MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wildzzz | 2025-08-22 17:14:46+00:00
We have an Aldi that has coin slots on carts, only store in the area that does this. I rarely have cash on me and never carry coins so the few I do have stay in the car for the rare coin-only parking meter. My wife likes to be nice and not get the quarter back after we return the cart. She'll get mad at me if I make an effort to get the quarter back or if someone hands me their quarter in exchange for the one already in the cart. Like, I'm not trying to be stingy. I could give a shit about paying an extra 25¢ to grocery shop. The issue is that I don't have many quarters and don't feel like getting cash back or digging through the junk drawer to find another quarter. That quarter is worth more to me than face value.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-22 17:15:26+00:00
fdm, imapsync, lots of similar alternatives. Synchronize email to your machine and then use any MUA, or even several of them, to read it from a local directory (Thunderbird also works AFAIK).

They can also remove email from the remote and keep just the local copy. Pretty much 1:1 with POP. I've been using this setup (with fdm) for probably more than a decade.
by kace91 | 2025-08-22 17:15:34+00:00
Thanks for the reply!

You mentioned that these classes were good enough that they made swedish classes a breeze in comparison. What differences in teaching made Saturday school so much more effective?

You did mention class size, and the sense of community, which were probably important, but is there anything else related to the teaching style that you thought helped? Or conversely, something that was missing in the regular school days that made them worse?
by 0_____0 | 2025-08-22 17:15:48+00:00
I took Amtrak from Boston South Station to Montpelier. You have to go south to Connecticut before you can get the Vermonter. The Vermonter was canceled due to contention with a disabled Metro North (or something...) and my connecting train turned into a bus.

When I've gone to NYC, it's honestly been less hassle to just take the bus.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-22 17:15:48+00:00
I don’t have to show ID, but I do have to pay the bill, which means a direct debit, which means over 18.

The correct solution (in addition to bill layer control and arguably compulsory support for an “over 18” tag in dns which would be easy enough to implement for the same sites that currently demand over 18s, would be to help parents utilise parental controls (having recently been through it with Minecraft and fortnight it was a nightmarish gordian knot.

The hand wringing about how evil vpns are is the same. My son can’t install mullvad or whatever on his phone without my approval thanks to apple’s parental controls. I assume android has the same.

The goal has never been to empower parents though
by jandrese | 2025-08-22 17:16:12+00:00
I think that's going a bit too far. The big thing is to have the AI spit out small digestible modules, check those for correctness, and then glue them together. The same way a person normally writes code, you are just having the AI do the grunt work.

This does have the caveat that reading code is usually harder than writing it, so the total time savings is far less than what AI companies claim. You only get in real danger when you don't review the code and just YOLO it into production.
by zzzeek | 2025-08-22 17:16:27+00:00
ffmpeg is a treasure to the open source and audio technology communities. The tool cuts right through all kinds of proprietary and arcane roadblocks presented by various codecs and formats and it's clear a tremendous amount of work goes into keeping it all working. The CLI is of course quite opaque and the documentation for various features is often terse, but it's still the only tool on any platform anywhere that will always get you what you need for video and audio processing without ever running up against some kind of commercial paywall.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-22 17:16:30+00:00
I find "STRING {var} STRING" much more readable. Also, far easier to type. You don't even need to explicitly convert to a string first, it happens implicitly (Which, ironically, goes against the "Explicit is better than implicit" line in the Zen of Python).

But this page isn't about merely inserting a number/string into a string, it's about expressing how you want that number/string formatted. Maybe you only want the first two digits after a decimal. Maybe you want it to always be the same width and to pad with spaces or zeroes. Or any other ways of formatting.
by fragmede | 2025-08-22 17:16:30+00:00
now you can, but, what, are you gonna lie down and wait for tech giants to do everything? Not every company needs to be Apple. If Dropbox filed for bankruptcy tomorrow, they've still made millionaires of thousands of people and given jobs to hundreds more, and enabled people to share their files online.

Steve Jobs gets to call other companies small because Apple is huge, but there are thousands of companies that "are just features". Yeah, features they forgot to add!

Apple still doesn't make cases for their phones.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-22 17:16:31+00:00
If you want mainstream, Java and C# are mainstream and both are used much more than Go. Clojure isn't too niche, though not as popular as Go, and supports concurrency out of the box at least as well as Go. Ada is still used widely within its niches and has better concurrency than Go baked in since 1983. And then, yes, Erlang and Elixir to add to that list.

That's 6 languages, a non-exhaustive list of them, that are either properly mainstream and more popular than Go or at least well-known and easy to obtain and get started with. All of which have concurrency baked in and well-supported (unlike, say, C).

EDIT: And one more thing, all but Elixir are older than Go, though Clojure only slightly. So prior art was there to learn from.
by Arnavion | 2025-08-22 17:16:39+00:00
I actually went looking at the source code to see if this would work on Wayland and it doesn't. The clipboard snooping is implemented by listening for events using gdk.Clipboard, which is not an ext_data_control_v1 implementation. So on Wayland it'll only notice clipboard events if it's in focus (or if the compositor sends clipboard events to unfocused windows, which I'm not sure any do).

https://github.com/murat-cileli/clyp/blob/2c0ce6c33813c3f35f...

Edit: Yes, tested it now and it doesn't detect clipboard events from Wayland windows when it doesn't have focus. It only detects events from Xwayland windows when unfocused, or if I copy something from a Wayland window and then focus the clyp window then it detects the thing I copied.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-08-22 17:17:09+00:00
Gods I would love to work more in a policy space, tho my background is entirely technical.

A friend of mine has been trying to get into law school for a few years; she's technically competent and plenty intelligent, but it's been hard going for her to get in, plus multiple years of education to even attempt the bar. All of that sounds like far too much sunk-cost to me to dally in and figure out if it's a path I would truly enjoy.

What ways could I engage with policy coming from a technical background that would serve as a useful stepping stone to a more policy based career, but doesn't require such an upfront cost as a law degree?
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-22 17:17:34+00:00
I also submitted this earlier today prior to this submission, but it was flagged, which I was confused by, so glad this one got through.

This was an interesting article and brought some good points around the fact that the AI never has a continuing backward/forward-looking context about one's project. Perhaps these ideas are being thought about to potentially add as features of LLMs somehow without making it unfeasible from token/context perspective.
by jfengel | 2025-08-22 17:18:00+00:00
No, it's not.

I opened a production of King Lear last night. Everybody in the audience knew how the play ends. They wept anyway.

The play's eye-gouging scene is very famous; I include a spoiler warning in the marketing for those who don't. Everybody last night knew it was coming -- and some people still looked away.

The last time I did this play, audience members sometimes vomited at the scene, even though they all knew it wasn't real. I deliberately dialed it back a bit, because I don't want to distract from the real horror of that moment.

This play is 400 years old. Nobody was ambushed. It is still incredibly effective drama.

Nor is that restricted to 400 year old plays. We watch remakes all the time. Nobody needed to be "ambushed" by the live-action Lion King to experience drama.

Surprise is one way to bring about drama, but it is by no means required. If the trigger warning really costs you all of the drama of your production, then you chose a single, shallow way to tell your story.

As Roger Ebert said, a movie is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. The audiences comes with the story -- if they're thinking about your trigger warnings while watching it, it's because you're not engaging them. The trigger warnings are there so that some people can say "Nope, not for me", and I am glad that they can find other entertainment for the evening. That frees me up to tell the story the way I want to tell it.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-22 17:18:13+00:00
No post war U.K. government aside from the 2010-15 coalition had a majority of voters voting for the parties in power. 1951 came close I think.

However opinion polls consistently put support for the “anti porn” bill up high amongst multiple demographics.

The cause for this is a lack of computer literacy, in both government and the population, but that doesn’t really matter.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-22 17:20:12+00:00
This seems like a common theme around very young computer users: Applications and operating systems have, for over a decade, deliberately tried to blur the line between "files on your computer" and "files in the cloud". Photo apps present you a list of photos, and deliberately hide what filesystem those photos are actually on. "They're just your photos. Don't think too much about where they are!" The end result is that the median computer user has no idea that files exist in some physical space and there is a difference between local and remote storage.

My kid struggles with this. She can't intuitively grasp why one app needs the Internet and another app does not. I try to explain it but it all goes over her head. The idea that you need the Internet when your app needs to communicate with something outside of the phone is just foreign to her: In her mind, "the app" just exists, and there's no distinction between stuff on the phone and stuff on the network.
by fragmede | 2025-08-22 17:21:59+00:00
Doctor Smith's ENT doctor's office has a bus factor of one. If doctor Smith dies, that company goes under. Their patients are going to have to find a new ENT doctor. There's a life long relationship people have with their doctors. If that doctor retires, it's a big deal to all of their patients who now have to find a new doctor. ENTs are fairly standardized, thankfully, so their patients can just go elsewhere if there's a bus event, but doctor smith is crucial to the company's survival. The continuity of business plan there is patients can find another ENT doctors and the employees can go to another practice.

Aka, why we should ask vendors for their source code in case they go under.
by kbolino | 2025-08-22 17:22:18+00:00
There's also atomic operations (sync/atomic) and higher-level abstractions built on atomics and/or mutexes (sempahores, sync.Once, sync.WaitGroup/errgroup.Group, etc.). I've used these and seen them used by others.

But yeah, the CSP model is mostly dead. I think the language authors' insistence that goroutines should not be addressable or even preemptible from user code makes this inevitable.

Practical Go concurrency owes more to its green threads and colorless functions than its channels.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-22 17:22:37+00:00
This shouldn’t really matter, software can also be written by very bad coders.

If you care about safety, you care about the whole process—coding, sure, but also: code review, testing, what the design specs were, and what the failure-path is for when a bug (inevitably) makes it through.

Big companies produce lots of safety critical code, and it is inevitable that some incompetent people will sneak into the gaps, there. So, it is necessary to design a process that accounts for commits written by incompetent people.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-08-22 17:22:39+00:00
> should be a natural way to work on your own pace at your own level

Analogous to the old one-room-school model where one teacher taught all grade levels and students generally worked from textbooks. There were issues with it stemming from specialization (e.g., teaching 1st grade is different than teaching 12th). They were also largely in rural areas and generally had poor facilities.

The main barrier in the US to track separation is manpower. Public School teachers are underpaid and treated like shit, and schools don't get enough funding which further reduces the number of teachers.

Teachers just don't have the time in the US to do multiple tracks in the classroom.
by rramadass | 2025-08-22 17:22:40+00:00
Yes, i would say my study of Philosophy, Understanding of Science, Practice of Technology, Applications to Psychology (both Individual and Group) has had a powerful impact on my life choices. It enabled me to sacrifice my job/career/future in the tech. industry a decade ago so that i could live with/take care of my aged Mother until her end without too much regret.

Philosophy taught me to discount Money/Worldly standards, Science taught me the need to have mental philosophical worldviews not be too dissonant from Objective Reality, Technology enabled me to earn my livelihood and finally Psychology enabled the coming together of all of the above in one's own being.

The way to think about this is;

1) What is the meaning of Life objectively i.e. outside-in from the pov of the Universe? This question is meaningless and unanswerable. However you can know aspects of Objective Reality using the Scientific Method and learn to manipulate/adapt it thus enhancing your subjective experience of it. This is the realm of all the Modern Hard Sciences and Technologies which are borne out of them.

2) What is the meaning of my Life subjectively i.e. inside-out from the pov of personal Experiences/Feelings/Emotions/Thoughts/Actions? This the fundamental question of Human Condition and answered by the various extent Philosophies/Religions/Psychologies. You devise "Worldviews" into Objective Reality but taking care that you don't stray into fantasy land.

The various Hindu Schools of philosophies and their derivative Buddhist schools have much to offer here. In particular the Samkhya School (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya) provides a good Worldview which meshes nicely with our Modern Sciences. A practical realization of the above Worldview is provided by the Ashtanga Yoga school of Patanjali (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtanga_(eight_limbs_of_yoga) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali)

The Greek schools of philosophies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_philosophy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_philosophy) also have much to offer here though their focus is more on harmoniously interfacing to/experiencing of/modulating of Objective Reality for a Good Life.

PS: You might also find the book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia interesting. Pdf available at https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781...
by mothballed | 2025-08-22 17:22:49+00:00
And that is another weakness of Georgism: it causes the base stock to be fixed.

Land speculators play an important role by introducing unimproved land into the market at a delayed point in time, adjusting the stock of available land to market demands, preventing economically inefficient prior improvements from happening which then make it even more expensive to use the land productively in the future.

The incredibly vital task of land speculation that adjusts available stock to market conditions, is virtually impossible under a LVT.
by gf000 | 2025-08-22 17:23:35+00:00
How could any library function work with completely random bytes? Like, how would it iterate over code points? It may want to assume utf8's standard rules and e.g. know that after this byte prefix, the next byte is also part of the same code point (excuse me if I'm using wrong terminology), but now you need complex error handling at every single line, which would be unnecessary if you just made your type represent only valid instances.

Again, this is the same simplistic, vs just the right abstraction, this just smudges the complexity over a much larger surface area.

If you have a byte array that is not utf-8 encoded, then just... use a byte array.
by bornfreddy | 2025-08-22 17:24:05+00:00
One thing that I love about Windows (and there aren't many others) is that pressing Super+V (instead of Ctrl+V) shows a list of last N clipboard entries and you can select which one you wish to paste. Simple and very effective.

You can also pin some entries so that they are permanently available, but that's a bonus.

I haven't seen a clipboard manager behave like that in Linux - can this one be used in a similar way?
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-22 17:24:07+00:00
OK well I think there's one superior aspect to the main post which is that it is short and not difficult to understand all of what will happen. This web-share-target requires more thinking about.

Also some stuff I dislike:

>The user agent MAY automatically register all web share targets as the user visits the site, but it is RECOMMENDED that more discretion is applied, to avoid overwhelming the user with the choice of a large number of targets.

Yeah, specs that leave it open to site discretion whether or not to be abusive have a great deal of success.

>This specification has no known accessibility considerations.

No really!?

Yeah a screenreader functions as a sequential medium, so what happens with registry of all share targets with screenreader, in fact what happens when screenreader comes to site, screenreader now will tell you that you have shares first? This is up to the browser how they tell the user that there are shares and ask for their input? So it will work differently between browsers?

I have found some bugs before in Google provided specs that were somewhat annoying for screenreader usage, and evidently the reasoning they must have had was that there were no known accessibility considerations because they sure didn't specify any.
by drdaeman | 2025-08-22 17:24:18+00:00
Article talks about "AI" as a buzzword. My understanding is that "AI" here means something much more closer to "market virtue signalling" when every product now has "AI", rather than "cutting-edge ML research".

It's the kind of "AI" I see when I walk by the TVs at Costco and see that every box that used to feature the word "smart" now has "AI" prominently written on it, even though in practice no one knows for sure what it possibly means or does. In this sense - sense of companies slapping "AI" (whatever it means to them) for the sake of having "AI" looks like a bubble/fad/hype.

I have no idea about any possible economical outcomes of that hype declining (for a better term than "bubble" "bursting"), but I'm skeptical it's gonna be anything huge. My whole life I've seen endless examples of companies realizing their "hot topic" marketing strategy stopped working (or never worked at all) and they just pivot for different strategies without any severe impacts. As long, of course, as the company had actually useful product and the issue was merely with the marketing.
by ivape | 2025-08-22 17:26:07+00:00
You underestimate how much code some people have sifted through in their lifetime. I read through every line the LLM codes, function by function.

I know exactly when it’s going sideways. You’d have to know to even know, it’s one of those things. If you don’t know then you don’t know.

Put it another way, you know how some people fail open book tests? How’s that possible? The book is not enough.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-22 17:26:27+00:00
I don't want to say too much because it would reveal where I live. But, to be general, my town has a very unique political system where a plurality of voters is the deadlock.

Basically, to break the deadlock, it would require a very large plurality of people to overrule a large group of retirees who have nothing better to do but reject adopting our private roads.
by bobsomers | 2025-08-22 17:26:42+00:00
Everything you said is 100% correct.

However, part of designing and upholding a safety-critical software development process is looking for places to reduce or eliminate the introduction of bugs in the first place.

Strong type systems, for example, eliminate entire classes of errors, so mandating that code is written in X language is a pro-active process decision to reduce the introduction of certain types of bugs.

Restricting the use of AI tools could very much be viewed the same way.
by ppqqrr | 2025-08-22 17:26:44+00:00
generic advice about how you should use the same tool and methodology (claude code, scrum) that everyone’s already using, lot of hand waving about being “senior,” This may be the most 2025 blog post ever written.

if anyone takes the art of software programming further using LLMs, it’s going to be young inexperienced people who grow up closely observing and learning the transcendental nature of LLMs and software, not hardened industry titans joyfully cracking their whip over an army of junior devs and LLMs.