging warning if n > 250 or so (and, maybe, a fatal error if n > 1000 or so), instead of spending time to write both versions of the algorithm and spend time finding the cut off value for choosing between the two.
by jug | 2025-06-08 13:25:21+00:00
Before that, you might ask ChatGPT to create a vector image of a pelican riding a bicycle and then running the output through a PNG to SVG converter...

Result: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8b03yu5v58w0o5he1zayh/pelican...

These are tough benchmarks to trial reasoning by having it _write_ an SVG file by hand and understanding how it's to be written to achieve this. Even a professional would struggle with that! It's _not_ a benchmark to give an AI the best tools to actually do this.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-08 13:25:54+00:00
> There are a dozen ways to become huge, and they all are essnetially anti-humanity.

Offering customers lower prices is a way to gain more customers. Software allows for automation and efficiencies of scale. The end result will be a few big organizations that win, without cheating or stealing. (Although, there most likely is cheating or stealing due to other factors).

But I would not classify the success of most larger modern businesses solely due to cheating or stealing. It was simply being at the right place at the right time and executing correctly to take advantage of developing technologies to take advantage of economies of scale.

In this specific case, I know my family and friends benefit greatly from the “free” instant communication and file transfer capabilities that Meta offers (WhatsApp). There obviously might be costs, but international communications have been made far, far cheaper and higher quality due to WhatsApp.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-06-08 13:26:40+00:00
It also appears that they were really trying to do just basic data extraction and classification with some confusing analysis of ill-defined "munchability" thrown in. Most of the data could reliably be sourced from structured databases already, making the use of AI pointless. Even if you are limited by context length, why not just run your data extraction task over a sliding window and merge the results after?

Reading the article, I got the impression that this was done by a junior developer mindlessly doing broscience. But apparently this guy is supposed to have helped build Pinterest and should thus be expected to not be an incompetent moron.
by jmclnx | 2025-06-08 13:27:17+00:00
Isn't this try # 10000000 ?

The problem, once Congress gets wind of the amount of real money that will need to be spent, plus the time it will really take to develop and fully test, it is cancelled.

Of course I fully expect this to be TIP (Test in Production), thus for maybe 10 years, flying in the US could be very dangerous. Lets hope the pilots will be able to manually avoid other planes.
by kennyadam | 2025-06-08 13:27:34+00:00
Seems like a made up interaction tbh. When would you just say “my trs80 had 4k” without specifics 4k of what unless the other person first said something like “my first computer only had 8MB of RAM” in which case they know from context you’re talking about memory, or you out of nowhere say “my trs80 had 4k” to someone and they have no idea what you’re talking about and ask if you mean the monitor.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-08 13:27:40+00:00
I don't think running shell commands is the achilles heel of Apple's ecosystem. I am quite sure most Apple customers are happy not to be running shell commands; they've done pretty good job so far without any shell access ability (unless you're strictly speaking about MacOS — and here too most of their customers have no doubt never launched Terminal).

The agent part may be important — but that's also the thing most likely to land in a future xOS.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-08 13:28:36+00:00
Yeah, that sums things up well --- the problem of course is what happens when one works on a project which blurs boundaries.

I had to drop into BlockSCAD to rough out an arc algorithm for my current project:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

(see the subsubsection "Arcs for toolpaths and DXFs")

Jupyter Notebooks come close to allowing a seamless blending of text and algorithm, but they are sorely missing on the graphic design and vector graphics front --- which now that I write that, makes me realize that that is the big thing which I miss when trying to use them. Makes me wish for JuMP, a Jupyter Notebook which incorporates METAPOST --- if it also had an interactive drawing mode, it would be perfect.... (for my needs).
by userlander | 2025-06-08 13:29:21+00:00
I don't have a responsibility to campaign for secession, that's nonsense. I have a responsibility to campaign for justice and what I believe is right. I believe that targeting immigrants and calling them criminals and rapists is wrong and that sending Marines to put down a protest that is well within the means of the LAPD is fascist.

And what in the world do you mean by "forcing other people to socialize with them"? They're humans. We can't be bothered to socialize with people that maybe look different than us? Sad world. Actually, sorry, sad country this is.
by jmogly | 2025-06-08 13:30:07+00:00
I think this might be part of the reason Apple is “behind” on generative AI … LLMs have not really proven to be useful outside of relatively niche areas such as coding assistants, legal boiler plate and research, and maybe some data science/analysis which I’m less familiar with

Other “end user” facing use cases have so far been comically bad or possibly harmful, and they just don’t meet the quality bar for inclusion in Apple products, which as much as some people like to doo doo on them and say they have gotten worse, still have a very high expectations of quality and UX from customers.
by jyounker | 2025-06-08 13:30:20+00:00
Because "GUI" and "Algorithm" are too big. You have to further decompose into small tasks which you can actually estimate. An estimable composition for a GUI task might be something like:

* Research scrollbar implementation options. (note, time box to x hours).

* Determine number of lines in document.

* Add scrollbar to primary pane. * Determine number of lines presentable based on current window size.

* Determine number of lines in document currently visible.

* Hide scrollbar when number of displayed lines < document size.

* Verify behavior when we reach reach the end of the document.

* Verify behavior when we scroll to the top.

When you decompose a task it's also important to figure out which steps you don't understand well enough to estimate. The unpredictability of these steps are what blows your estimation, and the more of these are in your estimate, the less reliable your estimate will be.

If it's really important to produce an accurate estimate, then you have to figure out the details of these unknowns before you begin the project.
by cornstalks | 2025-06-08 13:30:44+00:00
(This is a reply to multiple sibling comments, not the parent)

For those saying unsafe Rust is strictly safer than C, you're overlooking Rust's extremely strict invariants that users must uphold. These are much stricter than C, and they're extremely easy to accidentally break in unsafe Rust. Breaking them in unsafe Rust is instant UB, even before leaving the unsafe context.

This article has a decent summary in this particular section: https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/#unsafe-...
by NalNezumi | 2025-06-08 13:31:03+00:00
This difference is probably also why my brother who moved to US, and Now back to Europe (with his American wife) struggle with European colleagues.

They're both passionate about their work (game devs usually are) but feel like no one at their office share that sentiment. When it's 5Pm, even before deadline, people just leave. During breaks, they rather talk about local football teams than most recent news about their profession.

So that's the other side of the coin
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-08 13:32:14+00:00
I was more suggesting Apple follow where developers are going and not try to lead where few want to follow. And if developers want VSCode, so be it.

I remember when the Cocos framework (a 2D and later 3D gaming engine) was found to be a popular binary that iOS apps were linking against, Apple suddenly saw fit to push their own game engine. I am not sure how many developers came aboard though. Cocos was, shhh!, cross platform and that was likely a problem from Apple's point of view; a boon from the developer's point of view.
by 256dpi | 2025-06-08 13:32:37+00:00
Thanks tomhow! The idea for building the Air Lab simulator was very much inspired by the feedback I got from you. Here is a bit of background for the other readers:

I reached out to HN by mail (as suggested on their tips page) to gauge whether my story/product was allowed to be posted as a Show HN post. They pointed out that HN requires a more "direct" demo of things. Their suggestion was to create a "raw" video showing how the device works and feels. It made a lot of sense to me. However, as a designer by training, it’s hard for me to produce something like that, as I naturally gravitate towards polishing it too much. When discussing this dilemma with my colleague, we remembered an idea I had some time ago about creating interactive renderings for the Air Lab website. Quickly, we agreed that this would be worth testing, as the whole goal of the video was to give the HN community a feel for the device.

As mentioned in my comment and the Crowd Supply update, I used emscripten to compile the stock firmware to WASM. Luckily, by that time, I was already mostly done with extracting a hardware abstraction-layer from the firmware. This meant that I already had a nice API that I needed to ”mock” and connect to the fake sensors and controls on the website. So most of the work for that week was to actually build the simulator app using Ember.js around the compiled firmware and integrate it. By doing that, I also found a couple of bugs in the firmware itself that have been much easier to debug with the simulator than with a real device.

I can recommend to anyone to reach out to the HN moderators and validate their post. Especially, if it is not a software thing that one can immediately try out. But also then, I think most posts/projects could profit from a more interactive demo.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-08 13:33:58+00:00
> the whole object may not make sense in certain states

"Make invalid states unrepresentable" - it's bad design that February the 31st is a thing in your data structure when that's invalid. You can't always avoid this, but it's appalling how bad most people's data structures are.

C's stdlib provides a tm structure in which day of the week is stored in a signed 32-bit integer. You know, for when it's the negative two billionth day of the week...
by Defletter | 2025-06-08 13:34:06+00:00
In our case, it's not so much being forced to use Bun, but rather that Bun is in real terms infinitely more convenient than lower-level languages. Firstly, even the most novice of novices tend to have a passing familiarity with JS/TS, whereas this is not true for C/Zig/Rust/etc, so it's easier for people to contribute to our projects. Bun also provides so many things for free, statically, and cross platform. You want a TCP server? A websocket server? SQLite database? You want to include static assets? You want to generate static assets at compile time? Etc? Bun provides it.

Attempting to replicate even a modicum of this in lower-level languages can be a real struggle. Rust is definitively the least-worst in this respect because there's been a concerted effort by the community to provide stable packages that do most things. But Rust is a complicated and unapproachable language. Using other low-level languages like C/Zig, and you immediately run into issues of libraries and static linking. And even if you find a library, its documentation is either lacklustre or outright missing (looking at you libuv and libxev respectively).

The amount of manual setup and third-party builds-system finagling just to: 1) run a TCP server; 2) fetch data over HTTP; 3) do both of these using a single event loop (no separate threads); 4) use SQLite for storage; and 5) have all this produce a single self-contained executable. Yet I cannot understate how trivial this is with Bun.
by squigz | 2025-06-08 13:34:35+00:00
> I do not have enough knowledge to disagree on this. But I will say the FAA is still on floppy disks when the US Nuclear Arsenal moved off floppies back in 2019.

Well this isn't very long in terms of overhauling safety-critical systems that have many decades worth of processes and infrastructure built up around them, is it?
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-08 13:34:35+00:00
That's a page about Show HN, not HN in general. The guidelines for news stories like this one are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Specifically, I was paraphrasing this part:

> That includes more than hacking and startups.

Also this was not about voting or not voting, but about people flagging the submission.
by bob_theslob646 | 2025-06-08 13:35:45+00:00
>Dropping glitter or slime on the National Guard would be incredibly provocative, childish and counterproductive.

And Flashbangs and Teargas is not?

"LOS ANGELES (AP) — After federal immigration authorities arrested dozens of people across Los Angeles, protesters turned out to demand their release. Police in riot gear responded with tear gas to disperse the demonstrators." https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/immigration-raids-los-angel...
by mirekrusin | 2025-06-08 13:36:07+00:00
The problem with this kind of thinking is that you're funelling large streams of money into pockets of criminals. You're also not solving anything, in practice people keep buying it - without actual minor controls (unlike ie. alcohol or tobacco) and with blurred perception (ie. same dude probably deals weed, cocaine, heroine, whatever). It is shifting market to black side with all negative consequences that come with it. It creates this disgusting alternative, unofficial layers in cities where law enforcement long ago gave up on enforcing this ban and ordinary people learn/know to stay the fuck out and ignore.
by TapNfix | 2025-06-08 13:36:08+00:00
Thank you so much for raising this — you’ve touched on some of the most critical aspects we’re actively thinking through.

You’re right: trust and liability are fundamental concerns, especially when connecting people with unfamiliar service providers. At Tapnfix, our initial focus is on Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indian cities, where many people don’t have access to formal roadside assistance or verified home service providers. In many cases, people rely on whoever the nearest shop suggests — with zero background checks or accountability.

That’s where Tapnfix wants to step in — to bring structure and reliability to an otherwise informal, often risky process.

Why we emphasize speed: Because in these real-life scenarios — a car breakdown in traffic, a pipe burst flooding your home — delays cause damage, danger, and distress. Speed isn’t just a luxury; it’s often essential. But you’re right — speed without trust is dangerous. That’s why we’re building a layer of trust around speed, not in place of it.

We’re working on: • Background-verified service providers • Real-time location tracking • Ratings and reviews • Customer support and dispute resolution • Escrow-based payments in future releases

We’re still early and learning fast, but this kind of feedback is exactly what helps us strengthen our approach. So truly, thank you — it means a lot to get thoughtful input at this stage.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-08 13:36:54+00:00
Nixos is perfectly usable without an Internet connection. I've never encountered an issue, and in fact I've joked with my wife that considered as an overall end-to-end system (i.e. including the Internet dependency), my jellyfin instance gets better uptime than something like Spotify would.

You can't install or update new software that you'd pull from the web, but you couldn't do that with any other system either. I can't remember specifically trying but surely if you're just e.g. modifying your nginx config, a rebuild will work offline?
by diggan | 2025-06-08 13:37:13+00:00
Lets give it a try, if you're willing to be the experiment subject :)

The prompt is "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" and you're supposed to write it by hand, so no graphical editor. The specification is here: https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/

I'm fairly certain I'd lose interest in getting it right before I got something better than most of those.
by echelon | 2025-06-08 13:38:25+00:00
We should have frozen the web from 2006 - 2010 or so.

We had Ajax, lots of modern CSS, but weren't hell-bent on CSSifying and "SPA"-ing everything. Web standards hadn't yet jumped the shark.

It's also before Steve Jobs murdered Flash.

Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made. The modern HTML/CSS/JS stack can't replicate how simple and functional it was. We're easily dealing with 100x the complexity now.

We let Google trick us into going down this path. And now they're going to kill the web to keep us on their LLMs and platforms.
Show HN: The Polyglot's Atlas – Interactive world map for language learners
by lapdem | 2025-06-08 13:38:32+00:00
I built a website that let's you create a mop of the languages you speak/are learning. Data is mostly pulled from the CIA world fact book via python (package worldfactbook).

Posting now, as backend issues are finally resolved and the site is up and working!

Any feedback and ideas for features that would make it more useful to you are most welcome :)