MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linsomniac | 2025-05-04 14:59:27+00:00
I've been eyeing a "better shell" for a while, but I've just decided that a couple zsh plugins and I'm probably happiest. As the meme says "Change my mind".

I've been using fish for the last year or more, and I like some of the "batteries included", particularly the predicting of the command you want to run. But fish is too much like bash in syntax, meaning that I just think of it like bash until I have to type "(foo)" instead of "$(foo)", or "end" instead of "fi". The zsh plugins for doing command predicting and fancy prompt seems to get me all the fish benefits with none of the rough spots. And, frankly, the changes fish does doesn't seem to have any benefit (what is the benefit of "end" over "fi").

Even xonsh (I'm a huge Python fan) doesn't really have enough pull for me to stick in it. Oils, nu, elvish, they all have some benefits for scripting, but I can't see myself switching to them for interactive use.

It's kind of feeling like zsh is "good enough" with no real downsides. Maybe this is mostly that I've been using sh/ksh/bash/zsh for 40 years, some of these other shells might be easier to switch to if you lack the muscle memory?
by Rochus | 2025-05-04 15:00:03+00:00
> how structurally similar Oberon is to Go

There are minor similarities, mostly the fact that it is garbage collected, and also the receiver syntax Go inherited from Oberon-2 (i.e. proposed by Mössenböck, not by Wirth). Go has a completely different focus and is essentially a further development of Newsqueak, which was mostly influenced by Pascal and C.
by usamak23 | 2025-05-04 15:00:57+00:00
Hey folks, I've been building Komentiq solo for a while now — it's a tool that helps you collect feedback on your designs, organize it by screen, and now even generate AI-powered action items with effort estimates (low/medium/high). Super helpful when you’re juggling 10 things and don’t want to lose track of what a client said on that one tiny button last week Just launched a new Creator Hub Plan Built specifically for solo creators, freelancers, and small teams who need a bit more room to grow — without breaking the bank. Check it out here It’s already live, free to try — no credit card drama. Would love any feedback or questions if you give it a spin. And if you’ve got a system for handling chaotic design feedback… teach me your ways
by aoki | 2025-05-04 15:01:04+00:00
No, they bucket Vygotsky into “continental philosophy teaching methods” (see first paragraph), and dismiss “continental philosophy” as meaningless word play (see last paragraph). The first point is false even if you accept the second point.

The compressed textbook derivatives are obviously not an exercise in “continental philosophy,” an undergrad text for teachers is just going to give surface-level descriptions of concepts rather than any kind of actual philosophical discussion.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-04 15:02:36+00:00
Really well written web form applications were a delight in 2001 and a large improvement over conventional applications written in Windows. It helped that application data was in a SQL database, with a schema, protected by transactions, etc as opposed to a tangle of pointers that would eventually go bad and crash the app -- I made very complicated forms for demographic profiling, scientific paper submission, application submission, document search, etc. If you did not use "session" variables for application state this could at worst cause a desynchronization between the browser and the server which (1) would get resynchronized at any load or reload and (2) never get the system into a "stuck" state from the user viewpoint and (3) never lose more than a screen full of work.

Try some other architecture though and all bets were off.

Amazon's web store looked and worked mostly the same as it does now, people were very impressed with MapQuest, etc.

Applications like that can feel really fast, almost desktop application fast, if you are running them on a powerful desktop computer and viewing them on another computer or tablet over a LAN
by talos | 2025-05-04 15:03:04+00:00
Just did a little digging and looks sus -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36693222

> EDIT: It looks, at best, like a vanity project, and, most likely, a scam. The founder is a television personality [1]. Article claims the firm “currently produces chemical and electric propulsion systems for the aerospace and defence sectors,” yet they somehow have fewer than double checks £5,000 in fixed assets [2]. They hired this real estate and art advisory dude to raise capital for them in 2019 [3][4], who apart from two other individuals [5], is the main outside shareholder. The Princeton Propulsion Systems they’ve “partnered with” is crowdfunding $100,000 [6]. (The latter look marginally legit—I assume Pulsar signed a non-binding LOI with them. That or they’re the £300,000 [2] current liability Pulsar raised money from the real estate and art advisor this January [7] to extinguish.)
by Rochus | 2025-05-04 15:03:28+00:00
> Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell

See https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon, and derived languages such as https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron, which inherit the "spirit of Oberon", but specialize for other use-cases than the original.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-05-04 15:03:32+00:00
In a cruel twist of fate most people today neither own, nor use a computer, not in the sense used in the essay. They instead use their phones to do a very restricted sub-set of things they could do on a computer and in a very limited manner.

I guess the forward-looking tech nerds of the '80s, the tip of the spear of the information revolution, must now be crying in their corn flakes with the irony of it all. Nowadays only nerds (really) use computers.

P.S. Obviously I own computers. I have four laptops and a bunch of small-form clamshells left over from a period when I collected them semi-enthusiastically (including a Viliv, a Zaurus and a Ben Nanonote). I recently went on the market to see if there are any new ones around and ended up buying two, which I shall not advertise. I'm a victim of tech advertisement.
by sofixa | 2025-05-04 15:03:57+00:00
> Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.

They sell a version of the software, of course they'd have a CLA. It's not shady, it's a prerequisite to be able to sell - because even if you assume no contributor will decide to retract their contribution later on, many of your customers will ask for guarantees that you fully own, control and can sell the code you're selling them
by lelanthran | 2025-05-04 15:04:31+00:00
> But this requires JavaScript...

Depending on the specific objection to Javascript, this may or may not matter:

1. You object to any/all JS on a page? Yeah, then this won't work for you.

2. You object to having to write JS just to get client-side includes? This should mostly work for you.

It all depends on what the actual objection is.
by solatic | 2025-05-04 15:04:41+00:00
Do you understand that decompilers and reverse engineering are a thing?

Adversaries are not restricted to using your system the way you designed your system. GraphQL queries are trivial to pull out of Wireshark and other sniffers. If you deliver it to the browser, any determined-enough adversary will have it, period. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if it is already a thing for LLM models to sniff GraphQL endpoints in the quest for ever more data.
by brandensilva | 2025-05-04 15:04:47+00:00
When all this happens you cannot help but see that populism will need to rise again from the ashes as a class warfare is under way as the article points out.

The current administration will consider any action against billionaires as domestic terrorism as witnessed with Tesla's recent boycotts despite this happening all around the world against American's richest companies. Much of America is in the denial phase right now but the writing is on the wall already.

I'm willing to bet most people don't want to work in factories again with Chinese conditions even as Secretary of Commerce Lutnick professes it so but the mega corporations demand the corporate security along with the obvious national security reasons for detaching from China.

As billionaires lust to take more of the pie without one ounce of support or laws or worker rights, against AI that enshittifies jobs and turns white collar work into a race towards the bottom, the populist class has no choice but to fight this head on.

As the government and businesses use AI to target the resistance as they take away rights, benefits, and standards of living you have to ask ourselves what side of history you want to be on because history shows these things tend to come to a massive clash. Power vs the people. Rights vs profits. Morality vs corruption.

We live in revolutionary times, thanks for the article share.
by Zarel | 2025-05-04 15:05:06+00:00
While this is mostly true, there were similar techniques even before XMLHttpRequest. iframes could communicate with parents, and also JSONP. I think JSONP was mostly pioneered as a technique after XMLHttpRequest, but the iframe trick did work (I even used it! just a tiny 16x16 iframe communicating with the parent element by calling functions on window.parent, worked great on IE5).
by bigyabai | 2025-05-04 15:05:17+00:00
It's not about justice. When America emboldens Israel's targeted killing of aid workers and journalists, we sell more weapons. When we hold them accountable, we slow down the trade.

Conflating BDS movements with "antisemitism" is more of a fiscal policy than a crisis of consciousness. I'd wager that the opposition to BDS is not a popular policy and instead the brainchild of insecure Lockheed Martin executives.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-04 15:05:29+00:00
To start, the article gives a few good examples:

> children sometimes wake up from anesthesia with a set of side effects including lack of eye contact, inconsolability, unawareness of surroundings, restlessness, and non-purposeful movements

In general, a very simple mental model for general anesthesia is that it's an unnatural state for your body and your body will do its best to get rid of it, similar to say alcohol or drugs. This means systemic inflammation, stress on your cardiovascular system, liver and kidneys, brain, and so forth. Most all of these issues scale with how much anesthetic you receive, similar to a hangover being worse the more you drink.

In other words, general anesthesia is rough on you just like getting black out drunk is, it's just more controlled and we do our best to try and limit the downsides because it's invaluable for surgery where applicable.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-04 15:06:33+00:00
I think one of the causes of addiction is dopamine dysregulation where the normal feels bad and drugs help fix that, at least temporarily. I wonder if instead of using strong drugs such people would be better off skipping the addiction part and go direct to a rehab where they use a weaker drug like modafinil. I think the dopamine dysregulation caused by strong drugs is already likely pre-existing in those who are seeking the drugs in an effort to fill the hole. Those same people are more likely to become addicted and have more difficulty quitting.

I take Modafinil at half the normal dose of 100mg and have been on that same dose steadily for years with little sign of building a tolerance or an addiction.
by perihelions | 2025-05-04 15:06:47+00:00
Indeed, it's a doubly inverse-squared law: one 1/d^2 factor for how far it is from the sun, by how much the solar flux is reduced; and one 1/d^2 factor again for how it is from Earth-based observers. 1/d^4, a quartic law.

That's the idea behind this paper (and similar ones like it): since they're looking for the planet's intrinsic emissions, from its internal heat, it's only a single inverse-square law.

With d being ~20 times Neptune's distance and ~140 times Jupiter's, these really are large factors!
by rickandmorty99 | 2025-05-04 15:06:58+00:00
I'm not sure. My parents are heavy drug abusers. All my grandparents were alcoholics.

The only thing I'm mildly addicted to is coffee and I roll once every 2 years on mollie.

A few differences:

1. I've been pushed hard to do education. I did and became way more science-minded than anyone in my family.

2. I've seen the effects of drug abuse on my parents/grand parents. I was anti-drugs until 21.

3. I opened up experimenting when I was 27. All my parents/grand parents got hooked between the ages of 13 and 16.
by fzysingularity | 2025-05-04 15:07:53+00:00
Vertex AI is essentially equivalent to Azure OpenAI - enterprise-ready, with HIPAA/SOC2 compliance and data-privacy guarantees.

FWIW OpenAI compatibility only gets you so far with Gemini. Gemini’s video/audio capabilities and context caching are unparalleled and you’ll likely need to use their SDKs instead to fully take advantage of them.
by lelanthran | 2025-05-04 15:08:26+00:00
> We’ve built an industry around solving this problem. What if, for some basic web publishing use cases, we could replace a complex web framework with one new tag?

I actually did that replacement, with a few enhancements (maybe 100 lines of code, total?). It's in arxiv pending at the moment. In about two days it will be done and I'll post a Show HN here.
by wodenokoto | 2025-05-04 15:09:41+00:00
I believe it’s to ensure retailers want to sell the games.

When I go to virgin mega store, there’s a large section of Nintendo games, but nothing for any PC games.

If it was cheaper to buy online, why would I buy physically, unless I was really into it physical media.

And that segment isn’t big enough to cause retailers to put up a section in the mall, which not only works as a point of sale but also as a giant advertising banner.
by solardev | 2025-05-04 15:09:54+00:00
The motor itself is a moving part that is subject to wear and tear and reliability and parts availability problems. Solar manufacturers and retailers are notoriously short lived and fragile (in terms of being able to survive changing conditions, like Chinese subsidies, price dumping, and now tariffs, not to mention technological improvements in module efficiency).

If you buy a bunch of commodity modules (panels) without moving parts, you generally don't have to maintain anything except maybe replace the inverters in a couple decades. And you can do that with any electrically compatible parts.

If you have a moving motor, suddenly you need to find all the specific parts for that particular motor, and hire a specialist crew to maintain and replace it, requiring a team with not just electrical knowhow but motor mechanics too.

That's largely incompatible with the US model of solar deployment we have now, which is largely "install and forget" using whatever equipment is currently cheap and available. It's very likely that the equipment manufacturer won't be around in a few years, and that installation company probably won't be for much longer. So any additional possible failure mode should be avoided.

At commercial or utility scale it might be different, but generally it's still more cost effective over time to just buy more modules to offset the less than optimal facing than to try to actively adjust their direction with moving parts. Modules keep getting cheaper. Motors, and more importantly, shipping and labor don't. Installing an overcapacity upfront is still cheaper than maintaining the trackers later.
by rickandmorty99 | 2025-05-04 15:10:31+00:00
Some drug info teams at festivals told me I'm the most responsible drug user there is when I told them that I take MDMA at most once per year but preferably less.

Also the test lab I come into were excited to see me when I came in to test DMT.

But I prefer to do it in private with a close friend, or two. I've done it twice at festivals (MDMA). In both cases, while it was fun, it was also quite chaotic at times.

Countries where you can test your substances [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_checking
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-04 15:10:52+00:00
As a programmer, I really liked XHTML because it meant I could use a regular XML parser/writer to work with it. Such components can be made small and efficient if you don't need the more advanced features of XML (ex: schemas), on the level of JSON. I remember an app I wrote that had a "print" feature that worked by generating an HTML document. We made it XHTML, and used the XML library we already used elsewhere to generate the document. Much more reliable than concatenating strings (hello injections!) and no need for an additional dependency.

In addition, we used XSLT quite a bit too. It is nice being able to open your XML data files in a web browser and having it nicely formatted without any external software. All you needed was a link to the style sheet.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-05-04 15:11:46+00:00
When my (now) wife and I decided to move in together, we hired flat rate movers on craigslist (stupid move, I know).

After waiting an entire day during our scheduled move date as no-shows (and not taking our calls near the end): The next day I rented a u-haul, hired two or three day laborers for then very generous $15.00/hr, and got it done on my own in about 3-4 hours; with a minor incentive to get it done sooner. The total cost was about $250-300 included the rental, which cost the same as hiring the movers.

Because it involved just small furniture, it was doable. It also helped that I was quite fit then. When the movers called a week later I gave them a piece of my mind, naturally.

After this we agreed to only hire small but reputable movers, even if it costs quite a bit more.
by zahlman | 2025-05-04 15:12:03+00:00
The fact that we have ~8 billion people now vs ~1 billion in 1800 does make a difference to the equation, in terms of our own respiration and not just our deliberate use of fossil fuels. Admittedly it's minor, and I don't know what's happened to other biomass in that time. But still. The point is: having people eat more so that they could pedal a stationary bike hooked up to an electric generator, would not give "clean" power at the margin.
by ramon156 | 2025-05-04 15:13:23+00:00
Why is that a mess? From my experience you have to recalibrate your project constantly. the framework that's hip and new will be phased out in 5 years.

I don't mean that rewrite hell is a permanent state, but you will always be rewriting parts of your project. I'd rather choose an ecosystem where the friction for rewriting is minimal.
by petetnt | 2025-05-04 15:13:26+00:00
Great that it's working for them, but for the end user the feel of the site nearly unusable. There's 1s+ of delay on every interaction - pressing "home" button from explore tab takes 1,85 seconds (on a gigabit connection) before home view comes active, without any other feedback to the end user except for "Home" icon becoming active.

You cannot just blindly trust the page speed metric but it should be impossible to miss things like this when you are actually using the site. Compare the experience to something like GoodReads that's using plain old SSR and you'll immediately notice the difference.
by Cort3z | 2025-05-04 15:13:45+00:00
Kind of serious question. Do we have any alternatives to html? If not, why? It’s essentially all html. Yes, browser will render svg/pdf/md and so on, but as far as I can tell, it’s not what I consider "real web" (links to other documents, support for styling, shared resources, scripting, and so on ).

I would have loved for there to be a json based format, or perhaps yaml, as an alternative to the xml- based stuff we have today.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-04 15:14:00+00:00
Gateway, SLS, Orion, are dead, and Artemis is on the chopping block.

SLS deserves to be cut, as Boeing clearly failed. Orion too. No big loss there.

But I have a hard time believing it's a coincidence that the budget favors Musk in a major way, with SLS/Orion to be replaced with "more cost-effective commercial systems", and $650M increase in budget for human space exploration plus $1B for Mars exploration.

And this is NOT about saving money or reducing federal spending -- it's shifting money away from science to defense and border security, which is increasing by $150+B. So short-sighted.

More details in this article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/05/03/proposed-24-percent-cu...
by masto | 2025-05-04 15:14:04+00:00
I remember RPI had something like this in the 1990s. I can't remember what it was called though. But I do remember how impressed everyone was: if you call this phone number, they can answer ANY question!

I believe those of us who were around from then to now experienced peak information. We went from having to look things up in libraries to being able to find anything with a Google search. We're on the downward slope now. Business models have changed, spamvertisers are winning the war against search, and generative AI slop is already the dominant source of "content", ensuring the genie can never be put back. This is not an anti-AI rant, it is just an acknowledgement that like so many things, we were foolish to think that access to information was just going to keep getting better. I did not expect that in my lifetime, I would see the best it was ever going to be.

Maybe in the future, calling a trained human for help will be the only way to sort through the mountain of infogarbage to find something. Or we'll have to go back to the library.
by kyboren | 2025-05-04 15:14:29+00:00
> it works even with such big "holes"

I'm intrigued. Can you expand more on this? Why does it work? I guess because the hail is rarely coming straight-on at the holes and instead makes more glancing blows off the wire?

In any case I think it's a perfect example of a good hack. Original out-of-the-box thinking producing an effective but unconventional solution. Chapeau bas!
by solardev | 2025-05-04 15:14:35+00:00
A big, not so simple clock moving a heavy array in all weather conditions, having to deal with constant changes in humidity, temperature, thermal stress, potential salinity, wear and tear, lubrication, gears, jams, etc.

A large reason solar is winning out over wind is because the lack of moving parts drastically simplifies installation and maintenance. A solar tracker isn't as complex or high up as a wind turbine, but it's still much more complex than a standard roof or ground mounted array that doesn't move.

Trackers made sense back in the 70s and 80s when solar PV tech was still new, but now it's far cheaper to just add more module capacity than to try to dynamically optimize each module's facing through the day.
by api | 2025-05-04 15:14:46+00:00
It’s an object with theoretical maximum density. That’s one way to think about it.

Another visualization: if you had an Earth mass black hole with a solid shell surrounding it at the same radius as the Earth’s surface is from its core, gravity atop that shell would be 1g. The actual black hole would be about the size of a marble.

If you got close to it you would of course be subject to insane gravity and be “spaghettified” etc. All the mass would be in that marble. But at a distance it would be the same.

Compared to that object the Earth is mostly empty space. Ordinary matter is not that dense.

Black holes are totally fascinating. They are in some ways the most extreme objects that can possibly exist. If we could study one we could learn a lot.
by codeguro | 2025-05-04 15:14:52+00:00
> I understand that it should be fine to use an AGPL project in a commercial enterprise (without modifications, internally in backend network).

Making changes is fine too, so long as those changes are also distributed. "The source come with the binaries" is the general rule. You don't even have to open your whole stack (that is FUD), only the parts under the AGPL that you changed and only when you distribute it. Companies can and always have used these projects internally without risk.