MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kstrauser | 2025-10-09 21:36:08+00:00
That's all true, so long as you completely ignore doing any processing on the data, like evaluating the rows and selectively appending some of them into a data structure, then sorting and serializing the results, let alone optimizing the query plan for the state of the system at that moment and deciding whether it makes more sense to hit the indexes or just slurp in the whole table given that N other queries are also executing right now, or mapping a series of IO queries to their exact address in the underlying disks, and performing the parity checks as you read the data off the RAID and combine it into a single, coherent stream of not-block-aligned tuples.

There's a metric boatload of abstractions between sending a UTF-8 query string over the packet-switched network and receiving back a list of results. 300ms suddenly starts looking like a smaller window than it originally appears.
by phoronixrly | 2025-10-09 21:36:11+00:00
> I think that golang's model can actually be sort of cheaper/ more cost effective for servers as compared to how ruby might be doing it right now and so cheaper might mean that a new non profit can be created which can work on less money/outside funding/drama overall

It also means no code signing and the natural capture of most of the ecosystem by Microsoft (due to devs preferring to host their code on github, a bundler that lacks package hosting will be entirely at the whim of MS)
by closeparen | 2025-10-09 21:36:32+00:00
I give more of my attention than I'd like to admit to Twitter these days. But before that it was Hacker News, and before that it was Reddit, and before that it was Digg + Gawker-family blogs like Lifehacker.

I think the impulse to scroll is a feature of my own psychology, not something inculcated in me by Tech, and small web properties with simple feed algorithms are capable of feeding it perfectly well, often better than Big Tech and its data science armies.
by merely-unlikely | 2025-10-09 21:36:35+00:00
It's still my number one complaint about Rust, even though it has definitely gotten better over time. Partly my fault - I'm stuck on a slightly underpowered Windows machine at work. My Macs at home compile significantly faster. But as soon as I add certain crates like serde, tokio, windows, and some others, the compile times grow quickly. It also means that tasks Rust isn't necessarily designed for but can be used for (like web backends) become frustrating enough to dissuade me from using it as a do-it-all language despite certain aspects of the language being really nice. Even a 30-45 second tweak-test loop becomes annoying after a while. Again more of a personal problem than anything, but the point is I personally am constantly frustrated with the compile times.
by zh3 | 2025-10-09 21:37:44+00:00
Having had a twiddler since they came out, seeing this topic the first ting I did was search the thread to see who mentioned it first :) Not sure of the timeline, probably a little after that the Playstation Glove looked like a great idea but the reality sucked.

Decades on now but still trying to find wearable computing stuff that can drag modern computing back to the early 90s (spending years trying to recreate the original Private Eye [0] display). Checking that out on wikipedia right now just fired a harmony of so many nostalgia neurons:-

>The Student Electronic Notebook consisted of the Private Eye, Toshiba diskless AIX notebook computers (prototypes), a stylus based input system and a virtual keyboard. It used direct-sequence spread spectrum radio links to provide all the usual TCP/IP based services, including NFS mounted file systems and X11, which all ran in the Andrew Project environment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer#1980s
by gotodengo | 2025-10-09 21:37:53+00:00
Phishers are working completely blind, thus any amount of info going back to the phishers is a benefit to them.

Just getting server logs from an opened link lets them know their messages aren't being quarantined and their server is reachable through the target's firewall.

The user agent and how the links are accessed give info about who is opening them (A few every couple minutes == all good, 10 links sent to 10 different employees all opened within seconds with a non-standard user agent == you're being investigated and should burn the domain)

It's been a few years since I've done phishing engagements so details may vary with how things are done today. But the goal is to limit any information going to the bad guys. Let them think their messages are being blocked until they go elsewhere.

*edit: That being said, phishing at least one person at a large company is not particularly hard. There's too many companies using domains indistinguishable from shady links for one thing. Limiting engagement is good, but companies also need to be prepared for the eventuality that somebody will get fooled.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-10-09 21:38:04+00:00
> Authoritarian US is becoming the reality right now and the first amendment provides exactly zero protection.

Well, this is not true. As a matter of fact, you can talk about it without fear that you would be arrested for your speech. In real authoritarian regimes, e.g., Jordan, Qatar, China, Russia (de jure protections exist, de facto not so much) you have no protections at all. In those places speaking out means you end up in jail.

> We are watching US constitution collapse right now.

Can you give an example?

> Second, its meaning IS obscure. It get reinterpreted and modified by supreme court to unrecognizable degree.

What article do you think was interpreted to unrecognizable degree?

> The words dont mean what they used to mean back then, because court used some alternative history to achieve their political goal.

Can you provide an example for that as well?

> It is also not like the court was grounded in contemporary reality when making those decisions and explaining them.

I think this is the case with all the precedent-based judicial systems, no?

> Most of constitutional protections are weak. There is no recourse if your rights are broken, only ever increasing maze of special conditions and requirements you need to fill if you want those protections to apply.

In order to argue about that you would have to be specific. It seems to me that the constitutional protections are the only ones that actually work, e.g., 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendments are really powerful, and go without saying.
by Taikonerd | 2025-10-09 21:38:32+00:00
The real problem is the billing model we have, where every individual act a clinician performs is separately billable... and separately haggle-able.

One model that has shown promise is "bundled payments." For example, imagine that a certain insurance company switches to a bundled model for childbirth. They say, "we will pay a hospital $X to cover everything related to this patient's childbirth. Maybe it will be a very simple birth and the hospital will make a lot of money on it. Maybe it will be more complex/expensive, and the hospital will make less money. In some rare cases, the hospital will actually lose money."

Why is this a better model? Well, 2 reasons:

1. the hospital has an incentive to provide care efficiently, rather than trying to churn out as many procedures as possible so they can bill more

2. there's just fewer numbers for providers and payers to haggle over
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-09 21:38:43+00:00
I checked the github repo and I found out that its a single static html page and ahh I forgot to see that its hosted on github.io as well because of their static hosting, somehow I didn't see it!!

Static hosting is super cool and I am going to tinker with it to have monospace-web instead for something like this https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/

Thanks a lot for creating this! Appreciate it, I haven't read the source code but I am going to read it oneday (If I don't procastinate lol)!

Have a nice day!
by nitwit005 | 2025-10-09 21:39:01+00:00
During the cold war, American taxpayers ended up paying for bridges to be rebuilt in Europe so that theheavy tanks could defend against a Russian invasion. Now that the border is further East, they're busy rebuilding more bridges (not US paid this time): https://united24media.com/latest-news/maybe-this-europe-to-r...

They do not believe the tanks will be able to get there in time without doing that.

But that only gets you mobility in allied nations willing to spend billions on infrastructure.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-10-09 21:41:02+00:00
> But if you need a linked list, would that be so bad?

The answer from a Rust programmers perspective is: yes, it's bad.

Rust's secret sauce is if you don't use unsafe, you have a memory safe language. In fact it's better than that. Due to its strong type system "safe Rust" is safer than almost all languages, including Java and the popular interpreted languages like Python, the one notable exception being Ada spark.

The problem with this rosy picture is unsafe Rust. It's harder to get right than C (which 100% unsafe), and you can't write a non-trivial Rust program without at least calling unsafe code. That means there is a trade-off going on. If Rust can keep the amount of unsafe code small and bounded, it wins over 100% unsafe C. If it can't, well you may as well use C.

Today's Rust does manage to keep unsafe code bounded. Just about any program can be written using purely safe code by using Rusts standard library ("std"). Std itself does contain a high'ish percentage of unsafe code (about 20%), but crucially a programmer using std never needs to use unsafe if they are prepared to make the occasional speed tradeoff (as could have been done in the article). Thus Rust + std + the rule "no unsafe", makes for a perfectly memory safe programming environment.

Based on that, a pact has now arisen in the Rust community. You are allowed to write libraries like "std" that use unsafe, but normal usage of those libraries must never require the caller to use unsafe code. The pact ensures unsafe code doesn't spread like a virus, and so Rust will always maintain it's safety advantage over C for your average programmer.

But, it's not possible to write an intrusive implementation of a linked list that doesn't required the caller to use unsafe. Therefore, any such library would be ostracised by the Rust community.
by immibis | 2025-10-09 21:41:12+00:00
What's not stated, is that we used to re-render the text at the bottom each time you scrolled up, and could still do it pretty fast (not quite in 16.67 milliseconds but we could have if computers had been today's speed), and in the meantime, we seem to have forgotten how to do that. Although we also have more pixels now, which probably changes things.
by usr1106 | 2025-10-09 21:41:27+00:00
D-Ticket is a subscription only sold for calendar months. The basic terms are set by law, but some sellers have more generous terms, that is allowed. You need to cancel before the 10th of the current month in order not having to pay for the next month. If you buy after the 10th you are charged for 2 months right away. Most sellers require a German bank account, but e.g. HVV supports Paypal (worked for me) and in theory credit cards (did not work for me). I don't know any seller that accepts cancellations after the 10th, but I have heard a couple should exist.
by ncruces | 2025-10-09 21:41:35+00:00
> Or writing some data science stuff, it might be like: load data from disk or network for 6 seconds, run Numpy on it for 3 hours, write it back out for 3 seconds.

> You could rewrite that in Rust and it wouldn't be any faster.

I was asked to rewrite some NumPy image processing in C++, because NumPy worked fine for 1024px test images but balked when given 40 Mpx photos.

I cut the runtime by an order of magnitude for those large images, even before I added a bit of SIMD (just to handle one RGBX-float pixel at a time, nothing even remotely fancy).

The “NumPy has uber fast kernels that you can't beat” mentality leads people to use algorithms that do N passes over N intermediate buffers, that can all easily be replaced by a single C/C++/Rust (even Go!) loop over pixels.

Also reinforced by “you can never loop over pixels in Python - that's horribly slow!”
by pedalpete | 2025-10-09 21:41:43+00:00
I agree with the reasoning in principle, but I think the 2006 Canadian Olympic hockey team.

The Canadian hockey team is a bit like the US basketball team. When we take the ice, it's highly likely we're going to win.

In 2006, the coaches decided to build the team from players who never really got a fair shot. The thinking was that we have the great coaches, and these players just never got a shot.

We (Canada) lost in the quarter finals, and when asked why, the coaches said that even though the players had as much talent as the A team. They didn't have the commitment to win. They didn't show up to practice, or practice as hard.

These were the "marginally successful", that just needed a bit of help.

Sure, it's only one anecdote, but an interesting reference point.
by pfych | 2025-10-09 21:43:04+00:00
I’ve been eying for the bubblegum framework 12 for a bit now and almost pulled the trigger. Frameworks political stance of “hardware should be maintainable and replaceable” really resonated with me and I was excited to support them with my money.

This is not it though - “Big Tent” means nothing when you’re supporting people who directly call for “Britain to be white again” and use slurs against minorities. It creates a gross space where people (like someone earlier in that thread) feel empowered to outright call for my existence to be invalidated.

This literally happened a few days ago on RetroAcheivements & they handled it well. I really hope framework come out with a response to all this.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-09 21:43:09+00:00
It's HN. One of the most negative places on the internet in my experience.

I guess it's kind of natural because when you agree with stuff there's not much value saying "yes this is right" but if you disagree then you generally have a lot to say about why.

But also I think there are a lot of curmudgeons here. Back in my day we didn't need no stinkin robots and AI and toktik. And anyway I could make a way better robot, this is no big deal.
by dmoy | 2025-10-09 21:43:36+00:00
Because sometimes it's very wrong

Way back when during my EE course days, we had like a whole semester devoted to weird edge cases like this, and spent month on ieee754 (precision loss, Nan, divide by zero, etc)

When you took an ieee754 divide by zero value as gospel and put it in the context of a voltage divisor that is always negative or zero, getting a positive infinity value out of divide by zero was very wrong, in the sense of "flip the switch and oh shit there's the magic smoke". The solution was a custom divide function that would know the context, and yield negative infinity (or some placeholder value). It was a contrived example for EE lab, but the lesson was - sometimes the standard is wrong and you will cause problems if it's blindly followed.

Sometimes it's fine, but it depends on the domain
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-09 21:43:42+00:00
I see ethically there being a difference between what the Chinese and Russian government told them to do where leaders make and enforce the laws with their capitulation to the Trump administration in what is suppose to be a democracy where only the legislative branch and/or court system can demand anything.

I’m also not trying to escuse their heavy handedness about “being nice to China”
by munk-a | 2025-10-09 21:44:03+00:00
I'm very happy to see the article covering the high labor costs of reviewing code. This may just be my neurodivergent self but I find code in the specific style I write to be much easier to quickly verify since there are habits and customs (very functional leaning) I have around how I approach specific tasks and can easily handwave seeing a certain style of function with the "Let me just double check that I wrote that in the normal manner later" and continue reviewing a top-level piece of logic rather than needing to dive into sub-calls to check for errant side effects or other sneakiness that I need to be on the look out for in peer reviews.

When working with peers I'll pick up on those habits and others and slowly gain a similar level of trust but with agents the styles and approaches have been quite unpredictable and varied - this is probably fair given that different units of logic may be easier to express in different forms but it breaks my review habits in that I keep in mind the developer and can watch for specific faulty patterns I know they tend to fall into while building up trust around their strengths. When reviewing agentic generated code I can trust nothing and have to verify every assumption and that introduces a massive overhead.

My case may sound a bit extreme but in others I've observed similar habits when it comes to reviewing new coworker's code, the first few reviews of a new colleague should always be done with the upmost care to ensure proper usage of any internal tooling, adherence to style, and also as a fallback in case the interview was misleading - overtime you build up trust and can focus more on known complications of the particular task or areas of logic they tend to struggle on while trusting their common code more. When it comes to agentically generated code every review feels like interacting with a brand new coworker and need to be vigilant about sneaky stuff.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-09 21:44:49+00:00
I was mostly going down a sciencey path, but "real" is a fairly well understood word (part of reality; not imaginary).

In terms of philosophy I'm mostly of an empirical bent. Things which are observable are real, and things which aren't observable directly, but have a observable effect that can be repeatedly demonstrated on demand, are real too (though they may not be exactly as hypothesised if all we can see are their effects). This is how electromagnetism and quantum tunnelling can be real at the same time faeries aren't.
by mwpmaybe | 2025-10-09 21:44:57+00:00
> I've had poor luck with the couple of VGA-to-HDMI I've ever used over the years

Yes, they're terrible, but...

> latency, poor video quality

For a crash cart? Who cares. For everything else...

> Are there any known-working good adapters for VGA for these?

No, you're AOL.
by immibis | 2025-10-09 21:44:58+00:00
> More than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and five types of entirely pointless jobs:

> Flunkies, ...

> Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists; <-- YOU ARE HERE

> Duct tapers, ...

> Box tickers, ...

> Taskmasters ...
by brazukadev | 2025-10-09 21:44:59+00:00
> there are just two groups: people who for some reason didn't like React and its way of things, but now found something else they do like (which is good!), but now still have the need to shit on React; the second group likes React and never had serious problems using it.

There is a growing but already big third group of ex-React developers, even ex-React evangelists. You can see them in this thread and I think it is the majority of people talking about React's problems.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-10-09 21:45:05+00:00
There's an XKCD where the person who did the file download dialog for Windows visits some friends, https://xkcd.com/612/.

"I'm just outside town, so I should be there in fifteen minutes...actually, it's looking more like six days...No, wait, thirty seconds"

Sounds like that guy got a job setting prices for prescription medicine.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-10-09 21:45:16+00:00
> is John Juan when he's in Mexico?

For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His name was probably originally יֵשׁוּעַ, and should therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek linguistic conventions as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and from there transliterated into Jesus.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-09 21:45:19+00:00
As someone who was a hardcore python fanboy for a long time, no, no it won't. There are classes of things that you can only reasonably do in a language like rust, or where go/kotlin will save you a crazy amount of pain. Python is fine for orchestration and prototyping, but if it's the only arrow you have in your quiver you're in trouble.
by mullingitover | 2025-10-09 21:45:49+00:00
> So if the program were cancelled, the bonds could revert back to the US government - in other words a bunch of debt would be forgiven

That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."

Also, there's nothing stopping Social Security from upping the cap and thus returning to surplus, aside from the group of people who would absolutely love to steal from the fund.
by pdonis | 2025-10-09 21:46:14+00:00
> probably gnu readline piped directly into the interpreter or something

That is more or less how the REPL originally was implemented. I think there's more under the hood there now.

I still don't think what you describe qualifies as "shoddy". There are certainly limitations to the REPL, but "shoddy" to me implies that it's not really usable. I definitely would not agree with that.
by fmj | 2025-10-09 21:46:23+00:00
I'd definitely be interested in a project like that, but I think customizing a PCB layout and sending it off for manufacturing would be too much for many people that would otherwise be interested in it. I think a project like that would gain more traction if it focused on designing high quality boards for a few popular laptop models (MacBooks or ThinkPads IMO) and making those available via on demand manufacturing and/or crowdsourcing a bulk run.
by inopinatus | 2025-10-09 21:46:29+00:00
A few years ago I was unable to register a new Australian company via the automated systems because one of our directors has a hyphenated middle name and the various agencies concerned normalised this in differing ways, leading to rejection at a validation step. Resolving this turned a process of a few minutes into a multi-week telephonic saga.

I subsequently learned that many folks faced with the same problem simply didn’t bother and instead left intentionally erroneous/incomplete (but consistent, and thereby validating) data in the registers.
by dangus | 2025-10-09 21:46:33+00:00
I think you’re purposefully ignoring my point and misunderstanding the analogy.

Yes, there are things that the directly issues and provides. But the vast majority of regulations are like this one where it basically says “I don’t care how you do it, but you need to check the age of your customers.”

As another example, the government doesn’t make soap but it does mandate that restaurants have hand washing stations.
by hibikir | 2025-10-09 21:46:34+00:00
This would all be well and good if the doctors weren't also profiteering. When you visit one, you still don't know if their recommendations are good for me or for them. I have seen allergists which are no less slimy than used car salesmen. See also studies on dentists and their varied recommendations for the same patient.

The US insurance system doesn't seem to be giving us low prices, but let's not pretend it's all their fault. It's just a complex market where it's hard to compare providers, and therefore is prone to a lot of inefficiency.