MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amluto | 2025-09-21 16:30:57+00:00
Also: avoidance of mutable state, even locally. A lot of functions can be more straightforwardly expressed using mutable variables and data structures, and most functional languages can handle local mutable state, but a lot of code in functional languages avoids it.

Conversely, a lot of code written in imperative languages would be clearer and/or less bug-prone if it avoided mutable state and used persistent data structures.

I wish there was a mainstream, high performance language that made both styles equally ergonomic.
Show HN: Mimir Crypto – AI crypto news aggregator and analysis
by gitmagic | 2025-09-21 16:30:58+00:00
Hi, my name is Timothy and I recently created a couple of AI agents for analyzing cryptocurrencies, e.g. creating 6-month outlooks [1]. These agents are just searching Google for the latest news for a particular coin, which is expensive (token-heavy) and slow, and they often miss significant news, especially if it's not very recent. Existing crypto news aggregator APIs are expensive and doesn't (afaik) include any analysis such as sentiments, meaning I would still have to scrape and analyze the articles myself.

So I decided to create my own crypto news aggregator that uses AI (LLM) to analyze each news article. The website is different than other crypto news aggregators in that it ranks the coins/tokens by how much media attention they are getting, together with their sentiments and latest headlines. You can also see which tokens are trending and which are new. And each token/person/organization/etc. has its own page where you can see the latest news and related entities, such as who the most mentioned person is in relation to the token, and with what sentiments.

If you are interested in how it works, have a look at the Methodology & Ethics page [2]. It also includes decisions I made to make sure I scan for news in an ethical way.

For accuracy, check out the latest Accuracy Report [3].

While I think that the website is useful and interesting by itself, the real value would be to expose this data as an MCP server for AI agents to use, which is something I am working on. However, I haven't decided whether this is something I want to offer as a service or just keep for myself. If you are interested, let me know.

Hope you enjoy the site, and happy to hear your thoughts!

[1]: https://timothyej.com/letting-a-team-of-ai-agents-manage-my-... [2]: https://mimircrypto.com/methodology [3]: https://mimircrypto.com/accuracy
by hobofan | 2025-09-21 16:31:00+00:00
> ChatGPT omits ".search" but it says it's not a TLD anymore

Not sure where you got that information from (can't find it in any of the 3 ChatGPT logs here), and I'm pretty sure that it's false.

It's still a part of the official IANA list[0] that it referenced in my chat log , and from what I can tell there has been no delisting of that TLD. (It's always been a niche Google-only TLD, though).

From all indications it doesn't pick up `search` because it doesn't recognize it as an HTML element.

[0]: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
by joosters | 2025-09-21 16:31:20+00:00
Oxbridge have never had to 'let in dumber people'. They are always heavily over-subscribed, and give offers to a small fraction of the people who come for an interview, let alone apply.

The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.

I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.

Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.

Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!
by ewoodrich | 2025-09-21 16:31:29+00:00
The fact that seemingly 90% of stolen iPhones end up pinging from Shenzhen months later seems to indicate it's the inevitable top of the pyramid for the vast majority of the stolen phone market. As you mention due to the abundance of highly sophisticated large scale reverse engineering and disassembly capability in a cat and mouse game with Apple's expanding parts serialization. Plus, maybe 1/100 victims fall prey to the various phishing or threatening harassment strategies also associated with Shehnzen pings to remove the iCloud lock giving them full resale value occasionally as additional incentive.

So despite the meme that stolen iPhones are "worthless" while locked, the presence of large buyers with demand for unlimited quantities of locked iPhones means that the fence value at the lowest level of the food chain is still more than enough to incentivize rampant theft (even if it were only like $50 to a thief for a $1200 phone, that is worth $200 to a Shehnzen buyer).

I'm making the numbers up, but the point is that even if iCloud activation lock and serialization destroys the vast majority of the phone's value it's not enough to truly discourage theft rings selling to wholesale buyers overseas. It just put the humble local neighborhood thief or opportunist reselling on eBay out of business, with the vacuum quickly filled by organized crime.

In a world where most people don't carry around cash or valuables that's the best a street level thief is going to do unless you run into the odd person with a Rolex or jewelry with rare actual pawnable value, and it's a bottomless crime of opportunity in a big city or festival/concert/etc so adds up quickly.
by jmmv | 2025-09-21 16:32:05+00:00
Missed chance to do something like:

class User: def calculateCoworkers() = { this.coworkers.clear() for { d <- this.departments } this.coworkers ++ d.employees }

and then, somewhere else...

user.calculateCoworkers() ... many lines after ... for { c <- user.coworkers } ... do something ...

Yes, I've seen code like this many, many, many times where class members are used as "global variables" to pass state across functions. And I've noticed AI likes to generate code like this too (possibly because of the former (large presence of this "pattern" in the training data), which means I'm encountering this now in pull requests...
by hilios | 2025-09-21 16:32:58+00:00
>The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

Maybe they are supposed to do this, but let's not act like the filter doesn't quite apply the same way if your parents are rich and or well connected. They're however very effective in filtering out bright kids whose parents can't afford the tuition and aren't lucky enough to get a scholarship.
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-21 16:33:21+00:00
The whole thing feels performative because the framing is all martyrdom. “Bankruptcy for exposing Meta” makes for a good headline, but when you bury the $500k advance it turns into a morality play instead of straight reporting. Writing a book and doing media is symbolic, but it’s not the same as taking protected disclosures through proper channels. That’s where the activism starts to look more about appearance than effect.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-21 16:33:46+00:00
If you have a pending bill that is greater than your liquid assets, then you are on the verge of bankruptcy.

> Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement.

which is not the same as "Wynn-Williams" is not liable for any damages. Meta is not going to let someone public claim that meta can make them bankrupt, if it wasn't true. Its bad PR.

Its clear that meta has the power to claim breech of contract, but they are choosing _not_ to at this time. I assume in order to force a stop of book being sold.
by econ | 2025-09-21 16:33:52+00:00
For election to work you would have to read [all of] the [not legally binding] election programs, ponder the offerings and make up your own mind.

You won't find a single person who does this.

Apparently everyone votes by a different mechanism. One that involves a lot of money.

Even if everyone was well informed and able to objectively make their own choices that are truly their own. You don't actually have to do anything you wrote in your election program.
by sfink | 2025-09-21 16:34:01+00:00
Maybe, though I'll note that this matches how I use regular knives with cheese & similar things: with a dull unscalloped knife I have to carefully go straight down to avoid tearing. If my knife is sharp (or temporarily oiled) and the food doesn't stick, I'll slice. Because I can. The end result is different: thinner slices, less crushing. Also faster.
by cies | 2025-09-21 16:34:07+00:00
FP code is often easier to read (the article provides a case to that point).

What gave FP a bad rep is, i guess, Haskell (and the "pure functional approach w/ monad transformer stacks").

Every shop I worked at the devs were already at a level that they'd appreciate FP code: easier to read, refactor and test.

The tendency is also towards FP: see the features in recent Java/C# version. Or languages that gain popularity recently (Kotlin, Rust) are more FP'ish than their predecessors (respectively Java and C++).
by odyssey7 | 2025-09-21 16:34:22+00:00
"I am taking such pains with these things, not so much out of concern that the pupil might, if they were not explained, thoughtlessly accept and mechanically apply them, as to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes. But aesthetics alleges it has discovered eternal laws."

-- Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony
by rayiner | 2025-09-21 16:34:33+00:00
You also end up with a voter base that demands relatively little from their political leaders. The left-wing parties can win elections just using some feel-good measures targeted at recent immigrants and promising to make it easier for their co-ethnics to either immigrate legally or stay if they have immigrated illegally. That enables them to move right on economic issues to capture the politically powerful knowledge worker class.
by TMWNN | 2025-09-21 16:34:36+00:00
Patanegra wrote:

> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

In reply, I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.
by dimal | 2025-09-21 16:34:59+00:00
> When writing code you have the motto "don't make me think" in mind

I disagree with this phrasing. We’re engineering after all. The entire job is thinking. If someone doesn’t want to think, then they shouldn’t be a programmer.

Readability matters, though. I try to have a narrative structure in my code, so it leads the reader along. Formatting matters. And documentation helps. If you want to introduce an unfamiliar idiom that might be more functional, good, but document it. Share it with the team and talk about it. I know that writing and reading documentation is usually seen as a waste of time unless you’re doing it for AI, but I’ve seen it work well in multiple teams. In my experience, the teams with poor docs have the worst code.
by kaydub | 2025-09-21 16:35:30+00:00
> (though it can help with that too)

Yeah, this is a big thing I'm noticing a lot of people miss.

I have tons of people ask me "how do I get claude to do <whatever>?"

"Ask claude" is the only response I can give.

You can get the LLM to help you figure out how to get to your goal and write the right prompt before you even ask the LLM to get to your goal.
by theptip | 2025-09-21 16:35:41+00:00
If the president shreds the constitution, there would likely be many in the military opposed to it.

While they are actively replacing cabinet positions with loyal outsiders that have little-to-no experience within the organizations they now run (eg Patel, Hegseth), I think it’s reasonable to assume that there remains career leaders throughout that would put country before king.

You also need to look at loyalty within the rank and file of course.

When I talk to conservative friends about this scenario they generally laugh; of course the military would choose country over king. At least for now I think there remains enough institutional integrity that this is plausible.
by contingencies | 2025-09-21 16:35:47+00:00
Pretty sure this was ISA era. So yeah, VLB would make sense. While I don't recall it being any longer than regular cards, I just checked and that was only 12mm difference. On the face of it you may have just solved the mystery, but talking to the AI most of the supposedly faster chipsets of the time like S3, Cirrus Logic, ET4000, etc. were definitely on my radar ... so I'm not sure that's the reason, because this system definitely outperformed others. My running theory was that the developer hand-tweaked their graphics code on a similar configuration system. In the absence of any hard info (honestly can't really trust my memory after ~30 years!) I guess that'll remain the guesstimate explanation.
by dan-robertson | 2025-09-21 16:35:48+00:00
My prior would have been brexit-related changes reducing the number of smart but non-rich students coming from the EU, but I don’t actually know how the numbers there changed. Also, what are the rankings based on? When I was applying, I think it was lots of stuff like:

- grades of incoming class (the changes 'pg alleges could lower those grades even if th actual quality of the incoming students don’t change. Balance by subject can affect this too as eg science students tend to have more UCAS points. Private school students may also have more UCAS points because their schools are more likely to do things like putting students in for extra A-levels or GCSEs (taking those exams costs the schools money)). Alternatively, university funding is in a dire state in the U.K. (though less so for Oxford and Cambridge given their endowments?) so maybe they can trade prestige for letting in a larger number of international students who pay full fees but who would have otherwise not met the bar.

- research output metrics, which seem quite unrelated to undergraduate selection – there is a high lead time and if you get the selection wrong you can still hire researchers from elsewhere. These metrics also seem somewhat gameable

- metrics around outcomes for graduates. I wonder how biased these are by subject mix (ie how much is this just a measure of what percentage do courses that lead to good programmer/finance jobs) and how much they are affected by students perusing further education. I think to some extent this can also be affected by class mix because more privileged students may find themselves in better jobs (either because of parental connections or just class filters in hiring though one would hope that the university would train students to be able to pass such filters)

I recall being sceptical of these league tables when I was applying many years ago for reasons like these (not that it stopped me from applying to highly ranked universities).

Though comparing to American schools, I do think there are reasonable advantages to going to the US – you’re much more likely to work in the US (and therefore likely to get paid a lot more) if you go to a North American school. If you’re trying to compare Oxford to Harvard (with offers) and the financing works out either way, it seems to me Harvard would obviously be a better choice today and 10 years ago before the ranking changes. I’m not sure what the quality of US school is where you prefer Oxford.

One other thing: Oxford and Cambridge delegate a lot of admissions to colleges so I’m not sure how much one can claim that it is a global shift in attitude, though there are some ‘second chance’ mechanisms and schools that send many students to oxbridge will have better recommendations for which colleges to apply to, and the policies between colleges can still move in a coordinated way even if each college does its own policy.
by oceanplexian | 2025-09-21 16:36:04+00:00
Engineers have always been terrible at measuring productivity. Building a new internal tool or writing a bunch of code is not necessarily productive.

Productivity is something that creates business value. In that sense an engineer who writes 10 lines of code but that code solves a $10M business problem or allows the company to sign 100 new customers may be the most productive engineer in your organization.
by imtringued | 2025-09-21 16:36:12+00:00
This was posted a while ago on HN and I still think this is an extremely unproductive exercise in framing rather than a real observation.

What is so unbearable about it? Why is the phrase "being" exclusively related to the output of the human body rather than its inherently internal nature?

If I watch a movie sitting on a couch and don't say anything or don't move, my information output is zero bits and it's extremely unbearable apparently.

There is also a complete disregard for continuous data or an extremely coarse grained resolution is assumed.

Autonomous action like eye stabilization or balancing or breathing are also not considered relevant.

The numbers being referenced are also meaningless in the context of a computer system. The 10 bits per second do not relate to anything a machine can do unless it is a humanoid robot, because we could do the same exercise with a screen for example.

The information that the screen conveys is not the pixel output it displays but the information content displayed on it. Since it is meant to be read by humans, the text only updates as we scroll and we do not read the scrolled output, because it is not new. So only the newly shown letters count towards the bits of output.

The vast majority of the slowness comes from inertia of mechanical systems. If you control the mechanical system at a frequency of 1000Hz, the mechanical system will physically integrate your fine grained acceleration commands. There is no need for a "slow brain" type of system here. The micro updates updates are simply scaled down in magnitude which should be trivial with a spiking encoding Vs a small floating point data type like fp4. Long distance trajectories can be compressed down to equations with the horizon being limited by the finite number of parameters.
by wongarsu | 2025-09-21 16:36:13+00:00
Deploying UUIDv7 certainly requires more thought about the implications. In many cases leaking the creation time of a key is completely fine, in some cases it isn't

An interesting compromise is transforming the UUIDv7 to a UUIDv4 at the API boundary, like e.g. UUIDv47 [1]. On the other hand if you are doing that you can also go with u64 primary keys and transform those

1: https://github.com/stateless-me/uuidv47
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-21 16:36:38+00:00
I'm not so quick to pull the trigger on that assessment. I think we're at point where the rubber band has ostensibly been pulled back nearly as far as it can go, and it may snap, or it might make a surprising move in the opposite direction in response to the tension. I don't think any of us peons has any meaningful control of which of those two things happens, but I think it will hinge a lot on how much big businesses are affected by the economic and political consequences of recent policy moves. No matter how much Trump might bluster about big businesses and such, he'll still fall in line if enough get pushed to the point of having to draw a line in the sand. Too bad it will probably be big business operating in pure self-interest and not some actual principled entity. Maaaaybe if there's enough economic pain among his base, that could point us towards a voter-driven repudiation to some extent. Even if they cement their power significantly, I don't think they could swing it with an outright rejection of their approach. I doubt that will happen though.
by elcapitan | 2025-09-21 16:36:51+00:00
I find the new version of the site more practical, as you can enter stations: https://www.chronotrains.com

I always thought of this visualization type as kind of a gimmick, but recently used this site for planning a vacation. I was visiting one place in the middle of the country and wanted to find some time efficient way to travel to "some coast" as the second part of that journey, inside the UK. The travel time was very much dependent on the specific main lines rather than geographical distance, so that was very helpful.
by omnicognate | 2025-09-21 16:36:53+00:00
Do you not sharpen them in between? I've had to spend hours sorting out knives that have been left far too long without sharpening, but my routine is to spend about 15 minutes sharpening them every weekend. Then they're always sharp and never get into a terrible state and need remedial work.

My knives get noticeably suboptimal in a couple of weeks without sharpening, so if I left it 6 months they'd be blunt pretty much all the time.
by lwhi | 2025-09-21 16:37:00+00:00
What an appalling point of view.

Growing up without privilege is (obviously) markedly more difficult than being provided with the best education money can buy throughout childhood.

The students aren't necessarily worse; but they will be unaccustomed to the codified approach that other students from independent schools understand.

The system has been built to serve the privileged.

While you might feel blame can fairly be placed on differing entry requirements; the truth is more complex.

A 'sticking plaster' solution has been lazily applied to address disparity, when in reality, the whole system needs to be reworked.

'Dumber' and 'worse', are not labels that should be used here.
by pimterry | 2025-09-21 16:37:04+00:00
Fundamentally Oxbridge entry has never been based on academic results directly as you're implying. You needed near-perfect grades to be considered, but the vast majority of people applying with those grades fail the interviews regardless.

The interview is absolutely the primary test here, with the grades just acting as a filter to provide a manageable number of applicants. Widening that filter to allow more disadvantaged students the chance to interview seems perfectly reasonable - given that the interview itself remains equally demanding (and I've seen no suggestion or evidence against this).
by turtleyacht | 2025-09-21 16:37:17+00:00
Wonder if Lucifer would admit Jesus is sort of a loophole, a divine hack of the system. Maybe rebooting Earth is just too expensive.

Job says, "Look at all these bugs," and the architect asks, "Where were you when I designed the hardware?"

Eternal life with obedience, or a stunted one with knowledge of good and evil.
by lokar | 2025-09-21 16:37:24+00:00
I think it’s a mistake to think admissions can ever be some neutral objective process.

You are designing a contest, and students compete. You have to try to represent your goals in terms of the contest, this is very lossy. It’s just never going to be very accurate, and in highly selective institutions much of the selection will be random no matter how you structure the contest.