MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 14:16:42+00:00
He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does.

I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
by miloignis | 2025-07-13 14:17:23+00:00
I'll chip in with another datapoint that a seriously ergonomic keyboard helped me as well - in my case, the glove80. Expensive, and there might be a better option on the Pareto curve, but I got freaked out, bought the most ergonomic keyboard I could find, and it did solve my problem.

I've heard good things about voice typing with Talon too, but never tried it.
by thrance | 2025-07-13 14:17:27+00:00
Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to editorialize out content that would detract from clicking them.

You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.
by colinmorelli | 2025-07-13 14:17:38+00:00
This is an interesting take. By this perspective, it's essentially impossible to ever gauge the efficacy of AI in doing anything, because the people who will know how to measure the quality of that thing are also the people who will be displaced by showing the AI can do that thing. In fact, you could probably argue that every study ever is worthless, because studies are generally performed by people who know the subject matter and it's basically impossible to be unbiased on a topic if you're also highly knowledgable about said topic.

In reality, what matters is the methodology of the study. If the study's methodology is sound, and its results can be reproduced by others, then it is generally considered to be a good study. That's the whole reason we publish methodologies and results: so others can critique and verify. If you think this study is bad, explain why. The whole document is there for you to review.
by satisfice | 2025-07-13 14:17:44+00:00
For a guy who just made a uniformly damning and unnuanced statement about his peers in the industry, your concerns about "making a lot of assumptions" ring rather hollow. Perhaps you think only other people have to lay out their evidence and argument in a rigorous way, but not you?

Anyway, you could analyze my comment and reply. That's what I did with yours. Perhaps you could call my apparent bluff and challenge what I claim to know about epistemology. Maybe you're having trouble doing that because analysis wasn't how you arrived at your own opinion? You were expressing an ideological position that you inherited from-- I'm just guessing-- one article about Six Sigma or TQM that was 30 years old?

I read Quality Without Tears, by Phil Crosby, in 1987, that expressed much the same attitude as you just did. I've had a lot of time, since then, to become educated and experienced in these things.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-13 14:18:03+00:00
He doesn't want to judge people he wants to understand people. It is the opposite of a judgment. The idea is that you see someone on social media with ideas you disagree with, but instead of stopping there and dismissing that guy as an asshole, you try to see where these ideas come from and maybe realize that he has a point.

Now this feature could be used to reinforce your bubble (the crazy and dystopian scenario you refer to) instead of bursting out of it. How you see such a feature may be more telling about your own personality than about the feature itself.
by raincole | 2025-07-13 14:18:05+00:00
WinRAR is such a simple app compared to a browser. It probably only needs two or three full time developers to stay updated.

I was going to say "a better example is Reaper, a full-fledged DAW that has a similar business model..." then I realized even Reaper is probably a small piece of software when you consider what behemoth a modern browser is.
by whinvik | 2025-07-13 14:18:22+00:00
Maybe someone has better insights but what I have seen is that Claude Code is not amazing on greenfield. I mean it will generate something, which will probably work, but the solution can often be over-engineered, or hacky.

I think we have to build up enough code for it to start appearing like brownfield, before Claude knows how to engineer correctly. Which kind of makes sense if we view Claude Code as a junior engineer with infinite stamina.

I also actually like to spin up Claude Code and Gemini in parallel to see what each one comes up with. Gemini will often do the simpler approach, but not often fully featured, and my solution often ends up taking the 2 solutions and refining in Cursor to come up with the final solution.
by oasisaimlessly | 2025-07-13 14:19:35+00:00
That paper (P1364R0) was contentious, and I regard it as being severely motivated reasoning, published only to kill off competing approaches to C++ coroutines.

Some discussions of that paper:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1jwlur9/stackful_corou...

* https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dgfxde/fibers_...
by throwawaymaths | 2025-07-13 14:19:45+00:00
it's not a monad, since you can do unholy (for fp) things with it, like stash it in a struct and pass the struct around (even to functions which have no clue theres an io call) or just grab a globalized io object and use that at will arbitrarily at many entrypoints in your function.

most importantly, besides the obvious situations (creating the io object, binding it to another object), it's not generally going to be returned from a function as part of its value.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-13 14:20:14+00:00
I wondering how much this even matters in the age of everything being recorded.

If they are using axon body cameras and vehicle cameras, then usually the entire interaction is recorded, often from multiple officers.

I cannot imagine a defense so incompetent that they rely on the police report rather than watching the entire body cam footage and doing their own assessment.

Even if the cops are doing something sketchy (like turning off their camera) then it's not like the police report would be any more trustworthy.
by panick21_ | 2025-07-13 14:22:01+00:00
Its the cynical people who believe everything else is always cynical. If somebody wants to do a crash grab they could do crypto or some AI scam with much less effort.

> absorbing all resistance

Because its was not resistance in the first place ...

> hoping to ride on everyone’s burnout from modern tech

And with 'everybody' you mean a tiny group of nerds who know what a C64 is?
by constantcrying | 2025-07-13 14:23:05+00:00
>This kind of work isn’t possible with computers alone.

To be honest this is the kind of science journalism quote which hurts science journalism a lot. Not only is it plainly false, the explanation is even worse. Any normal person reading this paragraph can not possibly come away with a correct understanding of the issue involved.

>The number of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable method for enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can’t solve this problem efficiently.

The number of ways to go from city A to city B is also not enumerable by any computer. Yet efficient algorithms to find a good path exist. Clearly the size of the problem space is not the issue.
by ksec | 2025-07-13 14:25:19+00:00
It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense.

Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.

So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.

For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.

There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-13 14:26:26+00:00
Firefox isn't supposed to be a business to begin with. Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, isn't it?

If they can't survive off of donations, then they don't deserve to exist. If they want to sell user data or search defaults, Mozilla should fork Firefox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ

When Zuck said this, I could feel the smarm, but I respect his honesty, and I know what he's not saying. Mozilla is trying to spit the same game about its Google search default deal, as if that is the same thing. It's not, because when Facebook does it, it's a for-profit corporation selling out its users. When Mozilla does it, it's a nonprofit organization selling out its users to the single largest for-profit web property in the history of the Internet.

Google is a monopolist. They should lose the right to pay off their competition.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-13 14:26:39+00:00
Neuromancer was a much easier read to me than "A scanner darkly" I had the same trouble physically reading it as I did with a picture of dorian gray. (top tip, audiobooks totally made them easy and enjoyable to "read")

I'm not a natural scifi-cyberpunk literature person. I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.

One thing that did stand out was this: Everywhere had memory foam mattresses.

Some horrid bedsit: Memoryfoam matress

Uber fancy sky hotel: memoryfoam.
by taylorlunt | 2025-07-13 14:26:42+00:00
Elixir handles all of this pretty well, for example differentiating between Date, Time, NaiveDateTime (a date and time), and DateTime (a date and time in a particular timezone). The Timex library is a great improvement too.

JS has libraries that make the problem easier too. Though you'll never find a magic library that makes all the complexity disappear, because at the end of the day, you do need to tell the computer whether you mean 7 pm on the wall clock of where the users happen to be, 7 pm on a specific date in a specific time zone, etc. and doing math between dates is inherently complex with e.g. daylight savings changes. You might end up creating a datetime that doesn't exist (which Elixir handles well).
by spacechild1 | 2025-07-13 14:27:41+00:00
> Now Musk is copying Sundar: aligning the grok family of models with the current political climate that he's even even helped shape.

No, he is aligning it with his very personal political believes, see the "white genocide" thing. That's not what happened at Google. Musk literally wants to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge". I don't necessarily want to defend Google (although I think the topic is more nuanced), but it is not remotely comparable to what Musk is trying to do with xAI.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-13 14:28:09+00:00
Well, C does have a namespace mechanism, it's called prefixes ;) It's just unfortunate that both POSIX and the C stdlib don't use prefixes (except for the new C23 stdc_ functions which is going into the right direction at least).

The problem with C++ style namespaces as language feature is that they require name mangling, which opens up a whole new can of worms.

In the end, the POSIX _t just means "don't blame us when your library names collide with POSIX names", and that's fine. Other platforms have that problem as well, but the sky hasn't fallen because an occasional type or function name collision.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-13 14:28:34+00:00
The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.

Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.

Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.

That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
by pxc | 2025-07-13 14:28:37+00:00
Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now.

Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.

(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
by WJW | 2025-07-13 14:29:13+00:00
According to the internets, Ukraine is pumping out drones at about $300 to $500 at a rate of several tens of thousands per day. Of course a missile is faster and has bigger payload, but as a sibling comment mentioned, a javelin missile is about 500x more expensive than these cheap drones and can only hit target per missile. I can think of many scenario's where having a few hundred drones available to hunt down individual soldiers would be much more valuable that having a single javelin.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-13 14:29:22+00:00
If you've read the article as you claim, please quote where she says anything that shows she is anything but a leftist.

The point she is making is about not falling into the trap of tribalism. I am very much to the left (pro UBI and nationalization of key industries), but I am regularly disheartened by the primitive hostility and immediate irrational dismissal of people and ideas on the right (or even 'not far enough on the left'). That (we think) they're wrong doesn't justify treating them like shit and doesn't improve the discourse.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-13 14:29:31+00:00
Kinda inevitable after we got good VR headsets.

I was in grad school when VRML came out, I used it for things like visualizing 3-d slices of 5-d energy surfaces embedded in a 6-d phase space. I almost went to the VR CAVE to try it out but didn't quite, ironically I work in the social sciences cluster now and the former CAVE is our storage area and still has some big projectors on the floor which were expensive once.

A grad student who sat next to me, who I had endless arguments about "Linux vs Windows" told me that VRML was crap and the evidence was that it wasn't adequate to make 3-d games like Quake.

Today I'd compare A-Frame to Entity Component Systems (ECS) like Unity. A-Frame still has an object graph and it still has the awful primitives that VRML had that Horizon Worlds is stuck with, but you can make complex shapes with textures and import real models.

My one trouble with it as a developer is memory management, if you load too much geometry on an MQ3 it "just doesn't work." I got stuck on a project with it, I've got a good idea how to fix it but it was enough of a setback that I've been working on other things sense.

I did learn a lot more about the ECS paradigm this year when I was in a hackathon and joined up with a good Unity programmer and a designer to make a winning game (brought my mad Project|Product Management skills as well as my startup-honed talent of demonstrating broken software on stage and making it look perfect.) Now I play low-budget games and have a pretty clear idea how you'd implement them with an ECS framework so one day I'll put down the controller and make another crack at my VR project.
by Aachen | 2025-07-13 14:30:24+00:00
Because then: whose computer is it? If it's my computer, it does my bidding. If a child is currently on the computer, should the computer decide and refuse to work as in "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" where the operator (Dave) is deemed a threat to its objective? In this case, the computer's programmed goal would be preventing any minor from seeing content with this tag. It has to decide if you're a minor whenever content is marked as such. If you can't override its programming, it's your computer no longer
by hollywood_court | 2025-07-13 14:30:26+00:00
Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether.

I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.

It’s astonishing that police officers aren’t held to the same standards as the rest of us. As a carpenter and building contractor, if I showed up at the wrong address and built or tore down something by mistake, I’d be financially and legally responsible. I’d be expected to make it right, and my insurance would likely step in.

But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-13 14:30:35+00:00
Certainly "this is how C does it" might be the worst possible rationale for anything in this space. And I like C, got paid a whole lot of money to write C over many years.

But hilariously it's not even true, you see C believes the empty string is also true, it's a string, only the absence of a string would be false in C - whereas Javascript is quite sure the empty string, just like an undefined or null value, is false.
by motorest | 2025-07-13 14:30:56+00:00
> So the market isn't allowed to detect robots (...)

I don't know what you mean by "the market".

What I do know is that if I try to go to a site with my favourite browser and a site blocks me because it's so poorly engineered it thinks I am a bot just because I'm not using Chrome, then it's pretty obvious that it's not detecting bots.

Also worth noting: it might surprise you that there browser automation frameworks. Some of them, such as Selenium, support Chrome.
by angry_octet | 2025-07-13 14:32:40+00:00
My favourite lesser known post-Neuromancer works:

George Alec Effinger "When Gravity Fails" (1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails

Walter John Williams "Aristoi" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)

And just pre-Gibson: Michael Berlyn "The Integrated Man" (1980) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144056.The_Integrated_M...

Bruce Sterling "The Artificial Kid" (1980) This is not a hacker novel, but eerily presages Instagram/Snapchat and viral stardom, the need for creators to create content, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid
by anonymoushn | 2025-07-13 14:33:27+00:00
Yes, I understand that the designers prefer the Allocator situation and that Reader and Writer being anytype was downstream of the difficulty of using async readers and writers otherwise. So the intention was always to go with the design that I do not prefer. One reason I do not prefer it is that the Reader and Writer interfaces were already staggeringly inefficient, despite the lack or virtualization. We have avoided the issue by reimplementing a bunch of their API in some specific readers and writers and modifying the stdlib Reader and Writer to dispatch to these methods if they are present.

To be honest, I just do not have much faith in the commitment to optimality, when it seems like the team has not spent time doing things like profiling a program that spends a lot of time formatting integers as decimal syrings, and noticing that the vast majority of that formatting runtime is UTF-8 validation. I am happy to continue using the language, because it makes it easy enough to fix these issues oneself.

The only aspect that may not be recoverable by the end user is the "am I async/is this async" reflection issue, though a core team member has clarified in this comment section that the code in the article is a sketch and the design of stackless coroutines is far from done, so we may yet get this.

Some other philosophical point is, like, lua's coroutine.create/resume/yield/clone are control flow primitives for use within a single thread of execution. It's fine to ship an async runtime, which embodies the view they they are not control flow primitives for use within a single thread of execution, for doing I/O. But focusing the primitives for creating and switching between execution contexts too narrowly on the async runtime use case is liable to he harmful to other use cases for these operations. Ideally, we would be able to write things like a prominent SNES emulator that uses stack switching to ensure the simulation of different components proceeds in an order known to be more correct than other orders, and we would be able to do it using native language features, which would compile down to something a bit cheaper than dumping all of our registers onto the stack. Ideally when we do this we would not be asked by the language to consider what it would mean to "cancel" the execution context managing one of the components, in the same way that we do not need to consider what it means to cancel an arbitrary struct, or the function which is calling the function currently executing.
by nomendos | 2025-07-13 14:33:30+00:00
Stop using Chrome. (i.e. as main browser I use Firefox which with containers is unmatched and Brave for any websites that I used Chrome in the past mainly for faster JS, while speed is +/- per bench) This could not have much effect on Google in the beginning (technically informed users first), but at some point it can (and I predict will, as technical literacy and privacy awareness is increasing, plus greed and productization of user data does have limits..) be avalanche moment. It will take variable time due to many variables, but is inevitability (i.e. universe law of "optimal path"). In my opinion, Google has miscalculated with the move to obsolete MV2 (masking it as "security" adds to dishonesty and consequent distrust, which is the opposite from the original Google's founding principles)
by immibis | 2025-07-13 14:33:51+00:00
RDBMS (you spelled it wrong) are good for many things. Postgres is a veritable swiss army knife - have a look through the manual, scroll through all the features you don't care about, be amazed it has so many.

RDBMS are an old fogey tool. It takes a really old fogey to suggest storing records at fixed byte intervals directly on the disk - is that your proposed alternative? Or perhaps you grew up in the microservices era and that's already become old fogey.
by reactordev | 2025-07-13 14:33:52+00:00
Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss.

Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.

Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.