MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raffraffraff | 2025-09-23 21:00:16+00:00
Cool. That's reminds of an approach I took back in 2011 when implementing a Linux build / update system in a (small) bank. 8000 machines across hundreds of branches, no servers in the branches, no internet access, limited bandwidth. The goal was to wake one machine (WOL) which detects an update (via LDAP attribute) and then rsyncs repo update + torrent file. Once complete, that machine would load the torrent, verify the synced files, update it's version in LDAP and wake all of its peers. Each peer host would also query LDAP, detect the need to update, but also notice a peer with the latest version, so skip repo rsync and grab the torrent file and load it. So a branch with hundreds of hosts would torrent the repo update pretty quickly to each other. Pretty cool tbh, you could PXE boot and rebuild a bunch of hosts remotely, and once built, any one of them could act as an installation point. I even used this to do a distribution change, switching from SLES to Ubuntu.
by mattwilsonn888 | 2025-09-23 21:00:30+00:00
This is incredibly misleading (technically true maybe) and you know it. Rust has slower compile times for the sake of safety, it's a tradeoff you shouldn't be ashamed of.

I didn't narrowly claim the borrow checker (as opposed to the type system or other static analysis) was the sole focus of the tradeoff.
by ikesau | 2025-09-23 21:00:41+00:00
I love this.

Maybe these are incompatible desires, but I would really like some kind of system that allows me to own and present my own music listening data while also allowing me to interoperate with a broader music listening culture.

Newsletters and blogs are great for discovery, but I also really value the way my last.fm has allowed me to recall a band I used to listen to a decade ago because I can remember a few of their contemporaries that are neighbours in the Similar Artists graph.
by aidenn0 | 2025-09-23 21:00:47+00:00
Note that 21209 does not say "otherwise permitted" but "permitted." One interpratation (perhaps what the DMV is using) is that, since curb parking is generally permitted, parking in a bike lane that abuts the curb would also be generally permitted.

The city I live in put up "no parking in bike lane" signs everywhere, presumably to address this ambiguity.

FWIW the DMV test question was bad in other ways; it was a multiple choice asking "Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." My daughter got it wrong not just because of not knowing the answer, but also because the double-negative confused her.
by jamesblonde | 2025-09-23 21:01:01+00:00
This is an interesting article by Niall Murphy (O'Reilly author, SRE legend). However, I think has a few unsubstantiated claims for an academic article (e.g., "it's quite hard to have meaningful alerting for ML systems" - I work in this space, know this isn't true in practice).

It is also very agent/LLM-centric, without differentiating between LLMOps and MLOps. For example, the whole area of evals for agents is conspicuous by its absent.
by patagurbon | 2025-09-23 21:01:19+00:00
The post dismisses Julia quite quickly, especially since it is a language essentially purpose built to teach numerical linear algebra. Numerical methods is taught in Julia in at least a dozen universities I'm aware of, including MIT.

Unicode support and a few other syntax niceties make translation from the blackboard to the editor nice and clean. Fortran is great but legibility and easy tooling like (reproducible) package managers are paramount in teaching
by zahlman | 2025-09-23 21:01:33+00:00
> I would love to hear feedback from the community, whether it's about the code architecture, security best practices, or simply ideas for improvement.

I would take this more seriously if over the past 77 days of having the account you had made a clear effort to act as a member of "the community" rather than making 26 submissions of which 25 were this project (and most of those killed).
by foysavas | 2025-09-23 21:01:44+00:00
Engine Yard's management took several strategic missteps over the years. One of them was stifling Merb. The quotes from Yehuda describe his difficulty in making the best of a forced merger.

Ezra's vision for Merb and DHH's vision for Rails were distinct. Both warranted development. Over time, I assume they would have collectively strengthened the Ruby community. It was a mistake for Engine Yard's management to have instead framed it as zero sum and forced a merger.
by edm0nd | 2025-09-23 21:01:48+00:00
This was our old CFO.

He would park directly in front of our office building that was located inside a large complex that had a movie theater, fancy restaurants, and all kinda stuffs like that.

They couldnt tow so they would just write a ticket for being in the spot after like 60 minutes. He racked up thousands in tickets and simply just didnt pay them. Never got in trouble either lol. Since it was private property, I guess the owners just didnt care that much. He was a super douche and ended up quitting thankfully.
by cb321 | 2025-09-23 21:01:54+00:00
`hash -d` (aka "named directories") is surely an alternative and if that suits you, by all means.

I see at least two downsides: 1) now you have to remember to say `make -C ~c` { not `make -C $c` which I think most would find more natural } 2) the hash cannot be exported to inheriting subprocesses like a regular scalar $var.

Of course, 1) is kind of weak since you can also use "~var" most places. It's just not as familiar to many as $var.

One notable equivalency is that Zsh prompt escapes for $PS1 and friends like %~ would treat both the same - converting them to a "~c" inside your prompt.

So, in terms of "looking like what you type", that maybe makes ~c better. Maybe there is some setopt to make Zsh expand %~ as $c or $dd? Not sure. There are a lot of setopts.

Anyway, I actually use the exporting feature to non-Zsh subprocesses myself. So, I'm pretty locked-in to vars not just hash entries.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 21:02:08+00:00
It is true AI-generated UIs tend to be... Weird. In weird ways. Sometimes they are consistent and work as intended, but often times they reveal weird behaviors.

Or at least this was true until recently. GPT-5 is consistently delivering more coherent and better working UIs, provided I use it with shadcn or alternative component libraries.

So while you can generate a lot of code very fast, testing UX and UI is still manual work - at least for me.

I am pretty sure, AI should not run the show. It is a sophisticated tool, but it is not a show runner - not yet.
Show HN: Pledge boards without singups
by Jean-Philipe | 2025-09-23 21:03:22+00:00
I made this web app to replace the "who brings what" and "who does what" lists on google docs for our upcoming kindergarten fest.

The stack is react, drizzle, nextjs and postgres. I'm working on letting OpenAI generate initial content for the pledge board, based on title and description. One topic I want to explore is subtle AI integration that doesn't annoy users, like placeholder content in the input fields that fit the theme of the board. There are lots tweaks I have in mind for the future, like locking input fields when a user is entering their name, or encrypting the content with a passphrase.

The landing page is still AI generated, which has a lot of fluff. I want to trim it down and give it some soul.

Any feedback is welcome! Is this useful at all, or is google docs good enough?
by danlitt | 2025-09-23 21:03:30+00:00
Who said I don't care? I care a lot, I just don't care more than I care about staying out of federal prison. It would be one thing if you'd be carrying the torch and the public would be behind you if only you'd be so courageous. But that is a naive fantasy: I know, and you know, that you'd be hounded as a "terrorist", they would throw the book at you and throw away the key. Approximately 0.01% of your fellow citizens would even understand the issue, let alone be on your side.

Petition for change, sure. Complain in public. Protest. But don't martyr yourself for nothing.
by nucleardog | 2025-09-23 21:03:57+00:00
It's the least-annoying option in a lot of cases.

JSON is for computers. Writing and editing by hand is not great. Escaping things sucks. A simple multi line string or something gets really awkward.

XML goes too far the other way... it's annoyingly verbose to write by hand. Escaping can get annoying. It often allows you to represent data structures that are not easily representable in various languages.

INI sucks because it lacks a specification. It also sucks for nested data.

TOML fixes this by essentially specifying a better INI file. Much like an INI file, this falls apart at any real level of nesting.

EverythingElse is not widely supported.

When it comes to basic configs and stuff humans need to work with, I usually start with a basic K=V format. Writing a "parser" in any language usually takes about one minute and has no dependencies so is an easy win.

As soon as a use case grows beyond that (quoting, explicit typing, multiple lines, escapes, whatever) I just move to YAML. It's not the best, but it's easily available and the least bad from my point of view.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 21:04:16+00:00
A small description can be extrapolated to a large feature, but then you have to accept the AI filling in the gaps. Sometimes that is cool, often times it misses the mark. I do not always record that much, but if I have a vague idea that I want to verbalize, I use recording. Then I take the transcript and create the PRD based on it. Then I iterate a few more times on the PRD - which yield much better results.
by OskarS | 2025-09-23 21:04:21+00:00
I should explain a little further what I mean: there are "pure" ideograms even in English, like the & and % characters. These unambiguously refer to the words "and" and "percent", but the way they're written gives no clue whatsoever to a reader on how they're pronounced. If you had gone your entire life reading and writing English but somehow never encountered them, the way they're written is entirely unhelpful. Emoji are an even more abstract example, that don't even correspond to any word at all, just usually indicating mood or something like that.

It's a common misconception that all Chinese characters are like that, but my understanding is that while there are many, many more ideograms in Chinese than English, something like 80% of the characters do in some way indicate pronunciation (even if it's just something like tone) or use the "rebus principle" or something like that. So again, it's a spectrum, but all writing systems are phonetic to some extent. Human's wouldn't be able to use it to communicate effectively otherwise.

I will say that I'm not a linguist, nor can I read or write a word of Mandarin Chinese, and will happily stand corrected. This is just what I've picked up from reading books about the history and development of writing.
by discreteevent | 2025-09-23 21:04:32+00:00
You are not doing Rust any favours by arguing that code that may have memory safety issues is gibberish and something that could be associated with the IOCCC. Ramping something up to 11 makes it hard to take seriously.

You could write rust code with logic errors. I could write C with a memory leak that doesn't matter because of the context it runs in. Neither program is gibberish but one of them causes real problems.
by ummonk | 2025-09-23 21:04:49+00:00
GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
by mattwilsonn888 | 2025-09-23 21:05:26+00:00
*Under the assumption that you are maximizing both. I often hear complaints that Rust's semantics actually haven't maximized ergonomics, even factoring in the added difficulty it faces in pursuit of safety.

It's totally possible languages as ergonomic as Rust can be more safe, just because Rust isn't perfect or even has some notable, partially subjective, design flaws.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-09-23 21:05:36+00:00
I took care of it myself by cancelling my rental of the server and renting a different one. And then setting up that one the way I wanted it and restoring data from my offsite backup.

I think there was a form asking for reason for cancelling the server and I ticked something like “other” and left a note for them saying that there was hardware problems. So I would assume they have a look at it, replace the bad components and then rent it out to someone else.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-09-23 21:06:02+00:00
It was hilarious how fast UK changed “online safety act” to <insert liocense fer ‘at joke>.

Just send your face and details to anonymous companies prone to data leaks just to hear songs with naughty words! See Spotify is too dangerous for children!

Post anything about the issues with immigration in the UK? That is straight to jail territory now, and they know just where to find you.

I’m not joking. I want to know what happened to the people that created the British empire. What was at one point the most wealthy and successful nation on the planet. Where are those people?
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-09-23 21:06:39+00:00
My scientific computing journey was

- Matlab in the first few science lab courses + first CS course.

- C++ in second CS course

- Fortran for the scientific computing course

I found Fortran worse than matlab. The error messages were difficult to parse, and it was much more difficult to do step through debugging like in matlab.

But later I learned Python, and now use it professionally to do scientific computing, and I would give anything to go back to Fortran. Or use Rust or Julia. Or if Wolfram/Mathematica if that was possible. Anything but Python.

The fundamental problem with Python is that all the math is hacked into it, unlike Julia/Matlab/Mathematica where the math takes first priority and other values are secondary.
by michaelt | 2025-09-23 21:06:41+00:00
To me, it sounds like both sides are communicating successfully.

The group of friends is saying "you are invited" to someone probably disinterested - polite and inclusive to some, bothersome spam to others.

The 'workaholic' is saying "no thanks, and please stop bothering me"

The group of friends is stopping bothering him

Good clear adult communication, clearly expressing boundaries and gladly respecting them.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-09-23 21:07:11+00:00
What do you mean? Perhaps some HN users prefer traditional financial vehicles instead of something that could be fly-by-night.

x402 might end up being more legitimate, yet the ecosystem page doesn't inspire confidence - I only recognized node and the rest feel rag tag. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this space hasn't been problematic before, so skepticism is warranted.
by truncate | 2025-09-23 21:08:27+00:00
>> A tow truck will be dispatched in conjunction with the text message notification and could be there in as few as five minutes.

If only they operate in good faith, and that is something I'd highly doubt given its SFMTA. As in they could call tow truck ahead of time, so that its almost unlikely the person will be able to get to their car in time.
by arjie | 2025-09-23 21:08:55+00:00
I have a video from a street I used to live on that might illustrate what happens in between cleanings (you'll have to turn the camera view down to face the curb to see): https://youtu.be/ew4fMB7OIyo?t=8

I think at the time the video was taken the red car had been there a while.

The video is not very high-resolution admittedly, but you can gather how things go. If you'd like, here's a screen grab https://imgur.com/a/YTymus3
by msm_ | 2025-09-23 21:09:15+00:00
As a devil's advocate, there are also criminal groups, right now, that do actual crime, that operate on discord. 99% of criminals likely don't have enough knowledge to maintain proper opsec, so spying on chats could in principle help here.

On the other hand, there are also criminal groups, right now, that do actual crime, that operate on discord. Going after them would be trivial in comparison, and yet we introduce extreme spying laws instead.
by a-dub | 2025-09-23 21:09:39+00:00
this is the way. octave or matlab.

people like to complain about matlab as a programming language but if you're using it that way you're doing it wrong.

matlab (the core language) is awesome for expressing matrices and vectors and their operations as well as visualizing the results. matrix expressions in matlab look almost identical to how they look in mathematical notation (or how one might write them in an email). you shouldn't be using programming language flow control (or any of the other programming language features), you should be learning how to write for loops as vector and matrix operations and learning from the excellent toolboxes.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-23 21:09:56+00:00
The nerds would do sooo much better for ourselves if we could build a momentum behind comments like this.

Finding mechanistic (& programmatic) sympathy counts for so so much! Shapes the arch of software so much! But it's such invisible unknown work to most people, not so overtly clear & obvious but something that constantly builds day after day, person after person, incremental 0.2% gains compounded by lack of friction.

As well as just promoting good practioners, it feels like discourse about software architecture has really fallen off. We are deep inside rabbit holes specific to this framework or that, and there's only occasional popping out to free air to bring back some observations from the burrows. Ideally we'd have many more volumes of Architecture of Open Source Applications (2011), for example, to really dive into what is, to give us some common referents to learn from and talk about. https://aosabook.org/en/

This is all so core, so worth getting deep on & looking how things are assembled, what the interfaces and modules and shapes look like, what the tradeoffs were. But it remains chiefly an arcane art, one that most developers much less most businesses haven't developed a refinement or taste for.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-23 21:10:02+00:00
I think Patreon-style backing has been proving out the viability of payment based creators. Technology Connections is largely funded by Patreon but puts out free content all the time. My guess is that once x402 becomes more standardized that Youtube, Substack, and other SaaS can add in paywall functionality which can help fund the free content for creators.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-23 21:10:12+00:00
What????????? Given that, how was it not obvious for decades, that this devolves into something like the current LLMs? I give it only the first few paragraphs of a random man page and it already passes for a human, that tries to form nonsense sentences, while having mostly correct grammar, but not always. LLMs now feel not very technically advanced. The code isolation in their interface seams to be more impressive than this.
by perihelions | 2025-09-23 21:11:22+00:00
According to Google's censorship algorithm, Michael Osterholm's podcast (famous epidemiologist and, at the time, a member of President Biden's own gold-star covid-19 advisory panel).

https://x.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496 ("Our Osterholm Update podcast episode (Jul 22) was removed for “medical misinformation.”" (2021))

Most ironic thing I've ever seen. I still recall it perfectly, though it's been four years. Never, ever trust censorship algorithms or the people who control them: they are just dumb parrots that suppress all discussion of an unwanted topic, without thought or reason.
by Imnimo | 2025-09-23 21:11:35+00:00
A common distinction is that whatever you take to be your state space should be fixed-sized. So an LLM has a fixed context window, which might be extremely large, but with a long enough conversation, the oldest tokens will fall out of the context window, and your process will be non-Markovian. But with a large context size, most conversations will be small enough that they fit entirely within the context, and then the process is Markovian.

So, people can correctly call LLMs Markovian in practice, and also non-Markovian from a theoretical standpoint.

I think of it as conceptually little bit like the distinction between a formal Turing machine which requires an infinite tape, and a practical computer with a finite amount of memory. Your computer acts as a Turing machine for the real computations you use it for, but there exist some computations that would require more memory than you have. From a theoretical standpoint, your compute is merely a finite state automaton.
by triceratops | 2025-09-23 21:12:25+00:00
So you don't care about other people's freedoms but yimbys are bad because they're "authoritarian". Got it, totally cool, logical, and consistent.

You could just be honest and say "I want to use government power to suit my needs, even if it costs other people. But no one else can do that". It's pretty selfish but at least we'll know where you stand.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-23 21:12:59+00:00
I agree. I also don't make the rules.

And to be honest, I don't really care. It is a very comfortable position to be in. Allow me to explain:

I genuinely believe AI poses no threat to my employment. I identify the only medium term threat the very likely economic slowdown in the coming years.

Meanwhile, I am happy to do this silly dance while companies waste money and resources on what I see as a dead-end, wasteful technology.

I am not here to make anything better.
by Uehreka | 2025-09-23 21:13:35+00:00
The problem is that it doesn’t stay simplified; once you leave the room those people start using that model to explain details of actual LLM behavior. I’m constantly arguing with people who use this mental model to explain why LLMs can’t do things that they absolutely can do.

I frequently see people underestimate the danger of LLMs to humanity in the long term and to people’s jobs in the medium term because they follow this chain of reasoning:

- An LLM is basically a fancy markov chain (highly dubious even if there’s a tiny kernel of truth in there) - Therefore markov chains and LLMs have a similar skill ceiling (definitely wrong) - My job could never be done by a markov chain, it’s much too complex (this is presented self-evidently, no one ever feels the need to back this up) - Therefore, since LLMs are basically markov chains, and a markov chain could never do my job, I have nothing to worry about.

I’ll grant that you’re not necessarily responsible for these people using your model in a way you didn’t intend. But I do think at this point it’s time to start pushing people to stop trying to reason mechanically about how these things work.
by em-bee | 2025-09-23 21:14:22+00:00
you are completely missing the point. what exactly should germany have done? let those people suffer? stick them in crowded refugee camps?

you do not get to turn a generous humanitarian aid gesture into blaming germany for being dumb to let all these people in.

this is not ignoring observed reality. observed reality is a consequence of people not being welcoming enough. of not being supporting and considerate of the foreign culture and not doing enough to befriend these people. as i linked in my other post, i wrote about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746099 we are not letting these people integrate in a way that allows them to keep some of their culture while giving them an opportunity to learn about our culture.

yes, the current reality may be rough. but those are growing pains. and they are consequences of war, and not consequences of allowing to many people to enter the country. by sharing the consequences of these wars germany becomes an ally to the victims, and that is a good thing. rejecting refugees would have turned germany into a villain and an ally of the perpetrators. i'd be ashamed if that happened.