MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by basisword | 2025-09-17 20:17:13+00:00
>> US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users

Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:

1. US doesn't get my data.

2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.

3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-09-17 20:17:23+00:00
This library is basically Swift/Core Data, just portable farther back in time. It’s not hard to point out where the reinventing the wheel is.

> learning a third party library is just the name of the game when one feels that the tools Apple provides do not suit their needs

Or you can just wait a couple more platform updates instead of always being on the bleeding edge. Apple’s frameworks might not be perfect, but they’re quite exhaustive, and libraries that aim to fill in those gaps are offering diminishing marginal returns that would be unnecessary in 1-2 WWDCs.

I’m sure there are apps small enough to plan for short time horizons, but for companies who plan for their apps to run for half a decade or more, this is the sort of library that you’ll soon mark as tech debt and then refactor for removal when its approaches eventually make it to Apple’s own SDKs. The historical precedent is there.

> open source, and not a proprietary technology

Yea those are great virtues elsewhere but they stop becoming priorities the moment you pay for the license to develop for a walled garden and agree to its T&Cs
by armada651 | 2025-09-17 20:17:27+00:00
> The way noise cancelling works is that a microphone picks up the sound-wave, and then another speaker plays a slightly delayed version of that wave, which cancels it out.

I always thought noise cancelling worked by playing an inverted version of the sound wave rather than just a delayed one.

In fact, wikipedia seems to back me up on this:

> A noise-cancellation speaker emits a sound wave with the same amplitude but with an inverted phase (also known as antiphase) relative to the original sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control
by taeric | 2025-09-17 20:17:43+00:00
The idea isn't that it is easier to do things when not tired. It is that you specifically get tired exercising self control.

I think that can be subtly confused by people thinking you can't get better at self control with practice? That is, I would think a deliberate practice of doing more and more self control every day should build up your ability to do more self control. And it would be easy to think that that means you have a stamina for self control that depletes in the same way that aerobic fitness can work. But, those don't necessarily follow each other.
by neilv | 2025-09-17 20:17:49+00:00
Questions regarding the US government-appointed director (CCP style?)...

IIUC, Oracle has strong connections to the CIA, and Andreessen the person lately seems right-wing activist.

1. Under the current administration, maybe it doesn't much matter that there's a government monitor?

2. But if a more left-wing administration comes back into power, then a government appointee there could help moderate the other influences?
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-17 20:17:58+00:00
eh.. so long as Uber (or any other privately owned & operated vehicle) is getting free land & pavement, they are effectively operating in a collectivized, regulated market.

Yes ofc, on one specific aspect of regulation - the total qty of cars allowed - they did an end-run. But regulating the total # of taxis was always just a way of trying to limit land consumption by cars, rendered ineffective by only applying to cars used as taxis instead of all cars, all vehicles. So yeah, they benefited from a titch less regulation, but land in cities is so valuable that to give it away for free dwarfs the value gained from skirting any other regulation, so IMO it's still largely a collective non-market endeavour, just organized for the benefit of ppl in cars, rather than the public at large.
by bobcorponoi | 2025-09-17 20:18:14+00:00
I think the issue with correcting grammar online is that it diverts the conversation from the topic of the post. Of course this depends on the context but they might be excited about what they're posting about and seeing replies about their bad grammar or other off-topic things can take away from that.

If you can offer genuine advice privately, then you can but otherwise if you feel it might come off as rude or pedantic, then I would shy away from it.
by tsmango | 2025-09-17 20:18:23+00:00
I’ve been writing a series of “Design Principles” based on lessons learned from building and running software systems. The latest one is about scaling.

The core idea: most apps don’t need things like Kafka or CockroachDB on day one. You can push run-of-the-mill stacks like Postgres or SQS much further than you think, and that’s how you actually learn what scaling feels like. Specialty tools are impressive and have their place, but you only benefit from them once you’ve truly outgrown the simpler paths.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-17 20:18:28+00:00
However C++ offers several overloads where you don't get to provide a drop-in replacement.

Take the short-circuiting boolean operators || and &&. You can overload these in C++ but you shouldn't because the overloaded versions silently lose short-circuiting. Bjarne just didn't have a nice way to write that so, it's not provided.

So while the expression `foo(a) && bar(b)` won't execute function bar [when foo is "falsy"] if these functions just return an ordinary type which doesn't have the overloading, if they do enable overloading both functions are always executed then the results given to the overloading function.

Edited:: Numerous tweaks because apparently I can't boolean today.
by drjasonharrison | 2025-09-17 20:18:54+00:00
This is exactly the physics occuring. Amplitude of sound is pressure. When two signals are 180 degrees out of phase, one is "increases the pressure" while the other "decreases the pressure" of the air.

In an sound editor, the waveforms can be perfectly aligned.

In the physical world, the waveform created by the fan spreads out through space. Providing an opposite but equal sound waveform at your ears is very hard (impossible) with a single speaker but can be done with sound cancelling headphones.
by nicbou | 2025-09-17 20:19:05+00:00
I agree. There's always so much to do just to stay on top of things. Everything from writing to people down to watering plants and updating software.

Last summer I went to a festival, and for a week I was unreachable, had no working phone, and had no chores. I could eat by showing my bracelet. I didn't even have the time. It was blissful.
by tguvot | 2025-09-17 20:19:52+00:00
election were in 2006. there were no elections after this. i am not sure how payments that started in 2018 influenced 2006 elections.

also, you probably weren't around back than, but there was international pressure on Israel to allow those money, because, quoting mainstream press, un, etc "hundreds of thousands of people will be hungry, there will be famine and collapse of all services in gaza that will lead to humanitarian disaster".

so, now, after Israel caved to international pressure to prevent humanitarian disaster in Gaza, Israel is blamed for propping up hamas.
by flohofwoe | 2025-09-17 20:19:55+00:00
Think of it as traditional FFI (foreign function interface) situation.

Many important libraries have been written in C and only come with a C API. To use those libraries in non-C languages (such as Java) you need a mechanism to call from Java into C APIs, and most non-C language have that feature (e.g. for Java this was called JNI but has now been replaced by this: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/core/foreign-funct...), e.g. C APIs are a sort of lingua franca of the computing world.

The DOM is the same thing as those C libraries, an important library that's only available with an API for a single language, but this language is Javascript instead of C.

To use such a JS library API from a non-JS language you need an FFI mechanism quite similar to the C FFI that's been implemented in most native programming languages. Being able to call efficiently back and forth between WASM and JS is this FFI feature, but you need some minimal JS glue code for marshalling complex arguments between the WASM and JS side (but you also need to do that in native scenarios, for instance you can't directly pass a Java string into a C API).
by WalterBright | 2025-09-17 20:20:04+00:00
Back in 1975, my dad got a copy of Creative Computing magazine from a colleague, and gave it to me as he knew I talked about computers. I was in heaven reading that mag. I still have it.

In the 80s, I regularly went to B&N to troll the computer mags. They're all gone now.

My hot rod magazines have all disappeared, too. Magazines like "Chrysler Engines". Sigh. The only one left is Hot Rod.
by m463 | 2025-09-17 20:20:34+00:00
He wants a readable text console at boot.

Also 80x25 has a lot of history, and some things work better at that size.

I don't know if you've ever tried using a non-graphical display on linux recently, but if you have say a 4k display, you get unreadably tiny text. It also breaks a lot of text-mode stuff.

If you've ever tried to FIX this on your system, you'll find a bunch of roadblocks.

You can't just use an easily available font for the console. Console fonts have to be created or converted into a non-standard .pfs or .pfsu format.

most linux distributions have at most a 16x32 font available if you take the time to do the override properly. Even that font is pretty small on 4k.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console
by e_i_pi_2 | 2025-09-17 20:20:37+00:00
I'm sure this sort of unofficial blacklisting is fairly common, but it does seem very opposed to the idea of a free market. It definitely doesn't seem like Anthropic was trying to make some sort of point here, but it would be cool if all the AI companies had a ToS saying it can't be used for any sort of defense/police/military purposes
by Terretta | 2025-09-17 20:20:40+00:00
Here's an entertaining example from 20 years ago:

By using the Apple Software, you represent and warrant that you ... also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. -- iTunes

No production of missiles with iTunes? Curses, foiled again.
by yatopifo | 2025-09-17 20:21:10+00:00
They seem to be highly pragmatic. Rather than chasing AGI, they are more interested in what can be done with today's technology. Any breakthrough towards AGI will inevitably leak quickly, so they'll be able to catch up as long as the foundation is ready. In a bicycle race, it can be quite beneficial to travel behind the leader and enjoy a reduction in drag forces. Perhaps that's their guiding principle.
by dcre | 2025-09-17 20:21:33+00:00
The fact of being elected is not relevant to the question, and neither is the nominal existence of constitutional checks. Extrajudicial murder of alleged criminals, abuse of criminal prosecution to target political enemies, armed thugs yanking innocent people out of their cars, steamrolling firms and universities into administration-favorable policy changes and extracting hundreds of millions of dollars — and that's just the first few things I could think of. There are dozens of examples. It is not inflammatory to describe simple reality.
by TomaszZielinski | 2025-09-17 20:21:35+00:00
Safari is interesting. It's been separate, except for major macOS updates, which had it bundled. But if you had a newer Safari on an older macOS, and upgraded macOS to anything else that the latest version, then your Safari was downgraded, often causing data loss..

In Sonoma or Sequoia they started bundling all Safari updates with macOS, but right now Safari 26 appeared as a separate update in Sonoma/Sequoia—-and it will likely stay that way.

Each thing separately can be explained, but when put together it’s somewhat messy..
by mnahkies | 2025-09-17 20:22:22+00:00
Completely agree tbh, and that would be one of my preferred approaches should npm be the actor to implement a solution.

I also think it makes sense for GitHub to implement the ability to mark a workflow as sensitive and requiring "sudo mode" (MFA prompt) to run. It's not miles away from what they already do around requiring maintainer approval to run workflows on PRs.

Ideally both of these would exist, as not every npm package is published via GitHub actions (or any CI system), and not every GitHub workflow taking a sensitive action is publishing an npm package.
by unsignedint | 2025-09-17 20:22:35+00:00
Product placement ads can be the best kind when they’re done well. The catch is they take far more effort to weave naturally into content, and that limits the kinds of sponsorships you can accept.

The sweet spot is when it feels seamless, but too often creators overdo it and the result is hilariously awkward. Think of someone discussing, say, the dangers of mountain climbing, then suddenly blurting out: “And you know what else is dangerous? An unprotected connection. Which is why you need X VPN!”
by mrbombastic | 2025-09-17 20:23:19+00:00
The power of the purse is currently being usurped by the executive branch with no pushback from a republican congress, armed forces are being deployed to American cities, media corporations are being forced to have admin installed bias police, due process is a joke, museums are being forced to remove information the admin find objectionable. You can bury your head in the sand if you like but there are plenty of us who won’t.
by nichochar | 2025-09-17 20:23:32+00:00
I'm building an app builder (getmocha.com) and one of my favorite use cases I have seen is "small private social network":

some people are building custom, tailored social networks only available to their family, church, community, sports team, school, etc...

This was previously impossible but now AI changes that. I don't know if it will materialize, but a more federally distributed web with tons of small private social networks could be a future of healthy social
by double0jimb0 | 2025-09-17 20:23:35+00:00
Printable PC/Nylon/ABS are not the same as the injection molded equivalents, you may want to research this more if that is an issue. I've printed every material under the sun trying to chase various material properties, and I usually just come back to printing in PLA due to it's excellent mechanical properties (up to a certain temp), excellent layer adhesion, and near 100% success rate. When you stray from from PLA, you will start running into warping, shrink, layer adhesion, and other issues. If you need parts in PC/Nylon/ABS, get the design dialed in in PLA (I as almost all others recommend bambulab), and then send the part to FirstCut/Protolabs to have it machined out of whatever you want.
by michaeldoron | 2025-09-17 20:25:01+00:00
I appreciate my elders' experience, but do note that contemporary AI researchers and enthusiasts often feel similarly about AI advancements:

We watch AI models become better each month, not in ads, but in blogs and posts. While not making cover stories, new models do make the news. I was so excited when Dall-E first came out, I even hosted a guess-the-prompt party four years ago with what seems now like prehistoric-level generated images. The AI industry may face more scrutiny and criticism than the computer hardware industry of the olden days, but we even have a semblance of open source communities who are trying to democratize this for everyone.

All this to say, similar sentiments still exist in the frontier, it's just that the frontier moved.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-17 20:25:24+00:00
I think it really depends on how 'poisoned' the person is. I can totally believe that my politically-disconnected parents would consider being published in WaPo or NYT to be a strong sign of reliability. It helps that headlines that amount to "China is doing comically evil things again" tend to be taken at face value by many people, just for confirming their own biases, regardless of actual evidence.
by tgma | 2025-09-17 20:25:34+00:00
> plumbers

I have received free advice that reduced future need from such actual plumbers (and mechanics and others for that matter)

> we should really stop giving free advice and training to these robots

People routinely freely give advice and teach students, friends, potential competitors, actual competitors, etc on this same forum. Robots? Many also advocate for immigration and outsourcing, presumably because they make the calculus that it is net beneficial in some scenarios. People on this forum contribute to an entire ecosystem of free software, on top of which two kids can and have built $100 billion companies that utilize all such technology freely and without cost. Let's ban it all?

Sure, I totally get if you want to make an individual choice for yourself to keep a secret sauce, not share your code, put stuff behind paywall. That is not the tone and the message here. There is some deep animosity advocating for everyone shutting down their pipes to AI as if some malevolent thing, similar to how Ted Kaczynski saw technology at large.
by tguvot | 2025-09-17 20:25:55+00:00
the atlantic article from almost exactly year ago: https://archive.is/wKScw

-------------------

Brett McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq: We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?

It was an argument bolstered by a classified cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Israel in late fall. American officials had embedded in IDF operating centers, reviewing its procedures for ordering air strikes. The cable concluded that the Israeli standards for protecting civilians and calculating the risks of bombardment were not so different from those used by the U.S. military.

When State Department officials chastised them over the mounting civilian deaths, Israeli officials liked to make the very same point. Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, brought up his own education at an American war college. He recalled asking a U.S. general how many civilian deaths would be acceptable in pursuit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The general replied, I don’t even understand the question. As Halevi now explained to the U.S. diplomats, Everything we do, we learned at your colleges.

-------------------------

in other words Israel using same approach as NATO armies. And if any of NATO armies will be in same situation, the outcome will be same.
by antonvs | 2025-09-17 20:26:09+00:00
I specified "widely used", which effectively excludes brand-new vaccines.

I don't have any issue with what you're describing. The J&J COVID vaccine would be an example of caution being advisable, since you never know what unusual interactions (e.g. with blood clotting) might occur in a larger population than the safety studies looked at.

But that's not the usual definition of an anti-vaxxer.

Anti-vaxxers carry on about things like thimerasol which (1) were removed from most vaccines 25 years ago and (2) give you an exposure to mercury equivalent to eating something like a single can of tuna.
by Dachande663 | 2025-09-17 20:26:28+00:00
I miss the days of eagerly picking up the latest PCFormat from the cornershop. The guides, the reviews, but mostly the CD running some old Macromedia Shockwave/HTML website with random apps and tools I could never download in the few minutes a day of dial-up time. Wish I’d kept some of my favourite issues.
by groby_b | 2025-09-17 20:26:44+00:00
First up: If you were a machinist and can model in CAD (especially constraint based, not mesh based), slicers are trivial. You'll spend a bit learning about materials & how to deal with their inadequacies by fiddling with support structures, but it's really not an obstacle.

If OSS firmware and repairability matter to you, prepare to invest a lot of time fixing and improving your tooling. (But... if you've machined before, you likely know that drill :)

The Sovol SV06 is almost there in terms of build volume - and it clocks in at $350, so it might be a good starting point. The Voron 2.4 is 350 mm^3 and almost $1000, also a decent machine. Elegoo's Neptune 4 straddles the edge of open source - it's a branded klipper build.

All of them are enclosable (i.e. you can buy enclosures, or build one)

From what I hear, the Voron's the most likely fit for your material requirements. (But, worth keeping in mind - an alternate path is a cheapo PLA printer for prototyping, and then shipping of files to a printing service. Depends on what you plan to do)
by MadnessASAP | 2025-09-17 20:27:53+00:00
I would be hesitant to call the US democratic process "free and fair." And the powers held by the president certainly make them more dictatorial then the heads of state of other democracies, particularly as wielded by the current administration.

So you have a democratic process of dubious quality that elected a government that is dictator-ish.

Don't accept that your countries elections are free and fair as a axiom.
by magnushiie | 2025-09-17 20:28:13+00:00
Skype was written without exception handling and RTTI, although using a lot of C++ features. You can write good C++ code without these dependencies. You don't use STL but with cautious use of hand-built classes you go far.

Today I wouldn't recommnend Skype built in any language except Rust. But the Skype founders Ahti Heinla, Jaan Tallinn and Priit Kasesalu found exactly the right balance of C and C++ for the time.

I also wrote a few lines of code in that dialect of C++ (no exceptions). And it didn't feel much different from modern C++ (exception are really fatal errors)

And regarding to embedded, the same codebase was embedded in literally all the ubiquitous TVs of the time, even DECT phones. I bet there are only a few (if any) application codebases of significant size to have been deployed at that scale.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-17 20:28:27+00:00
I use MC all the item for both work and personal (and was using NC back in the day before MC). I find it much faster/more productive than all the GUI file explorers I've tried.

Recursively find files -> Panelize alone is worth the price of admission.

Multi-file select.

Two-panel for easy moving/copying files, including to cloud/remote/ssh drives (just mount them).

Quickly go back to previously visited folders in your history.

Compare folders.

etc etc

> I jump to a random far-away directory

Esc-C and type in the path. I do it all the time in MC.

> or edit a specific file

Navigate to folder (above), type first letters of filename to find it, press F4 to edit.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-17 20:28:29+00:00
> The 2017 white supremacist rally Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Virginia was planned through Discord, and the platform was used by far-right mass shooters in the 2022 Buffalo shooting and the Highland Park Parade shooting.

With Discord they really need to understand the difference between server level and platform level. A non-private tweet or Reddit post can be casually seen or shared by anyone on the platform, or even not on the platform. But I've been on Discord for a long time and I've never seen this extremism because I haven't gone out of my way to join servers where it's the culture.