MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fweimer | 2025-12-07 22:34:15+00:00
Most large open-source projects ban exceptions, often because the project was originally converted from C and is just not compatible with non-local control flow. Or the project originated within an organization which has tons of C++ code that is not exception-safe and is expected to integrate with that.

Some large commercial software systems use C++ exceptions, though.

Until recently, pretty much all implementations seemed to have a global mutex on the throw path. With higher and higher core counts, the affordable throw rate in a process was getting surprisingly slow. But the lock is gone in GCC/libstdc++ with glibc. Hopefully the other implementations follow, so that we don't end up with yet another error handling scheme for C++.
by zarzavat | 2025-12-07 22:34:26+00:00
There are several languages that I could use and be economically successful with, but I refuse to use because I consider them to be poorly designed.

Using a bad language for 8 hours a day makes me irritable and it's impossible to prevent that irritability from overflowing into my interactions with other people. I'd rather that my conversations with the computer be joyful ones.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-07 22:34:41+00:00
> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact

Mmm, yes and no.

It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes.

If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock.

If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock.

The whole thing breaks down very quickly if you don't have grass and clovers growing in fields, and ruminants eating them, breaking down the tough cellulose, and then shitting it out and trampling it in.
by vegetablepotpie | 2025-12-07 22:35:04+00:00
Padding ties up capital, it reduces credibility, it delays deployment, it adds costs through delay. It is bad for organizations. However, it is a great solution if you're a worker in a bureaucratic environment that can tolerate large costs, but is intolerant of 1-day of schedule slips. It's a great solution for complacent management, who are confused about the game they're playing and wants to report that they're "on track", which means "not late".

The agile solution of incremental value delivery is a compromise, and can produce good outcomes for functional changes. But agile has unacceptable failure modes when working on infrastructure and satisfying system constraints. Agile can work okay for programmers, but it's not a solution for engineers. Acknowledging, owning, and managing risk is more scalable, but you have to have leaders who acknowledge that they exist and have the maturity to take on that responsibility.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-07 22:35:10+00:00
Doesn't it make it more likely unused variables stay in the codebase? You want to experiment, the code doesn't compile, you add this (probably by automatic tool), the code now compiles. You're happy with your experiment. As the compiler doesn't complain you commit and junk stays in the code.

Isn't it just bad design that makes both experimenting harder and for unused variables to stay in the code in the final version?
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-07 22:35:14+00:00
The big difference is the extent to which PE will go to juice the quarters earnings. Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back. PE will do all of the above and more if it means they get their money. Which means, you as a customer get screwed over more when PE is involved.
Show HN: Art-2D – A physics-based model for financial collapse prediction
by asmyros | 2025-12-07 22:35:16+00:00
I've spent the last year working on a framework that treats financial risk as a conserved vector field rather than a scalar probability. The model (ART-2D) uses coupled Langevin dynamics to identify a phase transition threshold ($\Sigma \approx 0.75$).Backtesting shows it flagged the 2008 GFC 13 months early and the Terra/Luna collapse 5 days early. I'm looking for feedback on the entropy term derivation.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-07 22:35:19+00:00
Claude could probably have written a script to do it. I'm hunting assets to confirm.

Edit: yup very easy for claude. Most of the wall time was spent installing cv2 in a venv (uv dropped python 3.14 on claude, which seemed to get stuck compiling numpy or something so I interrupted and told claude to just use python 3.13 instead).

ME: In this directory there are two images: @p-pressbox.gif and @screenshot.png. @p-pressbox.gif is an image that exists somewhere inside @screenshot.png Write a script that finds the precise location

CLAUDE: Looking at the images, I can see that p-pressbox.gif (the spaceship with "PRESS BOX SHUTTLE" text) appears in the upper-left area of screenshot.png. I'll write a Python script using OpenCV to find the precise location.

[ some venv stuff/telling claude to use uv and python 3.13 ]

CLAUDE: The script found the precise location of p-pressbox.gif within screenshot.png:

| Measurement | Value | |---------------------|-----------------| | Top-left corner | (87, 110) | | Bottom-right corner | (218, 166) | | Center | (152, 138) | | Template size | 131 × 56 pixels | | Match confidence | 97.2% | The script is at /tmp/search/find_image.py and uses OpenCV's template matching with normalized cross-correlation.

ME> As part of the output create a visualization of the @p-pressbox.gif positioned on top of the original screenshot

CLAUDE: Done! The visualization shows a green rectangle highlighting the exact location where p-pressbox.gif was found within the screenshot. The match is at coordinates (87, 110) to (218, 166).

I confirmed the result was correct.
by collingreen | 2025-12-07 22:35:22+00:00
> "as soon as possible after the software launches"

This isn't true, just desired, and is one of the main roots of the conflict here. OF COURSE you would like to start selling in advance and then have billing start with customers the instant the "last" pr is merged. That isn't a realistic view of the software world though and pretending it is while everyone knows otherwise starts to feel like bad faith. Making software that works, then having time to deploy it, make changes from early feedback, and fix bugs is important. THEN all the other business functions should start the cant-take-back parts of their work that need to coordinate with the rest of the world. Trying to squeeze some extra days from the schedule is a business bet you can make but it would be nice if the people taking this risk were the ones who had to crunch or stay up all night or answer the page.

Trying to force complicated and creative work into a fake box just so you can make a gantt chart slightly narrower only works on people a couple times before they start to resent it. 10x that if management punishes someone when that fantasy gantt chart isn't accurate and 100x that if the one punished is the person who said "it's impossible to know" and then was forced into pretending to know instead of the person doing the forcing.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-07 22:36:11+00:00
Another procedure based on a similar problem I worked on with a friend: you both pick positive integers a and b, then add them together to create c. Either sqrt(c) or sqrt(c+1) is irrational and the fractional digits provide your random numbers. If you need a new sequence, you take some digits from the current expansion and sqrt() them again.

Might not be unbiased, but good luck proving it.
by machomaster | 2025-12-07 22:36:22+00:00
"I've never met anyone who was fired because they won't use "made up pronouns""

> Jordan Peterson lost his application to the Supreme Court of Canada this week for leave to appeal against the decision of the College of Psychologists of Ontario requiring him to undergo compulsory reeducation for various views expressed on social media, all of which were unrelated to the practice of psychology.

>The complaints which resulted in the college’s order were made by people who had never been his patients, and indeed, who had never met him. They were also mostly American and clearly politically motivated.

Compulsory, as in he can't refuse, otherwise they will take his license.

He raised to awareness when complaining about the compelled speech. People were saying that he misunderstood, that he is exaggerating, that there is not a totalitarian attempt to censor speech, that no such thing is going to happen, that freedom of speech is not under threat.

And what do you know, the exact thing he predicted would happen did indeed happen.
by rubymamis | 2025-12-07 22:37:29+00:00
I actually love that separation. QML is a great language for writing beautiful, responsive, modern UI with animations easily. C++ is great for performance and logic. I don't like Javascript but I don't need to write a whole lot of it. I wrote my note-taking app's block editor in QML and C++ if some people are curious[1].

[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
by drnick1 | 2025-12-07 22:37:40+00:00
The success of an OS is inevitably linked to the availability of apps. A "smart" phone today is basically useless if it can't run either iOS or Android apps. Projects like Waydroid can make Linux phones viable, but since there are approximately zero native Linux apps for phones, you might as well use Android as a FOSS base. This is precisely what Graphene and Lineage do.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-07 22:37:44+00:00
It’s kind of a meme; Costco’s profits are almost exactly the same as their total revenue from membership fees, which leads people to think that the warehouses run at zero margin and the fees are their only profit source. The fees certainly give them room to run the sales at extremely low margins (though large grocers like Kroger only have something like 3% margins), but it wouldn’t take a huge shift in purchasing patterns to change this coincidence. If all the people who don’t use their membership that much dropped them and those who use them were all large-scale buyers, they would have to increase their prices just to give themselves a bit of cushion.
by jwpapi | 2025-12-07 22:37:59+00:00
I mean if I create an offline private key and encrypt my message to be only read with my public key and I’ve learned about math and encryption. I can be assured that my receiver would need to be compromised.

I don’t like these general observation comments. This kind of makes it unappealing to learn about encryption, but it’s worth it and makes you choose either a proper encrypted software or use a key for secret messages.
by jakub_g | 2025-12-07 22:38:06+00:00
> “Take Paramount-Viacom-ABC-Disney, for example,” he said. “Disney makes the movie, Joel Siegel of Paramount-owned ABC-TV gives the movie a rave review, and Disney subsidiaries Blockbuster and McDonald’s promote the video release of the movie in their respective stores with mail-in rebates and Happy Meal action figures. It’s a win-win scenario.”

Apart from McDonald's, we're not that far!
by rtp4me | 2025-12-07 22:39:05+00:00
Sorry, real people who are on a real (strict) budget pay attention to the price of goods when they shop. If you are really hurting from a $3 overcharge, chances are you pay very close attention to the register receipt and bring it to the store's attention. Regardless of income, my wife and I routinely scrutinize the register receipt. Force of habit.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-07 22:39:07+00:00
Depends on how fast you delete merged branches?

I picked up `--update-refs` to not lose my mind working in squash merge repos. I much prefer merge commits. I often make good, well documented commits and I like having access to the original commits if I need them, so when in a squash merge repo I become a branch hoarder renaming merged branches with a `zoo/` prefix (to drop them low in sort order, among other reasons it is name `zoo/`).

I will often keep experiment branches around and `--update-refs` helps me manage that because if I see commits that might update-ref a `zoo/` branch I know to drop them from the experiment branch.

All of that discovery of already merged commits would be automatic/cheap in rebases with merge commits. I was very frustrated before discovering `--update-refs`. I'm still often frustrated with squash merging, but keeping a large `zoo/` and having `--update-refs` is extra work that almost replicates the experience of just using merge commits in the first place. I don't know why so many think squash merge workflows are "simpler".
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-07 22:39:29+00:00
"That's such a great observation that highlights an important social issue — let's delve into it!"

I've been prompting the bot to avoid its tics for as long as I've been using it for anything; 3 years or so, now, I'd guess.

It's just a matter of reading and understanding the output, noticing patterns that are repetitious or annoying, and instructing the bot as such: "No. Fucking stop that."
by amelius | 2025-12-07 22:39:32+00:00
I did some Qt programming in Python (PySide6), but ran into segfaults, which should of course not happen no matter what you do in a scripting language (except when using modules like ctypes). Many of these cases were related to object lifetime handling which is difficult to do correctly in Qt, and many people have written about it. In Python (a garbage-collected language) one should not have to worry about this.
by themafia | 2025-12-07 22:40:11+00:00
They oxygen delivery system fails and has left pilots hypoxic.

https://www.nwfdailynews.com/story/news/local/2021/08/02/f-3...

The electrical system performs poorly under short circuit conditions.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/10/marine-corps-reveals-wha...

They haven't even finished delivering and now have to overhaul the entire fleet due to overheating.

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-f-35-fighters-2-big-...

This program was a complete and total boondoggle. It was entirely the wrong thing to build in peace time. It was a moonshoot for no reason other than to mollify bored generals and greedy congresspeople.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-07 22:40:12+00:00
The usual argument against a decorated `return` keyword is that a proper tail call is not a true "return" since it has to first drop any locals that aren't passed thru to the tail call. I don't think it's a very good argument because if the distinction of where exactly those implicit drops occur was that important, we'd probably choose to require explicit drops anyway.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-07 22:40:13+00:00
> That's quite nebulous. It should be quantified.

Perhaps, but I'm reluctant to speak more definitively since I don't consider myself an authority/expert in the field.

> But the language hasn't changed in any way. How can an attribute of the language change without any changes?

The reason I put in "for practical use" is because since pedantically speaking no language actually requires GC - you "just" need to provision enough hardware (see: HFT firms (ab)use of Java by disabling the GC and resetting programs/machines at the end of the day). That's not relevant for basically everyone, though, since practically speaking you usually want to bound resource use, and some languages rely on a GC to do that.

I guess "general" or "normal" might have been a better word than "practical" in that case. I didn't intend to claim that how programmers use a language affects whether it should be considered a GC language or not.
by dehrmann | 2025-12-07 22:40:25+00:00
Not charging the best-advertised price is dishonest. It might also be in customers' best interest if the cost of keeping consistent price data on low-margin items costs more than whatever the inconsistency is. Or the answer might be that dollar stores sell too wide of a variety too cheaply on too low-margin product to play supermarket-style pricing games effectively.
by CPLX | 2025-12-07 22:41:16+00:00
> The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.

Right but they are seeking the highest returns as equity holders typically, usually through things like stock buybacks.

Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.

If you’ve ever seen the Goodfellas scene where they bust out the nightclub, that’s quite literally their business model.
by Itoldmyselfso | 2025-12-07 22:41:51+00:00
Don't know if you're replying to a wrong person but my point in the comment was about many of the tweets that get passed around include claims without links to any evidence. The recent tweets I've just seen from the top of my head were in relation to accusations of /e/os and Iode having government ties, but no evidence for that was linked in the tweets. A common person isn't going to go digging where that evidence has been presented if it isn't very clearly available, if at all. It may have a hassle to include it to every tweek, but the impression stands. Also never contested any of the harassment you have received.
by fencepost | 2025-12-07 22:41:52+00:00
I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the "Scanner law") - if you're overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the 'bonus' is optional, but if they don't do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees).

An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they've completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.
by einpoklum | 2025-12-07 22:44:29+00:00
The key word missing from the title: LibreOffice.

It is by now a trusty enough workhorse for large organizations.

Yes, it's not all the way there: I've filed hundreds of bugs against LibreOffice, and many are still open (not just feature requests); and yes, I have a lot of criticism of the governance. But it is proof that a huge, end-user-facing software project can sustain itself and improve within having to rely on the MS-bucks or the Googlebucks and such.

But a huge project needs a lot of support, and needs to renew its support from new people, so please help out!

https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org/

Filing bugs, contributing graphics, translating parts of the UI (which you would be a saint to do since the translation system is the pits), designing document templates, organizing an install-party, getting promotional material and putting it, and of course you can write write code (starting with easy-hacks) or contribute money.

----

Due disclosure: I'm a trustee of The Document Foundation, which manages the project. Going to speak at LOConf Asia 2025 in Tokyo later this month:

https://conf.libreoffice.asia
by jpkw | 2025-12-07 22:45:25+00:00
No. You state that this is all that it would take to be considered as tremendous business value. You are moving your goal posts on your point. My point is that you are taking an absolute position that there is tremendous business value in its current form(as a miniscule improvement and one insignificant new use case does does not equate to tremendous business value in itself) and so that remains to be seen.
by figbig | 2025-12-07 22:45:42+00:00
Seems to be that whether it's mandatory or voluntary is based on one's sex, not on any sort of identity.

Which makes sense otherwise a lot of males would be able to opt out by claiming that they are women in their minds or souls or in enactment of gendered stereotypes or whatever it could possibly mean to identify as the opposite sex.

Men are the ones used as cannon fodder mostly because from a reproductive point of view they are more disposable. They also tend to be physically stronger so are more suited to many combat roles that require raw strength.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 22:46:10+00:00
>So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever.

Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position.

I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement.

>The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.

They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
by Jaauthor | 2025-12-07 22:46:37+00:00
Writing the Struggles – Insecurity, vulnerability – these are things my readers don’t talk about. My job as a writer is to talk about the stuff my readers don’t want to discuss. How do you smile when your mom just died? What does it feel like to go to school on an empty stomach? When does it get better when your mom is an illegal immigrant?
by gruez | 2025-12-07 22:46:52+00:00
>It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.

You think dollar general is making $37.9B (in 2023) of annual revenue from one-off customers? Unless you're operating a tourist trap, or some sort of business that people only need a few times in their lifetimes (eg. real estate agents), most businesses rely on repeat customers.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-07 22:47:26+00:00
The trouble is "AI" is waaaaay less of a boost to productivity if you have to actually check the output closely. My wife does a lot with AI-assisted writing and keeps running into companies that think it's going to let them fire a shitload of writers and have the editors do everything... but editing AI slop is way more work than editing the output of a half-decent human writer, let alone a good one.

If you're getting a lot of value out of LLM writing right now, your quality was already garbage and you're just using it to increase volume, or you have let your quality crater.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-07 22:47:33+00:00
Many here have spent their lives developing skills that produce nothing tangible or immediate so "well the past sucked anyway" is a pretty attractive narrative if one has incurred that opportunity cost. Yes, a world without antibiotics and modern commerce sucked, there was hard labor everywhere but on the other hand these people didn't need pills to get their asses out of bed every morning.
by dehrmann | 2025-12-07 22:48:11+00:00
> Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.

Dollar Tree and Dollar General are publicly traded.

So Family Dollar might be the result of PE tactics, but the other two aren't, and Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar because they saw it as under-performing.

It's actually sort of weird Dollar Tree couldn't make it work. I know the dollar stores all have somewhat different businesses, but you'd think that Dollar Tree could have either turned Family Dollar around or knew it was selling a loser (see the market for lemons) to PE.
by machomaster | 2025-12-07 22:48:21+00:00
I don't want to be friends with people who cannot separate their personal opinions and friendships from their work opinions and colleagues.

Fortunately, I do not have to, because I am able to separate the two. The question you asked made sense only in your mind, because you cannot separate and compartmentalize two different things, and instead mix unmixable things together and create a complete unnecessary mess. This leads to a total mess in proposed solutions. Again, in your mind it makes sense, because a collegue's personal blogging FEELS like a betrayal of a best friend. Not good.