MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2025-07-22 04:52:53+00:00
> It pretty much manages memory for you with ARC,

Objective-C added ARC relatively late, about 2010 or 2011 or so, and giving people a decade to stew with manual memory management isn't going to endear people to your language, especially when your competitors (C++, Java) have something, even if not great (the less said about std::auto_ptr, the better).

> ObjC added about two dozen keywords to C and was rejected by the masses for use of [] insteqd of (). Is it really massively different to type:

The square brackets are a vestige of Smalltalk, and it gives Objective-C a feeling of someone smashing Smalltalk into C and not really caring about the consequences. And it really doesn't help that Smalltalk itself had a pretty poor reputation by that point in time.
by int_19h | 2025-07-22 04:53:13+00:00
On the other hand, I bought a pair of hiking boots back in 2011 that are still going strong. So much so that I got another pair of boots by the same company a couple of years ago - same exact model, same size etc - solely as a spare in case they stop making them. Fits like a glove.

The trick? The company in question is Belleville, and they make boots for the US military; they just also happen to be good hiking boots. I suspect that people in charge of logistics as DoD don't like it when things suddenly change, which would explain why they still have the same model still going for 25+ years, and why the sizes and everything else stays the same.
by alexose | 2025-07-22 04:53:14+00:00
There's a ton of research happening (99% of it in China, as far as I can tell) around turning CO2 molecules into useful multi-carbon molecules.

This one describes an interesting thermal pathway that uses barium. It stands alongside calcium looping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_looping), although this is slightly better in that the temperatures involved are lower and the materials are easier to regenerate.

I'm personally interested in electrochemical pathways to generate fuels, although it seems like these are even further away from commercialization.
Show HN: Created an "Indian Dowry Calculator", Calculate How Much You're Worth?
by airobus | 2025-07-22 04:53:20+00:00
Hello everyone,

Recently, I created a fun little website: the Indian Dowry Calculator.

Based on your age, occupation, skin color, caste, etc., calculate how much dowry you can get in the Indian marriage market. The results might surprise you.

Of course, this is just a satirical project, aiming to make more people pay attention to the deeply - rooted dowry problem in India. I hope you all have fun while also doing some thinking.

Welcome to give it a try and see your "worth": [https://dahejcalc.in](https://dahejcalc.in)
by HaZeust | 2025-07-22 04:54:57+00:00
>"The legislative branch being at odds with an executive branch representative isn't inherently problematic unless you think the President should be king."

There's another lens: You could think this, and have it rooted in the belief that separation of powers and the "checks and balances" against political institutions should have expanded beyond 'Executive' <-> 'Legislative' <-> 'Judiciary'.
by miki123211 | 2025-07-22 04:55:28+00:00
This article got me into the fascinating rabbit hole of airline websites for travel agencies.

It turns out most airlines have one, and while some content seems to be gated behind contracts and login walls, a lot of it is just out there.

Compared to the consumer-focused sites, there's a lot less marketing fluff and a lot more industry lingo (which Google and/or a frontier model can usually help you with). Most of the content is just weird aviation trivia; those sites won't let you book a flight, but you will learn a lot of minutiae about how an Amdeus PNR looks like, how to indicate that a passenger is carrying human ashes in Sabre, or what order an agent needs to make bookings in.

Some interesting things I found, in no particular order:

https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ...

https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ...

https://www.qatarairways.com/tradeportal/en/bookingnticketin...

https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/Smartpoint1P/Content/...

https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/site-map.html

https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/di...

https://air.flyingway.com/books/amadeus/Amadeus_Guide.pdf
by niij | 2025-07-22 04:56:04+00:00
> Anecdotally, I’ve heard that the process to get it through AAA seems quicker and easier than from the DMV.

You heard right, but that's because you won't get one at all from the any state DMV. The AAA is the only authorized entity allowed to issue IDPs in the USA. I wish I was making it up, because I'd rather go to my (excellent) DMV office than across town.

"The American Automobile Association (AAA) is the official organization authorized by the U.S. Department of State to issue IDPs" from https://www.usa.gov/international-drivers-license
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-22 04:56:41+00:00
No, it's not a distro problem. You need to use a laptop that has good Linux support, one that has hardware well supported by the mainline kernel or through well-maintained easily installable modules. System76 makes such laptops, for example.

I ran Linux on the desktop and then laptop for 8 years ish when I was younger. It was a huge timesink. It taught me a lot about how systems actually work (what is a kernel, what is a kernel driver, why does crashing kernel code hurt worse than crashing user code, what is pid 1, why do daemons double fork, etc etc) but now as an adult with a busy life I don't see myself using Linux like this again. I can probably debug issues much faster than I could when I was younger but the last thing I want to do with my free time is figure out why runit couldn't spawn the log service to tail my logs for the service that I tried to run.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-07-22 04:56:59+00:00
You got it backward. Outsourcing causes debt (and higher inflation) and decreases per capita earning power. Thus housing becomes practically more expensive. Framing housing as a problem for CEOs to even consider solving is just backward. Higher average wages actually would make housing more affordable, and enable more people to pay for construction. But the "good enough" jobs are getting scarce because we live in the "richest country in the world" (and the West overall is in the same ballpark).
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-22 04:57:00+00:00
There's some truth to this in that all organizations ultimately have their own perpetuation as a goal...but this is also a little like saying "well, there are a lot of complicated macroeconomic drivers of theft" while you're stealing somebody's purse.

The harms here are not the result of some broad faceless force so distributed and ethereal as to avoid accountability. The people performing them know exactly what they are doing. They're choosing to do it, when no systemic factor forces them to. If they wanted to not harm people, they could do so at zero or even negative harm to themselves.

Systems-level thinking is a useful tool, but it can make you miss the trees for the forest when a single concrete human being in front of you is just a bad person.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-07-22 04:57:11+00:00
Once you get into learning German, it’s surprising how many compound words like this are actually direct translations of the Latin or Greek roots of the same English words. Hydrogen = Wasserstoff (water material); television = Fernseher (distance seer) and so on. It’s almost as if they had their own uncleftish beholding moment.
by 0x457 | 2025-07-22 04:58:50+00:00
2x1080p streams is 10mbit/s 2x4k is 30mbit/s. so below 100mbit/s. Video games don't consume a lot of traffic[] fortnite literally measured in 100s kbps. Video games consume traffic most only when they're updating, then sure you can saturate 100mbit/s, but you also can saturate 10G just as well, so in this case it's about speed, kid can do some chores while it's updating lmao. I initially wanted to skip podcast because...320kbps max? But then thought that not only that, but it's also most likely already downloaded to the device.

[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.

That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.
by saltysugar | 2025-07-22 05:00:53+00:00
https://x.com/Mihonarium/status/1946880931723194389

OpenAI jumped the gun before *the closing party* - didn't even let the kids celebrate their winning properly before stealing the spotlight

Also in the article

> In response to the controversy, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown posted on X, "We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did."

> However, an IMO coordinator told X user Mikhail Samin that OpenAI actually announced before the closing ceremony, contradicting Brown's claim. The coordinator called OpenAI's actions "rude and inappropriate," noting that OpenAI "wasn't one of the AI companies that cooperated with the IMO on testing their models."
by decimalenough | 2025-07-22 05:01:26+00:00
Shotengai arcades have been dead or dying since the 1990s if not earlier, and it's not gentrification that's killing them, it's lack of demand. For daily needs, in Japan as everywhere else in the world, one-stop shopping spots like supermarkets and convenience stores win out over visiting lots of specialty retailers that can't compete on price.
by yonibulkin | 2025-07-22 05:02:13+00:00
I was recently testing an idea and needed to find a good domain name. I found it frustrating to go back and forth between ChatGPT-generated suggestions and manually checking their availability.

Then I came across this really cool website — it lets you enter an AI prompt along with a preferred TLD, and it instantly generates domain name ideas and checks if they’re available. Super helpful!

for example: (action words)myapp.(com/io)
by mattgrice | 2025-07-22 05:03:28+00:00
By any definition has China not been leading?

Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.

The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.

By any measure that is weak.
by bruce511 | 2025-07-22 05:04:42+00:00
>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.

I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income.

If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant.

If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important.

Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed.

Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.
by refurb | 2025-07-22 05:05:10+00:00
Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?

It's not a choice between democracy and a fascist (Allende was going regardless), it was a choice between a US friendly authoritarian or a USSR friendly authoritarian.

This is a nice summary of the situation in Chile at the time, the actors involved (domestic and international) and the role of the CIA.

https://www.kyleorton.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile

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.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-07-22 05:06:17+00:00
> You will be hard-pressed to find someone who stuck with it for a week and decided to go back to git.

I’ve tried jj on three occasions and I always get confused by something and just bounce. It hasn’t clicked for me.

I’ve only tried it solo hobby projects. For which git is perfectly tolerable.

I have many many many complaints about git. But jj doesn’t move the needle for me.

Reading this post I am extremely annoyed. Almost every single section is “but more on that later”. It’s still far more complicated than it needs to be.

I also really really really hate the jj log rendering. The colors are a sea of barf. Bolding the leading character that represent uniqueness is stupid and adds noise. The username being second is dumb, I almost never care about that. And the bright neon green (empty)(no description set) is such bad spew. Kinda nit picky, but blech.

Jujutsu suffers the same thing Git suffers. Every god damn blog post that tries to explain how simple it is just my eyes gloss over and think “this is too complex for me to care”.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-22 05:06:39+00:00
> It's that (already) old joke: we give the LLM 5 bullet points to write a memo and the recipient uses an LLM to turn it back to 5 bullet points.

This is already how we moved from stupidly long and formal emails to Slack messages. And from messages to reactions.

I understand not every field went there, but I think it's just a matter of time we collectively cut the traditional boilerplate, which would negate most of what the LLMs are bringing to the table right now.

> 2. Augmentation

I see it as the equivalent of Intellisense but expanded to everything. As a concept, it doesn't sound so bad ?
by snoman | 2025-07-22 05:06:52+00:00
> In practice, I find that if I don't format something as a bulleted/numbered list, nobody is going to look at it.

I’m one of those people, if I’m honest. If I’m reading for work, I want the minimum words necessary to get the point across. I’m looking for information, not a story.

If I’m reading for enjoyment though, it’s another thing entirely.
by bawolff | 2025-07-22 05:08:25+00:00
They did fly them for 33 years. Even if it didn't work out in the end its not exactly an abject failure. I could imagine slightly better business plan, etc could make all the difference.

After all, concorde design started almost 75 years ago, surely we've learned a thing or two on how to design aircrafts with lower maintenance & operating costs in that time.
by Supermancho | 2025-07-22 05:08:54+00:00
I do recall preferring the left hand on my first day with a pencil. However, during that first day, I remember being able to switch to use my right hand as well and it started to feel more comfortable after a very short time. The tipping point was the frustration of using my right hand and failing to be able to control it correctly. I swapped to my (then-worse) left hand and was willing to deal with the frustration better. By the second day, my right hand was too alien and I only switched back briefly in my early 30s due to injuring my left arm/hand, where I basically had pre-school level right-hand cursive.

As far as I know, I'm the only left hander in my extended family.
by ipdashc | 2025-07-22 05:09:04+00:00
I wonder how much is being invested into reducing the costs of inverters and MPPTs and such. ("Balance of system" seems to be the term?)

I'm looking into a DIY install, and it's looking like the microinverters are going to basically be just as expensive as the panels themselves. A quick Google seems to imply this is similar for utility-scale installs: the BoS costs are less than, but still comparable to the costs of the actual panels.

On one hand I get it; panels are very simple, robust devices, while inverters need to interface with the grid and usually have network connectivity and so on. On the other hand, there's a lot less material in an inverter, and they're still relatively simple electronics? Which we're pretty good at mass producing cheaply. You'd think there's a lot of room there to get the cost down.
by panick21_ | 2025-07-22 05:09:06+00:00
> NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason.

That is completely false. First of all, NASA didn't nix it, they just didn't make it a priority as it had little value from their perspective.

The reason it was not done is that para-shouts have to be in the design anyway for abort situations, so that was fixed.

So for SpaceX, the question was to likely delay the program, and take on a whole lot of extra engineering work that they were not actually getting paid for, remember fixed price contract.

They were only going to work on it if they really thought they needed it for something like Red Dragon. And then they could still add it later.

And one of the primary reason SpaceX thought that its to hard, is that they landing feet would have to have gone threw the heat shield. That would have made the whole heat-shield design massively more complex.
by theozero | 2025-07-22 05:09:16+00:00
This is interesting. Amazing how something so fundamental is still such a pain, and we all build our own half-baked solutions for it on every new project. We've been thinking about this problem for a while now as well, and just launched another tool (https://varlock.dev) that might be interesting for you to check out. Would be very happy to collaborate or just talk about the problem space.

Our tool has similar goals, although a slightly different approach. Varlock uses decorator style comments within a .env file (usually a committed .env.schema file) to add additional metadata used for validation, type generation, docs etc. It also introduces a new "function call" syntax for values - which can hold declarative instructions about how to fetch values, and/or can hold encrypted data. We call this new DSL "env-spec" -- similar name :)

Certainly some trade-offs, but we felt meeting people where they already are (.env files) is worthwhile, and will hopefully mean the tool is applicable in more cases. Our system is also explicitly designed to handle all config, rather than just secrets, as we feel a unified system is best. Our plugin system is still in development, but we will allow you to pull specific items from different backends, or apply a set of values, like what you have done. We also have some deeper integrations with end-user code, that provide additional security features - like log redaction and leak prevention.

Anyway, would love to chat!
by lenerdenator | 2025-07-22 05:09:36+00:00
I mean, most people didn't vote for Project 2025, which is exactly what Trump is implementing, despite having lied about not knowing about it during the campaign.

Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maximum sentence, presidential election be damned.
by _wire_ | 2025-07-22 05:09:54+00:00
TK was experimented upon in various ways while a teenage student at Harvard during the time that Leary and Alpert were getting into trouble.

There were several overlapping programs going on using Sandoz pharma at the same time, some connected to mind-control programs.

Naturally, the more pertinent records relating to MK-Ultra and TK were lost in mysterious circumstances

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/12/the-unabomber-the-ci...

There's a German documentary about TK's ordeals called The Net (2003), in which details are explored regarding TK history, his deteriorating state of mind and connections to his targets.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0434231/
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-22 05:12:25+00:00
TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 are still in use, despite 1.0 and 1.1 being deprecated, and only 1.3 requires forward secrecy. So any attacker that can MITM can just force a protocol that doesn't require forward secrecy.

In terms of "no longer controls this domain name", or "no longer controls this IP address", there are a raft of other issues related to this that expiration doesn't cover:

- Does the real domain owner still have a DNS record pointing to an IP address they no longer own? If yes, attacker that now has that IP can serve valid TLS.

- Does the attacker control either the registrar account, or the name server account, or can poison DNS, or an HTTP server, or an email server, or BGP? If yes, the attacker can make new certs.

There's so many holes in TLS it's swiss cheese. Expiration as security is like a cardboard box as a bulletproof vest. Yet that cardboard box is so bulky and cumbersome it makes normal life worse.
by dangus | 2025-07-22 05:13:05+00:00
I don't know why this is so hard to understand and why people like you argue so hard against the safety of transit over cars.

"Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 60 times higher than for buses, 20 times higher than for passenger trains, and 1,200 times higher than for scheduled airlines."

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

In 2019 there were 268 public transit fatalities in the entire USA. 36,096 vehicle deaths, 2.7 milion injuries, 6.7 million crashes.

In 2019, there were at least 14,375 total reported assaults on public transit in the US, with 8,309 on rail modes and 6,066 on bus modes. These assaults occurred both in-vehicle (50%) and in-station (49%). Additionally, there were 10,430 injuries and 250 fatalities related to these incidents.

Keep in mind that at least some transit crime is not crime that you avoid by taking a car. A lot of crime incidents happen between people who know each other and the fact that they were on transit was merely where they happened to be.

Something like 2-5% of all trips and 2% of all miles are made by public transportation in the US, so we can normalize our numbers to compare apples-to-apples. Even if we normalize conservatively in favor of automobiles at 2% (take our transit numbers and multiply by 98/2), we are at:

13,132 transit deaths

704,375 assaults

511,070 assault injuries

12,250 assault deaths

This means that after normalization you are still looking at 4x more vehicular injuries than assault injuries and still more deaths for automobiles compared to transit. And really, transit statistics would not scale linearly like this as current ridership skews lower in socioeconomic status than the population as a whole (i.e., if everyone entered the transit system the overall rates of incidents per person would likely decrease).

Let's not forget the health outcome benefits that are proven for transit users. Better cardiovascular health is one of many known benefits of taking transit instead of sitting in the car.

Look, maybe seeing real life sometimes is a lot scarier than experiencing a contained and isolated life behind the wheel, but it is factually statistically safer. And maybe seeing some more real life would be good for people right now in a political environment where individualized motorists are only thinking for themselves and voting for politicians who want to cut social services. You'll believe in universal healthcare and housing pretty quickly if you are taking transit rather than resorting to the motorist's steel shield of blissful ignorance.