MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-07 04:58:09+00:00
The thesis here seems to be that if Linux just had a good (paid) "app store", then it would set up a feedback loop wherein professional apps would be ported, and that would bring more users, and that would bring more apps, etc. And, as a side-effect, all of the "rough edges" of desktop Linux would be fixed.

First of all, this isn't going to happen. It's clear that Canonical and Red Hat have no interest in operating an app store. And community-based distros are too understaffed to deal with setting up payment processing and all that jazz.

But more importantly, it's extremely doubtful that this influx of users wouldn't stall out immediately, because transforming Linux from a really great Unix to a really great business-user-focused desktop OS is simply a huge undertaking, and nobody has the time or community support to do it.

The fact is, Linux is working just fine. It doesn't need to change. Linux users are happy with it, and that's enough.

You want something that meets your expectations for what Linux should be? Start your own thing. (Search my comments for "Linux is a fish, stop trying to make it a bird" to see my suggestions on that subject.)
by godelski | 2025-09-07 04:58:34+00:00
> if I was the founder with a huge equity stake

A few startups have reached out to me to be a founding engineer. The largest equity stake offered was 3% for being employee #2.

This kind of equity is batshit insane to me. These very early employees are much closer to co-founder than to a typical employee. I wouldn't demand to split the founder's equity with me but 3% seems pretty low to their 50% considering they're asking that I essentially be a founder but with <1yr delay. Unless I completely misunderstand startups, there's a lot that matters far more than the first year. At this low of a rate it generally makes more sense to go work for big tech where you'd get (near) guaranteed profits and much greater work life balances.

TBH, the low equity to founding employees makes me almost think there is a conspiracy to disincentivize people to work for them. I mean you see these 0.5-2% numbers seem crazy. It's got to be a real "unicorn" company for you to make more money than you would at the big tech. I imagine it's got to end up with a lot of bad feelings too. I mean let's say that 3% gets diluted to about 1% while founder has 50% and gets diluted to 20%. Is their value 20x more than mine? Don't get me wrong, if we got to a real unicorn and did like a $10bn IPO I'd be happy with my $100m, but I can imagine a lot of people feeling ripped off seeing the person they worked neck and neck with become a billionaire.

I agree, 996 is insane. Like the author said, pulling an all nighter just results in the next day being unproductive. I think of it like going to the gym, but with your brain. You can't become a body builder by just lifting weights every single day and pushing yourself to the limit every day. That only results in injury. It can be worth it for a short period of time, but I think we've also created this weird situation where no one sees that it is not worth it for anyone but the founder. IMO, if you want a successful startup, one of the key aspects is that your founding members need to be as dedicated as you. And I just don't think you're going to get that kind of investment if you're pricing yourself as 20-50x more valuable than them. It just seems doubly bad and I can't figure out why we've normalized such situations.
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-07 04:59:15+00:00
I think you're looking at it too literally - what people usually mean with"making invalid state unrepresentable" is in the main application which has your domain code - which should be separate from your inputs

He even gives the example of zod, which is a validation library he defines to be a parser.

What he wants to say : "I don't want to write my own validation in a CLI, give me a good API already that first validates and then converts the inputs into my declared schema"
by leoh | 2025-09-07 04:59:22+00:00
Really? I have found the UX stuff with egui to be super ergonomic. It's not "native", though. Trying to do macOS UX with it, I have found, generally sucks (curious if anyone knows of any good libraries). Then again C++ probably sucks for native macOS too. So I really don't think Rust is far off.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-07 05:00:25+00:00
That's not much an arc, at least as described. He starts with one set of principles, and he stays with those same set of principles, but just changes his methods. A more interesting (IMO) arc would be to realize that principles should be guidelines, not strict rules, and that those guidelines can sometimes be bent in order to accomplish goals. "I can't trust organizations anymore" is not character growth; the character is not learning anything about how his decisions affect the world.
by mitchivin | 2025-09-07 05:00:46+00:00
taskbar tabs - correct and I spent a crazy amount of time trying to figure out why they look off, admittedly I accepted defeat at where we landed but I think its pretty damn close!

the rest, are all aesthetic decisions haha but I was aware of some of them - I'm surprised you missed the biggest one of them all though.. also that nobody else has mentioned it yet - maybe its because nobody has tried it

the drag selection over desktop icons highlights the icons in a way much closer to windows 11 than XP... i really just thought it deserved an upgrade

edit: did i miss it or did you just add the thing about selection? you're right though
by pchangr | 2025-09-07 05:01:35+00:00
I believe this refers to the fact that, before Jupiter, the most powerful computer in Europe was HPC6, which is owned by Eni S.p.A, a private company, and the following most powerful computer was the Alps system, located in Switzerland. So, in this context, this new supercomputer is owned by Europe, “the public” and it’s located in the European Union sovereignty within Europe, the continent.

Edit: I found the full quote in the website of the Jülich Development Center and I guess it makes sense why it was editorialized for the eu-wide website.

“This is a historic milestone. With JUPITER, Europe is reaching the highest level of high-performance computing. JUPITER is also a testimony for Germany's long leadership in HPC. Today, it became the home of the most powerful computer in Europe and the fourth most powerful in the world. From European perspective, JUPITER is a pioneer. It shows that when we combine national vision with European cooperation, we can achieve global excellence.”

Source:

https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2025...
by magicalist | 2025-09-07 05:01:48+00:00
> In Marcus Luttrell's original after-action report, he stated that he and his teammates were attacked by 20–35 insurgents, while his book places the number at over 200....military journalist Ed Darack cites a military intelligence report stating the strength of the Taliban force to be 8–10.

> Luttrell's book and the film both suggest that the SEALs decision to release the goat herders led to their subsequent ambush - yet according to Gulab, people throughout the area heard the SEALs being dropped off by helicopter, and the Taliban proceeded to track the SEALs' footprints.

Yeah, I'm going to go with the reason these details are "emerging" (aka published in coordination with the DoD) is the aforementioned "unclear factual accuracy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Survivor#Historical_accur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Luttrell#Operation_Red_...
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-07 05:03:02+00:00
This is my best understanding as well.

I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT.

Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt, including the claim that they were even SF in the first place.

However, they all describe the selection processes similarly. And, my educated assumption is that this part is probably too dull for them to lie about, much less lie about in unison across many accounts and years. So I have a decent level of confidence in that aspect of their tales.

Anyway, the common threads are that while they do want highly confident and confident types who are also outliers in terms of physical ability, the selection process is HIGHLY geared towards selecting intelligent team-oriented individuals. Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. These missions are highly planned but due to the inherent ambiguity and difficulty the SF guys have to make a LOT of autonomous decision making on the fly when things (inevitably) deviate from the script.

You hear very similar stories from other "elite" types in the military, like combat pilots. While you have to be sort of a highly talented "alpha" type you also need to be professional and team oriented. No loose cannons allowed, either on the individual or squad level.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-07 05:03:23+00:00
Easy to reach these numbers.

Many developers never do the math of what their salaries actually cost.

We in consulting are deeply aware of the impact mapping hours and days into money, plus license and support costs, and infrastructure.

Hence why I dislike all those "I rewrote X into Y", great and how many thousands did that fun endeavour cost to the employer?
Show HN: CRoM – Context Rot Mitigation System for RAG-Based LLMs
by Flamehaven01 | 2025-09-07 05:03:30+00:00
We've just open-sourced *CRoM*, a context-efficiency layer for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.

Why this exists: RAG pipelines often suffer from "context rot" — long prompts or noisy retrieval degrading answer quality. CRoM focuses on efficient, relevant injection.

What it does: - Token-aware prompt packing under strict token limits - Cross-encoder fallback for low-confidence answers - FastAPI-based orchestration - Modular & ready for integration with existing RAG stacks

GitHub: https://github.com/Flamehaven/CRoM-Context-Rot-Mitigation--E...

Still early — feedback & suggestions welcome.
by hitekker | 2025-09-07 05:04:43+00:00
Reading HN is fun—a firehose of insights and intellectual candy.

But it's not work. Personal growth ("internal landscape") requires work; unfun human interaction oftentimes. Online discourse doesn't force this work; despite downvotes, flags, and angry text, it's all still in our heads and at our leisure. Whereas in-person or 1:1s force us to maintain empathy and listen— real work[1] that online spaces can only suggest, not enforce.

You could recreate that experience by researching, considering, reflecting and then interacting, but that's different work you impose on yourself. It's outside of the free online watercooler which has little power to change us beyond the ego we've invested in it.

The top commenter above, for example, used internet comments as the beginning of real-life friendships; they did the real work afterwards. Similarly, my original comment was looking more for like-minds, than to change minds; it summarizes an experience for those who've lived it but lack words for it. Though I believe my take is truth, I'm content to have my fun at one point, and do the work at another. Today, I felt like showing my work :)

[1] As a manager, this is a chunk of my job!
by kerkeslager | 2025-09-07 05:05:41+00:00
> From what I understand, the quality of the randomness of Fisher-Yates depends entirely on the quality of the random source AND that you didn't bias it by using modulo with a non-evenly-dividing divisor. It actually says that right in the article.

Yes.

Pretty much every modern language ships with a secure PRNG (which probably just calls /dev/urandom). A poker site probably has enough throughput to want to not block while waiting for /dev/urandom to build up entropy, so they might do something faster, but /dev/urandom is probably secure, it just might be a slower than a big poker site needs.

The non-evenly-diving divisor thing is a bit trickier, which is why standard libraries implement Fisher-Yates for you. But the solution is basically:

Using your PRNG, generate the number of bits you need. So if you need a number 0-51, generate 6 bits. 6 bits can hold 0-63. If you get a number in the range 52-63, discard that and generate a new 6-bit number with the PRNG.

If you need a number in an awkward range like 0-35, you'll need to discard a lot of numbers, but keep in mind this may still be faster than modular division which is pretty dang slow.

> My method may not suffer as much from those drawbacks, but you're right, without testing it thoroughly, there's no way to know and it should not be relied upon instead of F-Y.

That's very much not what I said.

"Testing it thoroughly" is not adequate. Start by proving the algorithm is correct. If you don't have a proof the algorithm works there's no reason to even start implementing it so there's nothing to test.

> EDIT: My intuition was correct more or less. Doing it the way I described serves to "smear" any bias across the deck. Fascinating chatgpt convo on it: https://chatgpt.com/share/68bd103f-9188-8004-8cbc-86693a0d87...

Jesus Christ, no. If you still believe anything ChatGPT says then security is not the field for you.
by neilv | 2025-09-07 05:05:42+00:00
If anyone is interested, but didn't read it because it looked long-form... it's only ~3,500 words, and is a very accessible writeup about this serious matter.

The bulk of the piece is also a more sympathetic reporting of the story (e.g., the alleged importance of the mission, and allegedly why things happened) than previous reporting I saw. (The end of the piece switches to criticism beyond this story, though.)
by to11mtm | 2025-09-07 05:07:41+00:00
At least in my head, the 'controller' is what can either take 0 or more parameters or input models as 'input' and the controller can either provide direction to the browser as to what to do next.

e.x. in a 'proper' ASP.NET MVC 4 project I 'inherited', the View took input data in and with a tiny bit of JS magic/razor fuckery around the query page etc, but overall the controllers would return the right hints for the Razor/JS 'view' to move the application flow along or otherwise do a proper reload.
by skydhash | 2025-09-07 05:07:46+00:00
Controller is where your logic is. Your model is your state, and the view is presentation. Both are static. The controller is the dynamic aspect that update the view to match the state and update the state according to interaction or some other system events.

Splitting the logic from the state and presentation make the code very testable. You can either have the state as input and you test your presentation, or have the presentation as input (interaction and lifecycle events) and test your state (or its reflection in the presentation).

Also this decoupling makes everything more flexible. You can switch your presentation layer or alter the mechanism for state storage and retrieval (cache, sync) without touching your logic.
by Eextra953 | 2025-09-07 05:07:57+00:00
This botched operation shows how representative government has been subverted in America. Power should flow bottom-up, rather than top-down. Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval? Highly doubtful. This suggests our current form of democracy is deeply broken and urgently needs fixing. IMO the issue is how we think about power itself. The assumption underneath it all is that once we vote, power becomes fully vested in our elected officials rather than remaining with the people who conditionally granted it to them. The "representative" part of our democratic republic has become the hack that allows crappy politicians to take over and use power for their own benefit. We grant power through voting, but that power should stay accountable to us - not disappear into secret operations that would never survive public scrutiny.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-07 05:08:18+00:00
Yes really, because it is nothing like Qt, in IDE integration, tools for designers, or ecosystem from 3rd parties components.

C++ sucks for macOS, because it was never a first party language, unless using it via Objective-C++.

The only role of C++ in macOS is for drivers, LLVM and being the Metal Shader Language (C++14 with extensions).
by esbranson | 2025-09-07 05:09:12+00:00
In 2021, FCC previously allowed correctional facilities to identify contraband wireless devices and send disabling requests to wireless carriers.[1] But Managed Access Systems (MAS) and especially "MAS Evolved" required formal roaming agreements with wireless carriers so the systems could authenticate, capture, and deny contraband phones.[2]

MAS operators told the FCC they had been trying for years to finalize roaming agreements but faced months-long delays, unreturned emails, and even situations where carriers sent non-functional SIMs for testing. Companies reported carriers often gave less than 24 hours notice of changes, or prisons only discovered changes after systems broke. Agreements included high costs and "termination for convenience" clauses, meaning a carrier could cut off the MAS operator at will, leaving prisons with sunk costs and no service continuity.

On and on they go.[4] So now they are going to get jammed.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis...

[2] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-20-791A1_Rcd.pdf

[3] https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/104192908201701/1

[4] https://recnet.com/ecfs/?docket=13-111
by __rito__ | 2025-09-07 05:09:37+00:00
> In my experience, the 996 teams aren’t actually cranking out more work. They’re just working odd hours, doing a little work on the weekends to say they worked the weekend, and they spend a lot of time relaxing at the office because they’re always there.

That's exactly what happens. Some companies' management values asses in the office, and the fitting kind obliges. They come in at 9, leave at 8/9 in the evening, but a lot of the times they are scrolling the social media, doing chit chat, reading blogs, etc. whenever they can (can't do other serious work/learning, as such companies tend to actually spy on what you are doing).

They take 90 minutes long lunch breaks, take walks to smoke, etc. But the bossman can hold a meeting with them at 1 or 3 in the morning sometimes. These get a lot of praise at such companies.

They retain the worst kind of 'talent'. These companies often hire decent technical talent, but with another dimension lacking, like poor communication skills, or a no-name college- knowing that they won't land better offers soon.

Often fearing market, some good people oblige, too, but then tend to quit after a year or two due to burnout.

Managers are the worst. They are perpetually in meetings having conversations much worse than free ChatGPT, but they can say that they are 'working' long hours, and in weekends, setting the bar for ICs.

Productivity is lower than 9-6-5 teams. But many people haven’t come out of the sweatshop/manual labour mentality.
by phkamp | 2025-09-07 05:11:52+00:00
The R1000 is a micro-coded computer built from approx 5k TTL functions, with an instruction set consisting of Ada Primitives like "Define a type for a variant structure with 3 variants, you'll get the details later".

It processes 64bit data and 64 bit type information about that data in parallel, in hardware.

It is also object oriented in hardware, there is no linear address space or VM-tree,

Three left in the world, plus one mostly empty chassis.

My Covid19 project was writing a software emulation of it, starting from 400 pages of schematics, because the instruction set is not documented.

And yes, I'm way behind on documenting it, because I also have a life :-)
by keepamovin | 2025-09-07 05:12:17+00:00
That's one way to assess it. Can you take the cost if your presence is detected?

Maybe nothing happens. How likely is nothing? And if your presence finds it ways to the authorities, what's the cost? Likely, NK will patch what might be your best chance at advance warning.

As fishing is dangerous and many never return, their plausibly 'accidental' deaths provide cover to keep the secrecy and your future access intact.

Now the story leaks out from inside - what are the consequences? I don't know.
by mjevans | 2025-09-07 05:13:08+00:00
Agreed, but maybe my mental model is splitting the 'Controller' aspect into the client / server model. Everything must get validated server side, there's no other rational choice. Otherwise you cannot enforce any consistency or business logic.

That just leaves formatting the requested changes into a language the server model accepts.

Maybe model is more 'database', controller is API interface (server side + client request requirements), and view is end user render?
by bobbiechen | 2025-09-07 05:14:40+00:00
I thought the style was like ChatGPT in a "clever, casual, snarky" prompt flavor as well. I see it a lot on LinkedIn especially in sentence structures like these:

"Invalid data? The parser rejects it. Done."

"That validation logic that used to be 30% of my CLI code? Gone."

"Mutually exclusive groups? Sure. Context-dependent options? Why not."

For me this really piled on at the end of the blog post. But maybe it's just personal style too.
by rekttrader | 2025-09-07 05:14:48+00:00
When I did it back in the day for a poker site we also had the constraint of never storing the positions of shuffled cards for security reasons. We always sorted the deck and when it came to dealing I developed a shuffle server that got noise from a taped up webcams cmos sensor, when a player needed a card it polled the server which was just outputting random positions from 0 to 51 continuously, if the card position was already dealt, it re requested a new one, entropy was gotten from player decision time and network speed. It was a fun thing to build.
by Animats | 2025-09-07 05:14:52+00:00
The evidence indicates that the air brake and the manual brake were quickly applied by the brakeman of cab #1, but that in the current configuration, the brakes do not have sufficient capacity to stop the cabins in motion without their empty masses being mutually balanced by the connecting cable. There- fore, the existing brakes does not constitute a redundant system in case of a failure in the connecting cable.

So the braking system is insufficient to stop after a broken cable.

There's more than a wheel brake system. There's a mechanism to clamp against the track slot from both top and bottom. See Fig. 2, right. Apparently it wasn't enough.

Funiculars are a problem because they're too steep for railroad wheel brakes, too heavy for elevator braking systems, and rare enough that there are not good standards for them. Angels Flight in LA has had two major accidents, one in 2001 and one in 2013.[1][2] Different causes. The 2001 accident was due to bad design - only one cable, no track brakes, and a system where each car had its own winding drum. The spline connecting the drums failed. The 2013 accident, after a total redesign and replacement of the hauling system, was due to bad maintenance. So bad that it involved a stick being used to hold down an override switch.

Elevator rail brakes are often jam brakes - once they're triggered, a wedge is jammed between brake and rail such that motion forces it into tighter contact. Stops with jam brakes are rather drastic. San Francisco cable cars have a jam brake for emergencies. That's the red lever, which drives a wedge into the slot. When used, there are usually passenger injuries and the wedge will be welded to the track by frictional heating.[3] So that's for serious emergencies only.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

[2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/cable-car-6-riders...