MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2025-11-02 20:52:26+00:00
The reason to not tax investment super harshly is that it’s an incentive to not just stuff your money under a mattress. Many people have jobs and careers they wouldn’t otherwise have specifically because 100 rich guys stuck their money in various VC funds (especially in this here audience on HN). If we taxed the idea of investment ruinously, we decrease that incentive. You may think that somehow all those jobs (or more) would somehow materialize without investors investing, but that’s a hypothesis or an argument, not a proven conclusion.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-11-02 20:52:48+00:00
It's extremely simple and straightforward for networking devices. Setting up an OpenBSD router or gateway is such a pleasant process.

The documentation in all aspects is superb, and you can run all sorts of servers just fine (ports is full of common software). You can technically use it as a desktop workstation too, but I can't point to anything that really stands out in this aspect — except perhaps the strong focus on security.
by thesz | 2025-11-02 20:53:00+00:00
"In general, neither can ensure at compile time that an index only known at runtime is in bounds, even if the bounds themselves are statically known."

I remember being able to use telescopes [1] in Haskell long time ago, around 2012 or so.

[1] https://www.pls-lab.org/en/telescope

Haskell was not and is not properly dependently typed.
by godelski | 2025-11-02 20:53:16+00:00
> because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend.

Do you think you would have been able to do that project to the same caliber and as fast had you not had your degree?

> These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree.

The degree isn't there to teach you a specific technology. Those come and go. Some people will work on web like you while others will work on games, graphics, machine learning, databases, languages, or other things. The degree is to teach you the generalized principles that all these things share so that you can learn the specifics you want. They try to cover a broad base to give you exposure because you likely don't know what you want to do or what you like until you get some exposure. That broad base also makes you more effective working with those other niches.

The degree isn't to teach you a niche, it is to make it effective in the broad field.

> No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.

What do you expect to be taught in only 4 years? Maybe you learned Postgres and Redis in the summer but I'm certain you wouldn't have learned it that fast had you not had other programming experience. It's not hard to learn one language once you already know another. Especially if that other language is low level or "mid" (like C/C++ or Java)[0]. The skills transfer even if the specifics aren't identical.

The problem is tragedy of the commons.

We question why train a junior if they're just going to leave instead of questioning why they will leave. We laugh at someone not "negotiating good enough" or hiring new employees at higher wages than we'll offer in raises.

We believe a new senior will be more effective out the gate than a mid level engineer with years of experience in the codebase. We act like institutional knowledge is meaningless. The senior might solve more jira tickets but their lack of institutional knowledge may lead to more being created and more complicated code that isn't leveraging existing libraries.

We act like training juniors isn't a shared community cost that builds a pipeline that we all rely on. Sure, maybe Google trains a junior that leaves for Apple, but Apple trains a junior that leaves for Google. Those costs balance out.

Juniors are having a hard time getting jobs because we've become myopic. We've created the richest companies ever but have become incredibly stingy. We care much more about the quarter than the decade. The customers became the shareholders instead of those buying the things we sell. We spend pounds to save pennies.

[0] it feels weird to call C "high level" in the days of interpreted languages and no memory management
by Avshalom | 2025-11-02 20:54:00+00:00
>>A key benefit of the technology, says Mr Paczek, is that it allows operators to bring freight wagons to a stop very quickly – and, as a consequence, that means they could, in principle, safely put lots of independently moving wagons relatively close together on one stretch of rail, increasing the density of freight transportation in a particular area.

THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN.
by 0_____0 | 2025-11-02 20:54:24+00:00
I find it helpful to see this the way that VCs do - these projects aren't a result of asking "is this a good way to accomplish this goal?"

They're a result of looking at an idea and saying "I bet I, personally, can make money off of this."

The degree to which VCs decide the direction of human endeavor is disheartening. We have real problems to solve, and in the case of rail, a really robust set of tools and approaches that are proven to solve them.
by themafia | 2025-11-02 20:55:17+00:00
> is why would you wait until people are getting hacked to address a known vulnerability?

Do you have some other way of _reliably_ identifying vulnerabilities?

> It makes no sense whatsoever to leave one open just because.

It makes sense to have security options. If I want to leave it fully unlocked, that's my business, and I possibly have good environmental reasons to do this.

What you should really care about are security _defaults_. And in X11's case I'm not aware of any distribution that ships the server with TCP connections to the sever enabled. You have to go well out of your way to even begin using this functionality.
by hinkley | 2025-11-02 20:55:18+00:00
I’ve heard the rayon process, which can take (m)any natural fiber source and convert it into something vaguely like a synthetic silk, has quite a pollution footprint. The more you have to process the fibers to be like a niche or synthetic fiber the more it becomes greenwashing.

Method Inc went through a phase where they made containers out of virgin materials because the overall ecological footprint was several times better than the best we could hope for plastic recycling, and that was before we found out plastic recycling is half sham. A lot of the trick was making thinner containers out of specialty materials that were lower volume than the waste stream from plastic recycling. Eventually they figured out a recyclable material that is as light as the disposable ones, so they get the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they only use those for hand soap refills.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-11-02 20:55:24+00:00
Similar with GTA V. Still very popular, but the multiplayer doesn't work anymore. Singleplayer works though and that's enough for some people to rate it good.

Rust is also similar: multiplayer community servers with anticheat do not work. When the majority of players are on those servers, switching to Linux is not an option. But people on Linux looking for servers think it's good enough that you can play on servers with anticheat disabled.
by comrade1234 | 2025-11-02 20:55:59+00:00
My wife had dozens, well probably over 100, handwritten recipes from a dead relative. They were pretty difficult to read. I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed.

Most of the work was done by one person - i think she was a woman in the Midwest, it's been like 15-years so the details are hazy. A few recipes were transcribed by people overseas but they didn't stick at it. I had to reject only one transcription.

I used mturk in some work projects too but those were boring and maybe also a little unethical (basically paying people 0.50 to give us all of their Facebook graph data, for example.)
by gpderetta | 2025-11-02 20:56:00+00:00
You can do arbitrary computations as part of type checking in C++, yet I don't think it should be considered dependently typed.

It seems to me that dependent typing strictly requires going from runtime values to types.

(You can parametrize types by runtime values in c++ in a trivial sense, by enumerating a finite set a compile time and then picking the correct type at runtime according to a runtime value, still I don't think it counts as the set of valid types would be finite).
by jstimpfle | 2025-11-02 20:57:18+00:00
Work has provided me with plenty opportunity to learn, at a foundational level even. It's also a question of how you approach work. Sometimes it's as easy as asking for a little bit of extra time or loudly considering a little side project as promising the insight that's required for the next task.

Work has grounded me in such a way that in hindsight I regret staying around uni as long as I did instead of entering the workforce as early as possible. While I was less than a brilliant student, I wouldn't go as far as saying that uni was a waste for me. There are some things that I might never have learned otherwise. But I would love to know the other paths I could have taken in my profession.
by grogers | 2025-11-02 20:57:35+00:00
Real world systems often have to deviate from the "pure" version used to run formal methods on. This could be how long you keep transaction logs for, or how long rows are tombstoned for, etc. The longer the time period, the costlier it usually is, in total storage cost and sometimes performance too. So you have to compromise with where you set the time period for.

Let's imagine that the process usually takes 1 minute and the tombstones are kept for 1 day. It would take something ridiculous to make the thing that usually takes 1 minute take longer than a day - not worth even considering. But sometimes there are a confluence of events that make such a thing possible... For example, maybe the top of rack switch died. The server stays running, it just can't succeed any upstream calls. Maybe it is continuously retrying while the network is down (or just slowly timing out on individual requests and skipping to the next one to try it). When the network comes back up, those calls start succeeding but now it's so much staler than you ever even thought was possible or planned for. That's just one scenario, probably not exactly what happened to AWS.
by pornel | 2025-11-02 20:57:35+00:00
Nothing in the C standard requires bytes to have 8 bits either.

There's a massive gap between what C allows, and what real C codebases can tolerate.

In practice, you don't have room to store lengths along pointers without disturbing sizeof and pointer<>integer casts. Fil-C and ASAN need to smuggle that information out of band.
by xp84 | 2025-11-02 20:57:36+00:00
It’s your position that we just don’t get how genius Marxism is and that it just hasn’t been tried? Why did it not work out so well for the USSR? When was that state going to “dissolve” into a utopia where everyone owns everything? Why was China a poor agrarian society when they followed Marxism better, and has become relatively wealthy since abandoning a great deal of those ideas and participating in a form of capitalism?
by davnicwil | 2025-11-02 20:58:46+00:00
Seems very cool, maybe a bit of a game changing paradigm?

- solar over day slowly charges batteries in train cars (easy to add, weight issue is trivial)

- train cars dynamically dispatched during night in response to pretty granular JIT demand for next day

- everything can be slow and maximally efficient, the charging, the trains themselves

Seems like potential to cut costs by a lot and enable new usecases
by ares623 | 2025-11-02 20:58:57+00:00
Everybody wants to ~rule the world~ have their Steve Jobs "one more thing" moment on stage.

Sometimes it feels like that all the tech "innovations" lately have all been due to a certain group of people's desire to experience what Steve Jobs had. A generation of impressionable young people who grew up into a world where tech is going to save the world, and watching Jobs on stage are now trying their hardest to make their dreams a reality.
by pests | 2025-11-02 20:59:05+00:00
Chrome (at least?) solves this via Text Fragments[0] which are a pure client side thing and requires no server or site support.

This URI for example:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Links to an instance of "The Referer" narrowed down via a start prefix ("downgrade:") and end suffix ("to origins").

These are used across Google I believe so many have probably seen them.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...
by bertman | 2025-11-02 20:59:16+00:00
Your description is not accurate and quite misleading.

>QuickVPN runs entirely in your browser

Like I said: What do you mean with this? You did not build a "VPN" that runs in the browser. Your extension sets up a web proxy.

And worse:

>or log user data.

You're implying you're running some kind of "no log" service which is false.
by Poomba | 2025-11-02 20:59:57+00:00
i dont even use a crm blushes. To be honest, im just starting out with outbound so im not doing anything sophisticated. Just want to import a list of leads, enrich with contact details and their tech stack data. Thats all.

Ppl keep recommending me tools like apollo and zoominfo but they way too powerful for me. I dont care about how many data providers they have because i just care about those 2 thinfs
by Someone | 2025-11-02 21:00:21+00:00
I don’t think this is a good article.

FTA: “This revolutionary new engine actually uses microwave and plasma technology as its foundation, which means it doesn't rely on traditional fuel or batteries as a source of power”

I doubt they have figured out how to create microwaves and plasma without using traditional fuel or batteries.

Also FTA: “The frequency of the microwaves is actually quite low, and on a comparable level with what you'd expect out of the microwave in your kitchen”

That doesn’t make sense to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven: “Typically, consumer ovens work around a nominal 2.45 gigahertz (GHz)”. I wouldn’t call that “quite low”.
by mtmail | 2025-11-02 21:01:12+00:00
We asked user to evaluate 300x300 pixel maps. Users were shown two image and had to decide which better matched the title we chose. Answers were something like "left", "right", "both same", "I don't know". Due to misconfiguration the images didn't load for users (they only loaded in our internal network). Still we got plenty of "left" and "right" answers. Random and unusable. Our own fault of course.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-02 21:01:37+00:00
I guess it made a lot of sense to implement compilers in 32-bit protected mode to get more space to work with easier? Free Pascal's compiler also requires 32-bit even if it can generate 16-bit DOS code as well (at least when cross-compiling from some other OS; I have not tried to cross-compile from DOS 32-bit compiler to DOS 16-bit executable).

Some people (and by that I mean Debian people; not sure about anyone else) disagree about OpenWatcom being free software. The license has some unusual requirement(s). There has been talk for a long time about possibly fixing that, but I do not know how on track that is (or how much it matters, in practice): https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/discussions/27...
by malshe | 2025-11-02 21:01:52+00:00
I assisted many professors in data collection for their research in the grad school. Later I also collected data for a couple of my papers. mTurk was very popular in the beginning in large part due to its low cost. Then one day they jacked up their commission so much, it was no more attractive to me. Also, the response/task quality went down significantly. My last time using it was in 2018 for a large scale image labeling task. After doing a pilot run, I concluded I was getting garbage. I went to some other vendor and never returned to mTurk after that.
by xg15 | 2025-11-02 21:02:00+00:00
Yup, this was also what irked me in the rationale of this paper: Combatting e-waste is a good cause, but this is not what the paper is doing - it's alleviating some of the harmful side-effects of e-waste.

The root cause that I'd like to see addressed is an industry that has incentives to churn out unrepairable throwaway electronics. But stuff like this that try to greenwash e-waste would make it less likely that the root cause is addressed, not more.
by Yoric | 2025-11-02 21:02:36+00:00
There are a few very large features that BEAM offers that, as far as I can tell, no other industrial language/VM implements. In particular, BEAM is meant for distributed computation.

You can spawn new processes, communicate between processes (which don't have to be on the same computer), sending any kind of data between them including closures.

BEAM also has an error model designed to handle concurrent and distributed failures, e.g. a process may fail and another process (which, again, may or may not be on the same machine) monitoring it may decide to restart it, or to do some recovery, etc.

BEAM builds into it a number of the features for which we use orchestration, observability, just simpler and (generally) more flexible. And this is a platform that has been used in the industry since the 90s.
by viktorcode | 2025-11-02 21:03:49+00:00
Seems this kind of comments will keep coming no matter what. Nevertheless, here's some points on the matter:

Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.

Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.

Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.

Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.

So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
by Stratoscope | 2025-11-02 21:03:56+00:00
This story gives me nightmares!

Why? I recently had a repair bill of more than $12,000 for my Kia EV6, after rats got under the hood and chewed through a critical wiring harness.

Of course rats will chew through most anything, but the EV6 apparently has soy-based insulation on the wiring instead of traditional plastic. So it is extra tasty for rats!

GEICO covered everything beyond my $1000 comprehensive deductible, but I don't want to be thought of as an irresponsible policyholder, especially with the great rate they gave me on this car - literally half of my previous policy.

So I have taken extensive countermeasures. If anyone is curious, feel free to ask and I will list them.
by bentt | 2025-11-02 21:04:04+00:00
The era of cheap money led to a lot of mergers and acquisitions, which incentivized companies large and small to bloat to increase their value to prospective buyers.

I really don’t think this is AI causing all these layoffs. It’s just a return to business fundamentals, but we’re in a period of massive inflation and it’s getting harder to be profitable.
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-02 21:04:24+00:00
The "runtime" values of a dependent type system are not quite runtime values either, because the computation is happening at compile time. When you "extract" a program from a dependently-typed to an ordinary programming language that can compile down to a binary, the dependent types are simply erased and replaced with ordinary, non-dependent types; though there may be "magic" casts in the resulting program that can only be proven correct via dependent types.
by krackers | 2025-11-02 21:04:26+00:00
No, I think it is normal. If it were easy to gain a mental model of the code simply by reading, then debugging would be trivial. The whole point of debugging is that there are differences between your mental model of the code and what the code is actually doing, that sometimes can't be uncovered unless you step through it line by line even if you're the one who wrote it.

It is why I am a bit puzzled by the people who use an LLM to generate code in anything other than a "tightly scoped" fashion (boilerplate, throwaway code, standalone script, single file, or at the function level). I'm not sure how that makes your job later on any easier if you have even a worse mental model of the code because you didn't even write it. And debugging is almost usually more tedious than writing code, so you've traded off the fun/easy part for a more difficult one. Seems like a faustian deal.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-02 21:05:33+00:00
I use this often, but it is sadly weak when used on C++ code that includes polymorphic methods/functions:

/* snip */ void Object::do_the_thing (int) { } void Object::do_the_thing (float) { } /* snip*/

AFAICT, git log will never be able to be told to review the history of the second version.
by solatic | 2025-11-02 21:05:35+00:00
Reliable systems require hard limits imposed by designers. When systems hit the hard limits, it's a sign somebody's assumptions are wrong: either the designer built too small, or there's some bug pushing up against the hard limit. Either you catch the bug or make an intentional decision on how to scale further. This is basic engineering and is a requisite part of any undergraduate engineering degree worth its salt.

Allowing eight hundred gigabyte containers is gross incompetence. Trying to fix it by scaling the node disk from 2 TB to 2.5 TB is further evidence of incompetence. Understanding that you need to build a hard cap, but not concluding with action items to actually build one - instead just building monitoring for image size - is a clear sign to stay away.

It boggles my mind that the author could understand copy-on-write filesystem semantics but can't imagine how to engineer actual size limits on said filesystem. How is that possible?

.... oh right, the blogpost is LLM slop. So nobody knows what the author actually learned.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-02 21:05:48+00:00
FreeDOS is no good at all for booting anymore, since BIOS support is increasingly rare. No way to boot FreeDOS (or MS-DOS) from UEFI. And of course also no point in trying to run it on ARM or any other non-x86 CPU. Looks like the future for FreeDOS will be to run in virtual machines only. A bit sad, since running FreeDOS on the bare metal of a 21st century computer (even one from 10-20 years ago) has been a nice way to experience just how fast modern hardware is.
by albumen | 2025-11-02 21:05:55+00:00
Uncharitable interpretation of TFA. “independently moving wagons” are different from a series of linked wagons that all have to leave the terminus at the same time, travel together, and arrive together. This idea would allow independently moving wagons to be dispatched as required from multiple destinations, share the line with others in very close proximity, and break away seamlessly to their different destinations.
by Scoundreller | 2025-11-02 21:06:28+00:00
Probably didn't help that your 1980s and 1990s 9V battery was likely a zinc-carbon battery, about 1/2 - 1/5th the mA of alkaline.

I do remember that I could unplug and replug my alarm clock pretty quickly and it wouldn't lose its time if I needed to move sockets. Yay capacitors?
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-11-02 21:06:49+00:00
It's all a grift for people who can't do basic math. I'm seeing heavy, low-speed electric passenger rail needs 15-30 kWh per mile. There's no way they can build out enough solar to meet that demand in the RoW for the tracks. Never mind that now you've cluttered the space that workers need to use when performing maintenance and created a safety hazard for emergency access.