MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moron4hire | 2025-10-10 05:16:36+00:00
Yeah, it's one thing to understand "a pointer is a location in memory". It's a completely different things to understand what to do with that information.

When I first started learning to program, it was in C, with one of those "Sam's Learn Yerself a C++ in Eleventy-Three Days" books. I was, like, 15 or something. This was long enough ago and my family was just barely poor enough that we didn't even have the Internet yet.

The book explained memory. That was not hard to understand. But we had been using stack-allocated variables through several chapters in the book so far. I didn't get why you would ever want anything as a pointer. If I wanted to write a program to add 3 and 5, why wouldn't I just say "int x = 3;"? Why bother with this stupid dereferencing syntax? Given that the author chose to explain pointers by first explain the address-of operator on stack allocated variables, it felt particularly perverse. The regular, ol' variables were right there! Why but just use them

I didn't have a concept yet of what one could even do with programming. Hell, just a few years prior to that point, I was pretty sure all of the other programs on my computer were written by massive teams of wizards manually typing out 1s and 0s.

I still managed to bungle on and write code. But my programs in C never really worked well. Though, they still worked better than my classmates' versions! Then, in my 2nd year of college, I had transferred universities and the new place taught in a Java.

Java was disgusting. It was so verbose. Why did we need all these weird, multi-sylabic, period-infested function calls to do anything? Why was it so slow? Why couldn't I write ASCII-art graphics with it? Why couldn't I run my programs on my friend's computer?

It wasn't until I had taken computer architecture that I gained a much better understanding of what any of all these computer things were meant to do. I ended up implementing a basic scripting language in Java. And then, suddenly, I understood pointers.
by xp84 | 2025-10-10 05:17:38+00:00
Bollocks. I wouldn’t care if it looked like Chewbacca if it did the household chores, had a good warranty and was repairable, and cost under $30k.

I’m not f##king the robot maid, I don’t care if it looks like a girl. If I was into that, there are other types of ‘robots’ for that.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-10-10 05:18:15+00:00
> To maintain anonymity and store zero user data, there is and can be no web app version of ICEBlock. There is and can be no Android version. Only iOS supports the security and privacy features for ICEBlock to offer what it does, the way it does.

I don't know if that's true but that's their claim
by deanmoriarty | 2025-10-10 05:18:49+00:00
A TurboTax-quality tax filing service for American expats with American investments who live abroad (particularly interested in a few European countries) and have to file in their country of residence and declare the income from such investments. I would pay $1-2k a year for a service like that, as I prefer to do things myself than relying on a CPA who will inevitably mess things up.
What's your workflow to pass cloud secrets/config metadata to apps safely?
by stanguc | 2025-10-10 05:21:02+00:00
I’ve been doing DevOps for about 9 years, and I keep seeing the same mess repeat itself:

- Terraform or Pulumi outputs → Vault/KMS → CI replaces values in YAML → K8s secrets operator injects env vars → app starts → DATABASE_PASSWORD typo, chaos ensues.

- Copy-pasted creds from Slack or Teams.

- Secrets/configs left in plaintext files or repos.

- Password managers with outdated entries that no one really trusts.

As a developer, what frustrates me most is the lack of predictability. Between Terraform, Vaults, pipelines, and operators, it’s often unclear who “owns” the truth — and every layer can quietly introduce drift.

So I’m curious:

- How are you handling that handoff today? - Are you still pushing everything through Vault + env vars, or have you built something cleaner? - What has actually worked for you in production — and what’s bitten you later?

Would love to hear some real war stories or simple patterns that actually hold up over time.
by fulafel | 2025-10-10 05:21:21+00:00
The caveats: Slang is a transpiled language so you're putting in extra abstraction layers, and there's a difference between what people commonly use for GPU programming in games/graphics vs general compute apps. For example people on AMD chips seem to be gravitating to Vulkan for LLM stuff now and Slang/HLSL are not involved.
by vasco | 2025-10-10 05:24:43+00:00
So who's starting 250thingsaboutyou.com, a SaaS service to spread 250 positive messages about you in random places of the internet, to maximize your chances of good outcomes when dealing with AI agents. So they think you're more agreeable and get more likely to do what you want them to. To make an AI CV parser more likely to hire you, whatever. $25 one time fee!
Show HN: Crock – secure P2P file transfer desktop companion
by kaotd | 2025-10-10 05:26:12+00:00
Sharing Crock, my Electron/Vite/React desktop wrapper for the croc CLI. It adds a GUI for quick send/receive, transfer history, settings, and uses electron-builder for packaging. Still early—some settings are rough—but basic transfers work. For now only the Windows x64 build is published; macOS and Linux builds will follow. Bug reports and contributions welcome!
by hodgehog11 | 2025-10-10 05:27:40+00:00
I kind of feel the same way, but my take may not be quite as cynical. The way I see it, some companies just act really stupid, and there's a lot more room for forgiveness when you suspect incompetence than active disregard. There's a lot of talk about how amazing Lisa Su is as a leader, and while it's true that she has executed brilliantly on the goals she dictated for the company, the record will show that those goals were rather short-sighted in the long run.

It's been painfully obvious since at least 2018 that GPUs were going to explode in value as Nvidia developed an increasingly large monopoly on AI compute. In response to this, AMD put almost no-one on the driver stack. At the time, it was baffling. Now it's a near Blockbuster-level failure in corporate decision making. They reap what they sow.

But what will benefit the consumer in the long run is to break the monopoly. There are no real sides to take here other than "not Nvidia". If AMD provides a decent product, it makes sense to buy it to show that the support is there. It's not been sunshine and roses, but my recent experience with the 7900 XTX has been positive and substantially better than anything they had to offer in 2020. The fact that the AMD stack is still so weak is not a product of their lack of improvement, but rather how astonishingly far behind they were.

Having said that, the recent GPU prices from AMD have been baffling. If they don't improve, they'll continue to be in the dust.
by dhosek | 2025-10-10 05:28:26+00:00
Worth noting that few people use the TeX executable as specified by Knuth. Even putting aside the shift to pdf instead of dvi output, LaTeX requires an extended TeX executable with features not part of the Knuth specification from 1988.

Btw, equations and polynomials while conceptually are old, our contemporary notation is much younger, dating to the 16th century, and many aspects of mathematical notation are younger still.
by wbolt | 2025-10-10 05:31:19+00:00
But this is exactly my point. The resources pypy has are much smaller. And still for years they managed to follow up being just 2-3 versions behind with features and high on performance.

So why not move all the resources from CPython to close the gap with features faster and replace CPython entirely?

Since this is not happening I expect there to be serious reasons, but I fail to see them. This is what I ask for.
by danans | 2025-10-10 05:31:27+00:00
> Per Wikipedia it has five nasals, each with its own glyph: m (ಮ) n (ನ) ɳ (ಣ) ɲ (ಞ) ŋ (ಙ)

There are 5 nasal glyphs, but like in other Indian languages, 2 (velar and palatal) are allophones of the others, leaving only 3 actual phonemes. Indian scripts are often overspecified, and not every glyph represents a phoneme.
by marekzan | 2025-10-10 05:32:35+00:00
Hey, author here :).

Thank you for your critique and you are right, I struggled with this chapter a lot.

I will read the link to get a better understanding of this type and update the section.

If I may ask, do you have more sources where I can read up on the history and current uses of unique besides the rustonomicon?

Thank you again for your engagement! It is very helpful to get these insights from people with more knowledge.
by josh_kratz | 2025-10-10 05:32:49+00:00
The idea is that a fixed gear approach means that instead of exhaustively checking against everything, a small subset of primes (k=300) actually is sufficient for effectively complete coverage and holds true at large slices in the quadrillions, or even higher, or all the way through an entire cycle of evens to 1 trillion. It’s saving a massive amount of compute and appears to be just as effective as naive checks. Like orders of magnitude faster.

As far as I know, no one has tested this method or written an algorithm precisely like this. And then determined that k=300 is the sweet spot for primes sets. Complexity isn’t required for improvements.
by Lapel2742 | 2025-10-10 05:33:05+00:00
> hallucinated or unfaithful conclusions

Disclaimer: I’m no expert. An anecdotal example: I asked the reasoning LLM a question, and it laid out the correct answer in its thinking step, only to stop thinking and confidently give the wrong answer. That moment led me to conclude that when LLM evangelists talk about reasoning and thinking, they are essentially bullshitting.
by Zvez | 2025-10-10 05:34:59+00:00
That's basically scaled up story of 'I store my files on my computer and it is 10x cheaper than using dropbox'

While disks fail rate is already explored in another threads here, there is one related thing that catch my interest. Disk failure in such setup is not just cost of new disk + replacement cost (someone has to go there and change it!). It also inconvenience with dealing with failing requests. Ok, you are willing to lose 5% of your dataset. But are your '200-lines of code' robust enough to handle such cases. What if disk didn't fail, but start to be veeeeery slow. Does your training process can efficiently skip such bad objects. Do you have enough transparency to understand how much data you already lost? Is it still below 5%? And so on and so forth.

I feel like this article was written right after they built this construction and before let say 6 months of usage. Because I'm pretty sure their costs will go much higher than they calculated here. Especially if they start including hidden costs, like the work needed to be done on training side.

Yes, cost for self-hosting most probably still be less than aws (aws is not cheap). But it might start to be comparable with storage solutions of small ('neo') cloud providers if you buy gpu there.
by chii | 2025-10-10 05:35:21+00:00
> There are no 'surprise' denials after the fact.

this is the crucial difference.

It's absolutely fine (and required even) that single payer public healthcare doesn't cover every conceivable thing under the sun. It should cover the most common, easily scaled and mass produced items.

For the remainder, the patient should be told and know what to expect price wise - private or self-paid etc. And this also allows competition between entities offering this thing that's not covered.

Having opaque and unknown pricing (until after you've done it) is basically a form of highway robbery.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-10 05:35:31+00:00
> But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things

These lists are called “Falsehoods programmers believe about...” because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, it’s a programmer who makes the decision to type it in, implement it, and ultimately cause the problem. Maybe, to be more accurate, the lists should be called “Falsehoods programmers perpetuate by not pushing back against clients and product managers.”
by drpixie | 2025-10-10 05:35:42+00:00
Winch launches are a lot like a kid with a kite. Run fast (wind in the winch) to get speed and up it goes. At its desired altitude, the glider disconnects and goes on its way. https://youtu.be/YePIJKs5me0 gives you an idea.

On a day with a decent breeze, it is possible to "kite" a glider up to very high altitude by letting the wire out again. But this is highly frowned upon because it means there is a very long (and nearly invisible) wire dangling right through the airspace used by other aircraft!
by WA | 2025-10-10 05:36:41+00:00
> Based on the findings, we advocate for new metrics and tools that evaluate not just final outputs but the structure of the reasoning process itself.

Maybe the problem is to call them reasoning in the first place. All they do is expand the user prompt into way bigger prompts that seem to perform better. Instead of reasoning, we should call this prompt smoothing or context smoothing so that it’s clear that this is not actual reasoning, just optimizing the prompt and expanding the context.
by mhb | 2025-10-10 05:38:25+00:00
I agree with your aspirations for this community. Which is why it is hard for me to understand how posts like [1] and [2] are allowed to persist. They are not in the spirit of HN which you are expressing here. The title of [1] alone would seem to immediately invite a deletion - it is obviously divisive, does not satisfy anyone's intellectual curiosity and is a clear invitation to a flame war. There is no reason to think that discussion here will be more enlightening than that found in plenty of other more suitable places where that topic is expected to be found.

I am skeptical that there are a lot of participants here, including me, who wouldn't have been unhappy if they could not participate in that discussion. Contrary to your assertion that leaving posts like that is necessary to retain the trust of the community, I think the result is the opposite. Another aspect of trust is evenhanded enforcement. I don't understand how various comments responding to posts which are obvious flamebait are criticized while letting the original non-guideline-compliant, inciting item stand. Similarly, but less so for [2] - Eurovision?

As a counterexample, I would suggest [3] which I suppose fits the guidelines of important news that members might miss otherwise.

[1] Israel committing genocide in Gaza, scholars group says [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45094165]

[2] Ireland will not participate in Eurovision if Israel takes part [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45210867]

[3] Ceasefire in Gaza approved by Israeli cabinet [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534202]
by monster_truck | 2025-10-10 05:38:30+00:00
This happened to my grandparents a few times going back and forth to Canada with me when I was a kid (before 9/11). Even with the birth certificate and whatever else, they can arbitrarily decide to waste your entire day. Better safe than sorry.

I think part of it was because the hospital I was born at was renamed just before I was born, and then demolished not too long after. I've had it trip things up before remembering to mention the original hospital name. Everyone seems generally familiar with the bullshit now, just a matter of remembering to bring it up because they're expecting it.
by abstractspoon | 2025-10-10 05:39:15+00:00
I am not a woman, but having just retired after more than 30 years of mental illness it finally feels like I am free.

I have a modest pension, a very modest lifestyle and I own my weatherboard cottage whose roof occasionally leaks.

I now spend my days mostly thinking. Pondering my life. Napping. Programming. I have few desires. Almost no wants. I just want to be left alone on the long slow downhill to my eventual passing.

These feel like they may just be the best years of my life, and it's early days
by hodgehog11 | 2025-10-10 05:39:25+00:00
And many people with comparable backgrounds have similar opinions to him, they just don't talk about it. Yes, his interviews to the general public have been more than a little alarmist. But if you listen to his longer talks, much of what he says is accurate, or at least generally agreed upon in the computer science community. He is taking those points to their logical extreme, and that extreme isn't particularly comforting.

At the moment I don't see any evidence, theoretical or empirical, to refute any of the more technical statements that he has been making (perhaps you can find some?). The same cannot be said for certain prominent members of the neuroscience community.
by phs318u | 2025-10-10 05:39:38+00:00
I'm old enough to remember the internet before the WWW and yes, anonymity enabled the troll culture (among other things). Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged (by the mostly anonymous). Yes, there were lots of flame-wars, but folks by and large had the gumption to hold their name to their positions.

* I may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. It's been a very long time since I'd spend 4 hours a day reading and replying on various Usenet groups.
by tpm | 2025-10-10 05:40:40+00:00
Yet he is also one of the riders of apocalypse. Techbros who only applied rules that suited them and abused everything else. It's one thing if we had some mythical true freedom fighters, or guys from Signal, against The State, but if it's people like him, Zuckerberg etc. then it gets much harder to defend anything they do. It is important to understand that 'the lunge towards authoritarianism' is directly caused by this.

> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet.

This is not correct as far as I know. If Germany is persecuting someone for something written on the internet, that something is much worse than criticism. Words should still have meaning.
by simonw | 2025-10-10 05:42:03+00:00
This paper looks like it overlaps a bit with that Apple paper that caused a stir a few months ago: "The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity" - the Towers of Hanoi one. https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...
by Copenjin | 2025-10-10 05:42:50+00:00
I wonder if I should really explain or if that would provide a list of things to sanitize before publishing stuff.

If someone has ever written any code is well aware of what can be done in a weekend and especially that no one doing something "in a weekend" will ever add all those useless comments everywhere, literally a few thousand lines of comments. That takes more time than writing code. Comments in Claude style. Other claude-isms all around.

It's ok to vibe things, but just say so, no shame.

And yes, after 5 minutes of looking around I had enough evidence to "prove it". Any moderately competent engineer could.
by 93po | 2025-10-10 05:43:26+00:00
because they already are. an industrial arm from ABB is frequently over $100k. add in the cost to fit it with specialty equipment like vacuum suction for handling boxes, made by a small to medium size business, they'd probably charge another $50k. and if it breaks you need specialty mechanics and parts.

in a world with 500 million humanoid robots, parts are plentiful, theyre easier to work on due to not weighing 5000 pounds, and like the other person said, economies of scale
by jacquesm | 2025-10-10 05:44:54+00:00
There are many, many more such issues with that code. The person that posted it is new to C and had an AI help them to write the code. That's a recipe for disaster, it means the OP does not actually understand what they wrote. It looks nice but it is full of footguns and even though it is a useful learning exercise it also is a great example of why it is better run battle tested frame works than to inexpertly roll your own.

As a learning exercise it is useful, but it should never see production use. What is interesting is that the apparent cleanliness of the code (it reads very well) is obscuring the fact that the quality is actually quite low.

If anything I think the conclusion should be that AI+novice does not create anything that is useable without expert review and that that probably adds up to a net negative other than that the novice will (hopefully) learn something. It would be great if someone could put in the time to do a full review of the code, I have just read through it casually and already picked up a couple of problems, I'm pretty sure that if you did a thorough job of it there would be many more.
by stingraycharles | 2025-10-10 05:45:50+00:00
This philosophy may have its place in some communities, but Python is definitely not one of them.

Even C/C++ introduces breaking changes from time to time (after decades of deprecation though).

There’s no practical reason why Python should commit to a 100+ year code stability, as all that comes at a price.

Having said that, Python 2 -> 3 is a textbook example of how not to do these things.
by Copenjin | 2025-10-10 05:46:53+00:00
Can't you just say that you used Claude and be done with it? I mean, I don't really care but in general I would refrain from posting "Show HN" with stuff that has been vibed, or state that you did since in that case it's even more interesting from my point of view, like you could describe how you kept everything under control during generation, etc...

I mean, no biggie and I don't understand the reaction but hey, I'm old so...
by graeme | 2025-10-10 05:47:25+00:00
It should be noted that Durov does not criticize Russia, his country of citizenship and the center of much of his userbase.

The Russian internet is far more controlled than the Western internet, with penalties up to and including arrest and death for expressing the wrong views. Russia also is actively invading Europe and sponsoring vast network of troll accounts which poison the discourse on the internet in Western countries.

This does not make his argument incorrect but it is worth keeping the context in mind before getting too cynical about western systems. That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.