MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pogue | 2025-04-27 14:12:55+00:00
The Register just wrote an article on creating a bootable USB version of DOS to make a distraction free writing machine. [1]

They include three freeware word processors "MS Word, Arnor Protext, an outliner, and the WordPerfect Editor" and released it on Github [2]. But, they mention other word processors in the article and their current status (free/paid/etc).

[1] Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/26/dos_distraction_free_...

[2] Usable DOS-based live USB media https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-04-27 14:13:54+00:00
I actually have the exact opposite viewpoint: if you’re managing a platform with multiple teams what you are suggesting is way more of a pain than a standardized, container based workflow. You want a language agnostic test runner that runs generic commands. The reason for this is that you want to be able to quickly skill up engineers and have them able to quickly switch codebases since the interface (like tilt) is the same across all of them.

You give up a bit of snappiness, sure, but you can also keep the very small non container based tooling like linting outside of the container.
by ahl | 2025-04-27 14:13:54+00:00
Sometimes data on disk and in memory are randomly corrupted. For a pretty amazing example, check out "bitsquatting"[1]--it's like domain name squatting, but instead of typos, you squat on domains that would bit looked up in the case of random bit flips. These can occur due e.g. to cosmic rays. On-disk, HDDs and SSDs can produce the wrong data. It's uncommon to see actual invalid data rather than have an IO fail on ECC, but it certainly can happen (e.g. due to firmware bugs).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquatting
by SkiFire13 | 2025-04-27 14:14:01+00:00
> The Rust philosophy is the idea that a complicated type system should ensure safety.

I don't think the "complicated" is part of the philosophy. Rather the idea is that a "strong" type system should ensure safety. The general consequence of this however is that the language becomes quite restricting and limiting. Hence the need for more more complex feature that allow for greater expressibility.
by dripdry45 | 2025-04-27 14:14:56+00:00
Do. Less.

all the dogs and furniture and hobbies and subscriptions and running around. Grasping, grasping, grasping...

my partner and I are people of simple means. We garbage pick or get off Facebook marketplace most of our stuff for super cheap (nice OLD stuff... Which I repair!) but have a fairly nice home that we’ve bought. She saved a lot just working for the post office in there pay: She didn’t go anywhere, and enjoys things like house cleaning and doing the dishes and reading. It’s the same as the Buddhist monks I spent time with. I give this example and people flat out rage at me, saying how awful a life that is. But my partner is one of the kindest, happiest people and adores simple things (she's also really fit and stellar in bed, so that helps...) She has found ways to legitimately enjoy the small moments and being present in life, not chasing a bunch of shiny flashy things all around the world. I’ve learned a lot from her.

In short: we don’t need AI, we need to just do less and learn to get back to simplicity. THAT would afford time to socialize.
by muixoozie | 2025-04-27 14:15:09+00:00
Would be truly living in a dystopian sci-fi universe if this shit gets normalized to being ubiquitous. And that seems to be the direction we're heading. Gamification. Tiered access. Implicit Data harvesting. Loyalty rewards or getting "ripped off" for opting out. Mundane corporate control and manipulation embedded in everyday consumerism. Next up: Daily deal lottery. Unlock new flavor packets.. Predicted craving "flash deals"
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-27 14:16:40+00:00
The comment I replied also breached the same rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43805821

Why wasn't it flagged? Thanks for confirming the bias and double standard selective enforcement on HN.

Be snarky against liberal views? Flagged for braking rules. Be snarky against unpopular views? Allowed and often upvoted.
by Snow_Falls | 2025-04-27 14:17:01+00:00
Unprovoked?

Are you aware that gaza has been under siege for decades? When Egypt refused to allow israeli ships throught the canal, Isreal invaded. According to israel, a blockade is cause enought for war.

Also why do you think gaza is so small? When did they lose access to the rest of the land around it? Why are there so many settlements?

You can really only say it's unprovoked if you ignore all of history before october 7th.

Oh and indiscriminately killing civilians is bad. Shame only one side of this 'debate' agrees.
by jvvw | 2025-04-27 14:17:06+00:00
Definitely. The season that coverage was done can be a big thing too. In Russia you'll be looking at the car, antenna type and the season as pretty much the first indicator where you might be.

Copyright year and camera gen is a big thing in some countries too.

Obviously they can still figure out a lot without all that and NMPZ obviates aspects of it (you can't hide camera gens, copyright and season and there are often still traces of the car in some manner). It's definitely not all 'meta' but to be competitive at that level you really do need to be using it. I think Gingey is the only world league player who doesn't use car meta.

Even as a fairly good but nowhere near pro player, it's weird how I associate particular places with particular types of weather. I think if saw Almaty in the summer for example it would feel very weird. I've decided not to deliberately learn car meta but still picked up quite a lot without trying and your 'vibe' of a place can certainly include camera gen.
by KyleBrandt | 2025-04-27 14:17:23+00:00
Using dolthub's go-mysql-server for Grafana's upcoming SQL expressions feature (private preview in Grafana 12, but in the OSS version with a feature toggle).

GMS lets you provide your own table and database implementations, so we use GMS to perform SQL queries against Grafana's dataframes - so users can join or manipulate different data source queires, but we don't have to insert the data into SQL to do this thanks to GMS.
by ahl | 2025-04-27 14:17:25+00:00
Back in 2016, Ars Technica picked up this piece from my blog [1] as well as a longer piece reviewing the newly announced APFS [2] [3]. Glad it's still finding an audience!

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-ap...

[2]: https://ahl.dtrace.org/2016/06/19/apfs-part1/

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-ana...
by ModernMech | 2025-04-27 14:18:11+00:00
How does high functioning autistic people speaking up for the autistic community "pollute" the conversation?

First of all, the reason this registry isn't going through is because autistic people who are functioning enough to speak out did so in solidarity with the entire autistic community. So far from polluting anything we are advocating for ourselves and our peers.

Secondly, this "high functioning low functioning" dichotomy is wrong so your framing it as a "us vs them" situation is off. It's a spectrum not a binary.

Third, presumably if they can't speak for themselves, and "high functioning" autistic people are discouraged, then the only people speaking for them are allistic people speaking about what's best for autistic people. When that happens, you get bone-headed characterizations like autistic people "never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." and suggestions of registries, wellness farms, and soon enough genetic cleansings.

Finally, it's autistic acceptance and awareness month, and the autistic community has been under attack for a week. You're spending your Sunday calling autistic people "selfish" and characterizing their input as "pollution". Have some compassion please.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-27 14:18:48+00:00
I've programmed in Rust extensively, and I'm on the Rust language team. I don't quite know what you mean, and I would genuinely like to. If Rust feels like "too much", I'd be interested in knowing what makes it feel that way and how we might be able to improve Rust to avoid that feeling.

Is this something you experience when writing your code, or is this something you experience when reading other people's code?

If it's the former, I'd really love to hear more about those experiences.

If it's the latter, are there particular features that crop up that make code feel like too much?

(To be clear, Rust isn't perfect for everyone, despite our best efforts. And if you want to work with another language, you should! I'm not looking to defend it; your experiences are valid. We'd love to make Rust better, so I didn't want to miss the opportunity to ask, because we so rarely hear from people in the intersection of "I love Rust" and "Rust is too much".)
by tiu | 2025-04-27 14:19:27+00:00
See https://wiki.alopex.li/SurveyOfSystemLanguages2024

and the related discussion https://lobste.rs/s/c3dbkh

Serious total MSLs that have a defined memory model to allow "low level" operations seem to be scarce if not any. Hence I do not think there is any single one that comes between C/Zig and Rust.

I would have said https://www.hylo-lang.org/ but, personal opinion, seems like there is too much going on as well. See also https://vale.dev/

P.S Mind mentioning what FP-like features are in Rust? (Genuinely have not looked into Rust that much but I am interested).
by pfdietz | 2025-04-27 14:19:34+00:00
The goal of the US nuclear unbrella isn't just to defend the western world, it's to inhibit the rest of the western world from building nuclear weapons.

At some point there may be a phase change where the US abandons this goal. In that world, the rational strategy becomes one of strategic disengagement, so that if nuclear war breaks out (or a conventional war that risks going nuclear) the US is not drawn in. The lesson becomes that of WW1, not WW2.
by nradov | 2025-04-27 14:20:14+00:00
The thinking has always been that we need a triad of nuclear delivery systems, partially for deterrence and partially as a hedge against future technology. Submarines are survivable today, but who knows what new detection system a brilliant Chinese scientist might invent tomorrow? And SLBMs can't really hold deeply buried bunkers at risk, like the ones heavily used in North Korea and Iran. Hitting those takes an air delivered "bunker buster" nuke.
by tsweijen | 2025-04-27 14:20:14+00:00
Thanks for bringing this up. This is exactly why we partnered with Truvi. They offer optional home swap damage protection (max $25 per swap) and also screen your guest before swapping to minimize risks. More info: https://swaphouse.io/damage-protection-truvi

It’s entirely optional, so if you want that extra peace of mind, you can go for it. That said, it ultimately just needs to feel good as well. We always recommend really getting to know the people you’re swapping with — having a video call for a virtual intro and house tour, and meeting face-to-face for the key exchange. The damage protection is a great extra layer if you want it.

Appreciate the feedback!
by goku12 | 2025-04-27 14:20:42+00:00
Autism, high functioning or not, rarely comes on its own. It often has comorbidities like PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder and ADHD. Many of these extra disorders, like the former 3 in my list happens due to how autistic people interact with the general society. Bullying, abuse, SA, etc are reported at higher than average rates by autistic people. A diagnosis often helps to deal with them and plan for the future. In addition, medication is used for these conditions. Autism doesn't really have a treatment as far as I know (could use a fact check). There are some therapies available, but they have limited effects.

Another matter is that 'high functioning autism' doesn't mean freedom from hardships. They learn and work differently and don't fit well in regular classrooms. If you search online, you'll find several hilarious accounts of puzzled and perplexed autistic students in their classrooms. Despite being 'high functioning', they really could use accommodations. This is true at home too. If you leave them alone, many would simply starve to death without even ordering food online. Another matter is 'masking' - something high functioning autistic people do in public. It makes them more approachable to others. But it also creates enormous cognitive loads that can later develop into other disorders. Diagnosis really helps in these cases.
by red_admiral | 2025-04-27 14:21:33+00:00
Everyone should read Oliver Sacks' autobiography "Uncle Tungsten" - the past is a different country.

Back in the day, a child could pick up chemicals and do experiments at home - one day Sacks' parents told him, "We'll install a fume cupboard for you, but can you make less poison gas next time?"

You could also be legally under-age and not allowed to vote yet, but you could just buy pitchblende (uranium) and several other radioactive substances for your experiments.
by boh | 2025-04-27 14:22:14+00:00
The trick is not have "wealth" (ie property ownership/rights). Societies that were nomadic with low/no property ownership culture did not have wealth inequality since there wasn't that much "wealth" to have. They had their hierarchies but those were weak, more akin to the kind of hierarchies you have in families ("everyone listens to grandma" kind of hierarchy). Wealth inequality is obviously synthetic (and this study is kind of silly), since you need a governing body to maintain property rights (along with creating what today are the most valuable legal ownership structures, like intellectual property). A corporation, a mortgage, a deed, equity, all the defining elements of wealth, are exclusively legal constructs created/administered by governments. The wealth of every wealthy person you can think of is based on their rights to property, not the property itself (i.e stocks, deeds, trademarks, copyrights etc.). This requires a very elaborate infrastructure to maintain and a culture to support it. Wealth isn't a given and actually is very easily destroyed (when governments are toppled or property rights are taken away--Communist rebellions of the twentieth century are a good example).
by IggleSniggle | 2025-04-27 14:22:29+00:00
I don't do front end these days and don't really have a dog in this fight, but most code is nouns and verbs, while design choices are adjectives and adverbs. When the business decides that we need to run, not walk, you can just change the name of the function from walk to run instead while changing the code, if that seems appropriate. With CSS selectors, when the business decides we need to change the "feel" of the page from "spiky" to "gentle," you might only want to change some subset of the design that was built up around the "spiky" concept, while leaving others as they are. There is not a comprehensiveness and absoluteness to the changes, and it's a lot harder to reason about "pure functions".

Add to this that CSS is like a codebase built on try/catch and throwing errors for its primary control flow mechanism, where the only thing that tames this is the naming conventions employed, and you've got a situation where the names really matter in a way that they don't when we're doing other programming, because the names are the only connective tissue to help you reason about the "control flow" once your css starts getting complex.
by dmbaggett | 2025-04-27 14:22:31+00:00
Many years ago (circa 1993) I ported the original Colossal Cave adventure by Crowther and Woods to TADS, a language created by Mike Roberts specifically for authoring text adventures. (Colossal Cave just came up recently here.)

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=c896g2rtsope497w

Graham Nelson ported my port to his Inform language, and Inform is probably your best choice if what you actually want to do is write a (plain text) adventure game.

If you want to learn C programming, writing a text adventure in C would be a fun learning project! But aside from pedagogy there’s no real reason to write a text adventure in anything other than Inform, TADS, etc. Not only is it much easier to use one of these purpose-built languages, with Inform you get multi-platform compatibility going back to the 8-bit era for free!

Personally if I had any free time, I’d be more interested in looking at how to use a frontier LLM like llama as an integral part of a text adventure. There was something like this using GPT-2 circulating on here a while back, but it was pretty rough.

However, it’s clear that if you figured out how to precisely control the LLM so it didn’t produce crazy stuff, you could realize the dream of truly realistic NPCs in these games. Text adventures would seem to be a perfect laboratory for experimenting with this.
by ahl | 2025-04-27 14:22:46+00:00
ZFS was developed in Solaris, and at the time we were mostly selling SPARC systems. That changed rapidly and the biggest commercial push was in the form of the ZFS Storage Appliance that our team (known as Fishworks) built at Sun. Those systems were based on AMD servers that Sun was making at the time such as Thumper [1]. Also in 2016, Ubuntu leaned in to use of ZFS for containers [2]. There was nothing that specific about Solaris that made sense for ZFS, and even less of a connection to the SPARC architecture.

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2005/11/16/sun_thumper/

[2]: https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in-ubun...
by thelastgallon | 2025-04-27 14:23:28+00:00
Because the western world (and rest of the world following western world) has one rule (the only rule): make the super rich richer, everything else is just marketing to accomplish that.

Home prices are completely out of reach for most people in UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia (coming soon to a country near you!). You're overpaying to live like a 1920's postman: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tGPHcteG9dY

Create artificial scarcity (by zoning, monopolies, regulatory capture), buy assets (never have to improve any assets because there is no competition, no functional market of competitors producing better housing), extract wealth forever by maximizing rents and asset prices.
by Fosowl | 2025-04-27 14:23:30+00:00
AgenticSeek only have agent communication for planning task but it isn't really communication. Planning task are simply a json list of task and how they related with each other. During execution output from each agents will be saved and "added" to the prompt of the following agents that depends on the information from the previous agent. Really dead simple but work quite well. For memory management, we store message as an array of {"role": "user", "content":...}. Where we take a more innovative approach if how we process message before adding to the history: We remove the <think>..reasoning..</think> pattern to keep only useful informations in the context (we don't really need the reasoning that was done on previous task for the current task). We also have memory summarization that is used when loading a previous session.
by schnable | 2025-04-27 14:23:44+00:00
"debunks the myth" => "makes a case"

And the question begging of assuming that equality is a desirable goal. We also need to look at the cost of equality (of house sizes?) -- if it requires authoritarian government, theocracy, slavery, subjugation of other tribes, maybe it's not necessarily a goal unto it self? Those other factors at least need to be considered!

Truly garbage science writing.
by dotty- | 2025-04-27 14:23:48+00:00
Really wish people didn't continue to misunderstand the concept of wealth & having cash. First sentence of the article:

> Back when Elon Musk had a bank account with merely one billion dollars in it he had to borrow money from the federal government to get his fledgling EV automaker off the ground. In January of 2010 the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office floated Tesla $465 million ...

Here is an article in 2010 talking about Musk running low on cash & his divorce causing him financial issues https://venturebeat.com/business/elon-musk-personal-finances...
by hagbard_c | 2025-04-27 14:23:53+00:00
> who needs to download the whole Wikipedia

Anyone who wants to have access while off-line, for whatever reason. This can be as simple as saving costs via more complicated as accessing content from regions with spotty and/or expensive connectivity (you're on a ship out of reach of shore-based mobile networks, you do not have access to Starlink or something similar, you're deep in the jungle, deep underground, etc) to some prepper scenario where connectivity ends at the cave entry because the 'net has ceased to exist.

I would like to have a less politically biased online encyclopedia for the latter scenario, it would be a shame to start a new society based on the same bad ideas which brought down the previous one. If ever a politically neutral LLM becomes available that'd be one of the first tasks I'd put it to: point out bias - any bias - in articles, encyclopedias and other 'sources' (yes, I know, WP is not an original source but for this purpose it is) of knowledge.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-27 14:24:02+00:00
If those electrical boxes are anything like the ones in the video I shared, then they’re trivial to move.

You don’t actually need the box though. In fact they weren’t even available in my previous two homes. It’s really more a convenience thing than anything.

But again, this is assuming we are talking about the same thing (region differences and all).
by jdiff | 2025-04-27 14:25:52+00:00
As someone currently engaged in teaching the Adobe suite to high school students, that doesn't track with what I see. When my students are getting stuck and frustrated, I look at the problem, remind them of the constraints and assumptions the software operates under. Almost always they realize the problem without me spelling it out, and they reinforce the mental model of the software they're building. Often noticing me lurking and about to offer help is enough for them to pause, re-evaluate, and catch the error in their thinking before I can get out a full sentence.

Reminding LLMs of the constraints they're bumping into doesn't help. They haven't forgotten, after all. The best performance I got out of the LLMs in my project I mentioned upthread was a loop of trying out different functions, pausing, re-evaluating, realizing in its chain of thought that it didn't fit the constraints, and trying out a slightly different way of phrasing the exact same approach. Humans will stop slamming their head into a wall eventually. I sat there watching Gemini 2.5 Pro internally spew out maybe 10 variations of the same function before I pulled the tokens it was chewing on out of its mouth.

Yes, sometimes students get frustrated and bail, but they have the capacity to learn and try something new. If you fall into an area that's adjacent to but decidedly not in their training data, the LLMs will feel that pull from the training data too strongly and fall right into that rut, forgetting where they're at.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-04-27 14:25:54+00:00
HBM are in very limited supply and NVidia tries to buy all the stock it could find at any price[1][2]. So the memory literally couldn't be increased.

[1]: https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/02/27/he-who-can-pay-top-d...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-clears-samsungs-hb...
by graemep | 2025-04-27 14:26:15+00:00
Really? So why are there food banks in the UK? Why does Google search remove links to personal details of multiple politicians in multiple European countries? For someone poor the top end of NHS dental treatment is a worry - even assuming they can find a dentist willing to take on NHS patients in the first place.

I could go on, but there are plenty of flaws in western Europe