MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kybernetikos | 2025-07-26 16:03:57+00:00
Net can be done with reasoning rather than mindless iteration. You start by locking in end points surrounded by other end points except for one free space. if you have a straight line that can connect two end points then you lock it in the other orientation. If a line is locked next to a T pipe, the back of the t pipe goes against the line. If a corner piece is next to a locked pipe, you know that the side opposite the incoming pipe is empty, so it could be the back of a T or the side of a line piece, etc.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-07-26 16:04:28+00:00
You can certainly do it, but since serialization and validation are the main benefit from using Pydantic, I/O are why it exists.

Outside of I/O, the whole machinery has little use. And since pydantic models are used by introspection to build APIs, automatic deserializer and arg parsing, making it fit the I/O is where the money is.

Also, remember that despite all the improved perf of pydantic recently, they are still more expensive than dataclass, themselves more than classes. They are 8 times more expensive to instanciate than regular classes, but above all, attribute access is 50% slower.

Now I get that in Python this is not a primary concern, but still, pydantic is not a free lunch.

I'd say it's also important to state what it conveys. When I see a Pydantic objects, I expect some I/O somewhere. Breaking this expectation would take me by surprise and lower my trust of the rest of the code. Unless you are deep in defensive programming, there is no reason to validate input far from the boundaries of the program.
by mikepurvis | 2025-07-26 16:04:30+00:00
Some things are good hard, the kind of hard that's driven by an interesting domain, going deep with well-architected tools or systems, learning lots of cool stuff.

I expect datetime-adjacent code is basically the opposite of all of this. All the hard parts are driven by fiddly adherence to real-world geography, politics, physics/astronomy, etc. There's no underlying consistency from which a sane model can be extracted, it's just special cases and arbitrary parameters all the way down.

I'm up for a challenge of course, but all else being equal, I'm happy to leave work that is the "bad hard" to others.
by kerkeslager | 2025-07-26 16:05:48+00:00
It's really not complicated. Don't support people who murder, torture, and expel people from their homes.

"The other guy was worse," is factually pretty off base. You can pick and choose sources all you want, but the fact is that Allende was elected as democratically as any US president in the last few decades: the idea that foreign interference invalidates an election is pretty specious. And even if you want to call Allende a dictator, he's definitely a better dictator than Pinochet: he killed far, far fewer innocent people. I give zero fucks about US-friendly vs. USSR-friendly in this case: if the US friendly dictator kills hundreds of thousands of people and the USSR friendly one doesn't, the USSR friendly one is better.

Let me make this clear: if you choose capitalism over preventing mass-murder, your morality is screwed up.

And even if somehow Allende was worse (which again, is not true), that doesn't make supporting Pinochet morally right. Most 5 year olds know two wrongs don't make a right.

> To get a sense of the CIA’s role, they didn’t even think Pinochet had it in him - they had others pegged as the coup leader. They were surprised to find out it was Pinochet.

If your argument is that the CIA was incompetent, that doesn't look much better for them.
by MindSpunk | 2025-07-26 16:05:48+00:00
WebGPU is about a decade behind in feature support compared to what is available in modern GPUs. Things missing include:

- Bindless resources

- RT acceleration

- 64-bit image atomic operations (these are what make nanite's software rasterizer possible)

- mesh shaders

It has compute shaders at least. There's a lot of less flashy to non-experts extensions being added to Vulkan and D3D12 lately that removes abstractions that WebGPU cant have without being a security nightmare. Outside of the rendering algorithms themselves, the vast majority of API surface area in Vulkan/D3D12 is just ceremony around allocating memory for different purposes. New stuff like descriptor buffers in Vulkan are removing that ceremony in a very core area, but its unlikely to ever come to WebGPU.

fwiw some of these features are available outside the browser via 'wgpu' and/or 'dawn', but that doesn't help people in the browser.
by bbuut | 2025-07-26 16:06:13+00:00
Free market is a euphemism for “there’s no physics demanding this be worked on”

If you want it archived do it. You seem to want someone else to take up your concerns.

An HN genius should be able to crawl this and fix it.

But you’re not geniuses. They’re too busy to be low affect whiners on social media.
by atum47 | 2025-07-26 16:06:49+00:00
Back in the day I use to like watching people creating things in YouTube. After a while I notice a trend of people building stuff just for the views. I think that's one of the reasons Ben left Element 14, they did not care about inventions, they just wanted content.

I feel like open sauce, as mentioned by others here, is just a place for YouTubers to gather an audience. With some exceptions, of course (I'm looking at you technology connections).
by toomanyrichies | 2025-07-26 16:07:13+00:00
> I don’t buy the “revealed a latent fetish” explanation. I don’t think people are born with a fetish baked into their soul.

There’s a 3rd explanation: fetishes aren’t inborn, but they’re not instilled by porn either. Instead, they develop through a complex interaction of psychological, developmental, neurological, and cultural factors.

One theory is that, if a person repeatedly experiences sexual arousal in the presence of a specific object or situation (even coincidentally), the brain may begin to link that stimulus with arousal (classical conditioning). Or if the experience isn’t repeated but it is intense, it can become imprinted as erotically significant. In both cases, the fetish can be considered “latent” in the sense that it existed prior to one’s encounter with porn related to that fetish. Porn simply revealed what was already there (and showed the viewer there are others out there like them, too!).

So-called “normal” sexual behavior is just the median of millions of data points. There is not one person who fits that median in all respects. Even if you can’t find a partner who finds your specific fetish “appealing”, there are plenty of women out there who won’t specifically judge you for it either. Failing that, just enjoy the fetish in your own mind and don’t divulge it to your partner. You’re entitled to an inner life, after all.

Just as we have a biological imperative to procreate, we also have one to eat. But I’d disqualify any potential partner who thought less of me for liking tacos. Again, as long as one’s fetish doesn’t harm others, why should sex be any different?
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-26 16:07:24+00:00
(1) They're out there, they are working on their own ideas. My list of projects I want to work on is three handwritten 8.5x11 pages. The ones who need ideas are the ones who are not "driven by passion, curiosity, or the desire to explore and contribute to unique or experimental ideas"

(2) My exposure to [1] makes me want to rewrite your first sentence as "I'm surrounded by people who are not driven by passion, curiosity, or the desire to explore and contribute to unique or experimental ideas" which doesn't make me feel good.

(3) People's brain switches gears when you go from presenting information to having them select something. Sometimes making a selection can be a key step in seduction (think of "forced choice" in card tricks) or can allow somebody to pick something that's relevant to them, but if people are forced to switch from System I to system II [2] you're asking a lot from people who aren't terribly bored.

You'd have better luck if you picked one idea to promote at a time and made a really awesome landing page for it that makes it look like some technology that fell off a UFO

(4) Also you made the rookie mistake of entering links into an Ask HN in which case they aren't clickable. It's almost always better to just post a link, if your landing page doesn't stand on its own, make a better landing page! A workaround is to post your question and then post a comment that has the links in it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Magic

[2] https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...

Yo @cindyllm -- for me "seduction" has a mixed valence; there is the French sense of "to alien someone from themself" or that chocolate ice cream is "seductive" but it can also be a mode of communications which is positive and that's what I mean here. Sometimes people are stuck and could use some alienation from themselves.
by stouset | 2025-07-26 16:09:21+00:00
> Once again we’re talking about employee #2, exercising early would not have been that expensive!

Exercising early almost certainly would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. For employee #2 of a startup, you’re almost certainly already working for mostly equity and not salary.

You are high as a kite if you think it’s reasonable to dump large sums of money into a five-person company while getting paid peanuts in return.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-26 16:09:32+00:00
Not just writing, but reading and comprehension. LLMs are a life-changing technology for a very large proportion of the population. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate, but are forced to go through life in a world that at best wasn't designed for them and at worst is actively malicious towards them.

A lot of people will look at a credit agreement they're about to sign and have no way of knowing whether it's a fair deal or naked exploitation that will financially ruin them. Thanks to LLMs, they can now point their phone camera at it and ask "is this a fair contract, or am I being ripped off". The LLM will give you an answer in speech and happily go back-and-forth with questions and clarifications for as long as you need. Whether the LLM is 90% accurate or 99% accurate at that task isn't truly critical, because it's a vast improvement over the status quo. Modern life is full of tasks that are utterly trivial for people in the top 10%, but a fraught ordeal for people lower down in the distribution.

To paraphrase a very old adage: God created man and Sam Altman made them equal.
by immibis | 2025-07-26 16:09:59+00:00
You're treating this as a computer security problem when it's actually a political problem. It doesn't have to work to be mandated. It doesn't even have to work, for everyone to get a pat on the back and a raise for implementing it. Keeping minors away from porn isn't the point, the point is more like to scare people about being surveilled so they voluntarily won't watch it.
by danhite | 2025-07-26 16:11:43+00:00
The article you cited was very informative.

For example it reminds that standards & intermediaries you trust might still allow multiple unconcatenated XFF headers though and the XFF unpeel by right to left heuristic fails if you only look at the e.g. the first such header.

This reminded me that there always seems to be a past or future pitfall case lurking, such as using old code/library honoring a X-HTTP-Method-Override header (e.g. historically used to ~convert POST to PUT bypassing client CORS restrictions).

Many holes I've noticed over the years seem to spring from legacy preservation of well intended endruns of restrictions, for example I can presently in Safari exploit a bug to get a crypto digest calculated for me within an insecure context ... I find this quite usefully locally (e.g. lan http: , data: , ~bookmarklets that I control) but nonetheless I reported the bug and am trying not to rely on it.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-26 16:12:07+00:00
For a kid, finding porn before the internet was significantly more difficult.

If you were old enough to pass for 18 yeah a newstand might sell you a magazine. Most would not if you were clearly younger. And you needed to pay for it. Most kids (especially young kids) don't have any money.

And then you had one magazine. Still photos. And it didn't show anything but naked bodies. No real sex, the hardcore stuff was only in adult bookstores.

It was virtually impossible, pre-internet, for an average kid to find a way to spend hours and hours looking at an endless stream of hardcore porn.
by danaris | 2025-07-26 16:12:25+00:00
Sure. Then you run even faster into the problem that this is not a real thing.

There is no AI that has consciousness. There is no AI that has human-level intelligence. We have no idea what it would take to build either of these things. Even if we were able to build either of these things, that does not automatically mean it is, or could ever become, superintelligent.

Your whole post is basically equivalent to saying "when the aliens come, and give us their technology, but enslave us all, capitalism will become irrelevant".

It feels truthy to say that we are close to the Singularity, but it's effectively a religious position. It has no basis in fact whatsoever.
by sparkie | 2025-07-26 16:12:54+00:00
I don't think we can get away with just using the C ABI - or even if we did, we would need a standardized name-mangling scheme, and then any language which consumes the ABI would need to be aware of this name-mangling scheme, so it would effectively be a new ABI.

We might be able to make this ABI compatible with C if no templates are used, which wouldn't cause breaking changes - but for other compilers to be able to use templates they would need to opt-in to the new scheme. For that we'd probably want to augment libffi to include completely new functions for dealing with templates. Eg, we'd have an ffi_template_type, and an ffi_prep_template for which we supply its type arguments - then an ffi_prep_templated_cif for calls which use templates, and so forth. It would basically be a new API - but probably still more practical than trying to support the C++ ABI.

Another issue is that if we compile some library with templates and expose them in the ABI, we need some way to instantiate the template with new types which were not present when the library was compiled. There's no trivial solution to this. We'd really need to JIT-compile the templates.
by louthy | 2025-07-26 16:13:33+00:00
I moved to London in 1996 and even Notting Hill wasn’t fully gentrified then! I used to walk home from nightclubs and have no issues (early morning, empty streets, dark alleys, etc). I actually did it recently (for old time’s sake), walked back from Fabric to Dalston. Again, no issues, no concerns, no hassle. If anything it seems safer now because of all the police cctv cameras.

In a city of 10 million people crime is bound to happen, but I’ve never felt unsafe in London. No more than any other major city I’ve been to. And the same with the UK as a whole.
by immibis | 2025-07-26 16:14:06+00:00
Yes? I expect that "take a weekend to France to bypass age verification" and "subscribe to NordVPN to bypass age verification" are both legal while "take a weekend to France to see the Eiffel tower" and "use NordVPN to increase your security" are both legal.

Did you never wonder why VPN ads don't really list any actual use cases, yet they're wildly popular? If you know what you need it for, the ad doesn't have to tell you - just has to tell you which company to give your money to.
by palmfacehn | 2025-07-26 16:14:12+00:00
It is possible to deliver a lite, PWA/SPA with vanilla JS and no loading spinners. Users can install it on their mobile device. I've done as much with blockchain dApp front ends. It isn't necessary to hijack the address bar or abuse the back button to achieve this. Modal dialogs, collapsible elements, tabs and simple anchor elements are enough. Yes, you can allow in-app back buttons to return to the previous modal's state, although that might suggest that the UI pattern should be simplified.

"State management" from a framework seems ridiculous. Developers should be able to handle their application's state with JSON objects representing reasonable abstractions of concerns. Typically, this would be similar to the data you query from the web. Therefore, upon launch, you can populate your document using <template> elements from cached data in localStorage or some of the newer options. When network connectivity is available, you can update the state using the same functions.

Perhaps this isn't something you would trust your large enterprisey team to do competently, but for a solo developer with a distaste for React and heavy frameworks, it seems like the obvious approach.

Interested to hear how others building sans frontend frameworks. If you love React and loading spinners by all means feel free to ignore this. To each their own.
by sillyfluke | 2025-07-26 16:15:27+00:00
Well what do you fight bad laws with? That's right you guessed it...other laws. Fighting fire with fire is everywhere. Crackers vs DRM, Reverse engineering vs vendor lockin, whistleblower protection, South Park vs MAGA, you name it.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good by letting those with no moral code run rampant all over the place.
by kerkeslager | 2025-07-26 16:15:45+00:00
> SPA is not only about seamless transitions but also being able to encapsulate a lot of user journey on the client side, without the need of bothering server too much.

True, but as a user, I don't want you encapsulating my journey. You can wax poetic about hypothetical book categories, but the reality of SPAs is that they break back buttons, have terrible accessibility anti-patterns, attempt to control my attention, and expose my computer to all your bad security practices. SPAs usually contain half-assed implementations of half the features that ship standard in a modern browser, and the only motivation for all that effort is to make the site more favorable to the server's owner.

When a site is implemented with simple HTML and careful CSS, I can configure it to my needs in the browser quite easily. That's a site that favors me, not your opaque blob nonsense.
by jlarocco | 2025-07-26 16:15:46+00:00
Well, is the free market going anywhere?

Who's lost out at the end of the day? People who didn't understand the free market and lost access to these "free" services? Or people who knew what would happen and avoided them? My links are still working...

There are digital public goods (like Wikipedia) that are intended to stick around forever with free access, but Google isn't one of them.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-26 16:16:30+00:00
It's the digital version of a whisper network. Whisper networks have been around as long as humans. Informal ways for people (often women) to share warnings will always self assemble when formal systems don’t protect them.

That said, you;re right to raise concerns about consent and the ethics of sharing information about people without their knowledge. These systems inherently involve trade-offs. When the risk is violence or death, the cost of a false negative (saying nothing) is obvious. So people naturally lean toward maximizing sensitivity, even if that means lower specificity. That;s not ideal, but it's understandable in a world where formal accountability is inconsistent at best, and finding out after the fact isn't an option.

Their existence reflects a failure elsewhere. If we want to reduce the need for them, the solution isn't to shut them down but to make them obsolete. The solution is building systems and cultural norms where violence and coercion are reliably called out and acted upon.

If that idea feels scary or unfair, that's the emotional context many women are already living in. Understanding that is the first step toward addressing why these networks exist in the first place.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_network
by Telemakhos | 2025-07-26 16:16:51+00:00
SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-26 16:17:41+00:00
I've spoken with a few conference organizers about this—how do you please sponsors enough to make them want to come back the next year, but also make it so their booths / areas on the floor don't turn into boring "whatever-conference" spaces.

It's a balance and so far Open Sauce seems to have done okay there; but a couple sponsored booths felt a bit more corporate/salesy and out of place this year.

You could tell people would kind of give them a wide berth compared to walking around other areas, where people were more densely packed around all the booths.
by SilasX | 2025-07-26 16:19:01+00:00
When I was an exchange student in Germany, the host family had Hanse: Die Expedition[1] on their computer, which they explained to me but I also had to kind of feel my way through, not being completely fluent in German. You'd play as a merchant, sending out salt to other ports to trade for goods. Each turn was a year, and it would go through many generations, the goal being to contribute enough from your profits to build a cathedral.

Other things I remember:

- When you'd die, you'd pick an heir from your kids. They would be described as (sometimes you were supposed to understand as) being skilled at either fighting, exploring, or trading. If you didn't have an old enough one to pick, you'd have to pay a lot for some godparent to take over in the interim.

- You could raise capital by selling shares in your operation, but the more shares outstanding, the more interest (Zinsen) you'd have to pay. (You could also buy them back, but they'd be more expensive when you had a good year.)

- If you couldn't pay your obligations, you'd lose a turn to the Schuldturm (debtor's prison, lit. "debt tower").

- You could send explorers to find more lucrative ports, Novgorod being a good one.

- Depending on the weather, you might lose ships. Sometimes you wouldn't want to send any out, in which case it would warn you, "Keine Koggen auf der See! Zug wirklich beenden?" ("No cogs[2] on the sea! Really end turn?")

- You would get random events each turn, one of them being a soothsayer that would offer to predict your fortune. They would then give you the option to pay for extra advice, which would always be "Don't trust charlatans!"

- As your empire expanded, you'd be promoted in rank, some of the higher ones being Senator or Patrician.

- There would be battles, as nobles would sometimes attack your ports.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/9273/hanse-die-expedition/

[2] A kind of ship used back then (also mentioned in the article as replacing the Knarr): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog_(ship)?useskin=vector