MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saltcured | 2025-09-20 16:32:50+00:00
Is this a bit of chickens coming home to roost as far as developer culture forgetting how to work with cross-compiling toolchains? When I started my career, it was common understanding that the developer may be manipulating sourcecode on a different system and/or platform than where it will be executed.

Our source control, editing, compilation, and execution was understood to happen in different computational spaces, with possible copy/staging steps in between. You were doing something very naive if you assumed you could execute the built program on the same system where the sourcecode files existed and the editor/IDE was running.

This was a significant fraction of the build rules we used to manage. E.g. configuration steps had to understand that the target platform being measured/characterized is not the same as the platform executing the build tools. And to actually execute a built object may require remote file copies and remote program invocation.
by tankenmate | 2025-09-20 16:33:10+00:00
I'm sure you are aware, reading between the lines of what you said, why, but for some others who aren't aware of the history of git; it was originally about 50% C and 50% Perl, the performance critical parts were written in C and then various git commands were written in Perl. Over time almost all the Perl was removed because there were less Perl monks than C devs.

Now it would seem the logic is reversed; even though there are less Rust devs than C devs, Rust is going to replace C. Maybe now that git is large enough and entrenched enough such a move can be forced through.
by Zanni | 2025-09-20 16:33:31+00:00
Depends enormously on the implementation and use case. My daily driver is a Tesla Model 3, which has a big, beautiful touch screen. But I almost never touch it while I'm driving. Anything I need to control can be handled by voice command ("set temp to 70") or the scroll wheels in the steering wheel. (The one irritating exception is the windshield wipers.)
by ncr100 | 2025-09-20 16:34:03+00:00
Touchscreens are like "secret handshakes":

When driving I may need to fine-tune a setting in a range, OR seek a specific touch- or switch-point amongst a field of identically sized levers or buttons.

My solution is to seek an anchor point with my hand while other fingers do the work. I like hanging my hand on physical knob controls, e.g. for volume, in a non-input direction and without motivating force to change the underlying value.

The problem with anchoring is that my arms jiggle like bouncy bridges, when driving over any kind of bump. This external force disrupts my solution. It can be somewhat solved by tighter grip on the knob or non-input region of the control.

Additional problems come from having touch-screens - they create an extra physical problem of reducing the anchor-safe areas on the dashboard.

And, I workaround touch-screen's problem of "need to anchor" vs "can't touch without committing to change" by tenting my hand on dead-zones of the screen, or around the bezel or surrounding non-input surface.

So touchscreens, for me, add complexity to using the vehicle as a tool to accomplish the deed. Like "secret handshakes" are to greeting.
by lucasoshiro | 2025-09-20 16:34:25+00:00
> Normal users who have to install the Rust toolchain to build a previously simple piece of software do not count.

"Normal users" would just install the same way they already do today without bothering about the toolchain.

"Normal users" who want to build by theirselves probably won't find it too difficult. Given the size of Git it's incredibly easy to build: just install the dependencies and run `make`.
by kylecazar | 2025-09-20 16:34:27+00:00
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section?"

This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise.

Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job
by Validark | 2025-09-20 16:34:58+00:00
Intermernet said, "Posting critical blog posts [...] is counter-productive."

You said, "anybody [...] can write whatever they want". "They are under zero obligation ...". "Members of the Zig project are free to reach out ..."

Do you not realize that you have not at all addressed the point about what is the most productive way to criticize?

All you have done is go off about people's rights, freedoms, and lack of obligations. But nobody actually said "People shouldn't be able to post critical blog posts" or "People are obligated to participate by filing issues or contributing code to open source". So what was the point in saying this? Do you think people believe anything contrary to what you said?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-20 16:35:17+00:00
<< But this is too heavy handed

Is it really? Given the current salaries for AI talent ( or whatever future most desired skill sets are ), 100k seems like a decent enough spot to do the following:

- keep the program limited to what it was intended to do ( bring in the best people in, keep US competitive -- on tech, not on low wages ) - keep populace in a state, where they don't see a reason for a leadership change

Unless, of course, that is not what the program is used for ( and anecdotally, that take does not seem that far fetched ).

So my overall response is: good. Frankly, this made Trump's election worth it.
by ranyume | 2025-09-20 16:35:37+00:00
A piece of information, or the answer to a question, could exist in the documentation but is not in a format that's easily readable to humans. You ask the AI to add certain information, and it responds with "I already added it". But the AI doesn't "read" documents the way humans read.

For instance, say you need urgent actions from other teams. To this effect you order an AI to write a document and you give it information. The AI produces a document following it's own standard document format with the characteristic AI fluff. But this won't work well, because upon seeing the urgent call for action the teams will rush to understand what they need to do, and they will be greeted by a corporate-pr-sounding document that does not address their urgent needs first and foremost.

Yes, you could tell the AI how to make the document little by little... but at that point you might as well write it manually.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-09-20 16:35:40+00:00
TVs are the archetype of of why hedonic adjustment is necessary. Your $1000 OLED TV is better than your $1000 CRT TV, but it's not even the right comparison. Every TV on the market today, even the bargain basement ones it never even crossed your mind to buy, is better than your $1000 CRT TV. We've hedonically adjusted, so it's hard to believe - is it really true that the "huge" "high definition" CRTs our cool friends had two decades ago were 720p and <35 inches? But yes, it is true.

Consider a more concrete example. In 2005, a 40 inch 720p LCD panel cost $3,500 (https://slate.com/culture/2005/09/it-s-finally-time-to-buy-a...). Today, that same panel in 1080p is $100 at Best Buy (https://www.bestbuy.com/product/insignia-40-class-f40-series...).
by amluto | 2025-09-20 16:35:49+00:00
What about physical buttons off the wheel? A well-designed car might have quite a few: window controls, sound system volume knob, temperature up-down, etc.

In my first car, I could operate the windows, climate control and sound system without taking my eyes off the road at all, although I had to glance briefly at the (fixed) display to see what radio station I was tuned to if it wasn’t obvious.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-20 16:36:48+00:00
Yes, no way that any of this isn't finely calibrated to cause maximum misery. I was on the wrong side of the border when 9/11 happened, for months a whole chunk of my life was in limbo. Thanks to giving my bookkeeper emergency power of attorney in just such an eventuality we managed to squeak through but if not for that bit of foresight I'm not sure if we would have.
by nine_k | 2025-09-20 16:36:58+00:00
If you're in a tight VM and are running Redis inside it, as opposed to a separate VM / cluster, you need an embedded DB, not Redis.

You can use the ancient BerkeleyDB which is supported everywhere for last like 30 years. Or a more recent LevelDB. Or even SQLite which is plenty fast on simple queries.

You'll have to tolerate the high latency of safely writing tings to a block device, compared to RAM. If your load is mostly reads, it should be OK.
by mariusor | 2025-09-20 16:37:11+00:00
For me personally, and I've never read Dickens in original English, it reads quite well. It's perhaps showing its age, but with a definite character and recognizable style. I'd call it a good piece of literature, and frankly would make me read more of the author, if his general choice of subjects wouldn't be so anachronistic and uninteresting for me personally.
by bendmorris | 2025-09-20 16:37:39+00:00
I've noticed AI generated docs frequently contain bulleted or numbered lists of trivialities, like file names - AI loves describing "architecture" by listing files with a 5 word summary of what they do which is probably not much more informative than the file name. Superficially it looks like it might be useful, but it doesn't contribute any actually useful context and has very low information density.
by the_af | 2025-09-20 16:38:04+00:00
Some are funny, but not ridiculous.

For example,

> for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.

This isn't absurd. It is currently thought that the stripes are NOT for camouflage, since simulated predator vision (such as lions) cannot resolve them. It is believed that one reason for the stripes could be to act as a deterrent against flies (how exactly, not sure).

In this sense, testing whether it works on cows isn't absurd!
by bloppe | 2025-09-20 16:38:41+00:00
Actually, the Rust toolchain makes cross-compiling way easier than any other fully-compiled language I've ever used. There are like 100 different platforms you can target by just setting the `--target` flag, and they all pretty much just work on any host platform.

Sounds like the real issue is that some Git developers have ancient, rigid requirements for their own development machines.
by Kon5ole | 2025-09-20 16:39:08+00:00
>Use a better setup!

Even if you only use your own computer, customizing the basics is a bit of a trap in many ways.

First you need to find a different setup that is actually better, not just different. Then you need to build muscle memory for it, then you need to never use any other computer because they will not have your setup.

I think getting good at using the defaults is better than changing the defaults. Basically learn to play the guitar, even if it's hard.

I customize things too, but take care to make it additive, not transformative. Aliases, plugins, better software and such are fine, but messing with my muscle memory is just not worth it.

>Also, there are no such symbols even on standard setup

That depends on the standard. In some countries you need two hands to type an @, just to take one example. For US english the numpad is a good example though. Not so easy to find the home keys from the numpad, but your hand passes the arrow keys on the way. :)

>why did you ignore the F6, numpad+ etc hand dance and only focus on the arrow keys?

Because I'm mainly making a counterpoint to your claim that using hjkl was better than using the arrow keys.

It has admittedly grown to a more general anti-bikeshedding rant fuelled by my own bikeshedding regrets - so I better stop here. :)
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-20 16:40:18+00:00
And with Apple’s brain dead idea to project interactive widgets that were designed for the iPhone onto CarPlay, it’s gotten less safe.

No matter what you think about Apple’s “wall garden” for safety reasons Apple use to be very strict about the interface for CarPlay apps and responsible app developers were thoughtful about their CarPlay interface.

Now developers widgets will end up on CarPlay even when they didn’t intend it.
by siavosh | 2025-09-20 16:40:31+00:00
Yeah I think if ethics are involved it has to be based on intentions and hence choice. Accidentally stepping on a few million microorganisms is probably ethically ok. Building your civilization in the “enslavement” of gazzilions of microorganisms might be more ethically discussion worthy. I do wonder how plants are different than microorganisms if at all since obviously we farm and eat them.
by max1990 | 2025-09-20 16:41:16+00:00
Completely agree. A manual sales process is a huge friction (per the CEO's comment above it takes more than 50% of startups over a week to buy tldraw!). And no visibility into scale pricing is a risk no company should take.

It's a great product - charge for it for sure - you need to be comercially viable. BUT, imho it's madness to make it so difficult to buy and have opaque pricing. It's a path to stagnant reliance on a handful of big customers while somebody innovates from under you and takes the market. Comfortable for a while, and then no business.
by snowwrestler | 2025-09-20 16:41:22+00:00
It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave.

Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?
by zdw | 2025-09-20 16:41:42+00:00
IMO, docker layering over the OS's built-in package management and update lifecycle in an incompatible ways is far worse than systemd replacing the init system and other service management functionality.

Back in the old days (late 90's, early 2k's) as a sysadmin I'd often write scripts to chroot or in other ways isolate services rather than run them as root, so extending the init system to handle those features feels like it's a logical extension, not a incompatible replacement.
by gtowey | 2025-09-20 16:42:20+00:00
Agreed. The OP's declaration that this is a difficult read pretty much proves the point of the article.

Especially if you were entering university as an English major, it seems like table stakes to have a conceptual understanding that not all English is going to be in simple, modern terms. That is you're going to be reading books from a variety of time periods and cultural origins, you might need to develop an understanding of those sources.
by latch | 2025-09-20 16:44:16+00:00
I ... don't disagree with you. Thanks. It helps my understanding.

I know this is moving the goalpost, but it's still a shame that it [obviously] has to be a runtime error. Practically speaking, I still think it leaves lot of friction and edge cases. But what you say makes sense: it doesn't have to be unsafe.

Makes me curious why they asserted instead of erroring in the first place (and I don't think that's exclusive to the zstd implementation right now).
by 3036e4 | 2025-09-20 16:44:26+00:00
What I like about seeing a project support a long list of totally irrelevant old obscure platforms (like Free Pascal does, and probably GCC) is that it gives some hope that they will support some future obscure platform that I may care about. It shows a sign of good engineering culture. If a project supports only 64-bit arm+x86 on the three currently most popular operating systems that is a red flag for future compatibility risks.
by theropost | 2025-09-20 16:44:34+00:00
Interesting point about touchscreens..I think it highlights a bigger issue with “safety” features sometimes backfiring. For example, that relentless beeping when the passenger seat detects weight but it’s just a backpack or groceries. I wonder how many drivers have been more distracted trying to silence the alarm than they would’ve been just ignoring the bag in the first place. Feels like we’ve traded one kind of risk for another. Do they really research this, or is it more of a gimmmic
by turkishdelight | 2025-09-20 16:44:39+00:00
I guess I'm primarily concerned with compromised firmware, not a special-made device. I'm not sure how realistic of a concern that is. Not that I'm a very interesting target, but I'd rather not have all my devices infected with malicious firmware. I figure that something like that would likely have state-level backing, and something that sophisticated could very easily get baked into brand new hardware at the fab without anybody knowing.
by ajross | 2025-09-20 16:44:57+00:00
> No, it doesn't. It's an ordinary reading of a common idiom

But not the only reading. Which you seem to agree with because you dodged that point. So if there are two interpretations, one offensive and one not, surely you agree that the reasonable reaction is just to discuss things like adults, right?

And not for the FCC commissioner to go out in public and threaten an unconstitional censorship of political speech, right?

Because you agree that Kimmel could have been innocent of the terrible crimes he was accused of.

Look, I'm not telling you that you aren't angry. I'm telling you that you're letting your anger lead you into some very scary places. Because those same tools can destroy Hannity too.
by felipec | 2025-09-20 16:45:06+00:00
That's what wokeness does to open source projects.

I was banned from the RubyGems project by simply saying "no satisfactory resolution from the development team".

Now woke people are walking away from RubyGems because Ruby Central wants to align with DHH. I say good riddance.

Software should be about technical merit, not ideological agendas.
by sebtron | 2025-09-20 16:45:10+00:00
Right, I never mentioned that I am a decently experienced C developer, so of course I got my fair share of buffer overflows and race conditions :)

I have also learned some Rust recently, I find a nice language and quite pleasant to work with. I understand its benefits.

But still, Git is already a mature tool (one may say "finished"). Lots of bugs have been found and fixed. And if more are found, sure it will be easier to fix them in the C code, rather than rewriting in Rust? Unless the end goal is to rewrite the whole thing in Rust piece by piece, solving hidden memory bugs along the way.
by elemeno | 2025-09-20 16:45:28+00:00
I’ve been building a tool to help with this - Safety Evals In-a-Box [https://github.com/elemeno/seibox]. It’s a work in progress and not quite ready for public release, but its a multi-model eval runner (primarily for safety oriented evals, but no reason why it can run other types as well!) and includes cost and latency in it reporting.
by majormajor | 2025-09-20 16:46:24+00:00
> If yt-dlp is used by a small minority of users, why would Google be antagonistic to it?

The concern is likely that if they let it become too easy the small minority becomes a large majority and the ad business becomes unsustainable.

Consider the ease and adoption of newsgroups in the early 90s vs Napster/Limewire later and the effect that had on revenues.
by toast0 | 2025-09-20 16:46:25+00:00
I've built a hobby OS around BEAM... BEAM doesn't require a whole lot from the OS, I built a minimal kernel that runs a single process, which you could consider a unikernel or at least very close. I had originally wanted BEAM in ring 0, but I had a lot of trouble getting started. This way, I can just use a pre-compiled BEAM for FreeBSD and don't have to fight with weird compilation options. Anyway, with x86-32 at least, I can give my Ring 3 process access to all the ioports and let it request a mmap of any address, so the only drivers I need in the kernel are IRQ controllers, timers, and pre-beam console. Once beam is up, console i/o and networking is managed from erlang code (with a couple nifs)
by nayak | 2025-09-20 16:46:28+00:00
This series was in response to another thread [1] which wanted to make rust mandatory in an upcoming release.

The authors proposal was to instead take the middle ground and use rust as an optional dependency until a later point of time where it becomes mandatory.

The later point of time was decided based on when rust support lands in gcc, which would make things smoother, since platforms which support gcc would also be included.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.1980.git.git.1752784344.git...
by marcuskaz | 2025-09-20 16:46:36+00:00
Sorry, but he takes it too far. McCarthy's omission of punctuation makes his books difficult to understand who is saying what, and a challenge to follow especially with dialogue. The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what. It is a choice and the art form he's choosing, but is far from writing for clarity.
by feoren | 2025-09-20 16:47:01+00:00
Your advice is completely un-actionable. "Learn the gestalt?" Do you mean the principles of gestalt design? Because half of those are entirely about designing clever logos, not about making useful UX. If designers spent less time gooning over the FedEx logo, everyone would be better off. The remaining principles are good to understand, but all the challenge is in applying them for specific cases.

Or do you mean: simply understand all of human psychology and design UIs that work for everyone? That seems to be what you're saying, but both are impossible. Nobody really understands human psychology, especially those who think they do. Show me a psychology finding that is applicable to UI design and I'll show you a study of 30 college freshman that doesn't replicate. And you cannot design a UI that is intuitive for everyone; people are too different, and the "average person" literally doesn't exist.

So what exactly is your advice? Know everything and apply that knowledge appropriately for your specific situation? React and Kubernetes have clear documentation, tutorials, and canonical ways of doing things. UX design has a couple of clever books. The analogue of "just learn good UX design" is not "just learn React", it's "just learn how to write readable, maintainable, clear, performant code everywhere." It takes decades.
by nickdothutton | 2025-09-20 16:47:25+00:00
Once upon a time I worked for a UK firm which could have been a competitor to Palantir, in fact... if Palantir's product could be framed as "next gen" the UK firm had the "previous gen" product(s). They had existing, reliable, but old product, all the right three letter agency customers, revenues in the several 10s of millions of pounds per year back as far as the early 2000s. Zero management interest in making the next gen product or in drastically improving (rather than incrementally improving) the tech underneath. Some of my brighter colleagues were so aggrieved by this that they quit to build something themselves, some just complained and eventually got bored and quit, some are still in the rusting hulk.

Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ. All I'll say is I met Karp once, face to face, in Palantir's very early days. The UK firm didn't have a Karp.
by altairprime | 2025-09-20 16:47:40+00:00
> Every single sports car would make a horrible and painful 500 mile drive.

> If you aren't disagreeing about the wrong car physics, then about what? That a 911 can be a comfortable drive? Shocking revelation.

I didn’t think it was a particularly shocking revelation, I’m just disproving the “Every” claim above. I see now that we’re in agreement on the invalidity of it — I assume a “Porsche 911” is a sports car to you, as it is to me? — so I’ve nothing further to add.