MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raffraffraff | 2025-07-21 07:56:27+00:00
I'm being downvoted because I equated zsh with oh-my-zsh (or actually, maybe because I hate MacOS?), but if you look through the rest of the comments you'll notice that most people are asking for a lighter weight omz or wishing that some omz alternative hasn't been discontinued.

But think about trying to onboard with a shell. Imagine the type of help you'll get online, and where that inevitably pushes you. Consider these two things: 1. The number of people using pure zsh config Vs plugin systems like OMZ. 2. The number of people using pure bash config Vs some plugin system (can't even name one)....

With bash, when you try to figure out how to do something, the internet will usually spit out a snippet of pure bash. The same search on zsh will generally tell you which plugin you need to add to OMZ.

Zsh would likely be easier to adopt, and overall better off, if it didn't have an extremely bloated plugin system almost synonymous with it. I'm sure if I started from scratch with zsh years ago I'd have a great zshrc. Or if I had the time and energy to devote to getting zsh working to my taste without plugins, I'd do that. But vanilla zsh wasn't to my liking and I took, what seemed like, the path of least resistance. For a short while it I stuck it out, trying to gradually tweak it into shape. But I couldn't figure out how to correct some "fucking weird" behaviour, and digging into a bunch of insanely complex plugins was just way harder that looking at a zshrc. I eventually dumped the whole lot for bash and never looked back.

Could I have dumped OMZ and started clean? Yep. But I was tired, and bash works.
by dns_snek | 2025-07-21 07:56:33+00:00
The only legitimate examples I can think of are restrictions on installing public-facing split ACs. Usually these restrictions are highly localized and only apply to historic buildings in larger cities.

I've only been able to find a source for recently instituted rules in Croatia: https://www.croatiaweek.com/new-rules-on-where-you-can-insta...
by ohopton | 2025-07-21 07:57:15+00:00
These things are great, I've managed to get them into all my indoor units without too much trouble. If you've already got them integrated into Home Assistant check out Versatile Thermostat (you can find it in HACS), if you've got temp sensors in the rooms with your AC you'll get very good target temperature tracking, much better than the auto functionality built into Faikin.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-07-21 07:57:17+00:00
Gen AI can only support people. In our case it scans incoming mails for patterns of order or article numbers, if the customers is already know, etc.

That isn't reliable either, but it supports the person who gets the mail on his desk in the end.

We sometimes get handwritten service protocols and the model we are using is very proficient in reading handwritten notes which you would have difficulties to parse yourself.

It works most of the time, but not often enough that AI could give autogenerated answers. For service quality reasons we don't want to impose any chatbot or AI on a customer.

Also data protection issues arise if you use most AI services today, so parsing customer contact info is a problem as well. We also rely on service partners to tell the truth about not using any data...
by ben_w | 2025-07-21 07:58:09+00:00
> Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.

These are also places where the USA could do better if it didn't think it was already the best.

Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence", while the UK is apparently a crime-free haven in comparison because the British *Police* are not armed by default and overwhelmingly don't want to be.

Sprawl is harder to fix once the cities are built. But even dense cores I've seen in the USA don't have great public transit networks.

I have absolutely no idea why, or even if, America has more untreated mental health issues than Europe in general. But your governments at each level ought to.
by geocar | 2025-07-21 07:59:44+00:00
Dynamic scope/binding is super useful, but I do not agree tcl does it or does it well, because it's not just shadowing the closure environment (ha), or changing globals in a dynamic-wind.

Perl's the only non-lisp I'm aware of that does dynamic binding well-enough to get the idea, but too many things just don't work:

local *int = sub { return 69 }; print int("42");

is a particularly annoying one: You just can't do it. Other names might have better chances, e.g.

package foo; sub int { 42 }; package main; sub a{local *foo::int = sub { return 69 };&b(@_);} sub b{goto \&foo::int}; print b("x"), a("x"), b("x"), a("x");

but this is a little unsatisfying.
by h4kunamata | 2025-07-21 08:01:25+00:00
"Pihole + Unbound recursive DNS" has been one of the best decisions I made years ago, alongside De-Google 2 years ago.

Everything is blocked on the network level so SmartTV and IoT doesn't even know things are being blocked while still works fine. OPNSense Firewall makes sure that nobody except Piholes can get out, it is beautiful.

If I am out, WireGuard VPN sends all the traffic through my home network. Everything loads bloody fast, ADs??? Tracking??? Personal data collection??? What are those???

When I need to access other networks like the office, it feels like people are living in a whole completely different world, seeing people's phone with so much garbage being loaded.

Since I went De-Google with GrapheneOS and replaced the majority of apps with their mobile web version, things have never been better. On Android, some apps have plus 20 permissions which can be blocked on GrapheneOS including the ones hidden with normal Android, from messages to the device sensor. All of these data is being collected to feed targeted ADs.

"Oh I don't care because I have nothing to hide", you do you :)
by edanm | 2025-07-21 08:02:40+00:00
> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.

Why?

If I want to pick up many hobbies, not to mention lines of professional work, I have to pay for tools. Why is programming any different? Why should it be?

Complaining that tools that improve your life cost money is... weird, IMO. What's the alternative? A world in which people gift you life-and-work-improving tools for free? For no reason? That doesn't exist.

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Btw, I think this was actually less true in the past. Compilers used to cost money in the 70s/80s. I think it's actually cyclical - most likely tools will cost money today, but then down the line, things will start getting cheaper again until they're free.
by xwolfi | 2025-07-21 08:03:43+00:00
But everyone experienced in such a "migration" would challenge your flawed impression that there would be cost saving. SAS is in fact used in many serious companies (I know it's used at the fraud department of Bouygues Telecom, for instance) so you're not gonna dead-end yourself all that much, you can do the python+r stuff on your own probably, as long as the reports are there, and call them from SAS if you cannot stand it.

Meanwhile, nothing has to move, nothing has to change, and your non-critical division will continue to cost exactly as budgeted instead of going through unknown waters just because maybe switching to something new might be ... cheap eventually ?

Plus this has nothing to do with Microsoft really, as most cost is in Windows and its integration. It's hard to replace the global policies of Windows by an alternative.
by exodust | 2025-07-21 08:04:21+00:00
The web is obviously not dead. If "boring information gathering" takes a hit, it's no biggie. Long live the creative web, or the good quality products and services web.

AI is great, but so is reading a dedicated article written by someone as a published piece of work. Like the "papers please" article about Australia's Orwellian digital ID regime. I liked that piece. AI could write something on the topic, but it wouldn't have the same punch or original expression. AI is not great with subtle nods or cheeky references to other topics. It tries but lands with an awkward thud mostly. So I use AI for "boring information" gathering, which it excels at. The web will be fine.
by practal | 2025-07-21 08:04:34+00:00
In Terence Tao's book "Compactness and Contradiction", at the very start on page 1, he introduces material implication "If A Then B" (or "A implies B") as "B is at least as true as A", and then lists the various easy conclusions one can draw from this.

Very interesting, I think, that "A implies B" is the same as "A ≼ B", is apparently mathematical main stream, and not just popular in formal logic.

If you continue along these lines, you also not just need to ask, what is implication, but what are A and B? Well, they are things you can compare for their truth content, so let's call them truth values. Surely, "≼" should form a partial order, and if you want arbitrary conjunction and disjunction to exist, truth values with "≼" should form a complete lattice T. This means that "∧" and "∨" are now operations T×T → T. If you want implication ALSO to be such an operation "⇒", instead of just the comparison relation "≼", you can use the following condition (somebody already mentioned it in another comment here, via Galois connections), which just means that "A and B imply C" is the same as "A implies that (B implies C)", interpreting implication simultaneously as "⇒" and "≼":

A ∧ B ≼ C iff A ≼ B ⇒ C

That allows you to define B ⇒ C as the supremum of all A such that A ∧ B ≼ C, in every complete lattice. If the join-infinite distributive law [1] holds, above condition will hold with this definition, and you get a complete Heyting algebra this way.

This is exactly how I turn abstraction algebra into abstraction logic [2].

[1] https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Axiom:Infinite_Join_Distributive_...

[2] http://abstractionlogic.com
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-21 08:05:10+00:00
Programming languages deprecate features in standard libraries all the time. As PHP did, causing many PHP 5.3 applications to fail catastrophically once the warnings added to PHP 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 were turned into errors. Of course, maintained software rarely ever runs into this issue.

The standard libraries were the lacking part in PHP. The language itself was never a serious problem.
by blackoil | 2025-07-21 08:05:30+00:00
That's a code time dependency which is of least concern. That's like saying how can a company hire a developer, they are now having a dependency.

Code written will continue to run, you can use alternate LLM to further write code. Unless you are a pure vibe coder, you can still type the code. IF programmer stop learning how to write code, that's on them and not Claude's or antirez responsibility.

We are using best tool available to us, right now it is Claude Code, tomorrow it may be something from OpenAI, Meta or Deepseek.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-21 08:07:17+00:00
Irradiance is a density function - it's telling you how much energy or how many photons are hitting a given area per unit of the dependent/spectral variable (you can see this by inspecting the units in the plots, for instance).

This means that changes of variable come with an additional factor - the Jacobian. You cannot simply substitute the relationship directly into the formula for the one spectral variable, like you would for a "point function" (you need to account for the change of unit in the y-axis too, if you like, not just the x-axis).

It's not explained well but this is fundamentally what causes the moving peaks.
by uncircle | 2025-07-21 08:07:39+00:00
Web devs: please, PLEASE, learn the difference between History.pushState() and History.replaceState(). It's the latter you want. Please do not spam my browser history just because I have interacted with your app; it's rude.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/rep...
by thrwwy_jhdkqsdj | 2025-07-21 08:08:57+00:00
I agree with you in principle but I would not put as much moral or rational in peoples head. Maybe your comment had some sarcasm in it and I missed it, in this case what's next is pushing an open door.

> ...In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others".

When it comes to functionnal products, my take is this is the rational we give because it is impossible to take down. What I think it really mean is "This is not me who wants it, it's them". It is the same argument as "I do it because if I don't do it, someone else will" when doing something illegal or immoral.

This is why I'm inclined to believe when your argument is this empty you know what you are doing. This is how you end up inventing "customer personas" and asking your consumer themselves why they buy your product.
by xwolfi | 2025-07-21 08:09:07+00:00
Because when they break things they lose hours of work they cannot afford to lose. My parents had a small business and if my mom mis-clicked somewhere and deleted some important thing, she would enter a panicked rage as she'd lose half the day with some remote tech support.

She would never touch a computer after work, because it just stressed her, she found them absolutely unbearable, also because the tech support was unbearably obnoxious.
by mbs159 | 2025-07-21 08:09:23+00:00
It's kind of fucked up that we are almost used to murder in various media (movies, games, etc.), meanwhile even slightly explicit sex is much more taboo. I do vaguely understand why this is (religious beliefs that formed our understanding of what is acceptable and what-not), but I am still surprised that this is how it is even with the rise of Atheism in recent decades.
by braza | 2025-07-21 08:10:26+00:00
> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.

For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.

Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.

Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?
by kleiba | 2025-07-21 08:10:52+00:00
I used to have a government job for a while, a desk job, nothing related to IT. But of course we had computers. It was all Windows machines with really old versions of Windows and very restricted in what software they allowed. Also, when I asked the IT folks if I could have Emacs on my machine, they just asked: "what is Emacs?", and I knew I was probably in the wrong place.

As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript.

So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes.

Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
by gorgoiler | 2025-07-21 08:11:24+00:00
What the inerter does is it gives the feeling of greater inertial mass between the two ends of the device. If you push on the inerter it feels like you are pushing on a boat in a marina: slow go get moving when you push it, and slow to come to rest when you push (or pull) it back the other way.

It does this because flywheels hold momentum but as angular momentum. The inerter converts linear motion to angular momentum. The gearing also it to give the same effect of an enormous inertial mass without itself being massive.

My understanding as to why this is useful is as follows. Suspension works best when the vehicle is heavy and the wheels are light. Imagine a battle tank on ultra strong bicycle wheels: the tank would glide along as the wheels jump up and down over every dip and bump. Something similar happens when you drive home with a car load of paving slabs.

Having a massive vehicle is a huge penalty though for other reasons. Battle tanks are not nimble! The only thing you really want the mass for is as an inertial mass in the suspension system. For accelerating and going around corners you’d rather it wasn’t there at all.
by ramraj07 | 2025-07-21 08:12:16+00:00
Except during the data science craze of 2015s, there was never a situation that you could just have a phd in any field and get any "phd level job", so whatever pedantic idea you have of what phds learn, not a single person who's hiring phds agrees with you. On the contrary, even most phd professors treat you as only a vessel of the very specific topic you studied during your phd. Go try to get a postdoc in a top lab when your PhD was not exactly what they work on already. I know I tried! Then gave up.
Ask HN: What strategy if planning to exit Software Engineering?
by megamix | 2025-07-21 08:12:26+00:00
Hi

Let's call it SWExit, software engineering exit.

I've lost a lot of the motivation to work as Software Engineer (15+ yrs). All the talk, news (nonsense) about the future of Software Engineering, LLMs, AI and related technologies is far from what I hoped my work to be. If I'm just reduced to an advanced administrator through LLMs, then I'll might as well be a chef or something else that is fulfilling.

What strategies do you suggest for someone struggling to find motivation at this stage?

a) Sabbatical year b) Move up the ladder c) Change career path d) get over it, accept it and do the minimum

To each alternative there's more to comment, e.g. option b) requires interest in the product to be a good leader - I refuse to do meaningless work.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-21 08:13:34+00:00
A good example is a vector addition kernel, which is simple, embarrassingly parallel, and well-suited for SIMD:

void vector_add(float *a, float *b, float *c, int n) { for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) { c[i] = a[i] + b[i]; } }
by delusional | 2025-07-21 08:13:45+00:00
And also directly proportional to the publicity of the CVE system. If you're creative enough in your writing, any bug in any program can be filed as a CVE, and filing CVEs is much more interesting carreer wise than filing bug reports.

Any decently sized project has probably seen an increase in reported CVEs over the past 5 years, simply because the number of CVEs total has grown.
by beAbU | 2025-07-21 08:14:19+00:00
For some reason C418's song "Minecraft", alongside the "klink-klink" sound skeletons make when near you are etched into my brain, like screen burn-in. I can recall the combination of the song and that sound instantly, and it's clear as day in my mind's ear today, nearly 15 years since I've last played any serious Minecraft.
by unlikelytomato | 2025-07-21 08:14:23+00:00
I can eat maybe one serving every few days regardless of the source. I can eat a lot of various fruits without issue(high fiber too). tofu is mostly ok. I have tried about once a year for 15-20 years.

I can eat a block of cheese a day and feel great. same with extremely lean chicken. When I try plants only without the problem foods, my energy and recover drops. I get depressed and I have huge protein cravings. If I try to squash that hunger with fats or carbs, I get fat. Just never been able to find a sustainable solution for my body
by Y_Y | 2025-07-21 08:14:44+00:00
>The ideological split emerged during the great dialectical conflict of the early 1990s within the Scheme community, dividing revolutionaries who insisted on large, modular Scheme codebases ("Permanent Modular Revolution") and reactionaries who championed the purity of "Scheme in One File." The modularist vanguard, led by Comrade Matthias Felleisen of the Racket Politburo, argued that true dialectical progress required collective libraries and communal code sharing across multiple modules.

> Opposing them, minimalist cadre under the austere guidance of Aubrey Jaffer maintained that genuine Scheme purity could only be realized through strict, isolated, single-file autarky, uncompromised by external dependencies or revisionist imports. This schism permanently fractured Scheme consciousness, decisively expelling modular heresy from orthodox minimalist implementations.
by lenkite | 2025-07-21 08:14:57+00:00
You can do debugging in a console-based text editor nowadays. Neovim has a DAP client for example. https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap. Works reasonably well for quick debugging even if you don't get all the bells and whistles of a sophisticated IDE. Though folks have made IDE-like debugging UI's too: https://github.com/rcarriga/nvim-dap-ui
by uncircle | 2025-07-21 08:15:29+00:00
The aura was a very brilliant green, which reminded me of an hallucinogenic experience I had. I was sat with friends in the city centre, my brain altered by chemical substances, and I spotted a guy 100m away with the most brilliant and beautiful green shoes. It was an amazing sight, standing out from everything else.

Sober, I later realised that they were normal green shoes, but in my no-brain-filter state, I was able to appreciate that we have many more green cones in our retina than red or blue, and normally the mix dial for green in our brain is kept pretty low not to overpower the other colours. The animation once again raised this dial to show how powerful is our raw perception of that colour.

(The evolutionary reason is that we spent a lot of time in vegetation or on trees, and it's very useful to be able to distinguish things and perceive small movements in a sea of green.)
by creshal | 2025-07-21 08:15:53+00:00
> In the early 90s it was the "electronics" people that were saying "I come from an electronics background, these young'uns will look at a computer and don't know what to do if it breaks".

...and today, Nvidia ships self-immolating graphics cards because nobody wanted to figure out how to design a safe electric connector.

> Oh, you young people are so spoiled with your IDEs and whatnot, real men code in a text editor.

...and today, a lot of so-called programmers are trapped in AbstractHellFactorySingletonFactories that they cannot and never will understand, because generations of code monkeys have abused IDE assistance to dig themselves deeper into their hole.

And as a user, you'll know, because the software they write is garbage and never works reliably.

> Then it was about frameworks. BBbbut what if your framework breaks, what do you do then, if you don't know the underlying whatever?

Going by software like Teams, or Slack: They just ignore it, because consumers can't fight back against the the enshittification of increasingly useless software nobody understands.