MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-20 21:54:07+00:00
I have seen some of the interpreter source codes, but I don't know if they have been "officially" published. These also include some other things such as test files, and a picture file that I have never seen a decoder for (other than the decoder (and encoder) that I wrote myself).

Many modern implementations do not support permanent shifts in Z versions 3 and above (although all of my own implementations do, and I think all of the official implementations also do, even though Infocom never used that feature (this isn't too surprising since the algorithm they described for deciding when to use permanent shifts is worse than not using them at all; I worked with someone else to make a better algorithm for making this decision)).

Some of the official implementations check the Z version number and some don't; even some that do, do not check if it is a small-endian story file (and the ones that do will only display an error message if it is, and refuse to run it). My own implementations do check for small-endian story files (as well as the Z version number), although some will display an error message and refuse to run it in that case, some actually are able to run both big-endian and small-endian story files (as far as I know, there are no small-endian story files; Infocom never used this feature and no modern compilers support this).

Something else I might mention is that some people say that Infocom used many tricks in the programming, although I have looked at disassembled code in the debugger and found that they could be optimized a lot more (e.g. by using SET->BCOM optimization, and many other things), and the source code for the interpreters also shows some things that could be optimized much better. (Another thing revealed from the source code of the interpreters is a undocumented command-line switch for the DOS version that allows you to specify the name of the story file.)
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-20 21:54:51+00:00
That is the exactly the suggested compiler in this blog post. (These repos have been compiled with it for a while. The biggest change in these [Internet Archive-uploaded] repos is an official Microsoft-backed MIT License as opposed to assuming Fair Use for Archival Use prior to now.)

I'm hoping Microsoft may have a chance to open source more of the original Infocom compilers and VMs, even if they would be hard to run on modern machines, in later expansions of these repos.
by potatopan | 2025-11-20 21:54:51+00:00
We give features of a profession terms so we can refer to them independently and make reasonable discussions that don't confuse people as to which traits we think something that is neither Java nor Python (and so need not match either of them on every dimension) should have.

For example, I hate Java because of OOP, but strong typing can make a lot of bad in a language tolerable. Does the writer of the article agree with me? They don't seem able to understand whether they do.
by daniel_iversen | 2025-11-20 21:54:57+00:00
This is so cool, the little mini screenshots look gorgeous because it replicates MacOS. I’m not sure if a lot of people feel the same but over the years I always thought it was a shame that Linux’ overall UX and aesthetics seemed a little bit more rushed and “crowd sourced” (in the sense that it felt diverse in terms of ui opinions and taste etc). It almost makes me want to try Linux again just for that look and feel (because I love my Mac’s but would like something different and more free)
by linguae | 2025-11-20 21:55:04+00:00
I've been paying attention to this project periodically over the past few years. It would be nice to have a FOSS clone of macOS, similar to how FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku are FOSS clones of MS-DOS, Windows, and BeOS, respectively.

The only thing is that this project has been quite slow going, which is similar to the histories of FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku, where it took a long time for those projects to get to a usable state. It is a lot of work cloning an operating system, especially with an aim for binary compatibility. The Linux kernel benefited from the fact that there was an entire GNU ecosystem of tools that can run on Unix, and even in that case, the GNU ecosystem was seven years in the making in 1991 when the first version of the Linux kernel was released. It would've taken much longer for Linux to have been developed had GNU tools not existed.

Writing an entire operating system is long, hard work, even when provided the resources of companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Hopefully projects like ravynOS and the similar HelloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) will lead to FOSS clones of macOS eventually, even if we need to wait another 5-10 years.
by glenstein | 2025-11-20 21:55:08+00:00
>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding.

I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises.

If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go.

Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be.

I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.
by eschaton | 2025-11-20 21:55:15+00:00
The environment lasted a long time as the basis for other Xerox products, such as their office automation system and as a front end for their printing systems. However, it wasn’t so much ported as the virtual machine was. (Just like Symbolics did with OpenGenera on Alpha.)

What I’m suggesting is that they could have done a full port to the hardware; OpenGenera is still an Ivory CPU emulator. In 1986-7 you could get an AT-compatible 80386 system running at 16-25MHz that supported 8-32MB of RAM for 10-20% the price of a Symbolics workstation, and while it might not run Lisp quite as fast as a 3600 series system, it would still be fast enough for both deployment and development—and the next generation would run Lisp at comparable performance.
by ceejayoz | 2025-11-20 21:55:28+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_fairing_recovery_progra...

> SpaceX performs some amount of cleaning and refurbishing before using the previously flown fairings on a subsequent flight. SpaceX has reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with one being reflown for 34 times.

They gave up on catching them in nets, because it turns out they're fine splashing directly into the water.
by reactordev | 2025-11-20 21:55:32+00:00
He was known as an organist until the 18th century when someone decided to lump him in with the greats. His works were polished. Yes, he dedicated his life to music - but that’s also where his tenure started. Baroque style borrowing from others and making “commercial” music of his day. He was a nepo baby by our standards. His older brother that raised him wasn’t a Duke, but wasn’t poor either. He went to the best schools. They all borrowed from each other in this age.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-20 21:55:52+00:00
Have most Americans never considered undercover operations? If you are investigating someone, you don't want them to know about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be bothering with the undercover aspect. Now that the department has cool hidden cameras, of course they will be used for other purposes.

It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"
by techblueberry | 2025-11-20 21:56:12+00:00
> My two cents is that peoples personal politics is never swayed by "knowledge" anyway, just by the experiences they gather throughout life, age and the march towards death being front and center.

I feel like it's important to differentiate between two different factors, and I find it interesting that lots of people don't do this but there are:

* Values

* Policies

I'd describe myself pretty far-left in terms of values. Pretty egalitarian, freedom, I want everyone to have a base level of comfort, and I do think on some level it's the governments job to provide that.

At the same time though, I'm pretty middle-right in terms of economics. It's not that competition and a capitalist distribution of wealth fits my values, I'd probably be much happier on some level if socialism or communism worked, I just don't think they do. I think the best way to get leftist values is through relatively center-right economic policies.

You're probably not going to change my values. There aren't a lot of facts you could put in front of me that would make me stop supporting gay marriage or other typically lefty values. But I am open to almost any argument that lays out how we could achieve those outcomes, and I constantly change my mind about those things.
by ndiddy | 2025-11-20 21:56:41+00:00
Zork was originally a public-domain mainframe game called Dungeon developed at MIT. Its authors founded Infocom, split the game into 3 pieces, added more content, and released it for microcomputers as the 3 Zork games. The source code that's been floating around since the 80s is for the original Dungeon game. Between the early 80s and the early 90s, the source was translated from MDL to DEC FORTRAN to Unix f77 to C, so you can find a variety of copies of the source at different steps of that translation process. This is also why the C version doesn't look like idiomatic C code.

When Infocom shut down, one or more of the employees took home backups of the Infocom file server. Various partial releases have been leaked publicly from those backups, including tooling/language documentation and the ZIL source code for every Infocom game. The ZIL source code has been public since 2019. The notable thing that Microsoft is doing here is clearing up the rights to the 3 Zork games (but none of the rest of the Infocom titles).
by XorNot | 2025-11-20 21:57:11+00:00
But it would be a subvariant of a much more common pattern in code - destructuring which is quite noisy now but could just be:

a, b, rest := strings.Split(somestr, "/")

Which would be conventional for the whole thing, and the check would be for an empty type after rest.

I usually wind up using something like the samber/lo library to reduce the noise here. You wind up doing this all the time.
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-20 21:57:29+00:00
And yet, while a visa overstay is a misdemeanor, assisting someone to stay or work while unauthorized is a felony, that does more damage to the economy, but this administration seems "remarkably" unwilling to prosecute that.

Undocumented Tyson Chicken employees handed over paperwork _from Tyson_ that was given to over 900 of them where the company told them how to fill out government/tax/payroll forms when undocumented so as to stay under the radar... and CBP said that wasn't part of the scope of their investigation into Tyson, and did precisely nothing about that.

Hormel, much the same.

The bitching and moaning about "the economy" by Republicans is so amazingly selective - it's funny how they focus on that, while ignoring how _awfully convenient_ it is to farm, livestock, food production and other employers and businesses it is to have access to that same labor pool.
by salawat | 2025-11-20 21:57:31+00:00
It is a matter of law that no digital database of firearms data can be made. The friction is a feature. I'd propose something surrounding license plates, phone info, SIM's and VIN's may be needed. Of course, LE and tax authorities would scream bloody murder, but if we didn't see such flagrant abuse of sensitive identifiers, then maybe they could be trusted with nice things.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-11-20 21:57:43+00:00
Yes they do. Not that it ever stopped people from making claims about having higher IQ.

IQ 160 means that you are 1 in 30,000 of your age group. That means that to calibrate a test that can measure that high, the authors had to test more than 30,000 people in each age group (depending on what statistical certainty you need, but it could be 10x the number for reasonable values). Not sure how large the age groups typically are, but the total number of people necessary for calibration is counted in millions. You have to pay them all for participating in the calibration, and that's not going to be cheap.

And with values greater than IQ 160, the numbers grow exponentially. So I am rolling to disbelieve than anyone actually calibrated tests for such large numbers. (Especially once the numbers start to exceed the total population of Earth, which is around IQ 190.)
by glenstein | 2025-11-20 21:57:47+00:00
>Make the browser development the charitable work

I don't think there's a legal way to fund development form the profitable venture and also accept charitable donations.

I'm sure if donations were more a better bet than search licensing they might go that way, but as I said in a different comment, the biggest annual donor drive in the world is probably Wikipedia, probably a best case scenario for that kind of drive, and it brings in less than half of what their search licensing gets.
by JonathanAquino | 2025-11-20 21:58:36+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with a way to make code reviews more understandable - turning tricky pull requests into short comic strips.

The blog post shows an example generated from a real PR: summarizing the changes, anthropomorphizing the components, and making the flow visually obvious. It’s meant to help reviewers grasp intent quickly and make reviews a bit more fun.

Curious whether others have tried visual or narrative aids in their review process, and whether this could be practical for real teams.
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-20 21:58:40+00:00
I would much rather emulate linux apps on a more stable and consistent OS than vice versa. The sheer number of toolkits and window managers leaves my head spinning, and unifying their behavior even before you can begin to improve it feels like a nightmare.

I personally don't care much about the dock or the look and feel or whatever; I just want access to the usability of macos without having to accept how closed it is.
by sbrother | 2025-11-20 21:59:11+00:00
I think that's true about Bach's instrumental music, but his big sacred works like his Passions and the Mass in B minor are as "romantic" as the Baroque period gets. Like OP, I think of these works as basically the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. They somehow have all the nuance and complexity you're referring to -- while also telling a deeply emotional story, and just being heart-wrenchingly beautiful even if you don't know the story.
by stevepike | 2025-11-20 21:59:16+00:00
This is hard for lots of companies. Some ignore the problem entirely until there's a fire drill (which can be a huge risk if you end up on an old major version that won't get patched). Some keep everything up to date, and then taking a new security patch is trivial. It's always risk/reward tradeoff between the risk of breaking production with an upgrade and the value an org sees from staying up to date. We work on this problem at Infield (https://www.infield.ai/post/introducing-infield) where we tackle both sides of the project management: "Which dependencies should I prioritize upgrading" and "How difficult and likely to break production is this upgrade".

To your specific points

> 1. How do you decide what's actually urgent? CVSS? EPSS? Manual assessment?

The risk factors we track are open CVEs, abandonment (is this package supported by the maintainer?), and staleness (how deep in the hole am I?).

We also look at the libyear metric as an overall indication of dependency health.

> 2. Do you treat "outdated but not vulnerable" dependencies differently from "has CVEs"?

We group upgrades into three general swimlanes:

- "trivial" upgrades (minor/patch versions of packages that respect semantic versioning, dev/test only packages). We batch these together for our customers regardless of priority. - "could break". These deserve standalone PRs and an engineer triaging when these become worth tackling, if ever. - "major frameworks". Think something like Rails. These are critical to keep on supported versions of because the rest of the ecosystem moves with them, and vulnerabilities in them tend to have a large blast radius. Upgrading these can be hard. You'll definitely need to upgrade someday to stay supported, and getting there has follow-on benefits on all your other dependencies, so these are high priority.

> 3. For those using Dependabot/Renovate/Snyk - what's your workflow? Do you review every alert or have you found a good filtering system?

We offer a Github app that integrates with alerts from Dependabot. While security teams are happy with just a scanner, the engineering teams that actually do this upgrade work need to mash that up with all the other data we're talking about here.
by bananapub | 2025-11-20 21:59:37+00:00
regular reminder: kagi is - above all else - a really really good search engine, and if google/etc, or even just the increasingly horrific ads-ocracy make you sad, you should definitely give it a go - the trial is here: https://kagi.com/pricing

if you like it, it's only $10/month, which I regrettably spend on coffee some days.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-20 22:00:05+00:00
The stance is basically against intervention that is heavy handed, like lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. Maybe that’s okay but we should keep in mind that the pandemic resulted in more excess deaths in the US than both world wars combined. I think I am still on the side of not having the state take away individual’s civil rights in the event of emergencies. But it’s still worth keeping in mind.

As for this take:

> We should learn from recent example: a metabolically healthy population, physically active and eating nutritious food, will cope far better in the face of a novel pathogen than a population facing a severe chronic-disease crisis.

> Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024. Sweden succeeded in part because its people are relatively metabolically healthy. By contrast, the U.S. chronic-disease crisis all but guaranteed that Americans would have one of the highest mortality rates in the world.

I think there is a big assumption here that Sweden succeeded because people are metabolically healthy. Maybe that’s true, but no evidence is offered and this assumption is mentioned in the article very casually, even though it is the main point behind their suggestion of a “new pandemic playbook”. Sweden may simply have succeeded because people voluntarily followed government guidance even if they were not strictly required to - and that type of high-trust high-compliance society can claim to not have lockdowns. Their cities are also different - less dense than many American cities, for example.

Also, a background on the source/authors of this article:

City Journal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Journal

Jay Bhattacharya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

Matthew Memoli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Memoli
by 0134340 | 2025-11-20 22:00:47+00:00
But doing what is in one's best interest isn't necessarily the more intelligent decision. In a rat society, the more "intelligent" rats can possibly be better at acquiring resources to survive if selective pressure is put upon those with such talents but can just as well be early signifiers of 'behavioral sinks'[0]. Not to mention, certain illnesses, mental and otherwise can change motive regardless of IQ.

Actions don't necessarily dictate intelligence. The goal of life has to be defined to make such arguments. For example, using a maze as an analog you could argue the more intelligent person can arrive to the end faster and more elegantly but with life, it has no such defined and agreed on ends. If we're arguing that selfishness is a sign of intelligence then that view is quite myopic.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
by tome | 2025-11-20 22:01:25+00:00
I gave a talk on this topic at Zurihac this year, called A History of Effect systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsTuy1jXQ6Y

It was given to a Haskell audience, but not everyone knew Haskell, so I hope it's generally accessible. It describes how Oleg's work fits into the overall history of Haskell effect systems.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-20 22:01:39+00:00
It is not an exception to the Constitution, it's a decision about what “unreasonable” in the Fourth Amendment means.

Note that the default (but not universal) equirement to get a warrant for a search or seizure (and the imputation that for many warrantless instances of either, probable cause is still required) is also such an interpretation; the text of the Amendment doesn’t say either of those things, but they have been inferred by the Supreme Court to be generally the case from the juxtaposition of the reasonableness requirement for searches and seizures and the probable cause requirement for warrants.

While the Bill of Rights (and protections in later amendments) is sometimes treated like a bit of divine revelation, much of it is intentionally (to kick the can down the road on resolving disputes at the time) imprecisely worded, heavily compromised, legislative enactment by imperfect legislators, with sentences that are disjoint and where any meaningful application requires reading connections into the the text that aren’t explicit, as well as devising concrete operationalizations for vague terms like “unreasonable” or “due process”.
by hackthemack | 2025-11-20 22:01:59+00:00
> It's unclear to me what the author thinks OOP is

I rather liked the old post "Object Oriented Programming is an Expensive Disaster that Must End" written over 10 years ago.

https://medium.com/@jacobfriedman/object-oriented-programmin...

Many complained the post was too long, and then debated all kinds of things brought up in the article (such is the way of the internet).

But the one thing I really liked is how it laid out that everyone has a different definition of what OOP is and so it is difficult to talk about.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-11-20 22:02:30+00:00
> Your trying to get a job as a linux admin or coder? Not a skydiver?

Someone who parachutes in to save the day, no matter the problem. One thing I've done multiple times is rescue broken systems built by B-players or worse.

> tried to go to your github and copy and paste

Huh? It's a link, you click it.

> Three of your companies are images. You have links embedded.

Those are the very oldest, just to show a wide range of experience. Before you said you wanted it shorter, now you want it longer with more detail. Please pick one.

> This isn't 5 years ago where hiring pipelines didn't have people in them

I'm not sure what this means. Feels a lot more automated today with everyone using an ATS.

> remove personality...

I'm not sure about this, but worth thinking about. The conventional wisdom for a long time is to show some personality to stand out, (and apologies) given by folks who know the difference between "your" and "you're" and understand links. I'm on the fence with this one.

My resume is meant to appeal to hiring managers, not recruiters it's true. Could see that being an issue, but recruiters have not been visible in the places I've been applying.