MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CodesInChaos | 2025-10-31 14:46:41+00:00
Java's distinction between Runtime and Checked Exception makes sense, and is pretty much the same panic vs Result distinction Rust makes. But Java's execution of the concept is terrible.

1. Checked exception don't integrate well with the type-system (especially generics) and functional programming. It's also incompatible with creating convenient helper functions, like Rust offers on Result.

2. Converting checked exceptions into runtime exception is extremely verbose, because Java made the assumption that the type of error distinguishes between these cases. While in reality errors usually start as expected in low-level functions, but become unexpected at a higher level. In Rust that's a simple `unwrap`/`expect`. Similarly converting a low level error type to a higher level error type is a simple `map_err`.

3. Propagation of checked exception is implicit, unlike `?` in Rust

Though Rust's implementation does have its weaknesses as well. I'd love the ability to use `Result<T, A | B>` instead of needing to define a new enum type.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-10-31 14:47:05+00:00
The criticism of the UK police arresting people for social media posts is largely fabricated as the actual arrests have been for people inciting violence/riots and pushing complete falsehoods to promote riots etc.

This incident, however, is completely about politically disagreeing with social media posts which is absolutely not a thing in the UK and would get thrown out of court in a heartbeat if police tried to do that. Also, the police would get heavily sued for wrongful arrest. Also, I can't see that a judge would keep someone incarcerated for that length of time over a social media post in the UK - it's just complete abuse of power.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-31 14:47:09+00:00
I remember the same argument being used before the 2008 crash.

Point is that all of this companies need to start making real profits and pretty damn big ones, otherwise all of this will collapse. Problem is that unless Altman has some super-intelligent super-AI hidden in his closet, it is very unlikely that it will.

And whose gonna take the bill when it falls? Let me guess… Where have I seen this before…?
by LeFantome | 2025-10-31 14:47:10+00:00
Even moreso their hardware buyers.

If most Intel hardware makers had gone full ARM, they would simply have lost market share. Apple customers are going to buy Apple hardware—whatever it has inside.

But of course Apple controls not just the hardware but the OS. So ya, if only Apple hardware will run your application, you are going to port to that hardware.

Apple has a massive advantage in these transitions for sure.
by api | 2025-10-31 14:47:23+00:00
The assumption is that they have a large moat.

If they don't then they're spending a ton of money to level up models and tech now, but others will eventually catch up and their margins will vanish.

This will be true if (as I believe) AI will plateau as we run out of training data. As this happens, CPU process improvements and increased competition in the AI chip / GPU space will make it progressively cheaper to train and run large models. Eventually the cost of making models equivalent in power to OpenAI's models drops geometrically to the point that many organizations can do it... maybe even eventually groups of individuals with crowdfunding.

OpenAI's current big spending is helping bootstrap this by creating huge demand for silicon, and that is deflationary in terms of the cost of compute. The more money gets dumped into making faster cheaper AI chips the cheaper it gets for someone else to train GPT-5+ competitors.

The question is whether there is a network effect moat similar to the strong network effect moats around OSes, social media, and platforms. I'm not convinced this will be the case with AI because AI is good at dealing with imprecision. Switching out OpenAI for Anthropic or Mistral or Google or an open model hosted on commodity cloud is potentially quite easy because you can just prompt the other model to behave the same way... assuming it's similar in power.
by willis936 | 2025-10-31 14:48:18+00:00
MEMS are made on a different process than other silicon devices, which slightly increases their cost. They also need to have hermetically sealed packaging, same as quartz. Together there is little fundamental savings to be had with MEMS, but they do offer a higher ceiling on performance. I don't see crystals going away anytime soon.

Also, if you get a MEMS in a small epoxy / CSP package be weary of gases that permeate the packaging material, such as helium.

https://hackaday.com/2018/10/31/helium-can-stop-your-iphone-...
by nkoren | 2025-10-31 14:48:24+00:00
Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.

About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.

The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.

Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.

Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.

So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldon_Chase -- mostly but not entirely accurate.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-10-31 14:48:39+00:00
AMD was being pummeled by Intel during the time Jim was there and was only the giant we know today when Jim left. AMD did this, mostly, by x64 server market. So AMD did what it could to get around intel's and apple's monopolies. Intel on the server end came in at a higher price, and often worse performance or more power usage, or both. I'm not sure who AMD would have sold ARM to in 2010's. Apple didnt want their product and made their own, cell phone companies were cozy with the established ARM vendors, MS wouldnt launch an actual ARM laptop for years, data centers didn't want it, etc.

Look at intel's various arm or embedded offerings it keep canceling. It can't find buyers. Qualcomm and Samsung other vendors just keep eating up sales in ARM.

Now I imagine AMD sees ARM servers as the future and wants to make sure not to be left behind, on top of ARM desktop/laptop and further embedded.

I think this mostly a sign the world is now moving away from the old x86/64 system that ruled technology for so long. AMD is needs to stay competitive here.
by tombert | 2025-10-31 14:49:00+00:00
I can have whatever rules I want in my house. I am the one who would be playing tech support for all these computers if something breaks, and Windows is so utterly terrible that I will not touch it anymore.

There are only three people in my house, two of which appear to be happy with macOS and one (me) is happy with Linux.

I am not upset with the job requiring people to use macOS. That job was awful for a whole bunch of wonderful reasons, but that wasn’t one of them. If people expect me to play tech support in my house I want an OS that I understand and isn’t terrible to do it.
by automatic6131 | 2025-10-31 14:49:19+00:00
> The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end.

This is bad. We should not shrug our shoulders and go "Oh ho, this is how the game is played" as though we can substitute cynicism for wisdom. We should say "this is bad, this is a moral hazard, and we should imprison and impoverish those who keep trying it".

Or we'll get more.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-31 14:49:21+00:00
Well isn't that defeatist. Politically impossible positions may become possible with enough outreach, especially if the position has economic advantages. Look at YIMBY.

Another intermediate possibility in California is distributed generation and storage to both reduce load on transmission and to allow transmission and distribution to be deenergized during times when fire risk is high. This could then gradually transition over into an entirely distributed system without transmission to some locations.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-10-31 14:49:35+00:00
The most annoying instance of this is installers in Windows that just assume you want to go into `C:/Program Files`, which nowadays requires admin to be modified

This is very annoying on company machines where you may not have admin, since now there's red tape with your IT because the installer was poorly written.

Half the reason I use the WSL is because you at least get "root" on it, so permissions are never an issue

Edit: there may be something lost in translation. This post is in reference to software your IT already approves, which happens to only install to program files.
Show HN: Loopletter: Open-source email marketing platform
by loopletter-max | 2025-10-31 14:49:35+00:00
Hi, I started building Loopletter, an open-source email marketing platform built specifically for independent artists and creators. I've been using this for a while to run marketing campaigns for my own company. But due to the lack of time to update it i've decided to open it up under the MIT license so other people and industries can self-host, extend, or just learn from the codebase.

What’s inside: - Full campaign builder (visual editor, reusable templates, optional Spotify-powered layouts) - Audience management tooling (imports, segmentation, consent workflows, list cleanup) - Queue-driven sending with AWS SES, BullMQ, and Redis — handles rate limits, retries, and deliverability feedback - Analytics dashboards with real-time metrics, campaign history, and basic attribution - Infrastructure scripts for Supabase, AWS EventBridge/Lambda, and Upstash Redis so you can set everything up from scratch Tech stack: Next.js, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind, Clerk for auth, Supabase (Postgres) for storage, AWS SES + S3 for mail/asset delivery. The repo has docs, scripts, and a demo data sandbox because we know email platforms can be boring to set up without real content. Why open-source? Most tools in this space are either huge enterprise SaaS products or very marketing/sales oriented. Independent artists have different needs (merch drops, tour announcements, limited release windows) and usually lean on social platforms they don’t control. Email still converts best for them, but standing up a full stack is painful. We’d love to see small labels, agencies, and indie devs fork it, run it for their communities, or contribute features. I'm especially curious if this has potential to be something bigger. Repo link: https://github.com/createdbymax/Loopletter-Open-source-email-marketing-platform Production website: https://loopletter.co/ Happy to answer questions about the project, SES deliverability, or anything else related to running email at indie scale. Thanks for taking a look!
by impossiblefork | 2025-10-31 14:50:08+00:00
If you start programming in it though, syntax only matters during the first day. Familiarity comes very fast, and if you do five programming exercises, maybe one a day, 'implement a hash map', 'make a small game', etc. you will have no problems whatsoever once the week is done.

If you have a course where one day you're supposed to do Haskell and another Erlang, and another LISP, and another Prolog, and there's only one exercise in each language, then you're obviously going to have to waste a lot of time on syntax, but that's never a situation you encounter while actually programming.
by jayd16 | 2025-10-31 14:50:13+00:00
If you need new values you just make new things.

If you want to do an operation on fooA, you don't mutate fooA. You call fooB = MyFunc(fooA) and use fooB.

The nice thing here is you can pass around pointers to fooA and never worry that anything is going to change it underneath you.

You don't need to protect private variables because your internal workings cannot be mutated. Other code can copy it but not disrupt it.
by PeterStuer | 2025-10-31 14:50:22+00:00
AFAIK the WoW server code was never leaked. All private server code bases were developed by reverse engineering network traffic, game behaviour and client asset files.

E.g. the code for AzerothCore is fully available (and very easy to run on very low spec hardware)

https://github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk
by pjmlp | 2025-10-31 14:50:25+00:00
I would be fine with a Objective-C 3.0, but the big question would be how to fix the underlying C flaws, which was one of Swift's original goals.

I do agree that the language design has gone overboard in the last couple of years, expecially in the various approaches to parallelism.

However they are not alone, just look at any programming language sponsored by companies, you need features to justify team sizes and naturally old features don't go away.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-31 14:50:34+00:00
That's fine, but that's a separate conversation. Maybe this is a bubble, maybe it isn't.

My point is that the way it's all being financed is just regular financing. This article is trying to present the way it's being funded as novel, as "complex and circular", when it's not. This is how funding and investment works 365 days a year in all sectors. Nothing about the funding arrangements is a bubble indicator.

So this is a strange article from the NYT, because it's trying to present normal everyday financing deals as uniquely "complex and circular".
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-10-31 14:50:38+00:00
it is a general purpose language, but it's happy place is math. Most languages (except Fortan Matlab and R) are very much oriented towards writing web servers/compilers etc, so Julia gets lots of wins in science just by virtue of caring more about math.

Julia is a completely reasonable general purpose language, but getting people to switch generally requires a ~10x better experience, and Julia can't deliver that for general purpose applications.
by tinfoilhatter | 2025-10-31 14:50:42+00:00
Thank you for shining light on these examples for me. I've been studying quite a bit of history, esoteric spirituality and the occult sciences over the past few years and have fallen into the habit of using this term when talking about lineages of influential people and their families.

I definitely did not mean to sound like I was into eugenics or racial purity - I think these concepts are grotesque and as you said, people that focus on them or use them to excuse atrocities are indeed, very bad people. Thank you for giving me the benefit of doubt and highlighting why my choice of language is problematic.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-31 14:50:47+00:00
Many here now didn't live through the dot-com bubble as an adult so can't really appreciate what it was like. The hype was something hard to describe. Financial analysts and journalists struggled to come up with ways to describe the health of these "companies". My favorite was what revenue multiple companies would trade it.

But the major takeaway was that almost none of these companies were real businesses. This is why I laughed at dot-com comparisons in the 2010s around the tech giants because Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc were money-printing machines on a scale we have trouble comprehending. That doesn't make them immune to economic struggles. Ad spending with Google will rise and fall with the economy.

OpenAI has a paper valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars now and no prospect of a revenue model that will justify that for many, many years.

Currently, the hardware is a barrier to entry but that won't last. It has parallels in the dot-com era too when servers were expensive. The cost of training LLMs is (at least) halving every year. We're probably reaching the limits of what these transformers can do and we'll need another big breakthrough to improve.

OpenAI's moat is tenuous. Their value is in the model they don't release. But DeepSeek is a warning shot that it will be in somebody's geopolitical interest, probably China's, to prevent a US tech monopoly on AI.

If you look at these AI companies, so many of them are basically scams. I saw a video about a household humanoid robot that was, surprise surprise, just someone in a VR suit. Many cities have delivery drones now but somebody is remotely driving them.

I saw somebody float the theory that the super-profitable big tech companies are engaging in layoffs not because they don't need people but to pay for the GPUs. It's an interesting idea. A lot of these NVidia deals are just moving money around where NVidia comes out on top with a bunch of equity in these companies should they become trillion dollar companies.

Oh and take out data center building from the US economy and we're in recession. I do think this is a bubble and it will burst sooner rather than later.
by wmeredith | 2025-10-31 14:51:01+00:00
Amazon - 14,000 layoffs; significant

Microsoft - 14,000 (multiple rounds); significant

Meta - 600 layoffs; insignificant for company size

Google - "Several hundred layoffs"; insignificant for a company size

Apple - No layoffs

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/tech-layoffs-2025-list/
by dalyons | 2025-10-31 14:51:19+00:00
> These are the things they make irrelevant because they're hybrids. It doesn't matter if it has a short range or takes 8 hours to charge because you charge it once a day overnight or while you're at work, which is enough for 98% of the days because the range is still double the average commute, and then the other 2% of the time you put gas in it.

Did you read the link? It absolutely does matter. The pathetic ev system in hybrids mean they save -19% of gas in the real world. Aka, basically nothing. Approximately no-one is doing 98/2 on electric.

Semi-solid states with 500+ mile range are already shipping in china, the remaining niche of hybrids is dying fast.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-31 14:51:35+00:00
Surely if you want to oblige companies to release new versions because you purchased a version in the past, then you also have to oblige every customer to also purchase the new version. Which would be preposterous.

When you purchase something you should get exactly what you purchased, nothing more and nothing less. That's how business has been conducted for three hundred thousand years by now.

Affinity cannot deactivate the software you have purchased, that would be outside of the law.
by lock1 | 2025-10-31 14:51:46+00:00
Probably, the problem with Java's `try-catch` is it's not composable and has an abundance of unchecked exceptions (could mess up `catch` type). In Rust, you could just `?` to short-circuit return or do another chained method call `result.map(...).and_then(...).unwrap_or(...)`.

And more importantly, I don't think there's any JEP trying to improve checked exception handling.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-31 14:51:47+00:00
There is much more to it.

There is such a thing as state-dependent memory or context-dependent memory: recall is better when the environmental context (e.g. location, lighting, smells) matches the context of learning.

If you study while on Adderall, which alters your neurochemical state (increasing dopamine and norepinephrine activity), you may recall that material more effectively when you are in the same neurochemical state, that is, also on Adderall.

Similarly, if someone learns something while sober, they will generally recall it better when sober again, rather than under the influence of a drug.

It is the phenomenon where memory recall is improved when the internal physiological or psychological state matches that during learning.
by tarentel | 2025-10-31 14:52:06+00:00
It is pretty rough but as someone who has been programming in Swift since 1.0 I can say it rarely happens in practice. In the early days it happened all the time where the compiler would trip up on random expressions. I can still get it to happen, especially on complex closure type things, but even if those did compile they're confusing enough where they really shouldn't make it past code review anyway. That url example should never either.

I am very curious as to what you're running into where you're seeing wildly slow type checking times.
by iliasabs | 2025-10-31 14:52:13+00:00
Thanks a lot for the feedback — that was really helpful!

I’ve just pushed an update addressing your points: commit d94969a(https://github.com/ellipticc/drive-frontend/commit/d94969a63...) — N and G are now public, hard-coded RFC 5054 constants (3072-bit for new users, keeping 2048-bit compatibility), and I fixed the session key calculation length.

I’ll definitely look into OPAQUE later on — I did some early testing, but ran into a WASM-related crash on the server side, so I’m holding off until I can debug that properly.

Really appreciate you pointing this out — it helped tighten things up!
by zigzagger11 | 2025-10-31 14:52:18+00:00
Well, maybe take a look at how this worked out? Because you're saying that all they have to do is delete the emails, but clearly that isn't what happened here.

The biggest difference is that there's little effort involved here. One click to send mass emails out to all relevant politicians. No they can not ignore a constant stream of emails from the electorate. Frankly, it doesn't seem like you understand why this site was different or effective.