MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2025-08-27 18:11:07+00:00
I had to explain this to my students today using XKCD #1987, that although Python is considered a universally "simple" and "easy to use" language, a lot of the complexity in that ecosystem is paid for on the backend.

With Rust, they frontload the complexity, so it's considered to be "hard to learn". But I've got to say, Rust's "complexities" have allowed me to build a taller software tower than I've ever been able to build before in any other language I've used professionally (C/C++/Java/Swift/Javascript/Python).

And that's the thing a lot of people don't get about Rust, because you can only really appreciate it once you've climbed the steep learning curve.

At this point I've gone through several risky and time-consuming (weeks) refactors of a substantial Rust codebase, and every time it's worked out I'm amazed it wasn't the kind of disaster I've experienced refactoring in other languages, where the refactor has to be abandoned because it got so hairy and everyone lost all hope and motivation.

They don't tell you about that kind of pain in the Python tutorial when they talk about how easy it is to not have to type curly braces and have dynamic types everywhere. And you don't really find that pleasure in Rust until you've built enough experience and code to have to do a substantial refactor. So I can understand why the Rust value proposition is dubious for people who are new to the language and programming in general.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1987
by lioeters | 2025-08-27 18:11:34+00:00
From: https://bun.sh/docs/install/lifecycle

> Packages on npm can define lifecycle scripts in their package.json. These scripts are arbitrary shell commands that the package manager is expected to read and execute at the appropriate time.

> But executing arbitrary scripts represents a potential security risk, so — unlike other npm clients — Bun does not execute arbitrary lifecycle scripts by default.
by smithclay | 2025-08-27 18:11:59+00:00
My favorite "malleable" example this past week that I recommend: using Gen AI to rewrite, customize, or create dotfiles* for your laptop/desktop.

Defining a bespoke system config was always something that never had the time, desire, or deep familiarity with various config formats to do. With Claude Code or ChatGPT can now generate Wezterm/tmux/neovim/etc config files and get exactly what I want not knowing a single thing about specific config file formats.

* https://dotfiles.github.io
by haolez | 2025-08-27 18:12:00+00:00
From what I remember:

- the IDE was unstable and crashed a lot

- the license was very expensive and the commercial relationship felt predatory

- new features got added all the time, while long standing bugs weren't prioritized (e.g., mobile apps support)

In the C++ variant (a combination of C++ with Delphi wrappers):

- the compiler(!!) was unstable and crashed a lot, where you had to make small irrelevant changes to your code to make it compile without crashing itself

In general:

- the overall culture around it seemed to attract developers without concern for technical debt, which maybe was a consequence of Delphi's own strengths; i.e., every Delphi project was a big ball of mud that you had to fight against
by _grilled_cheese | 2025-08-27 18:12:19+00:00
From the report: "After the second touch-and-go, all valid Weight on Wheels (WoW) sensors indicated the MA was on the ground, and the MA transitioned to the “on ground” flight control law (i.e., automated ground-operation mode causing the MA to operate as though it was on the ground when flying). However, because it was actually airborne, the MA was uncontrollable."

On projects that I've worked on we used the WOW switches as a backup and primarily used air speed to determine if the plane was on the ground or not. I'm surprised that the plane was able to enter "on ground" control law while it was still flying based only on the status of the WOW switches. It seems to me like there should be some additional checks before entering a state that makes the aircraft "uncontrollable".
Show HN: Evidence-based agents for PDF chat, academic search, and paper editing
by ieuanking | 2025-08-27 18:12:28+00:00
Hey everyone!

Ubik is great for academic research workflows, like uploading/marking up PDFs and searching scholarly databases. We built agents that can create precise annotations (notes) down to the line level, and can be referenced later when prompting agents using the @ symbol (like Cursor). Through @ sign note-referencing in prompts, agents stay grounded in source material added to the context window, minimizing hallucinations while building contextual understanding of user needs through interactive note-taking and PDF viewing in-browser.

We graduated from college right before ChatGPT was released, and we worried about AI's effects on learning, reading, and original research. We've spent the last 2 years building a platform that integrates the best parts of being human, like reading, writing, and thinking, with evidence-based AI agents.

If you think this sounds helpful, try it out, and let me know if you think this is a good tool for higher education and professional research. We are a small team of 2. A complete local app and evals coming soon <3
by CommonGuy | 2025-08-27 18:12:33+00:00
Developing GUI applications for Linux is also a huge pain. Developers not familiar with Linux need to learn so many things...

What is X11, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, d-bus, application ids, portals, etc.

Then once you have a working application, users request having it distributed as .tar.gz, snap, flatpak, you name it. Then dependencies are missing on some Linux distribution or there are random bugs with Nvidia graphics cards.

Compare that to developing for Windows, where most things "just work"
by kube-system | 2025-08-27 18:12:37+00:00
Windows Mobile was great and people loved it at the time. Most people I knew in 2007/2008 were laughing at how the iPhone was an expensive toy phone because you couldn't even install apps or use MS Exchange.

Of course, the problem for MS was that Apple (and Google) quickly closed those gaps, and they just simply had better overall products.
by burkaman | 2025-08-27 18:12:52+00:00
This is a problem across the whole planet: https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-groundwate.... One thing I learned from that article is that the California Central Valley is 28 feet lower than it was 100 years ago because of groundwater depletion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence).
by bee_rider | 2025-08-27 18:12:55+00:00
Most users who develop on Linux are not really Linux developers in the sense that we just write our own code and don’t contribute anything to the kernel, or to the userland programs that you were trying to use. The people who write the code you actually use are quite busy, so you usually just get random nobodies (myself included!) when you go online to chat about Linux. There’s some possibility that you might get help, because we happen to be using the same program, but that’s all there is to it.

If you want to know why VSCode is buggy, you will probably have to get into contact with Microsoft, I guess. I know this looks like some kind of smarmy sarcastic response, but it really is the truth; the rest of us really don’t know why they put bugs in there.
by lynndotpy | 2025-08-27 18:13:31+00:00
Pythons power is in the REPL. It's good for when you want to do something ad-hoc that's too much for Bash or a graphing calculator. It has a large enough ecosystem that you can make a PoC for basically anything in a day.

It's really, really good for <1000 LoC day projects that you won't be maintaining. (And, if you're writing entirely in the REPL, you probably won't even be saving the code in the first place.)
by skhameneh | 2025-08-27 18:13:38+00:00
In theory, that seems sound. In practice, there is very little information on efficiency details for vehicles like the CX-90 PHEV. At first glance, it seems other manufacturers are outperforming Mazda's PHEVs with standard hybrids.

There are so many questions this (the battery storage) raises regarding ROI and alternatives. I think it's great they're trying something, but I can't help but wonder if this will be another failed attempt on their track record.
by holoway | 2025-08-27 18:14:10+00:00
Nope. Terraform/OpenTofu state has several big differences.

The first is that Terraform/Tofu can drift. This is why people suffer when a change gets made outside of IaC, and the statefile no longer tracks. That's because IaC tools are by design unidirectional - change should only ever flow from the IaC to the Infrastructure. In SI, this is fine - the resource state can update, and then you can decide if it was beneficial (at which point we just update the component side of the equation, and you're done) or not (at which point you would decide what action to take to revert the change.)

The second is how it gets generated. In Terraform/Tofu, it's a side effect of the 'apply' phase - basically a compile time artifact. In System Initiative it's the heart of the system - the code you write is operating on that model, not generating that model. This makes programming it much simpler. You can change the model through our Web UI, you can change it through an API, you can change it with an AI Agent, the resource can change because the underlying cloud provider changes it, and it all just works.
by Sesse__ | 2025-08-27 18:14:13+00:00
`:not(.what) .ever` should be fairly fast, unless you have lots of `class="ever"` elements. Not ideal, but not as bad as e.g. `.ever :not(.what)` would be. `:has()` is just inherently slow if there's a significant amount of elements to search, even though browsers have some caching and tricks.

Normally, you be able to debug selector matching performance (and in general, see how much style computation costs you), so it's a bit weird if you have phantom multi-second delays.
by ssalazar | 2025-08-27 18:14:21+00:00
This blog post (and blog in general) has some detailed descriptions of different control laws, how they are activated, and how they contributed to the conditions of this particular crash: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/trial-by-fire-the-crash-...

The above post is focused on a Sukhoi jet, with some comparison to Airbus' design, but they also cover Airbus in another post: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
by zerocharge | 2025-08-27 18:15:34+00:00
I see where you're coming from. Some code may stick, and some generated code actually looks decent. There is a lot of coffee-fueled code that will never see the light of day again as well. It's just that there has been an inflation in code. Almost like the quantity has a positive quality all on its own, when that should be a negative ("Look at this 50k code app made in 1 day"). I think the next generation of code generators should be penalized for writing verbose code. Hopefully they'll ease the burden of maintaining systems instead of adding to it. My experience is that once a code base gets a certain size, agents start to lose the big picture - and often repeats themselves. Adding similar but not quite the same code. Less code will probably help here too. Still. If it works, it works. It's the next phase after the system's first steps I worry about (extending and maintaining).
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-27 18:16:15+00:00
> Great points -- thanks for contributing to the discussion.

Again, like my other comment, I'm not being snarky - but it feels weird and inauthentic to be thanked for contributing to the discussion, and sounds like you ran my comment through ChatGPT as well and asked it to post a response.

But the end result indeed sounds like more than just a trivial app, so I am genuinely impressed it's working well. (I'd love to see how long it would take another team of engineers, or another single engineer I guess, to re-create with the same functionality.)
by chneu | 2025-08-27 18:16:20+00:00
Conservatives did something kind of incredible.

I'm in the PNW so I'll use timber and logging as my example but one can find similar stories in coal and oil.

Conservatives used environmental causes as a means to distract workers. What do I mean? Back in the 70s and 80s loggers were looking to unionize and get more pay. So what happened? The spotted owl, land rights, environmentalists, etc. Now we have campaigns like Timber Unity which resulted in more gates on lands, less loggers in general(automation) and lower pay/benefits for those workers.

Now, rural Americans fly banners of campaigns that have stripped them of money. They eagerly proclaim their timber unity while they lose their jobs, acting as if they're battling this environmentalist boogieman.

While the low paid workers hit their chests and declare unity against environmentalists, their employers lower their pay, cut benefits, etc while blaming an owl.

It's mind boggling how hoodwinked they let them selves be. You can see this repeated in other industries that use environmentalists as scapegoats.
by jyunderwood | 2025-08-27 18:16:20+00:00
I was thinking the same thing. "Deactivated" is different from "deleted."

I’m not a customer, but in today’s world, I would actually prefer that when the service shuts down, all accounts and published data are destroyed. Just wiped completely. Otherwise, what are the odds that customer PII gets sold off and the service owner licenses the previously hosted posts and comments to an AI company?
by ryao | 2025-08-27 18:16:26+00:00
Not allowing a variable to implicitly refer to a member variable makes it much easier to find. If it is not declared in the function and there is no implicit dereferencing of a this pointer, the variable is global. If the variable name is commonly used and it is a member variable, it is a nightmare to hunt for the correct declaration in the codebase with cscope.
by nine_k | 2025-08-27 18:16:47+00:00
The year of Linux on desktop is not come=ing, because the year of anything on desktop is not coming, and hasn't been for maybe a decade. Every new mass-market thing runs either in the browser, or, more rarely, specifically on mobile phones. Or maybe it's a game, so it completely eclipses whatever platform experience. If not that, it's entrenched ancient desktop software, like Excel (turning 40 in a few weeks), which is also its own world.

The "desktop" itself, the underlying OS, is irrelevant to most users who are not hardcore pros, like, well, software developers.
by ryanryke | 2025-08-27 18:16:48+00:00
Essentially. I'm not sure you could call it IAC specifically, but the same ideas apply.

Regarding lock in: I don't necessarily think there is anything here that is stopping you from writing TF and importing objects. Conversely, SI is great for importing resources into their model.

So the objects are essentially modeled in type script on the back end so support for other vendors is available. It's just whether or not they are created yet. I'll let the SI folks dive into details there.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-08-27 18:17:23+00:00
> It’s not really a modded 911; it’s a completely reimagined version of the iconic German coupe. But it pulls off a trick I’m not sure I’ve seen: It makes a wild departure from Porsche’s original design, while simultaneously maintaining 911ness and, critically, still looking good. Take a look, because this is truly an impressive accomplishment of automotive design.

This is one of the most generic blobs of text I have ever read.
by bsimpson | 2025-08-27 18:17:37+00:00
Fair question.

I think he wants to be Steam. He wants to grow to be a foundational pillar of the market. He is to a certain degree with Unreal Engine, but that's split with Unity. He wants Epic to be the top player. Might be ego/power more than cash, but it's still coming from a place of greed.

So maybe he wants to use mobile as the lever to make the Epic Store relevant, and suing the first party markets is the path to do that.

Or maybe he's just used to being the richest guy in the room and doesn't like to be pushed around.

Either way, I think it's misplaced to herald him as a folk hero. I don't think he actually cares about individual freedom. He cares about whatever is good for Tim/Epic.

Epic's got its own anticompetitive bullshit. They don't let you play their games on Linux. They make excuses about Linux being a haven of cheaters, but really, they're just trying to add friction to keep people from moving to SteamOS.
by toss1 | 2025-08-27 18:17:38+00:00
Yup, I find LLMs are fantastic for surfacing all kinds of "middle of the road" information that is common and well-documented. So, for getting up to speed or extracting particular answers about a field of knowledge with which I'm unfamiliar, LLMs are wonderfully helpful. Even using later ChatGPT versions for tech support on software often works very well.

And the conversational style makes it all look like good reasoning.

But as soon as the wanders off the highways into little-used areas of knowledge (such as wiring for a CNC machine controller board instead of a software package with millions of users' forum posts), even pre-stuffing the context with heaps of specifically relevant documents rapidly reveals there is zero reasoning happening.

Similarly, the occasional excursions into completely the wrong field even with a detailed prompt show that the LLM really does not have a clue what it is 'reasoning' about. Even with thinking, multiple steps, etc., the 'stochastic parrot' moniker remains applicable — a very damn smart parrot, but still.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-27 18:17:56+00:00
To save the curious a click:

> for the best part of 900 years, the fruit was called the "open-arse" – thought to be a reference to the appearance of its own large "calyx" or bottom. The medlar's aliases abroad were hardly more flattering. In France, it was variously known as "la partie postérieure de ce quadrupede" (the posterior part of this quadruped), "cu d'singe" (monkey's bottom), "cu d'ane" (donkey's bottom), and cul de chien (dog's bottom)… you get the idea.
by aneutron | 2025-08-27 18:18:09+00:00
What this tells is the following:

1. You have absolutely no clue how the BitTorrent protocol works. 2. You have never maintained a widely used app as a single developer. 3. The extent of your use of LLMs is either academic / hobby or very narrowly focused and not integrated into a global product.

Just these points make your "suggestion" about using "LLMs to detect stuff is extremely easy" laughable at best.

The reason why people want to install their own software is to have freedom over their devices. The copyrighted content removal has a mechanism for it, called DMCA. And this is not how it works. The application does not have any content or means to circumvent any measures.
by neobrain | 2025-08-27 18:18:27+00:00
I can recommend it! I've been daily driving M1 for a few months now, it's working really well. Parent poster is raving about a potential "greatest linux laptop", but depending on your use case it's already there.

IME the Asahi support page is spot-on: There are a couple of yet-unsupported features (DP-alt mode being a big one), but any feature listed as supported will just work without hidden gotchas. I find this a big contrast to other devices, which will often "work" but have annoying little quirks here and there that are workable but can feel like a downgrade compared to Windows.
by NortySpock | 2025-08-27 18:18:30+00:00
The redundancy is pen and paper. The EMR just helps teams coordinate faster, pull up records faster, etc.

When I worked at Cerner years ago (now owned by Oracle), there were rumors that the Cerner EMR still could barely handle DST* spring forward, but could not handle DST fall back (where the 01:00 hour is repeated) -- you had do preemptively switch to pen-and-paper for the hours around the switch. I assume this was because someone back in the initial database design used local time instead of UTC for some critical patient-care timestamp fields in the database, and then had a bear of a time getting reliable times out of the database during the witching hour.

* Daylight Saving Time in the USA. And yes, everyone in the USA changes non-networked clocks twice a year because of some "brilliant idea" someone shoved through Congress in 1974.

EDIT: I wonder if Cerner finally fixed it?
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-27 18:18:37+00:00
> I tend to ramp things up pretty quickly

Unfortunately, that isn't possible in may cases. I'm currently dealing with a warranty denial of service perpetrated by a very well known appliance manufacturer, formerly reputable, some people would call it iconic, with a name that reminds of water moving in circles.

They ghost, they lie, they gaslight, they promise and never deliver. After a couple of months of said gaslighting, I'm absolutely certain that kind of behavior is trained throughout their service department, every person without exception that I get in contact with does the same maneuvers.

Without competition from Chinese manufacturers, the formerly ironic brands have devolved into a corporate dystopia. Why wouldn't they, we're trapped.
by pornel | 2025-08-27 18:19:28+00:00
To a large extent yes, but Rust adds more dimensions to the type system: ownership, shared vs exclusive access, thread safety, mutually-exclusive fields (sum types).

Ownership/borrowing clarifies whether function arguments are given only temporarily to view during the call, or whether they're given to the function to keep and use exclusively. This ensures there won't be any surprise action at distance when the data is mutated, because it's always clear who can do that. In large programs, and when using 3rd party libraries, this is incredibly useful. Compare that to that golang, which has types for slices, but the type system has no opinion on whether data can be appended to a slice or not (what happens depends on capacity at runtime), and you can't lend a slice as a temporary read-only view (without hiding it behind an abstraction that isn't a slice type any more).

Thread safety in the type system reliably catches at compile time a class of data race errors that in other languages could be nearly impossible to find and debug, or at very least would require catching at run time under a sanitizer.
by sfink | 2025-08-27 18:20:10+00:00
Ironically, this sort of thing could have the side effect of turning web page usability issues into security issues. If your web page is a pain to use, then your users will rely on insecure automation to avoid dealing with it.

I'd like to think that this would apply pressure for making things more usable, but I don't think that's how this story goes.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-27 18:20:14+00:00
Interesting that it cuts off at the M2, I guess the M3 was a massive enough shift that it did not transfer over as nicely. I certainly hope that the M3s and M4's are supported by the time Apple EOL's my M4 laptop so I can still slap Linux on it. The M4 series of Macbooks is one of the nicest laptops I've ever had the pleasure of owning and using.
by latexr | 2025-08-27 18:21:00+00:00
> I can download an APK and easily install it on my device (unless this changed since I last did this).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

> I don't care about competition, I care about the best product.

You can’t have the best product if there’s no competition.

> And if Google fails to deliver the best product, I'll switch.

You won’t if there’s nothing to switch to because due to monopolistic practices no other service was able to survive.
by momoschili | 2025-08-27 18:21:04+00:00
seemed like they were pointing out that Mazda EV offerings are bad and that they don't worry about EV initiatives. That doesn't have much to do with studying how to put older batteries to use - EVs can be bad for many reasons.

To me it seems perfectly reasonable to try to find a way to leverage depleted EV batteries for a factory - whether or not it's producing EVs or not.