MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arp242 | 2025-06-18 00:47:32+00:00
There are different kinds of "controversial" and degrees of things. While you're correct that both Torvalds and de Raadt have a well-earned reputation for not always being the easiest person to get along with, most of their controversial behaviour centres around flaming people over technical matters, or sometimes organisational matters directly related to the project. Basically: it's not what they're saying, it's how they're saying it.

I've never seen either Torvalds or de Raadt go off on these mega-weird political rants completely unprompted, or inject that sort of thing in the project's README. Never mind going off on rants that smell an awful lot like Nazi apologetics. This is not just a matter of "how they're saying it", there are some real issues with what they're saying as well.

But you know, it's open source. He doesn't need mine or anyone else's permission. More power to him.

But it's really not the same as Torvalds or de Raadt. And it's also not so strange people want to steer clear of it.
by lmm | 2025-06-18 00:48:12+00:00
> You appear to be arguing that law enforcement focusing on dangers to their communities and not doing someone else’s job instead is bad.

Deprioritising lawlessness against the will of the electorate is bad enough, but I'm talking about deliberate noncooperation policies, e.g. the California sanctuary laws. That's going much further than "focusing on" other things.
by presentation | 2025-06-18 00:49:09+00:00
What they mean is that you have many different train operators who run different portions on the track as independent lines, but seamlessly, without connections, your train will become another line’s train when you reach the border stations.

For example, let’s say you are going from Motomachi Chukagai to Kawagoe, try plugging this into Google Maps - you board the Minatomirai line, then once you reach Yokohama, without getting off your seat you are now on the Tokyu Toyoko line, then again at Shibuya it becomes the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin line, then again at Wakoshi it becomes the Tobu Tojo line.

4 different train operators maintained and run by 4 different companies with their own rolling stock and drivers, but they share access to the track and trains, they interoperate, and it just feels like one train with no dip in service quality. Many lines here do this.
by ajross | 2025-06-18 00:49:58+00:00
Can you cite the specific instance of Meta (or whoever) receiving pressure that led to an extrajudicial arrest (or whatever)? Or at least the specifics of the sharing that would enable it? Because if you're not talking about specifics your point is "abstract" by definition.

Repression in Iran is real, not abstract. It happens, the state wants to monitor internet use to enable it, and the linked article is very specific about them wanting to disallow Meta's product.
by dotBen | 2025-06-18 00:50:04+00:00
Remember Snowden outlined the Google<>US government interface:

The US agency would type in the gmail address of the subject (ie the primary key/identifier) and somewhere between the agency and Google a decision would be automatically made as to whether the owner of the account was a US person* or not.

If yes - FISA warrant was required

If no - the US agency user would have immediate access to the entire google account (think Google Take Out).

In other words, if you were not a US person there was no duty to protect data.

* = US Person is either a US citizen located anywhere in the world or anyone of any nationality who is physically in the US (current interpretation includes visa holders, visitors and even undocumented but that's shifting)
by CharlesW | 2025-06-18 00:50:07+00:00
> There is a whole discussions that modern codec, or especially AV1 simply doesn't care about PSY image quality.

In early AV1 encoders, psychovisual tuning was minimal and so AV1 encodes often looked soft or "plastic-y". Today's AV1 encoders are really good at this when told to prioritize psy quality (SVT-AV1 with `--tune 3`, libaom with `--tune=psy`). I'd guess that there's still lots of headroom for improvements to AV1 encoding.

> And hence how most torrents are still using x265 because…

Today most torrents still use H.264, I assume because of its ubiquitous support and modest decode requirements. Over time, I'd expect H.265 (and then AV1) to become the dominant compressed format for video sharing. It seems like that community is pretty slow to adopt advancements — most lossy-compressed music <finger quotes>sharing</finger quotes> is still MP3, even though AAC is a far better (as you note!) and ubiquitous choice.

My point about MP3 vs. AAC was simply: As you reduce the amount of compression, the perceived quality advantages of better compressed media formats is reduced. My personal music library is AAC (not MP3), encoded from CD rips using afconvert.
by Zak | 2025-06-18 00:51:05+00:00
There are 1800K white LEDs as well as phosphor-converted amber made to approximate the look of the classic amber low-pressure sodium.

1800K white can render colors surprisingly well depending on the phosphor mix. I recently put one with claimed (and measured) CRI over 90 into a flashlight and was surprised to see that it actually can render blues reasonably well.

I'm inclined to think those are better choices for street lights than anything daylight-ish, but I also think we should use far fewer street lights. Their presence often reduces the contrast car headlights provide, making it harder to spot hazards while driving.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-18 00:51:06+00:00
No software company I have ever worked at had an excess of worker productivity. There were always at least 3-5X as much work needing to be done, bugs needing to be fixed, features that needed to be implemented than engineers to do it. Backlogs just grew and grew until you just gave up and mass-closed issues because they were 10 years old.

If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as much work as we can possibly do instead of 3X.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-06-18 00:51:26+00:00
I watched large portions of the right wing immediately denounce the killings as a left-wing assassination. I don't think any of these people truly believed that left-wing assassins conducted a targeted execution of two Democrats in a tightly-divided R/D state legislature: I think it was a very deliberate effort to confuse the news reporting and minimize the damage of their divisive rhetoric, until something else (a war) pushed it out of the spotlight.
by throw123xz | 2025-06-18 00:51:42+00:00
I mean, from a security point of view, those related to the government should use something they control. This goes for all countries.

For the population in general though and in special those who don't like the people in charge of the country, WhatsApp is a great tool. I have to worry about WhatsApp and Meta as I'm in the "west", but there's no chance in hell Meta's going to provide data on any user to the Iranian government... it's a good option for Iranians.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-18 00:52:09+00:00
I still believe that most code, on average, is not DRY enough, but for projects I do on my own account I've recently developed a doctrine of "there are no applications, only screens" and funny enough this has been using HTMX which I think the author of that blog wrote.

Usually I make web applications using Sinatra-like frameworks like Flask or JAXB where I write a function that answers URLs that match a pattern and a "screen" is one or more of those functions that work together and maybe some HTML templates that go with them. For instance there might be a URL for a web page that shows data about a user, and another URL that HTMX calls when you flip a <select> to change the status of that user.

Assuming the "application" has the stuff to configure the database connection and file locations and draw HTML headers and footers and such, there is otherwise little coupling between the screens so if you want to make a new screen you can cut and paste an old screen and modify it, or you can ask an LLM to make you a screen or endpoint and if it "vibe coded" you a bad screen you can just try again to make another screen. It can make sense to use inheritance or composition to make a screen that can be specialized, or to write screens that are standalone (other than fetching the db connection and such.)

The origin story was that I was working on a framework for making ML training sets called "Themis" that was using microservices, React, Docker and such. The real requirement was that we were (1) always adding new tasks, and (2) having to create simple but always optimized "screens" for those tasks because if you are making 20,000 judgements it is bad enough to click 20,000 times, if you have to click 4x for each one and it adds up to 80,000 you will probably give up. As it was written you had to write a bunch of API endpoints as part of a JAXB application and React components that were part of a monolithic React app and wait 20 minutes for typescript and Docker and javac to do their things and if you are lucky it boots up otherwise you have to start over.

I wrote up a criticism of Themis and designed "Nemesis" that was designed for rapid development of new tasks and it was a path not taken at the old job, but Nemesis and I have been chewing through millions of instances of tasks ever since.
by gbacon | 2025-06-18 00:52:12+00:00
If you’ll be spending a significant amount of time around Unix or Linux as a sysadmin or developer, it’s definitely worth learning. Like vi, it will always be there. Larry Wall characterized Perl as inhabiting the void between the manipulexity of C and the whipuptitude of the shell. When your shell script starts to run out of gas, switch to Perl. For quick text filters or one liners dealing with code or other collections of files, Perl’s keystroke-to-horsepower ratio is challenging to match. Some you use frequently enough that they’re worth tossing into your ~/bin to run from the command line or as a filter inside vi.

It’s refreshing to see an even-handed discussion in the replies here rather than the usual hurr hurr punctuation language bigotry. Perl is a big language. Perl is a quirky language. Perl is a fun language. Perl is an extraordinarily well documented language.

Perl is a different language. The urge among programmers to conform is surprisingly strong. Even computer geeks seem to want to get their kicks bullying the weird kid. In comparison, Python and Java code look so bland, so boring. But the market has clearly decided, and Perl has paid the price for daring to be unorthodox.

The superficial demands of orthodoxy make it an inexpensive substitute for virtue. And that in turn is one of the reasons orthodoxy is so attractive to bad people. You could be a horrible person, and yet as long as you're orthodox, you're better than everyone who isn’t.

https://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-06-18 00:53:55+00:00
> It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

This is the real, actual conversation to be had about "AI taking jobs."

I've seen similar things a lot in the private sector.

There's just loads of people just flailing around doing stuff without really having any expertise other than some vague proxy of years of experience.

It's really not even exactly their fault (people have lives that don't revolve around messing about with software systems design, sure, and there's no good exposure to anything outside of these messes in their workplaces).

But, outside of major software firms (think banks, and other non-"tech" F500s; speaking from experience here) there's loads of people that are "Enterprise Architects" or something that basically spend 5 hours a day in meetings and write 11 lines of C# or something a quarter and then just adopt ideas they heard from someone else a few years back.

Software is really an utterly bizarre field where there's really nothing that even acts as valuable credentials or experience without complete understanding of what that "experience" is actually comprised of. I think about this a lot.
by eadmund | 2025-06-18 00:54:02+00:00
Is it possible to run an X11 window manager in XWayland and have it manage Wayland windows and intercept keystrokes for all windows?

If not then it’s not really an upgrade path.

I do get it — no-one owes me anything. They don’t even, really, owe me the kindness of not breaking the software I use. In principle I could fork and maintain everything I want myself, or working with others. But …
by krisoft | 2025-06-18 00:54:12+00:00
> This is a defeatist attitude.

It is not a defeatist attitude. It is a winning attitude.

You told people how you operate and you simply stick to it.

The thing you change about yourself is that you stop caring about the supposed “social expectation” that by writing “hello” they “opened a a synchronous channel“ with “expectations for somewhat realtime responses”.

Now imagine that someone heard that you use messaging asyncronously and yet they still send you a simple “hello” with nothing else. You have two choices here. You can play their game, write a “hello” back and patiently wait as they type out what they need from you. OR you can type to them “hello. long time no see, how can I help you today?” And then immediately forget about them and return back to your work. In due time when you check again your messages (maybe in an hour, maybe in half an hour) you will see if they messaged you. Maybe they will say what they want by then, maybe not.

My point is that while you can tell politely to people the benefits of getting to the point you can’t force them to do so. On the other hand you have full control over your reaction to them not following your prefered communication style.

You can get angry, and waste your time waiting for them. Or you can stay cool, keep on working, and answer them on your schedule and on your terms politely and to the best of your abilities.

If you think what i say is defeatist attitude then probably you are misunderstanding my point. It is not about changing how you communicate, but changing about how much you care about the “expectation of realtime responses”.
by felipeerias | 2025-06-18 00:54:33+00:00
It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.

I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”.

Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language should be automatically translated and explained.
by DoctorOW | 2025-06-18 00:54:50+00:00
> It could be annoying to post a horizontal video if it gets uploaded into a vertical reels format. Plus, users may not want to see longer videos mixed in with short ones.

These flaws so immediately obvious that the main reason I read the article was to determine if they had any kind of mitigation. The screenshot of the horizontal video in portrait looks awful.
by geophile | 2025-06-18 00:54:51+00:00
I am also in the camp that has very little use for debuggers.

A point that may be pedantic: I don't add (and then remove) "print" statements. I add logging code, that stays forever. For a major interface, I'll usually start with INFO level debugging, to document function entry/exit, with param values. I add more detailed logging as I start to use the system and find out what needs extra scrutiny. This approach is very easy to get started with and maintain, and provides powerful insight into problems as they arise.

I also put a lot of work into formatting log statements. I once worked on a distributed system, and getting the prefix of each log statement exactly right was very useful -- node id, pid, timestamp, all of it fixed width. I could download logs from across the cluster, sort, and have a single file that interleaved actions from across the cluster.
by noobermin | 2025-06-18 00:55:31+00:00
Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence.

I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte today" or more Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually involves less words because anything else confuses people.
by neilv | 2025-06-18 00:56:50+00:00
Up until a few years ago, I could've seen doing this as a worthwhile survival exercise, and to know that I can do it.

Then, without trying, I overheated simply by exercising in a room that I didn't know was 95F.

(Since I've mostly only lived in cold/moderate climates, and had never learned how risky 95F is.)

It was highly unpleasant, in an uh-oh, I can see how people die this way, kind of way.

Now, I actively avoid anywhere much hotter than about 80F.

Just last week, I declined a very interesting recruiting outreach from a CEO in Austin, telling him, sorry, but the weather in Texas is just too hot for me.

I'm ready to repurpose the term "special snowflake".

> A young woman seems to be walking around in a daze. [...] I don't think they believed their guidebooks about how uncomfortably hot it can get in Death Valley.

I hope someone helped the dazed person with first aid. And that other people take the heat seriously. It's right there in the name: Death Valley.
by senectus1 | 2025-06-18 00:58:06+00:00
Social media, AI etc has created a post reality world.

We DON'T all live in the same reality, the echo chambers and false narratives being fed to us and corralling us is completely messing with our heads.

back in the 60's and 70's we were worried that the CIA was micro dosing the population... what we've learned is that isn't even needed. just feed us attractive lies and we'll line up for brainworms via the internet and TV day and night.
by TMWNN | 2025-06-18 00:59:16+00:00
I thought a compiler, with no adjective or caveat, should turn a HLL into machine language. Isn't what this describes—turning BASIC into Go—more accurately described as a "pseudocompiler" or "Go compiler" or somesuch? I know Emacs is always said to have a "bytecode compiler" that processes Elisp code, not a "compiler" per se. Am I mistaken?
by someothherguyy | 2025-06-18 00:59:22+00:00
Sure, I am familiar.

The law prevents Colorado's agencies from sharing information with ICE, instead ICE uses LexisNexis.

This can lead to things like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalez_v._ICE

https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-a...
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-18 01:00:10+00:00
Mario Kart World generally looks more saturated than previous games if anything, so it definitely meets that minimum.

And the article is about they missed out on the optionality of using the additional gamut, but that additional gamut wouldn't intrinsically look better.

It's easy enough to edit a screenshot to show us what could have been, but even in that single screenshot there are things that look worse: like the flames gained saturation but lost the depth the smoke was adding, and some reasonable atmospheric haze vanished.

(similarly the game in the side-by-side has some downright awful looking elements, like the over-saturated red crystals that punch a hole through my HDR display...)

Given Nintendo's track record for stylization over raw image quality, I'm not sure why this isn't just as likely them intentionally prioritizing SDR quality and taking a modest-but-safe approach to HDR... especially when the built-in screen maxes out at 450 nits.
by acdha | 2025-06-18 01:02:20+00:00
> Deprioritising lawlessness against the will of the electorate is bad enough

You’re arguing that your personal opinion is “the will of the electorate”. The policies directing local police to focus on crime affecting their communities instead of shadowing federal immigration enforcement weren’t imposed by an aliens, they were enacted by democratically elected representatives.

California’s sanctuary laws are the subject of considerable mythology but they had no effect on crime rates according to actual studies because they don’t prohibit cops from working with law enforcement for cases involving people who pose a risk to their communities. They can’t hold people without cause or use a parking ticket to get someone deported but there’s no problem cooperating with federal law enforcement to get rid of a robber, killer, rapist, etc. – the kind of people most of the electorate want enforcement focused on, not gardeners and farm workers.

https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/01/california-sanctuary-...
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-06-18 01:02:26+00:00
It's 100% this; you're right on the money (pun intended).

Don't forget various pipelines, IaC, pipelines for deploying IaC, test/dev/staging/whatever environments, organization permissions strategies etc etc...

When I worked at a large, uh, cloud company as a consultant, solutions were often tailored towards "best practices"--this meant, in reality, large complex serverless/containerized things with all sorts of integrations for monitoring, logging, NoSQL, queues etc, often for dinky little things that an RPI running RoR or NodeJS could serve without breaking a sweat.

With rare exceptions, we'd never be able to say, deploy a simple go server on a VM with server-side rendered templates behind a load balancer with some auto-scaling and a managed database. Far too pedestrian.

Sure, it's "best practices" for "high-availability" but was almost always overkill and a nightmare to troubleshoot.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-18 01:02:29+00:00
I think that's conflating distinct concepts. Numbers aren't a physical property. Whether or not they're a fundamental concept is largely a philosophical question.

Meanwhile temperature (for example), while physical, is a statistical property of a macroscopic system. It isn't fundamental - rather it's an abstraction over a (very) large set - but it is nonetheless a quantification of physical characteristics. Whereas a number, for example 2 rocks, is not quantifying any physical property of the individual rocks themselves.
by Zak | 2025-06-18 01:03:15+00:00
It's possible to make an LED with a spectrum that is not very spiky, which a fan of incandescent light will likely enjoy. There is a cost to efficiency, which makes LED fixtures and screw-in bulbs with those traits specialty items. A color rendering index and R9 both in the high 90s is usually enough information to pick out such light sources.

Flicker is also not a given, but a product of using cheap rather than good methods to power LEDs starting from AC mains power.
by lxgr | 2025-06-18 01:03:17+00:00
Definitely, but they don't have to contain any (plaintext) message content for encrypted messengers.

On Android, push notifications were always processed by the receiving app, so it can just decrypt a payload directly (or download new messages from the server and decrypt these); on iOS, this isn't as reliable (e.g. swiping the app out of the app switcher used to break it in several iOS versions), but "VoIP notifications" and the newer "message decryption extension" [1] are.

The same principle applies to Web Push – I believe end-to-end encryption is even mandatory there.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...