MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjmlp | 2025-10-25 19:12:36+00:00
Unfortunately that is the standard behaviour every time some of us complain about Linux Desktop.

Just because we complain doesn't mean we are Linux newbies.

Many of us do use Linux at work, have been there since early days, myself kernel 1.0.9, do have multiple UNIX variants experience, what we lack is the willingness to keep doing the same over and over again on our free time.

Yet, a single complaint and there comes the same answer as back in the Usenet days.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-25 19:12:46+00:00
My understanding from reading other blogs on TigerBeetle (and the Power of Ten rule) is that it's not that they aren't allocating at all. It's all static allocation up front. Zig makes these far easier to manage with its use of Allocators. Rust wants everything to be RAII, tons of little allocations who's lifetimes are managed by the borrow checker. You can use other patterns in Rust of course but you're fighting the borrow checker.

Zig gives you a lot of tools to enforce correctness in simple and straightforward ways, where as Rust comes with a lot of complexity. TigerBeetle isn't the first project to talk about this, Richard Feldman also points out similar advantages to Zig over Rust as the reasoning for the Roc compilers rewrite from Rust to Zig.
by cess11 | 2025-10-25 19:13:30+00:00
Maybe I'm holding TFA wrong but to me it seems like they're hinting at wanting a Prolog-as-database that could also become widely used, unlike actual Prolog.

It's not hyper-performant and mega web scale but the object database and Prolog like query language that comes with Picolisp is quite fun and sometimes rather useful, and has helped me think differently about how to model things in the default SQL database engines.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-25 19:13:44+00:00
> decision to expand to Iraq was stupid, but did it really shake up the post-1991 neoliberal consensus?

Afghanistan was endorsed by the UN Security Council [1]. Iraq was not [2]. That set a loud precedent that wars of conquest were back on the table. (To be clear, they were never really off. China invaded and annexed Tibet without much of a fuss during the Cold War.)

> China played the long game to cement its geopolitical influence and make itself "too big to fail"

Nobody was ever bailing out China if it fails. It’s unclear it would be bailed out today. Too big to fail doesn’t apply.

What China has done is become too big to ignore. (Though Xi, being a dictator, seems unable to not squander goodwill every time China earns it. First with the Wolf Warrior nonsense. Now with these rare earth export restrictions on everyone.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
by andrewaylett | 2025-10-25 19:13:54+00:00
As much as I approve of sanctions in the general case as a tool for projecting political pressure, general sanctions against citizens of an ally are a definite indication (if more were needed) that the sanctioning country is at best an unreliable ally.

Targeted sanctions against an allied state can be good: they're a tool for a state to say that as as friends we won't help you with a specific thing (often an ill-advised military action). General sanctions against a non-ally can be good too, and extending the sanctions to politically-important figures makes sense (for example, Russia and oligarchs).

General sanctions against individuals where their country isn't sanctioned? That's bullying. The ICC derives its authority from its members, and if the US doesn't like that then it should take that up with the member states, not the individuals.

International politics is fuzzy enough (and the current public face of the USA is unstable enough) that it's definitely not a good idea -- but I'm tempted to say that we (as in: the UK) should draw a line and tell the US that if they want to play silly games then they're going to win silly prizes. And that if they want to sanction ICC officials (or, indeed, officials of other organisations that we participate in as a country) then they'll need to sanction the whole of the UK. It's probably a good thing I'm not a politician.
by thejazzman | 2025-10-25 19:15:40+00:00
My 2015 Model as’ battery went the day the warranty ended and so they gave me a trash refurbished one “half price” for $8k

This low maintenance cost thing is BS once something actually goes wrong. And it’s awfully frustrating / sus when it happens the moment the warranty ends

My 2017’s HV fuse went just days before the warranty ended. They tried to charge me $330 for that planned part.

These things aren’t cheap.
by pyridines | 2025-10-25 19:15:54+00:00
> spaghettification is also a non-issue, as long as the framework defines clear containers for spaghettis

Sorry, but I disagree strongly with this. When there is, inevitably, a bug that the LLM can't fix, someone's going to have to read all that spaghetti, and they'll curse whoever put it there. "clear containers for spaghetti" is a pipe dream, all abstractions leak, and the bug may very well be in the spaghetti. "Just start over" is unrealistic for large, complex apps.

Of course, if you really have a solution for this, that would be incredible.
by surajrmal | 2025-10-25 19:15:55+00:00
Most people stop feeling like they are fighting with rust a few months into using it. The borrow checker is something that becomes second nature and you still use the same techniques that would please the borrow checker outside of rust because it's generally better program structure in many cases and avoids bugs. If you want to do something that you know us correct that rust normally doesn't allow, just use unsafe. It's not the end of the world. You don't need to resort to a different language to achieve that same result.

This isn't to say it's better or worse than zig. If you're developing software and zig works for your needs, go for it. I'd like to see it used on a 100+ person project to see how it might hold up to the problems that I tend to see in c++, which largely arise for people not knowing about constraints that are not tracked explicitly by the compiler. On projects with less people, this doesn't happen as often.
by RedShift1 | 2025-10-25 19:17:18+00:00
I love GraphQL, it's great. It takes away the ambiguous way to organize REST APIs (don't we all love the endless discussion about which HTTP status code to use...), and at the top level separates operations into query/mutation/subscription instead of trying to segment everything into HTTP keywords. It takes a bunch of decision layers away and that means faster development.
by nas | 2025-10-25 19:17:25+00:00
I get:

3.9: 2.78

3.14: 3.86

3.14t: 3.91

This is a silly benchmark though. Look at pyperformance if you want something that might represent real script/application performance. Generally 3.14t is about 0.9x the performance of the default build. That depends on a lot of things though.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-25 19:18:58+00:00
> That's a political matter

It’s international law. Everything is, by definition, a political matter between sovereign states.

The ICC as an ideal may not be a failure, sure. As an instrument of practically effecting the world, it has failed. More than that, its impotence seems to have emboldened the notion that not only is its specific international law obsolete, but so is the concept of universal rights that states can’t deny.
by tqi | 2025-10-25 19:19:02+00:00
Most of these arguments against seem like personal preferences? For example, I understand it would be convenient to give special treatment to foreign key joins, but i personally find `fk_join(foo, 'bar_id', bar, 'quux_id', quux)` less easy to understand on it's own, without having to look up the underlying table structures to know which tables have which (ie is quux_id a column in foo or bar?). Not to mention I've never worked anywhere where foreign keys were consistently used, mostly for perf reasons.
by thom | 2025-10-25 19:19:03+00:00
My mum spent much of our youth, upon return from yearly holidays to her small seaside home town, tumbling rocks. We were kinda cluttered people growing up, so among other things (an extensive sci-fi collection, hundreds of kitchen gadgets, every microcomputer under the sun) we always had little piles and containers of beautiful shiny rocks strewn around the place. I never had the patience for the tumbling process, but on every beach I considered it my responsibility to find the most intriguing shapes and colours of rocks, fill my pockets, and bring them home. She died this year. We were supposed to scatter her ashes on that beach but my dad refused for inscrutable reasons. And I have a big pile of boring, dull rocks, that neither my mum, nor the relentless sea, is ever going to transform.
by Qem | 2025-10-25 19:19:31+00:00
> Nicolas Guillou is a French magistrate who practises as a judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC). He was elected to this post in March 2024 for a 10-year term: he currently chairs Pre-Trial Chamber I on the situation in the State of Palestine

It's baffling the lenghts US politicians go to enforce apartheid against the palestinians, on the Tel-Aviv regime behalf, even when it threatens US business interests abroad. Any government worth their salt must be running from US based information technology infrastructure like it were the plague.
by YZF | 2025-10-25 19:19:32+00:00
I've occasionally stored JSON directly in a database. It really depends on what you do with this data. If you do need to query and manipulate the internals of that JSON object then you should extract that data into a proper schema. But sometimes e.g. this is just something the frontend uses and you never (or rarely) have to query the internals, i.e. you treat it as an opaque blob.
by nawgz | 2025-10-25 19:20:14+00:00
Re: GQL - Explain to me what abstraction layer should exist between the data model and what data is loaded into the client? I’ve never understood why injecting arbitrary complexity on top of the data model is wise.

Perhaps unfettered write access has its problems, and GQL has permissions that handle this issue plenty gracefully, but I don’t see why your data model should be obfuscated from your clients which rely on that data.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-25 19:20:20+00:00
> if they want to sanction ICC officials (or, indeed, officials of other organisations that we participate in as a country) then they'll need to sanction the whole of the UK. It's probably a good thing I'm not a politician

The fact that this would probably cost the governing party their rule is why the ICC has been failing. Elites love it. Ordinary people couldn’t be fucked.
Show HN: I created a small 2D game about an ant
by aanthonymax | 2025-10-25 19:20:22+00:00
Hello HN! I created a short game in just a few days, just for fun, where you play as an ant and feed it apples.

This game also features random landscape generation, where clouds and trees are randomly distributed across all coordinates (only trees do not grow in the y direction). This is what took me the longest time :)

I would appreciate your feedback ^ ^
by D-Machine | 2025-10-25 19:21:34+00:00
Exactly, it is important and courteous still to cite your resources and tools.

I find a good workaround is to just say "some very quick research of my own leads me to ...", and then summarize what ChatGPT said. Especially if you are using e.g. an LLM with search enabled, this is borderline almost literally true, but makes it clear you aren't just stating something completely on your own.

Of course, you should still actually verify the outputs. If you do, there is not much wrong with not mentioning using the LLM, since you've don't the most important thing anyway (not be lazy in your response). If you don't verify, you had better say that.
by jll29 | 2025-10-25 19:21:35+00:00
I love the EU.

There just isn't a better place to live (having lived in other places like the UK, US and CH, and visited many countries).

For example, when I meet European researchers, each has some things to bitch about their own governments, but we all agree the unity of the EU is very valuable, and that we are very grateful for what it has given us (democratic stability, freedom of movement, a vision for living together respecting and celebrating our cultural differences yet sharing key values).

In the media, in particularly in the UK, people had not much good to say about the "European beaurocrats". In contrast, I work with some very committed officers in Brussels that administer the Horizon Europe research programme, and they are doing a job as well as possible given legal and political constraints. How they work is too little known by the general public, which makes the EU bashing easy but not quite fair.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-25 19:22:09+00:00
Executives since the dawn of buying computers for companies only care about buying the cheapest computers with reasonable support contracts.

If that was true, the various computer companies wouldn't spend billions on advertising to C-suite types, and fleets of salespeople to woo them.

Executives since the dawn of buying computers

Clearly you weren't there, or you'd know executives paid extra for the IBM brand because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
by harmmonica | 2025-10-25 19:22:37+00:00
I'm not sure if you're going to get downvoted here for the advertisement (not by me because I find it useful and interesting), but can you be specific about what "streamline direct labor" means? Also, with the virtual site visit, are you guaranteeing the customer that the estimate you give virtually will be the ultimate price?

Any chance you can you take on solar next because if we could get a solar system for half the price we'd sign right up. All we hear about is how cheap solar is now, but the labor costs have risen more than any hardware price decreases.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-25 19:22:44+00:00
> As much as I approve of sanctions in the general case as a tool for projecting political pressure

Can I ask you why you approve of them? The only people they hurt are the average everyday citizens, the working poor in the target country. And while the naive expectation might be that the economic hardship would lead to them turning on their government and pressuring them to correct the behaviour that lead to sanctions, in turns out in practice it actually boosts support for their government as they come to see the sanctioning countries as their enemies.

It should be abundantly clear how much of a failure sanctions are from how easily Russia ignores them while continuing to invade Ukraine for three years and counting. North Korea has been subject to a virtually global embargo since 1950, a full 75 years at this point. It has not affected the position of their government in any way at all, nor did it prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, but has rendered the people utterly desolate to the point of mostly not even having electricity. See also Cuba, Iran. I would really like to know what people see in this policy that seems to only exist to inflict undue suffering.
by 01100011 | 2025-10-25 19:22:45+00:00
Funny, was just thinking about this the other day as my daughter is currently obsessed with rocks. Did some research and.. nah, I'll just buy polished rocks off the jungle store.

A long time ago I had a brief rock-hounding phase and found some cool rocks. Polished them on a friend's polishing setup. That was pretty fun. I'd rather get back into that vs tumbling.
by danirod | 2025-10-25 19:23:27+00:00
Hi, author of Jacqueline here. I read HN almost daily so it caught me off guard to see my stuff here.

It's been a long time since I did this (2019). It was a prototype just to see if a standard PC boot loader could hand-off into something that's not C (or Rust). And yes you can, as long as the programming language has a way to control how symbol names are exported, and then to link the object code with the rest of the boot loader.

You won't have a runtime unless you implement one, so for most languages there is no stdlib, no exception handling, no garbage collector... But it is fun anyway. As I said, this was a prototype and once it could say Hello World I considered it complete.

Happy to see it here though, and I'll be happy to answer any questions about what I remember, or what is like to write code in Pascal, or OS development or i386 in general.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-25 19:24:28+00:00
Is gas actually less efficient? I haven't had to work out the math myself yet, but there are some very salient variables - e.g. what's the energy source of the electricity? If it's a natural gas power plant, you're looking at like 30-60% efficiency of gas->electricity in the first place. Are you looking a at a heat pump heater? If so, how much of its energy would be pulling heat from the house that needs to be replaced by the home's heating supply anyway?

This is the kind of thing where a carbon tax is great for sorting out the pricing to match the externalities.
by nevertoolate | 2025-10-25 19:25:52+00:00
Question is: do you need that flexibility if you have the backend for frontend? Can you design such a flexible api which makes it possible to iterate faster? If not, you just pay, in the best case, a constant overhead, or worst case, exponential overhead for each request! If you need to spend time optimizing because you have monitoring for slow queries or downtime caused by never terminating queries than most likely you’ve already eaten implementation speed advantage - if it exists at all in the first place.
by layer8 | 2025-10-25 19:25:53+00:00
This is mostly all true, but there is little incentive for RDBMS vendors to implement and maintain a second query language, in particular a shared cross-vendor one. Databases are the most long-lived and costly-to-migrate dependencies in IT systems, so keeping the SQL-based interface in parallel for a long time would be mandatory. This is compounded by the standardized SQL-centric database driver APIs like ODBC and JDBC. Despite the shortcomings of SQL, there is no real killer feature that would trigger the required concerted change across the industry.
by rsync | 2025-10-25 19:26:40+00:00
A certain business I own has an openai account for testing and research purposes.

What ID would we provide?

Would we pick some random employee to attach to the account?

What relevance does this have to the notion of “piercing the corporate veil” if a business account is tied to someone’s drivers license?

I place the blame for this situation squarely on the careless and thoughtless user population who have blindly provided their phone numbers and now ID scans to any old random, fly by night, start up who request them.
by treetalker | 2025-10-25 19:27:06+00:00
The US itself is no longer rules-based, at least in the sense of equal justice under law and no one above the law. Examples abound.

SCOTUS and the lower courts now selectively use history and tradition to skirt legislative texts to do whatever they want. For instance, the Second Amendment is clear and absolute that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and arms did not used to be forbidden when traveling — much less from airports, which did not exist, or even nautical ports. Yet the federal government prohibits carrying arms on airplanes, or even around the airport. Even my combo utility knife and bottle opener, with blade removed outside the airport, got confiscated recently.

Obviously, the usual rules do not apply to Trump (but do apply to similarly situated Democrat presidents).

And for something more quotidian, Florida state judges usually just do whatever the hell they want, summary-judgment and other rules be damned. And it's a rarity to get any appellate relief: the appellate courts typically affirm per curiam — that is, without any explanation whatsoever, on account of which the litigant is prohibited to seek further review in the Florida Supreme Court!

We are now a government of men, not of laws, and illogic and injustice reign supreme.
by churchill | 2025-10-25 19:28:08+00:00
Here's why I don't apply the same metric/standard to China & Russia. They don't pontificate about their morals. They're mask-off about their Schmittian approach to power.

Western countries preach about morals, human rights, rules-based order, and all kinds of bullshit but always seem to violate their acclaimed principles every Wednesday.

China sells weapons to everyone who has money, works with all kinds of regimes, and generally have a non-interventionist policy. That's why smaller countries tend to prefer partnering with them. They're not your fairy godmother, but at least they're honest about what they want.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-25 19:28:14+00:00
> Experienced doctors, yes. Though I’m hearing some ridiculous salaries in SF.

There is no medical specialty except perhaps pediatrics/geriatrics where the pay will start below $200,000. There is a relatively modest effect of seniority on physician salaries (there is a huge amount of quality control/gatekeeping before one becomes an attending). This is nationwide, not in SF.

Here are data in SF: https://www.doximity.com/reports/physician-compensation-repo...

And another source that reflects, purportedly, the data used in the above: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL6MT-ZMJ7K/

I'm not a developer but I don't think $300-400,000, normal salaries for fields like inpatient psychiatry or subspecialty medicine, are common for new developers, or even for any developer (vs a manager).
by blef | 2025-10-25 19:28:48+00:00
Feels old when you see how it played out to become SQL for everything in the data ecosystem lately.

Even though SQL as flaws, maybe a lot, it has one upside which is: it's so easy to onboard people on it, in the data ecosystem (warehousing etc.) it means that we can do way much stuff faster than before and hire less technical people, which is great