MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-30 10:58:25+00:00
I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.
by voidUpdate | 2025-10-30 10:58:38+00:00
If something is my favourite song, I will listen it in the language where it is my favourite song. I generally don't have favourite songs in other languages.

I have ADHD. I struggle to concentrate on anything. I would rather have the ability to be distracted for a bit and still be able to follow the show, than have to rewind it constantly or force myself to concentrate on something (which my brain doesn't enjoy). I don't need a distraction from a boring show, I need something else to keep me engaged.

I'm not sure why you are putting infotainment youtube videos in their own category, I treat them just the same. If it has visuals that I want to see, I'll put it on my second monitor and watch it while I'm doing something else. Not while programming, because that requires its own focus, or a narrative game, but more a sandbox game like minecraft or factorio
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-30 10:58:56+00:00
Another comment has explained this already, but the lack of dependency pinning and the general "it's just a script" attitude isn't conducive to long-term stability. During the early days of the llama local LLM runner, I was shocked to discover that releases weren't buildable mere days after being tagged in Git! Days!

Other platforms like Java and .NET enjoy one to two decades of life for source before it becomes mildly challenging to build.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-30 10:59:09+00:00
> So what? That sounds like competition, which is healthy in a free market.

No, it's not. Under capitalism, if Amazon could just take your book and start selling it without paying you a cent then nobody would be incentivized to write books anymore. That's the entire point of copyright.

I don't know what your business is, maybe you really carved out a niche that works for you, but it's not built on top of solid principles. I think you've just been lucky enough not to catch the wrong kind of attention because the more successful you are, the more economical it is for someone to invest resources into stealing your lunch.

If you deal with the typical consumer base then the single most important thing is always going to be the price and that's the one thing you'll never be able to compete on.

> Copying a business isn't just about copying the product.

You're really getting your wires crossed here. This "wisdom" is used to show that you can't win by simply copying someone else's winning idea. A reseller isn't copying your business, they're just reselling your product.
by LeonM | 2025-10-30 10:59:09+00:00
For what I remember, most of the DNS root servers used to run Bind9 exclusively. I'm glad to see that this is now more diverse with NSD and Knot also being used (see table 4 in the report).

Nothing against Bind9, but it is almost exclusively maintained by the ISC, so the DNS's future used to depend heavily on the ISC getting the funding needed to continue operating.
by alejoar | 2025-10-30 10:59:22+00:00
Hey, just so you know, newer lockfiles are meant to fully replace old ones, you shouldn't bother with solving merge conflicts on these files, just accept all the new changes always.

What you SHOULD solve are conflicts in the packages/project file. Once solved, just create a new lockfile and replace the old one.

This applies to lockfiles on any project python or non-python.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-30 10:59:49+00:00
> He's not going to war with Russia

... but with China instead. The trouble with this guy is, you can't be sure if what he spouts from his mouth is him being actually serious, him just parroting whatever the last person to talk to him said (seems to be a common trope regarding anything Ukraine) or if he's just out of his mind and gone off script, off rails. And on top of that you got stuff like the sinking of the "Venezuelan drug boats" that would be seen as and dealt with as a declaration of war if the aggressor weren't the USA.

All it takes for stuff to go Seriously Damn Wrong is one person on the other side taking his verbal diarrhoea seriously and literally and acting accordingly.
by DeathArrow | 2025-10-30 11:00:15+00:00
From my pov, both inheritance and encapsulation aren't great if you have to maintain code and add new one.

Also, I dislike design patterns overuse, DDD done Uncle Bob style.

Also we can think of where OOP drives many teams to:

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

https://factoryfactoryfactory.net/

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
by graemep | 2025-10-30 11:00:23+00:00
> Incremental adoption and mix-and-match is also a fundamental design goal so that should work fine.

Thanks, going to try it out on my project then, probably today.

> flask shouldn't be a dependency.

Its in the rest requirements: https://github.com/iommirocks/iommi/blob/master/test_require...

> I tried to get iommi to work on flask/sqlalchemy many years ago, but that's somewhat abondoned

I was wondering whether something like that was possible.
by milliams | 2025-10-30 11:00:40+00:00
I'd also argue that VS Code is not open source - at least not the version that 98% of people run. If you download VS Code from almost anywhere (and are not using Codium) then you are subject to the licence terms at https://code.visualstudio.com/license which says you may not:

- reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software except and solely to the extent required by third party licensing terms governing use of certain open source components that may be included in the software;

- remove, minimize, block or modify any notices of Microsoft or its suppliers in the software;

- use the software in any way that is against the law;

- share, publish, rent or lease the software, or provide the software as a stand-alone offering for others to use.
by tux1968 | 2025-10-30 11:00:49+00:00
> This is a game changer for all those other times.

Is it though? I honestly don't understand what the big deal is. The original contention was that the benefit was in offering selection-then-action, unlike Vi. And then when it's pointed out that Vim actually offers selection-then-action as well, there is a new assertion that it's the particular WAY that Helix offers selection-then-action that is key.

To my mind, selection-then-action is provided by Vim if you want it. Maybe it's a few extra keystrokes sometimes, because it's not the default mode, as it is in Helix, but the main concept (ability to think in object-then-verb) is available in both, if that's the way you prefer to think.
by dogman1050 | 2025-10-30 11:00:55+00:00
I had a brush with the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the day. IBM offered the PS/2-based Personal/370 on the platform with a card that could execute S/370 SW. My team built the I/O channel card for connecting 3480 tapes and the like. It was funny seeing the fat bus and tag cables attached to a little box through an adapter pigtail.
by afiori | 2025-10-30 11:01:17+00:00
Citing sources is not a magic that makes what you say true, it just makes statement more easily falsifiable.

LLMs can cite sources as well as any human, that is with a non-trivial error rate.

LLMs are shit for a lot of things but the problems are with the quality of the output whether they work by magic, soul-bending, matrix multiplication, or whatever is irrelevant.
by rgblambda | 2025-10-30 11:02:06+00:00
My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century. i.e. it's a fabrication. Contrast that with the differing dialects of Irish where the grammar is identical with some variations in pronunciation.

I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.

>There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland.

Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither. You're denying the factual existence of the different communities in NI for the purpose of winning an argument on the internet.
by giantg2 | 2025-10-30 11:03:00+00:00
"If the tool is used wrong most of the time, it's at least partially to blame."

Only if there were other tools that didn't fall victim to the same business incentives, but they all do.

I've had PMs that find a balance with the business incentives and make it work. If you’re human and make the wrong choices, then most people, including me, will likely call you bad in that context. If they can't stand up to find balance with the business incentives, then they're a bad PM. That doesn't make them a bad person.
by Juliate | 2025-10-30 11:03:13+00:00
Not one: several mistakes, or several failures, or several people in a submarine. Those systems all have multiple stages that require several validation steps to work, we do that for way less sensitive processes.

Nonetheless, yes, we're still on the brink of something gloomy. The movie is quite good, and would massively gain from spinoffs showing what happens in realtime in other countries too.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-30 11:03:32+00:00
You are mistaking technical issues and organisational issues.

Projects are driven by business requirements and values not a desire to share more or rationalise. Segregation is more often a matter of governance and processes.

That's not things you will solve using a bunch of developers. This discussion makes me realise that most of the people commenting on HN probably work for software companies and have very little experience of how big projects, be them IT or organisational, are conducted in traditional companies and what are the challenges they face.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-30 11:04:38+00:00
That's an application (as is Docker, also built in Go), but the question was about internal Google services and... we don't know because company secrets, but it's likely on the rise as it was written as a replacement for C++ which was their previous main language for backend services alongside Java/Kotlin. One source with the charming name "assbuttass" [0] says all new services are written in Go, with a follow-up by "deathmaster99" saying only 10% of code is Go, but this was a year ago and even 10% at Google's scale probably represents tens of millions of LOC.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1c9fhet/how_much_go...
by smj-edison | 2025-10-30 11:04:39+00:00
Honestly getting to mess with internal implementation details is my favorite part of using Zig's standard library. I'm working on a multithreaded interpreter right now, where each object has a unique index, so I need effectively a 4GB array to store them all. It's generally considered rude to allocate that all at once, so I'm using 4GB of virtual memory. I can literally just swap out std.MultiArrayList's backing array with vmem, set its capacity, and use all of its features, except now with virtual memory[1].

[1] https://github.com/smj-edison/zicl/blob/bacb08153305d5ba97fc...
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-30 11:05:22+00:00
> They don’t exist anymore because they were commie-funded

I don't claim they don't exist any more, I claim they lost political relevance.

> and also they exist and are cheering for Hamas to kill Israelis

AI and HRW have a serious anti-Israel bias [1].

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-amnesty-international-suspended...
by vintermann | 2025-10-30 11:05:44+00:00
You haven't understood what I'm saying. Call it grit, call it character, whatever: it can maybe be developed or change, but not on its own.

Circumstance, including other people, can change it for better or worse, but you can't change it on your own. You are exactly what you are. Without input from outside, you'll never turn into anything that isn't already implicitly there.

To explain it in computer science terms, since this is HN: suppose you have a method which takes no input. Even if it's self-modifying code, can it change into something else? Can it "improve"? No. Whatever it will turn into after overwriting its own code is essentially already there.

You have all the "character", "grit", whatever, that you started off with. If you get some or lose some throughout your life, it's from outside yourself: it can go either way, and you can't take credit for it anyway. This is something that all sorts of pagans, and Christians, have understood for thousands of years, but the modern Horatio Alger "conservative" doesn't understand it.
by bashkiddie | 2025-10-30 11:05:55+00:00
> (1) How old must the Python version of those projects be, to not be supported any longer with any decent GNU/Linux distribution?

Debian-13 defaults to Python-3.13. Between Python-3.12 and Python-3.13 the support for `pkg_config` got dropped, so pip projects like

https://pypi.org/project/remt/

break. What I was not aware of: `venv`s need to be created with the version of python they are supposed to be run. So you need to have a downgraded Python executable first.
by general1465 | 2025-10-30 11:05:57+00:00
> How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests

My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.

https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_spending_get_the_facts

Furthermore the fact that using of nuclear weapons has extremely low probability of happening is giving a massive space for corruption. Why maintain what you are not going to use? They managed to siphon money from maintenance of armored equipment, why not ICBMs?

We can get to the staggering reality like Russians have less than 100 working nukes and they themselves may not even know which one are those from those 5500
by LinXitoW | 2025-10-30 11:06:08+00:00
Isn't one gigantic advantage with Postgres the ACID part?

It seems to me that the hardest part of going for a MQ/distributed log like Kafka is re-working existing code to now handle the lack of ACID stuff. Things that are trivial with Postgres, like exactly once delivery, are huge undertakings without ACID.

Personally, I don't have much experience with this, so maybe I'm just missing something?
by Jackpillar | 2025-10-30 11:06:51+00:00
Exactly. No one is arguing the historical & material reasons as to why Bay Area is the birthing place of many technological revolutions. The Bay Area is special because of said history/staying power - which has systemic downstream advantages that cannot be replicated. 60% of total VC funding is in the Bay Area alone. Being surrounded by Stanford, Berkeley, etc gives the region a constant flow of world class engineers. Theres just no other region like it and won't be for a very long time.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-30 11:07:13+00:00
Sure, some would. But in the general case that's going to be a tiny fraction of the market. Why would I ever do that when I can simply not set myself up to be screwed and instead use a license that aligns with my definition of fairness?

Remember that people regularly walk into small businesses and spend 15 minutes talking to an expert asking questions about the products they sell. As soon as they get quoted a price of $120 they scoff and order it from Amazon because it's $20 cheaper. Consumer price sensitivity is... extreme.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-30 11:07:23+00:00
I've wanted an AC, but I cannot get one. This apartment is just not equipped for it, it literally cannot handle multiple ACs (the cables are old, yadda yadda).

And you have to get lots of permits to have an AC installed legally. If you do not have a permit, you will have to pay a really hefty fee when the inspectors come.

So yeah, buying an AC is what most people would do, but they do not because of the damn permits they most likely will not get. It is a shitty situation.
by nvarsj | 2025-10-30 11:07:55+00:00
Yup! Exact reason I saw companies migrate to AWS. Basically incompetent sysadmins who could barely manage a toaster let alone a server rack. I have this memory of one "sysadmin" who was tasked with expanding the server farm, asking me for help for what to order from Amazon.

I think it's the common reason why companies end up outsourcing technical work, whether it's to cloud or consulting companies or whatever. Leadership hasn't built a strong engineering culture (which includes hiring bar, how you promo people, etc.). This means companies are forced to spend 100x by outsourcing everything to get anything working, and AWS is one convenient way for that.
by AdamN | 2025-10-30 11:08:30+00:00
If the deal is in California's and OpenAI's interests roughly than there is no corruption. Sure they're using their big weapons but there's not a major principal-agent divergence on either side from what I can see. Altman wants to build the business (and make money) and California wants the tax revenue and maximize chances of the core business remaining largely in the state.
by f1shy | 2025-10-30 11:09:26+00:00
I would argue (without any proof, just by feeling) that currently there are more people that think the past is better than the present. There is even a statement "every past time was better": is a subjective perception influenced by cognitive biases like rosy retrospection, which causes people to remember the past more fondly and forget its difficulties.

Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
by frumiousirc | 2025-10-30 11:09:46+00:00
My understanding is that they claim that for every unique prompt there is a unique final state of the LLM. Isn't that patently false due to the finite state of the LLM and the ability (in principle, at least) to input arbitrarily large number of unique prompts?

I think their "almost surely" is doing a lot of work.

A more consequential result would give the probability of LLM state collision as a function of the number of unique prompts.

As is, they are telling me that I "almost surely" will not hit the bullseye of a dart board. While likely true, it's not saying much.

But, maybe I misunderstand their conclusion.
by cyberpsychosis | 2025-10-30 11:10:16+00:00
Nuclear weapon testing and development is very much needed. Nuclear weapon technologies have been stymied for decades. Humanity is under a possible threat from some sort of Non Human Intelligence whose drones and craft constitute most UAP sightings. All of this is kept secret for decades, and nuclear weapons are by far Humanity's most effective defense as we study these beings and craft.
by codedokode | 2025-10-30 11:10:26+00:00
I personally believe mocks are a bad practice which is caused by bad architecture. When different components are intertwined, and you cannot test them in isolation, the good solution is refactoring the code; the bad is using mocks.

For example of such intertwined architecture see Mutter, a window manager of Gnome Shell (a program that manages windows on Linux desktop). A code that handles key presses (accessibility features, shortcuts), needs objects like MetaDisplay or MetaSeat and cannot be tested in isolation; you figuratively need a half of wayland for it to work.

The good tests use black box principle; i.e. they only use public APIs and do not rely on knowledge of inner working of a component. When the component changes, tests do not break. Tests with mocks rely on knowing how component work, which functions it calls; the tests with mocks become brittle, break often and require lot of effort to update when the code changes.

Avoid mocks as much as you can.
by astrange | 2025-10-30 11:10:34+00:00
Isn't that easy? The message is a string in one of the register parameters to it.

> Everything is dispatched dynamically

Well, not everything, there is NS_DIRECT. The reason for that being that dynamic dispatch is expensive - you have to keep a lot of metadata about it in the heap for sometimes rarely-used messages. (It's not about CPU usage.)
by slv77 | 2025-10-30 11:11:08+00:00
Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with?

Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies.

But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen.

Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix.

Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?
by NwpierratorR | 2025-10-30 11:11:13+00:00
> I wonder from a modding perspective would it be better if all public methods are just the API users can call and they themselves create a way for mods to exist?

It's the way vintage story implemented modding. They developed the whole game as engine + modapi + hooking engine for stuff outside of hookapi.

Then most of gameplay is implemented as mods on top of engine using api and hooking. And those tools are open source, with central distribution point for mods, so servers can dispatch and send update of required mods to clients as they join.

Marvellous and elegant design. Makes running a server with client side mods a breeze, because mods are automatically pushed to the clients.

Though in the end, you can't really open all the interfaces and expect it to be stable without making some huge trade offs. When it works, it's extremely pleasing. Some mods for vintage story that are made purely using mod api can work between major game versions. Even server/client version check is intentionally loose as mismatched versions can still for the most part interact across most of mechanics.

In practice, to preserve balance of api evolution and stability, not everything in the game is in the api, and thus you have to use their hooking api, and stuff that is not exposed tends to break much more often, so mods require manual updates, just like in minecraft(though not as bad, tbh. In minecraft nowadays modders tend to support both fabric and neoforge/forge apis, targeting each for at least a few major versions. In vintage story, you only gotta support one modding api heh).