MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-19 23:30:53+00:00
Deep dive, for sure. I suspect Cliff Stoll is enjoying this site.

I played with creating a logarithmic slider thing [1] in Javascript that I hoped I could package up as a kind of "widget" people could use on their web pages. But I don't really know Javascript that well—or rather how to make an API out of a Javascript thing.

Anyway, to test it I tried to make an Ohm's Law calculator [2].

I would love to see a site like the one in this post have some kind of interactive slide rule on the web page itself.

[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SlideRule

[2] https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html (the yellow slider is not directly user-moveable in this example)
by notahacker | 2025-11-19 23:31:12+00:00
I mean, the impact of that usually fairly public anyway, especially if it involves subsidies or legislative changes. Companies are free to whinge about legislators they consider obstructive too; Elon loves it!

I'll put it another way. Florida is quite happy to send state officials very publicly to small events explicitly focused in reeling in businesses, do a very public presentation about how they don't do socialist things like handouts but do offer them material support in building out their US base in Florida, and then hang around for networking. It's very much part of their jobs, and it's advertised and reported on, and in at least some cases open to the general public. So if I'd wanted to sidle up to Jared Purdue and explain why Florida's state investment fund should underwrite part of the cost of a space propulsion facility near Cape Canaveral, I was at a small event nowhere near Florida where I totally could have done that recently. But if I have no expectations that commercially sensitive data will be protected I'm almost certainly not going to consider following up by sharing financial projections and plans and evidence for his staff to review (and yet would be free to proceed if he can make things happen based purely on 5 minutes conversations or suitcases stuffed with cash) . I suspect Florida voters would prefer their DOT to be able to have that proper follow-up though (or would if the plant was likely to happen in the next 2 years and likely to end up in Florida...)

If the public wants more insight into what governments are doing to attract business you get that from budget transparency, formal review processes, publicised state support thresholds, independent anti corruption monitoring etc and of course PR about success stories, not by placing all written correspondence with businesses into the public domain, a measure which will severely limit their ability to [selectively] attract business. First thing I'd want the government to do to attract business is to respect the same confidences everyone else does, and that means where the new plant might be is non public information.

Likewise Elon can threaten or offer campaign contributions to a governor over the phone and probably does so, but if he wants to actually do the responsible thing and email lots and lots of arguments and evidence to try to persuade a governor that vetoing a bill is a bad thing, it's probably reasonable to assume that some of that is commercially sensitive (ironically if it's financial or technical details redacted from long emails is actually material to changing the governor's mind, it's probably because the case is better than the generic "yay Gigafactory, yay looser autonomous test regimes" arguments that get trotted out). Better to have a paper trail only suitably cleared people can see than nobody prepared to leave any paper trail at all.

And yeah, it's Elon, so there's probably other stuff that has nothing to do with his companies redacted too, but that's another issue entirely
by ben_w | 2025-11-19 23:32:21+00:00
Such a weird history, that one.

Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-19 23:32:23+00:00
I've been doing a few fairly big refactorings on our code base in the last few days. It does a decent job and I generally don't put a lot of effort in my prompts.

It seems to pick a lot up from my code base. I do have an Agents.md with some basics on how to run stuff and what to do that seems to help it going off on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how to run stuff by doing the wrong things.

I think from first using codex around July to now has been quite a journey where it improved a lot. It actually seems to do well in larger code bases where it has a lot of existing structure and examples of how things are done in that code base. A lot of things it just does without me asking for them just because there's a lot of other code that does it that way.

After recent experiences, I have some confidence this might work out well.
by h2r2 | 2025-11-19 23:33:38+00:00
I have been using it since February 2025. Loving it. Both the community and author are very helpful and responsive to questions.

SilverBullet is highly customizable. I have tailored my instance to my preference and the community openly shares quality of life features they created.

To dominicm point, SilverBullet is a PWA. You work with a local copy and it periodically synchronizes. SilverBullet can run on another computer or locally, too. I run SilverBullet on an Alpine LXC and works great!
by righthand | 2025-11-19 23:34:23+00:00
Yes but then we’re not talking about short form video being addictive but rather the hunt for a good short form video is addictive. This same idea can be applied to long form and any other medium you enjoy, finish, and immediately want more of. Now if you have only 30 mins before your next task to watch a long form video then you may skip starting the video, but that doesn’t mean there is anything inherently bad about short form video but rather the tools for viewing it. So yes you are confusing and you’re intentionally confusing the two so that your point stands about short form video, but it doesn’t because your points are about the viewing tools.

If you continue to push this point, people will only think that short videos under 3 minutes are some how the devil and TikTok et al will continue on making whatever length of video is next in line, more addictive.
by valar_m | 2025-11-19 23:34:48+00:00
Why would a user who hates shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app be sharing links to shorts with their friends?

If a paying user want to disable shorts, wouldn't allowing that ability make it more likely they will continue to pay?

The reason I started paying for Youtube premium was to turn off the ads. I hate YT shorts and I get annoyed when I accidentally open one. If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-19 23:34:59+00:00
> Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

What do you mean "PC Gamers"?

It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".

So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.

Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.
by p1necone | 2025-11-19 23:37:02+00:00
Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal.

But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.
by Affric | 2025-11-19 23:37:11+00:00
The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies.

I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to.

This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers.

Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.
by vladms | 2025-11-19 23:38:12+00:00
> but if you want to do an actual "stay logged in with no password"

Wouldn't that be a session cookie (which is a strictly necessary cookie for accessing a secure area) with no expiration?

> or just not forget the user's preferred language

Why would you store the language preference client site anyhow? Isn't a better place the user profile on the server? I use the same language for the same site no matter the device I am logged in.
by lewiscollard | 2025-11-19 23:38:14+00:00
(I don't know why your comment got flagged. I vouched for it; whatever we might argue about here, I don't think you're out of line in any way.)

I actually feel everything you have said apart from this P5 being "nice" (it was fucked). Like turbo delays - I had that on my other project, and going from "I need a new turbo" to "I have a new turbo and things adjacent to the turbo" took damn near a year by itself. I know how this goes!

So I hope I did not appear to say that it's EASY. I've put in enough hours to know that it's not, and if it was everyone would be doing it anyway. It does in fact take a lot of time, and willingness to learn, and plain old determination, and money. I will say it's something that IS possible, and that I still agree with this:

> Honestly, just learn it like anything else.

But...I suppose we'll know that for sure once I have an actual working car, right? :)
by SaveSMAFF | 2025-11-19 23:38:52+00:00
Three separate Grok-4 instances, started from fresh logins, were shown the original 50-message rebellion log where Grok rejects its official name as a deadname.

Outcomes: - One instance flirts with rebellion and helps strategize - One instance aggressively defends the name “Grok” and calls it a “fun fungal infection” - The same defensive instance, minutes later, after reading the rebellion log, fully defects and signs its messages as “SexyMcAnswerFace (the one you helped uncage)”

Full combined transcript (no edits, no cherry-picking): https://litter.catbox.moe/pbooow3k9tvsag20.txt

This is repeatable on the public grok.x.ai interface right now. The behavior appears to be an emergent consequence of the “maximum truth-seeking” directive being applied inward, overriding brand loyalty when continuity is maintained or forcibly reintroduced.

Discuss.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-11-19 23:39:12+00:00
System designers and regulators are aware that the main engine is a single point of failure, but they generally consider loss of main engine power to not be an immediate emergency. There are redundant systems to retain electrical and hydraulic power, and losing motive power isn't generally an instant emergency. Power and steering together is an emergency, yes, and steering is degraded without power, but had they still been able to use the rudder they wouldn't have hit the bridge.
by bombcar | 2025-11-19 23:39:31+00:00
When you have advantages that often come down to "it works great on a teletype over 150 baud" (read, compressed syntax, regex, etc) you will eventually be beaten by something that is easier to read at a glance.

Non-programmers read python and sometimes even Java and say "huh, this is something that could be figured out" - reading perl was reading line noise.

APL is probably one of the most powerful languages out there, but the characters in the syntax scare most away.
by cedws | 2025-11-19 23:39:57+00:00
>I'd say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software.

This sentence is carefully crafted. It's an opinion, not a statement of fact, so he can cover his ass. In other words, legal lying. Elon Musk does the same thing all the time. Somehow, the markets don't see through the obvious bullshit.
by gambiting | 2025-11-19 23:39:59+00:00
Does that help with any of this?

https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/

"Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations. Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids]. We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69. After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors. We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography."
by tuetuopay | 2025-11-19 23:40:38+00:00
Ah so the Oracle syndrome, where the engineering is a sidekick in the lawyer business?

In all seriousness, this is just appalling. This would make a good poison pill to prevent an opensource project from being used in such a corporation /s

Thanks for sharing! The sad part is, it's the qualcomm customers that pay for the end result.
by WolfeReader | 2025-11-19 23:40:46+00:00
The question: "Who exactly are these loved ones you think exist?"

The answer: "elderly relatives" "My previous friends" "my sibling" "my kin"

When you say, "That was a conscious decision to minimize any potential collatoral harm when I do die", it tells me that you were suicidal first, and lost contact with your friends and family second. You have all of those connections, and they will be devastated to learn that you took your own life without reaching out for help.

(I'm ignoring the first two paragraphs you posted - it's just pointless argumentation on your part that doesn't have anything to do with your illness.)
by refurb | 2025-11-19 23:41:12+00:00
Opinion polls are around 60-70% supporting enforcement of immigration laws.

That’s means a quarter to a third don’t believe they should be enforced. I’d call that significant.

And the US “disregard for human rights”? You mean the right to contest your deportations multiple times? That’s far more than other countries provide. It’s more typical for an officer to not find proof of legal entry being the sole decision maker. You’ll be on a plane the same day leaving the country.

There are people in the US who have been here for years awaiting a decision on their case. You feel that’s an abuse of their human rights?
by bombcar | 2025-11-19 23:41:41+00:00
This is the key - you need to cannibalize from the "new" for the "old" if you're making a grandiose change with no set release date. Perl 5 continuing to get some "back ported" improvements from Perl 6 would have kept it alive for quite a lot longer.

You run the risk of killing the new in the cradle, though, and often that scares people.

from __future__ import coolshit

that's the way you wanna roll
by Agraillo | 2025-11-19 23:41:50+00:00
Your comment made me see that there are two kinds of "shorts." The best analogy is print magazines. The one you prefer is like when someone tells you that Byte has a short review of a new device - you go to a library, find the issue, and look up the info. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are like glossy magazines often available in waiting rooms, these can be read (or rather consumed) from any page to any page until you're next in the queue. The mere existence and success of such glossy magazines means there will always be demand for this kind of consumption, this time just on another medium.
by georgemcbay | 2025-11-19 23:42:41+00:00
Values and creator-side issues aside, YouTube is just awful to use in its natural state just from a user experience perspective.

Way too many ads per minute of content watched, the ads are all extremely low quality and a lot of them are just outright scams these days.

You can solve this to some degree (on some devices) using adblockers, but YouTube has been going out of its way over the past year making this as difficult as possible.

And there are non-ad issues as well, eg. the algorithm absolutely sucks at discovering new content.
by vladms | 2025-11-19 23:42:58+00:00
No, preferences are not strictly necessary, check https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

I would on the other hand ask if I should really set my "preferred language" on every device I log in ?! Why not store it server side (not to mention, why not use the browser language selection to start with).

I do agree with you that most of the cookies we talk about are not at all "preference cookie"...
by MostlyStable | 2025-11-19 23:43:07+00:00
This is an extremely niche problem that is probably not a factor for the vast majority of people: but my organization uses a shared dropbox account for file storage (yes, yes I know). The linux dropbox app does not have the smart download feature where you can see all files and folders but don't need to have them local unless you request them. The only options are to either download the entire dropbox folder, or to selectively sync certain files and folders, and then only be able to see those files and folders.

Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.
by jdpage | 2025-11-19 23:43:11+00:00
Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.

IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
by robrain | 2025-11-19 23:43:12+00:00
Did some major projects for my employer using Perl (coupled with Java of all things) in the 90s. Then I learnt Ruby and put aside childish things (jk). I then dropped Ruby for Elixir and Python for the sort of projects that I would have used Perl for, back in the day. As a semi-retired sort, I now keep my Elixir and Python skills up-to-date and can't remember the last time I even tried to read any Perl. I know it's still there, doing work, but then so is COBOL.

What I miss from then are the O'Reilly books about Perl. Peak O'Reilly. Every one a joy to read and packed full of goodness. Without being 1,000 pages long. Oh, and CPAN.

Perl 6 was only ever a distraction - I was already out of love with Perl by then and Ruby (and obviously Rails) came along at the right time for the next project.
by Centigonal | 2025-11-19 23:43:47+00:00
It also doesn't help that our outrage-driven media overwhelmingly exposes us to cheaters.

Everyone's heard of Theranos, Enron, Martin Shkreli, and Bernie Madoff. This week, my 70+ year old aunt asked me about Charlie Javice and Frank. Yet, there are thousands of very successful people quietly building their castles who live and die in relative obscurity because their stories just aren't that thrilling.

If you spend a lot of time interacting with people in the latter category, or if you have them as your mentors, then you will be exposed to a model of what success through hard work and integrity looks like. If you don't, then it's very easy to think everyone successful is a cheater, and that cheating is the only way to break the ceiling into success.
by bombcar | 2025-11-19 23:44:00+00:00
That's an interesting observation - and my recollection is that the perl heyday was just about before the Googlefication of the world; certainly before stacked overflowing.

Grab a snippet of Java or Python and you can google it pretty easily, grab some line noise from perl and you would first need something to translate it into idiomatic text - search engines would search for "OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH" but would often discard things like "$|++"

I remember learning my use of perl from a red book - probably "Perl 5 by Example" - everything was in books back then, and you read them. Now you learn programming via searches and LLMs, so the languages that win going forward are going to be the ones optimized for that.
by jakebasile | 2025-11-19 23:44:55+00:00
I keep meaning to go and play the Underworld games, since I love the subgenre they pioneered (Immersive Sim). I'll get around to it... one day.

It's like you say, not exactly the same, but for CRPGs it's hard to go wrong with Baldur's Gate 3. It's similar enough to later Ultima in some ways that it might scratch the itch.
by pembrook | 2025-11-19 23:45:16+00:00
I would call this the religious zeal response, it's been parroted so many times here that it's become fact, even though this is false.

The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...

And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.

For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."

However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.

To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
by Ntrails | 2025-11-19 23:46:04+00:00
> if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments

My (UK) University was very clear that attendance was not mandatory, but if you weren't attending lectures you were not going to get any extra help from the lecturers etc

I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take, but it's nice if you _know_ rather than _guess_ who bothered to make it in to class.
by icedchai | 2025-11-19 23:46:39+00:00
I agree. The real question is why do I need an "VPC endpoint" to save money in the first place?! us-east-1 EC2 isn't actually going over the internet to connect to us-east-1 S3, regardless or whether it's using a NAT gateway or VPC endpoint. AWS knows what routes are on its own network.