MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmz73 | 2025-07-24 00:26:11+00:00
Runtime flexibility is not restricted to dynamically typed languages, it just happens to be less available in some of the popular statically typed languages. Error handling, expressiveness, testing culture, meta-programming and gradual typing have nothing to do with static vs dynamic typing. The main "advantage" of dynamically typed languages is that you can start writing code now and not thing about it too much. Then you discover all the problems at runtime...forever. Statically typed languages force you to think about what you are doing in advance a lot more which can help you avoid some structural issues. Then when you do refactor computer helps you find all the places where you need to change things. Dynamically typed languages force you to write more tests that are not required in statically typed languages and that might prompt you to write other tests but if also increases the chance you just give up when you start refactoring. Finally, after some time has passed and few updates have been applied to the language and libraries, you may not have a working project anymore. With statically typed languages you can usually find and fix all the compile errors and have the fully working project again. With dynamically typed languages, you will never know until you explore every line of code, which will usually happen at runtime and on the client computer.
by chronid | 2025-07-24 00:26:15+00:00
And i want to use hibernation, as I don't mind putting my disk encryption passphrase once a day as the price of not risking having my laptop with a completely drained battery on Monday morning due to 1% battery drain/h of s2idle in my 64GB RAM configuration.

You can use suspend+hibernate to accomplish that and it works well. Unless the gods of kernel lockdown decide you cannot for your own good (and it doesn't matter if your disk is fully encrypted, you're not worthy anyway) of course. It's their kernel running on your laptop after all.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-24 00:26:24+00:00
Okay, but not selling knives to kids really reduces knife crime? I wonder by how much, if at all. I am having difficulties believing it does.

Fires though, I can definitely believe it does prevent some arson.

> Is there a benefit to society of allowing minors to buy knives?

The default is "no ban". You need an argument the other way around. I think it is a silly question by itself. Is there a benefit to society of allowing people to skydive?
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-24 00:27:02+00:00
Almost homing in on care vs assholery dilemma*

Recall the famous Steve Jobs takedown of Kamen

https://archive.fo/latest/hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html

(Payoff from cooperation in action/hard resources >> cooperation in thought/design)

*agreeability+conscientiousness vs dark traits

Need to check against all famous (=data-abundant) edgecases.

HN is a game where cooperation in hard resources is ... Not just an afterthought.. McLuhan's tetradic questions worth generalizing to Bartle's Taxonomy to attack the confusion!!

At face value, HN is about cooperative cognition.. but weird lack of relevant features suggest a different motive :) until one passes some ultimate karma threshold
by ddtaylor | 2025-07-24 00:27:33+00:00
There are a lot of really amazing TV and movies from the last 60 years. It seems we never have time to get around to finishing what we want, but I am genuinely curious what my wife and kids think about various scenarios presented in shows like Black Mirror.

Likewise, despite their inaccuracy, movies like The Imitation Game or A Beautiful Mind led me to look at the life of Alan Turing beyond just what I learned in college.

Consuming content is very much a time-blocked thing for me. I have some YouTube content I consume to stay up with various AI/ML groups, etc. but that is closer to work-related and not something I will put on during a break from work as that will defeat the purpose of recharging my brain.

It's also interesting to see how movies or shows capture small details that change over time.
by presentation | 2025-07-24 00:27:56+00:00
I invested a few days at the start of building my B2B SaaS company wherein on every deploy we automate branching our actual staging/production databases with Neon, spinning up a complete preview environment with all the real dependencies, applying all migrations to the real data, and running end to end tests on that environment. Once it was set up I almost never need to touch it (and it's documented, but my engineers also don't need to touch it either).

In a few years of that setup being in place, while it's only partially attributable to this CI/CD process, we have never had a single incident—a stark contrast to the volatile on-call experiences I've had at past startups. For me, never being woken up in the night or needing to stress out while reverting deploys that broke our users needs was well worth it.
by n20benn | 2025-07-24 00:28:29+00:00
> "Truth is an absolute defense for a defamation claim; you can’t just sue someone because your feelings are hurt."

As an aside, this hasn't always been the case in the US [1], and in some countries (e.g. Sweden) defamation suits can absolutely cover truthful statements that damage reputation.

[1] - https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/helmreich.pdf
by johnisgood | 2025-07-24 00:29:33+00:00
Hey, since I am in a thread where we are sharing what ChatGPT spits out, I just copy pasted it from there, too. :)

For what it is worth, I asked about LuaJIT after I have shared the link, and the numbers are now different for some languages, albeit not by much. Go (cgo) became ~50-100 ns. That said, I still believe it is unfair to single out Go when it does way better than some other GC languages.
by dkersten | 2025-07-24 00:30:14+00:00
I don’t say I don’t know how to use one. I was a longtime vim and then neovim user. But I don’t want to use one.

I still use vim for quick terminal edits, git commit messages, and doing stuff over ssh. But for my day to day heavy text editing, I do not want to sit in a terminal and be limited by what a terminal can display.
by globalnode | 2025-07-24 00:32:04+00:00
This is great. I'm currently trying to use Linux more due to Recall but in terms of security I'm just not sure what I'm doing most of the time. I suppose I should go read a book about it. Any suggestions on that front? Anyway, a tool like this (if trustworthy) would go a long way to helping me in this area. Also I do like that its in bash and not compiled.
by b3nto | 2025-07-24 00:32:38+00:00
> The Technology team’s post-incident investigation identified the primary root cause as a gap in environment controls. This control gap allowed an unsanctioned process to initiate an automated operating system update on production infrastructure where such updates should have been disabled.

source (link given in the twitter/X post): https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-reliability-i...

The problem seems much more about operations and process than anything else. Letting a third party (your OS provider/default config) decides when and how your production systems are updated seems quite unreasonable (for many many reasons).

I am not sure to understand why systemd is faulty here ? If you do believe systemd is faulty, why ubuntu would not be as faulty at least ?
by underlipton | 2025-07-24 00:34:03+00:00
I suppose part of the issue is that a lot of people don't really know how they got where they are. You can point to this or that traumatic incident as the watershed moment that made the difference in the wrong direction, but who's to say if that's really it? Maybe it was a completely different missed (or withheld) opportunity that they've completely forgotten, or can't confront because of what it would mean about their behavior or identity or the world we live in.

A conference that could cut through that and get to some real answers would be very valuable. I would call it a "burnout conference" though. It really seems like the terminology has changed recently; people say "loser" less and "burnout" more, perhaps in light of some recognition of:

(1) the seriousness of the circumstances (it's not a game)

(2) the personal nature of everyone's journey (it's not a competition)

(3) the degree to which a lot of this stuff is out of our control

(4) the toll the rat race takes on even the most strident
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-24 00:34:36+00:00
> The good thing about science is that it doesn’t depend on trusting any one person or institution, it depends on a process designed to catch bias and error.

In the long term, yes. In the short term it is extremely hard to know what is good science, and what is noise produced by the system that incentivizes publishing and not actual science.

> Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.

I think we do not have to go further than Covid times to see that it is absolutely not the case. Mass hysteria of the pandemic absolutely ostracized anyone who dared to suggest that (a) covid maybe is coming for a Wuhan lab, or (2) that lockdowns maybe not the best way to handle things especially if we consider impact on children. So... The evidence suggests that scientists are people like everyone else, make the same mistakes, may use their status to push their own biases and their own agendas, and pursue their own interests.

> Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.

All these things work only if people act with honor. The moment the incentives are misaligned nothing will work. Peer review is absolutely gamed. I do not know if you remember, but someone took his own life because of this -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27296433

> What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.

Totally agree. Me too (as a scientist myself). However, I have absolutely no belief in the system itself. Today, I only believe those who I think do good science, either because I read their papers and I see that they are absolutely honest and upfront about issues with their work and ideas, or because I know from personal experience that these people will never falsify data just to put the paper out. My advisor is like this: we never publish a paper until we know that all the data tracks, and all the environment, scripts, data, etc are archived to ensure that if needed we can track the issue. However, some advisors are not like that, and I know it because students talk between themselves, and you just hear those stories, and you know.

There is no incentive today for a scientist to be honest (unless they grew up this way).
by duxup | 2025-07-24 00:35:20+00:00
> The slideshow indicated that it took 272 days for Velti to collect its money. It also published a chart showing the difference between the revenue it was owed, accounts receivable ("AR"), and actual revenue. AR far outstripped sequential revenue, a clear warning that the business was not taking in as much cash as its contracts called for

Who were its clients that were supposedly going to pay them … eventually?

Finding good clients is half the battle….

> But after third-party costs are taken out, Velti keeps only $8.7 million in net revenues. Its sales and marketing expenses alone are $11 million.

What are these other expenses? They have 900 employees, I would expect a lot of their work is done themselves…. but apparently not?

So they were incurring expenses, on behalf of people that were not paying them?
by bpt3 | 2025-07-24 00:36:46+00:00
Most CEOs do own a majority share in their company, because they are very small businesses.

But even talking about publicly traded companies and their private equivalents in scale, plenty of them move their HQ when it makes financial sense to do so and have non-US entities that could employ their CEO so he or she could do the same.

I have no idea why you think Starbucks, with thousands and thousands of locations outside the US, wouldn't consider employing their CEO out of a non-US location to let them avoid a confiscatory personal income tax rate.
by Bratmon | 2025-07-24 00:37:43+00:00
> people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.

I don't understand this claim. Steam doesn't list specific games on credit card bills- why would chargebacks be higher for a bill that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" than for one that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" just because the latter was used to pay for Undertale and the former was used to pay for Sex Simulator 25?
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-24 00:38:43+00:00
Jesus fuck.

Obviously, as you predicted, the first reaction is "how do you afford all of that", which is a silly question, because the answer is "just be in the right place in the right moment".

Now, the second question is how do you get to actually organize a big party? My experience is that in modern times it's very difficult to maintain an extensive social network. First, people live far away from each other, so visiting someone becomes a journey. Second, people have shit to do, and when you invite them for a beer it usually means asking them to give up something else in that time (like taking care of their kids). Third, in the age of hyperindividualism it's difficult to meet people you vibe with, because everyone has their own distinct personality and the era of shared values and hobbies seems to be gone.
by x2tyfi | 2025-07-24 00:39:19+00:00
I love this idea and have considered doing something similar with friends for years. It’s cool to see how far they’ve taken it — much bigger than I had envisioned.

My biggest/only concern - which they gloss over, mostly — is security. Combining networks puts added responsibility on every family that joins. What if friend-X’s kid downloads a virus-riddled torrent, which is capable of multiplying across hosts?

Your own hosts/perimeter can always be protected, but there’s a loss of control with this setup.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-24 00:39:28+00:00
Some employees may have contracts that have ethical clauses for outside activity.

The person in this case worked for the US Government, and is subject to ethics laws and agency policy.

In most cases, a mutual fund isn’t an ethical issue for most roles - although in a more normal time some elected officials would put investments in blind trusts to ensure there wasn’t an appearance of corruption.

Owning a portion of a private company run by your spouse whose principal activity is directly opposed to those to whom you serve at the pleasure of is going to be a problem. If you fail to report it, you’re going to get fired.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-24 00:40:15+00:00
Okay, I offer you another analogy.

Consider linear regression. Curve fitting. Taking a bunch of points (“data”) and trying to find a function (“algorithm”) that fits them all as closely as possible.

If the points form a straight line the process is fairly easy and can be done with a simple “y = Ax + B” equation. You just need to find A and B.

But if they look more spiky, bouncing up and down as you go across the x axis, fitting a curve to the data is going to require a higher order polynomial. A saddle, or U shape, can be fit with a second-order polynomial: “y = Ax^2 + Bx + C”, but if the data is more complex than this, you have to go even higher-order.

Now let’s move over to machine learning a language models. Consider the real-world data used to train models as points in some high-dimensional space, and the training process as iteratively performing curve-fitting in that same space. Some of your real-world data must certainly be easier to fit than others: even though it exists in a high order space, it could be fit to a curve with only a few parameters. In order words, in some domains the data appear “smoother” than others. For example have a look at machine learning’s success in image generation: varying a few pixels doesn’t affect the result too much. It’s a “smooth” domain.

But the same is not true everywhere. In math, or engineering - even grammar! - one symbol out of place makes the whole thing nonsense. These domains would be “spiky” - and some of them are minefields punctuated by islands of valid data, such they’re not even contiguous.

In spiky or non-contiguous domains, approximation won’t cut it. You have to fit your data REALLY closely to have a useful function - a useful model.

Models with more parameters are better equipped for curve fitting in complex domains with hard-to-fit data. So as we start to see multi-trillion-parameter models, maybe we’ll discover those models can handle complex domains today’s models can’t!

(keen readers may notice the risk of fitting the points exactly by having as many data points as the order of the polynomial. But actually this would be a triumphant achievement as at this scale we just don’t know what magical things lie on the curve, right there between the data points we have.)
by Terr_ | 2025-07-24 00:40:16+00:00
> It's just a neutral tool

Tool != Service

Making and selling lockpicks is very different from running an "I will pick a lock for you" service. The latter is a dramatically higher level of involvement and culpability.

> Why is the creator of [Tornado Cash] being held responsible for how others use it?

Nonsense, they didn't give away (or even sell) a tool, they were actively operating the tool themselves, taking requests to control and aim it in different ways.

> That's like dragging Henry Ford to court the moment a car driver runs someone over.

No, it's like dragging Henry Ford to court because he was the driver of a vehicle that struck people, and his taxi service was advertised as The Light Is Green If The Passenger Says So™.

Driver Ford might not be the only person in the vehicle responsible for manslaughter, but a court case is absolutely justified.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-07-24 00:40:26+00:00
Java now has FFM, that is far better and simpler than JNI, FWIW. and chatgpt says

Language/API | Call Overhead (no-op C) | Notes

Go (cgo) | ~40–60 ns | Stack switch + thread pinning

Java FFM | ~50 ns (downcall) | Similar to JNI, can be ~30 ns with isTrivial()

Java FFM (leaf) | ~30–40 ns | Optimized (isTrivial=true)

JNI | ~50–60 ns | Slightly slower than FFM

Rust (unsafe) | ~5–20 ns | Near-zero overhead

C# (P/Invoke) | ~20–50 ns | Depends on marshaling

Python (cffi) | 1000–10000 ns | Orders of magnitude slower |
by cedws | 2025-07-24 00:41:16+00:00
I have to disagree about Act, my experience is that it only works for extremely simple workflows, and even then it’s easy to run into differences between Act and GitHub Actions. I’ve raised many bugs but AFAIK there’s like one guy working on it in his own time.

It’s terrible that the community has had to invent something like this when it should be provided by GitHub. I suspect the GitHub Actions team is a skeleton crew because nothing ever seems to get done over there.
by ddtaylor | 2025-07-24 00:41:22+00:00
There are many great YT creators and content.

One major problem I have with YT is that there is no concept of a "time budget" by the creators themselves. They are heavily incentivized to produce a lot of content. In the same way we see market distortions in the gaming space, where whales overshadow the general audience of the game, we basically see that in YT with how time budgeting works.

Most creators will succumb to this eventually and start making content longer and less respectful of your time.

Contrast that with a movie or TV show that has an actual time budget.

In the same way that SponsorBlock has really cut down on the time we watch YT content by skipping the intros, sub reminders, etc. I feel like a lot of YT content that is 25 minutes could be realistically condensed down into 3 minutes if a person wasn't just trying to fill time to pay their bills.
by slwvx | 2025-07-24 00:42:09+00:00
The ideas of superradiance [1] and superabsorption [2] in the article were new to me. The article [3] compares superradiance to superconductivity, but it's not clear if superradiance is as useful of a property as superconductivity. Now I'm wondering what other sorts of super-xxxx effects are possible via quantum properties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superradiance

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5705

[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.03153
by snovymgodym | 2025-07-24 00:43:19+00:00
I don't know, have there really been meaningful "language barriers" between mainstream programming languages for the last 20 years or so?

If I think about the 10 most common languages being used for application code right now, something like 80% of them can be described as "C or ALGOL's syntax with call-by-reference and automatic memory management". If you program for a living, I feel like you can switch between any of these without much effort. They're so similar to one another at a fundamental level, and there's lots of convergence going on as they adopt features from one another.

Sure, doing C or C++ for the first time can be hard if you've never had to think about memory lifecycles before, but even that isn't so crazy if you're working with established patterns, pay attention to warnings, and use an aggressive linter.

For languages with actual learning curves, they're just not as widely used (e.g. Rust, Ada SPARK, lisp, forth, ML).
by sammnaser | 2025-07-24 00:43:28+00:00
> The bottom line: There are only two absolutely guaranteed ways to build bug-free, resilient, maintainable software. Two. And they are not static vs. dynamic typing. Two ways. Thing is - we humans have yet to discover either of those two.

That's true but some languages don't let you ship code to prod that multiplies files by 9, or that subtracts squids from apricots
by dcrazy | 2025-07-24 00:44:24+00:00
> The way I see it, whenever a foreigner is around, they speak “Danish” and once at home they go back to speaking a real language … probably close to Norwegian.

Ironic, given there are two official standards for written Norwegian, and no universally agreed-upon way to pronounce the more popular one (Bokmål).

> When you are walking in the streets of Copenhagen, and you hear around you the beautiful language full of soft Ds, stød, uvular R and voiceless plosives, sounding like a rotten potato in the throat of a weary donkey ; Know that they don’t understand each other either.

> They are basically saying blah blah blah to each other, moving their heads and gesturing, acting as if they could be understood by another sentient being.

Even the Danish state broadcaster agrees: https://youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk
Ask HN: Copilot Makes Me Dumb
by ynarwal__ | 2025-07-24 00:44:58+00:00
I've been noticing that Copilot is basically hijacking my problem-solving process. Instead of working through challenges myself, I find myself just going with whatever it suggests, even when I haven't fully thought the problem through. It's making me mentally lazy. The constant suggestions feel like having someone looking over your shoulder, blurting out answers before you've even finished forming the question. Really breaks your concentration and stops you from developing your own solutions. I'm thinking of disabling it for a while, maybe permanently. Don't get me wrong - LLMs are incredibly useful for development work, but only when I deliberately choose to use them. Having them always on feels like it's weakening my ability to think independently. Curious what others on HN think about this. Anyone else feeling like these tools are changing how they approach problems?