MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benreesman | 2025-05-27 09:07:41+00:00
Nix is still waiting for its GitHub moment. It's possible to live a strictly better life (as an individual or company) via Nix and NixOS but there's still a ton of lore and inside baseball that requires a pressing need to justify learning it all. If there's a serious Nix person in your company or friend group it's time, otherwise be ready for a learning curve that's only worth it if you have one of the problems it solves (if Docker is starting to be a weird init system or devs are finding excuses to go around it). It's the choice of people who can't compromise on anything (Anduril, more and more trading shops, shit like that).

Nix is in a bit of a split/argument/fork-prone thing at the moment but it looks like this will settle into a practical/purist thing where everyone can be happy, so go in knowing which crowd is your people.

I'm not a purist so listen to one of them if you are. That said:

- flakes aren't optional or experimental, they're the default, its a small clique holding it up for years and its getting forked around by everyone serious

- flake parts is looking like a lock for the de facto flake standard, something else might come along but the leet stuff is congregating around it

- Cachix devenv is a good gateway drug: its better than Docker and easier to graduate from when it gets serious on that component

- nix-ld and FHS envs aren't a sin, they fix most all the friction bilugs and should be the default design, I overlay the shebang thing and all the unfree restrictions and all of it: the incompatible by design people are aging out, this will all work flawlessly in a year or two and you can do it today but its inside baseball

If you need to support Mac and Linux without the limitations of a strict all-OCI flow it's your best option, if you need a chance in hell against serious supply-chain attacks its your best starting point. If you need to run on a mix of metal and cloud and/or double-virtualizing is an issue its The Way.

The best super accessible resource to go from zero to "holy shit computers can do that" is vimjoyer's YouTube.

Use sops.nix and your secrets management is solved. Also by Mic92 is nixos-generators, that is basically infinitely portable to anything. juspay's GitHub, srid's GitHub, pretty much all the nixos-asia stuff is galaxy brain next level. It all works great on MacOS if you're not over it yet with the telemetry.

(sidebar: telemetry is your biggest computer problem now and your phone addiction is part of the telemetry deal. Linux and Graphene and NextDNS and Proton and stuff are worth it even for Grandma finally. I'm glad the purists do their thing, its an act of service).
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-27 09:08:12+00:00
Can you tell us: Is "remote study" a relatively recent phenom in AU -- COVID era, or much older? I am curious to learn more. And, what is the history behind it? Was it created/supported because AU is so vast and many people a state might not live near the campus?

Also: I think your suggestion is excellent. We may see this happen in the US if AI cheating gets out of control (which it well).
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-27 09:09:35+00:00
Meanwhile in German politics: "We don't need 5G on every cow facility" [1].

Turns out, modern agriculture needs good mobile connectivity wherever cows are being held...

Politics aside, what I don't get is why they don't go and raise temporary electric fences with gates - that's how cows are held in alpine regions. And a side note, if you go on a hike in alpine regions in Germany, please close the gates after you pass through so that the cows don't escape.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/anja-karliczek-br...
by paulluuk | 2025-05-27 09:09:38+00:00
Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational.

I guess this "tough love" attitude helps for some people? But I think mostly it's just that people think it works for _other_ people, but rarely people think that this works when applied to themselves.

Like, imagine the school administration walking up to this teacher and saying "hey dum dum, you're failing too many students and the time you've spent teaching them is a waste of life."

Many teachers seem to think that students go to school/university because they're genuinely interested in motivated. But more often then not, they're there because of societal pressure, because they know they need a degree to have any kind of decent living standard, and because their parents told them to. Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying they should invest more.
by JetSpiegel | 2025-05-27 09:10:07+00:00
More whining from this crybaby, this has been going for years now? What a snowflake.

https://twitter.com/malliberal/status/1927113425093644342

This guy does a Twitter poll to rant against "evil" politicians not wanting to bend the knee to him, an MP replies to him publicly, and he snubs him, tells him to email his minions. This is not a serious CEO.

He keeps whining about The Government stopping him from opening an office with thousands of jobs, but they never say to do what. It's clearly a minimum wage call center, it's cheaper than the US, I don't see any job postings anywhere for engineering roles.

Just leave us alone, this is sucking oxygen from real Portuguese twch companies. Our brain drain is bad enough already.

We already have some US military bases, there's no need for more NSA listening stations here. The US is no longer an ally.

Just go to Russia, it's even cheaper and the locals more talented in tech matters.
by skissane | 2025-05-27 09:10:41+00:00
And it is pretty clear that’s where most or all of these leaks actually came from, not from within Microsoft. e.g. the NT4 and 2000 leaks apparently came from Mainsoft

I don’t know the current status of those source code access programs but I believe at least some of them are still in effect. IIRC, to stop the Chinese government from dumping Windows, they had to give them source code access, but I believe they are planning to dump it anyway, they see relying on US proprietary software for their government operations as too big a risk
by NalNezumi | 2025-05-27 09:11:16+00:00
Wikipedia - Not much, but I did donate to it when I was a poor student. It's not a perfect page but nothing beats it in "Exam procrastination by going in to a deep rabbit hole by clicking hyperlinks on wikipedia".

Sioyek - PDF reader. I was happy to find it when it was still very new, and being among the firsts to donate to it. Pretty wholesome to see many have donated, a bit like seeing your favorite indie-band going big. https://sioyek.info/
by bradfa | 2025-05-27 09:12:35+00:00
Defined benefit plans work best when administered by an authority higher up the chain than a single employer. Like a union, trade organization, or government entity. Defined benefit plans work well when risk is spread, proper actuarial oversight is used, and especially for lower income jobs.

Defined contribution plans in the USA typically have an extremely small contribution by the employer. Works out great for the employer. Doesn’t work out so great for lower wage earners as they struggle to fund the plan.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-27 09:13:02+00:00
As someone who grew up with Nesticle and ZSNES as a kid and now uses OpenEMU, the icons and visual flare are big reasons lots of people use specific emulators. ZSNES is still used by a lot of people because it's "comfy" despite the accuracy being poor.

Kids downloading emulators today and experiencing 40 year old consoles like the NES and 50 year old consoles like the Atari 2600 for the first time don't want an all text UI. They want a picture of that ancient hardware. It makes their experience feel more real. In contrast, Retroarch is that it's an emulator frontend designed that has no frills in its UI, and it's designed with a mindset that everything doesn't take up much space, everything provides value, and color schemes aren't all over the place, and there aren't really any icons. And because it's the ideal HN emulator, it's difficult to use and ugly.
by anthk | 2025-05-27 09:13:07+00:00
Between current flat turds and Keramik/e16 there are sensitive settings:

-Motif UI

-Plastik

-Platinum

-GNUStep/NextStep

-BlueCurve

All of them have clear outlines and contrast.

On Icons, Tango and Tango2 from Gnome are unbeatable. Maybe just Haiku/Be icons can truly be over Tango.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-27 09:13:21+00:00
To be honest, that's a problem on your part. It is completely possible to write a paper on anything, using the scientific method as your framework.

But the problem is that in many cases, the degrees (like MBA, which I too hold) are merely formalities to move up the corporate ladder, or pivot to something else. You don't get rewarded extra for actually doing science. And, yes, I've done the exact same thing you did, multiple times, in multiple different classes. Because I knew that if what I did just looked and sounded proper enough, I'd get my grade.

To be fair, one of the first things I noticed when entering the "professional" workforce, was that the methodology was the same: Find proof / data that supports your assumptions. And if you can't find any, find something close enough and just interpret / present it in a way that supports your assumptions.

No need for any fancy hypothesis testing, or having to conclude that your assumptions were wrong. Like it is not your opinion or assumption anyway, and you don't get rewarded for telling your boss or clients that they're wrong.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-27 09:13:28+00:00
Jesus. No cell balancing, protection or monitoring that I can see, and most importantly - wires directly soldered onto the battery instead of spot-welded. That's a fire hazard waiting to happen.

People, if y'all ever build your own battery pack, please think about safety. Or if you don't, place a giant bucket of dry sand above the pack, with the bottom layer being made of acrylic or other plastic that melts. That's about the only thing that can stop a battery fire.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-27 09:13:39+00:00
> June 2020: questions start to decline, faster than before. Even though we did not know at the time, this was stilll two years from ChatGPT launching!

Looking at the graph, it actually looks to me that if we remove the covid spike of mid-2020, there's a very clean almost linear decline right from 2014 (when the dust settled from the change in moderation) all through to the launch of ChatGPT, where it went into a nosedive. Running this on the back of my envelope, StackOverflow would have reached 0 questions per month regardless of LLMs around 2035.

So the lesson for me here is more about how zealous moderation makes a platform better for its existing aging population, while discouraging new members.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-27 09:14:24+00:00
I worked for GE, back in the 1980s. It was the “Neutron Jack” era.

The subunit I worked for, was almost supernaturally dysfunctional.

I was there for 18 months, and they had 3 reorgs, in that time.

Once, the VP of our division, called an “all-hands” meeting, to tell us that he was a lawyer that didn’t have a computer, didn’t like software (we were a software company), basically, didn’t like us, and that we’d better get on the stick, and make number go up.

Ah…fun times…
by getnormality | 2025-05-27 09:14:30+00:00
I don't think it's entirely AI-generated. The review selects details and explains them logically, e.g. why GE was able to financialize itself. AI slop doesn't have logic, it just treats the text as a bag of words and vaguely gestures at the overall vibe.

On the other hand, the Key Quotes are not really that key, and some of the bullet points don't really work (it's not clear how the LTC insurance time bomb can be considered an accounting trick).
by ratorx | 2025-05-27 09:14:43+00:00
I’m building a (small) monorepo with Niv. It is much easier to understand and use than flakes. Flakes are simpler to use directly for sure (eg from CLI), but if you actually want to use them as dependencies, it becomes way harder to understand.

All Niv does is produce a JSON file with your dependencies, then you use the Nix functions they provide to read and load the dependencies. It is probably the simplest possible dependency management strategy in Nix.

This is also not a Nix specific strategy tbh. If you are using Python, Go, JS, etc they manage dependencies in the same style (lock file with dependencies, tool to update them).

I don’t think the documentation for it is any worse than the rest of Nix (low bar, but we are comparing things in the Nix ecosystem).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-27 09:15:02+00:00
This. People adopting security aspect often tend to forget to account for all the additional complexity they implement user-side. More insidiously though, they also fail to understand the fundamental mismatch between the behavior they're expecting, vs. how the real world operates.

Passwords are treated as means of identification. The implied expectation is that they stick to one person and one person only. "Passwords are like panties - change them often and never share them", as the saying goes. Except that flies in the face of how humans normally do things in groups.

Sharing and delegation are the norm. Trust is managed socially and physically. It's perfectly normal and common to give keys to your house to a neighbor or even a stranger if situation demands it. It's perfectly normal to send a relative to the post office with a failed-delivery note in your name, to pick your mail up for you; the post office may technically not be allowed to give your mail to a third party, but it's normal and common practice, so they do anyway. Similarly, no matter what the banks say, it's perfectly normal to give your credit or debit card to someone else, e.g. to your kid or spouse to shop groceries for you - so hardly any store actually bothers checking the name or signature on the card.

And so on, and so on. Even in the office, there's a constant need to have someone else access a computing system for you. Delegating stuff on the fly is how humans self-organize. Suppressing that is throwing sand into gears of society.

Passwords make sharing/delegating hard by default, but people defeat that by writing them down. Which leads the IT/security side to try and make it harder for people to share their passwords, through technical and behavioral means. All this is an attempt to force passwords to become personal identifiers. But then, they have to also allow for some delegation, which they want to control (internalizing the trust management), and from there we get all kinds of complex insanity of modern security; juggling tightly-scoped tokens is just one small example of it.

I don't claim to have a solution for it. I just strongly feel we've arrived at our current patterns through piling hacks after hacks, trying to herd users back to the barn, with no good idea why they're running away. Now that we've mapped the problem space and identified a lot of relevant concepts (e.g. authN vs authZ, identity vs. role, delegation, user agents, etc.), maybe it's time for some smart folks to figure out a better theoretical framework for credentials and access, that's designed for real-world use patterns - not like State/Corporate sees it, but like real people do.

At the very least, understanding that would help security-minded people what extra costs their newest operational or technological lock incurs on users, and why they keep defeating it in "stupid" ways.
Show HN: I made email validation tool
by overpower | 2025-05-27 09:16:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last 3 startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience.

Recently I started with cold outreach (its a struggle, since I dont have much experience with marketing). I am finding leads mainly using exa.ai websets (web vector search, extremelly good for multiple use cases, recommend checking them out) and then sending them through smartlead. I ran the campaign for the past 30 days and 12-15% emails always bounced.

This wasted my email credits & chances of reaching the right people. So we made a tool that checks emails before we send them (mx, timeouts, domain check, disposable emails, catch-all emails,..). Now the deliverability is close to 99% :)

https://verifyemailai.com

I am using it myself, lets see how market responds :)
by roman-kashitsyn | 2025-05-27 09:16:33+00:00
> you shouldn't make decisions on how to develop aerospace software based on how "authentic" the development process feels.

You don’t just land in an aerospace company with an unbiased, rational mind and make an engineering tradeoff. You join it because you find building high-integrity software fulfilling (I am!), and the job enables you to exercise choices that feel right to you. Alternatively, you are so passionate about space that you can endure whatever it takes to get there, including writing Ada/Spark.

The best swimmers don’t grow high and develop long limbs and a big chest due to their practice and rational decisions. They become best by already having a matching physique and working hard to capitalize on it.

I don’t promote a fixed mindset, saying that you can’t get better if you weren’t born with a natural talent. My point is that some things will resonate more with you and bring you the most satisfaction. You should try different things, listen to your inner response, and not judge others because they made different choices.
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-27 09:17:22+00:00
I guess we would just set up a cow fence.

These GPS trackers help find cattle, possibly making rescue efforts faster and thus cheaper, but they do not prevent them falling into that river in the first place. A fence does.

I know, this is the classical "NASA builds a 1 million dollar Space pen, Russians use pencil" story - but sometimes, high tech is not necessary to solve problems that have been solved for centuries.

Doesn't mean we don't need better infrastructure. Just that we should avoid overcomplicating things.
by gadders | 2025-05-27 09:17:53+00:00
Our neighbour's cow walked down a slope to drink from a river in the field near us. Unfortunately the slope was a bit muddy and it couldn't get back up again.

After we all tried to give it a bit of a push, we had to admit defeat and call in the Kent Fire Service Animal Rescue Unit: https://www.kent.fire-uk.org/news/meet-crew-specially-traine...
by mrweasel | 2025-05-27 09:18:57+00:00
The OpenBSD version of true is also amazing: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr...

The GNU version of true/false is more interesting. All the logic is in true and false just redefined the EXIT_STATUS and imports all of true.c. https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/false...
by ben_w | 2025-05-27 09:19:20+00:00
I completed the Duolingo German course several times as they kept changing the course rendering the previous all-gold as more-to-learn. And the Esperanto course. Tried Arabic for a few years over the course of the pandemic.

I can hardly remember any of the Esperanto, I never even mastered the Arabic alphabet let alone basic phrases, and actually living in Germany rapidly revealed how mediocre it had been at teaching me German.

I stopped at a 2500 day streak, shortly after one of the big controversial UI changes.
by ordinary | 2025-05-27 09:19:43+00:00
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...

That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
by stevage | 2025-05-27 09:23:24+00:00
It definitely existed before, particularly as a revenue stream for some of the smaller universities such as USQ. I think for the big ones it was a bit beneath them, then suddenly COVID came and we had lockdown for a long time in Melbourne. Now it's an expectation that students can access everything from home, but the flipside is everyone complains about how much campus life has declined. Students are paying more for a lower quality education and less amenity.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-27 09:23:46+00:00
I have used only whole-disk XFS SSDs and HDDs for more than a decade.

While the space wasted by GPT and partitions and by the arbitrary alignment rules used by various formatting tools is not great, I do not see any reason why it should exist. The space wasted now with GPT and UEFI is several orders of magnitude greater than it was with traditional partition tables, so eliminating it has become more attractive.

Such SSDs and HDDs are not bootable, but for me this is a desirable feature, not a bug. I boot my computers either from Ethernet (e.g. most of my servers) or from a removable USB memory.

The SSDs and HDDs with a whole-disk file system are also wholly encrypted. As in a proper encryption implementation, there is complete separation between the encrypted data and the encryption key. The encrypted disks or their hosting computers do not contain any information about decryption, unlike in many systems of disk encryption. The encrypted decryption keys can be found only on external or remote boot media, which are not normally associated with the hosting computers.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-27 09:25:24+00:00
That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve.

Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities and a rigorous assessment process, while leaving the actual learning to the students.
by vijucat | 2025-05-27 09:27:06+00:00
Designers are so out of touch. That whole criticism of Comic Sans is one example. Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage.
by stevage | 2025-05-27 09:28:39+00:00
> Teaching Linux basics doesn't suffer the same because the exam-preparing exercise is typing things into a terminal, and LLMs still don't generally have API access to terminals.

Huh, fighting my way through a Linux CLI is exactly the kind of thing I use Chatgpt for professionally.

I did study it in compsci, but those commands are inherently not memorable.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-05-27 09:30:13+00:00
>If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you

If you have any assets in the less than a billion dollars range, if you have assets over a billion dollars (which if you have enough of a loan in today's money to match the 100 million quote, you probably have over a billion in assets) then the bank knows its looking at a real fight. Nobody likes a real fight.

People like fights they're guaranteed to win quickly.