MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zelphirkalt | 2025-07-27 11:56:36+00:00
When I see languages like this, I always wonder, how far the ecosystem is. I have used GNU Guile a lot and there are quite a few libraries for it, so that one can do almost anything. Web things are coming, but maybe not as fully there yet, as one might like. Racket also has lots of libraries. And even a standard library web framework.

So lets say I want to start my next web project in Janet. I already know Scheme and can probably quite easily just start writing another lisp, assuming it has TCO and I can do things mostly like I would in Scheme, except maybe for having to use funcall (which is annoying, but OK). Does Janet have libraries, that enable web projects? Like a web server and SXML or something like that? Or does it have things like a JSON parser? All these little things one would like to have, to not have to develop the basics first, before getting to the actual project.

And what about data structures? Are there functional data structures available? In GNU Guile I have at least the unmaintained guile-pfds. Hopefully, I will one day understand enough about functional data structures to build more or to maybe even maintain that library. But learning resources are scarce. It is already difficult to find a functional version of an AVL tree! Lots and lots of places merely teach non-persistent, non-functional versions of these data structures, and it is not trivial to translate them, might impact performance in ways that are not necessary, if one had great knowledge about how to make these data structures.

And also reproducibility! With GNU Guile I have what I need on Guix, which is great! With other languages, I might need to rely on older package managing approaches, that do not have reproducibility/determinism as the a high goal on their agenda, or might even lack the ability to create lock files/files with checksums. I don't want to go back to non-reproducible.

I am also eyeing statically typed variants like Carp. Same questions arise. Some seem really great and I would probably enjoy using them a lot. Would be a pity to then discover, that the ecosystem is just not there, and one has to create all the basic tools one needs oneself. Sometimes that can be fun, but it can also be exhausting and one never gets around to ones actual project.
by chistev | 2025-07-27 11:57:22+00:00
You read the reviews about the book and get a sense of how it was received.

This is why I've never read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah

Although a best seller, the scholarly reception was not great, and I'd just rather read other things.

Sometimes, though, I still want to read those books to see the author's arguments/points.
by theelous3 | 2025-07-27 11:57:46+00:00
This wisdom is at least certainly more true than claiming the inverse, which is a good indicator. Would amazon be what it is now if everything was powerpoints? It would almost certainly be significantly worse in many areas.

The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.

Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.
by camel-cdr | 2025-07-27 11:58:03+00:00
Reminder: The Cortex-A76 cores in the Pi5 are 9.9 SPECint2006/GHz, only the UR-CP1000 is above that, but that doesn't support RVV.

The SpacemiT X100 is slightly below that, but has 256-bit RVV and RVA23 support.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-27 11:58:25+00:00
Its really complicated but I will try to sum it up.

Basically nano cryptocurrency has no gas fees so if you can get even 10^-30 nano, you can technically do unlimited transactions forever (there is some caveat)

You can get such nano from faucets and then you have basically an eternal source of doing transactions.

What are transactions? Transactions are a way of sending money from A public key to B public key

Now what if we actually take some data and parse it into chunks and then we can create a lot of addresses using some vanity generator whose seed we can know

Then we got all the seeds of the vanity addresses whose lets say top 4 letters of the first address can form a word... now we do the transactions and then we take a transaction id and in the end we send money to original account

by that transaction id or that special account we can actually see a loop of sorts and thus tada! we get some data that we can actually store in blockchain itself.. for 0 fees!!

Now what was my use case! sounds really silly but I wanted to use worldoftext and I wanted to prove that I am the first person to write some text..

Now so what I did was take a unique hash of text and then embed it into blockchain.., and since blockchain has some time, we have essentially timestamped some text and we can also prove that we are the owner of the account that created that text...

Oh yeah, I have also created my own cryptocurrency which actually used algorand's vrf function with it to create a sort of way for randomness to be integrated in it too/ in sense create a cryptocurrency too with this usecase lol

Side note: in order to improve the efficiency you could lose the 10^-30 nano to send to a completely different account which we don't control and since most faucets give like 10^-10 nano ish and like honestly, that is a more practical approach

How is nano still alive? because for each transaction the person doing the transaction has to do some work function, I recommend the 2nd latter approach but I like both approaches. I have some bun code which can automate this whole thing too and Its all on github and uh my practical approach is with me T-T, I think I legit accidentally deleted it but uh yea I built it using claude and its kinda Ai slop but it works :/

Someone gifted me the domain name for my work and some dollars too, Y'know.. I personally feel like the thing that I did was really innovative and I am the most proud of it but I personally feel like the decentralization aspect would never make me earn a single cent out of it and that's okay to me but I don't have too much money and I wish someday that I could work on such things without thinking about money :/

Fun fact: nano cryptocurrency creator actually said on reddit that such behaviour is unintended and that's exactly what I like doing.. Doing unintended things to do something useful.

I also created a whole youtube video and some other which I might share privately https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hHG8gOkZBE

I will update my HN to show some contact info I guess too
by altairprime | 2025-07-27 11:58:25+00:00
Set your site to 401 unauthorized with a basic challenge if an auth header isn’t sent, and set the auth description to “Enter anything to proceed. All human access is authorized. Unauthorized non-human access is prohibited.”. Crawlers can’t parse the instructions and will deadstop on them, while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work.

Anubis is also viable and popular, but it lacks the legal threat to AI of being able to file a federal hacking claim against a scraper’s unauthorized intrusion if they code their scraper to transmit an empty/invalid/valid authentication header.
by Ygg2 | 2025-07-27 11:58:38+00:00
> Compilers for higher-level languages are full of broken promises

Sometimes because C is lingua franca of low level.

Some noalias optimizations Rust had didn't work in LLVM, because no one bothered using it before in C.

This goes even further to hardware. C-like null terminated string search SIMD is faster than a saner (pointer + len ) string view. So it's faster to append null to end of string view than to invoke the SIMD on string slice.
by JoBrad | 2025-07-27 11:58:52+00:00
Not really a counterpoint, but a “yes, and”: I’ve often made an “internal” presentation that is mostly for myself and maybe a few others, which distills the key concepts of something into a coherent narrative. While it can help others, I also have found the process of creating a presentation, outline, or summary helps me to properly organize (and sometimes change) my thoughts at least as much as it helps convey those thoughts to others.
by strken | 2025-07-27 11:59:18+00:00
I think it's fine to be "good at programming" given a specific context. If your neighbour says "Hey, my daughter likes computers and thinks she might want to program them as a career, are you any good at that?" then sure, whatever, you're good at programming and can send her some links to get started. If your coworker asks if you're any good with databases and you know he's learning SQL for the first time, then sure, whatever, you're good with databases and can teach him about CTEs.

I get that humility is a virtue, but at some point you have to admit that you're capable of doing a piece of work.
by jraph | 2025-07-27 11:59:51+00:00
I did exactly the same thing in our Confluence to XWiki migrator to easily and automatically report which macro parameters we don't handle when converting Confluence macros to equivalent macros in XWiki.

This can be used to evaluate the migration quality and spot what can be improved.

https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/confluence/blob/7a95bf96787...
by eknkc | 2025-07-27 12:00:02+00:00
I remember downloading stuff from usenet 20 years ago and the par files going with them. Basically, files were split into chunks and you’d merge the chunks. In case there was a missing or corrupt chunk, the par files would allow recovering the missing part. You did not need to download entire par chunks either. You lost 1mb? Download 1mb of par and recover it (or something like that, cant remember now).

That blew my mind and I went into a rabbit hole of error correction. I did not know about the reed-solomon or any other methods. Just took days to understand it. Implementing my own par like shitty thing in the process.

This brings that back as I’m more curious about the error correction than the actual bit encoding.
by starfallg | 2025-07-27 12:00:10+00:00
> Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'.

This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.

The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.

>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago

Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.

You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.

>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo

Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-27 12:01:16+00:00
You could approximate this on <canvas> by drawing on multiple overlapping canvases: on every frame 1) clear the primary canvas and draw the waveform on it, 2) clear the secondaries with rgb(0,0,0,0.3) as the fill color (decrease the alpha for bigger blurs), 3) draw the primary on the secondaries. Apply additive blend mode and blur filters in CSS to the secondaries.

It’s not the most elegant solution, but more simple than drawing on one canvas.
by qart | 2025-07-27 12:01:25+00:00
As an Indian, I knew India would be pretty high up, but I would not have guessed topping the list. Here are some of the motivations I have heard over the decades, which I'm only relaying, not endorsing:

* rampant corruption

* rampant disorderliness (queues, traffic, crowds)

* rampant votebank appeasement politics

* the armed forces perceived as a vastly less corrupt institution

* uncontrollably large population (One neighbour even told me she wished someone would drop a few nuclear bombs on a few places randomly. She was fine with randomly being one of the dead.)

Many believe a "strong leader" would take tough decisions to fix India.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-07-27 12:02:15+00:00
Do you have any data or reviews to link for that?

I'd really like to replace my old Thinkpad with a long-running, lightweight Linux laptop that can also do some gaming on the side (think Witcher 3 on good settings) but Snapdragon has not lived up to the hype AFAIK.

But big thumbs up to all the Linux devs that are working on improving the situation!
by enthdegree | 2025-07-27 12:02:20+00:00
>“What is this?” I asked. “It looks like hair.” Marshall chuckled. “That’s them — the cable bacteria,” he said. “If you watch closely, you’ll see them twitching.” I stared harder. The filaments shifted.

This schmaltzy student-teacher roleplay immersion-journalism feels false and infantilizing to me. It makes me mistrustful of the text and I avoid reading essays written like it. The facts are embedded in an artificial adventure narrative as one feeds a dog a pill by hiding it in peanut butter. Why? Would the non-sensationalized, plainly framed information content be too un-stimulating for readers? Are false narratives hidden inside?

>Obama chuckled. "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"
by dathinab | 2025-07-27 12:03:01+00:00
honestly in my experience with tech companies

- you anyway have to create some non presentation handout; there is always a high risks of people having subtle misunderstandings about details and without handout they have no good place to double check after the meeting/in a follow up meeting etc.

- having long "seemingly" productive meetings with everyone leaving with slightly, but highly problematic, different opinions is the norm. Purely speaking based meetings tends to do this the worst, but power-point meetings have that issue too pretty badly as there is friction between a nice presentation and delivering subtle, but important, details

- different people need different times for different facts/parts of the presentation (e.g. because they are different stake holders with different concerns), but presentations have only one time progression

To some degree this points are why power point is so good for "selling" as you can take advantage of them to make a harder for the sales target to grasp the drawbacks you might want to gloss over.

It's also why it's fine in a shallow introduction, it's a) shallow anyway, and b) an introduction so always needs to be followed up if relevant for you.

Now you don't have to make a 6 page paper, but some source everyone can progress and focus on in their own peace where people can focus or gloss over on details as they find relevant is a pretty good idea.

Similar a 6-pager shouldn't be some time intensive supper well written paper with only text. It can (often should) have graphics, and diagram, etc. And there shouldn't be much scrutiny on how "perfectly" this is written or layed out.

And expecting: 1) some very basic ad-hoc writing skill, 2) some very basic reading comprehension/speed skill, you could say in general the skill set needed to read scientific papers and reasonably low effort create drafts in that direction is something you should be able to require in a leading/senior position. This has pretty much nothing to do with variety of mindset and similar. I'm saying that as a dyslexic person not good at any of that who has some form of attention deficit disorder. Because you know just because something isn't your strength doesn't mean you can't learn it to a _basic_ level.

IMHO there is only a problem if they expect a masterfully prefect grammar/spelling everything paper with only dense text to be written ad-hoc very every single meeting multiple times a day or similar.
by navane | 2025-07-27 12:03:10+00:00
The users were always the real service provider. All the value is in what they tell each other through their data. All Komoot does is aggregate it, supply the infra structure.

The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.

Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-27 12:03:23+00:00
It's wild to me that the use of PP and being prepared are held up as antithetical. I don't see how the practices at Amazon aren't in service of the real problem with meetings: they're too often used for information transfer vs. problem solving. You can't expect people to have anything of value to say when you do the "big reveal" (often via the PP wall of text) and then immediately ask them to solution. I see this ALL THE TIME, including a recent meeting at work where the findings of a consultant - including this fact - were shown to everyone for the first time before we immediately jumped into a brainstorming session.

Saying "no PP" is the same as saying no to whiteboards, or taking notes or sync meetings, or any tool/process that can be mis-used. I went to business school so essentially have a Bachelor of PowerPoint degree, and one of the few-I-mean-great truths it left me was the hard work to make a good presentation; it's a different medium that most just phone-in with some quick copy & paste. I believe the process at Amazon is addressing the fact that everyone is very busy, and if they just start the meeting it's low-quality "advice-style" contributions, so it's better to eat the cost of waiting for everyone to read. This itself feels like a leadership trick that's actually for the executives who are too busy to consume everything async, but it seems better than the alternative for Amazon. I imagine it too is gamed, with people preparing before hand, then pretending to see memos for the first time yet having amazing, well-tought-out strategies ready to propose.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-27 12:03:36+00:00
I'd have to disagree about the benefits of museums being completely silent.

As a child I was dragged around to a fair number of art museums, and I use a negative descriptor because I distinctly remember disliking it, mostly because of the silence. To me it felt like going to church, and in some ways it put me off of art early on. Felt elitist, which I picked up on even as a child.

Likewise, on a recent trip with a friend we commented on bones at the natural history museum and chatted about the graffiti art exhibit at another museum (both of which were not frowned upon at the museums we visited), and it made it much more memorable and enjoyable.

_____________

Now on to libraries... yeah it's an absolute travesty of the author experienced what I did. People in loud zoom calls treating the computer room like a co-working space. The worst part is that (I went to a good half a dozen dozen libraries last year) the librarians were obnoxiously loud! They would contactly gossip, and have extremely loud conversations with regulars/friends that you could hear throughout the library!
by beacon294 | 2025-07-27 12:04:26+00:00
I think, politely, this perspective misses the forest for the trees (or maybe the trees for the forest).

Out of the approx. 250 million adult americans, a large cross section do manage their health.

While average outcome might be better in the UK, it's useless to lump the 60% (150 million) of americans who are not obese in with the 40% (100 million) who are obese. And while this is easily the most major, it is just one measure of health.
Ask HN: Will I get left behind if I don't jump on AI train?
by LLcolD | 2025-07-27 12:05:06+00:00
I can’t decide if it is hype, FOMO, or what ever would I call it. I see all of the AI talk, I hear about new tools coming out daily, I read about startups pivoting only to include AI (otherwise there is no money for them)… And now I fear that if I don’t try out or even start using AI tools that I’ll get overrun.

Do I even need to know what is MCP? Do I need to have agents to do some tasks on my behalf? Do I need to start creating apps and sites using Vibe coding (I’m not a developer)?
by navane | 2025-07-27 12:05:07+00:00
The users were always the real service provider. All the value is in what they tell each other through their data. All Komoot does is aggregate it, supply the infra structure.

The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.

Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.
by RajT88 | 2025-07-27 12:06:32+00:00
I am in the Philippines this week. I am hoping the future is one where everyone has reliable internet access. My self host stuff is not terribly useful without it.

Christ, the ISP's here need to learn about QoS. ISP's everywhere need to learn how to keep their DNS running well.

We have not yet solved the basics. Of course we cannot solve the hard stuff.
by xscott | 2025-07-27 12:07:40+00:00
That's possibly short sighted. I have a friend who is very rude and condescending in his LLM conversations - it's just a machine, after all. However he also complains that it frequently becomes uncooperative at a certain point, which is something that I've never seen.

It seems likely that the LLMs have been trained on enough human conversations to mimic how people become less helpful when the conversation turns hostile.

So no moral judgment if you get enjoyment from kicking a robotic puppy, but it probably isn't going to make better answers as a result.
by 3036e4 | 2025-07-27 12:08:12+00:00
For a GUI in a limited sense you can use TIC-80 with its built-in Janet support. It can export to stand-alone binaries too, but I did not try that (and I mostly used TIC-80 with Fennel, not Janet).

Obviously I understand most of the time someone wants to make a GUI they are not thinking about something like TIC-80. I agree a more complete GUI library would be nice.

But if nothing else it may be worth mentioning that TIC-80 is a fun and easy way to install and try Janet. Even the Android version comes with Janet and a built-in code editor. Just run "new janet" in the TIC-80 console and then press F1 (on Android TIC-80 by default uses its own virtual keyboard that has all the keys it needs) to open the code editor.