MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LarsAlereon | 2025-09-07 05:16:22+00:00
Anyone who has done any level of chemistry, including home chemistry, has observed how important stirring is to dissolution. If you just dump some ingredient into a container with solvent without stirring, you're going to end up with undissolved solids on the bottom covered by a heavy super-saturated solution. Over a long enough time with changes in temperature, or heating from below causing convection, you'll eventually end up with a uniform solution. But if you need the product for some purpose, waiting an arbitrary time maybe isn't the best plan.
by rtpg | 2025-09-07 05:18:22+00:00
In the initial era of the split between North and South Korea, South Korea both was run by a bunch of people who had a history of outright killing leftists, and the United States was involved in similar actions.

The lack of serious offramps to reunification, along with not as huge a delta in quality of life between north and south for a long time (aid from other countries sure helps!), allowed the DPRK to establish itself as its own nation.

Now there is the surveillance state apparatus allowing the DPRK to exist in its current form in perpetuity. And even if tomorrow they showed up and said "let's unify Korea", South Korea (even ignoring all the ideological reasons it might not want to) would likely be unwilling to absorb an extremely poor country and pay for it (see the painful experience of Germany's unification).

There is probably no off ramp that exists unless people are willing to let the elite walk away clean from the situation in one way or another, and it seems hard to imagine such a future.

And if you are a north korean elite and you are allowed to travel to northern china, you will see a place where things are running more smoothly, but you're still going to see places with massive amounts of internal controls and restrictions. So who's offering the upside to some regime change here?
by defrost | 2025-09-07 05:19:10+00:00
Really?

The original Fisher–Yates shuffle was published in 1938 by Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates in their book Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research. The modern version of the Fisher–Yates shuffle, designed for computer use, was introduced by Richard Durstenfeld in 1964. It is also known as the Knuth shuffle after Donald Knuth who popularized it in Volume Two of The Art of Computer Programming (1969)

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle

Picking a bad algorithm, as they did here in this example from the 1990's is timeless.

Good shuffle algorithms existed then, and had existed since the 1930s.
by antonvs | 2025-09-07 05:19:27+00:00
> I bet you we'd drastically reduce the number of companies get hacked overnight.

The problem is that execs and companies in general don’t know how to achieve that. A great deal of security work at companies is cargo cult stuff designed to meet vague and largely irrelevant standards, without any real engagement with what’s happening in the company’s actual systems.

This is not the kind of problem that can be solved simply by motivating the kind of execs that have been allowed to succeed at today’s companies.
by samtheprogram | 2025-09-07 05:20:07+00:00
> For example, in ObjC an int is an object, but it is not observable. However, an ObjC object with an int property is observable using Key-Value Observing

I haven't written Objective-C in a decade or so, but isn't this a pretty big mischaracterization of the language? NSInteger is a typedef to a C type IIRC, while there's NSNumber for the cases you want an object and/or are deserializing -- and which has observable propeties?
by kerkeslager | 2025-09-07 05:20:08+00:00
My friend, I am not hostile. I'm merely pointing out that you have not understood a single post you've responded to. Including the one you responded to just now.

The following algorithm is not susceptible to RNG issues (in Rust, since I've been playing around with it):

fn shuffle(vec: &Vec) -> () { }

And I'm sure since you're reading all these posts so carefully you'll totally understand why this is both a joke and a proof that you don't know what you're talking about.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-07 05:21:41+00:00
MVC (and other OOP patterns) work around the fact that the language does not solve the Expression Problem.

You could say, the key to getting MVC correct is understanding the Expression Problem, and designing its solution into your programming language in the first place, so you don't need MVC, but if you want to do it, it becomes actually neat and clean and modular.
by skydhash | 2025-09-07 05:21:47+00:00
> *Design patterns suffer because in most explanations the context is completely missing. Patterns are totally useless outside very specific contexts.

It's hard to define how a pattern can be useful, because they're patterns, not recipes or snippets. They're supposed to fit in the reader's solution, not the author's examples. You're supposed to have the problem before reaching out for a solution and patterns are not solutions, they're models of solution, each with their own tradeoffs, costs and advantages.
by jtbaker | 2025-09-07 05:27:19+00:00
The 128 GB Strix Halo system was tempting me, but I think I'm going to hold out for the Medusa Point memory bandwidth gains to expand my cluster setup.

I have a Mac Mini M4 Pro 64GB that does quite well with inference on the Qwen3 models, but is hell on networking with my home K3s cluster, which going deeper on is half the fun of this stuff for me.
by stubish | 2025-09-07 05:27:45+00:00
Seems to me, any case where a robot needs to navigate an environment built for able bodied humans. Quadrupeds get close, but even they will encounter spaces we have organized for ourselves that they can't navigate in. An immediately useful and saleable use case would be a two legged robotic exoskeleton to replace wheelchairs or mobility scooters. More than replace, being able to perform actions like kneeling down to do gardening or play with kids. Or why not go superhuman and have extendible legs letting you reach the top shelf at the supermarket. Give the robot an opaque skin with open able flaps and the operator could use a regular lavatory for a bit more human dignity.
by unnsse | 2025-09-07 05:28:23+00:00
Built a Java 23 program that efficiently detects bounding boxes around connected asterisk regions in 2D ASCII grids using the Disjoint Set Union-Find (DSU) algorithm. Handles overlapping detection, finds largest non-overlapping boxes, and processes large inputs in O(n×m) time. Useful for image processing, object detection, and spatial clustering applications.
by qingcharles | 2025-09-07 05:28:36+00:00
Summary: the wrecked cabin had started its descent from the top station, only got a few seconds down before the steel cable pulled out of its socket; the cabin went into freefall down the tracks; the staff activated all the brakes available, but they were clearly not designed for this situation and could not provide enough stopping force before it derailed and hit a wall and a lamp-post at approx 60km/h.
by positron26 | 2025-09-07 05:30:11+00:00
There's several ways to do it:

- incorporate

- foundation (a subtype of incorporating)

- government

- cooperatives

The trouble with corporations is that they do have interests that are very independent of their customers and they are not good agents (principle-agent problem). RedHat, partly because they could not figure out better ways to monetize, has increasingly fought gadgets with gadgets, creating service contracts for support interfaces for open-core products and so on. This does not maximize the value delivery of open solutions.

Government is not known for speed or efficiency. Good luck getting the average Joe to understand why your little git repo needs to come out of his payroll. Even if you get something passed, now all Joe hears on the radio is about how you're stealing his paycheck. Less learned: narrow interests are easy political targets. Okay so let's do a foundation!

So how about foundations? Every single git repo needs a foundation? That's a lot of overhead. Foundations have a scope. They can also suffer from principle agent problems. Foundations are a good solution, but they themselves have not really adapted to the information age. Rigid, self-serving governance can easily become entrenched by insiders who beat the drum while cashing checks.

PrizeForge solve a lot of these problems just by being very broad in scope and very neutral as far as interests. More payment is better. If the market wins, we win. We don't really have to care who or why but we should try to protect customer value by making money smarter and creating the means of coordination so that nobody moves alone.

PrizeForge is not good yet. But it will be. Our solution for the principle-agent problems will completely change how we do social. To start, we've started operating our fund-matching systems. Those will help us bootstrap faster. We can serve some of the communities we know well while building up the rest of our features. (Log in after a few hours, I'm currently doing maintenance).
by bawolff | 2025-09-07 05:31:49+00:00
If we are going to use this metaphor, its not about putting a lock on the door but having a door at all.

You need locks to protect yourself from malicious people, you need a door just to indicate that people shouldn't randomly come in. MIT is like not even having a door. There is no point in buying a top of the end lock if you leave your door open and hang a sign saying free cookies.

I would also disagree that hard power is the only possible way to defend one self. Soft power has its place too and can often offer you much more bang for your buck.
by skydhash | 2025-09-07 05:32:08+00:00
> If you've got strictly one-to-one-to-one matches for each model, view, and controller, then you're just setting your design budget on fire.

That's sensible. But it's generally useful to split your core state from your presentation, and then you'll find strands of logic that belongs to neither, generally glue code, but some can be useful enough to warrant a module of their own. Also your core state can be alien from the view itself (think a game data (invisible walls, sound objects) and the actual rendering).

Maybe this architecture is not MVC, but MVC can be a first stab for a quick and dirty separation. Then once a cleaner separation can be done by isolating specific modules (in layers, graph, whatever)
by OmarAssadi | 2025-09-07 05:37:10+00:00
Nothing stopping you from using one with totally modern systems as well, except for the ever increasing prices, I guess. Anyway, yeah, same as some of the others already mentioned, but I don't think I actually owned any sort of standalone display—be it a monitor or television—that wasn't CRT until ~2009 or so?

I used my mom's iMac G3 (CRT) probably until 2004 or so, because I distinctly remember getting stuck on Tutorial Island on RuneScape as a kid, since you had to Right-click -> "Prospect Rock", and at the time, I had no idea how to actually do it with Apple's single-button mice lmao.

Aside from the couple of laptops that came later, I don't think I had moved on [for the worse] until a bit after I put together my first DIY computer (Phenom II 920, etc); I still had a CRT TV in my room long enough to have been using it when Halo Reach came out.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-07 05:38:14+00:00
I used to be very confused about MVC and MVCC and what have you---I can't keep design patterns straight in my head (personal limitation)---I finally went down a rabbit hole of trying to figure it out from scratch.

Like, why do we even need any of that stuff? I blogged about it [1] and spoke about it [2] and the post even got some HN love [3].

The opening parable concludes with this...

Multitudes of sworn "Rails developer"s, "Laravel developer"s, "Django developer"s, "Next.js developer"s and suchlike throng the universe… Why? ... ... Once upon a time, there was one. WebObjects. Now they are numberless.

The occasional email and DM gives me succour that I am not alone in my confusion. Even people who've "grown up" using traditional MVC frameworks took a minute to self-check and felt "huh, looks like I can look harder at this thing that I do".

Clojuring the web application stack: Meditation One

[1] blogged: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...

[2] talked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHVEId-utY&list=PLG4-zNACPC...

deck: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...

source: https://github.com/adityaathalye/clojure-multiproject-exampl...

[3] discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44041255

165 points by adityaathalye 3 months ago | 39 comments
by k_bx | 2025-09-07 05:38:57+00:00
While I am using cockpit every time I need to remotely manage the machines, I couldn't get it to log me in via something other than user's login/password, which are not that safe, and it listens to 0.0.0.0 by default too.

So I have to ssh into machine, start cockpit service, use it, and then stop the cockpit.socket once I finish.

Would be great to have something which has its own users/passwords (to have strong password in bitwarden) and doesn't listen to 0.0.0.0 by default. If it's also lightweight – even better!
by zkmon | 2025-09-07 05:39:37+00:00
It was basically the 3-tier architecture hijacked by some authors with hyper sales-pitch who messed it up beyond recognition. The 3-tier model has 3 simple layers - Data, Business, Front-end. The MVC inventors called data as "Model" - I could not get my head around this weird naming. What does "Model" mean in plain English? And why do you need those dotted lines between Front-end and Data layers bypassing the Business layer? MVC is a fake that lasted for decades.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-07 05:41:09+00:00
It's always the most low-brow takes as well. But the majority of Hacker News commentators "hallucinate" most of their comments in the first place, since they simply regurgitate the top answers based on broad bucketing of subject matter.

Facebook? "Steal your data"

Google? "Kill your favourite feature"

Apple? "App Store is enemy of the people"

OpenAI? "More like ClosedAI amirite"
by mpweiher | 2025-09-07 05:41:40+00:00
Hmm...have you looked at Smalltalk-72?

Now Alan makes it clear that the inspiration for Smalltalk OO came from Simula (and a bit from the Burroughs 220 and 5000, from Sketchpad etc.), but to say that Smalltalk is just that is a stretch at best.

The more direct line goes from Simula (Algol with classes) to C++ (C with classes).
by bluefirebrand | 2025-09-07 05:42:20+00:00
I hate to say it but it might negatively impact your career. I hope it doesn't, but it might

People in charge of promotions often have more than one choice for a given promotion and they will use any criteria they can to weigh for or against you

A speech impediment is more likely to weigh against you than for you, unfortunately

That's the sort of thing that anti discrimination laws and guidelines are supposed to remedy but I suspect they mostly don't actually fix

Personally, if speech therapy is an option I think I would try it? It can't hurt you any

I'm going deaf, and looking into fixes for that. I don't think you should be ashamed of your speech impediment, but I also don't think you should be ashamed for looking into help fixing your impediment either
by dingaling | 2025-09-07 05:42:25+00:00
> In railway jargon "brake configuration" refers to "how much are you braking"

I've never heard that terminology in a European rail context, you'll need to provide a citation.

In EU regs, "braking configuration" literally means the mechanical configuration of braking; how much braking force the inertial, hydraulic or pneumatic braking circuits can apply in total.
by danhite | 2025-09-07 05:43:01+00:00
> My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.

FWIW, later in his life there are many findable examples of Jerry finding fault with what he did--since I recalled seeing him express mea culpas I took the time to give you this early (jocular) example from 2014 :

https://youtu.be/eBL00CcBF40?si=PXXc5oJk9atlWKjv

"Jerry Springer Apologizes For His Career" -- Dish Network (~1 minute clip)
by jmyeet | 2025-09-07 05:43:17+00:00
We are fed a steady diet of media that propagandizes empire. We rewrite history (eg downplaying the USSR's role in WW2). We push a narrative of honorable soldiers, a competent military and elite commandoes.

But the reality is nothing like any of those things. This particularly mission was almost comically bad and would just be funny if a bunch of completely innocent fishermen didn't get deleted in service of this fiction that North Korea is some great evil.

But I take comfort in that. Because as much as hired killers and assassinations might appear in fiction, it basically doesn't exist in the real world. And when people do try, it basically always goes comically wrong (eg the Adelsons in Florida). Hired killers? Just not a thing.

Murder is an interesting crime because the perpetrator and the victim almost always know each other. And the recidivism rate is almost zero. Serial killers are a statistical outlier. Most murder is personal.

But there is "professional" murder, again to a very limited degree. Organized crime, gangs and (of course) state actors, most notably military units. Osama bin Laden was killed this way but even that was comically bad. It took years to find this massive compound that stuck out like a sore thumb in Abbotabad and even then, they managed to crash a Blackhawk.

This gives me a lot of confidence that, for example, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't killed.

The other aspect of this worth examining is the widesprread assumption that of course this was justified. Why? This was technically an act of war between nuclear powers. This was a huge provocation. Haven't we done enough to North Korea? I am, of course, referring to the intentional starving ("economic sanctions") of the citizenry.
by bravetraveler | 2025-09-07 05:43:18+00:00
+1. If I can't run nap or netcat, or have to justify it each time, I can't do my job. Better off elsewhere.

I've departed early at least twice over this. Draconian IT serves nobody. Been doing this long enough I deliberately poke any new employer; see what's in store.

Nobody cares, though. EDR appliances sell without careful administration. The industry will outlive us all.
by immibis | 2025-09-07 05:45:10+00:00
It's "whoever prepares for the commission of a [hacking] offence by acquiring computer programs for the commission of the offence" and it's been interpreted that downloading nmap can be preparing for an offence, therefore punishable. Giving copies to others (e.g. running a Debian mirror) is also likely illegal, but I doubt anyone's been charged for that yet.

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
by robocat | 2025-09-07 05:46:44+00:00
> In railway jargon "brake configuration" refers to "how much are you braking"

I presume the quote in English is translated from the original Portuguese. I would hope it was carefully translated but I wouldn't personally bet on that.

A Portuguese source document might be clearer.

[edit]

Document in Portuguese: https://www.gpiaaf.gov.pt/upload/processos/d054238.pdf

No entanto, e independentemente disso, as evidências indicam que o freio pneumático e também o freio manual foram rapidamente aplicados pelo guarda-freio da cabina n.® 1, mas que na configuração existente os freios não têm a capacidade suficiente para imobilizar as cabinas em movimento sem estas terem as suas massas em vazio mutuamente equilibradas através do cabo de ligação. Desta forma, não constitui um sistema redundante à falha dessa ligação.
by immibis | 2025-09-07 05:48:38+00:00
Police can always fabricate intent (this is not specific to Germany - they can just say you told them you were going to hack someone, or your actions or body language obviously showed it) and then in practice it's up to you to show an alternative interpretation of facts. If you're studying computer security, that might get you off - but who better than a computer security student to do actual hacking?
by Ygg2 | 2025-09-07 05:49:13+00:00
> Rust has still lots of work to do to provide any GUI, game engine or GPU framework as ergonomic as C++.

Slint, Bevy and no idea what a GPU framework is (even search engines are stumped; they keep recommending Framework laptops). Is it just CUDA?

Not gonna lie, what exactly is this mismatch of stuff? How to be C++ in 3001 steps?

Ergonomic as C++? That sounds as oxymoronic as "musical as nails on a chalkboard or a cat drowning in porridge." Having had the displeasure to read some relatively complex C++ codebase (SIMD json), has left me in deep appreciation of Java.
by phkamp | 2025-09-07 05:51:42+00:00
This is not only where ClearCase comes from, this is where "The Booch Method", UML, and the software for the Space Shuttle, The International Space Station, EuroControl (= pan-european air traffic control) and the F-22 fighter jet comes from. (Plus who knows how much other militarg hardware...)

It is a truly astonishing software development environment which with a a single key-press can answer questions like "what other code is affected if I change the default value of a parameter to this function". (Think about that one for a second!)
by neilv | 2025-09-07 05:52:19+00:00
I knew Rational did Ada (and later acquired awesome products from Atria and Pure), but didn't know they had their own workstation hardware in the '80s.

And it had a nice portrait orientation monitor like some early Xerox workstations (the PARC ones like Alto, and the fancy word processors like 850 and 860 IPS).

Later, starting as a teen, I was working for Cadre, a competitor of Rational on workstation software engineering tools. The company started with Apollo Domain workstations (not rolled their own), and, by the time I joined, had added Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, and MS Windows.

The Cadre site I started at (a spinoff of Tektronix, which did high-end hardware in-circuit emulators with CASE workstation frontends) was practically across the street in the OGI science park from Verdix, which, a bit like Rational, did Ada development tools and related neat systems work like (IIRC) secure compartmentalized workstation technology.

It was an exciting time in computers, and in hindsight, as a kid I saw engineers picking up and applying broader mixes of skills than we usually do in today's fairly rigid skills silos.
by mg | 2025-09-07 05:53:10+00:00
My favorite datetime format is "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss".

I consider it the "Markdown for time". It is human-friendly and computer-friendly at the same time. It is supported by many languages and databases. It is so elegant and common that even though it is not part of a standard, LLMs started to use it when writing answers:

Me: SQLite: Add 1 day and 3 hours to a date.

Perplexity: SELECT DATETIME('2025-09-07 07:51:00', '+1 day', '+3 hours');
by savanaly | 2025-09-07 05:53:54+00:00
>demand is hard to forecast for an individual, almost completely inelastic and often extremely time sensitive

These don't preclude a free market working well. For instance, they're all apt descriptors of me when I find myself needing an Uber home. I'm not completely inelastic, since I could take a series of long bus rides to get home, or walk, but accepting for the sake of argument those aren't life-threatening, the cab companies more or less have me over a barrel. Or do they? We all know what keeps them from charging me more they do, even given the time sensitivity, lack of prediction, or inelasticity. It's competition.

The USA system doesn't work well, and I'm not necessarily saying that free market is the right solution, just pushing back on the notion that just because a good meets those criterion we are forced to throw our hands up and say the free market could never provide that.