MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulRobinson | 2025-09-08 12:09:30+00:00
Kinda.

In South Kensington, they spent a fortune trying to use this non-delineated road setup where its not clear quite where the pavements (sidewalks for the USians), and road borders are, and in theory it means everybody just becomes very hyper aware of each other.

The theory goes something like how cycle lanes - just the a white line down the side of the road - can cause drivers to pass much closer to cyclists than they otherwise would without that border there, where a driver might slow and move a few feet out to the side on a single carriageway.

In reality, it's actually kind of anxiety inducing, particularly if you're in a larger crowd (common at this time of year, as Royal Albert Hall where proms season is coming to a close is at one end of this area), because drivers don't really seem to know what is going on.

I suspect it means cars are, on average, slowing down, but I can't find stats on whether its reduced accidents or not. I know it makes me nervous though.
by Skeime | 2025-09-08 12:10:14+00:00
But the second interpretation only makes sense if the last item somehow deserves special treatment (over, say, the second-to-last item). Otherwise, you should similarly argue that the previous second-to-last item should also show up in the changes as it has now turned into the third-to-last item. (So maybe every item in the list should be preceded by as many spaces as are items before it and succeeded by as many commas as are items following it. Then, every change to the list will be a diff of the entire list.)

first item,,, second item,, third item, fourth item

In my experience, special treatment for the last item is rarely warranted, so a trailing comma is a good default. If you want the last item to be special, put a comment on that line, saying that it should remain last. (Or better yet, find a better representation of your data that does not require this at all.)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-08 12:10:30+00:00
In Writing Solid Code[0], Steve Maguire recommends stepping through every line of code, in a symbolic debugger.

Sounds crazy, but I usually end up doing that, anyway, as I work.

Another tip that has helped me, is to add code documentation to inline code, after it’s written (I generally add some, but not much inline, as I write it. Most of my initial documentation is headerdoc). The process of reading the code, helps cement its functionality into my head, and I also find bugs, just like he mentions.

[0] https://writingsolidcode.com/
by sokoloff | 2025-09-08 12:10:51+00:00
Sorry to not have all the details handy, but if anyone in New England is interested in a smaller-scale version of this, I have in a storage unit around 45 minutes north of Boston what I recall to be around 3-4 old Sparcs, probably Sparc 20s. Similar story: not powered on in decades and I'd be happy to give them away to anyone who wants them and who avoids turning the process into a pain in the backside. Multiple 17" CRT monitors as well...

I'm not in a rush and you shouldn't be either, but if you can make use of them or just want them, my email is in my profile.

"My gain of shelf space is your loss..."
by nrdvana | 2025-09-08 12:11:47+00:00
Maybe the large number of standard library functions that operate on globals and require you to remember the "_r" variant of that function exists, or the mess with handling signals, or the fact that Win32 and Posix use significantly different primitives for synchronization? Or maybe just the fact that most libraries for C/++ won't have built-in threading support and you need to synchronize at each call site?

Unless I'm writing Java, I avoid multithreading whenever possible. I hear it's also nice in Go.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-08 12:11:50+00:00
Yes, it's exhausting. I mean I get it, having higher prices for people without the app is the same as member cards with swingeing prices for non-members. It's a surcharge on the unaware (including non-native speakers, the elderly, tourists, etc), the unprepared or time-pressured (who don't have time to fiddle with their phones to install the app at a given shop) and, they hope, the people rich enough that they don't want to fuck about with this today.

"Special offers" also really fuck me off. If I want to buy, say, peanut butter today, there's a statistical upcharge because I'm not carefully synchronising my purchase to a secret schedule of when it will cost 20% less. Whenever I see a special offer now, my immediate thought I'd not what it used to be ("wow, that's great"), it is "ugh, these scammers and their constant games".

Charitably, you could call it an elaborate game to make things cheaper for people with less money who can spend the time, privacy and energy (because poor people always have time and energy...?!) to get the best prices. Realistically it seems like mind games to get you used to overpaying most of the time and overbuying some of the time and handing over the data always.
by eythian | 2025-09-08 12:11:52+00:00
It depends on the region and specific needs, but a common reason for not encrypting is that it adds complexity in an emergency (where, e.g., people might need to communicate from other regions nearby, or ambulance needs to talk to fire, maybe civil defence or AREC needs to be involved.) The simplicity of plain unencrypted radio can outweigh the benefits of secrecy.

This said, different places weigh factors differently, there's no one-size-fits-all answer.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-08 12:11:55+00:00
> Because people in the West have been indoctrinated to trust their governments far too much to an unhealthy degree

Can you give specific examples?

I frequently find the US outlook to be exactly the reverse, where people pretend like "the government" is some conspiratorial shadow organisation undermining all the citizens at every step (which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for).

My view is that if you have incompetent, selfish administrators in a western democracy, then just don't vote for them next time; if they keep getting elected, then maybe your countries actual problem are the idiot voters instead (or possibly not-actually-independent mass media, the importance of which can not be overstated).
by joshstrange | 2025-09-08 12:12:33+00:00
SST has the best dev experience but requires you be online. They deploy all the real services (namespaced to you) and then instead of your function code they deploy little proxy lambdas that pass the request/response down to your local machine.

It’s still not perfect because the code is running locally but it allows “instant” updates after you make local changes and it’s the best I’ve found.
by andsoitis | 2025-09-08 12:12:59+00:00
Esoteric programmign languages are created more as an experiment, joke, art project, or proof of concept than for practical software development. They prioritize novelty, challenge, or expression over practicality and efficiency.

Forth is not that.

It was designed as a practical, stack-based language for embedded systems, instrumentation, and real-time applications. It emphasizes simpilcity, extensibility, and efficiency, and has been widely used in space missions, robotics, and hardware control. While its stack-oriented, postfix syntax can look unusual to those used to C-like languages, its purpose is entirely practical, not experimental or artistic.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-09-08 12:13:09+00:00
According to this other article [0] they still aim for 1:1 compatibility with RHEL, and not Stream. I also don't see any mention of Stream in the Rocky 9 release notes.

EDIT: I wonder if Rocky is still following their original plans to leverage rented VMs [1]?

[0] https://linuxiac.com/rocky-linux-confirmed-to-remain-fully-c...

[1] https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open
by MrJohz | 2025-09-08 12:13:14+00:00
Hey, that's me! I wrote this about a year ago, and I'm still using Helix, and still quite happy with it. The lack of a plugin ecosystem is sometimes irritating, but work there is slowly progressing. And I'm still not a fan of the idea of building the perfect IDE by composing different TUIs together and spending hours trying to get a perfect setup. But other than that, editing in Helix feels so fluent and fast that I'd really struggle not to use it if I went back.
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-08 12:13:33+00:00
Always have to look deeper either way

The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech universally, another part of the constitution is used to control all facets of life in line with the state narrative, and that’s a charitable interpretation when we just pretend that the process of law matters at all, and distinguish when it is just procedural theatre or a real constraint on the state

Conflicting parts of constitutions can change everything
by delusional | 2025-09-08 12:13:41+00:00
> If, however, someone insists on certain approaches while never going deeper in their explanations than arbitrary non-falsifiable qualifiers such as "best practice", "modern", "clean"

You're moving the goalposts of this discussion. The guy I was responding to said "fix your setup" to another person saying "Your table wrapped for me. The short line equivalent looks best on my screen." That's a stated preference based on a benefit he'd like to achieve.

We are not discussing "best practice" type arguments here.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-09-08 12:13:51+00:00
I've never had an experience in any house or office where anything has ever been unplugged other than to put it away (a kitchen appliance that doesn't need to live on a counter, or a hair dryer, for example).

Buy a fused extension cord with more plugs, you have now turned one socket into 4, 6, or 8 sockets. You can even get some that have USB built-in, so you don't use a socket up for a phone or tablet charger. They're not even very expensive.

And in an office, I'm pretty sure all equipment (computers, lights, controls for adjustable desks if you have them), are meant to remain permanently plugged in anyway in a properly installed desk setup. What is going on in your office where you're choosing what is plugged in and what isn't, constantly? And why can't your office manager spring £20 for an extension cord with multiple sockets?
by fuoqi | 2025-09-08 12:14:02+00:00
No, it absolutely will be an issue. You need to dispose of ~100 MW of heat energy. Simply dumping it into ground will quickly heat it up, you can't rely on water evaporation for obvious reasons, same goes for convection because of the thin atmosphere. So your only option is radiative cooling, either by using ground or dedicated radiators. But because it's relatively inefficient, you will need a lot of area and materials for it.
by bhickey | 2025-09-08 12:14:43+00:00
The corruption is simply incredible. About fifteen years ago I found myself in Kathmandu after getting altitude sickness. The team's fixer brought me to lunch with some government officials. The topic of discussion? How to steal from a hydroelectric project. One of his guests outright asked, "should we be talking about this in front of this guy?" The fixer shrugged it off saying "he's a Westerner, what is he going to do about it?" And, well, he was right. It wasn't like I could go report it to the police.

Years later the fixer was finally jailed for gold smuggling. https://english.khabarhub.com/2022/16/232667/

Edit: add link
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 12:14:45+00:00
> the US also lost to the Taliban after trillions of dollars and 20 years

The Taliban (and Viet Cong) showed the American military is crap at anti-guerilla warfare. Neither hit either American military or industrial capabilities, both of which expanded during those wars.

In contrast, Russia has shifted into a full wartime economy and is still on the net losing assets. It’s an objectively weaker martial and economic force than it was before. That couldn’t be said about the American military post-Afghanistan.
by stared | 2025-09-08 12:15:26+00:00
There are multiple ways to write exactly the same program. Linters are able to reduce this number by moving to some canonical version.

With modern tools it it is easy to add formatting on saving or on commit. So I don't understand what's the fuss about.

At the same time, for the most important tool in software engineering, Git, it matters which lines are changes. And it is better to only see actual logic changes, not swamped in tabs vs space or other parts that are just formatting.

That said, I would love to see more of this splitting between actual internal representation and view. Don't like anything in style guide (or even syntax alike curly brackets vs indentions) - just change view, alike folding.
by stevex | 2025-09-08 12:15:48+00:00
I had an Amiga disk image (*.adf) that I wanted to extract the files from. There are probably tools to do this but I was just starting with Claude Code, so I asked it to write a tool to extract the files by implementing the filesystem.

It took a few prompts but I know enough about FFS (the Amiga filesystem) to guide it, and it created exactly the tool I wanted.

"force multiplier of your own skills" is a great description.
by mothballed | 2025-09-08 12:16:09+00:00
Protests are rarely effectual, they serve more to gauge interest of others and provide connections.

In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.

As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
by lobsterthief | 2025-09-08 12:17:24+00:00
You will need to write custom CSS, but collapsible trees are totally possible to do purely in CSS in any framework via a simple combination of checkboxes, labels, pseudo-classes and CSS combinators.

The `:checked` selector allows you to target checkboxes that are checked. So you can have a set of checkboxes (off screen with an absolute negative position or similar) that are controlled via a <label> element that wraps the + or - text in the tree. Then based on its state, you can target elements directly afterward to be expanded or contracted using the CSS adjacent sibling combinator.

Checkboxes are neat because they provide state management natively in the DOM and you can do a lot via CSS based on that ;) Thus, you have pure HTML and CSS collapsible trees.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-08 12:18:01+00:00
>Can you give specific examples?

Most rich western/northern European countries.

>which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for

It's not silly when you consider that the candidates you can vote for, are all managed oppositions, each owned and supported by various mega-money interest groups. Why else did Bernie Sanders never got nominated as a presidential candidate even though many people supported him? Because he's not bought and paid for by the lobbyist groups. In every country it's like that.
by account42 | 2025-09-08 12:18:18+00:00
> But here is where it gets particularly egregious. The above problem can also affect software under just a permissive license and no CLA. This is what happened to Incus and LXD. LXD was initially under the Apache license and the linux containers community, in collaboration with Canonical. One fine morning, Canonical just decided to take control of the project, prompting the linux containers community to fork it as Incus. For a while after that, both projects used to borrow code from each other since they had the same license. But then Canonical decided to relicense LXD under AGPLv3 + CLA. This means that it was no longer possible for Incus to borrow code from LXD due to license incompatibility, while Canonical continued to do so under a slightly odd arrangement. You can read about it in detail here: [2]

Well yeah, that's what you sign up for with a permissive license. Canonical could have just as well kept their changes closed source - here Incus (or others interested in Canonical's changes) at least had the option to also adopt the AGPLv3.
by nkrisc | 2025-09-08 12:18:40+00:00
Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?

Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?
by wslh | 2025-09-08 12:18:43+00:00
Yes, there are several studies. One is this [1]. I have not tried the Oura 4 myself but once I test it I can compare with other devices. Clearly sample=1 but I found big errors with some watches.

[1] "Accuracy Assessment of Oura Ring Nocturnal Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability in Comparison With Electrocardiography in Time and Frequency Domains: Comprehensive Analysis": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8808342/
by BoxFour | 2025-09-08 12:18:51+00:00
Social media has proven to be quite an effective tool for mobilizing protests and beyond. I get how the short-sighted might see it as a tactical move to "cripple logistics" by banning social media.

But, the reason I call it short-sighted is exactly what you said: Removing those earlier pressure-release valves doesn’t solve the underlying issue at all and just increases the risk of a more volatile outcome.
by keyringlight | 2025-09-08 12:18:54+00:00
UE1 was in the timeframe that 3D acceleration was only starting to get adopted, and IIRC from some interview Epic continued with a software option for UT2003/2004 (licensed pixomatic?) because they found out a lot of players were still playing their games on systems where full GPUs weren't always available, such as laptops.

I know this is going back to Intel's Larrabee where they tried it, but I'd be real interested to see what the limits of a software renderer is now considering the comparative strength of modern processors and amount of multiprocessing. While I know there's DXVK or projects like dgVoodoo2 which can be an option with sometimes better backwards compatibility, just software would seem like a stable reference target than the gradually shifting landscape of GPUs/drivers/APIs
by nromiun | 2025-09-08 12:20:08+00:00
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is 100% true. It's not like you can take any random data and train it into a NN. You have to transform the data, you have to write the low level GPU kernels which will actually run fast on that particular GPU, you also have to get the output and transform that as well. All of this is hard and very much impossible to create from scratch.

If people use PyTorch on a Nvidia GPU they are running layers and layers of code written by those that know how to write fast kernels for GPUs. In some cases they use assembly as well.

Nvidia stuck to one stack and wrote all their high level libraries on it, while their competitors switched from old APIs to new ones and never made anything close to CUDA.
by cluckindan | 2025-09-08 12:20:09+00:00
Or think about the M (aka MUMPS) language, which allows you to type just the first letter(s) of a keyword and considers it valid syntax.

Imagine Java if you could…

na com.mycompany.myapp; pu cl MyClass { pro sta i = 42; pri fi ch[] MAGIC = ['a', 'b']; pu sta v main(String[] args) { OtherClass otherClass = n OtherClass(); f (i i = 0; i < MyClass.i; i++) { otherClass.hex(i, this.MAGIC); } } }
by tialaramex | 2025-09-08 12:21:13+00:00
Not really "goto statements" so much as the go-to arbitrary control flow semantic aka jump.

C's goto is a housecat to the full blown jump's tiger. No doubt an angry housecat is a nuisance but the tiger is much more dangerous.

C goto won't let you jump straight into the middle of unrelated code, for example, but the jump instruction has no such limit and neither did the feature Dijkstra was discussing.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-08 12:21:15+00:00
One thing that annoys me is when a police officer, even here in the US clearly does not agree with a law. I was under the impression in one of my government classes in college that police officers could in fact choose not to arrest someone, but a lot of the time they opt-out of making that decision for whatever reason. I never looked if in the UK it's similar, but it always bothers me more when a police officer is "just following orders" especially when at least here in the US, they can just not charge someone at their discretion, because sometimes the law is just wild.

We also see it with judges. Our system isn't perfect, but it allows for people who strongly believe a law is unjust to step in.
by al_borland | 2025-09-08 12:21:35+00:00
Nice work!

I re-caulked my bathroom tub yesterday and figured I’d search for “caulk”. Your search led me a blog with a nice post about a bunch of smaller tasks like this to help keep a home running well. While most searches for lists like this seem full of SEO and affiliate links, the result I got from your indie blog search just seems like a nice post, with a friendly tone, looking to share information they think would be helpful to others. It has links out to other resources, but as far as I can tell, they are just simple link to aid the reader.

I tried comparing this to Kagi’s small web filter, where the search returns 0 results. So it seems like you have the beginnings of something unique and useful here.
by hilbert42 | 2025-09-08 12:21:55+00:00
It's quite some time since I've been there but I can't remember an ID system being in place. I didn't have to produce an ID and usually I selected non-alcoholic drinks. However, that was before the proliferation of smartphones, so back then it is likely there was no ID checking.

As a nonsmoker, I can't speak about cigarette machines, likely there was no ID on them too.

Nowadays, with smartphones etc. checking IDs is comparatively easy but I can't think how it would have been done back then.
by lobsterthief | 2025-09-08 12:22:41+00:00
It’s just the default block-level containing element, so it serves its place but is not well explained in these tutorials (just as spans are the default inline element).

In my 25 years of experience writing HTML and CSS most engineers don’t understand semantic HTML, nor do they take the time to learn it; largely because companies don’t value it, unless they’re heavily SEO-focused companies.

I once worked at a company that would run an HTML5 validation test in our CI/CD pipeline. That was very helpful as it identified invalidly nested elements and taught proper semantic HTML.
Ask HN: How do I announce that I'm looking for a new job while being employed?
by throwawayAhoy | 2025-09-08 12:23:02+00:00
(Throwaway account for obvious reasons.)

I'm not happy working for my current employer and I'm looking for a change.

From previous experience, I know announcing it on social media can be helpful, but I'm afraid of any repercussions from my employer if they see that, and I can't afford being unemployed too long between jobs. (for visa reasons)

In the past I was open about changing jobs: I talked to my colleagues, even the CEO of the company, and they were all cool with me openly searching for a new position. But this time I'm just a row in a table for my manager's manager, and their higher-ups. So nothing that my manager tells me will give me confidence that there won't be any repercussions.

How should I approach this? Is it unreasonable to assume that there could be repercussions if I openly post on social media (including my blog) that I'm looking for a new position?

If it's not, then do you have any suggestions on how should I go about searching for a new job?

Thanks.