MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by woopsn | 2025-09-22 14:39:32+00:00
You make a lot of good points. Including that the technology to do all that incredibly dangerous to develop - I still can't see a path to terraforming where in the end it's human people left to take pleasure in Mars.

I had thought due to the eons we'd simply have evolved, but even on shorter time frames there is the transhumanist possibility. When we can engineer rabbit that eats chlorine moss, I don't know what we're aiming for at all. "People" by then could have robust gut culture that just digests the regolith.

There's a difference between considering all this vs thinking it's realistic. It's speculation, as any forecast into the centuries ahead must be.
by czx111331 | 2025-09-22 14:39:33+00:00
I believe that in the right contexts—specifically where eventual consistency is acceptable—the local-first paradigm is highly valuable and will gradually become mainstream. A major factor limiting adoption today is that existing local-first solutions are incomplete: when building such applications, developers must handle many problems that are trivial under strong-consistency or traditional models. This raises the learning cost and creates significant friction for paradigm shifts.

Our recent work on Loro CRDTs aims to bridge this gap by combining them with common UI state patterns. In React, developers can keep using `setState` as usual, while we automatically compute diffs and apply them to CRDTs; updates from CRDTs are then incrementally synced back into UI state [1]. This lets developers follow their existing habits without worrying about consistency between UI state and CRDT state. Paired with the synchronization protocol and hosted sync service, collaboration can feel as smooth as working with a purely local app. We’ve built a simple, account-free collaborative example app[2]. It only has a small amount of code related to synchronization; the rest looks almost the same as a purely local React app.

[1]: https://loro.dev/blog/loro-mirror

[2]: https://github.com/loro-dev/loro-todo
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-22 14:39:51+00:00
The funny thing about it is I see git being used in enterprise situation for non-dev users to manage files, often with a web back end. For instance you can tell the average person to try editing a file with the web interface in git and they're likely to succeed.

People say git is too "complex" or "complicated" but I never saw end users succeeding with CVS or Mercurial or SVN or Visual Sourcesafe the way they do with Git.

"Enterprise" tools (such as business rules engines) frequently prove themselves "not ready for the enterprise" because they don't have proper answers to version control, something essential when you have more than one person working on something. People say "do you really need (the index)" or other things git has but git seemed to get over the Ashby's law threshold and have enough internal complexity to confront the essential complexity of enterprise version control.
by albertogalca | 2025-09-22 14:39:55+00:00
Like you, I’m not a big fan of Gumroad. I’ll be checking out other options soon.

I don’t mind paying a fee if it helps avoid annoyances too.

Ideally, I’d like to upload directly to the App Store without disrupting my current UX. Let's see if I can find a good solution for this :)
by emschwartz | 2025-09-22 14:40:28+00:00
TBH, _I_ was also genuinely surprised when I made the initial MVP of Scour, pointed it at HN Newest, and right away was finding great posts with only 1-3 points.

I thought a lot of good stuff was probably getting buried in the fire hose, but I had no idea how well it would actually work at finding those hidden gems for me.
by lavela | 2025-09-22 14:41:00+00:00
Openly aligning with DHH is certainly a choice. After all being created by DHH is the only feature they list on their website.

Didn't care for the DHH controversies for a long time but if you start writing white national blog posts[1] I don't know what to say anymore.

[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
by acc348 | 2025-09-22 14:41:15+00:00
> Macbooks tend to last a very long time.

MacBooks had historically tons of design issues with keyboards and GPUs. Which I guess can happen, but the problem with Apple is that they never admin anything until someone drags them to court and the out of warranty repair is always extremely expensive, usually not worth it.

The battery replacement can also be extremely expensive, especially if you live in a country without any Apple Store. Battery replacement for M4 Air is like $340 in my country, which is insane for a $800 machine.
by kragen | 2025-09-22 14:41:20+00:00
I think mostly learning Forth is like learning any other programming language (or, better said, programming environment): you learn by doing it. Books can be a useful complement to practice, but practice is how you learn to do things. You can't learn to do things by reading.

As for string handling, in my limited experience, string handling in Forth is a lot like string handling in C; you have to allocate buffers and copy characters between them. memcpy is called move, and memset is called fill. You can use the pad if you want, but you can just as well create inbuf 128 allot and use inbuf. There are two big differences:

1. Forth doesn't have NUL-terminated strings like C does, because it's just as easy to return a pointer and a length from a subroutine as it would be to return just a pointer. This is generally a big win, preventing a lot of subtle and dangerous bugs. (Forth is generally more error-prone than C, but this is an exception.)

2. Forth unfortunately does have something called a "counted string", where the string length is stored in the byte before the string data. You can create them with C" (https://forth-standard.org/standard/core/Cq), and Forth beginners often wonder whether to use counted strings. The answer is no: you should never use counted strings, and they should not have been included in the standard. Use normal strings, created with S" (https://forth-standard.org/standard/core/Sq), unless you are calling word or find. https://forth-standard.org/standard/rationale#rat:cstring goes into some of the history of this.

If you want to allocate strings on the heap, which is often the simplest way to handle strings, malloc is called allocate, realloc is called resize, and free is called free: https://forth-standard.org/standard/memory

With respect to multicore and persistent data structures (I assume you mean FP-persistent, as in, an old pointer to a data structure is a pointer to the old version of the data structure), stacks aren't really related to them. Each Forth thread has its own operand stack and its own return stack (and sometimes its own dictionary), so they don't really create interactions between different cores.
by lapcat | 2025-09-22 14:41:32+00:00
> I care a lot more what smart people think about the articles than the articles themselves.

Frankly, I'd say that the article authors are smarter on average than the article commenters and in any case are vastly more careful and informed on average than the article commenters. There are of course exceptions to the averages, but it doesn't balance out, because the worst article commenters are infinitely worse than the worst article authors and wreck the discussions for everyone else.

> The news are just provocation to get them to post their opinions.

That's precisely the problem!
by em-bee | 2025-09-22 14:41:34+00:00
i recently discussed the development of a new application for a customer. one of the important aspects was that the app would handle data that would have to stay local. despite that my thinking went like this:

if i develop it as a webapplication, then i can do all the work on my computer, test with various browsers and deliver a working result. if the customer has issues, i can likely reproduce them on my machine.

but if it was a desktop application, my feeling was that testing would be a nightmare. i would have to set up a machine like my client, or worse visit the client and work with them directly, because my own machine is just to different from what the client uses. also not to forget distribution and updates

in short: web -> easy. desktop -> difficult.
by glenstein | 2025-09-22 14:42:13+00:00
>I also find the idea difficult to understand, but assume that is because it is in an area I know nothing about and the problems that I think sound bad are actually totally solvable engineering problems otherwise it would not be have been suggested as a solution by engineers expert in that area.

A refreshingly sober approach that I think is a lot more healthy than hip firing incredulous questions.

I agree though, I don't intuitively understand how it would work. I would think you would do horizontal takeoffs. Also Seveneves by Neil Stevenson gives some interesting examples of ways to escape gravity wells without rockets, but I won't spoil anything there.
by crote | 2025-09-22 14:42:29+00:00
Because a user first encounters it on the web - where it acts exactly like a website. The only difference is that the bookmark-button-thingy says "add app to home screen" instead of "add to home screen".

It's not giving a "I'm installing an application" vibe, it is giving "I am creating a shortcut to a website" vibes. Apps are installed via the app store, not as weird quasi-bookmarks in your browser.
by simiones | 2025-09-22 14:42:34+00:00
> Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.

I don't think this is the proper definition, since by this standard, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese ideograms, Norse runes and many others would not be considered writing; and any attempt to notate sign languages would not be writing by definition.

Instead, writing is a direct and consistent correspondence between marks and elements of human language (alphabets and abjads represent speech sounds, various ideographic systems represent semantics, you can have hybrids etc). This still makes sure that tallies or just general symbols or icons are not a form of writing, but it doesn't require any phonetic aspect to it either.
by justusthane | 2025-09-22 14:42:38+00:00
It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up and not on top of one the few existing engines (Gecko, Chromium, WebKit), which is extremely important to the health of the open web.

Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.
by CarpeQueso | 2025-09-22 14:43:12+00:00
On the flip side, it's taken me a long time to break my skimming habits and read slowly when I'm a novice in a new area. Especially with math or software engineering, it's often necessary to stop at each word I don't understand, unpack it, and gradually build a scaffolding for myself. This is very slow, but it pays dividends extremely quickly.

As a rule of thumb, it seems like skimming is useful if one already have a good familiarity with a subject and the content is slotting into an existing mental framework. However, when that's not the case, skimming gives me the feeling that I've learned something without much real progress.
by nine_k | 2025-09-22 14:44:22+00:00
To use bittorrent, your machine has to listen, and otherwise be somehow reachable. In many cases, it's not a given, and sometimes not even desirable. It sticks out.

I think a variant of bittorrent which may be successful in corporate and generally non-geek environments should have the following qualities:

- Work via WebSockets. - Run in browser, no installation. - Have no rebel reputation.

It's so obvious that it must have been implemented, likely multiple times. It would not be well-known because the very purpose of such an implementation would be to not draw attention.
by mordymoop | 2025-09-22 14:45:08+00:00
From experience it seems like preempting context scoping and routing decisions to smaller models just results in those models making bad judgements at a very high speed.

Whenever I experiment with agent frameworks that spawn subagents with scoped subtasks and restricted context, things go off the rails very quickly. A subagent with reduced context makes poorer choices and hallucinates assumptions about the greater codebase, and very often lacks a basic sense the point of the work. This lack of situational awareness is where you are most likely to encounter js scripts suddenly appearing in your Python repo.

I don’t know if there is a “fix” for this or if I even want one. Perhaps the solution, in the limit, actually will be to just make the big-smart models faster and faster, so they can chew on the biggest and most comprehensive context possible, and use those exclusively.

eta: The big models have gotten better and better at longer-running tasks because they are less likely to make a stupid mistake that derails the work at any given moment. More nines of reliability, etc. By introducing dumber models into this workflow, and restricting the context that you feed to the big models, you are pushing things back in the wrong direction.
by glenstein | 2025-09-22 14:45:19+00:00
>It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles.

It's a great comparison that helps me understand it a bit. In many respects, Venus's atmosphere is as heavy as an ocean. That said, I can still see how if you're talking about the upper atmosphere with pressure similar to what you would have on Earth, the force necessary to do a straight vertical takeoff imparted against a platform seems like it could cause problems.

But it might just be the Archimedes thing of "give me a prop large enough and deliver long enough and I can move the world" applied to atmospheric dynamics, e.g. enough buoyancy and you're good to go. I just don't know how much is "enough" when you're talking about Venus and if that runs into prohibitive engineering complexity that makes it different from our familiar Earth examples.

Not saying it can't be done but I think that one question at least, was reasonable.
by zimpenfish | 2025-09-22 14:45:20+00:00
[0] has 5718 deaths from 324m vaccine doses (0.002%). [1] has "around 10.5 per million first doses administered" (0.001%). [2] has "out of more than 18 million people who got J&J, 60 cases of TTS were reported" (0.0003%).

These numbers are likely underreported but even if you bump them by 2 orders of magnitude, they are still extremely small percentages.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10423859/

[1] https://www.publichealth.hscni.net/sites/default/files/2021-...

[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-...
by ruralfam | 2025-09-22 14:45:37+00:00
Sadly been going to HomeDepot long enough to have been there before all the cages were put up. E.g. if you want a small roll of wire, gotta find an associate to open the cage, get the wire, and walk with you to checkout to make sure you pay. I asked once if all the was necessary, and the experienced associate related some real horror stories such as folks putting a 200 ft roll of 4 guage onto a cart and simply walking out. That is impressive both in regard to the brazenness, and because someone could lift such a roll onto a cart (likely with a partner, but still).
by oefrha | 2025-09-22 14:45:38+00:00
I’m skeptical. Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web. People have been fiercely debating whether that’s a terrible thing, or whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners. I don’t want to make a judgement on that, but I don’t think the observation that CF is pushing us in that direction is very controversial. But an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos. So what’s the play here exactly? Just for goodwill?

(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
by Symmetry | 2025-09-22 14:45:49+00:00
A big issue is that neither seem to have developed photosynthetic life[1] and without a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere they don't have an ozone layer. That means that UV light penetrates further and breaks up water into its constituent parts allowing the light hydrogen to be blown away by the solar wind over geological time scales.

[1] It's looking increasingly plausible that Mars developed primitive life, but I'd bet heavily against photosynthesis. That took way longer than chemosynthetic life on Earth.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-22 14:45:52+00:00
I was running hyprland with my own dotfiles and using omarchy was quite painless except the only gripe I had were quickly fixed and the other gripe that I have is that it doesn't have nm-applet manager to manage wifi etc. and has a terminal.

So it turned out that my wifi adapter wasn't connected properly and I was giving a test and submission date was near and the wifi had died mid way and I couldn't connect to other wifi because I felt as if the terminal wasn't working and not the adapter...

Definitely give me a bit of a pain. really wish that they can use nm-applet as well... Optionally support terminal wifi too but definitely give atleast an option to get gui wifi.

Also I feel like omarchy focused quite much on bash and I used to use zsh with my custom dot filess which were really lovely. I had semi invented fish in zsh but it was my zsh and it was snappy.

Now I tried to have one ble.sh in bash and it stutters like it turned 80 lol. I definitely love zsh over bash and wish omarchy supported that too...

Luckily I have everything backed up so I will try to move away from bash I think,

One thing that I like is that omarchy has its own aur-ish thing where I found things like bun which isn't arch extra and aur definitely felt clunky. Using the omarchy repo to install bun was kinda nice actually.

I gave it a try because my system was bloated and I hadn't configured it properly in teh sense that my 100 gig was split into 40 40 and 8 swap and uh that 40 of home really got bloated somehow and I couldn't even update my pc using pacman and felt like a massive deal actually.

So I just actually picked my dotfiles and moved on. Might recommend it, it seems that omarchy also has backup support using btrfs by default which I didn't have in my ext4 arch
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-22 14:45:55+00:00
Sure, maybe you're right, and the foreign countries purchasing our politicians is a much larger problem than just the one that Israel presents (though, I'm rather skeptical in terms of actual impact on foreign policy and on who gets elected in our country). I still don't think Russia deserves much mention in terms of election interference; they gotta step up their game if they want to compete.
by vinnymac | 2025-09-22 14:46:10+00:00
I am also surprised by this. Especially because we can just run Claude Code from anywhere. Cursor, VS Code, Zed, emacs, vim, JetBrains, etc.

Cursor CLI, Codex and Gemini work too, but lag slightly behind in a variety of different ways that matter.

And if you think you’re getting better visual feedback through Cursor it’s likely you’re just not using Claude with your IDE correctly.
by robenkleene | 2025-09-22 14:46:28+00:00
Apple is practically the most antithetical to "free software" company around, yet Apple maintains perhaps the largest fleet of local-first apps in existence, e.g., off the top of my head: Calendar, Contacts, Keynote, Mail, Notes, Numbers, Photos, and Pages (these are all examples of apps that support multi-device sync and/or real-time collaboration).

I think the truth of your statement is more that free software tends towards what you might call "offline" software (e.g., software that doesn't sync or offer real-time collaboration), because there's more friction for having a syncing backend with free software.
by tasn | 2025-09-22 14:46:58+00:00
To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition. Or in other words: Firefox needs to become more competitive. I (unfortunately) don't think having another 0.1% market cap browser is the solution, at least not for now.

Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chrome dominance.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-22 14:47:01+00:00
So you’re talking about now. Currently.

But this concept is old. The quote from the guy who invented the concept of the “aryan master race”, de Gobineau, was from 1859.

That’s just 7 years after the irish potato “famine”, when the english perpetrated a genocide against catholics in ireland. Very tolerant.

Meanwhile, in 1859 in the ottoman empire - jews and christians were allowed to exist and believe what they wanted as long as they were loyal to the state and paid their special tax. Not exactly equal, but in 1859 i think i’d rather be catholic in iran than in ireland.

Your theory that this concept comes from a lack of religious freedom doesn’t really hold up if you look beyond the current moment.
by kolektiv | 2025-09-22 14:47:06+00:00
Yup, and just to add, for those not in the UK, or particularly connected to London, etc. - this take is utter garbage. The UK certainly has a variety of challenges, but they are not what the far right (and that's what the people he's talking about absolutely are) make them out to be. London is not what it's painted to be by external rabble-rousers and populists, and this mania/delusion that's being pushed (sometimes by the very wealthy who are often much closer to the problem than immigrants are) is a significant problem.

DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.
by palmotea | 2025-09-22 14:47:17+00:00
> Seattle levied taxes and fees on Uber and deliveries that are so high that it is comical. You literally will pay more in taxes and fees to the city than you’d ordinarily pay for the goods and services you are actually consuming. Like, up to 100% effective tax rates on consumption. Unsurprisingly, people noped out and now there is a new crisis because people that provided those services are underemployed or unemployed.

Is there? Because my understanding is Uber-delivered goods typically weren't profitable for the providers in any case (see: ghost kitchens, with lower costs than traditional restaurants, going bankrupt because of Uber's high fees). Killing the delusion dead is probably the best outcome.
by baobabKoodaa | 2025-09-22 14:47:18+00:00
I don't know exactly what you're asking of me. We already released the GoogleDoc that has all the options. It's linked on the landing page. It's the most concise way of expressing all the possible options in the generated contract. We don't want the generated contract to look like that, as that would defeat the whole purpose of the web generator.

Alternatively, one can step through the web UI flow to see what all the options are without the legalese.
by triceratops | 2025-09-22 14:47:23+00:00
> I’d behave like a guest [If I moved to Japan and got citizenship] for the rest of my life

Why would you want to be a guest in your own country for the rest of your life?

> I certainly would not make posts about how the locals are the real problem

That's not what the post said.

> they’re evil for not accommodating me.

What does "accommodating" mean? From what I can tell they just want to not be treated like a guest in their own country. Not a crazy request.

Taking citizenship in another country is comparable to being a new convert to a religion. Is it acceptable for people born and raised in the faith to treat new converts differently?