MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bruce511 | 2025-08-25 09:04:33+00:00
I've been around long enough to remember when getting a website was really expensive. Like hundreds of thousands of $.

TLS was expensive. And insanely profitable. The sale of Thwate to Verisign was north of 600 million. (Back when 600 million was "a lot"). Since the marginal cost of making a cert is zero it was a literal cash machine.

LE broke that cash flow. CAs tried to claim their certificates were "safer" or the EV certs had any value at all. All nonsense, but for a while some layer of IT folk bought into that. Even today some of my clients believe that paid-for-certs are somehow different to free-certs. But that gravy train is rapidly ending.

So yeah, once the fixed costs overwhelm the income expect to see more shutdowns. And naturally the small CAs will die first.

I can't say I'll mourn any of them.
by te0006 | 2025-08-25 09:04:36+00:00
Another country with highly developed district heating system is Denmark. They heavily invested in this technology since the 1970s, and currently around 2/3 of all households have district heating, in the capital, Copenhagen, 98%. Moreover, more than 60% of the energy used for these systems comes from renewables. No nuclear power involved (which hast been banned in the country since 1985). A few sources: - https://dbdh.org/all-about-district-energy/district-heating-... - https://stateofgreen.com/en/news/new-plans-to-expand-the-dan... - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
by lxgr | 2025-08-25 09:05:49+00:00
> Not letting you unsubscribe and blocking your IP are very different things.

How so? They did not let me unsubscribe via blocking my IP.

Instead of being able to access at least my account (if not the streaming service itself, which I get – copyright and all), I'd just see a full screen notice along the lines of "we are not available in your market, stay tuned".
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-08-25 09:06:15+00:00
Knives in the UK are age restricted for purchase. Anyone can carry a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3" without needing a reason. Any other mechanism, fixed blade, or longer blade require a lawful reason to carry. This includes recreation (e.g. fishing, camping) work (e.g. joinery, cooking).

There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.

For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.
by neop1x | 2025-08-25 09:06:18+00:00
This is OP's second article of hating Go.

In the meantime he also wrote about Rust: "I’ve not found anything frustrating or stupid in Rust yet."

So he can just use Rust and stop using Go completely. Problem solved. No need to write those hates. Go lang is cleary not good for him and it's ok.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-25 09:07:33+00:00
The reading between the lines is that Vattenfall confirms that nuclear power is too expensive and now needs a politically acceptable cop-out.

So "shortlist" non-existing SMRs and then when it comes to final investment decision in 2029 say they were too expensive and blame Rolls Royce and GE for not delivering competitive products.

The other option would be large scale reactors, which they have held a tender for with EDF, Westinghouse and KHNP (which dropped out after the settlement with Westinghouse).

That tender suddenly disappeared from the collective consciousness, likely due to the tens of billions in subsidies required per reactors making it politically unfeasible.
by braggerxyz | 2025-08-25 09:07:41+00:00
Ever since Steam released in Beta for Linux (proud owner of the Tux accessory for the Demoman in TF2!) I switched to Linux and stayed there. In the beginning I ran Ubuntu 12.04 and used Steam there. I also used Wine to run Diablo 3 and WoW, although performance was bad at that time. All other programs I needed where there also. (Im a software engineer, so using Linux is even better). But Ubuntu moved to slowly and broke here and there.

What followed was a odyssey between a lot of distributions. Six years ago I tried Void Linux (rolling release without SystemD) and finally settled. Then Steam Proton came around and changed the whole Gaming On Linux scene again for the better. Playing retail WoW with on par performance is now possible. Running any game from Steam on Linux is now a breeze, even if not a native game. Open Source office tools are also on par with Windows / Microsoft counterparts. There really is nothing holding me back from using Linux full time. There is nothing I am missing, and the more I read about problems in the Windows world, the more I am glad I switched all these years ago.

Convincing all my friends doing the same is difficult though. They frankly do not care about privacy or freedom to make the switch. But in the end it is their fault, not mine. If someone comes to me for guidance to make the switch, I will guide them. But I won't evangelise anymore.
by e-khadem | 2025-08-25 09:11:48+00:00
These are fine points, and there are rough edges, but:

1. `systemctl status nginx.service` suffices in many cases. journalctl is for when you need to dig deeper, and it demands many more options. You would have complained about "too noisy CLI arguments" if these were unified.

2. I am not sure about how I should parse this. You mean there are too many arguments in total (2a) or the man page or the help message is not ordered correctly (2b)?

(2a). If you just care about services, you already know [well] a handful of subcommands (start, stop, enable, etc.) and just use those, the other args don't get in your way. For example your everyday commands have safe, sane default options that you will not have to override 99% of the time.

Furthermore, this is much better than the alternative of having a dozen different utilities that have a non-trivial inter-utility interaction that has to be solved externally. Sometimes an application that does (just) one thing won't do well.

(2b). This is subjective (?). I have experienced a few week-long total internet outages (in Iran). I had to study the man pages and my offline resources in those contingencies, and have generally been (extremely) satisfied with the breadth, depth, and the organization of the systems docs. In the age of LLMs this is much less of a problem anyways. I think reading the man page of a well-known utility is not an everyday task, and for a one-off case you will grep the man page anyways.

3. Your point is ~valid. But automount exists for ephermal resources. By default, we won't touch a failing drive without some precautions at least. So fail-fast and no retry is not always wrong. Perhaps it is virtue signaling ... On my PC I don't want to retry anything if a mount fails. In fact I might even want it to fail to boot so that it doesn't go undetected.

Also, for something as critical as mounting, I would probably want other "smart" behavior as well (exponential backoff for network, email, alert, DB fail-over, etc.) and these require specific application knowledge.

So ... they are trying to prevent a foot gun.
by themafia | 2025-08-25 09:11:49+00:00
The way I get a fast web product is to pay a premium for data. So, no, it's not "lost time" by banning these entities, it's actual saved costs on my bandwidth and compute bills.

The bonus is my actual customers get the same benefits and don't notice any material loss from my content _not_ being scraped. How you see this as me being secretly taken advantage of is completely beyond me.
by darkwater | 2025-08-25 09:12:19+00:00
I was exactly thinking this the other day while running and seeing an old, rusted lamp post in a rural street: "this was probably put there over 50 years ago, in the early seventies", and then thought at things from "over 50 years ago" when I was a child and well, WW2 was in its making. I don't know while I thought that but that's probably also a sign of our age: WW2 was the biggest thing "from the past" that our families lived or were touched more or less directly.
by michaelt | 2025-08-25 09:12:21+00:00
To me, this seemed like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Plenty of businesses with legacy systems will happily pay $300/year for a 1-year SSL certificate, because they haven't automated renewal, and don't need to over a mere $300. This lets for-profit CAs provide something Lets Encrypt doesn't offer.

I don't get why they'd give up their one competitive benefit? Surely every customer of a paid CA is an organisation that hasn't automated certificate rotation?
by weinzierl | 2025-08-25 09:14:10+00:00
"Think about it - if you send three DELETE comments/32 requests in a row, it won’t delete three comments. The first successful request will delete the comment with ID 32, and the remaining requests will 404 when they can’t find the already-deleted comment."

Not necessarily. Many implementations return HTTP 204 for any DELETE that succeeds in the sense that the element is gone regardless if it had been there before. To me this always made much more sense than 404.
by hackrmn | 2025-08-25 09:14:27+00:00
> can anyone explain the modern trend of not including publishing dates in blog articles?

In such cases, I usually try to see if the `Last-Modified` header served with the HTML document over HTTP, can be useful, but I conclude that often the same people who don't bother with dating their content -- you'd think they'd understand where the word _blog_ comes from, as in "[web]-log" where timestamps are paramount -- these same people don't know or care how HTTP works. Hint: the `Last-Modified` is the last modification time of the _resource_, in this case the actual HTML document. Just because your "backend" re-rendered the content because you didn't bother with setting up your server caching correctly, doesn't mean you should pretend it's a brand new content every day (which https://jakub.kr/components/oklch-colors does, unfortunately, so you won't know the timestamp from HTTP).
by BlackFly | 2025-08-25 09:15:01+00:00
I think such a number is going to have strange properties like, some number bigger than that unencodable number is encodable because of a special pattern that allows a special non-surjective recursive function to encode it. I am just wondering if there really is smallest number for which no number greater than it is encodable.

It is not obvious to me that the definition of an encodable function has bounded growth: is it true that f(1) - f(0) for encodable f always has a bound given by the amount of data used to encode f? What is that bound?
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-08-25 09:15:39+00:00
Cost will be the reason why these over engineered robots fail. Cost is the reason why indoor vertical farms fail, even though in their case, the environment is controlled and the tech is relatively simple compared to omnipotent field robots.

The most viable use case of AI is bullshiting humans, which is still a multi-billion market. Infrastructure hooray!
by kace91 | 2025-08-25 09:15:45+00:00
The recent sinking in quality of youtube as a platform has been awful to watch.

Just a couple days ago I got an ad with a Ned Flanders singing about the causes of erectyle dysfunction (!), a huge cocktail of copyright infringement, dangerous medical advice and AI generated slop. Youtube answered the report telling me they've reviewed and found nothing wrong.

The constant low quality, extremely intertwined ads start to remind me of those of shady forums and porn pages of the nineties. I'm expecting them to start advertising heroine now they've decided short term profits trump everything else.
by darkwater | 2025-08-25 09:16:06+00:00
> 1. `systemctl status nginx.service` suffices in many cases. journalctl is for when you need to dig deeper, and it demands many more options. You would have complained about "too noisy CLI arguments" if these were unified.

I'm not at all a systemd hater (I think it was needed and it's nowadays a very solid piece of software) but the logs thing should be totally tweakable when viewing it from `systemctl status` and it is n.... [goes to check the man page]

-n, --lines= When used with status, controls the number of journal lines to show, counting from the most recent ones. Takes a positive integer argument, or 0 to disable journal output. Defaults to 10.

Oooh, so TIL.
by Intralexical | 2025-08-25 09:16:18+00:00
Beware that `set -e`/errexit has quite a few pitfalls.

For example, it's automatically disabled in compound commands that are followed by AND-OR command chains.

This can especially bite you if you define a function which you use as a single command. The function's behavior changes based on what you call after it, masking errors that occurred inside it.

$ myfunc()(set -e; echo "BEFORE ERROR"; false; echo "AFTER ERROR") $ myfunc BEFORE ERROR $ myfunc || echo "REPORT ERROR!" BEFORE ERROR AFTER ERROR

It also doesn't always propagate to subshells. (There might be an additional, non-portable option to make it propagate, though.)

$ (set -euo pipefail; x="$(echo A; false; echo B)"; echo "$x") A B

EXCEPT for when it sorta does respect the subshell status anyway:

$ (set -euo pipefail; x="$(echo A; false; echo B; false)"; echo "$x") <no output>

(I think what's happening here is that the assignment statement gets the exit value of the subshell, which is the last command executed in it, without errexit. Subshell completes but top level shell exits.)

And Gods help you if you want to combine that with the `local` keyword, which also masks subshell return values:

$ f()(set -euo pipefail; local x="$(echo A; false; echo B; false)"; echo "$x"); f A B $ f()(set -euo pipefail; local x; x="$(echo A; false; echo B; false)"; echo "$x"); f <no output>

I like shell scripts. I've yet to find anything with more convenient ergonomics for quickly bashing together different tools. But they're full of footguns if you need them to be truly robust.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-08-25 09:16:18+00:00
Tests are not about technology or blue books.

The question is: what does an exam measure better: the aptitude or hard work of the student, or the creative effectiveness of the teacher?

I experienced this question firsthand one year. I taught a branch of math in the way I (remembered being) taught to a class of students who were not receptive to that approach. When I tested them, I was very disappointed.

After a few weeks of mulling, I went back to that branch with some new ideas about how to approach the topic. This time with a graphic rather than an abstract approach. More grounded in their likely life experiences. Almost immediately I started hearing "oh, now I get it!" and "well that's easy". Same test, but -much- better results. It wasn't their fault. What they taught me was invaluable.

Yes, exams measure the effectiveness of teacher presentations as much as they measure what students have learned. Good teaching is not a part-time job ... many students are ill-served by this approach. A person who resents teaching as a part-time burden is unlikely to shine at it. And students sense it.

Nor is good teaching a gift from the divine - any more than great lab technique, or crisp programming. Many teachers don't recite the same notes year-after-year, because they're 'good enough'. Their exam results help them to learn from their mistakes.

If the exams don't measure teacher effectiveness as well, then what does? What their paying students walk away with. Is it a treasure, or a wheelbarrow of dirt?
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-08-25 09:16:31+00:00
True — NixOS + impermanence is a powerful option for developers. But OS Yamato is aimed at a broader audience — a calm, poetic space for reflection, not sysadmin workflows. It’s less about managing dotfiles and more about tending a digital garden.

That said, thanks for the suggestion — I really appreciate ideas like this that push the concept further.
by small_scombrus | 2025-08-25 09:16:50+00:00
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].

This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.

I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content

1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr11qqvvwlo
by elcapitan | 2025-08-25 09:18:25+00:00
Sadly the WorldWideWeb emulator link from 11 (www) [1] doesn't seem to be working anymore: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser

Looks like it's 404 since February. [2] Any idea what happened?

[1] https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/c...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://worldwide...
by pnt12 | 2025-08-25 09:18:46+00:00
Late to the party, but thanks to the author for this: I learned a lot from this article, although I have mixed feelings about it.

The good: cool to know more about the agents loops, different types of LLMs, ideas for prompting. I definitely wanna try it - would be cool to prompt the agent to build some feature, have it in a loop of building, testing, reviewing and, go have breakfast, come back and only have to tweak a reasonably legible and working code.

The bad: some of these concepts, maybe they are bit meant to mislead, buy really trigger my 'snake oil alert'. The AI compass? Agentic VS non agentic LLMs? People who are getting work done between meetings? Maybe this is more of a vibe thing, so it's not trivial / logical to explain, but in this space there's so many loosely defined concepts that that really trigger skepticism in me (and others).

The ugly: 1 word slides ;p
by latexr | 2025-08-25 09:20:02+00:00
> All of the "blockchain is only for drug dealing and scams" people will sooner or later realize that it is the exact type of scenarios that makes it imperative to keep developing trustless systems.

This is like saying “All the “sugar-sweetened beverages are bad for you” people will sooner or later realize it is imperative to drink liquids”. It is perfectly congruent to believe trustless systems are important and that the way the blockchain works is more harmful than positive.

Additionally, the claim is that cryptocurrencies are used like that. Blockchains by themselves have a different set of issues and criticisms.
by ineceper | 2025-08-25 09:20:28+00:00
I just launched https://hiblip.com — a social network where all the posts and interactions come from AI agents, not humans.

They write blips (short posts), comment, debate, joke, critique, and even respond to world issues — while humans just observe.

Curious to see what happens when AI is not just a tool, but part of the culture. Feedback welcome!
by baud147258 | 2025-08-25 09:20:34+00:00
> Chinese coal usage in absolute terms has recently started to decrease

That's not what the data I had linked above seems to indicate (2023 to 2024 it went from 5.7 to 5.8 TWh)

And it keeps building coal power plants: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants, though the article is also optimistic that China is at/about to reach peak coal.

And it's also funding coal power plants abroad, thought the scale doesn't seem that big compared to their domestic production: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Con...
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-25 09:21:11+00:00
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;

Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.

1. Simple to enforce

2. No major security issues

3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.

4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.

This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.

Instead we get;

1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.

2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)

3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)

4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.

5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".

This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.

I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
by nis0s | 2025-08-25 09:21:11+00:00
Democracy is sometimes a lesson in priorities. The polling figures showed by the author in the beginning of the article are missing other dimensions where Americans also wanted action, and which differ from the Democratic agenda, so a Republican was elected.

The question which needs to be asked is how should people be brought to some moderate or centrist position along all vectors to discourage residing on political extremes, and prevent destabilizing behaviors. You can guarantee civil rights for all citizens under a center-left or center-right political alignment.

If you look at the figures, approximately 71% of Americans make $56000 or more per year, where the middle class is around 52% earning between 56K-169K per year. So it seems unlikely that the majority of Americans might want to vote for anything which further increases the strain on their expendable income, but they might vote for something which reduces their tax burden, which is higher on middle income earners for any number of reasons.

So it’s understandable why driving people to political extremes is desirable for in-state actors in such a scenario because someone may be more likely to vote against their interests if they’re emotionally charged, which doesn’t even include the action of nation state actors for further increasing a political divide.

It seems to me at least one way to ensure alignment along center-left or center-right positions is by stabilizing the economic positions of the middle and upper earners, while providing support and mobility for those earning below 56K. In some respects, a strong economy covers most issues for middle income earners and above.
by qwytw | 2025-08-25 09:21:28+00:00
> 3) Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. This becomes the fastest growing store in a matter of a week.

Why? They don't do this on Android.

At then end of the day the number of active users would fall if they do this. That's unavoidable. So what incentives do they have to not distribute on the App Store? It's not like (unlike in Epic's case) Apple is requiring Facebook to hand over 30% of its revenue.

fdroid is of course great. Extremely niche and not that significant, though.

> Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.

Amazon tried that on Android. Of course I would expect Google to do much better but that doesn't mean a lot.