MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jal278 | 2025-10-15 02:40:20+00:00
The function of news is to help a democratic citizenry be critically informed, and that this kind of statistic doesn't accomplish what it set out to do, although it's certainly interesting for its own sake. I think it's a challenge of our age to figure out how to create institutions that are wise and don't simply bend to distorting pressures (money, politics, psychology).

For example, we do want terrorism over-represented relative to old-age-deaths. However, a responsible and self-aware media would really attempt to counteract 'availability bias' -- e.g. that due to the human mind what is repeated we tend to assume is actually more prevalent. But we don't have wise institutions at the moment.

The more general problem is that it is hard to quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which media fails at fulfilling its complex societal role, because it is a qualitative failure in general, although we can poke at it's edges for sure (e.g. fearmongering language probably has gone up, as has polarization on both sides of the aisle, and the amount of information-free 'babbling and speculating' in the immediate aftermath of some event has likely gone up over time).
How to Sell an MVP Pre-Revenue?
by urban-hacker | 2025-10-15 02:40:22+00:00
I'm a startup-focused software developer, and I recently built an MVP that’s technically solid and well-positioned on price and functionality. Think of it as a cheaper, streamlined alternative to something like Semrush or Snowflake - not literally that, but in that general “enterprise tool at startup pricing” lane.

The app hasn't been publicly launched, but it could be at any time. I’m not looking for feedback on the product or trying to promote it. What I’m trying to figure out is the sales path for something like this before launch or traction. I don’t have an existing audience or strong network in the target market. I also thought of white labeling as an option, but I'm not sure.

For those of you who’ve sold a SAAS product pre-revenue:

- How did you approach sales or outreach? - Did you pre-sell, cold email, build partnerships, or something else entirely? - Would you consider listing on Flippa or similar platforms? - How did you determine a sales price - based on projected growth or hypothetical recurring users (say, 10 users on a basic plan for 12 months)?

Would appreciate hearing from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation. Thanks!
by criddell | 2025-10-15 02:41:32+00:00
The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.

That said, the phone market is huge. They could sell enough devices to fund future development which might be good enough even if it doesn’t slow down Apple or Google. At least then there will be a device for those of us who are not happy with the state of things.
by Twisol | 2025-10-15 02:41:36+00:00
ICFP and SPLASH are this week, actually! Here's the program website for anyone interested: https://conf.researchr.org/program/icfp-splash-2025/program-...

(I have a pretty unfavorable view of LLMs myself, but) a quick search for "LLM" does find four sessions of the colocated LMPL workshop that are explicitly about LLMs and AI agents, plus a spread of other work across the schedule. ("LMPL" stands for "Language Models and Programming Languages", so I guess that's no surprise.)
by elmerfud | 2025-10-15 02:41:48+00:00
You're forgetting that table saws were invented thousands of years after hand saws. Master Craftsman used hand saws to do all of the things that are done with table saws. Many things are much easier on a table saw and much faster to do than with a hand saw. They are absolutely a replacement for hand saws that fulfill a niche. I suspect you haven't done a lot of actual woodworking for you to make this statement like this.

Just because we use table saws to rip lumber or massive table saws to cut up trees into lumber doesn't mean that no one could have created lumber prior to the invention of the table saw. We just factually know that's not true. Faster, easier, better, absolutely but all of it could be done and was done with hand saws. Maybe you're thinking the hand saw is limited to this simple hand saw that we have now or a simple Japanese hand saw and not the actual large hand saws that took two people to operate but are still hand saws that come with all of the dangers of the hand saw.
Ask HN: Parents, have you ever missed deadlines to book kids' summer programs?
by ghirni | 2025-10-15 02:42:50+00:00
Hello!

Not sure if this is you, but every year I either miss my kids’ summer camp deadline or scramble to grab whatever’s left . I figured there has to be a better way — so I’m building something that helps parents like us get reminders (and maybe even auto-book if this is possible) before camps fill up.

If you’ve been through this rodeo too, please take this super short Google Form — your feedback will help make next summer a lot less stressful!

https://forms.gle/GmAeg8ZD1k2RWvYR6
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-15 02:44:08+00:00
In rust at least you are free to access an array via .get which returns an option and avoids the “compiler inserted branch” (which isn’t compiler inserted by the way - [] access just implicitly calls unwrap on .get and sometimes the compiler isn’t able to elide).

Also you rarely need to actually access by index - you could just access using functional methods on .iter() which avoids the bounds check problem in the first place.
by socrateswasone | 2025-10-15 02:44:36+00:00
Oh goody. Living human tissue, mimicking an embryo if not a baby, without consciousness or soul, grown and molded for our purposes and pleasures in a lab. This is excellent news everyone. A clear sign that we're winning the fight against the Antichrist (per Peter Thiel). It does kind of make you wonder though, what life is going to be like when absolutely nothing is sacred.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-15 02:44:49+00:00
> If DoDEA demonstrates sustained K-12 excellence, the military’s technical training programs showcase something even more striking: the ability to take 18-year-old high school graduates and transform them into operators of extraordinarily complex systems, safely and at scale.

What I found most striking is that last word: scale. Most people employed to write software cannot write original applications of any size. They certainly cannot thus scale solutions forward if they cannot author solutions in the first place. This is supremely costly for these profit oriented companies. The military on the other hand must scale because while they do not have profits or revenue margins to chase they do have budget constraints. The result is an organization that can do more with less.
by csande17 | 2025-10-15 02:45:51+00:00
You are correct that Rust's marketing does not claim that there are no bugs in its compiler. In fact it does the opposite: it suggests that there are no problems with the language, by asserting that any observed issue in the language is actually a bug in the compiler.

Like, in the C world, there's a difference between "the C specification has problems" and "GCC incorrectly implements the C specification". You can make statements about what "the C language" does or doesn't guarantee independently of any specific implementation.

But "the Rust language" is not a specification. It's just a vague ideal of things the Rust team is hoping their compiler will be able to achieve. And so "the Rust language" gets marketed as e.g. having a type system that guarantees memory safety, when in fact no such type system has been designed -- the best we have is a compiler with a bunch of soundness holes. And even if there's some fundamental issue with how traits work that hasn't been resolved for six years, that can get brushed off as merely a compiler bug.

This propagates down into things like Rust's claims about backwards compatibility. Rust is only backwards-compatible if your programs are written in the vague-ideal "Rust language". The Rust compiler, the thing that actually exists in the real world, has made a lot of backwards-incompatible changes. But these are by definition just bugfixes, because there is no such thing as a design issue in "the Rust language", and so "the Rust language" can maintain its unbroken record of backwards-compatibility.
by godelski | 2025-10-15 02:46:26+00:00
People using Telegram doesn't bother me. People calling Telegram secure or "more secure than Signal" does.

But I'm curious, what makes Telegram an easier sell to your friends and family? I've gotten most people to switch over to Signal and the hardest problem is just getting them to use another app. I would be surprised if the API is the killer feature lol. And very few people seem to be concerned with the phone number thing with Signal. So I'm just curious, what is the features that normal people are missing?
by dathinab | 2025-10-15 02:47:02+00:00
> Had SQLite ever had a memory leak or use-after-delete bug on a production release?

sure, it's an old library they had pretty much anything (not because they don't know what they are doing but because shit happens)

lets check CVEs of the last few years:

- CVE-2025-29088 type confusion

- CVE-2025-29087 out of bounds write

- CVE-2025-7458 integer overflow, possible in optimized rust but test builds check for it

- CVE-2025-6965 memory corruption, rust might not have helped

- CVE-2025-3277 integer overflow, rust might have helped

- CVE-2024-0232 use after free

- CVE-2023-36191 segmentation violation, unclear if rust would have helped

- CVE-2023-7104 buffer overflow

- CVE-2022-46908 validation logic error

- CVE-2022-35737 array bounds overflow

- CVE-2021-45346 memory leak

...

as you can see the majority of CVEs of sqlite are much less likely in rust (but a rust sqlite impl. likely would use unsafe, so not impossible)

as a side note there being so many CVEs in 2025 seem to be related to better some companies (e.g. Google) having done quite a bit of fuzz testing of SQLite

other takeaways:

- 100% branch coverage is nice, but doesn't guarantee memory soundness in C

- given how deeply people look for CVEs in SQLite the number of CVEs found is not at all as bad as it might look

but also one final question:

SQLite uses some of the best C programmers out there, only they merge anything to the code, it had very limited degree of change compared to a typical company project. And we still have memory vulnerabilities. How is anyone still arguing for C for new projects?
by thwarted | 2025-10-15 02:47:13+00:00
Every banking phone app I've used auto-logouts after being idle or unused for a bit, and my primary bank's app requires 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing. They probably are not explicitly considering the phone more secure than a computer, but rather a good 80% of this is security theater or a checkbox on some baseline security checklist that was implemented without really understanding what the implications, for usability and security, were going to be.
by autoexec | 2025-10-15 02:47:32+00:00
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety.

Obama didn't swear an oath to safety, but he did swear an oath to protect the constitution. He is an oath breaker and not a man of integrity, but if we choose to trust his excuse then maybe we can forgive him as an individual for being frightened by the horror stories told to him by power hungry three letter agencies, but we should never forgive him as a president for his failure to uphold his oath. Obama studied and taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how important the oath he took was and what would be at risk if the constitution was ignored.

It will always be more "safe" to take people's freedom and control them. Safety is just not an acceptable excuse to take away the freedoms of every American.
by nmfisher | 2025-10-15 02:48:21+00:00
Overall I'm quite positive towards core Cloudflare products like Tunnels, Workers, R2, KV etc, but a lot of newer products are often either thoroughly broken (e.g. Cloudflare AI) or unusable due to insufficient documentation (e.g. Email Routing).

After being burned a few times, I think I'm going to ignore any new Cloudflare product for 12 months after stable release. If their products worked as advertised, I'd be willing to pay considerably more. I think their commitment to the free tier is hamstringing them a little bit.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-10-15 02:48:46+00:00
It’s taken for granted that humans are the best choice for how to accomplish tasks.

The tasks humans are best at now are different than 10kya.

The world changes, new human jobs are made and humans collectively move up the abstraction chain. Schumpeter called this creative destruction and “capital + technology” is the transition function.

At the point where “capital + technology” does not need a human anymore and that will happen (if not in my lifetime then at least in the next 500 years) then there will be nothing more to argue for or retain.

So unless humanity recognizes this and decides to organize as humans (not as europeans, or alabamans or han etc…) then this is the only possible outcome.

Me personally, I don’t think that’s mathematically/energetically possible for humans to do because we’re not biologically capable of that level of eusocial coordination.
by rmason | 2025-10-15 02:49:11+00:00
I am a life long fan of Jack Kerouac and thought will the biographies written about him every significant fact about his life was known and I am a bit gobsmacked.

Massachusetts, the state of his birth claims Kerouac as their own and Florida where he lived at the time of his death claims him as well. Never seen San Francisco claim him as one of their own before. I think Paris would have the better claim if they were to make one.
by GenerWork | 2025-10-15 02:49:27+00:00
>replace corn fields with solar fields

This will never ever happen, farmers would simply switch to different crops. I'm 100% behind getting rid of the ethanol mandate, but that's because it's completely counterproductive to its stated goal of reducing pollution because it requires more energy to grow the corn, fertilize the corn, harvest the corn, and then process it into ethanol than simply pumping, transporting, and refining oil. Also, cars also get worse mileage on gasoline that has ethanol due to the lower energy content.
by robgibbons | 2025-10-15 02:50:52+00:00
I've greatly enjoyed my Pixel 9 Pro Fold and would recommend it, with the following advice: I am very careful with mine. It's rated fairly well for water resistance, but not well for dust ingress. It's imperative that you keep it clean (I use alcohol wipes and microfiber cloth daily) and well contained in sandy or dirty environments. That said, I've taken mine to the beach and on camping/canoeing trips, albeit in a soft waterproof enclosure which still lets me use the external screen.
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-10-15 02:51:11+00:00
Should we ever know what kind of person flagged this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580780

:)

It seems to be a take on ROC and could be phrased more humorously. Replacing either acceptance/denial with "filter" makes it not at all insightful,so it is at least a step up from tautology.

In the acceptance case, author presumes(?) that the designer looks only at false positives, etc. there's deep stuff here if people want to dig (postselection fallacies happen in the classical world too!) but poster might have been high on something.

I don't see a world* in which allowing the irreversible flagging of this is positive sum :)

*I only see one in which HN is training some model on the commentariat but not on the "fast-grants" (that's my label for it rn) based policy optimization itself :)

To the posted paper. top schools asking interesting questions, great, if I were to try to make a useful prediction it is that this is going into a second tier conf at best, this seems to be "owned" by junior members of the pjlab team (disregard the corresponding author), is a clear intern project, just a tier below "fast-grants" eligibility.

Chinese schools have weird policy optimization tricks :)
by vel0city | 2025-10-15 02:51:42+00:00
From the statistics I've seen, the US has a higher stabbing homicides per capita than the UK.

Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting.

How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
by kragen | 2025-10-15 02:51:54+00:00
"Stealing" the physical design is legal after 10 years in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...), or 20 years if there's a patent, and that's how we avoided having a single giant company own everything and halt innovation forever in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. So I would say that stealing the physical design is good.
by feyman_r | 2025-10-15 02:52:26+00:00
63000 acres is about 98 square miles, so about a 10 mile by 10 mile area. Pretty sure this isn't 'destroying wildlife' levels of destruction, but yes, definitely ecosystem influencing. Compared to current alternatives (gas/coal/hydro), this may have less impact overall. Nuclear power should be invested in, but may take more time.
by electric_muse | 2025-10-15 02:53:14+00:00
I was wondering when books were going to start popping up. Looking forward to reading.

Have you written about MCP gateways for helping companies route all MCP traffic through one plane for observability, security, and compliance? Happy to chat through that. I just recorded an end to end demo of what we are working on: https://vimeo.com/1127330739/ee1fe5245b
by walkabout | 2025-10-15 02:55:23+00:00
Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win.

There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.
by hyperflow-ai | 2025-10-15 02:55:40+00:00
Core Values That Drive Us Inclusivity – AI is for everyone. We build tools that empower both seasoned developers and complete beginners.

Creativity – Technology should enhance human imagination, not replace it.

Transparency – We are committed to building AI systems that are explainable and ethical.

Community – Our users are collaborators, not just customers. We learn and evolve through their feedback.

Speed to Impact – Innovation should move at the pace of ideas, not bureaucracy.
by thehappypm | 2025-10-15 02:57:36+00:00
There actually is some coal in New England, and if there was (for some reason) a desire for New England to be energy independent, coal might be part of the mix as a result. This article discusses some less-successful attempts to get into that coal.. and it’s delightful to see the date of its publication.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/massachusetts-coa...
by _carbyau_ | 2025-10-15 02:57:40+00:00
I this similar concept, differently.

To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right.

Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways.

Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-15 02:59:01+00:00
> as a left-leaning liberal, I hereby declare

I know that's how it works on the internet: All it takes to negate thousands of people with one opinion is for someone to come out and identify with them and say the opposite. Just one person!

Likewise, if thousands of people believe something, as long as they say "nobody ever claimed THAT!" then, it's as though they never believed it (despite it being obvious from every other indicator that they DO, in fact, believe that).

Unfortunately, it's all just silly internet sophistry and the real world happily ignores it.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-15 02:59:11+00:00
tl;dr

Worry, but don't worry

A past pattern is reforming, but nothing ever really repeats.

There are troubling signs, but maybe it's meaningless.

These measures meant something back in the day, but these measures aren't used today.

Thanks to federal shutdown, there's no reporting, so who knows?

We're begging the question and the question has been begged.

On and on... etc... and so on.

The article has an author, but what does he know? He thinks so. Wait, what was the topic?

Subscribe and save!
by jMyles | 2025-10-15 02:59:14+00:00
> The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.

Is there survey data available on this? Anecdotally, everybody I know hates their phones. In fact, I think if you asked, "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" I think most people will point to their phones.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-15 03:00:06+00:00
This is up there with "Easy-Bake Oven" among plastic doodads that will be used for ~40 minutes and then added to a pile of plastic garbage many adults keep in their basement.

I don't oppose to the open backend of the device (it should be table-stakes for this kinda thing), but the concept seems really zero-sum and disposable. It relies on a form-factor that most kids don't use and depends on the novelty of AI which will wear off pretty fast. As much as I hate to say it, this should have been an app or a website.
by alganet | 2025-10-15 03:00:14+00:00
I think the world is full of suckers right now, both right wing and left wing. Also, full of suckers for CEOs and celebrities. Suckers for AI utopia and so on.

Trump somehow contributed to that radicalization (he is not the sole responsible for it though). I think many who support him don't see it that way, and instead interpret his actions as some sort of cheat codes for progress that cut through a lot of bullshit. I am skeptic of his agenda.

I am, however, also cautious about many of the leftist ideas, specially in the last decade. If made to chose though, I would definitely go left.

I think I'm an orphan of a deceased left that doesn't exist anymore. A left that cares more about things like education and healthcare than about how they look on social media. I don't see much value in discussing leaders (this comment is a rare exception) or amplifying partisan narratives.