MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2025-08-23 08:47:47+00:00
"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.

The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
by brabel | 2025-08-23 08:48:44+00:00
I've written many APIs. Never have I got it right without first writing lots of tests, finding the rough corners, improving it... and so on. Writing documentation after that is absolutely mandatory for the end result to be a high quality API. As you write how it is meant to work, you will definitely find things that don't really make sense, or that should not be as hard ( I think this post shows just such an API that hasn't gone through this process ). IMHO documentation is NOT optional. The implementation is NOT how you mean for the API to be used.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-08-23 08:49:29+00:00
> which is why most Windows apps are now deployed via Chocolatey, Scoop, WinGet, or the MS Store

rofl. <insert meme of Inglorious Bastards three fingers>

> Good luck tracking down whatever version of the MSVC runtime you need to install...

Perhaps back in 2004 this was an issue. That was a long time ago.

You use a lot of relevant buzz words. But it’s kinda obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about. Sorry.

> Linux does this better than other operating systems since it gives the user the choice of how they want to manage applications

I would like all Linux programs to reliably run when I try to run them. I do not ever want to track down or manually install any dependency ever. I would like installing new programs to never under any circumstance break any previously installed program.

I would also like a program compiled for Linux to just work on all POSIX compliant distros. Recompiling for different distros is dumb and unnecessary.

I’d also like to be able to trivially cross-compile for any Linux target from any machine (Linux, Mac, or windows). glibc devs should be ashamed of what they’ve done.
by Propelloni | 2025-08-23 08:49:59+00:00
Set up your Hetzner boxes in a European location so that they are in the same network zone. Activate automatic snapshots and Hetzner does 7 snapshots (a full image of your box) a day. The snapshot is never saved at the same location as the server running your box, but at one of the other locations in the same network zone.
by konart | 2025-08-23 08:50:47+00:00
>People do systems programming in rust, but that's not really what most of the community is doing.

As someone who haven't done any systems programming after university: wait, what?

I was under impression that this is exactly what people where doing with Rust.(system apps, even linux kernel, no?)

If not - what do they (most if the community) are doing with Rust?
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-23 08:51:43+00:00
Let's run the numbers.

If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.

Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.

I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.

But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
by thro1 | 2025-08-23 08:52:07+00:00
Yes. That's the right solution for the even playground regarding the situation:

Gecko currently has much deeper integration of the XSLT engine with the browser internals: The XSLT engine operates on the browser DOM implementation. WebKit and Chromium integrate with libxslt in a way that's inherently bad for performance ( https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578#issuecomment-321... )

Just Firefox XSLT is faster, better, cheaper than Google's (and JS), same, old Firefox extensions were to powerful Google could compete with Firefox (or block adblocks).

JS is very needed for ads, tracking and other strings attaching - and XSLT is not for that - but would make JS mostly obsolete in many cases.. (only "cross-browser functionality for XSLT is incomplete with certain features like <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> having open issues" ).

Google pay Mozilla to criple Firefox. It's money from ads, to not let the web be free. Right now, how much $ and CPU power a JS engine could cost, for that, is irrelevant - except for the final user !
by strogonoff | 2025-08-23 08:52:08+00:00
> The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.

Do you give a shit about honest indie devs? Putting them in quotes says you probably don’t.

If you did, perhaps you’d find that this is an obvious path to a better state of affairs that to walled garden operators is zero cost (or even profitable), financially and reputationally, while making it more economically viable to make good games that don’t use dark patterns to keep your kid glued to the screen and regularly asking for money to exchange for some in-game coins and lootboxes.
by Jaxan | 2025-08-23 08:52:39+00:00
I appreciate your reply, thanks!

About the “individual choice”: it indeed is, unless tech companies make bad choices. Like GitHub recently showed a button “what are my PRs?” When pressed it asked copilot to give you the list of PRs (incomplete btw). But there already exists a page for that! This is just wasteful and we should blame a company for that.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-08-23 08:53:11+00:00
>Her parents also believe that watch circles contributed to Liu’s increasingly unstable emotional state in the run-up to China’s high school entrance exams. With just three months to go, teachers advised that she take a leave of absence after a video emerged of Liu rolling on the floor of a classroom before rushing out. Shortly after, she was placed on medication for severe depression.

>While the Asperger’s syndrome and academic pressure no doubt played a part in the breakdown, Wang and Liu’s therapist also felt that she had become overstimulated by her online socializing.

Naturally, it wasn't the Zhongkao, but basic social media.
by sshine | 2025-08-23 08:54:22+00:00
Unstable APIs are a good example of something that's extremely valuable early on.

They unarguably cause confusion for everyone as they change.

But it lets you choose the right abstractions that are going to stick for decades.

If you're going to make a python2 -> python3 transition in your language, make sure it's X0 -> X1.
by Catbert59 | 2025-08-23 08:54:45+00:00
There's also Blitzortung.org which is a very interesting project.

They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.

All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).

Their service is stable for many many years now.

(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-23 08:54:46+00:00
> According to the WHO, between 2010 and 2015 there were 3,248 cases out of the worlds population of 8.2 billion, of which 584 people died. so we can safely say we are safe

If you imagined a counterfactual reality in which the plague had disappeared (it has not), in which death would the problem (that's subjective), in which the one in a million events would be literally negligible (they are not), then you would for some reason conclude that irrational label of "safety".

> Dont get bitten by a rat

That's not how it works.

Edit:

> I keep saying it in my head

Pretty please.
by simonask | 2025-08-23 08:54:58+00:00
There is almost nothing accurate about this comment.

"Makes predictions to within a quantifiable epsilon"? What in the world do you mean? The industry experience with C++ is that it is extremely difficult (i.e., expensive) to get right, and C++20 or newer does not change anything about that. Whatever "epsilon" you are talking about here surely has to be very large for a number bearing that sobriquet.

As for the mindless anti-Rust slander... I'm not sure it's worth addressing, because it reflects a complete lack of the faintest idea about what it actually does, or what problem it solves. Let me just say there's a reason the Rust community is rife with highly competent C++ refugees.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-23 08:55:03+00:00
On the one hand, I totally get that pre 1.0 is the wild west (somewhat) and should be. The team is right in jealously guarding their ability to make changes.

That said, others have pointed out that writing documentation and tests helps improve quality quite a bit, and in this case it would also increase usability. I think I'd agree with this stance, but there is no way I could make the statement that even most of the code I've written for public consumption had excellent documentation or examples. So I've got no leg to stand on there, just the armchair.

> And I would argue, writing good, simple, clear, detailed documentation is actually harder than writing code itself.

All the more reason why it must be done! A little silly but from my armchair maybe it's one of those "start with the interface you want and work backwards", but the problem is that approach can be at odds with mechanical sympathy and we know which side Zig lands on (and arguably should land on based on it's values).
by ksec | 2025-08-23 08:56:14+00:00
>all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.

My point is, it was available on iPhone. And has always been the case but people brush it off because it was an Smartphone SoC.

And I literally just stated there are ARM CPU Core offering available. You either compare the whole MacBook / Laptop, or you compare the CPU / SoC. The first being there aren't many choice compared to. The latter are there but not being used by laptop manufacturers.

And this is not the first time HN has mixed the two up. And god I missed the old Anandtech where this distinction was clear.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-23 08:57:05+00:00
> a lack of proper sum types

Do you consider Rust enums 'proper sum types'? If yes what are Zig's tagged unions missing?

E.g.:

const Variant = union(enum) { int: i32, boolean: bool, none, fn truthy(self: Variant) bool { return switch (self) { Variant.int => |x_int| x_int != 0, Variant.boolean => |x_bool| x_bool, Variant.none => false, }; } };
by keybored | 2025-08-23 08:57:39+00:00
I don’t know how Japanese city ordinances work.

What I would like from these things is to be able to opt-in to a recommendation. Just a two-minute way to opt-in. They can do the work and we all can have the least possible hassle trying it out.[1]

[1] I’m not up to date on the state of the art of limiting your own smartphone time
by i_dont_know_ | 2025-08-23 08:57:41+00:00
Thanks, the goal wasn't to get a full overview of the commercial space but really to understand more of the fundamentals of building, the limits and use-cases of agents in general.

Specifically I see a huge push to "build agents" and to "use agents" as building blocks for more complex interactions. I wanted to get a feel for why and my conclusions are more around that and not "what's possible"
by LAC-Tech | 2025-08-23 08:58:22+00:00
Web servers, games, and applications, that sort of thing.

Some people definitely do systems programming in, but it's a minority. The std library is not set up for it at all, you need something like rustix, but even that results in very unidiomatic ("unsafe") rust code.

In Zig it's all in the std library by default. Because it's a systems programming language, first and foremost.
by nine_k | 2025-08-23 08:59:05+00:00
> can't migrate stars/icons for emails.

(1) Create s label for starred emails, eg "Star-struck". A Unicode star would do if you like it literal.

(2) In gmail, search for "is:starred", mark all on the page, then "mark all matching emails".

(3) Drop the "Star-struck" tag on them. Now you can migrate it as a normal tag.
by thrance | 2025-08-23 09:00:31+00:00
Dividends are rightfully limited in their amount. Buybacks are a way to bypass this limitation, and used to be legally grey until they were fully legalized sometime in the 1980s.

> when the company does not have a better use for the money.

I think that's nonsense, you can always pay your talent better, invest in new equipment, diversify your offerings...
by cycomanic | 2025-08-23 09:00:44+00:00
> You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. > > 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. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices. >

Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so.

> I'm not some Apple fanboy—I'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. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.

The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recently lots of them lock up after a while (only in games in my experience). My Intel laptop never has any issues. I'm now actively looking for an AMD GPU because it has become so annoying.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-08-23 09:00:48+00:00
> You definitely need a source for that comment given that it only just happened.

I don't know a lot about the impact, but this happened about 2 years ago in multiple states. Here's some thoughts from those who have looked further:

https://thepostsa.au/education/2025/03/26/more-laughter-more... https://theconversation.com/we-looked-at-all-the-recent-evid... https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/mobile-phone-ban-impro...
by jjani | 2025-08-23 09:00:49+00:00
- The report doesn't name any Gemini models at all, only competitors'. Wonder why that is? If the models got so much more efficient, they'd be eager to show this.

- The report doesn't name any averages (means), only medians. Why oh why would they be doing this, when all other marketing pieces always use the average because outside of HN 99% of Joes on the street have no idea what a median is/how it differs from the mean? The average is much more relevant here when "measuring the environmental impact of AI inference".

- The report doesn't define what any of the terms "Gemini Apps", "the Gemini AI assistant" or "Gemini Apps text prompt" concretely mean
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-23 09:01:09+00:00
> Contributions to the Zig language or contributions to software using Zig (the latter is the one the post is about as I understand)?

Yes.

I think a contributor that really wanted to help the ecosystem would start in the stdlib and then start moving outwards. Even if it was LLM-assisted, I think it could be high value.

IIRC Loris already has an engine for building websites with Zig, but making sure that every Zig library has docs (similar to rustdocs) might be a great start. It is incredibly useful to have a resource like rustdocs, both the tooling and the web sites that are easily browsable.

Again, maybe everyone in the Zig ecosystem just has amazing editor setups and massive brains, but I personally really like the ease of browsing rustdoc.

> If so, I believe Zig will stay within a niche. Lower entry barriers allow "script kiddies" to easily start withe language, and they eventually will become leading engineers. Only a few people tend to go straight for the highest practice without "playing around". IMHO the reason, why PHP got so popular (it was not good back then, just very very easy to start with).

I agree, but I'd add that the niche they're aiming for is systems programming, so they're probably fine :). The average hacker there is expecting C/C++ or to be near the metal, and I think Zig is a great fit there. They're likely not going to convince people who write Ruby, but it feels reasonable for C hackers.

Also I want to just be clear that I think Zig has a lot of motivating factors! They're doing amazing things like zig cc, unbelievably easy, "can't believe it's not butter" cross-compilation, their new explicit/managed I/O mechanism, explicit allocators as a default, comptime, better type ergonomics. It's a pretty impressive language.
by brigade | 2025-08-23 09:01:17+00:00
Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
by Kazik24 | 2025-08-23 09:01:34+00:00
There is DNS over QUIC, and in case your current Connection ID or IP is blocked during the connection, QUIC can use multiple IPs and CIDs for single connection, and CIDs are negotiated in encrypted part of packet. It's a mechanism for migrating connection over changing networks. Servers can also take advantage of that.

Server could have multiple QUIC output nodes to migrate connection in case one of them is blocked. The output node network can be shared by many servers and DoQ endpoints so blocking it entirely would scare government.

This solution still needs to connect to some known IP in order to establish connection first. And the same goes for DoQ. To mitigate this we can use Encrypted Client Hello as other commenter mentioned and connect to a pool instead of single IP.
by lmm | 2025-08-23 09:02:48+00:00
> literally every filename is printable

Nope. Filenames on Unix can be arbitrary byte sequences, and even on Windows they can be characters that don't exist in the current locale.

> this isn't an interesting problem, every language and/or its stdlib should have reasonable defaults for this kind of thing.

It's not an interesting problem until you hit it. OSes should set better standards, but given that they can't or won't, every application needs to handle that case.
by jjani | 2025-08-23 09:03:06+00:00
> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?

The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
by cycomanic | 2025-08-23 09:04:30+00:00
> > So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good". > > I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine. >

Yes I agree Apple make good quality hardware and I would be surprised if they died after 5 years. My objection is simply these statements that overly praise apple for things that are pretty bogstandard.

> It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).

One more reason to run Linux.
by freehorse | 2025-08-23 09:04:44+00:00
Using domain for identification carries a similar risk though? If for whatever reason you stop renting the domain somebody else can rent your identification. You are not locked into an email provider but you are locked into a rented domain and the whole domain marketplace rules, by extension. At least with most email providers your email address is not supposed to be resold (likely with fastmail too judging by the responses).

Am I missing something?
by extraisland | 2025-08-23 09:05:10+00:00
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.

It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.

> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.

I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.

> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above

Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.

The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.