MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by afarviral | 2025-10-22 11:38:36+00:00
This is interesting, and I'll try to remember to give this a go next time I'm tempted to patch something from the standard library, but...

The README mentions 3 scenarios that this might be preferred over, but not the fourth which I regularly do: Create my own functions/classes that are composed from the unchanged modules. E.g. a request_with_retries function which adds retry logic to requests without the need to monkey patch. I regularly use decorators as well to add things like retries.

For more complex scenarios Modshim might win out, as mentioned in the understated section of the README "Benefits of this Approach":

> Internal Reference Rewriting: This example demonstrates modshim's most powerful feature. By replacing requests.sessions.Session, we automatically upgraded top-level functions like requests.get() because their internal references to Session are redirected to our new class.

> Preservation of the Original Module: The original requests package is not altered. Code in other parts of an application that imports requests directly will continue to use the original Session object without any retry logic, preventing unintended side-effects.

What I think this means is Modshim lets you really get in to the guts of a module (monkey-patch style, giving you god-like powers), while limiting the damage.
by aatd86 | 2025-10-22 11:38:40+00:00
Oh that's probably doable. Introducing something like this is a bit orthogonal to the point above, but yes.

It's not straightforward but probably something that will be considered at some point I reckon when thinking about making union interfaces first class. That will require to track a not nil typestate/predicate in the backend, something like that I guess.
by rbanffy | 2025-10-22 11:39:06+00:00
> Another is that people unsportingly write things in cuda.

Whether we like it or not, CUDA is the de-facto standard for these things. I wonder how much effort would it take for a company the size of AMD to dedicate a couple million dollars a year to track CUDA as closely as feasible. A couple million dollars is a rounding error for a leading silicon maker.
by Gormo | 2025-10-22 11:39:19+00:00
I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers.

I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
by gausswho | 2025-10-22 11:39:53+00:00
It's not only present in the title. Midway through: "Louis’s mother, was a more joyful figure, and proved to be resilient after her husband’s death, sailing with Louis’s gypsy family to the South Seas."

I'm inclined to think the author is aware of modern preferences, and that Stevenson's family may have referenced themselves this way.
by kragen | 2025-10-22 11:40:03+00:00
Newby did an enormous amount to help Project Gutenberg, but he was not its CEO or founder. Probably if you want to thank one person for the project it should be Michael Hart (PBUH). As WP explains:

> Newby got involved with Project Gutenberg in 1991 or 1992, became friends with founder Michael S. Hart, and was "undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer", according to a scholar writing about the history of the project.[10][21] In 2000 or 2001, Newby formed the associated nonprofit organization, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, and became its director and CEO.[10][22][2] He also worked to integrate Distributed Proofreaders into the project.[21] He was a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation at its formation in July 2006.[23][24] He led improvements to the technology platform underlying Project Gutenberg[25] and navigated challenges related to the copyright status of books in different countries.[26]
by xtiansimon | 2025-10-22 11:40:57+00:00
NPR Morning Edition today reported:

01:45 “The National Capital Planning Commission would typically have a role in approving a project like this. But the newly appointed chair of that commission. A top Trump appointee names Will Scharf (sp?) said in September the commission doesn’t have jurisdiction over demolition. […] And the commission is currently closed because of the government shutdown.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/22/nx-s1-5581433/parts-of-the-wh...
by Balinares | 2025-10-22 11:41:00+00:00
My current gig is an MSFT shop and when I joined I was genuinely excited to find out just how far that universe had come in the 20+ years since I last worked in a corp environment that uses it. The Ballmer days are long behind and there's been some genuinely cool stuff coming out of MS since.

I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Not going to go into an inventory of it all, but I'll admit I genuinely lost it when I discovered that the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it.

The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. There's no reliability baseline; if it's broken to the point the amount of work you can do is zero, just open a ticket with support, who will add yet another bit of duct tape or just reboot something somewhere and ask you if the problem went away somehow.

I think possibly the coworkers who don't look away from the emperor's non-clothed-ness, and the higher standards that they drive, may be more valuable to have around than you imagine, if you can get past the bad emotions that their lucidity gives you.
by ninkendo | 2025-10-22 11:41:53+00:00
> I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's.

Yup, still the case today.

Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.

I haven’t actually had any issues with noticeable data loss though.

I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
Is there _any_ US/UK remote web/dev job portal out there?
by mvgmvg | 2025-10-22 11:42:29+00:00
I've tried at least 5 different platforms. I've completed processes at proxify, I've created profiles on wellfound and others. There's nothing. Not even an answer. I'm based in the EU, I have 10+ YOE in Frontend and about 3 in React.
by o0-0o | 2025-10-22 11:42:37+00:00
A few observations. I never got the confirmation email and my account. The free one doesn’t seem to do anything except for allowing me to journal, but I can’t see the journal. I can’t go into the birthdate. I can’t edit my profile? This seems to be a web form with prompts? Where’s the verification email? Why can’t I change my birthdate? Why is the app totally not working as expected. How do you see the journal entries that you entered granted it’s 641 in the morning here but this is when I should be able to use an easy journaling app about what I want to do today also just note that questions like how do you want to show up in the world today are a bit flimsy. This is just my opinion of course, but why not just ask what are your goals and things like that my two cents ticket for what it’s worth everybody’s got an opinion.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-22 11:43:13+00:00
Search results do not have as chilling an effect as LLM-generated text, because search results are in essence links back to content (meaning human authors benefit from knowing who reads them, people discover who those human authors are, etc.), whereas it is not a thing in LLM-generated text (which may have occasional links back, but they are not complete nor always correct).
by daneel_w | 2025-10-22 11:43:27+00:00
>> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

> No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.

Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced. I managed to get it done the very first time I, 25 years ago, with zero *nix experience, decided to try OpenBSD. Also, you can always exit the installer and restart the process. You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-22 11:43:31+00:00
> But we hardly evolved past apes at this point

And? Evolution is not "Progress to this $UTOPIC_POINT". Evolution does not mean "progress at all", using "progress" as you seem to use it in the rest of your post.

They may have evolved to not have any compassion for any species that is not their own. They may have evolved to a point of having no compassion whatsoever.
by dkersten | 2025-10-22 11:43:47+00:00
I don't think I posted about my particle system, so I don't think I'm the same person.

> But then Id have reimplement a lot of the libs like phaserjs etc?

The way I see it is that you either:

1. Do everything in WASM, using your languages native libraries (eg Emscripten supports SDL and WebGL, for example -- I hear newest wasm version also makes more directly available from browser WASM)

2. Use WASM to offload certain workfloads or simulation, and send data to Javascript and do all rendering in Javascript (using three.js, PIXI.js, or WebGL directly).

If using 2, you either send updates (I made a little toy test engine where I wrote messages to a SharedArrayBuffer that the JS side could read), or you operate directly on primitives in a SharedArrayBuffer (fastest since there's no serialisation needed, but harder to do).

Note for my particle system, I used PIXI.js to render and the webworker to simulate. I had a read index and a write index and the simulation would basically read the particle attributes from the read index and write them to the write index. The read index would be incremented for each particle and the write index only for live particles, meaning that as particles died it auto compacted:

let read_index = 0 let write_index = 0 let numParticles = liveParticles const view = new DataView(sharedBuffer) do { const x = view.getFloat32(read_index + 0) const y = view.getFloat32(read_index + 4) const pos = update(x, y) // whatever your update logic actually is const stillAlive = // ... if (stillAlive) { view.setFloat32(write_index + 0, pos.x) view.setFloat32(write_index + 4, pos.y) // only advance for live particles write_index += SIZE_OF_PARTICLE_IN_BYTES } read_index += SIZE_OF_PARTICLE_IN_BYTES } while (--numParticles > 0)

Simplified for illustrative purposes. In real life, I used a wrapper than managed offsets automatically. But the point is that its a flat buffer, we don't try to serialise objects other than to read the properties out and write them back.
by mortarion | 2025-10-22 11:44:24+00:00
They haven't gotten anything done in regards to HLS. They can build their HLS and even launch it into orbit next year but then what?

HLS requires on-orbit refueling. Anything from 10 to 20 refueling launches will be required. Did you think it required one refueling launch? The SH+SS stack will never be reusable or reliable enough to accomplish the refueling operation in time and on budget.

This means one moon mission will require the use of 10 launch pads and probably 20 complete stacks to even be feasible, because reuse will not help one iota.

Their upper stage reuse will never pan out. Sure they will catch a few, then they will remove the engines and stick the rest in a shredder for scraps to be melted down and recycled.

Elon's HLS is completely detached from reality. I won't even call it a SpaceX system because it's unlikely anyone but Elon came up with it.
by xattt | 2025-10-22 11:44:26+00:00
> … the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable.

Is there a name for this “value stuffing”? This seems to appeal to some form of subconscious hoarding. There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.
by imiric | 2025-10-22 11:47:35+00:00
> Without any contract or promise, there is no obligation to anybody.

When a restaurant which you've been going to for years one day decides to serve you your favorite meal with a bit of poop on the side, do you not have the right to be upset about it? They're not under any obligation to serve you meals you're happy with. There was no contract or promise. The fact you're paying for their service doesn't buy you these rights either. Those are just the terms of service both parties have agreed to.

Similarly, open source software is much more than a license. There is a basic social contract of not being an asshole to users of your product, which is an unwritten rule not just in software and industry in general, but in society as a whole. The free software movement is an extension of this mindset, and focuses on building software for the benefit of everyone, not just those who happen to pay for it, or those who meet your specific criteria. Claiming you support this philosophy, while acting against it, is hypocritical, and abusive towards people who do believe in it. And your point is that that people who complain about this are entitled? Give me a break.

If you want to place restrictions on how your software is used and who gets to enjoy it, that's fine, but make those terms explicit by choosing the appropriate license and business model from the start. Stop abusing OSS as a marketing tactic.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45666757
by api | 2025-10-22 11:48:05+00:00
This is a big thing never shown in sci-fi. For example, those huge torch ships in The Expanse would need gigantic radiators. Even if the drive were upwards of 90% efficient the waste heat would melt the engine and the rest of the ship.

Even the ISS has sizable radiators. The Shuttle had deployable radiators in the form of the bay doors if my memory serves me correctly.

Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.

There’s no air resistance in space so radiators don’t impact your flight characteristics.
by johndhi | 2025-10-22 11:48:36+00:00
Thanks for posting. Every time I've read a RLS book lately I've been blown away by how entertaining and well done they are.

Treasure Island - pure gold. Kidnapped - gold.

I recall in the introduction to one of them he explains he wrote these stories for boys. Adventure, danger, fun characters. If you have sons you'll know there is a certain aesthetic young boy love and these books deliver it.

I also was amazed how much I enjoyed his books for adults, like the one about being on a ship as a kid (can't find the name).

If you look into his biography you find some really hard things that I guess he transformed into writing.
by motorest | 2025-10-22 11:49:01+00:00
> That's a diplomatic way of saying "Starlink seems better but we trust the owner as far as we can throw em".

The obvious aspect is that Starlink is a US company owned by a US oligarch with deep ties to the ruling regime, which is repeatedly threatening Greenland with invasion and annexation.

Relying on that service provider for communication would be outright stupid.
by akerl_ | 2025-10-22 11:49:26+00:00
I definitely wasn’t grokking that, because the prior commenter never mentioned AWS Identity Center, and instead linked to STS, which works how I described (you can’t use FIDO MFA for the authentication of the call that gives you your short-lived session creds).

I’m excited to see that Identity Center supports FIDO2 for this use case.
by 542354234235 | 2025-10-22 11:49:58+00:00
Of course. We are talking about ansibles, a Sci-Fi communication device from Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" book series. They work using quantum entangled particles. In the real world, you can't "send" information between two entangled particles, but I was speculating about how it would work and its hypothetical information throughput.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-22 11:51:59+00:00
Most of my running friends had painful knees until I told them to stop heel striking so bad and over stride, they had minor calf pain for two weeks and never complained again.

I have no data but I think most people simply don't know how to run, urbanites will spend $600 on carbon shoes and run like absolute clowns wondering why their fancy shoes don't prevent injuries... run barefoot in a field and you'll get your natural running gait
by Bender | 2025-10-22 11:52:16+00:00
Not so much switch, but rather "fall back to" a self hosted instance of uMurmur, IRC, etc... when Discord is down or if the topic is too sensitive for a shared corporate platform. People will stay were their friends are. Having a fall-back solution that gives them more privacy or a way to remain in contact when their primary means are down can be useful at times.

How vigilant people are about privacy will vary greatly by generation and by group interests.
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-22 11:52:16+00:00
This is absolute nonsense.

The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary!

Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly.

Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!?

If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes than that…
by Magnolia9438 | 2025-10-22 11:53:16+00:00
On the happy path downstream, yes, and it does work really well. But the error flow back upstream flips that, as errors are returned as, often nested, interfaces.

This is fine for a lot of general purpose code that exits when running into problems. But when errors are an expected part of a long lived process, like an API, it’s painful to build logic around and conditionally handle them.

The ergonomics of errors.Is and As are pretty bad and there doesn’t seem to be a clear indication as when to expect a sentinel, concrete, or pointer to a concrete error.

All that to say, I think Go’s errors really illustrate the benefit of “return values, not interfaces”. Though for errors specifically, I’m not sure you could improve them without some pretty bad tradeoffs around flexibility.
by p2detar | 2025-10-22 11:53:16+00:00
> the entire world is tired of him and his constant begging and rhetoric

It's like hearing my mom who constantly quotes crap from Facebook. Please get serious and never forget that children and women are dying from Russian bombs and drones every single day. Your comment is a total copy of the Russian propaganda that batters my home country and it is so sad to read this here as well.
by blourvim | 2025-10-22 11:53:21+00:00
So many questions, like how would you protect from bit flips, damage to circuits. "10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth." I am not sure if we need a rocket scientist to calculate the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator and just letting it run. What happens when the servers need to retire due to some unpatchable bug
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-10-22 11:54:44+00:00
Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field.

Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.
by sevenseacat | 2025-10-22 11:54:54+00:00
oh yes I've had times like this.

Recently I was looking at building a gnarly form, that had some really complex interactions and data behind it. It just kept being subtly buggy in all different ways. I threw Claude at it, went down so many rabbit holes, it was convinced there were bugs in all the different frameworks and libraries I was using because it couldn't find the issue in the code (that it had written most of).

After a couple of days of tearing my hair out, I eventually dug in and rewrote it from first principles myself. The code afterwards was so much shorter, so much clearer, and worked a hell of a lot better (not going to say perfectly, but, well, haven't had a single issue with it since).
by mortarion | 2025-10-22 11:56:49+00:00
> Refueling is done in LEO.

Look up how many refueling launches are required and you'll see the problem, especially because no matter if Elon says so, the upper stage will never be reusable, even if caught.

Every moon mission will require that they pre-build a HLS and probably 15 full stacks.

Ridiculous.
by torginus | 2025-10-22 11:56:55+00:00
Dunno, I'm pretty interested in HarmonyOS considering it's a major commercial OS that has come along in a long time, and features a number of technological differences such as a pure microkernel, compared to the existing big 3.

Despite that we (I) know next to nothing about it, neither on the user nor the technical side, so a bunch of deep dives would be welcome.
Show HN: I built a browser-based video editor for making social media reels
by vaneyckseme | 2025-10-22 11:56:59+00:00
Hey HN! I built Reelleer - a video editor that runs entirely in your browser to create social media reels. No uploads, no server processing, everything happens client-side.

Try it: https://reelleer.com

What it does:

Multi-track timeline editor (video, audio, images, GIFs, text) Real-time preview at 30fps Direct canvas manipulation (drag/resize elements) Animations and transitions Export to WebM

Current limitations:

Real-time export only (working on WebCodecs for 10x faster) WebM output only (MP4 coming soon) Chrome/Edge work best

Coming soon:

Undo/redo Cloud storage for projects MP4 export Filters
by kragen | 2025-10-22 11:57:27+00:00
This article is attractively presented and seems to be well written, but I disagree with the framing:

> Databases were made to solve one problem:

> How do we store data persistently and then efficiently look it up later?

There are indeed things described as "databases" which are made to solve that problem, but more commonly such things are instead called "file formats" or, to old IBMers, "access methods".

As I see it, the much more interesting problem that databases solve, the one that usually distinguishes what we call "databases" from what we call "file formats", is query evaluation:

> How do we organize a large body of information such that we can easily answer questions efficiently from it?

Prolog, Datalog, QBE, QUEL, and SQL are approaches to expressing the questions, and indexing, materialized views, query planning, resolution, the WAM, and tabled resolution are approaches to answering them efficiently.

dbm is not a database. ISAM is not a database. But SQLite in :memory: is still a database.