MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-24 07:54:53+00:00
Especially considering Kotlin is used as a drop in replacement for Java in a lot of projects. Especially when using the type of frameworks often associated with Java (Spring, Quarkus, etc.).

Personally, I think statistics like this are biased towards the median of the past few decades and do not necessarily tell much about the future; other than that things apparently move very slowly and people are mostly conservative and stuck in their ways.

Cobol is still in that list. Right above Elixir, which apparently is a bit of a niche language. Kotlin has only been around for about 15 years, and the 1.0 release was actually only nine years ago. Java was released 30 years ago and it's been dominant in enterprise development for 25 years now. So, no surprise that Java is nearer to the top.

Python is surprising but it's been around for quite long and gained a lot of popularity outside the traditional computer science crowd. I know biochemists, physicists, etc. that all use python. And it's a great language for beginners obviously. It's not so much that people switched to python but that it is driving the growth of the overall programmer community. Most new programmers use python these days and that explains why it is the #1.

Javascript has had a virtual monopoly on basically anything that runs in a browser, which is of course the most popular way to distribute code these days. Especially since plugins were deprecated and things like applets, flash, etc. disappeared around fifteen years ago. Anything that ran on the web was either written in Javascript; or transpiled/compiled to it. WASM is starting to change that but it's early days.

What the past 25 years tell us is that things definitely change. But very slowly. C++ still outranks Javascript. That's because it's mostly browsers where it is used. It's a lot less popular for other things.

I like Kotlin, so I'm biased. But it's obviously not the most popular thing by a long shot. But popular doesn't mean good. I actually like python for small unimportant things. But I reach for Kotlin if I need to do it properly. I used to reach for Java. But Kotlin simply became the better tool for the job; at least for me. I even prefer it over typescript and I do occasionally use it for web frontend development. The transpiler is pretty good. And there's a WASM compiler too and Compose for WASM just entered beta. Kotlin seems future proof and it seems to be growing into wider adoption. There are a few million programmers around by Jetbrains counts. It's not nothing.
by Epa095 | 2025-09-24 07:55:47+00:00
Massive paycheck? Feel free to apply yourself https://careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=8214

I dont know how far 70-100k goes in SF, but accoriding to https://www.livingwage-sf.org/living-wage-calculator/ it is barely enough for a single adult, but you better not have a child!
by sReinwald | 2025-09-24 07:56:09+00:00
Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the engineer.

Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target.

This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket.

I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-24 07:56:14+00:00
Forth has always intrigued me as one of those languages (APL and Mumps also come to mind) that appears to have a superpower, for example expressing somewhat complex systems compactly, while at the same time also being flawed enough so that this superpower only appears to be applicable to a small niche.

Given the somewhat sorry state of (lack of) expressiveness and accompanying bloat in programming in general, it would be really interesting to see if that is inevitable, so if the superpower is in fact also the flaw, or if it's possible to extract the superpower from the flaw.

The way you express Forth's superpower is one I haven't seen so far and seems to point a possible way:

> So you end up using the same mechanism for fairly disparate purposes, with the attendant compromises.

Can you tell more about those mechanisms that are used for disparate purposes?

> If it's ever easier to write something in Forth than in C, it's probably because you can define immediate words, thus extending the language into a DSL for your application in ways that are out of reach of the C preprocessor.

So compile-time metaprogramming is not just available as an add-on, but very much "how things are done"?

https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/11-forth-compiler-defin...

And having a bit of compile-time metaprogramming also be the compiler is enabled by effectively not having syntax?
by iyn | 2025-09-24 07:56:45+00:00
> I didn't want to be the one to have to say it, but neither masks nor social distancing had any scientific backing at all.

This is false. Even quick search shows multiple papers from pre-covid times that show masks being effective [0][1]. There are many more studies post-covid that show that N95/FFP2/FFP3 masks actually work if you wear them correctly (most people don't know how to do this). Educate yourself before sharing lies.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21477136/

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19652172/
by jojogh | 2025-09-24 07:57:11+00:00
Hey HN, Alex here, founder of undatas.io.

Huge news: We just launched as a LangChain Core Provider—and we’re here to kill the #1 pain point of RAG: garbage document parsing.

Let’s cut to it: Building reliable AI used to feel like rolling the dice. Existing loaders mangle tables, drop critical data, and give zero way to verify outputs. You’d blindy feed messy text into embeddings, waste compute on garbage, and wonder why your app failed. I started Undatasio because this frustration broke more of my projects than I can count.

Our fix? Two non-negotiables: absolute parsing precision and total transparency—wrapped in a model no one else offers: pay only for the parses you accept. Bad output? It’s free. No excuses, no gotchas.

This isn’t "another loader" for LangChain. As a Core Provider, `UndatasioLoader` bakes quality control into the start of your chain: - Programmatically check parsed JSON before it hits embeddings - Reject docs that miss key fields (e.g., no `invoice_total`, wrong table columns) - See exactly where data came from with positional `bbox` coordinates (build your own validation UI in minutes)

No more wasting time or money on downstream garbage. Data prep should be the reliable part of your stack—not the scary one.

We’ve been grinding to make this integration feel native to LangChain, and partnering with their team to push it live has been a blast.

If you’re tired of RAG failing because your inputs are broken, give it a spin. We’re here all day to answer questions, and we need your feedback to make this even better.

Links to get started are in the comments—fire away!

Here’s how to get started:

1. Install the Package: pip install langchain-undatasio (PyPI Link: https://pypi.org/project/langchain-undatasio/)

2. Check out the Official Docs: (LangChain Provider Page: https://docs.langchain.com/oss/python/integrations/providers...)

3. Try the Live Demo: We've set up a Colab notebook with examples. (Google Colab Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1k_UhPjNoiUXC7mkMOEI...)

I'll be here all day to answer any questions. Let me know what you think.
by discoinverno | 2025-09-24 07:57:15+00:00
The physics paper has been published on a predatory 'open-access' journal, where basically you can pay to publish whatever (ref: https://blog.cabells.com/2021/07/07/no-signs-of-slowing/, look for scirp).

I gave a diagonal reading, it uses the right jargon somehow. They add some new components to the Einstein-Hilbert action they say originate from quantum complexity contributions, to be honest seems completely random, but i'm not an expert. Especially the conclusions look like they have been written with AI.

The 10 citations are almost all self-citing: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2388097775195172652...
by unwind | 2025-09-24 07:57:17+00:00
Not all microcontrollers[1]} have FIFOs for stuff like this, but perhaps you meant implementing it in software as a regular queue or something.

Anyway, even easier since the OP seems to be dealing a lot with the time between samples, would be to just make sure that at least 2.5 ms have passed before reading the sensor again. Right?

[1] Not sure if older blog posts detail the hardware, I do remember reading about this product on here before.
by Veedrac | 2025-09-24 07:58:31+00:00
The point being made is equivalent to pointing out that by strict mathematical definition there aren't physically reliazable distinguishably-non-Markovian processes, because computers are finite objects. Yes, you can talk about Markov chains as referring to everything up to and including actual human brains, but the kind of Markov chains people actually refer to as Markovian in practice are much more specific than that, typically those systems with structurally simple, indexical nodes, but sometimes extending to more complex ideas like RNNs where the states are at least of finite bandwidth. An LLM not only has continuous-valued nodes, it has nodes whose description length grows proportionally to and theoretically-unboundedly with respect to the size of its history.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-24 07:59:21+00:00
UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance.

If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-24 08:00:52+00:00
Jesus Christ, what a poor take on those numbers! It's possible to have a more wrong interpretation, but not by much.

The Netflix consumption takes into account everything[1], the numbers for AI are only the GPU power consumption, not including the user's phone/laptop.

IOW, you are comparing the power cost of using a datacenter + global network + 55" TV to the cost of a single 1shot query (i.e. a tiny prompt) on the GPU only

Once again, I am going to say that the power cost of serving up a stored chunk of data is going to be less than the power cost of first running a GPU and then serving up that chunk.

==================

[1] Which (in addition to the consumption by netflix data centers) includes the network equipment in between, the computer/TV on the user's end. Consider that the user is watching netflix on a TV (min 100w, but more for a 60" large screen).
Show HN: Pantheon MCP – a central server for AI agent definitions
by valado | 2025-09-24 08:00:57+00:00
Hi all,

since I began building with agentic systems, I kept copying and sharing Markdown-based agent definitions across projects and devices. Syncing was a pain.

So I built Pantheon MCP, a server that always provides the latest versions of an agent definition from a collection of currently 42 agents. Now I have to only add the MCP server to a new project and everyone on the project gets the same agent definitions all the time.

In addition, using it allows the system to choose dynamically the correct agent based on the task at hand.

I’ve been running it internally — now I’m releasing it publicly. Feedback welcome. I hope others find it useful as well. Happy experimenting!

V.D. https://pantheon-mcp.com https://github.com/valado/pantheon-mcp
by joannanewsom | 2025-09-24 08:02:27+00:00
The federal government was literally pressuring YouTube to remove certain COVID content that did not violate its policies. It's said explicitly in the story.

What I'm trying to get at is it's possible to stifle people's freedom of expression without literally blocking them from every platform. Threatening their livelihood. Threatening their home. Kicking them off these core social media networks. All of these things are "silencing". And we should be wary of doing that for things we simply disagree about.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-09-24 08:02:50+00:00
For a professional/work context, I think this is mostly a human (rather than tech. decision). What languages are the team comfortable in? Where is talent available etc.

If you're in services, then the general demands of the market/your niche are important factors.

For completely personal projects, if you're trying to learn language X, use X. If you're trying to build a project for some reason, then use the language you're most familiar with.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-24 08:03:19+00:00
Similarly, I used a wired vibrator (more power) to get the bubbles out of body casting alginate.

It makes sense. Specific professional tools to vibrate viscous fluids to get bubbles out of it exist (like those odd looking concrete vibrators), but for a small handheld vibrating tool there is already an enormous market of affordable tools which do just that.
Show HN: I made a tool to make my Git operations easy
by rafmardev | 2025-09-24 08:03:22+00:00
A few months ago I needed to clear every feature branch that were in my local repo. After delete manually more than 10 branches, it was so annoying that I didn't want to repeat it.

So I thought, I've never build a full Rust app before but I'll use it to help me with git.

So created gat, a terminal tool that with one command, it executes whatever is needed so I don't need to do boring git operations and can focus on cool rebase interactive operations.

I hope it can help you as much as it helps me.
by lukan | 2025-09-24 08:05:53+00:00
Monarchies can be rich, but no one can be richer than the emperors family.

If you are into that, good luck with that and hope that there will never be a retarted king. Because it all depends on whether the king is nice and capable, or not.

Is that the stability and rule of law I should look forward? And they are all not so long lived either btw.

Plots, intrigues and coup d'etat of people who think they would make a better king is still a thing.

And .. I do make the claim that a real direct democracy does not tend to centralisation of power, as there are check and balances, but politicians left alone surely will aim for that as it make governing easier.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-09-24 08:06:37+00:00
Have you ever touched spider web? Have you walked in a forrest and got spider web stuck on your face or clothes impossible to get rid of? Y’know how in such a moment you immediately think ”Oh yeah, this is exactly like my ol’ nan’s skin, real silky like”? Why are people gaslighting themselves to think that this kind of cheap garbage has not been produced with LLM’s for years at this point? People just actually getting used to the ”style” and starting to recognise it.

I hope to god those paragraphs were written by a LLM, since otherwise there no excuse in publishing such drivel. But the fact that people (many many people) buy this, read this and go ”yeah granma’s spider skin, that makes sense”, is far more scarier than few ghostwriters losing commissions.

Or should I say: ”Honestly? Me thinks we cooked.”
by jcgl | 2025-09-24 08:06:50+00:00
> I would love to see cross browser support for forms encoded as application/json instead of url encoded. Additionally making name attributes in forms a query path selector to be able to nest JSON data structures would go a very long way.

This would be simply amazing. Would so drastically reduce the JavaScript truly needed for basic CRUD stuff. Could even eliminate it if you don’t need variable-length arrays. Just the simplicity of POSTing forms…
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-24 08:07:48+00:00
Numerical linear algebra is intrinsically strongly typed. The same algorithms that work in double or extended double precision may not work at single or half precision.

Pure python has a tendency to silently widen every floating point type to double. Numpy overlays a C ABI on top of python’s oversimplified type system, which complicates matters further.

I wouldn’t teach numerical linear algebra in any weakly typed language.
by bjackman | 2025-09-24 08:08:48+00:00
It's a weird one - I've been at Google for more than 5 years. I know from the stats that we have a zillion lines of actively developed Java, there must be huge swathes of the company that you could even call a "Java shop". I dig into random bits of code all the time. And yet I've looked at Java maybe three times in my tenure. And if I needed to submit Java code, I would not have a single contact to ping for readability review.

Java was the first language I learned in my CS degree, I still think this was a sensible choice by the CS department, but I don't think I've written a single piece of Java since I left 10 years ago!

It seems like a lot of Java usecases may be big and important but kinda isolated! Something about where they sit in the economic value chain perhaps?
by 63stack | 2025-09-24 08:08:54+00:00
>Everybody, who thinks this is OK, should think again - what if Anna genuinely didn't like parties, you at parties, music at parties or whatever else. Re-invating in that case is disrespectful, intrusive and even rude as all interactions need to be feedback controlled

Anna has a mouth she can use to speak up, instead of relying on others ability to read (possibly unexpressed) social cues.

Also what world do you live in where an invitation to somewhere from your friend group can be seen as disrespectful, intrusive, or rude? Talk about disconnect from reality.
by teamonkey | 2025-09-24 08:08:59+00:00
I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080).

The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time.

Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
by kapone | 2025-09-24 08:09:29+00:00
Well, as anecdotal data, have you folks noticed ads lately pushing Gemini/Claude/xx on both legacy media and online? If AI (and these products) is sooo great, why do these companies have to advertise to sell their wares?

And Google and Microsoft are hellbent on pushing AI into everything. Even if users don't want it. Nope, we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at you and see if it sticks.

In the non-tech world, nobody gives a shit about AI. People and businesses go about their daily lives without thinking about things like "Hmmm...maybe I could have prompted that LLM a different way..."
by unwind | 2025-09-24 08:10:34+00:00
I'm not (at the moment) a potential user of this, but I just wanted to say that it was a fantastic page with a really good presentation of the project and its capabilities.

One micro-question on the editing: why are numbers written with an apostrophe (') as the thousands-separator [1]? I know that is used for this purpose in Switzerland and that many programming languages support it. It just seemed very strange for English text, where typically comma (,) would be used, of course.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_groupi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Miscellaneous_uses_...
by pjmlp | 2025-09-24 08:11:59+00:00
CLU, Cedar, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Component Pascal, Eiffel, Sather, BETA, D, Nim, Swift, C#, F# are all examples of GC based languages with value types that can be used without any kind of boxing.
by branko_d | 2025-09-24 08:12:11+00:00
> would happen the same in a single-threaded event loop

Well...if you implemented a relational DBMS server without using threads. To my knowledge, no such DBMS exists, so the distinction seems rather academic.

> Btw if you really want consistent multi reads, some DBMSes support setting a read timestamp, but the common ones don't.

Could you elaborate? I can't say I heard of that mechanism. Perhaps you are referring to something like Oracle flashback queries or SQL Server temporal tables?

Normally, I'd use MVCC-based "snapshot" transaction isolation for consistency between multiple queries, though they would need to be executed serially.
by alex-moon | 2025-09-24 08:12:30+00:00
I think this is a real problem though I haven't got a lot of specifics to pull together into a comment just yet. Let me say a bit about what I mean though - I'll turn it into a blog post when I've got it more together.

I recently signed up for Junie - that's JetBrains' Cursor equivalent, an agentic AI coding plugin for the IDE. You tell it what you want and then it does it. My first thought was "Oh I'll just get it to do a rough outline for me then I'll fill in the details myself." But then the first rough outline was missing some things, so I iterated. Then it was basically working, just missing some things, so I iterated again.

After a dozen iterations, it was really clear to me that I was stuck in the intermittent reinforcement - aka the "just one more" - loop. This is the basic mechanism that drives addiction.

Addiction is basically where your prefrontal cortex gets short circuited out of the brain's reward system. The reward system is this kind of phased feedback loop between the PFC and the basal ganglia, the central tegmental area and the thalamus.

The PFC is the bit that does the "thinking" this article is talking about, the "putting together" of disparate pieces of information to make new information that then goes back into the reward system to shift the goals involved in reward seeking.

This is that feeling you get of "losing sight" of the "bigger picture" and it's responsible for a lot of social ills - we don't just get addicted to drugs, this basic mechanism, the tightening of that feedback loop, is involved in everything we do, whether that's exercise or eating or work or relationships, it's when these things become unhealthy.

Tech already does a lot of really bad things to our brains in this area. Doom-scrolling is the most famous example at the moment. So unhealthy, but we can't even stop ourselves - that's what an addiction looks like.

My biggest concern is that this is what AI is doing. All the big AI houses made their models free to use, and consumers lapped it up. We got hooked. The first hit is free, you see what I mean? Then they bump the price up. By the time they do so, it's too late - we need it.
by simonask | 2025-09-24 08:13:35+00:00
The point about "gibberish" is getting at a fundamental misunderstanding that people have about Undefined Behavior.

Rust's concept of "safety" really means "absence of Undefined Behavior". Lots of people don't seem to understand that C, C++, and Zig programs containing UB are gibberish - they are not C, C++, or Zig programs, but something else entirely. The key insight here is that in any language, UB invalidates the entire program. It no longer does what you think it does, your tests are all moot, and so on. But a lot of people seem to think that there is an acceptable amount of UB in any code base. There isn't.

UB is a concept that exists for every language, even languages like Python, Java, C#, JavaScript, but those languages make it very hard to encounter accidentally.

Before Rust, there was no way to guarantee the absence of UB without a significant runtime cost, so that's a very meaningful invention.