MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grayhatter | 2025-12-28 04:57:35+00:00
> This is what happened e.g. with chrome. There's chromium, anyone can build it. But that's not chrome. And chrome is what everybody uses because google has lock-in power.

Because Google has their attention. You can use chromium, but most people don't and pick the first thing they see. Also, Chrome is a much better name, err, not better but easier to say.

> Then google says "oh I'm going to disallow you running the extensions you like, so we can show you more ads". Then they make tweaks to chrome so that websites only get rendered well if they use certain APIs, so now competitors to Chrome are forced to implement those APIs, but those aren't public.

You and I have a different definition of "forced".

> And all of this was initially build by free labour, which google took, by people who thought they were contributing to some commons in a sense.

Do you have an example of a site that works better in chrome, than it does in chromium? I'll even take an example of a site that works worse in the version of chromium before manifest v2 was disabled, compared to whatever version of chrome you choose?

> Copyleft licenses protect against this. Part of the license says: if you use these licenses, and you make changes to the software, you have to share the changes as well, you can't keep them for yourself".

Is chromium not still foss? Other than branding, what APIs or features are missing from the FOSS version? You mentioned manifest v3, but I'm using firefox because of it, so I don't find that argument too compelling. I don't think FOSS is worse, I think google is making a bad bet.
by gudzpoz | 2025-12-28 04:58:33+00:00
> some editors display small flag on the cursor displaying current position direction

I was amazed to see IDEA/RustRover doing exactly this [1] when I added BIDI texts to my code to test things out.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Qqlyqpc.png (image taken from IDEA issue tracker)
by _will_ | 2025-12-28 05:00:40+00:00
So you somehow think that the $300 fine deters or hurts the person making $200k a year the same that it does the person making $20k per year?

It's not that the poor person speeding is any less dangerous than the rich person speeding, it's that the $300 fine doesn't really matter to the rich person. It's just a price they're willing to pay on random occasions to go faster.
by vee-kay | 2025-12-28 05:01:29+00:00
The most novel feature of the Indian numerals is the use of the rounded zero symbol for the mathematical zero, so we all know it so well.

The Indian numerals also covered all the basic numeral digits and fit perfectly into the decimal system (which was also invented by the ancient Indians - they primarily used it for measuring weights, especially for currency/trade). The word meter/metre (from Sanskrit "miti") is also of Indian origin. The mathematical zero also fits in perfectly with binary system, also an ancient Indian invention.

The ancient Babylonians did use a dot/period as symbol of zero, but there is no information on whether they also associated zero with voidness/emptiness which the ancient Indians certainly did.

It can be argued that the ancient Babylonians and Indians independently discovered the concept of mathematical zero, and rest of the world learnt such basic concepts from them gradually,
Interestingly, while even modern science+mathematics only uses big numbers to a certain extent, the ancient Indian Jain's & Hindus were doing computations of up to 10^32! Hindu cosmology even calculates time up to 10^15, and knows about multiverse, whereas modern science calculates Time only upto billions of years (10^9) and only recently started acknowledging the possibility of multiverse (as it is only explanation of what existed before the Big Bang), I
i.e. Time is cyclical, and universes are birthed (Big Bang), grow (expand), decay (collapse) and shrink back to the Infinitesimal Dot again).

So it is a shame that ancient India's contributions to mathematics and other fields (e.g., geography, surgeries, medical tools, metallurgy, etc.) are unknown and ignored by most of the world, and the credits for such knowledge were stolen.

Did you know?..
India built and managed the world's first universities, in Takshashila and Nalanda, which has lots of diverse subjects/disciplines being taught and researched. The Arabs/Turks later invaded, looted and destroyed these amazing universities and their priceless treasure trove of books (the libraries were so huge that the arson fires burnt for months). The ruins of these ancient pioneering repositories of knowledge still stand as mute witnesses to their glorious knowledge-sharing past.
by cubefox | 2025-12-28 05:01:54+00:00
Example: Option<> types. Maybe a function returns an optional string, but then you are able to improve the guarantee such that it always returns a string. With untagged unions you can just change the return type of the function from String|Null to String. No other changes necessary. For the tagged case you would have to change all(!) the call sites, which expect an Option<String>, to instead expect a String. Completely unnecessary for untagged unions.

A similar case applies to function parameters: In case of relaxed parameter requirements, changing a parameter from String to String|Null is trivial, but a change from String to Option<String> would necessitate changing all the call sites.

> From where I stand, untagged unions are useful in an extremely narrow set of circumstances. Tagged unions, on the other hand, are incredibly useful in a wide variety of applications.

Any real world example?
by wild_egg | 2025-12-28 05:04:02+00:00
> Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.

You're overthinking htmx then. I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.

Server always has authoritative state and code is dead simple to reason about.
by egypturnash | 2025-12-28 05:04:46+00:00
Wikipedia has a list of the most expensive video games to develop, with a lower limit of $50mil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

The top of the list is Genshin Impact, although it'll probably be displaced by GTA6 soon - that one's estimated to come in at $1.5-2 million. There's multiple FPS games on there but there's some pretty expensive open-world games too.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-12-28 05:04:58+00:00
> of a bottom of the barrel SSD wildly exceeding expectations.

I heard enough of stories of a bottom of the barrel SSDs wildly exceeding expectations by actually crashing with a partial or a full data loss waaay below their expected write endurance and while still powered on. Sure, these are the real bottom of the barrel, like Netac or KingSpec - but I won't expect any non-server grade SSD to retain data at all for any meaningful time.
by empthought | 2025-12-28 05:07:50+00:00
The falsehood is the phrase "with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations."

It hasn't had any such language-changing release for at least six years. The implication that this is an ongoing process attributable to newer adopters is simply false. It is a process that has stopped, and when it was happening, it was attributable to longtime Python developers.
by vtomole | 2025-12-28 05:08:12+00:00
You're right. I didn't sufficiently separate experimental physics QC from engineering QC.

On the engineering end, the question on if a large-scale quantum computer can be built is leaning to be "yes" so far. DARPA QBI https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/quantum-benchmarking... was made to answer this question and 11 teams have made it to Stage B. Of course, only people who believe DARPA will trust this evidence, but that's all I have to go on.

On the application front, the jury is still out for applications that are not related to simulation or cryptography: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124
by synergy7 | 2025-12-28 05:09:21+00:00
It feels so wonderfully weird reading about some else seeing a manatee today. I too saw a manatee while walking with my kids today. The interesting part was our navigational strategies complementing each other (me – misremembering the details of a road closure, and them - getting curious about what a bunch of people at a marina are looking at) to find a group of manatees in a place we didn’t know they can be found.
by rastrian | 2025-12-28 05:09:24+00:00
I think your Option/String example is a real-world tradeoff, but it’s not a slam-dunk “untagged > tagged.”

For API evolution, T | null can be a pragmatic “relax/strengthen contract” knob with less mechanical churn than Option<T> (because many call sites don’t care and just pass values through). That said, it also makes it easier to accidentally reintroduce nullability and harder to enforce handling consistently, the failure mode is “it compiles, but someone forgot the check.”

In practice, once the union has more than “nullable vs present”, people converge to discriminated unions ({ kind: "ok", ... } | { kind: "err", ... }) because the explicit tag buys exhaustiveness and avoids ambiguous narrowing. So I’d frame untagged unions as great for very narrow cases (nullability / simple widening), and tagged/discriminated unions as the reliability default for domain states.

For reliability, I’d rather pay the mechanical churn of Option<T> during API evolution than pay the ongoing risk tax of “nullable everywhere.

My post argues for paying costs that are one-time and compiler-enforced (refactors) vs costs that are ongoing and human-enforced (remembering null checks).
by condensedcrab | 2025-12-28 05:10:58+00:00
More so that the 1% have fewer loopholes, not the other way around.

Regular folks filing taxes don’t have particularly difficult returns, but if the government already knows what you owe/get back, why waste everyone’s time? Obviously deductions exist for a reason, but standard deduction folks shouldn’t have to file to confirm that their number matches what the IRS already calculated.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-12-28 05:11:28+00:00
I think it exists to power this easter egg?: https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/issues/678 The value I guess depends on whether its appropriate to put up decorations ie a 'celebratory' holiday. It looks like the only non-bunting holidays on there right now are Good Friday (which is more solemn) and Orangemens' Day (which is pretty sectarian), but apparently in the past the Queen's funeral was another non-bunting holiday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37789437
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-12-28 05:13:16+00:00
What I meant by "not treating LLM as senior" is that the disillusionment phase culminates in an a-ha moment which could be described a "LLM is not a senior developer". This a-ha moment is not intellectual, but emotional. It is possible to same time think that LLM is not a senior developer, but not realize it emotionally. This emotional realization in turn has consequences.

>The threading issue didn't come up at all in any of this.
>
>Once it came, the AI tied itself in knots trying to sort it out, coming up with very complex dispatching logic that still got things incorrect.""

Yes. These kind of loops have happened to me as well. It sometimes requires clearing of context + some inventive step to help the LLM out of the loop. For example my ad pacing feature required that I recognized that it was trying to optimize the wrong variable. I consider this to be partly what I mean by "LLM is a junior" and that "I act as the project manager".

> I guess my point is that the amount of effort involved to use English to direct and correct the AI often outweighs the effort involved to just do it myself.

Could you really have done a complex mobile app alone in one day without knowing the stack well beforehand? I believe this of stuff used to take months from a competent team not long time ago. I certainly could not have done one year ago what I can do today, with these tools.
by superb-owl | 2025-12-28 05:13:35+00:00
Some seem to think this organization was “anti free speech”. Thing is, if you believe in free speech, famously, you have to agree to let people disagree with you!

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.“

The federal government putting its thumbs on the scales in debates about what can and should be broadcast (on both traditional and social media) should worry anyone who cares about free speech.
by snvzz | 2025-12-28 05:14:53+00:00
US free speech is not absolute, nor is it freedom from consequence. The consequence for foreign activists pushing foreign agendas may very well be deportation.

No country has an obligation to welcome anyone from any other country, especially those who do not intend to even try and adopt its values and customs, even more so foreign agents who come with the sole intent of association to push the agenda of a party they were members from in their old country into the politics of the new one.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-28 05:15:41+00:00
It happens all the time. It just happens through the bankruptcy process, so we generally understand it as "company crashes down" even if their core business remained healthy. Purdue, again, is a great recent example of this, although the state governments and other plaintiffs preferred to retain ownership in a trust rather than get cash by selling it to some marginally more responsible pharma company.
by neilv | 2025-12-28 05:16:28+00:00
Pretty much. And that seems to reflect changing sentiment of the mods over time (e.g., no information, no inspiration, no trying to emulate, only emoting).

But what I thought was funny was, if you didn't know that, it would look like the two "experiences" were tailored separately: OG redditors get the constructive messaging in the spirit of RMS's mission, but modern social media redditors get the modern social media simplified passive consumption.
by aryonoco | 2025-12-28 05:18:42+00:00
Is this meant as sarcasm?

I run a bunch of services for friends and family, things like Immich, wallabag, mealie etc. Less than 10 users, but do you expect me to crate and maintain separate accounts for each one for every service?

The SSO tax is stupid. If your whole business model is based on putting SSO behind a paywall, it’s a sign of a broken business model.
by int08h | 2025-12-28 05:20:06+00:00
Hmm, it seems you actually agree with the OP:

OP says (your quote):

> [Most production incidents] are due to the code entering a state that should never have been possible.

You say:

> [...] it is more true that most production incidents are due to the system entering into one of thousands of unsafe states which were possible and latent in production potentially for years

I see you both agree that a broken system enters an "unsafe state" (your words) or a "state that should never have been possible" (OP's words).

"Unsafe state" and "state that should not have been possible" are, in practice in a real system, the same practical thing. I suspect you both would agree "system confuses a string for an integer and acts based on erroneous value" or "system acts on internal state that indicates the valve is both open and closed" would be states that a system should not be in. Outside pedantry, your descriptions are practically synonymous with each other.
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-28 05:20:23+00:00
Even when I was younger, I was baffled by how people could get their news just from TV, because the amount of information in a TV news report was so tiny compared to what you'd get in a newspaper. When I hear that people view TikTok as their main news source, it's like telling me people wear watermelons as socks. It's so nuts its hard for me to even bring the concept into my brain.
by ksec | 2025-12-28 05:20:59+00:00
I dont think anyone is arguing Google Earth should be pure HTML. But it is equally false you cant do Gmail with HTML only.

There are things that HTML could do, and should be doing, that is not done or not yet possible simply due to hype and trend from browser vendors. We could continue to polish HTML + sprinkle of Javascript to its absolute maximum before hitting JS Apps. Right now this is far from the case.
by armchairhacker | 2025-12-28 05:21:50+00:00
Why do you think it’s bad faith? It’s mostly political, but some people here are too and not all posts involve politics (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41195641).

OP definitely appears conservative. But how do you know they’re intentionally trying to stir trouble, vs. being naive (...maybe, hence conservative...) but genuine?

And do you think it’s a net benefit for posts like these to be flagged vs. visible, when the comments provide direct evidence contradicting OP's assumptions (Fox News is not blocked on HN)? It's always hard to change people's assumptions, and sometimes impossible, but why not try?
by Spivak | 2025-12-28 05:24:03+00:00
> Statically typed programming languages cannot be deployed nor can they run with a type error that happens at runtime.

This is so completely untrue that I'm confused as to why anyone would try to claim it. Type Confusion is an entire class of error and CVE that happens in statically typed languages. Java type shenanigans are endless if you want some fun but baseline you can cast to arbitrary types at runtime and completely bypass all compile time checks.

I think the disagreement would come additionally by saying a language like Ruby doesn't actually have any type errors. Like how it can be said that GC languages can't have memory leaks. And that this model is stronger than just compile time checking. Sure you get a thing called TypeError in Ruby but because of the languages dynamism that's not an error the way it would be in C. You can just catch it and move. It doesn't invalidate the program's correctness. Ruby is so safe in it's execution model that Syntax Errors don't invalidate the running program's soundness.
by mahirsaid | 2025-12-28 05:24:06+00:00
no society is going to just bow down for eternity and accept things as they are for long. if an opportunity presents itself. I'm not understanding what "reality" means as if the BRIC nations aren't in that "reality" as we speak. weaponizing sanctions and intimidating macro foreign economies isn't something that other peoples take lightly. the circumstances from the 90's and now are very much different with very much different rulers taking charge today. less dictators in third world countries and more dictator impersonators of developed countries. There was a less will to do more harm that can be public before vs now everything is public and you become immune to the affects of what could be until it becomes the norm for you. Things change my friend, its frugal thinking otherwise.
by sergiotapia | 2025-12-28 05:26:14+00:00
FWIW I just did in four hours what would have taken me about two weeks for my side project.

The boring routine parts of software engineering are no more. My project is elixir phoenix and tailwind. The AI and I completely overhauled my sites UI and UX and implemented many bug fixes and effectively relaunched my website in four hours.

If you were an experienced dev coming into this, you should definitely learn how to work with AI tools.
by TheCleric | 2025-12-28 05:26:20+00:00
Ahh so the constitution doesn’t apply to non-citizens? The Supreme Court disagrees:

There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law… Even one whose presence in this country is unlawful, involuntary, or transitory is entitled to that constitutional protection.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-28 05:27:25+00:00
"researchers, including those spearheading the work, are cautious about overselling their results"

Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.

I write this here because science does not really work well when it is based on speculation. So this article is weird. It starts by speculating about something rather than analyse the article. It then continues to "textbooks have to be rewritten". Well, I think if you are in science, you need to demonstrate that all your claims made need to be correct - and others can verify it, without any restriction whatsoever.

> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,” Conine said.

So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.

There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.

See this article:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258

It was later redacted - a total fabrication. A lie.
by CTDOCodebases | 2025-12-28 05:27:39+00:00
So with your 20/20 vision and your ability to see into the future what was the exact dollar amount at the time that you thought should be enough to stop a total meltdown of the US economy? Using logic and reason how did you come to the exact dollar amount that would emotionally appease investors and business providing them with enough "investor confidence"?

The timescale you are looking at is very small. The federal reserve has a dual mandate to have maximum employment and stable prices. What would have happened on a longer timeframe to employment and prices if every other country effectively backstopped their economy but the USA didn't?

It's like you don't know why the fed even came to exist or have any knowledge about the great depression or just fail to recognize how catastrophic that the pandemic was to the USA economy or the world economy as a whole.
by Dracophoenix | 2025-12-28 05:28:59+00:00
Define "drive". Correlation is not causation. It's difficult to anticipate the trigger for a particular action or choice when other circumstances or stressors may have more significant factors that contributed to the decision. After all, many have lost jobs without ending their own lives and many have killed themselves despite high-profile, gainful employment. Instead, holding MongoDB responsible risks incentivizing this company and others to turn away and preemptively furlough anyone remotely approaching the statistical profile of a suicide risk.
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-12-28 05:29:24+00:00
Decades ago I had one or two tẽte à tẽte about grayscale not being the same as black and white. You could emulate grayscale with b&w if you had a much larger canvas. In short: Black and white is 2 bits, grayscale is 8, 16 , more? bits

Am I wrong?
by SadWebDeveloper | 2025-12-28 05:31:00+00:00
This is another pointless article about LLM's... vibe coding is the present not the future, the only sad part of all of it is that LLM's is killing something important: code documentation.

Every single documentation out there for new libs is AI generated and that is feed again into LLMs with MCP/Skills servers, the age of the RTFM gang is over sigh
by xboxnolifes | 2025-12-28 05:31:07+00:00
Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.