MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atoav | 2025-12-03 08:57:14+00:00
A big part of what makes maths hard for non-math-people is math notation. That is like if a well versed python programmer told you it is as simple as:

result = [[{"x": x, "y": y, "v": (x+y if (x+y)%2==0 else None)} for (x, y) in row] for row in data]

Now with a bit of reasoning another programmer that hasn't used python might be able to figure out what that means. But what if my audience is non-programmers? The moment they encounter the first unexplained square brackets and then an opening curly brace it will essentially feel like telling them: "Here is a riddle for you" or potentially even like "I expect you to know this, dummy".

Not that this text was particular bad in that regard, but I wish more math people had a heightened awareness of the fact that for many the hard part is not understanding the concept (e.g. fourier transformation), but the foreign looking signs mathematicians have decided to use to write them down.

That is as if someone explaines the way to the next train station to you in a foreign language. The hard part isn't understanding the way, it is understanding the noises that are supposed to make up the description.

And as a programmer who from time to time has to translate maths into discrete programs (or the other way around) the hard part was always parsing the notation and when I figured it out I was usually like: "Ohh, this is just a simple algorithm doing that.

So if you want to explain a math concept to programmers you should chose one of two routes:

(A) Stay with your notation and explain every character that isn't visible on a regular keyboard in length and gently lead the reader into being able to read the notation or

(B) let go of the notation and first explain what it does and how, e.g. for our FFT example: FFT slices your list of values into frequency buckets, figures out how much of each frequency is present, and returns those strengths as numbers. And then you can work backwards from that understanding towards your notation explaining which sign relates to which part of the concept (e.g. to the number of buckets).

I would prefer the latter, since it explains both the concept and gives the mathematician a chance to explain how and why math notation can be useful on top, e.g. to figure out certain properties of the method that may even have practical implications.
by arghwhat | 2025-12-03 08:57:35+00:00
Our regular local European vehicles are often larger, they're just safer. So no, nothing specific to the use of imported vehicles.

For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.

In custom box or pickup bed configuration (used by e.g., gardeners), these vehicles get wider (and sharper).
by ares623 | 2025-12-03 08:58:20+00:00
> maybe 5 minutes going through the PR comments and deciding they were super simple monkey work

There’s an old joke about a mechanic banging a hammer on a car and charging $1000 for it.

Man us engineers severely undervalue each other’s worth huh. One thing all this AI hype has taught me is I’ve started to be very conscious of what my value is. It’s a hard habit to break.
by yfontana | 2025-12-03 08:58:46+00:00
> In the examples given, it’s much faster, but is that mostly due to the missing indexes? I’d have thought that an optimal approach in the colour example would be to look at the product.color_id index, get the counts directly from there and you’re pretty much done.

So I tried to test this (my intuition being that indexes wouldn't change much, at best you could just do an index scan instead of a seq scan), and I couldn't understand the plans I was getting, until I realized that the query in the blog post has a small error:

> AND c1.category_id = c1.category_id

should really be

> AND p.category_id = c1.category_id

otherwise we're doing a cross-product on the category. Probably doesn't really change much, but still a bit of an oopsie. Anyway, even with the right join condition an index only reduces execution time by about 20% in my tests, through an index scan.
by kelnos | 2025-12-03 08:58:50+00:00
> But it also fits priors

I know that it's important to look at data and not rely on our own assumptions and "common sense" about things (as reality can often be surprising).

But.

Based on how kids seem to actually use their phones in class (that is, not all that much for educational things related to the coursework at hand), and based on what we know (conclusive study after conclusive study) about how by-design addictive social media and smartphone games are, it's honestly hard to take seriously the idea that smartphone use in class hasn't hurt education and test scores.

Priors matter!
by gynvael | 2025-12-03 08:59:04+00:00
I mean... you actually can do that... https://pagedout.institute/?page=commercial-prints.php

"If you would like to sell printed copies of Paged Out!, please contact us about a commercial license [...]. We're happy to work both with very small sellers who print and bind Paged Out! at home, [...]"

ETA: Though admittedly I wouldn't count on buying a yacht for money earned this way ;). Our income from "official" (lulu.com) sales are about 30-300 CHF / month, and this is only because a lot of wonderful people want to support us and get the more expensive "sponsorship" editions.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-03 08:59:21+00:00
Trade wars work both ways. So far the US export market is not doing so great. All those tariffs are raising the cost of exported goods as well. And those were already too expensive before the tariffs. If the US wants more US cars on EU roads, it needs to start making better cars. It's that simple. But in the EU, cars have to compete with domestic cheap cars and imported Korean and Chinese cars. It's a level playing field. Hence not a lot of US cars on the roads. A few Teslas (made in the EU mostly), a few Fords (some made on the VW platform), and a sprinkling of niche imports for things like muscle cars and pickup trucks. They are quite rare but you see one or two once in a while.
by lnsru | 2025-12-03 08:59:46+00:00
Would be the end different if it was another oversized car like X7, G-Klasse or Cayenne?

Edit: I am really curious why there is no real vehicle physical size tax in Germany. Let’s take reference as VW Golf. Smaller cars cost less, bigger more. I agree to pay more, but current insanity with RAMs and vans should be somehow regulated.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-03 09:00:07+00:00
> Pressure switches, flow sensors, mechanical flame detectors, power supply monitoring, watchdog timers, and XX years of Honeywell or whoever knowing what they are doing.

Nope, nothing as complicated as that. You're close with the watchdog timer.

The solenoid is driven by a charge pump, which is capacitively coupled to the output of the controller. The controller toggles the gas grant output on and off a couple of times a second, and it doesn't matter if it sticks high or low - if there's no pulses the charge pump with "go flat" after about a second and drop the solenoid out.

Do the same thing. If a sensor at the edge of the LIDAR's scan misses a scan, kill the beam.

Same way we used to do for electron beam scanning.
by enopod_ | 2025-12-03 09:01:13+00:00
That's exactly the thing. It's only about bookkeeping.

The big AI corps keep pushing depreciation for GPUs into the future, no matter how long the hardware is actually useful. Some of them are now at 6 years. But GPUs are advancing fast, and new hardware brings more flops per watt, so there's a strong incentive to switch to the latest chips. Also, they run 24/7 at 100% capacity, so after only 1.5 years, a fair share of the chips is already toast. How much hardware do they have in their books that's actually not useful anymore? Noone knows! Slower depreciation means more profit right now (for those companies that actually make profit, like MS or Meta), but it's just kicking the can down the road. Eventually, all these investments have to get out of the books, and that's where it will eat their profits. In 2024, the big AI corps invested about $1 trillion in AI hardware, next year is expected to be $2 trillion. Only the interest payments for that are crazy. And all of this comes on top of the fact that none of the these companies actually make any profit at all with AI. (Except Nvidia of course) There's just no way this will pan out.
by habinero | 2025-12-03 09:01:43+00:00
> if it was true, the system wouldn't be able to produce coherent sentences. Because that's actually the same problem as producing true sentences

It is...not at all the same? Like they said, you can create perfectly coherent statements that are just wrong. Just look at Elon's ridiculously hamfisted attempts around editing Grok system prompts.

Also, a lot of information on the web is just wrong or out of date, and coding tools only get you so far.
by n4r9 | 2025-12-03 09:02:36+00:00
Exactly what I've been worrying about for a few months now [0]. Arguments like "well at least this is as good as what humans do, and much faster" are fundamentally missing the point. Humans output things slowly enough that other humans can act as a check.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44743651
by jakozaur | 2025-12-03 09:03:24+00:00
Is it just me, or do LLM code assistants do catastrophically silly things (drop a DB, delete files, wipe a disk, etc.) far more often than humans?

It looks like the training data has plenty of those examples, but the models don’t have enough grounding or warnings before doing them. I wish there were a PleaseDontDoAnythingStupidEval for software engineering.
by crimsoneer | 2025-12-03 09:03:30+00:00
At the risk of sounding contrarian, do we have any idea what the drivers of this are? Is this actually about car design, or is it other bits?

Just as a starter for ten, is that 30% increase distributed around the US or concentrated in certain states? I can't imagine we've seen the same increase in New York than in rural Alabama (and if that's the case, how much of it is really attributable to car designs)?
by teruakohatu | 2025-12-03 09:04:18+00:00
> I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through

I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police.

Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.

Generally anyone trying this is inebriated.
by mkornaukhov | 2025-12-03 09:04:26+00:00
IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great, you don't have to search for external donation platforms and post weird links in your profile/repository.

All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
by defrost | 2025-12-03 09:06:07+00:00
Here's an example of driving "standard" historic UK rural roads:

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/b2ad/live/a20a6d...

from: 'Carspreading' is on the rise - and not everyone is happy about it - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7vdvl2531o

Throws in the term "Chelsea Tractor", in Australia in the 1980's they were called Toorak Tractors or simply Yank Tanks.
by uniqueuid | 2025-12-03 09:06:44+00:00
I'm with you regarding the argument, but want to nitpick:

"dismissing" a politician sounds like an easy fix but we probably don't want hyper-polarized dismissal wars where politicians are "shot down" immediately after being elected. That's why there are other mechanisms such as not re-electing, public shaming, transparency fora etc. ... we need to work on strengthening those, the accountability and transparency.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-03 09:06:56+00:00
The US is underwriting European security (and by extension various European welfare states).

Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?

If Europeans were serious about their sovereignty they’d have made very different choices up until now.

It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
by anal_reactor | 2025-12-03 09:07:28+00:00
This comparison is extremely silly. LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, show me Russian <-> Japanese translation software that doesn't use AI and comes anywhere close to the performance and reliability of LLMs. "Please close the castle when leaving the office". "I got my wisdom carrot extracted". "He's pregnant." This was the level of machine translation from English before AI, from Japanese it was usually pure garbage.
by s_dev | 2025-12-03 09:07:42+00:00
>This sounds like the you expect your subscription to work as an on-demand service?

That's exactly what it is.

>I'm not sure I understand you correctly,

I understand perfectly well, I don't agree with that approach is the issue.

If I paid for 11/12 months I should get 11/12 months subscription not 1/12 months. They happily just took a years subscription and provided nothing in return. Even if I fixed the outstanding balance they would have provided 2/12 months of service at a cost of 12/12 months of payment.
Show HN: YapYap – Post to X/LinkedIn without seeing the timeline (macOS)
by mehdigtb | 2025-12-03 09:07:46+00:00
Building in public doesn't come naturally to me. I overthink, stress about engagement, get lost in timelines. Tried schedulers, web blockers, willpower - nothing stuck.

So I built YapYap, a macOS menu bar app with global keyboard shortcuts: - Option+X → X compose window (no feed) - Option+L → LinkedIn compose window (no feed) - Cmd+Enter to post, and back to work

Technical approach: It uses a webview to load the native compose UI. No API calls (avoiding X's $200/month pricing), no data stored on my servers. Your credentials stay in the app's sandboxed session.

The webview detects when you navigate away from compose (after posting) and auto-closes. Next time you press the shortcut, it's already loaded and ready.

Stack: - Electron + Vite - Global shortcuts via Electron's globalShortcut API - Persistent sessions so you stay logged in - Code signed + notarized for macOS - Auto-updates via electron-updater

€5 one-time purchase, macOS only.

https://yapyap.dev?ref=hn
by usegrand | 2025-12-03 09:07:53+00:00
Hey everyone, Today I launched shipsafer.app, a vulnerability scanner for SaaS founders. It scans any deployment before it hits production and gives a full report in seconds.

This includes:

Security vulnerabilities

Configuration issues

Frontend/backend errors

SEO & performance

Cookies/compliance

27+ total checks

I built it because I’m tired of seeing founders ship “blind” and only discover issues after users complain.

If you’re curious, here’s the Product Hunt launch: https://www.producthunt.com/products/shipsafer?launch=shipsa...

And the app link: https://shipsafer.app

Any feedback, missing features, or critiques are welcome! I want to make this genuinely useful for other builders.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your own launches!
by Tepix | 2025-12-03 09:08:23+00:00
The ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum were interesting machines at the time, but man did they have crappy keyboards.

Perhaps with a decent keyboard, the ZX Spectrum could have stood a chance against the Commodore C64. The price of the ZX Spectrum was 175 £ ($306 at the time) and the Commodore cost $595. Of course, the C64 also had much better gfx and sound capabilities.
by kelnos | 2025-12-03 09:08:27+00:00
As an American, I have plenty of disappointment in government right now with my own. But it's also incredibly disappointing how many other world leaders are letting Trump roll over them.

The trade wars go both ways. Certainly it can be a bit of a collective action problem when it comes to individual countries that are smaller than the US, but the EU as a whole should be able to negotiate on even-enough footing with the US on these kinds of issues.
by Kelteseth | 2025-12-03 09:08:35+00:00
Not just them. For example, Qt self hosted cgit got ddos just two weeks ago. No idea why random open source projects getting attacked.

> in the past 48 hours, code.qt.io has been under a persistent DDoS attack. The attackers utilize a highly distributed network of IP addresses, attempting to obstruct services and network bandwidth.

https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2025-Nove...
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-03 09:08:57+00:00
Honestly, local governments should just grow a pair and say no to this kind of shit.

If the US government wants to give its soldiers perks, they can rent or loan them a local car. Probably cheaper all round than flying/shipping in their financed Dodge RAM anyway.

Then again, American personnel being arseholes to the locals is well established from Okinawa to Croughton so it's probably endorsed as a power thing.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-12-03 09:09:08+00:00
> The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.

Yeah, mentioned in a comment, driving a Ford Expedition on holiday in the US I almost hit a hit walking down the sidewalk.

It literally had better visibility going backwards in the rear view camera than it did going forwards.
by asim | 2025-12-03 09:10:13+00:00
The article is very hard to read, with ads on one side, links in every other sentence. I could not even figure out where Zig has gone... TLDR anyone?

Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why am I getting connection refused?

Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at another thread on the frontpage to find that out...
by verdverm | 2025-12-03 09:10:14+00:00
https://tangled.org/ is building on ATProto

1. use git or jj

2. pull-request like data lives on the network

3. They have a UI, but anyone can also build one and the ecosystem is shared

I've been considering Gerrit for git-codereview, and tangled will be interesting when private data / repos are a thing. Not trying to have multiple git hosts while I wait
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-03 09:11:35+00:00
This is so inspiring. It has become almost axiomatic that Martian regolith is toxic. [1] This microbe research represents a move in thinking from planetary protection (protecting us from Mars) to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), using Mars to support us. The microbe turns two liabilities — the high perchlorate ClO4 mineral content and the atmospheric CO2 — into the two necessities for a colony: building material and breathable air.

[1] References:

Davila, A. F., Willson, D., Coates, J. D., & McKay, C. P. (2013). Perchlorate on Mars: a chemical hazard and a resource for humans. International Journal of Astrobiology, 12(4), 321–325. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1473550413000189

Oze, C., Beisel, J., Dabsys, E., Dall, J., North, G., Scott, A., Lopez, A. M., Holmes, R., & Fendorf, S. (2021). Perchlorate and Agriculture on Mars. Soil Systems, 5(3), 37. https://doi.org/10.3390/soilsystems5030037

Perchlorate on Mars – Overview and Implications. (2019). (NASA Technical Report).

Perchlorate-Reducing Biofilms Open a New Avenue for Martian Agriculture. (n.d.). Current Trends in Biotechnology and Bioengineering Sciences, 1(1).

Potential Health Impacts, Treatments, and Countermeasures of Martian Dust on Future Human Space Exploration. (n.d.). Life.
by jgilias | 2025-12-03 09:12:12+00:00
It’s not about champagne. It’s about us not making anything like the Patriot air defense system. Or us not having the capabilities to command our disparate militaries cohesively without US involvement in NATO. The whole Western order has been built on the premise of US being the corner stone that ties everything together.

Thank God the French have always been suspicious about it since the Suez crisis, hence we _do_ have at least some independent capabilities.
by eschaton | 2025-12-03 09:12:12+00:00
We don’t need more software, we need the right software implemented better. That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines.

Here’s a hint: Nobody should ever write a CRUD app, because nobody should ever have to write a CRUD app; that’s something that can be generated fully and deterministically (i.e. by a set of locally-executable heuristics, not a goddamn ocean-boiling LLM) from a sufficiently detailed model of the data involved.

In the 1970s you could wire up an OS-level forms library to your database schema and then serve literally thousands of users from a system less powerful than the CPU in modern peripheral or storage controller. And in less RAM too.

People need to take a look at what was done before in order to truly have a proper degree of shame about how things are being done now.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-03 09:12:28+00:00
>The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve.

Sadly not in "our" hands. At best, some director/product owner brings it up. Executives have a nice chuckle, and they continue to outsource to anywhere else. This US industry barely wants to hire Americans to begin with at this point.

We're gonna have to divorce from big tech and push more businesses that reflect our desires if we want true change. Or collectively bargain while we have the chance. I don't know what is more likely in this community.
by Ygg2 | 2025-12-03 09:13:10+00:00
> Who would have an incentive to spend resources

That's not how threat analysis works. That's a conspiracy theory. You need to consider the difficulty of achieving it.

Otherwise I could start speculating which large NAS provider is trying to DDoS me, when in fact it's a script kiddie.

As for who would have the most incentives? Unscrupulous AI scrapers. Every unprotected site experiences a flood of AI scrapers/bots.
by nicbou | 2025-12-03 09:13:41+00:00
I provide guides and tools for people settling in Germany. My work involves putting a lot of new information on the internet. There is no training data for that. A lot of it happens IRL and is captured by infrastructure and connections that I have built myself. It requires knowledge and empathy that are not in any LLM datasets.

It’s tech, but not everyone in tech is a coder. The industry is bigger than big tech and SaaS.
by baq | 2025-12-03 09:14:04+00:00
> a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system

having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.

> code navigation simply in a web browser

this is nice indeed, true.

> You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly.

if only. GHA are a hot mess because somehow we've landed in a local minimum of pretend-YAML-but-actually-shell-js-jinja-python and they have a smaller or bigger outage every other week, for years now.

> why developers like it so much

most everything else is much worse in at least one area and the most important thing it's what everyone uses. no one got fired for using github.
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-03 09:14:24+00:00
> In that case JS is not colored either because an async function is simply a normal function that returns a Promise.

Exactly, IMHO at least, JS doesn't suffer from the coloring problem because you can call async functions from sync functions (because the JS Promise machinery allows to fall back to completion callbacks instead of using await). It's the 'virality' of await which causes the coloring problem, but in JS you can freely mix await and completion callbacks for async operations).