MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petterroea | 2025-12-28 15:14:39+00:00
We don't need to look further than to Europe and the Ukraine war (wrt. gas etc) to see short-sighted decisions biting people in the ass. Or America, where the Roe v. Wade overturn caused peoples trust in healthcare apps to suddenly be weaponized against them using subpoenas. Short-sighted trust in the status quo hurting people isn't an abstract concept, it happens all the time.

My Christmas wish is for decision makers to do like I was told when I learned how to drive: Keep the eyes far ahead on the road, not right in front of the car.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-28 15:14:46+00:00
No, I actually misremembered… you can’t return in a defer.

The magical thing I was misremembering is that you can reference a not-yet-defined value in a defer, so long as all code paths define it once:

fn callFoo() -> FooResult {
let fooParam: Int // declared, not defined yet
defer {
// fooParam must get defined by the end of the function
foo(fooParam)
otherStuffAfterFoo() // …
}

// all code paths must assign fooParam
if cond {
fooParam = 0
} else {
fooParam = 1
return // early return!
}

doOtherStuff()
}

Blame it on it being years since I’ve coded in swift, my memory is fuzzy.
by jebarker | 2025-12-28 15:15:50+00:00
Multiplying two 100 digit numbers requires the application of a fixed algorithm which can be learned. If you don't know the algorithm it's challenging, if you do it's not.

But that is not true of painting. Painting requires choosing a subject (for its subjective qualities) and then translating what you _want_ to capture about that subject and how you want to represent it in paint on some medium. You will also be applying a theory of mind and perception about the audience of the painting since you probably want it to appeal to them. All of these choices and the skill to combine them into a painting that achieves what you want is vastly more challenging than multiplication.

Multiplication is akin to paint by numbers.

EDIT: it actually strikes me that this conversation gets to the crux of why AI art is so polarizing. It depends whether you view art predominantly as being about the thing that is created or the process of creation.
by throw0101c | 2025-12-28 15:16:05+00:00
> But if you have to worry about GPS jamming you probably have to worry about undersea cable cutting too.

GPS jamming can be done by a random truck driver:

* https://www.cnet.com/culture/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-acc...

Cutting cables at the bottom of the sea is an entire different class of attack (anchors notwithstanding).
by everdrive | 2025-12-28 15:16:46+00:00
I'll also add that paradoxically, bias is not really the problem here, but rather the problem is bias-disguised as objectivity. There's truly nothing wrong with a commentator who states "I have a particular view on this issue. Here are some of the things which inform my view. Here are the strengths of my view, here are the weaknesses, and here are what some of my opponents argue."
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-28 15:17:09+00:00
OK, now do dollar-denominated assets. Stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate. How have those fared over the same time period? Those types of assets are where I put my money for long-term savings.

Only idiots that don’t understand inflation hold lots of cash, bringing that up is a strawman. Cash is not a store of value, it’s a unit of exchange and unit of account. Again, cash is not for saving, it should be used to purchase assets if you want to create long-term wealth.

Inflation is a tool used to encourage people to spend or invest their money instead of hoarding it. By spending it or investing it in dollar denominated assets, economic activity and GDP increased. Hoarding cash doesn’t help anyone.

Have you ever considered that perhaps your ideas about the monetary system are wrong?
by xpe | 2025-12-28 15:17:39+00:00
> In fact, I'd argue that all you need for reliability is determinism and tests of all equivalent scenarios.

Any insights as to how to get effective determinism without pure functions?

Pure functions win here because we only have to reason about the function arguments. Reasoning is easier when you have to less of it! Without pure functions, the state space explodes, because anything anywhere could have a side-effect — madness, I say! — so how would you figure out equivalent states? Special case inspection I suppose?

There is a continuum between "anything goes" and "pure functions". From a certain light, all the varieties of encapsulation can be seen as explorations of this theme. (An idea: perhaps there are languages where side-effects can be circumscribed in ways that don't rely on the high bar of pure functions?)

The arguments against pure functions appear to be somewhat contingent: current adoption levels, practice, convenience, and taste. Things that are contingent have a way of changing over time as new methods emerge and new values take hold.

I don't hold shallow human preferences in high regard. As an example, many humans and organizations in practice trade security for convenience, at significant cost — especially when that cost is external to them.

At the same time, onerous tasks encourage work-arounds. This is the crux of it I think: unless people perceive the value of pure functions (to do what they want to do), some will seek shortcuts. So we need some combination of (1) making them easier to work with; (2) motivating people to aspire to higher principles; namely, high quality software that does not open to door to exploitation, misuse, botnets, etc; and/or (3) internalize the external costs.

As an example of (3), if people and companies faced predictable and commensurate costs when their flawed software inflicts harm on others, they would be more inclined to care about correctness.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-12-28 15:18:57+00:00
When I started dabbling in web development, writing HTML and CSS was already its own job, and professional JavaScript developers basically did not exist. This was before TypeScript, before Node, before Ajax, before React or even jQuery. If anything has exploded in complexity in the intervening years, it's the JavaScript part of the equation.

I agree that it's increasingly silly to ask someone to be an expert in all of frontend. But the primary driver of that is not all the new CSS features we're getting.
by ryandv | 2025-12-28 15:20:31+00:00
I've found it useful in limited cases for writing optics which can be incredibly obtuse, sometimes boilerplatey, and yet ultimately accomplish what in other languages might be considered utterly trivial use cases... consider the following prompt and output:

reply with one-line haskell source code ONLY: implement the function projectPair :: (Field1 s s a a, Field2 s s b b) => Lens s s (a, b) (a, b)

lens (\s -> (s^._1, s^._2)) (\s (a,b) -> s & _1 .~ a & _2 .~ b)

... which can be shown to satisfy the three lens laws. If you can understand the types it is generally true that the implementation falls out much more easily, in a similar vein as "show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious."

I suppose LLMs are good for this and other extremely constrained forms of boilerplate production. I consider it an incremental improvement over go codegen. Everything else I still tend to hand-write, because I don't consider source code production the bottleneck of software development.
by nrds | 2025-12-28 15:20:54+00:00
There are no types whose fields "live on the heap", nor are there types whose fields "live on the stack"; these are simply not properties of types. Values always live exactly where you put them and you can put values anywhere you want, thanks to Rust's "all types are moveable" rule. Now something like a `Vec` or a `Box` _owns_ some data strictly on the heap, but that data is not _part of_ (i.e. a field of) the `Vec` or `Box` value.

As a counter-example to your idea, it's theoretically possible for a type to have a `?Sized` field (at the end), although this idea was never completely fleshed out in the language. A value of such a type could be constructed on the stack.

Now in practice, if you encounter a type with an unsized type parameter, it's probably a smart pointer. It may have an ownership relation to some data which lives on the heap. That may be what you're referring to. But such heuristics are going to be more confusing than helpful for anyone who doesn't understand the basic premise. The location of data in rust is actually quite simple, but sometimes beginners make it more complicated than it really is somehow.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-28 15:20:59+00:00
The didn't redefine the words, they defined them. Anyone using them for anything other than the purposes they were defined to cover is a dishonest parasite who is intending to trade on the goodwill of the people who adhere to OSI's guidelines. "Open Source," capitalized or not, was not a common phrase before they introduced it. I don't care if somebody in 1965 said "I decided I'm going to be open, and share the source code!" Somebody sitting right next to him probably said "I decided I'm going to be open, and tell people that I will never share the source code."

Because prefixing something with the word "Open" to imply that it would be completely transparent (in any context) wasn't even common before the term "Open Source" was invented. When people do that, they're hoping that the goodwill that Open Source has generated will be transferred to them, and they are judged on that basis. "Open" generally had a slightly different meaning: honest.

> A random "initiative"

And when you play stupid, nobody respects your argument. It's self-defeating.
by cluckindan | 2025-12-28 15:21:36+00:00
Remembering how ”easy” it is to navigate with such an arrow in GTA, I would expect this to fail in unimaginable ways.

It could point at a river instead of the bridge over it.

It could point at an airport instead of the route around it.

It could point at a cul-de-sac, a dangerous neighborhood, a construction site, etc.
by adeptima | 2025-12-28 15:21:39+00:00
Real tip - find someone who loves outbound, can create a funnel outside of Linkedin or convert traffic from Linkedin to something more reliable and can talk about numbers non-stop for hours.

Ex. I never did more than 1k whatsapp messages with 20% open rate in a month ...

Know a friend who is doing 190k MRR with 12k whatsapp messages open rate 40%-60% (no AI SDRs!, fake avatars, etc) and what to double it next year. All he wants to talk is outbound ... and how it will make rich and how it should cost no more than 20% revenue.

99,999% hates outbound with passion, want to dump on someone else, can't retain SDRs for more than 6 months, etc
Show HN: Neural Net Flies Navigate through a maze
by logicallee | 2025-12-28 15:21:44+00:00
In this simulation, flies are controlled by a neural network. You can adjust the hyperparameters. There's a maze mode, in which flies have to avoid some obstacles. I think the effect is pretty cool. What do you think?

updated link:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5f7017c8-98fb-4d89-a32c-1...
by kstrauser | 2025-12-28 15:22:05+00:00
Free Software and Open Source are similar, but not identical: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

The GPL places no restrictions on how you can run the software. All meaningful licenses place restrictions — or, conversely, limit the permissions they grant — on how the code can be used, distributed, integrated with other projects, etc.

But I disagree that the meaning of Open Source is malleable. As others here said, if we want to make a new definition, we should make a new term. In my opinion, in this case, we have. It’s Source Available, which is basically “look, but don’t touch”. And as with other brightly colored things in nature, it’s generally best to avoid it.
by throw0101c | 2025-12-28 15:22:27+00:00
> Price stability is overrated.

Tell that to Biden/Harris. Dissatisfaction about prices helped get Trump elected (and now is causing him troubles with popularity as well).

> Letting the government print money any time prices start to fall is literally letting the government profit off your back.

The vast, vast majority of money that is "printed" is created by private banks through credit creation:

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625

And the money supply that is created by government(-ish) institutions is by central banks, which—in modern times—are generally operated independently from the government (except in, e.g., Turkey; and some folks want less independence). Central banks often work in opposition to what politicians want: just ask Powell.
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-28 15:22:52+00:00
Idk, seems like a different topic, no?

Off the top of my head, things that could be considered "the point":

- It's much cheaper

- It's more replicable

- It can be scaled more readily

But again, not what I was arguing for or against; my comment mostly pertained to "world through a straw"
by angristan | 2025-12-28 15:23:12+00:00
> but what are you able to do about it?

On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed.

For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max)

For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!
by somenameforme | 2025-12-28 15:23:19+00:00
The USD was metal based, in one way or another, from 1792-1971, with two brief interludes after the Civil War and Great Depression. That's a really good pedigree.

So our current inflationary system only really kicked off in 1971 and is already looking somewhat clearly unsustainable. But what makes this particularly relevant is that 1971 was also right when major breakthroughs in computing were about to unlock a huge economic leap. That helped briefly enable the infinite exponential growth that this inflationary system requires. Without that, I doubt this system would have seen its 50th birthday.

On the topic of stability, the Fed worked to calculate inflation levels from 1800 onward here. [1] You'll notice that from 1800 to 1950 prices never shifted by more than 50% relative to the initial baseline of 51. That's pretty wild if you think about it because it includes the Civil War, both world wars, Great Depression, Spanish Flu, and all of these sort of things. Then in just the relatively calm ~50 years from 1971 to to today, prices increased around 800%.

[1] - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
by shayway | 2025-12-28 15:23:35+00:00
I've noticed a funny tendency among some Fediverse passionates to have strong feelings about how others should be using it. Author says "We could not both be right," but that's rather antithetical to the value proposition of decentralized social media, IMO.

A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.

I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-28 15:23:46+00:00
> 404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base.

Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up?

I'm really fascinated by this. Fantastic story overall, can't wait for part 2!
Show HN: Compare what your current rent gets you in other cities
by Atallapr | 2025-12-28 15:24:19+00:00
I built a tool to compare your apartment’s rent against your zip code's average and see what that same budget buys you in other U.S. cities.

The current version uses 2023 US Census Data (the 2024 one seems incomplete). While the data is a bit dated, it still provides interesting benchmarks for relative cost-of-living comparisons. I’m currently looking into integrating real-time rental forecast APIs to improve accuracy for major metropolitan areas.

I had a lot of fun building this and got to use a bunch of new tech doing it! I’d love to hear your feedback and if there are any features you think would make this better. Thank you!!

data source: https://data.census.gov/table?q=B25031
by martin-t | 2025-12-28 15:25:00+00:00
> Rather from numbers in my opinion.

Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.

And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.

But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.
by holg | 2025-12-28 15:25:21+00:00
That mid-90s trend of embedding Lisp/Tcl everywhere was special. Everyone understood: give users a real language, not just config files. Emacs, GIMP, Abuse, AutoCAD - all bet on "let users program it." Now we have YAML and JSON configs. Progress?
Part of why I built this: if AutoLISP becomes truly undead inside AutoCAD, at least the workflow and playground can live on independently in the browser.
by ksherlock | 2025-12-28 15:26:24+00:00
well, audio books:

- Salem's Lot

- the Moon is a harsh mistress

- Stranger in a Strange land

- The Stand (1990 edition, which initially confused me since I read the 1980 edition long ago)

- The best short stories of Mark Twain

- Nightmares and Dreamscapes

- Liar's Poker

- The Big Short

- The intelligent investor (2009 revised edition -- my ears perked up when he casually mentioned microsoft vs microstrategy during the .com bomb)

- Flash boys

- Next

- Bonfire of the vanities

- Barbarians at the gate

- The man who solved the market

- The Fund

- The world according to Cunk

- The house of Morgan (currently 5 hours in and currently tired of the phrase "house of")
by throw0101c | 2025-12-28 15:27:41+00:00
> Many things work just fine right until they stop working, our current strategy of blowing ever bigger economic bubbles has worked for a long time and I expect it will continue for long time. It has the very stable property of enriching the already wealthy.

The enriching of the already-wealthy is happening because of non-progressive policies (taxes, and others). Plenty of countries have fiat currencies and independent central banks, and yet don't have inequality rates like that of US currently has.

In fact, the US used to not have inequality rates that the US currently has. This is a phenomenon that has a fairly definitive starting point, with particular policies that (US) society has "accepted" and can 'simply' choose to start rejecting:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

The current US rates are the same as during the Gilded Age, and just like they were reversed post-GA, they could also be reversed now.
by verisimi | 2025-12-28 15:27:48+00:00
Yes, set its own goals. Here's an example - say you wanted to track your spending, you might create a spreadsheet to do so. The spreadsheet won't write itself. If you want, you could perhaps task an ai to monitor and track spending - but it doesn't care. It is the human that cares/feels/values whatever-it-is. Computers are not that type.

Is your position that humans are pretty mechanistic, and simply playing out their programming, like computers? And that they can provide a stacktrace for what they do?

If so, this is what I was getting at with my initial comment. Most people do not apply their intelligence personally - they are simply playing out the goals that we inserted into them (by parents, society). There are alternative possibilities, but it seems that most people's operational procedures and actions are not something they have considered or actively sought.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-28 15:28:44+00:00
As a personal anecdote, while I’ve heard smart people say they were using “open source” way back when, I had personally never heard it used in any way before starting to used Linux and the BSDs in the late 90s, when OSI came along and people started discussing it in that context.

I can’t say others weren’t using it before then. I can say say that I first heard of Open Source after I’d heard of Free Software.
by cluckindan | 2025-12-28 15:28:53+00:00
Why would anyone want a distributed lock?

Sometimes certain containerized processes need to run according to a schedule, but maintainers also need a way to run them manually without the scheduled processing running or starting concurrently. A shared FS seems like the ”simplest thing that could possibly work” distribution method for locks intended for that purpose, but unfortunately not all cloud storage volumes are strongly consistent, even to the same user, and may take several ms for the lock to take hold.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-28 15:29:36+00:00
There's no need to be defensive. We are largely westerners on a western website studying history from a western perspective. There's nothing wrong with that, it's natural. It just means we lose some understanding of events if that's the only side we know. OP is performing a service by documenting first-person history, and doesn't need to justify why it's important. It's important.
by sublinear | 2025-12-28 15:30:02+00:00
I think weekly or bi-weekly is best since you're aligning yourself with the time scale that most workplaces tend to operate on.

I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.

I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.