MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wilsonnb3 | 2025-10-18 14:51:01+00:00
It is quite bleak to me. Thinking has always been an important part of what makes us human, much more so than physical labor.

Craftsmanship and tool usage are physical activities that also define us as a species and you will find no shortage of people lamenting our loss of those skills, too. Both those and thinking are categorically different than water carrying, ditch digging, and other basic heavy labor.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-18 14:51:09+00:00
> And as chaotic and concerning as many political events may be, the idea that the US will become “a failed state” is pretty divorced from the actual reality

Becoming a failed state overnight? Probably not, I agree. Midterm elections are approaching and the federal government has already shown its willingness to deploy the military to big cities for intimidation purposes. Also don't forget: our current President also tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. I feel like we get stuck in this "nothing ever happens" loop while our liberties slowly get stripped away and even after a thing happens, we delude ourselves by saying it won't actually get that bad. Frogs in a pot.
by JeremyHerrman | 2025-10-18 14:51:38+00:00
I'm interested in how these old IDEs were used during the transition from assembly to high level languages. It seems especially topical given the LLM integration into today's IDEs.

Back then was it common to have a split or interleaved view of high level and assembly at the same time?

I'm aware that you could do something like the following, but did IDEs help visualize in a unified UI?:

$ cc -S program.c $ cat program.s # look at the assembly $ vi program.c # edit the C code

A quick search shows that Borland Turbo C (1987) had in-line assembly:

myfunc () { int i; int x; if (i > 0) asm mov x,4 else i = 7; }

From the 1987 Borland Turbo C User's Guide [0] "This construct is a valid C if statement. Note that no semicolon was needed after the mov x, 4 instruction. asm statements are the only statements in C which depend upon the occurrence of a newline. OK, so this is not in keeping with the rest of the C language, but this is the convention adopted by several UNIX-based compilers."

[0]: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/borland/tur...
by rbanffy | 2025-10-18 14:51:57+00:00
It doesn't go nearly as far as US legislation such as the trade embargoes against Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela. In that the US effectively harms any company that does business with a sanctioned country by sanctioning the company in the US. By the same logic, the UK could sanction any company that does business with 4chan and prevent it from doing any business in the UK.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-18 14:52:10+00:00
The author notes that he programmed back in the 1980's, but the article only focuses on the mid-90's IDEs.

I'd like to see a companion article about the IDEs from the 80's.

I remember 64FORTH had a multi-pane IDE, but I could only find this low-res picture of it: https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/thumb/2/24/Forth64-audiogenic...

There were others, though, including one I remember that was all text at the bottom half of the screen, and then graphic output at the top.

And, of course, the most famous one of all: the Atari 2600 BASIC Programming IDE which fit in just 4K.

Today's ragebait bloggers like to say how awful it was, but if you're patient and thoughtful, the way people were when it came out, you can do quite a lot.

An entire Pong game in six lines, from Wikipedia:

1 Hor2←2+Key 2 IfVer1>90ThenVer1←88 3 IfHitThenVer1←9 4 Ver1←Ver1+IfVer1Mod2Then8Else92 5 Hor1←Hor1+7 6 Goto1
by pydry | 2025-10-18 14:52:38+00:00
>And just like diverse investments protect you from the failure of a specific asset, diverse countries can protect you from, for example, a collapse in heath care, a housing crisis or a currency crisis.

Although, just like certain asset classes correlate strongly, certain countries are geopolitically, economically, militarily tied at the hip and will both rise and fall together.

I wouldnt consider anywhere western a good hedge against America going down coz it has a really good chance of getting dragged down with it.
by alganet | 2025-10-18 14:52:47+00:00
> At any rate, this privacy threat is critical given the growing concern among users about their digital footprints—a recent survey found that seven out of every ten people have taken actions to protect their online identity, from disabling cookies to using virtual private networks

The absence of cookie persistence could, in theory, also be used as a highly unique fingerprint.

VPNs (those paid ones that advertise everywhere) are a privacy-breaking buffet. You're literally giving away your navigation pattern, and signaling that you have something to hide or protect.

Those are not preventive actions.

> For example, Google AdSense

This stuff is much deeper than ads or navigation patterns (I understand the paper focuses on those, it's fine). People have no idea.

> future legal and policy frameworks

That's the only reasonable way to protect privacy. I hate to admit it and I resisted for a long time, but regulation is the only way of doing it. Otherwise, it's an arms race.
by rafd | 2025-10-18 14:52:52+00:00
Having a random quantum seed to an otherwise opaque internal process is still a far cry from free will and agency.

Consider thermodynamics: even without quantum weirdness, we can't compute/predict the micro interactions of atoms in a gas. But most average out, and we can make a lot of meaningful predictions on a macro scale.

Back to brains: even if there is some underlying quantum process that might free us from full determinism, on a macro level, it might not matter - you're still gonna value what you value, and make the same "choices".

And if in some cases a "decision" is actually impacted by some quantum effect... is it "agency"? Or just yet another external process affecting us?
by ycombinatrix | 2025-10-18 14:52:58+00:00
Cool project.

>Warning: Do not connect to any POE capable equipment!

What's the deal with this? I thought POE hardware always needed to "detect" attached POE capable devices before sending power.

That being said, my ubiquiti POE switch somehow managed to brick the ethernet port on my 1st gen Nvidia Shield so maybe it isn't that safe...
by coreylane | 2025-10-18 14:53:15+00:00
Major US banking apps I've used in the past 7 or so years already support mailing physical checks directly from their mobile apps via their bill pay service. Just add someone's physical address as a "payee", create a payment, and it sends them a check in the mail, for free. Perhaps your app is slightly more convenient and has more advanced features which make it worth the fee, but it seems like a problem already mostly solved and widely available.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-18 14:54:13+00:00
> The citizenship test that USCIS has used since 2008 requires applicants to answer six questions correctly out of 10. The new test will require 12 correct answers out of 20. The list of possible questions the agent chooses from will grow from 100 to 128, and many will be more difficult.

Seems reasonable.

> Aside from the tougher civics test, applicants for citizenship will also have to convince an immigration officer that they have "good moral character." Until now, the absence of bad behavior or criminal conduct on an applicant's record has been enough. Now, they'll need to submit evidence of their "positive contributions to American society."

I wonder what that entails. Volunteering? Paying taxes? Having a job?
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 14:54:19+00:00
> The vast majority of people in the US still see their future in the US.

I mean, obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.

Just an anecdote, also with bias, but almost every American I've met outside of the US (from all walks of life, from uber rich to almost homeless) seems to agree with the idea that the US is approaching a "no turning back" point, and cites that as being the reason they moved away.

> If the US becomes a failed state, trust me, the rest of the world will be too.

I'm fairly sure every citizen of a huge empire felt like that too, through the ages. Rome citizens surely felt the same, until it turned out that no single entity is powerful enough that the entire world would be "failed" just because one nation failed.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-10-18 14:54:39+00:00
If a pattern is a common problem (e.g., becoming accustomed to a spectacular view) and generally-useful solution to that problem (blocking the view so that effort is required to obtain it), then an anti-pattern is what?

I think most people think an anti-pattern is an aberration in the "solution" section that creates more problems.

So here, the anti-pattern is that people use a term so casually (e.g., DevOps) that no one knows what it's referring to anymore.

(The problem: need a way to refer to concept(s) in a pithy way. The solution: make up or reuse an existing word/phrase to incorporate the concept(s) by reference so that it can can, unambiguously, be used as a replacement for the longer description. )
by raddan | 2025-10-18 14:54:48+00:00
It’s niche because the vast, vast majority of programmers just continue to do what they know or go with the crowd. I spend roughly 50% of my time doing FP and 50% doing imperative (most OOP) programming. I am dramatically more effective writing functional code.

Like other posters, I am not going to claim that it is better at all things. OOP’s approach to polymorphism and extensibility is brilliant. But I also know that nearly all of the mistakes I make have to do with not thinking carefully enough about mutability or side-effects, features that are (mostly) verboten in FP. It takes some effort to re-learn how to do things (recursion all the things!) but once you’ve done it, you realize how elegant your code can be. Many of my FP programs are also effectively proofs of their own correctness, which is not a property that many other language styles can offer.

Here’s an appropriate PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
by parpfish | 2025-10-18 14:56:23+00:00
but sometimes large case statements cant be turned into a simple dimension table/lookup table because it's not a simple key-value transformation.

if your case statement is just a series of straighahead "WHEN x=this THEN that", you're very lucky.

the nasty case statements are the ones were the when expression sometimes uses different pieces of data and/or the ordering of the statements is important.
by rayiner | 2025-10-18 14:56:57+00:00
Why are you comparing the cities based on whether you can get around “without a car?” In America, even the vast majority of the poorest people have a car. 96% of occupied housing units in Osceola County (where Orlando sits) have a car. American cities are optimized for that.

It’s almost certainly more convenient to get around Orlando by driving (as long as you aren’t going to Disney) than taking transit in Malmo. There is no city in the world where transit is more convenient and flexible than driving. I visit Tokyo once or twice a year, and even in Tokyo it’s usually more convenient to take an Uber than to take the train. And you’re not going to do better than Tokyo in terms of transit.

You can see this in the statistics. The average commute time of someone in the greater Tokyo area is 1 hour and 40 minutes round trip, or about 50 minutes one way: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu.... The average commute time for someone in Dallas County is under 30 minutes one way: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113. And the American commute is by yourself in a climate controlled car, instead of a crowded (even if clean and punctual) train.
by hmokiguess | 2025-10-18 14:57:09+00:00
sure, lots of things can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive — the way I see it, it looks like there's great effort being made out there in how to characterize and propagate the collective understanding of tools — what's the goal there? is this a "call this something else please" type of work? in the spirit of metalinguistics, what do you call this branch of human nature and behaviour as it pertains to our evolution of knowledge and use of language to apply it as a species

like, we clearly are deriving some kind of value from the current AI as a product — are some researchers and scientists just unhappy that these companies are doing that by using marketing that doesn't comply with their world views?

does someone know of other similar parallels in history where perhaps the same happened? I'm sure we butchered words in different domains with complex meanings and I bet you some of these, looking back, are a bunch of nothing burgers
by keiferski | 2025-10-18 14:57:29+00:00
I think your sample is pretty biased, because that viewpoint doesn’t apply to me or any Americans I’ve met abroad. Skeptical or critical of America and American culture, sure, but I certainly didn’t move abroad because of those reasons.

Most Americans abroad tend to be there because of work, or because their partners are from the country. The number of people able to move abroad because of recent political issues is extremely small, because that sort of life flexibility is not available to the vast, vast majority of people.

I mean, obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.

Where would they go? Immigrating to another first world country is pretty expensive and difficult. Just picking up and moving somewhere abroad is really not an option for 99% of people.
by 0xml | 2025-10-18 14:57:42+00:00
Last time I found a paper in Graphics Gems titled Solving the Nearest-Point-on-Curve Problem, which transforms the problem into a Bernstein polynomial form. Then an exact solution can be obtained using A Bézier Curve-Based Root-Finder. This is my implementation [1], but it's not very robust for high-degree cases.

[1] https://github.com/Long0x0/distance-to-bezier
by CGamesPlay | 2025-10-18 14:58:01+00:00
(Article is from 2023, so the title should be updated to say "32 years ago", or something)

The biggest loss in TUIs is the latest wave of asynchronous frameworks, which bring the joy of dropped keypresses to the terminal.

In any TUI released before the year 2000, if you press a key when the system wasn't ready, the key would just wait until the system was ready. Many TUIs today still do this, but increasingly frequently (with the modern "web-inspired" TUI frameworks), the system will be ready to take your keypress, and discard it because the async dialog box hasn't registered its event listener yet.

Other than that antipattern, TUIs are doing great these days. As for terminal IDEs, Neovim has never been more featureful, with LSPs and other plugins giving all the features this article discusses. I guess it isn't a mouse-driven TUI, so the author wouldn't be interested, but still.
by card_zero | 2025-10-18 14:59:21+00:00
Well, you're assuming that AGIs would see themselves as belonging to a separate faction, like aliens, instead of seeing themselves as being inorganic humans. They'd presumably be educated by human parents in human culture. We do tend to form groups based on trivial details, though, so I'm sure they'd be a subculture. But they wouldn't automatically gain any superior knowledge anyway, even if they did feel resentment for fleshy types. Being made of silicon (or whatever turns out to work) doesn't grant you knowledge of FTL, why would it?
by Teknomadix | 2025-10-18 14:59:25+00:00
Yolo has actually been shown to be run on 15-year-old Canon cameras. They in no way have the power of my Nvidia Jetson. But they can run the model just the same. No cloud necessary. These small devices, well maybe not being able to process four individual video channels at 60 frames per second will still have the capability of processing at lower frame rates and with less channels. Using much cheaper hardware, and using a whole lot last energy. So I don't think you're argument really holds up.
by raddan | 2025-10-18 14:59:26+00:00
I hear what you’re saying but the C# standard library is pretty well-behaved. If you’re really that concerned about it, wrap questionable calls in an exception handler and convert them into option types, and then you can force everything downstream to handle all the errors. I share your dislike of unchecked exceptions; sadly checked exceptions also kind of suck. Working in old Java codebases that use them is torture.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-10-18 14:59:50+00:00
With Gravity's Rainbow you can either read it and make peace with the fact that every acronym, reference, character, plot point etc. won't be fully understood or remembered (that's kind of the point with this type of writing style, imo), or you can read it with a companion guide kinda like how some people play video games.

I also liked Crying of Lot 49. Inherent Vice is also a bit of an easier time.
by hollerith | 2025-10-18 15:00:12+00:00
I agree: although there is a very small chance that civil war will break out in the US, there's essentially zero chance it becomes a failed state.

The administrative consensus created by FDR is breaking down, and it is not yet clear what will replace it. (Trump is unlikely to be the main architect of the new administrative consensus.) To people who cannot help but view everything through the lens of the old consensus, it looks like the entire US society is breaking down, but the US is very good at invention and reinvention, so once the outlines of a new administrative consensus forms, state capacity will return very quickly.

I'm repeating George Friedman here.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-18 15:00:26+00:00
There's a famous saying about going bankrupt: "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly"

In this case, "going bankrupt" is the dissolution of the United States. We definitely won't be able to predict when it happens, and it may be unlikely, but IMO the likelihood of it happening ticks up the more I see how the federal government is attempting to crush dissent.

Not to mention completely apolitical things like the debt crisis, which will be unmanageable after a certain point. Our biggest line item in the budget is now paying interest on the debt. And we just passed the OBBB which increased deficit spending by $3.4T over ten years.
by zkmon | 2025-10-18 15:00:42+00:00
I learnt programming, back in the 90's, all by myself, only to visualize platonic solids and other hybrid crystals in 3D. By using DOS graphics. I went on to generating fractals and bewildered by their beauty and resemblance to natural things.

Now, looking back, all this amazement around generated stuff was probably misplaced. It is like a tribal child on an uncontacted island accepting plastic toys from outsiders and getting amazed by the quality of the toys, without realizing that the toys would take over the island soon.

Speaking of toys - I used to make all my toys as a kid - chess pieces, chess board, playing cards, bow & arrows, wind-mills, cart-toys, bouncy balls... We didn't have any shops around. I miss the randomness, imperfection and freedom.
by crowbahr | 2025-10-18 15:01:32+00:00
The moment you write documentation it becomes stale. It's additional debt you've incurred and the upkeep must be payed every modification to the code.

That doesn't mean you should skip it - but it's vital to recognize the costs.

When I joined my current company they had extensive documentation on several systems, all of it outdated, stale or even just straight up wrong. I wasted cumulative weeks depending on other programmers to have properly documented things.

It's still worth doing: but you _must_ continually pay the debt down.
by gls2ro | 2025-10-18 15:01:35+00:00
> If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything.

Of course lets silently ignore Github, Gitlab, Shopify and others: all small, modest complexity web apps built with Ruby on Rails. Look at Shopify last year black friday numbers and come back and tell us how Ruby is fit only for modest traffic.
by tarsius | 2025-10-18 15:02:34+00:00
> Transient UIs [...] could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer.

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.

You also completely ignore that the menus are used to set arguments to be used by the command subsequently invoked, and that the enabled/disabled arguments and their values can be remembered for future invocations.

> The fact that Transient hooks into the MVC and breaks elementary navigation such as using isearch

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

> or switching around buffers

Since you earlier said that transient menus could be replaced with regular prefix keys, it seems appropriate to point out that transient menus share this "defect" with regular prefix keys, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/17#issuecomment-46.... (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, but if you really want to you can, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/114#issuecomment-8....

> has irritated me ever since Magit adopted the new interface.

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

I have grown increasingly irritated by your behavior over the last few weeks. Your suggestion to add my cond-let* to Emacs had a list of things "you are doing wrong" attached. You followed that up on Mastodon with (paraphrasing) "I'm gonna stop using Magit because it's got a sick new dependency". Not satisfied with throwing out my unconventional syntax suggestion, you are now actively working on making cond-let* as bad as possible. And now you are recycling some old misconceptions about Transient, which can at best be described as half-truths.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-18 15:03:33+00:00
As someone who has been doing this either professionally (since 1996) or as a hobbyist programming in assembly and a little Basic (1986-1992), I’m always amazed at the feigned Slashdot style “I haven’t owned a Tv in 40 years why do people still watch them”.

Are you really saying that you don’t see any utility in modern IDEs? Even back in 1999 I thought Visual Studio was a breath of fresh air let alone R# with all of the built in refactors in 2008.

But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-18 15:03:35+00:00
Interesting that as of August 2025 exactly, he's become the pop ska punk band Buck-o-Nine, which is probably distressing to both of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByaBdXi77Zg

Although I guess buck-o-nine is now approx $2.37, which is also concerning.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-10-18 15:04:30+00:00
> For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others

This statement sums up the tech centric bubble HN lives in. Your average former, shop assistant, fisherman or wood worker isn't likely to see significant life improevments from the transformer tech deployed until now.
by rswail | 2025-10-18 15:06:25+00:00
The Chinese government didn't steal the tech, CATL/BYD are more advanced than Panasonic/Tesla.

China learned how to make cars from European and US companies producing ICE vehicles, but the battery tech is more home grown.

They also invested heavily in robotics and manufacturing supply chains.

Korea has also invested into EV on top of their already big ICE vehicle manufacturing base.