MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 12_throw_away | 2025-09-07 20:36:12+00:00
> To do that you need to represent the invalid configuration as a type

Right - and one thing that keeps coming up for me is that, if you want to maintain complex invariants, it's quite natural to express them in terms of the domain object itself (or maybe, ugh, a DTO with the same fields), rather than in terms of input constraints.
by layer8 | 2025-09-07 20:36:37+00:00
The problem is how to statically ensure that you don’t run into the case of a missing implementation for some combination at runtime, in particular in languages with separate compilation. If you have a library A that defines a basic (T, O) set, and two libraries B and C that aren’t aware of each other but both use A, where B adds a new type and C adds a new operation, and finally you have a program D that uses both B and C, how do you statically detect or prevent the case where D tries to use the new type from B with the new operation from C, but no one has provided an implementation for that combination; while also supporting the case of the required implementation being present.
by seec | 2025-09-07 20:36:40+00:00
Your comment about the passively cooled M4 is misleading. Sure, in single thread, it will be definitely faster. In multithread unless you are going for low end or older CPUs it's basically a lie. A 10 Core M4 will score around a 14TH gen mobile i5. It will consume much less power but the argument is on performance, so that's beside the point.

And if we are talking about a passively cooled M4 (MacBook Air basically) it will quite heavily throttle relatively quickly, you lose at the very least 30%.

So, let's not misrepresent things, Apple CPUs are very power efficient but they are not magic, if you hit them hard, they still need good cooling. Plenty of people have had the experience with their M4 Max, discovering that actually, if they did use the laptop as a workstation, it will generate a good amount of fan noise, there is no other way around.

Apple stuff is good because most people actually have bursty workload (especially graphic design, video editing and some audio stuff) but if you hammer it for hours on end, it's not that good and the power efficiency point becomes a bit moot.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-07 20:36:42+00:00
It's not so much "advance" as "maintain". I want to make sure I have enough context of everything going on, especially in an age where there's a lot of blatant misinformation coming out the mouths of "offiial" sources.

Me by myself can't do much, and that's frustrating. But if nothing else, social media does at least let me boost people who do have a voice and can shout through all the spin (even if yes, they need a bit of spin themselves). I've joined a few protests in my area (things that the news will never inform and cover themselves), I try to at least like important news stories on social media to help those kinds of modern reporters rise up. I've been trying to at least keep a pulse on any union situations around here (none, sadly. But it's a muscle to flex with that will pay off later).

It doesn't feel signifigant on the day to day, but I do see the wider effects happening overtime. If you feel you don't need to do any work to progress that, I understand. But I also just want to lightly ask to consider the bystander effect. If everyone thinks "someone else will do something", no one will.
by jolmg | 2025-09-07 20:37:06+00:00
> In Apple Stores all screens are tilted at exactly 76° degrees, this is so you move the screen with your hand…interacting with the product more and making you feel more attached to it.

From the description, I would've thought it meant 76 degrees from the user's PoV, i.e. slightly closed so the user would feel compelled to open it more / tilt it into their view (with their hand). The pictures show ~70 degrees from the back of the devices though, so IDK what they mean about the hand moving the screen. There's no need for interacting then, since the display can be seen from afar.
by dijit | 2025-09-07 20:37:11+00:00
Is it even a question that we’re in a bubble?

The effects of the technology would have to rival that of.. idk, soap and the locomotive combined? In order for us not to be in a bubble.

It has swallowed nearly all discourse about technology and almost all development, nearly every single area of technology is showing markers of recession.. except AI, which has massively inflated salaries and valuations.

I can’t even think of a scenario where we don’t look back on this as a bubble. What does the tech need to be able to do in order to cover its investment?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-07 20:37:12+00:00
You may be assuming a fair bit. Just because it is evidently true that there is a difference, to the parent, depending on their philosophical bent, it is not impossible that it is the outcome alone that determines level of willingness to accept level of.. dunno what is a good word here.. responsibility. In other words, from where they come from, all other factors are not relevant. I don't subscribe to this particular view of the world, but it helps to be able to understand others.
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-07 20:38:37+00:00
Ah, this is such a silly non-issue at this point in time. As long as I have to wait ~10 minutes to get my agent to return code, we are ~10 minutes of compute per request away from a bubble. 10 minutes covers a lot of compute. Nothing we are building right this second will not instantly be eaten up by improving already existing use cases (code, image generation, video generation) for a very long time.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-09-07 20:38:41+00:00
Pretty neat. This would certainly make for an interesting Mars mission should SpaceX want to try it, land a lander, have the lander process regolith into iron chunks, create a pile of chunks. All good threshold goals.

What ever happened the asteroid mining folks? They have a similar problem, albeit with very little gravity and no atmosphere, but their metals are in theory worth a lot more (platinum, gold, silver, Etc.)

There was a similar idea/proposal for extracting aluminum from Lunar regolith, also a good space mission for private interests.

Once you've got basic metals you can make more interesting things, with iron you can make reinforced concrete which would be an interesting building material on Mars I suspect.
by throw-the-towel | 2025-09-07 20:38:48+00:00
Well, just happening to be in a different country is not a "valid reason". Maybe for someone from the West it would be accepted, but not for the rest of us.

Also, "a traveler without a fixed residence" can get a non-immigrant visa for Schengen? I'm sorry but this just is not true if you're not a Westerner.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-07 20:39:19+00:00
A classic. I was just getting started, when he wrote that, and that kind of thinking informed a lot of my personal context, throughout my career.

I feel as if a lot of multipliers have happened that he didn't anticipate, but I also feel as if the culture of software engineering has kind of decomposed, since his day.

We seem to be getting a lot of fairly badly-done work out the door, very quickly, these days.
by komali2 | 2025-09-07 20:39:19+00:00
Their comment got buried but they're right about one thing - they do exist, in numbers. I think less than they suspect, but still.

I'm still reeling from a conversation I had with an Israeli man 3 days ago where he repeatedly insisted to me that "everyone is racist" and that I just wouldn't admit I'm racist because I'm woke. He assured me that Israel knows what it's doing in Gaza is bad but it won't stop because all Israelis are racist (his words). I have never visited Israel but such a claim seems absurd to me on the face but he was so confident that it did make me wonder - there probably are a great many racists in Israel, trained from generations of propaganda to hate their neighbors and believe in zero sum tribalist thinking. It made me realize I probably should learn about deradicalization.

I'm also now thinking a lot about how to handle racists. He kept pressing one particular question to me - "Israel won't stop. So what do you do?" As an optimistic anarchist my hope was always deradicalization leading to, you know, Israel stopping. Or convincing the Americans to stop giving them weapons which forces them to actually be friendly to their neighbors rather than to try to kill them all. But when I brought this up to him he said "no, Israel will never stop. I didn't know Palestine existed until I was twelve, I always was taught Israel is a big square."

So, I don't know what to do about weaponized racists, but I think I should like to figure it out before the radicalization methods applied to the Israeli population are adopted elsewhere.
by sunscream89 | 2025-09-07 20:39:42+00:00
Yes by duh!

Try reading a few proofs. If you can put a proof on a piece of paper that isn’t simply laughed at you are in the running.

Like what is the relationship between the speed of light, and the mass of an electron. Must there not be some correlation between the potential of mass and non mass particles?

If someone could pencil that out it would be both “no duh!” And a question only an amateur would explore (of course not silly, if there was a relationship we would already know all about it.)

Maybe someone already has that one, I don’t know, not my expert area. Sure that counts, however the pursuit of Truth (or novel truths) is not played only by professionals.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-07 20:39:59+00:00
There's definitely a spectrum, but to be fair I do see a lot more "put your head in the sand" than "being too engaged and doomer" .

Or rather, it varies from community to community. This one is a lot of the former. Ones I see on Reddit are probably a bit too much of the latter everytime I see stuff like "it's too late to vote in 2026" or "protests aren't doing anything, we need more". Saying that just ignores all the lawyers and judges who are in fact slapping such attempts away in real time.
by IFC_LLC | 2025-09-07 20:40:06+00:00
I have completed an interview with a neurosurgeon recently. I'm writing an article for a big magazine about AI and Brains, and I was given a chance to get some comments from a neurosurgeon about AI, thinkingness and how he things things work.

I can't disclose the contents of the interview, this is under NDA till published. But, gosh, was that bad.

I thought neurosurgeon would know something about thinking process, and stuff like that. The guy in a state of a total despair. When I was bashing him with questions about the purpose of a brain and all that stuff, he was almost crying.

He ended up telling me that he hopes that someone will find quantum entanglement in the brain, and everything will be fine after that. After he sent me to this from PBS Science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k
by bigyabai | 2025-09-07 20:40:38+00:00
I'll take "reasons the American public shouldn't be averse to regulating FAANG" for 500, Mr. Trebek.

It really just makes me laugh. Five years ago half this site acted like DOJ cases against FAANG was surefire economic suicide. Now we're staring down one of the most corrupt admins since Tricky Dick, suffocating the economy with tariffs to help stabilize our poor megacorps. Can't have a competitive economy if you're not bailing out your industry leaders, can you?

It also seems to confirm that businesses like Meta, Apple and Google are nationally-integrated to the point that competition isn't even desirable to the fed. I won't speculate on the ramifications for international surveillance, but it does reinforce what we already know about lawful intercept and Apple/Google's crackdowns on user freedom.

The American tech industry's greatest weakness is the inability to call out a bad idea when they see it. China yoked us like an ox.
by vmg12 | 2025-09-07 20:41:54+00:00
> The effects of the technology would have to rival that of.. idk, soap and the locomotive combined? In order for us not to be in a bubble.

Can you quantify this or are you going based on vibes? If I were to compare this to previous bubbles (ie crypto, dot com bubble), in valuation multiple terms we haven't gotten started. And a number of tech companies eventually grew into and surpassed their bubble valuations.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-07 20:41:55+00:00
Absolutely. After the “Great Resignation,” where labor was tight and wages were pushed up, there was a large push in both tech and financial services to stand up offshoring operations in Chennai and Hyderabad (India), Manila (Philippines), and LATAM (primarily Mexico City, but also parts of South America) in order to avoid hiring US workers.

As others have mentioned in this thread, simply look at the unemployment rate and time to find a job for these workers. The labor force exists, companies just don’t want to pay for it or offer flexible work (RTO, which is also used to cram down labor costs). They want the control back.
by komali2 | 2025-09-07 20:42:05+00:00
Ah well we must just know different folks. Every startup I've been aware of in my personal life was a weekend project amongst people who kept their day job, until they could get into yc or something, and then get to a seed round. The only self funded quit your day job startup I know of in my personal life is the restaurant I opened and closed within a span of a year. Learned my lesson!
by accrual | 2025-09-07 20:42:08+00:00
Thanks for the additional detail! It is really fascinating to think about not just the individual traits but the collective traits and behavior of life across Earth that got it where it is today. Indeed, I'm not surprised so much at finding life in all the cracks on earth (there is life even deep in the crust!) but moreso I didn't realize the scope of it (interior biomes, exterior biomes, etc). Really cool stuff. Makes me appreciate the trees even more.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-07 20:42:20+00:00
This issue looms large in my family. My grandparents traveled the world in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and collected astonishingly large quantities of finely crafted art and heirlooms that they had been warehousing until they died. My parents' generation inherited literal housefuls of this stuff but much of it is of a nature that it would be criminal to dump it in the trash.

A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-07 20:42:55+00:00
One thing thats not addressed here is that the bigger you scale your shared memory cluster the closer to 100% chance that one node fucks up and corrupts your global memory space.

Currently the fastest way to get data from node a to node b is to RDMA it. which means that any node can inject anything into your memory space.

I'm not really sure how Theseus guards against that.
by dang | 2025-09-07 20:42:57+00:00
Related. Others?

No Silver Bullet with Dr. Fred Brooks (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40233156 - May 2024 (1 comment)

No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32423356 - Aug 2022 (43 comments)

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25926136 - Jan 2021 (9 comments)

No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818537 - Aug 2019 (85 comments)

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15476733 - Oct 2017 (8 comments)

No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306335 - Sept 2015 (34 comments)

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068513 - Oct 2011 (2 comments)

"No Silver Bullet" Revisited - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239323 - July 2008 (6 comments)

--- and also ---

Fred Brooks has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33649390 - Nov 2022 (211 comments)
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-07 20:43:31+00:00
One answer to some of those problems is to use remote desktop technology.

Last time I went to a hackathon I brought a 15 inch Alienware from 2017 which has bad connections in the USB system and is on the edge of death. I loaded up Visual Studio and the Unity Framework ahead of time so I'd be ready to use the same tools as my team.

Personally my favorite hackathon kit is a tablet plus a keyboard and a mouse. Remote desktop into a big computer and you have the sleekest kit anyone has and the most powerful computer. I have a powerful computer at home but I have ADSL, it is possible to remote into but latency is pretty bad.

My plan, the next time I go to something like that, is to set up a cloud instance ahead of time and just boot it up. Somewhere between $1-$2 an hour would buy a powerful machine which would really be a bargain if I only want to run it for 20 hours on an occasional weekend.
by sky2224 | 2025-09-07 20:43:38+00:00
> In just 18 months since ChatGPT, AI has already displaced coding, design, research, and support roles.

Can you provide an actually credible source that shows this? And what do you mean by "displaced"? Sure, AI is aiding, but it is nowhere close to replacing.

So far, the people I've seen mentioning that AI is taking jobs haven't actually provided evidence of this being the case.
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-07 20:44:00+00:00
> There is even a reference implementation, so it could be added to existing compilers?

I don't think it would be that straightforwards since this is one of those changes which depends pretty heavily on compiler internals, unlike library-only reference implementations. It'd be like taking a reference implementation in Clang and "adding it" to GCC/MSVC.
by arcane23 | 2025-09-07 20:44:20+00:00
>discourage theft

Does it though? Are there statistics that clearly show devices aren't being stolen anymore because they cannot monetize them anymore?

The way I see it the only thing this does is make you feel better the thief cannot monetize it, or use it, but it does nothing to prevent the theft which is really a moot point in the grand scheme of things. We end up paying in this way, of not having the freedom to easily and cheaply replace parts, while being comforted that even though they still are getting stolen from us, whoever steals them cannot use/monetize them. Which is quite primitive in a sense, and I do not think it's worth it. But that's just me.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-07 20:44:34+00:00
That's definiely the biggest thing I "advanced" from earlier on. Fighting others on the internet doesn't change their mind, nor is it really speaking to anyone who actually is in control. There will always be shills and haters and trolls, but that's the noise you need to filter through on the internet if you really want to seek the truth or find solidarity and start taking action.

Fighting that base instinct of "I need to call this guy out for how BS this is" was definitely a much harder issue for me than I care to admit last decade.
by troupo | 2025-09-07 20:46:18+00:00
> The people who wrote PB clearly knew ASN.1.

And your assumption is based on what exactly?

> It was the most famous IDL at the time.

Strange that at the same time (2001) people were busy implementing everyting in Java and XML, not ASN.1

> Do you assume they just came one morning and decided to write PB without taking a look at what existed?

Yes, that is a great assumption. Looking at what most companies do, this is an assumption bordering on prescience.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-07 20:47:04+00:00
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by ceronman | 2025-09-07 20:47:26+00:00
> That's not the expression problem.

To me it looks like this is exactly the expression problem. The expression problem is not about adding methods to a trait, it's about adding an operation to a set of types. In this case every operation is defined by a single trait.

The idea behind the expression problem is to be able to define either a new operation or a new type in such a way that the code is nicely together. Rust trait system accomplish this beautifully.

> That's not unique to Rust, you can add new interfaces in any language...

Many languages have interfaces, but most of them don't allow you to implement them for an arbitrary type that you have not defined. For example, in Java, if you create an interface called `PrettyPrintable`, but you can't implement it for the `ArrayList` type from the standard library. In Rust you can do this kind of things.
by skrishnamurthi | 2025-09-07 20:47:26+00:00
Thanks for the pointers. Trampolining is an old idea for obtaining tail-calls. It's a kind of folk-wisdom that has been rediscovered many times, as the related work here shows:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/317636.317779

Usually the trampoline is implemented automatically by the language rather than forcing the author to confront it, though I can see why Clojure might have chosen to put the burden on the user.
by dang | 2025-09-07 20:47:27+00:00
Related. Others?

Single day Firebase bill for $100k - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43884892 - May 2025 (14 comments)

Serverless Horrors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39532754 - Feb 2024 (169 comments)
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-07 20:48:08+00:00
Steel has between 2% and 0.05% carbon, that's not really a lot, particularly when you consider martian colonists will want materials like sugar and polyester that have a much higher carbon content. [1]

There are numerous ways to fix carbon from CO2. If you can grow plants you can make a char out of them which what people used to use to reduce iron and add carbon as an alloying elements. There is a huge amount of research on turning CO2 into CO so that it can be mixed with H2 (then they call it syngas) and then build up larger molecules such as methane, methanol, gasoline, fats, etc.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/engineers-find-new-way-convert-car...

It's not a question of being able to do it but instead doing it better, cheaper, harder, faster, ...

The funny thing about reduction of iron (and many metals) is that it can be done with either of the two ingredients of syngas, CO [2] or H2 and either way you get the oxide CO2 or H2O as a byproduct. If space colonists think that volatiles are precious they'll practice chemical cycling, turning those back into reactive CO or H. On the moon or asteroids I'm pretty sure people would think either C or H2 is precious and wouldn't waste it, I am not sure about Martians (e.g. if you can get CO2 out of the atmosphere it might not seem like a crime to vent it)

[1] people think "technology" and they think "metals" but actually a lot of what you want is made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON)

[2] what a blast furnace uses
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-07 20:48:29+00:00
> Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.

I mean sort of. CBs are still a thing that the phone doesn't quite replicate.

I would make the argument that the modern version of this is LORA/Meshtastic... Im sure at some point they will jam a few more radios into the phone just to have more features.