MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neRok | 2026-02-14 15:23:45+00:00
> - Configuring the python client with a json string that did not seem to have a documented schema

I'm far from an expert, yet I came to believe that what you've described is basically "code smell". And the smell probably comes from seemingly innocuous things like enum's.

And you wondered if the solution was using Go, but no, it isn't. I was actually Go at the time myself (this was a few years ago, and I used Twirp instead of Protobuf) - but I realised that RDBMS > "Server(Go)" layer had quirks, and then the "Server(Go)" > "API(JS)" had other quirks -- and so I realised that you may as well "splat" out every attribute/relationship. Because ultimately, that's the problem...

Eg: is it a null field, or undefined, or empty, or false, or [], or {}? ...

[] == my valentines day inbox. :P
by anal_reactor | 2026-02-14 15:24:31+00:00
> Somebody who is fun to be with, who makes me feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside, who at times makes me feel safe and at other times dares me to go farther. Somebody who is willing to go to new depths of vulnerability together, so that I can trust that they see me, the whole me, even the crummy parts, and I can see them, the whole them, even the crummy parts, and be loved and accepted nonetheless.

Cool. If I had stated that I am like this, then someone else would've complained that this is overly romantic view and in reality a relationship is built with someone who can help with boring everyday tasks like doing the laundry or watching the kids. The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.

> This is transactional language.

Because all relationships are transactional. Welcome to adulthood. I don't really have time to argue with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.

> Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing.

It's strange to me that you tell me not to be transactional, but then you point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support. Also, there's a huge difference between "without a relationship, I'll literally starve to death" and "without a relationship, I'll go on holiday once a year instead of twice a year".

Something tells me that your view of relationships is incoherent at best.
by jofla_net | 2026-02-14 15:24:52+00:00
Doesnt surprise me, Seagate is marching to its own drum. My experience defiantly mirrors others' higher than average failure rate as well.

My latest 'fun' experience with them, also, came in the form of an Ironwolf drive which is 'detected' on usb-to-sata interface when plugged in, around %15 of the time. While it starts up consistently on a plain SATA interface. This makes it unusable for what I need. Again, no other drive or MFG ever fails on this usbSata, just the new ironwolf, which it appears is actually for the chineese market, but was sold on newegg, but this is not necessarily seagate's fault, nevertheless.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-14 15:25:39+00:00
Shouting fire in a crowded theater is also speech. So is publishing a highly detailed plan for anyone to kill the president and usurp power. So is child pornography. There's a long list of precedents that free speech in America is not absolute.

And this is about Europe, which has never had an absolutist view of rights to begin with. In Europe, rights are seen as intended to be balanced against each other instead of maximizing an arbitrary set of them to 100%. You have the right to free expression (except in... most countries, so let's call it a theoretical right) as well as the right to not be preyed upon. Although it's legal to distribute chemicals, some of them are highly addictive so they're restricted. Same with social media.
by pwg | 2026-02-14 15:25:43+00:00
IIRC, this was because there was significant uncertainty about whether the network exec's would cancel the show after season 4, so JMS reworked things so that 4 wouldn't end on an open-ended cliffhanger if that were to have happened.

In the end, season 5 was given the go-ahead, and so now season 4 seems rushed needlessly.
by grayhatter | 2026-02-14 15:25:57+00:00
> This is ironic since these two crowds are mostly solving the same type of problems. It's just democrats vs republicans type of split, some of it is just for show and philosophical.

This is a painfully shallow framing.

Yes, programming languages solve problems by emitting instructions that a programmable logic chip can use to preform calculations on input resulting in output. And the scaffolding you use to get there isn't just a matter of philosophical show. Rust as a first order decision will refuse to emit perfectly valid programs because it's unable to prove it's correctness. Zig will emit any program it has enough information to do so. People coding in rust off load much of the effort in understanding and proving that correctness to the compiler. In Zig that relationship is reversed, where the compiler offloads that responsibility to the programmer.

The person you responded to is correct. For some people. Rust solves the difficult and annoying problems, for others it creates difficult and annoying problems.

Some people like creating art, some people like creating software. I guess you could frame that as philosophical, but to call it a political show, belies ignorance to the interactions between systems and predispositions of individuals.
by kartoffelsaft | 2026-02-14 15:26:03+00:00
The roadblock there is a cultural one. Among Rust devs if you ever find the need for an unsafe block then you need an explanation to back it up. If anything, the Rust language would benefit from adding as much friction to unsafe code as possible, so that you're only going to use it when you actually need it.

In other words, the Rust approach to safety is to make as few unsafe LoC as possible, and the Zig approach is to make every unsafe line as safe as possible. As long as their philosophical approach to safety is such that Zig makes writing unsafe code easy and Rust avoids it as much as possible, then writing unsafe code in Zig will always be easier.
by bjoli | 2026-02-14 15:26:11+00:00
I am not sure there is much more to say. I have used an iOS device for many years and "broken and nearly useless" perfectly describes every aspect of the iOS keyboard.

I have always just suspected that it is the same as it was with the lack of t9 dialling. Everybody knew it was awful, but apple just stuck their head in the sand and asked their users to just live with it.

There are many things I dislike about iOS (most notably the settings app), but those are just intermittent annoyances but the keyboards is still so infuriatingly bad.

The reaction at work when I brought a usb keyboard to plug into my phone when I had to write something wasn't "why do you do that?". It was "I have thought about that as well. The keyboard sucks".
by piva00 | 2026-02-14 15:26:29+00:00
I think it's a general misunderstanding of Americans about other law systems, the American way of codifying laws leaves a lot of loopholes (intentionally or unintentionally) due to it being a game to be played, the spirit of the law is second to the letter of the law. They expect precise and well-defined constraints in the letter of the law.

Most European countries, and the EU as a legislative body, work with the premise of the spirit of the law. It is less precise and requires real world judgment to determine its boundaries but it can be much harder to side-step with technicalities and "gotchas" using loopholes in the letter of the law.

It's just a different system, in my opinion it's less exploitable even though it's riskier. I prefer the spirit of the law to be defended instead of a whole system of gaming technicalities, really don't like the whole vibe of playing Munchkin the USA has in its legal system. Makes some good legal drama though.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-14 15:26:36+00:00
I’m confused. The register clobbering is an issue in the compiler, not in the stdlib implementation right? Or are you saying the stdlib has inline assembly in these IO implementations somewhere? I couldn’t find it and I can’t think why you’d need it.

If it’s a compiler frontend-> LLVM interaction bug, I think you are commenting in the spot - it should go in a separate issue not in the PR about io_uring backend. Also, interaction bugs where a compiler frontend triggers a bug in LLVM aren’t uncommon since Rust was the first major frontend other than clang to exercise code paths. Indeed the (your?) fix in LLVM for this issue mentions Rust is impacted too.

I agree with the higher level points about stability and I don’t like Zig not being a safe language in this day and age, but I think your criticism about quality is a bit harsh if your source of this complaint is that they haven’t put a workaround for an LLVM bug.
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-14 15:27:16+00:00
> You either trust it or you don't.

don't see why it has to be this way. It doesn't take much to tell us what the review process is like and what gets added and what does not. If I know in advance that the blogs I submit are outside their scope, then I won't waste time submitting them.

I also don't see why there can't be an open directory of websites where the community makes decisions about what to add instead of leaving it to a single individual.
Show HN: Built and shipped an iOS app from my phone while traveling Japan
by lordokami | 2026-02-14 15:27:43+00:00
I wanted to see how far I could push remote development.

Before leaving for Japan, I configured my Mac at home to never sleep, set up VPN + SSH access, and used persistent terminal sessions so I could keep everything running remotely.

During the trip, I built and shipped a native iOS app entirely from my phone.

No laptop.
No local Xcode.
All builds triggered remotely and deployed to TestFlight.

The app itself is a lightweight Japanese travel phrase app we actually used during the trip. Fully offline. We pre-generated TTS audio and bundled it so it worked in stations, underground areas, and rural zones without connectivity.

What made it interesting wasn’t the app itself, but the feedback loop.

We would test phrases in real restaurants and train stations during the day, notice friction, tweak things that evening over SSH from a hotel or ryokan, ship a new build, and use the improved version the next morning.

It felt less like building in a simulated environment and more like building inside the exact context the product was meant for.

Happy to answer questions about the setup, tooling, deployment pipeline, or what broke along the way.

App:
https://apps.apple.com/es/app/kotomaji/id6755911289
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-14 15:27:46+00:00
Judges and juries are people with common sense, not robots you can easily trick. What did you advertise to clients? It would still be legal to host someone else's content; it would have to be clearly marked as theirs. None of this nonsense where newspapers rent out sections of their website and brand name to advertising companies (IIRC Forbes Business is this — a completely different company renting a sub–URL and sub–brand)
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-14 15:27:47+00:00
> I'm just not a fan of the legal solution because it sets precedent

The precedent for "creating a law against an ongoing problem which is bad for societies and individuals and has no redeeming qualities" was set thousands of years ago.

> I want society to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future

Unfortunately, some members of society resist that, like here. Companies have thusfar failed to eliminate the 'infinite scroll' dark pattern out of engagement and responsibility for our collective future. "Plan A" has failed. So now we try "Plan B".

This isn't to say that we shouldn't strive for everybody to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future. Just that the appeal to decency doesn't always work (e.g. here).
by kachapopopow | 2026-02-14 15:28:09+00:00
/skill:make_hn_frontpage_submission create a golf game the domain is the-golf-is-golfing.com deploy using <...> use svelte.

I don't know, it just feels so low effort when it's just "look what AI made", not a writeup of how the golf game was made, problems experienced, back and forth needed.

I know this works because I have a real /skill:create_website command that does just that, except that it only has to create dockerfile + push + kustomize apply and the domain is automatically taken care of
by braiamp | 2026-02-14 15:28:12+00:00
> "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

You can't. You don't need to specify how to comply with the law, just that generally a goal must be met. That's good lawmaking there, since it's flexible enough to catch all future potential creatives way to break it. I remember someone comment about how working at MSFT as a compliance officer, dude was going around saying that it's not the letter of the law that must be followed, but the spirit of thereof. They rolled over him and released the product nonetheless. Almost immediately came the EU investigation and that crap had to be reversed an put in accordance to what the stated goal of the law is.
by lioeters | 2026-02-14 15:28:17+00:00
It sounds like Zig would benefit from someone like you on the inside, as a member or active contributor, reviewing and participating in the development of the standard library.

Zig is one of my favorite new languages, I really like the cross-compiler too. I'm not a regular user yet but I'm hopeful for its long-term success as a language and ecosystem. It's still early days, beta/dev level instability is expected, and even fundamental changes in design. I think community input and feedback can be particularly valuable at this stage.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-14 15:28:17+00:00
It's wild to think that 4096 bytes are sufficient to play chess on a level beyond anything humans ever achieved. Makes you think what other difficult tasks are out there that take even highly gifted humans years or decades to master, but a superior algorithm would more or less fit into one of those big QR code formats.

These things always make me think back to Westworld season 2, where the finale revealed that human minds are much simpler than they themselves believe and fit completely into an algorithm that could be printed in an average book.
by sheepscreek | 2026-02-14 15:28:38+00:00
The field of medicine - pharmacology and drug discovery, is an optimized version of that. It works a bit like this:

Instead of brute-forcing with infinite options, reduce the problem space by starting with some hunch about the mechanism. Then the hard part that can take decades: synthesize compounds with the necessary traits to alter the mechanism in a favourable way, while minimizing unintended side-effects.

Then try on a live or lab grown specimen and note effectiveness. Repeat the cycle, and with every success, push to more realistic forms of testing until it reaches human trials.

Many drugs that reach the last stage - human trials - often end up being used for something completely other than what they were designed for! One example of that is minoxidil - designed to regular blood pressure, used for regrowing hair!
Ask HN: Are junior devs getting worse?
by tavro | 2026-02-14 15:28:57+00:00
i keep seeing claims that many new junior developers "can't really code" and i am curious how true that actually is from the perspective of senior engineers?

i recently started my "first" dev job (i am junior) but i have been coding since i was twelve. i still deal with impostor syndrome, but i do feel capable of building things and solving problems -- which makes me wonder if that is true for more juniors than people assume?

have you noticed any real change in junior skill levels? if yes, what is actually different? are juniors judged too harshly?

interested in honest observations, btw. :o)
by lukaslalinsky | 2026-02-14 15:29:35+00:00
There is the one issue which I fixed in LLVM, but it should be fixed in Zig as well, because the clobber list in Zig is typed and gives you false impression that adding x30 there is valid. But there is also another issue, x18 is a general purpose register outside of Darwin and Windows and needs to be marked as clobbered on other systems. And yes, look at the linked changes, the stdlib has inline assembly for the context switching.
by ebiester | 2026-02-14 15:30:16+00:00
Not true at all, having seen the other side. In a large enough organization, entire divisions will be cut if a product is missing. Sometimes productive people are on the wrong product that gets slashed to maintenance mode, or they have the wrong manager. Sometimes deep cuts are necessary because the product is failing and a productive person on a growth initiative is cut for subject matter expertise in the core product that will allow maintenance mode to continue. Sometimes tenure is rewarded. Sometimes directors don't see the full story because the managers can't be told of the layoff.
by iso1631 | 2026-02-14 15:30:52+00:00
> It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.

So they got rid of 90% of adverts, then adjusted it to get that upto 99%

Meanwhile you're saying "lets use brainwashing to get 8 year olds hooked because we might not get 100% on the first attempt"
by krapp | 2026-02-14 15:32:07+00:00
TNG isn't actually about science, though. There is precious little actual science in the series, or even the franchise as a whole. Ironically the most scientifically grounded series is TOS because they didn't have a ton of franchise tropes to lean on and actually hired science fiction writers now and then. I remember one episode where they encountered a (Romulan?) cloaking device for the first time, a major plot point was the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the fact that such a cloak couldn't be perfect - it had to vent energy somewhere, somehow - which is a degree of scientific rigor no subsequent series would even attempt. And then in another episode they fought Space Lincoln so YMMV. By the time you get to TNG any pretense at science is abandoned for "teching the tech" and inverted space wedgies and whatever nonsense Q gets up to.

That said, B5 absolutely does wear its fantasy pretensions on its sleeve, and I think you're correct about the "forward looking" versus "backwards looking" themes. The technomages are wizards with robes and mystical incantations and everything - it's explained away as "technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic" but they wouldn't be out of place in any D&D setting. Mystical prophecies, gods, demons, "light vs. dark" motifs, the Minbari being so elf-coded it's ridiculous, the Great Man heroic ideal, sacred tomes, eldritch ruins, crystals crystals crystals. All the trappings are there. Crusade went even further in this regard. The hero ship in Crusade is named the Excalibur ffs.
by jaybrendansmith | 2026-02-14 15:33:11+00:00
Disagree. I lost my job once from a toxic workplace. I did not realize at the time, but it really was, because of poor leadership. I immediately got a job at an excellent place that set up my future career. Had I not been laid off, I would have missed this opportunity. Every change is an opportunity, whether instigated by you or not. My advice now to my young self: Don't stay anywhere if you don't get promoted within 2-3 years UNLESS the place has an excellent culture.
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-02-14 15:33:37+00:00
How are they adding GPRs? Won’t that utterly break how instructions are encoded?

That would be a major headache — even if current instruction encodings were somehow preserved.

It’s not just about compilers and assemblers. Every single system implementing virtualization has a software emulation of the instruction set - easily 10k lines of very dense code/tables.
by haute_cuisine | 2026-02-14 15:34:09+00:00
At some point social networks had XMTP servers, so it was possible for users to chat across social networks as protocol supports federation. It was even possible to use iMessage as a client.

Sadly, XMTP died once platforms gained enough users. The protocol itself is quite complex because of custom extensions (XEP) and different clients supporting different set of extensions.

I wasn't able to find a good desktop/mobile experience where I looked into self-hosting the XMTP server.
Show HN: Isol8 – An isolated environment for AI agents to execute code
by masterbruce10 | 2026-02-14 15:34:13+00:00
hey, I was working on this one project which involved the llm agent to do some maths. I don't trust the direct mathing skills so I wanted it to create and execute scripts.

The issue is that I am skeptical of whether the scripts would be safe or not because of possible prompt injections. I understand we already have things like docker and VM to sort of containerize and isolate the environments but I wanted to create something that these agents would use directly. It should be efficient, spin up quickly and should be configurable.

So, I came up with isol8. Simple API, simple usage. I hope someone else finds it useful as well :P

Thanks!

// LINKS

docs - https://bingo-ccc81346.mintlify.app/
, repo - https://github.com/Illusion47586/isol8
, npm - https://www.npmjs.com/package/isol8

, skill - npx skills add Illusion47586/isol8/skill/isol8
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-14 15:34:42+00:00
> but Rust doesn't protect you from memory leaks

In theory no. In practice it really does.

> unsafe code is still unsafe

Ok, but most rust code is not unsafe while all zig code is unsafe.

> and the borrow checker and Rust's language complexity are their own kind of footguns

Please elaborate. They are something to learn but I don’t see the footgun. A footgun is a surprisingly defect that’s pointed at your foot and easy to trigger (ie doing something wrong and your foot blows off). I can’t think how the borrow checker causes that when it’s the exact opposite - you can’t ever create a footgun without doing unsafe because it won’t even compile.

> but I still believe the overall argument is correct to point to Zig specifically in the case of writing code to optimize a hotpath behind FFI; it is much easier to get to more optimal code and cross-compilation is easier to boot (i.e. to support Darwin/AppleSilicon for dev laptops, and both Linux/x64 and Linux/arm64 for cloud servers).

I agree cross compilation with zig is significantly easier but Rust isn’t that hard, especially with the cross-rs crate making it significantly simpler. Performance, Rust is going to be better - zig makes you choose between safety and performance and even in unsafe mode there’s various things that cause better codegen. For example zig follows the C path of manual noalias annotations which has been proven to be non scalable and difficult to make operational. Rust does this for all variables automatically because it’s not allowed in the language.
by foxygen | 2026-02-14 15:34:56+00:00
You know IRC isn't just one giant server serving every single user, right? Same for Mastodon. There were/are many different servers. Again, you are arguing against reality. IRCs/Forums have existed for decades, with hundreds of thousands of active users, with no problem whatsover. Scaling to billions is easy, since with more people using it, more people would be interested in hosting a server.