MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjdesno | 2025-09-22 03:54:09+00:00
Most tutorials aren’t for non-developers. They’re not for developers, either. They’re a bunch of prose I want to skip, and then I finally get to the steps I’m really looking for, but the author left one out, or assumed some weird development environment or IDE I’m not using, and I have to give up and go back to Google again.

The problem is that writing is hard, because it’s for people outside of your head, while you’re inside of it. As toddlers we learn that our senses aren’t immediately accessible to other people, but many of us never master the art of remembering that knowledge and experience inside our heads isn’t available to you, the reader, until we write it down.

Oh, and maybe if folks thought “cookbook” instead of “tutorial” when they’re writing, the result might be organized better for the rest of us to use, and less likely to become useless after the next point release.
by komali2 | 2025-09-22 03:54:49+00:00
I feel like people who make such blanket value statements like "I don't cheat people" or "I don't lie" aren't being honest with themselves, or are putting too much faith in the stability of the society they live in.

The easiest retort is Anne Frank. You're hiding her in your attic and a Nazi asks if you're hiding enemies of the state. There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!

Someone might answer, "well, fine. I don't cheat or lie unless I'm in extraordinary circumstances." That's fine, they've let go of dogmatism then, now the interesting conversation starts of where the line is, what constitutes extraordinary circumstances. That's a very interesting conversation I believe.
by smartbit | 2025-09-22 03:55:05+00:00
Fun With UUIDs goes more into depth, presentation at PGday Lowlands sept 12, 2025.

> UUIDs have a bad reputation, mostly based on randomly allocated UUIDs effect on indexes. But UUIDs also give us 16 bytes of space to play with, which can be to our advantage. We can use the space of UUIDs to structure and encode data into our identifiers. This can be really useful for multi-tenant applications, for sharding or paritioning. UUIDs can also help improve you web app security, by not leaking sequentially allocated ids.

> We'll take a look at index performance concerns with randomly allocated UUIDs, sequential ids and sensibly structured UUIDs.

> Seeing how we can go about extracting information from these UUIDs and how to build these UUIDs inside PostgreSQL, and how we can look at the performance of these functions.

> Finally looking at adding support for bitwise operations on UUIDs using an extension.

Slides https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgdaynl2025/schedule/sessio...

Live stream https://youtube.com/watch?v=tJYEuIpzch4&t=2h36m
by ShroudedNight | 2025-09-22 03:55:25+00:00
I have encountered a number of people who exhibit startling hostility at being told something they were already aware of. While I cannot currently recall a specific example, I strongly suspect I have previously felt this way myself.

While sharing may be better than assuming when only considering the local optimum, if your signal to noise ratio is bad enough, you will face an impairment to communication that simply wouldn't exist if you had been more selective.
by anxman | 2025-09-22 03:55:33+00:00
I received counterfeit toothpaste from Amazon during COVID. I got asthma from using it and never had asthma before or symptoms like that. I purchased tubes from Costco to compare and the Amazon ones were clearly fake.

I left a review to warn others on the page. Amazon removed my review and lifetime banned me from leaving reviews again citing “abnormalities.
by jval43 | 2025-09-22 03:55:48+00:00
I like the term acerbic brevity! Generally though, I'd say concise and precise is exactly what I want in my docs, especially if I have to read hundreds of pages.

There's a fine line to walk for it to stay understandable though.

Academic papers sometimes take brevity to the extreme due to page limits and (frankly) bad writers, so much so that crucial parts are missing or ambiguous or where papers consist solely of formulas with little context.

Personally I draw the line where I need start writing down stuff in order to understand the following paragraphs. That's tedious.

However I encountered the other extreme too and it's similarly unbearable: full on conversational English in an overly friendly tone with everything explained at length and sometimes repeated. It gets old really quick and takes longer to get to what I need. Fine for a hobby project, but if I need it for work I don't want to spend time on that.
by lukan | 2025-09-22 03:55:57+00:00
"Most tutorials are not for non-developers"

That has been repeated in the comments many times now, but the very headline says that this tutorial was indeed also intended for non developers.

Like some open source Github project that the author merely wanted to install, not starting to mess with the code. Basically, it is complaining in a satirical way about installation readmes, that maybe they could be made easier, that also non developers can follow some simple steps. A complaint that I can very much agree with, even though I am a developer. But so often little steps are left out and when that happens in a area you are not familiar with, then this can mean lots of wasted hours.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-22 03:56:02+00:00
> But for the life of me, no forum post or FP tutorial that I could find explained monads in clear language. I've googled "what is a monad" once a year, only to get the vague idea that you need monads to handle IO.

Another phrase to search for is "railway oriented programming"[0], which technically describes a monad called a Kleisli[1]. Still, there are many introductions in a lot of languages based on the term above.

HTH

EDIT:

Something to keep in mind is that the term "monad" identifies a mathematical concept having well-defined behaviors, not a specific construct. So searching for "what is a monad" is akin to searching for "what is a happiness."

0 - https://medium.com/geekculture/better-architecture-with-rail...

1 - https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/12/23/kleisli-categories/
by realisticfoo | 2025-09-22 03:56:18+00:00
the best use of LLM is to help you program a digispark USB dongle with Arduino to make it emulate mouse movement and scrolling to appease the idi0tic spyware retarded boomers monitor like it was relevant somehow on their corporate spy box.

Meanwhile we adults can do real work on a separate real computer. Never use their laptop more than absolutely minimum possible.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-22 03:56:26+00:00
People are confused about what these published agreements (like with the EU as well) are. They're not legal agreements, treaties, or even executive orders, although the corresponding orders to reduce the tariffs are of course executive orders.

But the agreements themselves are completely informal and an overview of what the US expects to see happen in order to maintain the tariff reductions. The interpretation of whether the other country or group of countries is abiding the agreement is entirely at the discretion of Trump.

So there's no such thing as a loop hole. If Trump isn't satisfied with e.g. the EU's progress towards implementing said agreement, he can increase tariffs back to where they were at his discretion, with or without reason given. So there's no such thing as a loop hole in this sort of agreement.
by linehedonist | 2025-09-22 03:56:39+00:00
A number of organizations announced during the 2.5 month pause that they had run out of food:

* UNRWA ran out of flour April 24. https://abcnews.go.com/International/malnutrition-gaza-worse...

* World Food Program ran out of all food April 25. https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-runs-out-food-stocks-gaza-borde...

* World Central Kitchen ran out of all food May 7. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/world-central-kitc...

These were major food providers in Gaza. If they had run out of food, I can't imagine that "food was handed out continuously." You are welcome to prove me wrong and find a major provider still providing food in ample quantities in early May.

I don't understand your point with the comparison with Germany. What the US did was barbaric and cruel. Maybe what Israel is doing to Gaza is the 8th circle of hell instead of the 9th, but who cares?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-22 03:58:48+00:00
As someone that uses pointer tagging, I must point out that this article is insufficiently defensive.

I've done my own exploration of what I can get away with across 64-bit x86 and ARM in this regard. It has been a while but the maximum number of bits that are reliably taggable across all environments and use cases that I have been able to determine is six. Can you get away with more? Probably yes, but there are identifiable environments where it will explode if you do so. That may not apply to your use case.

Reliable pointer tagging is not trivial.
by voxl | 2025-09-22 03:58:53+00:00
The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. Yet, much ink has been spilt on arguments to the contrary. Refuting some of these arguments is quite difficult, honestly, but none of the arguments really matter because they reject all the convincing evidence as conspiracy or magic.

In this way, what you suggest demands significant labor on the part of the person arguing an obvious fact against an ideologue who will proclaim an open desire to change their belief but whose world view is entrenched in magic making it fundamentally impossible to actually change it.

Long story short I don't buy it and think what you said is full of shit.
by scuff3d | 2025-09-22 03:59:20+00:00
I said this elsewhere, but I think the awkwardness is coming from Zigs attitude towards interfaces. It seems like from a language design perspective they've been made intentionally awkward because they want to discourage their use, and fair enough. There are other options for sure. But now they want to base Io around interfaces. So Writers and Readers, it sounds like Async as well, and of course Allocators were already using interfaces. If they are going to become that fundamental to core features of the language, I think a more ergonomic way to work them needs to be a higher priority.
by anta40 | 2025-09-22 03:59:25+00:00
How to build the OS? I'm on macOS with zig 0.15.1 installed.

`zig build` gave me this:

/Users/anta40/Lab/OSDev/OS-1000-lines-zig/build.zig.zon:9:13: error: expected enum literal .name = "zoros",
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-22 03:59:46+00:00
For what it's worth, here's the relevant section from the patch description:

Correctness and feature parity ------------------------------ Rust binder passes all tests that validate the correctness of Binder in the Android Open Source Project. We can boot a device, and run a variety of apps and functionality without issues. We have performed this both on the Cuttlefish Android emulator device, and on a Pixel 6 Pro.
by qnleigh | 2025-09-22 04:00:33+00:00
Wait really?? I also wound up migrating to Fedora 75bit for basically the same reason (TopHat doesn't even support hoobastank). But then I couldn't find `file` in the specified directory. I have

`library/Lib/library/llibrary/liiiiiibrarrrary/llllliiiiibrary/hidden/hidden/hiding/you can’t find me/hidden/nope/never/hahahahereiam/file` and `/hahahahereiam/file.`, but neither of these boop.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-22 04:02:37+00:00
> The first project I was able to change their workflow to build inside a 20.04 container.

This approach does _not_ work because you end up with the `node` that runs GitHub Actions not being able to run, certainly this will happen if you end using a sufficiently old container.

> Do you have any documentation or generic recommendations for solving these issues caused by blindly using GitHub Actions for all compilations?

Install these pkgs in an `ubuntu-latest` image:

- debootstrap debian-archive-keyring - software-properties-common - schroot fakeroot fakechroot

then

- name: 'Cache sysroot' # This comes after checking out the sources because # actions/checkout@v4 cleans $PWD! id: cache-sysroot uses: actions/cache@v3 with: path: ${{ github.workspace }}/sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE key: sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE-${{ runner.os }}-${{ runner.arch }}-v1 - name: 'Setup cross-compilation sysroot' if: steps.cache-sysroot.oututs.cache-hit != 'true' run: | set -vx SYSROOT_PATH="${{ github.workspace }}/sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE" echo "SYSROOT_PATH=$SYSROOT_PATH" >> $GITHUB_ENV if [ ! -d sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE ]; then sudo debootstrap --arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) DEBIAN_RELEASE sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu fi sudo chroot sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE apt-get update sudo chroot sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE apt-get install -y build-essential git wget curl sudo unzip zip autoconf libfreetype6-dev libcups2-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrender-dev libxrandr-dev libxtst-dev libxt-dev libasound2-dev libffi-dev file binutils libfontconfig-dev sudo chroot sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE apt-get install -y software-properties-common sudo chroot sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test sudo chown -R $USER:$USER sysroot-DEBIAN_RELEASE

where you replace `DEBIAN_RELEASE` with the release you want to target, and then

- configure your project's build to use that sysroot.

That's it.

If your project does not support sysroots, make it do so. In general compilers will support sysroots, so it's just a matter of making your build configuration facility support sysroots.
by brailsafe | 2025-09-22 04:03:24+00:00
Tbh this just seems like a classic "my anecdote disputes the reality for many" without seemingly any qualifiers or nuance.

Nobody ever said it was impossible to buy a house in general in any geography with a sufficient salary and ability to service any amount of debt. In the city I live in, the ratio between median income and cost of any home was wildly, comically more favorable for boomers, to the point where if you aren't literally rich already, you need to go become a rare doctor and shack up with an L6+ engineer at booming tech company to pull it off, then maintain that income 'till it's paid off.

If two people want to get married or find it useful, they'll do so regardless, on that point we might agree, but many people in the past just did so because they accidentally got pregnant and might have felt internal or external pressure from family to get married and not abort. My grandparents were broke as hell and got married at their rural community center, that's just what people did then, they weren't about to stretch for something glamorous.

Many people now look at the decisions of their parents during whatever time it was, including with houses, and think "well this is what mom and dad did, and they're both broke and divorced now, so maybe lets not do that this time"
by scuff3d | 2025-09-22 04:03:56+00:00
It's always a problem that you forget what you use to not know.

When I first started writing some internal docs/tutorials at work, I was new to Linux. So I generally took the time to include tangents into explaining fairly basic Linux concepts, because they were new to me. They were rough edges I had to get past so I wanted to help others do the same.

Five years and a shit load of Linux experience later, I don't do that anymore. That stuff has become so second nature to me that it just doesn't even occur to me anymore. And I just don't have the damn time. If I had to stop to explain what cat or sudo or | mean in every doc I write I wouldn't have time to get anything done.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-09-22 04:04:01+00:00
Walter, I never said he couldn't spend his money how he wants, so that really isn't a counter argument to what I was claiming. Personally, I think most people (Musk is just one) who thinks terraforming Mars is realistic have read too much science fiction and are more enamored of the cool Robinson Crusoe aspect more than it would really serve any purpose.

As for "every one" of his successful business ventures being called crazy, the first one was a dot-com online map of businesses in a given city. Did people say that was crazy? His next venture ended up getting acquired by Paypal, was that considered a crazy business? He invested in/took over Tesla -- I don't know if it was considered crazy or not at the time. SpaceX obviously is a great success. The brain control company -- we'll see. Grok -- nobody called that a crazy idea. Some of his other ventures, like hyperloop and the boring company, do seem more crazy but those escape your claim because they are in fact not successful. His solar roof company wasn't crazy, but it also isn't a success.

In short, Musk has no doubt had great successes, but there is no need to alter history to claim that at every turn he broke new ground when everyone else said it was crazy or impossible.
by marklubi | 2025-09-22 04:04:03+00:00
> Beginners have to be nurtured through lots of context that builds up slowly.

My son is 17 and very interested in programming. Had to explain to him public, private, internal, and also static the other night.

I then joked, you should ask your teacher about recursion tomorrow. He's with his mom this weekend, but I'm anxiously awaiting hearing how that went.
by sandspar | 2025-09-22 04:04:44+00:00
Saw a friend's recent wedding video. It appears she hired a professional documentary film crew? Like there were multiple angles of the same events, Hollywood level production values etc.

It also seemed like she went down a checklist of "What to do in your wedding": the newlywed's funny walkout dance, throwing the bouquet, coastal scenery in the background.

The effect was to smack you over the head with "either her or his family is rich". Maybe that was the intended message?

And possibly relevant: she shared it on LinkedIn.
by varenc | 2025-09-22 04:05:56+00:00
you mean screen recording? Or using a virtual display you can record? pretty sure this is false for the level 1 DRM used for 4k content. Still certainly will work for some things but never for 4K. Sites downgrade you to 720p if you're in a lower security context. Would love to be proven wrong.

Use OBS to capture the 4K version of this test pattern[0] off Netflix and I'll buy you lunch!

You can point a camera at your monitor of course, but with level 1 DRM the video decoding happens in a hardware video decoder that's not accessible by the operating system. If you try to screen record or use OBS on 4K content on macOS/Windows, you just get black. Same with phones. It's not "just use OBS". If it works for you it's probably because you're getting 720p content. (which admittedly provides the majority of the value)

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80018499 # <-- this test pattern is the most reliable way to actually know what resolution video Netflix is sending you.
by yobbo | 2025-09-22 04:06:31+00:00
> Often blaming "esoteric" and "irrelevant" subjects such as linear algebra for their lack of success, while not understanding that it is a vital course for any engineer.

The author was successful in his particular environment. It was only much later he understood that the content of his education wasn't valuable in itself.

He is not blaming linear algebra, rather complaining that he was graded on memorisation rather than understanding.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-22 04:06:50+00:00
I know (you'd said up-thread).

> and we had to go through a large number of design mistakes, mostly involving signals.

Eh, Unix signals themselves were a bit of a design mistake, especially SIGPIPE (which was a byproduct of the lack of error checking in Unix programs). The reality is that Unix was too simple an OS, but the reality too is that that simplicity was the key to its success.
by larme | 2025-09-22 04:07:04+00:00
I'm very interesting in this field (realtime audio + GPU programming). How do you deal with the latency? Do you send or multiple single vectors/buffers to GPU?

Also I think because samples in one channel need to be processed sequentially, does that mean mono audio processing won't benefit a lot from GPU programming. Or maybe you are dealing with spectral signal processing?
by svat | 2025-09-22 04:07:29+00:00
The binomial theorem (though here Newton is still talking “powers of 11”) is apparently very deep. The algebraic geometer S. S. Abhyankar, in his article “Historical Ramblings in Algebraic Geometry and Related Algebra” that won a couple of writing awards, speaking of “high-school algebra”, “college algebra” and “university algebra”, gives as his thesis:

> The method of high-school algebra is powerful, beautiful and accessible. So let us not be overwhelmed by the groups-ring-fields or the functorial arrows of the other two algebras and thereby lose sight of the power of the explicit algorithmic processes given to us by Newton, Tschirnhausen, Kronecker, and Sylvester.

and goes on to write:

> Personal Experience 1. In my Harvard dissertation (1956, [2]) I proved resolution of singularities of algebraic surfaces in nonzero characteristic. There I used a mixture of high-school and college algebra. After ten years, I understood the Binomial Theorem a little better and thereby learned how to replace some of the college algebra by high-school algebra; that enabled me to prove resolution for arithmetical surfaces (1965, [4]). Then replacing some more college algebra by high-school algebra enabled me to prove resolution for three-dimensional algebraic varieties in nonzero characteristic (1966, [5]). But still some college algebra has remained.

> I am convinced that if one can decipher the mysteries of the Binomial Theorem and learn how to replace the remaining college algebra by high-school algebra, then one should be able to do the general resolution problem. Indeed, I could almost see a ray of light at the end of the tunnel. But this process of unlearning college algebra left me a bit exhausted; so I quit!
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-22 04:09:21+00:00
Macro-economics, military science, cryptocurrency, and now medical science! Is there nothing that Trump can't do, and do well? Think about the outcry that would have happened if Obama or Biden had made a medical announcement like this. The congressional hearings, editorials, and news analysis would have been deafening. Truth to tell, that would have happened even for G.W. Bush. But if Trump makes a decision, there's a little factual reporting, there's no wasteful court cases, no hearings, no media outcry. Relaxing and efficient!
by peteforde | 2025-09-22 04:09:49+00:00
I find that a lot of project homepages (or GitHub README.md these days) are riding high on "if you're reading this, you already know what this is for" energy.

What I would give for people to approach documentation in a more empathetic way; tell me what something is for, what problem it solves vs other competing solutions such as X or Y, whether it's still the best solution or in maintenance mode because another tool has become dominant.

Give me the tools to construct my own pros and cons matrix, without assuming that I'm an expert. Put five minutes into asking yourself "what questions are people likely to have, even if they aren't sure exactly what to ask" and write that down.

I'll never understand how someone can spend months or years of free time building something, but then actively sabotage it by not making it easy for people to realize that they've found what they are looking for.

It's also really valuable to keep perspective on the different kinds of documentation. https://diataxis.fr/ is a really solid starting point for anyone aspiring to create better docs.
by rasz | 2025-09-22 04:10:02+00:00
> Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 ... Minimum specs called for an 80386 with 12MB of RAM to really breathe — at a time when 4MB of RAM was typical and 8MB was luxurious.

1992 was flood of cheap clones with Am386DX, 486SX / 4 MB ram / VGA / Sound Blaster. Then in 1993 standard became 486 DX2-66 / 8 MB RAM / VLB VGA.