MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nathcd | 2025-11-07 18:19:15+00:00
There's Borgo: https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo

I've never used it so can't speak from any experience, and unfortunately it doesn't seem particularly active (and doesn't mention a current status anywhere), and doesn't have a license, so shrug. When it's been posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211891), people seemed pretty excited about it.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-11-07 18:19:32+00:00
> What is the software equivalent of spacing studs interspersed with fireblocks that we're not doing?

You're comparing apples to hockey pucks. For the analogy to hold, you need to specify what industry the software is for. i.e., if I'm building a garden shed, I don't need a specific stud spacing or even fireblocks at all. Hell, I can build it from raw timber if I have enough of it.
by loudmax | 2025-11-07 18:19:42+00:00
> Men must be valued for simply being, rather than having our value determined by what we do or perform (which is the patriarchal standard).

I have no idea that "patriarchal standards" are, but we absolutely should value people based on what they perform and do. That's not to say that people don't have an inherent value, or that we shouldn't care for people who need help. We value people who help those around them to the best of their abilities, and we denigrate those who use their abilities to hurt others. Regardless of gender.

> We must reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.

There is an extremist element that roughly hews to this notion of masculinity, and this is something that Galloway warns against. I don't think that definition of masculinity that was ever mainstream. It's always been on the fringe, and rightly so.
by timhh | 2025-11-07 18:19:50+00:00
> why isn’t OCaml more popular

I've used OCaml a bit and found various issues with it:

* Terrible Windows support. With OCaml 5 it's upgraded to "pretty bad".

* The syntax is hard to parse for humans. Often it turns into a word soup, without any helpful punctuation to tell you what things are. It's like reading a book with no paragraphs, capitalisation or punctuation.

* The syntax isn't recoverable. Sometimes you can add a single character and the error message is essentially "syntax error in these 1000 lines".

* Ocamlfmt is pretty bad. It thinks it is writing prose. It will even put complex `match`es on one line if they fit. Really hurts readability.

* The documentation is super terse. Very few examples.

* OPAM. In theory... I feel like it should be great. But in practice I find it to be incomprehensible, full of surprising behaviours, and also surprisingly buggy. I still can't believe the bug where it can't find `curl` if you're in more than 32 Unix groups.

* Optional type annotation for function signatures throws away a significant benefit of static typing - documentation/understanding and nice error messages.

* Tiny ecosystem. Rust gets flak for its small standard library, but OCaml doesn't even have a built in function to copy files.

* Like all FP languages it has a weird obsession with singly linked lists, which are actually a pretty awful data structure.

It's not all bad though, and I'd definitely take it over C and Python. Definitely wouldn't pick it over Rust though, unless I was really worried about compile times.
by n0um3n4 | 2025-11-07 18:20:20+00:00
There are standards (and surely more to come), but I still wouldn’t call it engineering. Then again, I’m just a theoretical physicist who wandered into software development out of necessity, so treat that as a biased call.

Sometimes I wonder: do people still believe a man's word? I do honor that. I have great respect for humans who give and follow their word. Sure, they make mistakes and you bet your butt they hold themselves accountable but... do people still do that?

I’m honestly curious, because I do take people’s anecdotes seriously (keeping in mind that brains are fuzzy with perception and memory fills the gaps), and I still tend to take someone at their word. Lately I’m noticing how naive that is, and how much people take advantage of it.

Why don’t we hold them accountable? Are we tolerating so much that we end up doing a kind of “peaceful violence”? I’m not calling for witch hunts or anything, but surely we can do better than whatever is happening now.

Take the congressional hearing, for example: if there’s strong evidence someone lied, publicly we should at least be able to say, “Your statements are not credible for the time being.” How do you come back from that? I don’t know.

Take YouTube videos nowadays: clickbait titles and exaggerated facial expressions in thumbnails just to grab attention. If the video doesn’t actually deliver on the premise of the title, it should be reported as misleading, regardless of the “this video was made for entertainment” disclaimer. That attitude is bleeding into so many areas of life. Language and words are becoming a joke, and over time people get used to it and copy the same behavior.

I guess my point is: why is someone’s word no longer taken seriously (if it ever really was)? And why don’t we hold people accountable?
by Lio | 2025-11-07 18:21:01+00:00
Is there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts?

If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part?

I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
Tell HN: Amazon intentionally keeps your money for as long as possible
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-07 18:21:02+00:00
Stories of how Amazon bullied its providers into giving better payment terms while at the same time taking as long as possible to pay what it owes are legendary. In particular, there were long periods in the past where Amazon managed positive cashflow while keeps earnings at zero.

I never connected the dots that Amazon used the same tactics on its customers. I just bought a book (Rust book if case you're curious) and afterwards noticed that it was a kindle book. I swear it must've taken be 3-5 seconds to press the return button. I decided to talk to customer support to make sure I had actually returned (it wasn't obvious at all, in particular ebook returns don't show up in the list of "all returns"). Anyway, I talked to customer support and they helpfully confirmed that I had indeed initiated the return and I would have the money back in 5-7 working days. So it took them <3 seconds to take my money, but to have it back it takes 5-7 working days. This is intentional.
by griffzhowl | 2025-11-07 18:21:04+00:00
It's not just a question of instrumental error though. There are also assumptions being used in interpreting the data from the instruments, and it's not generally possible to assign them reliable probabilities.

e.g. the first line of the article's abstract quoted above:

"Supernova (SN) cosmology is based on the key assumption that the luminosity standardization process of Type Ia SNe remains invariant with progenitor age."

If the results reported in the article are right, the confidence we should have in this assumption, and therefore any results relying on it, have just radically changed.
by jancsika | 2025-11-07 18:21:08+00:00
> That is a very difficult assertion to validate.

Keep in mind he's limited his assertion to UX. That narrow point is almost certainly true in the case of his C codebase.

But read the rest-- he literally wrote how security researchers find memory safety errors in C codebases!

Dollars to donuts he came up with this UX-on-accident vs. security-researcher-on-purpose bug dichotomy in his head as a response to some actual CVE in his own C codebase.

In short, he's agreeing with the research that led to programming languages like Rust in the first place. And even though he's found an odd way to agree, there's no assertion to validate here (at least wrt security).

Edit: clarifications
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-07 18:21:12+00:00
The scam in online advertising is far more sinister;

Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested.

This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.

The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.

>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago

Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?

Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.
by w10-1 | 2025-11-07 18:21:24+00:00
Yes, new frameworks will have a harder time getting uptake.

Worse, with LLM's easily generating boilerplate, there's less pressure to make old framework code concise or clear, and the superior usability of a new framework won't be a big draw.

But coding is a primary application/profit center, and you can be sure they'll reduce the latency between release and model support, and they'll start to emphasize/suggest new frameworks/paradigms as a distinguishing feature.

My concern is about gaming the system, like SEO. If LLM coding is the gatekeeper, they'll be corrupted by companies seeking access/exposure. Developer uptake used to be a reasonable measure of quality, but in this new world it might only reflect exposure.
by diek | 2025-11-07 18:21:41+00:00
From the description I thought the expression was a function of only 't', and there was no (for instance) accumulation of the previously computed byte. Then in the image I saw the same value of 't' evaluating to different values:

t=1000: 168 t=1000: 80

Reading the source: https://github.com/KMJ-007/zigbeat/blob/main/src/evaluator.z...

It does look like the expression is a pure function of 't', so I can only assume that's a typo.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-11-07 18:21:58+00:00
The proposal is about deploying automated scanning of every message and every image on all messaging providers and email client. That is indisputable.

It therefore breaks EtoE as it intercepts the messages on your device and sends them off to whatever 3rd party they are planning to use before those are encrypted and sent to the recipient.

> It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.

How can a judge be involved when we are talking about scanning hundreds of millions if not billions of messages each day? That does not make any sense.

I suggest you re-read the Chat control proposal because I believe you are mistaken if you think that a judge is involved in this process.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-07 18:22:01+00:00
It sounds extreme, but I support banning usage of anything that runs software for children under 13. Under 13, children are still developing their minds, it is important for their welfare that they learn how to function without technological dependencies.

You know how in school they used to tell us we can't use calculators to solve math problems? Same thing. It can't be done by individual parents either, because then kids would get envious and that in itself would cause more problems than it would solve.

It is important for kids to get bored, to socialize in person, to solve problems the hard way, and develop the mental-muscles they need to not only function, but to make best use of modern technology.

It is also important that parents don't use technology to raise their children (includes TV). Most parents just give their kids a tablet with youtube these days.
by martin-t | 2025-11-07 18:22:01+00:00
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters

And this is why laws should always include their justification.

The intent was clearly to protect people - to make sure the balance of power does not fall too much in the government's favor that it can silence dissent before it gets organized enough to remove the government (whether legally or illegally does not matter), even if that meant some crimes go unpunished.

These rules were created because most current democratic governments were created by people overthrowing previous dictatorships (whether a dictator calls himself king, president or general secretary does not matter) and they knew very well that even the government they create might need to be overthrown in the future.

Now the governments are intentionally sidestepping these rules because:

- Every organization's primary goal is its own continued existence.

- Every organization's secondary goal is the protection of its members.

- Any officially stated goals are tertiary.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-07 18:22:37+00:00
>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither

I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.

And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.

People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.
by NelsonMinar | 2025-11-07 18:22:49+00:00
Could use a more reliable source for this report.

I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well. I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very helpful to me.
by isr | 2025-11-07 18:23:10+00:00
If you read the chain of posts I directly responded to, then there's nothing vague about what I said. Here, I'll help you out:

That chain was in response to:

>> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here > Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done. Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.

So in that context, there's nothing "vague" about my somewhat tongue-in-cheek response. Neither, you'll find, is there any attempt by me to say that one SHOULDNT stop the FBI from doing anything bad.

The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".
by phplovesong | 2025-11-07 18:23:18+00:00
Borgo looks like some guys phd thesis. It looks like it was a fun experiment.

I feel a new simple ocaml like language that just compiled to Go would be really popular, really fast. And it would not even need to build a ecosystem, as Go already have all the things you need.

Something like what Gleam is for Erlang.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-07 18:24:22+00:00
These are all confused meandering thoughts around the one core truth.

There are somewhere around 500,000 humans who can travel among our minds and mess with us through the occult Power of consciousness. They have always been there, yet they change as a culture over time. They war among each other and spread craziness among us all.

I was press ganged into a hooligan army of American Thought Control. It did not work out as I would not be racist, nor tolerate their extortion. My life to drive a stake into the heart of such Powers.

As a person prominent in Power I have been exposed to all of the gossip that comes by the cultures of the voices in our heads. That includes of those “greys” which are not nazis, human, or abductors. Humans do abduct, and they do have the power to make others trip balls in their own minds. Besides, humans often lie if you haven’t figured that out yet. The occult Power programs (such as Stargate) did come from an era of post WW2 “think tanks.” We only hear the absurd versions.

Those so-called greys have been in contact with many, through the mind. They do not need to make personal appearances. I have shared a few stories of what has come to me. Check my past comments!

Some are provocative, they are all honest accounts as far as my part is concerned.
by awillen | 2025-11-07 18:25:05+00:00
The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.

Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?
by phineyes | 2025-11-07 18:25:35+00:00
This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive.

On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
by edanm | 2025-11-07 18:25:47+00:00
But isn't this true of all technologies? I know plenty of people who are amazing Python developers. I've also seen people make a huge mess, turning a three-week project into a half-year mess because of their incredible lack of understanding of the tools they were using (Django, fittingly enough for this conversation).

That there's a learning curve, especially with a new technology, and that only the people at the forefront of using that technology are getting results with it - that's just a very common pattern. As the technology improves and material about it improves - it becomes more useful to everyone.
by belter | 2025-11-07 18:25:57+00:00
BEAM performance model trades throughput for isolation, which hurts CPU-bound tasks, and ironically, whenever you need speed, you end up using NIFs that break BEAM safety guarantees, and reintroduce the exact fragility Elixir was supposed to avoid.

In 2025, Elixir is a beautiful system for a niche that infrastructure has already abstracted away.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-07 18:26:34+00:00
I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1.

> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.

Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
by pqtyw | 2025-11-07 18:26:36+00:00
> It is pretty obvious how they are intertwined.

Instead repeating the same thing in multiple messages you might at some point consider saying HOW do you think they are related. Because yes its obvious that they are, on its own that is saying very little.

> ignorant they actually gaslite me.

Because its very hard to understand what specific points are you trying to make?
by cauch | 2025-11-07 18:26:55+00:00
No one is going to take you seriously if your argument is the very reductive "because they choose to" (being tongue-in-cheek here, don't take it seriously)

It is very clear that public image has a huge impact on what people choose. For example, people who consider themselves introvert choose, in majority, to avoid fields that have a strong extrovert vibe. Similarly, people will tend to not choose fields if the field "gives a vibe" they don't feel they belong to. So, if there is an initial bias toward men, the fact that some people don't choose the field is in no way a proof that there is no bias.

I agree that the 10% number is not the best, but the "corrected" number where you take the samples in same job and position does the same mistake. In fact, there are arguments that in these cases, you have a selection bias (some of the men in the field are seeing this field as their calling, but some of the men are just doing it as a job without being overly passionated, while the women that are not overly passionated just don't choose this job) and that using this methodology, women should overperform because there is a gap. The "real" number is probably in between.
by isr | 2025-11-07 18:27:46+00:00
If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know.

(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-07 18:27:59+00:00
Naah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much.

Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether.

What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.

tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech.

[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
by hylaride | 2025-11-07 18:28:07+00:00
Bell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their policy is most people should pay them to peer. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but IIRC for awhile they also refused to peer with any other domestic backbone providers.

The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto.

It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.