MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eel | 2025-09-18 15:11:47+00:00
It's a shame that Lua did not evolve in a more backwards-compatible manner. In addition to Roblox, lots of others projects started adopting Lua 5.1 as a scripting language in the late 00s. Lua itself is now at 5.4, but it did not keep backwards compatibility. LuaJIT and related projects pretty much only support 5.1. It's similar to the situation Python had with 2.x/3.x, except that the majority of Lua users I am aware of are preferring to stay with the older 5.1.
by jonalgarve | 2025-09-18 15:11:59+00:00
Every society faces moments when punishment becomes more than consequence. It becomes final. The death penalty is unlike any other measure: it cannot be undone, corrected, or softened by time.

This reflection explores the blurred line between justice and vengeance, the weight of error in human systems, and the illusion of closure often promised to grieving families. It is not advocacy for one side or another. It is an attempt to think about what this choice says about us as a society.
by dcrazy | 2025-09-18 15:12:26+00:00
As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month
by jamesgresql | 2025-09-18 15:12:37+00:00
Author here — you beat me to it!

Hi everyone A lot of you will probably see the title of this post and immediately think “of course, just use the right tool for the job.”

But for those who don’t … here's a thing for you.

I’d really love to hear from both sides:

- Folks who’ve been burned by using Elastic as a primary datastore.

- Folks who haven’t — and can make the case for why it works just fine. (I know some of you are out there!)
by amalcon | 2025-09-18 15:12:39+00:00
It may not be better, but the space of responses to such a situation is totally different. Incentivizing manufacturing won't bring back manufacturing jobs, because the new jobs are at least as easy to replace with machines as the old ones. Banning the machines will just make your manufacturing uncompetitive internationally. Making labor cheap enough to compete with machines necessarily lowers living standards for laborers, which will get you overthrown.

If you want people to learn how to make things even when it's economically non-viable to do so, you need to explore a totally different solution space outside of private industry. E.g. encouraging maker hobbies, or subsidizing trade schools. Industry will always move toward automation as long as it is cheaper.
by ksymph | 2025-09-18 15:12:59+00:00
GNOME on touchscreens is in a weird place -- everything it needs to be perfect is right there. But there are a handful of pain points and weird bugs that make me think none of the developers are actually using it on a touch device. The OSK is the worst offender.

I still prefer it over KDE on my 2-in-1/convertible laptop, though. Despite the jank it also irons out a lot of the pain points that more traditional desktops have with touch, and is clearly made with it in mind, even when the execution is iffy.
by ActionHank | 2025-09-18 15:13:41+00:00
Why are there 2 context menus, multiple places to change settings, and a file explorer that is somehow a worse experience to use than one they had in XP?

All the while they develop and push a product that screenshots what you are doing so that AI can "assist" you. Not to mention pushing ads and news and free to play games.

Maybe the margins or icons aren't what you'd prefer, but you're being intellectually dishonest pretending that there is any uniformity in their product let alone even a single iota of care or interest in the experience the user has with their product.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-18 15:13:56+00:00
It wasn't about the technology - it was about the blatant corruption and wheeling and dealing in Nepali politics.

Making it a takeaway about Section 230 is completely misunderstanding WHY the anger existed.

The social media ban was just the straw that broke the camels back.

And romanticizing the violence is doing a disservice to the protesters and organizers like Hami Nepal who came out against corruption.

The violence itself was politicized bloodletting with party jholeys/karyakartas/cadres hijacking the protests to conduct violence on those businesses aligned with their political competitors.

> Public records were not spared. When the protesters stormed the Supreme Court they also destroyed records kept therein. What is the use of court documents in a country where the corruption continues year after year, decade after decade

Because now jholeys and politicians under active investigation for corruption, rape, and murder now have the evidence in their cases destroyed, and cannot be convicted or even held ;)

> Oli’s attempt to rein in social media was unlikely gamble for a more U.S.-aligned figure

Oli is China aligned. In Nepali power politics, it's China and India that are wheeling and dealing. The US is a bit player in all this.

> Nepal’s government, though discredited by corruption across the spectrum, still gave space for a genuine Left

There is no genuine left or right in Nepal. Nepal is a country where communist parties will campaign using Hindutva and evoke "Ram Rajya" as well as work closely with Hindutva icons like Baba Ramdev (who's chela Balkrishna is Nepali as well) and Yogi Adityanath. And notably, the entire leadership in Nepal are Khas Brahmins in a country where they only make up at most 5-6% of the population.

Either your party's leadership is backed by the Chinese (eg. Oli) or your party's leadership is back by the Indians (eg. Deuba and Prachanda). Nepal is sadly an ant stuck between an elephant and a dragon dueling it out to build lebensraum.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-09-18 15:14:05+00:00
For all its success typescript demonstrates the downside of this approach. Like you said it's just difficult, and the end result of having every corner of the dynamic language expressible in the type system forces you into the most complex & novel type systems.

IMO a better approach is the one used by rescript and gleam. With a few careful restrictions of the target language you can fit it into a hindley-milner type system. These are extremely well understood, robust & usable, and give you a much smaller interface than the expansive turing complete one of TS.

I'm kind of surprised there's not an active project for a small ML language outputting lua code. I really wish gleam could pick it up as a third backend, it would be an amazing fit.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-09-18 15:14:07+00:00
There is a problem somewhere deep in capitalist economies. The model has served humanity well - from Napoleon to Neo-Liberal the world has seen vaccines, space flight, farming revolutions and sewage plants giving longer better life to billions.

But … OSS is like a bellwether - the foundations of this great wealth need investment and maintenance else we build on rotting timbers.

And when a major global e-commerce platform chucks a few Weeks salary of a junior developer in SV and we call it worth mentioning, we need to find a new way to shore up those foundations.

I don’t have a good answer - I suspect I need to look deeper at the real problem - but it does seem to be a real problem
by slowroll22 | 2025-09-18 15:14:23+00:00
It was definitely possible, as mentioned there were some exceptions (such as cases where we did need to roll out a version with dependencies bumped or with our own critical fixes).

The harder part, as is often the case, wasn't technical - but more convincing customers to take the new version and getting time with their IT teams to manage. It got easier over time but the bureaucracy at some of the clients was slow to change so I suspect they still face some issues.
by vorpalhex | 2025-09-18 15:14:27+00:00
I was in jury selection for a case several years ago. Defense attorney is asking members of the jury if they would actually consider a minimum sentence, which for the case at hand of child sexual assault is a minimum sentence of six months.

A respondee, a man, maybe in his 40s, cowboy hat, used jeans, you know, clearly like fairly legit farm worker, rancher, something along those lines, stands up after he's called and goes "No, sir, I believe that child abusers should be hung from the neck until dead." Sits down.

If you are going to commit crime, Texas is the wrong place to do it.
by jncfhnb | 2025-09-18 15:14:28+00:00
Well here’s a quote where it seems very plain that he is framing it as an intellectual no no to me

> This brings me to my main point: ridiculing or shooting people with whom we disagree is not a sign of intelligence. An extraterrestrial observer might have a hard time concluding that humanity represents an intelligent civilization given our history of political violence.

And responding to an individual’s statements does not comprise a witch-hunt.
by WD-42 | 2025-09-18 15:14:45+00:00
This 100%. Just look at the screenshot on the KDE page for Konsole: https://apps.kde.org/konsole/

What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be.

And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.
by bombela | 2025-09-18 15:14:49+00:00
If unplugging the display cable works though. It's most likely the TV pretending to be still on.

I have a LG TV C1 that behaves like that. While my computer monitors do not have this issue.

The TV even has a dual personality. It doesn't appear to report the same informations via EBID when powered off vs powered on.

I also have a MS Windows 10 connected to this same TV, and if I make the mistake of powering up or wake from sleep Windows before turning on the TV, then the NVIDIA GPU setup some broken resolution. And only a reboot fixes it.

So my guess is it's the TV presenting itself with different EBID when off vs powered on. And also somehow presenting itself as active on the HDMI line no matter if off or on. Changing the TV inputs also doesn't tell KDE that the display was turned off.

I haven't debugged any of it. These are just my observations.
by sho_hn | 2025-09-18 15:15:09+00:00
KDE Neon was originally founded by devs who worked on Kubuntu previously, and some of that team has now moved on to KDE Linux.

The company stuff in the background doesn't really matter.

The team working on KDE Linux are motivated by addressing some structural challenges that always plagued KDE Neon from the concept of trying to graft more recent SW on top of the Ubuntu LTS base, plus some lessons learned from the SteamOS project's way of handling updates, and fully utilizing more recent Linux/systemd features.

It's sufficiently different that sticking with the Neon brand and swapping it out for that userbase would have been pretty disruptive, so they felt it was better to go with a distinct identity.
by dcchambers | 2025-09-18 15:15:50+00:00
Maybe a good time to remind people that 37 Signals made their standalone chat product, Campfire, open source and free earlier this month:

- https://once.com/campfire

- https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.
by nirav72 | 2025-09-18 15:15:54+00:00
Not sure HUDs in cars will cause same issues. There aren't a lot of things to read on car HUDs that require direct concentrated focus. Every HUD I've seen have displayed the most minimal information. Usually the speed, map directions and media currently playing. Even the map directions usually only indicate the next step in route. So a quick glance is all that is required. Regular dashboard gauges require far more concertation. Especially if you're new to that specific vehicle.
by quentindanjou | 2025-09-18 15:16:00+00:00
Its true but then again, they could provide tiers that restrict large file upload, video calls etc. I think most of the businesses using Slack are unlikely using their video call system (and more likely to use Zoom, Teams, Google Meet). Most organizations use Slack for its organized messaging system; maybe they should make plans that focus on that.

They try to pack more and more features and realize that when their customers start using these, it costs them money.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-09-18 15:16:59+00:00
When asked to write UI tests (playwright), I've seen Claude Code do essentially the following:

const elem = document.querySelector(".foo"); // actual element that exists elem.innerHTML = '<div class="bar"></div>'; const child = elem.locator(".bar"); // child we actually want to test for expect(child).toExist()

Gee thanks Claude, what a great test...
by graemep | 2025-09-18 15:17:40+00:00
XFCE is fine. I used to use it and there is a lot to like.

It lacks tiling, and I use some KDE apps very heavily (Kate, Dolphin) so KDE integrates a bit better.

I have thought of giving XFCE another go and I do not think there is anything critical I would miss if I had a tiling window manager (which would have some advantages over KDE's tiling, I think), but I have KDE configured in a way that works for me so not very motivated to do it.
by xyzelement | 2025-09-18 15:18:21+00:00
Sorry for your loss, and thank you for your perspective.

>> Absolutely right. There is a certain cowardice in how we deal with death in the contemporary west.

I never thought about it but it likely stems from loss of religion, like many other problems. If I see my life as insignificant in the chain of generations - as a conduit between ancestors and descendants - and believe in the soul at least as a metaphor - then personal death or that of others is sad, but is in the context of a deeply meaningful existence.

On the other hand, if I am closer to atheistic hedonism/nihilism - there's nothing else but me and my thoughts and experiences, then my existence or non-existence takes on a very heavy weight - and we project that onto others.
by Nursie | 2025-09-18 15:18:28+00:00
I lost someone, a good friend and lover, when I was young. 27 years ago now.

Grief still occasionally hits me. Not so often these days, it’s a long time in the past, but after some reminders of that time of life on social media a couple of years ago, I felt the unfairness of it all like a knife twisting in my gut again.

All of which is to say I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a spouse who you had a life and a child and plans with, and I don’t believe that everyone grieves the same, or that it should just be over when someone tells you that’s ‘normal’ or expected of you.

And also, as said in the blog post, if you’re functioning, if your grief isn’t actually stopping you from living your life, then who is to say it is disordered?
by kokada | 2025-09-18 15:18:41+00:00
Author here: to be clear, I am using KDE back and forth since I bought a Steam Deck 3 years ago, and before that I used KDE daily during the 4.x days (so I am familiar with KDE bugs actually).

I am using it in my main machine now for almost 2 weeks, and this is the period of time that this blog post refers too.
by lobsterthief | 2025-09-18 15:18:52+00:00
Another pitfall is SEO: the SEO team might tell us they need a certain element on the page to be an h2, for SEO purposes, but it needs different styling than other h2s on the page.

MUI solves this problem by having different typography sizes defined in the theme, and then you specify variant=“h2” on an arbitrary Typography component and all the styling is consistent.

One more reason I always choose or recommend MUI for all new projects.
by whatever1 | 2025-09-18 15:19:02+00:00
The model we have works for used packages. If a package is used by a large company and requires maintenance, the company pays its engineers to do it, and the rest of us receive the updates for free due to the license.

However, the system breaks down for packages that are not used by major companies (or are stable and safe enough to avoid triggering an alarm).

There is no viable way to fund continuous support for every forgotten open-source project.
by SchwKatze | 2025-09-18 15:19:28+00:00
Brilliant!

While reading I remembered "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" where the whole world is a computer and everything in on Earth happened to a random person have a sudden insight about the meaning of life.

My two cents: I think computation is a bedrock concept in the universe, idk about the extent of this importance but it's something that was "discovered" and not "invented"
by otterley | 2025-09-18 15:19:46+00:00
Now would be a good time to remind people that freedom of speech, whether you like it or not, applies to large entities as well as individuals. TikTok is as free to boost a pro-Israel narrative as you are to boost an anti-Israel narrative.

Stating that there’s some sort of “mind control” at work is both false and insults people’s intelligence. For one, there is literally no way to “control” someone’s mind. Influence is not control. It’s not the same as shaping a narrative. I think you ought to choose your words more responsibly and accurately.

What’s needed is to protect the marketplace of ideas from which people can choose for themselves. Some people will carry larger megaphones and have bigger venues than others. But being louder and bigger doesn’t assure the outcome you want. History has illustrated time and time again that minority opinions can, in the fullness of time, become majority ones.

And if they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean the opinion wasn’t heard. (I doubt people haven’t heard that Israel is committing atrocities or that Gaza is a horrible mess.) Some ideas just fail for lack of popularity or traction. You might think you’re right, but the majority just might not agree with you.

And even if major media outlets are all pushing your favorite narrative, that’s no guarantee of an outcome, either. If every major media outlet came on TV and social media tomorrow and said hemlock juice is good for you, I wouldn’t buy it.
by mindcrash | 2025-09-18 15:20:22+00:00
This point in particular just... clicked:

"So democracies can’t go to shit, right? Wrong. They just go to shit more slowly and quietly. There’s no incentive for democratic governments to provide objectively good policies (as opposed to good-sounding policies), because voters lack the expertise to assess the complex effects of any particular policy on any desired outcome. This is because 1) it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to acquire that expertise, 2) voters are largely ignorant and biased by tribal allegiances, and 3) each citizen’s vote has essentially zero impact on political outcomes, giving them essentially zero incentive to acquire that expertise or overcome those biases. Therefore, democratic governments gradually accumulate good-sounding (but ultimately bad) policies, grow increasingly sclerotic and inefficient, and go to shit."
by aeturnum | 2025-09-18 15:21:43+00:00
> We medicalize grief because we fear it.

I think this is just incorrect. You are not obligated to seek treatment for most medical problems[1]. The point of medicalizing something is to draw a line between situations where it would be too soon for medical professionals to step in and when people enter a situation where they may need external help. One of the diagnostic criteria, which this article mentions, is that your grief is disrupting your life - but despite what this article claims they have misunderstood that criteria. Of course grief changes your routines and life. That change only becomes "disruptive" if you feel the change has somehow gone too far or you are struggling to undo it. This writer is doing neither and therefor does not meet the diagnostic criteria for disordered grief. They are grieving normally and the medical literate supports that understanding.

There are of course medical professionals who use diagnostic criteria as cudgels. Trying to force people to become patients in order to enforce their idea of what someone "should" want. This is a problem but it is a problem that the official diagnostic guidelines try to avoid. For those who are interested in this kind of problem with our medical system might look into the professional philosophy of doctors (generally arrayed around identifying and curing disease) and nursing (generally arrayed around making the patient comfortable as possible). I tend to think the nursing model is the more useful and sensible of the two - even though, of course, if one wants to cure a disease a doctor is helpful.

[1] There are very few diseases, such as tuberculosis, where you can be forced to treat the disease.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-18 15:22:04+00:00
Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"?

Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"?

Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, and that stays pretty stable in the long haul. We put windows in homes in specific places and make them rectangular. But that's not taste, that's practicality. Everything else changes dramatically from one decade to another.
by OptionOfT | 2025-09-18 15:22:35+00:00
And the value of AI as pushed to us by these companies is in doing larger units of work.

But... reviewing code is harder than writing code. Expressing how I want something to be done in natural language is incredibly hard.

So over time I'm spending a lot of energy in those things, and only getting it 80% right.

Not to mention I'm constantly in this highly suspicious mode, trying to pierce through the veil of my own prompt and the code generated, because it's the edge cases that make work hard.

The end result is exhaustion. There is no recharge. Plans are front-loaded, and then you switch to auditing mode.

Whereas with code you front-load a good amount of design, but you can make changes as you go, and since you know your own code the effort to make those are much lower.
by halfcat | 2025-09-18 15:23:20+00:00
> Opening the native keyboard…

I think this is the roadblock, that there isn’t always a way to pop open the keyboard programmatically. Rather, the mobile keyboard only pops up when there’s a DOM input element detected. So it would need a hidden input layered on top of the ImGui WASM app and mapping coordinates, or would need an HTML input element overlayed on top of every text input.
by sudosteph | 2025-09-18 15:23:33+00:00
Having experienced a few hard losses this year (My dad to ALS, and my cat suddenly a week after my dad), the thing that has surprised me the most is how they show up in my dreams. In some dreams, I'm like "I thought you were dead? What am I going to do with all these death certificates now?", in others we're just hanging out at the pool. I never dreamed about my dad before he died. But in these dreams he's just there, and healthier looking than I had seen him in years. My cat shows up too, and many times I remember petting her in her bed, not realizing it was a dream, only to wake up surprised she wasn't still there next to me. In my waking life I fully know they're gone, but at least part of my brain really doesn't want to accept it's true.