MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-26 21:30:19+00:00
If you refuse to do something on a problem I raise, one of us should be fired. Either you, because you refuse to work for what you get money, or me because I hand out advice on random stuff I am not supposed to do.

If you did ask me for my opinion, but ignore them, that's a refusal to work on your side. If you didn't asked me and I still started to mess with your work, then either I did found a serious issue and you should be grateful, if you ignore that, that is misconduct, or I spread nonsense around and should get a meeting with the employer on why I harass my colleagues.

Creating documentation is the professional way of ignoring problems. If I don't do that, I am acting against the profession I am employed as. Sweeping evidence of problems under the rack, will be later classified as something from at best misconduct to at worst malicious and criminal.
by sysguest | 2025-10-26 21:30:48+00:00
> Most buyers are one-time users

well, even if they are, if google got scam-report, then isn't google obliged to start some investigation? are you ok with "well that's too bad you're scammed"?

> Gift cards and redeeming is exclusively Indians targeting the US market (in the UK they have money mules to launder actual bank transfers, so no need for gift cards).

well nope it's a thing everywhere -- even in some east-asian country, there's a public advertisement targeting convenient-store workers: "don't give google redeem code even if the person claims to work for the cvs chain"

AND...

> Google doesn't sell the cards directly - at least not the ones purchased at the supermarket and used for scamming.

wow... ok so where does that "redeem card" come from? are you saying stores can generate those redeem codes? ...something doesn't seem right here...?

> Ideally the whole "gift card" industry just goes away as there's no good reason to have it when we already have the ultimate form of "gift card" in the form of money... but until then, even if Google were to step out of the game someone else will step in (the company issuing the cards isn't directly involved, their gift card is just used as a negotiable instrument in lieu of cash during the scam transaction, so any company's will do).

wtf is this... are we talking about some random mom&pop store-issued giftcards? is Google a mom&pop store? is the "google doing a giftcard biz" so valuable enough to license them turning blind-eye?

> Cambodia/etc is pig butchering/fake investment scams

cambodian operation is massive enough that it INCLUDES google-giftcard scheme.

idk, all this adds up to one thing: google needs to replace whatever PR firm it's using
by averageRoyalty | 2025-10-26 21:32:13+00:00
That's sad if that's your bad. They were fined $3m only a few years ago for failing to comply with Australian consumer law and illegally witholding refunds. They didn't even bother getting legal advice.

I'm not anti-valve, but "complying with consumer laws in a country you make sales in" should be a minimum standard at least.
by pier25 | 2025-10-26 21:34:16+00:00
> What about Rails or Redis or Linux?

Linux and Redis have funding and millions of users. So much depends on these projects. Rails is less popular these days but still a project with a long history, financial backing, and a huge ecosystem.

Imba has some brilliant ideas and Sindre is extremely smart... but IMO the decision to go with a custom language has hurt the project more than it has helped. It won't work with any of the tooling around JS/TS. Development is also extremely slow. More than 4 years after announcing v2 here on HN[1], it still hasn't been released.

The reality is that almost nobody is using Imba and it currently sits at about 2000 weekly downloads on NPM with no growth. Even Mithril which is also super niche has more downloads than Imba [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28196158

[2] https://npmtrends.com/imba-vs-mithril
by analog31 | 2025-10-26 21:35:03+00:00
Oddly enough, my mom taught computer programming at a community college in the early 80s, and she used the PB&J lesson, though without physically making one. She also used to remind her students: "Computers are stupid. They can only do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you want or need them to do." A series of children's stories, Amelia Bedelia, uses that theme too.

Her first gripe was that the computer didn't recognize the lower case "l" for the numeral "1" ad vice versa. Her old Smith-Corona typewriter didn't have different keys for those characters, or for upper-case "O" and Zero.
by pgaddict | 2025-10-26 21:35:33+00:00
IMHO the whole point of Qubes is that it does not do the compartmentalization at the level of individual applications, but groups of applications. Otherwise you'd need to very clearly specify how/when exactly the applications can exchange data, what data, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible, but "apps in the same qube VM can do whatever" is a much easier concept.
by boccaff | 2025-10-26 21:35:54+00:00
You can see aggregated results on `stats` [1] for every year. In general, half the people drop in the first 3-4 days. For last year, by day 12 there is less than 1/5 of day 01. While the stats do count people that completed later, the shape appears to track well with what I saw during the events since 2021.

[1] https://adventofcode.com/2024/stats
by margalabargala | 2025-10-26 21:35:55+00:00
> avoided GMO-food, she was always eating as much as possible from her own garden

Depending where she lived, this may have been the cause.

Plenty of people unknowingly live and grow food in areas that had toxic waste dumped on them a century ago, and it's still there in the dirt.

GMO food, in addition to not being any worse for you than non-GMO food, generally gets grown in places that have always been agricultural land.
by grebc | 2025-10-26 21:36:09+00:00
Not sure what you mean by done statically in the context of a report writer?

Columns are added, removed, pivoted, summed etc by the user running the report. This can’t be static but the OP was mentioning how you can’t get column meta data easily.

By sanitised SQL I mean the query is fed to the MSSQL parser and only select & union all is allowed as far queries go(eg. no delete, drops, updates etc).
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-26 21:36:11+00:00
You didn't answer the question. Zero breakthroughs away, one, or more than one? How strongly do you think whichever you think, and why?

(I'm asking because of your statement, "Don’t fool yourself into believing artificial intelligence is not one breakthrough away", which I'm not sure I understand, but if I am parsing it correctly, I question your basis for saying it.)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-26 21:36:50+00:00
Antonio La Cava, a retired teacher from Basilicata, Italy, transformed his three-wheeled van into a travelling library, the Bibliomotocarro, to make sure no child goes without a book.

https://www.instagram.com/il_bibliomotocarro/

Related:

The smallest library in Italy - https://educated-traveller.com/2019/02/06/the-smallest-libra... - February 6th, 2019
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-26 21:37:24+00:00
How would you know that your neighbours aren't secretly spying together on you and interfering with your life in ways you don't notice?

We have to put a limit to paranoia. If things work correctly for decades and there are no signs of foul play after endless real world usage, it's safe to say nobody is hacking our FTP.

It's different if you're a bank or the KGB or the CIA.

> It may well be that you're not a sizeable target and that no-one is interested in hacking your site, but that's just luck and not an endorsement of unencrypted FTP.

Do you drive an armored car?
by boznz | 2025-10-26 21:37:32+00:00
My last novel took over a year to write and edit, going through dozens of revisions. The novel before that took almost five years.

For a laugh I used grok to generate a 35,000-word slop novel, it took twenty prompts and a few hours, it even threw in a nice cover. From there it would have took me another 30 minutes to release it as an ebook on Amazon under a different pen-name. This is what I and the world of indie authors are up against. It is already hard for non-established authors, this may be the final nail in the coffin for most. My first book is now free, but good luck anyone ever finding it.
by westurner | 2025-10-26 21:40:57+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Precise and scalable analogue matrix equation solving using resistive random-access memory chips" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0

ReRAM, RRAM: Resistive random-access memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory :

> ReRAM bears some similarities to conductive-bridging RAM (CBRAM) and phase-change memory (PCM) in that they change dielectric material properties. CBRAM involves one electrode providing ions that dissolve readily in an electrolyte material, while PCM involves generating sufficient Joule heating to effect amorphous-to-crystalline or crystalline-to-amorphous phase changes. By contrast, ReRAM involves generating defects in a thin oxide layer, known as oxygen vacancies (oxide bond locations where the oxygen has been removed), which can subsequently charge and drift under an electric field. The motion of oxygen ions and vacancies in the oxide would be analogous to the motion of electrons and holes in a semiconductor.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-26 21:41:06+00:00
> One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president

I don't think the President would have gone to Cheyenne wouldn't have been time since Colorado is quite far from Washinton D.C - iirc the plan was always kneecap (NEACP[1]) once it was online (and it still is).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-26 21:42:31+00:00
So, it seems like this makes the DGX a viable ARM-based workstation, for those of us who need/want such a thing, while also offering a relatively decent AI/ML environment.

Two things need to happen for me to get excited about this:

1. It stimulates other manufacturers into building their own DGX-class workstations.

2. This all eventually gets shipped in a decent laptop product.

As much as it pains me, until that happens, it still seems like Apple Sillicon is the more viable option, if not the most ethical.
by skissane | 2025-10-26 21:43:32+00:00
I don’t think anyone really knows the answer yet. UK law has much looser standards for copyrightability than US law - UK law accepts the “sweat of the brow” doctrine - mere human effort is enough to create copyright, even if it lacks any significant creative element-under UK law, a transcriptionist transcribing an audio recording creates a new copyright in the transcription separate from the copyright in the audio itself; US law does not consider a mere verbatim transcription to be sufficiently original to create a new copyright. But, will UK judges extend “sweat of the brow” to include AI sweat as well as human sweat? My gut feel is probably “yes”, but I’m not aware of any case law on the topic yet. A complicating factor is there are a lot of wealthy vested interests who are going to be pushing for the law in this area to evolve in a way which suits them - both in the courts and in Parliament - so the law might not evolve in the way you’d expect if judges were just left to logically extend existing precedents.

Even in the US, I think the situation is complex. If I prompt an LLM to edit a copyrighted human-written text, the LLM output is going to be copyrighted, because even if the LLM’s changes aren’t copyrightable, the underlying text is. And what happens if an LLM proposes edits, and then a human uses their own judgement to decide which LLM edits to accept and which not to? That act of human judgement might provide grounds for copyrightability which weren’t present in the raw LLM output.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-26 21:43:39+00:00
I prefer 0 == x, because you can skim code faster and the first few words serve as a documentation. Compare:

if (TIMEOUT ... if (NO_SETUP ... if (REQUESTING if (PENDING if (DEACTIVATED if (USER_INVALID ...

to:

if (object.action.send_timestamp ... if (object.state == ... if (object.state == ... if (object.state == ... if (object.state == ... if (database.users_query (USER_BY_STATE, ...
by exmadscientist | 2025-10-26 21:43:44+00:00
Only one side of the cable is going to be lit, but you don't know which one it is: it depends on whatever happened upstream. So you have to be able to handle either side being lit up. You can't easily do that with a single set of contacts because of how D+/D- is handled (it would be a literal X-shaped crossover), so now you're kind of stuck.

It ends up just not being worth the trouble if you need the USB 2.0 pair. But power-only is much easier and, guess what, pretty available in the market.

The 6-pin Type-C provides 2 pins each for power, ground, and CC. (DO NOT LEAVE CC OUT. THIS IS WHY A LOT OF RECENT USB STUFF MISBEHAVES. GET CC1/2 RIGHT PLEASE.)

The 16-pin adds 10 more: 4 for D+/D-, 2 more each for power and ground, and then they add 2 more for SBU as well. I'm not entirely sure why SBU is important enough but I'd guess it's because it's physically vertically next to CC so probably helps the mechanicals to leave it in.

There actually do exist 8-pin guys like this https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47326494.html (among others) that add D+/D- only to the 6-pin connectors. I can't imagine they work terribly well most of the time but they must have some use? They do seem to be from Asian vendors only, which might mean something.

(Side note: the way Type-C handles D+ and D- has caused me so much pain. I get that it was a difficult problem to solve... but there had to be a better way than this, right? Probably not, but I can still whine.)
by margalabargala | 2025-10-26 21:45:38+00:00
It's not an attack, it's a description of your behavior. Alongside your stated opinion, you keep asking questions wondering why reality isn't different than the way it is.

> shouldn't HN remove the link?

> So why doesn't it do it for something more polite?

> So why wouldn't the same apply to criticism coming from elsewhere?

And yet the submission stays up. I'm sorry you felt attacked by the word "confused" being used to describe your behavior when you are asking questions about how you do not understand why things are the way they are. I'm open to using other terms if you prefer.

While we're discussing terms for behavior, often when someone assists another person who is wondering at how they do not understand why reality is as it is, that is referred to as "helpful".
by bigyabai | 2025-10-26 21:45:45+00:00
It really depends, the metrics are kinda all over the place right now: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SF1u0J2vJ-ou-R_Ry1JZ...

(cited from https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-10-13-nvidia-dgx-spark/)
by fleeting900 | 2025-10-26 21:46:10+00:00
Early 30s is the sweet spot for travel.

You have the budget and growing maturity to experience things a 20 year old backpacker can’t, and the body, freedom, and tolerance for discomfort for experiences that won’t happen if you wait until you’re 40 or have kids.

It’s a waste to only allow week-long sugar hit breaks from work over the next decade to experience it. Decide now when you’ll take six to twelve months to travel without working.
by nawgz | 2025-10-26 21:46:16+00:00
For instance, while I work in small teams, I’ve relied on Hasura GraphQL-Engine a lot for my api. This is a full GQL API automatically generated from your SQL schema, Postgres being the best supported DB. GQL relations are available across foreign keys (or manual joins which I never use), so a well defined normalized schema can have deeply nested queries executed easily with full type safety for the consumer.

Taking an HR example, you could query for an employee, their PTO status and accrual history, their manager, and their reports all in one nice easy query that no one has to write any business logic for, just a schema set up with employees, manager, reports, and PTO tables joined on ID keys.

And in such a case, what abstraction does the backend team need to put in front of the schema? I can’t motivate what this means myself. A well designed DB schema is truly a beautiful contract, and with table and column comments you can even get intellisense docs in the IDE for the front end team building the client.

On the flip side, I agree the write operation should be done thru an API when there is complexity and requirements beyond just writing one row to one table, but read operations are much more graceful and speedier to define in GQL than REST.
by matiasmolinas | 2025-10-26 21:46:50+00:00
I wanted to share a project I've been refining, called llmunix-starter. I've always been fascinated by the idea of AI systems that can adapt and build what they need, rather than relying on a fixed set of pre-built tools. This is my attempt at exploring that.

The template is basically an "empty factory." When you give it a complex goal through Claude Code on the web (which is great for this because it can run for hours), it doesn't look for existing agents. Instead, it writes the markdown definitions for a new, custom team of specialists on the fly.

For example, we tested it on a university bioengineering problem and it created a VisionaryAgent, a MathematicianAgent, and a QuantumEngineerAgent from scratch. The cool part was when we gave it a totally different problem (geological surveying), it queried its "memory" of the first project and adapted the successful patterns, reusing about 90% of the core logic.

I think it's particularly useful for those weird, messy problems where a generic agent just wouldn't have the context—like refactoring a legacy codebase or exploring a niche scientific field.

Thanks for taking a look!!
by dang | 2025-10-26 21:47:07+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44954524 - Aug 2025 (73 comments)

D2: Declarative Diagramming – A modern language that turns text to diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42033790 - Nov 2024 (7 comments)

D2 Playground - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805529 - March 2024 (34 comments)

D2: Declarative Diagramming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224084 - June 2023 (3 comments)

Generate diagrams programmatically with D2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376143 - Jan 2023 (2 comments)

D2 language, open source alternative to PlantUML - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34064921 - Dec 2022 (70 comments)

D2, a diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams, is now open source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704254 - Nov 2022 (155 comments)

D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32652291 - Aug 2022 (126 comments)
by westurner | 2025-10-26 21:47:13+00:00
"IBM lays out clear path to fault-tolerant quantum computing". IBM Quantum Computing Blog. (2025-06). ; 2025 IBM Quantum Roadmap https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/large-scale-ftqc

- ( [2506.03094] Tour de gross: A modular quantum computer based on bivariate bicycle codes https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03094 )

- [2506.01779] "Improved belief propagation is sufficient for real-time decoding of quantum memory" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01779 :

> Abstract: [...] Relay-BP is inherently parallel, enabling rapid low-footprint decoding with FPGA or ASIC real-time implementations, similar to standard BP. A core aspect of our decoder is its enhancement of the standard BP algorithm by incorporating disordered memory strengths. This dampens oscillations and breaks symmetries that trap traditional BP algorithms.

- "QUEKUF: An FPGA Union Find Decoder for Quantum Error Correction on the Toric Code". ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (2025) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3733239

necst/QUEKUF: "Union Find Decoder for Quantum Error Correction on the Toric Code": https://github.com/necst/QUEKUF
by knodi123 | 2025-10-26 21:47:46+00:00
I chuckled, but presumably it's useful for applications where you want data types to take up the same amount of space, like for matrices or database columns? Or maybe where you coerce different data types into boolean? The language offers WordBool and ByteBool too, so they're pretty consistent. And AFAIK, there aren't any languages where you can specifically allocate only a single bit for a single boolean.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-26 21:47:54+00:00
"Distributed" was the point and the language their site uses*, not decentralized. It's only described as a convenience and reliability thing in contrast to the mess known as CVS. I haven't seen a note about avoiding one entity having too much power, even if that's a goal some users have in mind. Normally you have one master repo, or "blessed" as the site calls it.

It's like, a Redis cluster is distributed but not decentralized. The ssh protocol is not decentralized. XMPP, Matrix, and Bitcoin are decentralized protocols, first two via federation.

* https://git-scm.com/about/distributed
by versteegen | 2025-10-26 21:47:59+00:00
I really like the sound of Wren, but you may also want to look into Squirrel, it's basically Lua re-imagined/reimplemented but without all the Lua quirks and with C-style syntax (but it still has optional lua-style prototypes, which means it ends up very similar to Javascript). Its embedding API is largely a copy of Lua's. There is also an active fork called Quirrel that makes the language more like Python.

There are loads of scripting languages but very few of them have an embedding API as powerful as Lua or Squirrel's. (My benchmarks: what's the overhead of a userdata pointer? Is there a proper debug API? Can you suspend a co-routine from inside a called C function? Very few languages even have coroutines.) Last I looked at it years ago, Wren was one of the best. Of course, the most featureful embedding API of all belongs to LuaJIT.
by kevincox | 2025-10-26 21:48:08+00:00
> Note: The ByteBool, WordBool, and LongBool types exist to provide compatibility with other languages and operating system libraries.

Which makes sense. So these are really only intended to be used for FFI, not internal Delphi code. If you are bridging from C where bools are a byte you want to determine how you handle the other values.

I think the one thing missing is specifying what the True and False constants map to. It is implied that False maps to 0 by "A WordBool value is considered False when its ordinality is 0" but it doesn't suggest that True has a predictable value which would be important for FFI use cases.
by johnfn | 2025-10-26 21:51:15+00:00
> Clojure is clearly a niche language, but Stack Overflow is also not a place that Clojure developers typically go, so Clojure usage there is going to be under reported.

It seems unclear to me why Clojure developers would not go to Stack Overflow, and especially unclear why they would avoid SO more than developers in other niche languages. When I learned Clojure, I spent a very long time on SO.

I suppose I’m just a little skeptical. I often hear similar sounding rationales - “oh don’t worry, <my favorite language/technology> is under-represented by the data”. Somehow every niche technology is underreported by the data! But to an outside observer, Clojure to me seems to be used very rarely in the types of engineering work I come in contact with, and 1% doesn’t seem that wrong to me.