MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnisgood | 2025-05-22 10:08:15+00:00
I need more context, I do not understand anything apart from the quote on the bottom, which is just a mere expression of dislike of something without any reasons provided...

> Ada was such a mess that I shuddered at the thought that Western security would depend on it and that I would feel much safer if the Red Army were to adopt it as well.

Replace "Ada" with "Rust" or anything else (like Dijkstra's favorite programming language). It does not explain the why.
by capitol_ | 2025-05-22 10:08:33+00:00
It's also easy for people to have the opinion the those who do the unpaid work of packaging software should do even more work for free.

I have sent about 50 or so patches upstream for the 300 packages I maintain and while it reduces the amount of work long-term it's also surprisingly amount of work.

Typically the Debian patches are licensed under the same license as the original project. So there is nothing stopping anyone who feels that more patches should be sent upstream to send them.

Typically the Debian maintai
by seec | 2025-05-22 10:09:39+00:00
I strongly disagree. I have experienced many very well-off people (middle class+) who consistently choose cheap crap because they refuse to think about their choices in any other ways than maximisation of their benefits (at a surface level).

Poor people are not necessarily the ones to make those choices. In fact, sometimes you find out that they are actually poorer than they would be if they would optimise their choices for their own financial benefits. If you look at who's buying expensive local food at your farmer's market it's unlikely to be dominated by rich people. If you go to some discount supermarket, you will most likely find a lot more well-off people, proportionally. Lidl is a supermarket chain that has terrible consequences, from treating their own employees badly to putting extreme pressure on the suppliers and its whole reason for existing is cheaper prices. Their biggest customer demographic is rich boomer.
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-22 10:12:21+00:00
I don't think there's any reason to believe there'll be mass unemployment. Any job where human is cheaper than automation will stay human, or where people want a human and are willing to pay for it. Those jobs are probably most of the jobs, although I don't have data to back that claim up.

Also it's worth noting that if automation in the right areas has its intended effects, costs of living should come down, making the cost of a human less, not more[0], and moving the bar for what is worth automating higher and higher

[0] modulo policy decisions that raise the cost of living back up
by eru | 2025-05-22 10:12:24+00:00
Well, obviously you put the smallest unit in your integers.

Cents was just an example. Old British currency used to be even crazier than your example of a unit divided into 1,000.

> But, the moment you need to convert from KWD to VND (84000.00:1) you could be at the edge of the size of a 64 bit int.

So? You should use arbitrary length integers for that. Many languages have good support for them. Eg in Python they are the default integer you get.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-22 10:12:42+00:00
I second that. Not only are there not infrequent cases of package maintainers breaking software, it's effectively nothing but the "app store" model, having an activist distributor insert themselves between the user and software.

It's why I'm really glad flatpaks/snaps/appimages and containerization are where they are at now, because it's greatly dis-intermediated software distribution.
by natmaka | 2025-05-22 10:12:44+00:00
> Disagreement

Indeed, my point was about a form of propaganda quite common in France, which states that long-term waste repositories (now work-in-progress) will be perfectly safe. They won't.

> assess the waste?

Most of renewables' waste is recyclable, and more and more is recycled, even wind turbine blades.

> likely number of people killed over the lifetime of the waste

The more types of waste and the longer the lifetime (nuclear...), the more difficult it is.

> count the waste from manufacturing

As far as I understand yes, an adequate life-cycle assessment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment ) has to do so, however this is a good point: it may somewhat be neglected.
by metalman | 2025-05-22 10:12:51+00:00
And now I need to take a closer look at a small trackway that I brought home, after I might add watching a greater portion erode out of a cliff face and disapear into the surf over a few years, not that there is any shortage of animal fossils and other things like fossilised rain and wave impressions, literaly 1000's of km³. As to the information that can be extracted from a trackway, it would be intetesting to run these past indiginous trackers and have them consult with scientists to train field workers doing palentological research, a realy realy cold trail.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-22 10:12:58+00:00
Modula was first described in March 1976.

Modula-2 is a much later language, from 1982, 3 years after the publication of Ada, and this is the version of Modula that has become well known. The first version of Modula has seen very little use, if any.

The first version of Modula has been conceived by Wirth while he took a sabbatical year during which he stayed at Xerox PARC. There he was impressed by the language Mesa, which already had modules.

In my opinion, Mesa was a programming language vastly better than any Modula version. Wirth however thought that Mesa was a too big language, so he attempted to design a simple language that offered some of the benefits of Mesa.

In 1976, when Wirth has designed the first (not very good) version of Modula, the DoD requirements specification process that has resulted in Ada had already passed through 3 stages: STRAWMAN (1975-04), WOODENMAN (1975-08) and TINMAN (1976-01), though the first requirements document that was close to the final language, IRONMAN, would be published only next year, in 1977. (The final DoD requirements document was STEELMAN, in 1978-06, and Ada was published one year later, in 1979-06.)

Therefore Modula had no influence on Ada.

After implementing the detailed DoD requirements (which included some influences from the language Jovial, which was used within the DoD at that time), the remainder of Ada was influenced by IBM PL/I, by Algol 68, by Pascal from Wirth, and also by Xerox Mesa, the source of inspiration for Modula. Any resemblance between Ada and Modula comes either from Pascal or from Mesa, which have been sources of inspiration for both Ada and Modula.

Xerox Mesa has been a very innovative programming language, but it is seldom mentioned today, despite being the origin of many features added to later languages, e.g. the less usual loop syntax used by Python (with ELSE; Mesa used a better keyword, FINISHED).

Unfortunately some of the best features of Mesa are not supported at all or only badly supported in most modern languages.
by keiferski | 2025-05-22 10:13:12+00:00
I did read the article and wrote my comment afterward. I didn't find it to be nuanced at all, and the author's description of using LLMs was amateurish at best, which is my point.

30 second sketches also are not nearly as effective as detailed images and would likely have dubious value in implementing the Picture Superiority Effect.

Nowhere did I say that people who write essays about AI being useless are idiots. That's your terminology, not mine. Merely that they lack imagination and creativity when it comes to exploring the potential of a new tool and instead just make weak criticisms.
by dustingetz | 2025-05-22 10:13:32+00:00
“I contacted all the Vcs in the world, twice” cold outreach can work but the email needs to be an absolute bullseye to the exact VC in the world who already has your hypothesis and wants to learn more. But even if it’s love at first sight, you still need momentum with other VCs to get them to pull the trigger, which means you need interest from generalists, which means you need a few dozen warm intros. Broadly intros at seed stage come from angels who have already invested or are close to investing. Getting first checks from angels is a less hard game (because they likely have deep technical knowledge of your space and can therefore recognize the brilliance of your team and product, see the staggering opportunity you are after w/o you needing to baby-splain it) but it takes a long time, years, to reach them, as no “ordinary human being” wants to be hit up by cold emails from a cold startup asking for money, in my experience they need to come to you inbound via your brand and network. Using twitter DMs to meet as many people as possible (once your reputation is established) is a good way to get networked and start to map out who’s who in your space and develop the alliances you will need to succeed, get intros to customers, eventually get intros to acquirers (even harder game than VC, acquirers are even less technical and more spreadsheet-brained than VCs)
by RobirdLiu | 2025-05-22 10:13:40+00:00
To get started on building it yourself, you could consider a stack like: Python as the base, Ollama for local LLM serving, Whisper (e.g., via whisper.cpp) for STT, Langchain for the agent orchestration and tool integration, and something like Piper for TTS. For Notion/GCal, their official Python SDKs wrapped as Langchain tools would be the way.

This selection prioritizes a pragmatic balance between capability and a more manageable entry point for an individual project, rather than focusing strictly on the absolute SOTA or most experimental options for each component. It should provide a solid foundation for iterative development, and you can always swap out/upgrade specific parts later as you see fit
by tialaramex | 2025-05-22 10:13:49+00:00
> There are valid use cases for TLS middleboxes

There are, and always have been, people who are sure that they "need" to do things which don't work because the correct solution would be inconvenient for them. Those people should instead suck it up and accept the inconvenience or, as is more likely, remember they don't "need" this after all considering how inconvenient it is.

It won't suddenly work just because that would be more convenient and it's very annoying technically that we have to keep having this conversation, it's not going to stop being true just because that would make your life easier.
by olllo | 2025-05-22 10:15:38+00:00
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by vintermann | 2025-05-22 10:16:48+00:00
Yes, but the point is, some use them, most don't. The existence of the words means that someone using the language cared enough about the difference to distinguish - but nothing about how few or many they were.

Arguably the existence of niche words could even mean less, as in the flock words example, words that have more or less been invented as pure word games.
by chedabob | 2025-05-22 10:17:25+00:00
I wish I could block any IP that runs CPanel and Wordpress.

Every time a server is hammering our corporate firewall, I know that if I put it into Shodan, it's going to be running out of date versions of those two. It's rare they come from the same IP block, so at best I can block a /32 if they're a persistent offender.
by iainmerrick | 2025-05-22 10:17:33+00:00
I'm a bit bemused at that "lost to time", as immediately before that it says:

The law requires a bale of straw to be hung from a bridge as a warning to mariners whenever the height between the river and the bridge’s arches is reduced, as it is at Charing Cross at the moment.

That seems clear enough! OK, the reason why it specifically has to be a bale of straw isn't obvious, but apart from that it seems very reasonable, just outdated.

Edit to add: straw does make sense as a makeshift crash barrier -- you'll notice if you hit it, but hopefully won't actually damage your ship. It seems like you would always just plough through and hit the actual bridge, though.
by practal | 2025-05-22 10:18:12+00:00
Ok, so the main point that makes it different from CRDTs seems to be: if you have a central server, let the server do the synchronization (fixing an order among concurrent events), and not the data structure itself via an a-priori order.

Because all communication is between client and server, and never between clients, when the client connects to the server, the server can make sure that it first processes all of the client's local operations before sending it new remote updates.
by guerrilla | 2025-05-22 10:18:34+00:00
In case anyone else forgot what that means.

> The "brown M&M clause" was a specific contract requirement by Van Halen that demanded all brown M&Ms be removed from a bowl of M&Ms provided backstage before their performances. This clause was not a frivolous demand but a way to test if the concert promoters had read the entire contract carefully. If brown M&Ms were found, it indicated that other important technical details might have been overlooked, which could pose safety risks for the band and the audience.
by shegby | 2025-05-22 10:19:13+00:00
Here are some thoughts to kick off the discussion:

I’ve seen a lot of discussion in the Nostr community about the limits of relay scaling — it seems like Nostria is tackling this issue head-on. I'm curious to know if others here have experimented with similar peer-to-peer models.

I'm also wondering about offline message delivery, which I see as a potential challenge. How might a fully P2P protocol handle delayed delivery, especially for mobile users?

Lastly, is it a fair concern that removing relays could increase complexity for developers who are used to the current Nostr model?

I would love to hear how others are thinking about the trade-offs of decentralisation in social protocols.
by natmaka | 2025-05-22 10:19:26+00:00
> we don't seek unanimity before proceeding with something.

> this is a settled matter since at least 1972

This is an opinion. My (dissenting) one is that the more someone is or could be impacted, the more we have to take his/her opinion into account.

> Disposal of small amounts of radioactive material at sea and into the air happens

It doesn't imply that it is an adequate way to dispose of it.

> An international convention does not settle the science behind ocean disposal

"The main objective of the London Convention is to prevent indiscriminate disposal at sea of wastes that could be liable for creating hazards to human health; harming living resources and marine life; damaging amenities; or interfering with other legitimate uses of the sea." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Convention_on_the_Preve... )

> The lack of supporters perhaps reflects the difficulty in carrying out such research, and the problems of trying to change international agreements.

Nuclear-waste long-term repositories projects are very expensive and difficult (to the point of many attempts failing flat) everywhere, therefore attempting to convince that ocean-dumping is OK would be useful.
by macleginn | 2025-05-22 10:19:32+00:00
A spelling error, using one dictionary definition, is "an error in the conventionally accepted form of spelling a word" --- mistaking one word for another does not fall under this definition. It is true that we now expect spell checkers to do grammatical checking as well, but a pure spell checker can indeed rely on a wordlist for English (this wouldn't work in languages with more developed morphology and/or frequent compounding).
by tialaramex | 2025-05-22 10:19:46+00:00
There will be (is? under standards development?) a DTLS replacement built on QUIC but today these are orthogonal technologies. QUIC makes you a TCP-but-encrypted while DTLS is more TLS-but-for-UDP

In a world with no legacy technology rusted in place, QUIC would be a new IP protocol, like TCP and UDP, but there's stuff rusted in place which can barely manage UDP and would not understand how there can possibly be a new protocol even though the entire network was designed to allow that, so that's why QUIC is spelled as UDP data.
by laurieg | 2025-05-22 10:20:06+00:00
> I ran a survey people said would love to pay 5$ a month but no one converted when I added premium modal.

"Hey mom, what do you think of my app?" "That's a lovely app dear. I'd definitely pay $5 for it"

You have learnt a valuable lesson. People will say one thing and do something else. Users actually paying you money is great, not only because you get money but because you get strong information that what you have made is valuable to them. (The above example is drawing on the book The Mom Test. I definitely recommend you read it)

Most engineers build software backwards. They start with a solution and go looking for a problem. They make the fastest, shiniest, neatest solution to a problem no one actually has. (How do I know? It's exactly what I did with my first startup!)

Imagine a dating app. It takes 30 seconds to open. The pictures only show up in black and white. The app crashes half the time you try to send a message. But it always gets you a date on a Friday night. It would be the most popular dating app in the world.

Try to find a problem that is so important and valuable to people that they will pay for your app even if it is slow, buggy, ugly and broken.
by qu0b | 2025-05-22 10:20:30+00:00
Great summary of the trade-offs in Agentic systems. We’ve tackled these exact challenges as we built out our conversational product discovery product for e-commerce at IsarTech [0].

I agree function composition and structured data are essential for keeping complexity in check. In our experience, well-defined structured outputs are the real scalability lever in tool calling. Typed schemas keep both cognitive load and system complexity manageable. We rely on deterministic behavior wherever possible, and reserve LLM processing for cases where schema-less data or ambiguity is involved. Its a great tool for mapping fuzzy user requests to a more structured deterministic system.

That said, finding the right balance between taking complexity out of high entropy input or introducing complexity through chained tool calling is a tradeoff and balance that needs to be struck carefully. In real-world commerce settings, you rarely get away with just one approach. Structured outputs are great until you hit ambiguous intents—then things get messy and you need fallback strategies.

[0] https://isartech.io/
by didntcheck | 2025-05-22 10:21:19+00:00
The behavior of Windows is subject to Microsoft's whims. Microsoft could just as easily have pushed an update to Windows XP that exfiltrated sensitive screenshots too. The existence of a user-facing feature changes nothing at all here

See again: Raymond Chen's "other side of an airtight hatchway" analogy. Microsoft already have ring 0 access to your machine
by rbanffy | 2025-05-22 10:21:39+00:00
> now that original chassises are disintegrating due to aging plastics and parts are becoming more scarce.

We need to start making detailed 3D scans of parts. The original parts will degrade, but we can make accurate reproductions of those parts. It would be great if museums took part of that effort, even if for no other reason than having the historically relevant items all in one place.
by vaporary | 2025-05-22 10:22:30+00:00
I was extremely disappointed to recently learn that visidata(1) phones home, and that this functionality has not been disabled in the Debian package, despite many people requesting its removal:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1001647

https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/discussions/940
by tuetuopay | 2025-05-22 10:23:13+00:00
> You can see the the number for the dB get bigger, while when using prefixes the numbers get bigger two times in a row and then go back to smaller

Interesting, I don't have any issues with that, and I see the numbers getting bigger and bigger no problemo. Perhaps it's an issue of metric/imperial, as I grew up in a metric country: I have a mental visual model of decades, while dB feels linear. The opposite is likely true e.g. in the US.

> You can plot dB nicely as an axis of a chart

Nothing prevents you from putting the decimal scale on a chart. As a matter of fact, many engineering fields do precisely that. One example that comes to mind are components datasheets: a lot is in log scales, but explicitly so, by putting the 1-10-100 numbers with naught-k-M-G. It's explicitly logarithmic.
by HSO | 2025-05-22 10:23:58+00:00
Default way is drag and drop which adds a copy of the file to your attachments.

Another way is to put a file reference into your note (in a link). Your file stays where it is and you have a link to it in a note. Links are opened by default apps as per your OS config.

Since I use Keyboard Maestro on Mac, I wrap the file references in a KM callback url before I insert them in notes. That way you can run custom macros upon clicking a link and even pass parameters. For example, I add page numbers to links to PDFs and when I open such a link, it opens the PDF to the right page.
by vrighter | 2025-05-22 10:24:12+00:00
I started coding at a young age, but entered the professional world in 2012, just like you. I feel the same. I just can't come to grips with the fact that the goal is not to write good software anymore, but to get something, anything out the door on which we can then sell by marketing it based on stuff it doesn't do yet (but it will, we promise!) so that we can make more money and fake making something "new" again (putting a textbox and a button, and hooking it up to an LLM api). Software is nowadays assumed to not work properly. And we're not allowed to fix it anymore!
by abhaynayar | 2025-05-22 10:24:43+00:00
This article speaks to me a lot because I have been meaning to become more of a generalist, cause my role in security (specifically web-bot detection) seems to be too narrow of a niche, which is fine while it lasts, but doesn't seem too resilient to change..

But I also do not wish to get into leetcode type-stuff.. so I have been thinking maybe getting some devops/sre/cloud-infra type-stuff.. not-sure.. if anyone else has been through this, it would be great to hear how you transitioned..
by ocornut | 2025-05-22 10:25:13+00:00
> The real meat & potatoes is all the tooling and content and asset pipelines around the engine. If you think about it, you need to implement:

The sum of all those parts IS the actual meat of the engine imho.

People mistakenly assume that rendering something and having a Dear ImGui frontend constitute an engine but it's only the tip of iceberg. Actual real world issues, productivity concerns, getting shit done is the meaningful work.
by godsinhisheaven | 2025-05-22 10:25:22+00:00
This doesn't make any sense to me. Isn't this completely backwards? Wouldn't this behavior be expected from a logarithmic knob, and not a linear knob? I know what a logarithmic curve looks like, it rises quickly and then it tapers off, exactly the behavior you describe. But then you attribute that to a lineae knob! The parent comment confuses the hell out of me too, I am just really not putting 2 and 2 together here.