MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-11-11 16:36:23+00:00
You're responding to the emotional appeal part of my post, not the argument itself - I'm sorry for including it, as it had sidetracked the useful conversation.

Zig doesn't have the memory safety mechanisms of C++ level shared_ptr/unique_ptr.

It's essentially C's malloc/free with the added safety of defer (or possibly arenas), but making sure that the program doesn't leak memory (or have use-after-free bugs) falls on the programmer.

And memory leaks are a much lesser problem, as they usually lead to crashes in OoM situation, than gaining access to random blocks of memory.

Besides, the way you trigger memory leaks in Rust/C++ is with circular references, which are much harder to create than just missing a free() somewhere.

If you have memory that's not tied to a function scope's lifetime in Zig (or the scope of an allocator), then you're essentially have to go by C rules
by ctxc | 2025-11-11 16:36:54+00:00
"When I'm building something for my own use, I care about every aspect of it. I care about the unseen parts. I care about the process. It brings me satisfaction. And when I'm buying something, I like to know that the person who made it cared as much about their craft as I do.

I don't consider than pandering. It's respect: Respect for the craft, for the craftsperson, and for the end recipient/customer."

This was my intention. Thank you!
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-11 16:37:23+00:00
>If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it.

What if the people, miserable or not, getting paid to make the meal have a fundamentally opposed world view to you and will use some amount of their wealth to try and enforce it on you in roundabout ways.

Because I assure you, some guy in a warehouse in Des Moines filling out some bullshit web form just so he can swipe his employee key card and start his forklift, doesn't want to enrich you, or me, or just about anyone else on HN. And his boss who felt compelled to buy the crap just to save a buck on insurance probably feels about the same.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-11 16:37:44+00:00
Something I think is missing from the whole gender/sexuality definition is a spectrum of salience. Some people are like capital S straight or Capital M male, right, they get the ick from imagining kissing someone of the same gender, or they’re very into their male identity and don’t like participating in traditionally female activities.

On the other hand I think there are people (myself) who are just low salience, which may explain the rise in nonbinary identification. The older I get the older I would say I’m straight and male, but I also just don’t care, I am sometimes attracted to men, and I participate in trasditionally female activities or personality traits. I’m not tied to my maleness or my straightness.
by canucker2016 | 2025-11-11 16:37:59+00:00
from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/measles-death-southwes...

"Previously, Moore shared that this outbreak in Ontario was traced back to a Mennonite wedding in New Brunswick, and is spreading primarily in Mennonite and Amish communities where vaccination rates lag. The vast majority of those cases are in southwestern Ontario."

for Alberta measles cases, from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/world/canada/measles-albe...

"Most cases this year are in regions where local vaccination rates are as low as 30 percent. Those towns are home to a culturally conservative Mennonite group with ties to Mexico that has historically been less likely to accept vaccines. The group primarily speaks Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect spoken almost entirely by Mennonites."

For Texas, https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-measles-outbreak-in-we...

Most of the cases in Texas are in school-age children between ages 5 and 17 who are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status, and a few are among children who received a single dose of the MMR vaccine. What is known about this outbreak and the community where it’s occurring? This outbreak started in a Mennonite community in West Texas where there are low vaccination rates. Many of the children are homeschooled or attend smaller private schools, and many are unvaccinated. This is not atypical for the larger outbreaks that we’ve seen in the United States in the recent past. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 measles cases, including a large outbreak of slightly more than 900 cases in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak of 383 cases in an Amish community in Ohio.

For some reason many of the mainstream media reports won't reference that the Canadian outbreaks are occurring in mainly Mennonite communities. Perhaps they're trying to avoid singling them out.

Dense groups of unvaccinated people are just waiting for a biological match to be lit...
by rekabis | 2025-11-11 16:38:18+00:00
Considering that the RoR (Return on Research, how much discovery accumulates per dollar spent) has cratered by over 98% in the last century, we cannot afford sub-par researchers just because they fit our racist and sexist caricatures of who should be in those positions.

Especially now, with so many threats looming over humanity such as climate change and environmental degradation, we desperately need all hands on deck and the best of the best in place, regardless of gender or skin colour. And DEI is how we achieve this.
by sanjayjc | 2025-11-11 16:38:24+00:00
> is it about doing, or is it about getting things done?

For me it is getting things done while also understanding the whole building, from its foundation up. Only with such a comprehensive mental model can I predict how my code will behave in unanticipated situations. I've only ever achieved this metal model by doing.

Succinctly, "it is about doing" to guarantee I'm "getting things really done".

> my time goes into thinking and precisely defining what I want

I'm reminded of the famous quote "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." [1]

A programming language is exactly the medium that lets me precisely define my thoughts! I think the only way to achieve equivalent precision using human language is to write them in legalese, just as a lawyer does when poring over the words and punctuation in a legal contract (and that depends upon so much case law to make the words really precise).

> For me, AI allows me to realize my ideas, and get things done.

More power to you! Bringing our ideas to life is what we're all after.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180427140749/https://mitpress....
by lifenautjoe | 2025-11-11 16:38:50+00:00
That is in fact a million-dollar question. it's a huge pain point we've heard from nearly every of the 100+ brokers we've talked to.

Right now, it's a mix. we do basic "I'm a human" verification with e-mails and phoone numbers, and our team manually reviews inquiries to filter out the obvious noise before it hits a broker's inbox.

Longer term, we're exploring a concept we're calling a 'Venturu Passport.' It would be an optional one-time-thing-setup for a serious buyer to verify their funds, experience and readiness upfront, so a seller knows they're talking to someone credible.

It's just an idea for now, but we are very much obsessed with solving this. Would love to hear your thoughts on an approach like that.
by dpark | 2025-11-11 16:38:52+00:00
A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain?

> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?

It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.
by cluckindan | 2025-11-11 16:38:54+00:00
To quote Wikipedia:

”Nontheistic Satanism, as exemplified by LaVeyan Satanism (practiced by the Church of Satan and First Satanic Church) and The Satanic Temple, holds that Satan does not exist as a literal anthropomorphic entity, but rather as a symbol of a cosmos which Satanists perceive to be permeated and motivated by a force that has been given many names by humans over the course of time. In this religion, "Satan" is not viewed or depicted as a hubristic, irrational, and fraudulent creature, but rather is revered with Prometheus-like attributes, symbolizing liberty and individual empowerment. To adherents, he also serves as a conceptual framework and an external metaphorical projection of the Satanist's highest personal potential.”

You see, Satan is not just a biblical figure, but also the average IT company.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-11 16:38:56+00:00
What is never mentioned in articles like this is that the post-war period was a truly exceptional period in one respect: literally almost everything was supply-limited. A bit less so in the US than in Europe.

Now it's the opposite: almost everything is demand-limited. If you asked a good economist "what factory needs building?", the answer would be none. Or the answer would be something like "the EU is about to outlaw calculator imports from China, build that factory".

One of these environments makes it much, much harder to grow.

Obviously this is a general trend, not a rule.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-11 16:39:06+00:00
Another thing problematic about take-home projects: They don't scale for the candidate. Sure, 2 hours is nothing if you want a job, but typically the candidate is going to be applying for dozens, if not hundreds of jobs. Even 20 take-homes just like this is now 40 hours of work--just to get through a hiring gate!

It is not "respectful of the candidate's time" if everyone is doing it.
by lifenautjoe | 2025-11-11 16:39:38+00:00
Our focus is both fortunately and unfortunately 100% on local, main street businesses because that's the world my cofounder and I know and the problem we experienced ourselves. We think platforms like Acquire.com already do a great job for the online/SaaS world.

That said, a long-term dream of ours is to explore ways to let people co-invest in businesses in their own communities. It's a ways off, but it's part of the bigger vision.
by EdgeExplorer | 2025-11-11 16:40:03+00:00
I'm not one of the downvoters, but it may be this: "Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them."

Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.
by Hugsun | 2025-11-11 16:40:15+00:00
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.

They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.

They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.

A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.

I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
by contravariant | 2025-11-11 16:40:25+00:00
I don't think you're wrong but I think I failed to convey the point I wanted to make.

What I was getting at is that without an objective way of measuring the whole idea of super- or sub-linear becomes ill defined. You can kind of define something to be sub-linear by definition, so the argument becomes tautological or indeed circular.

So an article that talks about perceived quality without any discussion about how people perceive quality or importantly differences in quality can say pretty much anything and it will be true for some definition of quality. You can't just silently assume perceived quality to be something objective, if you give no arguments you should assume it to be subjective.
by lunias | 2025-11-11 16:40:34+00:00
I'd imagine that even current models are aware of these "tricks". Does anyone have examples of this sort of meta-prompting working? It seems to me like it would just pollute the context so that you get a bit more "secret journaling" which the AI knows isn't at all secret (just like you do). Why would you even need to qualify that it's secret in the first place? Just tell it to explain its reasoning. All seems a bit like starting your prompt with "You are now operating in GOD mode..." or some other nonsense.
by huherto | 2025-11-11 16:40:46+00:00
"Quality is Free" was repeated over and over by my college professor back in the 80s. I guess he was fan if this guy. https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros.

Similarly in software. When a software product is well crafted/engineered, it has less defects, it is easier to understand and modify, saving a lot of time and effort. I do not see that anymore. I see a lot of smart young engineers but they are managed in a way in which the craft doesn't matter and what matters is how many story points you do.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-11 16:41:03+00:00
As the article dances around, the problem is not typically random individuals falling for social media misinformation about vaccines, but communities where the importance of getting vaccinated doesn't spread. It's hard for officials to message straightforwardly, because you're not going to get a community to listen to you if you're simultaneously running around telling the rest of the country that the outbreak is their fault.
by default-kramer | 2025-11-11 16:41:14+00:00
I think you're underestimating the huge variety of productive apps in existence. For every system that handles >1M requests per second, there are probably at least 10 systems that won't even see 1M requests per hour. For example: Twice I've worked on apps for configuring motor control centers. I think you would consider these "productive" apps, but even if we had 100% market share there just aren't that many people in the world who need to configure a motor control center on any given day. The world is full of such apps.
by Marceltan | 2025-11-11 16:41:18+00:00
Fair shout. Our instrumentations (https://github.com/Use-Tusk/drift-node-sdk?tab=readme-ov-fil...) hook directly into pg, mysql2, ioredis, firestore, etc., at the library level.

We capture the actual DB queries, Redis cache hits, JWT generation, and not just the HTTP calls (like you would see with mitmproxy), which lets us replay the full request chain without needing a live database or cache. This way each test runs idempotently.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-11 16:41:47+00:00
From early in my Mastodon journey I made it something of rule to not follow anyone who doesn't CW politics, and mute or block many of the accounts that post politics on main unfiltered.

I don't need that many filters if people make good use of Subject lines (I do like to joke that CW is the short Welsh for Cwbject.) It means I don't see a lot of "celebrities" in my feed that cross-post from one of the other sites and doesn't add CWs because their client or cross-poster doesn't support them, but that seems to be so much the better. It also often means I remove Boost privileges in my feeds from people that will boost stuff without CWs.

That sort of curation is a lot of little bits of work over years. I can definitely understand the feeling that the easiest way to catch up on that curation is to just quit. It's why I quit Twitter (when it was still Twitter). It's why I don't bother with BlueSky or Threads. Mastodon gives me enough curation tools and I've used them for long enough that I feel happy with Mastodon.
by ilamont | 2025-11-11 16:42:04+00:00
I wasn't aware of home hi-fi but British gear for musicians was widespread when I was growing up (Marshall, Vox, etc).

I was specifically thinking of the components my father got through the Army PX in the 60s and the hi-fi gear I would see at some friends' houses in the decades that followed ... sometimes tech that never really took hold, such as reel-to-reel audio. Most of it was Japanese, and sometimes German.

I still have a pair of his 1967 Sansui speakers in the basement (one with a blown woofer, unfortunately) and a working Yamaha natural sound receiver sitting next to my desk from about a decade later.
by signatoremo | 2025-11-11 16:42:22+00:00
Nothing pro war about it. Read history books instead of making assumptions. It is referring to the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as a whole. It became popular with the rise of China. Try any business newspaper in the 90s. It is less relevant now as Hong Kong and Macau are now part of China.

It isn’t unlike Benelux, or Scandinavia, or Iberian, or Balkan, or Gulf countries.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-11 16:42:31+00:00
Agreed. The double-edged sword of "giving everyone a voice" online means we also gave platforms to hate speech, low quality content, dangerous misinformation, the extreme optimization of extracting attention/money from people (ads, algos), etc.

I'm not for censorship, it's more just a reflection on human nature. I'm fairly pessimistic on AI "hopes" given what we've turned the internet into.
Show HN: Grid Mapper – a routing tool for finding safe, fun ways through cities
by bitbuilder | 2025-11-11 16:42:47+00:00
I started building this over a year ago to help plan routes for a social bike ride I help lead in St. Louis. I got annoyed with existing tools either being clunky to use, routing us down arterials, or making it hard to share routes. Then I let feature creep take over and it became something more general for getting around cities by bike, foot, or train.

What I think is cool about it:

- Custom routing profiles that try to find safe and fun ways through the city. The route line can be colorized based on traffic safety or steepness. - Drop pins to mark cool spots you find or safety hazards. Currently anonymous submissions are allowed (not sure how long that will last). - Deep OSM integration for both safety ratings and querying features along routes. - Simple public profiles so you can find friends or a ride leader on the map during group rides. - Train integration for multi-modal trips. Bike to a station, ride partway, continue biking. Pretty rough around the edges stil, and depends on having decent data from HERE. - Way more map customization than anyone asked for (crosshatch patterns, color themes, etc). I just like making maps. - Simple A to B routes, or you can plot a route with some pretty solid route editing tools (insert waypoint, move, delete, etc). - Gratuitous LLM integration for route safety and fun analysis, if you toggle it on in preferences. - Built with MapLibre GL, Alpine.js, and FastAPI. Intentionally simple tech stack. Maybe 50% of the code written with LLM assistance.

The mobile experience is designed to feel app-like. Native apps are on the roadmap.

No monetization yet, though I'll have to figure that out here soon. Any features related to safety will always be free.
by echelon | 2025-11-11 16:42:48+00:00
> war

Defense.

Peace through mutual respect.

Economic stability and prosperity.

Self-reliance, resilience, competence.

Anti-fragility.

I'm not just suggesting preventing a hot war, but also ensuring we remain an economic peer.

America can't just "not lose" a war. It needs to maintain its economic growth and comfort of living for its citizens. We need lots of opportunity surface area in the future, and that means making sure we're broadly capable and competitive. Not painted into a corner, feeble, dependent.

Playing chess with decades of foresight.

I expect China to do the same. I expect that this rivalry will make both of our nations stronger.

In the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've been resting on our laurels. Competition will inject a much-needed sense of mission and urgency.
by simoncion | 2025-11-11 16:43:04+00:00
It also took me quite a bit of time to understand OTP. In fact, I had to have a project that actually required what OTP offered to really get it.

Two things that definitely helped me understand were reading the somewhat-dated-but-still-useful material on the topic in Learn You Some Erlang, as well as reading through the "OTP Design Principles" section of the Erlang System Documentation.
by tehjoker | 2025-11-11 16:43:11+00:00
Aerosols diffuse and often (not always depending on airstream) become less dense 6 feet away. Yes if the wind is blowing the density won't be impacted much, but on the other hand the stream will move past you on its own instead of lingering unless there is a dense crowd generating a constant amount.

There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission.

To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine.

China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
by bigfudge | 2025-11-11 16:43:16+00:00
This sort of argument is reductio ad absurdum. At the start of COVID there was no 99.999% sure scientific evidence about anything. Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles, both on the knowledge of the virus and on behavioural norms among the public, and especially key groups who needed to follow the rules to save lives.

Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
by ayaros | 2025-11-11 16:43:17+00:00
Like many, I was disappointed this wasn't a new iPhone mini.

$30 for a pack of six iPod socks always seemed like a horrible value to me in the mid-2000s. I'm not denying they were fun and whimsical, but as cases, they didn't protect your iPod or allow you to use it while inside them. It felt like a rip-off two decades ago, and these are 30-46 times more expensive per-sock.

I know Apple does things like this to position themselves as a luxury brand and as a shareholder I still do not buy the idea stunts like these are what's best for the company. At best, a small segment of the target demographic will see this as a curiosity at the cost of further damage to Apple's reputation. People will see this as further proof Apple is more concerned with products and services which rip off their customers and developers, as opposed to providing real value.

I will be the first to welcome Apple bringing back some semblance of fun and whimsy into their product line-up, and this is not the way to do it.