MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-31 16:14:47+00:00
There's the rub: Private Equity represents the decomposers of business world. Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE, in the same way most healthy, thriving animals don't get colonized by fungi. In the case of vets and dentists, historically the practice owner would sell to some young practitioner, and the cycle would continue. But what happens when the businesses are worth too much for the next generation to afford (or the next generation's too broke)?

Enter PE. They buy out the old practitioner, hire the young one that would have ideally bought the place themselves, then proceed to gradually dismantle the business. Divest all the capital assets, fire all the institutional knowledge, and even convert the business's accumulated customer good will into cold hard cash by exploiting the hell out of them.

Then it's just a matter of running the hollowed-out shell of business until a stiff breeze leads to complete bankruptcy.
by nxobject | 2025-07-31 16:14:53+00:00
If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days.

https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html

What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere.
by jjk166 | 2025-07-31 16:15:02+00:00
Definitely not exclusively, a cat that slept 24 hours a day every day would be dead in a week, unable to possibly pass on its genes to descendants. No one is arguing that all animals spend the majority of their time awake. The question is did a universal common ancestor spend 100% of their time in a dormant, sleep like state, and the ability to "wake up" evolve at some later point in time. The answer is no.
by pyuser583 | 2025-07-31 16:15:03+00:00
I'm familiar with Madden's more political stuff. I also read his book on the Fourth Crusade.

One thing mentions a lot is that our understanding of Crusades is heavily influenced by 19th century colonialism. "Our understanding" being both the modern West and modern Islamic understanding.

It's also completely and totally wrong.

Just because a bunch of Christians and bunch of Muslims fought, does not mean it's a crusade. And just as there were no Crusades in the 19th century (with one teeny-tiny exception) there were no Crusades in the 9th century.

What's most relevant this conversation is that ChatGPT would be opening itself to lots of criticism if it started talking about 9th Century Crusades.

There are simply too many reputable documents saying "the first crusade began in ..." or "the concept of crusading evolved in Spain ..."

I'm reaching into my memory from college, but I recall crusading was mostly a Norman-Franco led thing (plenty of exceptions, of course).

Papal foreign policy was based around one very simple principal: avoid all concentrations of power.

Crusading was useful when it supported that principal, and harmful when it degraded it.

So the ideal papal crusade was one that was poorly managed, unlikely to succeed, but messed up the established political order just enough that all the kingdoms were weakened.

Which is exactly what the crusades looked like.
by matrss | 2025-07-31 16:15:38+00:00
A single one of the gfortran packages released about 20 hours ago already has 362 downloads, so I think it is safe to say that the non-python users of conda-forge are more than just a handful.

If you don't need it that's fine, no one is stopping you from using PyPI and uv instead. But for some that is not a replacement.

And yes, some things about conda(-forge) could be described as bloated. I particularly dislike the convoluted packaging process.

It is always tradeoffs and deciding based on your own use cases. E.g. if you want to distribute tested packages to users of your software then both conda-forge and PyPI are ill-suited for you. They (and most other package managers) do install-time dependency resolution, so the installation cannot be guaranteed to be tested as working at all. Some package managers do that better, so is conda-forge and PyPI obsolete now?
by rrgok | 2025-07-31 16:16:19+00:00
> This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard.

I still don't understand why this is a problem. As long as the engine implementing the spec - governed by committee formed by entities other than Google itself - is open source. The problem and the waste of resource is how we are behaving now.

The browser engine should become as the Linux Kernel: one engine and different distros.
by mezzie2 | 2025-07-31 16:16:21+00:00
I'm neutral on them, but I have MS so I think being a mother would be irresponsible given the lack of additional support I would have. I have always been interested in fostering, though, and plan to pursue that in my 40s if I'm legally allowed the financial stability to do so. (Earning enough to buy a home and pay off my loans means losing support for my medical care/expenses).

If you're not interested, don't have them. I had one parent that enjoyed parenting and one that did not, and having a parent that doesn't want or like kids is so obvious to the kid. It definitely causes issues.

I have found that people don't know what to do with people who don't follow 'the life path', whatever path that is. Like here, I'm an oddball for not going all in on my career or caring that much. In general life, being an unmarried woman with no kids in my late 30s means people don't know where to 'put' you. A lot of parents in particular tend to think of childless people as children/adolescents, which is rather annoying.
by senko | 2025-07-31 16:16:43+00:00
> it costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are often considered parasitic.

> Another example would be where a commerce site doesn’t want competitors bulk-scraping their catalog

I think of crawlers that bulk download/scrape (eg. for training) as distinct from an agent that interacts with a website on behalf of one user.

For example, if I ask an AI to book a hotel reservation, that's - in my mind - different from a bot that scrapes all available accommodation.

For the latter, ideally a common corpus would be created and maintained, AI providers (or upstart search engines) would pay to access this data, and the funds would be distributed to the sites crawled.

(never gonna happen but one can dream...)
by runarberg | 2025-07-31 16:17:25+00:00
I think it is very sad that people are still blaming other people than Israel for the Gaza Genocide. Hamas is not doing the Gaza genocide, and yet we regularly see Hamas being blamed for it.

I will offer an alternative theory from yours: If you remove Hamas it is still quite likely that Israel will find a different justification in a different time for their genocide, and would conduct it anyway with Western aid and complicity.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-31 16:18:14+00:00
The core issue with the Gartner hype cycle (beyond it not being a cycle!) is that it simply does not apply to "any new tech," tautologically it only applies to hype-driven tech with staying power. Tech which is not driven by hype (e.g. mRNA vaccines driven by urgent need) don't have a trough of disappointment, just a steady slope upwards. And tech which is driven entirely by hype (Theranos) stays in the trough of disappointment forever.

The Gartner hype cycle is astrology for MBAs: it cannot fail, it can only be failed by those lacking faith to see its wisdom.
by interestica | 2025-07-31 16:18:38+00:00
Interesting! As a continued hypothetical, it's interesting that the "No Smoking" permanently-lit sign is next to the seatbelt one. It's a weird contradiction: by being an electronic illuminated sign in the most prominent area (like a passenger HUD - reserved for critical info) it is given an elevated importance that doesn't really align with user expectation (is it really on the same level as the 'alert' implementation of the seatbelt sign?). So, there may be some kind of "cries wolf" subtle psychological effect in play: the cigarette signage is so obviously unnecessary in place and prominence that maybe the seatbelt signage takes on some of that cognitive placement (and implied importance) in mind. I think it kind of plays into that "respect for authority" you noted -- not unlike the possibility that programs like DARE that tried to group drugs like marijuana with heroin may have caused an increase in harder drug use when people realized that they were misled by that initial 'noble lie'. (See also mask use during the pandemic)
by cultofmetatron | 2025-07-31 16:18:38+00:00
> and got shot only in knees ? sounds like a good outcome for them.

please go on

> do you support their right to march back and reclaim their land and homes ?

considering that they were kicked out by violence in 1948, likud terrorists mass killed entire villages of Palestinians in order to force the rest to flee.

Israelis then forced them to live in an apartheid state

I certainly do support their right of return. Israel has committed multiple oct 7 level atrocities against Palestinians over the last few decades while sweeping them under the rug.

edit: are the descendants of those germans being systematically oppressed with no rights and living under military occupation? if not, whats stopping them from returning currently?
by elcritch | 2025-07-31 16:18:56+00:00
CBOR (and MsgPack) still embraces that simplicity. It provides the same types of key-value, lists, and basic values.

However the types are more precise allowing you to differentiate between int32’s or int64’s or between strings or bytes.

Essentially you can replace json with it and gain performance, less ambiguity but with the same flexibility. You do need a step to print CBOR in human readable form, but it has a standardized human readable form similar to a typed json.
by zo1 | 2025-07-31 16:19:31+00:00
I think that's a great idea. I for one want to enable our governments to track down criminals and punish them for it. If they're not doing everything they can do so in this technological and digital age, then they are breaking their part of that pesky "social contract" I am being upheld to.

And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian laws that prevent me as a citizen from protecting myself: You don't speak for all of us.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-31 16:19:45+00:00
> Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big.

> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?

I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-31 16:19:46+00:00
I think the problem is that a realistic city builder is going to require too much processing power and would probably be unfun.

If you want traffic that moves in real time, then your day/night cycle needs to also be real time: 24 hours. That means that if you're only playing in 2 hour gaming sessions, it's going to take nearly 2 weeks to simulate a single day. For those that truly want realism, that's great. For most gamers though, that's gonna be a non-starter.

So of course there's a problem: You can either have traffic moving in real time, or you can have a reasonable day/night cycle length. You can't have both.

The compromise that city builders make ends up with what you said: Ambulances take 3 months to reach patients, even if they're only traveling a mile.

That said, I do think that Cities: Skylines could do it better. The amount of semi-truck traffic in that game is absolutely insane. Easily 4x what it needs to be. You make an industrial district that's only ~1/2 of a square mile and it's an absolute zoo of semi-trucks, requiring some crazy traffic engineering to make it not be a gridlock.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-31 16:20:06+00:00
Heavily subsidized by the government:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/25/meta-massive-data-center-lou...

The state offered billions of dollars in tax breaks to win the project, and the local utility will supply three new power plants.

People are forced to subsidize their own replacements (if you buy into "AI" promises).
by doubled112 | 2025-07-31 16:20:43+00:00
I went from a 32" 720p TV to a 43" 4K TV. I don't really notice the difference for TV watching. I don't watch a lot of TV anyway.

Now a 1080p monitor up to a 4K monitor? That was a huge improvement to my experience. It's like having 4 1080p monitors without a seam if you get one big enough.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-31 16:21:20+00:00
> It's remarkable that academia hasn't produced rigorous studies with statistically significant samples, with hundreds of developers across languages and skill levels, to properly assess GenAI impact on productivity.

It's much more remarkable, to me, that the AI vendors have been unable to publish a study on the effects of agents on developer velocity.

I mean, if it was really a 10x (or even 2x) boost to productivity, why aren't they seeing it? The returns on each generation have been diminishing compared to the cost. Shouldn't it be the other way around if AI was such a productivity boost?
by electroly | 2025-07-31 16:21:36+00:00
The second link in the post you replied to explains how to use NuGet packages without using a .csproj file. You are not limited to in-the-box libraries. Not having a .csproj is the whole point of this feature; everything in this blog post is talking about things you can now do without a .csproj file.

Repeating the link again here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
by roughly | 2025-07-31 16:22:10+00:00
I really like Kagi, but I'm starting to get that same sense of anticipatory melancholy I used to get when I found a really good drug dealer back in the day - this product or service is fantastic, and I'm very happy to be able to give it money, but I recognize this is a short term affair and some day I'll be back to having to search for it again.

I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.
by conikeec | 2025-07-31 16:22:23+00:00
Hey Hackers

Not sure if this is worth sharing, but I've been using AI coding assistants heavily for the past few months and kept running into the same frustrating pattern.

I'd have these amazing flow sessions with Claude or other AI tools where we'd build something that felt brilliant. The code looked clean, the architecture seemed solid, and I'd go to bed feeling productive.

Then I'd wake up and actually try to use what we built. Half the functions were just sophisticated-looking stubs. Error handling that caught exceptions just to ignore them. TODOs that were more like "TODO: figure out how this should actually work."

The worst part wasn't that the AI was wrong - it was that the AI was convincingly wrong. In the moment, everything felt right because the code looked professional and the comments were confident.

So I started building this tool called "sniff" (yeah, like sniffing out BS) to catch these patterns in real-time. It looks for things like:

* Functions that claim to do X but actually just return a default value

* Error handling that's all ceremony and no substance

* Comments that overpromise what the code delivers

The weird part was using AI to help build the tool that catches AI mistakes. Meta level stuff where sniff would analyze its own improvements and flag them as suspicious. "Your new feature detection is just an untested regex" -thanks, tool I just wrote.

I've been using it for months now and it's honestly changed how I work with AI assistants. Still get the creative benefits but with a reality check built in.

Anyway, I open sourced it in case anyone else has dealt with this. Maybe it's just me overthinking things, but figured I'd share: https://github.com/conikeec/sniff

https://conikeec.substack.com/p/how-i-built-an-vibe-coding-m...

Not trying to solve world hunger here, just scratching my own itch. Let me know if you've had similar experiences with AI coding tools - curious if this resonates with others or if I'm just paranoid about my own code.
by conradev | 2025-07-31 16:22:25+00:00
Zig's standard library is structured so that you only compile what you need, so Zig has no problems adding richer functionality to its standard library. This is influenced by Zig's decision to only have a single compilation unit per compile.

HTTP, for example, can go into Zig's standard library, whereas C or Rust cannot do that. This helps control package explosion.
by antisthenes | 2025-07-31 16:22:40+00:00
> The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments.

That's the easiest part for anyone who's been on the internet long enough.

> Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself?

I wouldn't and don't care and your buddy shouldn't either. Modern content creation aka TikTok is basically shouting into the void. Why would I care what the void shouts back?
by NomDePlum | 2025-07-31 16:22:43+00:00
There is also a big difference between supporting a peaceful resolution to the current situation and not acknowledging that Israel has played a huge part in the current situation prior to October 7th and has participated in genocide and ethnic cleansing after.

The existence of settlements in Palestinian land is not something the International community should have tolerated for days never mind decades.

There are lots of parties, including Hamas, that could have helped avoid where we are today. A shameful place for the whole world.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-07-31 16:23:36+00:00
Recently Pakistan has introduced a "Digital Proceeds Tax", basically a 5% tax on all online commerce (compared to the 18% sales tax).

The US Chamber of Commerce’s US-Pakistan Business Council (USPBC) sent a letter to Pakistan stating [1]

> The proposed tax would be similar to digital services taxes (DSTs) in France and the United Kingdom, which the United States Trade Representative has found to be discriminatory against US companies, inconsistent with established principles of international taxing jurisdiction, and burdensome on US commerce... The act would not only disproportionately harm US companies and American digital exports but also undermine the robust US-Pakistan trading relationship at a critical juncture.

The result of this masked threat is that Pakistan removed the tax for all foreign companies [1].

[1] https://www.dawn.com/news/1927776/digital-proceeds-tax-to-no...
by gtirloni | 2025-07-31 16:23:47+00:00
Once it's fully open source, there are certain expectations and a lot of overhead involved in maintaining the community, governance, etc. I can understand if they delay it while they are still figuring out the initial vision and want to stay focused. There are many examples of open source maintainers burning out due to that overhead, and it seems Kagi might be stretched too thin right now.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-31 16:23:50+00:00
I also daydream about opening a business, like in the opening paragraph of the post. But I also know that I never will; it's a daydream, not a retirement plan. I know I would hate 95% of the process, without even fully unpacking it. That's why it's a daydream, and that's why when I'm frustrated at work I say "I wish I could quit and become a woodworker" or "I want to walk out of this job and open a D&D cafe."

But to your point, yep. There's a coffee shop in town - one of the only ones! - that we go to because we like it. But two more just opened up, both in better locations for both foot & car traffic, which might genuinely kill the other place. And there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-31 16:23:51+00:00
The play here for Brazil is likely a nationalism story to stoke rejection of US payment systems and Big Tech by consumers. That should poison the well for some time for US companies trying to make inroads against Pix.

> “With Pix, I don’t have to carry cards or worry about losing them,” Neves da Luz said. At one point, she considered using Samsung Pay but eventually decided against it. “I feel more comfortable supporting a national system rather than a foreign one.”
by captn3m0 | 2025-07-31 16:24:10+00:00
Kagi announced in March that the Linux desktop version is under development:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-co...

https://bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n

You can signup to get notified at https://forms.kagi.com/?q=orion_linux_news
by crawfordcomeaux | 2025-07-31 16:25:01+00:00
It's true...conventional usage is rooted in addiction to violence, which includes dualistic myths of right/wrong, life/death, like/dislike, belief/disbelief.

Perhaps a site-wide call for curiosity when encountering such myths could help spur people to pull themselves out of such ways of "killing" nondual animist views of experience.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-31 16:25:43+00:00
This is, in practice, true which has led to the other complaint common on tech forums (including HN) about paywalls. As the WSJ and NYT will tell you: if you request some URL, they can respond over the wire with what they want. Paywalls are the future. In some sense, I am grateful I was born in the era of free Internet. In my childhood, without a credit card I was able to access the Internet in its full form. But today's kids will have to use social media on apps because the websites will paywall their stuff against user agents that don't give them revenue.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-31 16:25:46+00:00
Soon after he bought Twitter, it got changed to requiring login to do anything at all. Even before that, Twitter was super eager to ban new accounts for no reason, while old ones seemed to be grandfathered in.

This coincided with tech companies broadly moving to profit-taking over growth. Even before LLMs took off, everything started locking down. Making a Google account used to take nothing, now you need a phone number. It'd be wise to sign up for possibly useful free accounts while you still can.
by orbsa | 2025-07-31 16:25:48+00:00
I've been a Kagi subscriber for over a year now because I love the product and think they do a great job working on it and improving it. That being said, I've tried using Orion on my Macbook Pro and it always seems to get full of memory leaks. Freezing at times and making it troublesome to use the developer tools. I prefer Zen browser currently and don't see myself switching until Ladybird is stable