MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by basisword | 2025-10-04 11:24:03+00:00
It does in some places. Firstly banks will usually let you pause or significantly reduce mortgage payments while unemployed. You then make up for it with increased payments (for a period of time) when you regain employment. There is also government help in the form of a loan to pay the interest on your mortgage while unemployed if you've been unemployed for a certain period of time (longer than the bank grace period).
by fastasucan | 2025-10-04 11:24:51+00:00
That would be a strange choice for reading RSS with Duckdb. On a more serious note, it says so in the blog:

>I wanted to see DuckDB in action. Since DuckDB can already read remote text, CSV, JSON, Parquet, and even Excel, it seemed natural to try replacing requests with read_text

And

>In the end, this wasn’t about building a reader or replacing RSS clients. It was about bending DuckDB in a direction it wasn’t designed for and seeing how far it could go. I like DuckDB because it makes small data fun again: quick to set up, light to use, and surprisingly flexible when you throw odd formats at it.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-04 11:26:43+00:00
Vue 2 had really bad support for static typing. It's improved in Vue 3 but still not as good as React. TSX is especially good.

But the main issue is the automatic reactivity. It's difficult to reason about and leads to spaghetti code. We also had occasional issues where people would put objects in properties that had some tenuous link to a database object or something, and Vue recursively infects the entire object with getters and setters to make the reactivity work. Sometimes we didn't even notice but it makes everything way slower.

I haven't tried Svelte so I'll take your word for it!

Also this was 3 years ago so I may have misremembered some details. No nitpicking!
by tliltocatl | 2025-10-04 11:27:14+00:00
Committees' investment tends to be not very diversified and often too risk-averse because of how blame placing works. E. g. most of soviet's cloning of chip (and many other products) wasn't due to lack of engineering skill - it's just less risk for the bureaucrats running the show. R&D for an original chip is risky and timing it to the next November the seventh is likely to not work. Cloning is a guaranteed success.

The whole point of capitalism is that one is entitled to the consequences of their own stupidity or the lack thereof. The investors are more willing to take the risks because their losses are bounded - they are risking only as much as they are willing, rather than their status in an organization. Of course once all investors ends up investing into the same bubble there is no real advantage over a committee.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-10-04 11:27:42+00:00
Reminds me of this old series of posts on the Turbo Pascal compiler (have been shared a few times on HN in the past):

A Personal History of Compilation Speed (2 parts): https://prog21.dadgum.com/45.html

"Full rebuilds were about as fast as saying the name of each file in the project aloud. And zero link time. Again, this was on an 8MHz 8088."

Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

Old versions of Turbo Pascal running in FreeDOS on the bare metal of a 21st century PC is how fast and responsive I wish all software could be, but never is. Press a key and before you have time to release it the operation you started has already completed.
by graycat | 2025-10-04 11:27:55+00:00
> I don't understand how you could have trouble finding the volume down button.

Read again: It was Apple Online Help that didn't know where the Volume Down button was.

I wasn't asking them; in a 'chat' session as part of an effort to get the phone working, they were asking me, asking me to press that button, and not for sound volume; to be sure, I asked them just where the button was, and they didn't know.

In simple terms, I unpacked the phone, read the documentation, plugged it in to charge its battery, tried to use it to make and receive calls, and it didn't work. "Just work"? No, didn't work.

Whatever, this was one HORRIBLE end-user experience, and I'm way past putting up with it, returning the iPhone, and going to look at something from Samsung. Before spending any money, I will want to see their DOCUMENTATION.
by reactordev | 2025-10-04 11:29:19+00:00
Fiberglass is super cheap and is what most boats are made out of now. Balsa wood core, fiberglass shell. Pennies compared to the cost of a concrete pour. Another issue is that concrete is porous so the rebar inside would rust faster.

In the end, there’s no reason why you can’t. There’s plenty of reason why you shouldn’t. Costs being the biggest. Fiberglass builds are just so much cheaper than anything before it.
by adastra22 | 2025-10-04 11:30:05+00:00
There is absolutely no reason to think that radiation damage should be linear. In fact, we can objectively say that isn’t the case because we KNOW about damage correcting pathways. The linear model, used for public safety limits, is picked as a conservative method because we don’t have a better model (and collecting data to make a better model would be unethical).

The “small dose radiation is actually beneficial” part is pure conjecture, and almost certainly wrong. But unrelated to the issue of the validity of the linear model.
by netsharc | 2025-10-04 11:30:30+00:00
As an EU citizen, I never doubt the ability for the EU to do the wrong thing...

The current European Commision president: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zensursula

The previous president, Juncker, was the premier who made Luxembourg a taxhaven. Nowadays buying from Amazon in Europe you still get a purchase receipt from Amazon Luxembourg...
by businessmate | 2025-10-04 11:30:56+00:00
For two decades, Q4 meant fighting for search rankings, media slots, and cart conversions. Brands assumed visibility could be bought and managed. That assumption no longer holds.

AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude now collapse discovery and decision into a single synthesized answer. Their retraining cycles—often landing in September, October, or December—reshuffle which brands appear, with 30–60% recall losses inside 30 days. A competitor takes your slot and captures seasonal spend.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-10-04 11:31:59+00:00
By the way, some time ago when I checked there were two cool applications of LoRa: (1) a mesh, for (hopefully) truly decentralized and more difficult to disrupt communication, (2) a gateway, so that you could get data from your sensors in remote places via standard internet protocols.

Both are very cool, but I wonder if I missed something else?
by lifty | 2025-10-04 11:33:38+00:00
Nobody is in denial about the politics and game theory of adoption.

It seems you are in denial about the rate of crypto rails adoption. Stable coins seem to be part of the US national strategy for creating some extra demand for US debt so this goes fully against your previous comment. Decentralized debt markets are growing. Wall Street is dipping its toes more and more in tokenization and more and more organizations are interested in that. That list goes on.

It’s frankly tiring to debate this on HN. The fact is, blockchains are just a technology so they are adopted in all sorts of of ways which sometimes align with decentralization ethos and sometimes not. Ethereum and Bitcoin seems to be getting more adoption, as bearer assets that are independent and have a predictable issuance rate, and in a world with so much debt they can only continue to gain more market share.

So I really don’t know where you’re coming from.
by simonask | 2025-10-04 11:35:10+00:00
Rust competes with both GC languages (offering way superior performance) and with C++ (offering safety and modern language features).

It’s a pretty strong value proposition, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to pick a GC language if you can afford the performance hit.

The list of reasons to pick C++ over Rust is very short, mostly momentum, recruitment, and legacy. For greenfield projects, the list is even shorter.

The general experience is that developing software in Rust is slightly more expensive compared with, say, C#, and way, way cheaper than C++.
by cb321 | 2025-10-04 11:35:17+00:00
I use tcc with Nim all the time and it yields almost interpreted REPL-like code-iteration speed (like 100-500ms per compile-link - almost ENTER-see-results).

As a warning, you need to be sure --lineDir=off in your nim.cfg or config.nims (to side-step the infinite loop mentioned in https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/23488). You may also need to --tlsEmulation=on if you do threads and you may want to --passL=-lm.

tcc itself is quite fast. Faster for me than a Perl5 interpreter start-up for me (with both on trivial files). E.g., on an i7-1370P:

tim "tcc -run /t/true.c" "/bin/perl</n" 58.7 +- 1.3 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead 437 +- 14 μs tcc -run /t/true.c 589 +- 10 μs /bin/perl</n

{ EDIT: /n -> /dev/null and true.c is just "int main(int ac,char*av){return 0;}". }
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-04 11:35:38+00:00
Enhanced Tracking Protection is using the Disconnect domain list. ipinfo.io is listed in services-relay.json and mdl-services-relay.info, which I believe makes the Disconnect.me product route requests to these domains through their proxies to prevent IP fingerprinting.

Should be noted that IPInfo doesn't get blocked with tracking protection set to "standard". Users have to set tracking protection to "strict" to run into this issue. When they do this, they get warned that this setting may break sites.

I don't think Mozilla/Disconnect will make an exception because privacy-infringement is a potential risk with a service like yours if used by malicious websites. I wouldn't put too much effort into this, the people affected by this are a fraction of a fraction of the general web audience and they've already seen a warning that websites may break because of their choice.
by danabramov | 2025-10-04 11:36:04+00:00
The PLC is being spun out into a separate entity independent of Bluesky. The intention is for it to become something analogous to ICANN. So hopefully, with time, even Bluesky shutting down wouldn’t affect it.

It’s also very simple software and is not difficult to run. People are already running PLC mirrors (e.g. https://plc.wtf/). So if push comes to shove it should be possible to figure out the next step. Although this does require trust and coordination across the ecosystem which is tricky.

See https://updates.microcosm.blue/3lz7nwvh4zc2u for some thoughts on that.
by prngl | 2025-10-04 11:36:50+00:00
> The last time I used [a doubly linked list] was in the nineties. I know the Linux kernel uses them, but that design was also laid down in the nineties; if you were designing a kernel from scratch today, you would probably not do it that way.

This and sibling comments about the supposed uselessness or outdatedness of linked lists taught me something about the disconnect between many systems engineers resistant to Rust and many members of the (evangelical) Rust community.

To address the technical topic first: a doubly linked list is what you reach for when you’re looking for an intrusive data structure with fast append and fast delete. You need to iterate over it, but don’t need random access. Queues where you may need to remove elements. Think a list of completions that can be cancelled.

Why an intrusive data structure? Because you don’t want to, or can’t allocate. Because you want only a non-owning reference to the object, and you don’t want to have to manage any other lifetimes or dynamic (potentially unbounded, or arbitrarily bounded) allocations. Intrusive data structures are a great tool to minimize allocations, and to keep allocations (and ownership) logically separated across modules.

And now onto the cultural topic. That a member of the Rust community might not know this (which is of course totally fine) is what taught me something, which was maybe obvious to many: Rust brings safety to a C++ style language and audience. For the same reasons many dislike C++, many dislike Rust. For the same reasons many would opt for C over C++ when they have the choice (either across all their projects or for certain projects), many continue to opt for C over Rust.

Rust will not be taking over systems programming for the same reasons C++ did not. Well, by the numbers, it probably did (and Rust probably will too), so maybe better to say that it will not stamp out C for systems programming for the same reasons C++ did not. And it’s not just because of the stubbornness of C programmers.

Systems programming has 2 cultures and practice groups: the C camp, and the C++ camp. The C++ camp is a big tent. I’d argue it includes Rust and Swift (and maybe D). Zig belongs to the C camp.

Safety is important, and maybe Rust has the right model for it, but it is not a solution for the C camp. It likely did not intend to be, and again, by the numbers, replacing C++ is probably the more important task.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-04 11:38:02+00:00
> They don't show a massive jump in capabilities over your average transformer

Long context is a massive capability improvement.

> But it's promising as an incremental improvement, not a breakthrough that completely redefines the way AIs are made, the way transformer LLMs themselves did.

Transformers themselves were an incremental improvement over RNN with attention, and in terms of capabilities they weren't immediately superior to their predecessor.

What changed the game was that they were vastly cheaper to train which allowed to train massive models on phenomenal amounts of data.

Linear attention models being much more compute-efficient than transformers on longer context may result in a similar breakthrough.

It's very hard to tell in advance what will be a marginal improvement and what will be a game changer.
by danabramov | 2025-10-04 11:38:04+00:00
Yes, which is already the case with every app you use. But like I explain in the second half of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45471337, you’d still be able to restore your account from a backup to a different host without losing reach or breaking any links.

See also https://blog.muni.town/atproto-isnt-what-you-think/ which goes into more detail on the consequences of this approach.
by sph | 2025-10-04 11:38:05+00:00
Unpopular opinion: you do not need Twitter-style social media in your life. In fact, it is actively harmful for your mental well-being.

I signed up for bsky, had the same experience, and realised my life is qualitatively better without constant exposure to manufactured drama, ragebait and American politics. I deleted my account. Life is still meh, but could be much worse.
by avianlyric | 2025-10-04 11:39:41+00:00
It’s a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. The API docs you link too are for an API that covers a tiny fraction of what can be expressed in the actual ISO 8583 messages which are the real “API” of the card networks. The docs for those are hundreds of pages long.

Plus you need to analyse how the different messages types and sequence of messages interact with the transaction processing rules, which are also hundreds of pages long.

Suffice to say, the entire system is insanely complicated, and just about everyone out there implements it all incorrectly, with the whole system on working because partners are only allowed to complain about the insanity if they actually loose money. Until that point they’re expected to just handle everything as best they can.
by downsplat | 2025-10-04 11:40:45+00:00
> that doesn't address the discovery problem.

The real problem is the expectation of immediate discovery. People have gotten used to "give me something new now", and the algorithm complies but then quality is low.

Slow, organic discovery is where it's at. Seed your feed by following people you already know, then slowly add other people you come across. If your feed is half empty for weeks, that's a feature, not a bug.
by illiac786 | 2025-10-04 11:42:27+00:00
I still think we’re better off with the EU than without. Imagine trumps tariff war without the EU. He would have crushed every country individually… The deal is not great but it would have been worse.

I just don’t see how they will enforce it. Will they force telegram and signal to exit the EU app stores? The won’t offer a different app in the EU.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-04 11:42:35+00:00
I thought printed papers were all but dead even in the US

In its last financial statement, the New York Times reported 600,000 print subscribers. (Plus something like 20 million paid online subs.)

Newsstands are mostly gone (though there are a few), but my experience over the last few years is that outside of tourist areas, print newspapers are available at most chain drug stores, book stores, and some gas stations. The more urban you are, the more likely you are to find them. They also remain popular in ethnic communities. I recently picked up a monthly printed newspaper in Japanese that is distributed in the DC area.

I can think of five places with six blocks of me that sell newspapers (two drug stores, two bodegas, and a bookstore).

The latest Superman movie even did a PR stunt where the movie company printed up thousands of Gotham newspapers with Superman headlines and distributed them to newspaper racks. I saw them at Walgreens.
by esskay | 2025-10-04 11:43:22+00:00
> That’s because credit card benefits suck in Europe and there’s no point to using them.

Theres still a very good reason to use them - buyer protection.

I use a Virgin Atlantic reward card and have it set to pay off automatically, never running up debt. It both protects me as a buyer, and has the benefit of taking ~£500 off annual family holidays, and gives me a free companion seat in the process, effectively halving the price for one of the passengers.
by Theodores | 2025-10-04 11:43:49+00:00
The legacy automakers have been cramming ever more ECUs into their cars, at a considerable cost expense. Tesla did something different with the big screen and one 'big computer' rather than a bevvy of ECUs. This appears to be the design pattern going forward, as evidenced by VW's investment in Rivian, where they also go for the 'big computer' approach.

It seems to me that the security of Tesla cars is pretty good, compared to that of the legacy automakers. You can't hotwire a Tesla.

Securing one computer is relatively easy when compared to the challenge of securing a veritable forest of hardware, as made by numerous suppliers.

Regarding the way that general attacks on car security systems happen, something has gone wrong with how all of it has been implemented. RFID works fine in many other applications, but they are doing it 'back to front' with automotive and it is just too easy to hack. I am not even sure it has been for features people really want. Remotely opening the car before you get in it has convenience value but we got in trouble with that.
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-04 11:44:07+00:00
It is not meaningless for me, who was born into a one-party state ruled by the Communist Party which proudly called itself as such.

If I wanted to be cheeky, that's your privilege showing :) There are likely some people in your proximity (if you are American, then mostly Cubans and some Russians) who have lost some family member to actual Communism.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-10-04 11:44:30+00:00
I think a fundamental problem is that keys aren’t security forward compatible - break the keys and you’ve broken an entire generation (or more) of cars.

The only solutions I can see are software based keying and a mobile app or legally enforced security guarantees.

But the car manufacturers don’t give a fuck if your 3 years and one day old car gets stolen. You move to the next competitor, only for the same to happen in just over three years time. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-04 11:44:46+00:00
You’re right. “Side effect” here means that your program’s behavior changes simply by importing something, eg by monkey patching something else.

If’s not:

* Importing other modules.

* Taking a long time to import.

* Writing .pyc files.

If any program can “import foo” and still execute exactly the same bytecode afterward as before, you can say that foo doesn’t have side effects.
by FabHK | 2025-10-04 11:46:08+00:00
> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.

There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.

The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.

Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.
by brightball | 2025-10-04 11:47:12+00:00
It’s only long compared to sprints. With standard PI planning you’re looking at 8-12 weeks and with the authors post above they are going by quarters. 6 is short by comparison.

The idea is that there are numerous pieces of work that your team will do which take longer than 2 weeks and you’re better off planning on a longer window so that you can find the best way to execute with clearer scope. This is the approach of all of the longer timelines and it’s much more effective in my experience.

The 6 week approach advocated by ShapeUp tries to find a balance from years of trial and error that balances “enough time” with “short enough that there’s still a sense of urgency”.

The other hard rule for this system is one that I’m a huge believer in. Namely, “if you are doing something that’s too big for 2-3 people to ship something in 6 weeks it’s too big and you need to trim it.”

It doesn’t say “complete” it says “ship something”. Thats key. There will always be work that takes more than 6 weeks, but you should always be able to find a way to slice it into smaller pieces that can be shipped. There are subtle things happening under the hood of this simple dynamic that force a lot of good practices from everyone involved too.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-04 11:48:45+00:00
Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures?

What's exciting about FPGAs is that they make "custom" chips affordable for colleges and even individuals... At this point in time, with the AI world fixated on LLMs, it seems that there's an opportunity for small groups/individuals to use FPGAs to experiment with more animal-like ground-up approaches to intelligence.
by shireboy | 2025-10-04 11:49:20+00:00
This could mean in the Drake equation ne -number of planets capable of life- is very small. A planet has to be hit with a comet big enough to deliver a large amount of water but not so big or fast to destroy it. And be in the Goldilocks zone of the star. Also the mass of the planet would play a part - gravity of more massive ones would be more likely to capture a comet. But again, too massive and I could see that hampering life.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-04 11:49:22+00:00
Given how badly jury duty pays, it seems a wasted effort.

It seems to vary from county to county. When I served, we were given a pamphlet stating that the rate had recently been raised.

I don't remember the exact figure, but it was well above minimum wage. Something like $80 for the first and last day, plus $120 for each day between, plus transportation costs.

Far less than what I make as a super cool tech dev bro, but I can see it taking a lot of the pain away for the average person.