MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superkuh | 2025-12-06 18:32:21+00:00
Try to run any random python program of moderate dep use on your python 3.9 system interpreter without using containers. Most likely you'll have to use a venv or the like and setup a special version of python just for that application. It's the standard now because system Python can't do it. In practice, pragmatically, there is no Python. Only pythons. And that's not even getting in to the major breakages in point version upgrades or the whole python 2 to 3 language switch.
by rdiddly | 2025-12-06 18:32:36+00:00
Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague & generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a container. Content is simply "that which is contained." Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you need to fill with words, any words, or else people will stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-06 18:32:42+00:00
> In software, optimizing for speed works best in cases where architecture has minimal relevance for product outcomes.

The other consideration is the impact of low quality on the business.

Generally, I find that cleaning up issues in production systems (e.g. transactions all computed incorrectly and flowed to 9 downstream systems, incorrectly) far outweighs the time it takes to get it right.

Even if the issue doesn't involve fixing data all over the place and just involves creating a manual work around, that can still be a huge issue that requires business people and systems people to work out an alternate process that correctly achieves the result and gets the systems into the correct state.

The approach I've seen that seems to work is to reduce scope and never reduce quality. You can still get stuff done rapidly and learn about what functions well for the business and what doesn't, but anything you commit to should work as expected in production.
by kmeisthax | 2025-12-06 18:32:58+00:00
This wasn't what I was talking about, but for what it's worth I don't think welfare and migration are exclusive. If your concern is free-riding, then you can require a certain number of working years before a migrant is eligible for certain social services; or have a scheme in which free migration is required to be reciprocal and bundled with a minimum standard for welfare programs. I believe the EU does both.

The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0].

Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system.

The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary!

tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system.

[0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on.

[1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2025-12-06 18:33:20+00:00
you didn't create anything, you just asked AI to make this. And it's quite bad. Nice that you added screenshots because they make it obvious that you didn't even check the effects:

* rounded corners??? What kind of scanner has ever done that?

* The rotation doesn't rotate the rounded corner mask, so when it's rotated it's so obviously fake

* The bent shadow looks terrible because the text is entirely undistorted and the shadow is just overlaid on top.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-12-06 18:33:37+00:00
In Rust you typically use the "log" crate, which also has a global logger instance [0]. There is also "tracing" which uses thread local storage.

As another comment said, global state is allowed. It just has to be proven thread-safe via Rust's Send and Sync traits, and 'static lifetime. I've used things like LazyLock and ArcSwap to achieve this in the past.

[0] https://docs.rs/log/latest/log/fn.set_logger.html
by mystraline | 2025-12-06 18:34:22+00:00
If we had an effective government, this would have already been solved by a FTC issue of fraudulent sale.

If I sell a widget, but do not transfer full control to the buyer, that should be considered a fraudulent sale that was misclassified from a rental.

Same for a computer. Same for a phone. Or a refrigerator. Or a car.

(Old person comment incoming) I remember when working on hardware from the 70's and earlier, the manufacturers would glue in a full schematic on the back plate. Reparability was absolute. Now, its "how can we screw you over with cryptographic signing of individual hardware"

Reparability and ownership go hand in hand. And it also strongly goes towards sustainability and ecology, with not needing as much resources.

But the "Smart TV" in your comment, pcthrowaway, is that in 5 years, the 'Smart' OS will be either so slow to be unusable, die cause a $.10 part failed, or other really dumb ewaste reason.
by tptacek | 2025-12-06 18:35:01+00:00
I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.

Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
by librasteve | 2025-12-06 18:35:03+00:00
TL;DR

- Combining grammars and LLMs produces robust translators. - Three translators with different faithfulness and coverage are demonstrated and used. - Two of the simplest, yet effective, combinations are implemented and - demonstrated. - Parallel race and grammar-to-LLM fallback. - Asynchronous implementations with LLM-graphs are a very good fit! - Just look at the LLM-graph plots (and be done reading.)
by splintersio | 2025-12-06 18:35:05+00:00
What Bob and the signatories fail to recognise is that they're attempting to swap out nuanced advice for foundational advice and they're patting themselves on the back for it, actually. that foundational advice has always been

the nuanced advice is for unsolved problems, so ... if you ask a nuanced question, you'll be ... directed back to foundational security advice ?

I don't think they've thought about it, perhaps Signatories shouldn't play risk-advice cosplay at population levels.

I'd be annoyed if this influenced policy because of who they are and not how dumb the logic is.
by hyperpape | 2025-12-06 18:35:17+00:00
I think you're misreading that article.

> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.

> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.

> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.

Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
by NickC25 | 2025-12-06 18:35:22+00:00
This is the type of advertising I actually like.

I'm a huge buff for music gear/tech. I love seeing the newest plugins, pedals, software. I actively seek it out. I know demos of products are effectively advertisements, but they are the right type of ads and aimed at a crowd that seeks info the right way and likely is a higher probability of making a purchase.
by jordanb | 2025-12-06 18:35:25+00:00
It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode.

Organizations struggled with it but they struggle with basically every breaking change. I was on the tooling team that helped an organization handle the transition of about 5 million lines of data science code from python 2.7 to 3.2. We also had to handle other breaking changes like airflow upgrades, spark 2->3, intel->amd->graviton.

At that scale all those changes are a big deal. Heck even the pickle protocol change in Python 3.8 was a big deal for us. I wouldn't characterize the python 2->3 transition as a significantly bigger deal than some of the others. In many ways it was easier because so much hay was made about it there was a lot of knowledge and tooling.
by jjk166 | 2025-12-06 18:35:39+00:00
But the question isn't "what are the odds someone who dies in this period has rabies" it's "what are the odds someone who died after being infected with rabies died before they started showing symptoms" so the rarity of people incubating rabies is irrelevant.

Further, rabies incubation is highly variable - symptoms may not appear for years.
by gs17 | 2025-12-06 18:36:11+00:00
> I spoke previously about how the Rust book uses the external rand create as a key example and it sets the tone for developers. I'm changing that stance somewhat since it was a decent strategic choice to have crypto packages plug-and-play. But tit still builds a habit.

Yeah, that originally turned me off from the language entirely. I also changed my mind eventually.
by lysace | 2025-12-06 18:36:27+00:00
Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!
by js2 | 2025-12-06 18:36:54+00:00
Perl died for many reasons. For me, it was a language that was always too tempting to be too clever by half. I'd been using Perl pretty significantly from 1995-2000 (perl4 to perl5) when I was introduced to Python (1.5.2)[^1]. I greatly appreciated its simplicity, zen, batteries included standard lib, and REPL. I found add on packages easier to install than dealing with CPAN. I switched to Python and basically never looked back.

[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44790671
by rolandog | 2025-12-06 18:37:19+00:00
Nice! Thanks for the link. I noticed they didn't mention MOCOR OS (for the new Nokia 3210), but then I remembered that that's not an Android version. I'll see if they can add it somewhere else.

Unrelated, but this led me to find gnuclad, which may be somewhat externally maintained and is used to create the cladogragms.
by bfffbgfdcb | 2025-12-06 18:37:31+00:00
Traversing a graph and inspecting each node can definitely make good use of tail call optimization.

For instance: you have a large graph and you are traversing a particular path through it — say a R/B tree seeking a node. You can write it iteratively or recursively. Neither needs to hold more than 1 node reference at a time, the choice is which you prefer to read and write.

I prefer to write that recursively. Sounds like you may not. Observing “well I can write it iteratively so why do I need TCO” is obvious and uninteresting; that’s the point.
by Groxx | 2025-12-06 18:38:14+00:00
Some minor data is in postgres, but to test it I just fed it a previous install's library folder (images and metadata files). Worked fine, restored all my albums and tags, though perhaps not "people" iirc. And not e.g. ML image content search, of course, you need to re-generate that. And the metadata files were more than obvious enough to satisfy my "I can do this by hand if I really need to" bar, and recreating the accounts by hand is trivial.

The main "weak point" is probably that it doesn't have S3 integration, which is entirely fair. But for my purposes, rcloning the library folder (or e.g. rsync to a btrfs for free deduplication if you reorganize) is more than good enough, because that folder provides enough data for it to restore everything I care about.

For DB backups for keeping everything, there are configurable auto-backups, but it's only a snapshot to a local filesystem. So you'd need to mirror that out somehow, but syncthing/rclone/etc exist and there are plenty of options.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-06 18:38:20+00:00
I also think the first example has a solution which is worse than the purported problem it attempts to solve. If you're worried that someone might take the if statement out from around the vec index (I don't think this is actually a concern, but let's say it is for sake of argument), what's to stop someone from taking the match statement out from around your slice access? I can't see any reason why the solution isn't equally as vulnerable to the exact same problem. So the match approach doesn't seem to be adding value, while being much more verbose, and less clear.

As you said, calling first() is a far better approach.
by steve_wilson | 2025-12-06 18:39:28+00:00
I love the concept and general flow of things. The landing page looks a bit to SaaS for me though, I‘d focus more on design and „feeling“. Otherwise, why is this application better than just generating an invitation using ChatGPT and sending it over WhatsApp?

Also if you want to focus on kids, I‘d make the overall design more playful & colorful, right now it’s all very dark.

Wish you the best of luck with your project!

Disclaimer: I‘m the creator of a similar digital invitation website (invitivo.com).
Show HN: Stateless compliance engine for banking and blockchain
by ADCXLAB | 2025-12-06 18:40:10+00:00
I’ve been working on a stateless compliance engine that validates IBAN/SWIFT, OFAC lists, ISO20022 (pain.001/pacs.008), and multi-chain data (ETH, BTC, XRPL, Polygon, Stellar, Hedera).

Statelessness feels important in financial and blockchain workflows because no user data persists between requests, outputs are fully deterministic, and auditors can reproduce results without relying on stored state.

Current progress: • Deterministic validators live and callable • On-chain checks working across 6 networks • ISO20022 structuring + downloadable PDFs • AWS backend deployed; Azure environment being added for multi-cloud isolation

Looking for technical critiques or alternative patterns for building stateless compliance systems.
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-06 18:40:38+00:00
I don't believe that's the true problem. Booting operating system is not a problem. There's no standardized hardware abstraction layer in PC either, every OS brings their own set of drivers.

My guess is that modern hardware is too complicated for one hacker to write reliable drivers. That wasn't the case back in the 90-s, when Linux matured. So we are at mercy of hardware manufacturers and they happened to not be interested in open upstreamed drivers.
by o11c | 2025-12-06 18:41:26+00:00
I'd take this a step further and say that the design flaws that motivated Perl6 were what really killed Perl. Perl6 just accelerated the timeline.

I do imagine a saner migration could've been done - for example, declaring that regexes must not start with a non-escaped space and division must be surrounded by space, to fix one of the parsing problems - with the usual `use` incremental migration.
by renewiltord | 2025-12-06 18:41:34+00:00
The biggest mistake in this strategy is the amount of intervention in Europe. Europeans don’t want a partnership with the US. Ask any of them and they’ll say “there’s no trust and that’s not coming back” or some variant.

That’s fine. What’s done is done. Russia, on the other hand, seeks an alliance. Perhaps we should ally with those who want to be allies and let those who don’t want to be allies go their own way.

Even trying to end hostilities in Ukraine, while noble, should primarily be aimed at our interests and those of our prospective allies, not our erstwhile allies who no longer wish to be.
by ADCXLAB | 2025-12-06 18:41:39+00:00
The main reason I went stateless for all validators (banking + blockchain) is to avoid storing any financial identifiers, wallet addresses, or transaction metadata. Every request is processed independently, and all outputs can be reproduced later by re-running the same input through the rule engine.

This reduces: • data retention risk, • breach impact, • compliance obligations (since nothing is persisted), • and audit friction (deterministic logic instead of ML scoring).

The hard parts I’m still working on: • maintaining deterministic outputs across multiple chains with different RPC behaviours • handling ISO20022 structuring without keeping session state • managing rate limits and abuse control without storing user data • making multi-cloud (AWS + Azure) work while remaining fully stateless in both environments

If anyone here has experience building stateless financial or compliance pipelines at scale, I’d appreciate technical critiques — especially around reproducibility, rate limiting design, or RPC reliability patterns.
by dwoldrich | 2025-12-06 18:42:14+00:00
Hi @w4g1, this is a very beautiful API! I am curious if it supports my hypothetical use case.

I want the pre-existing DOM thread to enter into a long term relationship with a particular web worker thread. I'd like the web worker to hold onto a transferrable that has ties back to the DOM thread, the WebGLRenderingContext, and have the DOM thread send draw commands to the worker and its gl context over time.

I imagine this could be achieved by having a dedicated web worker pool of size 1 and allowing the DOM thread to initiate an async send to the worker pool.

Can your API do something like this? Thank you for this early Christmas gift!
by desideratum | 2025-12-06 18:42:29+00:00
Thanks for sharing this. I agree w.r.t. XLA. I've been moving to JAX after many years of using torch and XLA is kind of magic. I think torch.compile has quite a lot of catching up to do.

> XLA isn't at present particularly useful at scheduling across machines,

I'm not sure if you mean compiler-based distributed optimizations, but JAX does this with XLA: https://docs.jax.dev/en/latest/notebooks/Distributed_arrays_...
by dunham | 2025-12-06 18:44:03+00:00
Congratulations on having a working language. You put a lot more effort into documentation than I have, but my language is just for me. (https://github.com/dunhamsteve/newt)

You might be interested in checking out Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/) to exercise your language. I had fun doing that with mine.

Also, there is a programming language development discord if that's your thing and you want to discuss your project with like-minded folks: https://discord.com/invite/4Kjt3ZE

> No tooling (LSP, debugger, etc.)

If you don't want to do a full LSP yet, you can get far with simple highlighting and scraping the output of the compiler for errors. I'm also dumping some additional information (top level names / types) as json to facilitate completion and type on hover.

> Is context-oriented programming solving a real problem or creating busywork?

Not sure. This kind of reminds me of dynamic scoping, something that seems to come up in languages that don't support. Go pushes contexts through as additional arguments, and Java thread local variables cover cases that look like dynamic scoping to me.

> Should I focus on making it fast OR making the stdlib useful?

I would go with whatever sounds fun and interesting to you. You'll probably want examples of what you want to make faster if you go with the former.

> Is 1-based indexing a dealbreaker for you?

Not a huge deal, but that was surprising to me in Lua. I adapted to it, but it did cause a little bit of awkwardness in some code I wrote that decoded a binary file format (realm database).

> Would arbitrary precision by default bother you for a general-purpose language?

I only glanced at it, but it looks like the user can choose IEEE if they want. It's nice to have options and few languages have this option.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-06 18:44:36+00:00
> Time to ban all adverts everywhere.

I think that is too much, but it should be almost entirely banned, with only very limited exceptions. Advertisements which you are specificailly looking for, such as catalogs for those specific things, could be one of those exceptions.

However, even regardless of these exceptions, there will need to be limits, such as: do not be dishonest, do not emit light, do not waste power, do not spy on you, do not block the view of other things, do not try to prevent you from seeing them, they cannot pay you or give you discounts for seeing the ads, etc.

> The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past.

I think it will need to be a "nearly banned" ground rather than the "middle" ground, though.

> Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves.

This part I agree with.

> The only solution is [...] to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.

But, this part, I think that won't work. Even if it does work (which it won't), it is bad for freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.
by jwr | 2025-12-06 18:44:46+00:00
> Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me

Incidentally, Mathematica + LLMs make a great combination. If you take what is pretty much the biggest mathematical routine library in the world and combine it with interactive visualization tools, and then use an LLM to accelerate things, it becomes an incredible tool. Almost ridiculously powerful for trying things out, teaching, visualizing things, etc.

(I've been using Mathematica since 1992 or so, so I'm familiar with the language, but it's still so much faster to just tell Claude to visualize this or that)
by pomatic | 2025-12-06 18:44:58+00:00
How old are you now? Mid fifties here. And 'vibe coding' in what exactly - it is not of interest from a programming perspective, but from a 'what does the AI know best perspective'? I've followed a similar, but not identical trajectory and now vibe in python/htmx/flask without needing to review the code in depth (NB internal apps, not public facing ones), with claude code max. Vibe coding in the last 6-8 weeks now also seems to make a decent fist of embedded coding - esp32/arduino/esp-32, also claude code.