MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by safety1st | 2025-09-18 09:17:39+00:00
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter?

I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.

The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.

Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.

But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.

That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.

Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.

And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-18 09:17:41+00:00
The starting points are not so difficult to come up with:

(1) Stop of all armed offensives.

(2) Complete dismantling of genocidal and corrupt government. Netanyahu and his gang in front of international courts, and then afterwards additionally in front of an Israeli court.

(3) Partial disarming of Israel, to restore a balance in the region, and keeping them from attacking more countries. Defensive weapons they may all keep, maybe even get more, but it really needs to be defensive stuff, for example to intercept missiles/rockets. Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff is needed more in Ukraine right now, which should take priority over Israeli needs.

(4) Organization of elections. Israel needs to get back from authoritarianism to functioning democracy. This might be done with international help. Possibly reforms, that strengthen courts, so that a second Netanyahu is unlikely to happen again.

(5) Long running rebuilding projects in at least Gaza, if not more countries, financed by Israel.

(6) Probably some international peacekeeping will be needed. This should not only include personnel from western countries. Must be from countries not directly involved and not from the US, or some EU countries, that supplied weapons used for the genocide.

(7) Negotiations are on again, this time with a new government, and mostly about how Israel thinks to aim for a peaceful future, in which it gives back illegally annexed territories, including, of course, illegal settlements in the west bank. This also includes all the illegally taken or occupied territory since founding, back to internationally recognized borders.

That's mostly the Israeli side of things. Of course Hamas will also have to make concessions. For example there could also be disarming of Hamas, where this is the price to pay for release of prisoners and a portion of the illegally occupied territories by Israel. Hamas shouldn't be helpless, but also shouldn't be able to launch new significant offensives.

There are many things, that can be done, and they are not difficult to see. They are difficult to execute in the current climate, where the powerful country has an authoritarian leadership, that is unwilling to compromise.
by perihelions | 2025-09-18 09:18:23+00:00
The last criticism of Nazism was a very milquetoast 1934 speech by a Nazi, Franz von Papen, who though supporting Adolf Hitler detracted in some (seemingly) lesser ways—decrying the fanaticism of Hitler's personality cult. He was severely punished for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_speech ("...said to be the last speech made publicly, and on a high level, in Germany against National Socialism...")

An ironic tombstone for freedom of speech:

"They will bear them and follow the Führer with unwavering loyalty, if they are allowed to have their part in the planning and in the work, if every word of criticism is not taken for ill will, and if despairing patriots are not branded as enemies of the state."
by Metasyntactic | 2025-09-18 09:19:04+00:00
Hi there. C# lang designer here :)

Discriminated unions continue to be worked on, and you can see our latest designs here: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/uni...

The space there is large and complex, and we have a large amount of resources devoted to it. There was no way that `a?.b = c` was going to change if/when unions come to the language.

For unions, nothing has actually been delayed. We continue working hard on it, and we'll release it when we think it's suitable and ready for the future of the lang.

The only feature that actually did get delayed was 'dictionary expressions' (one that i'm working). But that will hopefully be in C# 15 to fill out the collection-expression space.
by einpoklum | 2025-09-18 09:19:29+00:00
I didn't say "easy to deal with", I said it's not bespoke nonsense, and that you could keep it mostly unchanged today, 8 years later.

Plus - the "obscure third party modules" have been getting less obscure and more standard-ish. In 2017 it was already not bad, today it's better.
by Ray20 | 2025-09-18 09:19:37+00:00
>he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh

Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.

So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
by wickedsight | 2025-09-18 09:19:59+00:00
Ray-Ban is part of EssilorLuxottica. They own pretty much every single (sun)glasses brand on earth. I'm sure someone in their organization has made the decision that Ray-Ban was the best fit for a brand in their portfolio to do something together with Meta.

Also, you're right about the niche. A lot of 'normal' people probably don't even have a clue that Meta and Facebook are the same thing.
by gempir | 2025-09-18 09:21:00+00:00
With the risk of sounding like a fanboy.

LTT makes 9.2% of their revenue on In-Video Sponsors and 12.5% on Sponsored Projects (which are like full videos for a sponsor)

I wouldn't call this the vast majority

https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=2ob1AixcwGZwR4VC&t=719
by Balinares | 2025-09-18 09:21:53+00:00
Same as you do it in any language: you compose instead of inheriting, you avoid shared state, you generally think about how this thing you're implementing can be tested even as you are implementing it. Test-driven development tends to constrain your interfaces too early but you can get a lot of the same benefits with, let's call it, test-mindful development. That works in any language.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-09-18 09:23:22+00:00
We still have (hopefully) a democratic choice how this plays out, so the distinction between left/right is meaningful regarding political overreach (beyond the stereotypes propagandists like to attach).

If you are arguing that the left is identical to the right in that regard, you truly deserve your downvotes. I mean ... leftist censorship-cancelation for no good reason.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-18 09:23:44+00:00
Zionist state - So that is the state, that thinks, that the land is god given theirs, right? Maybe such a state should disappear and a sane state appear in its stead. It may be that Hamas has a different understanding of that, but I think, that this religious fanatics state thing is no good for Israel as a country anyway. It would do them good to get rid of that ideological baggage.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-18 09:24:24+00:00
I am a teenager and I approve this statement!

Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would love to apply :>

They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.

Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.
by 946789987649 | 2025-09-18 09:26:00+00:00
Their problem was that they didn't look like normal sunglasses, so people were immediately intrigued/suspicious of them. Although these have the little light if you're recording, the amount of instagram videos where creators are using these and the random people they're directly talking to don't notice, should tell you all.

The rise of smart accessories (especially watches) should tell you that a lot of people don't want to disconnect
by kketch | 2025-09-18 09:26:50+00:00
WASM itself does not support pthreads. However things like Emscripten have very good support for pthreads. WASM is one of the compilation targets of Emscripten (we had asm.js before that) and on top of that emscripten provides excellent shims for many POSIX APIs. Regarding Rust which has supported WASM as a compilation target for a long time now, the idiomatic way of doing this is not shiming, but using higher level APIs: if you need parallel execution threads and need to compile to WASM you would use a crate (such as rayon) that is able to compile to WASM (and will use web workers under the hood just like Emscripten does). You would not use pthreads directly (std::thread)
by sambuccid | 2025-09-18 09:27:06+00:00
Ok I think we were talking about different things. I was referring to just the current conflict with gaza, without knowing any of the other things you just mentioned.

I'm not contraddicting anything you said, but at the same time I just want to point out that picking always "one side" without evaluating the facts each time is a dangerous position.

This population has been unfairly persecuted for a long time and it has been unfairly accused of many things, but this doesn't make what IDF is doing any more humane
by bombcar | 2025-09-18 09:28:09+00:00
These batteries are fun to use for “other things” - like running a kids 12v battery jeep on 18v - but the TOOL is what has battery protection; the batteries will discharge until they actually kill themselves.

If you really want to use it outside m18 tools you want something that turns off when voltage drops below 17 or 16 or so.
by remus | 2025-09-18 09:28:55+00:00
This process usually goes:

1. "This XML library is way bigger than what I need, I'll write something more minimal for my use case"

2. write a library for whatever minimal subset you need

3. crash report comes in, realise you missed off some feature x. Add support for some feature x.

4. Bob likes your library. So small, so elegant. He'd love to use it, if only you supported feature y, so you add support for feature y.

...

End result is x+1 big, complex XML libraries.

Obviously Im being a bit obtuse here because you might be able to guarantee some subset of it in whatever your specific circumstances are, but I think it's hard to do over a long period of time. If people think you're speaking XML then at some point they'll say "why don't we use this nice XML feature to add this new functionality".
by lelanthran | 2025-09-18 09:29:28+00:00
We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause.

Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar.

I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.

The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.
by Snild | 2025-09-18 09:30:15+00:00
Expat is suffering from similar problems: https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/blob/7643f96bd5b9f5d3b2...

> <blink>Expat is UNDERSTAFFED and WITHOUT FUNDING.</blink> > The following topics need additional skilled C developers to progress > in a timely manner or at all (loosely ordered by descending priority):
by croon | 2025-09-18 09:30:18+00:00
I'm not disagreeing that cable news broadcasts a lot of propaganda, but you can't both claim that you're servicing "customer" segments based on calculus, and also claim that the news wire viewers into the same opinion.

If it's the latter you don't need the former, etc.

I can agree that shoddy news (a lot of it these days) do abuse viewers worst instincts and provide plausible coverage for it, but there is clearly something more going on for a sustainable amount of people to still support this.
by deeringc | 2025-09-18 09:30:21+00:00
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.

1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.

2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
by Wurdan | 2025-09-18 09:30:45+00:00
So what's your suggestion for how YouTube could be doing better here?

Especially in the scenario that (as the top level comment in this thread suggests) YouTube didn't actually make any changes and the reason the views dropped is because EasyList added an entry to their privacy filter. Should YouTube have recognized that they're in a quasi-monopoly position as you suggest, done the research to identify EasyList as the culprit behind the view metric drop, and then released a change to their client to add a new endpoint which isn't blocked by EasyList?

We don't know that the EasyList theory is what's really going on here, but if you're going to tar YouTube/Google over this ordeal, then I think you have some responsibility for suggesting how they could have done better.
by mirchibajji | 2025-09-18 09:31:36+00:00
Another vote for Qidi from me. I have Qidi Plus4, which is amazing. I selected the UK version (where I live), and don't have any issues. I believe the faulty part issue you were referring has been resolved long since as mine doesn't have this, based on the part numbers.

I was against getting a Bambu mainly for the proprietary software.
by singulasar | 2025-09-18 09:31:37+00:00
Again, I disagree, I wouldn't call it extremist. It's vile and wrong, but people all over the political spectrum are in favour of this. there's a difference between something being bad or self-serving, and something being extremist. Labelling everything as extremist does not help anyone, especially today when everyone is already highly divided.

No way I'm getting into the restrict state powers discussion as that is highly complex and not something that can properly be discussed on an internet forum.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-18 09:31:50+00:00
Cool, didn't know of it.

In a nutshell, assuming I understood it correctly: to find the storage location of a file, instead of doing the intuitive pattern of hash(filename)%num_servers (which would change completely every time the list of servers changes) you do something just a tiny bit more complicated:

sort([hash(filename+serverID) for serverID in serverList])[0]

If you add a server to the list, it may become the new highest priority location for a given filename and it would have to move, but that's only the case for about 1 in length(serverList) files and makes the load balance equally across all servers again. And if the first entry (sortedList[0]) becomes unavailable, you fail over to the second one at [1] etc.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-18 09:32:28+00:00
The idea is, that without the victim role of the Jews in the 2.WW, they would never have had the international support, that they enjoyed for decades. They would never have had the "social credits" among nations, that they had. Countries like Germany, supposedly would have opened their mouth much sooner and sanctioned Israel, if it were not for our perpetrator role in 2.WW. The idea was, that finally the Jews have a safe haven, and that that needs to be protected.

Israel has been playing that victim card for decades. It allowed them to get where they are. Now that card is crumbling, as they did the unthinkable. I hope that one day our German politicians will also realize this. It is becoming quite ridiculous, how Germany behaves in foreign policy in that regard, and many people here are ashamed of their own country and government. This is stuff that makes people vote for extremists, which I can tell you, we have no additional need for right now. To me it is unthinkable to ever elect the ruling parties again, due to how shitty they handled everything. Well, already wouldn't vote for them anyway, because of all the corruption in their ranks.
by mihaaly | 2025-09-18 09:33:20+00:00
> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation

I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.

Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
by bjornsing | 2025-09-18 09:34:57+00:00
> So for data centers, training is just as important as inference.

Sure, and I’m not saying buying Nvidia is a bad bet. It’s the most flexible and mature hardware out there, and the huge installed base also means you know future innovations will align with this hardware. But it’s not primarily a CUDA thing or even a software thing. The Nvidia moat is much broader than just CUDA.
by the_other | 2025-09-18 09:35:46+00:00
I like it. Nice effort. Plus I like the visual style a lot too.

I feel there's a mismatch between creating novel "semantic" elements, and then customising them in the markup, rather than the contextual approach (nesting, rich selectors). The mismatch is that the new elements still apply a "what" approach, but the attributes used for customisation apply a "how" approach and leave it in the mark-up. It's still like `<p class="red" />` rather than `main p { background-color: red; }`.

I get that there's a trade-off between purity and code that's nice to work with, and I think you've hit a very readable, appealing and creative balance.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-18 09:36:10+00:00
Perfect is the enemy of good. Current LLM systems + "traditional tools" for scanning can get you pretty far into detecting the low hanging fruit. Hell, I bet even a semantic search with small embedding models could give you a good insight into "what's in the release notes matches what's in the code". Simply flag it for being delayed a few hours, till a human can view it. Or run additional checks.
by kketch | 2025-09-18 09:36:11+00:00
WASI does not implement POSIX. And it isn't the goal of WASI to implement POSIX. It does not support pthreads either. WASI is similar to POSIX because its an API that provides a "system interface" for WASM programs. But the API is much simpler and quite different and capability based. There are things like WASIX (by Wasmer) built on of WASI that aims to provide POSIX support for multiple languages
by TomaszZielinski | 2025-09-18 09:36:35+00:00
As a kid I had Atari 520ST(M) and GEM was like a… window to a magic world. It was so different from anything I had seen before (older Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64).

Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.

The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)
by amzin | 2025-09-18 09:36:41+00:00
Professional procrastinator here. All the tips in the post are common knowledge and, sadly, not very good (especially in the long run).

The only thing that works for many people is to skip the motivation part and embrace the rather uncomfortable principle of "action before motivation."

The flow state will come. I believe it arises independently of motivation. Motivation just tricks us into believing that everything we do should bring joy.

It will — but not right now; we need to dive in first.
by rglullis | 2025-09-18 09:36:56+00:00
> don't fragment themselves into endless distributions?

My dear Lord! In what world are you living in?

Take a look at all of the "mobile apps" you installed on your phone and tell me which of those would ever devote any resource to make a apt/rpm repository for their desktop applications.

Even the ones that want to have a desktop application can not figure out how to reliably distribute their software. The Linux crowd itself is still at the flatpak vs AppImage holy war. Mark Shuttleworth is still beating the snap horse.

The Web as a platform is far from ideal, but if it weren't for it I would never been able to switch to Linux as my primary base OS and I would have to accept the Apple/Microsoft/Google oligopoly, just like we are forced to do it at the mobile space.
by tim333 | 2025-09-18 09:36:59+00:00
Stephen Miller has always seemed a bit freaky and fascist. Here's him last month:

>The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.

Hope they don't try to ban it.
by anthk | 2025-09-18 09:37:32+00:00
Inform6 would set these rooms in hours... Just create a Room class, which is something done in miliseconds (basically a room with a 'has light' atrribute), and being creating objects like crazy until the v8 Z-Machine gets exhausted (very difficult as it has been pumped up to great limits).

Also the game would run on PC's, Linux/BSD machines, DOS, Classic Macs, Amiga, Ataris, Android, IOS, OSX, RiscOS... everywhere from 16 bit and up.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-18 09:40:35+00:00
I think the HTML, CSS and even JavaScript are the most stable and future-proof components of your stack. Your Rails backend, on the other hand, will experience far more changes and API instability in the long run.

JavaScript was considered as a unstable and under-specified part of the Web in the "Dynamic HTML" era somewhere between 1997-2006, when Microsoft Internet Explorer implementation of DOM diverged from more standard Netscape/Firefox in many tricky ways. This has largely been solved by better standards, initiatives like Acid tests and (unfortunately) slowly spiraling into Blink engine monoculture.