MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-20 14:43:51+00:00
Yes, equivalent. Did endure, repeatedly. Demonstrated to auditors to maintain compliance. They would pick the zone to cut off. We couldn't bias the test. Literal clockwork.

I'll let people guess for the sport of it, here's the hint: there were at least 30 of them comprised of Real Datacenters. Thanks for the doubt, though. Implied or otherwise.
by jmclnx | 2025-10-20 14:43:57+00:00
Mainframes are king on Wall Street and any company dealing with extremely high volume of transactions. They are hardware optimized to process millions (billions?) txns per second. Nothing yet can still compete. The main language for Mainframes is COBOL.

Replacing just any failed hardware component does require downtime, that is critical for any financial business.

So he number does not surprise me.

Many companies tried to move off mainframes, but they realized the costs and risks are to great to bet their business in order to be "cool".
by lesuorac | 2025-10-20 14:43:58+00:00
> Let people vote with their money

I feel like I only hear this argument after people voted with their vote and somebody doesn't like the result.

That said, not really opposed to continuous raising of ICE / gas tax until it's undesirable since that's how it works a lot of the time for something not immediately dangerous (i.e. C4 is banned, Cigarettes are taxed).
by noident | 2025-10-20 14:44:11+00:00
> The outgoing Element mobile app (‘classic Element’) will remain available in the app stores until at least the end of 2025, to ensure a smooth transition

https://element.io/blog/mas-migration-unleashes-element-x-on...

I can't find any other communication from Element Creations other than that.

The renaming to Element Classic doesn't bode well considering that Element X still doesn't support a vast number of home servers and a number of Synapse authn/authz features.

If they remove it from the app store, my advice for my users is going to be to switch to fluffychat, and I'll eventually migrate away from Synapse to some flavor of Conduit.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-10-20 14:44:14+00:00
Different people have wide variations in what they consider the 'big picture' to entail in the first place. My suggestion is to name either 2 or 3 non-fiction books or 2 or 3 specialty blogs you've considered valuable to the 'big picture' and then ask your preferred LLM that, if you like those, which big picture news sources you'd most prefer. Is Matt Levine's writing up your angle, or Lawfare, or something alternative like Naked Capitalism?
by opan | 2025-10-20 14:44:24+00:00
I agree with the spirit of your post, and that AMD is probably the lesser evil, but it's worth noting they "just" moved the proprietary bits into a firmware blob. It's still similarly proprietary but due to the kernel being pretty open to such blobs, it's a problem invisible to most users. You'd have to use linux-libre to get a feel for how bad things really are. You can't really use any modern GPUs with it.
by conartist6 | 2025-10-20 14:44:43+00:00
I don't know the answers with that much more clarity than you. I'm proposing to change the cost structure completely and I'm making a lot of guesses about which costs and which savings will cancel each other out and to what degree. I don't think there actually is anyone out there who knows what the result of this experiment will be once it meets the mess of the real world. I do think I have a bit of free-lunch factor going for me though in all the layers of complexity that are just not present in my implementation. I certainly don't expect to have to do latency hacking with optimistic updates. I am a UI engineer originally so my approach is more like "make it feel fast" than "give it super-high throughput". In UI we know that something that produces some results incrementally feels much faster than something that can only produce all its results at the end, in part because you can start doing something with the results immediately. Wall clock time can be saved sometimes even at the expense of greater use of CPU time. To make use of that trick though you need to be able to describe the system when it's in a state of partial evaluation, and that's the trick we have up our sleeve generally. If we have a complex computation do to, say something to do with the type graph, then we would want to show you the state of the recomputations as they propagate outwards from your changes.
by theptip | 2025-10-20 14:44:52+00:00
My take on AI-for docs is - it’s good. But you need to have a human review.

It’s a lot easier to have someone who knows the code well review a paragraph of text than to ask them to write that paragraph.

Good comments make the code much easier for LLMs to use, as well. Especially in the case where the LLM generated docs would be subtly misunderstanding the purpose.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-20 14:45:00+00:00
My apologies, I misread the intent of what you're saying.

I see now and I think I agree. Base air is premium and compete spec wise with the mid range but at a higher cost.

I'm hoping that rumours are true and a budget macbook using the a19 pro chipset from iphone will mean something at the low to mid price. Basically something that is more attuned for students / casual users that need a computer and not a tablet.
by shagie | 2025-10-20 14:45:01+00:00
IIRC, it started out as a reimagining of Space Cadet by Heinlein but instead of the young it was with the old.

After the first book, he then goes to explore all the questions that it brought up. The question of identity (to me) seems like the most reoccurring question.

Btw, there's a new book in the series. The Shattering Peace was released in September.
by drdec | 2025-10-20 14:45:17+00:00
They recently stepped up their game.

So they do the thing where they set breaks to sunset in order to make the bill revenue neutral according to the CBO.

Then, later on, when the tax breaks are ready to sunset, they convince the CBO that the tax breaks constitute the new baseline. So now when they pass the next budget they are not considered "new" and they do NOT need to be balanced with cuts or increases any more.

It's a total end run around the intention of the process.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-20 14:45:54+00:00
maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.
by naasking | 2025-10-20 14:45:56+00:00
> The idea that having a separate table for every optional field is too unworkable isn't an issue with SQL.

It sure is. Consider a database language that innately supported algebraic data types. Instead of:

table Contact { int Id; Nullable<string> email; Nullable<string> phoneNo; }

you have:

type PhoneOrEmail = Phone<string> | Email<string> table Contact { int Id; PhoneOrEmail info; }

This completely clarifies the relationships between the nullable columns (can both be null, or only one null?), and the database storage layer would manage how to actually store this. This is a direct consequence of SQL's semantics and how it implements the relational calculus.
by cjfd | 2025-10-20 14:46:06+00:00
To me it means that one attempts to use the machine well. I.e., avoid introducing overheads that have nothing to do with the problem one is trying to solve. As an example of something that is very far from the machine imagine wanting to add some integers together. One can do this in untyped lambda calculus by employing Church Numberals. If one looks at the memory representation now your numerals are a linked list of a size equal, or proportional, to the number. However, the machine actually has machine language instructions to add numbers in a much more efficient way. For this discussion maybe the most relevant example is that using dynamic typing for algorithms that don't need it is distant from the machine because every value now has a runtime type label that is actually not needed because if your program could actually be statically typed, one would know in advance what the type labels are so they are redundant.
by rglover | 2025-10-20 14:46:20+00:00
It would behoove a lot of devs to learn the basics of Linux sysadmin and how to setup a basic deployment with a VPS. Once you understand that, you'll realize how much of "modern infra" is really just a mix of over-reliance on AWS and throwing compute at underperforming code. Our addiction to complexity (and burning money on the illusion of infinite stability) is already and will continue to strangle us.
by lan321 | 2025-10-20 14:46:27+00:00
Not really since then all students can learn the exam as a template after 2-3 exams leak.

The curving I know at uni was targeting to exmatriculate 45% by the 3rd semester and another 40% of that by the end so the grades were adjusted to where X% would fail each exam. Then your target wasn't understanding the material but being better than half of the students taking it. The problems were complicated and time was severely limited so it wasn't like you could really have a perfect score. Literally 1-2 people would get a perfect score in an exam taken by 1000 people with many exams not having a perfect score.

I was one of the exmatriculated and moving to more standard tests made things much easier since you can learn templates with no real understanding. For example an exam with 5 tasks would have a pool of 10 possible tasks, each with 3-4 variations and after a while the possibilities for variation would become clear so you could make a good guess on what this semesters slight difference will likely be.
by gruez | 2025-10-20 14:46:37+00:00
>Here on Long Island (NY), most apartments are illegal (addition/remodeled single-family homes). Many of them make you sign a lease, anyway, but they can get dismissed by any law student.

What does this mean in practice? Courts won't enforce late fees or unpaid rents? Landlords can't evict bad tenants? Renters can terminate leases without any penalty?
by spunker540 | 2025-10-20 14:46:42+00:00
I am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.
by taeric | 2025-10-20 14:46:59+00:00
It remains a bit of a mystery to me that applications seem to grow further and further from traditional game techniques. Both in how state is propagated through the application, and in how it is represented.

Like, I understand why people aren't going full 3d game simulation style for applications. But I don't understand why things are as divergent as they are?

Is this just my off perspective?
by Frotag | 2025-10-20 14:47:23+00:00
It's pretty and scratches that scifi itch. I've only read a little of the books but it's supposedly an entirely different story that coincidentally shares character names.

In terms of hardness, it probably on par with Expanse, so mostly technobabble with the magical tech only used when it's convenient for the plot. The abuse of "psychohistory" is particularly egregious. There's so many scenes where it's visualized a hologram of scribbles and they zoom in on more squiggles while divining the future.

But again it's pretty, so if you're okay with drama in space, it's maybe a 8/10.
by aperture147 | 2025-10-20 14:47:33+00:00
Neat feature to make use of Containers. I'm thinking of wrapping my video renderer in Containers and use sandbox to spawn the rendering job, but I'm not sure about the limitation of CF containers, such as how much vCPUs I have, how many capability I can get from containers (like SYS_NICE), how many RAM I have and how many jobs I can run at the same time, is there any built-in queue like Runpod (which I am using) to ratelimit the job, etc. I will give this a try.
by Rooster61 | 2025-10-20 14:47:46+00:00
I have a few questions about test frameworks that use AI services like this.

1)The examples always seem very generic: "Test Login Functionality, check if search works, etc". Do these actually work well at all once you step outside of the basic smoketest use cases?

2) How to you prevent proprietary data from being read when you are just foisting snapshots over to the AI provider? There's no way I'd be able to use this in any kind of real application where data privacy is a constraint.
by tredre3 | 2025-10-20 14:48:04+00:00
In theory you can do the same with Signal, as they source dump their server code every now and then.

If you reject that on the basis of "we can't know if it's what they're running" or "it's a partial dump", then I don't see how Matrix is any different. Not only we can't know if Matrix servers have modified software, but we also have to trust/verify several servers instead of a single one.
by bananaflag | 2025-10-20 14:48:28+00:00
Not the OP, but that show is a severely dumbed down adaptation of the books.

For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally), as befits a saga that spans centuries. No producer was willing to run with that (as they didn't believe the audience smart enough to follow it would be big enough for the show to make a profit), so they introduced cryonics, clones, sorta-AIs (including robots out of their original context) to have some sort of continuing cast.

Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere, with excitement about "atomic" energy (changed to "nuclear" in the 1950s publication), distant descendents of the slide rule, and generally weird-sounding math and science, that the show totally drops in favor of a "contemporary" feel.

And btw, the space elevator scene is lifted from Brin's Foundation's Triumph where it is described as a "future" event, part of Trantor's fall, predicted by Seldon's early team and trickled down to the general population.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-20 14:48:36+00:00
You would think so, but historically that's why they never became more than a regional power. Empires for millennia craved trade with China but only the mongols from that region made it all the way to western europe in their invasions.

It is a strength, if their goal is to have a stable and prosperous country long term, and that seems to be what they want. good for them. But nature abhors a vacuum, so there will always be an empire at the top of the food chain. Such empires want to maximize wealth for their people and secure them against threats, that's why invasions and exploitation of weaker countries happens. That game hasn't changed. Friendly relations work, until you need a lot of resources from a country that doesn't want to give it up. Or, like with the US, when they're opening up military bases next to your borders and you need a buffer state. Or, when naval blockades and sanctions are being enforced against your country for not complying with extra-sovereign demands.

History shows that countries content with what they have collapse or weaken very quickly.

China will have a population crisis in a few decades for example, and it won't have the large manufacturing base and its people will be too used to luxuries to go back to slaving for western countries for pennies. Keep in mind that the current china itself is so great and prosperous because of all the invasions it did against western china and satellite states like Vietnam and north Korea (the US isn't special in this regard).
by a-french-anon | 2025-10-20 14:48:38+00:00
It could also be a more charitable "I make significant efforts to fight against this and spent years/months of my life trying to convince others to do the same only to be ignored, so fuck them".

Like that RMS meme where the world is finally getting the pointy end of the proprietary software trap and cries for help and he just whispers "Gno".
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-20 14:48:57+00:00
Circa 1980 BASIC was the dominant language for micros because you could fit BASIC in a machine with 4k of RAM. Although you got 64k to play with pretty quickly (1983 or so) it still was a pain in the ass to implement compilers on many chips, especially the 6502, which had so few registers and addressing modes that you're likely to use virtual machine techniques, like Wozniak's SWEET 16 or the atrocious p-code machine that turned a generation of programmers away from PASCAL.

FORTH was an alternative language for small systems. From the viewpoint of a BASIC programmer in 1981 the obvious difference between BASIC and all the other languages which that you could write your own functions to add "words" to the language. FORTH, like Lisp, lets you not only write functions but create new control structures based on "words" having both a compile-time and run-time meaning.

FORTH's answer to line numbers in BASIC was that it provided direct access to blocks (usually 1024 bytes) on the disk with a screen editor (just about a screenful on a 40x25) You could type your code into blocks and later load them into the interpreter. Circa 1986 I wrote a FORTH for the TRS-80 Color Computer running the OS-9 operating system and instead of using blocks it had POSIX-style I/O functions.

FORTH was faster than BASIC and better for systems work, but BASIC was dominant. Probably the best way to use FORTH was to take advantage of it's flexibility to create a DSL that you write your applications in.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-10-20 14:49:15+00:00
if you've been tracking the shark deals they give countries for loans, I think you'd recant what you just said.

"while the CCP accuses the West of predatory interest rates, the average Chinese rescue loan carries an interest rate of about 5 percent, more than double the IMF’s standard 2 percent. As of Oct. 1, 2025, despite higher U.S. interest rates, the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights lending rate stands at only 3.41 percent, still significantly lower than what China charges struggling nations for so-called relief."

These countries paying these loans are the ones least able to pay them back, and at more than double IMF loans, they are really putting them in a vise.
by Arathorn | 2025-10-20 14:49:16+00:00
which app are you talking about? as per the conference keynote, there are loads of different ones now, written in different stacks without any overlapping implementations.

If you're talking about the old Element Classic mobile app, then yes, it's now been replaced by Element X (which now has spaces & threads support, and so pretty much has parity with the old app), and it is super fast, and not buggy.
by probably_wrong | 2025-10-20 14:49:34+00:00
Thinking about it as "utility" is a cornerstone of effective altruists, so you're not alone in wondering that. From that point of view, for the price of one package of flour in Germany I can buy two in Uganda and four in Syria. Assuming that the charity keeps their costs low, writing a check to the local orphanage is a waste because you could be doing much more "good" somewhere else.

But from another POV helping your local orphanage gives you a stronger bond to your local community and contributes to the well-being of the society you live in. By sending your help (aka, money) away you're essentially corroding the pillars holding the nice society you're living in.
by padzochambers | 2025-10-20 14:50:50+00:00
Yeah that's a solid point you've broken it down well. I think it just seems overwhelming on where to even start with those different roles. Suppose research is my best friend and should see what I should be focusing on first.

I'm definitely one that enjoys the creative/technical mix of coding and design. I assume that I should be learning new tools too as in 5 years, a lot can change in the programming world.

I know I'll have to enter at entry/junior level too which is fine as long as there was growth potential.

I've thought about the research side of things but definitely want to be more hands on.
by BurningFrog | 2025-10-20 14:50:57+00:00
There are also millions who would volunteer to be killed for $12M to pass on to their heirs.

You "statistical death" is of course 100% correct. These kind of tradeoffs are done all the time when designing safety features, and using a monetary value per human life is the right way to do it.

Some people can't deal with that kind of rationality though.
by anenefan | 2025-10-20 14:51:22+00:00
Echo chambers are not a recent phenomenon, but social media turbo charged it refining the engagement factor. The fact moderation by and large in social media platforms were able to utilise a report button and a script, rather than live human moderators was all thanks IMO to the changes as per 2006 (see reply to AJRF [OP], 2007 is when iirc I started to notice the stark changes to the rest of the discussion areas and occasion angry ex Facebook user. The near humanless moderation apart from the occasion cookie cutter, was particularly conducive for designing algorithms to exploit people, especially young impressionable people.

Additionally no one was really closely monitoring the sleep quality of those who frequented the net, or those who were really engaged (near omni present) on the net pre 2005, but I don't recall thinking the conversations had back then were anything as borked as some ... most of the crud in some social media areas. I'm left with a sense, sensibility was much higher a couple of decades ago ... or one knew that they were going to be called out on whatever they said if it was in error.
by syntax-sherlock | 2025-10-20 14:52:29+00:00
Good questions!

1) Beyond basic tests: You're right to be skeptical. This is best for quick exploratory testing during local development ("does my new feature work?"), not replacing your test suite. Think "scriptable manual testing" - faster than writing Playwright manually, but not suitable for comprehensive CI/CD test coverage.

2) Data privacy: Screenshots stay local in /tmp, but console output and page content Claude writes tests against are sent to Anthropic. This is a local dev tool for testing with dummy data, not for production environments with real user data. Same privacy model as any AI coding assistant - if you wouldn't show Claude your production database, don't test against it with this.
Show HN: Func-to-web – Turn Python functions into web UIs with zero boilerplate
by offerrall | 2025-10-20 14:52:33+00:00
I needed a tool to quickly prototype internal utilities for our company – PDF generators, data processors, file converters that non-technical colleagues could use.

func-to-web generates web UIs from Python function signatures with zero boilerplate:

```python from func_to_web import run

def divide(a: int, b: int): return a / b

run(divide) # Web UI at localhost:8000 ```

For more complex needs, it supports advanced types:

```python def process_data( scores: Annotated[ list[Annotated[int, Field(ge=0, le=100)]], Field(min_length=3, max_length=10) ], # 3-10 items, each 0-100 files: list[ImageFile], # Multiple file uploads email: Email, # Built-in validation notes: str | None = None # Optional with toggle ): return FileResponse(pdf_data, "report.pdf") # Auto-download

run(process_data) ```

Key features: - *Advanced lists*: Dynamic add/remove with constraints on both list size and items - *Optional fields*: `Type | None` creates toggle switches - *File handling*: Upload/download with progress bars, supports GB+ files - *Rich outputs*: Auto-displays PIL images, matplotlib plots, or downloadable files - *Dynamic dropdowns*: Runtime-generated options from functions - *Multiple functions*: Auto-generates index page

Not trying to replace full web frameworks, but for internal tools and quick utilities, this approach feels superior to writing HTML forms.

454 unit tests. Used daily for internal tools and rapid prototyping. Got 150 stars in the first week.

GitHub: https://github.com/offerrall/FuncToWeb

Sharing here in case others find it interesting too :)