MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-10-01 12:21:04+00:00
> AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.

The computers is a very dumb machine. It does exactly what you tell it to do and nothing else. Complexity in programming stems from the need to formalize things and specifying every single detail of the algorithms.

Using AI can give you patterns for the most common things, but everything common is likely to be soon a library or a framework. So what you're instead doing is reinvent the wheel, but differently and the result is likely broken. Good enough for short runs (scripts), but anywhere you want something to last, then the cracks will start to appear.

The things with photography is that it's a spectrum. But software is discrete. It either works or it doesn't.
by jorangreef | 2025-10-01 12:21:42+00:00
Joran from TigerBeetle here!

Yes, this is by design. SQL is a great general purpose query language for read-heavy variable-length string workloads, but TigerBeetle optimizes for write-heavy transaction processing workloads (essentially debit/credit with fixed-size integers) and specifically with power law contention, which kills SQL row locks.

I spoke about this specific design decision in depth at Systems Distributed this year:

1000x - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yKgfk8lTQuE
by mallowdram | 2025-10-01 12:21:54+00:00
It's largely irrelevant in terms of intelligence. What you're describing is throwing out 2-D topological integrations (what we do to achieve optic flow ultra fast reaction times in motion), vicarious trial and error, and brute force imposing a machine wax fruit of motion dexterity. It's simply not analog to events the way we experience, it's been cooked up in cog-sci as imitation, but it's not even that. The more we understand the brain's architecture and process, the less relevant this gets, as it's not for legitimate long-term bio ware. There are no world models, the idea is oxymoronic as the topological bypasses this in scale invariance. It's all a dead end this binary, since eventually, analog will rule this with minimal energy and software and use an entirely different software. Think of any arriving too early industry, AI is irrelevant, the first step was reinventing software. It took the least efficient compute principle and drove it to irrelevance using machine vision as an endgame. The lack of redundancies is the tell.
by spuwho | 2025-10-01 12:22:01+00:00
While McDonnell Douglas seems to be the whipping boy for Boeing Commercial Aircraft (BCA) problems, many of the business decisions actually predate the merger. As a college student in 1988, a BCA executive was invited to speak in our capstone class about Boeing plans for the future. The executive spoke about their extensive outsourcing strategy. Where Boeing would still design the platform, but suppliers would be required to design/build to spec. This distribution of work was supposed to drive out the vertical costs of design/build inside Boeing. The 777 was at the time in testing out at Moses Lake and nearing release. The reaction in the class was somewhat of a shock. Boeing was essentially "giving away" their book on how to make an airplane (a quality one) and turning it over to all of these suppliers with a mandate to do it more cheaply. The Boeing exec was quite pleased with how much money this was going to save the company as they became only the prime assembly point, with essential components coming in JIT mode from around the world. Students were quick to challenge him during the Q&A asking how they were going to maintain quality by so much outsourcing, he stated that there would be contractual requirements and inspections to make sure the components met the spec. McDonnell Douglas business methods are not above it either as they too were looking to outsource MD-9x parts production overseas before they were bought out by Boeing. Their effort to partner with Airbus to build a super-jumbo by fusing certain MD-11 design elements (MD-12) is no secret.

So in summary, let me state for the record that Boeing's redirection into outsourced suppliers and engineering was moving forward by 1988. Well before the merger with MCD.
by justinclift | 2025-10-01 12:23:41+00:00
> In less than a decade, the world has become at least three orders of magnitude more transactional. And yet the SQL databases we still use to power this are 20-30 years old. Can they hold up?

Errr yes. Without much sweat really.

Just because something started ~30 years ago doesn't mean it hasn't updated with the times, and doesn't mean it was built on bad foundations.
by DocTomoe | 2025-10-01 12:24:24+00:00
> Passengers rarely know what type they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it over price even less.

Virtually every booking page gives you that information during booking, and I (and several of my friends) actively avoid any flight that has a MAX operating it, to the point that we'd rather fly longer and/or more expensive alternative routes operated with other models.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-01 12:24:27+00:00
> Out in the real world, the thing that all programming languages are actually built on top of looks much more like a Turing machine than a collection of composed anonymous functions.

Hardware logic as described in a HDL language is precisely a collection of "composed anonymous functions", including higher-order functions which are encoded as "instructions" or "control signals". We even build stateful logic from the ground up by tying these functions together in a "knot", with the statefulness being the outcome of feedback.
Fast, Secure, Language-Agnostic Policy Engine Using WASM
by javirln | 2025-10-01 12:24:40+00:00
I’ve been diving deep into the intersection of Wasm and Policy-as-Code, and I’m excited to share some of those thoughts in the blog post.

The big idea: policies shouldn’t be locked into a single DSL. With WebAssembly, we can bring speed, security, and flexibility to policy evaluation—letting developers write policies in the languages they already know (Go, Rust, TypeScript, and more).

It’s a step toward making DevSecOps more practical and developer-friendly. Would love your thoughts!

Red about it at: https://chainloop.dev/blog/introducing-webassembly-policy-engines

Best :)
Show HN: We built a modern research paper reader
by weyxie | 2025-10-01 12:24:45+00:00
Over the past year, we’ve been frustrated with how clunky it is to manage research papers. So we built Ontosyn, a modern research paper reader, with clean ui, better in paper navigation (bookmarks, jumping back up after clicking on a reference), an integrated ai chat with useful tools such as recommending relevant papers that you can directly add to your library, and, of course, library functionality to keep everything organized.

We launched a closed alpha last week, and our first users are quite pleased with it. One user asked for author-based search for paper recommendations yesterday, and we shipped it within an hour.

Our goal is to make it easy to stay up to date with relevant research and enjoy engaging with it.

We have lots of cool features planned, we’re still very early, and we’d love to iterate with feedback from the HN community.

You can try it at ontosyn.com
by graemep | 2025-10-01 12:24:56+00:00
its more complex than that. There are many agreements you can make younger than that. Kids can, for example, buy services such as transport (e.g. the monthly bus tickets my daughter bought at 18) that are subject to legally binding agreements. They can buy things in general, on and offline. You can enter into employment contracts in general at 16, and for some limited exceptions even younger.
Show HN: Play snake on your razer keybard on Linux
by lightofshadow | 2025-10-01 12:25:26+00:00
I have built this Python script that uses OpenRazer drivers to play a game of Snake on a user's keyboard. I have only tested it on my Razer Ornata Chroma. If anyone tries it on other keyboards, feel free to reach out to report any problems or compatibility issues.
by tensor_ninja | 2025-10-01 12:25:29+00:00
Hi HN, working on a project called TwigBush with a few security nerds. It’s an implementation of GNAP (RFC 9635) written in go. It provides dynamic, key bound, short lived tokens to AI Agents for accessing protected resources. For those interested here’s a recorded talk I gave last night at Lightning AI MCP meetup. https://youtu.be/8ufF0CK9I5A?si=spr-MANYjpDNDr-X
by SkyBelow | 2025-10-01 12:25:32+00:00
One path that might help you work out your own personal justifications is to find two forms of entertainment you enjoy at near equal levels, but where one you view as valuable and another as a waste. Then look at how both impact your life and see if you can identify what makes one valuable and the other a waste. This not only gives you a good inside view of what is happening with both forms of entertainment, but removes any bias to see your own version as superior because both forms of entertainment belong to you.

I did this, found two things I did for fun, both consuming significant blocks of time. The one that felt useless left not real impact. I want to do more of it, but after spending hours on it, I'm no different than I was before (other than perhaps a bit more skilled at the form of entertainment).

The other form, which was the same thing from an outside perspective (for example, my parents would see them as the same) left me different. It led to me building new goals, reevaluating things happening around me, spend more time thinking about where I'll be in 10/20 years. It led to me walking an hour a day and to start jogging some to build my endurance, despite the form of entertainment being unrelated to physical activity. I don't think this is innately a property of one entertainment form over another, but more about my personal relationship to entertainment.

Using this, how do 'poorly regarded' entertainment impact those engaging in it, compared to 'well regarded' entertainment? Are their lives better for it?
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-01 12:25:35+00:00
> include something like a TXT record

The people writing these laws don't know about DNS.

This isn't really relevant because what is considered "suitable for under 18s" varies wildly per country. Some countries ban rainbow flags, others will happily sell alcohol to 16-year-olds. Plus, 99.99% of websites don't care about this and will be blocked by default if you block the "unknown" category. Grandma isn't going to call their ISP and ask to unblock pornography because the American knitting forum she's on doesn't know how to add TXT records.

Technical solutions don't solve political problems.

> The majority of the big ISPs would likely block the "over 18" category by default.

Existing UK legislation already requires them to do that.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-10-01 12:25:36+00:00
The Continental Congress was famously held in secret. A small number of wealthy aristocrats waged war on their home country without the consent of the people they were governing.

I don’t remember the powhatan or Lenape (Virginia-MD-PA tribes that were exterminated in order to build the core of the US trade and political networks) being consulted on any of this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powhatan
by timschmidt | 2025-10-01 12:25:40+00:00
What makes you think that selective breeding results in a less targeted therapeutic than synthetics?

Reportedly, pure THC as administered to cancer patients to treat nausea results in much less favorable results than the compounds naturally produced by plants selectively bred for the purpose.

This is why I pointed to the tight feedback loop between plant and grower. Evolution, coupled with a good fitness function, outperforms most other methods available to us on hard problems. Targeting specific receptors for therapeutic benefit certainly qualifies as one.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-01 12:26:55+00:00
>I disagree with the implication in your comment that we are in uniquely lost times.

It's not unique, but it the situation is much more dire.

>I think FOSS was under much, much more threat in the Microsoft and proprietary software times than it is now.

I disagree. FOSS's appeal is exactly in how it's there for everyone. no proprietary software can change that. And we've seen over the decades that throwing billions at the problem doesn't make something billions of times better.

Today? You share info and your content might be scraped into submission. You get bombarded by spam and bad faith actors to a point where moderation is now a forefront of how to approach a release, and not just a little thing to do a few minutes a day. Finding a commuity to share your project with is harder than ever as everyone is trying to push their own (often paid) idea out with much more vigor. And of course, less peopel can even afford to contribute to begin with.

These aren't just "vibes". It's genuinely more difficult to navigate this space these days. Unless you submit to some centralized serviceto take care of that for you.

>Mature conversations need to accept reality to move forward.

Mature conversations also realize there is no "single" reality. But a variety of perspectives, viewpoints, and opinions. Sure, some people are genuinely better off abandoning FOSS and sustaiing themselves on selling software. That doesn't necessarily justify everyone abandoning FOSS, though.
by myrmidon | 2025-10-01 12:27:30+00:00
This is a good point.

It seems to me that Russia could've easily kept pretending to be a slightly flawed democracy, and it would've been super effective in hoodwinking "the west", but they "blew it" with obvious assassinations even before the Ukraine war.

This raises the question: Why would you ever admit to be totalitarian or a dictator if you have to deal (economically/diplomatically) with softhearted democracies which really hate that?

I think the answer is that just lying about this (to improve your reputation abroad) by itself hurts your local power base. Every signal in that direction undermines that image of strength that dictators rely on to keep in control, and no dictator can stay in power "against" the population because all the instruments to exert that power (prison/murder/army) rely themselves on (parts) of that population.
by sjw987 | 2025-10-01 12:27:32+00:00
About a year ago I switched my news reading habits.

Now I just read the news on a Sunday (unless I'm doing something much more exciting). For the remainder of the week I don't read the news at all. It's the way my grandad used to read the news when he was a farmer.

I've found it to be a convenient format. It let's you stay informed, while it gives enough of a gap for news stories to develop and mature (unless they happen the day before). There's less speculation and rumours, and more established details, and it has reduced my day-to-day stress.

Annoyingly I still hear news from people around me, but I try to tune it out in the moment. I can't believe I used to consume news differently and it baffles me why I hear of people reading/watching/listening to the news 10+ times per day, including first thing when they awaken and last thing before they sleep. Our brains were not designed for this sort of thing.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-01 12:27:46+00:00
Robert Anton Wilson once essentially said that any society that hasn't yet found a cure for pain is still barbaric.

Right now, opiods are the closest thing we have to that, but they are like Cannabis in that they also have many less useful/safe side effects.

One day someone will find a drug that obliterates pain without damaging consciousness, and I suspect that society will become a more evolved place.
by KevinMS | 2025-10-01 12:27:51+00:00
According to my research (watching youtube videos), putting those big turbofan engines (which had to be pushed forward and up to fit) gave the plane different flying characteristics which, under the rules of whatever, required new pilots to be retrained to some degree (at least flight simulator training), which made it a real pain for some airlines to ship their pilots off to wherever those simulators are.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-01 12:28:00+00:00
> will be PC laptop with ~Snapdragon (or something similar) with Linux...

Before you do that really research the exact model you plan on buying, and how much support it truly has in Linux. Qualcomm has not exactly lived up to their own hyped intentions of good support on Linux, and that provides a foundation of sand for hardware vendors to further drop the ball on when it comes to Linux support.

Apparently, some models built on the Elite platform have reportedly great support, while others don't. My experience with Linux on ARM SoCs, outside of servers, has made me very wary about using consumer products for desktop Linux with them. You really don't want to be dependent on the vendor, or some random people in their free time, for their custom kernel forks or Linux images, and that seems to be the trend in the non-server ARM boards + Linux ecosystem.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-01 12:28:54+00:00
Children spend pretty much every waking hour - every day - learning language. If you were to put in that amount of constant effort, you might also learn language just as effectively as a child. Okay, probably not just as effectively, but I think people underestimate the amount of effort children put into learning language. That's practically their job for the first 5+ years of life.

The main reason why people fail to learn languages is that they do not put in enough time. There is no magic shortcut, despite countless language-learning programs claiming they have one. You have to spend a significant amount of time every day working at it.

Having good resources (e.g., access to native speakers, competent instruction, a flashcard app like Anki) is important, but again, people fail mostly because they don't dedicate enough time towards the language.
by Steltek | 2025-10-01 12:28:58+00:00
Going by the wiki link further down the tree:

1980's: 4 shutdowns totaling 2 days

1990's: 3 shutdowns totaling 29 days (21 of those days was when Gingrich as Speaker)

2000's: 0 (9/11 and GWoT unity?)

2010's: 3 shutdowns totaling 54 days

2020's: This one

I guess I would agree they were common but they also weren't severe until Gingrich-ism took over the GOP: putting polarization and partisanship into overdrive.
by nickdothutton | 2025-10-01 12:30:09+00:00
Power is very concentrated in the PM's office and with the Cabinet Secretary. Even to the point where individual ministers are relatively weak within the system. One of the common lines you can find in almost any political autobiography in the UK (last... say... 30-40 years) goes something like "I entered government eager to grasp the levers of power, but never managed to truly find them".
by ben_w | 2025-10-01 12:30:31+00:00
> In that context, the computer was solving for a faithful representation.

Was it, though?

They had Newton (died 1727) playing playing poker (invented at some point during the early 19th century), repeating the myth that the apple fell on his head and then reacting insulted when Data says "that story is generally considered to be apocryphal".

More generally:

In TNG, Holo-Moriarty claimed to be sentient and to have experienced time while switched off despite Barclay saying that wasn't possible, much like LLMs sometimes write of experiencing being bored and lonely between chat sessions despite that not being possible given how they work.

In DS9, there was a holo-village made out of grief, and when it got switched off to reveal the one real person who had made it, while the main cast treated all the holograms as people, that creator himself didn't. Vic Fontaine was ambiguous, being a hologram who knew he was a hologram but still preferring to keep his (fake) world to its own rules and eventually kicking Nog out of the fake world when it was becoming clear Nog was getting too swept up in the fantasy.

In Voyager, the Doctor was again ambiguously person and/or program, both fighting for his moral rights as an author in a lower-stakes echo of TNG's Measure of a Man, and also Janeway being unsure if he was stuck in a loop or making progress with grief about the death of Ensign Never-Before-Mentioned-In-This-Show.
by jorangreef | 2025-10-01 12:31:00+00:00
Depending on contention and RTT, as a specialized OLTP DBMS, TB can do roughly 1000-2000x more performance than a single node OLGP DBMS (cf. the live demo in the talk above)… but also with strict serializability. You don’t need to sacrifice correctness or real-time resolution, and that’s important. For example, if you need to do real-time balance checks.
by manwe150 | 2025-10-01 12:31:11+00:00
Seems more like the value of a single ticket would mean nothing to Waymo anyways, but the value of keeping their license means a lot. Makes it much easier for them to simply report software bugs and fix them, without some random tiny fine amount attached to individual violations to deal with processing. Unlike humans, the robot doesn’t need constant disincentives to dissuade it from breaking the law for convenience; it just needs to be told when it broke the law.
by Bender | 2025-10-01 12:31:49+00:00
Rather than DNS consider an existing solution that just lacks laws to require server operators to add it and web clients to look for it. That is RTA headers. [1] Adding a header is trivial and clients looking for it is an afternoon of coding from an intern. As a bonus there is no privacy leaks unlike third party adult verification sites. The onus would be on the parents to enable it. Teens will always get around it given they watch porn and pirated movies together from within G and PG rated video games and that will always be a thing but it could help small children.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by wpm | 2025-10-01 12:32:00+00:00
Yeah but even for device administrators using bleeding edge “Declarative Device Management” the “your Mac must be on this version by this time” thing is really hit or miss. I was testing it yesterday just telling a test computer to update to 15.7.1 and while I got nagged to hell, it never actually rebooted to start the update. This is despite claims in each of the nag messages that it would.

At least Apple is still somewhat deferential to the user experience.
by rightbyte | 2025-10-01 12:32:01+00:00
> You’d prefer that the owner of a UK pro-LGBT site could be extradited to Uganda over some anti-gay law?

Ye I wish people did this more often. Looking at the consequences from an external view and also how things can be missused.

The usual response is some handwaiving "obviously it doesn't apply to the outgroup only to the ingroup as I define it don't be silly".
by sgarland | 2025-10-01 12:32:03+00:00
I went from a base M1 Air to a mid-spec’d M4 Pro. My main reasons were the 14” screen size, and the lack of a wedge shape for the new Airs (I loved the wedge). IMO, 14” is the perfect size for a laptop that actually sees time in your lap. My 13” Air was fine, but the extra inch is just enough to make a difference, while not feeling overly bulky.

Re: refresh rate, it’s nice, but I wouldn’t miss it most of the time. I have my external monitor for my work M3 running at 120 Hz because I can, not because I need it.