MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Vespasian | 2025-09-25 11:04:19+00:00
I expected and predicted exactly the behavior that Apple is showing right now.

Currently it's impossible to differentiate real issues of the DMA from Apple being in active resistance.

They themselves are not a trustworthy source on this because it endangers their power and income.

Personally I still support the act and urge the EU to stay it's course. Once Apple returns to sanity and compliance we can talk about reasonable improvements where required. Right now they apparently still think they can bully themselves out of any obligation and this must not succeed.

Users will live without mirroring and AI translation for a little bit.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-25 11:04:51+00:00
I have been thoroughly enjoying re-watching HBO's Silicon Valley, appreciating all the little details and sub-plots I missed during my first watching long ago. It's aged so well.

It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-25 11:05:08+00:00
>A rangefinder is a higher quality camera than an SLR ever was

This does not mean anything at all. The comparison is total nonsense.

>and a full frame mirrorless probably has better quality than a DSLR

No. DSLR and Mirrorless camera differ how the viewfinder works. Generally Mirrorless cameras are newer, but ranking them for quality is totally nonsensical. This is independent of the size of the sensor.

>A medium format camera can be better than all of those.

You are comparing totally different things. A full frame Camera can be Mirrorless or a DSLR. There is no comparison to be made here. You are totally confused about technology and terminology.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-09-25 11:05:17+00:00
Sample size of 1, but the most popular article on my blog is about to practically build a modular monolith. It was inspired by a Google paper published 2 years ago: Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications[0] which touched on the shift from microservices to monoliths that can be deployed modularly.

Very much worth the read as it is easy to skim.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3593856.3595909
by darkwater | 2025-09-25 11:05:30+00:00
> There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do"

And how does that work, exactly? If you get a PR to modify all the docs/code to be gender neutral you accept it? And what if in the same PR someone else vehemently opposes to the change? Or what if 2 days after the PR was merged you get a revert PR by someone else?

The thing is that you cannot just ignore "politics", politics are an integral part of our lives. Completely ignoring politics means accepting the status quo, so it's by definition a conservative position.
by lapcat | 2025-09-25 11:05:54+00:00
> You're coming across as a bit of an idiot here

This is a gross insult. Please review and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I don't know whether you framed it as such for clickbait or out of genuine obsession

The latter. Notice that I did not submit my own article to HN. I published it to my blog, for the people who already follow me, either via RSS or by Mastodon, and who already appreciate my writing. I did not write my article for HN commenters, and in many cases I would prefer that my blog posts not be submitted to HN, but I have no control over that.

> If you don't want any negative commentary about your article or opinions, don't post them on the internet.

This is victim blaming. You are responsible for your own commentary. Your comment started by insulting me and calling me a name. Do better. Also, HN claims to have better commentary than the rest of the internet. The issue here is not mere criticism, which is fine, but rather shallow dismissal, which is not.

> I too feel that your evidence is substantially lacking

You're both misinterpreting the entire purpose of the post. I explain this in later replies to this thread. My post was quite short, only 391 words, and not even intended to make an argument. You're expecting way too much here. You need to think about why an author writes an article and who the article was written for. If you think an author is completely flopping on their face, perhaps you just misunderstood what the author was trying to do.

> However, the merging that people were concerned about, and which was refuted by Apple, is fundamental merging that would make macOS less useful to people through either inappropriate UI choices (removing fine interface elements to support touch) and locking down the platform entirely to third-party software ecosystems.

This is indeed what I'm concerned about. It was denied but not refuted by Apple. And I think the darkening of videos is one (among countless) of those inappropriate UI choices.
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-25 11:06:08+00:00
> If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.

Well, it's not just capability. I know people who had offers at Big Tech, but had to move. There was no option to work from Bucharest or Eastern Europe. You either move to the US or to some other country like UK or Germany. Even if the job is remote. For legal and accounting reasons apparently. I know someone who officially rented a tiny space in rural Germany then secretly worked remotely from Poland, because they needed the official address for paperwork. So there are many artificial hurdles as of now. But the more normalized remote work becomes, the more people will realize these rules don't make sense.
by bluecalm | 2025-09-25 11:06:14+00:00
It's an exchange. You offer to bet X and wait for a matching offer. If no one wants to bets that much your order waits in a queue - same as on a stock market.

There is 0 risk for the exchange and the bettors can only use what they put in front.

Bookies run some risk because they accept the bet first and try to hedge (or got more people to bet on the other side) later. The exchange doesn't have this problem.

Exchange doesn't even need to charge commission cause they make money on float.
by cube00 | 2025-09-25 11:06:35+00:00
> I’ve even heard of people being told they need to be “at their desks at 9am” and “expected to stay until 5pm at a minimum.”

PMs always manage to end their day on time with "I'm heading out for a bit, I'll be back online later tonight for a quick check in on progress so send me a link when the ticket is complete" and I'll be able to finally say without guilt or shame "I'm heading out too and I'll continue working on your ticket tomorrow from 9am."
by benchly | 2025-09-25 11:09:12+00:00
> Individuals may be heartened when they have confidence these principles will carry on to the next generation.

I like this and care deeply about what happens to our world after I am gone, but I worry (excessively, actually) that most others do not. Greed, immediate gratification, etc, these things cloud our judgement so greatly that even I have trouble remembering that the future exists with or without me in it.

It's an interesting problem to think about, but I have no idea what branch of philosophy it falls under, so pardon my sophistry. I do wonder, though; how do we get people to care about this?
by a_humean | 2025-09-25 11:09:18+00:00
I'm not certain, but WORMs WMD is a pretty old 2016 title that might predate a lot of these container runtimes being available to games other than Valve's own first party titles like Dota 2 and CSGO/CS2.

Also, Valve has recently insituted changes about how native titles work forcing existing native titles onto the scout 1.0 runtime and giving developers the ability to pick newer stable targets.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/collection/steam/?emclan...

> Native titles will execute in 'Steam for Linux runtime 1.0 (scout)' by default, instead of the legacy runtime environment. This behavior is consistent with Steam Deck and promotes better compatibility across all Linux desktop distributions. Note that this new feature can be turned off globally with "-compat-force-slr off" on the Steam client command line.

Its also the case that the original version of this that was bouncing around in the 2010s was more of a gaint shell script hack and it was possible for games to depend upon the host system in way which could break over time. Today it is utilising stuff in the flatpak ecosystem:

https://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDEM/video/2020/UD2.208/conta...
by Hilift | 2025-09-25 11:09:22+00:00
That doesn't mean those regulations or structures were intended to be a permanent fixture. Similarly, Bretton Woods was not intended to maintain gold at $35 per ounce.

The world is a place where some development requires large amounts of capitalization. That is also a competitive advantage. No-one cares about any of those previous bullet points if they are generally happy in their lives.

When the SEC brought their first large scale financial fraud indictment, no-one cared. (Investors Overseas Service (IOS), $224 million and International Controls Corporation (ICC)). It was pursued because someone stole money from the wealthy. However, many years later, one of the two fraudsters was revealed to be a notorious Russian agent that worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London during WW2. He would walk files of Ukrainian sources out of the OSS office (obtained from MI6!) and down the street to the Russian embassy. Those Ukrainian sources later disappeared.

The world is a sketchy/dodgy/evil place. Partitioning it into chunks may provide some temporary benefit, but the real world does not evolve that way. Look at Carlos Slim, Mexican Cartels, Russian oligarchs, META is on track for $80 billion net profit this year ...

Oh also, two of the Bretton Woods principal architects, also Russian agents. One had their US passport revoked and US citizenship revoked in 1954. He was the chief economic advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. No-one cared about him either, and he essentially envisioned the world of monetary policies that we have today. He lived out the remainder of his life very well off, advising Colombia on their monetary policy. In 1995, he was revealed to be a prolific Russian agent from KGB archives researchers and authors.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/21/internationalc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Controls_Corpora...

https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591496adadd7b049345e5c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauchlin_Currie
by williamdclt | 2025-09-25 11:09:35+00:00
It's not because it's technically right that it's not funny. Your english example isn't particularly funny so you wouldn't have the same reaction, but you could easily imagine plenty of sentences using "cock" or "pussy" that would be.

I know that some cultures consider it rude to laugh at this sort of things when it's not the speaker's native language (brits don't even correct me when I misuse/misspeak english because they think it's rude), but for many (most?) cultures it's really not, that's not being a jerk
by racecar789 | 2025-09-25 11:09:41+00:00
It’s likely that Google has tested how many ads it can place in search results before users lose patience and turn elsewhere.

On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.
Traces of CAL: a lost hybrid programming language (1959–1964)
by den_dev | 2025-09-25 11:09:43+00:00
While digging through some old IBM technical reports, I ran into something that didn’t quite fit the usual pattern. Buried between dry charts and assembler notes were these odd references to an “experimental modular assembler.” At first, I figured it was just another obscure internal tool — IBM had tons of those back then. But the more I read, the stranger it got. The fragments kept pointing toward something bigger, almost like a forgotten programming language. After weeks of connecting dots across journals, archives, and even some old interviews, I think I’ve stumbled across traces of CAL — Combined Assembly Language, a short-lived hybrid that seems to have existed between 1959 and 1964.

From what I’ve pieced together, CAL was a mix of raw assembly and higher-level constructs. Imagine writing assembly but with IF...ENDIF, FOR...ENDFOR, even modules and macros baked in — stuff that wouldn’t become mainstream until years later. The idea was that you’d write CAL, run it through a translator to turn it into assembly, and then feed that into the normal assembler. In other words: early attempts to bridge the brutal low-level control of assembly with the readability of structured programming.

Here’s a reconstructed example based on notes I found:

MODULE CalculatePi DECLARE Pi VALUE 3.14159 BEGIN FOR Count FROM 1 TO 100 IF Count > 50 PRINT Count, Pi * Count ENDIF ENDFOR END ENDMODULE

What makes this even wilder is the trail of evidence. A 1965 IBM Systems Journal article talks about “an experimental modular assembler allowing intermixed macros and structured operators.” No mention of CAL by name, but it lines up almost perfectly. The underground Black Programming Guide from the 1970s (a kind of hackerish student handbook floating around MIT and Stanford) mentions programmers using a “CAL method” with a nonstandard translator. Then, in 2018, while digitizing Carnegie Mellon’s archives, a box labeled ADC Seminar 1963 turned up — inside were handwritten notes with MODULE/ENDMODULE directives, stamped Algorithm Development Consortium — C.A.L. And if that’s not enough, in a 2001 interview for an IBM retirees’ magazine, engineer David L. Siemen casually recalled: “We experimented with what we called a combined assembler… but it was too avant-garde for the hardware of the time.”

So why did CAL vanish? Probably because it was too weird and too far ahead. Programmers were either deep in pure assembly or moving to Fortran, and IBM itself didn’t back CAL officially. By the time people were ready for structured programming, COBOL and ALGOL were already stealing the show.

Still, I think CAL matters. Even if it never went beyond prototypes and seminar notes, it shows that the urge to mix low-level control with high-level structure was alive way earlier than most of us realize. CAL might have been a dead end — or maybe it was just a few decades too early.

Now I’m wondering: has anyone else ever run into CAL, or other “ghost languages” that only survive in scraps, rumors, or forgotten manuals?
by balamatom | 2025-09-25 11:10:17+00:00
You mean tens of millions of consumers?

That would actually make sense. But it would also point at the larger problem (the one we're not actually looking into because we're too busy with solving the unsolvable a.k.a. with C++).

It goes like this: are "we" building a browser for it to be reckoned with, or are "we" building a browser in order to let people browse webpages?

Because only one of these two requires collecting tens of million of... pretty much anything where ten million is a large number I guess? Yet people conflate the two, thinking the same approach holds for both goals, so let's put it sideways:

Which exact problem does a new browser (engine) solve, besides people saying there are too few browsers? What's the purpose of having this problem, its underlying nature? Can we solve it a way that doesn't require reimplementing the last 30 years of computing history? Can we even go look for such a way or will someone show up to stop us?

If the goal is to become a browser vendor, obviously there's no workaround to building a browser (or rebadging one lol); if the goal is not that or not only that, anyone building a browser is gonna have to expound a little more on what exactly they're trying to achieve. That's complicated by how the vast difference between a new browser engine and, say, a new model of TV set, can't really be expressed in beancounts.
by microtonal | 2025-09-25 11:10:32+00:00
Wait what? We always knew Apple would be affected, though I think the holding back of features is also partially out of spite and to weaponize users against the EU.

I am super happy with the DMA (and DSA) and have been an Apple user since 2007. Monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies should be regulated by law. The law is above Apple. Apple should deal with it and stop whining like a spoiled child.

For me the most egregious thing is when China asks to jump, Apple asks how high. When a democracies ask, they fight it tooth and nail and go full malicious compliance.

tl;dr: yes, it's a shame we are missing out on some features, but protecting the rules established by democracies is more important than a bunch of features.
by egroat | 2025-09-25 11:11:17+00:00
I was going to disagree with you; and I was going to use a very simple function to do it `randString(length, alphabet)` where alphabet is defaulted - as azAZ09 is a good default.

However, on many non-trivial projects I've worked on we ended up making the default explicit and then creating wrappers for specific use cases (i.e. randFileName, randFilePath not being case sensitive on some platforms and randTestFilePath including additional characters for tests but production variants sticking to portable sets).

Its further worth noting that rarely do I allow the default global random to be used and instead dependency inject it via params/factories.
by einpoklum | 2025-09-25 11:12:31+00:00
> The handwriting in the early 1100s is known as Carolingian Miniscule. It was easy to write, very legible and ideal for writing Latin.

It was not very legible. Its legibility is weak due to aspects such as:

* Non decomposability into rectangles bounding letters

* Variation in letter forms depending on preceding and succeeding letters

* "extended serifs" or edges of letters which may vary at the author's pleasure.

* Some pen strokes being extremely thin to the point of near-invisibility (like the middle line of 'e' characters)

* non-uniform vertical height of letters (even ignoring ascenders)

* non-uniform horizontal baseline
by smcin | 2025-09-25 11:14:04+00:00
Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc.

Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.

Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.
by microtonal | 2025-09-25 11:14:54+00:00
I am not sure if they should be broken up. It's more that once you are a gatekeeper (which Google and Apple are in mobile), then you get regulated like one. Similar to how in many European countries insurance companies, electricity companies, public transport companies, etc. are regulated because they are .*polies. You can do business, make a profit, but citizens and other companies should be protected against the enormous power you wield.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-09-25 11:17:07+00:00
Those same traps and dark patterns you mentioned are used well beyond gambling. those things themselves should be regulated, not gambling. You're arguing against something unrelated to the topic here. It's fine to trap and addict people into gambling, and then punish them for getting addicted and trapped? how does that make sense? let people gamble if they want, but ban malicious and hostile practices of capitalism. Whether it is gambling,shopping addiction, social media addiction, porn or political influence campaigns, the practice and trappings are the same and should be heavily regulated. No argument there.
by protocolture | 2025-09-25 11:19:29+00:00
One of my first ever bug reports, was a submission to a company that made legal software.

In particular, it was a document management system built as a plugin for MS Outlook. (ew)

Most users, had no issue. However for one user, a lawyer, in particular, she would open and close a bunch of documents (using the built in pdf viewer) and then the application would crash, taking outlook with it, often requiring a restart.

I went over to view the behavior, and she was some kind of robot. Unlike her peers, she had 12 documents open at once, and she could update and bill (in minimum 6 or 7 minute increments) 12 customers cases in 15 minutes. It was like meeting the Usain Bolt of law practitioners. My back of the napkin math is that she billed like 3-4 hours for every hour she was online.

Open Email

Load Attachment

Review Attachment

Reply to email

Assign Email thread to case number

Close attachment.

12 times in 15 minutes.

The bug was that, after loading ~6 pdfs, the application would back off and wait to deallocate the memory. It would then later, randomly decide to write to that memory when another pdf was loaded, and go kaput.

Just to replicate the issue, I had to close and reopen pdfs so quickly my hands hurt.

It took 3 revisions of the bug report to get the software company to accept it and resolve it. And even then I think the pdf limit just increased, before we submitted another report and had it resolved permanently.

On that note, the principal of another law firm I supported would require us to cleanse his personal laptop of porn themed golf games he had downloaded on a regular basis.

The impression I get is that, lawyers work but the work is just unevenly distributed.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-09-25 11:21:21+00:00
Yes, I sincerely agree. But the person that sells them the poison has to make sure they are of sound mind and fully understand the consequences. So long as a person is well informed and of sound mind, I don't see the problem. I'm even for putting their names in a registry so that they won't receive any social welfare benefits in the future if they go down that route. But outright jailing people, that's insane. Imagine eating something unhealthy and suddenly you're serving 25 years in prison for it. What is happening is only mildly less absurd.
by mindcrime | 2025-09-25 11:23:06+00:00
> right now i wouldn’t trust an ai agent anywhere near my warehouse with raw sql.

Same. And definitely not with read/write access. But even RO is risky due to the possibility of an unintentional DDOS via a bad query, etc.

> custom mcp tools on top of it. those tools basically act as guardrails - the agent can only call “get_customer_tickets” or “fetch_usage_events” instead of writing arbitrary queries.

This is more or less what I would do, although I would say it's neither here nor there to me whether one uses a view or not. But I'd definitely advocate building dedicated, purpose specific tools, with known queries, and let the agent use those. At least in the near-term.

If it proves too unwieldy to implement all those tools, I might could be convinced to let the agent generate its own queries to use, but I'd insist on a HITL mechanism to have a given query reviwed before it is ever allowed to be executed the first time.
by dleeftink | 2025-09-25 11:24:33+00:00
Our modern-day nomenclature owes a lot to the 'arrays' and 'threads' that made up these weaving machines (see Howard Rheinhold's Tools for Thought)[0].

Evidently, the punch cards that stored Jacquard's weaving patterns were a direct inspiration for Babbage's analytical engine.

[0]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/02.html#:~:text=The%20we...