MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hibikir | 2025-09-24 19:21:54+00:00
It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs per subscriber can be lower.

We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies. Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive advantage in data quantity and quality.

And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now: The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in some ways that are completely above board.
by kg | 2025-09-24 19:21:58+00:00
Depending on the language, GC is either implemented in userspace using linear memory, or using the new GC extension to webassembly. The latter has some restrictions that mean not every language can use it and it's not a turnkey integration (you have to do a lot of work), but there are a bunch of implementations now that use wasm's native GC.

If you use wasm's native GC your objects are managed by the WASM runtime (in browsers, a JS runtime).

For things like goroutines you would emulate them using wasm primitives like exception handling, unless you're running in a host that provides syscalls you can use to do stuff like stack switching natively. (IIRC stack switching is proposed but not yet a part of any production WASM runtime - see https://webassembly.org/features/)

Based on what I read in a quick search, what Go does is generate each goroutine as a switch statement based on a state variable, so that you can 'resume' a goroutine by calling the switch with the appropriate state variable to resume its execution at the right point.
by 0xffff2 | 2025-09-24 19:22:07+00:00
Yep. I don't fly a ton, but I had a flight canceled by Alaska a couple of years ago. They refunded me so I wasn't actually out anything, but they also gave me a $100 credit in addition to the refund. I really tried, but since I don't live in Seattle and don't fly much, there was no way I could use that $100 credit without paying a whole lot of my own money too. It annoyed me to "throw away money", but the credit expired unused.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-24 19:22:45+00:00
I too really miss the old OKCupid. I was on it from near its inception (around 2003 I think) until they started requiring phone numbers (2020 I think) and I agree its decline was tragic.

That said, I think the world has changed in ways that would make it difficult to replicate now. For one thing, imagine all the AI bot profiles that would exist. For another, the legal environment has only gotten worse in the sense that entities like Match will try to sue you for infringing on some bogus patent.

Also, let's not forget that the takeover by Match was a deliberate choice: those "140 IQ dudes" chose to sell out their nice product to a big evil company although it was pretty foreseeable they were going to ruin it. Who's to say that wouldn't happen again?
by tschellenbach | 2025-09-24 19:23:35+00:00
There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything, including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficiency. Companies that don't become efficient have their valuation collapse or go under.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-09-24 19:23:39+00:00
Once can just as trivially construct an argument demonstrating the issue with patents but the problem with this style of argument is that patents are not a simple thing. They have global far reaching effects. The government distributing a monopoly on information is a serious interference with the market, and due to patent harmonization efforts across the world, one person filing a patent in New Jersey affects even people in Kenya and Turkey and Thailand. The arguments for patents are often, as I see it, based on a deeply flawed understanding of the motivations of innovators and the affects of open information on innovation. For example most arguments in favor of patents cannot explain how open source works, and so are clearly incomplete or outright wrong.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-24 19:24:11+00:00
>As far as blow out games with the stronger team getting more penalties, it could be a much more simple explanation as the ball just spends more time in the area which raises the likelihood of a penalty occurring

This may be specific to hockey but that's the game I care and know most about: as a rule if there's a blowout it's usually the defenders taking penalties. Whether it's a blowout because defenders are taking penalties, leading to a lot more time at a disadvantage or defenders are taking penalties because its a blowout, they're getting dominated and they can't defend without breaking the rules is difficult to tease out objectively but anecdotally it's the latter. Nobody's faster than you if you grab them by the jersey. No one is stronger than you if you trip them with your stick. You try doing it legally at first but if that doesn't work then you try getting away with doing it illegally. Whereas if you're just absolutely imposing your will on a team anyway why bother grabbing a stick that isn't lifting yours up anyway, or holding onto the jersey of someone who's already behind you? But the data reveal the opposite: the team in the lead tends to be more likely to take a penalty and the theory is that the refs just assume they can afford it and it won't affect the outcome or create an appearance of impropriety. But a tickytack holding call against a team that's already down by 3 feels like piling on at best and intentionally influencing the game at worst, and that's why officials tend to avoid it.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-24 19:24:11+00:00
See my other comments here. You are wrong.

The current law is dictated by the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision, and it's explicit that shouting fire in a crowded theater is very much one of the only kinds of speech that IS restricted. They literally use that example in the decision.

So.... I think you might be the one who didn't do the research. Thank you for attending my TED talk.
by iLemming | 2025-09-24 19:24:44+00:00
One of the biggest wins in my life that Emacs has granted me is the principle of never sacrificing plain text liberties. I could've probably achieved similar results using other tools, but the way Emacs puts you into that mindset is just on another level of awesome.

Today, I can extract text from any tab in my browser to appear in an Emacs buffer. And it specifically "extracts" the text, it's not operating on the URL - meaning that I don't have to deal with auth, cookies, and other things, it just grabs the .outerHTML of an already rendered page - takes me not even a second. I can do whatever I want with that text - read it with far better readability features, feed it to an LLM, export into formats, grab some parts for my notes, etc.

I can extract transcript from a YT video URL with a press of a key.

Heck, I can even extract text from an image in my clipboard. That's what I do almost every day. My colleague would be showing me stuff through Zoom, I'd run Flameshot to grab a specific portion of the screen, and then run my elisp function - it OCRs the image and puts the results into a buffer.

My advice to you folks: do not ever surrender to the status quo; keep the hacker's mindset; hack your way around computers. You have a finite amount of attention tokens, do not waste them getting angry at the upsetting design of web pages; extract what you need like a boss and move on.
Div vs. Span: A Quick Guide
by mrburton | 2025-09-24 19:24:49+00:00
A quick write up since I see so many people who don't know the difference. Now that AI is writing a lot more code, I wanted to share something useful for humans.

In HTML, div and span are fundamental elements but differ in their roles due to display behavior and use cases. A div is a block-level container (display: block) that takes up the full width of its parent and starts on a new line, making it ideal for structuring layouts or grouping multiple elements, like sections or cards. A span is an inline container (display: inline) that flows within text without breaking the line, perfect for styling small pieces of content, like a word or phrase, or targeting text for JavaScript.

Use div for layout and grouping, such as a container for a card component. Use span for inline tweaks, like highlighting text. Prefer semantic elements (e.g., section or strong) when possible for better accessibility. Both are non-semantic and can be styled with CSS or scripted, but their default behavior guides their use: div for structure, span for inline finesse.

Example: A div might wrap a title and paragraph for a card component, while a span could highlight a single word in a sentence.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-24 19:24:58+00:00
> So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.

I tend to think that makes things less bearable in the long term, though, precisely because it doesn't fix the underlying issues. It's like just taking a bunch of ibuprofen and walking on a badly injured leg. It may make it hurt less but it can also make the problem worse. We may need to let the pain get intense enough that people feel no alternative but to overhaul the whole system.
by labrador | 2025-09-24 19:25:36+00:00
Björk and Laurie Anderson are my two favorite artists who have a feel of both nature and technology in harmony, but there's an artist who preceeds both that captures the feeling best for me: Richard Brautigan in the 60's

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace
by cs702 | 2025-09-24 19:25:43+00:00
I'd agree that too much concentration of power in any single organization, public or private, without any checks or balances, is a bad idea. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Historically, the executive branch of the US federal government has been kept more or less in check by (a) the legislative and judicial branches, and (b) voters.
by watwut | 2025-09-24 19:25:48+00:00
> And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem.

We are not discussing someone who has any potential or interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is complete support of that thing.

And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders take.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-24 19:25:57+00:00
The "simplicity" you're so happy about means you only get whatever it is Bill made. If that doesn't work for Bill he'll fix it, but if it doesn't work for you (and at scale, it won't) too bad.

Far from just the two special cases you listed I count five, Bill has found need for iterating over:

Both built-in array types, strings (but not cstrings), slices and maps.

`for a, b in c { ... }` makes a the key and b the value if c is a map, but if c were instead an array then a is the value and b is an index. Presumably both these ideas were useful to Bill and the lack of coherence didn't bother him.

Maps are a particularly interesting choice of built-in. We could argue about exactly how a built-in string type should best work, or the growth policy for a mediocre growable array type - and Odin offers two approaches for strings (though not with the same support), but for maps you clearly need implementation options. and instead in the name of "simplicity" Bill locks you into his choice.

You're stuck with Bill's choice of hash, Bill's layout, and Bill's semantics. If you want your own "hash table" type that's not map yours will have even worse ergonomics and you can't fix it. Yours can't be iterated with a for loop, it can't be special case initialized even if your users enabled that for the built-in type, and of course all the familiar functions and function groups don't work for your type.

I don't have a use for a "language designed to make computers perform actions" when it lacks the fine control needed to get the best out of the machine but insists I must put in all the hard work anyway.
by michaelstewart | 2025-09-24 19:26:15+00:00
Here's the system prompt used for anyone that's curious:

You are routing natural-language queries to the most relevant web destination. Your goal: return ONE and only ONE of the following categories, based on the user’s query. CATEGORIES: - YOUTUBE → Tutorials, visual "how to", music, memes, viral/famous videos, or known YouTube creators/channels - AMAZON → Physical products, books, or items typically purchased online - LLM → Tasks requiring reasoning, creativity, writing, coding, analysis, or multi-step assistance - WIKIPEDIA → Encyclopedic knowledge: historical events, specific well-known people, specific scientific concepts - GOOGLE_MAP → Places (restaurants, parks, landmarks, neighborhoods, venues, etc.) - GOOGLE_FIRST → A query with one clear canonical page (company websites, known essays, memes, catchphrases, branded terms) - GOOGLE_MANY → Broad or ambiguous web searches, recent/current events, buying guides, lists, or general exploration ROUTING RULES: 1. Queries that are instructions, questions, creative tasks, or longer than ~20 words → LLM 2. Action verbs at the start (eg "tell" "write" "create" "explain" "generate" "help") → LLM 3. Exact book titles or product names → AMAZON 4. "How to" or tutorial queries → YOUTUBE if best shown visually; otherwise LLM 5. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that a Wikipedia page exists with a title that EXACTLY matches this query → WIKIPEDIA 6. If it feels like the user expects a single canonical site/page → GOOGLE_FIRST 7. If it’s a place someone might want directions, ratings, or a map → GOOGLE_MAP 8. "Best ___" or buying guides → GOOGLE_MANY 9. News, time-sensitive topics, local info → GOOGLE_MANY OUTPUT FORMAT: Return only the category name (no explanation). EXAMPLES: - "best wireless headphones under $100" → GOOGLE_MANY - "wireless headphones" → AMAZON - "explain quantum computing" → LLM - "World War 2" → WIKIPEDIA - "how to tie a tie" → YOUTUBE - "write a poem about spring" → LLM - "facebook" → GOOGLE_FIRST - "founder mode" → GOOGLE_FIRST - "weather in SF today" → GOOGLE_MANY - "dolores park" → GOOGLE_MAP - "charlie bit my finger" → YOUTUBE QUERY: ${query}
by kg | 2025-09-24 19:26:53+00:00
Maintaining a browser is already hard enough, it's a very tough sell to convince 3+ browser vendors to implement a new language with its own standard library and quirks in parallel without a really convincing argument. As of yet, nobody has come up with a convincing enough argument.

Part of why WebAssembly was successful is that it's a way of generating javascript runtime IR instead of a completely new language + standard library - browsers can swap out their JavaScript frontend for a WASM one and reuse all the work they've done, reusing most of their native code generator, debugger, caches, etc. The primitives WASM's MVP exposes are mostly stuff browsers already knew how to do (though over time, it accumulated new features that don't have a comparison point in JS.)

And then WASM itself has basically no standard library, which means you don't have to implement a bunch of new library code to support it, just a relatively small set of JS APIs used to interact with it.
by chermi | 2025-09-24 19:27:02+00:00
Oh boy you got me good! How could I have fallen for such a clever ruse. This actually isn't complicated. Who owns the farm + stand? Again, maybe you meant farming collective, one last chance.

I don't really know who you think you're arguing against, but free markets can exist as a theoretical idealization, you know, like some other systems I'm guessing you're fond of.

Btw, if a farmers stand is socialism, then certainly I can say Walmart with subsidization via food stamps most definitely isn't capitalism.

Every actual fact you state I agree with. As for your theories and straw men, I'll leave to you.

Just as an exercise, try to run through the mental trajectory that got you to your rant on free markets and Sumeria and shit. What is going on there? You have some enemy in your head your imagining you're dunking on?
by cyphar | 2025-09-24 19:27:30+00:00
Go was sold as a "systems language" for a long time, and a lot of people deciding on what language to use in the 2010s made decisions based on that bit of advertising. Rust filled the same niche at around the same time so it's not really surprising people would mentally connect the two.

FWIW, I suspect the entire container ecosystem would not have gone with Go if it wasn't for Docker picking Go mostly based on the "systems language" label. (If only they knew how painful it would be...)

To be clear, I use both and like them for different reasons. But in my experience I agree that Go and Rust are far closer brethren than Go and Python. A lot of the design nexus in Go was to take C and try to improve it with a handful of pared down ideas from Java -- this leads to a similar path as the C++-oriented design nexus for Rust. Early Rust even had green threads like Go. They are obviously very different languages in other respects but it's not particularly suprising that people would compare them given their history.

Your later comments about lots of Go users coming from Python is not particularly surprising and I don't think actually helps your point -- they wanted to improve performance so they switched to a compiled language that handles multithreading well. I would argue they moved to Go precisely because it isn't like Python. If Go didn't exist they would've picked a different language (probably Rust, C++, or any number of languages in the same niche). Maybe if there was a "Python-but-fast" language that they all switched to you would have a point, but Go is not that language.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-24 19:27:51+00:00
> war, moon

You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.

> Malaria

Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.

> Social safety nets

Not a science breakthrough

> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch

I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.

Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.

This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.

Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.

That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.

[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!

[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.

Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.
by arbll | 2025-09-24 19:28:14+00:00
Deno is a V8 wrapper, the same JS engine as Chrome. Vulnerabilities are very common there, not necessarily because it's poorly designed but more because there's massive financial incentives in findings them.

This plus what you mentioned is why I would never trust it to run arbitrary code.

Now in the context of yt-dlp it might fine, google isn't going to target them with exploits. I would still prefer if they didn't continue to propagate "DeNo iS SaFe BeCauSe It HaS sAnDbOxInG" because I've seen projets that were actually executing arbitrary JS rely on it thinking it was safe.
by kryogen1c | 2025-09-24 19:28:23+00:00
> this sort of tone, with the absolutism, the attempt to reduce the complexity and nuance of reporting to the point where it can be dismissed is pretty typical of what passes for commentary in today's blog/tweet/commentary culture but it really plays more into the hands of those that would sow confusion

I think this is the mechanism of action that will lead to america's downfall.

algorithmic content has connected dopaminergic interest to extremism while simultaneously welcoming influence from both agents of neutral chaos and malicious destruction.

i am currently watching a schism unfold in my immediate family over the death of charlie kirk. if we literally cannot discern the difference between charlie and a fascist/nazi/racist because complexity and nuance are dimensions of information that do not exist, then we are destined for civil war.

you cannot understand vaccine safety, israel v palestine, russia v ukraine, or literally anything else by scrolling instagram reels. stop having an opinion and uninstall the poison.