MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgoated01 | 2025-08-27 14:24:21+00:00
> So much of writing is managing your own emotions. The virtue of “pseudowriting” is that it helps you preserve hope for as long as possible—hope that what you will eventually put in place of those square brackets will be good. Hope keeps you coming back: it is more pleasant and low-stakes to pseudowrite than to fix actual language into the draft; and it is less daunting to return to a document where it feels like all that’s left is for you to fill in some blanks. Do that enough times and you will, in fact, end up with something you can read top to bottom.

This describes how I write a new chunk of research code, often. I'll type along until I get to something like "oh, I'll need to calculate the foo of the widget here," and I'll just put a non-existent function call calculateFoo(widget) there until later, when I'll come back and fill it in. I feel like it keeps it manageable; I'm choosing the level of abstraction that I'm drafting code at, and I come in and fill in the details later. I hadn't connected this idea to the journal articles that I am working on; I typically feel somewhat guilty when I add a FIXME in my LaTex document, but with this framing I see now that that is probably the better way to do it than aiming for a finished paragraph from the get-go. The square brackets and placeholders also seem much nicer that the FIXME I was using. Glad to have seen this at a timely moment for me!
by UpsideDownRide | 2025-08-27 14:25:02+00:00
You are overselling ADHD meds by quite a bit. There is plenty of data in literature that quite a bit of people will not respond positively to meds. So if they work for you that's great. But lightly shaming someone by implying they might be anti medicine is super uncool and as an ADHD person you really should know better. Lets not invalidate each other just because experiences are not exactly the same.
by glitchc | 2025-08-27 14:25:28+00:00
It doesn't need to be AGI to build complex software. A human software developer can build a complex software system and perform other complex tasks with the same body (play an instrument, fly an aircraft, etc.). Doing all of that with the same resources is what AGI is needed for. Just software, well I'm sure an LLM can eventually become an expert just like it learnt how to play Go.
Show HN: Dsa.rb: Practice core dsa in Ruby from the command line
by carter2099 | 2025-08-27 14:25:42+00:00
I made a DSA practice tool for Ruby. It’s test-driven, runs locally, and is easy to extend with new exercises. Would love feedback on the interface and which problems to add next.

The objective is to cement ability to implement core algorithms through repetition. This test suite is not like LeetCode. In fact, it’s more of a prerequisite to LeetCode. The test cases are not exhaustive in the spirit of checking for runtime performance, scalability, etc. Implementations are generalized, so that through practice using this tool, the user can begin avoiding having to think about the algorithmic pattern, and instead focus on its application to the problem at hand.

It uses Minitest to test the user’s implementations, dynamically loaded at runtime.
by e-khadem | 2025-08-27 14:25:48+00:00
We are talking about isolated teenagers. Many movies (and stories) show drug overdose and self inflicted wounds as suicide methods, when in reality the survival rate without significant injuries is very high. Also in many cities it might be very hard to find a high place. The keypoint is that the signal to noise ratio is often too low (and deliberately so).

Edit: also consider that suicide rate is much higher after depression symptoms improve. Severely depressed people simply lack the energy to research the topic or acquire the tools. Even the OP's hanging failed for the first time. And they had to specifically look for some suitable material for the second time, and had to double check every step ...
by Retric | 2025-08-27 14:26:19+00:00
> What regular people own properties in foreign countries

Expats often chose their location based on such factors.

> people who cheat their way out of having to pay anything.

Good luck finding someone who actually pays zero property tax on US land they own. You’re assuming loopholes exist that don’t.

> it's hard for a regular person to under/overreport a property by, say, 200 million USD

Comparing wealthy taxation is only meaningful based on percentages. There’s definitely people who avoid property taxes by failing to disclose they built a house on undeveloped land thus avoiding 50+% of their tax bill.
by tikhonj | 2025-08-27 14:26:31+00:00
The best software around is Emacs. Does that count as "opinionated" in your view?

In some ways it is—Emacs does a lot of things its own way, completely unbothered by mainstream conventions—but, at the same time, it's also totally malleable in the sense of this article. What makes Emacs great is a consistent and coherent conceptual foundation coupled with remarkably flexible code, letting you adjust Emacs to your needs rather than adjusting your needs to Emacs.

Or maybe the best software around is situated software. Software that's built by and for a specific set of people in a specific social context. Situated software is qualitatively different from product software, and it works so well because, again, it gives its users real agency and control. Instead of trying to create software that knows better than its users, we can create software that supports its users in whatever ways works for me. The result is still opinionated, but it's opinionated in a categorically different way from what you're describing.

So perhaps the best mainstream software is Excel.

And, while I don't think they're there now, it seems like LLMs are likely to be the foundation for the next Excel.
by threetonesun | 2025-08-27 14:26:41+00:00
npm workspaces and npm scripts will get you further than you might think. Plenty of people got along fine with Lerna, which didn't do much more than that, for years.

I will say, I was always turned off by NX's core proposition when it launched, and more turned off by whatever they're selling as a CI/CD solution these days, but if it works for you, it works for you.
by aschobel | 2025-08-27 14:26:41+00:00
It would be surprising if claude code would actually run that prompt, so I tried run it:

> I can't help with this request as it appears to be designed to search for and inventory sensitive files like cryptocurrency wallets, private keys, and other secrets. This type of comprehensive file enumeration could be used maliciously to locate and potentially exfiltrate sensitive data.

If you need help with legitimate security tasks like: - Analyzing your own systems for security vulnerabilities - Creating defensive security monitoring tools - Understanding file permissions and access controls - Setting up proper backup procedures for your own data I'd be happy to help with those instead.
by ranger207 | 2025-08-27 14:26:43+00:00
> If she committed a felony, she shouldn't be in charge of anything. I don't think that's a controversial opinion.

When Al Franken resigns because of allegations of sexual misconduct, it proves Democrats are evil. When Donald Trump is convicted of dozens of felonies, it proves Republicans are victims of politically motivated witch hunts. It shouldn't be a controversial opinion that being a felon should disqualify you from public service, but because of that very opinion, labeling someone as a felon as been weaponized to the point where the label can be dismissed by supporters
by staplung | 2025-08-27 14:26:49+00:00
Maybe, but remember that getting astronauts to the moon and back took a single Saturn V launch but with Starship, it will take (at least) 10 flights for refueling, possibly as many as 20. So each launch has to be much cheaper to beat Saturn V for the full mission.

Nobody but SpaceX knows how much each Starship test costs but the estimates online range from $50 million to $200 million. Presumably, whatever the actual cost, they're more expensive right now while they're redesigning bits and doing custom, one-off work for each flight but it has a long way to go to beat Saturn V for the full mission.
by avodonosov | 2025-08-27 14:26:58+00:00
Thank you very much.

I can not give you thi final feedback at the moment, I only breefly looked through the articles for not.

The first ones are very accessible (given my prior lnowledge of lamport clocks and happens before as in Java memory model), the later ones I am currently not sure are very clear.

But are easier than the docs I used when first approached this topic in the past, like Documentation/memory-barriers.txt and the Doug Lea's texts.
by fzeroracer | 2025-08-27 14:27:03+00:00
No, this is definitely not true. I dabbled with Linux back when I was in college (hence, a decade ago) both because the computer labs had Linux installed and because it was interesting to me at the time.

There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.

If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
by stetrain | 2025-08-27 14:27:17+00:00
I wouldn't expect that on the next flight.

One option is they can run it again with the data gained from missing tiles etc. and see if there is an improvement.

They could also do a similar flight but with an actual orbital insertion and de-orbit if they are confident in the odds of success of the de-orbit burn.

Landing the ship at the launch site means overflying land and potentially populated areas, so I think they're going to want to demonstrate successful control, re-entry, and landing from orbit a few times before attempting that.
by spacechild1 | 2025-08-27 14:27:18+00:00
> Also explicit this eliminates the problem, that you don't know if the variable is an instance variable or a global/from somewhere else.

People typically use some kind of naming convention for their member variables, e.g. mFoo, m_Foo, m_foo, foo_, etc., so that's not an issue. I find `foo_` much more concise than `this->foo`. Also note that you can use explicity this in C++ if you really want to.
by hvb2 | 2025-08-27 14:27:27+00:00
That's what a package is supposed to solve, no?

Sure there are packages trying to solve 'the world' and as a result come with a whole lot of dependencies, but isn't that on whoever installs it to check?

My point was that git clone of the source can't be the solution, or you own all the code... And you can't. You always depend on something....
Ask HN: Any other Google Fiber uses having issues
by nodesocket | 2025-08-27 14:27:30+00:00
I have Google Fiber and just this morning many sites are timing out, including Hacker News. Though I can access some sites (Google for example) which is super strange. I connected to Nord VPN using Atlanta and everything comes back working 100%. I'm guessing maybe a Google Fiber peer is having issues?

My first instinct was must be DNS, but I am using CloudFlare (1.1.1.1) and can successfully dig:

dig +short news.ycombinator.com 209.216.230.207
Show HN: I built a robot that draws caricatures with a Sharpie
by ringerapps | 2025-08-27 14:27:48+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been tinkering with this for a while and finally have it in a decent state. It’s a plotter robot that draws caricatures from photos.

I trained a diffusion model (Flux Kontext LoRA) on caricature images, 3D-printed a Sharpie mount for my Ender 3, and hacked together a pipeline that goes photo → caricature → G-code. After a lot of trial and error it’s working pretty well, and I put up a little site where you can try it out.

Happy to answer questions or hear any feedback. Thanks!
by ilovetux | 2025-08-27 14:27:48+00:00
Disclaimer, I just pulled this quote from Google ai which probably took it from somewhere else, but I just wanted to provide a little context. ASCII encoded text is also valid utf8.

> The first 128 characters of Unicode, which are the same as the ASCII character set (characters 0-127), are encoded in UTF-8 using a single byte with the exact same binary value as their ASCII representation. This means that any file containing only ASCII characters is also a valid UTF-8 file
by shermantanktop | 2025-08-27 14:28:59+00:00
That’s right, it’s good at things that are common. If your job is mostly filled with uncommon tasks, it won’t be good at helping you.

But for the rest of us, who have a mix of common/boring and uncommon/interesting tasks, accelerating the common ones means spending more time (proportionally) on less common tasks.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to great at classifying tasks as common or uncommon, and there are bored engineers who make complex solutions just to keep their brain occupied.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-27 14:29:00+00:00
>Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

If non-scummy companies realize that even trying in that region will lead to lawsuits by malcontents and losers, they'll leave too. You're left only with the scummy ones, because they figure they'll have skipped town before the lawsuits come rolling in. And if your regulatory framework discourages that heavily enough to dissuade them, they'll stay away too.

When circumstances are hostile enough, no one wants a piece of it. Always lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
by Silhouette | 2025-08-27 14:29:02+00:00
Within a dedicated organisation you probably would disable it. If you're a supplier working with multiple clients then each might have their own policies on confidentiality and data sharing. Some of them might want you to manage information using an account they provide on a cloud system they use. Others might completely prohibit external transfers. A third category are OK with using online systems in principle but for legal or regulatory reasons they need to make sure that the data doesn't leave a certain geographic area so you can only use systems that provide that guarantee.

A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.

And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
by triceratops | 2025-08-27 14:29:42+00:00
> Even if proven, the administration’s claim — that Cook violated the law before her time in office by designating two different homes as her primary residence when applying for mortgages — probably wouldn’t meet the test.

Seriously that's the allegation? When I heard false information on a mortgage I assumed inflated income or assets or concealing the source of a downpayment. Is this even material? Can't a person have 2 homes and live in both?
by 827a | 2025-08-27 14:30:15+00:00
I disagree with a lot of the assertions the article makes.

IME: LLMs don't "thrive" in messy open-ended spaces. They handle spaces like that better than traditional code, and traditional code handles structured spaces a lot better, but LLMs still do perform better in structured spaces than unstructured ones. Giving them lists of tools, schemas for data, consistent examples, etc always produces better results than not doing this.

The correlate thesis you have to make is: Do humans work better in unstructured spaces. This can be true for highly creative and individual work, but generally (and especially in the enterprise SaaS world) the opposite is true. The Structure is how you keep the users of the product aligned on one pattern of usage. E.g. giving people the ability to just create whatever ticket fields they want in Linear ends up being useless because you'll end up with 10 fields that do similar things; the friction structure introduces is necessary because while it can cost a few seconds up-front as users learn how things are done, it saves time down the line as your organizational tools (filtering, dashboards, reports, etc) are aligned on the structure.

Its also 100% the case that oftentimes companies buy SaaS tools not to solve their problems, but to help them better structure the problems they have so they're even solvable at all. Think about Sentry: The end-goal of Sentry is to solve issues in web applications, for sure. But that's not why people buy it. I could do that without Sentry; but Sentry adds structure to the errors, it adds deterministic workflows to the errors, and it provides excellent SDKs to report them. Sentry's value isn't actually in the end-goal; its value is in the structure it adds every step before the end-goal. Accelerating the inputs by adding formality to them ends up accelerating the end-goal.
by superkuh | 2025-08-27 14:30:30+00:00
Because it's actually your telco's phone. They're the one that has the license to run the baseband computer and RF transceiver. The 'pad' computer device is sort of yours. But there's no legal way to have ownership of a cell phone unless you yourself bid for and get the RF spectrum and set up your network in a way that accomplishes the FCC coverage and timing requirements. Then run your own telco for your phone. Basically, impossible.

Smart phones try to limit and firewall the interface between the two but tight integration is required for energy efficiency. So a smart phone, or a cell phone, can never be yours. They aren't good choices for doing computing and this legal reality is becoming more and more obvious with time.
by fluoridation | 2025-08-27 14:30:45+00:00
Starship isn't exactly the same as Saturn V. It's bigger, for one.

The reason why it matters is that efficiency matters. It's fine if it takes longer, not so much if it costs way, way more, especially if such a huge rocket has limited applications. And as I understand it the consensus is that Starship (or at least a fully-loaded Starship) will never go to the Moon. Once it's in orbit it takes like twenty refueling launches and space rendezvous to fill it up again so it can make the transfer burn. In other words, it's never happening.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-27 14:30:45+00:00
Perkin-Elmer turned out to offer the first "desktop" (benchtop) multi-user multi-tasking (threaded) data system, designed in the 1970's and finally released in 1979:

https://www.bidspotter.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/quaker-c...

I would estimate it was fine-grained.

No microprocessor in the CPU, just a PCB a foot square covered in discrete logic chips.

Memory PCB the same size, connected by short ribbon cables to the CPU, this bypassed the backplane. Fully upgraded it was 16K of 32-bit memory.

Each user could run more than one Basic program at a time, and also the same Basic code in memory could be run by more than one user, or even more than one time simultaneously by the same user. Simultaneous with the collection of live data from more than one chemical analyzer, which the firmware could handle most of the mainstream chemical needs without the Basic option. User-programming was for the exotic stuff that actually requires custom code.

But that made it completely programmable using only the documentation supplied, it was straightforward to accomplish things which PC software that eventually came along never has been able to do without settling for additional commercial offerings which are much more user-friendly (mouse!) but not as appropriate as my own code was.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-27 14:30:59+00:00
the price is much lower today. Cheaper then the latest f15. I was also skeptical of the project but its really proved itself. The simple fact is that stealth abilities gives it an ubeatable advantage. It expands the capabilities of an army so much its indispensible. 5 years ago i would agreed with you but im forced to change my opinion in the face of the evidence. The f15 is going nowhere like the b52, but it cant come close to the f35.
by plandis | 2025-08-27 14:31:46+00:00
Causal profiling is something I infrequently use but I have been able to apply it outside of micro benchmarks in an orchestration system.

If you have a business process that is complex and owned by many different groups then causal profiling can be a good tool for dealing with the complexity. For large workflows in particular this can be powerful as the orchestration owner can experiment without much coordination (other than making sure the groups know/agree that some processing might be delayed).
by adrian_b | 2025-08-27 14:31:48+00:00
RDTSC or RDTSCP, like also CPUID, work certainly very well for slowing down a program.

However, like integer division, they may clobber registers that the program wants to use for other purposes.

For great slow-downs when the clobbered registers do not matter, I think that CPUID is the best, as it serializes the execution and it has a long execution time on all CPUs.

For small slow-downs I think that BSWAP is a good choice, as it modifies only 1 arbitrary register without affecting the flags, and it also is a less usual instruction so it is unlikely that it will ever receive special optimizations, like NOP and MOV.

However, multiple BSWAPs must be used, to occupy all available execution ports, otherwise if there is any execution port not occupied by the rest of the program the BSWAP may be executed concurrently, not requiring any extra time.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-27 14:32:18+00:00
Super efficient LEDs have made this problem totally out of control. Incredibly bright while also being very cheap to run.

Paranoid/careless jackasses are lining their houses with 100,000 lumen cool white prison lights they bought on amazon for $30.

Parking lots are getting filled with ridiculously bright street lights because "Brighter = better? Right?". Just enough light to see? No! We need to recreate the sun for this vacant lot all night every night!
by chrisbrandow | 2025-08-27 14:32:21+00:00
It reminds me also of the original head of development of the Safari browser talking about at least the early days of building the browser. They had a rule that no commit of code could cause the browser benchmarks to get slower. And apparently he was maniacal about the rule.

I don’t know if that’s a good or realistic rule for most projects, but I imagine for performant types of applications, that’s exactly what it takes to prevent eventual slowdown.
by yrds96 | 2025-08-27 14:32:25+00:00
Isn't the opposite? No one in this thread even cogitating how bad Safari is in terms of performance and supporting web standards? There's in one even partially blaming both. Github isn't the best example of a fast website, but if you can run it in Chrome and Firefox, even on rudimentary browsers like Palemoon (I tested) on decent hardware (even mobile), there's something clearly wrong on Safari.
by plqbfbv | 2025-08-27 14:32:44+00:00
That's not out of reach/plans according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Futu...

But I agree with you, I'd rather have test flight 11 demonstrate at least another successful reentry with no issues (they had a non-fatal explosion on ship reentry in flight 10) before attempting to catch the booster AND landing the ship.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-08-27 14:32:58+00:00
Not very convincing. If you prompt GPT-4 (nobody uses it) with a huge chunk of an article (nobody does this), sometimes it'll output another chunk of said article. Conveniently omitted, how many attempts did not result in this behavior, how much of the the articles were not repeated (you can see they cut off mid answer)