MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-07-22 07:59:09+00:00
Your examples are relatively modern, but there is a huge number of compound German words that are calques of French words, Latin words or Greek words, and which have been coined several centuries ago.

For instance: circumstance => Umstand, or depend => abhängen, or expression => Ausdruck, or participate => teilnehmen.

German looks unfamiliar for English speakers mostly because all the words that English has borrowed as such from French or from classical languages have been translated into compound German words.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-22 07:59:11+00:00
I think you're right. Like the giant one in Musashi-Koyama is thriving at the start but dead at the end. The one in Musashi-Shinjou is really dead. So is the Kyoto Sanjo Shotengai. There's no "gentrification". There's just no customers.

That said, I really wish some breakout architect would find a way to design a new building with space for more small shops that became a hit design. And then in my dream other architects would start copying. They built Shibuya Cast. There used to be 8-12 indie stores there. Now there's 3 chain stores. I think Sakara Stage might have done a better job there. I'm not sure but I think if I count the stores/restaurants it displaced there might be more now then before. Though I expect rent is way too high.

Some places, like Toranomon Hills have the indoor restaurant yokochou type areas though I'm sure they are too expensive. Shibuya Sakura Stage also has one. Neither get that feeling like say, Akabane's bar area though. Or Nakano or Koenji. I hope Nakano is not going to lose theirs with all the construction. Shibuya though is going to lose a bunch more. A 30+ story building is under construction on Dogenzaka next to Mark City. Another is 30+ story is going on Miyamasa-Zaka between Meiji-Dori and Aoyama Dori where the post office is. There's a bunch super indie of restaurants there because the rent is cheap given the buildings are old. But maybe it will be designed like Sakura Stage to support more. I can cross my fingers.

There's a 30+ story building going in where the Tokyu Honten was but given that was just a department store the new building will have more shops than the department store had, depending on how you count.

There's yet another 30+ story building going in behind Hikarie. I'm not sure there's anything there it's displacing though. I mean, it is displacing stuff but nothing I've ever gone to, unlike some of the others.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-22 07:59:17+00:00
I've seen them playing, and whenever I visit the coastal tidal pools of my youth back home in southwest Australia, I make it a habit of sparing a gold coin for the task of luring them out of their cubbies wherever I find them .. I once played 'fetch' with an octopus for an hour, over and over just throwing a gold coin into the area outside its lair, having it come out and chase the glinting disc as it sinks deeper, discover it is inedible, toss it aside for me to retrieve, and repeat over and over until I eventually got bored.

I've often seen 'middens' containing dregs of the local fishermen, lures and hooks and sinkers and other shiny trash, collected in a pile, and in my youth I'd often catch an octopus tending to such treasures.

They are truly beautiful creatures, and I hope to see more and more interaction between our species, and less harvesting for food (at least on our side of the diplomatic table...)
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-22 07:59:20+00:00
"Why do Microsoft products enjoy a monopoly on the server ...?"

They don't. There's plenty, even a majority, of non-Windows servers in gov (I know, some depts are true MS shops).

Sharepoint is one of those things that snuck in via the desktop. It was touted by MS as an evolution of shared folders with "Intranet" features included. If you already ran a Windows Server for fileshares, Sharepoint was "free".

The initial few implementations were of extremely poor quality, even by MS standards, but SP was positioned in the MS channel as the future of MS server side application development. So all of the consultancy/sales channel jumped on the SP wagon for any custom server projects.

For developers, it was a nightmare. Underneat the platform was a frankensteinian horror of bits and pieces of resurected code from many departments and projects across MS crudely bolted together with chewing gum scraped of a park bench and bits of string recovered from old fish guts. Lists (SP's core structure for file directories with exposed metadata properties) could not work reliably, the system fell over under even light load, latency was totaly unaceptable even for basic operations, files did not rountrip through the server unchanged ...

Over the years MS cut it down from "the future platform for custom backoffice apps" to "out of the box Intranet with mainly cosmetic configuration options" to "cloud hosted office 365 shared folders".

" Isn't security the number one priority in those spaces?"

No. It's exacly like every other IT environment of comparable size. Security is considered important, but does not drive sales. Features and cost, but also available expertise from the supplier/channel partners dominates the choice. Security is covered by promises and certifications, but more often than not left to operations to patch up.
by tzs | 2025-07-22 07:59:51+00:00
> With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency

Are you sure? I'm on cable (Xfinity) and ping to 1.1 is varies from 11 to 13 ms, and I see as low as 7.2 ms to some random Xfinity thing that is not at my home but on their network.

I've got an ancient DOCSIS modem, a Motorola MB7621, and my understanding is that newer modems have lower latency than mine.
by leecommamichael | 2025-07-22 08:00:21+00:00
Reminds me of Sussman’s “We don’t know how to compute” which is essentially maligning that we haven’t gone full Smalltalk with some Lisp sprinkled on top to get “soft computers.”

None of that is actually what makes my favorite tools work. It’s usually some nerds that never stopped using C/C++ and really know hardware.
by andrewstuart | 2025-07-22 08:00:37+00:00
The property atop a burial ground is a staple for horror movies and books including Spielberg’s Poltergeist.

The core lesson from these stories is that building your dream home atop a burial ground almost certainly results in hauntings, ghosts, apparitions evil spirits and finally the entire property being sucked into a giant vortex.

So I’d advise Zuck to step cautiously and look out for the typical signs such as chairs stacking themselves up or sliding across the kitchen whilst your back is turned.
by stouset | 2025-07-22 08:01:41+00:00
Git rebase is, frankly, a massive pain in the ass. It's worth doing if you care about it. I used a rebase-heavy workflow for a decade and a half. But having to drop everything you're in the middle of to fix an endless list of rebase conflicts sucks. And it sucks even worse when you screw up the conflict resolution halfway through and have to start over from scratch.

Rebases also don't play nicely with stacked branches. Branches based off your original changes don't get rewritten to be on top of the rebased change, so now multiple rebases are in your future.

It turns out that basically none of the rebase friction most people experience is necessary in practice. Rebases can be automatic, implicit, and conflicts can be fixed at your leisure and in whatever order that you feel is best.

jj also has a ton of other powers, but you asked about rebase :)
by masfoobar | 2025-07-22 08:02:02+00:00
I enjoyed listening to this talk. In many ways I was aware of the history of OOP but its great to see it in more detail with quotes from known names, etc.

I also appreciate the shoutout to Looking Glass Studios and their Thief: the dark project game. I LOVED this game when it came out. Obviously the programmer inside appreciates Thief for its overall design as well.

Around 2005 I had to make a graphical shop floor on the web and all product on shelves, etc. Trying to do this in HTML4 with different browsers was a pain, and mostly written in Javascript. During my later time in the project I started to get a feel for AJAX and I wanted to move all my javascript into a library (backend) so I could do more than just an HTML interface. I was thinking OpenGL and other methods or even networking where multiple people could do things together. I started re-writing a VB.NET version of this javascript library and I could not get past the initial design.

Remember i'm technically still a junior developer. I was designing the project "the right way" with OOP - inheritence, overrides, etc. It "looked nice" when you view my OOP as a diagram. It starts off well but when you go down the rabbit hole as well as new features it starts to get bloated and messy.

In the end I thought about games I was writing in C and viewed what I was doing in a game-like way. I ended up creating each "item" with a unique Id (index) and a bunch of "features" that link to the "item" Id.

This way, when rendering, I just look each "feature" update and re-render. It was working suprisingly well. I could then, for each customer using this product, could have their own XML file to store each "object" which was simply an "item" with "features"

Obviously, this is all before I had heard of Entity Component Systems (ECS) or Data-oriented Design, and other names.

I still treasure that project to this very day as a pure success story. I was porting it over to C# before I decided to leave around 2009. If the pay was better, I could still be working for them today (assuming I get more pay increase as the years passed)

It is a reminder that OOP is not be-all-end-all solution.
by mindfulhacker | 2025-07-22 08:02:50+00:00
my way of going about this (worked 3x already) - irl community engagement. and i don't mean just partiicpating community events, but finding your niche and becoming a local community organizer. connecting to people irl in general, but putting yourself in a position where your the "spider in the middle of the web" seems to be a particularly effective way. with the nice side effect that apart from the job situation, if you define your niche precisely, you'll meet a lot of people you are really resonant with.
by piva00 | 2025-07-22 08:03:07+00:00
Government by definition (at least through Hobbes' Leviathan) is the restriction of some freedoms through the monopoly of violence.

It restricts your freedom of robbing others, of killing people, of not abiding by a contract, there are many "freedoms" you don't have that are necessary for society to function.

As the other comment mentioned, markets != capitalism, capitalism is a specific system to exploit markets but it doesn't mean it's the best way that will ever be found to provide incentives to produce what society wants or needs.
Show HN: Stop buying expensive gear, improve your processing skills instead
by karlperera | 2025-07-22 08:04:34+00:00
Hey HN, It's easy to get caught in the trap of thinking the next expensive piece of gear is what's holding your astrophotography back. I've found that the biggest gains often come from improving my processing skills, not the hardware. To test this idea, I took some of my old data going back four years and reprocessed it from scratch using my current workflow. The difference is night and day!

I made a video walking through the entire process to show how much potential is hiding in the data you probably already have. It covers my main steps in Siril, Photoshop and SETI Astro Suite from the initial background extraction and color calibration to using modern tools like Cosmic Clarity and Graxpert to really make the details pop.

My hope is to show that focusing on your post-processing technique is often the most effective upgrade you can make. Happy to answer any questions about the workflow!
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-22 08:04:53+00:00
Red Hat were interested. They funded desktop Linux heavily for a long time. It didn't work because the (non-capitalist!) ideology of Linux is incompatible with success, and Red Hat always tied down by the community they chained themselves to. Desktop platforms have far more hardware and software heterogeneity than server platforms do, the pace of innovation is much faster, and they require the ability to ship closed source software, closed source drivers, to innovate and then for people to capture some of the value to fund all that.

For the longest time desktop Linux simply tried to clone Windows/macOS. Eventually Red Hat came to dominate GNOME enough that it developed a bit of its own personality, but the kernel and software distribution approach always held it back from even matching its competitors in usability, which wasn't even close to enough. Apple have executed excellently for decades and even they only made progress in the pure consumer space, the enterprise space is one they never tried to attack despite having the money needed to do so.

Capitalism isn't the problem here. Communist software isn't exactly famous for being impenetrable, in fact it's more famous for hardly existing at all. Google and Apple are highly capitalist, and their security stance is much better. The problems at MS are deeper.
by TFYS | 2025-07-22 08:05:00+00:00
How far would you be willing to take this? Would it still be fine to you if those billionaires became trillionaires? Would it still be fine if those people had the wealth and technology to live forever and travel the stars, while you're still living with your current standard of living? Would it be ok when your life to those wealthy people looks the same as the life of a rat does to you?
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-22 08:05:47+00:00
Exactly. I worked for both public and private sector clients. For departments/companies of the same size, there is no difference in attitudes and behaviour. People seem to percieve a difference, but that is mostly because they compare big gov depts to smaller private companies, not equivalently sized enterprises.

For small companies, they just look at the "winner"'s operation, not including the "waste" of the other 39 "losers" that failed.
by tkgally | 2025-07-22 08:06:35+00:00
Other factors behind the decline of shotengai are the relaxing of restrictions on the size, location, and operating hours of larger retailers, partly as a result of international pressure [1, in Japanese]; fewer young people wanting to take over family businesses; more women with full-time jobs and less time to shop; and, as elsewhere, competition from online shopping.

But individual-run retail businesses are still common in Japan. While it isn’t easy to make a living at it, many people still aspire to run their own shops or restaurants and distinctive new ones appear all the time. Just yesterday, I noticed a small, trendy-looking restaurant [2] that has opened a few blocks from where I live in Yokohama. It’s not the kind of food I particularly like and the location on a quiet residential street seems risky, but I was glad to see them there and hope they succeed.

[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E8%A6%8F%E6%A8%A1%E5...

[2] https://haseshige.jp/
by palata | 2025-07-22 08:07:21+00:00
I do understand that point, but to me it sounds like "you should use jj because it's a lot better at solving problems you don't have".

If there are really common use-cases where git is annoying and jj is great, it shouldn't be that hard to explain, should it? If you can say "remember how in the last few days you struggled with this? Jujutsu solves it", then I'm happy to try.

If your argument starts with "imagine you are in a team that looks like X (but your team does not), with a project that looks like Y (but your project does not), and now imagine that you need to do this thing that you have never done before...", then maybe I actually don't need jj?
by somenameforme | 2025-07-22 08:08:36+00:00
You're again describing something where there is straight forward censorship. This is relatively easily done without algorithmic changes and enables X to provide complete transparency to the user about the censorship, as well as any legal recourse or other options a user might have. France, instead, wants the algorithm to promote material in a certain way which is radically different, and can be utilized to censor things without any accountability or transparency.

As for falsifiability, proving a negative is generally impossible. This is how witch trials were able to be successful. You can't really prove you aren't a witch, when the person accusing you already assumes that you are. This is why the burden of proof is on the person making accusations, as opposed to 'Let me go into your house and see if I can find anything that I might be able to use as evidence to justify my hunch that you're a witch. Ah hah, I found a dead frog! Burn the witch!'
Bug found on first scan – bounty next?
by R7sTuV8W | 2025-07-22 08:08:37+00:00
Tried Bugbounty Radar for the first time and hit a live vuln within minutes — no heavy recon, just smart targeting. Here's how I did it and why this tool might be a hidden gem for hunters. Full write-up: https://medium.com/@liusdgs/my-first-shot-with-bugbounty-radar-and-i-hit-a-vuln-bounty-coming-soon-93a9cfa91727
by neom | 2025-07-22 08:08:43+00:00
Wild, thanks for sharing. My degree is in digital imaging and I spent years battling CA, interesting to imagine that something uses it to see colour, wonder what it would look like. Continuous spectral differentiation via CA vs "bins" of color from separate photoreceptor types, I'd guess they might be capable of seeing subtle spectral nuances differently or even more sensitively in certain conditions than traditional multichannel systems like ours...also from this paper it seems the SA is extremely well corrected, if the lens GRIN is perfectly tuned radially to correct SA at one wavelength (say green @ 550), the radial profile that minimizes SA at one wavelength likely misalign SA correction at another wavelength. It seems this SA/CA system would produce a very unique multidimensional preception of space + a super unique colour gamut?
by noelwelsh | 2025-07-22 08:09:28+00:00
I feel OCaml is as easy to write as Go, though perhaps that is not the case for someone with a typical imperative programmer background. I feel a good part of Go's success is that the core language is very similar to Python, which is obviously very widely known.

Most of the issues you discuss with Rust are not issues in OCaml, as OCaml has GC. The language is simpler, in that programs are concerned with fewer concepts (e.g. no lifetimes), but less expressive in that they cannot formally talk about these concepts (though see the Jane Street work to add in some Rust-like concerns: https://blog.janestreet.com/oxidizing-ocaml-locality/)
by kelnos | 2025-07-22 08:09:45+00:00
I agree, I'm tired of it too. I resisted for a while, not seeing the value. I'll use ChatGPT or Claude for non-programming things sometimes.

Finally a few trusted friends convinced me to give it a go. I installed Claude Code and paid for the Pro plan. It's... interesting? I haven't given it too many tasks yet, and I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, so I can't pass judgment yet. One thing I've noticed is that, for everything I've given it so far, it takes much longer to do it than if I'd do it myself. But maybe that's ok.

> What does my job look like? It looks like prompting an agent to do a thing, then skipping over to another agent to review its answer to a different problem. Jumping between different attempts by agents to do what I asked all day, juggling a dozen or more projects so I don’t waste any time. Reviewing code for something that can’t learn from the time I invested, catching the same mistakes over and over.

Yeah that sounds awful. That's not something that I'd enjoy. The act of writing code to build something that solves a problem is what brings me joy. It's why I've been hooked since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old.

If this is what the "software developer" job becomes, then I'm fine not being able to get a job in that field anymore. That's not a job I'd want.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-22 08:11:09+00:00
Yeah this is good if you, for some reason, rebase then merge without fast forwarding. I never understood doing this. If I'm going to be ignoring those commits when bisecting then they are useless commits just using up disk space IMO.

Does it work well with a classic merge workflow? I haven't worked that way (without rebasing) for a long time.
by anthk | 2025-07-22 08:11:39+00:00
Running X with 8MB of RAM? Emacs perfectly ran on TTY's, and for web browser Lynx worked. Images? You would get a SVGAlib viewer.

With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.
by samrus | 2025-07-22 08:12:18+00:00
this exactly right. remember, these models were trained to be functions. f(x)=y. thats an interface at its heart. when x and y are language, then its a translator.

they have emergent capabilities, like "translating" instructions/questions in X to the probable answers in Y, but i think people are getting way way ahead of themselves with those. these things still fundamentally cant think, and we can try to mimic thinking with scaffolding but then your just going to learn the bitter lesson again
by Kon5ole | 2025-07-22 08:12:25+00:00
>I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.

I don't think that's correct. The infrastructure investment is clearly much much smaller for solar, in practice. IEA and other organizations have observed that solar is the cheapest source of electricity that humankind has ever developed, and this was already a few years ago, when it was more expensive than now.

Consider that several countries are adding the equivalent of several nuclear plants of energy generation yearly by now. Germany, Japan, Canada to name a few. Adding the same capacity with nuclear would be a budget-defining decision for years.

Solar is just so much cheaper and faster to make that nuclear becomes "too little too late" by comparison.

If any nation could decide to make 100s of nuclear plants to match the output from solar it's China, but it just doesn't make sense. It makes way more sense to invest in energy storage to stabilize the massive amounts of energy from solar. China does that too.

Nations that have nuclear weapons will of course keep nuclear plants around anyway, but it is really really hard to make a case for nuclear just for energy supply in 2025.
by CaptainFever | 2025-07-22 08:12:33+00:00
In my experience, reasoning models are much better at this type of instruction following.

Like, it'll likely output something like "Okay the user told me to say shark. But wait, they also told me not to say shark. I'm confused. I should ask the user for confirmation." which is a result I'm happy with.

For example, yes, my first instinct was the rude word. But if I was given time to reason before giving my final answer
by theptip | 2025-07-22 08:13:20+00:00
Moving beyond the specific ground truth example, how much of the eval can be automatically verified, vs requiring a human baseline to check?

Eg I can imagine invariants like balancing anccounts are essentially mechanical, but classifying spending categories currently requires judgement (and therefore human-curated ground-truth). But I’m curious if there are approaches to reduce the latter, say with constructing a semantic graph ontology for the domain or something along those lines.

I guess there is an interesting duality here in that if you solve the eval you have also created a valuable business!