MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lproven | 2025-05-23 13:09:27+00:00
This is why the single most widely-used desktop/laptop Linux distribution in the world has a simple, brilliant solution to app packaging:

It has none. You can't install new apps.

It's ChromeOS. It has something like quarter to half a billion users, judging from the sales numbers of ChromeBooks and their supported lifetime.

Real ChromeBooks let you install Android apps, but that is side-stepping the issue.

ChromeOS Flex on a PC, which I use, doesn't offer that. You can open a Debian shell and install Debian packages in there, though. Handy for VLC.

Ubuntu, from its own numbers, has maybe 20-30 million users. Debian about a third of that. All the RH distros less than Debian, maybe a tenth.

In China, UnionTech says it passed 3 million paying users of UOS last year, implying numbers maybe comparable to Ubuntu's. Which in turn implies that most of China still runs on pirated MS Windows.

All the other distros put together come to about 10% of the number of ChromeBooks sold in the last 3-4 years.

The way to win in Linux packaging seems to be: don't do it at all.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
by lossolo | 2025-05-23 13:09:47+00:00
> but it sounds a little bit nerve wracking.

> But if you're a large scale company ... it can definitely make sense to self-host.

I'm not a large company like OpenAI and I've been running various PostgreSQL setups for years—ranging from single-node instances without replication to multi-node, fault-tolerant, highly available configurations with automatic failover and backups, serving 4-5 digits of updates, selects, and inserts per second. I'm not sure what you're referring to, but in my experience, once it's set up, it's almost maintenance-free.
by chriswarbo | 2025-05-23 13:09:57+00:00
Haskell's default `String` type is a singly-linked list of `Char` values[0] so it takes O(n) time to access the end of the string. Hence I think the solution using `reverse` is probably the best there is, since any attempt to be "smarter" would just be more complicated for no real performance gain. Though I agree that we could ask someone to also write their own reverse function.

[0] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.21.0.0/docs/Prelu...
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-23 13:11:06+00:00
Huh that's really interesting! As one of them gays myself, I can see what they mean. The scenes with Monty being a gay "sex pest" are a hurtful stereotype, but given the time it was made in there was much worse depictions of gays in media at the time.

To this day people seem to believe all gays are they feminine heeyyyyy type sex pests, whereas in reality the majority of us just regular dudes - hell I find most straight guys unattractive (not in looks, but definitely in behaviour).
by screcth | 2025-05-23 13:11:38+00:00
Many companies use RHEL Workstation to run proprietary GUI applications. The application usually runs on RHEL Servers and uses X11 forwarding to show the GUI on the Workstation.

Running the same OS on the client and on the server makes support much simpler. ISVs may not even support more modern OSs like Fedora or Ubuntu.

Those companies don't need an Office Suite as they have Windows machines that can run Microsoft Office. They just need a Linux desktop environment that is easy to use and stays out of the way when accessing the Workstation through VNC.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-23 13:12:16+00:00
It’s different because you have a decision engine that is generally available. The blade guard protects the user from inattention… not the same as an autonomous chainsaw that mistakes my son for a tree.

Scaled up, technology like guided missiles is locked up behind military classification. The technology is now generally available to replicate many of the use cases of those weapons, assessable to anyone with a credit card.

Discussions about security here often refer to Thompson’s “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. He was reflecting on compromising compilers — compilers have moved up the stack and are replacing the programmer. As the required skill level of a “programmer” drops, you’re going to have to worry about more crazy scenarios.
by _fat_santa | 2025-05-23 13:12:18+00:00
One thing that stuck out to me reading this was the constant reference to various AI agent's by a name.

It made me step back and think about how some of these AI products are named and I honestly prefer when a product isn't named like a person. Just to think of two: you have "Claude" and "Alexa" which gives the impression you are speaking to a person when you very very much are not.

I gotta say I kind of prefer the name "ChatGPT" that OpenAI went with. It doesn't try to pretend it's a human with it's naming and also describes what it is in it's name.
by belter | 2025-05-23 13:12:25+00:00
They are one of the most well capitalized company/startup/foundation/non-profit in the planet and just spent 6,5 billion to hire a designer.

They should be using the best technical and cheapest solution, and they owe it to their investors. At their scale they will never be able to use anything else than a cloud solution.

They could solve these issues at the number of users they report, for a monthly bill below 25 million dollars.

"6,311 database instances running the PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora processed more than 376 billion transactions, stored 2,978 terabytes of data, and transferred 913 terabytes of data" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/how-aws-powered-prime-day-2...
by WHA8m | 2025-05-23 13:13:22+00:00
Hey, I might be too late to the party, but I'd love to get some more info to your comment.

Imagine me: I'd consider myself a Linux noob, although I probably aren't anymore. I use Arch Linux for about 3 years now as my daily driver. I'm not young anymore - I didn't grew up with computers - I don't have it in my blood. I don't have formal education in anything computer and have never worked in the field. During Covid I learnt Linux from the Arch wiki. Now I'm using it. I configured some things and can control my computer through the command line.

Everytime I read comments like yours, I get the shivers. Did I miss something integral? What do I not know about? Especially network stuff is a blind spot for me. I didn't touch network stuff beyond the default wiki pages.

When I read comments like yours "Arch is a minefield" "With Arch it is so easy to shoot yourself in the foot", I never know what this could be specifically. How could this look like? Can you give me something more concrete? I'm really eager to know what everyone is talking about.
by cess11 | 2025-05-23 13:13:23+00:00
I disagree with MacIntyre about a lot, both in theology and political philosophy, but I respect him for having tried to engage with both Nietzsche and the french philosophers heavily influenced by him as well as sticking by his egalitarian ethics even after the successful revolt of Reagan and the yuppies.

'When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”'
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-23 13:14:02+00:00
My impression of the VAX is, regardless of whether it was absolutely first at anything, it was early to have 32-bit addresses, 32-bit registers and virtual memory as we know it. You could say machines like 68k, the 80386, SPARC, ARM and such all derived from it.

There were just a lot of them. My high school had a VAX-11/730 which was a small machine you don't hear much about today. It replaced the PDP-8 that my high school had when I was in elementary school and visiting to use that machine. Using the VAX was a lot like using a Unix machine although the OS was VMS.

In southern NH in the late 1970s through mid 1980s I saw tons of DEC minicomputers, not least because Digital was based in Massachusetts next door and was selling lots to the education market. I probably saw 10 DECs for every IBM, Prime or other mini or micro.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-05-23 13:14:28+00:00
>Perhaps you can fill us all in given, as you said above, you've read the transcripts and hopefully still have a copy you can look up.

I don't really have a copy, I just link to the source material, which is the wikipedia page. Still, I can quote it to fill folks in:

"He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."

>Bit random.

I thought Steve Martin would be a nice break from all the religious fundamentalism terrorism talk.
by Tade0 | 2025-05-23 13:14:35+00:00
Solar actually has over twice the footprint of onshore wind, considering the energy needed to produce the panels, but it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as all those mentioned sources, if they were to form the majority of the mix, would make electricity a much smaller chunk of the overall footprint than, say, food.

In 2024 France electricity was responsible for an equivalent of 16.1Mt of CO2 - largely due to gas peaker plants, which together contributed to a single digit percentage of overall electricity consumption.

That's 235kg of CO2 per person, or 2.5-7.5kg of beef in terms of environmental impact.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-23 13:15:24+00:00
Follow up: and Trump again today with the 'The president also threatened to impose a 25% import tax "at least" on iPhones not manufactured in America.'

Lmao the profit from Chinese companies (or India, etc) manufacturing the iPhone is so, so much less than the profit that Apple makes selling the iPhone.

Honestly just ridiculous. I was hoping he'd stick with the insane tariffs so I could watch Americans mob & oust him. But he's backpedaled as he is wont to do, the absolute cretin.
by toofy | 2025-05-23 13:15:30+00:00
he’ll say three entirely different things on this within 24 hours im sure.

it’s likely not even legal for a president to do this to a single product or a single company.

but, if this is the precedent he wants to push to normalize, i say go for it, it’ll be kind of interesting to see which individual company’s products are targeted when a progressive inevitably takes power.

it seems to me all of the things he’s normalizing will be comical to watch repeated once a progressive candidate comes along who realizes progressive voters crave red meat too.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-23 13:15:43+00:00
Z80 has a Shift Right Arithmetic (SRA) instruction. From Zilog Z80 User Manual:

"An arithmetic shift right 1 bit position is performed on the contents of operand m. The contents of bit 0 are copied to the Carry flag and the previous contents of bit 7 remain unchanged. Bit 0 is the least-significant bit."

So if value was used as signed integer, that's a sign-preserving /2 (and easy to expand to 16 or more bits).

Z80 also has a SLA, which does shift all bits.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-05-23 13:16:04+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

not strictly because of wind power but few denies that wind power hasn't been a contributing factors - politically it's too sensitive so it's going to be "under investigation" for a long time. Alledgedly too little inertia / rotating power ... there is a parallel to the Australian blackout 10 years ago, where the solution was to build large batteries
by WHA8m | 2025-05-23 13:17:48+00:00
This is a duplicate command to increase my chance of getting a late reply :) Hope that's fine.

When I read comments like yours "Arch is a minefield" "With Arch it is so easy to shoot yourself in the foot", I never know what this could be specifically. How could this look like? Can you give me something more concrete? I'm really eager to know what everyone is talking about.

Imagine me: I'd consider myself a Linux noob, although I probably aren't anymore. I use Arch Linux for about 3 years now as my daily driver. I'm not young anymore - I didn't grew up with computers - I don't have it in my blood. I don't have formal education in anything computer and have never worked in the field. During Covid I learnt Linux from the Arch wiki. Now I'm using it. I configured some things and can control my computer through the command line.

Everytime I read comments like yours, I get the shivers. Did I miss something integral? What do I not know about? Especially network stuff is a blind spot for me. I didn't touch network stuff beyond the default wiki pages.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 13:17:57+00:00
Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.

Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-23 13:18:05+00:00
In the US we only have a remnant of that in the Senate, in what has been popularly marketed as "the Nuclear Option." A Senator just makes a point of order that a Senate rule is the opposite of what it actually, verifiably is. The chair denies it, the Senator appeals the decision, and a majority of the Senate then overrules the chair.

After this has happened, the rule just changes and whatever was not in order in the past is in order in the future (or vice versa.) In the Senate as in Parliament; the majority of Parliament is the law, it can't break the law.
by BirAdam | 2025-05-23 13:18:23+00:00
Yeah. So, in the West, Rome proper didn’t allow Hebrew numbers. However, in Constantinople, all accounting had to be done in Greek or Latin and Arabic numerals were forbidden. One can cite all kinds of reasons: tax assessors not wanting to learn it, distrust of foreigners, the fact that the Rhomaioi were almost always at war with the Arabs and/or Turks.
by ageitgey | 2025-05-23 13:18:43+00:00
I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).

The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.

Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.

You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.

The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
by snarf21 | 2025-05-23 13:18:45+00:00
Just One (best party game ever designed) Splendor (intro to "engine builder" games) Carcassonne (intro to tile laying games) Sushi Go (intro to "drafting" games) Scout (intro to climbing/shedding card games)

All of these are very inexpensive and rules light and very approachable for beginners.
by lossolo | 2025-05-23 13:18:49+00:00
You need to add indexes on cloud-hosted instances too, perform migrations there as well, and launch new features in your application in both cases. Almost everything you're talking about has little to do with whether you're self-hosting or using a cloud provider. You still have to deal with most of it either way.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I've also managed Kafka clusters, ClickHouse clusters, Elasticsearch clusters, etc. and I have my share of Zookeeper horror stories. Some of the tools I just mentioned are definitely not maintenance-free. But in my experience, you can't really compare PostgreSQL to them.
by bobbybarnaclebb | 2025-05-23 13:20:26+00:00
made an account just to add to this. I did this workbook with my son the summer between K and 1st. every night we did a single lesson and his teachers were flabbergasted as he breezed through the spelling and reading curriculum for the entire year in the first month. the rest of the year he was allowed to choose books from the library while the others did assigned readings and he’s reading somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade level without any additional “study.”

the book provides a literal script for the parent to read, like inline code comments, which took a lot of the overhead out of it on my side. heart melting hearing him say his favorite gift/summer memory was “my dad teaching me to read!”
by os2warpman | 2025-05-23 13:20:49+00:00
Because they require so little, infrequent, maintenance it makes very little sense to pave asphalt roads to wind tower locations.

For the vast majority of wind farms, dirt or gravel roads connect masts to pre-existing infrastructure.

The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rPjUGSTN979dfUoDA

The largest wind farm in Europe is the Markbygden Wind Farm: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETVeMXpf1uPieTct8

Dirt and gravel roads.

I'm not saying that there have never been roads paved to create wind farms.

I am saying that the number of roads that have paved is so small that it is irrelevant.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-23 13:22:34+00:00
There's no easy way to "just" transmit data in a foolproof manner. You practically need to support CSRs as a CA anyway, so you might as well use the existing ASN.1+X509 system to transmit data.

ASN.1 and X509 aren't all that bad. It's a comprehensively documented binary format that's efficient and used everywhere, even if it's hidden away in binary protocols you don't look at every day.

Unlike what most people seem to think, ACME isn't something invented just for Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt was certainly the first high-profile CA to implement the protocol, but various CAs (free and paid) have their own ACME servers and have had them for ages now. It's a generic protocol for certificate authorities to securely do domain validation and certificate provisioning that Let's Encrypt implemented first.

The unnecessarily complex parts of the protocol when writing a from-the-ground-up client are complex because ACME didn't reinvent the wheel, and reused existing standard protocols instead. Unfortunately, that means having to deal with JWS, but on the other hand, it means most people don't need to write their own ACME-JWS-replacement-protocol parsers. All the other parts are complex because the problem ACME is solving is actually quite complex.

The author wrote [another post](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/03/ssl/) about the time they fell for the lies of a CA that promised an "easier" solution. That solution is pretty much ACME, but with more manual steps (like registering an account, entering domain names).

I personally think that for this (and for many other protocols, to be honest) XML would've been a better fit as its parsers are more resilient against weird data, but these days talking about XML will make people look at you like you're proposing COBOL. Hell, I even exchanging raw, binary ASN.1 messages would probably have gone over pretty well, as you need ASN.1 to generate the CSR and request the certificate anyway. But, people chose "modern" JSON instead, so now we're base64 encoding values that JSON parsers will inevitably fuck up instead.
by dtagames | 2025-05-23 13:22:55+00:00
This sounds disingenuous and misleading. There is no way LLMs can be cajoled into consistent results. It's all prompts, all the way down.

While this service may add more prompts around prompts around prompts, that's all it can do. Cursor and other tools already do that with rules files.

It does not help the overall case for AI tools when we promise things they can't deliver or mislead people about how they work. Using words like "learning" and "memory" here in your advertising are examples of that.
by abcd_f | 2025-05-23 13:23:11+00:00
> every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post

As the joke from the 00s went - in other news, Cisco has become today the first company to close its doors because all its employees cashed out their stock options and quit.

That is, hanging rich persons from the lamp posts is probably not the maxim that would resonate well on the HN :)
by crazygringo | 2025-05-23 13:23:32+00:00
> If you’re waiting up to 24 hours to voice a blocker or work with someone to resolve it, you’re waiting too long.

Yes, but that's part of the point. A lot of people wait too long, and a standup makes sure it doesn't wait even longer.

Daily standups are a first line of defense against all sorts of bad practices.

But also, standups increase visibility so things get addressed and escalated faster. Maybe you thought being blocked wasn't a huge priority, but the team lead realizes it is and ropes in someone from outside the team to help.
by dcre | 2025-05-23 13:23:36+00:00
It is a thread. You may have only seen the first tweet because Twitter is a user-hostile trash fire.

“The lesson: on a fundamental level, solutions to these games are low-dimensional. No matter how hard you hit them with from-scratch training, tiny models will work about as well as big ones. Why? Because there's just not that many bits to learn.”

https://unrollnow.com/status/1925795730150527191
by Aurornis | 2025-05-23 13:24:33+00:00
This was a fun read. I appreciate a journalist willing to dive into something obscure and reveal a lot of interesting process details and anecdotes as they go.

Before I knew anything about the film and TV industry I would have assumed the process was rather straightforward from concept to script to filming and then editing, almost waterfall style.

But no, it typically evolves and lives and changes through the process. Dialog and storylines are tweaked at every stage as the end product is incrementally manifested. Not unlike software development.
by ownagefool | 2025-05-23 13:24:34+00:00
It's actually probably a more difficult problem at scale.

When you have a single smallish schema, you export, restore, and write automated tests that'll probably prove that backups in 10 minutes ( runtime, development time few days / weeks ). Either the transaction runs or errors, and either the test passes or not.

The problem when small is obviously knowledge, skills, and procedures.

Things like:

- What if the monitoring that alerts me that the backups are down, is also actually down. - What do you mean it's no longer "safe" to kubectl delete pvc --all? - What do you mean there's nobody around with the skills to unfuck this? - What do you mean I actually have to respond to these alerts in a timely manner?

The reality is, when the database is small, it typically doesn't cost a whole lot, so there's a lack of incentive to really tool and skill for this when you can get a reasonable managed service.

I typically have those skills, but still use a managed service for my own startup because it's not worth my time.

Once the bill is a larger than TCO of self-hosting you have another discussion.