MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-25 17:37:19+00:00
Software projects fail because humans fail. Humans are the drivers of everything in our world. All government, business, culture, etc... it's all just humans. You can have a perfect "process" or "tool" to do a thing, but if the human using it sucks, the result will suck. This means that the people involved are what determines if the thing will succeed or fail. So you have to have the best people, with the best motivations, to have a chance for success.

The only thing that seems to change this is consequences. Take a random person and just ask them to do something, and whether they do it or not is just based on what they personally want. But when there's a law that tells them to do it, and enforcement of consequences if they don't, suddenly that random person is doing what they're supposed to. A motivation to do the right thing. It's still not a guarantee, but more often than not they'll work to avoid the consequences.

Therefore if you want software projects to stop failing, create laws that enforce doing the things in the project to ensure it succeeds. Create consequences big enough that people will actually do what's necessary. Like a law, that says how to build a thing to ensure it works, and how to test it, and then an independent inspection to ensure it was done right. Do that throughout the process, and impose some kind of consequence if those things aren't done. (the more responsibility, the bigger the consequence, so there's motivation commensurate with impact)

That's how we manage other large-scale physical projects. Of course those aren't guaranteed to work; large-scale public works projects often go over-budget and over-time. But I think those have the same flaw, in that there isn't enough of a consequence for each part of the process to encourage humans to do the right thing.
by the_overseer | 2025-11-25 17:37:52+00:00
Most likely saving Windows developers from learning programming. They are just javascript monkeys because that is what Microsoft is hiring these days and you can't trust monkeys with native C++. The thing would leak memory and explode immediately if those idiots tried to write native code. So in the name of hiring cheap idiots that can't program we all have to put up with this slow, bloated garbage.

There is no universe in which I should see lag between a click and a menu appearing in File explorer, taskbar or anywhere in the OS. Not on a machine with 8 idling cores.
by ngriffiths | 2025-11-25 17:38:08+00:00
Am I the only one who was really underwhelmed? I saw that it was supposedly a very tense trainwreck situation and sure, it gets sarcastic and stuff, but most of it was

Interviewer: "so I heard you were/are doing a bad job with moderation"

CEO: repeats banal PR talking point for the 10th time

Repeat.

I mean, at no point did the CEO say anything interesting about the moderation problem or what they are doing. The interviewers seem too skeptical to be genuinely interested. He explains to them that cost =/= quality and that 2016 =/= 2025 for what feels like an eternity. I was bored.
by hbn | 2025-11-25 17:38:18+00:00
I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it.

I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI.

https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-25 17:38:20+00:00
If they use protocols with defaults (traits, interfaces, etc.), then they have inheritance.

What they don’t get with protocols, though, is polymorphism. I think a lot of folks confuse them.

I wrote about an odd bug that I encountered, from protocol defaults: https://littlegreenviper.com/the-curious-case-of-the-protoco...
by fragmede | 2025-11-25 17:38:33+00:00
Did he refer to the AI with a name? How much of a relationship did he have with his? I have multiple friends that have named their ChatGPT, and they refer to it in conversation, like "oh yeah, Sarah told me this or that the other day", except Sarah (names changed) is an LLM.

I'm worried about our future.

...except I went over to ChatGPT and asked it to project what the future looks like in seven years rather than think about it myself. Humanity is screwed.
by mikepurvis | 2025-11-25 17:38:34+00:00
Historically apt hasn't had much of a "solver". It's basically take the user's upgrade/install action, if there's some conflict or versioned requirement, go to the candidate (≈newest barring pinfile shenanigans) of the involved packages, and if there's still a conflict, bail.

It was always second-tier utilities like Aptitude that tried to search for a "solution" to conflicting packaging constraints, but this has always been outside of the core functionality, and if you accepted one of Aptitude's proposed paths, you would do so knowing that the next apt dist-upgrade was almost certainly going to hose everything again.

I think the idea in Apt-world is that it's the responsibility of the archive maintainer to at all times present a consistent index for which the newest versions of everything can coexist happily together. But this obviously breaks down when multiple archives are active on the same apt conf.
by parasubvert | 2025-11-25 17:38:39+00:00
> We have a culture where we’ve been told for decades that market forces and the profit motive are sufficient for running a society. That the market will find a way to give everyone what they need efficiently without problems.

I don't really think that culture has existed lately, it kind of died out with the 2008 financial crisis. Now it's about naked use of power, whether political or economic.

The problem with constraints on individual freedom (which is essentially what happens when you constrain capitalism) is that no one agrees on what they should be, and therefore a segment of society will not be happy with them, and claim them as tyrannical oppression. Sometimes this is hysterical nonsense, sometimes it has a point.

Ultimately the antidote to unfettered capitalism is sensible policy crafted through political compromise. But largely Western politics itself has skewed towards extremes lately, few have the patience or understanding for this process, they want a quick fix.
by mmh0000 | 2025-11-25 17:38:52+00:00
If you've bought a pre-built computer, desktop, or laptop, you've paid for Windows. Traditionally, we've called this the Microsoft Windows Tax[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows

- This is why I never feel guilty about "pirating" Windows. I've already paid for it!
by mbesto | 2025-11-25 17:38:53+00:00
I would boil this down to something else, but possibly related: project requirements are hard. That's it.

> While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not. People do not regularly pull apart old systems for learning.

For most IT projects, software folks generally can NOT "pull apart" old systems, even if they wanted to.

> Typically, software folks build new and every generation of software developers must relearn the same problems.

Project management has gotten way better today than it was 20 years, so there is definitely some learnings that have been passed on.
by DiskoHexyl | 2025-11-25 17:38:53+00:00
I'm perfectly fine with paying for software, so the price wasn't a leading factor in my choice (and I have contributed to Jellyfin).

It just looks to me that Plex (as a company) isn't really as reliable for self-hosting in the long run. So even though Plex has a better client support (for example, on xbox and playstation), I decided against it in favor of something that only I am in control of.

Initially intended to buy a license for Emby, but it doesn't support hardware transcoding on Apple Silicon yet, so Jellyfin it is then.

If you are happy with Plex, there's no reason to switch, IMO. If something goes wrong, it likely won't take you long to connect an alternative to the same media library
by clickety_clack | 2025-11-25 17:39:25+00:00
I know we can tell that a chemical does a particular thing in the body, but can we tell that it does not do anything other than that thing? The body is ridiculously complex, and as far as I know we don’t know how every part (or combination of parts) works.

Edit: I mean in the theoretical “this targets the x receptor” kind of way, not in “we tested this and found no causal link” way.
Show HN: StepKit, an open and cross-platform durable execution standard
by tonyhb | 2025-11-25 17:39:36+00:00
Hi HN! I’m Tony, one of the co-founders of Inngest (https://inngest.com/). Wanted to show you something we’re working on: StepKit.

StepKit is an open source SDK and framework for building and iterating on durable workflows that run on any platform (self-hosted, Inngest, Cloudflare, Netlify, etc.) without requiring any provider or bundler-specific code.

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/inngest/stepkit.

StepKit extracts the core execution loop that we built in Inngest and makes it fully open, Apache 2, and hackable/pluggable to different backends. We don’t want people to have to go through multiple major versions in SDKs to learn the lessons we’ve already learned in production:

It needs to work anywhere: This SDK is push-based and receives tasks via API endpoints, so it works anywhere (servers, serverless, k8s, etc). That's also customizable. It doesn’t need any specific runtime or bundler support.

It needs to be complete: StepKit includes the entire execution engine: step discovery, memoization, a core event loop to turn async steps into generators without relying on `try/catch` based control, and middleware for extensibility (eg, end-to-end encryption, Sentry integrations, and so on).

It needs a simple API: StepKit APIs are explicit `step.*()` functions, which we designed in our original Inngest SDK back in 2022. They’re easy to read, understand, implement, and use. They contain all of the primitives for durable execution: steps, suspend/resume, human-in-the-loop, and observability. These same APIs have also been adopted by Cloudflare, Netlify, Convex, and others, and support billions of runs every month.

It needs to be resilient: Steps tolerate changes when refactoring, and provide the building blocks of durable execution without complex abstractions.

We’re starting with in-memory, filesystem, Inngest, and Cloudflare (WIP) drivers, with more coming soon.

The roadmap includes middleware, compatible SDKs in different languages, as well as extensions like concurrency controls and idempotency: https://github.com/inngest/stepkit/discussions/52.

Excited to see what you think: https://github.com/inngest/stepkit.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-25 17:39:50+00:00
Your post is offensive to me.

I have plenty of relatives without money or resources and $150 is something they can all afford.

It's not even the floor of the amount of money needed (Here's a used NUC for $30 [1]), but rather just showing that a new system can be had for a lot less than many people expect.

You are the one divorced from reality if you think there's an army of poor orphans running modern linux on pentium pros.

Affording rent and health insurance is a FAR bigger issue than being able to throw a little money towards a new computer once every 10 years.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/366000004972?_skw=NUC&itmmeta=01KAY...
by gpm | 2025-11-25 17:40:02+00:00
> The first version I got working was `d`, and my first thought was, "you're kidding me - the right hand side is inferring it's type from the left?!?" I didn't learn about "turbo fish" until some time later.

Tbh d strikes me as the most normal - right hand sides inferring the type from the left exists in basically every typed language. Consider for instance the C code

some_struct a = { .flag = true, .value = 123, .stuff = 0.456 };

Doing this inference at a distance is more of a feature of the sml languages (though I think it now exists even in C with `auto`) - but just going from left to right is... normal.
by Jordan-117 | 2025-11-25 17:40:34+00:00
What was the nature of his interests, if you don't mind sharing? I'm always curious about how these things develop -- makes it easier to recognize.

Seems like a lot of them fall into either "I'm onto a breakthrough that will change the world" (sometimes shading into delusion/conspiracy territory), or else vague platitudes about oneness and the true nature of reality. The former feels like crankery, but I wonder if the latter wouldn't benefit from some meditation.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-11-25 17:40:56+00:00
> Being explicit adds syntax.

Not what they are talking about. Rather better to use words instead of symbols, like python over perl.

Instead of “turbofish” and <‘a>, there could be more key words like mut or dyn. Semicolons and ‘c’har are straight out of the seventies as well. :: not useful and ugly, etc.

Dunders avoid namespace collisions and are not a big problem in practice, all one char, and easy to read. I might remove the trailing part if I had the power.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-25 17:41:09+00:00
I think this is pretty easy to explain psychologically.

The first time you see a dog that can make pancakes, you’re really focused on the fact that a dog is making pancakes.

After a few weeks of having them for breakfast, you start to notice that the pancakes are actually kind of overcooked and don’t taste that good. Sure it’s impressive that a dog made them, but what use are sub-par pancakes? You’re naturally more focused on what it can’t do than what it can.
by gadders | 2025-11-25 17:41:20+00:00
I think it depends why you're interested in the Romans. As a layman, I like the military history, the politics, etc. I'm less interested in the sociology - especially when retro-fitting a 2025 world view on it.

And you can despise the Romans for the way they went about things, but it's not like the other societies they went to war with were any better, and in a lot of cases were worse (EG Carthaginian baby sacrifice).
by swed420 | 2025-11-25 17:41:33+00:00
> I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today.

But "regulated" capitalism inevitably leads to crony capitalism.

What we've arrived at can barely even be called capitalism, and old school capitalism paved the way:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331174542/https://nymag.com...
by hamdingers | 2025-11-25 17:41:36+00:00
"How" expects an adjective -> "how does he look" "he looks happy"

"What" expects a noun -> "what is he?" "a dog"

"Like" invites a comparison -> "what does he look like?" "he looks like Lassie"

When you combine "how" and "like" it gives native speakers an itch because you're requesting I create a comparison with an adjective.
by Agraillo | 2025-11-25 17:41:37+00:00
> The people paying for everything would get to make the decisions.

Just as a thought experiment: what if the threshold for having a vote was tied to paying a positive amount of personal income tax, and the weight of each vote was proportional to the amount paid? How skewed might such a system be? My first reaction is that in countries with high inequality, the wealthy would disproportionately influence the outcome. However, on the other hand, if people avoid or minimize paying taxes, they would lose the power of a weighted vote, which theoretically could incentivize paying taxes in full.
by pavon | 2025-11-25 17:41:43+00:00
> I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did.

If you have to compare to a 20+ year old processor to look good, your system has problems. But since we are comparing old computers, Finder opens quicker on a 30 year old Macintosh 512k than Explorer opens in Windows 11.

> 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying.

Nope. I actually just updated that number up to 20 seconds after testing, because I thought my memory was exaggerating. This started in Windows 10 when they introduced "Snip & Sketch" to replace the old Snipping tool, but it was easier to go back to the old one in Windows 10.

Edit: Oh, and I just remembered another detail. Our library folders are mapped to network shares at work. Again, this has been the case for 15+ years now, and performance has just recently cratered. It would not surprise me if most Windows developers today assume everything is on SSD, and don't think about slapping low-importance file I/O in critical sections.
by parasubvert | 2025-11-25 17:42:14+00:00
If you think DOOM and CS aren't brain rot, you might be just falling into nostalgia. Shooting demons and other players and spraying bloody gibs is absolute brain rot.

I play Roblox with my 9 year old, and no, they're not anymore brain rot than DOOM or Quake deathmatches were. Capture the flag or tower defense was almost never the point. It was being first in a deathmatch.

Quite frankly today's Roblox games tend to be a lot more enlightening, innovative and entertaining. Not all of course but many.
Show HN: God's Eye – Subdomain recon with local AI analysis
by vyntral | 2025-11-25 17:42:37+00:00
Hi HN! I built God's Eye, an AI-powered subdomain enumeration tool that combines traditional recon techniques with local LLM analysis.

What makes it different: - 100% local & private - no data leaves your machine - Zero API costs - uses Ollama with models like DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen2.5-Coder - 20 passive sources (crt.sh, Certspotter, AlienVault, etc.) - AI analysis of discovered subdomains for security insights - Written in Go for speed

I built this because most subdomain tools just dump lists without context. Adding AI analysis helps identify interesting targets faster during pentests and bug bounties, but I wanted to keep everything local for privacy and cost.

The AI features are optional - you can use it as a traditional enum tool too.

Would love feedback from the security folks here! What other analysis would be useful to add?

GitHub: https://github.com/Vyntral/god-eye
by move-on-by | 2025-11-25 17:42:41+00:00
Sorry in advance if this is a dumb question, but isn't Rust's 'Cargo' package manager one of the draws of Rust? While I follow along that Rust's memory safety is a big benefit, does not the package manager and the supply chain attacks that come along with it take away from the benefits? For reference, NPM has had no shortage of supply chain security incidents.

How would adding Rust to such core dependencies not introduce new supply chain attack opportunities?
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-25 17:42:47+00:00
More important than knowing what 4x6 is, is understanding what multiplication is, why division is really the same operation, understanding commutative, associative, distributive properties of operations, etc. All of this comes as a result of repeated drilling of multiplication problem sets. Once this has been assimilated, you can move on to more abstract concepts that build on that foundation, and at that point sure you can use a calculator to work out the product of two integers as a convenience.
by alangibson | 2025-11-25 17:42:53+00:00
"While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not." Couldn't be further from the truth. Software folks are obsessed with copying what has been shown to work to the point that any advance quickly becomes a cargo cult (see microservices for example).

Once you've worked in both hardware and software engineering you quickly realize that they only superficially similar. Software is fundamentally philosophy, not physics.

Hardware is constrained by real world limitations. Software isn't except in the most extreme cases. Result is that there is not a 'right' way to do any one thing that everyone can converge on. The first airplane wing looks a whole lot like a wing made today, not because the people that designed it are "real engineers" or any such BS, but because that's what nature allows you to do.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-25 17:43:08+00:00
Overall, I think Rust is probably too dangerous to introduce into core software. Every time there is a donation to the Rust Foundation, the Rust community is in an uproar that it is not a large enough fraction of gross revenue. Linux, apt, are all currently both free as in speech and free as in beer. If we have to start donating to the Rust Foundation a percentage of gross revenue for every tool that we use written in Rust, it will cost a lot. Probably much better to just not put Rust in the kernel or in apt.

It's a Trojan horse language. There are no demands from C users that anyone donate to C non-profits. Much better, safer language to use from an ecosystem perspective.
by evilmonkey19 | 2025-11-25 17:43:10+00:00
By the way, I am trying right now Orion on MacOS and it goes quite fast as now. Actually, it is faster than Firefox at least when trying against speed.cloudflare.com under a VPN. Nonetheless the speed difference is not significant.

Also, there are two features which I would like to know/see in Orion:

- I use quite a lot the Containers and Group tabs in Firefox. The containers allow me to have different active accounts in the same browser. I use it a lot when managing AWS accounts.

- Change the behaviour of Cmd+Shift+F to be the same as Firefox, doing the full screen instead of the hide the tabs.
by steveklabnik | 2025-11-25 17:43:37+00:00
It hasn't been my job to work on Rust in for years now. And even then, it was not to "defend" Rust, but to write docs. I talk about it on my own time, and I have often advocated for change in Rust based on my conversations with users.

If you're being overly literal, yes, the <>s are needed here for this exact syntax. My point was not about this specific example, it's that these forms are equivalent, but some of them are syntactically simpler than others. The existence of redundant forms does not make the syntax illegitimate, or overly complex.

For this specific issue, if square brackets were used for generics, then something else would have to change for array indexing, and folks would be complaining that Rust doesn't do what every other language does here, which is its own problem.
by roarlyte | 2025-11-25 17:43:58+00:00
Unless you’ve been living blissfully offline, you’ve probably noticed shadcn/ui taking over the React ecosystem.

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