MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weinzierl | 2025-08-21 14:00:30+00:00
"Unicode still does lots of work on language support."

Yes, and that's a good thing.

"The notion that emoji support impedes that is simply not true."

If it does not, why are there so many unresolved issues and shortcomings lingering around for years.

It's not that the issues around Han Unification will go away by ignoring them. There are related issues in western languages, like the umlaut/trema distinction. Pushing these topics, which are core to Unicode's original mission, into OpenType is not a solution.

Why do we continue adding pictures of random every day objects, like disco balls, when not even characters common in ordinary books can be represented?

Don't you think reallocating resources from emoji work to more serious issues would make sense?
by nerdjon | 2025-08-21 14:00:35+00:00
> you don't really need to be 100% sure of it being truth for a vast majority of cases.

Except that these tools are being positioned as a source of reliable truth and the companies are incentivized to keep you on their system (google) instead of actually pushing you to the source (unless the source is an ad).

Any disclaimer they try to put is hidden and often lighter/smaller text.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-21 14:00:43+00:00
> quoting these people unedited

If you're quoting something, the only ethical thing to do is as verbatim as possible and with a sufficient amount of context. Speeches should not be cleaned up to what you think they should have said.

Now, the question of who you go to for quotes, on the other hand .. that's how issues are really pushed around the frame.
by guytv | 2025-08-21 14:01:16+00:00
With AI based coding (no, i won't use "Vibe coding", thank you) this workflow improves a lot. Instead of jumping straight into code, I have my engineers write a Notion doc that describes what needs to be built. Think of it like an LLD, but really it’s a prompt for Claude-code. This forces them to think through the problem at a low level, and they share the doc with me before sending it to Claude — so I get to review early in the process. Once we finalize this "LLD" or "low-level-prompt", they hand it to Claude. The next time I see the work is in a GitHub PR. At that point, we rarely have to throw everything away and start from scratch.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-21 14:01:34+00:00
While there’s no reasonable way to disagree with the sentiment, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who can “think and decompose problems” who isn’t also widely read, and knows a lot of things.

Forcing kids to sit and memorize facts isn’t suddenly going to make them a better thinker, but much of my process of being a better thinker is something akin to sitting around and memorizing facts. (With a healthy dose of interacting substantively and curiously with said facts)
by gf000 | 2025-08-21 14:01:39+00:00
In the off chance your search didn't expand to k3s, I can semi-recommend it.

My setup is a bit clunky (having a Hetzner cloud instance as controller and a local server as a node throught Tailscale), from which I get an occasional strange error that k3s pods fail to resolve another pod's domain without me having to re-create the DNS resolver system pod, and that I so far failed at getting Velero backups to work with k3s's local storage providers, but otherwise it is pretty decent.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-08-21 14:01:53+00:00
It depends. I take the Amtrack from Albany to Chicago once a year or so because I hate flying. It's maybe an hour or two slower than driving and that's with a lot of time built in to the schedule for delays. The last time I took it We left Albany 45 minutes late and still made it on time to Chicago. Yes, delays happen, just like in traffic or at the air port, but I find the focus on delays when Amtrak comes up extremely over-stated. Perhaps it's just the routes I'm on.
by dinfinity | 2025-08-21 14:02:24+00:00
The solution is almost trivial and well known:

Document. Whenever a member of the team leaves, you should always make them document what is in their head and not already documented (or even better, make documenting a required part of normal development).

The thing to understand is that every (new) AI chat session is effectively a member entering and leaving your team. So to make that work well you need great onboarding (provide documentation) and great offboarding (require documentation).
by pas | 2025-08-21 14:02:25+00:00
Sure, of course, but unless funding is coming from users the economics won't change, because:

The vendors cite an aspect of said responsibility (security!) to get rid of an other aspect (costly maintenance of a low-revenue feature).

The web is evolving, there's a ton of things that developers (and website product people, and end-users) want. Of course it comes with a lot of "frivolous" innovation, but that's part of finding the right abstractions/APIs.

(And just to make it clear, I think it's terrible for the web and vendors that ~100% of the funding comes from a shady oligopoly that makes money by selling users - but IMHO this doesn't invalidate the aforementioned resource allocation trade off.)
Show HN: RunMat – a V8 inspired Rust runtime for the landlocked Matlab language
by nallana | 2025-08-21 14:02:25+00:00
Why build this? MATLAB wasn’t chosen by engineers; it was inherited from classrooms. That unfair advantage let MathWorks sell a decades-old runtime with heavy startup, sluggish hot loops, and paywalled toolboxes. It milks about $500M a year out of the engineering ecosystem for what amounts to an outdated compiler and runtime stack.

GNU Octave has been the main open-source way to run MATLAB code but it only supports a subset of the grammar and semantics, and its performance is far behind modern expectations. It’s more of a compatibility bridge than a true runtime alternative.

I decided to implement a MATLAB language compiler and executor from scratch, grammar and semantics complete, in Rust with a modern architecture inspired by V8. Like V8, RunMat starts in a lightweight interpreter, then profiles and JITs hot paths using Cranelift. Snapshotting makes cold start essentially vanish (5ms vs 2–10s in MATLAB), and tensor operations run natively across CPUs or GPUs (CUDA, Metal, Vulkan) without an extra license.

Performance (vs Octave, Apple M2 Max, 32GB): * Startup: 0.9147s → 0.005s (180× faster) * Matrix ops: 0.8220s → 0.005s (164×) * Math funcs: 0.8677s → 0.0053s (160×) * Control flow: 0.8757s → 0.0057s (154×)

Unlike Octave, RunMat implements the full MATLAB grammar: arrays/indexing (end/colon/masks/N-D), multiple returns, varargin/varargout, classdef OOP, events/handles, metaclass, and standardized exceptions. The core is slim at 5MB static binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows (or embedded devices and containers), with language extensibility coming from packages that can be written in MATLAB or in Rust.

It’s 100% open source: The repo is about 3M characters of code, has over 1,000 tests covering the edges of the semantic surface, and was bootstrapped in three weeks. A package manager is next, along with a final draft of the builtin standard library.

TLDR: Same language semantics, but rebuilt with modern methods, the way Chrome’s V8 redefined JavaScript engines.
by i_don_t_know | 2025-08-21 14:02:47+00:00
Sütterlin was used to denote vectors and matrices in my linear algebra class at university in Germany in the 1990. We got a cheat sheet with all letters in the first lecture (also included all Greek letters).

I still have the sheet. And it’s so weird to see vectors and matrices denoted with Latin letters. I still use Sütterlin.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-08-21 14:03:00+00:00
I am curious how you choose the breadth of people responsible for stopping Trump in various ways.

For example, does it make sense to blame Americans for their failure to protest every weekend?

If so, then why stop at Americans? Why not blame e.g. all Norwegians as well?

Or why not blame the Americans who merely protest, as opposed to organizing a general labor strike or for not attempting an outright assassination?

My only point is that if you're going to blame some people and not others for the current state of affairs, it would be interesting to understand the justification.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-21 14:03:05+00:00
More granular control, more verbosity.

I am still proud of the D3 gadget I made about 8 years back as a green web dev. Couldn't have made it any other way, not sure if I could with any other library today. Wouldn't want to do it again, though, unless I was a dedicated front-end guy.
by boringg | 2025-08-21 14:03:09+00:00
You should probably think of it with a different perspective. The long term outlook for oil majors is stagnating at best. They provide great logistics for fuel globally but haven't expanded past that.

If we continue to go to electricity and go via solar, energy storage, wind and nuclear - you end up in a spot where oil and gas are limited.

NVIDIA has blue sky ahead of it -- are valuations totally out of line? Most likely. That said it has a highly desirable product globally. Oil is a valuable commodity but there are many other providers that could snatch up exxonmobil share.

Also if you want a better example -- good look at any critical supplier in the food space. Thats way more important - we lose that we get in a world of hurt.
by 4bpp | 2025-08-21 14:04:10+00:00
A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.

I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.
by marcyb5st | 2025-08-21 14:04:15+00:00
I agree with you fully.

However, even friends/colleagues that like me are in the AI field (I am more into the "ML" side of things) always mention that while it is true that predicting the next token is a poor approximation of intelligence, emergent behaviors can't be discounted. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that, but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-21 14:04:42+00:00
Something I wonder about the percent of code - I remember like 5-10 years ago there was a series of articles about Google generating a lot of their code programmatically, I wonder if they just adapted their code gen to AI.

I bet Google has a lot of tools to say convert a library from one language to another or generate a library based on an API spec. The 30% of code these LLMs are supposedly writing is probably in this camp, not net novel new features.
by crussmann | 2025-08-21 14:05:24+00:00
I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.

What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!
by gz09 | 2025-08-21 14:06:06+00:00
Unfortunately, it's quite a big mess (as the article indicates), which leads to a steep learning curve for someone who "just wants to build some images".

And that's just half of it. Want to build an image on two native architectures (ARM64 and AMD64) and then make a multi-arch image out of them. Might blow someones mind on how complicated that is with 2025 docker technologies: https://docs.docker.com/build/ci/github-actions/multi-platfo...
by Izkata | 2025-08-21 14:06:25+00:00
Also, self-checkout itself is faster here anyway. We don't have baggers, so in the cashier lanes you have to unload onto the conveyor and put your items into the bags yourself, with some awkward maneuvering since the register is between the conveyor and the bagging area. In self-checkout unloading and bagging is combined into one action: Lift item from cart, pass over scanner on the way to the bags, place in bag, and pay at the end without even having to move. No real additional work on the customer's part.

Also like the other response, I hadn't heard of explicit limits either, as long as everything fits on the bagging scale.
by vorgol | 2025-08-21 14:06:28+00:00
It's very tempting to assume what people will or are doing, and it's so, so easy to get it so wrong.

Picture this. Guy comes home late at night. Outdoor light is on. He goes in and presses he light switch. No lights come on but the fuse blows and now the outdoor light is gone.

What does he do?

The answer is that you have no idea based on only that information. It's tempting to think he'll do what my friends and I would do: find the fusebox and investigate.

But the thing is, his crazy ex's crazy boyfriend threatened yesterday to kill him. This guy is bolting, not looking for the fusebox.
by yodsanklai | 2025-08-21 14:06:29+00:00
> My favorite professor in engineering school always gave open book tests.

My experience as a professor and a student is that this doesn't make any difference. Unless you can copy verbatim the solution to your problem from the book (which never happens), you better have a good understanding of the subject in order to solve problems in the allocated time. You're not going to acquire that knowledge during your test.
by mamonster | 2025-08-21 14:07:16+00:00
At IB you can get margin interest rates of like 6% I think? SP500 total return is like 9.5% already this year, 25 and 26% in 2024/2023. You get paid to borrow like crazy. Exactly why Dave Ramsey is the worst financial youtuber of the 10s: When rates are close to 0, you only need a 1% return to pay the carry. You should be borrowing like crazy.
by evanelias | 2025-08-21 14:07:25+00:00
I'd love to hear more about your experience with AGPL licensing and building a cloud/SaaS product later. It looks like you introduced a CLA four months ago, but have a lot of external contributions prior to that.

How did you solve the AGPL hurdles for that pre-CLA third-party code? It's usually impractical to get a lot of contributors to retroactively sign a CLA. Did you have to rewrite some/all of those older code contributions, or is the full cloud product open source as well?
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-21 14:07:52+00:00
Hmmm... It's the other way around for me. I find it hard to memorise things I don't actually understand.

I remember being given a proof of why RSA encryption is secure. All the other students just regurgitated it. It made superficial sense I guess.

However, I could not understand the proof and felt quite stupid. Eventually I went to my professor for help. He admitted the proof he had given was incomplete (and showed me why it still worked). He also said he hadn't expected anyone to notice it wasn't a complete proof.
by Aachen | 2025-08-21 14:08:30+00:00
Interesting, I didn't even know it had such a failure mode. Thanks for the reply, I'll sadly have to update my opinion on this project since it's apparently not a pure "everyone is equal if they can Prove the Work" system as I thought :(

I'm curious how, though, since the submitted article doesn't mention that and demonstrates curl working (which is about as low as you can go on the browser emulation front), but no time to look into it atm. Maybe it's because of an option or module that the author didn't have enabled
by bluGill | 2025-08-21 14:08:45+00:00
Memorization and closed book tests are important for some areas. When seconds are counting the ER doctor cannot go look up how to treat a heart attack. That doctor also needs to know now only how to treat the common heart attack, but how to recognize this isn't the common heart attack but the 1 in 10,000 not a heart attack but has exactly the same symptoms as a heart attack case and give it the correct treatment.

However most of us are not in that situation. It is better for us to just look up those details as we need them because it gives us more room to handle a broader variety of situations.
by FredPret | 2025-08-21 14:08:50+00:00
These high PE's imply an expectation of further profit growth - by rational investors. There's a strong element of less rational investors with FOMO jumping on as well.

Index funds offer some defense against crazy PE's through diversification, but keep in mind that when an asset bubbles, it also takes up a greater percentage of the index fund. The big tech stocks make up a significant % of the SP500.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-21 14:08:51+00:00
Movie reviews (stars) given on Amazon Prime's streaming service always seemed incredibly sus. All the bad movies from the long-tail back catalog all seemed remarkably highly-rated. Typical pattern: Forth-rate sci-fi action movie amalgamation of the 12 other well-known sci-fi action hits? Yes!! Four stars!

Just assumed Prime's claimed ratings were untrustworthy and must be based on some corporate "we'll promote your dreck, no problem-o!" data feed. But a bit sadder that Rotten Tomatoes, once at least reasonably legit and crowd-sourced, now poisoned by the same "everything's good! watch it! watch it!" inflation. Not surprising. Anti-surprising, really. Still a bit sad.

Thank you for the excellent historical, statistical deep dive.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-21 14:08:55+00:00
There are two freight trains currently smashing into each other:

1.) Elon fired 80% of twitter and 3 years later it still hasn't collapsed or fallen into technical calamity. Every tech board/CEO took note of that.

2.) Every kid and their sister going to college who wants a middle class life with generous working conditions is targeting tech. Every teenage nerd saw those over employed guys making $600k from their couch during the pandemic.
by moron4hire | 2025-08-21 14:09:05+00:00
This is why I've always found it weird that people consider D3 to be a charting tool. Yes, people have used it to build a lot of charts, but it's really just a streaming data processing tool. It doesn't provide anything specific to charting[0]. All of that part, you're still left to figure out on your own.

[0] At least in the core, I'm not too familiar with the full ecosystem and what is considered official in terms of plugins. Everytime I've tried to use it, I've not found the documentation leading me to using anything more specifically oriented towards charting.
by tkjef | 2025-08-21 14:09:30+00:00
I have been on the terraform side for 7 years-ish.

eksctl just really impressed me with its eks management, specifically managed node groups & cluster add-ons, over terraform.

that uses cloudformation under the hood. so i gave it a try, and it’s awesome. combine with github actions and you have your IAC automation.

nice web interface for others to check stacks status, events for debugging and associated resources that were created.

oh, ever destroy some legacy complex (or not that complex) aws shit in terraform? it’s not going to be smooth. site to site connections, network interfaces, subnets, peering connections, associated resources… oh, my.

so far cloudformation has been good at destroying, but i haven’t tested that with massive legacy infra yet.

but i am happily converted tf>cf.

and will happily use both alongside each other as needed.
by 9rx | 2025-08-21 14:11:04+00:00
Haven't we been talking about that for a long time? Even the whole "go to college to make more money" was premised on the idea of people leveraging college research facilities to create new opportunities for money in recognition of the walls closing in. The game of telephone saw that turn into "go to college to get a job" with few compelling creations to come from it and, thus, stagnant incomes, but you can only lead the horse to water...
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-21 14:11:08+00:00
> In this microservices world, things are small enough that any small group of even low productivity employees can make things work. That is quite literally true, because smaller things that work well don't even need all that many changes on a everyday basis.

You're committing the classic fallacy around microservices here. The services themselves are simpler. The whole software is not.

When you take a classic monolith and split it up into microservices that are individually simple, the complexity does not go away, it simply moves into the higher abstractions. The complexity now lives in how the microservices interact.

In reality, the barrier to entry on monoliths wasn't that high either. You could get "low productivity employees" (I'd recommend you just call them "novices" or "juniors") to do the work, it'd just be best served with tomato sauce rather than deployed to production.

The same applies to microservices. You can have inexperienced devs build out individual microservices, but to stitch them together well is hard, arguably harder than ye-olde-monolith now that Java and more recent languages have good module systems.
by dirkc | 2025-08-21 14:11:10+00:00
I had a like minded professor in university, ironically in AI. Our big tests were all 3 day take home assignments. The questions were open ended, required writing code, processing data and analyzing results.

I think the problem with this is that it requires the professor to mentally fully engage when marking assignments and many educators do not have the capacity and/or desire to do so.
by abustamam | 2025-08-21 14:11:14+00:00
It's a good question. Anime (like many media, but especially anime) is known to have gratuitous fan service where girls/women of all ages are in revealing clothing for seemingly no reason except to just entice viewers.

The reasoning is that because they aren't real people, it's okay to draw and view images of anime, regardless of their age. And because geek/nerd circles tend not to socialize with real women, we get this over-proliferation of anime girls.
by closewith | 2025-08-21 14:11:23+00:00
> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?

What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.

> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.

And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.

> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.

You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.
by 4bpp | 2025-08-21 14:11:30+00:00
That makes a lot of sense, given that in the Kurrent era it was actually considered proper to use a "Romance" (and hence "modern-looking") script even for non-Germanic loanwords in German text, mirroring the Fraktur/Antiqua distinction in print typesetting!

In a way, this could also be compared to the present-day use of katakana for loanwords and hiragana for native text in Japanese (which ironically only crystallised as a universal convention after WWII).
by gverrilla | 2025-08-21 14:11:45+00:00
I tried to watch a Marx Brothers movie a while ago, and I deeply regretted having abandoned my "pirate" library a decade ago. Opening Spotify, half of the tracks on my playlists are blurred out and unavailable. I'm not paying for a single streaming service, and for the ad's I get I'll boycott the advertiser. When I can make some time I will rebuild my own free library again.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-21 14:11:45+00:00
Visiting my dad's work in the 1980's, what I distinctly remember is not only office doors, but that everyone had a busy light outside that they could toggle from a switch on their desk. Presumably so they could close the door but still let others know they were fine with interruptions. The lights probably did not ONLY exist for visiting kids to have something to play with.