MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyman | 2025-07-20 09:00:22+00:00
A person is flying a hot air balloon and realises he’s lost. He lowers the balloon and spots a man down below. He shouts:

“Excuse me! Can you help me? I promised a friend I’d meet him, but I have no idea where I am.”

The man replies, “You’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above the ground, somewhere between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be a Prompt Engineer,” says the balloonist.

“I am,” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but it’s of no use to me and I still have no idea where I am.”

The man below replies, “You must be a Vibe Coder.”

“I am,” says the balloonist. “How did you know?”

"Because you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You made a promise you can’t keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is, you’re in the same position you were in before we met, but now it’s somehow my fault!"
by LarsKrimi | 2025-07-20 09:00:54+00:00
Went down so hard that their status report page (https://www.nets.eu/dk-da/Pages/driftstatus.aspx) took 2 minutes to load a blank page. Later it started reporting an azure 504 after minutes

"Don't know why, but now it works. Problem solved"

Absolutely embarrassing. They need to be nationalised..
by JdeBP | 2025-07-20 09:01:14+00:00
Previous generations would have simply read something like the circle drawing writeup by Jeffrey S. McArthur in chapter 4 of COMPUTE!'s Third Book of Atari which as a matter of fact is available in scrapable text. (-:

* https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-computes-third-book-o...

* https://atariarchives.org/c3ba/page153.php

Fun fact: Orson Scott Card can be found in chapter 1.
by sureglymop | 2025-07-20 09:01:22+00:00
I also use restic and do backups to append-only rest-servers in multiple locations.

I also back up multiple hosts to the same repository, which actually results in insane storage space savings. One thing I'm missing though is being able to specify multiple repositories for one snapshot such that I have consistency across the multiple backup locations. For now the snapshots just have different ids.
by JimmyBuckets | 2025-07-20 09:01:48+00:00
Related: https://pol.is/home

Pol.is is a tool that uses ML to synthesize these shared views and provide inisght into both areas of consensus and discordance.

I am not sure of the specific relationships but it has been championed by Audrey Tang (Taiwan's minster of digital affairs) and other Pluralist people.

I think this is a worthy tool but slightly narrower than pol.is because it's just as important to understand where there is disagreement.
by gizajob | 2025-07-20 09:01:50+00:00
An issue with this is that even if pensioners are millionaires and getting state pension, they’re definitely the right people to trickle it down to where it’s most needed.

I think “30% of pensioners are millionaires” is also a bit moot given the majority of those are living in properties that they didn’t buy for millions and have lived in while house prices have gone up. My parents for example are probably close to your millionaire threshold and it seems unfair that they’d have to sell their home they’ve lived in for decades and want to continue living in just because the housing market has pushed its value past the point where it seems like it should be taxed. They’d have to sell it just to pay that tax and move somewhere smaller, which seems unfair to force on people approaching 80yo.
by g42gregory | 2025-07-20 09:02:36+00:00
> "In short, salaries paid to software engineers can no longer be deducted as a cost, like all other employee wages are."

I simply can not accept this as the full story. Here is why:

Google is full of software engineers. If the effect on the bottom line was this big, they have the capacity (together with Oracle, Palantir, Meta depending on the administration) to simply change the government.

They would not have waited for the legislation "to fix it". It would have been changed immediately. Since they haven't done that, I am questioning whether this is the full story. Happy to be proven wrong.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-20 09:02:38+00:00
I have done multiple roles throughout my career.

What I love when doing DevOps, being outside most of the whole FE / BE discussions regarding sprints, tickets, endless discussion with product teams, the plurality of the technology stack.

What I don't like, many teams only remember that we exist when things go wrong, and usually we're the only ones staying late or doing weekends when it happens, debugging black boxes.

Debugging these kind of issues without access to Go's source code, and talking over some kind of ticket system with "Go support team", isn't the same kind of fun.
by tomhow | 2025-07-20 09:02:47+00:00
It's true that there were many inorganic upvotes on this submission, made within the first 10-20 minutes by a bot. Maybe bigyabai could see that there was an unusually high vote count for a story that was submitted so recently.

But this just goes to show how futile – indeed counter-productive – this kind of activity is. These votes are easily detected and were ignored, and the submission had enough legit upvotes to make it onto the front page organically. We've penalized the users involved and the domain, as we can't let this kind of attempted abuse go without any consequence.

But also, public callouts like this are against the guidelines and we ask that people let us know via email at hn@ycombinator.com. This allows us to know about it sooner and investigate it thoroughly before making a public comment about it.
by Asraelite | 2025-07-20 09:02:53+00:00
In principle I don't see a problem with bots looking out for grammar mistakes and typos that could confuse readers (so long as it's less intrusive than this bot), but in this case the bot is just incorrect.

"Good to merge? Test suite passes locally?" is perfectly valid English. You need to make sure that the bot is configured to not insist on arbitrary prescriptivist style guides that nobody cares about.
CrushFTP zero-day alert – patch now
by oceanstack | 2025-07-20 09:03:46+00:00
Heads up—there’s a zero-day in CrushFTP that’s being actively exploited. If you’re not using their DMZ proxy setup, attackers can remotely grab admin access via HTTPS. Versions before 10.8.5 and 11.3.4_23 are affected.

Already being used in the wild since mid-July. Patch ASAP and check your logs!
by hibikir | 2025-07-20 09:03:46+00:00
Gouging: When I have a significant control of the supply, and set prices up in a way that significant parts of the supply get wasted because my profits are maximized anyway.

So one can argue that some cartel-like algorithms are price gouging, but it's unlikely to be what a provider of a lone AirBnb unit will do, as for them, going empty is worth zero.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-20 09:04:44+00:00
Great to see someone going into this. I wanted to do a simple LSM tree using io_uring in Zig for some time but couldn't get into it yet.

I always use this approach for crash-resistance:

- Append to the data (WAL) file normally.

- Have a seperate small file that is like a hash + length for WAL state.

- First append to WAL file.

- Start fsync call on the WAL file, create a new hash/length file with different name and fsync it in parallel.

- Rename the length file onto the real one for making sure it is fully atomic.

- Update in-memory state to reflect the files and return from the write function call.

Curious if anyone knows tradeoffs between this and doing double WAL. Maybe doing fsync on everything is too slow to maintain fast writes?

I learned about append/rename approach from this article in case anyone is interested:

- https://discuss.hypermode.com/t/making-badger-crash-resilien...

- https://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/alice-osdi14....
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 09:05:04+00:00
It depends on whether you calculate it as including the amortized fixed costs (e.g. the cost of building the tunnels) or the incremental cost (what does it cost to have one additional passenger). If it's the first one then the cost is way higher, but then you'd have to do the same thing in the other case and include the cost of building roads etc.

However, fixed costs are better funded by general taxes than by usage fees because otherwise you pay a huge fixed cost to build something with a low incremental usage cost and then under-utilize it because recovering the sunk cost through fares causes high fares which deters uses whose value exceeds the incremental cost.

Meanwhile human labor is a significant proportion of the incremental cost, when you have humans doing things per-trip that could reasonably be automated.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-20 09:06:23+00:00
Perhaps I'm mistaken. But I thought that several of the original MIPS designers, etc became the leaders of the RISC-V movement.

The ISA and its implementation are two different dimensions. Look at the x86 ISA how it evolved from 80386 to present day superscalar, predictive, re-ordered, who knows what else microprogrammed implementations. The code I compiled back in 1990 runs today without even recompiling it. My sleek light-weight laptop is totally unlike the beige box I originally compiled it on.
by NalNezumi | 2025-07-20 09:07:32+00:00
Sure. But that again depends on calculation? If we are talking about "disposable income" in the average statistic (after tax) then ofc anywhere that does it through tax will have lower purchasing power because it's (easy to be) included. While places where it's mostly out of your pocket (or private) you can only really do an educated guess.

Ofc it's not free. But the point is that in the way you calculate, it can present as free. My question is to what extent do they calculate
by seec | 2025-07-20 09:08:23+00:00
I think you are confused, MacOS definitely necessitates specific kernel drivers to get the lowest latency possible and some other features. Every high-end audio interface has its own driver that you need to install just like on Windows.

Otherwise, you actually use the generic HID (Human Interface Device) implementation which has a 16bits/96khz sample rate limitation along with many other limitations, depending on variables (interface speed, specification etc.).

It's better than what Windows had by default back in the days but at the same time it wasn't THAT good. But the "genius" of it is that for most people it was a seamless plug-and-play experience since the vast majority of Mac users are actually amateurs dabbling in the stuff. So, for "basic" needs, it suffices to pick up a "good enough" interface, connect it, and you are on your way. But if you use a professional level interface, like something from RME for example, you will definitely need to install the drivers and configure the thing properly and it doesn't work worse on Windows. The "advantage" of Mac OS X was that you could potentially get away with a cheaper interface and use the good enough implementation instead of having to buy expensive hardware, but that's a bit of a lie/stretch because you are not getting the same quality/experience at all. But this is usual with Apple aficionados, they are very fluid with reality, distortion field is no joke.

Yes, Linux has become pretty good with audio, but realistically it's more trouble than it's worth for most people. Whether you buy a Mac or a Windows PC, the license cost of the system is pretty negligible but access to specific softwares and support is extremely important. This is actually, in my opinion, the single best reason to get a Mac for audio: all the indie software that you get access to, that are often extremely good and does not have true equivalency on Windows.

Of course, I don't think that people should know their computers inside-out, what I'm pointing is that in general Windows users get by just fine, sometimes doing mistakes or having trouble because of poor choices they misunderstood but they are generally very chill about it. Mac users on the other hand are almost systematically convinced that they use the best thing around and that they know better when in fact they are rarely competent enough to understand properly but have a very large ego.

Personally, macOS used to be my OS of choice and I think it still is very good in many ways. But it has also stagnated too much, made too "secure" and more closed like iOS and Apple's behavior in general is just abhorrent. The Mac is still good mostly because of various exclusive softwares that are very good (which is why Apple should treat their devs much better, they largely underestimate their importance) and the hardware for laptops that is indeed quite good and unmatched if we forget about value.
by meindnoch | 2025-07-20 09:08:26+00:00
Well, consider a function that is vastly more complex than IsOdd() from my previous example. IsOdd() was a function from Z[2]^n to Z[2]. Instead, imagine a function from Z[2]^n to Z[2]^m, aka a general N-to-M bit Boolean function. Any such Boolean function can be represented as a logic circuit, that is, AND/OR/NOT gates and connections between them. Now, if we can implement these logic gates (and the connections between them) homomorphically, then we can implement a homomorphic realization of arbitrary functions. One "small" caveat when transforming programs into logic circuits is that all data must be inlined, all loops must be unrolled, all branches must be executed.
by danhor | 2025-07-20 09:08:29+00:00
Mont (if not allmost all) S-Bahn trains in Germany only have one staff member. The space for wheelchairs is directly behind the drivers cabin and the few times I've seen a ramp being deployed, it took the driver 1-2 minutes (Usually the automatically deployed gap filler is good enough). A large portion (I'd guess somewhere around 20-40%) of regional trains are also only staffed with the driver. The others do have an additional staff member, but they're almost always not safety relevant and only perform ticket checks, answer questions and help with ramp deployment.

The only times I've seen more than the driver on trams/Stadtbahns/metros, they checked tickets. This also happens surprisingly rarely.
by tacker2000 | 2025-07-20 09:08:34+00:00
Yea, homebrew feels like a package manager for people who have no idea what packages or versions are.

Its doing so much hand-holding and extra stuff, it cant be really considered “pro” at all.

What bothers me the most is when they immediately remove packages because they get EOL’ed, but in the real world it doesn’t work like this.

I still have projects that use old PHP versions for example and brew just refuses to install these since they have been deprecated.

So then you have to use some finicky workaroud and download these old versions off of some repo/cask that will also probably go away at some point.
by vladms | 2025-07-20 09:09:13+00:00
It means there is a law, and Germany makes a reasonable effort to apply it. Germany asks for Steam to use a different system than "Asking the age to the user" (which in my opinion is hilarious and obviously a joke), Steam decides to not sell the games. (source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...)

It's not like "Germany wants to ban sex games altogether", which seems to be what some other private groups would prefer.
by nosianu | 2025-07-20 09:09:17+00:00
Anecdote

Many years ago, in another millennium, before I even went to university but still was an apprentice (the German system, in a large factory), I wrote my first professional software, in assembler. I got stuck on a hard part. Fortunately there was another quite intelligent apprentice colleague with me (now a hard-science Ph.D.), and I delegated that task to him.

He still needed an explanation since he didn't have any of my context, so I bit the bullet and explained the task to him as well as I could. When I was done I noticed that I had just created exactly the algorithm that I needed. I just wrote it down easily myself in less than half an hour after that.
by samrus | 2025-07-20 09:10:32+00:00
The problem is these bots dont understand the concept of "goals" or "achieving something". So they cant judge for themselves when they are actually helping (like in correcting grammar where its so bad its hindering communications with other contributors) or being pedantic (like this) because they wont think to consider the difference unless wxplicitly told to do so

And NGI like a human would be given this task and consider the spirit of the law, the goal we want to acheive, and enforce it to reach that. The next token AI doesnt model that. It just predicts the next token, and understanding the spirit of the law does not seem to be in the emergent capabilities of that
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 09:11:06+00:00
On YouTube, by far the best is Easy German. Their playlists also divide the content by levels from A1 to C2, as well as by theme: https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman/playlists

They also have podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/easy-german-learn-germ...

More generally, there's also good podcast content from:

• DW news: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-na...

• Coffee Break German: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/coffee-break-german/id...

> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-20 09:11:33+00:00
You've provided reasons why other languages have other properties, but Rust's fearless concurrency requires borrow checking.

The concurrency focused trait Send only makes sense because we have control over references, through the borrow checker. Thread #1 can give Thread #2 this Doodad because it no longer has any references to it, if you try to give it a Doodad you're still referring to, then the borrow checker will reject your code. The Send trait guarantees that this (giving the Doodad to a different thread) is an OK thing to do - but only if you don't have outstanding borrows so you won't be able to look at the Doodad once you give it to Thread #2
by defraudbah | 2025-07-20 09:12:00+00:00
it does, I am using it extensively (little snitch on mac, and open snitch on linux). My problem with it is that every new tool wants to connect to the internet and my terminal is the constant source of outbound connections. I try to review everything but the amount of tools and connections is overwhelming. It does limit the risk, but i do not trust my terminal and dev tools as usually i give them way too many permissions and any plugin or tool from AUR can contain malware

PS. Regarding downloading files from internet, every self-update tool does that nowadays, it becomes more common because of apple/others stores policies. I created a few remote control tools and it is very very difficult to caught them, and I am not even a professional malware researcher. Things they do is beyond understanding of average superuser
by krisoft | 2025-07-20 09:13:56+00:00
I do not doubt that freezing them would kill the bugs. I would be worried that unless it is very carefully managed it might damage the books though. In particular i would worry that moisture from the air would freeze on the books and as they are thawed they would get water damaged. Or that moisture trapped inside the bindings would form ice crystals and physically damage the books as they form.

None of these are concern with the hypoxic treatment they choose. Plus the nitrogen atmosphere treatment is so much simpler on the practical level. Instead of bringing in freezers and powering them for the whole duration of the treatment all you need is some crates, plastic bags and nitrogen bottles. Makes it much easier to bring the treatment where the books are, thus you avoid all kind of complications with transporting the books.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-07-20 09:16:45+00:00
I don't know if anyone notices that, but LLMs are very much like what you see in dreams when you reflect on them when awake. When you asleep a dream feels very coherent; but when you're awake, you see wild gaps and jumps and the overall impression of many dreams' plot is that it is pure nonsense.

I once heard advice on trying to re-read the text you see in dreams. And I did that once. It was a phrase where one of words referred to a city. The first time I read that city was "London". I remembered the advice and re-read the phrase and the word changed to the name of an old Russian city "Rostov". Yet the phrase was "same", that is it felt same in the dream, even though the city was different.

LLMs are like that dream mechanics. It is how something else is reflected in what we know (e.g. an image of a city is rendered as a name of a city, just any city). So, on one hand, we do have a similar mechanism in our minds. But on another hand our normal reasoning is very much unlike that. It would be a very wild stretch to believe that reasoning somehow stems from dreaming. I'd say reasoning is opposite to dreaming. If we amplify our dreaming mechanics we won't get a genius; more likely we'll get a schizophrenic.
by niemandhier | 2025-07-20 09:17:03+00:00
Walking through the Louvre or the British museum I always feel a mixture of awe, sadness and relief.

Awe of the artefacts. Sadness that they have been taken from their native lands. Relieve that they are safe.

I hope at some point in the future we can come up with a solution that will enable all humans to appreciate these parts of our shared cultural heritage, without ripping them from their current sanctuaries or forcing the formerly conquered to engage in a pilgrimage to the capitals of their conquerors.
by newdee | 2025-07-20 09:17:24+00:00
People earning 90k aren’t “the rich” that are doing the most egregious tax avoidance. They’re still working class. They still have to work or face destitution.

The very top sliver who own the majority of the land and assets and who never need to work a day in their life are who must be looked at; that hereditary wealth needs to begin to find itself flowing into public services more and more.
by motorest | 2025-07-20 09:17:29+00:00
> Vibe Coding seems to work best when you are already an experienced programmer.

I think that is a very vague and ambiguous way of putting it.

I would frame it a tad more specific: vibecode seems to work best when users know what they want and are able to set requirements and plan ahead.

Vibecoding doesn't work at all or is an unmaintainable god awful mess if users don't do software engineering and instead hack stuff together hoping it works.

Garbage in, garbage out.
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-20 09:18:39+00:00
The main killer in the Himalayas are avalanches, and the route to Mt. Everest summit is somewhat predictable in this regard. There was a terrible avalanche in 2015 that swept the base camp and killed almost twenty people, but most of the time, nothing like that happens.

The more deadly mountains like K2, Nanga Parbat and Annapurna, are prone to avalanches that cannot be avoided by taking a specific route. Or icefalls. A couloir called the Bottleneck is a major killer on the K2 route. You have to traverse a very exposed terrain there to get to the top, and a majority of K2 deaths have happened there.

Nothing like that on the standard Everest route. The Khumbu icefall or the Hillary step are challenging, but nowhere near as treacherous.
by Earw0rm | 2025-07-20 09:19:57+00:00
The thing with x87 is that it's easy to write compilable, correct-looking code, and much harder to write correct compilable code, even for trivial sequences of a dozen or so operations.

Whereas in most asm dialects, register AX is always register AX (word length aliasing aside), that's not the case for x87: the object/value at ST3 in one operation may be ST1 or ST5 in a couple of instructions' time.