MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danpalmer | 2025-06-18 02:11:57+00:00
> Americans are extremely polite

Having grown up in the UK and living in Australia, I do not find Americans polite. To me, politeness is "please", "thank you", "may I have", etc, whereas "I would like a latte today" reads to me as a demand. In context it's fine (it stands out a bit but not in a problematic way), it's not particularly rude, but in general just stating your desires is not considered polite in my experience in UK/AU.

There are some other parts of American English that may be considered polite, I notice a lot of US folks addressing me as "sir" for example, but this sort of thing comes off as insincere or even sarcastic/rude.

I know this is how people communicate so they don't really bother me, I'm used to them and accept that different people have different expectations. I also understand that Americans might believe they are being polite and consider me to be rude, but I think this is why blanket statements like "Americans are extremely polite" are just missing so much cultural nuance.
by username223 | 2025-06-18 02:16:38+00:00
I love it! This was what the ultra marathon community used to be like before it became commercialized and professionalized (https://mattmahoney.net/ultra/, especially the story of Gravel Man https://mattmahoney.net/ultra/death600.txt). Now you can't run 50k without a crew.

EDIT: And this is what a serious amateur can do on that route: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-10/astrophy...
by NoPicklez | 2025-06-18 02:17:11+00:00
My take just purely based on the title, I'm in the security space not a developer but I did study it during my degree.

I would say that when the fundamentals are easier to learn it becomes a great time to learn anything. I remember spending so much of my degree during software development trying to fix bugs and have things explained by trawling through online forums like many of us have. Looking for different ways of having concepts explained to me and how to apply them.

LLM's give us a fairly powerful tool to act as a sort of tutor in asking questions, feedback on code blocks, understanding concepts, where my code went wrong etc. Asking it all of the dumb questions we go trawling for.

But I can't speak to how this translates when you're a more intermediate developer.
by msgodel | 2025-06-18 02:17:25+00:00
Xwayland has been slow and buggy in my experience. It's very far from seamless. I know one user who stuck with Gnome for decades (he was an "I don't care just get draw the stuff on the screen" kind of guy) until libreoffice became unusable because of the Wayland transition and actually switched back to FVWM over it.
by tossaway0 | 2025-06-18 02:18:46+00:00
I imagine even for professional teams with clients that need proper translations, LLMs have made it so one person can do the work of many. The difference between the quality of former automatic translations and LLM translations is huge; you couldn't rely on auto translation at all.

Now a professional service only needs a reviewer to edit what the LLM produces. You can even ask the LLM to translate in certain tones, dialects, etc. and they do it very well.
by jrflowers | 2025-06-18 02:19:11+00:00
Hegel is extremely satisfying on an emotional level to some readers. The idea that you —yes you, the reader— not only stand at the precipice of unfettered genius by the mere fact of possessing any critical faculty, but you also already possess the requisite tools to seize and contemplate the infinite truths of the universe, is very seductive.

Like everybody loves being told that they are smart, and Hegel tells the reader that they can be superlatively intelligent. It’s a hella thrilling idea to entertain, and the best way to keep that feeling going is by believing that it’s true, and the best way to convince yourself of that is to write defenses of Hegel.
by simulator5g | 2025-06-18 02:19:56+00:00
You could very easily hook this up to a smartwatch. The device attached to the nasal cannula could be a simple BLE module + 2 air flow sensors. You don't even need a nasal cannula, thats just for increased accuracy for the study. The results of the study suggest that you can just observe someone's chest rise pattern to get similar results, though maybe with less accuracy.
by Zaylan | 2025-06-18 02:21:33+00:00
I’ve run into this a few times while working on projects. Even a few seconds of connection loss can cause serious issues. A lot of systems seem to assume the network is always available and always fast.

We’ve gotten used to try again later or pull to refresh, but very few apps are built to handle offline states gracefully. Sometimes I wonder if developers ever test outside their office WiFi.
by smcameron | 2025-06-18 02:21:43+00:00
What if you're writing swear word censoring/detecting software? Or maybe something less draconian, like your space game that has a Zork like parser, and needs to know that if the user says, "set the f'ing warp drive to f'ing max", that it should set the warp drive to max and not worry about the swear words.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-06-18 02:22:12+00:00
That sort of dancing is basically a sport. You have to learn it, you have to get good at it after you learned it, and it is cardio after all. I think op was talking more about what you see in the edm scene these days. Where basically people aren’t there to dance like the old days or sing along like other genres, they are there to see a certain DJ and then they will post clips from the entire set on their instagram story. And they can do this because the dancing they are doing at the edm show is super passive kind of dancing where you are just swaying a little so you can hold the phone stably at the same time. If you were dancing like how they’d dance at the edm concerts in the 90s all rolling on molly it would be like your blues swing where its just too physical to do anything but rave around flinging your arms all around shirtless and sweaty.
by whodidntante | 2025-06-18 02:22:33+00:00
I think this is quite different than Iraq. We know Iran has many sites were they are developing nuclear technology, sites that they not only do they not let inspections happen, but that are literally buried deep in the ground. We also know they are acquiring or have acquired the technology to enrich to weapons grade, and they themselves have said they will continue to enrich beyond what a civilian program needs.

In other words, this is not a civilian energy program.

Maybe they can build a bomb in 1 month, maybe three years. You may not agree whether or not action should be taken, but I do not see that agreement/disagreement based on the difference.

In any case, our "intelligence" community has lost a lot of credibility, and has been politicized for decades. I would not bet my life, let alone an entire nation, on what they have to say.
by switchbak | 2025-06-18 02:22:46+00:00
What I find annoying is how these async toolkits screw up the stack trace, so I have little what the real program flow looks like. That reduces much of the benefit off the top.

Some IDEs promise to solve that, but I’ve not been impressed thus far.

YMMV based on language/runtime/toolkit of course. This might get added to my wishlist for my next language of choice.
by alisonatwork | 2025-06-18 02:23:29+00:00
This is basically it. When I started programming in C, I used a debugger all the time. Even a bit later doing Java monoliths I could spin up the whole app on my local and debug in the IDE. But nowadays running a dozen processes and containers and whatnot, it's just hopeless. The individual developer experience has gone very much backwards in the microservice era so the best thing to do is embrace observability, feature toggles etc and test in prod or a staging environment somewhere outside of your local machine.
by tuveson | 2025-06-18 02:24:19+00:00
This kind of question winds up being the CS equivalent of “is a hotdog a sandwich”. I agree that transpiler is a more accurate term for it and that a hotdog is not a sandwich. But there are lots of languages that start life as compile-to-C things. Many compiled languages today output LLVM IR which is not machine language. Similarly people would probably call javac a compiler, even though it outputs bytecode.
by pogue | 2025-06-18 02:24:19+00:00
I'd be curious to know how many people in the western world actually suffer from hyponatremia (low blood sodium) since it's so utterly pervasive in our diets to the point that most of us are probably close to hypernatremia on a daily basis. The American Heart Association recommends adults limit intake to no more than 2.3g (2300mg) of sodium per day. [1] A typical prepackaged meal, fast food, restaurant meal can often contain 1g or higher just in itself. Increased sodium intake for chronic peroids can lead to higher blood pressure [2] which may contribute to increased anxiety [3] [4]. While it's not necessarily always causative, we know some drugs that lower blood pressure also reduce anxiety (e.g.: propranolol [5]). But, there are cases where individuals can be consuming a lot of sodium from the diet and still losing it through sweat & other mechanisms and it could be contributing to anxiety. Stress can cause some people to pee more sodium out and others to retain more sodium! [6][7] Definitely another good reason to have regular blood work from a doctor.

[1] How much sodium should I eat per day? https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

[2] Dietary salt and blood pressure: A complex connection https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/dietary-salt-and...

[3] Stress and high blood pressure: What's the connection? https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pr...

[4] The Link Between Anxiety and High Blood Pressure https://www.verywellhealth.com/anxiety-high-blood-pressure-6...

[5] Beta-blockers for anxiety: What to know https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326397

[6] Can Stress Cause Low Sodium Levels? https://www.healthline.com/health/can-stress-cause-low-sodiu...

[7] The stress, salt excretion, and nighttime blood pressure (SABRE) study: Rationale and study design (2022)

"Exposure to an acute stressor (e.g., mental stress task) normally increases urinary sodium excretion. However, some individuals have sodium retention after stress provocation, revealing substantial between-person variability in the degree of stress-induced sodium excretion." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266660222...
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-06-18 02:25:52+00:00
Yeah that's been my experience too, or if the lens is open wide enough they don't watch the AF and have it focus on a belt or something weird and then blur out faces and eyes.

The other big one is HDR. HDR on phones makes lighting a lot less of a factor but a lot of times if I'm asking a friend to take an indoor picture they underexpose the shot because they don't have good lighting.
by sothatsit | 2025-06-18 02:25:56+00:00
I think the distinction is more about the "level of railroading".

Workflows have a lot more structure and rules about information and control flow. Agents, on the other hand, are often given a set of tools and a prompt. They are much more free-form.

For example, a workflow might define a fuzzy rule like "if customer issue is refund, go to refund flow," while an agent gets customer service tools and figures out how to handle each case on its own.

To me, this is a meaningful distinction to make. Workflows can be more predictable and reliable. Agents have more freedom and can tackle a greater breadth of tasks.
by dtagames | 2025-06-18 02:27:47+00:00
These are all over Europe. It would be cool to see them here in the US.

The most logical use case, as the paper points out, is for discounting expiring or unsold merch, not marking things up.

With the proliferation of apps and websites with everyone's prices, stores are falling all over themselves trying to show they have a low price, not a higher one.

Besides, printing and throwing away millions of shelf tags is just wasteful.
by never_inline | 2025-06-18 02:27:59+00:00
I am young grug who didn't use debuggers much until last year or so.

What sold me on debugger is the things you can do with it

* See values and eval expressions in calling frames. * Modify the course of execution by eval'ing a mutating expression. * Set exception breakpoints which stop deep where the exception is raised.

One other such tool is REPL. I see REPL and debugger as complementary to each other, and have some success using both together in VSCode, which is pretty convenient with autoreload set. (https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/posts/vscode-ipython-debuggin...)
by numpad0 | 2025-06-18 02:28:11+00:00
Japanese average income is $32k, the JP special of Switch 2 is $350, Switch 1 sold 37m, and Japanese working age population under is ~74m(out of 120m).

Either six-figure Nintendo gamers are hoarding boxes full of Switch 1 in the attic and completely destroying the statistics, or everyone at that income bracket is sophisticated enough to desire one.

Frankly, this is why I'm wondering how normal it is globally, because I believe Japan is not supposed to be a village of broke Vulcans. Maybe the nerds are in fact hoarding tons of Switches.
by asielen | 2025-06-18 02:28:37+00:00
Tiff if you want to archive them and they started as raw or tiff, jpeg for everything else. If the file is already jpeg, there is no point in covering it to a new better quality format, the quality won't get better than it already is.

It may be obsolete, but it is ubiquitous. I care less about cutting edge tech than I do about the probability of being able to open it in 20+ years. Storage is cheap.

Presentation is a different matter and often should be a different format than whatever your store the original files as.
by aeonik | 2025-06-18 02:29:04+00:00
I use it to edit some of my posts, and clean up grammar, or to help articulate thoughts that I don't have time to give a proper third or fourth pass to.

I'm very busy these days, and will often use ChatGPT as an editor.

I'll often drop a rough draft into ChatGPT and have it clean it up, or ask or for other perspectives I might be missing.

For the comment in question, I had a spidey sense activated from the conversation. And ChatGPT helped me narrow my focus down to the different levels that entropy apply to, though I had push back on it a bit before it got to the meat of my thoughts.

I think of it as a sort of translator, it helps communicate vibes that the Striatum part of my brain is feeling/sensing, but that the verbal or symbolic part of my brain hasn't figured out to say or express yet.

Normally this process can take a while, and ChatGPT remarkably speeds this cycle up, at least for me.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-18 02:29:06+00:00
Fascinating!

I also recoiled at the complexity of React, Docker, etc. and went a different path: I basically moved all the code to the server and added a way to "project" the UI to the browser. From the program's perspective, you think you're just showing GUI controls on a local screen. There is no client/server split. Under the covers, the platform talks to some JavaScript on the browser to render the controls.

This works well for me since I grew up programming on Windows PCs, where you have full control over the machine. Check it out if you're interested: https://gridwhale.com.

I think pushing code to the server via HTMX and treating the browser like a dumb terminal has the same kind of advantage: you only have to worry about one system.

Fundamentally, IMHO, the client/server split is where all the complexity happens. If you're writing two programs, on the client and one on the server, you're basically creating a distributed system, which we know is very hard.
by amy214 | 2025-06-18 02:30:38+00:00
Fertilizers is what we call "a gateway chemical" first thing you're putting some ammonium nitrate on your crops to make more than break-even this year, next thing you know it's a U-Haul parked up in Oklahoma city. We need to have common sense fertilizer control laws. Mostly it will be police who can use fertilizer, sometimes though we'll let a private detective (ex-police) use fertilizer.
by josephg | 2025-06-18 02:30:42+00:00
There's another story I heard once from Rob Pike about debugging. (And this was many years ago - I hope I get the details right).

He said that him and Brian K would pair while debugging. As Rob Pike told it, he would often drive the computer, putting in print statements, rerunning the program and so on. Brian Kernighan would stand behind him and quietly just think about the bug and the output the program was generating. Apparently Brian K would often just - after being silent for awhile - say "oh, I think the bug is in this function, on this line" and sure enough, there it was. Apparently it happened so often enough that he thought Brian might have figured out more bugs than Rob did, even without his hands touching the keyboard.

Personally I love a good debugger. But I still think about that from time to time. There's a good chance I should step away from the computer more often and just contemplate it.
by celsoazevedo | 2025-06-18 02:30:45+00:00
Just tested on my self-hosted WordPress blog and it works without any plugins.

WebP support was added to WordPress in 2021 with version 5.8: https://wordpress.org/documentation/wordpress-version/versio...

AVIF support in 2024, with v6.5: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02/23/wordpress-6-5-add...
by bdangubic | 2025-06-18 02:31:09+00:00
c’mon mate, the first sentence is the most important sentence to reel me in :)

jokes aside, I did read your entire post and I don’t disagree with a single word you wrote. I still don’t understand why anyone in their right mind would install a Meta-owned application on their PHONE. Lots of people overall and number on this thread go with “hey, the GOVERNMENT is already spying on you so why don’t I also let one of the most evil corporations in the history of mankind access to all my everything too… I don’t expect privacy in general, it is 2025 after all and we are talking on HN but these silly “plate reader excuses” are really too much… like saying “well the government can obviously break into my home whenever they want (in 2025 without a warrant as well) so why don’t I leave the door wide open, if government can enter why would I care if someone else does :)
by drabbiticus | 2025-06-18 02:31:48+00:00
First off, the display looks great!

Second off, I didn't realize how deep the dep tree would be for this type of program -- 141 total! So much of it is the url crate, itself a dep of the git crate, but there's a bunch of others too. I'm just getting into learning Rust -- is this typical of Rust projects or perhaps typical of TUI projects in general?

(EDIT to strikeout) ~~The binary is also 53M as a result whereas /usr/sbin/tree is 80K on my machine -- not really a problem on today's storage, but very roughly 500-1000x different in size isn't nothing.~~

Maybe it's linking-related? I don't know how to check really.

(EDIT: many have pointed out that you can run `cargo build --release` with other options to get a much smaller binary. Thanks for teaching me!)
by kjkjadksj | 2025-06-18 02:33:06+00:00
It is still as hard as its been to get a good photo. They had full auto film cameras that could take good photos in the 70s but the devil is always the edge cases and the subconscious ability to take an evenly exposed (in the Ansel Adams definition not auto camera exposure definition), well composed image at the decisive moment. Understanding how lighting works (either natural, or different artificial light like flash or studio lighting) is also not easy.

It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
by kibwen | 2025-06-18 02:33:12+00:00
> Assembly is tied to the system you target and it can't really be "improved".

Of course it can. There's no reason for modern extensions to keep pumping out instructions named things like "VCTTPS2DQ" other than an adherence to cryptic tradition and a confidence that the people who read assembly code are poor saps who don't matter in the grand scheme of the industry, which is precisely my point. And even if x86 was set in stone centuries ago, there's no excuse for modern ISAs to follow suit other than complete apathy over the DX of assembly, and who can blame them?

> You can however improve ergonomics greatly via macros and everyone does this.

Yes, and surely you see how the existence of macro assemblers strengthens my argument?
by insane_dreamer | 2025-06-18 02:34:12+00:00
> everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.

Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again.

You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots).

One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)
by hakfoo | 2025-06-18 02:34:28+00:00
The whole "95% support on major implementations" thing is still a hurdle. Wayland ends up railroading users into GNOME and KDE, with virtually everything else being in some way second-class.

In X11, I can still use all the same core features whether I run a full KDE desktop, Window Maker and a few dockapps, or a stack of xterms that I manually position with --geometry.

It does astonish me how Wayland missed obvious killer angles when they decided to reinvent X11. People would have been excited by "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that?
by _wire_ | 2025-06-18 02:36:03+00:00
My 2c—

Diary of a CEO dude is impressively ignorant and sycophantic interviewer who comes across as nothing more than a pampered and buffed robot.

(Lex Fridman is another, and lord have mercy Joe Rogan. I cry for a new generation that make Charlie Rose seem erudite.)

But G. Hinton stands out as commentator on policy for having no idea what he's talking about and just nattering.

OTOH Hinton speaking within be his narrow lane of the history of modern transformers is interesting and intelligent.

But wherever Hinton's speaking veers out into cybernetics, philosophy, or ethics, I cringe because all he can do is make stuff up without discernible structure to his thought. He waves his hands about risk based on appeals to his own authority, but he seems to not know what's going on and shows no signs of involvement with any larger social movement of reckoning-- other than being famous.

To listen to him in his own terms, the creation of transformers was largely an accident, and everything that he expects to happen will be equally accidental. So if it turns into a boon, he can take credit in the same way Beatles or Stones took credit for re-popularized folk music into the electronic age without actually knowing anything about it socially, and if his work turns into a disaster it's his incompetence and playing with fire that is to be blamed. Of course he identifies with being a Beatle, but he also reveals that he's nagged by the self doubt of a sorcerers apprentice.

He's seems wise enough to know better, but the fame and confusion seems to have got the best of him.