MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by funnybeam | 2025-11-25 21:42:49+00:00
From memory I believe it was windows 7 that broke the taskbar - before that you could put it on any side of the screen and also embed folders on it.

I used to have it on the left side of the screen with my actual documents folder (not “My Documents” which even then was full of other crap) embedded in it. Kind of like vertical tabs in the browser, but better

I was really annoyed when they took that functionality away for no apparent reason. Win 7 was the start of the slide for me, windows steadily got worse with them removing more and more functionality. Was it seven that removed all the customisation you used to be able to do as well and replaced it with much more limited themes?
by ryandv | 2025-11-25 21:42:57+00:00
It is worth noting that this exact sequence (the Chaldean sequence) of the seven classical celestial objects follows the same paths as the Serpent of Wisdom coiled about the Tree of Life in the Hermetic Qabalah. This is the western analogue to the Hindu notion of Kundalini, which shares the same serpentine symbolism; both of which represent the process of the psychological maturation of man.

See Liber 777 Col. VII [0], Key Scales 3 through 9 inclusive. Also note that Key Scales 4 through 9 in Col. XCVII, excluding Saturn in old age, correspond to the "Ruach," "soul," "mind," or (one could say) "post-bicameral ego" of man.

[0] https://ia902906.us.archive.org/22/items/Liber777Revised/Lib...
by retrac | 2025-11-25 21:43:05+00:00
x86_64 is the only official Arch Linux. All other ports are unofficial. They are community projects where many of the members are the same as the main Arch Linux.

I think it's basically for the same reason as why they dropped 32-bit x86 support about 8 years ago. Not enough users. (That resulted in the unofficial Arch Linux 32 to maintain support.)
by jpereira | 2025-11-25 21:43:19+00:00
I'm curious about how the persistence primitives (OrderedTable, Table, etc) are implemented under the hood. Is it calling out to some other database service? Is it implemented in Unison itself? Seems like a really interesting composable set of primitives, together with the Database abstraction, but having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around it!
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-25 21:43:45+00:00
even if you prepped since you were 5 years old? and what if you're unprepared, will the decrease be significant? I mean of course, even with weight lifting, you can't prepare even a year in advance and show a significant difference over professional competitors. But people do peak. Are you saying Einstien's IQ would be the same if he was tested at 50 yo, and he was working in the coal mines in virginia his since 5 yo? If so, that's indeed enlightening, I'd love to see any research that backs up that claim.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-25 21:44:34+00:00
>The smartest kids are smarter than ever before.

That is provably incorrect, as since Victorian times people lost around 14 to 23 IQ points on average. Notably, the corrected scores have continued on a downward trend for the past century.

People are not getting smarter, as recent events have shown. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMHfBobgLSI
by shagie | 2025-11-25 21:45:07+00:00
> If you need to make a national payroll, you have to use it for a small town with a payroll of 50 people first, get the bugs worked out, then try it with a larger town, then a small city, then a large city, then a province, and then and only then are you ready to try it at a national level.

At a large box retail chain (15 states, ~300 stores) I worked on a project to replace the POS system.

The original plan had us getting everything working (Ha!) and then deploying it out to stores and then ending up with the two oddball "stores". The company cafeteria and surplus store were technically stores in that they had all the same setup and processes but were odd.

When the team that I was on was brought into this project, we flipped that around and first deployed to those two several months ahead of the schedule to deploy to the regular stores.

In particular, the surplus store had a few dozen transactions a day. If anything broke, you could do reconciliation by hand. The cafeteria had single register transaction volume that surpassed a surplus store on most any other day. Furthermore, all of its transactions were payroll deductions (swipe your badge rather than credit card or cash). This meant that if anything went wrong there we weren't in trouble with PCI and could debit and credit accounts.

Ultimately, we made our deadline to get things out to stores. We did have one nasty bug that showed up in late October (or was it early November?) with repackaging counts (if a box of 6 was $24 and if purchased as a single item it was $4.50 ... but if you bought 6 single items it was "repackaged" to cost $24 rather than $27) which interacted with a BOGO sale. That bug resulted in absurd receipts with sales and discounts (the receipt showed you spent $10,000 but were discounted $9,976 ... and then the GMs got alerts that the store was not able to make payroll because of a $9,976 discount ... one of the devs pulled an all nighter to fix that one and it got pushed to the stores ).

I shudder to think about what would have happened if we had tried to push the POS system out to customer facing stores where the performance issues in the cafeteria where worked out first or if we had to reconcile transactions to hunt down incorrect tax calculations.
by 9dev | 2025-11-25 21:45:09+00:00
To the contrary, I feel the distinction to be very arbitrary and especially in the context of web applications so muddy it’s almost useless. Who is responsible for websockets? CSP? JavaScript chunk caching? Web worker edge deployment? File uploads? HTTP/2 stream usage?

The web as a platform shouldn’t be constrained by two arbitrary, isolated boxes, because that’s not how it works. A software developer writing code necessarily has to get involved with stuff running on client and server devices and everything in between them out of sheer necessity, if they even want to understand how modern technology works in this space.
by givemeethekeys | 2025-11-25 21:45:13+00:00
Oh, I didn't think about that.

If a private firm can make money from catching bad guys, then why wouldn't the same private firm pay rewards to people who make their job easier?

Many of the detention facilities where we keep illegal immigrants are privately run. Many of our politicians own shares in those private companies.

Shareholders don't like it when their investments don't appreciate.
by theamk | 2025-11-25 21:45:39+00:00
That's illustrates my point well - the "TRUE IPv6" philosophy is major changes in every network-facing user software.. that's why it has been 20+ years and it's not done yet.

And the justification of "Software is expecting public IPv6 address to be just reachable" is super silly. You have to be crazy in this day-and-age to operate without firewall. Every office, every home network should have "default-deny" policy from the internet. So no, your software should not expect to be reachable even once IPv6 adoption is complete.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-25 21:46:12+00:00
Even if “anyone who makes physical stuff” has heard of them, manufacturing jobs represent 12.8 million jobs[1] compared to 158 million non-farm jobs[2]. That’s 8% of the workforce. Let’s double that to account for people that used to work in manufacturing or are in maker hobbies and the like. Even at 16% I would comfortably stand by the assertion that most people have not heard about McMaster Carr’s website being a very high functioning web site.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/34316/share-of-manufacturing-...

[2]: https://falconproducts.co.in/us-manufacturing-workforce-perc...
Ask HN: Is Techmeme getting paid to boost certain articles?
by dabockster | 2025-11-25 21:46:25+00:00
https://imgur.com/a/EcBT3Cc

I noticed that Techmeme is currently boosting some guy's podcast to the very top of their website as a headline. I've also noticed the website overall becoming very deafeningly pro-AI in the past six months, often using the same idea in my screenshot to boost pro-AI content to the same headline spot or "above the fold" at the very least.

Are they taking kickbacks somehow? I don't see how a random podcast deserves headline treatment like this unless they got paid or some kind of kickback to promote it. And even then, it's not labeled as promoted content. The whole thing smells fishy to me.
by o_nate | 2025-11-25 21:46:53+00:00
Inheritance is not necessary, but then very few programming constructs are absolutely necessary. The question is does it help program clarity or not. I think that in some cases, used sparingly, it can. The main danger of inheritance is not that it is OO, but that it is not OO enough. It breaks encapsulation by mixing properties and methods between base classes and derived classes without clear boundaries. Composition is safer because it preserves encapsulation. In general, I think that protected abstract methods are a code smell, because they usually indicate close coupling of details that should be kept separate between the base and derived classes. But used correctly, inheritance can be more succinct and convenient.
by Analemma_ | 2025-11-25 21:46:58+00:00
> There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).

Gambling and facilitating sexual predation is probably worth regulating, but I don't find tasteless jokes a sufficient cause for intervention.

Nor is this even a remotely new phenomenon. I was on Newgrounds as a pre-teenager when people were making wacky flash games about school shootings and 9/11.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-25 21:47:18+00:00
Don't read this as a defense of Zuck or Musk, but some of the most brilliant people I've known sometimes had trouble getting thoughts out. It wasn't that they couldn't see their goal, but that how they thought of it was changing even as the words were leaving their mouths. Have you ever tried to explain while you were still working it out in your head? "See, it's kind of like A..., except that one part is closer to B, and that's interesting because, well, B and C have a relationship that's closer than A and C, so it might be more appropriate to say it's more C-like, except where A is..."

That didn't mean they were unintelligent. It meant that them trying to explain the flurry of ideas in their head was like me trying to type with mittens.

Of course, knuckleheads can also sound like that, but for different reasons. That kind of rambling doesn't imply that the speaker is a dumbass. It definitely doesn't guarantee that they're a genius.
by jwpapi | 2025-11-25 21:47:22+00:00
Or they just wanted to prove a point.

They surely seemed to be smart enough to choose encryption over encoding.

Hard to believe encryption would be the one thing that would trigger code scanners.

Also it’s not just every vendor, also every bad actor could’ve scraped the keys. I wonder if they’ve set up the infrastructure to handle all these thousands of keys…

Like what do you even do with most of it on scale?

Can you turn Cloud, AWS , AI api keys to money on a black market?
by maksum | 2025-11-25 21:47:30+00:00
Can’t both be true? It can be true that Roblox keeps kids hooked through shady practices but if not them, kids would have sought other places. Club Penguin, RuneScape, WOW, Xbox Live, all served similar functions for myself growing up, I don’t find it hard to believe I would have ended up on Roblox
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-25 21:48:33+00:00
That feedback is very well received, thank you.

Currently you set up a new Stripe Connect account to get started. We tried the "connect existing account" flow and discovered that, maybe due to regulations or Stripe policies, we weren't able to debit the existing accounts.

Our Stripe flow is different from the run of the mill billing SaaS because we're involved in the movement of money (rather than simply using your Stripe key to steer API requests on your behalf).

We know that makes us look a bit like a fish with legs while we grow towards where we want to be.
by observationist | 2025-11-25 21:49:05+00:00
There's a lot of data that seems to fit. I'd say the science heavily leans this way - things like the dog/cat talking button studies, AI vocalization research in primates, whales, and birds, a whole ton of biological research across mammals, and most data start to paint a picture of mammalian brain structure being more important than particular quirks of human brain biology.

There are some theories of function out there, like that of Numenta, which seems consistent across mammal brains, and is at least partially explanatory of cognitive function at a cellular level. There's also value to be found in LLMs and AI research in understanding networks and recursion and what different properties of structures that perform different functions have to conform to.

Pilot whales and blue whales and some other species have upwards of 45B cortical neurons, and if higher cognitive function is conserved across species, then they'd have the potential to be significantly more intelligent than humans - all else being equal.

A useful thought experiment is to compare different species to feral humans. Absent culture, the training, education, knowledge, and framework for understanding reality, without language, natural and wild living is pretty grim and intense. There's a whole lot we take for granted underpinning our abilities to reach the heights of technology and abstract use of language and thought.

It could be humans and primates have some sort of magic sauce - a particular quirk of networking or neurochemistry that augments relative capabilities, as opposed to embodiment or other factors. People have sought the magic sauce for decades, however, and that doesn't seem to be a viable explanation.
by rich_sasha | 2025-11-25 21:49:08+00:00
I always found the idea of jury trials terrifying.

We make legal education very hard, very thorough, we teach prospective lawyers about subtle nuances of law, guilt, evidence, bias, epistemology even. We make them do mootings.

Then we say lawyers are the very people who cannot sit in juries, and instead random people are to judge. Actually worse than random - people who have better things to do try to get out of it, or are resentful that they couldn't.

It's a bit like having highly educated doctors explain symptoms, possible diseases, as well as a crash course in biology, immunology and statistics to a panel of randos, who then vote on the best treatment for the patient.

Its only slightly worse than judges and prosecutors under reelection pressure though...
by major505 | 2025-11-25 21:49:19+00:00
I would say that he have a point if movie theaters came back as the blue colar entertainment of choice. But greed studios, financing over expensive and mediocre movies like the ones James Cameron does this days killed the cinema as an viable middle lower class option, killing small street theaters in favor of over expensive multiplex rooms, so fuck James Cameron and his opinion about what Netflix should or should not be eligible.
by simonw | 2025-11-25 21:49:30+00:00
The easiest way to do that today is to use one of the cloud-based asynchronous coding agent tools - like https://claude.ai/code or https://chatgpt.com/codex or https://jules.google/

They run the agent in a VM somewhere on their own infrastructure. Any leaks are limited to the code and credentials that you deliberately make available to those tools.
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-25 21:50:20+00:00
I always wonder what happened here. I remember hearing about how CPS was chronically underfunded in the 90s and did not even have the resources to investigate every case of serious abuse. But now they have the resources to go after parents that let their 10 year olds walk 2 blocks to a park? Did we start pumping funding into CPS or something? This is like if the cops started ticketing people for jaywalking.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-25 21:50:24+00:00
The problem with DOGE savings is that they had the typical Musk promise progression:

October 2024: Musk: “at least $2 trillion” promise.

January 20 2025: DOGE officially established by executive order.

February/March 2025: Revised target up to $1 trillion.

10 April 2025: $150 billion savings expectation announced.

By April 2025: Claim of ~$160 billion saved.

23 November 2025: Reuters reports DOGE disbanded ahead of schedule.

Independent reports of the actual result ... well claim negative savings. Musk increased spending instead of decreasing it:

A analysis by CBS News reports DOGE claims to have saved US$ 160 billion, but estimates that the cuts may instead cost taxpayers around US$ 135 billion.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-cuts-cost-135-billion-anal...

The Washington Post showed that many of the announced savings were inflated: for example, of 1,125 contracts listed as cancelled, only ~US$ 7.2 billion in savings could be verified; many reflected zero savings.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/22/doge-savi...
by csours | 2025-11-25 21:50:32+00:00
There are 2 big problems with large software projects:

1. Connecting pay to work - estimates (replanning is learning, not failure)

2. Connecting work to pay - management (the world is fractal-like, scar tissue and band-aids)

I do not pre-suppose that there are definite solutions to these problems - there may be solutions, but getting there may require going far out of our way. As the old farmer said "Oh, I can tell you how to get there, but if I was you, I wouldn't start from here"

1. Pay to Work - someone is paying for the software project, and they need to know how much it will cost. Thus estimates are asked for, an architecture is asked for, and the architecture is tied to the estimates.

This is 'The Plan!'. The project administrators will pick some lifecycle paradigm to tie the architecture to the cost estimate.

The implementation team will learn as they do their work. This learning is often viewed as failure, as the team will try things that don't work.

The implementation team will learn that the architecture needs to change in some large ways and many small ways. The smallest changes are absorbed in regular work. Medium and Large changes will require more time (thus money); This request for more money will be viewed as a failure in estimation and not as learning.

2. Work to Pay - as the architecture is implemented, development tasks are completed. The Money People want Numbers, because Money People understand how they feel about Numbers. Also these Numbers will talk to other Numbers outside the company. Important Numbers with names like Share Price.

Thus many layers of management are chartered and instituted. The lowest layer of management is the self-managed software developer. The software developer will complete development tasks related to the architecture, tied to the plan, attached to the money (and the spreadsheets grew all around, all around [0]).

When the developer communicates about work, the Management Chain cares to hear about Numbers, but sometimes they must also involve themselves in failures.

It is bad to fail, especially repeated failures at the same kind of task. So managers institute rules to prevent failures. These rules are put in a virtual cabinet, or bureau. Thus we have Rules of the Bureau or Bureaucracy. These rules are not morally bad or good; not factually incorrect or correct, but whenever we notice them, they feel bad; We notice the ones that feel bad TO US. We are often in favor of rules that feel bad to SOMEONE ELSE. You are free to opt out of this system, but there is a price to doing so.

----

Too much writing, I desist from decoding verbiage:

Thus it is OK for individuals to learn many small things, but it is a failure for the organization to learn large things. Trying to avoid and prevent failure is viewed as admirable; trying to avoid learning is self-defeating.

----

0. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+green+grass+grew+all+aro...

> git commit -am "decomposing recapitulating and recontextualizing software development bureaucracy" && git push
by impossiblefork | 2025-11-25 21:50:33+00:00
As a westerner who has at least to some degree been influenced by socialism ideologically, but who perhaps isn't a communist (I don't know what my ideology really is-- and who does), I don't necessarily dislike welfare, but I don't want to build society on it. Instead I want some element of an actual 'to each according to his contribution'-type thing with an exception so that we treat disabled people and others who can't work or who for different reasons end up being unproductive in an acceptable way.

So I don't think this is necessarily unusual in the west either, especially not if you look back to 1950s or 1960s Swedish social democrats.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-25 21:50:42+00:00
Indeed, it's editorializing.

But more broadly, all journalism is necessarily axiologically loaded. Why report on X but not on Y? Obviously, because the journalist/editor/owner thinks X is "newsworthy" while Y isn't.

Whether that means proposing a solution is another question. I can sympathize with annoyance at nonconstructive complaining, however.

Whatever the technical/legal solution, I think an important factor is also parental involvement. If Roblox is dangerous enough, don't let your kids use it. They might get around your ban, but at least you did your part. That means a great deal already. And people circumvent and break the law all the time, but that doesn't invalidate the law, and parents are lawgivers.
by INTPenis | 2025-11-25 21:51:24+00:00
PF is also from 2001. But its roots go further back, I once used a very PF-like syntax on a Unix firewall from 1997. I forget which type of Unix it was, maybe Solaris.

Either way, I don't think there is any defense for the strange syntax of IPtables, the chains, the tables. And that's coming from a person who transitioned fully from BSD to Linux 15 years ago, and has designed commercial solutions using IPtables and ipset.
by pstuart | 2025-11-25 21:52:17+00:00
IMHO there are two kinds of politics:

1. Partisan/tribal personality driven with a core of "us vs. them" 2. Government policy and the application of same.

The first has no business here, but I'd argue the second does in the context of "hacking civilization". Of course a lot of politics gets smeared about so you can't have one without the other (which is not an accident), but we should strive to find ways to talk about policies and their their merits and concerns.
by tristor | 2025-11-25 21:52:45+00:00
> Do your two decades of experience cover both sides?

Yes.

I appreciate both sides and have a wealth of experience in both. The challenge is that all the non-technical problems cannot be solved successfully while lacking a technical understanding. Projects generally don't fail for technical reasons, they fail because they were not set up for success, and that starts with having a clear understanding of requirements, feasibility, and a solid understanding of both the current state and the path to reach your desired outcomes, both politically/financially and technically.

I was an engineer for more than a decade, I've been in Product for nearly a decade, and I'm now a senior manager in Product. I can honestly say that I have the necessary experience to hold strong opinions here and to be correct in those opinions.

You need technical people who can also handle some of the non-technical aspects of a project with the reins of power if you want the project to succeed, otherwise it is doomed by the lack of understanding and competency of those in charge.
by tim333 | 2025-11-25 21:53:07+00:00
Humans are quicker at picking up patterns than LLMs though, like I think an example if you can show a human who hasn't seen one, one picture of a dalmatian and then ask them to spot them in other images they can do it straight away whereas LLMs need many examples. Which doesn't mean we have an innate knowledge of dalmations, just that we pick up patterns quickly.