MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ashvardanian | 2025-12-16 13:37:04+00:00
This article is about the ugliest — but arguably the most important — piece of open-source software I’ve written this year. The write-up ended up long and dense, so here’s a short TL;DR:

I grouped all Unicode 17 case-folding rules and built ~3K lines of AVX-512 kernels around them to enable fully standards-compliant, case-insensitive substring search across the entire 1M+ Unicode range, operating directly on UTF-8 bytes. In practice, this is often ~50× faster than ICU, and also less wrong than most tools people rely on today—from grep-style utilities to products like Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, and VS Code.

StringZilla v4.5 is available for C99, C++11, Python 3, Rust, Swift, Go, and JavaScript. The article covers the algorithmic tradeoffs, benchmarks across 20+ Wikipedia dumps in different languages, and quick starts for each binding.

Thanks to everyone for feature requests and bug reports. I'll do my best to port this to Arm as well — but first, I'm trying to ship one more thing before year's end.
by danaris | 2025-12-16 13:37:11+00:00
None of these other public sector unions are for jobs that have the power of life and death over people on a daily basis.

None of these other public sector unions are for people who already get massive deference by the legal system.

None of these other public sector unions actively and regularly protect their members when they murder people.

You may see similar dynamics, but that's because you're ignoring the abuses the police commit on a regular basis, fully supported by their unions.

Other public sector employees getting generous pension packages are not remotely like what police unions do. Indeed, they are very much like what many people could expect from retirement in the latter part of the 20th century. Before we decided that everyone's old age should be at the mercy of Wall Street.
by 5upplied_demand | 2025-12-16 13:37:30+00:00
> Parents will always need to combine education, guidance, and trust-building with any tools, rather than relying on government mandates that compromise privacy.

I agree. You haven't explained why the government can't be one of those tools, just as it is for so many other harmful activities (drugs, alcohol, gambling, firearms, etc.).

You use the phrase "relying on" to imply parents are just asking government to do everything for them. A more charitable view is that this is a tool along with other tools to support a common societal goal.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-16 13:37:46+00:00
I think some of the big features of VSCode are the extensions and, equivalently, the nice debug support. I just started using VSCode about a week ago thanks to moving to a project that uses scons as its primary supported build tool, and I've learned to hate scons and love VSCode over that time. The completely manual tasks/launch/etc stuff is kind of weird at first, but then becomes amazing and far more convenient, after you get used to it. And the 'debugger' (kind of weird to frame it that way as its extension based, like everything) is amazing - extremely fast, great visualizations, and so on.

How would vim compare?
by DangitBobby | 2025-12-16 13:37:50+00:00
I would call a "UX change" on a bike anything that significantly impacts your experience on the bike: comfort, speed, control, maneuverability, and even safety (as long as you know it makes you safer). And for those of us who maintain their bikes, durability and repairability.

In the last 20 years alone we've seen introduced or popularized:

Carbon frames, carbon wheels, disk/hydraulic brakes, expanded cassettes (2x11, 2x12), electric shifters, aerodynamic wheels, string spokes, and a boat load of different tires (for different levels of comfort, speed, durability, grip) for whatever you are doing. That's road bikes.

For mountain bikes you have all of that (minus aerodynamic stuff), dropper posts, 1x drive trains (1 chainring, 12 gears on the cassette, these are so good people want them on road/gravel bikes too) plus a slow evolution of geometry that completely changes how the bike feels on different terrain (also making them safer on dangerous terrain), plus a slow march from incredibly heavy builds to today's lightweight builds which are still more than capable of handling downhill. And in that same time-frame you'll see them going from 26" to 29" wheels, which results in a massive difference in the way the bike rides, and also the bike's ability to go over obstacles. And tubeless tires are now popularized on MTB, which means you can run lower pressures for better comfort and traction, and you also spend a lot less time futzing with holes in tubes.

Not to mention... E-bikes. There's just been so much going on. A lot of that might sound like it does a bunch of nothing, but all of it contributes heavily to how the bike feels and performs overall. Carbon frames and wheels for example aren't just about weight savings, they make the bike more rigid (which changes how it responds to inputs) and reduce vibration making the bike more comfortable overall. If you were somehow blindfolded and put on a bike from 20 years ago versus one from today you'd be able to tell. Doubly so for 40 years ago.
by sixtyj | 2025-12-16 13:37:54+00:00
When managers take up their positions, they must sign not only their employment contracts but also various codes of ethics and other documents.

When a survey was conducted on the misuse of finances and powers, it was found that managers who did not sign the code (because they had to study it and then "forgot" to do so) were more likely to cheat than those who actually signed the documents.
by tmountain | 2025-12-16 13:38:12+00:00
Yes, but if you do need to, it's much simpler if you were using UUID since the beginning. I'm personally not convinced that any of the tradeoffs that comes with a more traditional key are worth the headache that could come in a scenario where you do need to shard. I started a company last year, and the DB has grown wildly beyond our expectations. I did not expect this, and it continues to grow (good problem to have). It happens!
by CharlieDigital | 2025-12-16 13:38:20+00:00
The article is quite light in its definition of "monopoly".

It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO.

Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.

Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook.

Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0]

Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products.

Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL.

AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models.

Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly.

Gaming and leisure? Nope.

To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
by flexagoon | 2025-12-16 13:38:59+00:00
To be fair, 1337x.tw is a fake 1337x domain [1, 2]. It's bad that it's even indexed by DDG higher than the official one, I think it would be better if it was completely hidden from results. The .tw is a malicious website that actively tries to mislead users. For example, on the main page it says "1337x.to is our main domain", but when you click on that, you get redirected to "1377x.to" (notice the swapped digit), yet another fake clone website that conveniently lists the .tw as one of the official mirrors.

Searching for site:1337x.to, which is the official domain, does give results.

[1]: https://1337x-status.org/

[2]: https://fmhy.net/unsafe#torrent-sites-clients, see "fake 1337x sites"
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-16 13:39:11+00:00
Almost every "smart" home appliance has privacy invasion baked into it. These "smart" appliances assume consumers are very dumb.

Aside from the "smart" label, the key indicator is network access. Once granted, manufacturers simply cannot resist the urge to abuse consumer trust.

Unfortunately; in order to dissuade others, some may have to go bankrupt.
by engineerhead | 2025-12-16 13:39:25+00:00
Framing this as the US “losing control” misses one of the points i.e what’s actually happening in energy sector. Oil worked as a lever of power precisely because it was scarce, centralised, and geopolitically choke-pointed. Renewables will flip that model. Sun and wind don’t care about borders, navies, or petrodollars.
by FroshKiller | 2025-12-16 13:39:29+00:00
I'm a technical lead, and I often tell my teammates exactly how I want them to implement something. I am not looking over their shoulders at every line of code, but I will tell them plainly that I want an interface, a concrete implementation of the interface that is up to them, and a configuration option for substituting a different concrete type.

I don't do this because I don't trust them but because I have different requirements. What matters most to them is completing their work items according to specifications. What matters more to me is long-term maintainability of our projects for the rest of the team.

Some of them have the long-term needs in mind. Some of them just don't think that way. I try not to make them feel like their work can't be trusted or like my demands are arbitrary. I think they are more receptive to my demands when I can at least provide context for them. That seems absolutely necessary to me.

I ask myself all the time whether I'm insisting on too much control. I appreciate you asking of yourself, "Is this my ego?" It can definitely go both ways.
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-16 13:39:43+00:00
Verbal fluency is a completely different ballgame to literary fluency. Literature uses vastly more words. Stride is a pretty common one.

Open a collegiate dictionary to a series of random pages, checking the first word to see if you can give any vague definition of it. A fluent speaker who doesn't read literature will likely be able to for fewer than 1/4th of them. A decent literary vocabulary would know ~2/3 or more imo.
by raffael_de | 2025-12-16 13:40:01+00:00
> Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this

Also worth considering that Rob Reiner might have played his part in the roots of Nick's troubles ... after all Rob was his father and the drug problems started when he was still a child.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-16 13:40:23+00:00
> Many people's views are shaped by algorithms and established without any grounding in actual facts

The facts are there, easily accessible for people to read or see. That they choose to ignore them is evidence of the problem with democracy. Whatever mistakes were made by the party that lost, their candidate was not the one with a (comparatively) long track record of fraud, treason, and overall lack of decorum.
by hermannj314 | 2025-12-16 13:40:56+00:00
Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.

Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.
by danaris | 2025-12-16 13:40:57+00:00
...Where do you get that what demolished teaching over the last 30 years is "left-wing teaching practices"?

The biggest change in teaching in the past 30 years was No Child Left Behind, and...I don't know how to tell you this, but that was not under a left-wing administration.

> which probably means you were taught by someone from the US teachng profession in the last 30 years

Nope.

> I'm saying people shouldn't be forced to support political causes they don't believe in.

And you're not! No one is forcing you to support the causes the union supports. (Even if some of your dues might go toward supporting them.)

Just like no one is forcing me to support the causes our current President supports. (Even if some of my taxes go to supporting them.)
by kakacik | 2025-12-16 13:40:57+00:00
> E-Bikes do not require license plates

Maybe in US but in various parts of Europe this ain't true, you cross certain threshold for power or speed and license plate is required, with corresponding insurance - same for e-scooters.

Ie in Switzerland thats 20kmh so basically all of them since they often cut off at 25kmh. Almost nobody does that for weaker ones and thus police keeps taking them and then you see police guys riding around say Geneva on various e-scooters.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-16 13:40:59+00:00
The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.

(IMO there has actually been a retreat from China trying to do propaganda "please like us" adventures overseas in the past few years. Peaked round about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_(film) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin - second highest grossing film worldwide of 2021! For a Korean War movie?!)
by hnben | 2025-12-16 13:41:11+00:00
I like to browse HN via "/front" and "Go back day" and then look at the couple of top posts for each day. I don't see such a day-by-day view on TPE.

What is the "official" acronym? TPE? TP? TecPeu?

What is language policy? (e.g. it would be nice if people would post any language they want, and the system shows other users what language the link is, and then offers an alternative link to a translated version. I imagine this would be hard to implement in a way that is robust way, but maybe you when user submit a link, they can set the language themselves)
by Arnt | 2025-12-16 13:41:31+00:00
Ah, let's have a long discussion of this.

Unicode avoids "different" and "same", https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/ uses phrases like compatibility equivalence.

The whole thing is complicated, because it actually is complicated in the real world. You can spell the name of Gießen "Giessen" and most Germans consider it correct even if not ideal, but spelling Massachusetts "Maßachusetts" is plainly wrong in German text. The relationship between ß and ss isn't symmetric. Unicode captures that complexity, when you get into the fine details.
by CmdDot | 2025-12-16 13:41:36+00:00
«As such, you want to pick a pair where the odds are as close to 50/50 as possible.»

This is incorrect, the correct strategy is mostly to check the most probable match (the exception being if the people in that match has less possible pairings remaining than the next most probable match).

The value of confirming a match, and thus eliminate all other pairings involving those two from the search space, is much higher than a 50/50 chance of getting a no match and only excluding that single pairing.
by ralferoo | 2025-12-16 13:41:40+00:00
I guess maybe mine is just too old from before they got this sorted.

From what I remember, mine always fully turns black then clears before rendering. Even big areas of the page that are white both before and after, there was always a full screen black flash. I wouldn't be at all bothered if it was just the areas with text that went fully black before clearing, but it's very jarring full screen.
by baby | 2025-12-16 13:42:23+00:00
There is no perfect process. I think after a long time working in software I now understand that it works like this: you need one person to work by themselves really really quickly to ship and create the foundations. After that, they need to remain in place to make sure the design continues to make sense as more people add code to the monolith. Having a specification process is a must in complex environments, and the downside is that it adds friction (and some people can abuse the back and forth to prevent you from landing your design changes), so you need that process to happen as late as possible. But if you're running in production in sensible environments then you will need to make that process happen earlier than desired.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-12-16 13:42:27+00:00
Police killed about 1200 people last year, with 118 happening during a wellness check, 116 during a traffic stop, and an additional 213 for unspecified non-violent offenses.

Only 10 officers were charged with a crime from these cases. What do the 'rubber-room' stats look like?

https://policeviolencereport.org/
by danaris | 2025-12-16 13:43:23+00:00
Er...what?

The change I'm talking about happened in the mid-to-late 2000s. Nothing from the periods you cite are relevant.

Here's one of the articles that's been written about the three-cueing model: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

If you want more, you have the search terms.
by jreola | 2025-12-16 13:43:26+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Josh. I built Speechbolt, an AI receptionist that answers unknown callers, asks what they want, and then (based on your rules) connects you, takes a message, or wastes scammers’ time.

It started after someone close to my family circle nearly fell for a deepfake voice scam. While testing, I also ran into a real-world mess: 700+ unwanted calls from one source. That pushed me to learn about the TCPA (a U.S. law regulating certain robocalls/texts; people often cite $500 - $1,500 per illegal call/text/voicemail, depending on the facts). Speechbolt can log call summaries and highlight possible TCPA red flags, not legal advice, just indicators, so users can keep better records if they choose to file complaints or talk to an attorney.

Try it (no signup): a WebRTC demo bot at https://speechbolt.ai

I’d love feedback on: • What would you need to trust an AI to answer unknown calls? • Is the TCPA indicator feature useful, or distracting? • What privacy controls are non-negotiable?

Note: Speechbolt isn’t a law firm and doesn’t provide legal advice.
by willgeary | 2025-12-16 13:43:52+00:00
Introducing Codesplain.ai — a new way to explain code using infinitely-zoomable, interactive visualization.

Code walkthroughs today are broken. They’re usually rambling screen-shares, tab-hopping, or documentation no one wants to read. And it’s getting worse. As we rely more on LLMs to generate code, we’re shipping faster — but understanding and explaining what we’ve built is getting harder.

Codesplain.ai turns your code into an intuitive, editable map. Zoom out for the big picture. Zoom in to understand exactly what’s happening. Save your mental model instead of rebuilding it every time.

Stop explaining your code. Codesplain it!
by palata | 2025-12-16 13:43:52+00:00
> For now, we’re stuck doing what we do for any consequential question where we can’t just wait and see (as with climate change projections or assessing the trajectory of AI development): we gather the best available evidence, and we ask the people most qualified to interpret it.

I think it's important to realise that because someone has knowledge in the field does not mean they can make prediction about completely unknown things.

There is a huge difference between "we don't see a reason why telekinesis would be impossible, but we have no clue how it would work" and "we have measurements and models of climate change that lead us to believe that if we don't change anything, our society will collapse".

How feasible is it to revive someone? We don't know. We haven't proven that it is impossible; just like telekinesis.
by close04 | 2025-12-16 13:43:57+00:00
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit

A selfish voter will throw the world under the bus if it means they win something. An uneducated voter won't understand the full implications of their vote. A hateful voter will go down with the ship if this takes their enemies down too. What "merit"?

Look around, look at the last US presidential elections, those politicians were elected "on their own merit". Hate, bigotry, populism, treason, corruption. That "merit".
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-16 13:44:18+00:00
It’s quite sporty to drive but has about twice the torque you can easily put down with energy efficient ev tires in a small light FWD car so you need to go easy if you want tires to last. Handles great also. Those might be low specs nowadays but were respected performance car specs not long ago, and roads haven’t changed any- plus those were big specs at redline in a combustion engine, feels like a heck of a lot more with the instant torque at any speed of an EV. It’s still way more power than you need, and more than enough to have fun. And I say that as a Porsche enthusiast that drives a lot of fast and sporty cars.
by atq2119 | 2025-12-16 13:44:32+00:00
I'm always skeptical of claims like these. Ultimately, programming is about writing down instructions for computers to follow. Existing programming languages evolved to be ergonomic for that, proof assistants less so.

And having meta language that is significantly different from the core language really sucks for ergonomics. I never understood why, for example, a lot of dependent types literature invents a meta language for expressing constraints rather than using the core language for it. Syntactic familiarity matters.

Also consider C++ templates vs Zig comptime, and how C++ is evolving to bring its meta language closer to the core language via constexpr and consteval.

So the more viable path is to judiciously integrate formal concepts into "normal" programming languages and have LLMs generate proof artefacts in a search process that is guided by proof systems.
by vel0city | 2025-12-16 13:44:52+00:00
I've timed a number of the pumps around my home filling ~20gal. None of them have come close to filling in a minute. They're often 3-4 minutes of pumping, after spending a few minutes negotiating payment. I don't think I've ever spent less than 8 minutes between pulling off the road, pulling up to the pump, getting out of my car, negotiating payment, pumping, finishing up, getting in my car, and returning to the road.

It takes a few minutes just getting the kids in and out of their car seats. No way everyone is getting out of the car, through the bathroom, and then back in the car ready to go in 5 minutes.

Seriously, time yourself sometime. You're way underestimating the actual time you spend at a stop.