MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by panny | 2025-09-21 17:48:31+00:00
There's the old saying, there are three types of people. Dumb people never learn from their mistakes, smart people learn from their mistakes, and wise people learn from the mistakes of others.

I try to choose wise, even if someone will later throw shade on me for not being "self reliant" or some other insult of the day. If my goal is to write a better libcurl, then that's what I'll work on. But that's basically a solved problem and working on that doesn't seem like the best use of my time.
by mindcrime | 2025-09-21 17:49:28+00:00
Old Mozilla / Firefox with XUL / XPCOM[1] was probably about as close as you get. If you were willing to use the low-level interfaces, you could change just about anything as far as I can tell. But that led to security issues and issues with maintaining comparability when there was a need to change those low-level interfaces. So Firefox largely moved away from XPCOM and blocked extensions from calling XPCOM interfaces.

That said, AFAIK Pale Moon still allows use of XPCOM. And I think Seamonkey may be the closest remaining browser to the Mozilla of old. I believe you can still use all of the XUL/XPCOM stuff there, but don't quote me on that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey
by layer8 | 2025-09-21 17:49:46+00:00
Why don’t you look at the source code, it’s only 150 lines?

The nesting is limited by using an int as the depth counter. The C standard guarantees that MAX_INT is at least 32767, so that’s a limit on portable nesting depth. Nowadays int is typically 32 or 64 bits, so a much higher limit in typical C implementations.

If I see correctly, the library doesn’t check for overflow, however. This might conceivably be an exploitable vulnerability (and such an overflow would constitute UB).
by Amezarak | 2025-09-21 17:50:12+00:00
Constitutional amendments by fiat: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/17/biden-dec...

Assassinated Americans with drone strikes: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-were-the-4-us-citizens-kill...

Lied to the courts to imprison Twitter users: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.967...

Used intelligence agencies to spy on Congress: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief...

Expanded mass surveillance: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov...

EO declaring that some laws would not be enforced on favored demographics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DACA

Ordered social media companies to censor and ban users: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...

Locked people down unless they were protesting for approved causes: referring to the BLM protests

> engaged in politically motivated prosecutions of their enemies. Another reference to the Mackey case and the novel legal theories required prosecute Trump in NY, and the now known to be false constructiion of the Russia narrative.

Look, many or all of these things may have been for a good cause, a good end. But the problem we're talking about is the means. Now people are using the same means for different ends. Everyone has to agree authoritarianism is bad even when it’s for really good ends or this will continue to escalate.
by ghostpepper | 2025-09-21 17:50:27+00:00
This is a cool site. For anyone who doesn't feel like clicking, the top overall is Carnegie Mellon. There are three from China in the top 10, the other seven are American. ETH Zurich is the first outside of China/USA at number 12.

However if you select only AI, Carnegie Mellon drops to 3rd and only two of the top ten are outside Asia (mostly China but also National University of Singapore and KAIST in South Korea).
by retrochameleon | 2025-09-21 17:50:30+00:00
I'm a fan of the browser becoming a sandbox for much more than "documents". It has the most developed, flexible, and powerful UI system ever, it established numerous standards that pervade modern software development, and it's already available as one of the most cross-platform standard utilities.

If the browser sandbox is a reliable cross-platform sandbox, the potential to develop and distribute software is huge. Progressive Web Apps are awesome because you can visit the website and use it normally, and then click a button to "install" the website to your device. If designed correctly, the website can work offline. By doing this, you get free distribution, automatic updates, no app stores, an excellent platform to develop an app on top of (the browser), etc.

I think PWAs are the future, but the web platform still has some ways to go. There are numerous amazing examples of what you can accomplish with PWAs in their current state, though.
by Asraelite | 2025-09-21 17:51:01+00:00
https://tech.nextroll.com/blog/dev/2022/11/11/exploring-mona...

The thing that always makes FP concepts click for me is seeing them explained in a language that isn't Haskell or similar.

I don't know why people are so obsessed with using Haskell for tutorials. Its syntax is a nightmare for newcomers and you can do FP in so many other languages.
by Amezarak | 2025-09-21 17:51:34+00:00
> where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives.

This is manifestly untrue. The government directly prosecuted people for their social media postings and ordered Facebook and Twitter to censor people, among many, many other acts.

> The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence,

You are able to believe this because the government and the chattering classes were so efficient in their control of the narrative that their abuses were institutionalized as the norms: people that were punished were so bad we didn't question the idea they were extremists or Nazis, and even when the government clearly overreacted, the reaction was largely tepid because complaining too loudly would seem to empower the wrong people. Now that populists have reacted, we're all shocked. That's on us to be responsive democratically, or these things will continue to happen.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-21 17:51:56+00:00
They demand that the children of adam go back through the wardrobe and stop killing the giants.

They also affirmed their ongoing calls for the white witch to thaw her statues and condemned the arrival of spring which according to the leaders of the goblin hordes created adversial conditions for them. "we are well adapted to winter, and the arrival of summer gives hope to our enemies". Read their official statement.

While concerns mount about the fate of the centuars and the sapient horses, the white witch is in the middle of constructing her 15th winter palace. "i think we should be focusing on more important things, like ensuring the supply of food so that my palace can get completed. Just because i've declared perpetual winter for the last 3 centuries doesn't mean we must starve. My team is in negotiations with Aslan and our demands from him are clear. We want him to surrender himself so i can murder him. I was here since the beginning, who is he to tell me what to do? Would you like a Turkish Delight?" she said in response to a question posed to her by our correspondent.

In other news Caloremens Deplorable Word program is close to a major breakthrough according to experts. "we are researching swear words for peaceful purposes only. In order to better train our language models on what to avoid" they insisted. They also denied claims they started the current war in Narnia as a distraction.
by watersb | 2025-09-21 17:52:33+00:00
macOS Snow Leopard almost adopted ZFS.

But a few weeks before release, Sun was acquired by Oracle.

It was going to take months of further negotiations to nail it down. Apple-sourced ZFS on macOS was canceled.

ZFS had been released by Sun before the Oracle Situation under their MIT-like CDDL.

I suppose when Big Tech is involved, they rattle patents at one another until the dust settles with handshakes and payouts all around. I'm speculating here. But I was told that the CDDL was not considered sufficient for Apple to support its own development efforts.

ZFS is relatively complicated, but it generally works. At the time, Apple was shipping servers with iSCSI SAN and a GUI comparable to Disk Utility.

Really a shame. I was running native ZFS on my Mac Pro that summer. Eventually migrated those pools to Open Solaris and eventually to Linux.
by dionian | 2025-09-21 17:52:51+00:00
As a Scala/FP newbie, i was stuck in this rut for years then i just stopped caring. it actually doesnt matter to me much. ZIO helped due to the eschewing of mathematical terms (compared to things like Cats ). In other words, you don't really need to know to get things done. Monads are incredibly intuitive once you start composing them.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-21 17:52:51+00:00
The entire purpose / point of this book is that the overly-oppressed majority is easily susceptible to becoming "NAZIS," and why National Socialist mentality ought to be actively DISCOURAGED.

But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies.

Good work /s

If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...
by 8organicbits | 2025-09-21 17:53:09+00:00
> system's security in any way depends on the randomness of a database private key

Unlisted URLs, like YouTube videos are a popular example used by a reputable tech company.

> UUIDv7 has 6 random bytes

Careful. The spec allows 74 bits to be filled randomly. However you are allowed to exchange up to 12 bits for a more accurate timestamp and a counter of up to 42 bits. If you can get a fix on the timestamp and counter, the random portion only provides 20 bits (1M possiblities).

Python 3.14rc introduces a UUIDv7 implementation that has only 32 random bits, for example.

Basically, you need to see what your implementation does.
by _hark | 2025-09-21 17:54:38+00:00
I'm a researcher at Oxford, and I've both taught and studied here and in the US.

The undergraduate teaching here is phenomenal. It's incredibly labor intensive for the staff, but the depth and breadth students are exposed to in their subject is astonishing. It's difficult to imagine how it can be improved.

My favorite study of university rankings comes from faculty hiring markets, which compute implicit rankings by measuring which institutions tend to hire (PhD->faculty) from others. [1] It's not perfect, but at the very least it's a parameter free way to get a sense of how different universities view each other. The parameters in most university rankings are rather arbitrary and game-able.

Some have pointed to things like contextual admissions [2], and more broadly some identity politics capture of the administration for declining standards. While this might be true, in my view Oxford is still far more meritocratic than US institutions on the whole. There are no legacy admissions, and many subjects have difficult tests which better distinguish between applicants who have all done extremely well on national standardised tests (British A Levels are far more difficult than the SAT/ACT/AP exams.)

Lastly, admissions at Oxford are devolved to the individual colleges, of which there are ~40. The faculty at each college directly interview and select the applicants which they will take as students. This devolved system and the friction it creates is surprisingly robust and makes complete ideological capture more difficult.

The most pressing issue for Oxford's long-term viability as a leading institution, in my view, is the funding situation. For one the British economy is in a long, slow decline. Secondly, even though Oxford has money, there are lots of regulations/soft power influence from the British govt to standardise pay across the country, which makes top institutions like Oxford less competitive on the international market for PhD students, postdocs, and faculty in terms of pay.

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005

[2]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
by layer8 | 2025-09-21 17:54:52+00:00
The library doesn’t check for signed integer overflow here:

https://github.com/rxi/sj.h/blob/eb725e0858877e86932128836c1...

https://github.com/rxi/sj.h/blob/eb725e0858877e86932128836c1...

https://github.com/rxi/sj.h/blob/eb725e0858877e86932128836c1...

Certain inputs can therefore trigger UB.
by giantg2 | 2025-09-21 17:54:53+00:00
Yes, and the article explores none of that. Complaining about stress from rent being high would be much more palatable if they explored those types of things, or simply didn't mention it at all. Instead they focus on the stress being from high rent vs from the reasons you point out. The way they use that quote makes it seem like they didn't read or understand the larger text, but just cherrypicked what fit with their narrative.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-21 17:55:13+00:00
> Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought

Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland).

The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset.

Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy.

And I say this as an Ivy grad.

To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact.

Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-09-21 17:55:54+00:00
It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.

People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the value of your output (hence why we have more of a "laborer" market than a "labor" market), let alone sharing that value back to you as is typical with UGC contracts. It's disappointing to see that kind of elitism here.

edit:

When you pay for ads/boosted content instead, all contemporary platforms have tried hard to make the paid ads look convincingly like “organic” content for long enough for the content’s hook to land - just look at X, Reddit, TT etc.

At least with “organic” promo, established accounts have a reputation to preserve or foster when they choose what promo work aligns with their audience and their values. As a consumer I can usually evaluate how much to trust a creator too by how scrupulously they choose their promo.

With paid ads I know I am just seeing it because they were the top bidder for my attention and that the only reputation protection from the platform is to avoid particularly criminal or other extreme content.
by Dwedit | 2025-09-21 17:56:31+00:00
Back in 2001, ATI got in some hot water after it was revealed that they intentionally blurred all textures (used a lower resolution mipmap) if you were running Quake 3 Arena. Changing all strings from "Quake" to "Quack" (including renaming the executable) disabled the degraded mipmaps, and improved the graphics (and reduced framerates).

https://web.archive.org/web/20190728022442/https://techrepor...
by calebh | 2025-09-21 17:56:43+00:00
In my experience the main benefit of functional programming is function purity. I am completely fine with mutation inside of a function since the all of the mutation logic is self-contained in a single small block of text.

I think everyone should take a shot at writing a non-trivial functional program to see the benefit. Once you understand what makes it great, you can apply what you've learned to the majority of OOP/impure languages.
by 93po | 2025-09-21 17:58:37+00:00
We have a legal system that allows for private agreements of restricted speech, which can be and is frequently abused by the party in a position of power (in this case, a 2 trillion dollar company). And these agreements are enforced by the government. So it is in a round-about way the government infringing on rights, both by allowing it to happen and also enforcing it.
by grayhatter | 2025-09-21 17:59:24+00:00
> An officer could potentially wear their identifying information in a manner that is obscured or difficult to read.

Yeah... but they could also not wear a badge. I doubt that'll fly

> or other device which bears clearly on its face the identification number or name of the officer.

Any reasonable court would find that wearing a badge in a manner that obscured the number or name would not be "clearly wearing" said badge. Is the officer an ethical person who makes a good faith attempt to follow the law they're hired to uphold, and will the court be reasonable are both questions that don't change what the law clearly expects and requires.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-09-21 17:59:54+00:00
According to this post, technological stagnation via regulation is what leads to zero-sum, totalitarian societies (in Thiel’s worldview).

I personally feel so little connection to this ideology, especially in the post-COVID world. Wanting things my neighbor has occupies nearly zero space in my mind. I drive a 10 year old car that was not fancy when I bought it, and although I could afford to buy a new one, even a fancy one, I just. don’t. care.

Freedom is the only thing that motivates me, and Thiel’s worldview sounds like slavery. His totalitarianism is an inability to personally privatize more of the world than his neighbor. My totalitarianism is obligation to participate in that world.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-21 18:00:46+00:00
Youth services has been hiding the names of their employees for more than a decade now. A few years back the final shoe dropped: now kids aren't even allowed to know the name of the judge that took them away from their home anymore.

They cite, of course, the same argument ICE makes: threats against them.

Is that legal? Well, their theory is that any kind of "family law" proceeding (including convicting minors of crimes, and locking them up without access to family or schooling for years) is considered civil law. Therefore none of the normal legal rights apply. I would think this is trivially a violation of the constitution, especially because it comes to imprisonment, but clearly it is not, since the justice department has no problems doing it. A child can be locked up for a crime (up to when they get 27 years old, yes, not 18, in some states), even if the present proof they didn't do it. The very, very, very basic legal right to not get convicted of a crime that you didn't do is openly violated by youth services. Right to have a trial? Nope. Right to having the state prove their case? Nope. Right to not get locked up without cause? No. Etc.

Needless to say, this was promptly exploited by some states who gave kickbacks to judges who "delivered" juveniles for private detention facilities. When caught doing this, the justice department promptly declared nobody had done anything wrong (except one of the judges who, in addition to having thousands of kids locked up for money, had lied on his taxes. He was never actually imprisoned, and finally pardoned by the president)

Oh and in case you don't know: locking minors away from school? Yes. Youth services does that. Parents aren't allowed to do that. Schools aren't allowed to do that. The police isn't allowed to do that (minor gets arrested, and wants to go to classes or do your homework? Police has to make it happen). Fucking death row isn't allowed to keep a minor out of school. But youth services IS allowed to do it.

So a secret police in the US? This is not new. What's new is that immigration enforcement started doing it on a large scale.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-21 18:00:52+00:00
It remains one of the minor curiosities of digital modernity that every recipe blog insists on beginning with a 5,000 word ethnography of the Hugo Spritz, SEO-optimized invocations of Tuscan terraces, grandmotherly hand-gestures, and the precise terracotta shade of sunset, only to resolve in instructions amounting to little more than "insert beverage into rectum."

Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.

There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.

And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-09-21 18:01:31+00:00
> 1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.

Mission accomplished? In real life everything has a paywall. I much prefer a supermarket to the modern internet. I know what I'm getting, I know what I'm paying for it, I can pay cash, and when I walk out it's over. I can see the cost upfront, I can compare different suppliers, I can buy in bulk: I know what I'm getting and what I'm paying.

I hate the "$0" internet.
by mentalgear | 2025-09-21 18:01:32+00:00
> unlike Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee never read about Bush’s memex. He built a system that connected people like never before—but made little effort to facilitate the connection of ideas. There are no trails on the World Wide Web—instead, there are misattributed quotes, dead one-way links, constant plagiarism scandals, and widespread misinformation and mutual distrust. It’s often said that we’re living in a ‘post-truth society’. The words we write and videos we share have become entirely unmoored from the ideas underlying them. Strangely, the Web has facilitated more disconnection than was ever possible before.

> Ted Nelson, in his own oblique and dodgy way, predicted the failure mode we’re now seeing: “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” We built our global information-sharing system quickly, efficiently, and technically, when we should’ve treated it as a philosophical and aesthetic puzzle as much as a computational one, and built carefully and precisely.

Agreed: nothing is more important than the foundation that you built, especially if it may make or break society.