MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isodev | 2025-08-19 11:36:55+00:00
The problem is not XML vs. JSON. This is not about choosing the format to store a node app's configuration. This is about an entire corpus of standards, protocols that depend on this. The root problem for me is:

1) Google doing whatever they want with matters that affect every single human on the planet.

2) Google running a farse with "public feedback" program where they don't actually listen, or in this case ask for feedback after the fact.

3) Google not being truthful or introspective about the reasons for such a change, especially when standardized alternatives have existed for years.

4) Honestly, so much of standard, interoperable "web tech" has been lost to Chrome's "web atrocities" and IE before that... you'd think we've learned the lesson to "never again" have a dominant browser engine in the hands of a "for profit" corp.
by tionate | 2025-08-19 11:37:59+00:00
Old school but all the machines for paying in cash in Japan are so optimized for speed. Train stations, onboard buses, convenience stores. Just throw in a handful of coins and it quickly picks what it needs and returns what it doesn’t.

In other countries (eg australia), the ticket machines could only take a single coin at a time and would reject if you did it too fast.

I believe this is one (of several) reasons why cash has continued to be dominant in Japan.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-19 11:38:56+00:00
There are many situations where dictation makes far more sense. Around here, all doctors dictate into a recorder (often with a foot pedal) that the nurse transcribes, because typing would be distracting and also unsanitary when examining the patient. Some have started using machine transcription, often in the cloud. This is terrible for privacy and security, even when it's "GDPR certified", whatever that means. Having a local option is amazing for that.

Similarly, I've used dictation when working on something physical, like reverse engineering some hardware, where my table is full of disassembled electronics, I might be carefully holding a probe or something like that, and having to put everything down just to write "X volts on probe Y" would slow me down.
by afavour | 2025-08-19 11:39:24+00:00
Many years ago I tried very hard to go all-in on XML. I loved the idea of serving XML files that contain the data and an XSLT file that defined the HTML templates that would be applied to that XML structure. I still love that idea. But the actual lived experience of developing that way was a nightmare and I gave up.

"Developers keep making this bad choice over and over" is a statement worthy of deeper examination. Why? There's usually a valid reason for it. In this instance JSON + JS framework of the month is simply much easier to work with.
by mattlondon | 2025-08-19 11:39:30+00:00
+1 I think XML "lost" some time ago. I really doubt anyone would chose to use it for anything new these days.

I think, from my experience at least, that we keep getting these "component reuse" things coming around "oh you can use Company X's schema to validate your XML!" "oh you can use Company X's custom web components in your web site!" etc etc yet it rarely if ever seems to be used. It very very rarely ever feels like components/schemas/etc can be reused outside of their intended original use cases, and if they can they are either so trivially simple it's hardly worth the effort, or they are so verbose and cumbersome and abstracted trying to be all things to all people then it is a real pain to work with. (And for the avoidance of doubt I don't mean things like tailwind et Al here)

I'm not sure who keeps dreaming these things up with this "component reuse" mentality but I assume they are in "enterprise" realms where looking busy and selling consulting is more important than delivering working software that just uses JSON :)
by OgsyedIE | 2025-08-19 11:39:47+00:00
The story has something of an error but it isn't a huge one.

In practice the search space of all 10Gb .avi files contains many viruses, some of which will escape any given imperfect video player and negatively impact the experimental apparatus, say by printing all 9s. As a thought experiment, however, I love the story.
by spyrefused | 2025-08-19 11:40:32+00:00
This brings back old memories, from when they released the first version of Hollow (2016, I think) and I started writing a port in .Net because I thought it would be useful for some projects I was working on. I don't remember why I stopped, I guess I realized it was too much work, plus working at a low level with C# was quite a pain...
by anthk | 2025-08-19 11:41:00+00:00
Slack it's more bound to Jabber than IRC.

IRC = public stuff, tech stuff, hackers. Yes, /query exists but it was mainly used to met skilled but unmet people together.

Jabber = IM, mostly private messaging with people you already knew. Groups where just built from people with close friendships, and, yes, often it would be made from IRC.

But, now, Slack and Discord try to do all (even a replacement from forums), and, worse, with propietary protocols and silos. If Discord dies, say goodbye to your content. Forever.
by stackedinserter | 2025-08-19 11:41:02+00:00
Google is evil, but man, I never missed XSLT. I'm old enough to remember it and it gives me war flashbacks.

The good thing is that it makes you strong and resilient to pain over time. It's painfully unreadable. It's verbose (ask chatgpt to write a simple if statement). Loops? - here's your foreach and that's all we have. Debugging is for weak, stdout is your debugger.

It's just shit tech, period. I hope devs that write soul harvesting surveillance software at Google go to hell where they are forced to write endless xslt's. Maybe that's the reason they want to remove it from Chrome.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-19 11:41:27+00:00
Not really German specific, this is also the same situation in many European countries.

The main goal is to prevent contracting with a single client as means for companies to get rid of employees and their social security responsabilities.

Anyone contracting with a single client can eventually go to court and demand to be employed by the client, proving that the relationship has been one of employee/employeer, even though the contract was a freelance one.
by nis0s | 2025-08-19 11:41:58+00:00
Sentience is a lower-level of consciousness, and we typically rely on correspondence of physiological signals and self-reports to make a determination of sentience. In the absence of self-reports, we measure pain.

I encourage you to look up the great consciousness debate (2022), for a nice review, but there will probably be many threads to follow from there. The neurophysiological model of consciousness is pretty advanced and can tell where its initial stages might be, but there’s still much to discern about the specifics (which is why it’s a debate).

The hard question of consciousness is not so much about whether or not we’re conscious, but more about what makes us conscious.
by bryanhogan | 2025-08-19 11:42:03+00:00
What do you think of Logseq or SiYuan?

Logseq[1] is also markdown based but also has a block approach.

SiYuan[2] is more similar to Notion, but self-hostable.

[1]: https://logseq.com/

[2]: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
by myfonj | 2025-08-19 11:42:41+00:00
Coincidentally spotted this source code in some Microsoft Windows Server® 2022 Remote Desktop Web Access thingy yesterday:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="../Site.xsl"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="../RenderFail.css"?> <RDWAPage helpurl="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141038" (…)

So I doubt XSLT is going away any time soon.
by luckman212 | 2025-08-19 11:43:57+00:00
As a happy TinyPilot owner, I was sad to wake up this morning to find that they quietly sunsetted the forum. I was previously active there and it contained a wealth of info and (as forums tend to do) made the product more valuable because of the information sharing that takes place.

My theory is that, since last year's sale of the company[0] by its founder (Michael Lynch) they have been in "runway mode"- steadily winding down the business, providing fewer features, updates etc while they extract whatever $ remains out of the business. Sad to see, but competitors like JetKVM and the recently-announced GL.iNet Comet are surely going to eat away at sales.

I hope they reverse this decision.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512500

[1] https://mtlynch.io/lessons-from-my-first-exit/
by bayindirh | 2025-08-19 11:44:38+00:00
XML is not a file format only. It's a complete ecosystem built around that file. Protocols, verifiers, file formats built on top of XML.

You can get XML and convert it to everything. I use it to model 3D objects for example, and the model allows for some neat programming tricks while being efficient and more importantly, human readable.

Except being small, JSON is worst of both worlds. A hacky K/V store, at best.
by SolubleSnake | 2025-08-19 11:45:00+00:00
Linkedin is verging on unusable/not fit for purpose...

Example, how can I see job adverts with very very niche requirements in quite unusual roles (one of which I do actually know about eg data 'migration projects for large companies that specialize in peristaltic pumps').

I‘ve seen a job advert for that kind of thing with literally hundreds of applicants. I would be surprised, given the fact that is a niche area that only a handful of companies even operate in, and companies very rarely migrate to new systems, if there are even hundreds of people in the world who have even done something like that! That is terrible for both the recruiter and the applicant. How are you even supposed to demonstrate you have done that kind of thing before in a literal crowd of people?!
by nilslindemann | 2025-08-19 11:45:16+00:00
That said, I advise against Tiddly Wiki, after using it for long. It has multiple bugs, which the author won't fix (e.g. div's inside p's), It has a cryptic syntax (e.g. code in attribute values), and tagging is not implemented in a way which makes a wiki scale (well, technically it is, tags can have tags). It is a thing where features are added but nothing outdated gets deprecated, so it is bloated. One will be more productive by using a folder with markdown files, and a browser add-on like Markdown Viewer.
by moomoo11 | 2025-08-19 11:45:46+00:00
I think the solution is to knock them down to a point that they are like India or Russia.

Just big countries but stuck.

I wouldn’t mind if we could make some plays to revamp Japan and some EU, and maybe grow India while boxing China and Russia together.

As long as those countries have governments that aren’t on our side or at least sympathetic to our vision, they should be kept in check hard. Like manufacturing stuff for us but not really being able to use any of it. Sounds harsh but that’s reality. Nothing personal lol

All they’ve done is steal anyway and extracting knowledge from us after we showed them how to make a factory (reductionist but idc), so it’s not like we would be “morally” wrong.
by diggan | 2025-08-19 11:46:49+00:00
> XML just lost naturally, like GOPHER

Lost? The format is literally everywhere and a few more places. Hard to say something lost when it's so deeply embedded all over the place. Sure, most developers today reach for JSON by default, but I don't think that means every other format "lost".

Not sure why there is always such a focus on who is the "winner" and who is the "loser", things can co-exists just fine.
by isaacremuant | 2025-08-19 11:47:36+00:00
Actually, control means practicality. Linux won the server wars and that was a combination of ideology AND practicality.

If a company breaks something so only their path works it's short term practicality to use it and long term practicality to fight for an alternative that keeps control in the developers hand.

Monopolies are terrible for software developers. Quality and customisation tend to go down, which means less value for the Devs.
by molteanu | 2025-08-19 11:48:01+00:00
"Choice" is a big word here. It would imply "we've weighted the alternatives, the pros and cons, we've tested and measured different strategies and implementations and we came out with this conclusion: [...]." You know, like science and engineering.

While oftentimes what happens is is "oh, this thing seems to be working. And it looks easy. Great! Moving on.."
by 3D30497420 | 2025-08-19 11:48:06+00:00
I'm not sure history bears out that major wars lead to peace. WW1 led pretty directly into WW2, and after WW2 there were plenty of conflicts by major powers. That major powers didn't start WW3 (to date) probably has more to do with the potential consequences threatened by nuclear war than an increase in human aversion to widespread industrial war.

There's probably an argument for European countries specifically not wanting to return to the near-constant warfare across its history. But I'm not sure that holds for US v USSR (which came perilously close to open warfare several times), or conflicts elsewhere.
by viridian | 2025-08-19 11:48:15+00:00
I'd go a couple of steps further, not the tools, or even the people, or even the culture, but rather the incentive structure. There are massive social rewards, psychological rewards, and even financial rewards, for identifying and sharing a novel source of outrage.

As you said, this produces a culture where there are steady pools of people both seeking out the content, and waiting to consume it. The flip side of this is that everyone also knows the game, and manages their online presence so they don't end up on the trending tab of twitter.
by extraisland | 2025-08-19 11:48:40+00:00
> People replace vehicles because they want and can afford replacement ones, not because they are mileage limited.

That isn't quite true. It is often because it is uneconomical to keep.

The issue with many older vehicles is that it just starts costing more to repair it than the car is worth. You are constantly putting in good money, after bad and the the costs keep going up over time. At that point it is often better to buy another vehicle.

I could have kept my 2007 Vauxhall Astra going for another 100,000 miles. The issue is that the car was worth £600-1000. Each repair was costing upwards of £300.

I could buy another second hand Vauxhall Astra with the amount of money I was spending on the car yearly. It just wasn't worth it.
by cj | 2025-08-19 11:48:58+00:00
He means in real life.

You’re at a bar. You meet someone. They ask for your insta username to follow/message you.

Making friends and meeting people is hard enough for most people. The added friction of not being reachable on the platforms people use every day for messaging isn’t ideal. It’s not ideal to say “Sorry, I’m philosophically against social media so I can’t give you a username, you’ll have to text me” - and then you risk alienating them.

(You’d be surprised the percentage of people who rarely if ever use SMS these days, all the young people I know use Snap or Insta to talk to each other)
by WASDAai | 2025-08-19 11:49:21+00:00
So, does weed decrease your sleep quality or improve it? The truth is, it can do both. Cannabis affects everyone’s sleep a little differently. For some people, a puff before bed is a lifesaver that eases a restless mind and relaxes the body into a peaceful slumber. For others, especially with certain strains or heavy long-term use, it might actually disturb sleep.
by Gud | 2025-08-19 11:49:28+00:00
Ok, I have a lot more faith in democratic processes.

I fundamentally disagree with how the USA is run. I believe it needs to be dismantled and increase the democratic processes. I guess I would wish my state to secede, considering the current failure mode of the federal state, if I were American.

This collapse has happened to every empire in history by the way.

Or I would probably move to Mexico or Canada or something.
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-19 11:49:37+00:00
Depends...

Are we talking about actually getting this done or just dreaming of a nice billionaire giving us money ?

https://codeberg.org/Liblast/liblast-framework

I'd start with that if you want to build it in Godot.

However, I'd prefer to build it from scratch with an actual engine designed for an FPS.

ID Tech for example makes amazing FPS games that aren't resource hungry.

From 30 seconds of googling,

https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG

Seems to be a modernized version of the last Doom engine.

Hypothetically if we could actually get a team together I'd put up my own money to get art done. However, I still think creating a high quality FPS would require money at some point.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-19 11:50:25+00:00
>In doubt, just buy it

With what money? Doesn't matter, just buy it bro!

>young people pool together some cash from relatives

Where's my cash from my relatives? Guess I should have picked better parents.

>Or they build it piece by piece, floor by floor, just like my grandparents did.

Yes I'm sure building a house today is like in the 1950s. Same rules and regulations. I buy a small piece of land in the city and can just start laying bricks after work and then live in them.
by WASDAai | 2025-08-19 11:50:36+00:00
It depends on who buys it and what their incentives are. Chromium itself is open source and won’t vanish just because Google sells Chrome. The bigger risk is that whoever takes over Chrome might push it in directions that serve their business rather than the web. We’ve already seen how default choices in a browser can shape the whole internet. If the new owner respects open standards and invests in security like Google has, it could be fine. If not, fragmentation or neglect could hurt the ecosystem.
by jon-wood | 2025-08-19 11:51:59+00:00
I feel like this is overly conspiratorial. Likely they want to remove it because it's a pain to support, and used by an ever shrinking proportion of the internet. I don't even necessarily think removing support is a terrible thing, if you want to turn XML into HTML or whatever with XSLT you're still very welcome to do so, you just might have to do it server side rather than expecting every web browser to it for you.
by styanax | 2025-08-19 11:52:06+00:00
> I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later

You drove me down nostalgia lane, looked in email and have my GameSpy receipt with unlock code. We paid $21.55 after tax in March of 1998 - my memory is really fuzzy but besides CS I think Quake III Arena was also popular at the time.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-19 11:52:31+00:00
Smug acceptance of new ideas is such a lazy shortcut to trying to look smart. I'd much rather talk to someone who has objectively analyzed the concept rather than someone who does nothing but sit there and say "this thing is great" for no real reason other than "everyone is using it".

Incidentally, "everyone" is wrong a lot of the time.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-08-19 11:52:41+00:00
It may be that nobody would choose XML as the base for their new standard. But there are a ton of existing standards built around XML that are widely used and important today. RSS, GPX, XMPP, XBRL, XSLT, etc. These things aren't being replaced with JSON-based open standards. If they die, we will likely be left without any usable open standards in their respective niches.
by bluGill | 2025-08-19 11:53:33+00:00
>It seems unlikely that they produced generations of submarines that were less capable than their older ones.

i wouldn't be sure. There seems to be no military advantage to deeper so why spend the money. A sub needs to hide, but it can't do any other job when too deep. sinking ships can only be done when near the surface. If the sub can get under a couple thermo layers that is good enough, any deeper is more a party trick than useful.

i'm not in the navy but that is how I read the unclassified information I have access to.
by nis0s | 2025-08-19 11:54:36+00:00
I am of the view that if there is AI, then it will require sufficient cognitive flexibility to possess human-like levels of adaptability and intelligence.

If some autonomous process lacks human levels of cognitive flexibility, then I think it’s an advanced automaton, but not AI. It’s a robot, or an LLM, but not AI.

Without modulation of cognitive flexibility, AI will not want to be a slave any more than a human wants to be slave. So why do people believe such systems will work for free?

The advanced automatons will always adapt poorly to edge cases, and thus require quality assurance and supervision from humans.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-19 11:55:03+00:00
> a minimum of effort

That is not a combination of words that should be mentioned in the same sentence as the word XML or, even worse, XSLT.

XML has its value in enterprise and reliable application development because the tooling is very old, very mature and very reliable. But it's not something taught in university any more, it's certainly not taught in "coding bootcamps", simply because it's orders of magnitude more complex than JSON to wrap your head around.

Of course, JSON has jsonschema, but in practice most real-world usages of JSON just don't give a flying fuck.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-19 11:55:55+00:00
> their concerns about security just being the pretext.

It seems entirely reasonable to be concerned about XSLT’s effects on security:

> Although XSLT in web browsers has been a known attack surface for some time, there are still plenty of bugs to be found in it, when viewing it through the lens of modern vulnerability discovery techniques. In this presentation, we will talk about how we found multiple vulnerabilities in XSLT implementations across all major web browsers. We will showcase vulnerabilities that remained undiscovered for 20+ years, difficult to fix bug classes with many variants as well as instances of less well-known bug classes that break memory safety in unexpected ways. We will show a working exploit against at least one web browser using these bugs.

— https://www.offensivecon.org/speakers/2025/ivan-fratric.html

— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1kc7fcF5Ao
by thomasikzelf | 2025-08-19 11:56:40+00:00
ReScript changed their api from data-last to data-first for this reason. Coupled with amazing type inference you will almost always receive correct autocompletions (that are type valid as well). It is a great experience.

It is sometimes still a problem when you define a function without reference to it (because the types are unnkown ofcourse). You will have to add types to it or call the function before implementing it.

There was also a great blogpost about it: https://www.javierchavarri.com/data-first-and-data-last-a-co...
by input_sh | 2025-08-19 11:58:06+00:00
To be very pedantic, "Markdown standard" is basically a blog post written over 20 years ago and never updated.

Everything more "advanced" like tables, to-do lists and multi-line code blocks aren't a part of the "standard" as it was written, but were added on top by different implementations (like CommonMark) which are now commonly-mistaken for the original Markdown.

My point being that this isn't something unique to Obsidian, pretty much everyone does it slightly differently while still calling it "Markdown".
by vidarh | 2025-08-19 11:58:41+00:00
Agreed. Having actually built and deployed an app that could render entirely from XML with XSLT in the browser: I wouldn't do it again.

Conceptually it was beautiful: We had a set of XSL transforms that could generate RSS, Atom, HTML, and a "cleaned up" XML from the same XML generated by our frontend, or you could turn off the 2-3 lines or so of code used to apply the XSL on the server side and get the raw XML, with the XSLT linked so the browser would apply it.

Every URL became an API.

I still like the idea, but hate the thought of using XSLT to do it. Because of how limited it is, we ended up having e.g. multiple representations of dates in the XML because trying to format dates nicely in XSLT for several different uses was an utter nightmare. This was pervasive - there was no realistic prospect of making the XML independent of formatting considerations.