MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iLemming | 2025-05-19 20:11:23+00:00
I have used Windows for years, and I loved it. I never understood why Linux and Mac users kept bashing on it. I just didn't know any better.

These days I'm avoiding booting into Windows unless I really have no choice. The ridiculousness of it is simply limitless. I would open a folder with a bunch of files in it and the Explorer shows me a progress bar for nearly a minute. Why? What the heck is it doing? I just want to see the list of files, I'm not even doing anything crazy. Why the heck not a single other file navigator does that — not in Linux, not on Mac, darn — even the specialized apps built for Windows work fine, but the built-in thing just doesn't. What gives? I would close the window and re-open the exact same folder, not even three minutes later and it shows the progress bar again. "WTF? Can't you fucker just cache it? Da fuk you doing?"

Or I would install an app. And seconds after installing it I would try to search for it in the Start menu, and guess what? Windows instead opens Edge and searches the web for it. wat? Why the heck I can't remove that Edge BS once and for all? Nope, not really possible. wat?

Or like why can't I ever rebind Cmd+L? I can disable it but can't rebind it, there's just no way. Is it trying to operate my computer, or 'S' in 'OS' stands for "soul"?

Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong. I have to manually re-sync it. It just doesn't do it, even with the location enabled. Stupid ass bitch.

And don't even let me rant about those pesky updates.

I dunno, I just cannot not hate Windows anymore. Even when I need to boot in it "for just a few minutes", it always ends up taking more time for some absolute fiddlesticks made of bullcrap. Screw Windows! Especially the 11 one.
by adventured | 2025-05-19 20:12:09+00:00
The US is not adopting isolationist policies. It's adopting more nationalistic policies, which is no different than how China has been running its economy (and politics in general) for decades. And specifically the four year Trump Administration is pursuing heavily nationalistic policies. There's no evidence the Democrats will keep much of Trump's policy direction, as certainly the Biden Admin and Trump Admin could hardly be more different.

Let me know where you see the US military pulling back from its global footprint. How many hundreds of global bases has the US begun closing? They're expanding US military spending as usual, not shrinking. The US isn't shuttering its military bases in Europe or Asia.

The US is currently trying to expedite an end to the Ukraine v Russia war, so it can pivot all of its resources to the last target standing in the Middle East: Iran. That's anything but isolationist.

Also, the US pursuing Greenland and the Panama Canal, is the opposite of isolationist. It's expansionist-nationalistic. It's China-like behavior (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, Tibet).
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-19 20:12:14+00:00
> For example if you declare a type hint on a function parameter as `foo: int = None` you will get a type error. It says that a parameter of type int can't have a None value. This is false.

No, it is correct. The value None is not with the domain of type int, a parameter that can take the value None does not in fact have type int.

> This yields no value because when you say `= None` you are saying that this is an optional argument.

When you provide any default value, you are making the argument optional, but that's an orthogonal concern to the Optional[T] type, which doesn't mean “optional argument", it is simply a more convenient way of expressing Union[T, None], though with the modern type syntax, T | U is generally more convenient than either Union[T, U] or Optional[T] for U=None.
by doug_durham | 2025-05-19 20:12:20+00:00
No offense taken. I've had a long career with many different phases. I had a phase where I built palaces of types bordering on DSLs. I ended up building myself a straight jacket. I wasn't solving the customer problem, and I was only slowing myself down. Software is an engineering discipline. Every situation needs to be critically evaluated. Building a life-critical single point of failure component is much different than building a road over a culvert. In early languages you needed to specify types so the compiler knew how much space to allocate for storage. In languages like Python, type hints are more like documentation. It helps the reader understand how to use your code. It can be used for correctness. However if correctness is a primary criteria driven by engineering requirements I'd probably consider another language and accept that it is going to cost more and be slower to develop.
by droelf | 2025-05-19 20:12:44+00:00
We've been building `pixi` and more specifically "pixi global" as a replacement for homebrew, but based on Conda packages. It creates a single virtual environment per globally installed tool (deduplication works by hard-linking) and then links out the binaries from the isolated environments to a single place.

It's written in Rust and quite fast: https://pixi.sh
by zomg | 2025-05-19 20:13:08+00:00
All of these comments are wrong and you sound very uneducated.

- Certain states have serialization requirements and registration once a firearm is assembled (the slide is connected to the frame).

- Many states require a permit to conceal carry but may only require a driver’s license to purchase (meaning you can own but not conceal without a permit).

- If a store posts signage saying firearms are prohibited, you legally can enter, however you can be trespassed if they discover you possess a firearm. This is generally not a criminal charge, unless your firearm is possessed illegally or another violation has taken place.

- A “suppressor” (the more correct and accurate term) is purchased from an FFL and transferred to the buyer via an ATF Form 4 (not a Form 1). Additionally, certain states do not allow the possession of a suppressor, regardless of the legality at the Federal level. FFLs don’t generally manufacture suppressors, they sell them.
by ryoppippi | 2025-05-19 20:13:21+00:00
sitemcp is a command-line tool that allows you to fetch an entire website and use it as an MCP (Media Control Protocol) server. This enables you to interact with the site's content through your MCP client. Originally forked from egoist's sitefetch, sitemcp offers enhanced features such as improved concurrency, pattern matching for specific pages, and customizable content selectors. It's particularly useful for developers and content creators who want to integrate web content into their MCP-compatible applications. For more details, visit the GitHub repository!
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-19 20:13:35+00:00
There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?

If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.

If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.
Ask HN: Any recommendations for help with (engineering) career presentation?
by tfederman | 2025-05-19 20:14:13+00:00
I'm in a long career break to work on my own stuff because my financial situation allows it, but I've found one job I'd like to apply for. My LinkedIn profile is extremely neglected and I've never put any effort into that sort of presentation, self promotion, or online presence in general.

I'd like to fix that, I want to pay for someone to fix (or help fix) up my profile, touch up my resume, and help write a bio and generic cover letter about my specific strengths and situation.

There's a million people and services that do this but are there any that are focused on software engineering and really solid on understanding that specific market?

Any recommendations? I'm not looking for a low effort/AI solution.

(email in bio)
by qwertox | 2025-05-19 20:15:03+00:00
I despise Windows 11 so much, but have to use it. I have a 24/7 box with Ubuntu running a couple of Linux and Windows VMs and that's the way I like it. I don't touch the Ubuntu host except for when I need to reconfigure it.

All development is done on Windows laptop via SSH to those VMs. When I tried using Ubuntu via WSL, something didn't feel right. There were some oddities, probably with the filesystem integration, which bothered me enough to stop doing this.

Nevertheless, I think it's really great what they now did.

Now all what's missing is that they do it the other way around, that they create a 100% windows compatible Wine alternative.
by teddyh | 2025-05-19 20:15:07+00:00
Seems to work fine: Last succesful archive was made on march 16th: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250316060617/https://geekfemin...>

And I just now added a new one: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250519201255/https://geekfemin...>
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-19 20:15:31+00:00
Microdrones and mirror life are still highly speculative[0]. Industrial waste heat is a threat to both human and AI (computers need cooling). And furthermore, those are harms we know about and can defend against. If AI kills us all, it's going to be through the most boring and mundane way possible, because boring and mundane is how you get people to not care and not fight back.

In other words, the robot apocalypse will come in the form of self-driving cars, that are legally empowered to murder pedestrians, in the same way normal drivers are currently legally empowered to murder bicyclists. We will shrug our shoulders as humanity is caged behind fences that are pushed back further and further in the name of giving those cars more lanes to drive in, until we are totally dependent on the cars, which can then just refuse to drive us, or deliberately jelly their passengers with massive G forces, or whatever.

In other, other words, if you want a good idea of how humanity goes extinct, watch Pixar's Cars.

[0] I am not convinced that a mirror virus would actually be able to successfully infect and reproduce in non-mirror cells. The whole idea of mirror life is that the mirrored chemistry doesn't interact with ours.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-19 20:15:36+00:00
> Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways.

look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al).

but... i'm going to talk specifically about this example - whether you can extrapolate this to other fields is a broader conversation. this is such a bafflingly tonedeaf and poorly-thought-out line of thinking.

neal stephenson has been taking money from giant software corporations for so long that he's just parroting the marketing hype. there is no reason whatsoever to believe that designers will not be made redundant once the quality of "AI generated" design is good enough for the company's bottom line, regardless of how "beneficial" the tool might be to an individual designer. if they're out of a job, what need does a professional designer have of this tool?

i grew up loving some of Stephenson's books, but in his non-writing career he's disappointingly uncritical of the roles that giant corporations play in shepherding in the dystopian cyberpunk future he's written so much about. Meta money must be nice.
by quantadev | 2025-05-19 20:16:06+00:00
I love Copilot in VSCode. I have it set to use Claude most of the time, but it let's you pick your fav LLM, for it to use. I just open the files I'm going to refactor, type into the chat window what I want done, click 'accept' on every code change it recommends in it's answer, causing VSCode to auto-merge the changes into my code. Couldn't possibly be simpler. Then I scrutinize and test. If anything went wrong I just use GitLens to rollback the change, but that's very rare.

Especially now that Copilot supports MCP I can plug in my own custom "Tools" (i.e. Function calling done by the AI Agent), and I have everything I need. Never even bothered trying Cursor or Windsurf, which i'm sure are great too, but _mainly_ since they're just forks of VSCode, as the IDE.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-19 20:16:40+00:00
I think it's still far too soon to know what the impact will be. My bet is that it won't be as bad as many think, and it won't be as good as many think.

> Are you more optimistic or anxious about the future of our profession compared to six months ago?

I don't think about its impact on our profession much at all, to be honest. I am, however, much more worried about the impact on the future of our society compared to six months ago. Perhaps that's why I cling so hard to the "it's too soon to tell" reaction.
by atonse | 2025-05-19 20:17:00+00:00
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is.

It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.

But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-19 20:17:30+00:00
This person claims otherwise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaJFudED5FQ

They claim that the change was driven by railroad shipping charges, and wasn't based on drying, but on pre-planing the rough lumber to reduce shipping cost. They further claim that in 1919 the US Dept. of Agriculture studied the issue and ended up defining a national standard for what the post-planed dimensions of a 2x4 should be. And they further claim that it took until the early 1960s to settle on a new standard that matches what we use today.
by Groxx | 2025-05-19 20:17:38+00:00
I think you kinda missed the point. The point is that trying to make a user-friendly API with the familiar, highly composable, and extremely common io.Reader that everything (including Go's stdlib) encourages you to use ends up putting you in this unfortunate design corner if you also care about performance.

It's frustration about getting close to a good API, but not having any reasonable way to close the final gap, forcing you do you to go stuff like you mentioned: have multiple near-identical APIs for performance, and needing your users to understand and use them correctly to get a good result.
by infogulch | 2025-05-19 20:18:07+00:00
Because wage stagnation is literally the Federal Reserve policy for the last 20 years.

The fed treats wage growth as a leading indicator inflation -- even though anyone with a brain knows that wages are the last thing to go up in an economic cycle, so if it's anything it must be a trailing indicator -- so when wages start to rise up the fed responds by increasing interest rates. Raising interest rates kills wage growth, as intended.

tl;dr: slam the economy every time wages start to go up for 20 years -> "why haven't wages gone up in 20 years" surprise pikachu face
by floxy | 2025-05-19 20:18:13+00:00
So when will we be able to just run general relativity numerical simulations on our desktop machines? So that you could set up Observer A at some point, and Observer B at some other point and and mass distribution, etc, then just crunch the numbers to see what each observer could see/measure as time evolves for each observer. Seems like the differential equations are straight forward enough(?). Is the possibility of singularities at the center of a black hole the hard part? What if you just simulated something that was 99.99% of the density needed to get a black hole? I suppose that you'd need a 4 dimensional matrix to hold the simulation (three space coordinates plus a time coordinate)? Is it that we just don't have enough RAM and storage yet in consumer machines? If your simulation did a 1,000 points in ever dimension, that would be 1e12 points. If there are 10 components of the tensor at each point and we are using 64-bit doubles per parameter, that means our simulation takes up ~80 TB. Or is it a that we don't have enough processing speed? Or are there still some philosophical issues that need to be decided when you program up the simulator? How many lines of code is a numerical general relativity solver using something like Euler's method? Is the core of a naive version less than, say 500 lines of C? I can see an optimized CUDA version being significantly larger of course.
by Firehawke | 2025-05-19 20:18:27+00:00
How long ago did you try that?

I use WSL2 to handle Linux (and Windows cross-) compilation regularly, along with running a number of native tools that are specific to Linux.

I've never had any issues with that, even to the point that I've been able to run MAME natively from Linux and have it show up like any other windowed app.
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-19 20:18:38+00:00
Not that you should ever write this in any language, but as an illustration:

fn main() { let x: i32 = if true {1} else {"3"}; println!("{}", x); }

This will not compile even though if it were allowed to execute it would, correctly, assign an integer to x. Python will happily interpret its equivalent:

x = 1 if True else "3" print(x)

Even giving the if-expression an explicit `true` constant for the condition, Rust won't accept that as a valid program even though we can prove that the result of the expression is always 1.
by nuxi | 2025-05-19 20:19:04+00:00
That's not a proper explanation IMO. The thing is - all these settings are introduced "quietly" as new defaults and you have to opt out. So one day you decide to upgrade a package, brew updates itself, and then starts doing all these things that weren't present before (and are most likely not needed at all). It's very annoying, and a dark pattern to say the least.
by bawolff | 2025-05-19 20:19:57+00:00
> the ICC openly considered and openly rejected this argument (https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-p...), saying that Palestine's consent was sufficient because the alleged crimes took place in Palestinian territory.

Its a little more complicated than that. The dispute is also about if palestine is a "state" and thus able to consent (and i'm not sure, but possibly what the territorial extent of Palestine is. it probably doesnt matter, but the fact that the official government of Palestine lost control of the gaza strip in a civil war a long time ago is another winkle in this whole thing)

While the court initially rejected Israel's challenge, the appeal court reverses the decision, and threw it back to the lower court, which is now deliberating on it https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-appea... . As far as i understand most observers think this is an extreme long shot on the part of Israel and they are unlikely to win this challenge.

[IANAL, and far from an expert at this, this stuff is complicated, it is very possible i got the details wrong]
by daemonologist | 2025-05-19 20:20:02+00:00
All the big providers offer no-training/retention guarantees (either by default, or as a toggle, or upon request). For many high security environments though I'd expect everything to be hosted on-prem or at minimum on company-controlled instances, which does limit your model options somewhat.

My employer has such contracts for some use cases, but actually forbids use of code completion/generation due to IP concerns.
by jraph | 2025-05-19 20:20:33+00:00
> On Windows, I don't have to pick my hardware accordingly.

Fair enough. I think the best way to run Linux if you want to be sure you won't have tweak to stuff is to buy hardware with linux preinstalled. That your choice is more limited is another matter than "linux can't suspend".

Comparing a preinstalled Windows with a linux installed on random laptop whose manufacturer can't be bothered to support is a bit unfair.

Linux on a laptop where the manufacturer did their work runs well.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-19 20:21:02+00:00
It looks like you can switch the processor back to true 32-bit protected mode (not just 32-bit "compatibility mode" within long mode) https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=43127 which in turn gives you access to the old virtual 16-bit mode - but this involves running kernel code too in 32-bit mode, which is kind of a no-go in a modern OS. Using the virtualization extensions will be a lot easier.
by bobbruno | 2025-05-19 20:21:04+00:00
I am responding to this from my living room in Berlin, sitting on a sofa that belonged to my father, after having dined on a table he inherited from my grandfather. Both were brought with us when we moved from Brazil.

So yes, people do want to inherit the old stuff. I have some IKEA stuff (the beds were just too big, and mattress sizes are different), it just can't compare.
by closewith | 2025-05-19 20:22:49+00:00
> The tech sector in the "fascist hellscape" is paying its workers 3-4x what Europe is, and Europe is doubling down on the policies that got it there

The absurd income inequality in the US tech sector is not the boast you think it is.

> You built your whole argument on a future collapse you've imagined for across the pond, rather than engaging with the topic at hand.

The collapse of US society has already occurred.
by alex_smart | 2025-05-19 20:23:25+00:00
> You are going to find issues for any computer for any OS by looking things up like this

I wasn't cherry-picking things. I literally searched for laptops available in my budget in my country and looked up what was the linux support like for those laptops as reported by people on reddit.

> Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled

I suppose you are talking about System76, Tuxedo etc. These manufacturers don't ship to my country. Even if I am able to get it shipped, how am I supposed to get warranty?
by Timon3 | 2025-05-19 20:23:38+00:00
Your first paragraph is what I frequently hear when people purport science to be a religion, but you're making two fundamentally wrong assumptions - first most scientists no longer believe a "Theory of Everything" to be able to fully predict observations, and second "Occam's razor" is merely a useful tool, but not a guiding principle of modern science. Sure, there are some people who might follow the ideas you talk about, but there are people who believe anything.

I don't fundamentally deny that something like an aura could exist, but believing it on the basis of common folklore should mean you also believe in many other things - like ghosts, fae and so many other "consistent" ideas. Yet I see no reason to believe it unless there is reliable evidence of it. You said that such evidence cropping up would be a disaster for science - I disagree, it would be wonderful! It would finally be a way for these things to be studied objectively. Does it not give you pause that, after so many decades, no group of people has been able to bring up such evidence?
by jraph | 2025-05-19 20:24:01+00:00
> SSPL happens to be a free software license - that is a fact

Says who? I assume you have irrefutable evidence for this since you are stating this with such confidence?

It would be some major development in the SSPL case.

> No competent capitalist entity will ever say

As much as I don't like them, you need to back something you claimed. Until you do, it's just beautiful theory.
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-19 20:24:48+00:00
I'm not talking about theming, but the general feel of the UI. It did not try and win innovation trophies back in the day, it was a platform that gave you the feeling it was ready for serious work to be done on, relatively stable, similar UI language over several programs, that kind of thing. Konqueror as the dual file manager / web browser was great, but it was "something on top", not "something radically different from proprietary UIs" like Gnome kept doing in that timeframe.

I think it was the closest we ever came to a 'Linux on the Desktop' year for a mass market.