MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-13 13:15:32+00:00
Perhaps publications like Mondo 2000 and WIRED (and Boing Boing) killed Cyberpunk the way The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis stuck a knife in the beatniks of the 1960's. Not that they made fun of Cyberpunk, but rather they so overly-embraced it that they kind of unintentionally made a mockery of it (so perhaps not so much like Dobie Gillis?). That was the way I saw it in the 90's anyway.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-07-13 13:15:38+00:00
OP said, in their post, they “Couldn't find one”

It’s totally fine to build your own implementation of something, especially if it’s for personal use or you’re not charging. OP is pitching a paid product. It’s not okay to ignore the sea of competitors and pitch your product on HN with a marketing blurb that isn’t true.

Anybody can slap together a chat UI and integrate a few LLM APIs. We need more than that if you’re charging money.
by phplovesong | 2025-07-13 13:15:56+00:00
Async/await tend to be IO bound, in zigs case hiw can i know what to use and when? Say i do a db call, thats clearly IO, and later do heavy CPU thing, now how do i know that the CPU thing does not block inside my async io thing?

I guess its pure luck if the io implementation can handle both, but who knows?
by brianjlogan | 2025-07-13 13:16:30+00:00
Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never read it and went "This is garbage."

In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.
by MrAlex94 | 2025-07-13 13:16:46+00:00
I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.

They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.

It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
by mdedetrich | 2025-07-13 13:16:58+00:00
iirc, btrfs has fixed the issues with raid 5/6 but it requires a breaking change to the on disk format which means you have to create an entirely new partition and copy the data over (you cannot update an existing partition to it). This new on disk format also needs its own testing.

Your point raid 5/6 not being tested heavily by actual users is entirely on point, those enterprise heavy users are only running RAID 10 like configurations.

If you want RAID 5/6, just use ZFS as they have solved all of these issues. I don't know if its due to sheer luck or maybe the fact is that Sun at its time was actually running RAID 5/6 in production (hard drives were not as cheap back then as they are now)?
by mingus88 | 2025-07-13 13:18:02+00:00
The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a single line of dialogue.

With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.

If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.
by yoav | 2025-07-13 13:18:19+00:00
You make some very good points but I would argue that many if not all the people you observe “without introspection” have enough to know they’re getting dummer but they don’t care because they never liked the art of writing code itself or problem solving they just liked getting a paycheck and are relieved that they can still have output their managers don’t fire them over with far less effort.

They see the same thing as you but are overjoyed to power down their brain and spend more time thinking about their personal hobbies and sports and 90 day fiance instead of real problem solving or code.
by gibbitz | 2025-07-13 13:18:23+00:00
Hopefully the fear of foreign actors will put an end to this too.

I have to hand it to North Korea on the inventive revenue streams. This is a country under sanctions for decades that has developed some of the most clever IT scams for siphoning money from the west. Between this and the Lazarus group the country has brought in Fortune 500 company kinds of money to keep itself afloat.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-13 13:19:04+00:00
MDN was a consolidation of several vendors’ web documentation efforts (I still remember Opera’s Web Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively decided to put under Mozilla’s stewardship because surely Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade, but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN, I’m not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I’m incensed by Google’s web.dev—it’s not just the domain name, it’s that they are reneging on that old agreement.)
by DangerousPie | 2025-07-13 13:19:23+00:00
PostgreSQL is just a community of volunteers as far as I'm aware, not full-time developers employed by the project.

FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/

Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
by jacknews | 2025-07-13 13:19:42+00:00
Lua is just a much simpler language at heart.

Python does have the 'there should be one, preferably only one, way to do it' mantra, but to me it utterly fails at that, and is in fact a bit of a 'kitchen sink' or 'armchair' language.

That is it's strength in some ways, it's easy and approachable, and has more libraries than perhaps any other language, so you can usually get something working fairly quickly.

But it's not so suited to sparse environments. You can't easily turn a plump armchair with automatic footrests and telescoping side-tables into a plywood Eames.
by josephg | 2025-07-13 13:19:49+00:00
At a very large company, I think some individual decisions the CEO makes will have much more impact on the company than the work output of 268 employees. I think some CEOs really are probably worth that kind of money. People like Steve Jobs.

However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.

I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.

Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.
by benreesman | 2025-07-13 13:19:54+00:00
I'll let a real category theorist get into the details that I'll likely flub, but the IO monad is where you end up if you start on this path. That context can be implicit, but it's there, and if you want any help from the compiler (to, for example, guide Claude Code towards useful outcomes) you've got to reify it as a real thing in the formality of the system.

Async and coroutines are the graveyard of dreams for systems programming languages, and Andrew by independently rediscovering the IO monad and getting it right? Hope of a generation.

Functions in the real world have colors: you can have predictable rules for moving between colors, or you can wing it and get C++ co_await and tokio and please kill me.

This is The Way.
by arp242 | 2025-07-13 13:20:17+00:00
I suppose we need to have a semantic discussion about what exactly "full of" means. Note that the original person who started the thread used the phrasing "many" (which only moves the semantic discussion to how many artifacts with dubious origins you need to have to speak of "many").

Personally I think that's not a very interesting discussion. Your general point that there are also a great many artifacts are not stolen (the majority): yes, you are correct. And I agree it's worth pointing that out as some people do overstate the case at times.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 13:20:54+00:00
I've seen other drugs used in therapies too. MDMA phychotherapy is more common and even legal in some places. Because it can temporarily remove internal barriers that make it much easier to reach the painful spot your brain is trying to shield. And without reaching it you can't really work on it. Several of my friends have had great experiences with this but I don't do any drugs so I never tried. I think there's too much stigma on these things. In another example, in the Netherlands cannabis can be prescribed as a pain killer for chronic issues, it works better and has way less side effects than other strong painkillers.

But an official program using illegal drugs is of course a bit of an issue. Though I'm not sure if LSD was illegal in the 50s?
by tzs | 2025-07-13 13:21:31+00:00
> I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier

Maybe because a few years ago it could be very annoying? It was mostly pretty good at rendering web pages but it had many UI problems that could really get on your nerves after a while.

For example somewhere around late 2020 or early 2021 after several years of using it as my main browser on my Mac I switched because a couple of those problems finally just got too annoying to me.

The main one I remember was that I was posting a fair bit on HN and Reddit and Firefox's spell checker had an extraordinarily high false positive rate.

This was quite baffling, actually, because Firefox uses Hunspell which is the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, MacOS, and many other free and commercial products, and it works great in those with a very low false positive rate.

Here's the ones I hit and reported: ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-13 13:21:46+00:00
I see AVR-8 microcontrollers in many devices (continuous hot water heaters) and as an Arduinio fan I can totally see places where they could be used: for instance to drive a gas pump including the buttons, measurements, valves, mag stripe readers and serial link for credit card payments and/or remote control by the clerks.

Rumor has it Russia was importing washing machines so it could extract microcontrollers to put into weapons.
by tcfhgj | 2025-07-13 13:22:28+00:00
Sprinkling "?" everywhere and the properties you mentioned are not really a different approach by the language but by the (some) users.

I am not even sure if Rust is that more convenient in this regard generally. To actually be able to use a ?, you have to actually define a conversion for the error types (which again you define yourself) or explicitly opt into a solution like anyhow, which would allow to use them almost blindly.

In Go, you can just blindly put your boilerplate (potentially using IDE shortcuts/autocomplete as some suggested to me or told me about).

> whereas in rust the convenience of just bubbling it up wins

Not necessarily, I have seen so many ways of error handling at this point, and what is best probably may depend on the individual situation.

In my personal experience, neither using anyhow nor my current default approach (custom error struct and `map_err(Error::EnumVariant)?` have prevented me from acknowledging that a potential error and thinking about if I should handle it in the current function or bubble up, although I agree that the perceived cost of handling an error may be increased, because you add comparatively more code in Rust.

Further, I feel like what Rust does is already the upper limit of boiler plate I can tolerate, although I am not sure there is a better way of this type of error handling.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-13 13:22:32+00:00
Agree that with something like go, there is truly no function coloring at all. However, since most real world async things require cancellation, a context parameter is always present so there is some "coloring" do to that. Still, it is much less viral than C# style async await as if you don't have a context in your call stack you can still create one when needed and call the function. I don't think it is reasonable to abstract cancellation in a way that nothing has to be passed in so perhaps the approach presented here is realistically as good as it gets.
by cowsandmilk | 2025-07-13 13:22:39+00:00
This description does a disservice claiming the work isn’t possible with computers. The papers on FoldIt do a much better job of describing taking optimization and communication strategies from players and implementing them in code to improve the existing algorithms.

I mean the first sentence about enumeration and efficiency just shows how shallow the discover article is; the whole area of optimization is about efficiently finding optimal solutions without enumerating all possibilities.
by KineticLensman | 2025-07-13 13:22:44+00:00
"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-13 13:22:51+00:00
>Carbon capture of course technically works. But you typically end up dumping the CO2 back in the air for things like fuels and plastics after they are expended. So, it's not that meaningful ultimately. You take fossil carbon, you burn it, you capture it, you create another fuel, and you dump it in the air. Because we simply don't capture the overwhelmingly vast majority of fossil carbon that we process and use. Using the carbon twice is a modest improvement. Three times even better. It's not that much of an improvement. Most carbon capture is stupid like that but it sounds nice if you are trying to green wash your CO2 intensive business. Optics and marketing are the main driver for carbon capture schemes. But technically it's just adding cost to things that are already quite expensive.

I have heard about a proposal to blow up a huge nuclear bomb in deep sea basalt deposits that would dissolve massive amounts of CO2 to the bottom of the ocean. Bomb scale proposed is SF for now but would be interesting to see a PoC experiment with a large warhead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko
by perilunar | 2025-07-13 13:23:01+00:00
I used Cursor (with ChatGPT) for the first time last week to build two web apps and it worked well. Working results first go, then a few hours of tweaking and adding features. These were simple CRUD apps using PHP and SQLite on Apache. I had to clean up the front-end code a bit, but it all worked. I’m not strong on SQL, so it was neat to have all the database code working on the first pass, and helped me keep up the momentum and finish them, instead of getting bogged down and frustrated. Definitely plan to keep using Cursor, and try other AI tools.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-13 13:24:05+00:00
The theocracy types are making this terrible, but the technology has alot of potential to enhance privacy.

For example, I was involved in a project several years ago on this where this was explored before the big vendors became players. The issue we were studying was abuse of credentials in-person - many bars will capture people’s identity information when validating IDs.

The ability to provide only the attribute securely is awesome, but of course the systematic abuse of this technology by the reactionaries among us will drive adoption.
by pieds | 2025-07-13 13:24:10+00:00
The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US companies with US culture in them.

The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.

I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.

A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
by tombennet | 2025-07-13 13:24:27+00:00
Thanks - I appreciate the comment. It's a valid concern, and one I thought about while making this. Just to clarify a few things:

- I've explicitly discouraged entering a real mnemonic, in several places. In fact I tried to steer people in a safe direction by putting the random generation component first. The article works best when starting with random entropy.

- All the BIP39 logic is handled client-side using paulmillr/scure-bip39, a minimal audited library.

- It works fully offline - no backend, no database, no server calls.

- There are no cookies or tracking scripts beyond simple pageview stats via Plausible (which is privacy-focused)

That said, I’d genuinely welcome suggestions on how to make it more trustable. Do you think open-sourcing the code for the page/site would help?
by froh | 2025-07-13 13:25:12+00:00
"the UNIX bubble" is an interesting take in the context of C, given the origins of C

Is your point "why did posix not establish a prefix_ ... _suffix" combo, and maybe even better some reserved "prefix_" namespace?

which --- I think --- for better or worse leads to the reality that C doesn't have a namespace mechanism, like, say, Java.
by alternatex | 2025-07-13 13:25:34+00:00
Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire.

Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.

It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
by bGl2YW5j | 2025-07-13 13:26:02+00:00
Also feeling let down by it.

Have been using it to build a DSL in JS. Greenfield. I’ve followed the commonly touted “plan, act, evaluate” approach; I’ve got it to generate a clear project vision, scope, and feature checklist. Then told it to refer to that for context. I’ve been descriptive and explicit in my prompting, way more so than previously.

It has gotten the broad strokes right, I’ve got an exceptionally barebones DSL, made up of 5 entities, working…just.

It has now started to spin its wheels on small issues and can’t fix them without breaking something else. The codebase isn’t even big (~8 main functions across a few files). Troubleshooting the code is difficult because it’s convoluted and I lack the same intuition for it I would have had I written it myself. I’ve decided to rewrite everything with less control ceded to the LLM.

When it works, it feels great. When it doesn’t, which is often, the spell is broken and I feel I’ve wasted a bunch of time and have not much to show for it.
by eeue56 | 2025-07-13 13:26:02+00:00
We actually did test. We didn't test in the exact same conditions or environment (i.e with no internet access), as we didn't find out about the no-internet restriction until the last minute. That is covered in this paragraph:

> While this bug was a costly mistake, we learned from it. Whenever we would deploy code-last minute, we'd try to test it more rigorously. If we were running a study without internet access, we'd make sure to test in the same environment. We hadn't accounted for the environment change, partially due to the short notice for the locked-down machine, but also just because we didn't test with the exact same restrictions.
by ecocentrik | 2025-07-13 13:26:53+00:00
I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best cyberpunk manga after Akira.
by fluidcruft | 2025-07-13 13:26:54+00:00
One response to flaws in the law is to oppose them. Another response is to find common ground and embrace and extend.

It won't harm anything. Even now as these things spread nationwide something like Stripe or whatever will pop up and fill the need as a service. It used to be essentially universally required to prove your age using a credit card. There was/is a company that specializes in that. I can't remember its name but it was ubiquitous for porn access for quite a long time. Those over 18 confirmation banners used to be much stronger than the merely souped up cookie notices they have become today. Age verification as a service is trivial (particularly with the rise of phones) and someone will build a system that does a much better job preserving anonymity than credit cards ever did. At this point all you need is something like a passkey or FIDO token and a way for something to vouch age during account creation.

I agree that federal law is preferred.