MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-07-16 18:31:29+00:00
It's pretty heavily used within Azure itself, and my old team didn't have any issues, even though we had a high volume service with stored procs, triggers, list indexes, etc. And it was cheaper and faster than the SQL Server instance it replaced (granted, the original Sql-based app had tons of big joins and wasn't designed to scale).

I know a few other teams when I was working elsewhere that had to migrate off Spanner due to throttling and random hiccups, though if Google uses it for zanzibar, they must not have that problem internally. Maybe all these companies increase throttling limits for first party use cases.

My current team uses dynamo, which has also given throttling issues, but generally only when they try to do things that it's not designed for (bulk updating a bunch of records in the same partition). Other than that, it seems reliable (incredibly consistent low latencies) and a bit cheaper than my experience with cosmos, though with fewer features.

They all seem to have their own pros and cons in my experience.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-16 18:31:38+00:00
This is largely people who were previously Windows customers but who chose to go another way. Microsoft is doing a lot of shenanigans with their monopoly power, and anti-trust is largely toothless.

I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.

The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.
by fidotron | 2025-07-16 18:32:01+00:00
If you follow things like three.js you'll be painfully aware that in truth there doesn't seem to be much use for this at all. "3D on the web" is something that sounds fun until it's possible at which point it becomes meh[1]. The exception proving the rule would be that Marble Madness promo game https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212644

Consequently much of the JS 3D community has become obsessed with gaussian splatting, and AR more generally.

[1] And I would extend this to what's going on here: people prefer complaining about how missing features in APIs prevent their genius idea from being possible, when in truth there's simply no demand from users for this stuff at all. You could absolutely have done web Minecraft years ago, and it's very revealing such a thing is not wildly popular. I personally wasted too long on WebGL ( https://www.luduxia.com/ ), and what I learned is the moment it all works people just assume it was nothing and move on.
by seanw444 | 2025-07-16 18:32:34+00:00
https://mill-build.org/mill/depth/parallelism.html#_mill_chr...

This is kinda funny. Generating a profile that is meant to be visualized with a web browser's built-in profiler, not even an HTML file. I guess if it's already built and works well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by bunderbunder | 2025-07-16 18:32:34+00:00
That might be the big thing that I think gets glossed over in a lot of these discussions. I agree that I wouldn't want to maintain 100kloc of Python. But, I don't really view that as a realistic hypothetical for a business application. Idiomatic Python tends to require a fraction as much code as idiomatic Java to accomplish the same task. The only time it even gets close is when you have code written by people who go out of their way to make things look like old-school enterprisey Java. So it ends up accumulating a bunch of stuff like

class IWantToBeABean: def init(self, arg1: int, arg2: str, arg4: str) -> None: self._field1: int = arg1 self._field2: str = arg2 self._field3: str = arg3 def get_field1(self) -> int: return self._field1 def set_field1(self, value: int) -> None: self._field1 = value def get_field2(self) -> str: return self._field2 def set_field2(self, value: str) -> None: self._field2 = value def get_field3(self) -> str: return self._field3 def set_field3(self, value: str) -> None: self._field3 = value

when it could have just been:

@dataclass class IDontWantToBeABean: field1: int field2: str field3: str

The worse case for Python is when you get people doing the oldschool Python thing of acting like dynamic and duck typing means it's OK to be a type anarchist. Scikit-learn's a good one to put on blast here, with the way that the type and structure of various functions' return values, or even the type and structure of data they can handle, can vary quite a bit depending on the function's arguments. And often in ways that are not clearly documented. Sometimes the rules even change without fanfare on minor version upgrades.

The reason why large Python codebases are particularly scary isn't necessarily the size itself. It's that for a codebase to even get that large in the first place it's very likely to have been around so long that the probability of it having had at least one major contributor who likes to do cute tricks like this is close to 1. And I'd take overly verbose like the Java example above over that kind of thing any day.
by MintPaw | 2025-07-16 18:33:03+00:00
If it weren't for the brand new shading language it might have been a step forward. But instead it's further fragmentation. Vulkan runs happily with GLSL, Proton runs HLSL on Linux, SPIR-V isn't bad.

And the new shading language is so annoying to write it basically has to be generated. Weird shader compilation stuff was already one of the biggest headaches in graphics. Feels like it'll be decades before it'll all be stable.
by ano-ther | 2025-07-16 18:33:21+00:00
Here is the FDA's warning letter: https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...

Responding to an FDA warning letter (sent after previous interaction) with a marketing blog post takes some chuzpe. They even include "We stand by its accuracy, which the FDA has not questioned," as if FDA had assessed that for a device they haven't submitted for review.
by sophacles | 2025-07-16 18:33:42+00:00
I too have been online for 30 years, and frequently had ISP caused dns issues, even when I wasn't using their resolvers... because of the dns interception fuckery they like to engage in. Before I started running my own resolver I saw downtime from my ISP's DNS resolver. This is across a few ISPs in that time. Anecdata is great isn't it?
by grep_name | 2025-07-16 18:34:18+00:00
This is an interesting project. So the whole thing is hosted at gemini://station.martinrue.com, with no way to host other instances? Stuff like this that leverages the default TLS nature of gemini is pretty exciting. I'm going to have to set up an account later to check it out.

Edit: Checked it out and this is definitely a cool idea. Is there any way to change the unicode emoji next to your name?
by molsongolden | 2025-07-16 18:34:31+00:00
I need to read books like this with extra intentionality or it all just flows through and I might retain a couple of key concepts if I'm lucky.

1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.

2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.
by tombert | 2025-07-16 18:34:37+00:00
I mean, maybe, that's why your lambdas shouldn't be too long.

I have done a lot of Haskell and F#, and I'm very familiar with the concept of "lifting", and yeah being able to individually test the components is nice, but even within Haskell it's not too uncommon to use a lambda if the logic doesn't really need to be reused or is only a couple lines.

If you have a huge function, or you think there's any chance of the logic being reused, of course don't use a lambda, use a named function. I'm just saying that sometimes stuff that has 2-4 lines is still not worthy of having a name.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-16 18:34:48+00:00
We also didn't evolve to do math or science, a lot of our intelligence is incidental and born of the communication & strategy that we did evolve.

Given time and will, it is a guarantee that humans could colonize Mars. Heck, even terraforming is possible at large timescales and an enormous concerted effort.

But there's nothing for us there. The cost in both resources, opportunity, and human lives would be enormous and there's almost no payback at the end but saying "neat".

We're struggling politically to keep our own planet from boiling us alive, at even giving food and water and shelter and healthcare to the citizens within our country - let alone the planet - let alone another. THAT is why it will never happen, not because we didn't evolve for space travel.
by 10000truths | 2025-07-16 18:35:09+00:00
I never stated that it is impossible to have a Hollywood quiet firearm, nor did I cherry pick anything. I merely highlighted a tradeoff that calls the efficacy of "Hollywood quiet" firearms into question. For subsonic ammo, quietness is not affected by bullet size, it's affected by the amount of exploded powder. And it just so happens that your muzzle energy is also affected by the same thing. Your subsonic .45 and 7.62x35 will be louder than your subsonic .22 by roughly the same proportion that they are deadlier.
by genshii | 2025-07-16 18:35:27+00:00
This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though.

For the other 10% software that is performance-sensitive or where I need to ship some binary, I haven't found a language that I'm "happy" with. Just like the author talks about, I basically bounce between Go and Rust depending on what it is. Go is too simple almost to a fault (give me type unions please). Rust is too expressive; I find myself debugging my knowledge of Rust rather than the program (also I think metaprogramming/macros are a mistake).

I think there's space in the programming language world for a slightly higher level Go-like language with more expressiveness.
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-07-16 18:36:47+00:00
It’s hard to say privatization earlier would have lead to better outcomes. The drawback of privatization is the constant search for profitability which puts undue pressure against safety (Boeing?). Historically, only nation states had the organizational structure and long-term thinking to fund the massive investment required to research space flight in the first place, often motivated by weapons development.

Obviously, this is no longer the case. However, It’s arguably because of these nation-sponsored programs that made companies like SpaceX commercializable in the first place since they’re piggybacking on a lot of the science done by the governments.
by chasil | 2025-07-16 18:36:55+00:00
"In his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British government had advance warning of the attack from Ultra; intercepted German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma cipher machine and decoded by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. He further claimed that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ul...
by gosub100 | 2025-07-16 18:37:25+00:00
I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.

What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.
by tombert | 2025-07-16 18:37:29+00:00
Obviously it's totally fine to have a difference of opinion for something like this.

> I have seen people do this in JavaScript quite often, but I always assumed there was some kind of underlying performance benefit that I didn't know about.

I don't think so, at least I haven't heard of it if there is.

I tend to have a rule of thumb of "if it's more than 6-7 lines, give it a name". That's not a strict rule, but it's something I try and force myself to do.

Like in Python, most lambdas can be done in one line, but that also kind of gets into a separate bit of gross logic, because you might try and cram as much into an expression as possible.

Like, in my example, it could be written like this:

[1,2,3,4].filter(x =>((x * 2) + x * (x/2)) % 27 == 2);

But now I have one giant-ass expression because I put it all into one line. Now where previously I had two extra names for the variables, I have the ad-hoc logic shoved in there because I wanted to squeeze it into a lambda.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-16 18:37:51+00:00
It makes it nearly impossible to reference that attribute by accident. Basically, if class Foo defines "self.__bar", the Python interpreter sees the leading "__" and mangles it. It's the lightweight equivalent of a private attribute in other languages, with the difference that Python will let you attempt to access it anyway. But if you do, and it makes your code utterly brittle and prone to explosion, no one will give you sympathy or help you fix it. They're much more likely to tell you not to do that.
by CartwheelLinux | 2025-07-16 18:37:53+00:00
Haha. You're 100% correct in the AGI/AI thing. I'm just sick and tired of every article being about AI, it's great people but we can't stop innovating and attending to other areas of technology.

>You can do a lot with glorified prediction systems that require human prompting >People don't need a machine that wonders the same stuff they do; they need something that does a specific task in lieu of their own effort.

This is the problem with our current revision with AI; the way I see it those two are in conflict with each other. In lieu of their own effort, the way a vast amount of the would be users think, is "without promoting" which would lend towards AGI than AI.

>Actually, they are arguably more valuable than AGI because you can more easily communicate and utilize their value proposition.

To you and I this might be true, but to your average non-techie I don't think it's quite as true as you would like it to be.

Short term it is very true, everyone sees the value until you realize it's inherit limitations and the 'shiny, wears off
by thornewolf | 2025-07-16 18:38:06+00:00
TFA is another iteration on the wonderful semantics debate about intelligence.

a rock is, a typewriter is, a computer is, a human is. all on some varying levels. TFA takes it as a given that "no thinking" happens. I take it as a given that thinking happens unless we prove it cannot be happening.

https://www.thornewolf.com/its-not-intelligent/

once again, both sides of this argument are making equally valid/invalid baseless claims that are all unfalsifiable. it is completely impossible to determine who is "metaphysically" correct. we can only judge outcomes
by dietr1ch | 2025-07-16 18:38:13+00:00
I'm not sure if they refer to how large the language's reach is, but more about how advanced Java is once you stop looking at syntax bloat. The JVM can do stuff that's not easy to do in other environments.

I recall things like updating packages/code on the fly, recompiling fast paths on the fly. Maybe that's not necessary in a borg/kubernetes world where you can just restart things and have your load balancer infra take care, or just run slower code because compute isn't that expensive once you accelerate your CPU-heavy libraries, but cool anyways.
by SamBam | 2025-07-16 18:38:29+00:00
> Actually, young people are writing more.

Is this a feeling, or something you know from statistics?

Many of the teens I know (I'm a teacher) aren't writing blog posts, or even comments on Reddit. They're watching YouTube videos and not interacting back with anything more than a thumbs up.

Sure, some are writing on anime subreddits or whatever, but I don't want to make generalizations for what teens are doing across the US or the rest of the Western world without some kind of statistics.
by fablematic | 2025-07-16 18:38:58+00:00
FableMatic is an AI-powered platform that generates personalized children’s stories in minutes, tailored to each child’s interests, age, and reading level. But we’re not just creating stories — we’re embedding comprehension questions and learning metrics directly into the narrative, giving parents real-time insights into their child’s reading development.

We’re solving a common pain point for families: getting kids excited to read while knowing they’re actually absorbing what they read. Our approach blends creative storytelling with gamified learning and measurable progress — no lesson planning required. FableMatic makes storytime smarter, easier, and more magical for today’s busy parents.
by nocsi | 2025-07-16 18:39:13+00:00
So technically the OS is supposed to be handling this, or at the least whatever app you're in is supposed to signal the MIME to the pasteboard. They even updated the APIs for it this year. I'm not complaining, just giving away loose headsup that they might rugpull you. Apple is particularly not a fan of oblique data transformations, especially since malware keeps going after the user's pasteboards.

Something worth implementing is multiple layers to the pasteboard content, so you're at least maintaining the original raw bytes. That and I always wanted a pasteboard that let you append contents to it. Just some ideas to consider
by isk517 | 2025-07-16 18:39:21+00:00
Half sarcasm and half serious. Obviously there were a lot of things to do back then, but also this was a time before everyone was carrying around a device that let you contact everyone else and access information about what is going on around you. Movies were a very heavily advertised things to do, the movie theater provided both a place as well as a time to meet your friends, and watching a movie at home meant gambling that the rental place would even have what you were looking for and provided a experience that was a very noticeable step down from going to the theater.
by cwillu | 2025-07-16 18:39:26+00:00
From the appendix:

“DuckDuckGo: in the past, when I've compared DDG to Bing while using an ad blocker, the results have been very similar. I also tried DDG here and, removing the Bing ads, the results aren't as similar as they used to be, but they were still similar enough that it didn't seem worth listing DDG results. I use DDG as my default search engine and I think, like Google, it works fine if you know how to query but, for the kinds of naive queries in this post, it doesn't fare particularly well.”
Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?
by lucideng | 2025-07-16 18:39:28+00:00
What won't they force AI into? Everywhere I look they have hastily shoehorned AI into something. The power button on a Galaxy S24 is now the Gemini button. Every search engine has 'AI Suggestions'. Even Logitech ships AI tools with its 'Logi Options+', I just wanted to reconfigure my buttons FFS. I didn't ask for this 'Powered by ____ AI' future, shame on you if you did.

Anyone else get the feeling that AI is a net loss for humanity? Search already made us lazy, now we don't even have to think about the answer, just regurgitate what the AI said. Don't even read your email, just have AI summarize what an AI probably wrote.

Then there's a strange dismissal of AI's failures. You can blame the AI for a failure, but if you were to arrive at the same conclusion/result, it would be your fault. It's become some sort of ownership offloading. Easier to blame the machine than take responsibility?

Where are the environmentalists? AI uses 10x the energy (and thus 10x carbon emissions) as search. That doesn't include the resources and energy to make the hardware and train the models in the first place. I can't think of any device or tool where people would tolerate a 10x increase in energy usage to complete the same task. People don't care what happens in the Datacenter until its next door to them causing problems.

I find it very useful for generating boilerplate code, unit tests, etc. It's a great tool for doing certain work. I don't need or want it shoved into everything because every Product Manager and Sales team seems to think it's a good idea to drive 'growth factors' or some other BS.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-16 18:40:19+00:00
Fair point, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. Being a peon for the US army/marines is one thing, being cannon fodder in the Ukrainian army is another one.

The US army treats, equips and protects its soldiers way better than any other army in the world, so US soldiers are a lot more likely to be cooperative with orders and conscription process than armies where you're just given an AK and shipped to the meat grinder.

For context, even the German military had a shortage of underwear and dog tags for its conscripts due to underfunding. Now imagine what the armies of Ukraine and Russia are like.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-16 18:41:49+00:00
I have a paper that got denied but it was about using 2AFC sorting to do this instead of elo. It has a defined end unlike elo scores. The code is on my github and focuses on humans sorting images but basically if you have a python sort function, you put your comparison as the key instead of assigning the comparison a numeric score. Then the algorithm does the rest

Code: https://github.com/Neywiny/merge-sort Conference/abstract presentation: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
by bumby | 2025-07-16 18:41:52+00:00
I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading, but misses that reading (as a process, a verb) can be the goal in itself, at least in terms of recreational reading. Summarization misses all that experience, just like reading the synopsis of a movie isn’t the same as viewing the art. I don’t want everything in my life to be just a rush to the ends, anymore than I’d want to trade the human experience of hugging my child to be reduced to simply understanding “an increase in reading oxytocin creates bonding leading to higher resource investment and survivability.”

A rush to “get to the point” when dealing with art feels very much like the tech-obsessed productivity porn that can miss the forest for the trees.
by lioeters | 2025-07-16 18:42:03+00:00
> Mozilla now only seems to speak using creepy, gibberish lunatic language.

I think the reason is that Mozilla used to be a tech-focused company, speaking in a precise technical manner about concrete things in the real world.

Gradually the management and C-suite were taken over by people who are completely disconnected from the products and their userbase. They speak in corporate jargon, and their speciality is performative theater and conning people out of their money. This kind of corporate culture has a lot in common with politics, largely responsible for the enshittification of society.
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-07-16 18:42:06+00:00
Robots completely replacing humans cannot occur in a capitalist system without complete economic collapse.

If robots are developed to be able to perform the most undesirable jobs, then they will also be developed to perform the most desirable jobs. If humans don’t work, they have no money. Humans without money cannot buy things. Humans can’t buy things, companies can’t exist.