MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-06-01 13:12:08+00:00
I mean the whole point of the ST was "rock bottom price" and a lot of the things you're talking about would have raised the BOM significantly, or delayed its introduction by precious few weeks or months.

Beating the Amiga to market, and beating it on price were super important.

But I do think there was a serious problem with follow through. The Blitter and GDOS and then the STe came too long to come after. The Blitter never became standard, and the games and software suffered for it. And updates on the operating system were slow and thin until it was way too late.

I do agree that the cartridge port thing -- it being limited to 128kB expansion -- was needless. One more pin, even, would at least allow for a proper OS upgrade via cartridge port! Definitely one of the stupidest design decisions on the machine.
by morsecodist | 2025-06-01 13:12:48+00:00
I agree that people want things in theory but aren't willing support the policies necessary but that's why we need a movement to help change that.

Also I think it's important to consider what we call a community. We can't consider every single block a community, a community is a town or even a metro area. They use shared water, to to shared schools, and they need to make decisions together because these things are interconnected.

Is there a genuine market preference for single family home ownership? I'm sure some people prefer to live that way especially because it allows you to take advantage of the ample subsidies we give single family home ownership. But if there was a preference for it we wouldn't need to artificially restrict people's ability to redevelop them into multi family homes. No one would choose to live in them so no one would build them.
by ciwolex | 2025-06-01 13:13:36+00:00
3. Should students still study computer science? There are misinformed narratives on how AI has replaced the software engineering industry. Sometimes they try to connect AI and Job losses, creating big fears for new graduates and students aspiring to become software engineers. Although many times, this connection is misinformed. AI tools are impressive, but real software engineering involves architecture, security, distributed systems, ethics, and much more. A 4-year degree is also a long time. A lot could have changed.

I’m curious. How are you thinking about AI in your engineering? Is it a useful, a distraction, or a threat to the craft itself? Where do you draw the line?
by TacticalCoder | 2025-06-01 13:14:08+00:00
The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga (I think an Amiga with a stock MIDI port would have been a homerun).

I saw Atari ST in music studios well into the late 90s/early 2000s because back then quiet beige PCs weren't a thing yet: PCs virtually all came with super noisy fans, which was a big no-no for music studios.

A buddy would bring his Korg synth to my neighbour's house and hook it to their Atari ST. Another dude I remember would play drums from Dire Straits song from his Atari ST hooked to some MIDI gear and then he'd take his guitar and play Dire Straits songs.

These were the days.

I'm not surprised some musicians still use them. If I'm not mistaken Kavinsky (who became famous after the movie Drive came out but recently had renewed interest for he performed at the Olympics games' ceremony) started doing music at a late age, on an Atari ST a friend of his game him.

As an anecdote PCs were so noisy that I asked my neighbour (an electrical engineer) if it was possible to come up with a system where the fan would slow down when the CPU wasn't too hot: and sure enough we were then modding our PSUs with "thermistors" and we'd be calibrating our tiny hack, no shit, with boiling water in the kitchen (ah clueless teenagers). Funnily enough about 10 years later every single PSU had variable fan speed.

That's the thing: we were used to quiet 8-bit and then 16-bit computers and when we had to move to these piece-of-shit PCs (but with fast CPUs / FPUs and that were upgradeable), we had to endure these painful ultra noisy CPU/PSU fans (and HDDs).

So the Atari ST just made sense. You could have these super fast (compared to Atari ST) PCs but they were noisy, fugly, piece of unbearable shits that the cool guys in music studios simply wouldn't tolerate back then.

Now of course at some point PCs became just too good and several brands started focusing on quietness and it was then possible to have a totally silent PC, both looking cool and being literally cool (big heatsink, quiet fans, etc.).

But yeah the Atari ST was and still is certainly for some a thing for creating music.

Lots of respect to the Atari ST for his MIDI port (and that comes from a Commodore Amiga owner and fan).
by grumpymuppet | 2025-06-01 13:14:23+00:00
Right. There are two problems with software generally like this: interface and culture.

Becoming expert at a tool like git involves building familiarity with the concepts involved. While it's not entirely hidden in the --help and manual pages, the descriptions provided there do not consistently use higher levels semantic descriptions of the transformations. You are REQUIRED to look elsewhere to understand or worse -- develop a privately held theory of what's actually happening.

Culturally, a lot of engineers have a basic ethos of "getting things done". Getting the job of the moment done is a "win". There are tons of how do do XYZ articles that are separated from "why" and unmarried from useful additional context.

Like, one should be proud of learning a new tool, but it shouldn't be a personal endeavor to conquer Everest. I think it would do a LOT of good for tools -- especially collaboration tools -- to have completely standard introductions that the community enforced in collaboration. "Oh you don't know XYZ? You probably haven't read the standard introduction."
by kbolino | 2025-06-01 13:17:40+00:00
Ok, but in the context of this thread, it is important. Remember that I'm replying to the statement "For added assurance, just round to the nearest cent after each operation." That is misleading advice and the behavior of floats is just context for why.

First of all, a lot of languages don't include arbitrary rounding in their math libraries at all, only having rounding to integers. Second, in the docs of Python, which does have arbitrary rounding, it specifically says:

Note: The behavior of round() for floats can be surprising: for example, round(2.675, 2) gives 2.67 instead of the expected 2.68. [...]

Thus I think what I said stands: you cannot round to nearest cent reliably all the time, assuming cent means 0.01. The only rounding you can sort of trust is display rounding because it actually happens after converting to base 10. It's why 2.675 will print as 2.675 in Python even though it won't round as you'd expect. But you'd only do that once at the end of a chain of operations.

In a lot of cases, errors like these don't matter, but the key point is that if the errors don't matter, then they don't need to be "assured" away by dubious rounding either.
by nemomarx | 2025-06-01 13:18:05+00:00
I feel like part of why comments here are thought provoking is because they're grounded in something? It's not quite coordination, but if someone talks about using software at a startup or small company I do assume they're genuine about that, which tells you more about something being practical in the real world.

And use cases like bringing up an issue on HN to get companies to reach out to you and fix it would be much harder with llms taking up the bandwidth probably.
by noperator | 2025-06-01 13:18:28+00:00
You can also use https://github.com/noperator/raink to brainstorm TLDs that are relevant to some topic you care about. For example:

curl -s https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt | raink -f /dev/stdin -p 'which of these TLDs is most related to the concept of "hacking"?' | jq -r 'map(.value)[:10]' [ "BLACK", "COMSEC", "TOOLS", "SECURITY", "ZERO", "EXPOSED", "FORUM", "SHELL", "BOT", "SOFTWARE" ]

Those are all in the IANA list but not all can be registered—just showing as PoC. See https://bishopfox.com/blog/raink-llms-document-ranking for more background.
by rxtexit | 2025-06-01 13:19:24+00:00
I know some women that have some issues with men in general, largely and understandably from childhood abuse.

They express this though with dissociation from men when possible.

They aren't going to harass men online, quite the opposite.

It just seems like misogyny is vastly easier to study than misandry. These concepts are so asymetric that I am not sure misandry is even a good characterization of the process.
by lioeters | 2025-06-01 13:20:11+00:00
> thankfully Next.js / Vercel have proposed to implement (and dogfood) adapters that allow this functionality to be implemented on different platforms with a consistent API:

Seeing efforts like this (started by the main dev of Next.js working at Vercel) convinces me that the Vercel team is honestly trying to be a good steward with their influence on the React ecosystem, and in general being a beneficial community player. Of course as a VC-funded company its purpose is self-serving, but I think they're playing it pretty respectably.

That said, there's no way I'm going to run Next.js as part of a server in production. It's way too fat and complicated. I'll stick with using it as a static site generator, until I replace it with something simpler like Vite and friends.
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-01 13:20:19+00:00
> Women naturally "longhouse" when men let them

For anyone else confused about a reference to indigenous dwellings:

"[it’s] a slang expression and a metaphorical concept popularized among the far-right and alt-right used to refer to a matriarchal society that is distinguished by suppressing non-conformity by canceling individuals..." [0]

The source of that nugget of knowledge, goes on to tell its slang origins:

"In 2018, far-right Internet personality and writer Bronze Age Pervert published the book Bronze Age Mindset, which contained criticisms of modern society. In the book, Bronze Age Pervert compares the modern leftist males to the dwellers of the longhouse, ‘browbeaten and ruled by obese mammies who instilled in them socialism and feminism’"

Guess now I know... (and knowing is half the battle!)

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-longhouse
by gitaarik | 2025-06-01 13:20:54+00:00
Well chess has a very limited set of rules and playing field. And the way to win in chess is to be able to think forward, how all the moves could play out, and pick the best one. This is relatively easy to create an algorithm for that surpasses humans. That is what computers are good at: executing specific algorithms very fast. A computer will always beat a human to that.

So such algorithms can replace certain functions of humans, but they can't replace the human as a whole. And that is the same with LLMs. They save us time for repetative tasks, but they can't replace all of our functions. In the end an LLM is a comprehensive algorithm constantly updated with machine learning. It's very helpful, but it has its limits. The limit is constantly surpassed, but it will never replace a full human. To do that you need to do a whole lot more than a comprehensive machine learning algorithm. They can get very close to something that looks like a human, but there will always be something lacking. Which then again can be improved upon, but you never reach the same level.

That is why I don't worry about AI taking our jobs. They replace certain functions, which will make our job easier. I don't see myself as a coder, I see myself as a system designer. I don't mind if AIs take over (certain parts of) the coding process (once they're good enough). It will just make software development easier and faster. I don't think there will be less demand for software developers.

It will change our jobs, and we'll have to adapt to that. But that is always what happens with new technology. You have to grow along with the changes and not expect that you can keep doing the same thing for the same value. But I think that for most software developers that isn't news. In the old days people were programming in assembly, then compiled languages came and then higher level languages. Now we have LLMs, which (when they become good enough) will just be another layer of abstraction.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-01 13:21:53+00:00
Having links in comments has always been problematic.

For myself, I usually link to my own stuff; not because I am interested in promoting it, but as relevant backup/enhancement of what I am writing about. I think that a link to an article that goes into depth, or to a GitHub repo, is better than a rough (and lengthy) summary in a comment. It also gives others the opportunity to verify what I say. I like to stand behind my words.

I suspect that more than a few HN members have written karmabots, and also attackbots.
by tomburgs | 2025-06-01 13:21:55+00:00
> I think one of the regrets is only doing the ML API and not the end-user apps. It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

I'm curious why this is not preferable? You can focus on your core competency and I imagine you have enough apps using your API that it more than makes up for getting only a small slice of revenue from each.
by Aldipower | 2025-06-01 13:21:58+00:00
I own 4 Mega STe and I am using them almost daily. One of them, the rest is spare parts. Producing music with it. The Atari is my MIDI master clock and central piece of MIDI sequencing together with Cubase 3.1 for the Atari. Seriously the MIDI timing is unbeaten until today! The MIDI ports are directly attached to the CIA chip which is again directly connected to the Motorola 68k CPU. Runs absolutely stable even 35 years later. No crashes what so ever and also no distractions by updates or "phone home applications". It just works, distractless! Shame on the "present future".
by tialaramex | 2025-06-01 13:23:22+00:00
One habit worth trying to adopt early in this mode is running clippy, Rust's linter. Typically invoked as `cargo clippy`

Clippy likes idiomatic Rust and will suggest you change code that's not idiomatic into code which is, even when the machine code would be completely identical - the rationale being that the maintainer (later you with more Rust knowledge, a colleague, or even some stranger) is more likely to follow the idiomatic Rust and the whole point of source code is that it's for humans not machines.

Clippy is no substitute for a capable human reviewer, it has no sense of taste or style, no higher level understanding of the problem, but it's free and it's right there and unlike a human reviewer you won't feel judged which can be sensitive when you're learning a new language and are used to having mastery.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-01 13:23:50+00:00
"We can't consider every single block a community, a community is a town or even a metro area."

And that's how you end up with the interstate cutting off the poor/black section of town from the rest. Of course there are different levels of community, but there tends to be some out-group that gets the short stick. If every neighborhood says no to new section 8 housing, where does it go?

Yeah, preferences vary by demographic and market, but overall, 65% of people want a SFH and the average preferred size has increased continuously over the past few generations.

The restiction isn't that people don't want to live there. The restriction is because you're intermingling the people who want SFH lifestyle with people who want multi-family home lifestyle. Of course the SFH current residents are concerned about the potential issues caused by neighbor renters, parking, etc. Even SFH rental properties are similarly looked down on due to the common problems that some tenants cause (noise, lack of respect for property, etc).
by nixpulvis | 2025-06-01 13:24:02+00:00
I guess tests are like being on call, supporting outages and the like, while homework more closely mirrors feature development. We also had a number of group assignments and labs which required on-demand work but were more project based than tests.

My main point is that while testing knowledge in small bits is useful for grading, it's less where I got value as a learner.
by mpeg | 2025-06-01 13:24:32+00:00
That's both genius and a massive hack, love it.

For those who are wondering: they alias @typing.overload as @ovld only for type checkers.

Normally, @typing.overload is a way to define multiple function signatures with empty bodies so your type checker can work nicely with functions that for example only return a certain type when called with a certain signature, but the function implementation is left to you and usually involves a bunch of runtime type checks to branch your logic the right way
by constantcrying | 2025-06-01 13:25:09+00:00
The real question is what is the point of education and what is the point of teaching those who do not want to learn?

Is the point of the homework to have students just do some work or is it a tool to encourage them to more deeply engage with the material? If it is the former, then what is wrong with using LLMs? If it is the latter, then students should be judged based on their understanding, which they have to demonstrate in a scenario where deception is very hard or near impossible.

The real problem is students not wanting to learn. And what is the point of educating people who do not want to learn?
by intended | 2025-06-01 13:27:09+00:00
This keeps me up at night too. I’d like to stake the position that LLMs are antagonistic to the (beleaguered) idea of an internet.

LLMs increase the burden of effort on users to successfully share information with other humans.

LLMs are already close to indistinguishable from humans in chat; Bots are already better at persuading humans[1]. Suggesting that users who feel ineffective at conveying their ideas online, are better served by having a bot do it for them.

All of this, is effectively putting a fitness function on online interactions, increasing the cognitive effort required for humans to interact or be heard. I dont see this playing out in a healthy manner. The only steady state I can envision is where we assume that we ONLY talk to bots online.

Free speech and the market place of ideas, sees us bouncing ideas off of each other. Our way of refining our thoughts and forcing ourselves to test our ideas. This is the conversation that is meant to be the bedrock of democratic societies.

It does not envisage an environment where the exchange of ideas is into a bot.

Yes yes, this is a sky is falling view - not everyone is going to fall off the deep end, and not everyone is going to use a bot.

In a funny way, LLMs will outcompete average forum critters and trolls for their ecological niches.

[1] (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09662)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-01 13:27:11+00:00
I have made it a point to be un-anonymous, for the last few years. If you look at my HN handle, it's easy to see who I am, and to look at my work.

This was not always the case. I used to be a Grade A asshole, and have a lot to atone for.

I also like to make as much of my work open, as I can.
by avs733 | 2025-06-01 13:28:43+00:00
This is awesome. I think a problem to wider adoption of this is going to be verification.

This would be very useful for the aerospace industry. However the reason they still use things like MATLAB is less about “the best software in terms of efficiency or modern code structures is the stability and backing of it. I’ve seen stacks that are matlab transcompiled to Fortran loaded onto aircraft…as late as 2015.

The other detail, and without reading the documentation fully, is variable accuracy in types would be something interesting to have as a controlled set of options.
by matt_s | 2025-06-01 13:30:12+00:00
People love their craft and want to really understand how a tool works. They might start with taking a tool apart, looking at how it works, putting it back together and then using it for a bit. Then they need a similar tool for a slightly different use case, so they start making one themselves. Maybe they have more specific, detailed needs than existing tools. Maybe there is something about the tool that annoys them or they think they could make it work better. This keeps going over time.

> This was the craftsman’s ‘Golden Age’ and much time and trouble was taken over the design of tools. Craftsmen were being called upon to do more skilful and exacting work and the use of tools and the interest in development had become very widespread.

Above pulled from A Brief History of the Woodworking Plane [0]. A woodworking tool that has evolved over 2,000 years. Now there are electric planers, handheld electric planers and lots of heavy machinery that do the same thing in a very automated way. If a company is mass producing kitchen cabinets, they aren't hand planing edges on boards, a machine is doing all that work.

I feel like with AI we are on the cusp of moving beyond a "Golden age" and into an "industrial age" for coding, where it will become more important to have code that AI understands vs. something that is carefully crafted. Simple business pressure will demand it (whether we like it or not). The difference with hand planes (and other woodworking tools/concepts) is that a lot of people can appreciate a piece of furniture and the craft that went into it by opening a drawer and seeing hand cut dovetails for example. When it comes to digital products, none of the consumers of the product will really care about the craftsman that created a JS library that they are indirectly using on a web site that has its "view source" hidden with minification/obfuscation.

[0] https://www.handplane.com/879/a-brief-history-of-the-woodwor...
by kaashif | 2025-06-01 13:31:39+00:00
Can you explain how this is rent seeking? It seems to be straightforwardly not rent seeking.

1. Company develops model, invests in research, hardware, and software.

2. Company sells access to the model.

(1) is the step that makes this not rent seeking.

Rent seeking is when you profit from something you didn't earn - land rent, monopoly profits, protectionism.