MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gfiorav | 2025-11-23 16:40:36+00:00
Great. I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Time will tell. I’m still a bit confused about the right-wing remark though.

As I mentioned, my only claim here is that I’ve lived for years in various Western countries. I’ve paid taxes, held jobs, bought and sold homes, made friends, volunteered, and so on. I believe my experiences give me an edge over others who just are “traveling” or “spending the summer.”

I grew up in Europe, and I can tell you that you’ll encounter more right-wing perspectives in a random bar on a Tuesday than you’ll find anywhere in America. Europe has always been an ethnonationalist continent, which is why it surprises me that calling out its inner workings would result in accusations of being right-wing.

Like I said, time will tell.
by danaris | 2025-11-23 16:40:49+00:00
There are better ways.

In fact, there's plenty of evidence that prison is, in many cases, a net negative, as it takes people who committed crimes of opportunity or poverty and turns them into either hardened criminals who see it as a lifestyle, or people who have no choice but to commit crimes to survive, as we treat them as nonpersons and shut them out of society.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-23 16:41:20+00:00
Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company.

I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then.

I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then.

That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a very different creature, and lumping it in with them, seems like a cheap grab for Apple-haters.
by andai | 2025-11-23 16:41:50+00:00
I've been debloating some of my personal projects — you know how it goes, "keep adding one more thing" driven development.

I asked Claude Code to simplify the code. It spent ten minutes spinning, making countless edits. They all turned out to be superficial. It reduced the code by 3%.

Then I asked the same model (Sonnet) in my web chat UI to do the same thing, and it reduced it by 50% — the program remaining otherwise identical, in terms of appearance and behavior.

I love the agents but they are explicitly designed not to rewrite entire files, and sometimes doing that gives you way, way better results. 15x better, in this case!

(Even better might be to first rewrite it into user stories, instead of incidental implementation details... hmm...)
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-23 16:42:05+00:00
> Just because TypeScript allows developers... does not mean TypeScipt is the reason you spend time validating your own bugs

Unfortunately, taking an ecosystem-wide view, it means exactly that. If one of my dependencies hasn't provided type stubs, or has provided stubs, but then violated their own type signatures in some way, I'm on the hook for the outputs not matching the type annotations.

In a strict language, The compiler would assert that the dependency's declared types matched their code, and I'd only be on the hook for type violations in my own code.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-23 16:42:30+00:00
Edit: apologies, missed the "a few weeks ago" and didn't realize it was still an ongoing matter. Please disregard.

---

Original comment:

> then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill.

And yet you let them do it, didn't recall the payment, and seemingly didn't even follow up on the threat?

Looks like mission accomplished for them, of course the customer service monkey is going to do this again and everyone else will also happily look the other way while it's happening.

Yes, corporation-on-consumer-fraud becoming de-facto legal is a major problem (that is unlikely to be something the current US government will address), but it mostly relies on fear/apathy and 90% of people caving in and paying (like you did); disputing the payment is easy and then the ball goes into their court and they must prove you agreed to this new contract/upgrade (which they can't) if they want to get paid.
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-23 16:42:36+00:00
Reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams is eye opening here, and it's pretty close to exactly that.

> I think they just did not give a fuck.

It's that people like Zuck and Sandberg were just so happily ensconced in their happy little worlds of private jets and Davos and etc., that they really could not care less if it wasn't something that affected them (and really, the very vast majority of issues facing Meta, don't affect them, only their bonuses and compensation).

Your actions will lead to active harm? "But not to me, so, so what, if it helps our numbers".
by dahart | 2025-11-23 16:42:37+00:00
At least Vulkan runs on Windows, that certainly makes it more cross-platform than DirectX. According to Google, some VNCs on Linux don’t support Vulkan, but I don’t think that’s a fair reason to suggest Vulkan doesn’t run on Linux in general, right? You’re right Vulkan isn’t part of the OS. Does that usually matter, if most people get Vulkan support through their driver?
by blablabla123 | 2025-11-23 16:43:15+00:00
Wow... one solution is of course to deactivate these. Which is what I did for my Legion 5 Gen 10. Speakers don't seem to be much in use these days anyway.

Still, I didn't expect this amount of custom configuration for my new laptop. Most importantly Bluetooth sound and getting Nvidia driver support. For Bluetooth I ended up writing my own tiny daemon. While driver support exists there seems to be a race condition somewhere between Pipewire, systemd and the bluetooth drivers. And for Nvidia drivers I ended up using the CUDA driver repository which is curiously only available for Debian 12.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-11-23 16:43:28+00:00
If people actually read history books we'd make much better decisions as a society.

No. Water and electricity were not mandated in a magical past where the government was awesome. The government has been captured by corporations and special interests forever. The level of corruption in the 1800s was astronomical compared to today.

People fought for those rights. Often literally. And they still don't exist in some places.

Arkansas just passed a law that you need a working roof, electricity, heat and water, in 2021.

So no. Sitting around lamenting a past that never existed won't get us anywhere.
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-23 16:44:05+00:00
Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.

Obviously, nobody would take that kind of deal. But what if regular loans were just flat out not made available to you? Like, if tomorrow, banks as a class individually decided they would only accept payment in this sort of lifetime wage equity. Then it's not really a choice anymore. One of the options has been taken away from you. If I take a fair deal and have one of the counterparties flat out remove some of the negotiating options - even if they were not the ones taken - is it still a fair deal?

In other words, the argument that fair exchange has been violated is based on the idea that market power can be a form of coercion. If you don't agree, then you can argue that every possible counterparty deciding to only offer you a bad deal is perfectly acceptable and non-coercive. "Natural shorts[0] are not coercion", in other words. But why stop there? I mean, even in outright theft, where I'm holding a literal gun to your head and demanding payment, you could still choose to eat lead. We can redefine theft and coercion down to excuse any behavior we want on libertarian terms. The tautology is not with the argument, it's with fair exchange itself.

[0] As in, "thing you need to exist". You have a natural short position in food, drink, and shelter.
by Beijinger | 2025-11-23 16:44:24+00:00
You don't understand the problem. If we encounter aliens, they would likely make a law to protect them. In the situation I came up with, this is their first encounter with us, and they would NOT be protected.

You are very optimistic that they will be considered animals. For example they would have to live on organic matter. And they would have to have a spine to get more protection since living things with a spine are considered more valuable (Wirbeltiere).

GROK (And using all the Roman law principles on what German law is based):

Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Art. 103 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz + § 1 StGB) is the decisive wall that the prosecution would smash into in a real first-contact case under current German law. This principle has four sub-requirements (all must be fulfilled for a conviction):

Lex scripta – there must be a written statute → Yes, §§ 211, 212 StGB exist.

Lex certa – the statute must be sufficiently precise → “Mensch” is precise if you are Homo sapiens. It is not precise (in fact completely indeterminate) when the victim is an unknown extraterrestrial species.

Lex stricta – no punishment by analogy, no extension to the detriment of the defendant → This is the killer. → Extending the word “Mensch” in §§ 211/212 to include extraterrestrials would be a clear case of forbidden analogy that worsens the legal position of the accused. → German courts are constitutionally barred from doing this in criminal law (unlike in civil law or constitutional law, where they sometimes stretch concepts to protect victims).

Lex praevia – the law must have existed before the act → Also fulfilled, but irrelevant here.
by namuol | 2025-11-23 16:45:01+00:00
Programming in general is about converting something you understand into something a computer understands, and making sure the computer can execute it fast enough.

This is already hard enough as it is, but GPU programming (at least in its current state) is an order of magnitude worse in my experience. Tons of ways to get tripped up, endless trivial/arbitrary things you need to know or do, a seemingly bottomless pit of abstraction that contains countless bugs or performance pitfalls, hardware disparity, software/platform disparity, etc. Oh right, and a near complete lack of tooling for debugging. What little tooling there is only ever works on one GPU backend, or one OS, or one software stack.

I’m no means an expert but I feel our GPU programming “developer experience” standards are woefully out of touch and the community seems happy to keep it that way.
by matt_kantor | 2025-11-23 16:45:24+00:00
> A good dev isnt necessarily a good writer.

I think they should be (or at least "decent").

Should this reasoning be applied to other skills involved in software engineering? If someone never writes tests, or over-architects everything, or has terrible people skills, or never updates documentation, or doesn't bring attention to blockers, or constantly forgets to update the issue tracker, or doesn't follow the local code conventions, or works on random tasks and ignores high-priority ones, etc etc etc the solution isn't usually "don't ask them to do a thing they're bad at", it's "help them get better".

The important question is whether "skimmable commit messages" is a thing you care about enough to advocate for and teach people about. Maybe you don't, and that's fine.

> But id rather 200 chars of useful text than 72chars of useless text.

I completely agree with this. I just don't think those are the only two options.

> Expecting them to deliver above average commit messages like googles examples is a pipe dream.

This thread started with praise for that Google guide and I assumed you were of similar opinion given your reply. That's why I kept referring to it.
by prmoustache | 2025-11-23 16:45:28+00:00
This, I do think parents have a right to secrecy. Kids don't have to know everything.

Even the idea that our partners/spouses/SO should know everything about us is waaaay too extreme. I think that as long as we love and don't hurt each others and we respect the rules we set between each others it is ok to keep some things secrets.

From what I understand from the author's post, the whole marriage was a big lie to begin with so it is not like authors parents really loved each others. While we can criticize his father for not accepting divorce and thus allowing his mother to rebuild a life, we can hardly call him cheating. And I don't think kids have a right to know everything. I know my parents have had at least one major crisis when I was a kid without knowing the specifics but I have no right nor need to know why. It was between them.

A lot of couples only stay married because it is easier from an organisationnal, social and economic point of view than divorcing anyway.
by dahart | 2025-11-23 16:45:32+00:00
Figuring out if a pixel is within a shape, or is on the A-B intersection line, is part of the rasterizing step, not the shading. At least in the parent’s analogy. There are quite a few different ways to draw a red line between two points.

Also using CPU and GPU here isn’t correct. There is no difference in the way CPUs and GPUs draw things unless you choose different drawing algorithms.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-23 16:46:08+00:00
I wasn't talking about about stuff you can walk off with, nor was the article author, nor was Proudhon in 1840. This is about the difference between owning things made my people versus owning people who make things.

Used to be that the people themselves were property, then it was the machines they used, now it's some abstraction related to shares and companies, but it's all the same: what you're doing belongs to me not because I bought it from you but because of something to do with my position in society as it relates to yours.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-23 16:46:23+00:00
Going off on a tangent now, but man, I wish when you called support you could go through a quick technical competency test, and your results dictated who you got support from.

Nailing dense questions about network infrastructure? You get to the engineering team.

Failing to know what the "G" in 2.4GHz means? You probably just need someone to tell you to restart your router.
by squidbeak | 2025-11-23 16:46:33+00:00
The proposed format cuts out government, except as a dumb reference. The verification services are private companies, whose responsibilities are tightly defined under law in the recent Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. These services poll government departments during onboarding, or when data changes or is added. The ID itself isn't a single ID, rather a wallet organizing bundles of data attributes into any number of IDs. I was skeptical at first, but looking at it, I'm convinced it strengthens citizens, by giving them some control over their data.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-11-23 16:46:54+00:00
Yes. F9 has a catalog payload to mars of 4020 kg [1] and Spirit and Opportunity had a total mass of 1,063 kg [2] each. So an F9 launch could easily launch 3 similar missions on a single rocket (the MERs were launched separately on Delta II rockets). Squeeze out some weight (material advances, fuel optimisations, better transfer windows, etc) and you could probably get 4.

Anyway, in a CLPS type program you could also cover kickstage development, like some of the new companies are proposing. Impulse Space is working in that area, developing intermediary stages that can take payloads from LEO to GEO, TLI and TMI.

[1] - https://www.spacex.com/assets/media/Capabilities&Services.pd...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover
by spacebeer | 2025-11-23 16:47:38+00:00
I decided there won't be Windows device in my home anymore. If it turns out I can't do some stuff on Linux or Windows VM, I'm willing to give my money to Apple, Nintendo or Sony, even though I consider(ed) them worse then MS, and I hate their UI and policies. But at least they've been doing the same (bad) things for decades, while MS has no idea what they want and what users want from them. Or worse - they know but still insist on giving us all this cr*p
by labcomputer | 2025-11-23 16:47:46+00:00
> but you don't prove that it's impossible for any other system of ownership or of mediating access to resources/"things" to allow that.

You can’t prove a negative, so the onus is actually on you to show an example of a working alternative that does not rely on property.

And it has been tried in the 20th century. Several times, in fact. Despite all the industrial espionage committed by the Soviet Union (which saved them the resources to do the research themselves) and the slave labor of people who spoke or wrote about the “wrong” ideas (which surplus was given to the rest of the population), ordinary people in the USSR had much worse lives than those in the West.
by linguae | 2025-11-23 16:48:05+00:00
I admit I'm one of those students who never used Racket in a non-academic setting (but mostly because I needed to contribute to already-existing projects written in different languages), and I was taught Racket from one of its main contributors, John Clements at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. However, learning Racket planted a seed in me that would later grow into a love of programming languages beyond industry-standard imperative ones.

I took a two-quarter series of classes from John Clements: the first was a course on programming language interpreters, and the second was a compilers course. The first course was taught entirely in Racket (then called DrScheme). As a guy who loved C and wanted to be the next Dennis Ritchie, I remember hating Racket at first, with all of its parentheses and feeling restricted by immutability and needing to express repetition using recursion. However, we gradually worked our way toward building a Scheme meta-circular evaluator. The second course was language-agnostic. Our first assignment was to write an interpreter for a subset of Scheme. We were allowed to use any language. I was tired of Racket and wanted to code in a much more familiar language: C++. Surely this was a sign of relief, right?

It turned out that C++ was a terrible choice for the job. I ended up writing a complex inheritance hierarchy of expression types, which could have easily been implemented using Racket's pattern matching capabilities. Additionally, C++ requires manual memory management, and this was before the C++11 standard with its introduction of smart pointers. Finally, I learned how functional programming paradigms make testing so much easier, compared to using object-oriented unit testing frameworks and dealing with mutable objects. I managed to get the project done and working in C++, but only after a grueling 40 hours.

I never complained about Racket after that.

In graduate school, I was taught Scala and Haskell from Cormac Flanagan, who also contributed to Racket. Sometime after graduate school, I got bit by the Smalltalk and Lisp bugs hard....now I do a little bit of research on programming languages when I'm not busy teaching classes as a community college professor. I find Futamura projections quite fascinating.

I'm glad I was taught programming languages from John Clements and Cormac Flanagan. They planted seeds that later bloomed into a love for programming languages.
by ibejoeb | 2025-11-23 16:48:26+00:00
It'll work because that's what typescript does, and that's why it needs to be implemented there, also. That's my point.

And as far as runtime goes, well, that's not what typescript does. It's a typical compile-time static type system.

Typescript aside, even a javascript-level first-class pattern expression is still extremely useful. I really hope it gets in there soon.
by inhumantsar | 2025-11-23 16:49:30+00:00
I firmly believe that this sort of fixit week is as much of an anti-pattern as all-features-all-the-time. Ensuring engineers have the agency and the space to fix things and refactor as part of the normal process pays serious dividends in the long run.

eg: My last company's system was layer after layer built on top of the semi-technical founder's MVP. The total focus on features meant engineers worked solo most of the time and gave them few opportunities to coordinate and standardize. The result was a mess. Logic smeared across every layer, modules or microservices with overlapping responsibilities writing to the same tables and columns. Mass logging all at the error or info level. It was difficult to understand, harder to trace, and nearly every new feature started off with "well first we need to get out of this corner we find ourselves painted into".

When I compare that experience with some other environments I've been in where engineering had more autonomy at the day-to-day level, it's clear to me that this company should have been able to move at least as quickly with half the engineers if they were given the space to coordinate ahead of a new feature and occasionally take the time to refactor things that got spaghettified over time.
by symbol-mason | 2025-11-23 16:49:40+00:00
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars ended with the US famously achieving few to none of its long-term war goals and a huge public and international sentiment against further regime change adventures. If those resisting the US occupation had given up earlier, would the US neocon warmongers have been so thoroughly driven from power? Or would they have been emboldened by the victory and more likely to continue with their promised invasion of Iran?

Russia is a nuclear state, and will in no rational scenario ever "come under attack by the entire world" due to the inevitable consequences. On the other hand, manufacturing casus belli again and invading Ukraine in a few years is an obvious outcome.
by dijit | 2025-11-23 16:50:05+00:00
The amount of paperwork in my life is effectively zero. Even filing taxes can be sending an SMS saying I agree to what they’ve said.

Signing up for a new bank? No problem, the same ID is used for both banks so my authentication of one is good enough to action the transfer.

Benefits (Rot/Rut- for home improvements) are handled without me doing anything.

All my receipts/payslips etc; go to a digital mailbox and I can download them and print them no problem.

Its a lot like how the NHS works w.r.t. prescriptions: except for quite literally everything.
by webdoodle | 2025-11-23 16:50:27+00:00
They aren't going to stop because LifeLog was as Darpa project before they found a private stoog to build it for the military. Remember it's only dystopian to spy on every aspect of a persons life, if YOUR THE GOVERNMENT. Private entities in the U.S. basically can do anything they want, especially now when they can rent a President too pardon it away.
by dribblecup | 2025-11-23 16:50:50+00:00
ALGO 68 (dc) was the go to language for Burrough's [6-8]x00 variants.

These were fairly popular for awhile and supported advanced features like multiprocessing. The demand for exercising the full range of capabilities was kind of niche but an "amateur", like myself, could make a few bucks if you knew ALGOL.

I used to have the grey manual for the Burrough's variant - I'll have to poke around to see if it's in the attic somewhere.