MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ygg2 | 2025-10-01 23:27:14+00:00
> My account is throttled by Hacker News moderators.

Seems most accounts are throttled 2posts per hour. Mine included.

> Edit (for Ygg2): What you think is superficial is an entire portion of the art of software development. And your usage of FUD is incorrect.

There is no art in programming language design. Art can be defined as something meant to exist solely for its own sake. That's not what PL is. It's just the thing that makes up a program.

There is a lot of creativity and application involved in programming language design. You can design works of art with a language. But on its own I would have trouble seeing it as art.

But what you mean by art is probably aesthetic i.e. how beautiful is something to look at. When it down comes to userbase it's just a popularity contest. Braces, Parens, keyword or indent? It makes very little difference.

Yet people are vocal about their pet syntax being "The one true" syntax to rule them all. It's like quarreling over whether to stir cement clockwise or counterclockwise.

I'm of the Douglas Crockford school of language design. Languages are meant to facilitate transfer of programming ideas while minimizing errors. If your syntax isn't minimizing errors I frankly don't give a damn. Give me a cement that lasts a thousand years, not one with that I need to worry which way I mix.

As for FUD, I stand by that statement. Saying Rust is uglier than C++ a language known for its near-universally disliked syntax definitely strikes me sowing fear aimed at newcommers.
by khazhoux | 2025-10-01 23:28:03+00:00
I can draw better than most people, but have nearly zero internal visualization. I learned to draw by direct observation, committing the patterns to memory, and repetition.

As a result, I have excellent (if I do say so myself) drawings from life, some shockingly good portraits in oil, and also I can reproduce a few cartoon characters (which I’ve practiced extensively) almost perfectly. BUT, ask me to draw my mom from memory, and I can’t do it, like at all. I have, really, no idea what my own mom looks like.
Ask HN: Who is Buying? (October 2025)
by nthypes | 2025-10-01 23:28:14+00:00
We have the monthly "Who is Hiring?" and "Who Wants to be Hired?" threads, which are incredibly valuable for connecting talent with opportunity.

Let's experiment with the other side of the marketplace: a thread for people and companies who are actively looking to buy a solution for a problem they have.

This is for founders, managers, and engineers who have a budget and are tired of searching for the right tool, library, or service. It's also for builders and vendors to find qualified leads for problems they genuinely solve.

Guidelines: - For Buyers: Please post a top-level comment describing your need. Follow the template below to give solution providers the best context.

- For Sellers/Builders: Please reply directly to a buyer's comment if you have a relevant solution. Do not post a top-level comment to advertise your product.

Buyer Template (please use this in your top-level comment):

PROBLEM: (Be specific. Instead of "I need a CRM," try "I need a lightweight, self-hostable CRM for a 3-person dev tools company that primarily integrates with GitHub and Slack. Salesforce is too complex.") BUDGET: (e.g., "$50-$200/month", "Up to $5,000 one-time for a perpetual license", "Flexible for the right solution.")

WHAT I'VE TRIED: (e.g., "We've tried HubSpot but found it too marketing-focused. We looked at Close but the per-seat pricing doesn't work for us. We've considered building our own but would rather not.")

IDEAL SOLUTION: (Describe what the perfect solution would look like. e.g., "An open-source tool with optional paid support, or a SaaS with a transparent API and fair pricing. Must have a clean, fast UI.")

CONTACT: (e.g., "My contact info is in my profile," or "Reply here and I'll reach out," or "email me at hn-buying[at]mydomain.com")
by gruez | 2025-10-01 23:28:22+00:00
I don't think gp is trying to imply that she's explicitly making it up, just that the phenomena is in her head. To take an absurd example, it's probably safe to say that electromagentic sensitivity doesn't actually exist (ie. radio waves aren't actually causing people pain/distress), even if sufferers aren't lying to others about their experiences.
by muwtyhg | 2025-10-01 23:28:28+00:00
That's where the network of CCTV cameras with facial recognition and gait detection come in!

Barreling towards a complete lack of privacy is scary and waving it away as "just don't bring your phone" is massively naive. There are many many ways you can be identified and tracked besides your own phone, because there is so much incentive to do it. Even if everyone stopped bringing their phone everywhere out of fear of tracking, they would _still be tracked_
by neilv | 2025-10-01 23:28:36+00:00
It's not available, but I once made a researchy Statechart->Java compiler. For the concurrency, it leaned on Java's green threads.

Since then, I sometimes do manual implementations in code. For example, the Swift code of an iOS app I wrote has an ASCII art diagram of a hierarchical Statechart, for making the UI and NFC event handling solid (despite SwiftUI quirks and inconsistent docs at the time).
by dzonga | 2025-10-01 23:29:01+00:00
quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.

but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.

For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
by waterTanuki | 2025-10-01 23:29:46+00:00
Every time this subject comes up there is always a "well MY C code is safe so Rust is a stupid language! You're just using the <language wrong/wrong tools>".

I find it funny how much folks foam at the mouth about using X or Y wrong in a language that specifically chose to be flexible to fit into any possible combinations of toolsets and now you're telling people they need to use YOUR tools.

Meanwhile Rust has solved this problem by having 1 compiler, 1 package manager, 1 formatter, 1 way to run tests, etc. etc. C/C++ will never have this because of how fragmented the ecosystem is. That's the price paid over years of committee decisions which prioritized industry customization & backwards compatibility above all else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
by tacostakohashi | 2025-10-01 23:30:29+00:00
I try to make a clear distinction between:

1) Questions for which you can recall the answer off the top of the head, or by sharing an _existing_ note, document, link, etc.

2) "Questions" which cannot be immediately answered from memory / existing records, and are in fact a request to do _new work_, be it research, analysis, writing some document, etc. etc.

Hopefully, you are sufficiently well organized, keep notes, and anticipate obvious inquiries such that that many questions are of type #1. Think of those as L1 or L2 cache hits.

Then, for the remainder that are #2, you can say "sorry, I don't have anything to hand, haven't thought about that, but I could look into it and get back to you with something in X amount of time, if that's useful. should we create a ticket, and prioritize this alongside other priorities?".

The thing that will inspire confidence is not saying this all the time, but only for the non-#1 things, and that many things are #1 and get an immediate response.

It's also powerful to build these constructs into questions of other people. You could ask "Hey, Bob - I'm wondering, do you know, off the top of your head, where the code that does X is?".

Ideally, Bob can then say, "oh, yes, I was just looking at that yesterday, it's here: http://....", or alternatively "Hmm. Actually, no, sorry.".

An annoying non-answer would be "No, but it's probably in place X, because Y, or maybe it's Z, or it could be found using git history or blah blah blah..." - that's not helpful, because if it needs to _searched for_, you can do that just as well as Bob, the question was whether he had it _to hand_, not whether he could make some guesses about where it _could_ be...
by torstenvl | 2025-10-01 23:31:52+00:00
But C is the default and canonical programming model.

It is the native language of every major operating system.

It is the language most closely tied to mainstream ISA assembly, and—symbiotically—which mainstream archs have tried to optimize for.

It's one of few languages that are completely public, in the sense that it is not de jure or de facto owned by a single market participant.

And it is the only language that both has standardized ABIs (per platform) but API and ABI compatibility implemented in a huge number of other languages.

There is no extern "Rust" {} in C++. There is no with Convention => Swift in Ada.

There is extern "C" and with Convention => C exactly because because C is the de facto standard that everything has to interface with.
by almosthere | 2025-10-01 23:32:24+00:00
$0 should be $100 because you're probably going to use some cloud service and AI

At the low end I would start building a small AI app - likely in the chat or forum space. Start as an OSS vendor that has a free deployable or paid options

At $10k really isn't much different because 10k is not paying for anything significant. But I would either add agentic features (since it uses a fuck-ton more tokens) for my chat/forum- OR - I would hire an intern at a non-zero biweekly rate (maybe $1k per month) for at least 4 hours per day.

At $100k I would start a construction company if I can attract a GC and build ADUs for people for $500k each in the Bay Area. Probably have the GC and one other person and myself doing the actual buildings and split it 3 ways evenly (as long as everyone's doing the same amount) and make about 3 ADUs per year.
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-01 23:32:27+00:00
> have a lot of time, want to build software

Don't worry about being a company, worry about building a product or service enough people want to pay for. The nice thing about software is that your development costs can be close to zero. Keep your day job, program nights and weekends, and see if you can fill a niche by creating something worth taking to the next step.
by NobodyNada | 2025-10-01 23:33:46+00:00
> The argument for using Rust instead of a memory safe implementation of C is all about performance. And that’s not a bad argument! But we should be honest about it.

This is half of it; the other half is that there's more to writing correct code than just memory safety.

Rust was not initially designed as a memory-safe "C alternative" -- it started as a higher level language with green threading and garbage collection. Borrow checking, affine types, and all that were introduced not to "solve" memory safety, but to reduce logic bugs in complex, highly concurrent code by enabling programmers to statically check application invariants using the type system. Once it became apparent that this system was powerful enough to express the semantics of full memory safety without garbage collection, GC was removed from the core of the language, and Rust became what it looks like now.

The point is, I think focusing on "memory safety" seriously undersells Rust. Rust is aimed at giving you tools to statically verify arbitrary correctness properties of your program; and memory safety is just one example of how the standard library uses the available tooling to prove one particularly useful property. But Rust's "safety" protects you from any logic bug that you define to be a safety issue.

Additionally, this means that you're not restricted to one particular runtime or environment's ideas of memory safety -- you can write or bring in unsafe code to define your own requirements. This is very important to me -- I work on low-level driver and RTOS code for microcontrollers, and am commonly doing very unsafe things with task switching, interrupts, DMA, memory layout and pointer casting tricks, inline assembly, hardware MMIO, power management, etc. Rust fits fantastically in this niche, because I can use the type system to write out all the preconditions that external users must uphold when interacting with my driver code.

I think Fil-C is an excellent project, and is far more practical and realistic than TRACTOR for the problem of securing legacy code. But I also see it as largely orthogonal to Rust -- I can't see many situations where someone would choose Fil-C for greenfield code over something like Java or Go. Rust has safety, performance, and interop advantages over GC'd languages; and safety advantages over other C-like languages; so it's a great choice for new projects, but it's not gonna help you with all your old code like Fil-C will.

> It’s also annoying that this DARPA page mentions some kind of consensus. There’s no consensus on Rust being the safe bet.

The "consensus" the article talks about is not Rust, it's that "relying on bug-finding tools is not enough." Swift, C++-with-[the right]-changes, and Fil-C all would fall within that consensus (of needing some sort of guaranteed safety); only Zig is something of an exception in your list.
by bastawhiz | 2025-10-01 23:33:48+00:00
Absolutely unacceptable that their TOS basically gives them unrestricted access to your datasets, as far as I read it. The terms let them use your datasets for pretty much whatever they decide they want to do with it (though they do say they would anonymize the data, which isn't especially helpful). The TOS leaves a lot of wiggle room for them to do pretty much whatever they want to the data.

I wouldn't touch this until they get serious about having real assurances that they're not going to access customer data without a real, justifiable reason. If Amazon gave themselves free reign to read S3 data it would be outrageous, this is basically the same thing.
by kemayo | 2025-10-01 23:35:02+00:00
They could have raised the debt limit through reconciliation, but this shutdown isn't about the debt limit. This is literally the bill saying what the budget for the next year is, without which the government isn't allowed to spend any money (as opposed to not having any money to spend when it's the debt limit).

I think the reason they can't use reconciliation for this is that the budget has to include discretionary spending, and reconciliation is only allowed to be used for mandatory spending.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-01 23:35:34+00:00
There are definitely categories of code where you could realistically expect lift-and-shift from C which you're confident is correct to safe Rust that's maybe not very idiomatic but understandable.

I believe Microsoft has a tool which did this for some bit twiddling crypto code. They have high confidence their C crypto code is correct, they run a process, they get safe Rust, and so their confidence transfers but now it's safe Rust so it just works in Rust software and you get all their existing confidence.

But it's never going to be all code, and it might well never be most code.
by duskwuff | 2025-10-01 23:36:11+00:00
DSEG7 uses some lower case forms (e.g. for "b", "n", "t") to avoid letter shapes which are impossible to represent on a 7-segment display (like "N"), or which would be ambiguous (e.g. "B" / "8").

You still can't represent all lowercase letter shapes on a 14-segment display, but you can do all uppercase, so I'm assuming they went with that for consistency.
by kwanbix | 2025-10-01 23:36:13+00:00
Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.
by bfg_9k | 2025-10-01 23:36:23+00:00
>Would you agree that as a guiding principle for good government no one should be forced to associate with anyone they don't want to or disallowed from associating with anyone they do want to?

For an individual? Sure. For a business? Morally/ ethically, no. If you have a business model predicated on only being profitable when you pick and choose your customers, then that business model is unsustainable and shouldn't exist. It's complete crap that I get banned from a casino or betting app simply because I know how to profitably bet on things.

If it's not profitable to serve someone like me, then don't serve the product at all. It's like an all you can eat buffet, you shouldn't be allowed to ban someone from there simply because they eat too much. Set time limits, or whatever else you need to do, but don't market it as "all you can eat".

Traditional businesses don't have this problem, Apple makes the same amount of money regardless of who they sell an iPhone to, it's predatory businesses that have this issue.

>if they can't ban good bettors they'll either swap the odds to juice bad bettors even more or go out of business.

Good, do that then.

>The idea that government can force you to do business with people you don't want to do business with is broad and dangerous.

Governments have been doing stuff like this for a long time. Look at how the legal profession works.
by ggm | 2025-10-01 23:37:34+00:00
I wish people in the tech business would use non X methods of publishing their exploit, or if people could use the bypass links so readers like me who do not want to appear on X click tracking can see things.

There are so many better choices. I understand people like Troy need the PR and so he has little choice but to use the channel journalists and public shaming happens on, but we're in a conversation here, and tagging X legitimises X.

It's figuratively using the KKKs nightly cross of fire meet to discuss racism impacts on society. We're feeding the grok beast. Can we stop?
by gruez | 2025-10-01 23:38:31+00:00
>1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.

I don't get it, are you trying to imply there might be 0.0001% of people with negative side effects, they're not getting picked up, and for that reason those substances should have never been approved? If so what does that say about allergens? If the Colombian exchange happened today, should we ban peanuts on the basis that a few percent of people get side effects?

>but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.

How is it "blindingly obvious" that it's caused by artificial colors specifically though? Otherwise it's a leap to go from "there must be something in the food" to "we should ban artificial colors".
by parineum | 2025-10-01 23:38:34+00:00
The majority of Americans think that the border situation/immigration has improved since Trump was elected, more than approve of Trump/ICE.

Trump also appointed the judges that got Roe overturned, a huge win for his constituency.

Democrats certainly don't approve but Republicans don't approve of the ACA so, if that's the bar, neither did anything of significance.
by scubbo | 2025-10-01 23:39:13+00:00
...wait, you and I are using "KVM" in different ways, then. To me, it means a switch that lets you use the same Keyboard, Monitor ("Video"), and Mouse for two different machines. Sounds like you're talking instead about a technique for running a VM on a single machine - which, from Googlin', I suspect is "Kernel-based Virtual Machine", a new-to-me term. Thanks for teaching me something!
by sarchertech | 2025-10-01 23:39:24+00:00
We’re coming off of nearly 20 years of growth, years of free money, and the COVID boom that caused massive over-hiring.

Then you add the millions and millions tech companies spent promoting coding as a career, and the organic attraction from high salaries that caused CS to became the most popular major at many schools, and pushed droves up people into coding bootcamps.

The free money stopped, and without that subsidy we probably have 50% more programmers than we really need.
by freeopinion | 2025-10-01 23:40:36+00:00
Clearly,a million people have tried to find an answer for this question. I've tried. At least one of my attempts was an XY problem. I was converting generated HTML that would never see a browser. It was never intended to see a browser. The people generating it were very good at HTML/CSS/JS, but didn't know how to produce the same content outside HTML.
by Kimi_livekit | 2025-10-01 23:40:40+00:00
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by khazhoux | 2025-10-01 23:41:36+00:00
Are you saying you think everyone can see basically the same amount of imagery?

I’m quite convinced it’s a real distinction. I have nearly zero visualization. The main thing for me is that I may get a fleeting glimpse of part of an image if I focus, but it evaporates instantly. I can’t hold it for any amount of time whatsoever.

On the other hand, I have very strong internal audio. I can play back music I haven’t heard for years or even decades. I hear the different instruments come in, the timbres, etc. It’s obviously not the same as music hitting my eardrums, but it is full, detailed audio which I can pause at will, rewind and pick apart. I’m told there are people that can’t hear any sound in their heads at all...