MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2025-11-25 15:43:29+00:00
> upon the learnings of the past 20+ years.

That's the thing though... Rust does build on many of those learnings. For starters, managing a big type system is better when some types are implicit, so Rust features type inference to ease the burden in that area. They've also learned from C++'s mistake of having a context sensitive grammar. They learned from C++'s template nightmare error messages so generics are easier to work with. They also applied learnings about immutability being a better default that mutability. The reason Rust is statically linked and packages are managed by a central repository is based on decades of seeing how difficult it is to build and deploy projects in C++, and how easy it is to build and deploy projects in the Node / NPM ecosystem. Pattern matching and tagged unions were added because of how well they worked in functional languages.

As for "Perl-esque unreadability" I submit that it's not unreadable, you are just unfamiliar. I myself find Chinese unreadable, but that doesn't mean Chinese is unreadable.

> Is there a "Kotlin for Rust"?

Kotlin came out 16 years after Java. Rust is relatively new, and it has built on other languages, but it's not the end point. Languages will be written that build on Rust, but that will take some time. Already many nascent projects are out there, but it is yet to be seen which will rise to the top.
by busfahrer | 2025-11-25 15:44:16+00:00
One of the interesting points to me from reading this (or something similar about CB) the last time was this:

The PSX had no real 3D capability, you could just throw a list of triangles at it to draw. The problem here is that you have to sort the list of triangles yourself, since there is no such thing as a z-buffer.

For Crash Bandicoot, since the path is essentially linear, they were able to pre-sort most of the triangles at build time, which allowed them to achieve greater visual fidelity compared to contemporary titles that allowed for freer movement.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-25 15:44:19+00:00
I largely avoided iostream in favor of printf-like logging apis, but std::format changed my mind. The only hazard I've found with it is what happens when you statically link the std library. It brings in a lot of currency and localization nonsense and bloats the binary. I'm hoping for a compiler switch to fix that in the future. libfmt, which std::format is based on, doesn't have this problem.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-25 15:44:20+00:00
Paywall free alternative:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi...

Report:

https://www.ebrd.com/home/news-and-events/publications/econo... [abstract]

https://www.ebrd.com/content/dam/ebrd_dxp/assets/pdfs/office... [pdf]
by zmgsabst | 2025-11-25 15:44:26+00:00
Opera, symphony, etc weren't the affairs we see today throughout their history: the quiet sterility is a modern behavior — and my understanding that it used to be quite a bit more like, eg, movie premiere crowds that made noise in response to the show.

I think the emphasis is on the class structure, formality, etc. rather than saying the Coliseum followed modern theatre etiquette. And the according comparison about status of attendees, etc.
by shkkmo | 2025-11-25 15:44:30+00:00
> And advertising spending is increasingly exponentially. Good numbers on ad spend are available here [1]

I don't see a single place in that PDF that lists historical ad spend data. You do realize that is a "forecast" not a mearement?

And even that forecast contradicts the point you are trying to argue. It projects that ad spend will grow exponentially...at a rate lower than GDP.

So again, the only evidence here that the Internet increased advertising spending is by arguing that the Internet increased GDP.

> Ad spending was estimated at growing around 14% per year

This is false. The only place that numer was used in your cited text was here:

>> We forecast paid search to grow at an average rate of 14% a year to 2016

So that isn't a measurement, it is a forecast. It is also not for all ad spending growth, but for "paid search".

I too dislike mass advertising, but if you wanna argue against it you need to do MUCH better.
Ask HN: I built app for Japanese learners but Apple blocks me from dev program
by ig0r0 | 2025-11-25 15:44:34+00:00
I spent the last few months building an iOS app to help Japanese language learners like myself improve reading fluency.

The app is finished, tested, and the mini-site is live: https://yomuapp.kulman.sk.

Everything is ready for App Store submission — except Apple won’t let me enroll in the Developer Program.

When I try to enroll with my personal Apple ID, the process stops with this message:

“Your enrollment in the Apple Developer Program could not be completed at this time.”

I contacted Apple Support thinking it was just an ID verification issue, but after reviewing my case they told me: • I cannot enroll

• They cannot tell me the reason

• There is nothing more they can do

To rule out issues with my Apple ID, I tried creating a brand-new Apple ID with the same phone number — but even that fails immediately with:

“Your account cannot be created at this time.”

This effectively blocks me from publishing the app or even getting a paid Developer account. I have a working iOS app and no way to distribute it through official channels.

Has anyone dealt with this type of silent block before?

Any advice or shared experience would be really helpful.
by paul2495 | 2025-11-25 15:45:26+00:00
Thanksthat makes sense and it never even crossed my mind . FAISS has been great for prototyping but I'm definitely hitting the limits around metadata, updates, and operational overhead.

One thing I’m exploring now is Qdrant in embedded mode, since the tool has to run in fully air-gapped environments (no internet, no external services, distributed on a portable SSD). The embedded version runs as a simple file-based directory, similar to SQLite:

from qdrant_client import QdrantClient client = QdrantClient(path="./qdrant_data") # local-only, no server If that model works reliably, it would solve several problems FAISS creates for my use case:

incremental updates instead of full index rebuilds

storing metadata as payloads instead of a 1.5GB pickle

much easier filtering (e.g., per-source, per-customer, per-tool)

better concurrency under load

I’m still benchmarking, but curious about your experience: Have you used Qdrant’s embedded mode in a production/offline scenario? And if so, how does it behave with larger collections (500k–1M vectors) on consumer hardware?

Not dismissing FAISS — just trying to pick the right long-term architecture for an offline tool that gets updated via USB and needs to stay lightweight for the end user.
by jwr | 2025-11-25 15:45:32+00:00
I think the "cancel-rebook" explanation is a red herring. Yes, it might have been a factor, but that's easily fixed by having a cancellation fee. Reservations being totally non-refundable at any date or time are an entirely different matter and it's a power grab.

Also, I tried booking directly with the hotel networks several times recently, in most cases non-refundable was all they offered, or the option of refundable was so much more expensive that it bordered on ridiculous.
by square_usual | 2025-11-25 15:45:42+00:00
> The display of the colon and parenthesis characters as ":(" relies heavily on the client's font rendering capabilities and the underlying character encoding. If the system defaults to a legacy encoding like ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8, or if the chosen font lacks the specific glyphs, visual inconsistencies can occur. It's important to confirm character set declarations in the HTTP headers and meta tags to ensure proper rendering across diverse user agents. This prevents unexpected visual representations of text.

I love the AI pedantry. It's perfect.
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-25 15:46:05+00:00
I'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase.

Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?

Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-25 15:46:17+00:00
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.

I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
by Weves | 2025-11-25 15:46:20+00:00
RAG + connectors is a huge reason why people deploy Onyx (enterprise search roots means we do a pretty good job there).

Also, open-source works really here, since connectors are a long-tail game. We've tried to make it easy to add connectors (a single python interface), and as a result over half of our connectors are contributed by the community. We expect that percentage to grow over time. This means that compared to something like Agentspace, we'll very likely be connected to all of the key tools at your company (and if we aren't, you can easily add an integration).
by theptip | 2025-11-25 15:46:28+00:00
My current idea for this is to have AI administer the 1:1 oral exam. I’m quite confident this would work through grade school at least.

For exams you’d need a proctored environment of some sort, say a row of conference booths so students can’t just bring notes.

You’d want to have some system for ephemeral recording so the teachers can do a risk-based audit and sample some %, eg one-two questions from each student.

Honestly for regular weekly assignments you might not even need the heavyweight proctoring and could maybe allow notes, since you can tell if someone knows what they are talking about in conversation , it’s impossible to crib-sheet your way to fluent conversational understanding.
by skissane | 2025-11-25 15:46:56+00:00
> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.

They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage
by smath | 2025-11-25 15:47:08+00:00
Shameless plug: More than a decade ago, I wrote a paper [1] on how the random perturbations in the wireless channel between an ambient RF transmitter (FM radio, TV) to the two devices, allow nearby devices to authenticate locality because the perturbations are correlated only if they are nearby (where nearby is relative to the wavelength being monitored)

[1] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/121443
by Der_Einzige | 2025-11-25 15:47:35+00:00
Sorry, but why use this over oobabooga/sillytavern?

Why do we have to yet again poorly copy an oversimplified UI?

The value of local models comes from their huge amount of settings/control that they offer. Why must we throw that all away?

Yet again, the world waits for good UI/UX for pro/prosumers with AI systems. No one is learning from ComfyUI, Automatic1111, or SillyTavern. No, LM-Studio is not actually prosumer
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-25 15:47:51+00:00
Shouldn't we wait until Rust gets full support in GCC? This should resolve the issue with ports without a working Rust compiler.

I don't have a problem with Rust, it is just a language, but it doesn't seem to play along well with the mostly C/C++ based UNIX ecosystem, particularly when it comes to dependencies and package management. C and C++ don't have one, and often rely on system-wide dynamic libraries, while Rust has cargo, which promotes large dependency graphs of small libraries, and static linking.
by DennisP | 2025-11-25 15:47:51+00:00
Regarding reproduction, I'm willing to write that off to advanced medical technology doing DNA repair. Most of the plot wouldn't be that different with slower space drives, so I wasn't too bothered by that either.

But fwiw, it turns out it is possible to get that level of rocket performance, if ToughSF got their numbers right:

https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...

It wouldn't look the same and the power level would be higher than what all of civilization uses today, but the amount of fusion fuel isn't all that remarkable. The design uses helium-3, which could be collected in large quantity from Uranus and Neptune.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-25 15:47:52+00:00
That's not an important point for me. It's worth it to me to go to efforts to minimize the amount of surveillance being foisted on me where I can, even if there is other surveillance I can't avoid. Especially when that surveillance is connected to databases.

Every little bit helps, so I maintain every little bit of my privacy and autonomy that I can. Airports and flying are places and activities that are notorious for getting you spied on, so I avoid them whenever possible.

I understand that you, and others, are not quite so sensitive about these issues. There's nothing wrong with that. We all make our own choices.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-25 15:47:59+00:00
Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was.

Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-25 15:48:02+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 WD-42 | 2025-11-25 15:48:05+00:00
I’ve been writing python professionally for over 10 years. In the last year I’ve been writing more and most Rust. At first I thought the same as you. It’s a fugly language, there’s no denying it. But once I started to learn what all the weird syntax was for, it began to ruin Python for me.

Now I begrudge any time I have to go back to python. It feels like its beauty is only skin deep, but the ugly details are right there beneath the surface: prolific duck typing, exceptions as control flow, dynamic attributes. All these now make me uneasy, like I can’t be sure what my code will really do at runtime.

Rust is ugly but it’s telling you exactly what it will do.
by eucyclos | 2025-11-25 15:48:50+00:00
I have a DVD set of old UFC events - I think UFC 1 to 84 or something - and I remember in one very early event in Japan the commentators talk about how silently focused the crowd is. Of course, some people do find Japanese culture extremely creepy, but many would say the same of ancient Rome.

I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
by SeanDav | 2025-11-25 15:49:21+00:00
I hate the flat, borderless, barely visible scroll bar mess that is Windows 11. Just try to determine where one window starts and another ends with multiple overlapping windows open, especially in dark mode.

Windows UI peaked at Windows 7 and has been steadily in a race to the bottom ever since.

Windows 11 is going to be the final straw that prompts me to relegate it to a game playing or only-use-because-I-must secondary OS. Linux, here I come - if only I could decide which flavour...
by jjk166 | 2025-11-25 15:49:47+00:00
McMaster Carr is probably the most famous industrial supplier in North America. It's a $1.3 billion company that's been in business for over a century. Anyone who makes physical stuff probably goes on their website multiple times per day. I currently have 17 different McMaster tabs open.

It's fine if your personal experience has never lead you to encounter this site, and it's fine to remark on your unique perspective as someone observing it not as a user but as an admirer. But the presumption that others share your ignorance is at best impolite, and the suggestion that some may be irritated should be taken as useful criticism, because plenty are.
by questioner8216 | 2025-11-25 15:50:27+00:00
Right, I forgot that 'const' in Rust is 'constexpr'/'consteval' in C++, while absence of 'mut' is probably closer to C++ 'const', my apologies.

C++ 'constexpr' and Rust 'const' is more about compile-time execution than marking something immutable.

In Rust, it is probably also possible to do a cast like &T to *mut T. Though that might require unsafe and might cause UB if not used properly. I recall some people hoping for better ergonomics when doing casting in unsafe Rust, since it might be easy to end up with UB.

Last I heard, C++ is better regarding 'constexpr' than Rust regarding 'const', and Zig is better than both on that subject.
by lazide | 2025-11-25 15:50:34+00:00
Even therapists are a mixed bag - and some are legitimately dangerous - but in my experience at least 100x safer than a chatbot or just books.

If for no other reason than a chatbot can’t call you out on your bullshit, because it has no hope of telling what is or is not bullshit. And that is key. And has no actual feelings, remorse, license to lose, etc. etc.
by automatic6131 | 2025-11-25 15:51:03+00:00
It's pretty clear what regulation should exist for 3rd party markets of licensed digital content: none.

If you choose to blow your finances on digital skins, or make it your trade and primary job, and you lose everything, then I have one word for you: "ha-ha".

May seem harsh, but we shouldn't encourage digital speculation nor the companies that seek to invent (more of) these markets wholecloth.
by graycat | 2025-11-25 15:51:09+00:00
> Not enough time for evolution to respond

And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond".

Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, ....

Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-25 15:51:26+00:00
This is beautifully written and well conceived, though it is premature.

Quantum holography will be discovered and the qubit shall be a dead end, for quantum holography underlies an information capacity the quantum spin disposition cannot match.

Quantum holography is the crucible of consciousness, the spindle of the enchanted loom. In such days all of your optimism, and a shadow of despair may be matched.
by gcbirzan | 2025-11-25 15:51:34+00:00
When I say history, I mean more than just the decision, which might look like "oh, they didn't like the results", but also the events that lead up to it, the campaign. I'm not even going to go into the coup d'etat he attempted after the elections with a group of far right mercenaries, or the things that came out about the campaign and Georgescu that weren't known at the time (which, obviously, couldn't have been a factor, but confirm that this was the right decision).

I'm not sure what the accusations you're talking about are
by steveklabnik | 2025-11-25 15:52:14+00:00
> Are the many who disagree that it is unreadable more than the people who agree?

I have no way to properly evaluate that statement. My gut says no, because I see people complain about other things far more often, but I do think it's unknowable.

I'm not involved with Rust any more, and I also agree with you that sometimes Rust leadership can be insular and opaque. But the parent isn't really feedback. It's just a complaint. There's nothing actionable to do here. In fact, when I read the parent's post, I said "hm, I'm not that familiar with Kotlin actually, maybe I'll go check it out," loaded up https://kotlinlang.org/docs/basic-syntax.html, and frankly, it looks a lot like Rust.

But even beyond that: it's not reasonably possible to change a language's entire syntax ten years post 1.0. Sure, you can make tweaks, but turning Rust into Python simply is not going to happen. It would be irresponsible.
by sorcercode | 2025-11-25 15:52:22+00:00
Kotlin programmer here who is picking up Rust recently. you're right, it's no Kotlin when it comes to the elegance of APIs but it's also not too bad at all.

In fact there are some things about the syntax that are actually nice like range syntax, Unit type being (), match expressions, super explicit types, how mutability is represented etc.

I'd argue it's the most similar system level language to Kotlin I've encountered. I encourage you to power through that initial discomfort because in the process it does unlock a level of performance other languages dream of.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-25 15:52:24+00:00
> My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.

I don't care. It is completely unacceptable to have ads in a product I paid them for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to remove, that doesn't fly.

You act like people are hating on Win11 for no reason, but truthfully you're just ignoring the reasons to hate it.
by superxpro12 | 2025-11-25 15:52:27+00:00
As a c/c++ cmake user, cargo sounds like a utopia in comparison. It still amazes me that c/c++ package management is still spread between about 5 different solutions.

IMO, the biggest improvement to C/C++ would be ISO defining a package manager a.la pip or uv or cargo. I'm so tired of writing cmake. just... tired.