MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-08-20 00:01:52+00:00
Those activities are certainly prohibited. I don't think we don't need a guideline to say that though.

The HN guidelines don't list everything that's prohibited. To publish such a list would be to imply that everything not on the list is ok. That would be a big mistake! It would be carte blanche to the entire internet to find loopholes and wreak havoc with them.

> Sometimes the pattern is overwhelming.

The trouble is that in many cases it feels like such a pattern—and the feeling can be super convincing—yet there turns out to be no evidence for it. Perceptions are awfully unreliable about this.

We ask people not to post about these things in the threads, not to imply that actual astroturfing etc. is at all ok, but because unfounded comments about it vastly outnumber well-founded comments. Worse, they have a way of proliferating and taking over the threads.

Keep in mind that that guideline doesn't say "please don't post and then do nothing". It says "please don't post, but do email us so we can look into it". We do look into it, and on occasions when we find evidence, we act on it. There just needs to be something objective to go on, and in most cases there isn't.

The phenomenon of internet users being far too quick to jump to conclusions about astroturfing, bots, etc., is extremely well established. If there's one phenomenon we've learned about decisively over the years, that's the one. (Well, one of two.)

Btw, I've written about this a ton over the years (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I particularly remember writing these two:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 (June 2021)

They're long, but they still hold up as descriptions of these phenomena and the moderation approach we take to them.
by natrys | 2025-08-20 00:02:47+00:00
Don't really see how the string (and other usual container types) or filesystem APIs are lacking in any significant way compared to stdlibs of other scripting languages.

I also believe that buffer as an abstraction strictly makes many harder things easier, to the point I often wonder about creating a native library based on elisp buffer manipulation APIs alone that could be embedded in other runtimes instead. So the without touching buffer is a premise/constraint I don't quite understand to begin with.
by hitekker | 2025-08-20 00:03:00+00:00
You're part of the way there. Think less feature development, more architecture & governance.

A language reference is like documentation and a language specification is like a contract. If I uncover behavior in a system that isn’t documented, then I will update the documentation. But if the behavior fails to match the (formal) spec, then the system is at fault for not meeting the expectations of the contract, and the system needs to be corrected. As https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355#issuecomment-134... states:

> If you built a rocket and that rocket crashes, you wouldn't update the spec of the rocket to say "it is expected to crash after reaching 3000m altitude". But if you made a typo that says the rocket should crash after reaching 3000m altitude and somehow passed review, you wouldn't add a self detonation device into the rocket just because of this either.

In contexts like safety critical/offline environments, the consequences of unexpected behavior can be dire and hard to fix in the moment (e.g. airplanes in flight). Liability becomes a real concern, and outside parties need a "contract" to be confident certain expectations or behaviors will be met in perpetuity. The reference doesn't offer that guarantee, and has understood itself to be a best-effort technical reference, despite attempts to increase its authoritativeness into a spec https://github.com/rust-lang/reference/issues/629

My opinion is that the spec is actually more needed for people inside the language than for people outside. Like the contractual element of a language spec fulfills a constitutional, if not judicial role, in the development process. However, I've learned requires a level of integrity that Rust can no longer hope to achieve.
by Casteil | 2025-08-20 00:03:29+00:00
Came here to say as much. No proprietary 'lock-in' with Obsidian, just plain .md, and honestly (if I recall correctly - it's been years now) I felt like I struggled using Notion's 'fancier' features. It seemed like copying/pasting out of it was often problematic.

Like others are saying, though, Notion is much more geared for collaboration. I couldn't care much less about that, so here I am with Obsidian, still, years later.
by Marsymars | 2025-08-20 00:03:52+00:00
> The major identity support cost is 2FA, because people constantly lose it, and you need to design and manage an account recovery process.

Some of this is self-inflicted, e.g. a few of my banks only support 2FA via their own apps, so while I'd never lose my TOTP code, it's a hassle every time I lose my phone. (Or it breaks, is stolen, etc.)
by esseph | 2025-08-20 00:04:54+00:00
Just to add to this, a lot of those businesses in those industries are NOT in "IT", and have awful Operational Technology networks and security, yet their business as a chemical supplier, or shipping company, or finished materials producer, or even a small regional ISP is both "critical" to the country, and yet lucky to even have a handful of staff looking at "IT" or security.

SSO tax is creating a lot of barriers and problems that it doesn't even realize.

Something has to give.
by passivegains | 2025-08-20 00:05:12+00:00
This came up in some of the comments: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315... if you click the links instead of copy/pasting into your reader you get a page full of raw XML. It's not harmful or anything but it's not a great look. You can't really expect your users to just never click on your links, that's usually what links are for.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-20 00:06:25+00:00
> the token is still widely scoped and has the same scope as the PEM

What the person above you is trying to tell is you is that no, it doesn't.

The authentication flow is that the private key is used to sign an initial JWT; that gets you access to some GH API calls. From there you exchange that JWT for an access token with smaller scope, scoped only to the installation in question.

While the tool execution environment ought to have had none of the credentials, there is the possibility of only holding onto the installation access token.
by pryce | 2025-08-20 00:06:35+00:00
It's fascinating that this pattern happened the reverse direction, with a different biblical term: the word 'fool' as used in the KJV Bible translates a Jewish concept that doesn't really mean what we think of today "a person without intellectual wisdom", but at the time of writing meant more closely "a person without moral wisdom" - or perhaps without both but apparently primarily referring to the moral flaw.

I have also seen the argument that our contemporary distinction between moral and intellectual wisdom itself is something we as readers unconsciously impose on the text, with the distinction not prominently drawn in the ancient Jewish view(s).*

This means that "Fool" moved from a meaning close to "an objectionable or obnoxious person" toward "a person without intellectual wisdom" over centuries, while "jerk" apparently has gone the opposite direction within just a few recent decades.

* I'm far from an expert at this.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-20 00:07:00+00:00
I misremembered the cost for electricity; it's $0.26 not $0.28 (and that is the discounted overnight rate). Peak usage is over $0.50, but that's only 4pm-9pm in the summers.

The bill is rather maddening because there is no one place where they put the price per kWh. There is "Delivery Cost" "Generation Cost" and "Non bypassable charges" each with different values for peak/off-peak so I have to do the math myself.
by neilparikh | 2025-08-20 00:07:09+00:00
I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs. sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy.

Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.

Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].

[0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?”

[1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.
by brudgers | 2025-08-20 00:07:32+00:00
An Emacs tool to trim video most likely has a conventional Emacs API, conventional Emacs documentation, and was developed using conventional Emacs user personas. Modulo the skill of the tool’s developer, this means it won’t require a lot of unnecessary brain cycles to learn or use or automate.

It won’t require switching to a browser. It won’t require creating an account. No going to the app store. No license consent. No dangerous program warning. No turn on notifications. No unlock premium features. No an update is available. No marketing emails. No cookies.

It’s just gonna STFU and do what it says it does in a way that makes sense. And if it is good enough, it’s good enough. It won’t add bullshit to your day.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-20 00:09:28+00:00
Contra, "The First $10,000 [of Net Worth] is the Most Important":

> What’s the smallest amount of money that you would consider “life-changing”? Some might say $100,000. Others over $1 million. If you had asked me this question a few years ago, I would have told you something similar.

> But today, I’m convinced that the most life-changing amount of money is $10,000—in particular, the first $10,000.

[…]

> Why? Because getting out of Level 1 fundamentally changes how you experience life. You go from focusing on your next paycheck and dreading your next bill to enjoying your time without worry. Getting out of Level 1 frees your mind so that you can focus on other things. That first $10,000 can bring: Stability […]; Confidence […]; Momentum […]; Mental freedom.

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-first-10000-is-the-most-imp...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931836
by atombender | 2025-08-20 00:12:58+00:00
For me, a lot of it is that the "plumbing on the outside" approach of Markdown isn't nice. I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.

Maybe Obsidian appeals to a particular type of techie who uses Vim and stores all their files locally, compared to someone who isn't technical and just wants "documents in the cloud".

I should add that I dislike Notion for most things. In particular, the database support (which a lot of people here are singing praises about), tables, lack of diagramming, and the poor search.

But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage.

That's because Notion only has hierarchy. It doesn't have a sense of "cross cutting". So everyone organizes their stuff in completely different ways, and you have to deal with poorly thought-out folder hierarchies. Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool.

Lately I've been using Linear as a replacement for Notion for some things, and it's just a much better designed tool.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-20 00:13:17+00:00
So, one of the things I didn't touch on is misaligned incentives. This creates a layer of apathy that grinds everything to a halt.

Ultimately, the IT person setting up SSO is not the user of the product. "Setup SSO for X" is just another ticket in their queue. When things go wrong, not only do they want to avoid hurting their company, they don't have a strong incentive to solve that ticket right away. They just toss the ticket back to the requester and say "it doesn't work".

This is _why_ so many of these support tickets end in a call. The only reliable way to get all parties to solve the issue is by forcing them to get on a call and spend time actually thinking and working through the problem.

No level of docs is going to solve that human issue.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-20 00:14:36+00:00
I use tinydns or nsd

You can use unbound

I do not use a cache

For HTTP I use a localhost-bound TLS forward proxy that has the DNS data in memory; I gather the DNS data in bulk from various sources using various methods; there are no remote DNS queries when I make HTTP requests

Unbound is overkill for how I use DNS on the local network
by metalman | 2025-08-20 00:14:58+00:00
It's simple, when I can, insure, return, re sell or give away digital "property",that exists on an internationaly standardised format, then I might buy some. Also anything produced with public funding can not be copy righted or patented, there are oceans of private money, they can build there own private research entities and keep all the secrets they want, right. oh!, but wait!....china
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-20 00:15:25+00:00
They were cutting the tamper seal off. That is a disposable metal part that sells for a few cents. It is supposed to be removed destructively, and authorities do it all the time for inspection purposes, document the serial number of seal they removed, and tell the shipper what the new seal is. Sometimes its a lock, but most shippers don't do that since it is a hassle to get the keys to the receiver, and customs will cut your lock off. The act of sealing the container after inspection makes the owner whole.

While it is "destructive" in a very strict sense, it damages no property in any relevant way.

Any shipper anywhere on earth is well aware that their container can be opened by the authorities at any time.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-20 00:17:14+00:00
> The good news is there isn't a backup.

Recently Charlie Rose [1] interviewed Michael Wolff,[2]

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlrRr4ljLFM

who just published his fourth book on Trump, and who labelled Trump sui generis:

> Sui generis (/ˌsuːi ˈʒɛnərɪs/ SOO-ee ZHEN-ər-iss,[1] Classical Latin: [ˈsʊ.iː ˈɡɛnɛrɪs]) is a Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind" or "in a class by itself", therefore "unique".[2] It denotes an exclusion to the larger system an object is in relation to.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis

A unique personality that happened to come along at a unique time, and who which probably cannot be replicated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Rose

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wolff_(journalist)
by stock_toaster | 2025-08-20 00:17:18+00:00
Unbound unfortunately has some a pair of issues ([1][2]) that in some situations (adblocking, source address based dns selection) can make it a less than optimal match for some use-cases.

[1]: https://github.com/NLnetLabs/unbound/issues/132

[2]: https://github.com/NLnetLabs/unbound/issues/210
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-20 00:17:37+00:00
For "branch always", yes, but for "branch never", it is not necessarily the same as the "nop" in many instruction sets, because it would still have an operand of the same size and format of a branch instruction, although the operand is ignored.

(For instruction sets with fixed size instructions, the "nop" will potentially work if it has an operand which is not used for any other purpose; the SWYM instruction on MMIX is also no operation but the operand may be used for communication with debuggers or for other stuff.)
by segfault99 | 2025-08-20 00:19:19+00:00
In the late 1980s I did an electrical engineering internship in a coal-fired power station over summer vacation. The gas furnace igniters ran continuously, but how do you detect presence or absence of burner flames against semi-apocalyptic background of ignited pulverised coal dust being air-blasted into the furnace? Have a little window and photosensor pointing at the burner flame and FFT. No spectral component spike at xHz (IIRC x ~= 13? -- it's a burner flame, underlying dynamics not same as for candle wick) --> ringing alarms, flashing lights.
by andrekandre | 2025-08-20 00:19:58+00:00
> No one paper cut is the cause of death, but all of them are when you have a thousand.

this is a common failure mode of projects unfortunately, and its precisely because paper-cuts have low signal-to-noise ratio that they are hardly worked on...

ironically, sometimes its the reactions to big issues that cause paper-cuts to flourish (aka red-tape, incident mitigation, rushing to deadlines, "temporary" bug fixes piling up etc etc)
by btbuildem | 2025-08-20 00:20:29+00:00
Impressive! An entire article about semantic layers, artfully avoids ever defining what a semantic layer is.

Let me take a swipe at it: a semantic layer helps express queries and their results in terms the end-consumers will care about / prefer to reason in, instead of whatever extremely correct and efficient atrocities the database nerds came up with.

Did I get that right?
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-20 00:20:31+00:00
That caught my attention too.

A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.

Congratulations: the port is now a crime scene, its gonna take hours or days to process this. I'm going to need you to remove all containers from this shipper from the stacks for further inspection. Please stop all movement of containers. I'll need to interview all longshoremen who came in contact with this container. Please begin filling out these 17 forms to recover your inspection fee.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-20 00:21:06+00:00
Bloody numbers! I also have snags dealing with them and I have an A level in Maths.

Your discount rate at $0.26 - I assume that is for overnight usage - sounds a bit nasty. Are you able to move to another provider or are you tied to a single provider?

If the latter, then that is another discussion 8)
by Demiurge | 2025-08-20 00:21:33+00:00
Yeah, I think it's great that there are ARD formats and you can access bytes via low level s3 like protocol. This enables interesting tools like DuckDB which can abstract away some stuff, and be fastish and "serverless". However, clearly there is also some kind of marketing hype train and jargon built around it, and it seems like a concerted movement to displace some other "boring" and "uncool" products and technologies. I actually think it's great to displace proprietary services with open formats and protocols. I hope it takes out "data lakes" and co, but I'd love to keep MVC and not invent completely new terms, APIs and ORMs, for things that have been working fine, for a long time.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-20 00:21:50+00:00
If my memory serves right, the browser vendors couldn't agree on the implementation.

On the one hand, allowing any function to be eligible for TCO means that the developer won't know if the code was optimized or not. A trivial change can easily convert a fast function to one that blows the stack. Additionally, every function created- or at least every named function- would need to be analyzed, causing a performance hit for everyone, even those who never write a recursive function in their lives.

On the hand, some argued that TCO eligibility should be explicitly opt-in with some sort of keyword or annotation. If a function so annotated did not end up being a valid target for TCO, the script would not compile, similar to a syntax error. This is an even more harsh failure mode than the implicit version, but would have been easier to identify.

I vaguely recall chrome devs generally being in favor of explicit annotations, and Safari implicit. I could be completely wrong on this, and I don't think anyone was particularly enthused about the trade-offs either way.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-20 00:22:27+00:00
It's very relevant. Prevention is the best cure. One set of statistics might paint a grim picture, but a different set might be far more encouraging (of course these could have been fudged but i'm taking op at his word), if violent crime is falling people are safer even if the police are doing a worse job and that's much more important. This runs deeper then that. It's a common theme for people to complain how everything is worse now and the gradual failure of institutions. Any positive news should be highlighted and celebrated.

I'm not saying to ignore the problems, but it's important to get a better perspective.
by derefr | 2025-08-20 00:22:43+00:00
These would essentially be animals in a persistent vegetative state, so they would be a lot like humans in that same state — needing to be individually hooked up to a bunch of machines to keep them alive. Parenteral nutrition and all that.

While that type of infrastructure is certainly possible, there's no clear way to scale it like there is for cellular culturing.

And the result might be pretty disappointing even if you did it. Picture a human who spent their whole life in a coma in a hospital bed — they'd have zero muscle mass, fragile bones, etc.

However, you might be able to get around this by hooking the animal's body up to a synthetic brainstem that sends computer-controlled impulses down the spine – such that you've got e.g. a bunch of brainless salmon strapped in place in a flow tank, whose bodies are constantly being told to breathe, swim forward, open their mouths to capture food when food is released into the tank, etc.

I think that, besides the scalability challenges, the reason this approach isn't more looked into as an avenue of research, is that the ethics of cellular-cultured meat are really clear (there is nothing experiencing pain there; there aren't even nerve cells to sense or relay pain), while the ethics of brainless whole-animal cultivation are... non-obvious, to say the least.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-20 00:24:28+00:00
Obviously we have infinite things to do. But we also waste a shocking about of time on random leisure and braindead nonsense. The interesting part to me is that we obviously do 'must do' and 'should do' and even 'want to do' things before we utterly waste time.

I'm just shocked that "learn how this important object in my home works" is not somewhere on either of those 3 lists.
by yieldcrv | 2025-08-20 00:24:45+00:00
you understand it

but one thing you’re missing is that people dont know which ones will be money laundered - or attract gobs of capital for unknown reasons - and go up in price wildly. so people play at all levels depending on their risk appetite since the profits from a coin being pumped are so wild.

these things launch with a marketcap in the low thousands, and run to marketcaps in the millions and billions for tens of thousands of % gains. its what retail has always wanted from the IPO market, but instead of waiting decades for every rule to slowly change with no sign of the private sector using those rules, they have the crypto ecosystem now and its been a hit.

as far as financial market innovation goes, the liquidity pool code is pretty novel and an active area of research and competition, a candidate of something to graduate to - or intertwine with - the traditional markets
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-20 00:26:52+00:00
Great point.

The technique of currying method parameters such that the last one is the input to the operation also makes chaining Kleislis[0] quite nice, albeit using a bind operator (such as `>>=`) instead of the Thrush combinator operator (`|>`).

0 - https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/12/23/kleisli-categories/