MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-04 18:03:01+00:00
A few things:

1. There is a spec now, Ferrocene donated theirs, and the project is currently integrating it

2. The team takes backwards compatibility seriously, and uses tests to help ensure the lack of breakage. This includes tests like “compile the code being used by Linux” and “compile most open source Rust projects” to show there’s no regressions.
by nyrikki | 2025-10-04 18:03:55+00:00
That is because typing in this case is converting a semantic (run time) property into a trivial property (T/F).

It is just making a trade off that is often a reasonable pragmatic default, but if taken as an absolute truth, can lead to brittle systems stuck in concrete.

Not all problems can be reduced to decision problems, which is what a trivial property is.

For me looking at how algebraic data types depend on a sum operation that uses either tagged unions or disjoint unions is a useful lens into the limits.

Note that you can use patterns like ports and adapters which may help avoid some of that brittleness, especially with anti-corruption layers in more complex systems/orgs or where you don’t have leverage to enforce contracts.

But yes if you can reduce your problems to decision problems where you have access to both T and F via syntactic or trivial semantics you should.

But when you convert pragmatic defaults to hard requirements you might run into the edges.
by the_gipsy | 2025-10-04 18:03:57+00:00
What about mail servers generally rejecting email (or marking as spam) from residential IP ranges? Decades of malware sending spam has spoiled self hosting emails.

I needed some minimal mail delivery for user registration confirmation and password recovery, and I finally caved and just use some free service. It's okay since those emails are really, really, sparse in my case. But it sucks that email, this one old and open technology, is not realistically self-hostable.
by mindslight | 2025-10-04 18:04:22+00:00
From the first part of your comment, it directly follows that neither Apple nor Google has a required monopoly on the important medium.

IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
by 18nleung | 2025-10-04 18:04:44+00:00
Author here. Wrote a bit about how we use Terraform for local dev at work. In brief:

Our Docker Compose local dev setup started to break down once we had to model more complicated production behavior locally – things like table-specific Postgres roles for audit logs and dynamically provisioned databases per-clinical-trial. We were drifting toward a bespoke Bash mess to keep dev and prod in sync.

Our core idea was instead to embrace Terraform in the local dev environment too. We were already using Terraform heavily in prod, and Terraform's robust provider ecosystem meant that we could e.g. substitute Docker containers for RDS and MinIO for S3 without deviating too far from our production configuration.

The really fun part is how we use Terraform to handle dynamic provisioning, which we need for isolated, per-clinical-trial databases. The way we do it in prod is by giving each clinical trial its own, isolated Terraform state, stored in a cloud storage bucket. By writing an equivalent local Terraform config for this provisioning step, we enable the app to run the same `terraform apply` command as it does in prod to locally to spin up a new database, with the individual state for that new db stored in a local MinIO bucket... which is itself created by the original `terraform apply` that sets up the initial local dev infrastructure.

Altogether, Terraform gives us a super high-fidelity local environment that lets us test complex application behavior and infrastructure logic without the full overhead of spinning up a local k8s cluster (which is what I imagine the next best alternative might be?). It's readable, declarative, and required no new tooling on our side since we were already using Docker and Terraform anyways.

Curious to hear how other folks are managing complex local dev setups, especially if you're not on Kubernetes!
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 18:04:54+00:00
For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime.

We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc).

Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers.

We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors.

Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.
by martin-t | 2025-10-04 18:05:01+00:00
People should collectively own the companies they work for.

The people doing actual real work often have a much clearer picture of what's a good or bad idea. Meanwhile management, let alone owners, are looking to either

a) maximize short term profits (because they intend to be somewhere else by the time the bad decisions manifest)

or

b) create infinite growth from finite resources (but they still intend to sell when the peak is reached).

Customers, workers, management and owners have wildly different incentives. And only customers and workers have incentives that lead to long term prosperity - building value (indirectly) from natural resources and human time. Management and owners don't build anything, their incentives are redistributing the created value, ideally so as much as possible goes to them.
by joules77 | 2025-10-04 18:05:20+00:00
These kind of people make their living freaking out kids. I mean if you are that full of yourself, that you think your thoughts are critical to saving the lives of "millions and billions" of people why would you go and talk to a kid about it? Too many of these kind of pointless people being propped up. Monetizing fear and anxiety 24x7.
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-04 18:05:32+00:00
I thought it was obvious. Charging (scoping just to US) has some difficulties. First, you need to know how charging works (110V vs 240V vs DC fast charging) and also understand what kind of charging the car you are stealing supports: https://www.power-sonic.com/ev-charging-connector-types. Also understand the various apps that are needed for different cars and how they work. The thief most likely may not have charging at home or at work (if they have a place of work, I'd assume they are not working at FAANGs, which have 2 - 3 EV chargers at each location). Then, when they are chased by cops, etc, they will eventually run out of charge. They can't do a quick pitstop. When they are charging, lets say at a Tesla station, the car may be electronically identified. But, most importantly, the media instills a fear of electricity (you can't find electricity anywhere except these things called EV charging stations and there are very few charging stations) and electric cars. Everyone is worried about range (range anxiety).
by resize2996 | 2025-10-04 18:06:19+00:00
"Advertising is a cancer" is the moderate position, in that it assumes the patient can be saved. My personal view is that art that has been infected by advertising should be taken out back and shot.

I'm glad you enjoyed the show! Again, my personal opinion is that we gather more enjoyment out of these things if we spend a modicum of effort to curate our experiences rather than being spoon-fed the slop with the largest marketing budget.

As for "we're smart adults": The research on cognitive biases wrt advertising is settled. No, we're really really really not smrt.

Edit: I realized I am criticizing without offering a solution to my 2nd para. Think about the art (music / games / movies / comics) you like. Find those artists on the internet and see what art they recommend, and then consume that.
by akerl_ | 2025-10-04 18:06:26+00:00
I don’t think you’re quite grokking the problem space here.

The goal is “I want my phone to always connect to a given hostname. When I’m on my home WiFi, that connection should be direct. When I’m not, that connection needs to bounce through the WireGuard tunnel”.

The target system isn’t even on the same subnet of my home LAN as my phone. So short of injecting custom routes, netmasks aren’t helping me at all. But even if they were, short of running split horizon DNS, I’d need my WireGuard subnet to be a superset of my home LAN, and for my home LAN to be a portion of that, and also my WireGuard subnet can’t conflict with whatever network I’m on. So I’ve now made a bunch of complex constraints and my home LAN is taking constraints from my remote access flow.

Or I just tell WireGuard to route the IP of the LAN-side system and to disable itself if I’m home.
by mooreds | 2025-10-04 18:07:05+00:00
From 2024. Sorry, should have added that to the title when I submitted it.

I personally loved the takeaways. They resonated with my startup experience, esp: "Not all business problems require technical solutions". I think as devs/engineers, we're in love with technical solutions, but they are not always the right choice. Other options include:

* customer support

* duct tape solutions with platforms like Zapier

* saying "we are not going to solve that problem" and letting folks that need that solution go somewhere else
by setr | 2025-10-04 18:07:24+00:00
I’m not saying columnar databases don’t have indexes, I’m saying that they get to have indexes for cheap (and importantly: without maintaining a separate copy of the data being indexed), to the point that every column is indexed by definition. It’s a separate data structure, but it’s not a separate db object exposed to the user — it’s just part of the definition

> So the same thing, no? Consider it as like: for a given filtered-query, a row-based storage is doing a table-scan if no index exists. There is no middle ground. Say 0% value or 100%.

A columnar database’s baseline is a decent index, and if there’s a sorted index then even better. Say 60% value vs 100%.

The relative importance of having a separate, explicit, sorted index is much lower in a columnar database, because the baseline is different. (Although maintaining extra sorted indexes is a columnar database is much more expensive — you basically have to keep a second copy of the entire table sorted on the new key(s))
by amlib | 2025-10-04 18:07:56+00:00
> GNOME 3.0 needs so many extensions

Unless you want to significantly change how gnome works (nothing wrong with that! It's awesome you can do tons of experimenting that way) you really only need two or three extensions to work around bone headed decisions from the gnome team.

> versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience

I honestly think GNOME pre 3.something sucked and always saw KDE 3 as vastly superior (KDE 3 mod even more so) than gnome of those days. Things got a lot rougher with KDE in version 4 and even 5 but they seem to be course correcting and producing something finally mostly superior to KDE 3.

> and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.

Its not a full browser running in gnome, but actually their own thing with a much more reasonable footprint (haha get it?) and a lot less baggage than a full web view. There is no npm ecosystem, no crazy 1000s of libraries dependency for each extension, no DOM, very simple and direct CSS implementation, no web APIs and so on. Anyway, what other dynamic language would you recommend to be used in this situation? Python? Would that really be better in terms of speed and memory usage?

> Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered,

Well, duh, gnome is not unity so for ubuntu to make GNOME into unity they do need a way to modify it, and I bet you they are glad they can just use the extension system rather than keep a giant patchset of C code that they need to maintain each release (well they do, but it's much smaller than it would have to be if no extension system existed.).

Besides, Canonical can easily deal with their own extensions breaking each release because they are the distribution and can plan around it, breaking is more of a problem for the extensions that users add, and I do agree GNOME ought to come up with a better way of handling it.
by driggs | 2025-10-04 18:08:30+00:00
> and support having multiple simultaneous versions of any Python library installed.

Installed. Not loaded.

The reason is to do away with virtual environments.

I just want to say `import numpy@2.3.x as np` in my code. If 2.3.2 is installed, it gets loaded as the singleton runtime library. If it's not installed, load the closest numpy available and print a warning to stderr. If a transient dependency in the runtime tree wants an incompatible numpy, tough luck, the best you get is a warning message on stderr.

You already have the A, B, C dependency resolution problem you describe today. And if it's not caught at the time of installing your dependencies, you see the failure at runtime.
by someuser54541 | 2025-10-04 18:08:48+00:00
My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure that we're actually more productive overall.

If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth of understanding of a piece of code as an author).
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-04 18:09:23+00:00
Ford Pintos exploded way to easily. Ford chose not to fix it because it would cost them $11 per car. It was later revealed that Ford presented flawed data and bad math to hide even cheaper options to fix the Pinto.

In the modern world people can choose obvious evil choices because it makes them money, but because the damage is spread across the entire world and only slightly makes peoples lives worse it is ignored. Our laws are setup for a world like this. But there needs to be then same sort of legal incentives to keep people in line at this scale. Where if your choice results in one million human years wasted/made worse, society sure a shit is going to punish you hard because it benefits society to not waste one million human years.
by Centigonal | 2025-10-04 18:09:28+00:00
To be clear, what the researchers & AI here have discovered is not a treatment for IBD per se.

Rather, the gut of some people, especially people with IBD and people who have received broad spectrum antibiotics, can be colonized by enterobacter species. These are bacteria (including some kinds of E. Coli) that are resistant to broad spectrum antibiotics, and this overgrowth is not good for gut health. The researchers have discovered a compound that appears to fight these enterobacter species without destroying the larger gut microbiome. This could help people (especially people with IBD) whose gut has been taken over by this kind of bacteria get back to a more normal gut microbiome, although only mouse studies have been done so far.
by george87 | 2025-10-04 18:10:52+00:00
Location: Europe Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Java (Spring, Swing, FX), JavaScript (Node, React, D3), Python, various SQL & NoSQL data stores, ETL platforms, UI/UX design tools, AI/LLM tools, Git, AWS, etc. Résumé/CV: www.linkedin.com/in/georgetanev/ Email: geotanjazz@gmail.com

Multifaceted software engineer with a master's degree in computer science and research published with IEEE, OEIS, and Springer. 15+ years of experience helping organizations grow, by developing comprehensive software solutions from design to deployment, from web and desktop applications to data pipelines and interactive visualizations. Primarily interested in consulting and tech co-founder/CTO roles, open to full-time engagements under the right circumstances.
by pron | 2025-10-04 18:11:18+00:00
Yes, we know how to offer memory safety; we just don't know how to offer it without exacting a price that, in some situations, may not be worth it. Memory safety always has cost.

Rust exists because the cost of safety, offered in other languages, is sometimes too high to pay, and likewise, the cost Rust exacts for its memory safety is sometimes too high to pay (and may even adversely affect correctness).

I completely agree with you that we reach for low-level languages like C, C++, Rust, or Zig, in "special" circumstances - those that, for various reasons, require precise control over hardware resource, and or focuses more on the worst case rather than average case - and most software has increasingly been written in high-level languages (and there's no reversal in this trend). But just as different factors may affect your decisions on whether to use a low-level language, different factors may affect your decision on which low-level language to choose (many of those factors may be subjective, and some are extrinsic to the language's design). Of course, if, like the vast majority of programmers, you don't do low-level programming, then none of these languages are for you.

As a long-time low-level programmer, I can tell you that all of these low-level languages suffer from very serious problems, but they suffer from different problems and require making different tradeoffs. Different projects and different people may reasonably want different tradeoffs, and just as we don't have one high-level language that all programmers like, we also don't have one low-level language that all programmers like. However, preferences are not necessarily evenly distributed, and so some languages, or language-design approaches, end up more popular than others. Which languages or approaches end up more popular in the low-level space remains to be seen.

Memory safety is clearly not "table stakes" for new software written in a low level language for the simple reason that most new software written in low level languages uses languages with significantly less memory safety than Zig offers (Zig offers spatial memory safety, but not temporal memory safety; C and C++ offer neither, and most new low level software written in 2025 is written in C or C++).

I can't see a strong similarity between Go, a high-level language, and Zig, a low-level language, other than that both - each in its own separate domain - values language simplicity. Also, I don't see Zig as being "a better C", because Zig is as different (or as similar) from C as it is from C++ or Rust, albeit on different axes. I find Zig so different from any existing language that it's hard to compare it to anything. As far as I know, it is the first "industry language" that's designed almost entirely around the concept of partial evaluation.
by YZF | 2025-10-04 18:11:44+00:00
I agree with this. That's been my take throughput my pretty long career and was a recipe for success.

You still need to:

1. Be good at what you do.

2. Be good at politics/communication when that's needed.

3. Be in an organization that has good people and also cares. There are organizations where there's just a complete disconnect from the business for various reasons. Dysfunctional.
by macintux | 2025-10-04 18:12:02+00:00
My pessimistic side says that the conditions for intelligent life are so implausible that we’re unique, and when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet.

Basically I fear we’re the universe’s only shot of appreciating and populating the galaxy (or beyond) and we’re on the brink of throwing that away.
by ricksunny | 2025-10-04 18:12:16+00:00
>was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulphur.

Today years old on learning that 'carbon' is a 'volatile element'. (I come to learn that astrogeology has a unique definition of volatile).

• The summary's own source article points makes no reference to carbon being volatile.

• The wikipedia article for 'volatiles' in the astrogeological sense makes no reference to carbon being volatile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_(astrogeology) . Similarly, the wikipedia article for 'refractory', posed as the astrogeological opposite of volatile, does not place carbon at all in the spectrum of volatile to refractory.

• Contra: at least two papers do refer to carbon being a volatile element. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05276-x and https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18262

[shrug]
by hakfoo | 2025-10-04 18:12:17+00:00
What keeps the production cost high?

A new inkjet-- especially if you're not getting a photo-optimized one-- isn't doing that much technically different from a 20-year-old one. You don't need 4800DPI and rich six-ink photo finishes if all you're asking for is one four-colour pie chart in a 20-page report, so you don't need to be at the edge of premium technology here.

So why can't they just keep manufacturing a 20-year-old DeskJet, using long-amortized tooling and fully-worked-out mechanicals, but with a new controller board to replace parallel with USB/Ethernet/Wi-fi?
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-10-04 18:13:56+00:00
Dinosaurs existed for some 200 million years with no detectable signs of technology development[0]. Presumably, the steady state did not produce a scenario in which the intelligence niche would develop without some other less catastrophic global change event.

[0] Unless that episode of Voyager was right on the mark https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Distant_Origin_(episode...
by jancsika | 2025-10-04 18:14:14+00:00
The Reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect-- one vastly underestimates the work it took to reach a conclusion in a book they haven't finished reading. Then, without reading another page, they assume everything in the entire bookshelf is at the same shallow level as their own misapprehension of the book they didn't finish.

I rankly speculate: for the set of low-effort comments on HN, there are more Reverse Gell-Manns than there are Gell-Manns.
by Barrin92 | 2025-10-04 18:14:21+00:00
>Why?

Memory bugs are hard to debug, potentially catastrophic (particularly concerning security) and in large systems software tend to constitute the majority of issues.[1]

It is true that Rust is not absolutely memory safe and Zig provides some more features than C but directionally it is correct that Rust (or languages with a similar design philosophy) eliminate billion dollar mistakes. And you can take that literally rather than metaphorically. We live in a world where vulnerable software can take a country's infrastructure out.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...