MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yzydserd | 2025-09-16 05:38:14+00:00
Is there data behind that or is it just anecdata?

A year ago someone on HN said “I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365562

My guess is you’re both expressing truths of your individual social circles but making unjustified extrapolations to an entire nation.
by KronisLV | 2025-09-16 05:38:19+00:00
See: multi MB downloads to display a few forms in a browser. Software that can’t work well with literal GBs of memory (some of it being a full browser runtime for some desktop forms). Games that run bad thanks to UE5 coming preloaded with footguns that ensure almost every developer will ship games that run poorly. Operating systems that run worse than a decade ago for even the parts that are functionally the same (e.g. a file explorer or start menu).

I sure love the smell of Wirth’s law in the morning - smells like my PC melting.
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-16 05:38:56+00:00
I feel the author could do more to separate “restaurants” from “takeout”. These are surely two very different market sectors. Johnny’s Pizza might have a couple of bar stools and chilli flake shakers but they’ve always been 90% focused on delivery. Chez Johnny on the other hand has always been about an in-house bistro dining experience. Ghost kitchens were always about the former.

The author touches on margins being eaten up by the delivery hegemony which feels like a much more important point. The handful of online ordering marketplaces are the app/play stores of this part of the economy and I can believe that they are far too greedy and powerful. Yet would the economy tolerate a much more diverse marketplace for connecting cooks, drivers, and customers? One of the only things holding the whole system together is shitty drivers and crappy kitchens being weeded out by the major marketplaces. If drivers could just hop between apps there would be no way to filter out the rogues?

They also bring up quality issues with packaging and delivery. To that extent, food delivery feels like healthcare where one cannot reasonably be expected to shop around for a surgeon to see your legs back on. When you order a meal you can’t just hope for the best knowing that if the food arrives cold and demolished then you’ll be able to get a refund and try somewhere else! Regulation here would help: your municipal certificate could not only rate food hygiene but also your ability to hit a reasonable p99 turnaround from order to order-up!.
by tetha | 2025-09-16 05:41:41+00:00
> Only bad experience I remember from Java was the int/Integer primitive/object issue and boxing.

Heh, I once had to work in a code base that used an `Integer premiumDefenseLevel`. It contained the level of premium defense a player had purchased, or null if the player didn't have any levels of premium defense purchased in the recent times.

This was in fact annoying to remove, because a 0 after a 1 was treated differently than a null some time for advertisement reasons: Someone who had bought premium defense in the past is more likely to re-buy than someone who didn't, so they are pestered with ads. But it eventually turned into a neat little domain object.
by nananana9 | 2025-09-16 05:41:58+00:00
> the int/Integer primitive/object issue and boxing.

That's a deal-breaker. If you can't tie together a few values in a record/struct without being forced to box them/heap allocate them, the language will never be used anywhere where you even remotely care about performance.

This is not a difficult problem to solve - C# did it in a very elegant way with structs, and as a direct result, probably for half of all videogames written today, the gameplay portion is written in C#.
by foogazi | 2025-09-16 05:42:05+00:00
No - Here is a charitable way to read it:

The Koreans are not responsible for the cruelty US immigration imposes on its victims- it’s not their country or fight.

It’s US internal affairs and laws, Korea is involved only in looking out for its own citizens.

The Hyundai workers were still working for and being paid Hyundai - so they didn’t “need” to skirt US immigration law.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-09-16 05:42:18+00:00
[Not the OP] Massive Attack is (was?) amazing but their live shows aren't.

I attended one in Paris this year. Not only it was exactly the same show as few years ago including the decorations and the scrolling text wall but the sound was horrible. I couldn't hear anything.

I would be better off if I just stayed home and listened to the recording.
by mrexroad | 2025-09-16 05:42:55+00:00
Restaurants / cafes in Japan have less fixed cost overhead than in the US. Zoning, licensing, insuring, etc. in Japan are more conductive to small shops being able to stay afloat with only moderate business. There’s other factors of course, but those are biggest ones I found when exploring potential for small side project. With that said, I have yet to run a bar/cafe in either country, so my experience is limited to my research.
by hmry | 2025-09-16 05:44:10+00:00
The fact that you have to explain what classes are, and what static methods are, a huge load of information, for a hello world program. And what's worse, it will leave students rightly confused about what the point of the class is, if it only has static members... Making it more likely they don't retain any of the information. Or alternatively, just say "type it exactly like this, don't think about what the magic words mean" which is a great way to ruin programming for people
by imiric | 2025-09-16 05:44:45+00:00
When a project has thousands of users it's irresponsible to use it as a testing playground. If there is a legitimate benefit from rewriting something in another language, which is rare to begin with, the decision should be researched thoroughly and committed to. Doing it this often signals that authors easily latch on to shiny new tech, and value their experience over their users'. When the next modern language comes along, will we see a similar post explaining why they chose to abandon Rust?
by vkazanov | 2025-09-16 05:45:04+00:00
Oh, I do remember the narrative: OOP is amazing but Cpp is not pure OOP let's make the OOPiest language possible.

I also remember casts all over the place in Java because polymorphism wasn't OOP enough.

And then lambdas and functions were not OOP enough to be first class values and that's why we needed numerous "verb-classes" everywhere.

And of course printf() is not OOP enough...
by toast0 | 2025-09-16 05:45:42+00:00
The NES light gun works with the properties the CRT provides... Roughly what happens is ... When you pull the trigger, the next frame is all black, and then one frame per target with a white square for the targer. If you're on target, the photodetector (photodiode? photoresistor?) will make a step change when the beam hits the white square, and the game code is looping to detect that. If the light comes late, it won't count; if it's not a big enough change, it won't count. If the screen was too bright during the black frame (or you were pointing at a light the whole time), it won't count.

Most modern displays are going to show the square too late, some might not be bright enough.

If you have an LED matrix and the right driving circuitry, you could probably replicate the timing, and that might work too, but I've not seen it done.

More details and options for LCDs https://www.retrorgb.com/yes-you-can-use-lightguns-on-lcds-s...
by riffraff | 2025-09-16 05:46:03+00:00
The goal is go make java easier to learn for people new to programming.

When they start with the old style there is an overload of concepts where the teacher just have to say "ignore all this", which is not ideal. With new style they grasp fewer concepts at first.

I'm not truly convinced this is such a big deal, but I lived through my university switching from Pascal to Java in the first programming class, and I can confirm people did get much more confused during the first few classes (to be fair they got way less confused later not having to deal with pointers tho).
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-16 05:46:08+00:00
this one. Java is far from the worst out there. I've used MuMPS and know of the horrors of TCL, but Java is once of those languages where everything takes 5x more more code than it should, and the result always feels ugly.

part of my dislike is probably that I'm a math person, and the lack of operator overloading really makes any math not using the built-in types dreadful to read.
by rottc0dd | 2025-09-16 05:46:30+00:00
From my previous comment in hn:

As a java guy and think python is weird, I don't think this sucks.

But, I also agree that can serve as terrible intro to programming if you start programming right away without understanding the basics of abstractions. But, often when we have tools either designed for a purpose in mind or a dominant paridigm or reaction to existing set of tooling, this can result in understandable yet extreme abstractions.

Java is designed with OOP in mind and it kind of makes sense to have the user to think in terms of lego blocks of interfaces. Every method or class needs to have clear understanding of its users.

public - software handle is for all users

protected - software handle for current and extending classes

default - software is exposed to current package

private - software is restricted to be used in current class alone and nowhere else

So, the beginning of java programming starts with interface exposed to the user or other programmers. Is it weird and extreme. Yes. At least, it is consistent.
by yallpendantools | 2025-09-16 05:46:57+00:00
> this is something you learn like day 1 on learning java, and it's something you write once in a blue moon, like 0.001% of the code you are going to write.

I think this is the exact audience for this change: for newbies in day 1 of 10 years in their programming journey. Less boilerplate to just swallow, less time spent debugging an otherwise-fine lab exercise if not for the wrong instantiation of Scanner, more time actually focusing on the basics they should be focusing on.

Granted, I still think Java is a horrible first language to learn from or teach with but this is a step in the right direction. Might revisit this opinion in a few years, who knows.

Oh also, we use Java in production so we also have a bunch of ad-hoc "scripts" written in Java for mostly one-off interactions. Nonetheless, these scripts can get unwieldy fast. You'd think I'm exaggerating the benefit here but I, for one, welcome one less level of indentation in these scripts.
by sfink | 2025-09-16 05:47:01+00:00
It's a callout to the concept of "dramatic tension". See also all the talk of stories, movies, etc.

https://fiveable.me/key-terms/introduction-creative-writing/... is as good a source as any.

To me, friction is more negative. It's always there and it only serves to slow things down (by definition!) Tension can be released, and in fact creates anticipation for the release.
by drysart | 2025-09-16 05:47:08+00:00
Browser are much better, but directly manipulating the DOM is still extremely slow compared to manipulating Javascript objects; and perhaps even more now than a decade ago it's fraught with performance traps that differ from browser to browser and even between successive versions of the same browser.

That hasn't changed in the past decade, and it's not going to change in the next decade either because the DOM has to make certain API guarantees that simply can't be optimized away. It'd take a significant change in how the DOM API works to even get close to achieve performance parity with a virtual DOM. (Like being able to tell the DOM to completely defer layout until you tell it that it's okay to continue.)

It's simply much more reliably performant to have all your DOM touching be done in a single batch during a virtual DOM diff resolution than it is to touch it and update it piecemeal as your application's components all mutate their own elements on their own schedules.
by antonvs | 2025-09-16 05:47:49+00:00
When you first learn programming, you don't know what a class is, or a method, let alone a static method.

But if you teach people using Java, you have to teach them to write this:

public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello world"); } }

...instead of just:

print "Hello world"

The latter is easy for a student to understand. With the former, you just have to tell them to use it without understanding it, and that they'll understand it later.
by ranger207 | 2025-09-16 05:47:53+00:00
SSH most of the time of course, and a management interface (iDRAC, iLO, etc) if you have an enterprise server; otherwise an old monitor and spare keyboard. Sometimes they'll support serial out that you can use over a cable to another computer instead of the whole monitor+keyboard combo. Or nowadays you can use a network KVM like a PiKVM, NanoKVM, or JetKVM
by ggm | 2025-09-16 05:49:42+00:00
Good explain. Thanks. Also fascinating. In Oz, far more women than men get D3 and calcium looked at, because they're prepped for (peri)menopause drops in bone density. But, with dietary shift and the anti cancer sun issues, I think old people in general need to talk to their GP about it.

The SAD thing, and MS also come up. I think the SAD one is covered by your mood disorder and the need for context. I didn't see MS well covered?
by optionalsquid | 2025-09-16 05:49:52+00:00
The original FASTA/Pearson format and fasta/tfasta tools have supported 'N' for ambiguous nucleotides since at least 1996 [1], and the FASTQ format has to my knowledge always supported 'N' bases (i.e. since around 2000). IUPAC codes themselves date back to 1970 [2]. You can probably get away with not supporting the full range of IUPAC nucleotide codes, but not supporting 'N' makes your tool unusable to represent what is probably the majority of available FASTA/FASTQ data

[1] See 'release.v16' in the fasta2 release at https://fasta.bioch.virginia.edu/wrpearson/fasta/fasta_versi...

[2] https://iupac.qmul.ac.uk/misc/naabb.html
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-16 05:50:14+00:00
I completely agree with your point about food quality being borne from the economic incentive of protecting an initial investment.

However, I always thought the DYBOOPs and BIPLOZAs of this world existed on Amazon because of a glut of Chinese manufacturing expertise outpacing any ability to do proper branding and marketing. My QSMYYUYE grill stove, CYEER steel plates, and SUNYAY telescopic bug sprayer are all well made and reasonably priced commodity objects.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-16 05:50:22+00:00
In general, Java made OO design trivial to implement, but due to a clear specification standard requirement a lot more planning/time is needed.

Thus, many sub-optimal project coordination approaches ended up fighting the design patterns. Java is a good student language, but there are so many better options now... with fewer footguns, and without Oracles farts. =3
by flakes | 2025-09-16 05:52:54+00:00
> I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit

Not to invalidate your experience, but you shouldn’t need to memorize too much to use the common command line tools (although it does always help to have more experience using them).

I recommend always keeping a second terminal session open, purely for referencing man pages. You should be able to see most options easily, or be able to grep for the instructions you need.

The tight integration between documentation within the CLI, coupled to the exact software version you have installed, helps immensely when invoking CLI tools.

For the common linux tooling, found in most distros (e.g. coreutils or common busybox ops) the documentation in man pages is quite excellent.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-16 05:53:45+00:00
If it's going to a web3 filesystem from which I can't delete it then it's not really "mine". Just like my account/data here isn't "mine" so I can only treat it as a throwaway. My accounts on Twitter and Reddit were mine enough that I could delete all of my content before leaving them. That's a non-negotiable.
by throwawayben | 2025-09-16 05:53:59+00:00
the best author-read audiobook I've listened to recently has been Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky[0]. He did a really good job and I would never have guessed it was the author himself. As you say, it's a very different and difficult job.

[0] https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0CMXTZZN2
by teo_zero | 2025-09-16 05:54:49+00:00
I'm lost at the first line of code:

char buffer[64];

And then it's not used anywhere!

I was curious about the "Why not printf" section, but I found code I don't understand there, too. For example this admittedly non-working snippet is cited as idiomatic:

char str[4] = {0}; int cursor = 0; cursor += snprintf(str, sizeof str, "hello "); cursor += snprintf(str, sizeof str, "world!");

Of corse this doesn't work (if the intent was to assemble the "hello world!" string, of which I'm not entirely sure), but not for the reason stated in TFA. You need to actually use cursor, not merely set it! :)
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-16 05:55:46+00:00
Ultimately, it all stems from two things - for one, it's illegal to emit radio waves without a special permit. And secondly, it's also extremely hard to process radio signals at the kind of rates we expect today.

Together, these facts make it so that (competitive) wireless modems require organized businesses to create, and organized businesses don't want to share their code with competitors. A foundation dedicated to creating open hardware and software for a competitive wireless modem would face giant hurdles both in regulatory terms, and in hiring people who can actually work on this extremely difficult technical challenge.

Also, building an open source software for controlling wireless modems that complies with the law is probably not fully possible. Per law, to sell a wireless device, you as the manufacturer are responsible for taking reasonable precautions against users misusing it to emit in reserved bands, or to not respect military device priority in the allowed bands. If every user is extended the rights and documentation for modifying the software as they see fit, you're clearly not taking reasonable precautions to prevent them from breaking the law.
by vintermann | 2025-09-16 05:56:27+00:00
I could have sworn she had been discussed before on HN, but I must have hallucinated it from reading Carl Svensson's article, linked in the article.

But that didn't mention that she had died. Sad, she definitely deserved more recognition when she was alive.

One of the reasons I didn't like the modern cartoony artwork rework for Monkey Island. The original had some really fine pixel art, not least the portraits.
by ozim | 2025-09-16 05:56:39+00:00
I think you are missing one thing. HTML, CSS and ekhm EcmaScript are open standards not owned by any single corporation.

Every other toolkit was not gaining adoption because it was shut down by one or the other corporation owning one or the other system. GTK is mostly irrelevant as it doesn’t do mobile.

Web stuff is best we could get away with circumventing corporate greed and ownership.

Even if we nag technically it could have less complexity - in reality not because all it was required to work around corporate bullshit.
by staplers | 2025-09-16 05:56:46+00:00
Corporations and businesses aren't the only middlemen in traditional finance. The federal reserve, treasury, and/or whatever settlement system (swift), clearinghouses, and networks (visa etc) exist.

As a naive consumer you might not see all the gears but the layers of complexity in traditional finance are vast compared to the bitcoin whitepaper.

I'm still amazed at how deeply this forum of supposed compsci gurus is hoodwinked by groupthink and a few "scam" headlines from info brokers.
by faangguyindia | 2025-09-16 05:58:46+00:00
I don't find multiple agents helpful at all for coding, here you can see i am running a modded aider and single shot most features, https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1nh7bu1/3_ph...

I also use claude or codex but i do not find them much useful for what i do.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-16 05:58:58+00:00
1. Did any of them insource their own delivery? This seems like where they lost most of their money.

2. Did they adopt checklists and double-checking supervision to ensure food-safety, uniformity, and correctness?

3. Did they use quality ingredients rather than the cheapest shit Sysco sold that day?

4. Did they right-hire enough competent, sufficiently-paid staff so that churn wasn't 100% per 4 months?

5. Did anyone there ever run a successful restaurant storefront to multiple-location chain before? (Restaurants of any sort are the hardest, most grueling, tending to be risky businesses around. My grandfather became a mechanic rather than take over his father's French restaurant after going through the trouble of training to become a chef.)

I'm going to make a giant leap and assume most of these were "no" and they failed horribly on execution by focusing on the wrong things.
by mrtesthah | 2025-09-16 05:59:22+00:00
>What they don’t like is going to the grocery story, cooking the same three basic meals they know how to cook...

I personally am not fine being force-fed excess salt, sugar, low-quality oils, and other ingredients over which I have no control, ultimately leading to my risk of death increasing by 50%.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/
by empressplay | 2025-09-16 06:01:56+00:00
When I was a teenager, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom. People would call in at all hours to download (ahem) 'Public Domain' (wink) games off of my Atari 130XE and its array of half a dozen floppy drives. It was kind of noisy, but it always lifted my spirits when I'd hear the drives start grinding.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-09-16 06:02:14+00:00
:-) I didn't use or abuse people for sex. Typical and false accusation of people who misunderstand what that really can be, and besides that in most of the cases I haven't even been the initiator.

Because, yes, I can be, and have been shy, regarding these matters. If you think I've been whoring around and just discarded them 'after use', you are wrong.

Maybe I can be just charismatic and tempting sometimes?

Please don't pray for me, that is just offending and insulting to me. Like that attempted exorcism.

I stand by my words: Christianity (and Islam even more so!) is BS for holding sheeples down. A trapdoor, dead end, cargo cult.

Regarding oral traditions, I'm wondering what you think of the 'Dreamtime' of Aboriginial Australians, the accuracy of their transmissions, reaching back tens of thousands of years?

Or the Akashic Records? (Whoa! So satanic!)
by mrexroad | 2025-09-16 06:02:30+00:00
I’ve settled on swiping up on the (…) button. But yeah, either way I’m bummed that usability had been traded for shiny/trendy aesthetics here. Worst part is that they know and have provided options to have “classic view”/“try new ui” rather than iterating and polishing it to the point it’s substantially improved and there’s no choice but to release it.

Design is a series of decisions. Those decisions should be rooted in a strong, thoughtful, point of view. It’s a problem when the final product embodies multiple points of view; view options should be the extreme exception, not the norm we now see in phone, mail, safari, etc.
by amatecha | 2025-09-16 06:03:02+00:00
No I know but I mean it has actual mp3 encoding errors because the files are getting corrupted over time lol, like it's an issue in the storage medium not the original analog-to-digital conversion :(

Examples in the following file http://bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/Tape1a.mp3 :

0:40, 1:04, 1:13, 1:21, 2:18 ... I mean.. the files are basically ruined :\