MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by juliangmp | 2025-11-25 10:30:18+00:00
I've dug into this topic in the past and my takeaway for this entire thing was “cool idea, but don't use it practice ”. I.e. just unrwap the lock call's result. If a worker thread panics you should assume your applications done for. Some people even recommend setting panic=abort for release builds, in which case you won't even be able to catch those panics to begin with.

I mean, think about the actual use cases here. On of my threads just panicked. Does it make sense to continue running the application? And if you answer yes, this is an error condition that can occur, then it shouldn't panick to begin with and instead handle errors gracefully, leaving the mutex unpoisoned.
by traceroute66 | 2025-11-25 10:31:38+00:00
> updates on OpenBSD are the most painless updates I have ever done

I see we have a post-syspatch (6.1 - 2017), post-sysupgrade (6.6 - 2019) OpenBSD user in our midsts. ;D

You are positively a newbie in the OpenBSD world !

Some of us are old enough to remember when OpenBSD updates were a complete pain in the ass in involving downloading shit to /usr/src and compiling it yourself !
by SllX | 2025-11-25 10:31:39+00:00
Nobody is giving them more deference than the other. In a perfect world, the ROC would be the one and only surviving entity from this mess and the PRC would be a relic of history.

That isn’t what the facts on the ground are though. The ROC no more has sovereign jurisdiction over the mainland than the PRC does over Taiwan. Which is to say that at this point they are functionally separate sovereign nations independent of each other, regardless of the claims by either the PRC or the ROC. Or put another way, the way I did the first fucking time: Taiwan is an independent nation.
Show HN: Pingora with Edward and Noah from Cloudflare (Netstack.fm Podcast Ep15)
by gdcbe | 2025-11-25 10:32:04+00:00
In Episode 15 of netstack.fm, I sat down with Edward and Noah from Cloudflare to unpack the design of Pingora, the Rust based proxy framework that now powers Cloudflare’s origin facing traffic. The discussion covers why Cloudflare moved away from NGINX, how Pingora differs from Oxy, and what it takes to operate a high performance global proxy at massive scale. Listeners will learn about connection reuse strategies, dynamic traffic handling, gRPC and protocol translation, custom HTTP implementations, TLS backend choices, and the practical trade offs of Rust, Tokio, and work stealing in real production systems. It is an episode full of deep technical insights into building and operating modern networking infrastructure.

Note that this episode was recorded prior to the recent cloudflare outage and as such this is not something we discussed in the episode. If you are interested to learn more about that I can recommend their excellent post-mortem blog post which already circulated around here. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973709
by _pdp_ | 2025-11-25 10:32:09+00:00
Well either that or stuff the tool usage examples into the prompt for every single request. If you have only 2-3 tools GraphQL is certainly not necessary - but it wont blow up the context either. If you have 50+ tools, I don't see any other way to be honest, unless you create your own tool discovery solution - which is what GraphQL does really well with the caveat that whatever you decide to do is certainly not natural to these LLMs.

Keep in mind that all LLMs are trained on many GraphQL examples because the technology has been in existence since 2015. While anything custom might just work it is certainly not part of the model training set unless you fine-tune.

So yes, if I need to decide on formats I will go for GraphQL, SQL and Markdown.
Show HN: How I think tabs should be managed in a terminal
by novoreorx | 2025-11-25 10:32:31+00:00
While using iTerm2 while busy working today, I once again felt frustrated by having too many tabs and losing the overall perspective of what tasks were in progress. So, I used v0 + Opus 4.5 to envision an ideal Terminal tab management UI in my mind, to demonstrate the best way for me to manage tabs in the terminal. What do you think?
by arethuza | 2025-11-25 10:33:50+00:00
The UK also nuked the US 24 times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_testing_in_the...

Then there was that thing where RAF bombers pretended to bomb US cities... which had to be hushed up as it made it clear that US air defence systems weren't nearly as good as the public had been told.
by never_inline | 2025-11-25 10:33:58+00:00
It's true that ancient Indians had some interesting insights into astronomy and natural sciences (recognizing the heliocentricity as early as the aitareya BrAhmaNa, and some ideas about electricity) and have some evidence about Indo-Aryan warfare being evolved with variety of weapons.

But it would sound like boomer uncles to claim that there is mention of space travel or nuclear weapons in our epics. The astra-s are simply figments of imagination.
by ale42 | 2025-11-25 10:34:28+00:00
Well, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose ages to find them once again.
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2025-11-25 10:34:30+00:00
>People opting for unchallenging pseudo-relationships over messy human interaction is part of a larger trend, though.

I don't disagree that some people take AI way too far, but overall, I don't see this as a significant issue. Why must relationships and human interaction be shoved down everyone's throats? People tend to impose their views on what is "right" onto others, whether it concerns religion, politics, appearance, opinions, having children, etc. In the end, it just doesn't matter - choose AI, cats, dogs, family, solitude, life, death, fit in, isolate - it's just a temporary experience. Ultimately, you will die and turn to dust like around 100 billion nameless others.
by rckt | 2025-11-25 10:34:32+00:00
For me this feels irrelevant. These tools are marketed for developers for their day-to-day jobs that involve building products. Devs don't look up information on people or build some complex mathematical things daily. They build things that consist of different parts, which in turn can consist of different contexts and can be a combination of other things as well. It can be a straightforward approach or it can be a legacy codebase that also need to incorporate new features with new stacks. The real test is in the real world scenarios. But every time it's about a narrowly scoped thing, the tests, the marketing. And they try to build an image that the combination of these scoped tasks can somehow bring you the ability to build at large scale. They don't say it, but they implicitly mean it with the way they present all this. Computers can compute, they can detect patterns and do analytics part, they can build assumptions based on the data they have. But they need the data, they need parameters, they need not only an operator, they need the source for the material they base their computations and output on. And somehow all the marketing completely ignores this fact. And this is damaging.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-25 10:34:43+00:00
> They were fired almost day one of the Trump admin.

And then they hired different ones. Which in and of itself has nothing to do with it.

> The other part to mention is that Medicare Part C, putting public dollars into private insurers, has lead to a huge amount of the fraud. Those useless tests have often been done by these private insurance agencies because they can easily bill the government for them.

That's not the half of it though. The entire US healthcare industry is full of corruption and inefficiency. In general it's the providers who want the unnecessary tests, not the insurance companies.

> Our inefficiencies are largely due to our reliance on the private sector to backfill what the government isn't doing.

I feel like this is why we never solve it. The Democrats insist that the only solution is for the government take the whole thing over, the Republicans point to people in France waiting a year for an appointment and then nothing changes because they're both taking money from the industry so neither of them are trying to fix the real problem.

Because what you need is to set up non-emergency care to have actual competition. If you need an X-ray some time in the next month, a computer gives you a list of every office with an open appointment, their price and their distance from you. The providers charge between $50 and $200 but some are closer to you or have sooner appointments, the insurance pays $50 no matter where you go and then you get to pick but you pay the difference.

You need the patient to have the ability to say "you know what, the one that's 10 minutes closer isn't worth $120 extra" and pick the less expensive one, because then they actually have the incentive to get prices under control, instead of the current insanity where just getting them to tell you how much something is going to cost is like pulling teeth and the government subsidizes getting your health insurance through your employer in the tax code to keep it that way.
by anon7000 | 2025-11-25 10:34:44+00:00
It’s less about targeted ads and more about how little right you have to your own information. Politically, you really should care that you have a right to your own data! Everyone generates so much data through their online activity, and privacy policies everyone agrees to allow your data to be collated, sold, and analyzed really without your knowledge or true consent. While it might not have a negative impact to you today, there are more and more compelling business incentives for companies to turn your data against you.

For example, did you know your car manufacturer sold information about their customers to data brokers? Which then combined that data with anything else they can buy and get their hands on to calculate a “risk score?” Which then gets sold to car insurance companies, which increases your insurance rate? https://youtu.be/X6UW4CFz71s

This kind of BS is why we all need to care and assert our right to privacy. Companies don’t have a right to your data, but aren’t forced to do informed consent, and somehow data brokers are legal. Why is my data being sold without my informed consent?
by lqet | 2025-11-25 10:34:46+00:00
> Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic

You must have a pretty broad definition of useless / toxic if you think that reading, writing and basic math, but also geometry, calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, foreign languages, a broad overview of history, and basic competency in physics / electronics fall under these categories.

Sure, I learned a lot in school that turned out to be pretty useless for me (chemistry, basically anything I learned in PE, french), but I did not know that at the time and I am still grateful that I was being exposed to these topics. Some of my classmates developed successful careers from these early exposures.
Show HN: PassVault – A secure, lightweight, and offline Android password manager
by jksalcedo | 2025-11-25 10:35:05+00:00
PassVault is a lightweight password manager that allows users to securely store credentials on their device. All data is stored locally and sensitive information is encrypted using the Android Keystore system. The application does not require internet permissions. User data never leaves the device.

Core Features

Secure PIN Authentication Biometric (Fingerprint) Login Encrypted Database (AES-256) Argon2Kt for file encryption Add, View, Edit, & Delete Passwords In-app Password Generator Encrypted Import/Export (for backups and transfer) Encrypted Automatic Backups Import from KeePass (using kotpass)/Bitwarden
by versteegen | 2025-11-25 10:36:43+00:00
I'm really confused by "about $15k of x86 gear ... The minute AMD K10 and Intel Nehalem dropped, high routing performance was mostly a software problem". What kind of $15k machine would you have needed? That's a heck of a lot more than even the most expensive K10 2008 CPU (which according to Wikipedia seems to be Opteron 8384 (quad core, 2.7GHz, 1.0GHz HT, $2149 November 2008), supports up to 8 CPUs per machine, I guess that's what you mean.)
by rerdavies | 2025-11-25 10:37:02+00:00
If only it would do something entirely different faster. :-(

Somebody really needs to rethink the entire commitment to meta-programming. I had some hope that concepts would improve reporting, but they seem to actually make it worse, and -- if they improve compile times at all, I'm not seeing it.

And it has nothing to do with historicity. Every time I visit another modern language (or use it seriously) I am constantly reminded that C++ compile times are simply horrible, and a huge impediment to productivity.
by munksbeer | 2025-11-25 10:37:35+00:00
> I can assure you pretty is very real in London.

It seems to me this may be one part of the problem. De-industrialisation means people in developed nations have surged towards cities because that is where most jobs are. But lower paid jobs just don't pay enough to support a reasonable life for a poor family in London. It would be far easier support a family on a minimum wage job in the NW or NE of the UK than in London. But there don't seem to be enough jobs to do that.

Additionally, and I say this admitting I am speaking from a position of relative ignorance, there are a huge number of non UK born immigrants, living in state subsidised housing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I don't fully understand why this is, but maybe it is because people are placed close to other family, maybe because of jobs.

As an immigrant to the UK myself, I'm aware that I should be very sensitive to criticisms of the system, but it does feel weird to have more than 50% of social housing in the capital allocated to people not born in the country. Please take this comment with as much charity as you can, I fully admit I am not close to the reasons for this.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-25 10:39:52+00:00
ChromeOS has been converging on Android for a while but never quite gets there. They are asymptotic ;-)

It rather looks like Aluminium OS is the intended solution.

I don't see any problem with it being "locked down", in the sense that it doesn't sound any worse than Chrome OS or Android.

The open question is whether any open source release will happen worth a damn.
by teekert | 2025-11-25 10:40:04+00:00
I guess you've never read the English of a Dutch person ;) During my PhD defense I was told I "should have checked with a native speaker." Pre-LLMs, I'd go to my American colleague and she'd mostly remove text and rewrite some bit to make texts much more readable.

Nowadays, often I put my text into the LLM, and say: Make more concise, include all original points, don't be enthusiastic, use business style writing. And then it will come with some lines of which I think: Yes! That is what I meant!

I can't imagine you'd rather read my Dunglish. Sure, I could have "studied harder", but one simply is just much more clever in their native tongue, I know more words, more subtleties etc. Over time, and I believe due to LLM use I do get better at it myself! It's a language model after all, not a facts model. I can trust it to make nice sentences.
by 0xEF | 2025-11-25 10:41:02+00:00
I can be pedantically forgiving myself, admittedly, but this is one thing I'm staunchly behind. If I cannot read every character of every line of code, including packages/dependencies, that makes the hardware function and allows me to alter it as I see fit, then it is not truly open-sourced.

For me, the open-source movement is about keeping my software and hardware in alignment with my values and security concerns. If there is a part of that "open-sourced" software that is closed to me, I have no way to evaluate that and determine if I want to use it. Yes, this imposes some extremely strict limitations about what I end up with in my projects, but I'm okay with this since it forces me to think differently about certain problems.

I also don't mind that other people use product with closed-source portions or whatever, and in fact, find some of them quite good. I'm a wearer of an original Pebble to this day, and I'm fine with knowing some proprietary libraries are needed to make it go. I didn't build it, I'm not hacking on it, it's just serving my meager smartwatch needs in this instance.

What I do mind is misappropriation of what I consider a clearly defined term. I am not sure why we haven't come up with another term to mean "partially open-sourced" yet (or have we, and I am just not aware of it?) but I think it's time we did so more discerning users can delineate between the two when making a decision about products to purchase or build.
by masfoobar | 2025-11-25 10:43:09+00:00
> The industry and the academy have used the term “object-oriented” to mean so many different things. One thing that makes conversations around OOP so unproductive is the lack of consensus on what OOP is.

There has been different terms and meaning to it - but we all know the "OOP" thrown about since the mid-to-late 90s is the Java way.

A typical Java book back then would have 900 pages.. half of which is explaining OOP. While not focusing fully on Java, it does help transition that knowledge over to Delphi or C++ or.. eventually.. C#, etc.

Overall -- we all knew what "Must have good OOP skills" means on a job advert! Nobody was confused thinking "Oh.. I wonder which OOP they mean?"

I have a love/hate relationship with OOP. If I have to use a language that is OOP by default then I use it reasonably. While the built in classes will have theor own inheritence -- I tend to follow a basic rule of no higher that 2. Most of the time it is from an interface. I prefer composition over inheritence.

In C#, I use static classes a fair bit. In this case, classes are helpful to organise my methods. However, I could do this at a namespace level if I could just create simple functions -- not wrapped inside a class.

OOP has its place. I prefer to break down my work with interfaces. Being able to use to correct implementation is better than if/switch statements all over the place. However, this can be achieved in non OOP languages as well.

I guess my point is that OOP was shoved heavily back in the day. It was shutup and follow the crowd. It still has it's place in certain scenarios - like GUI interfaces.
by hazbot | 2025-11-25 10:43:46+00:00
I just went and had a flutter at being a high school math teacher. I went in saying 'I never used math to create until my honours year, I want different for my students'.

I soon changed my mind; I think those of us who become expert have often have really rich memories of a project where we learnt so much, but we just don't remember episodically all the accumulated learning that happened in boring classrooms to enable the project-induced higher order synthesis.
by jraph | 2025-11-25 10:43:46+00:00
> go against the Unix philosophy

The Unix philosophy is not an end goal neither. It's not even something well defined. Everyone seems to have their own view on what it is. I personally take the "everything is a file" and "do one thing well and be composable" rules as a guideline, an ideal to consider when designing stuff, but not as a strict thing to adhere. It might be something that's nice to have in some contexts and something that's useless or even counter productive in others.

What I mean is that I take "does not follow the Unix philosophy" as something to look into to find potential improvements or design issues, but not as blocker or a counterpoint in itself.

To me, the Unix philosophy discussion is quite moot. Those discussions are often very vague. I don't care much that systemd follows the Unix philosophy or not. I'm more interested in what actual problems this does cause in practice.

You do, however, point out something practical here:

> An init system should do one thing (well): manage system services

I suppose one could consider that to manage system services well, you have to manage "everything". I also suppose systemd's scope is way bigger than "managing services", they do want to "fix/figure it all". It seems reasonable to me not to agree with any of these things.

I do believe the uniformisation systemd causes is a good thing, but I absolutely understand that the big scope can be seen as an issue, and I almost fully agree with your last paragraph. I would object to the statement that systemd is not a monolith and is composed of many programs is a moot point: this modularity still means that you can replace individual systemd programs with your own implementations if needs be…

… as long as you provide the expected features / APIs, yes, you are totally forced into this indeed. systemd is a de facto API. It brings / forces standardization at the cost of diversity. It broadens the standardization that comes with UNIX/POSIX and XDG. I'm sure this can be criticized in a few ways: the API design, the scope, the featureset, the way the project is lead…

The alternative to systemd is non-existent standardization and each alternative designs stuff its own way on their side. For the better and for the worse. I can see how systemd can be criticized for when we are in "the better" cases. I personally easily see the worse side where several projects (for instance desktop environments) would each have to implement features that come with systemd. And programs on top of these environments now have to implement APIs of each desktop environment to be well integrated.

This is more work for everyone.

I guess this is a diversity vs efficiency balance to strike and we don't all see it at the same place.

I suppose another alternative would be to have different people working on different implementations that are then grouped in some common "system core" package or set of standards that everyone adopts. I'd probably be happy with that, if this is at all possible.
by keyle | 2025-11-25 10:43:52+00:00
I remember the days of NT4 and the guy that would lock a file, leave for the day and you couldn't check it out :D Good times!

Same year I deleted all our customer's websites by simply dragging the hosting folder somewhere into C:\programs or something by mistake... A double click + lag turned into a drag and drop! Whoops!

I was pale as a ghost as I asked for the zip drive.

We had to reboot the file server first, which we did a swift kick to the power button.

At least today we employ very secure mechanisms; like YAML rollouts of config, to keep things interesting.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-11-25 10:44:17+00:00
This would be awesome, but great CLIs would have already been valuable prior to the age of LLMs and yet most services didn't ship one. I think it is because services like Jira and others do not want to be too open. Ultimately, despite the current LLM/MCP craze, I think this won't change and MCP tools will start getting locked down and nerfed somehow, the same way APIs have in not so recent memory after there being a bit of a craze around those a decade+ back.
by yu3zhou4 | 2025-11-25 10:44:59+00:00
Thanks!

Are you sure it’s an extinct art though? LLVM is flourishing, many interesting IRs come to life like MLIR, many ML-adjacent projects build their own compilers (PyTorch, Mojo, tinygrad), many big tech like Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple and others contribute to multiple different compilers, projects integrate one to another at different levels of abstraction (PyTorch -> Triton -> CUDA) - there is a lot of compilation going on from one language to another

Not to mention many languages in a mainstream that weren’t that popular 10 years ago - think Rust, Zig, Go