MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ColinWright | 2025-04-14 16:40:12+00:00
This is the PDF of the talk given here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

It's Guy Steele[0]'s keynote at the 1998 ACM[1] OOPSLA[2] conference.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.

[1] Association for Computing Machinery

[2] The 13th annual ACM SIGPLAN[3] Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications.

[3] SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on programming languages.
by abecedarius | 2025-04-14 16:40:23+00:00
The UCSD system was indeed astonishingly, unusably slow. When I got to try it in high school computer lab, in the 80s, I was like "Did whoever ported it to this particular computer just totally fuck it up? WTF?!"

An Infocom adventure on a machine with 16k RAM also had frequent pauses to fetch from floppy, but it was much more tolerable.

Re verb lookups in Basic: you could use DATA statements and READ in a FOR loop for lookup. I don't know what was typical but that's what I recall from some examples.
by xedrac | 2025-04-14 16:40:28+00:00
I know you're being down voted, but I've struggled with my Emacs config breaking quite frequently over the years. Nearly all of the breakages were due to plugins. I assume these breakages would be far less common if I was only using old plugins like Helm. But I like fancy new plugins that bring new functionality and smooth UX. They just seem to make breaking changes a lot more often. As far as performance goes, Emacs is roughly equal to VSCode IMO. It sometimes chokes on large files, but in general works well enough for me. To be fair, I've had trouble with Neovim + plugins becoming sluggish as well.
by tanjtanjtanj | 2025-04-14 16:40:43+00:00
I actually found out about the Silksong “announcement” from it being number one on the r/all feed followed by several other switch 2/games announcements in the top 5…

You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.
by legitster | 2025-04-14 16:40:45+00:00
The fact that it's apparently so hard to even just confirm he is still alive is what's especially horrifying.

The people perpetrating this clearly have no care about how much trust they are eroding in our legal system right now. At least people used to have a reason to submit to an arrest knowing that they were protected by due process. But why would anyone in their right mind want to trust federal authorities right now?
by runjake | 2025-04-14 16:40:48+00:00
If it's not helpful don't use it.

Personally, this appears to be extremely helpful for me, because instead of checking several different spots every day, I can get a coherent summary in one spot, tailored to me and my family. I'm literally checking the same things every day, down to USPS Informed Delivery. This seems to simplify what's already complicated, at least for my use cases.

Is this niche? I don't know and I don't care. It looks useful to me. And the author, obviously, because they wrote it. That's enough.

I can't count the number of useful scripts and apps I've written that nobody else has used, yet I rely on them daily or nearly every day.
by headhuntermdk | 2025-04-14 16:40:49+00:00
If the average target consumer didn't care, Target wouldn't have had 10 weeks of consecutive foot traffic declines. Most things sold in Target can be bought elsewhere, so people have voted with their wallets.

Executives at Target made the calculation that their sales wouldn't decline much (if at all) by publicly canceling their DEI programs.

To the question about Target and Costco's prices: Typically these retailers will have price matching policies in place to keep foot traffic.

Quick google search implies (not sure how accurate this is), that approximately 12% of Target's demographic is black [0]. Seeing close to a 10% drop in foot traffic for a low margin business like Target when a competitor is seeing almost the near opposite gains is a signal someone really screwed up.

[0] https://expertbeacon.com/targets-target-market/
by downut | 2025-04-14 16:40:57+00:00
For the people who are wondering whether this is a good idea or not, lemme tell you about some x-country cyclists I met on a ride. 3 years ago in the middle of summer I was climbing Iron Springs Rd on the west side of Prescott AZ. 3 youngish cyclists were paused on the side of the road with an apparent mechanical. They had a modest amount of camping gear in their panniers. Turns out they were French, had the barest grasp of English (I have the barest grasp of French), and needed a derailleur adjusted (no gears, no climb). I fixed them up and of course I was damned curious about their situation. Turns out, they on a whim flew into NYC, bought some not serious bikes and camping gear, and... just started biking across the country! In the middle of summer! In the wrong direction! Going to LA! And their pins... NOT CYCLISTS.

The Iron Springs climb tops out at 6000' or so, the weather is awesome in summer. However that is the end of weather happiness for 300 miles or so, because it's a steady drop from there into the desert, all the way down to the Colorado River. Temps in the 100-115F range are normal. Water is scarcer there than on just about any roads in the country. I was pretty alarmed so I got it across that they needed to show me their route. As best I could I showed them the best way on maps to not die. I tried my damnedest to get across they should not bike in the afternoons. "extra chaud!" etc.

And off they went. Never found out if they made it or not, but... you just can't keep humans down. They will always find a way to do the craziest things.
by zeristor | 2025-04-14 16:41:10+00:00
Press release:

https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2025/research/po...

The actual paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.4c13276

In PDF: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.4c13276?downloa...
by zackmorris | 2025-04-14 16:41:27+00:00
+1 for Mailgun. My only gripe with it is that they detect and block bot activity on their frontend. So if you have end to end (e2e) integration tests built with something like Puppeteer, you can't have them log into Mailgun and check the inbox table's HTML to see that an email was sent. So you have to write some sort of plugin manually - perhaps as a testing endpoint on your website that only appears in debug mode - that interacts with their API.

This might not seem like much of a big deal. But as we transition to more of these #nocode automated tools, the idea of having to know how programming works in order to interact with an API will start to seem archaic. I'd compare it to how esoteric the terminal looked after someone saw a GUI like the one used by Apple's Macintosh back in the 1980s.

I looked forward to this day back in the early 2000s when APIs started arriving, but felt even then that something was fishy. I would have preferred that sites had a style-free request format that returned XML or even JSON generated from HTML, rather than having to use a separate API. I have this sense that the way we do it today with a split backend/frontend, distributed state, duplicated validation, etc has been a monumental waste of time.
by srean | 2025-04-14 16:42:40+00:00
That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.

Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.

It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.

It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.

Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.

There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-14 16:43:17+00:00
I tend to view open source like a gardener treats extra produce from their garden or orchard.

You spend some time and energy to grow some delicious fruits and vegetables that you and your family enjoy eating. You have extra so you share some with friends and neighbors. You still have way more than you need and you don't want it to go to waste.

You contemplate opening a stand to sell to passersby. That's a lot of work so you just put out a box with a sign for anyone to take what they want for free.

Some drop by and get what they need and you get an occasional 'thank you' note. Someone leaves a few bucks in a jar for you. It makes you feel good.

But not everyone is so well behaved. Kids come by and tip over the box or throw some peaches at your house.

Some criticize you that some of your free stuff is not the best quality and demand better service.

Then you find out the local grocer is stopping by every day to take it all and sell it in his store.

What started out as a good will gesture, turns into a headache.

Of course the analogy falls apart a bit when you compare a tangible good like food to easily replicatable digital bits, but it still fits in some ways.
by hollerith | 2025-04-14 16:43:36+00:00
Also, even the Japanese that would accept an American as a friend or a tenant are not accepting of the standard American moral stance towards racism. I.e., to be accepted, you basically have to be tolerant of the racism in Japanese society: the Japanese have a very low tolerance for non-Japanese persons who try to change Japanese society. Or so I've gathered from people who've been to Japan, then written about it or spoken about it.
by kk3 | 2025-04-14 16:43:46+00:00
As far as combining full-text search with embedding vectors goes, Typesense has been building features around that - https://typesense.org/docs/28.0/api/vector-search.html

I haven't tried those features but I did try Meilisearch awhile back and I found Typesense to index much faster (which was a bottleneck for my particular use case) and also have many more features to control search/ranking. Although just to say, my use case was not typical for search and I'm sure Meilisearch has come a long way since then, so this is not to speak poorly of Meilisearch, just that Typesense is another great option.
by lithocarpus | 2025-04-14 16:44:00+00:00
They do, and, mostly they will eventually rot and release the carbon back - but it may take hundreds or thousands of years - if ever - for a forest to reach equilibrium where it's emitting as much as it's accumulating.

One way humans can improve on this is by making charcoal out of wood and burying it or just spreading it on soil. This drastically improves the fertility of the soil improving the rate that that soil can sequester carbon by growing trees even faster, and, as long as the charcoal is mixed in soil and not in a huge dry pile on top where it might burn, this process need never reach an equilibrium and can keep accumulating more and more carbon, more and more fertility and water retention capacity, more and more abundance of food production. This is what the ancients did in making terra preta in South America and similar charcoal-infused soils that have been found all over the world.

We do this where I live in California. It's a way to reduce forest fuel load while increasing carbon sequestration and fertility. Only cost is labor. It's theoretically possible to do at large scale with machinery instead of people, though the attempts I've seen have not proved viable. For a low expense human-scale way to do it, just making big piles and burning them from the top down (so no smoke) - piling more and more fuel on as it burns, and then dousing with water once it's mostly a big pile of coals, works quite well. With the addition of a big metal ring for a kiln, efficiency can go up even more from (very roughly) 50% of carbon turned to charcoal, to maybe 80 or 90%. Numbers vary considerably. But in all cases, the amount of carbon moved from the rotting or burning cycle to permanently sequestered is significant.

Compared to the short term carbon sequestration of building things out of wood (99% of which will burn within a few centuries), these soils have lasted thousands of years. There must be some mechanism that will eventually recycle this carbon back to the atmosphere but it may be on the timescale of hundreds of thousands of years for most of it.
by bluGill | 2025-04-14 16:44:01+00:00
The right forest fire will turn trees into charcoal and sequester the carbon. However doing this correctly is really tricky. There are many different forests and they all have slightly different needs. Make sure your government allocates enough money to proper forest management. Make sure that you oppose "environmental" groups that have heard smokey the bear years ago and think all fire is bad thus they get court injunctions against prescribed burning to the long term harm of the forest.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-14 16:44:13+00:00
You should be able to comfortably not own one, without it being a real problem.

We lived in Munich for five years as a family of three with no car and it was fine. There were definitely some times where a car would be more convenient (going to Ikea or the mountains) but overall getting around with our electric cargo bike or public transit was fine.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-14 16:44:24+00:00
The smartest bots and shills write more convincingly than average people who are in the lucky 10000 (https://xkcd.com/1053/), and reactionary phrases work in part because people who are exposed to them spread them (like idioms and other memes).

Some posts are very likely authentic, because they have a distinct writing style and/or incorporate things that yesterday's LLMs have trouble with (like relevant screenshots); and some posts are clearly inauthentic, e.g. your prior example that had an affiliate link. But in between, there are many posts which could have come from a bot or a human making "small talk" online. And unless you know the person who wrote something, you can never be completely sure: a talented state actor could write a genuine piece of insight (e.g. to build credibility), or tomorrow's LLM (perhaps unreleased but being tested in the wild) may beat today's commonly-held signs that detect and disprove AI.

I never accuse people of being a bot or shill, because I think it's irrelevant. Does the writing provoke thinking or generate insight? Are its claims cited, or backed up by reasonable-sounding logic from claims I already believe? I'm not "separating the text from the writer", I'm deciding that if the writer's text is interesting and convincing, it doesn't matter whether they're a bot or shill; because the intrinsic problem with bots and shills is that their posts are bland, reactionary, and misleading, so the solution is to avoid bland, reactionary, and misleading content. Plus, I already doubt anything I read on the internet; even if the poster is authentic, they could be wrong (for facts) or have different values and preferences (for opinions e.g. perspectives or product recommendations).

I do feel the need to mention: I agree the internet is "faker" today, with more bland and reactionary content, and the main factors are probably LLMs and improved marketing/propaganda. There are still niche places, but they usually don't interest me (probably why they stay niche). I think the solution is "better curation", but how? Ironically, perhaps it will be AI figuring out what is "interesting" to specific people; a thing that enables (or at least clears an obstacle to) infinite "slop" generation, will be the thing that protects us from uninteresting and upsetting media.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-04-14 16:45:01+00:00
I've been using EMACS since it was TECO on TOPS-10. Not a day goes by that I don't spend at least an hour with it. But it is long in the tooth and the abstractions it exposes are as advanced as they can be without breaking reverse compatibility. It is one of the few packages I think would be improved by a fully-supported package manager. E-Lisp is a warren of inefficiency, notational paucity and half-implemented tools. If someone wanted to build an emacs-like text editor in Lua or Fennel, I would absolutely sign up as a beta tester (assuming the key bindings were mostly the same.)
by simianwords | 2025-04-14 16:45:09+00:00
I have built something similar that runs without a server. It required just a few lines in Apple shortcuts.

TL;DR I made shortcuts that work on my Apple watch directly to record my voice, transcribe it and store my daily logs on a Notion DB.

All you need are 1) a chatgpt API key and 2) a Notion account (free).

- I made one shortcut in my iPhone to record my voice, use whisper model to transcribe it (done locally using a POST request) and send this transcription to my Notion database (again a POST request on shortcuts)

- I made another shortcut that records my voice, transcribes and reads data from my Notion database to answer questions based on what exists in it. It puts all data from db into the context to answer -- costs a lot but simple and works well.

The best part is -- this workflow works without my iPhone and directly on my Apple Watch. It uses POST requests internally so no need of hosting a server. And Notion API happens to be free for this kind of a use case.

I like logging my day to day activities with just using Siri on my watch and possibly getting insights based on them. Honestly the whisper model is what makes it work because the accuracy is miles ahead of the local transcription model.
by dinero_rojo | 2025-04-14 16:45:52+00:00
Reddit’s algo is doing an astonishingly bad job if they want me to stay engaged based on the things I follow. I’ve got two seperate accounts one for general stuff, the other intended strictly for NSFW purposes and meeting people with similar interests. I spent maybe half an hour yesterday on the NSFW account blocking everything that wasn’t in my interests, but more and more unrelated (and general) subreddits kept being recommended to me. After a while of this, I gave up and deleted the app, which I can’t imagine is good for Reddit’s bottom line. I’ll probably be back at some point as it is still in my experience the best way to see that stuff and meet like-minded people, but I was kinda shocked at how difficult (impossible?) it was to just keep one account restricted to specific interests that I do kinda want to be engaged with.
Show HN: GPTShirt - AI-powered Custom T-Shirts
by nliang86 | 2025-04-14 16:46:11+00:00
Hi all,

I built GPTShirt to make it easy to make quirky, unique t-shirts. I found that existing options required design skills that I don't have.

The site lets you enter a text prompt, generates a design, and then handles production and shipping. No account needed to try the design generator. You can share the designs too.

It uses recraft v3, which is a solid image generator that handles text well. There are additional pipeline steps to get the designs to look good when printed on fabric.

Here are a few examples with prompts:

Cosmic floating cat island - https://gptshirt.app/designs/0d65835c-ea70-4a56-9f5e-92a0ec4...

Fantasy vegetable character photo shoot - https://gptshirt.app/designs/554b47c2-b8df-49ed-8cde-fb1f192...

Avocado motivational workout - https://gptshirt.app/designs/6bf0d4c2-982c-4183-94b9-ae0f59e...

I'd love to hear your feedback, regardless of sentiment (positive, negative, yawn, etc.).

Thanks for taking a look!
by zahlman | 2025-04-14 16:46:30+00:00
> When you run a Python program, it will run until it encounters an error, even if there's malformed syntax! As long as it doesn't need to load that malformed syntax, you're able to start running.

Sure. However, Python "needs to load" the code an entire source file at a time. It will not ignore syntax errors elsewhere in the file; it will syntax-check the entire file before it executes anything, even though it executes top to bottom. This has historically been important during the 2-to-3 transition era; it's still common enough to find separate driver/entry-point .py files that are carefully made to use 2.x-compatible syntax, so that they can check `sys.version_info` and exit with a proper message rather than crashing with a `SyntaxError`.

> But if you cargo run a Rust program, it won't run at all if it encounters an error in the compilation step! It has to run the entire compilation process before the program will start at all.

This is only because "the entire compilation process" includes linking, which Python does not. Python's "entire compilation process" is a file at a time, since `import` is an entirely run-time construct.

It's also entirely possible to use the Python standard library to precompile all the .py files in a project to .pyc, requesting the legacy naming/placement of those files (side by side with the source - as opposed to the new way of putting version-tagged bytecode into a `__pycache__` subdirectory), remove the corresponding .py files, and still run the program. That seems pretty meaningfully "compiled" to me (just, again, not "linked"). The drawback here is that stack traces won't show the original code, because the .pyc files don't store it (the default last-chance exception handler normally tries to look that up in the corresponding .py source).
by vindex10 | 2025-04-14 16:46:51+00:00
I have a thought on "sharing" the snapshots. Many pages nowadays are behind a paywall.

Typically you are required to log in (pay or not) to remove them. I'm aware of archive.org and others, but it is not the main point :)

The point is, that if you are logged in, some private information about yourself may be stored in the snapshot. It is less dangerous when it is something on the screen -> you can make a decision. But if is is some hidden field with your ip address for example.
by mubou | 2025-04-14 16:47:03+00:00
The fact that the source is so small is wild. I would have expected a huge convoluted parsing library implemented in types.

On the other hand, the fact that this is even possible is more wild. Instead of replacing JS with a proper statically-typed language, we're spending all this effort turning a preprocessor's type system into a turing-complete metalanguage. Pretty soon we'll be able to compile TypeScript entirely using types.
by krasavchik | 2025-04-14 16:47:16+00:00
Is Open Source a Winning Financial Strategy?

If you're building in software — especially in infrastructure or AI — this is a central question. It's hotly debated and increasingly relevant as the world demands more innovation, trust, and sovereignty.

Yet, it remains largely unanswered.

The prevailing narrative says open source successes are non-repeatable anomalies, a view reinforced by recent license changes and skepticism about OSS transferability to AI.

Today, we bring our answer to that question—backed by 25 years of data on VC-backed Open Source companies.

Here’s how we broke it down: 1. Is Commercial Open Source (COSS) VC-fundable? 2. How challenging is the financing journey for COSS startups? 3. Do COSS companies deliver superior exits?
by uecker | 2025-04-14 16:47:37+00:00
I am not sure the number of CVEs measures anything meaningful. The price for zero-days for important targets goes into the millions.

While I am sure there can not be enough security, I am not at all sure the extreme focus on memory safety is worth it, and I am also not sure the added complexity of Rust is really worth it. I would prefer to simplify the stack and make C safer.