MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsenftner | 2025-10-01 14:01:59+00:00
It's a framing mechanism, where when one identifies with "writing code" and gains a sense of purpose doing that, and then automation starts "writing code", does that trigger a loss of a sense of purpose? By framing one's innate skill as communicating it should not matter what medium one operates, they are still using non-casual and specific communications to do their job, even when code generation, or ad copy generation, or a talking spokesperson video is the result.

Also, consider that a really good communicator often ends up running the places they are at, simply because they leave a wake of understanding behind them. That's really good for business operations.
by tomck | 2025-10-01 14:02:12+00:00
This whole page, and their response in this thread, is about tigerbeetle as a transaction processing database - e.g. financial transaction processing

I think this is very clear, I don't know why you're saying that tigerbeetle is trying to make a generic claim about general workloads

The comment you're replying to explicitly states that this isn't true for general workloads
by bell-cot | 2025-10-01 14:02:13+00:00
If you're both competent, and responsible for critical national security documents - then MS's long-term "push your stuff into our cloud" strategy is a poisoned chalice. Glowing red, and with touch-activated danger music.

But I've no familiarity with Austria's armed forces, to guess at the actual priorities of their decision-makers here.
by jplusequalt | 2025-10-01 14:02:17+00:00
While I believe that long form content such as YouTube essays can actually be intellectually stimulating depending on how you engage with the video itself (e.g. do you actively watch it, or do you just have it on in the background?), I truly believe that 95% of TikTok is just mindless slop.

My S.O. probably spends 3 hours a day on TikTok/Reels and I seriously doubt they could remember even 10% of what they saw in that time. It's like a part of their brain turns off while scrolling.
by piqufoh | 2025-10-01 14:02:29+00:00
> Doing the smallest and easiest solution to a problem as a way to get to know the full scope and then iterating after that if needs be is by far the best solution (for me).

100% -- this is YAGNI (or you-aint-gonna-need-it) and should be among the first things you think about when starting a new project.
by lsaferite | 2025-10-01 14:02:35+00:00
Just for clarity, you're claiming that there's data to support that 10-year flood plain areas should be marked as having a 100% chance of having a flood every year and you have enough data to say a 100-year flood plain should be reclassified as a 10-year flood plain? I ask this because those numbers are shorthand for event probabilities given (flawed) observation data over large time-frames. Argue all you want about climate change moving these number due to rising sea levels. I agree it's happening. That being said, hyperbolic assertions such as this don't help.

The reality is that our flood plain designations are very flawed, but they are the only current metric we have to assess some of these risks. Every location that receives precipitation or is near water has some risk of flooding and that risk of flooding may be hidden. The whole state of Florida is low elevation. Something like 1/3 of it is very low elevation and subject to sea-level rise causing catastrophic changes in coastline. But the other 2/3 of Florida is something like 100ft (30m) above sea level. The other issue with Florida is that it's the flattest state in the US. That flatness contributes to flooding being difficult to properly predict.

> Dont buy houses in flood planes.

I'd just like to call out this hard-line assertion as well. Have you looked at a flood plain map? They have hard borders of zones. Those zones are calling out that event probability. If I buy a house 10 ft outside that zone, do you think my event probability went to 0% in those 10ft? Maybe, if the terrain was drastic, but maybe not even then. Every place we humans build has some probability of catastrophic events. Evaluating those risks is difficult. Hedging against those events is why people buy insurance.

Edit:

Grady, from Practical Engineering, did a good video about this subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc
by layer8 | 2025-10-01 14:02:46+00:00
To play the devil's advocate: From an OOP perspective, lambdas are just syntactic sugar for a special form of objects. Regarding monads, we had smart pointers and the like in C++ already in the 1990s. Both concepts are orthogonal to mutability.

I'm convinced that imperative programming will endure alongside functional code, because being stateful is how the real world works, and most programs have to repeatedly interact with the real world over the course of their execution.
by afavour | 2025-10-01 14:03:43+00:00
Because ultimately Apple is making software for its users. Something that negatively affects their users experience is something they should factor in with new releases no matter whose "fault" it is. Such is the pain of making operating systems.

You're right in the purest sense: use a private API, get burnt. But when it's something this widely used and depended upon you could argue Apple should have made it into a public API by now.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-01 14:03:49+00:00
> they wouldn't be usefull in modern days.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Usefulness, joy.

I think modern BASIC and Pascal environments strike a reasonably good balance where you can write non-industrial programs where you can ignore all the “engineering” and “bureaucratic” processes that support building larger scale systems with many contributors and focus on getting something done or have some fun.
by danielbarla | 2025-10-01 14:03:58+00:00
TigerBeetle is plenty interesting, though if half of SpacetimeDB's [1] [2] claims are true, it's even more interesting for me. (The title of this post has "_a_ most interesting database", while the article has "_the_", hence this comment)

[1] - https://spacetimedb.com/ [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzDnA_EVhTU&
by actuallyalys | 2025-10-01 14:04:09+00:00
I’ve mostly used LibreOffice for personal use and other cases where I don’t want to use Big Tech, but you could try OnlyOffice. I’ve also been interested in Grist, which is more like AirTable but programmed in Python and (relevant to your request) self-hostable.

Edit: Depending on your reasons for avoiding big tech, you may want to research the owner of Only Office, which was a Russian company but apparently isn’t anymore? You might want to also try CryptPad, which is based off of OnlyOffice and recommended elsewhere in the comments (which reminded me).
by slightwinder | 2025-10-01 14:04:18+00:00
> A spreadsheet gives you a DB

They can emulate behaviour of databases; but the missing parts missing will haunt you. Spreadsheets are a jack of all trade, mastering nothing, haunting you with everything;.an amplifier for the Dunning–Kruger, where people are misguided about data-quality.

Spreadsheets are indeed a great tool, but the implementations we have today are bad, with too many booby traps, not enough safeguards, not even much comfort for those with higher demands.
by kasumispencer2 | 2025-10-01 14:04:22+00:00
Author of the tutorial here. A newer version of this tutorial for the book I've mentioned in the introduction part can bee seen here:

https://github.com/bctnry/gentle-introduction-to-mercury

I'll write more and finish this book in the future, and I'm definitely writing my response to some of you's replies in the book.
by gwd | 2025-10-01 14:05:01+00:00
> I’d say if you can be jailed for a particular opinion

Can you give an example of someone in a modern democracy jailed for their "opinion"?

To wit, are the examples you're thinking of "statement of opinion", "statement of fact", "pejorative insult", or "incitement"?

Saying "I think <public figure> is an idiot" is an opinion. "The earth is flat" or "The holocaust never happened" are not opinions; neither is, "Kick out all the <insert pejorative here>."

And yeah, in North Korea you'll absolutely be jailed for expressing some opinions. That may make them illegal, but it doesn't make them no longer opinions.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-10-01 14:05:20+00:00
It's literally in the article.

> Although cyberattacks have become more high profile, there is little reliable data on how many attacks take place in the UK each year. Hackers are drawn from a mix of organised criminal gangs, those sponsored by state actors including Russia and China, and hacktivists with a political agenda, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi).
by 9rx | 2025-10-01 14:05:23+00:00
> Throwing out SQL is not really the recipe for "performance"

We've discovered hacks to work around the limitations of SQL, so you can maintain performance with sufficient hackiness, but you have to give up "purity" to get there. Worse is better applies, I suppose, but if we were starting over today the design would be very different.

Throwing out SQL isn't strictly required, but like Rust isn't strictly required when you already have C, sometimes it is nice to take a step back and look at how you can improve upon things. Unfortunately, NoSQL turning into a story about "document databases" instead of "A better SQL" killed any momentum on that front.
by _alternator_ | 2025-10-01 14:05:26+00:00
According to the discoverer, NVISO: “We can however not assess whether this exploit was part of UNC5174’s capabilities or whether the zero-day’s usage was merely accidental due to its trivialness.”

This may explain the failure to notify of a 0day, since it seemed to be exploited accidentally in the course of a more sophisticated operation.

But that doesn’t excuse the lack of disclosure IMO. If it’s so trivial you could accidentally exploit it, seems bad.
by dangus | 2025-10-01 14:06:26+00:00
I’d also extend this by saying that you can just exist and be happy and then die. There’s no need to be defined by some effort you’re putting into some kind of work or hobby.

If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation.

And that’s a bit of a problem with this article. The photographer that wants to quit because of digital photography? I find that odd, it seems to me like the film community has a really great time with the craft of film photography in the digital age. If anything, the massive shrinkage in available professional labs should make the art of developing your own photos even more validating.

Why didn’t this photographer want to quit when Kodak made disposable cameras and CVS would develop your photos in an hour? I submit that it isn’t digital photography that killed their hobby/passion.

It’s okay to not love doing something anymore and take a break or move on to something else. I think this idea that it defines you is a bit of a toxic validation mechanism.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-01 14:06:30+00:00
I've worked for military contracts that outlived the time that their officer-in-charge (typically a colonel, trying to get his general's star). That is EXACTLY what they do.

We had a more-or-less don't-care issue, that was a fundamental design choice, flip-flop every two years. It would require redesign of the whole weapon, but at least the colonel could provide a bullet on his CV stating that he improved the program by choosing XYZ (because arguments could be made either way). Meanwhile, our actual problems with the weapon were weight and cost - the flip-flop choice had no real impact on either.
by jorangreef | 2025-10-01 14:07:37+00:00
CAP defines availability physically: “requests to a non-failing node receive a response”. TigerBeetle ensures logical availability: as long as clients can reach a majority, requests complete with strict serializability, preserving safety and liveness under partitions.

cf. Durability and the Art of Consensus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRgvaqpQPwE
by CyberDildonics | 2025-10-01 14:08:08+00:00
I don't know what you're trying to say here. This thread was about someone saying in an alternate universe lisp computers might have caught on.

They were never going to catch on and it was never going to work because people didn't want them. Programmers might have wanted to program in lisp, but users didn't want to buy software made in lisp.

For some reason you're bringing up that someone may have written some scripts in an interpreted language which if anything reinforces that lisp machines weren't necessary.
by pickledoyster | 2025-10-01 14:08:09+00:00
>Several European governments have jailed people for social media posts. Many Europeans support this - they don't understand how government censorship can quickly get out of hand.

I think quite a few Europeans have lasting and direct experience with totalitarian, oppressive regimes. Which might also explain why they have stricter (or simply more precise) laws governing expression – not as an oppressive tool, but as a safety valve for the society.
by cousin_it | 2025-10-01 14:08:49+00:00
I spent some time with Apps Script a few weeks ago. It has some strange design decisions:

1) Everything runs on the server, including triggers and even custom functions! This means every script call requires a roundtrip, every cell using a custom function requires a roundtrip on each change, and it feels much slower than the rest of the UI.

2) You can't put a change trigger on a cell or subset of cells, only on the whole sheet. So you have to manually check which cell the trigger happened on.

3) Reading and writing cell values is so slow (can be a second or more per read or write) that the semi-official guidance is to do all reads in a bunch, then all writes in a bunch. And it's still slow then.

4) A lot of functionality, like adding custom menus, silently doesn't work on mobile. If your client wants to use Sheets on mobile, get ready to use silly workarounds, like using checkboxes as buttons to trigger scripts and hoping the user doesn't delete them.

Overall I got the feeling that Google never tried to "self host" any functionality of core Sheets using Apps Script. If they tried, it'd be much faster and more complete.
by kamranjon | 2025-10-01 14:09:06+00:00
I’m somewhat confused by the distributed story for tiger beetle. In the docs here: https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/concepts/performance/#single-th...

It says: “TigerBeetle uses a single core by design and uses a single leader node to process events. Adding more nodes can therefore increase reliability, but not throughput.”

How does this work with multi-region? Does this mean that regardless of where in the world your users might live, they need to make a request to the leader node for a write to occur?

Is distribution purely for redundancy?
by runjake | 2025-10-01 14:09:07+00:00
It’s not on Apple. They explicitly warn developers not to do this because stuff exactly like this can happen. If it were an issue involving public APIs, then yes, it would be on Apple.

I get it. I’ve used private APIs in some of my Apple apps. But when you do, you take on a certain level of risk and responsibility when you’ve got customers.

The bigger question is why none of these Electron app developers, particularly larger outfits like Slack, didn’t catch this issue in the last 3 months they had access to Apple OS betas.

Do they have a QA process? Perhaps they should start.
by yoursitee | 2025-10-01 14:09:11+00:00
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Would you like to try it? Sign up for the waitlist or send us a message on Twitter (@yoursitee).
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-10-01 14:10:35+00:00
There's this related phenom which seems paradoxical to me but maybe you can help figure:

Things that are built with money (& not by say, intrinsic motivation alone) seem to have a high ratio of (traction) to (resources invested). Not sure if marketing alone can explain that?

Obvious exceptions come to mind , eg the Linux kernel, but even that was massively boosted by commercial interests.

(One other class of exceptions could be tentatively named "winning the zeitgeist lottery")

If you would agree that this phenom exists in the short to mid time frame: without the likelihood of traction, how can intrinsic meaning alone provide motivation?
by atombender | 2025-10-01 14:10:54+00:00
You can get the X-T4 relatively cheaply. Unlike the T3, it has a fully articulated screen and in-body image stabilization.

I have the X-T4 and X-E3, both of which purchased used for much below the price of the newest models (about $800 each). No regrets, and I love both equally.

The E3 is my stripped-down pocketable camera; with the Fuji 27mm pancake lens, I can fit it in a jacket pocket or shoulder strap bag, and it weighs almost nothing, less than my iPhone. This combo is pretty much equivalent to the immensely popular X100IV, but much better value for money.

The T4 is the bigger camera I use for nature and macro shooting. Tons of settings, more advanced features (focus bracketing and "picture in picture" focus closeup are important to me), more advanced dials. It's heavier and bulkier, but also more solid (IBIS, weather sealing).

For some reason Fuji appears to consider yellow focus peaking (which IMHO is the best colourbfor it) to be a high-end feature reserved for the T4, which is annoying.
Show HN: Generate interactive slides with AI (65 languages, live feedback)
by tygynbayev1 | 2025-10-01 14:11:23+00:00
Hi HN,

Back in 2020 I built a startup where people in movie theaters could compete with each other on the big screen and earn points in real time. It was all about interaction and shared experiences. Then COVID hit, cinemas shut down, and the project died.

After that, I wanted to apply the interactive mechanic to a global problem, not just entertainment. One of the biggest pain points I kept hearing from teachers, trainers, and business teams was how much time it takes to prepare presentations (often 2–3 hours) and how hard it is to keep audiences engaged. That’s where the idea for Oina came from.

What Oina does: - Enter a topic (or upload a doc), pick the number of slides and tone of voice. - AI generates a full presentation outline in 65+ languages. - Add interactive slides (quizzes, polls, open questions, ratings). - When presenting, the audience joins via QR code (no app required) and interacts live. - After the session, you get analytics (who joined, answers, engagement per slide).

New: web search integration so the AI can pull in fresh information (recent stats, case studies, current events).

What’s different: Most AI slide tools stop at static slides. Oina integrates real-time audience interaction, analytics, and web search — so the content isn’t only well-structured but also up-to-date. It’s built for teachers, trainers, and teams that need feedback during presentations, not after.

There’s a free tier (200 credits ≈ 2 presentations) and then subscription plans. It’s live here: https://oina.ai

I’d love feedback on: - UX: is it easy enough to try without guidance? - Web search: is this useful for your use cases, or would you expect more depth? - Technical thoughts: scalability of handling 100+ live connections per session. - Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, business model, or early traction. Thanks!
by rconti | 2025-10-01 14:11:44+00:00
Sort of timely because I was on an Alaska Max 9 yesterday I couldn't believe how narrow the aisle was. I actually looked up whether a Max 9 fuselage was narrower than a traditional 737, it was that bad. Now, it's possible this plane had the wider seat option (possible ex-Hawaiian, if they used a different config?), but even so, I've been on a lot of planes, and this is the first where I felt like I had to walk down the aisle sideways.
by phkahler | 2025-10-01 14:11:50+00:00
>> The men running these company live like wannabe kings but have absolutely no backbone when it comes to having a stance about moderating for basic decency and are profiting greatly off of festering trash heaps.

Part of that is they don't want responsibility. The phone companies in the US are classified as "common carriers" which in part means they are not held responsible for misuse (drug deals, terrorist plots, whatever, discussed on their system). The flip side is that the are not allowed to discriminate - their job is to complete calls.

Online "platforms" want no responsibility for the content people post. They want to be common carriers, but that would also prevent them from discriminating (even algorithmically) what people see. Since they aren't properly classified/regulated yet they're playing a game trying to moderate content while also claiming no responsibility for content. It does not make sense to let them have it both ways.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-01 14:12:29+00:00
No, I'm arguing in fact the opposite and you'll have to prove the point wrong instead of drive-by insisting on this. The point of Codd's original paper was to separate concerns about data storage from its representation and to propose an elegant representational & transformation & query model based on first order logic and I believe he succeeded.

SQL was the first serious attempt to translate this into a working system, and it's full of warts, but the underlying model it is reaching towards retains its elegance.

But most importantly the principle of not tying the structure of data to its storage model is absolutely key. Not least because we can iteratively and flexibly improve the storage model over time, and not be stuck with decisions that tie us to one particular structure which is the problem that 1960s "network" and "hierarchical" databases (and modern day "key value" or "NoSQL" databases) cause.
by philipkglass | 2025-10-01 14:12:44+00:00
what becomes of the public square under this doctrine tho? There cannot be more than one public square, as it's a natural monopoly

Which one platform for user generated content do you think holds the natural monopoly? I agree that network effects limit competition, absent government intervention, but among my acquaintances people are using:

- Discord

- Snapchat

- Instagram

- TikTok

- Bluesky

- YouTube

- Twitter/X

- Reddit

I think that enforcing anti-trust would be enough to keep any one platform or corporate owner from monopolizing public discourse.
by bkfunk | 2025-10-01 14:13:01+00:00
If moving millions of people—functionally including entire metro areas like…oh I don’t know…Miami and New Orleans and large swathes of NYC—by forcing them to abandon their homes (with no insurance they are now unsalable) and then buy/rent (using what money?) new homes far away from their communities and jobs (if they bought close, they’d still be in the flood plain!)—if that’s “simple”, I don’t want to know what policy implementations you’d call “hard”!
by karmakaze | 2025-10-01 14:13:10+00:00
It helps to know what kind of data TigerBeetle handles. The data committed by its transactions is an immutable Transfer of id:128-bit, debit_account_id:128-bit, credit_account_id:128-bit, amount:128-bit, ledger:128-bit, code:16-bit, flags:bitfield, timestamp:64-bit, user_data_128, user_data_64, user_data_32.

Transactions atomically process one or more Transfers, keeping Account balances correct. Accounts are also records, their core fields (debits_posted, credits_posted, etc).

This gives a good idea of what TigerBeetle might be good for and what it might not be. For anything where latency/throughput and accuracy really, really matters, it could be worth the effort to make your problem fit.