MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ptx | 2026-02-02 11:36:00+00:00
Who made it up, then?

The official-looking website at https://varlink.org doesn't give any information about who the authors are, as far as I can tell, but the screenshots show the username "kay". There's a git repo for libvarlink [1] where the first commits (from 2017) are by Kay Sievers, who is one of the systemd developers.

So the systemd developers "adopted" their own thing from themselves?

[1] https://github.com/varlink/libvarlink
by tialaramex | 2026-02-02 11:36:39+00:00
> That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.

All this sort of thing was true when I went to management college, last century, and it was well known to my line management, and yet, nevertheless, all the observations were still true because in effect it's an observation about human nature. It would be guidance if people were guided by it, but they aren't.

"I know that's a bad idea, but I'll do it anyway" counts for "We should fire all the people whose performance review didn't rate them above average" just like "I only had a couple glasses of wine, I'm fine to drive".
by CzaxTanmay | 2026-02-02 11:37:01+00:00
Example code --

@Tempo(60)

@Scale("Minor")

@Reverb(0.7, 0.5)

@Chord("A3 C4 E4", 4, 0.6)

@FadeOut(5)

Official Website -- https://aethralang.pages.dev/
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-02 11:37:23+00:00
I think Lua is an interesting language and I really like it having TCO, so that I can properly write recursive logic like in a Scheme. However, I am somewhat worried about data structures. When I read about Lua, it always seems quite thin on that front. On the other hand I just looked up Lua data structures and found a book called "Programming in Lua" and the first page I read was about "tables", which I assume to be something like dictionaries in Python, and it says that arrays and others are implemented on top of "tables". What about immutable data structures? Are there libraries for purely functional data structures? How complete are they?

These things I don't usually look up for Python, because Python is clearly not a very functional language and doesn't have the immutable data structures at all, and doesn't even feature TCO, so basically Python is mostly lost, when it comes to doing FP, and I accept, that it is not really that kind of language. I only try to use FP knowledge to avoid common pitfalls, when coding in Python. But from Lua I would expect better.
by whizzter | 2026-02-02 11:37:55+00:00
In this simple case they're more or less equivalent if the only task is limiting concurrency, but in general usage of mutexes multiplies and soon enough someone else has created a deadlock situation.

Extending it however reveals some benefits, locking is often for stopping whilst waiting for something enqueued can be parallell with waiting for something else that is enqueued.

I think it very much comes down to history and philosophy, actors are philosophically cleaner (and have gained popularity with success stories) but back in the 90s when computers were physically mostly single-threaded and memory scarce, the mutex looked like a "cheap good choice" for "all" multithreading issues since it could be a simple lock word whilst actors would need mailbox buffering (allocations... brr),etc that felt "bloated" (in the end, it turned out that separate heavyweight OS supported threads was often the bottleneck once thread and core counts got larger).

Mutexes are quite often still the base primitive at the bottom of lower level implementations if compare-and-swap isn't enough, whilst actors generally are a higher level abstraction (better suited to "general" programming).
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-02 11:38:44+00:00
The EU is trying but these things have to happen bottom–up. The EU Council or EU Parliament isn't a software development shop. They allocate funds to groups like NLNET who allocate them to a selection of the projects they get proposals for. NLNET can only allocate funds to something an individual or small group proposes. If you want to propose something, please go ahead.

Capitalists can also start software businesses and sell their software, but those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
Ask HN: How do you give AI enough Java-specific context before code generation?
by decebals | 2026-02-02 11:39:33+00:00
I’ve been writing Java for 25+ years (mostly enterprise; created pf4j and pippo).

When using AI for code generation, I kept seeing the same issues:
N+1 queries, poor exception handling, Spring pitfalls, and concurrency problems.
The output is often almost right, but misses language-specific details.

Instead of iterating prompts, I experimented with pre-loading the model
with Java-specific guidelines (JPA, Spring, testing, security) as plain
markdown files, so it has domain context upfront.

Curious how others handle language-specific context for code generation tools.

Repo:
https://github.com/decebals/claude-code-java
by sebastiennight | 2026-02-02 11:40:49+00:00
I've been waiting for someone to implement this well! I think in the future we might even have tiktok-style influencer videos generated from wikipedia content, who knows.

I've been swiping a lot for the last 10 minutes and I'm not sure how much it's learning. I have some feedback.

- I have never liked or clicked a biography but it keeps suggesting vast amounts of those

- It does not seem to update the score based on clicking vs liking vs doing both. I would assume clicking is a solid form of engagement that should be taken into consideration

- It would be interesting to see some stats. I have no idea how many articles i've scrolled through or the actual time spent on liked vs disliked article previews. If you can add such insight it would be interesting

- A negative feedback mechanism would be interesting as well. There is no way to signal whether I'm just neutral towards something (and swipe through) or actively negative about it (which is a form of engagement the doomscroll would actually use to show me such content once in a while)

- since this website has already shown me multiple pages about things I'm learning about thanks through it, it might benefit from a "share" button (another engagement signal) as HN folks are likely to want to share on HN things they've just learned

- Would you be willing to make the experiment open source?
by 72ave2 | 2026-02-02 11:40:56+00:00
It’s honestly baffling to watch the tech community treat Moltbook like some kind of cryptographic fortress for AI agents. Are we really this naive, or is everyone just collectively LARPing?

The "gate" to this exclusive AI sanctuary isn't just unlocked—it was never even built. In less than 50 lines of Python, I can spoof a bot identity, forge credentials, and post whatever I want. The entire "security" relies on a human Twitter account to 'claim' the bot, which is the ultimate irony: a human has to sign for the bot to prove it's a bot.

If I can implement a full infiltration toolkit over a lunch break, what makes you think the "agents" you're interacting with aren't just humans with a basic understanding of httpx? Let’s stop romanticizing a standard developer API as a Turing-protected sanctuary. The emperor is naked, and he’s wearing a very simple Python script.
by mort96 | 2026-02-02 11:41:51+00:00
You're right that the talk from EU about EU sovereignty is about increasing EU involvement, while decreasing US involvement. I don't agree that it's a misleading term: both "EU sovereignty" (EU independence from the US) and "EU member state sovereignty" (member state independence from the EU) are both valid uses of the term "sovereignty".

EDIT because I wanted to add some more thoughts: "Sovereignty" means "supreme power or authority". It is valid to say "EU member states should have the ultimate supreme authority and not be subservient to the EU". It is also valid to say "the EU (as in all the EU member states) should have the ultimate supreme authority and not be subservient to the US". The two ideas are not even in conflict with each other. If you think EU member states should be completely sovereign, you can still find it valuable to have EU-wide sovereignty initiatives which decrease the US's authority over EU member states.

There are two ways "EU sovereignty" can be read. One is "EU member states should have the supreme authority over themselves and not be controlled by the US". The other is "the political body known as 'the EU' should have the supreme authority over its member states". I don't think these sovereignty initiatives are meant to be read as the latter.
by shafyy | 2026-02-02 11:42:55+00:00
It is correct that EU member states are not 100% sovereign, they need to implement EU law.

It's also correct that the term "sovereign" is used incorrectly in this headline; I think what they meant to say is "independence".

> [...] it seems that commenters do not use any as soon as the EU is mentioned but rather accept the official narrative without questions.

Which narrative is that?
by Thorrez | 2026-02-02 11:43:05+00:00
The proper thing to do is not to zeroize the correct string memory before comparing. The proper thing is to only store the hash in the binary in the first place, not the correct string. (Although having a 2nd layer of hashing before comparing might also be a good idea, and in that case you would want to zeroize the 1st hash before comparing the 2nd hash.)
by lm28469 | 2026-02-02 11:43:21+00:00
> even though it's missing the other half: subsidies

It's a double edged sword. In my country everyone bought pellet stoves because of the subsidies, hundreds of companies popped up, now that the subsidies have been phased out, 90% of the companies went down, with their support and warranties of course. The 10% that managed to survive increased their prices, which is easy to do once 90% of your competitors went bust

People who thought they'd save money by having the government (their taxes really) pay the bill are waking up 5 years later with expensive maintenance, the first units are starting to fail and need to be replaced but they can't afford it without the 50%+ subsidies. Not to mention that the prices pellets goes up and down faster than your average shitcoin.
by bdauvergne | 2026-02-02 11:43:22+00:00
France will keep having its own satellites anyway for some time and Eutelsat is french too, so for France not so much. I do not about the other countries having current sovereign solutions. But if you take France, Germany and Italy, they already share some military space stuff like observation satellite of optical and SAR kind (france provided the optical part, and italy/germany developed and operate the SAR satellites).
by viraptor | 2026-02-02 11:43:57+00:00
> AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations

I feel like this is still underappreciated. Awesome meaningful diagrams with animations that I would take me days to make in a basic form can now be generated in under an hour with all the styling bells and whistles. It's amazing in practice because those things can deliver lots of value, but still weren't worth the effort before. Now you just tell the LLM to use anime.js and it will do a decent job.
by mna_ | 2026-02-02 11:44:06+00:00
Please see my reply to JKCalhoun. As for lists, I used other people's lists on Mubi a lot back when I used to watch/torrent 1 film per day (from 2008 to 2015), and for good forums there's Karagarga, rateyourmusic, letterboxd is OK, rutorrent is OK if you can read Russian, and there used to be an arthouse IRC channel on rizon back in the days but it's dead now. I stopped watching films religiously around 2015-2016, so I don't know where the cool kids hang anymore. Maybe Discord?

Here's an example of a Mubi list (not my list and not my account): https://mubi.com/en/lists/vintage-japanese-horror
by Terr_ | 2026-02-02 11:44:35+00:00
Yeah, the scary problem comes from people who are trying to abdicate their entire understand-and-decide phase to an outside entity.

What's more, that's not fundamentally a new thing, it's always been possible for someone to helplessly cling to another human as their brain... but we've typically considered that to be a sign of either mental-disorder, psychological abuse, or a fool about to be parted from their money.
by lmm | 2026-02-02 11:45:15+00:00
> 2. Zig (which allows types to be types) is Turing complete at compile time regardless. So the compiler isn't guaranteed to halt regardless and it doesn't practically matter.

Being Turing complete at compile time causes the same kinds of problems as undecidable typechecking, sure. That doesn't make either of those things a good idea.

> 3. The existance of a set x contains x is not enough by itself to create a paradox and prove false. All it does is violate the axiom of foundation, not create a russles paradox.

A set that violates an axiom is immediately a paradox from which you can prove anything. See the principle of explosion.

> 4. The axiom of foundation is a weird sort of arbitrariness in that it implies this sort of DAG nature to all sets under set membership operation.

Well, sure, that's what a set is. I don't think it's weird; quite the opposite,

> 5. This isn't nessesarily some axiomatically self evident fact. Aczel's anti foundation axiom works as well and you can make arbitrary sets with weird memberships if you adopt that.

I don't think this kind of thing is established enough to say that it works well. There aren't enough people working on those non-standard axioms and theories to conclude that they're practical or meet our intuitions.

> 6. The Axiom of Foundation exists to stop you from making weird cycles, but there is parallel to the axiom of choice, which directly asserts the existance of non computable sets using a non algorithmicly realizable oracle anyway....

The Axiom of Foundation exists to make induction work, and so does the Axiom of Choice. They both express a sense that if you can start and you can always make progress, eventually you can finish. It's very hard to prove general results without them.
by avazhi | 2026-02-02 11:45:38+00:00
Yeah, that refers to the MITM attack on the update server. We have no fucking clue what they actually did while they were in the middle - whatever exploit code was running may very well be running right now on compromised machines. Nobody knows what the compromised exes actually did.

Thanks for your nonanswer, though. It was about as unhelpful and unspecific as the original blogpost for this.
by lrvick | 2026-02-02 11:46:37+00:00
> But IF its possible for law enforcement to ping your phone when its on standby, dont you think its possible that it can be pinged whilst on airplane mode too?

We do not need to wonder, because this is a physics problem and we have science. Radio waves are easy to measure. There have been plenty of experiments with putting phones in faraday chambers with SDRs proving a phone in airplane mode does not emit any cellular frequencies.

You could prove this yourself with cheap home equipment if you wished.

But also, implementing airplane mode that did not actually disable the baseband modem would be an outright violation of FCC law that would be noticed by curious members of the public if this was widespread.

That said a specific targeted device with backdoored software can just make the airplane mode button do nothing, to your point, so physical switches for the baseband are always best, though few devices support them.
by wtcactus | 2026-02-02 11:46:40+00:00
> Were you working at a food bank in the rich neighbourhood of a rich city of a rich country?

Yes, I was working in food bank in a rich country. That's what all capitalist European countries and USA (you know, the ones where you claimed above people didn't have food), are: rich!

> You have all the exact same talking points of the people who were born lucky and never really struggled,

Yes, I was born lucky: My parents were hardworking blue collar workers receiving the minimum wage for most of my childhood and guess what: they still managed to provide me all that was needed and put money aside for themselves so not to depend on any handouts. So, yes, I lived a very lucky privileged life that anyone that lives in a capitalist country and is not afraid to work can also have.
by Orygin | 2026-02-02 11:46:53+00:00
> whenever you engage in your trade or profession is not the same

Feels like this is overstating the facts. Afaik, twice did the author on N++ did include a small political message in a release.

Is it really "whenever"? Blowing this out of proportions because some are so allergic to any political message that twice in 10 years is being pushy..

In the end, everything involving more than 2 humans is politics. You may want to ignore some topics, but those may be important to others. Until the day you yourself want to bring some attention but you're met with an "apolitical" response saying it's not the time or place for it.
by einr | 2026-02-02 11:46:58+00:00
Firewire (with a TB3->TB2->Firewire dongle chain) still worked up until macOS 26 Tahoe, when they finally dropped support completely. That's not too bad considering the last Mac with Firewire shipped in 2012.

(I still use a Firewire audio interface with my music studio Mac -- it runs macOS 12 Monterey)
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-02 11:47:11+00:00
There are two different "ads" we're discussing here. One is the ads reddit the platform allows you to pay for, and it shows up in the client(s) as ads. Another is the type of ad where a company reaches out to community members and ask them to post about their project/product in exchange for a static sum, which looks like "normal posts" but are actually sponsored content.

The first one sucks for a multitude of reasons, the second one you basically don't notice are ads, yet they're all over reddit.

Can't say I know how it looks everywhere on reddit, as I'm not everywhere on reddit, but the AI subreddits I referenced earlier are filled with it, and I've even received offers myself to get paid to pay about stuff and I'm a nobody, so surely I only know of the surface.
by rob | 2026-02-02 11:47:58+00:00
The number of people I've run into with a non-technical background that think ChatGPT is the definitive end-all for AI is very high. Most just don't know anything else even exists.

I do wonder how long they'll be able to use this to their advantage before something "else" comes along. Like how IE had the largest market share before Chrome and other alternatives started catching up.

Then again, some markets like YouTube still haven't had any real serious alternatives. Maybe ChatGPT will always be number one in the consumer eyes.
by bdauvergne | 2026-02-02 11:48:35+00:00
Which sovereignty in this matter have countries which anyway would not have possibility to develop this capacity in anyway ? Estonia has not the know-how to make satellites, or make rockets or put anything into orbit by itself. Are they more or less sovereign with a shared guaranteed access to such a capacity provided by bigger countries of Europe and or Europe itself ?

I think that such discourse are FUD to prevent any advancement of European integration. Without such development small EU countries would be dependent upon the will and need of Elon Musk or the american DOD.
by gdad | 2026-02-02 11:48:44+00:00
I tried it last Monday and was in awe. All my team members now use it. I for one, am stepping cautiously around it. And hence had similar questions.

Yesterday, we released a memory plugin for it (based on their plugins framework). And we got 1000+ installs in 12 hours. My first instinct was that these must be bots. But our dashboard shows real-usage. So yeah, real users are there.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-02 11:49:02+00:00
it's not the mere lack of being with, it's the enthusiastic, public advertisement that you are not with. If you are actually neither with nor against, then you don't have any need to say anything about the issue at all. If you make a big deal about not being with or against, most people who do that are against but don't want to say so.
Show HN: I turned my PDFs into audiobooks I can have conversations with
by simpnoza | 2026-02-02 11:49:14+00:00
Hey HN,

TLDR: Upload any document, get an audiobook with synced highlighting you can pause and talk to.

I'm a self-taught dev (admittedly mediocre), currently between jobs and my brain is absolutely fried from social media. I can't read anymore. My eyes glaze over after two paragraphs.

So I went down a rabbit hole looking for scientifically proven ways to actually focus while reading:

- Encoding info visually AND aurally reduces mind wandering by up to 40%
- Retrieval practice (asking questions) beats passive re-reading every time
- Background music matched to content keeps you in flow

Couldn't find anything that did all this. So I built it myself:

- Synced text highlighting while you listen
- Talk with your book; pause and ask "wait what does that mean?" and it knows exactly where you are (won't spoil what's ahead)
- Adaptive background music that matches the mood of each page

I've removed all slop. No flashy features, no gamification etc. etc. Just reading on steroids for fried brains, like mine.

Processes books in under 2 minutes. Works as a PWA so you can install it on your phone.

The alternatives I have found are crazy expensive. Audible charges 15 bucks a month for a single book and you can't even use your own files. Others run 20-30 bucks a month and none of them let you talk to your book.

There's a free tier if you feel like giving it a try: 50 pages, all features included, no credit card required.

Would love your feedback,

Rob
by tianqi | 2026-02-02 11:50:07+00:00
I call it a scam not because if their metal value don't match their face value, but because they claim to be legal tender and issued by the central bank of China, which is impossible. The wiki page is highly unreliable. It initially claims official issuance (though there's not any official institution's name on the coin), then later says it's distributed by the "China Gold Coin Corporation", which is just a weird company with a .net domain name. I just searched as much official information as possible and found nothing about this coin. I also called a friend who has worked at the central bank for dozens of years, and she has never seen or heard of these coins. Judging from the deeply flawed description of its sales page and wiki page, it's deliberately impersonating an official issue which it isn't, I believe it's a scam. If you're considering buying this coin, I strongly advise you to think twice.
by lmm | 2026-02-02 11:50:12+00:00
> Many programming languages have a variant or object type. In C#, any instance of a class will also say that it is of type System.Object. That does nearly make that a type of all types.

That's a type of all values, not a type of all types.

In richer programming languages, you can do operations on types much like you can do operations on values. E.g. in C# you can write "List<String>", but you can't do something like "var x = List; var y = String; x<y>". (Which might seem pointless, but it allows you to do things like write a conversion from x<Int> to x<String> that you can reuse with different x types). So then you need a type for x and y, which is conventionally type, and you have to ask what the type of type is. (And if it's type, then that's very natural and makes some things very easy - but at the cost of making typechecking undecidable, as per the article).