MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Grimburger | 2025-08-23 08:06:28+00:00
> but the overwhelming impact has been positive

You definitely need a source for that comment given that it only just happened.

Smartphones are neutral pieces of technology. It can create the next Einstein or radicalise the next terrorist, the 1's and 0's don't mind.

Why not ban them at universities also? Are these kids suddenly protected the moment they leave high school?

Like your opinion I have my own, and banning smartphones in Australian high schools will turn out to be overwhelmingly negative for outcomes. I predict it will be reversed and looked back upon as a failure.

Khan academy taught me more than dozens of different teachers. Kids are now blocked from accessing it for their entire time at school and when they would be most intruiged to learn.

Just like terrible having internet, Australians seem intent on being left behind in a hypercompetitive world.
by maxdamantus | 2025-08-23 08:07:09+00:00
They have effectively done this (since the linked issue was raised), by just converting Windows filenames to WTF-8.

I think this is sensible, because the fact that Windows still uses UTF-16 (or more precisely "Unicode 16-bit strings") in some places shouldn't need to complicate the API on other platforms that didn't make the UCS-2/UTF-16 mistake.

It's possible that the WTF-8 strings might not concatenate the way they do in UTF-16 or properly enforced WTF-8 (which has special behaviour on concatenation), but they'll still round-trip to the intended 16-bit string, even after concatenation.
by hermanzegerman | 2025-08-23 08:07:16+00:00
You really come off as a Hardcore Apple Fanboy

> Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB

Doesn't matter because for the equivalent price you can load up your non-Apple Machine with RAM to the Max, same with SSD Storage. With a MacBook you would need to prepare to cough up, up to 9k more than the base model for a huge SSD and RAM. No more than 1k for this elsewhere

> ve been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two.

I don't need to reboot for Weeks, I'm using Fedora though. It sounds like you're doing something terribly wrong, as most Linux Users also don't need to reboot ever 1-2 days. Maybe you should try a more beginner friendly distro if Arch is too complex for you
by anileated | 2025-08-23 08:07:31+00:00
There is nothing in the word “theft” that implies depriving someone of physical property.

Theft of private data deprives the owner of privacy. Theft of corporate secrets deprives the company of competitive advantage (and if not prosecuted, economy at large of incentives to innovate). IP theft deprives IP holder of ownership claim (and if not prosecuted, arts at large of incentives to create). Identity theft deprives the identity holder of whatever access to their identity provided to them. This can be continued infinitely.

These scenarios are not the same, and using “theft” for all of them is not precise. However, it is 2025 and in developed countries this sort of crime happens more often than basic theft of physical property, and the detriment from it is often much, much more severe than from basic theft of physical property. (I am sure I don’t need to explain how depriving IP owner of ownership claim can cost the original creator much more than depriving them of some single physical asset, both literally financially and in terms of psychological damage.) It’s therefore important to have a short, mainstream, easy to understand and non-legalese term for these scenarios.

Without any suitable mainstream term the word “theft” is a good enough intuitive approximation—if anything, it’s a bit too mild of a term.
by sothatsit | 2025-08-23 08:08:18+00:00
I love Zig precisely because it is so similar to C. Honestly, if you don't like C, I can totally understand why you wouldn't like Zig. But I love C, and I love Zig.

Zig has become my go-to for projects where I would previously have reached for C, largely because Zig has such good compatibility with other C projects.

Rust, on the other hand, is a completely different beast. It is very different from C, and it is far more complicated. That makes it harder to justify using, whereas Zig is a very easy choice as an alternative to using C itself.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-23 08:08:29+00:00
This is a good point, but one could make a point for the usefulness of documentation in “thinking like a user” which is a valuable exercise.

I do very much prefer moving fast though, so I get it, docs-later is obviously a very valid way of doing things.

If someone is excited about Zig and wanted to make a difference I guess it’s now obvious where they could have outsized impact!
by tigrezno | 2025-08-23 08:09:38+00:00
On android I degoogled almost everything by using Fossify apps. Only gmail and maps remain for obvious reasons. My photos are now synced with Syncthing through my wireguard vpn. Calendar/Notes have local backups that are also synced. The simple camera I use (fossify too) works with physical directories instead of meta directories that I hate.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-23 08:10:09+00:00
That's a theoretical problem that almost never surfaces in practice.

Using `defer...recover` is computationally expensive within hot paths. And since Go encourages errors to be surfaced via the `error` type, when writing idomatic Go you don't actually need to raise exceptions all that often.

So panics are reserved for instances where your code reaches a point that it cannot reasonably continue.

This means you want to catch panics at boundary points in your code.

Given that global state is an anti-pattern in any language, you'd want to wrap your mutex, file, whatever operations in a `struct` or its own package and instantiate it there. So you can have a destructor on that which is still caught by panic and not overly reliant on `defer` to achieve it.

This actually leads to my biggest pet peeve in Go. It's not `x, err := someFunction()` and nor is it `defer/panic`, these are all just ugly syntax that doesn't actually slow you down. My biggest complaint is the lack of creator and destructor methods for structs.

the `NewClass`-style way of initialising types is an ugly workaround and it constantly requires checking if libraries require manual initilisation before use. Not a massive time sink but it's not something the IDE can easily hint to you so you do get pulled from your flow to then either Google that library or check what `New...` functions are defined in the IDEs syntax completion. Either way, it's a distraction.

The lack of a destructor, though, does really show up all the other weaknesses in Go. It then makes `defer` so much more important than it otherwise should be. It means the language then needs runtime hacks for you to add your own dereference hooks[0][1] (this is a problem I run into often with CGO where I do need to deallocate, for example, texture data from the GPU). And it means you need to check each struct to see if it includes a `Close()` method.

I've heard the argument against destructors is that they don't catch errors. But the counterargument to that is the `defer x.Close()` idiom, where errors are ignored anyway.

I think that change, and tuples too so `err` doesn't always have to be its own variable, would transform Go significantly into something that feels just as ergonomic as it is simple to learn, and without harming the readability of Go code.

[0] https://medium.com/@ksandeeptech07/improved-finalizers-in-go...

[1] eg https://github.com/lmorg/ttyphoon/blob/main/window/backend/r...
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-23 08:11:39+00:00
the problem for me at any rate, reading the spec, is trying to think out exactly how this will be affected by the ability of the site to add multiple share targets

as quoted >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.

The spec evidently feels it won't make any difference at all, but I'm not sure, and it's harder for me to reason about this than the simple rel share url thing.
by herbst | 2025-08-23 08:11:41+00:00
I've had a MacBook Pro for about a year. I've got actual burns from the case, I couldn't use a external screen without it being attached to power and it was incredibly loud, I didn't like the OS, the support I've witnessed was horrible, ...

I know many people like their macs but it's not that single perfekt machine people want it to be
by alex-moon | 2025-08-23 08:12:03+00:00
There is a very famous experiment which has been reproduced many times - I don't know if this is the original: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10437101/ - where you can measurably impact how much strangers will donate to a charitable cause simply by painting a pair of eyes on the donation box. I imagine this "hologram" is largely the same effect.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-08-23 08:12:50+00:00
I’m unclear how you’re hitting $1k/mo in personal usage. GitHub Copilot charges $0.04 per task with a frontier model in agent mode - and it’s considered expensive. That’s 850 coding tasks per day for $1k/mo, or around 1 per minute in a 16hr day.

I’m not sure a single human could audit & review the output of $1k/mo in tokens from frontier models at the current market rate. I’m not sure they could even audit half that.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-23 08:13:11+00:00
The Aga for me is the ultimate "I am an upper class British" item.

When I was at uni I made friends with a fellow. He was into theatre, so the invited me and the rest of the gang up to his house. Dude had an empty 5 bedroom house that he used for theatre nights.

So I arrive and I see his stove is on.

"Bro you've left your stoves on?"

"Yeah it's an Aga"

"A what? I thought we were eating out?"

"Yeah we are, we just keep this thing on to heat the house. Useful for keeping food warm as well."

"Wait so you have an empty house that has an oven in it which is always on?"

"Yes, feels great when I arrive before a theatre night!"
Ask HN: At what age did you start programming or think about it?
by Forgret | 2025-08-23 08:13:30+00:00
For example, I first thought about it when I was 12 years old, then I started learning the C# programming language for Unity, but I didn't succeed, so I gave up on it a year later.

At the age of 13, I started learning Python, but quit after a month.

And then somewhere around the age of 14-15 (i.e. today) I started learning the C programming language, and so far everything is going well and I dream of going to university and becoming a developer.
by xg15 | 2025-08-23 08:13:36+00:00
I feel especially with generics though, there is a sort of loop that many languages fall into. It goes something like this:

(1) "Generics are too complicated and academical and in the real world we only need them for a small number of well-known tasks anyway, so let's just leave them out!"

(2) The amount of code that does need generics but now has to work around the lack of them piles up, leading to an explosion of different libraries, design patterns, etc, that all try to partially recreate them in their own way.

(3) The language designers finally cave and introduce some kind of generics support in a later version of the language. However, at this point, they have to deal with all the "legacy" code that is not generics-aware and with runtime environments that aren't either. It also somehow has to play nice with all the ad-hoc solutions that are still present. So the new implementation has to deal with a myriad of special cases and tradeoffs that wouldn't be there in the first if it had been included in the language from the beginning.

(4) All the tradeoffs give the feature a reputation of needless complexity and frustrating limitations and/or footguns, prompting the next language designer to wonder if they should include them at all. Go to (1) ...
by nottorp | 2025-08-23 08:14:08+00:00
> the early butterfly keyboards were fragile

... and the last butterfly keyboards. I bought one after they added extra insulation under the keys (or whatever they pretended to do) and it broke in a couple months just like the early ones.

"As such, they are not intended to encounter circumstances that don’t track to the lifestyle of the average Apple employee."

This one is right. For the wrong reasons.
by kstenerud | 2025-08-23 08:14:28+00:00
> Are you clearly somewhere in the autistic spectrum?

The "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

> Primary and secondary school, church, family, these are ready-made, we're ushered into.

Yup, and for neurotypicals, belief is a function of loyalty. They believe (unconsciously) in order to demonstrate their allegiance to their clan (which is why you can't argue them out of a belief). The entire social fabric (and all institutions therein) is designed to reinforce your clan's code by telling you what to believe.

Autistics don't work that way. When we believe, we actually do believe. So we need a different approach: pretending to believe in order to preserve our social standing (and thus, safety - because people only help you if they like you, and that usually requires congruent "beliefs").
by virtualritz | 2025-08-23 08:15:16+00:00
I do not think this is a viable excuse any more.

I am just editing docs now that Claude Code writes for me. I am fanatic about developer docs (and I guess an exception as I love writing them) but with a set of concise instructions for CC and some writing style examples I get 90% there, sometimes 99%.

If you believe you don't have time for the last 1--10% you should not be in charge of writing any API used by anyone but yourself. Just my two c.
by mcny | 2025-08-23 08:15:41+00:00
I think it is reasonable for a teacher to say you can't actively use your phone while class is in session but not appropriate for them to say you can't have your phone on you. It is also inappropriate to say your phone must be in some special pouch that only they can open, etc.

This is just my own opinion, of course. I think it is also inappropriate to say you need someone's permission to use the restroom. All my opinions of appropriate ness is mostly about adults behaving like adults though. They probably don't make sense when it comes to children?
by ksec | 2025-08-23 08:15:49+00:00
I think it is a trade off for between zig's development speed and documentation. It is Pre 1.0, extreme beta mode with lots of breaking changes.

Generally speaking I think it is the right trade off for now. Purely inferring from Andrew and the Zig's team online character as I don't know them in person, I think they do care a lot of DX, things like compiling speed and tools. So I think once 1.0 come I won't be surprised if it will have extremely good documentation as well.

And I would argue, writing good, simple, clear, detailed documentation is actually harder than writing code itself.
by benreesman | 2025-08-23 08:15:58+00:00
Haskell makes guarantees. Modern C++ makes predictions to within a quantifiable epsilon.

Rust makes false promises in practical situations. It invented a notion of safety that is neither well posed, nor particularly useful, nor compatible with ergonomic and efficient computing.

It's speciality is marketing and we already know the bounding box on its impact or relevance. "Vibe coding" will be a more colorful and better remembered mile marker of this lousy decade in computers than Rust, which will be an obscurity in an appendix in 100 years.
by rvz | 2025-08-23 08:16:54+00:00
One vast difference - he (and all the other contributors) understood each line of code they wrote for the Linux kernel.

LLM agents doing all the work without you understanding the code they write is even far worse for a hobbyist than it is for a professional.

So having no understanding about the code that LLMs write, fails the first test in inspiring confidence in building robust software.
by brigade | 2025-08-23 08:17:00+00:00
Microtransaction infested games were inevitable even if mobile gaming didn’t exist. Like, of the top 10 highest lifetime grossing games, 3 are arcade pay-per-play (the original microtransaction), 6 are f2p that got their start on PC, and only one is mobile-first / only.

Last year, 58% of PC gaming revenue was from microtransactions, and that percentage is only growing.
by storus | 2025-08-23 08:17:54+00:00
If you are self-employed in Germany (i.e. most high earners that earn over 200k) then you pay around 1100-1200EUR/month on health insurance which is more than a family health insurance plan in the US. Moreover, even if you earn only 62000EUR, you pay 1100+EUR/month, which is absolutely ridiculous given other taxes and VAT.
by gf000 | 2025-08-23 08:18:58+00:00
Sure, though RC can't get away from pauses either - ever seen a C++ program seemingly hang at termination? That's a large object graph recursively running its destructors. And the worst thing is that it runs on the mutator thread (the thread doing the actual work).

Also, Java has ZGC that basically solved the pause time issue, though it does come at the expense of some throughput (compared to their default GC).
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-08-23 08:19:19+00:00
If freelancing and if I am doing 2x as much as previously with same time, it would make sense that I am able to make 2x as much. But honestly to me with many projects I feel like I was able to scale my output far more than 2x. It is a different story of course if you have main job only. But I have been doing main job and freelancing on the side forever now.

I do freelancing mostly for fun though, picking projects I like, not directly for the money, but this is where I definitely see multiples of difference on what you can charge.
by maxbond | 2025-08-23 08:19:28+00:00
If you can run inference in real time (while doing a video call), and you can extract text through your operating system's accessibility APIs (eg the application isn't doing it's own bespoke text rendering), then probably. You'll still need to figure out where the entity appears on screen in order to censor them. (Or maybe the accessibility APIs have that information?) And you'll need some way to get in-between the OS and the screen share, like a virtual display or something.
by riedel | 2025-08-23 08:20:38+00:00
I would agree to see the outcry more as a symptom about this meritocratic system. I think we are at a point where new browser/rendering engines are developing like ladybird or Servo. An independent group should make sure that they will strive. Making specs simpler can help here. But I think many things are done for the wrong reasons (E.g. Google wanting to cut down cost on parts irrelevant to their income, other vendors that are reliant on them).

Last time I used XSLT in the browser was actually transforming PMML to JavaScript executable ML models about 10 yrs ago. Before that I think it was building a light weight web frontend for our SVN repo. With XML APIs replaced by json or binary formats, the relevance is becoming less and less. And in the end it is about legacy stuff only because there are XSLT compilers [0] that could fill the gap (maybe with a small web extension, that won't work on phones with native Apple and Google browsers...)

[0] https://github.com/egh/xjslt
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-23 08:20:45+00:00
The most obvious way to me is sharing a chat link, e.g. like this https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_3407db4e-47fc-4dfb-85a6-1013... .

Anyone with that link will be able to get that chat.

It does not mean users pasted them on HN or some other public website. People often are not aware services they use crawl their data. Links in your personal hosted mail, or IMs will most often end up in the associated provider's search index. They are publicly accesible links after all.

Additionally, grok.com's robots.txt explicitly disallows crawlers from accessing these specific chat links as they are under grok.com/chat/, but it allows explicitly published chats by the user as those are made available under grok.com/share/

Now I know many users of these mail and chat services are not aware that when they mail or chat a link, even just with themselves, they are giving that link to the search crawler/indexer. There lies IMHO the root of the problem.

What is your take? Should grok, as well as all the other ai chat providers, remove the 'share this chat publicly' functionality? Should providers such as Google, Meta and Microsoft not index links from mails and chats?

Personally, I think the latter makes more sense.
by bazoom42 | 2025-08-23 08:20:59+00:00
It is just a special nostalgia for technologies which never became sucessful. They are percieved as more pure and perfect than the messy real world.

Client side XSLT transforms are very rarely useful. It was intended for a vision of the web as a multiude of different XML formats served to end users. Since this didnt happen (for good reasons), XSLT becase less useful. In reality it is only ever used to tranform into XHTML.

It was also touted as a more powerful style sheet since it could rearrange elements and transform semantic elements into tables for presentation. But CSS supports that now in a much better way, and most significantly CSS can react to dynamic updates.

Serving XML to end users only makes sense if someone actully understands the XML format. But only very few XML formats beside XHTML and SVG have any broad support. RSS is one of the few examples, and seem to be the main use case for XSLT.
by i_dont_know_ | 2025-08-23 08:20:59+00:00
I wanted to dig into the hype around agents and figure out both the use-cases and quirks, so I wrote this little 'review'.

I think, like most of the 'AI' sphere right now, they're overhyped but I think it's good to get a feel firsthand of when they're useful and when they're not.
by fullautomation | 2025-08-23 08:22:01+00:00
"I don't see any reason to make a video about it". This sentence is so wrong in its depth that's difficult to know where to start arguing against it. "The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR." For the same reason we should ask how many years contributing have been writing software and in the specific language, as they are also correlated with quality of produced code. "we need to be responsible about what we're using it for and respectful to the humans on the other side that may have to review or maintain this code" Yes, producing great code and documentation, regardless the process.