MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by haberman | 2025-12-12 19:12:25+00:00
> Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts.

It's very surprising to hear you say this, as it's so contrary to my experience.

From the smallest programs (Computer Language Benchmarks Game) to pretty big programs (web browsers), from low-level programs (OS kernels) to high-level programs (GUI Applications), from short-lived programs (command-line utilities) to long-lived programs (database servers), it's hard to think of a single segment where even average Java programs will out-perform average C, C++, or Rust programs.

I hadn't heard of QuestDB before, but it sounds like it's written in zero-GC Java using manual memory management. That's pretty unusual for Java, and would require a team of experts to pull off, I'd think. It also sounds like it drops to C++ and Rust for performance-critical tasks.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-12 19:12:25+00:00
The “filth of others” can be described in as many ways as a human might use to justify their elevation of one tribe over the degradation of another.

Look at it critically - whenever you encounter a totalitarian-authoritarian personality bloviating about “those people over there” (others), its usually based on the totalitarian mechanism of ‘avoiding affinity with attributes considered unsavoury’ (filth).

This concept has other applications. If you have two villages, separated perhaps by a near-insurmountable mountain or lake, or if one of those villages raises cows while the other raises goats - this is usually the basis of the formation of a new dialect, accent, or indeed entirely new language. However, when civilization occurs and those two villages merge into a broader community, that language changes to become a unity.

This is observable at an individual level, too. Any unacknowledged or under-recognized similarities/identities/differences between two or more entities will inevitably be used to justify segregation of those entities. The solution, as always, is to identify similarities/identities/differences in a cohesive manner - this is anathema to the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, who is usually pretty stubborn about enforcing, in totality, those under-acknowledged facets.
by maxpert | 2025-12-12 19:12:41+00:00
LOL what are the odds, I posted in `Show HN` about Marmot today https://github.com/maxpert/marmot/releases/tag/v2.2.0 and in my head I was thinking exact same thing for supporting MySQL's JSON datatype. At some level I am starting to feel, I might as well be able to expose a full MongoDB compatible protocol that let's you talk to tables as collections, solving this problem once it for all!

But this technique I guess is very common now.
by estearum | 2025-12-12 19:13:21+00:00
> These studies are run by the same companies that stand to make billions based off the study outcomes

No they're not. Studies are run by a distributed network of large, medium, and small businesses who are independently following the "recipe" designed by the pharma company.

Then this data is submitted back to the pharma company and collated into a report that is given to the FDA.

It is effectively impossible to systematically get a couple hundred or couple thousand independent trial sites to misreport safety data.

It is possible that the pharma company could manipulate data during collation, but unsurprisingly there is a vast infrastructure to detect this and gargantuan penalties for when they're discovered.

> For example we know now when a toddler died in the Moderna covid RTC of cardiac arrest after vaccination they reportedly covered it up and didn't report it.

This is literally not true. You can find the death reported in the exact regulatory filing exactly when and where it should have been reported. What happened is that a Substack author found it and has made it seem like it was not reported.

Re Vioxx comparison:

Sure we should always be vigilant for another Vioxx. The way we do that is through fair and levelheaded analysis of the data we have available. Right now, that analysis lands very clearly on the side of vaccines. At the scale of vaccine rollout, we would not need to squint to see signal of a major problem.
by asadotzler | 2025-12-12 19:13:53+00:00
Downloading software over dial-up speeds of 14.4 kbps to 28.8 kbps sucked, and most businesses weren't large enterprises so didn't have T1s (which were themselves only 1.5 Mbps) so sending the office manager across town to Circuit City to buy a boxed copy of some piece of software made sense. The app stores of the 90s were "third party" and physical and covered the needs and capabilities of 90s companies. The other "app store" was even more indirect, software makers paying PC sellers to pre-install.
by Averna2 | 2025-12-12 19:14:37+00:00
Real life jobs are nowhere near this clear cut. Overly protective unions result in lower levels of innovation.

Please look to the EU and their --ZERO-- level of tech innovation and how their anti-business regulations have worked out.

Question - if you think layoffs during high profit times are bad/immoral, then should employees also accept pay cuts when profits are low?

Didn't think so. Think about that "power" dynamic you keep talking about.
by dylanhouli | 2025-12-12 19:14:46+00:00
I first read this blog post about a year ago I think. It was a bit after I started developing my own personal productivity app. It got me really excited because my philosophy is extremely similar, and it seems to resonate with people.

I'm still working on the app today but planning to get it out into the world in the new year. I think anyone who enjoys this notepad technique will find it quite familiar but just "powered up" maybe.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-12 19:15:59+00:00
Wellllll. Despite the title, the paper does not make a claim about string theory. The starting point is the "Witten string field theory" which is a field theory engineered to have properties like string theory. Nothing guarantees that theory is exactly like string theory. In addition, the idea is perturbative in nature, there's no guarantee that perturbative effects are in fact realized in the full quantum theory - exoteric cancellations happen often in field theories with many symmetries. This is two degrees of questionable.

So A) the paper isn't actually about string theory and B) it's not clear that the claim it makes is actually correct for the field theory it supposedly applies to.
by jokoon | 2025-12-12 19:16:09+00:00
So it could be possible to make a small portable screen device with this, or maybe not because (I think) the RPI is not optimized to work on a battery.

I would prefer a touchscreen with it.

I am not talking about a smartphone, because smartphones are often more powerful, more expensive. I would just prefer a device to do simple computing, with full access to the OS.

Smartphones tend to have android and powerful hardware, and a 4G or 5G antenna. I would just be happy with wifi and enough power to run some C or python code.

I am just curious what is the cheapest screen device that is possible to make with this, as long as it has wifi, a touch screen and be completely open. So far RPI is nice, but it's not really what I want.
by everforward | 2025-12-12 19:16:15+00:00
I think it's more fundamental than that: science education has gotten so bad that people miss what should be pretty clear red flags.

The hydroxychloroquine debacle is one thing because there's no way as a layman to gauge that. It's still wrong, but I understand that people were worried and there's no intuitive route to "this won't help".

This feels like something where even laymen should be skeptical. Baseline, disinfectants are generally not medicine. Really, I would hope our education system was good enough that people hear "chlorinated disinfectant" and can jump to "probably an oxidizer and very bad for living things".
by rsynnott | 2025-12-12 19:16:55+00:00
When I was a kid, in the early 90s, there was a diagram in the local library of the planned Dublin metro. It was, at that point, an old plan, I think from the early 80s.

The third attempt at a Dublin metro just got planning permission a few weeks ago; said planning is now bogged down in a judicial review.

Somewhat envious of Austria’s speed in this sort of thing, really…
by sys_64738 | 2025-12-12 19:16:59+00:00
I'm expecting that later ones will contain methods to get out however they can, whether that's connecting to xfinity free wifi, connecting to a satellite, or having a cheap cell connection that is always on. They want your data and will do their damnedest to get it with/without your permission. Geolocation will be found. I'd expect they'll scan your local wifi SSIDs and send those too and ethernet MAC address to figure out who you are. There must be methods of using this info to wrangle your identity for marketing purposes.
by antiration | 2025-12-12 19:17:03+00:00
You can certainly side with Descartes and believe in rationalism, or you can study David Hume and understand those beliefs for what they are.

You can still have and respect beliefs, but distinguishing fact from belief is purely in the realm of philosophical debate. That doesn’t mean you have to accept absence of absolute truth or facts, but there is much we don’t know and that we think we know but we don’t, and that is logical and illogical. Life is dichotomy.
Show HN: Storyloom – Deterministic Storytelling Framework
by joshcsimmons | 2025-12-12 19:18:01+00:00
Hi HN. I'm the creator of Autism Simulator[1], a choose-your-own-adventure story. I used a library called Inkle for the CYOA logic but I really had to push the limits of the JS implementation of Inkle to get it to accomodate player stats over time (and it was fragile!).

So I've built my own CYOA adventure library.

[1] https://autism-simulator.vercel.app/
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-12 19:18:08+00:00
I don't really care what some arbitrary number on Wikipedia tells me about the freedom of a country I know quite well, as long as I am unable to insult my political leaders on the internet for their fuckups or say that 'Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide', without police later knocking on my door to arrest me for "hate speech" or "far right extremism", I consider the freedom score of that country to be ZERO. This is mostly a UK, Germany and Austria exclusive issue in the EU-zone and not an EU widespread issue quite yet, but boy they sure are trying to get everyone at that same level.

Any scientist will tell you to not to look at the end data, but to look at the formula used to calculate the result and the way in which the data for the study was gathered. That's what's most important.

Depending on what your formula and data is, you can get to any arbitrary result you want, which is how scientists also had studies in the 1950s saying that smoking was good for your health.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-12 19:18:49+00:00
It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.
by overfeed | 2025-12-12 19:18:54+00:00
> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business

I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.

Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-12 19:19:19+00:00
> Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to?

The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)

IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-12 19:19:35+00:00
You can get on secret watchlists by means of guilt by association, automagically.

https://legalclarity.org/what-happens-if-you-are-on-a-watchl...

https://abcnews.go.com/US/terrorist-watch-list-works/story?i...

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-be-on-fbi-watch-list-...

That also applies to just visiting absolutely harmless websites which have been deemed VERBOTEN! to visit, for whichever reason(again, in secret).

Have fun trying flying then, or being debanked. Would you like to spanked?
by password-app | 2025-12-12 19:19:56+00:00
This is a great approach. We took a similar philosophy building password automation - the AI agent never sees actual passwords.

Credentials are injected through a separate secure channel while the agent only sees placeholders like "[PASSWORD]". The AI handles navigation and form detection, but sensitive data flows through an isolated path.

For anyone building AI tools that touch PII: separating the "thinking" layer from the "data" layer is essential. Your LLM should never need to see the actual sensitive values to do its job.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-12 19:20:10+00:00
That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.

The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.

If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.
by focusgroup0 | 2025-12-12 19:20:12+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. The document model in mongo was slopped together by a junior engineer, so perhaps an unorthodox approach. It is basically flat, and already used in a pseudo-relational manner via in-app join to the existing sqlite store. This blog post inspired me to think, what if we just chucked all the json from mongo into sqlite and used the generated indices? Then we can gradually "strangler fig" endpoint by endpoint
by seneca | 2025-12-12 19:21:01+00:00
That's not at all what the statement I replied to says in context.

hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."

popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"

That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.
Show HN: Readly – Speed-read PDFs with RSVP and inline word highlight
by sumit-paul | 2025-12-12 19:21:21+00:00
PDF readers usually don’t help with pace or focus, so reading long documents becomes slow.

Readly uses two techniques to fix this:

RSVP reading Shows one word at a time on a clean black screen. This removes eye movement completely and keeps your reading pace steady.

Inline spotlight reading Adds a moving highlight bubble directly on the PDF. It guides your eyes word by word, like a focused magnifier, without breaking the document flow.

Other features - Clean focus mode with no distractions - Offline library and resume progress - Custom highlight colors and themes - Quick jumps across long PDFs

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bufferlabs...

Feedback is welcome.
by avandecreme | 2025-12-12 19:22:06+00:00
This reminds me of when I learned to program on my casio calculator.

There was a function to detect a key press which would return a number identifying the pressed key.

I needed to map that number to the letter printed on the key to print it on the screen. I don't remember whether there was no hashmap data structure or I just didn't know about it, but I implemented it with a serie of if.

The problem with that solution is that while mapping A was fast, Z was very slow because it was at the end of the list. That is how I discovered divide and conquer/ dichotomy with if branches.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-12 19:22:17+00:00
But there are such experiments. String theory says that the result of such experiment is: Lorentz invariance not violated.

> but our other theories

This is not how scientific research is done. The way you do it is you a theory, the theory makes predictions, you make experiments, and the predictions fail, you reject that theory. The fact that you might have other theories saying other things doens't matter for that theory.

So string theories said "Lorentz invariance not violated", we've made the experiments, and the prediction wasn't wrong, so you don't reject the theory. The logic is not unlike that of p-testing. You don't prove a theory correct is the experiments agree with it. Instead you prove it false if the experiments disagree with it.
by ablob | 2025-12-12 19:22:55+00:00
Usually it is the work of the one claiming something to prove it. So if you believe that AI does "think" you are expected to show me that it really does. Claiming it "thinks - prove otherwise" is just bad form and also opens the discussion up for moving the goalposts just as you did with your brain emulation statement. Or you could just not accept any argument made or circumvent it by stating the one trying to disprove your assertion got the definition wrong. There are countless ways to start a bad faith argument using this methodology, hence: Define property -> prove property.

Conversely, if the one asserting something doesn't want to define it there is no useful conversation to be had. (as in: AI doesn't think - I won't tell you what I mean by think)

PS: Asking someone to falsify their own assertion doesn't seem a good strategy here.

PPS: Even if everything about the human brain can be emulated, that does not constitute progress for your argument, since now you'd have to assert that AI emulates the human brain perfectly before it is complete. There is no direct connection between "This AI does not think" to "The human brain can be fully emulated". Also the difference between "does not" and "can not" is big enough here that mangling them together is inappropriate.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-12 19:23:13+00:00
Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .

The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.

This is not a "see unions are bad" example.
by jayd16 | 2025-12-12 19:23:15+00:00
Ah, you don't mean enforce a novice making a mistake, you mean ensure from a design purity perspective?

I don't think its true that you need requests to flow both ways. For example, if a downstream API needs more context from an upstream one, one solution is to pass that data down as a parameter. You don't need to allow the downstream services to independently loop back to gather more info.
by runarberg | 2025-12-12 19:23:42+00:00
I am not a fan of String Theory, but as far as fringe science theories go, String Theory is probably one of the more innocent ones. If you are going to pour money into a fringe science theory, I would much rather it goes to scientists trying to discover some properties of the universe which may or may not exist (and probably doesn’t exist; lets be honest here), than many of the awful stuff which exists on the fringes of social sciences (things like longtermism or futurism) or on the fringes of engineering (a future Mars colony, AI singularity, etc.).
by trhway | 2025-12-12 19:23:45+00:00
that is until autonomous pothole-fixers. Just the other way, looking at the Waymo driving by and with me doing small autonomy myself i was wondering what niche they leave for me, and looking at the road i thought that autonomous pothole-fixers is going to be multi-trillion business.

People writing in other comments about cost of roads, new and repair - it all will change with autonomous road paving hardware.
by spyspy | 2025-12-12 19:24:33+00:00
Treating N4 as a service is fair. I think the article was leaning more toward that idea of N4 being a database, which is a legit bad idea with microservices (if fact defeating the point entirely). My takeaway is that if you're going to have a service that many other services depend on, you can do it but you need to be highly away of that brittleness. Your N4 service needs to be bulletproof. Netflix ran into this exact issue with their distributed cache.
by echelon | 2025-12-12 19:24:50+00:00
Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored.

Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.

Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.

LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.

It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.

Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.

edit: fixed the idiom, thanks frmersdog
by barbazoo | 2025-12-12 19:25:15+00:00
> Once enrolled in Vine, Voices may request products from thousands of brands selling in the Amazon store which are shipped to their doorsteps at no cost. They then use the products and provide insightful reviews that reflect their honest and unbiased opinions - positive, neutral, or negative. Reviews of a product ordered through Vine appear in the same location as other reviews. Amazon Vine reviews are distinguished with this special badge "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" for full transparency.

Sounds like such an obvious conflict of interest to me, it's in the employees interest to leave reviews that make it more likely for someone to buy that product, what other reason could there be?
by craftkiller | 2025-12-12 19:25:44+00:00
If you go to the home depot page for torque wrenches and click the filter for drive size, you get this list:

1/2 in 1/4 in 1 in 3/8 in 3/4 in Specialty

Here is the same list in decimal to make the insanity plainly obvious:

0.5 0.25 1 0.375 0.75

What sadistic lunatic made that sort order?! It's not based on size and it's not alphabetic.
by wrathofmonads | 2025-12-12 19:26:36+00:00
Oracle’s massive bet on OpenAI might be financially risky, but its investments in AI farms could accelerate Java’s evolution for AI. While Python dominates training, inference is where the money is. Projects like OpenJDK Babylon hint at a future where the JVM becomes a serious player in AI inference.

https://openjdk.org/projects/babylon/articles/auto-diff
by atheljcarlton | 2025-12-12 19:26:45+00:00
It's dog-doo-doo. I put in my algebraic geometry final review (100's of thousands of tokens) and Gemini instantly found all the propositions, theorems, and problems that I needed in a neat list (in about 5 seconds), meanwhile ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking took 10mins before timing out and not even completing the request.