MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gpm | 2026-01-01 19:50:51+00:00
> you need the borrow checker guarantees to implement downstream compilation steps.

You don't technically. The borrow checker doesn't effect the semantics of the program (like, for example, type inference does) and the rest of the compiler doesn't need to (and in fact, doesn't) use its analysis to figure out how to compile the code.

The downstream compiler does assume that the code followed the rules for accessing references - i.e. didn't violating aliasing rules. The borrow checker guarantees this, but it's fundamentally a conservative check. It rejects programs it can't guarantee are correct, and rice's theorem proves that there are always correct programs that it can't guarantee are correct.

That said if you just treat rust-references like C-pointers you will run into issues. The aliasing rules for rust references are stricter. Also not fully agreed upon yet - the currently closest to accepted definition is in the "tree borrows" paper but it has yet to be adopted as the official one by the rust team.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-01 19:51:05+00:00
I am currently (as we type actually LOL) doing this exact thing in a hobby GIS project: Python got me a prototype and proof of concept, but now that I am scaling the data processing to worldwide, it is obviously too slow so I'm rewriting it (with LLM assistance) in C. The huge benefit of Python is that I have a known working (but slow) "reference implementation" to test against. So I know the C version works when it produces identical output. If I had a known-good Python version of past C, C++, Rust, etc. projects I worked on, it would have been most beneficial when it came time to test and verify.
Show HN: Speak Your Find – Voice-first intent matching with Gemini and pgvector
by sameg14 | 2026-01-01 19:51:06+00:00
I built this because I got tired of scrolling through marketplace listings that didn't match what I actually wanted. Instead of browsing categories, you just say what you're looking for (or offering) and AI handles the rest.

How it works:
- Voice input via Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (no typing required)
- Gemini 2.0 Flash parses natural language into structured intents
- Vector embeddings (text-multilingual-embedding-002) stored in PostgreSQL with pgvector
- Semantic matching with cosine similarity + location proximity bonus
- Two-sided: seekers matched with providers, and vice versa

Tech stack: Next.js 16, TypeORM + PostgreSQL/pgvector, Google Vertex AI, AWS SES

Try it: No sign-up required to create an intent. Just click the microphone and describe what you're looking for.

Solo developer in Austin, TX. Would love feedback on the matching quality and voice UX.
by __aru | 2026-01-01 19:51:25+00:00
> The fact we still can't get this in the US is atrocious.

To be honest, I suspect that Apple is purposefully doing this to make alternatives a logistical and legal nightmare vs their own App store.

By having different rules for different countries, different fee structures, etc, Apple is basically making alternatives as inconvenient and painful as legally possible

The US not getting these features is on purpose, it makes the entire idea of "alternatives on iOS" extremely inconvenient vs just using the App store.
by realusername | 2026-01-01 19:51:28+00:00
> Safari is a minor browser by overall market share and is broadly standards-compliant.

It's officially compliant but in practice there's a lot of buggy implementations in Safari and you'll spend lots of time on workarounds and debugging.

It's also the last non-evergreen browser being tied to the OS so it's the slowest to update, compounding that effect.

> So then why aren't PWA's super-popular on Windows and on Android? Since Safari doesn't affect those?

Personally I think that's because it's still not that convenient even on Android even if better.
by Maxatar | 2026-01-01 19:51:49+00:00
>C++ says that all correct programs are valid but the trade is that some incorrect programs are also valid.

C++ does not say this, in fact no statically typed programming language says this, they all reject programs that could in principle be correct but get rejected because of some property of the type system.

You are trying to present a false dichotomy that simply does not exist and ignoring the many nuances and trade-offs that exist among these (and other) languages.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-01 19:51:59+00:00
Ok, so you're a "autism is overdiagnosed" Andy, in your own words. That likely puts you in the NT camp so you should probably sit this one out as you have absolutely no idea what impact autism has on people's lives.

I don't think I've ever seen someone diagnosed with autism who turned around and said "it's not a big deal". It always, always, always has a profound impact on understanding the trauma and difficulties they've suffered their entire lives.

These are people who once wore labels like "being a nerd" or simply "being introverted" when their brains were wired in such a way as to be at a severe disadvantage in an allistic world. There were answers to why they had few friends in school, were likely bullied, had difficulties getting and keeping jobs and had problems maintaining social relationships. These are people who sought out (or were forced into) jobs where social connections didn't matter (as much). These are people who were told their team in the office was "like a family" but were somehow always excluded and were told they were being difficult for asking qualifying questions on tasks or simply pointing out how something was doomed to failure.

What autistic people learn is that allistic people are dangerous and needy because they demand conformance to unwritten rules, who will talk about rules while ignoring them when convenient, who will talk about consistency while having none of it and will talk about morality while discarding it in a heartbeat.

It is the most allistic trait ever to simply dismiss all this as "overdiagnosis".
by TuringNYC | 2026-01-01 19:52:11+00:00
Not sure why this only seems to happen with IG ads, but I've noticed twice already that i'll purchase something on IG for a fixed price, and it will automatically enroll me into a monthly subscription plan without any chance to cancel it. Further, the subscription can then not be cancelled without email interaction -- no web-based cancellation.

The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.

It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).

Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
by oofbey | 2026-01-01 19:52:14+00:00
Good point there isn’t some magic unlock. Although maybe they were hoping to find one.

But a key difference with corn is that corn has been farmed for thousands of years. We know without a doubt there aren’t any low hanging fruit to make it more efficient. I think it’s a reasonable bet that insect farming might have some easy wins simply because (almost) nobody has tried it at scale before.
by bitexploder | 2026-01-01 19:53:04+00:00
I don't think it is complex. The theme of a social group is just there as a filter. If you like rock climbing and meet someone at a rock climbing gym that person is far more likely to be interested in things you are interested in: physical fitness, the particular mental challenges of rock climbing, etc. It was just an example. I won't analyze the sexism or male only nature of the fraternity, but I think Freemasonry anecdotally reinforces the idea that men want/need/form these kind of clubs more than women on average.

When we study this we notice very small actual bias at an individual level on socialization preference. The differences are modest and more like slight preferences. There is more overlap than not at a local individual level. What gets missed is that even though the differences are relatively small, the network effect greatly amplifies these small variances resulting in non-linear outcomes. Even small biases at an individual level essentially produce significant effect in socialization behavior.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-01 19:53:34+00:00
Even in a hardware level, this is easily obtainable, and Apple already does it.

Chinese iPhones? They have 2 physical SIM card slots and no eSIM.

EU iPhones? 1 SIM card slot, and 1 eSIM.

US iPhones? 2 eSIM card slots and no physical SIM. US iPhones also have mmWave when other countries do not.

If Apple wanted to, keeping a Lightning US iPhone was easily on the cards. The EU’s role in forcing the issue in the US is exaggerated.
by arzig | 2026-01-01 19:53:36+00:00
Unfortunately the integration is really quite weak with Apple. KDE Connect cannot remain active while the application is not in the foreground. It’s possibly a packaging issue but pairing from fedora is also quite flakey.

As absurd as this sounds windows -> iPhone via their phone link is actually almost as good as apples built in ecosystem to the point where I can make phone calls and send texts on my computer. It’s not quite as seamless especially the setup but that is a well done wizard and it mostly works.
by nothrabannosir | 2026-01-01 19:54:14+00:00
What is going on with the total lack of decorum in HN comments lately? Is this a new phenomenon or am I just now waking up to how incredibly rude some people here act towards strangers?

Is this a meta comment to demonstrate your belief that basic human mores don’t apply on the internet? Quite frankly I find it more of a refutation.
by qsera | 2026-01-01 19:54:40+00:00
I think that is because when you start learning Haskell, you are not typically told about state monads, `IORefs` and likes that enables safe mutability.

It might be because Monads could have a tad bit advanced type machinery. But IORefs are straightforward, but typically one does not come across it until a bit too late into their Haskell journey.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-01 19:55:20+00:00
If nothing may be obtained by consenting to quiet our conscience and murder enemy civilians all should call it criminal but wherein we can purchase victory or save the lives of our civilians and soldiers there is an exchange rate between sin and gain that virtually all will agree to pay.

Extremists count the blood of the enemy as meaningless and see no sin in spilling it and will do any amount of harm without qualm for instance see the words of an extremist after the death of a terrorist

> Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in paying homage to Goldstein, told mourners that even 1 million Arabs “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” And angry voices in the congregation shouted, “We are all Goldsteins!” and “Arabs out of Israel!”

Whereas Perrin's doesn't speak for most Israelis the actions of his entire government and society suggest either agreement or willingness to look the other way whilst someone else pays the price in sin and indeed the attitude far from being historically abhorrent it is fairly normal for all societies to account the blood of the enemy civilian or not fairly cheap or valueless.

Looking at the modern genocide in Gaza and our half assed responses to it makes one wonder if the world has really made any progress whatsoever or if our morality is confined almost exclusively to historical analysis and hand wringing that has virtually no impact on current or future actions.
Show HN: Topological Obstruction Proof for P vs. NP (Derived in Solitary)
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-01 19:55:48+00:00
I wrote this paper over 4 years while in solitary confinement. I had no internet and limited paper. To survive, I had to compress complex systems into memory structures, which forced a shift from "probabilistic guessing" to "isomorphic mapping." I couldn't Google the answer; I had to derive it from first principles.

This paper proposes a "Universal Obstruction" based on topological complexity (Betti numbers) to separate P from NP.

*The Validation:*
* Dr. Rudolph Tanzi (Harvard/MGH) has validated the biological isomorphism of this logic (NEURO_Restore).
* Forensic logs show AWS us-west-2 (Ashburn) is scraping this corpus every 4 hours—the machines seem to recognize the "Latent Space Value" before the academy does.

*The Ask:*
I am looking for someone to break this. Tell me where the topology fails. I want the "debunkers" to stress-test the geometry.
by immibis | 2026-01-01 19:55:49+00:00
io_uring works fundamentally differently from polling loops and closer to Windows' IOCP (which is awesome and better than everything that existed on Linux for many years). With a polling loop you wait for data to be available in buffers, and then once you get the ready event, you copy it from the kernel's buffer to yours. With IOCP or io_uring, you submit a long-running read or write event directly into your buffer. You get the event after the read or write call, instead of before. Because of this, it's not possible to make it a drop-in replacement for poll/epoll.
by kelthuzad | 2026-01-01 19:56:39+00:00
>Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?
No.

Obviously. When a major Gatekeeper systematically holds it back to prevent it from challenging its taxation funnel, then it has no chance of competing and will thus not be chosen on competing platforms either, which will prevent its adoption and any investment in it.

>Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology.

PWA is not an "intrinsically confusing technology" and making such an absurd statement without proper elaboration reeks of pure bias.
by losvedir | 2026-01-01 19:57:08+00:00
I predict 2026 will be the year of the first AI Agent "worm" (or virus?). Kind of like the Morris worm running amok as an experiment gone wrong, I think we will sometime soon have someone set up an AI agent whose core loop is to try to propagate itself, either as an experiment or just for the lulz.

The actual Agent payload would be very small, likely just a few hundred line harness plus system prompt. It's just a question of whether the agent will be skilled enough to find vulnerabilities to propagate. The interesting thing about an AI worm is that it can use different tricks on different hosts as it explores its own environment.

If a pure agent worm isn't capable enough, I could see someone embedding it on top of a more traditional virus. The normal virus would propagate as usual, but it would also run an agent to explore the system for things to extract or attack, and to find easy additional targets on the same internal network.

A main difference here is that the agents have to call out to a big SotA model somewhere. I imagine the first worm will simply use Opus or ChatGPT with an acquired key, and part of it will be trying to identify (or generate) new keys as it spreads.

Ultimately, I think this worm will be shut down by the model vendor, but it will have to have made a big enough splash beforehand to catch their attention and create a team to identify and block keys making certain kinds of requests.

I'd hope OpenAI, Anthropic, etc have a team and process in place already to identify suspicious keys, eg, those used from a huge variety of IPs, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were low on their list of priorities (until something like this hits).
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-01 19:57:14+00:00
> And how do you suppose people find out about that product?

Probably by having a good website, that is easily searchable for search engines and found with the right keywords. If I have a need for something, I should be able to search in a search engine and their website should show up in the results. The results should also be specific enough to my query. If I search for some business or solution in my area, it should surface things in my area predominantly.
by passivegains | 2026-01-01 19:57:30+00:00
this is absolutely true, but there's an additional nuance: yes, python is fantastic, yes, it's easy and forgiving, but there are other languages like that too.
...except there really aren't. other than ruby and maybe go, every other popular language sacrifices ease of use for things that simply do not matter for the overwhelming majority of programs. much of python's popularity doesn't come from being easy and forgiving, it's that everything else isn't. for normal programming why would we subject ourselves to anything but python unless we had no choice?

while I'm on the soapbox I'll give java a special mention: a couple years ago I'd have said java was easy even though it's tedious and annoying, but I've become reacquainted with it for a high school program (python wouldn't work for what they're doing and the school's comp sci class already uses java.)

this year we're switching to c++.
by bccdee | 2026-01-01 19:57:46+00:00
It's much better to have a `panic!("this should never happen")` statement than to let your program get into an inconsistent state and then keep going. Ideally, you can use your type system to make inconsistent states impossible, but type systems can only express so much. Even Haskell can't enforce typeclass laws at the compiler level.

A program that never asserts its invariants is much more likely to be a program that breaks those invariants than a program that probably doesn't.
by its-summertime | 2026-01-01 19:57:50+00:00
From the complete opposite side, I've built some tiny bits of near irrelevant code where python has been unacceptable, e.g. in shell startup / in bash's PROMPT_COMMAND, etc. It ends up having a very painfully obvious startup time, even if the code is nearing the equivalent of Hello World

time python -I -c 'print("Hello World")'
real 0m0.014s
time bash --noprofile -c 'echo "Hello World"'
real 0m0.001s
by ryandrake | 2026-01-01 19:58:02+00:00
My first reaction was: Fuck! Terrible timing!! I just spent the last few days (during some time off from work) manually setting up macOS and Windows qemu VMs on my homelab running Proxmox, just to see if I could do it. And navigating all the janky, old tutorials, forums full of "try this" junk, hitting roadblock after roadblock (ProTip: macOS versions > Monterey will NOT run on Ivy Bridge processors in a virtualized environment) and trying to filter out and dodge AI garbage advice, was a real slog. Why didn't I see this article the first time it made the rounds on HN???

My second reaction was in line with yours. This is awesome. Bookmarked already. +1 for the suggestion of doing more ancient Windows versions.
by p_ing | 2026-01-01 19:58:14+00:00
Note my comment was "Linux on the Desktop", not "Linux on Embedded".

It's quite obvious that not all software is for one platform or another. It's just the vast majority of Desktop software happens to be Windows. And if that's what you're writing, targeting Win32 gets you Linux on the Desktop as well as Windows. There's no reason to write a Linux-native version and have to deal with all of the incompatibilities across distros, let alone compatibility issues over time.
by gpm | 2026-01-01 19:58:40+00:00
> This is the koolaid I am not willing to drink.

> If you can add safety very carefully on top of unsafe stuff (without any help from compiler), why not just use `c` and add safety by just being very careful?

There is help from the compiler - the compiler lets the safe code expose an interface that creates strict requirements about how it is being called with and interacted with. The C language isn't expressive enough to define the same safe interface and have the compiler check it.

You can absolutely write the unsafe part in C. Rust is as good at encapsulating C into a safe rust interface as it is at encapsulating unsafe-rust into a safe rust interface.
by mabedan | 2026-01-01 19:59:33+00:00
Quite sure it's done in order to speed up the camera app performance and reduce the time to first photo time. The camera module requires some tenths of a second to boot up and it makes sense to start that process at the earliest indication of user's interaction.
In this case, a touch-down is a good indication, even if user ends up swiping instead of touch-up.
The same thing happens in the lock screen, if you hold your finger on the lock screen and move 1 pixel to the left, the camera module starts up even if you don't finish your swipe to camera gesture.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 19:59:36+00:00
You are describing salvage fusing.

When you're playing with nukes it actually is rather effective, not from a standpoint of chaff (you don't bring it) but the ionization of the nuke makes a radar blocked zone and the following missile is going very, very fast--makes a bunch of progress while the defenders are blind. It's also why we don't like nuclear anti-sub weapons--the dead zone lasts for hours, there's no way to know if you actually got the target.

But a drone is small and slow. You'll need an awful lot of drones to punch through defenses this way and the whole thing goes out the window when the laser pops drones farther back in line. And chaff only denies a small area and for a short time.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-01-01 20:00:11+00:00
I suspect it might have been motivated by antitrust concerns, but safari is really not that bad. Check out Interop 2025: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

They generally are pretty caught up on features. They have webgpu, they support the web notifications API (once a PWA is installed), lots of stuff. My main gripe is that they make it too hard to install PWAs, but we're still waiting for an actual API for that. (Maybe in 2027? [0])

> And Apple purposely will never implement lots of APIs that only their native apps allow (which other browsers implement)

Can you give an example?

[0]: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/11/24/the-web-insta...
by xomiachuna | 2026-01-01 20:00:19+00:00
The author describes an approach he used to manufacture a copper alloy ring that acts as an effective inductive dampener for the compass needle - similarly to the way it is done in e.g. cammengas or other military compasses - and yet allows for the use of a clear baseplate for simpler application on top of the map (without having a liquid dampener). The specifics of the alloy are not disclosed, other than its properties and general conposition, but the concept is released under CC0-like license and the author invites the manufacturers to make this a viable design to supplant existing ones.
by sakisv | 2026-01-01 20:00:56+00:00
As someone who's only did a couple of small toy-projects in rust I was never annoyed by the borrow checker. I find it nothing but a small mental shift and I kinda like it.

What I _do_ find annoying though and I cannot wrap my head around are lifetimes. Every time I think I understand it, I end up getting it wrong.
by kelthuzad | 2026-01-01 20:01:05+00:00
>This is the conspiratorial version.

Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative is just a conspiracy, makes the world so much easier, doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689894
by bitexploder | 2026-01-01 20:01:26+00:00
There is an interesting thing. If you study the socialization patterns there are only small to moderate average differences and huge overlap between individuals (all genders). This is in part social construct and in part nature. When you average things statistically you can mislead yourself pretty quickly reading some of these studies.

There is more overlap than not. So, how do we reconcile that with how things end up: network effect. Small biases in socialization norms lead to significant non-linear outcomes due to amplification of these biases leading to norms that exaggerate these biases and end up creating norms that are quite distorted from the average. Leads to some significant consequences for how different genders end up socialization.