MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-11-07 17:02:21+00:00
"The Onion" is a long sold-off brand that has nothing to do with that very funny midwestern free paper. It doesn't even have anything to do with that national media success of the 2000's.

It was first mostly sold off to the head of Strong Capital Management, moving to NY, then moved to Chicago under the editorship of "Cole Bolton - a Brown University graduate of business economics, former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and research associate at Harvard Business School." During that last move, 85% of the staff resigned. From there it was sold to Univision (the tv channel) and merged with Gizmodo. Then it was sold to private equity group Great Hill Partners, then sold off again to the founder of Twilio under whom Ben Collins was put in charge, former NBC "disinformation expert"/twitter troll and worst person on the planet.

That's just a quick summary of the 4K words offered by Wikipedia about the ownership history of this brand. Brands aren't actually things anymore, their purpose is to conceal things.
by ernst_klim | 2025-11-07 17:02:30+00:00
TBH I think it's rather a post-hoc rationalization of why the language is not popular.

> there's multiple standard libraries

Scala has a far more fragmented ecosystem with Cats, Scalaz, Zio and Akka. C++ and Java have a bunch of stdlib extensions like boost, Guava, Apache Commons etc.

> many documents are barely more than type signatures

Can be said of most of Java, Kotlin, Scala, Erlang etc etc. Just compiled javadocs, sometimes with a couple of unhelpful lines.

> data structures aren't printable by default

Neither they are in C++

I think the real reason it's not popular is that there are languages which solve more or less the same problems of system programming but look far more familiar to an avg. programmer who was raised on C++ and Java.
by bko | 2025-11-07 17:02:48+00:00
> so you reject the claim that systemic racism had any effect that can be meaningfully attributed

I claimed that it's not the sole contributor. I don't think we have laws anymore that target one group over another. There are some that disproportionally impact certain groups, but that's my entire point. You can't look at the end result.

> genetic inferiority

I'm not very interested in genetic differences among groups, because I reject the whole "groups" thing all together. So why would I talk about it? But I guess if you do look at groups, cultural similarities are more obvious than genetic differences. And those are driving most of the differences IMO

> what was the Civil Rights movement about, exactly? What does "Colored" mean in this sign?

Correct, it was equally wrong to group people based on "Colored" back then as it is now. I'll also add that back then there was a lot less immigration so the group made slightly more sense (uniform), but it was still wrong.
by rekabis | 2025-11-07 17:03:05+00:00
> I still rinse dishes

This! I mean, at least get all of the low-hanging fruit with a quick, needle-spray pass of hot water. And to do so while the plates are still fresh so that stuff hasn’t had the time to dry.

Like, we’re talking about powering through table settings for a half-dozen people at a family dinner in less than 60 seconds. Plates, bowls, cups, silverware; everything done in about 10s per person. This isn’t any kind of a deep scrub; it’s removing everything that will come off easily as fast and expediently as possible before the dishes go into the washer.
by stusmall | 2025-11-07 17:04:09+00:00
Oh definitely. I have zero expectation of high level of manual reviews. You can run limited runs of adds for next to a couple dollars. The math could never work out. I understand a lot with make it through the system, this was just so blatant. It should be so easy to catch with an automated system. It was nothing but red flags. The automated systems could reject outright or maybe escalate to manual review if it met enough criteria (account reputation, spend floor, etc)
by discoutdynamite | 2025-11-07 17:04:17+00:00
This almost deserves to be nominated for the AI darwin awards. "Volunteer community destroyed and leadership self-exiled because someone at corporate thought thier machine translation was better than native speakers, of one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages."

I would bet money that Japan has thier own yearly "business fail awards" and this is gonna wind up there. "Just hop on a quick call, never mind the time zone!"
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-07 17:04:24+00:00
Funny you should say this - just this morning I was mocked during a standup because I use Neovim instead of VSCode.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect everyone to use the same environment that I do, and I certainly don't expect accolades for preferring a TUI... but that struck me as a regression of sorts in software development. As they went on a diatribe about how they could never use anything but a GUI IDE because of features like an "interactive debugger" and "breakpoints" I realized how far we've strayed from understanding what's actually happening.

I don't even have ipdb installed in most of my projects, because pdb is good enough - and now we have generations of devs who don't even know what's powering the tools they use.
by thomasmg | 2025-11-07 17:04:39+00:00
Well floating point operations never throw an exception, which I kind of like, personally. I would rather go in the opposite direction and change integer division by zero to return MAX / MIN / 0.

But NaN could be defined to be smaller or higher than any other value.

Well, there are multiple NaN. And NaN isn't actually the only weirdness; there's also -0, and we have -0 == 0. I think equality for floating point is anyway weird, so then why not just define -0 < 0.
by tmerc | 2025-11-07 17:04:46+00:00
Ways to prevent someone from extracting value out of their work that are clearly not theft:

- murder

- kidnapping

- ddosing their site so they can't sell things

- carpet bombing their reviews with 1 star

- filing an injunction blocking the sale of their product on bogus ip claims (aka copyright trolling)

- gaslighting them to the point where they think the idea is worthless

- being the owner of IP that prevents them from selling their IP

Probably others but I think that's enough to show your definition is wrong.
by entropie | 2025-11-07 17:05:12+00:00
Iam nearly 15 years on reddit now and I would miss it if i cant use old. or a good client. Iam sure sooner or later it will happen and ill most probably leave.

Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.

Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-11-07 17:05:44+00:00
Strong agree. There seem to be a lot of people who think that being in the middle without taking a side is virtuous in itself, as if there's a law of equilibrium keeping both sides equally crazy or competent or corrupt at any time. In reality they're just getting dragged by the Overton window as other, richer people slide it around.
by zyx321 | 2025-11-07 17:06:01+00:00
Intel i5-9350, UHD Graphics 620, Windows 11 v25H2

Completely unplayable. It runs fine at first, and then suddenly drops to below 1FPS for no discernible reason. This happens regardless whether I am on the world map or combat scene. I am running the exe, couldn't find the browser version.

On an unrelated note, I am surprised to see a JS program working without the usual 200MB NW.js runtime (as seen with RPG-MV)
by bookofjoe | 2025-11-07 17:06:16+00:00
As a complete non-techie reading hundreds of comments on this it strikes me that there are a pretty much unlimited number of solutions/methods employed and described by HN readers — which makes me conclude none of them is THE best answer. It's like we say in medicine: the fact that there are 100 remedies for hiccups means none of them usually work.
by tharne | 2025-11-07 17:06:28+00:00
> Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.

I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.

As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.
by derbOac | 2025-11-07 17:06:58+00:00
Maybe I'm in the minority, but with ad blockers I never see ads on Reddit. I honestly don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit at all, with a tiny exception for ads for other Reddit offerings, which is very recent for me.

Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.
by debugnik | 2025-11-07 17:07:13+00:00
That's the repo, Jane Street has rebranded their OCaml fork to OxCaml (as in oxidised, Rust-like). From the readme:

> This is also the home of the Flambda 2 optimiser

Their plan is to use OxCaml as their experimental fork and work with upstream to port features from it. Labelled tuples and immutable arrays for example landed in OCaml 5.4 but were originally from OxCaml.
by seanw444 | 2025-11-07 17:07:22+00:00
I'd rather have that issue than seeing "AI" plastered all over the place. I'm of the opinion AI should be reserved for artificial general intelligence. These things aren't intelligent yet. They're just em-bloat-ified traditional machine learning techniques. Not that they're useless. I just hate the terminology.

If people start using the term AI, we better be living in I, Robot. Not whatever the hell this is.

Tangential rant. Sorry.
by z500 | 2025-11-07 17:07:48+00:00
> For example, one format I use is just to concatenate multiple files into a single one, I use it to group video timeline seeker images into one file - it is faster than using archive or tar/gzip

I did something like this when I was moving my files onto a new computer like 25 years ago, and all I had was a floppy drive. Just continuously dump the data onto a floppy until space runs out and ask for another one until there are no more files.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-07 17:07:49+00:00
That's Facebook. Just because it's mandatory doesn't mean people aren't going to cheat it. And cheating is the problem. Verifying that it's an actual human sitting at the keyboard is basically an exam proctoring level problem. Otherwise people will just produce vast farms of accounts.

AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.

(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)
by phillipcarter | 2025-11-07 17:08:25+00:00
Would be curious about this in more detail since I’ve not normally seen a JS app be significantly slower due to adding autoinstrumentation over the years. There’s obviously an overhead but aside from the occasional bug I’ve never seen it be significant to impact user experiences or cost to serve.

That said if your goal is basic performance metrics and nothing more, then tracing is overkill. Don’t even need an SDK, just monitor the compute nodes async with some basic system metrics. But if your goal is to narrow down behaviors within your app on a per-request basis there really is no way around tracing if you value your sanity.
by PetitPrince | 2025-11-07 17:08:44+00:00
Steve Jobs "bicycle for the mind" analogy is more potent than I initially thought.

When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.

(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)
by jerf | 2025-11-07 17:08:49+00:00
I'm still fiddling with this so I haven't seen it at scale yet, but in some code I'm writing now, I have a centralized repository for services that register themselves. There is a struct that will provide the union of all possible subservices that they may require (logging, caching, db, etc.). The service registers a function with the central repository that can take that object, but can also take an interface that it defines with just a subset of the values.

This uses reflect and is nominally checked at run time, but over time more and more I am distinguishing between a runtime check that runs arbitrarily often over the execution of a program, and one that runs in an init phase. I have a command-line option on the main executable that runs the initialization without actually starting any services up, so even though it's a run-time panic if a service misregisters itself, it's caught at commit time in my pre-commit hook. (I am also moving towards worrying less about what is necessarily caught at "compile time" and what is caught at commit time, which opens up some possibilities in any language.)

The central service module also defines some convenient one-method interfaces that the services can use, so one service may look like:

type myDependencies interface { services.UsesDB services.UsesLogging } func init() { services.Register(func(in myDependencies) error { // init here } }

and another may have

type myDependencies interface { services.UsesLogging services.UsesCaching services.UsesWebCrawler } // func init() { etc. }

and in this way, each services declaring its own dependencies means each service's test cases only need to worry about what it actually uses, and the interfaces don't pollute anything else. This fully decouples "the set of services I'm providing from my modules" from "the services each module requires", and while I don't get compile-time checking that a module's service requirements are satisfied, I can easily get commit-time checking.

I also have some default fakes that things can use, but they're not necessary. They're just one convenient implementation for testing if you need them.
by theamk | 2025-11-07 17:09:39+00:00
Hard disagree, esp re "only useful for a software developer familiar with the codebase". Too many "user-friendly" apps create "helpful" error messages that hide essential information.

"Cannot open data file: Not found" and that's it - no more context (such as a filename). Even for a user with no coding experience, this is absolutely useless, you cannot find good explanation for it on the Google. A backtrace might look ugly, but at least would have a much higher chance to point to a useful forum post. And now with AI advances, AI can analyze backtraces and sometimes give an explanation (not very often, but there is no alternatives...)

So by all means, add a nice, human-readable error message for a few common cases that user likely to encounter, such as "internet down" or "wrong type of input file"... but leave backtraces on for all other unexpected cases, like "server returned nonsense", "out of disk space", etc....
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-07 17:09:42+00:00
> It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers

It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable

An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem, you can actually continuously improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps accidentally.

Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to release updates to already working and used by many apps for random things.

And despite that, they let through clear and obvious scams like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass. That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark should never be possible to get a scam through. There's no excuse.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-07 17:09:47+00:00
The takeaway I take from that is that "AVIF sux" which is my general feeling about AVIF.

My own interest is in publishing images that I took with my DSLR and having them look like images I took from my DSLR. People like to show me

https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/

to prove I'm wrong. It's true that the AVIF image is small doesn't have the obvious blocking artifacts that JPEG and WebP but if you look really close at the reflections on the upper wing of the car it looks like the AVIF just made up some probable-looking blobs of light that don't look that much like the original if you look really closely.

The thing is a video codec doesn't have to be good for images. For instance a single frame of a VHS video looks atrocious but an actual video on VHS isn't that bad.

When I tried to use AVIF to make files of the quality I wanted, I didn't see a clear benefit over WebP and to the contrary I came to the conclusion that WebP was a good drop-in replacement for JPEF for my application. If I wanted to make a big splash image for my web site that didn't have to hold up to close inspection though, AVIF's compression ratio is really high.
by JSLegendDev | 2025-11-07 17:10:11+00:00
That's because I'm using GemShell. It's tool that generates executables using, under the hood, Neutralino which is similar to Tauri (uses the OS's webview rather than packaging a Chromium instance).

More info here, if you're interested : https://jslegenddev.substack.com/p/export-web-games-for-desk...
by Night_Thastus | 2025-11-07 17:10:14+00:00
I recently completed a playthrough on 0.49, with the Total Overhaul pack.

It's remarkable what modders have done. They've breathed a lot of life into such an old game.

Don't be fooled though, even with OpenMW it still runs quite poorly at times. Any water reflections cause effectively the whole scene to be rendered twice, and it just kills the framerate. Many of the shaders like volumetric clouds can kill it too.

And if you have one of those mods that messes with waterfalls, that'll do it as well. Or if you allow the sun to get really close to the horizon all the sudden the shadows are super long causing a bunch of extra stuff to be rendered.

It needs a lot of technical work like proper occlusion culling, draw call batching, LOD, shadow culling, etc.

I'm hopeful though, it's an amazing project!

EDIT: Also dear god give me a proper UI for filtering and sorting in things like shops and (mainly) containers. It's so painful right now.
by AJ007 | 2025-11-07 17:10:16+00:00
The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on.

What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.

The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.

Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.
by nostrademons | 2025-11-07 17:10:47+00:00
I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too.

So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.
by asacrowflies | 2025-11-07 17:10:48+00:00
The Eocene was 45 million years ago. Humans have existed for less than 250k.

The interglacial warming is the most likely origin of the catastrophic global flood mythos across many cultures (including the Bible). And involved a scale of mass migration and suffering/death that would make modern sensibility recoil.

Your argument is like if I burned down your house or community but stated "well the forest will reclaim it in 10 thousand years and it will be beautiful and full of life! Is anything really even different on the grand scale?"

I care about the immediate future. And all the suffering and death, and the animals and plants that coevolved with us and ARE our evolutionary environment.

It's absurd and either supremely ignorant or bordering on malicious anti social behavior . The paradox of tolerance is being pushed to its limit.
by tharne | 2025-11-07 17:10:49+00:00
> This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.

Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-07 17:11:06+00:00
I don't think the "tool weakening" discourse is strong enough: it overlooks the aversarial nature of the modern internet. There are humans actively intending to weaken you for various reasons, either to sell you stuff or to weaken you ideologically by making you hate other humans such as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848215

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845772 "meta predicted 10% of revenue came from scams"
by karmakaze | 2025-11-07 17:12:16+00:00
I did get some sense of that where F# sort of (actually is) 2nd class to C# which is slowly gaining some F# features, but F# itself isn't well promoted/supported.

As for missing language features, they can also be a double-edged sword. I slid down that slippery slope in an earlier venture with Scala. (IIRC mostly implicits and compile times).
by zarzavat | 2025-11-07 17:14:28+00:00
> React is that the compilation step is almost required - and that compilation step is a significant and growing piece of friction.

As a recovering C++ programmer the idea that a basically instant compilation step is a source of friction is hysterical to me.

Try waiting overnight for a build to finish. Frontend devs don't know they're born. It takes like 5 minutes to set up vite.
by entropie | 2025-11-07 17:14:42+00:00
> “I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

Well, this guy obviously didn't get the memo that Google search isn't what it was 10 years ago and is total junk.

It's not just AI brain rot. Brain rot is everywhere. Social media, linear TV, politics.