MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thinkharderdev | 2025-10-31 13:39:00+00:00
This depends a lot of what you are using exceptions for. I think in general the branch on Ok/Err is probably not meaningful performance-wise because the branch predictor will see right through that.

But more generally the happy-path/error-path distinction can be a bit murky. From my days writing Java back in the day it was very common to see code where checked exceptions were used as a sort of control flow mechanism, so you end up using the slow path relatively frequently because it was just how you handled certain expected conditions that were arbitrarily designated as "exceptions". The idea behind Result types to me is just that recoverable, expected errors are part of the program's control flow and should be handled through normal code and not some side-channel. Exceptions/panics should be used only for actually exceptional conditions (programming errors which break some expected invariant of the system) and immediately terminate the unit of work that experienced the exception.
Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop
by threeturn | 2025-10-31 13:39:55+00:00
Dear Hackers, I’m interested in your real-world workflows for using open-source LLMs and open-source coding assistants on your laptop (not just cloud/enterprise SaaS). Specifically:

Which model(s) are you running (e.g., Ollama, LM Studio, or others) and which open-source coding assistant/integration (for example, a VS Code plugin) you’re using?

What laptop hardware do you have (CPU, GPU/NPU, memory, whether discrete GPU or integrated, OS) and how it performs for your workflow?

What kinds of tasks you use it for (code completion, refactoring, debugging, code review) and how reliable it is (what works well / where it falls short).

I'm conducting my own investigation, which I will be happy to share as well when over.

Thanks! Andrea.
by masom | 2025-10-31 13:40:21+00:00
lol, the author (or whoever translated) doesn't know that "super" doesn't mean "génial" in the context it would be used in.

"super" is also a Latin word that's valid French.

> Au-dessus de, exprimant une supériorité dans la qualité

https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/super-/75409
Show HN: I build a cheap Skype Clone
by vadimk_77 | 2025-10-31 13:41:18+00:00
I build a skype clone, where you can make international calls via browser.

Skype was my go to app for that, but since they shut it down, decided to build my own. Its perfect for calling international customer support, or any other gov numbers.

Its pay-as-you-go - so no subscription charges, very transparent pricing. You can just top up $5 and see pricing in real time during the call.
by qustrolabe | 2025-10-31 13:41:38+00:00
GIMP doesn't have "Patch tool", it doesn't have "Inpaint Brush" that is like content aware fill but brush, it doesn't have content aware fill either. I remember there were some plugins that provide features kinda similar to those tools but it was a huge pain to install and use them through nested filter menus. It's a great program for free open source, but it's decades behind on feature parity with other editors, and launch times long enough for me to prefer opening Photopea tab in browser instead
by LogicHound | 2025-10-31 13:42:10+00:00
Arguments about whether the is and switch operators should exist is missing the forest for the trees. I am sure there are circumstances where it very useful.

It isn't any one language feature it is the mentality of both the developer community and Microsoft.

> I agree that they should not add new stuff lightly

It seems though kinda do though. I am not the first person to complain that they add syntactic sugar that doesn't really benefit anything.

e.g. https://devclass.com/2024/04/26/new-c-12-feature-proves-cont...

I have a raft of other complaints outside of language features. Some of these are to do with the community itself which only recognise something existing when Microsoft has officially blessed it, it is like everyone has received the official permission to talk about a feature. Hot Reload was disabled in .NET 6 IIRC for dubious reasons.
by comrade1234 | 2025-10-31 13:42:12+00:00
something that confuses me a bit...

I was in Egypt about two weeks before the arab spring revolution and not too long after terrorists shot a bunch of tourists in the Luxor area. There were very few tourists because of the terrorist attack, and so in Luxor my wife and I had a driver and a egyptoligist tour guide that normally works with large tour groups. They drove us around (with a handgun under the driver's seat and a rifle in the trunk that I pretended not to see) to different sites for a few days and the guide gave excellent academic-like guiding.

Later we were in Cairo and it felt like I had their main museum completely to myself. There were only a few tourists and they were outnumbered by the docents/security. We saw the tutankhamen exhibit by ourselves.

What I'm confused about is that I read that during the spring revolution the tutankhamen exhibit was looted, and yet it still goes on tour. It was here in Switzerland a couple of years ago. Are they showing copies of the original exhibits? Or I suppose not everything was on exhibit at once and so a subset was looted? I never got a good explanation to this.
by athulbc | 2025-10-31 13:43:03+00:00
Currently computer programming is done using one's knowledge in mathematical language(or mathematical way of thinking) + knowledge in English. It would be nice to see how replacing the English part with mothertounge work. For me, atleast I can read the documentation with confidence and much ease(I'm not French btw). And may it become an experiment to see how it works for non-English languages. Thanks for the French to starting this. I was once wrote in my blog about programming in my own mothertounge which is Malayalam.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-10-31 13:43:05+00:00
No, these are separate subjects with specific definitions (it's a specific name not a phrase of speech). I struggle to explain it briefly as it's an entire subject and I might be lambasted here for wrongly simplifying as it's nuanced. Ill give it a go (it's been 15 years since the textbooks).

Equity accounted for investments imply it's treated as one and the same as the business, the individual entries will be included with the rest of the entries related to the business being reported on. Related parties are considered external and are basically reported "at arms length". This still doesn't necessarily mean they're providing you with the consolidated results to make matters more confusing.

Separately, They're required to report intercompany transactions with related parties (specific meaning) as there is a lack of visibility on the innerworkings of that related party business (it's external and not included) and the potential conflict of interest exists as they're related and could be used to skew the ratios/reporting of the reported entities results.
by kubanczyk | 2025-10-31 13:43:07+00:00
That's subtly different. It's secondary whose fault is this, what primarily matters is whether you should continue with the rest of the process.

There is always a cleanup layer, the trick is to choose well between 1 and 2:

1. Some code in the same OS process is able to bring data back to order. 2. OS can kill the process and thus kill any corruption that was in its address space. 3. Hardware on/off button can kill the entire RAM content and thus kill any corruption that spilled over it.

Take for example an unexpected divide by zero, that's a classic invariant violation. The entire process should blow up right there because:

- it knows that the data in memory is currently corrupted,

- it has no code to gently handle the corruption,

- and it knows the worst scenario that can happen: some "graceful stop", etc., routine might decide to save the corrupted data to disk/database/third-party. Unrecoverable panic (uncatchable exception) is a very good generic idea, because persistently-corrupted-data bug is a hundred times worse than any died-with-ugly-message bug as far as users are concerned.
by DrakeDeaton | 2025-10-31 13:43:56+00:00
There's certainly situations where this pattern creates some tricky ambiguity, but more often than not Result is quite an ergonomic pattern to work with.

In case it's useful for anyone, here is a simple plug-in-play TypeScript version:

```

type Ok<T = void> = T extends undefined ? { ok: true; } : { ok: true; val: T; };

type Err<E extends ResultError = ResultError> = { ok: false; err: E; };

type Result<T = void, E = ResultError> = { ok: true; val: T; } | { ok: false; err: E | ResultError; };

class ResultError extends Error { override name = "ResultError" as const; context?: unknown; constructor (message: string, context?: unknown) { super(message); this.context = context; } }

const ok = <T = void>(val?: T): Ok<T> => ({ ok: true, val: val, } as Ok<T>);

const err = (errType: string, context: unknown = {}): Err<ResultError> => ({ err: new ResultError(errType, context), ok: false, });

```

```

const actionTaker = await op().then(ok).catch(err);

if (result.ok) // handle error

else // use result

```

I will be forever grateful to the developer first introduced to this pattern!
by kingnothing | 2025-10-31 13:45:21+00:00
There might be. You need to talk to your market and find out. I work at larger companies, so I can’t speak to startup culture right now. There’s no way I would personally sign off on giving access to all of our company data to a small company with no certifications, especially in an AI world where you might leak all of our data into public training models if it’s done wrong.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-10-31 13:45:28+00:00
A concise 9 word summary of OTR. As a young person, I found the idea of just running around with your friends, doing whatever, and not trying to be "productive" in any way, intoxicating.

After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
by bmitc | 2025-10-31 13:45:38+00:00
I get your sentiment, but I side on it's infuriating that it's taken this long. Lol.

F# is wonderful. It is the best general purpose language, in my opinion. I looked for F# jobs for years and never landed one and gave up. I write Rust now which has opened up the embedded world, and it's nice that Rust paid attention to F# and OCaml.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-31 13:46:00+00:00
I've uh said this a few times. But AI is a bunch of people overpaying CS students to implement old algorithms and then realizing that they need Software Engineers to optimize the existing known systems. Most of AI (if not ALL of it) as we know it today has been coded for decades, we just never had the hardware for it.

A lot of the optimizations are not some ground breaking new way to program, they're known techniques to any Software Engineer or Systems Engineer.
by qwertfisch | 2025-10-31 13:46:16+00:00
"unpaid vacation"? I was discussing about paid vacation, did you mean the same?

(Unpaid vacation should be a lesser problem, depending if a company will get by without your workforce for a time.)

If paid vacation really is not required in the US, how the hell do you get any vacation and recreation time? This is unhealthy and results in a lot of physical, mental and social degression.
by fred_is_fred | 2025-10-31 13:46:24+00:00
Agree. Early in my career I was in an org that had been fast growing but then sales went flat. I was effectively told that I could not be promoted because there were already too many people at level N+2 and N+1. I told my M2 that this to me meant we'd all just grow old together and the org would be static. He didn't disagree and I transferred to a new org which although it was also not growing, did have a leadership gap and a growth path for me.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 13:46:45+00:00
Allowing paywalls vs not been discussed for a long time. Latest comment from dang about it seems to be this:

> The answer is that paywalls are allowed when there are workarounds (such as archive links) which allow ordinary readers to read the article without paying or subscribing, while hardwalled domains (i.e., without such workarounds) are banned. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43876575

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by everyone | 2025-10-31 13:47:57+00:00
Most times Ive seen anyone playing a racing game they seem to be totally clueless.. They dont even comprehend the big circle. They always go into corners way too fast, break super hard and then crawl out.

Its so common it surprises me racing games have always been so popular.

What I have also noticed is that over time racing games have changed their physics to be totally wacky in order to meet the general public's wacky expectations.. (eg. mario kart or GTA5) I cant play those games cus the physics are so strange.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-31 13:48:03+00:00
> The same confusion I have when trying to imagine satellites going around Earth or slingshot maneuvers.

I can't recommend KSP enough. It's a "silly" game with "on rails physics" (so not exactly 100% accurate wrt general relativity stuff) but it's got a very nice interface and it will make you "get" orbital mechanics by dragging stuff around. You'll get an intuition for it after a few hours of gameplay / yt video tutorials. Really cool game.
by endymion-light | 2025-10-31 13:49:13+00:00
"Bicycles are the most efficient forms of transport in energy per mile. They are often the fastest in built up areas as well."

I don't disagree, but if this is the purpose of this graphic, why not just specifically measure different forms of transport in energy per mile?

This article is putting a metric of efficiency, while ignoring the reasons why things like a dog may have less efficent locomotion over perfectly flat terrain, because there are very few natural landmarks that have perfectly flat terrain.

I'd love to see a deeper comparison, how does efficiency of locomotion compare between animals within different types of environments, obstacles, etc. Otherwise this is a graphic that was used to make a point about cycling using an abstract measure rather than actual research.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-31 13:49:16+00:00
> I use Javscript mostly. Or Typescript actually, these days. I remember when ES2015 introduced `let` because `var` had weird scoping issues. But ever since, I barely use either of them. Everything is `const` these days, as it should. reply

const prevents reassignment of the variable but it does not make the object the variable points to immutable.

To do the latter, you have to use Object.freeze (prevent modification of an object’s properties, but it is shallow only so for nested objects you need to recurse) and Object.seal (prevent adding or removing properties, but not changing them).

May people use immutable.js or Immer for ergonomic immutable data structures.
by vorpalhex | 2025-10-31 13:49:18+00:00
If me saying I don't want people to enter my country illegally (especially with criminal records), that sex trafficking is bad, or that confronting the police with force instead of courts is bad makes me a Nazi in your eyes, then you are so far from normal human behavior you might as well be from Pluto.

The Nazi's killed, through bulk extermination, 13,000,000 people. Literally bulk gas chamber stuff.

That enforcing a land border is equivalent to you is insane.
by nixpulvis | 2025-10-31 13:49:24+00:00
I try to keep deeper mutation to where it belongs, but I'll admit to shadowing variables pretty often.

If I have a `result` and I need to post-process it. I'm generally much happier doing `result = result.process()` rather than having something like `preresult`. Works nicely in cases where you end up moving it into a condition, or commenting it out to test an assumption while developing. If there's an obvious name for the intermediate result, I'll give it that, but I'm not over here naming things `result_without_processing`. You can read the code.
Glitch to shut down access at end of 2025
by benatkin | 2025-10-31 13:49:45+00:00
I received an email from glitch, the first one since around the time of this post, with the subject "REMINDER: You have 60 days left to access Glitch."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230

It goes on to say:

Hello,

This is a final reminder that you have 60 days left to access your Glitch projects, assets, and set redirects. As a reminder:

- Your Glitch dashboard will be available through the end of 2025 with code downloads for all of your projects. A script to download all of your projects at once is also available.

- Access to your dashboard and your Glitch user login will end on December 31, 2025.

- You can still set up redirects for your project subdomains from your dashboard, so all your links will keep working. Make sure your redirects are set up before December 31, 2025.

- Redirects will stay active through the end of 2026.

If you have any questions please reach out at support@fastly.com. Again, thank you for being a part of the Glitch community.

— Jenn Turner Glitch comms & content strategy
by techblueberry | 2025-10-31 13:50:43+00:00
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I do think, even if Zelensky is arguably making the right decision to consolidate power during a war, and he really is a benevolent dictator, that there will be negative externalities if not negative direct effects of consolidating power.

That being said. What do you do with an article like this. Anything you can say about Zelensky, probably applies to his opponents as well. To really understand it probably requires a few books worth of information; but almost every explanation of any interpretation of power in any of these war zones is propaganda.
by iso1631 | 2025-10-31 13:51:34+00:00
https://xkcd.com/2205/ comes to mind with your pi approximation.

Nobody is saying KSP physics is perfect.

Until I played KSP, I had no idea how hard orbit was compared with just going up into space (and generally the greater population thinks the same -- they think that sending New Shephard upto 100km is about the same as sending a Dragon into orbit). I had no idea how you move in orbit, how getting from low earth equitorial orbit to Jupiter takes less energy than getting from the same ship to a polar orbit (and even then that the only real way to change your orbit like that is to go out beyond the moon and back), etc.
by GhostDrift | 2025-10-31 13:52:33+00:00
Two CC-BY preprints from GhostDrift Mathematical Institute. (1) Uniform Window Positivity (UWP±) ⇒ RH — a short, closed sufficiency chain (we do not assert UWP± itself). https://zenodo.org/records/17434681 (2) The Prime Number Theorem as an Exact Poisson–Laplace Identity — the Fejér–Yukawa machinery and finite-window positivity framework backing (1), with outward-rounded constants and a reproducibility ledger. https://zenodo.org/records/17426522
by paulgerhardt | 2025-10-31 13:52:34+00:00
While I understand the spirit of this comment, if you look at the fossil record you’ll see that’s objectively not true.

Roughly half of the shifts in the last 11 evolutionary periods, over the last 500 million years, were caused by changes that occurred in a-few-hours-to-a-few-thousand-years with 75%-90% species lost.

Evolution did not fail to work then.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 13:53:12+00:00
> A lot of the optimizations are not some ground breaking new way to program

Hindsight is a bitch huh? Everything looks simple now once people proved it kind of works, but I think you over-simplify "how easy it is".

Lots of stuff in ML, particularly recent ~5 years or so, haven't been "implementing old algorithms" although of course everything is based on the research that happened in the past, we're standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
by steveharman | 2025-10-31 13:53:19+00:00
I wonder if it's coincidence: today Anthropic mailed out all previous customers of Claude offering a free monthly of 5x Claude Code if they sign up again.

Plenty on Reddit saying they did. And I did.

Could the outage be a the result of an "unexpected" surge in account activations / use?

Not much of a "welcome back" ;-)
by paulcole | 2025-10-31 13:53:25+00:00
Yes. I read that because that’s what you said:

> I don’t think I’m haughty when I don’t want to try and convey 20 years of experience in a few sentences every time some quotes chatgpt?

Could you explain how “every time some[one] quotes chatgpt” should be read as “not every time some[one] quotes chatgpt”?
by reify | 2025-10-31 13:53:57+00:00
YEP!!

Said, meteorite fell out of the sky two billion years ago, and hit a random human on the head. killing him/her instantly.

this led to human DNA being left on said meteorite, which stayed there for two billion years, only for some super scientist working for CSI to find the DNA.

Modern science, Eh, what would we do without it?
by gnabgib | 2025-10-31 13:54:06+00:00
OSU.Edu - original research (6 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698732

PLOS - original paper (3+6 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45714547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731592

Toms Hardware coverage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718691

SemiEngineering coverage (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45730587

Phys.Org coverage (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732287
by saubeidl | 2025-10-31 13:55:16+00:00
> The Nazi's killed, through bulk extermination, 13,000,000 people. Literally bulk gas chamber stuff.

They didn't start with that. They started by framing it as immigration enforcement.

"We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country of a strange people which was capable of snatching for itself all the leading positions in the land, and to oust it." - Adolf Hitler, 1939

You know what the euphemism for that bulk extermination was? "Resettlement to the East".
by overfeed | 2025-10-31 13:55:22+00:00
> AMD does not have any product that can compete with Intel's N-series or industrial Atom CPUs, which are designed for power consumptions of 6 W or of 10 W and AMD never had any Zen CPU for this power range

A cursory search shows that the AMD APU used in the Valve Steam Deck draws 3-15W. Limiting the TDP to 6W on a Steam Deck is fine for Linux in desktop mode.
by dataengineer56 | 2025-10-31 13:55:24+00:00
I asked a novel question, well-written and clear, and a "subject matter expert" decided it was too similar to another question (it wasn't), so they defaced it, downvoted it and closed it.

Stack Overflow is dying, it's extremely difficult to get new questions through. Even if they survive moderation then they're unlikely to get answers.
by ajuc | 2025-10-31 13:55:32+00:00
Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside. You don't need to commute far, your water, electricity, gas, savage, road, telecommunication etc infrastructure is shared by many more people per 1 mile. You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal).

If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person.

Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.
by Jedd | 2025-10-31 13:55:34+00:00
I note TFA mentions 'normal' people 8 times, but never uses the word 'average'.

Whereas I think they are in fact describing 'average' people.

I suspect most HNers self-assess as normal, but are also self-aware enough to acknowledge (rightly or wrongly) they're not average.

Certainly I have felt overwhelmed with the 'why have they broken so many conventions?' sensation with, invariably, audio apps on microsoft platforms - but OTOH the implied expectation that all software should have a comparably broken UI as mildly modern microsoft word versions expresses a collective poverty of expectations.