MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-11-23 22:15:39+00:00
A big concern I have for the industry is what happens as people who truly understand how this stuff works age out. Unfortunately we seem to have stopped replacing them.

Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with. So you’re not getting as many people with this knowledge.

Just as significant I think is the prevalence of lucrative work higher up the stack. Why learn deep system internals when slinging JS and wiring together APIs pays as much or more.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-11-23 22:16:34+00:00
You can't move them (apart from the opening and closing animation), but they can move other objects that are in their way. Both need to be physics objects for that to work, even though the door is just kinematic (i.e. it won't react to forces applied to it). Although if I remember correctly, they are not even fully kinematic. I think you could get them stuck halfway closed by cramming something in the door frame that would get the whole thing jammed.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-23 22:16:37+00:00
Totally wrong.

> Its compilation is slow. I mean SLOW. Slower than C++.

No way. Maybe Rust 1.0, but it's steadily improved and it's definitely faster than C++ now.

> It’s complex. Just as complex as C++.

True, but the problem with C++'s complexity is that you have to memorise all of it or you'll accidentally invoke UB. It's so complex that is basically impossible.

Rust is complex but most of the time the compiler will tell you if you got it wrong. There are exceptions of course (lots of async footguns) but it's still night and day.

> Memory safety is not that sacred. In fact, for many applications malfunctioning is better than crashing

Not sure I really need to counter this...

> When handling lots of mutable shared state (GUI, DB, stateful services, OS/hardware), the performance of native Rust memory model is subpar, and non-native unsafes just leave you with slow compilation, high complexity, and no memory safety in the end — which makes Rust practically meaningless for heavy mutable state jobs.

Not totally clear what he's getting at here. Maybe the ergonomics of GUI style programming which are still being figured out? Hardly a deal breaker though is it? There are plenty of C/C++ GUI libraries with terrible ergonomics and the only one that is actually great (Qt) had to use a custom language extension for decades to achieve that.

> So, is the Rust bad or good? It’s neither. It’s a mediocre programming language with thousands of man-month put into its development

I would love to hear what he thinks a good programming language is, because I can easily pick more holes in any other language than he has.

This anti-Rust zealotry is super tedious.
by Animats | 2025-11-23 22:16:47+00:00
> "there is just no perfect correctness possible in the Turing machine model"

Grrr. Clueless people keep saying that. People have been verifying programs for over forty years now. Formal correctness in terms of not violating assertions is possible for most useful programs. As someone pointed out about the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, if you're program is anywhere near undecidability, it has no business being in the kernel. This not a legit criticism.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-23 22:17:06+00:00
Africa isn’t the only battleground where China has been trying to monopolize the rare earth supply chain. The reason Greenland has been on the Trump administration’s mind at all is because of potential Chinese acquisition or partial ownership of various resource plays in Greenland, including rare earth mines (https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-lobbied-green...).
by maffyoo | 2025-11-23 22:18:25+00:00
my 83 year old mother was able to use (almost) all the features of iOS when she first got an iPhone, in 2012. It genuinely changed her life and meant she could participate in a world I dont think she ever expected to be comfortable in. She tried and failed to use a PC for years. Local library lessons, family time (and patience) etc, but she always needed support. the iPhone as different, it was simple to use with familiar user interactions with every app. Roll forwards to 2025, gradually bit by unnecessary bit bells, whistles and complexity has bled in from every angle. Last week I did a FaceTime call with her to help her log in to an app on her phone. She can do it fine on her iPad that hasn't been updated. this was like going back to her PC days - too complicated and giving her features she didn't ask for, or need.

what was it Steve Jobs said?

"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
by gessha | 2025-11-23 22:19:06+00:00
I walked through a tech store recently and I saw the new iPhones with the liquid gimmick. I opened the camera app on one of their pro phones and it was lagging. I was shocked, I found it mind-boggling. Brand new phone, up to date OS, marketing material BS and for it to lag just feels unprofessional. I’d understand it if it was a Pinephone or whatever but from Apple? My expectations are reaching lower and lower depths.
by k_roy | 2025-11-23 22:20:05+00:00
Shrug? Our experiences have been totally different then.

I bought an older version of Zorin, probably 15 or 16, to review for a blog, and I was totally impressed with the consistency of the theming.

To each their own, but Zorin is a cheap on-ramp for people coming from older Windows/Mac and looking for a somewhat apples-to-apples experience of Windows or Mac, with actual updates and not a bunch of ads or telemetry.

Not everyone is a Linux power user
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-11-23 22:21:21+00:00
Great article. Can confirm, writing performance focused C# is fun. It's great having the convenience of async, LINQ, and GC for writing non-hot path "control plane" code, then pulling out Vector<T>, Span<T>, and so on for the hot path.

One question, how portable are performance benefits from tweaks to memory alignment? Is this something where going beyond rough heuristics (sequential access = good, order of magnitude cache sizes, etc) requires knowing exactly what platform you're targeting?
by vindarel | 2025-11-23 22:21:32+00:00
Arc was re-written to Common Lisp (SBCL) around last year, for performance reasons.

> [Clarc] is much faster and also will easily let HN run on multiple cores. It’s been in the works for years, mainly because I rarely find time to work on it, but it’s all pretty close to done.

> there’s now an Arc-to-JS called Lilt, and an Arc-to-Common Lisp called Clarc. […]

> open-sourcing the Arc implementation (i.e. Clarc) would be much easier [than the HN site]. [Because…]

more and sources of Dang quotes: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/hacker-news-now-runs-on-...
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-23 22:21:40+00:00
I wonder if it would ever be possible to reach that value-per-dollar in the current economy.

Hetzner works because it was built a long time ago when talent was cheap, which it was because the property Ponzi wasn't at the stage where an average post-tax middle-class salary barely covers rent. Since then they've managed to stay afloat because it's only maintenance and small incremental changes from that point on.

Building such a new operation (and offering competitive prices) from scratch today would be impossible based on labor costs alone. This is presumably the same reason they don't offer their very-good-value dedicated servers in the US either, only "cloud" VPSes which are orders of magnitude more expensive.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-23 22:22:12+00:00
Malware has a specific meaning - that one app can surreptitiously embed itself in your device, cause damage, or exfiltrate your info.

I’m not saying there haven’t been vulnerabilities in iOS. But those were bugs that Apple tried to close. For desktop operating systems, giving third party applications that ability is a feature not a bug.

Yes I’m including MacOS in that bucket - see Zoom installing a web server on Macs without letting users know.
by probably_wrong | 2025-11-23 22:22:18+00:00
What about Meta AI? For reasons I cannot comprehend they have been releasing quality research for free for years like PyTorch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models.

I don't know how to reconcile the one side of the company that should be burnt to the ground and the one that's pushing local models forward, but I'd say it's worth considering.
by dahart | 2025-11-23 22:22:29+00:00
Whether the benefit is light sources or transparency or reflectance depends on your goals and on what spectral data you use. The article’s right that anything with spiky spectral power distributions is where spectral rendering can help.

> sRGB and P3, what most displays show, by definition use the D65 illuminant

I feel like that’s a potentially confusing statement in this context since it has no bearing on what kind of lights you use when rendering, nor on how well spectral rendering vs 3-channel rendering represents colors. D65 whitepoint is used for normalization/calibration of those color spaces, and doesn’t say anything about your scene light sources nor affect their spectra.

I’ve written a spectral path tracer and find it somewhat hard to justify the extra complexity and cost most of the time, but there are definitely cases where it matters and it’s useful. Also there’s probably more physically spectral data available now than when I was playing with it. I’m sure you’re aware and this is what you meant, but might be worth mentioning that it’s the interaction of multiple spectra that matters when doing spectral rendering. For example, it doesn’t do anything for the rendered color of a light source itself (when viewed directly), it only matters when the light is reflected or transmitted through spectra that are different from the light source, that’s where wavelength sampling will give you a different result than a 3-channel approximation.
by immibis | 2025-11-23 22:23:05+00:00
You said this: "If to someone it makes sense to pour money into an apparently non-viable business on the off chance that it succeeds, what exactly is it that you're saying is not functioning properly?"

But this comment only makes sense when starting from a whole bunch of assumptions, which happen to be true right here and now, but are in no way universal.

Let me make a comparison: "If to someone it makes sense to carry a flamethrower to the grocery store to defend against thieves, what exactly is wrong with that?" What's wrong is a society where that kind of defense is necessary! We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.

Also, rich people don't get to create a problem and also claim credit for solving it (with money).

Edit: much better analogy.
by protocolture | 2025-11-23 22:23:54+00:00
No in my locality, angry old karens got together to get the local government to prevent used tyre sales (small fine from memory), and actively damage and break tyres that are being provided to motorsport enthusiasts for free. Actually they were able to create a police task force to damage the tyres for them. They also had a tyre buyback scheme at one point, to make bald tyres unaffordable.

Its a social harassment scheme that has become popular for the local government to buy into and legitimize.

It is already illegal to drive with bald tyres, so the extra regulations and enforcement really only serve to make life difficult for law abiding citizens.

Keep in mind we have 2 local legal motorsport venues that have open track days. And theres a separate police task force that spend their time chasing down our principle hoons, who are public enough that they have an official facebook page and sell illegal car modifications over facebook sales groups.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-11-23 22:24:33+00:00
> Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years

Yeah, but they are far outweighed by the quality of life regressions that pushed me to desktop Linux a number of years ago. I only use Windows, begrudgingly, on my work laptop these days, and it just seems to get more bothersome as the years pass.

Linux used to require more install and post-install-setup effort to get me to my happy workflow place, but Windows overtook it a while back and has only been increasing its lead ever since as a result of a growing stack of defaults and unnecessary inclusions being, quite specifically, quality of life regressions (transgressions).
by dustfinger | 2025-11-23 22:25:17+00:00
Don't underestimate the advantage of being able to move the cursor anywhere in a few clicks without having to take your hands off the keyboard. It is much faster than a mouse. Also, you can save your elbows the pain of constantly reaching over for the mouse.

avy does more than just jump the cursor to a specific place. It also allows you search for, copy and move text round without needing to move your cursor to that text. It is extremely easy to use and very efficient.
by nunez | 2025-11-23 22:25:30+00:00
I don't trust LLMs or "deep research" for any serious analysis. I use them for guidance (when I do use them) but not for the final product. Too many words with too many landmines (mistakes) hidden within. Also, distillation and inference via human brain is much more environmentally-friendly than sacrificing fleets of GPUs while only being just a tad bit more work.
by Manuel_D | 2025-11-23 22:25:33+00:00
I'm mostly interested in getting concrete answers as to what people are referring to when they talk about "algorithmically served" content. This kind of phrasing is thrown around a lot, and I'm still unsure by what people are referring to by this phrase and I've rarely found people proposing fleshed out ideas as to how to define "algorithmically served content".

Some people take the stance that even using view counts as part of ranking should result in a company listing section 230 protections, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027529

You proposed an interesting framing around reproducibility of content ranking, as in two users who have the exact same watch history, liked posts, group memberships, etc. should have the same content served to them. But in subsequent responses it sounds like reproducibility isn't enough, certain actions shouldn't be used for recommendation even if it is entirely reproducible. My reading is that in your model, there are "small" actions that user take that shouldn't be used for recommendations, and presumably there are also "big" actions that are okay to use for recommendation. If that's the case, then what user actions would you permit to be used for recommendations and which ones would not be permitted to use? What are the delineation between "small" and "big" actions?

Labeling is another idea but Meta does, in fact, disclaim which user actions are used for content recommendations: https://transparency.meta.com/features/ranking-and-content/

Basically, I still don't have a clear picture of what does and doesn't qualify as "algorithmically served" content in your model.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2025-11-23 22:26:18+00:00
Your AI slop said you have fiber, so maybe you should try to actually read it instead of having us catch your lies.

> 1. Downgraded Xfinity from $90/mo to a basic $50/mo plan (still usable speeds, just lower tier)

> 2. Added AT&T Fiber as a second line at $55/mo (different infrastructure = different failure modes)

> 3. Bonded both connections using WireGuard VPN and OpenWRT routing

Edit:

Another lie detected: ATT isn't accepting new customers on DSL, and is in fact yanking service for existing customers in many areas. So there's zero chance that OP signed up for ATT copper internet within the last year or so.

https://www.att.com/internet/dsl/
by armada651 | 2025-11-23 22:26:23+00:00
> They’re victims, but only in the same sense that someone can be the victim of a hurricane.

What about those that can't form connections because of emotional abuse in their past? I wouldn't call them victims of a hurricane like it's some kind of unpreventable natural disaster. They're victims of their abusers and the people in their life that didn't intervene to stop the abuse.
by b3ing | 2025-11-23 22:27:01+00:00
Sure it’s great the way it is now, if it’s free, but at some point it’s gonna change because it needs to make more money and I don’t think subscriptions are gonna be enough, so it’ll probably be embedded ads inside of it and then there’s an issue that it’s scraped and ripped off the entire web without permission and pirated books and scrape those as well. I’ll look forward to the day when you can run AI on your own computer no ads, 100% percent open source because it’s all based on stolen data.
by hublio | 2025-11-23 22:27:08+00:00
Wow, that is a really sophomoric analysis. Considering interstellar travel to be infeasible on the basis of duration or distance is a narrow perspective. If we lived much longer, or if our metabolism was much slower, it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

The amount of energy required is the only sensible perspective from which to analyze interstellar travel. If you make things really small, again, it's not much of a problem.

The author also neglects the time dilation. Go fast enough and the time dilation takes care of the duration.

Give my team the resources and I'll put a few billion base pairs of Picard's DNA into orbit around Proxima long before Daenerys is riding a dragon.
by shkkmo | 2025-11-23 22:27:14+00:00
> I'm somewhat unsurprised that my off the cuff hypothesis has been tested, and is indeed likely accurate.

That study is a correlation with self reported satisfaction. The effect size is that a doubling of ad spend results in a 3% change in satisfaction. I struggled to find good numbers but it appears as if ad spending in the USA has been a more or less constant percentage of GDP growth.

Thus the only real conclusion you can draw from your argument is that any increase in unhappiness caused by the internet was caused by its associated GDP growth increasing ad spend per capita.

Personally, I do think advertising has become more damaging precisely due to the internet but good luck proving it.

> And a practical point on this topic is that the benefits of the internet are, in practice, fringe, even if freely available to everyone

Ok, nevermind. I can't take anything else you say seriously when you call the ways the the internet has improved people's lives "fringe". I take it you never tried to take a bus pre-internet? Drive a car across the cohntry? Or lookup any information? The internet's effects on people is so far from fringe that it has seeped into almost everything we do at a fundamental level. Perhaps because of that you can't see it.
by mallets | 2025-11-23 22:27:21+00:00
It's "legal" at first glance but it's effectively banned in most cases. No monetary compensation, only direct relatives, only traditional pregnancy, etc.

It's outright banned (commercial) in most of EU. In most countries it was left unregulated for a long time but most of them are choosing to ban all commercial forms of it. Besides US, most major countries have banned it.

Now many people do ignore these laws and most governments do little to enforce them unless they make the news for some reason. Banning commercial forms of it just ensures abuse and issues go unreported. It's the paternalistic part of feminism that's been leading the charge for modern bans, with both liberal and conservative roots.
by deltadarkly | 2025-11-23 22:27:23+00:00
We think that using event based agents will eventually become the standard. Currently most AI agent frameworks are essentially a single runtime and use "agents" as nodes in a "workflow". This design pattern is fine for most non-developers to automate tasks locally. However we believe that this pattern doesn't scale well especially for developers. Which is why our agents operate their own runtimes as microservices, and "workflows" are the abstraction layer above agents that allow you to connect and attach agents together to do real work (Workflows to-be-announced soon). We separate "workflows" & agents as different layers in the stack, we think this design pattern is the future of agentic.
by dahart | 2025-11-23 22:27:27+00:00
Yeah exactly. Spectral isn’t often giving you a very different result from RGB. It rarely matters for entertainment rendering like films & games, but it’s useful for scientific predictive rendering.

Sodium lights are a problem not because they’re yellow, but because they have very spiky spectra. Smooth spectra, whether it’s lights or materials, will tend to work fine in RGB regardless of the color.
by lvass | 2025-11-23 22:27:31+00:00
Definitely not it's purpose. Avy can be used to select a word, line, or region. One action is move to it. But it can also, in it's own words, copy, yank, zap to, transpose, teleport, kill, mark, ispell, org-refile, and custom actions.

https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/
by qingcharles | 2025-11-23 22:27:40+00:00
Smells really get embedded into your conscience from early days. I remember as a kid really loving the "Smell-O-Vision" movie they had set up at La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris. As you watched they had little aerosol cans labeled with different scents ("baking bread" etc) that a mechanism would squirt towards the viewer.

I found this History of Smell-O-Vision paper too today:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7691926/
by zipy124 | 2025-11-23 22:28:00+00:00
If I try to play a video in a chat, and then press the three dots to go full screen or change quality or scroll through the video, it just jumps to the top of the chat. Messages do not sync between devices. Microphone or video sometimes do not work and requires a restart. Sending attachments often just results in a failed message. Note these happen on all the OS I have triend on high end devices and on extremely high end internet 10-gigabit.

There is also just feature jank like for instance you cannot have two instances open at the same time if you have two organisations that you work for, you have to switch constantly. This is a disaster for any consultants or contractors who are placed in-org on teams.

The calendar space for an all day event takes up a sliver of space on the calendar, meaning people will often instead schedule an event for 9-5 or worst case 12-12 hours so it's not missable on the calendar easily etc...
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-11-23 22:28:02+00:00
5% is backed by data, you just haven't bothered to investigate.

Every single day for decades now Iraqi mothers have given birth to still-born children - 50% of children born in Baghdad - because of the US' use of depleted uranium on the battlefield - a war crime if any other nation were to do it.

https://psr.org/resources/body-count/

>russian-backed agent

This is about as productive as me calling you a bootlicker for empire, which I won't do. I'm not a Russian - I'm simply a member of a co-criminal state in the absolutely phony, criminal 'war on terror', who is willing to hold my government accountable for the heinous crimes committed in my name. Why are you not so willing to take responsibility for our nations war crimes?