MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jdkoeck | 2025-06-27 12:41:08+00:00
> Hard not to laugh out loud at "We know what good syntax for templating looks like."

First of all, it's not very nice to laugh in the face of someone advocating for progress on the web platform, which benefits everyone.

Second of all, yes we do now know what good syntax for templating is, it's basically jsx (and I'm saying this as someone who's really not a fan of React). It took the whole web by storm, it's been adapted for all kinds of frameworks, and it's undeniable that all js templating systems converged towards common attributes: templates-as-expressions, composition via nesting and control flow with just javascript (instead of specific template syntax).
by mbreese | 2025-06-27 12:41:29+00:00
> keep having to pay the guy if you want copies.

This is the key point. If you hire an actor for a live stage show, it is a one time fee. The live show happens, the tickets are sold, the actor gets paid, and at the end of the day everyone goes home.

But what if you recorded that show? You’ve now made a copy of a performance. When you sell a copy of that recording, you’ve made a copy of the actors work. But you only paid for the single live show, so or course there should be some kind of further compensation. The original payment was to see their one-time performance. The actor still owns the artistic/intellectual rights to their interpretation/performance. If you want a copy of that, they need to get paid.

For software developers, they are paid specifically to create intellectual property and as part of their employment agreement, any IP rights belong to the company. But this is part of their contract.

It’s all in how the employment agreements are setup. Any actor/photographer/etc could be hired to a contract that would allow unlimited copies without royalties. It happens all the time. But. if you are an actor with enough clout, such a contract would be very expensive. I’d also imagine stock photo shoots work this way. The models are paid a one-time fee with an unlimited release.

But, I think the key part is that contracts with royalties are cheaper (cashflow) for the producers. The actors get paid a small fixed amount with a percentage of the ongoing profits. The alternative would be a large payout initially with no share of the profits. Both contracts are possible, but the former spreads the risk (and rewards) across a larger pool of people.

Whether or not this applies to Apple and foundational use of software is a different story, but it’s pretty well established for arts.
by astura | 2025-06-27 12:41:52+00:00
I'm well into my 40s. I've noticed aging in almost all my friends and work colleagues my age as well as those up to 10 years younger than me. I haven't noticeability aged myself yet though. Don't have any grey hairs, no wrinkles, don't look older than I did in my 20s.

It's not just my perception either, other people assume I'm early 20s.

I can't really relate to the physical stuff though because muscle sores after training was always 3 days for me and it was always difficult to keep VO2max up, even in my early teens. So I guess I just started out in middle age.
by benreesman | 2025-06-27 12:42:15+00:00
The meme that static linking is slow or produces anything other than the best executables is demonstrably false and the result of surprisingly sinister agendas. Get out readelf and nm and PS sometime and do the arithematic: most programs don't link much of glibc (and its static link is broken by design, musl is better at just about everything). Matt Godbolt has a great talk about how dynamic linking actually works that should give anyone pause.

DLLs got their start when early windowing systems didn't quite fit on the workstations of the era in the late 80s / early 90s.

In about 4 minutes both Microsoft and GNU were like, "let me get this straight, it will never work on another system and I can silently change it whenever I want?" Debian went along because it gives distro maintainers degrees of freedom they like and don't bear the costs of.

Fast forward 30 years and Docker is too profitable a problem to fix by the simple expedient of calling a stable kernel ABI on anything, and don't even get me started on how penetrated everything but libressl and libsodium are. Protip: TLS is popular with the establishment because even Wireshark requires special settings and privileges for a user to see their own traffic, security patches my ass. eBPF is easier.

Dynamic linking moves control from users to vendors and governments at ruinous cost in performance, props up bloated industries like the cloud compute and Docker industrial complex, and should die in a fire.

Don't take my word for it, swing by cat-v.org sometimes and see what the authors of Unix have to say about it.

I'll save the rant about how rustc somehow manages to be slower than clang++ and clang-tidy combined for another day.
by ehutch79 | 2025-06-27 12:42:20+00:00
I disagree on it being a good crm.

A lot of my problems show up on lists like “25 falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”. These were things that were maybe acceptable in 1999, because they didn’t know better, but only having a single street line is a problem.

I could rant, but half of it would be sales directors who have never used Salesforce shooting us in the foot.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-27 12:42:27+00:00
Maybe so, although I don't recall it being that bad.

But Go wasn't designed for CLI apps. It was designed for writing highly multi-threaded servers at Google, according to the designers, hence the focus on features like goroutines. And in that context startup time just doesn't matter. Startup time of servers at Google was (in that era) dominated by cluster scheduling, connecting to backends, loading reference data and so on. Nothing that a change in programming language would have fixed.

Google didn't use classloader based frameworks so that also wasn't relevant.
by stavros | 2025-06-27 12:43:00+00:00
We need to clarify the terms we use, then. I'm not "buying" a phone, I'm leasing one, with Apple being able to choose what I can and can't do on it.

The other day my car got an update that decided to not let sideloaded apps access the internet. The infotainment system went from amazing to useless in one tiny update, just because BYD doesn't want me to have useful apps. I can't even open my garage door without fumbling for my phone any more.
by alkonaut | 2025-06-27 12:43:01+00:00
WYSIWYG doesn't necessarily mean you are limited to using some designer and can't edit code. It's enough (and better) to have a live preview, than a full designer. It just means you see live what the code does, at the point when you write it, not later when you run it.

When hand-writing XAML or similar, it's great to see the UI created live. Like editing markdown and seeing the preview, versus editing markdown and not seeing the preview.
by tmtvl | 2025-06-27 12:43:07+00:00
The core point, to me, seemed to be about limiting factors in language extension. To allow something like:

my_if (points <= 100, printf ("%D", points), error ("Invalid point total"));

Where the various parameters are lazily evaluated. Or like:

frobnicate (frazzle: foo, frozzle: bar, frizzle: baz);

Where frazzle, frozzle, and frizzle are position-independent keyword variables.

Allowing those in C would require a modicum of effort, while other languages make these kinds of syntax extension fairly easy.
by atombender | 2025-06-27 12:43:14+00:00
There are concerns around safety. Compounding is somewhat controversial because they produce versions of FDA-approved drugs that are not FDA-approved, and may use chemical formulations (such as semaglutide salts) that aren't FDA-approved. [1]

The problem isn't that compounding pharmacies provide cheap versions of the same drug, it's that the compounding process doesn't produce exactly the same drug, and hasn't undergone the same stringent quality controls as Wegovy etc.

Ideally, these drugs should be cheap. The compounding is only done because there's a loophole that provides a market opportunity. The correct solution would be to improve the regulations in a way that would let more manufacturers produce safe generics.

[1] https://www.goodrx.com/classes/glp-1-agonists/compounded-sem...
by gotoeleven | 2025-06-27 12:43:41+00:00
I said: >the tariffs will encourage the creation of more, better, jobs in the US through re-shoring

they said: >that isn't possible for any production other than a primitive one.

What I find bizarre in this discussion is the refusal to even acknowledge that there are other economic effects at play besides the first order effect of tariffs increasing the cost of imports. A second order effect is to make building things domestically relatively cheaper, all other things being equal, because those things won't be subject to the tariff. Will the net effect be positive or negative? Who knows. But people refusing to even acknowledge that there are effects that cut both ways tells me that they are dishonest or stupid and you probably can't have much of a conversation with them.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-27 12:43:52+00:00
You didn't actually indicate a downside to using xslt, and yes it would fit your use case of a static include for a shared menu, though the better way to do it is to move all of the shared pieces of your site into the template and then each page is just its content. Sort of like using a shared CSS file.

To just do the menu, if your site is xhtml, IIRC you could link to the template, use a <my-menu> in the page, and then the template just gives a rule to expand that to your menu.
by nyeah | 2025-06-27 12:43:54+00:00
Or "garbage in, garbage out"? But that's really about computers. And maybe it is name calling. Is there no standard name for this? Or not in English?

Maybe it's similar to the "Good Student" picture. Bright within a given assignment, but taking the assignment to be immutable, or taking no interest in where the assignment comes from.

Or I've heard a saying "nobody will pay you to solve problems that they've already defined clearly."
by appsDev | 2025-06-27 12:44:07+00:00
Hello HN Community!

I just launched an app to make the caps lock key actually useful! It turns your caps lock key into a trigger for a stopwatch in your menu bar.

The app does not need Accessibility or Input Monitoring permission.

The inspiration came from personal difficulty. I use a stopwatch to track how much work I get done each day. This means I turn the stopwatch on whenever I am being productive, and have to toggle it dozens of times a day.

It has taken me several attempts to get it to work - including tons of failed approaches as well. Sometimes it would work in Xcode but not in production, but I finally got it to work reliably now!

The app is paid since it took me a lot of time to find the right approach to make it work, but if someone really needs a promo code please let me know and I will provide one in the comments.

Thanks for reading! (and if you have any other ideas with this concept you would want to see made feel free to share in the comments!) :)
by tannhaeuser | 2025-06-27 12:45:14+00:00
> bloat of '00s enterprise XML

True, and it's even more sad that XML was originally just intended as a simplified subset of SGML (HTML's meta syntax with tag inference and other shortforms) for delivery of markup on the web and to evolve markup vocabularies and capabilities of browsers (of which only SVG and MathML made it). But when the web hype took over, W3C (MS) came up with SOAP, WS-this and WS-that, and a number of programming languages based on XML including XSLT (don't tell HNers it was originally Scheme but absolutely had to be XML just like JavaScript had to be named after Java; such was the madness).
by lucianbr | 2025-06-27 12:45:16+00:00
> that decreases their risk if the TV show or movie doesn't do well.

The risk is not decreased. The risk is the same, just moved around. Instead of the producers risking not making a certain amount of profit, now you have the risk that the actor only asked and got a paltry sum for a runaway success.

The uncertainty of how a movie will fare cannot be removed from existence through contracts or financial arrangements. But you can make it so some other party suffers instead of you.

...it's possible we have the same opinion. I'm not sure if this is a counter argument or just a rephrasing :)
by akmarinov | 2025-06-27 12:45:16+00:00
Sorry, meant Phil Schiller, the only one to question whether a 27% commission is wise.

> Prior to the June 20 meeting, there were individuals within Apple who were advocating for a commission, and others advocating for no commission. Those advocating for a commission included Mr. Maestri and Mr. Roman. Mr. Schiller disagreed. In an email, Mr. Schiller relayed that, with respect to the proposal for “a 27% commission for 24 hours,” “I have already explained my many issues with the commission concept,” and that “clearly I am not on team commission/fee.” Mr. Schiller testified that, at the time, he “had a question of whether we would be able to charge a commission” under the Injunction, a concern which he communicated.
by Retric | 2025-06-27 12:45:34+00:00
It’s not that difficult to hit basic exercise targets as part of your lifestyle without realizing it. Going from an apartment to a two bedroom house involves a great deal of climbing up and down stairs per week. Taking a dog on a walk involves you yourself walking etc.

People talk about being a couch potato because there’s a massive difference between activities that involve passively sitting and things like gardening that require occasional movement that adds up over time.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-27 12:46:35+00:00
While landmines have the obvious explosive and shrapnel first order effect of causing great harm, I'm wondering about the subtler effects of fiber optic cable pollution.

What happens when someone uses agricultural machinery on a field littered with cable, both to machinery and people? What are the consequences of consuming broken bits of cable that may mingle into produce?

And most critically, if the above are issues, how do you then remove cable from fields at scale? It would seem maddening to try to detect and gather kilometers of tangled glass.
by protimewaster | 2025-06-27 12:47:10+00:00
AFAIK this is pretty common on iOS too. People use AltStore or similar to auto-sideload Spotify++ or similar every week.

I'm not convinced that the reason people on Apple devices are more willing to pay is because it's harder to pirate. Piracy on Mac is just as easy on Windows, but the typical view is that, like with iPhone vs. Android, Mac users are more willing to pay than Windows users.

I think the real explanation is that there are a lot of cheap Android devices throughout the world, and people who are trying to save money on devices also try to save money on apps. I suspect that if you look at the piracy rates for just the $1000+ Android devices, they won't be that much different than for the $1000+ iPhones.
by fibbidd | 2025-06-27 12:47:26+00:00
> Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it.

Yes, I have similar issue with motivation I have noticed, if I am presented with a problem to solve and I can see the solution before implementing anything, I am not really interested in coding the solution and testing it. I.e. the abstract or logical proof of the solution is sufficient for me (the fun part), but the actual coding, fixing some environmental problem and details of creating a working solution are (usually) much more boring - because they are almost always essentially the same.
by jraph | 2025-06-27 12:48:53+00:00
I agree that DOM lists not being real arrays is a pita. I can understand why for getElementBy* methods which return live lists, but it's less clear for those methods returning fixed lists.

But to me, these are minor inconveniences and habits. A thin wrapper can get you there easily if you care enough. I personally dislike this array/element confusion that jQuery adds.
by harperlee | 2025-06-27 12:50:00+00:00
I stand corrected, what is illegal is to operate them continuously, not to just have them as I simplified above.

"If, for example, you use a continuous recording of the road in which other vehicles' license plates are visible to defend yourself against a traffic ticket, you could be violating data protection, a serious offense that could be punishable by a fine of up to 300,000 euros."

https://www.race.es/camara-para-coche
by dleeftink | 2025-06-27 12:50:18+00:00
How about instead of scaling up, try scaling-in? Promise superior internal market services and local storage/processing instead of competing on the global square. Kagi's subscription model comes to mind.

The myth of infinite start-up scaling is just that, a myth. We need a more pragmatic, context sensitive startup market, not one chasing scale-up stories.
by mmarian | 2025-06-27 12:50:38+00:00
I haven't tried the service, but I'd like to say that it feels like unnecessary automation. My understanding of screening calls is that they're not really there to handle custom questions; if that were the case, you might as well have the candidate fill an application form. And even if you build an automated solution, the person who answers the call can use an automated solution as well and neutralize the value.

The real reason, in my opinion, is that the caller checks how you answer the questions. ie do you sound like someone who can work well with other people in the team. That's it. And that's something that's hard for an AI to judge.
by wk_end | 2025-06-27 12:51:30+00:00
I don’t think your link is showing what you want it to show - it’s showing costs, but not necessarily any sort of counterfactual delta AFAICT.

There’s been a number of studies on this, and they do seem to suggest that overall smoking saves society money. E.g. here’s one from Finland

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-27 12:52:13+00:00
“Chinese authorities have far-reaching access rights to personal data within the sphere of influence of Chinese companies,”

In China, there is no effective legal wall of separation between "company" and "government".

In other words, if the Chinese "government" wants data from a Chinese "company", there is no legal basis for the "company" to refuse.

Don't take my word for it, just ask JacK Ma --- if you can find him.
by vslira | 2025-06-27 12:52:30+00:00
Basically any member of a group can unilaterally send all of its text content to a system that understands it in natural language. In light of recent moves all over the world of governments regulating online speech, I'm worried that the gravity pull is in the direction of somehow utilizing these capabilities in ways that might not be aligned with users.

I'm not accusing Meta of planning to do this, by the way: I'm afraid it might be forced to.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-27 12:52:55+00:00
My problem with Peter Thiel is he’s too political in his speech. It’s not all consuming —- In this interview he’s not so bad, but in others he’ll outright lie and push MAGA talking points in ways that are not purely objective.

In one interview he said outright if Democrats won in 2024 it would be the end of Democracy, because of great replacement theory, while also in other interviews basically saying he doesn’t like Democracy because populous’ will never come around to his views.
by 47282847 | 2025-06-27 12:53:23+00:00
Maybe I’m overthinking it, but don’t see this happening. Not now, not by 2028. 2050 maybe, and I don’t know if I would like the centralized United States of Europe that I see as requirement for this to happen in any meaningful way. Federation and independence has its downsides, but to me the benefits of the European way of plurality are much more preferable.

(Co-founder of various European and US entities)
by bluGill | 2025-06-27 12:53:28+00:00
Sure, but we can trade off computer power. Pi level computers can fly a straight line inside and explode in the middle (you are likely running several drones so each flys to a pattern hoping to get something useful inside). While flying to the middle they can do some image recognition, and if something looks like a high priority target they can target that, if not exploding in the middle will do something. The more powerful computer you put on (were powerful is often more expensive though not always) the better you can find targets

The important point in this is the drone will explode before it could reach anything not a target. It can sometimes find a better target than a pattern. In the ideal case you might fly it all the way, but if you lose radio over enemy territory anything the drone can find needs to die anyway so it may as well attempt to find something and kill it.
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by adityavinodh | 2025-06-27 12:54:07+00:00
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by 010101010101 | 2025-06-27 12:54:29+00:00
I think it’s pretty well understood that the money/happiness relationship is initially very strongly correlated but reaches a point of rapidly diminishing returns once a certain economic threshold is met. i.e. it’s nearly impossible to be “happy” if you’re experiencing food shortages because you can’t afford food consistently, but it’s also possible to be “unhappy” if you didn’t get the right color Porsche for your 16th birthday
by palata | 2025-06-27 12:55:54+00:00
> the problems described in the article are already solved, but that Ukraine (and Russia) couldn't get their hands on enough of the more capable FPV drones due to those being too expensive or not produced in large enough quantities.

Yes, that's what I think. And I believe that's what the article says: "The FPV drones we currently use are not ideal".

Then people say "yeah but they will improve", to which I answer: "or maybe not so much". Simply because better systems already exist, are mass-produced and are more expensive.
by ecocentrik | 2025-06-27 12:55:55+00:00
> but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.

In a hostile environment a lack of prior experience or a lack of guidance with prior experience can mean death in a few days. The mathematician has no time to update priors. A nutritional deficit or a lack of adequate shelter will result in a rapid cognitive decline.

IQ as a predictor of health seems like the most relevant point in the research to this hypothetical situation.
by femto | 2025-06-27 12:56:32+00:00
They're actually in pretty serious trouble as a species, with potential to go extinct.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-17/bogong-moth-populatio...

I can remember bogon moths all over the fly-screens on our house windows at nighttime in Sydney 50 years ago. In the last 30 years or so, I've seen one bogon moth in Sydney (a couple of years ago).
by samuell | 2025-06-27 12:57:01+00:00
In the early 2000s, XSLT allowed me as a late teenager with some HTML experience but without real coding skills (I could copy some lines of PHP from various forums and get it to work) to build a somewhat fancy intranet for a local car shop, complete with automatic styling of a feed of car info from a nationwide online sales portal.

Somehow it took me many years, basically until starting uni and taking a proper programming class, before I started feeling like I could realize my ideas in a normal programming language.

XSLT was a kind of tech that allowed a non-coder like me to step by step figure out how to get things to show on the screen.

I think XSLT really has some strong points, in this regard at least.