MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-14 09:33:07+00:00
Indeed, you're describing the lack of a 3rd place. These days, maybe even the lack of a 2nd place as you graduate school and work is now fully remote. Without that societal push towards being in a public spot, many people will simply withdraw to themselves.

A third place would fix this, especially for men who need "things". You go to a bar for "thing" and if you meet some others to yell at sports with, bonus. We have less "things" for gen Z, and those things happen rather infrequently in my experience. I'm not sure if a monthly Meetup is quite enough to form strong bonds.
by account42 | 2025-08-14 09:34:33+00:00
> By design, nothing is allowed to delegate signing authority, because it would become an immediate compromise of everything that got delegated when your delegated authority got compromised.

Or because it would expose the web PKI for the farce it is. Some shady corporation in bumfuckistan having authority to sign certificates for .gov.uk or even just your personal website is absolutely bonkers. Certificate authority should have always been delegated just like nameserver authority is.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-14 09:34:43+00:00
> I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1]

OCaml had its act together. It was significantly nicer than Python when I used it professionally in 2010. Just look at what JaneStreet achieved with it.

The main impediment to OCaml was always that it was not American nor mainly developed from the US.

People like to believe there is some technical merit to language popularity but the reality it’s all fashion based. Rust is popular because they did a ton of outreach. They used to pay someone full time to mostly toot their horn.
by securesaml | 2025-08-14 09:36:17+00:00
I agree that open source infrastructure needs to be funded. I think first there needs to be a mindset shift in who's responsible for open source.

Currently when new vulnerabilities pop up (i.e. xz-utils compromise, log4j shell), people are quick to blame the maintainers for it. Why shouldn't companies instead be responsible for these vulnerabilities?

Currently, companies treat open source code as someone else's, so they don't bother to audit, maintain it, or fund it. Clearly, this is wrong, and reflected in the oss license, which states that code is solely consumer's responsibility.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-14 09:37:53+00:00
Anecdotally - I also disable most notifications, but this approach works for me.

In my case the notifications that I didn't receive are still in the relevant apps in the form of unread messages, missed calls, or similar; I can look at them later, when I have the time.

Sometimes an app would send a notification that would leave no trace in its app; e.g. a time sensitive reminder. But if the app's design assumes there's no benefit to viewing that notification later, I'm happy to trust it - and this approach acts for me as a natural filter.
by zuzuen_1 | 2025-08-14 09:38:02+00:00
Perhaps when LLMs introduce a lot more primitives for modifying behvavior such a programming language would be necessary.

As such for anyone working with LLMs, they know most of the work happens before and after the LLM call, like doing REST calls, saving to database, etc. Conventional programming languages work well for that purpose.

Personally, I like JSON when the data is not too huge. Its easy to read (since it is hierarchical like most declarative formats) and parse.
by efitz | 2025-08-14 09:38:22+00:00
1:1 classroom instruction removes a number of teachers from the labor pool equal to the number of students. Apprenticeships remove only a small fraction of that from the labor pool (because the practitioner spends only part of their time teaching/supervising the apprentice and then makes the apprentice go practice the skill) and partially makes up the lost labor with the labor from the apprentices- apprentices are expected to do actual productive work, not just learn.
by netsharc | 2025-08-14 09:38:34+00:00
Having SponsorBlock and making myself be an unpaid editor to cut out the lameeee jokes the YouTuber thinks he needs to make is a satisfactory thing...

I remember opening a Linus Tech Tips video and the scrollbar was very very colorful because someone was very keen on marking all the bits they deemed irrelevant (the color signifies the category, e.g. sponsorship, calls to action like "Like and subscribe!", irrelevant content)
by dandanua | 2025-08-14 09:38:44+00:00
You're shifting the blame from politicians to society because in your field teachers have lost power over students. It is a huge mistake to make such a parallel. In fact, teachers have lost power because the power has become much more centralized - thanks to the politicians. You're not allowed to punish a disruptive student singlehandedly - the government took that from you and gave it to people who don't really care. The government itself can't care less. The mass hypersurveillance is not designed to solve your problems, sorry, it solves problems of people with control buttons.
by ManBeardPc | 2025-08-14 09:39:53+00:00
No it hasn’t become so dangerous and surveillance doesn’t help. Neither cameras nor real-name accounts actually helped to prevent crimes. Same with databases, lists or other surveillance tools. Many criminals who committed terrorism were known to the police before and they chose not to act or processes were not in place. All it does is lead to less freedom and security. The government itself is the security threat. There are always black sheep working there. They sell private details, enforce their own agenda or fail to secure sensitive information. Also extreme political parties can and did/will use it to silence undesired persons. Ask anyone who knows a bit of German history for many good examples.
by dspillett | 2025-08-14 09:40:36+00:00
> The Pebble battery life is with the display always on. … no dorky wrist flicks

My watch display (Garming Fenix 7) is always on and the battery life is great. Any dorky wrist flick or button presses are for the backlight when it is needed.

[Though as others point out, the balance of needs targetted by the two devices differ noticably]
by imtringued | 2025-08-14 09:41:06+00:00
Bad software quality is when you update your software frequently.

Instead, we should always choose the common denominator of the most obsolete software platform imaginable. If there is an OS that has not been maintained for several decades, then that is the baseline we should strive to support.

Using an operating system with old libraries and language runtimes is not a personal preference with the consequences of restricting oneself to older software versions, no, it is a commandment and must not be questioned.
by ben_w | 2025-08-14 09:41:07+00:00
> If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.

And what are deaf people supposed to do in a cinema, or with broadcast TV?

(And I'm ignoring other uses, e.g. learning a foreign language; for that, sometimes you want the exact words, sometimes the gist, but it's highly situational; but even once you've learned the language itself, regional accents even without vocabulary changes can be tough).
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-14 09:41:12+00:00
I’ve explored this idea of portable computing using a mobile form factor for years too. So long that the first devices I tried were PDAs with compact-flash micro drives.

I actually preferred those devices for development work because the stylus is a much better input device than fat fingers when it comes to precision input. However you then lose the one-handed feature that the author is keen on.

These days, MacBook Pros have such long battery lives that I couldn’t imagine wanting to use a phone-form-factor for any serious work. But maybe the new style phones bendable screens that flip open like a book, might tempt me back to using a phone for development work again. Unfortunately such devices are currently Android-only at present.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-14 09:42:03+00:00
People want addictions. The answer is to regulate addictive algorithms, not to give them more things to be addicted to.

But addictions are wonderfully useful politically, so that's unlikely to happen.

The point is simple - an algorithm is a form of meta-content. It's curated and designed, not neutral. And so are its commercial, psychological, and political effects.

Currently SM companies have been allowed to use algorithms with little or no oversight. The emphasis has been on regulating privacy, not influence.

In the same way the media need to have a Fairness Doctrine restored to restore sanity and quality to journalism, algorithm providers need to be able to demonstrate an equivalent for their platforms.

This is very much against the spirit of the times, but that spirit is algorithmically created - which just proves the point.

If you're thinking "Yes, but government..." - how do you know that's a spontaneous original thought, and not something you've been deliberately conditioned to believe?
by N0YS | 2025-08-14 09:42:07+00:00
Completely agree with the text sources. I think the key question is whether LLMs are actually reasoning about geography or just memorizing coordinate patterns from training data.

Going with the hypothesis that their "geographic knowledge" simply reflects coordinate density in text (more populated areas → more mentions → better land prediction). If true, plotting all Wikipedia coordinates should correlate with the "LLM world map" here.

This is exactly what you see here, if plotting all GCS co-ordinates extracted from Wikipedia: https://github.com/Magnushhoie/Wikipedia_Coordinates_Visuali...

This implies that larger models aren't necessarily "smarter" at geography - they just have bigger memorized datasets.
by hnarn | 2025-08-14 09:42:10+00:00
My experience is that the only concrete "benefit of Ubuntu" is that ZFS ships pre-compiled as a kernel module instead of having to be compiled on upgrade, other than that I am not sure what benefits Ubuntu provide on desktop over Debian.

Saying that Debian is "not Ubuntu to begin with" is of course technically true, but the similarities are so large that I have a hard time seeing anyone would have much of an issue switching, Ubuntu is and always has been based on Debian.

On servers, my experience is that Ubuntu is, while not "better", far more common, simply because of the fact that they have a more clear and understandable paid support plan, which I guess makes sense. Not that most users bother to pay for it anyway, but at least it's there if you end up with an EOL system you can't decom.
by xchin | 2025-08-14 09:42:32+00:00
One alternative is to create a website that outs the company that is harming you in a way that is non-libelous and just tells your story, and then focus fully on SEO and GEO to ensure that the other company sees your site front-and-center when searching for their own.

You may get more attention this way, because it can affect the company more than the optics of a legal dispute. It’s not revenge, and you shouldn’t have that intent, if you want it to work.

However this method, and other similar methods used in the U.S. such as filing BBB complaints, are mostly used for harm done to consumers rather than businesses affected by disputes, so it may not be the best advice.
by iggldiggl | 2025-08-14 09:43:13+00:00
Not being logged in to Google and not keeping cookies between browser sessions, most of the time Google gives me the standard cookie permissions popup (where you can enable or disable search personalisation and targeted advertisting), but occasionally I seemingly at random I get the "we can't determine whether you're over 18 yet?" variant instead. I wonder what's causing it to flipflop between the two states…?
by saberience | 2025-08-14 09:43:39+00:00
Is this really an issue? I only message on WhatsApp with people I’ve met in real life and I prefer it that way.

I only want to engage with people on Twitter if I specifically add that person to a whitelist. I don’t want to be subject to an algorithm that is trying to increase “engagement”. I don’t want more engagement with Twitter, I want to see random posts which an AI thinks are going to enrage me so I stay on the site longer.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 09:44:10+00:00
Me too. I do use it. It is very useful when you redesign a site and want to compare them. Just switch between themes and you instantly see if something is pixel-perfectly at the same spot.

I think it should be "sticky" the same way non-submitted form content stays persistent across page-reloads.

This kind of features should be what browsers are judged and compared on.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-14 09:44:38+00:00
Indeed. I still keep around a couple of old computers, because they have PCI slots (parallel, not PCIe), unlike any newer computer that I have, and I still use some PCI cards for certain purposes.

However, those computers are not so old as to have 32-bit CPUs, they are only about 10 years old, but that was because I was careful at that time to select MBs that still had PCI slots, in order to be able to retire all older computers.
by probably_wrong | 2025-08-14 09:44:46+00:00
The string length in C is "whatever number of bytes are there between the beginning of the string and the first \0 character". That's different from "how much memory is being used by this string" because you usually allocate a bigger buffer.

The length of the string "Foo", when properly terminated, is 3. The minimum number of bytes needed [1] to represent that string properly is 4 (3+'\0'). The actual number of bytes used by that string is whatever you asked for and received when using "malloc".

[1] Assuming ASCII and 1-byte characters.
by lrvick | 2025-08-14 09:45:54+00:00
I go to CCC and Defcon every year and they are night and day.

CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.

While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.

While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.

While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.

I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.

I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.

I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.

If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-14 09:46:00+00:00
> All those prompt strategies I'd painstakingly learned suddenly felt outdated.

This is the critical bit, the bit that makes it impossible to "fall behind". There's no actual useful knowledge you can learn right now that'll stay relevant in the future, so don't bother!

Just use these things naively. Investment on your end on how to "use them properly" should be close to 0. If they produce useful output with the most naive prompt imaginable, wonderful. If they don't, do something else.

All those people running an army of agents on their codebase with carefully curated rules file and whatever else? They're vibing their way off a cliff. No need to worry about them. You'll probably get to the same place they do by just using the autocomplete mode in VSCode with a braindead cheap model you get for free.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-14 09:46:00+00:00
Ignore them. I’ve played around with this stuff so I have some idea of what it’s all about, but only minimally. I haven’t used it for work at all. Despite this, I remain gainfully employed, and I’m convinced that I’m still going to be fielding offers at the age of 90 because pretty much none of the programmers diving into this stuff will have any idea how a computer actually works. You can keep your toes in the water without much commitment.
by vidarh | 2025-08-14 09:46:08+00:00
Fraud done by shop owners is one reason why they might still offer a discount, but also a lot of the time I simply think stores don't actually realise how much it is costing them.

E.g. they might not include staff time and incidental costs around cash transactions that aren't obvious because they're not linked to the individual transactions, such as reconciliation, time spent transporting the cash, costs of depositing the cash, insurance to cover storage of cash.

Also consider that it takes very little theft to tilt the balance, and even a tiny amount of theft by cashiers not putting through all cash transactions can make a big difference.
by mna_ | 2025-08-14 09:46:22+00:00
You can do all of that without paying a monthly fee. You just need a library card (or know of a person called Anna and her archive ;) ) and a list of books. These are the ones I used:

Precalculus by Axler

Calculus (Ninth Edition) by Thomas

Linear Algebra by Lay

How To Prove It by Velleman

Understanding Analysis by Abbott <--- I'm currently here

Much, much, much cheaper than paying $50/month. What I've spent most on so far has been printer paper and fountain pen ink because I do exercises by hand instead of using a tablet/iPad but in total this expense has been waaaaay under $50.
by crimony | 2025-08-14 09:46:25+00:00
If I remember correctly the military / aerospace shy away from this spec because the connector with the pins is on the backplane, with the sockets on the cards.

So if you incorrectly insert a card and bend a pin you're in trouble.

VPX has the sockets on the backplane so avoids this issue, if you bend pins you just grab another card from spares.

This may have changed since I last looked at it.

Telecoms industry definitely seem to favour TCA though.
by dvdkon | 2025-08-14 09:48:18+00:00
A pairing system as seen in e.g. Zigbee or BLE seems pretty good to me. Not everyone cares to implement it well and there's still no standard for web-based devices, but it's here and it works.

I'd like to see more devices able to pair with NFC, but even that's standardised for Bluetooth, just underused.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-14 09:49:00+00:00
F-Droid is so insignificantly small their entire userbase is smaller than the amount of users of each app in the top 500 of every single large store (Play, Galaxy, Huawei, etc.)

This happened because nobody gives a shit about F-Droid, not because it's somehow a "threat" with unmaintained apps.
by wrasee | 2025-08-14 09:50:17+00:00
The uncertainly over a future rug pull is always real, but in reality I wonder if the actual reason for people's hesitancy is more than just that. In reality I suspect it's closer to one of simply identity and the ownership model itself. Just the very idea that core tooling you depend on is in the hands of a commercial company is enough to many back off in a way one might not be when the tooling is in the hands of a broader community that one can support on more equal terms.

@woodruffw I love your quote above that commits you to your open source base and I'm rooting for you. But how about an approach that commits you to this sentence in a more rigorous and legal way, and spin off your open source tooling to a separate community-based entity? Of course, upon that you can continue to maintain sufficient representation to make Astral's commercial products the natural progression and otherwise the model remains the same. That would be a significant transfer of control, but it is that very transfer that would get a overwhelming response from the community and could really unblock these great tools for massive growth.

I work a lot with LLVM/Clang and whilst i know Apple and Google are significant contributors I feel confident that LLVM itself exists outside of that yet accept that e.g. Apple's contributions afford them weight to steer the project in ways that match their interests in e.g. Swift and Apple tooling.
by dspillett | 2025-08-14 09:51:38+00:00
> Back in the day computer mags had 20-liner competitions.

In the magazines I remember from my days cutting my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron, there were 10-liners and 1-liners. What some people could squeeze out of 252 bytes was very impressive, even without using extra features (extra graphics primatives for instance) found in other models like the Master series.
by zipy124 | 2025-08-14 09:51:41+00:00
It is incredible talent and my comment does not try to claim otherwise. I indeed believe I would struggle to create a better system architecture, it is something I have not got a lot of experience in and I didn't try to claim otherwise.

This type of attitude is not constructive however, as if we followed this logic, we would not have coaches and athletes, as the coaches likely cannot do better than the athletes, but that does not mean they are useless.
by Grimblewald | 2025-08-14 09:51:53+00:00
There's a difference between being well read and being able to do something with what you've read. I would argue a far more useful and pragmatic definition of intelligence is one that focuses on, given the same information, a more intelligent person can achieve more with that information. In such a scenario, doing nothing if the information is bad is obviously more than what is achieved by acting on it. The idea, I guess, is that intelligence is about how you wield information, not what information you have. Being able to swim long distances unassisted is fairly called having high endurance. Doing so with all manner of aids, assistance, and pre-planned routes, is less impressive. So in a space of information, intelligence is like strength, or endurance. It allows one to defend, to change, to build, to create, especially in areas where others might be limited.

So this is in no way a `no true Scotsman` fallacy. Being able to be well read is a product of having intelligent people in your society, people who make hard things accessible, make it learnable, but it does not itself make you intelligent.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-14 09:51:55+00:00
> You all thought several other automakers would make a better diner than Tesla

Notoriously, VW makes its own sausages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_currywurst

> Initially, the plant received whole animals from a Volkswagen-owned farm that were butchered on site – this has since ceased and pre-butchered animals are sourced locally

I mean, really they should be getting the pigs from Bosch.