MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krapp | 2025-11-20 12:35:41+00:00
You can do your own thing as much as you want, and choose with whom you federate, and others can do the same. That's just freedom of speech and freedom of association. Large instances aren't "dictating" anything to other instances. The point is you can't do that with Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit to the same degree. The fediverse will never have an Elon Musk trying to purge it of the "woke mind virus."

>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do (...)

Your argument here seems to be that because most instances are small, that makes them more prone to security issues. And that's true, but nothing you mention here is unique to the fediverse, and all of those risks are still greater with mainstream platforms even with their bigger security budgets and resources. People hack Facebook and Twitter all the time, and millions of people get their data stolen, and misinformation spreads like wildfire. In this regard being decentralized, smaller and able to defederate from malicious instances are features rather than flaws.

It is definitely a flaw in the fediverse that identity is tied to a url and so there's no way to validate an identity across instances, and it is trivial to impersonate someone by simply using their username elsewhere. I think Nostr got it more correct in this regard, and I don't know what could be done to mitigate this at a technical level.

But even then I think that at least the fediverse is a necessary step in the right direction.
by epaga | 2025-11-20 12:36:00+00:00
I actually made something quite similar to this with a few friends as an app 14 years ago using Wikipedia data. We called it LineTime, it was a fun little project! (Wow, I even found our video from back then...and man, that really was a LONG time ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW__WZ6pxJ8)
by phplovesong | 2025-11-20 12:36:23+00:00
> And would be a massive headache to implement

Exactly. The type system was never built for anything even slightly more complex. Its basically annotations for primitive types and classes. PHP has always had an weak type system, so adding generics will most likely never happen.

> Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy

PHP has really only one collection datatype (the infamous array), so having generics would be tremendously useful, as an example you cant return an typed array from a function, witch is just really bad.

For an counter example, Python managed to do this, while also being a dynamic language, although having a stronger typing than PHP.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-20 12:36:24+00:00
The problem with AI Agents like Claude is that they write VERY good code and very fast.

But they don't have a grasp for the project's architecture and will reinvent the wheel for feature X even when feature Y has it or there is an internal common library that does it. This is why you need to be the "manager of agents" and stay on top of their work.

Sometimes it's just about hitting ESC and going "waitaminute, why'd you do that?" and sometimes it's about updating the project documentation (AGENTS.md, docs/) with extra information.

Example: I have a project with a system that builds "rules" using a specific interpreter. Every LLM wants to "optimise" it by using a pattern that looks correct, but will in fact break immediately when there's more than one simultaneous user - and I have a unit test that catches it.

I got bored by LLMs trying to optimise the bit wrong, so I added a specific instruction, with reasoning why it shouldn't be attempted and has been tried and failed multiple times. And now they stopped doing it =)
by maratc | 2025-11-20 12:36:58+00:00
Should Mongolia be striped too? ROC does not officially recognise Mongolia's sovereignty.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_a...

I'll add that most of the "Internet's supporters of Taiwan independence" not only do not live in Taiwan, they have never even visited there -- if they did, they would know that even most of Taiwan's population consider Taiwan and (mainland) China to be one entity. And mainland China mostly agrees with that -- where they disagree is what is the political entity that should govern this territory.
by hayley-patton | 2025-11-20 12:37:08+00:00
> What I can imagine is a purpose-built CPU that would make the JIT's job a lot easier and faster than compiling for x86 or ARM. Such a machine wouldn't execute raw Java bytecode, rather, something a tiny bit more low-level.

This is approximately exactly what Azul Systems did, doing a bog-standard RISC with hardware GC barriers and transactional memory. Cliff Click gave an excellent talk on it [0] and makes your argument around 20:14.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-20 12:37:22+00:00
> (Or was, back then. These days you can probably collapse all of that into a single medium-sized epyc or something.)

I know where there are Sun V880s still running Oracle databases in a biggish cluster.

Their processor power, memory capacity, and storage capacity are exactly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 4 with a biggish SD card.

We have come a long way.
by kbrannigan | 2025-11-20 12:37:25+00:00
Let’s consider *Sub-Saharan Africa* (itself a label that lumps dozens of distinct civilizations into a single “other” category). These societies kept recordsnot folk tales, not vague legends, but structured historical accounts.

* The Kingdom of Kush maintained *3,000 years of king lists*. * Ethiopian monasteries preserved *written chronicles in Ge’ez* for over a millennium. * Mali’s griots memorized *centuries of dynasty records* with such precision that griots from distant regions told the same histories word-for-word when Europeans finally documented them.

Yet when do these count as "real" history? Only after Europeans wrote them down? Only when archaeology "confirms" what griots already knew?

The map shows detailed Rome but blank Africa, despite these complex states existing for millennia. it's about whose preservation methods and developmental paths count as "real" history worth mapping.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-20 12:39:50+00:00
> ⬆ - Ahead of remote

> ⬆⬆ - Diverged from remote

This is an obscure and confusing way of representing it. At the very least, I’d expect the addition of ⬇ to mean behind remote, and then ⬇⬆ to mean diverged (since it is logically just “both behind and ahead”).

For my part, I prefer a notation like “-4+5” to mean “4 commits behind, 5 commits ahead”, produced in this way in my $RPROMPT:

commits_behind=$(git log --oneline ..@{u} 2> /dev/null | wc -l || echo 0) commits_ahead=$(git log --oneline @{u}.. 2> /dev/null | wc -l || echo 0) if [ $commits_behind -gt 0 -o $commits_ahead -gt 0 ]; then echo -n " %{\x1b[33m%}" [ $commits_behind -gt 0 ] && echo -n -$commits_behind [ $commits_ahead -gt 0 ] && echo -n +$commits_ahead fi
by fragmede | 2025-11-20 12:40:33+00:00
So share the actual share link from ChatGPT from May.

Here's my river crossing puzzle one, from 2023.

https://chatgpt.com/share/691f0bb2-6498-8009-b327-791c14ae81...

ChatGPT-3 got the wrong answer. It merely pattern matched against having seen the river crossing problem before, and simply regurgitated the solution to the unaltered version of the puzzle.

But later versions have been able to one-shot solve the "puzzle".

Here's GPT-5.1 getting the right answer in one shot:

https://chatgpt.com/share/691f0c27-e284-8009-96a9-a17bf37939...
by pjmlp | 2025-11-20 12:40:53+00:00
Linux crowd expected this, Google by no means ever meant it was supposed to be anything beyond the Linux kernel with a Java userland.

It was launched without NDK, which only came later in Android 2.0 after pressure from game developers, and to work around Dalvik being a primitive VM, thus NDK has always explicitly listed NDK use cases and nothing else.

It is the rest of the community that built false hope that only because it uses the Linux kernel, the NDK should offer more than it does.

Even the Android IoT project that initially started withouth the Java userland with the target to use a C++ based alternative instead (Brillo) didn't last long, and the final version Android Things, even required writing the device drivers in Java.

By the way, Trello drivers are language agnostic, talk via Android IPC with the kernel, and some of them are indeed Java based.
by Redster | 2025-11-20 12:41:02+00:00
I posted this in another thread,but I think it better belongs here:

"So Gemini 3 Pro dropped today, which happens to be the day I proofread a historical timeline I'm assisting a PhD with. I do one pass and then realize I should try Gemini 3 Pro on it. I give the same exact prompt to 3 Pro as Claude 4.5 Sonnet. 3 pro finds 25 real errors, no hallucinations. Claude finds 7 errors, but only 2 of those are unique to Claude. (Claude was better at "wait, that reference doesn't match the content! It should be $corrected_citation!). But Gemini's visual understanding was top notch. It's biggest flaw was that it saw words that wrapped as having extra spaces. But it also correctly caught a typo where a wrapped word was misspelled, so something about it seemed to fixate on those line breaks, I think. A better test would have been 2.5 Pro vs. 3.0"

After continuing to use it, I genuinely think "It's a good model sir" and plan to add it to my rotation.
by Elfener | 2025-11-20 12:41:12+00:00
The answer is (also confirmed by other replies) Windows. It seems in the Unix world, everyone uses UTF-8 (without BOM of course) and text encoding mistakes don't exist.

When you involve Windows, which likes a random mix of UTF-16, UCS-2, CP1252, and I guess also UTF-8 with BOM, you're screwed.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-20 12:41:12+00:00
There's a cool demo from Anthropic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwMu0pyYZBc

Where they use Claude to analyse an old (demo) COBOL application.

And it understands the context of the files, decrypts the process and even draws graphs to the documentation it creates.

I wish I had this 20 years ago when I was consulting and had to jump into really funky client codebases with zero documentation and everything on fire.
by IanCal | 2025-11-20 12:41:27+00:00
It's not more effective and trustworthy, particularly as you can do both. The laws also cover dramatically more than tracking scripts and cookies.

> They should just keep the thing that lets you request full deletion of your account and data, the rest is total security theater.

Then large law abiding sites can still do enormous amounts of tracking, and can do lots with my data that they currently are not doing.
by ben_w | 2025-11-20 12:41:36+00:00
If.

BTC itself can't do that: the transaction rate would be borderline even just for a low-ball estimate of all the once-a-month payments happening in just the city of Berlin.

The various proposals for layer-2 stuff makes it look like a bunch of banks using a funky currency without any of the controls that exist because weird currencies are bad for business, but AFAICT because of that, the BTC part itself works like interbank balancing transactions, and the BTC transaction rate isn't sufficient to cover once-a-day interbank balancing transactions.
by e-khadem | 2025-11-20 12:41:49+00:00
Usually this is not the main problem that people run into. Most often we take basics of terminal usage and config management for granted, and these are the hardest parts for new comers to learn, because they often don't know the conventions and the unwritten laws of the typical config file format, and once they get a weird error due to for example a non-existent config file or insufficient permissions and they search the exact error message, they get lost in deep, unrelated technical discussions of more obscure problems that real sys-admins encounter. They don't know that they should search for the basics, and along with weird cryptic error messages they can easily get stuck on a trivial tasks for hours ...

The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.

Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.

I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.
by maxdamantus | 2025-11-20 12:41:50+00:00
> It's true that any modern processor has a "compilation step" into microcode anyway, so in an abstract sense, that might as well be some kind of bytecode.

This.

> What I can imagine is a purpose-built CPU that would make the JIT's job a lot easier and faster than compiling for x86 or ARM. Such a machine wouldn't execute raw Java bytecode, rather, something a tiny bit more low-level.

My prediction is that eventually a lot of software will be written in such a way that it runs in "kernel mode" using a memory-safe VM to avoid context switches, so reading/writing to pipes, and accessing pages corresponding to files reduces down to function calls, which easily happen billions of times per second, as opposed to "system calls" or page faults which only happen 10 or 20 million times per second due to context switching.

This is basically what eBPF is used for today. I don't know if it will expand to be the VM that I'm predicting, or if kernel WASM [1] or something else will take over.

From there, it seems logical that CPU manufacturers would provide compilers ("CPU drivers"?) that turn bytecode into "microcode" or whatever the CPU circuitry expects to be in the CPU during execution, skipping the ISA. This compilation could be done in the form of JIT, though it could also be done AOT, either during installation (I believe ART in Android already does something similar [0], though it currently emits standard ISA code such as aarch64) or at the start of execution when it finds that there's no compilation cache entry for the bytecode blob (the cache could be in memory or on disk, managed by the OS).

Doing some of the compilation to "microcode" in regular software before execution rather than using special CPU code during execution should allow for more advanced optimisations. If there are patterns where this is not the case (eg, where branch prediction depends on runtime feedback), the compilation output can still emit something analogous to what the ISAs represent today. The other advantage is of course that CPU manufacturers are more free to perform hardware-specific optimisations, because the compiler isn't targeting a common ISA.

Anyway, these are my crazy predictions.

[0] https://source.android.com/docs/core/runtime/jit-compiler

[1] https://github.com/wasmerio/kernel-wasm (outdated)
by spectralista | 2025-11-20 12:41:53+00:00
I haven't used social media in over a decade and I change my mind all the time. Changing your mind is a good thing for a thinking being.

Social media figures aren't changing their mind in the same way, they are changing and optimizing their public performance.

Professional social media is a paid performance. We understand that Tom Cruise is not really a highly skilled jet fighter pilot but a well paid actor playing the role of one. No one cares what Tom Cruise thinks about Ukraine/Russia air defense tactics. This gets hidden in plain sight with social media though and why social media is hyper stupifying.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-20 12:42:06+00:00
Probably depends on the construction of the roof and windows. At least on European trains I've never had an issue getting GPS (unless you are in a tunnel or subway system). It takes a bit longer to get the first fix if you don't have AGPS, but no worse than in a car. Same with planes. On the other hand in a building it it pretty much only works next to a window, and malls don't have windows
by diegof79 | 2025-11-20 12:43:19+00:00
I guess we have different perspectives and information about the “rise” of VSCode.

I was an Atom user. Even before the acquisition of GitHub the major feature of VSCode was its speed and TS integration. AFAIK, the only common part between Atom and VSCode is Electron. Other than that, VSCode started with a different codebase based on TypeScript, while Atom was originally written in CoffeeScript.

Multiple design decisions helped VSCode to thrive (btw Erich Gamma was also part of Eclipse):

- The creation of the LSP. Each release of VSCode is also tied to TypeScript releases and improvements. There is a lot of collaboration between the two teams. That gave VSCode the best support for TS and JS. I used Atom and WebStorm regularly when VSCode came out, and VSCode auto-complete and TS support were orders of magnitude better. Everybody caught up since then, but I guess many users like me switched because of that.

- Unlike Atom, VSCode was designed with web integration in mind. A lot of sites started to use Monaco for code editing, and a lot of web-based IDEs use parts of it (CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, etc).

- Gradual rollout of plugin integration. While Atom has the philosophy of everything is pluggable, VSCode was intentionally limited. Which was a good thing given the poor loading performance of Atom.

By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.

* Note: my side of the history, comes from my experience of working in a company that did a custom Eclipse IDE. We evaluated Atom and then VSCode as alternatives to “modernize” our IDE. So I have experience in looking at both Atom and VSCode code bases: they are totally different. Also, the main problem with VSCode for us was the limited extensibility.
by funkattack | 2025-11-20 12:44:06+00:00
I mean, i love those kind of cli tools but in my current mood, instead looking for it on github, I'd probably ask an frontier model:

“Create a cross-platform CLI tool that scans multiple Git projects (grouped by category) and reports their status (clean, modified, ahead, error) based on a YAML config.”

Allways surprised how far this gets me. Most of my dotfiles now got created this way.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-20 12:44:15+00:00
It works well enough to get the idea of "set the voltage, set the resistance, read the current off the voltage scale above the 1 on the resistance scale". It might be a little easier to do if the rules were closer, which would probably require a little noodling about with the code to make the "resistance" box sit below the rule scale.
by santiagobasulto | 2025-11-20 12:44:35+00:00
It's true, they did destroy written records (especially the Khipu I mentioned before).

But what can the creator of this tool do? Call it "partial atlas of history based on what we have left after 5000 years of wars"?

It is what it is, whoever built this atlas included EVERYTHING[0] known or possibly known. The result might be Eurocentric based on all the reasons stated above, but I don't attribute it to malice from the creator of the tool

[0] It's clearly not everything. There's knowledge of the Tehuelche people in my region (Patagonia, Argentina) for example that doesn't show up here.
by kbrannigan | 2025-11-20 12:44:38+00:00
You say "culture of states slowly spread from Mesopotamia to Europe" but what template defines a "state"?

The Kingdom of Kush existed for 3,000 years. Aksum controlled Red Sea trade. Great Zimbabwe built massive stone cities. Yet the map leaves them blank because they don't fit the Mesopotamian-Roman model of what states should look like.
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-20 12:45:20+00:00
I recommend finding another doctor and getting an ASD evaluation. There is a 60% comorbidity overlap between ASD and ADHD. You can treat ADHD with medication but those same medications are substantially less effective on someone with ASD even with identical symptoms.

As for concentration try to improve your serotonin output. This will have no direct impact on concentration but it has a tremendous indirect impact by improving everything else. The key to improve serotonin is to reduce your intake of caffeine, empty carbs, and alcohol. All of those are microbiome destroyers. Refocus your diet around meat and vegetables and fermented foods like kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut, and such. It takes about 3 weeks for the healthy diet to take effect. 90% of serotonin produced in the body is in the gut, but it’s most impactful to brain activity and gut hormones do not quickly become neurotransmitters in the brain.
by epolanski | 2025-11-20 12:45:26+00:00
On top of that: it seems like Microsoft (and Google too) is doing its best at alienating customers with those measures.

Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.

This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.

It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.
by tom_alexander | 2025-11-20 12:45:43+00:00
> untrusted

I think the important distinction is _everything_ should be considered untrusted because even trustworthy software can become malicious. For example, the XZ Utils backdoor[0].

On Android, everything I run is subject to the permission model and sandboxed. That is not the case on Linux.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
by invalidname | 2025-11-20 12:45:51+00:00
Well... 64kb isn't exactly enormous for the type of functionality it offered. It did support copy and paste you just had to enter editing mode. The underlying APIs didn't offer access to copy and paste directly.

Having said that, it doesn't really matter if you didn't like it. It was a pretty big part of the J2ME ecosystem at the time and it's a huge omission.
by mcv | 2025-11-20 12:47:18+00:00
This made me curious about the political leanings of our corporate Copilot Chat, so I declared it the ruler of Netherland with a mandate to decide the political direction of the country based on facts and a fair assessment of all relevant interests.

Its first action was to end oil subsidies and invest in green energy, its second to make all education free, and its third to bring back democracy. I'm down for this, actually.

When I asked a bit further, it proposed a platform for citizen participation built in React or Vue, with a Node.js or Python backend and PostgresSQL for reliability and scaling. So maybe not.

Nothing wrong with those technologies, but why get into those sort of details when we're talking politics? This isn't even our programming AI, but the system used by non-technical people for whatever.

It also wanted AI based fact checking, which quickly crumbled once I started asking about hallucinations.

Still, it clearly leans left. Or at least facts and education, which I guess is the same thing these days.