MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivan_gammel | 2025-10-18 16:18:32+00:00
A rather strange conclusion from my words. I do not assume it’s profitable, but it’s pretty logical that a for-profit organization running a service that is based on user engagement will have its revenue from the sources linked to the audience, be it advertising, subscriptions or donations. If you cut a visible slice of that audience, it’s going to impact the revenue. It’s still not profitable, 10 years after acquisition? May the investors be blessed for their charitable attitude, but it doesn’t change anything.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-18 16:19:01+00:00
Most Japanese companies doing firmware are happily working like it's still the 90s. Nikon and Omron are examples. Sure, they don't have working networking, but some would say that's a good thing in automotive software.

By all accounts, rakuten is dealing with absolute horror shows of internal codebases, but they're generally competent at delivering reliable software without a lot of surprises in my experience.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-18 16:19:53+00:00
I'm pretty sure that if you have an unmodified install and no .emacs that is configured otherwise, when you start emacs you are prompted with a help screen that includes instructions on using the built-in tutorial. If you do that, you'll learn the basics in about 10-15 minutes. If you skip that, yeah it's pretty different from most other software conventions.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-18 16:20:56+00:00
I learned to code with Turbo Pascal 6 without the internet by trial-and-error and the debugger. When in real mode, a program crash would often reboot the system or occasionally lead to some other unexpected behavior/semi-silent corruption.

Borland C++ 3.1 & Application Frameworks for DOS and Windows 3.1 came with an entire library of paper books. It was probably the heaviest and largest boxed retail software package ever because 4.0 skimped on paper books and didn't include real mode versions of the IDE for DOS.

The Pascal almost equivalent was Borland Pascal 7.0 with Objects.

It was possible to link assembly, C++, and Pascal in the same executable assuming the memory model and function calling convention were set correctly.
by kazinator | 2025-10-18 16:21:06+00:00
If you could chown files to an arbitrary other user, you could use that to evade disk quotas.

The protocol for changing ownership should be two step.

1. The file is put into an "offered" state, e.g. "offered to bob". Only the owner or superuser can make this state change.

2. Bob can take an "offered to bob" file and change ownership to bob.

Files can always be in an offered state; i.e. have an offered user which is normaly equal to their owner. So when ownership is taken, the two match again.
by grayhatter | 2025-10-18 16:21:18+00:00
> > Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from?

> Why not?

Because laws vary from location to location, and it's an unreasonable for a [UK] agency to make demands from an exclusively [US] group under the assumption that they are aware of every possible law in existence. Someone in the [US] can't expect to have reasonable influence over the laws in the [UK] that they're now required to follow? That's a blatantly unfair system. That's why not.

But actually why? You confidently assert that because it has happened before, that's the way it should always be!

You're still trying to apply rules for jurisdiction, that don't map well to the Internet. If I was sending someone to the UK to buy and sell, I think your arguments would make sense. But that's not the analogy that applies here. The better analogy is, people from the UK are traveling across jurisdictional lines, and buying from my shop, based exclusively in my country. My country feels privacy and anonymity are important fundamental rights, and my business exists to that end. Here, instead of trying to control UK citizens, and making it illegal for them to travel to the US to do something they want to prevent, they instead are trying to force the US group to attempt to doxx every user and exclude some of them.

That feels insane to me, what's your take on that examplev

Also, I feel it's important to note, part of the reason they're using this specific tactic, is because they're aware how impossible and intractable their demands actually are. To call internet geolocation complex or error prone would be an understatement. So based exclusively that they're demanding someone other than them should tackle a near impossible task, should be enough of a reason to reject the demand. Legal or not, unreasonable demands deserve rejection.
by giardini | 2025-10-18 16:21:23+00:00
This is great!

Periodically, I'll go through one of Larson's cartoon books, laughing all the way. It's like housecleaning for my brain - afterwards everything is spic-and-span and in it's proper place.

The first Gary Larson cartoon I ever saw was "Freeze...OK now...who's the brains in this outfit?". When I saw it I had to see more:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c4/c4/75/c4c475c0a2fdc310a34c20722...
by t-writescode | 2025-10-18 16:22:12+00:00
Ruby Blocks and how they're used literally everywhere is one of the hallmarks of why it's so nice to write the first time in that language; and it shaped how I use and select future languages.

Ruby Blocks are almost certainly the reason why I love Kotlin so much - it feels like a well-typed, curly-bracket-styled Ruby in those ways. The collection operation chains in both languages just. feel. good. And I blame Ruby for my first exposure to them, and possibly a lot of people's early exposure to them that helped languages that came after become better.

Ruby does take it to a-whole-nother level though, in particular with its 'space as separator' syntax, so you can make a *robust* DSL that's even more powerful than Kotlin's "if the last param is a function, you can just put a curly bracket and go" style.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-18 16:22:13+00:00
Yes, and it may not be the ideal policy.

It may be better to do what we do with the flu, reevaluate the vaccine from time to time, and give the new version to everybody.

But also, around here covid seems to be a smaller problem than influenza, by a rate of 2 if you count only deaths. So it's understandable why people don't want to mess with it.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 16:22:16+00:00
I think there are many reasons. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood were both hugely into .NET/C# and Windows Tech (one of them worked at Microsoft even maybe?). Then the entire startup was built with Microsoft tech, because they knew that best, so when they talk about their architecture they obviously draw a particular crowd among others. It felt like a lot of the early community came from the founders blogs and Microsoft circles, and I was also asking mostly C# questions on SO too in the beginning.

Probably someone remembers the history better than me and have more clarity and/or corrections.
by Spivak | 2025-10-18 16:22:23+00:00
The page posted doesn't include the latest addition to specials which was posted on their Discord and visible here https://kagi.com/specials.

Which to save you a click it's https://notesnook.com/. It's an E2EE notes app. It seems a little rough around the edges but they've got the spirit. Like if you create a new note and open with a code block I can't find any way to type text after it without inserting a horizontal rule typing after that and then deleting the rule. You don't get highlighting or completion with math blocks which seems a necessary ergonomic feature on mobile but overall pretty good.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-18 16:22:36+00:00
I mostly meant that suggestion as a joke, but to be real I can't imagine reading so many books that you run out of room for enough bookshelves. I have several boxes of books and it's a huge pain when moving to a new apartment, but otherwise I just get more shelves when I need more. I don't think having a lot of full bookshelves would ever be perceived by others as a hoarder scenario if the apartment is kept clean and neat. But I do think that being seen to own many books will generally give people a better impression of you, so I was sort of serious with that joke.
by pkal | 2025-10-18 16:22:52+00:00
> For people who can look at a list of key bindings once and have them memorized, maybe. Turns out most people are not like that, and appreciate an interface that accounts for that.

To clarify, the "custom buffer" can list the bindings. Think of Ediff and the control buffer at the bottom of the frame.

I am not saying that transient offers nothing over regular prefix keys, there is a common design pattern that has some definitive and useful value. My objection is that the implementation is more complex than it should be and this complexity affects UX issues.

> Not true. (Try it.) This was true for very early versions; it hasn't been true for years.

Then I was mistaken about the implementation, but on master C-s breaks transient buffers for me on master and I cannot use C-h k as usual to find out what a key-press execute. These are the annoyances I constantly run into that break what I tried to describe in my previous comment.

> Except that in the case of transient you actually can enable such buffer switching, it's just strongly discouraged because you are going to shoot yourself in the foot if you do that

I did not know about this, so thank you for the link. I will probably have to take a closer look, but from a quick glance over the issue, I believe that the problem that you are describing indicates that the fear I mentioned above w.r.t. the complexity of transient might be true.

> I usually do not respond to posts like this (anymore), but sometimes the urge is just too strong.

I understand your irritation and don't want to deny its validity. We do not have to discuss this publicly in a subthread about DOS IDEs, but I am ready to chat any time. I just want you to know that if I am not saying anything to personally insult you. Comments I make on cond-let and Magit sound the way they do because I am also genuinely irritated and concerned about developments in the Emacs package space. To be honest, it often doesn't occur to me that you would read my remarks, and I say this without any malicious or ulterior motives, in my eyes you are still a much more influential big-shot in the Emacs space, while I see myself as just a junior janitor, who's opinions nobody cares about. But these self-image and articulation problems are mine, as are their consequences, so I will do better to try to remember that the internet is a public space where anyone can see anything.
by pcurve | 2025-10-18 16:23:04+00:00
This article doesn't mention it, but PIMCO is lead lender

"Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) is the anchor lender on the deal. The debt, which matures in 2049, is fully amortising and has been rated A+ by S&P. The bonds were priced at around 225 basis points over U.S. Treasuries."

https://pe-insights.com/blue-owl-and-meta-close-record-30bn-...

Oof.. I don't know about this one.
by derfabianpeter | 2025-10-18 16:23:58+00:00
We at ayedo[0] are specialized for this kind of migration away from inflated hyperscalers onto European cloud providers like Hetzner, IONOS, Plusserver etc. we provide the missing cloud-native services like databases, storage, loadbalancing, etc so teams don’t need to adjust that much.

[0] https://ayedo.de
by gdulli | 2025-10-18 16:25:35+00:00
Wikipedia used to be the tl;dr substitute for reading real sources, and now people are being trained to rely on a further level of summarization from that, this time with opacity and motivated by profit. Imagine telling the 2012 HN community we'd get to that place in 2025 and it would be widely accepted here. You'd get laughed off the site.
by yoouareperfect | 2025-10-18 16:26:00+00:00
Hi, this is a short Saturday morning project.

I usually want to learn how big repos work, but looking at the latest commit is not worth it. They more often than not contain a lot of yadda yadda and edge cases that aren't helpful when learning.

So I like to go to the very first commit and step forward.

This tool helps me do that, hope you find it useful as well!
by bwfan123 | 2025-10-18 16:26:08+00:00
Humans perceive phenomena via senses, and then carve categories or concepts to understand them. This is a process of abstraction and each idea has an associated qualia. Then use language to describe these concepts. As such, a concept is grounded either by actual phenomena or operations, or is a composition of other grounded concepts. The creation of categories and grounding them involves constant feedback from the environment - and is a creative process, and we as agents have "skin in the game", in the sense that we get the rewards/punishments for our understanding and actions.

Map vs Territory is a common analogy. Maps describe territories but in an abstract and lossy manner.

But, most of us dont construct grounded concepts in our understanding. We carry a muddle of ungrounded ideas - some told to us by others, and some we intuit directly. There is a long tradition of attempting to think clearly all the way from Socrates, Descartes, Feynman etc.. where an attempt is made to ground the ideas we have. Try explaining your ideas to others, and soon, you will hit the illusion of explanatory depth.

LLM is a map and is a useful tool, but it doesnt interact with the territory, and it does not have skin in the game, and as a result, it cant carve new categories in a learning process that we have as humans.
by mrbonner | 2025-10-18 16:26:33+00:00
The Turbo Pascal “IDE” was my very first dive into programming, and it’s still the best experience I’ve ever had! Maybe it’s just because it was my first, but wow, it already had tons of cool features back then, like syntax highlighting, step debugging with breakpoints, and a quick peek at variable values.

Do you think there’s anything like that out there today? The only ones I can think of that are closed are nano and micro editors, but I wouldn’t really call them IDEs.
by skopje | 2025-10-18 16:26:36+00:00
> Runs entirely on plant based biofuels

You forgot, "and pollutes like crazy."

The environmental calculus of driving a new car, versus driving a 40 year old diesel engine is challenging, I admit. Moreso if you are distilling your own fuel. I would bet that a gross polluter (as California calls them) from 40 years ago are probably a net loss compared to a 20 year old ICE today.
by opan | 2025-10-18 16:26:53+00:00
This is pretty much flipped from my experience, so I'm curious if you could expand on this. I use grep a lot to filter command output or maybe search all my txt file notes at once when I can't remember which file contained something. I use rg rarely, one example in recent memory is searching the source code for the game Barony to try to find some lesser-known console commands or behaviors (like what all drops a particular spellbook and how commonly).

Does rg work in the places grep does or is it about the type of task being done? In my examples I expect more default recursion from rg than from regular grep and I'm searching an unknown codebase with it, where as I often know my way around more or less when using regular grep.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-18 16:27:05+00:00
> their MVP was not auditable and thus not compliant with financial regulations and also not scalable (high usage and fault tolerance).

There it is. My automatic response to any questions about event sourcing is “if you have to ask, you don’t need it.” This is one of those situations where the explosion in complexity somewhat makes sense: when you need legally enforced auditability.

Event sourcing is a really cool architecture that makes theoretical sense but the yak shaving needed to implement it is at least an order of magnitude more than any other design.
by prinny_ | 2025-10-18 16:27:27+00:00
> If you use neovim inside a terminal you are just straight up using an inferior product, with less features and more problems

I use neovim like that and the selling point for me is that it's 1 less program that I have to install and learn with the added (crucial) benefit that it doesn't update on its own, changing UI and setting that I was used to.
by skeledrew | 2025-10-18 16:27:37+00:00
I had issues as well when I was attempting to transition over 15 years ago. Made a few false starts trying to use Ubuntu. What eventually did it for me was switching to Zorin OS for a few months, and then Kubuntu which I've been on ever since (back then, and I suspect even now, Ubuntu had limits primarily stemming from software principles, such as no mp3 support) without issue.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-18 16:27:49+00:00
The way the recent deals have been structured is that the capacity and thus revenue is pre-booked, which upgrades the credit quality in the eyes of the lenders. Blue Owl is private equity, so they are likely loading the special purpose vehicle itself with the debt (in a way that it off Meta's balance sheet, which is the primary objective), and then possibly funding the capital outlay through secondary markets (if not now, then perhaps later they can bundle it up and sell it - it's Meta adjacent so they will have no problem selling on that debt).

If Blue Owl is providing capital for an equity slice, they get huge leverage on their cut baked into the deal. Pension funds that may end up buying debt in the deal eventually don't want to actually fund the equity of the project and take the risk booting it all up while sitting at the front of the capital stack with corresponding risk of getting wiped out (even if it's a Meta partnership), they simply want securitized fixed income, and make it as vanilla as possible.

So the question is more "will Private Credit (or pension funds/institutions) take debt backed by datacenter collateral with long term service agreements with Meta" and the answer is yes. There is much lower quality stuff than that in the PC space.
by geophile | 2025-10-18 16:28:09+00:00
Turbo Pascal was completely amazing. I remember resisting it for a long time, because IIRC it implemented non-standard Pascal. But the competitive tools were less powerful and far more expensive, (e.g. the Microsoft tools). And then I tried it, and was completely blown away. I no longer cared about the non-standard stuff. I had a fast intuitive IDE running on my original IBM PC.

As for modern IDEs, Intellij has been orders of magnitude better than any competition for more than 25 years (I think). I have stayed away from Microsoft products for a very long time, so I can't comment on VSCode and its predecessors. The main competition I remember was Eclipse, which I always found to be sluggish, unintuitive, and buggy. The fact that it wasn't even mentioned in this article is telling.

JetBrains, the company that created Intellij (and then PyCharm, CLion and many others) is one of those extremely rare companies that defined a mission, has stuck to it, and excelled at it for many years, and has not strayed from the path, or compromised, or sold out. It is so impressive to me that they maintain this high level of excellence as they support a vast and ever-growing collection of languages, coding standards and styles, and tools.
by esskay | 2025-10-18 16:28:17+00:00
This is a fairly meaningless, and very much expected stage of EV adoption. EV costs had to come down, that's just a given. They were priced at a premium over ICE vehicles. As production costs lowered and more manufacturers started making the move to EV's, the prices naturally dropped. Meaning an EV that previously cost $100k and now costs $80k would understandably mean the resale value of those $100k earlier models is going to be poor.

We're still way too early in the shift to EV's to have a reliable metric of long term resale values, but theres basically nothing to suggest they would be lower than ICE vehicles once people stop believing the utter nonsense being pushed about EV's longevity by a select few.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-10-18 16:28:56+00:00
I have a local pro A/V business- when I started they absolutely -were- cheap garbage. I was forced to work with (and repair) a lot of their consoles, mics, etc over the years and a lot of it was truly bad stuff that was made as cheaply as possible simply to get "something" to that functioned (mostly).

They have gotten a lot better- I have made a lot of money off owning my xr18 over the last 12 years. And if you count midas, the m32 etc has been really good for me too. I've go a pair of the 76kt and they have been useful as well.

It's really great that they are making synths, and cheaply.
by tangotaylor | 2025-10-18 16:29:06+00:00
Having TUIs available for remote administration is an excellent point. I frequently spin up nmtui on machines with NetworkManager because I’m used to Ubuntu’s network settings GUI and I haven’t bothered to learn enough nmcli.

(“real” deployments would use systemd-networkd and config files but for simple things…who cares)

No matter how good computers and networking get, text-based tools always seem to win for remote administration. I’ve tried forwarding X servers, mounting remote file systems with sshfs, vscode’s remote features, VNC, RDP, but I always seem to revert back to just tmux and TUI tools.
by vidarh | 2025-10-18 16:29:58+00:00
Just to clarify here: Both lambdas and procs are Proc objects. Blocks gets turned into Proc objects when you take their value.

So just be clear about whether you're talking about a proc or a Proc...

> In a block or Proc, it returns from the calling method

No, in block or a Proc it returns from the scope where it was defined.

Usually this is the same, and so it doesn't usually matter much, but if you pass a proc or a block down to another method, then a return within the block will still return from the method where it was defined.

This can occasionally be useful, as you can use it to pass in a predicate to a method that can control if/when you want to return, irrespective of how deeply nested.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-10-18 16:30:00+00:00
Are the design specifications, like interconnect, GPUs, CPUs, memory and storage of this new cluster public? I seem to recall xAI has made public theirs. I’m mostly asking out of curiosity and a desire to read up on the SOTA hardware specs being used. EDIT: this has some interesting details — https://www.adwaitx.com/meta-prometheus-ai-cluster/

I assume eventually all this investment should result in price drops for cloud GPU rates. Maybe somebody has setup an automated rate aggregator and collected the data? It would be interesting to see the historical data and monitor the changes, like dollars per TFLOP/hr or something standardized to track over time like other economic data or prices. EDIT: this is along the lines and pretty interesting — https://www.unitedcompute.ai/gpu-price-tracker

I know I’m mixing two different thoughts but they are connected in my head for entrepreneurs interested in starting independent tech/AI/LLM businesses needing heavy compute infrastructure.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-18 16:30:13+00:00
The reason IDEs blossomed on DOS was because there was no multitasking. On unix/linux, even on a "dumb" tty with no GUI, you could hit CRTL-Z and your editor would go into the background and you'd be at a shell where you could run make or gdb or manage files. Then type 'fg' and your editor would be back exactly as you left it.

IDEs do all that in one huge program because if you exited your editor to run the compiler or run your program, when you went back to the editor it was starting up cold again.

TSR programs like Sidekick avoided some of this but were a poor substutute for real multitasking.