MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vessenes | 2025-11-25 15:52:48+00:00
Thanks for the detailed response! I completely missed the band division / similarity plan - I’ll read more thoroughly next time.

I thought about geo largely because it radically changes the order of magnitude of work necessary; it lets you segment ‘possible’ subsets of APs down to sets of say 100, not millions, and changes the combinatorics. A side effect is knowing a rough spatial location.

Off the top of my head, I don’t think that epochs alone make a big difference. If I want to see if you’ve been somewhere, or tell you I’m somewhere, why not take the 3-4 networks you mentioned, and forward hash them for the next million epochs?

Or, more ambitiously, why not take 3-4 networks each from the geo indexed clusters available at https://wigle.net/ and do the forward and backward epochs, letting me track where you’ve been and pretend to be near you any time in the future?

Wigle reports 1.7bn networks; a rough look at a suburban street near me shows most places have 10 in a reasonable range boundary; so call it 200mm “locations” with 128 segmented hashes, 250 billion hashes per epoch — I think we’re in the “seconds per epoch” range for a reasonable compute heavy server to cover the entire space.

Upshot - I think the salting needs to be something local / not predictable or stored remotely.

Hopefully these comments hit you right - I like the idea a lot - and I don’t fully understand the system - but as I understand it, the system does not offer privacy — I could replay any phone’s hashes against a system that cost a few dollars to reconstruct your location and time, if my understanding is correct.
by mothballed | 2025-11-25 15:52:53+00:00
Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard.

I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.
by _pdp_ | 2025-11-25 15:53:13+00:00
> We’re building an open-source chat that works

As long as you have Pricing on your website your product is not open source in the true spirit of open sourceness. It is open code for sure but it is a business and so incentive is to run it like a business which will conflate with how the project is used by the community.

Btw, there is nothing wrong with that but let's be honest here if you get this funded (perhaps it already is) who are you going to align your mission with - the open source community or shareholders? I don't think you can do both. Especially if a strong competitor comes along that simply deploys the same version of the product. We have seen this story many times before.

Now, this is completely different from let's say Onyx being an enterprise search product where you create a community-driven version. You might say that fundamentally it is the same code but the way it is presented is different. Nobody will think this is open-source but more of "the source is available" if you want to check.

I thought perhaps it will benefit to share this prospective here if it helps at all.

Btw, I hear good things about Onyx and I have heard that some enterprises are already using it - the open-source version.
by alexjplant | 2025-11-25 15:53:15+00:00
> We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?

People already pick and choose who they feel sympathy for and give a pass to on the basis of their personal experiences, belief system, and social proximity. Think of how many, for instance, ridicule politicians for being too saintly and enabling or mean and without empathy then give their friends and family a pass for the exact same behavior. They'll get angry with celebrities for things that they allegedly did then shrug off a driver running a red light and nearly killing them because they "don't take things personally". Addicts are a blight on society until it's somebody's child or brother or sister in which case they just need help. Et cetera ad infinitum.

People (you and I included) are fickle. This changes nothing.
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-25 15:53:31+00:00
The gigantic difference is that assembly language has extremely simple semantics, while C has very complex semantics. Similarly, assembler output is quite predictable, while C compilers are anything but. So the level of match between the Rust code and the machine code you'll get from a Rust-to-assembly compiler will be much, much easier to understand than the match you'll get between the Rust code and the machine code produced by a C compiler compiling C code output by a Rust-to-C transpiler.
by tensility | 2025-11-25 15:53:37+00:00
Oh, it would be nice if it were just feature size. Over the prior 15 years, the nand industry has doubled its logical density three times over with the trick of encoding more than one bit per physical voltage well, making the error bounds on leaking wells tighter and tighter and amplifying the bit rot impact, in number of ECC corrections consumed, per leaked voltage well.
by echelon | 2025-11-25 15:54:02+00:00
That's it exactly.

Once you're writing Rust at full speed, you'll find you won't be putting lifetimes and trait bounds on everything. Some of this becomes implicit, some of it you can just avoid with simpler patterns.

When you write Rust code without lifetimes and trait bounds and nested types, the language looks like Ruby lite.

When you write Rust code with traits or nested types, it looks like Java + Ruby.

When you sprinkle in the lifetimes, it takes on a bit of character of its own.

It honestly isn't hard to read once you use the language a lot. Imagine what Python looks like to a day zero newbie vs. a seasoned python developer.

You can constrain complexity (if you even need it) to certain modules, leaving other code relatively clean. Imagine the Python modules that use all the language features - you've seen them!

One of the best hacks of all: if you're writing HTTP services, you might be able to write nearly 100% of your code without lifetimes at all. Because almost everything happening in request flow is linear and not shared.
by disambiguation | 2025-11-25 15:54:06+00:00
The current education system is going to collapse. Teachers and students alike won't be able to resist the ultimate cheat code.

Schools need to become tech free zones. Education needs to reorient around more frequent standardized tests. Any "tech" involved needs to be exclusively applied towards solving the supply and demand issue - the number of "quality teachers" to "students per classroom."

I admire Karpathy for advocating common sense, but none of this will happen because SV is full of IQ realists who only see "education" as a business opportunity and the bureaucratic process is too dysfunctional for common sense decisions to prevail. The future is chrome books with GPT browsers for every student.
by ed4bb9fb7c | 2025-11-25 15:54:23+00:00
Sorry I don’t know your circumstances but “Walking on Eggshells” by Langford has literally saved me.

The only wisdom I can offer: other people emotions don’t have to control yours (despite what they tell you). The best take on this that I know: be like a goose - they don’t get wet, just shake it off.

And take care of yourself!
by kace91 | 2025-11-25 15:54:34+00:00
Have you considered that part of it is not the language but the users?

I'm learning rust and the sample code I frequently find is... cryptically terse. But the (unidiomatic, amateurish) code I write ironically reads a lot better.

I think rust attracts a former c/c++ audience, which then bring the customs of that language here. Something as simple as your variable naming (character vs c, index vs i) can reduce issues already.
by bobbob27 | 2025-11-25 15:54:35+00:00
To be honest, it's MUCH easier to have one source to blame when things go down. If a small-medium vendor's website goes down on a normal day, so poor IT guy is going to be fielding calls all day.

If that same vendor goes down because Cloudflare went down, oh well. Most already know and won't bother to ask when your site will be back up
by dimgl | 2025-11-25 15:55:02+00:00
> Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years.

I said this years ago and I was basically told "skill issue". It's unreadable. I shudder to think what it's like to maintain a Rust system at scale.
by anarki8 | 2025-11-25 15:55:04+00:00
> The problem is that rust is being shoved in pointless places with a rewrite-everything-in-rust mentality.

> There's lunatics ...

I think the problem is people calling developers "lunatics" and telling them which languages they must use and which software they must not rewrite.

Battle tested is not bulletproof: https://cybersecuritynews.com/sudo-linux-vulnerability/

Applying strict compile time rules makes software better. And with time it will also become battle tested.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-25 15:55:11+00:00
> Julian appears to be the APT maintainer, so there's no compulsion except what he applies to himself.

To who is this addressed?

> If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port.

Because that sure reads as a compulsion to me.
by dpark | 2025-11-25 15:56:44+00:00
> these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.

The problem with this is that it takes away only half of the negotiation. Doctors are now obliged to charge $X consistently but insurance is not obliged to pay it. So the negotiation process seems broken, and seems like it would cause a lot of bad faith negotiations from the insurers. “Eh, we’ll pay you minimum wage. Don’t like it? We’ll just wait until someone else finds your actual minimum and then you can pay us that.”

It’s also not clear what happens if Doctor A charges 10% more than Doctor B at the same medical facility. If you see Doctor A, can your insurance decline that even though they would have paid Doctor B’s rate?

Of course the current process is broken too.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-11-25 15:56:53+00:00
Glad that nvidia gets its deserved competition in the AI space. I still am careful about Gemini being lobotomized on controversial topics. Probably all consumer AIs are to some extend, but the culture that allowed this to happen at Google probably didn't change and it is probably just more subtle. I don't get why they did that and its heavily dystopian...
by lewisjoe | 2025-11-25 15:56:56+00:00
The criticisms here surprise me. "Programmatic Tool Calling" is a huge leap when you want AI to work with your app - like a human would.

I've been trying to get LLMs to work in our word processor documents like a human collaborator following instructions. Writing a coding agent is far more straightforward (all code are just plain strings) than getting an agent to work with rich text documents.

I imagined the only sane way is to expose a document SDK and expect AI to write programs that call those SDK APIs. That was the only way to avoid MCPs and context explosion. Claude has now made this possible and it's exciting!

Hope the other AI folks adopt this as well.
by pxc | 2025-11-25 15:57:15+00:00
What's wrong with R? I used it and liked it in undergrad. I certainly didn't use it as seriously as the users who made Python popular, but to this day I remember R fondly and would never choose Python for a personal project.

My R use was self-taught, as well. I refused to use proprietary software for school all through high school and university, so I used R where we were expected to use Excel or MatLab (though I usually used GNU Octave for the latter), including for at least one or two math classes. I don't remember anything being tricky or difficult to work with.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-25 15:57:18+00:00
I wonder what this means for the mobile ecosystem (talking about essential apps whose usage requires a smartphone : digital only banks, whatsapp, etc). The sitation is such that if you need to use any of the above (except whatsapp which has backward compatibility going all the way back to android 6), you pretty much are required to buy a new phone every 2-5 years which is wild. Making Android Os available somewhere could potentially be another avenue to access Android apps.

Yes, I know about waydroid and similar, but it is very slow and requires you to have relatively powerful machine.

Of course, ideally, a Proton like layer would be best
by skissane | 2025-11-25 15:57:58+00:00
Also keep in mind that ISO’s official answer was UTF-1 not UTF-8, and UTF-8 wasn’t formally accepted as part of the Unicode and ISO standards until 1996. And early versions of UTF-8 still allowed the full 31 bit range of the original ISO 10646 repertoire, before it was limited to the 21 bit range of UTF-16. Also, a lot of early UTF-8 implementations were actually what we now call CESU-8, or had various other infelicities (such as accepting overlong encodings, nowadays commonly disabled as a security risk). So even in 1993, I’m not sure it was yet clear that UTF-8 was going to win.
by johngossman | 2025-11-25 15:58:23+00:00
And you don't think she knows this? She's clearly fascinated with the Romans, despite all she finds unappealing about them. Which can easily be said about a lot (most?) of history. Based on books and TV, WW2 is possibly the historical period that draws the most attention, which doesn't mean the historians (or their readers) "love WW2."
by javcasas | 2025-11-25 15:58:37+00:00
OCaml is also from 1996. And I say 2005 because that's when I started using it, not when it started being useful.

By that time it supported parametric generics, multiple inheritance, named parameters, optionals instead of nulls everywhere, compile to machine code and quite a few extra things that I couldn't understand at the time.
by powerclue | 2025-11-25 15:58:43+00:00
As a vegetarian on ethical grounds (mostly due to factory farming of meat) I politely disagree with your assessment.

I have to decline and explain in social settings all the time, because I will not eat meat served to me. But I do not need to preach when I observe others eating meat. I, like all humans, have a finite amount of time and energy. I'd rather spend that time focused on where I think it will do the greatest good. And that's rarely explaining why factory farming of meat is truly evil.

The best time is when someone asks, "why don't you eat meat?" Then you can have a conversation. Otherwise I've found it best to just quietly and politely decline, as more often than not one can be accommodated easily. (Very occasionally, though, someone feels it necessary to try and score imaginary points on you because they have some axe to grind against vegetarians and vegans. I've found it best to let them burn themselves out and move on. Life's too short to worry about them.)
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-25 15:59:00+00:00
> There is no myth here

The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
by mrweasel | 2025-11-25 15:59:06+00:00
That article is really good, because it highlight that Rust doesn't have to look messy. Part of the problem, I think, is that there's a few to many people who think that messy version is better, because it "uses more of the language" and it makes them look smarter. Or maybe Rust just makes it to hard to see through the semantics and realize that just because feature is there doesn't mean that you need it.

There's also a massive difference between the type of C or Perl someone like me would write, versus someone trying to cope with a more hostile environment or who requires higher levels of performance. My code might be easier to read, but it technically has issue, they are mostly not relevant, while the reverse is true for a more skilled developer, in a different environment. Rust seems to attract really skilled people, who have really defensive code styles or who use more of the provided language features, and that makes to code harder to read, but that would also be the case in e.g. C++.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-25 15:59:33+00:00
Discussions:

X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028422

X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417

Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211

X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035574
by lenkite | 2025-11-25 15:59:38+00:00
Runtime borrow checking: RefCell<T> and Rc<T>. Can give other examples, but admittedly they need `unsafe` blocks.

Anyways, the article author lacks basic reading skills, since he forgot to mention that the Go http doc states that only the http client transport is safe for concurrent modification. There is no "subtlety" about it. It directly says so. Concurrent "use" is not Concurrent "modification" in Go. The Go stdlib doc uses this consistently everywhere.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-25 16:00:39+00:00
This study seems like finding a way to quantify the well known and then twisting it to make a good headline.

People don't grow up until they need to. Of course you're gonna see college educated rich westerners delay whatever mental markers you're looking at. And likewise people who "stay active" seem to stave off the mental decline of old age.
by buran77 | 2025-11-25 16:00:43+00:00
> defines a range of possible products, not exactly ratios

I'm not sure I follow, varying range necessarily implies varying ratios (e.g. a product missing from the range means its ratio is zero).

Even when in theory you can obtain some higher quality products, the composition of the crude can make it too complex and expensive to practically obtain them.

You don't want to refine gasoline from heavy crude, especially in winter when demand is lower. For gasoline or kerosene you want to start from lighter crude. Same with many undesired components (either from the crude or resulting from the refining methods), the more you have, the more complex the refining, and the resulting ratio of products you obtain varies.

So in practice what you get out of the refining process absolutely depends on the characteristics of the crude, and many other things like market demand or the capability of your refinery.

Same as with silicon. The process to make the wafer results in different quality if you want to make low tech or cutting edge semiconductor products.
by tmuhlestein | 2025-11-25 16:01:04+00:00
LLMs are increasingly being used as evaluators — grading outputs, ranking options, and even guiding autonomous agents. But raw model scores are unstable: they drift over time, vary across models, and don’t map linearly to real quality.

This write-up explores why LLM-based judging is unreliable out of the box, how calibration curves can improve stability, and why multi-model consensus may be necessary for trustworthy evaluation systems.

Curious how others in the industry are handling calibration, drift mitigation, or cross-model agreement for “LLM-as-a-judge” setups.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-11-25 16:01:26+00:00
I don't know if it was adulhood, but after 30 I started feeling calmer & more adult than before.

There was no special event in my life that kickstarted this, it was tge beginning of a more mature way to look at things & people. I started to see some repeated events & behaviours that I had already experienced and this also contributed to have a more tempered way to manage things.

As you age of course you still face unknown things, but you star to see that supposed new things rhyme with things you already know.
by bicarbonato | 2025-11-25 16:01:37+00:00
What do people actually mean when they say "the syntax is janky"?

I often see comparisons to languages like Python and Kotlin, but both encode far less information on their syntax because they don't have the same features as Rust, so there's no way for them to express the same semantics as rust.

Sure, you can make Rust look simpler by removing information, but at that point you're not just changing syntax, you're changing the language's semantics.

Is there any language that preserves the same level of type information while using a less "janky" syntax?
by zorked | 2025-11-25 16:01:45+00:00
The Bourbaki group was reponsible for the Mathématiques modernes movement which intended to reform basic education on rigorous math. This may be the world's best documented educational failure in history. It was tried in several countries, so the sample size isn't one. All evidence points at rigor as a terrible educational tool.

The point of Math education isn't to create a clone army of the most pedantic pure Mathematicians in Academia.

> if you really think it's so effective when many demonstrate a lack of understanding all around us. That so many struggle with calculus is evidence itself

Because the first attempt went so well.
by SquibblesRedux | 2025-11-25 16:02:09+00:00
As an official greybeard who has written much in C, C++, Perl, Python, and now Rust, I can say Rust is a wonderful systems programming language. Nothing at all like Perl, and as others have mentioned, a great relief from C++ while providing all the power and low-level bits and bobs important for systems programming.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-25 16:02:27+00:00
It's not a Britishism particularly. My sense was it is coming in part from Indian Standard English but it may well be European english mistranslation. I rather like it, actually. Not least because it is the reciprocal of "teachings", which is long established usage.

"What are the asks" and "what's the offer" are turning up much more than I'd like, and they annoy me. But not as much as other Americanisms: "concerning" meaning "a cause for concern", "addicting" when the word they are looking for is "addictive", and the rather whiny-sounding "cheater" when the word "cheat" works fine. These things can meet the proverbial fiery end, along with "performant" and "revert back" (the latter of which which is an Americanism sourced from Indian English that is perhaps the only intrusion from Indian English I dislike; generally I think ISE is warm and fun and joyful.)

The BBC still put "concerning" in quotes, because the UK has not yet given up the fight, and because people like me used to write in to ask "concerning what?" I had a very fun reply from a BBC person about this, once. So I assume they are still there, forcing journalists to encase this abuse in quotation marks.

Ultimately all our bugbears are personal, though, because English is the ultimate living language, and I don't think Americans have any particular standing to complain about any of them! :-)

ETA: Lest anyone think I am complaining more about Americanisms than other isms, I would just like to say that one of my favourite proofs of the extraordinary flexibility of English is the line from Mean Girls: "She doesn't even go here!"