MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yawaramin | 2025-11-17 16:29:46+00:00
OK, side note, whoever decides the GHC release numbers should be pulled aside and given a quick talk about how version numbers are supposed to work.

Anyway, looks like or-patterns just landed as a GHC extension:

foo (Bar; Baz) = 0

I still like OCaml's (built-in) syntax better:

let foo (Bar | Baz) = 0

Which I feel stems from its elegant decision to use the pipe character as the 'alternative pattern prefix':

let foo = function | Bar | Baz -> 0
by whoknowsidont | 2025-11-17 16:30:15+00:00
Probably a good read for you to start with: https://raz.sh/blog/2025-05-02_a_critical_look_at_mcp

There are tons of articles detailing the problems if you are genuinely interested.

Notice you couldn't technically point to anything to support your statements, but instead had to revert to religious zealotry and apologetics -- which has no place on this forum.

>be objective about what MCP is and is not meant to do and disconnect what MCP is from how people are currently using (and frequently misusing) MCP.

Please re-read what you wrote.

You wrote all of that just to counter your own stated position, because I think at some fundamental level you realize how non-sense it is.
by troupo | 2025-11-17 16:30:53+00:00
> It's a dead format that no one uses[1],

This has to be proven by Google (and other browser vendors), not by people coming up with examples. The guy pushing "intent to deprecate" didn't even know about the most popular current usage (displaying podcast RSS feeds) until after posting the issue and until after people started posting examples: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...

Meanwhile Google's own document says that's not how you approach deprecation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

Also, "no one uses it" is rich considering that XSLT's usage is 10x the usage of features Google has no trouble shoving into the browser and maintaining. Compare XSLT https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... with USB https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... or WebTransport: https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... or even MIDI (also supported by Firerox) https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity....

XSLT deprecation is a symptom of how browser vendors, and especially Google, couldn't give two shits about the stated purposes of the web.

To quote Rich Harris from the time when Google rushed to remove alert/confirm: "the needs of users and authors (i.e. developers) should be treated as higher priority than those of implementors (i.e. browser vendors), yet the higher priority constituencies are at the mercy of the lower priority ones" https://dev.to/richharris/stay-alert-d
by debugnik | 2025-11-17 16:30:59+00:00
By "static analysis" you mean unsound, best-effort analyzers which try to study code as-is, rarely allow extra annotations, and tolerate false negatives and even positives by design.

While these are a huge improvement over no extra tooling, they don't compare to analyzers like Frama-C plugins, which demand further annotations/proofs if necessary to show code is free of UB, and you can provide further to show your code is not just safe, but correct. Assuming one doesn't ship rejected code, the latter is pretty much its own language with much stronger guarantees, much like SPARK is to Ada.

I like sanitizers and other compiler-specific guarantees, they at least try to fill the gaps by giving proper semantics to UB. But the ones available for C are still insufficient, and some are very resource-heavy compared to just running safe code. I'm excited about Fil-C showing a path forward here.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-17 16:31:02+00:00
I have yet to read an article complaining about XSLT deprecation from someone who can explain why they actually used it and why it’s important to them.

> I will keep using XSLT, and in fact will look for new opportunities to rely on it.

This is the closest I’ve seen, but it’s not an explanation of why it was important before the deprecation. It’s a declaration that they’re using it as an act of rebellion.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-17 16:31:24+00:00
Ultimately I think it’s not really about going to far in one way or the other. I tend to be very blunt in my dealings with people to a fault. I wouldn’t say I’m mean, but like, in order for blunt truths to be effective I think they have to be somewhat rare, so I’m trying to adapt to be more strategic in my bluntness, but most of the time, let things go and maybe subtly steer rather than just calling things out all the time.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-17 16:31:36+00:00
> It doesn’t take much time to fix a puncture with a tiny kit the size of a matchbox.

That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you. This is like solving the short battery life in phones with a portable battery charger. You still have to remember to charge the charger beforehand and bring it with you. Small kits are easy to lose sight of that by the time you need them so you don't know where they are.

Tubeless tires are sadly not compatible with most bikes. I am not trying to be downer, this is just my experience (losing the kit and finding out that the bike I bought is not compatible with tubeless tires). I do agree though that bikes are definitely the way to go. But I wouldn't rely on them too much, especially on the electric components. Humans have a tendency to aim for convenience above all and being stranded in the middle of nowhere with dead phone and a bike with a dead battery in winter is not fun
by card_zero | 2025-11-17 16:32:01+00:00
Go ahead, begin. What do you say about it? I could find the Wikipedia page, and put a name on the question I guess, some philosopher must have written some discussion of the matter. I kind of doubt it went anywhere.

Oh, the article is just called "Why is there anything at all?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3...
by eslaught | 2025-11-17 16:32:56+00:00
It depends on what you care about. If you're writing purely for yourself, then by all means, go ahead and do so.

I've found there's a balance to be found in listening to others vs yourself. Usually, if multiple people give you the same feedback, there is some underlying symptom they are correctly diagnosing. But they may not have the correct diagnosis, or even be able to articulate the symptoms clearly. The real skill of an author/editor is in figuring out the true diagnosis and what to do about it.

In the communication example, this means rooting conflicts in the true personalities of the characters and/or their context, so that even if they sat down to have a deep chat, they still wouldn't agree. E.g., character A has an ulterior motive to see character B fail. Now you hint at that motive in a subtle way that telegraphs to readers that something is going on, without stopping the action for what would turn into a pedantic conversation. At least, that's what I'd do.
by chb | 2025-11-17 16:32:59+00:00
Widely used? By whom? Devs who don't understand rsync or scp? Give me a practical scenario where a box is running FTP but not SSH.

Edit: then account for the fact that this rare breed of content uploader doesn't use an FTP client... there's absolutely no reason to have FTP client code in a browser. It's an attack surface that is utterly unnecessary.
by nozzlegear | 2025-11-17 16:33:02+00:00
I'm interested in trying this, but not really interested in signing up for the whole Testflight rigamarole. I've had uBlock Origin Lite installed ever since it was released, but I prefer Safari's Content Blocker approach which uBlock doesn't use. (uBlock uses manifest v3, and it sometimes it leaves those small "empty image" boxes where an ad would be; I'm not sure if those two things are related.)
by bluGill | 2025-11-17 16:33:02+00:00
You didn't use global state in the same sense that I did. I mean global as in state of the entire world, not just the computer you are on.

I tamed our inter-set dependencies by doing things like starting dbus on a different port for each tests - now I can test with real dbus in the loop and my tests are fast and isolated. We have a strict rule of what directories we are allowed to write to (embedded system - the others are read only in production), so it is easy to point those to a temp dir. It was some work to set that up, but it tames most of your issues with global state and allows me to verify what really counts: the system works.

For a CRUD web app your database separation of concerns makes sense. However in my domain we have lots of little data stores and nobody else needs access to that store. As such we put it on each team to develop the separation that makes sense for them - I don't agree with all their decisions, but they get to deal with it.
by self_awareness | 2025-11-17 16:33:08+00:00
> In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another

You say like it's some kind of feature, but for me it sounds like a potential for name clash, and using private API which is prone to change/break.

> You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing

The thing is that is was VSCode which has brought us LSP, not "emacs hackers". It was VSCode which has brought us LLM Agent mode. All editors are catching up to VSCode, not the other way around.

LSP, LLM, ssh/docker/podman remote development, what's the Emacs answer to those? (I mean, nowadays vim+emacs have their own LSP clients built-in, years after VSCode)
by nwellnhof | 2025-11-17 16:33:27+00:00
Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue and I'm saying that as ex-maintainer of libxslt who probably triggered (not caused) this removal. What's more interesting is that Chromium plans to switch to a Rust-based XML parser. Currently, they seem to favor xml-rs which only implements a subset of XML. So apparently, Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well. This is a lot more concerning.
by ecliptik | 2025-11-17 16:33:56+00:00
From what I remember about the name, it's derived from NASA space programs. Where Gopher is Mercury, Web is Apollo and Gemini is in between.

Gemini is a new internet protocol which:

- Is heavier than gopher

- Is lighter than the web

- Will not replace either

- Strives for maximum power to weight ratio

- Takes user privacy very seriously
by catapart | 2025-11-17 16:34:16+00:00
The thing I love most about the "why am I not just saying the boring, clumsy thing I'm actually thinking, instead of assuming everyone already understands it" rabbit hole is that once you actually commit to it, everything becomes simpler and easier. It takes away the pretense of religion, or anything supernatural, and it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them (which, ironically, doesn't make people think you're dumb, it just makes them introspect about why you would "just SAY that").

Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!
by elevation | 2025-11-17 16:34:23+00:00
I've considered rust for some performance-critical greenfield work where I would normally use C. Rust's syntax, idioms, and packaging are foreign to my team, so the only motivation to take that on is the safety of the borrow checker.

But as I investigate Rust, I learn of trivial use cases that cannot be safely represented [0] in Rust's syntax. TFA demonstrates even more provably-safe techniques that are impossible to express safely in Rust. So after all the difficulty of learning Rust, I might still have to choose between performance and safety?

My impression is that Rust 1.91.0 simply isn't a suitable C replacement for many real world use cases. But since it's already being used in production, I worry that backwards compatibility concerns will prevent these issues from being fixed properly, or at all.

Perhaps rust2 will get this right. Until then there's C.

[0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han...
by Aurornis | 2025-11-17 16:34:24+00:00
> Also, "no one uses it" is rich considering that XSLT's usage is 10x the usage of features Google has no trouble shoving into the browser and maintaining. Compare XSLT https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... with …

Comparing absolute usage of an old standard to newer niche features isn’t useful. The USB feature is niche, but very useful and helpful for pages setting up a device. I wouldn’t expect it to show up on a large percentage of page loads.

XSLT was supposed to be a broad standard with applications beyond single setup pages. The fact that those two features are used similarly despite one supposedly being a broad standard and the other being a niche feature that only gets used in unique cases (device setup or debugging) is only supportive of deprecating XSLT, IMO
by tracker1 | 2025-11-17 16:34:55+00:00
There's also the fact that a modern emulator (assuming you're running as an emulator, instead of real/raw) is that you aren't constrained by memory the way real hardware implementations were either.

I keep thinking it would be cool to emulate enough of DOS and earlier x86 to just run BBS Doors directly and connections over ws(s) to make authentication and program selection a bit easier. Even if no classic BBS terminals (currently) support connecting over WebSockets, which are easy enough to bridge.
by rayiner | 2025-11-17 16:35:04+00:00
Republicans and Trump supporters are two overlapping but distinct groups. A lot of establishment Republican approaches were based on ideas that are obsolete in the Trump era. Trump can win enough Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens or Hindi nationalists in New Jersey to win the popular vote. Mitt Romney Republicans can’t.

There is nothing about right-wing politics that inherently benefits from a limited electorate. After all, Latin American countries regularly flip-flop between far-left and far-right leaders, like in Brazil with Bolsonaro, or Modi in India. The increase in immigrants in the U.S. and expansion of the electorate to include them won’t get rid of “Republicans,” like many had hoped. Instead, it simply changed what kind of right-wing party could form a viable majority coalition.
by EGreg | 2025-11-17 16:35:22+00:00
Nah. I don’t “feel the AGI”. I think the AGI is a silly quest, just like having a plane flap its wings. Feynman had it right in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI

I think the future is lots of incremental improvements that get replicated everywhere and humans outclassed in nearly every field, where they stop relying on each other.

As far as LLMs yes I think they are the best placed to know if some code or invention is novel, because of their vast training. Can be far better than a patent examiner, if trained on prior art, for instance.

What you’re not used to is an LLM being fed stuff that you statistically / heuristically would expect to be average but is in fact the polished result of years of work. The LLM freaks out, you get surprised. You think it was the prompts. The prompts are changed, the END result is the same (scroll to the bottom).

I want to see whether foundational LLMs can be used as a good first filter for dealflow and evaluating actual projects.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-17 16:35:30+00:00
Firefox renders HTML just fine: this is a made up complaint by people who don't actually use Firefox regularly.

And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-17 16:35:42+00:00
The most important resource you'll need is a hex editor that can let you drop at a cursor and see what the value is at the cursor for all the basic datatypes (u8/u16/u32/u64, float, double, at minimum). Something like 010 Editor or ImHex.

If it's a really simple format, since you appear to have the ability to generate arbitrary file contents using the program, you can get some mileage by generating a suite of small contents with few changes between them. I reverse engineered the DSP sphere blueprint format by generating a blueprint with one node, then the same node located elsewhere, then two nodes, then two nodes and one frame between them, etc. But this process is really only possible for the simplest formats; I'd gander that most reverse-engineered file formats are heavily based on decompilation of the deserialization code.

A lot of binary file formats end up being some form of "container" format--essentially, a file contains some form of directory mapping an item ID to a location in the file, and the contents of that is in some other binary format. It's worth first checking if this is the case, and matching against known formats like ZIP or HDF5.
by rdtsc | 2025-11-17 16:35:49+00:00
This can work on a feedback loop as well -- popular media is where young people learn how communication works. If they all watch the same "movie logic" scenarios, those scenarios are the only examples they have of how to behave.

So while Hollywood writers may have just needed a mechanism to make the plot interesting, that pattern can become reality as well.

It's a bit like people talking reading ChatGPT crap, will start talking and writing like ChatGPT.
by dominicrose | 2025-11-17 16:36:00+00:00
Well you are only responsible for your side of a 2-person relationship, no matter what kind of relationship it is. If the other person doesn't react in the best way, at least you tried and maybe that was the best thing to do based on the information that you had.

I guess most people think that it takes two persons to end a relationship but that's not true. It only takes one. If you're not that person, then maybe it's enough to know that it wasn't you because you tried.

Being stuck or being at the end is pretty much the same thing if you never get unstuck.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-17 16:36:36+00:00
> It’s not “free tier” it’s all the tiers being significantly discounted (underpriced). It’s ALL pricing.

That's possible, but how would we know what the cost to provide the service is from any of the companies, which will anyways vary from company to company since they are using different models and hardware (e.g. OpenAI/Microsoft NVIDIA, Google TPUs, Anthropic/Amazon Trainium).

We also don't know how much the average chat subscriber is using the service. A low usage subscriber may be profitable at $20/mo, but a high usage one unprofitable.

Chat subscription prices seem to have been steady at $20/mo for a while, but cost of providing the service is falling very fast. In recent Dwarkesh interview, Satya Nadella says costs are falling 5/10/40x year over year, or evern quarter over quarter.

Here, at 1:10:56

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella-2
by makemake_kbo | 2025-11-17 16:36:46+00:00
well for the bluetooth headphones i dont think you were the target demographic.

but open source generally isnt treated as a product. its just a bunch of volunteers having fun writing code. its natural that they will include their other interests in it in some way because it makes working on a project more fun. first impressions matter a lot, but i dont think foss projects should optimize for that instead of having fun.
by _sr6i | 2025-11-17 16:36:48+00:00
Having a background in C/C++, that was the problem I ran into when I had to learn XSLT at translation company that used it to style documents across multiple formats. The upside of using XML was that you could store semantically rich info into the tags for the translators and designers. The downside, of course, with all the metadata, was that the files could be really large and the XSLT was usually specifically programmed for that particular document and very verbose so the XSLT template might only be used a couple times.
by Xylakant | 2025-11-17 16:37:33+00:00
The bosch drivetrain is pretty much bog standard on the german market and available on almost all price classes and Schwalbe Marathon/Big Apple tires are aren't exactly restricted to the higher price classes as well.

Now, if you're riding Mountainbike or Gravel tires, your tradeoffs are different - they sacrifice puncture resilience in favor of less weight.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-17 16:37:43+00:00
Yeah, the idea that it's some kind of foundation of the "open web" is quite silly.

I've used XSLT plenty for transforming XML data for enterprises but that's all backend stuff.

Until this whole kerfuffle I never knew there was support for it in the browser in the first place. Nor, it seems, did most people.

If there's some enterprise software that uses it to transform some XML that an API produces into something else client-side, relying on a polyfill seems perfectly reasonable. Or just move that data transformation to the back-end.
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-17 16:37:57+00:00
Will we ever even get a widespread new programming language? AIs work great for coding because they have massive codebases in C/C++/Python/JS/etc. to train on. If I create a language called "foo" tomorrow, no such codebase will exist for it and the lack of AI support for the language will be a huge barrier for adoption so it's going to be much less likely to catch on like Python did back in the day.
by fragmede | 2025-11-17 16:38:34+00:00
In the wake of every scandal in finance is a wave of regulations. Finance is one of the most heavily regulated industries the is. That smart people keep finding new areas that haven't yet been regulated doesn't mean that the existing areas agent heavily regulated and audited.

If you give me $5, and then I pass it on to Bob for you, how many licenses and how much paper work do you think I should need to do that if I did that as a business? If you give me some money and I am a business, how much paperwork should that incur?