MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pas | 2025-09-28 23:47:50+00:00
there are two possibilities, either the big behemoth provides something for cheap (let's say because there's competition or because the buyers form an efficient price negotiation bloc), in which case the buyers benefit from buying from the behemoth (trade! comparative advantage!), or the big behemoth is bad, in which case it makes sense to try to start a company that has similar offerings.

and if domestic companies cannot outcompete the behemoth then it means whatever the behemoth is selling hard to replicate (which is really really .... reeeeaallly rare in software tech, and only non-software companies like ASML/TSMC come to mind, which are more like joint companies funded by and providing to a whole industry) in which case there's unfortunately not much to do anyway - the behemoth's offer might be "unfair", but then by definition it's not competing with domestic companies, it's offering completely different.

(sure, transactions costs matter, subscribers are sticky, etc.)
by reaperducer | 2025-09-28 23:48:08+00:00
Sky didn't say anything. The two talking heads from two different political parties said things.

As an outsider, I have no idea if Sky News is "right wing" or not. I watch Sky and BBC because those are the two British services I can get where I am.

(And occasionally ITV, but it seems to be all potatoes, and no meat.)

I note that instead of addressing the topic of discussion, you deflect into another topic. Why is that?
by hirvi74 | 2025-09-28 23:49:40+00:00
> or another statically typed language

I'm a professional .Net Core developer, but I'd throw my hat in the ring for Swift on this one. While obviously not exactly a 1:1 with Rust, there is definitely some common benefits between the two. Though, from what I understand of Rust (very little), its typing system is slightly more strict than Swift's which is slightly more strict than C#'s.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-28 23:50:03+00:00
I'm actually very pro israel and i agree with you on this. It's "two tier" kier at his finest. Labour have demonstrated they have no problem using the police and judiciary to go after anyone who causes them problems. And they somehow convince themselves they have the moral high ground from which to lecture everyone else. Even conservatives with all their indifference and contempt for the British public were never so dishonest.
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-28 23:51:49+00:00
Also, the obsession with public transit coverage and walkability as some sort of benchmark for how well your country is doing is at best misguided and at worst ableist and ageist.

Public transit fucking sucks even in countries where it's supposed to be good, because it's inherently sucky. Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living. Not everyone is a childless 25-year-old healthy able person who doesn't mind living in some 350 sqft box in the middle of a loud downtown hellscape and take public transit to almost-get-to everywhere they need to go before walking the last mile.

When you go to someplace like the Netherlands and see "everyone" riding a bicycle, just keep in mind that what you're seeing isn't actually "everyone".
by KK7NIL | 2025-09-28 23:52:06+00:00
> ferrous shield would warp magnetic flux lines

It wouldn't, the only way to "shield" from magnetic fields is to get them to induce Eddy currents and but that requires more and more length and as the wavelength gets longer and essentially infinite for the Earth's field which is very slow moving.

> RF ground up there. "ground" is relative and not at all required for a Faraday cage to work.
by wild_egg | 2025-09-28 23:52:45+00:00
There's an argument to be made that this gap is actually highlighting design issues rather than AI limitations.

It's entirely possible to have a 100k LOC system be made up of effective a couple hundred 500 line programs that are composed together to great effect.

That's incredibly rare but I did once work for a company who had such a system and it was a dream to work in. I have to think AIs are making a massive impact there.
by ofalkaed | 2025-09-28 23:53:40+00:00
It sometimes ignores it when the results are poor but generally all you need to do is add something to the query besides what is in the quotes (context) and it will handle it properly and give better results. When it ignores what is quoted it does so because the results are all over the place and it has no idea what you actually want. Google's search works off of how most people use it, not how you use it, so you need to adapt.

You have always been allowed to panic, have at it.
by jaredsohn | 2025-09-28 23:53:57+00:00
> has become the new "cloud-based"—a meaningless marketing term often used to justify a price hike for a feature that is, at best, a glorified if/else statement

Cloud-based isn't a meaningless marketing term - it means you can (or have to) visit a website instead of installing an app locally - made things easier to distribute/update compared to desktop apps. Also probably means you might have to keep paying for it regularly and if the company goes away the app will stop working.
by senfiaj | 2025-09-28 23:53:57+00:00
Interesting article. I remember have solved a leetcode problem called "Trapping Rain Water" https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/descriptio...

On leetcode the "elegant" and fastest solution was something like this:

class Solution { public: int trap(vector<int>& height) { int i = 1; int n = height.size(); int j = n - 1; int leftmax = height[0]; int rightmax = height[n - 1]; int tw = 0; while (i <= j) { if (leftmax <= rightmax) { if (leftmax > height[i]) { tw += leftmax - height[i]; } else { leftmax = height[i]; } i++; } else { if (rightmax > height[j]) { tw += rightmax - height[j]; } else { rightmax = height[j]; } j--; } } return tw; } };

My solution was this:

class Solution { public: int trap(const vector<int>& height) { int mx = 0; long long sum = 0; for (const auto h : height) { mx = max(mx, h); sum += mx - h; } int rMx = 0, h, i; for (i = height.size() - 1; (h = height[i]) != mx; --i) { rMx = max(h, rMx); sum += rMx; } return sum - (height.size() - 1 - i) * mx; } };

However, I compiled and run some benchmarks on my local machine, and it turned out while on average my solution was slower, but in the worst case it was beating that solultion. My solution was less sensitive to the random input and the degradation was far less dramatic, around 2x, while that solution degraded much much more. I also thought that it was probably caused by the fact that my solution seem to be more predictable for the CPU branch predictor than that one, despite that it iterates twice.
by seec | 2025-09-28 23:54:26+00:00
Yes it is particularly stupid because there are European people doing way better than the natives in many of those hot countries. The argument is always that the bad white people oppress the natives but at some point, there are patterns that can't be ignored. Many places that the colons were left for the natives to run went to shit also, so clearly, it's not just about the climate.

The amount of bullshit people can say for bullshit political correctness virtue signaling is absolutely insane.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-09-28 23:54:41+00:00
This reminds me of American voting on Gaza resolutions in UN. Apparently I have not condemned Putin enough and must be helping him, just because I say that further military escalation leads nowhere. What a nonsense. But if you wish so, I do fully agree that Russia was wrong to start this war and Russia is wrong to continue this war. As for resolve, time will tell. I don’t see a lot of resolve now in practice.

> There is no way that you can legitimize the Russian aggression against Ukraine

I did not legitimize the Russian aggression. Understanding the logic and legitimizing are not synonymous. Whether the reasons were legal or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they serve as a basis for starting negotiating position.

> I'm trying to get you to understand that the Russian point-of-view in this whole discussion is utterly irrelevant

If it’s irrelevant to you, this is fine. It’s absolutely relevant to EU foreign policy and the negotiations and as such worth talking about, because it may actually save lives.

I understand the direction of this conversation, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to continue. We are looking at it from very different angles and while agreeing in principle that the war is bad, have very different perspectives on the future of it. Time will tell who is right.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-09-28 23:54:54+00:00
1. Ask yourself what kinds of things you really enjoy doing deep down inside. This is going to matter in the long term. You did mention you liked programming, but was that triggered by the glamor and promise?

2. Assuming that it is still to do with computers. A software business does not have to be about building products and selling them. I imagine in Iraq (or where ever you are) there are many small businesses and non-technical people who need their computers maintained and repaired (example, this guy has posted on HN and has a small business that does this : https://www.scottrlarson.com/services/computer/repair/ .. I am not affiliated in any way with him). You might need to hit the street, ignore the fear / embarrassment / rejection, and cold call or cold visit businesses. If only 1% of the people are going to turn into customers, get the other 99% out of the way, faster the better.

3. Teaching positions may not pay well but may pay the bills while you work to build a career or business.

You country was devastated by an illegal war. Rebuilding will take a lot of time and courage. Wish you all the best.
by pas | 2025-09-28 23:56:36+00:00
how would you pick those 1000 projects? this is the problem with NIH grants too, for example - lots of appeal to authority, lot of noise, not a lot of signal.

AI might be a bubble, but at least there are people (who value their reputation) who decided on the investments, and in the end if (when?) things don't work out with these insane bets they will be the ones looking stupid, not some faceless committee.

and sometimes we feel that feedback cycles are too short (managers only think in quarters) but here we have a pretty long cycle for this moonshot, and yes, this leads to bonkers numbers (and real systemic risks, which need to be managed - and alas neither laws and regulations nor the lawmakers and the regulators are even remotely capable and ready for managing this)
by rtpg | 2025-09-28 23:56:37+00:00
> For example a common failure mode in my work’s codebase is that some function will take something that is indexable by ints. The type could be anything, it could be List, Tuple, Dict[int, Any], torch.Size, torch.Tensor, nn.Sequential, np.ndarray, or a huge host of custom types! And you better believe that every single admissible type will eventually be fed to this function. Sometimes people will try to keep up, annotating it with a Union of the (growing) list of admissible types, but eventually the list will become silly and the function will earn a # pyre-ignore annotation. This defeats the whole point of the pointless exercise.

You are looking for protocols. A bit futzy to write once but for a heavily trafficked function it's woth it.

If your JIT compiler doesn't work well with protocols... sounds like a JIT problem not a Python typing problem
Submitting A16Z application without a working product/app
by UnconvNeuro | 2025-09-28 23:56:44+00:00
I am building an ambient and passive mental health measurement application. I do not have a working prototype yet and I am new to this space. I have spoken to a lot of clinicians and users to understand the problem, identify core requirements, and only recently started building it after realising there is a strong need and want for the tool. However, I am yet to have a working prototype. Should I submit an application to accelerators like A16Z speedrun? And if so, what all should I submit? What all should I put in the pitch deck? Should I make a pitch deck at all at this stage?
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-09-28 23:56:47+00:00
I find this to be too rosy a story about using agentic coding to add to a codebase. In my experience, miss a small detail about the code and the agent may can go out of control creating a whole new series of errors that you wouldn’t have had to fix. And even if you don’t miss a detail, the agent eventually forgets because of the limited context window.

This is why I’ve constrained my use of AI agents to mostly “read-only and explain” use cases, but I have very strict conditions for letting it write. In any case, whatever productivity gains you supposedly “get” for its write scenarios, you should be subtracting your expenses to fix its output later and/or payments made for a larger context window or better reasoning. It’s usually not worth the trouble to me when I have plenty of experience and knowledge to draw from and can write the code as it should be myself.
by strangescript | 2025-09-28 23:57:47+00:00
I appreciate these takes, but I can't help to think this is just the weird interim time where nothing is quite good enough, but in a year an article like this would clearly be "overthinking" the problem.

Like when those in the know could clearly see the internet's path to consuming everything but it just hasn't happened yet so there were countless articles trying to decide if it was a fad or not, a waste of money, bad investment, etc.
by westurner | 2025-09-28 23:57:59+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Efficacy of inhaled nebulised unfractionated heparin to prevent intubation or death in hospitalised patients with COVID-19: an investigator-initiated international meta-trial of randomised clinical studies" (2025) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
by KK7NIL | 2025-09-28 23:58:46+00:00
> You cannot tenuki in Chess.

You absolutely can! If it's during a tactical sequence we might call it an intermezzo. If it's not during a tactical sequence we don't usually have a name for it in chess but it happens all the time. The mainlines of the KID are famous for having theory where white goes for a queenside attack and largely ignores the kingside and vice-versa for black, just as one example.

> Chess is almost all tactics. Go on the other hand, is Strategic I used to think so too but I think this is a meaningless and superficial comparison now. Each go move is simpler by itself but to counter balance that you get a much bigger board and generally much longer games with much longer tactical sequences (I'm sure you've had games where you spend over 50 moves in a long tactical battle over a mojo, for example).
by anon-3988 | 2025-09-28 23:59:34+00:00
> The thing is, there is a lot of existing software in the world written in C and C++.

This is true, and I think that there is a type of language that I don't think have been explored yet: Cross language ABI language.

That is, the language is fully designed for being the glue between multiple languages to allow for migration in the future. I think it would probably end up being C.

> There are several languages that have managed a transition away from a base language into a more capable, flexible successor language, though: TypeScript is an evolution of JavaScript, Swift is an evolution of Objective-C, and C++ itself is an evolution of C.

And yet none of these have fully escaped the chain of their predecessors. And that is almost the point, people actually wanted to do what JavaScript could do, what C could do, what Objective-C could do. Then we put cover on it, but it is still a wooden table at the end of the day.

Have Hyrum's Law teach us nothing? Unless you consciously make the effort to REMOVE features, it will always be there. The fact that cross language boundary is complicated is a sign that the new language is actually shedding off technical debts. If I wrote a massively complicated function in C that leaks file handles, the answer isn't to read /proc/fd before and after, then manually unlink the new FDs. The answer is to actually dig through the code or rewrite it.
by jkrejcha | 2025-09-29 00:01:39+00:00
I disagree. I think, if the decision was made today, it probably would have ended up being structural, but the fact that it isn't enables (but doesn't necessarily force) Python to be more correct than if it weren't (whereas forced structural typing has a certain ceiling of correctness).

Really it enabled the Python type system to work as well as it does, as opposed to TypeScript, where soundness is completely thrown out except for some things such as enums

Nominal typing enables you to write `def ft_to_m(x: Feet) -> Meters: and be relatively confident that you're going to get Feet as input and Meters as output (and if not, the caller who ignored your type annotations is okay with the broken pieces).

The use for protocols in Python in general I've found in practice to be limited (the biggest usefulness of them come from the iterable types), when dealing with code that's in a transitional period, or for better type annotations on callables (for example kwargs, etc).
by posix86 | 2025-09-29 00:01:54+00:00
What is "understanding code", mental model of the problem? These are terms for which we all have developed a strong & clear picture of what they mean. But may I remind us all that used to not be the case before we entered this industry - we developed it over time. And we developed it based on a variety of highly interconnected factors, some of which are e.g.: what is a program, what is a programming language, what languages are there, what is a computer, what software is there, what editors are there, what problems are there.

And as we mapped put this landscape, hadn't there been countless situations where things felt dumb and annoying, and then situation in sometimes they became useful, and sometimes they remained dumb? Something you thought is making you actively loosing brain cells as you're doing them, because you're doing them wrong?

Or are you to claim that every hurdle you cross, every roadblock you encounter, every annoyance you overcome has pedagogical value to your career? There are so many dumb things out there. And what's more, there's so many things that appear dumb at first and then, when used right, become very powerful. AI is that: Something that you can use to shoot yourself in the foot, if used wrong, but if used right, it can be incredibly powerful. Just like C++, Linux, CORS, npm, tcp, whatever, everything basically.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-09-29 00:02:55+00:00
Is there really _any_ other measurement? This is the number quoted by a lot of PRs, but e.g. professional reviewers put much larger numbers

e.g. rtings puts AirPods Pro 2 at 160ms https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/audio-video-foto/apple-a... (AirPods Pro 3 review is in progress)

and ComputerBase puts AirPods Pro 3 at 160-180ms. https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/audio-video-foto/apple-a...
by senfiaj | 2025-09-29 00:03:07+00:00
From my understanding branches are about conditional jump instructions. Here are some of them:

JZ, JE - Jump if Zero, Jump if Equal JNZ, JNE - Jump if Not Zero, Jump if Not Equal JC - Jump if Carry JNC - Jump if No Carry JO - Jump if Overflow JNO - Jump if No Overflow JS - Jump if Signed (Negative) JNS - Jump if Not Signed (Positive or Zero) JP, JPE - Jump if Parity, Jump if Parity is Even JNP, JPO - Jump if Not Parity, Jump if Parity is Odd
by blooalien | 2025-09-29 00:03:44+00:00
> "However, as OP directly experienced (as have I) most startups will fail."

I was taught by my very first real "boss" (way back when dinosaurs roamed the streets) to never put more into your startup idea than you can afford to lose and still manage to survive afterwards. You can always rebuild (a totally new idea or a variation of the old, after learning from your mistakes) from that point as long as you can manage to survive your mistakes. On the other hand, he also said that if you're really serious about your idea you should absolutely invest in it as much as you're realistically able to (finances, time, and effort) without putting yourself in an un-survivable bind.
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-09-29 00:05:12+00:00
They destroyed "drone and aircraft machinery" [0] at APPH and at Teledyne "damage to the clean rooms could halt production for up to 12 months" [1].

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-57403049

[1]: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/pro-palestine-activists-dama...
by pdonis | 2025-09-29 00:05:28+00:00
> it is factually and objectively an esoteric and unusual case.

Sorry, but your unsupported opinion is not "factual and objective".

> If your argument is that all type systems are bad or deficient

I said no such thing, any more than the article did. Again you are attacking a straw man. (If you had said "limited in what they can express", I might buy that. But you didn't.)

I think I've said all I have to say in this subthread.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-29 00:06:43+00:00
Money is just a representation of value, and value exists in every socioeconomic system past, present or future, with or without money, with or without AI.

It’s plausible to imagine a perfectly egalitarian world where a robots do all the work to provide human needs. But human wants, and human social status seeking, are insatiable, so the idea that there will be no value in a world full of robots doesn’t hold water. 30 seconds after we are all equal, someone will do something different than someone else, and we will be off to the races, reinventing a status hierarchy, replete with higher and lower valued objects, tasks, behaviours etc.
by monomial | 2025-09-29 00:07:32+00:00
Anyone have some recommended resources for learning this stuff? I know there are commonly recommended electronics books like "The Art of Electronics" and "Practical Electronics for Inventors" but are there any resources that are focused specifically around guitar pedals? Ideally some sort of progression that introduces analog circuit basics through a set of increasingly involved projects and results in something that actually sounds good and that I would use as a musician.
by ckunte | 2025-09-29 00:07:44+00:00
With the wisdom from a TU Delft graduate student, I switched from Word to LaTeX in 2007, having never known or used it ever before, and never looked back for the next seventeen years. Using it within the corp. environ. (Shell) became progressively harder as time went by due to the need to install such a large installation (under Cygwin, which itself got on the list of not-allowed, and had to resort to `setup-x86_64.exe --no-admin` for nearly all my subsequent time there).

While I appreciate LaTeX structure, and the resulting end product (Knuth is God), it is as you know highly verbose in markup, thereby making the content somewhat unclean, and not easily readable like plain text (my yardstick on content readability and re-usability). I wrote multiple plug-ins for the text editors of my choice Sublime Text, and Vim to produce snippets for writing ease.

- https://github.com/ckunte/latex-snippets-st

- https://github.com/ckunte/latex-snippets-vim

Switched to Typst cautiously in 2023, and have never since looked back. If LaTeX was the gold standard for the 20th century, I think Typst is on track to become that for the 21st.

I wrote a little note about writing a template for Typst to remind myself how-to, and for anyone I'm working with:

- https://ckunte.net/2025/template
by vdupras | 2025-09-29 00:07:59+00:00
In that context, it's not very small, it's 20% (all instructions are register-to-register instructions, so they all have the same weight). It's huge.

Yes, there's the possibility that ecx is used elsewhere, and in that case, my second comment is irrelevant, because I was answering to the possibility that such big wart is to be expected from compilers because they crop up regularly.

But then again, it's unlikely that it's used elsewhere, because eax has the return value of the C snippet, there's nothing else to do, the function can return. So the original question remains: did this come from a C compiler? If yes, it's crappy code.