MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Duanemclemore | 2025-07-13 16:58:19+00:00
Great read - it's nice to see something I take for granted with fresh eyes (I think I've read all the Gibson). The fact that it's someone steeped in the genre humble enough to go back to a foundational text is a great device for explaining it.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the Apple adaptation. I think they did as good a job as The Peripheral deserved (although it did end on a really dumb note). Although Gibson's writing has gotten less strong as he's aged, his world-building is still top-notch and some good writers of narrative taking a pass at it was I think mostly successful.

The Sprawl Trilogy is great front to back, each book has its charms. And of course the world is so rich, beyond Neuromancer. So if they do it right they could set themselves up for a compelling multi-season series.

The question with Neuromancer that took until now to start realizing was - how do you do it and not look like a fool by mangling a classic? I think that its world has advanced sufficiently (as the author of this piece highlights) that a lot of the kinks have been worked out by reality. Now, a central conceit of an ultra technological society without cell phones is going to be interesting in and of itself! I'll stop now, but excited to see this continue.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-13 16:59:32+00:00
Ive been a resident of two countries and am a citzen of the USA. 2 years Norway. 3 years Bahamas. Along with a lot of work in Europe and Asia. So Ive witnessed a wide spectrum of governments, and have been detained by all of these governments at some point for reasons Im not going to speak on.

Maybe its because im a citizen of the USA and they have the ultimate power over me, but i felt the most terrified when under their custody. Hell in the Bahamas the officials took me to Burger King (in handcuffs lol). To be clear im not a criminal I just have a wierd line of work that people question.
by hollerith | 2025-07-13 17:01:04+00:00
Irrelevant to the OP unless you explain why North Koreans would be prevented from obtaining these licenses: it's not like there aren't competent developers in North Korea.

If your explanation is that the license grantor will verify that the applicant is a resident of a Western country, than the employer can just do the same verification of job applicants, dispensing with the need for the occupational license.
by p_ing | 2025-07-13 17:01:43+00:00
The author of this article clearly has a bent in mind. The average user doesn't care about any particular technology in an OS that isn't visible, much like anything else they're not concerned with learning about. They just want to do their work, be it on Windows, macOS, flavor-of-Linux, AmigaOS, etc.

Then the author gets into gems about how users interact with their computer via GUIs, but tpm.msc (a GUI, mind you) is somehow set apart; of course Windows includes many other legacy MMCs, the most valuable being the Event Viewer. That said, even a corporate end user has no business being in tpm.msc.

The author points to blog posts from Microsoft touting TPMs and that being a reason to upgrade to Windows 11 -- except the author fails to note those are targeted at IT Pros/upper mgmt of various sorts, not the home user.

IT Pros (generally) do care about security and the benefits of new tech.

(But holy shit neowin is awful -- all of their links point to OTHER neowin articles, some of those links references back to other articles previously link -- and they even take quoted Microsoft content and add their own links in the quotes)
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-13 17:01:44+00:00
> All of those sports are far more niche than sports where the competitors compete directly against each other.

They might not be your field of expertise but calling (for example) Rally as “niche” is insanely off the mark.

> I can give you an example

Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.

Well done on the triathlon though. It’s a very tough sport to get any good at.

I tried a few times but hated the running part haha
by shitonU2 | 2025-07-13 17:02:52+00:00
Being neither an expert nor illiterate I've been blocked, very recently, from websites vital to me. Whether caused by Microsoft (most likely) or Google (less so) I've never had problems like this before. Usually, a little patience and they resolve the issue in short order. I hope this is the case now. Long ago I used IE, then Firefox and finally settled on Chrome. These current issues, if they persist, will be enough to make me move.
by grishka | 2025-07-13 17:03:25+00:00
To me the magical part about CRTs is color. I don't quite understand how the shadow mask works. Like, yeah, there are three guns, one for each color channel, and the openings in the mask match their layout, and somehow the beam coming out of each gun can only ever hit its corresponding phosphor dots. Even after being deflected. But... how? Also, wouldn't the deflection coils affect each of the three beams slightly differently?
by Retric | 2025-07-13 17:03:59+00:00
Looking up manuals, researching products before purchasing them, there’s a bunch of reasons to go to a manufacturer’s website.

Firmware updates can fix compatibility long after a purchase, it’s not just a question of whether something works on day 1 but day 540. IE why isn’t this EV charger taking to the solar inverter so it preferentially charges the car over sending energy to the grid? Firmware fix and suddenly it all works.
by paradox460 | 2025-07-13 17:05:02+00:00
This works because you're deliberately targeting a set of features Firefox supports, and the overwhelming majority of the time they're a subset of what Chrome (and increasingly, Safari) support

Read over the various web platform blogs out there, and keep a tally of how many times you'll see "Firefox gains support for XYZ in 139, bringing it to widespread availability. Chrome has supported this since 32 and Safari since version 16"

And many of these are fantastically useful features. Sure, they're not ground breaking building blocks like in the old days when IE didn't even support certain types of box model, but they're echos of the past
by wslh | 2025-07-13 17:05:11+00:00
In the 1980s, many kids had new computers, but most were just playing games rather than programming, despite having to type a few commands to load and run them.

Today, the cybersecurity scene feels more comparable in terms of power it can provide. The "classic hacker" archetype seems less central now, overshadowed by state sponsored actors and the rise of cryptocurrency related crimes.
by rglover | 2025-07-13 17:05:35+00:00
So this is basically a modern approach to Danny Meyer's (Union Square Hospitality Group [1]) "collecting the dots" he described in his book Setting the Table [2].

His suggestion was to have staff listen to conversations (and have conversations with guests) and then record any interesting "dots" like a child having a graduation coming up or an anniversary just around the corner. That way on their next visit the staff could be well-prepared.

Click-bait headline makes you think otherwise, but this is just standard hospitality stuff.

[1] https://www.ushg.com/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Table-Transforming-Hospitalit...
by Sevii | 2025-07-13 17:05:44+00:00
I recently used claude code and go to build a metric receiving service for a weather station project. I had it build all the code for this. It created the SQL statements, the handlers, the deployment scripts, the systemd service files, the tests, a utility to generate api keys.

I think you are using the wrong language to be honest. LLMs are best at languages like Python, Javascript and Go. Relatively simple structures and huge amounts of reference code. Rust is a less common language which is much harder to write.

Did you give claude code tests and the ability to compile in a loop? It's pretty good in go at least at debugging and fixing issues when allowed to loop.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-07-13 17:05:45+00:00
Oh, after sending the previous comment and taking a piss it occurred to me.

Behold, "that stupid bar have no reason to exist in the first place except for TB devs to copy-paste some shit" mock-up:

https://ibb.co/Kx9dD2n5

And don't let me start on that idiotic vertical toolbar.
by skybrian | 2025-07-13 17:06:14+00:00
As a hobbyist I just use Arduino (via platformio). I don't think I need an interpreter of any sort for microcontrollers because recompiling and uploading the flash on hobbyist boards is quick and easy.

But I'd like to try some other compiled language someday because I'm not a big fan of C++. Any recommendations for something that works well with a Raspberry Pi Pico?
by pxc | 2025-07-13 17:06:58+00:00
My first software internship in college, I was at a Microsoft shop. I ended up astonishing the people I worked with (who were all programmers) by automating solutions to some annoyances I ran into, some menial tasks I was assigned to do, etc. I did it all with Cygwin or MSYS, although I don't remember whether the scripts were Bash or Fish.

All of my co-workers could have written their own code to automate such tasks. They even had access to PowerShell, which was by then part of Windows.

But they didn't, because they didn't have a shell worth "living in" (PowerShell is much too slow-- and to a lesser extent, too verbose-- for daily interactive use), and writing code to automate the same tasks in a "real programming language" seemed laborious and boring enough that it always made sense to put it off and live with the mess.

Solid bash experience would benefit lots of Windows developers.
by unscaled | 2025-07-13 17:07:45+00:00
The post's title is quite hyperbolic and I don't think it serves the topic right.

Memory arenas/pools have been around for ages, and binding arenas to a lexical scope is also not a new concept. C++ was doing this with RAAI, and you could implement this in Go with defer and in other languages by wrapping the scope with a closure.

This post discusses how arenas are implemented in C3 and what they're useful for, but as other people have said this doesn't make sense to compare arenas to reference counting or a borrow checker. Arenas make memory management simpler in many scenarios, and greatly reduce (but don't necessarily eliminate - without other accompanying language features) the chances of a memory leak. But they contribute very little to memory safety and they're not nearly as versatile as a full-fledged borrow checker or reference counting.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-07-13 17:08:14+00:00
Take this with a grain of salt as I'm in academia now, outside everyday software implementation in AEC, but I think that's changed / changing. My background is in the profession, and I'm a self-taught computational designer. Before going academic I built a lot of tools for small architecture firms, implemented BIM workflows for them, etc. So I talked to but didn't work with the tech tooling people at large AE or C firms. That said any time I look at the kind of software and tools being built at those companies, it seems like they've become increasingly comfortable with needing relatively full stack development.

Just one of many examples is how EHDD's EPIC [0]was successful enough to spin out [1]. There are a lot of others.

[0] https://ehdd.com/philosophy/epic/

[1] https://epic.ehdd.com/
by majormajor | 2025-07-13 17:09:10+00:00
It's not claimed to be an "objectively optimal" solution, it's claimed to represent how the world works.

I don't know where you're going with discussion of destruction and killing, but even fairly simple consumer products have any number of edge cases that initial specifications rarely capture. I'm not sure what "objectively optimal" is supposed to mean here, either.

If a spec described every edge case it would basically be executable already.

The pain of developing software at scale is that you're creating the blueprint on the fly from high-level vague directions.

Something trivial that nevertheless often results in meetings and debate in the development world:

Spec requirement 1: "Give new users a 10% discount, but only if they haven't purchased in the last year."

Spec requirement 2, a year later: "Now offer a second product the user can purchase."

Does the 10% discount apply to the second product too? Do you get the 10% discount on the second product if you purchased the first product in the last year, or does a purchase on any product consume the discount eligibility? What if the prices are very different and customers would be pissed off if a $1 discount on the cheaper product (which didn't meet their needs in the end) prevented them from getting a 10$ discount 9 months later (which they think will)? What if the second product is a superset of the first product? What if there are different relevant laws in different jurisdictions where you're selling your product?

Agents aren't going to figure out the intent of the company's principal's automatically here because the decision maker doesn't actually even realize it's a question until the implementers get into the weeds.

A sufficiently advanced agent would present all the options to the person running the task, and then the humans could decide. But then you've slowed things back down the pace of the human decision makers.

The complexities only increase as the product grows. And once you get into distributed or concurrent systems even most of our code today is ambiguous enough about intent that bugs are common.
by halostatue | 2025-07-13 17:09:22+00:00
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness

It literally was not.

The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.

Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.

Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
by switknee | 2025-07-13 17:11:06+00:00
It's a traditional medicine for malaria, and the reason china wasn't exporting it was due to the military importance of anti-malaria medicine. This was a thing before Bill Gates was rich or powerful. Since then, I'm not really aware of any suppression of the drug. The only anti-malaria treatment which has been suppressed by US interests is the vaccine, because they didn't believe it was profitable. Now that it is profitable, they're going forward with it.

Now that the white wormwood based treatment is known worldwide, there are questions about whether it should be kept in reserve like quinine. I'm not sure if things have changed, but I recall an approach is to give Artemisinin alongside another treatment, to prevent malaria from adapting. In africa, people will commonly listen to the doctor's instruction to take the whole course of medicine and will ignore it and just take half. They give the other half to a relative. This causes treatment resistant malaria to develop.
by satvikpendem | 2025-07-13 17:11:09+00:00
It's funny to read these comments, of course HN would react this way but since the vast majority of restaurant patrons are so-called normies, it doesn't make much sense to cater to HNers. In fact, most normal people actually prefer that restaurants know their interests and cater to them, it leads to their higher satisfaction and makes the restaurant experience (which includes more than just the taste of the food, for most people at least) more memorable overall.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-13 17:11:40+00:00
tbh its wild you assumed my world view was curated by headlines. You probably have had the softest, easiest life and have never put your neck on the line in a way that might result in you being locked in a cage by a government official, so you welcome the white vans, because you don't take enough risk in life for it to ever matter to you.

Wild, and offensive. How do you like it when people make assumptions about you?
by xp84 | 2025-07-13 17:12:10+00:00
Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though? Nobody's saying that grown-ups should be blocked inside a US-only Internet. We're saying that cleaning up US IP space from free no-questions-asked porn would mean that parents could allow children more freedom by choosing to allow traffic only to US IPs by default. Just like you could allow your 10-year-old child to roam around a mall if (but ONLY if) you knew it didn't have stores demonstrating sex toys out in front of them.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-13 17:13:06+00:00
On the other hand, I could see this causing a resurgence of exactly that same aesthetic. Software will be eaten by LLMs and computers will remain ubiquitous, but hardware for now remains where it was. Specialized, niche, and able to be combined into something cool only by someone knowledgeable.

Having to solder or breadboard something together is approximately the same experience it was in the 80s. And the sorts of results you can expect are similarly rare and exotic. An at home automated solution for soldering is not coming any time soon.
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-13 17:13:20+00:00
It is absolutely true for industry.

It's not just IoT. Look around you in your daily life. Your average person has a few super-dense complex PCBs around them (laptop, phone, maybe a TV etc) but they have at the absolute minimum a few hundred simple PCBs. Your average household doodad these days requires multiple PCBs (power, control, and communications are typically separate.) How many things do you own with LEDs in them (including your lightbulbs?) How many modern cables do you own - because they all have PCBs in them now! I recently tore down a popular non-smart home appliance that's basically a fan, and it has five PCBs - one power, one control, one for the buttons on the top, one for the buttons on the side, and one for a sensor, none of those were off-the-shelf, and this is not unusual. If you really want to lose your mind, look at cars or children's toys, you'll go insane. Your average American with a car and an apartment, or a modest selection of modern children's toys, will own well into the four figures of simple PCBs. I think it's quite rare for your average person to own more than a handful of phones and laptops.

Beyond consumer products, still the overwhelming majority of PCBs are very simple. You say "all the weird hyper-specific industrial electronics" yet go into a sheet metal shop or a train factory or a refinery and count the ratio of simple PCBs to complex. Every sensor, every lightbulb, every cable, every scanner, every connected device... look at how simple process control is for most processes, or how simple most PCBs in most motorized devices are. The employees' smartphones will be the majority of the complex PCBs on the floor.

Now that I think of it - I don't think it's possible to buy or use a complex PCB without multiple accompanying simple PCBs. They virtually never take 110v, they typically take 110v->USB-C->5v DC, so that's two simple PCBs for power conversion plus two USB-C PCBs. You might use the device with a display (countless simple PCBs, its own power etc) or a mouse (yet more...) or some earbuds.
Show HN: ZenStreak - I built an iOS app to help me quit...
by g_host56 | 2025-07-13 17:14:18+00:00
The reason why I got into programming like many other people was because I feel in love with video games. Zelda, and Mario on the N64 were some of my favorite. But I also started watching adult content (pron) at a very early age.

I was able to navigate the web more naturally than other people. And so my brain was hooked.

It's been more than a decade carrying this unwanted habit. After my long term girlfriend almost ended things with me about my use I decided it was time to quit.

I tried other apps to quit. Their attempt was honest and at times good. But they just felt short of what I was actually looking for. What ended up working for me was: having a notecard on my desk and a checkbox for every day, that I look at daily.

It's actually comically simple. But it worked for me. So I decided to build a native iOS app. Partly because I didn't want the notecards to pile up and make a mess. But also to learn Swift, SwiftUI, and SwiftData.

I had fun making the app for myself. I've been using it for about 8 months now on my development Xcode build ... I finally got around to making it available for others.

Check it out if you're interested. thanks for reading.

app store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zenstreak-quit-porn-tracker/id...

website: http://zenstreak.app
by nickfromseattle | 2025-07-13 17:15:20+00:00
I built a Facebook group / community of my target market.

0. Created Facebook Group

1. Optimized my FB profile as a landing page for this community

2. Join all of the other similar groups

3. Send friend reqs to prominent members in other groups

4. Post statuses on personal profile / in FB group creating value for this audience

5. Funnel / invite people into the FB group

Launched 2 products, both failed, but the community came through for me.

#1: Got to $14k MRR in 8 months

#2: Sold ~30 annual subscriptions with a PPT pre-launch
by m3047 | 2025-07-13 17:15:23+00:00
It was put forward in 1960s (maybe? Robert Anton Wilson? and for parallel purposes Philip K Dick's percept / concept feedback cycle) science fiction, and having therefore casually looked for phenomena when support / disprove this hypothesis over the intervening years: that people in power necessarily become functionally psychotic because people will self-select to be around them as a self-preserving / promoting opportunity (sycophants) who cannot help but filter shared observations through their own biases, this is profoundly unsurprising to me.

If you choose to believe as Jaron Lanier does that LLMs are a mashup (or as I would characterize it a funhouse mirror) of the human condition, as represented by the Internet, this sort of implicit bias is already represented in most social media. This is further distilled by the cultural practice of hiring third world residents to tag training sets and provide the "reinforcement learning"... people who are effectively if not actually in the thrall of their employers and can't help but reflect their own sycophancy.

As someone who is therefore historically familiar with this process in a wider systemic sense I need (hope for?) something in articles like this which diagnoses / mitigates the underlying process.
by valorzard | 2025-07-13 17:15:41+00:00
Note that with std::execution, c++26 will have a default async runtime (similar to how C# has a default async runtime).

This means that c++26 is getting a default coroutine task type [1] AND a default executor [2]. You can even spawn the tasks like in Tokio/async Rust. [3]

I’m not totally sure if this is a GOOD idea to add to the c++ standard but oh well.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p35...

[2] http://wg21.link/P2079R5

[3] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p31...
by ksec | 2025-07-13 17:15:49+00:00
LCD on paper you see lots of drawbacks, in practice modern state of the art LCD for TV is pretty damn good. We will soon have RGB LED Backlight LCD with WHVA+ Panel that is about as wide angle as IPS, 95%+ REC 2020 colour, and 1-2ms response time.

Phosphorescent blue OLEDs should reduce current OLED display energy usage by 20-30%. But it still seems to be way off for phones and mass usage.