MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frumiousirc | 2025-08-12 11:26:30+00:00
Not everyone participates in the popularity context. By some estimates about 1% of users do: There are about a quarter million popcon responses in Debian's recent popcon graphs. Absolute number of users is hard to estimate but I find one estimate of 20-50 million Debian users. So taking 1% as a lower bound, at least 18k people use StarDict in Debian. I don't know how to guess the number that use StarDict in another OS.
by gambiting | 2025-08-12 11:26:34+00:00
>>If the best thing you can say about the EU membership is there were lots of exceptions, that is an argument for leaving, not staying.

Having the best deal out of all members states in a union is a reason to leave that union? Are you even listening to what you say, or do you just say it so quickly it doesn't process? If you negotiate with your employer to have the best working conditions of everyone at your company, according to you that's the reason to leave - why? You tell me.

>>For example, the UK was originally assured that the human rights principles they'd originally proposed as a vague set of aspirations would never be made into law, because they weren't suited to be law.

Can you give a specific example of a human right principle that wasn't suited to be a law please?
by hnquestion12345 | 2025-08-12 11:26:35+00:00
I think your two points really capture the cycle that I'm stuck in. Being online, and especially on this site, I come across a lot of smart people and interesting projects that they're working on. I convince myself that I also need to make something interesting and usually it's something complex. After it gets complex, I start to see the flaws and start feeling low and lose motivation. I've also noticed this in some of my personal relationships.

I'll definitely check out the videos. Thank you for your insight.
by kazinator | 2025-08-12 11:26:46+00:00
> I can't think of any interpretation that makes sense

Start with a concrete example. A header that is not in our program, or described in ISO C. How about:

#include <winkle.h>

Defined behavior or not? How can an implementation respond to this #include while remaining conforming? What are the limits on that response?

> But header files do not have to have any particular correspondence to translation units.

A header inclusion is just a mechanism that brings preprocessor tokens into a translation unit. So, what does the standard tell us about the tokens coming from #include <winkle.h> into whatever translation unit we put it into?

Say we have a single file program and we made that the first line. Without that include, it's a standard-conforming Hello World.
Show HN: Blozz – A block-puzzle sudoku-like game (yet another)
by deejayy | 2025-08-12 11:28:16+00:00
Drop the pieces on the board to occupy empty space, complete a row/column/3x3 square (highlighted) to make 'em disappear.

Try "zen mode" for more relaxed experiecnce or "tetris mode" if you want to deal with rotation!

No competition, just try to beat yourself every time.
by UK-Al05 | 2025-08-12 11:28:25+00:00
Casey is a game programmer.

In tests in a web application/api, your tests can actually be real use cases quite easily and design your api around real use cases.

How would you do that in a game? Check a frame looks a certain way?

I have done proper testing a puzzle game where the game can be represented by abstract state. But modern 3d rending is hard to test well.
by penguin202 | 2025-08-12 11:28:47+00:00
In Italy under Mussolini's fascist regime, private property was generally respected, but with significant state intervention and control. While private ownership wasn't abolished, the state exerted considerable influence over the economy through the corporate system, regulating industries and labor.

Private Property: The fascist regime in Italy did not abolish private property. Mussolini's economic policy, known as corporatism, aimed to organize the economy through corporations representing various sectors (e.g., agriculture, industry).

State Intervention: While private ownership remained, the state played a central role in economic decision-making. The regime established a Ministry of Corporations to oversee the economy and regulated labor relations through the Charter of Labour.

Corporatism: The fascist regime organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations. These corporations were intended to represent the interests of both employers and employees within each sector, but in practice, they were largely controlled by the fascist state and party members.

Limited Independence: The corporations and labor organizations had limited independence, and the state played a significant role in regulating their activities and resolving disputes.

Influence on Production: The fascist state influenced production and economic activity through various agencies and institutions, such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale (IRI), which held shares in key industries, and the Instituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI), which controlled credit.

As in more regulation (leftist), not less (current admin)
by roscas | 2025-08-12 11:28:50+00:00
I do appreciate this kind of work, don't get me wrong.

But the github page has a link to adblockplus site. That is not acceptable.

adblockplus is a "ad block" (lol!) that "Acceptable Ads are allowed by default".

I will not use the list. Almost every link is for google and duckduckgo. I don't use any of those, nor you should.

So what to do? Use LibreWolf with uBlock Origin and it's default block list.
by al_borland | 2025-08-12 11:28:52+00:00
My assumption is they are built by a developer to solve the problems of that developer, in a way that developer understands, and requires too much knowledge of how it works to make it useful for anyone else.

A guy I worked with made a seemingly awesome tool to solve various problems (builds, cicd, etc). He used it for everything, but when anyone else had to do anything with it, they went to him. No one had the patience to learn how to use it or to learn that they needed to plug into it. He had documentation, but it was very long, so no one wanted to read it; it was also focused on what he cared about, not what users actually wanted. Going into the code was a non-starter. It was over 1m LOC spread across dozens of repos and thousands of files. So people either asked him, or just did their own thing.

I made a little tool to help in an operations job I had years ago. People saw me using it and wanted it, but I knew there were too many sharp edges. I knew to avoid them, since I knew the code. I ended up spending a significant amount of time smoothing out those edges, adding a GUI, making in configurable in said GUI... all if this took way more time than the initial tool I was using. This did get some adoption in our small internal group. If someone is just looking to get something out there to see if there is enough interest to justify development, I'm guessing they aren't making things that nice to use. I was getting paid anyway, so I didn't care.
by ben_w | 2025-08-12 11:28:56+00:00
The only change I would make there is the "to" in "to distract".

On the basis of his behaviour in courts, I recon there's a common cause for performative behaviour and him being a convicted criminal, rather than it being an instrumental behaviour intended to distract. He doesn't behave as if he has a mental model for the difference between "I did a bad thing and should be ashamed" vs. "I am having power struggle and must fight dirty", nor any concept of a lie beyond observing that "liar" is an insult.

This isn't really an improvement, and other people may be playing him in this way for their own power games.
by cmsefton | 2025-08-12 11:29:05+00:00
I've also tried many things over the years.

The problem was always about finding a process that fit with my needs, a process that worked for me, and then having the discipline to stick with it.

I finally settled on bullet journaling. I like books, I like writing, I like journaling, the simplicity and adaptability worked for me. There was value for me in being able to tailor the system to my needs, rather than me trying to fight with UIs that forced me to change, or didn't quite do what I wanted.

If you are resisting or fighting your system, it will fail, regardless of the tools involved. Go with what works for you.
by williamdclt | 2025-08-12 11:29:12+00:00
It's a big problem for the elderlies, it snowballs into serious issues. Don't feel thirst -> be dehydrated -> UTI -> hospital.

And having to be stay at a hospital for a length of time for any reason is very much Not Good for an elderly person. Other illnesses, muscle atrophy, disorientation, loneliness, cognitive decline...
by blame-troi | 2025-08-12 11:29:35+00:00
I've been struggling with this lately. My defaults are either 65 (8 1/2 wide paper, 6 1/2 text, leaves an inch either side for notes and hole punch), 72 (usable card image width), or 80 (because terminal were either 80 x 25 or 80 x 43).

My mainframe indoctrination there.

In terms of screen reading width, there's some sweet spot where characters per screen "page" and characters per line are easily readable without the text being "big". I need to be able to move my eyes left to right without losing track of my vertical position on the page.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-12 11:29:48+00:00
Oh, this is an area I know something about. I work on railway software in my day job.

Broadly speaking you are correct. Expertise like mine is rare and fleeting mostly because you can only really build it long term by working at a company which can convince international clients to take them on. Even large countries tend not to have more than a handful of trains being built on any given day of the week.

This is one place where having a business located in a nation long known for its relative neutrality, calmness and international trustworthiness can pay off. All of the Nordics are good at this, really.
by treetalker | 2025-08-12 11:31:28+00:00
Gall's Law almost always deserves to be repeated and higher up in HN threads, and this is another instance where I wish I could upvote more than once.

Here, Gall's Law provides an accurate explanation for why so many of us have returned to paper, pencil, and brain cells. It is also apropos of your comment's sibling comment regarding how tech folks frequently and mistakenly believe that they can improve on a solution that has worked well for thousands of years of human civilization (e.g., paper + writing instrument + human thought) in just a few weeks. For all the talk of Emacs's being relatively ancient and mature software, handwriting is orders of magnitude more mature and sanded down.

With software to "solve" the problems of thinking, remembering, linking ideas, or deciding what to do … now you have two problems, as we say.
by coldtea | 2025-08-12 11:31:35+00:00
>But you are right that most of the people currently claiming to know what's going to happen in 3 years were fast asleep when chat gpt launched, which is almost 3 years ago. And I include myself in that group. Most in the industry did not see that coming. Not even a little bit.

The researchers responsible for LLMs didn't see them coming either. The architecture is quite basic, if they knew it would have this success they'd do it way sooner as a PoC, even when hardware wasn't quite up to it.
by atombender | 2025-08-12 11:31:51+00:00
Calling undo/redo MVCC isn't really accurate. The whole point of Postgres' style of MVCC is that updates leave the original rows unmodified, which allows concurrent transactions to read them without extensive locking or redirection.

In Oracle's database engine, when transaction A updates a row, it begins by reading the old row, updating it in-place, and adding the old row to the undo log. The heap row has a header with a list of transactions currently accessing that row and pointers into the undo log. If a transaction B comes in (while A is still ongoing) and wants to read the row, it startsby reading the current row header, where it sees that someone else has modified it, and then goes to the undo log to read the old version. (This is all very simplified.)

The huge benefit of the undo log is that the main heap doesn't get bloated with old data. Deletes cause holes, of course, but updates do not. Meanwhile, the undo log can be trivially be truncated when rows are no longer needed. Postgres, since it effectively mixes undo data with current versions, needs to do vacuuming. Postgres may win when there's a huge amount of contention around hot spots, but arguably loses when it comes to "normal" transactional volume.

OrioleDB adopts Oracle-style undo logging, among other table layout improvements, and their own OLTP benchmarks show extreme performance improvement over mainline Postgres.
by camgunz | 2025-08-12 11:32:19+00:00
I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all), and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly usable.

[0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-12 11:32:57+00:00
There's absolutely reason to lose faith in the system, I'm just as guilty of that. At the same time, it has helped me to know that in many parts of the world there's been slides into authoritarianism, and in cases where there's been strong push-back its been possible to reverse it. It's when there's no push back that it becomes worse.

Objectively, it's still possible to fight it and democracy is still a good venture for making improvements.
by lproven | 2025-08-12 11:33:12+00:00
Not on low-end kit.

I cut down Win95 to run from a 16MB SSD in 1996, paid for by PC Pro magazine. I knew that OS inside out.

Around the turn of the century my travel laptop was an IBM Thinkpad 701C, the famous "Butterfly". 40MB RAM and a 75MHz 486DX4.

Win95 was great on it, better than OS/2, but the thing is Win95 had a max of 4 IP addresses. In total.

I had a dialup modem (1), an Ethernet card (2), AOL for toll-free dialup (different stack, so 3) and Direct Cable Connection (4).

Add a different modem or Ethernet card and it couldn't bind TCP/IP to it. No more addresses.

I tried NT 4 but it had no power management, no PnP, no FAT32.

I tried Win2K. Not fun in 40MB of nonstandard (and so vastly expensive to upgrade) RAM.

I tried 98SE. Too big, too slow.

So I cut it down as hard as possible with 98Lite.

(Still around, remarkably: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html )

No IE, no themes, no built in media stuff, no Active Desktop, and it ran reasonably on a 486 in 40MB of RAM.

And it supported more IP addresses!

But it was hard work to get it working, and it was never entirely stable.

No. I reject your statement based on considerable personal experience and benchmark testing.

98 was considerably heavier than 95.

Just look at the ISO files!

95 OSR 2.1 with USB support:

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/osr-21

385MB.

98SE:

https://archive.org/download/windows-98-se-retail

622MB.

98 is a significantly bigger and more complex OS.

Same design, but a lot more stuff piled on top.
by mxuribe | 2025-08-12 11:35:19+00:00
Your approach on "issues" is fascinating! It certainly sounds like you're talking about almost tracking tickets...you know like for a dev or tech support team...Because my experience is that often tickets are not a one-and-done thing. Often enough, they require a little more folow-up, and i myself like to add comments along way towards the progress of completion...so, yeah, your approach sounds alot like tracking tickets...which in itself is NOT bad at all. The only concern is that tracking tickets often requires some pretty robust software/tool...so unless we're talking a kanban, the fear i would have is that the software/tool to use for tracking tickets might be too unwieldy for quick, let's say mobile tracking of progress...though i admit that may wrong on all thre above.
by ben_w | 2025-08-12 11:36:11+00:00
At various points, several western European nations have been "democratic socialist", with varying degrees of success. Not so much of those since the end of the Cold War, but they were generally on the liberal side when it came to personal freedom. For example, the UK — and sure, the UK had The Troubles and all the associated awfulness, and the Empire for some of that period, ditto — the police forces in England, Scotland, and Wales were not (and still are not) routinely armed.
by hnquestion12345 | 2025-08-12 11:36:22+00:00
Recently I have started reading more and picked up artistic hobbies like drawing. I do find that they help a lot. It's hard for me to just keep something a hobby though. Like I think I should post my drawings but they're not good enough so it becomes stressful trying to learn how to draw well. I don't know why it's hard for me to keep a hobby a hobby.

Same thing with development. I see people making cool things and I feel like I should also be making cool things.
by irthomasthomas | 2025-08-12 11:37:34+00:00
You are experiencing the jagged skills frontier. All models have these weird skill gaps and prompt phrasing sensitivity. This is the main problem solved by an llm-consortium. It's expensive running multiple models in parallel for the same prompt, but the time saved is worth it for gnarly problems. It fills in the gaps between models to tame the jagged frontier.

My very first use of the llm-consortium saw me feeding in it's own source code to look for bugs. It surfaced a serious bug which only one out of the three models had spotted. Lots of problems are NP-ish so parallel sampling works really well. Googles IMO gold and openais IOI gold both used parallel reasoning of some sort.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-12 11:37:44+00:00
Never meant to be hostile (if I indeed were, I would have question every single word), but sorry for that.

I mean to say that best practices do help much but learning those best practices take much time as well. So short compilation time is easily offseted by learning time, and C was not even designed to optimize compilation time anyway (C headers can take a lot to parse and discard even when unused!). Your other points do make much more sense and it's unfortunate that first points are destructively interfering each other, hence my comment.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-12 11:38:17+00:00
This asserts that UB was deliberately created for optimisation purposes; not to handle implementation differences. It doesn't provide any evidence though and that seems unlikely to me.

The spec even says:

> behavior, upon use of a nonportable or erroneous program construct or of erroneous data, for which this International Standard imposes no requirements

No motivation is given that I could find, so the actual difference between undefined and implementation defined behaviour seems to be based on whether the behaviour needs to be documented.
by xnoyzi | 2025-08-12 11:38:36+00:00
Had a really interesting call last week with someone who runs a high-volume cold email operation.

He walked me through his workflow — how he scrapes, enriches, and personalizes at scale. But when we got to the tooling part, he paused and said:

“I love Clay, but I’m paying over $300/month just to use custom APIs. It feels crazy.”

That stuck with me.

As someone who’s been building tools for solo founders, that kind of friction hits a nerve. When a great workflow becomes too expensive or limiting, it kills momentum.

So I started experimenting. Nothing fancy, just trying to see if I could replicate the functionality he actually needed, without all the fluff.

Now there’s a scrappy little version up and running. It’s definitely not Clay. But it solves that one pain point, using your own APIs, easily.
by amiga386 | 2025-08-12 11:39:01+00:00
This article smacks of paternalism.

Part of the fun of free software is that it might do terrible things. Debian is not a distro that promises you a walled garden run by an iron-fisted tyrant who beats programmers into submission so they'll respect your privacy

Nothing in Debian will install StarDict invisibly. Only you install StarDict. Only you run StarDict.

Wayland is not a panacea. If you want StarDict to translate everything you highlight/clip, you will tell Wayland to let StarDict do that. If Wayland can't do that, it's bad, paternalistic software. There is Android and iOS for idiots who want to be bossed around by their device and have no real freedom.

The real problem are these HTTP lookups by default, which is the fault of the packager, and Debian as a whole for not prodding them into fixing it.

This bug was already reported and fixed as CVE-2009-2260. Then StarDict was kicked out of Debian, and when it came back, so did this bug. The most recent re-reporting of this bug (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=806960 raised in 2015) was fixed a few days ago by removing the dict.cn plugin, 2 days after Vincent Lefevre raised this issue on oss-security-list. He also raised CVE-2025-55014 for another dictionary plugin that sends HTTP requests, which has also been fixed by removing that plugin.

Both plugins should be removed from Trixie as of today, and more appropriately, all the "network dictionaries" are now in their own package (stardict-plugin-network-dictionary), not installed by default (stardict-plugin suggests rather than recommends it):

Changelog: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/stardict/-/blob/debian/trixi...

stardict (3.0.7+git20220909+dfsg-8) unstable; urgency=medium * remove stardict_youdaodict.so plugin from stardict-plugin package, Closes: #1110370 * split network-dictionary plugin to a new binary package stardict-plugin-network-dictionary * add d/NEWS.Debian -- xiao sheng wen <atzlinux@sina.com> Mon, 11 Aug 2025 10:46:11 +0800 stardict (3.0.7+git20220909+dfsg-7) unstable; urgency=medium * d/stardict-plugin.install:not install stardict_dictdotcn.so, Closes: #806960 * d/rules:Added --disable-dictdotcn option, dictdotcn is not provid server now -- xiao sheng wen <atzlinux@sina.com> Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:09:39 +0800

Control: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/stardict/-/blob/debian/trixi...

Package: stardict-plugin-network-dictionary Description: [...] *Warning* * The query word will send through the network use plain-text in this plugin! * Please do *NOT* selects any confidential data to query dictionary * When enable "Scan" function on stardict, the selected text will sended on the net at once. Package: stardict-plugin Suggests: [...] stardict-plugin-network-dictionary (= ${binary:Version}),
by mmcconnell1618 | 2025-08-12 11:39:01+00:00
There was a time when everyone hand-coded HTML. Then came Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage which promised a WYSIWYG experience. No one would ever need to "learn HTML and CSS" because the tool could write it for them. Those tools could crank out a website in minutes.

When those tools created some awful, complex and slow output, only the people who knew HTML could understand why it wasn't working and fix things.

Vibe coding is in a similar place. It demos really well. It can be powerful and allows for quick iteration on ideas. It works, most of the time. Vibe coding can produce some really terrible code that is not well architected and difficult to maintain. It can introduce basic logic errors that are not easily corrected through multiple prompts back to the system.

I don't know if they will ever be capable of creating production quality systems on par with what senior engineers produce or if they will only get incrementally better and remain best for prototypes and testing ideas.