MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dskrvk | 2025-08-18 04:37:16+00:00
> And for another, in the process of seeking to maximize its gain from technologies discovered in its labs, the University of Chicago now does more than participate in licensing. It actively invests in start-ups by its faculty, millions of dollars in dozens of investments. Quite apart from the fact that these investments have mostly been a bust, the practice raises serious questions. Can a university make rational decisions about the value of a given employee when it co-invests in commercial ventures with that employee?

> And more seriously, where does the money come from? Is the university driving down what it spends to educate its own students so that it can use unrestricted funds to invest in startups? Or is the university functioning as a kind of tax-free pass-through organization? Does it receive third-party money that it invests as a tax-free enterprise, to the benefit of other investors in the same start-up?

> Spending as little tuition as possible on educating students, and (instead) investing in start-ups ... This is why I say the University of Chicago’s leadership and trustees run it as a tax-free technology incubator. All of which raises the question, whether an operation of this kind deserves the status of 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
by thwarted | 2025-08-18 04:37:47+00:00
> Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help?

If you don't create anything, you're not being creative. My assertion is that just coming up with an idea is not sufficient to create something; an idea alone isn't manifest. An idea without expression, in whatever medium, isn't very useful.

Why does prose need to be "perfect" (whatever that means) in order for the act of writing to be "creative"? Much poetry isn't "perfect prose", and that it doesn't follow a known, accepted grammatical standard is often its defining quality as poetry.

Have you created a joke if you just think of it (the "idea") and it is never told to anyone (the "execution")?

Have you created a joke if someone is exposed to it but they don't laugh? (You may have created something by telling it to someone, but it probably isn't a joke if no one finds it funny, and delivery is a good portion of what can make a joke funny, and delivery is part of the execution).

If your intent is to exercise your creativity by writing a book, but all you do is come up with an idea and have an LLM write it, did you write a book? If you intend to write a joke and say "it would be funny if we had a joke for this" and someone else comes up with a joke, did you write the joke because you had the idea of it?

> If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help?

Asking for help isn't a sin (nor do I know why one would use that word). But claiming you did something that you didn't do is a lie, and lying is a sin.

If it's the idea that is killer, then the quality of the output doesn't matter as long as the idea is communicated, so one's ability with Photoshop isn't relevant. A well drawn four-panel comic doesn't turn a shit idea into gold. But a lot of meme gold isn't gold because of the quality of drawing — which means you don't need to draw to some arbitrarily high standard to produce meme gold. The assertions that somehow it's not creative unless it's "perfect" and the use of an LLM can result in "perfection" are ideas that have to die.

> Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?

Well, my original observation at the top of the thread is that HN has considered ideas to be largely worthless if they don't have meaningful execution. In the case of writing — books, jokes, or memes — expression is the execution.
by toast0 | 2025-08-18 04:39:26+00:00
> In 99% of use cases, there’s other, easier optimizations to be had. You’ll know if you’re in the 1% workload pinning is advantageous to.

Cpu pinning can be super easy too. If you have an application that uses the whole machine, you probably already spawn one thread per cpu thread. Pinning those threads is usually pretty easy. Checking if it makes a difference might be harder... For most applications, it won't make a big difference, but some applications will see a big difference. Usually a positive difference, but it depends on the application. If nobody has tried cpu pinning your application lately, it's worth trying.

Of course, doing something efficiently is nice, but not doing it is often a lot faster... Not doing things that don't need to be done has huge potential speedups.

If you want to cpu pin network sockets, that's not as easy, but it can also make a big difference in some circumstances; mostly if you're a load balancer/proxy kind of thing where you don't spend much time processing packets, just receive and forward. In that case, avoiding cross cpu reads and writes can provide huge speedups, but it's not easy. That one, yeah, only do it if you have a good idea it will help, it's kind of invasive and it won't be noticable if you do a lot of work on requests.
by tombert | 2025-08-18 04:40:54+00:00
Oh, no argument.

I did used to have Rumble installed on my phone specifically for a single creator that was banned from YouTube, but this guy isn't racist, and isn't even conservative. The ads on the videos were something, lots of conspiracy baiting and "vaccine alternatives" and gold investing. I uninstalled it after a few months because it was using an obscene amount of data, even when I wasn't using the app. I don't know why and I couldn't be bothered to investigate.

I have a super fancy video camera that I bought specifically to make YouTube videos, and I had fun setting it up, but then I realized I don't have any ideas for videos to make.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 04:41:03+00:00
> {{brace-enclosed shortcodes}}

I haven’t checked if any of the details have changed any time recently, but Zola does this, and I had a rough time with it because of the interactions with Markdown rules around raw HTML and escaping and such. I have worked to forget the details. I reckon Zola bakes Markdown in too deeply, and it’s a pain. Especially because of indentation causing code blocks, that’s one of the biggest problems with extending Markdown by “just writing HTML”.
by VivanPanda | 2025-08-18 04:41:40+00:00
I have recently been working on creating an open-source Arduino curriculum and now have a working base completed.

When I first attempted to learn Arduino, I noticed that there weren't many clear, structured resources which taught beginners from the grounds up. Rather, these courses usually hand-held students through the lessons, or were frankly too difficult to understand. I created ArduinoMap with the very intention of solving this problem and providing a free, open-source curriculum that teaches good fundamentals.

As ArduinoMap is open source, I would love to involve the community in growing it. Also, I must mention that this is just a base - it would be great to work on adding new lessons, projects and ideas together to make it a great resource to learn Arduino.
Show HN: Alias Manager, tiny macOS app to manage Git aliases and shell aliases
by argrau | 2025-08-18 04:43:44+00:00
I kept editing aliases by hand, so I made Alias Manager, a tiny macOS app to view, add, and edit Git aliases and shell aliases quickly. Built in spare moments in airports and cafes, kept the scope small.

Status: beta. macOS build is signed and notarized. PRs welcome. The icon is intentionally temporary.

Happy to hear feedback on features and UX.
by Arainach | 2025-08-18 04:44:27+00:00
It's miserable to parse C++ and that's fine, because only a few people have to write a parser while 5 orders of magnitude more have to read and write it. Same thing with markdown - the user experience is what matters.

Edge cases largely don't matter, because again I'm not trying to make a book. I don't care if my table is off by a few pixels. 50% of the time I'm reading markdown it's not even formatted, it's just in raw format in an editor.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-18 04:44:34+00:00
Other WAY more qualified people already responded and elucidated on the initial origins of Rust (it used to have a garbage collector!), but I can at least add this:

The definition of "same niche" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

There's a marked difference between what these tools became and the impression of them along the way and the axes along which they were compared in actuality. In the simple "I need to build a backend" conversation, Rust and Go were comparable long after Rust changed to a "real" systems language -- I'd go as far as to say people still compare them to this day (and Go probably wins that larger niche for many contextual reasons).

I think the point is partially reflected in your own statement -- there are many axes along which Go is not a Java replacement, and is not a Python replacement either. The definition of the "niche" vastly changes the answer.

For example, if you pick the right niche (e.g. HFT) Java meaningfully outperforms Go because high performance Java is... actually high performance -- those millions of man years into the compiler, runtime, etc produced progress. That said both of those languages get trounced by the FPGAs and custom hardware in the end.

I'm not convinced it was always wrong to compare Rust and Go, but the modern understanding of how different they are today is definitely better/I am glad they're more separated/more people know not to directly compare them.
by godelski | 2025-08-18 04:44:39+00:00
I'm one of those people. It seems like all search engines give pretty similar results, so why not use the one with more privacy? I can even do a quick LLM ask on DDG and with different models. Helpful when search terms are not getting the right match.

I think most people's judgement about DDG is from a few uses and from some time ago. It's worth giving it a shot if you haven't in awhile. But give it a real shot, like use it for a few days to get over the "I hate it because it's different" game that our minds play.

And a major benefit now is you don't just get a fucking popup on your phone every time you're just trying to search something. Like seriously, wtf google. Needy much?
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-18 04:44:45+00:00
This is a persistent myth that is just flat out wrong. Your k8s cluster orchestrator does not need to be online very often at all. The kube proxies will gladly continue proxying traffic as last they best know. Your containers will still continue to run. Hiccups, or outright outages, in the kubi API server do not cause downtime, unless you are using certain terrible, awful, no good, very bad proxies within the cluster (istio, linkerd).
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 04:45:35+00:00
It's just so so sad that the cost of living is so high, that it's so hard and sooo risky to strike off on your own & to try to get stuff started.

How the world has captured so much potential, such an amazing era, and lashed it to this middling servitude is so sad. But it feels so impossible to try to begin better, the odds so stacked against us, the society about us so cowed and so FUD'ed up against "socialism" as to be unwilling to do anything to improve access to health care child care housing food and utilities. All ventures made available to the already wealthy.

Fuck enterprises, and worse, fuck this too scared world for being propagandized into cowardice that obstructs human spirit from being able to make a real go at better.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-18 04:46:13+00:00
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how the five most popular porn sites handled age verification since I live in Florida. One of the states that require it. I started here (safe for work - just list of the most popular websites overall - not porn sites)

https://conversion.ag/blog/top-websites-in-the-world/

Do any of these alternatives seem like something you would want to use?

#10 doesn’t require any age verification.

#12 doesn’t allow you to sign in at all unless you are a creator

#14 no verification needed

#25 requires you to use your Google or Twitter account or an email address.

#61 requires you to log in with your Google account.

#69 wants you to upload your drivers license or passport to a site called

https://saas-onboarding.incodesmile.com/multimedia214/flow/6...
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 04:47:28+00:00
If you’re not accustomed to reStructuredText, it looks dreadful. If you saw it in the context of a larger document that used directives for more things, it’d make more sense.

Also the author has very bad taste in having used two spaces of indentation. It should have been three, which makes it significantly less ugly:

.. image:: example.jpg :alt: alttext

“.. ”: this block is magic.

“image::”: directive, type image.

“example.jpg”: directive argument, file name.

“:alt: alttext” directive option, named alt, value alttext.

Rewritten with a completely different sort of syntax, for fun:

┌ IMAGE ─ example.jpg ──┐ │ alt = alttext │ └───────────────────────┘
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-18 04:47:30+00:00
> You just think that altruism could function just as well

Not at all. I'm no proponent of altruism.

I proposed crowdfunding as the alternative. As in, entire nations worth of people investing money to make something happen. Decentralized investors.

Once intellectual work is done, the value of the intangible product trends towards zero. Selling things that have infinite supply makes no economic sense. Society needs to find a way to pay creators before the work is done. Creations must be treated as investments rather than products.
by fy20 | 2025-08-18 04:49:50+00:00
I'm in another European country. Here it's combined into the final kWh price rather than a separate line item. 7c/kWh for transmission fees.

The grid is owned and managed by a government entity, so the price is set by them with parliament oversight. Last year they had to reduce the price (from 10c/kWh), as they found out they'd been overcharging people for a few years and had a few hundred million surplus of revenue.

And yes they are investing quite a lot to modernise the equipment and put high voltage powelines underground (lots of forests here). My country has a population density comparable to Texas.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-18 04:49:51+00:00
I can't imagine a sense of shame that would be more powerful than the knowledge that I spent $32,000, many months of my & my partner's life, and risked dying to be a few cm taller. Definitely one of those things where its baffling to me how people consider it appropriate to mock people for. Imagine someone walking around in public today describing someone as having a "flat chest personality" or how most westerners are very uncomfortable with "skin lightening" as a beauty thing.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-18 04:51:02+00:00
1)

Yeah, not everyone is mitchellh -- I'd argue that his intuition was right (expecting to find more issues), there's a reason we don't all write C.

That said, it's great to hear that others are having success with Zig and aren't writing very many bugs.

> To me, the tradeoff of a demonstrably small number of bugs in a system software language in return for the demonstrably faster developer velocity (Zig compiles WAY faster than Rust, Zig wraps C/C++ libraries way easier than Rust, Zig cross compiles way more easily, etc.) is a decent tradeoff for my use cases.

Reasonable points! This is one of the reasons I have on my list to consider Zig at all (that and wanting to write more C), it seems people that like it are wonderfully productive in it.

I really like a lot of the design decisions and watch the streams than Andrew and Loris, Tigerbeetle folks and others do to see the decisions they make. Their managed IO approach is certainly interesting and quite powerful.

Dislike some small petty syntax things (whyCamelCaseFunctions()!?), but that's a me thing.

> For me, programming is about corralling motivation more than anything else. Rust saps my motivation is ways that Zig does not.

Agree with this, anecdotally.

> I love what the Oxide folks are doing. Having someone pwn your big server because of a memory bug? Yeah, I'd reach for Rust in their use cases. Or, if I'm handling credit cards, I'll have a very different set of tradeoffs that swing against Zig. (Although, in that case, I'll probably reach for a GC language in that case so that I don't have to think about memory management at all.)

Yup, Typescript works for me here, and usually the hard parts are offloaded to an external service anyway (e.g. Stripe)

> Zig is simply a much smaller language than Rust. I use Zig because my brain isn't big enough for either C++ or Rust. > > I'm not a 10x programmer, but I still want to get stuff done. Zig and C enable me to do that without bending my brain.

I wouldn't put Rust and C++ in the same league there as far as brain size requirements, but point taken!
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-18 04:52:13+00:00
Microsoft included almost a full 1988 toolchain (masm, C, make, etc) in their MIT licensed MSDOS repo last year: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS

There is no source code, but at least the license makes it free to use and redistribute. The C compiler seems very close to supporting ANSI C89.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-18 04:52:54+00:00
> Anyone who claims there is no difference between the parties at this point is trolling or sufficiently ignorant as to be indistinguishable from a troll.

Good thing that's not what I said.

Biden dramatically increased Arctic oil drilling, shut down labor strikes, increased police funding and militarization, declared the Covid pandemic over prematurely, deported 4.6 million people (vs Trumps 2 million), reduced protections for lgbtq individuals, and enabled a genocide.

> Not have the federal government trying to criminalize their existence.

Biden is a big part of why we have "truth in sentencing" and "three strikes" laws. See the 1994 violent crime control and law enforcement act. He's literally one of the poster children for the carceral state.

Biden deported over twice as many people as Trump, he eliminated protections for trans youth, he bombed Gaza. Clean air? The man pushed oil drilling. The concessions in the IRA alone will be polluting for generations.

You can convince me there are good Democrats, but not Biden. Biden was a right wing politician. One left of Trump, no doubt, but he would fit right in with a Bush or Reagan.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-18 04:54:59+00:00
> All of that said, there are patterns that will just be harder to reason about in Rust, mostly with self-referential things, and if you area already used to using them a lot, this can be a hassle. If you're used to smaller data structures and data-oriented programming, it will be a lot easier.

Also an underrated chance to be forced to learn about Arenas, most of the time.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 04:55:39+00:00
Your either deep in the shit amazed anything works and respecting the world about you, so happy any tool at all is trying to make things better…

Or you have the free time to be a loudmouth online and mouth off about how tech's x y and/or z are dumb and how a shitty bash script is more than enough.

Thankfully I think now Linux has some really great tooling now. But very few people have calls of duty where they are called to do super serious work. Mostly the job calls for pretty simple shit. Make the dumb app go. Throw more servers at the problem someday. The tension is real. It's unfortunate that the cutting edge is so spread out, is so far in advance of the main body of devs.
by sho | 2025-08-18 04:55:49+00:00
> This is a bit of popular myth on sites like this but isn't supported by economists, historians or people in finance. The total volume of oil trade is small fraction of total global trade or capital flows.

What's a popular myth? That oil, still the strategic commodity worldwide, plays a large role in the USA's security relationships and use of the USD is, written or unwritten, a tacit part of those relationships?

That's completely wrong and you have a lot of reading to do to understand the entire post-WWII geopolitical order. Oil is receding yes, but it's still critical and you can't understand anything about the postwar security order - which is very closely tied to the rise of the USD - until you understand that.

I mean, the Nimitz is in the Persian Gulf right now keeping the sea lanes open for their client states in the region. That's the USA's part of the deal right there.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 04:56:58+00:00
If you write C++ in a way that it will misparse, you will normally get a hard error that you have to fix. (Also, the complexity is mostly fairly well encapsulated.)

If you write Markdown in a way that your engine will misparse, you may well not notice—the compiler probably doesn’t even have the notion of throwing an error. The fact that you’re normally working with the unformatted text makes it even more likely that you won’t notice. (And the complexity is badly encapsulated, too.)

I have seen errors due to Markdown complexity so often. I just dealt with a blog where some images were completely missing because they’d written <img> tags in order to add some class attributes, and the engine didn’t allow raw HTML, and they didn’t notice they were gone (probably because ![]() images were still there). Markdown is so technically unsound it’s sometimes quite distressing.

We’re not talking about a table being off by a few pixels. We’re talking about words being mangled, text disappearing, much more severe stuff. Markdown isn’t even capable of table stuff.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-18 04:57:44+00:00
Agreed, I really like Zig's explicit allocation (and to be fair, lots of people from Rust like it too[0], it's just such an insane lift that who knows when it will stabilize)

The new "managed" async strategy (I was previously mistaken thinking it was the same as sans-io) is also really intriguing IMO, and feels like a fantastic balance (people in Rust are doing this too, but for the unrelated reason of trying to support various async runtimes).

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/32838
by Aurornis | 2025-08-18 04:58:34+00:00
> Telstra and Optus to only pre-install Google Search on Android phones they sold to consumers, and not other search engines.

> In return, Telstra and Optus received a share of the revenue Google generated from ads displayed to consumers when they used Google Search on their Android phones.

So Telstra and Optus entered into this agreement and profited from it, too. Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 04:58:50+00:00
Linux 6.17 is adding support for arm's Branch Record Buffer Extension (BRBE), which does something similar of recording branches taken!

Not a new capability at all, but Linux support is new. The lag to adoption for this sort of stuff always seems very high. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-ARM64
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-18 04:59:49+00:00
GW-BASIC is fun. Microsoft released it with a MIT license and then someone forked it to make it compile and actually work:

https://codeberg.org/tkchia/GW-BASIC

For development it is convenient that PC-BASIC exists, that is a pure Python implementation of GW-BASIC that has its own partial 1999s PC emulator built in.

http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/