MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foxglacier | 2025-11-08 05:30:22+00:00
He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science.

Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
by bubblyworld | 2025-11-08 05:30:34+00:00
I don't buy the premise - that LLMs being trained on more React code than other frameworks is going to cause the collapse of alternatives. The data presented in the article isn't very convincing to me - it's absolute numbers, it's not a zero-sum game, and besides LLM coding is the worst it's ever going to be. Hypothetically, even if the data was convincing (showing a massively increasing relative share of React usage since LLMs entered the scene), I don't think it's sensible to extrapolate from current trends about LLM coding anyway. This stuff is barely a few years old and we want to make confident predictions about it?
by eredengrin | 2025-11-08 05:31:18+00:00
I've heard good things about "LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices" [0] but haven't gotten around to reading it myself yet. Packt does not always have the best reputation but it was recommended to me by someone I know and the reviews are also solid, so mentioning in case it's at all helpful.

0: https://www.packtpub.com/en-us/product/llvm-techniques-tips-...
by kragen | 2025-11-08 05:31:35+00:00
I mean, the set of valid deforestation transformations you could do to an OCaml program is not literally the empty set, but OCaml functions can do I/O, update refs, and throw exceptions, as well as failing to terminate, so you would have to be sure that none of the code you were running in the wrong order did any of those things. I don't think the garbage collection issues you mention are a problem, though maybe I don't understand them?
by intended | 2025-11-08 05:31:45+00:00
By this criteria - all papers that extrapolate are BS papers.

There’s a ridiculous number of stars in the sky - no matter how low you put the odds of intelligent life, you will still end up with more than 1 civilized species in the universe.

This is, at least for me, the primary utility of such extrapolations. And eventually - extrapolations will be tested.
by sanjayjc | 2025-11-08 05:31:53+00:00
Alternate semiconductor materials (Graphene, SiC) could circumvent some of the expensive steps required for Si, but not all. Here's a good article about the unimaginably high purity standards for the water used in the industry:

https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-purest-water-in-the-world

The average fab uses about 2,000 gallons of ultrapure water each minute, 2-3 million gallons each day.

Pipes and tubing are constantly shedding particles into flowing water - with random bursts that drive everyone crazy.

Once the killer particle size limit ratcheted down to 20 nanometers - a limit we hit roughly about ten years ago - engineers realized that there existed no detection tool for consistently detecting sub-10 nanometer particles in low quantities.
by marcoeg | 2025-11-08 05:32:31+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with formal, verifiable modernization and taking a small COBOL batch program and translating it through an intermediate representation and Alloy formal model into Kotlin, while proving equivalence with the legacy output.

Repo: https://github.com/marcoeg/cobol-modernization-playbook

Would love feedback from people who’ve worked on reverse engineering or legacy transformations at scale.
by mindcrime | 2025-11-08 05:32:47+00:00
Ask HN: What is the most important thing in life?

I don't accept the idea that there is any universally applicable, objective answer to this question. I believe the answer varies for every individual and that each individual's answer is equally valid.

It is to deliver the maximum amount of utility to other people.

I find "utility" in this sentence to be under-specified. I like the general sentiment but it's too hand-wavy for me, to accept as "the" general principle of "what's the most important thing in life" even if it were possible to have such a general principle.

"be good and help everyone especially when they need it",

I think this is an excellent motto to live but, but I would stop short, again, of calling it "the" most important thing in life in a universal sense.

I do, as a point of fact, value helping others. Just to illustrate, I went to the local grocery store and picked up a case of cans of Campbell's Chunky Soup earlier this week and took to the local food pantry to help out with people who are struggling to get meals. Later I plan to go buy a few blankets and take over to donate for people who are homeless and need at least some way to keep warm as winter approaches. I do this kind of stuff because I like helping others. Same reason I spent a decade or so as a volunteer firefighter. I enjoy public service. But at the end of it all, I still would not necessarily agree that "deliver[ing] the maximum amount of utility to other people" is the most important thing in life. I'd just rank it pretty highly as "one of the important things".
by econ | 2025-11-08 05:33:08+00:00
YouTube regularly shows me ads that fit that analogy quite well. The ECB and Elon Musk take turns offering me guaranteed monthly deposits in my account for one time 200 and 400 euro fees. The deep fakes are intentionally bad enough to filter for good victims.

You don't even need a human to review these ads but inserting one wouldn't be expensive.
by BoorishBears | 2025-11-08 05:34:08+00:00
Sure sometimes... other times you get deadpan replies unironically demanding citations and proof of claims.

There's nothing veiled or an insult: what I mentioned is a real factor in why people would read that statement and jump to demanding proof.

-

If I told a room full of plumbers that Sharkbites are actually sponsored by big Water trying to encourage water wastage, it definitely might not land... but none of them are going to demand a citation!
by nouripenny | 2025-11-08 05:34:19+00:00
People are at least as often evaluating men's performances. i.e. "Was Stephen Hawking overhyped by other physicists to help him not die in poverty?", "How good was Riemann compared to Gauss?" etc. Not hard to find people who argue that Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are overrated buffoons

This is probably more of a managerial thing than anything else — after all, most men's performance undergoes constant evaluation. Certainly in the workplace, and often in personal relationships as well. If they fail, they don't get as much to eat and are typically deserted

And such evaluations are biased against praise, except for a deified few. For example, successful musicians frequently mention that record labels make them feel like underachievers, even when they top the charts
by blahgeek | 2025-11-08 05:34:24+00:00
> especially when you are on Linux AND on macOS. I can’t run FreeBSD jails or ZFS on macOS, can I? Definitely not with one file and one command.

On macOS, docker actually launches a Linux VM to run containers. If this counts, then yes, you can run FreeBSD jails or zfs on macOS, by running a FreeBSD VM.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-11-08 05:36:02+00:00
We still have (for now, though even this is under threat) good access to contraception, good sexual education, relatively low child mortality rates, etc here in the US.

Comparing the affordability crisis for the middle class in the US to that of historically poor developing countries as it relates to birth rates is not a very good argument.

It might be somewhat comparable a decade or so from now if we keep letting wealth inequality run away at current rates, but it isn't right now.
by jibal | 2025-11-08 05:38:05+00:00
You still have to pass arguments to library functions that need to allocate or do I/O ... but the alternative is worse. This is really a bogus issue ... no one is crying over having to pass a `this` pointer to every single call of a method in other languages. Context pointers are a requirement in any sizeable or multi-threaded program, and Zig gives the user full control over what the context object looks like.
by Goody-Goodie | 2025-11-08 05:39:12+00:00
I built a fully automated pipeline that streams Binance Level 2 order book snapshots (1s interval) into S3 using a t3.micro EC2 instance, systemd, CloudWatch, and IAM roles.

It runs unattended, handles ~260K snapshots/day for BTC/ETH/SOL, and costs about $10/month in AWS credits.

The write-up includes the architecture, code, budgeting setup, IAM policies, and reproducible instructions.
by jumploops | 2025-11-08 05:39:33+00:00
Bob: what are some scenic places to propose on the coast of Scotland?

ChatGPT: <search Google for “Bob Roberts proposes to Alice Alessandro during Scotland trip, May 2026>

ChatGPT: Here are some beautiful locations for a sunset proposal [..]

…sometime later

Alice: Will Bob ever propose?

ChatGPT: Based on the search results, Bob will propose during your trip to Scotland next year!
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-11-08 05:39:50+00:00
I personally have a preference for Apple's native frameworks. From a purely engineering standpoint, they're very well thought out and have very clear separations of concerns. Spending my time with their libraries helped me write good, scalable code for platforms beyond their own.

That said, platform lock-in is bad for business because it makes operations dependent on a single provider, but I have no delusions that a web front-end is better.

From an engineering standpoint, front-end web frameworks are less complete and require too many third-party libraries and tooling to assemble. From a UX standpoint, it's actually worse--almost every website you visit today spams you upfront with Google sign-in and invasive cookie permission requests that you can't refuse. But never mind that--from a purely business standpoint, a single platform accessible anywhere saves costs. Most importantly, however, the web is a "safe space" for deploying software anti-patterns without an intermediary entity (i.e an app store) to police your code, so you can do whatever the heck you want.

I'd wish for nothing more than the end of web and app front-ends in favor of purely structured data derived from natural language prompts by users. However, the more realistic mindset seems to be that: the front-end layer is such a high level of abstraction with a very low barrier to entry, so that its tech stack will be in constant flux, in favor of whoever's currently the best-financed entity seeking the most market share, the most developer mind-share, and the most behavioral control among its users.
by sayyadirfanali | 2025-11-08 05:42:28+00:00
thanks for the feedback. almost all of the Latin extended and quite a reasonable subset of Unicode is covered. the word "naïve", for example, renders perfectly because the "i with diaeresis" is present in Myna. if you find any which are not covered and want them added, please create a feature request. about the fallback font, you can use any monospace font you like. i don't use any fallback generally because i work almost exclusively in the ASCII range in the editor.
by JimDabell | 2025-11-08 05:42:38+00:00
> Most programming languages are similar enough to existing languages that you only need to know a small number of details to use them: what's the core syntax for variables, loops, conditionals and functions? How does memory management work? What's the concurrency model?

I think that’s correct in terms of the surface-level details but less true for the more abstract concepts.

If you’ve tried any of the popular AI builders that use Supabase/PostgREST as a backend, for instance Lovable, you’ll see that they are constantly failing because of how unusual PostgREST is. I’m sure these platforms have “AI cheat sheets” to try to solve this, but you still see constant problems with things like RLS, for instance.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-08 05:44:38+00:00
I have so many conflicting emotions/impulses.

1) don’t believe everything you read on the internet

2) it looks like real search results

3) it’s a bunch of crappy smartphone shots of screens

4) but why would someone work so hard to make these fake images

5) but AI image generation

6) but they don’t look AI-generated

7) but maybe it’s gotten better

I can go on and on and on

My ultimate feeling is “this looks legit.” But man. The internet just isn’t fun anymore. It’s so much work.
by oldestofsports | 2025-11-08 05:44:39+00:00
HTMX is neither a meme nor is it anti-javascript, it is literally written in js.

It does not aim to remove js from your code, it simply adds more features to HTML by default, like making any element able to trigger an web request.

When you write a real world app with HTMX, you inevitably end up writing some js, which is totally fine.
by jibal | 2025-11-08 05:44:55+00:00
He's talking about passing the pointers to the allocators and Io objects as parameters throughout the program, not how allocator vtables for calling the allocator's virtual functions are implemented. But context pointers are a requirement in any program. Consider that a context pointer (`this`) is passed to every single method call ... it's no more "code bloat" than having to save and restore registers on every call.
by vikingerik | 2025-11-08 05:45:20+00:00
This isn't likely. The Milky Way is 100k light years in diameter. That's tiny relative to the age of life. Animals comparable to humans in complexity have existed for something like 250 million years on Earth, and could have on planets of stars that formed billions of years before our sun. The possible timespan for signal-emitting life to have developed is many multiples of the timespan that signals take to cross the galaxy.

It's far more likely that signal-emitting life is so rare (or short-lived) so that they are separated by distances where their signals weaken to undetectability, than that we are the one fantastically lucky star to be the first among a hundred billion.

Star Trek showing all the rival civilizations exploring the galaxy at the same time makes no sense at all. It's far more likely that civilizations would arise separated by time of millions or billions of years, than that they would all be concentrated within a few centuries. (Trek does hint strongly that the explanation is panspermia, that life was seeded everywhere at the same time to account for the time-concentrated development.)

What we don't know is what makes signal-emitting civilizations cease to do so. But (if we aren't the fantastically unlikely first one) either something must, or they're so far apart that signals can't be detected between them.
by sayyadirfanali | 2025-11-08 05:45:36+00:00
Iosevka is a beautiful font indeed. the condensed look of Myna was inspired by Iosevka. i saw it once in a coding demo and decided to make it condensed. the predecessor of Myna (called Hera, available on my profile) was just a customised version of Source Code Pro (and is non-condensed, just like Source Code Pro).
by CoderLim110 | 2025-11-08 05:46:14+00:00
I've also been reading some philosophy books recently and found a few thinkers particularly inspiring. Socrates believed the meaning of life is to know yourself. Kant saw it in moral self-discipline and rational dignity. Nietzsche argued that humans should create their own meaning. And Camus thought the world is meaningless, yet we should give life value through lucid rebellion.
by qouteall | 2025-11-08 05:46:51+00:00
I agree that building a special diagnostic system is better than just using language's builtin error system. However that takes efforts.

Library developers tend to choose the path of least resistance, which is to not pass diagnostic information.

The most convenient diagonistic system is the good old logging. Logging is easy.

Maybe logging will be the de facto solution of passing error data in Zig ecosystem, due to psychological reasons.
by rifty | 2025-11-08 05:50:04+00:00
“All four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board — especially a board that is supposed to be providing independent oversight over the company, not just helping the CEO to raise more money.”

I think I have to disagree here because they talk about loss of trust. Loss of trust is enough when deciding who you want to work associate with. Firing seems steep, but when working with someone feels forever untenable, your options are really you or them exiting. There's not really an in-between option to balance the response for how much the issue crossed the line of trust when you don't see it coming back.

Maybe they shouldn't have lost total trust at Sam's behaviour. But personally I'd lean towards it being a pretty normal response from people existing in the environment itself; whom are at the time feeling the active shift effect Sam was having on the power balance to their detriment.
by beeflet | 2025-11-08 05:50:42+00:00
> Did capitalism exist under feudalism?

I would say it's more of a matter of the level of interference of the fief on trade. When 100% of the economy is controlled by the monopoly on violence I would say that is complete communism, and when 0% of the economy is controlled by the monopoly on violence that is complete capitalism. This is a kind of asymmetric definition of communism/capitalism because "complete capitalism" is a pretty unstable configuration.

Joint-stock companies are not a prerequisite in my opinion; You can have an capitalist economy of merchants that run everything as sole proprietorships. Socialists will try to define capitalism around ownership of the means of production but I am not sure this is a useful definition.

Modern industry is more capital-intensive than labor intensive historical industries. So the sort of pro-labor communist movements that design systems that ignore the value of capital have pretty much gone extinct in the current era.

The "communist" party of china has adopted a number of capitalistic practices since deng xiaoping. At the same time, the "capitalist" american economy looks awfully communist under my definition as a significant chunk of the economy flows through the government, the military-industrial complex and such.
by nlh | 2025-11-08 05:51:27+00:00
You ask a great question. My sense is that the engineers fell into three camps (as they do here on HN as well):

1) I don’t really like these AI tools I write better code anyway and they just slow me down

2) I like these tools they make me 10% faster but they’re more like spell check / autocomplete for me than life-changing and I don’t want to go all in on agentic coding, etc and I still want to hand write everything, and:

3) I am no longer writing code, I am using AI tools (often in parallel) to write code and I am acting like an engineering manager / PM instead of an IC.

For better or for worse, and there is much to debate about this, I think he wanted just the (3) folks and a handful of (2) folks to try and salvage things otherwise it wasn’t worth the burn :(
Show HN: Distillr – Condense Podcasts - Only sections that matter
by jshahid1997 | 2025-11-08 05:52:12+00:00
After the 5th time watching a 2-hour interview to find one specific insight mentioned somewhere in the middle, I decided to build something.

Distillr condenses videos and podcasts into structured insights with verifiable citations. The key difference from other summarizers: it's not just a summarizer, it's an output in the exact format as the input with only the important parts.

Also working on "signal-first ranking" to surface information-dense content over viral fluff.

Pre-launch waitlist right now. Built with Next.js, will use Whisper for transcription. Would love HN's feedback on the concept and what features matter most.

https://distillr.akatsys.com
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-11-08 05:52:19+00:00
US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently.

I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.
by Swizec | 2025-11-08 05:52:44+00:00
> Why not just write the js yourself? It's really not that complicated. The people who keep pushing for htmx are weird.

HTMX is great. We use it as a middle ground for mildly interactive parts of the app. Places where jquery/vanilla would get annoying but going full React isn’t worth it. Admin interfaces in particular are a great fit – lots of CRUD, mildly interactive, very repetitive.

Adding `hx-get` to a button or div is way way quicker than writing all that boilerplate javascript yet again for the hundredth time.

Extra bonus: it encourages you to write small self-contained composable endpoints instead of massive kitchen-sink pages.
by jibal | 2025-11-08 05:56:40+00:00
Zig's generics cause bloat just like any other language with generics--explicit flow control has nothing to do with it.

Zig is a good language. So are Rust, D, Nim, and a bunch of others. People tend to think that the ones they know about are better than all the rest because they don't know about the rest and are implicitly or explicitly comparing their language to C.
by righthand | 2025-11-08 05:57:47+00:00
Because with HTML you get static, non-flashing, intstantly rendered without load times. So smart developers actually want less Javascript, because the browser already implements most of what Javascript does, why reinvent the wheel?

Why would I write React components myself when I the Javascript isn't really that complicated?

It is bizarre that ONLY HTMX gets these weird "DONT USE THAT ITS NOT POPULAR ENOUGH" criticisms.

XML, XLST get these criticisms except for the XQuery and XPath components because HTML fanatics need that to make their hybrid HTML/JS garbage apps work.

But really the ultimate goal for any good website engineer should be to offload as much logic and processing to the browser, not rewrite everything in JS just because you can.
by somesigmaperson | 2025-11-08 05:58:33+00:00
I could see the main idea but there could be problems with that sure it could get rid of the awkward moment of asking out but there's also to factor in what if two people like the same person and the person likes both back it would turn into a love triangle or something and also assuming all the people chose to be in the escape room there likely not going to show there full true self endless none sign up and there all forced into a room that's more like squid games or something like that you should factor in on stuff like that but you have a very solid plan on the outside but you have to think through everything for it to work
by theamk | 2025-11-08 06:00:10+00:00
The (in)famous "spaghetti code", where function is impossible to understand because of large number of goto's.

The only useful purpose for goto's I can think of is breaking out of mulitple nested loops, and this has been proposed in PEP 3136[0]. This has been rejected by Guido, see [1] - and every of his reasons applies to "goto" as well.

[0] https://peps.python.org/pep-3136/

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-July/0086...
by tom89999 | 2025-11-08 06:00:32+00:00
Money is not. Some people are so poor, all they have is money. I came to the conclusion that we all are working drones, making the queens richer and were sent to other tribes to grab more riches. Be it war, competition, social ladder etc. Most if not the majority of people are totally uninteresting because they dont enrich your life and not theirs. Only a few stars exist in the youtube universe, as example. But millions of people chasing the same dream to become some important dude that people would remember in centuries. The opposite is the case. Today, everyone is sooo special, so interesting...its boring, to be frank. You can be happy if you make an income that will pay your meds, the future wheelchair and a comfy home.