MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meken | 2025-11-17 18:13:00+00:00
> If you can make $30 an hour as a digital freelance marketer (a job that did not exist a generation ago), then you won’t accept less than that from working in food service. And if you can make $150 an hour installing HVAC for data centers, you’re not going to accept less from doing home AC service.

Plenty of people work jobs for less money because they enjoy the work more. I’m not sure if it’s worth reading what follows if most of the argument is predicated on this claim.
by lproven | 2025-11-17 18:13:04+00:00
"Several years"?

Try "a decade and a half".

AT&T itself ported UNIX™ to the Intel 8086 in 1978:

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...

The 8086 was the first ever microprocessor to run Unix – before 68000 or anything.

The first release of MS, later SCO, Xenix was 1981.

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix

It was later ported to the 8086 in 1983 and 80286 by 1985.

https://landley.net/history/mirror/unix/scohistory.html

So Unix was running some 4 years before IBM launched the PC and Xenix was on the market by 2 years after launch.

That was a full 8 years before Linus got Linux 0.01 out in 1991.

UNIX is a 1970s OS; x86 PC Unix was a commercial 1980s product; Linux is a 1990s thing.
by bluGill | 2025-11-17 18:13:11+00:00
Do you have $800? I'm trying to get my daughter a full set of acoustic drums (though odds are her brother will use them more even though he plays clarinet and she does percussion). I've seen full sets for as little as $30 - but it doesn't take much checking to realize they are not worth it even at that price. Good sets quickly cost more, but $800 is a good starting point for a set that isn't unusable.
by jerf | 2025-11-17 18:13:16+00:00
Another thing about Go, and more generally, the statically-typed languages, is that these utility functions are generally safer to get a once-over and a commit into the code base than in dynamically-typed languages. Something that joins an array of strings with a joiner in some non-trivial way is a lot easier to review when you don't have to worry about it getting an array of DOM nodes and a NaN for the join character, and all the other things that could come in. Well-tested little utilities for Javascript are valuable, and I don't 100% trust LLMs to not give me code based on common misconceptions rather than the actually correct code in that case. Or at least, correct for some definition of correct, which in the dynamic languages can itself be some work to figure out.
by nocoiner | 2025-11-17 18:13:30+00:00
I commend you for your imagination. Can I ask how you crafted the object to match the dimensions? I’m brand new to 3D printing and currently climbing the learning curve of printing itself but will want to start learning about doing my own modeling soon.

The only criticism I’d make is that patching drywall is dead simple and cheap and so your solution seems possibly a bit overengineered (and, while I’m at it, that Andreesen’s observation is both facile and meaningless and is probably a reflection more of the bids Marc Andreesen’s house manager gets than anything insightful about labor costs in America).
by arp242 | 2025-11-17 18:13:36+00:00
There's an old presentation from late 90s or early 2000s where Linus talks a bit about the origins of Linux, how much he hated working with OpenVMS at university, and how much of a breath of fresh air Unix was. The reason he liked Unix so much was that "you could understand the whole system. Maybe you don't know exactly how the startup system works right now, but if you need to know then you just go in there and figure it out".

This fairly accurately describes why I generally prefer systems like Void (including for my daily desktop). Alpine has a similar experience (although I hate OpenRC), as do the BSD systems (mostly; there's some ridiculous historical complexity here).
by Attrecomet | 2025-11-17 18:14:32+00:00
WebSerial and WebUSB are the best thing to happen to browsers since sliced bread. Just because you can't see why it's amazing that users won't need to give some random, badly supported driver SYSTEM/root privileges to run their specialized hardware -- encompassing hobbyist, educational and professional uses -- doesn't mean it's not obviously useful, and Mozilla's stance on keeping it out of Firefox will just harm their market share in these area -- education probably being the most hurtful.

From what I gather here, XSLT's functionality OTOH is easily replaced, and unlike the useful hardware support you're raging against, is a behemoth to support.
by matwood | 2025-11-17 18:14:42+00:00
> Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively?

Admittedly this was 20ish years ago, but I used to teach the business analysts XSLT so they could create/edit/format their own reports.

At the time Crystal Reports had become crazy expensive so I developed a system that would send the data to the browser as XML and then an XSLT to format the report. It provided basic interactivity and could be edited by people other than me. Also, if I remember, at the time it only worked in IE because it was the only browser with the transform function.
by stuxnet79 | 2025-11-17 18:15:26+00:00
Concur on this. I always thought that Debezium only supported MySQL binlog since that is the world I operate in. I did not know that it was also an option for Postgres CDC via the WAL. Now that I know, I would recommend defaulting to it.

Even with Debezium I have run into myriad issues. It blows my mind that someone would want to roll their own logic to set up replicas. IMHO this post should be advertised more as a fun intellectual exercise.
by SkyBelow | 2025-11-17 18:15:43+00:00
I didn't really say this in my previous point as it was going to get a bit too detailed about something not quite related to what I was describing, but when models do give me lyrics without using a web search, it has hallucinated every time.

As for searching for the lyrics, I often have to give it the title and the artist to find the song, and sometimes even have to give context of where the song is from, otherwise it'll either find a more popular English song with a similar title or still hallucinate. Luckily I know enough of the language to identify when the song is fully wrong.

No clue how well it would work with popular English songs as I've never tried those.
by glenstein | 2025-11-17 18:15:53+00:00
Exactly, those changes which I believe were done at the time to create space for Google Plus (which I think in an alternative reality with some different choices and different execution could very well have been a relevant entrant into the social media space).

It involved driving a steak through the heart of Google reader. Perhaps the most widely used RSS reader on the planet, and ripple effects that led to the de-emphasis of RSS across the internet. Starting the historical timeline after those choices in summarizing it as an absence of market demand overlooks the fact that intentional choices were made on this front to roll it back rather than to emphasize it and make it accessible.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-17 18:16:11+00:00
Okay, I was entertaining the author's position to a point, but I have to get off the train where they sing the praises of NPAPI.

Hey fam. I remember NPAPI. I wrote a very large NPAPI plugin.

The problem with NPAPI is that it lets people run arbitrary code as your browser. it was barely sandboxed. At best, it let any plugin do its level best to crash your browser session. At worst, it's a third-party binary blob you can't inspect running in the same thing you use to control your bank account.

NPAPI died for a good reason, and it has little to do with someone wanting to control your experience and everything to do with protecting you, the user, from bad actors. I think the author tips their hand a little too far here; the world they're envisioning is one where the elite hackers among us get to keep using the web and everyone else just gets owned by mechanisms they can't understand, and that's fine because it lets us be "wild" and "free" like we were in the nineties and early aughts again. Coupled with the author's downplaying of the security concerns in the XSLT lib, the author seems comfortable with the notion that security is less important than features, and I think there's a good reason that the major browser creators and maintainers disagree.

The author's dream, at the bottom, "a mesh of building blocks," is asking dozens upon dozens upon dozens of independent operators to put binary blobs in your browser outside the security sandbox. We stopped doing that for very, very good reasons.
by iLemming | 2025-11-17 18:16:30+00:00
Yeah, I admit, fair complaints. Emacs can be tricky to render things exactly how you like - I use it on Mac, Linux, GUI and terminal and do have different semantics for each.

The tradeoff is that Emacs does let you handle it all - you're not forced to accept platform defaults like in some editors. Most editors have their UI/behavior largely baked in by the platform. You can customize colors and keybindings, but the fundamentals - window management, font rendering, how system keys work, terminal integration - are mostly dictated by whether you're on Mac, Windows, or Linux.

So when you have mac Emacs behaving differently than Linux Emacs, it's not because the software forced you into that corner - it's because the underlying systems are different and Emacs exposes that difference rather than hiding it behind a unified abstraction layer.

Emacs gives you the rope to make things consistent across platforms, but also the rope to hang yourself. Other editors pre-tie the knot for you.
by lproven | 2025-11-17 18:16:40+00:00
Came along later.

386BSD was 1992:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/TZ-gIRRHiXA/m/eA...

BSD/386, later BSD/OS, was 1993:

https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1993/0411.htm

A pic of a contemporary advert:

https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386
by dang | 2025-11-17 18:17:11+00:00
Prequel:

Google is killing the open web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44949857 - Aug 2025 (181 comments)

Also related. Others?

XSLT RIP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873434 - Nov 2025 (459 comments)

Removing XSLT for a more secure browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45823059 - Nov 2025 (337 comments)

Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779261 - Nov 2025 (149 comments)

XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987346 - Aug 2025 (146 comments)

Google did not unilaterally decide to kill XSLT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987239 - Aug 2025 (128 comments)

"Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185 - Aug 2025 (535 comments)

Should we remove XSLT from the web platform? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44909599 - Aug 2025 (96 comments)
by laxd | 2025-11-17 18:17:24+00:00
"If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus

My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing.

And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.
by TurkishPoptart | 2025-11-17 18:17:39+00:00
This phrasing surprised me, too. Bandera certainly has a mixed legacy. The truth of the matter is that Stalin's brutality and evil was so bad that he forced western Ukrainian nationalists to collaborate with Nazi Germany (which of course was also brutal and evil, but also offered a semblance of hope for Ukrainians, like other ethnic minorities and partisans who were placed against gargantuan rocks and hard places during the height of the horrors of the 20th century, and perhaps world history).
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-17 18:18:16+00:00
What you can do, and what has been done in the past, is get a critical mass of large cryptocurrency actors to agree that a protocol change should be applied and that the results of that protocol change are called "Bitcoin". As the Bitcoin Cash folks quickly realized, it's not tenable to try and maintain a disagreement with Coinbase and large miners about about what the Bitcoin protocol is; if you don't want to accept the upgrade, your only practical option is to make a fork and call it something else.
by mc32 | 2025-11-17 18:18:18+00:00
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach.

ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)

It’d be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder what Tiburon will be doing. They’ve had ALPRs since forever as they only have one road in and one road out, so it’s easy for them to do.
by throwaway675309 | 2025-11-17 18:19:19+00:00
I have a rough time calculating how much more productive AI tooling has made me, because when it does save me time (simple mocking, greenfielding, proof-of-concept), - it saves me a ton of time. Conversely when it fails hard on me I can lose a lot of time and also patience.

The trick is developing the intuition to know when to cut your losses early and instead of continuing to fight the LLM, just implement it yourself.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-11-17 18:19:25+00:00
Karpathy needs to cite the damn papers. In this case its clear he read or at least heard of: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14245&ved=2ahUKEwjru7nL5fmQAxUMDT...

For a guy with such high profile, its soooo easy to take credit for ideas to make them seem original.
by cubefox | 2025-11-17 18:19:27+00:00
There are only a few hundred people working at Valve, with 79 working on Steam, but they are making 6.5 billion USD yearly. That's extreme. One of the highest revenue per employee ratios in the world. They are spending almost nothing. The 30% are almost pure profit.

Since PC is an open platform, the proper comparison would be other PC store fronts which are substantially cheaper than Steam. Unfortunately there is no incentive for users to switch, as Valve apparently contractually forbids games to be sold at a lower price outside Steam.
by tsoukase | 2025-11-17 18:20:19+00:00
Off course curing patients is viable. I am a doctor and I live off from it well enough. Now, if GS means "searching for potential methods to cure patients", then the answer is it depends. Is searching for new oil fields worthless? Or for a new battery technology? The low, even medium, hanging fruits have long been chopped. We have to climb ladders to reach the high hanging ones. This is called investment and is getting more and more expensive.
by dang | 2025-11-17 18:20:32+00:00
We don't like euphemisms, bowdlerisms, or corpspeak either, and consider them loosely included under the word "misleading" in:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I've made the title say 'used' instead of 'pre-owned' now.
by ilaksh | 2025-11-17 18:20:49+00:00
Okay so if sending raw binary is a normal use case, does that mean HTTP/3 is a misnomer? Or are they confusing me with the way they present Web transport ad being equivalent to HTTP/3 and WebTransport just sending binary data?

Also, what client libraries are there for Python, Rust etc. for WebTransport? Does it work with any HTTP/3/QUIC implementation?
by vacuity | 2025-11-17 18:21:03+00:00
Why are you singling out Americans? Cognitive biases and hazards abound. I think that everyone is irrational on choice subjects (differing by person), more or less. The idea that humans are rational, always or mostly, seems wrong. Now, I may accept that pure rationality is not necessarily desirable, so I'm willing to discuss tradeoffs.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-11-17 18:21:13+00:00
In Norway people are extremely weather-focused, and the national weather service delivers quite advanced graphics for people to understand what is going on.

The standard graph that most people look at to get an idea about today and tomorrow: https://www.yr.no/en/forecast/graph/1-72837/Norway/Oslo/Oslo...

The live weather radar which shows where it is raining right now and prediction/history for rain +/- 90 minutes. This is accurate enough that you can use it to time your walk from the office to the subway and avoid getting wet: https://www.yr.no/en/map/radar/1-72837/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/Oslo

Then you have more specialised forecasts of course. Dew point, feels like temperature, UV, pollution, avalanche risks, statistics, sea conditions, tides, ... People tend to geek out quite heavily on these.
by gruez | 2025-11-17 18:21:29+00:00
That might be true but that doesn't mean the effect is false in the aggregate. The classic example given in Baumol's paper was a violinist[1]. Sure, playing a violin might be more enjoyable than working in HVAC or churning out enterprise CRUD apps, and some people might even accept a paycut[2] to be a violinist, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't real. Despite zero productivity growth in being a concert violinist, wages for it has still risen, thanks to productivity growth elsewhere. People might be willing to take a pay cut to be a violinist, but not a arbitrarily large paycut.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential
by kykat | 2025-11-17 18:22:26+00:00
With all these new APIs, I worry what the web will look like in 10 years, will be have this huge API surface always will us? Will we start to see deprecations in the web api? I'm worried if the XSLT is setting a precedent on deprecating "complex" and "hard to maintain" APIs.

EDIT: Think also about webgl1/2, webgpu, webxr, websocket, webrtc, webauthn ...
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-11-17 18:22:31+00:00
> The fact that you put "contract" in quotes suggests that you know there really is no such thing.

It's in quotes because people seem keen to remind everyone that there's no legal obligation on the part of the browser makers not to break backwards compatibility. The reasoning seems to be that if we can't sue google for a given action, that action must be fine and the people objecting to it must be wrong. I take a rather dim view of this line of reasoning.

> The reason we have as much backwards compatibility as we do is largely historical and always driven by business goals and requirements, as dictated by customers.

As you yourself pointed out, the web is a giant pile of cobbled together technologies that all seemed like a good idea at the time. If breaking changes were an option, there is a _long_ list of potential depreciation to pick from which would greatly simplify development of both browsers and websites/apps. Further, new features/standards would be able to be added with much less care, since if problems were found in those standards they could be removed/reworked. Despite those huge benefits, no such changes are/should be made, because the costs breaking backwards compatibility are just that high. Maintaining the implied promise that software written for the web will continue to work is a business requirement, because it's crucial for the long term health of the ecosystem.
by lelandbatey | 2025-11-17 18:22:41+00:00
To fully show my hand: What I do not like are mocks which have you outline a series of behaviors/method calls which are expected to be called, typically with specific input parameters, often with methods in order. In python, this looks like setting up Mocks and then using `assert_called` methods. In Go, this means using Gomock-generated structs which have an EXPECT.

A test should not fail when the outputs do not change. In pursuit of this ideal I often end up with fakes (to use Martin Fowler's terms) of varying levels of complexity, but not "mocks" as many folks refer to them.

[0] - https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.mock.html#unittes...

[1] - https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/golang/mock/gomock
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-11-17 18:22:42+00:00
The billion laughs bug was fixed in libxml2 in 2008. (As far as I understand in .Net this bug was fixed in 2014 with .Net 4.5.2. In 2019 a bug similar to "billion laughs" was found in Go YAML parser although it was explicitly mentioned and forbidden by YAML specs. Among other products it affected Kubernetes.)

Other vectors probably mean a single vector: external entities, where a) you process untrusted XML on server and b) allow the processor to read external entities. This is not a bug, but early versions of XML processors may lack an option to disallow access to external entities. This also has been fixed.

XSLT has no exploits at all, that is no features that can be misused.
by estebank | 2025-11-17 18:22:58+00:00
"CPython has historically encountered numerous bugs and crashes due to invalid memory accesses. We believe that introducing Rust into CPython would reduce the number of such issues by disallowing invalid memory accesses by construction. While there will necessarily be some unsafe operations interacting with CPython’s C API to begin with, implementing the core module logic in safe Rust would greatly reduce the amount of code which could potentially be unsafe."
by lkey | 2025-11-17 18:23:32+00:00
Also as noted in the prior dupe, the article also misunderstands it's own topic, as explained in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox):

In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient *to use*; however, as the cost of *using the resource drops*, if demand is highly price elastic [PED], this results in overall demand [for the resource] increasing.

The cost to use tokens is already zero or deeply negative, depending on your accounting. And the author is mistaking the cost of 'creating/extracting the resource' (token generation economics) with cost of 'using the resource' (calling an API). I don't think we'll understand the true cost of, and demand for AI services for quite some time.
by mrandish | 2025-11-17 18:23:53+00:00
You may not need to get a museum's cooperation. After a quick search it seems these come up for sale from time to time. I saw one on the Vintage Computer Federation forums offered in 2021 for $500. You may be able to find a collector online who has one and will record the relays for you. A lot of folks have pretty high-quality USB mics for conferencing/podcasting these days.

An alternative might be going to a regional VCF show where one will be (possibly by pre-arrangement with a collector). There are five or six shows held around the country every year. Unlike a museum almost all the devices there are available for hands-on interaction.
by pmontra | 2025-11-17 18:24:00+00:00
Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of downvotes. Then Windows 11 happened. Surprise. Actually I thought that there has been a consensus about Google being evil for at least ten years but I might me wrong.
by estebank | 2025-11-17 18:24:22+00:00
I'm really not looking forward to another week long round of Rust discourse from people rubbernecking on the proposal.

To get the first few points I expect to be raised on every thread that links to the proposal:

- it is a proposal by people who work on Python that would want to leverage Rust, not Rust people imposing on Python

- it is a proposal, doesn't mean it will get adopted, let the team discuss amongst themselves

- as called out in the proposal, official Rust platform support covers official Python platform support already