MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mouse_ | 2025-10-04 17:46:51+00:00
It's going to take me some time to come to terms with what you have to say; I'm probably not going to be able to internalize it today, and my gut reaction to it is, "I hate it; I'm over-engineering for a reason! I'm going to be better for it and my output is going to be better for it!" but this kind of thing has had me hung up on simple things at every turn. A present example is, I'm going through Chapter 1 of ANSI K&R as a refresher (I'm not a programmer) and I've been stuck on exercise 1-21, "entab", which is presented as follows:

/* 1-21. Write a program entab that replaces strings of blanks by the minimum number of tabs and blanks to achieve the same spacing. Use the same tab stops as for detab. When either a tab or a single blank would suffice to reach a tab stop, which should be given preference? */

When confronted with a problem like this, I begin to think, "Well what's the most robust way of going about this task? What's a simple, good, and useful rule that will accomplish the stated goal?" And I'm not quite sure what happens next - figuring that out might require some deeper introspection, but I end up with the proposed solution:

"Any time we encounter consecutive whitespace characters, including spaces, tabs and newlines, ignore the literal characters and instead simply add up exactly how many columns of whitespace they are going to take up, and then, find the smallest number of newlines, tabs and spaces we can print to the screen to match that amount of whitespace. This way we accomplish the stated goal and also end up with a nice text sanitizer."

I'm still mulling all of this over but I'm pretty confident this goes so far beyond the stated problem that it could be considered self sabotage. There's a lot of moving parts to my solution and I don't have the cognitive tools to break up a problem like that yet. (I'd like to eventually of course, but I have to stay focus on what I'm doing!)

Tangentially related maybe? Witches' Loaves https://www.littlefox.com/hk/supplement/org/C0002439
by teiferer | 2025-10-04 17:46:52+00:00
Collective punishment also has done immeasurable damage to society and I'm glad that most reasonable systems of law do not consider it legal.

Go after the guilty party and revert whatever benefits they got. If money went to dependents, that money is to be seized. But those who received the money are not at fault per se. Unless they helped in the crime, then they are obviously guilty too, but not of receiving fund but for helping committing a crime.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-04 17:46:53+00:00
There's nothing wrong in my first comment, it's the second that clarifies adding a `try_join` at the top of the stack can break things below (which is what I was trying to figure out in my initial comment).

Because rust is ultimately constructing a state machine which is ran by the caller, the execution of that state machine can be interrupted or partially executed at any of the `await` points. Or more accurately the caller can simply not advance the state machine.

So, the `try_join` macro can start work on the various functions and if any of them fail, the others are ultimately cancelled. Which can happen before those functions finish fully executing.

This is particularly bad if there's a partial state change.

I'm not entirely sure what that means for memory allocation.
by procaryote | 2025-10-04 17:47:00+00:00
I am sure these techniques are effective; but they're disingenious and self serving.

If I see a staff engineer consistently trying to latch onto company initiatives and strategy goals to get funding for their pet project, I would like to fire them

Why not try to actually solve the issues, and spend the politics budget on making sure people noticed? Even if you failed on the politics thing you've at least done something useful
by verdverm | 2025-10-04 17:47:23+00:00
> If you get enough devs creating software for the fork, you can start to get users.

Why would devs invest effort into developing for a new platform? You've hit the issue of bootstrapping two-sided markets

Most users don't know or care about this side-loading issue, and when they are informed about what it means, they definitely like the idea that the app can be traced to a real human who has been validated by their phone provider. Not having those things sounds like malware and hacking to them.
by eszed | 2025-10-04 17:47:30+00:00
Speaking strictly for myself, it's because I did eye contact wrong.

As a teenager, with standard-issue high-function ASD eye-contact aversion: fake it, by looking only at the bridges of people's noses.

After learning, from doing theatre, that vulnerability is amazing, actually, and eye-contact is powerful: try for it, by looking fixidly at one of their eyes.

After being told by a kind friend, in my early twenties, that I had a "staring problem": shift focus between both of their eyes.

Soon after: figure out that you're supposed to look away from their eyes sometimes.

Since: try to pick up and match their gaze-rhythm. I still have difficulty doing this with some people: there are folks who don't seem to have a rhythm. I don't get them!

My wife told me a few weeks ago that when we first got together (over a decade ago) that the times I forgot to mask - during sex, specifically - sufficiently weirded her out that it's why she broke up with me (for about twenty minutes, lol; she reconsidered on her own). Now, bless her, she says she likes it when I "stare", because she says she knows it means I'm comfortable with her and feeling relaxed.

I've got other peculiarities - and some I haven't noticed yet, I'm sure! - but that's a big one, and how I've dealt with it. I hope that helps someone.
by notatoad | 2025-10-04 17:50:19+00:00
because paying users don't want features quickly.

companies want features gated behind controls, they want audit trails, compliance, SLAs, integration with their admin consoles. and they want some certainty that the feature won't change too quickly.

i will never understand why people keep using workspace accounts for personal use, and then being surprised when features hit those accounts more slowly. this is how it's worked for 20 years, it's not going to change. if you want earlier access, create a gmail account for your personal use.
by poizan42 | 2025-10-04 17:51:43+00:00
Importantly not just counterfeit chips but also completely legal clone chips. For context, for a long time Windows did not have a driver for the CDC serial communication class out of the box. But FTDI had made good Windows drivers, and their interface was easy to clone. So for a time there was a market for making 3rd-party chips implementing FTDI's interface and copying their USB id to be recognized by their driver[0]. Of course some unscrupulous sellers would inevitably try to pass those of as genuine FTDI chips. FTDI was probably not happy with either of them, with the clone chips manufacturer piggybacking of their hard work. But they could only do anything about the counterfeits, so they kinda ignored the existence of legal clones and in all their public communication only talked about taking steps to shut down counterfeit chips (most likely well knowing that their were also destroying chips of legitimate competitors).

[0] Clearly allowed at least in the US under the decision in Sega v. Accolade
by fogzen | 2025-10-04 17:52:31+00:00
All great advice. But I wish I had spent more time asking myself whether I should spend my life eating crap and kissing someone’s butt in order to further someone else’s ambitions.

You can play the game, but ask yourself if that’s the game you want to be playing. I’m wary of people who seem happy to make themselves slaves to money no matter the human cost.
by andai | 2025-10-04 17:53:06+00:00
There was a blog posted to HN years ago describing a self hosted email setup in detail, and this was indeed the main issue. Everyone he emails is on a small number of big companies, and most of them don't like his server.

Edit:

"After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-04 17:53:07+00:00
hard disagree.

With prop drilling how do you get the setter methods into C3? You have to prop drill all the way down.

Let's say I add a new component under C3 that has a side effect in some sister hierarchy under B. Then now suddenly in between and B and C3 and the other component I have to modify EVERYTHING to take that new change into account and these components now all have an extra prop that they don't intrinsically need but they keep in order to account for C3.

Because data is so intrinsically linked with components Every component between B and C3 now needs to be modified to prop drill when previously it wasn't needed.
by hedora | 2025-10-04 17:53:09+00:00
That sounds like a nice setup for decentralization.

I've long thought people should just fork DNS. This already sort of happens with ad blocking commercial services, but I'm thinking it might be time for something that runs over a mix network, where devices have multiple trust roots for DNS services, and run a quorum computation when there's disagreement.

Ideally, disagreements between the roots could be escalated to a web browser UI.
by boombaby97 | 2025-10-04 17:53:10+00:00
I was there a few years back, was absolutely incredible! Really special time. I used this this travel agency called remót travel which planned some fantastic hikes, we ate with locals, met artists, and even the prime minister (pretty funny, such a small country haha). Highly recommend for people (although I don't know if the Faroes has gotten more crowded now like Iceland)
by jorangreef | 2025-10-04 17:54:07+00:00
> But his biggest users (tigerbeetle and bun especially) will only be taken seriously once Zig is 1.0.

TB is only 5 years old but already migrating some of the largest brokerages, exchanges and wealth managements in their respective jurisdictions.

Zig’s quality for us here holds up under some pretty extreme fuzzing (a fleet of 1000 dedicated CPU cores), Deterministic Simulation Testing and Jepsen auditing (TB did 4x the typical audit engagement duration), and is orthogonal to 1.0 backwards compatibility.

Zig version upgrades for our team are no big deal, compared to the difficulty of the consensus and local storage engine challenges we work on, and we vendor most of our std lib usage in stdx.

> They’ll nudge him towards 1.0.

On the contrary, we want Andrew to take his time and get it right on the big decisions, because the half life of these projects can be decades.

We’re in no rush. For example, TigerBeetle is designed to power the next 30 years of transaction processing and Zig’s trajectory here is what’s important.

That said, Zig and Zig’s toolchain today, is already better, at least for our purposes, than anything else we considered using.
by hollerith | 2025-10-04 17:54:20+00:00
Part of my evidence is how much better I felt when I started doing these 5-day FMD "dives". A chronic condition (chronic pain in one of my femurs) which I had consulted a doctor about without avail and which had plagued me for decades completely cleared up, making my experience of life significantly more pleasant. (The most likely cause of the chronic condition is damage to the "growth plate" in this bone through too much usage of it when I was a child.) There were other positive changes if my subjective experience of life is any indication (and according to my immunologist, it is a good indication—at least of immune-system function).

Our ancestors were required to do hours per day of physical exertion just to stay alive. Because of technological progress, it is possible for most people these days to survive with very little exertion, but we now know that living this way (doing very little exertion) is bad for a person with the result that most of us should regularly exercise to maintain our health. Similarly our ancestors were required to endure periods of "calorie deficit" (eating fewer calories than would be survivable if the deficit went on indefinitely). The body uses these periods to disassemble damaged proteins inside cells (autophagy) and to get rid of unnecessary and damaged cells (apoptosis). When a person never undergoes a calorie deficit, these processes do not happen or happen to a much lesser degree than is optimal.

IIUC the main experimental evidence for the benefits of FMD come from an earlier protocol called "calorie restriction" in which the number of calories is kept constant and is a little lower (25% or 30% IIRC) than the individual would prefer to eat or that most Westerners actually eat. This protocol was found to extend life in mice significantly. Then someone found that fasting can improve the same biomarkers that calorie restriction improves (and consequently can be expected to have the same beneficial effects on longevity). But fasting by eating zero calories for days has adverse effects (including sudden death), starting a search for a diet that has the same beneficial effects on the biomarkers without the adverse effects of zero-calorie fasting.

Valter Longo is the longevity research who devised the FMD.

I am _not_ an expert or a professional in this field.
by adventured | 2025-10-04 17:54:32+00:00
The single best resolution to crime is to dramatically reduce poverty.

The single best way to reduce poverty is to pay (bribe) the poor to stop having children, which ends the cycle of poverty (which is extraordinarily difficult to break and tends to trap generations). That should go hand-in-hand with free birth control, free day-after pills, free abortions, comprehensive sexual education, etc.

A large share of the bottom 1/3 in the US will never step foot outside of poverty, most of them will never hold a job on a sustained basis. Pay them to not have children, which simultaneously benefits their lives in the here and now, while preventing the mistake of bringing children into poverty. It's one of the most humane things the US could do as a society. It would very rapidly improve poverty (and reduce crime) in the US.
by cameldrv | 2025-10-04 17:54:48+00:00
There was a similar circular effect in the dot com boom around ads. VCs poured money into startups, which put the money into ads on Yahoo and other properties. Yahoo was getting huge revenue from the ads, which pumped up the stock price. The rising price and revenue, and hence stock price of Yahoo pumped up the market for other dot coms, as it proved you could make money on the Internet, so the market for dot com IPOs was strong. That drew more VC money. More VC money meant more ads.
by fuzztester | 2025-10-04 17:55:39+00:00
>Ada has some really good ideas which its a shame never took off or got used outside of the safety critical community that mostly used it. The ability to make number types that were limited in their range is really useful for certain classes of bugs.

As pjmlp says in a sibling comment, Pascal had this feature, from the beginning, IIRC, or from an early version - even before the first Turbo Pascal version.
Ask HN: How should parties handle candidate controversies?
by techyquantum | 2025-10-04 17:56:04+00:00
`Recent reports have surfaced about Virginia Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones sharing offensive texts in 2022. This has sparked backlash ahead of crucial statewide elections. From a tech/news/communication perspective, what are best practices for political parties or campaign teams when dealing with such controversies without losing public trust. Looking for examples, strategies, or analyses from political campaigns and media handling.
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 17:56:32+00:00
I spent several years doing a bunch of work in my local muni that drastically restricted, and eventually booted (I'm not happy about this; long story) Flock. I feel like my Flock bona fides are pretty strong. I understand people not being comfortable with Flock. I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.

People disagree about this technology. I live in what I believe to be one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the United States† and I can tell you from recent experience that our community is sharply divided on it.

† (we're a small inner-ring suburb of Chicago; I'm "cheating" in that Chicago as a whole is not one of the most progressive cities in the country, but our 50k person muni is up there with Berkeley and represented by the oldest DSA member in Congress)
by bko | 2025-10-04 17:56:50+00:00
I think it's incredibly naive and arrogant to tell billions of people who use a product through their own free will "ackchyually its really bad and you should stop".

Almost everyone would give you a response similar to mine. They use it because its easy way to plan events since so many people are on it, or a small business can easily create a website, sell something or just kill some time on the can.

Give it a rest.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-04 17:56:54+00:00
> But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen.

It's common for curling broadcasts to do this for lead stones (so a quarter of stones thrown). Rage-inducing.
by cornholio | 2025-10-04 17:56:56+00:00
I wonder why the system didn't caught on and why it's not used today by manufacturers of multi-functional printers. Seems like a huge opportunity to use the existing paper handling mechanism - with an autofeeder, a feature most flatbeds lack! - and get a more compact device.

The entire device consists of a single, cheap CMOS image sensor, a lens focused at a fixed distance and a RGB led. Everything else, stitching the resulting scanbands, correcting for mechanical and optical distortions, etc. is all in software. The native optical resolution you could expect from, say, a 1080x720 px sensor would be something like 2400 DPI.

The only downside i can think is that you can't scan IDs, passports etc. and the location near the inkjet head tends to get dirty.
by Djonckheere | 2025-10-04 17:56:56+00:00
Apparently less than 15-minutes of athletic action in a typical 3-hour game, with ~45-minutes devoted to advertising: [2020] How Much American Football Is Even in an American Football Broadcast? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22218909

This explains why NFL RedZone exists.

Fun comparison, a typical Formula 1 Grand Prix clocks in at ~1.5 hours. Live race broadcasts (e.g. Sky Sports F1) will typically show the entire race with no commercial breaks or interruptions. Same goes for MotoGP (e.g. TNT Sports), where a sprint race (~10-12 laps) takes just 25 minutes, not including post race podium and interviews.

English Premier League game durations come in at just under 2-hours with a full hour of athletic action, the remaining 50% occupied by a 15-minutes halftime, substitutions, free kicks, and a mere 10-minutes of commercial interruptions.
by worldsayshi | 2025-10-04 17:57:39+00:00
Partial explanation: Gentrification + increased costs because of inflation is my understanding.

Berlin has been relatively underpopulated ever since WW2 which seems to have contributed to a de-gentrified situation which allowed an unique culture to grow. But time's are changing.

Look at this pop graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_population_statistics Still hasn't caught up with the peak in the 1930:s.
by mhb | 2025-10-04 17:57:53+00:00
The United Nations has been active in Yemen for a decade, yet the country remains one of the poorest places on Earth. The country is at war with itself and home to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who kidnap aid workers, regularly attack shipping through the Red Sea, and launch missiles at Israel. From the negotiating table to field operations, the UN’s efforts have been plagued by blunders, missteps, and a lack of foresight to the detriment of the Yemeni people and their regional neighbors.
by disambiguation | 2025-10-04 17:58:11+00:00
> people do have some ability to distinguish truth from lies

In a pre-AI era, this is a reasonable heuristic.

But I think everyone has their own internal barometer - how much trash are they willing to sift through for gold?

I'm concerned that AI will poison the well to such an extent that people stop trusting, and subsequently stop using, the web altogether. This isn't only a sad state of affairs for the average user, but ties into an existential risk for the business model of the entire tech industry.
by mindslight | 2025-10-04 17:58:24+00:00
No, I am most definitely not ignoring or downplaying that.

> What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.

Yes, in fact I explicitly acknowledged it as a "shortcoming of its implementation".

What I'm taking issue with is your whitewashing corporate censorship as "exercising the first amendment" in your first comment.
by ricksunny | 2025-10-04 17:59:16+00:00
As far as we know, molecules and atoms escaping into space comes due to the solar wind. Somehow the solar wind activates these atoms and carries them off into the distant vacuum, ad infinitum presumably though (I would imagine) limited by the heliopause.

[edit, benefiting from convo: mechanisms on atmospheric escape, to varying degrees of verification)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_escape ]

Absent that, our treasured atmospheric molecules would have to autonomousy achieve escape velocity, some 22 km/sec , with no outside assistance. A difficult feat. And so, resident atmosphere.
by oldandboring | 2025-10-04 17:59:21+00:00
While I also dislike the ghost runner, I can't deny that it's been a net positive for the game. By mostly eliminating marathon extra-inning slogs, not only does it speed up the game, but it also makes it much harder for teams to run out of pitchers they can safely use, which reduces injuries and ensures that we are not subjected to watching two backup catchers throw 48mph Eephus pitches in the 17th inning, long after they stopped selling beer.
by deadlyllama | 2025-10-04 18:00:36+00:00
I went back to self hosting when Google were going to kill free Gmail for your domain. I have no problems with deliberability. And I have tiny mail volumes.

Pre Gmail I was on Exim. Now I'm on Postfix. I used the 123qwe.com tutorial as a starting point.

The real problems are (1) family members just want Gmail and (2) I have to maintain an email system.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-04 18:00:37+00:00
Here is my advice to anyone wanting to test out self-hosting email. Start by using your self-hosted email to sign-up for accounts. You don't have to use the email address for your personal correspondence

Use Mail-in-a-box to get started [1]. You can literally set it up in a couple of hours by following the instructions and everything should just work.

After a few years, you can think about switching your personal correspondence to your new email.

[1] https://mailinabox.email./
by edude03 | 2025-10-04 18:00:43+00:00
Maybe a better way to make my point - the GPU is nvidias golden goose egg and it's good enough that they may go down with the ship. For example (illustrative numbers) - if it costs nvidia $100 to make a GPU they can sell to gamers for $2000, researchers for $5000 and enterprise for $15,000, would it make sense for them to start from scratch and invest billions to make something that's today an unknown amount better and that would only be interesting to the $15,000 market they've already cornered? (Yes, I'm assuming there are more gamers than people who want to run a local LLM)
by bko | 2025-10-04 18:00:43+00:00
What are the costs? Seems like a huge benefit to me considering the alternative would be... I don't know. No updates? Maybe some shitty custom app that would 100% for sure have worse data security and privacy rights than something like Facebook?

Everyone's talking vaguely about the costs but no one actually makes a concrete case, where I made a concrete case of the benefits.