MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-25 18:36:45+00:00
High level languages tend to hammer the allocator like a Piñata. C++ can improve code smell of C, but different languages have their own specific use-cases. The reason llvm and GC based languages is a problem in low-level real-time code is bewildering for many.

Java is unique in that it often ran a dual stack for byte code, and platform specific binary objects.

My advice often is to use high-level languages if you can get away with the convenience, and a low-level language with proper design patterns if you must.

Many programmers I've met shouldn't write C/C++, but mostly because they can't be trusted to use memory or thread safe code.

Cheers, =3
by voidnap | 2025-07-25 18:36:52+00:00
I scrolled down the page to figure out why all the hate, and the first link is to a page on Request Smuggling.

Maybe I'm out of the loop but isn't request smuggling a vulnerability in HTTP proxies that try to convert HTTP2 to HTTP1? Why not showcase vulnerabilities in the HTTP1 spec that are solved in HTTP2?

A doomsday clock for a vulnerability in a bad http proxy, doing something that should probably never be attemped anyway, is a bit dramatic.
by jimmaswell | 2025-07-25 18:37:20+00:00
moment is far smaller if you include it without locales you don't need.

I don't care how much they talk themselves down on their homepage, begging me to choose a different library - I like it and I'll continue using it.

> We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done.

> We will not be adding new features or capabilities.

> We will not be changing Moment's API to be immutable.

> We will not be addressing tree shaking or bundle size issues.

> We will not be making any major changes (no version 3).

> We may choose to not fix bugs or behavioral quirks, especially if they are long-standing known issues.

I consider this a strength, not a weakness. I love a library that's "done" so I can just learn it once and not deal with frivolous breaking changes later. Extra bonus that they plan to continue making appropriate maintenance:

> We will address critical security concerns as they arise.

> We will release data updates for Moment-Timezone following IANA time zone database releases.
by FigurativeVoid | 2025-07-25 18:37:26+00:00
I used to work at a company that stored all dates as ints in a YYYYMMDD format. When I asked why, I was told it was so we could subtract 2 dates to get the difference.

I asked them why they couldn’t use DATEDIFF since this was in a sql db.

They said they hadn’t heard of it and that it must be new.
by LaGrange | 2025-07-25 18:37:59+00:00
> Well...without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app...

You do exactly that.

"Oh but security."

Any security you get from hiding behind a firewall is illusory at best. You still need to keep on top of updates and tech news. And I want to be able to access my stuff from wherever too.

Most of my friends don't have to, because they have me and at least 3 other friends who also self host.

There's a couple of things I won't let others in (like, my email domain. That's like my last name, so nope). But things like _sharing a video_? Yeah, I'll let them log in.
by senfiaj | 2025-07-25 18:38:16+00:00
Every time I see an input date string in XX/XX/YYYY format I get a micro PTSD flashback. This cannot be parsed reliably and is locale dependent. The standard date format is YYYY-MM-DD (it's also the date part of the ISO time format). Raw text inputs should be avoided as much as possible, date/time pickers should be preferred.
by nozzlegear | 2025-07-25 18:38:17+00:00
We do the same thing. There are a couple of channels we watch on YouTube who forego ads and use Patreon to fund their livelihoods; we'd be sad to see them disappear, so I started supporting them with a monthly donation on Patreon. They offer the same early release perks, but like you said, the variety of our YouTube subscription feed is important. I could binge all of these creators' videos on Patreon if I wanted to, but my wife and I aren't opening YouTube to binge just one type of video.
by isoprophlex | 2025-07-25 18:39:07+00:00
Barely useable, pfff. Needs at least two out of three of

- airhorn and/or light saber sound effects,

- a sixel-based rendering of lens flares, or

- a fluid dynamics engine to simulate rippling of characters around the path along which the cursor moves

(Joke, looks very cool even though i'd probably find it too distracting)
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-07-25 18:39:24+00:00
I agree that you could make a Tea app for every faction's favorite cause, and use "safety" as the justification: report your local communist, report your local infidel, report your local secret white supremacist, report your local secret Western imperialism agent, report your local suspected jihadi, report a homosexual, report a suspected illegal immigrant, report a local adulterer, report an apostate, report a kulak.. etc. chefkiss

Witch Hunt as a Service, with a delightful UX, a little gamification, and soon integration with your favorite apps. Coming to an App Store near you.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-25 18:39:55+00:00
A whole host of reasons:

- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.

- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.
by kouteiheika | 2025-07-25 18:40:07+00:00
I still don't understand what exactly you are disagreeing with.

Meta is paying the big bucks because to train a big LLM in a reasonable time you need *scale*. But the process itself is the same as full fine-tuning, just scaled up across many GPUs. If I would be patient enough to wait a few years/decades for my single GPU to chug through 15 trillion tokens then I could too train a Llama from scratch (assuming I feed it the same training data).
by timr | 2025-07-25 18:40:20+00:00
Before tackling that, a non-profit should fund well-designed randomized controlled trials in areas where none exist. Which is most of them. Commit to funding and publishing the trial, regardless of outcome, once a cross-disciplinary panel of disinterested experts on trial statistics approve the pre-registered methodology. If there are too many qualified studies to fund, choose randomly.

This alone would probably kill off a lot of fraudulent science in areas like nutrition and psychology. It's what the government should be doing with NIH and NSF funding, but is not.

If you manage to get a good RCT through execution & publication, that should make your career, regardless of outcome.
by HocusLocus | 2025-07-25 18:40:30+00:00
I'm glad to see people discussing [zero,infinitesimals,false,emptystring,isnull,unpopulated,missing] as if each one is a thing. They've always been things! We've just been buried in compromises and shortcuts all these years.

There should also be a [the-asteroid-has-hit-y'all-are-so-stupid] and global data systems should just just pass that around after impact until the power goes out for good.
by pryelluw | 2025-07-25 18:40:37+00:00
Tamiya was a big part of my childhood. It was also part of my young adult years when I worked as a “mechanic” in a hobby shop.

Their assembly manuals have always been top notch. Giving me hours of entertainment even after assembling the model. It was a great introduction to systems design.

I’ve been wanting to get a re-release of the original grasshopper. It’s too cool to pass up.
by notpushkin | 2025-07-25 18:40:38+00:00
Losing right cmd isn’t great IMO (e.g. if you want to press ⌘ P, you need both hands now). I’ve tried doing both cmds for launching apps, but settled on ⌘+⌥ (and use it for very common apps only: browser, mail, Telegram, Finder).

Both variants (and of course an rcmd-like setup) are easy to do with Karabiner (free, Unlicense): https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

Edit: looks like rcmd also includes a quasi-modal app switcher - if it works like I imagine (type the name of the app you want), that’s pretty neat. But not that different from just typing it into Spotlight I guess?
by egypturnash | 2025-07-25 18:40:50+00:00
Random thoughts:

* anything using proof-of-work is still gonna be a hard sell * good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD without ever having to give a shit about the constantly-fluctuating value of BTC * fun times ahead when you get big enough for the government to notice you and start requiring you to comply with all kinds of arcane regulations
by simpaticoder | 2025-07-25 18:40:54+00:00
>Once you learn Scheme, well now you've learned Scheme.

There is something really joyful in learning a new language and then implementing a well-known protocol, like HTTP, in that language. You can pick either the agent or server side, and check your work with other well-known agents and servers. In my experience this tends to happen when students like the language they've just learned, regardless of the direction their given by staff. In fact, I'd almost consider it definitional of what it means to like a language - that you'd consider implementing a well-known protocol in it in your free time.
by yoz-y | 2025-07-25 18:41:09+00:00
For that to happen imo:

- browsers need to start supporting a better language (it could be typescript without backwards compatibility for things like var and function scoping) - browsers need to eventually provide a way to polyfill JavaScript - then JS can be removed without breaking content

But for this to even be of any utility, there would need to be a WebUI framework developers are willing to use bundled with a browser (and properly versioned).
by dv_dt | 2025-07-25 18:41:33+00:00
Its too bad that the old school anti-trust provisions against restraint of trade are no longer of interest to enforcers. This isn't a case where visa/mc are against a specific game/publisher transactions is where they are saying we will stop processing payments for your entire platform because of a few games we object to. And its worse because the pmt processors aren't really specific about their objections in public at least.
by neomantra | 2025-07-25 18:41:37+00:00
One could pretty easily wrap an MCP server around the ScreenTime activity SQLite database file on MacOS. You could use DuckDB like this server does.

I’ve found good value in making purpose-build MCP servers like that with the general model: Data<>DuckDB<>MCP<>LLM With verbose description for the LLM of an “sql” tool endpoint for it to use to explore.
by fidotron | 2025-07-25 18:41:42+00:00
Yep, or the old GreenArrays GA144 or even maybe XMOS with more compiler magic.

One of the big questions here is how quickly it can switch between graphs, or if that will be like a context switch from hell. In an embedded context that's likely to become a headache way too fast, so the idea of a magic compiler fixing it so you don't have to know what it's doing sounds like a fantasy honestly.
by vorpalhex | 2025-07-25 18:41:56+00:00
Nobody actually wants to fix crime.

We know there are a bunch of interventions with meaningful impacts on the crime rate. This ranges from actually keeping repeat offenders in jail to making preschool freely available.

Nobody does them. It isn't cost, there doesn't seem to generally be an ethical outcry, etc.

Just nobody actually wants to address the problem. They instead want to leverage crime to achieve some other goal. Actually fixing crime harms the ability to use crime to achieve other ends.

So it goes.
by pridzone | 2025-07-25 18:42:08+00:00
It would be in Apple and Google’s best interest to pull these apps immediately. Multiple Supreme Court justices have indicated an interest in narrowing the breadth of section 230 immunity. This app, structured entirely around effecting the reputation of private individuals, provides a relatively clean case to do so. It’s not a stretch that the app could be considered a ‘developer in part’ of the content it hosts, and thus lose section 230 protection.

A narrowing of section 230 would not be good for Apple or Google, though they wouldn’t face any liability for the Tea apps conduct.
by eikenberry | 2025-07-25 18:42:18+00:00
Yes, they have official docs on how to set it up and use it.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

Here's a 3 year old article going through their freebsd/wayland setup, so it seems like it's been supported for a while now.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/example-tutorial-pure-way...
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-25 18:42:39+00:00
I suspect you might be observing two correlates and picking one as the cause of the other in a way that is ahistorical.

Specifically, it seems to me that colleges becoming more vocational and colleges becoming more expensive are both natural outcomes of the neoliberalisation of all things. I am aware that some students now rationalise their educational investments with the logic you describe above, but I think it's a post-hoc rationalisation.

You can get a good job without going to college, and you can get a good education without paying a gazillion bucks.

A side point, but calling it "vocational" seems a bit euphemistic too. Learning carpentry is a vocation. Getting a business degree is not equivalent to learning carpentry. I might say colleges have become commercialised, rather.
by StillBored | 2025-07-25 18:43:20+00:00
I will stick this here to expand on your point.

People complain about lack of US manufacturing, and short term thinking and its all heavily tied to a couple fundamental truths about companies in the USA.

Corporate raiding and looting is a core part of the fiance sector. There are a half dozen methods of asset stripping used against literally all successful businesses here. Much of this 'short term thinking' is either the business trying to make itself look less appealing, or the actual act of handing the money over directly via stock buybacks or dividends (which are at least taxed) rather than investing in the company.

'Investors' in the USA have absolutely zero interest in the actual companies they are investing in, because it is to easy to divest of those investments or sell/merge the resulting companies. The goal largely seems to be to create the illusion of success at any cost. If that means destroying the company to get a 10% return next month, then that's fine, because they will then turn around and sell it before it collapses.

At least some of this could be solve via strong incentives against short term investing. Say an actual value tax (rather than a capital gains tax) that penalizes holdings less than a couple years. A 25% value tax applied for holdings less than a year that decreases to 0 over some longer time-frame, say 5 years. Yes this would completely destroy the business model of quite a number of wall street firms, and maybe even make it hard for businesses to raise capital. But, it would put a lot more focus on buying businesses that actually have long term prospects, allow those businesses to invest in capital intensive manufacturing operations and a laundry list of other things most people agree is a good idea. It would also likely return stock prices to realistic future return numbers because investing in companies with obviously inflated market caps would become a lot more risky.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-07-25 18:43:31+00:00
> nebulously stupid standards

Here's the quote, talking about his daughter: “I mean, I’d rather if she was going to fck some ngger, I’d rather have her marry an 8-foot-tall ngger worth a hundred million dollars! Like a basketball player! I guess we’re all a little racist. Fcking n*gger.”

Feels fucking gross to even read this out loud.
by omnicognate | 2025-07-25 18:43:47+00:00
> Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts.

Probably the best way, and maybe the only way, to learn this is by doing it. That's how I learned it, with no formal training in programming.

What I learned from SICP and Sussman's other books I would never have figured out any other way. I don't think the world is really as different as Sussman says it is here, and I think the programming world lost something special with this change.

The book lives on anyway, and he'll always be one of my heroes.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-25 18:43:58+00:00
That's not really what we were talking about here. The context was that compsci students want to learn marketable skills, and the claim was that if the student had learned Scheme in class, they could quickly pick up Python. And that's true, for the language itself. But knowing only the language, like never importing code you hadn't written yourself, doesn't go far along the road to marketability.

I'm not arguing that compsci should be job training, not at all. My disagreement is solely with this specific claim.

But FWIW, while I understand your analogy, an astrophysics department that didn't tell the students that there are these things called telescopes, and here's why you might use one over the other for various situations, and that they're how you're going to get the observation data you'll test your theories against, would be doing a disservice.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-25 18:44:09+00:00
> Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.

For all of the talk (hype) about how crypto has the potential to avoid the exact type of meddling and manipulation and pressuring we’re seeing now, it surprises me that no equivalents to PayPal have really popped up - that best that can be done is apparently something along the lines of what Linux was on the desktop a decade or two ago. Basically, before Valve and others picked up the slack and worked on things your average person actually cares about - notably, gaming and simple(r) to use desktop environments and software stores.

Where’s the flagship platform for payments that’s built on crypto but lets you ignore the technical details, that’s trivial to implement as a merchant and is a download away on app stores? If there are a few of those, why would anyone bother with these puritan payment processors?
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-25 18:44:10+00:00
Given the assumption that Google has Google's own interests at heart, the question isn't 'why doesn't Google release models that allow other companies to compete with them' but 'what is the reasoning behind the models they release' and that reasoning is 'for research and for people to use personally on their own hardware'.

We should be asking why Meta released the large Llama models and why the Chinese are releasing large models. I can't figure out a reason for it except prestige.
by mbreese | 2025-07-25 18:44:15+00:00
True. However, mine were for connecting to modems, so they were definitely only 9 pin serial cables. I didn't have the pleasure of seeing the 13W3 connectors until I was in grad school, and I still think they look weird. It didn't occur to me until today that they were the exact same size/shape as the DB connectors. They were so different that the thought never occurred to me!
by lokar | 2025-07-25 18:44:19+00:00
This is one of many divides in the field that makes many general discussions hard.

There are many people who think of themselves as a “X programmer” (and perhaps Y and Z), and managers/companies looking for them.

Then there are people who think of themselves as software engineers, and the language does not really matter (and companies that hire for that).

If often see the two camps talking past each other.
by dguest | 2025-07-25 18:44:50+00:00
Wait so one day over the new year is

2025-01-01 - 2024-12-31 = 20250101 - 20241231 = 8870

i.e. 90 months and 10 days

or 7 years 6 months and 10 days

How is that the same thing as one day?
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-25 18:44:52+00:00
Do yourself a favour and go out and purchase a high pixel screen. I don't understand why people who spend a good part of their days in front of a computer (or employ others to do it), but refuse to get quality hardware. Is it worth destroying your eyes, posture, and joints to save this money? Not to speak of just the personal pleasure of using good hardware.

Restaurants spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment so that their staff can work more efficiently. Why doesn't IT people take inspiration from them and get a bit better equipment. It's not a luxury item.
by jtuple | 2025-07-25 18:45:20+00:00
Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though.

Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc.

Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)?

Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-25 18:45:39+00:00
Agreed that it's the active land use, not a specific crop, that matters from a food security perspective.

Disagreed otherwise though. Soil degradation is due to people cutting corners to save money. Rice requires significantly more water. Wheat and oats don't have the same shelf life. Legumes are likely comparable but how do they stack up against corn for things like animal feed and chemical feedstock?

The reality is that corn is an extremely practical crop regardless of its lack of political popularity of late.
by TheJoeMan | 2025-07-25 18:45:44+00:00
It's funny to reason why we must go to bed when the clock has a certain number, since modern technology could easily be programmed to adjust as needed. No technical reasons the Martians can't go to bed at 9:00am today and 9:40am tomorrow. This mirrors my thoughts on why farmers caring about daylight savings time is farcical, farmers I know use the timekeeping of "crack of dawn" and "sunset".
by blurbleblurble | 2025-07-25 18:45:45+00:00
The things I struggle with are very niche, like remote desktop via pipewire over ssh.

Day to day stuff is way better than x11. Remember how much fiddling used to be necessary to configure x11 for your specific devices? I've never once done that and I don't miss it at all.

By the way, pipewire is amazing.
by bix6 | 2025-07-25 18:45:54+00:00
If it was easier to do the work yourself I think more would out of privacy, price, and longevity concerns.

Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.