MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-08-27 15:04:30+00:00
My take is less "the mindless hordes crave darkness and ennui" and more "the owner class is squeezing the working classes harder than ever, and so those people optimize things to be lower cognitive overhead or less effort, that they otherwise would like to do the slower but more fulfilling way, in an attempt to eke out any semblance of freedom or free time."

Being able to just "get out of the house" implies you're not crushed by just the facts of trying to exist. I'm glad, for your sake, that you don't understand why. But don't mistake your own lack of understanding for there not being a root cause that's not just writing off most people as inherently seeking out isolation.
by RajT88 | 2025-08-27 15:04:55+00:00
I see two things which may have an impact:

1. Conferences require travel budget, which in tech companies (from what I hear) is being repurposed to build out AI capacity. Really, everything is being squeezed like this it seems.

2. A lot of folks only go to cons to network - which also means finding better jobs. There might be some connection between cons and turnover.
by octernion | 2025-08-27 15:04:57+00:00
as a threads user since the beginning and a big fan of the platform, my answer is strongly "no."

which is my favorite reason to be there and i hope it doesn't change.

it's full of instagram and facebook users, which to use the common parlance, are all "normies." it's full of normal people have normal opinions in small spaces. there's very little viral posts or bits or memes that are carried outwards.

that being said dril started posting again there recently as have some other bigger ex weird twitter people so who knows.
by foxyv | 2025-08-27 15:05:39+00:00
This is a very "Don't do this" kind of situation but you can force the computer to switch to a different law by pulling circuit breakers for certain instruments. Typically though it will happen automatically when the computer detects sensor failures.

Changing the law of the aircraft is something you REALLY do not want to do. It's a "The Airplane broke real bad, do that pilot thing!" situation. Especially on a fighter jet with relaxed stability.

https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=748133

Some fighters have an "EFCS" switch which will switch laws. This can be used during "I'm going to fly into the ground" or "I'm losing this dogfight" situations. Typically this means you are going to be scrapping the airframe soon one way or another.
by stetrain | 2025-08-27 15:05:43+00:00
I don't think "plan an explosion" is quite right.

They planned a test that would subject various components to stress levels outside of the normal mission profile. The various specific failures that resulted from that may be within expectations but not necessarily planned.

In engineering you want to know that a design will not just succeed at its rated limit, but have some margin percentage of safety above that. To measure that margin often involves destructive tests.

SpaceX's development methods differ a bit from more traditional rocket development by performing some of these potentially destructive tests with full-scale articles in real flight scenarios as part of an iterative process.
by dpkirchner | 2025-08-27 15:06:14+00:00
> But after the pandemic, the release schedules slowed dramatically to once every 3 years, and the new features weren’t really groundbreaking, not requiring deep education to keep up.

This really seems to be the clincher here -- COVID surely contributed, but "post"-COVID if there's not much to talk about, why make the trip?

I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID. Was there interest from people outside the regulars? Were people truly excited to learn about SQL technologies?
by reactordev | 2025-08-27 15:06:25+00:00
I’m more worried about the young generation taking LLM as fact. Or thinking they are talking to an expert in the field. When an expert will say “Let’s find out!”.

They weren’t taught to think, they were taught to ask.

Taught that there’s only “one way” to live. “One way” to a good paying job. “One way” to go to college. When that’s a lie they tell you so that you conform, pay tuition, or pay restitution.

There’s pilots that operate all over the world. Not everything is FAA approved. Not everything is by the book unless you fly commercial.
Show HN: Wuchale: Protobuf-like internationalization from plain code
by K1DV5 | 2025-08-27 15:06:59+00:00
If you, like me, are put off by the huge effort required to add i18n to your web app (Svelte/React/SolidJS), let alone make it performant, then this is for you. I worked on this exact issue over the summer. Where it mainly differs is two things:

1. It lets you keep your code as-is: <p>Hello</p> stays like that.

2. It adds almost zero bundle overhead by just putting the messages in arrays: ['Hello']. Accessed by indices, like Protobuf, no keys, and no function-for-each-message.

Bonus: it can optionally auto-translate with Gemini + HMR in different languages during dev!

Feedback always welcome!
by webdevver | 2025-08-27 15:07:05+00:00
Losers aren't talked about, they just lose.

The pitchfork crowd is going to be out to get the AI innovators, one way or another. There's no amount of 'safety training' that will exonerate them. Gemini got burned, now its OpenAIs turn.

So the calculus is very simple: Do the absolute minimum that's required, and ship it. Sam is proving himself very capable, very rational. OpenAI could scarce wish for a more politically savvy, more brutally rational captain to steer the ship into these uncharted waters.

Sometimes, fortune punishes the brave. But it is ruthless to idlers.
by billy99k | 2025-08-27 15:07:12+00:00
"punish your enemies, and then they can no longer be trusted when they say negative things about you."

This was done to the Republicans for 4 years. I suppose he's just using the same strategy?

NPR wouldn't report on things that would actually hurt the Biden administration, like the laptop, so why should I believe them now? I haven't trusted them for years...the fact that my tax dollars aren't paying for it anymore is only a bonus.

This is why they can't be trusted: Non-biased reporting will report bad things about a politician they support, even if it helps the person they don't support.

In addition to this, the actual article is a nothingburger. They moved secure information from one non-Internet connected server to another. If this is the standard for security reporting, the violations found during the 2020 election should have been front-page news for weeks...but they were strangely silent..............
by genshii | 2025-08-27 15:07:17+00:00
I thought about doing exactly what you suggested, where a query could access deeper properties with a syntax like "model.cost", but ultimately decided against it because I didn't like the complexity that would necessitate.

As for arrays, I usually opt for joining the string and then doing an "includes" query. e.g. ["sm", "md", "lg"] -> "sm,md,lg" and then you could write a query like "size *= md". Obviously this approach has its disadvantages though.

I'm definitely open to rethinking both of these if that's a common enough want/need.
by bzzzt | 2025-08-27 15:07:25+00:00
It's not as expensive as it looks, Starship plus booster costs around 100 million. A Saturn V Apollo mission cost 185 million in 1969 which, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Cost, would now be a bit less than a billion dollars.

Also, SpaceX is not building rockets, they are building a rocket factory. If they succeed they will have lowered the cost of putting stuff into space by an order of magnitude. The potential rewards are huge.
by BrentOzar | 2025-08-27 15:07:26+00:00
> I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID.

Large SQLSaturday events used to regularly get 300-400 attendees, and a good 10-20% of them were new to the field. I would regularly do a show-of-hands in my session asking how many of them were attending a SQL Saturday for the first time, and it wasn't unusual to see half the hands go up.

People learn SQL every day, believe it or not.
by imtringued | 2025-08-27 15:07:47+00:00
It reminds me of gray market capital investments. They are actually quite regulated, and the contracts are only valid if the investor is fully aware of the risks associated with the investment.

In practice the providers sprinkle a handful of warning messages, akin to the California cancer label and call it a day.

Of course this leaves judges unconvinced and the contract will be redeclared as a loan, which means that the provider was illegally operating as a bank without a banking license, which is a much more serious violation than scamming someone out of $5000.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-27 15:07:57+00:00
> There are some builders of AI on BlueSky but far fewer. It's mostly the other sciences that have migrated, because X actively suppressed that type of content on X. Its not uncommon for a Bluesky scientist to have 10x the engagement on Bluesky with a tiny fraction of the followers.

I’ve seen similar patterns with some technical subcommunities on Mastodon. Low follower numbers but vastly higher engagement and overall better signal to noise ratio in the replies.

Maybe instead of there being one big platform, communities will settle into different ones.
by juliansimioni | 2025-08-27 15:08:04+00:00
In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm.

At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-COVID was not exactly easy, it was doable and familiar.

But now, 5 years after COVID, all the longstanding meetups are long enough gone that people nearly have to start from scratch. It's starting to happen, but is a huge uphill battle. For the most part, I suspect it will be a new generation of organizers, but they'll be learning all the same lessons again, in a much less interesting and more hostile tech environment.
by close04 | 2025-08-27 15:08:18+00:00
> It's a pity

If there's a game that all of a sudden makes people enjoy it that much that they'd spend $30k on it as the rule not the exception, I'll be very worried that those people will retreat in the game from real life. It would go way beyond "I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game".

$30.000 is a lot of money anywhere in the world so it takes a lot to make a balanced person dish this kind of money for a game. Most of the world's population doesn't have $30k as their entire wealth.
by gchadwick | 2025-08-27 15:08:34+00:00
If either of those accidentally triggered in the air would anything catostrophic happen? Auto breaks I guess have no effect in the air as they break the wheels? Thrust reverse unlock sounds like it allows thrust reversers but the pilot would still have to manually activate them?

Someone else was talking about a WoW (weight on wheels) sensor that locks the landing gear down with no manual override but again doesn't sound like a catastrophic thing to accidentally trigger in air (indeed this particular aircraft had a landing gear that was stuck so a faulty WoW sensor wouldn't have made the problem worse).

This particular mode switch thing sounds like it does something to the flight control that immediately causes catastrophe if turns out you're still in the air.
by summermusic | 2025-08-27 15:08:45+00:00
On the note of artists, I always wondered why so many artists don't use a proper gallery/portfolio in addition to social media. This could be a general art-sharing platform, one of the many niche- or fandom-specific gallery sites, or their own website. Get the audience and reach through social media, but link back to a portfolio with the originals for those who care.
by stetrain | 2025-08-27 15:08:45+00:00
> "Why didn't just get it right on their first test", really? People can't even get a regex right the first time.

The comment you replied to didn't say that. And this isn't the first test.

I think their comment was reasonable. It was a successful mission that met the stated objectives and demonstrated progress. But it wasn't perfect, and there is definitely more progress to be made for Starship to be a reliable operational launch system.
by api | 2025-08-27 15:09:08+00:00
There's a whole niche in cryptography called verifiable delay functions (VDFs) if you want a big rabbit hole to go down.

The idea is that these are unavoidably slow and preferably non-parallelizable to compute one way, but fast or near instantaneous to verify the result. Examples include the Weslowski VDFs based on similar math to RSA, MIMC, and the use of zero knowledge proofs to provide proof of slow computations.
by grapesodaaaaa | 2025-08-27 15:09:22+00:00
My personal estimates are similar. For anyone that followed Falcon 9 development (from the first Falcon 1 launches), it’s really similar. I remember boom after boom until one day they cracked the problem and reusable boosters became the status quo.

I got tingles when the first booster landed on the drone ship, because I knew access to space had just changed in a fundamental way.
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-27 15:09:24+00:00
"It's fine if it takes longer, not so much if it costs way, way more, especially if such a huge rocket has limited applications."

Taking longer at lower cost is a great trade-off for Starship but wasn't for Saturn V. The main driver for Saturn V was the space race against the Soviet Union. Economic interests played a very small role. It was all about being first and compensating for the Sputnik shock.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-27 15:09:40+00:00
Cool. People who want gradual typing can use those and leave Ruby alone.

> I don't do Ruby

So why have an opinion?

Languages I use: Ruby, C++, Odin, R. I'm not about to to around telling Rust, Python or Typescript people they're doing their languages wrong, even if there's things I hate about those languages. I just don't use them.
by rimunroe | 2025-08-27 15:09:50+00:00
> 90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another.

I hear this from people extolling the virtue of AI a lot, but I have a very hard time believing it. I certainly wouldn't describe 90% of my coding work as boilerplate or API glue. If you're dealing with that volume of boilerplate/glue, isn't it incumbent upon you to try and find a way to remove that? Certainly sometimes it isn't feasible, but that seems like the exception encountered by people working on giant codebases with a very large number of contributors.

I don't think the work I do is innovative or even novel, but it is nuanced in a way I've seen Claude struggle with.
by sumtechguy | 2025-08-27 15:09:54+00:00
One guy I know had one of those UFO pics. When I saw it I knew instantly it was an iridium flare. I knew it because I was dead set on seeing a good one with several apps on my phone to track them. I showed him exactly where he was standing on a map, the time of day, and which satellite it was and when he could see it again by time/date/location. He had none of that. He became totally mad at me. I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-27 15:09:54+00:00
I had to download STP for a specific case I don't even remember. Ever since, I get frequent OS Update notifications with new STP versions. Updates without a fully system which means no rebooting necessary. About as easy any other software typically does it, only this is using the OS' upgrade so it does make it those extra steps instead of clicking the update->relaunch button
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-27 15:10:11+00:00
Ah yes, the whole lawsuit where Trumps legal team argued that he in fact did submit a slate of fraudlent electors, but argued that he had the right to do so because he was immune from legal prosecution, is totally false, despite being all documented in publicly available court proceedings.

Also this https://www.project2025.observer/en

So please understand that when you claim that these things are false, it is absolutely ok for people to assume you are mentally ill. Because you chose to live in a world inside your head instead of actual reality.
by diego_moita | 2025-08-27 15:10:14+00:00
Do you know the reasons why people (including you) don't want in-office jobs? Now multiply these reasons by 10.

Instead of 1 hour commute, have an airplane travel or a couple hours drive. Instead of hours in a cubicle, have an hotel. And now add more expenses and crappy food.

Sure, the "social interactions" in a pub might be more pleasant than the "water-cooler side chat" but they won't be much more productive.

Socializing is overrated.
by vampiriostudio | 2025-08-27 15:10:18+00:00
Dear Y Combinator Team,

My name is Gabriel, I am a developer from Argentina, and I would love to share with your community a project I have been passionately working on for several years: Vampirio Code.

Vampirio Code is an open-source code editor and lightweight IDE designed to make programming faster and more accessible. It supports syntax highlighting and compilation for multiple languages (C#, C++, JavaScript, Java, HTML, PHP, CMake) and integrates with compilers like MSVC, GNU g++, Clang, Emscripten, Node.js, and XAMPP. My goal was to create something as lightweight as Notepad++ but powerful enough to compile and build programs instantly.

The project is completely free and open source:

Website: https://vampiriostudio.com/vampirio_code

GitHub: https://github.com/leirbag4/VampirioCode

DEV article: https://dev.to/vampiriostudio/my-first-open-source-program-v...

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/vampirio-code

What makes this personal for me is not only the technology, but the journey: I started this project because I needed a fast way to test code while studying and working, and over time it grew into something much bigger. However, despite years of effort, very few people have discovered it. To be honest, that has been discouraging—but I still believe it could truly help developers, students, and enthusiasts.

I would be honored if the Y Combinator community could take a look at Vampirio Code. Even if just a handful of people find it useful, it would make all the difference to me.

Thank you very much for your time, and for the inspiration you bring to developers and makers all around the world.

With appreciation, Gabriel Creator of Vampirio Code
by DrBazza | 2025-08-27 15:10:56+00:00
Whenever we talk about space flight, this movie quote comes to mind: "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder."

Starship has considerably fewer moving parts. And googling 'evolution of raptor engines' gives you some pretty stark images on how simpler things look, in principle.
by abuob | 2025-08-27 15:11:01+00:00
Shameless self-plug and probably not what you're looking for, but anyway: I've created https://github.com/abuob/yanice for that sort of monorepo-size; too many applications/libraries to be able to always run full builds, but still not google-scale or similar.

It ultimately started as a small project because I got fed up with NX' antics a few years back (I think since then they improved quite a lot though), I don't need caching, I don't need their cloud, I don't need their highly opinionated approach on how to structure a monorepository; all I needed was decent change-detection to detect which project changed between the working-tree and a given commit. I've now since added support to enforce module-boundaries as it's definitely a must on a monorepo.

In case anyone wants to try it out - would certainly appreciate feedback!
by HelloNurse | 2025-08-27 15:11:26+00:00
But what ground handling equipment? Does the hydraulic fluid need to be replaced after normal usage? Any intervention is an opportunity for mishaps, failure and sabotage. I'd expect the unlimited F-35 budget to come up with some formula that resists fire, cold, heat and pressure and doesn't need refills and/or with water detectors and other safety-critical chemical sensors in the hydraulic system.
by avidiax | 2025-08-27 15:11:40+00:00
> we can estimate whether an optimization is beneficial before implementing it. Coz simulates it by slowing down all other program parts. The part we think might be optimizable stays at the same speed it was before, but is now virtually sped up, which allows us to see whether it gives enough of a benefit to justify a perhaps lengthy optimization project.

Really interesting idea. I suppose the underlying assumption is that speeding up a function might reveal a new performance floor that is much higher than the speedup would suggest. Spending time to halve a function's time only to discover that overall processing time only decreased slightly because another function is now blocking would indeed be quite bad.

Not sure how this handles I/O, or if it is enough to simply delay the results of I/O functions to simulate decreased bandwidth or increased latency.
by hearsathought | 2025-08-27 15:11:50+00:00
It gets even weirder than that. Kushner isn't a semite. European settlers calling themselves "israelis" aren't semites. Palestinians/arabs are actual semites.

So the non-semitic peoples butchering semites are accusing people trying to protect semites ( palestinians ) of being antisemitic.

Once you learn what a semite is and who these "israeli" settlers are, you realize how silly everything is.
by animal531 | 2025-08-27 15:12:00+00:00
>During its beta period, Tailwind v4 tried shifting from sRGB to Oklch for gradient interpolation; by release, they’d decided Oklab was a safer default.

I recently implemented both, first I started with OKLab which turned out really well, the gradients you get from it are amazing and the usual color sets (analogous etc.) produce really pleasing sets.

However I quickly ran into the main problem with it, which is that fiddling with its Lightness, Chroma and Hue dials doesn't produce human understandable results. For example sometimes changing L or C induces a color shift, or for some given values changing L only gives midrange values that doesn't go up or down all the way.

I then implemented OKLCH on top of that, which was the way I assumed everyone was doing it. Just have it act as the controller for the human layer, then convert to OKLab for creating gradients etc. The article doesn't really go into it, but having OKLCH as the frontend controller fixes the LCH sliders such that they produce values that make sense to us humans, while still having the superior OKLab setup in the back.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-27 15:12:05+00:00
With all due respect to subsistence farming, I would say that digital tech is already sufficiently "bootstrapped", such that even if the world's industrial base entirely collapses, and we don't have any more chips fabricated, the next century will still be about who can best utilize computers, scrounging up discarded phones and repurposing them to (re)automate farming, manufacturing and drone warfare. Even LLM-based AIs are already entrenched, and I'd expect people to be running ollama and aider/void on solar powered laptops in their tribe's half-destroyed buildings.
by chmod775 | 2025-08-27 15:12:14+00:00
> Previously you might've been able to say "okay, but that requires the attacker to guess the specifics of my environment" - which is no longer true. An attacker can now simply instruct the LLM to exploit your environment and hope the LLM figures out how to do it on its own.

Not to toot my own horn too much, but in hindsight this seems prescient.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007074