MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucas_membrane | 2025-07-16 06:12:23+00:00
There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. IIRC, the best COBOL or whatever could do on the IBM 360's was 15 digits. The smaller, cheaper, and older 1401 business machines didn't have any limit. Of course, for nerdy financial applications, compound interest and discounting of future money would require exponentiation, which was damn-near tragic on all those old machines. So was trying to add or subtract 2 numbers that were using the maximum number of digits, but with a different number of decimal places, or trying to multiply or divide numbers that each used the maximum number decimal places, with the decimal point in various positions, and it was suicide-adjacent to try to evaluate any expression that included multiple max precision numbers in which both multiplication and division each happened at least twice.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-16 06:12:51+00:00
Wait, then why does 1.0.0.1 exist? I'll grant I've never seen it advertised/documented as a backup, but I just assumed it must be because why else would you have two? (Given that 1.1.1.1 already isn't actually a single point, so I wouldn't think you need a second IP for load balancing reasons.)
by jaggederest | 2025-07-16 06:12:54+00:00
I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.

Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.

In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
by smcin | 2025-07-16 06:13:13+00:00
Memphis, TN (Shelby County) has the highest homicide rate in the entire country.

Why is it in any way meaningful to lump that in with unrelated small cities and counties in TN? (any more than including/excluding East Hammond, IN's gun sales in Chicago metro stats?)

To @bigbacalaoa:

The city of Franklin and Williamson County, TN are not Nashville; they're separate things in the Nashville metropolitan area. So your analogy to neighborhoods of Sao Paolo is offbase.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-16 06:13:15+00:00
I’m surprised at the delay in impact detection: it took their internal health service more than five minutes to notice (or at least alert) that their main protocol’s traffic had abruptly dropped to around 10% of expected and was staying there. Without ever having been involved in monitoring at that kind of scale, I’d have pictured alarms firing for something that extreme within a minute. I’m curious for description of how and why that might be, and whether it’s reasonable or surprising to professionals in that space too.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-16 06:15:41+00:00
The article has a confusing link to their methodology section.

The article itself is about their "Quality of Life" ranking, which is weighted into (at 10.6%) their "Top States for Business" ranking. The methodology link in the article jumps to the "Quality of Life" section within the "Top States for Business", ranking, but the other "Top States for Business" weights aren't considered in the "Quality of Life" ranking given in the article.

If you only look at just the "Quality of Life" methodology you'll see that it's— much worse than you were thinking. There's no weights given, but of more than ten metrics considered, it looks like eight or nine of them are purely based on policy, with almost no nuts-and-bolts consideration.
by ccppurcell | 2025-07-16 06:15:59+00:00
> straight up funneling

Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-16 06:16:27+00:00
My brother legit invested in a company some 60$ in a company that chatgpt recommended, then he saw that it makes sense.

The day he bought, everything went downhill in that particular company lol. But to be fair, he said that he just had this as chump change and basically wanted to just invest but didn't know what to (I have repeatedly told my brother that invest funds are cool and he has started to agree {I think})

Also don't forget all the people atleast in the crypto alt space showing screenshots saying that grok/chatgpt (since they only know these two most lol) are saying that their X crypto is underrated or it can increase its marketcap to Y% of total market or it has potential to grow Z times and it is the Nth most favourite crypto or whatever. Trust me, its already happening man but I think its happening in chump change.

The day it starts to happen in like Thousand's of dollars worth of investment is the day when things would be really really wrong
by saghm | 2025-07-16 06:16:41+00:00
This is an important point I like to mention to people. Thinking back to old code you wrote and how you would choose to do it better than you originally did it a sign of growth, and if that stops happening after a certain point, it's a sign you've stopped growing. Given that the best programmers in the world still don't write perfectly bug-free code, I don't have any illusions that there will always be plenty of room for me to continue improving as a programmer, so I consider having those thoughts to be an unequivocally good thing. I'd honestly be a bit wary of anyone who didn't think they needed to learn or grow any more as a programmer!
Show HN: Floaty, a tiny portable stand designed for MacBook, phones and tablets
by jorjordandan | 2025-07-16 06:18:38+00:00
I designed a tiny collapsible laptop stand that fits in your pocket and weighs less than a AA battery. It props up the back of your MacBook (or most laptops with a rear lip), and also works as a phone/tablet stand. After dozens of prototypes, I landed on a form that prints fast, folds flat, and actually feels stable. Site is live at https://floatystand.com Feedback welcome!

Also if you have a 3d printer, the files are available for free, just check the FAQs of the website.
by chii | 2025-07-16 06:20:53+00:00
> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?

there's no such thing as a specific $100.

The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).

It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
by intended | 2025-07-16 06:21:26+00:00
Financial modeling does have formatting norms, eg: different coloring for links, calculations, assumptions and inputs.

However one of the major ways people know their model is correct is by comparing the final metrics against publicly available ones, and if they are out of sync, going through the file to figure out why they didnt calculate correctly.

Personally, this is going to be the same boon/disaster as excel has been.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-16 06:21:31+00:00
The readme explicitly states it’s not suitable for desktop usage. For staters, it doesn’t support all the features needed to run x11.

This looks like a very interesting project for OS devs but if you’re after a Windows replacement then there’s already a few options out there from ReactOS to Linux-distros that come with Wine configured as part of the base install.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-16 06:22:36+00:00
Could probably just record user:group in the filesystem and ignore it at runtime except when serving clients? Ex. a Linux file server running as root can still check permissions and ownership without having to change its own user. (Although as an interesting thought experiment, forking per session and switching to the client user would give you file permissions for "free" by way of the kernel imposing them on you...)
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-07-16 06:23:41+00:00
A little. The real perspective shift happens when people learn how to stop comparing their lives to stories about other people they’ll never meet, but that’s a harder and more general lesson. The idea that medieval peasants had more free time than me comes from the same place as the idea that everyone could afford a house in the 1950s, or the idea that everyone I see on Instagram is living more vibrant lives than me.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-16 06:24:32+00:00
In the finance world COBOL is still very much not dead. It's not as dominant as it once was, but core mainframe code is very often still COBOL.

Replacing that is a very hard problem as thousands and thoudands of (abused and overloaded) integrations are layered in serveral strata around it relying each night on exact behaviour in the core, warts and all.

As for Smalltalk, I know at least one company around hete still running some legacy, but still maintained afaik, code on it ( https://mediagenix.tv ).
by II2II | 2025-07-16 06:24:53+00:00
Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a lot of the existing privacy features by default is going to break many websites (which, in the minds of most people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are stuck talking about it while end users have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser as it is advertised.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-07-16 06:25:25+00:00
I hadn't considered that! That makes me wonder... Is that likely to be true for most forms of life? I wonder if there's some physical constraint that makes this likely. I suppose I won't know in my lifetime. It's also probably not so significant that we're close to the middle; maybe it's just my ape brain finding significance in arbitrary figures.

If I were to guess before, I think I would have estimated humanity was in the lower 10%. I suppose I was mostly thinking in terms of the Kelvin scale.

It's fascinating to consider how staggering the scale goes in either direction, now. Absolutely bizarre.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-16 06:25:52+00:00
Ranking crime rates by city or county, instead of by state, reverses the correlation between crime rates and politics: https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate...

That article is from a conservative organization, and local crime rates have a much larger impact on individuals than state crime rates, so they could make a "we're right and you're wrong" claim by focusing on the more pertinent data, but instead they came to an even better conclusion: The correlation is so weak that it's easy to manipulate into any outcome, so it's not worth considering.

A very small correlation to a specific category may be statistically significant, but it's what doctors call clinically insignificant, which is to say it doesn't make enough of a difference to bother with.
by ta1243 | 2025-07-16 06:26:35+00:00
Far quicker to type ping 1.1 than ping 1.1.1.1

1.0.0.0/24 is a different network than 1.1.1.0/24 too, so can be hosted elsewhere. Indeed right now 1.1.1.1 from my laptop goes via 141.101.71.63 and 1.0.0.1 via 141.101.71.121, which are both hosts on the same LINX/LON1 peer but presumably from different routers, so there is some resilience there.

Given DNS is about the easiest thing to avoid a single point of failure on I'm not sure why you would put all your eggs in a single company, but that seems to be the modern internet - centralisation over resilience because resilience is somehow deemed to be hard.
by tastyface | 2025-07-16 06:26:38+00:00
And what is the procedure for me to not get abducted by some shithead thugs cosplaying as ICE, assuming it's totally fine for law enforcement to conceal their identities and throw people in unmarked vans?

How do I get myself unstuck from CECOT or Alligator Auschwitz once I'm thrown in there without due process?
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-16 06:27:19+00:00
Godspeed, fellow LeetCoder. I'm not currently grinding but I still have my handful of practice problems in active Anki rotation.

I have my rightmost code at part III of the miniseries, [1]. It loks quite similar, but I save the -1 for the very end return.

def rightmost_bsearch(L, T): l, r = 0, len(L) while l < r: # Loop invariants. Always true! Comment out in production! for somewhat_smol in L[0:l]: assert somewhat_smol <= T # Note: Weak inequality now. for lorg in L[r:len(L)]: assert lorg > T mid = (l + r) // 2 if L[mid] > T: r = mid else: l = mid + 1 return r - 1 # return the first element AFTER L[r:len(L)].

(It should technically be BEFORE, I guess. If it helps all rightmost bsearches are also leftmost bsearches on the reversed array, so AFTER is secretly not wrong)

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/binary-search...
by komali2 | 2025-07-16 06:28:13+00:00
> it's at least not reasonable to complain if there's an outage.

I don't think this is fair when discussing infrastructure. It's reasonable to complain about potholes, undrinkable tap water, long lines at the DMV, cracked (or nonexistent) sidewalks, etc. The internet is infrastructure and DNS resolution is a critical part of it. That it hasn't been nationalized doesn't change the fact that it's infrastructure (and access absolutely should be free) and therefore everyone should feel free to complain about it not working correctly.

"But you pay taxes for drinkable tap water," yes, and we paid taxes to make the internet work too. For some reason, some governments like the USA feel it to be a good idea to add a middle man to spend that tax money on, but, fine, we'll complain about the middle man then as well.
by Theodores | 2025-07-16 06:28:21+00:00
What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would never know. The electricity and other services were back up in days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash was just collected.

If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
by wahern | 2025-07-16 06:29:40+00:00
I bought The Practice of Programming years ago. It's a great book that is no less relevant today, but I don't see your argument. The suggestions you've summarized are critical advice, but rather than obviate the need for the proof-like mindset, they complement it. Idiomatic code doesn't directly help you solve and implement difficult algorithmic or architectural problems. However, idiomatic code certainly helps reduce noise so that the irreducibly complex aspects of a solution conveniently standout, both conceptually and literally.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-16 06:30:39+00:00
I live near a railyard, and when playing around with a scanner, I was amazed by how much of their communication is over open voice bands. You could easily buy an off-the-shelf transmitter and make your own unauthorized radio calls.

The same goes for air traffic controllers, and it's happened before: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-05/melbourne-airport-hoa...
by 59nadir | 2025-07-16 06:30:50+00:00
> Two, fragmenting the community would just reduce engagement and risk making both feel like a ghost town.

I would rather hang out on a HN more similar in attitude and user count as when I joined than have it be "lively" with the user base it has now.

I would agree with #3 if it were the case that the technical side of LLMs were discussed more, and there was a focus on trying to run and understand them yourself; these are topics that I think make more sense for hackers to care about. The front page stories about LLMs are usually business news about LLMs, blog post about using (someone else's) LLM, the occasional blog post that says LLMs suck either for technical, social, or other purposes.

Obviously I'm missing a few categories here, but my point is that there is basically zero hacker spirit in the LLM posts. Since when is it part of the hacker ethos to plug into a SV machine that you pay $200/month for the privilege to use to do stuff? That's ridiculous...

It's hard to not feel like this is part of a bigger transformation of the culture and then absorbing that culture on HN. Hackers make things, and they are unlikely to settle for poorly made things, but routinely the chorus on HN is that you should never reinvent the wheel, etc., even though you could make a better wheel for your purposes than the wheel you've found online. Not to mention this hilarious "I hate writing code" sentiment that seems to have grown over time. In my opinion neither of these sentiments belong in any group claiming to be hackers.

But the user base of HN is not hackers, hence why they feel comfortable spouting these opinions, plugging into $200/month services that write code for them (badly and slowly, I've used Anthropic's Max plan with Claude Code), not understanding and/or taking apart the technology they use, etc.
by untoasted12 | 2025-07-16 06:31:55+00:00
Yeah its the 451 error. It says:

'Unavailable For Legal Reasons What happened?

In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare's pass-through security and CDN services within the United Kingdom. Find more information about the order, the party that requested it, and the authority that issued it here.'

It's a Dublin VPN though.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-16 06:31:57+00:00
That quote doesn't talk about the peak at all though so why am I said to make such claims? The quote should have the same exact meaning even if you substitute in 2001 or 2003 when reading 2002 - if it doesn't then you're inserting claims not from the quote on my behalf and then asking me to explain these claims I never made.

The quoted section was in response to the claim movie watches are down on the basis ticket sales are down compared to the past:

> And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Hence the next line after the quote "Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often."
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-16 06:32:21+00:00
> Far quicker to type ping 1.1 than ping 1.1.1.1

I guess. I wouldn't have thought it worthwhile for 4 chars, but yes.

> 1.0.0.0/24 is a different network than 1.1.1.0/24 too, so can be hosted elsewhere.

I thought anycast gave them that on a single IP, though perhaps this is even more resilient?
by ryao | 2025-07-16 06:33:11+00:00
Upon seeing this, thoughts keep occurring to me such as:

* “It could be fun to be the author of a block layer, VFS and an AHCI driver for SATA. NCQ support is a must if I do.” * “It could be fun to port ZFS: ztest and zdb, plus the userland version of the driver into which they hook need pthreads, but the important userland utilities do not. Having to statically link everything would be a pain. I would probably have to reimplement the entire SPL for this to work and that would probably be at least 10,000 lines of code.” * “If I port ZFS, a NFS server needs to follow so ZFS has an application. This will need support for setting/getting user/group ownership and mode bits. If I rewrite the VFS, I could maybe sneak that feature into it for a NFS server to use while preserving the documented syscall behavior that requires everything be root. If I port the NFS server from illumos, it could share the SPL code with ZFS. NFSv4 permissions will be needed to make it fully happy. Beyond that, I will need a network stack.” * “It could be fun to port a network stack. Maybe LwIP could be used.” * “It could be fun to write an e1000 driver.”

I have already found the documentation I need if I actually were to implement AHCI and e1000 drivers:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/pci-pci-x-famil...

If I were to do all of this, I would likely try my best to make it a production platform. The purpose would be fun.

Anyway, I wonder if these thoughts will continue if I sleep on them.
by _def | 2025-07-16 06:34:39+00:00
Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
by scribify | 2025-07-16 06:35:11+00:00
Here’s how to turn a YouTube video into a downloadable MP4 file in 3 easy steps: Step 1: Copy the URL Open your target YouTube video, then copy the link from your browser’s address bar. Step 2: Paste the link Head to your video downloader tool and paste the URL into its input field. Step 3: Download the MP4 Once processed, hit the download button to save your MP4 file.
by overfeed | 2025-07-16 06:35:22+00:00
> Price for ChatGPT will go down.

As will the response quality, while maintaining the same product branding. Users will accept whatever response OpenAI gives them under the "4o", "6p","9x" or whatever brand of the day, even as they ship-of-Theseus the service for higher margins. I'm yet to see an AI service with QoS guarantees, or even that the model weights & infrastructure won't be "optimized" over time to the customer's disadvantage.
by ilaksh | 2025-07-16 06:36:06+00:00
I think Gemini is a step in the right direction for some things. I usually mention my "tersenet" ideas when I see Gemini. Now that we have the Gemini LLM and Claude etc. there is less excuse for me to not finish any real software demo for it. Maybe one these days I will make an actual client for part of it.

I think there is room for things like media and applications even on an idealized web. But they should not necessarily be combined along with information browsing and search into one thing.

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-16 06:36:07+00:00
>that we'll probably solve the problem before we go from 7 BILLION people to not enough humans for

This just goes to show how little you've ever considered the problem. I don't think you're stupid (probably), so let me get you started...

It's not "from 7 billion to not enough", because right now we don't have 7 billion. We only have the generation(s) that are from 0 to 40 years old... everyone older doesn't even count. 80 yr olds and 55 yr olds aren't potential parents.

We will still have many billions of people even once we become functionally extinct, because you were counting everyone even the octogenarians, when you should've been counting the people who mattered in this regard.

>We've rescued animal species from extinction with populations of <100.

But there's no "us" to rescue us in that manner, and we can't do it ourselves. Why? Because doddering senile geezers don't have the ambition, marbles, or energy to do such a thing and those are the only people who would be left at that point. Not to mention that any such rescue would turn us into franken-people, no thanks. We should all be terrified of the science fiction dreams of artificial wombs and gestation chambers and so forth because just as those might be used for good things, the CCP and North Korea will use them to churn out armies of replicants.

You really are the extinction apologist you think you're not.