MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hutao | 2026-02-06 19:20:29+00:00
A great way to understand monads is as a "design pattern," because they pop up extremely often in practical programming. Consider functions with a type signature that looks like `A -> T<B>`, such as `A -> Promise<B>` or `A -> Optional<B>`.

If you have some function fetchResponse that returns a Promise<Response>, and a function processJSON that takes a Response as an argument, you cannot compose them the usual way, as `processJSON(fetchResponse(x))`. Instead, you need to do `fetchReponse(x).then(processJSON)`, and the entire expression has to return another Promise. Ditto for functions that return an Optional.

All data types that implement this design pattern have the structure of a monad. A monad consists of a generic type that is "covariant" in its type parameter (such as Promise or Optional), a way to embed a singular value into the data type, and a "then" method to compose the data type with a callback. Lists also implement the monad design pattern, and the "then" method for lists is flatmap. A monad basically lets you compose functions with a type signature that looks like `A -> T<B>`.

Furthermore, each of these data types (Promises, Optionals, Lists) can be viewed as the output of some computation. Promises are produced whenever a function performs asynchronous IO, Optionals are produced when computations may return some "null" value, and Lists are returned if an algorithm may produce multiple solutions.

Just like Promises have async/await syntactic sugar, similar syntactic sugar can be devised for other "monadic" types. For Optionals, the equivalent of async/await is null propagation (some languages have a `?` operator for this). For Lists, the equivalent of async/await is list comprehension, which "picks" each element from the list to build up a new list. Async/await, null propagation, and list comprehensions all have the same underlying structure, called a "monad."

A "free monad" is a monad that does not implement any specific computation, but instead builds up an abstract syntax tree that needs to be interpreted. Free monads are useful because other monad instances can be implemented in terms of the free monad.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-06 19:21:05+00:00
It's also important to note that in Haskell and other functional programming languages, there is no implied order of operations. You need a Monad type in order to express that certain things are supposed to happen after other things. Monads can also express that certain things happen "in between" two operations, which is why we have different kinds of Monads and mathematical axioms of what they're all supposed to do.

Outside of FP however, this seems really stupid. We're used to operations that happen in the order you wrote them in and function applications that just so happen to also print things to the screen or send bits across the network. If you live in this world, like most people do, then "flatmap" is a good metaphor for Monads because that's basically all they do in an imperative language[1].

Well, that, and async code. JavaScript decided to standardize on a Monad-shaped "thenable" specification for representing asynchronous processes, where most other programming languages would have gone with green threads or some other software-transparent async mechanism. To be clear, it's better than the callback soup you'd normally have[0], but working with bare Thenables is still painful. Just like working with bare Monads - which is why Haskell and JavaScript both have syntax to work around them (await/async, do, etc).

Maybe/Either get talked about because they're the simplest Monads you can make, but it makes Monads sound like a spicy container type.

[0] The FP people call this "continuation-passing style"

[1] To be clear, Monads don't have to be list-shaped and most Monads aren't.
by uecker | 2026-02-06 19:21:18+00:00
C compilers can emit SIMD instructions just fine and often have extensions to support writing it explicitly. Also few other languages have explicit support for them from the start and most have added them as some kind of extension later. So the idea that this is some fundamental computer architecture thing C got wrong seem pretty far-fetched. Support for multi-core processing would be a more plausible thing to look at, but even there it seems that C still does quite well.
by daleseo | 2026-02-06 19:21:29+00:00
That's a great question! Once you install the skills, they activate automatically based on your prompt.

Here's how it works: each skill has a description with trigger conditions, like "use when designing a GraphQL schema" or "use when writing GraphQL queries." The agent reads these at startup and loads the full instructions whenever it detects a relevant task. So, if you ask it to "design a schema for users and orders," it will automatically pull in the graphql-schema skill.

Some agents, like Claude Code, also support explicit slash commands if you want to invoke a skill directly, but that's not necessary.
by m132 | 2026-02-06 19:21:36+00:00
> Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux.

Not true. There are increasingly more cases where Windows software, written with Windows in mind and only tested on Windows, performs better atop Wine.

Sure, there are interface incompatibilities that naturally create performance penalties, but a lot of stuff maps 1:1, and Windows was historically designed to support multiple user-space ABIs; Win32 calls are broken down into native kernel calls by kernel32, advapi32, etc., for example, similar to how libc works on Unix-like operating systems.
by chickensong | 2026-02-06 19:21:40+00:00
It's a lovely idea of course, and I applaud anyone who manages to make progress in this area, but my condolences to all the others that have tried and failed. Perhaps the enabling tech could be improved, but we've had LDAP and the like for decades, and many orgs simply can't/won't build the business around the tech.

IMHO, the main issues are cultural, and culture change is hard once an org is established. Even new companies will face issues, because business culture at large gets carried forward through people and interactions. Good luck getting execs to learn and conform to anything, they're too busy emailing confidential Microsoft Office docs to unauthorized third parties.

Computers have the ability to provide wonderful features like transparency and accountability to orgs and business processes, but just like security, we typically choose not to invest in those areas unless forced. Perhaps AI will enable some change by providing a generic interface that brokers interactions between humans and the organization itself, analyzing all inputs before forwarding to a destination.
by compiler-guy | 2026-02-06 19:21:46+00:00
The author's fixes based on the slop are good, because he knows the issue is slop and therefore can improve and fix the sloppiness.

Ignoring AI for a moment: I don't expect anyone to be able to write a design-doc from my own random notes about a problem. They are semi-formed, disconnected ideas that need a lot of refinement. I know that and I have plans around them and know much more context, but if some random person were to take them the outcome would be very bad, or at least require a lot more effort.

A random person has very little chance of being successful with that.

This issue is very similar, only with some AI tools intermediating the notes.
by tptacek | 2026-02-06 19:22:00+00:00
The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.

It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.
by cryptonector | 2026-02-06 19:23:32+00:00
If Cuba's government had created prosperity when they had the chance then they wouldn't be experiencing this crisis right now. They had a decade plus of no economic blockade from the U.S., and still they squandered the opportunity. They had 6+ decades of subsidies from their friends (minus a brief period following the fall of the USSR), and still they squandered that. This is because Cuba's government does not want prosperity for its citizens (subjects) for whatever reason (probably because they would be harder to keep down), and instead preferred to live off the largesse of the USSR (later Russia), Venezuela, and Mexico.

There is no world in which that is OK!
by cluckindan | 2026-02-06 19:24:18+00:00
”Because we don't experience reality through language but direct sensory perception”

That statement is patently false. We know that language influences our senses to a degree where we are unable to perceive things if our language doesn’t have a word for it, and will see different things as being equal if our language uses the same word for both.

There are examples of tribal humans not being able to perceive a green square among blue squares, because their language does not have a word for the green color.

Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors.
by almosthere | 2026-02-06 19:24:21+00:00
He was able to show all the evidence David had. The evidence had to be leaked out of the government of MN because it was silent whistleblowers that had been turned down after doing internal investigations. The government of MN may be complicit in all of this. It could be that they were trying to be anti-racist, which is why a lot of the fraud is specifically being performed by Somalians. But it can also be pay for vote fraud - where the leaders of the Somalian communities tell everyone who to vote for, and they are doing this because Walz (or some other people) are shielding the daycares from being shut down.

There is literally nothing wrong with stating this, we ought not be political about this. There may also be conservatives being elevated from Fraud as well, all of it should be routed.

At this point it definitely warrants deep investigations, not more articles trying to destroy a 23 year old that went viral.
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-06 19:24:34+00:00
> The driver acknowledged he knew she was drunk, and that he didn't get explicit consent.

Lots of riders are drunk; it's evidence of nothing. Are you in effect saying the driver admitted to raping her?

> Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride

Irrelevant. Numerous rides could be flagged as high-risk without any incident. I am not excusing it, just saying that it doesn't in itself prove rape. As for security measures, the sensible thing is to not allow such matches at all.
by mananaysiempre | 2026-02-06 19:24:41+00:00
Right, by “file system” here I mean all of the layers between the application talking in terms of named files and whatever first starts talking in terms of block addresses.

Also, as far as my (very limited) understanding goes, there are more architectural performance problems than just filters (and, to me, filters don’t necessarily sound like performance bankruptcy, provided the filter in question isn’t mandatory, un-removable Microsoft Defender). I seem to remember that path parsing is accomplished in NT by each handler chopping off the initial portion that it understands and passing the remaining suffix to the next one as an uninterpreted string (cf. COM monikers), unlike Unix where the slash-separated list is baked into the architecture, and the former design makes it much harder to have (what Unix calls) a “dentry cache” that would allow the kernel to look up meanings of popular names without going through the filesystem(s).
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 19:24:47+00:00
Big Pharma and foreign megacorps have deep clutches in almost every industry in almost every poor and developing nation.

e.g., India's huge e-Commerce industry is controlled by and dominated by 2 US giants: Amazon and Walmart (which acquired India's biggest e-commerce platform Flipkart, and then threw out its founders (Bansal Brothers)).

e.g., India's automobile industry is dominated by foreign heavyweights: Toyota, Volvo, Hyundai, Suzuki, Mercedes Benz, etc.

e.g., American Big Pharma companies controlled significant volume of Indian agriculture. e.g., Monsanto and PepsiCo owned patents in GM seeds that allowed them to control India's lucrative Cotton and Potato agriculture. They got this control by systematically dismantling India's native seed breeds in these vital rich crops, and then hybridising the best of those seeds and getting patents on them, so the Indian farmers were forced to buy these GM seeds.

e.g., PETA (an NGO) lobbied and used powerful lawyers in courts, to get bans done on traditional cattle festivals in India : Jallikattu (Tamil Nadu state), Kambala (Karnataka state), and Maramadi (Kerala state). The reason for this was ulterior. India's native cow breeds produce A2 milk protein, which is missing in many foreign cow breeds. Unable to compete with India's high-quality nutrient-rich cow milk, the Western powers-that-be got their puppet PETA to ban the traditional Indian cattle festivals that had been in vogue since many centuries as competitive and comparitive ways to identify and breed best specimens of bulls and cows. Thankfully, mass protests by Indians overturned these bans.
The same PETA and its alliee have been instrumental in getting court-imposed bans done on Indian festivals : kite flying, Holi, Diwali crackers bursting, etc. Their aim is to obstruct and destroy Indian culture and traditions, so Indians will move away from their ancient traditional roots and become converts of Western religions and consumers of Western products/ideologies (e.g., clothes, festivals, entertainment content, etc.).

This is why Trump tried to impose 500% tariffs on India, because India's PM (Modi) refused to allow American/Western companies to get more deeper clutches and control on India's vital industries: agriculture, diary, food, etc.

It is a war for India's future. And powerful forces (such as Bill Gates, George Soros, egc.) are arraigned against India, to make it a weak and puppet state, under Western control and exploitation.

It is basically Colonisation, disguised as tariffs and "investments".
by jMyles | 2026-02-06 19:26:06+00:00
Well I think we all understand the basic arithmetic; that's not what's in dispute.

The question is,

> even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.

...if you're taking money from people earning $11 million, and giving it instead of the military and prison industrial complexes, obviously you've concentrated, rather than diluting power.

I think there's a real question about how possible it is for a taxation regime to ever have a progressive effect inside the belly of empire.
by redeeman | 2026-02-06 19:26:21+00:00
what is insane is that everyone just accepts it, knows that this happens, and dont go lynch the ones in charge immediately.

There was a time when the guy making the cannon had to sit on top of it for the first shot. Perhaps this kind of policy could be adapted to other situations aswell.

Take the job to guard epstein? take the consequences when things go wrong.

Protect criminals? take the very real consequences if found out
by Melonai | 2026-02-06 19:26:24+00:00
Definitely agree on your last point, "consumer" is by far the most passive of the terms, and wholly represents the current idea that companies can simply shovel out anything, because "consumers" will simply consume either way. Of course this isn't magic, a single person won't change just because you call them a user or a consumer, but it reflects your view of them, and will inform your actions towards them.

"customer" represents a two-sided relationship, and I do feel that "user" is kind of one-sided, but gives agency, a user will use a product for their own purposes, presumably to help them achieve some kind of goal. A "consumer" is completely passive, their main goal is to do what the company tells them to do. A customer can walk out of the relationship, a user might complain about problems they have with your product, but the consumer will simply continue consuming whatever you want them to consume.

The worst part though, they seem to be mostly correct in their assessment.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-06 19:26:51+00:00
I'm not a libertarian. I'm an Idaho native. But really this is just an underscore of why libertarian ideals are dumb. Some government is necessary and those are basic things like public roads and schools.

It may be surprising, but Idaho actually had pretty decent infrastructure throughout my youth. This "defund everything" attitude is relatively new to idaho politics. Idaho's drift into libertarianism started around the tea party era and just slowly has gotten worse since then.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-06 19:27:01+00:00
> But this isn’t unlike the general populous. At scale humans accept new things slowly.

right, the model works like humans at scale. Not like a human who reads the actual paper disproving the fact they thought was correct and is able to adapt. True not every human manages to do that, science advancing one death at a time, but some can.

But since the model is a statistical one, it works like humans at scale.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-06 19:27:09+00:00
Indeed. And writing out a design is actually a good method for thinking through the design. It helps uncover assumptions, including those that are flawed. It allows you to weigh various design options explicitly. It provides a place for identifying and resolving ambiguity and lack of clarity in the requirements. Contracts can be distilled in the process. Such design docs can also focus and direct implementation; you have a clearer picture of the parts and contours of your system. In a way, it is like programming, but at a conceptually higher, architectural level, where you work through and chew on the thing to flesh out and validate it in the very act of specifying.

And by doing this sort of exercise, you can avoid wasting time on dead ends, bad design, and directionless implementation. It's okay if requirements change or you discover something later on that requires rethinking. The point is to make your thinking more robust. You can always amend a design document and fill in relevant details later.

Furthermore, a mature design begins with the assumption that requirements (whether actual requirements or knowledge of them) may change. That will inform a design where you don't paint yourself into a corner, that is flexible enough to be adapted (naturally, if requirements change too dramatically, then we're not really talking about adaptation of a product, but a whole new product).

How much upfront design work you should do will depend on the project, of course. So there's a middle way between the caricature of waterfall and the caricature of agile.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 19:27:26+00:00
Since you haven't bothered to connect the dots, I'll do what you are afraid to do.

1. Parliamentary report: PATH is indicted for HPV vaccine related crimes :
Page 15 - text in bold:
https://www.hsrii.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/72.pdf

2. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded PATH:
Page 7 - first paragraph:
https://www.icmr.gov.in/icmrobject/static/icmr/dist/images/p...

--------

Summary:

1. HPV vaccine deaths: India's Parliamentary panel Parliament panel indicts PATH organization, health officials. PATH bypassed ethics and rules while conducting clinical trials for vaccine which was administered to girls, says panel.

Tens of thousands of minor girls were given HPV vaccines under false aegis and without informed consent. Several patients died, more than hundred minor girls were hospitalized with adverse effects from the vaccines.

"The interest, safety and well being of subjects were completely jeopardized by PATH by using self-determined and selfservicing nomenclature which is not only highly deplorable but a serious breach of law of the land."

"Had PATH been successful in getting the HPV vaccine included in the universal immunization programme of the concerned countries, this would have generated windfall profit for the manufacturer(s) by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses."

"The Committee feels that there was serious dereliction of duty by many of the Institutions and individuals involved. The Committee observes that ICMR representatives, instead of ensuring highest levels of ethical standards in research studies, apparently acted at the behest of the PATH in promoting the interests of manufacturers of the HPV Vaccine."

2. The PATH agency was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), says final report by panel.

--------

HPV vaccine deaths in India:
Parliament panel indicts PATH, health officials. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded agency (PATH) bypassed ethics and rules while conducting clinical trials for vaccine which was administered to girls, says parliamentary panel.

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/hpv-vaccine-death...

India’s Ban on Foreign Money for Health Group Hits Gates Foundation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/world/asia/india-health-n...

The art of Gatescrashing democracy: Journalist Tim Schwab says his book probing the Gates Foundation is a case study for the larger problem of extreme wealth and how it threatens democracy:
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/journalist-tim-sc...
by j58656122 | 2026-02-06 19:27:33+00:00
Location: Portland, Maine (ME), USA
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Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use
by vecti | 2026-02-06 19:27:37+00:00
Hello everyone!

I'm a solo developer who's been doing UI/UX work since 2007. Over the years, I watched design tools evolve from lightweight products into bloated feature-heavy platforms. I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way.

So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need: pixel-perfect grid snapping, a performant canvas renderer, shared asset libraries, and export/presentation features. No collaborative whiteboarding. No plugin ecosystem. No enterprise features. Just the design loop.

Four years later, I can proudly show it off. Built and hosted in the EU with European privacy regulations. Free tier available (no credit card, one editor forever).

On privacy: I use some basic analytics (page views, referrers) but zero tracking inside the app itself. No session recordings, no behavior analytics, no third-party scripts beyond the essentials.

If you're a solo designer or small team who wants a tool that stays out of your way, I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback:
https://vecti.com

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, architecture decisions, why certain features didn't make the cut, or what's next.