MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-09-23 19:18:04+00:00
Unfortunately, you're invariably going to end up with a "Some<false>" at some point, and you're going to spend the next 20 years explaining to people why that's not a wart in your language that your if "treats it as true", no matter how much you say "my language doesn't even have true so that's not a valid statement".

It isn't going to matter that it's technically a "JSON::false" or whatever... you're still going to get people calling that a wart forever. ("But a JSON::false would be a None" - no, you need that for either "null" or "missing". A JSON library has to have an exposed "false" value to distinguish it from null and missing, both for input and output.)

I'm not saying that doesn't mean to try this out, but as more of a heads up and something to talk about explicitly in the eventual tutorial.

Personally, I find myself fairly satisfied with if statements rigidly requiring a boolean and refusing to have a concept of "truthiness", which I consider a mistake, and I'm not sure this is solving real problems I've had. A user can always write the Option vs. None themselves in an if statement with mandatory else if they want. This introduces a wrapper level of Option that may not always play nice in real code (I mean, a lot of sum type types essentially already have it built in with things like "type Color = Red | Blue | Green | Unspecified" where adjoining a None is often unnecessary) and may really tempt you towards a concept of truthiness that may be a bigger wart than when you're trying to fix. It's pretty hard for a computer programming language to essentially evict the concept of a "bit" from the language. I'm not sure it can be done in practice, but it's fun to think about it and I encourage the pondering.
by binarynate | 2025-09-23 19:18:27+00:00
As humble as Michigan City is, it's also a popular vacation destination for Hoosiers seeking an inexpensive summer getaway. I grew up in Indiana and have many fond memories of going to Michigan City in the summer: swimming at the beach, walking to the lighthouse and zoo, and looking at Chicago's skyline from across the lake. As a kid, I thought the power plant tower was cool, too.
by Ciantic | 2025-09-23 19:18:31+00:00
I've stumbled on this twice now, usually you can use just CDN caching, but I once solved it with redis locks, and once with simply filling the cache periodically in the background.

If you can, it's easier to have every client fetch from cache, and then a cron job e.g., every second, refresh the cache.

In CDN feature to prevent this is "Collapse Forwarding"
by thegrimmest | 2025-09-23 19:18:46+00:00
Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made.

Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-09-23 19:18:47+00:00
I’m personally wary of uploading too much private data to any host. I am also a customer of Hetzner, and rent a couple of bare metal servers. But I mostly use it to store data that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal if it was stolen by someone.

I’ve previously experimented a bit with encrypted volumes that I manually decrypt over ssh, and even full disk encryption that I manually decrypt over ssh.

My experience with Hetzner has been good. It is really rare that the servers go down on their own. Reboots are usually my own doing, so I am already “around” to decrypt encrypted volumes.

I have experienced critical, unrecoverable hardware failure on Hetzner servers a couple of times over the years. But I’ve had offsite backups in place since day one, so I never ultimately lost any important data. Had to deprovision the broken server, reprovision a new one and restore from my offsite backup. Which is a bit of a hassle, but no biggie because the only one that relies on my servers is mostly myself. A few days of downtime because I am too busy to set up a new server right away is therefore also ok for me, with how infrequently it has happened.

A single Hetzner server should never be the only place hosting a copy of all your photos or other data you cannot afford to lose. But that applies to any host really. Not unique to Hetzner.
by kulahan | 2025-09-23 19:19:05+00:00
Nope, balanced as in people are allowed to have a balanced viewpoint of things. And don't worry - even back in the founding days, there were still flat earthers and climate deniers and vaccine skeptics. These people are still downvoted to hell here.

I don't know if it ever came back up, but you should go spend a little time on /b/ - you seem to have forgotten how bad that site is.
by grmnygrmny2 | 2025-09-23 19:19:16+00:00
The electricity aspect has always been one I wish AI skeptics/critics wouldn’t lean on so much, because it seems like the one most likely to be solveable. I think we should be focusing on the economic aspects instead - if all this pans out as boosters promise, how does our economy exist when all white collar jobs go away? Who buys all the stuff, with what money?
by mitchellh | 2025-09-23 19:19:34+00:00
libvterm is great. Ghostty supports many more features, but the most important I hear from other libvterm users are that it's missing scrollback and reflow on resize, which are both pretty major pieces of functionality.

Example: Neovim is considering the switch to libghostty-vt when its ready. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/33155
Request HN [Meta]: Noticed a bug with renamed submissions
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-23 19:19:52+00:00
When a submission is renamed/retitled by mods, it's no longer hidden for people who have previously hidden it. Could hides please be keyed by submission ID rather than title in whatever data store holds hidden submissions?

It seems that submissions are being retitled after posting much more frequently than in the past which has made it more visible.

Thank you!
by unfitted2545 | 2025-09-23 19:20:06+00:00
There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck.

It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.

And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-23 19:20:19+00:00
> People usually like to believe that they're at least better than average and bring the same level of contributions to the team. This is most definitely not the case, and an engineering manager, VP, sales manager who simply appears to talk to people all day long may actually have important contributions such as overseeing key projects, talking to customers etc. which may be the thing that the company needs to lock that large sale or prevent customer attrition, or whatever the case may be.

As an engineer I have constantly heard throughout my career complaints that "We make the product, without us the sales wouldn't have a job, so we deserve better compensation"

To which I have always replied - speaking as an engineer, I struggle to sell a product, and I have seen multiple products that were technically superior to their competitors fail (Beta vs VHS!) - sales and management are vastly more important than engineering.
by kami8845 | 2025-09-23 19:21:03+00:00
Amazing to see the scale of it. As a piece of feedback my assumption is that different officers are assigned to different areas and so since street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas, this will allow different officers to float to the top in different weeks. Having at least a 2 week lookback for the leaderboard is probably best. Otherwise great work!
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-23 19:21:07+00:00
I live in the NY area (Long Island), and have a business line on my phone, so I get dozens of scam calls per day.

Most are spoofed. Many, from local Long Island exchanges.

All the spoofed calls just reuse existing numbers. When I first started getting them, I called a couple, until I figured it out. I usually got some poor, confused schlub.

I’ve gotten some calls, myself, and have been said poor, confused schlub.
by scottbez1 | 2025-09-23 19:21:18+00:00
Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets.

I get it - street cleaning are "easy" tickets to write in bulk, and therefore efficient ROI for PCO time, but they're not the most important violations to cite compared to safety-critical things like blocked bike lanes (which SFMTA has an official policy to completely ignore citizen reports thereof), double-parking, or red zone (including daylighting) violations.

Part of the issue is improper fine structure (though I think this is at least partly controlled by the state?) - tickets for blocking a bike lane are rarely written and therefore it's a good bet to just do it and odds are in aggregate it's cheaper than paying for parking legally.

UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Uber etc rely on this as a cheap cost of doing business, externalizing their costs onto the safety of the public. SFMTA even offers bulk payment discounts to UPS, when they should be charging escalating fines for repeat offenders.
by primitivesuave | 2025-09-23 19:21:18+00:00
I did a fascinating analysis of SFMTA data a few years back. They posted a public list of names and license plates [1] that they refuse to take down, despite many emails from me over the years. I found a particular license plate that belonged to a plumber with an impeccable 5 star reputation on Yelp, whose business in SF was effectively ended by street sweeping fines. He accidentally paid the same ticket twice, which resulted in his work vehicle being towed for excessive delinquency on the original ticket, which culminated in him moving his plumbing business to Utah.

I mentioned his 5 star reputation because several people got on Yelp over the years and described situations where he wouldn't even charge them money if he could fix something in a few minutes. It was very sad to learn how the SFTMA ran an honest plumber out of our city, and still won't take his name down off the list below (even 8 years after the deadline to respond).

I don't mean to draw undue attention to that list - please bombard the SFTMA with emails to take it down, it is a very obvious invasion of privacy and laughably unnecessary.

1. https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-20...
by RyanOD | 2025-09-23 19:21:39+00:00
Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe.

There is a very real reason why most intersections require drivers to park 20-30 feet away. Please think of the safety of others and adhere to this rule.
by LelouBil | 2025-09-23 19:21:49+00:00
> Instant settlement

> Accept payments at the speed of the blockchain. Money in your wallet in 2 seconds, not T+2.

Are crypto payments instant now ?

I don't follow this space at all but my understanding was that the "speed of the blockchain" was pretty slow.

Or maybe they mean this compared to payment processors or bank transfers that can take days ?
by Peritract | 2025-09-23 19:22:03+00:00
>where success is defined by AI made me faster, more efficient etc?

I think this attitude is part of the problem to me; you're not aiming to be faster or more efficient (and using AI to get there), you're aiming to use AI (to be faster and more efficient).

A sincere approach to improvement wouldn't insist on a tool first.
by jonas21 | 2025-09-23 19:22:06+00:00
You'll probably find a high correlation with the street cleaning dataset (if there is one). Nearly all of the tickets at the top of the leaderboard are street sweeping violations.

I wonder if street cleaning is net profitable for the city once you factor in tickets. That would make cutting the cleaning frequency [1] a doubly bad idea.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/18/san-francisco-city-hall-st...
by lupusreal | 2025-09-23 19:22:40+00:00
> I'm about 98% certain this is simply a ploy to put autistic people on a list for future abuses.

Yes I think so. And I think they'll want to target people with autism particularly because people with autism are less likely to go with the flow, they question social customs and traditions that other people take for granted. Why do I have to wear a tie, what practical purpose does it serve? Why do I have to put forks on one side of the plate and knives on the other? Etc. Lower conformity to social norms, and a preference for precise and literal information.

This tendency makes people with autism somewhat resistant (but not immune) to most normal forms of propaganda. This scares power hungry politicians.
by nickjj | 2025-09-23 19:22:50+00:00
It's more than the PWAs.

There's:

https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...

https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...

There's around 180 packages being installed, most of which are considered base packages.

1password and tons upon tons of other apps and tools.
by MonkeyClub | 2025-09-23 19:22:58+00:00
Through TFA I ended up perusing Hashimoto's blog, and from that moved on to "The Tao of HashiCorp".

Curiously, it hasn't been discussed on HN before, so I started a thread to get HNers' thoughts on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45351378
by valadaptive | 2025-09-23 19:24:16+00:00
Am I missing something? The LGPL only applies to the library itself--you can dynamically link to it from proprietary code. So in this hypothetical scenario, someone could just write a terminal emulator (or IDE, or what have you) that dynamically links to libghostty and put as much telemetry in it as they wanted, couldn't they?
by K0nserv | 2025-09-23 19:24:34+00:00
Yes of course, although, as I said in a sibling comment, it's a bit convoluted as an example. The fundamental problem is that the xor mutable and shared reference rule gets in your way when you access separate fields through &self and &mut self even if the borrows are non-overlapping.

There has been discussion to solve this particular problem[0].

0: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/1215
by rixed | 2025-09-23 19:24:53+00:00
> How is it that people simultaneously believe > 1) GC makes a language slow, and > 2) Go is fast?

Easy one: either not the same people, or people holding self contradicting thoughts.

GC are slow not only because of scanning the memory but also because of the boxing. In my experience, 2 to 3 times slower.

Still a better tradeoff in the vast majority of cases over manual memory management. A GC is well worth the peace of mind.
by tennysont | 2025-09-23 19:25:01+00:00
Interesting!

The nix package for ghostty is broken/unavailable on MacOS at the moment, but installing the brew cask (`brew install --cask ghostty`) and a basic config file:

```

font-family = Monaco

theme = dark:Catppuccin Frappe,light:Catppuccin Latte

```

Got me almost everything I used from iTerm2. Nerdfont just worked (in iTerm I think you have to use the `Use a different font for non-ASCII text` setting)
by throwaway93626 | 2025-09-23 19:25:43+00:00
I'd guess the top spots are just super wealthy people who figure that at their "hourly rate", paying for parking is basically more costly than just eating the tickets. Like if someone's time is worth $10k+/hour, the parking tickets are basically just premium parking fees that are still "cheaper" than spending even a minute dealing with payment... Let your assistant pay whatever tickets you get in the mail instead.
by daxfohl | 2025-09-23 19:25:56+00:00
Have you considered or tried adding steps to create / review an engineering design doc? Jumping straight from PRD to a huge code change seems scary. Granted, given that it's fast and cheap to throw code away and start over, maybe engineering design is a thing of the past. But still, it seems like it would be useful to have it delineate the high-level decisions and tradeoffs before jumping straight into code; once the code is generated it's harder to think about alternative approaches.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-09-23 19:26:27+00:00
And I assume there's no actual product that customers are using that we could also demo? Because only 1 out of every 20 or so claims of awesomeness actually has a demoable product to back up those claims. The 1 who does usually has immediate problems. Like an invisible text box rendered over the submit button on their Contact Us page preventing an onClick event for that button.

In case it wasn't obvious, I have gone from rabidly bullish on AI to very bearish over the last 18 months. Because I haven't found one instance where AI is running the show and things aren't falling apart in not-always-obvious ways.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-23 19:26:46+00:00
> Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux.

The answer is rather that everyone is doing it. Then most people care about it a little so they do a little, but because it's most people that adds up to being the majority of what needs to be done. A smaller number care about it a lot but all that's left is for them to shave off the rough edges.

> Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.

How does it not yield a competitive advantage? If you're Framework, Dell, System76, Canonical, Red Hat, etc., you want people to use your product instead of buying a Mac or some competitor's Windows laptop.

> In other words, centralize the battery life project.

I don't understand how this is centralization.

Suppose Intel does the work to make good open source drivers and make sure their hardware has low idle power consumption, Red Hat does the work to make systemd behave in a way which is power inefficient in the hardware-independent ways, etc. Then Framework does an analysis of where power is going on their systems and finds that Intel and Red Hat did a good job but there's a bug in the third party network controller driver preventing it from going to sleep, so they fix the bug.

Where is the centralization? The work is being done by all different companies who aren't even necessarily interacting with each other. Some of the bugs in third party software are fixed by hobbyists or other vendors. Then Framework is left with a limited amount of work to do and they do it.

The problem comes when they go to do that analysis and find that the thing using more power than it should is a piece of hardware that the vendor both failed to document and failed to provide source code for the firmware, so that no one else can fix it when they don't. In other words, it's caused by a thing that isn't open source.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-23 19:26:48+00:00
> Yes, this means your heating and cooling bill will be a bit higher.

Not even necessarily. People these days are accustomed to keeping their homes at comfortable T-shirt temps even in the dead of winter, but if you dress appropriately for the season you can drop your indoor temperatures 20F or more from what people normally set the thermostat to while still maintaining a safe margin to keep your pipes from freezing.
by zahlman | 2025-09-23 19:27:54+00:00
> The above is just a small selection, as the possibilities for implementing a bilinear resize operation on Apple Silicon are numerous (e.g. using the GPU, Neural Engine). The key here is that we can generate as many of these as possible (thanks to LLM-powered codegen), then emit compiled programs that use each one—with absolutely no limits.

This sounds... definitely not up to the standard of rigor one might reasonably expect for the task.
by scottbez1 | 2025-09-23 19:28:08+00:00
The DMV is unfortunately wrong about this, with an invalid interpretation of CVC - the DMV handbook is NOT the law (it's a simplistic layman's interpretation), and is not a valid legal defense.

That said, in SF proper it's absolutely inarguably illegal as a violation called "Obstructing traffic" in the SF transportation code. A bike lane is an active travel lane for vehicles as defined under the CVC (including bicycles), and therefore stopping in one is illegal just like stopping in a car lane. I've had drivers cited for this in the past.
by kragen | 2025-09-23 19:28:23+00:00
This was 20-25 years ago. No Uber Cab, no Google shuttles, no e-bikes, no rental scooters, Caltrain was diesel and hadn't been renovated, and there was no real-time tracking of Muni buses' positions, so unless you were taking an express bus, you had no idea when the bus would arrive at the stop. And a large part of San Francisco's population was still poor.

There were a lot of people who didn't use a car in that context at all, but people who could mostly did.
by aorth | 2025-09-23 19:29:37+00:00
How can we try it? The linked story is only a blog post summary of the paper.

Shmatko, A., Jung, A.W., Gaurav, K. et al. Learning the natural history of human disease with generative transformers. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09529-3
by joshvm | 2025-09-23 19:30:59+00:00
I think pre-commit is essential. I enforce conventional commits (+ a hook which limits commit length to 50 chars) and for Python, ruff with many options enabled. Perhaps the most important one is to enforce complexity limits. That will catch a lot of basic mistakes. Any sanity checks that you can make deterministic are a good idea. You could even add unit tests to pre-commit, but I think it's fine to have the model run pytest separately.

The models tend to be very good about syntax, but this sort of linting will often catch dead code like unused variables or arguments.

You do need to rule-prompt that the agent may need to run pre-commit multiple times to verify the changes worked, or to re-add to the commit. Also, frustratingly, you also need to be explicit that pre-commit might fail and it should fix the errors (otherwise sometimes it'll run and say "I ran pre-commit!") For commits there are some other guardrails, like blanket denying git add <wildcard>.

Claude will sometimes complain via its internal monologue when it fails a ton of linter checks and is forced to write complete docstrings for everything. Sometimes you need to nudge it to not give up, and then it will act excited when the number of errors goes down.
by michaelw | 2025-09-23 19:31:01+00:00
If the costs were all bandwidth related I would agree. Most open source package managers benefit from Fastly's generous donation of credits. Even if one ignores the single-provider-point-of-failure risk, the reality is that the development and operational costs of running package managers is much more than just networking bandwidth and more is needed.

Malware scanning, AI slopsquatting, and typosquatting are just a few of the things that package managers do today. Implementing emerging standards like Trusted Publishing ( https://repos.openssf.org/trusted-publishers-for-all-package... ), the Principles for Package Repository Security ( https://repos.openssf.org/principles-for-package-repository-... ), and improved infrastructure hardening will all important.

The key insight is that these are services that require development and operations budgets that scale with their usage.