MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by singleshot_ | 2025-08-06 23:57:19+00:00
I don’t think we were talking about equal application of the law. We were talking about the unwise approach of creating new law for new situations when the old law would work just fine.

For example, when you ask Uber to quote a price for a trip, and they quote the price, and you click “ok,” that’s pretty similar to a paper contract, but it’s not exactly the same.

Should we make up a new set of laws for contracts that you form over your phone? Or should we do our best to apply the old law to the new situation?

The law takes the latter approach. Benefits include: we already have a ton of experience dealing with the old corner cases. To the extent the new corner cases have some similarity to the old ones, we can use the old precedents to establish a greater degree of certainty about future events and how the law will consider them.

Obviously the law will never be equally applied to everyone, but we would greatly simplify our legal lives if we avoid coming up with a new set of laws for every slightly different new technology.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-06 23:58:00+00:00
Much of this complexity comes down to primitives being too primitive for the use case of web apps. They’re fine for documents, but for web apps it’s like trying to build a building from grains of sand instead of concrete blocks. Rube Goldberg machines are unavoidable when you’re doing that.

The browser should be doing most of the heavy lifting by providing a full suite of minimally themed but capable widgets that require little to no JavaScript and can be skinned entirely with CSS. That alone would wipe out an incredible amount of complexity and if done right would make web dev as an experience vastly more pleasant.
by vincent-manis | 2025-08-06 23:59:48+00:00
Actually, the PDP-10 didn't have any byte size at all, it was a word-addressed machine. (An early attempt to implement C on this machine came a cropper because of this.) It did have a Load Byte and a Store Byte instruction, which allowed you to select the byte size. Common formats were Sixbit (self-explanatory), ASCII (5 7-bit bytes and an unused bit), and (more rarely, I think), 9-bit bytes.

My first machines were the IBM 7044 (36-bit word) and the PDP-8 (12-bit word), and I must admit to a certain nostalgia for that style of machine (as well as the fact that a 36-bit word gives you some extra floating-point precision), but as others have pointed out, there are good reasons for power-of-2 byte and word sizes.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-07 00:00:07+00:00
"But these marginalized group of people isn't something we need to worry about right?"

But even setting aside homeless, US states have a very documented, very public history of disenfranchising African American voters.

* 1890-1960 you've got "literacy tests" that would routinely fail black voters but allow white voters through

* 1800-1960 you've got poll taxes which was used strategically in places to harm black & sometimes even poor white voters, mostly to suppress black voters. This by the way is where a lot of the sensitivity comes up around driver's licenses and ID cards - it's frequently referred to as a modern day poll tax.

* "Grandfather" clauses where if you grandfather could vote before the Civil War then you could bypass literacy tests & poll taxes.

Let's fast forward lest you think this is an "old" problem.

* In the 1960s you've got racial gerrymandering which starts to become popular as previous mechanisms are disallowed (this by the way still happens today & the GOP will frequently try to whitewash it as a political move and it just so happens that the Democratic party is predominantly black & the current SCOTUS has allowed that kind of fig leaf).

* Voter roll purges frequently seem to target black communities.

* Felon disenfranchisement laws seem "equal access" until you realize that African Americans are jailed in a 2:1 ratio to white people.

* North Carolina in 2013 cut early voting and same-day registration specifically targeting Black voters (as ruled on by the 4th circuit). Alabama in 2015 closed DMVs and polling places making it hard to get an ID AND to vote (closures centered in majority-Black counties). Wisconsin in 2016 had DMV clerks caught on tape intentionally giving incorrect information to deter voters from getting ID. Georgia in 2018 closed a huge amount of polling places centered in black majority districts. Texas as well (these counties had been protected by the VRA).

Sure, the most impacted tend to be poor people, but regardless of income, it's almost always got a racial bent by most of these power centers. Pretending like racism is a solved problem in America is being willfully blind.
Show HN: A game where you rebuild crosswords from tiles (Demo)
by Paul_Hebert | 2025-08-07 00:01:06+00:00
Hey HN!

I've been building a little web-based word game in my free time and would really appreciate your feedback!

Right now I have a demo of the core functionality built out for folks to play. I want to gauge whether people are interested and what would make it more fun to play. (For example, should I do daily challenges? Or provide a fixed set of challenges?)

I'd really appreciate your feedback! Thanks!

P.S. I put together a little survey with specific questions but any and all feedback is appreciated: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mv8p0ctr5QOpC0iJSB6XHnGYF9K...

Thanks!
by baobun | 2025-08-07 00:01:38+00:00
There are probably better links still around if you DYOR but a sample with further pointers:

https://nixsanctuary.com/ventoy-718-shades-of-open-source/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40689629 (See also: Sus behavior from Deepin which recently got the project removed from Suse)

https://feddit.org/post/12078124

https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/112906968594601449
by esseph | 2025-08-07 00:02:12+00:00
Triage, you work by priority to maximize impact.

Look at the problems in this country

23 instances. 23.

As an analogy, let's say I'm triaging a broken neck, a burn, a gunshot wound, a compound fracture, a stab wound, a broken toe, and a hangnail.

If Voter ID were to be placed somewhere on here, it would be below hangnail.

This is smoke and mirrors nonsense that is using minorities and trans people as a scapegoat and distraction.

How much fucking richer are people getting? Poor people have been convinced by rich people that their problems are the other poor people. It's insane. You can pull this pattern out of every modern fascist government and yet people are lacking on to it like a bunch of suckers. It's embarrassing. We should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.
by triceratops | 2025-08-07 00:02:18+00:00
It's not exactly unprecedented and also orthogonal to voter id laws. Scotland, for example, allows foreigners to vote in local elections [1] and makes photo id mandatory [2].

1. https://www.mygov.scot/voting-in-elections-in-scotland

2. https://www.mygov.scot/voting-in-elections-in-scotland/how-t...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-07 00:03:04+00:00
My estimation is 5% of the US is fully supportive, 15% are manipulated into thinking that all of this is necessary through very selective coverage, and some 10% don't necessarily like everything, but still prefer this over "other team" being in charge.

Meanwhile, 50% live in apathy (be it due to burden, a means of escape, or otherwise)and that's probably the biggest shame. I can only hope enough of those people rise up or wake up before it's truly irreversible. There's probably so much damage as is to take decades to repair.
by oriettaxx | 2025-08-07 00:03:19+00:00
until the 80s political parties could make money with any public project (more then 30%), then EU auctions stopped the game, and now the only way to drain money for parties is to make some kind of exceptional project (best are earthquakes or other disasters, but unfortunately they are not so frequent): so anything unique (olimpic games, stopping the floating of Venice, etc etc) is worth.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-07 00:03:35+00:00
Side note: I'm not sure why folks downvoted you. Even if they disagree it seems like an honest question.

> For instance, it's quite difficult to use Linux with IPv6 in a static configuration without any form of autodiscovery of addresses or routes; I've yet to achieve such a configuration. With IPv4, I can bring up the network in a tiny fraction of a second and have it work; with IPv6, the only successful configuration I've found takes many seconds to decide it has a working network, and sometimes flakes out entirely.

On IPv4 I assume you're doing something which boils down to (from whatever network configuration tool you use):

ip addr add 192.168.1.100/24 dev eth0 ip route add default via 192.168.1.1 dev eth0

Which maps directly to:

ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:abcd:0012::1/64 dev eth0 ip -6 route add default via 2001:db8:abcd:0012::1 dev eth0

If you're also doing a static ARP to be "fully" static then you'll also have an additional config which boils down to something akin to:

ip neigh add 192.168.1.50 lladdr aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff dev eth0 nud permanent

Which maps to this config to statically set the MAC instead of using ND:

ip -6 neigh add 2001:db8:abcd:0012::2 lladdr aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff dev eth0 nud permanent

In both cases you either need to still locally respond to dynamic ARP/ND request or also statically configure the rest of the devices in the subnet (including the router) in a similar fashion, but there's not really much difference beyond the extra bits in the address.

> Challenge: boot up an AWS instance, configure networking using your preferred IP version, successfully make a connection to an external server using that version, and get a packet back, in under 500ms from the time your instance gets control, succeeding 50 times out of 50. Very doable with IPv4; I have yet to achieve that with IPv6.

I have a strong aversion to AWS... but if there is anything more difficult about this for IPv6 than IPv4 then that's entirely on what AWS likes to do rather than what IPv6 requires. E.g. if they only give you a dynamic link local gateway it's because they just don't want you to use a public address as the static gateway, not because IPv6 said it had to be so by not supporting unicast gateways or something.

There's also nothing about IPv6 ND that would make it take longer to discover the gateway from a statically configured unicast address than IPv4 ARP would take, but AWS may be doing a lot of optional stuff beyond just being a dumb gateway in their IPv6 implementation - again, not because IPv6 itself said it should be so but because they want to do whatever they are doing.
by quatonion | 2025-08-07 00:05:36+00:00
Same where I went at Leeds Uni in the mid 80s.

Ours was just for CS undergrads mostly when I was there, and wasn't too overloaded. I guess we had about fifty terminals maybe on campus at least.

I remember we could dial it up from a couple of terminals in our Halls of Residence over JANET.

You are right, I never found it that slow either - loved that machine and the terminal to terminal messaging was crazy fun.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-07 00:06:36+00:00
Android was nearly my real life example a la "IPv6 doesn't mandate anything be different, some guy at Android just likes doing things that way more". I.e. nothing needs to be changed in the IPv6 standard, there's just some guy on the Android team who really likes SLAAC and thinks DHCPv6 is an abomination.
by grafmax | 2025-08-07 00:06:48+00:00
The investor class increased as did homelessness in Austin. Not only that but mortgage payments on the median priced home have increased in Austin, comparing 2018-2019 . Houses are even less affordable.

Investors can make money on price fluctuations and rent. And supply increases are neither immediate nor endless, despite what a simplistic model would hold.

Sadly we need structural solutions not superficial answers to the housing crisis.
by jim-jim-jim | 2025-08-07 00:07:29+00:00
I could hardly believe it, but I've witnessed multiple men trying to navigate the mean streets over there in Hummer H2s. They were all driven by the Japanese equivalent of "Deano" if that makes any sense: young, hair immaculately coiffed and dyed orange, brash and oblivious. We like to view Japan through the lens of tidy urban utopianism, but this guy seems to exist in every culture.
by kimixa | 2025-08-07 00:09:45+00:00
As GPUs are already asynchronous devices with their own command queue, and the IOCTLS generally just abstracting a relatively cheap write into that command queue, I suspect there's limited utility in making another asynchronous command queue on the CPU to schedule those writes.

Unless you mean to make the GPU command queue itself the uring and map that into userspace, but that would likely require significant firmware changes to support the specifics of the io_uring API, if even possible at all due to hardware specifics.
by Twey | 2025-08-07 00:10:16+00:00
Typically when an OOP programmer says the word ‘class’ they mean one (or both) of two things, depending on their favourite OOP language:

- a factory for objects, that hides some internal state of the object;

- a static construct that gives a name to some (‘public’) subset of the behaviour of those objects, and which a type-checker can then use to ensure that the use of the objects adheres to the intended contract.

They're both mechanisms for encapsulation of internal behaviour (that may change at any time) while providing a blessed public API that you promise will stay the same (or at least only change in certain ways, under a strict discipline like semver or ‘we'll tell you on the mailing list’). The difference is that the former is runtime (dynamic) behaviour, while the latter is compile-time (static) behaviour. The former maps to functions (or, with state, closures), not types, in functional languages (see ‘objects are a poor man's closures, and vice versa’ [1]), and the latter… is types :) The same typing concept that ensures correct interaction with objects can also be used to ensure correct interaction with functions or other data types, though since functional languages are easier to type than OO languages strictly-typed functional languages tend to have stronger type systems that capture more properties, like effects.

[1]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/...

From one perspective, there's a spectrum imperative <-> procedural <-> OOP <-> functional that is about how tightly scoped state changes are. In that view, functional languages are just the natural next step: if the whole point of OOP is to scope state, a functional language is just an OOP language with _even more_ tightly scoped state. The philosophy (uncontrolled state changes are scary and hard to reason about: add language constructs that allow the reader to see at a glance how far they have to look for the knock-on effects of a given state changes) is the same, just the implementation is different.
by oliyoung | 2025-08-07 00:12:09+00:00
> Sounds a bit like a fancier ngrok.

Well, yes and no.

You can use it like ngrok, and I'm sure you could configure wireguard and ngrok to give you something similar to what Tailscale does, but Tailscale does it out of the box, with polished and well built client and server apps.

I'm no infra guy, I'm just a former front-end eng, but it gives me the confidence to expose media centres and file servers etc to "the wild" without it being public.

Using Jellyfin to watch content from my home server on my iPad while I'm away from home is as "easy" as Disney or Netflix with Tailscale, just installed the clients and servers and .. voila?
by tekacs | 2025-08-07 00:12:18+00:00
Rust memory management is... profoundly not manual?

Case in point: I use Rust/WASM in all of my web apps to great effect, and memory is never a consideration. In Rust you pretty much never think about freeing or memory.

On top of that, when objects are moved across to be owned by JS, FinalizationRegistry is able to clean up them up pretty much perfectly, so they're GC-ed as normal.
by n4te | 2025-08-07 00:12:41+00:00
Ah. One difference is a normal desktop can access a lot more or even all of your system. Otherwise cross platform UI toolkits exist: GTK, Qt, Swing, SWT, etc. They could be great but they aren't, not because it can't be done well just no one has managed to do it well. They could technically be sandboxed but they aren't, or not well. Java applets tried long ago and a lot of systems got owned.

You'd never design from the start the bonkers HTML/CSS, box model, and other junk we are stuck with, but browsers have a number of good aspects that you'd probably end up with in a complete redesign.

The problem is multifaceted. UI toolkits are very hard to do well (I have a lot of opinions on this, and my own crossplatform toolkit), even on a single platform. Just that alone is huge. There are basically no overall great UI toolkits, even if some have good parts. Even a theoretical great UI toolkit will have quite a task to achieve parity with what browser UIs can do.

If we could get past that (spoiler: we can't, no way in hell) then we'd also have to be willing to ditch all the legacy browser stuff to switch billions of users and devices to something new AND we'd still have many other big problems to deal with: getting the committee/everyone to agree without ruining it, security, privacy, etc.

We've accepted we can't really fix it, so the only thing we can do is keep extending it. That's how we got here.
by anyfoo | 2025-08-07 00:13:34+00:00
Very interesting. I'm curious what the os2museum.com can say -- if anything -- on this. A deeply technical perspective, as in knowing the actual bit-by-bit internals, can shed much more light.

os2museum.com was just recently able to trace how one particular DOS bug (more than two BIOS harddisk drives would make earlier DOS-versions hang at boot) was handled across different companies, and how and when exactly a fix made it into actual MS-DOS.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-07 00:14:08+00:00
> If you're an ethno-European and you live in Munich, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel u.z.w not needing money would be OK because at the end of the day you can have relatives nearby, and probably you might be sitting on some real estate heritage that can make you good in the future.

It's not that and I don't have that, it's just that we have good social security and free healthcare where I live. And nearly free public transport. So you don't have to be afraid that an unexpected event can bankrupt you like in the US.

We care more about quality of life here than just about money. Of course money still matters but not as much as in the US where it's pretty much people's only goal in life.

I don't want my country to become like the US. As it is Holland is already one of the most capitalist countries in the EU, very neoliberal. If you want it to be more about money, then the US would be a better destination to migrate to than the EU (and I'm not saying that in a "go away" manner, I'm an immigrant too, I just mean that the US is a much better match with your economic vision).

And yeah I know there's many people from poor countries, I have an ex who is from South America. But they get the worst jobs with really shit pay so of course it's more about money.

> If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.

I wouldn't. I'm fine as it is. I took about a 50% pay cut to be where I am but my life is so much better here. I can buy much less tech things here (things that cost the same everywhere) but things like food are also much cheaper. A car would be difficult but I don't need one and I really enjoy no longer having to drive (I deeply hated driving). And rent is cheaper too, even though they are really inflated right now, it's still a lot cheaper.

The tech things don't really matter, and I have more free time and a much easier life than at home.
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-07 00:16:10+00:00
Unfortunately it really is a niche thing that only appears to speak to certain people.

As someone who feels like the sound of the 303 touches me deep in my soul, it's constantly disappointing to be reminded that other people don't hear it the same way I do. You can even see it in comments on this post where expressing a love or appreciation for the actual sound of the silver box is dismissed as elitist or something because lol whatever, any old synth sounds just as good. Most people either can't hear or don't care about what makes it special, which perhaps explains why it never became respected as a mainstream instrument like the 808 did.

Fortunately the clones these days are very cheap and very good and music has become so easy to obtain that you can visit Bandcamp every week and still find new tracks featuring the 303 and its descendants. Every now and then you might hear a 303 in a mainstream tune and it's a treat, but if you just love the sound and don't mind listening to music that few others get, I don't think there's ever been a better time.
by drjasonharrison | 2025-08-07 00:16:31+00:00
You can also use Canada, with the exception of access to medical records, to minimize all of the differences between populations in the USA and the control group.

Denmark has a very different vaccination schedule because they have exposure to many fewer "childhood diseases." Might seem like a small difference given the availability of 'properly regulate medical records without privacy issues" but these sorts of differences add up.
by devKnight | 2025-08-07 00:17:20+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE (Part Time/Contract) FULL STACK DEVELOPER

Based in: Latam

Time Zone: US time zones

Technologies: React, Next, Vue, Typescript, Express/Node, Mongo, Mysql, AWS(Serverless), Laravel/PHP, Jest, Cypress, playwright, python

Email: me+hn @ segoviacristian dot com

Have 6+ years of experience working at US based startups and small companies. Looking for full stack roles, though open to frontend or backend roles as well. Speak English at an advanced level
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-07 00:17:21+00:00
Yeah but our country was one of the more socialist ones in the period 1965-1990. After that it all went downhill, the neoliberals took over and ruined everything. It's now a total shithole, I really hate it. There's a lot of hate against foreigners (they're being blamed for all the issues when it's actually the neolibs that caused it), the housing market is broken, all construction is locked because of nitrogen deposits, and nobody dares to reduce farming (which is the main cause of this problem) because the farmers set the country on fire when such plans are raised. Social housing is down to nothing with many years waiting lists. Social welfare and mental health has really declined and people are even driven to suicide when there are any suspected irregularities. A fascist party got 30% of votes last election because they pretend to have solutions.

Basically none of these problems were even remotely tackled in the last 20 years and now everything is beyond repair. All they cared about was money and externalising any environmental or social cost.