MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quamserena | 2025-11-05 01:29:11+00:00
> Your syntax complaints will never be well-justified. It’s just a syntax family you are unfamiliar with, not an actual downside. You can either put up with it or change language. The syntax is however in no way inferior to C style syntax because that’s what you are used to.

I think match statements should have an explicit `end` terminator or something so that you can nest them naturally. I think errors from accidental partial function application could be clearer. I think those two are pretty objective.

In terms of my subjective opinion the punctuation of C-style makes code hierarchy more clear, but at the cost of making it read less fluidly. I also think that `let...in` is weird and that Rust straddles a nice middle ground here by not having it but still having everything be an expression.

I like strict languages, and I like Rust for its strictness and robustness. I don’t like its standard library though, I wish it was more batteries included.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-05 01:29:32+00:00
Google disabled cloud services, and therefore the app. The remote control features were a key reason many bought these.

Can you edit schedules directly on the thermostat? From what I recall, much of the functionality required the app. That can’t be used now.

If you’re only using it as an analog dial to set the temperature, you won’t miss anything. However the majority of functionality is now gone from the devices.
by vincenthwt | 2025-11-05 01:29:56+00:00
I agree, Deep Learning OCR often outperforms traditional methods.

But as engineers, it’s essential to understand and maintain the systems we build. If everything is a black box, how can we control it? Without understanding, we risk becoming dependent on systems we can’t troubleshoot or improve. Don’t you think it’s important for engineers to maintain control and not rely entirely on something they don’t fully understand?

That said, there are scenarios where using a black-box system is justifiable, such as in non-critical applications where performance outweighs the need for complete control. However, for critical applications, black-box systems may not be suitable due to the risks involved. Ultimately, what is "responsible" depends on the potential consequences of a system failure.
by Frannky | 2025-11-05 01:31:01+00:00
The problem with these types of technologies is that you will be at the mercy of whoever uses them. It's like chat control, censorship, gun laws, etc. You can't control how they will be leveraged.

I lived in California for some time a few years ago, and it was a mess, so I understand people being okay with this type of stuff if it will make them more secure, but it's a very risky slippery slope.

The other thing is that with all the data Google has, they can probably uncover everything they need just by paying for Google Ads data :/
by croes | 2025-11-05 01:31:27+00:00
It can be both but it definitely had a security problem

> Mitre lists more than 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities.

>Flash ranks 14th on the list of products ranked by the number of vulnerabilities – one of only two applications in the top 25 that aren’t operating systems or browsers.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-manage...
by epolanski | 2025-11-05 01:31:44+00:00
Authoritarianism by definition is about controlling all the forms of power, not about expanding one.

Nor it has anything to do with what countries do around the world. You can be democratically elected, law abiding, not overreach and bomb weddings abroad, those are not related.

US has the same constitutional weakness of the countries that went authoritarian in the last decades: a presidential republic.

There's one thing that Russia, Belarus, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua made constitutionally simpler to allow authoritarianism to happen, they gave the country a president elected by the government.

Thus enabling: - personality cult - hard to remove individuals - claiming popular mandate despite anything - deadlocks

All those situations are breeding grounds for chaos.

Say what you want about slow Europe, but it's hard, very hard to pull this stuff here where most countries don't have popular elections for presidents.

In parliamentary republics those shifts are very difficult and are generally centred on party-ism, so identification between state and party.

This is the Indian and Hungarian playbook, as the constitutions don't allow individuals to power grab with ease, it's a very tougher game to succeed.

You don't win an election and start firing executive orders and stretching their limits while courts get to decide what the limits are.
by unoti | 2025-11-05 01:32:30+00:00
> Please just use Docker in a microVM or whatever. It's 0% slower and 100% more mature.

Wasm has different characteristics than docker containers and as a result can target different use cases and situations. For example, Imagine needing plugins for game mods or an actor system, where you need hundreds of them or thousands, with low latency startup times and low memory footprints and low overheads. This is something you can do sanely with wasm but not with containers. So containers are great for lots of things but not every conceivable thing, there’s still a place for wasm.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-05 01:33:39+00:00
That's only partially correct. The vast majority of missiles were intercepted by Israel. I was surprised at how little drones featured in the war. It seems that sophisticated defences can easily handle them. Ukraine and russia use them to devastating effect, but neither of those countries are on the cutting edge of warfare . Western armies have more in common with Israel so hopefully drone attacks are a solved thing for them.
by stephen_g | 2025-11-05 01:34:53+00:00
I’m sure it is still taught, but a lot of power designs do often now swap diodes out for actively controlled mosfets, for example in power multiplexing (there are integrated chips called ‘ideal diodes’ or eFuses which use mosfets that do it all for you), or swapping the diodes in DC/DC converters with mosfets (called ‘synchronous rectification’).
by rameerez | 2025-11-05 01:36:16+00:00
OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)

The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start breaking a sweat.

Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN and your site will be alright.
by nis0s | 2025-11-05 01:37:46+00:00
If AI spending is only improving the bottom line via job cuts, you’re doing AI spending wrong. You’re misinterpreting gains from reduced payroll expenses as increased productivity or market share. What a fucking mistake. If AI spending isn’t directly contributing to sales in some fashion, then you’re just clowning around by pushing money from payrolls to revenue. Your company hasn’t innovated, your product hasn’t become more attractive or competitive, and your business is just as profitable as it was prior to the AI spending.
by p1necone | 2025-11-05 01:37:56+00:00
Anecdotally I find myself appending 'reddit' to search terms very frequently. It's effectively shorthand for "I want to read about peoples direct experience with this thing", and reddit is huge and well crawled by search engines. It's astroturfed to hell especially around political topics, but I feel like it's easy to tell when discussions about random products are authentic.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-11-05 01:38:11+00:00
The damage done by scammers is enormous. Families losing their life’s savings. Quite often these scams are perpetrated on less sophisticated people so the economic damage to them is even more devastating.

It’s not like the government woke up one day and started to cane scammers. There have been years of educational programs in different languages. A campaign with special focus on protecting the elderly. Every time you transfer money with your online banking app you get a warning about scammers. They instituted an SMS registry that results in unknown numbers (for instance pretending to be your bank) showing up as “LIKELY SCAM” on your phone. That hasn’t eradicated the problem, so now the punishment goes up.

Imagine a government that actually protects its citizens…
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-05 01:38:14+00:00
To be fair, I was using TPM a little genetically (hence the "etc"). I (perhaps wrongly) assume most SoC's today have a non-volatile area for storing roots of trust and possibly a bootloader. My only embedded experience was an Android-based tablet project where DRM on the firmware was of major import because features were locked behind time/geo-limited license keys.
by EGreg | 2025-11-05 01:38:22+00:00
I started out with linode, a decade ago.

It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous.

AWS has a bunch of startup credits you can use, if you're smart.

But if you want free hosting, nothing beats just CloudFlare. They are literally free and even let you sign up anonymously with any email. They don't even require a credit card, unlike the other ones. You can use cloudflare workers and have a blazing fast site, web services, and they'll even take care of shooing away bots for you. If you prefer to host something on your own computer, well then use their cache and set up a cloudflare tunnel. I've done this for Telegram bots for example.

Anything else - just use APIs. Need inference? Get a bunch of Google credits, and load your stuff into Vertex or whatever. Want to take payments anonymously from around the world? Deploy a dapp. Pay nothing. Literally nothing!

LEVEL 2:

And if you want to get extra fancy, have people open their browser tabs and run your javascript software in there, earning your cryptocurrency. Now you've got access to tons of people willing to store chunks of files for you, run GPU inference, whatever.

Oh do you want to do distributed inference? Wasmcloud: https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2025-01-15-running-distributed-ml... ... but I'd recommend just paying Google for AI workloads

Want livestreaming that's peer to peer? We've got that too: https://github.com/Qbix/Media/blob/main/web/js/WebRTC.js

PS: For webrtc livestreaming, you can't get around having to pay for TURN servers, though.

LEVEL 3:

Want to have unstoppable decentralized apps that can even run servers? Then use pears (previously dat / hypercore). If you change your mindset, from server-based to peer to peer apps, then you can run hypercore in the browser, and optionally have people download it and run servers.

https://pears.com/news/building-apocalypse-proof-application...
by colechristensen | 2025-11-05 01:38:54+00:00
>depending on the habit is a months supply max for some

People with substance abuse problems are generally the "get more every day or two" type not the "have a month's supply on hand" type.

And I really believe more in corporal punishment for a lot of things than the maze of fines, legal costs, and probation which really seems more like complicated inconvenience.

For drunk driving, sexual assault, and grand theft the appropriate punishment for the first offense is a public beating where they stop half way through and give you a chance to admit guilt and apologize on camera or they keep going. It would be particularly good for any fraud that nets you, say over a million dollars. Only for the kinds of crimes that have significant victims.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-05 01:39:12+00:00
>It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.

Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle.

>If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.

You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.
by arcastroe | 2025-11-05 01:39:26+00:00
hmm.. if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster, or would you have the same quibble there too?

Edit: Thinking about this some more: You could say you are saving 9x [of the new cost], and it would be a correct statement. I believe the error is assuming the reference frame is the previous cost vs the new cost, but since it is not specified, it could be either.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-05 01:40:18+00:00
Not really.

They are famous for having a lot of rules, but the instances where they really go wild are when someone has been particularly egregious.

For the most part it is just insanely materialistic as the main downside.

Most of the "harsh" rules make a tremendous amount of sense when you actually go there. Yeah, gum and spitting are illegal, and that is a good thing in a city as crowded as that with a significant population from countries where spitting is customary. Take an overnight train in China, and you will come to discover that you too appreciate a place where people can't just hork one up at will.

To put it into perspective, SG is one of the rare tier 1 cities where you can get a Michelin meal from a street vendor (literally), after engaging the services of a prostitute, and drinking a beer in public. It isn't nearly as uptight as an HOA.
by RussianCow | 2025-11-05 01:40:29+00:00
But way more difficult and with a much higher attack surface area.

And also, it's not necessarily apples to apples. It would be nice to be able to drop a compiled WASM module into your codebase and use it from just about any language on the backend. You could reuse a lot of code that way across different services without the overhead of spinning up yet another container. And you could potentially even run untrusted code in a sandboxed way.
by rzerowan | 2025-11-05 01:40:30+00:00
One thing that i would prefer in biometrics would be that the iris/fingerprints get treated as what they are publicly available and easily obtainable data.

At worst using it a a secret key is similar to using your name as a hidden variable for authorisation, whent it sshould strictly be a identification token.And once leaked you cant revoke it .

Back on topic , a Gattaca type system is unbelievably bleak and when(not if) it is finallly shoved through.It wont take long to foist it on the rest of the planet (see the recent visa requirements viz social media and insane bond requirements demanded of some countries like Mali citizens being asked for $15K per visa application).
by bruce511 | 2025-11-05 01:41:14+00:00
Building a business based on sales to consumers is hard. Consumers are fickle, their life-time value is low and acquisition costs are high. Products also tend to have very short life cycles. Any hint of success is quickly cloned and iterated on by others. It becomes primarily an exercise in marketing, not coding.

Assuming the value in the sale is static (ie not something like DuoLingo but more like Tetris) I would say the approach here is to build something fast, (like a couple months), spend the rest of the year promoting and pushing it, then (more or less) abandon it to make the next thing.

By year 2 you're looking to spend money only on marketing that is demonstrably profitable, while relying on word-of-mouth for residual sales. Sales will eventually approach zero.

Rinse and repeat, with a new product each year. Avoid the trap of "just coding" - remember you need probably 5 times coding time in marketing.

Try and save up enough to cover the inevitable flop years.

Of course the goal is to find the increasingly rare "hit". With any luck, sometime in the first 30 years, you'll have a "great year". Try and see this as your retirement and spend it accordingly. Resist the urge to use it to improve your life-style.

I wish you good luck on your journey. It is a very crowded space, with many intrinsic barriers to success. But it can also be satisfying if you manage to find success.
by bigiain | 2025-11-05 01:41:22+00:00
I started making sure my notes included the search queries keywords/keyphrases/terminology I uses and any webpages or documentation that I successfully used to come up with the solution (and where relevant, and search queries or misunderstandings on my part that lead to dead ends).

This hasn't solved the problem of sometimes needing to do new things, but it at least gives me a map to remind me of the parts of the rabbithole I've explored before.
by neoattikos | 2025-11-05 01:42:14+00:00
This is morphing definition of intellectual property rights in age of agents & chat bots in western world, public should not be calm about this, if ai scrapes all indie blogs of authors, chefs, journalists and even major news outlets, won’t it leave those human endeavors (creative or not, we can all agree it’s unique & done by humans with good economic incentives) vulnerable to stagnation and people forgetting that side of internet & going back to passively consuming it instead of participating in it because of lack of economic or even sociological incentive (if people summarize or loose attention anyway, why think or write of any nuance in politics, law, even fiction books, recipes etc., it becomes evolutionarily costly for humans to do this gradually)

> Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

Prudent or not, self serving or not, amazon is right to argue its access controls be strict and that it as owner of website should control it with industry wide accepted rules of engagement, this argument from perplexity is a bad one, human or not while browsing web is a low bar already, captcha etc. were easily circumvented even before ai agents, now if we argue agents are human adjacent, it is a direct case for removing humans of any agency (largely philosophically speaking) and not to mention, imagine the horror show of scams & ransomware it unleashes on millions of users (even engineers can’t recognize or stop them today, prompt injection etc)

This argument that websites controlling their access to bots & agents is a good idea. It should be the way it is, for businesses (amazon or not) and for internet blogs and open web associated sites, if they choose to exclude themselves from upcoming lovely silicon valley stories of ai utopias, they should be able to do so. No one should force them to ‘get with the program’.
by defrost | 2025-11-05 01:42:48+00:00
I had exposure to TIFF files shortly after the format creation in 1985/86, before the final form specification in 1992.

Not mentioned in either the article or the tail end wikipedia article iamge was the early adoption of TIFF by the mapping and geodetic community to store raster line data (maps, images, and raw sat and instrument platform multichannel line data).

The tagging format made the embedding of spheroids, datums, projections, origins, lens and focal specifications relatively easy (plus or minus the usual Tower of Babel Tag Naming and Meaning Confusion).
by consumer451 | 2025-11-05 01:43:05+00:00
> Yes! There's more oil in the ground than we should ever burn.

I don't think that everyone realizes what would happen if we did so. [0]

> Our calculated global warming in this case is 16°C, with warming at the poles about 30°C. Calculated warming over land areas averages ~20°C. Such temperatures would eliminate grain production in almost all agricultural regions in the world (Hatfield et al., 2011). Increased stratospheric water vapor would diminish the stratospheric ozone layer (Anderson et al., 2012).

My question is, what is going to stop this trajectory?

https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/what-if-we-burn-all-t...
by tombert | 2025-11-05 01:43:56+00:00
If you work for a BigCo, you're generally not allowed to do a "side thing", or at least they claim ownership and reserve the right to sue you over it if you are caught doing it. I know this isn't the case for every state, but it's still the case in NY; it's one of the (many) reasons I left Apple actually.

I don't think my current gig is so bad about that, but ironically I feel less of a compulsion to leave my current gig and start my own thing because I actually like this job.
by dangus | 2025-11-05 01:44:38+00:00
It’s amazing tech, it’s just a solution looking for a problem.

It feels a bit like the original Segway’s over-engineered solution versus cheap Chinese hoverboards, then the scooters and e-bikes that took over afterwards.

Why would I be paying all this money for this realistic telepresence when my shitbox HP laptop from Walmart has a perfectly serviceable webcam?
by sholladay | 2025-11-05 01:44:47+00:00
I think the main thing holding people back from leaving the cloud is simple inertia. There was a time when the cloud was obviously the right choice. Static IPv4 addresses were becoming scarce, IPv6 had not been deployed widely enough, and cloud providers made it easy to stand up a server and some storage with high speed links on the cheap. But over time, things have changed. Rate limits, data caps, and egress fees are now normal (and costly). IPv6 is now deployed widely enough that you might be willing to just run an IPv6-only stack, which greatly simplifies running a server on-premise. And of course, we've all seen time and again how providers will carelessly lock out your cloud account for arbitrary reasons with little to no recourse. The time has come to own your infrastructure again. But that won't happen until people realize it's easy to do.
by neoattikos | 2025-11-05 01:46:12+00:00
This is morphing definition of intellectual property rights in age of agents & chat bots in specifically western world, public should not be calm about this, if ai scrapes all indie blogs of authors, chefs, journalists and even major news outlets with this weird logic that agents are humans, won’t it leave those human endeavors (creative or not, we can all agree it’s unique & done by humans with good economic incentives) vulnerable to stagnation and people forgetting that side of internet & going back to passively consuming it instead of participating in it because of lack of economic or even sociological incentive (if people summarize or loose attention anyway, why think or write of any nuance in politics, law, even fiction books, recipes etc., it becomes evolutionarily costly for humans to do this gradually) > Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

Prudent or not, self serving or not, amazon is right to argue its access controls be strict and that it as owner of website should control it with industry wide accepted rules of engagement, this argument from perplexity is a bad one, human or not while browsing web is a low bar already, captcha etc. were easily circumvented even before ai agents, now if we argue agents are human adjacent, it is a direct case for removing humans of any agency (largely philosophically speaking) and not to mention, imagine the horror show of scams & ransomware it unleashes on millions of users (even engineers can’t recognize or stop them today, prompt injection etc)

This argument that websites controlling their access to bots & agents is a good idea. It should be the way it is, for businesses (amazon or not) and for internet blogs and open web associated sites, if they choose to exclude themselves from upcoming lovely silicon valley stories of ai utopias, they should be able to do so. No one should force them to ‘get with the program’.