MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-23 23:38:47+00:00
Right, you have to give it a usize range. And that will index by bytes. This:

fn main() { let s = "12345"; println!("{}", &s[0..1]); }

compiles and prints out "1".

This:

fn main() { let s = "\u{1234}2345"; println!("{}", &s[0..1]); }

compiles and panics with the following error:

byte index 1 is not a char boundary; it is inside 'ሴ' (bytes 0..3) of `ሴ2345`

To get the nth char (scalar codepoint):

fn main() { let s = "\u{1234}2345"; println!("{}", s.chars().nth(1).unwrap()); }

To get a substring:

fn main() { let s = "\u{1234}2345"; println!("{}", s.chars().skip(0).take(1).collect::<String>()); }

To actually get the bytes you'd have to call #as_bytes which works with scalar and range indices, e.g.:

fn main() { let s = "\u{1234}2345"; println!("{:02X?}", &s.as_bytes()[0..1]); println!("{:02X}", &s.as_bytes()[0]); }

IMO it's less intuitive than it should be but still less bad than e.g. Go's two types of nil because it will fail in a visible manner.
by schmookeeg | 2025-08-23 23:40:16+00:00
Claude and some of the edgier parts of localstack are not friends either. It's pretty okay at rust which surprised me.

It makes me think that the language/platform/architecture that is "most known" by LLMs will soon be the preferred -- sort of a homogenization of technologies by LLM usage. Because if you can be 10x as successfully vibey in, say, nodejs versus elixir or go -- well, why would you opt for those in a greenfield project at all? Particularly if you aren't a tech shop and that choice allows you to use junior coders as if they were midlevel or senior.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-23 23:40:22+00:00
When I tried to use it about 4 years ago it definitely suffered from kwargs-itus. Everything is kwargs. No type annotations (it wasn't even possible to write type annotations for kwargs at the time). Definitely made it unnecessarily difficult to use.

I did make an attempt at fixing that but it got zero traction. I wonder if they've made any progress.
by smw355 | 2025-08-23 23:41:40+00:00
Last week we published an open source MCP Gateway called Obot. It's software that runs on Kubernetes, and is basically a control plane for the growing number of MCPs we are dealing with: catalog, access control (Google, GitHub Okta, Entra), audit logs, proxy, and the runtime to host the MCPs for users. IT folks get the admin tools they need, and everyone else gets a simple way to find and use what’s approved.

Still early days, but it’s open-source and would love feedback. http://obot.ai
by asyx | 2025-08-23 23:42:23+00:00
Not from the UK but in Germany we have the same issue where there is T-Mobile (best coverage), Vodafone (good coverage) and o2 (worst coverage) and there are simply some remote areas where anything but T-Mobile doesn’t have coverage.

And the easy answer is that T-Mobile, or rather the parent Telekom, is a terrible company best known for right now for getting the government to agree that they can cancel your existing internet contract to make switching easier when they want to catch you as a fiber customer but actually all they’re doing is sending a marketing company around Germany (Raider Marketing) to lie to your grandma to sign contracts for the Telekom or just cancel your existing internet contract because they think with a bit of pressure they can get you to sign up with them.

Alternatively, they are also known for the worst peering on existence because they have the crazy idea that they can charge tenfold what other ISPs take for peering because they are the Telekom…

In summary, the Telekom is such a terrible company that I’d rather not give them any money and if I needed T-Mobile coverage I’d rather get a foreign eSIM and rely on roaming than giving them a single cent.
by ponector | 2025-08-23 23:42:42+00:00
>> Ukraine is relying on the US instead of Europe for defense.

Is it? Especially in 2025.

It is embarrassing how little of (very old) heavy equipment USA provided to Ukraine. North Macedonia provided same amount of main battle tanks as USA, Poland provided ten times more. And zero fighter jets.

Anyway, people of Ukraine are thankful for any support and USA was the biggest donor during first years of the war.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-08-23 23:42:44+00:00
I see a vulnerability in that - spoofing location data is not hard. I really hope this doesn't lead down the path of transport operators introducing DRM-like rootkits, but unfortunately the concept of relying on data from devices owned by the user is always going to be at odds with preventing dishonest use. I'd much rather use a smartcard which, whilst tamper-proof and not modifiable by me, is separate from my own devices and personal data.
by duskwuff | 2025-08-23 23:43:18+00:00
From the looks of that FAQ, macOS support for the project was effectively abandoned long ago. The most recent looking FAQ entries reference Mac OS 10.5, which was released in 2007. Declaring it "formally deprecated" now is - well, a formality.

(Is Gutenprint even relevant anymore? I don't know a lot about professional printing - if you know more than I do, how outdated does the printer list at https://gimp-print.sourceforge.io/p_Supported_Printers.php look?)
by gilbetron | 2025-08-23 23:43:20+00:00
Nearly all available evidence points the other way, sorry. Now, intense sports (like hockey) isn't as good as exercise where you don't put yourself in physical collisions and major strains is better, but both are better then sedentary lifestyles.

I'd recommend a better doctor. My dad was active and sporty well into his late 70s and lived until he was 94.
by mcphage | 2025-08-23 23:44:22+00:00
> The fact that you can't understand this is exactly why this administration is doing this.

> because you believe that excellence is not worthy of being rewarded. Your culture has the mindset that excellence is not a product of hard work and determination, it's a product of luck and nepotism, so any hint of excellence gets taken away and diminished.

This administration does not believe in rewarding excellence, hard work, or determination. It’s an administration by the most malicious, incompetent people who have ever led this country.
by futevolei | 2025-08-23 23:44:45+00:00
Do the db guys at your company help you optimize queries and table set up at all? Ours basically don’t at all. Their job is to maintain the db apparently and us devs are left to handle this and it seems wrong. I’ve been partitioning tables and creating indexes the past few weeks trying to speed up a view and running explain analyze and throwing the results in Gemini and my queries are still slow af. I had one sql class in college, it’s not my thing. Seems like if dbas would spend a few minutes with me asking about the data and what we are trying to do they could get this guys results relatively easily. Am I wrong?
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-23 23:45:15+00:00
Well, no, if you think that legacy admissions are unnecessary (because, to the extent genetics have an effect on the outcomes you care about, they'll show up in more direct measurements), and counterproductive (because they presume a simple relationship rather than a stochastic and messy one.)

OTOH, legacy admissions make a lot of sense if the outcome you care about is serving an elite class defined rather simply by familial lineages.
Idea Sharing and Local Culture
by mcelligott2025 | 2025-08-23 23:45:25+00:00
Two weeks ago I shared my ‘most interesting’ startup idea (an opinionated, low-friction collaboration platform I call ‘GroundFruit’) with an acquaintance. Within days he'd told a friend, then a few days later an investor - without my permission or knowledge. I was shocked and intended to address it the following day when we were set to meet but he flaked and has since moved to Colorado to "work on some things."

The irony here (if it’s what I think) is that his target audience will be us, founders. This hasn’t happened to me before and it got me thinking about how location and culture affect collaboration. In most cities I've lived (SF, LA) everyone was already building The Next Big Thing. The dynamics and culture here (Florida) are different.

Have place, local demographics and culture affected how (and if) you collaborate? Execution is king and idea similarity is really common but some concepts represent years of ‘search time’ in a problem space. Insights can be like a private key: trivial to transmit but hard to derive. The belief ideas “don’t matter” seems a little glib and only mostly true.

I’ve run large founder groups so I’ve had plenty of conversations but I’m still wondering if my views on this are naive. if you had the chance to invest in a founder with a pattern of running, ‘permissionless’, with the ideas of others', would you? Would you work with them? It would almost certainly be a deal-breaker for me but I’d love to hear what people think.
by Amezarak | 2025-08-23 23:46:04+00:00
Opinion polling is largely bunk. In addition to the problem with getting a good polling sample today, questions are carefully crafted to achieve the desired results. Opinion polls are for shaping consensus, not reporting it.

Consider how badly off "will you vote R or D in 7 days" polling is in the US, even with the top national experts on the problem. Opinion polls are much, much more troublesome.
Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?
by mrs6969 | 2025-08-23 23:46:15+00:00
I have been thinking about this, and don’t have a proper answer for myself.

I like llms, or lin other words, I like that we are getting better at something.

However, just want to ask; what was the initial problem llms were trying to solve, what problem did they solve so far?

Do you have any examples in your life or work, which you can clearly say “we were not able to do this before llms, but now we can” or “we were able to do it, but not good enough, it was causing us some issues, now it is a lot better”

If the answer yes; second question would be like, does the total cost of those problem at least equal or exceeding the amount of investment on these models?

Thanks in advance
by data-ottawa | 2025-08-23 23:46:29+00:00
The section in the r studio documentation called Computing On The Language is by far favourite feature of R

It lets a function observe the context in which the function was called, which is why R can contextually use formula notations so ergonomically. That also backs pseudo symbolic computing, like plotting a function over a domain and magically getting the right chart titles.

That language support is why Python libraries struggle so much to replicate the ergonomics of the tidyverse.

https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-lang/Computing-on-the-...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-23 23:49:33+00:00
Smart blogger, with interesting synopses.

For Edison:

>What looked like prescience was the result of having seen more of nature.

That says it pretty well, plus determination.

I say Burbank had both, myself. This doesn't do him justice:

>was terrible at documenting and communicating his experiments, and therefore cannot be understood as a scientist.

The shortage is in understanding, not scientific accomplishments.

Too bad there was not somebody dedicated enough to follow him around with a clipboard his whole life, but I imagine he had the choice to come up with 400 of the most well-documented strains versus 800 overall which is often the exact tradeoff so much of the time. Even if the scientist themself can produce documentation that is consistently above-average, the right person can still be far more effective at experimentation by orders of magnitude, and for real progress that is where the tasks should be concentrated.

It's actually quite rare when there is any documentation at all when experimentation has been as active as possible.

IOW almost all scientific progress has been lost since like forever, and it's likely to continue.

Now Ford is another one I studied since childhood, he really put things through the roof with efficiency, turning something that "everybody" wanted but was out-of-reach, into an affordable commodity that could fly off the shelf by itself. And that was before the actual "car salesman" was invented, drawn by the incentive of a once-in-a-lifetime big-ticket purchase, it put the whole thing on steroids ever since.

But Gibson was already mass-producing mandolins and guitars in Kalamazoo before Ford built his first assembly line, and I can only imagine there were seasoned instrument wheelers & dealers who really perked up when they saw cars coming down the pike :)

>The Bitter Lesson teaches us that innovation in complex domains emerges from systematic exploration of combinatorial complexity, not brilliant insights or domain expertise.

I feel this way too, even as a pre-teen, many decades ago, but if you already "invent" something every day anyhow you're probably going to want a sweeter lesson to go forward with.

How about taking the domain expertise which can stand on its own and often embodies brilliant insights as part of the core function, and combining that with a tool that can leverage the expertise?

Now you've built a Stradivarius for a virtuoso, but you need a virtuoso to step up to the plate and be leveraged by the tool in such a way that they become better at leveraging the tool.

This could be like an endless loop that goes on forever but I have to think you end up in a way different place when there is a human in the loop than without.

I figure when you leverage human intuition rather than be constrained by it, the bitterness is mainly somebody else's problem :)
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-23 23:50:38+00:00
You can use the same techniques as fast inverse sqrt anywhere logs are useful. It's not particularly common these days because it's slower than a dedicated instruction and there are few situations where the application is both bottlenecked by numerical code and is willing to tolerate the accuracy issues. A pretty good writeup on how fast inverse sqrt works was done here: https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2024%2...

A lot of old-school algorithms like CORDIC went the same way.

There's a related technique to compute exponentials with FMA that's somewhat more useful in ML (e.g. softmax), but it has similar precision issues and activation functions are so fast relative to matmul that it's not usually worth it.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-08-23 23:51:54+00:00
> fewer chargers, less e‑waste, less drawer chaos.

care to mention what negates those things to make it a “not good” regulation?

as a consumer, i think it’s a good thing to not need Nx different charging cables / plugs to go away for a weekend. usb-c is basically the de-facto standard for charging all but apple devices anyway.

hardware manufacturers might have a different opinions/motivations (but that was kind of the point really wasn’t it)
by MoltenMan | 2025-08-23 23:52:50+00:00
That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.

The one thing I can think of off the top of my head is some sort of magnetic connection similar to macbook chargers to prevent damage when the cord gets pulled out. (Also I would like the USB-3 standard to not suck, but that's never happening and doesn't relate to the physical hardware anyways)
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-23 23:53:15+00:00
OP should really mention that they made stackerror. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this read like an ad for stackerror… and of course the author is the crate writer. This feels somewhat disingenuous without a disclaimer that you wrote the lib and there are other ways.

The general advice is good (except for the awkward use of std error), so for anyone who wants to know what rustaceans are actually using:

- std error when it’s required

- anyhow for flexibly dealing with large classes of errors and rethrowing (often in bin crates or internally in a lib crate ), use anyhow::Context to tag errors

- thiserror for building and generating custom errors (in a lib crate)

- miette/eyre for more advanced features

Watch out for exposing error types in public API because then you are bound to push a breaking change if the upstream does.

Anyhow will probably never have a v2 at this point IMO, the entire Rust ecosystem might have to rev!

[EDIT] dont want to suggest that people avoid stackerror, just want to show what other ecosystem projects there are! stackerror seems to fit the hole of anyhow.
by credit_guy | 2025-08-23 23:53:30+00:00
Just about a month ago I realized for the first time that legacy admissions result, in many cases, in better candidates rather than worse. Not always. But here's an example (from real life, without names obviously): highly qualified student, with lots of national level achievements, Cornell legacy. Applied in the early admission period to Cornell, got in. But the student had a reasonably high chance for Princeton or Yale, let's say. However, the legacy system incentivized him to apply to Cornell, even if his level was slightly higher. Why? Because if he didn't apply in the early period to Cornell, hoping for Princeton or Yale, and didn't get in, then Cornell would not have given him any preference in regular admissions. So he had to choose between nearly 100% admission at Cornell in the early round, vs 10% chance at Princeton, and then a non-negligible chance to not get into Cornell in regular.

My point: legacies are not always dumber than non-legacies. Sometimes they are stronger, and the legacy system incentivizes them to stick to the school where they are legacy.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-23 23:53:31+00:00
> This is a really common problem with science reporting in general. Its often the case that the news will say things about the paper that aren't in the paper, often they say something that is completely the opposite of what the paper actually represents with its data.

I wonder if perhaps a part of LLM hallucinations can be explained by them being provided such reporting and having it (mistakenly) tagged as high-quality training data.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-23 23:54:19+00:00
I think that would fix the issue at the type level (up to a point; for unsigned types, the "correct" type for the result of a subtraction is underdetermined -- it could be any of {same type, larger signed type, same-size signed type} depending on the circumstances).

But I think the more serious niggle is the fact that that first element shows up in the output at all. OTOH, I suppose you could write a discard_first iterator adaptor that ignores the first write and increment and passes the rest through to the underlying output iterator.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-08-23 23:54:22+00:00
I'd started using it at v0.8 at a previous adtech company because my problem was "We generate terabytes of events a day we need to process and aggregate and bill on, how the hell do we move this data around reliably?"

The data team I'd inherited had started with NFS and shell scripts, before a brief detour into GlusterFS after NFS proved to be, well, NFS. GlusterFS was no better.

Using S3 was better, but we still hit data loss problems (on our end, not S3 's, to clear) which isn't great when you need to bill on some of that data.

Then I heard about Kafka, bought a copy of I <3 Logs, and decided that maybe Kafka was worth the complexity, and boom, it was. No more data loss, and a happier business management.

I was headhunted for my current company for my Kafka experience. First thing I realised when I looked at the product was - "Ah, we don't need Kafka for this."

But the VP responsible was insistent. So now I spend a lot of time doing education on how to use Kafka properly.

And the very first thing I start with is "Kafka is not a queue. It's a big dumb pipe that does very smart things to move data efficiently and with minimal risk of data loss - and the smartest thing it does, it choosing to be very dumb.

Want to synchronously know if your message was consumed? Kafka don't care. You need a queue."
by lumost | 2025-08-23 23:55:45+00:00
While earnest, I’ve heard this claim for 30 years - that it’s simple political will. The reality is that until very recently there were only two economically viable carbon neutral energy sources. We now have four, however there are real unsolved problems with scaling three of those solutions. The only technology which can reliably solve the crises brings along its own set of externalities.

It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-08-23 23:58:07+00:00
> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”

I rarely drive my car. When I do, 99% of the time it's within a few kilometers of my house. I have no need for lane keeping or automatic braking in city traffic, it's barely moving to begin with.

My car is also getting old and will soon need replacing. Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations, emission standards and the fact that it's practically impossible to buy a car with an ICE anymore.

I understand the need for these things for cars that are driven daily, but why do they have to apply to cars that are mainly used for short trips to the grocery store? It's making cars unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
by Avamander | 2025-08-23 23:58:57+00:00
It's not even the fact that you're running a dynamic language or something. PHP is to some extent and Wordpress's ecosystem is to a large extent, extremely horrendous. Ridden with vulnerabilities and performance issues that should not exist by now. As the other comment says, Laravel can be fine in some situations, but that's a tiny fraction of all PHP usage.
by dhosek | 2025-08-24 00:00:44+00:00
What I found impressive was that Apple Photos, given pictures of my cousins when they were 50 or more years old, was able to identify pictures of them as kids. On the other hand, it could never consistently distinguish between my two older brothers (although to be fair, they were identical twins). It also insists that a beagle I once owned was a cat. I mean, sure, he sometimes slept on his back with his paws in the air like a cat, but he was all dog.
by daft_pink | 2025-08-24 00:01:01+00:00
the average american really couldn’t care less what plane other countries fly.

but if you look at conflicts around the world recently, american weapons are absolutely annihilating russian and chinese weaponry. from Israel to India to Ukraine, US weapons are generally expensive, but well worth it.

would you really want your soldiers to be fighting for their lives with anything other than the best?
by dxxvi | 2025-08-24 00:02:08+00:00
> turn to Redis Cluster Streams instead. So much simpler to manage and so much cheaper to run

I don't have any experience with Redis Cluster Streams. Could you please tell us how it is simpler to manage? IMO, installing and managing a Kafka cluster in a non Fortune 100 scale is simple enough: run 1 java command for zookeeper, run another java command for a broker (with recent version of Kafka, zookeeper is not needed anymore). The configuration files are not very simple but not very complicated either. When we have another machine, we can run another broker on it.

Redis Cluster Streams is cheaper to run because it's written in C, doesn't need a VN to run? Or because its messages are stored in RAM not SSD?