MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lalaithion | 2026-02-02 06:02:53+00:00
System.Object is a type of all objects, NOT a type of all types. That is, all objects are System.Object. If one has a class Foo, then every object of type Foo is also of type System.Object. But what is the type of Foo itself? Not of an instance of Foo, but Foo itself. In the languages this paper is about, the type system can recurse upon itself, allowing types themselves to have type. It’s sort of like C#’s System.Type, except System.Type is a class that holds type information for runtime type inspection, whereas the type of types in this paper is for compile-time generics that can abstract over not just types but the types of types as well.
by lmm | 2026-02-02 06:03:01+00:00
> we don’t want to write one particular arrangement of concurrent operations, but rather want to create a meta system that lets us string together arbitrary ones. Would you agree that the actor abstraction becomes useful again for such cases?

Actors are still just too general and uncontrolled, unless you absolutely can't express the thing you want to any other way. Based on your description, have you looked at iterate-style abstractions and/or something like Haskell's Conduit? In my experience those are powerful enough to express anything you want to (including, critically, being able to write a "middle piece of a pipeline" as a reusable value), but still controlled and safe in a way that actor-based systems aren't.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-02 06:03:20+00:00
We have a very nice Jotul stove that we use occasionally during winter to supplement our minisplits (e.g. when it drops to -10C or colder overnight). I've been told it's one of the best wood stoves you can buy.

But we burn Siberian Elm wood that grows (and dies) on our property, and even when the stove is working at its best ... jeez, I feel embarrassed for how much we stink up the neighborhood. Burning elm wood is just inherently nasty in terms of the smell.

It's particularly embarrassing because a lot of neighbors use pinon in their stoves and that makes parts of the village basically like walking into a cafe with the best smelling chili you've ever eaten (while remaining outside!).
by Kodiack | 2026-02-02 06:04:32+00:00
Thank you for speaking some sense. As a site operator that's been inundated with junk traffic over the past ~month where well in excess of 99% of it has to be blocked, the scrapers have brought this upon themselves.

I actually do let quite a few known, "good" scrapers scrape my stuff. They identify themselves, they make it clear what they do, and they respect conventions like robots.txt.

These residential proxies have been abused by scrapers that use random legit-looking user agents and absolutely hammer websites. What is it with these scrapers just not understanding consent? It's gross.
by walterbell | 2026-02-02 06:05:02+00:00
Products gross margin was 40.7%, up 450 basis points sequentially, driven by favorable mix and leverage.
Services gross margin was 76.5%, up 120 basis points sequentially, driven by mix.

Apple is paying 50% more for memory, yet maintaining product margin thanks to reduced royalties to Qualcomm for cellular radios and Broadcom for WiFi radio. As more Apple devices switch over Apple modems, margins will increase.

Hardware OEM competitors will likely pay >50% more for memory and continue paying full price for Qualcomm and Broadcom radio IP.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 06:06:27+00:00
If you can refute it, feel free to do so.

Meanwhile I'm just sitting here, being healthy as fuck as usual. Same shit I do every day. It's pretty boring by now. I just never get sick, that's all. I can run and work circles around you and your entire crew, and will continue to do so for decades, even as your frail body circles the drain.

Has nothing to do with my intellect, or life decisions; no, I'm clearly a total moron who just stumbled into good health by complete accident.

Or I'm lying. Obviously. (Who DOESN'T get sick, right? Unheard of among your crew.)
by mbork_pl | 2026-02-02 06:06:55+00:00
This is a really cool Emacs package (not mine) I found recently. Its purpose is to create links to objects (files and commits) on sites like GitLab, Savannah, Bitbucket, GitHub etc. (I wrote a blog post about it, too, with a little extension, though I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share it here so I won't.)
by Retric | 2026-02-02 06:08:38+00:00
Economies of scale are huge here. You can store well below -40 when you're talking food for 100 million people, that just doesn’t work well when you’re talking one person.

Of note I didn’t say a year or 2’s notice 10 years of food on hand would be fairly cheap and we currently have the surplus to hit that number quickly. And that’s for 100% replacement, most situations aren’t going to drop food production to zero giving us more time.
by KingMob | 2026-02-02 06:09:16+00:00
Sibling comment from gcr has the right details.

This doesn't involve git use at all.

Even with multiple workspaces (like git worktrees), once you use something like jjk, both the agent and jjk in the associated VS Code are operating on the same workspace, so that doesn't isolate enough. I don't think jjk uses `--ignore-working-copy` for read-only status updates, so it's snapshotting every time it checks the repo status while the agent is editing.

On top of that, throw in whatever Claude does if you "rewind" a conversation that also "reverts" the code, and agents wrongly deciding to work on code outside their focus area.

It's possible watchman helps (I need to look into that), but I'm so rarely using jj in VS Code (all I really want is inline blame), that it was easier to remove jjk than try to debug it all.

Divergence won't hide or lose any work, but it's an annoying time-suck to straighten out.
by ibegtin | 2026-02-02 06:09:24+00:00
Hi HN, I've made major progress in implementing Python lib, Iterable Data for reading and writing data files row by row in a consistent, iterator-based interface. It provides a unified API for working with various data formats (CSV, JSON, Parquet, XML, etc.) similar to csv.DictReader but supporting many more formats.

I use it extensively inside our dataset search engine Dateno and it's helpful since I had to operate with wild range of data formats and something more or less universal was really needed.

Repo: https://github.com/datenoio/iterabledata

I'd love feedback from folks who reads, converts and processes data regularly and existing tools are not ideal for these tasks!

Now I am lookng for
by jakebasile | 2026-02-02 06:09:27+00:00
> [...] [I]n the long run, choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional and communication skills.

Probably the pull quote of the (short) thing for me. It lines up exactly with my personal experience, and is probably one of the biggest overall dangers of this technology aside from mass unemployment and making my RAM cost too much.

I'm very glad that Pope Leo continues to speak about AI in such clear ways. It's obvious he and/or the Curia really get it and the costs and dangers it has.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-02 06:10:37+00:00
Why are people on hackernews downvoting this? I am not American but from what I hear from americans, this is such a genuine and proven concern that AI does end up increasing their electricty and water costs.

I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.

Personally I feel as if the problems aren't datacenters themselves (there were so many datacenters before AI) but AI datacenters in particular are really lucrative for the business but really hurtful to the average person in that area.

AI datacenters increase your electricity bill, water bill & now your ability to buy your hardware (ramflation)

Why are the demands of some billionaires preferred over the needs of the people who vote and how the mindset in many people themselves (I don't think there are billionaires reading my comment) is to be on the other side of line rather than fixing it, this whole philosophy doesn't sit right with me honestly especially within AI datacenters (I don't think that I am against normal CPU datacenters so much)
by FatalLogic | 2026-02-02 06:10:56+00:00
>I'm still on 8.5.8 (Oct 2023) - it turns out I'm actually...safer?

Notepad++ site says The incident began from June 2025.

On their downloads page, 8.8.2 was the first update in June 2025 (the previous update 8.8.1 was released 2025-05-05)

So, if your installed version is 8.8.1 or lower, then you should be safe. Assuming that they're right about when the incident began.

edit: Notepad++ has published, on Github, SHA256 hashes of all the binaries for all download versions, which should let users check if they were targeted, if they still have the downloaded file. 8.8.1 is here, for example - https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/relea...
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-02 06:13:06+00:00
> Similarly, C# does differentiate between a class and an instance of a class. Both a class and an instance are of a given type, but a class is not an instance of a class.

Incidentally one of the things I missed from Delphi in C#. In Delphi you can declare

type TWidgetClass = class of TWidget;

Then you can declare variables of TWidgetClass, and assign TWidget or any subclass to such variables, and call class methods using it, like say the constructor.

var widgetClass := TTextWidget;
var myWidget := widgetClass.Create();

After which myWidget holds and instance of TTextWidget. Very handy for factory pattern code, but also other stuff. Of course after C# got generics it alleviated some of this.
by ashdksnndck | 2026-02-02 06:13:10+00:00
Are you buying apps in the App Store or paying for digital goods (eg. signing up for streaming services) through iOS apps? Apple charges a 15-30% rent on all of that.

Apple also tracks and charges for conversions on ads for mobile games (eg. purchasing lootboxes on clash of clans) which makes them direct competitors with the other big tech ad platforms.
by edge17 | 2026-02-02 06:13:14+00:00
yea I used a lot of low price editions in college that i would order from ebay etc and would ship from india. Wow i didnt know about the ink x-ray stuff, thats pretty interesting.

what i was referring to though was generic american bestsellers, nothing black/gray market. used books feel very expensive to buy online. my guess is market capture though
Show HN: A $200 DuckDB UI VSCode extension
by cjonas | 2026-02-02 06:13:18+00:00
duckdb is my go-to data utility tool and I've wanted a first class experience in my IDE for a while now.

However, I'm a recent dad and don't have time to hack on "pet projects" as much these days.

This felt like a great project to really test what Opus 4.5 can do... but to make it more interesting, I put some additional rules in place:

1. I'd attempt to build it using a single Cursor thread to push the context management to the limit

2. I decided I was not allowed to touch the code (or really even read it beyond the inline code diffs)

It cost ~200$ and took me ~270 "user turns" over a few days (not continuous). At some point, I'm sure it would have been more efficient to move to dedicated feature threads, but I stuck out the single thread until I had built every core feature originally planned.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the outcome. I got to play "product designer / architect" and now I have a workflow that works exactly* as I wanted it to.

There are some rough edges, but overall it came together better than I would have expected. Looking back at the full transcript, I managed the self restraint to only say "WTF are you doing?!" 2-3 times :).

That said, I'm sure the code-base is an absolute disaster!

I think when the next generator of models come out, I'll cough up another 50$ to have them refactor the code so I can open the source without it burning my eyes.
by somat | 2026-02-02 06:13:58+00:00
Isn't this true of any greenfield project? with or without generative models. The first few days are amazingly productive. and then features and fixes get slower and slower. And you get to see how good an engineer you really are, as your initial architecture starts straining under the demands of changing real world requirements and you hope it holds together long enough to ship something.

"I could make that in a weekend"

"The first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time, the remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the time"
by rolph | 2026-02-02 06:14:38+00:00
you know this sounds like a dystopian storyline.

due to the vehicles recent usage:

it starts with a rental car trip, an "incidental roadrage" incident while travelling, then the surveillance and whistle blowing starts at a rest stop, and then the complete lockout from any business, lodgings, or financial dealings.

no fuel, no food no water...

i wonder how the story ends.
by addaon | 2026-02-02 06:14:40+00:00
Don't have the spec handy, but specifically binary operations combining two NaN inputs must result in one of the input NaNs. For all of Intel SSE, AMD SSE, PowerPC, and ARM, the left hand operand is returned if both are signaling or both or quiet. x87 does weird things (but when doesn't it?), and ARM does weird things when mixing signaling and quiet NaNs.
by akropp99 | 2026-02-02 06:16:40+00:00
Built a solution for this last night: credwrap (https://github.com/akropp/credwrap)

TCP client-server model. Server holds credentials (encrypted at rest with age), injects them into a pre-approved allowlist of commands. Agent calls credwrap gog gmail search ... — server injects the API key and executes, agent never sees the credential.

Features:

Tool allowlist with argument validation
Token / IP whitelist / Tailscale auth
Full audit logging
Works on Linux and macOS
Two deployment modes: run as your own user with encryption (simple), or run as a separate system user for full privilege separation (more secure).

Had the thought that this was needed, and then saw this thread, so I figured I'd share.
by anon291 | 2026-02-02 06:17:50+00:00
Nix already has a ton written in it and it works... Magically.

Gradual typing for a system like this is the proper thing to do. You can always write a static linter for sections you need tested and maybe eventually you'll be able to type nixpkgs as well.

Any solution to the nix typing problem NEEDS graduality. Nixpkgs is too large to make it possible to have one commit that fixes everything. Starting from scratch is not a realistic option either.
by acheong08 | 2026-02-02 06:18:12+00:00
It took me 4 years from learning to code and getting my first check. My writing from 4 years ago (at 16 yrs old) is extremely cringe but here's a link: https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-earned-47000-usd-as-a-high...

A lot of time has passed since then. There was a lot I didn't realize back then:

- With the money I earned + another bounty I got a year later, I was able to actually move to the UK for uni, something my parents never could've afforded

- Being known for reverse engineering was a huge factor in me getting 2 of my internships

- Having the background knowledge in cybersecurity has helped immensely for me as a software engineer for problem solving

- I am now building a startup in the cybersecurity space as a software engineer. No more relying on the good will of companies for bug bounties
by charles_f | 2026-02-02 06:19:05+00:00
Actor model is one of these things that really seduces me on paper, but my only exposure to it was in my consulting career, and that was to help migrate away from it. The use case seemed particularly adapted (integration of a bunch of remote devices with spotty connection), but it was practically a nightmare to debug... which was a problem since it was buggy.

To be fair, the problem was probably that particular implementation, but I'm wondering if there's any successful rollout of that model at any significant scale out there.
by crb3 | 2026-02-02 06:21:36+00:00
Go carefully there. Kynar tends to wilt at soldering heat. Press insulated wires together when they're still hot and suddenly they can be kissing; a 1-diameter short is easy to overlook when you're inspecting your work.

I find it worthwhile to use teflon-insulated wire here. When I'm building a prototype, the last thing I want to have to distrust is my construction.
by kaashif | 2026-02-02 06:21:49+00:00
I don't think they're being malicious. It is definitely a normal reaction to respond with incredulity at something incredible.

As in, someone was actually killed because their friend forked an open source project? There is clearly more to the story, it's not like if I forked Audacity tomorrow people would be after me immediately.

The explanation, if any, involves the whole thing being very public and 4chan harassment, etc.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-02 06:21:59+00:00
> You know what's even more important than politics? Water.

Access to water is political. If you get water from the city, the building of infrastructure delivering water to your residence is political. Whether or not that water is polluted is political. If you get your water from a well on your own property, your ownership of that land is political. None of that is achieved without group consensus, and group consensus can take all of it away from you. You are able to ignore that fact because all of those political consensuses are currently going in your favor, but the same is not true for everyone, and when it isn't true for them, they can be predicted to make noise about not having access to water for obvious reasons. They will make noise about it everywhere they can because it will be more important than anything else to them, given that it will determine whether they live or die and they need to galvanize communal support in order to reverse their fortunes.

> You seem very angry at a stranger on the internet. I think a break from thinking about everything through the lens of politics might be good for you.

My previous comment was written entirely neutrally, so I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Incidentally, I happen to live in a prosperous and stable society that I have confidence will remain secure for decades to come, so I have the privilege to ignore politics at my leisure. I am grateful for that opportunity, but I also understand how much of a privilege it is that politics are going well and not actively creating problems for me, so when other people complain about political processes creating problems for them, like the threatened invasion of their country, I listen without complaining.

I took HN as a place for rational discussion, so I made an effort to communicate to you why politics are so important to many, but in the end it seems this discussion is fruitless. If there is any emotion I feel, it is that of disappointment for wasting my time trying to discuss things logically and rather than being met with any kind of reasoned rebuttal, I get a childish dismissal the likes of which I could've gotten on Reddit, which I stopped using for that very reason a decade ago.
by mhink | 2026-02-02 06:22:11+00:00
> how do you safely let your company ship AI-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failures? Nobody has solved this yet.

Ultimately, it's the same way you ship human-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failure: by only investing trust in critical systems to people who are trustworthy and have skin in the game.

There are two possibilities right now: either AI continues to get better, to the point where AI tools become so capable that completely non-technical stakeholders can trust them with truly business-critical decision making, or the industry develops a full understanding of their capabilities and is able to dial in a correct amount of responsibility to engineers (accounting for whatever additional capability AI can provide). Personally, I think (hope?) we're going to land in the latter situation, where individual engineers can comfortably ship and maintain about as much as an entire team could in years past.

As you said, part of the difficulty is years of technical debt and bureaucracy. At larger companies, there is a *lot* of knowledge about how and why things work that doesn't get explicitly encoded anywhere. There could be a service processing batch jobs against a database whose URL is only accessible via service discovery, and the service's runtime config lives in a database somewhere, and the only person who knows about it left the company five years ago, and their former manager knows about it but transferred to a different team in the meantime, but if it falls over, it's going to cause a high-severity issue affecting seven teams, and the new manager barely knows it exists. This is a contrived example, but it goes to what you're saying: just being able to write code faster doesn't solve these kinds of problems.
by noduerme | 2026-02-02 06:22:13+00:00
I agree with you about Qatari influence. You bring up Iran's history. In the 1979 revolution, Marxists were the leading exponents in Iran, seconded by the theocrats. The Ayatollah talked a good game about reconciliation from France, until he came back and wiped the Socialists out in short order. [If you haven't read Among the Believers by VS Naipaul, check it out - it's one of the most engaging books I've ever read].

So somehow the Iranian socialists failed to see that Khomeini was a reactionary even worse than the Shah, until it was too late. So this alignment is not new, but it's still completely mind-boggling. For instance: Every progressive leftist I know in the US hates the church they grew up in, hates Christianity, hates religion. I'm an atheist myself, so I don't care about that. But then they can somehow idolize Islamic theocratic regimes that are far more totalitarian than even the rigid culture they grew up in. Why that? Ignorance, post-colonial guilt, some racist idea that brown people don't have the same thoughts and agency to rebel against bad ideas? Yeah, Qatari money in the universities is part of it, but this has been going on longer than that.

Here's a theory: They're what Hannah Arendt called, in Origins of Totalitarianism, "superfluous men", outcasts of the educated elite who are attracted to any utopian belief, no matter how murderous. The more murderous the better, actually. Because they have an unearned dissatisfaction and an unearned sense of grievance, coupled with a righteous sense of anger about things they know very little about.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 06:23:04+00:00
None of these figures, presented by any of these "authorities", can be believed. It's all fake.

The irrefutable fact is that a full 1/3 of lifelong smokers never develop any kind of cancer, period, no matter how much they smoke. Those are the ones actively breathing in deep lungfuls. People who merely happen to be in the same room or in a nearby area and smell the smoke aren't being hurt by this. At all.

You believe all the crap you've heard about secondhand smoke for the same reason you probably thought your life was in danger because I didn't wear a mask or take any shots during COVID. It's all nonsense sold to you based on fear. Happens all the time.

(Meanwhile, I never got sick, before or since. Explain that shit.)

You'd be shocked to learn how much of what you believe to be "reality" is complete fiction.

Say, while we're on the subject of Hollywood fiction...are you a big believer in the laughable idea that men went to the moon in 1969 in a giant cardboard box with mylar duct taped over it, planted a flag that waved proudly in the breeze (on video!), rode a dune buggy around and played a bit of golf, then got bored and came home, and never managed to do it again since? Please, tell me more. I want to probe the depths of your grip (or lack thereof) on actual reality.