MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Volundr | 2025-09-01 00:00:32+00:00
I didn't know FDroid used entirely FOSS services. Strong disagree that when offering up something free to help with a problem that's clearly being had one must first do a deep dive on the org. This conversation could be as simple as "hey we like FDroid and would happily help support it by providing our service for free to make sure this doesn't happen again", "No thanks, we only use FOSS'.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-01 00:01:36+00:00
In order to make things work smoothly, the module has to have its own namespace, and a namespace that is closed.

D also has an `alias` feature, where you can do things like:

alias Q = abc.T;

where from then on, `abc.T` can be referred to simply as `Q`. This also eliminates a large chunk of purpose behind the preprocessor.
by ghaff | 2025-09-01 00:02:20+00:00
>Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims

Except in practice, they mostly aren't because onboarding takes time and cost and relocating employees (if applicable) has costs.

Of course, if you're a pro football player, here today/gone tomorrow is the norm. But I'm not sure that is or should be the expectation for an engineer. In part, because I doubt there is a "One True Candidate" for the the most part.

Yes, roles shift/requirements shift and both companies and employees move on but there's generally some value to stability on both sides. Even if an employee can get an employer-paid rental for a month, thy've still presumably left their prior job and will have to scramble in various ways.
by StrandedKitty | 2025-09-01 00:02:45+00:00
Does it even fall into "AI-generated" category? GitHub Copilot has been around for years, I certainly remember using it long before the recent AI boom, and at that time it wasn't even thought of as any kind of a breakthrough.

And at this point it's not just a productivity booster, it's as essential as using a good IDE. I feel extremely uncomfortable and slow writing any code without auto-completion.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-01 00:02:55+00:00
Strangely I've found myself more exhausted at the end of the week and I think it's because of the constant supervision necessary to stop Claude from colouring outside the lines when I don't watch it like a hawk.

Also I tend to get more done at a time, it makes it easier to get started on "gruntwork" tasks that I would have procrastinated on. Which in turn can lead to burnout quite quickly.

I think in the end it's just as much "work", just a different kind of work and with more quantity as a result.
by calmbonsai | 2025-09-01 00:05:29+00:00
I read you comment and I'm sorry you had to jump through all the hoops just to get copies of your medical records.

I dealt with some of that while being a foreign national working in Düsseldorf a few years back.

Medical care is definitely screwed up in the states, but getting my basic test results and emailing my doctor has always been a straightforward and rapid comms loop.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-01 00:06:44+00:00
Since Whatsapp isn't a public utility, the people who designed it are free to make it for a certain type of device, with a so-called smart screen. That you feel oppressed because they didn't cater to your very specific need to have it work on a button phone is pretty weird. "feeling free" isn't about having any random whimsy catered to. It requires realistic adjustment to the world of others and their efforts.
by shiandow | 2025-09-01 00:06:55+00:00
That we're trying to replace entry/mediocre/expert level code writing with entry/mediocre/expert level code reading is one of the strangest aspects of this whole AI paradigm.

There's literally no way I can see that resulting in better quality, so either that is not what is happening or we're in for a rude awakening at some point.
by TylerGlaiel | 2025-09-01 00:09:01+00:00
All that the C++ committee needed to do was just introduce "import" as "this is the same as include except no context can leak into it".

Would have been dirt simple to migrate existing codebases over to using it (find and replace include with import, mostly), and initial implementations of it on the compiler side could have been nearly identical to what's already there, while offering some easy space for optimizing it significantly.

Instead they wanted to make an entirely new thing that's impossible to retrofit into existing projects so its basically DOA
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-01 00:09:53+00:00
Like upstate NY in the winter. If you can maintain shirtsleeves conditions inside an old farmhouse at that outdoor temperature, NASA can do it for astronauts. Contrast that to the surface temperatures which swing from 260°F to -280°F.

The corollary is that ice buried on the moon with a vapor barrier to prevent sublimation could be stable.
by hcnova10 | 2025-09-01 00:09:57+00:00
As an Asian guy, I’d guess the statistics in Asia are even worse. There’s the combination of long working hours, academic pressure and a culture that tends to be less openly sexual. From my own experience dating both Asian and Western women, I’ve noticed a clear difference: Western women often bring up sexual topics casually, sometimes even asking for nude photos and wondering why you haven’t already suggested it. That’s something I’ve never encountered with Asian women. It makes me think that in long-term relationships too, Western women are more likely to be sexually expressive and expect frequent sex, whereas Asian women generally place less emphasis on it.
by themafia | 2025-09-01 00:10:10+00:00
> request and response sizes

If either of these exceed the limitations of the call, which is 6MB or 256kB depending on call type, then you can just use S3. For large distributed task coordination you're going to be doing this anyways.

> deployment .zip sizes

Overlays exist and are powerful.

> max execution time

If your workload depends on long uninterrupted runs of time on single CPUs then you have other problems.

> Plus you'll be locked into AWS.

In the world of serverless your interface to the endpoints and semantics of Lambda are minimal and easily changed.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-01 00:10:31+00:00
The problem is, in real life you're unlikely to find yourself in a situation where your needs are met, or at least have an action plan how to get there. There are tons of things that go wrong and you can't do anything about that. Stuck in a shitty job? Sucks to be you. Marriage drains you emotionally? Sucks to be you. Mother is sick and you need to take care of her? Again, sucks to be you. "Find a passion" is actually a ridiculously unrealistic standard - most people really do spend their free time just scrolling TikTok.

I'm really really tired of people throwing solutions at my problems while one of the problems is that I'm fundamentally profoundly tired of trying and failing.
by Animats | 2025-09-01 00:11:08+00:00
> On systems before apple's locked-down iphone, it was just called "installing".

If the phone people could make a solid permissions system, this wouldn't be a problem. Applications should by default be able to read their own install files, and have dedicated directories for their local storage, caches, and such. They can make network connections to their home site, if the user allows it. That's all they get.

This covers most games. What else does it cover?
by vitorgrs | 2025-09-01 00:11:11+00:00
Gnome is as simple as Windows 8.0. Maybe even less. We know the history about Windows 8.0.

Gnome made several decisions toat make it super complex for normal users. Windows have a taskbar. Mac have a dock. KDE have a taskbar.

And I really like Gnome design language, UI. But the UX is awful.
by echelon | 2025-09-01 00:13:31+00:00
> Things are "scare walled" because things are scary.

It's 100% about power.

Imagine if websites were scare walled. If Microsoft had owned the Internet, that might have happened. Websites can do "scary" things, after all.

You can buy guns and knives and drive 60 miles per hour. You can give your banking information away. So many things scare the user less than Google does. Not to mention you have to go five settings deep to untick a setting to even enable it.

Again, I reiterate: It's 100% about power.

We should stop being afraid, we should stop trying to "protect the children", and we should stand up for our rights.
by themafia | 2025-09-01 00:13:47+00:00
> significantly more expensive per vCPU hour

It's almost exactly the same price as EC2. What you don't get to control is the mix of vCPU and RAM. Lambda ties those two together. For equivalent EC2 instances the cost difference is astronomically small, on the order of pennies per month.

> like transcoding long videos, [...] data analysis, and other compute-heavy tasks

If you aren't breaking these up into multiple smaller independent segments then I would suggest that you're doing this wrong in the first place.

> training a model

You're going to want more than what a basic EC2 instance affords you in this case. The scaling factors and velocity are far less of a factor.
by bmitch3020 | 2025-09-01 00:14:30+00:00
This can be summed up as a time and money problem.

Time has disappeared as people attempt to do everything themselves (work, cooking, cleaning, managing finances, etc) that may have been shared or outsourced in the past. But time has also disappeared into intentionally addictive apps on our phones. Every commercial game and social media site is designed to maximize your eyes.

Money seems to be ignored by the article, but every generation is worse off than their parents, as wages stagnate, housing skyrockets, student loan and medical debt keep going up, leaving less and less disposable income. With finances so tight, people cut back on group gatherings that have an associated expense (bars, concerts, etc). And raising children becomes unaffordable.

Personally, I blame billionaires, including their influence on tax policies, suppression of wages, and the creation of monopolies that push up prices. The elimination of sex is just one of many side effects of a much bigger issue affecting the working population around the world.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-01 00:14:51+00:00
I'll give you another reason to consider Canada as part of the British empire. It's actually called Canada.

The local Indians have two words for settlements - one word for their own settlements, and another word for the settlements of other peoples who have come to their lands. Canada is the latter - it actually means "foreigner's settlement on our land" or "invader's settlement". Interestingly, I just tried to Google it and the only two websites I looked at - Wikipedia and some official Canada site - both conveniently leave out the part about it being a foreign settlement. Both simply translate the word as settlement, without the nuance.
by svat | 2025-09-01 00:15:08+00:00
The 2009 film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, has a portrayal of the period. Of course it's not a historical document and subject to interpretation, but it is one perspective at least. Also there's a novel about Julian by Gore Vidal — I haven't read it but Julian was the last pagan emperor who unsuccessfully tried to receive Hellenic religion and stem the tide of Christianity.
by jvm___ | 2025-09-01 00:15:45+00:00
I just got back from backwoods camping, each site has a wooden chest/thunderbox/toilet out in the open woods near the site. I'm not sure if the thunder is the heavy wooden lid closing or the noises that come from it. Some are out of sight of the campsite but ours was only 75ft away, fortunately the lid blocked your view if it was in use.
by toast0 | 2025-09-01 00:20:10+00:00
It's not you. As a junior, there are going to be so many candidates for anything you feel qualified to apply for. It's a numbers game. IMHO, you should still tailor your resume to fit the position. I'd put together a too long resume with everything, and trim off irrelevant stuff so it's down to one page (maybe two, if that's the standard locally) of mostly relevant things for each position; when your resume does get looked at, you want it to pass muster.

Do your best to network. Think about the people you went to school with: who among them would you like to work with.

Every week, send 2-5 of them an email, remind them of what you did in school together, ask them how their summer/etc was, how are they doing at job hunting/if they like the job they found. If you don't mind looking a little desperate, in that email write something like I'm having a hard time getting interviews, have you found anything that works? If you don't wait for their reply... if they got hired, ask if their company is hiring; if they're still looking ask for tips.

Check in with your school's career center. Check in with your favorite professors.

Check in with your parents' friends and your friends' parents.

A personal connection is likely to get your resume looked at closely and not just ignored because there were 1000 applicants and 10 candidates seemed worth interviewing in the first 100, so they didn't look at the rest. It might not get you an interview, but it helps your chances; also, a personal connection might get a referral to an unrelated opening which is unlikely for an unconnected application. I would definitely send a friend's kid to another friend at a different company if I thought that was a potential match, but I wouldn't consider it for a resume that just came in.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-01 00:21:12+00:00
This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones. That would be great, but as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible. Even assuming that building a solid alternative is feasible, though, I don't think their point stands. Generally I'm not keen on legislatively forcing a developer to alter their software, but let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations. I'm all for mandating that they change their code to be less user-hostile, for the same reason I prefer democracy to autocracy. Any party with power enough to impact millions of lives needs to be accountable to those it affects. I don't see the point of distinguishing between government and private corporation when that corporation is on the same scale of power and influence.
by robjan | 2025-09-01 00:22:48+00:00
I'd say the software is an asset more than the code itself, much like an interstate is an asset rather than the concrete that it consists of. The quality of the concrete impacts the depreciation (reduction of value) of the asset and how much operational expenditure is required to upkeep the asset which would again impact the asset value. There's probably also a risk management angle which should be considered.
by bugglebeetle | 2025-09-01 00:22:51+00:00
Yeah, so it’d be interesting to see if provided the correct context/your understanding of its error pattern, it can accomplish this.

One thing you learn quickly about working with LLMs if they have these kind of baked-in biases, some of which are very fixed and tied to their very limited ability to engage in novel reasoning (cc François Chollet), while others are far more loosely held/correctable. If it sticks with the errant patten, even when provided the proper context, it probably isn’t something an off-the-shelf model can handle.
by sfink | 2025-09-01 00:23:37+00:00
Yes, and this is the most commonly used workflow these days with jj (the "squash workflow"). You have a top commit, which is also your working directory, and you make changes freely. To "stage" something, you squash it down into the next commit (all changes, or interactively selected changes with -i aka --interactive).

This generalizes to using a whole stack of "stages", by doing ´squash --into´ to select the patch to put the changes into if it's not just the next one down.
by kylecazar | 2025-09-01 00:24:46+00:00
It's a matter of ownership vs. licensing. You own the hardware you buy, but you license the software. I agree with the author that as long as you use that software, you should be subject to the constraints of the license.

The key is that if you choose not to run that software, your hardware should not be constrained. You own the hardware, it's a tangible thing that is your property.

Boils down to a consumer rights issue that I fall on the same side of as the author.
by platevoltage | 2025-09-01 00:28:31+00:00
> The AI tools can just spit out function names and tools I don't know off the top of my head, and the only way to check they are correct is to go look up the documentation, and at that point I've just done the hard work I wanted to avoid.

This is exactly my experience, but I guess generating code with depreciated methods is useful for some people.
by Retric | 2025-09-01 00:30:04+00:00
> no one knew how to even convincingly fake a natural language interaction.

There was some decent attempts at the turing test given limited subject matter long before LLM’s. As in people looking at the conversation where unsure if one of the parties was a computer. It’s really interesting to read some of those transcripts.

LLM’s actually score worse one some of those tests. Of course they do a huge range of other things, but it’s worth understanding both their strengths and many weaknesses.
by sgarland | 2025-09-01 00:30:15+00:00
That’s because 75% (citation: wild-ass estimate) of tech workers are incapable of critical thinking, and blindly parrot whatever they’ve heard / read. The number of times I’ve seen something on HN, thought “that doesn’t sound right,” and then spent a day disproving it locally is too damn high. Of course, by then no one gives a shit, and they’ve all moved on patting each other on the back about how New Shiny is better.
by mcswell | 2025-09-01 00:31:01+00:00
I was using it to transform DocBook XML into LaTeX, based on an existing tool that used xslt code to do just that (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dblatex/). We had to modify the existing xslt code to allow for enhancements to DocBook that accommodated some linguistic structures (like interlinear text). So yes, we were using it for exactly the right thing: transforming XML.
by snvzz | 2025-09-01 00:32:02+00:00
Note on RISC-V, the RISC-V Server Platform Specification[0] requires UEFI always.

There is also a specification[2] on how UEFI is to be implemented.

0. https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-server-platform/relea...

1. https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-uefi/releases
by galleywest200 | 2025-09-01 00:32:58+00:00
I know this is a tad off topic, but the one feature I wish ReMarkable had included is the ability to export your highlights, at least the snap-to-text ones.

Currently I use a third party software, RCU [1], to do this (and it works well!) but one would think ReMarkable could have included this themselves when they added the snap-to-text feature for highlighting!

[1] https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-01 00:33:24+00:00
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/08/politics/kamala-harr...

https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/09/09/harris-policy-pl...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-harris-campaign-promises-...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...

All of the above were posted prior to the 2024 election.
by toast0 | 2025-09-01 00:33:44+00:00
Typically there's a lot of onboarding, and even a good candidate might not get a lot done in the first month or three... By the time you realize the new hire isn't a good fit, you've spent a ton of time on training.

Otoh, if you hire me to frame a house, it'll be objectively clear you need to get rid of me in the first hour, if not the first ten minutes. I don't know how I'd get past a screening for that either, but still.
by steveklabnik | 2025-09-01 00:34:20+00:00
In general you don’t want to mix git mutating commands with jj commands. I believe that there might be a way to get jj to resync its understanding of the word, but I’m not sure what it is off the top of my head.

In rere’s case specifically, I’d expect you’d just be using jj’s rebase, so it shouldn’t be needed though of course want and need are different things.
by vidarh | 2025-09-01 00:35:02+00:00
This is usually only true of you lift and shift your AWS setup exactly as-is, instead of looking at what hardware will run your setup most efficiently.

The biggest cost with AWS also isn't compute, but egress - for bandwidth heavy setups you can sometimes finance the entirety of the servers from a fraction of the savings in egress.

I cost optimize setups with guaranteed caps at a proportion of savings a lot of the time, and I've yet to see a setup where we couldn't cut the cost far more than that.
by slug | 2025-09-01 00:35:41+00:00
What bad old days? 15 years ago we had n700, n800 and n900 to run whatever we wanted on a portable device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N700_Series_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
by junon | 2025-09-01 00:35:47+00:00
That's a reductio ad absurdum conclusion.

Both lobby for and are in major political cahoots with many governmental bodies worldwide. They lobby like crazy, and can defend just about any lawsuit that comes their way - including dodging congressional hearings, selectively adhering to laws other companies cannot afford to skip, etc.

But I think you knew that. Being argumentative with the general point OP was making doesn't solve anything and just defends multinationals when they shouldn't be defended.
by bentley | 2025-09-01 00:36:00+00:00
The article provides ancillary hyperlinks to nearly every topic mentioned, but fails to link the actual video of Kernighan speaking. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

In reality the subject of the talk is Kernighan’s perspective of the history of Unix at Bell Labs. The questions covered in the article are the least interesting part, and make up about six minutes at the very end—a small fraction not just of the 70-minute video, but even of the 30-minute Q&A session.

In short, the headline and article are disappointing clickbait, but the video itself is worth watching for Kernighan’s relating of history and his theories about what confluence of factors made Unix successful (collegial environment, good management, overall mission…).

Another worthwhile video from the same conference (in a different year) is Kernighan’s interview of Ken Thompson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o&pp=ygUSdmNmIGVhc...
by msgodel | 2025-09-01 00:37:07+00:00
I wrote bingeblock.com to deal with stuff like this. It kicks you off sites by domain name with no opportunity for snoozing. You set a daily limit in minutes and then you get exactly that. That way you can still access useful sites from time to time without getting sucked into them.

I think Screentime does something similar on iOS so you could try that too but there wasn't anything I could find for Linux.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-09-01 00:37:08+00:00
The hardware should not be equipped with undefeatable digital locks. Put a physical switch on the hardware (like Chromebooks have-- had?) to allow the owner to opt out of the walled garden.

Also worrisome are e-fuses, which allow software to make irrevocable physical changes to your hardware. They shouldn't be allowed to be modified except by the owner. (See Nintendo Switch updates blowing e-fuses to prevent downgrades.)
by i80and | 2025-09-01 00:37:47+00:00
I was there, Gandalf, 15 years ago. I think the last virus I saw in person was closer to 25 years ago, but I've done my time in the trenches.

Locked-down app stores certainly have significant utility and even should maybe be the default depending on the device, but calling people "assholes" for asking for an escape hatch is extremely odd.