MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-10 05:41:15+00:00
Anything but PKI I guess? I'll never understand why the FOSS ecosystem is so stubborn on this matter. PKI based systems like authenticode work fine (FYI: The Windows/NT kernel has an entire dedicated Code Integrity Subsystem just for PKI/authenticode).

The Linux foundation, Linux distribution projects and other FOSS organization can issue code signing certs. The infrastructure burden isn't more significant than key servers or git repos. You can trust specific root CA's, there is no need to trust every public/commercial CA. As a result of commercial adaption, PKI has a lot of tooling and support that PGP lacks.

PGP is just so awkward to use. Fetching keys from key servers, googling if you have the right key,etc... a couple of weeks ago one of my Linux VMs on a rolling release wouldn't update packages because of a missing key. I only solved it after finding a stack overflow post suggesting to fetch a specific key.

The PGP ecosystem feels a lot like security theatrics instead of a well designed system that considers real-world threat models. Not that PKI lacks its own problems, but it is far more sturdy, easy to use and has a consistent user experience.

PGP relies too much on its users not making a mistake. A lot of its security properties depend on users carefully fetching the right key or attending key signing parties or whatever shoddy scheme you have to come up with. Anarchy doesn't work well in real life. I implicitly trust the Linux kernel devs as well as the maintainers of my Linux distribution. There is no reason why I shouldn't trust them to issue CA certs and issue code signing certs for ELF binaries, kernel modules and even scripts (powershell does this on windows!). Especially with things like flatpak and vendoring being so popular these days, PKI makes a lot of sense.

Any time I have to install commercial software, I have to add a whole new repo and trust that vendor's PGP keys. Imagine if instead those vendors were required to obtain code signing certs from distros and sign their packages. Actually, package signing is nice and all but the lack of actual well supported executable/script signing is disappointing.

I get the whole modular Unix philosophy around this whole topic. But the FOSS ecosystem has come a long way and pretending dependencies don't exist or that projects live isolated on an island is disconnected from reality.

There are lots of trust issues with open source software due to how hard it is to mange supply chain security. Practical approaches like PKI in my opinion can contribute a lot to the improvement of trust for such projects.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-10 05:41:21+00:00
Unity feels like such a bottomless pit of bad management decisions, I truly don't know why anyone still uses it today. I switched 2 years ago, when they came up with their insane pricing models. Their tech stack had already accumulated its own problems, but I never had a good enough reason to re-learn everything until then. Even though they pedalled back eventually, I never returned because the alternatives are actually better in so many ways. Unity certainly was the best engine for indies at one time, but it has lost it's most important edge, which was being nice and fun to work with. Other engines have some problems in this department too, but at least they don't have crazy management that will only make everything worse for sure in the future.
by protocolture | 2025-05-10 05:42:17+00:00
Going to lay this out without names, but I have had the opportunity to meet some video game writers, from what I guess you would call the last (or N - 2) generation.

I have never before or since met a more self indulgent, greedy, stuck up set of snobs in all my time. People who are exposed to their work might think them interesting, funny people but they were quite serious and believe themselves at the pinnacle of writing.

I think the stage has long been set for professional novelists to show up and eat their lunch.
by rovr138 | 2025-05-10 05:47:08+00:00
Puerto Rican here in the states when hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.

I spent $600 for a box to be delivered to family which only had batteries and battery fans.

It took my family 6 MONTHS to get power.

My sister would alternate what she did every day.

Some days, she would leave in the morning to go get gas. The line was ALL DAY. Only thing she was filling was the car up. If the temp was too high, because of my grandparents (90’s), they’d just sit in the car to cool off. They’d take the time to charge the phones.

The next day, she’d hit a supermarket. Again, a line all day, to be hopefully let in, and buy whatever is left. I mean, WHATEVER is left (if anything) because the ports weren’t open and nothing was no food being delivered. She would buy expired food, food that clearly had been too warm, then cooled down again, etc.

That and then she’d hit the more rural areas to see if anyone had fruits or anything they were giving out.

The currency at one point was ice. Cause it can keep your food safe and getting it wasn’t easy.

Cellphones were down most of the time. When they came up, they were overloaded. Then antennas would run out of gas and they’d go down again.

At 3 months, I was finally able to get my mom, my sister, and my grandparents out. Before, we’d buy tickets and flights would get cancelled. Every single day we’d go in.

When they made it to us, I took my sister to help buy groceries for my mom and grandparents.

Seeing her walk in, and when we reached the back of the first aisle, she just couldn’t hold it back and fell down crying because of the food. ‘The food’.

Seeing a woman in her mid 20’s crashing into the floor and crying just cause there’s food after being 3 months without it is sad. That being my sister was, heart breaking. Other people came, my wife explained a bit. A few stayed and talked, tried to calm her down.

-----

I applaud the author for taking action. For preparing. But let’s also understand, this is 6 days, and he could have drove his family anywhere else with that money. Find the cheapest rental or hotel and put everyone in a room there. That’s it.

From the reading, the hard part is keeping the kids entertained and food. He lost some. He could have used bags of ice.. but a cooler, drive 2, 5? hours and fill it with bags of ice. The fill your fridge and gift the rest. Repeat in one or two days. Only open to fill a smaller cooler for the day.

But he needs a jackery, solar panels, a generator, and $350 worth of groceries. Would $100 have sufficed for a bit and left stuff for others?

For me, while rainy funds are good, after disasters back home the most important part is community. They’re the ones helping each other. But I see nothing about it.
by lsy | 2025-05-10 05:47:42+00:00
One thought technology for understanding "hallucination" is that LLMs can only predict a fact statistically using all of the syntax available in its training data. This means that when you ask for a fact, you are really asking the computer to "postcast", or statistically predict the past, based on its training data.

That's why it "hallucinates", because sometimes the prediction of the past is wrong about the past. This differs from what people do, in that we don't see the past or present as a statistical field, we see them as concrete and discrete. And once we learn a sufficiently believable fact we generally assume it to be fully true, pending information to the contrary.
by mindslight | 2025-05-10 05:48:27+00:00
The actual destruction of our country is not tied to race, no. I chose to skip taking the trolled bait of the racial breakdown of votes for fascism, because I think that gets us nowhere. The maggot agenda is going to be a bad time for everyone, regardless if you're white, Christian, watch porn, or not. The only people who will think they are benefiting are the corporate and religious authoritarians who each want to meddle in our lives in their own ways, even as the rest of their lives still get shittier.

But this does not mean the original article's mention of "as a black man" is invalid! The fascists use identity politics as the tip of one spear for their totalitarian agenda. This dynamic was demonstrated in Trump's first term with events like Kenneth Walker having his family member summarily executed for his daring to exercise his second amendment right to self defense at home at night. That should have been a straightforward rallying cry for gun enthusiasts. Yet the political machines went to work framing it in terms of race and lo-and-behold whole communities of people that would say things like "from my cold dead hands" instead fell right into line supporting the jackboots!

So regardless of the ultimate agenda not seeming to include sweeping top-down goals like sending all the black people to concentration camps, it seems likely that stochastic violence will be disproportionally targeted at them and it's reasonable to be worried about that.
by nielsbot | 2025-05-10 05:49:10+00:00
> Of course if they set higher bonuses for hiring white people

Are you saying that (straight) (white) (men) have not had (nor continue to enjoy) unfair advantages in our society? And is that not an injustice?

Saying "racism is bad" is correct but only the first step. Step two is recognizing the accumulated results of long-standing historical (and continuing, frankly) discrimination against minority groups and working to right that injustice.

But would like to hear your perspective.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-10 05:50:21+00:00
Ok I'm not sure I understand the issue here. I'm not an Android whiz but I thought FCM was inherently invasive, so if I ran Zulip from a security and privacy perspective, I'd want to self-host it including running my own notification server. It doesn't bother me at all if Zulip charges people to use their hosted plans, and I'm suspicious of the existence of a gratis one ("if you're not the customer...").

I guess though that an openpush/unifiedpush(?) client is another thing to install on the phone though. I probably care more about the web version than the mobile apps. I've been using nextcloud talk but it's kind of awful.
by bernb | 2025-05-10 05:51:12+00:00
Living in Germany which is a relatively small country by size, it is stunning to hear about all those story about long going power outtakes. Never heard of that before.

Experienced a relatively large outage a few weeks ago. I think I had one every ten years or so. Happened at 8pm. Online monitoring system (Mobile Internet is able to run on backup power for a day) said it would be fixed by 11pm, but it was actually fixed at 9pm. I watched Netflix on my tablet for the time being.

Needles to say, there's no big market here for such generators.
by potholereseller | 2025-05-10 05:51:49+00:00
> The proof that AI has already ruined life is that I sent that rainbow photo to a friend of some 40 years with lens data and it had full EXIF info attached, less location, which can be seen from only one place on earth. He asked me if it was real.

AI may have ruined his life, but it seems to have not ruined your's; it certainly hasn't ruined mine. This phenomena might be more unevenly distributed than we know.

> My philosophy is not that we seek meaning in life, but that we live to create meaning, as we write stories with our lives, and exerience the stories of others, stories that touch our knowledge (filtered, not a giant bag of dissociated bytes) and life experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.

If something can destroy that meaning-creating in a person without altering their way of life (as war alters lives), then it might be the case that the person's ability to create meaning was under-developed the whole time. It's somewhat related to consumerism and trend following; one makes so little meaning in one's life that an external, endless stream of vapid things feels meaningful. The current generation of AIs (and social media) seem to target that exact sort of person.

It will be worth paying attention when the AI companies crash and burn during the next recession. Our friends/families/co-workers who currently rely on those vapid streams might not take it well, and may need someone who can show them that it's not difficult to create meaning.
by Timon3 | 2025-05-10 05:52:49+00:00
I'm not playing this game with you, people can go look at previous posts for your software and decide themselves.

I'll just leave one great example - you keep saying that JS can't handle more than 150k records, when people explained to you that it's simply due to the syntax you've used: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43546118
by iTokio | 2025-05-10 05:53:39+00:00
I think this is partially true, but more nuanced than just saying that Rust std lib is lacking.

Compared to go and c#, Rust std lib is mostly lacking:

- a powerful http lib

- serialization

But Rust approach, no Runtime, no GC, no Reflection, is making it very hard to provide those libraries.

Within these constraints, some high quality solutions emerged, Tokio, Serde. But they pioneered some novel approaches which would have been hard to try in the std lib.

The whole async ecosystem still has a beta vibe, giving the feeling of programming in a different language. Procedural macros are often synonymous with slow compile times and code bloat.

But what we gained, is less runtime errors, more efficiency, a more robust language.

TLDR: trade-offs everywhere, it is unfair to compare to Go/C# as they are languages with a different set of constraints.
by arp242 | 2025-05-10 05:54:30+00:00
I find types useful especially for smaller solo projects: because the test suite is much less complete, or even non-existent. Types give quick feedback for a bunch of silly but common errors.

It's entirely unclear to me that types reduce developer velocity on small projects; it seems roughly the same to me. I certainly don't see how it's a "time sink".

But in the end: if you don't like it, just don't use it? Ruby has never been about restricting how people use the language.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-10 05:54:49+00:00
I'd encourage you to read the entire letter alongside its context. The reason I link to the letter and not the quote is because the quote, relevant and insightful though it may be, is made exponentially more so by understanding the context in which it was said.

Here's a quiz for understanding: what did Jefferson think of the 'revolutionaries' of whose actions he's directly defending?
by rednafi | 2025-05-10 05:54:58+00:00
One thing that’s common in most business and productivity books is that they use an awful lot of words to say things that either don’t mean much or aren’t really replicable. Ton of nonfiction books suffer from the same issue and could easily just be a blog post.

I still read them now and then because I figure it’s better to read Mark Manson than scroll through TikTok or get sucked into some other Gen Z brainrot.
by teo_zero | 2025-05-10 05:56:21+00:00
> "Better-C" still has things many C-programmers wouldn't particularly like

I'd say a couple, not many.

> RAII

Who wouldn't like RAII?

> Metaprogramming

As a way to avoid preprocessor macros? Yes please.

> Nested functions

Already offered as extension.

> Member functions

I'm sure no C programmer would object to that.

> constructors, destructors

This yes. Agreed.

> operating overloading

Instead of _Generic()? Why not?
by vunderba | 2025-05-10 05:56:47+00:00
Our next-door neighbor had one of the original Clappers and I distinctly remember the dad cursing whenever he would be channel surfing and accidentally turn to a show filmed before a live audience (like the Arsenio Hall Show) because the applause from the audience would occasionally trigger the clapper and turn the lights off in the living room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clapper
by banana_giraffe | 2025-05-10 05:57:02+00:00
Yep, exactly, just looped through each image with the same prompt and stored the results in a SQLite database to search through and maybe present more than a simple WebUI in the future.

If you want to see, here it is:

https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/f300149131c008798411aa3246...

Here's an example of the kind of detail it built up for me for one image:

https://imgur.com/a/6jpISbk

It's wrapped up in a bunch of POC code around talking to LLMs, so it's very very messy, but it does work. Probably will even work for someone that's not me.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-10 05:58:36+00:00
I was thinking the same. I was on a week-long biking trip with no power. No big deal.

When in college, no one bothered to pay the electric bill and we were without power for a week or so. Candles and the acoustic guitar came out.

A radio with batteries is always going to be a good idea to have in case of an emergency. A camp stove and lots of dried ramen will keep you from starving.
by favorited | 2025-05-10 05:58:43+00:00
> Yes. Garbage collectors also call free. They call functions.

Ok, what is calling `free` here? Point to the garbage collector. Show me the thing that is collecting the garbage.

> And in reference to `shared_ptr`, or Rc and Arc in Rust, that's manual memory management because you're doing it... manually.

You're also doing it manually when you decide to make a type a class in Swift. You're opting in to reference counting when you write a class, or use a type that is backed by a class.

It also seems that our goalposts have gone missing. Before, "it" (whatever "it" is) was a garbage collector because it happened at runtime:

> That reference counting is done at runtime. It’s a runtime garbage collector.

shared_ptr, Rc, and Arc also manage their memory at runtime. But now, "it's" a garbage collector because the compiler generates the retain/release calls...
by vunderba | 2025-05-10 05:59:38+00:00
Yeah. A LOT of games have that "economic exploit" where you can generate infinite money. But in BAK just barding alone you can get as much money as you need - no tricks involved.

The bigger issue is giving the player a "Invulnerability spell" where X mana = X turns, and having the spell block both PHYSICAL and MAGICAL damage. Worse, you can (and I did as a kid) find this spell in the first chapter of the game.

If your party gets move priority, there is literally NEVER a reason to not immediately throw it on all three characters. You can even rest WHILE in combat and recover the stamina necessary to cast the spell. Let that sink in for a minute.

I used to deliberately skip getting that scroll after I beat it the first time because it made the game trivially easy.

Also all long-range physical damage (such as with crossbows) was basically pointless. They should have made it so if you successfully hit with a crossbow, the opponent becomes "temporarily hampered" and it halves their movement speed. As it is, it's trivially easy to engage in close combat with almost every enemy in game.

I'd love to see a modernized BAK with more D&D style combat mechanics (attacks of opportunity, flanking, etc.)
by shoo | 2025-05-10 06:01:49+00:00
Watts is an excellent hard scifi author & a lot of his older writing -- including many short stories, the Rifters trilogy (Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth) and the excellent novel Blindsight are available to read here: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from the bridge" a few times -- IIRC on this episode with Peter Watts & Richard K Morgan (author of Altered Carbon), both authors discussed writing for video games. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watt...
by bruce511 | 2025-05-10 06:02:11+00:00
This is going to sound harsh, but please read it as offered in good faith. Also, the obvious caveat is that I don't know you or your director so these are generalizations not specifics.

>> My interview is dedicated to assessing candidates' facility and depth with this specialty.

Technical ability is one part of hiring. It's an important part sure, but as an employer I'm looking far beyond "ability to do the task." You note that he's specifically checking to see if the person is a "good fit".

When down in the weeds, it can be hard to understand the different boxes a candidate ticks. For example, if most of our team leader and junior manager appointments come from internal promotions, then I'm looking for potential in those spaces.

Your director may be looking for people with ambition. Or he may consider previous employment patterns (for us, we like long-term employees so candidates who job hob every couple years are usually a cause for concern.) Each company will have different criteria.

You don't go into detail here about your hiring experience, or your awareness of company goals beyond this specialization, or indeed if your earlier candidates were accepted or rejected.

>> I'm sensing what seems like some amount of distrust from the director about me and my team's capability to hire good candidates for this specialty

Trust is an interesting quality. We naturally feel we shoild be trusted by default, we naturally distrust others until trust is validated.

Any new director starts from a trust of zero. Your actions either build, or erode, that trust. Since the consequences of a bad hire fall on his shoulders not yours, he is wise to at least interview your approvals.

Your reaction to a veto, or even a pass, will help build trust. After he sees the candidate have a conversation with him. Try and glean what he liked, what he didn't like, and so on. There's a reason he's a director, and you are not.

Each interaction you have with him is an opportunity to learn. He is balancing variables above your pay grade, learning what those variables are, and how to factor them into your decision making is what builds trust.

Lastly, I'll point out that trust is not transferable. Your old director may have had complete faith in you. That counts for nothing. You have to build trust with this director from scratch.

Trust flows both ways. The more you trust your new director, and adapt to his requirements the faster the trust is built. The faster you adapt to him, the easier it is for him to understand your commitment. The more you dig into the new mindset (ideally by communicating directly with him) the more you adopt that mindset the easier it is to build trust.

As a new "boss" at any level, the worst situation is employees still hankering after the old boss, resistant to change, unwilling to move forward. The quicker you let go of the old baggage the faster your new trusts can be built.

You need to decide who's train you are on. And then get on. Or get off.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-10 06:02:59+00:00
> Your `_jsx` function can auto-wrap children in a function.

It unfortunately can't, because by the time the jsx function gets a chance to run, the expression has already been evaluated, whereas the whole point of a framework like this is to be able to run that evaluation repeatedly.

So what you'd need to write to get that to work would be something like

<div>{() => user.name}</div>

for every single case where you're interpolating a value, which starts looking kind of ugly. It also has its own pitfalls. For example, your example with a ternary in it would unnecessarily rerender (i.e. completely unmount and recreate) the child elements if the input changes but the conditional still evaluates to the same thing. (E.g. if data.enabled was 1 and we set it to 2, what we want is to have no change in the DOM, but what we'd get the input element being unmounted and remounted.)

There's also just the general issue that JSX requires some sort of transform. This isn't necessarily bad - I use SolidJS a lot which explicitly makes use of the chance to optimise the JSX rendering at compile time - but there are situations where you want to avoid that, and having a syntax that's focused on the "no compile step" case is useful.