MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teekert | 2025-10-30 08:17:53+00:00
It's the same everywhere. I think that at some point in your life you've seen enough error codes on machines around the house, enough windows 0x8048154 errors, printer errors and enough weirdness on websites that you need to get reacquainted with error messages that are actually helpful. Software dev tools are really an exception (pun intended) and indeed made to guide you.

But the amount of times I've told my partner: What did it say before it crashed? and the answer was "idk" is staggering, I tell her: Please take pictures of any errors around the house (most recently "E18" on washing machine... It's always an object in the pump!).

Regardless of how cryptic they are, they are the start of solving a problem.
by Frenziefrenz | 2025-10-30 08:18:55+00:00
The way the term "sideloading" suddenly popped up for things like apps and ebooks to make it sound like a weird, special thing has always bothered me. It's just installing an app and putting a ebook on your reader.

> You have the right to install whatever you want on your computer, regardless of whether that computer is on your desk or in your pocket. That's a hill I'll die on.

Hear, hear!
Ask HN: Feedback on privacy first AI chat
by srsly001 | 2025-10-30 08:20:10+00:00
Hey all, i’ve seen a discussion here about AI chat apps logging data or using it for training. i am working on an ai chat that has

- messages encrypted in storage - we can’t read chat history server-side - there’s a mode that only uses self-hosted / open-source models, so no training on your data

for those of you who care about privacy: would you use something like this? appreciate any input. or what features would you like to see to trust a chat system like this?
by AlecSchueler | 2025-10-30 08:21:34+00:00
> If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes.

Yes, and I can read and understand historical Ulster Scots as well, but you were making a different point about codification/drift, no? The English I would find in those historical writings is quite different from what is being taught in schools today or recommended in style guides.

> What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.

Then by your definition I am a native speaker. So how can we square it that you're telling me native speakers feel one way while I feel another way?

> Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots

That's the nature of any newly codified minority language.

> The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.

There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland. A Dungannon farmer, an East Belfast loyalist and a BT9 lecturer will all give you very different views despite being of protestant background.
by coldtea | 2025-10-30 08:21:51+00:00
Overpopulation is not the problem of India. Mindset towards public areas and public behavior is - and the very much active in practice caste system, still excluding millions from full participation in all of society.

And inversely, demographic collapse if fertility falls will be a problem, just because it will hit after 2065 doesn't mean it's something to ignore.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-10-30 08:22:03+00:00
>It is a public street surveillance camera marketed to police to “end all crime in America” through total surveillance.

When is any public facing video camera (such as those in people's smartphones) not a "public street surveillance camera"?

?

Can we really change the function of a group of devices (which use the same physics and create the same effect), by labeling them something else?

?
by throw844958585i | 2025-10-30 08:23:50+00:00
Land for garden in my town costs like 1000 eur per square meter. Gardening clubs are full of old dudes, who want to have a sex with me. Public libraries are homeless shelters now. If I actually plant some vegetables (in pots or front yard), it will be full of dog/cat excrements the next day!

You are living in imaginary land, nothing is free in todays society!
by jsmailes | 2025-10-30 08:24:53+00:00
Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces.

Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).
by coldtea | 2025-10-30 08:25:07+00:00
There are MANY issues with a demographic decline, "that fewer people can live of their wealth" is the least of it.

Less productive hands (60 year olds are not as productive as 20 and 30 year olds, especially in any industrial and labor intensive field, but also in intellectual ones - who would have thought?). More older people in need of health support. Less dynamic society. Slowing economy.

Beyond some (not very low) point it's also a self-reinforcing feedback point to relatively quick (in historical term) elimination of a whole people.
by friendzis | 2025-10-30 08:26:23+00:00
> “Flexible” means the range from gradual typing (‘any’) to Turing complete conditional types that can do stuff like string parsing (for better or for worse).

So the flexibility means one gets to pretend they are doing typing, but in reality they get to sprinkle the code with void casts, because expressing ideas is apparently hard? For better or worse, that is probably the main pillar Rust is designed on.
by novoreorx | 2025-10-30 08:26:54+00:00
I'm using the React Router v7 in framework mode, fetching data directly from the database in server-side components. So far, it works reasonably well as long as we avoid mixing server code with client components. However, although it offers the convenience of writing frontend and backend code together, the mental burden added by this approach makes me feel it is not worth it more and more often.
by coldtea | 2025-10-30 08:28:01+00:00
>However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever.

All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis.

The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
by freespirt | 2025-10-30 08:28:18+00:00
This article examines the series of ethical controversies surrounding Rachel Reeves, the United Kingdom's first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, from her appointment in July 2024 through October 2025. Through analysis of primary sources including ministerial correspondence, whistleblower complaints, and regulatory findings, we identify a pattern of conduct raising serious questions about ministerial accountability, transparency, and the effectiveness of existing oversight mechanisms. The scandals span multiple domains including housing law violations, historical expenses irregularities, curriculum vitae misrepresentations, and problematic political donations. We argue that these incidents, while individually defended as inadvertent errors, collectively suggest systemic issues in how senior politicians understand and meet ethical obligations during both their pre-political careers and ministerial service.
by jdranczewski | 2025-10-30 08:30:27+00:00
I agree that having a reliable main environment for quick experiments is great! On Windows I just use the main Python installation as a global environment, since no system stuff depends on it, on Linux I tend to create a "main" environment in the home directory. Then I can still have per-project environments as needed (say with uv), for example for stuff that I need to deploy to the VPS.

Note that I'm mostly in the research/hobby environments - I think this approach (and Python in general, re: some other discussions here about the language) works really well, especially for the latter, but the closer you get to "serious" work, the more sense the project environment approach makes of course
by jampekka | 2025-10-30 08:31:45+00:00
In general Europe is quite safe, but tourists scammed in some more popular destinations does happen quite a bit.

But Europe is also quite heterogeneous. E.g. in Scandinavia getting scammed or pickpocketed is really rare, but in say Barcelona or Rome the chance is a lot higher. Violent crime like robbery is in general very rare everywhere.
by robocat | 2025-10-30 08:32:58+00:00
It is often the case that a "good" word is used, and then the derogatory secondary meanings grow.

Years ago special needs was a fairly safe term, yet now "speshul" definitely has different tone. I'm sure you know if many other examples (I can think of heaps). I predict that "delayed" will become derogatory.

I think that banning words is literally dumb. I am bit older and went through the Politically Correct putsh. Disclaimer: I'm a lefty.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-30 08:33:23+00:00
Doesn't really change your point, but I should clarify that what I said was wrong, it was anyone in the study could choose not to take the blinded pill that could be placebo or active, they were removed from the study, and were provided with the active experimental drug + compensation as to not punish them for giving or not giving their consent after being sufficiently informed of the risks of either choice.
by suprjami | 2025-10-30 08:34:30+00:00
Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss what we thought it was about.

I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.

I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.

Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.
by csnweb | 2025-10-30 08:36:15+00:00
You can activate the uv venv from anywhere just fine, just do source path_to_sandbox/.venv/bin/activate. Probably makes sense to define a shortcut for that like activate sandbox. Your conda env is also linked to a directory, it’s just a hidden one, you can also create the uv obe somewhere hidden. But I get it to some extent conda has this large prefilled envs with a lot of stuff in it already that work together. Still if you then end up needing anything else you wait ages for the install. I find conda so unbearable by now that I voluntarily switch every conda thing I have left over to uv the second I need to touch the conda env.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-30 08:36:22+00:00
It's because the concepts are the same, but people get enraged by the words. What Java calls a factory would be a "plugin loader" in C++. It's the same concept. And most big C++ codebases end up inventing something similar. Windows heavily uses COM which is full of interfaces and factories, but it isn't anything to do with Java.

Java I think gets attacked this way because a lot of developers, especially in the early 2000s, were entering the industry only familiar with scripting languages they'd used for personal hobby projects, and then Java was the first time they encountered languages and projects that involved hundreds of developers. Scripting codebases didn't define interfaces or types for anything even though that limits your project scalability, unit testing was often kinda just missing or very superficial, and there was an ambient assumption that all dependencies are open source and last forever whilst the apps themselves are throwaway.

The Java ecosystem quickly evolved into the enterprise server space and came to make very different assumptions, like:

• Projects last a long time, may churn through thousands of developers over their lifetimes and are used in big mission critical use cases.

• Therefore it's better to impose some rules up front and benefit from the discipline later.

• Dependencies are rare things that create supplier risks, you purchase them at least some of the time, they exist in a competitive market, and they can be transient, e.g. your MQ vendor may go under or be outcompeted by a better one. In turn that means standardized interfaces are useful.

So the Java community focused on standardizing interfaces to big chunky dependencies like relational databases, message queuing engines, app servers and ORMs, whereas the scripting language communities just said YOLO and anyway why would you ever want more than MySQL?

Very different sets of assumptions lead to different styles of coding. And yes it means Java can seem more abstract. You don't send queries to a PostgreSQL or MySQL object, you send it to an abstract Connection which represents standardized functionality, then if you want to use DB specific features you can unwrap it to a vendor specific interface. It makes things easier to port.
by hollowturtle | 2025-10-30 08:36:26+00:00
> There is no objective reality, according to Rovelli — only perspectives. “This is very radical, because you can no longer say, ‘This is a list of things in the world, and this is how they are.’"

Perfectly in line with his political views, when he's a guest on the Italian TV's, or on social media he spend so much time defending the reasons of the Russian in the Ukrainian invasion. With hosts that often asks physics and political questions in the same set, as if his way of looking at reality gives him any ground truth. I'm wondering how much his physics and political views overlap. Such a delusion for me as Italian, I stopped reading his books for this reason and because at some point, after the wonder effect of reading about quantum worlds, I was left with the sensation that I read a lot and nothing at the same time
by FooBarWidget | 2025-10-30 08:36:43+00:00
It has been a loooong time since that. I'm pretty happy they not only went the legal route, but also were successful doing it while retaining a relatively large library. They could have failed and shut down. Remember that back then, Japanese producers didn't take overseas demand seriously, many of them don't even know that it existed or that there were many fansubs.
by keiferski | 2025-10-30 08:39:13+00:00
I think the idea of an "external reality that follows certain rules and humans operate in" could itself be a kind of evolutionarily-advantageous belief, even if it's not actually true in a quantum physics sense. In other words, we become capable of science and technology only after assuming there are scientific rules to be found.

There are many concepts like this throughout human history - another one I'm thinking of is the (in the West) monotheistic idea of narrative history/time. By framing time as something that can have a beginning and end, you enable or at least incentivize "progress", and mentally unlock the ability to work toward some idealized future, rather than accepting that time is cyclical and/or without some notion of moving forward.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-30 08:39:32+00:00
Obfuscating Minecraft code doesn't make much sense to me from an IP protection angle. It is one of the easier games to build from scratch once you see how it plays. Most of the magic is emergent behavior between many simple rule systems. Nothing in that source code would be much of a revelation. It's not like there's a nanite implementation hiding in there somewhere. It's mostly boring stuff like defining how pig or sheep walk through the scene and respond to various goals. The "scariest" part of Minecraft tech is probably chunk management.
by optionalsquid | 2025-10-30 08:39:56+00:00
Definitely. I haven't tried building anything that requires DNS using musl, but I've had to work around musl's much, much slower malloc implementation

The musl wiki lists a number of differences between it and glibc that can have an impact:

https://wiki.musl-libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc...
by ooloncoloophid | 2025-10-30 08:40:23+00:00
I'm half way through this article. The word 'introspection' might be better replaced with 'prior internal state'. However, it's made me think about the qualities that human introspection might have; it seems ours might be more grounded in lived experience (thus autobiographical memory is activated), identity, and so on. We might need to wait for embodied AIs before these become a component of AI 'introspection'. Also: this reminds me of Penfield's work back in the day, where live human brains were electrically stimulated to produce intense reliving/recollection experiences. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilder_Penfield]
by CraigJPerry | 2025-10-30 08:41:14+00:00
That's a fine approach for "plumbing" type work, you know "join this thing to that thing then call that thing" - and that is most of the code in the world today but it falls apart in math heavy code.

You really just want operators when you're performing tons of operations, it's an absolute wall of text when it's all method calls.
by gradstudent | 2025-10-30 08:41:56+00:00
To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? 32bit support?

I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
by danwills | 2025-10-30 08:43:05+00:00
Yeah that was my original interpretation of the title too! Perhaps something like:

How did early humans understand their situation and what did they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they should do with their lives?! I find it fascinating to think how that longing to know what it's all about has changed so much for humans over time.

Mirrors are still heaps interesting though, as is reflection/refraction/light-transport in general I'd say! But it wasn't about what I expected when I read it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-30 08:43:16+00:00
> Today's funding (VC or government grants) demands results in 2-3 years

This is nonsense. VCs have been happily investing in technology on 5 to 10 year timelines; traditional VC funds were raised with 7 to 10 year tenors.

> We've systematically eliminated the "patient capital" that creates foundational infrastructure

Did you miss all the space and fusion funding? Biotech? Flying cars? The folks on this board complaining investors have infinite timelines for results?
by creatonez | 2025-10-30 08:44:32+00:00
> 3. Curseforge's website and modrinth both seem to be legit places to get mods from. I personally find the installable Curseforge program itself to be bad and spammy, and would never use that, but the site still lets you directly download the jars you need, and lets you check "Dependencies" to find out what other mods you need.

PrismLauncher, a popular MultiMC fork, has direct integration with Curseforge and Modrinth, while being completely ad-free. Best of both worlds.

A few mods are not available because Curseforge allows mod authors the option to force ad monetization by blocking API access, but these are few and far between.
by jakobnissen | 2025-10-30 08:47:57+00:00
It also has poor tooling when compared to Python. Julia's package manager is good, and so is it's tools for performance optimisation, but for type checking, app/cli creation, semver checking and IDE integration, the tooling is quite bad. Also, the compile times are shit, and the type system makes it very hard to make a type checker in the first place.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-30 08:48:38+00:00
React is a kind of strange dysfunctional OOP pretending not to be, to appeal to people like those on this thread ;)

Function calls have state, in React. Think about that for a second! It totally breaks the most basic parts of programming theory taught in day one of any coding class. The resulting concepts map pretty closely:

• React function -> instantiate or access a previously instantiated object.

• useState -> define an object field

• Code inside the function: constructor logic

• Return value: effectively a getResult() style method

The difference is that the underlying stateful objects implemented in OOP using inheritance (check out the blink code) is covered up with the vdom diffing. It's a very complicated and indirect way to do a bunch of method calls on stateful objects.

The React model doesn't work for a lot of things. I just Googled [react editor component] and the first hit is https://primereact.org/editor/ which appears to be an ultra-thin wrapper around a library called Quill. Quill isn't a React component, it's a completely conventional OOP library. That's because modelling a rich text editor as a React component would be weird and awkward. The data structures used for the model aren't ideal for direct modification or exposure. You really need the encapsulation provided by objects with properties and methods.
by saagarjha | 2025-10-30 08:50:22+00:00
I write Python all day for work and I run into its issues all the time, be it performance or weak typing or just lack of modern language features. If you’re just vibecoding all day and that’s ok for what you want it to do, all the more power to you, but do at least take a moment to understand that when people want things you see no value in maybe they just have different requirements than you do.
by Pannoniae | 2025-10-30 08:50:54+00:00
Yeah, I honestly think that the thing which would kill modding in the future won't be any kind of (overtly) hostile action, it will simply be sheer inertia. Since the new "drop" system, pretty much every minor version requires rewriting many things in your mod, and modders find it hard to keep up, and there will be point when many mods just don't bother updating to the newest version.

The game used to be simple, both conceptually and codewise but obviously, it became more and more bloated the more developers touched it and the more bureaucracy was added. Now, it's a complete nightmare, and I bet it's also a nightmare for the developers too, considering how hard it is for them to fix even basic issues which have been in the game for like a decade at this point.