MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrScientist | 2025-10-31 13:55:49+00:00
Sure modularity, encapsulation etc are great tools for making components understandable and maintainable.

However, don't you still need to understand the entire program as ultimately that's what you are trying to build.

And if the state of the entire programme doesn't change - then nothing has happened. ie there still has to be mutable state somewhere - so where is it moved to?
by patrakov | 2025-10-31 13:55:52+00:00
While working for one of the previous companies, I hit a regrettable counterexample for the point in the article.

Developers built a web UI for creating containers for the labs, taking the advice from this (then future) article too literally. Their app could only build containers, in the approved way. Yet, not all labs were possible to run in containers, and the app did not account for that (it was a TODO). Worse, people responsible for organizing the labs did not know that not all labs are compatible with containers.

Lab coordinators thus continued to create containers even in cases where it didn't make sense, despite the explicit warning "in cases X, Y, Z, do not proceed, call Alexander instead".

So if you make one button you better make that it is always the right button. People follow the happy-but-wrong path way too easily if there is no other obvious one.
Show HN: SAP hierarchy flattener (open source)
by jochesch | 2025-10-31 13:56:14+00:00
I built an open source tool called TreeHouse for flattening SAP hierarchies (i.e. tree structures) for data warehouse / lakehouse use cases.

This is particularly help when migrating from SAP's data stack (BW, Datasphere, etc. which have prepacked hierarchy models and ETL) to something like Snowflake, where all ETL and data models have to be built from scratch.

GitHub (MIT-licensed): https://github.com/jchesch/sap-hierarchy-flattener
by techblueberry | 2025-10-31 13:56:24+00:00
I never understand what “fire all the people managers” _actually_ means. Presumably, someone is in charge of hiring and firing and all the hr stuff and people development, and presumably that’s the people they promoted into roles formally held by managers?

I think he kind of alluded to it, but I wish these oeiple he would explain it instead of the clickbait “we fired all the managers”. I assume he means, he changed the expectations such that managers are expected to be held accountable and heavily invested in work output (the implication made since he talked about promoting tech leads into those roles) and then managed out the people who didn’t fit that description.

I do agree with the headline, but inevitably he says “we fired all the managers” and I don’t think that’s strictly speaking true to his point. Promoting all your best if’s to manager’s can be the best way to lose some of your best IC’s (either because they hate managing people or they hate being managed by a terrible manager)
Show HN: AltSendme – Open-source p2p file transfer tool based on Iroh
by SandraBucky | 2025-10-31 13:56:35+00:00
Hi HN!

I believe people here are somewhat familiar with Iroh - the p2p networking library. It does Hole-punching and make use of QUIC connections between endpoints to enable peer-to-peer connectivity

https://www.iroh.computer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44379173

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572755

Easiest way to make use of Iroh is through their in-house file transfer CLI tool called sendme

https://www.iroh.computer/sendme

Sendme uses iroh to establish direct links between devices for data transfer, and iroh-blobs to send and verify your files

Features:

- Free, for files & folders of any size

- No account requirement

- No server component

- Fast - can saturate a 4Gbps connection.

- Resumable fetching - Interrupted downloads pick up where they left off.

- Integrity checks - Data is automatically verified for correctness on both send and receive.

What I have built is something that complements sendme, Started with their CLI tool fork, made it into a Tauri desktop application with very simple but modern UI (yes, I have read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45760878, coincidence I guess)

Altsendme has almost all the features that sendme offers plus it is interoperable with sendme CLI tool.

Thank you.
by mips_avatar | 2025-10-31 13:56:52+00:00
I think your sign up flow is just too long also, all that information might be necessary to get the app to function how you want but it feels more like filing your taxes. Maybe you could build an agent that the user talks to during sign up? And it will fill out the form in the background? Also you could definitely cache some high quality content (kind of like how TikTok has a core set of high quality videos it uses during new user onboarding)
by ben_w | 2025-10-31 13:56:56+00:00
> You're assertion that consciousness, chemistry, and biology can be reduced to matrix computations requires justification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics

"It matches reality to the limits we can test it" is the necessary and sufficient justification.

> For one, chemistry, biology, and physics are models of reality.

Yes. And?

The only reason we know that QM and GR are not both true is that they're incompatible, no observation we have been able to make to date (so far as I know) contradicts either of them.

> Secondly, reality is far, far messier and more continuous than discrete computational steps that are rountripped.

It will be delightful and surprising if consciousness is hiding in the 128th bit of binary representations of floating point numbers. Like finding a message from god (any god) in the digits of π well before expected by the necessary behaviour of transcendental numbers.

> Neural nets seem far too static to simulate consciousness properly. Even the largest LLMs today have fewer active computational units than the number of neurons in a few square inches of cortex.

Until we know what consciousness is at a mechanistic level, we don't know what the minimum is to get it, and we don't know how its nature changes as it gets more complex. What's the smallest agglomeration of H2O molecules that counts as "wet"? Even a fluid dynamics simulation on a square grid of a few hundred cells on each side will show turbulence.

Lots of open questions, but they're so open we can't even rule out the floor as yet.

> but the first round of AGI won't be close.

Every letter means a different thing to each responder, they're not really boolean though they're often discussed that way, and the whole is often used to mean something not implied by the parts.

It is perfectly reasonable use of each initial in "AGI" to say that even the first InstructGPT model (predecessor to ChatGPT) is "an AGI": it is a general purpose artificial intelligence, as per the standard academic use of "artificial intelligence".
by dankai | 2025-10-31 13:57:10+00:00
This is not the only paper that scales reasoning complexity / difficulty.

The CogniLoad benchmark does this as well (in addition to scaling reasoning length and distractor ratio). Requiring the LLM to purely reason based on what is in the context (i.e. not based on the information its pretrained on), it finds that reasoning performance decreases significantly as problems get harder (i.e. require the LLM to hold more information in its hidden state simultaneously), but the bigger challenge for them is length.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18458

Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of CogniLoad so feel free to ask me any questions.
by oxqbldpxo | 2025-10-31 13:57:16+00:00
I switched from chatgpt to Perplexity; and now to Kimi K2, after reading an article here explaining that all the fear around some of the Chinese models spying and so on.. is simply not true. I have to say that in my experience Kimi K2 is way better than perplexity. I hope we can get our act together. Seems that building this Ai's requires a level of collaboration that is in opposition to greed.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-31 13:57:38+00:00
It’s probably hard to do that in a news context because the real rationales are pretty tight.

Depending on your POV OpenAI and the surrounding AI hype machine is at the extremes either the dawn of a new era, or a metastasized financial cancer that’s going to implode the economy. Reality lies in the middle, and nobody really knows how the story is going to end.

In my personal opinion, “financial innovation” (see: the weird opaque deals funding the frantic data center construction) and bullshit like these circular deals driving speculation is a story we’ve seen time and time again, and it generally ends the same way.

An organization that I’m familiar with is betting on the latter - putting off a $200M data center replacement, figuring they’ll acquire one or two in 2-3 years for $0.20 on the dollar when the PE/private debt market implodes.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-31 13:58:05+00:00
I would say it's more than immutability - it's the "feel" of working with values. I've worked with at least 6 languages professionally and likely more for personal projects over last 20 years. I can say that Clojure was the most impactful language I learned.

I tried to learn Haskel before but I just got bogged down in the type system and formalization - that never sat with me (ironically in retrospect Monads are a trivial concept that they obfuscated in the community to oblivion, yet another Monad tutorial was a meme at the time).

I used F# as well but it is too multi paradigm and pragmatic, I literally wrote C# in F# syntax when I hit a wall and I didn't learn as much about FP when I played with it.

Clojure had the lisp weirdness to get over, but it's homoiconicty combined with the powerful semantics of core data structures - it was the first time where the concept of working with values vs objects 'clicked' for me. I would still never use it professionally, but I would recommend it to everyone who does not have a background in FP and/or lisp experience.
by nemomarx | 2025-10-31 13:58:57+00:00
Having to read a label and go out of the tool to do something else is basically impossible UX, yeah. You'll never get users to do that, and little in line warnings also won't work unless you block the buttons at the same time I think.

In this example I wonder if the tool was too "MVP" and they didn't evaluate what minimum viable would mean for the users?
by actionfromafar | 2025-10-31 13:59:12+00:00
Good luck having an election. All suspicious looking people approaching a polling station will get their identities very thoroughly checked, in a prison in some undisclosed location, until the election is fairly counted to be won by MAGA.

Or any other number of ways to disrupt an election. Maybe not open Congress at all?

edit: They wouldn't arrest citizens you say?

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
by tialaramex | 2025-10-31 13:59:18+00:00
In the cases we're interested in here the variable does vary, what it doesn't do is mutate.

Suppose I have a function which sums up all the prices of products in a cart, the total so far will frequently mutate, that's fine. In Rust we need to mark this variable "mut" because it will be mutated as each product's price is added.

After calculating this total, we also add $10 shipping charge. That's a constant, we're (for this piece of code) always saying $10. That's not a variable it's a constant. In Rust we'd use `const` for this but in C you need to use the C pre-processor language instead to make constants, which is kinda wild.

However for each time this function runs we do also need to get the customer ID. The customer ID will vary each time this function runs, as different customers check out their purchases, but it does not mutate during function execution like that total earlier, in Rust these variables don't need an annotation, this is the default. In C you'd ideally want to label these "const" which is the confusing name C gives to immutable variables.
by jsmailes | 2025-10-31 14:00:57+00:00
I've been using and loving the Affinity v2 suite for the last 3 years or so, and will continue to use v2 of the suite for the time being. I know how it works, I know it won't change drastically, and it already does all the things I need it to. I know new users won't have the luxury of staying behind on the old version, but it seems wise to give them a year or two to get some legs and see if they'll stand behind this "base product free" strategy, or if they'll start locking more features behind a paywall if it doesn't make money quickly enough.
by pasteldream | 2025-10-31 14:01:28+00:00
Yes. I’m not sure how slow it is in Julia, but pure functional languages do tend to generate more garbage for this reason. Hopefully the compiler can optimize it away in simple cases.

Edit: It’s not deepcopying the whole struct, just the parts that need to point to something new. So if you update a.b.c, it will shallow-copy a and a.b, but nothing else.
by patrakov | 2025-10-31 14:01:41+00:00
For one of my relatives, it also never happened. I installed Linux on their laptop that was having issues and explained how to browse the web and use some apps.

They always answered me "it works well".

But what I found during my next visit is a paper with a telephone number of computer helpers, and the laptop was running a fresh copy of Windows, presumably installed by these helpers.
by herbst | 2025-10-31 14:01:52+00:00
I dislike monthly subscriptions myself, and always look for alternatives which I then happily spend my money on.

However the business is as it is

For software I really like the patreon model (like in some game communities) monthly subscription you could cancel after downloading and if you want updates you just get another month. Big portion will just pay monthly while they wait anyway. Best for all worlds.

Otherwise I would maybe recommend a yearly price instead of monthly. Especially if the monthly would be something small anyway. Easy to forget so most people will at least pay 2 years and you save a lot in transaction costs.
by teraflop | 2025-10-31 14:02:30+00:00
I find it kind of funny that this is almost exactly how Java's much-maligned "checked exceptions" work. Everything old is new again.

In Java, when you declare a function that returns type T but might also throw exceptions of type A or B, the language treats it as though the function returned a Result<T, A|B>. And it forces the caller to either handle all possible cases, or declare that you're rethrowing the exception, in which case the behavior is the same as Rust's ? operator. (Except better, because you get stack traces for free.)
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 14:03:04+00:00
> after reading an article here explaining that all the fear around some of the Chinese models spying and so on.. is simply not true

Not doubting they aren't spying on people, but regardless, how would you really know? Are you basing this on that no Chinese police has visited you, or how would you really know if it's "simply true" or not?

With that said, I use plenty of models coming out of China too with no fear, but I'm also using them locally, not cloud platforms.
by acdbddh | 2025-10-31 14:03:44+00:00
In python its common to see code like this:

df = pd.concat(df,other_df) df = df.select(...) ...

My eyes hurts, when I see it. It makes me avoid python. I bet the reason for this mutable code is a missing simple pipes syntax. I love pipes. In R can do:

df |> rbind(other_df) |> select(...)

It feels much better.
by 0x001D | 2025-10-31 14:04:31+00:00
Happy to see this to continue to thrive. As a Swiss, same happy to see European OSS software to flurish. We use CUE for k8s and all kinds of structural configurations and data. Its catalyser to see things conceptually elevated from a pure YAML/JSON/other resulting data formats – YAML and friends will stay, but their generation and management is elevated to sane user experience and engineering driven principles. All the best for CUE and CUELabs!
by chung8123 | 2025-10-31 14:04:36+00:00
I forgot where I heard this quote but it stuck out to me, especially after the election where so many just didn't vote. "if the left won't protect the border a fascist will"

I think the small percentage of the far left that feels like it is ok to have immigrants here that are not following the rules of immigration and the small percentage of the right that feel it is ok to violate our constitution to stop these immigrants have taken over while the big middle just watches with their jaws open at what is happening.
by AlanYx | 2025-10-31 14:04:41+00:00
Based on reported decisions (mostly SCA-related; FISA stuff is not public), Microsoft is the cloud provider who's litigated the most on behalf of client privacy. e.g., It was the Microsoft Ireland case, challenging the extraterritoriality of the Stored Communications Act, that ultimately led to the CLOUD Act.

Microsoft understands at a corporate level that it's in their business interest (as a global vendor) for local lawful access regimes to be as narrow as possible. Their pushback here is understandable; if they're not seen as trustworthy by the US government, it potentially undermines a lot of the latitude they're trying to fight for.
by adaisadais | 2025-10-31 14:04:42+00:00
I’ve been listening to “The Smartest Guys In The Room” (the definitive book on Enron and their scandal) and one of the ways Enron continued to grow and grow is by setting up a really complicated system of moving debt onto equities off of their balance sheet.

While it was sorta legal (at the time) it was not ethical and led to a massive collapse of the #1 company at the time.

Makes you wonder if AI is in such a bubble. (It is).
by pessimizer | 2025-10-31 14:05:14+00:00
> I’ve had models “redirect the problem to someone who has a greater likelihood of not failing”. Gemini in particular will do this when it runs into trouble.

I have too, and I sense that this is something that has been engineered in rather than coming up naturally. I like it very much and they should do it a lot more often. They're allergic to "I can't figure this out" but hearing "I can't figure this out" gives me the alert to help it over the hump.

> But when you’re talking about things related to failures and accuracy, they’re mostly superhuman.

Only if you consider speed to failure and inaccuracy. They're very much subhuman in output, but you can make them retry a lot in a short time, and refine what you're asking them each time to avoid the mistakes they're repeatedly making. But that's you doing the work.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-31 14:05:19+00:00
'Npm install thing' is easier than programming or even auditing imported code.

Too lazy to write, too cheap to pay for it, that's half of open source.

Now what's going to dominate stackoverflow answers, thoughtful articles on how to program? Or gratis npm/uv installable libraries that hide the actual solution details in between tests and polyfills and readmes, that end up just download another dependency while contributing enough lines of code so that the author can safely put it in their resume and grift over the oss ecosystem to get a cushy 300k/yr job at an extended faang where they are in charge of an ad pixel tracker or yet another one of those wallet things that are just an IO proxy for money but they get to keep some comission if they spend enough money on ads to convince someone to use the thing once and then it becomes their main neo(not) bank* forever.

*for regulatory reasons we must not call it a bank, but it's a bank
by gtirloni | 2025-10-31 14:05:27+00:00
This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0oQ0v0W10

This comment is pretty depressing but it seems to be the path we're headed to:

> It's bad enough that people think fake videos are real, but they also now think real videos are fake. My channel is all wildlife that I filmed myself in my own yard, and I've had people leaving comments that it's AI, because the lighting is too pretty or the bird is too cute. The real world is pretty and cute all the time, guys! That's why I'm filming it!

Combine this with selecting only what you want to believe in and you can say that video/image that goes against your "facts" is "fake AI". We already have some people in pretty powerful positions doing this to manipulate their bases.
by patrakov | 2025-10-31 14:05:43+00:00
In this case, the product owner had a wrong idea of what's minimum viable, and his idea was faithfully implemented, plus a warning in the app to call me in specific incompatible cases.

Later the missing pieces were added, we had "two buttons" and the resulting user confusion because they did not know and could not be taught whether a container makes sense for a particular lab.
by iainmerrick | 2025-10-31 14:05:51+00:00
You're getting your history mixed up.

Acorn won the bid to make the original BBC home computer, with a 6502-based design.

Acorn later designed their own 32-bit chip, the ARM, to try to leapfrog their competitors who were moving to the 68000 or 386, and later spun off ARM as a separate company.
by furyofantares | 2025-10-31 14:06:04+00:00
An order of magnitude? That sounds like pretty outrageous hyperbole. A variable getting reassigned 10 times sounds extremely rare, the average in my experience has to be less than 1 reassignment. I think the approach requires coming up with maybe 10% more names.

Usually there are good, obvious names for intermediate calculations in my experience.

I'm open though - what kinds of things are you doing that require reassigning variables so much?
by Tarean | 2025-10-31 14:06:12+00:00
Sometimes keeping a fixed shape for the variable context across the computation can make it easier to reason about invariants, though.

Like, if you have a constraint is_even(x) that's really easy to check in your head with some informal Floyd-Hoare logic.

And it scales to extracting code into helper functions and multiple variables. If you must track which set of variables form one context x1+y1, x2+y2, etc I find it much harder to check the invariants in my head.

These 'fixed state shape' situations are where I'd grab a state monad in Haskell and start thinking top-down in terms of actions+invariants.
by nobody9999 | 2025-10-31 14:06:25+00:00
>edit: They wouldn't arrest citizens you say?

Who said that? Not me. In fact, they've been doing so for a while. And beating them, even shooting[0] them -- because they can -- with impunity.

[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/04/ice-shooting-chica...
by wongarsu | 2025-10-31 14:06:26+00:00
A train has momentum in the direction of the track. If the track makes a 180° turn the train will lose some momentum to increased friction with the track during the turn, but essentially the momentum still follows the track.

A fighter jet (or X-Wing in orbit) kind of generates its own "track" with the guiding forces of the wings. You can still do a 180° turn and keep a significant part of your momentum. Though the guiding effects are a lot softer, so your losses are a lot worse

A satellite (or an X-Wing in orbit) has no rails that can go in arbitrary directions. Any momentum is in "orbit direction", but orbits work in weirder ways. If you make your orbit highly elliptical then at the highest point you will have traded nearly all your kinetic energy for potential energy and can make a 180° turn pretty cheaply (because it's only a small change in speed)
by NetMageSCW | 2025-10-31 14:07:03+00:00
Caveat: when the tires are already at the limit of adhesion (e.g. on an F1 car). In a road car, you are not normally turning at 1g and probably can’t accelerate at 1g so you can turn and accelerate when you have enough margin.

It’s just the average driver doesn’t realize how much margin is available.