MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-27 18:01:53+00:00
Whenever you invent syntactic sugar you need to make some usage blessed and some usage impossible/needing to fallback to the old way without syntactic sugar. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45040662. Also some point of C is, that it doesn't hide that dynamic complexity. You always see when there is dynamic dispatch. There are tons of language, which introduce some formalism for these concepts, honestly most modern imperative languages seem to be. The unique selling point of C is, that you see the complexity. That influences you to only use it if you really want it. Also the syntax isn't really that complicated.
by mmcn | 2025-08-27 18:02:21+00:00
Agreed that performance always has a cost, and not just on maintainability. I've seen working with financial ledgers that there's a ceiling on throughput when read-after-write consistency is required. If you want to make sure a financial account can't go below 0, then each write must be processed serially. That means a round trip to a database each time.
by holoway | 2025-08-27 18:02:24+00:00
That's cool. For what it's worth, the software is all open source, precisely because it's critical in this way. I realize that's like telling you that you can take care of this puppy yourself if you want. :)

Even if you don't move away from IaC, you can still get benefits from the approach by having SI discover the results, and then do analysis.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-27 18:02:26+00:00
Strong stone soup vibes from this. AI's ability to process unstructured data may kickstart a new but different Semantic Web process, where businesses provide machine-compatible access to their services. A bit like how robust self driving cars that can drive anywhere are going to kickstart more investment into smart infrastructure, road monitoring, and real-time distributed traffic control and signaling, which will deemphasize the need for super-robust driving ability under messy unstructured conditions.
by nine_k | 2025-08-27 18:02:45+00:00
I suppose this has a better chance to happen in city trucks than in cars. Delivery trucks are used more heavily, owners care more about efficiency, they are bigger and taller, so they can offer easier structural options to house swappable batteries. Also, swappable batteries could make charging very fast, if a sufficient stock of batteries is kept on a charging station.

Cars could follow, but it's significantly more involved in them. In most cases, the batteries are a relatively thin layer covering the entire floor space, or similar.
by microtonal | 2025-08-27 18:02:51+00:00
It's their market. No one is forcing you to participate.

On the regular 'market', you have plenty of options. You can sell to supermarkets, you can make a webshop, you can sell on a local market, etc. You could even directly sell goods from your own farm (which works in a lot of places). Similarly, a buyer can get most products from a lot of places.

If you make an smartphone app, you practically only have two markets: the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. They can dictate outsized fees and draconic rules, because there is no other way to sell your product. Moreover, they can kill apps that they decide to compete with or pick winners. It is everything but a free market and the EU is right to regulate it with the DSA/DMA.
by christophilus | 2025-08-27 18:03:10+00:00
Yes. I would review any changes to any 3rd party libraries. Why is that unrealistic?

Regarding the language itself, I may or may not. Generally, I pick languages that I trust. E.g. I don't trust Google, but I don't think the Go team would intentionally place malware in the core tools. Libraries, however, often are written by random strangers on the internet with a different level of trust.
Show HN: Play a game to learn what products/services were killed by Google
by spillman | 2025-08-27 18:03:17+00:00
This is a simple 2048 game. Instead of playing with numbers, it shows the logos of Google deprecated products/services. Play it to learn what products/services were killed by Google. Maybe, Googlers will get some sense as to which products/services to work on to prevent your work being killed or deprecated:)
by burkaman | 2025-08-27 18:03:27+00:00
Technically a bank is a much larger shareholder (https://www.mazda.com/en/investors/stockinfo/situation/), but Mazda and Toyota have been collaborating for a long time with joint manufacturing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_Toyota_Manufacturing_USA) and technology sharing. Toyota has similar arrangements with other companies like Subaru and Suzuki.
by lordleft | 2025-08-27 18:03:58+00:00
I love Linux, and I use it daily for software development and gaming, but I am often exasperated by the Linux community. There's a strange combination of newbie-friendliness combined with gaslighting; if you're completely new, you'll get tons of enthusiastic help, but the moment you experience genuine frustration, you're castigated or told that your preferences are inherently wrong. I think that many hardcore Linux users don't get that some people will never grok the command line, or do not intrinsically enjoy tinkering with their OS. Luckily, I do, but I am hesitant to recommend a Linux box to just anyone.
Ask HN: Why does macOS assume apps can reliably maintain settings files?
by amichail | 2025-08-27 18:04:08+00:00
I don’t trust apps to keep settings intact over long periods through multiple updates.

I think macOS should offer a feature to reset to a fresh install while preserving the home directory name and moving its contents to an "old" subdirectory.

Would you use such a feature occasionally (e.g., yearly)?
by cheema33 | 2025-08-27 18:04:14+00:00
> The amount of offline documentation required to do so is gargantuan.

I have Ollama running on my local PC with 128GBs of RAM. If civilization collapses will my tribe be better off compared to a tribe that doesn't have a similar system running on solar power? I would think so. And if we have a local copy of Wikipedia (25GBs compressed, 150GBs uncompressed & with basic images), then we'd be infinitely better off.

My PC isn't anything special and is made of commodity parts.

The tribe members do not have to run ollama on their phones. My PC could be the server that they connect to over tribe wifi.

Capabilities of commodity PCs continue to grow every year. This appears to make a complete civilization collapse near impossible. As long as some of us survive the initial catastrophic event, and the planet can sustain human life, humanity will not be starting from scratch and will bounce back.
by al_borland | 2025-08-27 18:04:30+00:00
> Asking why an AI can't count to a million seems similar to asking a human why they can't easily recite the alphabet backwards (unless they've tried it before, or they really think it through ie count forwards to get each prior letter, or they use a 'tool' e.g. writing it down).

This is where people get frustrated with AI, because a human can and would break down the problem, knowing what they know, so they could get the right answer. When the public, who doesn't understand how AI works, is told ChatGPT can do all this amazing stuff and is passing these advanced tests, they get very frustrated when it can't simply count in the way a decades old calculator can.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-08-27 18:04:39+00:00
Most of the uses for a casual computer user have been replaced by smartphones and tablets.

Then you have walled gardens like the Apple ecosystem where interoperability is superior among Apple products which cross sell each other. If you got an iPhone, now get the Apple Watch and a Macbook and all integrate well.

Then you have games, where consoles will give you a decent experience for less money.

Then you have professional users where the most common use case is office documents. This remains contentious but there are more alternatives now like web apps, MS Office clones like Libreoffice, Softmaker Office/FreeOffice, WPS Office.

Then you have specific desktop apps for specific OSes and there you are tied to an OS. This is one of the few legitimate uses for Windows I can think of.

Otherwise Linux is king.
by smileysteve | 2025-08-27 18:04:56+00:00
Re: 1, ignoring the complexities, is really interesting but depending on the effort to change our battery banks quickly makes renting a car more feasible.

And this highlights American traffic and sparseness.

- plug-in hybrids have 10-13 mile range which is great for running a few errands (this is only slightly more feasible than in a golf cart or ebikes) - also great for last mile connectivity for mass transit n users;

- the Nissan leaf 2012 had an 80 mile range - perfect for most daily commutes in a metro area

- modern electric vehicles have 200-300+ mile range, good for weekend getaways; esp with a charge at the destination
by kenhwang | 2025-08-27 18:05:12+00:00
Mazda as a company has a very good track record of adopting green production initiatives. For example, they were one of the first to switch to water based paint to reduce VOC emissions, and specifically formulating the paint to not require heat-drying to lower energy use.

Their current stance seems to be that PHEVs are better than EVs for the environment because it better matches the driving patterns of the typical customer and charging availability, and minimizes the weight of the vehicle and production of batteries, both of which are still contribute significantly to pollution.
by jMyles | 2025-08-27 18:05:32+00:00
Reminder that "All the President's Men" - the film - really holds up as a film depicting difficult journalism amidst childish corruption, and depicts an interview with Donald Segretti, who brought the term "ratfucking" to prominence.

Also of note: ratfucking was employed extensively in student government elections in this era. I think it's worth considering whether that's still the case. Student governments at large state universities are far more powerful than many people realize, and corruption at that level is probably just as impactful as corruption in Washington, DC.
by timr | 2025-08-27 18:05:42+00:00
Title is clickbait. This is based on 25+ different models, the AMOC is not the Gulf Stream, the authors admit there’s a great deal of uncertainty, and the confidence intervals extend from 2023 to 2076 for the high emission scenario. Moreover, per the authors:

> If the AMOC starts to collapse, it takes more than 100 years to reach a substantially weaker state.

Better title would be “Simulations of Atlantic Meridonal Circulation Collapse Due to Climate Change”
by esalman | 2025-08-27 18:06:22+00:00
I am parent to a 4yo. I am also fairly well versed in development and usage of AI and LLM.

When I want an LLM to do something but it won't, I know various ways to bypass that.

If my son is using AI, which he probably will when he is close to middle school age anyway, I will take care to teach him how to use AI responsibly. He'll be smart enough to know how to bypass, but I'll do my best to teach him when to bypass and when not to bypass. That is if the current state of the art and also AI legislation etc. holds.

But I'm just one parent, I have an engineering degree, a PhD, coding, mathematical, and analytical skills. I'm a very small minority. The vast majority of parents out there do not know what's going to hit there kids and how, or they will have very skewed idea about it.

OpenAI should have been the one here to guide a child not to bypass AI and use it responsibily. They did not. No matter how anyone twist the facts, that's the reality here and the child died.
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-27 18:06:31+00:00
It's not reasonable to expect every software in existence to work with a compatible set of dependencies. So no, the distro can't supply all the libraries.

What happens is that distro developers spend their time patching the upstream so it works with the set included on the distro. This has some arguable benefits to any user that wants to rebuild their software, at the cost of random problems added by that patching that flies under the radar of the upstream developers.

Instead, the GPs proposal of vendoring the dependencies solves that problem, without breaking the compilation, and adds another set of issues that may or may not be a problem. I do argue that it's a good option to keep on one's mind to apply when necessary.
by nawgz | 2025-08-27 18:06:37+00:00
I’m not sure if you’re saying the latency was introduced in client <-> server hops or server <-> db hops, but chrome dev tools (I’m sure all browsers too) can simulate different network conditions with a few clicks! Useful for something similar to what you’ve said, but in the end I think you meant server <-> db latency is what you want to inject
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-27 18:06:37+00:00
> Can a (more or less) two party system where the population hovers around 50/50 support for each side truly be called a democracy?

Unless democracy has never existed, and thus has evidence for being unable to exist, sort of like communism, yes. It’s flawed. But it’s more than in line with historic systems. (Not all of which failed due to populism.)
by fourside | 2025-08-27 18:06:49+00:00
Not the OP but my guess is that they want to raise awareness that people who are making significant technical contributions in our field are affected by the actions of the US administration. Not that exceptionally talented people deserve more legal protections, but the reality is that our industry would be worse off without people like Alyssa.

I know it can be at times grating to constantly hear about stuff like this, but I can assure you folks like Alyssa would rather focus on techie stuff rather than have to ask for help so they can stay safe. For them that worry is now always present and it’s not something they can ignore.
by redwall_hp | 2025-08-27 18:06:58+00:00
Toyota also owns Daihatsu, which is a lesser known name in the US, but is a major maker of kei cars, which are huge in Japan and other parts of Asia.

They also own Denso, which is the second largest auto parts company.

And they partner with Subaru on some things, such as the Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86, which are basically the same car with different badging.
by takluyver | 2025-08-27 18:07:00+00:00
> As for religious wars over init systems, desktop environments and package managers, competition is making the options stronger, not weaker.

Competition can definitely improve things, but it's not universally positive. In particular, endless competition in parts of the operating system makes it hard to build anything on top of them. E.g. if you want to distribute an application for Linux, do you build a Flatpak, or a Snap? Or take a more traditionalist approach and make RPMs, DEBs, etc.? You either pick your favourite and leave out a large fraction of Linux users who disagree, or you have to do more than one of these. This is definitely a drag on the ecosystem.

I agree that most users don't care about the OS, though.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-08-27 18:07:29+00:00
>more customers are choosing to do without any alternative which means it must be really rough out there

Absolutely. Outside of software, here is my simple dietary POV:

Last year, I gave up beef (chicken is less expensive).

Last spring, I planted my first garden (cucumbers, squash, peppers, strawberries).

Last week, I gave up chocolate (no alternative, so far).

I am a fat native blue-collar Texan, so this is ultimately a good dietary change — but terrifying for a consumer-based economy / society.
by CharlesW | 2025-08-27 18:07:52+00:00
> …on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13.

In case you're one of today's lucky 10,000, OpenCore Legacy Patcher supports Macs going to back as far as 2007: https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
by barbazoo | 2025-08-27 18:07:54+00:00
> There is enough place on Earth for humans to resettle

It's romantic to imagine populations slowly moving to where life is better, haven't we always done that since out of Africa. I doubt it'll be like that when land becomes uninhabitable within decades due to changes to the experienced temperature range, rainfall, drought, fires, etc. We can't even figure out how to make space for a couple million Palestinian people. The Russians are still expanding their empire to restore their glory days. We need to figure out the whole living next to each other thing before we can resettle large populations.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-27 18:07:57+00:00
> According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the behavior of a black hole depends on two numbers: how heavy it is, and how fast it is rotating. And that’s it. Black holes are said to have “no hair” — no features that distinguish them from their fellows with the same mass and spin.

As far as I know, there's a third property that black holes have - electric charge. Would a sufficiently strong electric charge between two black holes be detectable, whether they both have the same charge, or opposing charges?

I suppose based on the article, the effects would only take places once the black holes got within 40km of each other...
by ForceBru | 2025-08-27 18:08:18+00:00
I'm imagining quick prototyping (including on-device, offline execution) of small pieces of code (potentially growing into a small app) with the software keyboard, like in Pythonista or Pyto.

My workflow often goes like this: got an idea, let me quickly test it on the go, like while walking down the street, working on unrelated stuff or just chilling. Open up Pythonista, write some code, run it, tweak it, etc. If a piece of code becomes important enough, I copy it to the computer and continue working on it there.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-27 18:08:20+00:00
> a lot of countries in South and Central America, where the US overthrew an elected government and supported dictators

From that society? The people who were in power when we were the global nuclear hegemon?

My point is societies corrupt, and great societies emerge from the corrupted. America before and after was not benevolent. The Americans at the helm during and at the end of WW2 were, as an aggregate, as expressed through our republic, benevolent. (Benevolence doesn’t require faultlessness.)
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-27 18:08:21+00:00
The author is incredibly talented, and has done the community with a valuable service; one that the HN crowd especially is likely to benefit from.

Many people in her situation are not lucky enough to be in a mental or physical position to be able to pursue this sort of work or take advantage of their talent, and that is in large part due to the persistent and long-standing discrimination trans people face.

Even if one is totally self-interested, it pays not to discriminate. Even if one can't muster up even a little decency to not discriminate because, ya know, it's wrong.
by Eji1700 | 2025-08-27 18:08:51+00:00
> Why is that unrealistic?

Because the vast majority of development is done by people with a very narrow focus of skills on an extreme deadline, and you actually comfortable with compression, networking, encryption, IO, and all the other taken for granted libraries that wind up daisy chained together?

Because if you are, great, but at the same time, that's not the job description for like 90% of coding jobs. I don't expect my frontend guy to need to know encryption so he can review the form library he's using.
by mrguyorama | 2025-08-27 18:09:34+00:00
God that "post mortem" is such a portent of things to come. I've seen this exact problem path happen locally nearly any time I use claude. It very obviously just picks what it should put where based on weighted random chance, and that random chance is going to not go in your favor at some point, in a way that no amount of training or job experience can help with, because no, a human would not have made this mistake.

This is the kind of mistake that fails people out of CS101; It's obvious that the student is just manipulating symbols they don't really "get" rather than modifying code. Throwing the chinese room thought experiment at your code base is bad engineering.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-27 18:09:57+00:00
I assume that's why it gets specifically called out, same if you're shipping apples to the entire US East Coast headline writers will pick up on the fact they're going to New York City.

It wouldn't actually make sense to put turbines in Chicago because it's a city, the wind force is disrupted by the human structures littered everywhere in a city - but obviously you'd expect a windy area to have a lot of turbines outside the city and not ordinarily need to import wind energy from hundreds of miles away.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-27 18:10:24+00:00
> it didn't, that's the entire point of this counterexample

This is sort of like arguing Belgian colonialism was fine because there was one village they forgot to enslave.

Also, we were jointly occupied [1]. (Austrian-Indian American.) The reason we weren’t Polanded is the Allies, who controlled part of us at the end of the war, argued we were victims of Anschluss. If the Soviets controlled Austria, it wouldn’t have been spared.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria
by extraisland | 2025-08-27 18:10:54+00:00
I feel like I could have read this article back in 2004. The main benefit is that you get to choose. The other two big operating systems don't really allow much choice.

> Meanwhile, the Linux community spends enormous energy on debates that rarely affect mainstream adoption. Consider the “init wars,” where systemd sparked endless flame wars (and memes) about the proper way to boot a Linux system.

This is almost in anything. We had play ground arguments over whether SEGA or Nintendo were better. Then Playstation vs N64 vs Saturn. There was Amiga vs Atari. BSD vs Linux. Vim vs Emacs. Ford vs Chevy.
Why is AI search still bad at trust and context?
by zyruh | 2025-08-27 18:10:59+00:00
I’ve been testing a lot of AI search tools lately, and I keep running into the same three issues:

Accuracy with sources — either the responses don’t cite sources at all, or when they do, the citations don’t hold up.

Bias — answers are often skewed toward a certain narrative instead of presenting a balanced perspective.

Context memory — tools forget what you asked a few prompts ago, which makes complex queries tedious.

Individually, some products do one or two of these well. But I haven’t found anything that consistently delivers all three at once.

Why is this such a hard problem to solve? Is it a technical limitation, a product decision, or something else? Curious to hear what others here think.
by w10-1 | 2025-08-27 18:11:00+00:00
This is not the example readers need to understand, because the failures were so rudimentary and systemic that it seems "good process" is the answer.

Having written and validated both FDA and CLIA software, I'd suggest that process is never sufficient.

Plenty of well-meaning people will create and follow incomplete plans and hand-wave away issues when they sign off -- particularly people who gravitate towards rule-based, formulaic work in a hierarchy.

You need people both capable of and willing to seriously question whether proof is really proof, and who will stand up for some random patient in the distant future over their boss and colleagues on a deadline -- and yet they cannot be oppositional or egotistical, and must have deep insight into the subject matter.

It's really, really hard to find those people.