MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by satiric | 2025-05-26 22:19:35+00:00
It's too damn small. Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px (as does Chrome I think), and even then I zoom in to 130% to get the font to 15.6px.

On the home page the text that tells you who the poster is, how many upvotes and comments, etc, is gray text on a gray background, at 7pt font. Again, Firefox and Chrome scale this up to 9.33pt, which again, is too small for me to read comfortably on a 24 inch desktop monitor without zoom.

(I accept that 120% would be fine; that brings up the main font size to 14.4pt. Wikipedia seems to use 14pt and that's totally fine for me. But still, neither me nor the browser should have to scale up the website.)

Even at 130% zoom, on the home page I can see 20 posts at once. I understand complaints that reddit went too far in the other direction, but that doesn't mean they should throw accessibility out the window for this site.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-05-26 22:19:55+00:00
> I've heard before stories about solo closed source developers who suddenly and unexpectedly die, and they'd left the source code on an encrypted disk, and even if their family gives some technical friend permission to try to retrieve it, turns out to be impossible because nobody knows the password. Open source, not an issue.

I feel we need more code escrows for that reason. Keep it commercial till you die, fine, but let it live on afterwards.
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-26 22:20:07+00:00
I think the reason they should have feared as soon as they began to become familiar with the website would be that they could find the form too easily, that the website was too small-- i.e. that their visits to it would make them conspicuous once something was noticed.

If it were Google and it was a standard Google, or some kind of Github chat that was like Signal but in JavaScript embedded in a website it would become much more reasonable.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-26 22:21:04+00:00
> it's not estrogen where you would expect breast growth

Actually, it is. Reducing DHT levels causes the body to elevate both testosterone and œstrogen levels, via homeostasis. But yeah, it's not a direct effect, and if it's a problem you can twiddle further to make it go away. (You could even do that pre-emptively, though you normally get days and days of warning before breast development actually starts, so I'd advocate the "wait and see" approach.)
by tredre3 | 2025-05-26 22:21:20+00:00
> Great, now that you are in. All my e-mails are encrypted on server's disk with a mix of S/MIME and GPG.

So what? Hiding your old email content might be valuable from a privacy point of view but if you cared about that you'd just delete them from the server to begin with.

What a hacker cares about is the ability to receive new emails (password recovery). Those emails are still sent to you in clear text.

He might also care about getting a list of past senders (to know what accounts you might have) and that info isn't encrypted by GPG, only the content.
by mxfh | 2025-05-26 22:21:28+00:00
On capable devices actual downloading is even supported as an USP by most providers for offline/travel scenarios.

Besides that there are even more externalities that differentiate them:

Client and User requirements and targeted devices, therefore mass adoption and market penetration.

Downloading requires quite expensive hardware by comparison in usually quite complicated setups for a TV/like experience, it requires the user to do active file management, (which includes deleting files at some point, or buy more expensive local infrastructure) to become a mass market consumer thing, this needs to be externalized.

A streaming client is way cheaper to build and market, since doesn't need any relevant amount of non/volatile memory to speak off, that the user experience easier to sell is also quite obvious as witnessed by the golden last decade, it's only now getting tainted by encroaching advertising and platform proliferation etc.
by cosmic_quanta | 2025-05-26 22:21:41+00:00
The discussion on the PR linked in this post, about upstreaming lazy trees to Nix proper, seems to indicate that some of the benefits also require changing the semantics of the Nix language.

I'm not familiar enough with Nix to understand, but it looks like the performance gains in the blog post might not all materialize to upstream users.

In any case, cool stuff
by mh- | 2025-05-26 22:21:43+00:00
Think this is a great idea, I would have paid for this when we were buying our house. Especially for one feature: let me give you a list of properties (perhaps forwarded from my agent, or e.g. a Zillow search) and get back the "enriched" listings with your added insights. It'd be great if I could then weight different factors (local schools, walkability, etc.) to stack rank them.

With a once-in-a-century shakeup in commission structure for Realtors, you're building this at a very interesting time.

Happy to chat more if you'd like to bounce ideas around.

edit: Also, I think you could easily monetize this by charging agents (or their brokers) for it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-26 22:21:51+00:00
> Security Keys. Your mother and siblings have seen keys before right? They can understand the metaphor and use it. Several of the accounts listed, such as Google and Facebook allow Security Keys.

The problem with these is, they can get lost, stolen, damaged or misplaced. With a physical key to the home, no problem - call up a locksmith and if you don't have an ID card also the police, he'll drill out the lock and you can enter your home back.

Google, Facebook, whatever - good luck trying to get into touch with a human to reset your "security key".
by fortran77 | 2025-05-26 22:21:53+00:00
This was my first programming language. CS 101 was taught in PL/I, on punch cards, when I went to college. We actually used a Cornell dialect called "PL/C"

While it's called "Pee el one" it's rendered PL/I. So the title is wrong; the article has it correct. Please fix it! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I
by voilavilla | 2025-05-26 22:22:58+00:00
>> rights holders have engaged in a fundamentally-doomed arms race of implementing copy-protection strategies

Not entirely true. They simply haven't succeeded in created an industry-standard secure pipeline to the pixels on the display. Aside from the "analogue hole", eventually all of the gaps will be plugged, the same way we use secure sockets today. All media devices (including home HDTV/8K/etc) will extend the chain of trust farther into the pipeline. A set of signed apps and hardware will be required to watch any DRM films on HDTV, with each stage using authenticated encryption completely annihilating any MITM siphoning of the video.

So, its not doomed, just moving slowly, but it absolutely WILL arrive. I know, because I'm working on secure embedded video codec hardware, and our customers are targeting this..
by lukax | 2025-05-26 22:24:13+00:00
At Koofr[1] one of the most requested features was an option to prevent downloading files from public links. We didn't want to lie to our users so we added a "Hide download button" option because that's the only thing you can do. You can hide the download button but you can never really prevent the download.

[1] https://koofr.eu
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-26 22:24:48+00:00
Having to think about docker's hashing/caching scheme and also pip's and also npm's and to apply them each separately in CI and in a local environment and in dev/stage/prod... for a large repo that's a lot of work. Easy to overlook whichever one you're less concerned about at the time and put the repo in some kind of inconsistent state where something works here but not there.

There's a lot to be said for having a single lockfile for all of them.
by tredre3 | 2025-05-26 22:25:21+00:00
> To check on the validity of the information, Fowler emailed many of the people listed in the file and told them that he was researching a data breach. Several of the individuals confirmed that the records contained valid account passwords and other data.

Do security researchers really contact people willy-nilly and ask them to confirm their passwords? Then they lecture us about the dangers of social engineering?
by shlomo_z | 2025-05-26 22:26:05+00:00
Do you have any data to back this up, or are you speculating?

Personally, I do not hesitate to use a library if it has decent documentation or even well structured source code. And I say this as an AI autocomplete user.

Additionally, if code is well structured, usually humans and AI can both learn it with a very small context. For example, many AI models can write decent code if you provide them with a list of functions and classes in the library, along with their argument names and argument types.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 22:26:11+00:00
Or instead of a big conspiracy, maybe this code which was written for a client was later used by someone at the client who triggered the pathway volunteering the code for training?

Or the more likely explanation: That this vague internet anecdote from an anonymous person is talking about some simple and obvious code snippets that anyone or any LLM would have generated in the same function?

I think people like arguing conspiracy theories because you can jump through enough hoops to claim that it might be possible if enough of the right people coordinated to pull something off and keep it secret from everyone else.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-26 22:26:23+00:00
Loss of privacy, slowdown at the entrance, employee training on validation, not being able to hand a ticket to a friend later (you mentioned). Other things I’ve forgotten but others have mentioned on this page.

Scalpers have helped me out several times when I didn’t hear about an event until the last minute, so I don’t always think of them as an enemy to eliminate.

Patio11 has a piece on how, often, the optimum amount of fraud is not 0. Scalpers aren’t exactly that but informs the discussion.
by codetrotter | 2025-05-26 22:26:24+00:00
I applaud you for uploading even if it’s a bit disorganised still, and I do the same. It’s better to have something than nothing. Sometimes I see people talking about something but they don’t want to upload their code yet because they have to clean it up first. And then either they don’t get around to ever cleaning it up the way they wanted, or by they time they do it will have fallen off everyone’s radar and be forgotten. At least with a messy repo it’s possible to poke around, and not the least to star it and maybe check back later to see if they cleaned it up.
by brooke2k | 2025-05-26 22:26:31+00:00
I don't understand the vitriol this author seems to have towards rav1d/Rust. It's just a separate implementation of the project. Slower, faster, who cares? Getting so attached to "which language is faster" seems a tad dramatic.

But maybe I'm over-reading into what's actually friendly competition. The tone just seems oddly aggressive.
by i80and | 2025-05-26 22:27:20+00:00
We should. But even small baby step measures with no downsides like plastic bag bans are wildly contentious.

I live in a county that's enacted one, and it's been unambiguously an improvement for the area on top of the core goal of "reduce plastic waste". But visiters look at me like I live in East Germany when I mention that.

I don't say this to discredit the idea, but it's politically treacherous, and not a lot of people are willing to stick their necks out for the right thing.
by II2II | 2025-05-26 22:28:21+00:00
The two reasons I can think of: to run legacy or educational operating systems. There are going to be limitations to what can be supported, but simply getting the OS to boot is part of the battle. It would also be useful for those who want to experiment with operating systems by creating their own. Yes you can do that without BIOS support, but there are many old tutorials floating around that depend upon BIOS support. The BIOS was also created as a primitive hardware compatibility layer, so it will provide basic support for things like I/O.
by math_dandy | 2025-05-26 22:28:23+00:00
Centralization and IT-ification has made flouting difficult. There’s one common course site on the institution’s learning management system for all sections where assignments are distributed and collected via upload dropbox, where grades are tabulated and communicated.

So far, it’s still possible to opt out of this coordinated model, and I have been. But I suspect the ability to opt out will soon come under attack (the pretext will be ‘uniformity == fairness’). I never used to be an academic freedom maximalists who viewed the notion in the widest sense, but I’m beginning to see my error.
by gugagore | 2025-05-26 22:28:25+00:00
> I bring up Godel just to show that static typing cannot be a panacea. You are necessarily going to have false positives or false negatives or both. If you're OK with that, fine, more power to you. But don't judge me if I'm not OK with it.

If you want a static type system that is sound and decidable, it will necessarily reject some programs that would behave just fine at runtime. That’s not really Gödel’s fault. It follows more directly from the halting problem.

But that's a quibble, and I still know what to make of your stance. The thing you're not okay with is having the system "get in your way", which is your false positive (the polarity doesn't matter, if that's what I'm getting wrong). The point is you want to say "my program is correct, now run it for me", and you will hate if the system rejects it.

What you don't hate is runtime type errors.

There is no judgement on my side on the preferences. But I'm confused. If you don't have any static type checking, then it's like having a system that always gives negatives, and some of those will be false (again, assuming I got the polarity right. if not, just swap here and earlier). I'm pretty sure you're okay with this, even though the text of your last message leads me to believe otherwise.

To summarize, there’s a fundamental trade-off:

- If you want a sound type system (never accepts unsafe programs),

- And you want it to be decidable (terminates on all inputs),

- Then it must reject some safe programs.

If you're not okay with that, then... sorry :D
O1 Visa Question - Looking for help
by emitrranmol | 2025-05-26 22:28:48+00:00
Hey everyone, I wanted to get some help on my O1 visa application

As I am filling my O1 application, I am the founder of a SaaS company does 2.5m ARR in revenue, have a little press about me and we've raised a pre series A round of 4m

I dont have any memberships I am a part of and I've not really judged anyone's work (except helping 1 startup grow. I've helped them a lot in everything - recruitment, growth, pmf and now they are a team of 15 with 400k ARR)

Do you know what I could do for membership and judging criteria

I didnt want to go through any accelerators and apparently the administration does not value that much now.

But the attorney's said it helps to have memberships and judging too.

Thanks in advance for all the help
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 22:30:50+00:00
Also think about it this way:

Redis will eventually become obsolete. It may take 10 or 50 years, but it will happen.

But kilo taught many developers about C, editors, terminals, and how simple it is to do syntax highlighting. This epiphany inspired me and many others, and the things we make because of that will last much longer than Redis.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-05-26 22:30:51+00:00
That study is from 1985; subsequent studies have found no such utility for nicotine.

Nicotine harms sleep quality. People wearing patches to bed typically experience bizarre nightmares. Then factor in the cardiac risks.

Moreover, the pharmacology of atomoxetine and nicotine are very different.

Clinical effects of locally delivered nicotine in obstructive sleep apnea syndrome https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12756424/

Effects of nicotine on sleep during consumption, withdrawal and replacement therapy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19345124/

Polysomnographic sleep disturbances in nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, opioid, and cannabis use: A focused review https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26346395/

Impact of Nicotine and Other Stimulants on Sleep in Young Adults https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30461442/
by fao_ | 2025-05-26 22:31:09+00:00
I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very ineffective.

The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.

The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
by kayabuilds | 2025-05-26 22:31:22+00:00
> By this logic we will never have another new library again

I didn't mean "we'll never have new libraries again".

My point is that if a dev can't use a tool with the help of GPT or Claude, that tool starts off at a disadvantage.

Innovation can still happen. It just has to fight harder for attention now.

> We will never have a substantial API change to an existing library either, since there will be no training data for it.

If an update breaks the LLM's ability to assist, devs might avoid upgrading until the models catch up. It creates a weird lag where the old API is more AI-friendly than the new one, even if the new one is technically better.

Just look at React Router (Remix). It's a pain having to constantly tell the AI which version you're using. Sometimes you spend more time correcting the AI than writing actual code. (https://x.com/rafalwilinski/status/1924155117172838838)

So yeah, changes can happen. But now they need to account for how LLMs will interpret and support them, not just how humans will.
by greiskul | 2025-05-26 22:31:30+00:00
> foo = (lambda x = []: ...)

> For that, it has to immediately evaluate [] (like it always does anywhere!). So how is this not exactly what it should do?

It has a lambda there. In many programming languages, and the way human beings read this, say that "when there is a lambda, whatever is inside is evaluated only when you call it". Python evaluating default arguments at definition time is a clear footgun that leads to many bugs.

Now, there is no way of fixing it now, without probably causing other bugs and years of backwards compatibility problems. But it is good that people are aware that it is an error in design, so new programming languages don't fall into the same error.

For an equivalent error that did get fixed, many Lisps used to have dynamic scoping for variables instead of lexical scoping. It was people critizing that decision that lead to pretty much all modern programming languages to use lexical scoping, including python.
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-26 22:31:55+00:00
I live in a hard water area as well.

I researched about this, and the best solution is to get a water softener. These are devices that mix salts with the water that break down the limescale minerals.

That said, most reputable manufacturers and installers of these devices will recommend you have an unsoftened tap for drinking water. The minerals in the water are actually good for you, and removing them could have deleterious effects on your health. Watering plants is generally best done with unsoftened water as well.
by lispisok | 2025-05-26 22:32:19+00:00
The fetishizing enabled the massive explosion in what's basically a university industrial complex financed off the backs of student loans. To keep growing the industry needed more suckers...I mean students to extract student loans from. This meant watering down the material even in technical degrees like engineering, passing kids who should have failed, and lowering admission standards (masked by grade inflation). Many programs are really really bad now like what should be high school freshman level material. Criticizing the university system gets you called anti-intellectual and a redneck.

A lot of debate around the idea of student loan forgiveness but nobody is trying to address how the student loan problem got so bad in the first place.
by LukeShu | 2025-05-26 22:32:32+00:00
Very cool hack.

But, as okanat says, if the goal is to run legacy operating systems, then modern hardware is going to be challenging in other ways too. IME the biggest thing I want PC BIOS back for is the ability to use non-GPT disk layouts, which this doesn't accomplish as, as to use it you put it on the EFI partition on your GPT disk.
by SpaceNugget | 2025-05-26 22:32:48+00:00
At some point you hit the pixel driver with a bunch of bits, unless your pipeline involves digital signing of copyrights in everyone's future cyber eyeballs, it will always be possible to get the video if you have hardware access.

And the article goes over how there is already an industry standard for the encryption pipeline that goes all the way to monitors and television sets themselves and how you can get a cheap device which just pretends to be a TV and passes on an unencrypted HDMI out.
by globie | 2025-05-26 22:33:12+00:00
Do you believe the disaggregation of those monoliths helps to put the "hypothesis to bed"? It sure seems like you were listing "constant litigation" over "records request" as counterevidence of the claim that "if a company knows something about you, so does the government(s)".

If anyone in the U.S. government is extracting data from companies in a manner which is unlawful or should be (and they sure are), I see that as strong evidence of the hypothesis. Pointing out that local agencies may have to fight for their access in court doesn't change that it "is exactly the state of affairs the government prefers".
by perching_aix | 2025-05-26 22:33:28+00:00
If I understand it right, some lossy codecs can be implemented in an idempotent (and still standard-compliant) way, so there would be no generational loss (in select specific cases, e.g. matched settings). I'm also aware that e.g. JPEG-XL can reencode JPEGs without generational loss, while still improving compression efficiency a bit. But I never looked too deep into the math.
by josh-sematic | 2025-05-26 22:33:40+00:00
I love this. The web used to be a place filled to the brim with people making sites about stuff dedicated to some niche thing that brought them joy. Glad to see that vibe still survives out there.

Edit: to be clear, this site is connected with an organization and probably exists to help promote it, but it still gives that “look, this is cool!” passion to me.
by discarded1023 | 2025-05-26 22:33:49+00:00
Yes, AIUI Streicher's work was in the vein of your [4]. (I got a vague pointer to him a while back; I don't know who's responsible for the meat of the development.)

Game semantics is expressive but AFAIK it has not (yet) provided new tools for reasoning about programs. I wonder why those tools have (apparently) not been developed, or do they just add (not very useful?) information to the old LCF story ala Scott? Has its moment passed?

By parallelism I think you mean concurrency. (Scott's domains have a bit too much parallelism as shown by Plotkin in his classic paper on LCF; these are at the root of the failure of Scott's models to be fully abstract.) And Scott's big idea -- that computation aligns with his notion of continuity -- conflicts with fairness which is essential for showing liveness. For this reason I never saw the point in powerdomains, excepting the Hoare (safety) powerdomain.

As these notes show, models, even adequate models, are a dime a dozen. It's formulating adequate reasoning principles that is tough. And that's what Andy Pitts brought to classic domain theory in the 1990s.