MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by subjectivationx | 2025-10-18 16:30:36+00:00
I think the main mistake with this is that the concept of a "complex machine" has no meaning.

A “machine” is precisely what eliminates complexity by design. "People are complex machines" already has no meaning and then adding just and really doesn't make the statement more meaningful it makes it even more confused and meaningless.

The older I get the more obvious it becomes the idea of a "thinking machine" is a meaningless absurdity.

What we really think we want is a type of synthetic biological thinking organism that somehow still inherits the useful properties of a machine. If we say it that way though the absurdity is obvious and no one alive reading this will ever witness anything like that. Then we wouldn't be able to pretend we live at some special time in history that gets to see the birth of this new organism.
by manithree | 2025-10-18 16:30:43+00:00
The Borland Turbos had a much bigger market impact, but I was blown away by the Zortech C++ IDE in 1988. I don't remember why any more, but I was very dismissive of other TUI IDEs of the day after using Zortech. Even in the early 1990's when I was professionally using PWB (Programmer's Waste Basket) I still felt Zortech's IDE was superior.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-18 16:30:43+00:00
I've written and re-written many toy and throwaway UI frameworks. It's fun! My current pet project is built on SFML, which is basically a thin wrapper around OpenGL.

If I had infinite time I'd probably do most of my UI work at this level. I enjoy the process of "how can I do x? I don't have a feature close to x, so let's go build it!".

I think this mostly stems from the trauma of dealing with winforms/wpf/uwp and from having seen JavaScript once before. I feel like I'm restoring sanity in the universe by stacking rectangles in a not-crazy way.

Frameworks don't have to be complex and all-encompassing. When I'm "done" with a project, its UI layer generally only supports exactly what the application needs and not much more.

The reason the big frameworks are so gnarly is that they try to do everything and thus do no one thing particularly well.

You should absolutely build your own UI framework or try laying out a UI from GL primitives. It's like the assembly of UI design. Not for everyone, sure, but I find it peaceful
by skopje | 2025-10-18 16:31:08+00:00
What I hate are the dozens of little doodads in the car that fail after 10 years and are no longer manufactured. Mechanical knobs on the AC, servos in the mirrors, power windows, wiper motors, window seals, heck the shifter stalk on my 2006 forester broke (thank god for chop shops). I wonder what people are referring to when they say "this car won't last 200k miles". do they mean the engine, transmission, heater, what exactly?
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-18 16:32:07+00:00
I'm not sure if you know what "terminal" means. I'm not talking about terminal emulators (the "terminal" program on macOS/Linux/Android/etc.) but actual, real terminals. The "terminal" is a text mode rendering mechanism built into computers of the terminal era. The closest modern operating systems come to it is the terminal-like environment you can get on Linux or the *BSDs by disabling the GUI, but even those merely emulate text mode, they still contain the stacks upon stacks of timers and necessary to process input peripherals.

The problem is the entire software stack between the keyboard and the display. From USB polling to driver loops and GPU callbacks, the entire software stack has become incredibly asynchronous, making it trivial for computers to miss a frame boundary. Compared to DOS or similar environments, where applications basically took control over the entire CPU and whatever peripherals it knew to access, there are millions of small points where inefficiencies can creep in. Compare that to the hardware interrupts and basic processor I/O earlier generations of computers used, where entered keys were in a CPU buffer before the operating system even knew what was happening.

VSCode isn't even that slow, really. I don't find it to be any slower than Zed, for instance. Given the technology stack underneath VSCode, that's an impressive feat by the Microsoft programmers. But the kind of performance TUI programs of yore got for free just isn't available to user space applications anymore without digging into low-level input APIs and writing custom GPU shaders.

In small part, CRTs running at 70Hz or 85Hz back in the mid-80s, as well as the much smoother display output of CRTs versus even modern LCDs, made for a much better typing experience.
Ask HN: DOS Based "Multitaskers"
by alexshendi | 2025-10-18 16:32:40+00:00
Dear Auntie HN,

I recently tried QuarterDeck DesqView for multitasking (16 bit real mode) applications. It installed allright, but I couldn't get it to multitask PC-Scheme (More precisely PCS/Geneva 4.02PL1) properly. Could you recommend any alternative DOS Versions or task switchers better suited to that?

Programs I didn't try * MS multitasking DOS (to which the source was released not long ago) * DRDOS * Any other variant of DOS?

IMHO the experience under OS/2 was best.

Thanks!
by ryandv | 2025-10-18 16:33:08+00:00
PostgreSQL's `DISTINCT ON` extension is useful for navigating bitemporal data in which I want, for example, the latest recorded version of an entry, for each day of the year.

There are few other legitimate use cases of the regular `DISTINCT` that I have seen, other than the typical one-off `SELECT DISTINCT(foo) FROM bar`.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-18 16:33:16+00:00
>>> What was the remaining range for those replacements?

>> Who cares? Spending $15K on battery on a used car is a hard "No!", unless the car is under $10K.

> Well I do because I only need to drive at most 75 miles a day and even a car with 30 miles of range would satisfy my commute requirements.

The point is that when comparing dollar for dollar, I can likely get a used ICE for the same price that will work out better for me. If I already had an ICE car and was looking for a second car just for daily commutes, the EV may make sense. But the hassle of having to get a rental for longer trips - I don't know if it's worth it.

Also have to consider resale value - will people buy the (already used) EV from me if the battery has significantly reduced range?

(BTW, in my social circle, I don't know anyone who's bought a used EV - they all buy new ones out of fear)

> Can you get a better car for $25,000.00?

I have a list of things I want and need from a car. I can find plenty ICE for $15K that matches my requirements. $25K is the max I'll go for an EV, figuring that I may save $10K over about 8-10 years in gas based on the calculators I've used.

I can't find even one EV that matches my requirements for $25K. Each one has some problem - too little room or some other annoying problem (e.g. Ioniq 5 not having rear wipers).

I can get great ICE cars for $15K. I cannot get a single used great EV for $25K.
by grayhatter | 2025-10-18 16:33:17+00:00
The argument as I understood it was 4chan's existence, degrades society.

4chan's whole gimmick is that you can say whatever you want, because you don't have to identify yourself when you say it. It's a way for Internet denizens scream their intrusive thoughts into the pseudovoid.

If expressing intrusive thoughts makes society worse, and should be controlled. That, arguably makes expressing thoughts a crime. You shouldn't be allowed to think or say thing.

I guess you could insist that thinking is different from expressing, and that thinking is fine as long as you repress the inate human trait and desire of expression... But I feel that's a stupid line in the sand to draw given my intent was to point out 4chan doesn't make society worse, tolerating ideas you don't like generally improves society. It's how you behave that matters.

In other words, If 4chan didn't exist, people would behave better.

If you weren't exposed to those thoughts and ideas, you would behave better.

If you didn't have a thought....
by tern | 2025-10-18 16:33:51+00:00
I think what people miss about bloat, and about what's changed with software over the years, is that a vast variety of niche use-cases are now supported. Software runs on dozens of different systems, every aspect is customizable and programmable, and thousands of different programming languages and approaches are supported.

To give a random example, I use Neovim with SuperCollider, and music programming language. This involves launching a runtime, sending text to the runtime, which in turn sends commands to a server. The server generates a log, which is piped back into a Neovim buffer. There are all sorts of quirks to getting this functional, and it's a somewhat different workflow from any traditional programming model.

I'm not sure there's an easy solution to keeping things simple while also supporting the unimaginable variety of personalities, skill-levels, environments, and tasks people get up to. I do, however, think it's worth continued imagination and effort.
by geor9e | 2025-10-18 16:34:33+00:00
That wording manages to avoid answering the question entirely. It just shifted the ambiguity from defining the word “brick” to defining the word “recoverable”. Recoverable by your grandmother with dementia, before the next Matlock episode airs? Recoverable by one person on Earth for whom unbricking this one thing is their special interest? Recoverable by a hypothetical future technotopian society that we predict will be capable of vaporizing atoms and rearranging them into any desired form? Do you draw a hard line in the sand for everyone to share one definition? Or is it entirely subjective, a tautology, a self-fulfilling prophecy - meaning anyone’s feeling of brickiness and recoverability is valid by definition?
by aftbit | 2025-10-18 16:35:12+00:00
That was not my experience on the single road trip I've done since getting this new EV. I charged 7 times in total, and did not have to wait for a charging bay at all.

I'm honestly not that bothered by it. I'm very much a "type B" road tripper. I don't care if it takes me an extra hour or two to get there, as long as I'm having a good time. Heck, I might go down some random road named "Old Priest's Grade" and add an extra hour to the trip just because the descent has beautiful views.
by ajkjk | 2025-10-18 16:35:45+00:00
We're kinda talking about different philosophies here. There's "can it be done in any timeline" and "can it be done practically". Of course it can't be done practically. But if that is a 100%-filter on the things you attempt, then things that aren't likely to ever happen will never be attempted. Things go a lot better when people have unrealistic expectations and then end up in places they didn't expect (probably not the place they aimed for...). That's a moral worth nurturing, even if it is not any sort of practical approach that you would stake anything on.

Basically: it is false that you can be anything in particular if you work hard enough. But it is true that the best way to act is as if that were true to some degree, because the outcomes are better for everybody.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-18 16:37:22+00:00
A big one that isn't listed is looking for stuff that isn't there.

Using != or NOT IN (...) is almost always going to be inefficient (but can be OK if other predicates have narrowed down the result set already).

Also, understand how your DB handles nulls. Are nulls and empty strings the same? Does null == null? Not all databases do this the same way.
by simonw | 2025-10-18 16:38:39+00:00
Is this perhaps some weird British vs American English thing I was unaware of?

Oxford Learners Dictionary (because the Oxford English Dictionary is behind a paywall): "a statement that says what you think will happen; the act of making such a statement" https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

The current Wikipedia definition looks like a good fit for how I'm using the term here:

A prediction (Latin præ-, "before," and dictum, "something said"[1]) or forecast is a statement about a future event or about future data. Predictions are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge of forecasters. There is no universal agreement about the exact difference between "prediction" and "estimation"; different authors and disciplines ascribe different connotations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction
by EbEsacAig | 2025-10-18 16:38:57+00:00
> When people love an IDE product so much that they can't work without it, they have overspecialised to their detriment.

I think you are wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory

Being extremely good at something increases the gap between said something and everything else. That doesn't mean being extremely good at the first thing is "over-specialization to detriment". If someone is equally mediocre at everything, they have no such gap, so no "over-specialization to detriment"; but is that really worth desiring? I think not.
by Sesse__ | 2025-10-18 16:39:00+00:00
What do you mean? Here are your real alternatives for doing a semijoin (assuming ANSI SQL, no vendor extensions):

SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM t2 WHERE t2.x = t1.x ); SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE x IN ( SELECT x FROM t2 ); SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN ( SELECT DISTINCT x FROM t2 ) s1 USING (x);

Now tell me which one of these is the less verbose semijoin?

You could argue that you could fake a semijoin using

SELECT DISTINCT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 USING (x);

or

SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 USING (x) GROUP BY t1.*;

but it doesn't give the same result if t1 has duplicate rows, or if there is more than one t2 matching t1. (You can try to fudge it by replacing * with something else, in which case the problem just moves around, since “duplicate rows” will mean something else.)
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-10-18 16:39:08+00:00
Let’s upgrade our intellectual rigor here. Do you sincerely believe that “PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world” even when it comes to viral disease, dictatorships and warfare, chemical pollution, deforestation, social epidemics (eg, drugs, social media), housing crises, food deserts, famine, etc?

You might be only considering the energy transition, but it is not as if the original author was strictly speaking of that topic, or as if that is all that matters for humanity on earth.

“I don’t see any other significant levers,” you say? Read from history: how about the great liberalizing effect of the Christian marriage and family policy that broke down filial kin networks and paved the way for markets, universities, and democracies by way of fostering impersonal trust? How about the smallpox vaccine? How about the incredible rise in population and economic activity upon the introduction of potatoes to Europe? How about the invention of ammonium-based fertilizers? This one will rankle some feathers: how about the incredible geopolitical twist and – yes – reduction in atmospheric carbon introduced by the development of fracking (enabling the transition away from coal)? How about the civil rights movement in the United States? The invention of nuclear weapons? Metallurgy? Chemistry? The shipping container? Large language models? Look around and you will see fulcrums everywhere.

Literally look around you, wherever you sit right now, and just consider the vast number of twists and turns that led to the current circumstance. Then imagine someone 500 years ago in Beijing saying something as foolish as, “we just need more movable-type printing, yeah, that will protect us from the Northern invaders, that will completely solve deforestation, that will protect us from famine… Hey you farmer over there, stop farming! We have movable-type printing! We’re good, we just need more of it!”

The simplistic model is very appealing; it is easy to wrap your mind around it, it is easy to communicate via viral essay, it is easy to develop optimism upon it. But it is not a working model. It is just too simple and incomplete. The various fulcrums I pulled out of my imagination above all worked because the world was complex. The people who invented and developed those fulcrums were effective because they embraced a complex model. They made the intellectually rigorous choice to reject naive simplicity when others tried to thrust it upon them.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-18 16:39:21+00:00
> How is that working out for you?

Same as everyone else, not great. We've very few politicians that support the 4th Amendment in a meaningful way. Which I suppose is a reflection of voters harboring a fierce disinterest in the 4th.

And, in my estimation, all of that flows from generations of news orgs who rarely notice the 4th Amendment, nevertheless treasure it on behalf of the public.
by asim | 2025-10-18 16:40:32+00:00
Can't tell if it should be upvoted or not because attention is devoted to many addictive behaviours which I'd argue are not a luxury but the desperation of people who have been exploited or attempting to escape.

You don't become addicted because of luxury. Attention is not a luxury. It's our time. It's our most precious resource and when it's "wasted" it's often because something is going terribly wrong.
by a-dub | 2025-10-18 16:41:21+00:00
> Anyway, does anyone remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior?

didn't it have a cute little re-distributable header file that had a bunch of useful containers in it? (linked lists, hash tables, etc)

i didn't work with it much but once worked with a mac guy who added it to our project. sometimes i'd have to build his stuff, i remember lots of yellow road construction icons!
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-18 16:41:49+00:00
Clickbaitified title: Researchers cure Alzheimer's disease! (in APP/PS1 transgenic AD mice)

Extract suitable for layfolk:

> Current therapeutic approaches have often focused on improving transport efficiency by tuning ligand affinity, particularly in transferrin receptor-targeting strategies, which have demonstrated that mid-affinity interactions can outperform high-affinity binding by avoiding lysosomal routing and promoting transcytosis. While such strategies have opened a new chapter in neuropharmaceutical design, they largely remain transport-centric, concerned with getting molecules into the brain rather than repairing the transport systems themselves. In contrast, the approach presented here seeks to correct the pathological shift in endothelial trafficking, re-establishing a healthy balance between receptor recycling and degradation.

> Experimental evidence confirms that treatment initiates a rapid clearance phase within hours, marked by a substantial reduction in cerebral amyloid load and concurrent elevation of plasma Aβ, consistent with restored vectorial efflux. Pathological imaging reveals depletion of insoluble aggregates across the isocortex, while functional assays demonstrate normalization of transporter stoichiometry and re-coupling of the neurovascular unit. Multiplex immunohistochemistry confirms reactivation of vesicular trafficking from the luminal surface toward the parenchyma, representing a spatial inversion of pathological amyloid dynamics. Most notably, these structural and molecular restorations translate into long-lasting cognitive preservation, with treated animals performing indistinguishably from wild-type controls in complex spatial learning tasks over extended observation periods. The conceptual advance here lies in moving beyond the paradigm of “overcoming the [blood-brain] barrier” toward “repairing the barrier.”

> Looking ahead, the translational journey will require accounting for interspecies differences in receptor glycosylation and membrane composition, as well as vascular pathologies such as cerebral amyloid angiopathy and pericyte loss, which are incompletely recapitulated in murine models. Strategies integrating spatiotemporal mapping of clearance dynamics with human-specific in vitro models, computational simulations under physiological shear stress, and tailored ligand designs informed by patient-specific LRP1 polymorphisms will be essential. The potential extends beyond AD to Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and other disorders where vascular transport failure accelerates neurodegeneration.
by btilly | 2025-10-18 16:41:49+00:00
The biggest SQL antipattern is failing to recognize that SQL is actually a programming language.

Therefore you should create a consistent indentation style for SQL. See https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2011/02/sql-formatting-style.h... for mine. Second, you should try to group logical things together. This is why people should move subqueries into common table expressions. And finally, don't be afraid of commenting wisely.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-18 16:42:35+00:00
> Also, understand how your DB handles nulls.

Also in regards to indexing. The DBs I've used have not indexed nulls, so a "WHERE col IS NULL" is inefficient even though "col" is indexed.

If that is the case and you really need it, have a computed column with a char(1) or bit indicating if "col" is NULL or not, and index that.
by vidarh | 2025-10-18 16:43:00+00:00
As much as I love Ruby (and I love it a lot - I right now have Claude fix eigenclass compilation issues in another window in my long-languishing Ruby compiler hobby project), this is also the root of a lot of confusion.

Ruby has two types of closures: lambda's, where return returns to the caller, and proc's/blocks where return acts as a return in the defining scope.

Beginners often struggle with the distinction between lambda and block, and often will be wildly confused if they ever see "proc" in the wild.

Yet lambda and proc both return a Proc object, and if you take the value of a block, you also get a Proc object... Just with different return semantics...

It'd be nice if this was a bit clearer.
by kibwen | 2025-10-18 16:44:01+00:00
Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a species we have basically stopped writing fiction that presents an optimistic outlook of the future. The solarpunk genre is the best we can do these days, which is to say, the best that humanity can possibly collectively imagine in the present era is stridently coping with the collapse as best we can. The center cannot hold. (More solarpunk would still be welcome, though.)
by EMM_386 | 2025-10-18 16:44:05+00:00
> How large is a lion?

Ask a blind person that question - they can answer it.

Too many people think you need to "see" as in human sight to understand things like this. You obviously don't. The massive training data these models ingest is more than sufficient to answer this question - and not just by looking up "dimensions of a lion" in the high-dimensional space.

The patterns in that space are what generates the concept of what a lion is. You don't need to physically see a lion to know those things.
by igouy | 2025-10-18 16:44:48+00:00
May 1988 -- Smalltalk/V 286 -- on IBM-PC, PS/2 or compatible, with an 80286 or 80386

"INTRODUCTION TO THE SMALLTALK/V 286 ENVIRONMENT"

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTutorial...
by jazzyjackson | 2025-10-18 16:45:03+00:00
There's also the DIGIduino, an atmega128p design with segmented display. I like the variety of attempts and showing off the circuitboard like the complex movements of mechanical watches.

I do want to dig into how much a battery can be obviated here, there's one watch called the Pulse-o-matic that uses an automatic movement (that is, self-winding) to power an LCD display and associate 'tronics. I am charmed by the idea of wind up electronics now that we have microchips with deep sleep modes and ePaper displays that only need a blip to update.

https://theprintablewatch.com/collections/digital-watch-part...

https://www.hamiltonwatch.com/en-us/h52585339-pulsomatic.htm...