MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crq-yml | 2025-10-03 23:55:36+00:00
I'm a bit agnostic about the specific solution these days. In general, early binding(so, static memory and types, formalized arenas and handles, in-line linear logic with few or no loops or branches) debugs more readily than late(dynamic memory allocs and types, raw pointers, virtual functions, runtime configuration). The appeal of late binding is in deferring the final computation to later so that your options stay open, while the converse is true with early binding - if you can write a program that always returns a precomputed answer, that's easier to grasp and verify.

When we compare one method of early binding with another, it's probably going to be a comparison of the granularity. Arenas are "stupid simple" - they partition out memory into chunks that limit the blast radius of error, but you still make the error. Ownership logic is a "picky generalization" - it lets you be more intricate and gain some assurances if you put up with the procedures necessary, but it starts to inhibit certain uses because its view into usage is too narrow with too many corner cases.

If we take Go's philosophy as an example of "what do you do if you want idioms for a really scalable codebase" - though you can certainly argue that it didn't work - it's that you usually want to lean on the stupid simple stuff and customize what you need for the rest. You don't opt into a picky Swiss Army Knife unless there's a specific problem to solve with it. Larger codebases have proportionately smaller sections that demand intricacy because more and more of the code is going to itself be a method of defining late binding, of configuring and deferring parts of processing.

That said, Rust lets you fall back to "stupid simple", it just doesn't pave the way to make that the default.
by hn773746483 | 2025-10-03 23:57:05+00:00
some key facts Discord are maliciously intentionally withholding:

(approx.) amount of affected users, seeing hundreds of comments on reddit + twitter

tickets timespan, I personally have multiple support accounts, one has only one ticket from July which got the email

affected ticket categories

whether phone numbers were leaked (can lead to further attacks such as SIM swapping)

whether addresses were leaked (they carefully use language "limited billing information" rather than stating the exact pieces)
by jmward01 | 2025-10-03 23:58:54+00:00
'You can always say no...' That is like something from a bad movie about spouse abuse. 'Just leave' plays well on TV but the reality is often that a job is someone's life. Just saying no and leaving will have real, and likely massive, harm to the person. Where do they go? What do they do? Do they actually have 6 months of savings to look for a new position and explain why they left their last one? How about the money to spend on hiring lawyers to help them? We need functioning protections for whistleblowers that are well advertised, well funded, -not- subject to the whims of whoever is in office and that actually allow people to 'just say no' and not have their lives shattered.
by Johnny555 | 2025-10-03 23:59:17+00:00
I print so little these days that any inkjet printer is not cost effective due to the amount of ink it goes through to keep the heads unclogged, and I still have had to manually clean the clogged heads sometimes.

Now I have a cheap Brother laser printer for those few times I need to print something. It's over 5 years old, prints around a dozen or two pages a year and works fine every time I turn it on.

(Hopefully some day I won't need a printer at all, but sometimes it comes in handy, like when I needed to update my property tax records, my choices were either to go in to the office or mail them a signed paper form -- scanned or faxed forms were not permitted)
by firejake308 | 2025-10-03 23:59:23+00:00
Two key caveats: 40% of people said their arthritis got better with the placebo treatment, while 70% got better with the radiation. Yes, that's clearly a difference, but it also means that 40% of people don't need to expose themselves to the side effects of radiation in order to get relief from their arthritis. Second, the realy number of people who don't need radiation is actually higher, because this study limited the use of NSAIDs like ibuprofen (Advil) or naproxen, which would probably have helped a lot of the other people. Granted, for people who can't take NSAIDs because of kidney disease or something, maybe this will be an option in the future, but I really want to see the long-term safety data before I go irradiating everyone's knees.
by majewsky | 2025-10-03 23:59:38+00:00
I am interacting with AI daily through Google products. YouTube is consistently giving me auto-translated titles that are either hilarious or wrong, and I desparately want to turn this bullshit off, but I can't, because it's not giving me an option.

That's the kind of adoption that should just be put up for adoption instead.

(And of course, the reason that I can tell that the auto-translated video titles are hilarious and/or wrong is because they are translating into a language that I speak from a language that I also speak, but apparently the YouTube app's dev team cannot fathom that a person might speak more than one language.)
by array_key_first | 2025-10-03 23:59:39+00:00
> You heard it here. YC is dead. Close up shop. All these investors just wasting their money because you can't vote Zuck out.

Yes, this is actually true.

You want nuance? Here's the nuance.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is actually competing with facebook. They're not trying to.

So what is YC funding? What are these companies doing? They're attacking different markets and making different products. When was the last time you saw a startup make a general purpose social media platform? It doesn't happen. Nobody does it. Because they know they'll lose.

If you look at the hot new kids on the block, none of them are actually competing with facebook. TikTok? TikTok is not facebook, it's a completely different product. Twitter? They're incumbent too, but completely different product. Youtube? Disney Plus? Pintrest? Linkedin? Just think about it.

You could, TRIVIALLY, make a better facebook. I, right now, in the course of a few weeks, could make a better facebook. But I'm not. And you're not. And nobody is. And nobody is even trying to.

Search your feelings, and you will know it to be true.
by notahacker | 2025-10-04 00:00:27+00:00
That's completely unrelated to the popularity of card payments though. It's a denomination that's never given out as change or by ATMs

See also: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48993008

which as well as explaining the background to the note and debates over whether it should be taken out of circulation also points out the context the average British adult was making about 20 cash transactions a month as of 2018 (none of them involving £50 notes)
by amlib | 2025-10-04 00:00:35+00:00
Oh, i actually agree with you, I was more concerned about the suprise abd amusement of seeing that amount of windows pop up out of nowhere. Though, I do wonder how well a linux computer will deal with so much forking, if it freezes the machine for a minute it would be rather bad, but maybe linux and wayland are mature enough to not freeze and spawn all that in like a second or so
by slow_typist | 2025-10-04 00:01:06+00:00
The situation of ptsd service dogs is somewhat different, even more so if its client has to earn a living. A big chunk of the dog’s work could be to observe their client and to act if (and only if) dissociation happens (ideally to intervene before the client dissociates). While overseeing the client’s wellbeing, they have to stay out of the way of the business as much as possible (especially during meetings, seeing customers etc).

Apart from the clients workplace, the service dog will be on and off duty for the rest of the day depending on the specific needs of its client. It follows them wherever they go (supermarkets, doctors, museums, whatever).

The dog can play or relax during breaks, or in the evening, when the client is in a safer/less stressful environment.
by danabramov | 2025-10-04 00:01:24+00:00
Yeah, sorry for abrupt intro.

In short, at:// protocol lets you build apps that can deeply interop and query/embed each other's information, allow the user to have a shared user identity between apps, and allow the user to self-host their content (or move their hosting) without impacting the apps. It does this by giving bits of JSON permanent URIs that aren't tied to a specific user handle or hosting server, but instead are rooted in identity. The article describes how that works (and what an "identity" is) in technical detail.

Here's a concrete example: a blogging app (https://leaflet.pub) automatically "sees" mentions of a Leaflet post on a different microblogging app (https://bsky.app) and can display them: https://bsky.app/profile/o.simardcasanova.net/post/3luujudlr.... This is not done by hitting an API; it's just that both apps aggregate the same information from the open network into their respective databases.
by bko | 2025-10-04 00:02:22+00:00
ChatGPT currently has

~ 120 to 190 million daily active users

~ 800 million weekly active users

~ 450 million to over 800 million depending on the data source and methodology.

Get a grip. Hundreds of millions of people are using it, most of them for free. I would say "society" has benefited.

This has to be peak HN.

Create the fastest growing consumer product in history.

HN anon: yes, but who will benefit?
by tom_ | 2025-10-04 00:02:54+00:00
I've never handled a £50 note. (I am young enough that if you gave me £1 for every year I've never handled one, I wouldn't be able to afford one. But I am old enough that I could dip into my lifetime of savings to make up the difference.)

A friend's dad showed me one when I was at school - that's it. He seemed amused I hadn't seen one before, then after making a minor show of it, as if it was some precious, rare item, said he'd never previously seen one either. They've been uncommon my whole life, and apparently could/can be difficult to actually use, shop assistants being unfamiliar with them and not confident in their legitimacy.

I expect today most people would use bank transfers for the sort of sum where the sheer number of notes would make a £50 one useful.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-04 00:03:39+00:00
Define best positioned?

Best positioned as in, make the most money? No, of course not.

Best positioned as in, not completely and totally fuck their users up the ass? Yes!

Look at Meta, Google, OpenAI, you fucking name it. These companies are a cancer onto humanity. They are actively making everyone's lives worse, on purpose, for the pursuit of advertiser revenue and new and innovative addiction mechanisms.

It's sort of like asking, who would you rather make your food? The government, or R.J. Reynolds?

Shockingly, the answer is the government!
by bsder | 2025-10-04 00:04:18+00:00
> That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.

That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.

After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.

You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
by danabramov | 2025-10-04 00:04:52+00:00
Here's a TLDR on the problem it solves: https://overreacted.io/open-social/#the-big-picture. I've linked to this article in the intro. In short, it's a different model where apps participate host user data on the web under user's control. This enables some interesting use cases, like all apps can deeply interoperate by default. It's hard to explain this concisely, the article I linked to is my best attempt.
by hattmall | 2025-10-04 00:04:58+00:00
I'm not even sure if that I knew there was a $50 bill. And that's as an American of 30+ years that uses cash routinely. Multiple times I've cashed checks and gotten it all in 2's, but honestly can't ever remember a $50 bill. I always have at least one $100 bill in my wallet and don't ever recall getting a $50 in change, has to be the least common note. But now I'm thinking waaaaay back and does the President on it have a big mustache? Time to see what a $50 looks like.
by ctoth | 2025-10-04 00:05:11+00:00
I've been using AI coding agents since the very early days of Aider and I think this is not quite true. There's a place for async agents. There's a place for collaborative agents. Collaborative agents may even soon be delegating off to multiple async agents and picking best results. There's so much complexity here and we haven't even begun to explore a corner of the possible design space. We're still trying to plug AIs into human-shaped holes instead of building around their interesting/weird capabilities.
by yubblegum | 2025-10-04 00:05:16+00:00
Well, we're talking not just about "corporations", we are talking about entities with more gross earnings than most countries' GDP, e.g. Apple is sitting on billions of dollars in cash. These guys have the tech, the data, and oceans of money. Heck, some of them even have space forces :)

Maybe in our (very near?) cyber punk future, it's not only goverments that we should be concerned about. After all, we have some measure of input regarding the goverment.
by 0x457 | 2025-10-04 00:05:29+00:00
Laser printers absolutely could have produced "close enough" counterfeit of some currencies...like 10 years ago.

Reasons why it's laser and not inkjet:

- Crisp edges on fine details

- Consistent colors

- Consistent alignment

Remeber, we're talking about "EURion constellation" that was in use at least since 1996. Also, remeber we're talking about regular consumer printers: consumer laser printers > consumer inkjet. I guess also remember that not ever banknote is a US dolar?
by joshvm | 2025-10-04 00:05:34+00:00
I've visited New Zealand a few times en route to Antarctica. The only time I've ever needed to take out cash was for the Christchurch bus service. I was in MIQ on the way in, but they gave us free reign on the way out because Antarctica was considered virus-free (and according to immigration NZ, it counts as the Ross Dependency). There was obviously a lot of push for contactless payments in 2021. I get the impression that the pandemic helped really cement it, although it sounds like the UK where we've had widespread contactless for almost 20 years.
by basisword | 2025-10-04 00:06:20+00:00
In the UK most small shops had this same 'minimum spend' requirement for card. It disappeared a few years ago (maybe during Covid) and now I haven't come across minimum spend in a long time. That was one of the last things that made me always keep some cash on hand. Now, I genuinely cannot remember the last time I used cash - it's been at least 2-3 years, probably longer.
by measurablefunc | 2025-10-04 00:08:04+00:00
I don't really get the obsession w/ compiler performance. At the end of the day you are trading performance optimizations (inlining, dead code elimination, partial evaluation, etc) for compile times. If you want fast compile times then use a compiler w/ no optimization passes, done. The compile times are now linear w/ respect to lines of code & there is provably no further improvement you can make on that b/c any further passes will add linear or superlinear amount of overhead depending on the complexity of the optimization.
by bko | 2025-10-04 00:08:11+00:00
Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few.

The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.

This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.
by coolspot | 2025-10-04 00:08:12+00:00
2I/Borisov was not discovered by Zwicky Transient Facility .

The comet was discovered on 30 August 2019 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov at his personal observatory MARGO in Nauchnij, Crimea, using a 0.65 meter telescope he designed and built himself.
by orwin | 2025-10-04 00:08:17+00:00
> What is Apple native package version control? Almost everyone that I know uses brew

Exactly. That mean that if you have two ruby versions, or god's forbid, two Php version (along with php server dependencies), and don't have brew, you're basically fucked. It's unusable. Shoot out to brew developers, they made mac usable.

Let's say i have spent a lot of time setting up Hadoops, installing different ETLs developped on different platforms, and application version control without brew on Mac is still one of the most excruciating thing i've ever done (not difficult, just randomly hard and time consuming. Also hellish to debug)

> What is the distinction between computers and phones/tablets you're referring to?

Can't install anything one phone and tablets. Phones i don't care, because i understand why some user want a walled garden, and you have other choices. Tablets, i don't get. You don't have any terminal access, you can't do anything on it. Maybe new version have changed, but each time my father ask me to fix something on his mac tablet, it's hours of finding the issues. On Mac i usually find/fix the issue in minutes (last time was picture ordering). You also have to run a webkit browser, so you have a way inferior adblock, which make the web less usable.

> FWIW I've used IIS all the way back in Windows XP days. It worked well enough for my needs at that point to run a basic web server from my home computer!

I'm sure it was great for personnal project, as long as you don't have to run multiple versions of software. I had to run php4 alongside php 5.1 (or 5.3, not sure) and php 5.6, with different crypt libraries and different everything, it was hell. Less hellish than running two different versions of Ruby on Mac without brew though, and ruby is more opiniated than php about how it is installed, so it is generally easier to manage dependencies, to my original point.
by doytch | 2025-10-04 00:08:19+00:00
Listen I'm not a crazy huge fan of a lot of new tech, but this is pretty transformational. When reading the first article [1] I was struck by the fact that it granted so much new freedom to your "social identity" on the internet. The comparison to hosting providers was incredible, because imagine you building a website and posting your thoughts there or starting a business there...and then immediately being shut down and all your data lost because of some arbitrary change of policy at your "host".

Everyone always talks about how your Google account being tied to logins is scary because you can get arbitrarily locked out. This protocol makes something like functionally impossible since /you/ control your data.

[1] https://overreacted.io/open-social/
by dgfitz | 2025-10-04 00:08:42+00:00
It would be a "unique" situation. Most AMTs (not all, but most) only dispense $20 bills, the rarer ones will dispense $5s or $10s, and they're rare enough that I make a note of them. I have never encountered an ATM that gives a $50.

Your best bet of happening into a $50 is if you go to a bank for an in-person withdraw and they ask you for preferred denominations. Generally the money is dispensed in $20s even there unless specified.

Your second best bet would be if you're selling something "on the side" and the purchaser uses a $50 in a transaction, which I would say is also rare these days, most people use Venmo or equiv.

Your best bet of handling a $50 is probably as a bartender, or of course as a bank teller.

I have held $50s a few times in my life, and even my reaction is "huh, a $50, don't see those often"
by wpm | 2025-10-04 00:08:50+00:00
>funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS

That "funky" command key makes it so you can copy paste into/out of a terminal with the same keyboard combo you use everywhere else. Ctrl being used to send signals to the terminal and also all over the place for different thingsin the GUI stinks.

Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Same as in the terminal.

Methinks you're just annoyed because it's different than what you're used to. There's nothing wrong with that, but arguing about subjective preferences as if they are objective facts is silly. There's nothing wrong with the Mac's keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and they can all be customized with a NeXTSTEP style plist placed at ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict (There's a default set inside of the AppKit framework bundle's Resources folder, or grab a commented copy here https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings/blob/master/DefaultKe...).

Like, I'm annoyed X and thus all of desktop Linux just copied Windows' dumb keyboard combos that put everything on Ctrl, but that's hardly a reason for me to slag off the entire platform, because its minor, and I can just change them if I really wanted to.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-04 00:09:07+00:00
That sounds cool, though. Seeing protocols/formats/algorithms laid bare in assembly code makes them comprehensible in a way that I don't get from high level language implementations, where I have to either be content in just hand-waving away understand any "sugar" the language itself implements, or also having to understand the language's contrivances on top of whatever the core thing is I'm trying to understand.
by muzani | 2025-10-04 00:09:08+00:00
It's also interesting to see the sheer level of infrastructure they've built. IMHO their highways are more of a wonder than the Great Wall of China.

Chongqing is particularly amusing with what's possibly the longest escalator in the world: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1culpmy/the_deepe...
by jdietrich | 2025-10-04 00:09:24+00:00
HP, Canon and Epson all sell printers that use bulk ink - no cartridges, just bottles that you pour into the printer's reservoir.

The handles-and-blades business model that is implicit when you buy a $40 printer is still utterly miserable, but it's no longer the only option. If you're willing to spend $200, you get a reliable piece of equipment that isn't constantly trying to nickel-and-dime you.
by ajross | 2025-10-04 00:09:42+00:00
> the enforcers dgaf about you.

This is the attitude that lands otherwise-normal-seeming people in jail. They dgaf about you until they do. Maybe the prosecutor needs an easy win. Maybe they have a wealthy patron you offended. You don't know. And casual cheating becomes criminal very quickly.

Charlie Javice, to get back to the core subject, seemed to genuinely think she was on the right side of the line. All she was doing was faking some numbers for investors, right? Nine times out of ten, investors have already bet on the company and want to see it do well, and even if they catch a founder fibbing are likely to see more value in suffering along with it than in blowing it up.

Except in this case the investor was JP Morgan, not an incubator, and they had the prosecutor in the rolodex.

Startup culture, our culture right here, absolutely encourages cheating. And it doesn't give you a clean instruction manual to figure out how to stay out of jail, because there isn't one. The point above, while technically about government contracting, is absolutely of a piece with the same dysfunction. I think a lot of people in our world need to spend a little more time in introspection.