MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whatevsmate | 2025-07-16 14:06:42+00:00
What promises were made, by whom? Graphics APIs have never been about ease of use as a first order goal. They've been about getting code and data into GPUs as fast as reasonably possible. DevEx will always play second fiddle to that.

I think WebGPU is a decent wrapper for exposing compute and render in the browser. Not perfect by any means - I've had a few paper cuts working with the API so far - but a lot more discoverable and intuitive than I ever found WebGL and OpenGL.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-16 14:07:11+00:00
Yes, but it's important to understand that limitations are moved to Mastodon "layer" in that case. It takes careful deliberation and restraint to keep something tidy. Mastodon does this by limiting its scope and organizational structure. We as humans like to abuse capabilities. So, to keep something tidy and prevent (or realistically slow down) rot, you need a limit somewhere. Putting that limit to humans vs. the protocol is a trade-off.

In that scenario W3C doesn't put any brakes, Mastodon puts brakes on development, organizational structure and scope, and Gemini puts brakes on the protocol. So, it's the most limited but hardest to abuse in a sense.

I probably worded my "I see them as equals" part of my comment wrong. I know Gemnini is a subset of HTTP, it's more Gopher than HTTP, and that's OK by me. Moreover, that leanness is something I prefer. See, the most used feature on my browser is Reader mode, and I amassed enormous amount of links in Pocket just because of the reading experience it offered.

> I really don't get why we would have to deliberately be stripping ourselves of so much power and potential.

Because power corrupts and gets abused. A friend of mine told me that they now use Kamal which makes deployment easy. How it's deployed? Build a container -> Push to registry -> pull the container on the remote system -> runs the container -> sets up and runs a proxy in front of that container to handle incoming connections.

That's for a simple web application...

I mean, I push files to a web server and restart its process. I'm not against power, I'm against corruption, and given human nature, restraint is something hard to practice, and that's if you want to learn and practice it.

> Talking about Gemini as the best solution to the problems of the modern web is like saying we should wear chastity belts to deal with teenage pregnancies.

I never said Gemini is the only and the best way forward. Again, for me It's another protocol, which offers a nice trade-off for some people sharing a particular set of values. It's like a parallel web like BBSes or public terminals (e.g.: SDF).

Being an absolutist benefits no one. We should learn, understand and improve. We can have multiple webs, and we shall be free to roam them in a way we like. I'd love to use my terminal to roam some text only web with my favorite monospace font and terminal theme, but I like to write comments here and think on the replies I get, too.

I find myself preferring a text-only, distraction-free web more and more, and naturally evolving my habits and personal infrastructure in that way, but I'm not carrying a flag, shouting about end-times and preaching stuff as savior. I'm not that person.
by tomrod | 2025-07-16 14:07:54+00:00
I'm a big fan of Linux. My small business and personal life run on it. You can download XFCE/Ubuntu spin at https://xubuntu.org/download/. If you develop on your Apple system, it will be pretty similar except

- App Installation via repositories is more common than single program installs. No DMG files. There is a similar concept to DMG with "snap" installs. Steam should probably be installed via a snap. You trust the producer (Valve). But most software and security should come through repos (in CLI, sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade)

- Home directory is /home/<username>

Much of the rest is similar -- Apple's BSD and Linux share a common Unix design progenitor.

Linux is way open to rewipe, just pay attention that you don't lose files. My first day on Linux in the mid 2000s, I somehow overwrite the file system allocation table with the content of an MP3. It was recoverable!

Good luck, and have fun!
by daneel_w | 2025-07-16 14:07:58+00:00
Disagree that it's fairly close to the statement "they resell traffic logs" and the implication that they leak all queried hostnames ("secret hosts, like for your work, will be leaked"). Unless Quad9 is deceiving users, both statements are, in fact, completely false.

https://quad9.net/privacy/policy/#22-data-collected
by sumtechguy | 2025-07-16 14:08:29+00:00
> Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...

I have that exact workflow with any computer I do not use on a regular basis. If I use the thing every day it is ok. But if I let something sit for like 6 months it is 'patch city'. I usually play that game on my game consoles because i do not use it much. My daily used computers 10-15 seconds tops until usable desktop.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-16 14:08:42+00:00
> What she wants is to tell her phone to switch it's background to the picture she took last night of the family.

Which is kind of absurd. If you were asking a friend to hang a picture would you verbally describe the picture to them or just show them which one to hang?

There is a lot of "if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" going on.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-16 14:08:53+00:00
And how do you think putting a man on the Moon sounded at a time when we'd yet to put a single person into space?

Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and viewed the Moon as little more than a step on the way to his vision of colonizing Mars, for which he'd already been working on technical plans with the planned first landings to be in the early 1980s. In fact this is precisely where the Space Shuttle, and to a lesser degree the ISS, came from. They were meant to be tools, with the ISS a very small scale version of the supporting stations planned to come with the Space Shuttle working as a beast of burden during their construction.

He retired from NASA once it became clear the politicians were no longer interested in space after winning the space race. As an amusing anecdote, well before he was the head of Apollo, he also wrote a sci-fi book, "Project Mars: A Technical Tale." In it there was an advanced civilization living on Mars headed by a group of ten individuals who were, themselves, headed by "The Elon."

---

Those who lack the ability to think big will, unsurprisingly, never have anything big. Because there's no technological point where colonizing another planet, much like landing on the Moon, will ever be easy or simple. Because you're doing something that's never been done before which means there are a basically infinite number of things that might go wrong, and you simply cannot account for all of them. And this always has and always will be the same story. Technology doesn't simply come to us - we make it happen, and without pushing forward we will stagnate.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-16 14:09:09+00:00
Short version:

Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.

Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.

Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.

It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.

The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637

I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.

P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.
by snvzz | 2025-07-16 14:09:34+00:00
AmigaOS 4.x is a very different system altogether.

Most people on classic Amiga hardware are running some version of AmigaOS 3.

Last 3.x release was mere months ago.

There's a complicated legal history around AmigaOS and other Amiga IP. It is documented in the Amiga Documents[0].

0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
by sjw987 | 2025-07-16 14:09:35+00:00
"Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today."

Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.

Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.
by imiric | 2025-07-16 14:09:57+00:00
Huh, I wasn't aware that reasoning could be toggled. I use the OpenRouter API, and just saw that this is supported both via their web UI and API. I'm used to Sonnet 3.5 and 4 without reasoning, and their performance is roughly the same IME.

I wouldn't trust comparing two different models, even from the same provider and family, since there could be many reasons for the performance to be different. Their system prompts, training data, context size, or runtime parameters could be different. Even the same model with the same prompt could have varying performance. So it's difficult to get a clear indication that the reasoning steps are the only changing variable.

But toggling it on the same model would be a more reliable way to test this, so I'll try that, thanks.
by nordsieck | 2025-07-16 14:09:57+00:00
> I don't understand the purpose of consumers owning individual solar panels in a large array. How is that better than a single entity owning the whole array, and what function does the consumer provide?

I don't now if it's better, but it is different.

The benefit to the utility in this case is much lower capex - it's basically like the restaurant franchise model, but for power.

But like you imply, there's a tradeoff that can be made between capex and opex - in this case, the utility could own everything and consumers could pay for electricity on an ongoing basis. IMO, this model is superior due to reduced principal-agent problems.
by Calzifer | 2025-07-16 14:10:22+00:00
> Also, note that some areas of ThunderBird are rendered outside of the influence of userChrome.css in a "Shadow DOM" - as such, it is not possible to fully theme all elements of Thunderbird.

With some limitations it is possible to restyle Shadow DOM elements. It is just a lot harder to select the right element if it is inside a shadow dom.

I found a workaround (don't remember where I found it) which I use extensively in my personal userChrome.css.

The basic concept (afair) is that you can write selectors which match inside the shadow dom as long as they do not need to "cross" the shadow dom "boundary".

A good starting point for me is often to select by tag and part attribute, e.g. image[part="icon"] { ... }

Now the trick to style a particular instance of a web component (shadow dom instance) is to use variables and defaults.

With a selector which targets the "root element" of the shadow dom I set variables for any value I want to change and with a selector which is fully inside the shadow dom I add styles using the variable (which is then only defined for that particular instance) or a default which effectively cancels my custom style anywhere else.

As concrete example the dialog to create new calendar events has a drop down box to select the calendar where each entry is prefixed with a dot with calendar color. The menulist has a shadow dom and the menupopup another. I styled those dots as squares (for fun and because I think the modern web is to round). So to set the variables on the "outside" I have:

menulist#item-calendar { --parthack-boxmarker-radius: 0; --parthack-boxmarker-image-size: 1em; --parthack-boxmarker-border: inset 0 0 0 1px color-mix(in srgb, black 20%, transparent); }

and to apply it

menuitem.menuitem-iconic > hbox.menu-iconic-left > image.menu-iconic-icon { border-radius: var(--parthack-boxmarker-radius) !important; width: var(--parthack-boxmarker-image-size, revert-layer) !important; height: var(--parthack-boxmarker-image-size, revert-layer) !important; box-shadow: var(--parthack-boxmarker-border, none); }

(the variable prefix "parthack" has no special meaning; it just evolved because I initially used it to hack styles onto shadow dom elements over the part attribute)

Now this will change only the icons only in the menulist with id 'item-calendar' and leave others unchanged. Whether I use revert-layer as default or something else depends on what style the element has by default and try and error.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-16 14:10:22+00:00
> Despite impressive capabilities, large language models have yet to produce a genuine breakthrough. The puzzle is why.

I don't see why this is remotely surprising. Despite all the hoopla, LLMs are not AGI or artifical brains - they are predict-next-word language models. By design they are not built for creativity, but rather quite the opposite, they are designed to continue the input in the way best suggested by the training data - they are essentially built for recall, not creativity.

For an AI to be creative it needs to have innate human/brain-like features such as novelty (prediction failure) driven curiosity, boredom, as well as ability to learn continuously. IOW if you want the AI to be creative it needs to be able to learn for itself, not just regurgitate the output of others, and have these innate mechanisms that will cause it to pursue discovery.
by troad | 2025-07-16 14:11:00+00:00
I'm struggling to follow your logic a little.

Java has virtually nothing in common with Smalltalk, other than in the most superficial way (things called objects exist, that work nothing alike). The closest thing to Smalltalk in serious use today is Ruby, which hews very close to Smalltalk's philosophy of message passing, though it does abandon the idea of a holistic programmable environment.

If one considers the actor model to be a natural evolution of Smalltalk's original idea of message-oriented, dynamic objects, then the BEAM might be Smalltalk's natural successor (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc). Genservers are effectively isolated green threads that communicate solely by sending one another messages, which strikes me as very close to the spirit of Smalltalk's objects.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-16 14:11:03+00:00
"If we destroy the organization responsible for this thing I like, then only the bad parts of the organization will die and the thing I prefer will become better!"

No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay organization you just wind up with something worse. There is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.

Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being torn down.

Vote against increased taxes because the road department already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll just wind up with more potholes.

Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish". Everything just gets worse.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-16 14:11:05+00:00
Though there are any number of nonstandard things you can do over HTTP to restrict your community from the unwashed eternal september noobs from joining it.

Requiring a markdown content-type would probably even be enough.

Consider the fact that TFA is already proxied over HTTP just so more than 3 people will read it, so it seems more sane to be HTTP native.
by AlexeyBrin | 2025-07-16 14:11:45+00:00
I read your initial message, now edited, as this is THE reason. Of course it can be one of the reasons for which the author chose Python.

Also the vibe coding part gave me the impression that you were implying that people that use/chose Python for AI are all vibe coders which is again false. Sorry if I misunderstood you, but this is what I got from your initial message.
by nkrisc | 2025-07-16 14:12:47+00:00
Because that would still be a disproportionate response and make NATO the aggressor, playing right into Russian hands.

The Russian military is already being destroyed in Ukraine (and even in Russia). The proportionate response is to give Ukraine everything they need to destroy Russia in a war that Russia chose to start. A war that they opened with a surprise invasion, no less. They are unambiguously the aggressor in their war in Ukraine and they should be defeated there, and we should give Ukraine everything they need to do that.
by irchans | 2025-07-16 14:12:57+00:00
This might be the best article that I have read this year. It might change the way that I program. I really want to write up examples for each of the ideas presented: Monotonicity, Pre- and post-conditions, Invariants, Isolation, Induction, and Proof-affinity as a quality metric. I think it's easy to find these ideas in my code, but I want to try to practice writing proofs "in my head" as I code to make my code better. It is not apparent to me now how this will work, but if I write up some examples, I imagine it will become clearer.
by Gormo | 2025-07-16 14:13:00+00:00
Do you have even a shred of evidence to suggest that anything you're describing has actually taking place at scale?

"Software is written almost entirely by LLMs" is obviously false. "Every small business in the country has basically abandoned the big platforms and expensive enterprises for IT support" is obviously false. And how would you even know what medical conversations people are having with either their doctors or LLMs?

Everything you're saying sounds like unsubstantiated wishful thinking from someone who's taken a big gulp of the LLM Kool-Aid.
by eddieh | 2025-07-16 14:13:12+00:00
Basically, writing a CS paper in LaTeX using the "alg*" packages (algorithm2e, algorithmicx, algorithms, algpseudocode, algxpar, algpseudocodex, etc.) is living in the ALGO 60 / ALGO 68 world. For the most part, nobody uses anything from the standards that would require superfluous explanations in a paper.
by empath75 | 2025-07-16 14:13:13+00:00
Rust is really missing higher kinded types, though. You can do a lot of neat haskell tricks with it, but you still can't write functions that are generic over "monads" for example. You have to write a function for lists, a function for options and a function for results, you can't really treat them as the _same thing_, even though they all have similar methods.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-16 14:13:33+00:00
The BBB contained over 4.5 trillion dollars in tax cuts and will add around 3 trillion to the US debt. It is one of the largest transfers of wealth to the corporate elite in the history of America, while removing the healthcare of tens of millions and putting half a million jobs at risk.

Tariffs will not make up for this because tariffs are, beyond specific circumstances, a failed policy that harms your own economy and disproportionately targets your lower class. It threatens US exports, makes many US businesses non-viable (thus losing jobs), slows down economy by increasing the prices of even domestic goods. Combine that with a looming recession and Trump's insistence to take over the fed fiscal policy and enforce a political bond policy...

Crashing your economy does not help reconcile debts.
by keyringlight | 2025-07-16 14:14:03+00:00
One thing I wonder about with people moving to linux is whether "it works like windows" can act as a safe and comfortable landing point, but then how many people explore and prefer the options that they then have access to.

One aspect MS has been criticized for over the past few versions of windows is that they are opinionated about how the base windows UI operates and looks for a very large number of users. One of the things I find interesting on the subreddits for some distros is a lot of posts is showing off how they've customized things, so you can nudge people towards the theming support or panel components you can swap out, or that you can have drastically different DEs with different operation models yet handle the same applications.
by _acco | 2025-07-16 14:14:14+00:00
This is a good way of framing that we don't understand human creativity. And that we can't hope to build it until we do.

i.e. AGI is a philosophical problem, not a scaling problem.

Though we understand them little, we know the default mode network and sleep play key roles. That is likely because they aid some universal property of AGI. Concepts we don't understand like motivation, curiosity, and qualia are likely part of the picture too. Evolution is far too efficient for these to be mere side effects.

(And of course LLMs have none of these properties.)

When a human solves a problem, their search space is not random - just like a chess grandmaster's search space of moves is not random.

How our brains are so efficient when problem solving while also able to generate novelty is a mystery.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-16 14:14:41+00:00
> All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents

Well, yes. Because they've not quite got the heavily broadcast message that having children is a bad financial decision. The West is a society that respects wealth and has a vague distaste for children and parents.

The UK has an ongoing debate about the two-child limit on child benefit payments. Whenever this is discussed, furious people appear out of the woodwork to condemn those who dare to have three children as financially irresponsible.

An additional child at £17.25 a week is an intolerable cost to the taxpayer, apparently. And you wonder why people don't have more children.
by ripdog | 2025-07-16 14:14:51+00:00
Well that's the experience I had. Obviously caching was enabled (unbound), but most DNS keepalive times are so short as to be fairly useless for a single user.

Even if a root server wasn't in the US, it will still be pretty slow for me. Europe is far worse. Most of Asia has bad paths to me, except for Japan and Singapore which are marginally better than the US. Maybe Aus has one...?
by bodiekane | 2025-07-16 14:15:30+00:00
Maybe other people's usage of the term is just different than yours without either being "correct".

For at least half of America, "DEI" means "giving preferential treatment to some individuals based on their race, sexuality or gender".

That might be a good thing (at a societal level it balances historical racism, or it counteracts unconscious bias or other contemporary inequalities) or that might be a bad thing (it's unfair to the individuals, it harms trust in the system and undermines meritocracy, visible attributes are a weak proxy to actual privilege) but that doesn't mean using the term the same way as hundreds of millions of other speakers is incorrect.
by anonfordays | 2025-07-16 14:16:46+00:00
>Meanwhile on the Xlibre mailing list:

You mean the troll that in that same thread is called out for being an off-topic spammer and blocked? https://www.freelists.org/post/xlibre/Proposal-Standards-for...

You're making the case for Xlibre here lol.

>The official telegram also has antisemetic memes

Yes, leftist spammers are posting antisemitic memes and getting banned, nothing new.

>"gene therapies" for COVID and other stuff that doesn't seem problematic to moderators.

Similarly being called out for being off topic.

Meanwhile, at Freedesktop.org and Debian: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ehEoRkMtoT8

>I guess it is "normal" for the community there given the Xlibre founder posts stuff like

I guess it is "normal" for the freedesktop.org and Debian community given one of the Debconf25 main stage speakers and Debian release managers is a convicted violent pedophile that they're platforming: https://www.offenderradar.com/offender-details/jeremy-c-bich...

From outside it looks like something one would not want to interact with.