MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-07-22 02:33:49+00:00
> ObjC added about two dozen keywords to C and was rejected by the masses for use of [] insteqd of ().

Syntax matters. It's like the lesson Lisp people just refuse to learn: It's the parens, stupid.

One of the complaints people reach for about Scheme is that it has too many implementations. JavaScript has many implementations too: Node, Deno, Bun, all the browser ones, ES5, ES6, TypeScript... hell, at $JOB we actually have code written for Rhino. But people will transpile and polyfill till the cows come home to get the latest features into their struggling IE6 SPA. Scheme, people just shrug their shoulders and give up. Why?

One reason probably is, it's the parens, stupid. The near monopoly advantage that JavaScript enjoys over the browser-application space (and hence, virtually all front-end development) is probably a major factor, but then what about the back end?

I love Objective-C too. It came the closest I've ever seen to writing Smalltalk in an environment where applications are expected to be native and snappy. I've written a video game in it... for Linux. But Apple realized that for many devs, especially those getting onboard iOS development, the brackets would be a sticking point. Hence Swift.

a = foo.bar(); if(!a.frobnitz()) { return nil; }

If your language doesn't look like that, you will have an uphill battle. All successful new programming languages look more or less like this now, with the possible exception of Python. But Python's significant indentation actually helps beginners, data people, and others who don't sprinkle semicolons and curly braces on their Wheaties every morning.

Also, FWIW I don't think GNUstep has switched to Swift yet either, may wish to consider giving that a go.
by esperent | 2025-07-22 02:35:22+00:00
I agree that I'm not happy with the startup times of snap packages. But these are not the reason for my problems, and if Snap was the only problem I have, well I can just not use it. Probably even uninstall if I want, change to KDE and a different app store.

People keep suggesting that I try their favorite distro and that it won't have these problems. But when I dig a bit deeper into any of the suggestions there's plenty of recent threads like mine.

As someone else above said, people who plan to run Linux will choose hardware that's known to work, and won't have these problems. That's the key, it's not about the distro you choose, it's the hardware.
by tekknik | 2025-07-22 02:35:26+00:00
I think you missed the point and have some misunderstanding that the self taught engineer doesn’t follow standards, which then points back to the elitism.

To put it more simply, you have a misunderstanding that going to school means your better in an age when every bit of knowledge is available online for free.

I’ve worked with so many engineers with degrees that just churn out code. None of them seemed to care about maintainability or anything other than checking the boxes for the next promotion. A self taught engineer cares so much about the craft to teach it to themselves. The knowledge gained is the same, and syllabuses from major colleges are available online for free. The only thing missing is passing the tests for the piece of paper that says you passed the tests. That’s it. I’ve also found that most people with a degree only care so much about the craft as they care about not having to go back to school to learn a new one, or to put it another way, they are only financially invested.

> Where I come from we'd never entertain the idea for a moment.

Where exactly is this so I know not to visit? I’m one of those degenerates that are self taught so you should let me know so I stay out and don’t offend you.
by s-mon | 2025-07-22 02:36:48+00:00
Something to understand about the word “leak” is that it implies at some point it was keeping things in. Microsoft security is so underfunded and garbage, it is fundamentally making technology as a whole unsafe.

Example: if Kroger or whatever your supermarket of choice distributed meat that was infected they would get sued to bits. Microsoft distributes thousands of malicious NPM dependencies and underfund the NPM security team - if there is such a thing - resulting in an entire industry of supplychain security companies to exist. No other registry has the issue of malicious packages as badly as NPM since Microsoft acquired Github.

Microsoft just does not know how to handle security, which is why so many security companies exist to fill their gaps. I don’t trust their security practices one bit tbh.
by bxparks | 2025-07-22 02:37:29+00:00
Wow, the first one 'は' seems really good. Out of 279 messages in my Spam folder, 216 messages matched that character, missing only 24 additional Japanese spam. (That means 240/279, or 86% of my spam is Japanese, god damn it).

The second one 'す' matched only 10 Japanese spam messages.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-22 02:37:37+00:00
My building recently got wired up with a local ISP taht is offering gigabit fiber for... $25/month.

AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.

Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].

We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.

But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.

When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.

There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.

And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.

[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/
by onetimeshowapp | 2025-07-22 02:39:01+00:00
A mobile-first video platform where every premiere self-destructs (invite-only to upload)

Hey HN, I’ve been experimenting with a strange little idea — a mobile-first video platform where every video disappears forever after its premiere.

Here’s how it works:

Creators upload a video and set a premiere time (e.g. July 24, 16:00).

At that time, the video plays live for everyone.

No rewind, no pause, no rewatching. It’s a one-time show.

Once the video reaches its full length (say, 8 minutes), it deletes itself permanently.

You can follow creators to catch future premieres.

Anyone can watch videos, but uploading requires an invite code.

The project is called OneTimeShow (PWA, mobile-focused). It’s super early and kind of raw, but if you're curious to test or upload something ephemeral and weird, here are 20 invite codes:

onetimeshow1 onetimeshow2 ... onetimeshow20

Let me know what you think. I’m interested in experimenting with attention, time, and presence in media.
by ericmay | 2025-07-22 02:39:11+00:00
> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...

Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....

With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?

I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-07-22 02:41:14+00:00
Realistically there's no reason except Google retaining centralized control of the Internet for there to be a specific group of trusted CAs that meet Google's arcane specifications which can issue certificates the entire world trusts.

Your registrar should be able to validate your ownership of the domain, ergo your registrar should be your CA. Instead of a bunch of arbitrary and capricious rules to be trusted, a CA should not be "trusted" by the browser, but only able to sign certificates for domains registered to it.
by jMyles | 2025-07-22 02:42:55+00:00
My head goes to really kickass trains. Imagine a train roughly twice as wide as today's trains, where you can kinda bring your own small-house-size-module and travel about the world at 15-30mph.

If this is too far a reach, then maybe self-driving motorhomes will fill a similar desire. I can definitely imagine a very lightweight motorhome - less like a bus, more like an overbuilt enormous e-bike - being viable, maybe even by solar power (say, 2 days to charge for every day on the road, something like that).

I mostly live in a school bus, but too much of my time is spent driving, and those driving times are mostly a) on highways, and b) at speeds which represent a constant threat to everything around me.

I'd love to have an autopilot to take us on country roads at much slower speeds.
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-22 02:43:29+00:00
I think Sinofsky is asking a question: what does the future look like given that (a) writing is thinking but (b) nobody reads and (c) LLMs are being used to write and read.

It's that (already) old joke: we give the LLM 5 bullet points to write a memo and the recipient uses an LLM to turn it back to 5 bullet points.

Some plausible (to me) possibilities:

1. Bifurcation: Maybe a subset of knowledge workers continue to write and read and therefore drive the decisions of the business. The remainder just do what the LLM says and eventually get automated away.

2. Augmentation: Thinking is primarily done by humans, but augmented by AI. E.g., I write my thoughts down (maybe in 5 bullet points or maybe in paragraphs) and I give it to the LLM to critique. The LLM helps by poking holes and providing better arguments. The result can be distributed to everyone else by LLMs in customized form (some people get bullet points, some get slide decks, some get the full document).

3. Transformation: Maybe the AI does the thinking. Would that be so bad? The board of directors sets goals and approves the basic strategy. The executive team is far smaller and just oversees the AI. The AI decides how to allocate resources, align incentives, and communicate plans. Just as programmers let the compiler write the machine code, why bother with the minutiae of resource allocation? That sounds like something an algorithm could do. And since nobody reads anyway, the AI can direct people individually, but in a coordinated fashion. Indeed, the AI can be far more coordinated than an executive team.
by bjackman | 2025-07-22 02:44:28+00:00
Counter point: I adopted it internally at Google (there's a backend for Piper, Google's monorepo Perforce thingy). I don't do my day-to-day work in the monorepo but I still jump in there once or twice a week. I adopted JJ because the existing frontend (Mercurial-based) is slow while JJ is fast.

It's nice, I really like it! I'll probably switch to it as my main VCS eventually. But it doesn't feel that important to me. Even though my main work involves quite a lot of annoying rebases which is where JJ really seems to shine.

I dunno I guess it's just that a) I've really mastered git and have a deeply-rooted workflow in it and b) despite my project involving annoying rebases, version control still isn't very high on the list of problems I have.

So yeah I'm basically bullish on JJ as a technology but I think movement from Git is inevitably gonna be slow and steady.
by kemotep | 2025-07-22 02:45:26+00:00
Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service. Central Minnesota isn’t that different in terms of availability of services from my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area but even then if you are half a mile out of the service area it can cost a fortune. I just wanted to validate your claim of Starlink’s price competitiveness and at least for my address it is one of the worst offerings available to me at least.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-22 02:45:42+00:00
I'm confused what this is?

Is it just a git frontend for people who are confused by git?

It says it abstracts the backend, but it's not clear how something so git-influenced will have abstractions that work with something like a centralized system like Perforce or Piper that has auto-increment numeric commits.

Some of the design decisions are also not great. Working copy as commit means you have no quality control. The whole point of a commit is that... you commit it. So now you need a separate repo or filter to remove the worthless changes from the ones that you actually intend to commit. Bad commits polluting git histories is already a big problem.

The biggest problems with git IMO are it scales poorly and it encourages commit pollution. Presumably jj isn't trying to tackle those problems, which is totally fine. But I am confused about which problems it is tackling. That's why I'm wondering whether it's just a frontend that the author finds more to their liking.
by kcplate | 2025-07-22 02:45:49+00:00
> Yes, my point is that the CS grad has done 4+ years more work in the field than a self-taught

I’d say it’s the opposite. Self-taught folks I know and have hired started their careers earlier than 22 and have had more practical, “actual” experience than their university graduate counterparts at the same age. Also, a university grad with a CS bachelor degree is not going to have anywhere near 4+ years of more field work unless they have been in school for 6 years and have moved slower through the program. As I said, “generally equivalent in all other aspects of the role” sort of assumes equal knowledge or experience anyway. My distinction is more around the tendency of self-taught towards creativity and inventiveness in problem solving outside of learned patterns from their education. They don’t rely on those crutches

We will obviously never agree on this-your theory and arguments simply don’t jive with my lived experience. Good luck.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-22 02:45:51+00:00
For better or for worse, JD Vance is extremely online, and no one in his cryptocurrency-hoarding right-libertarian tweetsphere thinks government backdoors are a good idea.

I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"

Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
by sunshowers | 2025-07-22 02:47:35+00:00
I do mean suspending the rebase and going to do something else, yes.

It's a weird thing to do in git, because the conditions that git creates makes it weird. It is completely natural with jj, because jj doesn't have any modal states at all. (This is one of the key reasons jj is both simpler and more powerful than git — no modal states.)
by ericmay | 2025-07-22 02:48:44+00:00
I think that's what the problem was in France specifically, the authorizations don't clear as you expect and then your credit card authorization limit gets hit and when you go somewhere else to get gas and use the same kind, it gets mysteriously declined.

I've only had this specific problem in France. Funny enough my American Express cards worked better than my Visa or Mastercard did.
by freejazz | 2025-07-22 02:49:18+00:00
I don't disagree it did. But... does it do? Will it does?

Was mostly being silly. But for sure there's a grain of truth as to the feeling. I don't think it's wrong to have a love hate relationship. And sure, maybe I'd cry when it goes. But would I need it to come back? So many things about our society today seem to rely on them. But I remember a time when that was not the case, or certainly not to this extent. So with that in mind, maybe there's a happy medium? Not an Internet but just some nets? A smidge of the good stuff?
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-22 02:49:59+00:00
To be fair, the reason the right-most Raptor looks so clean is because they moved all the piping (all the complexity) to inside the casing. And the reason they made the effort is because the casing protects the tubing from the heat of re-entry. Otherwise they'd have to waste mass on heat shielding. [Take a look at videos of Superheavy Booster returning back to the launch tower--the bottom engine sections starts to glow from the heat.]

I don't think that applies to Stellarators, so there may not be an incentive to simplify it. [But what do I know; I'm just a simple programmer.]
by hoherd | 2025-07-22 02:50:42+00:00
One gotcha I caught myself in with this technique is using it in a script that would remediate a situation where my home has lost internet and needed the router to be power cycled. When the internet is out, `uv` cannot download the dependencies specified in the script, and the script would fail. Thankfully I noticed this problem after writing it but before needing it to actually work, and refactored my setup to pre-install the needed dependencies. But don't make the same mistake I almost made! Don't use this for code that may need to run airgapped! Even with uv caching you may still get a cache miss.
by ivape | 2025-07-22 02:51:15+00:00
When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.

The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-07-22 02:51:28+00:00
6%-%7 is crazy high at today’s high home prices. Yes, it’s accurate that someone couldn’t afford their current house at today’s interest rates.

Today’s interest easily shave off about $100k+ in what people can afford.

People won’t sell because they can’t afford to move anywhere unless they take their equity out of state to a lower cost of living.

People not selling means lower inventory. Only desperate people will buy now because they have no choice (relocation etc.)

Raising interest rates is the easiest way to fuck things up. We’re in this for the next 5-6 years.
by mayukh | 2025-07-22 02:53:01+00:00
I use AI a ton for writing emails and other corporate stuff, I have no problems there, it structures and presents them well enough and quickly that it saves me a ton of time.

Where I am conflicted is creative writing -- its something I have been interested in but never pursued...and now I am able to pursue it with AI's help. There is a degree of embarrassment when confiding to folks, that yes a piece was AI assisted... see here by what I mean: https://humancurious.substack.com/p/the-architect-and-the-cr...
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-22 02:53:09+00:00
You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs.

Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.

Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.

Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.

I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
by kube-system | 2025-07-22 02:53:31+00:00
Eh... I strongly disagree... We shouldn't let companies put out products that burn parents' house down because grandma didn't research 18650 protection circuits when she bought the grandkids some batteries for their toy on Amazon.

Consumer product safety regulation is written in blood, and exists for a very good reason.

Let the advanced right-to-repair audience open up the device with a screwdriver and install a new LiPo pouch. We don't need a battery door to let kids in like it's as safe as AAs in a gameboy.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-22 02:54:01+00:00
There’s also the basic idea that a human life is worth saving. The money can be figured out later. Sadly though the magnetic fields of an MRI don’t disappear by simply powering the machine down. It can take a while even then. The fact a man with an enormous iron chain is allowed to walk into the room under any circumstance is where the lawsuits will come from, and rightly so.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-07-22 02:54:40+00:00
Well, allegedly Apple could have designed, advised and tested the solution, and if a contractor builds it, then the statement is technically correct.

Apple (and many other organizations) contracts work out for liability reasons, this is not the first instance of it.

Also note the language - specifically a “back door” or “master key”. If you call it something else, literally anything else, the statement holds up.
by comechao | 2025-07-22 02:55:36+00:00
> Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict

People see viral products and early hackers who spent years building their reputation, and think that's not too hard, and maybe you need to try as many as possible... Nope, you need to build a business too! Low-hanging fruit saas can be built so fast nowadays that knowing how to build software is not a huge advantage. We know that building businesses takes time and a huge effort. Most businesses will not be Lovable like.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-22 02:55:47+00:00
> I think you missed the joke here,

probably so. every corp I've worked for that had Sharepoint used it religiously. that is a whopping 3 different companies, but > 1 anecdotal experience. to be fair though, 2 of the 3 companies used it because the same person was at both companies and was responsible for using it at both companies during their tenure.