MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sltkr | 2025-11-19 19:21:43+00:00
> when I asked on IRC the only answer I got was 'man perldoc'

Your overall point notwithstanding, this was just bad advice. What you want is `man perlvar` (or equivalently `perldoc perlvar`) which documents this and other predefined variables:

HANDLE->autoflush( EXPR ) $OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH $| If set to nonzero, forces a flush right away and after every write or print on the currently selected output channel. Default is 0 (regardless of whether the channel is really buffered by the system or not; $| tells you only whether you've asked Perl explicitly to flush after each write). STDOUT will typically be line buffered if output is to the terminal and block buffered otherwise. Setting this variable is useful primarily when you are outputting to a pipe or socket, such as when you are running a Perl program under rsh and want to see the output as it's happening. This has no effect on input buffering. See "getc" in perlfunc for that. See "select" in perlfunc on how to select the output channel. See also IO::Handle. Mnemonic: when you want your pipes to be piping hot

Also, `man perl` gives a great overview of the extensive number of Perl-related manpages. I think any person that starts from `man perl` will be able to answer a lot of their questions, but part of the problem was that around the millennium, people stopped reading man-pages, and started looking for information on the web. perl was one of those old-school tools that were documented extensively in man-pages, but past 1995 ~nobody bothered to read man-pages anymore.
by wan23 | 2025-11-19 19:21:44+00:00
Do you think each person is responsible for enforcing federal laws? Like if you personally are not spending your own time and money to round up those in violation of federal statute then you're doing something wrong?

And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.
by skerit | 2025-11-19 19:21:59+00:00
Last night, just after Gemini 3 was released and became available for Gemini-CLI, I saw Gemini-CLI's team post that you could access Gemini 3 with either an API key OR with _Gemini AI Ultra_, so I thought: great, I'll get that!

Now you CAN NOT get the Google One stuff if your account is part of a workspace. I thought: how awful. I want to pay, but I simply can't?

Oh, but then I noticed: You CAN add a _Gemini AI Ultra_ license via the Google Workspace Admin area, great!

Turns out: you fucking can't. That's _Google AI Ultra FOR BUSINESS_ and that IS NOT supported.

So I had to get the Google One subscription on my personal account after all.

Combine that with the _pathetic_ usage limits: somehow not token-based, but amount of requests per 24 hour window (which is 500 for Gemini 3) and Gemini 3's incredible chattiness (it uses A LOT more requests to get something done compared to Claude) and you hit the usage limits in just 2 hours.
by eikenberry | 2025-11-19 19:22:17+00:00
Perl 5.

Perl 4 was a great upgrade to bash as a scripting language. Perl 5 added a bunch of complexity to remake Perl into a programming language. It failed.

Perl 4 was a great scripting language whereas Perl 5 was a terrible programing language. Perl 5 lost to the better (dynamic) programming languages and bash reclaimed the scripting title as Perl 4 was dead.
by empw | 2025-11-19 19:22:32+00:00
To me Perl was just Weird, to no particular end. Not the kind of mind expanding Haskell/Prolog/Lisp weirdness that opens up new possibilities. It just does roughly the same things as every other language, but everything is done slightly differently due to evolving out of the primordial soup of bourne shell and AWK filtered through Larry Wall's brain.

Perl and Python were similarly powerful and useful languages, but I could learn and start producing useful code in Python after reading an hour long tutorial. Perl took an order of magnitude longer, and remained more awkward to use just due to the Weirdness. There was a momentum building in the early 2000s toward competitors like Python and Ruby that were seen as less crufty and more modern.

Perl's developers seemed to agree, since they cooked up their own competitor to Perl, an entirely different language confusingly called Perl 6. The coexistence of Perl 5 and 6 made the Python 3 transition look like a cakewalk -- at least it would have save for Perl 6's almost entire failure to exist for over a decade after its inception. It produced lots of constantly churning specs and blog posts about register based virtual machines with native support for continuations or whatever, but no implementation of a language that anyone felt comfortable using for any real development. Meanwhile people kept using the ossifying Perl 5 for existing applications, and gradually transitioning away as they were replaced.

Also PHP overtook it for the "just FTP a script to $5 shared hosting and make a webapp" use case.
by sinker | 2025-11-19 19:22:35+00:00
As an opposing viewpoint, I also use FC extensively for designing moderately complex parts (fully parametrically constrained assemblies, dozens of parts per assembly, mechanical components involving motion).

I've also extended the functionality with python, and have heavily customized the theme and shortcuts to fit my personal taste.

I not only tolerate the software, but enjoy using it, and am quite proficient at it.

I would recommend FreeCAD to others, but with some caveats. The most important being that they need to be willing to tolerate a few hours of introductory material, and second that they are serious about using the software long-term.

Otherwise, I'd probably just recommend Onshape. But, for many others, FC is fully viable.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-19 19:22:49+00:00
Eudora was practically a CULT. I worked for one of their users who straight refused to use anything else, and one of my ongoing jobs as an admin was trying to get Exchange to play nice with it. It was maddening.

I fired it up several times for testing purposes, I don't get the hype, but man, for some people it was just the best damn software ever made.
by VHRanger | 2025-11-19 19:23:07+00:00
Keep feedback loops short and critical output to be verified by humans short.

So this means that outputted answers in something like Kagi Assistant shouldn't be like those "Deep Research" report products where humans inevitably skim over the pages of outputted text.

Similarly if you're using an LLM for coding or to write, keep diffs small and iteration cycles short.

The point is to design the workflow to keep the human in the loop as much as possible, instead of "turn your brain off" coding style.
by bjackman | 2025-11-19 19:23:17+00:00
Dishwashers don't boil the water, and they anyway use different kinds of detergent specifically designed for the usecase.

Anyway like I said I doubt it's a huge deal. Washing liquid isn't _designed_ to be boiled but I certainly hope the engineers consider the possibility that it might get boiled, and avoid things that would be toxic in that case...
by gradientsrneat | 2025-11-19 19:23:24+00:00
IME Lemmy is more predominantly far left although a very small userbase.

Mastodon has islands of different culture on both the left and the right that don't interact much save a few of the largest instances. Some of the medium-sized ones vouched by joinmastodon have a lot of far left people. There's also a lot of mastodon forks which have been rebranded and closed off (at least one is far right), which complicates things. If you look at Mastodon blocklists you can get a feel for the boundaries.
by paradite | 2025-11-19 19:23:35+00:00
In theory, auto-regressive models should not have limit on context. It should generate the next token with all previous tokens.

In practice, when training a model, people select a context window so that during inference, you know how much GPU memory to allocate for a prompt and reject the prompt if it exceeds the memory limit.

Of course there's also degrading performance as context gets longer, but I suspect memory limit is the primary factor of why we have context window limits.
by mikem170 | 2025-11-19 19:24:18+00:00
Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:

> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]

The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
by nonethewiser | 2025-11-19 19:24:21+00:00
Again, then why does the EU do this? Clearly its not simply about erroding confidence in GDPR if the EU is literally doing it themselves.

Besides, you seem to be confusing something.

GDPR requires explicit explanation of each cookie, including these 1000s of trackers. It in no way bans these. This is just GDPR working as intended - some people want to have 1000s of trackers and GDPR makes them explain each one with a permission.

Maybe it would be nice to not have so many trackers. Maybe the EU should ban trackers. Maybe consumers should care about granular cookie permissions and stop using websites that have 1000s of them because its annoying as fuck. But some companies do prefer to have these trackers and it is required by GDPR to confront the user with the details and a control.
by mainecoder | 2025-11-19 19:24:48+00:00
What if I told you that China has more influence over the EU than it has over the Kamer der Staten-Generaal( the Dutch parliament), thus they are using the EU to pressure the dutch. The irony is that European Sovereignty is respected when all the countries of Europe are able to make their own sovereignty respected i.e. it is each of the individual states making their own sovereignty respected that actually elevates the sovereignty of Europe, the EU by pressuring, disregarding and relegating the sovereignty of the member states devalues the collective sovereignty of Europe. Additionally adversaries need only focus on having leverage over EU officials and the EU officials will do their bidding for them.
by damn3849472 | 2025-11-19 19:24:59+00:00
I must say I feel very vindicated by this. The seizure of control of the company just for appointing a CEO from China (the horror!) never smelled right to me, but everyone in the previous comment section on this tried to rationalize it with "There must be some legitimate national security reason for the Dutch to do this". Clearly not much of a threat for them to cave so quickly!
by etruong42 | 2025-11-19 19:26:18+00:00
Spot on. I would suggest a slightly different framing where the antagonist isn't really the "approving" teams but "leaders" who all want a seat at the table and exercise their authority lest their authority muscles atrophy. Since they're not part of the development, unless they object to something, would they really have any impact or leadership?

I always laugh-cry with whomever I'm sitting next to whenever launch announcements come out with more people in the "leadership" roles than the individual contributor roles. So many "leaders" but none with the awareness or the care of the farcical volumes such announcements speak.
by codexon | 2025-11-19 19:26:20+00:00
I've actually tried hetzner on and off with 1 server for the past 2 years and keep running into downtime every few months.

First I used an ex101 with an i9-13900. Within a week it just froze. It could not be reset remotely. Nothing in kern.log. Support offered no solution but a hard reboot. No mention of what might be wrong other than user error.

A few months later, one of the drives just disconnects from raid by itself. It took support 1 hour to respond and they said they found no issue so it must be my fault.

Then I changed to a ryzen based server and it also mysteriously had problems like this. Again the support blamed the user.

It was only after I cancelled the server and several months later that I see this so I know it isn't just me.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...
by port11 | 2025-11-19 19:27:15+00:00
This would require politicians and policy-makers that think long-term, know what they're regulating, and maybe have been in the field. I don't think Law school Eurocrats can do any of the 3 items above, at least not well enough. This is either a way to chop at the (poorly designed and already watered down) GDPR or true, unapologetic lack of care.

I'm hoping to go for my 3rd startup and ‘compliance costs’ have never been stifling; it's just more expensive to run a business here and there's far, far less funding available. That's really it.

Belgium's tax haven will make some people willing to give you 10k in post-seed. Wow. We hunted VCs for 1.5 years to negotiate one million-ish euros after showing market traction. We just aren't on the same level as the US, and that's kinda okay. Grants might work, but I mostly see grants for things that won't compete well in the current market.

AI nonsense won't make us more competitive — but hey, we'll arrive late to the bubble. We need to be building the kind of core, dependable infrastructure that would honour privacy, make us more independent. Backing off on privacy protections won't yield a mobile OS, an independent browser, better cloud options, etc.

It's just… lazy. “Slap AI on it”-level policy. Ugh.
by dfltr | 2025-11-19 19:27:32+00:00
I vividly remember the first time a friend showed me PHP in the late 90s. You're saying I can just write a script that generates HTML and throw it in /foo/index.php and that's the whole thing?

It's wild that right up until Rails got popular, we were writing code that served billions of requests off of homebrewed MVC-ish PHP frankenframeworks.
by wpietri | 2025-11-19 19:27:55+00:00
Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because this is, whether I like it or not, a commons for a community that I'm part of. So occasionally I still get sucked in if only to providing a contrasting voice to some of the grossly unempathetic stuff I see here.
by viraptor | 2025-11-19 19:28:17+00:00
There's lots of stuff that exists in AWS without being in TF. Where do you create a router, a DHCP server, each ENI, etc. ? Why are the instances in a changing state in ASG rather than all in TF? Some things are not exactly as they exist in TF, because it makes more sense that way. We never had 1:1 correspondence in the first place.
by blop | 2025-11-19 19:28:22+00:00
As my main desktop computers I've been using Fedora and Windows (for gaming only) virtualised on top of a single proxmox host with 2 GPUs passed through for more than 10 years... Upgraded all the way to latest versions (guests and hosts) without ever having to reinstall from scratch. I upgraded the hardware a few times (just cloned the disks), and since the desktops are virtualised, Windows always worked fine without complaining about new hardware drivers (only thing to change was GPU driver)

Another benefit is block-level backups of the VMs (either with qcow2 disks files or ZFS block storage, which both support snapshots and easy incremental backups of changed block data only)

Proxmox is great for this, although maybe not on a laptop unless you're ready to do a lot of tweaks for sleep, etc.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-19 19:28:22+00:00
GPT-5 was recently updated to make it more "thinking" and "warmer" or whatever and now a task (semantically compare these two short files) that used to take 5 seconds and reliably produce useful and consistent output now takes 90 seconds to "think" (while it's thinking output makes it pretty clear there is zero thinking happening) and produces a completely differently structured output every single time, making the tool not only slower and more expensive to use, but worse at a simple task that LLMs should be very good at.

There's an option to "get a quick answer" and I hoped clicking that would revert to previous performance and instead what it does is ignore that I uploaded two files and asks me to upload the files

Literally the only real good task I've found for these dumb things and they still found a way to fuck it up because they need to keep the weirdos and whales addicted. It's now almost easier to go back to comparing these files by eye, or just bite the bullet and finally write a few lines of python to actually do it right and reliably.
by NalNezumi | 2025-11-19 19:29:01+00:00
A hacker should probably know that it's usually trade offs and blanket statements are very useless. Certain tools are good for certain tasks and situations, but bad for others. No free lunch and all that.

If you make that blanket statement, you're definitely not a hacker (or just a novice). But you'd make a heck of a politician or tech bro salesman
by hadlock | 2025-11-19 19:29:04+00:00
I've been really impressed with codex so far. I have been working on a flight simulator hobby project for the last 6 months and finally came to the conclusion that I need to switch from floating origin, which my physics engine assumes with the coordinate system it uses, to a true ECEF coordinate system (what underpins GPS). This involved a major rewrite of the coordinate system, the physics engine, even the graphics system and auxilary stuff like asset loading/unloading etc. that was dependent on local X,Y,Z. It even rewrote the PD autopilot to account for the changes in the coordinate system. I gave it about a paragraph of instructions with a couple of FYIs and... it just worked! No major graphical glitches except a single issue with some minor graphical jitter, which it fixed on the first try. In total took about 45 minutes but I was very impressed.

I was unconvinced it had actually, fully ripped out the floating origin logic, so I had it write up a summary and then used that as a high level guide to pick through the code and it had, as you said, followed the instructions to the letter. Hugely impressive. In march of 2023 OpenAI's products struggled to draw a floating wireframe cube.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-19 19:29:21+00:00
>Why do the dutch feel the need to show goodwill towards CCP?

They're not showing goodwill, they're desperate. Why did the Netherlands (read the US) think it's in any position to seize a company from China when the entire auto industry is dependent on Chinese chips?

I can't help but laugh at this, as a European even. China unlike our esteemed continent isn't going to have its businesses commandeered around by Washington, we should take a lesson in self-respect from them. It's also not on us to dictate what system of government they run their country on. Thankfully someone isn't putting up with Washington's crap.
by rmunn | 2025-11-19 19:29:21+00:00
Personal anecdote in support: my first job out of college was at a data-analysis company, where my task was usually to write one-off scripts to extract data from various data sources and massage it into the format the analysts wanted for their spreadsheets. I wrote most of those scripts in Perl at first, with the odd Bash script here and there. Then one of my coworkers said "Hey, if you like Perl, you'll love Python". I learned Python (2.1 was the most recent version at the time, which tells you how old this story is) and almost immediately switched over. All my new one-off data-extraction scripts from then on were written in Python (though still with the odd Bash script here and there).
by blutoot | 2025-11-19 19:29:34+00:00
Regardless of the AWS tech in question (and yes VPCE for non-compute services is a very common pattern in an enterprise setup using AWS since VPC with NAT is a pretty fundamental requirement), I honestly believe this was the biggest miss from the author: “Always validate your assumptions. I thought "EC2 to S3 is free" was enough. I should have tested with a small amount of data and monitored the costs before scaling up to terabytes.” To me this is a symptom of DevOps/infra engineers being too much in love with infra automation without actually testing the full end to end flow.
by jsight | 2025-11-19 19:29:47+00:00
I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if Perl had been the dominant scripting language at the time that ChatGPT, Codex, Claude Code and other tools like that became available.

Would Python have been able to compete, in a world where Perl could be readily comprehended by LLMs?

So, maybe what killed Perl was lack of VS Code forks and lack of being agentic.
by nonethewiser | 2025-11-19 19:30:33+00:00
OK sounds great.

But some companies prefer to have trackers. They are required by GDPR to explain each cookie and offer a control for permissions. They probably had trackers before GDPR too. So how is that malicious compliance? They are just operating how they did before except now they are observing GDPR.

It sounds like maybe you just want them to ban trackers. Or for people to care more about trackers and stop using websites with trackers (thereby driving down trackers) Great. Those are all great. But none of them happened and none of that is dictated by GDPR.
by goranmoomin | 2025-11-19 19:30:54+00:00
I can't see how this is being blamed to the phone device maker (or the users who have not updated yet), why is Australia phasing out their 3G network if a large swath of their people's phones are dependent on them for dialing their emergency number?

In my view, they (the govt) either should have not gave permission on selling the devices who relies on having a 3G network for emergency calls for at least 10 years ago, or they should just have their 3G network operable for another 5 years.

For example, our country (South Korea) had 2G networks operable until ~2021, and are planning to have all of the 3G networks operable for the foreseeable future. It can be done.
by alwa | 2025-11-19 19:31:01+00:00
Yes, it is—gp’s point being we do that all the time and often agree that it makes sense.

A baby doesn’t catch a sex pest charge for running around naked, but it also can’t get a gun license. A mom-n-pop doesn’t have to hire an auditor and file with the SEC, but it also can’t sell shares of itself to the public.

Why? The bigger you are, the more responsibility you bear: the bigger the impact of your mistakes, the subtler the complexities of your operation, the greater your sophistication relative to individual customers/citizens—and the greater your relative capacity to self-regulate.
by halifaxbeard | 2025-11-19 19:31:02+00:00
At this point I’m not convinced that Gemini 3 Pro was post-trained on data Google had permission to use, going by the myriad of issues on the Gemini CLI tracker around Google AI/Google One/Google Cloud/Google Workspaces.

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/12121

It is far too easy to accidentally end up under the wrong privacy agreement, to the point of where some workplaces are banning use of the Gemini CLI!
by zahlman | 2025-11-19 19:31:10+00:00
I remember trying to use the new "reference" feature (when it was new), with "blessing" and so on and so forth, to try to create real data structures, and finding in some way or another that it was just not regular. I can't recall the details, but something along the lines of a feeling that the syntax worked differently for, say, the top level of a tree (or first index of a multidimensional array, etc.) vs the rest of the structure.