MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oytis | 2025-10-17 12:52:32+00:00
Being able to implement any decision by running a targeted campaign discouraging it's opponents from voting and swaying the undecided can't be a feature or we have very different understanding of democracy.

By closing up we defend us from some threats, but open gates wide for others. Foreign actors compete against much stronger domestic media machines and as you mentioned have to operate in foreign cultural environments. Gaining true influence also always involves financial flows, not just propaganda campaigns, so it is sure possible to mitigate these threats without closing information flow.

Consider the opposite threat of democracies being undermined from within. If some internal "threat actor" gets control of the executive branch and of the media and also can prevent information flow from the outside, very little can be done against it.

I think it is critical to keep in mind this second possibility even when the first threat seems more urgent.
by adithyassekhar | 2025-10-17 12:53:05+00:00
When I want to memoize something slightly complex, for simplicity's sake let's say sorting an array of objects based on one of it's keys. I can put that in a useMemo and it won't sort it again when the page eventually rerenders for some reason.

Usually that array is mapped elsewhere and those child components might also re render if the array is recalculated.

useEffects are when I need to call something outside of react, or when the page gets mounted or I need to call a function when something changes.

I'm still fairly new to this, the above examples may scream bad architecture to those more experienced, all criticisms welcome :)
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-17 12:53:20+00:00
I like using or exposing macros when appropriate. They can simplify messy syntax, or prevent repetitions not allowed by the compiler directly. I can't get the syntax for writing them to stick. So, I am happy with letting LLMs handle this.

Sometimes the macros are for large chunks of code that uses a different type in a key place, or sometimes they're for cleaning up verbose function calls that will be made multiple times, so the important parts (e.g. the params) are obvious, instead of being mixed with boilerplate. In general, they're nice for papering over boilerplate. In particular, there's a pattern in embedded that involves a long expression with `try_into().unwrap()` for parsing bytes that I have a macro for. And another for managing RefCell<Mutex<Option>>> locks.

I prompt the LLM with the working, but repetitive or boilerplate-laden code, and it macros it: "Please write a macro that stops the repetition in this code block: ```rust ```. Here's a example of calling it: `do_thing!(a, b, c)`

Works every time!
by dluan | 2025-10-17 12:54:00+00:00
In the long run, having multiple sources like gem.coop is probably a safer and more robust solution. But for RubyGems specifically, the trust was fully lost, through several layers - maintainers, community members, sponsors, etc. There's still open questions that probably need to be resolved like the funding and data privacy stuff, but I think most folks in ruby land will be supportive of this.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-17 12:54:13+00:00
I think the argument here is that Vietnamese script is so extremely reliant on diacritics that it cannot possibly make sense without them, despite looking legible to non-speakers. Similar argument could be made about Chinese or Japanese, but phonetic transcripts of those languages are actual gibberish to everybody that nobody cares. Vietnamese is on a such marginal point that frustrations can be expressed.
by reify | 2025-10-17 12:54:26+00:00
More ai bullshit!

diagnose cognitive decline in 60 seconds.

Im a retired psychotherapist and I would be hard pressed to come up with a diagnosis that quick.

I think these people are missing the most obvious fact. Our minds naturally deteriorate with age and has absolutely nothing to do with the onset of dementia.

These charlatans are taking advantage of those people who are worried about their parents.

this is the process:

VocalMaze can screen for signs of cognitive decline in about 60 seconds. You're shown an image, and you just describe what you see out loud into your device's microphone.

The site transcribes what you say and runs that text through a transformer (AI) model I fine-tuned to predict whether a person's language patterns resemble those seen in dementia. It doesn't analyze sound, tone, or emotion - just language.

clever stuff.

what a load of bollocks.
by mythz | 2025-10-17 12:54:40+00:00
We've moved most of our Apps off AWS to Hetzner years ago by switching to SQLite/Litestream > Cloudflare R2 replication to avoid needing to using a managed RDBMS and saved a bunch of $$$ [1].

Although for our latest App we've switched to using local PostgreSQL (i.e. app/RDBMS on same server) with R2 backups for its better featureset, same cost as we only pay for the 1x Hetzner VM and Cloudflare R2 storage is pretty cheap.

[1] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream
by quacked | 2025-10-17 12:55:10+00:00
Modern UI design is such a colossal nightmare of inconsistent command lists, hidden menus, changing interface behavior, duplicative functionality... My understanding is that many developers now engage in "telemetry-based design" that work to redesign interfaces around user behavior, leading to such excellent decisions as

- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"

- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen

- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on

And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.

Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.

I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?
by appapapp | 2025-10-17 12:55:21+00:00
Very concerning the author is ok with saying “I don’t know how to do this, and I don’t want to learn so I let Claude do it”.

I think a lot of LLM speedups boil down to this (from personal and read experience). Which is fine in some limited use cases, but also the antithesis of a good developer. Your job is to learn how things work if it’s work you’re putting your name behind.

Using LLMs to shortcut the blank page in these scenarios and get you learning faster is the way to go (though sometimes it’ll send you in the absolute wrong direction initially).

> Since then, I have vibecoded every single feature … now, this has lead to a number of hilarious failures

When I was a junior dev I wouldn’t read every line of a PR. Eventually you learn you should be reading lines that aren’t changed in a PR as well as every line that is. The author seems like a smart guy but more of a researcher than somebody I’d pay to build reliable software.
by trashb | 2025-10-17 12:55:49+00:00
Tesla mostly focused on the American market anyway. In my understanding there are a lot of facilities for Tesla's that we don't have in Europe like the program where you can buy a refurbished Tesla from Tesla.

Additionally there is a political drive to not trust Chinese manufactured products so those EV's are probably harder to maintain, get support for and in general it is socially considered less status to have a Chinese EV instead of a Tesla. Where in Europe this cultural drive is not as present in Tesla vs Chinese . In my experience in the EU the drive is more about is it EV and the Chinese EV's often offer more features/value for less money.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-17 12:56:21+00:00
Everything that's shared between customers, internal system state and customer metadata. I use Postgres with FDWs + Steampipe + Debezium to integrate everything, it's more like a control plane than a database. This model lets you go web scale with one decently sized database and a read replica, since you're only hitting PG for fairly static shared data, Cloudflare Hyperdrive gives insane performance.
by godsinhisheaven | 2025-10-17 12:56:58+00:00
Powerful article, Helen Andrews just won some respect from me. I think this is going to be one of the big "relearnings" of our age, that Men and Women are different. Not just that we wear different clothes or have different heights, but that we are truly, honest to goodness Different. No need to cite any studies, no need to proclaim some proof of higher learning. It's just, obvious.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-17 12:57:18+00:00
It was breaking enough for the Linux kernel, and the money Google sponsored to the effort remove them,

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kills-The-VLA

Breaking changes are breaking changes, even if it is only fixing a comma, someone has to spend part of their time making it compile again, which many times maps to actual money for people working at a company, their salary mapped into hours.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-17 12:57:19+00:00
Open Science folks understood this fact around 2018 IIRC, and there are a couple of nice standards for encapsulating research data such as RO-Crate [0].

Moreover, the science folks are not a picky bunch and they tend to use what works well, whether it be CSV and XML. As long as there's tooling and documentation, everything is acceptable, which is something I like.

[0]: https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/
by monocasa | 2025-10-17 12:57:44+00:00
> That also led me to research why a card with only 12GB of VRAM is requesting a 16GB BAR, and as far as I can tell, it has something to do with potential uses like SR-IOV where multiple VMs could access a single device, thus requiring more BAR space for the physical device being shared... BAR is still a little bit of a mystery to me.

Lengths of BARs have to be powers of two.
by tetris11 | 2025-10-17 12:57:52+00:00
I'm always fascinated by hobbyist's storage compartments. Some of the labels of the boxes in the background:

- "Broken and Delidded Pis" - "Non-PI ARM SBCs" - "-ers" - "Pico and Arduino Microcontrollers" - "Breadboards" / "Electric Doodads" / "Pepp(?) boards" - "M.2 / NVMe" - "Blades" / "Home Lab / Soquartz" - "Small Windows PCS"
by thomasikzelf | 2025-10-17 12:58:00+00:00
I don't think this has to be true. If you think of a framework as a piece of code that calls you where you sort of supply it with configuration you could do that when writing vanilla js but you don't have to.

When I write vanilla js I don't have a seperate file called framework.js. There is very little code needed to manage state. Almost all functions in my codebase are doing concrete things.
by tinyspacewizard | 2025-10-17 12:58:57+00:00
This seems like a cool article, but it isn't readable without Haskell background knowledge.

> For an intuition why this is true, consider that the constant functor Const r has an Applicative instance whenever r is a monoid, because pure stores a mempty value and (<*>) combines the held values with (<>). For a fun exercise, implement runAp_ in terms of runAp and Const.

Really?
by throwway120385 | 2025-10-17 13:00:08+00:00
The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for the police to pretend like nobody is.
by NemoNobody | 2025-10-17 13:00:11+00:00
I think you can understand quite simply why that isn't a standard type of example - far, far more companies and industries exist like my example, owned and dominated by a small number of companies that operate essentially in lockstep - same pricing, branding, type of products - none of the players trying to innovate at all, as that would threaten their status quo. This is everything in life nowadays, pretend otherwise, but as soon as you realize lie 5 companies own all the brands, it's all going to to make sense.

With micro chips, 1 company has all the companies by the balls - nobody likes that, so this is a bit different bc there is also room for several companies "Top level" chip manufacturers - for sure more than 1, so although it seems like that industry proves me wrong - it also proves me exactly right also.

Think about the demand for graphic cards with a lot of ram right now for an example - ALL PF EVERYONE knew we needed more than 8gigs of ram last generation but they still rolled out them this generation and there are still even smaller 4gb cards being made - look at an HP or Dell desktops or laptops, look at Gamepass now, so much evidence of the exact formula I described - bc it's like a rule, we just didn't have enough "East India Trading Companies" and couldn't see enough of the whole picture of capitalism, before we all globally started thinking in that mindset.

Capitalism doesn't give a fuck about innovation or quality or providing or services, or the 3 ps - only money. All of us are going to start understanding this in self evident ways as our lives continue - unless we pivot.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-17 13:00:48+00:00
In general this is not true. Typically you sign contracts and make agreements. You can't just unilaterally decide 'nahhh I don't wanna'.

Employment IS NOT like this - employment is at will. But we still have liability, particularly around discrimination.

And, also, you can follow the law and be a piece of shit. It's easy, people do it all the time.
by rjdj377dhabsn | 2025-10-17 13:00:50+00:00
Unless a 5 year old EV has lost a lot more functionality than a 5 year old ICE, that situation doesn't seem likely.

If in 5 years, your EV (that had similar utility as an ICE when you bought it) has lost so much value relative to a new EV, then the new EV must offer much more utility over both the old EV and the old ICE, in which case your ICE should have lost a similar amount of value.
by tsoukase | 2025-10-17 13:01:01+00:00
The intellectual level achieved in HN is unparalleled in the history of internet. The bad parts, except those mentioned other where:

1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop

2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.
by rich_kilmer | 2025-10-17 13:02:19+00:00
I was one of the originating authors of RubyGems along with Jim (RIP), Chad, David and Paul. I hosted RubyGems from my home for the entire community for many years. We never asked nor received anything for that. We wrote RubyGems for the Ruby community. Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.
by throw10920 | 2025-10-17 13:02:33+00:00
> Even if it takes multiple flags to kill an article, that's still vulnerable to brigading. So it takes 10 flags to censor a topic instead of 1? Fine, me and my 9 sockpuppet accounts will flag the article.

That's just an argument against sockpuppet accounts, and for detection and removal of those accounts.

> Or just 10 like-minded people independently deciding to abuse flag as a mega-downvote.

That's known as "user moderation" or possibly a "democratic system" if you consider the number of flaggers alone, which is a good thing; or if you're concerned about instead the incorrect usage of the flag tool: as stated above, the mods already look for and occasionally take away flagging privileges. So this isn't a problem.

> 1. Flag-powered users should only get like 1-2 flags a week.

Given that I see several flag-worthy stories and several dozen flag-worthy comments a day, this is a terrible proposal.

> 2. Flagging should be attributable back to the user who flagged it.

This is also a bad idea, because there are many bad actors who will still abuse that information, regardless of whether or not you're using the tool as intended. This proposal seems like it's designed to facilitate that abuse.

An actually good proposal is that the mods should be more aggressive about monitoring and either promoting or taking away flagging privileges.
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-10-17 13:02:53+00:00
Cellular radios also have this capability. There's work done to track individuals in this way (matching your walking pattern/gait).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761

Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
by bhouston | 2025-10-17 13:02:59+00:00
> So what? NPM wasn't originally owned by Microsoft, nor GitHub, but reality moves forward?

NPM was a company and it was acquired and it was voluntary. I don't think you can compare it to this situation - this is more of a messy situation with everything open source collaborations, rather than having clear ownership in a single entity:

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/npm-is-joinin...

Or are you referring to the pre-2014 situation where NPM wasn't VC Funded, but in a more nebulous state? It didn't last that long.
by trashb | 2025-10-17 13:03:33+00:00
Actually ICE has improved significantly in the last 20 years, even though progress was held back by emission and safety regulations. In the year 2000 a sports car would have around 200/250hp while these days any sports car that wants to boast power has around 500hp or more.

Perhaps you're not into cars much but if you compare top cars on track days etc. you will know there have definitely been huge changes. Though during the last 20 years repairability and reliability also took a hit.
by radu_floricica | 2025-10-17 13:03:37+00:00
> What is old is new again.

Over the years I tried occasionally to look into cloud, but it never made sense. A lot of complexity and significantly higher cost, for very low performance and a promise of "scalability". You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server - and at baremetal costs, you're usually about a year ahead of the curve anyways.
by ajross | 2025-10-17 13:04:36+00:00
> Yes this is largely because lower income deciles tend to hold more cash than assets

That's true, but it's important to point out that this is because the bottom of the income curve simply doesn't have meaningful assets at all. So what they have tends to be cash, and subject to inflation. But they don't have much, so the impact is very low. Their wages, however, do inflate along with the rest of the market.

And that's a problem that there's no wealth accumulation available to the bottom of the income curve! But it's not remotely a problem with monetary policy and "fixing inflation" isn't going to do anything for these people.

And in particular, trying to characterize inflation as a "tax" on them is voodoo nonsense.
by tinyspacewizard | 2025-10-17 13:04:41+00:00
> Of course you can inspect it: open the source code you wrote and read it. Also, don't write the code you don't want to be executed?

This is not what they meant by inspection.

What they mean is that you can write a function, in Haskell, that given a value in the DSL, it returns the list of all requests it will perform on execution.

This can be useful for tests, security, caching, performance, debugging...
by sgentle | 2025-10-17 13:05:06+00:00
As far as I can tell, this isn't adding any meaningful topology. The various notions of graph-connectedness basically amount to a standard finite-state CA with a slightly complex update rule.

The per-cell update mechanism, using "amazing dragons" as an example:

1. Calculate a metric for every cell based on its neighbours

eg: metric = sum(1/degree if degree > 0)

2. Calculate whether each cell is eligible based on its metric

eg: eligible = (state > 0) ? (0.9 <= metric <= 2.6) : (1.4 <= metric <= 7.0)

3. Calculate new state based on degree (degree = eligible ? number of eligible neighbours : 0)

eg: state = (degree == 1 || degree == 7) ? 0 : degree

Since the "edges" just represent eligibility of neighbours, which depends on their neighbours, you can replace them with a larger neighbourhood (ie 5x5 instead of 3x3). And since state is just degree or 0, you effectively have 1 more state than degrees.

Here's an example of that approach: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/wXSyRw

I think for this to live up to the name it would need one or both of the following:

1. edges that mask or gate cells in some way (ie a dynamic neighbourhood) 2. rules that turn edges into other edges without going via cell states
by mikemcquaid | 2025-10-17 13:05:07+00:00
As someone who spent a bunch of time talking before and after this all went down with current and past RubyGems maintainers, RubyCentral employees, Gem.coop maintainers and Ruby Core folks: this seems like the best outcome that was actually attainable.

I've been working on Homebrew for 16 years and leading it for some proportion of that and this all "smells" like a more sustainable long-term solution than anything we've seen happen in the last year. Some proposals sounded nicer but were not going to be acceptable to one or more sides.

Ruby already provides a vendored version of RubyGems and (more recently) Bundler so this seems appropriate. It also separates the "running a web service" which has guaranteed hosting costs, requires on-call, etc. from "running an open source CLI/library" which has no guaranteed costs.

It will be interesting to see what the Gem.coop folks do now (disclaimer: I helped them with their governance process). If there's some competition for rubygems.org as a server implementation that feels like a good thing for the community overall.

Good luck to all involved on all sides.
by kajnes | 2025-10-17 13:06:01+00:00
We built PrivateHub.ai to solve a new problem:

Search is changing. People are no longer just Googling — they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which generate answers from models trained on selected web data.

The problem is: most websites are invisible to these AI systems. Even if your site ranks well on Google, it may not be cited or even included in AI-generated responses.

PrivateHub.ai helps fix that by making websites AI-readable, licensed, and citation-ready.

We apply a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license to your public profile to give AI companies legal permission to use your data. We optimize your site’s structure and metadata for AI crawlers and generative indexing. We maintain an open AI directory to make your site discoverable by future AI agents and search APIs.

The goal isn’t to “game” AI systems - it’s to make the open web legally and technically compatible with how LLMs gather and use information.

Curious what you all think - is the future of SEO really “AIO” (AI Optimization)?
by rkomorn | 2025-10-17 13:06:14+00:00
Personally, I think it's the other way around.

Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).

In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.