MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DamnInteresting | 2025-06-01 17:23:18+00:00
This is quite true. I like to build browser-based games, and it is much more fun and stimulating to write a lot of the bits in old-fashioned HTML+SCSS+Javascript. I still use libraries for tricky stuff, like handling audio playback, but it's not that hard to implement one's own drag-and-drop (for example), and it works very well. Plus, there is the added benefit of understanding how things work.
by pie_flavor | 2025-06-01 17:23:42+00:00
It is not hard to remember what int division is about, when your types are ints in code. It also comes up almost never, and isn't what floating-point rounding error means. You aren't multiplying money 99% of the time, and when you are, you don't care about exacting precision (e.g. 20% discount). Floating-point rounding error, on the other hand, is about how 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3.
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-06-01 17:24:06+00:00
Like this product, there are many other products that focus on allowing one to back-up crypto-currency wallet seed phrases.

However, they all have in common the following major disadvantages:

* cost -- I can't see myself paying 50+/100+/150+ EUR for such a product, no matter how fancy is the marketing;

* they are meant primarily to encode ASCII passphrases, thus they have low information density; (most formats allow one to encode only one letter per column;)

* size / format -- I want something easily portable, not a large slab of metal, or a heavy paper-weight; (thus I've used the standard CR80 ID card size;)
by wpm | 2025-06-01 17:25:13+00:00
You argue that any system would be easier if we had all learned it in preschool, then turn around and claim some massive, mind boggling amount of effort that must be expended by Americans to use ounces, miles, and all sort of other yucky units you might need a lot of energy to use, but Americans have been learning, alongside SI, since preschool. Just like how you don’t likely struggle with 7 day weeks of 24 hour days with 60 minute hours.

So which is it?
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-06-01 17:25:43+00:00
Adblockers/no-adblockers is missing the point. YT and other internet media WILL eventually be mostly ads just like TV became. And they WILL figure out ways to prevent blocking, in fact there are likely very smart and talented people on HN will devote their knowledge and expertise to achieve these ends in exchange for fat salaries. There will also be lobbying of course and I foresee that ad-skipping will eventually be criminalized (harshly) to ensure compliance. There is no escaping these fates. The only hope is a brand new form of media and the brief window of ad-escape it grants before it too is overrun and conquered by ads.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-01 17:25:57+00:00
People of Earth and of every inhabited planet hate Elon with the hate of a thousand suns, and therefore, the Sun itself has become anti-Elon, and is generating anti-Elonic particles.

On Friday we detected an Elonal Musk Ejection from the Sun that should be selectively interacting with anything in Outer Space that is connected to Elon. Elonic forces are stronger than gravity and stronger than the Weak Force. Anything that Elon built will be rendered into nonfunctional wokesauce by these catastrophic chthonic left-quark forces.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-01 17:26:26+00:00
And any one of those could become an existential risk, could take down your entire company.

Do you trust your people to never slip up? To make sure there's really the reliability & security guarantees that your company depend on? Are there competent technical hands available at all times to handle issues as they come up? This adds significantly to the org chart, requires constant caring to be added, to keep it steered and staffed.

I'm a huge fan of self hosting, of buying your own hardware. Especially for very technical entities, that have lots of overlap & intimacy with computers. But your company needs to have reason to believe it can do the job not just well, but to a degree where you're sure you won't lose the entire business. Needs to believe they really are on top of this huge domain! I see very clearly why folks go cloud, and I wish the world was in a better position, had more to say, to show why buying pizza boxes is gonna not just save you money buy be an enduring acceptable safe choice.

Much safer to not wade in here, shutting the hell up is free, and there's plenty that can go wrong, but I do think Kubernetes presents the first maybe acceptable opportunity for broadly acceptable DIY computing, delivering key three things: an essential integrativeness of concerns allowing it to be a comprehensive cross-cutting platform for your business's compute, delivers strongly on the security and dependability you absolutely must have in a well known way, and avoids the historical trap of each company ending up married to their own specific boondoggle infrastructure that's been hand cobbled together by whomever had such and such task at the time. There's a stable practice here, one that many companies and practitioners are honing; there's much difference between Kube clusters sure, but these intracacies and elaborations support the creation of something that is mostly alike, if you look from one company's clusters to the next.
by Ameo | 2025-06-01 17:26:29+00:00
> runes basically infecting the entire codebase

Yeah sadly the stores the author talks about here aren't the right way to do things anymore in modern svelte and they're all-in on Runes.

Stores were a big part of the reason I liked svelte; they were so conceptually simple, extensible with plain JS, and made interop outside of Svelte trivial without the Svelte magic leaking out.

They're still in Svelte, but they mix poorly with runes and are basically unsupported in runes mode. I opened up a bug about store behavior not working like it used to when mixing with runes, and the response was pretty much "yeah we don't expect it to work like that anymore when runes mode is enabled".
by paulryanrogers | 2025-06-01 17:26:56+00:00
Which fundamentals may vary. College insisted I learn binary and bit shifting, which I've never had to use without libraries doing most of the heavy lifting. Data structures was more useful, though the business focus was at odds with where game dev was at the time.

Games in particular are such a vast mix of skills, techniques, and ever shifting market demand. I left game modding and went full time into biz software as my pixel painting and low-poly modeling skills were falling out of favor. Art fundamentals served me well enough, but I was far too slow an artist to put out high fidelity work at the new pace.

When my dad gave me QBasic, I bounced off it hard and thought I hated programming. Meanwhile I was programming games with tools like Klik-n-Play, Con, and batch files. Later in university I had to learn several programming languages and finally it clicked.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-01 17:28:19+00:00
There's probably hundreds of reasons, and a real answer is likely worthy of a graduate-level class. Like this one[0]. ;)

But we can start with the massive capital requirements of being a logistics provider. It's not something that many farmers, shopkeepers, or even medium-sized businesses could manage.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-01 17:29:37+00:00
> Drones have changed warfare forever

We’re in a strategic imbalance. Cold War air defences were trained on high-value targets, like strategic bombers and spy planes. So currently our air defences are overspecced for something like this.

Nothing about drones makes them inherently undetectable. You just need a different model. I suspect those should be commonplace within 20 years, potentially a decade.

> at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal

I could see ownership being restricted in wartime. More likely is eager air defences shredding birds on perimeters.
by Aldipower | 2025-06-01 17:30:47+00:00
The big deal was latency and jitter the Amiga could not provide that good as the Atari this way with the serial interface. I remember such discussion back in the days. Also the multitasking capabilities of the AmigaOS were to good! Yes, this hindered precise jitter. That is why Steinberg and other sequencer software producers bet on the built in and rock solid Atari Midi implementation. Which meant also a lack of good software for the Amiga then on top of it.
by mmphosis | 2025-06-01 17:30:51+00:00
Initially, I was impressed by the articles. I tapped on one then tapped the visit button then Firefox Nightly 141.0a1 (Build #2016093823) crashed. The web page is slow on this old tablet. I could bring out my new phone or the laptop but I think the web page should be just as fast even on old devices.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-01 17:31:59+00:00
"I am not saying we shouldn't consider each area as important I just don't think we should structure policy so tiny areas are incentivized to fight each other and the loser is where everything "bad" gets built."

I'm not disagreeing with the result. What is the solution to the factions not fighting? I haven't heard one so far, so I'm disagreeing with your stated cause of it.

"My point is that we should be more permissive with where we build affordable housing, including and especially in more exclusive areas."

That's not a solution because there's no path to achieving it and ignores the established legal processes, such as appeals, that society has decided are fair. As you've pointed out, the exclusive areas fight it. My solution isn't worth going over in detail again, but has been raised in similar discussions on here. Basically, these problems are the result of population distribution. Creating incentives to repopulate and employ shrinking cities will provide the best overall results through economic reinvigoration of places like the rust belt, take advantage of vacant housing, and have less barriers to development of new housing.

"It totally matters because if it is the result of policy then it is something we can change."

It wasn't posed as a policy issue. It was posed as an architectural vs stability issue. Stuff like not dealing with bad neighbors or landlords can't be cured with policy anyways. Many utilities charge a connection cost per building, where you have an apartment building paying lower per resident fees than a home. And higher density often requires larger infrastructure, so it's not just cost per stretch.

"Zoning policy in general increases the supply of single family homes relative to multi family homes, decreasing their cost."

Maybe that's happened in your area, but not around here. Most of the townships around here permit higher density housing in many areas, but it's rarely built. The predominate thing bring built is single family. The zoning does nothing for the cost - the cost of a townhome is significantly cheaper than a single family home. The mortgage guarantee applies to mortgages on other residential property types as well. The tax break when selling also applies to other residential properties like condos and townhouses. I have friends and family who live in condos and townhouse- loans were not difficult to get at all. There's no merit here to support that SFHs are favored over higher density ownership.

"they still put their thumb on the scales in favor of home owners at the expense of renters who are much more likely to live in multi-family housing."

I'm not sure what you mean here. Many areas even have rent control and rent assistance. I don't see anything being done to benefit home owners at the expense of renters.
by jmogly | 2025-06-01 17:32:23+00:00
I think svelte, especially now svelte 5, will “win” because it doesn’t fight with vanilla web dev it just beautifully supplements the short comings of rolling plain html, css, js.

This is coming from someone who is no way a front end dev, but svelte 5 in particular is just so easy to get started with and has the most sane approach to reactivity and syntax compared to the other frameworks I have tried, and it seems like it is in the best position to grow with the web as well.
by mardifoufs | 2025-06-01 17:32:51+00:00
Mhmm not sure I'd agree that webapps have more edge cases than say, Jetpack compose (especially the PC version), or QML. Plus a huge advantage of web based stuff is that the edge cases are usually a lot more documented.

I say this as someone who has mostly used Qt+QML for some newer projects and came to regret it, in huge part due to a big lack of components, libraries etc. And very little documentation, or examples, outside of the official documentation.

Also, at my day job, they used to make all of their UI using Windows GUI frameworks (we sell very expensive testing devices mostly for industrial customers). It led to a big problem down the line, since we were stuck with using Windows, meaning that when we started shipping even smaller devices, it became a huge mess. In fact most of the devs are very glad that we moved to web based UIs since we don't have to rewrite everything for every single platform. I know, it's a tired point that everyone repeats but it is very very helpful especially for smaller dev teams. And even for our bigger teams, it made it easier to get a consistent and tested front end.

Sure, you can be multiplatform without using web, but you still end up with tons of edge cases and you still have to write a web version if you want your app to be accessible on the web too.

Figma wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't so easily accessible-through the web.
by wpm | 2025-06-01 17:33:21+00:00
Couldn’t I just learn that Uncle Steve gets off work at 01:00 CST, by figuring out his offset from UTC and combining it with mine?

Your solution doesn’t change that I have to figure out some “how many hours different is Uncle Steve”, just that somehow I’ll magically figure that out without using the simple UTC offsets we use to denote those differences now. It just papers over them.
by andy99 | 2025-06-01 17:34:35+00:00
I've read a (untestable) theory that consciousness is a property of matter, so everything has it, and we're just sort of the sum of the desires and feelings of our constituent matter.

In that construct, a computer program would never be conscious because it's a simulation, it doesn't have the constituent consciousness property.

I don't believe or not believe the consciousness-as-a-property-of-matter part but I do think programs can't be conscious because consciousness must sit outside of what they simulate.
by spankibalt | 2025-06-01 17:34:44+00:00
I hope someone will write an entertaining satire about the sometimes almost PTSD-like bitterness and bizarre selective perceptions of the "anti-PC" crowd, especially in the Amiga space. :D

Please don't take it too harshly, but your list of grievances is almost radically different to my experiences of personal computing in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties... to me somewhat of a faszinosum all on its own. In my litle corner of the world the Amiga was virtually nonexistant [1], largely undesireable, and prophesized to be a corpse already as early as 1991.

I'll give you one thing, tho: A mostly non-plastic, compact keyboard computer case (Amiga 600-like) for a suitably powerful IBM compatible would've been awfully nice. Still would be, for a vintage bird that is. We only got "Schneiderplastik", the Euro-PC to be more precise [2], and that one wasn't updated in a satisfying fashion.

1. The only people I knew that had Commodores were two of my best friends, one with a Commodore 64, the other with a 128. The demosceners I grew up with were Atari ST guys, all of them (becoming) musicians.

2. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC]
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-06-01 17:34:48+00:00
The distilled version of this is that they let Headscale, a FOSS, use their proprietary client to connect to the Headscale server rather than Tailscale’s. They don’t need to allow this, they could easily disable that feature and have every right to, but they don’t. This makes the development of Headscale a lot more straightforward since the entire client codebase is just removed from the equation.
by glitchc | 2025-06-01 17:34:56+00:00
It's up to the merchant to decide if they want to support offline payments and to what limit. The terminals certainly allow it. Your transaction will be stored in a secure way (either encrypted or in a secure element) until the terminal reconnects.

The way the rules are set up though, the risk of a failed offline transaction is almost entirely borne by the merchant. In most cases the merchant is unwilling to accept this risk and disables the feature.
by troupo | 2025-06-01 17:35:33+00:00
Everyone gushing over Rogue One... but it was at best barely competent.

10-20 minutes of static talking heads, 5 minutes of mediocre action. Repeat until the end. Meaningless side-quests. The final is a thousand cliches one after another culminating in a "main computer at the end of a rickety walkway" and "a kiss at the sunset".

The only reason it's hailed as the greatest movie ever is because so much of the Star Wars is just objectively shit.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-01 17:35:34+00:00
Honestly, fish just has a much nicer user experience OOTB for me than anything else I've used. The way it colors commands, arguments etc automatically was what sold me on it more than anything.

It's an excellent shell for interactive use. I would recommend writing actual shell scripts in Bash or good old POSIX shell however, if for no other reason than LLMs generate much better Bash code than Fish code. Zsh is similar enough to Bash that I haven't heard of it making much difference.
by jmogly | 2025-06-01 17:36:16+00:00
Yes this is the way to do it, global-ish state files with getters and setters. I’ll have a .svelte.ts file (or a few of them) with a typed state object, maybe a function for refreshing it or syncing it with a backend api, import the state all over the place.

Might be an anti pattern but it works really well.
by tobr | 2025-06-01 17:36:56+00:00
Regardless of the specific bugs he ran into, it is a product that only works well online, despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available when it counts. Isn’t that just a fundamental miscalculation for this type of product? It’s almost guaranteed to put a certain percentage of your users in an embarrassing situation in front of an audience.
by throwaway290 | 2025-06-01 17:37:04+00:00
No I wouldn't argue that, it's fair. Promotions or product placement and that stuff are everywhere and no place is special in that.

But I bet the guy I replied to doesn't actually pay for premium. Most people who say "TV sucks because ads and YT is great because no ads and creators braining" mean that they can block ads on YT and those brainy creators can deliver stuff to them for free, so it's totally better than TV yeah. like it's "better" if you can steal stuff than if you have to pay for it)
by patcon | 2025-06-01 17:37:31+00:00
Ugh, I hate that I'm about to say this, because I think AI is still missing something very important, but...

What makes us think that "processing emotion" is really such a magical and "only humans do it the right way" sorta thing? I think there's a very real conclusion where "no, AI is not as special as us yet" (esp around efficiency) but also "no, we are not doing anything so interesting either" (or rather, we are not special in the ways we think we are)

For example, there's a paper called "chasing the rainbow" [1] that posits that consciousness is just the subjective experience of being the comms protocol between internal [largely unconscious] neural state. It's just what the compulsion to share internal state between minds feels like, but it's not "the point", and instead an inert byproduct like a rainbow. Maybe our compulsion to express or even process emotion is not some greater reason, but just a way we experience the compulsion of the more important thing: the collective search for interpolated beliefs that best model and predict the world and help our shared structure persist, done by exploring tensions in high dimensional considerations we call emotions.

Which is to say: if AI is doing that with us, role-modelling resolution of tension or helping build or spread shared knowledge alongside us through that process... then as far as the universe cares, it's doing what we're doing, and toward the same ends. It's compulsion having the same origin as ours doesn't matter, so long as it's doing the work that is the reason the universe has given us the compulsion.

Sorry, new thought. Apologies if it's messy (or too casually dropping an unsettling perspective -- I rejected that paper for quite awhile, because my brain couldn't integrate the nihilism of it)

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
by chongli | 2025-06-01 17:38:34+00:00
Nobody needs access to a git repo directly via Google.

I agree with this. The repo page should just have static HTML pages with information for people new to the project. Dynamic information and especially expensive computations such as git blame should be restricted to logged in users with an account. This would make it easy to ban anyone who was abusing the system or even implement CPU quotas without affecting ordinary users arriving from Google.
by badc0ffee | 2025-06-01 17:38:38+00:00
> a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good.

I hate to go to bat for MS-DOS, but it had at least one real advantage over CP/M: a single disk format. As doomed to failure as the various non-PC DOS machines (e.g. Tandy 2000 and DEC Rainbow) were, they could at least share disks.
by shayway | 2025-06-01 17:39:45+00:00
Fascinating! Reading this makes apparent how many 'subsystems' human brains have. At any given moment I'm doing some mix of reflecting on my own state, thinking through problems, forming sentences (in my head or out loud), planning my next actions. I think, long term, the most significant advances in human-like AI will come from advances in coordinating disparate pieces more than anything.
by xeonmc | 2025-06-01 17:40:14+00:00
How about simulation programs that are impure, i.e. those which include I/O in its loop? After all, taking the Turing-completeness analogy further, while a machine that satisfies said criterion is capable of universal computation, actually performing a computation still requires an external input specified outside of the program itself. Perhaps it might turn out that stimuli residing outside of the simulated system is a necessary condition for non-incompleteness of consciousness, as a seed of relative non-determinism with respect to the program’s internal specification?
by niemandhier | 2025-06-01 17:41:07+00:00
This is much more nuanced than many people realize.

Assuming you want to commit suicide by a sensible cocktail of drugs: - something against the anxiety

- something that puts you into a deep sleep

- something against the muscle spasms

- something that stops your heart / breathing

From the top of my head that would be: - ketamine

- propofol / thiopental

- potassium chloride

Most of these things are not available legally, you need a doctor to help you acquire them.

To implement the protocol in a way that prevents unnecessary suffering you need someone to administer the injections, preferable a professional.

Last but not least you might not want to be alone, but be accompanied by loved ones.

All involved people might face criminal charges, in some jurisdictions even not trying to resuscitate would be a crime.