MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hbrn | 2025-10-16 00:30:48+00:00
Funny, I've spoken about something like this to a colleague couple weeks ago. This could be a future of software development we're headed towards, if the DX is done right.

There are definitely cases where the spec is much easier to understand than the code that implements it.

Think systems with complex lifecycles or lots of required boilerplate.

Have you thought of embedding the specs into existing code?

E.g.

# @spec: if any method takes longer than 1s to execute, a warning must be logged class X: ...
by dangus | 2025-10-16 00:31:41+00:00
That’s an irrelevant aside because we are already comparing apples to apples here. The reality is that there are very few phones with SD card slots in them.

I’m personally fine with it at this point. It’s not ideal and it’s not consumer friendly, but SD cards are slow and failure prone compared to internal storage, and I find that multiple storage volumes introduces management friction (moving apps and content between two locations).
by toast0 | 2025-10-16 00:31:42+00:00
> On top of that it seems like by the time there is a clear winner for reliability, the manufacturer no longer makes that particular model and the newer models are just not a part of the dataset yet.

That's how things work in general. Even if it is the same model, likely parts have changed anyway. For data storage, you can expect all devices to fail, so redundancy and backup plans are key, and once you have that set, reliability is mostly just a input into your cost calculations. (Ideally you do something to mitigate correlated failures from bad manufacturing or bad firmware)
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-10-16 00:31:59+00:00
Between 1987 and 1988, I was obsessed with recording an anomaly with my first programmable Casio calculator that had an RND function. At the ripe age of 15, I took a bus to a warehouse-like building in some London suburb that had advertised the calculator in some computer magazine. I had saved up 100+ pounds and the calculator was 98 pounds plus VAT. I came home and opened the box and started reading the manual. All the sudden I fixated on some logical issue that can arise based on its instruction set. I have no recollection why, but I knew if that I could crash the calculator if I forced an undecidable state. Sure enough, when I ran it, it would wipe out what I had stored in memory and the LCD would go blank. Nothing unusual about that, I had simply managed to break it. I was fond of breaking things. After some time, I decided to make it more fun so I made it crash only if the random value 0.153 came up (I used the RND function inside the loop) and for fun I started recording the times it took before it crashed. Out of shear boredom and fascination with the power I had to crash the calculator, I started daring it to crash by thinking out loud (but in my head still, like an inner voice) the number 0.153. I convinced myself that I have ESP of some kind because the more I concentrated on that number the faster the calculator seemed to crash. I tabulated the times over a two year period (in a notepad that I ended up shredding and throwing in the trash because I thought I was going crazy.) My data revealed an anomaly in the correlation between the frequency of saying the magic number in my head (nothing special about the number) and the time it took for the calculator to crash.

Personally, I don't believe in the "anomaly". However. I still can't explain it. I mean it's not like my mind could interface with CMOS or that the calculator was fed off some quantum number generator or even an analog source. It was a deterministic pseudorandom number generator.

Yet, I spent two years of my teenage years obsessed with the experiment and the results. LOL.
by acdha | 2025-10-16 00:33:01+00:00
> Ideally government administered, but if we can't have that then maybe a distributed ledger would do the trick.

The problem is that it has to be government administered because otherwise you’re constantly stuck with the risk that what you see won’t survive a legal challenge. This is a constant problem for ledgers because the sales pitch is about being “trust less” or distributed in some sense that everyone can participate, but making them work is an exercise in picking which third-parties you trust to settle disputes. For the most important things, that usually means the government unless part of their authority has been delegated to a private entity.
by silvercymbals | 2025-10-16 00:33:12+00:00
This is a fantastic analysis.

I didn't want to go here, but I do have direct knowledge from two final rounds I was passed over for that h1b visa holders were selected instead of me and paid less. (I knew employees at these startups)

Part of why I'm just considering doing something else is the fact that so much of this work is going to be outsourced. Most of my friends who are actively running startups don't even bother hiring inside the US and just use latam contractors.

Unfortunately, I need money. I have effectively a net zero income for 2025, this after years of entrepreneurship just isn't good enough. I find it ironic how on HN anyone advocating to push themselves into a position where they have more options (more income) is met with accusations of being "entitled" or outlandish.

Let's say my skillset isn't as "senior" as I think, how on earth do I escape the tar-pit of being a semi-junior senior (to quote DHH)? This problem is what's been tearing me apart... I genuinely don't know what to do.

I also have some medical stuff I need taken care of and I can't afford to liquidate more of my retirement. So "bootstrapping" another company is just something I'm not interested in.
by Spivak | 2025-10-16 00:34:10+00:00
Well the falsifiable part of his statement is at least true, median real wages are up in the US. Americans are wealthier than we have been since at least 1980. Especially women, as a group our real wages are basically a straight line up. Some confounding factors there obviously but still. As for whether you can attribute the growth to Capitalism specifically, *shrugs*.
by techdmn | 2025-10-16 00:34:26+00:00
I had a similar experience helping a disabled family member. Without being too specific, it's amazing how much effort and expertise it takes to access benefits to which a person is legally entitled. It's almost as if the means testing is inverted, you cannot access benefits without the means to navigate a system designed to prevent benefits from being distributed. We have a homelessness epidemic for a reason.
by armchairhacker | 2025-10-16 00:34:39+00:00
Sum types are effectively implemented in Java, Scala, and Kotlin, via sealed classes and (Java “record”, Scala “case class”, Kotlin “data class”)es; and in TypeScript via discriminated unions (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/unions-and-inte...).

By “effectively” I mean you can construct and pattern-match these exactly like sum types, with compile-time exhaustiveness checking. Sure, you can do extra things with them (like share one variant between multiple types or compare instances by pointer), so some may argue they aren’t “real” sum types. But there’s nothing you can do with “real” sum types that you can’t with them, so I think they’re just a superset.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-16 00:36:30+00:00
This was such a fun neat part of the Direct File code drop 5 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901

In particular there's a pretty nice inline tutorial that's still there in that release: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...
by titzer | 2025-10-16 00:37:01+00:00
Testing this in Wizard is fairly easy.

Compare the running speed of the two binaries built with different options:

% V3C_OPTS=-redef-field=FastIntTuning.threadedDispatch=true ./build.sh wizeng x86-64-linux % bin/wizeng.x86-64-linux --mode=int test/microbench/100ms/fib.wasm % V3C_OPTS=-redef-field=FastIntTuning.threadedDispatch=false ./build.sh wizeng x86-64-linux % bin/wizeng.x86-64-linux --mode=int test/microbench/100ms/fib.wasm
by toast0 | 2025-10-16 00:37:20+00:00
UPSes are a PITA. I have frequent enough outages that I use them on all of my desktops, and they need a new battery every couple years, and now I'm reaching the point where the whole thing needs replacement.

When they fail, they turn short dips, which a power supply might have been able to ride through into an instant failure, and they make terrible beeping at the same time. At least the models I have do their test with the protected load, so if you test regularly, it fails by having an unscheduled shutdown, so that's not great either. And there's not many vendors and my vendor is starting to push dumb cloud shit. Ugh.
by bgutierrez | 2025-10-16 00:38:56+00:00
> One reason the practice hasn’t been more widespread is that it delivers a diminished dose of a drug. It isn’t clear how much of a high secondary users receive, and some medical experts say there is no more than a placebo effect.

Yes, this makes sense. People are not actually getting high from this, so I doubt that very many people are trying to get high from injecting other people's blood directly.

> Unusual injection practices in Pakistan include selling half-used, blood-infused heroin syringes. (link to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19558668/)

This is the headline, I think. Street vendors sell hits of a syringe that may have already been stuck in someone else. Every time the needle enters a blood vessel, some of the blood goes back into the needle. It's not that users are asking for "blood-infused" syringes, it's that the vendors are sticking multiple people with a single syringe and now 50% of intravenous drug users in Sargodha have HIV.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-16 00:40:13+00:00
The facts seem to be:

1. HIV in Fiji is up 10-fold from 2014 (that's a lot, but if the starting point was small, then it's hard to say)

2. 50% of people who contracted HIV said they shared needles (common issue, unrelated to "Bluetoothing")

3. "Bluetoothing" is a meme, and it sounds insane, and in some small sample in South Africa, 18% of drug users claimed to have done it.

4. In Pakistan, street vendors are selling pre-used heroin syringes (also insane - but needle sharing, not "Bluetoothing")

I mean, sure, this is news in the sense that it's insane. But the headline makes you wonder what's going on at the NYT.
by bccdee | 2025-10-16 00:40:29+00:00
That it's being framed as "raising expectations" at all is very silly to me. "Raising expectations" costs nothing and requires no external support, yet we see no success stories about schools which raised expectations and had big success.

The "Mississippi Miracle" boils down to directing resources toward struggling kids. They hired reading coaches specifically for struggling students, provided teachers with literacy-based professional development resources, and created Individualized Reading Plans for struggling kids and their parents. Yes, they also held back kids who didn't pass a literacy exam (and moved them to teachers who specialized in helping struggling children), but failing more students was not the primary policy improvement here, and on its own it would do nothing.

"Low-expectations theory" (and the accompanying suggestion that progressives are somehow to blame) is an absurd diagnosis for a problem that was not solved by raising expectations, but rather by targeting available resources toward problem areas—a solution which is painfully obvious in hindsight. That doesn't have an ideological valence, though, and this article seems intent on sticking it to progressives somehow.
by tombert | 2025-10-16 00:40:42+00:00
I agree. I use Grammarly for finding outright mistakes (spelling and the like, or a misplaced comma or something), but I don't listen to any of the suggestions for writing.

I feel like when I try writing through Grammarly, it feels mechanical and really homogeneous. It's not "bad" exactly, but it sort of lacks anything interesting about it.

I dunno. I'm hardly some master writer, but I think I'm ok at writing things that interesting to read, and I feel Grammarly takes that away.
by dangus | 2025-10-16 00:40:51+00:00
You aren’t superior to everyone else. Maybe you aren’t passing the vibe check rather than the tech screen if this is your level of humility in interviews.

The Midwest includes some amazing and really nicely affordable cities like Chicago. You would even find mental institutions like the twin cities, Milwaukee, Madison, Columbus, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh to be really nice places with lots to do.

And I’m not even telling you that you’re resigning to being a plebeian with median income, but you can’t help being snobby anyway.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-16 00:41:04+00:00
Right on, but even if you take a liter of blood at 0.4% BAC (potentially fatal) and give it to a sober person who nominally has five liters already, that dilutes it down to an equivalent BAC of 0.06%, right? They’d have to be a real lightweight to feel anything. And that’s a full liter, not the tiny hypos in the article photos.

I dunno. Another 300ml of vodka can’t be that much more expensive than the apparatus needed to perform a blood transfusion.
by 6510 | 2025-10-16 00:41:56+00:00
I've done a lot of experiments. Most turned out wonderful ways to ruin readability. (I combine those to highlight a single line of code in an article to troll the reader)

It is a huge problem that we are so used to what we have. I can barely make sense of the examples in the article.

I think it calls for actual research where we collectively catalog the approaches, experiment (on humans) and attempt to have conclusions about them.

What surprised me most in the experiments is that giving each different variable and each function call a different color makes scanning over the code much easier.(function declaration and call the same color)

Also a very successful experiment was to color the opening and closing brackets the same color and use a different one for each level of nesting.

One that I failed to code/design properly but looked very promising was to faintly color the background of each level of nesting so that the color gets more visible the deeper you go. It makes the hot spots jump out.

Probably the funniest was to have basic html tags in comments (like headings, pictures and videos) then define a css at the top of the code.

/*<style> body {background:Medium Blue;color:white} comments {color:lime} var {color:olive} h1 {font-family:inferno} </style>*/
Show HN: StudySpaces – shared Pomodoro rooms to study together
by n00bi3s2 | 2025-10-16 00:42:18+00:00
I made [studyspaces.org](https://studyspaces.org) because solo studying kept derailing me. You open a room, share a link, and everyone’s Pomodoro timer stays in sync. Camera/mic are optional; most people stay muted and check in during breaks. There’s simple chat, streaks, and a small leaderboard to keep it motivating without being noisy.

I’d love feedback on the room layout, reliability with bigger groups, and what would make it a daily habit (calendar hooks? gentle reminders? better mobile?). If you try it, tell me what felt rough or distracting.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-16 00:43:28+00:00
Never heard about this before, and seems it's maybe related to "Flashblood" where Heroin users would pass on their blood right after injecting, mainly to avoid withdrawal? From 2010: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4407801/

> During 2005, a new blood-sharing practice, “flashblood,” emerged among female IDUs in Dar es Salaam. Flashblood is a syringe full of blood drawn back immediately after initial injection that is passed to a companion to inject. Those practicing flashblood believe that the syringe full of about 4cm3 of such blood contains enough heroin to avoid the pains of withdrawal.
by scoodah | 2025-10-16 00:43:31+00:00
Very obvious writing style but also the bullet points that restate the same thing in slightly different ways as well as the weirdly worded “full server privileges” and “full nodejs privileges”.

Like… yes running a process is going to have whatever privileges your user has by default. But I’ve never once heard someone say “full server privileges” or “full nodejs privileges”…. It’s just random that is not necessarily wrong but not really right either.
by dwd | 2025-10-16 00:44:07+00:00
I don't believe Equifax received money, just a long list of demands to be allowed to continue as a viable business.

That it was a nation-state actor may have allowed them some grace, as it didn't result in individuals' details being wholesale sold on the dark web, and the fallout was most-likely a national security issue.

It would definitely have helped the CCP target individuals who were vulnerable to recruitment due to their financial status. Especially when combined with the Office of Personnel Management data hack.
by xpe | 2025-10-16 00:45:05+00:00
Poking around System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts… > Keyboard is a pretty good place to browse if you haven't. There are default keybindings that can changed and switched on/off. For macOS Sequoia 15.6:

[ ] Change the way Tab moves focus ⌃F7 [ ] Turn keyboard access on or off ⌃F1 [ ] Move focus on the menu bar ⌃F2 [ ] Move focus on the Dock ⌃F3 [ ] Move focus to the active or next window ⌃F4 [ ] Move focus to the window toolbar ⌃F5 [ ] Move focus to the floating window ⌃F6 [*] Move focus to next window ⌘` [ ] Move focus to status menus ⌃F8 [ ] Show contextual menu ⌃↩

I only have one checked currently; I'm not feeling adventurous.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-16 00:46:32+00:00
Why do you think the "d&d is satanic" thing was a joke? I remember growing up and that was going around, and it was very much not a joke. These people were serious about them thinking it was satanic. If you say it's a joke because it was laughably misguided, that's one thing I guess, but it was never a meme like joke. Just like the fear of backmasking in rock-n-roll music, these misguided people were very serious about it. I spent a lot of my teenage years with this crap, and it was only funny in how we made fun of the people with those beliefs.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-16 00:47:06+00:00
Oh wait, I can rewrite this for you. Here you go:

Yeah, ultimately they denied that you could group together all these projects under one environmental review as an exception to normal rules. But many of the most influential environmental organizations, and a majority of those shaping modern permitting policy, have supported or defended regulatory structures that make large-scale energy projects extremely difficult to approve while also actively using those regulatory structures to kill major projects. Many prominent environmental groups have, at various times, opposed nuclear, solar, wind, or geothermal projects in the US: sometimes over local impacts, sometimes procedural grounds, and sometimes due to broader philosophical objections. Taken together, the net effect of those positions may have been to slow or block clean energy deployment more than almost any other political force, and therefore they may have been the largest policy contributors to climate change in much of the United States.

There we go. I think you can probably retune every comment you read with an LLM so that there's lots of hedging in it like this and then you can satisfy your own need for sufficient phatic phrases. But this one is from a human, given to you for free. If you don't like my comments, ask dang to ban me.
by tombert | 2025-10-16 00:47:47+00:00
You're not wrong but I think it's sort of irrelevant. Rust is cool but from my understanding, graphics card drivers are almost an entire OS in itself. I don't think Nvidia is writing a new driver for each GPU, I think they're using a core driver codebase and making relevant modifications for each card.

My point is that I suspect that the Nvidia driver is a decades-long project, and dropping everything and rewriting in Rust isn't really realistic .
by ryukoposting | 2025-10-16 00:47:51+00:00
> people are generally happy with their phones

I'm not. Samsung treats my phone like dirt. I'd love to have some actual ownership of a device I spent $900 on last year.

I don't think my wife is happy with her iPhone either. She bought one of those little NFC fridge magnet things that locks your phone out of social media apps. She and I are dissatisfied in different ways, but there's a theme here.
by SecureBitChat | 2025-10-16 00:48:03+00:00
What it does: Browser notifications only fire when you're away from the chat tab (using Page Visibility API). No notification spam during active conversations. What it is: WebRTC-based messenger. No registration, no servers, no phone numbers. Scan QR code and chat with ECDH + DTLS encryption. What would you want to see next? Considering:

Voice/video calls Ephemeral messages Multi-device sync Group chats (mesh P2P) Native mobile apps

What features would make this useful for you?
by nirav72 | 2025-10-16 00:48:57+00:00
Whats the most common reason they’ve harnessed you over? Just wondering if they’re going based on prior issue on file? I’m of Indian descent , born and raised in the U.S - I must be the lucky one. Because I’ve never had any issues. Entering back in the country has been trouble free so far. Have you thought about signing up for global entry. Recently signed up for it myself and now I just skip talking to a human (and waiting in line)
by susiecambria | 2025-10-16 00:49:28+00:00
No answer to the question, but you raise a good point: Americans consider homes an investment.

Years ago when I was doing public policy analysis and advocacy full time, I spent some time thinking about home ownership, being financially and otherwise prepared, understanding the realities of home ownership, and acknowledging ownership is not the only game in town.

Either Fannie or Freddie published a paper about "appropriate" housing options for a person's stage in life. Nothing set in stone, but patterns and priorities.

The paper made the point that not everyone wants the responsibility of owning. These folks have other priorities and don't consider themselves failures by renting. Similarly, families may choose to live with other generations. Some older folks move to rentals, smaller owned homes, or assisted living.

The bee in my bonnet has always been the "I want I should have" mindset. When it comes to housing, it goes like "I want to die in my house." Great if you can afford it - meaning affording maintenance, modifications (ramps, lefts, etc.), skilled and unskilled help, taxes, etc. The rub comes when people can't afford it. Some jurisdictions offer interest-free loans to add ramps, etc.; loans are paid back upon death.

I'm not indifferent to the struggles of aging. But ignoring it does not make it go away. I feel like with the time and energy we put into trying to address affordable housing, for example, we should also pay attention to our individual (and community?) plans for getting older.

Back to the point: In my policy days, hearing stories about how old folks died in their homes and their kids expected a windfall only to find out that the property had to be sold to pay for X, Y, and Z. The house was great collateral but was not a wealth transfer as may have been expected.

Not sure how to balance, accommodate all the competing interests, but what we are doing now is certainly not working.