MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-08-24 17:36:17+00:00
> Lisps are "homoiconic" in the sense that everything is a list, but honestly?

That's not how I understand homoiconicity, "everything is a list" or not has nothing to do with it. The point is that whatever structure the compiler uses to understand the code (slightly loose), is the same code you write, since code is represented as data. But if it's maps, lists, booleans or whatever isn't the important takeaway from that.

In your example, how would I, after the multiplication line but before the result line , manipulate "1 + 1" to read something else like "2 + 1"? In Clojure for example, it would be (+ 1 1) so if you wanna change 1 to 2, you use the typical "replace item in list by index" function, but with Python you're either stuck with AST or "code-as-strings". I think that's where a lot of the complexity and error-proneness gets in.
by enether | 2025-08-24 17:36:19+00:00
~197 GB/s ... nice.

I believe these companies save literally every ounce of data they can find. Once you have the infra and teams for it, it seems easy to make a case for storing something.

Similarly, Uber has shared they push 89 GB/s through Kafka - 7.7 PB/s. People always ask me - what is a taxi/food-delivery app storing so much
by jhbadger | 2025-08-24 17:36:23+00:00
>UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough

The US also lacks a national ID, but as a non-driver myself, this is handled by things called variously by state a "state ID" or a "non-driver's driving license". These look exactly like driver's licenses and can be used wherever those can for ID (like for flying) except for a line saying "not valid for driving".
by alt227 | 2025-08-24 17:36:54+00:00
> Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.

Luckily that comes down to the policy of the individual company and is not enforced by law. I am personally happy to pay engineers more so they can buy this sort of thing themselves and we dont open the company to this sort of abuse. Then its a known cost and the engineers can decide from themselves if they want to spend that $30 on a meal or something else.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-24 17:36:57+00:00
I started building a project by trying to wire in existing open source stuff. When I looked at the build and stuff that would cause me to bring in, and the actual stuff I needed from the open source tools, it turned out to be MUCH faster/cleaner to just get Claude to check out the repo and port the stuff I needed directly.

Now I do a calculus with dependencies. Do I want to track the upstream, is the rigging around the core I want valuable, is it well maintained? If not, just port and move on.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-24 17:37:16+00:00
Factorio and stellaris are others i’m aware of.

Factorio it's an issue when you go way past the end game into the 1000+ hour megabases.

Stellaris is just poorly coded with lots of n^2 algorithms and can run slowly on anything once population and fleets grow a bit.

For civilisation the ai does take turns faster with a higher end cpu but imho it’s also no big deal since you spend most time scrolling the map and taking actions (gpu based perf).

I think it’s reasonable to state that the exceptions here are very exceptional.
by sgarland | 2025-08-24 17:37:26+00:00
Yes, yes it does [0]. I fully understand the need for backwards-compatibility given the sheer number of SQLite installations, I find their attitude towards flexible types [1] appalling. At least they’ve added STRICT.

Similarly, the fact that FKs aren’t actually enforced by default is a horrifying discovery if you’re new to it, but tbf a. MySQL until quite recently allowed CHECK constraints to be declared, which it then ignored b. The FK enforcement decision is for backwards-compatibility.

[0]: https://www.sqlite.org/quirks.html

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/flextypegood.html
Show HN: I Built a XSLT Blog Framework
by vgr-land | 2025-08-24 17:38:30+00:00
A few weeks ago a friend sent me grug-brain XSLT (1) which inspired me to redo my personal blog in XSLT.

Rather than just build my own blog on it, I wrote it up for others to use and I've published it on GitHub https://github.com/vgr-land/vgr-xslt-blog-framework (2)

Since others have XSLT on the mind, now seems just as good of a time as any to share it with the world. Evidlo@ did a fine job explaining the "how" xslt works (3)

The short version on how to publish using this framework is:

1. Create a new post in HTML wrapped in the XML headers and footers the framework expects.

2. Tag the post so that its unique and the framework can find it on build

3. Add the post to the posts.xml file

And that's it. No build system to update menus, no RSS file to update (posts.xml is the rss file). As a reusable framework, there are likely bugs lurking in CSS, but otherwise I'm finding it perfectly usable for my needs.

Finally, it'd be a shame if XSLT is removed from the HTML spec (4), I've found it quite eloquent in its simplicity.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817

(2) https://github.com/vgr-land/vgr-xslt-blog-framework

(3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988271

(4) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

(Aside - First time caller long time listener to hn, thanks!)
by 317070 | 2025-08-24 17:39:08+00:00
It is.

But!

Wasserstein distances are used instead of a KL inside all kinds of VAE's and diffusion models, because while the Wasserstein distance is hard to compute, it is easy to make distributions whose expectation is the gradient wrt to the Wasserstein distance. So you can easily get unbiased gradients, and that is all you need to train big neural networks. [0] Pretty much any time you sample from your current and the target distribution and take the gradient of the distance between the points, you will be minimizing a Wasserstein distance.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01558
by arcticbull | 2025-08-24 17:39:09+00:00
> They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach.

I support renewables. I think it's important we understand the whole picture, and think we should construct them even if they're expensive and imperfect. However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.

> The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling.

Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production. The renewables industry has historically and also continues to receives significant subsidies. So does the fossil fuel industry.

> I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.

Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem. Yes, you can put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 17:39:22+00:00
Except when they don't. Last time I tried an ST part, I specifically bought one that advertised UART bootloader.

It didn't. Every piece of documentation I could find said that it did, but it would never respond. Forums were full of people complaining about this problem for years with no response from ST. No datasheet or marketing update, no errata. You just get a useless chip and it's your problem now. They also never responded to any of my direct emails or messages.

Every time I've tried an ST part, it's been hell and I eventually gave up and used an Atmel part instead. Every time.
by alt227 | 2025-08-24 17:39:23+00:00
> but most (really all) employees are in it for money

Yes, but some also have a moral conscience and were brought up to not take more than they need.

If you are not one of these types of people, then not taking complete over advantage of an offer like free meals probably seems like an alien concept.

I try to hire more people like this, it makes for a much stronger workforce when people are not all out to get whatever they can for themselves and look out for each others interests more.
by cogogo | 2025-08-24 17:39:47+00:00
Less flippantly that was sort of my thought. I’m probably a paranoid idiot and I’m not really sure I can articulate this idea properly but I can imagine a less concise but broader prompt and an agent configured in a way it has privileges you dont want it to have or a path to escalate them and its not quite AGI but its a virus on steroids - like a company or resource (think utilities) killer. I hope Im just missing something but these models seem pretty capable of wreaking all kinds of havoc if they just keep looping and have access nobody in their right mind wants.
by davidandgoli4th | 2025-08-24 17:39:52+00:00
Sure no problem:

- Changefly ID is the core technology for anonymous authentication (https://www.changefly.com/our-research). Changefly ID requires zero PII.

- Optionally, if a service requires identity / age verification, we just released Anonymous Identity & Age Verification for Changefly ID (https://www.changefly.com/blog/2025/08/anonymized-identity-a...).

- You can verify your identity for free: https://www.changefly.com/account/verify

- Developers can verify Changefly ID’s and/or age requirement checks with our open API: https://www.changefly.com/developer
by gruez | 2025-08-24 17:41:08+00:00
That's trickier than it sounds. find for instance has the -exec command, which allows arbitrary code to be executed. build tools and linters are also a security nightmare, because they can also be modified to execute arbitrary code. And this is all assuming you can implement the whitelist properly. A naive check like

cmd.split(" ") in ["cd", "ls", ...]

is easy target for command injections. just to think of a few:

ls . && evil.sh ls $(evil.sh)
by mrkeen | 2025-08-24 17:41:21+00:00
> The typical example for ACID DBs are bank transactions; imagine a bank accidentally undoing a transaction upon server crash

That's why they don't try to do it that way! But it's still an informative way to think about it.

Also, while we're discussing defaults, your ACID db is probably running at READ COMMITTED by default, meaning that your bank transactions are vanishing/creating money:

* You read accounts A and B($30) in order to move $5 between them. The new balance for B should be $35. Just before you write the $35, someone else's transaction sets B to $100. Your transaction will proceed and blindly set it to $35 anyway.

But to your overall point, I'm also frustrated that these systems aren't as safe as they look on the box.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-24 17:41:38+00:00
For me I cannot play team based games where you are punished for leaving. Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise.

Also, I am no longer a 20 year old with no responsibilities and sometimes things come up where I would need to leave the game. I guess I am just getting older now and no longer play 20 hours a weeks of video games, but things like Deadlock don’t have appeal.
by necovek | 2025-08-24 17:42:14+00:00
If $20k is misspent by 1 in 100 employees, that's still $200 per employee per year: peanuts, really.

Just like with "policing", I'd only focus on uncovering and dealing with abusers after the fact, not on everyone — giving most people "benefits" that instead makes them feel valued.
by skaul | 2025-08-24 17:43:17+00:00
(I lead privacy at Brave and am one of the authors)

> Instead they believe model alignment, trying to understand when a user is doing a dangerous task, etc. will be enough.

No, we never claimed or believe that those will be enough. Those are just easy things that browser vendors should be doing, and would have prevented this simple attack. These are necessary, not sufficient.
by cyanydeez | 2025-08-24 17:43:29+00:00
It seems similar to the fermi paradox.

The underlying assumption is that it exists in the first place. Or rather, one must first accept an axiom.

In fermi, its that interstellar signals can be detected and further travel is possible.

In AGI, its that intelligence is a isolateable process which we can bootstrap in minimal time.

Both assumes human progress are templates of unlimited exponential growth.
by michaelt | 2025-08-24 17:43:33+00:00
Well partly, yes.

But also, when I tell one of my reports to spec and order himself a PC, there should be several controls in place.

Firstly, I should give clear enough instructions that they know whether they should be spending around $600, $1500, or $6000.

Second, although my reports can freely spend ~$100 no questions asked, expenses in the $1000+ region should require my approval.

Thirdly, there is monitoring of where money is going; spending where the paperwork isn't in order gets flagged and checked. If someone with access to the company amazon account gets an above-ground pool shipped to their home, you can bet there will be questions to be answered.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 17:43:56+00:00
Atmel has shockingly good documentation for their AVR CPUs. The datasheets are always thorough, usually include protocol timing diagrams, psuedocode examples for using peripherals, lots and lots of vital information. Their datasheets also link out to additional documentation like their instruction set manual. Now that is a good read.

Love Atmel. They're not perfect, but they're very good and they try pretty hard.

TI deleted all the I2C register programming information (40 pages!) from the docs for a widget I was using and it took them months to put it back. The device was literally unusable in any form without that information. Insane.
by cyberax | 2025-08-24 17:44:04+00:00
> Do we live in 2005 or 2025? We live in 2025 and can not influence past actions.

Yeah. "Oh, we made a mistake, but it's water under the bridge now. It's too late to build nuclear. Here, get this lump of coal and burn it to warm up. It's fine, we'll phase it out in 20 years. Just don't think about it now, and don't forget to vote for more green energy"

> Today renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history, why don't you celebrate that we over the coming decades finally are able to let go off fossil fuels for all but emergency and niche use cases?

OK. Why is Germany directly paying for new natural gas generation? Wouldn't it be cheaper to replace coal with cheap renewables and storage? Should be a no-brainer, yeah?

Oh, it's the "cheapest energy" only when you don't care about the grid stability (see: Spain) or winter (see: Germany).

> As per modern western nuclear construction costs that would result in about 10-15 GW of nuclear power.

Germany has spent more than $500B on Energiewende so far. It'll need to spend about that amount _again_ to decarbonize, even with some generous assumptions about future technologies.

If we use Oikiluoto Unit 3 as a guide, it cost 11B euros for 1.6GWe of capacity. Getting to 60GWe would have required 400B euros. Without considering any economy of scale or savings from streamlining the construction.

> And then you round it all off with crying about perfect. Missing the forest for the trees.

Perhaps you should look in the mirror? Maybe YOU are missing the forest for the trees? In this case, "trees" are vapid editorials about how Germany generated 100% of energy from renewables. Small print: in summer, when demand is low.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-24 17:44:10+00:00
Dupe, previously submitted 5 times in the last 41 days, including once by the current submitter:

Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer" (ghuntley.com) - 4 points by 0x000042 7 days ago

Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer" (ghuntley.com) - 2 points by nojito 31 days ago

Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer" (ghuntley.com) - 2 points by arrowsmith 40 days ago

Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer" (ghuntley.com) - 18 points by tosh 40 days ago | 5 comments

Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer" (ghuntley.com) - 2 points by ghuntley 41 days ago | 5 comments
by jmyeet | 2025-08-24 17:44:22+00:00
Solar really is ideal for partial or total residential power generation, for several reasons:

1. The price. It has plummeted in the alst 10-20 years and shows no signs of abating;

2. For many people it can be placed on their roofs so doesn't take up any land or generally require building any new structure. Generally the only planning required is artificial barriers in place to protect electricity providers;

3. It is the only form of direct power generation. Everything else involves turning a turbine. No moving parts is great for reliability. You do need some infrastructure to convert the panel output to the right voltage (eg an inverter) but that's all commodity tech;

4. Batteries are a largely solved problem for energy storage. You can use golf cart batteries if you really want.

There are problems. We need panel standardization, which I think will come with industry maturity.

Another big issue is lack of regulation for solar companies who use predatory financing on consumers and can actually make selling your home much more difficult. This is a big enough problem that any realtor will tend to advise you not to get solar because of the selling issues. This shouldn't be the case. It's a regulatory problem.
by OptionOfT | 2025-08-24 17:44:24+00:00
We wanted floor heating, so no radiators. And with that one of the concerns is condensation, so you cannot go too cold.

I do remember going into the software and overriding the fact that it could cool, but only after the house was certified.

You mention radiators. The ones on the wall with hot water running through them? Don't they need high temperatures to work efficiently? When we ordered ours, you couldn't even get radiators as air-to-water only did low temperatures.

But I don't live there anymore. I eventually ended up in Phoenix. Now the AC is too powerful, as it is only single stage...
by gruez | 2025-08-24 17:44:26+00:00
1. AFAIK most AI coding agents don't do this

2. even if the AI agent itself is sandboxed, if it can make changes to code and you don't inspect all output, it can easily place malicious code that gets executed once you try to run it. The only safe way of doing this is either a dedicated AI development VM where you do all the prompting/tests, there's very limited credentials present (in case it gets hacked), and the changes are only leave the VM after a thorough inspection (eg. PR process).
by jayd16 | 2025-08-24 17:44:50+00:00
The beatings will continue until the code improves.

I get the sentiment but taken literally it's counter productive. If the business cares about perf, put it in the sprint planning. But they don't. You'll just be writing more features with more personal pain.

For what its worth, console gamedev has solved this. You test your game on the weakest console you're targeting. This usually shakes out as a stable perf floor for PC.
by a2128 | 2025-08-24 17:45:23+00:00
There have been cases and a whole project was shut down because of it https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless?tab=readme-ov-file#i...

However this is an entirely different question. Whether or not an API is copyrightable, and whether you'd be in violation for recreating a proprietary API for the purpose of creating an (open-source) market alternative for their product, are entirely different questions to whether or not a specific private company has stopped serving specific customers due to use of software they do not authorize (which they are entirely in the right to do, legally)
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-08-24 17:45:54+00:00
That wasn't the argument at all.

If I wrote a card game in 3 months, then cloned the repository and used that as a base to implement a different card game, it would be significantly faster with or without LLMs.

The argument is that it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. "I wrote a game in 3 months and then used an LLM in 3 days to fork it and make some changes" is not the same thing as "I spent 3 months doing something that I could do in 3 days with LLMs".

I believe LLM-driven development is powerful (though I hate seeing "10x" everywhere, and have hated it long before LLM coding was big, when it was talking about supposedly superhuman coders), but this is not a good comparison, and the argument is sound.
by rchaud | 2025-08-24 17:46:18+00:00
The iPad wasn't positioned to be a productivity device though. The $499 price was a surprise, but only because all the online chatter was guessing $999. It was at best a Kindle/Youtube/Netflix device. The marketing for iPad these days reflects this, the ads explicitly say "not a computer".

Tablet computers at that time ran full Windows, came with a keyboard and had pen support which the iPad didn't for many years. In fact iOS didn't even have a file manager until 2017, or mouse support until 2019.
by btown | 2025-08-24 17:46:19+00:00
> without even looking at that author's past

It is worth noting that this comes two weeks after the authors posted https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213 "Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?"

They describe this first paper as "largely a pedagogical exercise" - clearly, if they're now providing emails to news outlets recommending this course change, their view of the target audience has certainly evolved. Orson Welles would be proud.
by belorn | 2025-08-24 17:46:23+00:00
I would nothing more than to enjoy those cheap prices. Here in Sweden (and EU in general), while energy prices has drop in response to renewables, grid fees and energy taxes has increased more than to cover any savings. Grid fees are now the wast majority off the bill, which pays for grid stability and transmissions that is required to operate a much more variable energy production. grid stability and transmissions are primarily a government responsibility, and when cost goes up they forward that costs as grid fees and taxes.

To put some numbers down, a quertly bill recent had $1400 usd as grid fees, while the energy consumption came down to $300. Those numbers could be specific to that house, that energy company, but it is a story echoed by more and more people in this region. The consumption cost could be $0/MWh, and the grid fees alone would still be way more expensive compared to the full bill just a couple of years ago.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-24 17:46:55+00:00
In general counts are just so commonly needed in 1:N relationships. Specifically counts grouped by "status" of the object on the N side of the relationship. I've never seen a CRUD app where this didn't eventually make the feature list.

So I just pre-emptively break "normal form" and maintain counts in the database right from the start. I either update it with multiple stmts everytime in a txn, or with triggers. In sqlite I prefer triggers mostly because I know the operation and edge cases of sqlite trigger impl better than I know other DBs'.

Caching can just be invalidation-based in this case.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 17:47:15+00:00
Adafruit's libraries are some of the worst code I've ever seen. And I recreationally dive into the low level esp-IDF code (I do not recommend if you value your sanity).

I found one just yesterday where the main entry point returns a byte value. It returns 'false' on error, and '0' on success. It may also sometimes return a non-zero error code. You can see why this design would be problematic.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 17:47:58+00:00
> Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.

Renewables are relevant given their trajectory and that they make up ~90% of new installations due to being the by far best option today.

Grid infrastructure has a lifespan of a couple decades. We are seeing a complete disruption of the grid, but it will take a couple of decades for everything to shake out as the existing fleet of fossil and nuclear plants ages out.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

> France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.

Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing. But relying on Russia for your energy supply chain is fine as long as it is nuclear power?