MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by int_19h | 2025-10-29 10:32:15+00:00
Do you mean to say that mutating globals is not commonly used?

Because literally every import, class definition, or function definition that you make at top-level is a global.

Now some people do in fact do all those things inside a function, too, and then call that function as the only thing that actually happens globally. And I've done such hacks myself to squeeze the last few % of perf out of CPython on the very rare occasions where you need to do that but dropping into C is not an option. But that's certainly not idiomatic Python.
by kunley | 2025-10-29 10:32:48+00:00
Well I called it a zealotry not as an insult but to redirect your attention to how this style of expression is seen by others. For instance:

> In other words, the only reason to not use zig if you detest upgrading or improving your code

So you were saying that my own ways of upgrading or improving my code are ruled out, because the only way is via rewriting it for every new language release, right? That's the kind if religious statement I am against.

> Code you write today will still work tomorrow

No it will not and wasn't so far. Where is the room for exchanging the views and experiences if statements are contradicting the facts?
by cess11 | 2025-10-29 10:34:23+00:00
You can't reason with fascists so the 'but they say things I agree with sometimes' is irrelevant. Either you keep pushing them out of public spaces and undermine their ability to organise regardless of whether they manage to say something innocuous or dress nicely for once, or you're at best lacking in knowledge about how the movement functions but more likely a sympathiser.

Sanger has been voicing politically motivated antipathy towards Wikipedia for a quarter of a century or so, and worked for competing projects for most of that time. This includes supporting far-right nasties like The Heritage Foundation.
by int_19h | 2025-10-29 10:34:38+00:00
> It's also common / Pythonic to use uppercase L for lists.

Variables always start with a lowercase letter in idiomatic Python unless they're constants or types.

Using single-letter uppercase for variables is not unusual in ML Python code, but that also happens to be one of the worst ecosystems when it comes to idiomatic Python and general code quality.
by palata | 2025-10-29 10:34:59+00:00
Linux on mobile is fun, but really I want AOSP and its superior security model and SDK.

Now I hate Google as much as the next person, but I also hate all the other Android manufacturers who just don't do better.

Ideally, major manufacturers would all contribute to AOSP to make sure that it runs well with their devices. And then we could install the "AOSP distro" we want, be it GrapheneOS or LineageOS or whatever the fuck we want.

> does anyone know if Huawei is following along with this in their fork?

They suck like all the other manufacturers: they forked as a quick solution, and then decided to go with their own proprietary codebase. If nobody else contributes, why would they make it open source?

What I see from the Linux experience is that the only way it works is to have a copyleft licence and a multitude of contributors. That way it belongs to everybody, and it moves too fast for one single entity to write a proprietary competitor on their own. But AOSP is not that: first it's a permissive licence, and only Google meaningfully contributes to it.
by SiempreViernes | 2025-10-29 10:35:24+00:00
> Big Tech lobbying is riding the EU’s deregulation wave by spending more, hiring more, and pushing more, according to a new report by NGO’s Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl on Wednesday (29 October).

> Based on data from the EU’s transparency register, the NGOs found that tech companies spend the most on lobbying of any sector, spending €151m a year on lobbying — a 33 percent increase from €113m in 2023.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-29 10:35:26+00:00
> My primary point was comparative - wait times are considerably longer for the NHS than in the US.

It depends what it's for. If you want something non-urgent, you may be waiting a bit longer.

If you go to A&E you'll be seen very quickly in the UK, but unless you're lucky with which hospital you pay to get into you could be waiting quite a while in the US.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-29 10:35:32+00:00
> I care about being honest. Not brutally honest or performatively honest, just plainly honest about what works, what doesn't, what we know, and what we're guessing at.

This seems to be the most dangerous thing you can do based upon my experience. Unless you are the CEO or sole investor, the blowback from telling the simple, honest truth can be career ending these days. Brutal truth would often play better. Honest truth feels too real. Many startups are complete bullshit and at some level their leadership is aware and hyper sensitive about it. They just don't want to admit it to themselves. The moment you force them to accept reality, you risk stopping the music for everyone involved.

If you are interested in the actual truth and doing things honestly, working for yourself is pretty much the only option. The truth generally sucks ass. Strategically, it is probably better to figure out a way to keep the lie going while you figure out a path for yourself.

From a game theory perspective, this strategy is compelling because if you're wrong about it you still win. The moment you start making accusations of not delivering customer value the cost is severe. Even if you're right you can lose big. Silence can be the most effective tool if you are interested in the long game.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-10-29 10:36:04+00:00
The article makes some good points but I think a lot of it is cyclical. Drinking, the very first activity mentioned in the article, was hardly considered weird or deviant for many of us growing up. I'm sure there are cultural factors at play here (I grew up in Ireland) but when I was a teenager it was the non-drinkers who were weird. Drinking was what our parents had done and their parents before them. Some of the more benign illegal drugs like weed were not so common that it was weird not to do them, but they were arguably common enough that they lost their weird status.

The decline in teen pregnancies can probably be explained (in part at least) by better access to abortion and contraceptives.

And as for the internet becoming more homogenous, this is a super very complaint on HN but I have long doubted it. I already know there are parts of the modern internet that are weird as fuck to me (just yesterday I read an article posted here about "gooning culture"). Objectively, the internet is just so much bigger now than it was then that it is statistically implausible that there isn't more weird stuff on it. HNers (myself included) are just in a relatively normal bubble.

But certainly the fact that we are all constantly online now can only encourage homogeneity in thought and behaviour.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-29 10:37:18+00:00
It's bad too, yes. But not as bad, because MS is a profitable company with real enterprise products, so they have some reputation and compliance to maintain. SamAI is a deeply unprofitable company, mostly B2C oriented, with no other products to fall back to except for LLM. So it is more probably that Sam will be exploiting user data. But in general both are bad, that's why people need to use Firefox, but never actually do so, due to some incorrect misconception from decade ago.
by jasode | 2025-10-29 10:37:31+00:00
>The solution is to run Linux.

The Linux answer is often repeated but unfortunately, some users depend on various Windows software that only runs properly on Windows. E.g. CAD/CAM, Quicken finance, sewing embroidery, etc can't run in a Linux WINE emulator nor QEMU/KVM virtual machine. And avoiding the WINE/KVM incompatibilities by switching to "Linux-native" software such as Gimp often means having less features and/or not having ability to open old files because they use different formats.

Sure, there's the idea that "90% of users just use email and surf the web so they can just get by with a Chromebook" ... true, but there's still a lot of users who can't because they use other productivity software.

For me, there's always some unexpected situation that requires a working Windows computer. Last year, I had to do an unplanned firmware update on a digital audio interface via a USB cable. There was no Linux updater. They had a firmware updater for macOS but it didn't work. Based on the tech support forums, I had to download the firmware updater for Windows platform and that finally worked.

reply to: >What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM?

Example would be software that use hardware USB dongles for DRM. E.g. embroidery software for sewing machines. The passthrough USB emulation to the vm is not invisible enough to fool the software searching for hardware dongles. Another example was Trimble software for LIDAR that depended on DirectX which crashed in a vm.

reply to: >A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases

That is a very techie solution that's not practical for "normies". Dual-boot creates the "2 os file systems" issue instead of having a single unified disk mount. Windows doesn't have a built-in way to read Linux ext4 file system. Linux doesn't have a bulletproof reliable way to read/Write NTFS partition (various tech forums mention data corruption). Unless one goes external with external NAS hardware and store all documents on an SMB mount -- but that also layers on more technical issues and doesn't work for laptops on-the-go being disconnected from the NAS.
by int_19h | 2025-10-29 10:38:31+00:00
The sharp edges in Go are when you try to use the built-in mechanisms that are supposed to replace data sharing - e.g. channels - only to discover the numerous footguns that abound there.

And then there's patently stupid design decisions like using raw slices as collections and the maybe-change-maybe-copy semantics of append() that don't make it easier to reason about shared data when it needs to be shared.
by rPlayer6554 | 2025-10-29 10:38:52+00:00
I think it’s simple economics. A competitor starts scrappy and has nothing to lose. It will take risks because if it fails because it has nothing to loose and everything to gain. It’s successful and as it grows in success it becomes more risk averse because it has so much more to loose. It looses the scrappiness that made it the dominant force.

This happened to the Roman Empire and it’s what’s happening to our current world order.
by swiftcoder | 2025-10-29 10:39:11+00:00
> So maybe there is hope that the core x86_64 binary translator will stick around for things like VM and emulation of generic (linux? wine?) binaries

It's mostly for their game-porting toolkit. They have an active interest in Windows-centric game developers porting their games to Mac, and that generally doesn't happen without the compatibility layer.
by mbrock | 2025-10-29 10:39:14+00:00
Right now Python simply does not work at all. I was trying last night just to get the compiler to build, but ran into some Fil-C panics at the last moment when it tries to "freeze" some modules? But it should work.

My idea is to move towards defining Fil-C as a "platform", meaning it would have its own ABI value, so it would look like a target called "x86_64-unknown-linux-filc", and then the magic of Nixpkgs is that it can instantiate a full realm called "pkgsCross.filc" which automatically has every package, whose packages are built on your ordinary non-FilC platform as a cross compilation.

When that works—I hope it works, I probably need help to get it working—you should be able to use all the Nixpkgs packaging helpers like

pkgs.mkShell { packages = [ (pkgsCross.filc.python3.withPackages (pypkgs: with pypkgs; [ pandas requests ])) ]; }

This is already how Nixpkgs can have a pkgsCross.musl that builds everything with Musl as a cross compilation. So it seems reasonable and possible. It should be of wide interest for Nix users, since it would suddenly allow memory safety for whole swaths of the C/C++ packages, it would let NixOS use memory safe builds for core services like OpenSSHd, and so on...

I should probably try to gather some interest among people who are truly familiar with Nixpkgs cross compilation...
by absurdwebsite | 2025-10-29 10:39:23+00:00
Halloween doesn’t have to wait till the 31st — we can already celebrate together online!

I made a small “Halloween simulator” where everyone joins with their real costume photo and goes trick-or-treating across the internet.

You can visit other people’s “houses”, get them candy, and give candy when they visit you.

Think of it as the world’s first digital neighborhood for Halloween.

So — show your costume, and let’s make today feel spooky already!

Here: https://absurd.website/candy-overdose/
by LogicHound | 2025-10-29 10:39:59+00:00
The big budget games are often the ones that people are playing. Sure there have been a few big flops as of late, but a huge number of people are playing that require kernel level anti-cheat and DRM that does not work on Linux.

There are also other issues around how well those games work. Some games will work perfectly fine. I am not disputing that. It is a bit of a lottery though e.g. I had annoying sound issues with Hell Divers 2 that was only fixed with an update to pipewire. Performance issues were solved by upgrading to Kernel 6.16.

On Windows I had to do literally nothing for the game to work perfectly (also don't believe some of YouTubers that are complaining HD2, their PCs were actually broken!).

Generally on Windows I have to do very little to get a game to work, outside of extremely old games from the late 90s/early 2000s.
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-29 10:39:59+00:00
>this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections.

This x2. A close friend of mine works at a major EU HW tech company and his job is wearing a suit, going to dinner parties and rubbing shoulders with high level local and national bureaucrats to convince them to fund X, Y, Z projects, none of which result in any major commercial success or ROI for the governments because the money they get is not enough to make new successful products, but hey, he's loving his job which gives him amazing job security against the waves of layoffs the company went through due to falling of sales, plus the networking he gets out of that is invaluable.

So at least some people are enjoying the gravy train while it lasts. But that's why a lot of EU tech companies immediately go to the US first before opening up to the EU market. US VSs are more generous with their cheque books than EU governments and investors, plus the 300 million people single consumer market speaking English as the common language and all that.
by stared | 2025-10-29 10:41:20+00:00
It is one of the game changers of AI.

It used to be a that the barrier of entry of creating a new tool was high - so we had to use popular pieces of software, often stretching them, or writing plugins (that had their own constraints).

Now it is often easier to write from scratch a new piece of software, for which with have full control.

We can stand on the shoulders of giants - not just "a giant".
by dns_snek | 2025-10-29 10:41:24+00:00
> Warning when a site doesn't use TLS is a clear cut case of crying wolf.

No, it's a warning sign that you may be an active victim of an HTTPS downgrade attack where an attacker is blocking HTTPS communication and presenting you with an HTTP version of the website that you intended to visit, capturing and modifying any information you transmit and receive.

> By throwing scary warnings in front of users when there is no actual security threat

Most of these situations may be innocent but the problem is that they look identical to "actual security threats" so you don't have a choice. If there was a way to distinguish between them we/they would be doing it already.
by Freak_NL | 2025-10-29 10:41:30+00:00
Correct. Frisia (or Fryslân) is a bilingual province. Frisian is an official language of the Netherlands. Someone called in front of a judge in the north of the Netherlands has the right to be heard in Frisian, for example.

Fun fact: villages, towns, and cities in Frisia often have names which differ in Frisian and Dutch. In those cases the signs at the place limits will have both names listed; the official one on top (which in some cases is the Dutch name (e.g., Leeuwarden/Ljouwert) and in some cases the Frisian (e.g., Gytsjerk/Giekerk)).
by theoreticalmal | 2025-10-29 10:41:47+00:00
This seems like a really really bad path to head down. I believe anyone can achieve their dreams through hard work and perseverance. However, reality shows us that kids with highly-educated / affluent parents are more likely to end up highly-educated and affluent. It seems in most “western” countries, the people that are having lots of kids are not the highly-educated and affluent. Seems like another form of brain drain happening on a generational time scale
by jamesblonde | 2025-10-29 10:42:38+00:00
The leading European ECommerce Company, Zalando with 50m users, is now using the leading European AI platform, Hopsworks, to power their real-time AI. Zalando are Databricks largest EU customer, but they are using Hopsworks instead for operational AI.

You would never hear it, though, as European IT press only promotes SV startups

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8QFiLhnuFg&feature=youtu.be

Disclaimer, i work at Hopsworks.
by distances | 2025-10-29 10:43:41+00:00
> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite > > writer, perhaps. calc, not even close

This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.

This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
by andrepd | 2025-10-29 10:43:55+00:00
> Before buying a smartphone I tried to find an inexpensive model that supports open source OS, but I couldn't. What open OS support is ether expensive Pixels, or outdated models.

You can buy a refurbished Pixel 5 for less than 200$. Great screen, great camera, 5G, the works. It's definitely not an "outdated" device, and it runs Graphene or Lineage with minimal hassle.
by int_19h | 2025-10-29 10:44:45+00:00
> Do you mean that there is no valid use-case where you wish to interrupt a blocking thread due to I/O, for example?

This is certainly a common case, but killing a thread with a blocking native call on it is a very poor way to do so (not the least because you don't know what locks it might be holding at the moment it gets killed - imagine what happens if that's one of the locks used by low-level heap, for example). The proper way to address it is to use asynchronous I/O APIs that allow for cooperative cancellation. Unfortunately Linux doesn't exactly have a good track record in that department, which is why people do these kinds of hacks. On Windows you get stuff like https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/cance....
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 10:45:36+00:00
Apple always phases out these kinds of technologies after some time to keep the ecosystem tidy and give a last push to developers to abandon legacy code.

In this iteration, it might also allow some simplification of the silicon since Mx chips have some black magic to mimic x86 (mostly in memory access IIRC) to allow Rosetta to work that fast. IOW, Rosetta 2 is not a software only magic this time.

I remember using the first Rosetta to play Starcraft on my Intel Mac. It also got deprecated after a year or two.

So leaving things behind despite some pains is Apple's way to push people forward (e.g.: Optical media, ports, Rosetta 1, Adobe Flash, etc.).
by theoreticalmal | 2025-10-29 10:45:41+00:00
I’m in Denver area and bought panels, rails, and inverter from CED Greentech. They were okay. Apparently they’re having trouble sourcing materials, and have massive demand due to the expiring tax credits. So if you’re thinking of going this route, buy the materials and have them delivered, even before waiting for utility/county permission.

I talked to a local engineer for drafting plans. I didn’t know what I was doing so had to go through 4-5 revisions, which the engineer got frustrated by I think.
by socalgal2 | 2025-10-29 10:45:43+00:00
The world is more deviant than it's ever been. It's just no one cares anymore beacuse it's normalized. Look at Deviant Art, Pixiv, Only Fans, 4chan, etc... It's all over the place. It's just we came to mostly except it. We've got way more explicit popsongs today and music videos that are way more sexualized than 20-30-40 years ago. It's all normalized. In the 70s a film like Halloween was considered too gross. Now movies like Deadpool-vs-Wolverine or the TV show Bad Boys are just full of exploding bodies and guts and no one blinks an eye.

As for people not drinking/smoking/having-sex, yea, because they're all at home looking at those sites I just mentioned, and because between the 1960s/1970s the message sunking that that shit is bad for you. Killing yourself != deviance.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-10-29 10:45:44+00:00
Interesting fact, but the article's opening argument lost me - with increasing frequency, 7 out of 10 concurrent incoming emails are spam.

DNS traffic makes up 1% of all internet traffic. My 15 year old g550 can easily handle 10,000 queries per second with fail2ban enabled, root servers are not under threat from repeat and erroneous DNS queries.

Further, attempting to filter or 'detect' misconfigured devices is much more likely to snare innocent users with aggressive DNS settings that may or not be accessible to the user... See cloudfare and Anubis.

With the AWS outage (ironically they claim DNS issue as the cause) fresh on everyone's mind, the last think the tech community should consider is adding more points of failure to foundational internet components.
by YesThatTom2 | 2025-10-29 10:45:45+00:00
That’s because it’s called “the news”, not “the olds”.

When I teach people how to talk to reporters I always emphasize this. If it’s the 10th time something happened, you need to explain it in terms of what’s -new- or your info won’t go beyond the pitch meeting.

Thats why your town’s street fair makes a big deal that it’s the 10th anniversary event. It’s “news” that you’ve hit a round number. That’s why Trump breaks the law in a little way before doing it in a big way… the second time isn’t interesting.
by engeljohnb | 2025-10-29 10:46:01+00:00
> VM for things that NEED to be windows.

The big two that spring to mind are online games and Adobe softwares. I don't think a VM can usually meet the performance needed for either.

I do wish more artists would take a chance on open source softwares, but most of the ones I know are still insistent that nothing can ever come close to Adobe. But that's a rant for another time.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-29 10:46:03+00:00
It's also unfortunately impossible to have a good competitive multi-player online experience without kernel-level anti-cheat. It's simply too easy to cheat at many of these games in the absence of strict control measures, and even a single cheater can ruin a game session for every other gamer.

No one reached directly for kernel-level anti-cheat. It was the result of an escalation of the sophistication of cheating solutions.