MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsolva | 2025-08-22 21:05:07+00:00
Oh, that would be something! All I want is to be able to make a website with some reusable elements and simple styling and keep adding content for decades, without having to think about keeping up with upgrades, dependencies and shifting framework paradigms.

I have made a couple of simple websites using PHP to bolt on reusable elements (header, footer, navigation), just because it is the solution that probably will work for ~decades without much churn. But XSLT would be even better!
by giantrobot | 2025-08-22 21:05:15+00:00
What? XSLT in the browser is an awesome idea. It let web sites publish data unencumbered by presentation and let the client's user agent decide how to use the data. Your browser can download the XML and use a linked XSL stylesheet to display it for a graphical browser. That exact same data resource could be used instead by a program that understands the schema of the data and do some custom thing with it.

There's no need to trust some giant blob of JavaScript to convert a data document into a usable web page. Just the native XSLT engine (using the same XML processing pipeline it uses for all the other XML it encounters).

A web of XML documents could all be easily viewable by a web browser but the exact same data can be processed with other tools. There's a lot of old web API ideas being recycled (poorly) with JSON to service AI tools today. The web could have already been nicely structured data easily ingested by autonomous tools (AI or not) while at the same time being still perfectly accessible by graphical web browsers.

But no, everyone decided that because Enterprise XML Usage was icky so they needed to completely throw out XML in favor of a much shittier serialization format.
by fainpul | 2025-08-22 21:05:24+00:00
It's my understanding that mice don't live long, because slower aging didn't provide a significant evolutionary advantage (lot's of predators, mainly). Instead the rate of reproduction settled at a very high level [1]. So by that logic, engineered, non-aging mice wouldn't have much of an advantage in the wild.

[1] https://biologyinsights.com/the-mice-mating-process-and-thei...

Fascinating, really.
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-22 21:05:59+00:00
Sounds like you really like code reviews. You must be a unicorn.

I find most programmers don't like code reviews. They do it because it's required by their job and most will just click the approve button. Or I guess in a more dysfunctional org, argue about formatting or something, which should just be done automatically so that nobody has to even think about it.

What they like doing is the coding and problem solving.

And now you want to make programming into code review?

How's that gonna go?
by Ethee | 2025-08-22 21:06:02+00:00
The article clearly isn't directed at how expert programmers are 'supposed' to use AI, though we see at least one of those a day on the front page of HN now. The first paragraph makes it pretty obvious that the author is trying to convince people who have completely disregarded AI, for one reason or another, to give it another try in a more meaningful way. Telling the reader how the author configures his AI isn't going to convince those people, as they likely are already very aware of how these tools 'work' the problem is in the 'how to use them' department which has nothing to do with what MCP tool you're using.
by kixelated | 2025-08-22 21:06:35+00:00
That is all sorts of miserable. I had an initial prototype that emulated UDP over SCTP, running QUIC (without encryption) on top. The problem is that SCTP becomes the bottleneck, plus it's super complicated.

I immediately jumped ship to WebTransport when Chrome added support. But I suppose there's no other option if you need P2P support in the browser.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-22 21:06:36+00:00
I have no personal interest in whether XSLT is supported in browsers. I've never once used it as a developer, but it doesn't offend my sensibilities to keep it around. To me, finding out that XSLT may be removed from the standard was like finding out that Fortran was being removed: huh, that was in there?

But as a meta comment, I'm surprised at the number of strong emotions on either side of this. I refused to believe that so many people knew or cared that XSLT was an existing feature in browsers before this all came up. And the hyperbole behind "this destroys the open web" blow my mind. I've been writing HTML since the mid 90s, and although I've known what XSLT is all along, I've never been in the room with anyone who claimed that they used it for any reason whatsoever.

Regardless of what happens, this is not the death of the open web. I have no doubt that certain people depend on having it in browsers, but there's no way it's required by more than a tiny portion of websites. Yes, this will be inconvenient and possibly expensive for those sites, and I am sympathetic to them. But the web? It's gonna be just fine without it, should that come to pass.
by malux85 | 2025-08-22 21:07:50+00:00
^ Exactly, generative AI can /sometimes/ help at /sometimes/ the first step of high throughput structure searching for example, but if you want results that are grounded in reality, then you need to fallback to classical simulations based on the laws of physics to verify them.

I think the above answer was just a hype parrot

I would love it if generative AI could get us even further, we are severely compute limited and also testing in the lab is 20k a pop ... I am strongly incentivised for generative AI to be the answer, but as someone who works deeply in the field, the hype is real.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-22 21:08:17+00:00
Try Claude or Gemnini pro, copilot is like the dollar store steak of LLMs. Gemini will go up to 8K LOC if you really optimize the context, but that's about the limit. You can use it free in aistudio[1]

[1]https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat
by gf000 | 2025-08-22 21:08:41+00:00
At the time of Date's "reign", were there any other language with a better library? And Calendar is not a replacement for Date so it's a bit out of the picture.

Joda time is an excellent library and indeed it was basically the basis for java's time API, and.. for pretty much any modern language's time API, but given the history - Java basically always had the best time library available at the time.
by Windchaser | 2025-08-22 21:09:24+00:00
>> I read somwhere and that stuck in my brain, that maxmimal logevity for humans is estimated to be approximetly 125 years.

Oh, that's just derived from old theology.

Genesis 6:3, 'Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”'

This kinda got spread throughout the zeitgeist long ago as a "maximal lifespan", but the reality is that only 3 in 10,000 even make it to 100. There's no hard cutoff, but functionally essentially no one gets to 110.

Scientifically, there's no hard reason we couldn't increase our lifespans indefinitely, but we've got a lot of work to do before we'll be able to get a reasonable number of people up to 125.
by II2II | 2025-08-22 21:09:58+00:00
If you wait until it's so bad you have no choice, you usually lack the ability to enforce the rules.

When I'm in the position that I have to enforce rules, I usually provide an alternative and explain to people that they're not the problem. I spell out that problems arise when you have a dozen people breaking said rule, or when the people who come after them decide to push the limits even further. As long as they see the rules enforced consistently and equally, I rarely encounter any pushback. But until my employer got all of the staff to consistently enforce the rules, things were getting pretty nasty (threats towards staff, people doing stuff that would endager lives, etc.).
by lossolo | 2025-08-22 21:11:02+00:00
> seems marginal at best

Depends on the workload.

Normally you would go read() -> write() so:

1. Disk -> page cache (DMA)

2. Kernel -> user copy (read)

3. User -> kernel copy (write)

4. Kernel -> NIC (DMA)

sendfile():

1. Disk -> page cache (DMA)

No user space copies, kernel wires those pages straight to the socket

2. Kernel -> NIC (DMA)

So basically, it eliminates 1-2 memory copies along with the associated cache pollution and memory bandwidth overhead. If you are running high QPS web services where syscall and copy overheads dominate, for example CDNs/static file serving the gains can be really big. Based on my observations this can mean double digit reductions in CPU usage and up to ~2x higher throughput.
by guilhermecgs | 2025-08-22 21:11:06+00:00
Just need to polish the solution... I experienced some crashes with zoom.

I am the IDEAL user, willing to pay a lot if this works. Count on me feedbacks.

So far:

good: - initial config as good, easy and very simple to feel secure

bad: - high cpu usage - zoom asked me to restart mic - could not make sure if the software works... Google meet has not voice testing loop... Zoom has it, but it did not work for me.
by kev009 | 2025-08-22 21:11:26+00:00
Then you don't understand the memory and protection model of a modern system very well.

sendfile effectively turns your user space file server into a control plane, and moves the data plane to where the data is eliminating copies between address spaces. This can be made congruent with I/O completions (i.e. Ethernet+IP and block) and made asynchronous so the entire thing is pumping data between completion events. Watch the Netflix video the author links in the post.

There is an inverted approach where you move all this into a single user address space, i.e. DPDK, but it's the same overall concept just a different who.
by simoncion | 2025-08-22 21:11:49+00:00
There are some that would say that moving a standard that covers a large number of complicated things from a versioned standard to a "living standard" makes interoperability impossible for all but the most well-financed organizations. I agree with this assertion.

I'll also point out that (for quite a long while now) only two companies produce the major browser engines: Google and Apple. Mozilla Firefox doesn't count as an independent entity because without the funding from Google, it would have shut down long, long ago.

So, anyway. If Google wants to remove a complicated, security-compromising feature that very, very, very few people use, they should REALLY start with WebUSB.
by Mawr | 2025-08-22 21:12:02+00:00
> I can reasonably likely run a 30 years old compiled, .jar file on the latest Java version.

Great, pretty much every language ever can do the equivalent. Not what anyone is talking about.

> Java is the epitome of backwards and forward-compatible changes,

Is the number of companies stuck on Java 8 lower than 50% yet? [1]

[1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/java/
by ChrisRackauckas | 2025-08-22 21:12:20+00:00
That's kind of the whole point. Setting up a few MCPs etc. is really a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I have setup context7, Sequential Thinking, etc. and my Claude.md has a lot of details in it, but that only improves the accuracy so much. My whole point is that if the mindset is "I need this to be very accurate for it to work", then you're already putting too much effort into it. I personally have not found any of that time worth it. For any PR I had to put effort into, I could have done it quicker myself. So I learned those things and they just didn't have a payoff for my work. They did really well in some things like front end development, devops, and stuff of that sort, but if it's the normal kind of problem that is my "here's my actual hard problem of the day", i.e. something where I would need to start white boarding a new algorithm and semi-prove some numerical stability result before throwing code, the LLMs just fail to ever come up with anything new enough to get a solution.

But, slamming down commands for it on only easy problems in order to get 90% of a PR done and just finishing it yourself? That can get you 6 PRs in instead of 3, where you did the hard 3 and just looked at the transcripts for another 15, and tossed all but the 3 that looked good. Using Claude like that takes about half an hour out of your day and you get a good benefit, and that is what I am pointing to as a very useful approach.

I personally don't think any amount of MCP servers will make "Claude, find me a novel algorithmic improvement in this space and code it up" work, but hey if that works for you that's great. But reviewing and checking the proofs would likely make it not worth it for what I'm doing.
by bsder | 2025-08-22 21:12:28+00:00
The problem with traffic cameras in the US was that they became outsourced revenue enhancement rather than public safety.

The cameras would get installed at busy intersections with lots of minor infractions to collect fines on rather than unsafe intersections that had lots of bad accidents. And then, when the revenue was insufficient, they would dial down the yellow light time.

Consequently, and rightly, Americans now immediately revolt against traffic cameras whenever they appear.

(San Diego was one particularly egregious example. They installed the cameras on the busy freeway interchange lights when the super dangerous intersection that produced all the T-bone accidents was literally one traffic light up the hill. This infuriated everybody.)
by MostlyStable | 2025-08-22 21:12:49+00:00
I think it's just too different from base R, and I had spent too long in base R before tidyverse/ggplot became a thing. By the time it came around, I was already good enough to do basically all my plotting without it, and having to learn an entirely new set of syntax just annoyed me.

My reaction is much more emotional than rational.
Should I focus on B2C cloud or B2B self hosting?
by itzzurf | 2025-08-22 21:13:24+00:00
Hello all,

I am building a product that’s designed to be self hosted. My business plan was to offer a cloud hosted version for B2C. Later down the line then start offering licenses to B2B companies to self host. However as a solo founder and dev I have been weighting up my options and I’m currently at cross roads which sector I should focus on at the start. This is a side gig of mine away from my full time job with the hope it would become the main. So time is a resource for me. I am now thinking of going with the B2B approach first instead of the initial b2c approach.

Here is the pro’s and cons for both.

For context the product itself is a complex front end library which plugs into websites.

B2C Pro’s - Already have a lot of interest for it. Acquiring customers will be a lot easier. - Average price $20 a month. - Higher long term value.

Cons - Very high expenses (3rd party data costs) - I have yet to build the backend. - Backend requires significant time and effort to design and architect. - High maintenance and effort required to support - Very high competition

Estimated profit margin: 50-70%

B2B Pro’s - Product is pretty much built already. - High annual contract value (low end $10,000+ and on the higher end varies significantly depending on use case and company size) - No backend or hosting required. - No 3rd party data costs as its self hosted so the hosted has to provide their own. - Low effort to maintain and develop - Very low competition. There is only one very large player in the game that basically has a monopoly in the self hosting game for this product. They offer a free version to self host and a paid version. The paid version is extremely expensive and only a very few select companies use it. The free version is used by most companies but is limited in features. The plan would be to try and get these companies to switch to my product which is way more advanced compare to the free version, but significantly cheaper than their paid version offering. For context they also have a cloud business for B2C where majority of the revenue comes from. The self hosting business for them is a small side business which they limit as to not to actively hurt their cloud business.

Cons - No sales experience at all - I have not gauged how many companies would be interested in paying for it yet. - Difficulty in securing contracts due to no sales experience. - No legal experience to create and work out contracts. - I do not know how big the market is for this. - Lower revenue in long term due to difficulty in getting contracts.

Estimated profit margin: 99%
by narrator | 2025-08-22 21:13:51+00:00
The robust mouse rejuvenation study is ongoing. Basically they took a lot of mice and threw the kitchen sink of promising age reversing therapies at them: https://www.levf.org/projects/robust-mouse-rejuvenation-stud...

Just off the top of my head, I think the longest they ever got a mouse to live in a study was the C-60 study where they wanted to test whether it was toxic and the mouse lived almost twice their normal lifespan. This paper has been cited over 300 times, so it's not like people haven't taken notice of it. There are a few supplement companies selling c-60 olive oil too:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01429... "Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity but it almost doubles their lifespan"
by godelski | 2025-08-22 21:13:58+00:00
I actually really like this. Seems like a good way to sustain the platform. Everything is free and open source, so you can run all the services on your own if you want, but allows users to pay to outsource that work and get direct support. Sounds a lot like the Red Hat model, which has been successful. I also *absolutely love* how transparent they are about future development. It's nice to hear about what features are being prioritized and what are still in the planning phase. I wish this was more common.

I like that everything is optional. Nothing is forced on people. I know Mozilla gets these complaints a lot and while there is some validity to them it's not like this also isn't true about any other platform... Plus, most complaints are about optional things...

I'd love to see integration with Relay[0]. I already use this as it is a big help to reduce spam. Integrate with bitwarden and I can give every website a unique email and password. I hate that this is a thing that needs be done, but it is a big help and worth 2 beers a year.

I've actually always been surprised more people don't use Thunderbird. It's got problems, but I've had fewer problems with it than GMail, Apple Mail, or Outlook. Some "features" on those platforms even feel hostile[1]. Hell, just the filtering capabilities make a massive improvement[1]. I mean there's of junk mail I catch this way that none of the other services do. I'm all for advanced spam filtering but come on, if I can catch it with "[To or CC] + [contains] + [<name>]" then you've done fucked up[3].

[0] https://relay.firefox.com/

[1] I never understood how people fall for those Paypal bitcoin scams until I saw one of those emails on my iPhone (and then checked Apple Mail to see if it was the same). Straight up rendered the PDF in browser giving no indication that it was a PDF and not text (GMail doesn't do this). I mean I don't have a Paypal account but I could see how my grandma could fall for that. Plus, they hide the addresses where in thunderbird this is much more apparent.

[2] One favorite filter is those "logged in from a new device". I get the toast notification on my machine (which I want) but it gets pushed to another folder so doesn't litter my inbox. Similar idea for other things like newsletters and email that borderlines junk (or is literal junk and hard to capture).

[3] These are LLM generated emails where the source is drastically different from what renders. Google support just told me to click "Report Spam" despite me telling them I've been doing that for a year and get these emails a few times a month...
by nine_k | 2025-08-22 21:14:07+00:00
Nitro does not declaratively handle service dependencies, you cannot get a neat graph of them in one command.

You can still request other services to start in your setup script, and expect nitro to wait and retry starting your service when the dependent service is running. To get a nice graph, you can write a simple script using grep. OTOH it's easy to forget to require the shutdown of the dependent services when your service goes down, and there's no way to discover it using a nitro utility.
by spankalee | 2025-08-22 21:14:55+00:00
XHTML was too rigid - as a user agent it should try to render a document, rather than tell the user: "tough, the developer screwed up".

So XHTML lost to the much more forgiving HTML.

There was an idea to make a forgiving XML for web use cases: https://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/xml5 but it never got traction.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-22 21:15:03+00:00
LUKS as any other encryption encrypts the whole device, which means your whole drive is filled with a white noise and you lose TRIM.

It would be fine for the occassional write operations but if you use it for the system drive you are effectively run with the write amplification 24/7 (for a server and my example up there was for the server, not for a notebook which would have only 8-12 hours of operation a day at most).

So it boils down for the usage pattern.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-22 21:15:59+00:00
> I would think the Linux kernel could offer a "don't let anything read/write to the process I'm about to open" with a launcher then have that process also create a random/temp executable to test that the configuration is working...

Then all a cheater has to do is run a custom kernel that has an API that responds to that request but then lets another process read/write the memory anyways.

You have to keep in mind something. The cheaters don't give a shit about what they have to do to let a cheat work. It's only the legit players that are like "I don't want anti-cheat to have kernel access". Cheaters will flash a custom BIOS to their motherboard if they have to without a second thought, while legitimate players would be absolutely horrified of the idea of needing a custom BIOS for anti-cheat, and very rightfully so.
by somat | 2025-08-22 21:16:16+00:00
I actually rather like XML(asterisk) But this is one of it's warts, It wants to be two things, A markup language, it's in the name and arguably where it should have stayed, and an object notation. This is where you start to question some of XML's fundamentals, stuff like why is it redundant? When do you stick data in attributes? Or is it better to nest tags all the way down?

Asterisk: except namespaces, I loathe those, you are skipping happily along chewing through your XML, xpathing left and right, and then find out some psychopath has decided to use namespaces, and now every thing has become super awkward and formal.
by spyrja | 2025-08-22 21:16:47+00:00
It's just a convention I use for personal projects. Back when I started coding in C, people often just opted to go with one or two character variable names. I chose three for locally-scoped variables because it was usually enough to identify them in a recognizable fashion. The fixed-width nature of it all also made for less eye-clutter. As for function arguments, the fact that they were fully spelled out made it easier for API reference purposes. At the end of the day all that really matters is that you choose a convention and stick with it. For team projects they should be laid out early on and, as long as everyone follows them, the entire project will have a much better sense of consistency.