MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by II2II | 2025-08-05 12:32:30+00:00
A couple of points here:

- People need to learn how to write. The quality of student writing was one of the biggest criticisms of students when I was in university, and that was 30 years ago. Writing will only improve with practice and someone to evaluate it. Very few people will be able to learn how to write properly by reading about it, and even fewer people will even realize that you can learn how to write by reading the work of other people (which is important for learning about style in a particular field). For most students, even well meaning ones, no grade means no work done.

- A certain segment of the student population will find ways to cheat anyhow. All you have done is raised the bar so that, hopefully, fewer people will cheat. Quite frankly, I don't know how helpful that is if the "top" of the class moves on since the top of the class tends to be defined by their GPA.

- Test anxiety is a real thing. Different people go to school for different reasons, not all of which lead to high pressure careers. Do we really want to limit who can effectively access an education because of that?

There is no easy solution to this problem. Likely the best solution would be to remove traditional assignments and exams from the loop altogether and having students work directly with their instructors. Yet this has it's own set of problems (it assumes both parties are honest, it is difficult to ensure consistency in the delivery of curriculum, etc.).
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-05 12:32:46+00:00
For over two years now I have had a dedicated Raspberry Pi running an app I wrote that plays a kind of TV schedule all day long. It was my way of capturing something like the programming I grew up with as a kid.

I have to have all the content on attached storage since I don't want to rely on online sources. But then of course the app is simply pulling up a file at a given time of the day and playing it with a media playback library in Python.

Unlike television when I was young, there are no commercials. Dead time is filled at random from lists of "shorts" that are kept on the hard drive as filler. (These in fact might include Looney Tunes cartoons or shorts, music videos, etc. scraped from YouTube.)

The schedule aspect means that there is a theme to the content and when it plays rather than just serving up random content from the drive. The Wednesday evening movie is always a western for example. Learning shows (courseware) and yoga in the morning, kid's shows around after-school time, a comedy series in the evening, mysteries on Mondays, etc.

The biggest shortcoming of the app is that I have no trial way to create the schedule short of a Mac OS app where you have to hand-add each show. When I get time I want to have a mechanism to specify "time slots" for content and have the app do an adequate job of preparing at least a stand-in schedule. (Maybe I'll finally get around to getting this going this Fall or Winter. I hesitate to even point out the repo since it is so half-baked, but if you check my GitHub and look for "UHF", you'll find the last checked-in versions.)

On any given day, I can load a web page I set up that shows today's schedule. Since the schedule that the app uses is just a JSON file, the web front-end just uses the same JSON file: parses to find today's content:

https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/
by throw0101d | 2025-08-05 12:33:09+00:00
> Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.

Yes, Japan was defeated a year before the bombs were dropped. The problem was Japan decided not to surrender even though themselves they knew they lost.

That's the problem.

Japan not surrendering even when they knew.

Per Japanese documents even after one bomb was dropped they still would not surrender. It took the second bomb, and even then the war cabinet was split on 3-3 on whether to surrender.

Two bombs dropping only got them to the point of a tie. The Emperor had to be called in to break the tie after two bombings.

And the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to enter the war. That was already in their calculations and they still were for fighting.
by rexxy404 | 2025-08-05 12:33:51+00:00
Classic backseat financial analysis - earning report last night showing they exceeded all analyst expectations (yet again) and further showed that the valuations is definitely holding. They exceeded pretty much every financial area they could and have just crossed $1bn in revenue. The proof is in the pudding, currently they are domination the market and for good reason. Sure there will become a point of uncertainty where people think they can't keep riding the price wave and people sell, but I think they have way more to deliver whether you like them or not
by bluecalm | 2025-08-05 12:33:52+00:00
It depends how you define "exploit". How is Jensen Huang "exploiting" others? He started a GPU company, hires a lot of people, pays some of them very well, pays others not that well. I don't think you can say he is "exploiting" them though. He made lives of hundreds of thousands of people much better. If anything I think he should be celebrated and I am very happy he is a billionaire.

How is Roger Federer exploiting others? He played a competitive game, won a lot of tournaments, accepted a lot of sponsorship money. He is now a billionaire. Did he need to give up ethics and morals to get there? What kind of blame is that really?
by Symmetry | 2025-08-05 12:35:57+00:00
One important thing the US could have done to get the Japanese to surrender without dropping the bomb would have been to promise that Japan would not be turned into a republic after the war but allowed to keep its imperial family as ceremonial heads of state. As, you know, actually happened after they surrendered.

Promising to do what we actually did would have been more than enough to save a huge number of lives, and honestly we should have had Hirohito "go into seclusion" in favor of a successor.
by zahlman | 2025-08-05 12:36:20+00:00
> things like intelligent defaults

Can you give a concrete example of a problem you encountered while porting 2->3 code caused by a poorly chosen default in 3?

> compatibility features and libraries

You mean like `lib2to3`? Or all the backports 2.7 got, e.g. what's listed at https://wiki.python.org/moin/StandardLibraryBackports ? Or the `__future__` system? Or third-party support like `six` (still immensely popular, though presumably only in CI)?

> the print statement (which could have coexisted with a print() function)

No, it absolutely could not have. Not with the same name, and making the name refer to the function was the point. The print statement syntax was inelegant, quirky and confusing. For example, parentheses can affect the meaning in unusual ways:

$ py2.7 -c 'print (1,); print 2' (1,) 2 $ py2.7 -c 'print 1,; print 2' 1 2

Besides which, outputting text has no more logical reason to use a dedicated statement form than inputting text.

> python's developers seem to have demonstrated tremendous contempt for the users

I don't understand how you have come to infer such an attitude. Any suspicion that they are introducing breaking changes on a whim will be immediately quashed by reading the discussion behind any of those breaking changes. (Not to mention what happens with the rejected proposals.)

> and avoid introducing breaking changes that multiply pain across an entire user base.

What breaking change was introduced in Python 3.x during your history of using it that caused a nontrivial problem for you? How many years do you believe you were given to account for it?
by em-bee | 2025-08-05 12:36:24+00:00
sadly, i haven't been able to get this to work. whenever i turn mouse support on in tmux or in vim, copy-paste stops working completely. it works within tmux, but i can't copy anything from the terminal to other windows. i tried this with gnome terminal and wezterm. i could not find any setting in gnome terminal to change that. (wezterm i still need to check if there is a configurable option to turn this on).

also, very annoyingly, when i select something in tmux, the selection doesn't stay highlighted. i find that a serious issue that makes tmux selection annoying. another problem: clicking on urls to open them, which is a terminal feature, stops working too.
by EPendragon | 2025-08-05 12:36:46+00:00
glaucon, I agree with you. Most of feeling of "gatekeepiness" came from being a novice at using tmux and having to get used to a new workflow. tmux is as gatekeepy as vim, or other complex cli tool is - if you have never used it in the past, you might find it to be a challenge. That was all I was trying to point out. It is an entry in a diary of a noob tmux user :D
by teiferer | 2025-08-05 12:37:25+00:00
Implicit or explicit, you need a hypothesis to be able to start probing. Many issues can surely be found with an oscilloscope. Many others can't and an oscilloscope does not help in any way. It's experience that tells you which symptom indicates which class of issues this could be, so you use the right tool for debugging.

That's not to say that at some point you don't need to get your hands dirty. But it's equally important to balance that with thinking and theory building. It's whoever gets that balance right who will be most effective at debugging, not the one with the dirtiest hands.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-08-05 12:37:54+00:00
My dad says basically "what you have seen and what you have eaten cannot be taken away from you".

He burnt a lot of money taking us around: car trips, ski trips, windsurfing, camping, cycling. He never regretted it and now I try to follow suit and spend good time with my kids before they grow up. I could have saved the money but the money physically won't be able to buy the same thing 10 years from now. It's a race against time in a sense.
by coderatlarge | 2025-08-05 12:38:21+00:00
i’m grateful to the author for making their work available online for free.

i once did an exercise like this myself (just the code not the book) for fun and found it extremely gratifying even though the code does not survive and never made it into any of my other projects as i had hoped at the outset.

mine got to be around 5 kloc with all the error handling but i wasn’t optimizing for keeping it short. i’m impressed by the many super brief ones that others with deeper understanding have built.

the point of view that this is really about learning C might have been buttressed further by starting with an existing super brief personal lisp and reading through that in a structured way; something that i personally would still like to do and that i semi-resorted to when debugging my way through the eval of the y-combinator which was one of the moments that exposed my poor design choices and the flaws i wasn’t cognizant of when doing simple expression evaluation. building a proper test harness was also a big deal as i went which seems like a highly relevant bit to highlight in a journey like this.

some references to existing high-quality short personal lisps and schemes might also be a welcome addition.
by quuxplusone | 2025-08-05 12:39:27+00:00
frontfor described "life as an investment account" and recommended a long-term strategy investing in index funds. zigman1 described "life as an investment account" and gave anecdotal evidence that a short-term "day-trading" strategy could be a bad idea.

They're both saying the same thing... although zigman1 didn't seem to realize it. (Perhaps through being unfamiliar with jargon like "index funds" and how that differs from day trading.)
by talkingtab | 2025-08-05 12:40:03+00:00
The "what you think of them" part. I've been thinking hard about web site user interfaces, so not quite the same ballpark even. But, it struck me that we have all these 3D games where the navigation is ... well like adding another dimension. So why are we stuck in 2D so many places?

Here is a codepen example

https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/yup2o

of a word cloud using @react-three/fiber for example. Imagine if I could have a little cloud floating for navigating tmux. A cloud not of words but sessions, windows, panes or whatever. If I could then I move around the 3d cloud from the keyboard .... Just an idea
by xtiansimon | 2025-08-05 12:40:09+00:00
I like this work exploring magnitude. The Eames film does this explicitly, “Powers of Ten” (1977)

A happy find is an exhibition catalogue on the theme of the numinous pre- and post-photography:

Clair, Jean. Cosmos from Goya to De Chirico, from Friedrich to Kiefer: art in pursuit of the infinite (2000)

https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19133047W/Cosmos?edition=key...
by amiga386 | 2025-08-05 12:40:28+00:00
> They absolutely targeted paysafe and paypall

OK, I read the link. They targeted Paysafe and PayPal AND VISA AND MASTERCARD AND DISCOVER AND JCB. All of them, in no particular order. Why did you not mention those?

Why are Valve's and Itch's payment processors, instead of citing their own policies, citing MasterCard's policies?

If "MasterCard doesn't care" then section 5.12.7 "Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions" of MasterCard's rules, that specifically lists out transactions MasterCard prohibit processors from performing, specifically citing the percieved risk to MasterCard's brand... that's a really weird way for MasterCard to say they "don't care" about those exact sorts of transactions, which Valve's payment processors have been facilitating for Valve since 2018... until now, when a media campaign has put them and MasterCard, Visa, Discover and JCB on blast.

If MasterCard "doesn't care", let them show it by completely removing section 5.12.17 of their own rules. They made those rules, and those rules say they care, no matter how much you say they don't.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-05 12:40:34+00:00
> What's he accused of?

The most serious accusation entails the creation of a "parallel intelligence apparatus" which was apparently keeping tabs on the supreme court judges. I don't doubt it.

He's also accused of ordering brazilian police to interfere in the elections in the northeast. I'm not sure if that can be directly attributed to him.

The "questioning of voting machines" and "incitation of protests" are just there to pad the list and insult our intelligence.
by neffy | 2025-08-05 12:42:00+00:00
I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.
by anilgulecha | 2025-08-05 12:42:12+00:00
The piece of paper is valuable because it represents a sustained effort of learning over an extended period of time.

I understand how from an individual's pov what you said makes sense. Similarly I hope you understand why from the system's perspective: it's the effort that's mandated and not just the proficiency.

Employers and others (higher education orgs, etc) care a lot about sustained effort, alongside proficiency. Only proficiency-focused systems (like Udemy/Coursera/Youtube) are not respected as credentials, since they do not showcase this.
by EPendragon | 2025-08-05 12:42:14+00:00
I tried LazyVim a couple of times, but felt that I would rather go back to a simpler nvim setup, and then build it up myself and learn as I go. I have stuck and enjoyed kickstart.nvim: https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

It has been my starting point, and I have gradually been adding new plugins and reconfiguring existing ones.
by crabbone | 2025-08-05 12:43:12+00:00
Oh, so we are launching attacks on personality now? Well. To start with: you aren't an admin at all, and you don't even understand the work admins do. Why are you getting into an argument that is clearly above your abilities?

And, a side note: you also don't understand English all that well. "Confusion" is present in any situation that needs analysis. What's different is the degree to which it's present. Increasing confusion makes analysis more costly in terms of resources and potential for error. The "solution" offered by Node.js offers to increase confusion, but offers nothing in return. I.e. it creates waste. Or, put differently, is useless, and, by extension, harmful, because you cannot take resources and do nothing and still be neutral: if you waste resources while produce nothing of value, you limit resources to other actors who could potentially make a better use of them.
by cess11 | 2025-08-05 12:43:31+00:00
I'll gladly praise it. It's a very practical language with good tooling and excellent amounts of libraries and scripts available. Performance is decent, development speed for tools, toys and prototypes is extreme.

The standard library has a lot of good stuff for calling API:s, handling JSON, shelling out, string juggling and HTML publishing on a socket. In every typical install you also have common database interfaces. I've done so much problem solving at breathtaking speed in single file PHP scripts and PsySH over the years.

The threading story isn't or wasn't very good so typically I've done logic in PHP and then driven it from something like a Scheme, Picolisp or Elixir when I've needed it.
by chuck8088 | 2025-08-05 12:43:47+00:00
This article makes a great case WHY the pipe operator is useful, but why didn't they just rewrite those functions to support method chaining? ` $profit = [1, 4, 5] .loadSeveral() .filter(isOnSale()) .map(sellWidget()) .array_sum(); ` this has the side benefit of 'looking normal'
by LoganDark | 2025-08-05 12:44:14+00:00
> Presumably your friend wants a particular brand of insulin, not the insulins that Medicaid covers because they are the most cost effective?

I don't think they're picky about brand, I seem to recall that they didn't know about the cheap insulin at Fred Meyer when their Medicaid stopped covering what they were getting before. I think that insulin does work for them.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-05 12:44:40+00:00
> People need to remember that the default for real estate is to fall into disrepair and turn back into the dust of the earth; as someone who owns real estate, you are responsible for fighting that entropy,

And that costs money. However, it still costs money as a renter, because whatever the house costs to keep, the landlord is going to pass that cost on to the renter.

There is no landlord renting at a loss.
by augment_me | 2025-08-05 12:45:42+00:00
You are already past your formative years. Imagine if you were 14 today, and you knew nothing else than BetterHelp, or psychologists in your phone. You would not know that there is an alternative, and would never feel the human connection with someone understanding you, you wouldnt have the point of reference, so the shrink in your phone would be enough. I am in my mid-20s as well, the argument is about a world-view that is shifted. Same with dating. In 10 years, it will perhaps be incomprehensible for kids to understand how people were dating before their AI-profiles selected the best match.

Society moves faster with faster technological innovations, you will feel like an old man faster as well.
by altairprime | 2025-08-05 12:45:43+00:00
Yes, precisely! That’s what I’m hoping to raise awareness of here. It’s DRM for passwords, that effectively blocks malicious attackers from exporting credentials, basically without exception.

Is killing off password theft worth the tradeoff of restricting the legitimate user’s rights, or is this a step too far towards authoritarian overreach, no matter how significant the harm done to humanity by password theft?

Societal-level ethics are incredibly interesting to me, so I’m glad that the broader tech community is catching on to the ethical dilemma and engaging with it. PassKeys are a ‘good first bug’ for evaluating large-scale ethical tradeoffs of technology: the benefit and tradeoff are clear and obvious to everyone once explained, unlike so many other ethical dilemmas in tech.
by death_eternal | 2025-08-05 12:45:47+00:00
Repo: https://github.com/navid-m/scar

Because of the relatively poor state of multithreading in Nim and the reliance on external libraries like Arraymancer for heavy numerical workloads (also the performance issues with boxed values due to `ref object` everywhere), I started writing a language from scratch, with built-in support for concurrency via parallel blocks (without macros) and a C backend, similar to Nim.

GC is optional and the stdlib will work with or without the GC.

Example:

int glob_value = 0 float glob_value_2 = 0.0 parallel: glob_value = some_heavy_task() glob_value_2 = some_other_heavy_task()

The idea is to make things like accessing shared memory concurrently a trivial process by automating the generation of thread synchronization code.

Also there are parallel fors, like so:

parallel for x = 1 to 5: print "x = %d" | x parallel for y = 10 to 20: print "y = %d" | y sleep 0.1 print "Nested parallel for loop completed."

It is not ready for use at all currently, though will likely see further development until it is.

Compiler implemented in Go, originally with Participle, recursive-descent approach. All examples in the examples directory compile.
by flippyhead | 2025-08-05 12:46:03+00:00
I've started and abandoned loads of projects! I started to notice that, often, ONLY after putting in considerable effort would I discover competitors or other projects doing the same thing.

Sometimes this would get me down. Other times it would motivate me. Either way I got sick of at least not knowing from the beginning.

Naturally I started a project to scratch this itch, which aims to help me quickly know in advance if my dumb saas idea is already* out there, so I can then go focus on building, customers etc.

* https://already.dev
by throw0101c | 2025-08-05 12:46:31+00:00
> If I have a million IPv6 servers, can I somehow accomplish the same thing using DNS64/NAT64/464XLAT? Assuming the incoming request is from an IPv4-only host.

You can have a front-end with IPv4 and have a box send the request to the back-end which is IPv6.

This is how FaceMeta works for the last few years: they are completely IPv6 internally in their DC and only have IPv4 at the edges to service 'legacy' connections.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKYw7JlyAQQ

* https://engineering.fb.com/2017/01/17/production-engineering...
by philipstorry | 2025-08-05 12:46:51+00:00
Quite the nostalgia blast for me!

I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either.

If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers on a motherboard. Given the physical size of disks even you'd probably just have a boot disk, maybe a data disk and then perhaps two optical drives. So it's absolutely believable that nobody found the bug simply because nobody had a machine configured that way.

Sure, you could have SCSI for more disks. But if you did, then you were probably doing something that required a lot of CPU grunt - at which point you might just leave the PC behind and go to a UNIX workstation anyway.

OK, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to just how bad SCSI support was on the PC, and it's stripping the the rose-tint from my glasses. Time to go!