MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by munk-a | 2025-10-03 22:01:12+00:00
Cisco, Level3 and WorldCom all saw astronomical valuation spikes during the dotcom bubble and all three saw their stock prices and actual business prospects collapse in the aftermath of it.

Perhaps the most famous implosion of all was AOL who merged (sort of) with TimeWarner gaining the lion's share of control through market cap balancing. AOL fell so destructively that it nearly wiped out all the value of the actual hard assets that TW controlled pre-merger.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-03 22:01:24+00:00
No, you are misreading the situation. Russia is spending a lot of money and effort and resources internally because it has a near total wartime economy now.

That is not a good thing. Nobody can eat a tank. You can't plow a field with a howitzer. Your economy suffers when you can make more money being a frontline soldier than you can being a skilled worker. Every single Shahed they build is a waste!

And Russia's demographics are fundamentally broken, even before they got hundreds of thousands of Russian young men killed.

They can't keep it going forever. Even if they won the war today, there would be serious repercussions. Russia is lucky they have a good central bank to manage these problems but that isn't magic.

Russia is burning dollars and real human lives for very little gain, again, even if Ukraine capitulated today. Putin already lost the war. Even gaining all of Ukraine, with a pacified populace, would be somewhat Pyrrhic, and just stave off problems.

Meanwhile, Russia's weapons export market, which was significant and meaningful, is just gone. Nobody wants what they sell anymore, and they can't make enough to export some of it anyway.

Also meanwhile, they have not fixed their "dutch disease" since Russia's economy is still entirely reliant on selling gas to people, and what little trade they had other than that is gone.
Show HN: A visual AI interface to understand papers/books/topics
by kanodiaayush | 2025-10-03 22:01:51+00:00
I feel like LLMs can help me understand anything. However, after I get a summary, I can't dive in to parts that I find interesting; can't refer to original source easily and can't control context with chatbots. This is an attempt to solve for a complete knowledge consumption experience with AI . Please give me feedback!
by echelon | 2025-10-03 22:01:59+00:00
I'd like to see something powerful for safety and speed in Crates.io and Cargo:

The ability for crates to specify whether they use certain features of Rust:

- unsafe

- arena allocation or other future "useful" stuff

- proc_macros, eg. serde (a huge compile speed hit)

- deep transitive dependency (total #, or depth)

- some proxy for the "number of compiler steps" (compiler workload complexity)

We should be able to set a crate-wide or workspace-wide policy that can ban other crates that violate these rules.

We could make this hand-written early on, but eventually enforced by the compiler. You could then easily guarantee that no downstream dependency uses unsafe code, has a crazy number of dependencies, or has crazy compile times.

You could opt-in or opt-out to these things without having to think too much about them or constantly (manually) be on the lookout.

This would be hugely beneficial to the Rust ecosystem, safety, code quality, and developer productivity / happiness.
by koito17 | 2025-10-03 22:02:00+00:00
Before adopting Rust, I also found it silly for high-level tasks where e.g. Clojure or Java would suffice. However, the results of using Rust changed my mind.

I used to write web backends in Clojure, and justified it with the fact that the JVM has some of the best profiling tools available (I still believe this), and the JVM itself exposes lots of knobs to not only fine-tune the GC, but even choose a GC! (This cannot be understated; garbage collectors tend to be deeply integrated into a language's runtime, and it's amazing to me that the Java platform manages to ship several garbage collectors, each of which are optimal in their own specific situations).

After rewriting an NLP-heavy web app in Rust, I saw massive performance gains over the original Clojure version, even though both aggressively copy data and the Rust version is full of atomic refcounts (atomic refcounting is not the fastest GC out there...)

The binary emitted by rustc is also much smaller. ~10 MB static binary vs. GraalVM's ~80 MB native images (and longer build times, since classpath analysis and reflection scanning require a lot of work)

What surprised me the most is how high-level Rust feels in practice. I can use pattern matching, async/await, functional programming idioms, etc., and it ends up being fast anyway. Coming from Clojure, Rust syntax trying its best to be expression-oriented is a key differentiator from other languages in its target domain (notably, C++). I sometimes miss TypeScript's anonymous enums, but Rust's type system can express a lot of of runtime behavior, and it's partly why many jokingly state "if it compiles, it's likely correct". Then there's the little things, like how Rust's Futures don't immediately start in the background. In contrast, JavaScript Promises are immediately pushed to a microtask queue, so cancelling a Promise is impossible by design.

Overall, it's the little things like this -- and the toolchain (cargo, clippy, rustfmt) -- that have kept me using Rust. I can write high-level code and still compile down to a ~5 MB binary and outperform idiomatic code in other languages I'm familiar with (e.g. Clojure, Java, and TypeScript).
by Loughla | 2025-10-03 22:02:01+00:00
Faculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them.

One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing."

I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?"

Blank stares.

I hate it.
by beeflet | 2025-10-03 22:02:07+00:00
Everyone in this forum seems to be obsessed with personal guilt and blame because the idea that they are responsible for their actions hurts their feelings. I am just talking about the cause and effect here.

The cause is that you are supporting a company that thinks it has the right to control what its users do on their devices, and the effect is that this relationship is easily hijacked by the government. It actually is very straightforward.

If you want to stop the company, you have to convince the stakeholders to change/abandon the company or disempower the stakeholders themselves directly. This is why I make the case here: I can either convince you or oppose you directly.

>I don't know that saying to someone: "hey, you're complicit in fascism because you bought an iPhone" is a reasonable stance.

Don't worry, I do know that it is a reasonable stance. There are a ton of phones on the market that don't enable this type of control, and they are more affordable and useful than iphones. The barrier to entry is slight inconvenience.

>Imagine you're a factory worker who builds a component for Apple products. Is it fair to shout to that person you're enabling the US government's clampdown on peaceful resistance?

Factory workers are probably living in some third world country where they have very little leverage in negotiating the terms of the company, and they are probably too poor to afford iphones and don't care about US politics, but they still have some leverage. So you could shout that to the factory worker but they probably wouldn't care. It would be futile

>Do you think it makes sense to say to the tens of millions of Americans (and foreign investors) who hold positions in S&P 500 that they are complicity in fascism because Apple decided to remove apps?

I don't use this language of fascism because it has because been overused by the left. But my answer is simply yes. Shareholders are responsible for the actions of their companies.

You are just playing this game of deferring responsibility to some non-existent person. The consumer defers blame onto the company. The worker defers blame onto the management. Management defers blame onto the shareholders. The shareholders can pass the blame onto management. At the end of the game we can all shrug and say "well there was nothing I could have done".

The reality is that all stakeholders are to blame. Everyone has some leverage over the company, and many stakeholders have pivotal positions.
by zahlman | 2025-10-03 22:02:26+00:00
Sure, but the average level of effort out there is so low that I'm not worried about losing my ability to notice this content instinctively any time soon. That's kinda why these tools are popular in the first place, after all.

(Also, a lot of AI operators come across like they wouldn't be capable of fixing those issues even if they cared.)
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-03 22:02:26+00:00
In the world I'm living in, corporate IT, there's a ton of COM and SOAP. I don't see COM running across the Internet (other than thru VPN tunnels), but I see a ton of SOAP for interop with third-party interfaces. Pretty much any of the "enterprise" Java-based apps I work adjacent to have SOAP-based interfaces.

COM is alive and well in the LAN space, too. I see it in industrial automation under the guise of OPC, fairly frequently, too.
by yoavm | 2025-10-03 22:02:36+00:00
I have an old Django site I'm maintaining for a long-time customer of mine. They often want to make small changes - things that are only a few lines of code, but would take an hour to just spin up the system, remind myself how it works, commit, push, update the server and all that.

Last week I've moved the whole infrastructure to Railway, and taught the customer to use Jules. They make their own PRs now, and Railway spins up an environment with the changes, so the customer can check it themselves. It works like 75% of the time, and when it doesn't, the customer see that it doesn't before it even reaches me. Only if they're happy with the changes, I step in to review the code and press merge. It's been a such a huge time saver so far.
by otterdude | 2025-10-03 22:03:21+00:00
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all took advantage of "viral marketing", ontop of lots of venture funding for advertising potential.

Distributed/P2P tech is essential because of the income from marketing maintains these systems, selling user data. P2P changes that by allowing people to own their data and share it their way. User-Hosting shouldn't be such a wild idea in 2025, especially if its like IPFS based which already has infrastructure for low-effort hosting such as a chrome plugin.

As long as transition is easy I dont see why change cant happen. A browser plugin to scrap your existing profiles and bring them to NEWSITE.com is all thats needed

There's No reason change cant happen especially when so many people see social media as despotic, and gov takeover of tiktok beckons. Be the motherfucking change yo!
by nobody9999 | 2025-10-03 22:03:29+00:00
>SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.

IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.

Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?
by chermi | 2025-10-03 22:03:46+00:00
I'm not a software engineer, but it simply blows my mind how shitty most of the streaming apps are. Is it really that hard to serve videos? How is Netflix so good at it? I guess apple tv is pretty snappy too. Surely there's not some deep hidden technical secret that others can't figure out, at least these days. I know back in the day auto-scaling and such was high tech, but isn't it standard technology now? Is it simply that they don't want to spend money to get good engineers? Poor management? It seems like serving videos to people smoothly should be a solved problem. And that's not even the only thing they suck at, the navigation within the apps suck. Or fast-forward/rewind functionality - some of them only have one speed or can only increment 30 seconds at a time. Or why can't I reset a show easily if I want to rewatch it? These are all doable things.

Ignoring the missing functionality, I can see one possibility being that the TV's built in computer is just too weak to process video? Would I better off buying a mini-PC to run all of the services off of?

But what seems like the most obvious explanation is that they know they can get by with it because they have exclusive rights to whatever show you're trying to watch.
by dblohm7 | 2025-10-03 22:03:50+00:00
Re: COM: I'd say it really depends on how you define "fail." I'm going to suggest that you're asking why it does not come up with most developers on a day-to-day basis.

I say this because COM and DCOM are very much alive in the Windows ecosystem, underlying WinRT, which underlies the object-oriented APIs for modern Windows apps.
by Liftyee | 2025-10-03 22:04:07+00:00
I love projects like this where you have to work around constraints like the Lego form factor and the support electronics for the CPU. In terms of modern hardware, the PCB is surprisingly sparse - using modern surface-mount components really helps.

The super detailed silkscreen on the Nintendo PCB does make me wish for the time when all products came with schematics and component specifications...
by dustrider | 2025-10-03 22:04:12+00:00
You should throw in CORBA from the 90s for completeness.

My view mostly it was a confluence of poor dev experience and over-engineering that killed them.

Some of those protocols were well designed. Some were secure, all were pretty awful to implement.

It’s worthwhile calling out REST as a long term success. Mainly because it was simple and flexible.

Whether MCP will have that staying power I dunno, personally I think it still has some flaws, and the implementation quality is all over the shop. Some of the things that make it easy (studio) also create its biggest flaws.
by instagraham | 2025-10-03 22:04:26+00:00
Not a contribution but a question - how do one-person SaaS founders find customers in 2025?

It feels like between most subreddits banning self promotion and LinkedIn being flooded by AI post and inboxes by AI cold calls, it should be harder to make yourself stand out to a stranger.

Do you have be a content creator to grow an audience, make it work and get your first clients?
by muppetman | 2025-10-03 22:04:32+00:00
Gosh this has really hit me hard. I love TTRSS. There is no other RSS reader that has filters like it. Means I can ingest massive amounts of RSS but use filters to surface only the things I am interested in. Wow. I mean it's open source but seesh. RIP to one of my most beloved bits of software.
by bravoetch | 2025-10-03 22:04:56+00:00
From wikipedia: "As of 2025, three interstellar objects have been discovered traveling through the Solar System: 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in 2025"

I would guess that observation improves over time. The wikipedia article is fascinating, estimating 10,000 such objects passing within Neptune's orbit in our solar system each day. I think that includes dust and sand sized objects.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-10-03 22:05:05+00:00
In addition to the issue of microchips being inherently difficult to tamper with, smartcards have various hardware and software based anti-tampering measures, that are designed to destroy the chip, if someone attempts to extract the keys from the chip. That kind of security measures are never totally impermeable, but defeating them requires advanced equipment and skilled labour, and the R&D costs of the cracking devices need to be offset, too.
by Dig1t | 2025-10-03 22:05:28+00:00
>I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that this is happening, the article itself talks about public posts.

It’s well established that if you post evidence of a crime publicly on social media the government will find it and use it. Illegal immigration is a crime by definition, using public information to find people who committed this crime is not the same as reading private mail.
by dang | 2025-10-03 22:05:42+00:00
Related. Others?

Multi-Agent Coordination in Factorio: FLE v0.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43926829 - May 2025 (5 comments)

Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43331582 - March 2025 (209 comments)
by varispeed | 2025-10-03 22:05:54+00:00
Exactly - the state is the main user of violence, which is why it hides its violence in bland packaging. Call it ‘security’, ‘safety’, or ‘child protection’, but the effect is the same: coercion by fear.

‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ misses the point here: the methods define terrorism, not the branding. When the state uses psychological violence to intimidate citizens into silence, it is engaging in the very thing it condemns. Chat Control is just the polished, bureaucratic face of terror.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-03 22:06:45+00:00
dpark's caveat (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45467182) applies here as well: there's a big difference between "fuck off" and "fuck off", and someone inexperienced in such conversations probably won't hit the right tone. (Especially if they've just come out of "oh no I can't think of a comeback" and are a bit stressed.)
by knorker | 2025-10-03 22:07:10+00:00
That godbolt illustrates what I've been saying, yes. The godbolt example is exactly what I meant when I said "If you check after dereferencing it, yes it can [remove the check]".

In fact we can make the example even shorter: https://godbolt.org/z/8fv4GKMse

And here's one with a "time travelling" removal of a branch because of UB: https://godbolt.org/z/PjYzqKxs4

Remove the memcpy, and it adds the comparison back in: https://godbolt.org/z/r1GTvGnnf

This one is fun too: Explicitly crash on null pointer: https://godbolt.org/z/sGzhK7zM4

As this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442103) says, it looks like we may have just been talking past each other.

When I said "If you check for null pointer before you dereference, then no the compiler cannot elide the check." I meant like:

if (ptr != NULL) { *ptr = 123; }

Which is obviously safe and the compiler cannot remove the check. Not:

if (ptr != NULL) { [… something else …] } *ptr = 123;

The latter is UB, and UB is allowed to time travel.
by yc_non | 2025-10-03 22:07:22+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA, US Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: HTML5, CSS3, SCSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, React Native, React Router, NextJS, VueJS, Python, NodeJS, NestJS, Go, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn UI, Chakra UI, RESTful API, GraphQL, SOAP API, OpenAPI, ORM, WebGL, ThreeJS, PixiJS, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Microservices, Micro-frontend, Storybook, Vitest, Jest, Cypress, Webpack, Babel, Logging, Monitoring, CI/CD, Vercel, AWS, GCP, AI, LLM, RAG, LangChain, LangGraph, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Git, Bitbucket, Jira, Kanban, Cursor, Claude, Copilot Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16GLRx0RP5bKSaEsnnr8LqJT4Jvbgm3PH/view?usp=sharing Email: michaelmiller199259@gmail.com

I am a developer and reader. I am helping my friend by working at his stealth AI startup company. Previously, I worked at Amazon. I started software engineering to solve real-world problems with software, and that is what keeps me on my way. I define what the problem is, understand why to solve it, design how to solve it with code, write code to do that, evaluate the result after writing code, and repeat the cycle. I am a result-driven developer. Writing code itself does not give me dopamine, meaning that I don’t add features that the end-users do not care about.

I am looking for where there is a lot to do, solving real-world problems, a hunger to learn exists, and everyone is collaborative and fun to work with.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-03 22:07:28+00:00
Are there people that like cheques?

For no good reason, I keep a list of why I use checks (in the U.S.):

- Charitable donations because charities maximize every penny, and electronic contributions eat into that

- Paying the accountant - Good accountants make every penny count, and aren't interested in paying credit card overhead.

- Tipping the paperboy at Christmas

- Tipping the doorman at Christmas

- Business license renewal in certain cities

- IRS payments without a fee

- Gas bill. Gas company charges $5+ to pay by credit or debit card.

- Rent. Building charges $50+ to pay by debit card, $200+ to pay by credit card.

- Electric bill. Electric company charges $5+ to pay by credit or debit card.

- Passport renewal fee (Though I believe this is finally possible with a credit card, I haven't had the opportunity to see yet.)

- My company requires me to send it a check for the amount I receive from the government for jury duty.

- My company allows me to buy computers and other equipment it no longer needs. Checks only. (And an M2 MacBook Pro for $200 woot!)

- Fee to pay for a new car title. No credit cards accepted in my jurisdiction.
by eugenekay | 2025-10-03 22:08:32+00:00
Computing Power has increased tremendously, along with the higher resolution of digital imaging technology compared to analog film plates. Sky Survey projects like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have become active in recent years, which generate Terabytes of spectrographic data each night which can be rapidly examined for differences from previous captures. In the past each exposure had to be hand-aligned on a Light table and “flipped” between to spot differences.
by meatmanek | 2025-10-03 22:08:44+00:00
Apple never sold a flagship ("Pro") iPhone mini. If you wanted the better cameras (particularly the telephoto camera), you had to get the 12 pro or 13 pro. By the 11, they had given the non-Pro models dual lenses, but with the gimmicky 0.5x instead of the more applicable 2x camera.

In the Android ecosystem, to get a good small screen these days you need to get expensive and fragile foldables. The mini phones like Jelly are too compromised on hardware and software.
by saulpw | 2025-10-03 22:08:55+00:00
I disagree completely. Many people take for granted that the expression of intelligence/competence is the same as actual intelligence/competence, and many people are acting accordingly. But a simulacrum is definitively NOT the thing itself. When you trust fake intelligence, especially as a way to indulge mental laziness, your own faculties atrophy, and then in short order you can't even tell the difference between a real intelligence bomb and a dumb empty shell that has the word "intelligent" written on it.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-03 22:09:33+00:00
There has been a significant increase in NEO observation projects in the last eight years and there’s one coming online soon that should increase the detection capabilities even more.

Pan-STARRS (discovered 1I/ʻOumuamua), Zwicky Transient Facility (2I/Borisov), and ATLAS (3I/ATLAS) are the major existing projects and the Rubin Observatory/LSST will be a huge upgrade. We’re going to detect a lot more if these objects, especially since a lot of the work of the projects are looking at historical data.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-10-03 22:10:16+00:00
Yeah! A big problem. We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] them all, right?

They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!

But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!

USA! USA! USA!

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-involuntary-letha...