MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pydry | 2025-08-30 15:36:53+00:00
>history shows often morphs into fascism (lots of Bernie voters went MAGA)

This is FUD that is very specifically DNC coded. The extremely plutocratic DNC-linked propaganda outlets that fed this absolute nonsense peddled all sorts of other nonsense conspiracy theories too (e.g. Russiagate, not that that one did them any good...).

Every single one of the DNC supporters implicitly backed fascism and Nazi-style genocide in Gaza by lending their support to the same DNC that backed it (even if they did not agree with it).

Again, plutocracy at work.

They paved the way for the equally depraved MAGA fascism that supplanted them. Trying to pin it instead on a bunch of powerless progressives, some of whom voted for "not more of the same shit" plumbs the very deepest wells of moral depravity. It is deeply shameful.
by turnsout | 2025-08-30 15:37:20+00:00
I'm in the same boat. I look at graphs of traffic generated by my server logs just to get a general sense, but analytics and user-level data? Honestly 99.99% of blogs don't even generate a sufficient volume of traffic to analyze. I just don't see the utility.

Put another way, how would my behavior change in response to analytics data? It wouldn't. It certainly shouldn't.
by betaby | 2025-08-30 15:37:29+00:00
XML is used extensively everywhere. Multibillion companies depend on libxml2 which historically had multitude of vulnerabilities, see https://ubuntu.com/security/cves?package=libxml2

Most of the Internet ifra depends on libxml2, major vendors like Juniper and Cisco use it. To my knowledge Android use it as well,

Naturally, with the advancement of AI, one would expect XML would be first thing to rewrite, given that library is in the critical path literally everywhere.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-30 15:37:37+00:00
REI is not worker-owned FYI. It's a consumer-owned co-op. Different beast

VCs are not interested in worker-owned coops. Economic climate works against the concept at scale. Workers are also divided on it and are not organized around enabling it. Employers are highly coordinated on maintaining current employer-worker relations.

edit: here is some related reading you might find interesting:

- Sociocracy - consent-based decision-making organizations (as opposed to dreadful unanimous decision-making which doesn't work and is a common criticism of non-hierarchical organizations) https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ // https://sociocracy30.org

- a UK tech co-op network: https://www.coops.tech but it seems a lot of these are more tech services than product companies
by morganw | 2025-08-30 15:38:20+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39385382 Here's Hector Martin (marcan) talking about their tooling: https://asahilinux.org/2021/08/progress-report-august-2021/

Running macOS in a hypervisor controlled from a second machine (proxy mode + verbose==on) to watch drivers talk to the hardware:

https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/m1n1-user-guide/#running-a-ma...
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-30 15:38:43+00:00
What you say is true, but I meant the product owners are the one who don't fully weigh the cost of their decisions.

I once tried to explain to a product owner that we should be careful to document what assumptions are being made in the code, and make sure the company was okay committing to those assumptions. Things like "a single order ships to a single address" are early assumptions that can get baked into the system and can be really hard to change later, so the company should take care and make sure the assumptions the programmers are baking into the system are assumptions the company is willing to commit to.

Anyway, I tried to explain all this to the product owner, and their response was "don't assume anything". Brillant decisions like that are why they earned the big bucks.
by martin-t | 2025-08-30 15:38:52+00:00
Can't watch the video now but partially.

I don't like describing it as cycles because it is too simplistic and pretend it is inevitable, robbing people of agency.

I prefer to think of society as a system where different actors have different goals and gradually lose/gain influence through a) slow processes where those with influence gain more from people who are sufficiently happy to be apathetic b) fast processes when people become sufficiently unhappy to reach for the source of all real world influence - violence.

This happens because uneducated/dumb/complacent people let it happen. It can be prevented by teaching them the importance if freedoms and to always fight back. But that goes directly against the interests of those in power - starting from parents who want children to be obedient.
by dahart | 2025-08-30 15:38:53+00:00
Low correlation (if that’s even true) isn’t a reason not to care about wealth inequality, that’s silly. It might be a reason we should focus more on wealth inequality than income inequality, but it’s pretty naive to frame wealth as “frozen” with the only options being spend, save, or invest. The definition of capitalism is that wealth begets more wealth; capital is the fuel and the leverage to claim profits. One might call that “invest”, but that’s misleading and you’ve downplayed it. There’s a broad array of ways for the wealthy to leverage wealth in order to collect more. You can use it to start companies. You can use it to buy other people’s companies. You can borrow against it to get loans for money you can spend without paying taxes. You can influence politics and business in many ways to lean conditions to favor your own investments and thwart others. That’s just to name a few, there are lots more. Having wealth without “spending” it still buys incomes, influence, power, and more wealth.

Given that having wealth earns money and accumulates wealth faster than not having wealth, believing that multi-generational wealth is somehow frugal is pretty funny to me. Sure spending looks “frugal” when your spending is offset by a passive income, when you have so much money you can opulently buy anything you want in the world and it doesn’t even put a dent in your interest income. The mega rich sometimes put their purchases (planes, yachts, mansions) to work earning money. They have a large set of options that they use in practice for enjoying their wealth while paying dramatically lower taxes. Other words that could replace your used of frugal are ‘incentivized’, ‘unfair’, and ‘greedy’. The multi-generational billionaires certainly are not living like paupers nor pinching pennies.

Some confounding factors against comparing income inequality and wealth inequality are that rich people tend to report very low incomes, which is well known and part of the way they get around taxes. For the middle class who is not going to pass on multi-generational wealth, in countries where taxes are high and the social safety net is large, it might make sense to not accumulate. For the middle classes, income is what you care about before you retire, and wealth is what you care about after retiring. If post-retirement living is covered, and if inheritance taxes are high, it might well make the most sense to spend income & share money with family before retiring.
by theptip | 2025-08-30 15:38:57+00:00
> and therefore aggressively sought to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks

I feel this is as close to “Management 101” as it gets, or even “employee-ing 101”, as it applies to technical roles too.

Don’t do it!

Just write down your list of gripes for the first month; use them as your list of things to ramp up on.

If something seems odd or wrong, it may be actually broken, but it’s unlikely to be so urgent that you have to go out on a limb like this.

It’s more likely that there is some context you are missing. By Chesterton’s Fence you need to spend some energy to understand why the thing was put there, before you tear it down.

Even if you are right - you will face an uphill battle because you haven’t built trust yet. So pick your battles carefully!
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-30 15:39:19+00:00
I have a drawer full of dead Pinephone Pro’s.

As a mostly-Linux based coder, my current rig consists of an iPad with keyboard, iPhone for connectivity, and a small Debian box based on the pwnagotchi hardware (it sometimes runs pwnagotchi, but is mostly my development machine). This is plenty of power for my needs, and turns the iPad into a monitor, mostly.

I’d replace all of this in an instant if someone made a LinuxPad with keyboard.
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-30 15:39:30+00:00
You're implicitly assuming your conclusion by calling it a "single" apple, which means exactly one. "Apple" is an imprecise concept, but they're often sufficiently similar that we can neglect the differences between them and count them as if they're identical objects, but this is a simplification we impose for practical purposes.

Even for elementary particles, we can't be sure that all electrons, say, are exactly alike. They appear to be, and so we have no reason yet to treat them differently, but because of the imprecision of our measurements it could be that they have minutely different masses or charges. I'm not saying that's plausible, only that we don't know with certainty
by crystal_revenge | 2025-08-30 15:40:14+00:00
> quality assurance and debugging

This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.

I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.

I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 15:41:11+00:00
The linked articles seem to primarily criticize three things about connotative load theory;

- Difficult to measure and therefore a hard or impossible to empirically study. (a bad scientific theory)

- Its application to education and learning theory which where a lot of other techniques are more proven.

- The idea that it's a primary mechanism of human learning, which has had a-lot of research showing otherwise.

Though those points seem valid, this article does not concern itself deeply with this concept. The word "mental strain" or "limited short term memory" could have been inserted in place of "cognitive load", and the points raised would be valid. In effect the article argues we should minimize the amount of things that need to be taken into consideration at any given point when reading (or writing) code. This claim is quite reasonable irrespective of the scientific bases of CTL which it takes its wording from.

So i don't think your criticism is entirely relevant to this article, but raising it does help inform others about issues with the used wording if they happen to want to learn more.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-08-30 15:44:28+00:00
The Smith-Mundt Act was not repealed. It was updated so that content intended for foreign audiences can now be accessed within the U.S. upon request, such as by researchers. The update was necessary because of the global nature of digital information. It became impossible to produce content for foreign audiences that was not also consumed in some way by Americans.

It remains strictly forbidden to use government funds to influence public opinion in the United States.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-30 15:45:02+00:00
> Or is there some mysterious window of time where they remain aligned before drifting apart?

This is the answer. Some truly random events, the molecular and atomic movements that we perceive as heat, just don't matter. So many gas molecules exist, and they move so often, individual, random movements don't matter.

There's also that weird fractal scale issue. Take the edge of a pond. From a distance, 30 feet or so, the edge of the water is distinct. But the closer you get, the less distinct it gets. Some plants are growing in the water. Some pond water is in the first few inches of bank. Dig a little down and you find "pond" even farther out into the banks.

Sure, technically, the first random event might be different, but it almost certainly won't matter. There will be a mysterious period of staying in synch.
by Bigpet | 2025-08-30 15:45:42+00:00
Could you try to address the obvious point being made instead of trying to obfuscate? There's plenty of bad outcomes besides death. Not all fentanyl users die. If some fent wholesaler were to provide unrefutable evidence that Noone died from his fent you wouldn't go "Oh alright then, nothing wrong with what you're doing".
by zbentley | 2025-08-30 15:45:59+00:00
> One way to do it would be to guard all DLL-implemented functions, and all access to DLL-associated resources, with a reference-counted token, or otherwise use a language-level mechanism (such as Rust's lifetimes) to ensure that all resources are dead by the time of closure.

That's true, but those approaches are only viable if you trust the DLL in question. External libraries are fundamentally opaque/could contain anything, and if you're in a tinfoil-hat mood, it's quite easy to make new libraries that emulate the ABI of the intended library but do different (maybe malicious, maybe just LD_PRELOAD tricksy) things.

Consider: an evil wrapper library could put the thinnest possible shim around the "real" version of the library and just not properly account for resources, exposing library (un)loaders to use-after-free without much work, even if the library loaders relied upon the approaches proposed.

Since there aren't good cross-platform and race-condition-free ways of saying "authenticate this external library via checksum/codesigning, then load it", there are some situations where the proposed approaches aren't good enough.

Sure, most situations probably don't need that paranoia level (or control the code/provenance of the target library implicitly). But the number of situations where that security risk does come up is larger than you'd think, especially given automatic look-up-library-by-name-via-LD_LIBRARY_PATH-ish behavior.
by morganw | 2025-08-30 15:46:41+00:00
Computer History Museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80

Worked on DEC Alpha, AMD K7 & K8, Broadcom, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent.

Keller keynoting TSMC's 2022 Open Innovation Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw
by Syntaf | 2025-08-30 15:46:59+00:00
I had a period of time at my last job where the product org was so dysfunctional engineers did in fact run out of work.

Initially I didn’t mind it because my team focused on technical debt, but it pretty quickly turned sour. Having to scrape up “work” for the team of 6 engineers each morning to appear productive to management was dreadful
by evelant | 2025-08-30 15:47:49+00:00
The more years I've been developing software (and it's been awhile) the more I come to find that the answer is almost always "it depends". The definition of "simple" depends on the case, the requirements, and the level of uncertainty about the future. The definition of "complex" depends on the case, the requirements, and the level of uncertainty about the future.

I've run into a lot of situations where doing the "simplest thing that could possibly work" ultimately led to mountains of pain and failure. I've also run into situations where things were over-engineered to account for situations that never came to be resulting in similar pain.

It boils down to "it depends" -- a careful analysis of the requirements, tradeoffs, future possibilities, and a mountain of judgement based on experience.

For sure, err on the side of "simple" when there's uncertainty but don't be dogmatic about it. Apply simple principles like loose coupling, pure functions, minimal state, avoid shared state, pick boring tools, and so on to ensure that "the simplest thing that could possibly work" doesn't become "the simplest thing that used to work but is now utter hell in the face of the unexpected". It all depends.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-08-30 15:48:52+00:00
That's a really good point. I was wondering why some of the LLMs were trained to try to pass things so sloppily constantly. Writing mock data, methods and pretending as if the task is complete and everything is great, good to go. They do seem to be trained just to pass some sort of conditions sadly and it feels somehow to me that it has got worse as of late. It should be relatively easy to reward them for writing robust code even if it takes longer or won't work, but it does seem they are geared towards getting high swe benchmarks.
by claytongulick | 2025-08-30 15:49:58+00:00
I try to structure functions and validations like this in a early-return list at the top of a function.

if(val <= someconstant) return; //not valid if(!(condition2 || condition3)) return; //not allowed ...

The author mentions this technique as well.

I find it particularly useful in controller API functions because it makes the code a lot more auditable (any time I see the same set of conditions repeating a lot, I consider whether they are a good candidate for middleware).

I try to explain this to newer developers and they just don't get it, or give me eyerolls.

Maybe sending them this article will help.
by tromp | 2025-08-30 15:50:34+00:00
It's hard to get a super compact eval for LISP with its many primitives. It's somewhat easier for the lambda calculus which inspired LISP, with obnly the 3 primitives of variable, abstraction, and application. In the binary lambda calculus this allows for a self-interpreter

(λ 1 1) (λ λ λ 1 (λ λ λ λ 3 (λ 5 (3 (λ 2 (3 (λ λ 3 (λ 1 2 3))) (4 (λ 4 (λ 3 1 (2 1)))))) (1 (2 (λ 1 2)) (λ 4 (λ 4 (λ 2 (1 4))) 5)))) (3 3) 2)

that tokenizes and parses a closed lambda term from a raw binary input stream and passes the term and the remainder stream to a given continuation [1].

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-30 15:50:52+00:00
>Nobody was pushing us to advance in Math and Science; there was just nothing better to do

Not true. Being a child prodigy at math or science in communism, meant you'd get a ticket to move the the nation's capital or other such big academic cities and have cushy desk jobs, instead of being stuck in underdeveloped rural areas doing nothing but backbreaking agricultural work. That was the big motivator. That's how my dad ended up in the big city from the poorest city of the country.

> Right now, kids are faced with all kinds of distractions and little incentive to go into studying seriously.

Why would kids today want to "study seriously" when they see top online streamers, influencers and serial hustlers(scammers) making way more money than lines of white collar people with academic degrees which are now filling the unemployment lines due to the economy. Kids want instant gratification, they want to make money quick and easy, not study for 16 years then get replaced by offshore workers or AI.
by toofy | 2025-08-30 15:50:58+00:00
do we have other sources for this other than just this government’s?

i absolutely believe it may have happened, but due to overwhelming and well documented history of lies from this regime, i’d feel like i was standing on more solid footing with this if we had some reputable 3rd party sources. ideally someone who is far away from the hysterical levels of partisanship our current leaders have planted themselves.

again, i’m not in denial that it couldnt have happened, it’s just that unfortunately i think it would be unreasonable to trust anything from this regime’s people. and to reiterate, they have a long and very well documented history of outright lying. not even typical politician half truths, but shoving it in our face lying.
by michael1999 | 2025-08-30 15:52:28+00:00
The security community warned that making Lawful Access easy and automated would guarantee that bad people would penetrate the network.

And now we have China using CALEA-crippled systems to slurp up the entire USA network. Exactly as predicted.

And this - "outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space" - LOL. ROTFL even. The NSA tapped Google's backbone! Have we forgotten Room 641A? MAINWAY? Poindexter and TIA? Palantir?

The NSA used to play defence and offence, and has gone full-offence for a generation. Did anyone really believe that only the USA could play offence?

Morons.
Show HN: Scryptogram – A game where you fill in the blanks to guess the subject
by sea_improvement | 2025-08-30 15:52:55+00:00
Hey HN! I built Scryptogram, a puzzle game where you’re given a category and a summary written in blanks, and you fill them in to reveal the subject. I’ve always loved crosswords, Wordle, and trivia, but wanted something that combines the “aha!” moment of trivia with the letter-filling satisfaction of word games.

Each puzzle starts with a category (e.g. “Fictional Character”) and a blanked-out summary. As you guess letters, the words slowly fill in, and once you figure out the subject you can keep completing the rest of the puzzle.

I built it with React on the frontend and AWS (S3 for puzzles, DynamoDB for stats + Archive, Cognito for auth) on the backend. I’m still experimenting with puzzle difficulty, retention features, and daily packs.

You can try it here: https://scryptogram.com - all feedback is welcome!
by thinkingemote | 2025-08-30 15:53:08+00:00
I mourn and celebrate the emdash as a sign and signal. I mourn our memories of it and laugh at myself in the future thinking about this when I have forgotten about it.

It's like the memory of the jokes about the wacky phrases of gpt2 or the ew at the yellow hue saturated ai generated images.

In the future this sign will be gone and our pattern recognition will adapt and our memory of this will also mostly be gone. Hello to future tech archeologists. The emdash isn't a meme, it will never survive and replicate but it's fun while it's lasting and I'm enjoying it in the meantime!

I mourn also because in the future we may have few or no obvious signs of LLM use. These are the golden years.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-30 15:54:50+00:00
They can all be right. I agree assigning variables doesn't help much more than good comments. But worth doing if they are needed more than once in the same scope. But do we need "is valid", "is allowed", and "is secure" more than once in differnt scopes? They should probably functions then. Do we always need all three considered together? Then they should be a single function. Are there ever places where condition2 or condition 3 are not allowed? More complexity.

Even simple examples like this get complicated in the real world.
by chihuahua | 2025-08-30 15:54:50+00:00
Yeah I'm not sure what an onboarding tool is going to do for a guy who gets hired, decides from day 1 that he must be promoted immediately, makes other peoples' lives miserable by showing to his manager that he's "aggressively" doing something before he even understands what's going on, and whines constantly about not being promoted within a few months.