MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by habinero | 2025-07-04 18:50:28+00:00
Hmm. Responding to "the government is kidnapping people off the street with no due process or recourse, and my friends are desperately afraid their spouses will be taken." with a sneering "yeah but what about all the other ways to die" is certainly _a_ choice, but not one I would ever make.

Most people aren't the type to watch The Great Escape or Bridge over the River Kwai and cheer for the camp guards. It's very brave of you.
by jhide | 2025-07-04 18:50:52+00:00
While the misanthropy is compelling, and bell collars slightly reduce hunting success for (invasive, feral) cats, literally nothing else in your comment correct.

Concern for native birds and small mammals which are a keystone part of our ecosystems is not futile. They support literally everything required for human survival (carbon cycle, water, cycle, nitrogen cycle, pollination, sea dispersal, pollution control, etc) directly, and indirectly by their behaviors which have coevolved for millions of years. Invasive, feral cats, just like humans have only been here for a very short window of time, and while there are still native birds and mammals and plants left to care for, we can and should support them by minimizing the wonton carnage and death which we unleash each year. You’re probably aware that in North America alone feral cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year. Euthanasia instead of trap neuter release is not a sailed ship. Planting native (human intervention) and undoing the lawns (human intervention) that have destroyed our native ecosystems is not a sailed ship. There is hope and it is exciting to work towards this in your own community and I hope you come to see that. The results (insects return, the soil enriches and traps carbon, and birds you've never seen before sing on your back porch in the morning) are nearly immediate and heartwarming

Edit: typo
by matja | 2025-07-04 18:51:03+00:00
ECC is a must-have if you want to minimize the risk of corruption, but that is true for any filesystem.

Sun (and now Oracle) officially recommended using ECC ever since it was intended to be an enterprise product running on 24/7 servers, where it makes sense that anything that is going to be cached in RAM for long periods is protected by ECC.

In that sense it was a "must-have", as business-critical functions require that guarantee.

Now that you can use ZFS on a number of operating systems, on many different architectures, even a Raspberry Pi, the business-critical-only use-case is not as prevalent.

ZFS doesn't intrinsically require ECC but it does trust that the memory functions correctly which you have the best chance of achieving by using ECC.
by bilbo-b-baggins | 2025-07-04 18:51:03+00:00
I’m surprised that in 5e where this appeared nobody noted that Falling Damage applies to characters falling, and maxes out at 20d6 (PHB). There is no specific height by d6 rule for being hit by falling objects, only some guidelines about improvising damage dice from environmental things based on how deadly it should be.

As usual when this comes up, I have to point out that the entire premise is Homebrew - even if Falling Damage rules applied to Thrown Objects (they do not), it would max at 20d6.

The correct ruling is it is an Thrown Improvised Weapon and does probably 1d6 (plus Dex, 0 for a commoner, iirc) - and requires a non-proficiency attack roll to hit.

Why? Because DnD is not a physics simulator. If you want the rules to apply at all, it’s just a thrown object no matter how far it got handed on first. If you want to Homebrew rules about things traveling distances adding momentum, and hence damage, that has nothing to do with RAW.

Source: Forever DM
by qwertfisch | 2025-07-04 18:51:17+00:00
I have seen the Japanese DVD cut with the fighting scene in full colour. This is a lot better. But also the black/white effect works with its own style. But … not several minutes long. Also if you have seen it in colour, you might not want to go back to black/white.

I haven’t seen the director’s cut, but it would be nice if Tarantino could use the Japanese cut in most scenes. Here is a (German) comparison: https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=1588 I like the first two differences (0.00.00 and 0.08.58) more in the international version.

Unfortunately there is no Bluray/HD version of the Japanese cut.

Also: yes, I very much like the first volume a lot, while the second part is really a bit boring with too quick fights. Seems like Tarantino already used the best scenes for chapter 1 and 2.
by mberning | 2025-07-04 18:51:49+00:00
Agent mode in RubyMine which I think is using a recent version of sonnet. I tried starting a new agent conversation but it was still off quite a bit. For me my interest in finessing the LLM runs out pretty quickly, especially if I see it moving further and further from the mark. I guess I can see why some people prefer to interact with the LLM more than the code, but I’m the opposite. My goal is to build something. If I can do in 2 hours of prompting or 2 hours of doing it manually I’d rather just do it manually. It’s a bit like using a mirror to button your shirt. I’d prefer to just look down.
by cb321 | 2025-07-04 18:51:51+00:00
Ah. You refer to the "write once, run anywhere" marketing slogan at a time when there was a lot of JVM-to-JVM variability and JVM JITs were not very advanced. I didn't buy that slogan at the time (look at aaaaall that open source code running all over with ./configure) and always hated Java's crazy boilerplate verbosity combined with a culture to defend it as somehow "better".

I mean, it's not like people ran Internet servers on such vastly different CPUs/OSes or that diversity was such a disadvantage. DEC Alpha was probably the most different for its 64-bitness, but I ran all those open source Linux/C things on that by 1996..97. But we may just have to agree to disagree that it made a lot of sense for that reason. I have disagreements with several high profile SiValley "choices" and I know I'm a little weird.

Anyway, I don't mean to be arbitrarily disputatious. Focusing on what we do agree on, I agree 100% early Java stdlib's being bigger than C/C++ & early STL/template awfulness was a huge effect. :-) C++ like keywords and lexical sensibilities mattered, too. PLang researchers joked upon Java's success that C's replacement sure had to "look like C". But I think programmers having all their lib needs met with very little work matters even more and network-first package managers were just getting going. A perceived-as-good stdlib absolutely helps Go even today. Human network effects are a very real driver even among very talented engineers.

Maybe since CTAN/CPAN?, that often comes more from popularity and the ecosystem than "what's in the stdlib". Even before then there was netlib/fortran algorithm distribution, though. Node/Rust/Python worlds today show this.

How to drive popularity in a market of ideas competing for it is hard/finicky or the biggest marketing budget would always win and people could also always just "buy reputation" which empirically does not happen (though it sure happens sometimes which I guess shows ad spend is not wasted). Even so, "free advertising", "ecosystem builds going exponential", etc. - these are just tricky to induce.

The indisputable elephant in the room is path dependence. Fortran, still somewhat reflective of people "stacking punch card decks" to "link" programs in the 1950s, is still used by much modern scientific research either directly or indirectly. Folks were literally just figuring out what a PLang should be and how interacting with these new things called "computers" might work.

But path dependence is everywhere all around us.. in institutions, traditions, and technology. It's all really a big Humanity Complete discussion that spirals into a cluster of Wicked Problems. Happens so fast on so many topics. :-) If you happen to make something that catches on, let us hope you didn't make too many mistakes that get frozen in! Cheers!
by pickle-wizard | 2025-07-04 18:51:53+00:00
I don't use AI for writing code directly. If I am working with a new framework or SDK I'll ask it for examples of how to do something, and then write the final implementation myself. This saves a lot of time digging through poorly written docs or decade old StackOverflow posts. However do keep in mind that it does sometimes make stuff up, so you have to keep an eye on it.

I'm a solo dev and also use it to rubber duck what I am planning to do. I can give it my requirements and it helps me to refine my plan. This is what I mostly use it for.

I know people say it is great for writing boilerplate, but I just don't find myself writing much boiler plate.
by archagon | 2025-07-04 18:51:55+00:00
These look compelling, but unfortunately, we know that SSDs are not nearly as reliable as spinning rust hard drives when it comes to data retention: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...

(I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not confirmed.)

If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my most precious data.

Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port, since you're going to lose out on a ton of bandwidth over 2.5Gbps... though I suppose you could probably use the USB-C port for that.
by wasmperson | 2025-07-04 18:52:11+00:00
> Obviously, the sample code above unwraps to high heaven, and that’s nothing something I would condone in actual production code—please do use proper error handling.

Everywhere the author used `unwrap` is a place where I would expect the program to crash if the operation fails, so I'm not sure what they imagine "proper error handling" in this case would look like. Take this snippet for example:

let doc = window().unwrap().document().unwrap(); let form = doc .get_element_by_id("login") .unwrap() .dyn_into::<HtmlFormElement>() .unwrap();

In javascript that looks like this:

// or you could write nothing. `login` is already a global variable let form = document.getElementById('login');

At a glance, the web-sys docs don't say, but I assume the error conditions that would trigger those `unwrap`s are:

- The `window` global is missing or the code is running outside of the browser

- The `document` global is missing

- The page has no form element with an id of "login"

I don't see a reasonable thing to do in those cases except crash.

A more general point: I find WebAssembly works best when:

- Interfacing with the DOM and web APIs is still mostly done in javascript

- The wasm binary has a narrow interface consisting of a handful of functions with careful calling conventions

- The wasm binary avoids dependencies on either third-party packages or the standard library (e.g. rust's "no_std")

- The compiled code generously uses mutable "global" variables (note: local to the wasm module instance)

The rust + wasm-bindgen + web-sys strategy feels like the exact opposite of this, which doesn't strike me as very useful unless you just want to avoid writing javascript entirely.
by kbenson | 2025-07-04 18:52:50+00:00
Everyone's gotta start some time. My first comment wasn't until almost exactly a year after I finally made an account (according to search, but that lines up with my memory), and I didn't even create an account until I had been reading for a couple years IIRC.

I think it's often people that have an emotional response that make their first comment if they've been a lurker for a while already.

FWIW I think people are reacting negatively to you is because you've done the equivalent of walk into a community center where someone is showing their hobbyist art project and loudly proclaimed all the problems and that you'll be more interested when they fixed it up enough to make it to a real gallery. Not only is that person missing much of the point of why that person did it and judging it by standards it was never intending to strive for, but doing so around others that are there to appreciate it for what it is actually hampers their enjoyment and the empathic happiness they feel for someone striving to do something for the fun of it.

In other words, most people don't really care if this materializes as an actual product or project that's widely usable. It's a cool hobby project and some of us appreciate that, and appreciate people documenting their process in doing such things.
by jon_adler | 2025-07-04 18:53:20+00:00
It is also possible to get the best of both worlds. The ODYSSEY features both a Celeron J4125 and RP2040 co-processor. I have an older model and find this combination very handy. I run Proxmox on it and it works very well.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-v2-p-5531.ht...
by materielle | 2025-07-04 18:53:47+00:00
I’d also point out, that even in the compiler space, there are basically no production compilers written in Haskell and OCaml.

I believe those two languages themselves self-host. So not saying it’s impossible. And I have no clue about the technical merits.

But if you look around programming forums, there’s this ideas that”Ocaml is one of the leading languages for compiler writers”, which seems to be a completely made up statistic.
by kccqzy | 2025-07-04 18:53:54+00:00
Having fewer parentheses is not a win, it makes more things implicit and forces everyone to remember operator precedence. In my opinion operator precedence is never worth remembering other than plus minus multiply and divide.

I find heavily parenthesized expressions easy to read, just because I tend to break them into multiple lines and the indentation serves as a guide. Don't put too many of them on a single line.
Why Prompt Libraries Are Quietly Becoming the Frameworks of AI Coding (2025)
by devtechinsights | 2025-07-04 18:55:47+00:00
Developers aren’t just writing prompts anymore — they’re architecting them. Version-controlled prompt modules, testable structures, and reusable templates are now powering AI apps like real frameworks. Here's how prompt libraries are changing how we build with LLMs — and what’s coming next. for more info, visit https://devtechinsights.com/prompt-libraries-frameworks-ai-coding
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-04 18:56:14+00:00
I think that if that is the case, then we might need a "tiny" more security if unsupervised rats could enter into their premise. It just feels kinda weird thinking how we have a country with nuclear power and yet the building where its highest ranking elected official / basically one of the most important buildings where they live can be infected with the tiny rat.

It almost feels poetic. They have the power to bend apple's arm in secret courts and doors to literally backdoor every/(billions?) of apple devices to mass control and yet a tiny rat can escape and enter their most prestigious building where such earlier decisions are made.

I am not sure why but it definitely gives me some david vs goliath the way I am picturing it.

I am not sure if this is such an unsolvable problem given I am pretty sure that there are definitely CCTV's everywhere with people surveilling over them 24x7 right?
by adarshd | 2025-07-04 18:56:30+00:00
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by aranchelk | 2025-07-04 18:56:34+00:00
I disagree. There are many operators that you’ll never use but if you memorize (^.), (.~), and (%~), you’re pretty much set for a lot of real-world software development.

Per Kmett’s original talk/video on the subject, I can confirm my brain shifted pretty quickly to look at them like OOP field accessors. And for the three above, the mnemonics are effective:

“^.” is like an upside down “v” for view.

“.~” looks like a backwards “s” for setters.

“~%” has an tilde so it’s a type of setter and “%” has a circle over a circle, so it’s over.

I’ll also add that my experience in recent versions of PureScript things get even nicer: visible type application lets you define record accessors on the fly like:

foo ^. ln@“bar” <<< ln@“baz”

“.” Is unfortunately a restricted character and is not the composition operator like Haskell, but I alias “<<<“ with “..”

The pretty obvious question with the above is: why don’t you just write “foo.bar.baz”. In my case I use a framework that uses passed lenses for IoC, but I think “%~” is always nicer and less repetitive than the built-in alternative.
by shironandonon_ | 2025-07-04 18:56:48+00:00
Thanks for the read! I too have over 20 years in tech and have been going back and forth with Gemini-cli to gamify some tools for integration testing some Enterprise applications and it’s amazing what can be done with Gemini alongside usage of MCP servers. I am finding positive results if I approach problems in chunks and provide clarity in prompt instructions. The AI will make mistakes and sometimes get caught up in loops for some problems (like application routing.. lol) but I am happy to step in and effectively pair program with the AI when issues are present. I notice too that it has never been a better time to enforce things like how Duplication Is Evil because otherwise the AI may make a change in one area and forget that it has similar changes to make in another file. This applies both to programming logic as well as User eXperience and application behaviour.

Anyway what a world. It would have taken me weeks to create what an AI and myself are able to whip up in a few short, and fun, hours.

Giving a personality to Gemini is also a vital feature to me. I love the portability of the GEMINI.md file so I can bring that personality onto other devices and hand-tailor it to custom specifications.
by trhway | 2025-07-04 18:57:02+00:00
>Probably best to keep your cats inside even if you do get another one, considering the devastating effect they have as an invasive species on local wildlife. [1]

>[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

You're posting an article by the Smithsonian department employing that felon convicted for animal cruelty toward cats.

Wrt. the article itself - it has pretty much no scientific merits as, not surprisingly given the authors' agenda, the article has an obvious fundamental flaw disqualifying it from science - it doesn't specify how many of that wildlife killed by cats were old/ill who would be anyway killed by other predators if it were a natural setting and not a developed area where the only predators left are cats.

If we to believe the article's total numbers then it would really mean what the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans. Killing the old/ill birds, reptiles, mammals by predators is good for those birds, reptiles, mammals species. (and around humans say an old/ill bird not killed by cats would become a dead bird and a food for rats or something like this)
by trod1234 | 2025-07-04 18:57:07+00:00
There isn't much of a future for the young or even middle aged at this point.

Most of the benefits the old received when they were young were systemically taken away or withheld to enrich the old.

Debts were piled onto the young without appropriate representation (i.e. social security, and many other taxes).

In many respects the older generation as a whole chose to willingly make their children sacrifices to the spendthrift debts of their generation; which is what happens when your leaders have no real funding plan and the population doesn't hold their leaders to account.

The old through aggregate choice (inaction is a choice) of their cohort made the world they intended for their children. All the leaders needed was your willing complicit consent to do nothing.

As a result, many of those children aren't having children themselves because there is no future, no economic means to support children, or even meet someone.

Just like the native peoples who became slaves following the Spanish Conquistadors, where they would kill themselves, not have children, and even kill their children. These things about slavery repeat when people blind themselves.

The systems which were handed off to the last generation are former shadows of what they once were. The protections have been removed to favor one party at the expense of many.

One bad generation is all it takes, and from there you have a generation of suffering and violence when that suffering becomes untenable by the majority. A hellscape, and that is the legacy of the boomer generation.

To make matters worse, the weapons the older generation developed to maintain control may even allow government to retain a system of enslavement thereafter, where everything collapses (i.e. Malthus/Catton).
by accrual | 2025-07-04 18:57:10+00:00
I'm not a scientist or someone producing technical literature for others to consume, but I feel like I'd want my humanity to come through on important topics like this. I love using LLMs but there are some tasks (like writing comments or texting friends) that I refuse to use them with, otherwise I'm applying `normalizeText(myUniqueText)`.

I'm sure there are deadlines and other constraints that cause professionals to reach for LLMs when producing their work, just like school-age kids use them for homework so they have more time to do whatever they'd rather be doing, so I can understand.
by pregressicko | 2025-07-04 18:57:22+00:00
>> I almost immediately learned that no one in tech, is interested in hiring a 55-year-old, regardless of their pedigree.

My comment is off topic but I have to chime in: while I'm sad to hear of your bad luck, this is YOUR experience, and it is not universal.

At 54, I got my highest paying job ever in tech after being walked out of a "marquee-name" company after 24 years. This was three years ago. There is a tremendous need for senior engineers in smaller companies. The main reason is that all the A+ engineers (clearly I am not one!) have retired from decades of fat equity compensation, and those of us at the B+ level (or me who financially screwed up) are actually now a rare commodity.

So hang in there, greyhairs are still valuable to smaller companies.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-04 18:57:44+00:00
Game addiction hits the same part of the brain as gambling does. In fact, it’s my understanding that gambling addicts and video game addicts have nearly identical similarities in terms of how the addiction progresses and “sets in” as it where.

As an aside, and really I am sorry for this tangent, and I have no issue believing any of this, but this comment somehow feels LLM (ChatGPT) generated to me and I can’t put my finger on it, as I like to default to being wrong about such things.

I know it’s an aside but it has become such a big issue on many forums now.

Sorry for the tangent!
by pluc | 2025-07-04 18:57:55+00:00
It really isn't. I've been blocking all JavaScript for years now, selectively allowing what is essential for sites to run or using a private session to allow more/investigate/discover. Most sites work fine without their 30 JS sources, just allowing what is hosted on their own domain. It takes a little effort, but it's a fair price to pay to have a sane Internet.

The thing is - with everything - it's never easy to have strong principles. If it were, everyone would do it.
by big_toast | 2025-07-04 18:58:29+00:00
Is it a coincidence that this shows up as John Smedley launches a new MMO (yesterday)?

As much as I loved EverQuest, it has informed my view that the world is full of addictive substances. And most people probably need a disinterested third party who loves them and helps them manage the addiction. Until they build their own defenses.