MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pstuart | 2025-08-02 22:45:58+00:00
I'm confused. I was responding to a complaint about "manual unlocks" (vs. the "certainty" of a Lock(); defer Unlock().

The examples pointed to in the stdlib to complain about that usage pattern could have easily done just that -- but they were optimized to shrink the window of the locking time. My take is that the code paths were simple enough to verify that it was safe to do, and being in the stdlib had both. enough eyes to validate and a driver (being foundational code).

I recognize that Go is far from perfect but think some of the pearl clutching is manufactured (OMG! nil pointers! -- they technically can happen but in my many years of coding in Go it hasn't been a problem of note.)

And of course we should recognize that the locking issue being brought up was a simple one and the story gets worse when talking about complicated concurrency. Then the Go story of "just use the race detector!" is tempered by the fact that it is only best effort and no guarantees that it's found everything (like a bloom filter of certainty).

So year, Go has footguns and other inadequacies (FFI is a bummer). But it's good enough for a lot of things. Rust is on my list to learn, so my only complaint about it is the steep learning curve and I'm an old lazy dev.
by patrakov | 2025-08-02 22:46:38+00:00
This essay resonated with me because it highlighted the similarity between AI-written texts, describing the result as a word salad. And this also reminded me about some words from my teacher of Russian Literature: that the "bright future" themed novels of the pre-WW2 Soviet writers — works produced under strict political control — read like one big novel without a beginning and an end, and not as separate works.

And this grayness and sameness is what happens when people are forced to "think" as a chorus, either by the authorities or their censorship, or voluntarily by using the same AI's help.
by bpavuk | 2025-08-02 22:47:44+00:00
TypeScript does not compile to machine code (in case of Android, ART bytecode) directly. Instead, it compiles to JS, which has a lot of well-known problems and is not as performant as machine code. Yeah, iPhones not older than 3-5 years will not notice it because of Apple's best-in-class flagship chipsets, but hey, 1) not everyone in the world has an iPhone and 2) why waste computing power and battery life? WASM wouldn't exist if not for JS's poor performance - it simply would not need to! I'm still glad TS exists, though, because it fixes quite a lot of problems with JavaScript DX just by marrying it with types. The only problem of TypeScript is JavaScript. (Arguably, also Microsoft, but this is a separate discussion.) Heck, the biggest problem of the whole web IS JavaScript - that's why there is a comeback trend in HTML/CSS-centric frameworks. JS is simply unable to sustain such heavyweight frameworks as React (including React Native, which is what Bluesky uses). Such frameworks as SwiftUI and Compose are living proofs of that - while you stay with Kotlin/Native or Kotlin/JVM targets (iOS, Android, JVM desktop), your app feels snappy, assuming you wrote it well, because you stay close to the metal. Once you move to Kotlin/JS, though, you are fucked. Immediately, you lose tons of performance, making such a beautiful framework with the best animations API in the world usable only for PowerPoint-style slideshows. Kotlin/WASM backend is still experimental, but future Kotlin/JS backend deprecation is confirmed.
by throw0101d | 2025-08-02 22:47:59+00:00
> IPv4 is never going away […]

This was considered likely when IPng was being discussed in 1990s:

Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4 hosts on the Internet effectively forever. IPng must provide mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5
by djtango | 2025-08-02 22:48:50+00:00
My first piano teacher was very artsy and whimsical, she and I simply were never able to establish any connection as I have always been a very logical learner. I suffered under her for almost 10 years as a child while she tried to teach music to me in the way that made sense to her.

My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself.

Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music.

In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different.

I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-02 22:49:33+00:00
This.

I've got myself in a PILE of trouble when trying to use LLMs with languages/technologies I am unfamiliar with (React, don't judge me).

But with something that I am familiar with (say Go, or Python) LLMs have improved my velocity massively, with the caveat that I have had to explicitly tell the LLM when it is producing something that I know that I don't want (me arguing with an LLM was an experience too!)
by AngryData | 2025-08-02 22:50:18+00:00
Ironically the people who make bad health decisions are often benefiting the medical system by dieing more often around retirement age rather than going on to live 20+ years past retirement with age-related healthcare problems that cost WAY more than any other health conditions they could encounter when they are younger.

Smokers for example have more lung disease and cancer which cost money to treat, but usually not until they are in their 60s so they still spend their entire life paying into the system, but then they die soon after, saving on age related healthcare costs. And that is on top of smoking disqualifying someone from many treatments and surgeries, making smokers a net-win for healthcare costs to society.

Being really fat also seems to have similar effects, although the the finances are much closer so perhaps the second order effects from being fat cancel them out. But on paper they are still a bit cheaper than the average person.

Many people will argue against it because it "feels wrong" and they think unhealthy people should be punished (for example with higher insurance fees) and don't want to admit that unhealthy people are subsidizing their own healthcare, doubly so if you add in the sin taxes they have been paying their whole life that often result in more state income than their entire life-time medical costs add up to. But there has been numerous studies across the decades in Europe and the US showing how much cheaper unhealthy people that die earlier are to care for compared to the 90 year old granny walking everyday and risking broken hips and taking 30 different medications a day.
Show HN: AI Physics Tutor with Free Body Diagrams
by andrewrn | 2025-08-02 22:50:21+00:00
Hi HN. I built a prototype AI physics tutor that can interpret, draw, and edit free body diagrams.

Lately I've been transfixed with generating diagrams with LLMs. If you pipe generated JSON through a D3.js renderer, you can get pretty consistent SVG results with the smarter models.

This physics tutor prototype is an example of an application. For a couple premade scenes, you can ask it to make an FBD, decompose an angled force into components, run through the math of Newton's Second Law, or off-road and try and generate a FBD for a scene of your own description.

I previously made a similar example for electrical circuits: www.circuit-tutor.xyz

LLMs have been really fun for me to brush up on my favorite physics and engineering topics, but if they could diagram and even simulate systems while also being able to explain the math, I think it could be genuinely useful for learning concepts from scratch.

Would love any feedback on whether this, bolstered with more diagram types, better UX, and more robustness, could be useful for people learning intro physics.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-08-02 22:50:25+00:00
The way SFUSD placed kids, after checking whether they have siblings, or pre-K attendance, is:

Test Score Area (CTIP1) Students who live in areas of the city with the lowest average test scores.

Which will tend to fill good schools in good areas from kids in areas with bad schools. After that they look at proximity, but most or all spaces will have been filled.

Attendance Area Elementary school students who live in the attendance area of the elementary school requested

It effectively means a lot of neighborhood swapping, and driving kids to schools.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210204205328/https://www.sfusd...
by rco8786 | 2025-08-02 22:50:56+00:00
You should lead with some deets about why you would use this vs just using `fetch` directly.

``` await fetchet('https://dummyjson.com/posts').then((response) => console.log(response)) ```

This is the first code sample and if I'm not mistaken you could s/fetchet/fetch and it would do the exact same thing?
by waldrews | 2025-08-02 22:50:58+00:00
Does caching make as much sense as a cost saving measure on Cerebras hardware as it does on mainstream GPU's? Caching should be preferred if SSD->VRAM is dramatically cheaper than recalculation. If Cerebras is optimized for massively parallel compute with fixed weights, and not a lot of memory bandwidth into or out of the big wafer, it might actually make sense to price per token without a caching discount. Could someone from the company (or otherwise familiar with it) comment on the tradeoff?
by jaggederest | 2025-08-02 22:51:25+00:00
I've actually gone through and tried to refactor the tests Claude writes (when I ask it to only touch test files). I can't improve them, generally speaking. Often they're limited by architectural or code style choices in the main code. And there are minor stylistic things here or there.

But the bulk of it, is that you get absolutely top tier tests for the same level of effort as a half-assed attempt.

If you set it up with good test quality tools (mutation testing is my favorite) it goes even further - beyond what I think is actually reasonable to ask a human to test unless you're e.g. writing life and safety critical systems.
by kubectl_h | 2025-08-02 22:51:26+00:00
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed.

I'm not here to defend brodozers, but you cannot possibly prove this statement. That a _pickup truck_ isn't hauling the majority of the time it is on the road is not some new thing. But of course there are more pickup trucks on the road than ever, so if you argument is aggregate time of all pickup trucks not doing truck things is the highest its ever been is certainly true, but you'd probably have to go back to before the 80s for that number to actually be meaningfully different per truck.
by pentamassiv | 2025-08-02 22:51:50+00:00
I think so too. It helps to form good habits. If you have a roommate for example, you can't leave your dirty dishes everywhere and need to clean it as soon as you are done. You can learn a lot from your roommates too. One of my ex flatmates was super crafty and I got a different perspective on things thanks to that.

I used to live in a flat with one flatmate who changed every half a year or so because they were usually interns. Never knew them before they moved in but 90% of the time we became friends. I liked that they changed after a while so I was never stuck with a bad roomate.

I don't recommend the other way around. If you have a good friend it's more likely to notice their annoying habits so there is little upside but in a worse case you can damage the friendship.
by daft_pink | 2025-08-02 22:51:56+00:00
I regularly use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, and I'm convinced that Gemini's enormous context window isn't that helpful in many situations. I think the more you put into context, the more likely the model is to go off into on a tangent and you end up with "context rot" or get confused and start working on an older no longer relevant context. You definitely need to manage and clear your context window and the only time I would want such a large context window is when the source data is really that large.
by netsharc | 2025-08-02 22:51:59+00:00
So is this behavior defined by societal rules and expectations, or by the genders' own nature?

I'm a man, and as I get older I feel like the idea of men having to be less social and aggressive (e.g. the part about not tolerating stuff - or the opposite idea that women are fine with suffering in silence while someone has poor behavior instead of speaking up) harms us.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-02 22:52:02+00:00
>Do you think videos like these need more animations/ visuals to be more entertaining or understandable? Or do you think content like this doesnt require those kinds of attention keeping tactics? I mean I try to be visual with code output and stuff like that, but I wasnt sure If i need to up my editing skills because its lacking important audio/visual production qualilty.

I don't think this type of content necessarily benefits from a bunch of animations and visuals. Your target audience seems to be technical enough to follow along with a terminal or IDE, especially with you explaining what you're doing and what's happening.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-02 22:52:27+00:00
No one is asking you to pass judgment. I’m a long-standing member here telling my truth, and preventing me from warning others is reprehensible imho.

There might be vindictive posts but people could judge them on the merits of their argument and history. But you are going out of your way to prevent expression. What is there to gain?
by perching_aix | 2025-08-02 22:52:36+00:00
> The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct

Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links. What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.

> But all arguments depend on their premises being correct

But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.

In fact, I ran into this the other day here when while someone said something potentially true, they were also engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy (also an informal fallacy). One of them claimed that "if it's a fallacy, it's nonsensical to call it true" - except no, that's not the point. The statement can absolutely be true in that case, it's the reasoning that didn't make sense in context. Context they were happy to deny of course, because they were not there to make people's days any better.

Similar here: the slippery slope can be true and real, it's just fallacious to default to it. Conversely [0], it is absolutely possible that people all think the same thing, are actually right, and some other thing becomes true because of it, just super uncommon, so it is fallacious to invert it.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-02 22:52:37+00:00
While the data on phonics suggests it works well, I feel like I may have benefited from an alternative method (my school taught phonics growing up).

I personally do not think I am all the special, but I from what I remember, I believe many of my issues with phonics were:

1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too. If I am not mistaken, most languages do not have Spelling Bee contests because how clearly the language phonics map to spelling, e.g., German.

2. This is purely a hypothesis on my part, but I wonder if certain accents of English are better suited for phonics than other English accents? I grew up in the Southeast, USA. People slur words, drop off endings, contract words n >= 2 words, and even mispronounce words all. For example, the words "ten" and "tin" or "pen" and "pin" are not typically pronounced differently where I am from.

3. If you are like me and had speech problems, then phonics are substantially harder. It's hard to sound out the words when one's mouth cannot produce the proper sounds.

I do not doubt the other alternative methods are worse than phonics, and perhaps I am ignorant, but this debate also seems to be predominately an English only issue. Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
by datameta | 2025-08-02 22:52:57+00:00
The point is there are those for whom one of the only forms exercise within reach is walking but it isn't thought of as exercise. Not all people are able to do more intense cardio or lift weights. Regular walking can bootstrap the body toward other exercise.

Tai chi actually is another amazing tool - it is a dynamic calisthenics exercise that builds core strength, balance, and stretches connective tissue.
by Strilanc | 2025-08-02 22:53:02+00:00
I think you're confusing the distinction between classical ray optics and classical wave optics with the distinction between classical wave optics and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and classical wave optics agree on the explanation for diffraction as a path interference effect. In classical optics, the reason you don't see light coming from angles away from the shortest path is because of destructive interference between the other paths.

For example, note that the Huygens principle predates quantum mechanics by over 200 years [1]. As another example, diffraction gratings (which manifestly require interference between different paths) were being made in the mid 1800s [2] but in physics documentaries you never hear of people being confused about how to explain their behavior. Because they are explained by classical wave optics. Also see this lecture which talks about diffraction in the context of ray optics [3].

Where wave optics disagrees from quantum mechanics is in the dim-light limit, when you start resolving individual photons.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tKPLfZ9JVQ&list=PLB1A0BF14E...
by gerdesj | 2025-08-02 22:54:05+00:00
I was merely noting that you used a grammatical rule I have not seen in quite a long time.

sigh

5 -> five, english -> English (we are not Germans who insist on all nouns be capitalised but why not try it for a proper noun), novel -> diatribe. Possible missing ellipsis.

I speak roughly seven languages really badly and can fail to apologise properly in several others.
by daft_pink | 2025-08-02 22:54:42+00:00
I'm running an M4 Max as well and I found that using project goose works decently well with qwen3 coder loaded on LM Studio (Ollama doesn't do MLX yet unless you build it yourself I think) and configured as an openai model as the api is compatible. Goose adds a bunch of tools and plugins that make the model more effective.
by tpae | 2025-08-02 22:54:55+00:00
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by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-02 22:56:11+00:00
Some news stories I came-across involved people with conditions like schizophrenia or with psychosis - and their interactions with LLMs didn’t exactly help keep them grounded in reality.

…but that is distinct from the people who noncritically appraise ChatGPT’s stochastic-parrot wisdom.

…and both situations are problems and I’ve no idea how the LLM vendors - or the public at-large - will address them.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-02 22:56:12+00:00
The public system in Hong Kong doesn't really cost anything. It's not that you get costs "waived" if you whine hard enough that you ought to be a charity case (which, by the way, is degrading,) and it's not that costs are passed on to a middleman. Medical treatment is transparently priced and simply inexpensive -- so it's simply not a cause of bankruptcy in Hong Kong, whereas, in the US...

> https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/medical-b...

Also, perhaps because it's a lot more laissez faire, the private system in Hong Kong is almost unimaginably superior to the private system in the US. It's far cheaper because pricing is transparent and most people pay cash! (Cutting out that middleman.) It's higher quality because there's a lot more competition, rather than collusion among a few major providers.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-02 22:57:12+00:00
Not sure what you mean by "prove this statement" but answering questions like this is exactly why organizations do consumer research. To wit [1]:

> According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
by yunruse | 2025-08-02 22:57:20+00:00
Having just taken an IQ test out of curiosity, they strike me as testing very little beyond the ability to pattern recognise and extrapolate.

Having pattern recognised and extrapolated to my perception of the wealth-happiness curve, it seems that when your wants are met by your current wage, wanting more money is paradoxical -- it requires either time or stress that take away from the many other richnesses of life.

A little ambition (and savings) is good -- you can't recline too far back into the comfort zone -- but wealth never struck me as a particularly important measure of a person.