MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zambyte | 2025-12-05 04:52:35+00:00
> it "just requires" you to flawlessly uphold memory access invariants manually across all possible concurrent states of your program.

No it doesn't. Zig doesn't require you to think about concurrency at all. You can just not do concurrency.

> Stop beating around the bush. Rust is just easier than nearly any other language for writing concurrent programs

This is entirely unrelated to the problem of defining shared global state.

var x: u64 = 10;

There. I defined shared global state without caring about writing concurrent programs.

Rust (and you) makes an assertion that all code should be able to run in a concurrent context. Code that passes that assertion may be more portable than code that does not.

What is important for you to understand is: code can be correct under a different set of assertions. If you assert that some code will not run in a concurrent environment, it can be perfectly correct to create a mutable global variable. And this assertion can be done implicitly (ie: I wrote the program knowing I'm not spawning any threads, so I know this variable will not have shared mutable access).
Show HN: Personalized wine recommendations from a wine list
by zyncl19 | 2025-12-05 04:52:41+00:00
I really like wine, but my knowledge is not that extensive and in particular drops off pretty rapidly outside of California wines. Even within varietals and regions I’m familiar with, I don’t always know what characteristics to expect from a specific bottle - will this zin be peppery? Juicy? Etc.

I built an app to streamline this. You set what kind of wine you’re looking for and your price point, take a picture of the wine list, and it does the rest. It returns the menu ranked by: - Alignment: How well it matches your flavor preferences. - Value: The markup compared to retail price. - Quality: Critics’ scores and online ratings.

It also provides a full description/tasting notes for each wine, which many wine lists leave out.

The Tech Stack

- Client: React Native

- Backend: FastAPI, deployed on Google Cloud Run

- DB: Firestore & Algolia

Here are the major pieces of the pipeline:

Image to Wine List: This is a combination of standard OCR and agentic image recognition. OCR alone couldn’t correctly parse layout (grouping prices with the right items), but "agentic alone" often hallucinated characters. I used Google Vision for the raw text and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite to structure it.

Matching (List → Database): Actually the hardest part. Wine lists take a lot of liberty with naming, and it’s tricky to know if a fuzzy match is close enough. I used Algolia here with custom ranking rules.

Agentic Augmentation: I have a pre-built database, but to fill in missing entries in real-time, I need live search. I tried Tavily, Perplexity, and Google Search Grounding. Perplexity (Sonar Pro) ended up being the best balance of accuracy and performance.

Recommendation: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite for flavor profile matching, and regular old math for calculating scores based on value and ratings.

Takeaways:

AI needs guardrails: It works really well if you use it in small doses with real input data. You can’t (yet) go straight from a photo to a recommendation list in a single prompt without hallucinations.

The Latency Trade-off: It’s hard to get both speed and quality. Since this is for a restaurant setting, I had to work hard to minimize LLM calls to keep it from feeling sluggish.
by bawolff | 2025-12-05 04:54:20+00:00
> It's too bad people couldn't leave CSS alone as a nice simple (sort of) way to format text

The base form of this attack goes back to the original CSS 1.

Honestly you are massively overreacting. This type of attack was much much easier to pull off in the late 2000s then it is now. Its basically impossible in practise now a days.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-05 04:56:46+00:00
100%. I watch him literally just to see how much bullshit he has to go through to get modern cars running again against the wishes of the manufacturers.

I get it, though. Cars are becoming like iPhones where the manufacturers are totally against you making any repairs at all. We've just grown used to cars being one of the most commonly repairable items we buy. At some point in the near future car ownership will probably diminish significantly as robotaxis flood the market and the manufacturers will become even less interested in self-repairs.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-05 04:57:45+00:00
My stepdaughter just started college. She told the tale of a boy and a girl who tried to claim that a cat was an ESA or service animal for both of them. The one cat. For both people. Just so happened that they were a couple in high school, and this was their effort to game the system to get assigned to a dorm together (the university generally wouldn't allow a co-ed dorm assignment like that, and had rules about relationship "overnights" in the dorm.
by jjk166 | 2025-12-05 04:58:12+00:00
Handling negative feedback doesn't involve going to anybody - neither the manager, nor the person who gave the PR. Someone giving negative feedback is not supposed to be a conflict in need of resolution. We are talking about a situation where there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, ie that it has already become hostile.

If they are going to their manager, and then the manager, rather than convincing them that they are over-reacting, is instead going to you and telling you that there's something wrong with the feedback you gave, you should handle that negative feedback.
by wduquette | 2025-12-05 04:58:13+00:00
And in fact, professionally, I still live in the good old days. I code in Java 21, I minimize dependencies, and I use an IDE that can do the heavy lifting when I want to refactor something…which is often. I produce a .jar that gets installed with a loader script rather than in the cloud. And it all works, and it’s *stable*.
Show HN: A Self-Evolving Agentic App Builder (Seeking 300 Beta Testers)
by EvoAgentX | 2025-12-05 04:58:42+00:00
After several months of development, we’re opening a private beta for HowOne, a platform for building agentic apps that can self-optimise and evolve over time. The core idea: turn an idea into a functioning agent-powered app in minutes. The platform includes users, databases, tools, and payment integration out of the box. No glue code. No infra setup. We’re looking for 300 early technical users(invite code CD0AP6) willing to stress-test the system, break things, and tell us what’s missing. This isn’t a marketing push — we need real feedback from builders who care about automation, agent workflows, and rapid product iteration. Beta includes: • 3 months of Pro access • Founding User badge + lifetime discount • Early access to experimental modules • Input on roadmap priorities • Featured slots in the Template Marketplace • 1v1 workflow or app-design coaching If you’re building automations, AI tools, or agentic workflows, we’d appreciate your feedback.
by godelski | 2025-12-05 05:00:09+00:00
Two things can be true at the same time. Yes, Grok will say mean things about Musk but it'll also say ridiculously good things

> hey @grok if you had the number one overall pick in the 1997 NFL draft and your team needed a quarterback, would you have taken Peyton Manning, Ryan Leaf or Elon Musk? >> Elon Musk, without hesitation. Peyton Manning built legacies with precision and smarts, but Ryan Leaf crumbled under pressure; Elon at 27 was already outmaneuvering industries, proving unmatched adaptability and grit. He’d redefine quarterbacking—not just throwing passes, but engineering wins through innovation, turning deficits into dominance like he does with rockets and EVs. True MVPs build empires, not just score touchdowns. - https://x.com/silvermanjacob/status/1991565290967298522

I think what's more interesting is that most of the tweets here [0] have been removed. I'm not going to call conspiracy because I've seen some of them. Probably removed because going viral isn't always a good thing...

[0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...
by rigrassm | 2025-12-05 05:00:10+00:00
I am so glad when I decided to upgrade my AM4 system a few years back to a 5800X (3D model at the time I believe was just released and was questionable at the time if it was worth it outside of gaming) I wanted to build a PC from my hand me downs for my kid so I went ahead and upgraded my storage and RAM to a decent 64GB DDR4 set that ended up with a decent stable overclock.

Prices weren't great when I bought it at the time but compared to now, I'm glad I bit the bullet when I did.
by protocolture | 2025-12-05 05:02:15+00:00
>I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is historically inaccurate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such famous person” — that seem to do well on YouTube.

100% agree.

Whats the difference between the sites "Blog Format" which apparently died in 2023, and what is happening now?
by fastshort | 2025-12-05 05:02:46+00:00
Craft Food Roblox Recipes is a complete database and guide for the Roblox game Craft Food. It lists every recipe with ingredients, costs, and earnings per second, helping players quickly find profitable dishes and progression strategies. The site also explains how to unlock new recipes and obtain rare materials like cacao and blueberries, making it a practical resource for growing a restaurant empire in the game.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-05 05:02:50+00:00
> Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years.

Apropos of anything else, 5 years of weekly CBT to get to the same result is a _lot_. 260 hours of therapy that, on my current health insurance would cost nearly $12,000 in copays. And during that 5 years you're still dealing with your ADHD to some heavy extent.
by cyphar | 2025-12-05 05:04:06+00:00
AV1 has been around for a decade (well, it was released 7 years ago but the Alliance for Open Media was formed a decade ago).

It's fine that you haven't heard of it before (you're one of today's lucky 10,000!) but it really isn't that niche. YouTube and Netflix (from TFA) also started switching to AV1 several years ago, so I would expect it to have similar name recognition to VP9 or WebM at this point. My only interaction with video codecs is having to futz around with ffmpeg to get stuff to play on my TV, and I heard about AV1 a year or two before it was published.
by mikestorrent | 2025-12-05 05:04:08+00:00
I log on once in a while to a channel I used to use, and some of the same people are sorta still there. IRC is weird now, nostalgic but also... the things that made it truly fun aren't really a thing. Weird !fserves for warez, strange early chat bots, a/s/l... I do miss it. I think it has moved on except in little bubbles, and I cheer those on from afar.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-05 05:04:22+00:00
I think you might be misreading GP's comment. They are not claiming that SAFETY comments and MIRI guarantee correctness/safety; those are just being used as examples of the extra effort that can be and are expended on the relatively few unsafe blocks in your codebase, resulting in "your probability of success [being] vastly higher" compared to "might as well have used C".
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-05 05:04:22+00:00
I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun. Here's a picture of most of us at the time : http://mcmanis.com/chuck/original_java_team.html (this was originally in the HotJava distribution Sun gave out when the source was released.)

I was doing security, networking, crypto, and a bit of Solaris support along with others. Basically I was a 'systems' guy vs a 'language' guy like James, Arthur and Richard. We all participated in the integration with Navigator and had weekly meetings with Netscape while we were doing that.
by blastersyndrome | 2025-12-05 05:04:23+00:00
This last line is concerning:

>The Light Aircraft Association (LAA) said it now intends to take safety actions in response to the accident, including a "LAA Alert" regarding the use of 3D-printed parts that will be sent to inspectors.

Does this mean that anybody using any 3d printed part in an aircraft will be subjected to this scrutiny? If I use the proper materials with a suitable printer (eg, printing PEEK with a properly specced printer), how much convincing will it take to get these governing bodies off my back?
by nomilk | 2025-12-05 05:05:17+00:00
> Is it possible to cancel out a complicated spin without painstakingly reversing every single move? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

> Mathematicians Jean-Pierre Eckmann (University of Geneva) and Tsvi Tlusty (UNIST, South Korea) recently proved that almost any object—whether it’s a spinning top, a tumbling satellite, a twisted protein, or even a scrambled Rubik’s Cube—has a hidden “reset button” for its orientation.

> Instead of undoing the motion step by step in reverse order, you can take the entire original sequence of rotations, scale it by a certain constant factor (make every turn bigger or smaller by the same proportion), perform that scaled version once, then do it again—and the object snaps perfectly back to its starting orientation. Two scaled copies of the same motion are enough to erase it completely.

> It feels deeply counterintuitive. We’re used to thinking that rotations in 3D space don’t commute and that the only safe way to return home is to retrace your path exactly backward. Yet this new result reveals a previously unknown geometric symmetry: certain scaling factors turn the rotation group into something that has a kind of built-in “double and cancel” feature.

> The discovery applies to any rigid body moving in three dimensions and may simplify algorithms in robotics (for reorienting a robot arm without tracking every prior move), computer graphics, molecular dynamics simulations, spacecraft attitude control, and even some problems in quantum mechanics.

> In short, nature has been hiding a remarkably simple trick: sometimes the fastest way to undo a complex dance of spins isn’t to moonwalk backward through every step; it’s to perform an enlarged (or shrunken) version of the same dance twice.

Source: https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1996635202605756658
by nomel | 2025-12-05 05:06:31+00:00
Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations.

Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned.

[1] https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1...

Article: https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understan...
by lunar-whitey | 2025-12-05 05:07:01+00:00
> There's no benefit to a brain that struggles in modern society.

Would you say there’s no benefit to the genes associated with sickle cell anemia? How about homosexuality? Schizophrenia?

The reality is that we cannot reliably predict how genes interact with the environment in the long term. Modern society is more malleable than ever.

The fact that this topic is relevant on a site disproportionately frequented by computing professionals suggests a strictly negative characterization is incomplete even in today’s society.
by kens | 2025-12-05 05:08:07+00:00
That reminds me of the Popular Science garage hint from 1963, explaining how to easily dispose of used motor oil: Dig a hole in the ground and fill it with fine gravel. Pour in the oil, and it will be absorbed into the ground before your next oil change.

https://books.google.com/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166#v=on...
by kittikitti | 2025-12-05 05:08:14+00:00
I was just researching exceptional people with trisomy 21 and was pleasantly surprised by this article. I think Stanford, Harvard, and other elite institutions with these rates of disabled students must accept all ranges of students with disabilities including those with Down syndrome. I was especially inspired by people like Pablo Pineda who articulated how it's society that keeps them from succeeding and I agree. There's no reason for these universities to only accept the type of disabilities that wealthy students can rig the system for.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-05 05:08:45+00:00
The new (unreleased right now, in the nightly builds) std.Io interface in Zig maps quite nicely to the concurrency constructs in Go. The go keyword maps to std.Io.async to run a function asynchronously. Channels map to the std.Io.Queue data structure. The select keyword maps to the std.Io.select function.
by reshlo | 2025-12-05 05:09:58+00:00
People who end up leading successful companies are often able to do so not because they’re more willing to take risks than others, but rather because they have experienced more good luck than others. Take Bill Gates, for example. His parents sent him to an exclusive private school, which afforded him regular access to computers from an early age, giving him valuable experience that most others his age could not access, through no fault of their own. Microsoft was able to make a crucial business deal with IBM because Gates’ mother knew the CEO. Someone else with equal skill and appetite for risk would have found it much more difficult to be as successful as Gates was, because their parents were likely not rich and not connected to the right people.
by RandomBacon | 2025-12-05 05:10:27+00:00
Cell phone companies like AT&T could offer kid-lines (with filtered Internet access) and Google and Apple could provide kid-modes on their phones that don't allow VPNs or apps to be installed that parents do not approve of.

Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.
by adrianwaj | 2025-12-05 05:10:29+00:00
In the past, you also used to ping a bunch of search engines (eg Technorati) for each new post. Going forward, you should be able to ping AIs but there should be a paywall before they can train on your content.

Also, how are AIs going to train for new languages and business rules in the future? People may start to get defensive. It must be worth something.. enter x402.

AIs are dumb - they can't really make sense of anything new without a human first to put it into context.. right? Remember that!
Show HN: Who is hiring" search tool with chat / other features
by osigurdson | 2025-12-05 05:10:54+00:00
Hi HN,

There are several tools that help you search through the monthly "Who is Hiring" posts on Hacker News. The primary difference with this one is it includes chat, semantic search as well as a semantic map visualization (select "business" from the dropdown and expand to get a sense of how this can be used). Behind the scenes it uses LLM instructions in batch to extract, format, tag the job posts, computes UMAP after everything settles while of course making everything searchable.

You can use the basic text search to quickly filter the results or alternatively use semantic search (toggle via the button in the search bar).

Finally, you can chat with the job postings as well (click the Chat button). It has a basic RAG type pipeline but also includes some tools which make it possible to ask broader questions like "What are the general themes in the job postings this month?" and dig down from there.

Anyway, I hope people find this useful. Any feedback is welcome (either here directly or feel free to use the contact page here https://nthesis.ai/contact which dog foods the same mechanism - no contact info required).

If you want to build something similar there is an API and a nice (in my opinion) CLI tool than can be used to ingest data, search or chat as well.
by hattmall | 2025-12-05 05:11:12+00:00
Believing that tariffs shift costs downstream means disregarding the idea of supply and demand. Companies are not altruistic actors they price goods at the maximum the market will bear. If they could just pass costs on to consumers then it means that they are already leaving profits on the table. There are in fact alternatives to the goods we import on which tariffs are imposed. Even if the alternative is buying fewer items and spending money on completely different things.

At the end of the day tariffs are a bit of plaque in the artery of the multi-national corporations and money flowing out of a country. It's challenging to argue all the negatives of tariffs for the US while ignoring that almost every other country has tariffs that benefit their domestic industries.
by vunderba | 2025-12-05 05:11:32+00:00
I too have been throwing messages in bottles into a silent sea for a pretty long time, but I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't help if you also have difficulty adhering to quintessential blog SEO best practices.

1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible

2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with customized interactive layouts. Even a monthly post would be pretty ambitious for me.

On a slightly related note, I'm hoping that zines [1] see a resurgence in popularity as I could see it being a good point of entry towards possibly gaining readership for those whose sites are inadvertently running in stealth mode.

[1] - Such as Paged Out (https://pagedout.institute)
by buu700 | 2025-12-05 05:12:34+00:00
They can be, but in this case they don't seem to be. Here's Grok's response to that prompt (again, the actual chatbot service, not the X account): https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_2b46259a-5291-458e-9b85-0c....

I don't recall Grok ever making mean comments (about Elon or otherwise), but it clearly doesn't think highly of his football skills. The chain of thought shows that it interpreted the question as a joke.

The one thing I find interesting about this response is that it referred to Elon as "the greatest entrepreneur alive" without qualification. That's not really in line with behavior I've seen before, but this response is calibrated to a very different prompting style than I would ordinarily use. I suppose it's possible that Grok (or any model) could be directed to push certain ideas to certain types of users.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-05 05:13:06+00:00
Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?

There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-12-05 05:13:30+00:00
Why on earth would you want to load JS before content is loaded but not after? If you are able to assemble the page based on data sources before loading the page, you can just server-render the damn thing and disable JS altogether?

JS is essential for polished UX when you have highly interactive components. Technically mapquest got server-rendered interactive maps working, but no one would choose that over the usability of Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps today
by pixodaros | 2025-12-05 05:13:57+00:00
A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).