MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-09-22 00:16:03+00:00
It's dangerous. This is awful.

Any coding construct that can cause defects is an antipattern. Your language should discourage defects by design. Especially if the faults crop up at runtime.

This struct field dereferencing is like NULLs and "goto".

Language design that is anti-defect yet ergonomic include the modern Option<T> and Result<T, E> as seen in languages such as Swift and Rust, with first class destructuring that doesn't make it painful to use. They're almost impossible to misuse, yet feel convenient instead of frictionful. Rust's sum types and matching are another set of examples. Hopefully these patterns spread to more languages, because they're safe and convenient.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-09-22 00:16:52+00:00
I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-09-22 00:17:41+00:00
> I worked at a functional / typescript heavy shop where when I had parsed what a complicated set of steps was doing discovered multiple redundant queries and a library that was parsing strings into code. But damn some of those functional paradigms chef kiss /s

And I've worked at a place where the imperative code was crap. Should we abandon all imperative code because I had that experience?

People can write bad code in any paradigm - that's not what decides how we should code.

Nobody says we should throw away all imperative code because of one poorly implemented code base. But for some reason I see that targeted at FP all the time.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-22 00:17:59+00:00
The battery allows you to bring a weight-saving device; your phone.

It can - within reason - replace maps, guidebooks, emergency satellite beacons, a camera, a secondary flashlight, etc.

You can, if you want, go out with your pockets stuffed with high calorie emergency rations and no pack at all. The weight savings will be tremendous, but at a certain point the tradeoff for weight over comfort and utility becomes too silly.
by _cxy8 | 2025-09-22 00:18:03+00:00
1. I don’t know how familiar you are with Suburban America, but it’s far from simply a place for affluent people. You do know people escape places like NYC because of the high cost of living right? What do you think an apartment in your average safe neighborhood in NYC vs. the average safe Jersey Suburb costs? And what kind of amenities do you think you get for that price? Now stretch that comparison to other suburbs of smaller cities and it’s a stark difference. Your description of the affluent suburbanite vs. the poor city dweller is reductive and untrue. Living in desirable American cities is very expensive. In actuality many people leave cities they love, because to have a similar lifestyle as they would in the cheaper suburbs would require them to be inordinately well off.

2. You can complain all you want but we live in a democracy. Your idea of “fairness” and “paying your share” would have to be voted on. And the populous would have to agree with your view of the world. Good luck with that.

3. Your view of a disjointed America where people are city folk or suburbanites is not how the country operates. People move about freely. You may live in the city and vacation “upstate” for a break. Or live in a suburb and commute into a city for work, paying city taxes, etc. It isn’t as disjointed as you presume.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-22 00:18:23+00:00
I linked this elsewhere on the page:

https://www.amazon.com/ChefsChoice-EdgeSelect-Professional-S...

I have one, I use it on my knives every 1-2 months. My knives will last decades rather than "lifetime" but I don't care... they're always sharp and I don't have to work at it. I can buy new knives.
by fathermarz | 2025-09-22 00:18:32+00:00
I can understand the frustration, however, part of the skills you have acquired should be taught and shared within teams you work with. Such a skill is meaningful, but the ability to pass on that skill to Juniors is more important than the skill itself.

I am not quite a fan of the “professional software development” elitism in some posts like this because it points to me vs you or highly skilled vs unwilling to learn, which I have found to be not true.

Also to say “attention to detail” while also having grammatical and spelling mistakes in a blog post is kind of poignant.
by zb3 | 2025-09-22 00:18:49+00:00
Touchscreens in general are not my thing and I hate having to use them.. I'm only using two fingers at most because I need to hold the phone.. I think we can do better.

I really hope smart glasses will put an end to the smartphone era and we'll realize how much smartphones sucked.. I want to be able to type in the air just like I'm typing on a keyboard right now, similar thing with with a mouse - like a laptop but you can use it everywhere.

Google Glass didn't make it, but maybe Meta can make it this time.
by Blackstrat | 2025-09-22 00:18:51+00:00
No, the US is not becoming autocratic. The media coverage is different because they are anti-Trump, but every administration has done "autocratic" things. Trump isn't unique, merely more bombastic and open about them. Obama, Biden, Clinton, both Bushs, etc. have all done things that we'd view as autocratic if we had been aware of them at the time. Quit worrying and enjoy life. The AI bubble should concern you more than Trump.
by blinded | 2025-09-22 00:19:09+00:00
Part of the issue is that the wedding market it just outrageous. The average cost of a wedding or attending one is out of control. The industry has done a good job marketing it. Social media "keeping up with the joneses" or comparisons is not helping either.

It adds yet another piece of pressure so I'm not surprised that less people are jumping head first into it.
by dlubarov | 2025-09-22 00:19:32+00:00
> Germany was still launching ballistic missiles at England a month after Dresden.

Just in the past 24 hours, there were rockets launched from Gaza toward Ashdod - https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-rockets-fired-at-ashdod-id...

> hamas has no real military capacity to do much anymore

They're still in control of a significant minority of Gaza territory. "Destroy military assets and get out" can sometimes be a useful strategy, but it's a pretty short term solution.

> what goals they want to achieve and why

The goal seems to be occupation of the entire strip, to make it difficult for Hamas (and PIJ etc) to operate effectively.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-22 00:19:38+00:00
As we were taught in entoptic studies, these are not elements of a proto language, they are externalizations of the occipital/retinal that both reference the brain and reference space - together.

They are the basis for a spatial language of topological parts that have yet to be realized but does integrate with the plastic arts. ie are these the source of pictograms as language? Probably not. Is there are continuity with Kurgan or Chinese ideograms? We can't find them. Is there a continuity between counting tokens and alphabets? Yes, there's a stronger case for that.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23890291/
by credit_guy | 2025-09-22 00:19:50+00:00
I find your problem to be much easier than the problem faced by a typical language learner. Mathematics literature uses quite a small subset of a language, and in many languages math authors use a lot of equations, which are quite language agnostic.

One way to tackle this problem is to just get started with an LLM. You ask ChatGPT for example, to translate for you, and then you try to figure out what word correspond to what word and keep going. After a while you will need the LLM help less and less.

Who am I to tell you this? I only read math in my native language, and in French and English. But once I wanted to do some calculations using Gauss's Theorema Egregium, so, out of curiosity, I picked up both the English translation of Gauss's original publication, and the original Latin text. I was able to understand sufficient Latin to figure out what Gauss was saying and to find out that the English translation has a bug.
by stevage | 2025-09-22 00:20:09+00:00
>ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed

Yeah I've had that one a lot. Or, it's a real option that exists in a different, but similar product, but not in this one.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-22 00:20:23+00:00
I don't see any mention of the Theia Impact theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis - of the Earth/Moon system's formation.

Whether or not Theia was the cause - having a fast-spinning Earth and huge satellite in a low orbit* make Earth's situation profoundly different from that of Venus.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#System_evolution for starters
by scorpioxy | 2025-09-22 00:20:58+00:00
You're not the only person, but it depends on what it is I'm trying to do. Reading on a phone for example is possible but it's a struggle due to smaller screens. Trying to write anything besides a few words for a short email is an exercise in frustration. Games are not enjoyable due to the exclusive touch interface and small screen and so on. Calendar, task list and communication are what phones do best though. There are some specific mobile applications that are also very useful for me.

I think when phones started morphing into computing devices(aka "smartphones"), functionality was being shoved into them that didn't quite fit. Things started to change when the UI/UX process for mobile software was re-considered and the builders walked away from the desktop UI/UX but on phones to what we have today.

"Hate" is a strong word though. I tend to use separate devices for separate functions and stopped trying to find an all-in-one device. That made it OK but I tend to use only a few apps on my phone or tablet compared to others.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-22 00:23:25+00:00
At the very least, the Go authors have been convinced this should be a feature since the Plan 9 C dialect[1].

[1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/comp, look for “anonymous structure or union” and note that a (different) part of that extension has since been standardized.
by lossolo | 2025-09-22 00:24:09+00:00
I get the optics point but the policy substance is narrower than the headline and there are ways to keep it from becoming the "unconditional victory" you’re worried about. Recognition is not equal to a blank check.

> The Hamas and the people that celebrated October 7th in the West will celebrate this as a victory and for a good reason because of the timing (in fact, they already did...).

Some will. But policymaking can’t be held hostage to who posts what on Telegram. The question is whether the net effect shrinks Hamas’s political space so give non Hamas Palestinians a credible horizon and resources only if they meet benchmarks that Hamas refuses. That’s how you break the militants monopoly on results.

> However, they recognized a state while the previous position was that they would not recognize one until an agreement is found with Israel.

Because the last 30 years show waiting for perfect conditions just entrenches the status quo. Recognition now creates a legal/political anchor (Palestine exists in principle), while the capacity to exercise that sovereignty is earned. It flips the incentive so reformers can tell their own street, "we can actually deliver borders/freedom if we keep Hamas out and meet X, Y, Z..."

> What happens when Hamas or an a similar faction kill any reformist and take back control for example?

Then you haven’t "rewarded" terrorism, you’ve precommitted the world to a two state endgame while keeping teeth so you freeze benefits, tighten sanctions and preserve the political baseline for the day spoilers weaken. That’s still better than the current loop where only hardliners can claim momentum.

So I’m not hand waving the risks. I’m arguing that recognition + hard conditionality + security guardrails gives you a strategy, not a hope. It separates Palestinian national rights from Hamas’s fate, creates leverage over the PA and builds a path where spoilers lose material advantages the moment they act like spoilers.
by stevenalowe | 2025-09-22 00:24:54+00:00
from the article -

"Two reviewers independently selected studies with high-concentration THC defined as greater than 5 mg or greater than 10% THC per serving or labeled as “high-potency concentrate,” “shatter,” or “dab.”"

Two reviewers who apparently knew very little about THC dosages.

"Ninety-nine studies (221 097 participants) were included...; more than 95% had moderate or high risk of bias."

Or cared about evidence quality.

Who funded this?

"Primary Funding Source: Colorado General Assembly, House Bill 21-1317."

Ah. The People of Colorado. I wonder if they know?
by Reason077 | 2025-09-22 00:25:16+00:00
> "Wow, that does look very neat for an Apple charger. The prongs are individually foldable, right?"

Better than that. You just move the biggest (earth) pin and the other pins fold automatically with it (in the opposite direction!), via a perfectly weighted/sprung mechanical linkage. It's a very smooth, elegant, robust action. Whoever designed it should get some design awards!
by yencabulator | 2025-09-22 00:25:24+00:00
Interestingly enough, this is the only mention of scoped_guard in Documentation/. I will definitely argue that (that part of) Rust is way more approachable.

Using device-managed and cleanup.h constructs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Netdev remains skeptical about promises of all "auto-cleanup" APIs, including even ``devm_`` helpers, historically. They are not the preferred style of implementation, merely an acceptable one. Use of ``guard()`` is discouraged within any function longer than 20 lines, ``scoped_guard()`` is considered more readable. Using normal lock/unlock is still (weakly) preferred. Low level cleanup constructs (such as ``__free()``) can be used when building APIs and helpers, especially scoped iterators. However, direct use of ``__free()`` within networking core and drivers is discouraged. Similar guidance applies to declaring variables mid-function.
by nomel | 2025-09-22 00:26:13+00:00
You're assuming the manager will dictate the design/work, without feedback. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never seen this in a technical setting, unless the manager was actually contributing to the technical work. The sorts of managers that micromanage and dictate like that don't last in technical environments, because they limit the teams technical ability to their own, and their ideas never make it past technical meetings/design reviews when others are involved.
by BirAdam | 2025-09-22 00:28:13+00:00
I’ve hated “smart phones” since the dawn of the iPhone. I rather enjoyed the Palm Pilot and thus the Treo which married a Pilot with a cellular phone, but for me, that was the limit. I would sync it with my Performa, just as I had done with my Pilot, and it was great.

I think the general idea of a smart phone isn’t too bad, but I hate what they’ve become. The idea of a general purpose, hand-held, computer packed with sensors is great. That these amazing tools are hampered by restrictive software, have no general purpose OS, and are generally used to generate addictive behavior and drain people of time and money… not so great.
by OJFord | 2025-09-22 00:28:59+00:00
All these Cambridge alumni with this dodgy Latin, 'smh'! You're an alumnus, or identifying as an alumna! (Identifying as many alumni at a stretch, but then still not 'a Cambridge alumni'.)

(alumnus not of Cambridge, but from a state school, fwiw)

('people called Johns, they go the Cambridge?!')
by btilly | 2025-09-22 00:29:01+00:00
You seem rather less informed on the topic than you think.

To start, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city will verify, the switch in the USA to car-centric cities began in the 1920s. By the 1930s, about half of American households had cars. And American cities were being reshaped by this. After the war, the automobile industry did conspire to remove public transit to improve profits. However this was on top of a giant car-centric housing boom, and already wide existing infrastructure changes. Which all contributed.

The American experience stands in stark contrast to Europe. In pre-war Europe, cars were only a luxury item for the rich. Germany's early success came in part because it was more mechanized than the rest of Europe. But even so, about 80% of all of Nazi German logistics was by horse. They were absolutely unprepared for what happened after the USA converted car manufacture over to tanks and airplanes. With the result that the USA quickly outproduced the rest of the planet combined. (Though, to correct a common American misconception, the most important military use of American equipment was by Soviet soldiers.)

After WW 2, Europe's manufacturing increased rapidly. And yes, cities did become more "car centric". Including Amsterdam. But even "car centric" Amsterdam was nowhere comparable to the average US city. By the time the 70s rolled around, car ownership was still well behind the USA. Yes, new construction was planned for cars, but there was a lot less of that than in the USA. And the core of various cities, including Amsterdam, was still built to the old scale.

The scale that the core of a city is built at, matters. Even in the USA it matters. The USA has many cities that were highly populated before cars. Particularly Manhattan. By and large, they remain walkable today.

But cities that were constructed almost entirely after cars, such as Los Angeles, are car-centric to an extent that simply never has existed anywhere in Europe. No, not even in the bad old days of "car centric" Amsterdam.

And so, I stand by my point. I'm someone who has visited multiple countries, and has lived in a variety of cities. I've lived both with and without a car for various stretches of my life.

Take any city in the world that is an example of a good place for living by mass transit and bicycling. At no point in its history was it anywhere near as car centric as the average US city. And that is true whether you compare to how car centric the US city is today, or to how car centric it was back when the other city had more cars.

So lay off on "car centric Amsterdam". It's an argument based on comparing apples and oranges. It was never even remotely comparable to the average US city.
by Jensson | 2025-09-22 00:29:09+00:00
They were making large overreaches and censorship, thinking anything else also makes you a person from this book.

This report was written when Biden was still in power, it details how they did pressure companies to censor material and not just friendly suggestions:

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...

Authoritarianism getting dialed up and voters having less power is bipartisan, this cannot get fixed by just changing one side. As long as democrats keeps ramping up republicans will feel like they have to ramp up as well, and vice versa, democrats ramp up since they feel republicans ramp up. You can't get out of this by just changing one side.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-22 00:29:27+00:00
I’m sympathetic to parts of the Go design philosophy, but the only thing that comes to mind looking at this is “damn, that’s some awkward (nominal-looking) syntax for (structural) intersection types”.

(It also feels to me that this sort of anonymous embedding is materially different for interfaces vs structs, though I admit that from a type-theoretic perspective it’s not.)
by yencabulator | 2025-09-22 00:30:12+00:00
#define guard(_name) \ CLASS(_name, __UNIQUE_ID(guard)) #define CLASS(_name, var) \ class_##_name##_t var __cleanup(class_##_name##_destructor) = \ class_##_name##_constructor #define __UNIQUE_ID(prefix) __PASTE(__PASTE(__UNIQUE_ID_, prefix), __COUNTER__)

Yeah Rust wins this one hands down, without breaking a sweat, and without really even noticing there was a competition.
by layer8 | 2025-09-22 00:30:13+00:00
The primary point was that the code doesn't ensure correct processing (or returning an appropriate error) for all JSON. Even if behavior is defined by the C implementation, the overflow can lead to parser mismatch vulnerabilites, if nothing else. There are likely other "defined" failure modes the overflow can enable here.

UB was a secondary observation, but it also can lead to logic errors in that vein, without involving memory safety.

I'm not sure I agree that UB usually leads to memory safety violations, but in any case, the fact that signed integer overflow is UB isn't what makes the code incorrect and unsafe in the first place.
by billy99k | 2025-09-22 00:30:25+00:00
"The economic contract of marriage has shifted, and now young people are looking for financial stability before the wedding"

This is just an excuse. Nobody ever had financial stability before a wedding in the past. Everyone I know had parents and grandparents that were dirt poor when they got married (including my own).

I've been hearing about financial woes since 2000. I remember in 2005, people were complaining about how impossible it was for a single person to get an apartment. I got one this year on a below-average salary in a nice city.

In 2015, I remember hearing it was impossible to buy a house by anyone that isn't a boomer. I bought a house later this year (I'm not a boomer).

Even now, I keep hearing about people sending 900 resumes out (which doesn't make sense, if you are only looking for jobs in your industry) and only receiving a few call backs. I was looking for extra work earlier in the year and I sent out 20 resumes and got 10 call backs.
by mtmail | 2025-09-22 00:30:49+00:00
I've used https://bigbluebutton.org/ and https://jitsi.org/ in browser (Firebox) this month and they were "good enough". I rarely do conference calls, much less than a typical FAANG employee. Most of my frustration with Zoom, Team, Google Meet is their complexity. They also seem to keep changing, open too many notifications, try to get me to download something. Again, I rarely use them, only if a customer or partner company insists.
by wredcoll | 2025-09-22 00:31:18+00:00
> Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.

Do elaborate on how exactly you tell if someone is a "native brit"? Who qualifies for such an honor?
by olivia-banks | 2025-09-22 00:33:23+00:00
The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.
by rcxdude | 2025-09-22 00:33:28+00:00
>You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early

To some extent, but one of the things about it that I liked was the course I was on was more general than most other English universities. But still, it's not as broad as e.g. a US university, so it's pretty relative. (Basically, for engineering the curriculum is basically 'all engineering' until the second year, where you then can pick specific modules to go into specific areas. Natural Science and Mathematics are similar. But, relevant to your point about burnout, they didn't really cut anything from each area compared to other, more focused courses, so the workload was definitely intense). For me it was a perfect fit because I knew I wanted to go into engineering but I didn't really have a strong preference for which type (still haven't really given up being a generalist).