MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zambyte | 2025-07-17 15:06:14+00:00
I don't think I am. Free Software does not suffer from the same authoritative restrictions imposed by proprietary software. If people don't like features being removed, someone will package the software without the feature removed, and everyone who cares about the missing features can just use that.

For example, people in this thread have been mentioning GNOME as software that has been removing features to the detriment of technically inclined people who want those features. But MATE exists, and I don't have to maintain it. Because someone else felt was worth spending to scratch their own itch.
by echelon | 2025-07-17 15:06:26+00:00
That's just the PBS stuff everyone knows about.

Back in the 90's and 00's, PBS had a show called "Irasshai" [1] aimed at high school students. It was a complete two year Japanese language education class filmed in conjunction with Georgia Tech.

They produced 140 30-minute lessons and produced two 500 page text books and teacher lesson plans. Study materials, homework, tests - everything.

It typically aired at 4 AM, so they asked you to set your VCR to record. If you couldn't do that, they could mail you the entire VHS boxed set of episodes.

But that's not the cool and powerful part. They actually let you register for classes and conference call in with an actual teacher. Twice to three times a week with class sizes of 4-6 students. Everyone took turns reading, answering questions, practicing dialogue. All year long.

There were tests and grades, and regular 1-1 proctored verbal exams. It was incredible.

The entire program was offered for free.

It was one of the coolest ways to learn Japanese and it was incredibly effective. This was such an amazing program for high schools that typically only offered Spanish lessons.

And now that's gone.

[1] https://www.gpb.org/irasshai
Ask HN: Changing Developer Career Specialty
by Rick76 | 2025-07-17 15:06:42+00:00
I'm a full-stack developer, .NET and React are my specialty. I've gotten really interested in lower level projects currently, especially the Linux development and embedded design.

I have multiple smaller Pico projects under my belt, but I understand that does not correlate 100% with the embedded field. Personally, from my perspective, it would feel like the equivalent to someone building a static HTML site and applying for a full-stack position, but I don't know how to fix that.

The Web Dev field and Embedded field feel extremely different, so I have the fear that with the current job market, even if I commit fully to ensuring my personal portfolio shows a lot of embedded programming, that I won't be trusted for professional projects.
by musicale | 2025-07-17 15:06:52+00:00
To me at least, the argument that young people face great restrictions (even if many of those restrictions might be intended for their benefit) doesn't justify not giving them a voice, or a seat at the table.

"So if democracy is so great, and voting rights are so important, why don't you let us vote on anything that matters to us?"

"So taxation without representation... that's like me, right?"

"So if universal suffrage is important, are people like me included in the universe?"

"So we can (in the UK) potentially join the army or navy at 16, and possibly die in dangerous training or even fighting in a war, but we don't get to vote?"
by throw10920 | 2025-07-17 15:06:55+00:00
I've seen this pattern before, with laptops ("I want a laptop with" specific spec+feature combo not in the market) and cars ("I just want an electric car with physical controls and no subscription services or extra electronics") immediately coming to mind.

Which is a shame, because I can sympathize with most of these requests.

I want something like Kick-starter which operates the same way but isn't meant for funding the creator to get the upfront capital investment - just avoiding existing companies getting burned out of the "let's listen to a niche slice of our customers instead of appealing to the masses" mindset. Companies put up a weird product proposal and see if enough people will commit to buying it to at least break even.

Then, if there's enough of a commitment, those people get something they actually want. If there's not enough, then there's a specific reason that you can point to to explain why.

This is almost equivalent to the normal market model (people buy things they want, and niche products don't get made much), except with a more explicit feedback step, to help people realize that if they don't actually put their money where their mouth is, then things won't get made.

There's probably a better way to do this, but I'm not sure how. Ultimately I just want my non-electronic electric car.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-17 15:07:08+00:00
> So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?

In a word, yes. More nuanced would say that anyone in power is willing to lie and make a politically coordinated event to lie about reality if it helps their agenda. More specifically, I would have you look at current US Administration as the greatest example. They are not the first nor only ones to do this, but they are the most brazen in their use of it
by lurkshark | 2025-07-17 15:07:20+00:00
Let’s say summer break is basically 3 months. I as a parent need to figure out childcare for that 3 month period at the beginning of summer. This is a much more time consuming endeavor than most would expect (or at least more than I expected). If you distribute those months throughout the year I need to repeat this process 3 different times, adding a bunch of overhead that could be spent on activities more beneficial to my family and kids.

Edit: Adding that I realize the summer slowdown absolutely exists and has a disproportionate effect on those that don’t need another wrench thrown in their life. But just wanted to add a perspective that isn’t “teacher union boogeyman”.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-17 15:07:53+00:00
I firmly believe intel went from decline (which you can reverse) to terminal (which in a business sense, can be reversed, but it usually isn't) as soon as AMD was able to successfully erode some of their server business, and ARM is now doing the same.

The mountain of money for intel has always been with server chips, as its their high margin chipsets. While they make alot of money on consumer laptops and desktops, its no where near the amount of money they traditionally have made on their server oriented chipsets.

I don't think Intel is likely to come out of this state without something extremely radical happening, and every time they try to do something that could be radical it never has enough time to gestate to work, it always ends up abandoned.
by bccdee | 2025-07-17 15:08:04+00:00
Collaborative editors are imperative; files are declarative.

If I want to edit a Google Doc, my edit must be expressed in terms of the Google Docs interface. If there's a Vim macro that could make that change in moments, it doesn't matter, because I'm not editing text: I'm consuming an API through a web UI. This is why, when I write a Google Doc, I usually draft it in Vim, compile to markdown, and then paste the formatted text into the doc. My clipboard offers me an interoperable workflow that the Google Docs UI does not.

This is why tools like Kubernetes use declarative yaml instead of interactive buttons and knobs. If your medium for communicating information is yaml, you can generate that yaml however you want, and update everything instantly. If your medium for communication is restricted to a set of buttons and dials, you're severely limited in terms of how you express information.

> OK, you're on Office 365 and I'm on Google - so we'll have to work a little harder to set up access.

You're going to have to use files, is what. You're going to download your Google Doc as a .docx file and upload it into 365. And then, unless you want to convert to .docx again, you're going to have to switch to 365 entirely. Google and Microsoft cannot interoperate imperatively with each other's APIs, but they can both parse the same declarative document files.

"When should we pass data vs exposing an interactive interface" is an essential question in software architecture, and someone's making the same mistake here that you see in so much over-abstracted enterprise Java. Sometimes an interface just makes things worse.
by dsabanin | 2025-07-17 15:08:10+00:00
I've been getting lots of scam calls lately, especially AI voice generated once, and there was one particularly annoying. Very persistent call about being approved for some loan, no reference to any particulars, all very vague, and I kept ignoring. In my mind I had no doubt it was a scam. Well, long and boring story short, now I have a missed payment on my credit report for my new HVAC system..
by daniel-payne | 2025-07-17 15:08:16+00:00
this is from a post on the node-red forum, and a solution i made.

Once you start to get big and complicated with node-red you will have this issue. But the rest of node-red is fantastic. It also covers a fix for git code reviews and integration with external testing frameworks.

--------------------------------------------------------

I hope this can help anybody having the same issues as I have when writing long functions in node-red editor.

Coding anything over 50 lines become difficult to work with, or trying to view multiple functions at the same time. The rest of node-red is fantastic!

----------------------------------------------------

https://github.com/daniel-payne/functions-templates-manager
Show HN: Locus – Git‑aware CLI task manager using Markdown
by tesso57 | 2025-07-17 15:08:21+00:00
I built Locus after spending a lot of time collaborating with AI coding assistants. To get high-quality work from an agent you need a well-structured Markdown brief for every task, and if you run several agents in parallel you need a fast, local way to manage those files. GitHub Issues is conceptually close, but it lives in the cloud and is awkward to drive from a CLI that an agent can call. So I wrote Locus: a Git-native, local-first CLI task manager where each task lives in its own Markdown file that an AI assistant can read and write.

What it is Locus stores each task as a Markdown file with YAML front matter, auto‑organized by repository at ~/locus/<user>/<repo>/. No server or DB—just plain files you can edit in VS Code, Obsidian, or any Markdown editor.

Key features – Git‑aware, offline‑first directory layout – Tags / status / priority managed from the CLI – JSON output for scripting or LLMs

Quick try (Deno)

deno install -q -A -n locus jsr:@tesso/locus locus add "Write Show HN post" --tags writing,show-hn locus list --detail

Feedback and PRs welcome!
by MisterTea | 2025-07-17 15:08:25+00:00
> I know the history of why Ada failed,

Do you have sources you could point to? I once read that it's a great language mired by a designed by committee ecosystem. I really liked the language when I tinkered with it a bunch around 2010 but moved on after work pushed me to other languages like C# for GUI stuff. First language I used with simple built in concurrency.
by nijave | 2025-07-17 15:08:26+00:00
I've seen the same thing in .NET and Java where there's 800 layers of interface and impl and it's an adventure trying to find the actual business logic in all the layers of indirection

>so there is never a reason to start a new project with Python today

Nothing else has an ML/data ecosystem that compares. Perl/Go are maybe a distant 2nd
by pwg | 2025-07-17 15:08:30+00:00
> Probably the procedure had been followed since 1573, well before home printers, scanners, phone cameras, or get-your-own-rubber-stamp-for-a-few-bucks internet shops.

This is almost always how these seemingly silly bureaucracy hoops become established. They were created in a prior time where a third party obtaining "magic item Y" with which to authenticate was significantly difficult to near impossible. Then, over time, the world, and technology improve, to the point where anyone, willing to spend $9.99, can have an exact duplicate of "magic authentication item Y" manufactured via any one of 78 different makers. But the bureaucracy continues using the now outdated process because "this is the way it has always been done".

It is largely a real world example of "The Monkeys, Bananas and Ladder Experiment": https://psychologyfor.com/the-monkeys-bananas-and-ladder-exp...
by thebigman433 | 2025-07-17 15:09:59+00:00
Portland has some major advantages over SF, but as someone who also goes there regularly (~5 weeks/year), I still prefer living in SF at the moment. Not considering the amount of tech jobs there (which is a major factor for me), the city in general just isnt quite there yet. There are also some very major fiscal problems that have to be sorted before I'd consider moving.

Great place though, definitely might end up there one day
by dylan604 | 2025-07-17 15:10:01+00:00
Ah yes, but were they really people's pets? They just claimed people were eating animals commonly owned as pets. Even in my neighborhood, there are plenty of cats that are not owned by anyone. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats." That's the quote I'm familiar. I've never heard "They're eating the pet dogs. They're eating the pet cats." Isn't that a difference that a critical thinker would be able to notice?
by j_seigh | 2025-07-17 15:10:02+00:00
Here's an interesting scheme. Some credit/debit card merchant accounts can arrange to get updated card info if your card expires and/or gets replaced. So if the merchant is a bad actor and doesn't charge your card directly but just tracks your updated card info so it can be used fraudulently elsewhere, you, your bank, and the card company will never know they were the source. And the card is linked to your bank account, you can replace it ad infinitum and the bad actors will get the updated info for the new card every time. The only way to break out of this is to close your bank account and open a new one.
by ben_w | 2025-07-17 15:11:00+00:00
> Is that a credible prediction?

That they will use it? Yes, models already do.

That it will increase performance? Unclear, I have no reason to expect that, not impossible.

That it will make it harder to tell what they're up to? Definitely. Even between humans, terms of art often confuse, e.g. "Mike's Nature trick" and "to hide the decline" being colossally misunderstood in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...
by nucleardog | 2025-07-17 15:11:11+00:00
Had the same thing happen with a debt collector. They would identify themselves, but seeing as their name was meaningless to me as we had no prior relationship, and even if I knew what they were calling about I had no debt I was aware of...

They were a _little_ more cooperative about it though.

"Hi this is <Person> from <ABC Inc.>. Can I start by confirming your name and date of birth?" "Who is this?" "<Person> from <ABC Inc.>. Can I start by confirming your name and date of birth?" "No, you may not. What's this regarding?" "I can't discuss that with you until you verify your identity." "Okay, well I have no idea who you are so I'm not about to do that." "Well, I can't tell you anything else until you confirm your identity for me." "Okay." "So can I get your name and date of birth please?" "No." "..." "..." "..." "..." "Can you tell me what _day_ in January of 1970 were you born?"

I'm sure it broke some rule somewhere, but at least giving me some verification that they already had some of the information they were asking for I was willing to play along.

(Turns out the ISP did their usual ISP thing and failed to mark that I'd returned my modem when cancelling service a few months prior then told no one and sent it to collections. The debt collector was very adamant that I needed to set up a payment because this wasn't going away. I walked into one of the ISP's retail outlets, told them what happened, they sighed heavily because this comes up _constantly_ and called in to have it marked returned and I never heard from anyone ever again. The end.)
by basfo | 2025-07-17 15:11:16+00:00
Well, but they are controlling that, the fact that they fail to check it shouldn't be on you.

But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization. I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer?

https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integ...

I don't think putting in jail a customer that is just reviewing what he bought is the way to go.
by leereeves | 2025-07-17 15:11:43+00:00
You seem to be saying it's a "ridiculous claim" because you're limiting the word "think" to math homework. The article is using "think" in a broader sense that includes decision making, a process that involves the limbic system and other primitive parts of the brain.

It's certainly true that those parts of the brain continue to influence decision making in adults. Nonetheless, research has shown that those parts of the brain are far more influential in teens.
by drcongo | 2025-07-17 15:12:01+00:00
I suspect this will be pretty much the end of the Labour and Conservative parties, which is clearly a good thing - neither is fit for purpose any more. The new left-leaning party announced by Zarah Sultana, and the far right arseholes in Reform are likely to take the vast majority of teenage voters - both because they will at least offer some kind of hope to people who otherwise have none.
by wpm | 2025-07-17 15:12:09+00:00
Pre-fab is illegal in a lot of places too. Pre-fab is for the poors! Houses in this neighborhood must be assembled on site by lumber by a team of expensive humans from raw lumber, not at a factory churned out by the hundreds, shipped on site on a truck, and quickly put together.

Like yeah, typical pre-fab, where it's legal, is going to go into a trailer park or something, but nothing says pre-fab has to be cheap and crummy. Why are we still cutting lumber on site?
by the8472 | 2025-07-17 15:12:13+00:00
> which tells you not to click links in emails (which is good advice!).

Hardly. The company shouldn't have XSRF-vulnerable software, if your browser is vulnerable you have bigger problems and what you actually shouldn't do is enter your credentials or download stuff after clicking on that link.

But of course there's an internal "phising test" that penalizes you for clicking on links... links that have been obfuscated by some email-modifying link-tracking security software that makes it nearly impossible to figure out to which domain the link even goes.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 15:13:00+00:00
There is an interesting article about AI tarpits that addresses a similar issue: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-...

The argument is basically to have them scrape your website indefinitely wasting their resources for the bots that decide to ignore your robots.txt (or any bot if you desire)
by wccrawford | 2025-07-17 15:13:19+00:00
I had this happen worse from my car loan bank.

I got an email with a header that was obviously badly scanned from a paper document. It demanded that I provide proof of insurance or my car loan would be canceled. It had the name of the bank and my name and my email, but nothing else of import.

The only URL was to a domain unrelated to the bank.

I ignored the first couple, and finally looked into it the third time.

It was legit.

When I told them all the ways this looked like phishing, they couldn't understand my concerns.

I gave them the info they wanted in person at a local branch. I soon after paid off that loan and got away from them.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-07-17 15:13:51+00:00
It's fun when you phone the bank's regular number, waiting hours to get someone on the phone, and they say that number isn't legitimate when it actually is.

Even better when it's a bank you don't use and the number on their site goes to an automated system that won't let you access it without an account number, so you have to scrounge for alternative phone numbers to get to talk to someone.
by cbm-vic-20 | 2025-07-17 15:14:01+00:00
> what's so great about IRC?

It's got a simple protocol that's easy to implement.

There's no company who "owns" IRC, as there is with Matrix, and no "reference implementation". Extensions and enhancements are done by consensus of the people writing the clients and servers, there's no central agency that maintains extendion proposals like Python's PEP or Java's JEP. As a result, to be as interoperable as possible, most implementations stick to supporting the existing status quo. If you want to add something new to a client or a server, you run the risk of having that feature only work for a small fraction of users. If it's popular enough, other impementors may choose to make their clients and servers support it.

IRCv3 is an attempt to make collaboration a little more formal, but it's a slow process.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-17 15:14:10+00:00
Ah, offloading the physical movement of papers between the offices onto the general populace... why don't they just mail each other directly, isn't the part of their job is to communicate with other offices? Lolnope.

Sometimes it becomes truly ridiculous: I once had to apply for some thing, and was told I need to grab and provide them some certificate from a different government service to prove that I'm actually eligible. Okay, I do that, and then they spend two weeks verifying the certificate by physically mailing and inquiring info about me from that other service and waiting for them to respond (also by physical mail).
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-17 15:14:15+00:00
http://www.adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=Advo...

Specifically, I think these three paragraphs near the end are critical:

> I'm reading a great book now called Why People Believe Weird Things, by Micheal Shermer, in which the author explains what rational thinking is, and how skepticism is a process. Basically, people believe something because that want to, not because of any scientific arguments you make.

> There are guys out there who dislike Ada, but they do so because they want to, not because of any rational analysis of its merits or flaws. Sometimes even their arguments are factually incorrect, like saying that "Ada was designed by committee," ignoring the fact that Jean vetoed language design arguments that were 12-to-1 against him. It's not unlike creationists who explain the "fact" that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (No, it does not, as any book on freshman physics will tell you.)

> I've explained the reasons Ada why I think is not as popular as C++, and I'd like to hope that it will convince Ada's detractors that Ada isn't so bad after all. But as Robert Dewar pointed out, a person who has made an irrational decision probably isn't going to be swayed by rational arguments!

That is, people aren't really rational. A choice was made to dislike it, it entered into the culture and to this day people dislike it because they think they should dislike it. They don't even spend 5 minutes studying it to see that half of what they've heard (if not more) is flat out wrong. In several Ada discussions on HN people claim its syntax is like COBOL's, for instance. Not just similar in being keyword heavy, but practically the same. Sometimes they even provide Ada "examples" that won't even compile. That's the kind of nonsense that happens when people turn off their brains or refuse to turn on their brains. You see it in many Lisp discussions as well.
by eth0up | 2025-07-17 15:14:18+00:00
Man, there's so much left to discover! South America, Turkiye, who knows, but so much.

One fascinating site not getting much attention is Zernaki Tepe, near the Van region. Some of it, if I've not confused it with something nearby, is buried under 40ft of sediment and its accessible parts exhibit some of the finest masonry work yet seen, with interlocking blocks, etc.

Estimated at 14k years, and probably older than Gobekli Tepe