MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucas_membrane | 2025-08-23 08:22:37+00:00
Few things that the article missed. 1. Software products had a huge physical size. Sometimes a single application or development environment would have 3 to five kg of serious mass. You could get it much faster by going to a store than by ordering it and waiting for it to come in the mail. And ecommerce at a distance was a somewhat iffy thing in those days pre-2k when Egghead was bleeding, and the customers were divided about 50/50 between those who wanted to buy from startup geniuses operating in the garage in their skivvies, and those who wanted to deal with market leaders who spent so much on tech support that they were doomed. If you could go to a store and evaluate the tangible reality of a product, you could see that the product was actually shipping, and you might be able to guess whether or not the firm that created it had adult supervision. 2. Software-related salaries shot up pretty fast during the 1990's, so keeping a competent staff in retail became more and more difficult as the generation that knew how the toy computers worked got old enough to get full-time jobs. 3. People liked bringing home those boxes of software, many containing over 150 tangible items (manuals, diskettes in envelopes, warranty cards, advertising, coupons, mouse pads, reference cards, keyboard decorations and cheat sheets, free trials of other software, invites to join the loozer groups, dongles ...) until the time when our offices started overflowing with it all. Then we realized how little of it had any lasting value, and that they had to buy a new version of everything at least once a year. And spouses didn't like seeing all that bling piling up.
by msylvest | 2025-08-23 08:24:07+00:00
I remember admiring the intent of XSLT when it was born. And how difficult it turned out to be to write; using XML framing makes it terse/verbose/arcane, eg. when compared to the compactness of regex/subs.

It is 2025 and now we've got LLMs to write our code - that may actually be a strong argument in favor of keeping XSL(T): It is a useful browser mechanism and LLMs makes it easier to harvest.

Does anybody have experience with LLM-generated XSL(T)?
by spankalee | 2025-08-23 08:25:19+00:00
This is simply not true, both in how it worked and why it was rejected.

HTML Imports didn't need JS to work: they used link tags and could transitively import HTML files without any JS.

You only needed JS because the wasn't anything you could do with the HTML yet because declarative custom elements don't exist yet.

HTML Imports were rejected because they created a parallel module graph to the JS module graph.

I think they could have been made to share the same graph, but that's basically what HTML modules are anyway.
by sothatsit | 2025-08-23 08:26:49+00:00
> If you are a heavy user, you should use pay-as-you go pricing; TANSTAAFL.

This is very very wrong. Anthropic's Max plan is like 10% of the cost of paying for tokens directly if you are a heavy user. And if you still hit the rate-limits, Claude Code can roll-over into you paying for tokens through API credits. Although, I have never hit the rate limits since I upgraded to the $200/month plan.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-23 08:28:27+00:00
Remember what it was like in Neanderthal times?

Adults always had more rights than children.

This is not a man-made law. They didn't even have scripture back then. This predates that. Well, it was the stone age, so you would have to figure it was written in stone if anything, way before there was paper and pen.

If Gods' laws even exist, this is one of them.

So when it comes to modern man, basically this all reduces quite logically to a simple equation:

How long does it take a moron to figure out that you can't make childrens' privacy illegal without doing it to everybody else at the same time?

It's like duh, why is it people want to not only go against Gods' law, but Neanderthals too?

Even a cave man would recognize it when they see a Mississippi lawmaker who still needs to grow some brains in the 21st century to even begin to keep up with evolution or anything else written in stone.
by jasode | 2025-08-23 08:30:28+00:00
>When / How did versioning enter versioning the awkward state we have today? There is cl.exe, MSBuild and build chain

The multiple confusing version numbers are caused by each software component (e.g. "cl.exe" vs "msbuild.exe" vs IDE "devenv.exe" vs platform toolkit SDK) evolving separately over decades. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Inter...)

E.g. Today's "cl.exe" at version 19.x goes all the way back to 1983 with Microsoft C 1.0 for MS-DOS. Just a text-based command line compiler with no C++, no GUI, no "Studio", etc. 43 years of the core compiler going from 1.x to 19.x. The Visual IDE component of VC++ version 17.x has a different version history going back to 1993 with 1.0. Microsoft C# also has different version numbers of C# language version vs .NET version vs CLR version, etc.

It's analogous to Linux world of different tools with different version numbers. GCC is 15.x, glibc is 2.4, make is 4.4, etc. If you include a "visual GUI IDE" like Jetbrains CLion, that's yet another different version (252.x) that doesn't match any of the others.

Microsoft could hypothetically "synchronize/unify" all version numbers for all disparate products to be a single number ... akin to Apple using version "26" to synchronize Xcode with iOS, etc by introducing large numerical gaps like v18 --> v26. That's probably not going to happen. Likewise, different groups at GNU are not going to agree to synchronize all version numbers such that next release will be GCC 20.0, glibc 20.0, and make 20.0.
by gorgoiler | 2025-08-23 08:30:35+00:00
In the good old days I was a member of a Day of Defeat clan. We had regular matchups with other clans that various members met through online forums or from random, public play. It was extremely rare to match up with another clan only to find out they were jerks / cheats / griefers. It maybe only happened once or twice.

In between clan matches I would practice by myself on public servers. In my eyes, there were only players that were better than me and players that were worse. They could have better through either skill or through cheating — hax. Either way, I didn’t gain anything from playing against them so I would just try another server.

Eventually you’d find one with a couple of guys from another clan hanging out (“[VD8 Bros] jojo” and “[VD8 Bros] dEvin” etc.), join them, and eventually more people would arrive. Someone really good would inevitably show up with very little social skills (it was mostly text chat) and we’d eventually combine these two priors into deciding they were cheating, and kick them off.

If someone really good showed up and had good, friendly, amusing chat then we’d try and play with them again somehow!
by nine_k | 2025-08-23 08:30:55+00:00
My point is that genius is exactly not that. Code like in these examples is, to my mind, a tour de force, only interesting as a curiosity, or an example of a terrible but clever hack.

(Like you, I of course immediately thought about the famous Artur Whitney's page of impenetrable C.)

The genius of J (and APL) is exactly in the simplicity of the language, where a single character denotes a whole well-defined operation on arrays which might take a page of Fortran code, and these operations are orthogonal, and useful for practical purposes.
by LordN00b | 2025-08-23 08:31:39+00:00
Visual InterDev was the first IDE I ever used outside of notepad. It was bundled in with one Microsofts early webediting tools with office (97/200)....but not FrontPage. I thought I was touching the future, it was so amazing! I really don't remember much about other than the impression that it left on me.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-23 08:32:52+00:00
Did it shake by a blast? Or was it just hastily turned around, to catch the flames?

I've watched many videos about that in the past, even ones where there were overlays with 3d-point-clouds.

Not in the mood to analyze this one further. Have doubts about it being really 'real time', conversion errors, whatver.

Maybe our understanding of 'explosion' is different. By explosion I mean something coming apart fast in an instant, with a bang, things flying away, shockwave.

That wasn't that, more like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflagration

Caused by whatever. Very likely propagated by the flammable paint on the hull. Like a flash fire.

Which was my initial point.
by latch | 2025-08-23 08:33:31+00:00
Author here.

I finally got it working. I had to flush both the encrypted writer and then the stream writer. There was also some issues with reading. Streaming works, but it'll always return 0 on the first read because Writer.Fixed doesn't implement sendFile, and thus after the first call, it internally switches from streaming mode to reading mode (1) and then things magically work.

Currently trying to get compression re-enabled in my websocket library.

(1) https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/47a2f2ddae9cc47ff6df7a71...
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-23 08:34:52+00:00
Ai is great at block comments, there is no excuse. Add to that a small anotated usage example written by a human and this whole post would have not existed.

Lack of docs also cripple AI from understanding, so future adoption becomes even more bleak.

If an api or library developer didnt bother doing even bare minimum docs, my confidence in the library drops aswell.

Did they skip testing aswell? Ran the happy path for a day and called it good?

This post sour my interest in zig. Its now obvious to me now why rust took much of its market.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-23 08:35:54+00:00
As a kid, I had a Sony 20" Trintron KV-20EXR20 with the weird PiP feature. That was right about the era of the change from OTA NTSC to cable TV.

On the PC side, I had a Sony CPD-1304 Trinitron monitor, and later an Iiyama Vision Master Pro 17 (with a Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube) which was possibly the finest CRT monitor ever made.
by dcminter | 2025-08-23 08:36:06+00:00
Typically the website displays a QR code which you scan with the BankID app - the app prompts you to authenticate and you use a fingerprint or a 6 digit pin code to confirm.

The app has a certificate set up so if some rando has the app and shoulder surfed your pin they would not be able to login.

Establishing the app certificate initially on your device requires interaction with your bank account - via an existing BankID setup or a bank issued OTC dongle.

It works extremely well and allows for a lot of "joined-up" thinking. For example I can log in to various online pharmacies and see and refresh the prescription from my doctor (and from the vet for my cat). The ubiquitous Swish cash transfer app is authenticated by BankID.

Downsides:

It can be a nuisance for those moving here; before you get your state ID ("personal number") you can't get BankID and it's borderline impossible to get a bank account!

The app has a single owner and uses pinned certs so it's virtually impossible to do BankID on anything except an Android or iOS device. No Pine Phone for you unless you want to carry a second device for BankID.
by k__ | 2025-08-23 08:38:32+00:00
I started degoogling 4 years ago.

I'm still using docs, sheets, drive and maps.

Most of it because my clients use it. But drive and maps out of convenience. Don't know if there even exist something with a similar feature set as maps.

I probably could move my stuff to proto drive but the docs and sheets integration is vital for me.
by arcfour | 2025-08-23 08:39:20+00:00
You know, it's funny—I always hear people say they want to keep their Windows-only applications and run Linux alongside it, but I made the switch almost a decade ago and honestly can't say I'm worse off for it. And frankly, there's never been a better time to make that leap; the Linux desktop has finally hit its stride and become genuinely mature, with the polish and features one would expect from a modern operating system.

Apart from a handful of games, I haven't actually needed Windows for anything. So I'm curious—what Windows-only software is keeping you on it, OP?
by pavlov | 2025-08-23 08:39:37+00:00
The “Visual” in this product’s name was one of the greatest disappointments of my childhood. [1]

I had dabbled in both QuickBASIC and Quick C on MS-DOS building very simple text games and such. When Visual Basic for Windows came out, I was ten years old. It was a revelation because it let me build something that felt like real software. Place controls on a canvas and start wiring them up with event handlers — so easy!

When Visual C++ was announced, I figured it would be the next step up. I had already learned some simple C, so probably it’s just like Visual Basic but you use an improved C for your event handlers? I harangued my dad to “borrow” a copy from his work, and sat down with the Hello World… Which was an incomprehensible 300 lines of Win32 message handlers and Hungarian notation variable names. Nothing “Visual” about it.

It did give me an appreciation for just how much work the Visual Basic team had done to hide the ugly guts of GUI programming.

- -

[1] I had a very easy childhood by most standards.
by xg15 | 2025-08-23 08:40:38+00:00
Yeah, I was surprised so many people were caring about XSLT. As a language it really isn't very good and I wasn't aware it was used in a meaningful fashion at all.

(Still, it always felt like a glimpse into an alternative, much less hackish processing model for the web, where you just have DOM trees and a pipeline of pure functions to transform them into different trees. I think that approach is still worth exploring and a lot of more recent tech, like React does it)

But I feel the backlash is more a symptom of how the web platform is ran in general.
by reactordev | 2025-08-23 08:40:48+00:00
He doesn’t have nano texture, I can guarantee that. His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels.

I’ve owned a hell of a lot of laptops and MacBooks are the best, not because of Mac, but because of the build quality. The touchpad is perfect, the aluminum body is rugged, the screen is amazing, and the audio truly is sorcery thanks to Apple acquiring Beat’s audionet.

The worst laptop for build quality were those HP Chromebooks.

ThinkPad’s are mid tier but still made of plastic.

Yoga foldable or a MS Surface is better.

MSI or Razor if you don’t feel like ever touching your laptop (:fire:)
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-23 08:41:06+00:00
Literally not one person said XSLT can't do it. But in case you missed it somebody did said React can't do it and so XSLT is better.

> build step with React and webpack and javascript absolutely required on the client-side

This was a false statement.

both XSLT and React can be used for this except React can additionally do a bunch of other stuff that does use JS and that XSLT can't do.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-23 08:41:16+00:00
Not inherently.

If their model reproduces enough of an AGPLv3 codebase near verbatim, and it cannot be simply handwaved away as a phonebook situation, then it is a foregone conclusion that they either ingested the codebase directly, or did so through somebody or something that did (which dooms purely synthetic models, like what Phi does).

I imagine a lot of lawyers are salivating over the chance of bankrupting big tech.
by poink | 2025-08-23 08:41:41+00:00
My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky

It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app

Using them side by side made it really obvious tho
by shiomiru | 2025-08-23 08:41:42+00:00
> Telling people to ignore code points

Nobody is saying that, the point is that if you're parsing Unicode by counting codepoints you're doing it wrong. The way you actually parse Unicode text (in 99% of cases) is by iterating through the codepoints, and then the actual count is fairly irrelevant, it's just a stream.

Other uses of codepoint length are also questionable: for measurement it's useless, for bounds checking (random access) it's inefficient. It may be useful in some edge cases, but TFA's point is that a general purpose language's default string type shouldn't optimize for edge cases.
by troupo | 2025-08-23 08:42:18+00:00
Tracking issue: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/435623334

Add flag to disable XSLT: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/68...

It's approved, I don't know which release it will be.

Additionally, quote from the GitHub discussion:

--- start quote ---

Q: why has Chrome already started working on removing the feature from the browser?

A: To explore the effects of removal. It's hard to tell what will break without being able to turn it off and see.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11582#issuecomment-320...

--- end quote ---
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-23 08:42:56+00:00
Using less is always an individual choice. But not a realistic one to expect 8 billion+ people to take. That's also why fossil fuel usage is still increasing.

However, you might be too pessimistic here. Fossil fuel usage is actually widely expected to peak in the next few years and then enter a steady decline.

Michael Liebreich of Bloomberg NEF did a pretty interesting editorial on this decline a few weeks ago: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/liebreich-the-p...

He uses a simple model with some very basic assumptions (conservative ones) where he shows how short term fossil fuel usage still increases. Mostly this is just market inertia. But then it will start decreasing and then some decades later, it declines all the way to zero with some long tail of hard to shift use cases.

He uses some very basic assumptions about economic growth continuing to grow by an average of 3%, a base assumption of renewables outgrowing energy demand increases by 3%, etc. You get to a modest fossil fuel decline by 2040, majority renewables powered economy by the 2050s. And virtually no fossil fuel left in the economy by 2065. The years change but the outcome stays the same as long as renewables outgrow demand increase.

There are lots of buts and ifs here but he's explicitly addressing the kind of pessimism you are voicing here.
by chrisandchris | 2025-08-23 08:43:10+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)?

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).
by jact | 2025-08-23 08:44:16+00:00
It certainly isn’t impossible to write good code in Go. Perhaps the code base I was working on was bad — it didn’t seem obvious to me that it was. Go is not a bad language in the way that brainfuck is a bad language.

I think Java and C# offer clearly more straightforward ways to extend and modify existing code. Maybe the primary ways extension in Java and C# works are not quite the right ones for every situation.

The primary skill necessary to write modular code is first knowing what the modular interfaces is and second being able to implement it in a clean fashion. Go does offer a form of interfaces. But precisely because it encourages you to be highly explicit and avoid abstraction, it can make it difficult for you to implement the right abstraction and therefore complicate the modular interfaces.

Programming is hard. I don’t think adopting a kind of ascetic language like Go makes programming easier overall. Maybe it’s harder to be an architecture astronaut in Go, but only by eliminating entire classes of abstraction that are sometimes just necessary. Sometimes, inheritance is the right abstraction. Sometimes, you really need highly generic and polymorphic code (see some of the other comments for issues with Go’s implementation of generics).
by somenameforme | 2025-08-23 08:45:50+00:00
I don't see how you can reconcile this with their past actions, like the prohibition of marriage or even the appointment of heirs - all as a effort to clamp down on abuses. This is what I was getting at with their historical actions prohibiting marriage. Imagine you live in a time where marriage was completely legal for those within the Church and then, as a punishment, they completely forbade it as well as the designation of heirs. That degree of extremism, in pursuit of a moral goal, is completely unimaginable in modern times - in most of any context. It'd be like combating corruption by requiring politicians give away all belongings when entering office and prohibit them from monetizing their time in office after leaving. That's just inconvenient, so it'd never happen.

In any case I suppose now we're looping back around to the original point that we started bickering on. I think the problem is that society has become broadly more amoral, including religious leaders. If one cannot lead by example, then one cannot lead. I think this is the exact same reason that government systems are also failing. It'll be interesting to see where and what this culminates in, as I expect it will happen without our lifetimes.

As for the Church, it was (and remains) never too late to pull a Hollywood. Hollywood had been making not entirely subtle jokes about Ratner, Weinstein, and all of these other guys for decades. Everybody in Hollywood knew they were sex abusers, but it's only when it became clear that they were beyond the point of no return that Hollywood was like 'oh my gosh, that's just so unacceptable, I can't believe you'd do that, away with thee.' But of course doing that would be inconvenient, so again - it'd never happen, certainly not with the current leadership nor cardinals that elected them.
by j4coh | 2025-08-23 08:46:33+00:00
I’m not OP but for me I end up having trouble with games and maintaining dual boot for it isn’t worth it. Most recently I was trying to install gamescope on PopOS LTS for retro gaming, but it was too old of a distribution for gamescopes dependencies, so I upgraded to Cosmic and it broke my software KVM. I use PopOS because it has great NVIDIA support and I’ve run into issues before with other distros.

At that point I switched back to windows but I’ll try again after a few months. I always keep trying.

I think if I didn’t play games I’d be fine with Linux. I hate Windows except that everything just works.
by librasteve | 2025-08-23 08:46:43+00:00
i think that we need to subset our definition of “thinking” on lines like

- contextualising - packaging / assembling - parsing - recognizing / labeling - comparing / contrasting - analyzing / subsetting - checking - reasoning - introspecting

in my view both human and LLMs perform most of these aspects of thinking in a similar way … I suspect that a large fraction of the human brain performs LLM like language manipulation

for sure, today’s LLMs lack the last two on the list, and there is probably a rational debate to be had whether these can just emerge in the substrate provided by the LLM-like setting or whether the brain provides some hardwired additions to loop around focus selection and perceive-model-decide-act that will need to be grafted on to LLMs to achieve AGI