MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2025-09-24 10:08:16+00:00
>"referring to a terminal emulator as a console" is not only not perfectly acceptable

To clarify, you don't like it.

>it is downright erroneous on all of the platforms on which Kitty runs

You make it sound like saying something "erroneous" (which of course I don't agree it is) is some kind of magic spell that does something. "Kitty is a console." What, what did that do?

>You are confusing the novices, too.

Uh huh. Literally no one is confused by these terms, you're just disagreeing with the usages. Say to someone "open up an xterm console" and I guarantee you they will understand that you want them to start an instance of xterm, not that you're having a stroke.

>XNU's console is very specifically a serial or video special kernel device.

If a system uses a word to refer to something specific, that doesn't co-opt the meaning of the word. An "XNU console" and a "console" in the broad sense are distinguishable concepts.
by dash2 | 2025-09-24 10:08:31+00:00
I read through this and got to this bit. The first paragraph is DHH. The second paragraph is the author's interpretation.

>> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states

> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.

The quote clearly doesn't "cheer on death via starvation". Given that, I'm extremely doubtful about the author's other claims that DHH is a fatphobe, homophobe, thisphobe, thatphobe.... If the author can be this silly and/or dishonest about something he himself quotes, then why should I trust anything else he says?

I then went and checked one of his links to DHH, which he describes as being "hateful to therapists". Here, check it yourself: https://world.hey.com/dhh/building-competency-is-better-than...

Calling this "hateful to therapists" is just ridiculous. DHH is arguing that there are good alternatives to therapy! There is nothing remotely close to hate in the whole article.

Maybe DHH is actually a total Nazi - I'd never heard of the guy till today. What we can clearly see is that Jared White is either a liar or an idiot.

I'm sorry to see this sort of nonsense still thriving, and it is 100% right that it should have been left behind. More than that - people who slander others deserve to be shamed themselves.
by romperstomper | 2025-09-24 10:08:47+00:00
Well.. my judgment was based on the facts from the article, which are mostly about the amount and sophistication of equipment. I also read more facts from this link posted there as a reference https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-9... - they mention 300 SIM servers and 100K SIM cards which is quite impressive as for me. Also, for some reasons all of this is clustered around the UN facilities (in 35 miles radius). Even if all of this is related to spam only activities this is quite a large investment as for me and that's why I'm not really convinced this is just some "normal" thing to see.
by isoprophlex | 2025-09-24 10:08:49+00:00
> ... going into detail about why cement mixers need to keep rotating so the cement doesn’t harden prematurely

Not to be the well ahkshually guy, but they rotate to keep the cement homogenized. It's a suspension of heavier and lighter materials of varying grain size. If you stop rotating it in transit you dont risk premature hardening so much, it's more that the concrete unmixes.

Even with a spinning container you need to pour it out asap. Can't keep it around for hours and hours.
by gf000 | 2025-09-24 10:09:04+00:00
I mean, CS is famously bad at exact definitions [1]. Why should we have one for what a PL is? Just do what humans have been doing for millenia, how is it commonly used. A tomato is a vegetable from a culinary perspective, and HTML is not a PL based on its use case and its literal name.

[1] what is a low or high level language? Strongly typed language?
by sylware | 2025-09-24 10:09:45+00:00
Proton titles on steam are illegal in tons of countries: there is no official support and real money is involved. Some say there is some special refunding policy with proton titles: well I have not seen any "legally binding" document about a game patch or a proton patch killing your game for good on elf/linux, and that anytime during the life cycle of the game. Only whining when that happens, no official support to turn to.

Basically PROTON = ZERO BUCKS is the only sane way. I am playing proton titles: gacha games which are kind of free-to-play friendly, well... those without 'anti-non-steamdeck-elf/linux' software like ACE(cf WuWa). They have the windows whales to finance them already, and we are only penguins which dislike to be scammed.

But now elf/linux people will be able to buy this game with the legally required official support.

This game is really not my thing, but I'll go back to banging my head against the wall and throwing my keyboard thru the window, aka I am going back to play silk song natively on elf/linux available since day one of its release (well, this is a unity game, then ez).
by anticrymactic | 2025-09-24 10:09:46+00:00
> Be careful. It is trivial for others to take advantage of such selfless kindness.

What harm does is do? Altruistic kindness is not affected by the response. That's the point. Being "exploited" for kindness is not possible, it's not a currency.

> Ingratitude is common, as is sociopathy.

Source? If anything, most anecdotes point to the opposite, gratitude and kindness is extremely common.
by Twey | 2025-09-24 10:10:04+00:00
Definitely a fun alternative-history! It's a nice take to see `Option`s or `Result`s as a step towards logic programming. Typically once you introduce loops you need to have a way to combine `E`s; the way to represent an ordered set of things e.g. to be combined is to return a list of things, and then you're in logic programming world. [1]

[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Logic_programming_example

It's a bit weird to me that the result `not` discards the content of the value rather than just swapping its truthiness (not A?E : E?A).

> The closest thing I’ve seen is fallible expressions in Verse, but those are pretty different because they (i) don’t assign a value to an if without an else, and (ii) involve speculative execution.

Traditional ifs, and the ifs here, also involve speculative execution :) (i.e. execution that happens regardless of which branch you end up on). It's just delimited by the brackets of the if condition (a ‘failure context’ in Verseland). It's true that traditionally logic languages don't assign a value to failure. I guess algebraic effects (of which `Result` can be an example) can be seen as a generalization of failure in that way.

Amr Sabry &a. also have an interesting notion of ‘failure with value’ as the semantics of their negative types: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3434290 , http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4964 (LtU for an older paper from the programme).
by piva00 | 2025-09-24 10:10:31+00:00
> What do we need? Real guidance. That comes from honesty about constraints, the times when your "strategy" was actually just making the best of what you had. It demands admitting that many successful decisions weren't visionary choices but creative responses to circumstances beyond your control.

> But that kind of honesty doesn't get shared or saved on LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

Because honesty is not incentivised nor rewarded, the rewards come to the deceivers, the ones inflating and exaggerating claims to their customers and investors.

It's all smoke and mirrors, founders searching for funding won't get any money from being honest, the same for workers, honesty is not appreciated nor valued during the hiring/funding process, hell, it's not even appreciated in a lot of working environments where being honest would save a lot of headache and waste.

We all need more "real" but there's nothing incentivising for realness, even less within social media where it's all bluster chasing a dollar.
by ziotom78 | 2025-09-24 10:10:39+00:00
I’m a teaching assistant in a C++ course for second-year physics students. The goal is to teach numerical and data analysis, but the course is structured around a very object-oriented style. For example, every function is defined through inheritance:

class BaseFunction { public: BaseFunction(); virtual double Eval(double x) const = 0; };

If students want to integrate or find the roots of a function, they must first subclass it:

class SinClass : public BaseFunction { private: double _omega, _phase; public: SinClass(double omega, double phase); double get_omega() const; double get_phase() const; void set_omega(double new_omega); void set_phase(double new_phase); double Eval(double x) const override { return sin(_omega * x + _phase); } };

Everything in the course (numerical integration, PDEs, Monte Carlo sampling, …) follows this pattern.

The professor is an excellent teacher and students love him. But other faculty worry that our students leave without any real exposure to Python, and that they keep reproducing this heavy OOP style even in situations where a simple lambda or a few lines of NumPy would be far more natural. (Lambdas are shown at the very end of the course, but mostly as a curiosity.)

That’s why I found the blog post so interesting: it shows how natural code can look in Python or Fortran. By contrast, our students’ code is weighed down by boilerplate. It makes me think that sometimes the real difficulty in teaching numerical analysis isn’t the language itself, or whether arrays start at 0 or 1, but the teaching approach that frames every problem through layers of abstraction.
by lm28469 | 2025-09-24 10:11:15+00:00
> This is software’s true purpose.

I assume you missed the whole part where 75% of people use LLMs for porn, AI bf/gf roleplaying, spam, ads, scams, &c.

It's like youtube, in theory: unlimited free educational content to raise the bar world wide, in practice: 3/4th of videos are braindead garbage, and probably 99% of views are on concentrated this.
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-24 10:11:24+00:00
I don't think you've ever talked with someone in manufacturing that's in any way aware how quality assurance works there...

I can understand how you might have that misunderstanding, but just think about it a little, what kind of minor changes can result in catastrophic failures

Producing physical objects to spec and doing quality assurance for that spec is way harder then you think.

Some errors are easy to spot for sure, but that's literally the same for AI generated slop
by dns_snek | 2025-09-24 10:11:33+00:00
> while an hour of active GPT-4 chatting (assuming 20 queries at 0.3 Wh each)

We're not talking about a human occasionally chatting with ChatGPT, that's not who the article and earlier comments are about.

People creating this sort of AI slop are running agents that provide huge contexts and apply multiple layers of brute-force, like "reasoning" and dozens/hundreds of iterations until the desired output is achieved. They end up using hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars worth of inference per month on their $200 plans, currently sponsored by the AI bubble.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-09-24 10:11:50+00:00
This is the decay of the current political discourse.

World views that disparage human beings where previously condemned but the overton window slowly shifted the topic of eg. "degenerates" back into the public. Even though we are thankfully not quite there to talk openly about a final solution (that time might come!).

It started with "edgy humor" and ambigous statements and slowly increased in misantrophy and number.

Ofc it is predominantly the political right that, openly or indirectly, revolves around conservative identity politics and in turn is more susceptible to disgust driven out-group biases.

But this behaviour can be seen on the political left too. As a reaction to the right communicating in dog whistles, they got kind of conditioned on it too and that is IMO the prime motivator of this blog post.

Jared White could have done a better job by collecting more examples of such "hate speech" but to be pedantic here, DHH -- like any reasonable person -- should avoid ambiguity and take a big step back from any ambiguous public communication or at least clarify.

When this open, clear and construstive communication doesnt happen, you can observe stuff like this. Name calling and blame around "banalities". Its just the surfacing part of a bigger conflict, which can be hard to pin point since one side is (intentionally) ambiguous/evasive/ignorant.

Reading DHHs quoted X post is a good example of deteriorating communication:

> @dhh: While the rest of the tech world has mostly moved on from the nonsense of the early 2020s, there are still a few ardent ideologues fighting the last war on Reddit, believing that ridiculous accusations like “nazi” and “fascist” still carry any weight

I wouldnt put a text together, where (1) i am not adressing the other sides concerns, (2) frame them negatively and (3) normalize allegations, others take very serious (nazi, fascism) as wheightless when i am in charge of managing (and uniting) a community. This is a serious red flag.
by doener | 2025-09-24 10:12:18+00:00
tl;dw: Two Tesla shareholders and influencers attempted to drive autonomously from coast to coast in the US. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had announced that this would be possible from 2017 onwards – but it had never been attempted before. However, the journey from San Diego in California to Jacksonville in Florida ended when the Tesla Model Y used caused an accident before reaching the 100-kilometer mark.

Via https://www.golem.de/news/fahrt-endet-nach-100-kilometern-te...
by izacus | 2025-09-24 10:12:58+00:00
When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers.

This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
by jwr | 2025-09-24 10:14:57+00:00
> They still suck at explaining which model they serve is which, though.

"they" in this sentence probably applies to all "AI" companies.

Even the naming/versioning of OpenAI models is ridiculous, and then you can never find out which is actually better for your needs. Every AI company writes several paragraphs of fluffy text with lots of hand waving, saying how this model is better for complex tasks while this other one is better for difficult tasks.
by maikhoepfel | 2025-09-24 10:14:59+00:00
I know a few bikers do something similar as you describe. I want to point out it is not generally accepted truth, e.g. the German ADAC explixitly teaches to keep fingers off the brake until needed. The idea being that if you're surprised by something, you're much more likely to slam the brake, introducing instability or locking up the front. You don't hover over the brake in a car either.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-24 10:15:04+00:00
There's a special irony in this being the top comment on a site where everyone has a rightthink score and people routinely and flagrantly engage in "probably bad faith, but there's plausible deniability so you can't pin it on them" communication to crap on whatever the wrongthink on an issue is.

As bad as facebook and it's opaque algorithms that favor rage bait are, the kind of stuff you get by keeping score is worse.
by rs186 | 2025-09-24 10:15:18+00:00
> Sean proposes that in the AI future, the specs will become the real code. That in two years, you'll be opening python files in your IDE with about the same frequency that, today, you might open up a hex editor to read assembly (which, for most of us, is never).

Only if AI code generation is correct 99.9% of the time and almost never hallucinates. We trust compilers and don't read assembly code because we know it's deterministic and the output can never be wrong (barring bugs and certain optimization issues, which are rare/one-time fixes). As long as generated code is not doing what the original "code" (in this case, specs) doing, humans need to go back to fix things themselves.
by dominicrose | 2025-09-24 10:16:11+00:00
This is unrelated to Ruby and the author is against free speech because he wants to professionaly censor someone because of his work-unrelated opinions.

Plus there are perfectly valid reasons to prefer some categories of people over others. It has nothing to do with hate or fascism, it's only natural.

I'm a DINK (double-income no kids) and I don't feel the hate of DDH, I only see someone who thinks it's worthwhile to be a parent and it's a dead end not to be. It's technically true and you can't argue against that anyway.
by bilekas | 2025-09-24 10:16:34+00:00
> That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable.

Yeah makes a lot of sense when framed like this, the timing of the secret service of all people busting this 'huge' operation was far too suspicious.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-24 10:16:39+00:00
> Scammers hijack the call

How do you do this bit? Is the caller deliberately cooperating, or they think they're using a real service?

I remember calling transcontinentally in the noughties - I would top up an international calls account. If I recall, I had bought a card from a shop with a scratch-off panel. To call first call a local number, then enter my account number. I would pay local rates for the call which were bundled with the contract, so free on the margin, and the call would cost me some pennies per minute from my calls account.

I have no idea how they completed the call, but I was thrilled as it was just before the time when you could just use apps, and the calls would have been ruinous otherwise. For all I know the whole network was a scam. Things like phone cards, money remittance etc, all seem pretty scammy anyway at the best of times.
by modulardevtools | 2025-09-24 10:16:59+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator. I built this because I was tired of the slow, manual, multi-week process of creating System Security Plans at previous jobs. It was a painful compliance task that often got neglected. I built this CLI tool using Python, focusing on a modular architecture to handle the codebase scanning and document generation. It's designed to turn a tedious, high-friction task into a simple, repeatable action. The code is open-source and I'm keen to hear any feedback or answer any questions. Thanks for checking it out..
by akarlsten | 2025-09-24 10:17:22+00:00
The outdoor air isn't really relevant, the issue is human activity (breathing, showering, laundry, etc.) raising the indoor humidity when combined with low indoor temperatures causing surfaces to approach the dew point. Particularly external walls or windows that will be a lower temperature than the room as a whole.

At 70% RH and 15C air temperatures, the dew point is 10C - which could easily be achieved along the exterior walls of an older more poorly insulated house.
by sjw987 | 2025-09-24 10:18:03+00:00
The original advertising for these removal and fix-up features confounded me.

Google ads for camera/Google Photos features were marketing the ability to change the content of the moment being captured, remove things in the background, fit people into the photo who weren't there, add details, change the weather and background.

It made me imagine in the distant future, I would be looking back at false memories. If I made a bunch of genAI photos now and ended up with a neurodegenerative disease, I would be able to fondly look back at memories of myself landing on the moon, winning gold at the olympics etc.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-24 10:18:07+00:00
> My prime conjecture now is that there's some kind of caching reason where it's more advantageous for their CDN if those handful of songs are the only ones that're played.

It's far more sinister than this. It has to do with royalties. They've got some secret algorithm that will even cut your account off from specific content if it's expensive and you consume it too frequently.

I find no issues listening to pop cult shit 24/7/365, but when I want to listen to some obscure opera more than 3 times it inevitably starts to fade out like a ghost.
by edent | 2025-09-24 10:18:59+00:00
Have you read his blog post about London? The one where he praises the racist convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon? The one where he described the violent march as being full of "normal, peaceful Brits"? The one where he stirs up ethnic tension by talking about "rape gangs" from one minority (despite the stats not backing up his assertion)? The one where he lavishes praise on an obsessive trasphobe?

What do you think he is trying to do if not incite violence and hate?
by vidarh | 2025-09-24 10:19:27+00:00
> Secondly it seems to me that applying something like Turing equivalence to things which are not computer programs is a category error which leads to him talking very obvious total nonsense.

Turing equivalence applies to all computation. "Computer programs" has nothing to do with it.

> How does a weather system compute anything at all for example? By any standard definition of these words it doesn’t

By every normal definition of these words it does. Any computation with a digital computer is us applying an interpretation onto physical computation in the form of basic physical interactions that carry out operations that we interpret in terms of logic.

And we have computing devices that makes this link more explicit, such as e.g. the Soviet "water integrator". Using physical interactions to compute is trivial, e.g. ranging from the trivial, with two pools of water merging is the computational equivalent of addition, to the slightly less trivial classic demonstration of Pythagoras theorem with tree interconnected triangles filled with fluid.

Every physical system carries out computations with every interaction, but most of them are useless to us. But every digital computer can carry out computations that are useless to us too, if we let them run chaotic programs on chaotic data.

> That’s cool but it’s not the universe.

It's not the universe, but that is irrelevant unless you can either disprove Turing equivalence or prove that the universe contains computation that exceeds the Turing computable. If you could, there'd likely be a Nobel prize with your name on it.

> 3. How does any of that make life indistinguishable from computation? All life that I’ve observed seems to be very easily distinguishable from computation, and I would suggest that anyone who finds this confusing should probably get out more.

If life does not exceed the Turing computable, then it can be fully simulated, to the point of giving identical responses to identical stimuli when starting from the same state and at that point if there is any distinction at all, it would need to require observing the internal processes of the entities involved.

Put another way: If life does not exceed the Turing computable, then you don't know whether or not you are simply a simulation, nor do you know whether or not the universe itself is.