MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DarkNova6 | 2025-09-02 08:43:44+00:00
This is a typical opinion to have. This is also an uninformed opinion.

All Java needs is better syntax to handle exceptions. Nobody wants to open a whole block to handle an expected exception.

``` switch (f.get()) {

case Box(String s) when isGoodString(s) -> score(100); case Box(String s) -> score(50); case null -> score(0); case throws CancellationException ce -> ...ce... case throws ExecutionException ee -> ...ee... case throws InterruptedException ie -> ...ie...

} ```
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-02 08:43:46+00:00
Oracle employs most of the contributors and the OpenJDK leadership is Oracle as well. But it's true that companies like IBM/Red Hat (mainly) and a few others contribute as well and that decision making is community based. In practice, Oracle still wields a lot of influence over the roadmap and technical direction. But you are right that decision making is community based and meritocratic. Which in practice means Oracle has a large vote.
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-02 08:44:36+00:00
My kids play the N64 more than the Wii because the Wii is quite frustrating to set up and maintain batteries and controller connections. The Switch is even more awful, but they’ll play it handheld. The PS5 is complex but generally straightforward. It helps that the controllers are big and we have a nice, clean charging dock for them. The Switch charging dock is finicky and annoying with the tiny controllers.

I think my immediate feedback is that the game cards could be a lot bigger. Anyone out there want to make a ridiculously beefy SD card adapter and corresponding slot? Or maybe even one that interfaces like a puck/block with some keying and locking.

But overall this is 100% on target for my 6 and 8 year olds. They want to play games, not operate a console.

We take them to a Retro Gaming night every few months and I’ve noticed that the X-in-1 consoles (even the brand names) are rarely touched, and all have laminated cards desperately attempting to tell kids how to get into a game. The console UX is paramount.
by wafflemaker | 2025-09-02 08:45:05+00:00
The truth is also that there are more noteworthy this happening in the world now. Previous world order has fallen.* New one is being formed. And Trump is kind of in the midst of it as the leader of the ex-hegemon country.

There will be much happening for the next decade or two. New wars, new alliances. Countries agreeing (or disagreeing) on new influence zones.

*The old hegemon (the country that leads the world and calls all the shots) has no power anymore to influence countries to do their bidding. Look at how Putin makes fun of Trump, playing a delay game, while he is trying to slowly win the war he lost (by not winning it in 3 days).
by palmfacehn | 2025-09-02 08:45:59+00:00
I'm not a React or Next.js user. Others will disagree, but personally I prefer to minimize my exposure to JS by decorating traditional HTML+CSS documents with vanilla JS as needed.

I was somewhat surprised when I noticed simple Next.js landing pages would break in Firefox. Worse yet, the failure mode was to overlay all of the content with a black screen and white text, "An application client side error has occurred". It was surprising in that a simple landing page couldn't render, but when I discovered that the cause was a JS frontend framework, I felt that it was par for the course.

Perhaps it makes sense to the advocates, but for those of us not on the bandwagon, it can be sincerely baffling.
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-02 08:47:31+00:00
>That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!

Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed with the novel. The characters were rather two-dimensional and the plot was somewhat muddled.

That said, its depiction of a corporatist/authoritarian society incorporates some of the tropes (rewriting history, mass market influencing/propaganda, redefining "good" and "bad", demonizing the "other" etc.) included in 1984 and Brave New World (BNW), but in a far right wing context. Which, as I mentioned, is more apropos to current circumstance than are the left wing "utopias" depicted in 1984 and BNW.

As such, while I don't discourage you from reading The Space Merchants (or its 1984 sequel, The Merchants' War -- which I haven't read), I'm not saying it's a fabulous piece of literature. Pohl[0][2] has written much better stuff, with similar cynicism but significantly better plotting and character development and takes on technology (cf. Heechee Saga[1] -- which I highly recommend -- and others).

In any case, I agree with your assessment of BNW WRT today, but with a far right wing dystopic bent rather than a far left wing dystopic one -- hence my reference to The Space Mechants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Saga

[2] Pohl was, as were many mid 20th century Sci-Fi (and other) authors, alarmed by the rapid population growth after World War II, especially as Malthus[3] was widely read at the time and we had not yet seen the fruits of the widespread agriculture technology deployment of the 20th century (Green Revolution[4]).

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Edit: Clarified prose. Added footnotes for more detail.
by rswail | 2025-09-02 08:48:02+00:00
Comma Separated files would likely exist because they're human readable, whereas FS/GS/RS/CR/LF are not visible.

There is "pipe delimited" which used "|" (ASCII 124 decimal) to separate fields, which actually makes way more sense, because that character is rarely used in normal text.

It's also a good separator when a human is reading the file.
by homebrewer | 2025-09-02 08:48:43+00:00
Even though I very much dislike WhatsApp, it does not require having full control over "your" device, and does not make itself an arbiter of what you can or cannot install on "your" hardware.

I can't see them changing this in the foreseeable future, major parts of their userbase run the cheapest phones one can buy, and they're much more interested in as much data as possible, so near 100% device coverage has to be important for them.
Ask HN: I got fired from 100k job so I've made a game and it failed
by martinlistiak | 2025-09-02 08:50:11+00:00
Hey guys I am trying to understand why my game isn't performing as I expected.

It's the game I've always wanted to play - logical, puzzle game. I made 3 game modes and I really enjoy playing it.

Help me improve it or just understand my mistakes. If you end up playing it rate the following please: UI: 1-10 Game Mechanic: 1-10 Fun: 1-10 Sounds: 1-10 Ads?: 1-10

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arrows-logical-game/id6751233749

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=webmobilegamedev.arrows
by d3Xt3r | 2025-09-02 08:51:10+00:00
More polished UI, easier to set up (distributed as an AppImage + a Windows Docker image), and it's written in Typescript + Go, whereas WinApps is mostly a collection of Bash scripts that requires you to manually set up your own Windows VM first.

But the core concept is the same, using RDP's RemoteApps feature via FreeRDP for the "seamless" integration.
by opan | 2025-09-02 08:51:14+00:00
Enter and Numpad Enter are still distinct in QMK, and possibly some video game keybinds (just as numrow and numpad numbers can be recognized separately). Comparable to the left/right versions of ctrl, alt, super, and shift, I suppose. Fuctionally equivalent usually but can be differentiated, like a hypervisor using right alt to unfocus input.

I wonder if the labels on your linked keyboard really mean much. It could be like how Apple calls their backspace key delete, and has their own names for some of the modifiers.
by vendiddy | 2025-09-02 08:51:16+00:00
And even if you fall under the first category, I find it hard to believe that the performance bottleneck is solved by using Vercel and SSR.

With all the other crazy shit people are doing (multi-megabyte bundle sizes, slow API calls with dozens of round-trips to the DB, etc) doing the basics of profiling, optimizing, simplifying seems like it'd get you much further than changing to a more complex architecture.
by ochrist | 2025-09-02 08:51:48+00:00
Really interesting to read. I have used a lot of strange systems in my time. In the military signals group I have worked a lot with teletypewriter systems and the like - also the civilian telex system and the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Fixed_Telecommuni...

One thing the article doesn't mention is that some of the old teletypewriters were so slow that you could not be guaranteed that you would get the carriage to the start of the line by using only one Enter character, so it was mandatory to use two.

This meant that all linefeeds consisted of the following characters: CR CR LF (two carriage returns followed by one linefeed). Even in the time where most of the equipment were modern and didn't really need this, you couldn't know if somebody somewhere still had an old teletype running. So this was mandatory and part of the standard.

On mainframes there is also a distinction between Return and Enter. As far as I remember there was a soft return, which only moved the cursor down. And there was a hard return, which acted as Send - thereby transmitting your screen to the mainframe.

Something similar can be used on modern computers. Here is an example in Excel: If you edit a cell (with F2) you can end the edit by using Enter. But if you have enabled to wrap text you can use Alt+Enter to just input a linefeed without exiting the editor.
by rvz | 2025-09-02 08:51:50+00:00
> Overall, LLMs aren’t yet at the point where they can replace all engineers. But I don’t doubt they will be soon enough, and in the meantime, they just can’t be ignored

Someone has to maintain that code and there is not a single mention of that caveat after the software is built in the article and 99.9999% of the most widely used software is maintained by humans - even if parts of it was vibe-coded, a human has to maintain it so that it functions correctly, especially a must if it is mission critical software.

It is like we are celebrating mediocrity under the guise of AI and rebranding 'prototyping' as 'vibe-coding' but worse - software with fast accumulating technical debt, slapping on third-party risks and close to no tests at all.

Eventually, someone has to maintain that software and surely 9 times out of 10, a typical senior software engineer will look at that vibe-coded slop and will either throw it all away or reduce these third party services with existing robust open source versions.

Vibe-coding gets you faster to maintain the same negatives from traditional software engineering without you understanding what you are doing.
by Vinnl | 2025-09-02 08:52:13+00:00
The direction React and Next.js have been moving is to give you very granular control over where your code runs, and when.

The previous model was that you simply have code that runs on a server when a request comes in, sends a response to the client, and then the code in that response is run on the client. Instead, now we have a situation where some bits run on the server, some of them on the client, which call out to some bits on the server again, and all of this can happen either before or after the server started sending the response. And then on e.g. Vercel, you also have edge functions as an additional permutation.

Which is kinda neat, but also massively complicates the mental model.
by makk | 2025-09-02 08:52:30+00:00
> Overall, LLMs aren’t yet at the point where they can replace all engineers. But I don’t doubt they will be soon enough.

All engineers? This doesn't match my hands-on experience at all.

If you give a chainsaw to everyone, it doesn't make everyone a lumberjack. And a chainsaw itself certainly isn't a lumberjack.

If you give Claude Code or the like to everyone, it's doesn't make everyone a highly skilled software engineer. And Claude code itself isn't a highly skilled software engineer.

I've come around to this view. When I first began using these things for building software (the moment ChatGPT dropped), I was immediately skeptical of the view that these things are merely glorified autocomplete. They felt so different than that. These computers would do what I _meant_, not what I _said_. That was a first and very unlike any autocomplete I'd ever seen.

Now, with experience using them to build software and feeling how they are improving, I believe they are nothing more or less than fantastically good auto complete. So good that it was previously unimaginable outside of science fiction.

Why autocomplete and not highly skilled software engineer? They have no taste. And, at best, they only pretend to know the big picture, sometimes.

They do generate lots of code, of course. And you need something / someone that you can trust to review all that code. And THAT thing needs to have good taste and to know the big picture, so that it can reliably make good judgement calls.

LLMs can't. So, using LLMs to write loads of code just shifts the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing code. Moreover, LLMs and their trajectory of improvements do not, to this experienced software engineer, feel like they are kind of solution and kind of improvements needed to get to an automated code review system so reliable that a company would bet its life on it.

Are we going to need fewer software engineers per line of code written? Yes. Are lines of code going to go way up? Yes. Is the need for human code review going to go way up? Yes, until something other than mere LLM improvements arrive.

Even if you assume 100% of code is written by LLMs, all engineers aren't going to be replaced by LLMs.
by photonthug | 2025-09-02 08:55:06+00:00
I'm also reading TFA's intent as less about big-brother and info-hygiene stuff, and more about standard enshittification.

Since we're talking about "doing more things with a piece of software than [users] could do without it", well, living with 10% of the features at 1000x of the price would typically still fit those criteria. Since this is exactly where most companies would like to go after establishing market-dominance, yeah, I think we do want to be protected.

Whether any dev or group of devs could realistically push back against the forces at work in the org or the wider economy here is a separate question of course.
by subscribed | 2025-09-02 08:55:13+00:00
No, it's not "long supported" phone fallacy.

Google and by extension banks, are claiming that the phone on, Android 9, without security updates AT ALL since 2009 is perfectly safe and secure to use.

Meanwhile, really well locked OS, hardened so well some of the improvements were later picked up upstream (both by Google and Apple), running _the_ latest AOSP version and releasing new security updates within hours is not considered safe and secure, despite assuring full chain of trust (including locked bootloader, verified boot, etc).

This is what Play Integrity does.

Of course Android supports better scheme, hardware attestation, but od course Google enforces their iron grip on the ecosystem, and instead uses the outdated, flaved system that certifies only the devices with preinstalled Google services running in the privileged mode. Snooping on everything you do and have.

Thats the reason.
by jraph | 2025-09-02 08:55:21+00:00
Maybe this?

Usorēs, data et veritas primum

Users, data and truth first.

And actually first in the sentence structure (in both languages).

(edit: I had initially used prima - neutral plural nominative for primus (adj.) to target the three subjects, which I don't know if it's right, but using the adverb feels better. I don't do Latin though)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-09-02 08:55:45+00:00
> At the least it can be inferred that Google has fundamentally changed their main product to mimic a competitor, which is something you just don’t do if everything’s OK.

I mean, the big thing that has changed is that investors are all in on AI, and Google looked like they were behind in this area, so they put it front and center so that they can talk nonsense about it on investor calls.
by brainless | 2025-09-02 08:56:31+00:00
Wow, didn't know about your product. I gave up city life since the pandemic and have been living a simple life in a small Himalayan village.

I can't overwork anymore for health health. I still lead engineering at an NY based startup remotely in 2022 but work targets made things hard.

I will read your post and apply if it's a fit.
by lucas_membrane | 2025-09-02 08:56:48+00:00
Anyone here know anything about where and how the cotton for bandages for the Union wounded was obtained during the US civil war? India and the Middle East being so distant, I'm guessing that some kind of smuggling or trading happened, but I've never read of it. But I have read of some traveling merchants who were allowed by the Union to exit the areas the Union controlled. Even more postmodern is the likelihood that printers in the Union states propped up the Confederacy by flooding the states in revolt with counterfeit confederate paper money. There being a dearth of competent printers, genuine Confederate cash was so shabby looking that no one would have trusted it, and the Southern economy would have collapsed even sooner than it did because no one would take money like that seriously. But the bogus money from the North was typically so respectable in appearance that it had a street value above the coin of the local realm, giving said revolting realm a stronger medium of exchange.

During WWII, one of Hitler's higher ranking underlings let the Allies know that they could spare the lives of a large number of Hungarian persons bound for the death camps in exchange for trucks shipped through Spain, approximately 1 truck for each 10 lives saved, but that offer drew no genuine response.
by rswail | 2025-09-02 08:57:06+00:00
Why? The use of TTYs for computing interfaces is very different to using them as teletypes on comms links.

I thought the control characters for that sort of use were the DC1-4 characters?

RS-485 uses polling but my understanding is that the characters for polling usually involve like "FF" (hex) and some sort of device ID.

I just read a TTY model 28 manual about the stunt box and I didn't see anything specific about FS/GS/RS there.

How were messages delimited in the polled multidrop environment?
by wafflemaker | 2025-09-02 08:57:39+00:00
There is this astroturf new news outlet in Poland called Infopiguła. I follow that, 9 minutes per day and that's it for politician news for me. I just ignore anything else, politicial or world, knowing I'll find out about it anyway if it's important.

But you can also just cut out news completely. There are edutainment channels on YouTube you could follow instead. You have hacker news. I watch other sources, just not "newsy" news.

There is one VERY IMPORTANT rule for choosing channels/podcasts/content to watch. I only watch people presenting with positive energy, in a calm manner. "Scary" way of presenting, or clickbaity titles give more followers, but I feel bad from watching them. Just like when I'm low I sometimes play an audiobook read by Eckhart Tolle. I wonder why it makes such a difference?
by eknkc | 2025-09-02 08:57:40+00:00
I have a tendency to use different stuff on new projects for the sake of it. I've built apps with express + react on client, angular, vue, next, nuxt.. Used go, .net, node, php etc on the server. I always find good and bad parts and appreciate different aspects of different solutions.

Not Next though. We built a pretty large app on Next and it was painful from start to finish. Every part of it was either weird, slow, cumbersome or completely insane.

We still maintain the app and it is the only "thing" I hate with a passion at this point. I understand that the ecosystem is pretty good and people seem to be happy with the results given that it is extremely popular. But my own experience has been negative beyond redemption. It's weird.
by balamatom | 2025-09-02 08:58:08+00:00
JavaScript was made insufficiently expressive on purpose (see Eich, Sun, Scheme).

He still ended up sneaking some metaprogramming capabilities into it, though he stopped short of something recognizable like macros.

So when the highest grade vendors started taking front end extra seriously since I'd say 2008-2010, what they built basically bulldozed over the things that made JS per se tolerable. Instead, they built frameworks out of the standard imperative primitives in JS, which take things in more of a C++-inspired direction.

The "growth hack" is here, as with vaunted Apple, vertical integration. The only way to couple markup to state management to server/client flow does not amount to a framework; it amounts to no framework since the Web was not invented by VCs.

To get a framework out of it, i.e. couple developers' practical knowledge to your ecosystem (turning it from general to domain specific but fuck devs right), you also need to couple things in your stack at the wrong places, as exemplified by the already much-maligned misfeature explored in TFA.

I.e. for the onboarding flow of a hosting business to work in 2025, you first need to have been teaching bad architecture for a generation. (It's why Meteor.js didn't take.)

On the one hand, pragmatic of Vercel to exist in the long shadow of the React/TS monstrosities. On the other hand, it's just one more company whose mere existence in this world has contributed for my work and life becoming harder for no real reason, even though nobody I'm within a handshake is even their customer.

Like many, I only learned of them only when I googled, "who the hell made this horrible thing the frontend team over is now stuck with, it's 0.01xing their velocity and frying their brains besides" and, well, now they're here. I would like to remind them to try and measure their externalities.
Stink of Garbage
by forkit | 2025-09-02 08:58:14+00:00
On my daily ride to badminton, there’s a stretch of road with a heap of garbage. My instinct is to clamp my nose and breathe through my mouth, while thoughts rush in—how careless people are, why we can’t be better as a society. And in that moment, I suffer.

The odd part is, I don’t do anything about it. I’m not cleaning it up. I’m only resisting it in my head.

Today I tried something different. Instead of avoiding, I allowed myself to smell it. Reality, as it is. And I noticed—it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. The wind shifts, the nose adjusts, and often there’s hardly any smell at all.

That’s when it struck me: most suffering comes not from the thing itself, but from our resistance to it. We live in imagination more than in reality. By fighting what is, we double our pain. By accepting, we cut it in half.

Garbage is just garbage. But the same applies to traffic, to noise, to heat, even to the uncomfortable moments in life. The mind wants to avert, but often it’s that very aversion that makes life harder.

Sometimes the lighter path is not escape, but acceptance.
by torginus | 2025-09-02 08:59:08+00:00
Please stop refering to the Chinese Room - it's just magical/deist thinking in disguise. It postulates that humans have way of 'understanding' things that is impossible to replicate mechanically.

The fact that philosophy hasn't recognized and rejected this argument based on this speaks volumes of the quality of arguments accepted there.

(That doesn't mean LLMs are or will be AGI, its just this argument is tautological and meaningless)