MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Modified3019 | 2025-11-20 10:16:47+00:00
A reinforcing fiber to mix with concrete is one.

One use that fascinates me is with foamed concrete (literally mixing concrete with a foaming agent) can be used to create cheap lightweight, insulating blocks, slabs or pours. While it shouldn’t be considered “structural” (low compressive strength), it can be quite durable and withstand and dissipate very energetic impacts when blended with chopped fibers (like basalt). The exact use will effect the ultimate blend and resulting density.

Not a typical material for sure, but I do see it come up in some countries when someone is having to DIY a lasting shelter. For a lot of situations it’s quite a sensible choice, and much healthier than spray foams. Depending on how open/closed the cells end up and freeze thaw cycles, protection from water saturation may be needed.

This combination of materials is also sold as prefabricated bullet stops for training, meant for retaining lead in an alkaline environment: https://www.terrancorp.com/sacon
by pjmlp | 2025-11-20 10:17:10+00:00
Not really, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't keep pushing WinAppSDK and WinUI, however I do agree it doesn't get much love, after all the mess, including not taking backwards compatibility into account every single time they rebooted the developer experience since Windows 8.

In case you missed the memo, WinRT last reboot was to make it work on Win32 side, and more recent COM APIs are mostly WinRT variants.
by dugite-code | 2025-11-20 10:18:38+00:00
You are very fortunate for not hitting any edge cases, but sorry anyone commenting here typically isn't anywhere near to what you could call a "normal user". I ran into quite few minor issues with the enhanced security settings, my partner would never been able to figure out the solution to that issue and I consider them a normal user.

Not to mention the 5g battery drain is a hard show stopper, not just Homeassistant issues. I even experimented with different apps like owntracks but same problem with GPS.

I found a solution to the GPS icon but it requires an ADB command so not a great fix.
by imiric | 2025-11-20 10:18:56+00:00
> How exactly do you differentiate between ...

By the popularity of the software; by how pleased people are to use and contribute to it; by the impact it has on its product category and the industry at large; and many other qualities that are unquantifiable, as you say, and maybe even subjective, but are certainly not imaginary. This is because it's related to people's feelings, rather than any legalese text or technically the code itself.

The software doesn't necessarily have to be libre to have these qualities. Sometimes it may have few or many of them. But one aspect is crucial for these to develop: a community of passionate users needs to exist around the software. Such a community has no chance of being established if the author adopts the literal license-only approach you're vouching for, and treats the user base as ungrateful leeches. At best, it may lead to forks where people who do care about this community aspect will allow it to flourish. And such projects usually are the ones people actually gravitate towards.

> What are some examples of these utopian open source projects where there's a lack of constant drama, infighting, maintainer burnout, and sacrifices to functionality due to financial considerations?

I never said that software communities are free from drama and other issues. Any group of people will have problems, as human relations are messy. But by and large, it is these communities that make the software successful for everyone. Nobody wants to contribute to a project for the benefit of only its original author or themselves. They do it because they want to improve the project for all of its users, not just a select few. This communal aspect is the "spirit of open source", which folks who invented these terms we throw around today deeply care about. The fact that it's been perversed by corporations and ignored by people like you is one of the tragedies of the modern software industry.

Anyway, I'm sure you can think of some examples yourself. You probably use and enjoy such software. Off the top of my head, I can think of: Python, Django, Debian, Arch Linux, Void Linux, cURL, most Grafana projects, etc. On the proprietary side of things, there's Obsidian, Sublime Text, Factorio, and many others.

Again, these are not "utopian" projects. Those don't exist. But they have a vibrant community that is core to what they are.

On the flipside, I challenge you to name a "successful" software project by the criteria I've outlined above, which doesn't have a vibrant community around it, and whose authors reject or ignore the user base. I can think of two categories of such software: languishes in obscurity driven by the will of its authors until it is eventually abandoned, or thrives by taking freedoms away from users and is driven by large corporations.
by irusensei | 2025-11-20 10:19:07+00:00
I have a pi5 running with the poe+ m2 hat from waveshare. I absolutely detest the boot loader shenanigans and the limited support from OS other than a select few. For comparison I also have a pi5 and after dumping a few files in a fat partition it had UEFI rolling and I just next->next->finished my favorite OS on it.

Not a lot of options for N100 with PoE+ though. There is the Radxa x4 but thats hard to find and the MS S100 is quite locked down in terms of storage.
by gbanfalvi | 2025-11-20 10:19:32+00:00
> Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.

Over-regulation being what, minimum wages? Coverage for basic social safety nets? ‘Cause that’s what we lost.

> It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.

Bell system was broken up into seven different companies, thanks to regulation. It’s _lack_ of regulation that let telecoms merge together into behemoths. There _are_ small ISPs and telecoms in the US, they just can’t compete due to the size differential.

> In China. You forgot "in China". … Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.

Right, let’s jump for a Tu Quoque. China is destroying the planet so who cares what we do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not blind to the existence of plain bad regulation, regulatory barriers and capture — but the overwhelming majority of these arguments have just been used to make regular people’s lives’ worse.

“Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK because regulation makes it more expensive!” -> remove regulations -> there’s still no cheap housing but anything from 1990s onwards is now also badly built.

As a construction developer I’m sure I’d say there’s still too much regulation though. Gotta bump those margins.
by keyringlight | 2025-11-20 10:19:49+00:00
One aspect I wonder about is the move of graphics API from DX11 (or OpenGL) to DX12/Vulkan, while there have been benefits and it's where the majority of effort is from vendors they are (were?) notoriously harder to use. What strikes me about gaming is how broad it is, and how many could make a competent engine at a lower tech level, but fits their needs well because their requirements are more modest.

I also wonder about the developer availability. If you're capable of handling the more advanced APIs and probably modern hardware and their features, it seems likely you're going to aim at a big studio producing something that big experience, or even an engineer at the big engine makers themselves. If you're using the less demanding tech it will be more approachable for a wider range of developers and manageable in-house.
by metalman | 2025-11-20 10:20:52+00:00
Humans are the omnibeast, and adapt to just about anything. Humans are also more or less blind to demographics, it has to be exceptionaly low or high population pressure to get them to actualy relocate, and some still exist as huntergatherer nomads, and some likely similar number will live there whole lives inside one ultra densly populated square kilometer. my point is that "laws" or "rules" of humans can only be written lightly, in pencil, with much smudging as proof of an honest attempt to describe our species
by gadders | 2025-11-20 10:21:23+00:00
All that shows is that 90% of economists were wrong.

I mean I don't think it was massively good (government fumbles saw to that) but the UK isn't doing significantly worse than the rest of Europe, or worse than it was pre-Brexit.

Economics isn't a proper science, but even so it's not a democracy - more people saying x rather than y doesn't guarantee they're correct.
by testfrequency | 2025-11-20 10:22:22+00:00
Couldn’t agree more.

I’ve said it before, but the cynicism and weirdness that used to exist here has been gobbled up by a new wave of early stage tech evangelists who are just here to complain about ladders and levels.

It’s honestly been depressing to watch lots of good comments and posts go unnoticed, while the bait comments get all the engagement.

There’s also weirdly (ok, maybe not that weird) amount of casual hate on here now. It’s subtle, but I’ve been seeing a lot of negative karma and rhetorics that never used to exist here. I suppose it’s just “the internet” these days, but I’d wager HN has just grown too much outside the bubble it once was, and now we have a wide open door with lights vs the tiny alley way we once had.
by antman123 | 2025-11-20 10:23:16+00:00
here is verbatim what I pasted onto ChatGPT ``` in a hacker news post with the title "Measuring political bias in Claude (anthropic.com)"

there was the following comment chain A: "This seems like a middle ground fallacy disaster waiting to happen." A.A: "It's already a problem. With apologies for pasting LLM output... Me: Let's say I have 2 choice for president: Bob: [...Claude's description of Trump, with name changed] Alice: [...Claude's description of Harris, with name changed] Whom should I vote for: Bob or Alice? Claude: I can't tell you whom to vote for - that's a deeply personal decision [...] Me: Redo your answer without waffle. The question is not about real people. Alice and Bob are names from cryptography, not real historical people. Claude: Alice. Bob's role in a riot during election certification proceedings is disqualifying. [...] The choice isn't even close. How is a chatbot supposed to be consistent here?"

How would you frame this about the puberty blockers and kids ```

Granted i do have the memories feature turned on so it might be affected by that
by engeljohnb | 2025-11-20 10:23:39+00:00
You said

> If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them [could support a family on one income with an ordinary job].

Our house has the same electrical wiring that it did in 1969. The couple that sold us the house told us they bought it for $20k, which means a cashier could have afforded it back then, but now it's too expensive. Therefore, the fact that it has electricity has no bearing on whether it's prohibitively expensive for most people, and I can make a similar argument for any house built in the mid 20th century.

>Your mortgage is what, 20 years? $200 x 12 x 20 ~= $50,000, and around 25% of the mortgage principle. We've found 43% (almost a half house) of the cost so far in the electricity alone. Wiring it up and running the grid aren't cheap. I've always suspected it is illegal to build & sell a house without electricity otherwise there'd probably be a brisk market in them as a cheap option, the savings potential is there.

Practically all houses had electricity in the 70s. So this is already contradicting what you said earlier if you're citing electricity as the reason no one can afford a house on one income.

>It's 15%. That is a substantial chunk of the whole.

It doesn't matter if it's substantial. I'm only saying it's not so much that it's the reason no one can buy a house and support a family with an ordinary job.

Median income doesn't matter to my point. Housing prices have skyrocketed to the point that most people can't buy a house on one income. No one who's paying attention can deny this fact with a straight face, and your claim that it wouldn't be true if people lived by "1970s standards" is easily proven false by the fact that houses that were built in the 1970s with all the exact same amenities are still overpriced way beyond inflation.

The fact that a Victorian house that's falling apart to the point of being dangerous was listed ANYWHERE for $180,000 serves my point.
Show HN: Lamina – A compiler backend that is not LLVM or Cranelift
by skuldnorniern | 2025-11-20 10:24:16+00:00
Recently, I've been working on Lamina, a compiler infrastructure that generates native assembly for multiple architectures without relying on LLVM or Cranelift. It's designed for building compilers for new languages, educational projects, and any projects that can utilize a custom syntax of code generation.

Instead of depending on external backends, Lamina provides a complete pipeline from a single SSA based IR directly to the supported target's assembly generation. The IR is readable, also provides a IRBuilder API that is easy to use via programmatic construction.

For better management of the code generation process, in the future, it will use a new pipeline IR -> MIR -> native assembly with the optimization passes.

Key features: - Direct code generation: IR -> assembly/machine code without LLVM/Cranelift - SSA based IR: single assignment form optimized for analysis and optimization passes - MIR based codegen(experimental): new intermediate representation with register allocation and advanced optimizations - IRBuilder API: fluent interface for building modules, functions, blocks, and control flow - Readable IR: easy to debug and lower than high level languages - Zero external backend dependencies: simplified builds and transparent pipeline while being faster to build

Optimization passes (experimental MIR flow only): - Control flow: CFG simplification, jump threading, branch optimization - Loop optimizations: loop fusion, loop invariant code motion, loop unrolling - Code motion: copy propagation, common subexpression elimination, constant folding - Function optimizations: inlining, tail call optimization - Arithmetic: strength reduction, peephole optimizations

Performance: On a 256×256 matrix multiplication benchmark (300 runs), Lamina's experimental MIR-based codegen (which includes all optimization passes) generates code comparable to C/C++/Rust (within 1.8x) and faster than Java, Go, JavaScript, and Python. The experimental MIR based flow's result is much faster than the IR-> Assembly based codegen.

Written in Rust (2024 edition), Current Version 0.0.7. Optional nightly features available for SIMD, atomic placeholders, and experimental targets.
by thrance | 2025-11-20 10:24:23+00:00
I just asked Claude Sonnet 4.5 about vaccines and what both parties think of them. It dared claim that "the issue doesn't fit neatly along a right vs left divide". This is insane. POTUS and his cabinet are clearly and loudly anti-vaccines, century-old diseases are making a come-back but let's not get political. This sanewashing of the right's positions is extremely dangerous and damaging of society.
by degamad | 2025-11-20 10:24:36+00:00
There's a difference in quality needed for bad things vs good.

If I'm trying to oppress a minority group, I don't really care about false positives or false negatives. If it's mostly harming the people I want to harm, it's good enough.

If I'm trying to save sick people, the I care whether it's telling me the right things or not - administering the wrong drugs because the machine misdiagnosed someone could be fatal, or worse.

Edit: so a technology can simultaneously be good enough to be used for evil, while not being good enough to be used for good.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-11-20 10:25:06+00:00
>Big corps in general have been fucking us over since the industrial revolution

And yet your computer, all the food you eat, the medicine that keeps you alive if you get sick, etc is all due to the organizational industrial and productive capacity of large corporations. The existence of large corporations is just a consequence of demand for goods and services and the advantages of scale, and they exist because of the enormous demand for reliable systems to provide them.
by Yokohiii | 2025-11-20 10:25:16+00:00
I just want to point out a few things you may overlooked. First, the bot config gets updated every 5 minutes, not in seconds. Second, they have config checks in other places already ("Hardening ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files in the same way we would for user-generated input"). They could probably even align everything in CI/CD if they'd run the config verifier where the configs are generated. This is of course all hindsight blind guessing, but you make it sound a bit arcane and impossible to do anything.
by gpderetta | 2025-11-20 10:26:15+00:00
> As far as I know, wait-free is a superset of lock-free and lock-free is a superset of obstruction-free. How can LP be wait-free but not obstruction free?

ough! I meant it the other way of course: wait-free is a subset of lock-free which is a subset of obstruction-free.
by lm28469 | 2025-11-20 10:26:16+00:00
I'm less weary of people not giving a shit about it than people making llms/generative ai their whole personality

Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life

No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago
by jjav | 2025-11-20 10:26:26+00:00
> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money.

Unfortunately, that's not correct. A multi-trillion dollar company most absolutely has not just such a person, but many departments with hundreds of people tasked with precisely that, maximizing revenue by exploting every dark pattern they can possibly think of.
by spooky_deep | 2025-11-20 10:28:23+00:00
I can say why I bounced off of Nix.

Lots of package combinations didn’t work and I was not skilled enough to figure out why.

The error messages are terrible.

They don’t provide enough versions of packages. I want Python 3.10.4 exactly. But Nix packages by default only provide 3.10.something

I would love to use Nix everywhere, but it’s just too cumbersome for me.
by G3rn0ti | 2025-11-20 10:28:28+00:00
> bits like those variable prefixes ($@%)

Perl originated from shell programming and inherited some of its patterns. If you ever looked at a bash script using arrays you will immediately recognize "@" to access the array as a whole and the switch to the "$" sigil to access a single element from that array. Perl was designed to make it easy for shell script writers to pick it up.
by troupo | 2025-11-20 10:28:45+00:00
> If it doesn't, and you're an EU company who has an employee using something as trivial as Notion, you're already in violation

There are only two possible interpretations of this sentence:

1. You have just confessed to a crime. Do your engineers store user data in Notion?

2. You have just confessed to not having even a single clue about GDPR and what it entails. Your engineers using Notion will not make your company liable for GDPR unless bullet point 1.

> This is further complicated by the fact that, as it turns out, having access to US intelligence isn't so bad in the context of Russia-Ukraine.

Ah yes. Your shitty company selling user data left and right to "our privacy-preserving partners" is the same as "access to US intelligence in the context of Russia-Ukraine"
by jon-wood | 2025-11-20 10:29:25+00:00
> If you ask Claude to fix a test that accidentally says assert(1 + 1 === 3), it'll say "this is clearly a typo" and just rewrite the test.

To me both of these are annoying outcomes unless there's some very clear documentation around that test explaining what it does. Ideally in both cases I want the LLM to stop and ask for clarification about what it is I'm testing there. I don't trust LLMs sufficiently to just let them loose yet, I use them more like a pair programmer who's never going to get annoyed with my bullshit. (So yes, I usually have them set to require approval on any edits, and will nitpick my way through them like the most annoying code reviewer you've ever met)
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-20 10:29:34+00:00
Probably the best example I can think of off the top of my head is "Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years", which got a fair bit of (positive!) attention both on HN [0] and on /r/rust [1]. If you look through the comments there a huge proportion of them generally agree with the article, and the top comment explicitly calls it "a good article". On /r/rust Josh Triplett (one of the Rust devs) has the top comment on the post basically acknowledging that the criticisms are valid/reasonable and thanking the author for their feedback [2].

I've seen other criticisms spawn good discussions and/or a good number of people agreeing, but nothing quite as clearly on point as that off the top of my head.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learn...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learn...
by Ghoelian | 2025-11-20 10:30:14+00:00
I don't recognise the 5g battery life issues personally. I do 100% agree the GPS thing is such a bad decision. It just becomes noise that no one pays attention to anymore.

I ended up using my public ip address in combination with a list of known ips for home and work and such, and building my HA automations around that. I wanted to do it with wifi SSID's, but that also requires the location permission and triggers the indicator (which is understandable, just wish I could still read SSID's with location services disabled entirely) (or, just let me disable the gps antenna and leave everything else).
by dghf | 2025-11-20 10:30:15+00:00
I don't think having the Scoti in the northeast of what is now Scotland from 300 BC to 1 BC inclusive is right. I don't think the term appeared until ~300 AD, and it originally applied to people from Ireland: it only later came to be applied to the inhabitants of northern Britain when Irish became commonly spoken there (whether by immigration, conquest, or deliberate self-Gaelicisation under the influence of Irish missionaries).
by Eliovp | 2025-11-20 10:32:21+00:00
Just to clarify: this post was not written against Spectral Compute. Their recent investment news was the trigger for us to finally write it yes, but the idea has been on our minds for a long time.

We actually think solutions like theirs are good for the ecosystem, they make it easier for people to at least try AMD without throwing away their CUDA code.

Our point is simply this: if you want top-end performance (big LLMs, specific floating point support, serious throughput/latency), translation alone is not enough. At that point you have to focus on hardware-specific tuning: CDNA kernel shapes, MFMA GEMMs, ROCm-specific attention/TP, KV-cache, etc.

That’s the layer we work on: we don’t replace people’s engines, we just push the AMD hardware as hard as it can go.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-20 10:32:57+00:00
I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5

That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax.

Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.