MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-09-26 10:20:22+00:00
Everything has a "day and age".

I'm not saying COBOL is a bad language, far from it, which the billions of lines of code running production proably also attests to. The first COBOL program i ever edited, in 2008, was last edited in 1987. It had run flawlessly every day for 20 years. COBOL when invented was invented to allow business people to express business logic programatically, which is also why it has such a large footprint in finance, insurance, etc.

I'm not saying Java is a bad language either. Java is great, much like COBOL was, and like COBOL, Java still evolves today. It has flaws, but so does every other language, and most of the flaws in Java are understood. There is literally also nothing you can't do in Java that you can do in <insert fashionable language of the year>.

We probably shouldn't write web frontends in Java, and most people figured that out a decade or more ago, including the financial institutions.

The typical flow in a financial institution is something like "Angular (in some form) => Java Backend => COBOL on mainframe => DB2", where "=>" can be anything from REST to message queues (i was tempted to write MQ, as most will likely be IBM MQ, but others exist and are used).

Most companies migrating away from mainframe (and thereby often COBOL), have also started implementing microservices instead of giant monoliths, which is what has kept the mainframes of the world running for so long. Most companies i've worked with, have had 45,000 - 90,000 COBOL programs running every night, with almost as many running on demand, and each and every one depends heavily on the output of the previous part of the chain.

Thost giant chunks are now being migrated to microservices with well defined couplings, meaning that when it eventually becomes time to migrate away from Java, it will be somewhat easier as you can eat the elephant one mouthful at a time, and not have to reimplement 50+ years of legacy code and conventions in one go.

I've said it before, and will gladly say it again, if you choose a COBOL career today, you will most likely never be unemployed for long until you retire.
by jabl | 2025-09-26 10:21:16+00:00
The Cray T3D and T3E used Alpha processors. But it wasn't really shared memory, each node with 1/(2?) CPU's ran it's own lightweight OS kernel. There were some libraries built on top of it (SHMEM) that sort-of made it look a bit like shared memory, but not really. Mostly it was a machine for running MPI applications.

A decade or so later on, they more or less recreated the architecture but this time with 64-bit Opteron CPU's in the form of the 'Red Storm' supercomputer for Sandia. Which then became commercially available as the XT3. And later XT4/5/6.
by imiric | 2025-09-26 10:22:47+00:00
I get where you're coming from, but I do think you're doing a disservice to yourself and your team by not doing granular commits. This doesn't mean splitting changes into arbitrary chunks, or that each commit must be of a specific size, but that each commit does a single change. I find conventional commits helpful for this, since they force you into thinking about the type of change, which naturally limits the commit scope. I don't do a perfect job at this either, and often bundle unrelated changes into one commit if I'm being lazy, but usually I strive to keep it clean.

There are many benefits of doing this. When following the output of `blame`, you can see exactly why a change was made, down to the line or statement level. This is very helpful for newcomers to the codebase, and yourself in a few months time. It's invaluable for `bisect` and locating the precise change that introduced an issue. It's very useful for cherry picking specific changes across branches, or easily reverting them, as you mention. It makes it easier to write descriptive changelogs, especially if you also use conventional commits, which nowadays can be automated with LLMs. And so on.

Most of these tasks are very difficult or impossible if you don't have a clean history. Yes, they require discipline, time, and effort to do correctly, but it saves you and the team so much time and effort in the long run.

Ultimately, it's up to each person or team to use a VCS in whatever way they're most comfortable with. But ignoring or outright rejecting certain practices that can make your life as a developer easier and more productive, even though they require more time and effort upfront, is a very short-sighted mentality.

> I think the primary difference between the two of us is that you write huge commit messages and I don't

The commit I linked to is an outlier, and if you see my other commit messages, most are a few sentences long. It's not about writing a lot, but about describing the change: what led to it, why it was implemented in a specific way, mention any contextual information, trade-offs, external links, etc. In that particular case it was a major feature (indicated by the exclamation point in the subject) that changed large parts of the code base, so it deserved a bit more context. I was also feeling a particular way and used the opportunity to vent, which isn't a good place for it, but since this is a personal project, I don't mind it. Although how the programmer felt while writing the code is also relevant contextual information, and I would gladly read it from someone else in order to understand their state of mind and point of view better.

Also, these days with LLMs you can quickly summarize large amounts of text, so there's no harm in writing a lot, but you can never add context that doesn't exist in the first place.
by 7bit | 2025-09-26 10:23:21+00:00
> We remain concerned that these changes to Search are a result of the DMA prioritizing the commercial interests of a small set of intermediary sites — who often shout the loudest in these debates — over the ability of most businesses to sell directly to their customers.

Say Google ... of all people. I would be ashamed working for a company and writing this shit. Ashamed of myself!
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-26 10:23:27+00:00
Are we still having to discuss arguments such as "Why are you afraid? You should have nothing to hide!" in 2025 Yeah, safety measures are useless until you face a risky situation.

Also I don't care that "the vast majority of people" prefer Facebook chat to discuss online. That they are free to do so doesn't mean I shouldn't be free to preserve the secrecy of my communications.
by r_lee | 2025-09-26 10:23:32+00:00
I really haven't tried that stuff myself except for claude code

but I do recall seeing some Amazon engineer who worked on Amazon q and his repos and they were... something.

like making PRs that were him telling the ai that "we are going to utilize the x principle by z for this" and like 100s of lines of "principles" and stuff that obviously would just pollute the context and etc.

like huge amounts of commits but it was just all this and him trying to basically get magic working or something.

and to someone like me it was obvious that this was a futile effort but clearly he didn't seem to quite get it.

I think the problem is that people don't understand transformers, that they're basically huge datasets in a model form where it'll auto-generated based on queries from the context (your prompts and the models reponses)

so you basically are just getting mimicked responses

which can be helpful but I have this feeling that there's a fundamental limit, like a mathematical one where you can't get it really to do stuff unless you provide the solution itself in your prompt, that covers everything because otherwise it'd have to be in its training data (which it may have, for common stuff like boilerplate, hello world etc.)

but maybe I'm just missing something. maybe I don't get it

but I guess if you really wanna help him, I'd maybe play around with claude/gpt and see how it just plays along even if you pretend, like you're going along with a really stupid plan or something and how it'll just string you along

and then you could show him.

Orr.... you could ask management to buy more AI tools and make him head of AI and transition to being an AI-native company..
by myself248 | 2025-09-26 10:23:50+00:00
I've been on Pop for about 5 years, through several major upgrade cycles, and it's nearly flawless. The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional. It has a system restore partition (that I've never had to use), boot-the-previous-kernel (that I've used once), full-disk encryption by default, so many little things that I appreciate. Everything Just Works, on both my old Thinkpad and my new Framework.

When I have had trouble (e.g. stuck updates, other apt woes, Bluetooth weirdness), System76's help pages have been great. If they don't cover it, I just search +Ubuntu and the advice I find almost always works.

I have no idea what WM or DE or anything I'm running, it's just here and it stays out of the way so there's no situation where I would be confronted by having to know its name. That's a bit annoying (I did finally find out that "Files" is actually "Nautilus", which helped when searching to understand some behaviors) in that it limits my ability to meaningfully search for, or change, these details, but I think if it was a big deal, I'd figure it out. It's just fine.

That I can run an OS for 5 years and not know my WM or DE, is pretty cool, IMHO.
by SahAssar | 2025-09-26 10:25:18+00:00
In my experience deliverability to gmail is not that hard if you configure stuff correctly. You need a clean IP and domain, rDNS and the usual email stuff like DKIM, DMARC, SPF, but not much else.

Also not sure why you would choose OpenBSD and OpenSMTPD unless OpenBSD is your style. For example I run maddy on linux, which is pretty easy to configure.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-26 10:26:13+00:00
You're right, of course, but the real issue is the lack of corporate accountability, and data stewardship. Since HN has a lot of folks that really don't want people talking about corporate accountability, the discussions are pretty much guaranteed to devolve into macguffins.

Case in point: notice how fast this discussion will dive off the front page. Happens quite frequently, when the topic is one that makes certain folks uncomfortable.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-26 10:26:16+00:00
> In my usage, the story is for myself first and foremost.

But that's my point exactly. Unless you're exceptionally clear thinker, a story that's natural for you is not very good for anyone else. Your story is optimized for an audience of 1, developed interactively, and meant to help you in the now. The story for the team is meant to help them orient themselves after the fact. Turning one into the other is its own kind of work.

But then different people and teams have different ways of working. VC isn't the whole world. In some projects, I'd make "team story" commits directly, because I used a separate text file to note down my thoughts, and used that to keep me on track. So it's a different way of solving this problem.
by jdietrich | 2025-09-26 10:27:37+00:00
This isn't an inherent property of LLMs, it's something they have been specifically trained to do. The vast majority of users want safe, bland, derivative results for the vast majority of prompts. It isn't particularly difficult to coax an LLM into giving batshit insane responses, but that wouldn't be a sensible default for a chatbot.
by rollcat | 2025-09-26 10:28:16+00:00
Thank you for the article.

My own conclusions from your data:

- Under light workloads, you can get away with Postgres. 7k RPS is fine for a lot of stuff.

- Introducing Redis into the mix has to be carefully weighted against increased architectural complexity, and having a common interface allows us to change that decision down the road.

Yeah maybe that's not up to someone else's idea of a good synthetic benchmark. Do your load-testing against actual usage scenarios - spinning up an HTTP server to serve traffic is a step in the right direction. Kudos.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-26 10:28:32+00:00
First of all, you are the one who stated this as a fact, and then provided only anecdotal evidence in support of the broad claim. Your singular limited experience in one country cannot blindly extend to all such countries, so the onus is on you to provide support for your claim.

____________

I was also under the impression that adoption was fairly strong in many of these regions, and after looking into it, I see far more evidence in favor of that than a single anecdotal claim on a discussion board...

>Venezuela remains one of Latin America’s fastest-growing crypto markets. Venezuela’s year-over-year growth of 110% far exceeds that of any other country in the region. -Chainalysis

>Cryptocurrency Remittances Spike 40% in Latin America -AUSTRAC

>Crypto adoption has grown so entrenched that even policymakers are rumored to be considering it as part of the solution. -CCN

>By mid-2021, trading volumes had risen 75%, making Venezuela a regional leader. -Binance

_______

It actually wouldn't surprise me if most of this was hot air, but certainly you have actual data backing up the claim, not just an anecdotal view?
by philipallstar | 2025-09-26 10:28:35+00:00
> If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.

I don't think you appreciate quite how much easier it is to write down rules and use your populace as economic hostages to get fines out of companies created in places with good economic policies, than it is to make your own stuff internally.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-09-26 10:29:19+00:00
I switched from Ubuntu shortly after they started using snap everywhere (so around 20.04?).

I really like it, everything mostly just works well without any hassles.

I'm keen to try out Cosmic, although I would have preferred that they had a Gnome based 24.04 release last year rather than making everything wait for it.

But I'm still a happy user. Just hope they stick to the 2 year LTS cadence in future.
by watwut | 2025-09-26 10:29:31+00:00
> . Do most conservatives agree with "punch/kill Marxists/Islamists/Anarchists" (and similar variations)?

Yes they do. Most conservatives support harm and violence to those who are not them. You see that on who they vote for, on what they say and what kind of influencers they promote.

> do most leftists currently agree with "punch/kill Nazis/fascists" (and other variations)

No they dont. They leaders openly dont. And they do not vote for those who promote violence.
by bear330 | 2025-09-26 10:30:01+00:00
You might want to check out MailTrigger (https://www.mailtrigger.net/) — it's a programmable SMTP server that can even call an LLM before sending emails, so everything you listed is technically doable: blacklists/whitelists, phishing detection, spam rollups, virus scans, link previews, etc. It’s not directly related to the MS email stack, but if you're self-hosting and looking for a flexible, programmable layer in front of your mail server, it could be a good fit. It’s still under development (though already running in production for my own company and a few early adopters), and the pricing page is just a placeholder for now. But the docs are public, and I believe it can cover what you're aiming for.

One thing to note: while the website mainly talks about multi-channel notifications, MailTrigger is actually more like IFTTT or Zapier, but specialized for email — when a message arrives, it can trigger smart, programmable actions. You can turn your existing email system into an IFTTT-style automation engine. It supports JS and WASM for preprocessing and routing, so you could, for example, auto-reply with an LLM-generated joke or handle customer support queries dynamically. The website might not fully reflect this yet, but the docs are more complete and show what’s possible.
by egberts1 | 2025-09-26 10:31:08+00:00
Cosmic Analogy of an Internet Exchange (IX)

- The IX as a Galactic Core:

The IX is like a gravitational hub at the center of a galactic cluster. It doesn’t create stars (data) itself, but it bends spacetime (network topology) in such a way that galaxies (ISPs) can orbit and interact efficiently without needing to sling data across the intergalactic void (expensive transit).

- ISPs as Stars/Planets: Each ISP is like a stellar system with its own mass (bandwidth capacity, user base). They orbit into the IX “gravitational well” by sending out fiber-optic “space-time bridges” (links) to dock into the exchange.

- Fiber Links as Wormholes: The optical fibers into the IX are essentially wormholes: direct, high-speed tunnels across spacetime that collapse distance. Instead of traveling light-years through transit (Tier-1 providers), local traffic jumps instantly between ISPs through the IX’s wormhole endpoints.

- Switch Fabric as the Interstellar Medium: The IX switching fabric is like a plasma medium in the galactic core — it doesn’t decide where stars go, it just provides the environment where matter (packets) can move around without collision. It’s neutral, like the intergalactic medium, just enabling the exchange.

- BGP as Gravity’s Equation: Just like Einstein’s field equations determine how mass curves spacetime, BGP policies determine how traffic paths curve through the IX. Each ISP “publishes its mass” (advertises prefixes), and neighboring ISPs decide how to route packets based on that gravitational influence.

- Local vs. Transit: Without an IX, traffic between two galaxies (ISPs) might have to pass through a supercluster-scale filament (Tier-1 backbone). With an IX, they just exchange starlight (packets) directly within the cluster, conserving energy and reducing latency — much like galaxies trading radiation locally instead of sending it across megaparsecs.

So in astrophysics terms: an IX is a galactic core enabling local wormhole trade routes, where BGP is the gravity law and fibers are Einstein-Rosen bridges connecting stellar systems (ISPs) into a dynamic, orbiting cluster.
by m000 | 2025-09-26 10:31:15+00:00
> I suppose the DOS version also supported Hercules (beyond CGA/EGA/VGA).

IIRC, Hercules cards were more pro-oriented (monochrome graphics, but higher resolution than their contemporaries), so I doubt anyone would bother to make a game port specifically for them.

If you ran the game on a Hercules, most likely it was the CGA version run on top of a CGA simulator [1].

[1] https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php
by chillfox | 2025-09-26 10:33:27+00:00
I think it's down to personal preferences/how you think. I haven't actually used any languages that didn't have 0 based indexing, but I remember it being very painful and super unintuitive to learn, it just didn't make sense at all (still doesn't, but it's not a problem for me anymore). I always thought 1 based would make a lot more sense and be way easier to learn.
by frumiousirc | 2025-09-26 10:33:41+00:00
I just asked Gemini Flash to do this. I included the instruction to use regular expressions to do the conversion to ANSI. It gave me a reasonable Python function which boils down to calling `re.sub()` for each of bold, italic and underline. For italics:

text = re.sub(r'(\*|_)(.+?)\1', replace_italic, text, flags=re.DOTALL)

The `replace_italic` is a one line callback function surrounding the re's match with the ANSI codes.

Knowing what technique is "best" and telling the LLM to use it produces better results (on average) than giving the LLM freedom to choose. For some problems, the specification of the prompt needed to get good output becomes more work than just thinking and writing for myself.

For very complex things, I myself can not put the design into English in my own head but can "see" the correct answer as code concepts. I don't know if this is universal for all developers. If it is, it shows a limit of LLM's usefulness.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-09-26 10:34:15+00:00
It's kind of odd that the US taxes its own farmers when they do business with China but is so supportive of Argentinian farmers who do so: https://soygrowers.com/news-releases/asa-responds-to-argenti...

Though I suppose if I were China and I was manipulating US leadership its what I'd have us do.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-26 10:35:28+00:00
Which means they are inventing a narrative that did not exist when they were developing the PR. While also spending time on squashing and merging commits to pretend the development was linear. When it absolutely wasn't.

That is the perfect story for the final merge commit or the PR when this nicely crafted story is squashed into nothingness and merged.
by mustaphah | 2025-09-26 10:35:30+00:00
Nicely done.

Funny enough, I had a similar idea a few weeks back; I jotted it down in my idea sketchpad. It felt a bit ambitious for an open-source side project, and I wasn't sure if it could even work with a local LLM. I was genuinely excited about it, nonetheless.

Now that I know it's totally viable, I've got even more reasons to build a Linux version myself.
by KronisLV | 2025-09-26 10:36:15+00:00
I think people will hate it somewhat because the older style and assets mixed with more modern lighting and textures (moreso, often AI upscaled ones), will look... kinda shiny and overall a bit off, same as happened with the GTA remaster, other launch issues aside.

That said, I am still in the minority that enjoys such attempts, if nothing else, then because at least these modern versions often run a bit better, with proper high resolutions and widescreen support, as well as sometimes receive some quality of life fixes to bring the game up to speed and make it play like something a bit more modern - the jank of early 2000s games is something I don't enjoy.

At the same time, there's no reason why a mod made by passionate members of the community couldn't do more or less the same, except often times a bit better, which is jarring - how some companies seem to do the equivalent of outsourcing it and try to produce something quickly and on a budget.

I think the best attempts at giving us a fresh look at old games that I've seen were the Mafia Definitive Edition https://store.steampowered.com/app/1030840/Mafia_Definitive_... and System Shock https://store.steampowered.com/app/482400/System_Shock/ although those are basically remakes, that just happen to stay true to the original.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-26 10:36:24+00:00
Not an ideal situation, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem like something that is that hard to address.

You have a group of people that are in severe enough mental distress that they are willingly calling a suicide hotline for help. Even if they aren't the user case that is in imminent danger that the service is designed for, I think it's safe to assume that many of these people do need help or at the very least could greatly benefit from learning more about the resources available to them.

It sounds like this could be screened relatively easily, and these people could perhaps get shifted to a resource line where they can be helped to find the resources that fit there needs. Perhaps that will involve updating the call screen protocol and hiring a few more agents, but a concentrated stream of mentally unwell people actively taking the initiative to seek help is something that provides far more social benefit to efficiently address than to complain about.

Of course the chatbots themselves should be offering more options to call than just a suicide hotline, no disputing that.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-26 10:37:22+00:00
There are multiple ways to end up an authoritarian State. You can add many regulations, then have someone come to power and use those regulations to repress society (a good example would be Germany in 1937), or have a weakening of the institutions protecting citizen's rights, which is something the US is experiencing.

It has started before Trump, I think that a turning point was the Patriot Act, but Democrats didn't overturn it and picked their ennemies, too[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point