MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pt7even | 2025-08-31 22:51:46+00:00
I attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation course earlier this year. The experience of disconnecting completely — no phone, no talking, no work — had a surprising impact on my focus, my sense of ego, and my ability to manage reactions. I wrote about the lessons and practical takeaways in this piece. Curious to hear if others here have tried Vipassana or similar extended meditation retreats.
by osigurdson | 2025-08-31 22:52:23+00:00
I'd say that is more like a terminal than a browser. Regardless, what I really mean is some data is needed for the pixels (or whatever abstraction you want above that). You don't need data for anything other than the current viewport and whatever is likely needed next. No less, no more. No over or under fetching. This would be much better imo.
by shirro | 2025-08-31 22:52:35+00:00
I can see a fracturing of digital convergence in my future. Corporate controlled communication device in one pocket and an open source SBC in the other. I'm not particularly into the privacy/security stuff. I just think it has all gone too far I'm not sure the value is there anymore as we all get squeezed for profits. I don't need or want most of the shit that companies are pushing. The services I used to find useful like really good search have been destroyed.
by lttlrck | 2025-08-31 22:53:50+00:00
If this is what AI is going to look like in practice it's a big letdown.

Science fiction has been predicting what an AI would be like for over a hundred years, there was even one in a movie in 1927. We're so far from what we dream that, to me, it feels like a mere leaf blowing in the wind compared to the Wright Flyer.
by the_af | 2025-08-31 22:53:57+00:00
> Anyone who wants a competitive advantage?

Do you mean long-term vision? Short-term the advantage is in hiring only seniors, but do you mean companies will foresee trouble looming ahead and "waste" money on juniors just to avert this disaster?

My own feeling is that this could become like a sort of... well, I recently heard of the term "population time bomb", and it was eye-opening for me. How once it starts rolling, it's incredibly hard/impossible to revert, etc.

So what if we have some sort of "experience time bomb" here? Businesses stop hiring juniors. Seniors are needed to make AI work, but their experience isn't passed on because... who to pass it to? And then juniors won't have this wealth of "on the job experience" to be able to smell AI disaster and course-correct. The kind of experience you learn from actual work, not books.
by retrac | 2025-08-31 22:56:19+00:00
Elizabeth II was at war with herself, briefly.

Jamaica has the monarchy. Jamaican forces were part of the US-led coalition that invaded Grenada in 1983, after the communists seized power. The communists found it politically expedient to maintain the structure of parliamentary government, and so the head of state of Grenada also remained nominally, Elizabeth II.
by theamk | 2025-08-31 22:56:22+00:00
You are an employee and you are overloaded (like the OP). You are worried about getting fired if you don't do enough. Your manager had talked to you about not overworking and said you should not work more than 40 hours. At the same time, the manager said that the company needs only high performers, so you should be working faster. You can't do this, you are already working as fast as you can.

Option 1: you do as told and leave home at 5pm. You spend 40 hours per week exactly, but work is not getting done, so people are complaining about your performance. Your manager is putting more pressure on you, you are worried about getting fired.

Option 2: you record 40 hours per week, but actually work for 80. Sure your home life suffers but at least the manager is off your back. You are getting compliments about performance and vague promises about raise sometimes in the future maybe.

Which option do you think people will choose?
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-31 22:57:11+00:00
Yes, United States. I should add that I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22.5 years old.

Growing up in the South East, USA, there were no such things as Autism, ADHD, etc.. Things have gotten better, I suppose, but I'm in my early 30s, so this wasn't exactly a long time ago either. You know how schools have 'gifted and talented' programs? I was in the 'cursed and talentless' program.
by dgan | 2025-08-31 22:57:40+00:00
what is this sorcery. I was reading HN for years, this is the first time I see someone brings up a memory safe C++. how is that not even on the headlines ? what's the catch, build times ? do I have to sell my house to get it?

EDIT: Oh, found the tradeoff:

hollerith on Feb 21, 2024 | prev | next [–]

>Fil-C is currently about 200x slower than legacy C according to my tests
by jacquesm | 2025-08-31 22:58:30+00:00
It's not what it can do today (which is already pretty impressive) it is what it can do in another century, which too is a relatively short time.

The Wright Flyer was a complete aircraft but small, awkward and not very practical. But it had all of the parts and that was the bit that mattered.

LLMs are not a 'complete AI' at all, they are just a very slick imitation of one through a completely different pathway. Useful, but not AI (at least, not to me). Meanwhile, a very large fraction of the users of OpenAI, Claude etc all think that AI has arrived and from that perspective it is mostly the tech crowd that is disappointed. For the rest of the people the thing is nothing short of magic compared to what they were able to do with a computer not so long ago. And for people like translators it is a massive threat to their jobs, assuming they still have one.

It is both revolutionary and a letdown, depending on your viewpoint and expectations.
by hdjrudni | 2025-08-31 22:58:38+00:00
I forget where I read it (maybe from Martin), but one reason I like to `jj new` before I start any work is just because it makes it easy to revert or abandon if I don't end up liking it. And also easy to diff. `jj new` is pretty much 'free' anyway, every time you make an edit you're creating new commits (not changes!) anyway.
by butterlettuce | 2025-08-31 22:58:52+00:00
You could use a firefox extension called BlockTube. You can still access Youtube but it’ll hide certain videos based on channel name, keywords in videos, etc.

For example, I have “Trump” or “Musk” to block any video with these keywords in the video title.

If you click on a share link video and those keywords appear, it’ll just show a black screen.
by decimalenough | 2025-08-31 22:59:19+00:00
> No other program has or likely to come close in the next 13 years including the current US one.

The Chinese are planning manned lunar landings in 2029-2030, and this is not a pipe dream, they've been systematically working at this for several decades now. They have already completed 6 out of 8 preparatory missions plus placed comms satellites in lunar orbit, and the final two are scheduled for 2026 and 2028.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...
by iod | 2025-08-31 23:00:43+00:00
U-Boot does basic enough UEFI emulation for most use cases. I find that I don't need native UEFI firmware and I can just build U-Boot with UEFI support for most ARM devices.

For example, right now I have an old armhf i.MX6 Wandboard Quad that runs:

U-Boot -> UEFI (with Secure Boot if desired) -> Systemd Boot (or Linux EFI Boot Stub) -> Debian (or other distro)

That same layout should be doable on any U-Boot¹ supported device.

Some arm devices such as the i.MX6, are strict on the placement of their boot firmware where it would interfere with a normal GPT table. One solution to this is to use a special "--move-main-table" option in gdisk² so that the GPT doesn't clobber U-Boot. While technically GPT is optional as long as U-Boot can read your main partition, I still always setup GPT anyway or Systemd Boot complains.

¹ https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/develop/uefi/uefi.html

² https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/sgdisk.html
by Jordan-117 | 2025-08-31 23:01:49+00:00
I've always been fascinated by the transition from paganism to Christianity in ancient times and how it was even possible. It's hard to imagine a society as conservative and honor-bound as Rome abandoning their ancient traditions for some upstart religious cult. I understand a lot of it was a top-down change driven by converted emperors like Constantine, but even then you'd think there would have been a greater resistance to shuttering old temples and tossing out household shrines, especially when they were so tied to the glory and power of Rome. I wonder what the mood and discourse was like on the ground when Christianity was clearly on the upswing but not yet in a position to displace paganism. Did it feel like a modern culture war, or even like the specter of religious fascism? Or were most people indifferent and just going with whatever religion the emperor mandated for pragmatic reasons?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-31 23:02:05+00:00
> either some update goes badly wrong [...] or the system just point-blank refuses to update

You don't understand, in that post I'm talking about purposefully not updating. At all. Updates can't go wrong if they don't happen. If it refuses to update then you win.

> What I want is something that's more like an appliance

Yeah, you get it! Set it up and then leave it alone.

And don't expose it to the internet.
by emtel | 2025-08-31 23:02:23+00:00
I did C++ for over 10 years, and now have been doing rust for about 4. On the whole, I like rust much better, but I really miss header files.

Modules are horrible for build times. If you change an implementation (i.e something that would not normally involve editing a header) the amount of rebuilding that happens is crazy, compared to any C++ project that was set up with a minimal amount of care.
by modeless | 2025-08-31 23:02:29+00:00
The catch is performance. It's not 200x slower though! 2x-4x is the actual range you can expect. There are many applications where that could be an acceptable tradeoff for achieving absolute memory safety of unmodified C/C++ code.

But also consider that it's one guy's side project! If it was standardized and widely adopted I'm certain the performance penalty could be reduced with more effort on the implementation. And I'm also sure that for new C/C++ code that's aware of the performance characteristics of Fil-C that we could come up with ways to mitigate performance issues.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-31 23:03:20+00:00
"Colossus was not a computer. It was a key-tester,"

The original definition of computer was basically a person wot computes (analyzes data and performs arithmetic and so on). That would have mostly involved pencil and paper, fag packets and napkins. IT co-opted the term for their devices, many years later.

What is your issue with Colossus performing automated computations/analysis given some inputs of some sort and hence being described as a computer?

One of the earliest modern day IT related truisms is "garbage in/garbage out" - that dates back to at least getting the clipper out on the cards. Can that notion be applied to Colossus or rather is Colossus the sort of device that gi/go might refer to?

What exactly is a computer?
by robocat | 2025-08-31 23:05:04+00:00
Marshmallow tests are about getting socially trained for compliance, not about self will. The test is performed by an authority figure, trying to manipulate a child. They are not about the child achieving what they want.

Using Marshmallow metaphors is patronising.

"How Elites Cause Crime By Acing Marshmallow Tests" - Conrad Bastable. https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/escalation-theor...
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-08-31 23:05:04+00:00
I actually think languages should rather enforce spaces around (most) operators for a number of reasons. One is clarity, another one is that it should make the grammar simpler. Whether `alice+bob` is a good name for a variable is certainly up for debate but using hyphens for compound names (as in CSS) is in principle even better for readability than using underscores (and def better than cAmElCaSe). I find this a similar issue to the (to me, mal-) practice of allowing `.86` for what should properly be written `0.86`; this, too, introduces complexity with very little gain, if any, in usability.
by StephenHerlihyy | 2025-08-31 23:06:24+00:00
Modules provide more than just speed. Compile time benefits are great and the article is right about build-time bloat being the bane of every developer. But modules serve a deeper purpose.

Explicit sub-unit encapsulation. True isolation. No more weird forward declarations, endlessly nested ifdef guards, or insane header dependency graphs. Things just exist as they are separate, atomic, deterministic and reliable.

Modules probably need a revision, and yes, adoption has been slow, but once you start using modules you will never go back. The clarity of explicitly declared interfaces and the freedom from header hell fundamentally changes how you think about organizing C++ code.

Start a new project with modules if you don’t believe me. Try them. That is the largest barrier right now - downstream use. They are not supported because they are not used and they are not used because they are not well supported. But once you use them you will start to eagerly await every new compiler release in hopes of them receiving the attention they deserve.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-31 23:06:43+00:00
> just finish the job and relegate the preprocessor to the dustbin.

Yup, I think this is the core of the problem with C++. The standards committee has drawn a bad line that makes encoding the modules basically impossible. Other languages with good module systems and fast incremental builds don't allow for preprocessor style craziness without some pretty strict boundaries. Even languages that have gotten it somewhat wrong (such as rust with it's proc macros) have bound where and how that sort of metaprogramming can take place.

Even if the preprocessor isn't dustbined, it should be excluded from the module system. Metaprogramming should be a feature of the language with clear interfaces and interactions. For example, in Java the annotation processor is ultimately what triggers code generation capabilities. No annotation, no metaprogramming. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the C/C++'s free for all macro system.

Or the other option is the go route. Don't make the compiler generate code, instead have the build system be responsible for code generation (calling code generators). That would be miles better as it'd allow devs to opt in to that slowdown when they need it.
by rappatic | 2025-08-31 23:06:44+00:00
This is a shortsighted way of seeing things. The first issue, though surface-level, is using LOC as a measurement. If Company A’s million lines of code are cleaner, clearer, and better-documented than Company B’s 100k lines, then in that case Company A would be better off. What I’m getting at is that the author means to talk about complexity, and is using lines of code as rough measurement for complexity. Code itself is not debt, the complexity engendered by code is.

Code is an asset. It is the product of software companies. Having more assets certainly increases complexity, but this is almost definitionally true. Imagine saying “the US interstate highway system is debt, because it’s complex and difficult to maintain.” The premise is true, but the conclusion is such a one-dimensional way of seeing things.

The AI stuff aside, in light of the above, what is the author’s thesis here? “For the same code, all else being equal, it’s better to have less complexity than more complexity”? Sure, true, but that’s a pretty easy and obvious point.

It seems this entire article could have been profitably boiled down to “make sure your AI coding tools aren’t adding unnecessary complexity to your finished code.”
by underlipton | 2025-08-31 23:07:57+00:00
I'm of two minds on this.

1) If such a short probationary period is involved, there's no reason to permanently move during it. A short-term rental will do. If the position works out, then move. (I have done this, it is doable.)

2) Then maybe the job isn't right for you.

The point is to strip the desperation to find The One True Candidate/Job On The First Try, from both sides. Companies are already hiring based on vibes, so this just formalizes it. Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims; this just makes that expectation transparent. From both sides: if it isn't going to work out, we get there quickly and move on. Little is worse than being on a job for half a year, only to get sacked because it took that long for the company to decide that it doesn't like you.
by fsckboy | 2025-08-31 23:08:06+00:00
seems like the since Kernighan didn't say anything good about Rust, folks here are quick to declare that he didn't say anything, and that Kernighan's opinion on a programming language he tried and didn't like is "uninformed" LOL

here is what he said, which i got from the writeup at this newstack.io article, which I had found via the discussion at Slashdot https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/30/044226/what-h...

Rust Replacing C?

It was a moment for the ages. “Do you think there’s any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?” one audience member asked, a frequent topic on TNS.

“Or is this just a huge hype bubble that’s waiting to die down?”

In a world that’s been earnestly transitioning for years to more memory-safe languages, the answer from a long-time booster of C — for over half a century — promised to be nothing short of iconic.

“Ohhh, Rust,” Kernigham said, to audience laughter.

‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!”

Yet his biggest complaint about Rust seemed to be its performance — an especially damning complaint from a man whose early career started on a 16-bit PDP 11/20.

Digital_PDP11-20 front panel - IMG_1498_cropped - Creative Commons via Wikipedia - author Rama and Musee Bolo

Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said “The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.”

“And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…”

All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. “When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes…”

It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust “I’m probably unduly cynical.

“But I’m — I don’t think it’s gonna replace C right away, anyway.”
by bramhaag | 2025-08-31 23:08:13+00:00
Bandcamp is primarily for independent artists and independent record labels. Depending on what music you listen to, you will either not be able to find anything (e.g. anything popular enough to be played on the radio), or you will be able to find more than on conventional streaming services (e.g. extreme metal).

Some big labels unfortunately have a "No Bancamp allowed" policy. This is the case for Century Media, which is owned by Sony, which has a large share in Spotify. I'm sure there are more examples like this.

The only ethical way I see to truly own all of your music is to pirate it, and support the artists by buying their merch and going to their shows.
by Jedd | 2025-08-31 23:08:29+00:00
Does garage-dev have a GUI? I thought it did not.

I'm using it in my lab, along with an older instance of minio, and both are excellent choices I think. (I'm running both as HA jobs within a Hashicorp Nomad cluster, which complicates / eases various things.)

I had a vague memory of minio losing some favour a while back because they switched their underlying storage from basic object : normal file mapping to something more complex. A lot of home users, and I guess developers, liked the ability to navigate their S3-esque buckets via normal linux file system tooling.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-31 23:08:34+00:00
Wether you agree or not is the entire point. This is not a theoretical question about what could be done.

The question is why should it happen in the first place? Why do you think people who have been there for 150 years and ask nothing more than cohabitation should be forcefully removed from a place?

As I said, it is not that simple. It has absolutely nothing to do with "the sun setting on the French empire".
by SatvikBeri | 2025-08-31 23:09:07+00:00
A lot of these articles look at on-demand pricing for AWS. But you're rarely paying on-demand prices 24/7. If you have a stable workload, you probably buy reserved instances or a compute savings plan. At larger scales, you use third party services to get better deals with more flexibility.

A while back I looked into renting hardware, and found that we would save about 20% compared to what we actually paid AWS – in partially because location and RAM requirements made the rental more expensive than anticipated, and partially because we were paying a lot less than on-demand price for AWS.

20% is still significant, but it's a lot less than the ~80% that this and other articles suggest.
by immibis | 2025-08-31 23:09:20+00:00
They do rely on you to tell them if hardware fails, however, and they'll still unplug your server and physically fix it. And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

But the cloud premium needs reiteration: twenty five times. For the price of the cloud server, you can have twenty-five-way redundancy.
by typpilol | 2025-08-31 23:12:05+00:00
I was able to find the 2 earlier manuals mentioned:

RadioNerds-TM 11-485 (PDF) (33.22 MB) 4

Internet Archive-US Army Cryptography Manuals Collection (see "TM_11-485.pdf")

https://radionerds.com/index.php/File:TM_11-485.pdf

https://archive.org/details/US-Army-Cryptography-Manuals
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-31 23:12:26+00:00
You can approach this from different "zoom levels". In the narrow sense, disable recommendations for channels that are the most useless timesinks with irresistible titles and thumbnails that you find annoying in retrospect. You can click the three dots and click "Don't recommend this channel". Similarly you can click that you're not interested in a recommendation. This will make the main page less of a candy store. uBlock origin can help hide Shorts and other annoyances.

Still, you may then do something else that can also be considered a distraction, like refreshing the news, or Reddit or HN. So the more "global" approach is to look at your life setup and figure out why you feel the need to fill time like this.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-31 23:12:38+00:00
It's probably something similar in concept to Markus Kayser's solar sinterer[1], but with the light being focused onto an optical fiber bundle whose endpoint is moved around in X and Y, rather than moving a basket of regolith.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptUj8JRAYu8&t=240
by immibis | 2025-08-31 23:13:45+00:00
SQLite has serious concurrency concerns which have to be evaluated. You should consider running postgres or mysql/mariadb even if it's on the same server.

SQLite uses one reader/writer lock over the whole database. When any thread is writing the database, no other thread is reading it. If one thread is waiting to write, new reads can't begin. Additionally, every read transaction starts by checking if the database has changed since last time, and then re-loading a bunch of caches.

This is suitable for SQLite's intended use case. It's most likely not suitable for a server with 256 hardware threads and a 50Gbps network card. You need proper transaction and concurrency control for heavy workloads.

Additionally, SQLite lacks a bunch of integrity checks, like data types and various kinds of constraints. And things like materialised views, etc.

SQLite is lite. Use it for lite things, not hevy things.