MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cduzz | 2025-05-11 13:51:59+00:00
I worked for a couple summers as a "relay operator"; in the USA there is (was? give the hateful time I suppose...) a law, "Americans with Disabilities Act" to the effect that people unable to do a thing should be able to do the thing. Roughly it means "people in wheelchairs should be able to access buildings" and "people unable to see should be able to read newspapers" and "people unable to hear should be able to talk on the telephone." and so on.

The "let people unable to hear talk on the phone" accommodation was to provide actual teletype machines to people who can't hear (at the time, many of these devices were some hideous 75 baud 6 bit monsters where there were limited punctuation and only upper case); the phone company would then also run a service where they had operators (I was one, for a couple summers) where people would call this service and that service would act as a bridge (or, "relay") to the other kind of device. So deaf people could order pizza, teenagers could call their friends and talk about teenager stuff, etc.

Specific to this conversation, the "relay operator" setup was a telephone system billing computer (that would also setup the phone call) and a standard terminal that'd interface with the person with the TTY. There were 2 800 numbers; one to connect to a TTY and one to connect to my ears; people would connect and ask to talk to a peer, and I'd enter the billing / call info into the phone computer, then actually do the talking on the terminal.

Each of these systems had a very distinct keyboard (the phone co keyboard had deep wells on the home keys; the terminal had "normal" nubs on the home keys), and I spent a ton of time entering phone numbers on the phone co's billing computer, with my right hand. To this day, my right hand touch-types "phone company" numbers and normal "ten key" (I did a lot of data entry at other points in my life) with my left hand.

[edit]

oh -- these things, though "ttys" were called "TDD" or "TTD" or some silly name to imply they were for deaf people, though they were just ttys; the cooler kids, calling that relay number, had 300 or 1200 or even 2400bps modems; I think that's as fast as the phoneco's relay terminal went, though)

GA
by bob1029 | 2025-05-11 13:52:01+00:00
At some point, the CEO is going to ask the CTO why the product hasn't been delivered. If this doesn't happen, the board will eventually intervene and install a new Cxx suite.

The financial pressure will eventually correct these issues. The cost of borrowing is non-zero now. Investors are going to want to see happier customers much sooner than before. Hobbling along with a handful of marginally happy customers for a decade isn't going to cut it anymore.

The most likely corrective measure is that the company goes away because they couldn't course correct in time. This is often the tragic consequence of tech egos (often the CTO) refusing to be sublimated in service of the actual business needs.
by neilv | 2025-05-11 13:52:11+00:00
I think that culture shift will have to come from the top in business -- the CEO and the board.

At this point, the software development field is about operating within the system decided by those others, with the goal of personally getting money.

After you've made the CEO and board accountable, I think dev culture will adapt almost immediately.

Beware of attempts to push engineering licensing or certifications, etc. as a solution here. Based on everything we've seen in the field in recent decades, that will just be used at the corporate level as a compliance letter-but-not-spirit tool to evade responsibility (as well as a moat to upstart competitors), and a vendor market opportunity for incompetent leeches.

First you make CEO and board accountable, and then let the dev culture change, and then, once you have a culture of people taking responsibility, then you'll have the foundation to add in licensing (designed in good faith) as an extra check on that, if that looks worthwhile.
by new_user_final | 2025-05-11 13:52:41+00:00
I am not a super coder but I am quite conscious what I write.

I copy pasted a part of my code into Claude.ai to help me add a few lines. It completed that part and also rewritten another few lines. I asked why it did that, explanation was that I missed a edge case.

LLMs are good for writing boring parts of code and also helpful for catching bugs.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-11 13:52:42+00:00
I'm kind of old, this is my 5th or 6th illicit drug moral panic.

1. LSD - it'll make you jump out of windows, and your children will be born with ectrodactly 2. Heroin - you will become a filthy degenerate 3. PCP/Angel dust - you will become an insane violent monster who kills their parents 4. Crack - makes people into virtual slaves, and their children are crippled, barely human 5. Meth - same as crack, but your teeth fall out.

You'll pardon me if this seems like we're all tired of meth, it's time for a new moral panic to motivate stricter laws and more police presence.
by lizknope | 2025-05-11 13:53:18+00:00
Microsoft and IBM were both developing OS/2 together. There were a lot of disagreements between the two companies. IBM wanted to keep supporting the 286.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup

> OS/2 1.x targets the Intel 80286 processor and DOS fundamentally does not. IBM insisted on supporting the 80286 processor, with its 16-bit segmented memory mode, because of commitments made to customers who had purchased many 80286-based PS/2s as a result of IBM's promises surrounding OS/2.[30] Until release 2.0 in April 1992, OS/2 ran in 16-bit protected mode and therefore could not benefit from the Intel 80386's much simpler 32-bit flat memory model and virtual 8086 mode features. This was especially painful in providing support for DOS applications. While, in 1988, Windows/386 2.1 could run several cooperatively multitasked DOS applications, including expanded memory (EMS) emulation, OS/2 1.3, released in 1991, was still limited to one 640 kB "DOS box".

> Given these issues, Microsoft started to work in parallel on a version of Windows which was more future-oriented and more portable. The hiring of Dave Cutler, former VAX/VMS architect, in 1988 created an immediate competition with the OS/2 team, as Cutler did not think much of the OS/2 technology and wanted to build on his work on the MICA project at Digital rather than creating a "DOS plus". His NT OS/2 was a completely new architecture.[31]

DOS extenders had started in the 1980's but they weren't a real OS but I would barely call DOS an OS either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_extender

But Unix was ported to the 386 in 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix#Transfer_of_ownership_to...

> In 1987, SCO ported Xenix to the 386 processor, a 32-bit chip, after securing knowledge from Microsoft insiders that Microsoft was no longer developing Xenix.[41] Xenix System V Release 2.3.1 introduced support for i386, SCSI and TCP/IP. SCO's Xenix System V/386 was the first 32-bit operating system available on the market for the x86 CPU architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

I had friends running Linux from the very beginning in 1991.
by jhp123 | 2025-05-11 13:53:41+00:00
How did manufacturing adjust to the rise of 3d printing and the new world where 90% of consumer goods were printed at home, replicator-style?

How did the finance world adjust to a world where financial transactions were automated on the blockchain using smart contracts?

How have cities adapted to the massive migration of in-person experiences to the metaverse — and so soon after they rebuilt all their physical infrastructure around the revolutionary personal transportation system known as the Segway[0]?

[0] none other than Steve Jobs predicted that cities would be designed around the Segway https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...
by aristofun | 2025-05-11 13:55:16+00:00
i noticed about people who like WhatsApp are mostly one of these groups (or combination):

1. They don’t know any better

2. Their expectations low (anything better than sms is already good enough)

3. They see “everyone is using it in my country” as the main feature

4. They are very light users (they don’t need cross device synchronization, they don’t do business or live inside a messenger for work, they don’t care about extra latency, clumsy ui, resiliency, backups etc).
by rpwilcox | 2025-05-11 13:55:39+00:00
I use a USB-C hub with DisplayLink to drive my setup. This means MacOS thinks I'm recording the screen.

I'm a bit worried Team's solution will use those APIs will be used (ie I'll have a choice: see a Teams meeting video OR be hooked up to all my monitors).

What I think is a related side effect: I also can't watch video (streaming via web browser or via Apple TV app) with this setup either.
by codingdave | 2025-05-11 13:56:03+00:00
If you read what they produce, learn to debug it, and make it an active learning experience, then yes, they are useful. If you just copy/paste code and errors back and forth, then no, they are harmful.

No matter what purpose you are trying to achieve, the success of a tool comes from applying the correct tool, to the correct problem, in the correct way. LLMs are kinda cool that they are flexible enough to be a viable tool for many things, but those other two criteria are up to you.
by yeeshh | 2025-05-11 13:56:18+00:00
Exactly. Boomers and Silent Generation built an iron grip around the real economy and handed everyone else a virtual one to service debt in.

Automation in the US could have provided our essentials going back to the 1950s.

Instead of living our lives we’re told to chant made up essentialist nonsense about the stock market and corporate. American Civic Religion gibberish.

Tacit ageism against next generation. We don’t owe fealty to the dying.
by flashblaze | 2025-05-11 13:57:28+00:00
I think you're right, I may be jumping to conclusions, and I would be in a better position to answer in a month or so whether the 30 signups are good or not. However, the reason I feel they are not enough is because I got them in my launch week (if you can call it that). I won't be able to do this every week, and I would like to find a sustainable way to get new users discovering my product.

I think SEO is the answer to that and I am planning on checking out resources or short courses if there are any since they might help me in the future as well. The reason I was curious about your process was whether you had tried something different which I hadn't tried (or thought of) which might help me avoid/improve on your feedback.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 13:58:17+00:00
> The whole "critic" towards `build.zig` also seems like it's done with without good faith. Yes it's daunting at first. Yes it requires to learn about the build system in the beginning. Sure those are all very real Arguments, author just doesn't want to mention the benefits of it.

He just pointed out to us language skimmers that it's a potential chicken egg problem, which we may not have considered. Perfect for this kind of article. Whereas pointing out its merits would just be recreating part of ziglang.org
by pas | 2025-05-11 13:59:34+00:00
Even the words of Caesar mean nothing without context. (Yes, it's interpreters all the way down.)

The author doesn't mock capitalism or strivers, it mocks the self-promulgating Sect of Success, and points out how it preys on vulnerable people, and coerce them through peer-pressure into the good old "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" and then make them feel inadequate when they doesn't work out, and they burn out, and so on.
by gruez | 2025-05-11 13:59:58+00:00
>but also general statements encouraging violence which are typically not. For example "Hitler did nothing wrong, we need to clear the lands of Jews",

What about the common refrain of "punch a nazi"? Does that get a pass because they're Bad People™? Even something like "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free" could arguably be construed as the violence.
by jurgenkesker | 2025-05-11 14:00:35+00:00
Very well rounded and grounded article. Like it very much!

Indeed as someone else in the comments said, the personal touch is the best asset you have as indie. So talk with your customers.

I run a Android app, next to my day job, and I pride myself on always putting the customer first, and actually fixing their pain points or implementing their suggestions. Empathy is so important, and something a big company will struggle with.

I'll checkout the recommended books!
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-05-11 14:00:35+00:00
Probably referring to having a sales team/person, rather than actual sales.

Hard to judge what is wrong/could be better as I couldn't gather what your actual project is. Maybe there are some obvious glaring mistakes on the landing page or something that scares people off?

Or it might just be trying to solve a problem that people don't actually have, or communicated poorly what problem it solves. I tend to see these being the most common reasons people don't even sign up.
by xg15 | 2025-05-11 14:01:11+00:00
I love how the first section in the "six cracks" starts quite reasonably with inequality, but then immediately conflates it with DEI in a way that is little more than emotional validation.

Then the author keeps on ranting and raving about DEI throughout the rest of the text, praising Trump for getting rid of it - while never mentioning inequality again.

Textbook example of psychological misdirection.
by josephg | 2025-05-11 14:01:41+00:00
Urgh this frustrates me so much.

The worst part is, the recommended way to avoid these compilation problems is to add:

_ = my_unused_variable;

to your code. Some IDE extensions even do this automatically. But if you do that, it permanently suppresses all compiler feedback that my variable is unused! Its basically the worst of all worlds:

- I can't easily prototype, or test code as I go because I keep stubbing my toe on irrelevant unused variables. And these are compilation errors, not warnings.

- In order to test my code, I need to go and fix all the unused variable errors (either automatically or manually). But once I've done that, they're essentially suppressed forever. Now I don't even get warnings, and I'm at risk of shipping code with unused variables. Now I need to manually scan my code, looking for times when _ = x was only added as a placeholder. Will I forget some? You bet.

So I end up in a situation where its both less convenient than other languages (I have to do more work to test my code). AND I'm more likely to ship bad code - since by the time I'm done, half my unused variable warnings have been manually suppressed and I can't find out where they are.

This obviously works for some people. Maybe some people never try running their code as they go. But its just horrible for me. It breaks my workflow and risks me shipping worse code. And it provides no actual benefit in return.
by aristofun | 2025-05-11 14:04:04+00:00
It depends on how you use it a lot.

The more you rely on it as a source of truth and as your mentor or executor of your hi level intentions - the more harmful. Obviously.

When you’re beginner you can’t possibly know good vs bad, right vs wrong decisions.

Whatever mental model and thinking flaws you start with is going to be amplified. And hidden behind false sense of progress (the more you rely on llm the more you trust it with whatever terrible code it spits out).

If you treat and use it just as a sophisticated algorithm to save some time on typing, or exposing alternatives, edge cases - then it’s very useful in speeding up your learning.
by jitl | 2025-05-11 14:04:46+00:00
IGN huge, they review/cover a broad amount of stuff but since they’re so big they become known for having average coverage, and the average is not great. So I personally have never looked to them for opinion coverage.

I think most people have some specific things they like, and end up following community opinion, like Reddit or Discord for a game genre, and following a different personalities on YouTube or Twitch.

Personally I’m mostly playing mostly (indie) Metroidvania games which are not well covered by IGN, I hear buzz about new releases on Reddit or from Cannot be Tamed on YouTube. Beyond that I sometimes see cool stuff on Twitter, I picked up Clair Obscure after seeing a few tweets mention its great writing and music. I also end up seeing the front page of the Steam store, which has reasonably good recommendation profile for me given 90% of my game purchases are through there and I’m playing on Steam Deck which focuses the recommendations on titles well supported by Linux and the hardware.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 14:05:21+00:00
It also protects innocent bystanders from being forced to see your horrifyingly mangled body tossed on the ground in front of them in what could otherwise have either been a crash with no injuries, minimized injuries, or at least contained injuries. Do you still think that law is overstep, if so why? Genuine question, I have no horse in this race and am on the fence myself.
by yujzgzc | 2025-05-11 14:06:04+00:00
All monopolies plow a fraction of their wins into loss leaders that look generous. Apple grabs a take on developer sales? It's to maintain a high quality app environment. AT&T is distorting prices in the long distance market? They use it to make local telephony a lot more affordable. Etc etc.

It often kills competition. Absent cross subsidies from the gusher of ad money, maybe Opera, Firefox, Garmin would have a chance to compete again in the browser and GPS world. Maybe Chinese companies that develop entry-level Docs alternatives (Lark) would enter the Docs market more favorably.

The alternative is not that all of Google's services stop existing, but that competition gets restored on a more even playing field.
by layer8 | 2025-05-11 14:06:14+00:00
Which doesn’t conform to RFC 3986, by the way.

The syntax rule for host is ambiguous because it does not completely distinguish between an IPv4address and a reg-name. In order to disambiguate the syntax, we apply the "first-match-wins" algorithm: If host matches the rule for IPv4address, then it should be considered an IPv4 address literal and not a reg-name.

This means that URL syntax like http://16843009/, http://127.1/, http://010.010.010.010/, and http://127.0.0.1./ (note the final dot) should be interpreted as domain names, not as IP addresses. (Domain labels are allowed to be purely numeric.)
by avidiax | 2025-05-11 14:07:01+00:00
I'm fairly liberal, but I don't think we should bail out a hypothetical murderer that happens to be homeless for $0, simply because that's what they can afford.

I do feel like we need a low-cost solution to monitored release. Something like an ankle monitor that isn't ridiculously overpriced, or just an app on the defendant's phone for misdemeanors. Maybe someday you can have the defendant swallow an AirTag that adheres itself to the stomach for a few months, and perhaps monitors pre-trial conditions such as discontinuing alcohol or drug use.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-05-11 14:07:02+00:00
Yes, they should be free to question it, but I think that the US view on freedom of speech makes dumber people because they don't need to think about the consequences of their speech.

They usually say whatever they want, usually surrounded with a "it's my right" without thinking about the whole process. Once they said whatever they said, what's next? What's the purpose of their message? Is it to express your anger in life and that you think that the source is some random ethnicity or community or do you want to improve everyone's quality of life?

With the recent shift towards extreme individualism, the philosophy behind the essence of freedom of speech has disappeared. Some are now focusing towards improving one individual's quality of life at the expense of the others.

In Europe, they FAFO the extense of free speech and that led to WWII. They said never again because they understood the consequences of full freedom of speech.

Even in the US, nobody has a full freedom of speech. How would a parent react if their kid would say "fuck off" to an elementary school teacher?
by thijson | 2025-05-11 14:07:16+00:00
Someone I knew that worked there said that the CPU business was like a giant tree, no other business could grow because of its shade. I remember Mike Bell was leading the x86 phone project, and later wearables. I thought an interesting data point is that he ended up at Rivian, but didn't last long there. A lot of the hype around him was that he kept claiming credit for the iPhone. He would threaten to leave Intel, and then Otellini would throw more money at him.
Show HN: Developer First Observability with Prism
by Debanitrkl | 2025-05-11 14:07:40+00:00
Over the past few months, we've been building Prism; a fast, developer-first observability UI that's deeply integrated with our open-source database, Parseable. Prism is designed for engineers who debug distributed systems, sometimes at odd hours, and need answers right now, without having to deal with five different tools.

Backstory:

We spoke to dozens of observability practitioners in large enterprises. Across the board, we heard two things:

(1)The RoI on observability tools is hard to justify. (2)OSS leads to tool sprawl, metrics in Grafana, logs in ELK, traces… somewhere.

We wanted a simple, unified, and fast observability platform that you can deploy on your own infra, whether it’s bare metal, VMs, or Kubernetes. Prism is the UI layer of that platform.

What it does: (1)Fast Log Explorer with real-time ingestion graphs, one-click filters, saved views, and auto-detected formats. (2)Sub-second Text Search using structured, on-demand indexing over logs stored on S3. (3)SQL Editor for deep slicing/dicing of telemetry data with autocomplete, indexed execution, and results in milliseconds. (4)Alerting System that works at the dataset level, supports Slack/Webhook/Alertmanager. (5)RBAC is built in with role creation, user management, and dataset-level access controls. (6)Datasets View showing compression ratios, retention policies, and ingestion statistics.

It's like using a modern IDE for observability, except it runs anywhere, stores on S3, and doesn’t cost you much.

What’s different: (1)Most existing tools force you into their cloud, or assume you’ll glue together five different OSS systems. (2)Parseable + Prism is a single binary, can be hosted anywhere, and gives you all core telemetry modes (logs, metrics, soon traces) in one place.

We’re intentionally minimal on UI fluff, everything is optimized for speed, clarity, and letting engineers move quickly.

Try it out: (1)OSS repo: https://github.com/parseablehq/parseable (2)Live demo (no login required): https://demo.parseable.com/

Related HN posts: Performance Benchmarks Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484310

We would love your feedback, especially from folks maintaining their own observability stacks or running on self-hosted infra. We’re building this from first principles and are happy to answer questions or dig into the details.

Thanks for reading!
Help PLEASE – Can Google track RCS messages for a missing person?
by Karsteski | 2025-05-11 14:08:21+00:00
Hi, my girlfriend is missing (Stratford, ON, Canada). I, her family and the police are looking for her. She had been missing for two hours now. I can see that she is reading her messages through RCS. She has a Pixel 6a. Is there any way to track her? I can put whoever can help in touch with the police. She is very suicidal and already attempted twice.

Please help. We are desperate to find her. Any advice welcome.