MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dllthomas | 2025-08-25 05:28:14+00:00
I was joking, although it was a gesture at a real thing. I don't know how much they don't care about success, versus caring but being deeply confused about how to reach it, versus in some sense "caring" but prioritizing other things. But regardless, retaliation against bearers of bad news is a great way to horrifically mismanage an organization, and we seem to be seeing it repeatedly from this administration, and it is alarming.
by bananaboy | 2025-08-25 05:28:42+00:00
Ah right I did know that much about then following seasons. I thought the previous poster meant different in that the characters etc and over the top-ness was different but from my understanding of reading the synopsis it’s still basically the same characters and storytelling style so I think I’ll probably have the same problem with it heh. But I do love historical stuff like this even when fictionalised so maybe I should power through it.
by lutusp | 2025-08-25 05:30:22+00:00
Don't let specialists detract from your enjoyment of Quanta-level articles. This one is well-written, makes no egregious errors, and only omits one important fact. And that fact is ...

All this talk about exponentiation, tetration and pentation have their roots in Peano arithmetic, which for reasons of logical clarity, defines precisely one function -- the "successor function":

s(n) = n+1

Using just this function, Peano defines addition, multiplication and exponentiation with great clarity. Since Peano's time, people have been making adjustments, like including zero among the counting numbers, and by extending exponentiation into tetration, pentation and a few more exotic operations fully discussed in the linked article and elsewhere.

I personally would have liked to see a more complete exposition of the logical roots of the Busy Beaver challenge, and I think the missing parts would have made the article a better read, even for non-specialists. Maybe especially for those readers.

But Quanta articles are perfectly suited to their audience, people who may be inspired to look for more depth elsewhere.
by kelnos | 2025-08-25 05:30:37+00:00
Aside from the fact that Bush signed the banking bailout bill, not Obama, it is absolutely possible and reasonable to believe that -- on the differing merits of each case -- bailing out the banks was a good (even if fraught) idea, but that bailing out Intel is foolish.

I'm not in either camp at the moment, as I don't have a deep understanding of Intel or its finances, but I'm tired of people whining about how others could possibly have a different opinion about two similar but different events, separated by nearly two decades, as if this is some sort of "gotcha!" moment. It's not. Move on.

But even if -- let's just say if -- this Intel bailout were identical to the bank bailouts in every way... priors matter! Even someone who agreed with Bush back in 2008 that the bailouts were necessary, someone who was largely in agreement with much of what Bush did during his presidential terms... that person could very much disagree with what Trump has done in the past 7 months (as well as what he did 2017-2021), and that disagreement makes it entirely reasonable to question whether or not this particular move is a good decision. That's just... entirely normal.
by refactor_master | 2025-08-25 05:30:51+00:00
My company’s use of code is a means to an end, not the goal. If we could just have all our code written in bash loops that’d be a brilliant time saver. Unfortunately, some of the code is very gnarly business-y, poorly tested, and may even have wrong assumptions about the business.

Additionally, we have multiple languages, both software and hardware products and finally there’s also the question of external stakeholders, of which there are many. So AI would need a tremendous amount of oversight for that to work.
by georgeck | 2025-08-25 05:31:00+00:00
SQLite's backward compatibility means many best practices - like WAL mode, foreign key enforcement, and sane busy timeouts - are not enabled by default.

The author's Go library, sqlitebp, automates these settings and others (NORMAL synchronous, private cache, tuned page cache, connection pool limits, automatic PRAGMA optimize, and in-memory temp storage) to make high-concurrency, reliable usage safer and easier right out of the box
by kuschku | 2025-08-25 05:31:58+00:00
There's always been both sides.

One creating a foundation of absolutely stable, reliable code, methodically learning from every mistake. This code lives for many decades to come.

The other building throwaway projects as fast as possible, with no regard to specs, constraints, reliability or even legality. They use ecery trick in the book, and even the ones that aren't yet. They've always been much faster than the first group.

Except AI now makes the second group 10× faster yet again.
by Nursie | 2025-08-25 05:32:37+00:00
> Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.

And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.

The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.

But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
by bobbiechen | 2025-08-25 05:33:41+00:00
I totally agree - I've sung in a few choirs myself but even I myself hesitate to attend choral events sometimes. It takes effort to appreciate the depth involved, even with modern choral music (think Eric Whitacre) or even gospel choir, compared to other forms of entertainment.

I also agree with the article that understanding the blend of voices is best "when you are singing in the midst of the action" rather than on a recording. But also, that means it's hard to gain familiarity with specific songs or genre-specific styles, which is another barrier to entry.
Show HN: VigyanVerse – A structured knowledge app for learning via topic cards
by manjusg | 2025-08-25 05:33:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m 19 and building VigyanVerse, a web app to explore knowledge through structured “cards.” Each card has a quick summary → deeper sections → advanced details if you want.

Early build: https://vigyanverse.netlify.app Features so far:

Browse science/tech topics in interactive cards

“Dive Deeper” for more detailed explanations

Dark/light mode, mobile-friendly UI

Track views & shares

I’d love feedback on:

What would make you come back daily?

What features are missing or worth adding?

How to make this more fun and addictive for learning?

Built solo, zero funding, just HTML/JS + Firestore + Netlify.
by smolder | 2025-08-25 05:34:31+00:00
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.

I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.

Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
by steelframe | 2025-08-25 05:35:08+00:00
This guy just went to federal prison on a 25-year sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Syonyk

https://www.idoc.idaho.gov/content/prisons/resident-client-s...

Some of his blog posts in the past several months also highlight the dismal state of prison tech, which I suppose is on-point for this thread:

https://www.sevarg.net/
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 05:35:48+00:00
I agree that this could be done as it has happened before, but I don’t think anyone would go quietly. It’s expropriation without pay or eminent domain if it’s with pay, but I would expect a Supreme Court challenge if Congress came anywhere near this, either way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_the...
by c0balt | 2025-08-25 05:35:49+00:00
> The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings.

I'm not too sure about that, for non-technical users the warnings before installing an APK on Android are very likely a good thing. There's a lot of malware out there and, similar to running a downloaded Exe on Windows, you should at least explicitly confirm it's execution.
by antognini | 2025-08-25 05:36:45+00:00
One thing that stands out to me about choral music is how much smoother it makes dissonance sound. Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular living composers of choral music and he routinely uses huge tone clusters in his works. When sung by a choir, his pieces sound dreamy and atmospheric, but if you were to play them on the piano they would be much more challenging to listen to. I have a theory that choral music tends to be sidelined by more "serious" classical music for precisely this reason.

As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVMtnaB28E

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT1PqR97urc
by 1123581321 | 2025-08-25 05:36:57+00:00
My coworker from years ago said it best. I’d had us listening to King’s College, Giovanni Gabrielli, etc. during Christmas. One day the station was switched to contemporary Christmas. My coworker said, “I’m really sorry, I tried to like it, but I’ll go insane if we have one more day of music without a beat.”
by hto2i34334324 | 2025-08-25 05:39:56+00:00
That's not the issue. The issue has always been that of knowledge and epistemology.

This is why the computer-assisted proof of the four-color theorem was such a talking point in math/cs-circles: how do you "really" know what was proven. This is slightly different from say an advisor who trains his students : you can often sketch out a proof, even though the details require quite a bit of work.
by tomhow | 2025-08-25 05:41:02+00:00
Can you just quit with this inane style of posting, littered with juvenile swipes like this:

> Crapple

> Keep coping apple fanboy

> it's not "your iCrap"

> winblows

> Clownflare

We've had to ask you to observe the guidelines before, and if anything your comments are only getting worse. HN is only a place where people want to participate because (at least some) others make an effort to keep the standards up. You seem intent on dragging HN into the gutter whilst also throwing out barbs at other community members or the community as a whole. It's not clever and it's not what HN is for. Please stop this, or we'll have to ban the account.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-25 05:41:48+00:00
For your possible interest, my own https://chrismorgan.info/atom.xsl is the most thorough Atom Feed Document stylesheet that I know of.

(I did also make an RSS version of it, https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-10-rss.xsl, including handling RSS’s stupid date format as perfectly as possible for some reason. It would actually be a useful guide for reversing that process, too…)

For maximum enthusiasm in this direction, make posts actual Atom Entry Documents. Will it benefit anyone? … well, I suppose it could be convenient for tooling to make a feed by just concatenating documents.
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-08-25 05:42:52+00:00
That’s a totally fair point — and yes, Yamato isn’t a traditional OS by any stretch. It doesn’t manage hardware or processes.

That said, “OS” here is a bit poetic — it’s more like a gentle digital environment, or a mindful space for everyday tasks.

Maybe it’s closer to a “life OS” in spirit — an interface for journaling, chatting, and reflecting, where forgetting is intentional and calmness is designed-in.

Happy to hear any naming thoughts though — it’s still evolving!
by andsoitis | 2025-08-25 05:42:58+00:00
> Mobile computing IS computing for most people. It's the only computer or internet portal they know. And two companies own it all. The passport to the modern world is owned and taxed by two trillion dollar companies.

Top smartphone brand global market share: Samsung (20%), Apple (17%), Xiaomi (14%), vivo (9%), OPPO (8%).

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smar...
by dhosek | 2025-08-25 05:46:52+00:00
I think there’s a big issue with the recording style used for choral music. It tends to be recorded with a far mic in an echoey room which gives the experience of hearing it in church, but I think close micing the individual sections would give more of a sense of being in the choir and really help make everything more distinct. I don’t know any choral music recorded this way, but I know that one of Tony Banks’ (keyboard player for Genesis) orchestral suites was recorded this way which I think worked well.
by bobbiechen | 2025-08-25 05:47:19+00:00
Unfortunately, well-behaved bots often have more stable IPs, while bad actors are happy to use residential proxies. If you ban a residential proxy IP you're likely to impact real users while the bad actor simply switches. Personally I don't think IP level network information will ever be effective without combining with other factors.

Source: stopping attacks that involve thousands of IPs at my work.
by lentil_soup | 2025-08-25 05:47:42+00:00
>> speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother.

What's the problem? They're not speaking to you and they share another language that's not English. Integration doesn't mean don't speak your mother tongue ever again. You're also taking about Europe where a different language is spoken every 100km.

Personally I find it pretty cool to hear other languages around me. Great opportunities to learn
by mathstuf | 2025-08-25 05:47:51+00:00
While I also find git-annex more elegant, its cross-platform story is weaker. Note that LFS was originally a collaboration between GitHub and Bitbucket (maybe? Some forge vendor I think). One had the implementation and the other had the name. They met at a Git conference and we have what we have today. My main gripes these days are the woefully inadequate limits GitHub has in place for larger projects. Coupled with the "must have all objects locally to satisfy an arbitrary push", any decently sized developer community will blow the limit fairly quickly.

FD: I have contributed to git-lfs.
by skinkestek | 2025-08-25 05:48:25+00:00
Unless you’re making changes, isn’t it enough to just link back to the original repo?

That said, I’ve also been in the camp that avoids AGPL-except maybe as a way to sell a commercial license while still being "open source," or just to be obnoxious. And honestly, I am still failing to see the upside in being obnoxious for its own sake.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-25 05:50:42+00:00
Yes we did, and unfortunately all of them have done design mistakes that keep to this day trying to fix.

Had Java actually been designed for where it stands today, instead for set top boxes and browser applets, retrofitting the value types, AOT compilation and low level capabilities already available in Modula-3 and Eiffel wouldn't be such an engineering feat that is already on 15 years mark.

Interestingly enough, value classes approach remind very much how expanded classes work in Eiffel.

Likewise money keeps being burned into making industry adopt a JIT compiler into CPython, which they could have been enjoying with Smalltalk and Lisp.
by jack1243star | 2025-08-25 05:50:48+00:00
Child abuse is already illegal. Law enforcement tracks down creator? Good. Court orders website owner to take down material? Good. ISP preemptively decides what to block? Bad.

CP is often used as an "I win" card in this kind of arguments, as it can stir up emotions in the general public, in favor of ever expanding scope of surveillance and censorship. We should be extra aware of this.
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-25 05:52:01+00:00
The above acts either carry no intrinsic information content and/or very few people apart of free-speech absolutists would be OK with them. They’re not evocative of the controversy at hand, and I can’t find anyone defending them.

Perhaps more appropriate:

* Instructions for making an illegal firearm

* Unpopular political opinions

* Instructions for engaging in illicit speech without detection

* Silently standing still with head bowed and hands folded in public

* Using a VPN

* Holding a sign at a protest

There are probably many more examples like the above, which would engender a more nuanced discussion.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-25 05:53:06+00:00
> combined with billing requirements

There's a certain flavor of US libertarian that complains that they should only be taxed for exactly the road-surfaces they personally use in proportion to how much they use them.

In response, I like to point out to them that their dream of "fair billing" can't occur without a nightmare of surveillance, making it easy for the government (or road-owners, and indirectly the government) to track and remember everybody's movements in excruciating detail.

Is that worth it? Perhaps a "sloppy" billing system (e.g. fuel/mileage taxes for roads) is actually an extraordinarily good deal in terms of the privacy we take for granted.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-08-25 05:53:25+00:00
I had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years.

Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US.

Long term, I think the real winners are going to be in robotics. Still an unsolved field, but Waymo proves that even a nearly 20 year slog to the finish line is viable. And robotics infrastructure may be more robust to obsolescence than the underlying compute. I find it odd so many companies are making humanoid robots though... Over engineering that reeks of bubble economics and possible fraud.
by coppsilgold | 2025-08-25 05:53:26+00:00
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want. And IPs can be shared or change regularly.

The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.

Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.

IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.
Show HN: InterceptSuite – MitM proxy that handles StartTLS upgrades
by anof-cyber | 2025-08-25 05:54:16+00:00
I built InterceptSuite to solve a problem I kept running into as a security engineer: there are virtually no good MITM proxies for non-HTTP protocols, and the few that exist completely break when protocols upgrade from plaintext to TLS.

The core technical challenge was implementing universal TLS upgrade detection. When PostgreSQL, MySQL, SMTP, or any other protocol issues a StartTLS command, most tools just give up. They'll show you the initial plaintext handshake, then nothing when TLS encryption kicks in.

InterceptSuite automatically detects when ANY protocol switches to TLS and handles the interception seamlessly. It's not just another HTTP proxy - it's designed specifically for database connections, email protocols, and desktop thick client application traffic that uses TLS or TLS upgrades.

Technical highlights: - Automatic TLS upgrade handling for any protocol, including StartTLS like SMTP, PostgreSQL, etc - Cross-platform GUI (Windows, macOS, Linux) - Real-time traffic interception and modification - Project management for security assessments

The Standard Edition is free and open source. There's also a Pro version with additional features like PCAP export and project management.

Would love feedback.
by srvo | 2025-08-25 05:54:19+00:00
Thanks for clarifying! I misspoke there, but from my standpoint (portfolio manager/equities investor) that's better.

Wafer fabs are capital intensive, complex, and need constant retooling. The bulk of the commercial value lives in the stuff you do on your whiteboard.

From a geopolitical standpoint, I'll concede there's value in having the ability to actually make the stuff without acceding to the duopoly. But I'd still rather see the capital invested in basic research which might change the capital dynamics of the industry in the intermediate to long term.
by kelseydh | 2025-08-25 05:54:36+00:00
I never understood why prisoners shouldn't at least have read-only access to the internet.

This is going to become a bigger issue as more and more people think and understand the world through Google searches and LLMs. One reason people who post bail end up with vastly better outcomes in court is because they can prepare for their cases so much better than those stuck in jail waiting for trial.
by zer00eyz | 2025-08-25 05:55:02+00:00
I have seen a few dozen Kafka installs.

I have seen one Kafka instal that was really the best tool for the job.

More than a hand full of them could have been replaced by Redis, and in the worst cases could have been a table in Postgres.

If Claude thinks it fine, remember it's only a reflection of the dumb shit it finds in its training data.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-25 05:55:29+00:00
> infamously declared zig was "a massive step back for the industry"

> [Golang] "not memory safe"

Both of these are entirely fair assessments, not "attacks". Golang really does have memory safety issues with concurrent code, and a memory-unsafe language like Zig is a step back even compared to Java/C#, let alone Rust.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-08-25 05:56:38+00:00
>There is no need to disagree on such strongly worded statements.

What's the bigoted history of those terms?

from here[0]:

"The English dramatist Philip Massinger used the phrase "black list" in his 1639 tragedy The Unnatural Combat.[2]

"After the restoration of the English monarchy brought Charles II of England to the throne in 1660, a list of regicides named those to be punished for the execution of his father.[3] The state papers of Charles II say "If any innocent soul be found in this black list, let him not be offended at me, but consider whether some mistaken principle or interest may not have misled him to vote".[4] In a 1676 history of the events leading up to the Restoration, James Heath (a supporter of Charles II) alleged that Parliament had passed an Act requiring the sale of estates, "And into this black list the Earl of Derby was now put, and other unfortunate Royalists".[5]"

Are you an enemy of Charles II? Is that what the problem is?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_te...
by refactor_master | 2025-08-25 05:56:49+00:00
This just sounds like a different way of saying "one more lane bro, trust me". Usually one doesn't "shut down" a road, but divert lanes, perform construction outside of peak hours (e.g. at night) etc.

Finally, some people may even consider the construction too much of a hassle and use the car less. Empirical studies suggest that "removing" a road does not cause productivity loss overall, since having the road in the first place induces a lot of "non-essential" demand.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-25 05:56:57+00:00
... They said, on a forum where everyone is posting and reading using connections encrypted by TLS/HTTPS.

I don't see how you've become a criminal just because you don't want somebody in the same coffee shop to see what you're posting or browsing.

Is it fine because it's not "truly" secure? How secure is so secure that it crosses the line and becomes evil?