MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonask | 2025-08-23 10:28:39+00:00
You put "just" in scare quotes, but that word does a lot of heavy lifting there. Static memory safety is an extremely useful thing, because it enables you to do things competent programmers would never dare in C, C++, or Zig. Things like borrowing data from one thread's stack in another thread, or returning anything but `std::string` from a function. These things were simply not feasible before without a huge bulky runtime and GC.

Keep in mind that Rust's definition of "memory safety" covers much more than just use-after-free, the most important being thread safety. It is a blanket guarantee of no undefined behavior in any code that doesn't contain the word `unsafe`. Undefined behavior, including data race conditions, is a major time sink in all non-hobby C or C++ projects.

What bad ideas from C++ did Rust copy, in your opinion? I'm really not sure what you mean. Smart pointers? RAII?

There are plenty of languages that enable quick iteration, prototyping, or "just getting shit done". If that's what you need, why not use them? I'm personally more concerned about the finished product.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-23 10:29:42+00:00
Yeah I let the LLM look at the code and ask it to implement some change.

It works pretty well with Claude Code. Much better than cursor, which is a step up from copilot. Even with the same models, and I'm not sure why. I haven't really tweaked much around the AI tools, since I don't really know much about how they work.

I've just found that Claude Code somehow... just works. Out of the box, no MCPs, no fancy configs. I just straight up tell it what I want, and most of the time it gets it right or close enough to right that a second instruction is all I need.

Would I recode what I wrote? Maybe not from the ground up, since I already had a pretty good framework. But LLM has managed to make some pretty fiddly changes to my codebase recently. It would have taken me a long time, mostly in tedious edits.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-23 10:30:40+00:00
We don't think that people who think there's a bearded man in heaven are crazy, even if that's crazier than thinking earth is flat.

We don't think they are crazy because they are not 1%, they are majority.

Most people think flat earthers are crazy not because they proved them wrong. Just most people around them think flat earthers are crazy and that's enough.
by pxc | 2025-08-23 10:32:06+00:00
> Many people disagree with that claim and think that TheLinuxModel is good actually. However I point that these people almost definitely make extensive use of Docker

You've got the wrong audience here. Nix people are neither big fans of "the Linux model" (because Nix is founded in part on a critique of the FHS, a core part and source of major problems with "the Linux model") nor rely heavily on Docker to ship dependencies. But if by "the Linux model" you just mean not promising a stable kernel ABI, pulling an OS together from disparate open-source projects, and key libraries not promising eternal API stability, it might have some relevance to Nixers...

> I also dont think that deploying a program should be much more complicated than sharing an uncompressed zip file. Docker adds a lot of crusting. Packaging images/zips/deployments should be near instantaneous.

Your sense of "packaging" conflates two different things. One aspect of packaging is specifying dependencies and how software gets built in the first place in a very general way. This is the hard part of packaging for cohesive software distributions such as have package managers. (This is generally not really done on platforms like Windows, at least not in a unified or easily interrogable format.) This is what an RPM spec does, what the definition of a Nix package does, etc.

The other part is getting built artifacts, in whatever format you have them, into a deployable format. I would call this something like "packing" (like packing an archive) rather than "packaging" (which involves writing some kind of code specifying dependencies and build steps).

If you've done the first step well— by, for instance, writing and building a Nix package— the second step is indeed trivial and "damn near instantaneous". This is true whether you're deploying with `nix-copy-closure`/`nix copy`, which literally just copy files[1][2], or creating a Docker image, where you can just stream the same files to an archive in seconds[3].

And the same packaging model which enables hermetic deployments, like Docker but without requiring the use of containers at all, does still allow keeping only a single copy of common dependencies and patching them in place.[4]

--

1: https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.30/command-ref/nix-copy-closure...

2: https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.30/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-cop...

3: https://github.com/nlewo/nix2container

4: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/grafts-continued/
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-08-23 10:32:21+00:00
I'm not sure intuition is required. Please bear with me.

If I ask a factual question of AI it will issue some output. In order for me to check that output, which I am apparently bound to do in all cases, I must check reliable sources, perhaps several. But that is precisely the work I wanted to avoid by using AI. Ergo, the AI has increased my work load because I had the extra useless step of asking the AI. Obviously, I could have simply checked several reliable sources in the first place. I see this as the razor at work.

It ought to be clear now that the use of AI for factual questions entails that it be trustworthy; when you ask an AI a factual question, the work you are hoping to avoid is equal to the work of checking the AI output. Hence, no time can ever be saved by asking factual questions of an untrustworthy AI.

QED

P.S. This argument, and its extensions, occurred to me and my advisors 25 years ago. It caused me to conclude that building anything other than a near perfect AI is pointless, except as a research project to discover the path to a nearly perfect AI. Nearly perfect should be interpreted to be something like "as reliable as the brakes on your car" in terms of MTBF.
by 6510 | 2025-08-23 10:32:49+00:00
Reading online for a bit it seems cors already ruined much of the fun. If you think about it, even with the "*" header you end up with a html document served from a different place than the url would suggest.

Kinda sad since slapping a generic template onto some familiar xml implementation seems a wonderful thing.

I've always wanted browsers to provide a set of standard templates. 90% of the time I don't care about the design, I just want something functional right now.
by mlry | 2025-08-23 10:34:03+00:00
I use Graphene but with Google play store app. Here in Europe my banking apps and 2fa apps (SecureGo) work flawlessly. NFC cards work with PassAndroid and FOSSwallet, both from Fdroid. I've had issues installing rather new games via the play store, but most often it takes a couple of tries or a waiting period to work in the end.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-23 10:34:42+00:00
> The fish is blind to the ocean. All of your arguments are soaked in the ideology of economic primacy.

Ok. I guess if you had any actual points you would have made them instead of poor sport poetry and blatant projection.

I don't believe in economic primacy.

Nor do I have ideology. I don't think any one way of looking at things can ever be complete. As I already stated.

It was you, who explicitly outed yourself as ideological, and are making ideological arguments instead of practical ones based on actual harm or benefit.

People or businesses pay to use public parks for events, public buildings, school buses, the list is endless. People like this. It is viewed as pro-sharing, pro-community. These options makes public asset more valuable to the public, help defray costs, and increase the good they generate for society. With any harm or mistreatment to anyone.
by Freak_NL | 2025-08-23 10:34:57+00:00
Regarding Organic Maps: I would recommend keeping tabs on what is happening there since this year. They seem to be having significant governance issues.

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/organic-maps-open-lett...

Short story: forget Organic Maps, use successor CoMaps or competitor OsmAnd.

https://www.comaps.app/about-us/
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-23 10:36:16+00:00
If we go by Marxist definitions, universal healthcare, universal education, etc. are communism, not socialism ('to each according to their need', which I interpret as capacity to provide a return on an investment of resources by society in one).

We have really little socialism in modern society, instead we have market systems combined with elements of communism. The only socialist elements we have are copyright and patents (you get them for contribution, so it follows the Marxist maxim characterizing socialism 'to each according to his contribution').

It's really a strange thing that communism, this hypothetical post-socialist stage of development, is so easy for states to adapt and so uncontroversial that elements of it are implemented today on a large scale, everywhere from the US to Africa, when socialism which Marx imagined as the stage that would give rise to communism is a relatively small element of society. I suppose the software industry has eaten a lot of other businesses though, and that it in the end is dependent on copyright, so maybe we actually are in the socialist stage, only with large middlemen intermediating 'to each according to his contribution' part. Socialism but with capitalist middlemen.
by coldtea | 2025-08-23 10:36:22+00:00
P. Give me quotes from Aristophanes describing the Peloponesian war as unfortunate.

A. Yes — Aristophanes, the Athenian comic playwright, lived through almost the entire Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and his plays are full of bitter humor about Greeks destroying each other. He often portrays it as an unfortunate, fratricidal conflict.

Here are a few key passages (in translation):

Acharnians (425 BCE)

Written during the war’s early years, it shows a farmer sick of the fighting: • Dicaeopolis (the main character) laments: “This war, which has come upon us all, is nothing but Greeks fighting Greeks.”

He later makes a private peace treaty with Sparta for himself, mocking the idea that the wider war must continue when ordinary people suffer.

Peace (421 BCE)

Produced right before the “Peace of Nicias”: • Trygaeus, the hero, flies up to heaven to free the goddess Peace: “It is monstrous that Greeks should destroy one another, while barbarians stand by laughing.”

This captures Aristophanes’ view that the war was not only ruinous but also shameful, as it weakened Greece before foreign enemies.

In sum: Aristophanes consistently portrayed the Peloponnesian War as a tragic absurdity — Greeks killing Greeks while the true enemies (Persians/“barbarians”) watched and benefitted. His comedies combine satire with a deep sense that the conflict was fratricidal and unnecessary.

P. You said Dicaeopolis (the main character) laments: “This war, which has come upon us all, is nothing but Greeks fighting Greeks.” Where is that quote?

A. Good catch — let’s pin this down carefully.

In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (425 BCE), the character Dicaeopolis indeed complains that the Peloponnesian War is a fratricidal war among Greeks, but the exact wording depends on the translation.

⸻

Where it appears • Early in the play (lines ~100–120), Dicaeopolis is waiting for the Assembly to begin. He grumbles about the war, saying essentially that it is:

“A war of Greek against Greek, when we should be standing united against the barbarians.”

⸻

Examples from published translations • Benjamin Rogers (1924 translation): “I am heartily tired of these Grecian wars, of Greeks fighting against Greeks.”

• Alan H. Sommerstein (Loeb Classical Library, 2002): (lines 116–118) “It’s not right — Greeks at war with Greeks, while the barbarian looks on, laughing at us.”

----

Needless to say, that quote is nowhere in the Acharnians - nor anything roughly equivalent. Not only that, in the later response it attributes to the play "Acharnians" the quote it initially attributed to the play "Peace".
by kristoff_it | 2025-08-23 10:38:11+00:00
Zig is not really a handmade project, case in point both Andrew and I are blocked on social media by the two gods of the handmade movement (casey and john) and, according to their die hard fans, Andrew gave a talk at the last handmade conference that caused the community to split apart (the reality is a bit more complex than this, but Andrew's talk is certainly one that you wouldn't see at their new "better software" conference).

Andrew's talk is here (second event after the two people chatting while sitting on chairs): https://handmadecities.com/media/seattle-2024/hms-day-one/

Here you can see a particularly funny (but also sad) reaction by one of these people https://drive.proton.me/urls/MB1EB4EF34#YZdvmAvBFp1C

> using game engines versus doing the whole computer from scratch for a game

That said you are doing yourself a disservice if you think that not using an engine to make a game is a form of "anti-intellectualism".
by zvr | 2025-08-23 10:40:14+00:00
The example I was referring to was not in the US.

A restaurant / cafe may pay a fixed fee and get access to a specific catalog of songs (performances). The fee depends on what the catalog contains. As you can imagine, paying for the right to only play instrumental versions of songs (no singers, no lyrics) is significantly cheaper. Or, having performances of songs by unknown people.
by 6510 | 2025-08-23 10:41:13+00:00
With patents there is this funny situation where you need to know exactly how to do something in order to find the document.

I forget who came up with the idea but we could create a database with functions for every use case with the idea to never have to write something already written but finding the one you are looking for (by conventional search) would take more time than writing from scratch.

AI just provides new angles to attack from. It could save time or take more time, bit of a gamble. Examine your cards before placing the bet.
by rendx | 2025-08-23 10:42:11+00:00
Who is this "they" you are referring to? It sounds like you see it as a homogenous group that is "woke", and you are asking about their "agenda"? You may want to consider shifting the framing away from them-us towards a more nuanced perspective.

One possible way of looking at it is individuality vs collectivism, group vs. individual, patriarchy/power hierarchy vs. self realization and rebellion. "Gender" is just one of many possible elements to "break free from your parent's values" and "find that you are great as an individual, regardless of labels and opinions of people around you"; every generation finds their own expressions of this. Used to be "long haired men", etc. etc. -- It's not about a "minority", it is about what makes you as individual special and "worth your existence".

There are other frames too which are worth exploring. There is no single truth to "why".
by kelnos | 2025-08-23 10:42:30+00:00
This really struck a chord with me. Writing documentation is an act of explaining something to others. Explaining something to others is a great way to test your own understanding. If it's hard to explain to someone else, then maybe it's the wrong design.

If you don't through that exercise, you're much more likely to build confusing, difficult-to-use APIs.
by mlry | 2025-08-23 10:43:23+00:00
I use https://brouter.de/brouter-web on my laptop. Someone told me that you can use brouter as the nav engine for Osmand and thus greatly improve speed and accuracy for navigation, but I have not yet tried this.

And I recently installed GMaps WV from Fdroid as a wrapper for Google Maps. It gives current traffic information but I don't really know if it is even close to gmaps.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-23 10:44:08+00:00
> You put "just" in scare quotes

...I don't use them as "scare quotes", it's more like in "can't you just..." - e.g. something that looks simple from the outside but is hard to do / complex on the inside - e.g. I do recognize the work that went into Rust's memory safety, but I question the effort that went into it compared to more traditional memory safety methods, especially when looking at the restrictions that Rust imposed on the programmer - it's a pretty hefty tradeoff (IMHO of course).

> What bad ideas from C++ did Rust copy, in your opinion?

Mainly doing things in the stdlib that should be built into the language (e.g. Option, Result, Box, Cell, RefCell, Arc, and probably a dozen other types and traits...), resulting in what I call 'bird droppings syntax' of too many chained function calls to get to the thing you actually want (.unwrap, .into_iter, .iter, .iter_mut, .as_ref, .as_mut, .expect, .unwrap_or_else, .unwrap_or_default, .ok, .ok_or_else, .and_then, .or_else ... like, wtf?). The absurd amount of `::` and `<>` in typical Rust code. The missing separation line between stdlib and language (like for-loops using the Iterator trait, or more obviously: operator overloading). The stdlib doing memory allocations behind your back through a global allocator - which we know from C++ do be a really bad idea for decades already... etc etc... I think most Rust programmers are blind towards those issues the same way that C++ programmers are blind towards C++ issues (which is another thing both language ecosystems have in common though).
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-08-23 10:44:31+00:00
Some ways to exercise avoid injury & get results, and some.. don’t.

I’m a triathlete of 4 years now - love to be sore but have never been injured & unable to train.

There are three things you must do:

1. good technique: lift with the right muscles, run at the right cadence & target heart rate.

2. listen to your body when it needs less or more load.

3. treat recovery as equally important as exercise itself. Exercise’s mirror.

That said, instead of actual complaints, your friends might be social signaling! Bringing it up to bond over the joy of exercise. Humans do that subconsciously, and there is a ton of joy to bond over!
by viraptor | 2025-08-23 10:44:31+00:00
There's an alternative of being much more up front about the status. For example the project page doesn't really say it's unstable/experimental. It only says "Zig has not yet reached v1.0" on the "getting started" page, which doesn't really mean that much - for example Putty is still at 0.83 after 26 years.

If the project invites me to use it "for maintaining robust, optimal and reusable software." without putting "super unstable, we don't even care about docs" on the same page... that's also saying something.
by pxc | 2025-08-23 10:45:39+00:00
> I don't mind stable base systems, I don't mind slow and well tested updates, I actively like holding stable ABIs, but if you haven't updated anything in 4 years, then you are missing bug and security fixes.

I'm not sure GP's claim here about the runtime not changing in 4 years is actually true. There hasn't been a version number bump, but files in the runtime have certainly changed since it's initial release in 2021, right? See: https://steamdb.info/app/1628350/patchnotes/

It looks to me like it gets updated all the time, but they just don't change the version number because the updates don't affect compatibility. It's kinda opaque though, so I'm not totally sure.
by asabla | 2025-08-23 10:45:51+00:00
I fundamentally agree with you.

But anti-cheat hasn't been about blocking every possible way of cheating for some time now. It's been about making it as in convenient as possible, thus reducing the amount of cheaters.

Is the current fad of using kernel level anti-cheats what we want? hell nah.

The responsibility of keeping a multi-player session clean of cheaters, was previously shared between the developers and server owners. While today this responsibility has fallen mostly on developers (or rather game studios) since they want to own the whole experience.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-23 10:46:09+00:00
Indeed—try to make a platform where a solo developer can create an app that is then distributed to almost the entire planet, where anyone can find, buy and install it (with a nearly 100% guarantee that it will work) with a click, and get paid for it without having to open branches in every jurisdiction and deliver paperwork for N different, constantly changing tax regimes.
by kobstrtr | 2025-08-23 10:46:13+00:00
> that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity

These comparisons are crap. You can‘t simply take one year, exercise 24/7, and get your 10 years of life. You have to fit it into life, which is much more time than it seems from claiming it‘s 1 year out of 80.

But it‘s still a good investment! :)
by christophilus | 2025-08-23 10:47:23+00:00
Dunno, but my Lenovo with Intel Aura is cool, quiet and runs for a long time. Its speakers are great, too. It’s comparable in those respects to a MacBook Pro (which I also own, M4). I never use the MacBook, though. I can’t stand osx. The Lenovo screen isn’t as good, though. I still prefer my 5-year old 4K oled xps.
by jjaksic | 2025-08-23 10:48:18+00:00
As a physics layman I sometimes watched Sabine's show and found it interesting. The one where she defended Weinstein was the one where she lost all credibility to me and I stopped watching her.

Her (expletive-laden) message was essentially: "Weinstein is my friend. Yes, his theory is bullshit, but so is all of theoretical physics." Seriously, aren't you one of them? You would rather throw your entire academic field under the bus to defend your friend? (And mind you, what a great way to defend your friend, calling his theory bullshit.)

This blog post is incredibly illuminating and explains a lot. It's a prime example of "Don't expect someone to understand something when their YouTube paychecks depend on them not understanding it", a.k.a. audience capture.

It's also an important reminder of the precarious situation laypeople are in - being unable to tell what's true and what's bs, and often relying on social cues like how confident someone sounds. We are all laypeople in most fields and are subject to easy manipulation by various confident-sounding grifters and LLMs.
by cornholio | 2025-08-23 10:49:11+00:00
> most high earners that earn over 200k

Those incomes are by definition restricted to the top 5% of the general population - of course those top earners prefer not to be enrolled in a socialized medicine plan and prefer market insurance with a nominal price tag that is not proportional to income.

That's the entire point, to establish a social contract where the healthy and successful pay for the healthcare of the less fortunate, can benefit themselves from that social net if their fortune reverse, and deal with the risk they might never be net beneficiaries if they remain healthy and wealthy.

Given the option, high earners would argue that all public spending should be financed by flat nominal taxes, it's not like they personally require more work from the army or the police, or they drive longer distances on public infrastructure.
by thedrbrian | 2025-08-23 10:49:40+00:00
>£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past

good that you ignore the actual point of the comment that you replied to

>That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.