MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-24 13:54:59+00:00
I think the misconception here is that studying computer science prepares you for a career as a software engineer. It helps but there are a lot of blind spots in the curriculum that boil down to the notion that academics don't really tend to have engineering backgrounds. The fix isn’t stuffing the curriculum with pet topics, because the list of useful ones is practically endless. And it would get outdated soon anyway.

I actually did a phd in the topic of software engineering and I had to learn a lot of stuff after I started practicing what I preached. I realized that this was the case while I was working on my thesis and it was a big reason for me to get some hands on experience.

Basically, academics tend to have a lot of somewhat naive notions about software engineering that usually manifest in them waffling about things like waterfall style development or emphasizing things like formal methods, which in 30 years of practice, I've rarely encountered in the wild.

That doesn't mean teaching that is a waste of time. But it does mean that there's more to software engineering than is taught in universities. You can't really learn most of that from someone that hasn't been exposed to real life software engineering. Most academics never leave university so they are not necessarily that up to speed with modern practices.

Teaching in most engineering disciplines boils down to a lot of theory followed by apprenticeships. The theory doesn't evolve nearly as fast as practice and tools. That's why it's fine using somewhat outdated or academic languages and tools in university. I don't think that's unique to computer science either.

Studying computer science gives you a theoretical basis and the ability to learn. Which is nice and relevant. But I actually know a lot of software engineers that studied completely different topics (theoretical physics, philosophy, mathematics, geology, etc.) that do fine without it. A few years of working can compensate for that. Having an academic background prepares people to wrap their heads around complex new stuff. Getting a degree basically means "you have a working brain". The most important skill you learn in university is using your brain.

I don't care what language people use in university. But I'd prefer people to have been exposed to more things than just 1 language and knowing that there are multiple ways to do the same thing. I did logic, functional, and imperative programming in my first year. OO was kind of hot and newish but that was a second year topic. I later studied aspect oriented programming as well (there are several flavors of that) and a few offshoots of object oriented (prototype based, role based). Many javascript programmers may have never heard of the language Self. But that's one of the the languages that inspired Brandan Eich; it's a prototype based OO language (no classes, just prototype objects). That's the difference between a good engineer and one with a decent computer science background. You don't need to know that to use Javascript. But it helps.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-24 13:55:14+00:00
I think there's an unevaluated tension in goals between keeping users safe from malware here and making it easy for new sites to reach people, regardless of whether those sites display patterns consistent with malware distributors.

I don't think we can easily discard the first in favor of the second. Not nearly as categorically as is done here. Those "false negatives" mean users lose things (bank accounts, privacy, access to their computer) through no fault of their own. We should pause and consider that before weeping and rending our garments that yet another hosting provider solution had a bad day.

You've stopped considering monopoly and correctly considered that the real issue is safe browsing, as a feature, is useful to users and disruptive to new business models. But that's independent of Google; that's the nature of sharing a network between actors that want to provide useful services to people and actors that want to cause harm. If I build a browser today, from scratch, that included safe browsing we'd be in the same place and there'd be no Google in the story.
by IT4MD | 2025-10-24 13:55:26+00:00
Most criminals have a specific type of cleverness, but not intelligence. If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.

I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for. The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far.

Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds.

The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH.

They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went.

Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.
by codyb | 2025-10-24 13:55:30+00:00
That is _nuts_ that the basketball season is longer than the MLB season. I never would have guessed that.

Let's go Jays! Looking forward to this World Series.

Also not a fan of the constant inundation with gambling ads even if they have literally no interest to me. Just seems like a net negative for a society that realized cigarette ads are bad, but can't seem to figure that out for alcohol or gambling.

At least the public education campaigns have started earlier, I definitely see ads talking about where to get help if you're having an issue fairly frequently.
by empath75 | 2025-10-24 13:56:32+00:00
> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do.

You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most.

People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-24 13:56:44+00:00
> > > It’s pretty dreadful on iOS, presumably due to OS constraints. I miss how amazing it was on Android

> > Then why use iOS?

> I don't need software freedom preached to me, thanks

...and we don't need to hear kvetching about self-inflicted punishment. If it was 'amazing' on Android and is 'dreadful' on iOS the solution seems clear.

> Suffice it to say: at the time I bought this iPhone 12 mini, there weren't really good options when prioritizing {small form factor,good privacy posture,good security posture,software freedom}.

Who cares about privacy and security postures? I'd rather have real privacy and security, never mind any posturing done by vendors whom have shown not to be trustworthy anyway.

Mentioning something iOS together with software freedom is as oxymoronic as it gets. There is no software freedom on iOS, you accept what you're offered and say thank you Sir may I have another [1]. Complaining about these well-known restrictions while passive-aggressively defending your choice does not make any sense.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdFLPn30dvQ
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-24 13:56:57+00:00
> userspace doesn’t get a signal from the OS to know when there’s system wide memory pressure

Memory pressure indicators exist, https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html

> have some way to have a shared data structure where you are told if it’s still resident and can lock it from being paged out.

What's more efficient than fetching data and comparing it with zero? Any write within the range will then cancel the MADV_FREE property on the written-to page thus "locking" it again, and this is also very efficient.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-24 13:58:17+00:00
> - high likelihood you lose money

When I play games like this, I don't bet more than I can afford to lose - and paying $20 to sit at a table with friends playing poker is actually cheaper than going out to a bar with them.

> - the point of the game is to lie to friends and strangers

Are there any games with hidden information that you find interesting? Or any competitive games at all? Things like Werewolf, or Go Fish, or Settlers of Catan? For that matter, even in a game without hidden information, like chess, you're still trying to outwit your opponents.

> - you're stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours

I mean, you can leave if you're not having fun.

> - the only victory condition is that you take money from other people

But you also spend time with friends.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-24 13:58:33+00:00
Yeah, it does seem unfair. However, it's important to note that you must have these controls, and Binance didn't. The effectiveness of these controls is not the point (sadly).

This is a super, super low bar. One can meet the BSA requirements by sending every transaction to the regulators, but Binance didn't even do that.
by rustdebacletime | 2025-10-24 13:58:43+00:00
> That's not what you asked though, these were intentional breakages. Language standard or not.

You are completely wrong, and you ought to be able to see that already.

It makes a world of difference if it is a language change or not. As shown in dtolnay's comment https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/127343#issuecomment... .

If breakage is not due to a language change, and the program is fully compliant with the standard, and there is no issue in the standard, then the compiler has a bug and must fix that bug.

If breakage is due to a language change, then even if a program is fully compliant with the previous language version, and the programmer did nothing wrong, then the program is still the one that has a bug. In many language communities, language changes are therefore handled with care and changing the language version is generally set up to be a deliberate action, at least if there would be breakage in backwards compatibility.

I do not see how it would be possible for you not to know that I am completely right about this and that you are completely wrong. For there is absolutely no doubt that that is the case.

> In any case though, bringing up language specification as an example for maturity is such a massive cop-out considering the amount of UB in C and C++.

Rust is worse when unsafe is involved.

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...
by fjfaase | 2025-10-24 13:59:08+00:00
I am not using AI tools for code generation. I have only used it for 'querying' information, for example, when I started to work with Device Trees and Yocto for embedded Linux development. I am happy with IntelliSense. Yes, AI tools can very quickly generate some simple app, but I do not believe it will work for more complex problems.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-10-24 13:59:22+00:00
In the summer of 1981, I was a high school student who had been programming in BASIC for three years. I got a summer job at a company to write some utility programs in BASIC on an Apple II.

One program tracked all the land leasing they did, including location, date of expiration, number of square feet, cost/sqft. Once that was done I did some other programs. I went off to college and brought the program listings (in dot matrix greenbar paper) with me. Oh, I was paid $5/hour, which I just looked up would be $17.81/hour now. Then again, I burned up $5 gas and two hours of driving a day, and $5 at the cafeteria.

Every so often I'd get a call from the guy who used the program asking for a fix or enhancement. He didn't know how to program, and I didn't have a computer, so I'd just dictate "between lines 1280 and 1290, type "1291 IF F2 < 100 THEN 1320:F2=B2+1" or whatever.

I went back to the same job the next summer and they had visicalc. I wrote everything as visicalc spreadsheets on the same Apple II, and taught the user how it all worked. It took 10% of the time and I never got calls again -- the user could figure out how to tweak things.

The main problem was the Apple II could only produce 40 columns of text, which really sucked. You could buy a card which could put out 80x24 but for some reason they didn't want to spend the money even though it seemed like it would have paid for itself in faster navigation.
by throwaway290 | 2025-10-24 13:59:32+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest

> By definition, a "conflict of interest" occurs if, within a particular decision-making context, an individual is subject to two coexisting interests that are in direct conflict with each other ("competing interests"). This is important because under these circumstances, the decision-making process can be disrupted or compromised, affecting the integrity or reliability of the outcomes.

The decision is what to write on HN and integrity is compromised if "writing truth" is in conflict with "get richer" which can happen if you invest in a sus biz.

We can pretend you are the rare exception that speaks the truth even if it means you go broke but even then it just proves the rule
by tom_m | 2025-10-24 13:59:39+00:00
Nah, they don't look at the data. They just try random things and see what works. That's why there's now the whole skills thing. They are all just variations of ideas to manage context basically.

LLMs are very simply text in and text out. Unless the providers begin to expand into other areas, there's only so much they can do other than simply focus on training better models.

In fact, if they begin to slow down or stop training new models and put focus elsewhere, it could be a sign that they are plateauing with their models. They will reach that point some day after all.
by btilly | 2025-10-24 13:59:46+00:00
The trick isn't winning when the celebrity is at the table, it is in getting the celebrity to the table, then keepong the victim there.

It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim.

By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.
by unregistereddev | 2025-10-24 13:59:52+00:00
In some orgs the move to the cloud was driven by accountants. In my org it was driven by lawyers. With GDPR on the horizon and murmurs of other data privacy laws that might (but didn't) require data to be stored in that customer's jurisdiction, we needed to host in additional regions.

We had a couple rather large datacenters, but both were in the US. The only infrastructure we had in the EU was one small server closet. We had no hosting capacity in Brazil, China, etc. Multi-region availability drove us to the cloud - just not in the "high availability" sense of the term.
by duxup | 2025-10-24 14:00:04+00:00
I'm going to tread close to generalizations here, but this is my experience and so obviously is limited:

I hadn't had much direct experience working with Indian emigrants to the US until a valley company acquired my employer who was located in the midwest. My experience before that was working with some random outsourcing companies, those experiences were very poor, at best.

So I was surprised how easy it was working with the team I ended up working with, they were very capable, responsible, and I found I could trust them. In fact they seemed to prefer working with those of us in the midwest vs their valley counterparts (there was some tension there for a variety of reasons, some I suspect I wasn't aware of).

I had assumed there would be cultural kinda issues to overcome / learn and understand, but I honestly found the Indian immigrants to the US easier to work with than some European teams I worked with.

I don't know what the dynamic is, maybe just what the article describes years of folks going to work in the US provides everyone with enough background to work well together, but it was certainly a positive experience.
by armonster | 2025-10-24 14:00:20+00:00
But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.
Show HN: Nano-Banana AI Art – Curated multilingual prompts with examples
by sagibo | 2025-10-24 14:00:45+00:00
I built a curated library of AI art prompts that fully supports multiple languages. Each prompt links to a real output/example, with categories like portraits, fantasy, comics, products, landscapes, and storytelling.

Why I built it: - Tired of repetitive, low-signal prompt dumps - Wanted language-inclusive prompts (not only English) - Each prompt paired with actual result for quality gauge

What's inside: - Curated prompt vault for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more - Multilingual support + local cultural twists - All open, free, no sign-up

Happy to hear feedback: missing categories, UX, prompt quality, speed, anything.
by ssharp | 2025-10-24 14:01:17+00:00
Where I live, bald-faced hornets and yellowjackets are very aggressive. Yellowjackets will also build nests inside of structures, in the ground, etc. where it's sometimes very difficult to even know they are there until it's too late.

This is much different than honey bees and other types of wasps who are much less likely to attack just by being near them.
by codazoda | 2025-10-24 14:01:25+00:00
I first wrote these instructions as reminders for myself. But, I do use AI in my daily work, and parts of this document are certainly touched by it. The instructions may even read that way because I'm getting used to talking to AI that way. One of them, in particular, was copy/pasted after asking an AI to use the `magick` command instead of `convert`. Then, I pasted it into this list so that I'd remember to continue the pattern through the guide.
Show HN: Visualizing Dithering
by damarberlari | 2025-10-24 14:01:42+00:00
Hi all, I've started a blog at https://visualrambling.space/ where I document my learnings on various topics in a visual format.

The latest topic I explored is about dithering, and in this latest post I tried to visualize the mechanism behind it. This is only the first part out of three, so it only cover the basics. (I’m still working on the next 2 parts).

Feel free to visit, and let me know what you think!
by sjxjxbx | 2025-10-24 14:01:53+00:00
I am proposing a new model, yes. I’d like to see a pro American billionaire doing what’s good for the people instead of what’s maximally profitable. They could leverage profit in other areas to finance an unprofitable (but morally correct) business.

Long term a regime change is needed because you will lose to immoral competitors, but it’s the only fight worth fighting.

I also realize Sam Altman is a sociopath who would never do this.
by wchswchs | 2025-10-24 14:02:27+00:00
The remarkable successes of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) have been largely driven by empiricism, but the lack of a solid theoretical foundation has produced deep crises in interpretability, safety, and generalization. This paper proposes a new mathematical framework called ”Dynamic Geometry,” aimed at establishing a rigorous axiomatic basis for AI. The framework reconceptualizes AI systems as parameter-driven multilayer families of holistic operators on Banach spaces, whose core dynamics are determined by the evolution of operator spectra — the so-called ”spectral flow.” By formalizing representation learning as spectral projection, relating interpretability to algebraic-topological invariants (such as Ktheory and cyclic homology), linking the realization of “infinite context” with Lyapunov stability of long-time evolution and tying safety (e.g., hallucination control) to verifiable mathematical evidence, Dynamic Geometry provides a fundamental path to constructing provable, robust, and general AI systems. We prove that this framework can encompass any finite-parameter deep learning model in terms of expressive power, and through an analysis based on spectral stability we reveal conditional advantages in its generalization behavior. Dynamic Geometry not only offers a unified theoretical framework to address the current crises in AI, but may also open a new era of next-generation AI driven by first principles and rigorously defined mathematics.
by genuineresponse | 2025-10-24 14:02:33+00:00
Wasps in a high traffic area are definitely bad, but if the nest is somewhere not too in the way I'd encourage folks to leave it be. Wasps are predators, and they eat a lot of the bugs that damage gardens. Yes, they are also assholes, do you have to strike a balance, but they can be really beneficial.

Obviously, if you've got young kids around or the wasps are being aggressive, take care of the humans first, but understanding them a bit can really reduce the conflict with them.
by manacit | 2025-10-24 14:02:33+00:00
I wouldn't say it's closing to completion - it looks like it's in the very early stages development according to their repo. I don't see any evidence they've gotten as far as even running a single query through it.

Even when it's done, it's going to be a lot of work to run. sure, it's not guaranteed to be hard, but if it's not your core business and you're making money, having someone else do it gives you time to focus on what matters.
by mfsch | 2025-10-24 14:02:34+00:00
If you are just creating a simple document with default styling, the main advantage you get from Typst is near-instant compilation speed. Pandoc to HTML is similar though, but if you’re generating PDFs with LaTeX the compilation delays can be pretty annoying.

If you are creating more complex documents, the advantages become more pronounced. Styling in Pandoc means modifying templates, at which point you’re just writing LaTeX, and styling in Typst is much nicer than in LaTeX. You can also hit the limits of Pandoc templates quite easily, at which point you have to write Lua filters. I have found those to be quite cumbersome, and now your document logic is spread out over the Markdown source file, the LaTeX template, and the Lua filters. In Typst you can have a single file with your whole document in a clean modern format, and you can decide for yourself how much you want to separate content and presentation.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-24 14:02:38+00:00
>PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or less?) maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in PanDoc

Which is bad if you want a complex document, since the intermediate representation of pandoc can not represent all typst features.

Also, I do not understand what your argument is. Pandoc and typst are not competing, they are different pieces of software with different goals. Pandocs markdown is also not competing with typst, since they are completely different ways to define a document. Typst is vastly more complex, it even includes its own scripting language. Pandoc also doesn't output PDF, except by calling some external tool, which then compiles a pandoc output format to HTML. It is fundamentally different to typst.