MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mckn1ght | 2025-12-16 11:36:55+00:00
Alaska checking in. Nobody is hauling a skidoo around here in a van. You also won’t see anyone towing a trailer with one or two machines with anything other than a truck, because nothing else is going to hack it in the mountains with all that. I currently just drive mine up a ramp into the truck bed, I can quickly park and get off and go and back on again. Very versatile combo to get around with.

Right tool for the job. I drive an AWD Prius with winter tires to get groceries in the snow.
by t0duf0du | 2025-12-16 11:37:05+00:00
Our manager comes every 3-4 months, and assigns a ticket. Literally the only TEXT in the whole damn ticket was `Auto discovery in host and k8s`.

Auto discovery of fucking what?!!!

He writes in the message "IMP: we have a month so lets try to push to stage/BETA in 2-3 week and test it for a week and make it live before end of month."
by AdrianB1 | 2025-12-16 11:38:06+00:00
As the other commenters stated, it is not clear what is the point. Writing good code and being a tech leader are very different positions with very different technical skills. I was a tech lead in a few cases (different companies or different departments of a very large company) and I was not the top developer there, my job was not to be one. I worked with developers that were much better than me that were not a good fit for a tech leader.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-12-16 11:38:15+00:00
Healthcare in the US seems to cost about double per capita what it does in other developed countries with universial/social healthcare. Public spending in US is on-par with others, and then private spending is that much again. Standard of healthcare I've heard (and would hope) is world class if you can pay, but still something seems broken there to be sure.

But you have lists, queues, lotteries, whatever you call it. That's not a lie. The fact you think lists are a vast right wing conspiracy demonstrates your government is not really forthcoming about your healthcare system. There are lists everywhere. There are ambulance wait times, hospital emergency wait times, various levels of urgent and elective treatment wait times. There are procedures and medicines and tests that are simply not covered at all.

Now, obviously USA has queues and lists too. And I could be wrong but I'm sure I've heard that US private insurance companies are notorious for not covering certain treatments and drugs as well. I don't know what it is exactly these right wing people are saying about healthcare, I thought they did not like the American "Obamacare" though.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-16 11:39:29+00:00
> Would this instantly convert C into a memory safe language?

I actually strongly encourage finishing this thought. Imagine you're WG14 and you're intending to drop this "safe C" bombshell in C29 and think about the implications just for your document.

You "just" need to spell out all these rules for the language itself, Rust only has a handful but you've got pages of these, and then you need to go re-design all your APIs so that instead of basically YOLO† each of the standard library APIs has an explicable set of safety requirements, just as Rust has to do with its relatively small subset of unsafe APIs.

A subset of this work is already underway for WG14 and has been for a few years. You'll need to hurry them along to prepare for your epoch making announcement because they're not expecting to be anywhere close by 2029 but hey, shoot for the stars right?

At the end of this, you've announced a deeply incompatible C version and the benefit is that if your customers can hire people who don't make mistakes and they port all their C to this new version, it has similar properties to if they were to rewrite it in Rust. Don't expect applause, in fact, I'd recommend hiring bodyguards.

† I think people really underestimate how much C relies on this. Remember C provides qsort, an unstable type-erased comparison sort (hopefully an introsort, but in some implementations literally just Hoare's Quicksort which is significantly older than C itself) which has arbitrary Undefined Behaviour if you screwed up your comparison function and yet for all the popular implementations it's still slower than in Rust which doesn't have that UB problem at all.

So now you're documenting specifically for functions like this why "safe C" is both much harder to use and slower in your standards document like it's an achievement, and unlike Karoline Leavitt you're not even getting paid to do this. Maybe you should take up knitting instead?
by aranw | 2025-12-16 11:39:46+00:00
Been trying to decide whether adopting a traditional RFC process or Oxide's RFD (https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001) would better suit my team. We're using ADRs at the moment but we've ended up mixing a discussion like process into it and review process and using ADRs more like RFCs/RFDs
by meindnoch | 2025-12-16 11:40:04+00:00
The brain cannot function outside the body. The brain needs your bone marrow to make red and white blood cells. The kidneys and the liver to filter and break down metabolic waste. Various other hormonal systems that affect how the brain works (c.f. the HN favorite "gut-brain axis"). A brain separated from the body could survive for a few weeks, but long term it would certainly die from neuron loss (i.e. dementia).
by koliber | 2025-12-16 11:40:06+00:00
Love the title. Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

This is what user stories were supposed to accomplish in a more lightweight way.

The whole scrum DoR (definition of ready) status means that something is clear and ready for development.

Stories are written and are sent to the engineering team for clarification. This is where the comments are supposed to come in. There is a clear step for clarification of stories, before the story is ready for development. It gets marked as DoR when that clarification is done.

It does not matter if you use RFCs, user stories, or hallway conversations as your process of clarifying work. If it does not work, it does not work.

Any way you can get your teams to communicate more clearly is great.
by anthk | 2025-12-16 11:40:12+00:00
A simple case. Amigans can still use thanks to standards, Usenet and IRC, they can connect to Bitlbee.org to several choices. With Discord and such it's more difficult, but for Jabber there's no isue at all. Ditto with AmiSSL and Jabber, Gemini clients. They can reuse Amiga 4000 machines (or FPGA based ones) and browse small sites, Gopher, connect to Biltbee and make tons of services usable again.

With Nerdfonts, these will be obsolete in further Unicode releases.

GNU Unifont and the unicode table might be backported to the Amiga. With NerdFonts, you need to do twice the jobs.
by ben_w | 2025-12-16 11:40:39+00:00
> 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Why 2 years?

Even though I'm expecting the current approximately-exponential growths of both PV and wind to continue until they supply at least 50% of global electrical demand between them, I expect that to happen in the early 2030s, not by the end of 2027.

(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).
by czl | 2025-12-16 11:41:30+00:00
I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.

Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.

Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.

If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.
Show HN: Calling tools w/ Python improves LLM perf. vs MCP (77.1% on BrowseComp)
by charlielidbury | 2025-12-16 11:41:34+00:00
If agent's tools are exposed as functions/objects in a Python REPL (as opposed to JSON schemas) they perform better, I linked the explainer article we wrote, but if you want to jump straight in check out the docs! https://docs.symbolica.ai/
by benchly | 2025-12-16 11:42:02+00:00
As much as the current administration turns my stomach, previous ones are not absolved from weaseling their way out of catastrophic mistakes, either.

It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.
by mgkuhn | 2025-12-16 11:43:29+00:00
The problem with MATLAB is that idiomatic MATLAB style (every operation returns a fresh matrix) can easily become very inefficient: it leads to countless heap memory allocations of new matrices, resulting in low data-access locality, i.e. your data is needlessly copied around in slow DRAM all the time, rather than being kept in the fastest CPU cache.

Julia's MATLAB-inspired syntax is at least as nice, but the language was from the ground up designed to enable you writing high-performance code. I have seen numerous cases where code ported from MATLAB or NumPy to Julia performed well over an order of magnitude faster, while often also becoming more readable at the same time. Julia's array-broadcast facilities, unparalleled in MATLAB, are just reason for that. The ubiquitous availability of in-place update versions of standard library methods (recognizable by an ! sign) is another one.

In our group, nobody has been using MATLAB for nearly a decade, and NumPy is well on its way out, too. Julia simply has become so much more productive and pleasant to work with.

https://julialang.org/

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/noteworthy-differenc...
by Alexander-Barth | 2025-12-16 11:43:48+00:00
I wish you all the best luck with your product!

Unfortunately, mathworks is a quite litigious company. I guess you are aware of mathworks versus AccelerEyes (now makers of ArrayFire) or Comsol.

For our department, we mostly stop to use MATLAB about 7 years ago, migrating to python, R or Julia. Julia fits the "executable math" quite well for me.
by beAbU | 2025-12-16 11:43:53+00:00
Nope. Sorry. From outside the US, there is just the US. We dont understand your "us vs them" tribalism nor the political divide. Every US citizen at this point is responsible for what's going on. Regardless of who you voted for. All of this is due to decades of complacency by the citizenry, it's not some sudden surprising coup.

I'm not saying the rest of the world is in the clear though. I think many countries are headed in a similar direction. Hopefully this is the wakeup call we all need to step up and arrest this slide into authoritarianism that's happening everywhere.
by vitus | 2025-12-16 11:44:16+00:00
It should be easier to understand the optimal truth booth strategy. Since this is a yes/no type of question, the maximum entropy is 1 bit, as noted by yourself and others. As such, you want to pick a pair where the odds are as close to 50/50 as possible.

> Employing that approach alone performed worse than the contestants did in real life, so didn't think it was worth mentioning!

Yeah, this alone should not be sufficient. At the extreme of getting a score of 0, you also need the constraint that you're not repeating known-bad pairs. The same applies for pairs ruled out (or in!) from truth booths.

Further, if your score goes down, you need to use that as a signal that one (or more) of the pairs you swapped out was actually correct, and you need to cycle those back in.

I don't know what a human approximation of the entropy-minimization approach looks like in full. Good luck!
by acdha | 2025-12-16 11:45:03+00:00
> don't think one can blame them, not voting can be a legit option for many reasons,

With the exception of people who have religious beliefs prohibiting voting, it’s saying that you don’t feel strongly enough about the differences between the two candidates to pick one. There are some people who can plead various hardships, but most people don’t have that excuse: it really did come down to thinking their life would be fine either way.
by Tepix | 2025-12-16 11:45:07+00:00
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06651 (in German, hopefully machine translation works well)

English article:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/38C3-AI-tools-must-be-evaluated...

If you speak German, here is their talk from 38c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-chatbots-im-schulunterricht
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-16 11:45:18+00:00
I am fan of using markdown to describe the UI.

It is simple, effective and feels more native to me than some rigid data structure designed for very specific use-cases that may not fit well into your own problem.

Honestly, we should think of Emacs when working with LLMs and kind of try to apply the same philosophy. I am not a fan of Emacs per-se but the parallels are there. Everything is a file and everything is a text in a buffer. The text can be rendered in various ways depending on the consumer.

This is also the philosophy that we use in our own product and it works remarkably well for diverse set of customers. I have not encountered anything that cannot be modelled in this way. It is simple, effective and it allows for a great degree of flexibility when things are not going as well as planned. It works well with streaming too (streaming parsers are not so difficult to do with simple text structures and we have been doing this for ages) and LLMs are trained very well how to produce this type of output - vs anything custom that has not been seen or adopted yet by anyone.

Besides, given that LLMs are getting good at coding and the browser can render iframes in seamless mode, a better and more flexible approach would be to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead of what Slack has been doing for ages with their block kit API which we know is very rigid and frustrating to work with. I get why you might want to have a data structures for UI in order to cover CLI tools as well but at the end of the day browsers and clis are completely different things and I don not believe you can meaningfully make it work for both of them unless you are also prepared to dumb it down and target only the lowest common dominator.
by ghaff | 2025-12-16 11:48:03+00:00
A number of my whitewater paddling friends really like their minivans. There are still at least a couple of models available but they have largely gone out of fashion.

Personally I have a mid-size SUV but if you regularly need to transport around a lot of people, minivans seem more practical in general than a lot of the big SUVs.
by intended | 2025-12-16 11:49:58+00:00
Theres a (now old) memo that specifically outlines which talking points carry most salience amongst the audience. Those terms are present here in your comment. (Luntz - The language of Healthcare 2009)

Even with waiting lists, people get healthcare. They get better health outcomes per $ spent. America can provide excellent cutting edge healthcare, which is especially great if you can afford it. At some point, you have to decide whether having most of the bell curve taken care of, is more / less important in terms of rhetoric and priority.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-16 11:50:02+00:00
This is exactly why we need more transparency in analytics tools. When building products that handle user data, the "free" model almost always means you're the product.

The scary part is these extensions had Google's "Featured" badge. Manual review clearly isn't enough when companies can update code post-approval. We need continuous monitoring, not just one-time vetting.

For anyone building privacy-focused tools: making your data collection transparent and your business model clear upfront is the only way to build trust. Users are getting savvier about this.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-16 11:51:48+00:00
How does that disprove what I said about abundance or lack thereof in socialized systems? Feels like an orthogonal issue.

Socialized systems don't work without abundance. How you generate that abundance is orthogonal to socialism since even countries that are wealthy on paper suffer from shortages and long waiting times in public healthcare leading to a gray-market of using connections to get ahead or more private use.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-16 11:52:14+00:00
To me it felt like they were trying to be the next Borland, with Kotlin as their Delphi, except the only reason Kotlin matters is Android.

As proven by their own survey, Kotlin is not taking over the JVM world as many assert,

https://devecosystem-2025.jetbrains.com/tools-and-trends

Java 33%, Kotlin 8% as the primary programming language among all existing ones, surveys that focus only on the JVM ecosystem show even smaller percentage for Kotlin.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-16 11:52:27+00:00
Welcome to Hell, kid.

I was a senior manager, for much of my career, and had about a 30% hit rate, with folks listening to me. My employees had to listen to me, but I actually encouraged them to talk back, if they had issues with my direction.

My bosses and peers?

...not so much...

This was especially true of the Japanese (I worked for a Japanese company). Even though I had a pretty significant level of influence (for a Westerner), I still had to beg for folks to listen to me.

My favorite, was when my team was assigned to help a Silicon Valley startup that my company had made a deal with, after the ink was dry on the contract.

There were a lot of problems with that relationship. Most of them, were because the senior Japanese management had made some really big mistakes; chiefly because of cultural differences between the companies (the startup was actually really good, but they were a fairly typical "smoke and mirrors" Silicon Valley startup, and had a different approach to pitching that didn't work well with the Japanese. Neither side really understood the other).

We did our best, but our hands were tied. It did not end well, which was pretty disastrous.

If someone had asked me to help out, before they signed the contract, it would have been a much better outcome. I'm no captain of industry, but the problems were pretty glaring and obvious, even to us mensches in the trenches.

> I think I never read as much in my life as during the month between announcing I was leaving my previous job and joining mytaxi.

I liked reading that. I would love folks to do that kind of thing, more often.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-16 11:52:50+00:00
What struck me is that when I reported an ad with an Elon Musk deepfake selling some crypto scam, I got an email back from Google saying that after reviewing the video they found nothing wrong. I don't understand how this is not actionable in court- I mean, you did act on a report, you declare you manually reviewed the content and that it's good for you? I don't get it.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-12-16 11:53:59+00:00
DOT and SOLAS conspicuity tape (the red and white reflective stuff on semi trailers and so on) is mandatory for certain commercial vehicles, but also works great on bikes, scooters, strollers, backpacks (or rigid tags attached to backpacks, many varieties are kind of stiff), boots, helmets, and other things that you want not to be run over by vehicles with headlights.

It comes in a few grades, the better ranks are magnificently, astonishingly bright! You can also get more flexible, stretchy types made to be stitched or glued onto fabric.

I outfitted my classy black bike and bike gear with a bunch of material from reflectivepro.com, they're easy to deal with even for consumers who only need a little bit of material.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-16 11:54:06+00:00
Poorer countries like Romania and Poland benefited more than richer countries like Austria and Luxemburg (exception were intermediate countries like Greece and Italy that piled on too much debt).

This was planned (called EU convergence), and is a victory of bureaucratic planning. Whatever you think of the goals or methods, I think it's awe inspiring that an organization can plan and follow through with a plan on multi-decade time horizon.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-16 11:54:36+00:00
The easiest thing to test will always be pure functions. Many people don't realize this, and how clean it can make your tests look. Provide input, get return value, assert/check it. Sure, at the end of the day you have some IO somewhere. But that will usually be a smaller part of the code base. Codebases that make testing more difficult than that, are making it unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes you depend on some library that forces you or heavily nudges you into another style, that can happen. But what one wants to avoid is a codebase, where one has to know to mock 5 other things because of their side effects.
by benchly | 2025-12-16 11:55:10+00:00
While I am not a software developer, it sounds like our career paths have had the same trajectory, and I'm wondering what the common factor is across industries.

I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.

Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.

Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.

You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.
by input_sh | 2025-12-16 11:55:31+00:00
Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.