MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fabianlindfors | 2025-10-15 22:44:36+00:00
Ah yes, we haven't spent as much effort on it as we could. Mostly been building the product itself!

Pricing is still to be determined. I imagine we will charge for infra usage (processing, storage, etc) in line with other providers like Supabase. We will also charge per-seat for developing inside Specific, which will likely be a fixed price with some token usage limit.

As for what's part of the beta, we currently offer hosting for the API and processing of requests, as well as a database to back it. We are planning on expanding that to support more use cases like background jobs, cron jobs, and object storage.

We don't offer built-in authentication and aren't planning to at this point. That's because we think there are much better providers (like Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS) that you can easily integrate in your Specific app by just specifying it!

That's the main difference to something like Supabase. We provide the infra automatically for your app to do what you need it to, but aren't opinionated around user-facing aspects like authentication. We also have the opportunity to be quite a bit more flexible. Building integrations with external APIs on Supabase for example often requires writing edge functions. In Specific, you can simply make it part of your specification.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-10-15 22:44:50+00:00
> Everything is just slightly different. I had to split all my dot files into common/Linux/Mac specific sections. Don't expect to be able to clone and build any random C++ project unless someone in the project is specifically targeting Mac.

This seems like a very unfair complaint. macOS is not Linux. Its shell environment is based on Darwin which is distantly related to BSD. It has no connection to Linux, except for its UNIX certification.
by astrange | 2025-10-15 22:45:04+00:00
> Apple had the money to support it, we both know that.

Not possible without forking the OS. No amount of money can make software development faster forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Especially because Apple has a functional design which means there is nearly no redundancy; there's only one expert in any given field and that expert doesn't want to be stuck with old broken stuff. Nor does anyone want software updates to be twice as big as they otherwise would be, etc.

> Security was never a realistic excuse considering how much real zombie code still exists in macOS.

Code doesn't have security problems if nobody uses it. But nothing that's left behind is as bad as, say, QuickTime was.

nb some old parts were replaced over time as the people maintaining them retired. In my experience all of these people were named Jim.
by altruios | 2025-10-15 22:45:17+00:00
> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.

I understand.

There is a however a flaw in that thinking.

There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon. Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).
by tavavex | 2025-10-15 22:45:17+00:00
> Russia uses a small nuke on a military target in the middle of nowhere Ukraine. ___________________________. Everyone is firing nukes at eachother.

While all-out international global war isn't guaranteed in this scenario, I don't see why you'd be so confident as to imply that it was very unlikely. For me, the biggest fear in terms of escalating to nuclear war is the time when some nuclear power is eventually beaten in conventional war to the point of utter desperation, and ends up going all out with nukes as a Hail Mary or a "if I can't have it, no one will" move.

Russia uses a strategic nuke in a military move in Ukraine. The rest of Europe, fearing a normalization of strategic nuke use and more widespread uses of these weapons (including outside Ukraine) begin deploying in Ukraine to help push back the Russian forces - especially since Russia showing the willingness to use nukes at all makes them and their military a lot more intimidating and urgently threatening to the rest of Europe than before. Russia perceives this deployment as a direct declaration of war from NATO and invades (one of) the Baltic states to create instability and drive the attention and manpower away from their primary front line. This leads to full war and mobilization in Europe. Russia is eventually pushed back to their original borders, but with what the situation became, Western countries are nervous that not dealing with this once and for all would just be giving Russia a timeout to regroup and re-invade with more nukes at a later point. They press on, and eventually Russia is put in a desperate situation, which leads to them using nukes more broadly against their enemies for one of the reasons I described at the start of this comment. Other nuclear states begin targeting known nuclear launch sites in Russia with strikes of their own, to cripple their launch ability. This is nuclear war.

I'm not saying this scenario is likely, but this is just one attempt at filling in the blank. If you can imagine a future - any future at all where Russia, or North Korea, or India, or Pakistan, or Israel have their existence threatened at any point in the future ever, this is when nuclear war becomes a serious possibility.
by HardwareLust | 2025-10-15 22:45:29+00:00
I don't know how much of this I buy. I worked nights or 3rd shift for years by choice and I always felt just as sharp at night, if not sharper, as I did during the daytime once I got my sleep schedule sorted out.

If you're normally a daywalker and occasionally pull an all-nighter, sure I could see there might be some impact on your mental state. But once you flip the script, I don't see any reason for prolonged effect on your mental capacity. At least not in my experience.
by pyrox | 2025-10-15 22:46:03+00:00
Hey! First, a disclaimer: I do not speak for anyone officially, but I am a very regular contributor to nixpkgs and have been involved in trying to increase nixpkgs' security through adopting the Full-Source Bootstrap that Guix and Stagex use. I also assume that the RFC you're talking about is RFC 0100, "Sign Commits"(ref: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/100)

As mentioned in the RFC discussion, the major blocker with this is the lack of an ability for contributors to sign from mobile devices. Currently, building tooling for mobile devices is way out-of-scope for nixpkgs, and would be a large time sink for very little gain over what we have now. Further, while I sign my commits because I believe it is a good way to slightly increase the provenance of my commits, there is nothing preventing me from pushing an unsigned commit, or a commit with an untrusted key, and that's, in my opinion, fine. While for a project like Stagex(which as a casual cybersecurity enthusiast and researcher, I thoroughly appreciate the security work you all do), this layer of security is important, as it's clearly part of the security posture of the project, nixpkgs takes a different view to trustworthiness. While I disagree with your conclusion that having this sort of security measure would "make volunteers run screaming", I would be interested in seeing statistics on the usage of these mechanisms in nixpkgs already. Nixpkgs is also definitely not focused on being a hobby distro, considering it's in use at many major companies around the world(just look at NixCon 2025's sponsor list).

To be clear, this isn't to say that all security measures are worthless. Enabling more usage of security features is a good thing, and it's something I know folks are looking into(but I'm not going to speak for them), so this may change in the future. However, I do agree with the consensus that for nixpkgs, enabling commit signing would be very bad overall for the ecosystem, despite the advantages of them. Also, I didn't see anything in your PR about "independent signed reproducible builds", but for a project the size of nixpkgs, this would also be a massive infrastructure undertaking for a 3rd-party, though NixOS is very close to being fully reproducible(https://reproducible.nixos.org/) at the moment, we're not there yet though.

In conclusion, while I agree that signing commits would a good improvement, the downsides for nixpkgs are significant enough that I don't believe it would be a good move. It's something to definitely continue thinking about as nixpkgs and nix continue to refine and work on their security practices, though. I would also love some more information about how Stagex does two-party hardware signing, as that sounds like something interesting as well. Thank you so much!

Edit: Also, want to be very clear: I am not saying you're entirely wrong, or trying to disparage the very interesting and productive work that Stagex is doing. However, there were some (what I felt were)misconceptions I wanted to clean up.
by tecoholic | 2025-10-15 22:46:44+00:00
> That's it! CanIndex was an unknown symbol and was probably mistyped, and replacing it with the correct SupportsIndex one brought NumPy's overall type-completeness to over 80%!

Let’s take a pause here for a second - the ‘CanIndex’ and ‘SupportsIndex’ from the looks are just “int”. I have a hard time dealing with these custom types because they are so obscure.

Does anyone find these useful? How should I be reading them? I understand custom types that package data like classes. But feel completely confused for this yadayava is string, floorpglooep is int style types.
by treetalker | 2025-10-15 22:46:46+00:00
I use the free version of PDF Expert on all my Apple devices, and it's pretty great. (I use it for heavy-duty highlighting and annotation, document creation/merging, creation of tables of contents, as well as handling large pdfs — appellate case records, briefs, etc.) I'm especially fond of how it works on my enormous iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil: almost as good as, and in many ways better than, working with real paper and pencil.
by danpalmer | 2025-10-15 22:46:46+00:00
30ms p99 for a cache read! Serverless might have been a problem, but I'm not sure it was the problem. In my experience a p99 of 2ms is more typical - 30ms is the sort of time I'd expect for p99 on a database query in production serving.

You don't need process-local caches to get the sort of performance they're looking for, and there are good reasons why most teams avoid stateful processing, it's much harder to get right and has bad failure modes.
by munk-a | 2025-10-15 22:46:47+00:00
Someone may correct me but - in three levels of conciseness...

A monad is a function that can be combined with other functions.

It's a closure (or functor to the cool kids) that can be bound and arranged into a more complex composite closure without a specification of any actual value to operate on.

It's a lazy operation declaration that can operate over a class of types rather than a specific type (though a type is a class of types with just a single type so this is more a note on potential rather than necessary utility) that can be composed and manipulated in languages like Haskell to easily create large declarative blocks of code that are very easy to understand and lend themselves easily to abstract proofs about execution.

You've probably used them or a pattern like them in your code without realizing it.
by neilv | 2025-10-15 22:47:13+00:00
> On linux there is (at least) one non-bad PDF reader. Zathura is amazing with the MuPDF backend.

Obviously, Linux has the showstopper of being a non-abusive, non-proprietary software platform.

Who needs that nonsense, when the problem we're trying to solve is abusive, proprietary software.
by billfor | 2025-10-15 22:48:07+00:00
I have a 13 years old NAS with 4x1TB consumer drives with over 10y head flying hours and 600,000 head unloads. Only 1 drive failed at around 7 years. The remaining 3 are still spinning and pass the long self test. I do manually set the hdparm -B and -S to balance head flying vs unloads, and I keep the NAS in my basement so everything is thermally cool. I'm kinda of hoping the other drives will fail so I can get a new NAS but no such luck yet :-(
by ilikebits | 2025-10-15 22:48:10+00:00
Monads are a generalization of Promises. Each type in Monad defines their own `.then` in a different way. For promises, `.then` is defined as "run this function once you have this deferred value from the last promise". For optionals (`Maybe`), `.then` is defined as "run this function if the last optional had an actual value". For Either, `.then` is defined as "run this function if the last Either returned Right, otherwise early-return with the value from Left" (this is functional early-return, basically).
by kbelder | 2025-10-15 22:48:35+00:00
How does that scale up to program that's thousands of lines? What if you have a hundred different vectors? You're not going to be calling them v1, v2, ...

So does it end up as

v_sepallength: 11 14 12 v_sepallthickness: 1.3 1.5 1.2 mul[v_sepallength;v_sepalthickness]

Or, do you just not do that sort of stuff in these languages? I'm not very familiar with them, but I have ended up with some pretty long programs using Pandas in Python.
by dmbche | 2025-10-15 22:49:35+00:00
Why do you share your opinion without having examined the information available?

And : Second video

First video seemingly was just to show she did indeed write for that book

And wait - you've not read the book? But you are here defending it ? Want to take a stwp back and think about what you're doing here? And second video moght be a good start.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-15 22:49:39+00:00
I've always thought the correct analogy was:

"No way to prevent this" say programmers of only languages where this regularly happens.

This only happens if you have the worst version of Tony's Billion Dollar Mistake. So C, C++, Zig, Odin and so on but not Rust.

It's a use-after-free, a category of mistake that's impossible in true GC languages, and also impossible in safe Rust. We have known, for many years, how to not have this problem, but some people who ought to know better insist they can't stop it, exactly like America's gun violence.
by yoavm | 2025-10-15 22:50:37+00:00
Why is it unfair? The OP literally stated "To any Linux users". They aren't saying it's worse, just that if you're coming from Linux it can be hard to adapt. Sounds reasonable to me.

As a Linux user, I sometimes dream about the Apple hardware, and I tell myself "How hard can it be to get used to MacOS?! It has a shell after all!". The OP reminded me that it can be quite difficult.
by Spivak | 2025-10-15 22:50:40+00:00
I mean if the standard is the current crop of political ads that are run every two years then, yeah, this makes sense. We've largely accepted that ads are allowed to lie as long as they aren't wholesale made up which encompasses all but a measure zero set of lies people actually tell. And while I wish for a better world I certainly don't have any answers for who or how to weigh truth in this manner.

I think a low hanging reform would be requiring ads to have attribution of the real life human persons actually responsible for and paid for the ad instead of the usual "The Center for Good Things Against Bad Things." Expose that it really all terminates at a group of rich assholes small enough to fit on one plane ride to Epstein's island.
by osn9363739 | 2025-10-15 22:51:10+00:00
Even if you pick one. First it's prompt driven development, then context driven. Then you should use a detailed spec. But no, now it's better to talk to it like a person/have a conversation. Hold up why are you doing that you should be doing example driven. Look, I get that they probably all have their place, but since there isn't consensus on any of this, it's next to impossible to find good examples. Some one posted a reply to me on a old post and called it bug-driven development and that stuck with me. You get it to do something (any way) and then you have to fix all the bugs and errors.
by spewffs | 2025-10-15 22:52:08+00:00
Yes monads in general are too expressive but the answer isn't to limit the typeclass to something between applicative and monad but rather to limit what monads are allowed. The problem is that there should only be one monad: an effect monad loaded with various effects depending on the side effect needed. Instead of defining this or that monad, there should only be the capability to define the effect you need.

In that case, everything runs within the effect monad and then no one would ever really need to learn what a monad is, just that some calls are effectful (like reading a file or throwing an exception).
by paganel | 2025-10-15 22:52:28+00:00
> Lawrence Edward Page was born on March 26, 1973,[19] in Lansing, Michigan.[20][21] His mother is Jewish;[22] his maternal grandfather later immigrated to Israel,[

and

> Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow in the Soviet Union,[8] to Russian Jewish parents,

As simple as that.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-15 22:52:43+00:00
In similar manners to how lots of optical mouse sensors are Agilent command compatible, many RC cars are built on clones of Realtek TX2/RX2 chipsets. Ironically designed originally by the same company as the RTL2832U.

The RX2 protocol is incredibly simplistic and inefficient at the same time, something like numbers of pulses in increments of few dozens to accept one of the grand total of dozen commands. It barely allow multiple command issuance within a second and completely incapable of handling analog inputs due to that. It's truly a product of "if it works" mindset.

They take the radio input, or just digital input into the antenna pin, or photodiode for IR input, or you can just remove the chip and solder an Arduino into H bridges. The difficulties are about the same. The minor disappointment I have had with these is that the steering servo built into the chassis inthe example I had was way too roughly made that analog control was plain impossible no matter what.
by observationist | 2025-10-15 22:52:54+00:00
I have grok produce a precise transcription of the text, then have chatgpt produce an editable word document, including forms, following the text that grok picked up (it's a lot better at OCR, for some reason)

And then if I need to produce another pdf, I export it from Word.

PDFs are silly. It's tech superstition, kinda like the belief that faxes are secure.
Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next?
by silvercymbals | 2025-10-15 22:53:27+00:00
Hey HN,

I feel like I've wasted the better part of my twenties trying to be a professional software engineer and founding two companies. Fortunately I have some money to show for it and I learned a lot, but at this point it seems I'm functionally unemployable / have skills that just don't make the cut anymore.

Building with AI is incredible, but when I get interviews I just flat out can't pass tech screens anymore. I've gotten lucky with a few "forward deployed" roles but for whatever reason, never get a callback after the final round.

I really enjoy software, but I need to actually figure something out that's a real career (earns more than $150k per annum). I'm sort of freaking out given that all this time and money I spent to become an engineer appears to be going to waste. It's been about four months and the prospects just aren't showing up like they used to.

Also, I have zero interest in 996 startup culture. How on earth it became impossible as an american to get a job in software where you make a decent salary and work 50hr weeks is sort of beyond my comprehension as someone in Gen Z.

Curious for advice or if anyone else has made the leap outside of tech. I fear for my mental health and stability if I don't figure something out soon. I flat out just don't know where I want to go next, even applying to sales roles has fallen flat.

I have good contacts for law school, but the notion of burning $200k on the chance that law is still a viable career with AI seems like an even worse decision than logic I applied in my 20s.

Cheers.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-15 22:53:41+00:00
Smart thermostats and water heaters can to that to some extent. Heat or cool the room a little more and run the water heater when electricity is cheap, so that they don't have to run when it is expensive. Of course, electricity price matches supply and demand.

Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
by squeedles | 2025-10-15 22:54:39+00:00
Well, if it was that way, it certainly isn't any longer. They keep adding new alien races, storylines, and sectors of the galaxy, and some of my best ships were franken monsters with tech from a half dozen races. There is a core storyline that is primarily human, but if you play to the end of that will suddenly discover that there is significantly more around you that becomes reachable with some interesting new technology (trying not to spoil anything)

They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)

Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.
by 1a527dd5 | 2025-10-15 22:55:46+00:00
[Window Title] Critical [Main Instruction] Unsupported GPU [Content] Zed uses DirectX for rendering and requires a compatible GPU. Currently you are using a software emulated GPU (Microsoft Basic Render Driver) which will result in awful performance. For troubleshooting see: https://zed.dev/docs/windows Set ZED_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 env var to permanently override. [Skip] [Troubleshoot and Quit]

Ah bummer.
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-15 22:56:24+00:00
Nan-in received a university professor who came to inquire about Monads

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you a Monad unless you first empty your cup?”
by RandomBacon | 2025-10-15 22:57:29+00:00
There are some other good ones in the other comments, including this one:

Falsehood: if a person has a U.S. Passport, they must be a U.S. Citizen.

Fact: Non-citizens can have a U.S. Passport (people born in American Samoa).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Samoan_citizenship_an...
by leakycap | 2025-10-15 22:58:14+00:00
> Intel chips were getting faster

Do you consider margin-of-error, single-digit gains to be worth arguing over? Intel offered 14nm for 4 years straight: Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake Refresh—four different names, same process node, and 3-7% gains each year. Such fast.

> The old MBP chassis designs are so awful that Apple doesn't consider them viable for cooling ARM CPUs

You don't put a 15-20W chip into a thermal system built for 90W+. The old chassis wasn't "too awful" for Apple Silicon, it was completely unnecessary.