MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jll29 | 2025-05-10 10:29:00+00:00
> I can't imagine it's any different in [R]ust land

Taste is important; programmers with good architectural taste tend to use languages that support them in their endeavour (like Rust or Zig) or at least get out of the way (C).

So I would argue the problems you list are statistically less often the case than in certain other languages (from COBOL to JavaScript).

> There's just too many devs and all of them, including myself, don't always make the best choices.

This point you raise is important: I think an uncoordinated crowd of developers will create a "pile of crates" ("bazaar" approach, in Eric Raymond's terminology), and a single language designer with experience will create a more uniform class library ("cathedral" approach).

Personally, I wish Rust had more of a "batteries included" standard library with systematically named and namespaced official crates (e.g. including all major data structures) - why not "stdlib::data_structures::automata::weighted_finite_state_transducer" instead of a confusing set of choices named "rustfst-ffi", "wfst", ... ?

Ideally, such a standard library should come with the language at release. But the good news is it could still be devised later, because the Rust language designers were smart enough to build versioning with full backwards compatibility (but not technical debt) into the language itself. My wish for Rust 2030 would be such a stdlib (it could even be implemented using the bazaar of present-day crates, as long as that is hidden from us).
by metalman | 2025-05-10 10:30:02+00:00
hmmmm, I think we agree, but I didn't phrase it well, my point is that the worlds consumption is huge, and growing, and that this growth in consumption will be driven by the bottom two thirds, rightly, trying to level up to a place where they see there children and grand children having ....you know, walls and a roof, clean water, and things to smile about..... I have travelled some of the meanest streets in the world, and begrudge no one there hopes for something decent, but I got to those streets, by jet liner, and have rubbed shoulders with some of the worlds wealthiest on the way, living societies contradictions in real time..,it's hard to convey
by mywacaday | 2025-05-10 10:30:08+00:00
I wish them the best, it was a great resource when I first started working when my options were trawling through the folder of msdn CDs and later a paid subscription to expertsexchange.com. Joel and Jeff were also the first blogs I would check weekly for updates. Whatever way it ended up it was a great resource for a long time and helped a lot of us.
by w0de0 | 2025-05-10 10:31:49+00:00
There is no shortage of the downtrodden and dispossessed in the USA, if you seek them. The problem in this hypothetical would rather be that acknowledging and prioritizing such people in America is likely to be, for many fellow first worlders (to include parts of the American Catholic hierarchy) an inherently radical, polarizing, and political act. I doubt such a priest would be so rapidly promoted as was Leo XIV.

Acknowledging and prioritizing similarly marginalized people in poor countries, or at least in countries less tetchy about their failings and political pieties, carries less political risk. (Which is not to claim Prevost cynically avoided American ministry to the poor.)

That said, that such ministry is qualification at all seems to me more a product of Francis’s remaking of the college of cardinals with a notably Franciscan philosophy. The majority of post-WW2 popes have been European, of the first or second world. Benedict was German and John Paul Polish.
by chobeat | 2025-05-10 10:32:16+00:00
Why not participating in Mastodon? Because nobody really wanted a Twitter clone and the project is losing its momentum. Lemmy is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is less in absolute numbers.

Why using Bonfire? The first thing that comes up to me from the website is that this model of community-focused development seems more resilient to the wave of AI slop. A small Mastodon instance with 30-40 active people and limited federation would be useless. A Bonfire instance with the same people where you can work on community projects or scientific projects, sounds a lot more viable while keeping the shields up against the slop.
by geremiiah | 2025-05-10 10:32:21+00:00
It's about money and everything else too. US is a really nice country to live in for high skilled individuals. An immigrant nation who speaks the international language, a fast growing economy, especially in cutting edge tech, with overall taxes lower than Europe and even the housing market crisis is not at bad as what you will encounter in many European cities. And its huge so for a lot of emigrants looking for a new home, they will tend towards the country with the huge economy so that when they get their new passport it will be worth something. The only downside of the US was always the immigration system.

From a purely financial perspective, a country like Denmark for example, would need to pay more than the US to be as attractive, to account for the fact that it is a tiny country where the main language is not English and where the overall career prospects are more limited.
by everdrive | 2025-05-10 10:32:30+00:00
I never see anyone describe just why Marijuana is less harmful than cigarettes (or apparently e-cigarettes) and it drives me up the wall.

My intuition would be that this is due to frequency, since a normal person would smoke weed far less often than they would smoke nicotine, and this is a really important distinction. If frequency is important to this question, then Marijuana smoke is not actually safer, but is just enjoyed more rarely. Maybe the lungs have a chance to clear themselves out and reduce inflammation between marijuana sessions? Just asking about the lifetime impact on users makes no sense since these drugs have totally different usage profiles.
by cannam | 2025-05-10 10:33:04+00:00
In 1968 a British newspaper ran a competition for English translations of "Spleen - Je suis comme le roi..." The poet Nicholas Moore - motivated by a belief that translating poetry was impossible and the project futile - sent in 31 different entries, by post, under false names and with varying levels of absurdity. He didn't win.

You can find them at https://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/moore_spleen.pdf, or in his published Selected Poems, along with an essay (written afterwards) about translation. Worth looking out.

(I particularly admire the sarcastic one that begins "I'm like The Winner of The Competition / The one who wrote the strong, rewarding phrase...")
by krisoft | 2025-05-10 10:34:50+00:00
The article says this: “Taking an active stance on political issues is just a small part of the obligations we acquire as humans, citizens, parents, employees, residents of some apartment block, and so on. And our free time… They might as well outlaw it.”

This sounds like the core complaint in the article and it leaves me utterly perplexed. Most people live their entire lives, without ever having what i would call an active stance on any political issue. Even the very few who are politicaly active (go to protests, organise) do it only occasionally. Most of their time they are doing other things (working, eating, sleeping, hanging out with friends, reading, whatever). And then there are very few who do activism or politics professionally and full time. This is not the norm but the exception.

So then why does the author think that they are obliged by society to take an “active stance on political issues”? Where is this notion comming from?

Maybe they have parents or a friend group who are politically very active and they live in a distorted bubble where they are made to feel not worthy if they don’t care that much? Or maybe their personal definition of “active stance on political issue” has a very low bar?
by hollowturtle | 2025-05-10 10:34:54+00:00
> These aren’t easy reads. > They require real cognitive effort. > But they offer lasting value.

Here we go, that's the real problem today, the lack of focus and not being able anymore to invest cognitive effort in long lasting things. Everything was turning into a short/reel/tiktok already, add llms for quick answers to the formula and that's a perfect recipe for disaster
by deng | 2025-05-10 10:35:21+00:00
I will never, ever understand why they closed their jobs portal, and I wonder if they are regretting this now, since their core business is eaten up by LLMs. The job portal was pretty great and back then we got by far the best hires through StackOverflow. I think it was one of the success stories of SO and there were definitely opportunities for growth.
by dndn1 | 2025-05-10 10:38:00+00:00
This is a cool way to teach!

I was blown away by the little functions at first and I too made a clone to experiment with calculang [1].

I added an evaluation feature (F9) so you can select sub-expressions and see what they do, which was helpful to figure out some patterns (video in [2])

[1] https://calculang-editables.netlify.app/tixyish

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXUd_-xrycs
by hmsimha | 2025-05-10 10:38:01+00:00
I think the work you've done with cryptpad, while impressive on many levels and, I'm assuming, motivated by a desire to make secure document collaboration more accessible, is actually putting people at increased risk due to how bad this issue with the share URLs is.

I attempted to disclose the issue responsibly (in other words, not as a github issue), and urged you to make passwords mandatory for documents, or at least default with a prominent warning displayed for users foregoing the password. The response I received indicated that Cryptpad didn't consider this to be a vulnerability, but that you'd welcome changes to improve documentation.

You asked where my PR was: I gladly would submit one if I didn't expect it to be closed based on the response I had received prior, but I don't think documentation changes would cut it.

I wasn't intending to make this personal and I definitely wasn't saying that you (or your team's) motivations were unambiguously malicious or deceptive. My last paragraph was perhaps overly dramatic, but my impression is that Cryptpad positions itself as a general-purpose e2ee document collaboration suite, and one of the use cases I associate with that positioning, one of the less strict ones if I'm honest, would be something like:

> empower laypeople to collaborate on documents with reasonable confidence that nation-state actors won't be able to passively surveil those documents.

which is a much softer use case to satisfy than, say, providing halfway-decent protection from active, targeted surveillance (the space I believe Signal to be in, and also the space I'd love Cryptpad to be in)

So if those aren't among the kinds of things y'all think about when designing Cryptpad, then I'd appreciate if you made your overall project goals and use cases more explicit. Of course there are other valid reasons to desire document security, they're just not ones I tend to spend as much time thinking about.
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-05-10 10:39:38+00:00
Jams and jellies existed before refrigeration and were used to preserve fruit year round. Root cellars kept things cool and you would just inspect your food before eating. Pickles is another thing. They used to be stored in a big barrel and people would reach in and grab a room temp pickle, safe and preserved. Today, they're always fridge after opening. It's safer, but it's a spectrum of risk, not binary.
by whstl | 2025-05-10 10:39:45+00:00
Plenty of libraries have "verbose" logging flags ship way more than assumed. I remember lots of NPM libs that require `winston` for example are runtime-configurable. Or Java libraries that require Log4J. With Rust it's getting hard to remember because everything today seems to pull the fucking kitchen sink...

And even going beyond "debug", plenty of libraries ship features that are downright unwanted by consumers.

The two famous recent examples are Heartbleed and Log4shell.
by oefrha | 2025-05-10 10:42:58+00:00
> The call to page.evaluate just hangs, and the browser dies silently. browser.close() is never reached, which can cause memory leaks over time.

Not just memory leaks. Since a couple months ago, if you use Chrome via playwright etc. on macOS, it will deposit a copy of Chrome (more than 1GB) into /private/var/folders/kd/<...>/X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone/, and if you exit without a clean browser.close(), the copy of Chrome will remain there. I noticed after it ate up ~50GB in two days. No idea what's the point of this code sign clone thing, but I had to add --disable-features=MacAppCodeSignClone to all my invocations to prevent it, which is super annoying.
by jll29 | 2025-05-10 10:43:07+00:00
> So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do.

I read most of the main books in the "ideation/innovation/startup/scale-up/ entrepreneurship/business plan writing" available at a certain time, and had to sift through a lot of useless or redundant material to extract very little wisdom from it. (Of course what is really useful emerges only when you then execute your own start-up idea later.)

The grandparent post cautions from "overgeneralization", so let me add a comment in the opposite direction, namely "undergeneralization": it is not only business books that are more for entertainment (and perhaps reflection) than hard facts; even the category of formal economics/business studies academic literature includes large quantities of claims that do not hold, were not properly assessed, hold no predictive power etc.

I recommend one that positively stands out, Philip E. Tetlock and his studies on forecasting abilities of so-called "experts" versus average person in the street: he wrote several critical studies that found academics (economists/business in particular, hence relevant for this post) and other experts to be lacking, and then developed a methodology for more systematic prediction (e.g. see the book Superforecasting: The Science of Prediction (2016, with Ben Gardner, https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-P...).
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-05-10 10:43:43+00:00
We buy meat in bulk and so it's really expensive to lose our freezers. We also lose power for a few days every year or two. It's worth it for us to have a generator to allow us to work and keep the food from spoiling. Plus we start eating the freezers food right away. Shelf stable food is the last to eat because it lasts the longest.
by barnacl437 | 2025-05-10 10:43:50+00:00
for real? i mean games are getting weird instead. just set a lower in game settings or if you feel a bit adventurous, upgrade the soldered ram chips.

8gb as a minimum/mid-end segment is totally reasonable for me. it's just like 2gb vram on 1030/1050 cards like almost a decade ago.
by Hakkin | 2025-05-10 10:45:29+00:00
Note that you don't actually need the generated column either, SQLite supports indexes on expressions, so you can do, for example,

CREATE INDEX subjectidx ON messages(json_extract(headers, '$.Subject'))

and it will use this index anywhere you reference that expression.

I find it useful to create indexes like this, then create VIEWs using these expressions instead of ALTER'ing the main table with generated columns.
by Propelloni | 2025-05-10 10:45:54+00:00
Sure, the author says as much and linked to the article you also linked. Wolff makes the better read and shows philosophical rigor in his working, for example, extracting and spelling out concise premises and conclusions. Now I have a hunch that the author is not an native English speaker, which certainly could explain some less convincing sentences.

But unlike Wolff, the author covers too much ground. Wolff limits his scope to Kant's works and esp. Kant's theory of justice, and excludes the seminal works on social contracts by other authors (which would IMO have impact on Wolff's conclusions) and acknowledges that fact, e.g. immediately in the title of his essay. The author does no such thing.

I respect the author, I myself had an infatuation with Illich and Mühsam in my punk years, but I still think that if you want to make broad claims, you have to have broad knowledge. The exclusion of, e.g. existentialist or other political and moral philosophers, makes the purview too narrow for such a broad conclusion. Aother viable approach -- working from first principles -- is also nowhere in sight. It's like saying "I don't like ice cream" after having only tasted Smurf and Big Red flavor.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-10 10:46:35+00:00
> add llms for quick answers to the formula and that's a perfect recipe for disaster

I understand some books are worth their weight in gold. The real worry is, now that LLMs can "deep search" & present larger reports, some of which I read religiously without gaining much for the time invested, I find myself preferring shorter answers.

That is, the feedback mechanism (of larger LLM output being too verbose than being too substantive) is reinforcing rewards for shorter and shorter text spans.

Then when I switch to reading long form articles, long instructional/educational videos, or book chapters, I have caught myself running out of patience and reaching for summarisation by LLMs (sometimes, when I've bothered to check the original source, LLMs have thoroughly misinterpreted or skipped key thesis/points... Kind of the reverse "miss the forest for the trees").
by geremiiah | 2025-05-10 10:47:00+00:00
My post was arguing that the "everything else" is more attractive in the US.

Consider a post doc or junior professor who do not know if they will ever get a tenure position or if you even want to remain in academia their whole life. Their plan B is to get an job in industry. Now consider having access to the whole US job market vs. having access to one tiny EU country. Not to mention that when you bias for cutting edge industry R&D there are industries which only have a significant presence in the US.
by xrhobo | 2025-05-10 10:48:06+00:00
I think this is just a human thing. The way science progresses one funeral at a time seems to apply to more than just science.

I am actually learning Unreal engine for artistic purposes but I don't really like games. Video games for me are forever linked to growing up playing Atari and 16 bit Nintendo so it is hard to take seriously as art, even while learning Unreal to make art.

True creativity, innovation and money usually don't go together. Composer Charles Ives I think is a really good example. Most of Ives life he would have introduced himself as an actuary in insurance. Ives also though probably doesn't make the same music if he didn't have the insurance income.

The nature of the taste of the mass market in time almost dictates that only a few true lucky geniuses can be innovate, creative and make a great living all at the same time.

We could probably have better things if we mythologized the life of someone like Ives that fits the present economic reality much better than The Beatles or Picasso.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-10 10:48:15+00:00
The answer is industrial processing. Inhaling combustants is bad no matter the plant matter but the tobacco industry has over a century of experience in optimizing their product which leads to a lot of nasty chemicals that have been grandfathered in as a historical accident.

They “reconstitute” tobacco dust and other waste into usable material via binders (“sheet tobacco”), add humectants to keep the tobacco from drying out, preservatives to keep it from oxidizing, shit to enhance the flavor, “puff up” tobacco with a bunch of chemicals so it takes up more volume, and so on. Since the 2000s there’s also compounds similar to flame retardants (!!!) in the wrapping so that the cigarette goes out if you fall asleep, instead of burning your house down. Much of these additions come from reprocessing the waste from previous steps to “minimize waste.”

Marijuana on the other hand is religiously tested for pesticides and other contaminants in most states. However that industry isn’t far behind: a friend loves diamond/oil infused blunts and to me it’s blatantly obvious that they’re using some of the same techniques to repurpose lost terpenes and adding synthetic aromatics that were never tested for combustion.
by furrball010 | 2025-05-10 10:51:21+00:00
Although it's difficult to monetize, you could (for the time being) work full-time on your open-source projects. I recognize that might not be the easiest path, but if you pull it off (you can do it!) then you have - in my view - the best position in tech.

In summary, install linux, move to a cabin in the woods, become open-source developer.
by lyu07282 | 2025-05-10 10:53:47+00:00
There was research on that, low or heavy marijuana use makes no difference. It just doesn't cause cancer, that's pretty much established fact at this point. There were substances in THC found that kill cancer cells, so whatever negative effects it does have (marijuana has 4 times as much tar than cigarettes) seem to be cancelled out.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1277837/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/0...
by huxley | 2025-05-10 10:54:23+00:00
Burroughs was also one of the great comic monologuists, in March 1975 he was asked by Harper’s Magazine (along with others including Ronald Reagan, who had just finished his last term as governor of California) to contribute an essay on the topic “When Did You Stop Wanting to be President”, it’s a funny essay but delivered best as a monologue: https://youtu.be/ir0JDok2TDE?si=W7JExK7VeMbL9Ky-
by mbwgh | 2025-05-10 10:55:14+00:00
> I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.

I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes... I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.

But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.

In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.
by genocidicbunny | 2025-05-10 10:56:09+00:00
Alcohol is also very easy, which is a huge part of the problem. It's extremely easy to make, and to refine. Anything with sugars in it will easily ferment with simple exposure to the atmosphere and the ever-present yeast in it -- fruit that fall off trees when ripe will very quickly ferment, and our bodies themselves produce some amounts of it as part of metabolism. Once you have some alcohol it's also very easy to refine it to something stronger, you don't need distillation, just some method of removing the non-alcohol components of the mix, such as simply freezing the mixture to a temperature where the water is frozen but the alcohol isn't; You can take a bucket of low-% fermented fruit juice, leave it to freeze overnight, and take out the ice in the morning. Presto, you have a basic braga that's going to be much more potent. Alcohol is also very useful for a lot of chemical processes we rely on for many of our industries, so it will always be in demand industrially.

A lot of humans (and other mammals and birds even) also like the effects that it has, despite the unpredictability and side effects. It's just too good at smoothing out many social interactions in ways that we humans are fans of. It's also a very good source of easy calories that are very shelf stable and for the most part safe to consume even if the storage conditions were poor. Small beer was a thing for a reason - even a low concentration renders most pathogens inactive enough that it's mostly safe to consume.

Until we figure out some way to simulate the positive effects without the negatives, a Synthahol if you will, I don't think we'll be able to do better. And the Synthahol will need to be cheaper and easier to obtain than literally just leaving some fruit juice to ferment in a jar.