MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agentcoops | 2025-08-27 14:39:36+00:00
Oh for sure, I'm not too stressed by it -- but I think the ship has sailed on the chance for mainstream Scala adoption. Perhaps it was always delusional, but there was a period when it really seemed like Scala had somewhat of a chance to be the Ruby replacement and become one of the main backend languages (after the Twitter rewrite to Scala, when Foursquare, Meetup and various other startups of that generation were all in on the language); then there was a generation where at least it was the defacto language for data infra. Now, I'm not even sure if many major companies are even using it for the latter case.

Mainstream adoption isn't everything and I still mostly use Scala for personal projects, but it's such a different world working in a language where the major open source projects have industry backing. The Scala community, meanwhile, seems mostly stuck starting entirely new FP frameworks every other week. Nothing against that, but I don't see that much advantage to choosing Scala over OCaml at this point (if you don't need JVM integration).

Momentum appears to be behind Rust now, of course, but I've yet to be convinced. If it had a better GPU story and could replace C/C++ entirely I'd be on board, but otherwise I want my everyday language to be a bit closer to Python/Ruby on the scale against C/C++.
by halz | 2025-08-27 14:39:46+00:00
On a whim, there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version. This random gist has a nice thread https://gist.github.com/peteristhegreat/b48da772167f86f43dec... ..and this fellow Nix wizard has the downgrade expressed in a nix config: https://github.com/Arroquw/nixos-config/commit/9d90d7d659e74...

I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-08-27 14:39:54+00:00
Indeed, UTF-8 "was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded file using only those characters is identical to an ASCII file."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
by skydhash | 2025-08-27 14:40:07+00:00
But I don’t really want your version of the application, I want the one that is aligned to my system. If some feature is really critical to the application, you can detect them at runtime and bailout (in C at least). Most developers are too aggressive on version pinning.

> Most distro package managers (except Nix and its kin) don't allow you to install multiple versions of a library

They do, but most distro only supports one or two versions in the official repos.
by alexflashdrive | 2025-08-27 14:40:46+00:00
I meant in comparison to other frontend products that can't do anything about your back-end. $200 for 2000 messages may seems a lot but it includes every tool use (even if the agent uses 100K tokens editing your code it would count as a single message), web deployment with hosting and everything.

Feel free to try it, the free tier is here for that!
by tombert | 2025-08-27 14:41:07+00:00
I eventually did get it working, but man you are luckier than I getting Nvidia to have "no issues". I had to waste an entire weekend getting an Nvidia card working [1].

I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-27 14:41:30+00:00
No. The exact opposite. It makes me hooked to it even more since now I can finally focus on designing the algorithm instead of thinking about releasing memory, converting datatypes, going to stackoverflow to grab the postgresql connection string or whatever. No more calloc/malloc or int to double or pointers. Plus most of the code generated will compile (ok, "will get interpreted" in the case of Python or whatever you see the point) so if you have designed the right algorithm, it's like 90% job done.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-27 14:42:00+00:00
Ha! I recently thought I would try it again as the cloud & office are getting really too annoying. Libreoffice is snappier than google docs/sheets in the browser, which I say like this is special, but these days with Electron it really is. And it's on my own system. I'm staying here... It's fast & works well for work and private use.
Ask HN: How to convince parents that half-hearted MS is worthless?
by shivajikobardan | 2025-08-27 14:42:02+00:00
Parents want me to do a masters degree in Nepal but I have some conditions.

They just want the certificate. I have work experience of few years. And now I am preparing for government IT job.

For them, masters degree is just a piece of paper that will improve my social status. And it is like "mission completed" type for them. A milestone for Nepali parents. But their constraint is that it should be in Information Technology/Computer Science.

I hold a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering. I have noticed a need of masters degree if I want to pursue advanced topics in computer science like "computational geometry", "advanced cryptography", "algorithmic mathematics", "high performance computing", and so on.

Otherwise to work in private sector in Nepal, masters degree is just a waste of money and time. I might only need masters degree if I succeed in entering government jobs and that too after 5+ years of experience. Specially when I would be eligible for promotion.

(Education is cheap in Nepal compared to West. It costs 2000$ for masters degree in Tribhuvan University. It is still a lot of money for Nepalese families but my parents are obviously willing to sponsor it.)

For me, masters degree is a way to broaden my vision on computer science. I do not want to do a degree for the sake of it. I want to do it full-time with it being the only thing in my life. At least at this point of time.

Since I am preparing for government IT job full time, I do not want to add extra workload.

My initial motive was to do masters in foreign Nordic countries for example.

Honestly, my inner passion is to do a PhD from decent university of USA.

But I feel too old (27). Yes, 27 might not be old but it seems like I do not have time for processing my visa(might take over one year), etc. I do not know where will I be in Nepal after I return after the completion PhD. I do not plan to work as a professor anywhere because they are not well respected and not well paid. There will not be a set career for me at that time. I will probably be 35 at the completion of my PhD. I might well be overqualified for anything in Nepal except academia.

What about marriage? Due to biological constraints of women, it is recommended for men to marry before turning 31/30. So that age gap is minimal between man and woman. It does not look nice to have a huge age gap in 21st century.
Show HN: React Web Camera – Fix <input type=file> single-photo limit
by painternishant | 2025-08-27 14:42:14+00:00
What we built

React Web Camera is a lightweight, reusable React component that allows users to capture multiple photos in one camera session, in-browser. It works across standard web apps, responsive UIs, and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)—unlocking a smoother experience than the default <input type="file" capture> element.

The problem

On mobile (and increasingly on desktops), using: <input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment"> only allows taking one picture before the camera closes. Want to add more? You have to reopen it each time.

How React Web Camera solves it

Opens the camera inline in-browser, Lets the user capture multiple photos in one go, Allows previewing captured photos, removing unwanted ones, and submitting everything in a batch, Fully client-side, respects user privacy, Supported across web, responsive UIs, and installable PWAs.
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-27 14:42:19+00:00
TLDR; essentially I define consciousness as “the inflection upon the potential of existential being.” The biotechnology of life creates a feedback loop allowing a holographic rendering of the senses. Many many many actually, most are satisfied with their “sanetizing” (pun) first perspective.

Our biotechnology has led us to our human standards of abstraction and complexity, though humans really don’t know what they’re going on about. Self discovery is a thing.

Life (all life) has an electrochemical relationship with the potential bound in the 2D crystalline lattices in our cells. The ground of the feedback with the “quantum domain”. Penrose was scorned for years for pointing out much the same thing (some parts only now testable), only I believe he too draws the wrong conclusions as to which direction the consciousness arrow points.

Essentially I’m declaring that vibrating (not swerving though they do spin) atoms (in entangled lattice by the billions) are the cradle of consciousness, and the living system networks and provides an illusion interface layer with external reality.

The “singularity” of the entangled domain allows holographic memory which is far more computationally efficient than any system of linear logic. When properly understood the qubit shall be a dead end. All quantum computing will be quantum holographic memory manipulation. That’s what our brains are doing, that is consciousness.
by damnesian | 2025-08-27 14:42:20+00:00
Don't get me wrong- this kind of post is porn for me. But I've really come full circle on the whole high fidelity concept.

When I was a tween, my parents divorced and as a sort of balm, my mom indulged my hifi and vinyl interests. I was allowed to get a decent Radio shack setup of receiver and turntable and headphones (no room for speakers). These were modest tools but a significant upgrade for me, and that simple, good system lasted me for a good long while. After I was old enough to work, I started investing in better gear, and did get to the point of having really good fidelity at my disposal. Along the way I've met some dyed-in-the-wool stereophiles. I've heard a couple of 10,000-dollar plus systems. Nothing close to a million. But once you get to a certain level the gear disappears and you're left with nothing but the music, which is of course the goal, right?

I always thought it was. I was given an assignment by my wife to assemble a modest "hands-on" system for a memory cafe program (folks who have elderly parents with dementia or alzheimers bring them, let them play with a record player and listen to some older records). Of course I took the challenge with gusto. I decided to find that same old first hand-me-down amplifier, in decent condition- if possible, because it had a rep for being built to last. I found one, the program was an success, etc.

So I brought the gear home and was thinking of selling or at the least storing the gear when I decided to play around with it a bit. there is just something really special about gear from the first decade of transistorized consumer stereo gear. This is a low-end Kenwood amp from 1970. It's sound signature is quiet, clear, but also with very slightly soft corners, a kind of rounded sound characteristic of the era. High-er fidelity than other choices but certainly not elevated hi-fi. You can guess the rest, it is now back at my adult bedside for dedicated vinyl listening in the evenings. And I love to immerse myself in its beautifully flawed reproduction.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-27 14:42:20+00:00
>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.

No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they won't get a good price or even a sale. They want good reviews from people who pay rent on time (or hell, even the people who are occasionally late but come through in the end), and they just want to be a trillion light years away from the hoarders, squatters, and apartment-destroyers.

Seen from the other side, you'd come to realize that almost all the horror stories you've heard are, at minimum, far more nuanced than you were led to believe, and that some large fraction were just fabricated entirely by people you'd never want living next door to you.

>My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. T

That's the thing though. There's this gigantic middle ground between nobility and villainy which is people just trying to get along and do what they're obligated to do, but you have leftists everywhere constantly slandering them because a German miscreant two centuries ago liked to mooch off his rich friends.

I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Only children want things for free (because they know no better), and it's what separates them from adults.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-27 14:42:24+00:00
I don't know. The core hope is that the dems can re-establish control and use that power to restructure the government to prevent totalitarianism.

If they cannot re-establish control or choose to do nothing meaningful with temporary power such that we repeat this again in 2032, then the country either completes its collapse into totalitarianism for a generation (or more) or there is a violent uprising alongside mass death. I pray that we escape this without either of those things happening, but I'm also making plans to be able to permanently leave the country if need be.
by pear01 | 2025-08-27 14:42:44+00:00
They said the same thing about the F-117 in 1999. It was shot down by a Soviet era AA. It was said once, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed". The same applies here. Comparing bombing Iran to a conflict with China is delusional, put plainly the capabilities of the aircraft have never actually been tested against a competent peer - when it actually matters.
by orochimaaru | 2025-08-27 14:42:54+00:00
Learning new technologies wasn’t the issue with the Therac. In fact as someone who has been coding and leading sw engineering teams for the past 28 yrs, I don’t like “new technologies”. When someone does this awesome complicated async state machine using a large set of brittle components alarm bells go off and I make it my life’s mission to make it as simple as it needs to be.

A lot of times that is boring meetings to discuss the simplification.

I can extend the same analogy to all the gen ai bs that’s floating around right now as well.
by 2a23de69 | 2025-08-27 14:43:01+00:00
The signal's frequency is extremely narrowband and matches the natural emission frequency of hydrogen atoms. This is the most likely frequency one might choose if aiming to have an unknown recipient guess and listen in. The signal's recorded intensity followed a bell curve typical of a fixed celestial source, because as the Earth rotated, the telescope's stationary beam swept across the signal's point of origin.
by lstodd | 2025-08-27 14:43:27+00:00
At a cost of indiscriminately imprisoning and killing people (remember Korolyov and von Braun)? Surely. he-he.

If Musk does achieve a second foothold for the humanity, then any and all objections to his methods become irrelevant. So far he does deliver. So we wait for the final result.

Also, if you don't know, we've got a war in europe for like 3.5 years already. I'm seriously curious how many times a space-x total program cost since their start in 2000s has been already sunk into that.
by agentcoops | 2025-08-27 14:43:52+00:00
I guess I haven't been an OSS maintainer in too long and might be a bit naive, but I still feel like completely incompetent "vibe-coded PRs" can't be that common... I understand why unqualified people try to spin-up X vibe-coded app that turns out to be a complete nightmare, but not why they would flood github with random PRs: there just doesn't seem to be all that much or even any incentive to push out PRs for free, especially if you more-or-less need a pro Claude subscription.
by Liquix | 2025-08-27 14:43:52+00:00
I thought "Willy Wonka-esque" was tongue in cheek, but they have a yellow brick road leading up to the front door... absolutely bizarre

Those who want to escape the office altogether, can hop on one of the company’s 600 cow-print bikes to take meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole or grab lunch in a train car.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-27 14:44:33+00:00
Some previous discussions:

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30273299

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536253

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16051428

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7085133
by ndiddy | 2025-08-27 14:44:37+00:00
Have you tried WinForms? It’s a similar workflow to Delphi except I find C# a lot nicer to work with than Pascal. WPF is also good if you need a program that’s more flexible with being resized, but you have to do your layout in XML rather than drag and drop (although you do still get live updates of what your window will look like while you’re writing the XML).
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-27 14:44:49+00:00
I don't think this solves the world but as a quickfix for this particular exploit I ran:

sudo chattr -i $HOME/.shrc

sudo chattr -i $HOME/.profile

to make them immutable. I also added:

alias unlock-shrc="sudo chattr -i $HOME/.shrc"

alias lock-shrc="sudo chattr +i $HOME/.shrc"

To my profile to make it a bit easier to lock/unlock.
by cjbarber | 2025-08-27 14:45:00+00:00
1. How sure are you that it can't? Have you tried with ChatGPT-5-Pro?

2. It's probably not very well represented in the training data. Humans don't often ask other humans to count to a million. Asking why an AI can't count to a million seems similar to asking a human why they can't easily recite the alphabet backwards (unless they've tried it before, or they really think it through ie count forwards to get each prior letter, or they use a 'tool' e.g. writing it down).
by fluoridation | 2025-08-27 14:45:07+00:00
Wikipedia:

> After a multi-phase design effort, on April 16, 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop Starship HLS and deliver it to near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) prior to arrival of the crew for use on the Artemis III mission. The delivery requires that Starship HLS be refueled in Earth orbit before boosting to the NRHO, and this refueling requires a pre-positioned propellant depot in Earth orbit that is filled by multiple (at least 14) tanker flights.

I stand by what I said: not happening. I'll believe it when I see it.

Can you imagine if to make a sightseeing trip to another city you had to stop in the middle of the highway and then make 14 round-trips with a second car to fill your first car back up? I can't imagine why someone would approve this plan, other than corruption.
by Sharlin | 2025-08-27 14:45:48+00:00
The goal of information warfare was never to make you blindly trust sources that should not be trusted. The goal is to fill your brain with conflicting information so you're not sure what or who to trust anymore.

In this post-truth era it's strangely apt that confabulation in particular happened to be a major failure mode of our shiny new AI tech. Almost too apt for it to be a mere coincidence…
by bmacho | 2025-08-27 14:46:08+00:00
All dynamically typed Ruby competitors like

Python, Javascript (via Typscript), PHP, Elixir

have embraced Gradual Typing/Type Inference.

You use typed variables/typed function signatures when it's convenient, they give you some compile-time contracts, easy documentation and probably even speed. Otherwise they don't exist. I don't do Ruby, but Gradual Types/Type Inference is a no-brainer for dynamic languages, practically no drawback, only benefits. (And popular statically typed languages such as C/C++, Java, Rust support Type Inference, or are going there too.)
by pessimizer | 2025-08-27 14:46:10+00:00
> we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system.

You're 20 years too late for this.

The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)

Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.

I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."

Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.

> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem

This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
by liamph | 2025-08-27 14:46:13+00:00
> "adjusting their level of detail according to the distance from the camera, a technique known as “billboarding”

No, billboarding is a technique in three-dimensional graphics in which a sprite is rendered perpendicular to the camera without respect to camera movement. Commonly used in early 3D racing games to display background details such as trees, people, and... billboards. It looks ok when driving normally, but the illusion fails when you stop driving and face the side of the road.

Level of detail is a separate concept.
Show HN: A math tutor that won't hallucinate answers (ChatGPT and Photomath)
by noygaryan | 2025-08-27 14:46:23+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of thinkercan. The best way to describe it is ChatGPT for reasoning + Photomath for the step-by-step solution. I built this because I wanted a tool that could understand a student's question in natural language (even word problems) like ChatGPT, but then generate a perfect, step-by-step mathematical solution like Photomath. The core problem with using LLMs alone for math is that you can't trust their process. They hallucinate steps and get the final answer wrong. My goal was to fix that. Under the hood, thinkercan uses an LLM as an intelligent interface to understand the query. But the crucial part is that it then calls a dedicated symbolic math engine to generate the entire solution path—every single step, from start to finish. This means you get a solution that is both easy to understand and mathematically sound from top to bottom. Here’s a 50-second video that shows the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI05v-Yltyc We're still in the early stages (just added calculus support), and I'm here to answer any questions. I would be grateful for any feedback on the approach and the product.
by b112 | 2025-08-27 14:46:28+00:00
Tracking services doesn't provide for a reliable init system. From my perspective, the only job for init is to control startup and shutdown of services.

Not to keep them running. Not to restart them. Not to track them.

I have logs, and monitoring software for that. I have loads of applications to do that, if I wish. But regardless of what you believe an init system is for, the reliability of it is separate from "keeping apps that are so crappy they crash, running".