MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gmiller123456 | 2025-07-24 21:50:22+00:00
The anti-satellite devices could be deployed in the same manner as the Starlink satellites. And they wouldn't need communications equipment, so they could be lighter and cheaper to launch. And you really wouldn't need to take them all out, just enough to make communication unreliable.

Starlink launches reduce costs by launching a bunch of satellites with similar orbits on the same vehicle, replacing one or a few satellites is going to cost a lot more per satellite. So just disrupting the network is a lot cheaper than fixing it.

Thought the cheapest is still probably paying an existing employee to break some stuff.
by alphazard | 2025-07-24 21:50:45+00:00
The payments space looks like it is going to be very competitive in the next few years. I don't see how something like this can last, without a competitor swooping in to process the payments. They are just giving up market share, seems crazy.

And eventually the friction of using cryptocurrency will be low enough that it is also a viable option. There are stable coins available on all the major ledgers. That means no need additional currency risk. You can get paid in USD.
by everyone | 2025-07-24 21:50:57+00:00
The fucked up thing is how they are enforcing archaic puritan ideals on the whole world. Acting as self appointed global censors. (Eg. not allowing adult games on Steam or Itch.io)

The most confusing thing for me is why. I have read a few theories, but nothing convincing. What could be a strong enough motivator to do such a bizarre thing?

Also we need governments to keep them in line. We cant have private corps acting as de facto censors like that. Its completely undemocratic and unethical.
by zbentley | 2025-07-24 21:51:17+00:00
The two don't really compete, because async/await is primarily about parallelizing IO.

If I want to (say) probe a dozen URLs for liveness in parallel, or write data to/from thousands of client sockets from my webserver, doing that with threads--especially free-threaded Python threads, which are still quite lock-happy inside the interpreter, GIL or not--has a very quickly-noticeable performance and resource cost.

Async/await's primary utility is that of a capable utility interface for making I/O concurrent (and parallel as well, in many cases), regardless of whether threads are in use.

Hell, even golang multiplexes concurrent goroutines' threads onto concurrent IO schedulers behind the scenes, as does Java's NIO, Erlang/BEAM, and many many similar systems.
by johngalt | 2025-07-24 21:51:28+00:00
The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?

There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."
by protimewaster | 2025-07-24 21:51:30+00:00
There's a nice interview with Mike Clark where he talks about this a bit. His take basically matches this. He says that, in his view, any efficiency benefits of ARM are just that's been the market for ARM. In his view, if x86 had a market motive for ARM levels of efficiency, they'd be able to deliver it. But, historically, the x86 market wants performance more than efficiency, so that's what it gets.

https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chie...
by scythe | 2025-07-24 21:51:32+00:00
I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.

So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.

Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.
by bitpush | 2025-07-24 21:51:33+00:00
> choose to use iPhone over Android purely because I align more with their practices/policies around data vs. Google

Based on what GrapheneOS shared, Apple forces apps to use their service. [1]. If you're a privacy conscious developer in, say, Switzerland, your data is being forcibly kept on US servers. You dont even have that choice.

According to GrapheneOS, Google gives you that choice with Android. That sounds better for privacy, if you ask me.

[1]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114789435383593180
by juliasilge | 2025-07-24 21:52:00+00:00
Hello! I work on Positron. We outline some answers here: https://positron.posit.co/faqs.html#how-can-i-use-positron-w...

tl;dr is that the desktop app (including remote SSH sessions) is free to use with a permissive license (no account needed, no subscription, commercial use is OK, etc), but using Positron in a server mode does require a paid subscription.
by dang | 2025-07-24 21:52:04+00:00
Sorry to pile on (to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676030), but can you please make your substantive points without putting others down, or their work? It's always possible to do so, and much more in keeping with the spirit we want here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's great if you know more than others and have time to share some of what you know in the comments. But the putdown aspect is unnecessary and can really hit people hard sometimes.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-07-24 21:52:24+00:00
I have definitely worked in TS code bases with overly gnarly types, seen more experienced devs spend an entire workday "refactoring" a set of interrelated types and producing an even gnarlier one that more closely modeled some real world system but was in no way easier to reason about or work with in code. The advantage of HM is the inference means there is no incentive to do this, it feels foolish from the beginning.
by greenavocado | 2025-07-24 21:52:34+00:00
This is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is what is preventing other payment processors from seamlessly getting in front of the customer, at every retail location, and online? If other payment processors existed and were allowed to flourish, we would not give a damn if these two blocked 90% of transaction types. Instead, something is suffocating innovation and personal freedom.
by benreesman | 2025-07-24 21:52:34+00:00
They're a particularly egregious example of what corporate governance has become, but they're cut from largely the same cloth as the rest of our leadership class. Maybe a little dumber than average, a little more short-sighted, but devoid of any notion of obligation?

I forget the name of the speaker guy who has this turn of phrase, but whatever the merits of his overall platform this hits perfectly: "People doing well today are using every means at their disposal to decrease their accountability while increasing their compensation. If you don't compensate people based on the responsibility they are willing to undertake, you will get a world run by people like this and it will look like the world you live in right now".
by robbiewxyz | 2025-07-24 21:52:36+00:00
This is an important topic. I wonder what it is that makes duopoly so prevalent in tech e.g. Apple vs Google for mobile, Apple vs Microsoft for desktop, Uber vs Lyft for ride sharing.

As for the linked article, it reads too much like AI slop for me to be bothered to analyze any of its specific points. If it's not AI, someone please correct me.
by Root_Denied | 2025-07-24 21:52:45+00:00
I think it's a fair question.

While I disagree with Apple's stance, I think there's a valid argument that Apple is running a platform that you can choose to utilize or engage with or not - similar to how Apple could refuse to serve or trespass someone from one of their physical stores, the platform is self contained and clearly owned by a single entity.

The fundamental difference with a payment processor is that they control financial transactions between entities that have no relation to Visa/MC. They facilitate money being moved quickly and efficiently between accounts for goods or services, and they have no business inserting themselves into the content of the transaction.

I think it's also worth pointing out that the main reason I think that it's inappropriate for payment processors to decide on what content can be paid for with their systems is that it's a closed ecosystem - you can't just set up your own payment processor (though some governments are attempting to do so already), so there's a real risk of a small number of companies controlling what can and can't be bought digitally - that includes not just content related to sex, but also potentially content that is violent, or political.

If we're going to have a very limited group of payment processors, then they need to be completely neutral - or we need to make it possible (or at least easier) for alternative payment processors to spin up operations and work within the global financial network. Considering the technical and regulatory difficulty of that second option I think the former is the better path.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-24 21:53:36+00:00
Positron is also the name of an ultra-portable 3D printer

> https://www.positron3d.com/

that actually defined its whole new class of ultra-portable 3D printers (Positron-style 3D printers; their drive system is named "Positron drive").

A sibling of the Positron is the JourneyMaker:

> https://github.com/mcfazio2001/JourneyMaker-Positron

A cost-reduced (no CNC-machined parts) variant of the JourneyMaker with a unibody chassis that you can 3D-print by yourself is the Lemontron:

> https://lemontron.com/
by rsyring | 2025-07-24 21:54:19+00:00
~my_superfunction() #> so, it's just usual function!

> Yes, the tilde syntax simply means putting the ~ symbol in front of the function name when calling it.

There's a way to work around that but...

> The fact is that this mode uses a special trick with a reference counter, a special mechanism inside the interpreter that cleans up memory. When there is no reference to an object, the interpreter deletes it, and you can link your callback to this process. It is inside such a callback that the contents of your function are actually executed. This imposes some restrictions on you:

> - You cannot use the return values from this function in any way...

> - Exceptions will not work normally inside this function...

Ummm...I'm maybe not the target audience for this library. But...no. Just no.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-07-24 21:54:32+00:00
That's fine, you can live in your world of magic. I don't care for intermittent fasting, it been easier for me to calorie count, but both of our systems are CI/CO. If we can acknowledge the core concept is that weight loss is done through caloric restriction we can then expand that to more implementations, because, as you've pointed out, the "right" way is very personal.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-24 21:55:03+00:00
Thank you, that helps!

But so did he keep the shares or take the payout? Is the 1% payout an accurate reflection of Windsurf's value after having lost so many valuable employees? And why didn't he take the Google job? Was the 1% contingent on taking the Google job? But how could it be, since Google doesn't own Windsurf/Cognition? But if it did somehow, did it have a higher paycheck to compensate? Or was it contingent on staying at Windsurf/Cognition?

This thing needs an in-depth blog post analysis. The tweet by itself isn't providing even close to the information necessary to understand what's actually going on.
by WorldPeas | 2025-07-24 21:55:29+00:00
I'm sure there was some sympathy for her former homelessness (unmentioned in this article). She was very much an unknowing actor who thought she was a "tech worker" and having never been part of this or around it likely thought her life was perfectly normal.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-americ...
by slashdev | 2025-07-24 21:56:14+00:00
It is good that it doesn't give you an option. I don't want some app on my phone telling me its database is corrupt, I want it to always load back to the last good state and I'll handle any missing data myself.

The checksums are not going to fail unless there was disk corruption or a partial write.

In the former, thank your lucky stars it was in the WAL file and you just lose some data but have a functioning database still.

In the latter, you didn't fsync, so it couldn't have been that important. If you care about not losing data, you need to fsync on every transaction commit. If you don't care enough to do that, why do you care about checksums, it's missing the point.
by haunter | 2025-07-24 21:56:33+00:00
Huawei EulerOS is one of the few POSIX compliant Linux distros, but it’s a commercial one [0]

But it has a FOSS release, openEuler [1]

I actually want to download it now to check if the vi there is really that POSIX version

0, https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm

1, https://www.openeuler.org/en/
by Ygg2 | 2025-07-24 21:56:47+00:00
> People talk as if "memory safety" was a PLT axiom. It's not; it's a software security term of art.

It's been in usage for PLT for at least twenty years[1]. You are at least two decades late to the party.

Software is memory-safe if (a) it never references a memory location outside the address space allocated by or that entity, and (b) it never executes intstruction outside code area created by the compiler and linker within that address space.

[1]https://llvm.org/pubs/2003-05-05-LCTES03-CodeSafety.pdf
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-24 21:56:51+00:00
It strikes me as a worst of all worlds solution where it is awkward to write superfunctions (gotta write all those conditionals) and awkward to use them (gotta call fn.something())

For async to be useful you've got to be accessing the network or a pipe or sleep so you have some context, you might as well encapsulate this context in an object and if you're doing that the object is going to look like

class base_class: @maybe_async def api_call(parameters) ... transform the parameters for an http call ... response = maybe_await(self.http_call(**http_parameters)) ... transform the response to a result ... return result

almost every time where I was wishing I could have sync and async generated from the same source it was some kind of wrapper for an http API where everything had the same structure -- and these things can be a huge amount of code because the http API has a huge number of calls but the code is all the same structure.
by skissane | 2025-07-24 21:56:54+00:00
> Acting as self appointed global censors. (Eg. not allowing adult games on Steam or Itch.io)

It seems extra illogical when you think of how much money they make from subscription adult websites, even brothels-in countries that have legal brothels, I think you’ll find many of them accept credit cards, and Visa and Mastercard don’t appear to have a problem with that
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-24 21:57:16+00:00
Most people aren't aware of the red tape. The decisions were made before they arrived and now they are seeing the results of it without knowing that the red tape is why things are the way they are.

Like why can't they walk to a cafe. Why a bar needs 100 parking spaces. Why parking dominates their city. Why they can't find a small lot. Why they can't build up to the edges of their own lot. Why they can't find a small house. Why housing prices only increase.

Most people don't realize that a place in Europe they might idealize is illegal to build in the US, and the closest they've experienced it in the US is walking around Disney World.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-24 21:57:34+00:00
>That said, I learned a lot by constantly screwing up Arch installs I had no real reason to be doing. Eventually I learned to appreciate projects like Debian or Enterprise Linux a lot more.

Which percentage of people do you think would have done the same? Especially if those people just wanted a way to escape from Windows?

>this is the next generation of Linux Desktop enthusiasts who could help make the dream a reality.

I am all for it. But these distros should set realistic expectations and should be clear and upfront that willingness to engage with technical topics is mandatory.
by ZeroCool2u | 2025-07-24 21:57:47+00:00
Kind of unfortunate that it uses pyright and jedi instead of just basedpyright for the more advanced features. Python language support just isn't great with jedi compared to pylance or basedpyright.

And not to beat a dead horse, but I'm also not a huge fan of the broad claims around it being OSS when it very clearly has some strict limitations.

I've already had to migrate from R Connect Server / Posit Server at work, because of the extreme pricing for doing simple things like having auth enabled on internal apps.

We found a great alternative that's much better anyways, plus made our security folks a lot happier, but it was still a massive pain and frustrated users. I've avoided any commercial products from Posit since then and this one makes me hesitant especially with these blurry lines.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-07-24 21:58:38+00:00
> I have deployed a functioning full stack application to the web

Best hope ChatGPT plagiarized that code from people who properly sanitized user input, otherwise it might be vulnerable to SQL injection, XSS, etc. If such holes exist, it may be tough to resolve them without a professional.

> But when I see people say it's a delusion, waste of resources, and everyone is wasting their time on it ... for me, it just doesn't line up.

I don't think anyone would say LLMs are useless, but there are people out there comparing the birth of LLMs to the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the Internet. Such claims are preposterous.

I think the widespread use of LLMs will ultimately be undone by a few factors:

1) Due to the way LLMs function, they will never be totally cured of 'hallucinations'. They are accurate a lot of the time, and apparently useful in those times. But you can never really trust its output. That is an exhausting problem, and will burn people out.

2) Prices for LLMs are artificially very low right now, these companies are burning investor money to keep going. The 'cost' is going to have to go way up for these LLM providers to be sustainable. I put cost in quotes because it will be some cost in subscription prices, but also cost in terms of ads that will be inserted everywhere, and other degrading forms of monetization.

3) Models are running out of good training data. They'll either hit a wall, or continue training on content that was itself LLM generated, which will go the way of Habsburg Jaw in a jiffy. Ensloppification is real.

I'm sure there will be niches for LLMs in the future, for those who can afford their true cost. But this cram-it-in-everything, available-everywhere frenzy will probably be looked back upon with deserved embarrassment.
by cthalupa | 2025-07-24 21:59:05+00:00
> Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.

What. Even natural bodybuilders go through cut and bulk cycles. And plenty of enhanced bodybuilders don't use clen or DNP, even IFBB pros.

Someone new to resistance training, significantly overweight, or both, can add pounds and pounds of lean body mass while in a deficit. But that stops when those things stop. You have to be in a surplus to add muscle mass if you're no longer a novice lifter or significantly overweight. And it is basically impossible to perfectly balance your diet so that you don't gain any body fat in this situation while still being able to efficiently add muscle mass.

For a non-enhanced person that doesn't have the benefits of strong nutrient partitioning effects from AAS and HGH it is even more difficult to do so.

Lean bulks are more popular than ever but they're still bulks and they're still followed by cuts - just cycled much less frequently.
by avhception | 2025-07-24 21:59:15+00:00
It's like watching the public discourse devolve into ever more screaming and posturing. The only winning move is not to play.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment with the perfect rat paradise. The overpopulation got so bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths. Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves by exposing the average human to millions of voices through the internet.

Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and still engage with the Internet. Though I mostly keep to HN and some IRC.
by Splizard | 2025-07-24 21:59:16+00:00
Go is a great language because it has distinct types by default, it's not about "making invalid states unrepresentable", it's about recording relationships about a particular type of value and where it can be used ie. it doesn't matter that UserID is just a string, what matters, is that now you can see what string values are UserIDs without making assumptions based on naming conventions.
by maxwellg | 2025-07-24 22:00:30+00:00
It is very nice to get MCP support in ChatGPT. OpenAI really fumbled the bag with the OpenAPI-based Custom Actions (or was it Custom GPTs?). The web editor experience was always incredibly buggy, even months after initial release. MCP servers allow us to move nearly all of the tool definition bits into the server codebase itself, so we can change things on the fly / version control / feature flag tools etc. much better.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-24 22:01:01+00:00
People who talk about there being a hard line between parallelism and concurrency are always writing code with race conditions that they deny exist or writing code with performance bottlenecks they can't understand because they deny they exist.

I like working in Java because you can use the same threading primitives for both and have systems that work well in both IO-dominated and CPU-dominated regimes which sometimes happen in the same application under different conditions.

Personally there are enough details to work out that we might be up to Python 3.24 when you can really count on all your dependncies to be thread safe. One of the reasons Java has been successful is the extreme xenophobia (not to mention painful JNI) which meant we re-implemented stuff to be thread-safe in pure Java as opposed to sucking in a lot of C/C++ stuff which will never be thread safe.
by jrk | 2025-07-24 22:01:22+00:00
Intel’s situation in 2025 is not comparable to the rest of big tech. They have lost technical leadership, bled market share, and started losing a ton of money in a hugely capital-intensive business. They are actually in need of major triage to survive, not just hopping on a belt-tightening trend among still-massively-profitable software companies.