MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-27 20:38:15+00:00
Mashup engines were so gloriously hopeful.

It feels like Opera browser was super early (as usual), with widgets (2008). Eventually we had a widget spec (2013). Overall PWAs cover a lot of this terrain today as a packagable standalone webapp, but also there was a lot more excitement in the world about small UI programs that overlayed and/or worked with your desktop at large, that we don't see today (but omgosh I wish Project Fugu had browbeaten Android into having a capable web home screen widget option!) https://www.wired.com/2008/05/opera-targets-widget-developer... https://www.w3.org/TR/widgets-apis/

But more than widgets, there were such interesting attempts ongoing to stitch together an inter-site inter-networked web. Google Buzz's protocols & especially the Digital Salmon protocol (2010) was a fore-runner to Mastadon, a way for discrete digital identities to push Atom/RSS like entries (such as a "like" or comment) at each other. Trying to work under the Open Web Foundation (OWF). http://blog.jclark.com/2010/02/tour-of-open-standards-used-b... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140893

Even before this, the OpenSocial folks were working on very ambitious cross-site data and widget systems. I really think some deep-diving technical retrospectives into OpenSocial would be incredible, could maybe help us shake loose some of the rut we're in with uncomposeable consumeristic computing being the only thing we can even think to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
by tadfisher | 2025-10-27 20:38:20+00:00
That's pretty hardcore, like you want to restrict the runtime substitution of function calls with their result values? Even Haskell doesn't go that far.

Generally you'd distinguish which function call introduces the error with the function call stack, which would include the location of each function's call-site, so maybe the "low-effort" label is accurate. But I could see a benefit in immediately knowing which functions are "pure" and "impure" in terms of manipulating non-local state. I don't think it changes any runtime behavior whatsoever, really, unless your runtime schedules function calls on an async queue and relies on the order in code for some reason.

My verdict is, "IDK", but worth investigating!
by ChadNauseam | 2025-10-27 20:38:21+00:00
An interesting look at a police-officer-turned-street-racer

> Meanwhile, also in 1970, Godfrey Qualls was hired by the Detroit Police to work as a motorcycle officer in the area of Traffic Enforcement. His passion for motorcycles led him to install a trailer hitch assembly on his Dodge Challenger R/T as well, which was a fairly rare upgrade for the top street brawlers of the era. His role on the police force likely played a role in the sporadic street racing appearance schedule of The Black Ghost Challenger. Had Qualls gotten caught street racing, he would have likely lost his job, so he would hit the streets, do some racing and then tuck the car away in the garage until police attention would die down. Being a police officer, Qualls would have been familiar with any targeted enforcement of the street racing scene, so he would know when it was safe for him to race and when it was best for him to stay away. This was also why he made sure that no one in the local scene knew who was driving that unbeatable Dodge Challenger in the early-to-mid 1970s.
by svachalek | 2025-10-27 20:39:01+00:00
Exactly. There's a lot of strongly worded stuff in here about how easy locks are to defeat, but that's only against someone who's practiced the art, which is a very small percentage of the population. And in my experience they're mostly honest people interested in the technical challenge, rather than criminal exploitation. A typical modern lock is going to massively slow down or outright stop nearly everyone who comes up against it.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-10-27 20:39:25+00:00
The thing really missing from multi-megabyte excel sheets of business critical carnage was a non-deterministic rewrite tool. It'll interact excitingly with the industry standard of no automated testing whatsoever.

I 100% believe generative AI can change a spreadsheet. Turn the xslx into text, mutate that, turn it back into an xslx, throw it away if it didn't parse at all. The result will look pretty similar to the original too, since spreadsheets are great at showing immediately local context and nothing else.

Also, we've done a pretty good job of training people that chatgpt works great, so there's good reason for them to expect claude for excel to work great too.

I'd really like the results of this to be considered negligence with non-survivable fines for the reckless stupidity, but more likely, it'll be seen as an act of god. Like all the other broken shit in the IT world.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-27 20:40:04+00:00
Looking at the uutils/coreutils repository:

- 22K stars - 1600+ forks - 33 releases - 622 contributors - 678 users (at minimum) - Code of conduct (with a debian.org mailing address nonetheless) - 1 distribution shipping it as default (so far)

The project has the stated goal as follows [0]:

> The uutils project reimplements ubiquitous command line utilities in Rust. Our goal is to modernize the utils, while retaining full compatibility with the existing utilities. We are planning to replace all essential Linux tools.

This is hell of a self-tutorial.

If this was GPL licensed, I'd love to try these. But at this point, it's looking for pushing GNU out of the Linux ecosystem, completely.

[0]: https://uutils.github.io/
by eric-burel | 2025-10-27 20:40:07+00:00
The LLM doesn't intervene much actually, it just tells what tool to call. It's your MCP implementation that does the heavy lifting. So yeah you can always shove a key somewhere in your app context and pass it to the tool call. But I think the point of other comments is that the MCP protocol is kinda clueless about how to standardize that within the protocol itself.
by hinkley | 2025-10-27 20:40:18+00:00
The example in the wiki page is far more rudimentary than the ones I encountered when I was shown this concept. Trivial, in fact.

CQS will rely on composition to do any If A Then B work, rather than entangling the two. Nothing forces composition except information hiding. So if you get your interface wrong someone can skip over a query that is meant to short circuit the command. The constraint system in Eiffel I don’t think is up to providing that sort of protection on its own (and the examples I was given very much assumed not). Elixir’s might end up better, but not by a transformative degree. And it remains to be seen how legible that code will be seen as by posterity.
by haskellshill | 2025-10-27 20:40:53+00:00
> If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.

Allow me to quote an article from Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine https://www.ccjm.org/content/85/7/529 (AI generated nonsense of course)

> Secondary drowning, sometimes called delayed drowning, is another term that is not medically accepted. The historical use of this term reflects the reality that some patients may worsen due to pulmonary edema after aspirating small amounts of water.

> Drowning starts with aspiration, and few or only mild symptoms may be present as soon as the person is removed from the water. Either the small amount of water in the lungs is absorbed and causes no complications or, rarely, the patient’s condition becomes progressively worse over the next few hours as the alveoli become inflamed and the alveolar-capillary membrane is disrupted. But people do not unexpectedly die of drowning days or weeks later with no preceding symptoms. The lungs and heart do not “fill up with water,” and water does not need to be pumped out of the lungs.

> There has never been a case published in the medical literature of a patient who underwent clinical evaluation, was initially without symptoms, and later deteriorated and died more than 8 hours after the incident. People who have drowned and have minimal symptoms get better (usually) or worse (rarely) within 4 to 8 hours. In a study of more than 41,000 lifeguard rescues, only 0.5% of symptomatic patients died.

Maybe don't set too much store by what some random "water rescue course" instructor tells you, especially if it sounds like complete bovine excrement.
by thsName | 2025-10-27 20:41:13+00:00
To paraphrase: ``` Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.

And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together). ```

Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
by tomhallett | 2025-10-27 20:41:28+00:00
If I'm correct that the data center shown is on Belfort and Glenn Dr, then you don't even have to "research" zoning, just look across the street.

In 2021/2022 before it was built:

* Here is what that lot looked like [1]. To assume something wouldn't be built there is optimistic at best. (And there was precedent for data centers at the time - there was already a data center less than half mile away on Vantage Data Plz across the street from Tart Lumber.)

* If you look across the street, ie if the video would have panned to the left, you would have seen the "US Customs and Border Patrol" building - not winning any architectural design awards [2].

For someone who bought their house decades ago, then yes - the area has transformed drastically. But grouping someone who purchased recently with someone who purchased decades ago is a bit muddled.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9991758,-77.4300191,3a,75y,1...

[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/IAD146/@38.9981504,-77.428...
by chairmansteve | 2025-10-27 20:41:43+00:00
"Noam Shazeer said on a Dwarkesh podcast that he stopped cleaning his garage, because a robot will be able to do it very soon".

How much is the robot going to cost in a year? 100k? 200k? Not mass market pricing for sure.

Meanwhile, today he could pay someone $1000 to clean his garage.
by dmix | 2025-10-27 20:42:17+00:00
Netflix and Spotify also auto bump the prices even for auto-renewal. I believe the issue here is that Microsoft created a new pricing category while keeping the $99 one, but bumped everyone to the new one. That is where it gets sketchy.

If they eliminated the $99 one then it might be a nothingburger.

Might be class action worthy.
by AppleBananaPie | 2025-10-27 20:42:19+00:00
I'm bad with spread sheets so maybe this is trivial but having an llm tell me how to connect my sheet to whatever data I'm using at the moment and it coming up with a link or sql query or both has allowed me to quickly pull in data where I'd normally eyeball it and move on or worst case do it partially manually if really important.

It's like one off scripts in a sense? I'm not doing complex formulas I just need to know how I can pull data into a sheet and then I'll bucketize or graph it myself.

Again probably because I'm not the most adept user but it has definitely been a positive use case for me.

I suspect my use case is pretty boilerplatey :)
by jchw | 2025-10-27 20:42:20+00:00
For the payment thing in particular, what I'd really like is if internet payments moved towards open standards. If my bank or credit provider was the one actually providing the "payment" part of the checkout flow, they could easily display my account information without adding a whole ton of complexity or additional privacy concerns.

Relatedly, it is frustrating that we have OAuth2 for authorization and OIDC for authentication, but we don't have similar open standards for making payments and subscribing to subscription products, even though PayPal has had proprietary implementations of the basic idea for ages. We don't have it for traditional currency, and we don't have it for custodial cryptocurrency wallets. What's the deal with that? I can totally understand why existing payment companies don't necessarily want interoperability everywhere, but the lack of attempts from even cryptocurrency exchanges seems bizarre to me. It's all just more proprietary stuff. Everyone wants to be Stripe, nobody wants to be PayPal. Why not both?
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-27 20:42:30+00:00
Perhaps I was unclear, to add to my comment:

hinkley poses this as a fault in CQS, but CQS does not require your commands to always succeed. Command-Query Separation means your queries return values, but produce no effects, and your commands produce effects, but return no values. Nothing in that requires you to have a command which always succeeds or commands which don't make use of queries (queries cannot make use of commands, though). So a better question than what I originally posed:

My "Why would you do this?" is better expanded to: Why would you use CQS in a way that makes your system less secure (or safe or whatever) when CQS doesn't actually require that?
by lelanthran | 2025-10-27 20:42:36+00:00
>> What's so great about MS Office that LibreOffice can't do??

> Work with spreadsheets more complicated than two cells.

I use both daily. You're misrepresenting what LibreOffice can do; 99% of the people I see using excel are using the exact same 20% of its capabilities.

Quick-n-Dirty database that they can update during sales meetings and create charts from. You think another spreadsheet can't do that?
by ryukoposting | 2025-10-27 20:42:45+00:00
Yep. Midland is basically Dow, the City. My dad went to Dow High School. One of the main tourist attractions is Dow Gardens (worth visiting if you didn't, by the way). Or you can go watch a baseball game at Dow Diamond. It's pretty, too - one of the best collections of Prairie architecture in the world... much of it designed by Alden B. Dow, son of the company's namesake, and student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Just don't go in the Tittabawassee river.
by sfn42 | 2025-10-27 20:43:27+00:00
I would have written each statement on its own line:

var users = db.getUsers();

var expiredUsers = getExpiredUsers(users, Date.now());

var expiryEmails = generateExpiryEmails(expiredUsers);

email.bulkSend(expiryEmails);

This is not only much easier to read, it's also easier to follow in a stack trace and it's easier to debug. IMO it's just flat out better unless you're code golfing.

I'd also combine the first two steps by creating a DB query that just gets expired users directly rather than fetching all users and filtering them in memory:

expiredUsers = db.getExpiredUsers(Date.now());

Now I'm probably mostly getting zero or a few users rather than thousands or millions.
by Animats | 2025-10-27 20:43:33+00:00
Ha! Didn't know that was a Stargate thing. I've only seen a few episodes.

It's a real-world thing, which is probably where the Stargate writers got it. Precise satellite positions used to be determined by ground stations sending up a pseudorandom stream to an analog transponder and correlating the returned signal to get a delay. Multiple stations give you accurate positions. The USAF had about a dozen stations worldwide for that, and pictures of the locations, from Arctic to tropical island, were a common wall decoration where I worked. Central control was at the now-demolished Blue Cube [1] at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley back then, and moved out to Colorado Springs decades ago.

It's like GPS in reverse. Satellites of that era were rather dumb. The satellite end used is pure analog. The clocks and compute were on the ground. Satellites were told what to do in great detail by the ground, via a labor-intensive process which looked way too much like 1960s NASA well into the 1980s.

Today, Starlink satellites are semi-autonomous. They're kicked off the booster and mostly figure out by themselves where to position and aim. Progress marches on.

[1] https://heritageparkmuseum.org/blog/what-is-the-blue-cube
by ChadNauseam | 2025-10-27 20:43:50+00:00
Worked a consistent 9-5 remotely. Maybe it's ADHD or something else, but it took me a long time to become accountable to myself when there's no one watching over my shoulder. Especially when the weather is nice and the sun is shining and I'd rather be outside or talking to my friends. I still struggle with it sometimes. When I first started working, I used to cry every night because I knew I much less done and worked much less hard than I should have. And then did the exact same thing the next day.

I know "doing your job" is not the most impressive accomplishment. But it is hard for me. Much harder for me than kicking my nicotine addiction, working out every day, teaching myself math and computer science, and so on.
by keane | 2025-10-27 20:43:50+00:00
Paired with H5BP you can use Normalize.css (as an alternative to a reset like http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/) found at https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/normali...

There's also this short reset: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/custom-css-reset/
by ndiddy | 2025-10-27 20:44:04+00:00
> Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?
by DEADMEAT | 2025-10-27 20:44:05+00:00
> To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them

The way LLMss are now, outside of the tech bubble the average person has no use for them.

> on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for robots"

This is a bizarre argument. Humans don't "train" on books, they read them. This could be for many reasons, like to learn something new or to feel an emotion. The LLM trains on the book to be able to imitate it without attribution. These activities are not comparable.
by kragen | 2025-10-27 20:44:33+00:00
> On Argentina, except for a die hard Ghetto like the '3000 viviendas' and Cañada Real, every Argentinian would love to stay in Spain even at the worst neighbourhood at their town. Iberia it's far more secure than Latin America by a huge margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... lists Argentina at 4.31 murders per 100k population per year, a bit lower than the US's 5.76, while Spain is way down at 0.69, so I think that's sort of true. 6× is sort of "a huge margin". I'm pretty sure there are neighborhoods in Argentina that are lower than 0.69, though, and neighborhoods in Spain that are over 4.31.

On the other hand, 4.31 is already low enough that I don't know anybody who's gotten murdered, although when I volunteered in the die-hard ghettos I met people whose children had been murdered before I met them. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_mortality... we can see that Argentina's crude death rate is 728 deaths per 100k population per year, so 99.4% of deaths are from non-murder causes. If you somehow acquired immunity to all causes of deaths other than murder, and you lived in 02025 Argentina until someone murdered you (through some kind of time-travel Groundhog Day thing, I guess) your life expectancy would be 23000 years. Real-life people who get heart disease and cancer don't really need to worry about getting murdered in Argentina unless they start dating a machista.

Consequently, murder is not a major reason that people leave Argentina. (Contrast Honduras at 31.4 murders; Belize with 27.8; South Africa with 45.5; Memphis, Tennessee, with 48.0; or St. Louis, Missouri, with 87.8.)

No, the reason every Argentinian would love to stay in Spain is that Spain has an economy.
by antisthenes | 2025-10-27 20:44:38+00:00
> The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others.

Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
by lisper | 2025-10-27 20:44:42+00:00
> you'd need a larger and more complex ferry

Don't those already exist? I don't know, but I assume that regular passenger ferries operate on this route, no?

> it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am

I presume that if one were offloading passengers onto an existing ferry one would not schedule the train to arrive during normal ferry operating hours rather than 3AM.

I think the right answer here is that Sicily is bigger than I thought, about 100 miles across, and so the onward travel time can be significant, and so if you're going to offer a night train whose final destination is (say) Marsala then putting the train on a ferry in the middle of the night makes sense.
by rixed | 2025-10-27 20:44:55+00:00
Also of interest:

du -sh kanban-*/src | sort -n 188K kanban-sveltekit/src 232K kanban-qwikcity/src 232K kanban-solidstart/src 260K kanban-tanstack-solid/src 260K kanban-tanstack/src 264K kanban-nextjs/src 272K kanban-analog/src 292K kanban-marko/src 380K kanban-htmx/src

I would be curious to learn why sveltekit has a significantly smaller source code.
by maxwellg | 2025-10-27 20:45:03+00:00
The initial remote MCP specification was pretty painful, but the June spec and the upcoming November spec are much more workable - MCP auth is (mostly) just OAuth now. MCP Clients are OAuth clients and can be granted access tokens and managed just like any other 3rd party app integration.

I'd love to hear more about the specific issues you're running into with the new version of the spec. (disclaimer - I work at an auth company! email in bio if you wanna chat)
by ruszki | 2025-10-27 20:45:36+00:00
> you can always decide what to do next.

I think everybody can find examples from their life when this was not true. And not even just simple one like a reaction to a flying object towards your face, but some high level impulses, like when I was in love, I definitely couldn’t control my acts completely. Of course, I was still responsible for my acts, but they were only instincts, no real thinking was involved.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-27 20:45:41+00:00
Let me bring it home for you. Imagine that you came up with a story in your head, full and complete. Imagine you used AI to get down a quick rough draft, specifying what happens in each chapter in explicit detail, then you went back and rewrote the AI draft line by line to be your words, your voice.

Now imagine someone calls the thing you created, your story, your words, AI trash, and refused to even critically examine it, just because someone told them AI was used in some way (however small) in the creation of the work.

This behavior is pervasive. Maybe you don't think this way but this is the company you're keeping.

Also, if you're not problem solving when you do AI coding, sorry to say but that probably predicts a lot of your results.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-27 20:45:47+00:00
I’d note those competed with minicomputers, my high school had a PDP-8 circa 1981 when I was taking a few classes there while still in elementary school. The PDP-8 could support three terminals of interactive BASIC or could be brought up in a single user mode where you got more memory and could run bigger programs like the Crowther & Woods ADVENTURE. A bigger school has a PDP-11 with about 20 terminals. By 1985 or so my school got a VAX-11/730 which is basically like a modern computer.