MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnfong | 2025-08-01 07:41:17+00:00
Re #1:

Perl did not only have mod_perl. It also had the same kind of frameworks that made Ruby and Python great for web development. It was called Catalyst and was production ready around the same time as RoR and Django.

The real reason why perl failed on this front, IMHO, is that the language makes it super unergonomical to define any nested data structures. In Javascript, Ruby and Python, a list of dictionaries is just some JSON-like syntax: { "x": [...], "y": [...] }

In perl you have to deal with scalars, references, references to scalar, value references, ... and you have the sigils that mean different things depending on what the variable contains. I mean, I spent significant time writing perl and never figured this out.

In a world where you just want a CRUD to load/save a piece of structured data, the ones that let you operate on the data and keep your sanity wins.
by tickettotranai | 2025-08-01 07:41:35+00:00
Something can be falsifiable without being false. F=ma is falsifiable but not false. With humanities stuff it's less clear cut, but I'm inclined to be skeptical of ideas that explain too many things.

Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.

It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.

PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.
by chadcmulligan | 2025-08-01 07:41:52+00:00
> The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.

Ah yes, I came to the same realisation - my family were pressuring me to be a doctor because my marks were there - but spending all day touching sick people was not for me. Building machines is so much more fun and someone will pay me to do it! - crazy. I do this for free in my spare time.
by sirtaj | 2025-08-01 07:41:59+00:00
As someone who shifted from a lot of perl to a lot of python in the early 2000s, it was because the same shortcuts that made perl really great for system "archaeo-devops" scripting made it difficult to read others' code and to write anything larger than a couple of files. I still use grep, awk, sed, cut etc etc a ton, just not perl.

I wouldn't say I was brought up on Visual Basic though. It was not a language that taught structured programming at all.
by skissane | 2025-08-01 07:42:31+00:00
It isn’t just employees. The manager/owner of the coffee shop I buy coffee from most mornings is very friendly - I’m sure part of this is just her personality, but it is also good business sense - there are lots of other places people can buy coffee instead, and no doubt her friendliness is one of the factors that keeps many of her regular customers coming back. And this is Australia, so no tips involved-it would feel weird and embarrassing even to offer one.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-01 07:42:37+00:00
I agree with "for Unixy folks who know shell, C, awk, sed, Vim, etc. Perl is a natural extension. Then came a generation of programmers brought up on ... I don't know, Visual Basic and Java? and these were more attracted to something like Python.".

I believe this, too.

I do not use Python. I would rather use Perl (!), Tcl, Lua (!), Go (!), C (!), OCaml, Erlang / Elixir, and Factor / Forth, and very rarely Common Lisp (SBCL). I do not like Java / Kotlin and related languages. That said, I started with shell scripts, and then probably a little bit of Perl and Tcl, and very often C because back when I was a kid I was modding ioquake3 forks that are written in C.
by voidUpdate | 2025-08-01 07:43:30+00:00
While the colours and such do look very nice, the "writing samples" images show exactly why I hate using fountain pens. I'm left-handed, so if I try to write prose then my hand will just smudge the writing. I've always found that cheap ballpoints are the least likely to smudge, even if they still leave residue on my hand, and as the pen gets more "premium", the worse the smudging problem gets.

I like to use as fine a pen as possible if I'm just trying to work something out (diagrams, small notes, etc), and I've found that a Unipin Fine Line (currently a 0.03) does work well, though I've been having some issues with ink flow recently (though the pen is probably nearing the end of its life at this point anyway). I have liked the feel of Uniball Eye pens in the past, though they have a similar smudging problem if used for prose. Other than that, the cheapest Bic ballpoints have been the most successful for me, since the ink dries super fast and they feel good enough to write with.

In school I was given a specific left handed fountain pen to write with, but I always had to write at wonky angles to try and keep it legible, and it never really worked very well anyway. Pushing the pen instead of pulling it generally gives bad results. I have experimented with trying to do mirror writing, like Leonardo da Vinci, but obviously nobody else can read it like that
by Traves-Theberge | 2025-08-01 07:46:05+00:00
An electron desktop application with an animated assistant companion. Tasky helps you stay organized with customizable recurring reminders, notification sounds, and a friendly desktop companion that delivers your reminders with personality.

## Features

### Core Functionality - *Recurring Reminders*: Set up reminders for specific days of the week and times - *System Tray Integration*: Runs quietly in your system tray - *Platform*: Works on Windows - *Notification Sounds*: Customizable audio alerts for reminders - *Auto-Start*: Optional automatic startup with your system

### Desktop Assistant - *Animated Companion*: Choose from multiple avatar characters - *Custom Avatars*: Use your own images as assistant avatars - *Interactive Speech Bubbles*: Reminders delivered with personality - *Positioning Options*: Place assistant above or below other windows - *Draggable Interface*: Move your assistant anywhere on screen

### Customization - *Notification Appearance*: Customize notification colours, fonts, and text colours - *Flexible Settings*: Configure notifications, sounds, and assistant behaviour - *Bubble Positioning*: Choose left or right side speech bubbles - *Animation Controls*: Enable or disable assistant animations - *Font Selection*: Choose from 9 different fonts for notifications with live preview
by sunshine-o | 2025-08-01 07:46:38+00:00
I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.

In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.

Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.

So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:

- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum

- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N

- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)

- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.

- Get some useful skills.

We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.

I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
by watwut | 2025-08-01 07:46:51+00:00
I think that conflating "blue state" with leftist is incorrect. "Blue state" confidently implies "centrist" and "not too much on the right". It does include also leftists, but not just them.

The parties are asymmetric. "Red state" implies very much on the right and is much more radicalized then democrats. But democrats themselves are centrists and unlike the republicans, tend to push away more radical parts.
by MrBrobot | 2025-08-01 07:47:04+00:00
I’ve worked in technology roles for 20 years. If you told me 20 years ago that my career was going to evolve the way it did, I never would have believed it. I’ve worked at 8 companies in that time, had 12 different roles, and managed people for the last 7 years. Every role I’ve had has been wildly different than the one before it. Passion and interest comes and goes, and the biggest factor is usually other people. In the last decade or so, most of my disinterest in my career has stemmed from collective shiny object syndrome from everyone I work with. People who want to adopt and build new things no matter the cost (or need). People trying desperately to pad their resumes, rather than truly improve things. Some of the more successful people I’ve seen in my career have been those that are truly curious, make sound decisions, constantly dig into solving difficult problems, teach others around them effectively, and can manage their own ego (not an exhaustive list by any means). What I do on a daily basis changes with every different team I’ve managed. Every team has been at a different stage, has different dynamics and challenges, needs different input and oversight, and needs more or less hands on leadership. I’ve played the role of a thought leader, salesman, mediator, therapist, project manager, etc. If you’re hands off (no technical contributions), it can be boring. You need to find a balance of being prepared for meetings (meaningful ones, with actual decisions and team driven outcomes), for your team members (1-1’s, performance management, mentorship, venting, etc.), following up on their asks (servant leader), keeping a backlog of work, addressing HR tasks, digging into PRs, planning execution around people possibly disappearing for a week or 12, etc, etc. Think about and answer the questions “What does the next month look like? What about 3? 12?” Hire, coach, fire, and everything that goes into all 3. Oh, and surprise Prod is down - now you’re behind on something, and you’re interrupting the business. Oh, the adult toddlers who are all the smartest person in the room are angry at each other? That was expectedly unexpected. The thing someone asked to work on suddenly isn’t as fun as they thought it would be? Couldn’t have predicted that since the last time it happened. If you’re working people too hard and they can’t self-regulate, you’re burning them out. If you’re not working them hard enough, they’re not growing and they’re bored. But everyone has different thresholds and skills and interests, and you need to figure these all out to make sure you can put them on tasks that keep them engaged, and challenge them, otherwise supplement with other work that will. What does this all look like at the end of the day? Click. Type, type. Click. Talk. Write (yes, on paper). Type type. Click. Talk talk talk.
by zem | 2025-08-01 07:47:38+00:00
you would end up with llvm-ir-like code that was only technically rust/d insofar as the compilers could handle it. it would not be human-readable or maintainable at all; indeed, it would be harder to convert that to idiomatic rust/d than hand-translating the c++ code. and really, all you would gain would be getting rid of the c++ compiler and ending up with worse code.

the point of carbon is that you can incrementally migrate your c++ program to it in place, and the migrated code will end up easier to maintain than the original c++.
by justcuriousab | 2025-08-01 07:48:35+00:00
> It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.

One good aspect about C++ is its backwards compatibility or stability. Also a drawback, but companies not having to spend huge amounts of time, expertise and money rewriting their whole codebases all the time is something they appreciate.

Rust is often somewhat stable, but not always.

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/type-inference-breakage-in...

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/127343

300 comments on Github.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/332176

Rust has editions, but it's a feature that it will probably take years to really be able to evaluate.

What kind of compatibility story will Carbon have? What features does it have to support compatibility?
by jononor | 2025-08-01 07:49:00+00:00
Ok, you guys have successfully nerd sniped me this morning... Here some experiments showing the use of code emitter to speed this code up massively. Link to code: https://github.com/jonnor/embeddedml/tree/master/handson/mic... The results on ESP32S3 (M5Stick AtomS3U), running MicroPython 1.24.1. All times in seconds, for the 2000 number sort.

bubble.py 19.119

bubble_native.py 9.482

bubble_viper.py 0.904

heapsort_viper.py 0.02

So one can do 100x better without changing the algorithm, and 1000x by changing it :)

Microcontrollers are a constrained platform. They can be plenty fast - but it is much more important to use the tools available, compared to on PC. MicroPython has excellent tools available for this.
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-01 07:49:29+00:00
Being able to change things. It's like all downsides of backwards compatibility but on a binary level

As to things ABI prevents:

- scoped_lock was added to not break ABI by modifying lock_guard

- int128_t has never been standardized because modifying intmax_t is an ABI break. Although if you ask me, intmax_t should just be deprecated.

- unique_ptr could fit in register with language modifications, which would be needed to make it zero-overhead, compared to a pointer

- Many changes to error_code were rejected because they would break ABI

- status_code raised ABI concerns

- A proposal to add a filter to recursive_directory_iterator was rejected because it was an ABI break

- A proposal to make most of <cstring> constexpr (including strlen) will probably die because it would be an ABI break.

- Adding UTF-8 support to regex is an ABI break

- Adding support for realloc or returning the allocated size is an ABI break for polymorphic allocators

- Making destructors implicitly virtual in polymorphic classes

- Return type of push_back could be improved with an ABI break

- Improving shared_ptr would be an ABI break

- [[no_unique_address]] could be inferred by the compiler should we not care at all about ABI

Source: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 07:50:30+00:00
I agree in principle that we shouldn't be bailing people out for the consequences of making purchases with their eyes open, but if something like this happened, a lot of people would be mad. And I get it.

The problem in this eventuality is mobility: if you buy a house for $400k, live there for, say, 5 years and the resale value of your house is at $300k, that's going to be a big problem if you have (or just want) to move. If you sell at $300k, you'll have about $50k left over (after repaying the bank) for a down payment on your new house, which means you can only afford a $250k house, which may well not meet your needs.

If someone is planning to live in that house long enough such that when they do want to sell it, they can move to a new place that meets their needs, at a price they can still afford, sure, great. We shouldn't be bailing those people out.

> You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators.

That's absurd. Aside from people who buy too much house ('00s, anyone?) and regret it later, people pay the price they have to pay for the amount of space and location they believe they need. Most people -- very understandably -- don't know the dynamics of the housing market to the point that they'd be able to predict that their resale value might go down by 25% at some point in the future, because, historically, that's just not what home prices do. (And don't parrot the "past performance is no guarantee of the future" crap... yes, true, so what. Most people unfortunately can't plan their lives around that.)

These people aren't speculators... speculators are buying to flip, or to hold and resell, as investment properties. These are just regular folks who need a place to live and have -- regardless of prudence or correctness -- bought into the idea that owning their home is the next life stage, a proof of success and well-being. Calling people like that speculators shows a severe lack of understanding and empathy.

> It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house...

A car or a TV costs nowhere near as much as a house. Losing a car or a TV is not going to make someone homeless. Housing is a basic need, and housing security is essential in a healthy society. (Granted, in many places in the US, losing your car can lead to financial ruin as well, sadly, considering how crucial a car can be to many people for basic things like getting to work.)
by grafmax | 2025-08-01 07:50:38+00:00
Developers are incentivized to build whatever units are most profitable, not what lowest income people need. More expensive units make more money.

Besides that, land and construction are both limited resources that constrain developers ability to “flood the market with small, high density units.” For example in high-land-value urban areas, developers need to build expensive units to be able to make a profit.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-01 07:51:55+00:00
Tipping is a thing in Eastern (to be more accurate: Central) Europe too, but where I live, tipping is not taxed. Actually, let me be more accurate: people who pay with credit card always tip in cash, as there is no way to tip with a credit card[1]. :P If you buy anything with a credit card, the total amount must always be identical to the sum of the prices of the products, it can never be more, so cannot include tips[1], which forces people who tip to tip with cash.

Food deliveries (similar to Uber Eats in the US I suppose) have the option to tip, and 100% goes to the courier. 200 HUF (0.57 USD) is the most common amount (as per their website[2]). We do not use percentages.

[1] It varies and might not be universal.

[2] https://foodora.hu
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-01 07:52:09+00:00
> Excessive regulation is 90% of it.

If it was, then the housing price would be correlated with the level of regulation, but it's not (housing less dense places is always cheaper than housing in big cities, even if you compare the most heavily regulated place on earth with the least regulated big city in the world.

> Here's how a rational market works.

A rational market made from human is as realistic as “dry water”.

The key issue is that housing is treated as an asset, and the policies made to boost housing construction are designed around building a market in a way that gives housing the same kind of financial yields as stocks. But while stock prices can grow because productivity increase, housing value can only increase if housing becomes more expensive.
by curl-up | 2025-08-01 07:52:23+00:00
Anyone who has recently worked on embedding model finetuning, any useful tools you'd recommend (both for dataset curation and actual finetuning)? Any models you'd recommend as especially good for finetuning?

I'm interested in both full model finetunes, and downstream matrix optimization as done in [1].

[1] https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/blob/main/examples...
by lll-o-lll | 2025-08-01 07:52:39+00:00
Interesting. When I read this I was thinking “that can’t be right, the whole internet relies on tcp being “reliable”. But it is right; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/347059.347561. It might be rare, but an unencrypted RPC packet might accidentally set that “go nuclear” bit. ECC memory is not enough people! Encrypt your traffic for data integrity!
Comparison Between Sync Engines
by belchiorb | 2025-08-01 07:53:18+00:00
Hey! Has anyone read a good comparison between sync engines?

I'm interested by them as they can shave off a lot of manual work, but I'm also skeptical of how they handle conflicts because the demos only show the happy path.

I'm mostly focused on JavaScript sync engines, but the question is applicable to other language ecosystems as well.

What are your thoughts on the options? If you have any experience with a sync engine, how was it?
by closewith | 2025-08-01 07:53:38+00:00
> Honestly something that was a bit galling was that the Irish would moan about Ireland morning day and night but the instant a foreigner made _any_ observation that wasn't rainbows and sunshine we were out of our lane and needed to shut up.

Not to be rude, but have you considered this may have been an issue with you and your attitude, rather than everyone you met, if even people who you seemed to think liked you couldn't stand you.
by ofalkaed | 2025-08-01 07:53:43+00:00
I sort of agree but I would say either get a cartridge pen or a refillable pen and leave it at that. Pick an ink and use it until it is gone. Don't get a second pen unless you actually have a need for a second pen.

There are few things in modern life which are lifetime buys and you can use every day of your life, a good pen is one of them, enjoy it instead of feeding into the endless search for something better. 99% of what I have written for the past ~decade has been with one pen, it is an old friend at this point. I picked my ink by it being a reputable brand and sold in bottles big enough that it would last years, and when it was time to order another bottle I had to pull it out to check what it was so I could order another because I had forgotten what it was. I am sure there are better pens and better inks but I have no real issues with what I have and anything else will be lacking in something more important than the supposed benefits offered by those better pens and inks.
by MrDresden | 2025-08-01 07:53:45+00:00
> for anyone who has ever read from a collection of his stories, a majority of them are most certainly not appropriate for kids.

That really depends on the culture you are coming from.

There is a deep divide between how European and USA culture views what is appropriate material for children.

Being from the nordics, H.C.A's whole collection was part of mine and every friends childhood, from as early as kindergarten, and I vividly remember feeling deep sadness and empathy towards some of his characters at an early age.
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 07:53:52+00:00
It doesn't really matter why; what matters is that they do see things that way.

And I agree with you, it's a bad convention, and it causes tons of problems, and it's the result of recent decades of bad mortgage/housing/zoning policy. But we can't just wipe it away and pretend it was never there, and let the chips fall where they may. That's just heartless, and, well -- you talk about making society poorer -- that will make society much, much poorer, nearly overnight.
by matt_cogito | 2025-08-01 07:54:48+00:00
I do not have a use case for this _right now_. But I am a 100% sure I will have one pretty soon.

Email has become this massive, constant influx of information, that cannot be managed with just adding an AI agent to it. It takes so much more context knowledge to get right. None of the tools I have tried so far seem to solve this problem the way I would need it.

So sooner or later I might solve it for myself. And you guys will get a new customer.

Good luck, cowboys!