MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2025-05-10 09:36:15+00:00
As others have pointed out elsewhere, that only removes static dependencies. If you have code paths that are used depending on dynamic function arguments static analysis is unable to catch those.

For example, you have a function calling XML or PDF or JSON output functions depending on some output format parameter. That's three very different paths and includes, but if you don't know which values that parameter can take during runtime you will have to include all three paths, even if in reality only XML (for example) is ever used.

Or there may be higher level causes outside of any analysis, even if you managed a dynamic one. In a GUI, for example, it could be functionality only ever seen by a few with certain roles, but if there is only one app everything will have to be bundled. Similar scenarios are possible with all kinds of software, for example an analysis application that supports various input and output scenarios. It's a variation of the first example where the parameter is internal, but now it is external data not available for an analysis because it will be known only when the software is actually used.
by xethos | 2025-05-10 09:36:20+00:00
I appreciate the clarification, my mistake taking your original comment the wrong way. I'm a little reassured too - what seems to be an Americanism (things that don't turn a profit aren't worth doing) feels like it's seeping into my locale as well, so I may be overly sensitive to it. It's nice to be told I was wrong in this instance.
by walterbell | 2025-05-10 09:37:57+00:00
They still provide database dumps for analysis and offline use (Kiwix), https://archive.org/download/stackexchange/

https://kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-offli...

> Stack Overflow is used offline in locations like The Ice Cube Lab, a remote research station at the South Pole and the world’s largest neutrino detector. “We constantly work on scripts, a lot of Python code.There’s always something that doesn’t work. That’s when Stack Overflow comes in handy,” says Ralf Auer, the Ice Cube Data Center Manager.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-05-10 09:38:08+00:00
This was solved before subscriptions took over everything by having to pay for new major versions. You pay once and have a limited duration of updates, after that you stick with the current version or pay again for the upgrade.

The benefit of doing it this way was that the user had a choice in upgrading which aligned incentives between users and developers. The developer had to deliver tangible improvements in order to keep payments from existing users coming. These days they change the color scheme every six months, remove features, change the UI for no dicernable reason and label the whole changelog "Various changes and bug fixes" when the product is clearly a mature product that should be in maintenance mode with no significant changes required.
by creshal | 2025-05-10 09:39:49+00:00
The US "solved" that particular problem by keeping its army much smaller than it could've been, precisely to free up more healthy 18 year olds for factory jobs.

Between the British Empire, the various Chinese governments and Soviet Union, the Allies had plenty of manpower, but all that was meaningless without US munitions, US equipment, US food, and US ships to get them where they were needed.
by NotOscarWilde | 2025-05-10 09:40:23+00:00
> I've worked in academia - and yes, that has been in multiple countries in the EU - I've never had to utter a single word in something other than English in the workplace.

I have the same trajectory as you -- multiple countries in the EU, working in academia -- but different experiences for sure. Or at least a mixed bag.

Let me list them in order of how much English sufficed:

1. The Netherlands -- common knowledge is that their English is top notch and anecdotally it was the case as well, I also got by purely with English.

2. Germany -- their English is also good but I needed German in edge cases. One edge case was finding an apartment (not speaking German simply pushed you down the list of candidates, even with a full time job in academia). Another one were university rules and announcements; not every email was in English, but arguably easy to get by with modern translation tools.

3. Czechia & Poland -- English is good among the professors but the percentage of locals at the university level is so high that most internal meetings, announcements, local seminars take place in the local language. In my experience, non-faculty university staff (department secretaries, payroll, entrance security) usually strongly dislike speaking English or outright do not speak it at all.

---

I've omitted some more cases where local languages are required. If you live in a country, you will eventually interact with the healthcare sector, where the language experience will likely mimic the experience at the workplace (for the countries above, it would be in the same order for the healthcare sector).

Another case is government bureaucracy. For most of the EU countries I've been to, the official language of the country is their local language and only their local language. This means that government employees are not required to speak any other language other than the official one to you, plus you might be required to fill in forms and communicate in the official language if you want to talk to them.

In my experience, the helpful/good ones may try to communicate with you in English but if you need something from them or if the bureaucrat had a bad day, you better start talking in the official language.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-10 09:41:09+00:00
There may have been something called "newspapers" during Shakespeare's time, if only just barely (Wikipedia's list begins in 1605, four years prior to his death, and in Germany: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_newspapers>). The first British paper didn't emerge until several decades later (1641, in Scotland).

But most who take even a generous view of that topic put the emergence of the first true mass-market, to use your favourite description, popular newspaper, disseminated widely, published daily, sold cheaply, reliant on mass advertising, and featuring lurid (and often entirely fabulous) reportage, was the New York Sun, published by Benjamin Day.

My earlier reference to Hamilton Holt's Journalism and Media (1909) describes the massive rise of advertising-supported media, and its pernicious impacts on the trade, beginning in about 1860. Mass-circulation required mass literacy, mass-advertising, mass marketing, large-scale print runs, and good which could be sold across a wide area through advertising and mechanised transport. Much as Viagra dominated early online advertising (particularly email), it was patent medicines (usually themselves ineffective, fraudulent, and/or dangerous) which served as the mainstay of early advertising. The book is short (115 large-print pages), information dense, written by an expert practition of the trade of which he writes, and engagingly written. I'd strongly urge you to take it in.

You seem strongly wedded to your views and unwilling to consider alternatives. But that's my whole point: as Schopenhauer notes, and he's hardly alone, the financial motive perverts the art:

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

Commercial journalism is imploding as advertising and attention flee elsewhere. The resulting landscape has a small number of winner-take-all commercial enterprises (the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in the United States), with most other even major-city papers suffering (Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe) if not utterly eviscerated (Chicago Tribune), or vanished entirely in news deserts. The Tribune's local competitor, was acquired by that city's NPR affiliate which was paid millions of dollars to take over the paper. And it's non-profit initiatives which are increasingly serving as the bulwark of journalism, such that it survives, in much of the U.S.

(That those non-profits, notably NPR and PBS are now under direct attack from the present US administration is hardly surprising.)

Again, whether or not you accept that the commercial motive is a negative, what other models for supporting authors might you find attractive. A couple of years ago on discussion of pirated books on Amazon, the question was asked "Would you continue writing novels if you got UBI of equivalent size and weren't allowed to charge for your books?". Writing here, author Charlie Stross (cstross) answered, "That's what I'd call living the dream!"

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35765198>
by GenshoTikamura | 2025-05-10 09:45:58+00:00
>This post was written by the Bonfire maintainers' circle and shaped by feedback from the advisory circle.

It is something about community, the sense of belonging, glorified bureaucracy, being slow, and good writing. A Kinfolk of software.

Relevant meme: "I took LSD last night and had this vision of a federated social network that will disrupt the world. Will you help bring it to fruition? I can't offer any money right now"
by domdomegg | 2025-05-10 09:47:24+00:00
Thanks! As I said in the analysis, I think Sourcery gives the best quality comments out of all the different systems in terms of explanation quality and solution quality.

But I think it just didn't catch as much as the other tools - possibly the default preset is a bit too cautious about reporting problems.

Keen to see how these tools improve, and think you'll probably go far if you are listening out for feedback like this :)
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-05-10 09:47:59+00:00
Are there any tools that leverage vision for UI development?

Use case: I am working on a hobby project that uses TS/React as frontend. I can use local or cloud LLMs in VSCode but even those with vision require that I take a screenshot and paste it to a chat. Ideally, I would want it all automated until some stop criterion is met (even if only n-iterations). But even an extension that would screenshot a preview and paste it to chat (triggered by a keyboard shortcut) would be a big time-saver.
by tsurba | 2025-05-10 09:48:03+00:00
I guess SO was quite useful for providing a lot of training material for technical question answering for LLMs? I don’t think they got compensated for it so that is a bit sad.

In terms of my use, most questions and answers either were low quality, the question was a bit off of what you really wanted to know, or if it was a problem that required discussion or opinions, a ”real” hobbyist forum was better.

While at some point I felt like I (tried to) look up everything from SO, I now basically never use it anymore, but thanks for all the fish!
by TechRemarker | 2025-05-10 09:48:13+00:00
Crazy how much I used SO for so long and yet how happily i switched to Reddit and LLMs 100% and haven’t once look back. Over the years it became a place to fear posting since their no matter how much you researched before posting you’d be met by an army of people noting it’s posted in the wrong place and off topic and closed and then years later you see it incredibly voted up for being so helpful. Changing the brand seems like rearranging chairs on the titanic or worse, on the bottom of the ocean.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-05-10 09:48:31+00:00
Socialism gave us Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and a wall splitting the country. The 5 days working week was introduced in the West in 1965 under a conservative government. It took 2 years longer for the socialist East to do the same. A 40 hours week was never achieved by Socialism but was only introduced after reunification.

The word Socialism might not mean the same for everyone.

Edit: Before you downvote read Webster's definition I posted further down. To be clear, I don't believe the conservative government of Ludwig Erhard would have introduced the 40 hours week out of their own good will. You can read about the union's campaign here: https://www.planet-wissen.de/geschichte/deutsche_geschichte/...
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-10 09:49:20+00:00
Finally somebody who gives a shit! Thank you for dropping that generous contribution.

Now I can use that device as an RSS feed! That puts the log into blog.

I haven't seen that much shit emerge from a wormhole since the Ed the Happy Clown episode of Yummy Fur comics:

https://everything2.com/node/1485685?bookmark_site=twitter&o...

>We now skip back in time a little, where we find Ronald Reagan before his mysterious transformation. He presides over an America that has no concept of toilets, and piles of feces on every street corner are becoming a serious problem. Fortunately, science can help; a farmer has stumbled across a small portal to another dimension. The solution is clear; push America's mounting shit through the portal via a huge funnel. The exit point for the portal is in fact the anus of the gentleman who couldn't stop shitting back in the prison in Ed's world; so there is at least a good scientific explanation for that little episode.

>During the official opening of the shit disposer, Reagan tragically falls into the giant collection of pending waste. His body blocks the funnel, but not before his head has gone through the portal; a headless president is recovered. A scientist heads though the portal on a rescue mission.

>(Now, I know what you're thinking, and I've no idea how Reagan's head became attached to the end of Ed's penis. It makes no sense, even within the logic of Ed's universe, and it's not explained. If you have any notions, please let me know - but for now, we'll just have to accept that somehow, it happened...)

The Chester Brown Interview:

https://www.tcj.com/the-chester-brown-interview/3/

Best NSFW Ronald Reagan Quote Ever:

https://the-comics-journal.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/wp-co...

Support Indie Comics!
by Etheryte | 2025-05-10 09:49:55+00:00
This is true, nearly every book has at least some useful or insightful bits, but our time is limited. If you're reading one book that's mostly uninteresting, you're also not reading all the other books that you could be reading instead. Now I'm not advocating for minmaxing your life down to the point of insanity, but I do think it's sensible to try and pick up good books over bad books — whatever that means to you.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-10 09:51:03+00:00
> That reference counting is done at runtime.

I thought Swift uses ARC just like Objective-C? The compiler elides much of the reference counting, even across inlined functions. It’s not like Python or Javascript where a variable binding is enough to cause an increment (although IIRC the V8 JIT can elide some of that too).

I don’t disagree that it’s a runtime GC but there’s a bit of nuance to its implementation that resists simple categorization like that.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-10 09:51:33+00:00
Yeah this was an uncomfortable read. That guy write as if he is the only one in his family able to plan and act and as if his wife and kids are some kind of useless piece of shit.

His wife probably knows better than him what is really valuable to keep in case of emergency: food in cans instead of 2 additional power hungry fridge and freezer. Whike I am not into child labour, non toddler kids won't lose their childhood if they have to provide manpower, help and learn about responsibilities during a specific event once in a while. On the contrary these can be good teaching moments.
by AdamBelis | 2025-05-10 09:51:56+00:00
> Weird keybindings, e.g. pressing Ctrl +/- does not zoom/unzoom

if you prefer illustrator shorcut inksape offers it in welcome screen but maybe it would not hurt to also add that binding defoult is just +- without modifiers

> The golden path feels buggy. When launching the window is for some reason cropped to the top 1/8th of the screen and needs to be resized, and the artboard is tiny.

this is not true for new installs.

> Exported SVGs are needlessly verbose. This looks like it has gotten better but is still there. For example, exporting an SVG with two gradients actually puts four gradients in the file (combining with inheritance).

Inkscape extends SVG a lot so it can add more features. for exports just one of optimised svg export options inskcape offers
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-10 09:56:21+00:00
I don't have an SO account, but I welcome the kudos here!

My experience with Microsoft-related stuff now being done "in the open" on GitHub has been great, because it means that users like us can directly open an issue ticket right where the developers are day-to-day. The tickets get attention and/or fixes more more often than screaming into the void on some generic forum full of only vaguely interested people.
by andy99 | 2025-05-10 09:57:27+00:00
I like to read the Code Golf Stack Exchange: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/

While I don't know how well it generalizes, pages like this can't be replaced by LLMs, and still contain instructive technical content. There are certainly other little islands like this.

LLMs have probably forever replaced the "how do I center a button" type questions, but there are still lots of things they can't do that needs a human asking and answering.
by linker3000 | 2025-05-10 09:57:52+00:00
Yep, I was learning C++ and could not understand an example in one of Stroustrup's books, so I posted a query asking for help, giving my thoughts and confusion.

I was roundly berated for not reading carefully enough, until one lonely soul piped up and said that actually there was a typo in the book's example code.

I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-10 09:58:26+00:00
Personal dream: in-your-attic IC factory. Along the lines of what people like Jeri Ellsworth or Sam Zeloof have been doing. But cheap-ish (and hopefully, small) enough that almost anyone could have one.

Or even more generic: some device to assemble atom-sized structures to your liking. Like what has been demonstrated with scanning tunneling microscopes: pick up an atom here, deposit over there.

Quick enough to produce, say a ~1M+ transistor IC in a week or so. That would be like a 3D printer on steroids.

Or a chemical variety: have a few mg. of life-saving medicine produced in your attic. That could do away with the power of Big Pharma overnight.

Unlike say, faster-than-light travel, none of these things conflict with (known) laws of nature; it's technology, miniturization & software for the most part.
by Propelloni | 2025-05-10 09:58:37+00:00
To summarize: the author struggles with the question why they should care (mostly about society and social contracts). The author references Plato's Republic, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and one of Wolff's blog postings and quotes the bible on stuff. To me there is no clear line of argument visible. I presume the author thinks they are some kind of a Christian punk. Fine by me.

The author seems to be blissfully unaware of existentialism, French or otherwise, which could have either saved the author 12 years of anguish (OTOH, a very existentialist thing to have) or made the article more interesting. Maybe both. This way I'd say, needs work.
by nvarsj | 2025-05-10 09:58:54+00:00
I'm trying to understand the rationale behind this.

US's global superiority has largely been driven by programs like the NSF, making the US the world leader for r&d and inventing completely new industries.

Why would you completely gut these programs with such amazing ROI?

Putting my conspiracist hat on, it seems like this only benefits countries like China/Russia that want to weaken the US.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-10 09:58:57+00:00
So they are "renewing the brand", appointed a committee but the post does not mention anything concrete at all apart from AI FOMO.

Stackoverflow's problem is that they did not push back on AI right from the start. Instead, they launched hundreds of surveys where they tried to extract from developers that they want AI.

Well, they don't. People don't like their free work under the Creative Commons License to be sold to "Open"AI under a partnership.

Is the recent lockdown with captchas designed to grant "Open"AI a monopoly over the stolen Creative Commons contributions? Is that the goal of the rebranding?
by smitty1e | 2025-05-10 09:59:00+00:00
I'd have to re-read TFA a few times to be sure, but it seems that the author echos something that I have felt for some time: humans don't scale.

There is no "categorical imperative" on the plane of existence for the same reason the Tower of Babel collapsed. Once we get above the 23 chromosome pairs defining the standard human, little is enduring.

To govern and coordinate people at scale requires stripping individuality and binding them through, e.g. a UCMJ[1]. That is, some sort of military-ish authoritarian system.

For a glance at history, authoritarianism is both attractive, and transient.

So history seems more a chemical reaction of a variable set of "people-molecules" in an environmental "solution", building up and tearing down structures as we collectively fumble along.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Jus...
by 7bit | 2025-05-10 10:01:42+00:00
I don't understand the post, to be honest. It seems they wrote a book to announce that they will install a new logo and an updated design.

They are asking the community to get involved in the process, but don't exactly tell them how. Possibly because they aren't interested in their opinion, but just want to keep them busy to keep up the appearance that they truly care. I guess so that the backlash is smaller when they actually roll it out.

My personal opinion of stack overflow is, that they're past their summit. The community is toxic. Questions get closed or down voted for subjective reasons. I've been a big fan of especially the serverfault community. It was small enough to feel familiar, friendly, and questions were not met with a harsh tone. It felt like building a reputation there was worthwhile.

I don't feel like that anymore, and for a long time. The community also changed. When before, my correct answers would get accepted or at least upvoted, more and more often Questioners don't care anymore. That is not StackOverflows fault, but it still keeps me from investing the time to answer questions if I don't even get a thank you in return.

Now the community takes a friendly tone with this post, but it just feels like a layer of pretense, from an enterprise that doesn't care about anything than the money. It's fair enough, but not enough to really impact me.

I just don't care any more.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-10 10:01:56+00:00
> Its super easy to say `import foolib`, then call `foolib.do_thing()` and just start running.

It's effectively an end-run around the linker.

It used to be that you'd create a library by having each function in its own compilation unit, you'd create a ".o" file, then you'd bunch them together in a ".a" archive. When someone else is compiling their code, and they need the do_thing() function, the linker sees it's unfulfiled, and plucks it out of the foolib.a archive. For namespacing you'd probably call the functions foolib_do_thing(), etc.

However, object-orientism with a "god object" is a disease. We go in through a top-level object like "foolib" that holds pointers to all its member functions like do_thing(), do_this(), do_that(), then the only reference the other person's code has is to "foolib"... and then "foolib" brings in everything else in the library.

It's not possible for the linker to know if, for example, foolib needed the reference to do_that() just to initialise its members, and then nobody else ever needed it, so it could be eliminated, or if either foolib or the user's code will somehow need it.

> Go and Rust, for example, encourage everything for a single package/mod to go in the same file.

I can say that, at least for Go, it has excellent dead code elimination. If you don't call it, it's removed. If you even have a const feature_flag = false and have an if feature_flag { foobar() } in the code, it will eliminate foobar().