MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cookiengineer | 2025-07-26 08:02:56+00:00
I feel obligated to comment on this.

Due to my work I rely on web scraped data for cybersecurity incidents. For Amazon Linux, they are disclosed with the fvcked up US datetime format (Pacific Time) and not in ISO8601 formatted strings which could imply Juliet/Local time.

In 2007 there was a new law that changed when Pacific Time enters/leaves Daylight Saving Time. Instead of making this fixed by a specific Day of a specific Month in numbered form like say "YYYY-03-01 to YYYY-10-01", they literally wrote the law quoting "first Sunday of April" to "last Sunday in October". Before 2007 it was "Second Sunday in March" to "first Sunday in November".

I'm not making this shit up, go ahead and read the law, come back and realize it's even more complex for other timezones, because some nations seem to make fun of this by going to +14:00 hours and -11:30 hours depending on the president's mood on Christmas or something.

In order to find out the Day of a specific calendar date, there's this cool article about Determination of the day of the week [1] which is quite insane on its own already. There is no failsafe algorithm to do that, each method of determining the day of the week has its own tradeoffs (and computational complexity that is implied).

Then you need to get all Sundays of a month, count the right one depending on the year, map back the date to ISO8601 and then you know whether or not this was daylight saving time they're talking about. Also make sure you use the correct local time to shift the time, because that changed too in the law (from 02:00LST to 03:00LDT and 02:00 LDT to 01:00LST before, to 02:00LST to 03:00LDT and 02:00LDT to 01:00LST after the changes).

Took me over 4 fvcking weeks to implement this in Go (due to lack of parsers), and I hate Amazon for this to this date.

PS: Write your own Datetime parser, this will help you realize how psychotic the human species is when it comes to "standards". After all this I'm in huge favor of the Moon Phase based International Fixed Calendar [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determination_of_the_day_of_th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
by ttiurani | 2025-07-26 08:03:03+00:00
> You can use datetime libraries that are widely available to localize timestamps as needed in whatever way is required locally. But timestamps should get stored and transmitted in a normalized and 100% unambiguous way.

If by "timestamp" you mean past dates and deterministic future dates, then agreed. (Although I prefer unix epoch in ms for those, to be able to use integers and skip string parsing steps completely.)

But if your unlucky enough to need to handle future dates, especially "clock on the wall" ("let's meet in Frankfurt on July 26th 2029 at 1pm"), then you just can't know the timezone. The reasons can be many political ones, but especially in this case there's a high probability that EU will remove daylight saving time by then.

So in those cases, if you want to be correct, you'd need to include the geolocation in the stored timestamp.
by simoncion | 2025-07-26 08:04:11+00:00
> VA screens have terrible black smearing though.

It depends on the monitor and the colors involved in the transition. My VA monitor (a BenQ EW3270U) has limited-but-noticeable smearing between certain dark colors. Blacks and dark colors against mid-brightness and brighter are just fine. [0] It's my understanding that this monitor has quite-a-bit-less-bad color smearing than most VA panels, and has roughly the same -er- amount of slow transitions (just with a different set of colors) as my Asus PA246 IPS monitor.

I play a variety of video games, so I see both muddily-dark and high-contrast areas. I'm fairly pleased with the performance of the panel they dropped into this monitor. Honestly, the off-axis color and contrast shifting is way more noticeable than the color smearing... and folks who sit down in front of this monitor don't tend to notice those shifts.

(Plus, if you play 3D video games released within the last five years, crap like temporal-anti-aliasing and its bastard children add so much smearing and rendering artifacts that it becomes quite challenging to determine what visual artifacts are actual pixels commanded to be on the screen by the renderer, and what might from too-slow flipping of the pixels in the screen. Is this a good state of affairs? Definitely not. But it's the one we find ourselves in.)

[0] It's entirely unlike the OLED screen in the Nexus 5a which has incredible smearing between black and a huge array of dark-to-medium-brightness colors. This smearing reduces as you increase the brightness of the screen, but doesn't go away entirely until you get to like the top quarter of the screen's brightness. (If you have one of these phones, drop your screen brightness to the bottom quarter and browse through back issues of the Gunnerkrigg Court webcomic. There are PLENTY of black-on-X color combinations to get a really obvious demonstration of the problem.)
by pjmlp | 2025-07-26 08:04:12+00:00
For quite a while now, in enterprise consulting, with project delivery based on integrating multiple SaaS products, the hype has been using AI for low code integrations.

Even if not perfect shows the trend, that in many domains language wars no longer matter as people on online forums think it does, or eventually won't matter, remember "worse is better", it only needs to kind of work, most of the time.
by omnimus | 2025-07-26 08:04:32+00:00
You can’t use inline css it’s not at all the same.

Inline css

1. Can’t use media queries (responsive design).

2. Gets you to specificity hell - you loose ability to cascade.

3. Does not follow any system or reuse of values.

4. Values can’t be centrally changed. Utility clases are still classes - when you change class value it changes everywhere where the class is used.

5. Its verbose. Utility classes can have multiple css rules.

Conceptually it might seem that inline css is similar but thats just feeling. Functional css (utility classes) are about composing classes with simpler (one purpose) behaviour together to create complex behaviour.
by cornfieldlabs | 2025-07-26 08:05:30+00:00
We are building a social network with chronological feed and we are building a mobile-friendly site instead of an app.

If the site takes off, I think we will have to build a mobile app even though we don't want to. Non-tech users don't care about web.

As someone who pushed everyone I know to use Firefox with uBlock on Android, I am disappointed

But as someone who uses old.reddit.com on mobile, I am not surprised
by crooked-v | 2025-07-26 08:05:37+00:00
The US in particular doesn't have a national identity system in the first place because the Republican party has opposed the concept for a long timr for various reasons both ideological ("mark of the beast" claims are less of a thing these days but have been made in the past) and political (having a patchwork of systems makes voter suppression and stochastic disenfranchisement of undesireables easier). Without that, any kind of unified verification system is very unlikely to happen.
by greggyb | 2025-07-26 08:05:53+00:00
Coming from an educational background of imperial units, I sometimes catch flak from ... most of the world about this.

I take joy in exuberantly pushing back on their insistence of clinging to such archaic time units as "minutes", "hours", and "days", telling them to come back when they embrace kiloseconds. It is telling that most of my friends accept this with equal joy and laughter (:

It probably doesn't hurt that I've also spent time drilling metric conversions so that I can code-switch pretty seamlessly among units. Neurotic tendencies can have payoffs.
by mdp2021 | 2025-07-26 08:06:42+00:00
Libraries make «contemporary best sellers» and «LPs from Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix» freely available. You call it «reputational damage», others may call it "advancing demands over rights", "stirring a stagnating reality in view of effective progress" (with reference to dematerialization), "pushing a debate" (about where we want to go societally".

It is unwise to push these latter points with the outmost care without having awakened the masses and clarified your stances to decisors - it is unwise to be "right" in front of the immature. But the reputation damage remains about wisdom, not about pride.
by edm0nd | 2025-07-26 08:06:50+00:00
I think this is the correct way too.

Some of the age verification systems that use digital ids (mDLs) do the same thing but people freak out about how they work because I think they misunderstand the tech.

They system basically asks the mDL via an api call "is this user above the age of 18/21" and the app only responds with a yes or no. It doesn't pass the users fulls details over or anything like that.
by crabmusket | 2025-07-26 08:06:59+00:00
New episodes of Signals and Threads are usually an immediate listen for me.

This starts off as mainly a discussion about datacenters, which is interesting enough, but I really enjoyed the latter half where they discussed the physical infrastructure for the trading floor.

This starts about minute 39: https://signalsandthreads.com/the-thermodynamics-of-trading/...
by DocTomoe | 2025-07-26 08:07:11+00:00
Thank you for providing scale. From how you describe it, these two examples - while unpleasant - likely fall below the threshold for criminal prosecution. And it’s precisely in that gray area where public shaming platforms risk becoming instruments of mob justice.

The “sex toy guy” (and yes, I now imagine the most awkward and presumptuous version of that scenario - perhaps with a flourish of presentation) is clearly socially tone-deaf. But if no coercion or violence took place: Should his name and face be broadcast online so he can be branded “The Dildo King” for life?

The “dirty bitch” guy? Rude and vulgar, certainly. But how many women have made disparaging comments about men — their height, their hair, their genitals - sometimes in front of them, sometimes with friends? We should strive for dignity and respect on both sides. If we accept social shaming as a norm, it shouldn’t surprise us when the pendulum swings both ways - and no one wins in that world. Was the woman in this case threatened or harmed beyond a verbal outburst?

Being in my mid-40s, I’ve also witnessed what a false or misguided accusation can do to a man - careers destroyed, relationships severed, even suicides.

What we’re dealing with is a cultural and moral challenge - not a technological one. And cultural problems can only be solved through dialogue, mutual respect, and shared norms - not through factionalism or digital vigilantism.
by troupo | 2025-07-26 08:07:30+00:00
> This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand the crux of the issue.

I do

> You are also confusing cause and effect.

I don't

> I clearly explained the root causes for that.

You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.

> If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights.

See. Again with the rant.

> Be specific, why are they not "good"?

E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments.

When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline.

Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.

To quote myself from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503

--- start quote ---

Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.

Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...

I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?

--- end quote ---

> There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?

There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.

> X (formerly Twitter) - has PWA

Yup.
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-07-26 08:08:12+00:00
Is it just me or is the entire concept of "ownership" kind of wrong in the realm of digital (things that can be copy pasted infinitely and distributed mostly for free)?

Instead we should have ideas of AUTH, AUTH fraud (distributing content with wrong authorship), the right to generate revenue by distribution.

Restricting distribution of something that is essentially free to distribute feels wrong. If you tried to explain to aliens that you had solved "food" with a replicator but The Gov actually banned this and people had to starve ... you would likely be met with some questions.
by Izkata | 2025-07-26 08:08:40+00:00
> In many cases it is much better to send requests more frequently, similarly to how a server side rendered website would behave. Instead of fetching 10,000 products, just fetch a page of products. Much faster. Have endpoints for filters and searches, also paginated. This can be fast if you do it right. Since you're only sending minimal amounts of data everything is fast.

This is actually a great example of what I mentioned elsewhere about how people seem to have forgotten how to make a SPA responsive. These are both simpler implementations, but not really the best choice for user interaction. A better solution is to take the paginated version and pre-cache what the user might do next: When the results are loaded, return page 1 and 2, display page 1, and cache page 2 so it can be displayed immediately if clicked on. If they do, display it immediately and silently request and cache page 3 in the background, etc etc. This keeps the SPA responsive with few to no loading spinners if they take the happy path, and because it's happening in the background you can automatically do retries for a flaky connection without bothering the user.

This was how gmail and google maps blew peoples' minds when they were first released, by moving data to the frontend and pushing requests to the server into the background, the user could keep working without interruption while updates happened the background without interrupting their flow.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-26 08:08:44+00:00
Go's GC is not compacting, it has significant mutator overhead on every pointer write, it has an expensive allocator (it has to search through free lists, since it can't compact), and the free pahse has to do work proportional to the amount of garbage the program produces. It also produces no debugging information for ownership, for some bizarre reason (you can't tell from a Go heap dump with any standard Go tool which object is keeping another object around).

The fact that it can do this mostly concurrently (it's not fully concurrent, actually) is not that special - Java's latest GC is also mostly concurrent, without having any of the other previous drawbacks.

Go's big advantage in terms of memory management is that it doesn't produce as much garbage as most GC languages. The fact that it natively supports value types, and actually uses them extensively in the standard library (unlike C#, which also supports these), and it's excellent stack escape analysis which allows many allocations to stay on the stack and outside the GC heap entirely, is what makes Go have such little memory overhead.
by nobrains | 2025-07-26 08:10:08+00:00
So, I recommend seeing it in 3 passes. 1st pass, see the right 1/3rd area of the video. It shows the 2 sides moving. Then see the middle 1/3rd area of the video. It shows both the movement and the rupture in the ground. Then see the left 1/3rd area of the video. It shows the rupture on the ground clearly.
by usrusr | 2025-07-26 08:10:16+00:00
This. The mental model of an API with a frontend deployed as static resources just happens to be very attractive. Even more so when the SPA isn't the only frontend, or when you don't know that the SPA will remain the only frontend forever. When you have an SPA sitting on top of an API, introducing new clients for feature subsets (e.g. something running on a Garmin watch) becomes trivial.

If you have a huge org working on the project you might actually succeed in sticking to that architecture even when serving as plain old HTML, but smaller teams are likely to eventually write full stack spaghetti (which might still be fine for some use cases!). Once there was a fashionable term "progressive web app", with manifest workers optionally moving some backend stuff into the browser for offline-ish operation, and these days I also see a parallel pattern: progressively moving a browser UI into an electron-esque environment, where you can features requiring more local access than the browser would allow.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-26 08:11:31+00:00
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.

Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
by fn-mote | 2025-07-26 08:15:09+00:00
The difference _for you_ is in the public or private nature.

It seems like your argument is based on (1) the discussion being slander (assumption); and (2) the idea that you could refute it if it were public (good luck, low credibility, also most men would immediately respond with vulgar name calling and - at least if anonymous - threats).
by gosteinao | 2025-07-26 08:16:19+00:00
People look at the "corrosion of the social fabric", and they point at the most inconsequential stuff. It's quite funny.

We live in a world where technology made everyone live in their own bubbles, only consume and reinforce what they already believe, create narrow identities with strict rules enforced by groupthink, and lose track of the things and people that we actually interact and have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Yet, people think this small stuff that has been around forever, that are tiny parts of our society or lives, that this stuff is the problem with everything today.
by vacekj | 2025-07-26 08:17:16+00:00
Good post, articulates what I've been feeling in regards to rising complexity but stagnating benefits. One point the author gets wrong though, is that it's not a critique of capitalism, but a critique of monopolies. All of the examples they provided are monopolies or oligopolies - utility company, government, big corporations. The government can get away with wasting lives precisely because they have no competition. You cannot subscribe to another tax authority, and therefore give feedback to your current one that it is misbehaving. In a free market, computational tyrrany is still a problem, but it's the company's problem, not the user's, because the user can switch to another provider of state services, electricity, and reduce revenue to the misbehaving company or state.

The only way to resolve these issues is to put a cost on misbehavior, and the only way to put a cost on misbehavior is a free market.
by bflesch | 2025-07-26 08:17:53+00:00
I like the simple icons and it feels like a snappy application. Well done.

However, as a new user it's not immediately clear where to click, for example the button in the top left corner which lets you switch between the plan and the diagram editor. Also the small sidebar for inputting the data might not be the most optimal place to do the data input.

What is the goal of the application? What is the benefit of having the diagram? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose but to me it seems like the main output from this software is the "maintenance table", but how do the pointers/diagram help instead of just having a dropdown in the table?

Maybe you can share a more elaborate example and then I understand it better.

Overall, could be more polished but I really like the simplicity and the combination of table & visualization.
by clauderoux | 2025-07-26 08:18:37+00:00
Funny as they always seem to forget the hardware side of search engines. Google was incredibly fast compared to its competitors because they were among the first to store their whole index in RAM rather than on hard drives. They were among the first to install huge data center with computer blades that could be changed in an instant in case of failure. As an early user, I was on board as early as 99, I was amazed by the response speed of Google and its bare style quite dépouillé.
by cycomanic | 2025-07-26 08:18:43+00:00
Controversial opinion, but many in the quantum community actively contribute to and take advantage of this confusion.

Prime example: The whole idea of QKD (Quantum Key Distribution), if you listen to many talks they often motivate the talk using Shor's algorithm and the idea that a quantum computer would possibly break many classical encryption algorithms in the future (that's so far still largely a theoretical result). They then sell QKD as the solution because it's "quantum secure", but QKD is a key distribution mechanism for symmetric encryption (which can't be broken by quantum algorithms). Moreover it's really just a physical layer "sensing" solution, where you can transmit data (over a special link) and detect if someone has listened in on your transmission.

So they sell a solution to the public key encryption possibly being broken by quantum computers in the future, but their solution can not replace public key encryption, because it can only secure a link between two predetermined endpoints. It's an dishonest marketing ploy.
by 3036e4 | 2025-07-26 08:19:41+00:00
I installed that on both my computer and phone after someone mentioned it in some HN comment a few months ago. On my phone it has been the only game I have played in several years that wasn't in an emulator (mostly DOSBox).

Also convinced my kids to install it on their phones, hoping that it will distract them somewhat from the apps they otherwise use. Not much success with that. I guess there isn't enough bling. If it was full of animated coins and sound effects triggering on every interaction it would probably work much better for competing with normal app-driven rubbish mobile games.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-26 08:20:57+00:00
Why I do programming?

Why I do programming?

Why I do programming?

Why I do programming?

These are four differemt questions. With four orthogonal answers.

You cannot truly know your deepest self until you can answer all four questions with insights that resonate and mirror your true self.

Good luck on your unique journey.

(Love, absolutely love, the essay/story.)