MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estebank | 2025-12-12 17:20:15+00:00
Does every discussion of Rust and C need this recurring subthread conversation? It is approaching Groundhog Day levels of repetition. Yes, `unsafe` code can have memory safety bugs. Yes, `unsafe` doesn't mean "unsafe". Yes, a sufficiently advanced C-developer can have a sufficiently advanced C-codebase with reduced probability of bugs that might be even better than an insufficiently advanced Rust-developer. Yes, regular safe-Rust isn't the same formal verification. Yes, Rust doesn't catch every bug.

On the other hand, most developers have no need of writing `unsafe` Rust. The same tools used for static and dynamic analysis of C codebases are available to Rust (ASAN and friends) and it is a good idea to use them when writing `unsafe` (plus miri).

The reason I'm replying is that "the impact of Rust on memory safety" is always a conversation that gets outsized amounts of ink that it drains focus away from other things. I would argue that sum types and exhaustive pattern matching are way more important to minimize logic bugs, even if they aren't enough. You can still have a directory traversal bug letting a remote service write outside of the directory your local service meant to allow. You can still have TOCTOU bugs. You can still have DoS attacks if your codebase doesn't handle all cases carefully. Race conditions can still happen. Specific libraries might be able to protect from some of these, and library reuse increases the likelihood of of these being handled sanely (but doesn't ensure it). Rust doesn't protect against every potential logic error. It never claimed to, and arguing against it is arguing against a strawman. What safe-Rust does claim is no memory safety bugs, no data races, and to provide language and tooling features to model your business logic and deal with complexity.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-12 17:20:33+00:00
> I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it

Its generally the case that people didn't ask for it, most of the legalization of gambling in 21st century America was done by state legislatures, not referendums, and there's plenty of evidence that lobbying had a big role in this. However its also true that the public failed to reject it, most of the times it was put to referendum. Most people probably never asked for it, but when they were themselves asked most people took a libertarian position and said let people do as they want, even if it harms their kids by ruining their family finances...
by taylodl | 2025-12-12 17:20:33+00:00
Oracle has bigger problems than OpenAI. They've been selling large enterprise contracts for the past 10 years and they're coming up for renewal. A lot of those enterprises don't feel they got a good value. If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years, then that could have a severe impact to Oracle. Their other issue is a lot of those enterprises are looking at migrating to PostgreSQL so they can migrate off of Oracle's RDBMS. Many have already deployed PostgreSQL for their department-level applications, so they can get the experience they need before tackling their enterprise-level applications.
by cj | 2025-12-12 17:20:42+00:00
Whether or not gambling is damaging to society shouldn't be a philosophical or moral debate. And IMO "popular opinion" surveys should carry zero weight.

There are many places where gambling has been fully legal for decades. We should be able to look at data to make conclusions about whether something is good or bad.

(I do, however, wish people would shine a spotlight on scratch off tickets... mainly because the odds are so terrible compared to how they're advertised -- if it weren't state-sponsored, I don't think private companies would be able to get away with running ads for lottery tickets that pay out so incredibly poorly)
by phantasmish | 2025-12-12 17:20:48+00:00
It’s too late. I got a behind the scenes view of a company that was heavily into online gambling, lobbying for further gambling legalization… and was just one arm of a larger corporation that ran right wing media organizations and produced & distributed for right wing personalities that you have heard of if you’ve looked into that world much at all (one features in a meme-image that’s been popular for many years, for example). Like, they were coupled closely enough that work for the media side crossed over to the gambling side.

IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians.

Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.
by rhgraysonii | 2025-12-12 17:20:50+00:00
I made this while making another utility as an experiment.

tl;dr: browse all the choices/logical flows an LLM made. Come back from compaction better. Ask questions about the why of some code and get better insights to work with and around it. Also: really great PR review cycles enabled by having the graph around.

The site goes a bit into the how and why.

If you want to see the live graph of how deciduous made choices while building itself, check out this link

https://notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io/deciduous/demo/

For examples of some code and PRs deciduous wrote up, check out

https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/deciduous/pulls?...

Feedback has been good has quality of work solid using it with my coworkers so far. Would love to hear more thoughts.

I've been working on this maybe 3 days. There are/will be more bugs.
by mmooss | 2025-12-12 17:21:13+00:00
So is most technology, widespread literacy, health, freedom, etc. In fact, everything since we were nomadic hunter-gatherers is a blip - should we go back to that? The argument makes no sense; what force is compelling us to go back to hunting and gathering? It's absurd to raise this argument for inevitability, rather than do something about it - which has worked overwhelmingly for generations.
by mothballed | 2025-12-12 17:21:23+00:00
Legalized gambling is one of the biggest gifts for criminals. It's basically money launderers gift to heaven. All you have to explain is how you came up with the amount for a winning bet, rather than having to explain how you came up with the winnings plus how much you lost to the house.

Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-12 17:21:38+00:00
True. All MOS transistors used in the modern CMOS processes used for instance to make CPUs are doped with germanium in their gate regions, in order to produce a strain in the silicon lattice.

While a little strain can be beneficial in some cases, the large strain caused by the mismatches in crystal lattice cell size between various semiconductor layers that must be deposited one over the other in order to make some semiconductor device can cause great problems during manufacturing, by generating various defects that may make the process yield unacceptable.

Because of this, when researching new semiconductor materials a lot of effort is dedicated for finding compositions that can have matched lattice cell sizes.
by stockresearcher | 2025-12-12 17:21:40+00:00
They absolutely will and they will absolutely get away with it. It just won’t be anywhere close to 27%.

There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.

In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.

Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-12 17:21:42+00:00
The thing is, it seems like they are planning to force everyone else out of the market. Acquire all the RAM they can possibly get, leave none for the competition, pray to survive the entire mess.

It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.

And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
by mkaic | 2025-12-12 17:22:03+00:00
Heavy and chronic usage of cannabis is associated with some of these things. I think "plenty of evidence that marijuana can cause {effects}" is somewhat overstating the consensus on the topic.

Like many things in life, cannabis can be enjoyed responsibly or irresponsibly. Irresponsible use is inadvisable and can absolutely ruin your life and the lives of others around you. I see no issue with responsible use, though. All things in moderation. Alcohol, social media, and caffeine all come to mind as examples of other drugs that can be largely safe and enjoyable if used responsibly, but which become dangerous/harmful when moderation is abandoned.

Signed,

a responsible/occasional cannabis user :)
by masfoobar | 2025-12-12 17:22:42+00:00
I was doing some pretty decent rendering in HTML4 back in 2008.. supporting various browers (let alone IE6, 7 and maybe 8 at the time)

Around 2010, I did experiment with things like Silverlight and SVGs. SVGs was OK, but the performance quality was not there. It might be a lot better now.
by dmitrygr | 2025-12-12 17:23:02+00:00
I have a really hard time believing that people who are actually struggling to make ends meet would use Instacart. This article does point out some pretty despicable behavior, but its attempt to pull at heartstrings falls flat due to the idiotic nature in which the argument is constructed. It’s comparable to complaining how terrible it is that caviar costs different amounts to different homeless people. Should’ve just stuck to the numbers — they are compelling and the story does need to be told.
by craftkiller | 2025-12-12 17:23:06+00:00
On my forge, I mirror some large repos that I use for CI jobs so I'm not putting unfair load on the upstream project's repos. Those are the only repos large enough to cause problems with the asshole AI scrapers. My solution was to put the web interface for those repos behind oauth2-proxy (while leaving the direct git access open to not impact my CI jobs). It made my CPU usage drop 80% instantly, while still leaving my (significantly smaller) personal projects fully open for anyone to browse unimpeded.
by Aerbil313 | 2025-12-12 17:23:07+00:00
It’s probably precisely because his browser is not customized that it’s not easily fingerprintable, because stock Safari has privacy protections and users generally don’t change anything.

I got a very similar result on unmodified iOS Safari, randomized among 380k users and conveying 15.5 bits of information. I only have the Dark Reader extension.
by concinds | 2025-12-12 17:23:07+00:00
It feels like courts are not doing a good job promoting "competition".

- Apple shouldn't be able to charge for external payments, come on.

- Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does. Epic knows exactly how predatory that is, betting some kids will find ways to spend thousands and the parents will be helpless. Ideally you'd have a law mandating refunds, but without that, there should be mandatory disclosure on the IAP screen, at least for microtransaction games. You can't have fair "competition" when you have an information asymmetry, and if these rulings don't mandate that, you'll open the floodgate for these gaming companies to screw over parents.
by macintux | 2025-12-12 17:23:08+00:00
Some of my favorite (or at least most durable) memories are from giving hitchhikers rides. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, and the pandemic really put a damper on that, but I've given ~20 people rides over the years and never regretted it.

Although, you definitely hear some tough stories that way.

I wrote about the ones I can remember here: https://opposite-lock.com/topic/45077/hitchhikers-over-the-y...
by iso1631 | 2025-12-12 17:23:09+00:00
The sports gambling craze in the uk started after I managed to almost entirely exclude adverts from my life -- the main adverts I see are on the escalators on the tube and tend to be for shows. Even then I try to avoid the tube and walk instead.

I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.

When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.

We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way
by lunatuna | 2025-12-12 17:23:43+00:00
This is a feature to get you to stop typing and to just speak. I have a couple friends that are almost exclusively speech to text. One friend is ESL and just finds the brain work easier and the other just figured it worked better.

Seeing this video has convinced me it’s a feature. I can’t see iOS development practices that shit and to read comments here about similar Android issues.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-12 17:24:37+00:00
This will continue to happen so long as two things continue to exist:

1) diseases and conditions refractory to treatment or cure by modern medicine

2) expenses related to medical care being born by Americans at a personal level

If you look at other countries, there are absolutely people in positions of power who still push quack medicine because of 1), but 2) creates an extra incentive for desperate or overeager people to try quack medicine.
by chantepierre | 2025-12-12 17:24:51+00:00
Sure ! Here are a few links :

https://stellafane.org/stellafane-main/tm/index.html

How to make a telescope, by Jean Texerau, which was the absolute bible of this field : https://rexresearch1.com/AstronomyTelescopesLibrary/HowMakeT...

Here is a talk (in french, but maybe the auto-subtitling would work?) I recorded that overviews the whole process (2h30 though, and lacks info on the Bath) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt7lBLS0ueg

Here is Gordon Waite's youtube channel which actually shows a lot of the moves : https://www.youtube.com/@GordonWaite/videos

Best resource on the Bath (french, but should translate well) : https://gap47.astrosurf.com/index.php/technique/optique-inst...
by digdugdirk | 2025-12-12 17:24:53+00:00
Is there a 3D equivalent (technical or spiritual) of SVG? I've been working on a CAD visualizer, and I'm looking for something lightweight that I can use to build up representative changes to cad models without having to do a full loop through the CAD application, pull a full .step export, and visualize that.

SVGs will work nicely for showing 2d sketches, but I'm hoping for something similar for the models themselves, without the slowdown of having to use the underlying CAD software for visualization.
by Ambolia | 2025-12-12 17:25:08+00:00
Steven Pinker on this article:

>https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310

>"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."
by 0x457 | 2025-12-12 17:25:16+00:00
> No, any web service instance can receive requests at arbitrary times, and sometimes in the same millisecond zone. The probability is proportional to the number of concurrent users and requests.

Yes, but does it matter that you have out of order IDs within the same ms for concurrent requests? That's why I said batch. I only ever been an issue for me when I've chosen ULID as an ID for an event log (if the command produced more than one event, random bits will ruin the order)

> However, that "optimization" is a failure mode if you're not aware how ULID internals work.

That's not ULID internals, that's whatever library you're using. The rust implementation I've used, for example, will generate random bits unless you implicitly increment, and that requires `&mut`
by mothballed | 2025-12-12 17:25:41+00:00
I'm not arguing you shouldn't do something about it. I'm a bit of a dreamer myself; I've basically carved out a life in a super rural area with almost no government -- but at the same time I like to be aware of the thoughts of great philosophers like Friedman and the history of this sort of liberalism and use it to my advantage. Knowing what I've stated has allowed me to deal with a world where I can't expect things to get better, even if I hope they will.

My personal take is you can use Friedman's thoughts to your advantage. Be prepared that everything will get much worse. And then maybe you can organize your life to minimize your interaction with the state in case your efforts don't help.
by beedeebeedee | 2025-12-12 17:25:42+00:00
Here are the statements from the White House from Thursday and earlier in the year, and past HN discussions on the topic: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/M-26-0...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665070

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598752
by triceratops | 2025-12-12 17:26:03+00:00
I don't think it's quite that simple to launder ill-gotten money as "gambling winnings". I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere (maybe a TV show) that legal gambling establishments have to report winnings to the government. So you need someone on the inside to make false reports.

I don't know the IRS's stance on money claimed to have been won in unauthorized, backroom card games.
by amelius | 2025-12-12 17:26:05+00:00
In this case Rust makes sense. However for the majority of UI projects it doesn't make sense. For UI you want to iterate quickly because requirements change often, and you want garbage collection to be able to move fast. At the same time, performance does not matter (low level stuff like bit blitting can be done by lower level libraries perhaps written in Rust or even at the hardware level). A language designed for systems programming makes zero sense there. Unfortunately, we see a lot of "This UI project now in Rust!" on HN, and people get annoyed by that, and I think rightfully so. People don't want to maintain code that was written in the wrong language, and that __will__ happen if other people pick a language for the wrong reasons.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-12 17:26:06+00:00
Sure but I've worked for other places too, not just AWS. Including small startups and mid-sized companies.

All of them had bad juniors--and bad seniors--who people quickly learned could not be trusted with anything and were either fired or put into a situation where they could do minimal damage.

However none of them had blanket expectations of "juniors are too stupid to figure out how to solve problems and need step-by-step instructions." I'm sure some places like that exist, but I'd never want to work there; after all, if the place I'm working for openly admits it hires idiots, what does that say about me?
by gus_massa | 2025-12-12 17:26:20+00:00
It's weird that it compares the numbers in all Britain to only "a district of around 300,000 people".

Google says there are 70.000.000 persons there:

7E7/3E5/250 = .93 ~ 1 << 20 deaths << 10000 "ear or chest infections"

> That is about a million to one chance

A million to one is much bigger, the number in the example are almost 100 millions to one per year
by bpt3 | 2025-12-12 17:26:30+00:00
How is it anything but a moral debate? The definition of "good" and "bad" are completely subjective and based on personal perspective, experience, and preferences.

On top of that, we don't have the granulatity of data you seem to think we do that would allow anyone to definitively determine that legalized gambling is the cause of any specific characteristic of a nation, state, or locality.
by echelon | 2025-12-12 17:26:33+00:00
Lots of substances cause depression, loss of motivation, and lead to mental health issues.

A large percentage of the population enjoys and venerates the activity.

Not everyone is a type-A overachiever. Not everyone is a Puritan who treats their body as a temple.

Some artistic folks thrive on it.

I think it's okay to let people do what they want with their limited time here, but I also think it's okay to call out the potential consequences. We shouldn't be nannies, but we also shouldn't embrace irresponsibility.

I'm something of a prude when it comes to myself, but I don't think I'm better than people who drink or do drugs.

Sometimes it's not bad at all, sometimes it's devastating.

But so are some academic and professional careers.

Circumstance, genetics, situation, and volume all play a role.

We really have no place intervening unless it has gotten out of control and damaged their lives.
by hackeman300 | 2025-12-12 17:26:36+00:00
Gravity isn't 9.8m/s/s across the universe. If you're at higher or lower elevations (or outside the Earth's gravitational pull entirely), the acceleration will be different.

Their point was the 9.8 model is good enough for most things on Earth, the model doesn't need to be perfect across the universe to be useful.
Show HN: Built a free USCIS form-filling tool (no Adobe required)
by junaid_97 | 2025-12-12 17:26:56+00:00
USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

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It’s free to use, and I’m actively improving it. If you try a form, I’d love your feedback.