skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
bytes are bytes, and in Apps Hungarian, it'd be 'b' type. So 'cb' would be a count of bytes.

I'm not sure you could place utf characters 'atop' of 'ch', more alongside/as well.

Win32 had support for wide-characters (UCS-2, I believe) which mapped to WCHAR/'wch'. They also support, in the windows.h headers, for compiling code to support both single-byte characters and wide characters using one code base via macros/typedefs with the TCHAR type et al. This resulted in code that used 'tch' as the underlying character type.

So code that only wanted 16-bit Unicode would have variables like 'wch' and 'cwch'. Code that supported both single and wide characters would have 'tch' and 'ctch'.

UTF support in Win32 appeared after I stopped Win32 programming. Looking up a few Win32 UTF-related programming docs, MS seems to have shoved UTF-8 support under the old Win32 Ansi-character/single byte string APIs. I'd probably create some Utf-type related APIs that called down to the Win32-related APIs. But it would also depend on the UTF-8 API design (strlen doesn't map 1-1 to UTF chars anymore) - parsing UTF-8 characters/code points is different than single-byte character set. I'd guess there'd be 'uch' for a UTF-8 character, probably a 'ucp' for a UTF-8 character point, etc.

[edit]
You wouldn't just repurpose single-byte string code with 'cch' for UTF-8 since the semantics aren't the same (not even if you include double-byte character sets like Japanese), one UTF-8 character can be one or more bytes which typical one/double-character set string code doesn't deal with.
For your reference:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Every geographic region in the U.S. has a natural disaster risk factor. In Oregon we are overdue for a large quake, but I've prepared for this. In fact, taken what other regions face - wildfire, tornadoes, hurricanes,flooding - an earthquake sounds down right mild.

My preparation of a truck camper as an emergency shelter makes perfect sense to me. It is mobile, has a built-in generator but is mostly run by solar charging, provides enough space to sleep and live with heat and AC. Few people prep their RV's as an emergency shelter. I'm not sure why. Naturally, I hope my community does not have to face a major earthquake, but I do find it interesting when I get criticism for preparing. Am I coming across as paranoid, or prepared?
There are certainly some problems in Germany that need to be solved, but you're painting a very extreme and absolute picture here that is pretty far from the truth.

Free speech is different in Germany than the US, that doesn't mean we don't have free speech in Germany. The US doesn't have the one and only true definition of free speech. And right now Trump is assaulting free speech in the US, so those lectures from Vance and others are just blatant, partisan rethoric.

We're not returning to coal. The economy could be better, but it's not as terrible as you imply.
But how does that effect the definitions of each?
The best thing would be blind preference tests for a wide variety of problems across domains but unfortunately even these can be gamed if desired. The upside is that they are gamed by being explicitly malicious which I'd imagine would result in whistleblowing at some point. However Claude's position on leaderboards outside of webdev arena makes me skeptical.
I would rather everyone use HTTPS than have them individually decide if it "needs to be secure".
For me: wi-fi and mobile providers injecting ads. Rarer these days but still happens.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Vibe%20Coding%22%20is%20a%2...
Yes. Make it a one time payment that is sufficiently large and you remove the pressure to retain users. In fact, it would be the opposite; find a great match as soon as possible to get the user off your platform.
Here's one where just appending dots to the output improved quality:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758
Your pitch seems to be that people can join a community in which they can receive free (no-cost) pet care (pet sitting, feeding, waste management, walks, time-sharing), and in exchange they themselves are in the pool of people who can respond if they can help out someone in the network who needs similar help (and their schedule/location/abilities/availability/preferences match).

As is see it: most people with sufficient funds might rather pay someone to do this type of work professionally, since that way the work-doer is more on the hook to do the tasks and do them well--there is no ambiguity around it being a favor or a best-effort kind of thing, since it is their profession. There is also no ambiguity around whether the worker will be available -- once a paid engagement is set up, it is on the books.

Your biggest competition is apps like Rover, Wag, etc.

Do some people feel the crunch of inflation, etc.? Sure. I think you can appeal to people who CANNOT afford the going rates of pet sitting, but NEED pet sitting, who also have the TIME and WILLINGNESS to perform pet care services for others (within the app's community).

Here's one analysis: people who need the pet sitting APPS are out traveling for the weekend regularly, or traveling for weeks on end for work. They have enough disposable income to contract a professional. These people use the pet-sitting apps similar to how they use Uber or Doordash for on-demand gig-work, or perhaps they use the app and find a regular that they like and can trust, etc.

The typical pet care app provides a middleman service that provides some kind of actual assurance and/or insurance, in case things go wrong; some kind of validation of the customer and the worker; mediates communication and payment; customer service; ratings, comments, profiles, work-execution-status-tracking/photos-proof-of-work-done, etc.

IMO you need to clearly differentiate who your community is, and why they prefer this app. Then the app MUST be easy to use to "request a gig from a person (or in general)" and to "receive a notification of a gig request" for fast responsiveness.

I suspect your market is people who do not have great funds to actually afford the pet care they would like to contract. And they themselves ARE NOT so busy nor so entitled that they couldn't pitch in when others need the help, too.

I have actually thought about this idea or something like it, too. I figured it as a "social network for pets", though. So, literally make a profile for your animal(s). And have them post and talk about their needs, etc. If you want to pivot to that, please feel free to.

Good luck. The animals need the care!
The uniqueness if the fingerprint doesn't matter nearly as much as whether the fingerprint is stable or if it is constantly changing.
Nvidia GTC 2025: The Time Has Come the Valley Said
If you're into this you should also check out Dan Iaboni from the parkour world. Started from a forum+fb group with a parkour gym built by the community in an old carpet factory, and now The Monkey Vault is in a massive factory in Toronto. Everyone thought he was crazy.
Everything took probably around 3-4 weeks, but it was spread around a couple of months. I wrote custom web crawler for web archived 808.pixll.de, pattern extraction tool from crawled data. Then i worked on the pattern player and finally started working on the website. Originally i planned to write website from the scratch, but in the end i decided to use WordPress. I have too much side projects already:)
That's easy to solve. When they ask me it might take an hour or two until I come back to them. If they were just trying to us me as a rubber duck the problem will have been solved by then.
And it's not only devs. Also PMs have this behaviour. Sitting it out before asking what they need makes most question vanish.
Yoo, great patterns. I'm working right now on procedural pattern generation to help with brainstorming ideas.
You mean you’re on Israel’s side? UN Watch is not impartial at all :D

The Times of Israel describe them as “A prominent pro-Israel lobbying group at the United Nations”.

They’re not really hiding it either. All sources referenced by UN Watch to “debunk” the claims (i.e. in your linked article), are Israeli or American.

But whatever, I don’t think we can agree on much about this conflict anyway. Hope you have a nice sunday anyway.
I wish I could tag filter and control what I see on my feed for example political content on LinkedIn is largely an unfollow event for me. Also I’d like to be able to filter for recruiter content and just jobs.
I think there's a meaningful difference between "based on" and "inspired by", Helios being the latter.
That makes sense. Thank you - in Oregon we can live without AC in an emergency.
Thanks, added to the TODO list.
50 years and they can't even spell create with an e at the end. That's some good backwards compat.
You'll discover that compounding growth is useless to YOU, when Trump and Musk are taking 99.9% of it. Wages are stagnant. The US is #24 on the world’s happiest countries list, and has been dropping for a long while. At the top of the list, we find socialist countries with access to world-class public services like healthcare and education -- which the US is currently trying very hard to gut. The last time something like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for Americans to snap out of it. Inequality is destabilizing and Americans are clueless (see inflation leading to Trump), so I think Europe is likely to do better in the long run.
It's not about the platform itself, it's the users.

Am I going to be able to find new customers on this platform, consistently, like I do in LinkedIn? If not, why would I spend the X number of hours I have dedicated this month to finding new clients on this platform?

If you can Crack this nut you will have no problem finding users.
Subduction zone earthquake.
I apologize this is not directly related to OP, but if you, like myself, get mad at all the "Suggested" posts LinkedIn is pushing on you, you can use the following ublock filter to get rid of these posts:

www.linkedin.com##:xpath(//span[text()="Suggested"]//ancestor::div/div[contains(@data-id, "activity")])

Combined with carefully managing who I actually follow, it made it for a much more pleasant experience.
The F.B.I., China’s Ministry of Public Security, Interpol and others have tried to combat scammers, who often lurk on social media and dating apps, luring people into bogus financial schemes or other ruses.

It's the IRS and FBI that does the overwhelming bulk of the investigative work and also opens the investigations. Interpol hardly does anything by comparison and have much less doggedness (it was the US who found Bin Laden for example). It typically helps the US, not actually initiates the investigation. At best its like a sidekick.

The question is, does the US get involved. If not, then laundering will work, because the vast majority of countries have neither the inclination or resources to do much. Otherwise, all bets are off. Because the US is unrivaled at this sort of stuff.

The article in typical clickbait fashion overplays its claim in the headline and then walks it back in the content. It's not that effective if accounts are constantly being tracked and frozen and if the scammers' profits are heavily diluted in an attempt to launder the money. if anything ,this is a success by imposing a huge cost on scammers and reducing the profitability of said scam.
Not the poster, but for me MacOS Orion (without stop the madness or little snitch etc) or anything else scores 16.07 bits and 98% ad block.

I had a look at Kagi official discord and Vlad (HN: @freediver) says they let the eff test run as non-malicious, i.e. other sites may not be able to see as much.
Not a good article with a lot of privacy theatre

adblock testing websites http://brave.com/blog/adblocker-testing-websites-harm-users/

fingerprinting test websites https://github.com/orgs/privacyguides/discussions/7#discussi...

Used useless extensions[1] for example "Privacy Badger"[2]

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...
What is "record time"? Trump does not have anything to do with diminished USA hegemony. The problem started when USA let China to join WTO, which result in offshoring production to China and rapid China growth (also military, which was happening below radar of western observers).

At the same time USA stopped investing in its military (as compared to Cold War times) and, what is equally important, its European allies did the same (with exception of Greece and to some extent France). As a result whole Euro-Atlantic alliance become weaker and heavily dependent on China.

This was a long, slow process, stared in the '2000.

Trump tries to revert this trend, but makes unnecessary mistakes, most notably, he is hurting USA soft power and is conflicting USA with its European allies, which gives an impression that "something" happened suddenly now.
Probably not the point but committing every day is one methodology for TBD and it’s great for generating productivity. Not so much useful for measuring productivity though.

I can’t imagine how miserable it would be to try to measure dev productivity by quantifying commits on a daily basis. What a waste.
People don't go looking on your github, but I have a (small) OSS section above my experience on my resume. It just lists 3 bullet points, including a big apache project I worked on, and some other notable projects.
I basically agree.

I do wonder, at some point executives are going to start asking, how do we reach more people, and I wonder if right wing executives think it’s hilarious that they pander to certain groups to increase market share, and everyone blames the woke left for it.

Not that I think it’s specifically a right wing issue, I think it’s a capitalism issue, pandering has been a problem forever and done badly it pisses everyone off.
Software making it easier for AI 'agents' to navigate websites, raises $17M
Totally hear you and I agree that most platforms go downhill when the focus shifts to likes, followers, and constant posting.

To clarify: OpenSpot doesn’t have a feed, followers, or any social mechanics. There’s no algorithm pushing content or encouraging endless posting. When we say “create content,” we mean things like a short video intro, showcasing past work, or writing a quick blurb about what makes you unique — all on your profile, not for public engagement farming.
You can click on the pattern, then click on the link below "Create a copy" and add missing bass drums. It's like forking a drum pattern lol.
> Russia can attack with ten million men armed with knifes and clubs.

This is just baseless propaganda and you know it. What a shame would it be for the west and Ukraine if an army of men armed with clubs was able to stand its ground against them.

> Russia will target hydro dams and other civilian infrastructure with potential for mass destruction. We care about protecting those things to avoid harm to our citizens, Russia does not care.

Of course, just like we did with Iraq's infrastructure[0] for example?

I suggest you use the effort you put in writing such uninformed rethoric in informing yourself, it will pay out at some point.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damage_to_Baghdad_during_the_I...
The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo Ornstein - https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...
I’ve heard this and at some large engineering orgs, I’ve even occasionally seen it applied sensibly, but IME irrational hype driven architecture dominates:

15 microservices at companies with 5 engineers. Event sourcing where it made no sense. Apache Spark used on a project where all the data and processing fit on a laptop. Orchestration layers; frontends for backends; queues everywhere; the list is endless.
i absolutely hear you on that. it just seems too hard to do that.

my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to work at, push good values and make some money.

then use that money to push for appropriate political moves like you are saying.

how would you propose to reform the government? through voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$.

additionally, i get really annoyed with all the complaining that is done about politics. did you vote? neat, that’s the system we have. want to do something about it? make some money. that’s the system we have.

these people complaining about things instead of doing something will die complaining.

coming from a liberal that is more in the center and annoyed with my overally liberal parents.
LLM Multi-Round Coding Tournament
Your About page doesn't work. I'd not share personal information with an anonymous company.
It could have been Rifaximin (brand name Xifaxan), which is a somewhat standard "special" antibiotic for gut issues.
Some good points, but I feel that by the end, the article lost track of an important angle. Quoting from the ending:

> And now we come full circle: AI isn’t taking our jobs; it’s giving us a chance to reclaim those broader aspects of our role that we gave away to specialists. To return to a time when software engineering meant more than just writing code. When it meant understanding the whole problem space, from user needs to business impact, from system design to operational excellence.

Well, I for one never cared about business impact in general sense, nor did I consider it part of the problem space. Obviously, minding the business impact is critical at work. But if we're talking about identity, then it never was a part of mine - and I believe the same is true about many software engineers in my cohort.

I picked up coding because I wanted to build things (games, at first). Build things, not sell things.

This mirrors a common blind spot I regularly see in some articles and comments on HN (which perhaps is just because of its adjacency to startup culture) - doing stuff and running a company that does stuff are entirely different things. I want to be a builder - I don't want to be a founder. Nor I want to be a manager of builders.

So, for those of us with slightly narrower sense of identity as software engineers, the AI thing is both fascinating and disconcerting.
I'm working on adding other drum machines (currently Yamaha RX-5 and Oberhiem DMX), not sure if i'm gonna end up adding generic midi. However, you can download current patterns as midi.
Hi! Great work! Could you add support for other amounts of measures such as 3/4?
The Unmovable Sink
Have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-intervention...

US non-interventionism was the norm for the longest time. Hence US entering WWII late - the US had no interest in helping their European cousins for a long time.

Perhaps this is just the US going back to its natural state.
Because open source projects are usually developed by a community of contributors, it might be better to talk with some of those communities. That way you have access to the reasons existing documentation is the way it is.

Sure, it might be more work than soliciting user complaints. But opining “your documentation is bad” is unlikely to foster the conditions that actually improve actual documentation for actual projects. Documentation problems are usually the result of effort writing documentation by people highly technically informed about a project, tooling is rounding error.

Good luck.
One promise i would love to see him keep is turning the liabilities in europe into an asset. Instead of paying for european security, if we can charge them for security and sell them weapons and tech from our big contractors, the US wins.
"I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?"

(Putin 2007 in Munich, Wikipedia)

This is kind of paranoid. But there are historical reasons:

Poland/Lithuania (Władysław), Napoleon, The German Kaiser, Hitler
Another rhetorical question: out of luck/marketing/technical advantage, which one is contributing the most to the extra 5% out of 105% of all the components success can be attributed to?
You do need one now if you are not a chinese national. See https://www.tibettourism.com/tibet-travel-permit.html
So much work. makes me wonder why not just earn it legit. It's like cheaters in school who use AI software and other tools. It would be less work to just study. I guess it does work or esle it the scams would not persist.
Do you mean the hardware slide toggle? I’m on an iPad on iOS and I can’t get sound working, no matter what. My iPad doesn’t have a mute toggle.
The alpha school results page from Google links to a 404?

https://alpha.school/results/

Is there any third party verification or even info from the school?
It's not social democracy, otherwise Sweden and Finland wouldn't punch so much above their weight.

It's most likely an artifact of smaller, less liquid capital pools and the fact that the US is a really easy large market to tap into, leading to European startups investing into the US market in preference to their own.
yea you are right, we are working very hard on expanding to more countries. Feel free to sign up on our waitlist to get notified as soon as we launch in your area :D
That's the thing about development with more than one developer designing APIs.

Looks like the RtlRunOnceExecuteOnce API and structures appeared in Windows Vista.

So one would have to do some code archaeology and dig into the Windows Git repo to look at the commits for RtlRunOnceExecuteOnce and see what the typical use cases were. For some reason, returning 0 for failure made sense. Given the pervasiveness of NTSTATUS, I have no idea what made them choose a non-NTSTATUS return value. Maybe there was another callback-type API which did something similar?

If one dev thought that RtlRunOnceExecuteOnce required NTSTATUS, then I'm sure other devs will have thought the same thing so I'd expect more such bugs in the current codebase and in the future.
That's why Microsoft static code analyzers (PREfix, PREfast) would flag such footguns.
This, and they actually invested heavily into building Nord Stream 2 from 2011 onwards. Nord Stream 2 never delivered any gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_2
So, generative AI LLMs don’t just hallucinate. Their also lazy. Good to know.
I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit
I would even agree on this, but I wonder why do I never hear anyone requesting for the EU leadership to be held accountable for pursuing a policy of blind dependence on the US? We've cut ties with anyone the US disliked, only to be left alone all of a sudden, why aren't we looking for those responsible for this? I can tell you, many of them are currently in a position of power within the EU.

Right now we have top diplomats like Kallas saying publicly that we need to find a way to beat China, all while we already have problems with Russia and the USA. They are putting us in a corner against the rest of the world, and for what? Who has to benefit from this?
Ask HN: What's Your Favourite Keyboard?
Title basically covers it, but if you need more clarification: what's your favourite input device that you use to input letters? It doesn't need to be a "traditional" keyboard, or even hardware. I'm curious where HN users go.
agreed. insane how all platform profiles just replicate the resume format (which also warrants another discussion)