MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pxc | 2025-10-18 21:56:27+00:00
> I beg to differ. [...] Why do you not call puts with its objects name?

In the first place, I'd say what you're asking for goes beyond "everything is an object".

But I think your questions can be answered in a way that affirms that "everything is an object" in Ruby anyway.

> Why do you not call puts with its objects name?

Because it belongs to whatever object you're working in already; `puts` is identical to `self.puts`. And yes, you're always working in an object: https://bparanj.gitbooks.io/ruby-basics/content/chapter1.htm...

> What object does the method `puts` belong to?

As indicated above, it belongs to the object `self`. It gets added object via the mixing-in Kernel module into Object. Kernel is itself an instance of class Module: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.4/Module.html

The `puts` in Kernel delegates to `puts` from IO, which is likewise an instance method belonging to the object you can refer to by the name `$stdout`: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.4/IO.html

> Ruby has a concept of mixins [and], these are not objects.

Sure they are. Mixins themselves inherit from Module, and Modules are also objects (just like classes are).

Some highlights from Chapter 27 ("Library Reference: The Class Model") of the recent edition of the pickaxe book (emphasis mine):

> The Kernel module is included by class Object, so its methods are available in every Ruby object. One of the reasons for the Kernel module is to allow methods like `puts` and `gets` to be available everywhere and even to look like global commands. Kernel methods allow Ruby to still maintain an "everything is an object semantics".

and regarding mixins:

> The Module class is the class of any module you declare with the `module` keyword. Each module is an instance of class Module.

on Object:

> Object is the parent class of (almost) all classes in Ruby unless a class explicitly inherits from. BasicObject. [...] Object mixes in the Kernel module, making the built-in functions globally accessible.

tl;dr: mixins in Ruby are instances of class Module, and their methods end up bound to instances of class Object. Abstract module methods that don't belong to a concrete instance of some class that mixed in their module belong to the Object that is the module itself (the instance of class Module). (The same kind of thing is how class methods work.)
by prisenco | 2025-10-18 21:56:40+00:00
Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable.

I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
by stevepotter | 2025-10-18 22:02:27+00:00
Agree on the importance of testing. Among the production-grade codebases I've worked on, I've found that the dynamically-typed ones have more comprehensive testing. It's just so easy to think that a successful compile means your code will work. I've also found that it's harder to set up great test systems for static languages because you often have to modify your logic just to make it testable (looking at you, IoC). A delightful test system is one that engineers will use during development because it saves time, not an afterthought. For whatever reason, I haven't ever found something that provides this type of experience out of the box. In one organization, we spent months building a rig and achieved true TDD. The result was fewer production issues, faster development, and of course, better test coverage numbers. We eventually switched from javascript to typescript, but it didn't compare to the difference that test system made.
by jeffinhat | 2025-10-18 22:02:27+00:00
This is an awesome experiment and write up. I really appreciate the reproducibility.

I would like to see how moving to database that scales write throughput with replicas would behave, namely FoundationDB. I think this will require more than an intermediary like kine to be efficient, as the author illustrates the apisever does a fair bit of its own watching and keeping state. I also think there's benefit, at least for blast radius, to shard the server by api group or namespace.

I think years ago this would have been a non starter with the community, but given AWS has replaced etcd (or at least aspects) with their internal log service for their large cluster offering, I bet there's some appetite for making this interchangable and bringing and open source solution to market.

I share the authors viewpoint that for modern cloud based deployments, you're probably best avoiding it and relying on VMs being stable and recoverable. I think reliability does matter if you want to actually realize the "borg" value and run it on bare metal across a serious fleet. I haven't found the business justification to work on that though!
by halyconWays | 2025-10-18 22:03:08+00:00
I had a Matrox Millenium card with a breakout box for capturing RCA, S-Video, and Cable TV; I'd watch TV on my Windows 98 SE2 computer, which was the craziest thing back then, but I always felt like the green-screen like effect was some kind of mysterious bug that I'd better not mess with, or video capture would break. Windows 98 was barely working on a good day, so it felt like the computer was in the process of failing in a graceful and useful way, so I'd better not push my luck.

Every so often you could get a glimpse of the man behind the curtain, by dragging the window quickly or the drivers stuttering, which would momentarily reveal the green color (or whatever color it was) before the video card resumed doing its thing. Switching between full screen and windowed mode probably also revealed the magic, or starting a game that attempted to grab the video hardware context. And of course sometimes other graphical content would have the exact right shade of color, and have video-displaying pixels.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-10-18 22:03:55+00:00
Even if sodium ion batteries have a quarter the energy density of lithium, they are still a massive win for grid scale storage. Honestly don't know why there's such a push for them in EVs when lithium works fine there. The cost benefit of sodium ion really makes a lot more sense when you can just drop a bunch of them on a lot of land and have it essentially be a reserve of power for a municipality.
by k310 | 2025-10-18 22:04:05+00:00
I lived in the South Bay and East Bay a total of 30 years (wow)

I had jobs in Sunnyvale and Palo Alto and when I got a Berkeley job, moved to the east bay. During my stay there, I had jobs in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Pleasanton (Sun had a nice office there).

I later joined a startup whose CEO kept moving the office every time he moved his home. Count that as a mistake.

But from the east bay, I BART'ed to both Berkeley and San Francisco, which beat the daylights out of commuting by auto.

Having a family, SF was never an option. Now that I'm retired, I might just wait for the "AI-Pocalypse" and move to SF. (yeah, beware of that. Those billions have not produced revenue, and who knows if they ever will?)
by exasperaited | 2025-10-18 22:04:08+00:00
Like others I have tinnitus that only now really rears its head in extremely quiet environments or when I see the word "tinnitus" or someone says it. Then I am reminded I have it.

I think I have always had it; I became more aware it was abnormal and unusual in my twenties when I realised that TV dramas use a similar high pitch sound to indicate someone who has had sudden hearing damage (after an explosion etc.) and then it really bothered me for a while because I was living in a very quiet area.

About six years ago now I was at a gig at a local venue when I experienced hearing loss due to a freakish bit of bass feedback. I was in a particular corner of the room and clearly experienced an overtone that almost nobody else heard at all, and at a volume nobody else experienced; pure bad luck. The sound made me run away automatically. I was thirty yards away before I even really comprehended that I was leaving.

I experienced considerable hearing loss — muffled, incomplete hearing — for several days. Nearly complete for the first day.

But when my tinnitus came back I realised I felt sure I was going to get my hearing back essentially entirely. It was curiously reassuring. I've never really been stressed by it since.

So I have what I expect to be lifelong tinnitus. But also earplugs now.
by isr | 2025-10-18 22:04:16+00:00
Hmm, but that's not really a "breakage" in ruby, it's more an aesthetic argument over which objects should have which logic. It's like naming things. Smalltalk (& ruby) has 'select'. Everyone else uses 'filter'.

To some, 5.times seems very readable & logical. It's like arguing over the "right" colour scheme to use while coding (BTW, the correct answer is solarised light, but with black foreground text!!)
by Syntonicles | 2025-10-18 22:05:11+00:00
I've been using Magit for years, and have never noticed any bugs.

The interface is unique and takes a lot of getting used to. I did need to leverage my extensive experience with Git and Emacs to understand unexpected behaviour but the fault always lay with me.

Given the implications of bugs in such a critical part of a developer's workflow, can you be more specific?
by da_chicken | 2025-10-18 22:05:31+00:00
I disagree. I think the only people that have read-heavy needs are big data and data warehouses. AI being hot right now doesn't mean big data is the only game in town.

Most applications are used operationally or have a mix of read and write. Even on applications where the user can only consume content present there, there is often more than enough data capture just tracking page history to be relatively write heavy.
by mmooss | 2025-10-18 22:05:32+00:00
You know that's a misstatement of the response (and oddly you responded to yourself, not to anyone else): It's not that the citations are of "people not on the left", but of people who are highly partisan for any persuasion (and also that you badly mischaracterize another citation). There are plenty of sources that are credible and not highly partisan.

Why be disingenous? Do you have something to lose by an honest search for the truth? Do you not want to look for it? Are you so sure that your narrow political group has the truth and no search is needed?
by pxc | 2025-10-18 22:05:38+00:00
I'm not a Rubyist really, but I started using it at work a few weeks ago for a very small script. I'm not allergic to RTFM, so I picked up the canonical reference book on Ruby and occasionally visit the official docs for the language. I agree: the structure is clear and straightforward and there's nothing difficult about learning it.

It's also the opposite of magic; magic is when language features can't be described in terms of the language itself.
by jjk166 | 2025-10-18 22:06:01+00:00
> Compare the size of a jet engine to a power plant of a similar size. Size shrinks dramatically when you can blow the heat out of your ass in propellant product.

Powerplants also blow the heat out. What do you think smokestacks are? Jet engines are smaller than gas turbine powerplants because a plane doesn't need as much power as a city. And the size of fusion reactors has nothing to do with heat expulsion - they haven't gotten to the point they're generating fusion heat to expel. The massive size is required for the equipment to produce the conditions for fusion. Whether it's massive lasers or massive magnetic coils, those things are just as necessary for propulsion as for power generation.

> Why? Burn it in vacuum?

There's still gravity in space. When you want to go from low earth orbit to the moon, or to mars, or to anywhere, you need to fight gravity to do so.

> Why. Fusion precursors are more plentiful than fissionable elements. And fission produces heavy nuclei; fusion doesn’t.

Fission will always be decades ahead because it was developed decades earlier. Nothing's going to change that. If a fusion plant started operating tomorrow, it would take ~70 years to gain the operational experience we currently have with fission, and in those 70 years fission will have advanced another 70 years forward. And of course the whole premise of this was that fusion propulsion was an easier challenge to tackle than making an economical powerplant on earth.

Relative abundance does not matter when both sources are essentially limitless. The actual difference isn't even particularly large. Take all the deuterium out of the oceans and extract the lithium necessary to produce tritium to burn it with and there is about 3 times as much energy as the uranium in Earth's crust. (The deuterium will run out before the lithium). For space applications, in situ production of either fission or fusion fuels is not realistic due to the need for isotope separation, so relative abundance off of earth is completely irrelevant.

As I stated, in space it is not a drawback for fission to produce heavy nuclei. On Earth (and also in space I guess), fusion does produce heavy nuclei by irradiating the reactor components. It's not quite as fundamental as the fuel itself becoming waste, but you're still going to be left with a lot of radioactive waste that needs to be handled. Nuclear waste is not really a big technical challenge in either case, but the idea that fusion will jump ahead because it is cleaner and safer is false.
by WanderPanda | 2025-10-18 22:06:03+00:00
I have a strong Tinnitus on one ear after an ear surgery for 8 years now. And I usually don‘t notice it for months at a time, even though it is there all the time (thanks for reminding me :p) So it’s not as bad as it might feel in the beginning. I‘m mostly bothered by my hearing being generally impaired by it. It sits at ~9kHz but it somehow still makes it significantly harder to comprehend voices.
by throwaway233927 | 2025-10-18 22:06:29+00:00
There is a company called Auricle that is working on releasing their tinnitus treatment device. To my knowledge, they are the only tinnitus treatment device company with a properly blinded study showing efficacy. They have started taking outside (accredited) investors for those interested:

https://www.auricleinc.com/joinourmission
by firesteelrain | 2025-10-18 22:07:33+00:00
On iOS, every browser is required by Apple to use WebKit. I just tried it again myself and FireFox on iPhone has no ublock Origin add on possibility.

Firefox Focus does work as an alternative.

Apple created a special system-level API for Safari Content Blockers. Apps like Firefox Focus, AdGuard, 1Blocker, Wipr can register filtering rules with Safari using this API. That’s why Focus can block ads/trackers inside Safari if you enable it under Safari
by immibis | 2025-10-18 22:07:57+00:00
Then reduce prices in that area, and there will be demand and you'll make more money.

Except you can't because there's a law saying the price of electricity has to be the same everywhere in the country. You can be right next to a wind turbine that's turned off, and they're not allowed to sell to you for less than the price they'd sell to the other end of the country, even though they're also not allowed to sell to the other end of the country.

Of course, this law was probably a reaction to a previous time where the price differences were excessively huge. A law like this doesn't exist for no reason. There is a balancing act, as both extremes were already found to have problems. It can be that the "stupid can't sell law" is actually considered good because it makes investors build new supply at the other end of the country or to build more transmission lines, instead of building where you are and trying to sell to you locally.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-18 22:08:04+00:00
MegaZeux was originally a DOS program, but now has emulated PC text mode (with some enhancements, such as SMZX and unbound sprites) and continues to use a TUI, although it is not as good as Microsoft and Borland (e.g. it does not have ALT+letters in a menu to select with different colour letters, etc).
by bigyabai | 2025-10-18 22:08:27+00:00
I think it is futile, and platform-owners know that. Unless you are willing to abandon iPhones, Macs, Windows PCs and Android devices, the United States and it's technocracy can still leverage the full extent of their surveillance, censorship and suppression mechanisms.

Your consent towards using certain services is really just virtue signalling. In a lot of ways you're contributing to the monoculture problem by relying on Substack (or HN, for that matter) to propagate your opinion.
by rbanffy | 2025-10-18 22:09:26+00:00
Not all people who serve a website need to be aware of that - I don't think my personal blog will be declared illegal anywhere, for instance. If a post is, I might just spare myself the pain and remove it. If a country wants to notify me, I'm pretty easy to find.

Now, for a relatively high-profile website such as 4chan, who deliberately dodges responsibility for the content it knowingly hosts, I'd say it is not a huge effort. They have the staff for that kind of thing. If they decide they aren't complying, then the UK government might order UK-based ISPs to block access and they will comply - as they did many times before. The people in charge of the company might face charges if they ever set foot in the UK, but that's a risk they need to balance.

And, in the light of legislation that sanctions whoever does business with sanctioned companies, sanctioning advertisers can go a long way to force compliance.
by greazy | 2025-10-18 22:12:57+00:00
The thermocycler replacement using an electric kettle is hilarious. Thats how old school dna amplification would happen before the invention of thermocyclers.

OP you'd get better results of you centrifuge your blood, extract the white blood cells and sequence those instead of whole blood. Thats a bit tricky with a lance and a tiny device though...
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-18 22:12:58+00:00
> What specific pain point are you solving that keeps people on WhatsApp despite the surveillance risk, or on X despite the white supremacy?

Why wouldn't a genuinely open social web allow people to communicate content that Ben Werdmuller thinks constitutes white supremacy, just as one can on X? Ideas and opinions that Ben Werdmuller (and people with similar activist politics to him) think constitute white supremacy are very popular among huge segments of the English-speaking public, and if it's even possible for some moderator with politics like Werdmuller to prevent these messages from being promulgated (as was the case at Twitter until Musk bought it in 2022 and fired all the Trust and Safety people with politics similar to Werdmuller's), then it is not meaningfully open. If this is not possible, then would people with Werdmuller's politics still want to use an open social web, rather than a closed social web that lets moderators attempt to suppress content they deem white supremacist?

> As I was writing this talk, an entire apartment building in Chicago was raided. Adults were separated into trucks based on race, regardless of their citizenship status. Children were zip tied to each other.

> And we are at the foothills of this. Every week, it ratchets up. Every week, there’s something new. Every week, there’s a new restrictive social media policy or a news outlet disappears, removing our ability to accurately learn about what’s happening around us.

The reaction to the raid of that apartment building in Chicago on many social media platforms was the specific meme-phrase "this is what I voted for", and indeed Donald Trump openly ran on doing this, and won the US presidential election. What prevents someone from using open social media tech to call for going harder on deportations, or to spread news stories about violent crimes and fraud committed by immigrants? If anything can prevent this, how can the platform be said to be actually open?
by hker | 2025-10-18 22:13:19+00:00
> 9 if you count people...

13 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_Nobel_laureate..., including peace prize laureates Liu Xiaobo (2010) and the 14th Dalai Lama (1989).

> But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded...

> The US has been invaded zero times...

The number of external invasions is not a strong indicator of the number of Nobel Prizes, if you compare all countries, beyond just China or the US.

And as you mentioned, the Cultural Revolution greatly reduces the chance of Chinese Nobel, so internal events can take a large role. And Mao led to more deaths—not to mention destruction to science and culture—than external invasions in the last century combined.

> The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships...

The dictatorship arguably hasn't ended, by taking another less brutal form. And to be precise, CCP brought the civil wars and its consequences, not the civil wars brought dictatorships.
by ofalkaed | 2025-10-18 22:13:23+00:00
Digging up and drawing the root systems of plants might be my dream job, I love digging, plants, and slow methodical tedious work. Anyone hiring? Pinus sylvestris[0] and Quercus robur[1] are good entries with numerous examples to compare. I would love to see a photograph of the exposed roots of their Sequoiadendron giganteum.

[0] https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/search/searc...

[1] https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/search/searc...
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-18 22:14:10+00:00
> I would not expect any of the EU or FiveEyes partners to share everything they learn.

I've been scraping hard to find something positive from this administration. Anything about intelligence services "sharing less information" is likely to be one.

This is tied to US IC's long history of (near exclusively) surveilling people not suspected of a crime and rarely (if ever) telling a public truth about it.
by mmooss | 2025-10-18 22:14:38+00:00
> Even if you are a govt that likes Trump, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the he and his administration are very much not "clean on opsec".

Also, Trump adopts the tactical position of arbitrary power: He asserts the power to do whatever he wants, and to disregard your interests. That tactic has some advantages but also means even his allies can't rely on him not turning on them.
by semitones | 2025-10-18 22:16:23+00:00
Remarkably, our experiences are _incredibly_ similar. Left ear, about a year, got all those tests done, specialists don't know other than "that's tinnitus for you - if I had a cure I'd be rich", 98% of the time I tune it out, I live in NYC, early thirties.

If you ever find something that works for you, please reply here @tombert, I'll do the same :)
by IIsi50MHz | 2025-10-18 22:16:45+00:00
OS X and later are derived from NeXT Step, which makes it derived from BSD. And thus, UNIX-y. Macintosh system software versions less than 10 are Apple original development. The earliest versions were designed for hardware with only 512 or 128 kilobytes of RAM and without physical support for protected memory.

Unfortunately, backwards-compatibility requirements prevented the addition of process memory isolation before OS X. One result of not having this protection was that an application with a memory bug could overwrite memory location zero(the beginning of a critical OS-only area), or any other memory area, and then all bets were off. Some third-party utilities, such as Optimem RAMCharger, gave partial protection from this by using the processor's protected mode, and also removed the occasional need for users to manually set the amount of memory allocated to a program. However, many programs were not compatible with these utilities.
by hn-ifs | 2025-10-18 22:17:03+00:00
I've never really got social media in any of its forms. I use messaging apps to stay in contact with people I like, but that's about it.

I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.