MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giingyui | 2025-07-10 16:17:20+00:00
It’s not ghosting, it’s halation as that bloke said. Bright things do not leave a trail, instead they are just blurry.

If I see a white LED in the dark, the LED shows some sort of smear at a certain angle and with a certain length. The length of the smear decreases the closer I get to the LED. It doesn’t change ever, even if days pass, because it’s a static deformation inside my eye. It does not leave a trail if I look around or if I move the object with the LED.

This also applies to white letters on a black screen. They are smeared at an angle. If I’m far away enough and/or the letters are small enough the smear is so large that they make it hard to read and make me nauseous. That’s why I ended up buying the glasses.

https://pixelbuddha.net/storage/51621/how-to-create-a-motion...

This is an example. The trail is not as long but it’s brighter. (Just googled “motion blur letters” - the effect is similar)
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-10 16:17:32+00:00
That misses a factor called good enough, or degree of predictability. Ultimately everything eventually becomes predictable if analyzed deeply enough. Another word for that is entropy. That is what my linked comment referred to. For security concerns, such as PRNGs, the appearance of randomness is not enough.

This is why security analysis requires a higher threshold than software employment at large.
by dangus | 2025-07-10 16:17:51+00:00
Technically it’s not really hypocritical because the author never claimed that a lack of light mode is an accessibility problem.

I think it’s also notable that websites being accessible isn’t really about being tied to a specific theme, it’s about being compatible with accessibility tooling and standards (screen readers as an example). There are plenty of CSS manipulation tools that can make a website look whatever way you want.
by not_your_vase | 2025-07-10 16:17:52+00:00
On one hand, yes, anonymous sources can say whatever they want.

But they are referring to call centers when it comes to savings: I don't know if half billion USD is real, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would be close to reality. The problems call centers face are usually about a handful of topics, and if an agent doesn't know something that another agent does, that can very frustrating for everyone, especially for the caller.

It was meant for AI, and I am very much waiting for my ISP to fire all their call center helpdesk agents, and have AI, so I can get real help when they mess up my connection in their datacenter.

Of course, there is a small percentage of cases when a real human touch is mandatory - those problems will remain unsolved unfortunately.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-07-10 16:18:01+00:00
Its all a question of scale. All these systems can afford some extra energy loss just like the planet could cope with a certain amount of CO2 production because the plants and oceans would grab it and store it. Once we exceed those (currently unknown) limits however it can become a problem and the biggest solar farms are impacting the area around them as they change that energy balance.
by wanderingstan | 2025-07-10 16:18:35+00:00
Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-10 16:18:50+00:00
Because a lot of tech sucks lately?

Everything now is just new kinds of ways to spy on people or the same old shit repackaged in a new format. I'm dying for some actual innovation. The only new product in tech I actually like lately is the Steam Deck and later, the Ally X. Making PC gaming mobile is incredible, and I guess you could say there's nothing revolutionary there, but I dunno, it's new at least and not flagrantly a free-at-use shitpile that's going to tell AdSense my resting heart rate.

Edit: And I suppose relevant to this comment thread, a lot of new tech is just more ways to fuck with people at scale to generate revenue. Which also blows ass.
by pshirshov | 2025-07-10 16:19:31+00:00
Awesome, it even supports HKTs.

Can't find any mentions of typeclasses though, are they supported?

Give me typeclasses and macros comparable with Scala ones and I would be happy to port my libraries (distage, izumi-reflect, BIO) to Flix and consider moving to it from Scala :3

UPD: ah, alright, they call typeclasses traits. What about macros?

UPD2: ergh, they don't support nominal inheritance even in the most harmless form of Scala traits. Typeclasses are not a replacement for interfaces, an extremely important abstraction is missing from the language (due to H-M typer perhaps), so a lot of useful things are just impossible there (or would look ugly).
by Kevin_Guo | 2025-07-10 16:19:43+00:00
Saw Sand Blast! Block Puzzle exploding on mobile (Tetris-like) but no web version. So I fed Gemini & Claude screenshots + text descriptions and asked: "Build this for web."

Result: https://sandblastgame.com/.

No manual coding. The AI interpreted visuals & mechanics, generating ~80% of the core game logic, block physics, and UI structure. I integrated outputs and polished.

It's wild: Feed it blurry phone screenshots and vague descriptions → get playable code. The leap in multimodal understanding (image + text → functional app) stunned me. Minor quirks remain, but the core works.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-10 16:20:08+00:00
That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.

Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.

It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
by evanelias | 2025-07-10 16:20:22+00:00
> Is MariaDB included in MySQL?

I was wondering the same, but I'm not sure if it would make a major change in the graphs. MySQL and MariaDB have both been unpopular on Hacker News for many years. Submissions on either topic rarely get much traction, which then leads to fewer submissions.

> MySQL trending downwards would make sense as people upgrade and switch over.

No, most large MySQL users are still using MySQL; there hasn't been a widespread migration to MariaDB. They're both actively developed and have grown in slightly different directions. Among corporations, MySQL's usage still far outstrips MariaDB by a significant degree. Lately MariaDB has better product velocity though, and their commercial enterprise finally seems to have stable footing.
by norir | 2025-07-10 16:20:23+00:00
Having scanned the source, I believe there is a better design for this language.

There exists a much smaller subset of jank that is capable of compiling itself. I am quite sure that you could write a bootstrap compiler in clojure (but restricted to the same subset) that translates to clojure (or some other language you prefer targeting). My guess, from experience writing small compilers, is it should be doable in ~5000 lines or even less.

Once you had that, you could then write a backend that translates to c. This gives you a native compiler for this small subset of jank. Applied to its own source code, you get a native compiler binary for free and cut the cord from clojure.

Now you have a native compiler and a very small, tight language. Because it is so small, it is easy both to check correctness and optimize. You can add new backends relatively easily. For the repl, you can compile functions into their own hash-addressed shared libraries using a c compiler and dlopen them. TCC is very fast for this purpose even if the generated code isn't quite as good as optimized gcc or clang.

All of the future vision could be implemented on top of this foundation. The current approach is likely going to just bog the author down, dealing with accidental complexity from c++ and llvm especially. It is also better to have fewer features implemented completely and correctly than more features incompletely or incorrectly implemented.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-10 16:20:42+00:00
i wonder if you're considering the huge difference between:

- individuals pirating copies of things for sole consumption or relatively-miniscule distribution; and

- large highly-funded institutions that pirate content for the sole purpose of generating revenue from it

...and why that might lead people to feel differently about one and the other (not to mention the outsized punitive response to the former compared to the latter).
by toast0 | 2025-07-10 16:21:01+00:00
Unpressurized sewers are often pretty leaky actually. A lot of early sewage systems have combined sanitary and storm sewers, but around the 1940s, separating santiary sewers from runoff drains became common for new systems. Even in separate systems, most sewage systems see an increase in volume during the rainy season, and it's not because people pee more when it's wet outside (maybe they do, but...). Ground water leaks into the sanitary sewers; and presumably sewage leaks out of the pipes into the ground at times. As long as the slopes are reasonable, and there is free flow, leaks aren't a big deal... but leaks and gaps do allow for root intrusion which leads to clogs. Typically municipal sewer lines are pretty deep and tend to be towards the middle of the street which makes it harder for plants to get in there, but some plants are pretty persistent.

Here's an EPA manual from 1971, Prevention and Correction of Excessive Infiltration and Inflow into Sewer Systems. The key thing here is that the goal isn't to eliminate infiltration, but to eliminate excessive infiltration; it's all tradeoffs.

https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=9100WH40.txt
Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
by friggeri | 2025-07-10 16:21:13+00:00
Today marks ten years, 3653 consecutive days, of running at least one mile every day under the USRSA rules [1]. To celebrate, I built an interactive dashboard that turns a decade of GPX files into charts you can explore.

Running has truly changed my life: I've made lifelong friends, explored beautiful places, and more importantly invested into my own health and fitness, which I'm starting to see the positive benefits as I get older.

The stack is pretty simple: a NextJS app, with a Postgres database to keep all my running data, and all the stats are pre-computed and cached in Redis, so I effectively only hit the database once a day when a new run is ingested. On the fronted, I toyed with the idea of using D3 or pre-existing data viz libraries, but ended up rolling my own using SVGs directly, it gave me more control on the visualizations.

I used the Strava bulk export to pre-populate the database, and I'm using their webhook API to do incremental updates. I have to tap into OpenWeatherMap and OpenCageDate to enrich the running data a little bit.

Happy to answer anything about the stack, data pipeline, or how I stayed motivated for 10 years!

[1] https://www.runeveryday.com Run Streak Association rules: ≥ 1 mile per day
by tikhonj | 2025-07-10 16:21:47+00:00
Functional programming à la Haskell has always been about making effects controllable, explicit first-class citizens of the language. A language entirely without effects would only be useful for calculation.

The talk about "purity" and "removing side effects" has always been about shock value—sometimes as an intentional marketing technique, but most often because it's just so much easier to explain. "It's just like 'normal' programming but you can't mutate variables" is pithy and memorable; "it's a language where effects are explicitly added on top of the core and are managed separately" isn't.
by oc1 | 2025-07-10 16:21:51+00:00
<< According to official records, the design for the bridge shifted multiple times over the past seven years, largely due to conflicts between the Public Works Department (PWD) and the Railways. The two agencies couldn’t agree on how to share land, and in trying to work around both railway property and the new Metro line, they ended up producing a final layout with an abrupt 90-degree angle.

I love that mindset. Europeans would have simply refused and 100 years later it would have probably been build after all legal has been cleared. Indians instead never say no. That's how you build software, so why not bridges.
by sausagefeet | 2025-07-10 16:22:36+00:00
I co-founded a competitor to Spacelift and it's cool to see them with the successful raise. I believe this brings them to around $70m in funding.

I am very thankful to Spacelift for funding and supporting so much of OpenTofu. They are not the only ones but they give a lot back.

As a competitor, I'm interested to see what their plans are with the money. My company is trying to fill a very narrow niche in the infra world, we see running Terraform/Tofu/Pulumi/Ansible as an important and useful service but a commodity and not a big budget item for our customers. We are bootstrapped and keep our scope focused and our pricing low relative to the VC backed options, so while I know what I would do with $1-$2m in funding, I don't know what I would do with $70m in funding that would make our customers happier.
Show HN: I built a tool that explains ArXiv papers in simple language
by grantsingleton | 2025-07-10 16:22:42+00:00
Hi HN! I built arxiv explained (https://arxivexplained.com) to make AI research accessible to everyone.

What it does: It's a free app with audio explanations of the latest AI research papers. Each paper gets a ~5 minute breakdown in simple language - no jargon, just clear explanations of what the researchers did and why it matters. Key feature: The app already comes loaded with all the popular and recent AI papers, so you can browse and discover the latest research right away. You don't need to bring your own papers - just open the app and start exploring what's new in AI.

How I use it: I pop in my earbuds during my commute or while doing chores and listen to explanations of cutting-edge research. It's like having someone explain the latest breakthroughs to you in plain English.

You can also paste any arXiv link to get a custom explanation, but most people just browse the curated collection of recent papers that's already there. Technical note: It uses AI to analyze papers and generate natural-sounding audio explanations focused on clarity over complexity.

Would love to hear your feedback, especially if you try it with papers from your field!
by g-b-r | 2025-07-10 16:22:50+00:00
Well, they would say it if they wouldn't pay them enough.

There are bigger problems than that, though, with bigger incentives to kill someone (in addition to those that the people involved with the exhibition have).

So, if they really think that exhibition has educational value (and enough of that to justify it), they should operate as a non-profit, with no revenue out of it, and with at most modest compensations to everyone involved.
by Tsarp | 2025-07-10 16:23:23+00:00
I recently had to do a form and just asked claude to 1. Write up the form with the questions styled with tailwind, shadcn, heroui. 2. Wire it up and give me a cloudflare function to write to a KV store 3. Instructions on how to setup above with cloudflare free tier.

It got it in the first shot, took me <3-4mins to copy paste in cloudflare. Been working well so far, the page is also hosted on cloudflare pages and hasnt cost anything so far.
by api | 2025-07-10 16:23:37+00:00
18-22

I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.

As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.

Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.
by tikhonj | 2025-07-10 16:24:08+00:00
If you start with lambda calculus you don't have effects in the first place, so there's nothing to eliminate. Lambda calculus and friends are perfectly reasonable languages for computation in the sense of calculation.

A better way to think about general-purpose functional programming is that it's a way to add effects to a calculation-oriented foundation. The challenge is to keep the expressiveness, flexibility and useful properties of lambda calculus while extending it to writing interactive, optimizable real-world programs.
by tlogan | 2025-07-10 16:25:13+00:00
I have a politically sensitive but potentially insightful question.

I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing policy. In practice, this means kids don’t attend their neighborhood schools. They’re assigned to schools across the city (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is beside the point)

One theory I’ve heard is that this setup leads to less socializing (or “partying”) among teens, since their school friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question: To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction outside school?

Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today? Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-07-10 16:25:29+00:00
> Should we tell them to get on with the times?

You can simultaneously ask permission in cases where you don't actually need the body for anything meaningfully useful (displaying them this way is extremely frivolous) and also think it's dumb and paleolithic for them to object on such grounds and also tell them to grow up in cases where their mysticism necessarily obstructs societal growth.

If someone believes the earth is flat, how far do you go to humor them? If someone believes lizard people control the Vatican, do we put that belief on equal footing? If someone's perception of god tells them that poor people don't deserve healthcare if they can't pay for it, is that good, or am I allowed to say "what the fuck, that's fucked up"?
by GTP | 2025-07-10 16:25:31+00:00
You started your comment with a correct distinction, but got the wrong conclusion. Asking if somthing is random is actually a question about the process used to obtain some value and not the value itself. If I ask you if 42 is a random number, can you actually answer? I can get that number with an intrinsically random process based on some quantum effect, or I can say it from the top of my head because I just read a very famous book. You can indeed use an hash function to extract randomness, but, to be precise, we are talking about pseudo-randomness. The crucial difference here is that, if I'm measuring photons' polarization to get a random number, then an attacker repeating the same process will (very likely) obtain a different number. If I'm instead hashing some data, an attacker passing the same data through the same hash function will get the same result. Another example: if I hash the digits of pi, I will get a sequence that will pass statistical tests for randomness. But an attacker that knows how I am generating such sequence can easily reproduce it.
by hosh | 2025-07-10 16:25:31+00:00
My biggest takeaway from Roy Fielding's dissertation wasn't how to construct a RESTful architecture or what is the one true REST, but how to understand any computer architecture -- particularly their constraints -- in order to design and implement appropriate systems. I can easily identify anti-patterns (even in implementations) because they violate the constraints which in turns, takes away from the properties of the architecture. This also quickly allows me to evaluate and understand libraries, runtimes, topologies, and so forth.

I used to get caught up in what is REST and what is not, and that misses the point. It's similar to how Christopher Alexander's ideas pattern languages gets used in a way now that misses the point. Alexander was cited in introductory chapter of Fielding's dissertation. These are all very big ideas with broad applicability and great depth.

When combined with Promise Theory, this gives a dynamic view of systems.
by throwforfeds | 2025-07-10 16:25:32+00:00
I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods, probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back, bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical Friday night (aside from the couch burning).

I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
by nico_h | 2025-07-10 16:25:45+00:00
Yes.

The side effects of solar panels is indeed a cooler ground underneath. Plants have difficulty growing in the shade.

Panels have a darker shade than most ground they are covering, so they might actually absorb more heat than the typical ground they are covering. They are distorting the local albedo.

I think for geocooling by solar panels shade, the effect is completely local and only surface deep. After all stone/ground is an insulator, and geothermal energy is considered renewable.