MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-10-18 10:07:34+00:00
This level of cuteness and obsession with syntax is partly what drives me away from Ruby. A function should just be a function. We don't need to make programming languages look more like English. There are certainly issues with other languages and their verbosity (like with Java). But I don't want to have more ways to do the same thing and worry about how poetic my code reads as English - we should worry how poetic it reads as computer code.

That said, we don't need just one programming language. Perhaps Ruby is easier to learn for those new to programming and we should introduce it to students.
by WJW | 2025-10-18 10:09:59+00:00
> The value 5 having a method, and that method being an iterator for its value, is kinda weird in any design sense and doesn’t seem to fix any architectural order you might expect, it’s just there because the “hack” results in pretty text when used.

I don't think this is particularly weird, in Ruby at least. The language follows object orientation to its natural conclusion, which is that everything is an object, always. There is no such thing as "just data" in Ruby, because everything is an object. Even things that would just be an `int` in most other languages are actually objects, and so they have methods. The `times` method exists on the Integer classes because doing something exactly an integer number of times happens a lot in practice.
by emn13 | 2025-10-18 10:11:13+00:00
I think it's not at all a marshmellow test; quite the opposite - docs used to be written way, way in advance of their consumption. The problem that implies is twofold. Firstly, and less significantly, it's just not a great return on investment to spend tons of effort now to maybe help slightly in the far future.

But the real problem with docs is that for MOST usecases, the audience and context of the readers matter HUGELY. Most docs are bad because we can't predict those. People waste ridiculous amounts of time writing docs that nobody reads or nobody needs based on hypotheses about the future that turn out to be false.

And _that_ is completely different when you're writing context-window documents. These aren't really documents describing any codebase or context within which the codebase exists in some timeless fashion, they're better understood as part of a _current_ plan for action on a acute, real concern. They're battle-tested the way docs only rarely are. And as a bonus, sure, they're retainable and might help for the next problem too, but that's not why they work; they work because they're useful in an almost testable way right away.

The exceptions to this pattern kind of prove the rule - people for years have done better at documenting isolatable dependencies, i.e. libraries - precisely because those happen to sit at boundaries where it's both easier to make decent predictions about future usage, and often also because those docs might have far larger readership, so it's more worth it to take the risk of having an incorrect hypothesis about the future wasting effort - the cost/benefit is skewed towards the benefit by sheer numbers and the kind of code it is.

Having said that, the dust hasn't settled on the best way to distill context like this. It's be a mistake to overanalyze the current situation and conclude that documentation is certain to be the long-term answer - it's definitely helpful now, but it's certainly conceivable that more automated and structured representations might emerge, or in forms better suited for machine consumption that look a little more alien to us than conventional docs.
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by judofyr | 2025-10-18 10:11:46+00:00
Blocks are fundamentally different from functions due to the control flow: `return` inside a block will return the outer method, not the block. `break` stops the whole method that was invoked.

This adds some complexity in the language, but it means that it’s far more expressive. In Ruby you can with nothing but Array#each write idiomatic code which reads very similar to other traditional languages with loops and statements.
by cryxnet | 2025-10-18 10:12:05+00:00
Just shipped Deep MCP Agent v0.5.0 — a framework for building model-agnostic AI agents that run entirely on MCP tools over HTTP/SSE, no custom SDKs or glue code.

The new release adds Cross-Agent Communication — agents can now call each other like tools. Each peer agent becomes an ask_agent_<name> tool, or you can broadcast_to_agents for parallel reasoning and consensus.
by krisoft | 2025-10-18 10:13:28+00:00
I’m a software engineer who has been trained on convex programming. I have read the Boyd book, did some hobby projects in the area. But it is just not comming up during the day to day work. Even when i have a task well suited for continous value optimisation it does never seem to be a good fit for convex programming. The application areas were sensor calibration, slam, model predictive control, trajectory prediction and the like. Usually when this happens we just throw the problem at ceres solver and deal with it when it is not converging. Would be nice to have the strong guarantees a convex optimiser could give us but I’m not finding a way in practice.

It is probably just a “git gud” situation. I even re-read Lars Blackmore’s “Lossless Convexification of Nonconvex Control Bound and Pointing Constraints of the Soft Landing Optimal Control Problem” from time to time hoping that i find a way to apply a similar convexification idea to my problems. With all of that I’m not that surprised that convex optimisation is not more widely known.
by koliber | 2025-10-18 10:14:38+00:00
> The [Online Safety] Act explicitly grants Ofcom the legal authority to regulate online safety for individuals in the United Kingdom

And so they should, within the borders of the UK.

It's illegal to own unlicensed firearms in the UK. In the US, it is legal. UK authorities can prevent ownership of firearms in the UK via penalties, prevent firms from selling firearms in the UK, and set up import controls to prevent people from importing guns bought abroad. They cannot prevent foreign companies from selling firearms abroad.

Ofcom can institute penalties for UK consumers who access illegal content, prevent firms from providing such content on UK soil, and put up firewalls to prevent people from digitally importing such content into the UK. They cannot prevent foreign companies from providing such content.

Ofcom is being lazy and is trying to offload the responsibility to foreign firms.

Safety and liberty are often at odds. Let the UK decide the balance for their citizens and let their citizens bear the benefits and costs of implementing the measures.
by frou_dh | 2025-10-18 10:14:57+00:00
An interesting thing about Smalltalk and Ruby blocks is that they aren't just anonymous functions/lambdas, right? i.e. if you 'return' / '^' in a block, it's the context around the block that you return from, not just the block itself? That's what struck me about both of them when I was used to thinking in basic Lisp terms.
by rcarmo | 2025-10-18 10:15:18+00:00
I would love to try out one of the mini-PCs that ship this, but they seem to be made of either platinum (hugely overpriced in EU) or unobtainium (no retailers carry them here, and getting something direct from China is dicey warranty-wise). ROCm 7 looks to be working already under most Linux distros and having this as a workstation with a local LLM or a “home inference server” with Ollama and a few services seems like a great solution.
by emoII | 2025-10-18 10:15:47+00:00
Interesting that this article makes no mention of eager vs lazy evaluation - isn’t a big reason that if, for etc has to be special forms in an eagerly evaluated language that their arguments need to be lazily evaluated, which of course, deviates from the rule? Also, lazy evaluation is achieved in an eagerly evaluated language as simply wrapping a block of code in a function, which makes lazy evaluation isomorphic with the contents of the article
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 10:16:03+00:00
Well, did IBM actually bring something new to the market?

As far as I know, IBM did have impressive technical innovations at first, like the Vacuum Tube Multiplier, but then at one point they stopped innovating and instead focused on basically business optimizations.

So yeah, I guess a bit similar to IBM, but that isn't the full story.
by masklinn | 2025-10-18 10:17:11+00:00
Assuming that by lambda you mean "an anonymous function"[1], for most intents and purposes they are, except their returns are non-local whereas functions usually have local returns.

However blocks are special forms of the language, unless reified to procs they can only be passed as parameter (not returned), and a method can only take one block. They also have some oddities in how they interact with parameters (unless reified to lambda procs).

[1] because Ruby has something called "lambda procs"
by pj_mukh | 2025-10-18 10:17:58+00:00
“ technology that has some legitimate uses, it doesn't need a huge boost”

That’s what I’m disagreeing with. “Legitimate uses” isn’t something just hanging out in the ether to attach itself to useful technology it happens via a grinding sales process and big industry wide cultural changes.

People don’t like change.

I think AI and its knock-on effects in robotics will have massive productivity boosts in industries where productivity has been lagging for years. It will take decades and multiple boom-busts to happen to drag the population into change but it’ll happen.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-18 10:18:16+00:00
No it wasn't that at all.

When browsing Firefox 3.0 would randomly not load a site when say about 10 tabs were in the window and hang for about 30 seconds. It was annoying. There was an obvious issue with how it handled the tab isolation (it didn't really that was the issue). IE 8 and Opera didn't do this.

It has nothing to do with my impression of Google Chrome because Google Chrome didn't exist at the time.
by Lio | 2025-10-18 10:18:37+00:00
> From my perspective more damage has been wrought to British culture by the Disneyification of Winnie-the-Pooh (big fan of EH Shephard here) than by 4Chan.

Here here!

None of what Labour are doing makes sense to me from a "tHinK oF tHE cHilDreN!!" perspective because it's so easy to get round with a VPN.

It's far more plausible, to me anyway, that's it's really a push to remove anonymity for online activity.

The chances they eventually enforce the usage of their new Digital ID as the sole form of acceptable age verification in the UK seem pretty high.
by fsloth | 2025-10-18 10:19:05+00:00
Yup. My daughter (15y) had the perfect example this morning. She said she was thinking about shooting a person with a cannon upwards, then realizing they feel effectively zero gravity at top, and maybe this could be usefull. Then she remembered parabolic flight paths to train astronauts, realized it’s the same thing, and that she started wondering about a thing she already knew.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 10:19:12+00:00
Huh, I guess my history been different, I always understood "innovative" as something like "new and different".

Making something cheaper can be innovative, depending on how you achieved that. But if you launched a product that is the same as a competitor only because it's cheaper, because your company is funded by VCs who can continuously inject cash to bleed your competitor, I wouldn't call that "innovative" at all.

But if you instead had figured out a way to actually create the same hardware but in a cheaper way, so that's why the price is cheaper, then you did innovative in the creation process, but I still wouldn't call the finished product innovative, I'd be more focused on the process itself.
by ksec | 2025-10-18 10:19:29+00:00
That is increasingly true and will only get more mainstream as times comes by. Why pay for Home WiFi. ( Internet ) when you have 5G / Mobile Data. 5GSA will further increase Mobile network capacity, and mobile network will be all you need. MNOs will specially those without cable / fibre to home infrastructure are already promoting 5G home solution as replacement.
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-10-18 10:21:34+00:00
I don't think you understand my argument. The point is not whether or not solar electricity generation is good or bad (it is obviously very favorable). The point I am making is that it is unhelpful to collapse complexity into a simplistic model.

Your discussion on owning battery + PV is illustrative. You are not in a vacuum and certainly are in relationship with the broader world: you paid for the system, you maintain it, you stopped buying something, you inspired your neighbors, you lowered the costs for your neighbors to implement a similar system, you reduced your and your countrymen's geopolitical dependencies, you may have saved some money you can spend elsewhere, you probably developed a working understanding of electricity in homes, your neighbors probably developed a better working understanding of electricity in homes, you are now less liable to extortion/persuasion from fossil fuel companies, you're now more likely to own an EV and reduce urban pollution. The entire point is that you exist in relationship; that is what makes it powerful. Had you simply implemented the PV system + battery without these second order effects (and only gained access to more/cheaper energy) you would have considerably less positive impact. The complex model is the correct working model that describes far more of the dynamics than the simplistic model.

My original point: belief in a single fulcrum when describing societal evolution is flatly misleading.

The metaphor of driving a car is not in opposition to solar; you misunderstood it. The point is, again, that the simple model is insufficient for effectively operating in the world.
by hulitu | 2025-10-18 10:23:33+00:00
> Jeep wrangler owners waiting for answers week after an update bricked their cars

Don't worry. It will be fixed in a future update.

Does Microsoft entered the Automotive business ? Because this surely looks like a lot of the issues with Windows, where an update breaks something and Microsoft needs a couple of succesive updates, until they acknoledge and fix the problem.
by ksec | 2025-10-18 10:23:38+00:00
In case this still isn't common knowledge. You should always use WiFi 7 hardware as the latest WiFi 6E solution. I.e Latest Generation of WiFi is the best version of last generation.

Just like when WiFi 6 came out, OFDMA didn't work well or wasn't even turned on by default. The same thing happened with WiFi 5 MU-MIMO, and WiFi 7 MLO. Expect the MLO to only work with WiFi 8.

And for all the latency reduction and reliability upgrade with WiFi 8? The expect them to work well in WiFi 9.
by kace91 | 2025-10-18 10:23:58+00:00
I don’t have an issue with the “everything’s an object” part, because it _is_ consistent, even though it gets a bit trippy when classes are objects as well and they are implementation of a Class class which is an implementation of itself (trickery again!).

The issue is more with this part:

>The `times` method exists on the Integer classes because doing something exactly an integer number of times happens a lot in practice.

It is practical, but it breaks the conceptual model in that it is a hard sell that “times” is a property over the “5” object.

The result is cleaner syntax, I know, but there is something in these choices that still feels continually “hacky/irky” to me.
by throwawaypath | 2025-10-18 10:24:50+00:00
>One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet.

Documented != legal, one can be documented and an illegal immigrant. If you have a deportation order with a final date in the past, you are a documented illegal immigrant. If you're unlawfully in the US due to overstaying your visa, you are a documented illegal immigrant. Practically every case in the past year has proven out to be the person deported was illegal.

>Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...

Yet they can still be illegal immigrants.

>do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt?

The vast majority of illegal immigrants being deported have none of those things. All cash.

>Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country

Car gets repossessed, house gets foreclosed. The majority have miniscule or nonexistent credit card debt. Less than a rounding error for the economy as a whole.

Their deportation will increase housing supply, which reduces rent and home prices though!

>We were lied to about the number of illegals. ... All because the lies saying they were illegal.

No we weren't. They are illegal.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-18 10:25:07+00:00
I often see sequential order IDs, and they get incremented by one, so I can guesstimate the amount of orders they get within a minute by creating my own orders. I watched this happen as I was intentionally removing and creating new orders (as they did not support modification of existing but not yet accepted ones). What may I do with this information though as an user that would be damaging? Legitimate question, intent is not harm, but I genuinely do not see how this is a bad thing.

I can see it being bad for tracking IDs, but not order IDs, unless you are allowed to view any orders that do not belong to your account, which is just fundamentally bad security and using UUIDv4 or a random string would simply be obscuring security.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-18 10:25:14+00:00
The really depressing part about LLMs (and the limitations of ML more generally) is that humans are really bad at formal logic (which is what programming basically is), and instead of continuing the path of making machines that made it harder for us to get it wrong, we instead decided to toss every open piece of code/text in existence into a big machine that then reproduces those patterns non-deterministically and use that to build more programs.

One can see the results in a place where most code is terrible (data science is the place I see this most, as it's what I do mostly) but most people don't realise this. I assume this also happens for stuff like frontend, where I don't see the badness because I'm not an expert.
Show HN: BlinkDisk – Modern File Backups
by pauxel | 2025-10-18 10:26:17+00:00
Hey HN,

I built BlinkDisk, a modern, minimalistic, and privacy-first backup app that’s designed to make backups effortless for everyone. It’s built on top of Kopia and combines strong encryption, deduplication, and cross-platform support with a simple, friendly UI.

Key features:

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GitHub: https://github.com/blinkdisk/blinkdisk

Website: https://blinkdisk.com

Would love your feedback!
by jackdoe | 2025-10-18 10:26:39+00:00
He is an absolute treasure, I have watched all his videos more than 4 times and I don't think I would've been able to have a good mental model about deep learning without them, regardless of the amount of Bengio, Goodfellow etc lectures I have seen, none of them come even close.

He is singlehandedly enabling millions of people to understand what is going on, what + and * do, actually demystifying the "wires".

I just wish he start thinking of himself as more than 'collapsing weights', regardless if it turns out to be true.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-18 10:27:45+00:00
> Over time the limitations of MCP have started to emerge. The most significant is in terms of token usage: GitHub’s official MCP on its own famously consumes tens of thousands of tokens of context, and once you’ve added a few more to that there’s precious little space left for the LLM to actually do useful work.

Supabase MCP really devours your context window. IIRC, it uses 8k for its search_docs tool alone, just on load. If you actually use search_docs, it can return >30k tokens in a single reply.

Workaround: I just noticed yesterday that Supabase MCP now allows you to choose which tools are available. You can turn off the docs, and other tools. [0]

If you are wondering why you should care, all models get dumber as the context length increases. This happens much faster than I had expected. [1]

[0] https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/mcp

[1] https://github.com/adobe-research/NoLiMa
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 10:28:02+00:00
My biggest takeaway is that agents/LLMs in general are super helpful when paired together with a human who knows the inside and out of software development, who uses it side-by-side with their normal work.

They start being less useful when you start treating them as "I can send them ill-specified stuff, ignore them for 10 minutes and merge their results", as things spiral out of control. Basically "vibe-coding" as a useful concept doesn't work for projects you need to iterate on, only for things you feel OK with throwing away eventually.

Augmenting the human intellect with LLMs? Usually a increase in productivity. Replacing human coworkers with LLMs? Good luck, have fun.
by andriamanitra | 2025-10-18 10:28:15+00:00
You may not want a fresh scope for control flow as you often want to use variables from the outer scope inside the if statement. Imagine you wanted to do something like this with your if statement implemented with a function (this is how the syntax would look like using a block argument in Ruby):

state = "inactive" if_func(condition) { state = "active" activate_button.disabled = true deactivate_button.disabled = false }

In many languages you would need to wrap `state` in something that can be passed by reference, and make the function take multiple parameters. For example in JavaScript it would turn into something like this mess:

let state = ["inactive"]; if_func(condition, ({state, activate_button, deactivate_button}) => { state[0] = "active"; activate_button.disabled = true; deactivate_button.disabled = false; }, {state, activate_button, deactivate_button});
by gsliepen | 2025-10-18 10:28:43+00:00
Predicting the future is very hard (think butterfly effects, Lyapunov exponents and so on). It's also easy to extrapolate what would happen if the current situation continues unchanged, but very hard to predict what will happen in the near future in response to the current situation. People are already reacting to changes in politics and climate, thereby softening the blow, and maybe in some cases averting it.

I'm hoping Charles Stross knows this, and you should take his predictions as "this is what would happen if we did absolutely nothing about it".
Show HN: 1 SEC to reduce file size of PNGs, jpg, pdfs, mp4, mov, GIF
by melvinzammit | 2025-10-18 10:30:54+00:00
I got tired of uploading sensitive assets to random websites just to make them smaller. Especially when those files end up in apps used by millions of people. I wanted a faster, safer way to optimize images and videos without ever leaving my device.

So I built a MacOS app to quickly do this natively on my mac. I built a lot on iOS Apps but this is the first time I’m building a MacOs App.

I would really appreciate any feedback. I’m looking for new features to build.