MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-14 08:17:13+00:00
Interestingly (or maybe not) I started writing a Bittorrent client last week, also in Go. I don't really like AI/LLMs for coding, and my goal is to really learn from it. Not to just deliver some piece of code that an AI wrote...

So the first step is to figure out if there is an actual spec for the protocol. Well, in the case of Bittorrent there is a spec, but it's kinda... brief. Basically, this is the spec: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html

There are some additional extensions here: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html

It's very important to break the work up in tiny steps that each give some kind of a result. E.g. I started with parsing .torrent files, for which you have to implement bencoding.

That was interesting, because I downloaded the Arch Linux .torrent and found out it was basically incorrect: it has a url-list key which isn't mentioned in the spec. Then you have to go down a rabbit hole of some research trying to find out what the heck is up with that (turned out to be https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html). Finally, was able to successfully parse the Debian Linux .torrent file.

Then came implementing the tracker Announce HTTP request and the peer protocol. The peer protocol was tricky, and that's when an experimentation mindset comes in handy. I stripped the announce URL from the Debian torrent and loaded it up in KTorrent, that way it wasn't able to find any peers. I used the "Add peer" option to add my client so I could see what messages it was sending me, and alongside I would implement sending those to KTorrent messages too. A lot of trial and error and debugging.

I have to confess that from time to time I had to ask ChatGPT about some small protocol details because they just didn't show up in the spec. There's also a lot of details that clients have implemented over time but which aren't really documented well. Mostly algorithms for which pieces to download, which peers to choose, how to "choke"/"unchoke", etc, is not well-defined. But web searches help out a lot.

Also an honorable mention to https://wiki.theory.org/Main_Page which has some nice information.

I'm now at a point where I can fully download and upload a torrent with my local KTorrent, so the next steps are to actually get peers from the tracker, and some algorithm to download pieces and store them in a file.

Hope this gives some insights. Let me know if you have specific questions about the process.
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-14 08:18:52+00:00
I would like to echo performance (and other issues) with Fyne. Every time I try it again, I'm actually kind of baffled that it's so popular.

Last week I came across these Qt bindings: https://github.com/mappu/miqt

I have no personal experience with it yet, but am excited to try it out.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-14 08:19:29+00:00
All of the same things were always true, and are true today, of Java. You can use Java entirely without touching anything Oracle-tainted. And yet, here we are.

Not to mention, nothing stops Google from deciding tomorrow to stop distributing any Go code freely. They pull the public repos, pull the public docs, pull the package server and cache, everything. They release everything back only under proprietary licenses: it's their code, they can change the license at any time.

Sure, you could still use anything they released yesterday, if you still have a copy. But would anyone feel that is a sound business or even personal decision?

I'm not saying in any way that I expect Google would do this. I'm just pointing out that this is 100% within their legal rights to do, and under their ability. I think Google is quite trustworthy on this, but if you feel they are not, you should be aware that the license doesn't act as any kind of real shield.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-14 08:20:31+00:00
> yeah man, the antrophomorphization is bad.

Unfortunately, it's also the least wrong approach. People who refuse to entertain thinking about LLMs as quasi-humans, are the ones perpetually confused about what LLMs can or cannot do and why. They're always up in arms about prompt injections and hallucinations, and keep arguing those are bugs that need to be fixed, unable to recognize them as fundamental to the model's generality and handling natural language. They keep harping about "stochastic parrots" and Naur's "program theory", claiming LLMs are unable to reason or model in the abstract, despite many published research that lobotomizes the models live and nail concepts as they form and activate.

If you squint and imagine LLM to be a person, suddenly all of these things become apparent.

So I can't really blame people - especially non-experts - for sticking to an approach that's actually yielding much better intuition than the alternatives.
by 317070 | 2025-06-14 08:21:17+00:00
There are so many more of these. A common one is everything to do with babies.

* In the UK you should not start solids before 6 months, in France you can start at 3, and should at 4.

* Baby bed room temperature: in the UK 16 degrees Celsius, France 19 degrees, in the nordics you should have them sleep outside while I've been told that in Hungary 25 degrees is considered optimal.

Don't underestimate how much of health science is embedded folklore knowledge by people who thought they managed to extract signal from noise with a lot of confounders, especially if the patient is not sick or cannot express their subjective experience.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-06-14 08:22:39+00:00
“First, you must remember to reuse the existing infrastructure as much as possible, it brings the cost of connecting the utilities way down. Disused train stations are a great example; you can also try town halls and museums; and you may experiment with unused mall sections, but from my experience, it's better to use a public space than a private one.”

“Why?”

“The mall owners can get really twitchy if they can't profit off those square feet.”

“I see. So, public underused spaces with intact utilities, you say?”

“That's right. Oh, and remember to keep all your invoices under $3,000.”

“Why that?”

“Funny you should ask, I clearly remember it being really important back in my time, but now that I think more of it, I guess it's just a habit I picked up.”
by v5v3 | 2025-06-14 08:23:29+00:00
For anyone not using one: You can export, CSV file being most common format, all your logins and date from most password managers and import into another, but at present it doesn't export 2fa.

So if you setup TOTP (authentication code) and move password managers you would need to login to each individual account and remove the 2fa and then add it again.
by robinhouston | 2025-06-14 08:23:47+00:00
This definitely needs some context for the non-logicians in the house! Gödel's second incompleteness theorem shows that, if PA can prove its own consistency, then PA is inconsistent (and can therefore prove anything, including false things).

The work linked here doesn't show that PA is inconsistent, however: what it does is to define a new, weaker notion of what it means for PA to “prove its own consistency” and to show that PA can do that weaker thing.

Interesting work for sure, but it won't mean anything to you unless you already know a lot of logic.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-06-14 08:24:34+00:00
I don't know how childbirth compares to the pain that I experienced during an incredibly pronounced bout of tonsilitis I had ~4 months ago, but if it's even 80% as painful, I don't know how one could live with that level of pain non-stop.

When I had tonsillitis, the pain was so intense and so persistent until the 3rd day of antibiotics, I was tempted to just throw myself off a bridge to make it stop. Had I been under the impression there was no way to make it stop in a few days, I suspect I would have.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-14 08:24:36+00:00
It's not, it's just generally a deceptive business practice. And while others may be doing it in good faith, it's very very very well established by now that Oracle is not. They very specifically do things this way, knowing that it will make it impossible for large orgs to police this, and can then extract money from the org, whether it's really owed or not.
by _1tem | 2025-06-14 08:25:04+00:00
Since when is YC about innovation? YC (and all VCs) are about maximizing returns for investors. That is NOT innovation, that is mostly rent-seeking. Hence most YC startups are boring B2B SaaS products designed to milk the oceans of freely printed money floating around the American economy.

The trickle-down wealth transfer goes like this: Federal Reserve -> Banks -> Traditional Businesses (who do the hard work of actually providing goods and services people need) -> B2B SaaS that sells them software to replace spreadsheets.

True inventors and innovators tend to be eccentric and purpose-driven rather than money-driven. That is actually a negative signal for YC. They want the slick grifters, popular kids, who can wine and dine clueless execs at "enterprises" to sell them chat apps like Slack at $100/seat. Much easier and faster way to get investor ROI than pie-in-the-sky "innovation".
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-14 08:25:12+00:00
Right here on HN, where you'd think that most people would be able to think better, there's no shortage of AI fanboys who seriously try to frame the idea that LLMs may be conscious, and that we can't really be sure if we're conscious, since, you know, science doesn't know what causes consciousness.

I guess me feeling conscious, and thus directing much of my life and activity around that notion is just a big trick, and i'm no different from ChatGPT, only inferior and with lower electrical needs.
I built 13 text manipulation tools in 17 days
by pqchanh | 2025-06-14 08:25:18+00:00
Hi HN! I'm building freetextconvert.com - a collection of fast, free text tools.

Started 17 days ago with a simple goal: create quality tools that solve real problems.

Some highlights: - JSON/CSV converters (most popular) - Line Filter Pro (remove lines by pattern) - HTML Tag Stripper (just launched) - All tools work instantly in browser

Would love feedback on what text manipulation problems annoy you most!

Link: https://freetextconvert.com
by blu3h4t | 2025-06-14 08:26:25+00:00
When I first time had Linux class twenty years ago at a secondary school first thing the often gentoo ltsp server compiling teacher told us was how he wrote a bookkeeping program using some proprietary tech and then had to pay so much for like the rest of his life that it wasn’t funny at all, Now I know firsthand why rms calls cellphones tracking devices etc We are in the Middle Ages of software or something :D
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-14 08:27:24+00:00
How hard it is depends a lot on your experience, how comfortable you are with the programming language, and if you have an experimentation mindset. To offer a perspective, I also decided to build a Bittorrent client in Go last week, and I'm about 80% of the way of the posted project in a week. But then again I have a lot of experience with Go, extensive knowledge about protocols and networking, and experimentation has become a kind of second nature for me.

If you're interested, the main Bittorrent spec is actually quite small, you can easily read and understand it in an hour or so: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html

There's a lot of stuff "around" Bittorrent, like protocol extensions. But in my experience so far, many clients have different levels of support. E.g. they would try communicating using Protocol Encryption (obfuscation, actually) and if it doesn't work fall back to the regular protocol (if configured in the settings).

If you just want to download a Linux distribution (e.g. Debian) using the .torrent file on their website, it's relatively straight forward. It has just one file, there's a tracker, plenty of peers using the regular protocol, and you could get away not listening for connections when you're behind a NAT.

Naturally when you get into the grey area of content, then you'd need to parse magnet links, use DHT to discover peers, and perhaps you'd want to implement UPnP to try and automatically map a port on your modem. But that is also an iterative process, you can just build out one by one. The more features, the more peers you'll be able to discover and have successful exchanges with.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-06-14 08:28:50+00:00
Worth noting that this basically doesn't work long term, and is much easier to maintain if it's different work (a job and a new enterprise).

You'll notice that you become less efficient over time. I recommend taking a long weekend and coming back and keeping to 8 hours. It's a great discipline if you want to go further in your career.
by chartered_stack | 2025-06-14 08:30:12+00:00
The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign.

Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspective.

I don't get that feeling from this redesign. I'm sure that this Liquid Glass redesign would look and work great next year or the year after that or even by the public launch of iOS 26. They'll fix the issues with readability, control center etc. But the fact that the first version of Liquid Glass doesn't look good is what's problematic.
by JetSetIlly | 2025-06-14 08:31:07+00:00
I understand your concerns with regard to what languages should be used for teaching purposes and I agree with them. But I don't agree that it applies to Go.

> Not to mention that there's really no second implementation of go for the specification,

Is that true? The GCC frontend is a little out of data with regard to the current spec but it was written to the spec as it existed at the time. Also, TinyGo matches the language spec I think. It has limited compatibility with the standard library, but the specification doesn't talk about the standard library at all.

> and who has the ability to make changes to this specification?

There's nothing stopping anyone taking the current Go specification, extending it and using the Google implementation of Go as the base for something new. Although you wouldn't call it Go in that case.

I personally like that there is a central arbiter with the final say on the specification. Admittedly, I would prefer it if it wasn't Google, but I'm not convinced a Rust like foundation model would be any better in the case of Go.
by _1tem | 2025-06-14 08:32:40+00:00
The wealthy have no incentive to invest their money in productive enterprises if it is sufficiently profitable to sit on it and earn interest. Similarly, people who would otherwise work hard at productive enterprises are discouraged by seeing how easy it is for the wealthy to simply do nothing and get richer.

And the result you have is: the modern American economy, where most efforts go into derivative financial products and investing, rather than actual productive enterprise. Day-to-day goods and services get worse and more expensive while the stock market keeps going up.
by benchmarkapp | 2025-06-14 08:33:04+00:00
I run SEO experiments for indie founders and bootstrapped SaaS. One of the biggest misconceptions I see (and used to believe myself) is that SEO success requires relentless weekly blogging.

Spoiler: it doesn't. In fact, most of the founders I work with rank with just a handful of well-targeted, evergreen articles.

This post breaks down why the “blog weekly or die” approach is broken in 2025—and what to do instead if you’re short on time but still want to get meaningful organic traffic. I also share a strategy to revive underperforming posts using Search Console.

Curious to hear how others approach SEO—especially with limited time or a solo/dev-heavy team.

What’s working for you? What’s not?
by abxyz | 2025-06-14 08:38:05+00:00
Another example is Ureaplasma Parvum which is treated as a serious STD in parts of the world but almost never acknowledged as an STD in the U.S. and therefore almost impossible to get tested for and treated for in the U.S. There’s an entire reddit about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ureaplasma/

Full background: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ureaplasma/comments/qavqf1/the_urea...
by w10-1 | 2025-06-14 08:38:31+00:00
It's a sickening feeling to realize that to justify spending $50-100K on a plane and $1K/mo on maintenance and storage, you need some excuse to actually fly the damn thing at least 30X each year at $100/hr.

So no, it's not $100 and it's not a hamburger, but you gotta call it something in polite company.
by GuiShou | 2025-06-14 08:44:20+00:00
Great idea! This fills a real gap in network debugging workflows.

I can see this being particularly valuable for: - Debugging weird SSL/TLS handshake issues - Analyzing API response timing problems - Understanding network-level failures that don't show up in application logs

The reusable configs feature is especially clever - manually crafting tshark filters every time is such a pain. How complex can these configs get? Can you chain multiple filters together?
by bawis | 2025-06-14 08:44:44+00:00
"In these situations I like to point out that Pakistan also has nukes, Muslim terrorists ..."

Tell me, did the "Muslim terrorists" nuked Hiroshima and Nakasaki? did the "Muslim terrorists" massacre the Vitenamese and Cambodians ? What about the current genocide occuring in Gaza ?

Dear god I can't even articulate how cunning is/was the western media when it comes to brainwash their people.
by benchmarkapp | 2025-06-14 08:45:17+00:00
Thanks for checking it out—and fair point, I kept the article tight and may have skipped over the “how.”

Before I dive in, could you let me know which part felt the most vague?

- Was it keyword research (finding topics worth writing about)? - On-page optimisation (titles, headers, FAQs, etc.)? - Or the promotion/“feature-launch” step once the post is live?

That will help me zero-in
by anotherpaul | 2025-06-14 08:46:06+00:00
It's great for the student. And it shows that the lab she worked in and the university are able to do this type of science.

Sequencing a new fungus is not that rare. It's done all the time these past years. People discover new species all the time.

What is cool is that they already know a bit about where this fungus lives and what it might do.

The hard biology will be go actually culture it, test it's abilities and see what else it can do.

I mean the article is very short so this is me speculating, but if it is of interest they might figure out what the symbiosis really means to the plant and the fungus.

Also discovering the gene clusters that produce the active compounds will be cool and interesting.

Edit: just so it's clear, its amazing that the student was involved and had the trive to do this. It's easy to not be curious but she was and also she was in an environment where her curiosity was taken serious. That's a great feat of the superiviser or whoever else was involved
by GuiShou | 2025-06-14 08:46:39+00:00
Love the honesty about "lots of bugs" - refreshing to see!

The fact that you're daily driving this speaks volumes about its usability despite being a "toy" project. A few questions: - How's the learning curve for someone coming from Vim/Neovim? - The org-mode-like feature sounds intriguing - can you elaborate on what Ctrl-C Ctrl-C does? - Any plans to add plugin support, or are you keeping it intentionally minimal?

The Helix color theme borrowing is smart - no need to reinvent good design choices.
by aquariusDue | 2025-06-14 08:47:00+00:00
Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech.

So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers.

All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality.

We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.
by fxtentacle | 2025-06-14 08:49:18+00:00
Lucky for you, Valve has sold millions of SteamDecks. The result is that the majority of mainstream Windows software now works well in Proton == Wine on Linux.

And despite people constantly whining about it, GNOME is ultra fast, has great shortcuts, and it looks kinda like the pinnacle of UI design, which IMHO was Windows XP.
by kqr | 2025-06-14 08:52:49+00:00
My favourites are

- How much alcohol can a pregnant person drink? (Not too much, obviously, but is a glass of wine a couple of different days in the third trimester okay? Probably, but it varies a lot deoending on which country you're in.)

- When can children start eating green leaves? (I don't know, but even different counties in Sweden have different guidelines on that one.)

- Should infants sleep on their tummy or back? (Definitely on their back. There is no argument there. But when I was an infant -- which is not that long ago, parents were advised otherwise.)
by JetSetIlly | 2025-06-14 08:54:25+00:00
Okay. So it's really just a protection against Google deciding to stop its own development and leaving everyone hanging. That's good. I could get on board with that.

For me however, I think it would be a challenge for the foundation to maintain the slow-and-steady development that we've seen under Google.

To bring it back to the main topic: I think a language that rarely introduces major new features, is good for teaching purposes. From that perspective, I think Go is a good language for teaching core concepts.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-14 08:56:16+00:00
Maybe sooner or later (increased variance), but I think the expectation is correct (2.5 yrs). The problem is Americans don't demonstrate nearly as assertively as the modern French, much less anything close to the French Revolution. The crap the US and the world sees on TV is done by a tiny subset of agitators who aren't party to organized, nonviolent, peaceful demonstrations that the establishment and the media love to paint with a brush as "criminals" and "insurrectionists". This is why people who protest about disagreements with the way things are need to carry only American flags because it does several things:

- Encourages unity and solidarity

- Reclaims the symbol to be neutral

- Doesn't look like "foreign" "agitators"

- Makes it harder for some thugs with badges to inflict wanton hurt on protestors who might be patriotic Americans and/or possibly on "their team"
by HellDunkel | 2025-06-14 08:57:09+00:00
This view is very „hackernewsy“ and reveals a lot more about the mindset around here than the what is going on with apple. Firstly i don‘t think there is much fluctuation with the apple design team except when Ive left but i guess that was mainly due to the ceo change.

I remember a time when microsoft came around the corner with flat design on their phones and the iphone all of a sudden looked outdated. They adopted a flat look shortly after. They did that pretty well.

Thirdly and most important: noone does gaussian blurs, macro and micro transitions better than apple and it‘s a key part of their success. They are taking it one step further now. Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.