MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-27 18:57:06+00:00
That’s an interesting question one im probably not the most qualified to answer. US capitalism was always based on prevention of monopolies and cartels (which the diamond industry is) and then a generally hands off approach by the government. Which I generally agree with although someone like Thomas Sowell would argue that even monopolies take care of themselves eventually. Unfortunately it’s been somewhat weakened due to lobbying and subsidies such as for ethanol. US probably has the closest to pure capitalism in the world though, again in my opinion.

I do recommend Sowell’s book basic economics. Its a trudge but its very educational and written in an easy to understand way
by moregrist | 2025-07-27 18:57:07+00:00
> One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch.

So slow, untested, and likely buggy, especially as the inputs become less well-conditioned?

If this was a jr dev writing code I’d ask why they didn’t use <insert language-relevant LAPACK equivalent>.

Neither llm outcome seems very ideal to me, tbh.
by Yoric | 2025-07-27 18:57:19+00:00
A tool to solve optimization problems using quantum computers. Just released the first open-source version https://github.com/pasqal-io/maximum-independent-set/ . Now expanding it to more complex types of optimization problems.

Also, thinking about resurrecting http://opalang.org/. We'll see if I have the energy to work on that.
by malikNF | 2025-07-27 18:57:53+00:00
Every time I see something about windows7 coming up, I feel a little sad. 7 imo was the last good windows ms came up with. I remember upgrading to it was something worth bragging to your friends in school. There was so much excitement around it. After 7, something felt, broken, new features felt unnecessary, things got more user hostile, the magic, it was just gone!
by CalChris | 2025-07-27 18:58:09+00:00
The test cost me $35.20 and I found out that I have sky high Lp(a), 218 nmol/L. I already take a statin and my cholesterol is well under control (LDL 83). But as has been pointed out, Lp(a) doesn't respond to statins. I'm getting a calcium score done (probably won't be covered but we'll see).

I'm prescribed a baby aspirin for the Lp(a). The AHA no longer recommends baby aspirin to the general population but 218 takes me out of the general population. The thinking is that Lp(a) clots and baby aspirin counteracts that.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-07-27 18:58:14+00:00
What are you on about? Government work is a wonderful career opportunity for the non-HN crowd. These are often people of at best average intelligence and near zero ambition who want a cushy career that you can't be fired from unless you punch a supervisor (and even then it's tough).

There are wonderful people in government, I've worked with them. But there are a ton of people along for the ride and it's absolutely insane to argue the opposite given hundreds of thousands of government employees on cruise control. Plenty of folks would (and do) love a GS-scale gig that requires nearly no work and provides terrific bennies. They were never going to work for FAANG or another high-payer anyway.

And many of the people "in on the grift" are constituents, not donors.
by samwillis | 2025-07-27 18:58:31+00:00
Tanstack DB - a new client side store for web apps, with transactions, optimistic state, and live queries spanning multiple collections.

It's designed for sync, so rather than fetching you can hook it up to a sync engine (any!) to keep your front end in sync with your backend. It's built on Tanstack Query, making the sync engine optional, and a great path for incremental adoption.

The query engine uses a typescript implementation of differential dataflow to enable incremental computation of the live queries - they are very fast to update. This gives you sub ms fine grade reactivity of complex queries (think sql like joins, group by etc).

Having a lot of fun building it!

https://tanstack.com/db/latest https://github.com/TanStack/db
by serf | 2025-07-27 18:58:34+00:00
like any attempt to categorize humans, it falls shorts on many exceptions.

I've been at what I do for 32+ years now, I love programming and I havent stopped since I started.

I love claude code. Why? It increases discoverability in ways far and beyond what a search engine would normally do for me. It gets rid of the need to learn a new documentation format and API for every single project that has different requirements. It makes it less painful to write and deal with languages that represent minor common current trends that will be gone by next year. I no longer have to think about what a waste of time onboarding for ReactCoreElectronChromium is when it'll be gone next year when Googlesoftzon Co folds and throws the baby out with the bathwater.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-07-27 18:58:54+00:00
To me this is sort of like saying about music "The guitar was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things."

That's true, but there's something qualitatively different about writing a song on a guitar vs. prompting to create a song in Suno. The guitar (or piano/Ableton/whatever) is an instrument, whereas Suno is… I'm not really sure.

But that difference makes me totally disinterested in using Suno to produce music. And in the same way — even though I also consider code "just a means to an end" — I'm also totally disinterested in using Claude Code to produce software.
by bbor | 2025-07-27 18:59:24+00:00
All right on, but your comment reminded me that they are innovating in the marketing space, or at least trying — last spring, they ran a sizeable ad campaign on Reddit for https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/natural-diamond-types-and-al...

As someone who’s already cynical about the ”natural”(/extractive) diamond “industry”(/cartel), the points made on that site are hilarious and absurd — highly recommend a scroll for anyone interested in how desperate they are to attack the new tech. Just from that comparison page, my favorite argument is probably “lab grown diamonds are from (dirty, evil) India and China, whereas natural diamonds are from ~nature~”, although “lab grown diamonds are so perfect that they’re all the same grade, and therefore boring” is a close runner up.

The fact that they’re now publishing a magazine devoted entirely to this topic tells me they haven’t slowed down, just improved their ad spend so that it’s not wasted on me! Something tells me there’s quite a mountain of financial instruments secured by the warehouses of diamonds they have to keep supply tight, so I can only see this ramping up in the short term.
by bawana | 2025-07-27 18:59:33+00:00
Globalism destroys national identity, a convenient source of self esteem. If anything, globalism favors the corporate mentality of dehumanizing people as it seeks to maximize profit by exporting services to the least expensive provider. This precept of Ricardo that has been extolled by billionaires like Buffett has been twisted into 'let the people who can provide the most output for the least input' prevail. Using this mentality, we will soon return to child labor and slavery. The significant intangible of nationalism is that it puts a floor under this race to the bottom and provides a foundation deeply rooted in our evolution for humans to coexist within a homogeneous pool - a shared culture - a set of behaviors that have a low cognitive burden, are easily maintained and transmitted.

Under globalization, we have confusing alternatives that require constant cognitive function to evaluate and maintain. As we seek conformity and agreement, we tend to a homogeneous gruel and the rich diversity of the world becomes an average gray standard.
by supplied_demand | 2025-07-27 18:59:48+00:00
== I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.==

I think the main reason people blame their fetishes on porn is in order to avoid confronting their inner compulsions.

== Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible? ==

I’m not sure, but it’s probably something you should unpack with a therapist. Blaming porn is the easy way out. Exploring why you are personally drawn to it is the hard work.
by lb1lf | 2025-07-27 18:59:55+00:00
Tom Lehrer has been my go-to source of acerbic wit and brilliant satire since I first encountered him when attending the Norwegian University of Tecnology and Science; a group I joined there held Lehrer in high esteem and I, too, was blown away by how timeless a lot of his songs were; a lot of satire ages very quickly, but chances are my unborn grandchildren will laugh hysterically to 'Who's Next?' or 'Wernher von Braun' after doing the mid-21st century equivalent of googling to find out who WvB was, of course.

Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?
by weiliddat | 2025-07-27 19:00:41+00:00
I see a few mentions of QuickJS, but they all refer to the fork of Bellard's QuickJS https://bellard.org/quickjs/, which I think deserves a mention. It seems to be still active (last release 2025-04-26, GitHub mirror at https://github.com/bellard/quickjs shows some activity).
by gertlex | 2025-07-27 19:01:20+00:00
I meant and left out a key word; "most recent". Whoops!

I'm used to seeing yearly or every-other-year streetview updates for locations I look at regularly.

That said, might be mixing up my broader impression with the interval of satellite photo updates in the google earth history. (but my bay area neighborhood does indeed have streetview history updating every year or so; obviously this is probably on the high end given proximity to tech companies...)
by serf | 2025-07-27 19:01:27+00:00
Smart caching fixes a lot of the issues there. If a fork is marked somehow as successful then presumably the cache lookup next time will be less painful/costly.

Of course that's dependent on how caching gets implemented/where/when/how, but it's not unsolvable for common occurrence questions/answers.

As for getting the SOTA questions wrong : we as humans would likely also go through an iterative feedback loop until initial success and experience, too.
by chistev | 2025-07-27 19:02:04+00:00
I'm building ClosedLinks, a tool for sharing files and/or messages anonymously through one-time access links with no traceable sender. Most digital tools assume persistence; ClosedLinks is built for ephemerality and unlinkability. Each link is single-use, redirects on access, and stores encrypted content only temporarily. Recipients never see the original URL, enabling plausible deniability. Think: whistleblowers.

Encryption uses Fernet (symmetric), and all decryption happens only at point of access. There's no data retention after viewing or expiration. Optional analytics give visibility without compromising identity. Users can get notified when their shared links was accessed by the recipient, and they can set passwords for enhanced security. Limitations include email-based signups and no end-to-end encryption (yet).

You can check it out at = https://www.closedlinks.com/

You can read the white paper here - https://www.closedlinks.com/white-paper/
by pacmansyyu | 2025-07-27 19:02:10+00:00
I've been working on an encrypted environment variables management tool, called kiln[1], for teams. I know, tools like age and SOPS exist, but this partly came through because of the lack of a good UX around the encryption part especially for a team-based workflow. I aim to continue building kiln as a developer-first experience, making it seamless to integrate into a large team's workflows.

The idea came to me when we were trying to find ways to manage Terraform secrets , CI vars were a no-go because people sometimes wish to deploy locally for testing stuff, and tools like Vault have honestly been a pain to manage, well, for us at least. So I have been building this tool where the variables are encrypted with `age`, have RBACs around it, and an entire development workflow (run ad-hoc commands, export, templating, etc) that can easily be integrated into any CI/CD alongside local development. We're using this and storing the encrypted secrets in Git now, so everything is version-controlled and can be found in a single place.

Do give it a try. I am open to any questions or suggestions! Interested to know what people think of this. Thanks!

[1]: https://kiln.sh
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-27 19:02:55+00:00
I’ve also had this feeling when conservation of particular species comes up. Species come and go. Why conserve this particular species?

So, inevitably, the answer must be that people want to conserve them either because of sentimental reasons or because a given ecosystem suits human flourishing, or because it maximizes some metric like species diversity.

> we’re really measuring against a value-laden idea of what we think nature should look like, not some neutral truth.

I will remark, that “value-laden” is not opposed to “neutral truth”. All knowledge is value-laden. Value itself is part of reality. The fact-value dichotomy is a fiction.
by yawboakye | 2025-07-27 19:03:13+00:00
there are many ways to account for the fall of the roman empire, and everyone chooses their favorite (usually depending on where their interest bends). for example, it could be explained by the increased usage of mercenaries in the roman army. i like this theory because the fall was brought by losses to renegade forces. it could also be explained by bad leadership.
by gondo | 2025-07-27 19:04:10+00:00
I am bootstrapping Appio.so

Appio lets you add mobile widgets and native push notifications to your web app within minutes, without building or maintaining mobile apps, hiring developers, or dealing with app stores. You can try it at: https://demo.appio.so/

If you’re building a web-based product without a mobile app, or just want to try Appio, I’d love to chat! You can reach me directly via https://my.appio.so/ or drop a comment here.
by williamcotton | 2025-07-27 19:04:30+00:00
A web app DSL that looks like:

GET /hello |> jq: `{ world: ":)"}` pipeline getPage = |> jq: `{ sqlParams: [.params.id | tostring] }` |> pg: `SELECT * FROM pages WHERE id = $1` |> jq: `{ team: .data.rows[0] }` GET /page/:id |> pipeline: getPage

WIP article that explains more:

https://williamcotton.com/articles/introducing-web-pipe

I would love feedback!
by laurencerowe | 2025-07-27 19:04:53+00:00
> For all the overlap in strategy, notable is the variety in engines underpinning all these runtimes. While Deno continues Node.js's tradition of using V8, we see Bun employing JavaScriptCore, WinterJS using SpiderMonkey, LLRT on QuickJS, and Cloudflare Workers on the tailor-made workerd. No longer is the backend solely a stage for Node.js and V8 – it's now fashionable to pick a runtime and engine optimised for the task.

I don't think this is completely accurate. While Cloudflare's workerd is a tailor-made runtime (equivalent level to deno/node/bun/etc.) it uses the V8 engine.

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/docs/v8-upda...
by nikshepsvn | 2025-07-27 19:05:06+00:00
thought about this idea reading about rust-gpu today (rust-gpu.github.io). thought we could make solana validators AI training/inference infra, but realized the smarter thing to do with that added on GPU compute is to make a decentralized ZK proving network that can make the chain essentially ZK-native (a single 4090 per node could open up wild possibilities vs needed beefy setups for AI stuff).

would love thoughts and feedback, researched and written with the help of gemini and o3.
by low_tech_punk | 2025-07-27 19:06:19+00:00
I think it's short-term vs long-term discussion.

In the short term, Figma's strategy to focus on existing designer market makes total sense. And Figma, now being a public company, is indeed held captive by the market demands to sell more.

In the long term, I believe some other start ups will figure out the end user programming problem before Figma does. Maybe Figma will acquire those companies rather than building its own?

As a side note, Figma acquired Dynaboard (https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard) years ago, which I suspect powered their Figma Make. It took them a lot of time to develop it up though. Definitely late to market compared to V0 and loveable.
by titzer | 2025-07-27 19:06:28+00:00
Biodiversity, biomass, and ecosystem robustness are all objective measures.

Human settlement has a tendency to reduce all of them. The story here isn't that reintroducing wolves established some kind of human-centric value system, it's the surprisingly complex and far-reaching effects of just one change in the ecosystem, particularly the re-introduction of a top predator.

Note also that absent extinction altogether, without humans actively killing wolves, their numbers most likely would have recovered eventually, probably with similar effects. In essence, we just accelerated a type of healing process that would naturally take place when our enormous ecological footprint is removed.
by righthand | 2025-07-27 19:06:29+00:00
> Lastly, JavaScript continues to show its strength as a language for GUI programming, being employed in a variety of ways to develop native apps on mobile phones and Smart TVs, though with web view based apps still being the vogue on desktop.

Really? I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser but Javascript was so amazing that no one uses the other languages. Javascript has had all this competition on the UI layer it’s amazing it came out #1. Am I reading the implication correctly?
by mvdtnz | 2025-07-27 19:07:47+00:00
There are very serious drawbacks to e2e encryption that can't be ignored for all use cases. Searching and indexing, reporting, analytics and performance are aspects of a program which become difficult or impossible if all of your data is encrypted everywhere other than the client. It's easy to just wave your hands and say "all data should be e2e encrypted" but it's not that straightforward.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-27 19:08:30+00:00
FT's cryptocurrency coverage has been abysmal for years now, and this continues the pattern. And I speak as somewhat of a crypto skeptic!

>First, the Genius Act (like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000) is being marketed as a way to make crypto safer, with stablecoins backed one to one by US dollars.

>But that doesn’t make what is, more broadly, a volatile asset class any less volatile. Indeed, it may only make the overall market more so.

This doesn't even make logical sense. Yes, regulating stablecoins so that they are backed one to one and audited, verse being a pseudo black box like many of them are today, absolutely makes that area of crypto safer!

No, it won't magically lower the beta of BTC. A stablecoin bill won't regulate volatility of an entirely different crypto asset. How obvious can you get.

Then we have the classic fear-mongering clickbait headline that is shameful to be running on FT.

Finally the short pretty meaningless article just tapers off into a quick end. I'm not even sure what the crisis is supposed to be. There's not enough regulations so it's going to repeat 2008?

The funny thing is there are so many interesting angles to pursue here, but the author is so incredibly obviously ignorant and close minded to the space (as was FT on the whole when I was a subscriber) that they don't have the ability to add anything of substance.

I'll do the work for the author. If we see institutional rehypothecation of crypto and systemic leverage generated through stable coin lending, and those stable coins are backed by t-bills, then a "bank run" could cause a repo crisis in the real banking system that the central bank is toothless to slow down. If you hold a pile of digital dollars that suddenly look shaky (let's see during the initial wave of quantum computing hacks of latent Bitcoin addresses with known public addresses in coming years), there's very little stopping a sort of bankrun phenomenon where everyone is incentivized to swap their digital dollars for actual paper, which would slam ungodly amounts of treasuries onto the market and collapse repo by making bond volatility go absolutely through the roof. That could create a flash crisis and blow up the basis trade, like we saw in 2020 (the financial meltdown bin was caused by the basis trade unwinding more than anything else).

That would be an interesting article. And I can come up with 10 more as well, but it's not like FT would ever actually write about something interesting in the space like that...
by lupusreal | 2025-07-27 19:08:35+00:00
Privatizing government institutions won't do anything to help, but it is nonetheless the case that the American government has a large amount of responsibility for what's going on. The reason why American companies cannot simply sell food to Gaza is because the government of Israel controls access to Gaza and the government of America supports them in this.

Without the American government's various anti-BDS laws, it would be much easier for American organizations to apply pressure to Israel to stop their genocide. Furthermore, without the American government providing support for Israel, they'd be in a much tighter spot and would face significantly stronger incentives to stop.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-07-27 19:08:46+00:00
Two things:

1. Software: An OS that masquerades as simple note taking software.

Goal is to put an end to all the disparate AI bullshit and apps owning our data.

I solved context switching for myself ages ago and now I'm just trying to productize it outside my 3 companies internal usage.

It also solves context switching for AI agents as a byproduct.

2. Ethics: Give Ai and proto-Agi a reason not to kill us all.

An extremely minimal, empirical naturalistic moral framework that is universally binding to all agents so AI won't kill us all. I view the alignment problem as a epistemic moral grounding issue and that the current pseudo utilitarianism isn't cutting it. Divine command, discourse ethics, utilitarianism, deontology they are all insufficient.
by walterbell | 2025-07-27 19:10:11+00:00
"Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?" (2024), 170 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439810

"Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain" (2020), 130 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683

"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire" (2018), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-27 19:10:28+00:00
> are they just this pathetic? or do they largely see this as personally beneficial?

They don't "see this", they control it.

> I am endlessly fascinated by how almost the entire American elite has just accepted... policy being driven by idiotic childish whims

There's nothing idiotic, childish or whimsy - bread for some, circuses for the rest - it's a scheme old as the world. The reality show isn't real.
by jks | 2025-07-27 19:10:32+00:00
I don't know about German law, but in Finnish law you can only appeal to the trial period if you have an acceptable reason related to the trial period. For example, if the employee isn't performing well, that is a legal reason to annul the work agreement during the trial period. But selling the business to investors or having financial difficulties because of the economy are not acceptable reasons, since they are not related to the specific recently-hired employee.

It cuts both ways: the employee can walk out during the trial period for reasons such as feeling like they didn't fit in, or the work being different from what they imagined. But if they merely find a better-paying job elsewhere, they cannot invoke the trial period but have to give notice in the usual way.