MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hxtk | 2025-09-23 01:58:28+00:00
I’ve long wished for an SQL error model: given a schema, query, and transaction isolation mode, what errors are theoretically possible?

I have a hard time answering this for Postgres, which disappoints me because I don’t see any reason it sounds very easy to answer, like there could be an extension to EXPLAIN that would dry run the query and list all the error states reachable.
by jonahx | 2025-09-23 01:58:47+00:00
You've made a general argument that shows not all theoretical economic theories about free markets can be trusted. Fair enough. But my claim is much narrower.

It merely relies on the love of money of real people in our current economy, and the premise that there is enough information flow that, if people cared, they would find and pay for products that don't screw their privacy, control, etc. I think both those premises are undeniably true.
by acdha | 2025-09-23 01:59:53+00:00
> Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in.

This is very much not my experience. I don't know if you use a VPN or have a ton of extensions but if I was hitting that so hard I'd consider trying a clean profile with no extensions and adding things back in to see if you can find the trigger condition.
by ziml77 | 2025-09-23 02:00:01+00:00
> To successfully make a parody case in regards to trademark the parody itself must make it obvious that the defendant is not in anyway connected to the owner of the trademarked thing. The Morgan and Morgan ad doesn't do that; without the disclaimer at the beginning it wouldn't be obvious that the ad wasn't a animation created by Disney.

This is what I was wondering about. Do those disclaimers make it okay? Because without that context it certainly feels like this ad could be officially endorsed by Disney. And that seems to be exactly the kind of thing trademark law is meant to deal with: avoiding trust problems from people being misled about who is selling them what.
by indolering | 2025-09-23 02:00:10+00:00
You can generate TypeScript schema for Haxe JS output. I'm honestly a bit surprised that TS isn't a supported target!

That could change with some investments. Haxe is a great toolkit to develop libraries in because it reduces the overhead for each implementation. It would be nice to see some commercial entity invest in Haxe or Dafny (which can also enable verification of the reference implementation).

> The moment they need to support multiple languages, they need to introduce a new complex layer (like Protobuf),

So this just won't be used outside of Node servers then?
by ferguess_k | 2025-09-23 02:00:33+00:00
Thanks. I agree that the 90s saw the explosion of graphic programming and graphic card techs.

I wonder if a "graphic card emulator" is a legit thing, like a CPU emulator -- or is that simply a 2d/3d/text renderer? The problem I face is, most of the legacy cards are either gone, or expensive to acquire (plus I need to buy a legacy PC), so it is not practical to write drivers for most of the legacy physical cards -- but say if I want to write a driver for a Hercules Graphic Card (admittedly it's a 80s card), can I simply write a software emulation and plug the "driver" into some place? Is it equivalent to writing the low level graphic libraries like SDL?
by russellbeattie | 2025-09-23 02:01:00+00:00
First, programming language fads have been a thing since about 10 minutes after the immortal Adm. Grace Hopper came up with COBOL.

Thompson and Ritchie could have used ALGOL, Lisp, FORTRAN, BCPL or PL/I to write Unix, but instead they created C and used that. I guarantee at the time there was someone at Bell Labs bitching about how they should be solving "real problems" instead of messing around with a new programming language.

But more practically, developers write code because they're paid to, or to scratch an itch. If a real problem doesn't substantially bother anyone enough to get solved by a developer, then it's not really a problem.

In general, code maintenance and optimization is always Somebody Else's Problem™. Instead of writing this blog post, the author could have spent that time optimizing some open source code, right?
by UltraSane | 2025-09-23 02:01:06+00:00
AUS-10 is basically 440C, and is an excellent steel for cutlery (and was once considered at the very high end of stainless steels). Very stainless, reasonably tough, and honorable slicing edge retention if heat treated to a relatively high hardness (60-61HRC would be on the mark). It will sharpen OK, but may have a bit of a gummy feel on the stones and not be as easy as carbon/low alloy steels.
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-23 02:02:23+00:00
You’re an optimist. I think we have lost a great deal of soft power that can never be regained. Because even if the next guy is normal, the citizens that decided this is what they wanted will continue to exist for decades after Trump is gone. There’s no reason for non-Americans to assume this is some kind of one-off anomaly and not a sea change in the culture of the US.
by MisterTea | 2025-09-23 02:02:29+00:00
Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially something general purpose that could power a mid range laptop/work PC/Desktop/Embedded but designed to be cost effective and crazy power efficient. "There is totally a market for it." I said.

People responded along the lines of "And what is going to run on that?" And they were right. At the time there would have been no killer app, not even Linux could propel it IMO. Of course Apple has the ability to steer their entire ship just like they steered from PowerPC to x86-64. So kudos to them for proving I was right ;-)

Though I still want my AMD Arm GPU SoC...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-23 02:02:41+00:00
> Does serving time really mean you should not get the same say in leaders as everyone else?

It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.
by fpoling | 2025-09-23 02:02:59+00:00
And it is easy for a thief to see that a bag is heavy and slim to judge that it contains something valuable. Anf then the thief can just forcefully take the bag from you.

In Barcelona there are a lot of cases when a thieve on a motorbike would try to snatch a bag or women handbag from a pedestrian waiting on a red light.

With a back pack it does not work. The drawback of a backpack is that a thief can just open the backpack or even cut with a sharp knife and one would not notice. But more expensive back-packs with a good design have protection against cutting and easy opening while on the back and with a cheaper one can be held in front.
by keyle | 2025-09-23 02:03:20+00:00
Yes.

At the same time, every generation of programmers will come in and will want to make a dent in the space time.

Why would a new developer want to use the stuff grand pa wrote ad nauseam? They want to take charge of their own adventure. Not everyone was born when things were exciting and we didn't know where we were going.

New tools likely wouldn't carry cruft that accumulated through time, as the tools understood their own essence, as they changed and morphed over time.

There is a Not_invented_here syndrome at play, with a New_shiny factor and potentially the benefits of cutting down a tool to the essential.

If anything, it's a good learning practice to rewrite existing tool, your way.

Rust does bring advantages, but if they don't learn the past, they're bound to repeat the mistakes made; memory safety only being a small part of the problem, over time (most of these old C tools now have been vetted many times over and are now pretty 'safe').
by toofy | 2025-09-23 02:03:52+00:00
this ‘growing sentiment’ has always been there. particularly with the crowd who persistently wants to lock everything behind a monthly subscription or insert hidden data collecting.

if the ‘growing sentiment’ wants to, they’re quite free to write their own code and use literally any license they want.

disturbingly, i’ve heard more than a few of these people upset because they can’t take our code that we gpl’d intentionally and lock it away stealing it as their own.
by asa400 | 2025-09-23 02:04:16+00:00
Excellent comment.

> People like to complain that writing correct Rust is hard. Thats's true, particularly for novices. But you'll get better. Thing is, writing correct C++ code isn't exactly easy either.

Agreed, and I wish all of the "Rust is hard" people would offer this critique _in context_.

The question is not "is Rust harder than C or C++?". The question is, "is writing correct Rust harder than writing correct C or C++?".

You could even think of it in financial terms: "is the cost of writing correct Rust higher or lower than the cost of writing correct C or C++?".

Another interesting qualification to add on is: "...for someone who doesn't already know Rust or C or C++". If you had to onboard a new team member, and they didn't know Rust or C or C++, which language would you want your project to be in? Which would they be able to safely contribute to the fastest? I know what I'm picking.
by nradov | 2025-09-23 02:04:43+00:00
No one — human or LLM — actually knows the meanings of the phrases that Tyler James Robinson wrote on his cartridge casings. There's lots of speculation but he isn't talking, and even if he was we wouldn't know whether he was telling the truth. If you want us to take you seriously then you'll have to come up with a valid example instead of posting a bunch of pseudo-intellectual drivel.
by reilly3000 | 2025-09-23 02:07:15+00:00
There is going to be a big market for private AI appliances, in my estimation at least.

Case in point: I give Gmail OAuth access to nobody. I nearly got burned once and I really don’t want my entire domain nuked. But I want to be able to have an LLM do things only LLMs can do with my email.

“Find all emails with ‘autopay’ in the subject from my utility company for the past 12 months, then compare it to the prior year’s data.” GPT-OSS-20b tried its best but got the math obviously wrong. Qwen happily made the tool calls and spat out an accurate report, and even offered to make a CSV for me.

Surely if you can’t trust npm packages or MS to not hand out god tokens to any who asks nicely, you shouldn’t trust a random MCP server with your credentials or your model. So I had Kilocode build my own. For that use case, local models just don’t quite cut it. I loaded $10 into OpenRouter, told it what I wanted, and selected GPT5 because it’s half off this week. 45 minutes, $0.78, and a few manual interventions later I had a working Gmail MCP that is my very own. It gave me some great instructions on how to configure an OAuth app in GCP, and I was able to get it running queries within minutes from my local models.

There is a consumer play for a ~$2499-$5000 box that can run your personal staff of agents on the horizon. We need about one more generation of models and another generation of low-mid inference hardware to make it commercially feasible to turn a profit. It would need to pay for itself easily in the lives of its adopters. Then the mass market could open up. A more obvious path goes through SMBs who care about control and data sovereignty.

If you’re curious, my power bill is up YoY, but there was a rate hike, definitely not my 4090;).
by colkassad | 2025-09-23 02:07:17+00:00
Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.
by pyuser583 | 2025-09-23 02:08:19+00:00
Same boat. It was terrible graduating in the aftermath of the crisis.

But they economic growth of the 2010s made up for it in a big way.

My parents gave similar stories graduating in the late 1970s.

I remember NPR saying my generation would always be poor. Now we are portrayed as aristocrats, with unearned stock market and real estate wealth.

The next generation has tough trials before them. Maybe, like my generation, my parents generation, and grandparents generation, they will be called to war.

But they will have opportunities as well.
by ferguess_k | 2025-09-23 02:08:30+00:00
Thanks. By saying Math I assume those are 2d/3d Maths and algos, like how to draw a line efficiently?

> The way that software wants to view the world doesn’t really matter there. (You probably already knew most or all of this.)

Actually I'm trying to understand this part. Can you please elaborate why the way that software wants to view the world doesn't matter there? My understanding is that the driver doesn't care about how the programmers are going to use the driver (could be drawing a window, drawing some fonts or drawing some polygons), but they merely need to implement certain standards?
by arp242 | 2025-09-23 02:08:53+00:00
> even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially

The dilemma that The Guardian faces is that it neither wants to draw attention to the lie, but also doesn't want to let it stand without some counter-argument. After all, if you just ignore everything then no counter-argument is ever offered and that's not good either.

This is really the "democracy hack" they're using: you don't want to draw attention to it, but you also can't really ignore it. In a healthy system, people that employ these kind of shameless dirty tricks would be excluded by the sense of civic duty of other people of their own party, as well as enlightened self-interest because in the end this will be bad for everyone. Yet here we are.
by freetime2 | 2025-09-23 02:08:56+00:00
Having learned more about the details, it's honestly not as heavy-handed as I originally thought. The Reuters article linked said it was "$100,000 fee per year" - but it has now been clarified to be a one-time fee per new H1-B petition. I also thought initially that it would apply to existing H1-B holders, but it does not. And I've learned is that it's structured as a temporary change lasting for 12 months (of course it could be extended in the future).

So - it's less heavy-handed than I thought. Given recent layoffs and the current state of the job market, I could maybe even be convinced that it's a good thing in the short term.

I do still have concerns about US comptetiveness in the longer term though if we incentive companies to hire in other countries vs bringing talent to the US.
by glenstein | 2025-09-23 02:10:03+00:00
>Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.

There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.

So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.

>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.

I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
by ferguess_k | 2025-09-23 02:10:39+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I know that "Zen of Graphic programming" is mostly about "graphic programming using CPU", is this actually the same thing that a GPU driver does? It makes sense though, as GPU simply take over what the CPU was supposed to do. But I do believe there are a lot of hardware information included too. I wonder how these two parts piece together...
by Kirby64 | 2025-09-23 02:10:50+00:00
Again, it’s not that it’s bad per-se, it’s that it is easily outclassed by numerous other more modern steels. It’s cheap compared to more exotic stuff, and feels almost insulting at the price you’re paying for the knife.

If the knife we’re discussing was sub $100 I’d have no issue with AUS-10/440C, but we’re talking about a $400 knife.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-23 02:12:39+00:00
> Apple's majority of buyers aren't their users or consumers; they are Apple fans and supporters. If Apple had consumers like Android, Linux, or Windows, either they would have fixed their act or been in the ground by now.

Companies who develop these fandoms live life on easy mode. You can do anything you want, abuse customers, raise prices, make promises and never deliver on them, lock people into your ecosystem, and there will always be an army of white knights out there ready-at-the-keyboards, defending the company. I honestly don't know how people get to the point where their identity is so wrapped up in a single company that they wake up in the morning and say to themselves, I'm going to be a company apologist for free and respond rudely to people, even though the company doesn't and will never even know who I am!
by magicalist | 2025-09-23 02:13:02+00:00
I mean this in the nicest possible way because you were just messing around on a fun thing, but...

I feel like there's a real metaphor here. 86+ people did work over two decades to maintain a cross-platform codebase and that "definitely deserves to be commended", but what "definitely felt magical" was Claude bumbling through header tweaks from compilation errors until the project compiled. And in the end what has AI wrought? A viral video but not anything to give back to the original project. Really there are multiple layers here :)
by komali2 | 2025-09-23 02:13:36+00:00
Unfortunately you're also engaging in an appeal to universal virtue.

It's weird because your argument doesn't seem to disagree with the notion that people should stay enfranchised, other than you saying specifically people should be disenfranchised for breaking a law. But you're now discussing lines so I guess you mean, literally any crime means no more voting.

A good democracy, and by that I mean useful for humans, isn't good by trying to be perfectly virtuous, it's good because it has recursive mechanisms to maintain its usefulness to humans. The primary mechanism is voting. For that reason I personally believe nothing should be allowed to remove the ability to use that primary mechanism, since the obvious outcome is a fascist is elected, and begins seeking means to strip the right to vote from his opponents, ensuring his perpetual rule. Modern example: I have a little antifa flag on my backpack, and therefore am now considered a terrorist in the USA, and can be arrested and have my right to vote stripped (other democratic mechanisms might prevent this, for now).

What crime would I have committed? Declaring an ideology a terrorist group is nonsensical but possible. Me suddenly being a terrorist crossed that line for you though.

So does speeding. So does operating your motor vehicle without checking your brake lights and turning indicators, every time. So does riding on a horse backwards in a specific town in Texas (don't forget local jurisdictions have their own laws, often insane!)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-23 02:13:52+00:00
Let's consider the consequences of that line with respect to electoral math. If we consider only serious criminals, e.g. murderers, they constitute a negligible proportion of the population and with high probability the number of election outcomes changed by allowing them to vote or not would be none.

By contrast, if you lump in people convicted of things like drug possession, that is enough people to change the outcome of some elections. And in general it's a strong heuristic that if huge numbers of people are committing a particular crime, it's a result of flaws in the law or society rather than flaws in huge numbers of different people.

So the only time disenfranchising felons matters to the outcome is when you get the line wrong, implying that it shouldn't be done because it shouldn't affect the outcome unless it's being done improperly.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-09-23 02:14:08+00:00
In the constitution it says:

> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons

"Free persons" in this case meant those not enslaved for life, so it includes incarcerated people. Representation apportionment also includes illegal immigrants under this clause.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-09-23 02:14:16+00:00
That first error isn’t an Xcode issue. It’s a Swift compiler issue. And you can’t blame your IDE for your bad instincts—at some point those ritualistic fixes stopped being necessary and I haven’t had to do them for more than half a decade. You really should be digging into your code using breakpoints and logging to find the root cause.

I do think Xcode has very rough edges but if we’re criticizing it, we have to criticize the right points.
by glenstein | 2025-09-23 02:14:25+00:00
The person they're replying to straight up claimed "Google doesn't have control over Chromium", which to me reads most naturally as treating the unforked code base as a community project where anyone can submit commits.

As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-23 02:14:34+00:00
In my netbook bag: charger, ac cord for the charger, hdmi cord, tiny wired mouse, laser pointer thing, pens/paper, notes, business cards, usb sticks with various linux distros (i often give these away) a kick-ass wifi dongle, ubertooth, and various usb cables. Im not having all that bouncing around in a canvas sack. This thing is small enough to qualify as a "purse" when the flight attendant tells me to check my carryon.
by asa400 | 2025-09-23 02:14:34+00:00
Yeah, I find the notion that coreutils is so proven and solid that it can't possibly be improved in any way to be utterly ridiculous. And I'm not even saying Rust necessarily has to be the thing to do it.

I just don't believe "pile of old C" is any kind of strong indicator of quality or performance, positive or negative.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-09-23 02:14:46+00:00
My experience with getting it to write code has not been good so far. Today I had a pretty mechanical task in Go. Basically some but not all functions from a package moved into another package so I asked Gemini to just change instances of pkg.Foo to pkgnew.Foo and import pkgnew in those files. It just got stuck on one file for 2 minutes and at that point I was already halfway through find/replacing it on my own.

For me it's been somewhat useful to ask questions but always fails at modifying any code in a big codebase.