MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aponysus | 2025-11-23 19:23:26+00:00
Building distributed systems I've always gotten frustrated with retry libraries treating all failures the same and with rewriting special handling myself. E.g., timeouts getting the same backoff as rate limit errors, db locks, etc. Also observability around retries tends to be either too noisy or too opaque. I wrote reflexio so retries would behave more like we want real systems to behave: - errors are classified (e.g., TRANSIENT, RATE_LIMIT, CONCURRENCY, PERMANENT, etc) - each class gets its own strategy (decorrelated jitter, equal jitter, fixed delay, etc) - everything emits clean, structured events for logging/metrics/tracing

The library has sync and async support and a simple @retry decorator. The retry envelopes are deterministic. There is an optional observability hook for structured events. I've kept the API small and explicit, so it is very easy to read the whole codebase.

Docs: https://aponysus.github.io/reflexio/

GitHub: https://github.com/aponysus/reflexio

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/reflexio/

I'd greatly appreciate any feedback. Especially, if there are patterns you rely on that I have failed to capture.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-23 19:25:29+00:00
Random encounter: I was at a piano competition in Texas a few years back and in the parking lot I bump into someone who looked a lot like Scott Cutler. Turns out it was Scott Cutler. Had great conversations about MDL, ZORK and Schumann. (Scott Cutler wrote the ZIL interpreter for the TRS-80 back in the day. Maybe for other platforms, too. Can't remember off the top of my head.)
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-23 19:25:35+00:00
Early on, there wasn't any lockdown, so instead we could see whole villages and regions being in emergency state, with the military handling the logistics of moving coffins around, because there were so many. The lockdowns after 2 years were avoidable, but the first one absolutely wasn't. I'm quite content with my governments actions in the beginning and I'm not alone, the governmental approval during the first lockdown absolutely skyrocketed (>10%).
by flag_fagger | 2025-11-23 19:25:47+00:00
I’m really curious about the 08 recession. I definitely remember some of the fallout, but I was young and insulated from much of what it meant. My parents were also lucky enough to be employed with a mortgage.

The one thing killing me in the economy is housing. Rent is up like crazy, but even more so rental criteria is ridiculous and competition is insane.

And this is in a dilapidated rust belt city with maybe one industry propping up the entire economy. It’s a bit cheaper than when I was in Florida a few years back, but not by a ton.

If I could figure out housing, all other problems would solve themselves, but it’s the one problem I can’t solve. My credit score took a battering during a long period of unemployment, and now I’m about as much of a pariah as a three time felon with two evictions, and I don’t even have an eviction.

But how was in after the 2008 crisis. How hard was it to find rent them. If you had a job, and income were the rents still ridiculous? Or was it easy enough to find a place if you had money?
by mouth | 2025-11-23 19:26:04+00:00
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams.

Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
by bloggie | 2025-11-23 19:26:31+00:00
These experiments afaik don't require particle accelerators and are a different field of science, one of the largest of these detectors is the LIGO observatory overseen by Caltech

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-is-ligo

There is a list of similar observatories in this document

https://dcc-llo.ligo.org/public/0125/G1600979/003/G1600979_L...
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-11-23 19:26:35+00:00
At that point, the conjecture's just numerology: 27 takes 5 bits, and 9232 takes 14 bits (two shy of 3×5+1 = 16). 27 is the peak of the average ratio between start and maximum, because the +1s are so significant when the numbers are small: past that point, we're relying on extreme outlier behaviour to get each new high-score. Those only start showing up often enough to matter once we get into the thousands.

Plugging in values from OEIS A006884, it looks like the maximum ratio between the maximum and starting values goes down until around 4255, then picks up again, gradually increasing from there. Eyeballing the growth rate, I suspect there's a counterexample to this interpretation somewhere before 10^1000. (Does anyone have an element of A006884 greater than 2358909599867980429759? That's 140 bits maximum to 71 bits starting.)
by DaveZale | 2025-11-23 19:26:45+00:00
what category of "evil online business ploy" do you have in mind? I see dozens of them daily with even brief, casual browsing. Also known as "monetization" ;-)

But it's not just online that I find these ploys. In fact, thanks to donating to the wrong non-profit, it's frightfully simple to end up with a stack of snail mail in the mailbox daily, often with free gifts to entice donations. I can't seem to find a simple, free way to turn it off.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-23 19:27:06+00:00
That post is even more worrisome!

> To address larger problems with the implementation and to improve performance, we started in 2017 rebuilding Racket on top of Chez Scheme. Rebuilding took some time, and we only gradually deprecated the old “BC” implementation in favor of the new “CS” implementation, but the transition is now complete. Racket BC is still maintained, but as of August 2025, we distribute only Racket CS builds

So they're billing Racket as "Mature Practical Extensible Robust and Polished". Of those I will give them "Extensible" and "Robust". You can't say you're mature and polished and practical if you've just rewritten the entire thing and deprecated the legacy codebase to support new features that have been in other languages since forever.

Maybe they were talking about Racket 8.0 and didn't change the website yet?
by namuol | 2025-11-23 19:27:21+00:00
> It turned out that trying to abstract away what the low-level hardware was doing was more harmful than beneficial.

Abstraction isn’t inherently problematic, but the _wrong_ abstraction is. Just because abstraction is hard to do well, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Just because abstraction gets in the way of certain applications, doesn’t mean it’s not useful in others.

Not to say nobody is trying, but there’s a bit of a catch-22 where those most qualified to do something about it don’t see a problem with the status quo. This sort of thing happens in many technical fields, but I just have to pick on GPU programming because I’ve felt this pain for decades now and it hasn’t really budged.

Part of the problem is probably that the applications for GPUs have broadened and changed dramatically in the last decade or so, so it’s understandable that this moves slowly. I just want more people on the inside to acknowledge the problem.
by ponector | 2025-11-23 19:27:25+00:00
>> It is an attempt to attain peace and economic stability for the region in a way which will prevent the conflict from flaring up again in the near future.

"Peace for our time!" Some people skipped history lessons. Russia is not winning the war. To give them Ukrainian capitulation is to reward for starting a war.

>> Because the West is guilty of far worse war crimes in the past 50 years, and the whole world knows this.

Typical russian whataboutism. But I bite. What crimes west did in past 30 years? Russia started war in Afghanistan, invaded Syria, Georgia, Ukraine.

>> the details of the peace plan

Nothing there about real punishment russia will get when the next invasion/annexion is going to be.

Just a reminder, russia lost to Ichkeria, signed a peace treaty with Chechen. Guess what happened next? Russians always lie.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-23 19:27:27+00:00
It reminds of this book

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...

which has a case study of US Steel used lobbying as a weapon against the rest of us by getting protectionism against steel imports because they felt entitled to keep making steel with pre-WWII open health furnaces that had been paid for long ago but produced more expensive and lower quality steel than international competitors who were using basic oxygen, electric arc and other modern processes. In a market economy they would have been forced to go out of business or invest in new equipment —- that is, make a disinvestment that they didn’t want to make (that’s why they call it “capital(ism)”), it’s like the capital makes decisions on its own.

Circa 1980 almost all futuristic thinkers thought the copper network was going to be ripped out to replace it with fiber because fiber was clearly better in the long term, but what we did get was much more complex and path dependent because in favorable locations cable TV was a great business that built out infrastructure which could be repurposed, DSL was a good solution for crowded little countries like South Korea and the UK, etc. Like those open hearth furnaces, bad infrastructure that exists drives out good infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet.
by chirau | 2025-11-23 19:27:42+00:00
Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
by eichin | 2025-11-23 19:27:46+00:00
Hmm, would be interesting to see a "race" between this and isearch; from the examples, it looks like this has an advantage only if you have lots of similar strings, so "the one you're looking at" vs. "typing more letters of the word" is an advantage? (externally timed, see The Humane Interface for details on how self-reporting doesn't actually work to measure this kind of thing)
by owenversteeg | 2025-11-23 19:27:57+00:00
James Cameron certainly knows a lot about submarines, but if he says something factually incorrect then it’s factually incorrect, period. Carbon fiber does not have “no strength in compression” and it is used in compression in countless applications, for example airplane wings. Again, the fact that the sub - built at absurdly low cost for its size, built by a bunch of cowboys that didn’t know what they were doing - DID survive to 3.7 km deep on several occasions is proof sufficient. If CF had no compressive strength than the whole thing would have failed at a tiny fraction of that depth. If CF had no compressive strength then what kept the sub together during the successful dives? Hopes and dreams?

I’m not here to defend the decision to use carbon fiber, and as I’ve said I completely agree that there are many issues with using it in this application. Delamination, water ingress, bonding the titanium to the carbon fiber, difficulty of manufacture including varying layer thickness and voids, sensitivity to impact, the list goes on. But _those_ are the issues, not the compressive strength.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-23 19:28:17+00:00
It's probably because you have to have weird precision issues where the numbers are calculated ever so slightly differently, and some other effect like a guard being slightly too close and getting clipped by a door where that difference matters.

I debugged some software synthesizer code a while back (like 20 years or so now I think of it) where a build of it on one platform failed because of a precision bug. I can't remember the details, but there was a lot of "works fine on my machine" type discussion around it. Anyway it relied on a crude simulation of an RC circuit reaching very close to 0 asymptotically to trigger a state change, but on something like 64-bit Intel with a specific processor it never quite made it low enough to trip the comparison because of something to do with not flushing denormals.

From an electronic standpoint, making it simulate "it's high enough" as being about 0.7 and " it's low enough" being about 0.01 was far closer to the instrument they were trying to simulate, and making it massively imprecise like that got it going on everything.
by pi-rat | 2025-11-23 19:28:30+00:00
You can use more than one key you know.

Keep the private key you actively use in the secure enclave. The system you actively use is most at risk.

Keep a secondary offline private key as backup. You can generate and store it in a secure location, and never move it around. Airgapped even if you want. You could even use a yubikey or other hardware for the secondary key giving you two hard to export keys.

Distribute pub keys for both of them.

Best of both worlds?
by CharlieDigital | 2025-11-23 19:28:31+00:00
macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.

Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).

Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.

I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.
by api | 2025-11-23 19:28:50+00:00
I’m in my 40s and have never believed retirement would be a thing for me unless I make a whole lot of money.

Retirement for all was an artifact of rapidly growing populations and shorter life spans. Back 50-100 years ago you had each young person supporting maybe 0.1 to 0.25 retired people, and a retirement age in the 60s meant you’d get a few years before now easily treatable heart conditions would kill you. (Everyone smoked too, which “helped” clear the retirement rolls.)

In a world with even a stable population (let alone a declining one) retirement isn’t viable. Or at the very least the age will be raised a lot. I could see 80 as a retirement age in 2050.

Honestly an institutionalized retirement age in the 60s today is unfair and exploitative toward young people. It’s generational economic cannibalism, stopping young people from establishing themselves to fund the old.
by __aru | 2025-11-23 19:28:58+00:00
How I see it is, of course you won't have a good time with Linux if you don't have compatible hardware. The stuff you're mentioning (flaky Wifi and Bluetooth) is a hallmark symptom of incompatible hardware, or newer hardware with immature drivers.

I personally use Linux for all my devices, but I'm also very intentional on making sure ALL my hardware is compatible with Linux.

If you have all hardware compatible with the mainline Linux kernel, generally you can achieve a ChromeOS-level of system stability and reliability.

But as soon as you introduce incompatible hardware, all of that goes out the window. It's why I only recommend Linux to users that have compatible hardware.
by keeda | 2025-11-23 19:30:01+00:00
> Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.

This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.

But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.

And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.

This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.

What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.

And the rest, as they say, is history.
by verdverm | 2025-11-23 19:30:28+00:00
Had my first encounter with this on GitHub this week. Saw an initial PR come in, left some comments, more commits came in, tried it out, looked deeper at the code and realized it was garbage. Asked how it was tested, got classic ai response, followed up with a question about how / why, thinking step leaked as a comment

Wasted my time, the account is running around doing this with dozens of rejected PRs across many varied projects.

If you're curious: https://github.com/google/adk-go/pull/306
by rickstanley | 2025-11-23 19:30:30+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I've been off editor hopping for quite some time, nowadays I just use some pre-defined configuration like Doom Emacs, occasionally I try to build some environment, with AI help, from "scratch" for fun and curiosity.

I really like Emacs' flexibility + evil-mode and reactivity, recently I searched for something similar and found Lem: https://github.com/lem-project/lem, looks promising, I'll try it out and compare with Emacs when I have the chance and time.
by mindslight | 2025-11-23 19:30:38+00:00
We didn't call them useful idiots for no reason. Naive idealists make great foot soldiers, but their reward is to be ultimately expendable. When all of the damage from "DOGE" gets perceived as politically inconvenient, the narrative will morph into something like these were cowboys doing unauthorized things at Musk's behest, not directed or approved by Dear Leader.

It's understandable how they would think otherwise because Musk fell for the same shit (first time Republican supporter didn't realize the cries about the debt are pure kayfabe, lol). But the thing Musk has is the means to insulate himself from the (direct) fallout.
by srvmshr | 2025-11-23 19:30:43+00:00
True. Applications as these go back a few decades. From the news buzz when it was launched, ASCI White was similarly used in early '00s to understand nuclear explosions and shockwave propagation (instead of relying on live tests) - classic CFD problems[1] Successor supercomputer clusters were also used to do weapon design & nuclear physics simulations. One supercomputer IIRC even simulated a tornado genesis.[2]

I can only imagine the classified applications must have grown ten-fold in complexity in the interim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White

[2] https://news.wisc.edu/a-scientist-and-a-supercomputer-re-cre...
by Doctor_Fegg | 2025-11-23 19:30:43+00:00
For UK readers, this is eerily similar to the typeface originally used on the "Thames Turbo" trains (class 165/166) from their construction in the 1990s until a refurb about five years ago - I could believe it was the same manufacturer. Some photos:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:166207_DMCO_Interior...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:British_Rail_Cla...
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-23 19:31:05+00:00
>On route, train operators punch the code into a control panel at the back of the display, and the LCD blocks light on specific segments of the grid to build each letter

I always thought those were mechanical displays with little mechanical shutters that moved to display the segments... like these:

https://youtu.be/Gj_mTp6Ypzk

Never knew they were LCD.
by Y_Y | 2025-11-23 19:31:17+00:00
> even if I find a bug, how am I going to patch it without access to the source code?

That's how. Bethesda put a mod manager in Skyrim and works with some of the developers, they distribute fixes as game patches, you can distribute yours as "mods" or let them repackage it into an official patch or the next update.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim_Mod:Unofficial_Skyrim_Patch
by munificent | 2025-11-23 19:32:07+00:00
The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.

But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)

The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?

The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.

Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.
by parineum | 2025-11-23 19:32:10+00:00
First, someone has to develop those models and that's currently being done with VC backing. Second, running those models is still not profitable, even if you self host (obviously true because everything is self hosted eventually).

Burning VC money isn't a long term business model and unless your business is somehow both profitable on Llama 8b (or some such low power model) _and_ your secret sauce can't be easily duplicated, you're in for a rough ride.

The only barrier between AI startups at this point is access to the best models, and that's dependent on being able to run unprofitable models that spend someone else's money.

Investing in a startup that's basically just a clever prompt is gambling on the first mover's advantage because that's the only advantage they can have.
by gruez | 2025-11-23 19:32:49+00:00
>The key is stored encrypted with a unique symmetric key that only your secure enclave knows until the point that you export it. It then re-encrypts it with the password.

But what's the security benefit of this compared to having a keyfile? So far as I can tell from the commands you provided, there's no real difference, aside from a hacker having to modify their stealer script slightly.