MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kstrauser | 2025-11-07 15:55:26+00:00
A lot of my programs crash, and that’s a deliberate choice. If you call one of them like “./myprog.py foo.txt”, and foo.txt doesn’t exist, it’ll raise a FileNotFound exception and fail with a traceback. Thing is, that’s desirable here. If could wrap that in a try/except block, but I’d either be adding extraneous info (“print(‘the file does not exist’); raise”) or throwing away valuable info by swallowing the traceback so the user doesn’t see the context of what failed.

My programs can’t do anything about that situation, so let it crash.

Same logic for:

* The server in the config file doesn’t exist.

* The given output file has bad permissions.

* The hard drive is full.

Etc. And again, that’s completely deliberate. There’s nothing I can do in code to fix those issues, so it’s better to fail with enough info that the user can diagnose and fix the problem.

That was in Python. I do the same in Rust, again, deliberately. While of course we all handle the weird cases we’re prepared to handle, I definitely write most database calls like “foo = db.exec(query)?” because if PostgreSQL can’t execute the query, the safest option is to panic instead of trying foolhardily to get back the last known safe state.

And of course that’s different for different use cases. If you’re writing a GUI app, it makes much more sense to pop up a dialog and make the user go fix the issue before retrying.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-07 15:55:49+00:00
The FBI and courts are enforcing the law that exists solely because the Founding Fathers enshrined it, but that says nothing about the ethical views that might exist among Americans. There are plenty of Americans who don’t find selling pirated media ethically problematic and would like to see the kind of marketplace sales and wide use of Bittorrent boxes that people in other countries have enjoyed.
by everfrustrated | 2025-11-07 15:56:08+00:00
As someone used to Datadog I can't find anything that comes close. Datadog makes it so easy to throw adhoc data up on a screen and explore a hypothesis from there. Using Grafana or New Relic feels like going from a 30" screen to a 14" laptop - everything is just harder and more frustrating in ways that are hard to articulate.
by moron4hire | 2025-11-07 15:56:49+00:00
No, it's true. There can be defects in the graphics driver that make certain, specific functions in GLSL or WGSL either completely broken or woefully inefficient.

It can be very dependent on hardware generation, too. One of my past projects was a very simple, photosphere-based learning environment. Photosphere rendering is incredibly simple. But on Intel processors with Iris Xe integrated GPUs used by one particular year of iMacs (I don't remember which, it only impacted 2 users and it was several years ago), I couldn't use the standard cube sampler because it was just broken. I had to split my photospheres into 6 cube faces and render 6 quads separately to be able to use the not-broken 2d sampler. The issue didn't appear on any other generation of Iris Xe on macOS and it didn't appear on any generation of Iris Xe on any other OS. It was very specifically the combination of macOS and that generation of GPU.
by pornel | 2025-11-07 15:57:03+00:00
Fil-C uses `free()` to mark memory as no longer valid, so it is important to keep using manual memory management to let Fil-C catch UAF bugs (which are likely symptoms of logic bugs, so you'd want to catch them anyway).

The whole point of Fil-C is having C compatibility. If you're going to treat it as a deployment target on its own, it's a waste: you get overhead of a GC language, but with clunkiness and tedium of C, instead of nicer language features that ground-up GC languages have.
by ozim | 2025-11-07 15:57:04+00:00
I think you don’t see ads that are served in there. Those are outright scams like fake investments and not just crypto but outright “buy big company X shares to get rich, photo of celebrity” with celebrities not even knowing they are used for those scam ads - meta doesn’t do shit about it.

Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.

You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to wire money that’s the level we are talking about here.
Show HN: Hellocafe.ai – open-source voice and chat enabled AI ordering system
by westoque | 2025-11-07 15:57:09+00:00
we wanted to experiment on how feasible it is to build a cafe ordering system using chat and voice with 100% local models.

we were able to build this demo using llama 8B for the llm and whisper for tts/stt. it's deployed using kubernetes and could be used a base for any AI enabled application.
by akerl_ | 2025-11-07 15:57:25+00:00
My pitch is that it’s generally bad and dangerous for society to make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action.

If I ship a game and my obligations about updates change depending on how popular the game gets, that limits what games I’m willing to release.

Sorry, No Man’s Sky sold too many copies on day 1, so now we can’t ship any fixes that break backwards compatibility.
by phkahler | 2025-11-07 15:57:33+00:00
>> Using a compositor fixes screen tearing, no need to use Wayland for that.

Right, and that abandons the whole X drawing API in favor of passing around client drawn bitmaps. That was one of the big points of Wayland too - X has a whole bunch of stuff that no modern apps use anyway so lets throw it out and build up a better version of the capabilities we need.

If we abandon the X drawing API and half an OS included (memory management) and use KMS, all that's left is the features that are security holes.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-07 15:57:45+00:00
Anything related to WinUI is a bad joke.

Have fun following the discussions and amount of bugs,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml

That C++ support that WinUI team marketing keeps talking about relies on a framework that is no longer being developed.

> The reason the issues page only lets you create a bug report is because cppwinrt is in maintenance mode and no longer receiving new feature work. cppwinrt serves an important and specific role, but further feature development risks destabilizing the project. Additional helpers are regularly contributed to complimentary projects such as https://github.com/microsoft/wil/.

From https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme...
by GrumpyYoungMan | 2025-11-07 15:58:14+00:00
Software "engineering" doesn't kill people instantly in a flashy way, sure, but it has become more like leaded gasoline, a widespread low-level harm whose effects are increasingly evident in hindsight. You pretty much can't go more than a couple of days without hearing about another massive consumer data compromise by hackers, CVE, major services outage, etc. At some point, there is going to be a software related incident that is bad enough that the public and government is going to demand accountability.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-07 15:58:18+00:00
> > It's not that I couldn't have written that oneliner, it's that I assumed you'd get blocked very quickly.

> junon https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=junon

> You are being purposefully obtuse here. HIBP is a very, very well established site with a long history of operating in good faith.

Allowing people to query and someone downloading the entire dataset is normally considered abuse, so being blocked is the expectation here. You're so dense you're bending light around you.
by alde | 2025-11-07 15:58:29+00:00
Huh, such a self-deprecating take on software engineering can only come from a software engineer.

If the author spent more time with people working in other "real" engineering or science fields, he would know how much slop and lazy reasoning there is in there.

For a visual confirmation, look at how much faulty and badly designed cars or house electrical appliances get released every year. Things which break after a couple weeks of use.

Quality is rare everywhere, not just in SWE.
by simpaticoder | 2025-11-07 15:58:30+00:00
>I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies"

Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize it's not worth it.

The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or malicious individual malefactors.

In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
by estebank | 2025-11-07 15:58:34+00:00
The annoying experience with the borrow checker is when following the compiler errors after making a change until you hit a fundamental ownership problem a few levels away from the original change that precludes the change (like ending up with a self referencial borrow). This can bite even experienced developers, depending on how many layers of indirection there are (and sometimes the change that would be adding a single Rc or Cell in a field isn't applicable because it happens in a library you don't control). I do still prefer hitting that wall than having it compile and end up with rare incorrect runtime behaviour (with any luck, a segfault), but it is more annoying than "it just works because the GC dealt with it for me".
by hamdingers | 2025-11-07 15:58:53+00:00
Similarly, if you wanted to watch every single NFL game:

NFL Sunday Ticket ($150-204/season) - Out-of-market Sunday afternoon games

Amazon Prime Video ($9/month) - Thursday Night Football

Peacock Premium ($10.99/month) - Some exclusive games on NBC

ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month) - Monday Night Football on ESPN/ABC

Fox One ($19.99/month) - Fox Sunday games

Paramount+ ($7.99/month) - CBS Sunday games

Netflix - Two Christmas Day games
by troyvit | 2025-11-07 15:59:00+00:00
I don't know if how close Europe is, but I'm sufficiently whelmed by Mistral that I don't need to look elsewhere yet. It's kind-of like having a Toyota Corolla while everybody else is driving around in smart cars but it gets it done. On top of it, there's a loyal community that (maybe because I'm not looking) I don't see with other products. It probably depends on your uses, but if I spent all my time chasing the latest chat models (like Kimi K2 for instance) I wouldn't actually get anything done.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-07 15:59:10+00:00
Either you're trusting a large number of individuals and therefore haven't done proper vetting, or you're trusting a small number of individuals and are vulnerable.

I was very upset when I found out how the NYT was manipulated to shill for the Iraq war.

I was also very upset when one of the bloggers I followed went crazy slowly and it took too long for me to notice. I also had another I trusted who turned out to be a biased corporate shill.

I don't trust the NYT, but I trust the process of their checks and balances in their organization and the presence of inside whistle blowers more than I do any individual blogger.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 15:59:33+00:00
> The tech is from America actually, decades ago. (Thorium).

I guess it depends on how you see it, but regardless, the people putting it to use today doesn't seem to be in the US.

FWIW:

> Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius during his analysis of a new mineral [...] In 1824, after more deposits of the same mineral in Vest-Agder, Norway, were discovered [...] While thorium was discovered in 1828 its first application dates only from 1885, when Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the gas mantle [...] Thorium was first observed to be radioactive in 1898, by the German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt

For being an American discovery, it sure has a lot of European people involved in it :) (I've said it elsewhere but worth repeating; trying to track down where a technology/invention actually comes from is a fools errand, and there is always something earlier that led to today, so doesn't serve much purpose except nationalism it seems to me).
by meonkeys | 2025-11-07 15:59:42+00:00
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/instal... is a great place to start.

So much depends on your use case. Can you say more about that? And what have you already tried? I'm skeptical their server-side tuning suggestions will improve your "initial loading delay" depending on what that means exactly. If you mean you see a slow cold cache page load of the Files app web UI (or any Nextcloud app, really) then I'd say that's common with many complex JS-heavy web apps, including Nextcloud.

FWIW, my Nextcloud web UI seems as fast as I'd expect. Roughly 5sec to load the Files app completely in Firefox (logged-in & warm cache) and this is roughly the same time Google Drive takes to do the same thing! Navigating folders actually feels faster in Nextcloud Files.

I'm not using the web UI except when I have to. I do as much as possible locally (e.g. editing docs, contacts/calendars/tasks). I mostly use Nextcloud for mobile and desktop file/calendar/contacts/photo/notes/tasks sync & share and it seems to do quite well at this. Server-side I did spend a lot of time tuning at first, but it has been stable for years once I got it to a good place.
by memsom | 2025-11-07 15:59:55+00:00
> The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are [...] and flutter

I wouldn't really call Flutter "native".

I don't have a strong enough grasp of where React Native is at now. It was severely lacking when I looked at it circa 2018. But then we needed to call in to our own native code libraries, so we were probably quite niche.

Xamarin.Forms worked well enough, but the transition to MAUI has been full of woe and even more bugs and weird edge case functionality than Xamarin had.
by jinwoo68 | 2025-11-07 15:59:56+00:00
That happens whether immutable or not. In the mutable world, you have to guard that using a mutex or something. In that case, operation 1 may be blocked by operation 2, and now you get a "stale" state from operation 2. But that's okay. You'll get a new state next time. The real problem occurs when two states are mixed and corrupted.
by atlas-systems | 2025-11-07 16:00:09+00:00
This is a live preview of Erevos v1.3, a minimal adaptive control system.

It detects when its internal processes start to overload and automatically re-balances itself toward baseline.

The demo visualises this feedback loop in real time — you can watch it shift between stress, correction, and stability as inputs change.

I built it as a proof-of-concept for adaptive stability — showing how a simple feedback loop can detect its own stress and correct itself without supervision.

Demo: atlas-systems-labs.com/demo

Code: github.com/Atlas-Systems-Labs/erevos-demo

I’m curious how others see this kind of adaptive feedback loop fitting into areas like simulation, robotics, or behavioural systems.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-11-07 16:00:43+00:00
Chrysler didn't really recover. It made it out alive but soon chose to be eaten by Stellantis. They now are in crisis again, but under different ownership structure so another bailing is highly unlikely. They are at best 50% American (financially) with only one vehicle in production (big minivan and medium minivan, both terrible).

GM made it, but quite a bit of their family didn't.

I would be happy to see the Microsofts being forced to choose between axing something like Xbox and Office to survive the 2030s due to AI becoming a brown turd investment. That would be wild.
by godshatter | 2025-11-07 16:01:37+00:00
It can't be hardware, as others have noted these kinds of games have been working great on machines that are magnitudes slower than the OPs machine. Maybe it's some kind of search that is running linearly on an assumed small dataset and it gets bigger than imagined, instead of it running a binary search or something. Maybe some of the data is unreasonably large for what it contains and can't get cached as easily.

And, as others have mentioned, if you really want to know, profile.
by kaon_2 | 2025-11-07 16:01:39+00:00
I once read a fascinating booklet that made the argument that "intelligence" as we call it evolved out of the ability to track better. Early hominids had many different skills, but improved reasoning capability paid for itself evolutionary speaking by making you a much better tracker. You spot measure the temperature of droppings, and reason that a gazelle was here only 2 hours ago. You see the tracks and notice that the gazelle was probably in the shade to avoid the midday sun. Now it must be thirsty and is therefore likely to go visit the stream nearby.

In that context, "Intelligence" is just one part of a collection of useful skills for a band of early hominids. You only need a few great trackers, but those trackers would be grateful if they also had some "meatheads" in the crew that are phenomenally atletic. And who knows; early hominids would mock each other for not being good at tracking, but would they call each other dumb? I somehow doubt it.
by toast0 | 2025-11-07 16:01:41+00:00
> This again? In general, Software Engineering is not engineering.

Software Engineering is definitely Engineering. But Software Development usually doesn't practice it. I've got a degree in Computer Engineering and took SE courses and at least at the companies I've been at, we never did any of that. You can't use formal methods without a formalized specification, and I never even got a written specification of any project I worked on in 20+ years. Regardless, Software Engineers don't wear stripey hats and are not real engineers.

There's not much structual engineering in single family home construction either. A couple story wood frame building needs to be pretty exotic to have structural issues (but soft story buildings used to be common and collapse with strong earthquakes)
by lm28469 | 2025-11-07 16:01:59+00:00
> but I use those 1,000 apples to start my own orchard

Steal cuttings, not the fruit, if you plan to start an orchard. From 1000 apples you'll get ~10 000 seeds, statistically you won't even end up with one good tree.

> An output of three cultivars from around 50.000 seeds means that 17.000 seeds were needed to get one cultivar. Only one out of around 9.000 scab resistant seedlings showed the appropriate quality to become a cultivar. This proportion underlines the enormous effort which is necessary to develop a new cultivar.

https://orgprints.org/id/eprint/13698/1/220-225.pdf
by mr_mitm | 2025-11-07 16:02:01+00:00
That fuzziness can be quantified. It's called error bars. Whenever physicists perform a measurement, they always derive a confidence interval from the instruments they use. They take great care of accounting for the limits of each individual instrument, perform error propagation and report the uncertainty of the final result.

Consider figure 5 of the following article for example:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3470

The differently shaded ellipses represent different confidence levels. For the largest ellipsis, the probability of the true values being outside of it is less than 1%. We call that 3-sigma confidence.

> Whenever I read things like "This model can't explain the bullet cluster, or X rotation curve, so it's probably wrong" my internal response is "Your underlying data sources are too fuzzy to make your model the baseline!"

Well, then do some error analysis and report your results. Give us sigmas, percentages, probabilities. Science isn't based on gut feelings, but cold hard numbers.
by empath75 | 2025-11-07 16:02:08+00:00
Any definition of engineering which excludes the Wright brothers and James Watt, who _invented the machine that gives the field it's name_ is a fairly poor definition. If you're creating something in a poorly understood situation by applying rules of thumb, you're doing engineering. Depending on what you are doing, flying by the seat of your pants might be really poor engineering practice, or you might be doing cutting edge work that people will be studying decades from now. Those rules of thumb might be a result of personal trial and error, or you might be getting them from a detailed technical manual. It just depends on what the state of the art is, the maturity of the field, etc.
by neoCrimeLabs | 2025-11-07 16:02:20+00:00
Have similar studies been done over the decades?

I remember the same sentiment when I was a teen and the sentiment was common among my peers.

The times have changes significantly, and what is available to teens is very different now than what it was even 5 years ago.

That said, the teen brain likely has not changed much in that time. (trying to assert independence, be different than their parents, do what they want, trust what they want, etc)
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 16:02:30+00:00
GPT-OSS-120b/20b is probably the best you can run on your own hardware today. Be careful with the quantized versions though, as they're really horrible compared to the native MXFP4. I haven't looked in this particular case, but Ollama tends to hide their quantizations for some reason, so most people who could be running 20B with MXFP4, are still on Q8 and getting much worse results than they could.
by lostapathy | 2025-11-07 16:02:34+00:00
The "you can just not agree to it" argument is so bogus. You can only buy good/services that are for sale, and when they all have the same crappy terms, you have to agree to somebody's to live in the modern world.

That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house" it's "live in an apartment forever"
Show HN: React Prompt Kit
by _pdp_ | 2025-11-07 16:02:48+00:00
A React-based toolkit for building structured prompts using JSX, inspired by Claude's XML tags best practices.

Traditional prompt strings become hard to maintain as soon as they mix instructions, examples, and formatting rules. React Prompt Kit lets you compose those pieces using familiar JSX, then reliably renders them into clean XML/Markdown that large language models understand.

You get:

* Readable, declarative prompt definitions that live alongside your React code

* Automatic whitespace handling and Markdown conversion so outputs stay consistent

* A set of dedicated components that capture common AI prompt patterns without reinventing XML tags each time

Features:

* Structured Prompts - Use React components to build well-organized prompts

* XML Tag Preservation - Components output proper XML tags for AI prompt engineering

* Markdown Conversion - Standard HTML elements convert to clean Markdown

* Security-Aware - Inline elements strip XML tags and normalize whitespace to prevent injection

* TypeScript Support - Full type definitions included

* Composable - Mix and match 50+ pre-built components

* Flexible - Use with any LLM that supports structured prompts

* Code Block Escaping - Automatically escapes backticks in code blocks using proper markdown fencing
by Selkirk | 2025-11-07 16:02:49+00:00
Looks like game theory interaction strategies presented with a bit of color:

Stupid = Spite (lose / lose); Helpless = Altruism (lose / win); Bandit = Selfishness (win / lose); Intelligent = Cooperation (win / win)

The OP "Laws":

Everyone underestimates the number of spiteful individuals in circulation.

The probability that a certain person be spiteful is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

... and so on through ...

A spiteful person is more dangerous than a selfish person.