MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-16 15:48:24+00:00
I like it

“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-16 15:49:02+00:00
> Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses.

No, entry-level courses were in a mix of Scheme, C, and other languages until Java’s industrial ubiquity ended up in it becoming a popular choice, but not completely displacing the others. Then as Python (along with the broader class of dynamic OO scripting languages) became quite popular, Python got added to the mix, but, unlike Java, it fairly quickly displaced not only Java but a lot of what had been around longer in introductory courses.

Python’s industrial success drove its initial use in introductory courses, but doesn't fully explain it, as it doing what Java never did indicates.

I think the people teaching introductory courses find it less of a compromise to industrial popularity than they did with Java.

Python’s success is multifaceted, some of it is right-place right-time, a lot of it is the ecosystem it built because of that, but a lot of it is, I think, that it turns out to be a language that has been designed (both initially and in how it is been managed over time) to be a very good language for real people solving real problems, despite not adhering to any of what various typing and performance and paradigm purists like to posit as the essential features of a good language.
by ashwindharne | 2025-07-16 15:49:06+00:00
Cool stuff! We use a similar process internally to rerank and filter our cold outbound lists. We just use an off-the-shelf model as the judge, give it a custom criteria, and let it run until some set number of iterations. It's helped narrow down wide searches to the maximally relevant set of people (few thousand medium-bad matches to few hundred good matches)

It's not cheap and it's not fast, but it definitely works pretty well!
by Night_Thastus | 2025-07-16 15:49:43+00:00
I love writing Python. However, there are caveats:

1: I don't like dealing with language crossing boundaries with it - it's painful, especially if to/from a compiled language - there's just too much friction. It's easy to write but hard to maintain.

2: Debugging python can be...painful. If you have a pure perfect environment dedicated to pure python and all the tooling set up, it can be breezy. But if you have something messier like C++ that calls Python or vice-versa and are using an editor not made for Python like QTCreator then suddenly it becomes hell.

Who owns this data!? Where was this initialized!? What calls this function!? What type is this data!?!?!?!? These questions are so effortless in C++ for me and so very painful in Python. It slows efforts to a crawl.

It feels exhausting to have to go back to print statements, grep, and hand-drawing a graph that shows what functions call what just to figure out WTF went wrong. It's painful to a degree that I avoid it as much as possible.

...and don't even get me started on dealing with dependency problems in deployments...
by lupusreal | 2025-07-16 15:49:48+00:00
> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting

It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them.

8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.
by brycewray | 2025-07-16 15:50:50+00:00
As I wrote recently on my own blog site:

> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”
by genewitch | 2025-07-16 15:50:55+00:00
> Every HN thread that isn't about fawning over AI companies is devolving into armchair redditor analysis of topics people know nothing about.

It took me a very long time to realize that^. I've worked with two NOC at two huge companies, and i know they still exist as teams at those companies. I'm not an SWE, though. And I'm not certain i'd qualify either company as truly "global" except in the loosest sense - as in, one has "American" in the name of the primary subsidiary.

^ i even regularly have used "the comments were people incorrecting each other about <x>", so i knew subconsciously that HN is just a different subset of general internet comments. The issue comes from this site appearing to be moderated, and the group of people that select for commenting here seem like they would be above average at understanding and backing up claims. The "incorrecting" label comes from n-gate, which hasn't been updated since the early '20s, last i checked.
by js8 | 2025-07-16 15:50:57+00:00
I would say that real breakthrough was training NNs as a way to create practical approximators for very complex functions over some kind of many-valued logics. Why they work so well in practice we still don't fully theoretically understand (in the sense we don't know what kind of underlying logic best models what we want from these systems). The LLMs (and application to natural language) are just a consequence of that.
by lunaticman | 2025-07-16 15:50:57+00:00
My step dad doesn't know how to share links over messenger (constantly sends me screenshots of pages), but he runs Thinkpad Manjaro for last 3 years without issues. At first, I was afraid that I will have to do some sort of support regularly or answer questions, but besides "Which music player should I install?" it was crickets for the last 3 years.
by BizarroLand | 2025-07-16 15:51:01+00:00
After reading that article I now understand what my boomer parents felt like watching star trek for the first time.

"In condensed matter physics, altermagnetism is a type of persistent magnetic state in ideal crystals. Altermagnetic structures are collinear and crystal-symmetry compensated, resulting in zero net magnetisation. Unlike in an ordinary collinear antiferromagnet, another magnetic state with zero net magnetization, the electronic bands in an altermagnet are not Kramers degenerate, but instead depend on the wavevector in a spin-dependent way due to the intrinsic crystal symmetry connecting different magnetic sublattices."
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-16 15:51:10+00:00
I was not correct with past the breaking point -- it is more with no regard to a breaking point, he is not suicidal at all, just believes that he can do more.

He is very happy with his body and eats a ton (and healthy) to build muscle and strength. It is just that this is way, way too much in terms of effort and time spent on exercising. There are plenty of articles on the topic of people of all ages who got addicted to sport and needed professional help to break the dependence. At least they wanted help.

His parents are not looking at forcing him to do anything, this is not in the picture at all. They want to help him. He has a good relationship with them and is leaving the house to study as expected (and normal)
by dang | 2025-07-16 15:51:13+00:00
(Pretty sure there have been other HN threads about this, but I couldn't find them. Anyone?)

Edit: thanks everybody!

I bought one of Sicily's famous $1 homes and spent $446K renovating it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371806 - Dec 2024 (2 comments)

Italian town is struggling to sell off its empty homes for one euro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812671 - March 2024 (28 comments)

Old towns eager for new blood sell Italy homes for $1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29058053 - Oct 2021 (124 comments)

1-Euro Houses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24195000 - Aug 2020 (190 comments)

We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here's what happened next - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552701 - Nov 2019 (3 comments)
by kbolino | 2025-07-16 15:51:19+00:00
An IP is about as much of an identity as a domain is.

There are two main reasons IP certificates were not widely used in the past:

- Before the SAN extension, there was just the CN, and there's only one CN per certificate. It would generally be a waste to set your only CN to a single IP address (or spend more money on more certs and the infrastructure to maintain them). A domain can resolve to multiple IPs, which can also be changed over time; users usually want to go to e.g. microsoft.com, not whatever IP that currently resolves to. We've had SANs for awhile now, so this limitation is gone.

- Domain validation (serve this random DNS record) involves ordinary forward-lookup records under your domain. Trying to validate IP addresses over DNS would involve adding records to the reverse-lookup in-addr.arpa domain which varies in difficulty from annoying (you work for a large org that owns its own /8, /16, or /24) to impossible (you lease out a small number of unrelated IPs from a bottom-dollar ISP). IP addresses are much more doable now thanks to HTTP validation (serve this random page on port 80), but that was an unnecessary/unsupported modality before.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-16 15:51:28+00:00
> 90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically

Why even pay TurboTax if you're just taking the standard deduction and have only W2 income? Might as well just paper file for free. Anything more complex than that, and having a desktop monitor and full size keyboard is very useful. I can imagine even filling out 5 stock trades in TurboTax on a phone would be quite painful.

> Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.

This one bit me recently as I did some traveling. None of the major airline apps even work on my phone anymore. Their developers all just up and decided to block use of their app on older phones with full-screen modals preventing the software from working. My only choice is to buy a new phone or do my flight booking on a desktop. Mobile apps are an absolute shit show unless you have a <= 5 year old phone.
by libertine | 2025-07-16 15:51:58+00:00
> Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending

Energy prices are going down, and have been going down consistently ( https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil ) and the new US Admin wants them even lower, and they're not alone. So that's settled. Defense spending will also be met with investment, jobs, etc.

But if you think Europe is having it bad in terms of using taxpayers money to fund wars... what do you think is happening to Russian taxpayers money, with a much smaller economy?

> The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum.

Inflation is affecting everyone. Not Europe in any particular way.

Again, if you think that's bad for Europe, you look at Russia is being completely destroyed with inflation. I don't even think they're reporting the fake numbers of how bad things are, every quarter they prohibit more data from coming out...

> On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps.

Again, if you think that's a problem in Europe... how does Russia compare with qualified people leaving, 1.000.000 young men casualties, low birth rates, aging population? Europe isn't speedrunning its demographic collapse like Russia is.

> As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now.

So, to sum it up, you highlighted a few points that are by many orders of magnitude worse in Russia. Even counting energy, since Ukraine has been taking out distribution and refining capacity (and my guess is that it will get worse) - somehow you still think Europe is in a worse shape and position.

And a lot of your claims don't make much logical sense: "Europe is in bad shape, they can't even properly help Ukraine", in a context of Russia with 1.000.000+ casualties, max military production capacity, using North Korean Army help, and failing to make any meaningful gains at heavy costs...

I'm not even stating the fact that Russia will inevitably have to surrender that territory back to Ukraine, in the future anyway, because no country will ever recognize their occupied territory as part of Russia.

So to sum up your "Europe is unable, and Russia is giving their max" scope doesn't help your case at all, just shows that Russia has massive unrecoverable problems, even trying with everything they have...

You ended up supporting what I said. Europe is OK, while Russia can collapse at any moment - that's being on the line.

Just to bring you back to reality: no European country had part of their military going on a straight line to its capital to take down the government, and that happened to Russia around 2 years ago - that's not a good sign.
Show HN: GitGuard - Painless GitHub PR Automations
by habosa | 2025-07-16 15:51:58+00:00
Hey HN,

Every team I've been on has cobbled together some sort of combination of GitHub branch protections and custom scripts to make sure that PRs conform to organization policies and best practices.

Things like:

- When {X} file is changed, require review from team {Y}

- When a new db migration is added, ensure that a special set of tests pass

- Require multiple approvals when the PR is very large

- Add a special label to PRs that include breaking changes

- Allow emergencies / hotfixes to break glass and bypass all of the above

Most teams tend to start out with a little script running in GitHub actions to enforce all of these policies but it tends to get out of hand and become hard to maintain. PRs that should require scrutiny slip through the cracks, and others that should be allowed through are unnecessarily blocked.

That's why I made GitGuard (https://gitguard.dev/)

GitGuard lets you write and maintain these policies in a custom DSL so simple it looks like pseudocode. The policies are checked on every single PR nearly instantly (no need to wait for a GitHub actions runner) and the results are reported in plain english.

Right now policies can make simple assertions about PR metadata and take some stateful actions (adding labels, requesting review) but I'd love to hear more from HN about how GitGuard could be even more useful.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-16 15:52:08+00:00
The principled way of doing this (while coping with the new post-Pie restrictions) would be to build a new "updated" .apk on-device with a new /usr/bin/ equivalent, then have the user explicitly "install" it and relaunch Termux. It would work no different than any live-CD install, or for that matter any other kind of "immutable" OS.
by zac23or | 2025-07-16 15:52:18+00:00
It's no surprise that Cloudflare is having a service issue again.

I use Cloudflare at work. Cloudflare has many bugs, and some technical decisions are absurd, such as the worker's cache.delete method, which only clears the cache contents in the data center where the Worker was invoked!!! https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/cache...

In my experience, Cloudflare support is not helpful at all, trying to pass the problem onto the user, like "Just avoid holding it in that way. ".

At work, I needed to use Cloudflare. The next job I get, I'll put a limit on my responsibilities: I don't work with Cloudflare.

I will never use Cloudflare at home and I don't recommend it to anyone.

Next week: A new post about how Cloudflare saved the web from a massive DDOS attack.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-07-16 15:52:22+00:00
Meta has a massively profitable social media business with an impenetrable network effect, so they're using that to subsidize the research. Whether that's a good decision or not is above my paygrade, but it's sustainable until something changes with the social media market.

I don't know what "moving the goalposts" means. Why were the goalposts there in the first place? The interesting questions here are whether OpenAI can sustain their current cost model long-term, and whether the revenue stream is sustainable without the costs. We'll see, I guess! It's fascinating.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-16 15:52:26+00:00
She was seeing a psychologist in the few weeks prior to her hospitalisation and my wife tells me that CBT was part of that.

Post hospital discharge, hopefully in a couple of weeks, we'll be doing FBT (family based therapy, I think) which, according to this morning's information session, is rated above CBT in it's effectiveness.

There's a 12-month-ish program she'll be going into once she's recovered to a healthy weight / nutrition level.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 15:52:50+00:00
Yes, you can publish an NPM package without having a repository linked to it. Technically you can inspect the source code using "Code" feature on NPM, but in this case it is minified. You can see a lot of stuff tho (ex: query used to inspect database, endpoints, etc...), but obviously it is not as easy to read as not bundled source code (not to mention you can use WASM, which is unreadable).
by yesfitz | 2025-07-16 15:53:08+00:00
This article provides a lot to think about.

To paraphrase some ideas poorly:

> "LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."

> "An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other."

The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-16 15:53:12+00:00
If you just have a W2 and are taking the standard deduction (applicable to many, if not most taxpayers), then there is no insane complexity. Your tax document is one and a half pages and can be done with a pen and calculator.

If you have stock trades, IRA distributions, rental income, things like that, then yea, you probably need computer-based help.
by ekr____ | 2025-07-16 15:53:33+00:00
> If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.

I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".

As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.
by strcat | 2025-07-16 15:54:09+00:00
> I will follow their wishes and not specify the specific war or side, but this comment gives me all the information to figure it out.

The primary goal of making it public was getting him diverted away from infantry to a role related to software engineering and/or security research. It makes little to send the lead developer of a security research and engineering project to launch grenades from a trench. We got in contact with high level people who were able to intervene after he completed 45 days of basic training. He had to do several weeks of menial tasks and was just recently transferred to a more sensible tech related role. We're still down our most important developer.

We deliberately made it obvious which country we were talking about without directly specifying it. A Russian opposition paper did the basic investigative journalism required to confirm what we implied:

https://meduza.io/feature/2025/04/22/veduschego-razrabotchik...

The way we approached it worked out well. It was an appeal to their military leadership based on it not being in their interest to use him as infantry, not a political statement. Ukraine forcibly conscripting men aged 25 through 60 to defend against an invader trying to wipe out their nationality is a messy topic. We had to publicly post about it to get help, that's all.
by genewitch | 2025-07-16 15:54:37+00:00
i am 95% certain i run unbound in a datacenter, and i have pihole local, my PC connects to pihole first, and if that's down, it connects to my DC; pihole connects to the DC and one of the filtered DNS providers (don't remember which) and GTEi's old server, that still works and has never let me down. No, not that one, the other one.

i have musknet, though, so i can't edit the DNS providers on the router without buying another router, so cellphones aren't automatically on this plan, nor are VMs and the like.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-16 15:55:06+00:00
but that's the opposite of the request to move from a googDNS to a local one because of latency. so your ISP's DNS sucked, which is a broad statement, and is part of the why services like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 exist. you didn't make the change of DNS because you were picking one based on nearest location.