MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitbasher | 2025-10-29 23:00:45+00:00
I used Vim for over 15 years. I then used NeoVim for a couple years.

I tried Helix for several months. I then tried VS Code for the first time and only lasted about eight weeks. I gave Zed a try but gave up because it required a GPU which my machine didn't have and there's a login button on the editor which I found ridiculous (I don't use GitHub, how am I supposed to log in). I then tried RustRover / JetBrains products for a few weeks.

Ultimately, I ended up back in Vim8 (default install on my LTS distro). I like to think I've given each editor a fair try.

1. Vanilla vim is just there and works. You can use it with or without plugins and it works great. The built in :make / compiler options are a viable alternative to lsp / linter plugins. Also, it has ctags support built in which works for dozens of languages. You can also use a linter/lsp plugin by adding to your optional plugins and simply do `:packadd vim-lsp` or whatever the plugin name is whenever you want to use it. It's literally a text editor, with optional plugins.

2. NeoVim is "plugin hell". It's an editor that people use as an IDE and require a dozen plugins to do so. You could use it like Vim (see above), but no one does that. I don't have any issues with NeoVim as a tool, but the community and "influencers" are annoying to me.

3. Helix was a nice IDE out of the box, no plugins required. Ultimately I found the different key mappings to be annoying for me (15+ years of vim muscle memory). It's not a bad alternative if you want the "IDE experience" in the terminal. It's certainly better than stringing 24 plugins together and hoping none of them are ever compromised.

I won't discuss the other editors or IDES. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings :)
by kragen | 2025-10-29 23:01:38+00:00
You seem to be suggesting that code that crashes in Fil-C will often run successfully in YOLO-C, but that doesn't seem to be the case from Pizlo's LFS exercise. He's had to modify a few things, but not much. Generally, UB in C code is a bug, and usually a portability problem, so C code that runs on a VAX, a 68000, a SPARC, a 386, an Alpha, and AMD64 will also probably run on Fil-C.

Old BASIC programmers are mostly working on Pick and other "business BASIC" systems, and I still run into them from time to time. But most of that code is only useful within a single business, so I expect it to eventually die out. (Meanwhile, new BASIC programmers are proliferating in the retrocomputing hobby.)

By contrast, on my system here I have over a thousand libraries written in C or C++. A random sampling reveals libraries for: LevelDB; various JS interpreters; file format handlers for zipfiles, OpenEXR, DjVu, and JPEG; gamepad interaction; a sparse matrix solver (used in Octave); the RIST protocol (used by OBS Studio); simulation with finite element models, which uses a different sparse matrix solver (used by FreeCAD); inspecting and manipulating configuration of PCI devices; the MTP protocol; the Icecast protocol; the protocol FTDI devices speak over USB; and so on.

Nearly all software written today is either written in C, written in C++, or interpreted or compiled by an interpreter or compiler written in C or C++.
by duskwuff | 2025-10-29 23:01:50+00:00
"Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial"

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

But seriously: this is a recognized problem in medicine and there's already a widely used solution. Whenever you're doing trials of an intervention for a condition which already has an accepted treatment, you run a trial to compare your new intervention to that, and see if your test group has better outcomes. After all, the question shouldn't be whether your treatment is effective; it's whether it's better than existing treatments.

Trials against a placebo have a purpose, but they aren't the only way to run a trial.
by philip1209 | 2025-10-29 23:01:52+00:00
Interesting - this reminds me a lot of the story with Cisco: for decades they remained a California C-Corp while many other companies reincorporated in Delaware. I once heard a lawyer say “all my clients are Delaware C-Corps except Cisco, and their reason is political.”

Eventually Cisco did indeed buckle in 2021 and reincorporate in Delaware . . .
by echelon | 2025-10-29 23:01:57+00:00
I live in Atlanta.

The Atlanta Metro has 6.5 million people across TWENTY THOUSAND square kilometers.

Trains just don't make sense for this. Everything is too spread out. And that's okay. Cites are allowed to have different models of transportation and living.

I like how much road infra we have. That I can visit forests, rivers, mountains, and dense city all within a relatively short amount of time with complete flexibility.

Autonomous driving is going to make this paradise. Cars will be superior to trains when they drive themselves.

Trains lack privacy and personal space.
by jonahx | 2025-10-29 23:02:55+00:00
It makes the service worse. I won't pay for a streamer that uses ads. If they start doing that I'm out. Ofc, that doesn't mean it's not a net win for them across all customers, but it does mean there are a subset of customers who are now willing to pay for a different service, and the market has an incentive to service that.
by cma | 2025-10-29 23:03:35+00:00
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.

If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.

There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.

Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
by jacobgkau | 2025-10-29 23:04:11+00:00
Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around 2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before, and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.

But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).
by ben_w | 2025-10-29 23:04:12+00:00
Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:

The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.

We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.

(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
by pinnochio | 2025-10-29 23:04:24+00:00
It sounds like you're saying the setting was already commonplace in fictional media? But you don't reference such representations in your prior comment at all.

At any rate, while themes of technological surveillance and authoritarianism certainly predate Winter Soldier, I'm not aware of anything in popular culture prior to 2014 that really matches the moment _to the degree_ Winter Soldier does. And if you simply meant the actual state of America circa 2014, sure, Palantir existed, but DOGE and an authoritarian-controlled US military institution did not. ML, yes, but not the quasi-AGI of today that's a much closer match for the computerized Arnim Zola.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-29 23:04:43+00:00
That works, more or less. But now you have a requirements.txt file with 300 dependencies. Which ones do you actually care about, and which are just transitive things that your top-level deps brought along for the ride? And a year later, when GitHub's Dependabot is telling you have a security vulnerability in some package you've never heard of, do you remember if you even care about that package in the first place, or if it's left over cruft from that time you experimented with aiohttp instead of httpx?
by UniverseHacker | 2025-10-29 23:04:49+00:00
I think this is a valid point, and the reason I haven’t tried these drugs and don’t plan to. There are huge benefits to developing the mental strength and discipline to lean into discomfort consistently and just do what needs to be done- and all types of addiction provide one of the hardest, and therefore most valuable and useful obstacles here. As Marcus Aurelius said “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

I’ve found that the general act of leaning into challenges and mild physical discomfort has a ripple effect on my mind, and all types of addiction and dopamine seeking behaviors become automatically less interesting- almost exactly like what people report on these drugs. If I take a cold shower or work out every morning even when I don’t feel like it- pretty soon I’m eating healthier and limiting my alcohol, caffeine, and screen time without even really trying to.

That said, it only works if you manage to actually do it. It’s much better to get over addiction with a drug than to continue suffering from the addiction, and be unable to escape, especially something that causes as much damage as alcohol can.

One idea I had was to set a deadline for overcoming an addiction, and to just use the drug if you reach the deadline and the mental approach is still unsuccessful.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-29 23:05:33+00:00
If you actually look back towards all of human history and analyze the conservative and progressive positions at the time, you will find yourself almost exclusively siding with progressives.

Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now. That's what they're trying to conserve: always the very, very near past.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-10-29 23:06:32+00:00
Can someone help me understand what this is vs exposing my services via MagicDNS using the tailscale Kubernetes operator? Functionally it looks like a fair amount of overlap but this solution is generic outside of Kubernetes and more baked into tailscale itself? The operator solution obviously uses kube primitives to achieve a fair amount of the features discussed here.
by hunter2_ | 2025-10-29 23:06:41+00:00
Glad I snuck in that it's just my opinion! But the article you linked to sort of admits what I'm saying:

> The above thresholding matrix approach describes the Bayer family of ordered dithering algorithms. A number of other algorithms are also known; they generally involve changes in the threshold matrix, equivalent to the "noise" in general descriptions of dithering.

Basically, I'm leaning into "general descriptions of dithering" with my noise requirement, and the lack of noise in "ordered dithering" leads me to consider it not-quite-dithering.

The very first sentence of the general Dithering article [0] connects with my perspective as well:

> preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding

Aside: I probably misspoke with the word "halftone" earlier; apparently that's a specific thing as opposed to an umbrella term. I'm not sure there's a great word (other than "dither"...) for techniques to trade resolution for color.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither
by mcswell | 2025-10-29 23:06:44+00:00
(Almost) irrelevant question. You wrote "...a bigger generator, which you spin up to start the turbine spinning until the steam takes up load..." I once served on a steam powered US Navy guided missile destroyer. In addition to the main engines, we had four steam turbine electrical generators. There was no need--indeed, no mechanism--for spinning any of these turbines electrically, they all started up simply by sending them steam. (To be sure, you'd better ensure that the lube oil was flowing.)

Are you saying it's different on land-based steam power plants? Why?
by mandevil | 2025-10-29 23:07:09+00:00
While that is true in the general case, OpenAI was founded as a 501(c)3 to whom all donations were tax-deductible, which is why I used non-profit and charity interchangeably in describing it in particular. There was a for-profit subsidiary spun up in 2019, four years after the original non-profit was created. But it was still owned and operated by the larger non-profit charity organization.

See, for example, Charity Navigator's page on OpenAI: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/810861541
by jacobgkau | 2025-10-29 23:07:11+00:00
Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily.

(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
by Aeolun | 2025-10-29 23:07:17+00:00
I feel like companies are unreasonably afraid of cost up front, never mind that they’re going to pay more for cloud over the next 6 months, spending 6x monthly cloud cost on a single server makes them hesitate.

It’s how they always refuse to spend half my monthly salary on the computer I work on, and instead insist I use an underpowered windows machine.
by devjab | 2025-10-29 23:07:56+00:00
I think the OO hatred comes from how academia and certain enterprise organisations for our industry picked it up and taught it like a religion. Molding an entire generation og developers who wrote some really horrible code because they were taught that abstractions were, always, correct. It obviously weren't so outside those institutions, the world slowly realized that abstractions were in many ways worse for cyclomatic complexity than what came before. Maybe not in a perfect world where people don't write shitty code on a thursday afternoon after a long day of horrible meetings in a long week of having a baby cry every night.

As with everything, there isn't a golden rule to follow. Sometimes OO makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. I rarely use it, or abstractions in general, but there are some things where it's just the right fit.
by m-p-3 | 2025-10-29 23:08:01+00:00
> But no they have to live in their secured enclave or on a dongle so that you can't copy them between devices because nothing ever happened to a device.

I'm actually fine with this. It's like how SSH private keys are supposed to be handled: generated on the device, and never supposed to leave it.

The proper way of doing Passkeys is to have several Passkeys enrolled in your account, so that you always have a trusted device to access your services. Now, if the service doesn't allow multiple Passkeys per account that IS a problem.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-29 23:08:21+00:00
> doesn't explain the value of Sam Altman's pinky promise

The MOU [1] requires OpenAI "provide at least 21 days’ prior written notice to the Attorney General before consenting to: (a) a change of control of the PBC; (b) any change to the PBC mission as set out in the PBC Delaware charter; (c) any amendment to the PBC Delaware charter that would remove the NFP’s sole right, as holder of the Class N shares, to appoint PBC directors or otherwise reduces in any material respect the rights of the Class N shares; or (d) the relocation of the headquarters of the NFP or PBC outside of California" [1].

The meat appears to be in the agreements by OpenAI to not change its ownership and control structure. California's real leverage would be in re-opening this dispute, though ¶ 22 seems to water down that power somewhat. (Maybe go after the donors?)

[1] https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Final... ¶ 19
by lelandbatey | 2025-10-29 23:08:48+00:00
I think you may be applying a very weird definition of "free software", even compared to the usual gratis vs libre axis.

Also, I really don't think controlling a domain name NFT in a system that's mostly computers you neither own nor control constitutes "more ownership" than the IRL law and contract bound rental world we currently live in. Especially if all the requirements and outcomes (payments for control resulting in land grabs of valuable names) are the same as our current system.
by paxys | 2025-10-29 23:09:07+00:00
Remember that Cambridge Analytica was "research" as well. Laws like these sound good on paper, but it's the company that has to deal with the fallout when the data is used improperly. Unless the government can also come up with a fool proof framework for data sharing and enforce adequate protections, it's always going to be better for the companies to just say no and eat the fines.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-29 23:09:08+00:00
> identical to almost all other general purpose RPC systems

The problem is that GraphQL doesn't behave like all other general purpose RPC systems. As a rule, authorization does not work on the same abstraction level as GraphQL.

And that explanation you quoted is disingenuous, because GraphQL middleware and libraries don't usually export places where you can do anything by hand.
by dotancohen | 2025-10-29 23:09:12+00:00
I run non trivial services on EC2, using that service as a VPS. My deploy script works just as well on provisioned Digital Ocean services and on docker containers using docker-compose.

I do need a human to provision a few servers and configure e.g. load balancing and when to spin up additional servers under load. But that is far less of a PITA than having my systems tied to a specific provider or down whenever a cloud precipitates.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-10-29 23:09:25+00:00
Fair response it's just nothing else feels like this weird duct tape'd together bunch of hacks to work around the design mistakes of the base language assuming it's a top level part of the OS.

> which is otherwise impossible on Linux

Node, Rust, etc all manage it.

> Because the entire point is that...

I just mean there is a history of Python using overly generic naming: activate, easy-install. Just feels weird and dirty to me that you'd call such a specific things names like these and I think it's indicative of this ideology that Python is deep in the OS.

Maybe if I'd aliased the activate command a decade ago I wouldn't feel this way or think about it.
by alwillis | 2025-10-29 23:09:55+00:00
Gotta give a shoutout regarding Ghostty [1]. I keep switching terminal apps; I'm on an iTerm2 kick right now… but I used Ghostty for a while and it's pretty damn cool.

Anecdotally, it feels the fastest to me. Also GPU-accelerated and super configurable. It's amazing how a guy (Mitchell Hashimoto)[2] leaves the company he co-founded before it was sold to IBM.

[1]: https://ghostty.org

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qY2p0OH9A
by ben_w | 2025-10-29 23:10:28+00:00
There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the skip has now gone…)
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-10-29 23:10:36+00:00
It depends on the implementation. The naive solution is to have every client hold the full chain.

The lightweight solutions come in two flavors, the easy "good enough" solution and the much harder ideal/zero trust solution.

The easy solution (light clients) to avoiding carrying the full chain is to simply rely on some set of known/trusted "beacon" servers that you are willing to trust to relay you the chain state and send you what information you need.

The hard solution is called a "super light" client. One of the famous super light client implementations is called flyclient[1]. It relies on some tricks with proof of work to only store log2(n) blocks out of the n blocks in the whole chain. It gives you enough security to be able to verify that your chain is valid and constructed from the origin block as well as allowing it to use the longest chain rule to decide what chain is the current "official" chain for the network just like you would with a full chain history.

There's another approach called NiPiPoWs [2] (non-interactive proofs of proofs-of-work) which is conceptually similar but is a bit more generally useful (outside of just as a light client system). A few networks adopted it but idk how prevalent its use is nowadays.

Note that flyclient, NiPiPoWs and most super light clients tend to rely on properties of proof of work as well as UTxO accounting models which disqualify their use for most networks. Cardano at the very least seems to have figured their own version out [3][4] and it exists kind of as a conceptual redesign of NiPiPoWs but for stake based systems (and actually came out of NiPiPoW research).

And of course super light clients still require miners to hold the full chain state generally but there's work[5][6] on how to do "light mining" which of course would allow everybody to abandon old chain state and only keep the data they care about.

Note: a lot of the research I linked is inter related as these are the researchers I kept up more closely with last time I was deep in the ecosystem but there's a lot of work on the topic in general coming at these problems from different angles.

--------------------------

1. Flyclient: Super-Light Clients for Cryptocurrencies - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/226

2. Compact Storage of Superblocks for NIPoPoW Applications - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1444

3. Mithril: Stake-based Threshold Multisignatures - https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/916

4. The velvet path to superlight blockchain clients - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3479722.3480999

5. Mining in Logarithmic Space - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3460120.3484784

6. SNACKs: Leveraging Proofs of Sequential Work for Blockchain Light Clients - https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/240
by icedchai | 2025-10-29 23:10:51+00:00
Some organizations force you to use their internal dependency repos because the "IT department" or similar has blessed only certain versions in the name of "security" (or at least security theater.)

Inevitably, these versions are out-of-date. Sometimes, they are very, very out of date. "Sorry, I can only install [version from 5 years ago.]" is always great for productivity.

I ran into this recently with a third-party. You'd think a 5 year old version would trigger alarm bells...