MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mr_mitm | 2025-08-27 19:00:28+00:00
This is the first time I heard quanta magazine being accused of click bait. They show no ads and don't sell anything. What would be their motivation for using click bait?

Click bait used to mean things like "five reasons you always get sick - number three will SHOCK you" or "doctors hate this one weird trick!".

The title of this article isn't click bait at all. Black holes having hair or not is almost the technical expression, as evidenced by the "no hair" theorem. Physicists are quirky like that sometimes.
by holoway | 2025-08-27 19:00:52+00:00
Right - obviously, if you need the actual code deployed to run your test, there is not much anyone can do about that. But let me tell you how you would set that up, from scratch, in System Initiative (assuming you have a working deployment at all).

I assume the use case here is 'I want to deploy the application on every pull request to net-new infrastructure, then run my test suite, and destroy the test infrastructure once the PR is merged or the code is updated'.

You would fire up the AI Agent and ask it to discover an existing deployment of the application. Probably give it a hint or the boundaries you care about (stop at the network layer, for example - you probably don't want to deploy a net new VPC, subnets, or internet gateways). Once that's done, you'll have a model of the infrastructure for your application in System Initiative.

Then you'll turn that into a repeatable template component, by either asking the AI to do it for you, or selecting the related infrastructure in our Web UI and hitting 'T'. You'll add some attributes like 'version' to the template, and plumb them through to right spot in the code we generate for you.

Then you're going to call that code from our GitHub action on every PR, setting the name and the version number from the branch and the artifact version, naming the change set after the PR as well. You'll let the action apply the change set itself, which will then create the infrastructure.

The next step will be to run your tests against the infrastructure.

On merge you'll have another GitHub action that opens a change set and deletes the infrastructure you just created, so you don't waste any cash.

Notice what I didn't tell you to do - figure out how to create new state files, build new CI/CD pipelines, or anything else. Just started from the actual truth of what you already have, used our digital twins to make a repeatable template out of it, then told the platform to do it over and over again with an external API.

Hope that helps it make sense.
by zachwills | 2025-08-27 19:01:01+00:00
I'd consider that part of the business goals, personally. I also think over time we will end up with more people doing what I talked about in the post, so the code that gets generated by those workflows will become the norm and will impact long-term direction/vision.

FWIW, the vision and direction can and should still be dictated by the human engineer. That's what engineers will be doing IMO vs. coding.
by tchalla | 2025-08-27 19:01:22+00:00
German banks (and in general businesses) are amazing. They won't do anything until legally required to do so and even then will drag their feet. There has been instant bank transfers (transfers in 10 seconds) available for a while - launched in November 2017. German banks kept charging 1.5€ for this instant transfer or some didn't have them available at all. They didn't build any of these systems and yet this was their stand.

On January 9 2025, EU made it compulsory to have receipt of transfers instant and in October 2025 - sending too should be available at the same cost as the normal transfer. There's nothing stopping from implementing bot send/receive instant transfers in January 2025. Yet, some of these banks only enabled instant receipts in January and will make the sending available exactly on 8th October 2025, 1 day before the deadline. What a business mindset to have!
by db48x | 2025-08-27 19:01:26+00:00
> The so-called TDP of the Ryzen 9950X is 170W. The used heat sinks are specified to dissipate 165W, so that seems tight.

TDP numbers are completely made up. They don’t correspond to watts of heat, or of anything at all! They’re just a marketing number. You can't use them to choose the right cooling system at all.

https://gamersnexus.net/guides/3525-amd-ryzen-tdp-explained-...
by n1b0m | 2025-08-27 19:03:24+00:00
PayPal is the most important online payment service in the German market, with nearly 30% of online purchases made using the platform.

The sheer volume of PayPal and direct debit transactions in Germany magnified the impact of the outage compared to other markets.

With millions of potentially fraudulent debit requests appearing simultaneously, German banks chose to freeze all incoming PayPal direct debit payments. This was a necessary step to protect their customers from what appeared to be a massive, systemic fraud event.
by layer8 | 2025-08-27 19:03:32+00:00
For one, observers inside the event horizon can still observe each other. From the point of view of an observer falling into a black hole, nothing unusual happens when they cross the event horizon. They still observe stuff falling in with them in the same way as before (assuming a large enough black hole so that the local curvature is negligible).

If Hawking radiation is real, it might also expose information from inside the black hole, possibly solving the information paradox. In that sense, the inside of a black hole would still be “observable” from the outside in the QM sense. But since we don’t know how quantum gravity works, that is an open question.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-27 19:03:35+00:00
> Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters.

IFLScience used to be great, back when they used their full name, "I Fucking Love Science".

At some point years ago, they rebranded as "IFLScience" and became a source of clickbait and shitty articles that are often designed to be misleading. They often have headlines that don't match the body of an article. For example, I would not be surprised if they put out an article with a title like "Physicist Invents a Faster-Than-Light Drive", and in the article, it's merely a theoretical design that we can't actually produce.
by dminik | 2025-08-27 19:04:05+00:00
Both the Zig standard library as well as several third party projects do check errors like this.

I already commented on Zig compiler/stdlib code itself, but here's Tigerbeetle and Bun, the two biggest(?) Zig codebases:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atigerbeetle%2Ftigerbeetle...

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aoven-sh%2Fbun%20%22%3D%3D...
by mips_avatar | 2025-08-27 19:04:30+00:00
This would be 100x more compelling if they exposed something closer to Google Flights Explore through MCP. The real value to agents isn’t “user already knows the exact date and route, now just book it.” It’s “user is loosely considering Tokyo, doesn’t know when, so let me scan the next 3 months and surface the cheapest windows.” Agents should excel at processing more data than the user can hold in their head and then framing the best options. Releasing an MCP server is cool, but this still feels like a limited slice of what agents could actually do.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-27 19:05:00+00:00
No. The "no hair theorem" has a condition that says "after a while", but people ignore it because it's a short time. So intermediately after the object entered the black hole will have bump and will emit gravitational waves and after a while it will be a perfect sphere (if it's not rotating, or a similar round elongated shape if rotating).

As far as I can understand, it totally unrelated to Quantum Mechanics.
by jjk166 | 2025-08-27 19:05:15+00:00
> What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years?

Waiting to be rescued. We're not talking about sending one guy to mars for funsies, we're talking about one person left after an emergency. In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.

If you assume a team of 5 people with an intended stay of 6 months, 5 years of supplies is a factor of safety of 2. If you send enough supplies to keep the whole team alive till the next launch window, that would keep a single person alive for about 2 decades (ignoring potential storage lifetimes).
by Zanfa | 2025-08-27 19:05:21+00:00
> And to be fair, the problems that Facebook had when they introduced React are not common problems at all.

That’s one of my favorites. The exact bug they described during React launch presentation, that React was supposed to help fix with the unidirectional dataflow. You know the one where unread message badges were showing up inconsistently in the UI in different places. They never managed to fix that bug in the 10 years since React was announced and I eventually left Facebook for good.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-27 19:05:22+00:00
> You can't just pointer cast one thing to another in Rust, that's going to be rejected by the compiler

You can't safely do this yourself. That is, you couldn't write safe Rust which performs this operation for two arbitrary things. But Rust of course does do this, actually quite a lot, because if we're careful it's entirely safe.

That famous Quake 3 Arena "Fast inverse square root" which involves type puns? You can just write that in safe Rust and it'll work fine. You shouldn't - on any even vaguely modern hardware the CPU can do this operation faster anyway - but if you insist it's trivial to write it, just slower.

Why can you do that? Well, on all the hardware you'd realistically run Rust on the 32-bit integer types and the 32-bit floating types are the exact same size (duh), same bit order and so on. The CPU does not actually give a shit whether this 32-bit aligned and 32-bit sized value "is" an integer or a floating point number, so "transforming" f32 to u32 or u32 to f32 emits zero CPU instructions, exactly like the rather hairier looking C. So all the Rust standard library has to do is promise that this is OK which on every supported Rust platform it is. If some day they adopted some wheezing 1980s CPU where that can't work they'd have to write custom code for that platform, but so would John Carmack under the same conditions.
by miduil | 2025-08-27 19:05:26+00:00
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro in the making. I think that would then also supersede Wero?

Portugal got mbway, Austria used to have paybox, there is iDEAL, sofort.com and generally besides the local country systems with de-facto European banks you get "SEPA Instant Credit Transfer" nowadays - however IBAN is "harder" to share than lets say the phone number your friends already got.
by imiric | 2025-08-27 19:05:36+00:00
> No developer is being asked to support every distro.

You mentioned $current_debian above. Why Debian, and not Arch, Fedora, or NixOS? Supporting individual Linux distros is a deep rabbit hole, and smaller teams simply don't have the resources to do that.

> You just need to provide the code and the requirement list.

That's not true. Even offering a requirements list and installation instructions for a distro implies support for that distro. If something doesn't work properly, the developer can expect a flood of support requests.

> `apt install` is way easier than the alternative and more secure.

That's debatable. An OCI image, AppImage, or even Snap or Flatpak package is inherently more secure than a system package, and arguably easier to deploy and upgrade.

> There's no burden because no one does it.

Not true. Search Debian packages and you'll find thousands of language-specific libraries. Many other distros do the same thing. NixOS is probably the most egregious example, since it literally tries to take over every other package manager.

> You have dev version for libraries because you need them to build the software that is being packaged.

Eh, are the dev versions useful for end users or distro maintainers? If distro maintainers need to build the software that's being packaged, they can use whatever package manager is appropriate for the language stack. An end user shouldn't need to build the packages themselves, unless it's a build-from-source distro, which most aren't.

My point is that there's no reason for these dependency trees to also be tracked by distro package managers. Every modern language has their own way of managing dependencies, and distros should stay out of it. The only responsibility distro package managers should have is managing runtime dependencies for binary packages.
by pornel | 2025-08-27 19:06:09+00:00
Borrowing isn't for mutability, but for memory management and limiting data access to a static scope. It just happens that there's an easy syntax for borrowing as shared or exclusive at the same time.

Owned objects are exclusively owned by default, but wrapping them in Rc/Arc makes them shared too.

Shared mutable state is the root of all evil. FP languages solve it by banning mutation, but Rust can flip between banning mutation or banning sharing. Mutable objects that aren't shared can't cause unexpected side effects (at least not any more than Rust's shared references).
by bhouston | 2025-08-27 19:06:23+00:00
> Yeah that'd be a very easy 1A case.

The Trump admin was very creative when it came to Harvard and figured out many different pressure points to push all at once. Don't expect it to be too simple. The guys running this have thought about avoiding the easy dismissal: https://www.ortecfinance.com/en/about-ortec-finance/news-and...

Just look at how the recent flag burning EO was worded in order to get around 1A concerns.
by dang | 2025-08-27 19:06:34+00:00
It seems to me that you're repeating the dynamic I just described, which is that you feel like your side is getting treated worse and the opposing side is getting favored. I don't agree that that's the case—not at all. It's just how this cognitive bias works, and it's a powerful one - maybe the most powerful.

I think the way out of this is to agree that a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45019132 is unacceptable regardless of who the commenter wants to see killed. When you add a "but", you undermine that. There shouldn't be a "but" here.

Exactly the same standard applies to the symmetrical situation. If you (or anyone) see other comments which are that egregious, you're welcome to send us links so we can take a look.
by stouset | 2025-08-27 19:06:37+00:00
Part of the problem is that we unknowingly make a million little assumptions every day in the course of software development. Many of them are reasonable, some of them are technically unreasonable but fine in practice, and some of them are disasters waiting to happen. And it's genuinely hard to not only know which are which, but to notice even a fraction of them in the first place.

I'm sure I knew the href thing at one point. It's probably even in the documentation. But the API itself leaves a giant hole for this kind of misunderstanding, and it's almost certainly a mistake that a huge number of people have made. The more pieces of documentation we need to keep in our heads in order to avoid daily mistakes, the exponentially more likely it is we're going to make them anyway.

Good software engineering is, IMHO, about making things hard to hold the wrong way. Strong types, pure functions without side effects (when possible), immutable-by-default semantics, and other such practices can go a long way towards forming the basis of software that is hard to misuse.
by kepeko | 2025-08-27 19:07:17+00:00
The writer mentions "panic monster" which is something like deadline or fear or public embarrassment and it forces you to work. It's kind of strong external motivation.

I wonder if ADHD can be described in terms of motivation instead of in terms of attention. Like what if someone with ADHD can regulate his attention as well as somebody other but he's not motivated enough to do it. Could ADHD be described as a better than usual resistance to "panic monster"? In a class somebody might feel very stressed out about homework and about being in time (are those things "panic monsters" to him?) while somebody other feels uninterested. Somebody other is not even scared of getting reprimanded by teacher if he directs his attention to talking with friends during class. He's not scared of being late. He's not scared of getting bad grades. He's generally not easily stressed out and he does fun things while the other reads homework.

If both internal and external motivation are lacking for him he might have some troubles graduating from university. If he's expected to work without much direction or pressure(e.g. remote coder) he might have troubles getting good results in work.

This idea is surely simplistic but can you relate to this, that instead of ADHD person being more prone to divert his attention to fun things randomly he might be just feeling the external motivation in a weaker way?

I don't have ADHD even though the article made me think about it.
by WhitneyLand | 2025-08-27 19:07:40+00:00
Hey Kyle, looks very cool!

- If Bitrig can do things like let your app have editable data, or make rest api calls, etc. it would be nice to see a little more in the demo video.

- Sounds like you don’t have an expensive mic/studio for recording, but luckily this is free and can work wonders for your audio: https://podcast.adobe.com/en/enhance

Best of luck with the launch.
by dazzaji | 2025-08-27 19:07:47+00:00
Wow - I'd forgotten all about this but just realized I have posts from an entire phase of earlier professional life - topic by topic and event by event - on an old blog there. Amazingly the browser remembered my login so I was able to find the URL. It's been quite a trip down memory lane revisiting some of the posts. Not sure I need to keep any of that published but I'll at least scrape and store it somewhere for old times sake. Maybe I'll find some buried gem of an idea when I scan them during the great scrape. Or - optimistically - perhaps a future zillion-token context LLM will uncover some personal patterns that unleash deep and actionable insights. Irrespective of the measurable value, I just hate to see the old posts dissapear forever.
by NobodyNada | 2025-08-27 19:07:59+00:00
I was specifically responding to the statement "Zig and rust do not have the same scope. I honestly do not think they should be compared".

I don't know enough Zig to have a qualified opinion on the particular example (besides being very surprised it compiled). However, I thought this post from the front page the other day had more practical and thoughtful examples of this kind of thing: https://www.openmymind.net/Im-Too-Dumb-For-Zigs-New-IO-Inter...
by iandanforth | 2025-08-27 19:08:05+00:00
This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined.

There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a discussion, which they are not.

And remember even if the investigation (which is a farce) goes nowhere, allowing it to exist unchallenged means that some people are going to be harassed and intimidated. But, that too is the point, fear is what they want.
by bubblebeard | 2025-08-27 19:08:08+00:00
I’ve been a developer for 25 years and I both love and hate what AI is doing to our industry.

I use these tools in projects where there is no sensitive information, outside of my own code, with a full understanding that I may well be sharing my IP with unwanted processes. I do what I can to mitigate this, but I’m sure it’s not enough.

For performance I think Claude or ChatGpt are the best, but it varies depending on your use case. Best way to find out is to subscribe to a service that offers you the choice to alternate between them, to figure out which works best for you.

The company where I’m currently employed lets us use Github Copilot, even though this is a horrible idea in context of the sensitive information they deal with, and the small edge this gives their developers.

I use AI to search for information a lot of the time, and when I’m satisfied with my results I usually cross reference them against other sources. AI is great at putting you on the right track, but still not good enough to give you exactly what you needed most of the time.

As for workflow. I usually create a mental model, covering all the code I want in the way I want it. Sort of like making a map. Then I ask the coding agent to write it piece by piece, not all at once. If there is too much to do, it gets confused and the code becomes a mess.

After it completes each piece, I review it, fix potential problems and then move on to the next piece.
by bhouston | 2025-08-27 19:08:29+00:00
> Does Wikipedia take any federal funding?

As a charity they are tax exempt - that could be revoked. The US government could declare them to be a foreign influence operation and require them to register as foreign agents. They could add a requirement that everyone on Wikipedia must declare who they are before editing. They could restrict various pages from being displayed in the US. They could even block or even cease the domain if they wanted to play hardball.

Do not underestimate the levers of pressure that could be deployed here.
by prerok | 2025-08-27 19:09:33+00:00
Well, that's a good point. Why?

I think one of the reasons is that if you think it's better and see how other users are struggling with all the bs these companies are throwing at them, it's only natural that you would suggest what works for you.

There is also another reason, though, and this is more on a platform level, i.e. think globally, act locally. If more users are on Linux then companies will start to target it as a platform that requires first class support. So, then, even if payable, we would also get native Linux apps for enterprise. This would be a win.

As it stands, Steam was the big push but we need more companies to adopt this approach. Don't get me wrong, even wine was amazing, but Proton is such an easier experience that makes it all a breeze.

So, why? In the long run, it will be a better experience for all of us, Linux native users.
by delfinom | 2025-08-27 19:09:36+00:00
The problem I've been finding lately is airlines, even via searches like Google Flights will fluctuate prices hourly to daily. And I mean price changes that are nearly double sometimes for economy flights at random times (looks at Lufthansa)

I can spend my time checking over a few days to see what the game is. The LLM Agent is gonna need a cron job system....

Otoh, LLMs booking flights? Airlines are going to exploit the ever loving shit out of that to jack rates for people not paying attention by detecting LLM queries which is completely legal.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-27 19:09:40+00:00
As with any website, the HTML provides a guide to the location (URI) of resources some httpd is serving. Generally, I am not after Javascript, CSS, or other non-substantive "resources". I only want the HTML or JSON and any susbstantive resources pointed to therein

I use the Github website as I would any software mirror/repository

I'm not interested in images (mascots or other garbage) or executing code (gratuitous Javascript) when using the Github website, I'm interested in reading and downloading source code
by submeta | 2025-08-27 19:09:47+00:00
When I heared that Zed is VC backed, it was a signal to move away from it. Emacs, NeoVim will be here in fifty years from now. VC backed companies don’t have a guarantee. VCs except too much, and pressure founders to pivot if they don’t seem to fulfill the promise for 20x return. See what happened to Evernote. Or SoundCloud.