MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-16 21:51:56+00:00
I can't find any privacy policy at all. There's a bullet point on the page about "search history" but nothing that I can comprehensively analyze. It can search my files so without any additional information I have to assume any/all contents of my documents might be sent to google for more efficient indexing.

General note for app developers: Try to think of the worst, most sociopathic things you could do with your app's level of access. Then reassure your customers by using your privacy policy to create a legal obligation never to do the things which would enable the ability to do those things.

If you don't tell me you're not doing it (in a way that I can clearly sue you if you do), I have to assume that you are doing the absolute worst things your app is technically capable of doing with the data it has access to. That's just the way the world works these days.
by pxc | 2025-09-16 21:52:00+00:00
Comments on this post are disabled for new accounts, but in the era of anti-BDS regulation and other measures aimed specifically at curtailing practical freedom of speech surrounding this conflict, can we really comment freely on this without anonymity? The vast majority (38/50) of US states have passed some form of anti-BDS legislation. We can also expect corporate retaliation against employees who speak about this issue in a "wrong way".
by metalman | 2025-09-16 21:52:50+00:00
Next gen solar and batteries are going to wipe everything else away. PV will hit 40% conversion efficiency, sodium and solid state batteries will reduce costs and eliminate flamability issues while providing longer lifespans, capacitive battery tech will last indefinitly, as solar PV does now. I cant help it if the truth trolls the haters, and often I bite my ,my finger, but hey it's tuesday
by the_af | 2025-09-16 21:52:51+00:00
> In fact the entire narrative of 'you'll get it better the second time' is nonsense, the software being rewritten was usually written for the first time by totally different people, and the rewriters weren't around for it or most of the bugfixes. They're all starting fresh, the development process is nearly the same as the original blank slate was - if they get it right with Rust, then Rust is an active ingredient in getting it right!

Yes, this is a serious flaw in the author's argument. Does he think the exact same team that built version 1.0 in C++ is the one writing 2.0 in Rust? Maybe that happens sometimes, I guess, but to draw a general lesson from that seems weird.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-16 21:52:56+00:00
The right's split thinking on this issue is largely a split down generational lines. The balance of the split is shifting as old people die. The Zionist faction of the left is almost dead already, and on the right it will still take some more years, but once that's done, America's support for Israel will have expired.

I think Israel realizes they're on borrowed time, and that's why they've adopted such an overtly aggressive strategy of getting what they want now, making their strategic goals a fait accompli while still receiving protection from America. With America out of the picture, Israel goes the way of Rhodesia.
by k310 | 2025-09-16 21:53:17+00:00
If "Love You Forever" doesn't bring on tears, you aren't a Dad. [0]

That's one book that will live forever. I wish Mr. Munsch peace.

> One day the publisher called up and said “This is very strange. It is selling very well in retirement communities in Arizona. It is selling in retirement communities where kids are illegal. This is supposed to be a children’s book. What is going on?”

> “Grownups are buying it for grownups!”

> In fact, it turned out that parents buy it for grandparents and grandparents buy it for parents and kids buy it for everybody and everybody buys it for kids.

> As a matter of fact, everybody buys it for everybody. That’s why it sells a lot of copies. I think it’s my best book. So far it has sold about 15,000,000 copies.

[0] https://robertmunsch.com/book/love-you-forever
by jkaplowitz | 2025-09-16 21:53:27+00:00
Yeah, a lot of different types of people get involved in this ecosystem, not only the stereotypical primarily altruistically motivated old-school hacker. This is especially true for the for-profit sector rather than among the purely volunteer part of the community.

That said, only some of them would be tech bro wannabes. Others might not want to try to rock the boat in this awful economy, in the sense of not wanting the career consequences of having been part of a failed attempt to form a cooperative when the company ends up capitalist in the end, or simply might be skeptical that a cooperative would succeed well enough to meet their genuine financial needs.

I am a Debian developer myself, though quite inactive for the last 6 or so years due to life circumstances. Plenty of people even in that world end up working for the man, in such forms as Google or Dropbox or the like, even if they’d rather not. Life is expensive and the world is capitalist with bills to pay.
by filchermcurr | 2025-09-16 21:53:54+00:00
I'm trying to give it a chance but it's kind of rough.

- File save dialog has a massively reduced width sidebar. It has a resize handle. But the resize handle does nothing. This is the most infuriating thing for me because all of my sidebar locations are cut off. - M4 Pro Macbook Pro and I'm now experiencing stuttering when scrolling. - Why is everything in Spotlight enormous?! Was it always like this and I just seemingly never noticed?

Otherwise, if you 'reduce transparency' and turn off 'tint window background with wallpaper color' (both of which I had done already anyway), things are decidedly nicer visually.
by ergocoder | 2025-09-16 21:53:59+00:00
Many of the current hostages were in a music festival (it's not a war zone) and captured during the Oct 7 massacre by Palestine.

Edit: I see you edited your comment to blame the hostages for being in the music festival. So, you normalize blaming regular people who have nothing to do with the war; the very thing you said we shouldn't do.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-09-16 21:54:01+00:00
Unfortunately the idiots are often the nation's security agency, or a large consulting company.

You will not have them change their policies if they do not have a good person inside, who will slowly move the boat.

I fought for audit findings because they were pissing me off at a personal level and it wirked. But the auditor did not change their procedure, just reverted the finding. Until the next year.
by loeg | 2025-09-16 21:54:06+00:00
> in C++, you can write perfectly fine code without ever needing to worry about the more complex features of the language. You can write simple, readable, and maintainable code in C++ without ever needing to use templates, operator overloading, or any of the other more advanced features of the language.

This... doesn't really hold water. You have to learn about what the insane move semantics are (and the syntax for move ctors/operators) to do fairly basic things with the language. Overloaded operators like operator*() and operator<<() are widely used in the standard library so you're forced to understand what craziness they're doing under the hood. Basic standard library datatypes like std::vector use templates, so you're debugging template instantiation issues whether you write your own templated code or not.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-09-16 21:54:07+00:00
They've used their own search in the past 5 years right? Because it barely works, barely gives any results, straight up pretends queries have only 9 results that before they ruined it would have returned 6 figures of results.

In 10 years Google will be known for Android and Maps, I don't think they'll even be known for YouTube because TikTok if they dropped a web longform spin on their algo they'd displace YT within 3 years.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-09-16 21:54:33+00:00
I don't actually know what "Antifa" is, if it is in fact anything specific (rather than, e.g., a banner used by many and disparate groups--maybe that was your concern?).

What I did mean is that declaring certain organizations to be terrorist organizations (HAMAS, Al-Qaeda, etc.) seems to be well within the remit of the executive branch.
by MarineCG40 | 2025-09-16 21:54:50+00:00
I keep seeing people fine-tune LLMs for use cases where they probably don’t need to. In most doc/product scenarios, you don’t need another fine-tuned model—you just need retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Why I think RAG wins in most cases: Fine-tuning is expensive, slow, and brittle. Most use cases don’t require “teaching” the model, just giving it the right context. With RAG, you keep things fresh: update your docs → update your embeddings → done. I built a small proof-of-concept to test this: a documentation assistant where docs are chunked + embedded, user queries are matched with cosine similarity, and GPT answers with the relevant context injected. Every query is logged, which turns out to be valuable—surfacing missing docs, common user struggles, and even feature requests. Demo: https://intlayer.org/doc/chat Write-up + code: https://intlayer.org/blog/rag-powered-documentation-assistan... My question: Do you see fine-tuning + RAG coexisting for these types of tasks? Or is RAG simply the obvious solution for 80% of real-world doc/product use cases?
by tzs | 2025-09-16 21:54:56+00:00
What does that have to do with US domestic terrorists, which is what the study concerned?

Trump is the only one on your list where it was a US domestic terrorist.

The shooter in that case seems to have been more right-aligned than left-aligned but there is nothing definitive. He donated $15 to Democrats when he was 17, but a few months later when he was 18 and registered to vote he registered as a Republican. A social media account that is thought to be associated with him had a lot of anti-immigration and antisemitic content.
by skinnymuch | 2025-09-16 21:55:30+00:00
Saying that your standard response is the standard response of any oppressor isn’t exactly illuminating. Literally the whitest man response possible.

Your comment can be adjusted a bit and it would work for “do black men have no agency” contrasted with white people in a country like America. Or any number of other oppressive dynamics.

—

This all ignores that Egypt’s current regime right now is propped up by America.
by shermantanktop | 2025-09-16 21:56:01+00:00
Have you been reading the news? Perhaps about someone who engaged people in debate while holding extreme views? In the process, they gained some measure of credit amongst people with less radical views, merely for the act of having conversations. Except in this case the debates were not with Bertrand Russell, but with 18 year old college freshman.

I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.
by mattmanser | 2025-09-16 21:56:22+00:00
That's different, those are clever people who are bad developers. But too proud to admit it even to themselves. You come across them a lot in small/mid sized companies and non-tech IT teams.

Cloudflare's no longer the darling of HN, but they unquestionably have clever people who are excellent developers. Just maybe not excellent at web dev and cache invalidation by the sound of it.
by WCSTombs | 2025-09-16 21:56:24+00:00
Good article overall. There's one part I don't really agree with:

> Here’s a rule of thumb I like to follow for C++: make it look as much like C as you possibly can, and avoid using too many advanced features of the language unless you really need to.

This has me scratching my head a bit. In spite of C++ being nearly a superset of C, they are very different languages, and idiomatic C++ doesn't look very much like C. In fact, I'd argue that most of the stuff C++ adds to C allows you to write code that's much cleaner than the equivalent C code, if you use it the intended way. The one big exception I can think of is template metaprogramming, since the template code can be confusing, but if done well, the downstream code can be incredibly clean.

There's an even bigger problem with this recommendation, which is how it relates to something else talked about in the article, namely "safety." I agree with the author that modern C++ can be a safe language, with programmer discipline. C++ offers a very good discipline to avoid resource leaks of all kinds (not just memory leaks), called RAII [1]. The problem here is that C++ code that leverages RAII looks nothing like C.

Stepping back a bit, I feel there may be a more fundamental fallacy in this "C++ is Hard to Read" section in that the author seems to be saying that C++ can be hard to read for people who don't know the language well, and that this is a problem that should be addressed. This could be a little controversial, but in my opinion you shouldn't target your code to the level of programmers who don't know the language well. I think that's ultimately neither good for the code nor good for other programmers. I'm definitely not an expert on all the corners of C++, but I wouldn't avoid features I am familiar with just because other programmers might not be.

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/raii.html
by puzzledobserver | 2025-09-16 21:56:25+00:00
That claim appears to contradict the second-system effect [0].

The observation is that second implementation of a successful system is often much less successful, overengineered, and bloated, due to programmer overconfidence.

On the other hand, I am unsure of how frequently the second-system effect occurs or the scenarios in which it occurs either. Perhaps it is less of a concern when disciplined developers are simply doing rewrites, rather than feature additions. I don't know.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-09-16 21:56:26+00:00
This reminds me of a story of my bank that at some point told me to send them a screenshot.

I told them that their app prevents this. To their surprise.

I told them that I would use the web site and they were happy that there is a workaround for their own limitation.

I had other wild stories with this otherwise good bank.
by butterisgood | 2025-09-16 21:56:33+00:00
A pet peeve of mine is when people claim C++ is a superset of C. It really isn't. There's a lot of little nuanced differences that can bite you.

Ignore the fact that having more keywords in C++ precludes the legality of some C code being C++. (`int class;`)

void * implicit casting in C just works, but in C++ it must be an explicit cast (which is kind of funny considering all the confusing implicit behavior in C++).

C++20 does have C11's designated initialization now, which helps in some cases, but that was a pain for a long time.

enums and conversion between integers is very strict in C++.

`char * message = "Hello"` is valid C but not C++ (since you cannot mutate the pointed to string, it must be `const` in C++)

C99 introduced variadic macros that didn't become standard C++ until 2011.

C doesn't allow for empty structs. You can do it in C++, but sizeof(EmptyStruct) is 1. And if C lets you get away with it in some compilers, I'll bet it's 0.

Anyway, all of these things and likely more can ruin your party if you think you're going to compile C code with a C++ compiler.

Also don't forget if you want code to be C callable in C++ you have to use `extern "C"` wrappers.
by Ethee | 2025-09-16 21:56:47+00:00
Sorry, can you point out exactly where I've lied and how? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the entire history of this conflict goes back to the UN partition plan in 47, which established a Jewish and Palestinian state. Which then lead to the 47-48 civil war, which from everything I've found relating to it, the Arab's were the ones to retaliate against the Jews in the region which started the war and it's been basically tit for tat ever since. A Palestinian petition to the Security Council in 48 even said this: "Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."

I have no issue discussing this situation, in fact that was the whole point of my original statement. Which is that most people seem too emotionally attached to this situation to the point where they can't even have a proper discussion without trying to talk down to me about a position I don't even hold.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101003080945/http://unispal.un...
by mrandish | 2025-09-16 21:56:49+00:00
The "About" link on the upper left of the site's homepage goes here: https://kguttag.com/about-karl-guttag/

But I found his blog a couple years ago and have been reading it ever since. Karl follows VR/AR display tech obsessively, goes to all the shows/conferences and talks with all the companies - then does highly technical, in-depth write-ups of what's new and notable - which often includes his unvarnished opinions. His blog is read by basically everyone in the industry, so all the companies give him briefings and demos despite the fact he'll call it like he sees it. Which is why he's pretty much my go to source when any new VR/AR display tech gets announced.

Even more valuable to me, he'll mention when companies are lagging or falling short of expectations and he'll even speculate about where things could (or should) go. His blog is basically like having a buddy who's an expert industry insider who'll tell you what he really thinks over a beer - which is pretty invaluable if you're someone who's interested and technical but doesn't follow this space that closely. That doesn't mean Karl's opinion is always correct but it is certainly well-informed and usually supported with technical data - although he did say this post was just a quick note that a video was leaked. He'll probably have a real post after it's announced and a deep dive once he gets his hands on one.

Interesting fact: Karl's career was as a chip architect. He designed key parts of the the Texas Instruments 9918 - the first general purpose video display processor which was used in dozens of 80s computers and game systems including Sega Master System (and coined the term "sprite"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS9918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28computer_graphics%29 https://kguttag.com/2025/07/01/tms9918-the-first-sprite-chip... So yeah, he's just "some random retired guy with a blog" but a guy with 150 patents and dozens of published technical papers. But being some random retired guy with a blog, he makes little effort to be accessible to first-time visitors or do design, marketing, etc. You just have to read-in and when you do, you pretty quickly figure out this guy knows his stuff.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-16 21:56:53+00:00
C++'s design encourages that kind of allocation "leak" though. The article suggests using smart pointers, so let's take an example from there and mix make_shared with weak_ptr. Congrats, you've now extended the lifetime of the allocation to whatever the lifetime of your weak pointer is.

Rc::Weak does the same thing in Rust, but I rarely see anyone use it.
by 8note | 2025-09-16 21:57:09+00:00
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?

why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.

the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.

the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
by BeetleB | 2025-09-16 21:57:42+00:00
> Here’s a rule of thumb I like to follow for C++: make it look as much like C as you possibly can, and avoid using too many advanced features of the language unless you really need to.

Also, avoid using C++ classes while you're at it.

I recently had to go back to writing C++ professionally after a many-year hiatus. We code in C++23, and I got a book to refresh me on the basics as well as all the new features.

And man, doing OO in C++ just plain sucks. Needing to know things like copy and swap, and the Rule of Three/Five/Zero. Unless you're doing trivial things with classes, you'll need to know these things. If you don't need to know those things, you might as well stick to structs.

Now I'll grant C++23 is much nicer than C++03 (just import std!) I was so happy to hear about optional, only to find out how fairly useless it is compared to pretty much every language that has implemented a "Maybe" type. Why add the feature if the compiler is not going to protect you from dereferencing without checking?
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-16 21:57:53+00:00
Can the non-Hamas surrender and live? No, they can just stay and die. Tell me, what should a non-Hamas member in Gaza do right now to avoid getting bombed?

Edit: I found your answer to that question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45268680&goto=threads%...

Paraphrased, the children are part of the culture and may die. There are no civilians.
by teleforce | 2025-09-16 21:58:09+00:00
TCS vehemently denied that any of their systems were compromised for the attack on M&S [1].

Perhaps they will do the same here but after some highly publicized security incidents sooner or later people will be calling a thorough independent audit of their systems.

[1] India's TCS says none of its systems were compromised in M&S hack:

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/indias-tcs-sa...
by zahlman | 2025-09-16 21:58:18+00:00
> This does not make an objective misrepresentation. It doesn't even make it a subjective misrepresentation. They would be objectively misrepresenting it if "mass-murder" is objectively incorrect and/or if "mentally ill people" is objectively incorrect. As I said in my previous comment: mass-murder is, at worst, subjectively incorrect and mentally ill people is obviously correct.

It is objectively a misrepresentation. It was misrepresented as being about mentally ill people in general. In reality, it is about an identifiable subset of mentally ill people, for a clear reason that directly relates to the basis for subset identification. To describe it as "the mass-murder of mentally ill people" is to imply that it doesn't have anything to do with the government assistance question. But it does. That is what makes it misrepresentative.

> I don't have to wonder why they refuse government assistance. It's the mental illness.

Many mentally ill people do not refuse government assistance. In fact, probably a large majority of them are happy to receive government assistance.

> You are stating that you believe the policy is justified because they are mentally ill.

I am not stating that the policy is justified because they are mentally ill. I am not stating, and did not state, that the policy is justified at all. In fact, I explicitly said:

> I disagree with it, but it's objectively not what you're representing it as.

I will not reply to you further, because this is not a good-faith discussion — it is just you repeatedly refusing to acknowledge something that I have clearly established, and falsely claiming that I said things that I objectively did not say.
by cookiengineer | 2025-09-16 21:58:27+00:00
I'd argue that Go is somewhere in between static C and memory safe VM languages, because the compiler always tries to "monomorphize" everything as much as possible.

Generic methods are somewhat an antipattern to how the language was designed from the start. That is kind of the reason they're not there yet, because Go maintainers don't want boxing in their runtime, and also don't want compile time expansions (or JIT compilation for that matter).

So I'd argue that this way of handling compilation is more low level than other VM based languages where almost everything is JITed now.