MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noosphr | 2025-10-21 09:26:19+00:00
It is hard to find people that can support it in production.

But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language.

The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no one could explain and was driving the cellular network of a tier two city towards failure.
by nness | 2025-10-21 09:26:48+00:00
My guess is that the scraping tools are specialized for web, and creating per-application interfaces isn't cost effective (although you could argue that scraping Wikipedia effectively is definitely worth the effort, but given its all text context with a robust taxonomy/hierarchy, it might be non-issue.)

My other thought is that you don't want a link showing you scraped anything... and faking browser traffic might draw less attention.
by nosianu | 2025-10-21 09:28:36+00:00
> an integerless programming language

Technically true-ish, but deserves an important qualifier. The Javascript number format has a huge "safe space" of integers between

Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER => -9007199254740991 (-(2^53 - 1)) Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER => 9007199254740991 (2^53 – 1)

Also, the number format is a standard, not only used by JS, and given that it was supposed to be a minimal scripting language it is hard to argue against the initial design choice of choosing one all-encompassing big standard, and not burden the language with a complete set. Since he criticism was on the initial design:

> ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language

I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all.

Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is.

For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.
by pllbnk | 2025-10-21 09:29:13+00:00
People overestimate computer vision and other AI capabilities. A few days ago I had a relative struggle to open some fancy cosmetics box. Another relative decided it would be helpful to photograph it and send it to ChatGPT for help. Coincidentally, not that long ago I also heard someone telling about the recent AI advances on the radio and talking how they send photos of things and ChatGPT helps them figure out how to use them instead of reading those boring manuals.

I guess that's what marketing does to the people. But also it doesn't take many failures and broken expectations until those people decide that it's not worth the effort and stop using these tools entirely.
by adwn | 2025-10-21 09:29:59+00:00
> Without memory order guarantees enforced by memory barriers, a write to the boolean in thread A is not guaranteed to be observed by thread B.

No, that's not correct. Memory ordering doesn't influence how fast a write is propagated to other cores, that's what cache coherency is for. Memory ordering of an access only matters in relation to accesses on other memory locations. There's a great introduction to this topic by Mara Bos: https://marabos.nl/atomics/memory-ordering.html
by beAbU | 2025-10-21 09:30:01+00:00
When you buy a really nice power tool or hand tool, it's going to last you a very long time. It will remain fit-for-purpose for decades to come. The cost can often be justified because it's an investment in emotional happiness. It feels nice to use an expensive quality tool, and it feels nicer knowing that you'll be able to continue doing so for many years.

One of these expensive laptops? It's going to be as obsolete as a cheaper laptop in a couple of years' time. Hell, it'll probably start feeling old and slow after the next round of Windows updates in less than a year.
by holowoodman | 2025-10-21 09:30:43+00:00
Radiation damage being cumulative over long periods is an assumption for radiation safety. In reality, it is probably less harmful than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

Edit: For comparison, a chest X-ray is around 0.1mSv, a chest CT at 6.1mSv, so a factor of 61 between (https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray ). Compared to natural exposure (usually 1 to 3mSv/a) however, a chest CT isn't that bad at 2 to 3 years natural dose, 2 polar flights or 1 year of living at higher altitude or Ramsar (https://aerb.gov.in/images/PDF/image/34086353.pdf ). Acute one-time dose damage has been shown above 100mSv, below that there is no damage shown, only statistical extrapolations.

So I'd say that the risk of using a CT right away should be lower than the risk of overlooking a bleed or a clot in an emergency, where time is of the essence and the dance of "let's do an X-ray first..." might kill more patients than the cancers caused by those CTs.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-21 09:33:00+00:00
I got interviewed twice for Google, the first one I made it to the second round of phone calls, the second one only the first phone call.

The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences.

Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way.

I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.
by internet_points | 2025-10-21 09:33:24+00:00
Last I checked, an IDE like Android Studio (based on IDEA) needs to download a hogshead of java before it can even begin to build anything. And if you switch compiler versions, it needs to download even more. Sure it makes installing java as easy as clicking a few buttons, and it'd be great if Emacs made it as easy, but still: it doesn't bundle every version. No one would have the drive space for that. And now consider that emacs has support for not just java/kotlin, but pretty much every programming language in existence..
by radu_floricica | 2025-10-21 09:33:54+00:00
To most of the replies to my comment, the point is that:

- ChatGPT is _satisficing_, not optimal. It's definitely worse than a dedicated decoder tool.

- and it's also much more versatile, so it will be satisficing a large array of tasks.

So in scenarios where precision isn't critical and the stakes are mid, it'll simply become the default tool.

Like googling something instead of checking out wikipedia. Or checking out wikipedia instead of using those mythical primary sources. etc.
by latexr | 2025-10-21 09:34:41+00:00
Read the link and follow the definition. The “figurative”, “for emphasis” usage of literally was officially added to dictionaries, meaning it is official it means that, whether we like it or not. Whenever you tell people they are wrong for that usage of “literally”, you are now the wrong one.

You are advocating for prescriptivism, but descriptivism is a perfectly valid approach to language.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/descriptive-vs-presc...

We all use plenty of words by their “wrong” meaning, because they changed over time and before we were born.
by positron26 | 2025-10-21 09:35:20+00:00
WSL2. While it's a fair criticism, the underlying issue here is that there aren't enough Windows users who program and upstream things for individual users to get support. Lean on the Linux ecosystem and things are fine.

The reason there aren't programmers targeting the large market is a tangent into why I'm building PrizeForge, but the answer now doesn't change.
by em500 | 2025-10-21 09:36:02+00:00
> We use 55% more energy than in 1997? Where is all that going?

Mainly to rapidly developing countries like China and India. Europe and US have decreased fossil fuel consumption a bit, China and India have increased 3 fold.

> I have no problem going back to my 1997 lifestyle and cant point to much explaining this growth.

Approximately nobody in develping countries feels that way.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-10-21 09:36:26+00:00
When I was in high school, I would see the algebra teacher work through expressions and go "ohhh, that makes sense". But when I got back home to work with the homework, I couldn't make the pieces fit.

Isn't that the same? Just because you recognize something someone else wrote and makes you go "ohh, I understand it conceptually" doesn't mean that you can apply that concept in a few days or weeks.

So when the person you responded to says:

>almost overnight *my abilities* and throughput were profoundly increased

I'd argue the throughput did but his abilities really weren't, because without the tool in question you're just as good as before the tool. To truly claim that his abilities were profoundly increased, he has to be able to internalize the pattern, recognize the pattern, and successfully reproduce it across variable contexts.

Another example would be claiming that my painting abilities and throughput were profoundly increased, because I used to draw stick figures and now I can draw Yu-Gi-Oh! cards by using the tool. My throughput was really increased, but my abilities as a painter really haven't.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-21 09:37:15+00:00
> for a child born in the 1950s in high income countries the mortality rate was ~5%. 1 in 20 kids dead before the age of 5.

Essentially all of this was infant mortality, i.e. kids who died before the age of 1, and that in turn was more related to things like sanitation and vaccines and pre-natal screening.
by Duhan | 2025-10-21 09:37:55+00:00
We built Styly, a tool that transforms design prompts into photorealistic interiors in about 30 seconds for 9€ per month. Many users today pay €200/month for 3-minute generation tools — a clear sign of how quickly this new creative market is shifting.

Our data shows a strong trend toward simplicity and speed: people want instant, editable visuals instead of complex pipelines. We’ve shaped Styly around that — fast, unlimited, intuitive.

We’re also working on a book exploring these new creative habits, showing how professionals are adapting their workflow to this new generation of design systems.

Curious how others here see it — are people paying for results, or for the comfort of big platforms?
by suddenlybananas | 2025-10-21 09:38:50+00:00
>A Serbian folk song about Dukljan says that he once removed the Sun from the sky and brought it to the Earth.[1] Saint John managed to trick him and restore the Sun, but afterwards, while chasing him, Dukljan grabbed at him and tore a piece of flesh from John's foot, which explains why humans have arches of the foot.[1]

I don't know, I'm pretty sure this is in the Historia Augusta.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-21 09:39:27+00:00
Absolutely nothing about Tesla makes any sense.

Musk's proposed pay is just the start. The market cap and P/E (over 250) are equally outlandish.

Tesla stock is priced as if it is the largest auto manufacturer, the biggest robotaxi service and the leading robot company and AI service provider.

The problem is, absolutely none of that is even close to being true.
by exDM69 | 2025-10-21 09:39:48+00:00
> To kill the thread, set the stop flag and cond_signal the condvar

This is a race condition. When you "spin" on a condition variable, the stop flag you check must be guarded by the same mutex you give to cond_wait.

See this article for a thorough explanation:

https://zeux.io/2024/03/23/condvars-atomic/
Show HN: Multi-Agent AI with OpenAI Agents SDK (Analysts → Statisticians)
by antonellof | 2025-10-21 09:41:08+00:00
Built a multi-agent research system with OpenAI Agents SDK where specialized AI agents collaborate autonomously:

Master Orchestrator → Data Analyst → Statistician → Report Writer

Each agent has specific expertise. The orchestrator delegates tasks. All agents can execute code securely to solve problems.

Example workflow: "Analyze e-commerce data" - Data Analyst: writes Python to load/clean data, spots trends - Statistician: performs significance tests, calculates growth rates - Report Writer: synthesizes findings into executive summary

This demonstrates OpenAI Agents SDK's handoff system + autonomous code execution working together. One of 6 examples including a stock analyst with ML predictions, interactive coding assistant, and data viz pipelines.

GitHub: https://github.com/Cognitora/Integration-Example-OpenAI-Agen...
by cyberax | 2025-10-21 09:41:28+00:00
But you can run TWO identity centers in different regions for the price of one(1)! IAM IDC is just a regular application hosted on the AWS infrastructure, it really has nothing special.

The hindsight is 20/20, of course, it's a good practice to audit CloudTrail periodically for unexpected regional dependencies.

(1) offer void for services that run on AWS.
by antonvs | 2025-10-21 09:41:56+00:00
Every single time I’ve installed anything with snap I’ve regretted it. It causes all sorts of annoying issues, including e.g. preventing integration between apps because of its supposed security model. This is typical of consumer operating systems, like Windows, but not what should be encouraged on Linux.

On top of that, Canonical is pushing snap very hard. Try to uninstall the Firefox snap - e.g. because it doesn’t integrate well with password managers - and install it using apt from the Mozilla repo. Ubuntu will later just silently replace it back with the snap version.

I’m about to switch away from Ubuntu as a result of this.
by peterpuzzle | 2025-10-21 09:42:28+00:00
Creator here. No, you can arrange the puzzle pieces to make dates that don't exist, like Monday February 31. Actually there may be "impossible" dates, because I didn't check for them, but I guess all combinations of days of the week, day of the month and month are possible. And also many non-dates, like 1, 2, 3. But good point: alle possible dates have at least 1 solution. Disclaimer: I sell these puzzles for a little more than the raw material.
by apexalpha | 2025-10-21 09:43:29+00:00
>A decade after a landmark study proved that feeding peanut products to young babies could prevent development of life-threatening allergies, new research finds the change has made a big difference in the real world.

I am sorry, but am I going crazy?

We have been giving infants small amounts of peanut butter, egg etc... for decades where I live. But also let them play outside, get dirty put stuff in their mouths to train the immune system.

This is common knowledge to me.
by HelloNurse | 2025-10-21 09:44:13+00:00
It's the most plausible, fact-based guess, beating other competing theories.

Understaffing and absences would clearly lead to delayed incident response, but such an obvious negligence and breach of contract would have been avoided by a responsible cloud provider, ensuring supposedly adequate people on duty.

An exceptionally challenging problem is unlikely to be enough to cause so much fumbling because, regardless of the complex mistakes behind it, a DNS misunderstanding doesn't have a particularly large "surface area" for diagnostic purposes and it is supposed to be expeditely resolvable by standard means (ordering clients to switch to a good DNS server and immediately use it to obtain good addresses) that AWS should have in place.

AWS engineers being formerly competent but currently stupid, without organizational issues, might be explained by brain damage. "RTO" might have caused collective chronic poisoning, e.g. lead in drinking water, but I doubt Amazon is so cheap.
by x______________ | 2025-10-21 09:45:24+00:00
Normal conversations by topic enthusiasts usually have fun stuff hidden in their profiles and at times lead to fun rabbit holes where you endlessly learn and somehow, forgot that you were initially browsing HN.

Agree about the public discussion part, one of the reasons why I'm here lately.

Also, why can't someone create Startup News: Where every article reply is an opportunity to be sold a service, SN would take a cut of transactions. /s
by jraph | 2025-10-21 09:47:36+00:00
That's a slow process and you need someone to do the packaging, either yourself or a volunteer, and this for each distro. Which is not trivial to master and requires time. The "new" qualifier in the parent comment is key here.

Open build service [1] / openSUSE Build Service [2] might help a bit there though, providing a tool to automate packaging for different distributions.

[1] https://openbuildservice.org/

[2] https://build.opensuse.org/
by taubek | 2025-10-21 09:49:48+00:00
But if you are user because of Path A, and startup midway decided to go on Path B what is your future? What if pivot isn't working for you as user?

I get it that if you are paying user you have some support or what ever.

The reason that I'm asking is this: how to justify the trust in some new technology devolved by startup? How can I convince decision makers that this is the way to go when 1 in 10 startups fail.
by spoiler | 2025-10-21 09:50:15+00:00
My experience is that if I know what I want, CC will produce better code, given I specify it correctly. The planning mode is great for this too, as we can "brainstorm" and what I have seen help a lot is if I ask questions about why it did a certain way. Often it'll figure out on its own why that's wrong, but sometimes it requires a bit of course correction.

On the other hand, last time I tried GPT-5 from Cursor, it was so disappointing. It kept getting confused while we were iterating on a plan, and I had to explain to it multiple times that it's thinking about the problem the same way. After a while I gave up, opened a new chat and gave it my own summary of the conversation (with the wrong parts removed) and then it worked fine. Maybe my initial prompt was vague, but it continually seemed to forget course corrections in that chat.

I mostly tend to use them more to save me from typing, rather than asking it to design things. Occasionally we do a more open ended discussion, but those have great variance. It seems to do better with such discussions online than within the coding tool (I've bounced maths/implementation ideas off of while writing shaders on a personal project)
by constantcrying | 2025-10-21 09:50:27+00:00
>Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.

Which is always a combination of many factors.

I do not believe that you can market performance to anyone but a niche audience. The metrics are often difficult to comprehend and do not mean much. The one industry which does this is gaming and they usually do not go above giving specs at which a certain graphics quality at a certain frame rate is achievable.

I do not see how e.g. productivity software could be marketed like this. Except for unverifiable claims about "good performance".

To be honest, I do not think most users even care. They are annoyed at it, sure, but they will use what they have always used.
by animal531 | 2025-10-21 09:51:20+00:00
Yeah, doing some googling it seems that if you for example glue two together in a NS-SN type fashion that they would either turn into a single magnet as you are describing, or if its unstable then the two fields will demagnetize each other over some time.

But having said that, there's probably a few openings for research in there where you can experiment with different field/magnet shapes, sizes and counts.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-21 09:52:42+00:00
> If you predicted next week's lottery numbers, I'd be very suspicious if you didn't buy a ticket

But that is not what is happening here, is it?

If you were able to predict a lotto number that has a high probability of appearing within the next 24 months, but each ticket cost $2000 to buy, would you still be suspicious?

I find that the people of the opinion "If you think this is a bubble, why aren't you shorting it" don't really have much of a grounding in statistics, especially with regard to EV.

I also find it odd that so many people saying "Why don't you short it" have never heard "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
by peterpuzzle | 2025-10-21 09:54:48+00:00
Learn to write effective unit tests using Test-Driven Development and Mutation Testing.

This game is written by me, a developer who wants better software. Good software is at least thoroughly tested by the developers. Testing software is a skill and this game helps you learn just that.

I am also a computer science professor at a university of applied sciences and I see many students and (junior) developers struggle with the concept of unit testing and writing enough (more then 1) and effective tests per unit (function). The game teaches them Boundary Value Analysis without mentioning it.

I am open for constructive feedback.
by pietz | 2025-10-21 09:55:32+00:00
My biggest RAG learning is to use agentic RAG. (Sorry for buzzword dropping)

- Classic RAG: `User -> Search -> LLM -> User`

- Agentic RAG: `User <-> LLM <-> Search`

Essentially instead of having a fixed loop, you provide the search as a tool to the LLM, which does three things:

- The LLM can search multiple times

- The LLM can adjust the search query

- The LLM can use multiple tools

The combination of these three things has solved a majority of classic RAG problems. It improves user queries, it can map abbreviations, it can correct bad results on its own, you can also let it list directories and load files directly.
by duskdozer | 2025-10-21 09:55:38+00:00
Exposure to microbes and potential allergens relevant to the hygiene hypothesis doesn't seem likely to have changed very much - it's not like people started keeping their babies in sterile bubbles. While lots of wishful thinkers jumped on the concept in recent years, the hygiene hypothesis doesn't apply to disease-causing pathogens like COVID or the flu. But yes, will be something to pay attention to, considering the massive volume of COVID infections and COVID's negative effects on the immune system.
by dspillett | 2025-10-21 09:55:56+00:00
> Dang & co, this is a bug, it should be fixed.

Agreed, more or less, this would be easy to work around naively. Though an duplicate detection should not block reposts based on removing the anchor nor should the anchor portion automatically be removed generally. Some sites unnecessarily setup as SPAs use the anchor portion for context so it is needed for direct links to the right article in those¹, and going directly to a specific section in a long page can also be useful.

> nice karma trick posting the URL with the anchor to bypass the HN duplicates detector.

Karma jealously is as unbecoming as karma whoring, so perhaps wind the ol' neck in a little there. Laziness/ineptitude is more common than malice and this could have been accidental via quick copy+paste.

A better way to respond in this situation is a more neutral “Already recently discussed at [link]”, as had been done some hours before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45646691#45647047

----

[1] Yes, those sites are badly designed, but they are unlikely to change because of our technical preferences and breaking the ability to deep link into them would add an issue for HN while not being noticed by those sites at all.
by jankovicsandras | 2025-10-21 09:56:07+00:00
"It's also possible to do it on top of other DBs like Postgres, but takes more effort."

Shameless plug: plpgsql_bm25: BM25 search implemented in PL/pgSQL (The Unlicense / PUBLIC DOMAIN)

https://github.com/jankovicsandras/plpgsql_bm25

There's an example Postgres_hybrid_search_RRF.ipynb in the repo which shows hybrid search with Reciprocal Rank Fusion ( plpgsql_bm25 + pgvector ).