MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by colinb | 2025-10-31 08:58:55+00:00
To which Beacon of Free Speech will you go?

The UK has its problems. Vague laws, over-excited police, Home Secretaries from every party who can never get enough polish on jack boots.

When I lived there I complained to my MP about David Blunkett. Jack Straw was no better. I left around the time Teresa May (leopard skin boots. A change for the better) was telling migrants they weren’t welcome from the back of trucks.

But stasi is ain’t. It’s a nonsense statement.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-31 08:59:29+00:00
My point wasn't that you should rely on the weak checksum, but rather that the possibility for failure is already baked in even for such a small set of fields, because errors of any kind can happen at any point even in the simplest setups.

The statement

With adjustments to ring buffers, IRQ/core affinity, and receive buffer size, you can receive a saturated 40GbE stream with no packet loss.

_Probably_ works out _most_ of the time in physical setups (especially in server environments with strict ECC memory), but it's not something you can write a protocol around if you need all of that data to _actually_ arrive.
by miki123211 | 2025-10-31 08:59:59+00:00
How does downstream code know which kind of asynchrony is requested / allowed?

Assume some code is trying to blink an LED, which can only be done with the led_on and led_off system calls. Those system calls block until they get an ack from the LED controller, which, in the worst case, will timeout after 10s if the controller is broken.

In e.g. Python, my function is either sync or async, if it's async, I know I have to go through the rigamarole of accessing the event loop and scheduling the blocking syscall on a background thread. If it's sync, I know I'm allowed to block, but I can't assume an event loop exists.

In Zig, how would something like this be accomplished (assuming led_on and led_off aren't operations natively supported by the IO interface?)
by jbstack | 2025-10-31 09:02:40+00:00
> AGI will behave as if it were sentient but will not have consciousness

Citation needed.

We know next to nothing about the nature of consciousness, why it exists, how it's formed, what it is, whether it's even a real thing at all or just an illusion, etc. So we can't possibly say whether or not an AGI will one day be conscious, and any blanket statement on the subject is just pseudoscience.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-31 09:03:44+00:00
> In C/C++, making almost every variable const at initialization is good practice. I wish it was the default, and mutable was a keyword.

I know it's irrelevant to his point, and it's not true of C, and it doesn't have the meaning he wants, but the pedant in me is screaming and I'm surprised it hasn't been said in the comments:

In C++ mutable is a keyword.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-10-31 09:03:59+00:00
2. Yeah, I am regularly irritated by old chestnut of “kids are tech geniuses unlike the helpless adults”. With few exceptions, they think WiFi/the Web/The Internet are the same thing and have no clue how any of it works deeper than the UI (just like most adults). In the UK at least, our “progressive” government shifted the focus in the late 90s from teaching basic CS concepts to using Microsoft Office applications. I hope it is slightly better now.
by linkregister | 2025-10-31 09:04:21+00:00
Fire danger is not a linear function. It fluctuates from year to year with rainfall. Efforts to reduce ignition events are meaningful.

Furthermore, risk to people and property is not uniformly distributed. Fire mitigation efforts are performed disproportionately near population centers. When man-made, preventable ignition causes are concentrated near towns like Paradise, responsible entities have a duty to reduce those risks.

It is not necessary to allow fires to burn houses down to fulfill a concept of accumulated fire risk. Marin County has published a series of videos showing homeowners how to landscape their properties to reduce the spread of fire.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-31 09:04:24+00:00
The real precedent for this is the removal of the drone strikes tracker app on the grounds that it was "political". https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/apple-finally-approv...

Which predates Trump and was happening under the Obama presidency. The real lesson there is that the application of the Jack Bauer principle ("good guys" are allowed to freely torture and murder "bad guys" without legal process) would eventually leak back into the mainland US. The same excuse - the concept that foreigners do not have rights - enables ICE to be incredibly abusive. And of course citizenship then becomes something that can be taken away by such a trivial matter as a cop deciding to throw away your ID. You might be able to prove you're a citizen if you had due process, but now you're a noncitizen you're not entitled to that.
by resonious | 2025-10-31 09:04:29+00:00
I'm a native English speaker. I do actually remember programming languages feeling a little uncanny at first. Like you can tell that it's "computery" and that the language author tried to make it English-like and only sorta succeeded.

So I think at this point, for me, programming languages just aren't English. One odd thing I've noticed is that in Ruby the `unless` keyword confuses the hell out of me, and yet when speaking English I never get tripped up on the actual word "unless". So I guess it's handy that the keywords in programming happen to be English words, but my comprehension of programming languages seems to occupy another region of my brain.
by teamonkey | 2025-10-31 09:05:18+00:00
> Things were said like “get the vaccine and you won’t get Covid”

Was this actually said, or did they say something like “much less likely to get Covid symptoms”?

Because the science never claimed 100% efficacy, at best they said 94%, which is quite a clear indication that some people would still get symptoms. The efficacy rates and R rates were all over the news at the time.

> “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”

Again an absolute that was never claimed by science. If you have milder symptoms it reduces the chance of spreading and reduces the viral load when it does. Even a small reduction in symptoms in the population will greatly help reduce the rate of the virus spreading.

> “you will have a milder case if you do get it”.

This part at least is correct.

There was a lot of confusion and bad science communication at the time, but the vaccines worked the same as vaccines always have. R rates and efficacy rates were talked about at length on mainstream and social media (what else did they have to talk about). The problem is that people heard only what they wanted to hear.
by max002 | 2025-10-31 09:06:06+00:00
Hmm, i'd like: - full control on what it remembers - being able to loadup/import stuff into memory, lets say my meetings for next week (with import id so i can delete those too with single click)

For quick rags you can check starrocks, i know its for analytics but ive loaded it up with like 100gbs of data and partial query was still like 0,3s
by jbn | 2025-10-31 09:06:24+00:00
This whole topic seems to be a re-discovery of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics with non-linearities and saturation.

In the same vein, on the consumer side we talk of admission control (which is just another name for "drop incoming messages") and throttling...
by tialaramex | 2025-10-31 09:06:42+00:00
Discouraging shadowing in languages with unclear lifetimes makes plenty of sense.

Clippy offers lints for (three?) distinct ways of shadowing because in most cases it turns out people who don't like shadowing only had problems with typically one specific kind of shadowing (e.g. same type unrelated shadowing, or different type same value shadowing) and since that varies why not offer to diagnose the specific problem this programmer doesn't like.

To be concrete some people are worried about things like:

let sparrows = get_a_list_of_sparrows(); // .... let sparrows = sparrows.len() + EXTRA_SPARROWS;

Whereas for some people that seems fine but they're worried about:

let sparrows = find_wild_sparrows(); // .... let sparrows = find_farmed_sparrows();

These are both shadowing the name sparrows, and Rust is fine with either but Clippy can provide different lints so that you can ban one of them while using the other freely in your codebase.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-10-31 09:07:03+00:00
There is a way to once and for all prevent this.

More IT people in politics.

The mass-surveillance proponents will always exist in small numbers, but it gets revived every other month because the number of ignorant politicians receptive to the idea is a function of their ignorance and malformed understanding of reality.

But that isn't their fault.

It's the magic tech companies are selling - and it's knowledgeable individuals who have to effectively communicate and explain bullshit.
by leshenka | 2025-10-31 09:07:21+00:00
Apple has this thing called lockdown mode. In the help article they state that “to connect your iPhone or iPad to an accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked”

Wonder if this helps against forensic tools. Also wonder why would they not disable USB port for anything besides charging or even go as extreme as disabling it altogether and only allow wireless charging.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105120
by dns_snek | 2025-10-31 09:08:06+00:00
This folk-wisdom scapegoating of post-install scripts needs to stop or people are going to get really hurt by the false sense of security it's creating. I can see the reasoning behind this, I really do, it sounds convincing but it's only half the story.

If you want to protect your machine from malicious dependencies you must run everything in a sandbox all the time, not just during the installation phase. If you follow that advice then disabling post-install scripts is pointless.

The supply chain world is getting more dangerous by the minute and it feels like I'm watching a train derail in slow motion with more and more people buying into the idea that they're safe if they just disable post-install scripts. It's all going to blow up in our collective faces sooner or later.
by croemer | 2025-10-31 09:08:12+00:00
Previously discussed:

Rouille (338 points, 144 comments, Sept 11, 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490935

Rost – Write rust code in German (55 points, 16 comments, Nov 9 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159077

Rost – Rust Programming in German (161 points, 115 comments, Mar 25, 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488490
by LogicHound | 2025-10-31 09:08:17+00:00
> It's funny how functional programming is slowly becoming the best practice for modern code (pure functions, no side-effects),

I once mentioned both these concepts to a room of C# developers. Two of them were senior to me and it was a blank expression from pretty much everyone.

> yet functional programming languages are still considered fringe tech for some reason.

You can use the same concepts in non-functional programming languages without having to buy into all the other gumpf around functional programming languages. Also other programming languages have imported functional concepts either into the language itself or into the standard libraries.

Past that. It is very rare to be able to get a job using them. The number of F# jobs I've seen advertised over the last decade, I could count on one hand.
by lukan | 2025-10-31 09:08:52+00:00
I think it is not clear.

"They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for."

That reads like just stating government perspective.

"We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."

But this says something different to me. Because yes, I do see it as a inherent flaw if governments focus is on things that are mainly good for the government. Government's job should be focusing on what is good for the people.
by saubeidl | 2025-10-31 09:09:14+00:00
Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c...

ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308...

Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr...

We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...

Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...

This is not "immigration enforcement".

It's paramilitary thugs beating up and disappearing political opponents. The closest equivalent would be the SA.
by maccard | 2025-10-31 09:09:53+00:00
> Everyone wanted a one time license, you aren't allowed to complain when that one-time licensed product stops getting updates.

A one time license is sold on the promise of future updates perpetually to this version. If serif said “we’re not adding AI tools to v2, we’re going to go to v3 instead” I’d be fine with it. But instead they’re taking the updates they were providing to us anyway and packaging them up under a new revenue stream.

If they didn’t want this backlash they shouldn’t have sold perpetual licenses, they should have sold licenses with 1 year of updates.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-10-31 09:10:37+00:00
Neither this article nor this book discuss the fact that hair cells phase lock to sound pulses. While individual neurons can fire no more than 200hz, populations of neurons are capable of phase locking to frequencies up to thousands of hertz.

Because cochlear implants only rely on stimulating the places in the cochlea related to particular frequencies but do not play the actual frequencies themselves (for reasons unknown), people with cochlear implants can detect frequency differences but lose appreciation for music.
by lopitoff | 2025-10-31 09:11:13+00:00
I want to like it too.

Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?

You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.

You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
by int_19h | 2025-10-31 09:11:25+00:00
It depends on how you do it. XSLT 2.0 had <xsl:tunnel>, where you still had to declare them explicitly as function (well, template) parameters, just with a flag. No explicit control over levels, you just get the most recent one that someone has passed with <xsl:with-param tunnel="yes"> with the matching qualified name.

For something like Zig, it would make sense to go one step further and require them to be declared to be passed, i.e. no "tunneling" through interleaving non-Io functions. But it could still automatically match them e.g. by types, so that any argument of type Io, if marked with some keyword to indicate explicit propagation, would be automatically passed to a call that requires one.
by _notreallyme_ | 2025-10-31 09:11:29+00:00
As a native french speaker, I have the same feeling when reading code written with french keywords, except that since I learned boolean and arithmetic in french, it makes more sense to me to read them in french. As others have pointed out, it seems to only be a matter of how you learn to read and write code.

For comparison, in mathematics I learned to read all the symbols in french, and only learned their english equivalent much later, so it feels uneasy for me when i read their english version. So it is clearly a matter of habit that took its root when you learned reading.
by phryneas | 2025-10-31 09:12:27+00:00
I'm an engineer on the client team, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the Apollo Server details and history, so please bear with me :)

I guess you're talking about [Safelisting Persisted Queries](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graphos/platform/security...) here. Afaik, if you want to use the full integration with the GraphOS platform, you'll need an account with us. The feature is supported on the free account with a rate-limit, and if you would need more, you could go with the "developer" account, which we launched this summer, which is quite reasonably priced and comes with starting credits: https://www.apollographql.com/pricing

That said, Apollo Server is open source and at no point you are locked into our platform - it's just that our platform takes a lot of work away from you, allowing you to manage those whitelists easier. If you want to manage your whitelist yourself, it's totally doable - I just did a quick google search and have come up with more than a dozen articles describing various ways of doing it. Just be aware that there is a lot of coordination between builds and deployments going on, quickly leading to very complex setups - which is why we offer the platform integration in the first place.

So I think the idea was not to lock anyone out of these features, just create a quick pit of success by making the GraphOS integration really easy - but I can see where your feelings are coming from. I hope we can earn back your trust over time!
by rogual | 2025-10-31 09:13:18+00:00
I do have the "second visual canvas" people here are talking about, but the thing about mine, and I haven't seen anyone say this yet, is that I don't have full control of it.

For example, I have a memory from childhood of visualizing a yellow bucket, and it showed up in my mind's eye with big cartoon eyes. I tried to delete the eyes because I just wanted a normal yellow bucket, but they kept coming back.

Also, when reading Harry Potter as a kid, Severus Snape always showed up in my mind's eye with the head of a crocodile. I remember telling my brain, no, he's just a guy, just give him a normal man's head, but it never worked. Even now when someone mentions Severus Snape I see him with the crocodile head.

Anyone else, or am I just nuts?
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-31 09:13:21+00:00
Or put differently, why bake the CPU instruction sets into the chips? What Apple has shown is that emulating x86 can actually rival or be faster than a natively running x86 chip. There are currently two major ones (ARM, x86) and an up-and-coming minor one (e.g. RISC-V), and lots of legacy ones (SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.). All these can be emulated. Native compilation is an optimization that can happen at build time (traditional compilers), at distribution time (Android stores do this), just before the first run (Rosetta), or on the fly (QEMU).

Chip manufacturers need to focus on making power-efficient, high-performance workhorses. Apple figured this out first and got frustrated enough with Intel, who was more preoccupied with vendor lock-in than with doing the one thing they were supposed to do: developing best-in-class chips. The jump from x86 to M1 completely destroyed Intel’s reputation on that front. Turns out all those incremental changes over the years were them just moving deck chairs around. AMD was just tagging along and did not offer much more than them. They too got sidelined by Apple’s move. They never were much better in terms of efficiency and speed. So them now maybe getting back into ARM chips is a sign that times are changing and x86 is becoming a legacy architecture.

This shouldn’t matter. Both Apple and Microsoft have emulation capability. Apple is of course retiring theirs, but that’s more of a prioritization/locking strategy than it is for technical reasons. This is the third time they’ve pulled off emulation as a strategy to go to a new architecture: Motorola 68000 to PowerPC to x86 to ARM. Emulation has worked great for decades. It has broken the grip X86 has had on the market for four decades.
by fastneutron | 2025-10-31 09:13:57+00:00
Ludlum is rare among equipment manufacturers in that they design with user-servicability in mind. They happily took phone calls and emails from my 16-year-old self about how to diagnose and repair various instruments of theirs I had picked up on eBay, many of which were long obsolete. Their schematics are still open, to my knowledge.

I have no relation to the company, just a very satisfied customer.
by GTP | 2025-10-31 09:13:59+00:00
> Spinning up a proper project to replace this application isn't feasible in the short term, because there are processes around creating software in the organisation, for very good reasons learned painfully from old mistakes, and there just isn't time to go through that.

I assume those processes weren't applied when deciding to use this application, why? Was there a loophole because it was done by an intern?
by frasacco05 | 2025-10-31 09:14:46+00:00
The 71% accuracy refers to the fact that, given 2 teams, 71% of the time the team with the most percentage really won. For example tonight there was MIL vs GSW and it guessed correctly at 71% probability that MIL would have won and it happened. Or yesterday for example, where it guessed that DET won when the odds says a completly different stories. I see that in 60 / 40 matchups in terms of win probability it des a pretty good job because 60 / 40 is not a clear win and it really has guessed right since now in those type of games. When it comes to compare it to other methods, it's not that much better BUT, if combined with trend analysis, record, streak and overall player momentum you can have a boost in your predictions (not meant for betting btw, even if I'm testing it and I'm 15$ dollars starting with 10$ at the the start of the season)
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-10-31 09:16:55+00:00
I find it strange that people believe cows and sentient animals don’t believe something extremely similar to what we do.

Evolution means we all have common ancestors and are different branches of the same development tree.

So if we have sentience and they have sentience, which science keeps recognizing, belatedly, that non human animals do, shouldn’t the default presumption be our experiences are similar? Or at the very least their experience is similar to a human at an earlier stage of development, like a 2 year old?

Which is also an interesting case study given that out of convenience, humans also believed that toddlers also weren’t sentient and felt no pain, and so until not that long ago, our society would conduct all sorts of surgical procedures on babies without any sort of pain relief (circumcision being the most obvious).

It’s probably time we accept our fellow animals’s sentience and act on the obvious ethical implications of that instead of conveniently ignoring it like we did with little kids until recently.
by cess11 | 2025-10-31 09:17:30+00:00
Fascism is capitalism violently colonising its home turf, there is no conflict between a group calling itself a "free market think tank" and being part of a fascist movement or tendency.

Obama is quite pro-capitalism and hence much closer to fascism than any leftist position. As a politician he also invested heavily in and innovated deceitful application of violent force, mostly abroad, but kind of rolled out the carpet for it to turn explicitly fascist by 'boomeranging' back home.

I suspect insights like these frighten you, because they would force you to reevaluate your identities and place in society.
by guiriduro | 2025-10-31 09:18:08+00:00
Its pretty decent. Decent enough in fact that I can run a Windows 11 ARM install on vmware Fusion on my macbook m4 pro, and it will happily run win arm and x86 binaries (via builtin MS x86 emulation) decently fast and without complaint (we're talking apps, gaming I haven't tried.)