MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imglorp | 2025-07-21 13:04:36+00:00
I'll put a point on the "it depends" bit.

If you have a standard-ish environment, you'll have an array of Unix tools to compose together, which is what a shell is best at. Even a minimal image like busybox will have enough to do serious work. Golfing in shell can be a pipeline of tools: lately "curl | jq | awk" does a lot of lifting for me in a one-liner.

As soon as you say "switch to (favorite decent scripting environment)", you're committing to (a) many megs of its base install, (b) its package management system, (c) whatever domain packages you need for $work, and (d) all the attendant dependency hells that brings along. Golfing in a scripting environment is composing a bunch of builtin operations.
by clappski | 2025-07-21 13:04:57+00:00
You'd have an error about an incomplete type - see https://godbolt.org/z/G4Gsfn7MT

> a pointer, whose size is always known

Yeah, this is exactly how it works. You work with a pointer that acts like a void* in your code, and the library with the definition is allowed to reach into the fields of that pointer. Normally you'd have a C API like

struct Op; Op* init_op(); void free_op( Op* ); void do_something_with_op( Op* );

in the header provided by the library that you compile as part of your code, and the definition/implementation in some .a or .so/.dll that you'll link against.*
by vorgol | 2025-07-21 13:05:05+00:00
> I'm relatively new to working on this type of system.

> In the end, what's the difference between a log and a metric?

Don't let me put you down, but writing a logging advisory blog post when you don't know the difference between a log and a metric seems like a peculiar thing to do.

But I'm not shaming lack of knowledge, we all had to learn somehow.
by jbeard4 | 2025-07-21 13:05:41+00:00
I love XSLT. I wrote a SCXML-to-JavaScript compiler in it back in 2010:

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/commons/sandbox/gsoc/2010/s...

Written as a pipeline of XSLT transformations. Ran natively in the browser to execute SCXML documents to control UI logic. Good times.
by Intrinisical-AI | 2025-07-21 13:06:30+00:00
That's fascinating! — but I don't fully agree with the framing.

Using G(t) in the context of embeddings seems problematic, specially given the probabilitistic nature.

Example - Take a sentence with a typo but semantically clear and correct (let's suppose): "The justice sistem is corrupt."

G(t) = 0, right? But semantically, it's close to G(t) → 1.

Instead of focusing on exact validity —which for me seems too rigid for something as ambiguous and context-dependent as language— what if we focused on _approximate semantic trajectories_?

You wrote:

> "If you have two points in the embedding space which represent well-formed sequences and draw a line that interpolates between them you'd think that there would have to be points in between that correspond to ill-formed sequences."

In my view, it's actually the opposite:

> If the embedding model captures meaningful structure, and you account for geometric properties like curvature, local density, and geodesics — then the path between those two points should ideally trace semantically valid (even "optimal" - if that exists) reasoning.

The problem isn't that interpolation fails — it's that we're interpolating linearly in a space that likely isn't flat!

Thanks for your comment. Lmk what you think :)
by octopoc | 2025-07-21 13:06:48+00:00
The difference is, is it pro-social or not? Not whether it's good for the individual. Charging enemy machine gun nests is pro-social behavior, arguably. Killing yourself because you're in constant pain is anti-social.

I'm just saying that social mores line up more with what is pro-social vs. anti-social, not what is good for the individual (which is more ambiguous anyway).
by dudeinjapan | 2025-07-21 13:07:07+00:00
English skills put hospitality staff in a better position to serve guests, and ultimately reduce the burden/friction on the operators themselves.

As for business travel, the price of business hotels in Japan overall has not dramatically increased—certainly not beyond what corporate budgets can afford—and much of business travel is to cities that are not of particular interest to tourists. Staying outside the city and commuting by train is also an option.
Show HN: Make fake ChatGPT chats for memes and pranks
by dorperetz | 2025-07-21 13:07:58+00:00
Sometimes life is too serious, That's why i built a simple tool that lets you create fake ChatGPT conversations where you control both sides of the chat.

It’s mainly for memes, jokes, parody posts, or testing how a conversation might go — with instant screenshot generation.

Not meant for deception — purely for fun and creativity.

Would love to see your created memes, ideas, or criticism from the HN crowd!
by docdeek | 2025-07-21 13:09:09+00:00
It’s different to the US in some important ways.

There are strict limitations on 'hate speech’, denial of the Holocaust is illegal, and there are laws still on the books (and some examples of media outlets being prosecuted for breaking those laws) around presenting drug use as a positive thing, or encouraging drug use.

You can be prosecuted as an "apologist for terrorism” should the government conclude that this is what you are doing. You can also be charged with “contempt of public officials” as people were for burning an effigy of President Macron.

In the US, as far as I know as someone who has only ever visited the country for a short time, you are allowed to hold the President in contempt, you can announce to anyone who’ll listen your ignorant, racist, Holocaust-denying opinions and not be afraid of that speech being criminalized (though there are social costs you’ll probably pay), and if you want to go on the internet and encourage people to try drugs, you can. You can support whatever side of whatever conflict around the world you like with your words and you probably won’t be breaking the law.

France’s laws around freedom of expression are strong, but they are different to those in the US and I would say offer fewer protections for citizens than the US 1st amendnment.
by explainingbcuz | 2025-07-21 13:09:26+00:00
Should the OEM have to pay to fix a product that the product owner modified?

For example, if A flashes aftermarket firmware to tractor X by OEM Z, and then tractor X (in conjunction with a human operator) causes loss; it is not reasonable to assess liability to OEM Z who could not have inspected or certified the modified product.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 13:09:35+00:00
> HTTP/1.1 is inherently insecure and consistently exposes millions of websites to hostile takeover. On August 6, James Kettle from PortSwigger Research will reveal new classes of desync attack, that enabled him to compromise multiple CDNs and kick off the desync endgame.

> Follow PortSwigger for the full reveal.

With a timer on top.

So yeah, I guess we may know nothing much from them until then.
by threetonesun | 2025-07-21 13:10:38+00:00
I'll say this everywhere I can, OpenAI, with Microsoft's involvement, is more a play to break up Google's monopoly on ads inserted into search than any fantastic future state where OpenAI dreams of electric sheep.

You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?
Show HN: MCP server for up-to-date Zig standard library documentation
by afirium | 2025-07-21 13:10:59+00:00
Hey HN! I made this because Zig's stdlib changes so much and outdated docs are a problem. Server fetches the latest documentation directly from the ziglang.org and makes it available through the MCP, so LLM can query stdlib functions and builtins.

Link: https://github.com/zig-wasm/zig-mcp
by faxmeyourcode | 2025-07-21 13:11:04+00:00
I don't aggree 100% with the OP on this suggestion. I use an agent to build a feature, then if it's significantly important enough I will have it open a PR that I can review traditionally after testing.

Copying and pasting code may work but when the agent is right there and can go read a file on its own I don't see the point in copying and pasting this way.

Really though, like another comment said, I'm probably working on different problems than antirez, so your mileage may vary.
by cassianoleal | 2025-07-21 13:11:15+00:00
> I tend to skip the -u flag as bash scripts often interact with global variables that are set outside my scripts.

That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, default the optional global variables with something like:

"${GLOBAL_VAR:-}"

That will satisfy the optionality of the variable whilst keeping the check for the cases you actually want them.
Show HN: Improve Your Spanish, French or German Language Skills via an Email Bot
by Marten42 | 2025-07-21 13:11:28+00:00
Hi,

I built a simple email-based language learning bot that sends you daily messages in your learning language. You just reply like you're writing to a pen pal, and you'll get personalized responses and feedback based on your level the next day. This way you get consistent conversations practice through your inbox.

You can choose your level (Beginner to Advanced), pick the days you want to receive messages and add topics you're interested in. You can change your preferences via email later too. The bot currently supports Spanish, French and German, later we may expand.

See it here: https://www.tnxapi.com/LanguageLearningEmailBot.php
by prmph | 2025-07-21 13:11:34+00:00
True, that's why I'm beginning to adopt a certain strategy working with AI coding agents:

I don't babysit them for long periods in one session. I allow them to one-shot the initial solution. Then, I thoroughly review the output, make notes of what should be improved, then either feed that into the original prompt and one-shot it again, or ask the agent to update the solution based on the notes.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-21 13:11:37+00:00
> Substantial - This feels like skinning n8n to make a product is meant to prevent. If there's an existing business solving their issues and either it's not substantially n8n, and the n8n part isn't a product, service, or module being sold, it could be OK.

It’s not. We wanted to incorporate n8n into our product. It would represent a small, non-essential part of our product. We weren't just skinning and reselling n8n as a product itself. But our users would be directly using an n8n instance hosted by us in a commercial context. I reached out to n8n and was told directly by them that the free license does not allow this and it required a $50k commercial license.

You seem to keep steering the discussion towards “they don’t really mean that”. Yes, they do. These are not unintentional restrictions. They wanted to make these restrictions so they could charge for commercial licenses, so that’s what they did. There is nothing hidden between the lines. There is nothing to figure out. Those are the restrictions.
by rawling | 2025-07-21 13:12:34+00:00
Thanks for the context.

(Machine translation also)

> Obstructing or distorting the operation of an automated data processing system is punishable by five years' imprisonment and a fine of €150,000.

I would be really worried if that got applied to people working on systems they own. Take it down because of an issue? Obstruction. Make a change? Distortion.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-21 13:12:41+00:00
Indeed, but in practical use (like a mini refrigerator), one will want to insulate the hot and cold sides from each other.

If one makes the walls thick, then they end up with a hole for the Peltier device and somehow sandwich two heatsinks on the device while maintaining insulation around it.

Perhaps easier to deal with in CPU cooling and such since one side is simply smacked into the thing being cooled.
by 317070 | 2025-07-21 13:12:52+00:00
At a quick glance, the minimal memory requirement is the O(N) partial solutions you need to keep, with N being the number of rows.

Is your comment that this is higher than the memory requirement of the recursive solution, because that doesn't seem correct to me? The recursive solution also has O(N) memory, which is the depth of the tree it is searching.
by camillomiller | 2025-07-21 13:12:54+00:00
As someone who is forced to use Ryanair to move around Europe because they priced out any other competition with their unfair, dark pattern-y, and borderline deceitful tactics, I can't wait for them to be regulated into a much more reasonable market position. Easyjet, while being problematic in many ways, is not even remotely as bold and arrogant as Ryanair in this regard. Also, there is an element of fundamental need in booking flights last minute (visiting a sick family member abroad, for example): getting a Ryanair ticket in these conditions means paying an incredible amount of money for a subpar service. They thrive on this.

Personal Experience: last minute ticket from Italy to Germany, major airports, bought the morning for the evening with Ryanair with no luggage: 569€.
by chuckadams | 2025-07-21 13:13:10+00:00
It's entirely possible to have specifications somewhere between "vague hand-wavy descriptions" and source code. But it's really not my job to defend AI against all the people who want it to be completely useless, seem to need it to be so, really. I just use it, it works a lot of the time, doesn't work other times, and that's that. Results carry more weight than opinions.
by newsclues | 2025-07-21 13:13:19+00:00
Assuming you define tools and technology as the same thing I disagree.

Hammers build homes, and smash faces

Encryption keeps honest people’s information safe, but it also can be used for drug trafficking

The internet is used for social media and news. But it’s also used for child porn.

Tools are neutral, it’s how they are used that makes a tool like a gun, something that feeds a family or something that kills innocent people.
by bilekas | 2025-07-21 13:13:36+00:00
> "I am going to eliminate the scourge of this 0.1% of passengers who simply will not comply with our baggage rules. Please fly with somebody else we don't want your business."

Trust me, this man VERY much wants the business, he makes all profit from that, they also wont let you checking 3 hours before the flight for free. You need to go to a physical kiosk for them to print your ticket, for the lovely fee of 60EUR.

They upcharge everything and it's fine.

The people who have slightly bigger bags are not intentionally bringing those extra 500 grams of clothing and chancing their arm.

> "eliminate the scourge"

I like Oleary, but this is just lazy ragebaiting from him now.
by Jessibot | 2025-07-21 13:13:50+00:00
For non EU people, Ryanair is like the evil version of spirit airlines, so this is not surprising. They are well known to refuse cabin bags that were bought specifically for their sizing requirements. And passengers who do bring cabin luggage that does not «fit» to the boarding gate will either have it refused or placed in the aircraft's hold for a fee of up to €75. Many people have complained that these specifications havent been enforced fairly, but I suppose this is a win for the shareholders
by drabbiticus | 2025-07-21 13:14:28+00:00
I suppose you could argue many things? I would not naively expect Perl's versioning behavior, and a system package manager will have many users who are not Perl devs but who may nevertheless have Perl packages installed on their machines. "There is more than one way to do it" is fine for some things, but I also think it's desirable behavior for a system package manager to only require users to learn a single versioning scheme. In gentoo's case (and in most cases of system package managers I've seen), this happens to be dot-separated sequence of numbers, not floating point.

A system package manager also needs to be able to compare versions, and within gentoo's dot-separated versioning scheme 1.2 < 1.12. However, a perl package could have a dev sequence of 1.1, 1.12, 1.2. If these versions are entered naively into the gentoo packaging scheme, the intended order will not be preserved. So there must be some conversion in order to handle it correctly.
by kamaal | 2025-07-21 13:14:40+00:00
>>fake humanity

I'd rather be treated nice by a bot, than be abused by a human. Make whatever of this you will.

Though I know the bot is not sentient. I'd rather chat with it, than some human who doesn't talk well.

Im guessing the future of relationships works the same way. All the best competing with a bot that makes you feel nice, than a spouse/partner who doesn't.

It will be a hard era to come for people who misbehave. The tolerance for that sort of stuff is going to go away entirely.
by ekianjo | 2025-07-21 13:14:51+00:00
I somewhat agree with your comment, but there is definitely a space for something in between Ubuntu and a full-fledged Arch distro installed by hand. As in, not for beginners, but for intermediate users who want a taste of Arch without a strong commitment. Where I agree with you is that this approach has indeed failed several times before (Antergos and more recently Manjaro), but who knows, CachyOS may be different.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-07-21 13:15:26+00:00
Nah. Manjaro sucks because it's just different enough that it breaks a lot of things (like the AUR) but EndeavourOS and CachyOS are just Arch with the edges filed off. Nice installers, sensible defaults. If your argument is that filing those edges off is antithetical to Arch, that absolutely is gatekeeping. EndeavourOS and CachyOS don't put any barriers upon the user, what fixes and guides that work for Arch will work for them and ultimately it's not a whole lot more complicated than Ubuntu is but with much better documentation thanks to the Arch wiki.

SteamOS also clearly has a place as an immutable Arch, hard to argue that it's been a disappointment or a cause of frustration for users, given the narrative has been an overwhelming want from the gaming community for a desktop version. I guess the frustration comes from, if anything, it's narrow scope.

Speaking of Ubuntu, it has atrophed. It used to be that it was popular enough that you could google your problem and someone would have solved it. Try doing that now, you get ancient posts from a decade ago that are no longer relevant. It's not like it's terrible, but I don't see anyone recommend it anymore. Though Mint has it's fans.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-21 13:15:37+00:00
Subpoena the company and demand registration data for accounts flagged as looking like foreign influence. If it's a foreign IP or email, it's foreign influence. If it's through a proxy or VPN, it's likely foreign influence.

It is that simple. If Twitter doesn't comply with court orders like that, they will no longer be allowed to operate within France or the EU. Never ever think companies are above the law or don't have to cooperate with requests like this, that's a defeatist attitude.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-21 13:15:59+00:00
I imagine theres going to be an entire new class of intelligent humans powered by LLMs that

learn this way, and they are going to be at such a disadvantage to the people that do it the old fashioned way and dont take shortcuts.

The vast majority of humans are going to offload all their critical think skills to LLMs. I dont want to be friends with those people.

I want to start a blog about these people called "Artifically Intelligent"
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-21 13:16:15+00:00
> Golfing in shell can be a pipeline of tools: lately "curl | jq | awk" does a lot of lifting for me in a one-liner.

> As soon as you say "switch to (favorite decent scripting environment)", you're committing to (a) many megs of its base install, (b) its package management system, (c) whatever domain packages you need for $work, and (d) all the attendant dependency hells that brings along.

OK, but isn't jq just an example of a favorite scripting environment with a multi-meg install and a dependency system? What are you doing that's different from what you're advising everyone else not to do?

> Golfing in a scripting environment is composing a bunch of builtin operations.

Neither curl nor jq is a builtin operation.
by js8 | 2025-07-21 13:17:09+00:00
Regarding planned obsolescence, what do you think of Veritasium's video on the topic?

Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed.

For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.
by palsecam | 2025-07-21 13:18:36+00:00
Oh but yes, Firefox (and Chrome) do support XSLT natively! See https://paul.fragara.com/feed.xml as an example (the Atom feed of my website, styled with XSLT).

FTR, there’s also XSLTProcessor (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XSLTProcess...) available from Javascript in the browser. I use that on my homepage, to fetch and transform-to-HTML said Atom feed, then embed it:

const atom = new XMLHttpRequest, xslt = new XMLHttpRequest; atom.open("GET", "feed.xml"); xslt.open("GET", "atom2html.xsl"); atom.onload = xslt.onload = function() { if (atom.readyState !== 4 || xslt.readyState !== 4) return; const proc = new XSLTProcessor; proc.importStylesheet(xslt.responseXML); const frag = proc.transformToFragment(atom.responseXML, document); document.getElementById("feed").appendChild(frag.querySelector("[role='feed']")); }; atom.send(); xslt.send();

Server-side, I’ve leveraged XSLT (2.0) in the build process of another website, to slightly transform (X)HTML pages before publishing (canonicalize URLs, embed JS & CSS directly in the page, etc.): https://github.com/PaulCapron/pwa2uwp/blob/master/postprod.x...
by nikshepsvn | 2025-07-21 13:19:09+00:00
hey hacker news,

one of my first posts on the platform! i quit my job last august and have been spending my time building experiments in AI and crypto -- during this time i spent a lot of time wondering about the future post actually good AI (context, hallucination etc solved) and this is my take on what companies might look like (and what I'm building SCULPT to become)

would love some thoughts, its ambitious but i do think we're headed there sooner rather than later
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-21 13:19:26+00:00
Takes more than 15sec to strangle someone. 30 shouldn't cause any serious damage beyond whatever mechanical damage there is from being tugged around. Heck, 2-3min is probably fine if the MRI is located at a hospital.

Edit: Per the article that I would like to remind everyone is well worth reading, he had time to say goodbye to his wife, that would seem to me to imply he wasn't tossed hard enough to be incapacitated.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-21 13:19:53+00:00
If you don't see the problem with far-right rhetoric then you are part of the problem. Europe has free speech protections, but only within reason; nazi symbolism is explicitly banned in Germany for example, and holocaust denial is also illegal.

Then there's some things you can say without getting into legal trouble, but you may get killed for it by those you offend.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-21 13:20:30+00:00
The very next sentence of mine

> And eventually the actual value of such things is the extensibility and integrations with various things like corporate SAML etc.

I could make a Dropbox clone by hand in a weekend. I could make one with AI in a few hours. Neither will be valuable like Dropbox because the value is the hard stuff that I have yet to see proof AI can do