MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RaftPeople | 2025-10-31 19:29:40+00:00
For me the default is typically an instant view of whatever is described, first an apple, then when I read "sliced" now it's suddenly in slices. But if I want to image motion I can easily do that also, like of a knife cutting down through an apple and the two halves falling to either side, just like a video but with a generic background and other simplifications, like the knife suddenly disappears when the cut is complete.
by Maxatar | 2025-10-31 19:29:41+00:00
>For exemple, it's endlessly amusing to me to see all the efforts the Haskell community does to basically reinvent mutability in a way which is somehow palatable to their type system.

That's because Haskell is a predominantly a research language originally intended for experimenting with new programming language ideas.

It should not be surprising that people use it to come up with or iterate on existing features.
by znort_ | 2025-10-31 19:29:48+00:00
> Of course if your knowledge of HTML standards is great and Button exactly fits your current use-case you probably will use it

i would have imagined that coding html should be done by people with basic understanding of it, at the bare minumum to know what a button is. but maybe that's just me being old and not going on with the vibes ... maybe i'm just going to facepalm a bit and get some fresh air.
by softwaredoug | 2025-10-31 19:30:00+00:00
Silos make sense if the product can cleanly be broken down into neat compartments. And those won't get disrupted easily. The business model is stable. Teams can have a clean, well defined, mandate.

Silos don't make sense if the existence of product area might go away every 6 month. Everything is fluid, and you'll need to regularly tear apart and reform teams. The business model is not stable. Or step-change growth is sought after by investing in new markets (and foreclosing old ones).

I've seen companies build structures like they're in the first category. As if things are stable. Then they need to grow or are themselves disrupted, they need to act more collaboratively across groups, or even dissolve groups. But they can't because the intentional silos have become overspecialized fiefdoms.

The cost of un-siloing is high. I much prefer companies with strong cultures beyond one fiefdom. They can quickly unform or form teams as needed without a lot of nonsense. And to do that, I think you need a lot of organizational muscle about un-siloing a lot.
by kakacik | 2025-10-31 19:30:00+00:00
OK sure, some people care if you really need to play with the words. But only absolute fool would ignore those massive risks.

We have fools in many places, but not that much and that bad. Look at defense - every single country in Europe is ramping defense budget big time, most of those money goes to European companies. Doesn't matter much how good US tech currently is, if it has electronics that can be tweaked or switched off remotely its a massive risk. F16 case was really enough for whole world to wake up and reevaluate.

Why should any other industry including what we discuss react differently? Private companies can risk as much as they want, its up to governments to sweeten the deal for local stuff or let it be, sure there market forces can play as hard as wanted.
by mras0 | 2025-10-31 19:30:17+00:00
Not sure why you're being downvoted. You need a to know quite a bit of esoteric knowledge to parse this beyond knowing x86 opcodes (even x86 assembly).

It's more or less the same information you get from the intel manuals (specifically appendix 2A of https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...). There you can also see what e.g. "Jb" means (a byte sized immediate following the instruction that specifies a sign-extended relative offset to the instruction).

One-byte opcodes here differs from 2 byte opcodes (386+ IIRC) prefixed by a 0F byte and even more convoluted stuff added later.
by aaronpierron | 2025-10-31 19:30:32+00:00
Normal chess puzzles teach you tactics, but no matter how many I do, I still make bad moves.

I made a site that rates every move in a position with Stockfish (a chess engine, stronger than every human) to give you feedback. Hopefully doing enough of these will reduce the likelihood of catastrophic blunders in real games.

Still a work in progress, and more game modes to come, but hopefully it's fun for any chess players out there. Feel free to ask me questions and I'll reply in the comments.
by guywithahat | 2025-10-31 19:30:49+00:00
The couch fascinate me the most because it's almost justifiable. Like offices need furniture and grand openings should be nice; however the cost could never be recovered and the company was way too big to be doing things that don't scale.

In a similar vein, LLM's/AI are clearly impressive technologies that can be done profitably. Spending billions on a model however may not be economically feasible. It's a great example of runaway spending, whereas the weed thing feels more along the lines of a drug problem to me.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-31 19:31:01+00:00
> I wanted a single-letter name, but all regular Latin letters were already used

The single-letter langs don't get to squat on that namespace, if they abandon the project the name is up for grabs. That "U" programming language in the list has 9 commits a decade ago. Your project has 11k commits over a long period of time, so U is really yours for the taking. That's basically what V did anyway, you see there's two "V" langs in the list -- a research language from the 80s, and the newer V lang which is completely unrelated. The umlaut is distinctive but it's also unfortunate that it's called U+00DC when it can't be rendered.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-31 19:31:13+00:00
Note that the Ancient Greeks very often had democracies, when their standard of living was rather lower than what you describe. Life expectancy at birth was often below 30 years.

EDIT: Add some cites -

https://acoup.blog/2023/03/10/collections-how-to-polis-101-p...

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-an...
by tokyovigilante | 2025-10-31 19:32:17+00:00
Agreed, Nim is a fantastic language and heavily under-rated. Moved from Swift about 12 months ago and development has never been more Pleasant.

My only complaint is that the threading/async model and how memory and GC pools are managed per thread took me a bit to get used to, but the speed and C FFI are fantastic.

Also would say that the community is very helpful, particularly on the Discord/IRC channels I have used.
by keyserj | 2025-10-31 19:32:23+00:00
I feel the author loses points (persuasiveness? respect? integrity? I can't think of the word) by not acknowledging what they think accurately happened. What's the word alternative to genocide in this case? "War" with large sprinkles of civilian casualties?

> To defend truth, one must defend vocabulary

I completely agree with this. The decay of words reduces our ability to communicate accurately, which leads then to a myriad of disagreement, misinformation, disinformation, etc.

I think "semanticide" happens often when there's outrage, and there aren't accurate words that carry enough connotation to reflect the emotion and frustration in the speaker. What's the solution in this case? I don't blame the speakers for resorting to it in haste, but perhaps the issue comes when the word abuse becomes well-meditated, and repeated?
by jayd16 | 2025-10-31 19:32:23+00:00
As Carmack points out, naming the intermediate values aides in debugging. It also helps you write code as you can give a name to every mutation.

But also keep in mind that correct and incorrect is not binary. You might want to pass a fooA to another class that does not want the fooB mutation.

If you just have foo, you end up with situations where a copy should have happened but didn't and then you get unwanted changes.
by PMunch | 2025-10-31 19:33:00+00:00
> The community "leaders" / moderation team is also full of abrasive individuals with fragile egos.

I certainly hope this isn't the case any longer. As one of the moderators I feel the current group is very patient and welcoming. At least that's what we're trying for, no one is perfect so I'm certain you can find counter examples. But as a whole I think we're doing pretty well. If you have any specific complaints we would love to hear them. They can be left anonymously in our community feedback form, or you can find we anywhere in the community for a chat.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-10-31 19:33:09+00:00
I tried DuckDB - liked it a lot - was ready to go further.

But found it to be a real hassle to help it understand the right number of threads and the amount of memory to use.

This led to lots of crashes. If you look at the projects github issues you will see many OOM out of memory errors.

And then there was some indexed bug that crashed seemingly unrelated to memory.

Life is too short for crashy database software so I reluctantly dropped it. I was disappointed because it was exactly what I was looking for.
by phantasmish | 2025-10-31 19:33:26+00:00
"Meritocracy" was a satirical term invented to mock the way that the markers and abilities suggested by "merit" tend to accrue self-reinforcingly to the "meritorious" and those connected to them, creating a stratified society that pretends to justice and legitimacy by appeals to "natural" outcomes of "natural" advantages or "better work ethic", and dismissal of calls for reform with pleas that changes could only result in "less-meritorious", so, necessarily, worse, rule.

The word itself is basically a joke about the circularity and word-game bullshit of "well we assign power according to merit, so anything else is necessarily less-just". If it's not clear, consider: "Goodocracy" or "Bestocracy", or "everyone-gets-what-they-deserve-ocracy". Like... yes, sure, but the details are everything, that's just a vague appeal to stuff approximately everyone wants.

It's entirely hilarious that it's been adopted as a serious term.
by ericmcer | 2025-10-31 19:33:46+00:00
Can't you run small LLMs on like... a Macbook air M1? Some models are under 1B weights, they will be almost useless but I imagine you could run them on anything from the last 10 years.

But yeah if you wanna run 600B+ weights models your gonna need an insane setup to run it locally.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-31 19:33:46+00:00
> I'm kind of horrified by the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric in engineering circles online and how normalized it's becoming

Agree, and it came on pretty suddenly as well, which is particularly horrifying. To me it shows how fragile civility and safety is. I see this type of sentiment showing up in the comment sections of YouTube videos on tech or financial topics recently. I think the reality is when people feel their own way of life and chance at becoming rich is at risk, they will search for whatever external risk they can eliminate. And increased competition (from foreign talent) is one such risk.

If it were just that, it would be one thing. But alongside the protectionism, I am seeing a lot of outright racist comments accompanying this backlash against immigrant labor. Like comments that play up stereotypes or worse. As a mild example, I see people saying things like “They can’t fix their own country so they’re coming to ruin ours” or “We don’t need more call center scammers”.
by dr_pardee | 2025-10-31 19:33:50+00:00
> I still don’t like macOS and would prefer to run Linux on this laptop. But Asahi Linux still needs some work before it’s usable for me (I need external display output, and M4 support). This doesn’t bother me too much, though, as I don’t use this computer for serious work.

“I don’t use this computer for serious work.” Dropped $3K on MBP to play around with. Definitely should have gotten MBA
by Barrin92 | 2025-10-31 19:34:06+00:00
>Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him

The great thing about Linux is we don't need to care where Linus lives. We obviously have — in principle — the tech, the workforce and the money to build an alternative tech stack. Most of it is open source at this point.

It's just political will. If we had the commitment and sense of urgency to unwind from America we could. Just like in military affairs we don't do it because we have a mental blockade to break with the existing global order.
by Xcelerate | 2025-10-31 19:34:09+00:00
Hmm... I agree with parts of this and disagree with other parts. In my experience "cross-functional collaboration" splits into two distinct components: leadership and information. Anecdotal, but when leadership is split into too many people at the same level who are each in charge of a domain (that requires heavy interaction with the other domains), nothing gets accomplished—analysis paralysis and politics takes over. You absolutely need one specific person as the final decision maker. They should carefully consider all input from various sources and then make a final decision in a timely fashion. If it turns out to be the wrong path, that's fine, just reverse course quickly as well.

On the other hand, information silos are absolutely horrible. The most effective companies I've worked at have always had tons of information freely available to all employees. Unless there are privacy, cybersecurity, antitrust, or similar risks involved, every employee should have access to all information across all teams. It should be easily searchable as well. There are certainly exceptions—Apple seems to function well despite all the secrecy. But most companies aren't Apple, and I don't think it's generally a good strategy.
by joshvm | 2025-10-31 19:34:13+00:00
It seems to be for offices where you'd have a lease agreement. But even my accountant's letter was refused as not proof enough. I believe you can have HMRC send something, but they're not exactly quick and Wise wanted something more urgently. The strange thing is they didn't ask until months after the account was set up and had already approved proof of incorporation for the registered address.
by zrm | 2025-10-31 19:34:49+00:00
NTFS writing isn't that inexplicable. NTFS is a proprietary filesystem that isn't at all simple to implement and the ntfs-3g driver got there by reverse engineering. Apple doesn't want to enable something by default that could potentially corrupt the filesystem because Microsoft could be doing something unexpected and undocumented.

Meanwhile if you need widespread compatibility nearly everything supports exFAT and if you need a real filesystem then the Mac and Windows drivers for open source filesystems are less likely to corrupt your data.
by kakacik | 2025-10-31 19:35:31+00:00
Somebody drank its portion of cool aid for sure. There is that little detail that glossy screens needed absolutely perfect conditions in front of them to not reflect literally whole world, making resulting visuals often subpar to matte. I have never, ever been in work conditions in past 20 years that didn't manifest this in annoying and distracting way.

I haven't seen a single display that ever overcame that properly for long term work. Sure, phones use it but they increased luminosity to absurd level to be readable, not a solution I prefer for daily long work.

I admit there are corner cases of pro graphics where it made sense (with corresponding changes to environment) but I am not discussing this here.
by RaftPeople | 2025-10-31 19:35:33+00:00
> I am the same and I am not convinced people can really - see - things

My experience of seeing images in my mind is significantly different than when I am not seeing images, and also different from just remembering the details of an object like an apple vs visualizing it.

Regarding closing your eyes: I don't typically close my eyes when I create mental imagery, I'm turning it off and on right now as I type this, now there's an apple I can see in my mind, now there is nothing but the generic slightly darkish background that the apple was sitting in front of. Now the apple is there again but it's green not red, etc.
by bebb | 2025-10-31 19:35:35+00:00
I've not used Suno Studio but I did put some of my own piano improv recordings into Suno and asked it to apply different styles. Fascinating results, hearing my work translated into disco, funk, acid jazz, marching brass band, film scores, 8-bit chiptunes, cor anglais solos, and more. It's given me a deeper appreciation for the broader musical landscape and has somewhat helped me out of a creative rut.

That said, I don't like the idea of generating entire songs and/or lyrics from scratch with AI. That's a step too far, as it diminishes creativity rather than supplements it. So I have mixed feelings overall about products like Suno.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-31 19:36:10+00:00
They are really good at selling a small quantitative improvement that causes them to start using something, as a new type of thing going from impossible to possible. As if the tech didn’t just didn’t exist before Apple started using it.

It is probably a pretty good screen, though.

I don’t really like Apple overall. But, to some extent, it’s like… well, maybe that’s a good way of selling incremental engineering improvements.
by mkagenius | 2025-10-31 19:36:45+00:00
Since you are on Mac, if you need some kind code execution sandbox, check out Coderunner[1] which is based on Apple container, provides a way execute any LLM generated cod e without risking arbitrary code execution on your machine.

I have recently added claude skills to it. So, all the claude skills can be executed locally on your mac too.

1. https://github.com/instavm/coderunner
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-31 19:36:56+00:00
Even in your comment you can see the challenge with education and gambling. In practice the return on a dollar (just a different formulation of EV) is often legally mandated to be something around 0.9 and for many games is very close to fair.

But variance, not expectation, is where casinos get their edge. The “Gambler’s ruin”[0] demonstrates that even in a fair game the Casino will win due to their effectively infinite bankroll compared to the player.

You can also simulate this yourself in code: have multiple players with small bankrolls play a game with positive EV but very high variance. You’ll find that the majority of players still lose all their money to the casino.

You can also see this intuitively: Imagine a game with a 1 in a million chance to win 2 million dollars, but each player only has a $10 bankroll. You can easily see that a thousand people could play this game and the house would still come out ahead despite the EV being very much in the players favor.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin
Show HN: HN Pulse – stay updated on Hacker News from your menu bar
by resca79 | 2025-10-31 19:37:24+00:00
HN Pulse is a minimal desktop app that sits in your menu bar and notifies you when Hacker News stories cross a custom threshold or match your keywords.

No RSS, no browser tab — just quiet, relevant updates.

Built with Electron and JavaScript. Open source (MIT): https://github.com/acapilleri/hn-pulse

Download (macOS Universal build): https://github.com/acapilleri/hn-pulse/releases/download/v1....

Feedback and ideas welcome!
by bluescrn | 2025-10-31 19:37:26+00:00
The Napster era was the period when I bought the most CDs, by a large margin.

It was new+exciting, I was discovering lots of new music. But at that point, casual piracy over slow connections (low-bitrate often-poorly-encoded MP3s) wasn't quite good enough to replace real CDs. And back then, MP3 was still a 'nerdy computer thing' and CD players were everywhere - and by far the most convenient way to play music on a proper hi-fi, in a car, etc.

But these days, there isn't really the same upgrade path from a lower-quality pirated copy to an authentic copy. Especially with TV/movies, now tied to subscription services and encumbered by increasing levels of ads.
by exogen | 2025-10-31 19:37:46+00:00
In today's world, yes. But as with a LOT of complaints about "web developers!!!!" the answer is usually "because of the way the web WAS."

Before IE became Edge (and maybe even in the earliest versions of Edge), there were certain styles and descendants that simply did not work on a <button> element, like Flexbox and Grid positioning. So, if your button had content like an icon, and you were trying to align it a certain way with the label, you simply couldn't use some features of CSS like you could with a <div>. It was a pain in the ass.

In the same vein, do you remember the period where some browsers wouldn't allow you to make a button look like a link using CSS, because they thought it might deceive people and thus be a security issue? I do.

And similarly when people complain about the complexities of webpack and bundlers in general, do you remember including the jQuery <script> tag on the page and then almost always needing to call `jQuery.noConflict()`? And how in those days, most people got even THAT wrong, because atomic <script async onload> behavior didn't work correctly in all browsers yet, so other code could actually run in between a <script> and its onload callback, meaning the jQuery.noConflict call was ineffective and something else could steal it? I remember. webpack fixed that by automatically scoping everything.

Nowadays, a lot of those workarounds are unnecessary (depends what browsers you're supporting). But it's not like there was never a reason for them.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-10-31 19:37:48+00:00
Because that sounds terrible? What would I use this for? Reading email or browsing the internet? I can read faster than an AI can dictate to me. Though I'm sure I could adapt somewhat, as I understand that people using screen-readers are already able to use them quite quickly, I don't really want to. I can't play my favorite games via an audio interface, I can't watch a movie, and just about any attempt at using such a device for work would be compromised by the knowledge that I'd be able to do the same thing more efficiently with a keyboard. Heck, just the idea of verbalizing commands means I probably can't use it for work outside of an office, because I can't exactly go around in public verbalizing company information every time I need to get something done on the go.
by resca79 | 2025-10-31 19:38:26+00:00
Hey everyone I'm Angelo — I built HN Pulse because I read Hacker News every day and often miss good discussions while I’m coding or in meetings.

I wanted something super lightweight that just lives in the menu bar and quietly notifies me when stories are actually worth checking out — based on score, comments, or keywords.

Everything runs locally (no data leaves your machine). It uses the official Hacker News Firebase API and is built with Electron + JavaScript.

So far I’ve tested it only on macOS (universal build). Windows and Linux versions are generated but not yet tested — I’d really appreciate feedback if you try them!

Repo → https://github.com/acapilleri/hn-pulse Download (macOS) → https://github.com/acapilleri/hn-pulse/releases/download/v1....

Would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, or bug reports
by deaddodo | 2025-10-31 19:38:59+00:00
Finder is the number one reason it boggles my mind that people claim macOS as head and shoulders above other OSes "for professionals". Finder is a badly designed child's toy that does nothing at all intuitively and, in fact, actively does things in the most backwards ways possible. It's like taking the worst of Explorer (from Windows XP), and smashing it into the worst of Dolphin or Nautilus; and, to top it off, then hiding any and all remaining useful functionality behind obscure hot keys.