MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Marsymars | 2025-11-24 03:04:25+00:00
"More taxes on everyone" also is dishonest. Every individual is paying more in "taxes", but the net amount of money collected from the population of the city for the cost of providing transit is decreased. (Since the cost of fare collection disappears. Or if the net amount of money doesn't decrease, they're presumably spending what was formerly spent on fare collection on additional service.)
by refulgentis | 2025-11-24 03:04:34+00:00
At FAANG, open source is de rigeur for things you can’t make money off of, either because it’s an ecosystem play or someone asked their boss.

You’d be surprised how little drama there is around this.

I’d note that the department that made open LLMs hasn’t produced any work since they produced a Gemini 2.5 Flash equivalent with much better tool calling, because the God King threw a fit. Without reasoning. And they had a reasoning model on deck that was cancelled too.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-24 03:04:58+00:00
> Come on, please tell me you don't do this in your code.

I don't, but that's not to say that I think it should never be done.

> Formally you are correct, but there are many things in C++ that should have better not existed.

Sure, but I think it's important that one should do their best to be correct and/or precise.

> Because it would lose most of the Rust properties by that time.

Perhaps for specific bits of code, but that doesn't necessarily require that your entire codebase give up on safety. Part of Rust's value is in isolating unsafe stuff to specific sections of your codebase both so the rest of the code can make use of Rust's guarantees and so if/when something goes wrong it's easier to pinpoint the problem.

Not to mention if you're talking about "specially designed" codebases in the kind of situation you describe you're almost certainly not in pure-C-land either (e.g., standard C doesn't have the concept of CPU registers, so if you really need to stick to what's in registers you're going to have to resort to compiler-specific extensions and/or assembly). If you're willing to allow the necessary extensions for C, it's only fair that you do the same for Rust.

> I'm not saying that you are wrong though, there might be people optimizing Rust for this very purpose, but I'm not aware of such an effort.

There's a reason no_std exists. Low-resource embedded use has been a design focus since well before Rust's 1.0, and those considerations have continued to influence its evolution since - for example, Rust's async design is the way it is specifically to ensure it is usable in limited-resource environments.

> Who's gonna GC the poisoned garbage left in undefined state after the crash?

Whatever supervising process/thread you write/designate, if that kind of recovery is important to you? I don't think there's anything about Rust that precludes you writing such a thing.

Not to mention, must there be "poisoned garbage" in the first place? I don't think it's strictly necessary that such a thing be produced after a crash even if you ignore the fact that part of the reason unwinding exists is to clean things up even while crashing.

> but from what I know it's rather in middle of "not possible" and "not viable".

I'm curious how you came to that conclusion. It seems wrong both on a theoretical level (Drop/unwinding/catch_unwind should obviously suffice for at least some cases?) and on a practical level (tokio can recover from worker thread panics just fine?).
by appreciatorBus | 2025-11-24 03:05:55+00:00
You could do that, but then you would have to make them pay more upfront, and given the choice, the likely result would be a fewer people purchasing insurance.

The entire concept of insurance is that of a risk pool. If you get the math right, there’s nothing left at the end of the year. All the money that was paid in by all the insured, has been spent reimbursing the random portion of insured to whom bad shit happened to.

Of course, part of getting the math right is understanding the risk profile of all the people you’re insuring. If you have a legal way to determine that some people are way less riskier than others, then you can put those very safe people in their own risk pool and charge them much less, which encourages people to be more careful,I think is what you’re getting at.

But it only works if you have some legal statistical method to figure out with reasonable accuracy, who is less risky upfront. If you can’t do that, then your idea boils down to running a lottery scheme (get paid if nothing happens to you!) on top of an insurance scheme. (Get paid if something happens to you!).
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-24 03:06:15+00:00
Google thinks my account is American for Play Store geo limiting purposes, and if I recall correctly would only let me update it by adding a payment card, which I refuse to do. I don’t know where they even got that idea—they should have known full well I was Australian. My best guess is that for a few years I used a phone I bought while visiting America. But it was neither my first phone nor my most recent, and the account was at least five years old before I even visited the US.
by deadbabe | 2025-11-24 03:06:41+00:00
I think it’s mostly bullshit, and a misunderstanding of what poverty is.

Poverty doesn’t mean you can only afford bare minimum stuff and can’t take any vacations or buy luxuries. It means you are struggling.

People in poverty do not have childcare costs, or healthcare, or even housing and transportation (they could be homeless or live with relatives, and either take buses, walk, bike, or get some kind of free ride to work)

Food is truly the only thing people really need. For that, the original amount seems accurate.

Ridiculous to say $100k is the new poverty line. Get a grip.
by mmooss | 2025-11-24 03:06:48+00:00
> Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place

You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.

Y Combinator and much of SV would be out of business if innovators followed that thinking. One reason is that people do come up with new ideas; that's how the world changes. The other is that the world changes, and what didn't work before now works - costs change and value changes, and now it's worthwhile. For example, with congestion pricing and other rapidly increasong costs of NYC car ownership, there's more value in free transit.

Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.

> without sustainability, a political shift will kill it

That can be said of many things. A political shift could kill military funding in the US.
by ori_b | 2025-11-24 03:06:57+00:00
> With an mmap based heap, you can free all 999 other pages back to the OS whereas with sbrk you're stuck with those 999 pages you don't need for the lifetime of that 1000th object (better hope it's not long lived!).

Thanks to the wonders of virtual memory, you can madvise(MADV_DONTNEED), and return the memory to the OS, without giving up the address space.
by mpyne | 2025-11-24 03:09:02+00:00
> We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.

States mostly take the equivalent of those taxes out of vehicle registration fees for electric vehicles.

And bicycle usage is nearly a nil cost on the existing public roads, so the costs here would be appropriate to come out of the general sales/property taxes that fun the city/county. If anything you might argue to try to subsidize bicycle ridership more in urban areas, whether with bicycle paths or otherwise, to reduce the number of cars on the roads and reduce congestion for those still on the roads.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-24 03:09:07+00:00
> I’m trying to understand how/whether what Anna’s Archive is doing is different from what OpenAI is doing.

Political capital and the entire US economy is all-in on AI. Nobody is all-in on Anna's Archive and it has no political capital.

AI cannot be allowed to fail at this point; and it's likely OCLC would suffer more in the short-term if they set a successful anti-AI precedent and crash the economy as a result, so they too have an incentive to play it strategically and slowly negotiate a settlement/royalties down the line without rocking the boat.
by kasool | 2025-11-24 03:09:19+00:00
Not really! The difference is MoltenVK (and now KosmicKrisp) is officially supported and funded by Khronos itself.

DXVK, vkd3d on the other hand is propped up by dozens of passionate open-source contributors.

I'm drawing my lines not based on technicalities, but on the reality of the situation when it comes to how much the "controlling entity" of each API cares about supporting your platforms. And the fact is, Khronos has put time and money into supporting more platforms than Microsoft has.
by theamk | 2025-11-24 03:09:40+00:00
Wow, the author is serious, it does not seem to be a joke! I've checked their last commit on github[0] and it has those lines:

if (hasValidRate) { audio.playbackRate = playbackRate; } if (!hasValidRate && lastAudio === urlOrDataURI) { audio.playbackRate = 0.6; }

If I was code-reviewing this code, I'd recommend using else-if here, for easier understanding and to avoid accidental mistakes.

[0] https://github.com/RickCarlino/KoalaCards/commit/0750a329237...
by nozzlegear | 2025-11-24 03:10:04+00:00
I don't live in Iowa City but do live in Iowa; the (visible) homelessness population is still nearly zero. I have to imagine that anyone who finds themselves homeless for long enough will eventually find a way to move indoors (couch surfing, shelters) and become less visible or, if possible, leave the state entirely for warmer climes. Winters just aren't survivable here for the "traditional" homelessness we think of when we envision camps of people in California metros.
by heavyset_go | 2025-11-24 03:10:21+00:00
My point is that from the Linux side, you're damned if you and damned if you don't no matter how you tackle the issue. If the layer above Linux is going to deliberately malfunction and lie on the Linux happy path, or speak some non-standard per-device driver protocol if you lie to use the Windows path, there's not much that can be done.

It's only a "Linux problem" if you're trying to run Linux on hardware that is actively hostile to it. There are plenty of vendors who supply good Linux happy paths in their firmware, using their hardware is the solution to that self-imposed problem.
by nrposner | 2025-11-24 03:10:28+00:00
If it helps, GPTZero rates the text as 99% AI-generated. In addition, the whole article has a patter that's very typical of LLM-writing, fond of short phrases and reversals. You might also consider that the medium page it's pulled from posts short daily articles on programming, full of surface-level takes on language and technology choice without going into serious technical detail or providing biographical detail about the author, their work, or their projects. Or, most clearly, you might notice that those articles are replete with ASCII flowcharts--something a human writer would almost certainly not bother with in favor of just drawing them, but which is very easy for an LLM to output.

All of this points quite clearly to this being LLM-generated. But, as I pointed out in my other comment, as have others above, it's just not well argued. The points are shallow and don't adequately support the claims made. It looks to me very much like someone churning out posts on surface-level topics by prompting an LLM, either not having the expertise to tell the quality of the argument or just not bothering.
by leejasoc1234 | 2025-11-24 03:10:54+00:00
As someone who spends a lot of time with CFOs looking for real efficiency gains, the biggest blocker I keep hearing from CIOs is that agents don’t talk to each other cleanly. Every team ends up rebuilding auth, payments, and comms. Bindu is actually tackling that interoperability gap instead of creating yet another standalone agent.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-24 03:12:56+00:00
I assume you're responding to the commercial alternatives to Microsoft ?

I was thinking about the OS layer. My understanding is that hardware makers want to discharge responsibility of the OS on other entities, and ideally wouldn't even want to write drivers if they could avoid it. Having a partner you can enter a contract to provide an OS and maintain it for however long is needed is IMHO a huge deal they don't get with linux.

That's why Framework is the only maker coming up with remotely innovative ideas and also supporting linux. I love them for that, but as the other side of the coin they are extremely limited in the business side, they won't even ship to most of SEA for instance.

Apple plowing forward at least brings some competition, we've seen that on the ARM side. And looking at Microsoft(!) and other makers plowing forward on the form factors, I'd wish Apple had followed.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-24 03:13:23+00:00
Moreover, now they realize this is an issue for them, they can just do "Ctrl+F unwrap" and fix each instance. Then they can put a hook on their commits that automatically flag any code with "unwrap". In some languages where you're allowed to just ignore errors, you could fix the proximal bug, but you'd never be sure you weren't causing or ignoring more of the same in the future -- how do you search for what isn't there?
by mmooss | 2025-11-24 03:13:54+00:00
More fear mongering about the 'other'. Not immigrants or religous groups or racial groups this time, but unhoused and addicted people.

The dangerous people are the ones spreading fear - that leads to horrible things. I've had no problem with unhoused people who I am around almost every day. Why would I?

All the fear mongering is wrong. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
by remh | 2025-11-24 03:14:10+00:00
I’m sorry I can’t answer your question but on a related note I wonder if anyone has used AirPods Pro 3 as hearing aids either as their first pair or replaced their traditional ones with AirPods? I’m considering getting a pair for a family member who has been reluctant to wear traditional ones but I think would be willing to do AirPods.
by 7thaccount | 2025-11-24 03:14:44+00:00
You're correct in a sense, but glossing over a very real problem. You still need some kind of knowledge of how to use a desktop computer for a lot of jobs in the workforce. If all you know is how to click on some apps, then you're at a competitive disadvantage. There are plenty of horror stories of Gen Z being just as bad as Boomers at tech (like can't figure out how to copy files) and that should concern everyone on HN. I'm sure some grow up with raspberry pi computers, but 99% are probably iPad only kids.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-24 03:15:15+00:00
> Democrats broadly lack the spine

The party elites are complacent. That’s creating a political vacuum for someone who’s more aggressive.

> this is also illegal

An EO is. The President asking the FBI, DoJ and state AGs to prioritise the last administration’s lawbreakers—a thing Biden was elected to do and failed at—is just norms and conventions.
by chrisweekly | 2025-11-24 03:16:40+00:00
> "Normal people do not use public transit... kick all homeless off (even if they are willing to pay)"

At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.

[1] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/chris-boucher-nba-boston-c...
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-24 03:16:52+00:00
> I don't think I have enough points to vouch for anything.

Based on this [0] (and a few other random comments search engines pulled up) the points threshold for vouching is supposedly 31. It does appear that I misunderstood the vouching functionality, though, since apparently it's supposed to counteract [dead] posts, not [flagged]. My mistake!

> The rules about how many points are required to do things seem to promote a hive mind phenomenon.

As with many things, it's a tradeoff. Having a points threshold also makes it harder to abuse new accounts to manipulate flags/votes/etc., so there's no free lunch here.

> If you're not trying to explain why this thing is flagged, or at least why it isn't flagged, idk why you are in this thread.

My intent was very specifically to push back against the claim that Rust criticism is a surefire way to get downvoted/flagged. The tl;dr is that good criticism of Rust is well-received, and this article is not a good critique and so it's not all that surprising that it was not well-received.

[0]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
by rramadass | 2025-11-24 03:17:25+00:00
> Most people don't need to know calculus.

People should have at the minimum a conceptual idea of Calculus. A good motivation is Everyday Calculus: Discovering the Hidden Math All around Us by Oscar E. Fernandez - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175751/ev...

> And if you do learn it, do so with rigor so you actually learn it

This is not strictly necessary for everybody. The conceptual ideas are what are important; else you are merely doing "plug-and-chug" Maths without any understanding. You need to focus on rigor only based on your needs and at your own pace. Concepts come first Formalism comes second.

A good example; In the Principia Newton actually uses the phrase Quantity of Motion for what we define today as Momentum. The phrase is evocative and beautifully captures the main concept instead of the bland p = m x v definition which though correct and needed for calculations conveys no mental imagery.

In Mathematics one should always approach a concept/idea from multiple perspectives including (but not limited to) Imagination, Conceptual, Graphical, Symbolic, Relationship, Applications, Definition/Theorem/Proof.
by prescriptivist | 2025-11-24 03:18:15+00:00
MCPs as a thin layer over existing APIs has lost utility. Custom MCPs for teams that reduces redundant thinking/token consumption and provides more useful context for the agent and decreases mean time to decision making is where MCPs shine.

Something as simple as correlating a git SHA to a CI build takes 10s of seconds and some number of tokens if Claude is utilizing skills (making API calls to the CI server and GitHub itself). If you have an MCP server that Claude feeds a SHA into and gets back a bespoke, organized payload that adds relevant context to its decision making process (such as a unified view of CI, diffs, et. al), then MCP is a win.

MCP shines as a bespoke context engine and fails as a thin API translation layer, basically. And the beauty/elegance is you can use AI to build these context engines.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-24 03:18:48+00:00
You could just Google it.

- There's https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/about/h... which does say that the Official Poverty Measure is indeed based on food expenses multiplied by three.

- On the other hand, there's also https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/demo/pove... which says that there are now two measures: the Official Poverty Measure and the newer Supplemental Poverty Measure that's intended to address some of the problems of the former.

Mention of the Supplemental Poverty Measure doesn't seem to appear in the submitted post using a quick Ctrl-F. Draw your own conclusions.
by subroutine | 2025-11-24 03:18:51+00:00
Why are you equating busses to roads and not cars? Cars are not subsidized and in fact car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. Without car related taxes, we would absolutely need to charge bus fees to subsidize roadway costs, and they would probably need to be pretty steep.
by NaOH | 2025-11-24 03:19:15+00:00
Previous and related:

how come a company founded over 100 years ago has the fastest site - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41883419 - Oct 2024 (15 comments)

McMaster-Carr: A refreshingly fast, thoughtful, and well-organized website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34306793 - Jan 2023 (37 comments)

Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 - Dec 2022 (169 comments)

Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 - Sept 2022 (494 comments)

McMaster-Carr: Beautifully organized and informational industrial product store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803857 - Oct 2020 (27 comments)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-24 03:19:42+00:00
> "the deficit is entitlement spending; this is a political problem, not a bureaucratic one".

Sort of? Medicare is about a trillion dollars, but what percentage of that is actually helping people and how much is going to unnecessary tests or fraud or overpaying for things? If e.g. HHS issues some bad rules that increase healthcare costs, that increases the cost of Medicare and Medicaid and the VA, but if you're doing it properly you're not ignoring that part of HHS just because its regulatory budget is comparatively smaller when it's doing things that incur billions in indirect costs.

Moreover, you can't find a trillion dollars in a program that costs a million dollars, but if it costs a million dollars and isn't worth a million dollars then that's not a reason to keep it.

And nobody can claim with a straight face that the military budget contains no inefficiencies, but that's not entitlement spending.

> Instead, they went scorched-Earth and assumed we were all deep state leeches.

The general problem is that nobody wants their thing to be the thing that gets cut even when it's the thing that ought to be, and then how do you tell if something is actually important when somebody will claim that everything is? It's legitimately a hard problem and DOGE did not succeed in solving it, but that means we need a solution that actually works or people are going to keep coming at you with knives drawn because the status quo is untenable.
by entropie | 2025-11-24 03:19:59+00:00
I wanted to take a look at some of these bug fixes, and one of the linked ones [1] seems more like a feature to me. So maybe it should be the week of "low priority" issues, or something like that.

I don't mean to sound negative, I think it's a great idea. I do something like this at home from time to time. Just spend a day repairing and fixing things. Everything that has accumulated.

1: https://github.com/google/perfetto/issues/154
by zmmmmm | 2025-11-24 03:20:11+00:00
> identifying and executing on whatever is highest value that you have the skills for

There's a hidden assumption there though, that you CAN actually do that. At least management skills mostly stick over time but even a year away from hands on technical work is going to leave you likely stranded and unable to execute on the technical aspects. Which is why I continue to push back against suggestions technical managers shouldn't be engaged hands on. Apart from being incredibly hostile to their own interests (it will be central to you getting hired to any future role), it also impairs one of the most strategic aspects of the role which can drastically affect the value you can deliver internally in the future as well.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-24 03:20:15+00:00
> would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE

Ramaswamy is a useless idiot. He wasn’t useful in getting DOGE to exist. (He rallied voters in states Trump couldn’t or otherwise would have won. It’s why he was easily cast aside–he didn’t bring anything to the table.)
by al_borland | 2025-11-24 03:20:22+00:00
Adam Savage made a video about them. If I remember correctly, they won’t be replacing his primary hearing aids, but would be a serviceable backup. Note that I could be misremembering, as I watched the video 9 months ago.

https://youtu.be/uykq5aJCwBw

In your situation they could be a low stakes way to get someone to try a hearing aid and sell them on the idea, while still being a useful thing to have around even if they do upgrade to something more purpose built.