MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kens | 2025-08-21 20:22:07+00:00
On the topic of how Sears used to be high-tech: back in 1981, when IBM introduced the IBM PC, it was the first time that they needed to sell computers through retail. So they partnered with Sears, along with the Computerland chain of computer stores, since Sears was considered a reasonable place for a businessperson to buy a computer. To plan this, meetings were held at the Sears Tower, which was the world's tallest building at the time.
by diarrhea | 2025-08-21 20:22:13+00:00
Go is not thread safe. It even allows data races in its own runtime. Go 1.25 fixed a nil-checking error that has been sitting in the runtime for two years.

Generally, Go will let you compile just about anything when it comes to channels, mutexes (or not..), WaitGroups, atomics, and so on. It usually compiles as there are no static checks, and then just fails at runtime.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-08-21 20:22:19+00:00
For some people the pandemic was very traumatic and resulted in a severe loss of income (eg. worst case scenario, a theatrical performer) but for other people, (eg. tech workers) they experienced the opposite, an increased demand for their services alongside a reduction in their costs (nil commute). The latter was the greater amount of people and so you had a lot of people with increased disposable income, alongside ultra low interest rates, and that caused the economy to surge as people spent money, took on debt and acquired assets.

Covid cheques which in some countries only went to persons in the former niche category I think had less remarkable impact than the broader factors.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-21 20:22:43+00:00
What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend.

Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
by gunta | 2025-08-21 20:22:47+00:00
I've analyzed 100 installation methods across all platforms and created a trust scoring system. Key findings: - curl|sh: Trust Score 18 (critically unsafe) - iOS App Store: Trust Score 98 (near perfect) - 80-point gap between best/worst methods on same platform

As an engineer writing my first paper, I'm looking for: 1. Security researchers for technical review 2. Academic co-authors familiar with supply chain security 3. ArXiv endorsement (cs.CR or similar categories) The framework addresses recent incidents (XZ backdoor, CrowdStrike) and helps teams choose secure installation methods. Would love feedback from the community!
by Mainan_Tagonist | 2025-08-21 20:23:02+00:00
Maybe because what you call "Fascism" isn´t Fascism and, as far as i know, nobody wants to gut our (varied) social programs, but we are just conscious that in some cases, said programs are failing, unsustainable due to resources misallocation and/or grossly mismanaged.

Having a slightly more dynamic entrepreneurial scene, where one is allowed to fail for instance, would be nice.

In my view, the way forward and the example to follow is Switzerland, not the US.
by jbstack | 2025-08-21 20:23:48+00:00
Definitely by far the best way to learn to write characters. It is very expensive (compared to most apps, anyway) but its essentially obligatory to spend the money if you are serious about learning the language. When I'm learning Mandarin my favoured method is to work my way through the HSK decks on Skritter, plus a custom deck where I add my own words. Then I make sure to put at least 1 example sentence in Anki for each word that I've learned in Skritter, to reinforce it and place it in a useful context. Skritter itself rather helpfully gives an example sentence for most words. This often then leads me to adding more words to my custom Skritter deck when the example sentence contains other words I don't know yet. In this way I expand my vocabulary beyond just HSK.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-21 20:23:49+00:00
> I love the restarts system but the fact that the industry as a whole chose other approaches makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.

The restart system is complex, harder to implement, and harder to reason about (it has more "spooky action at a distance", much of it determined at runtime and not compile time).

The "wisdom of the crowds" will generally favor systems that are either:

1. Easier to implement (including sustainment work in the future)

2. Easier to use (or reason about in this case)

Sometimes you get things that are both, but it's often not possible (or feasible) to find or make systems that are both easy to use and easy to implement.

Checked exceptions and explicit error returns are one of those things that happen to provide both (1) and (2) (sort of on 2: often more upfront work, but better reasonability). They're easier to implement for language developers (everything is known at compile time, there is less needed in terms of runtime support especially for explicit error returns), and they're easier to create static tooling for which helps users (programmers). Even without tooling, the explicitness and locality of information makes them more reasonable.

Unchecked exceptions are harder to implement (for instance, the need for handling cleanup as you unwind the stack, which could happen at any point in a function's execution), and they are harder to build static tooling for and harder for programmers to reason about. Common Lisp's conditions and restarts are even harder on all fronts.

This isn't a bad thing, it's a powerful tool. But it means that it won't be mainstream once easier alternatives come along. All the wisdom of the crowds has told us on this is that checked exceptions and explicit error returns are easier. Not that one is better or worse than the other.
by QuercusMax | 2025-08-21 20:23:50+00:00
I recently watched a mid-level engineer use AI to summarize some our code, and he had it put together a big document describing all the various methods in a file, what they're used for, and so forth. It looked to me like a huge waste of time, as the code itself was already very readable (I say this as someone who recently joined the project), and the "documentation" the AI spit out wasn't that different than what you'd get just by running pydoc.

He took a couple days doing this, which was shocking to me. Such a waste of time that would have been better spent reading the code and improving any missing documentation - and most importantly asking teammates about necessary context that couldn't just be inferred from the code.
by showcaseearth | 2025-08-21 20:24:08+00:00
I doubt a PR is going to be buried if it's useful, well designed, good code, etc, just because of this disclosure. Articulate how you used AI and I think you've met the author's intent.

If the PR has issues and requires more than superficial re-work to be acceptable, the authors don't want to spend time debugging code spit out by an AI tool. They're more willing to spend a cycle or two if the benefit is you learning (either generally as a dev or becoming more familiar with the project). If you can make clear that you created or understand the code end to end, then they're more likely to be willing to take these extra steps.

Seems pretty straightforward to me and thoughtful by the maintainers here.
by typpilol | 2025-08-21 20:24:13+00:00
Honestly the best way to get good code at least with typescript and JavaScript is to have like 50 eslint plugins

That way it constantly yells at sonnet 4 to get the code at least in a better state.

If anyone is curious I have a massive eslint config for typescript that really gets good code out of sonnet.

But before I started doing this the code it wrote was so buggy and it was constantly trying to duplicate functions into separate files etc
by marcus_cemes | 2025-08-21 20:24:16+00:00
To extend upon this, memory generally has a single owner. When it goes out of scope, it gets freed [1]. The drop() function, which appears analogous to free() in C/C++, is actually just an empty function who's sole purpose is to take ownership and make it go out of scope, which immediately frees the memory [2].

> This function is not magic; it is literally defined as: pub fn drop<T>(_x: T) {}

This is usually more deterministic than GC languages (no random pauses), but can be less efficient for highly nested data structures. It also makes linked lists impossible without using "unsafe rust", as it doesn't abide by the normal ownership rules.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/scope/raii.html [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html
by czzprr | 2025-08-21 20:24:21+00:00
I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down. If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman. But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
by godelski | 2025-08-21 20:24:35+00:00
I get this and tend to not name names either, but at the same time I also think the mob like behavior is a symptom of the rampant abuse. What's the old MLK Jr quote? So honestly I've been asking myself if not naming names is actually the best strategy here. I tend to also be willing to give benefit of the doubt. But it is clear that people are taking advantage of this behavior as well. So I guess the question is which failure mode is worse: corporations being caught in the cross-fire or corporations taking advantage of good nature? (There's definitely more complexity than this one question)
by saghm | 2025-08-21 20:24:55+00:00
The way I sometimes describe it is that memory is essentially managed at compile time in Rust, whereas with a (tracing) GC it happens at runtime, and in C it's done manually by the programmer. This is a simplification, but it's both true that Rust is similar to C in that there isn't a runtime cost to memory managed and that it's similar to Java in that outside of specific APIs, you have strong guarantees about certain issues with memory not being possible because they're automatically handled by the language.
by AmruthaK | 2025-08-21 20:25:04+00:00
I’m part of the team at Epistemix, where we’ve built Populus, a standalone data platform that enables data scientists to work directly with synthetic populations.You can run simulations and models, test interventions & forecast outcomes across healthcare, pharma, and insurance contexts.If you are interested sign up using the link here - https://epistemix.com/populus
Show HN: Convosphere – Real-life proximity chat
by jothetaha | 2025-08-21 20:25:23+00:00
The idea for Convosphere came to me a few years ago, when I was visiting a friend in Sardinia. I had just landed at the airport and needed to get to the train station. I wanted to share a taxi with someone else but didn’t feel like going around asking people one by one. That’s when it struck me: what if there were an app that allowed me to instantly connect with everyone nearby – like a group chat for people in the same location? That became the seed of the project.

On the technical side, Convosphere is built with Flutter for cross-platform development, and the backend currently runs on Firebase+Firestore. The app is available as a web app, Android, and iOS, and it supports location-based group and one-to-one chat, events, and a trust score system for safer interactions.

You can try Convosphere at the following links:

WebSite: https://site.convosphere.app/

WebApp: https://convosphere.app/

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.convospher...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/it/app/convosphere/id6737458247

Feedback welcome!
by therobots927 | 2025-08-21 20:25:27+00:00
This is pure sophistry and the use of formal mathematical notation just adds insult to injury here:

“Think about it: we’ve built a special kind of function F' that for all we know can now accept anything — compose poetry, translate messages, even debug code! — and we expect it to always reply with something reasonable.”

This forms the axiom from which the rest of this article builds its case. At each step further fuzzy reasoning is used. Take this for example:

“Can we solve hallucination? Well, we could train perfect systems to always try to reply correctly, but some questions simply don't have "correct" answers. What even is the "correct" when the question is "should I leave him?".”

Yes of course relationship questions don’t have a “correct” answer. But physics questions do. Code vulnerability questions do. Math questions do. I mean seriously?

The most disturbing part of my tech career has been witnessing the ability that many highly intelligent and accomplished people have to apparently fool themselves with faulty yet complex reasoning. The fact that this article is written in defense of chatbots that ALSO have complex and flawed reasoning just drives home my point. We’re throwing away determinism just like that? I’m not saying future computing won’t be probabilistic but to say that LLMs are probabilistic, so they are the future of computing can only be said by someone with an incredibly strong prior on LLMs.

I’d recommend Baudrillards work on hyperreality. This AI conversation could not be a better example of the loss of meaning. I hope this dark age doesn’t last as long as the last one. I mean just read this conclusion:

“It's ontologically different. We're moving away from deterministic mechanicism, a world of perfect information and perfect knowledge, and walking into one made of emergent unknown behaviors, where instead of planning and engineering we observe and hypothesize.”

I don’t actually think the above paragraph makes any sense, does anyone disagree with me? “Instead of planning we observe and hypothesize”?

That’s called the scientific method. Which is a PRECURSOR to planning and engineering. That’s how we built the technology we have today. I’ll stop now because I need to keep my blood pressure low.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-21 20:25:47+00:00
As someone who was a customer of Netflix from the dialup to broadband world, I can tell you that this stuff happens much faster than you expect. With AI we're clearly in the "it really works, but there are kinks and scaling problems" of, say, streaming video in 2001 -- whereas I think you mean to indicate we're trying to do Netflix back in the 1980s where the tech for widespread broadband was just fundamentally not available.
by enaaem | 2025-08-21 20:26:32+00:00
In the 70s there were massive protests in the Netherlands called "Stop the Child Murder". People were used to safe streets where children could cycle independently to school, go to sports clubs and hang out with their friends around the city. Then cars came and started killing their children.

At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.

So yeah. You don't have to accept that roads are community killers.
by hollerith | 2025-08-21 20:27:29+00:00
Prodigy predates ISPs (internet service providers). Before the web had matured a little in 1993 the internet was too technically challenging to interest most consumers except maybe for email, and Prodigy was formed in 1984 -- and although it offered email, it was walled-garden email: a Prodigy user could not exchange email with the internet till the mid-1990s at which time Prodigy might have become an ISP for a few years before going out of business.
by typpilol | 2025-08-21 20:27:52+00:00
Honestly I think LLMs really shine best when your first getting into a language.

I just recently got into JavaScript and typescript and being able to ask the llm how to do something and get some sources and link examples is really nice.

However using it in a language I'm much more familiar with really decreases the usefulness. Even more so when your code base is mid to large sized
by andruby | 2025-08-21 20:28:22+00:00
> I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of

I really appreciate this point from mitchellh. Giving thoughtful constructive feedback to help a junior developer improve is a gift. Yet it would be a waste of time if the PR submitter is just going to pass it to an AI without learning from it.
by tzs | 2025-08-21 20:28:23+00:00
> When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure, it always makes me think: Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating?

One of the problems might be that a data center puts a lot of demand into a small area and it needs that power soon.

Those other things are being phased in over time, so we only need modest annual capacity growth to deal with them, and they are spread out.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-08-21 20:28:29+00:00
The correct way to setup an analytics tool is to point it to an analytics db that is a replica of your main DB. It's a pretty common part of an HA setup to replicate your primary to an actual hot read replica and a cold analytics store. This way the analytics tool queries your analytics store and doesn't put load on your hot primary or hot read replica.

> I'd say most of my comment is substantively correct, with a disclaimer on an (important) point, where I'd be happy to be corrected.

I read this and feel that you still want imaginary internet points for something that is, at best, directionally correct. To me it seems your desire for internet points urged you to post a statement and not a question. I imagine most of HN is just statements that are overconfident bluster by only directionally correct statements which create the cacophony of this site.
by QuercusMax | 2025-08-21 20:28:35+00:00
Brownfield projects are more challenging because of all the context and decisions that went into building things that are not directly defined in the code.

I suspect that well-engineered projects with plenty of test coverage and high-quality documentation will be easier to use AI on, just like they're easier for humans to comprehend. But you need to have somebody with the big picture still who can make sure that you don't just turn things into a giant mess once less disciplined people start using AI on a project.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-21 20:28:35+00:00
> try it in a language and environment you know nothing about and so aren't tempted to keep taking the wheel.

That's a good insights. Its almost like to use AI tools effectively, one needs to stop caring about the little things you'd get caught up in if you were already familiar and proficient in a stack. Style guidelines, a certain idiomatic way to do things, naming conventions, etc.

A lot like how I've stopped organizing digital files into folders, sub folders etc (along with other content) and now I just just rely on search. Everything is a flat structure, I don't care where its stored or how it's organized as long as I can just search for it, that's what the computer is for, to keep track for me so I don't have to waste time organizing it myself.

Like wise for the code Generative AI produces. I don't need to care about the code itself. As long as its correct, not insecure, and performant, it's fine.

It's not 100% there yet, I still do have to go in and touch the code, but ideally I shouldn't have to, nor should I have to care what the actual code looks like, just the result of it. Let the computer manage that, not me. My role should be the system design and specification, not writing the code.
by mcrwfrd | 2025-08-21 20:28:40+00:00
8 years ago I graduated with a bachelors degree in pure math and theoretical physics. 2 years later I settled down and decided to just become a software engineer building CRUD apps. Since graduating I've consistently looked for a job that explicitly had software and pure math requirements, but I've continuously come up short.

In theory, I think two good avenues for you to check out would be: 1) building physics and game engines at a company like Unity; 2) building the knowledge engine behind something like WolframAlpha/Mathematica. It's possible you'll need graduate school experience to be competitive for these jobs.

I'd guess that no matter what you're going to end up doing some kind of programming. I don't think formal education is required for this.
by newfocogi | 2025-08-21 20:28:56+00:00
I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards:

'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'

Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
by password4321 | 2025-08-21 20:28:57+00:00
Water infrastructure outages are typically due to failures needing repairs (relevant to this discussion: water main breaks which lead to boil water advisories). Few municipalities are fiscally responsible enough to invest in all the preventative maintenance required to completely avoid failures across all types of infrastructure (a low-priority budget item when things are working smoothly), but it also takes decades for water mains to fail.
by NortySpock | 2025-08-21 20:29:11+00:00
I did.

It was convenient. The official docker image includes all the tools you need.

Overkill? Sure. It sips memory and compute, but when most everything else is in docker, what is wrong with one more container.

I did a write-up here:

https://github.com/NortySpock/selfhosted-show-wiki/blob/bca6...

(Eventually I did switch over to NATS emulating an MQTT endpoint so I could get a broker with Prometheus-scrapeable `/metrics` endpoint )
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-21 20:29:16+00:00
There is an easy subset of Rust, namely the "pure functional" subset that doesn't use reference types at all and just passes everything by value. The use of & ("shared") references is only marginally harder. All of these features can be introduced step-by-step, together with basic notions that are not exclusive to any programming language. I'm aware that this is not how Rust is generally taught, but it's worthwhile to attempt such an approach.