MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gramie | 2025-12-25 15:25:15+00:00
Without government interference, someone who is stronger/more brutal than you can kill you and take your property, partner, and anything else they like. It is in the top 10 in the world for homicides.

Haiti is a horrifying place to live, for most people. The UN says that 85% of the capital is controlled by gangs, and they are spreading out into the rest of the country.
by derriz | 2025-12-25 15:25:18+00:00
What puts me off the Amiga scene is how little of the 30 or 40 year old software has been released into the public domain.

I have no issue with charging for new software for retro platforms in order to support the scene but find it slightly offensive that you have to pay to acquire a legal 1.3 kickstart ROM - released and unchanged since 1988. It just feels like copyright squatting.
by somat | 2025-12-25 15:25:32+00:00
Barely related but the headline reminded me of this video on the ontology of dogs and their infectious cancers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YerdELZuEhY (Clint's Reptiles "Not All Dogs Have Bones")

A bit of a dry subject to be sure, but I had never heard of infectious cancers before.

In summary: a lot of information on how canines are related to each other. With a short segment how there is an infectious cancer found on dogs that is genetically different from any existing breed and as such could be considered it's own species.
by attractivechaos | 2025-12-25 15:26:28+00:00
I have been thinking what talent means in programming and thought of a case in the past. The task was to parse a text file format. One programmer used ~1000 lines of code (LOC) with complex logic. The other used <200 LOC with a straightforward solution that ran times faster and would probably be more extensible and easier to maintain in future. This is a small task. The difference will be exponentially amplified for complex projects that Fabrice is famous for. The first programmer in my story may be able to write a javascript runtime if he has time + obsession, but it will take him much longer and the quality will be much lower in comparison to quickjs or mqjs.
by gen220 | 2025-12-25 15:27:18+00:00
As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.

So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.

That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.

Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.

(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)
by arcfour | 2025-12-25 15:29:23+00:00
> The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws

This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"

> If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.

I honestly wonder how leftists manage to delude themselves so heavily? I'm sure a bunch of politicians really have my best interests at heart. Lol
by netsharc | 2025-12-25 15:29:39+00:00
It's called "Hacker News" but it's full of "Silicon Valley bros", and as far as I know, SV was originally hackers, but then someone noticed there's money to be made in the industry, and SV became attractive for money-and-power-hungry types. And HN too. Too many FAANG employees here preferring their 6-figure paychecks over morality...

There's movies as an art form, and there's movies as a vehicle to make money (Marvel, Star Wars, etc, etc franchises, anyone?)...
by zahlman | 2025-12-25 15:29:46+00:00
> I don't think I know Java well enough to understand the ramifications of choosing Integer instead of integer as a parameter type.

[0]

Java's `int` is a 32-bit "machine" integer (in a virtual architecture, but still stored by value with no additional space overhead). Java's `Integer` is an object with reference semantics, like[1] every value in a Python program — but unlike Python's `int`, it still has the 32-bit range restriction. If you need arbitrary-size integer values in Java, those come from `java.math.BigInteger`.

> It always writes a bunch of utility functions. It refactored simple and direct conditionals into calls to utility functions, which might not make the code very easy to read.

Are the names good, at least? I do this sort of thing and often find it helpful. Of course, that does depend on choosing one utility function for the same task and reusing it, and being sure it actually works.

> I hand wrote manual calls to all the functions, filling in the parameters, which the autocomplete LLM in intellij kept trying to ruin. It would constantly put the wrong parameters places and get in my way, which was stupid.

Yeah, Java lacks a lot of Python's nice tricks for this. (I've had those frustrations with IDEs since long before LLMs.)

> it told me to write log statements everywhere. To be fair, that is how I ended up tracking down the slowdown I was experiencing, but that's because I'm an idiot and didn't intuit that hitting a database on the other side of the country takes a long time and I should probably not do that in local testing.

It sounds like you wanted this for immediate debugging. The word "logging" does not autocomplete "to a remote server db" in my head. Sometimes it's useful to have mental defaults oriented towards what is temporary and quick rather than what is permanent and robust.

[0] Did you consider asking the LLM? It can probably deal with this question pretty well if you ask directly, although I don't know how much it would take to get from there to actually having it fix any problems. But I might as well write a human perspective since I'm here.

[1] Unlike Python, all those "objects with reference semantics" can be NULL in Java (and you need a possibly-third-party annotation to restrict that type to be non-null). There is no "null object" analogous to Python's `None`.
by pkphilip | 2025-12-25 15:29:48+00:00
If you want user serviceable equipment - example: phones, computers, cars, bikes, washing machines etc, you will have to deal with the issues that come with it - the same as the inconveniences that come with user serviceable software AKA open source software.

The reason being that a device which has been tested to work with only a fixed set of parts will likely have more of the issues ironed out in comparison to a device which has to work with a much wider range of devices.

You may not get the same form factors because user serviceable equipment will tend to be bulkier - for instance, you may not be able to get ultra thin laptops, phones etc.

However, these inconveniences are worth it because the alternative is that we will find ourselves in a place where the equipment becomes more and more adversarial to consumers.
by pardon_me | 2025-12-25 15:31:22+00:00
In a society based around ranking others perceived worth and value, having a disability gets conflated with "being a burden". Silently overcoming a disability and adapting to an unsuitable world becomes the "hustle culture" variant of modern-day working life. Praised for being ultra self-sufficient and "paying our way".

It's harrowing how people prefer donating resources over exerting mental effort to bridge simple psychological boundaries in understanding the different needs of others, especially for disabilities (which nobody chooses to have). I often wonder if the root of this is the individual fear it could happen to us. By exercising empathy, we are reminded that ourselves and our families are vulnerable to disability at any time--from birth to life events this second (injury, illness, luck), existence is vulnerability.

Our intrinsic fears combined with societies lacking safety nets and breathing space has created a positive feedback loop for hyper-individualistic living. Our own bubbles. I try to do the opposite, but it's not easy.
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-25 15:32:21+00:00
I feel like folk in this thread haven't used a Macbook Pro from the past ten years or so — which is fine, I don't expect everyone to want to use MacOS (I prefer Linux) but the hardware is genuinely nice.

On my personal 2019 MBP I have four USB C ports, and can charge via any of them. My work M3 MBP only has three, but has a full-size HDMI port too (and a magnetic charging port I've never used). I carry a cheap USB C dongle that works with pretty much anything and gives me a couple of USB A ports, HDMI, a USB C with pass-through charging, and Ethernet. It's great, and it's DP alt mode rather than TB so it works with anything (including Android phones with the right hardware).

Apple definitely aren't perfect (although I do actually like my touch bar) but when they make hardware that works, it really does work well. I wish it were possible for other companies to make things as nicely.
by DougN7 | 2025-12-25 15:32:44+00:00
If the reaction is actually knee jerk/automatic before the upper brain(?)/concious tolerant/empathetic side can take control, is someone a jerk for having that primal response first. I consider myself very tolerant and empathetic and I do my damndest to be that way, but my wife says sometimes it’s not the first thing that shows. I’m trying as hard as I know how. Should I be condemned?
Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol
by yarlinghe | 2025-12-25 15:32:45+00:00
I’m building a Unicode reference where each symbol has its own dev-friendly page with all relevant encodings.

Example:
[https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/almost-equal-to](https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/almost-equal-to)

Includes Unicode, HTML, CSS, JS, UTF-8/16 bytes, URL encoding, and usage examples.

The same structure is used across thousands of symbols (math, arrows, currency, tech/UI, punctuation).

Built because existing references are fragmented.
Feedback welcome.
by Eridrus | 2025-12-25 15:34:22+00:00
Can you say more about why mechanically she didn't get anything?

If you exercise your options you have real stock in the company, so I don't see how you can get shafted here.

Did investors do some sort of dividend cash out before employees were able to exercise their options? (Obviously shady, but more about investors/leadership being unethical than the deal structure).

Would love to know more about how this played out.
by mgaunard | 2025-12-25 15:34:29+00:00
Some comments from skimming through the code:

- spin loop engine, could properly reset work available before calling the work function, and avoid yielding if new work was added in-between. I don't see how you avoid reentrancy issues as-is.

- lockfree queue, the buffer should store storage for Ts, not Ts. As it is, looks not only UB, but broken for any non-trivial type.

- metrics, the system seems weakly consistent, that's not ideal. You could use seqlocks or similar techniques.

- websocket, lacking error handling, or handling for slow or unreliable consumers. That could make your whole application unreliable as you buffer indefinitely.

- order books; first, using double for price everywhere, problematic for many applications, and causing unnecessary overhead on the decoding path. Then the data structure doesn't handle very sparse and deep books nor significant drift during the day. Richness of the data is also fairly low but what you need is strategy-dependent. Having to sort on query is also quite inefficient when you could just structure your levels in order to begin with, typically with a circular buffer kind of structure (as the same prices will frequently oscillate between bid and ask sides, you just need to track where bid/ask start/end).

- strategy, the system doesn't seem particularly suited for multi-level tick-aware microstructure strategies. I get more of a MFT vibe from this.

- simulation, you're using a probabilistic model for fill rate with market impact and the like. In HFT I think precise matching engine simulation is more common, but I guess this is again more of a MFT tangent. Could be nice to layer the two.

- risk checks, some of those seem unnecessary on the hot path, since you can just lower the position or pnl limits to order size limits.
Show HN: AudioWorklet-Based Modular Synth
by katspaugh | 2025-12-25 15:35:37+00:00
I vibe-coded this on the evening before Christmas. It's a modular synth where each module is an AudioWorklet.

On each page load, it generates a random patch, and quite often it's a happy accident. You can share your patches via a URL.

Merry Christmas any happy tunes!
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-25 15:35:42+00:00
> In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions.

... and for good reason, because it turns out that people with no support network (which most mentally ill people and a lot of prisoners are) are perfect victims for all kinds of abuse - both from other inmates and from "wardens". They didn't end up in an asylum randomly, they ended up in there because their family didn't want or could not provide care for them.

And it's not just mental "health" institutions or prisons... all forms of "care" breed abuse. The Catholic Church for example is still reeling from constant discoveries of abused children in orphanages. Elder care institutions, particularly severely understaffed, routinely have to deal with inmates being injured by anything from a lack of care (e.g. bed sores) over physical abuse to sexual abuse [1].

And to make it worse... private/family care without independent oversight is just as bad. A lot of homeschooled children are heavily abused, caregiver burnout and its fallout is also a nasty issue, and particularly in men with dementia, they can also be the abusers.

In the end, the root problem is that we as a society haven't yet figured out how to properly deal with the balance between care work, employment work and rest, and we also haven't figured out how to properly reward and audit care work.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/06/shock...
by spauldo | 2025-12-25 15:36:19+00:00
The FSF has written extensively on why (in their opinion) you should prefer copyleft licenses over non-copyleft licenses, but they don't require a license to be copyleft in order to be considered free. It's worth spending a bit of time on their site to understand their point of view. Just be careful not to drink too much of the Kool-Aid or you'll become one of those annoying people who never shut up about the GPL on forums.
by eviks | 2025-12-25 15:37:19+00:00
Not really, you can't. For example, you might have a service that lies dormant using 0.1mb of memory and then does some scanning/maintenance once a week and uses 50% CPU for 5 minues with 100m memory.

Also, checking those dozens of services will take a lot of time

Unsuspecting users can't even measure space savings correctly since many components can be hardlinked to something else and deleting them will "free up" the space shown in the folder (the size standard size reporting on Windows is deeply inadequate), but not free up anything in reality.
Or for some uwp apps you can't even see the size at all as the folders have a very dumb permission set, and these scripts remove those preinstalled uwp apps.

That's the point of public benchmarking - so that ever single user doesn't have to waste time doing the mistaken comparisons on his own, so your suggestion doesn't help at all even in theory.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-25 15:37:47+00:00
The authors report that restoring NAD+ balance in the brain -- using a compound called P7C3-A20 -- completely reversed Alzheimer's pathology and recovered cognitive function in two different transgenic mouse models (one amyloid-based, one tau-based). The mice had advanced disease before treatment began.

Three comments:

- You can actually buy the drug here: https://focusbiomolecules.com/p7c3-a20-nampt-activator-prone...
It's a simple small molecule. If this stuff works, expect it to be everywhere within just a couple of years.

- There's room for skepticism. As Derek Lowe once wrote: "Alzheimer's therapies have, for the most part, been a cliff over which people push bales of money. There are plenty of good reasons for this: we don't really know what the cause of Alzheimer's is, when you get down to it, and we're the only animal that we know of that gets it. Mouse models of the disease would be extremely useful – you wouldn't even have to know what the problem was to do some sort of phenotypic screen – but the transgenic mice used for these experiments clearly don't recapitulate the human disease. The hope for the last 25 years or so has been that they'd be close enough to get somewhere, but look where we are."

> https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/just-how-worthless...

- If the drug's mechanism of action has been correctly assigned, it's very plausible that simply supplementing with NMN, NR, or NADH would work equally well. The authors caution against this on, IMO, extremely shaky and unjustified grounds. "Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer."
by tetromino_ | 2025-12-25 15:37:50+00:00
Without context, the reaction is bizarre. There must be some back story that you omitted; maybe something about the mother previously asking other people in the family to vacuum, and being ignored?

My wife and I, by the way, are giving each other a joint New Year gift of a fancy robot vacuum cleaner: it's the best sort of gift, useful, elegant, and something that one would be reluctant to spend the money on otherwise.
by meltyness | 2025-12-25 15:37:56+00:00
I mean I'm sure cramming synthetic data and scaling models to enhance like, in-model arithmetic, memory, etc. makes "alignment" appear more complex / model behavior more non-newtonian so to speak, but it's going to boil down to censorship one way or another. Or an NSP approach where you enforce a policy over activations using another separate model, and so-on and so-on.

Is it likely that it's a bigger problem to try and apply qualitative policies to training data, activations, and outputs than the approach ML-guys think is primarily appropriate (ie., nn training) or is it a bigger problem to scale hardware and explore activation architectures that have more effective representation[0], and make a better model? If you go after the data but cascade a model in to rewrite history that's obviously going to be expensive, but easy. Going after outputs is cheap and easy but not terrifically effective... but do we leave the gears rusty? Probably we shouldn't.

It's obfuscation to assert that there's some greater policy that must be applied to models beyond the automatic modeling that happens, unless there's some specific outcome you intend to prevent, namely censorship at this point, maybe optimistically you can prevent it from lying? Such application of policies have primarily targeted solutions that reduce model efficacy and universality.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35703367
by lumost | 2025-12-25 15:38:37+00:00
Startups typically offer employees, particularly early employees, substantial equity compensation. If the employer is offering this compensation in bad faith, or otherwise preferring one equity holder over another without an explicit contract - then they are at the very least a crappy business partner. A founding engineer with a 2% stake could be missing out on 5-10 million of this transaction.

As an aside, most founders are paid during the entire project. It’s not hard to raise a preseed round to get yourself paid for 6-24 months to work on an idea. If a founder chose to bootstrap - that’s all fine, but let’s not pretend that the employees aren’t taking massive career risks vs “standard” employers.
by ogogmad | 2025-12-25 15:39:07+00:00
`forward_shuffle` is the (GROUP) INVERSE of `fisher_yates_shuffle`.

`mirror_shuffle` is the (GROUP) CONJUGATE of `fisher_yates_shuffle` by the cyclic permutation (n-1,n-2,...,1,0). In group theory, CONJUGATEs are like changes of coordinates. In the present application, they reverse the index labels.

The article said it, but it's worth distilling it.

PS: Oh, here's another link. Denote by "S!", or less formally, the factorial of a set S, to mean the set of permutations of S. Fisher-Yates is equivalent to a bijection between (S+1)! and S! × (S+1).
by curl_e | 2025-12-25 15:39:38+00:00
Allow me to suggest Research Software Engineering - https://society-rse.org/careers/rse-stories/

US Organisation - https://us-rse.org/
UK (but also worldwide) - https://society-rse.org/

There are RSEs who specialise in Earth Science, e.g. https://socrse.github.io/geoscience-sig/
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-25 15:41:47+00:00
As others have pointed out, a lot of us would very much like to buy a Framework laptop but as it is we can’t make it make sense. We’ll be customers if Framework can figure out how to patch up their shortcomings, and by expressing that sentiment hopefully they’re encouraged to try to do that.

We value reparability and upgradability and are willing to pay for it all else being roughly equal.

It’s like for the same price, being given a choice between a hybrid car that’s quiet on the road and gets 45 MPG fuel economy with great torque and responsiveness but needs to be taken to the dealer to service and a car that’s easy to self service but has an annoying rattle at highway speeds, gets 15 MPG, and has a 4-speed automatic transmission. Both technically do the job, but you’d be hard pressed to find people who’d choose the latter over the former.
by zahlman | 2025-12-25 15:43:29+00:00
Such a large fraction of human communication is non-verbal (and, unless you're actively studying this sort of thing as a neurodivergent person trying to fit in) unconscious that it's hard for me to imagine this working very well on average. The LLM simply couldn't possibly get enough relevant input. And even emotional reactions purely to words are informed by context that the LLM didn't experience and the user won't know was important, so the LLM can only wildly speculate.

I'd like to encourage you to resist the "what I did wrong" framing, because it's definitely not a given that you did anything wrong in any given circumstance. Sometimes neurotypical people are just completely unreasonable, and sometimes they will try to manipulate you (and each other).

The strange part to me is that neurodivergence is commonly explained in terms of inability to see things from another point of view (see the classical "what will X person say is in the box?" test). But supposedly neurotypical people demonstrate what seems to me like a stunning lack of empathy (or more generally, ability to comprehend other worldviews) all the time. Especially when politics is involved.