MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 59nadir | 2025-06-03 16:23:00+00:00
This is in line with "Programming As Theory Building"[0] (Peter Naur, 1985) that puts forward the idea that when one is building a system one builds a "theory" (in a sense a mapping of what, where and why) of that system that is essential for continued work on it. Once I internalized this idea it helped me make sense of why rewrites are not "never a good idea" and simultaneously why they are so fraught with peril, as well as what kind of onboarding actually makes sense for work on a system. It's also why I can never get on board with the passive "review code an LLM spits out" type of development; it just does not build theory as reliably, effectively and efficiently.

It's a good, very digestible paper, in my opinion; well worth the read.

[0] - https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
by conradev | 2025-06-03 16:23:26+00:00
Yeah! When that happens I usually stop it and tap in a bigger model to “think” and get out of the loop (or fix it myself)

I’m impressed with this latest generation of models: they reward hack a lot less. Previously they’d change a failing unit test, but now they just look for reasonable but easy ways out in the code.

I call it reward hacking, and laziness is not the right word, but “knowing what needs to be done and not doing it” is the general issue here. I see it in junior engineers occasionally, too.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-06-03 16:23:58+00:00
> Polyester is still used extensively but it isn’t the replacement industry wanted

This is almost always the case. It's very rare that an improvement is better than the original in everything.

The new thing is always sold as universally better, and some times it takes a while for the mass consciousness of people to figure out that the new is better in some respects but the old is still better in others.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-06-03 16:23:59+00:00
> Then something shifted. I started experimenting. I stopped giving it orders and began using it more like a virtual rubber duck. That made a huge difference.

This is how I use it mostly. I also use it for boilerplate, like "What would a database model look like that handles the following" you never want it to do everything, though there are tools that can and will and they're impressive, but then when you have a true production issue, your inability to quickly respond will be a barrier.
by michaeld123 | 2025-06-03 16:24:07+00:00
Yes. I love Google Ngrams.

We use the top google Ngrams in 2 ways. (a) we share it in the reference mode of our app, i.e. common words before or after; (b) we use longer N-grams, where possible, like a 4-gram, to choose literary examples that also show a common pattern.
by doomrobo | 2025-06-03 16:24:10+00:00
If the server stores the transcript of a session, can it brute force the PIN later on?

Magic Wormhole (https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole) avoids this by using a password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol. If you don’t use a PAKE, you get trivial brute force attacks from anyone with a transcript.
by palmotea | 2025-06-03 16:24:12+00:00
> I would bet the US DOT, for example, is as costly or more in terms of monetary input->realized output of all the federally supported space agencies.

No. Everyone uses and needs roads and other kinds of transportation. No one actually needs space probe pictures or chemical analyses of Mars rocks, so that output should arguably be valued at 0 when you're evaluating "monetary input->realized output." NASA could be incredibly "efficient" at turning tax dollars into large volumes of esoteric research findings, but that money would still be better spend on less efficient organizations whose output is far more valuable (e.g. giving large numbers of real people access to medical care).

This might make my point clearer: think of NASA as an organization that builds giant stone penises in the desert. NASA is very good at that job, efficiently builds a lot of them, and I suppose the penises provide some shade. But do we really need them (even if some people are huge fans and are really inspired by them), when that money could be used to feed people who have no food?

> Regularly, highway projects in any of the 50 states turns from "3 months, 30 million" to "actually, 2 years, 110 million." and VERY rarely is that challenged by the public. It is mind boggling, as it's our tax dollars going to the pockets of scummy contractors connected to politicans.

That's a problem, but it doesn't have anything to do with the question of what output to prioritize.

Now don't get me wrong. NASA does do some valuable stuff, but that stuff doesn't have anything to do with Mars or taking pictures of deep space.
by vangel | 2025-06-03 16:25:13+00:00
We are team of three people, we initially built this for enterprise. However we decided to start migrating the system to a self serve system so more people can try it.

You can sign up and use it today, it’s like lovable but for market data.

Looking for early feedback on what would help you personally to see, as it won’t be the same as enterprise.

As of now we can generate charts on the fly , you can prompt it to use other data sources.

We also have about a year of SEC filings indexed that you can query including comparing them. We can of course index further back.
by geertj | 2025-06-03 16:25:18+00:00
The annoying thing about locks (at least the variant that waits) is not just that you have to enter the kernel and wait when the lock is not available (fair enough), but also that the current holder will have to wake you, which requires another dip into the kernel by the holder.

I have been thinking on and off on how to create a syscall-less wake operation. One way to get almost what you want is to have a polling io_uring. That still requires one kernel thread that busy polls per application. Maybe this is fine in some application architectures but it's not ideal.

It would be nice if there was a way to use Intel's debug registers to write a value to some address, which would then interrupt some kernel task, allowing that kernel task to somehow figure out what futex to wake, without the interrupter having to enter the kernel.
by bko | 2025-06-03 16:25:33+00:00
People should pay for services they use.

Highway system is mostly funded through gasoline tax, which although not perfect, is pretty good proxy for how much you use public roads.

Regarding police, private security does exist and works pretty well. Whether you're installing an alarm on your home or paying off-duty police to escort you around, it's an option and often provides better service and more options due to the profit incentive.

I wish more public services had a profit incentive as long as there was a choice. Like with fire insurance, I can choose my coverage and its priced competitively. The insurance company also has an incentive to not have your house burn down, so they mandate you have fire detectors and other such preventative measures. Seems like a pretty good system.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-06-03 16:25:36+00:00
I've been trying to organize my thoughts of how I feel about consuming AI generated content. This comment really encapsulates how I feel.

As long as a human put time and effort into making something, then I'm willing to consider putting my effort toward reading/watching. If someone just spends 5 seconds to throw a prompt out there, that's when I get annoyed.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-03 16:25:47+00:00
Actually, fwiw, I didn’t really play BotW. My non-gaming SO did, I just did the boss fights. They seemed to have fun exploring and hunting for ingredients. Although it was the pandemic so maybe standards were low.

Nowadays, I find the stagnation of open world games a little boring. But, I also enjoy steeping in a world. So I play rogue-lites, haha.
by yencabulator | 2025-06-03 16:26:16+00:00
There are so many Rust things that Prusti doesn't understand that applying it to any real world project is still extremely challenging.

Kani interacts a little better with real code (see https://model-checking.github.io/kani/rust-feature-support.h...), as long as you don't accidentally need e.g. randomness for HashMap DoS protection (https://github.com/model-checking/kani/issues/2423#issuecomm...).

Loops are an utter pain to prove with Kani, though: https://model-checking.github.io/kani/tutorial-loop-unwindin... -- I believe people are using Verifast for loop-heavy code instead: https://github.com/verifast/verifast (this hole patchwork of multiple tools mostly consumed as binary downloads is miserable)

Here's an attempt to gradually verify the Rust stdlib: https://github.com/model-checking/verify-rust-std
by chime | 2025-06-03 16:26:46+00:00
TL;DR: Move your .git folders out of ~/Code into ~/Git/[reponame]. Use ln -s or plain text .git file[1].

I have my code folders in Dropbox on OSX but I believe my process should work for you. I work in node and have a number of monorepos with nested node_modules folders. I run my idempotent dev-files.command script [2] with or without "--nono" in any monorepo and it handles the entire git aliasing and dropbox folder ignore for node_modules process. I use --nono if I ever need to clear out all of the node_modules and do a fresh pnpm install.

1. https://git-scm.com/docs/gitrepository-layout

2. https://gist.github.com/chiragmehta/a41bd33356b6a2f84075d23d...
by goosedragons | 2025-06-03 16:28:20+00:00
You had a very niche device at the time that was far from the typical reader of 2010.

7 and 8" inch devices very much still exist. Kobo has the 7" Libra Colour and the 8" Sage. Amazon also moved the popular Paperwhite line from a 6" device to 7". Pocketbook has 7 and 8" readers. 7" only got MORE common if anything. Six inches was the most common eInk size for a long time.

You can still get big format devices with notetaking. Now the big brands like Amazon and Kobo have them in addition to smaller players like Boox or Meebook.
by ashdksnndck | 2025-06-03 16:28:22+00:00
In my city the buses suck. There are lots of lines going on meandering routes through the suburbs. Not enough routes going between dense areas with high frequency. I desperately wish to take public transit, but it’s normal that the travel time would be hours longer than driving, which makes it totally impractical.

There is obvious room for improvement with routes that dynamically respond to demand. If the bus doesn't have to run where nobody uses it, and can instead pick up riders who are waiting in a popular area, and take them where they want to go, the same number of buses and drivers could deliver much more transit value.

Probably it would be better if the city bus service ran this instead of Uber. But that bureaucracy has no history of making reasonable decisions.
Ask HN: Who is using C?
by 00taffe | 2025-06-03 16:28:28+00:00
I'm a senior web developer that sometimes struggle with the over complicated stuck full of dependences that hide how the real technology works.

Sometimes I would like to do a step back and simplify the way I work, basically using just a few tools / language that have less ideas but that the power to do big things!

C is a language that can be easily to understand but very very difficult to master.

I'm very curious to knwo who is using it and for what!

Thank you :)
by hakanderyal | 2025-06-03 16:28:31+00:00
Spot on. Current gen LLMs also has the ability to mimic your code style. I always point it to existing code, and the result is the same as what I would have written.

Yesterday I “wrote” 18k lines of code with Claude & Cursor. Mostly UI, some backend. This would have taken me a week without LLMs.

I’m sold.
by rerdavies | 2025-06-03 16:28:48+00:00
Fer goodness sake. Eyeroll.

Write an audio processing loop for pipewire. Wrap the code up in a C++ class. Read audio data, process it and output through an output port. Skip the explanations. Use CamelCase names for methods. Bundle all the configuration options up into a single structure.

Run it through grok. I'd actually use VSCode Copilot Claude Sonnet 4. Grok is being used so that people who do not have access to a coding AI can see what they would get if they did.

I'd use that code as a starting point despite having zero knowledge of pipewire. And probably fill in other bits using AI as the need arises. "Read the audio data, process it, output it" is hardly deep domain knowledge.
by alamu | 2025-06-03 16:28:50+00:00
Remote: Yes (CET or WAT Timezone)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Location: Abuja, Nigeria (GMT+1)

Tech Stack: Java, Spring, TypeScript, Angular, Node.js, Express.JS, PostgreSQL/MySQL, NoSQL, Redis, AWS (EC2, S3, RabbitMQ), CI/CD

GitHub: https://github.com/aalamu

Portfolio: https://aalamu.github.io

Email: alamuyusufmusa [at] gmail [dot] com

Hi! I'm Yusuf Musa — a Full Stack Java Developer focused on building scalable, secure backend services and user-facing web apps. I enjoy solving technical problems with clean, efficient code and have contributed to several production and open-source projects.

I've built and contribute to open-source projects such as:

- Localizer: https://github.com/aalamu/localizer — A Java/Spring Boot library for localization and i18n of application responses and errors.

- Detective Z: https://github.com/aalamu/detective-z — A reactive AI-powered assistant using Spring WebFlux and OpenAI.

- Hibernate Validator (OneOf Constraint): https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-validator/pull/1540

I'm passionate about clean architecture, internationalization, and developer experience. Open to remote roles and relocation opportunities.
by hftf | 2025-06-03 16:29:07+00:00
I really enjoyed the article, reading it more from the perspective of what 21st-century lexicography could be, less as a customer of a word game however thoughtfully designed. As a Wiktionary editor (and Android user who's also grown out of bare word-relationship puzzle games) though, it's sad that there seems to be no way to just use the end-product network as a reference, which I would love to do, but I suppose they did spend a million bucks on it.

I'll also use this post to wish that more people would edit Wiktionary. It has such a good mission (information on all words) and yet there are only like 80 people editing on any given day or whatever. In some languages, it's even the best or most updated dictionary available. The barriers to entry and bureaucracy are really not high for HN audience types.
by bccdee | 2025-06-03 16:29:27+00:00
> Access modifiers were originally invented in Simula. As far as I can tell from extensive research, the inventors and users at that time simply didn't realize that access modifiers duplicated the interface-defining features that were already available: virtual methods and subtyping, which together are sufficient to define interfaces in Simula.

Simula was designed in the '60s. Public methods are still static, which mattered a lot back then. An 00s language like Java can take vtable hits for granted, but in the 60s that price was too high.

Anyway, interfaces and visibility serve different purposes. Interfaces exist so the caller can abstract over multiple implementations of a particular behaviour. Private methods exist for the callee's sake, to protect its internals from misuse that might violate invariants.

This is why languages like Go and Rust can comfortably define privacy at the module level—something that would make much less sense for interfaces—and why a language like python needs private methods (or, at least, _courtesy_private and __mangled_private methods) even though it has no interfaces.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-03 16:30:46+00:00
> Simula was designed in the '60s. An 00s language like Java

Not that it is a big deal, but Java is a 90s language, not 00s.

> This is why a language like python can have private methods (or, at least, _courtesy_private and __mangled_private methods) but no interfaces

Interfaces are a feature of typing, and Python has them for both runtime (abc) and statically-checked (protocol) typing.
by dhashe | 2025-06-03 16:31:27+00:00
This is very cool. In puzzlehunts, we often use tools to assist with solving and writing puzzles (the classic example is https://nutrimatic.org ).

Years ago, I wrote a puzzlehunt puzzle that involved navigating through words where an edge existed if the two words formed a common 2-gram (that is, they often appeared one after another in a text dump of Wikipedia).

For example, a fragment of the graph from the puzzle is: mit -> press -> office <- post <- blog.

This work is obviously much more advanced, and it's very cool to see that they managed to make it work with semantic connections. I was able to get away with a much simpler approach since I only cared about 2-grams over a set of about 1000 words (I literally used a grep command over the entire text of the English wikipedia; it took about a day to run).

But the core idea is shared: 1) wanting to build a graph representation of word connections for a puzzle, 2) it being way to much work to do that manually, 3) you would miss a bunch of edges if you did do it manually, so 4) use programming tools to construct a dataset, and then 5) the end result is surprisingly fun for the user because the dataset is comprehensive and it feels really natural.

If anyone is curious, the puzzlehunt puzzle is here: https://dhashe.com/files/puzzles/word-wide-web.pdf

And the solution is here: https://dhashe.com/files/puzzles/word-wide-web-sol.pdf

And a fair warning to anyone unfamiliar with puzzlehunt puzzles: they do not come with instructions and it is very common to get stuck when solving them, especially when solving them alone. You have not completely solved a puzzlehunt puzzle until you extract an answer word or phrase from the puzzle. This one has an extra layer after filling in the words in the graph. Peeking at the solution is encouraged if you get stuck.
by fiachraross | 2025-06-03 16:31:28+00:00
Most people don’t realise their utility bills can be reduced. They assume what they’re paying is just the rate. We built a tool that audits water and electric bills and finds savings most people wouldn’t think to check for. Even when usage looks normal, the charges often aren’t.

In many cases, people are paying more than they need to—sometimes by thousands a year—without ever knowing. We’ve been surprised by how often it works. Curious if anyone here has worked on similar tools or explored this space.
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-06-03 16:32:58+00:00
> biologically-ignorant people

What does this mean? People who don't know a lot about biology? That's effectively everyone who isn't a biologist (and probably even some who are), which is effectively everyone.

> who latch onto vaccines as their cause du jour

That sounds like more than skepticism to me.

> But in practice, at least in America, that represents a small portion of the entire vaccine skeptical community.

I have no way of evaluating whether this is true beyond gut feelings. Do you?
by kergonath | 2025-06-03 16:33:56+00:00
> As a Linux user do you even have basic features like a search bar that searches the internet?

Are you fucking kidding? This has been a thing for about 15 years. Here you have a discussion on the subject dating back from 2012: https://askubuntu.com/questions/233543/how-to-enable-google-... .
by Suppafly | 2025-06-03 16:34:25+00:00
>I'd disagree with that. People build wild shit in Excel that only they can understand. It makes sense to them because they built it. Nobody else can use it.

I think the parent comment is talking about using excel as a grid based layout tool to show how they want the app to look, not implying that you should build GUIs based upon the convoluted stuff people build in excel to avoid having a dedicated app.
by gattr | 2025-06-03 16:34:39+00:00
Here's a comparison of bad and good seeing (captured with a D = 90 mm telescope with a solar Hα filter):

https://app.astrobin.com/u/GreatAttractor?i=246828#gallery

Technically speaking, in the first half of the vid the incoming wavefronts are distorted (the Fried parameter r₀ is smaller than the telescope's diameter D) and do not focus to a clean, tight Airy pattern ([1]). In the second half, r₀ is above D and we're left with just some rubber-membrane distortion (the wavefronts are tilted this way and that, but remain mostly planar), which can be corrected in software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-03 16:34:50+00:00
If you really think that a university degree course is still the right thing for you, you typically just choose another "related, but different" degree course at some university in the same country.

Concerning "next European country", on the other hand, keep in mind that in this country often a different language is spoken; in particular for your daily life, you cannot assume that everybody understands English or even your native language.
by dovlex | 2025-06-03 16:35:08+00:00
Hey, this looks super interesting - nice work!

Couple questions:

How does cognee handle temporal evolution of memory (e.g. when facts change over time)? Curious what’s still an open problem here because AFAIK this is really hard to solve.

Is cognee meant to power agent memory that builds up evolving contextual data about individual users and agents acting on their behalf? Say you track evolving user preferences in some domain space e.g. travel. If so, how do you handle user-specific memory separation—especially in multi-user or multi-agent setups?
by barbazoo | 2025-06-03 16:35:19+00:00
> Most people think better telescopes or cameras are the key to sharper astrophotography, but there’s a hidden culprit that often matters more: “seeing.” I always wondered why, on some nights, even the best gear produced blurry, shimmering images—especially of planets and the Moon. It turns out the real limit is the turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere, which bends and distorts light in unpredictable ways. In this post, I break down what “seeing” actually means, how it’s measured (arcseconds!), and why even perfect-looking nights can ruin your images. I also share some surprising lessons I learned about how geography, altitude, and even the time of night can make or break your results. If you’ve ever been frustrated by fuzzy details or want to understand the real physics behind the “twinkle” of stars, I’d love to hear your experiences and tips.

> Let’s discuss: How do you deal with seeing, and have you found any tricks that actually work?

Reads AI generated to me. https://gptzero.me/ agrees.
by bko | 2025-06-03 16:35:30+00:00
They're providing a good. People have to part with money to use the good. The money someone is willing to pay is necessarily at worst exactly equal to the value they place on it. For instance, I may be willing to pay up to $5 for a slice of pizza, but it only costs me $3 so I get a surplus of $2.

That's basically how the market economy works. It's not controversial and it's why we in the industrialized world live in such affluence when compared to centrally planned systems or systems from the past.

I find these kind of comments like "corporation doesn't care" are lazy and boring. What's the point? It's a service, that looks pretty cool and is supplementing an often crappy public transportation system. And it won't cost taxpayers anything. In fact, it'll likely be subsidized by rich people who own Uber stock
by bccdee | 2025-06-03 16:36:08+00:00
Java 1.0 was in '96. I had remembered it as being more like '98, which was why I said 00s and not 90s—1998 felt a bit late to really be "90s" for me.

I wouldn't really call abstract classes interfaces. They're a way to spread behaviour across an inheritance hierarchy, but a fully abstract class doesn't do anything. Python is duck-typed; inheriting from a fully-abstract class is a no-op unless you're doing something metaprogrammy.
by threecheese | 2025-06-03 16:36:22+00:00
The yandex one uses client/browser-side code to exfiltrate; it’s within the realm of possibility to abuse this, given a user visits a site under your control.

On the FB side, I can see a malicious user potentially poisoning a target site visitors’s ad profile or even social media algorithm with crafted cookies. Fill their feed with diaper ads or something.