MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-10-19 09:26:31+00:00
Quite an assertion to say that static typing slows people down. I find the opposite. Beyond a few hundred lines you get a ton of productivity benefits that easily outweigh the time it takes to write types down:

1. Shorter iteration time for fixing type errors, especially things like field typos, missing arguments etc. They show up immediately as I'm typing instead of having to run a test suite (and having to write an extensive test suite).

2. You can write fewer tests to achieve the same code quality. Especially with really strong type systems like Haskell and Rust. Huge time saver.

3. IDE navigation features (go-to-definition, find-all-references) are generally faster and more reliable than grepping. I'm sure we've all had the pain of trying to grep where the `process` function is defined in a large dynamically typed codebase.

4. Auto complete works reliably.

5. You can refactor things reliably, especially renaming identifiers.

6. For multi-person projects or long-lived single-person projects it means you waste less time figuring out what code does.

IMO gradual typing isn't a good idea. Adding types after the fact is much more effort because you basically have to reverse engineer the code. And you don't get the performance benefits of "true" static types. There's a reason Dart switched away from it.
by anthk | 2025-10-19 09:26:47+00:00
Xine and TVTime worked the same with the overlay video output. If you tried to create a screenshot with X11, you would get a blue/greenish window instead of the video.

You had to use the builtin screenshot function from your video player/tv viewer.

The current MPlayer under OpenBSD 7.7 still has the overlay video output

mplayer -vo xover
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-19 09:28:16+00:00
Basic aspects of auto design, safety and functionality have been refined by over a century of real world experience and testing.

Changes should be considered and evaluated very carefully, particularly where user safety is concerned.

Tesla has failed to do this and has boldly "fixed" some things that didn't need fixing in my opinion.

An obvious example is door latches. Exiting the vehicle under duress should be as intuitive as possible without written instructions. Expecting passengers to read the manual beforehand is simply absurd and indicative of a basic design failure.

Another is moving basic driving feedback info (like speed and range) out of the driver's typical line of sight.

But one of the most egregious is mis-labeling driver assistance as "Full Self Driving" which even they admit is purely aspirational at this point.

Will Tesla robots be labeled "Sentient" when they clearly are not?
by mvdwoord | 2025-10-19 09:28:20+00:00
I found stylus to work really well for this.. I have most of my apps typically in Nord palette. For some frequently visited websites, such as HN, I apply the Nord theme. Not sure if it was already built by someone else, but something I found chatbots are quite good at is creating custom CSS! I point it at a website and ask for a Nord themed customs CSS. Copy Paste into Stylus... most sites I tried it oneshotted a very decent solution.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-19 09:29:46+00:00
Right, you want both, which is why databases like Oracle can store data in both forms. You can enable columnar formats on tables for both on disk and in-memory modes, where those columns can then be processed at high speed with lots of SIMD operations, but the data is kept consistent between them.

https://www.oracle.com/database/in-memory/

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/exadata/softwar...

That eliminates the complexity of running two databases and keeping them in sync.

Disclosure: work part time for them, own stock
by ramon156 | 2025-10-19 09:30:04+00:00
So what's worse/better? What did u fix? What didn't u fix?

All this description says that it's better for you. Why? What could be improved?

I mostly check HN on my phone. Harmonic is awesome for this, and I can definitely tell you why it's better for phones.

- Nice filtering - infinite scroll - local bookmarking - rich UI for actions
by badpun | 2025-10-19 09:31:05+00:00
> if you finally just accept yourself for who you are (because that's basically what love means)

That's not a good definition of love. Counterexample: most parents love their children, and yet don't just accept them for who they are (at the moment), but try to change them for the better, by raising them. You can love yourself in the same way.
by midenginedcoupe | 2025-10-19 09:31:38+00:00
Font size is one of my biggest bugbears with HN, as well as the terrible colour contrast on downvoted posts.

I scratched my itch with a custom UserScript

https://github.com/mgladdish/website-customisations/tree/mai...

I'm particularly pleased with how quotes are rendered - I wouldn't go back to 'default' HN now.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-19 09:32:11+00:00
I agree with all of this. Many is time I've had to tell developers I work with: "don't just look at the mean/median, look at a graph of the full distribution!... then slice your distribution a lot of different ways by all the tags/facets you have and look again at the slices." Often you find that a shift in the mean or median was driven by one particular class of data points that skewed the whole thing. (Looking at you, NVDA.) This is usually a little lecture I give in the context of performance engineering, where it's api response times or whatever, but it applies everywhere.

At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.
by rikroots | 2025-10-19 09:32:51+00:00
> 16 bit as standard. Do a gradient in an 8 bit Photoshop document and you will see how limited 8 bit info is. (OUR PAINT supports this).

For interest, this seems to be an active issue for the HTML <canvas> element in browsers. There's a proposal[1] to extend the canvas data type to include both "unorm8" (the beloved default) and a new "float16" (normalised?) format - which should meet your desire?

Typically, the proposal seems to have shipped already in Chrome/Edge browsers. Documentation around what the new functionality is for and how to make best use of it is (of course!) sparse - MDN barely mentions it. As a canvas library maintainer I find this upsetting (eg: Ignore it and it might Go Away).

(I think for now my unhelpful response is: manipulate your RGB images as much as you like; just do it in the OKLAB color space.)

[1] - https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG/blob/main/hdr_html_canvas...
by Oarch | 2025-10-19 09:32:56+00:00
I find the favicons needlessly distracting and unhelpful. I suspect we probably use different parts of the brain for processing images and text, so it's a lot of different information at once.

My main gripes with HN UI are the expand/collapse and voting buttons are tiny on mobile. And it's very easy to accidentally hide an article by accident (it's a hassle to undo this).
by IshKebab | 2025-10-19 09:34:13+00:00
Yeah because everything was built with GCC when LLVM was first created and it hasn't displaced them all yet. It will though. All new languages use LLVM as a backend - nobody is using GCC. Every company that writes some kind of custom tooling (e.g. for AI) uses LLVM. Most compiler research is done on LLVM.

It will take a very long time (30 years maybe?) - I did say slowly - but the direction of travel is pretty clear.
by adwn | 2025-10-19 09:34:25+00:00
You're arguing that "Black" is an identity in the US because the people thus identified share a common history within the US, even though their ancestors originated from different regions and cultures before they were enslaved and shipped to North America. Yet in the next paragraph you argue that "White" is not a valid identity, because their ancestors originated from different regions and cultures, even though they share a common history within the US. How do you reconcile this double standard?

Edit: In case you're only paraphrasing a point of view which you don't hold yourself, it would probably be a good idea to use a style that clearly signals this.
by rcarmo | 2025-10-19 09:35:02+00:00
I keep pointing this out every time dark mode comes up, so don't take it personally: embedded browsers (like the ones in RSS readers) cannot use extensions, and only native dark mode support in the site itself works there. It is _extremely_ annoying to get a white flash while reading news in the night time, and I really don't get why HN doesn't have a pair of CSS lines that would fix it for everyone.
Show HN: Crossword Creator – Browser-based crossword puzzle maker
by bartek_gdn | 2025-10-19 09:35:34+00:00
I built a full-featured crossword puzzle creator that runs entirely in the browser. It uses advanced constraint satisfaction algorithms to automatically suggest words that fit your grid pattern.

Try it here: https://crossword-creator.com

Why?

A few years back I got into crosswords and created an android app for solving them, to create content though I had to make my own puzzles. Existing tools were either too basic or required desktop software, so I slowly built a workflow in the browser. With a bit of Claude's help, I decided to move the whole process to a frontend app and share it with others.

Who is this for?

Anyone who wants to create custom crossword puzzles easily in the browser, whether for personal use, educational purposes, or publishing. It is a nice exercise to do in school, or to create themed puzzles for events (birthdays, holidays, etc).

Key features: - Fully client-side: No backend, all processing in-browser, privacy-friendly - 4-step workflow: Construct grid pattern → Fill with words → Add clues → Generate PDF - Smart word suggestions: Solver algorithm running in Web Worker - Multiple dictionaries: English, Polish, French + support for custom word lists - Keyboard shortcuts: Full keyboard navigation for speed - Auto-save: Your work is saved as you go - Export options: Generate PDFs for printing

Technical highlights: - Advanced backtracking constraint satisfaction solver with forward checking - Most constrained variable heuristic for efficient solving - Web Workers prevent UI blocking during computation - Command pattern with undo/redo functionality - Built with React + TypeScript + Vite

Current status: Fully functional and deployed. Working on adding better dictionary filtering to support themes.

Would love feedback from the HN community! What features would you want to see in a crossword creator?
by specproc | 2025-10-19 09:35:37+00:00
The contagion risk is huge. As the article points out in several ways, the AI bubble is the only part of the US economy where number go up.

Every single bank, fund and retail investor is heavily, if not existentialy, exposed to this house of cards. Absurd promises are being made with national economy-sized volumes of cash.

This is going to take everyone down when it blows.
by homarp | 2025-10-19 09:36:03+00:00
With normal HN, on the phone I get 12 items from home page. Your version shows me 10.

Overall it has 'more' spacing. Which I don't feel I need: I appreciate the high density of original.

did you add any 'additional' features? stuff lile 'kill file', per commemt bookmark/tag, different search features ( 'more like this', 'best of the day comments based on your liking') would gives some reason to switch
by qcnguy | 2025-10-19 09:36:45+00:00
SQL isn't very intuitive. Lots of people claim it is but then lots of people claim Haskell is, market outcomes suggest they are outliers.

The big justification for its design is to enable compiler optimizations (query planning) but compilers can optimize imperative code very well too, so I wonder if you could get the same benefits with a language that's less declarative.
by ubutler | 2025-10-19 09:37:24+00:00
Personally, I like it. However, I like being able to comment and upvote more. At the same time, I'd be reluctant to say the least to hand over my login credentials. It could be quite cool to see this turned into a FOSS RES-style browser extension. Or maybe even a commercial product. I already paid for the HACK app.
by versteegen | 2025-10-19 09:40:23+00:00
(Edit:) Let me start by thanking you, I love these stories about the glory days of computing generations past! I really must try some of these; obviously there are so many fantastic ideas to take.

Irrelevant aside: I've been using emacs 20 years but I very recently gave up and mapped ctrl-V to paste because I still made the mistake of hitting that too often. (I don't hit ctrl-C accidentally, because to select text I've already switched to emacs for at least a few seconds.)
by dxxvi | 2025-10-19 09:42:30+00:00
My hacker news modified with violentmonkey: https://vercel-html-example.vercel.app/hn-violentmonkeys.png

The + - buttons on the top panel change the font size of every thing except the font size of the panel.

Things are arranged to minimize the page scrolling.

The news title and number of comments are darker and a little bit bigger than other elements for an easy reading.
by Alifatisk | 2025-10-19 09:43:15+00:00
Your example is Rspec, a testing framework for Ruby, not everyone enjoys it

Here's with Minitest (part of std)

it "adds two numbers" do calc = Calculator.new assert_equal 5, calc.add(2, 3) end

If you want even closer to yours, the following works just fine

assert calc.add(2, 3) == 5

Better?
by IndySun | 2025-10-19 09:44:23+00:00
There are lots of interconnecting bits inside and around the ear, and with that in mind...

Can you try something? Find a very quiet place, one where you do hear the tinnitus.

Move your jaw as far to left, and then to the right, and notice if the tinnitus stops, changes, or alters at all.

Next, get a firm hold of your earlobe of the tinnitus ear, and pull and hold it away and at various angles from your head; you can do this earlobe move separately or in combination with the jaw movements.

Do any positions improve the tinnitus?
by weinzierl | 2025-10-19 09:44:52+00:00
I'm not sure if I agree that Rust crates overdo abstraction.

Coming from a Java world with heavy use of annotations and their behind the scenes magic I fear the Rust world that overuses macros.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that the way annotations work in Java is quite different from macros in Rust and you don't need to convince me that Rust macros are a ton better and cleaner and more useful while in a sense being even more lightweight.

I still dread a world with Rust becoming like Java where complicated and impenetrable magic is considered a virtue and not a sin. The main enabler to this is in my opinion is the overuse of macros, as wonderful and magical as might be.
by rurban | 2025-10-19 09:46:02+00:00
It's pointing to the ongoing western European government efforts to replace Windows with Linux, first with servers going off Outlook/Azure for security reasons, and then the clients for monetary reasons. The windows 11 upgrade desaster, which caused everyone to consider switching to Linux.

If you look at the European map, what backends the governments are using, only the poor eastern countries still are on Windows, the rest already switched. Also Russia is off, China is off, only a few are still on the US spyware.
by gabrielpoca118 | 2025-10-19 09:47:14+00:00
sorry, I was talking about no LLM vs MCP, but in the scenario of LLM vs MCP I think at least 1 week with MCP vs LLM. It's a bit hard to estimae because every project is different, but when feeding our own instructions to the LLM it would still take a long time to UI to look exactly like figma. It could get close enough, but we still needed a lot of iterations.
by bargainbin | 2025-10-19 09:47:35+00:00
Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?

The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.

All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.

The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
by satisfice | 2025-10-19 09:47:54+00:00
I think it simpler than all that: it’s enacting social order. This is not weird or transgressive or obscene. With our individual words and deeds we create a conceptual terrain that constrains social behavior. It’s a form of marketing.

I get meaning from reminding my fellow adults about what it means to BE an adult, instead of a child. I am marketing a philosophy of living.
by rahen | 2025-10-19 09:48:48+00:00
Did you really use vi on DOS in 1991? I don’t remember Elvis being easy to find back then, and I don’t think it was a TSR either, so the compiler couldn’t be spawned in the background like it was with the Borland IDEs.

Almost every C bedroom programmer I knew had a cracked copy of Turbo C / Turbo C++ because they were so modern and convenient. DJGPP was a nightmare in comparison, it filled up the small HDDs of the time, created large executables, and the process of opening edit.com, leaving the editor, running gcc, and then going back to edit.com was tedious.

The few brave souls using DJGPP would usually end up running Slackware from around 1993. This was a step up from bolting an awkward POSIX runtime onto a monotasking system, as DJGPP did on DOS.

DJGPP was a stellar idea, basically the WSL / MinGW of the days, but the limitations of DOS prevented it to shine compared to the Borland IDEs.
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-19 09:48:58+00:00
By most metrics we're in a recession as many of our state economies are crashing due to the psychotic tariff policy and economic decisions by the current admin. Some places are temporarily avoiding the fallout because the ramifications of breaking our ability to manufacture and import stuff is going to take months to fully hit and the rest of our economy is propped up by AI psychosis.

With the job market being the shittiest I've seen and more ladders being kicked out than ever I think this crash will end up being possibly one of the most violent ones. We might see a return to the early 1900s era of union vs corporate violence as corporations have gotten more brazen than ever to try and stop any sort of concerted effort by labor.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-19 09:49:09+00:00
Negative feedback, viewing on a Linux PC with Firefox:

1. It lacks density where HN excels at density. It is my opinion that it has way too much negative space, and that I do not care if my opinion flies in the face of modern web design ethos. (I do not come to HN because my scroll-finger lacks exercise.)

2. It includes tiny little icons that I cannot discern without careful attention. At best, this is distracting and represents additional complexity that provides no positive value.

Positive feedback:

1. The pages do seem to load fast, and that's certainly a welcome consistency.

Other thoughts:

1. If the best it accomplishes is that parts of it stay the same, but other parts get worse, then: It isn't better. It is worse. Change for the sake of change is usually a non-starter, in my opinion.
by mrkeen | 2025-10-19 09:49:58+00:00
* Most single-db deployments give up on ACID for performance reasons (see READ_COMMITTED)

* Even if you have ACID, it's not sufficient for distributed systems. Its guarantees will keep one node consistent with itself. No transactionality between the customers app and your db.

Maybe you're one bank with all the customers, but as soon as you want to talk to other banks, are you really going to share the one ACID instance? Who's the DBA?

Currently the state of fintech is 90% of devs being in denial that they're in a distributed system.

> proven double-entry ledger approach.

Yes. In that language, the ledger is the list of events. If today's devs were around 300 years ago they'd be calling for 'balances' instead of 'ledgers' because they're simpler.
by scotty79 | 2025-10-19 09:52:41+00:00
> control being one of the central

I could agree that inebriated, fried brains are easier to control by the rich. Sale of alcohol was always a mean of controlling populace and extracting wealth from it.

> Alcohol, for example, lowers stress, and inhibitions in general, so it's easier to strike up a conversation, or to share a vulnerable secret and feel good about it, or to start dancing.

Ale those things are super easy, when the culture doesn't force you to drink first to allow you to do them.

> And substance abuse can be partly done for self-harming reasons. And therefore it's very bad taste to assert that people doing this "don't have a brain".

Self-harm is never smart.
by BSDobelix | 2025-10-19 09:55:03+00:00
The problem isn't landfills; it's the toxic substances being spread all over our planet, as seen in the video. Just stop telling people that e-waste is being recycled—it's mostly a lie.

But i can answer you the "guilt-free" part it's really easy:

Don't buy stuff you don't need, or stuff that's just for short-time-fun (Labubu vs. Guitar) ;)
by bob1029 | 2025-10-19 09:56:35+00:00
I row every day without exception for ~40 minutes at a rate of around 800-900kcal/hr. 2 hours seems excessive. You can trade intensity for time. It will suck a lot more, but that's kind of the point.

The best way to build power on the rower is to do HIIT. Pulling at 1400kcal/hr for a solid minute will awaken something inside of you. I'd start with 30s sprint, 60s recovery. The idea is to try to break the chain during the sprint. A C2 rower can handle anything if that's what you're using. There's no way you could hurt that machine. I'd encourage you to try.
by sylware | 2025-10-19 09:57:09+00:00
This does not really matter, there is really worse.

This real apocalypse did happen upon making gcc a c++ project. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes in open software ever.

There were rumors which do match the timing: the media labs (and gcc steering "committee") at MIT being fiddled auround by B. Gates via Epstein (yes, the one you are thinking about). Are those rumors true? Well, there is "something", but "actually what"? All we know is RMS had to "disappear" for a little while... and that was not for health issues and probably to avoid being splash by the MIT 'media labs' affair.

Open source is not enough anymore, we (all of us) need _lean_ open source, which excludes de facto ultra-complex syntax computer languages (c++ and similar), that to foster real-life alternatives in the SDK space.

gcc is now not much better that closed source software.
by silvestrov | 2025-10-19 09:57:27+00:00
1) Get rid of all the margins. I'm not here to look at postcards, I'm here to read text. old.reddit is good.

2) Font is too small and light. Make subject font much bigger. The 2nd line is not nearly as important as the title, so title should be much bigger. (your darkmode is better at this than light mode). Personally I prefer Verdana to AppleSystemFont as the latter is very light.

1+2) The posting page has too much vert space between posts and too small font. I'm here for the text.

3) I don't care about icons. They don't help me to decide "do I want to read this posting".

My layout design: https://imgur.com/a/uBPb2pC