MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-28 12:11:57+00:00
There could be multiple reasons. You can't hurt russia too much because they have the nukes. Russia can't lose and Ukraine can't win. The deterrence if it existed should have worked for Russia because America showed to the world that wars can be stopped prematurely and on your terms. This is a moral way to test more weapons on both sides. This war will let all parties know who stands where. This is more like bickering between superpowers and to establish a new equilibrium.
by fn-mote | 2025-09-28 12:12:59+00:00
> Because the flexibility has been a boon and not a problem

Well, you could say that the problem in this case was the lack of documentation, if you wanted. The type signature could be part of the documentation, from this point of view.

Let me give a kind-of-concrete example: one year I was working through a fast.ai course. They have a Python layer above the raw ML stuff. At the time, the library documentation was mediocre: the code worked, there were examples, and the course explained what was covered in the course. There were no type hints. It's free (gratis), I'm not complaining. However, once I tried making my own things, I constantly ran into questions about "can this function do X" and it was really hard to figure out whether my earlier code was wrong or whether the function was never intended to work with the X situation. In my case, type hints would have cleared up most of the problems.
by yladiz | 2025-09-28 12:13:50+00:00
Actually in Python it can. Since the type hints are accessible at runtime, library authors can for example change which values in kwargs are allowed based on the type of the argument.

So on the language level it doesn’t directly change the behavior, but it is possible to use the types to affect the way code works, which is unintuitive. I think it was a bad decision to allow this, and Python should have opted for a TypeScript style approach.
by jascha_eng | 2025-09-28 12:15:23+00:00
Types become very useful when the code base reaches a certain level of sophistication and complexity. It makes sense that for a little script they provide little benefit but once you are working on a code base with 5+ engineers and no longer understand every part of it having some more strict guarantees and interfaces defined is very very helpful. Both for communicating to other devs as well as to simply eradicate a good chunk of possible errors that happen when interfaces are not clear.
by ivorbuk | 2025-09-28 12:16:11+00:00
+1 on the demographic base - it's a shrinking market and was geared towards something "quintessentially British"... which only really sells well in the UK. Close your eyes and picture a Jag driver and you see Nigel Farage. Not a fashionable sell.

Pretty proud of their first pitch - it was a brave move. Looking forward to seeing how they get on.
by feichai0017 | 2025-09-28 12:17:43+00:00
I’ve been building QuillSQL, a small relational database in Rust focused on education/research and hands-on prototyping. It supports a practical subset of SQL (DDL/DML, joins/aggregates), B+-tree indexing, basic transactions, and EXPLAIN. There’s a live SQL demo so you can try queries right away.

Rust implementation with a modular parser → executor → storage design

B+-tree index (+ buffer pool), good for range queries

BEGIN / COMMIT / ROLLBACK

EXPLAIN to inspect plans

CLI + server included

Links

Live demo: quillsql.fly.dev

GitHub: https://github.com/feichai0017/QuillSQL

If you have feedback or want to hack on operators/indexes, I’d love issues/PRs. If this looks useful, a helps a lot—thanks!
by WillAdams | 2025-09-28 12:17:50+00:00
Sort of --- ideally, it would be an rPi foundation product line, something like the Kano computer kit mayhap?

- a screen sized and proportioned to look good with the rPi 500+ which can be powered by it

- a(n optional) battery pack

- a case (or an STL for 3D printing?) which all the parts would snap into to make a laptop

For bonus points, the screen could have touch (and perhaps stylus?) input.

I'm currently waiting on a Soulcircuit Pilet from the Kickstarter (2 actually), but may have to give this a swing at some point.....
by mxinden | 2025-09-28 12:17:57+00:00
_Author here_.

4 Gbit/s is on our rather dated benchmark machines. If you run the below command on a modern laptop, you likely reach higher throughput. (Consider disabling PMTUD to use a realistic Internet-like MTU. We do the same on our benchmark machines.)

https://github.com/mozilla/neqo

cargo bench --features bench --bench main -- "Download"
by bookshed | 2025-09-28 12:19:09+00:00
################## MODERATION TEAM REMAINS IN PLACE - NOTHING HAS CHANGED ##################

If you review the post and refresh it frequently, you will observe the censorship in action.

Some instances of censorship are quite extreme. They censor individuals for even the mildest comments. I saw one person get flagged for linking to Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis and requesting more scientific discussion. The TLDR was something like "More of THIS" were "THIS" was a hyperlink to Dolstra's PHD thesis that sparked NixOS. I wanted to reply, stepped away for a meal, and by the time I returned, the comment had been censored.

NixOS isn't a technical project anymore. It's just Dolstra's stole life's work being kept in life support. I don't care which side of the political spectrum you are... this should anger you. They stole this man's life's work through distasteful political shenanigans.

It's like removing Linus from Linux (unsuccessful removal attempts), Stallman from FOSS (unsuccessful removal attempts), and Eelco Dolstra from NixOS (removed).

I don't care for these people thoughts or beliefs, I see them for what they are, thought leaders. People that ACTUALLY move us (humanity) FORWARD. They should stay in place leading their respective movements for as long as possible or until they break the LAW. Not some "constitution of NixOS" or "bylaws of NixOS", the actual LAW of their respective jurisdiction.
by card_zero | 2025-09-28 12:21:00+00:00
In context:

> ... this shit doesn't impress me even a little. Wow, you created a superficially-impressive research project that's really long and that cites a bunch of shit it found online that it made little attempt to verify?

> ... everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous ... expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product... Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb ...

> I'm tired of reading stories about Sam Altman perpetually saying that we're a year away from "everything changing" that exist only to perpetuate the myth that Silicon Valley gives a shit about solving anyone's problems other than finding new growth markets for the tech industry. I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.

So he's saying it's a bubble, and yes it can be unimpressive (when pompous claims are examined), dangerous and stupid (because it's a bubble), and at the same time can not matter (because its inflated value is based on claiming it does matter).

The research is unimpressive, the bubble is dangerous, the product is stupid, and the tech doesn't matter as much as it is claimed to.
by OisinMoran | 2025-09-28 12:21:05+00:00
I really need to do this!

You reminded me of the early days at inscribe.ai where we just had an Asana board with red, orange, and yellow tags meaning high, mid, and low importance, and after completing an important one I'd treat myself to a few unimportant ones. I'm not sure I ever did anything in the middle!
by latexr | 2025-09-28 12:21:10+00:00
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too.

Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste.

> The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers

Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters?

> is that they understood natural language and intent.

Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-09-28 12:21:12+00:00
Just fyi: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

If you'd want monospace you should indent the snippet with two or more spaces:

from typing import Protocol, TypeVar T_co = TypeVar("T_co", covariant=True) class Indexable(Protocol[T_co]): def __getitem__(self, i: int) -> T_co: ... def f(x: Indexable[str]) -> None: print(x[0])
by happimess | 2025-09-28 12:21:24+00:00
I suspect that each player has a bowl of stones, and they have 1 lid that covers those bowls. After taking a turn, the player puts the lid over their own bowl so that the other player can easily see that its their turn.

"Drive by" game, to me, sounds like they've got the board set up somewhere in the house, and make moves over the course of a day (days?), rather than sitting across from each other and having dedicated time for the game.
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-28 12:22:24+00:00
the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for.

what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.

technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
by dvcoolarun | 2025-09-28 12:24:04+00:00
I believe types are a great way to encourage good practices with relatively little investment. They provide type-safety, act as living documentation, and add an extra layer of protection in production.

However, in a large codebase, consistency can become a challenge. Different developers often approach the same problem in different ways, leading to a mix of type patterns and styles, especially when there’s no clear standard or when the problem itself is complex.

With the rise of LLM-generated code, this issue becomes even more pronounced — code quality and craftsmanship can easily degrade if not guided by proper conventions.
by SchwKatze | 2025-09-28 12:24:07+00:00
One thing that stood out when I tried to learn and play Go was the tempo.

I'm a chess guy, and I like to play blitz with 5+0 and bullet (format equivalent to tik tok) so games tend to be frenetic, but it's quite rare to find a Go game on those formats, they tend to have 40+ min in time. And honestly, this is a big W for Go.
by chiph | 2025-09-28 12:24:52+00:00
It's only a matter of time before the LLMs start having paid product placement in their results. Even open-source - the money needed to train & operate these models is just too enormous.

Could there be a distributed training system run by contributors, like the various @Home projects? Yeah, decent chance of that working, especially with the widespread availability of fiber connections. But then to query the model you still need a large low-latency system (i.e. not distributed) to host it, and that's expensive.
by philo23 | 2025-09-28 12:27:20+00:00
I don't know why Fred keeps getting posted to HN, but I love it. and I'm glad more people get to see his work.

Something that might not be immediately obvious from this clip is that all the sound effects you're hearing of the planks bouncing and scraping off the bricks, the iron dogs being hammered into the brickwork or wind blowing etc, is all recreated and recorded after the fact in some BBC sound studio. There's no sound guy up there with a boom mic or even a lapel mic recording, yet all the sound effects are perfectly audible. Even the ones around the other side of the chimney. If they didn't dub them in afterwards the video recording from the ground level would be quite boring!

Though there are a couple of other recordings of Fred with a one-man camera crew up at the top once he's got the platform fully setup.

Besides, I suspect if he was mic'd up there'd be quite a bit more swearing than you'd be able to get away with on the BBC!
by graemep | 2025-09-28 12:27:34+00:00
I do not think scientists are entirely blame free, and institutions certainly share part of the blame. University PR departments frequently spin stuff to get attention from journalists (most commonly everything is a huge breakthrough, preferably related to an issue already in the news).

My guess is that the underlying issue is funding.

I also think there are often communication failures from many scientists - for example failing to distinguish between personal opinion, consensus opinion, and well proven things.

On top of that, of course, individual scientists are still fallible and biased like any human being, especially about things they feel strongly about.

A good journalist would speak to multiple people in the field with different opinions, ask them questions like how well proven a theory actually is, etc. Pity they are not more common!
by card_zero | 2025-09-28 12:27:42+00:00
3000 years ago is about when the first recognizable letter A was drawn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Canaanite_alphabet

The amphora vessel design is neolithic, so you could add on another 10,000 years if you want to trace the roots of the @ symbol tenuously into pottery. There's such a thing as too much context.
by themgt | 2025-09-28 12:27:55+00:00
You're talking about a counterdrone system that's at technology demonstrator stage. I don't think they even have any contract or timeline for delivering production systems. Meanwhile tech used in the Ukraine war is adapting by the month.

"That a countermeasure can be built doesn't mean it's necessarily effective to do so" applies especially to reading a corporate press release about a system doesn't even have a timeline for being on the battlefield.
by mxinden | 2025-09-28 12:30:29+00:00
Author here.

QUIC does not depend on UDP datagrams to be delivered in order. Re-ordering happens on the QUIC layer. Thus, when receiving, the kernel passes a batch (i.e. segmented super datagram) of potentially out-of-order datagrams to the QUIC layer. QUIC reorders them.

Maybe https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerating-udp-packet-transmis... brings some clarity.
by yawpitch | 2025-09-28 12:30:38+00:00
And, amazingly, when you reach, say, 96, and you do die, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll die of complications of infection from a descendent of SARS-CoV-2.

Also, re: the definition changing, pre-2015 the only vaccines we had for viruses were so-called live-attenuated vaccines, which usually got shortened to “weakened or killed virus” because most people are too uniformed (and uninformable) to understand that viruses are not alive and cannot be killed. Essentially we took remnants of virions from organisms that had survived infection and brute-force introduced those remnants into humans in order to provoke an immune response (ie immune protection, there never has been and never could be a world in which a primed immune response is the same thing as permanent and irrevocable immunity, though again most people can’t understand this so it gets short-handed). Post 2015 we had artificially produced viral proteins we could synthesize and introduce… post 2020/1 that arsenal now includes mRNA-produced targeted proteins, which is friggin amazing tech.

But no jab ever offered lifelong permanent immunity… every jab ever just offered you some response to that specific virion in the future. If the virus mutates fast (as all coronaviruses and influenza viruses do) then that protection naturally decays over time as the protein drifts away from what you’ve been exposed to. That’s why you have to get a new booster every year for fast-evolvers, every five to ten years for slow evolvers, and probably never again in your lifetime for glacially slow evolvers.
by JambalayaJimbo | 2025-09-28 12:30:45+00:00
If there is a Covid round 2, and my government tries to implement another lockdown, I will flaunt the rules as brazenly as possible. So will almost everyone I know.

My trust in the government has completely evaporated; the “cure” was worse than the disease, by far.

Now if Covid round 2 is significantly lethal even to young people, that’s a real problem! The government wasted its social capital on Covid round 1, and left us exposed to a serious pandemic.
by jnxx | 2025-09-28 12:33:49+00:00
There is another technical reason:

A digital ID requires essentially a digital signature running on a secure device (for example, a smart card).

Thus it implements public key cryptocraphy. Which makes confidentiality and integrity of computing two inseparable sides of the same medal.

You simply cannot break confidentiality of communication without practically breaking integrity of digital signatures at the same time. (Otherwise, a user, for example could generate a fresh random public key, sign it with their digital id, and send it to any communications partner).

Breaking this in turn means that the government can sign on behalf of you, without your knowledge.

Human communication is based on symbols and whatever the means are to transport these symbols, cannot work without trust.
by crote | 2025-09-28 12:35:30+00:00
> Right next door, Ireland had a little problem with potatoes

Common misconception: Ireland actually had a little problem with the British. Even during the most intense parts of the famine Ireland was still exporting food. The British absentee landowners simply did not care that their peasants were starving. The ruling party wanted to let the "free market" solve it, with some politicians considering it "divine providence" or a "lack of moral character". This was made even worse by refusing aid to small landowners, which killed sustenance farming.

People often forget that it was a European famine, rather than an Irish one. The Irish potato yield was reduced by 30%, while the potato yield in Denmark was reduced by 50%, The Netherlands by 71%, and Belgium by 87%! Tens of thousands died in those countries, but it is only Ireland where the population was reduced from 8 million to 4 million.

Monoculture (as decided upon by the absentee British landlords) was indeed the direct cause, but it only got as bad as it did because the British elite chose to let them die. Had they imported alternative crops to feed their peasants, or even just stopped potato export, it would've been far less severe.
by jibal | 2025-09-28 12:35:49+00:00
> Why would that lower the average elo?

Because the average chess.com player is considerably weaker than the average FIDE player.

> In the much more common scenario where beginners come in, lose a bunch of games, and then leave, the average rating will go up over time.

Weak players come into the chess.com pool faster than they leave.
by Stranger_X | 2025-09-28 12:36:14+00:00
Before everything turned into feeds, influencers, and ads, the internet was full of chance encounters. Talking to someone new—even for a few minutes—felt exciting and real.

That’s gone now. So we built StrangerMeet :

One click → one stranger.

Text, voice, or video.

If you click, continue. If not, move on.

It’s simple, lightweight, and human—something we think the web lost along the way.

Do you think randomness still has a place online in 2025?
by 3oil3 | 2025-09-28 12:37:28+00:00
I feel the same astonishment! Our computers surely are today faster and stronger and smaller than yesterdays', but did this really translate in something tangible for a user? I feel that besides boot-up, thanks to SSDs rather than gigaHertz, it's not any faster. It's like, all this extra power is used to the maximum, for good and bad reasons, but not focused on making 'it' faster. I get a bit puzzled to why my mac could freeze half a second when I 'cmd+a' in some 1000+ files-full folder.

Why doesn't Excel appear instantly, and why is it 2.29GB now when Excel 98 for Mac was.. 154.31MB? Why is a LAN transfer between two computers still as slow as 1999, 10ishMB/s, when both can simultaneously download at > 100MB/s? I'm not starting with GB-memory-hoarding tabs, when you think about it, it's managed well as a whole, holding 700+ tabs without complaining.

And what about logs? This is a new branch of philosophy, open Console and witness the era of hyperreal siloxal, where computational potential expands asymptotically while user experience flatlines into philosophical absurdity?
by frumiousirc | 2025-09-28 12:38:29+00:00
> Software engineering is a collaborative process, not an adversarial one.

The collaborative process itself is adversarial. Capitulating to others when their contributions go against one's goal compromises that goal. Sometimes compromise to achieve a lesser goal is better than failing to achieving the full goal. But, when stakes are high (and Linux stakes are enormous) compromised goals are less appropriate. Linux and Linus are in a position not to have to compromise the goal.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-28 12:39:09+00:00
"A newly launched account said they were in “open dispute” with their employer over the threats to fire staff and the failure to meet all its demands. “The workers are queer, trans, racialised, disabled, sex workers and students,” it argued. “Their identities have been used to advertise and fundraise for the bookshop as a radical space whilst their voices are not listened to.” As might be expected, there was an outraged response online. Responses on Instagram accused the bookshop of being a “marketing campaign” as well as “colonial”.

Eight days later, Scarlett fired back on the shop’s Instagram, claiming they had attempted to, or were in the process of meeting, almost all the union’s demands. “Trying to create a space like this in advanced capitalism is extremely difficult,” it read. “The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.”

And all the above is a good summary of why for all the deep nuttiness of MAGA-level conservatives, the deep left is just as fucking off the deep end.