MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1659447091 | 2025-09-01 03:08:44+00:00
It means the damage done by the massive amounts of aeral bombings destroyed a large amount of historical records, cultural heritage sites & artifacts, libraries, national and academic archives etc. It wasn't only Germany that lost these things. But since you mention it, I wonder how much of the looted artifacts by Nazi soldiers got destroyed in the leveling of Germany in WWII. It's a miracle that da Vinci's Last Supper survived the the bombings and only because someone cared enough to try and put sandbags up, many of the other walls of the church & convent did not

I know the Chinese state destroyed their own culture that they didn't like. That happens everywhere, every culture, it happens to this day (see Buddhas of Bamiyan) -- it's a fact of life. The Longmen Grottoes comes to mind as it was a place I visited. The scale vs bombings is simply not the same, Europe also had its own cultural heritage self destruction over the centuries.

But that is not what I am talking about. That self-inflicted + looting level destruction is not the destruction that comes with carpet bombing cities. Bombs can ruin/degrade future archeological digs sites. An example from personal experience: The Xi'an city wall is the longest & oldest continuous city wall that is still a part of the city. There are older city walls (that I also visited) but they are in sections and are mostly combined archaeological/cultural tourist sites (I mean no one is riding bikes on them), some from time some from bombings and some had parts rebuilt but none (that I am aware of) stand up to the walls of Xi'an. One would get far more historical data from the well preserved Xi'an than from the ones destroyed in bombings.
by echelon | 2025-09-01 03:08:47+00:00
The market has forced us all to buy Apple or Google. There is not a vibrant field of alternatives, and there is certainly a desert of hobbyist tech.

The market is now so depressed that everyone has to jump through these companies' hoops to participate in the most important computing form factor in the world.

Don't apologize for trillion dollar hyperscalers. They don't need your love, adoration, or apology. They do not care about you at all.

Too much power has accrued to these two and it's being leveraged against all of society and the open market. Competition is supposed to be difficult, ruthless, challenging, and frenetic. I see two companies resting on their laurels that are happy to tax us into the next century while we wear their little straightjackets.
by userbinator | 2025-09-01 03:09:58+00:00
Ford could afford to purchase dedicated steel-stamping presses to churn out pressed-steel crankcases, which were cheaper and used less material than the cast iron employed by other manufacturers

Eventually it was even cheaper to not have a separate crankcase and just cast it with the rest of the engine block, as is now common practice (and has been for around a century).
by lukev | 2025-09-01 03:10:50+00:00
Hmm, I actually think complexity is a red herring here.

Postulate that you have a viable software business, and work backwards from there. Everything else: every purchase and every pay period you pay someone to work for you is a cost, from this point of view, and undesirable unless necessary for the welfare of the business. But every cost is a step away from the platonic ideal of a business, one with arbitrarily high profits and arbitrarily low costs.

I agree that complexity is worse than simplicity, to the extent that complexity really is more expensive. But cost: whether long term or short term, capital or operational, is what really matters.

The question is whether LLM-generated code increases or reduces cost. Size, complexity, and a million other details not considered in the OP or in your comment all matter a lot.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-09-01 03:10:50+00:00
> The problem isn't that locked-down devices exist - it's that we don't have enough truly open alternatives for those who want them.

Not for lack of trying. See for yourself

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_p...

The list is not short.

Plenty of companies have attempted this over the years but it’s not obvious that a big enough customer base exists to support the tremendous number of engineering hours it takes to make a phone. Making a decent smart phone is really hard. And the operations needed to support production isn’t cheap either.
by bccdee | 2025-09-01 03:10:56+00:00
> Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would undermine what made the iPhone successful.

Even if this is true… so what? Perhaps the App Store monopoly has helped make the iPhone successful, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

> If you want to play Playstation games on your PS5 you must suffer Sony’s restrictions, but if you want to convert your PS5 into an emulator running Linux that should be possible.

Why? What if Sony's restrictions are bad? Why are we ceding corporations the right to treat us however they want, so long as we're using their software?

You shouldn't have to flash a new OS onto your hardware in order for it to respect you as its user & owner. You shouldn't need to be tech-savvy, either. The happy path for the median user should be privacy and freedom.

Free/libre alternatives to consumer software are always going to be second-class, because respecting users is at odds with making money off them. If we people to be treated well by tech, it's not enough to provide an alternative ecosystem. We have to deny corporations the option to treat users badly in the first place.
by flomo | 2025-09-01 03:11:09+00:00
Always fun to interact with some internet Thomas Jefferson giving freedom speeches from his mother's basement.

Reality is that people pay a lot of money because they 'trust' Apple (and to a lesser extent Google), but Meta is the sleaziest one of them all. (And I don't use their shit either.) But people want Whatapp and Instagram, and so you are telling them now they have sell-out and go to the "Meta App Store" to talk to their friends. That fucking sucks. And I think you agree with that.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-01 03:11:37+00:00
> \Sum_{e \in S} e_i

I'm tempted to call that notation simply wrong instead of abusive. Generally "abusive" notation, while technically wrong, has some redeeming feature in intuition or consicebess.

In this case, the alternative notation would be to simply drop the index and write "\Sum_{e \in S} e", which seems to be all around better.

From having spent way too much time doing technical writing; I'm tempted to say the notation you are recalling really was a mistake. They probably started out with "\Sum_{e \in S} e", then decided to make all summations be index based instead of set based. Unless you spend a lot of time proofreading, that type of style change can easily lead to half translated expressions like what you recall.
by byintes | 2025-09-01 03:12:41+00:00
Sorry for the late reply! We did this in our first MVP actually, and the result was that giving more choice over model selection resulted in worse retention / usage over time

Each models have their own behaviors / use cases (we're using Gemini now), and by opening it up to everything we needed to allow users full control over the prompts (even with defaults), which increased the learning curve significantly (and the usability of other features like Voices)

Ultimately decided to go with generous (i.e. Unlimited) paid plan
by kyralis | 2025-09-01 03:12:56+00:00
The portal side of Whitney is a sad sight. I ended a week-long trip there years ago, and the difference between the backcountry side by Guitar Lake and the portal side in terms of human impact and trash was somewhat horrifying. And it's not like Guitar Lake is unpopular - the line of headlamps climbing the path up before the sun comes up attests to that.
by sunshowers | 2025-09-01 03:13:02+00:00
Ehh these are mostly edge case features that are very important to some, but not relevant to most. I've been using Jujutsu full time with dozens of repos and the only one that's come close to mattering is submodules (which are easy to work around with a colocated repo + `git submodule update`).

CRLF autoconversions especially shouldn't have been supported, imho. Git on Windows's default setup still converts LF to CRLF to this day, even though every program on Windows has understood LF for a number of years.
by vaishsagar | 2025-09-01 03:14:04+00:00
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by AtlasBarfed | 2025-09-01 03:14:19+00:00
That's one of the boil-ups. Why would lack of Linux compatibility for hardware be a thing? If AI can write the drivers in 1/10th the effort/time, it should be a game changer for open source.

I haven't heard much from the major projects yet, but I'm not ear-to-the-ground.

I guess that is what is disappointing. It's all (to quote n-gage) webshit you see being used for this, and corpo-code so far, to your point.
by codethief | 2025-09-01 03:15:38+00:00
> the key is that each step should be simple

In other words, every time you optimize only locally and in a single dimension and potentially walk very far away from a global optimum. I have worked on such systems before. Every single step in and by itself was simpler (and also faster, less work) than doing a refactoring (to keep the overall resulting system simple), so we never dared doing the latter. Unfortunately, over time this meant that every new step would incur additional costs due to all the accidental complexity we had accumulated. Time to finally refactor and do things the right way, right? No. Because the costs of refactoring had also kept increasing with every additional step we took, and every feature we patched on. At some point no one really understood the whole system anymore. So we just kept on piling things on top of each other and prayed they would never come crashing down on us.

Then one day, business decided the database layer needed to be replaced for licensing reasons. Guess which component had permeated our entire code base because we never got around doing that refactoring and never implemented proper boundaries and interfaces between database, business and view layer. So what could have been a couple months of migration work, ended up being more than four years of work (of rewriting the entire application from scratch).
by smrtinsert | 2025-09-01 03:15:55+00:00
It's 80% at least for me. I've hit a groove for sure. It's not only 80% is very well tested, and almost exactly how I would have preferred. Big tips are to design your CLAUDE.md files how you would actually code from a high level perspective, and not try the usual "You are an expert Google Distributed Engineer" and all that embarassing AI hype bro crap.
by Jr23_xd | 2025-09-01 03:16:57+00:00
We’ve reached the point where GPUs are the core of modern compute. But the programming tools haven’t kept up. They’re still CPU first, GPU second.

That gap is why we built RightNow AI. It’s a code editor that treats GPUs as the primary target. Real-time kernel profiling, architicture specific suggestions, and optimization built into the workflow.

If GPUs are the datacenter, this is the missing layer of infrastructure. Waitlist is open.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-09-01 03:18:19+00:00
Youre not wrong about the real interest but security is another very real one.

> There are many ways to protect security, leaving all your keys in the hands of one party is not the only one.

When youre dealing with idiots its a bit harder than you might expect. Tons of idiots own phones and if apple allowed them to be the victim of security vulnerabilities they get terrible pr.
by righthand | 2025-09-01 03:18:39+00:00
Yes there is even a small business that champions an small LLM that is trained on the language Lsp, your code base, and your recent coding history (not necessarily commit, but any time one presses ctrl + s). How it works is essentially autocomplete. This functionality is packaged as an IDE plugin: TabNine

However now they try to sell subscriptions to LLMs.

Tabnine has been in the scene since at least 2018.
by Izkata | 2025-09-01 03:19:03+00:00
> Once the PR has been merged, I prefer it merged as a single squashed commit so it's reflective of the single atomic PR (because most of the intermediary commits have never actually mattered to debugging a bug caused by a PR).

While working on a maintenance team, most of the projects we handled were on svn where we couldn't squash commits and it as been a huge help enough times that I've turned against blind squashing in general. For example once a bug was introduced during the end-of-work linting cleanup, and a couple times after a code review suggestion. They were in rarely-triggered edge cases (like it came up several years after the code was changed, or were only revealed after a change somewhere else exposed them), but because there was no squash happening afterwards it was easy to look at what should have been happening and quickly fix.

By all means manually squash commits together to clean stuff up, but please keep the types of work separate. Especially once a merge request is opened, changes made from comments on it should not be squashed into the original work.
by nik282000 | 2025-09-01 03:19:29+00:00
> Grandma and grandpa aren't reading the source code and certainly not up at a professional level.

This is one of the core misconceptions of the anti "free/libre" formulation of OSS. Most users don't need to read the entire Debian source to know that it is safe to use. You are free to look up who maintains any part of the project and look at the history of changes that have been made. A lot of projects have nice, easy to read notes along with the actual code.

If you are so paranoid that you can't even trust open release notes then why would you trust a closed project at all?
by al_borland | 2025-09-01 03:20:14+00:00
Interesting. I get pay statement adjustments (they show up alongside my paychecks when I view them) to take out the taxes, so it seems like my employer is doing it, not the brokerage. I’m not sure if they do this when the RSU’s are first given, or when they vest; I’ll have to pay more attention this year.

I do need to do something weird with my taxes every year to enter that the taxes were already paid, as by default when I import, it shows that I need to pay taxes on the whole thing. Every year it feels like doing it for the first time; it’s always confusing to find the right spot in TurboTax and which numbers to enter for the taxes I already paid.

If the brokerage is doing the deduction based on a checkbox the user selects, I can see how a discrepancy could arise.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-01 03:20:29+00:00
Haskell uses where in the sense the article describes.

E.g

f x = y + 1 where y = 2 * x

Haskell also has a "let" notation

f x = let y = 2 * x in y + 1

> If a programming language wanted to use a keyword for restrictions that isn’t “where” (and still is a single word, hence “such that” doesn’t qualify), what word would be suitable instead? “With”? “Having”?

If? Python does so with it's list comprehensions:

[ x for x in range(100) if x % 2 == 0 ]
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-01 03:21:40+00:00
The damn things are pretty much impervious to civilian anti-air defenses, such as they are. The obvious kinetic options are far too likely to cause death and injury to bystanders.

In my mind the best option would be triangulating the pilot’s transmitter, but even that requires LEOs to care about right-wing violence. That was a tough ask even back in 2000, nevermind now.
by KingMob | 2025-09-01 03:22:09+00:00
> I'm still open to being convinced, but have yet to see anything that makes me go "wow, I need to try that!".

You might not find that feature, but I'd suggest giving it a go anyway. The list of jj technical superiorities is short, but the numerous quality-of-life DX improvements all add up to pleasant, fearless version control.

Even without editor support or a UI, I abandoned git forever last year after using jj for a couple weeks.

Just my $.02.
by ggm | 2025-09-01 03:22:50+00:00
I learned a new term: Survivor's Euphoria. Only having had relatively minor procedures, I have only had relatively minor instances. But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia. As if the interrupted mental processes carry some flow state forward, which I re-attach to.

There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
by tavavex | 2025-09-01 03:25:42+00:00
> If the USG decides to pass a law saying you can only buy iPhones, then we will have more to talk about w.r.t. liberty.

Is what the US government does the only concern to you? This feels like a very semantic argument that tries to define the government as the sole arbiter of what's expected in our society. Majority consensus has an equal if not greater reach in telling us what we can and can't do. Case in point: the only two types of smartphones you can reasonably use nowadays are iOS devices and Android devices (and that is Google-sanctioned Android devices, custom ROMs are being rooted out as we speak). Sure, you can technically buy a random dumbphone, and just accept losing access to most of society, including services where using specific apps on specific platforms is mandatory. Is that liberty to you? Everyone telling you that you must pick from one of these options, but you're not forced to at gunpoint, so it's fine?

> Nothing actually prevents you from modifying your iPhone however you see fit, btw. If you are incapable of breaking Apple's security without bricking the phone, that's a "you" problem.

I would agree if we were still in the 2000s, when people could actually plug their phones in and flash whatever firmware they desired on them. Current-day phones, iPhones especially, are black boxes that are designed to be impenetrable by anyone by Apple, under the guise of 'security'. Everything is cross-checked to ensure that you can't as much as screw your phone open without consequences. The threat vectors they're supposedly addressing are utterly ludicrous. It's gotta be stuff like "Oh, what if a malicious actor steals grandma's iPhone, opens it, installs a battery that wasn't blessed by Apple, and explodes it after giving it back to her?".

Everyone knows they're doing this because they want every facet their devices to be in their tight grip, so that you just obtain temporary permission to do some things with it under their watchful eye, as long as you stay in your lane. Best of all, they can just incessantly scream something about "safety", "security" or "integrity" and that will be good enough justification.

And 99% of people don't even have the capacity to care about any of this, they'll just pick "security" and cheer on for any new "secure" update that tightens corporate control over you and what you can do. The 1% is too small of a market to care about, they will just reluctantly use the socially acceptable option because what choice do they have?
by ropable | 2025-09-01 03:26:20+00:00
This is a profoundly ignorant take on the subject matter. Notwithstanding neurological changes that happen to everyone over the time span of decades, ADHD isn't something that people can just willpower their way out of. It's a spectrum of disorders with a strong genetic component. None of what you wrote above bears any resemblance to fact, and these sentiments can cause actual real-world harm to people.

As a thought experiment, insert "type 1 diabetes" in place of ADHD and apply your statement to it. You get "insulin does nothing long-term for diabetes, and in fact creates a dependency on drugs. The best thing for managing this is a disciplined lifestyle." See how ridiculous that sounds now?
by repiret | 2025-09-01 03:27:33+00:00
There is a large adult population with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD. A generation ago that population was even higher. A bunch of them are pilots.

So then the question is, if in a professional pilot and I think I might have ADHD, do I follow up on that hunch? Of course not, because a diagnosis would cost me my career.

There’s good research to show that stimulants reduce the rate of car crashes in people with ADHD. I have no doubt that if we encouraged pilots to seek ADHD treatment, it would improve safety.

IMO the diagnoses that should exclude someone from flying are those that could cause them to become suddenly incapacitated. For everything else, we can just test whether someone can safely fly an airplane, which we already regularly do for pilots.
by tombert | 2025-09-01 03:29:34+00:00
I mean none of my TVs are top of the line, I don't own any TVs that cost more than $600, but I did feel like the upgrade to 4K was worth it back in ~2018.

The TV I was referring to was extremely cheap even in 2015. It's not even 1080p, and I'm not even 100% convinced it's even 720p, despite what it says. It served us well enough when I was broke working for academia, but I upgraded everything when I was able to afford it.

Still, this TV is relatively small and could still be kind of fun for a virtual clock, so it might be nice to get a bit more life out of it.
by codethief | 2025-09-01 03:30:50+00:00
> But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call".

Sounds to me like we need to distinguish between simplicity of the individual diff, and simplicity of the end result (i.e. the overall code base after applying the diff). The former is a very one-dimensional and local way of optimization, which over time can lead you far away from a global optimum.
by odo1242 | 2025-09-01 03:31:30+00:00
It likely won't be safe - they're probably going to enforce it through a Google Play Services update rather than an Android update, which means all previous Android OS versions after 5.0 (Lollipop, released in 2014) will be hit with the changes. In order to bypass that you'd need to install a Custom ROM or stop using and uninstall the Google Play Store entirely (since it's not possible to selectively disable just this).

Android uses Google Play Services updates to update some features or security without relying on manufacturers to update the OS and drivers.
by Fwirt | 2025-09-01 03:33:28+00:00
Shoutout to what is probably the best online catalog I have discovered recently, https://rockauto.com. Dynamic, but also fast, easy to navigate, well-organized, every part can be expanded for more information, and it even does things like help you identify which parts minimize shipping cost and suggest SKUs that you may need in addition (like spark plug wires when you add spark plugs to the cart) all without being annoying or pushy.