MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ronsor | 2025-08-16 21:44:16+00:00
The way C3[0] handles this is fairly interesting. An function returning an optional in C3, such as:

fn int? run_operation_by_id(int id);

Would be equivalent to the following in C:

/* ABI type definitions omitted for brevity */ c3fault_t run_operation_by_id(int *return_value, int id);

[0] https://c3-lang.org
by JamesBarney | 2025-08-16 21:45:26+00:00
Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist?

Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.
by immibis | 2025-08-16 21:45:59+00:00
A more specific, but not commonly used, term is "giro transfer" (coming from an Italian word). That's a payment where the sender pushes money, as opposed to the receiver pulling it, as they do with a cheque or a card swipe. In the past you'd send a letter (which is why it was inconvenient), but nowadays you log into my online banking page, enter a destination account number, amount of money to send, and a note, and click "send", and the money is transferred somewhere between immediately and three working days depending on which system you're using. This capability is very obvious to non-Americans and I'm sure even to Americans, is an extremely obvious thing that any banking system should have...

The key difference here is that you communicate with your bank, giving them a direct instruction to send money to the recipient at their bank. With cheque or card, the recipient communicates with the recipient's bank, to forward an authorization written by you, which is sooner or later verified against your bank. Which is convenient for you, but involves more steps.
by herval | 2025-08-16 21:46:15+00:00
The same kind of environment that made VCs pour billions into Bored Apes just a few years ago enables this: sunk cost + FOMO

Early investors incentivized to pump and dump their bags, new investors still believing the dream of AI agents being worth trillions of dollars. They’re likely getting pretty terrible terms on these deals too (in particular crazy liquidation preferences), if any previous bubble serves as reference.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-16 21:46:29+00:00
> I was being sarcastic

It's best to never use sarcasm online unless it's explicitly declared as such at the time of posting. Your comment will be taken literally.

> they needed to muddy the water to give an illusion to the reader that big brother surveillance is over the top and you should never trust crypto privacy

This impression was given for Bitcoin, whereas the reverse impression was given for Monero. These are as expected.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-16 21:46:54+00:00
I mean... yeah? Tim Cook and Trump were documented buddies in the first term of his presidency. No over-the-table attacks over offshored manufacturing or outsourced services. They probably celebrated the demise of Intel over a filet mignon and Coca-Cola while discussing the merits of lower manufacturing margins.

The idea that now Trump (or anyone, for that matter) wants to bail-out American chipmaking is laughable. Intel bet wrong, and now all of America has to satisfy itself with being critically reliant on Taiwan for our highest-margin products. You don't have to blame Trump, but there's no reason any corrective action shouldn't have been done during the first term. We either let Intel drown or send them a government-issued life raft - we can't teach them to swim from underwater.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-08-16 21:46:59+00:00
People who talk about "intersectionality" really should go read the original Crenshaw paper, published in the stanford law review.

It is criticizing a legal decision where a judge found that a company that had fired all of the black women working there had not discriminated against them on the basis of their race, because it had not fired black men, nor on the basis of their sex, because it had not fired white women. Thus the judge decided that their civil rights had not been violated, and used the word "intersection" in the formal decision, that's why Crenshaw chose it.

She then extrapolates into some other situations where people are afforded less protection due to being at an "intersection" of legal categories in this way. But the way people use "intersectional" now, either in support or against, is almost completely different from what was originally meant and in fact is often exactly what she wrote the paper in criticism of.
by immibis | 2025-08-16 21:47:39+00:00
Not sure how they do it in the UK, but in the EU, for online purchases they typically give you a unique code to enter in the note field. This is picked up by an automated system and matched to your order.

It does sometimes take two business days to clear, so it's not good if your service requires fast turnaround (e.g. pizza delivery). Of course, it's always good to have another option, and perhaps even for pizza delivery you could accept it on trust with customers you have a good relationship with.

(On the software side, unlike a credit card payment, this does require that you temporally decouple ordering and billing. Besides the processing delay, a lazy user might not send the payment immediately. Two weeks seems to be a typical length of time, and of course you don't ship anything until payment is received. Treat it a bit like a cash-by-mail payment.)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-16 21:48:36+00:00
I'm not missing your point, I fully agree with you. But to say that this raises issues in a manner that is detrimental to Anthropic seems inaccurate to me. Those issues are going to come up at some point either way, whether or not you or I feel they are legitimate. Thus raising them now and setting up a narrative can be expected to benefit them.
by Animats | 2025-08-16 21:49:13+00:00
“Smooth, iterative deepening”

The emphasis on cross-language compatibility may be misplaced. You gain complexity and lose safety. If we have to do that, it would help if it were bottom-up, replacing libc, for example.

Go doesn't do cross-language calling much. Google paid people to build the foundations, the low-level libraries right. Rust tends toward many versions of the basics, most flawed.

One of the fundamental problems in computing for about two decades now has been getting programs on the same machine to efficiently talk to each other. Mostly, people have hacked on the Microsoft .DLL concept, giving them state. Object request brokers, like CORBA, never caught on. Nor did good RPC, like QNX. So people are still trying to link stuff together that doesn't really want to be linked.

Or you can do everything with sockets, even on the same machine. They're the wrong abstraction, raw byte streams, but they're available.
by Xymist | 2025-08-16 21:49:41+00:00
Seagate have an Exos M in 36TB for about £450, so 24 of those could do it. Three vdevs with one parity drive each? Call the project £13k?

Not exactly a production grade setup, but it'd do the job and you'll see fewer failures each year than in 544 10k SAS drives.
by nis0s | 2025-08-16 21:50:10+00:00
I think a corporation is as much a person as Voltron is a person.

A person’s constitute components don’t have higher-levels of consciousness, but a person does. Whereas for a corporation, the situation is reversed—the constituent components have higher-level consciousness, but the corporation does not by itself.

I agree with the premise that a corporation then is some kind of slave, or thrall, at the command a committee of wizards. So, a zombie in some sense.

Another similarity to note is that the will and nature of a corporation changes depending on its most influential constituent components, which is similar in nature to how a human person might change due to a disease or different mental state.
by saltcured | 2025-08-16 21:50:42+00:00
For the AI believer who has an axiom that AGI is around the corner to take over knowledge work, isn't that just "a small matter of robotics" to either tele-operate a physical avatar or deploy a miniaturized AI in an autonomous chassis?

I'm afraid it's really a matter of faith, in either direction, to predict whether an AI can take over the autonomous decision making and robotic systems can take over physical actions which are currently delegated to human professions. And, I think many robotic control problems are inherently solved if we have sufficient AI advancement.
by taikahessu | 2025-08-16 21:50:46+00:00
It's officially appearing in the prime spot in their web UI.

I saw it few months ago in mine. Frankly, it's actually plain, uninteresting (in the sense of what it could be, imagine controversial homophobe transvestite or a talk show of 3 weird characters ... etc), and on top of it all, for me personally, I find it distasteful, sort of tonedeaf in front of all controversy. The mildest corporate thing that passed through their PR.

I hid it from my UI after quick testing. Cringe, as someone here put it.
by pron | 2025-08-16 21:53:42+00:00
> You have to avoid abstractions and conveniences and minimizing allocations so as not to trigger the garbage collector.

That's not really how modern GCs work, and not how abstractions work when you have a good JIT. The latency impact of modern GCs is now often effectively zero (there are zero objects processed in a stop-the-world pause, and the overall CPU utilisation of the GC is a function of the ratio between the size of the resident set and the size of the heap) and a JIT can see optimisation opportunities more easily and exploit them more aggressively than an AOT compiler (thanks to speculative optimisations). The real cost is in startup/warmup time and memory overhead, as well as optimising amortised performance rather than worst-case performance. Furthermore, how much those tradeoffs actually cost can be a very different matter from what they are (e.g. 3x higher RAM footprint may translate to zero additional cost, and doing manual memory management may actually cost more), as brilliantly explored in this recent ISMM talk: https://youtu.be/mLNFVNXbw7I

> C++’s innovations in zero-cost abstractions

I think that the notion of zero-cost abstractions - i.e. the illusion of "high" [1] abstraction when reading the code with the experience of "low" abstraction when evolving it - is outdated and dates from an era (the 1980s and early '90s) when C++ believed it could be both a great high-level and great a low-level language. Since then, there's generally been a growing separation rather than unification of the two domains. The portion of software that needs to be very "elaborate" (and possibly benefit from zero-cost abstractions) and still low-level has been shrinking, and the trend, I think, is not showing any sign of reversing.

[1]: By high/low abstraction I mean the number of subroutine implementations (i.e. those that perform the same computational function) that could be done with no impact at all on the caller. High abstraction means that local changes are less likely to require changing remote code and vice-versa, and so may have an impact on maintenance/evolution costs.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-16 21:54:09+00:00
> Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38, faces felony charges of luring a child with a computer for a sex act

> He has since evidently been released from custody and returned to Israel.

That is a terrifying level of criminal impunity. If I was an Israeli citizen, I wouldn't feel very safe knowing these sorts of people are protected by the government.
Show HN: I'm creating fictional incident report on GitHub for a satirical series
by Satoshi_Durden | 2025-08-16 21:54:13+00:00
Hey HN,

Satoshi here. Thanks for checking out my post.

I'm an ex-dev who spent the last couple of decades in fintech, eventually ending up in management. I started this project as a form of catharsis after getting completely burned out by the corporate hype cycle.

What I'm "showing" you today is a GitHub repository of fictional incident reports. Each "release" is the technical artifact that accompanies an episode of a satirical animated series I'm creating called FinTrade Corp.

The idea is to ground the show in real-world technical failures. The GitHub repo is the "source of truth"—the post-mortems, the pull requests, and the bad code snippets are the real story, and the animation is the narrative that brings them to life.

I'm posting this here because I would genuinely appreciate your feedback on the artifacts themselves. Does the Root Cause Analysis feel plausible? Is the "bad code" snippet a realistic (and depressingly common) mistake? I'm trying to make this feel as authentic as possible to the developer experience.

The first case study that these artifacts are based on, "The Push to Prod," can be viewed here for context: https://youtu.be/EltUlQsFKyY

Thanks for taking a look. I appreciate ANY thoughts you have.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-16 21:54:19+00:00
The problem is that it’s more of a dictatorship now with Xi than it was after Deng. It’s not longer the best and brightest but those loyal to Xi. That’s how you got highly capable people like Li Keqiang sidelined and many others purged altogether on “corruption “ charges. A benevolent dictator can be beneficial for a country in crisis (the original Roman idea of a dictator which was a temporary position), like you could argue Deng was, but it’s not a good model for long-term governance.
by godelski | 2025-08-16 21:54:25+00:00
Median looks to be higher, though skewed, so let's say 60k? That would be $5k/mo. Not to mention that a standard job includes things your hardware and things like insurance (yeah, I know, CA not US). The donations don't just cover salary but also all operating costs.

But what's your point? That Anubis creates less value because it's made in Canada? That Xena should be paid like an entry level engineer because it's open source? That there's people who make less so be happy? (Starving kids in Africa) How would you respond if your employer made the same argument to you? Or that Xena should work two jobs because one of the above options?

I really don't understand what you're arguing.

My comparison to an entry level engineer's salary was because it is a very low bar.

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/canada

Or look at just entry level: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...

US for comparison: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
by andy99 | 2025-08-16 21:55:12+00:00
Normally (at least in the US) intelligence personnel are heavily vetted for this sort of thing, as a pretty obviously vector for blackmail etc. I wonder if the role, apparently "executive director of the Israel Cyber Directorate" did not need a real security clearance, or if it just wasn't detected?

(Also unclear why he would have been released)
Show HN: Full Stack Starter Repo Optimized
by atbeme | 2025-08-16 21:55:57+00:00
Hi everyone!

I've been loving building with AI, and over the past few years I've been leaning more and more into Typescript (and bun).

My team at inference.net is constantly trying to get more leverage out of AI and find ways to setup our codebase to be able to increase the level of correctness that our AI is able to write code at.

This starter repo is a very opinionated way to lay out a repo to lean into AI heavily.

It leverages Cloudflare Workers as a deployment target for the API (my goal is to never have to deploy an API on a AWS/Azure/GCP server ever again unless I get to a scale that absolutely requires it).

I'm also a big fan of tRPC for its type-coupling between the backend and frontend (you can also use Next App Router to get the same benefits).

Some key properties of the project:

- Its a monorepo, so everything the AI needs to see is in one place

- Very heavily leans into Taskfile (similar to Makefiles) to give the AI commands it can run to do complex tasks that give it feedback on its code (like linting/formatting/running the project/generating migrations)

- Uses strict typing to give the AI a strong feedback loop on the code it writes

- Uses the repository pattern to be able to easily swap out implementations for persistence

- Uses bun for its ease of use

- Leverages DI to allow configuration to be injected so it can easily be overridden when deploying to Cloudfalre Workers

- Has a very opinionated way to leverage markdown documents to give the AI strong context on how and when to do things

- Can be run end-to-end locally with zero external dependencies

*I'm looking for feedback.* Please don't hold back, tell me where you think it can be simpler (one area is maybe swapping out GoTrue for better-auth). And if there are patterns that you use to get more leverage and correctness out of AI, I'd love to learn about them!

Thank you for checking it out :)

- abe
by whycome | 2025-08-16 21:56:31+00:00
Drug and Copyright Enforcement Agency?

I always thought that one reason to go after marijuana was that it was something that one could easily "grow at home" -- eg, make a copy. Alcohol and hard drugs typically required a lot of equipment or expertise.

..and in a dystopian future there will be an agency to remove any unauthorized knowledge (gained from pirated sources) from ones' brain.
by skylissue | 2025-08-16 21:57:36+00:00
nHA is prohibitively expensive to produce and the most effective process that produces the smallest particles is patent-protected by Sangi, and therefore many nHA toothpaste brands only contain a fraction of the concentration used to produce the effective results reported in academic studies (1-2% instead of 10%).

If keratin toothpastes can be produced more economically they could be a better option for mass adoption. For anyone who wants to try nHA toothpaste for remineralization, I can only recommend Sangi Apagard Royal toothpaste ($$$) but it does work quite well when used as directed.
by l33tbro | 2025-08-16 21:57:39+00:00
Work is central to identity. It may seem like it is merely toil. You may even have a meaningless corporate job or be indentured. But work is the primary social mechanism that distributes status amongst communities.

A world of 99 percent of jobs being done by AGI (which there remains no convincing grounds for how this tech would ever be achieved) feels ungrounded in the reality of human experience. Dignity, rank, purpose etc are irreducible properties of a functional society, which work currently enables.

It's far more likely that we'll hit some kind of machine intelligence threshold before we see a massive social pushback. This may even be sooner than we think.
by notahacker | 2025-08-16 21:58:03+00:00
The author explicitly dismissed the idea of "greedy airlines" as not passing his "sniff test" whilst the data shows their own actions are a more frequent culprit for delays than aviation services (be they ATC shortages or congestion, which combined only account for <20% of the delays; unlikely to cause of a fourfold increase in long delays by themselves never mind be a reason for slower cruising speeds).

I doubt an economist a little less enthusiastic about the ability of markets to give people exactly what they want than Max would have missed the obvious dynamic that when airlines are competing mainly on price in a thin-margin capital-intensive industry they absolutely can capture market share (from paying customers, not just points collectors) by accepting the risk of degraded service.
by panzi | 2025-08-16 21:58:09+00:00
I meant independent of this change about monochrome icon sets in general. Like in settings dialogues the menu on the left side. I'm fastest just going by the colors before I have parsed anything else. But yes, also the same applies in the context menu -> open with. So I welcome them not replacing the original app icons with monochrome ones. At first I read the news the wrong way around.
by mhb | 2025-08-16 21:58:59+00:00
I would like to avoid China, too, and it looks like Creapure is good. From their site (https://www.creapure.com/en/how-creatine-produced):

"Production in Germany in our own production plant

Creapure® is produced in Germany in a production facility specifically designed to eliminate the risk of cross-contamination and contamination by other products. Not all creatine supplements are subject to the same strict manufacturing standards as Creapure®. Look for the Creapure® logo as a seal of quality. Renowned manufacturers of food, nutritional supplements and sports nutrition products use Creapure® and other high-quality ingredients from AlzChem to produce food supplements to be sold in stores or online."

After re-reading this, I thought maybe they had fooled me with the AlzChem reference, but AlzChem is also in Germany.

They list many brands that use their creatine. Momentous in the US is one that I've heard of before and their price is good ($30/lb (450g). Better than the alternative I've been buying.

https://www.livemomentous.com/products/creatine-monohydrate
by ericmay | 2025-08-16 21:59:21+00:00
> Because the United States from back then is completely gone now.

Aaaand Europe from then is different too? Poor argument.

> Switzerland shouldn't even be in that list and Spain and Portugal are just about able to stay afloat, a little bit ahead of Italy, Romania and Bulgaria on some dimensions and at party on others.

Please do us a favor and read the OP. I didn’t bring up Switzerland, I responded to the OP.

> No, let's not.

So don’t do it?
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-16 21:59:39+00:00
> in the construction of formal computational systems

> Basically every computational system lives and dies on its degree of formal specifiability

How much software development work would you say qualifies as "construction of formal computational systems"? I feel like I have to be thinking of something different than you because to a first approximation I think ~no software has much in the way of formal specification done on it, if any at all.

I feel like there's a bit of black-and-white thinking here as well. It's not as if you pick either "full formal specification with bonus Lean/Coq/etc." or "YOLO" - there's shades of grey in between where you can nail down different bits with more or less specificity/formality/etc. depending on feasibility/priorities/etc. Same with support for/against a formal spec - there's more nuance than "an absolute necessity" or "a waste of time".
by melonmars | 2025-08-16 22:00:35+00:00
I think it's more a case of incumbents (like Ford and Chrysler/Jeep) all getting outcompeted by new companies (Xiaomi is 15 years old), and for the American Car Industry, those incumbents are all we have! But I think there still is promise for new American car manufacturers (e.g. Slate, Telo) to be able to outcompete Chinese imports (e.g. Slate is planning on their EV being mid-20k, Xiaomi Su7 is ~30k)

https://www.slate.auto https://www.telotrucks.com/
by bobthepanda | 2025-08-16 22:02:19+00:00
There were Chinese typewriters but they were very large and a lot more annoying to use. Japan also used typewriting. They just look a lot different, with a giant cylinder of tiny keys to facilitate thousands of characters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ-SHOsbH4Y

Hangul ones were a lot smaller. I misspoke earlier; they had letter-based keyboards and mostly just did compromises on the shape of the syllabic blocks; a keyset for an initial character, a keyset for medial characters and a keyset for terminal characters. If you just assume the initial character set can be tiny to fit both the characters with and without bottom terminals, then you wind up with slightly odd-looking but perfectly serviceable typed Korean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8lfgxBj440&list=PL7HFg4f79l...