MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by haswell | 2025-05-17 14:58:03+00:00
NixOS has been my daily driver for gaming, code experiments and general productivity for about a year and a half now. I’ve been using desktop Linux in varying ways for 20+ years, and while there are certainly downsides/tradeoffs, I don’t see myself leaving NixOS anytime soon.

I’d been curious about it many times in the past, but found the learning curve to be prohibitive the first several times I tried it. I’m fairly convinced that many of the problems people experience stem from the poor documentation and over-enthusiastic community extolling the virtues of Flakes and Home Manager.

I understand their value and why people like using them, but for a beginner, those capabilities just layer complexity on top of something that already feels unfamiliar, and make it impossible to figure out which thing isn’t working when things go wrong. When I went to a very Vanilla NixOS configuration as a starting point, everything clicked and I was able to build up a solid desktop environment incrementally.

As a tinkerer, the killer feature for me is the ease of experimenting with packages/whole configurations and then reverting back to my known good config. Type `nix-shell -p <package>` and the package is ready for use, and totally gone when I exit the shell.

I don’t think need is the right way to describe my relationship with NixOS as a desktop. But decades of experience dealing with the aftermath of installing/experimenting/tweaking my environment in traditional distros sure makes me appreciate how much easier it can be.

> I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop.

NixOS on the desktop isn’t targeted at the average person, or probably even the average Linux desktop user. If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice. But I think that will be a very individual/personal calculation.
by jack_h | 2025-05-17 14:58:50+00:00
Tax rates aren't everything as those affect the size of the economy. Since the end of WW2 the federal government has received ~17.5% of GDP in taxes[1] (+/- ~2.5%). You can decrease effective tax rates, end up with a larger economy, and have a higher absolute value of tax revenue than you did with higher tax rates. So it's more complicated than "lower tax rates => less tax receipts".

If we restrict our view to programs like Social Security or Medicaid we see that demographics are also straining the system. For instance I believe the number of people contributing to Social Security vs the number of people receiving benefits in the 70s was around 3.7 (payer/beneficiary), we're currently around 2.6 and in 10 years that will go down to 2.1. Put simply we're unhealthy, we're getting older, and we're not having enough kids to contribute to these programs that pay for all of these old, sick, childless people to retire and have healthcare.

From a philosophic point of view I would say the fact that about half of the electorate do not want higher taxes while the other half wants more government services should mean that these extra services are non-viable politically. What we've essentially done instead is "compromised" by not having higher taxes but still expanding government services which is contributing to our debt issues. We simply can't have it both ways, but that's exactly what the people voted for through their representatives.

> Don't worry, I gave up on this country's ability to fix any problem a long time ago.

While we are likely on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I can agree that I don't see us actually fixing this problem. I made a comment elsewhere in this thread discussing the fact that Congressional Republicans appear to be going for lower taxes and higher deficits right now while the Democrats are in disarray and not particularly focused on this problem. The unfortunate fact is that this problem is going to get worse and the solutions will get more painful over time. Congress as a whole has really dropped the ball here.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
by lmeyerov | 2025-05-17 14:59:05+00:00
Splunk Boss of the SOC is the realistic test, it is one of the best cyber ranges. Think effectively 30+ hours of tricky querying across 100+ real log source types (tables) with a variety of recorded cyber incidents - OS logs, AWS logs, alerting systems, etc. As I mentioned, the AI has to seriously look at the data too, typically several queries deep for the right answer, and a lot of rabbit holes before then - answers can't just skate by on schema. I recommend folks look at the questions and decide for themselves what this signifies. I personally gained a lot of respect for the team create the competition.

The speed run formulation for all those same questions helps measure real-world quality vs cost trade-offs. I don't find uncapped solve rates to be relevant to most scenarios. If we allowed infinite time, yes we would have scored even higher... But if our users also ran it that way, it would bankrupt them.

If anyone is in the industry, there are surprisingly few open tests here. That is another part of why we did BOTS. IMO sunlight here brings progress, and I would love to chat with others on doing more open benchmarks!
by MrJohz | 2025-05-17 14:59:19+00:00
In practice, a lot of stuff has already implemented this using forwards-compatible polyfills. Most of the backend NodeJS ecosystem, for example, already supports a lot of this, and you have been able to use this feature quite effectively for some time (with a transpiler to handle the syntax). In fact, I gave a couple of talks about this feature last year, and while researching for them, I was amazed by how many APIs in NodeJS itself or in common libraries already supported Symbol.dispose, even if the `using` syntax wasn't implemented anywhere.

I suspect it's going to be less common in frontend code, because frontend code normally has its own lifecycle/cleanup management systems, but I can imagine it still being useful in a few places. I'd also like to see a few more testing libraries implement these symbols. But I suspect, due to the prevalence of support in backend code, that will all come with time.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-17 15:01:10+00:00
Dynamic keys (square brackets on the left hand side in an object literal) have been around for nearly 10 years, if memory serves.

https://www.samanthaming.com/tidbits/37-dynamic-property-nam...

Also in the example is method shorthand:

https://www.samanthaming.com/tidbits/5-concise-method-syntax...

Since symbols cannot be referred to by strings, you can combine the two.

Basically, there isn't any new syntax here.
by jerf | 2025-05-17 15:02:12+00:00
If you don't know what the end of your array is, you've got bigger problems.

I also don't understand why people seem to think that all you can do is maybe write one line of code or something. You can write as much code as it takes. Presumably, you know, not thousands and thousand just to read the array backwards or in some funky order, but you're not limited to calling the standard-library-provided "reverse" function and giving up if it doesn't exist.

These protests that "I can't do that because I'm just so helpless" make no sense to me. Read the array in whatever order you want, whenever you want. It's not that hard. It's just about the easiest thing there is. (Too much vibe coding?)
by homedespot | 2025-05-17 15:02:29+00:00
I started using home assistant when it first came out, found it too clumsy, returned years later, and found it too bloated.

A lot of volunteer work has gone into it but it lacks overall coordination of efforts and a usage model that is simple and consistent. That’s one of the downsides of open source: too many cooks and you get mediocrity, but accidentally when everyone is good hearted about it.

I had to do so much research on appliances I was adding that it was easier to just roll my own gateway and cloud. Now it is a vastly smaller code base that I control and can easily debug issues.

Maybe HA could refactor into a smaller set of modules that doesn’t require a huge set of assets from the get go?
by brookst | 2025-05-17 15:02:48+00:00
Protect you from what?

What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your code to build a business, as compared to not doing so? How are you worse off?

I’ve never understood this mentality. It seems very zero sum and kind of anti social. I’ve built a couple of businesses, and there’s always economic or technical precedent. I honestly don’t mind paying it forward if someone can benefit from side projects I enjoyed doing anyways.
by lacker | 2025-05-17 15:03:25+00:00
I'm a little worried on behalf of the "Python Language Tooling Team" at Meta, because uv has been so popular, and I wouldn't be surprised if ty wins out in this space.

So watch out, or this will become like Atom or Flow, an internal competitor of a technology that is surpassed by the more popular external open source version, leaving the directors/vps muttering to themselves "It's too bad that this team exists at all. Could we get rid of them and just switch to the open source stuff?"

Perhaps just something for the manager (Aaron Pollack?) to keep an eye on....
by sinuhe69 | 2025-05-17 15:05:45+00:00
Nope. Hyper-V only works on pro and higher versions of Windows. VMWare is not free. I can run VirtualBox on demand (as a portable app) and that simplifies things immensely. VirtualBox can also work with all different kinds of virtual hard disks, can archive and import archives from different versions without any problem and that make it a versatile and useful tool. There are also tons of information about VirtualBox from the community.
by jerf | 2025-05-17 15:06:07+00:00
I defy you to name an environment in which it is impossible to read an array from backwards to forwards.

That's an array, as in, things already in memory. Not a stream. An array. A collection of fixed-size-in-RAM elements, contiguously in order.

That is not "an environment which doesn't provide a one-liner to do it". C, for instance, may not provide a backwards iterator, but then, it doesn't exactly provide a forwards iterator either. It is trivial to iterate backwards on an array in C. To the extent that it's a pain to provide a function that does it either way, that's C's problem, not the fact it can't be done. Everything's a pain in C.

Cache coherency is not an issue here either because I have specified it as being read once and already called out that if you're going to read it multiple times it may be worth it. Reading it once to do whatever it is you are doing is faster than reading it once, writing it in a new order, then reading it in that new order, at least on anything remotely resembling real, existing hardware.
by accrual | 2025-05-17 15:06:23+00:00
It's very impressive to see "realistic" graphics on the N64. The demo reminds me of "ICO" for the PS2.

I've always wondered if it would be possible to create an SDK to abstract the N64 graphics hardware and expose some modern primitives, lighting, shading, tools to bake lighting as this demo does, etc. The N64 has some pretty unique hardware for its generation, more details on the hardware are here on Copetti.org:

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/
by jitl | 2025-05-17 15:06:52+00:00
Browser web pages are quintessential long running programs! At least for Notion, a browser tab typically lives much longer (days to weeks) than our server processes (hours until next deploy). They're an event loop like a server often with multiple subprocesses, very much not a run-to-completion CLI tool. And errors do not terminate a web page.

The order of execution for unhandled errors is well-defined. The error unwinds up the call stack running catch and finally blocks, and if gets back to the event loop, then it's often dispatched by the system to an "uncaught exception" (sync context) or "unhandled rejection" (async context) handler function. In NodeJS, the default error handler exits the process, but you can substitute your own behavior which is common for long-running servers.

All that is to say, that yes, this does work since termination handler is called at the top of the stack, after the stack unwinds through the finally blocks.
Ask HN: Is there a hosting provider that offers 2FA for webmail?
by taubek | 2025-05-17 15:07:42+00:00
Most of the hosting providers that I came across use cPanel and the offer webmail clients such as OpenCube, SquirrelMail, etc. I’ve never seen one that would also offer 2FA for webmail. Is there a such hosting provider or do I need to take VPS and run my mail server and webmail by myself?

I’m looking for hosted/self hosted alternative for Gmail/Proton/Outlook. EU based if possible.
by theoryaway | 2025-05-17 15:07:58+00:00
> was Pakistan that shot 3 to 5 Indian jets. Pakistan says three Rafale jets, a MiG-29, and an Su-30, along with one Heron drone. NY Times confirms at least 3. This was a huge win for Pakistan by all military expert accounts. This was all using Chinese technology.

Can not comment anything on this as it is not confirmed or denied from Indian side.It is only said that no pilot has been lost.

> Trump said today that it was India that went to the US to solve the situation. CNN also reported this.

You can see Trump's change of wording on the recent tweets as well as India clearly denying role of Trump as mediator.India said the discussions took place directly between the two neighbours-in-conflict.

> India isn't innocent either; they meddle a lot with Balochistani separatist groups in Pakistan. This is no hidden secret. These terrorists have killed Chinese engineers.

Is there any proof for this?I have not seen any.From what I have heard, they are supported by Afgans.Still no proof.

> There has been a lot of false information out there, particularly from Indian media (many accounts said a pilot was also captured, and other cities such as Karachi were hit).It was very alarming to see such blatantly wrong accounts by mainstream Indian media.

Yes, the examples given are fake news,peddled by Indian media.They do not care anything besides high TRP.

You may find this tweet from John Spencer insightful: https://xcancel.com/SpencerGuard/status/1923417456565178568
by xp84 | 2025-05-17 15:08:04+00:00
I agree with you. Cyclomatic complexity check may be my least favorite of these rules. I think any senior developer almost always “knows better” than the tool does what is a function of perfectly fine complexity vs too much. But I have to grudgingly grant that they have some use since if the devs in question routinely churn out 100-line functions that do 1,000 things, the CCC will basically coincidentally trigger and force a refactor which may help to fix that problem.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-05-17 15:09:08+00:00
I'd say about 90% of the pain in NixOS comes from its non-FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) layout. But that's also a fundamental part of Nix/NixOS's design-it was built that way from the start.

For complex packages like Steam, it's both possible and recommended to use FHS-compatible containers on NixOS. Still, I've seen people say things like, "All I do is set up containers-why not just use Docker instead of NixOS?" The thing is, if you dig deeper, tools like Docker or Flatpak are actually less powerful than Nix when it comes to container management.

I've been toying with an idea: using filesystem access tracing to replace the current approach of using random hashes for isolation. This could allow an FHS-style layout while preserving many of the guarantees of the Nix model. It would dramatically improve compatibility out-of-the-box, enable capabilities that aren't possible today, and reduce network and disk usage-since files could be modified in-place instead of being remade or redownloaded.

It's on my backlog, though. Starting a new distro doesn't seem particularly rewarding at the moment.
by karaterobot | 2025-05-17 15:09:51+00:00
> The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot.

I've been wondering recently when boards of directors will realize that the role of CEO might quite acceptably be split into two parts: an executive, who makes decisions to implement a high-level vision based on data and cold-blooded analysis, and (for lack of a better word) a culture head, who is the public face of the company, and keeps relationships with people, and gives inspiring speeches, and so on.

The executive part, it seems to me, might quite adequately be replaced by an AI. I don't even mean a hypothetical future AI, I mean literally the level of GPT models we have today. People's response to this is often "but what about genius visionaries like Steve Jobs?" and I admit that they can't be replaced. But, I'm talking about the median CEO, of the median corporation. Or even the bottom 80%, maybe. I don't think that part of their job is safe from AI in the medium term, except by gatekeeping and inertia. I firmly believe AI could do as good a job at that than most CEOs, and better than many, more cheaply, and more predictably.

(Everybody else's jobs aren't safe from AI, of course. It's just a matter of AI agents working up the ladder of complexity, from intern-level work, to junior, then senior, and so on. An important assumption here is that the executive part of being a CEO is not particularly difficult, or different from what AI has been shown to excel at already. Just that once the decision maker's job is in danger of being replaced, there will all of a sudden be a lot more skepticism about AI's ability to do human tasks.)

The other half of that split, the inspiring networker with amazing soft skills, who is good at driving the company culture and building relationships, would be harder to replace with an AI for the foreseeable future. Because they're not as good at it right now, and because people don't want to be led by a machine. That'll be true for a generation at least, but I imagine that could change as well. Things get normalized, and people's expectations change when their experience changes.

What Moderna just did is not what I've described above, but it does feel like a step toward it.
by Ray20 | 2025-05-17 15:10:01+00:00
>This description sounds suspiciously similar to the situation in Russia for any male of fighting age or anyone who fights against corruption

That is factually not true. There is no forceful conscription in Russia and generally relatives of those who fight corruption doesn't discriminate against.

>throw all its resources at stopping an invasion >its resources >resources

Do you mean "violently, under the threat of murder, send tens of thousands of people to horrible die against their free will for the sake of the dictator's political ambitions"?

This is if we call what is happening there by its proper names, and do not consider people as "resources" of the dictator.
by krapp | 2025-05-17 15:10:59+00:00
The difference, of course, being that synthesizers and drum machines are instruments that require actual skill and talent and can be used to express the unique musical style of an artist, whereas AI requires neither skill nor talent, and it cannot generate anything with actual artistic direction, intent or innovation, much less a unique creative style.

AI is never going to give the world a modern Kraftwerk or Silver Apples or Brian Eno. The best an AI "artist" can do is have the machine mimic them.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-17 15:12:15+00:00
When people discuss Japan being a homogeneous society, that typically refers to it being a very ethnically uniform society.

I really, really don't see how that connects to... payment systems. Surely you're not trying to claim that what people actually mean typically is that Japan is homogeneous in every arbitrary way possible, right? That's a bit too much even for a strawman, even if I factor in the kind of forum this is.
by minraws | 2025-05-17 15:12:20+00:00
Is it enough for this project though? I have worked on optimization projects, and have been hired as the Performance person, making well over 5K US a month in a startup working on optimization stuff, in a 3rd world(read: one of the two largest asian) country...

Largely because optimizing the last 10% in such projects is extremely labour intensive and niche work.

Either way this feels like atleast 4-5 months of full time work minimum...

Creating a bounty which is essentially a zero sum competition and not including folks from countries where 20k can be living annual wage...

Means you are essentially excluding most folks who are working full time.

And honestly if someone can wrap this up in a couple months as a side hustle. And if they feel like 20K was more than worth their time..

Then not to argue but they are significantly under paid.

And if I had a company, I would definitely like to hire them. Even at 15-20K a month...
by jerf | 2025-05-17 15:13:00+00:00
Cyclomatic complexity may be a helpful warning to detect really big functions, but the people who worry about cyclomatic complexity also seem to be the sort of people who want to set the limit really low and get fiesty if a function has much more than a for loop with a single if clause in it. These settings produce those code bases where no function anywhere actually does anything, it just dispatches to three other functions that also don't hardly do anything, making it very hard to figure out what is going on, and that is not a good design.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-17 15:13:41+00:00
I don't know if you have used 2.5, but it is the first model to disagree with directions I have provided...

"..the user suggests using XYZ to move forward, but that would be rather inefficient, perhaps the user is not totally aware of the characteristics of XYZ. We should suggest moving forward with ABC and explain why it is the better choice..."
by pjmlp | 2025-05-17 15:15:10+00:00
Yes, Astrobe is still in business for about 20 years.

https://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

ETHZ still uses Active Oberon somehow,

https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon

This is the owner of that repo,

https://inf.ethz.ch/de/personen/person-detail.MTMyNjc0.TGlzd...

However I do agree it is very niche, one is better of with Go, D, C#, Swift, as modern compiled managed languages with low level language features for systems programming.
by jitl | 2025-05-17 15:15:20+00:00
Yeah, great for that use-case - memory management; it's great to get the DisposeStack that allows "moving" out of the current scope too, that's handy.

I adopted it for quickjs-emscripten (my quickjs in wasm thingy for untrusted code in the browser) but found that differing implementations between the TypeScript compiler and Babel lead to it not being reliably usable for my consumers. I ended up writing this code to try to work around the polyfill issues; my compiler will use Symbol.for('Symbol.dispose'), but other compilers may choose a different symbol...

https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/aa48b619...
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-17 15:15:20+00:00
It shows that this document is not meant for end users. People who want to sell their apps or indirectly by having people watch the included ads want users to connect on an emotional level.

Publishers don't want you to go back to the "real world", they want your money (or attention). Sometimes, the goals align, like for business software, where they measure productivity, but sometimes not, like with ad supported apps.

Video games are another case. Here emotions are the entire point. But games rarely use standard UIs anyways.