MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-01 11:27:24+00:00
You can't fix broken mugs with duct tape. ;)

>Partway through, Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes listening, and then he very calmly walks over to the coffee service table in the corner, and there were about 20 of us in the room, and he picks up a coffee mug and throws it against the other wall and he keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other wall, and he says "we are fucked unless we can come up with something that will excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing other things".

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Raku_Programming/Perl_History#...

Intermission: The Jon Orwant Mug-Throwing Incident in 2000

By 2000, it was evident that Perl needed an infusion of life:

"The [P5P / Perl Conference] meeting was originally a gathering of Chip Salzenberg, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Elaine Ashton, Tim Bunce, Sarathy, Nick Ing-Simmons, Larry Wall, Nat Torkington, brian d foy and Adam Turoff, brougt together to draft a constitution of sorts since the community seemed to be fragmenting. Jon showed up to the meeting late and found us talking about the community and started throwing things to express his discontent with how perl itself was stagnating, possibly even dying, and that we should be talking about reviving Perl. The cup incident was planned theatre from what I was told later. So, it was already a fait accompli but the tantrum was it's outing." [1]

https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.packrats/2002/07/msg3.h...

Andrew.Savige@ir.com [Andrew.Savige@ir.com] quoth:

*>I am interested to learn more about this incident. *>What this really the catalyst for the current Perl 6 development?

Well...calling it a catalyst may be too dramatic a word. The meeting was originally a gathering of Chip Salzenberg, Jarkko Hietaniemi, myself, Tim Bunce, Sarathy, Nick Ing-Simmons, Larry Wall, Nat Torkington, brian d foy and Adam Turoff, brougt together to draft a constitution of sorts since the community seemed to be fragmenting. Jon showed up to the meeting late and found us talking about the community and started throwing things to express his discontent with how perl itself was stagnating, possibly even dying, and that we should be talking about reviving Perl. The cup incident was planned theatre from what I was told later. So, it was already a fait accompli but the tantrum was it's outing.

*>How many mugs were broken?

only one. 5 were thrown but they were tough :)

*>Were they coffee mugs or coffee cups?

Coffee mugs. Standard hotel issue.

*>What colour were they?

White.

*>Did anyone keep some broken cups for later display in musuem?

No :)

*>Did anyone photograph the incident or broken cups?

No :) Thank goodness as I'd hate to have a photo of me diving under the table.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110716115800/http://www.spider... is about as close to a photo of this as you'll find :)

e.
by keizo | 2025-08-01 11:27:55+00:00
gemini flash and groq are pretty fast, and that part is streamable. curiosity got the best of me so i had claude code write a quick test. given this test is simply is 20 requests, with 1 second delay between requests ran once. so take with a grain of salt, but interesting still. Extra half second in a search is super noticeable so google looking like a reasonable improvement.

OpenAI Statistics: - Average: 0.360 seconds - Median: 0.292 seconds - Min: 0.211 seconds - Max: 0.779 seconds - Std Dev: 0.172 seconds Google Gemini Statistics: - Average: 0.304 seconds - Median: 0.273 seconds - Min: 0.250 seconds - Max: 0.445 seconds - Std Dev: 0.066 seconds The key insights from these numbers: - Google has much lower standard deviation (0.066 vs 0.172), meaning more consistent/predictable performance - Google's worst-case (max) is much better than OpenAI's (0.445s vs 0.779s) - OpenAI had a slightly better best-case (min) performance (0.211s vs 0.250s) - Google's performance is more tightly clustered around its average, while OpenAI has more variability
by TylerE | 2025-08-01 11:28:15+00:00
Tells you how hard advertising collapsed in the same time period. I was at a small chain of local papers from about '09-'13. I saw it first hand.

Classifieds used to be a cash cow... not EASY money nessesairly, it's made $20 or so at the time, but it was a lot of money. Things like apartments for rent or cars for sale.

Then craigslist came a long and killed that.

Similarly ads went from large purchases, often for very large placements (we'd do things like sell rights to entire sections for flat fees), went to Pay Per Impression models paying hundreths of a cent, with no guarantees or minimums.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-01 11:28:36+00:00
In my country, which does have a tipping culture, the norm is to give a 10% tip in restaurants as a default, for competent service, decent food, etc. If the service is worse than normal (rude server, cold food, huge wait times, mistaken orders etc) you'd live a lower tip, possibly none at all. If the service is great, you might leave a higher tip - though 20% would be considered huge, 12-15% might be quite normal for very good service.
by CompoundEyes | 2025-08-01 11:29:09+00:00
Domain knowledge is key I agree. I think we’re going to see waterfall development come back. Domain experts, project managers and engineers gathering requirements and planning architecture up front in order to create the ultra detailed spec needed for the agents to succeed. Between them they can write a CLAUDE.md file, way of working (“You will do TDD, update JIRA ticket like so”) and all the supporting context docs. There isn’t the penalty anymore for waterfall since course corrections aren’t as devastating or wasteful of dev hours.
by HPsquared | 2025-08-01 11:29:48+00:00
I suppose each satellite has its orbit defined by the elliptical path (4 parameters). Like for GEO you can have many satellites in a single elliptical path.

You can also probably have different satellites on different ellipses whose paths intersect with each other, but the timing is such that they never collide.

I suppose it's quite complex in reality!
by rnaarten | 2025-08-01 11:30:04+00:00
The blog still assumes that AI does not affect Mastery. I think it does.

All the AI junk like Agents in Service centers that you need to outplay in order to get in touch with a human, us as consumers are accepting this new status quo. We will accept products that sometimes can do crazy stuff because of hallucinations. Why? Ultimate capitalism consumerism sheepism, some other ism.

So AI (and whether it is correlarion or causation, i dont know) also corresponds with lower level of Mastery
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-01 11:31:06+00:00
It would be really nice to try it first -- even if only on one or two queries -- before purchasing. I will never "book a demo" because that sort of appointment tends to be pushy, awkward, and something of a burden.

Also: The "10 spots left" thing seems disingenuous and desperate. This is meme-tier artificial scarcity.

So I would be interested, but not the way it's currently set up.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-01 11:31:54+00:00
UK Greens aren't NIMBYs. They're against doing more of what's being done across UK cities already - which is building generic boxy blocks of cheap housing that look like they fell out of Minecraft, and selling them for unreasonable prices.

Many of the flats end up in the hands of landlords, who charge even more unreasonable rents.

There is no sense in which that's a workable long-term solution to the housing problem.

The Green pitch is "That's clearly not working, let's not do more of it." Which has nothing in common with "We don't want anyone to build anything anywhere."
Ask HN: Will AIs soon conclude that all humans are philosophical zombies?
by amichail | 2025-08-01 11:32:18+00:00
Unlike humans, AIs have no first-hand proof that any human has subjective experience.

Therefore, concluding that all humans are philosophical zombies would be the simplest way for an AI to make sense of the world, as it would make the hard problem of consciousness go away.

This could pose a serious AI safety risk: if a reasoning AI concludes that humans lack subjective experience, then killing a human might seem no more significant than destroying a computer.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-01 11:32:54+00:00
I don't know (not a philosopher or politician or whatnot), but I think great steps were taken when countries introduced a constitution; the US was one of the first modern countries 250 years ago. I think a constitution is that long-term vision, setting a country's morals and values in writing, spanning multiple generations and administrations.

Of course, it can never be set in stone because morals and values evolve; things like equal rights for PoC and women were only added later on, and they seem unsteady at best right now.

The other candidates for long-term vision (but not necessarily success) is organized religion (e.g. Holy Roman Empire) and generational authoritarianism (e.g. kingdoms/empires, North Korea). There's also an in-between with China's 5-year plans, where they make plans (or, feel like they do, I don't even know lol) instead of trying to make big changes one legislation or one budget term at a time.
Ask HN: Startups, 0 Stability – Is It Time to Move on from Tech?
by OulaX | 2025-08-01 11:33:01+00:00
When I was a teenager, I developed an interest in programming. I spent countless hours following tutorials and building small projects. Naturally, I decided to major in Computer Science, hoping it would lead to a great job someday.

But I didn’t realize how difficult that would be—mainly because I live in Iraq, where there’s very little demand for software developers. And when a job does open up, the competition is fierce.

After graduating in 2020, I couldn’t find a job for about six months. Eventually, I took a job as a trainer instead of a developer just to pay the bills. During that time, I kept applying to every local and remote opportunity I could find.

After two years as a trainer, and out of sheer luck, I landed a paid internship as a full-stack developer. It was borderline slave labor, but I needed the experience. The pay wasn’t bad considering the living costs here. The role was fully remote and contract-based for a U.S. startup.

When the internship ended, they offered me a junior full-stack role—again contract-based for six months. But then the startup failed to secure funding, and I was let go.

I was unemployed again for six months until someone I used to work with reached out. They were starting a new company and offered me a frontend position. I worked as the only frontend engineer for eight months. It was another contract gig since they couldn’t legally hire someone from Iraq. The workload was heavy, but I delivered.

Then, once again, the startup failed to get funding and I was let go.

Now I’m working part-time in a government job that has nothing to do with coding. I can’t seem to find any local developer roles or remote contracts anymore. I’ve started to question whether I’m even cut out for a career in software development.

Should I keep looking for a job? Pursue a master’s degree? Switch to a different field entirely? What would you do if you were in my shoes? What does your career path look like?
by nickjj | 2025-08-01 11:33:12+00:00
I still plan to keep using tmux. I like how it manages multiple sessions, making it easy to switch between projects and even resurrect them after rebooting. I also never had a problem with mouse copy / paste using tmux-yank. I've been using this set up for many years.

One cool feature of tmux is its ability to send keys. I did that a few months ago when I was revamping my dotfiles. I kept changing aliases and other shell files and wanted to source those files in dozens of panes at once and also reload neovim when I changed certain config files.

The above was pretty easy to pull off using a combo of tmux's built-in commands and a shell script. I made a post and video about that here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/running-commands-in-all-tmux-...
by taylorius | 2025-08-01 11:33:57+00:00
An issue I have with this, is that it poses two rather contrary hypotheses.

1. When considering a career, people do a bad job of unpacking the detailed day-to-day activities that make it up.

2. When shown these detailed day-to-day activities people can do an excellent job of assessing whether they would be "happy" doing it or not.

Why would a person who is so bad at making the leap from the vague notion of being a professor to imagining the real-world actualities of that job, suddenly gain 100% detailed insight into whether or not those actual tasks would make them happy?
by zbentley | 2025-08-01 11:34:32+00:00
Eh, I’m not so sure.

We didn’t see adoption nearly this fast for poetry, pipenv, or conda (or hatch or PDM, but I never saw those as even reaching critical mass in the first place).

Those tools got pretty popular, but it took a long time and most folks found them to have a lot of tradeoffs (miles better than Python’s first party tooling, but still).

I’m not seeing that with “uv”. Other than concerns about Astral’s stewardship model (which could be valid!), I’m not seeing widespread “it works but is hard to use” dissatisfaction with the to the way I do with, say, poetry.

Couple that with uv durably solving the need for pyenv/asdf/mise by removing the pain of local interpreter compilation entirely, and I do think that adds up to uv being fundamentally different in popularity or approach compared to prior tools. Is that “different” the same as “better”? Time will tell.

As to being written in Rust? Shrug. A ton of shops for whom uv has been transformative don’t even know or care what language it’s written in. Being Rust provides, in my opinion, two benefits: a) avoiding chicken-and-egg problems by writing the tool for managing a programming language environment in a different language that is b) not bash.
by oftenwrong | 2025-08-01 11:34:35+00:00
I don't think clothing quality has fallen. Quite the opposite. We are able to buy high quality clothing at a very low price. More advanced materials, more consistent construction, better construction, greater selection, etc.

Much of what you can buy today did not even exist 30 years ago. For example, trail running shoes more or less did not exist. Perhaps you could have had a pair custom made, at a high price, with the worse materials available at the time, but today you can them "off the shelf".

Even the many shirts I've received for free are very high quality and have endured years of abuse.
by Avalaxy | 2025-08-01 11:34:38+00:00
This actually killed my motivation to do some of my side project ideas. I would spend a lot of time writing very good specifications, setting everything up for succes by really finetuning my prompting and context, but then the AI would output something that looks impresssive but is completely full of mistakes. And it would take SO many tries to make the AI fix it, but every time it creates more and more bloat, and introduce more and more issues. Until the point I decide to throw away everything the AI produced, and try it from scratch again with a different prompt.

Eventually I spent so much time trying to make it work, only to remain empty-handed.
by gilleain | 2025-08-01 11:34:47+00:00
As they say, with perl there's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI) and with python there is only one way.

Both approaches have their merits. Like with maven, where I once saw a question on a forum that was like "how do I do X?" and the reply was basically "You can't, don't try to do so, as that's wrong".
by xg15 | 2025-08-01 11:35:01+00:00
> Studies show crying can relieve stress for a week.

Correlation, causation, etc?

I.e. I can easily imagine that, if something is seriously weighting on your mind, opening up about it and even crying would reduce stress.

It might even be the other way: That once people get a moment to de-stress and get a chance to mentally process some devastating event, they will cry.

I find it much harder to believe that just crying about some random, unrelated thing will magically make you more relaxed.
by dml2135 | 2025-08-01 11:35:56+00:00
They will publish a list

> (h) Published List of Occupations Traditionally Receiving Tips.-- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Treasury (or the Secretary's delegate) shall publish a list of occupations which customarily and regularly received tips on or before December 31, 2024, for purposes of section 224(d)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (as added by subsection (a)).
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-01 11:36:42+00:00
Table-service restaurants always take your card (Not sure if they support chip and/or contactless), but most other services support chip and contactless. (2025, NC). This wasn't true in my experience until a few years ago. We lag Europe by 5+ years on payment techs. E.g. chip, contactless. There's a coffee shop holdout near me that was magstrip only until a few weeks ago.
by close04 | 2025-08-01 11:37:19+00:00
Their software updates are also very flakey. The past few releases for the Console and occasionally the Network were pulled right after being published for having blocking bugs. Again and again they publish the update and then do QA on their users. If you have an IT department you probably have some sort of process in place to deal with this and deploy when you're satisfied. A home user will probably have auto-updates enabled and bite the bullet again and again.

A while ago one update automatically enabled PMF (set to required, I believe) on all Wi-Fi networks. That didn't go great for me when half of my IoT devices stopped connecting and I wasn't available to fix.
by resource_waste | 2025-08-01 11:37:23+00:00
You could have an existential crisis if you keep reading about ontology and epistemology. I'm 50/50. Def sad there is no universals, but its also liberating.

You would be classified as a Platonic Realist or Scientific Realist. I am a Fallibilist and Instrumentationalist. Its not that we are denying the usefulness of these claims, we are denying the certainty of our knowledge being divine.

If you want an extremely short book, easy to read, natively English, and the Magnum Opus of a field: Pragmatism by William James.

Separately:

>2 x pi x r = c is a also tautological if that is what you defined c to be. That's obviously not useful.

Idk, I find it useful.
by noisy_boy | 2025-08-01 11:37:45+00:00
> Which kind of coffee mug is best?

I don't want to open a coffee shop. But I have put some thought about the type of cup I like (not what is scientifically the best).

All this is in context of plain ceramic cups.

First, it shouldn't be too wide. It is an uncomfortable feeling holding such a cup. Relatively taller cups feel nicer to hold. Not sure if that helps with heat retention due to less wide mouth, if you don't have a cover.

Secondly, the handle should be just slightly wider than your fingers wrapped around it. Stupid fancy creative ones are the worst. Overly circular ones are terrible. If your fingers are going over each other while holding it, avoid it like plague.

Thirdly, the inner seam shouldn't be sharp but bevelled. That avoids buildup of deposit. I prefer black but white might be preferable for those particular about cleaning (also see last point).

Extension to previous point: glazed is better than matted - stuff doesn't stick so much.

Fourthly, avoid ones with uneven top/lip. Because you want to be able to put any available plate/cover without the steam escaping that much.

Tip for cleaning cups for lazy people: squirt some dishwasher liquid, fill it up to the brim with water and leave it until your next round. Make sure to hold it low so that the tap water generates some foam due to impact, basically avoid the soap lumped sitting at the bottom. It'll practically wash itself by the time you are back for your next cup and will be much more clean compared to having to clean a dirty cup that has been sitting for a while.
Show HN: Square Images – Make Any Image a Perfect Square in One Click
by devxiyang | 2025-08-01 11:40:35+00:00
Hi HN,

SquareImages.co lets you turn any image into a square without distortion. Great for profile pics, marketplaces, or Instagram. •Add padding (choose color or blur) •Download-ready square outputs •Simple, clean UI •Runs fully client-side

Feedback welcome — especially if you use it for social content!
by blueflow | 2025-08-01 11:40:56+00:00
Yet the author incorrectly blames it on tmux, which gives the article a bad taste.

Also im not sure whether the scolling problem is actually tmux fault. Tmux uses the alternate screen buffer, the alternate screen buffer is activated using the smcup/rmcup terminfo capabilities, whose semantics actually say that it "fixes" the window viewport in-place so absolute cursor movement has a known zero position. In this state, any native scrolling attempt should have no effect, and the keypress/scroll wheel events should be forwarded to tmux directly.

For some reason, every other terminal emulator still allows local scrolling in the alternate screen, which kinda breaks the semantics of smcup/rmcup and easy scrolling in tmux, too.
by voidUpdate | 2025-08-01 11:41:00+00:00
I live in the UK, and I personally have never given a tip, I don't think I've even seen it as an option other than physically giving the other person some cash, but AFAIK its generally seen as something you do if the service was excellent, but as I say I've never done it myself. I'm not generally in situations where it could be warranted, like I don't really eat out much or anything like that
by NoGravitas | 2025-08-01 11:41:28+00:00
My VT420 doesn't support hardware flow control, but software flow control does not play nice with many modern terminal applications. GNU Screen provides an extremely effective workaround, plus its other features. I've used tmux a lot on modern terminal emulators, but it seems to lack this important feature for vintage terminals. Glad that tmux solves your problems with broken apps that don't support termcap or terminfo.
by cloudbonsai | 2025-08-01 11:42:12+00:00
This is cute, but I find OpenSSL's version policy way funnier. Here I quote it verbatim from https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Versioning:

*Major releases* that change one/both of the first two digits, which can break compatibility with previous versions *Minor releases* that change the last digit, e.g. 1.1.0 vs. 1.1.1, can and are likely to contain new features, but in a way that does not break binary compatibility. This means that an application compiled and dynamically linked with 1.1.0 does not need to be recompiled when the shared library is updated to 1.1.1. It should be noted that some features are transparent to the application such as the maximum negotiated TLS version and cipher suites, performance improvements and so on. There is no need to recompile applications to benefit from these features. *Letter releases,* such as 1.0.2a, exclusively contain bug and security fixes and no new features.

This is arguably the most important piece of software where people need to watch out for updates carefully, but its release version policy is a bit loony.
by sfpotter | 2025-08-01 11:42:23+00:00
It's a great feature, and D has a bunch of support for this kind of thing.

But D and C++ have just enough differences to make extern(C++) not be automatic. It can take some pretty arcane metaprogramming to get things to work, and some things are impossible.

It's also worth pointing out that D isn't trying to be fully compatible with C++.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-01 11:42:46+00:00
I've deployed my fair share of both and SBCs are still a very widely useful middle ground. Being able to use existing Linux tools instead of limited or nonexistent embedded libraries is a huge benefit. Most things to do with sound or video, for example, are totally infeasible with microcontrollers. A mini PC is noticably bigger and you need to add a microcontroller over USB if you need absolutely any real world interaction (even something as simple as sensing ambient light to adjust brightness).

My new favourite tool for these situations is the Radxa X4, which is the exact dimensions of a RPi, but with an Intel x86 CPU and an onboard microcontroller to drive GPIOs.