MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsck | 2025-11-10 11:40:37+00:00
All these people talking about voluntarily giving their kid Linux.

When I was 12 or so my Dad installed Linux on my laptop as punishment because I kept installing viruses on Windows.

I suppose it definitely helped with my knowledge of Linux as I had to do a lot of tinkering to get anything I wanted to work, even then 90% of the games I wanted to play didn't work (Waaay before Proton was a thing, Wine alone wouldn't work for most games)

Also had the added benefit of me just generally not wanting to use the computer, Linux sucks for desktop use. Constant source of issues that I just dont care for, I use a computer to play games or do work - I don't care about the operating system side of stuff. You dont daily drive a project car.
by cube00 | 2025-11-10 11:40:45+00:00
> CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people

It's no guarantee, I've had a few terrible managers that I assumed were non-technical but was shocked to learn they actually had IT degrees from decades ago.

They just checked out for some reason and would jump from meetings the minute they got even vaguely technical.

"I'll leave that to the engineers as we're self organising, I've got to head off" which left us to run by consensus which slowed everything down.
by varjag | 2025-11-10 11:40:58+00:00
While I generally agree with your point presenting Russia as a decision making entity is dangerously misleading. You're not dealing with democracy or even 1970s committee-run USSR anymore.

Sure Putin has broad support and a number of companions but he remains unilateral, undisputed, unchallenged decision maker. Assuming otherwise brings you back into the fold of rational actor argument which has proven a fallacy for some time now. Yes Putin is not suicidal today, although the chances he'll outlive total retaliation strike. But he may feel differently tomorrow, waking up in a bad mood.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-11-10 11:41:27+00:00
Not just that, but even their game studios. Take for example Starfield. Lots of hype, massive letdown. I'm one of many massive Bethesda fans. Starfield absolutely could have had so much more, but HN knows what happens with software projects. Deadlines aren't met, marketing / business depts start signaling that we need it out the door yesterday, and a bunch of things get cut. I have seen on reddit loads of comments about a ton of content being cut out of Starfield, which is ridiculous, Bethesda games are always content rich.

Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
by Arnt | 2025-11-10 11:41:57+00:00
It was legalised in Germany about 20 years ago. The proposal to legalise it was very thoughtful and readable, quite unlike your single-sentence assertion.

Two brief examples that I remember: ① Many prostitutes were also witnesses to related crimes, which were difficult to prosecute because the key witnesses would have to admit to their own prostitution. ② The first employer of an ex-prostitute has to teach the ways of normal employment. Some employers will make that effort, but not many. The organisations that help prostitutes find regular employment stated that a criminal record made the search much more difficult.
by davedx | 2025-11-10 11:42:40+00:00
No, you're not "on the hook". You're definitely motivated to increase profits - most senior leadership's compensation will be heavily equity weighted, and net profit growth tends to result in share price growth - but there's no hard rule saying they have to purse short term profits at all costs. They might be pressured to by shareholders but they're not obligated to.

Consider companies like Amazon, Tesla, who (initially, for many years) prioritised long term growth over short term profits. Look at how long they lost money for. You do need a CEO who actually has some vision.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-10 11:43:34+00:00
The Register, being British, should probably have gotten this right, but people constantly get this wrong. Even a lot of people living in the union don't even realize the different between EU, Europe, EEA, Schengen and all the other layers, so maybe it's hard to blame "outsiders" from not getting it either.

I'm guessing maybe the "European Commission" threw them off, because it's an EU entity (basically the executive branch), not "Europe wide" one, which the name kind of implies. But then "EU" also implies "Europe wide" in its name, and people seem to kind of get the difference most of the times.
by internet_points | 2025-11-10 11:43:34+00:00
I should have specified. I wasn't asking about OCaml vs Haskell in general[0], but what advantage does OCaml have with respect to concurrency?

[0] I think most people just end up post-rationalizing whatever choice they have already invested in, I know I do :) With that in mind, maybe I as a mainly-Haskell dev should instead list some things I miss from OCaml: faster compile times, non-recursive `let` by default, polymorphic variants, labeled arguments
by exasperaited | 2025-11-10 11:43:39+00:00
Except the post that you were replying to was not, was it? And you were talking in the present tense.

If you think unions have no possible value in 2025 you are either independently wealthy, retired on an excellent pension, or very misinformed. Right now everyone should be considering whether there is a union for them, because what is coming down the pipe is not good.
by paulnpace | 2025-11-10 11:45:13+00:00
They aren't usually accessible until the network is compromised.

TP-Link cheap consumer configurable switches used to have, IIRC, a VLAN permanently available on all physical ports, giving access to everything going through a switch. After many complaints, they "upgraded" the firmware to support disabling the VLAN from the GUI, though it remained default enabled, and included a note with something like "we only had it that way because customers demanded it".
by _heimdall | 2025-11-10 11:45:18+00:00
Why would Google keep supporting AMP if the line is drawn only by use?

They chose to kill off a spec and have it removed from every browser because they don't like it. They choose to keep maintaining AMP because its their pet project and spec. Its as simple as that, it has nothing to do with limited resources forcing them to trim features rather than maintain or improve them.
by pm215 | 2025-11-10 11:45:31+00:00
I suspect Dijkstra would have disagreed with you about "and" and "or", judging from his criticism of the technical report which had the line "even the standard symbols used for logical connectives have been avoided for the sake of clarity".

Personally I think one advantage of '&&' and '||' is that it's clear they're a notation that you need to know the syntax and semantics of. For instance typically '&&' is "short-circuiting" and will not evaluate its RHS if the LHS is true; a natural-language "if a and b then ..." doesn't suggest that critical detail or necessarily nudge you to go and check. (Not that Dijkstra was in favour of short-circuiting logical operators, to judge by https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD100... point 4...)

More generally, I'm not sure of the benefit of tailoring the language syntax for beginners rather than experienced practitioners; the advantage of '&&', '||' and the rest of the "C-like" syntax stuff in a new language is that it's familiar to a wide base of existing experienced programmers.
by MrJohz | 2025-11-10 11:46:02+00:00
I think you are misreading the phrase "based on". The author, I believe, intends it to mean something like "descends from", "has its origins in", or "is similar to" and not that the ECMAScript 262 spec needs to be understood as a prerequisite for implementing a JSON parser. Indeed, IIRC the JSON spec defined there differs in a handful of respects from how JavaScript would parse the same object, although these might since have been cleaned up elsewhere.

JSON as a standalone language requires only the information written on that page.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-11-10 11:46:09+00:00
I think it's the other way around. Simply raising awareness about endangered animals may be enough to gain traction since many/most people are naturally sympathetic about it. Conversely, XSLT being deprecated has lower awareness initially, but when you raise it many people hearing that aren't necessarily sympathetic - I don't think most engineers think particularly fondly about XSLT, my reaction to it being deprecated is basically "good riddance, I didn't think anyone was really using it in browsers anyway".
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-10 11:46:19+00:00
>The whole purpose of inclusive language is to cover everyone, not just an “overwhelming” majority.

Science and medicine deals in absolute details, not in blankets covering everyone. When a doctor needs to treat you, they need to know your sex, weight and age, since the dose or treatment is highly specific on those variables, there's no such thing as an inclusive thing to cover everyone the same. Inclusivity here would get you killed.

> It harms no-one to say “pregnant people”

It also helps no-one now, and it also harmed no-one in the past to say "pregnant women", since no-one other than women can get pregnant. So why did it have to be changed other than for virtue signaling?
by asdefghyk | 2025-11-10 11:46:58+00:00
There is an excess of solar in the middle of the day, because there is no economical way to store it for when sun is not shining, typically at night time and when cloudy weather.

The hard, and $$$ expensive, challenging, problem that has to be solved is storage of renewable energy on a massive scale.

( Personally I would just like the cheaper electricity that country was promised, instead of the price rises over the last few years.)
by b112 | 2025-11-10 11:47:15+00:00
There's a difference between buying shares, something Western governments have done forever, and owning controlling interest.

There's also a difference between owning some shares, which is hands off, and having no legal blocks to killing the CEO's family if he doesn't do as wished.

You're comparing false equivalences.

Chinese ownership of corporations is entirely different in this context. Even with the current US leadership, no comparison. None.
by santah | 2025-11-10 11:47:55+00:00
20 years and counting, working on https://next-episode.net (it's a TV/Movies tracking website and community).

I've dedicated this week to some maintenance tasks that are long overdue (mainly modernization of the code and the database), kinda delaying the inevitable (which is to work on harder tasks in my todo - like adding features to the mobile apps).
by diego_moita | 2025-11-10 11:49:04+00:00
England is an island, both geographically and culturally. This is the culture from where Brexit comes.

They still think that the world spins around their navel, that football (soccer) is their game and the sun never sets in their empire.

At the end of WWI, 4 empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian tzar, the Ottoman Empire and the British. The Austrians accepted it and moved on. The Russians and Turkish are in denial and resisting to accept what they already know. The British didn't even get the memo, they're totally oblivious, in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy.

> While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.

Bullshit. People know about Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Maseratti, Ducati, Beretta (guns), Carpiggiani (ice-cream machines), La Marzocco, De Longhi (espresso machines), etc.
by wahern | 2025-11-10 11:49:05+00:00
> Friends aren't good enough

They are if you actively manage your relationships with an eye to maintaining redundant access to necessary materiel or having multi-pronged defense strategies. Singapore is constantly nurturing strategic defense ties with multiple allies and attempting to avoid existential reliance on any single ally. And the one nation they definitely wouldn't rely on is Malaysia, the country most likely to threaten their sovereignty. Ukraine's problem was they were politically too dysfunctional and dependent on Russia defense trade until Russia's successive invasions forced them to reform domestically. (To be fair, Russia had a hand in prolonging their dysfunction.)
by ghaff | 2025-11-10 11:51:25+00:00
Though honestly 40 years ago, sending out hundreds of cookie cutter applications by post wasn’t that hard.

I do agree that once someone gets through an initial filter and screen they should be willing to meet in person. That has costs on both sides but, during the tech boom, one heard a lot of complaints by applicants that they’re no going to travel for interviews, dinner, etc. <shrug>
by energy123 | 2025-11-10 11:51:43+00:00
Nuclear weapons are overrated. Multiple countries already invaded a nuclear power (1973 Yom Kippur War) and nothing happened. If Egypt wasn't afraid of nukes, what makes you so confident that your future enemy will be?

It's an empathy gap. You are rightly cautious of nukes, but you then project that mindset onto belligerents, which is the mistake. A very important rule in strategic planning is to avoid projecting your own calculations onto the enemy.

Nuclear powers, like all states, need to meet the pacing challenge and be capable of winning, or at least have enough asymmetric capabilities to force a frozen conflict if necessary.
by mabster | 2025-11-10 11:51:57+00:00
You nailed it - that's my criticism :)

I've worked with a lot of code like this (particularly C libraries and litanies of return codes), and it's fine... But I prefer something like Java-style exceptions. And with Java lambdas or Kotlin the trend is unfortunately away from checked exceptions these days...

I too am interested in your other reasons!
by stephencanon | 2025-11-10 11:52:04+00:00
IEEE 754 is a floating point standard. It has a few warts that would be nice to fix if we had tabula rasa, but on the whole is one of the most successful standards anywhere. It defines a set of binary and decimal types and operations that make defensible engineering tradeoffs and are used across all sorts of software and hardware with great effect. In the places where better choices might be made knowing what we know today, there are historical reasons why different choices were made in the past.

DEC64 is just some bullshit one dude made up, and has nothing to do with “floating-point standards.”
by rsynnott | 2025-11-10 11:52:24+00:00
The Register know very well what the EU is. However, in practice, the EU is colloquially referred to as "Europe" in many contexts in the UK.

The rules the EU establishes will also apply to the EEA, and in practice will almost certainly also be adopted by the UK, which has tended to take its lead from the EU on such matters since Brexit. So, while pedantically these are not rules for Europe, _for practical purposes_ they likely will be.
by ethin | 2025-11-10 11:52:41+00:00
Hot take but I seriously think both Agile/Scrum and "make a single dev do a ton of things that wouldn't necessarily count as software development" (like RDB design and management) is the direct cause of all of these problems. It is my opinion that Agile/scrum (or, at least, the "agile"/"scrum" that corporations understand) institutionalized the "move fast, break things, consolidate everything into as few positions as possible" mindset, in the name of things like "reducing expenditures" and "ship things really fast and damn the consequences". That includes, oh, I dunno, dumping QA/QC and putting all of that on the end-users. Maybe the real Agile might not do this, but I can't say because, from what I know, very few, if any, corporations actually use the real Agile at all, and instead repurpose the word to mean a completely different system.
by LadyCailin | 2025-11-10 11:52:57+00:00
I think you should also balance your take by asking people who recently lost their job what they think about their healthcare. I’m sure you’re aware of that, and my point is rhetorical, but that’s the trade off here, it isn’t only about what it looks like when things go right, you should also consider what happens when things go wrong. It’s also enlightening to see what happens many times when people “did everything right” and still got shafted by the US system. See: Sicko for instance https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEQ7acb0IE
by whizzter | 2025-11-10 11:53:13+00:00
More than anything, once people realize that they can be fine without MS because 5-10% of the non-Apple market has done so (and the alternatives has figured out the kinks with the mass influx of users) it could move from a trickle to an avalanche.

The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
by netbsdusers | 2025-11-10 11:53:23+00:00
If it's about "prettier code" then I think a number one candidate would be making bitfields more viable for use. It could make driver code much cleaner and safer.

Windows is only targeting little-endian systems which makes life easier (and in any case they trust MSVC to do the right thing) so Windows drivers make much use of them (just look at the driver samples on Microsoft's GitHub page.)

Linux is a little afraid to rely on GCC/Clang doing the right thing and in any case bitfields are underpowered for a system which targets multiple endians. So Linux uses systems of macros instead for dealing with what Windows C uses bitfields. The usual pattern is a system of macros for shifting and masking. This is considerably uglier and easier to make a mess of. It would be a real improvement in quality-of-life if this were not so.

You can also look at Managarm (which benefits from C++ here) for another approach to making this less fraught: https://github.com/managarm/managarm/blob/a698f585e14c0183df...
Show HN: ChartPilot: New Proprietary 'Pilot's Score' to Filter Stocks Breakouts
by thisisagooddayg | 2025-11-10 11:54:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the developer behind ChartPilot, a momentum scanner for swing traders. The single hardest problem in momentum trading is confirmation: How do you know a 4-hour signal is valid if the Daily trend is weak? Most scanners just dump data; we wanted to provide conviction.

We're now launching our new metrics dialog and architecture to solve this:

The Pilot's Score: A proprietary aggregate score (0-5) that rates signal strength instantly by systematically aligning EMA, ADX, and Squeeze Momentum across 1H, 4H, and Daily charts. It simplifies complex Multi-Timeframe Analysis (MTFA) into one number.

Verifiable Performance: We've refactored the data structure to track the historical performance of every signal type, moving from speculation to data-backed decisions (backtesting features are in development).

The goal is consistency and objectivity. We're not here to predict tops—we're here to automate the search for high-probability structures.

I'd appreciate any feedback on the implementation and the utility of this proprietary scoring system.
by fortranfiend | 2025-11-10 11:54:47+00:00
Patches have been a mess the last couple years. Makes me think someone or a group of people either quit, were fired, or got pulled into the ai side of the business. The mistakes being made are that of junior programmers without a proper lead or review and testing team. That plus removal of features and addition of too much telemetry into the os and office products.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-11-10 11:55:14+00:00
I think most people realise there is a difference. If nothing else, Brexit made it very clear to those who didn't already know that you can be in this part of the world but not in the EU. But rightly or wrongly, people still use "Europe" as shorthand for "the European Union". It's no different to referring to the US as "America".

I do think the media should aim to do better so agree that the Register should have used the correct term.
by arbitrandomuser | 2025-11-10 11:55:26+00:00
carnot theorem does not put an absolute limit , a carnot cycle can have any efficiency as long as you have reservoirs hot and cold enough ,

besides that if you could be more efficient than carnots cycle at two temperature you can spontaneously extract heat from a cold object and out it in a hot object without any input energy , this would mean you can have perpetual motion . we are not just going to bump a kardashev scale , were going to truly max out and go beyond.

fun fact the U S patent office has been bogged down by so many perpetual motion applications they have made it policy to outright reject such applications without a working model satisfactorily demonstrating it
by b112 | 2025-11-10 11:55:27+00:00
But if you show it to people, it's not personal use.

If you make a rip-off of Star Wars, OK. Now show it to others.

Same with a t-shirt.

Of course, a lawsuit has to do with damages... what is the damage of a t-shirt 6 people saw?

But if you wear it on a TED talk?
by ericpauley | 2025-11-10 11:55:32+00:00
Indeed, real systems is a lower bar than you imply. In this case it’s unclear from the CV that I’d be getting someone that has ever written more than a 50 line one-off Python script.

You mention mentoring people in undergrad. Sure, by a year-3 course I’d expect to have to coach beyond basic understanding. To say that basic understanding of performance optimization is out of scope for a BS graduate is not supported by my experience, however. We’re not talking about boot camp grads here.
by schoen | 2025-11-10 11:56:09+00:00
When Noisebridge was new, I wrote a program to get the BART arrival times and play them (in a synthesized voice as close as I could find to the BART one, though clearly not the same one) through the loudspeakers at the space during the last half hour or so of BART service every night. Unfortunately, other people found this annoying, so it was disabled very quickly.
by Thev00d00 | 2025-11-10 11:56:20+00:00
Beets can do this too!

The -C option to avoid copying files and the -W option to prevent writing tags (or set it in the config file)

It will still attempt to match and store the results in its DB for later writing to files, or moving, or querying.

For the data to be most useful, you will need a client that connect to Beets to get the data though, Im not sure how prevelant those are. You can use the web-ui plugin though.
by somberi | 2025-11-10 11:56:22+00:00
Your morning latte costs $4.50. The author traced every penny through 17 years of coffee industry data, from your local café to farms in Honduras. The result? Your barista captured $1.67 for 3 minutes of work. The farmer who spent 6 months growing your coffee? They profited $0.04. That's not a typo. Four cents. This isn't about individual greed—it's about infrastructure. The entire supply chain is architected to ensure 97% of value is captured before coffee reaches the farm gate.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-11-10 11:56:40+00:00
Even early in its history, Microsoft was famous for merging these together into a single role: "developer". I remember reading (but can't find now) an article about how IBM has all these fancy roles like designer, architect, tester and the lowly programmer, and Microsoft's approach of integrating then is what allowed then to succeed over early competitors.

Remember Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, developers, developers" (in about 2000)? That's why.

I'm not saying I totally agree (although I think I do at least a bit), just that this is hardly new.
by atwrk | 2025-11-10 11:57:22+00:00
As someone from Europe, I certainly am at least equally uncomfortable with products from the US. Made in USA to me equals zero concept of privacy protection but plenty state surveillance (CLOUD Act, Cisco having hard coded back doors every two weeks etc.) and recently even lack of rule of law and even threats of annexation of European land and interference in domestic elections.

Sure, China will probably also spy and conduct industrial espionage, just as the US, but they appear to be a rational actor and have never threatened the sovereignty of European countries.