MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hansvm | 2025-08-30 13:45:32+00:00
Alright, suppose I'm passionate and an expert, and I want to write a blog going into a deep dive about logarithm approximations:

How do I frame it? Is this for a math audience or a programming audience? If for programmers, are we talking about tricks to make it faster on modern x86_64 platforms or when you need to do voodoo on a microcontroller? If for modern x86_64 platforms, is this a short, punchy article empowering people with a new trick? Is it a long, dry article empowering other experts with nitty, gritty details? Do I frame it in terms of some other problem (like randomized, weighted sort for example)? If so, which problem?

All of those are just questions about "what" I intend to write, after I've ostensibly already chosen what to write about using my expert knowledge and opinions. "What" questions aren't the only unknowns which are improved in the face of knowing your audience though. For the content to land successfully you need to know something about who's reading it. Should you use Python/F#/C/Zig/curl-braces-pseudocode/python-pseudocode/JS/... to deliver the examples? Is it worth incorporating the resulting assembly into the article? If targetting programmers, do they have enough of a math background that you can or should include a derivation or two? Is this the sort of audience who would appreciate seeing all the tricks and solutions which _don't_ work?

And so on. Analytics are a powerful tool for ensuring your article will actually be useful to somebody, even predicated on your assumption that the best content is written by passionate experts (a statement I largely agree with) -- and the hidden, implicit assumption that somebody informing their writing decisions with analytics is _not_ acting as a passionate expert for the resulting work (a statement I wholeheartedly disagree with).

Diving slightly into that point of disagreement, my niche isn't logarithm approximations; it's using a wealth of math, old-school ML, and low-level CPU knowledge to push computers well past their ordinary limits. I don't have near enough time to write. When I do find time, what should I write about? I'm a passionate expert about a lot of things if our yardstick is the length of a blog post, and I don't have time to write about all of them. If I were to write that logarithm article in today's world I might instead write its dual, fast approximate softmax, signalling some sort of expertise to the "AI" people. Or not. Unless I know who's reading my stuff I only have the vaguest of inklings about the specific topics people might find interesting.

In my mind at least, that choice isn't pandering in the same way as the least-common-denominator drivel being shovel-fed on LinkedIn. I still have my own unique ideas and unique takes on those ideas. You can imagine a Venn diagram of the things I'd like to write about and the things the hive mind wants to consume. I'm definitely biased in that I'll pander to the intersection of those two things, but I think your complaint is about people who exit their own bubble completely.
by hypeatei | 2025-08-30 13:45:53+00:00
I'm glad to see people in this thread saying that this will be an environmental win while we're ending subsidies for "Unreliable, Foreign-Controlled Energy Sources"[0] and "Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry"[1]

There is no good here. I don't when it became popular or acceptable to restrict free trade and ignore reality.

0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-pr...

1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-30 13:48:13+00:00
I picked a random Raw Fury game, Regions of Ruin. It looks like a Viking side-scroller, fighter, builder game. The art is pretty good, but amateurish. Overall, a pretty good game, though it would probably never catch my eye. I looked up the stats: it once had 3000 players at once, and has about 2000 good reviews. A game stats site estimated it had about $400,000 in sales. I consider this a success.

I should clarify that by "success" I mean the game had a good amount of attention and enough sales to potentially make a profit. This is what I care about as a potential game developer. Does the market still give decent games a decent shot at being profitable? Regions of Ruin is a decent game and had a decent shot at being profitable.

I looked at Phantom Spark. It's a simple F-Zero style racer through nice looking 3D stages. It's fairly minimal, only one type of racing vehicle with some color variations. The main draw of the game is improving your time trial times. There's some characters that put text on the screen, but their style doesn't really fit the game. Overall, the characters don't appear to contribute to a story or anything. I'm guessing there's maybe like a dozen tracks? This game was reviewed by several gaming sites, including IGN and received decent scores. One website estimated it made $80,000 in revenue.

Everyone will have to judge for themselves whether or not those two games had a shot at success. Judge for yourself the state of the gaming market.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-30 13:48:18+00:00
> even my highly regarded Expanse, which avoids a lot of inaccuracies usually, is not innocent here.

I can forgive a "hexagon everything", but The Expanse has these transparent displays and low contrast holograms, which really get me upset. I mean it's just obviously idiotic and absolutely wouldn't be a thing.

Then again, my iPhone looks and feels almost exactly the same front and back, save for the LED, which results in me tapping the back's decorative glass panel several times a day, before I realize it's not the display. A real-world, omnipresent design choice nearly as idiotic.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-30 13:50:03+00:00
I can tell you anecdotally as someone who only does green field implementations which are proof of concepts/MVPs to train clients and to hopefully get a larger implementation down the road where we will need to bring in a team, before LLMs got “good enough”, I would have had to staff 1-3 junior engineers to do the grunt work while I did a lot of the higher customer facing, architecture, team lead type work, now I can do it all myself in the same amount of time.

The code that even ChatGPT generates is usually just as well structured using good software practices as I would have done - and I’ve been in the field professionally since 1996.

The only work I do manually is moving functions out into their own libraries and telling it to use my libraries to reduce duplicate code.

It’s going to hurt junior devs the most. I still have to do the higher level design work and tease out requirements.
by mdhb | 2025-08-30 13:50:31+00:00
But this is again what I am saying. Of course you can get yourself into such a state where you immediately go to the worst possible case scenario and get yourself so worked up where the only logical conclusion is that you need a weapon with one in the chamber at all time… just in case.

But that is just being scared and has nothing to do with actually assessing and managing risk.
by noodletheworld | 2025-08-30 13:50:46+00:00
Really?

We both read the article; you know as well as I do that the advice in it is to build simple reliable system that focus on actual problems not imagined ones.

…but does not say how to do that; and offers no meaningful value for someone trying to pick the “right” thing in the entire solution space that is both sufficiently complex and scalable to solve the requirements, but not too scalable, or too complex.

There’s just some vague hand waving about over engineering things at Big Corp, where, ironically, scale is an issue that mandates a certain degree of complexity in many cases.

Here’s some thing that works better than meaningless generic advice: specific detailed examples.

You will note the total lack of them in this article, and others like it.

Real articles with real advice are a mix of practical examples that illustrate the generic advice they’re giving.

You know why?

…because you can argue with a specific example. Generic advice with no examples is not falsifiable.

You can agree with the examples, or disagree with them; you can argue that examples support or do not support the generic advice. People can take the specific examples and adapt them as appropriate.

…but, generic advice on its own is just an opinion.

I can arbitrarily assert “100% code coverage is meaningless; there are hot paths that need heavy testing and irrelevant paths that do not require code coverage. 100% code coverage is a fools game that masks a lack of a deeper understanding of what you should be testing”; it may sound reasonable, it may not. That’s your opinion vs mine.

…but with some specific examples of where it is true, and perhaps, not true, you could specifically respond to it, and challenge it with counter examples.

(And indeed, you’ll see that specific examples turn up here in this comment thread as arguments against it; notably not picked up to be addressed by the OP in their hacker news feedback section)
by djoldman | 2025-08-30 13:51:08+00:00
Yes! Thanks. In particular one might use "[is] instance of":

https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P31

So we would take in all items with that property to make the graph. Although we might have to deal with multiple roots.

There are also other interesting linking relations:

Comparing items ... said to be the same as (P460) instance of (P31) - (is an example of ...) subclass of (P279) - (is a subset of ...) facet of (P1269) - (aspect of .../ subitem of .../ a broader perspective on the same topic is offered by ...) Item contains ... has part(s) (P527) - (contains ...) has part(s) of the class (P2670) (has parts that are instances of .../ some parts form subclass of ...) Example: Albert Einstein's brain (Q2464312) is part of (P361): Albert Einstein (Q937). Albert Einstein (Q937) is an instance of (P31): human (Q5). human (Q5) is a subclass of (P279): mammal (Q7377). mammal (Q7377) has part(s) (P527): mammary gland (Q189961).
by gruez | 2025-08-30 13:51:12+00:00
>I'm glad to see people in this thread saying that this will be an environmental win while we're ending subsidies for "Unreliable, Foreign-Controlled Energy Sources"[0] and "Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry"[1]

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074362
by mothballed | 2025-08-30 13:52:05+00:00
A modern striker fired pistol that is designed properly (like glock gen 3+) is not going to go off unless you pull the trigger. I don't understand why you wouldn't carry it chambered, if you are going to carry. You shouldn't be pulling it out of the holster unless you are about to shoot someone with it, at which point, why just stand around racking it and hoping it doesn't jam?
by alephnerd | 2025-08-30 13:52:10+00:00
Yet Ilya Sutskever was not an Olympiad participant.

Heck, he attended a correspondence college for 2 years (Open University of Israel) before his family immigrated to Canada and then attended UToronto (an amazing university, but not significantly selective by any means).

Ilya is by definition an example of why heavily stratified systems are subpar for human capital development - they remove the opportunity to identify talent from a broad pool, because humans can change.

And as I pointed out from personal experience, the difference in outcomes between IMO and non-IMO participants when I studied CS at HYS was nonexistent - we all did equally well professionally as well as academically. The difference was we all had the ability to study and get guidance from the same professors if we so chose.

A rising tide raises all ships.
by solatic | 2025-08-30 13:52:16+00:00
People forget both why the US invaded Afghanistan in the first place, and why US financial sanctions are so effective. The US invaded Afghanistan, a country whose government was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, because that government refused to extradite OBL and other senior Taliban leadership, to bring them to justice in the United States. US financial sanctions are so effective because they cut off foreign institutions from the US financial system if those institutions do business with those who harm Americans and American interests. Soft power is backed by hard power, first against organizations hosted by governments willing to cooperate with the US, and eventually against governments unwilling to cooperate.

That scammers can operate from anywhere is beside the point. More often than not, law enforcement and the military know where that is. A conscious decision is made not to prioritize or fund fighting it.
Show HN: Sourcerer – MCP for semantic code search that reduces token waste
by st3v3nmw | 2025-08-30 13:53:15+00:00
I built this because I got tired of watching Claude Code read through massive files just to find a few functions. Sourcerer lets AI agents search code semantically and grab exactly the code chunks they need instead of burning tokens on whole files.

It uses tree-sitter to parse your codebase and creates a searchable index. So instead of "read auth.py (538 lines)", an agent can search for "user authentication logic" and get back just the relevant functions.

Demo: https://asciinema.org/a/736638

GitHub: https://github.com/st3v3nmw/sourcerer-mcp
by honeybadger1 | 2025-08-30 13:53:20+00:00
Neither Russia nor China has ever deployed nuclear weapons against civilian populations, a distinction held solely by the United States. Their reasons for restraint diverge significantly, rooted in distinct strategic and cultural priorities, yet China’s rising global influence positions it as a greater long-term threat to the United States than Russia, despite Russia’s more overt aggression.

Russia’s behavior, exemplified by the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, reflects an aggressive posture driven by a desire to counter NATO’s eastward expansion and maintain regional dominance. However, its economic challenges sanctions, energy export dependence, and a GDP of approximately $2.1 trillion in 2023 (World Bank) constrain its global reach, rendering it a struggling, though resilient, power. With the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, Russia’s restraint in nuclear use stems from a pragmatic focus on national survival. Its actions prioritize geopolitical relevance over a quixotic pursuit of Soviet-era glory, but its declining economic and demographic strength limits its capacity to challenge the United States on a global scale.

In contrast, China’s non-use of nuclear weapons aligns with its cultural and strategic emphasis on economic expansion over territorial conquest. Through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative, which has invested over $1.2 trillion globally since 2013, China has built a network of economic influence. Its military modernization, backed by a $292 billion defense budget in 2023 (SIPRI) and a nuclear arsenal projected to reach 1,000 warheads by 2030, complements this economic dominance. While China’s “no first use” nuclear policy, established in 1964, reflects a commitment to strategic stability, its assertive actions such as militarizing the South China Sea and pressuring Taiwan signal a willingness to use force to secure economic and territorial interests. Unlike Russia’s regionally focused aggression, China’s global economic leverage, technological advancements, and growing military capabilities pose a more systemic challenge to U.S. primacy, particularly in critical domains like trade, technology, and Indo-Pacific influence.
My Newly Developed Web Application
by StatLinko | 2025-08-30 13:53:24+00:00
Hello everyone, I’ve created a new web application that allows users to build static websites without writing any code. I’ve already shared the URL with you, but let me share it again: https://statlinko.com .

I’d be truly happy if some of you could take a look at the app. I’m open to any kind of feedback, and I sincerely thank you in advance!

Best regards.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-30 13:53:28+00:00
No, Inter is fantastic, it is the only typeface that produces legible text on one of the monitors I have with DPI a bit lower than 82 (I know...)

I look at most fonts that get recommended here and it's immediately obvious they weren't tested on low end monitors at all (which is what most people I know use).

(As an aside, Cascadia is the only compact monospace font that looks good on this POS. Other good looking typefaces are too vertically stretched — oversized x-height.)
by noAnswer | 2025-08-30 13:53:32+00:00
I have a homapage (just static manual html). I host config examples, for when I'm out and about and I need a reminder. And I write "blog posts" about unique problems I solved. Unique in the senses that a search engine was unable to help me at the time. It is not about reach at all. I write for my self and for the one or two people that are in a similar situation. I know I have helped people, because ~0.7 times a year I get a thank you mail from someone. If I analyse with goaccess all I see is bot noise.

BTW: This video pushed me over the edge to finally start a homepage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDzAAjzbV5g
by hollerith | 2025-08-30 13:53:38+00:00
I don't think the "ethic" you are proposing (i.e., a consumer should have free choice of what software to install on their own device) has much bearing one way or the other on AI extinction risk.

Do you simply not care that this Linux computer that you have such warm feelings about is fairly easy to pwn (in part because of the lack of verified boot and in part because desktop Linux software is just much easier to pwn than the systems software on a Mac or a Chromebook or an iPhone or an Android phone) such that if you ever got to be an effective activist against some government or some powerful industrial interest, that government or industrial interest could fairly easily eavesdrop on everything you do with this Linux computer?

That doesn't sound much like protecting your individual rights.
by coldtea | 2025-08-30 13:53:38+00:00
>How do you even "consume" wealth, assuming the wealth is more significant than a few millions in the bank.

"A few millions in the bank" for hundreds of thousands or million of people would already make a nordic country the king of lesser inequality - unless (as the parent says, don't know it's true) it's tied up in company assets (and perhaps they use them as company perks even in one-person companies, to avoid the tax, thus masking better equality at the individual level).
by kelipso | 2025-08-30 13:54:13+00:00
Don’t know about that…it’s not some rule that palate develops with age. You have to actively try. And when you grow up on a diet consisting of limited foods, you will definitely have problems appreciating a variety of foods a ps an adult. Pretty sure that’s the main reason average restaurant food quality in the US is so bad. The customers can’t even tell the difference because their palate is so limited.
by jackothy | 2025-08-30 13:54:42+00:00
I have come to the conclusion that both Android and iOS, along with the banking systems, are all doomed platforms.

Even something like GrapheneOS, in theory the best path to security and privacy and liberty, was falling way short even before this latest announcement from Google.

The problem lies partially in the app ecosystems, which embrace spyware and exploiting users (requiring all the worst Google APIs), and partially in governments, which will leverage any centralized organization like Google to gain control (EU chat control etc.).

The solution cannot be just a custom OS or an OS fork. In fact, ecosystem compatibility is toxic and slows down growth of real alternatives. There needs to be some wholly independent and decentralized offering.

The challenge is hardware compatibility and core services like digital IDs. Most apps should be solved by using a website instead.

These issues are especially important because the future is increasingly digital. Smart phones, smart glasses, smart watches, VR glasses, smart homes, and even brain implants. I don't want to live in a future where I'm either left behind or my whole life is controlled by Google/Apple/the government/etc.
by sleepyguy | 2025-08-30 13:55:27+00:00
No, because I like to order items from Canada and the EU that will now incur an enormous duty. A t-shirt from Canada or Germany will incur additional fees of $50 -$250 USD, depending on where it is cleared.

There is the law of unintended consequences. Other countries will now make American small business products much more expensive to export. Why would they give a De Minimis to these small businesses when the USA doesn't reciprocate?

You're only thinking about China and not the rest of the World. US small businesses buy things (under $800) from countries like Canada and the EU, and were able to do so because of De Minimus. Canadians could buy things from US small businesses without worrying about duties as long as it was under $500.

Now even the smallest item, even a gift from abroad worth $20, will incur a duty of $50-$250 plus administrative fees from the carrier.
by solatic | 2025-08-30 13:56:18+00:00
I fully agree that there's a different strategy for before the line is crossed, one that is often more humane, more freedom-respecting, and cheaper to boot. Too often those strategies are sadly under-funded.

That's beside the point that the line, too often, is being crossed, and perpetrators are allowed to perpetuate their crimes, instead of the military and/or law enforcement stepping in and performing their organization's missions to protect us, especially the most vulnerable among us.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-30 13:56:22+00:00
I suspect too much is broken (well, I'd say more clearly "crap") in C++ to be sure whether any particular core ideas hold up based on that whole language.

I'm particularly mindful of C++ 26 Erroneous Behaviour for initialization. This idea was introduced for the forthcoming C++ 26 language version, it says that although just making a variable `int k;` and then later taking its value is an error, it's no longer Undefined Behaviour, the compiler shall arrange that it has some specific value.

This is a meaningful improvement over the C++ status quo. But, that doesn't mean the core idea is actually good. It's bad to do this in your language, they didn't have any better choice for C++ for historical reasons so this was the least bad option.
by emptysongglass | 2025-08-30 13:56:27+00:00
You are correct that technically this is true. The EU has proposed to eliminate the threshold [1] but in practice EU consumers have not seen the benefit of the de minimis practiced by the US: try and import goods below the threshold from outside the EU and you will be hit by a variety of fees [2], making it uneconomical for a consumer to buy anything from outside.

[1] https://copenhageneconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/S...

[2] https://www.postnord.dk/siteassets/pdf/forretningsbetingelse...
by gruez | 2025-08-30 13:57:54+00:00
>A lot of the stuff I am buying in China (electronic components and modules)

Surely you must realize that's a very atypical use case and is dwarfed by people buying cheap clothes and trinkets? Just go to aliexpress or temu right now and see what the items on the front page are. It's not niche components that you can only order from china, it's the same cheap shit you can order off amazon or buy at a local discount retailer.
by usernamed7 | 2025-08-30 13:58:04+00:00
This is delulu. Yes, if you know people who are hiring, or companies where people you know who work, great. By all means do that. Referrals are a strong mechanism IF you can leverage it.

But nobody in my network of ~100 is in either situation. They are either also jobless, or their company is not hiring or, what they are hiring for is not applicable to me (such as wrong role/country/TZ/stack).
by coldtea | 2025-08-30 13:58:08+00:00
>I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.

What's more likely going forward is that they'll downscale their operations in a contracting economy, than hire 70 years olds or needing robots for the same jobs. And if it needs be, they'll get immigrants for most jobs.