MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by von_lohengramm | 2025-09-16 23:44:50+00:00
There's nothing contradictory here. Not once do I say that I've found the best solution. I merely reached a point where more effort & time spent on this problem will only give me a worse solution. And of course this is merely for myself and everybody has different needs. I never claimed otherwise. The crux of the issue is that we all disagree on what's good and bad, what's necessary and pointless, and too many people are just willingly accepting what's being given to them even if it's worse by their own metrics.
by cerved | 2025-09-16 23:44:57+00:00
The Coursera courses are a great resource for learning how to model problems.

> any good primer literature I might check out for understanding the basis of tweaking constraint solvers? I have started running into some performance issues after integrating an optimization function, and have started to wonder how can I claim back some performance.

There is usually less tweaking of solvers and much more remodeling the problem using a different viewpoint or constraints to solve the problem. There courses teach you that. But beware that's it's not so trivial.

Also, careful with LLMs and constraint solvers, sometimes they yield absolute rubbish.
by hwc | 2025-09-16 23:45:05+00:00
I used to live in this part of the country. There's an insane amount of disregard for the environment and climate. Yes, new buildings have to be reinforced against hurricanes. But they are still building new houses only a few meters above sea level, as if sea level rise wasn't already unavoidable.

And on the largest scale, there is a limit to the amount of fresh groundwater that wells along the South Florida coast can get. Once they exceed that amount, they'll be pumping brackish water seeping in from the ocean. Then they have to desalinate the brackish water.

But the last time I was there, they were still building new houses.
by solid_fuel | 2025-09-16 23:45:15+00:00
> If you talk to a doctor about your medical history or a lawyer about a legal situation, we have decided that it’s in society’s best interest for that information to be privileged and provided higher levels of protection. We believe that the same level of protection needs to apply to conversations with AI which people increasingly turn to for sensitive questions and private concerns. We are advocating for this with policymakers.

ChatGPT is not a licensed professional and it is not a substitute for one. I am very pro-privacy, but I would rather see my own conversations with my real friends be protected like this first. Or my own journal writings. How does it make sense to afford specific privacy protections to conversations with a calculator that we don't give to personal writings and private text chains?

> And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.

And I'm certain this won't have any negative effects on users where their parents are part of the problem. Full disclosure, if someone had told my parents that I am bisexual while I was in high-school, they absolutely would have sent me to a conversion therapy camp to have it beaten out of me. Many teenagers do not have a safe home environment, systems like this are as liable to do harm as they are to do any good at all.

I don't think teenagers and children should be interacting with LLMs at all. It is important to let children learn to think on their own before handing them a tool that will think for them.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-16 23:45:18+00:00
The danger with stating this in terms of absolutes like:

> no support group from a big company is going to call you. Ever.

Is, eventually, you probably will get a call from a support group at a big company, as many have noted in response, and then all of the other absolutes in the list also become "well, people say never, but I think this is one of those exceptions" instead of "it's never worth taking the risk of assuming it's the company who really called you".

A company, even big one people joke about having a complete lack of actual human support agents, may really call you one day. The other 364 days of the year it's probably a scam. The safe bet is to take the issue they called about and contact the official support channel yourself (being careful to get a real one and not an ad/fake site if you need to Google it). It may not always seem the most convenient, but it only takes one mistake to end up in a much more inconvenient place one day.
by cuillevel3 | 2025-09-16 23:45:40+00:00
Distros are struggling with the amount of packages they have to maintain and update regularly. That's one of the main reasons why languages built their own ecosystems in the first place. It became popular with CPAN and Maven and took off with Ruby gems.

Linux distros can't even provide all the apps users want, that's why freshmeat existed and we have linuxbrew, flatpak, Ubuntu multiverse, PPA, third party Debian repositories, the openSUSE Buildservice, the AUR, ...

There is no community that has the capacity to audit and support multiple branches of libraries.
by layer8 | 2025-09-16 23:45:55+00:00
The history is more complicated than that. Originally, ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode were two separate efforts, with only ISO having 31-ish-bit ideas, and Unicode being strictly 16 bits [0][1]. UTF-8 as in TFA was clearly developed to cover the 31-bit ISO character collection, the encoding going up to 6 bytes per character, although a couple of years later this was restricted to the 4 bytes sufficient to cover the 20 bits of Unicode 2.0 (1996). The initial UTF-8 development is therefore somewhat beyond the scope of what Unicode 1.x was about at the time.

Furthermore, the development of Windows NT already began in 1989 (then planned as OS/2 3.0) and proceeded in parallel to the finalization of Unicode 1.0, and to its eventual adoption by ISO that lead to Unicode 1.1 and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993. It was natural to adopt that standardization effort.

Once established, the 16-bit encoding used by Windows NT was engrained in kernel and userspace APIs, notably the BSTR string type used by Visual Basic and COM, and importantly in NTFS. Adopting UTF-8 for Windows XP would have provided little benefit at that point, while causing a lot of complications. For backwards compatibility, something like WTF-8 would effectively have been required, and there would have been an additional performance penalty for converting back and forth from the existing WCHAR/BSTR APIs and serializations. It wasn't remotely a viable opportunity for such a far-reaching change.

Lastly, my recollection is that UTF-8 only became really widespread on the web some time after the release of Windows XP (2001), maybe roughly around Vista.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set#...

[1] "Internationalization and character set standards", September 1993, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/174683.174687
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-16 23:46:15+00:00
Adding a z-index was a hack to workaround the .rotate180 class creating a new stacking context, causing downvotes to be rendered over the sticky topbar. This is hella overengineered. https://news.ycombinator.com/triangle.svg is 131 bytes!

<svg height="32" viewBox="0 0 32 16" width="32" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path d="m2 27 14-29 14 29z" fill="#999"/></svg>

Meanwhile, the relevant section of https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css is much larger:

.rotate180 { -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); /* Chrome and other webkit browsers */ -moz-transform: rotate(180deg); /* FF */ -o-transform: rotate(180deg); /* Opera */ -ms-transform: rotate(180deg); /* IE9 */ transform: rotate(180deg); /* W3C complaint browsers */ /* IE8 and below */ -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(M11=-1, M12=0, M21=0, M22=-1, DX=0, DY=0, SizingMethod='auto expand')"; }

Just having a separate triangleup.svg and triangledown.svg would save bandwidth and rendering time, and make naïvely-written userstyles work properly! I thought Hacker News, of all websites, would be free from dodgy overengineered CSS…
by ofalkaed | 2025-09-16 23:46:46+00:00
70 meters is not actually the limit as this article suggests, I know the Duluth/Superior port receives 80 meter blades which are then trucked out and I think they plan on going bigger but don't recall the details. Saw some of the trucks hauling those 80 meter blades last year when I was there, it was impressive.

Edit: Reading about it some, the blades I saw might not have been 80m, it looks like the 80m blades might have gone right onto a train. I was told by the person I was with that they were 80m, I didn't measure.
by dmix | 2025-09-16 23:47:44+00:00
AFAIK Uber is doing app integrations + some local operational fleet management. Waymo is supplying the cars, radars, computers, remote service, the brand, etc. Waymo has to scale that production and maintenance up country wide and then globally.

Uber's CEO compared it to Marriot, people come in to run the hotels in the local region, but they actually don't own the hotels. It's like hired managers who take a cut.

It also makes sense to have people with local experience run them in each local region. But those businesses still involve margins and expenses that have to make sense.
by jppope | 2025-09-16 23:47:52+00:00
> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism

Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).

In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.

Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).

Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
by jordanmorgan10 | 2025-09-16 23:47:55+00:00
I made Alyx as a caffeine playground for iOS 26. It's actually been on my phone for a few years, but I decided to pretty it up and ship it. If you're keen on iOS 26, these are some things I am proud of:

- Visual Look Up: You can scan coffee and it'll use AI to figure out the contents. This was a new API that iOS 26 brought and I thought this was kinda fun.

- Logging with AI: Apple shipped Foundation Models on iOS 26, and while they are far less capable that flagship models, they are great for bite sized tasks. Plus, they support tool calling - which means they can fire up tools that you give them when they are generating responses. So, I feed it caffeine data and people can type in what they're drinking, and it'll give you a reasonable estimation of how much caffeine is in it.

- Tons of Siri stuff: If you're into automation, every single thing in the app works as an action in Shortcuts. This was a lot of work, but was a goal from the start. Even small things, like changing the app's theme, can be done in Shortcuts.

It turned out pretty good I think! Excited that some people seem to dig it too. I never know how to make these Show HN things super interesting, but if you like caffeine logging and have iOS, I think you'll like this.
by cmckn | 2025-09-16 23:48:06+00:00
> instead of updating to the absolute latest version available of everything, it updates to versions that were released no more than some configurable amount of time ago

The problem with this approach is you need a certain number of guinea pigs on the bleeding edge or the outcome is the same (just delayed). There is no way for anyone involved to ensure that balance is maintained. Reducing your surface area is a much more effective strategy.
by kaiokendev | 2025-09-16 23:48:25+00:00
I was targeted by this exact same attack several months ago. It sounded incredibly real, the emails looked legit, down the domains, Google even has a process for this exact scenario. The only thing that tipped me off is that they sent a login request to my phone. Nothing about the login request seemed off- it even originated from a Mountain View IP. But it was the fact they had sent me a login request which prompted me to drill the voice on why they needed a login request instead of some other form of verification. The disembodied voice soon became agitated and eventually told me that I should expect to lose access to my Google account soon since I hadn't complied with their request.

It was only after I checked Twitter that I saw Garry Tan's callout of the exact same scam. After experiencing it myself, I wouldn't fault anyone who fell for it. The only other tip-off was that the voice was pretty monotone and unemotional, but that only appears obvious in hindsight, not in the moment where you're slightly panicking that someone might be trying to claim access to your account.
Ask HN: Why don't we have a shared "libchrome" the way we have glibc or DirectX?
by omagdy7 | 2025-09-16 23:48:41+00:00
The status quo of shipping a cross platform desktop app easily for the past years have been electron, but this comes at the cost of pretty much shipping a chromium with each app which is not ideal. So why don't we have a libchrome like we have glibc in Linux or DirectX in windows. Imagine every game would bundle their own DirectX version with them. The big blocker I imagineis stability glibc doesn't change much but chrome is constantly changing, but I feel this is easily fixable by maintaining a LTS version of the library and calling it a day. Has anyone pitched this idea before. Is chromium as an engine too coupled in logic with chrome as a desktop app making it impossible to ship it as a library?
by muzani | 2025-09-16 23:48:58+00:00
We made this up in school: "saya tak hensem, kalau saya hensem, tentu Tipah suka" [opposite = tentang, adjacent = sebelah, cos = kos]

Translation: I'm not handsome, if I were handsome, Tipah (our principal) would like me"

25 years ago and I still remember it clearly. Also it was middle school education on how to solve problems in a different space; this one solving math in a second language space lol
by lavezzi | 2025-09-16 23:49:00+00:00
Lucky for you Coinbase have set up a fund for people who got scammed through social engineering attacks due to their recent security fuckup.

Regardless of whether you received an email from Coinbase notifying that you were affected, the attack they suffered is much larger than they let on to the SEC.

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/protecting-our-customers-stand...
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-16 23:49:02+00:00
Are you truly a “generalist”? These are the different “roadmaps” for someone who wants to be good at something.

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

I have one rule that I have kept for a decade - I don’t touch the clusterfuck of front end development.

My value proposition is simple. Like Joel Spolsky hiring criteria, I make sure I continue to have experience that shows “I am smart and gets things done” and I pick a lane to go deep in - “cloud native green field implementations”. If that lane starts to narrow, I’ll jump on projects at work that get me into another lane. Technology is just a tool. Anything you learn new, Tens of thousands of others will learn the same thing.

Learning technology and not knowing how to communicate with the “business” and how to communicate adding business value will not help you stand out.

I’ve done this for over 30 years.
by latentcall | 2025-09-16 23:49:12+00:00
I can find you videos of mangled Palestinian children recorded every single day since October 8th 2023. So tell me, does October 7th in your eyes justify a war against civilians?

And if you’re about to tell me it isn’t a war against civilians, it should be easily provable by IDF videos of firefights with Hamas on a daily basis since October 8th 2023. However the videos I have seen have targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.
by Theodores | 2025-09-16 23:49:28+00:00
Agreed.

I just checked with some code that I wrote a while back to rotate a faux-3D pyramid, to see how I did it. The trigonometry was the easy part, it was the backface culling that was the hard part. Anyway, I decorated my elements with CSS variables in script and used lots of Math.sin/cos/tan. Also present were lots of radian conversion things and the fun that goes with animating things the 'right way'. Basically oodles of extra stuff that took me the best part of a week to do, to result in something that memory leaks if left running for a few hours.

Now I have seen this article, I might just have to mix and match JS and CSS, so I build out the elements in code and add the CSS variables to them, for everything else to be done in CSS. I will obviously need an intersection observer to trigger the CSS rather than my JS, and so it goes on!

Either way, the trigonometry is the easy part, fixing that memory leak the hard part, but CSS is the way to go because that will work perfectly, unlike with JS.
by epolanski | 2025-09-16 23:49:40+00:00
> One of the first Hamas Gopro videos of October 7th was the shooting of an ambulance

Nobody's ever denied that October 7th was a tragedy and that similar things happened. Not even once.

Don't get your point besides "if some of us suffered, it's fine to inflict 1000x the suffering on anybody associated, related or even just in proximity of those who caused us the suffering".

> It's not reckoning

I've never seen a war in which only one side has an army, and the other one loses almost exclusively civilians.
by accumulator | 2025-09-16 23:50:32+00:00
Great write up. Really appreciate the work from the teams at Shopify, Expo, and countless OSS maintainers pushing the ecosystem forward. Looks like the coast is mostly clear to upgrade to the new architecture, but as a solo dev who only just made it to Expo 52 / Xcode 16, I can’t say I’m excited. With RN/Expo it often feels like a race to build features before the bottom drops out and you’re forced into another round of foundational upgrades just to keep the app building. Even with good migration tools and guides, any non-trivial app will likely hit unique challenges. I don’t think that’s on Expo or Facebook - it’s just the reality of mobile development and reflective of the way Apple and Google shape the ecosystem. Imho mobile platform churn is much worse than developing for web, and working on a mobile app makes me appreciate the web more every day.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-09-16 23:50:56+00:00
Just to add, people in the field are unlikely to find a paper on Zenodo. I don't think any of the major search engines or databases for papers will include anything on Zenodo in their results.

That said, posting on arXiv can't be done unless someone vouches for you, which might be difficult or not for an independent person.

I think the best bet would be to submit your paper directly to a journal. However the paper in GP is unlikely to be published by any reputable journal. One direct feedback: if you can't explain at the start why your paper is relevant to current researcher's then why should anyone care? A sniff test for this is that you discuss in the introduction recent papers which have tried to solve the same or similar problems. But GP paper's references are over two decades old.
by pitpatagain | 2025-09-16 23:51:30+00:00
The study is linked early in the article and is fairly dense, the article summarized it well and is a lot more readable.

16/18 are the most carcinogenic strains, they have been close to eradicated in Denmark. "Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out" is the full headline and 100% accurate.

Those were the only two high risk strains covered by the vaccine used in the time frame studied. The study covers the first cohort of girls given the 2008 version of the vaccine when they recently reached age to start screening. It is expected to not see other strains affected in this study, even though current vaccines are broader. The total number of high risk HPV cases in the study went down post-vaccination.

The notion of numbered strains of HPV is about diverging lineages going back hundreds of thousands of years in a highly conserved, slowly mutating virus. They are not comparable to things like seasonal COVID or flu strains.
I launched a Mac utility; now there are 5 clones on the App Store using my story
by tTarnMhrkm | 2025-09-16 23:51:39+00:00
I'm a solo dev, and I wanted to share a recent experience as a case study on the current state of the App Store and indie development.

A few months ago, I built a simple macOS utility to solve a personal frustration: verifying the actual speed of USB-C cables and devices in the Mac menu bar. It is call USB Connection Information (usbconnectioninformation.com) and it supports macOS 13 and up. Before launch, there were no other apps in this specific niche on the Mac App Store. The app became unexpectedly successful, hitting the top 100 paid utilities and getting a good amount of organic press.

In the last two weeks, at least five near-identical apps have appeared on the App Store. The concerning part is that some of these clones have copied my App Store description, including my personal origin story about why I built the app.

A few open-source clones have also appeared on GitHub, which I see as a positive community contribution. My concern is with the commercial clones on the App Store that are engaging in plagiarism.

This raises a few questions I'd be interested to hear HN's thoughts on:

I've been transparent about my success on Reddit. How much are LLMs lowering the barrier to entry, allowing others to take a validated idea and marketing copy and generate a functional clone in a matter of days?

It seems that derivative apps with plagiarized descriptions and app elements are being approved without issue. Does this signal a shift in App curation?

My app's value is its simplicity. In an environment where simple, successful ideas can be replicated this quickly, what is the moat? Is it brand, speed of innovation, marketing, or something else?

Curious to hear your perspectives.
by Invictus0 | 2025-09-16 23:51:41+00:00
I literally wrote "AI summary" at the top because I copy and pasted it from google. If there was a genocide there would be many more palestinians dead, full stop. There would not be evacuation zones, humanitarian corridors, leaflets, announced bombings, etc. It would be trivial to simply kill everyone in Gaza, it is very obviously within their power.
by fragmede | 2025-09-16 23:51:46+00:00
We don't have to theorize. MacOS has TCC, which was first added in 2012 in Mountain Lion and later versions added more grants. It's not a proper capability system, but it's still a security system that came after traditional Unix primitives. Later macOS versions added a sandbox as well, and programs can't reach outside of that sandbox willy nilly. So macOS programs can't navigate to ~/Photos without the user hitting allow, possibly in system preferences, not just as a pop-up.

The external APIs themselves haven't changed. Without recompiling, if I want to enumerate photos using the appropriate framework, the newer version of the framework code will ask the TCC system which popups up a "allow access to Photos" dialog. If my program tries to read the photo db file with a standard open(), it's going to get permission denied. (you can grant programs full disk access of you so choose.)