MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by osiris88 | 2025-12-28 20:54:12+00:00
I've been using rust for 8+ years, I remember the experiments around `failure` crate, a precursor to anyhow if I remember right... and then eyre, and then thiserror...

It just felt like too much churn and each one offered barely any distinction to the previous.

Additionally, the `std::error::Error` trait was very poorly designed when it was initially created. It was `std` only and linked to a concept of backtraces, which made it a non-starter for embedded. It just seemed to me that it was a bad idea ever to use it in a library and that it would harm embedded users.

And the upside for non-embedded users was minimal. Indeed most of it's interface since then has been deprecated and removed, and it to this day has no built-in idea of "error accumulation". I really can't understand this. That's one of the main things that I would have wanted an generic error interface to solve in order to be actually useful.

It was also extremely painful 5 years ago when cargo didn't properly do feature unification separately for build dependencies vs. target dependencies. This meant that if you used anyhting in your build.rs that depended on `failure` with default features, and turned on `std` feature, then you cannot use `failure` anywhere in your actual target or you will get `std` feature and then your build will break.

I think the whole "rust error handling research" area has frankly been an enormous disappointment. Nowadays I try to avoid all of these libraries (failure, anyhow, thiserror, etc.) because they all get abandoned sooner or later, and they brought very little to the table other than being declared "idiomatic" by the illuminati. Why waste my time rewriting it in a year or two for the new cool flavor of suck.

Usually what I actually do in rust for errors now is, the error is an enum, and I use `displaydoc` to make it implement `Display`, because that is actually very simple and well-scoped. I don't bother with implementing `std::error::Error`, because it's pointless.

If I'm writing an application and I come to a point where I need to "box" or "type erase" the error, then it becomes `String` or perhaps `Box<str>` if I care about a few bytes. It may feel crude, but it is simple and it works. That doesn't let you downcast errors later, but the situations where you actually have to do that are very rare and I'm willing to do something ad hoc in those cases. You can also often refactor so that you don't actually have to do that. I'm kind of in the downcasting-is-a-code-smell camp anyways.

I'm a little bit excited about `rootcause` because it seems better thought out than it's progenitors. But I have yet to try to make systematic use of it in a bigger project.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-28 20:54:13+00:00
I mean this is one of the risk factors in AI safety that's been communicated for a long time. It's not just computing, but potentially everything. Energy resources, land resources (like those used to grow food for us meat bags), transportation resources. Suddenly humans find themselves outbid by AI as AI has pushed us out of the economy.

The economy says nothing about requiring humans to exist.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 20:54:22+00:00
> It's all hype

It’s geriatric hype. It tells you how the administration is thinking about the Navy. It’s in terms someone born in the 1940s—and who never refreshed their assumptions since childhood—can understand.

What we should have are floating, automated drone-production platforms that can be mass manufactured themselves and shipped to right ahead of the front for overwhelming the enemy’s sea-based defences (while F-35s take care of SEAD). Instead we get Popeye with a rail gun.
by burnerRhodov2 | 2025-12-28 20:54:42+00:00
Well, you have different players now... working at a different scale.

They are purchasing crypto infrastructure for a huge premium, importing massive turbines from old generation facilities, making huge personal investments in nvidia stock for "preference", and acquiring companies that happen to have an order.

It went from we need to make a data center as cost efficient as possible to we need a data center at all costs.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-28 20:54:45+00:00
From a intrigue POV:

After Skool: https://www.youtube.com/afterskool | https://open.spotify.com/show/36mIOrFwTKIDER8KF0aGrx | https://www.afterskool.net/

Academy of Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/academyofideas | https://open.spotify.com/show/2dio7KUNuDHErlMumZtNt6 | https://academyofideas.com/
RegentLock – Software licensing for desktop/offline apps
by fintexa | 2025-12-28 20:55:40+00:00
I built a licensing system for desktop and enterprise software. Posting to get the word out and get feedback from HN.

The problem I had

I ship commercial engineering software (nuclear/thermal-hydraulics simulation tools). My customers often work in air-gapped environments - government labs, defense contractors, utilities with strict IT policies. Existing licensing solutions either assumed always-online connectivity, required heavyweight SDKs, or were priced for Fortune 500 companies.

What RegentLock does

It's a licensing backend + API for generating, activating, and managing software licenses. The crypto is straightforward: Ed25519 for signing, ChaCha20-Poly1305 for license file encryption. Licenses are validated locally after activation - no phone-home required (though you can configure check-in policies if you want).

Supports:
- Node-locked and floating licenses
- Offline/air-gapped activation (generate request file → process on connected machine → transfer license back)
- Rehostable licenses (customers can revoke and move to new hardware)
- Hardware binding via MAC, disk serial, or a portable "rehostable" ID

Integration

REST API. I have integration examples for C, Go, Python, Java, and C#. Typical integration is ~50-100 lines - validate license on startup, check expiration, verify signature.

Pricing

Indie tier at $349/year for solo devs (500 activations). Starter is $1,499/year. I'm not trying to compete with Gumroad for $10 e-books - this is for people shipping software that actually needs protection.

What I'm looking for

- Feedback on the approach
- Edge cases I haven't considered
- Whether the feature set makes sense for your use case

Website: https://regentlock.net
Features: https://regentlock.net/features.html

Happy to answer technical questions about the implementation.
by culi | 2025-12-28 20:56:04+00:00
Yeah I guess I wasn't following that closely but I know their previous position was that there wasn't enough benefits to .jxl to justify supporting another raster image standard.

There's been a lot of major changes since then though. Like Apple fully adopting JPEG XL and PDF announcing support as well.

I know many in the industry also think that AV2 might be a huge game changer and wanna wait and see how that ends up before choosing what standards to adopt.
by bflesch | 2025-12-28 20:56:21+00:00
Nobel prize might be waiting for two sets of octomom same-egg offspring with compatible genders that join together to have n=8 firstborn children which are conceived at same date under the same conditions (no alcohol, no ongoing infections, etc.), and the pregnancy period is spent together.

It will definitely need 8 scientist relationships, a lot of energy and money.
by goldsteinq | 2025-12-28 20:56:50+00:00
I’m definitely not “commiting malpractice” on account of not being a security practicioner. I’m talking from a perspective of a user.

It’s important to me — as a user — that a communication tool doesn’t lose my data, and Signal already did. Actual practicioners keep recommending Signal and sure, I believe that in a weird scenario where my encryption keys are somehow compromised without also compromising my local message history, Signal’s double-ratchet will do wonders — but it doesn’t actually work as a serious communication tool.

It’s also kinda curious that while the “email cannot be made secure” mantra is constantly repeated online, basically every organization that needs secure communication uses email. Openwall are certainly practicioners, and they use PGP-over-email: are they commiting malpractice?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 20:57:13+00:00
> Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles?

Given 90s-era NATO air defences are shooting down Russia’s newest hypersonic missiles [1], I’m continuing to treat the category as more hype than utility.

[1] https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patrio...
by jonathaneunice | 2025-12-28 20:57:51+00:00
It paved the way for a lot more than that. At a time open source in general, and Linux in particular, did not have much corporate buy-in, IBM signaled "we back this" and "we're investing in this" in substantial ways that corporate IT executives could hear and act upon. That was a pre-cloud, pre-hyperscaler era when "enterprise IT" was the generally understood "high end" of the market, and IBM ruled that arena. IBM backing Linux and open source paved the way for a large swath of the industry—customers, software vendors, channel/distribution partners, yadda yadda—to do likewise.
by alwillis | 2025-12-28 20:57:55+00:00
> I know for sure that Apple, who has an important seat on the standard committee, holded back innovation for so long, it's not a matter of finding or not finding solutions. They're failing us for different interests

Apple isn't the problem.

Apple was the first to ship :has(), which developers wanted for 20 years but was thought to be essentially impossible to implement [1].

Apple pushed to get consensus on how to implement masonry layouts in CSS [2].

And they were first to ship the new specification in a browser you can use right now [3].

This dashboard shows Apple slightly ahead in terms of new CSS features being implemented and interoperable with Firefox and Chrome [4].

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/16026/css-masonry-syntax/

[3]: https://webkit.org/blog/17660/introducing-css-grid-lanes/

[4]: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
by drnick1 | 2025-12-28 20:57:56+00:00
I suppose this largely depends on the kind of software that you write. Ideally, you also extract only the part of the external code that you need, audit it, and integrate it into your own code. This way you minimize the attack surface. I don't work on software that is exposed to the Internet however, so admittedly the importance of security vulnerabilities is low.
by kmoser | 2025-12-28 20:58:43+00:00
> Remember, you want to leave your visitors with NO information, not blurred information.

Blacking out text still gives attackers an idea of the length of the original, which can be useful information, especially when the original is something like a person's name. You can mitigate that by either erasing the text completely (e.g. replace it with the background color of the paper) or making the bars longer.
by hinkley | 2025-12-28 20:59:30+00:00
One of the things I’ve been hoping for every time a new EC2 instance comes out is for them to unpin the memory:core ratio a bit. I don’t expect they have enough r# and c# users to completely balance things out so what they’re really doing is selling people more CPUs to get the memory they need.

It would be nice if it were creeping up generation to generation. But if this keeps up I fear the opposite.
by bicolao | 2025-12-28 20:59:50+00:00
> Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up.

Vulkan isn't meant for beginners. It's a lot more verbose even if you know the fundamentals. Modern OpenGL would be good enough. If you have to use Vulkan, maybe use one of the libraries built on top of it (I use SDL3 for example). You still have freedom doing whatever you want with shaders and leave most of resource management to those libraries.
by pron | 2025-12-28 20:59:55+00:00
As a non-American, the thing that is most terrifying to me about Trump's presidency isn't his authoritarian tendencies, corruption, cruelty, or criminality. The world has seen plenty of leaders like that. It's his sheer idiocy. Calling him a moron is an insult to the intelligence of morons. What's so terrifying about it isn't that a man so stupid was elected president of such a big and important country, although that's bad enough, but seeing American titans of industry and other members of its elite seriously discussing, or even praising, the quality of the emperor's new clothes.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-28 21:01:04+00:00
After about 24 hours I don't notice anymore. I just finished a 2 week fast on only water, tea and supplements. I hardly notice when I focus on something else (work/hobby). When I stop focusing I get sleepy instead of hungry. Cold I have not managed; I come from a cold country and I really really hate any type of cold; I like 30C+ high humidity as a baseline, under that, I am cold and uncomfortable. I did try to view them the same and tried to meditate through it, but, unlike fasting, I cannot ignore the continues suffering that is cold while fasting is almost pleasant (makes me sharper).
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-28 21:01:48+00:00
Whatever this febrile dream vaporware could be, it's still way too big for modern combat. Don't take my word for it, listen to a US Navy Commander, a serious person obviously, explain how it's terrible and completely inattentive to real USN needs and doctrine. https://youtu.be/0Zqa9azGo6M

Moreover though, it's another facet of the show of the White House occupant embellishing their ego and playing the reality star part through random, aspirational concepts of a plan.

PS: I dislike almost all Republicans and most Democrats, especially all of the ones who take bribes from corporations and foreign governments, so this isn't a political message but a reality statement.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-12-28 21:01:57+00:00
I was in my 2nd year on college when I remember Gerstner was named to run IBM. At the time, IBM was the big tech monster that was stagnet and needed a fresh way to move forward. He came in and radically changed how it worked. I remember services became a big part of its core business. He really made a big difference on how the company functioned.

What I admire is that one man changed IBM from the 50s and 60s stoggy IBM to a more modern functional company that was able to move forward. I supect that without him IBM would have died long time ago.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-28 21:02:29+00:00
Techempower isn't perfect, but a 33% loss of speed is really not bad versus best of the best web stacks. Your attempt to belittle is the same tired heaping scorn, when the data shows otherwise. But it's so cool to hate!

Libuv isn't the most perfect networking stack in the planet, no. It could be improved. We could figure out new ways to get io-uring or some eBPF based or even dpdk bypass userland stack running. Being JS does not limit what you do for networking, in any way. At all. It adds some overhead to the techniques you choose, requires some glue layer. So yes, some cpu and memory efficiency losses. And we can debate whether thats 20% or 50% or more. Techempower shows it's half an order of magnitude worse (10^0.5, 33%). Techempower is a decent proxy for what is available, what you get, without being extremely finicky.

Maybe that is the goal, maybe this really is a shoot for the moon effort where you abandon all existing work to get extreme performance, as c10k was, but that makes the entire lesson not actually useful or practical for almost everyone. And if you want to argue against techempower being a proxy for others, for doing extreme work & what is possible at the limit, you have to consider a more extreme js networking than what comes out of box in node.js or Deno too, into a custom engine there too.

It's serious sad cope to pretend like it's totally different domains, that js is inherently never going to have good networking, that it can't leverage the same networking techniques you are trying to vaunt over js. The language just isn't that important, the orders of magnitude (<<1 according to the only data/evidence in this thread) are not actually super significant.
by mpyne | 2025-12-28 21:02:41+00:00
Yes, the opportunity cost is the real problem with all of this. A navy takes approximately forever to build.

If we are extremely lucky the outcome of this will be increased shipyard capacity and refined shipbuilding practices just in time to switch back to building a multitude of actually-useful ships.

But most likely is that this ends up delaying the U.S.'s ability to build back its navy in time to matter, which is a tremendous issue given how we do our commerce and where some of our deepest friends are physically located.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-28 21:02:55+00:00
I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are really poor in quality and can be emotionally driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who get surprisingly aggressive if you say anything remotely negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these tools. Particularly how they are trained and deployed and who should be guiding that process.

I find it very odd when people proudly proclaim they used, say, Grok to answer a question. Their identity is so tied up in it that if you start talking about the quality of the information they get incredibly defensive. In contrast: I have never felt protective of my Google search results, which is basically the same thing given how most people use these tools currently.

It’s kind of wild how hostile some people get if you attempt to open the discussion up at all.
by Zacharias030 | 2025-12-28 21:02:57+00:00
Thank you xethos, this has been exactly the kind of opinion and experience report that I've been looking for.

the one thing I really want beyond persistent over whatsapp is threads.
I hope matrix has a similarly trivial app/web/pc story as mattermost has, because the other users are not necessarily able to handle anything more complex than "download an app and sign in".
by googlebot6178 | 2025-12-28 21:03:00+00:00
They got rid of country specific sites like google.co.uk as said they could work out what people wanted with one size fits all .com Now as an expat when trying to do Christmas shopping for family in UK from abroad using UK shopping results you no longer can. If you ask Gemini who came up with such an idea it will shut you down for questioning Google policies. They are taking the apple approach of telling the user what they need and force them to take or leave it. So I left using Google.
by dc396 | 2025-12-28 21:03:04+00:00
<eyeroll>. Not a big fan of warning labels like this. While I might agree that "social media" (whatever that gets defined to be) can have a very significant negative impact on mental health and/or society as a whole, trying to forcing platforms to putting a label to that effect seems like another instance of politicians "doing something", just like the stupid cookie warning crap we all get to click through to visit websites. I figure the money spent coming up with this bill (and that will be spent on lawyers appealing and/or developers implementing) could've been better spent on a wide array of other, more useful activities.
by dmwood | 2025-12-28 21:03:55+00:00
A trip to Wanamakers at Christmas (including eating in the top-floor restaurant and listening to scheduled organ concerts) was a treasured fixture of my childhood in the late 50s and early 60s. If I remember correctly, there was a monorail-like tram that ran around the periphery of the toy department too. Christmas lights festooned the facade of the organ.
Show HN: I built an AI fashion photographer to help small e-commerce businesses
by fabriciosx | 2025-12-28 21:04:04+00:00
After talking to dozens of small fashion sellers in Brazil, I kept hearing the same pain point: professional product photos are expensive and slow to produce.

So I built VestiAi, an AI tool that generates professional fashion campaign photos from simple product images.

How it works: Upload a photo of your clothing → Choose an AI model → Get campaign-ready photos in seconds.

The diversity aspect was important to me, the AI generates models of different ethnicities and styles so brands can create inclusive campaigns.

Tech stack: This was also a learning project to explore modern tooling – built with Turborepo monorepo, Better Auth for authentication, Stripe for payments, ElysiaJS + Eden Treaty for the backend API, and Next.js on the frontend. Happy to discuss any of these choices!

Already working with some clients who've saved thousands on photoshoot costs. Free tier available to try it out: https://www.vestiai.com.br/en

Would appreciate feedback on the output quality, tech stack, or use cases I might be missing!
by jessegrosjean | 2025-12-28 21:04:17+00:00
I dislike Liquid Glass.

At the same time I make Mac apps and I've got to adopt liquid glass to keep my apps looking alive/updated. How to do this without making my apps UI worse?

I would love to see some "how to fix Liquid Glass" type articles. List out the problems, list out potential solutions.

Anyone run across articles like this? Please share relevant links.
by morning-coffee | 2025-12-28 21:04:22+00:00
> I want less code. I want to limit the amount of 3rd party code I pull in. This is mostly due to supply chain disasters over on NPM scaring me and the amount of code dependencies bringing in see rust dependencies scare me.

`anyhow` has exactly one optional dependency (backtrace).
`thiserror` has three (proc-macro2, quote, syn) which are at the base of practically the entire Rust ecosystem.

Unless the author has zero dependencies in general, I'll bet they have all of the above dependencies already.

¯\_(°ペ)_/¯
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-28 21:04:26+00:00
As much as I love any opportunity to stick it to Trump, wasting billions of dollars is about the only thing the US Navy does anymore; in this case he's keeping them on-brand and on-mission. It's kind of hilarious they announced this at the same time as the Constellation-class getting canceled, just to make sure there's no chance the Navy goes even a single day without an active boondoggle of a ship which will never sail.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 21:04:42+00:00
> Hasn’t all recent oil purchases been settled using USD

No. I’ve traded and settled oil in British pounds from a desk at a bank in New York.

> most countries buy US treasuries to maintain US credit ratings and to settle global trade debts

No to the first, partly to the second. Holding Treasuries doesn’t affect creditworthiness. That said, Treasuries are a universal collateral, so some lenders may require Treasuries be held in reserve for their safety (usually in a third-country bank).

The main reason countries buy Treasuries is for reserves. These are maintained so they can defend their currency. They need dollars to do this if their country trades in and/or finances with dollars. (If they trade in or finance with yuan, they should hold yuan bonds, which they can quickly turn into yuan to sell into the market to buy back their currency, thereby stabilizing it.)
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-28 21:04:48+00:00
> So inside a destructor throw has a radically different behaviour that makes it useless for communicating non-fatal errors

It's weird how you tried to frame a core design feature of the most successful programming language in the history of mankind as "useless".

Perhaps the explanation lies in how you tried to claim that exceptions had any place in "communicating non-fatal errors", not to mention that your scenario, handling non-fatal errors when destroying a resource, is fundamentally meaningless.

Perhaps you should take a step back and think whether it makes sense to extrapolate your mental models to languages you're not familiar with.