MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rocqua | 2025-10-20 12:32:47+00:00
This worked great for me.

It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.

There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-20 12:33:01+00:00
Most professional high-volume projects wouldn't use Raspberry Pi as it is, because those boards contain functions they don't need. So they would design their own board which will be cheaper and more compact by including only functions they need.

That's why there's "Compute Module" SoM with minimal functionality. It is made for professional designs.

But if you want to produce low volume product or you're 100% fulfilled with Raspberry Pi, there's nothing "unprofessional" about it. PCB is PCB.
by westcoast49 | 2025-10-20 12:33:52+00:00
I think you're right. I'm on the opposite side of it, but I have a colleague who routinely writes functions that are hundreds of lines long, with 30-40 local variables inside each function. I've come to realize that he does so because his brain allows him to do it. He has a brain that is more detail-oriented than my brain. Where I naturally see a problem as a "tree" of sub-problems with their own details, he naturally sees one large problem with 100 details. He naturally writes code to accommodate his own cognitive style, while I write code to accommodate my own cognitive style.

Moreover, I've come to realize that my colleague is not adverse to using abstractions if they are well established, and if they already exist. But he is (much) less inclined to invent or write new abstractions than I am. As you have concluded, I have also concluded that this is actually a matter of cognitive style, more than it's a symptom of "slop" or "cargo-culting of best practices".
by marshfram | 2025-10-20 12:33:56+00:00
It's not a sentiment, it's real coding. Rhythms of the Brain by Buzsaki. Cinema is already a prototype of differences, using space, and coreelating topological states. It's analog software that's been running for 130 years.

Binary was always a dead end alley, we knew this going in. How do we escape it?
by htamas | 2025-10-20 12:34:07+00:00
I'm still rocking a refurbished Macbook Pro 2015 CTO model. I was planning on upgrading this year or the next because of the Mx chip, but it seems like with the latest MacOS version, Apple software is falling to Jevons paradox: even though compute is becoming extremely fast, Apple is deciding to spend that extra compute on things not important to me (fancy glass effects).

I'm gonna wait out a bit longer and see if I can get away with using only my Linux Desktop.
by stockresearcher | 2025-10-20 12:35:19+00:00
I searched for the Lenovo E16 and can only find a $900 version at a 3rd party seller on Amazon. With the same memory but twice the hard disk as the Apple.

Much more noticeably, however is the Intel Core Ultra 5 225U which is about half the performance as an M4.

However, the $900 MacBook is not the one with the large screen, right? That costs much more money, right? It doesn’t make sense to compare a small laptop with a large laptop. Even if they are in the same price range, consumers aren’t really choosing between the two.
by dewey | 2025-10-20 12:35:37+00:00
> X13: 60 seconds

If you know what you are doing, and have that spare part including the correct screwdriver and screws in the shelf next to your desk?

How often does your keyboard fail? I've never had that happen in all my computing life and the other parts are usually not that easy to change for any regular person on a laptop. Not sure if that's the scenario to optimize for.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-10-20 12:36:21+00:00
> I would never pay it for a machine that does not properly run Linux.

I find comments like this a little puzzling. Apple products run MacOS. The operating system is part of the package. And yet someone always shows up to say they would never buy it because of the operating system… it would be like me showing up on a post about an android phone and saying I would never buy it because it won’t run iOS.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-20 12:36:46+00:00
> There are at least 3 rewrites of AmigaOS (AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.x) but despite so much passion nobody bothered to bring the desktop to Linux?

The passion is there for the whole AmigaOS, of which the desktop metaphor, Workbench, is just a part. What fun is AmigaOS without Exec, Intuition and AmigaDOS? The passion is to see AmigaOS run, not to see Linux wearing its skin.

GUIs for manipulating files a-la Workbench are readily available, nobody seems to have built an Amiga-skinned one when a Win95 one will do. DOpus is already a clone of Midnight Commander, and there are clones of that aplenty, the most DOPus-like one I've seen is Worker (http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/)

The rest of the Workbench metaphor is available via AmiWM (https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html), or requires apps to play along (e.g. Gadtools, MUI, Commodities, ARexx)
by floundy | 2025-10-20 12:37:02+00:00
My Mac has 256GB. Just checked, I’m using 90GB. I have a 500GB SSD always plugged in for Steam games.

Media goes on my RAID1 NAS. Whose boot drive is running on a 32GB SSD.

As long as I have enough space to install the programs I use I don’t see the need for more boot drive storage. Network and external storage are cheaper and more convenient.
by ho_schi | 2025-10-20 12:37:21+00:00
The window-management of macOS is pain. As the application menus. Outside of the application windows! Core applications like Finder are so bad, that even Apple-Fans admit it (not lack of features, it is the crippled UI). And they keep using this desktop-metaphor.

The UX of all Windows applications is crap. Everyone is using an own toolkit and neglects design guidelines. But the worst thing is, setup and maintenance are the biggest pain ever.

If you can, Linux. If you must, macOS. If you prefer agony, Windows.

PS: Simple hint, never do something like Microsoft. Chances are high, that it is good.
by cbdevidal | 2025-10-20 12:37:22+00:00
I just installed it on my son’s desktop with Cinnamon. It’s good enough for me. It’s the server OS I prefer to use so I’m most familiar with it. And has the same excellent software compatibility as Windows; Most tutorials assume Ubuntu.

Oh and I’ve been using Lubuntu for the past year on my road laptop. No issues.

Good enough.
by ggus | 2025-10-20 12:37:52+00:00
for me 16gig is definitely not enough.

I'm on a 36gb M3 and I have to reboot it every three to five days to have it behave again.

I have normal dev apps open: a browser with jira, another with testing, another with documentation, an ide, teams, calendar, zoom.. it adds up very, very quickly. 16gigs are gone in the blink of an eye
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-20 12:38:01+00:00
Be careful, even for prevention, because even a single use of ibuprofen can very easily leave one with a gastrointestinal ulcer, even if taken with food or on a full stomach. Taking omeprazole at +0 hours and again at +12 hours lowers this risk, although I wonder if vonoprazan would be better suited. If care is not taken, healing the ulcer can take several weeks via glutamine, vitamin C, fresh cabbage juice, collagen hydrolysate, etc. Also, it doesn't really seem to make sense to take ibuprofen if one isn't struggling with inflammatory pain.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-10-20 12:38:26+00:00
The year I dumped all Apple hardware was when I discovered that the Corporatron was deprecating my perfectly capable Mac hardware -- via an XML property in a hidden plist -- simply because Corporatron decreed that my hardware was insufficient to "upgrade to the latest OS".

But I modified that plist and my Mac ran the latest OS just fine.

Microsoft has done the same thing with the transition from MW10 to MW11. Corporatron is doing something wrong and bad for the environment... to satisfy the needs of Corporatron.

I have long preferred the freedom of GNU/Linux. But Corporatron is making a zealot of me. ^_^
by jonhohle | 2025-10-20 12:38:29+00:00
Apple hardware is as good as it’s ever been, but macOS has seen better days. The fun of everything being scriptable, consistency throughout the system, and even stability has been replaced with transitional pains of a new application framework, iOS-ification of much of the system, and inconsistent behavior that I have trouble reasoning about, despite using Macs as my frontend almost exclusively for the past 20 years.

That being said, I bought an old Dell last year for dev work (primarily Linux) and I can’t believe most of the world puts up with Windows. It seems like desktop computing is an afterthought.
by 0_____0 | 2025-10-20 12:38:36+00:00
I learned a while back that Hammurabi's Code contained a proto-building code, in that a builder whose building collapsed and harmed its occupant could be punished in a similar way.

However the occupant was still harmed.

Individuals must have a complete context for the environment in which they operate in order to build "correctly." Permit reviews, building codes etc. codify that context so that builders don't need to carry the entire system context, even if they could, which often they can't. And as a result, buildings don't randomly fall over or catch fire with nearly the same frequency as they used to
by rocqua | 2025-10-20 12:39:08+00:00
I slightly disagree. Specifically, in the case of academic lectures, on:

> The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.

Especially when not taking notes, having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great to allow you to go back to the content of the lecture days or weeks later.

That does not mean that I want a lecturer to just read from the slides. But I want the slides to be more than just a visual aid for the lecture. They need to be reference material as well. This is also generally accepted, and can be considered the reason so many other presentations where this is a bad idea, still have the bad lecture-style slides. Because its what is modeled to people during their education.

Note, for presentations to stakeholders, or presentations of results, or almost any other type of professional presentation. Slides should probably be visual aids only, and not reference material. But lectures are a special case.
by snowwrestler | 2025-10-20 12:39:20+00:00
I would take the opposite view, the little AWS outages are an opportunity to test your disaster recovery plan, which is worth doing even if it takes a little time.

It’s not hard to imagine events that would keep AWS dark for a long period of time, especially if you’re just in one region. The outage today was in us-east-1. Companies affected by it might want to consider at least geographic diversity, if not supplier diversity.
by thunky | 2025-10-20 12:39:20+00:00
> a perverse incentive for obstructionists to shut government

That doesn't make any sense. A politically manufactured government shutdown isn't the only way to reduce government or taxes.

But regardless, fear of poor incentives hasn't stopped us from getting to where we are now. Bad incentives are everywhere. This shutdown itself is the result of bad incentives.

Your argument is the one that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-10-20 12:39:23+00:00
>Windows isn't worsening in every regard.

It feels like it is. I was watching my wife use Outlook the other day and was appalled by how slow it is. The last time I used it it was fine on 2000 era hardware, now it barely runs on 2025 hardware. It seems Microsoft has forgotten how to write good software.
by randomgermanguy | 2025-10-20 12:39:30+00:00
If the alternative is a Linux-distro, likely UX won't be much better/more-consistent when applications use different UI kits/styles etc.

Even Though Apple is doing a shitty job with their walled garden, a garden is still more organized than a jungle of different distro's/applications/frameworks/etc.

(at least in my limited experience)
by JohnLocke4 | 2025-10-20 12:39:30+00:00
Not to rationalize it, but it appears that they're gatekeeping the dataset to get access to the OCR-scans from the people they choose to share it with. This is to improve their existing service by making the content of books (and not just their title/tags) searchable.

As per the blog post: >What does Anna’s Archive get out of it? Full-text search of the books for its users.
by prmph | 2025-10-20 12:40:09+00:00
Yeah Apple hardware is good, but oh boy, there are many design choices in MacOS that are real head-scratchers

- The over-reliance on weird key combinations and touchpad gestures, that you have no way of guessing until you look it up, and if it is for something you only perform once in a while, you need to look it up every time you need to do it.

- The refusal to adopt the best parts of Windows's file explorer in the Finder app

- Bad window size/position management that is seemingly never fixed

- The lack of support for proper virtualization

- And more
by randomtoast | 2025-10-20 12:41:22+00:00
Thing is us-east-1 the primary region for many services of AWS. DynamoDB is a very central offering used by many service. And the issue that has happend is very common[^1].

I think no matter how hard you try to avoid it, in the end there's always a massive dependency chain for modern digital infrastructure[^2].

[1]: https://itsfoss.community/uploads/default/optimized/2X/a/ad3...

[2]: https://xkcd.com/2347/
by maccard | 2025-10-20 12:42:39+00:00
The windows laptop experience is frankly nothing short of embarrassing today. Battery life is measured in closer to minutes than hours, sleep/hibernate is less reliable than my last Linux laptop (in 2017), default OS functionality is unusable for 10-20 minutes after booting, boot times measured in minutes, a never ending stream of windows updates (despite me installing them all at every opportunity), and such lacklustre performance are all problems I have with a < 4 month old top of the range dell laptop my work provided for me (and this is actually the second one they gave me.)

I’m usually in the camp of “things aren’t as bad as you think and they weren’t as good as you remember” but I’ve upgraded from a mid range windows 10 laptop to this and it’s one of the first times I’ve ever experienced a complete step back on what should be a generational update. And that’s before you get to the “quality” of the hardware.

Meanwhile, my 5 year old MacBook pro is faster than either of those machines….
by BartjeD | 2025-10-20 12:43:16+00:00
I'm afraid you missed the emoticon at the end of the sentence.

A `;)` is normally understoond to mean the author isn't entirely serious, and is making light of something or other.

Perhaps you American downvoters were on call and woke up with a fright, and perhaps too much time to browse Hacker News. ;)
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-10-20 12:43:52+00:00
Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college
by ho_schi | 2025-10-20 12:44:18+00:00
For regular users with a consumer laptop, a damaged key or keyboard means:

Laptop defunct. Use an external keyboard if not affordable.

Used my X220 for ten years, handled it with care, but after ten years a new keyboard was a nice uplift. You can also switch languages but especially also the layout between ANSI- and ISO.

Buying an Apple device with ANSI in Europe? Pain. ThinkPads? Buy anything. 30 EUR and new keyboard.
by Pinus | 2025-10-20 12:44:27+00:00
I thought "this feels like Univers" when I saw the text. A quick check, and it turned out to be URW Classic Sans, a font that I had not heard about, but which is apparently a Univers clone. (Not to be confused with URW Classico, which is more like Optima. I also wonder how it relates to U001, another URW clone of Univers... just different names? U001 comes, or used to come at least, with GhostPCL under a non-commercial licence.)
by rsynnott | 2025-10-20 12:44:31+00:00
(Though thinking about it further, probably _should_ be afraid of railbuses, which are a bus chassis on rails; kind of amazing they were ever allowed really. Bizarrely, some were actually still in use in the UK til 2021 or so. Even more shockingly, there don't seem to have been many/any documented fatal incidents; one of the UK railbuses was destroyed more or less completely in a crash, but it was empty at the time.)
by jccc | 2025-10-20 12:44:41+00:00
From the first paragraph:

Earlier reports suggested it could have been something from space but that seems unlikely since the velocity of anything that survived reentry would likely have caused substantial damage beyond a cracked windshield. The theory was likely amplified by the captain of the flight who reportedly described the object that hit the plane as “space debris.”

Maybe the submitted headline isn’t justified?
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-20 12:44:52+00:00
I tried getting into nvim (handy for editing from the CLI or over ssh), but within weeks the plugin system started getting weird errors.

Then I tested Helix[0] when a friend suggested it and it Just Works. Along with LSP support that just picks up language servers automatically if you install them.

The target-action command style takes some getting used to after (n)vim's action-target style, but I actually prefer it now.

[0] https://helix-editor.com
by bayindirh | 2025-10-20 12:45:12+00:00
Bloat is generally code complexity, which slows down maintenance and development.

In this case, there's a new pager library, conditional connections to the pager library, and possibly the whole shebang of supporting both internal and external pagers at the same time.

I seldom use bat, and I'm not hating it. Syntax highlighting and line numbering looks nice for the use cases I played with it, but I don't find chaining a couple of pipes together to get something exactly I want, a waste of time, esp. when mangling outputs of commands and taking actions according to these outputs.

Development and system administration calls for different conventions on the terminal, and I understand & respect how developers like to "enhance" their terminals to work faster. OTOH, after having both hats for a very long time, I find most (if not all) of these "enhancements" unnecessary because it's either distracting or getting in the way.

For the most tiring and most-used expressions, I use espanso to expand them on the terminal instantly, and I found that doing this gives me more flexibility without it being on my face.

Maybe this is because I can think further steps while typing something in, and I don't waste that time in a sense many people sees. Maybe we shouldn't strive to extract efficiency over every nanosecond of work, and maybe there's something happening we don't quite grasp in these moments we label as "waste".

IDK.;)
by program_whiz | 2025-10-20 12:45:19+00:00
The TLDW : In the 90s clippy was a symbol of a friendly product feature that wanted to help you do one thing (but you could opt out). Clippy wasn't stealing your data, serving you ads, or anything malicious, it just wanted to help you do one specific thing (e.g. write a letter). The clippy movement is about sending a message to big tech that we don't appreciate ads in our start menu, having our data scraped and sold, being forced into dark patterns, having AI try to take jobs and/or destroy industry, blatant theft of work, etc. Basically, "make computers friendly again".
by mcphage | 2025-10-20 12:45:27+00:00
It shouldn’t, but it does. As a civilization, we’ve eliminated resilience wherever we could, because it’s more cost-effective. Resilience is expensive. So everything is resting on a giant pile of single point of failures.

Maybe this is the event to get everyone off of piling everything onto us-east-1 and hoping for the best, but the last few outages didn’t, so I don’t expect this one to, either.
by klaussilveira | 2025-10-20 12:45:52+00:00
I would have to disagree. Since Windows 11 rolled out, calls from family have increased. This is not the usual "where is my printer", but basic stuff: "where are my files", "why can't i find the backup drive", "where is my computer", followed by "why do they change stuff".

Microsoft seems to insist on alienating a whole generation of computer users. I expect that this next Christmas I'll be doing a lot of Vista or 7 installations.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-20 12:45:59+00:00
US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans.

AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize if us-east-1 has an issue. Most people would say that means AWS isn’t truly multi-region in some areas.

Not entirely clear yet if those single points of failure were at play here, but risk mitigation isn’t as simple as just “don’t use us-east-1” or “deploy in multiple regions with load balancing failover.”
by maccard | 2025-10-20 12:46:27+00:00
I’ve been using laptops for 25 years, and I have never, not once, had a keyboard need to be replaced.

I worked in an IT repair place for 5 years where we repaired laptops for customers. I can probably count the number of times we got people asking for keyboard swaps. For context of scale, we probably handled 30-70 computers a week, the vast majority of which were “user serviceable” repair jobs
by Jnr | 2025-10-20 12:46:46+00:00
I have been actively using all of them - Linux, Windows and macOS for the past 15-20 years and currently Linux has the best desktop environments possible. macOS is still stuck in 2010 and it is quite painful to work with my Macbook even with all the tweaks and modifications. Sure, you can live with it, but there is always something annoying about it and you can't do anything about it. Apple has the best laptops but the worst desktop environment that does all the window management, etc.
by isgb | 2025-10-20 12:46:55+00:00
> Space elevators are actually a possible idea being considered by scientists. > The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music...

Most engineers would bring up a lot more issues than just finding a strong cable. Also, most attempts with e.g. carbon nanotubes have been abandoned ages ago https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093356-carbon-nanotube....

- We don't have a good ascent mechanism other than rockets - and then we might just use rockets without building an elevator. - We don't have a good (and safe) descent mechanism. - Maintenance? Protection from space debris? Protection from oscillations? Ground-protection if the elevator collapses?

This is dyson-sphere level of fiction. We can do back-of-the-napkin calcualtions on how things would work, but the practicalities make it completely impossible or impractical.
by delichon | 2025-10-20 12:47:04+00:00
I had a colleague who wrote long functions like that. Over time I came to think of him as an inconsiderate asshole. Unfortunately he was me a few years earlier. I gradually learned the value of organizing code in short sweet methods. When that style become old code, I and my other colleagues came to like that crusty old coder better. I also thought it was a matter of cognitive style but for me it turned out to be inexperience.