MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwd | 2025-11-19 09:21:18+00:00
> This is the multi-million dollar .unwrap() story.

While there are certainly many things to admire about Rust, this is why I prefer Golang's "noisy" error handling. In golang that would be either:

feature_values, err := features.append_with_names(...)

And the compiler would have complained that this value of `err` was unused; or you'd write:

feature_values, _ := features.append_with_names(...)

And it would be far more obvious that an error message is being ignored.

(Renaming `unwrap` to `unwrapOrPanic` would probably help too.)
by dark-star | 2025-11-19 09:21:30+00:00
This is pretty neat. There have been multiple attempts at something like that in the past, and of them, this is by far the best-looking one.

However, I think some artefacts can never be properly resolved (see for example the marble statue to the left at 1:53 in the video), which makes it look veird and break immersion (also the flat roofs that are supposed to be slanted/angled roofs)

Also, the U7 engine is a very complex beast so to properly implement it will take a lot of work and fine-tuning (although I guess they can use Exult as a start, which is by now pretty feature-complete)
by watwut | 2025-11-19 09:21:52+00:00
No, because once you to restore the distance, you have to go slower. The cars behind you then fill the restored space the moment they feel they can, because they perceive you as the slower car. If this happen with multiple cars and in practice it does, you are suddenly going very slow.

The fact is, you can have only so much space in front of you as other cars allow. I had to reduce the distance literally because of this. It then stopped happening.
by rmoriz | 2025-11-19 09:22:08+00:00
I reported several spammers impersonating with posts like „click here to verify your account“ phishing links and they disappeared in less than 2 minutes. There is little arguing about malicious content, it‘s about political and „tone“ related moderation. You can‘t be successful by just doing X but with an authorian left point of view. It‘s just the other side of the populistic, hateful spectrum. Some people want it, I get it. I‘m still running several accounts on other instances publishing open data and aggregating news (cycling and chess related) but the content I want to read is not created by people on the Fediverse.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-19 09:22:44+00:00
They are very good at talking to businesses but even more important was their installed base. As they used to say "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

They won because they were first mover, not because they were the best because they weren't and they aren't. This is why they are so hell bent on copilot everywhere. They want to build an installed base again so they can milk it. But they're hardly the best. In fact what they are selling as copilot isn't even anything they made. It's just Chatgpt. Another interesting parallel with edge by the way which is of course just chrome.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-19 09:22:52+00:00
I have to disagree that unwrap is ever OK. If you have to use unwrap, your types do not match your problem. Fix them. You have encoded invariants in your types that do not match reality.

Change your API boundary, surface the discrepancy between your requirements and the potential failing case at the edges where it can be handled.

If you need the value, you need to handle the case that it’s not available explicitly. You need to define your error path(s)

Anything else leads to, well, this.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-19 09:22:57+00:00
So what's your argument then? Companies can't release a product unless each and every feature works with their competitors products? By that logic most of the software and hardware you use today simply would not exist.

Like a lot of parts of the (especially earlier revisions of) Bluetooth spec the battery status took a slapdash approach to defining things. Look at anyone who's used Bluetooth on Windows to see what a nightmare interoperability still is. So Apple released ear buds that implement poorly defined parts of the spec but otherwise work with third party bluetooth devices, and that's bad?

Yikes.

Meanwhile, the Bluetooth SIG released an update at the end of 2022 that actually starts to require some sort of standardization. You know who's name was on that little update? Big bad awful anticompetitive Apple.
by mrweasel | 2025-11-19 09:23:20+00:00
Something incredibly weird is going on in the "AI space", everyone seems to believe that they need their own browser and IDE. All of them are just forks of each other, so why aren't they extensions or plugins?

I can't really explain what the issue is, I'd assume it's about lock in, but I don't see a VS Code fork or yet another Chromium browser being something that a person couldn't easily replace with another similar fork, but with a different AI. It that the pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or IDE, so they'll be forced to use a certain AI?
by mamonster | 2025-11-19 09:23:55+00:00
Honestly, now that you have all-white snus, basically all of the issues of cigarettes are gone (and they are so fking expensive in Europe) and you get all of the benefits of nicotine. I don't need to go outside the office, just sit at my desk and continue working. Now that the market is developed you can vary nicotine dosage at will.

Maybe someone else here heard something different, but my dentist told me that there don't seem to be any dental issues associated with oral pouches, at least so far ?
by marrs | 2025-11-19 09:23:57+00:00
> In a text that introduces itself with a section describing the increase in brown people, if you talk about crime in the next section, the context is brown people. And you know it, unless your reading comprehension skill is on the level of a toddler.

I absolutely don't know it. Reading comprehension is being able to accurately describe what's written; not inferring insinuations and presenting them as fact. You can't even get your first sentence right. DHH doesn't say London is now full of brown people; he says London is no longer full of native Brits. If you look at the chart in the article he links to, you'll notice that many (not quite most) of the immigrants he's talking about are white; but you presume they must be brown. Then you see a subset of Pakistanis mentioned and it just reinforces your cognitive bias.

Try to empty your mind of these preconceptions and read the article again.

> And the point about confusing nations and states is salient, because that is exactly what nationalists do.

Where does DHH do that in the article? Please provide an actual quote this time instead of some vague interpretation.

I'm still unclear what point you're trying to make about nations in the first place anyway. Earlier you said:

> Re nation: a nation is the socially constructed identity I was talking about. It can be mono- or multicultural, and people from other cultures may be integrated, it's all vibes-based depending on the nation. But one thing is clear, if you're born into a culture you are part of the culture, and so through a civic nationalist logic you are automatically part of that nation. Also note that nation does not equal state or country.

So if a nation can be made up of multiple potentially divergent cultures then it's clearly not tied to culture. If it's not tied to state either, then is it just tied to region? If it is, then what value does a nation even have? Why even name it? Britain is a state and a nation. Does that make it nationalist? Is it therefore a lost cause to begin with, as far as you're concerned?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're from mainland Europe, because your concept of nationhood seems to be rooted in European nationalism.
by jesuswasjew | 2025-11-19 09:24:15+00:00
Problem is, new adopters of digital presence do so by standardized convention set by market and market incentivise faster and efficient adoption and cloudflare is/has become that standard as what wordpress became decades ago, for bloggers. The boogeyman hackers pose uncertainity and cloudflare standard promised a solution against it, especially ddos. I usually reverse dig new companies and almost all of them are behind cloudflare. It is just a learned helplessness.
by graemep | 2025-11-19 09:24:21+00:00
Those are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between).

Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go wrong.

A lot of people want the brand recognition too. Its also become the standard way of doing things and is part of the business culture. I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
Codeberg under attack for everyone else as well?
by LtWorf | 2025-11-19 09:24:32+00:00
I've received several AI generated bugreports in a matter of minutes.

They contain hate towards trans people, slurs, links…

One was a realistic AI generated bugreport from a user complaining and whining. If it had come alone I'd have taken it seriously. But like the other ones it was from a fresh account.

Are others experiencing this?
by eru | 2025-11-19 09:24:33+00:00
Gwern's page (https://gwern.net/nicotine) and personal anecdata seems to go against the claims of nicotine by itself being addictive, especially 'highly addictive'.

Smoking (or even vaping) might be 'highly addictive'. But nicotine as eg patches that you glue on your skin doesn't seem to cause much addiction, if any at all.
by Jensson | 2025-11-19 09:24:36+00:00
> No I'm saying that if you don't have anything new or informative to say, don't say it.

I don't see anyone else saying that here yet though? Every day new people learn about that quote, its a good quote that helps many not lose money, its not bad to post it where its relevant.

If you goad people to lose their money then they can defend with that quote, that is fine.
by sph | 2025-11-19 09:25:40+00:00
I also blame screens. My other pet theory is that in 30 years we'll discover there is really no such thing as ADHD, just pre-frontal dopaminergic dysfunction from a lot of different causes, such as addiction (there is a great presentation by Dr. Todd Love about how ADHD and drug addiction present exactly the same), superstimuli frying our reward systems and natural differences in drive between people. What we're doing now is just treating the symptoms.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-11-19 09:26:02+00:00
That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.

I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks
by ktallett | 2025-11-19 09:26:47+00:00
I like the idea a lot more than other implementations (although I still think the original google glass was great), but I do feel the market for these, outside of the bankers and financial industry that loves to show off with tech, is primarily dorks like myself, and dorks like myself often like to be able to fiddle. The fact I can't be trusted to install applications that I can make as I go with an easy to use api seems a mistake. I see the even hub but that seems far off considering there is no details about it.
by the8472 | 2025-11-19 09:27:47+00:00
"if it compiles it runs" - this is indeed an inaccurate marketing slogan. A more precise formulation would be "if it compiles then the static type system, pattern matching, explicit errors, Send bounds, etc. will have caught a lot of bugs that in other languages would have manifested as runtime errors".

Anecdotally I can write code for several hours, deploy it to a test sandbox without review or running tests and it will run well enough to use it, without silly errors like null pointer exceptions, type mismatches, OOBs etc. That doesn't mean it's bug-free. But it doesn't immediately crash and burn either. Recently I even introduced a bug that I didn't immediately notice because careful error handling in another place recovered from it.
by imoverclocked | 2025-11-19 09:29:03+00:00
I think we need to make a highly-available downdetector from a collection of SBCs hosted around the world. Each node gets its configuration via git-pull which is self-hosted/republished. Simplest DNS configuration possible: each node has a unique $n.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com while they also happily host a common hostname with simple dns round robin entries for it.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com. The common page attempts to load a check resource (perhaps just a tiny css output?) from all of the $n.i.u.c nodes which just changes a div from gray to green/red.

It would be interesting to see just how small this whole thing could be; I bet it could be made into a <500MB sdcard image for a RaspberryPi4/2GB that simply updates a static css out of (say) cron and serves a surprising number of HN requests.

With all of this redundancy, there is no way it could fail! /s
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-19 09:29:05+00:00
It is just 2 different layers. Of course the code is also a problem, if it is in fact as the GP describes it. You are taking the higher level view, which is the second layer of dealing with not only this specific mistake, but also other mistakes, that can be related to arbitrary code paths.

Both are important, and I am pretty sure, that someone is gonna fix that line of code pretty soon.
by lan321 | 2025-11-19 09:29:10+00:00
In eastern europe they do. It's a decent revenue stream. The loop for many friends is:

Put on tint.

Get pulled over (hopefully) a while later

Police demand you remove it and usually write you a ticket for ~50 eur

Maybe you plead that the car is your dad's if it's not registered to you and get to keep the tint if they decide to do you a favor

Otherwise you remove it and go pay another X eur a week later to have new one put on

Since there's no license point deduction, it's just a money/inconvenience issue.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-19 09:30:25+00:00
> I don't see anyone else saying that here yet though?

My original thought was:

> It's totally fine to say something like "I'm worried that the actual products that the AI boom are producing won't generate enough revenue to justify these levels of investment." But the silly doomshilling happening constantly makes no sense. Perhaps more saliently, if you treat the market as a source of economic information, the doomshilling seems to offer no new information at all.

I'm not sure what folks are thinking about money when they read what I say. I think there's some imputed values about gambling and money there (namely I read some values about gambling being bad and money being dangerous) that might be confusing from my point.

Money is just the tool to hold one accountable for what they say. Saying something like "oh it's obvious Oracle is in trouble, AI is a bubble it's going down" (not actually what GP said) is, to me, a post of sentiment without information. It's the kind of thing I do in group chats not online forums. I think it's important for folks who post a sentiment to either post why they believe that sentiment with some amount of detail or to have some consequence for failure for their sentiment. Or else the commons are polluted with irrelevant at best and incorrect at worst content.

Put another way, I think the open internet needs a much, much, much higher level of gatekeeping than it gets now. Putting money behind your beliefs is one way to do this. And since we're talking about publicly tradable financial instruments, it seems like a fairly obvious one.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-19 09:30:51+00:00
> an uncaught exception is not a big deal

In my experience, it actually is a big deal, leaving a wake of indeterminant state behind after stack unrolling. The app then fails with heisenbugs later, raising more exceptions that get ignored, compounding the problem.

People just shrug off that unreliability as an unavoidable cost of doing business.
by wohoef | 2025-11-19 09:31:14+00:00
Find a new dentist. Nicotine pouches are incredibly bad for oral health. Huge risk of oral cancer. And it’ll make your gums recline, exposing your nerves (this hurts). Also nicotine itself is quite bad for you to begin with (cardiovascular health, anxiety, etc).

Sure snus is better than smoking, but that’s just because most things are better than smoking.
by anthk | 2025-11-19 09:31:36+00:00
Exult did this decades ago :).

On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.

BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-19 09:31:45+00:00
The whole "porn is a poison to society" narrative is very strong with conservatives now. A lot of them (here in Holland even) want it banned like it's Afghanistan and for everyone to have a family with lots of kids that has their dinner at 6pm after prayer.

I also don't subscribe to that. I'm polyamorous and sex-positive. And very LGBTIQ friendly. But I've seen that attitude a lot even in Europe :( especially from the emerging extreme right parties.

I don't really understand it either. Why is it any of their business what I do? I don't tell them they can't have a big traditional family. Why are they so preoccupied with me.
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-11-19 09:31:58+00:00
Problem is when 2 billion Brazilian bots hit your blog daily and exhaust all resources, crashing it and preventing you from posting a new post.

If you host images as well, your bandwidth costs might skyrocket.

I was pretty much forced into putting a site I'm managing for a client behind cloudflare due to the above-mentioned issue.
by eredengrin | 2025-11-19 09:32:26+00:00
It worked for me on GrapheneOS for quite a while, but a couple months ago things started breaking and I no longer have it enabled. There's an absolute behemoth of a thread discussing the issue, and unfortunately it's still active which I assume means I'm not safe to enable it again yet. If you want some light reading to help put yourself to sleep: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...
by fithisux | 2025-11-19 09:32:50+00:00
Why keep XSLT if the huge majority of devs use the HTML5+CSS+Javascript combo? Why pump money on a standard which will not be used?

Are XML technologies better or safer? Probably. However practice sets the standards. Is it a good thing? It remains to be seen.

Personally I am not satisfied with the "Web" experience. I find it unsafe, privacy disrespecting, slow and non-standards compliant.
by refurb | 2025-11-19 09:34:01+00:00
Actually the United States stands out not from the moralism, that’s very common in other countries.

What amazed me is how many Americans think immigration laws are optional. That entering and working illegally is no biggie.

Every other country I’ve lived in has much more strict immigration laws. Even the 3rd world countries that can’t seem to deliver potable tap water.

Deportations are standard, quick and supported by the population. Actually “supported” is wrong, it was more “yeah and…?”. No anger, self-riteousbess, just “thats how it’s supposed to work”

Most countries consider immigration enforcement is as standard as enforcing laws against bank robbery or littering. “Why wouldn’t you do it?” is the most typical take.
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-19 09:35:31+00:00
> They consistently have the best or second best models.

This is the problem with your original argument. It assumes that having a "good model" (e.g. one that performs well on some benchmarks) has somehow to do with something in the real world. It doesn't. If you can show that it does, your thesis might have at least a glimmer of credibility.

The idea that a chatbot will somehow displace an operating system is the kind of absurdity that follows from making this error.
Show HN: Solar Panel Shade Simulator – Visualize How Shading Impacts PV Output
by funsi | 2025-11-19 09:36:18+00:00
I built an interactive solar panel shade simulator that lets you click on individual solar cells to apply shade and instantly see how it affects power production at the cell, string, and system level.

The goal is to make the often-confusing behavior of shaded solar panels intuitive—especially how string current is limited by the most-shaded cell, and how bypass diodes change the story.

Why I built it

Shading is one of the least intuitive aspects of solar PV design, and most explanations are either too simplistic or too academic. This tool aims to bridge that gap with a hands-on visualization you can play with. Also, I wanted to try how good Lovable really is :)
by cstrahan | 2025-11-19 09:38:17+00:00
> Okay....now what function calls or libraries should the API use to write that code?

Whatever the most popular library is which provides a client to whatever "thing" (locally running process, or service, or whatever) you are trying to interact with via LLM.

I have had LLMs generate probably 10s of thousands of lines of code, all without providing an MCP. LLMs can do that. They are trained on code.

What if there isn't a library available? Well, sure, then you could go implement an MCP server... or you could just write a library. It's practically the same effort.

Not that I'm 100% against MCP servers. But I think there's some misconception spreading across the software community that an MCP server is always inherently the optimal, obvious solution; all I'm suggesting is that people actually think about the problem, instead of outsourcing that responsibility via a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" type of appeal to bandwagon fallacy.
by 0xAFFFF | 2025-11-19 09:38:36+00:00
Fellow ADHDer here, I'm not a smoker but long before I was diagnosed, lyrics from a song of my favorite band/artist hit me particularly hard. It was Drag by Joey Cape/Lagwagon, a song about the struggles of smoking. Here's the part, especially the last two lines.

The drag on the next one Is something I can look forward to Something to slow the synapse Something to do with my hands

I'm lucky enough to be properly medicated now and to have been shielded from smoking by a combination of favorable family environment, a great pediatrist back then and great prevention efforts in school, because if not I'm pretty sure I would have been a heavy smoker. The need for mental peace and focus was just too strong.
by jesuswasjew | 2025-11-19 09:39:04+00:00
I wish online discourses didn't feel like engaging with possible shills for corporations as it did during 2000s, or maybe it didn't. Maybe, we became too aware and critical or maybe there is absolutely no honest discourse possible when commerce, political or even ideological agendas are involved. The best stance should one that presents varied solutions to a common problem.