MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hypeatei | 2025-11-19 11:41:59+00:00
I don't understand how your takeaway is that this is a language flaw other than to assume that you have some underlying disdain for Rust. That's fine, but state it clearly please.

The end result would've been the exact same if they "handled" the error: a bunch of 500s. The language being used doesn't matter if an invariant in your system is broken.
by kreetx | 2025-11-19 11:42:02+00:00
This part is interesting with regarding to LLMs: https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4?t=817. He presents as if it were the year 1973, pokes fun at APIs (think HTTP), then says that computers in the future will figure out by themselves how to talk to each other. The opposite had become true when the presentation was actually done, but now the situation is turning.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-11-19 11:42:02+00:00
Oh oh oh I know this!

I work in the refurb division of an ewaste recycling company[0]. To prepare a machine for sale, the drive needs to be wiped, and (optionally) an OS loaded. Wiping happens in WipeOS[1], which loads when you PXE boot on the internal company network. To install an OS, I have a separate network on my desk that will load iVentoy[2] when PXE booted, where I can further boot from ISOs I have on my server, but I almost always install Linux Mint. With those 2 things, I can largely do my job without fumbling with and losing USB drives.

I have 2 16 port switches on my desk, with over a dozen ethernet cables plugged into each. The yellow cables will PXE boot WipeOS, and the black ones PXE boot iVentoy.

[0] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling

[1] https://www.wipeos.com/

[2] https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html
by sofixa | 2025-11-19 11:42:29+00:00
It's not that it's technically impossible. The very simple problem is that there is no way of providing hard spend caps without giving you the opportunity to bring down your whole production environment when the cap is met. No cloud provides wants to give their customers that much rope to hang themselves with. You just know too many customers will do it wrong or will forget to update the cap or will not coordinate internally, and things will stop working and take forever to fix.

It's easier to waive cost overages than deal with any of that.
Show HN: Excel Custom Functions in Zig
by alexjreid | 2025-11-19 11:42:39+00:00
A Zig package for implementing Excel custom functions against the ancient C SDK.

This exists because I wanted to learn about Zig's C interop and comptime to see if it was possible to make the Excel C SDK slightly nicer to work with.

It's just a demo, I wouldn't use it for anything important, but I learnt a lot doing it. There is also a demo repo: https://github.com/AlexJReid/zigxll-standalone
by polack | 2025-11-19 11:43:53+00:00
Yes, it's probably an overreaction.

But at the same time, what value do they add if they:

* Took down the the customers sites due to their bug.

* Never protected against an attack that our infra could not have handled by itself.

* Don't think that they will be able to handle the "next big ddos" attack.

It's just an extra layer of complexity for us. I'm sure there are attacks that could help our customers with, that's why we're using them in the first place. But until the customers are hit with multiple ddos attacks that we can not handle ourself then it's just not worth it.
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-11-19 11:44:38+00:00
Men are workers. Not all work needs to be a "worker-drone", but yes, all men are built towards some form of work, and that work typically is around an item of sorts.

Men can work all sorts of ways, and that can include raising kids. Women tend to be a lot less happier leaving their kids to go toil with the dirt.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-19 11:44:51+00:00
In the 1980s, it was pretty common.

This is what cellphones looked like, back then: https://share.google/z3bBbfhT43EHcDYoc

Cellphones actually were quite small, during the 1990s. I used to go to Japan, and they got downright tiny during that time.

Smartphones actually increased the size (but not to 1980s scale).
by kqr | 2025-11-19 11:45:36+00:00
One of the remediations listed is

> Eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources

but this is not mentioned at all in the timeline above. My best guess would be that the process got stuck in a tight restart loop and filled available disk space with logs, but I'm happy to hear other guesses for people more familiar with Rust.
by theknarf | 2025-11-19 11:45:40+00:00
Git was created to replace BitKeeper. There used to be a whole industry of commercial version control software. I grabbed the following list from Wikipedia (but I image there where even more companies around):

- AccuRev SCM (2002)

- Azure DevOps Server (via TFVC) (2005)

- ClearCase (1992)

- CMVC (1994)

- Dimensions CM (1980s)

- DSEE (1984)

- Integrity (2001)

- Perforce Helix (1995)

- SCLM (1980s?)

- Software Change Manager (1970s)

- StarTeam (1995)

- Surround SCM (2002)

- Synergy (1990)

- Vault (2003)

- Visual SourceSafe (1994)

A lot of companies was also building their own internal version control software. Either from scratch or as a bunch of loose scripts on top of other existing solutions. Often turning version control, package management and build scripts into one single complex messy solution. I worked for a company early in my career that had at least 4 different version control systems in use across different projects and even more build systems (all a mix of commercial software and home grown solutions on top).

These days almost everyone uses Git. Some companies uses Mercurial or SVN.

One commercial actor that is still around is Perforce, which is still popular in the game industry. Since managing large game assets isn't optimal for Git (but is possible with Git LFS or Git annex, or similar solutions).
Show HN: We built an easy way to sync multiple Google Calendars
by aggarwalachal | 2025-11-19 11:45:40+00:00
We were running into the issue where it was extremely hard to manage and juggle multiple calendars across personal, work, and sometimes multiple clients.

The problem was not so much what I can see, but rather what time others can see on my calendar as available.

Hence, it made sense for us to sync calendars across accounts.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-19 11:46:05+00:00
In case anyone wants a proper definition: ultra-processed food is defined using the Nova classification system [0]. I still find the definition a bit confusing though.

This is the outcome of having researchers dedicating multiple lifetimes towards optimizing food to be as palatable and optimized as possible, such that people are forced to have a self-control battle each meal. Maybe GLP-1 drug proliferation will force companies towards other optimization goals. We ultimately end up paying for the negative externalities of UPF through higher healthcare costs and overall worse long-term quality of life.

It's difficult to change and maintain healthy eating habits when so much of your environment is designed to push you towards foods with questionable health properties. Even if it's technically possible to eat healthy, the cognitive overhead is enough that individualistic solutions are always going to be limited in effectiveness. The ideal is living in an environment where the healthy options are the default choice, so you don't have to waste time, energy, and willpower on maintenance-level tasks. I imagine that a healthier population would also be more productive, for the number-go-up optimizers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
by mlrtime | 2025-11-19 11:46:07+00:00
I've also led a team of Incident Commanders at a FAANG.

If this was a routine config change, I could see how it could take 2 hours to start the mediation plan. However they should have dashboards that correlate config setting changes with 500 errors (or equivalent). It gets difficult when you have many of of these going out at the same time and they are slowly rolled out.

The root cause document is mostly for high level and the public. The details on this specific outage will be in a internal document with many action items, some of them maybe quarter long projects including fixing this specific bug and maybe some linter/monitor to prevent it from happening again.
by luma | 2025-11-19 11:46:24+00:00
I've worked with a major retailer on similar backend systems and can echo the post above - all of them are running these systems and they almost never discuss the specifics (until someone like Walmart sues Everseen and we get a glimpse behind the curtain from the court documents).

If you go to an org's website offering these tools (eg, Everseen mentioned above, RetailNext, etc), they don't directly advertise the full breadth of their capabilities until you have them in a room for a sales pitch. They can combine multiple data streams such that an individual can be traced throughout the store via cameras, wifi, and bluetooth, which gives the retailer an opportunity to sell that information. Did a customer pause in front of the corn chips but then decide not to buy? Print them out a Frito-Lay coupon at checkout and see if you can't get them next time, and Frito-Lay will pay you to do that.
by flohofwoe | 2025-11-19 11:46:40+00:00
> Exult did this decades ago :).

Tbf though, Exult kept the original fixed 2D overhead perspective which is a bit hard to grock when used to what has now become the 'traditional' camera angle for isometric games.

Revisited moves the entire game world into 3D and it looks magical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4
by Krutonium | 2025-11-19 11:48:42+00:00
>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.

That's an incredibly bad take lol.

There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data sovereignty.

I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.

Any Data you have on the cloud is no longer your data. Not really. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whoevers.
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-19 11:49:31+00:00
It's not really about optimism or pessimism, it's effect vs no effect. Self reported anecdotes like yours abound, but as far as I'm aware the effect isn't real. That is, it's not in fact true that if a business buys AI tools for its developers their output will increase in some way that impacts the business meaningfully. So while you may feel more productive using AI tooling, in fact you probably aren't, actually.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-19 11:49:57+00:00
Resolve Studio is more feature rich by a significant margin and 2/3rd’s of the price. Lightworks is a respectable program but I can’t really see picking it over resolve studio tbh. Definitely not for professional work.

I still root for them though. More NLE’s is good for the editing world as a whole and who knows, BMD could heel turn on us and ruin resolve. I’ve gone through 3 different NLE’s since 2011 (FCPX->briefly Premiere->Resolve) so I definitely don’t plan for more than 3-5 years ahead lol
Microsoft E Anthropic
by jonasthimoteo | 2025-11-19 11:50:06+00:00
Microsoft has announced a new strategic partnership with Anthropic, marking the startup's models' entry into Microsoft Foundry for the first time.

The agreement also includes a robust financial commitment: Anthropic will acquire $30 billion in computing capacity on Azure, in addition to contracting up to 1 gigawatt of additional processing power.

With the change, Microsoft Foundry clients will have direct access to the startup's cutting-edge models — including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. Despite this, Anthropic will maintain Amazon as its primary cloud provider and training partner.
by echelon | 2025-11-19 11:50:56+00:00
This.

This is a failure caused by lazy Rust programming and not relying on the language's design features.

It's a shame this code can even be written. It is surprising and escapes the expected safety of the language.

I'm terrified of some dependency using unwrap() or expect() and crashing for something entirely outside of my control.

We should have an opt-in strict Cargo.toml declaration that forbids compilation of any crate that uses entirely preventable panics. The only panics I'll accept are those relating to memory allocation.

This is one of the sharpest edges in the language, and it needs to be smoothed away.
by presstorch | 2025-11-19 11:52:19+00:00
We’re launching PressTorch.com — a news site with attitude, focused on calling out the misleading, the sensational and the hidden-in-plain-sight narratives in media and politics.

--

What we are

A news platform building long-form articles and features on media, politics, culture and power. For example: “Reform Turns on the BBC After Years of Feasting on Its Airtime” is live. presstorch.com

We publish under clear categories (“Opinion”, “Straight News”, “The Feed”) so you know when it’s analysis vs reportage.

Our tone is sharp, visual, designed for digital readers — combining journalistic storytelling with visually-rich illustrations and a modern feel. Example: “A Royal Rinse: Charles Scrubs Andrew, but the Stain Remains.” presstorch.com

--

What’s different

Traditional news outlets are stretched, under pressure from clicks and algorithms. We believe there’s still space for a site that openly says: “Here’s how media plays you, and what’s actually going on.”

We’re not just scoring or ranking publications anymore — we’re out there doing the reporting, the commentary and the breakdowns.

Digital consumption is changing fast: readers want bite-sized layers and bigger context. Our mix of “The Feed” (shorter pieces) and longer features aims to hit both.

--

Where we are now

The site is fairly new, and we’ve published a strong set of early or “seed” articles to set the tone — pieces such as “Reform Turns on the BBC…”, “Reform UK after the pivot…”, and “Labour’s Comms Are Buffering”.

We’re using this launch phase to test our voice, format and coverage. We’d love for you to check out these early pieces and let us know what you think.

Over the coming months we’ll be ramping up numbers — more articles, more beats, more international coverage.

--

What’s next

Increase publishing cadence: more articles, deeper investigations.

Expand international coverage beyond the UK.

Launch interactive data/visualisations showing how headlines evolve, media ownership impacts coverage, etc.

Build community features: reader submissions, tip-offs, commentary threads, maybe open database of media ownership.

--

How you can help / get involved

If you spot an article, headline or media trend worth covering: drop us a line.

If you’re into frontend/data: we’re open to building tools/visualisations on top of what we produce.

If you’re a reader: explore the site, share what you like, give feedback on tone, layout, coverage.

--

Would love to hear feedback from this community:

What do you think of the tone and focus?

Are there formats (podcast, video, interactive) you think we should prioritise?

Any features you love/hate in news sites right now?

What do you like or dislike about the early “seed” articles?

Thanks for reading. If you’re curious, check out PressTorch.com and I’d appreciate any pointers, ideas or critiques.

Cheers.
by styanax | 2025-11-19 11:52:48+00:00
How do they compare in actual use? I have a Pixel 6a connected to $40USD bone conducting headphones and the range and punch-through are incredible; the phone is sitting in the living room playing music and I can almost make it to my mailbox at the end of the block (about 3 houses away) before it starts to degrade or cut out.

Do these alternatives compare with just how well UWB serves regular, normal daily activity like this? Because to me, what I have is absolutely excellent in use with daily routine.
by mlrtime | 2025-11-19 11:53:00+00:00
>documented problem in Home Assistant this evening. All it would take is 3-5 lines of YAML. The model failed miserably. I think we're all still safe.

This is mostly because HA changes so frequently and the documentation is sparse. To get around this and increase my correction rate, I give it access to the source code of the same version I'm running. Then instructions in CLAUDE.md on where to find source and it must use source code.

This fixes 99% of my issues.
by Pilottwave | 2025-11-19 11:53:20+00:00
Creatine might not be without risks. Search for creatine withrawal symptoms. Some people are wrecked for months when they quit the supplement. I tried one cycle of 4 weeks and quit cold turkey and had a crash/depressive episode unlike i ever experienced before for about 7 days. I did like the benefits, it provided me resitance to mental fatigue. Roughly i'd say i experienced a "+30% boost", significant!
by keepamovin | 2025-11-19 11:54:27+00:00
That's interesting. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network. It's like the issues with HOSTS.TXT needing to be copied among the network of the early internet to allow routing (taking days to download etc) and DNS having to be created to make that propagation less unwieldy.
by formerly_proven | 2025-11-19 11:54:38+00:00
> It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved.

Why? Almost everywhere a majority of people (and certainly the majority of voters) are already invested in housing and do not want their investment to loose value.

> Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down.

People are more willing to spend an ever-growing share of their dual-incomes on housing, which drives housing prices modulo interest. So interest has no actual effect on housing affordability, since it doesn't influence how much people are willing to spend. If you lower interest, prices are simply going to rise such that people spend the same % of their income on housing. If you increase interest, prices will (eventually, slowly, since this is a seller-dominated market) fall to match.

> More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no diversity of supply, and builds aren't undercutting the market yet.

New builds will never be cheaper than existing housing stock. Low-cost new housing is a mirage; new housing is premium by construction.
Show HN: SLFG: We Made Gets() Safe. Everyone Said It Was Impossible
by DenisDolya | 2025-11-19 11:54:42+00:00
For decades, C programmers banned gets(). We found a way.

Two simple rules. Four lines of code. Perfect safety.

No more fgets() complexity. No more buffer overflows.

See how: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/slfg
by VBprogrammer | 2025-11-19 11:55:25+00:00
No one is truly blinding you. Even old incandescent headlights can be unpleasant. Some people are more sensitive to it than others and things like a car coming over a slight hill or bend in the adverse direction can change the alignment of the lights in such a way that they appear much brighter.

The point I was trying to make is that reducing the brightness isn't a simple trade off. How many accidents are caused by people being "blinded" vs people not seeing something until it was too late?

If it needs regulation to fix then that regulation should try to balance those things. Perhaps by automatically adjusting the headlights when another car is detected (maybe matrix style headlights, or a simple angle adjustment).
by keepamovin | 2025-11-19 11:56:50+00:00
I think this is so important and in fact with services now becoming utilities for daily life and the national/global economy, it's something that people like DARPA could get behind. We understand why a big peering corp's incentives might not align with true distributed (and hence how they may lobby for the crippling of certain useful p2p APIs from being widely 'distributed'), but it's something we should really push for and technically just do. And we'd probably find many allies doing it in the continuity of system and reliability space.
by philipallstar | 2025-11-19 11:56:51+00:00
There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.

If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.

As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-19 11:56:55+00:00
They weren’t the first movers. They just managed to get IBM to sign with them after BASIC proved not to be IBMs long term version and CP/M struck out from any disk OS talks (though stories differ about exactly how that interaction went)

Microsoft didn’t even have an OS when they made that deal with IBM.

Hence why I said they’re good at negotiating with businesses.

Being first to market is actually less important than people think it is. It’s just history tends to remember the victors so everyone assumes they were first to market.
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-19 11:57:15+00:00
Someone decided that the audience of standup comedy overlaps with tech meetup one 100%.

Jokes aside though, it's much broader than that, it's just that the zeitgeist dictates that everyone shifts from work to meta-work: musicians must impress not with their music but the way they make music, researchers must entertain, developers must manage agents, children watch someone else play games instead of playing themselves.

That's yet another increment to the already dizzying level of simulation per Jean Baudrillard.
by jtrn | 2025-11-19 11:57:28+00:00
The only thing that matters is how easily I can customize what is shown on the screen. Everything else is probably just annoying, like the translation or map feature, which I assume will be finicky and useless. If the ring had four-way arrows and ok/back buttons, and the glasses had a proper SDK for creating basic navigation and retrieval, such as the ability to communicate with HTTP APIs, there would be no limit to the useful things I could create. However, if I'm forced to use built-in applications only, I have very little faith that it would actually be useful, considering how bad the last generation of applications for these devices was.
by amiga386 | 2025-11-19 11:58:39+00:00
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.

IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it completely hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see anything the server is ingesting, without first logging in.

Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy for yourself, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-19 11:58:59+00:00
I wonder is Google's AI investment a rational reaction to real competition or something else? My strong suspicion is that it's in fact delusional beliefs held by their management--something to do with "AGI"--that drives this activity, perhaps combined with the effects of information monoculture/social isolation/groupthink. It seems the simpler explanation that a very small group of people are behaving insanely than a very large number.