MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-11-19 20:13:58+00:00
I used to be interested in Arduino, but the hobbyist movement is nothing like it was in the early 2010s. In part, I think, we had amazing technologies (3D Printing! Arduino! CNC! Raspberry Pi!)… but not really that many amazing ideas on what to actually do with it.

What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone.

I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.
by worik | 2025-11-19 20:14:36+00:00
No.

I came to Perl when Perl 4 was the latest.

I was using it as a frame work for distributed computing, moving data between machines.

I was on the point of throwing it all away for C++ when Perl5 came out.

I forget the details, but it made everything possible, and did not get in my way like Perl 4 did.
by Arainach | 2025-11-19 20:15:12+00:00
8 bits and no transparency is good enough for many 9s worth of the photos people take.

I have a calibrated HDR monitor. I have a camera that can shoot in 12bit color. And what HDR support does is just cause me pain. I don't find it beneficial in games. I find it to have limited utility in video. I never need more than 8 bits when sending photos to friends or having them printed. The extra support other formats offer gives me no value.

If you want transparency you want some other format, but no camera I know of records an alpha channel.
by derriz | 2025-11-19 20:15:27+00:00
If your program requires executing another program to prepare its options, then something has gone wrong in design or architecture.

Configuration is a type of API - and should be designed with the same care and goals including human legibility, orthogonality, “simple things should be simple to do”, surprise avoidance, stability, minimalism, etc.

Instead often what we get is little more than a sort of serialized form of the internal state of the system.
by l-one-lone | 2025-11-19 20:16:14+00:00
I think you don't understand the GDPR. The GDPR does not disallow the processing of personal data, nor does it disallow the sharing of personal data with suppliers or other entities in the supply chain. For example, if you run a merch store, it's perfectly OK to share the buyer's address with DHL or whoever does the shipping.

What the GDPR requires is that the user is informed about the processing and the suppliers used, and in some cases, provides consent to the processing.

The new proposal which suggests that pseudonymized data is not always PII is a different thing. It actually opens the door to a lot of new problems in my opinion. For example, with this new interpretation, big tech might question whether IP addresses are still personal data (which is something EU top courts had previously established)? What about cryptographically hashed values of your social security number (easy to break)?
by ceejayoz | 2025-11-19 20:16:30+00:00
> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing.

I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.
by exceptione | 2025-11-19 20:16:34+00:00
I think this is the best part of the essay:

> But then I wonder about the true purpose of AI. As in, is it really for what they say it’s for? > There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have. Their billions buy them ownership over what they are told will remake a future world nearly entirely monetized for them. And if not them, someone else. That’s where the fear comes in. It leads to Manhattan Project rationale, where any lingering doubt over the prudence of pursuing this technology is overpowered by the conviction of its inexorability. Someone will make it, so it should be them, because they can trust them.
by overgard | 2025-11-19 20:17:14+00:00
I don't know what it's based on, but it works extremely well. I use Rider & WebStorm daily and I find Rider is a lot faster than Visual Studio when it comes to the Unreal Engine codebase and WebStorm seems to be a lot more reliable than VSCode nowadays (I don't know if it's at fault, but ever since copilot was integrated I find that code completion can stop working for minutes at a time. Very annoying)
by filoleg | 2025-11-19 20:17:38+00:00
> This will probably lead to a series of committees about how to scale back the laws [...]

> [...] which will create new rules which will be put in place [...]

> [...] and then the career eurocrats will move on to their next job, without anyone ever being held accountable for the mistakes of the past

As intended by design.

I don't think there is some grand conspiracy or anything like that in the EU government around this, but it is clear where their priorities are. With those priorities being:

1. Perpetual rule of bureaucracy that exists for the sake of bureaucracy, with the best outcome of it being creation of even more bureaucracy. Anything of actual usefulness being done is just a side effect, not the goal. Bonus: this principle ensures perpetual job security for those career bureaucrats as well (and it helps with creating even more of them), as you can never have one too many committees or processes.

2. Hyperfocus on things that actually need to get done to consolidate power needed to ensure staying power for those bureaucrats and that the previous priority is not encroached upon. Case in point: an HN post[0] from yesterday about the EU pushing forward another new Chat Control proposal, shortly after their previous one failed earlier this year. For the EU governing bodies being stereotyped as ineffectual and too bogged down by their own bureaucracy, they surely are really efficient when it comes to repeatedly pushing publicly unpopular (but seemingly popular among the EU government bureaucrats) measures like Chat Control so quickly after their previous attempt had failed.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970663
by cogman10 | 2025-11-19 20:17:47+00:00
The upside is it stops corruption.

The fact is, spacex does not have any "trade secrets" that they should be dropping into communication with a government official when speaking about policy or a future contract.

It's not like Musk would be dropping in things like vendors or material composition when talking to Abbott.

The upside of working with the government for a contract is that usually means a lot of money. The price should be full transparency as that's our tax dollars. Secret government communications should pretty much always be seen as highly suspicious.
by Modified3019 | 2025-11-19 20:18:47+00:00
Depending on what your needs are, have a look at Incus-OS. While recently released and with lot of stuff “still in progress”, it’s something to keep an eye on. Even comes with ZFS:

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus-os/

https://github.com/lxc/incus-os
by debazel | 2025-11-19 20:19:04+00:00
> What works is content based advertising - so advertise a power drill on a woodworking hobbyist site. No tracking required there. Conversion can be obtained when user clicks a link via redirect. Like in the good ol times.

This still requires tracking to follow the user through the whole flow, which is required unless you want to be defrauded with fake users at the very least, but also very important to track the actual performance of each ad source.
by sockgrant | 2025-11-19 20:19:26+00:00
“As a designer…”

IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.

Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile.

I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I think the innovation is lagging in other areas. I don’t doubt they don’t yet have compelling AI tooling.
by Animats | 2025-11-19 20:19:55+00:00
Briefly,

The big dumb switch fabric of #5 Crossbar has no processing power at all, but it has persistent state. The units that have processing power all go down to their ground state at the end of each call processing event, and have no state that persists over transactions. The various processing units (markers, junctors, senders, originating registers, etc.) are all at least duplicated, and usually there's a pool of them. Requests "seize" a unit at random from a pool, the unit does its thing, and the unit is quickly released.

Units have self-checking, and if they fail, they drop out of their pool and raise an alarm. The call capacity or connection speed of the exchange is reduced but it keeps working. Everything has short hardware stall timers which will prevent some unit failure from hanging the exchange.

#5 Crossbar has almost no persistent memory. End offices (for connecting subscriber lines) did not log call info. Toll offices did, but that used an output-only paper tape punch. There's so little state in the switch that matching up call start and call end events was done later in a billing office where the paper tape was read.

The combination of statelessness and resource pools prevented total failure. Errors and unit failures happened occasionally but could not take down the whole switch.

There's plenty of info about #5 Crossbar on line, but 1950s telephony jargon is so different from 2020s server jargon that it's not obvious that #5 Crossbar is a microservices architecture.
by flomo | 2025-11-19 20:20:11+00:00
My take is a lot of that Web 1.0 stuff was total spaghetti code, hardcoded to a table layout, full of injection holes, etc etc. (It was like everyone did my first CGI script x 100.) So in that sense Perl wasn't any different than classic ASP or cold fusion or etc, it became associated with bad legacy code. And because there was no 'Perl 6', people had to choose something else.

(There's stuff about the perl language, but that's probably secondary.)
by submeta | 2025-11-19 20:20:18+00:00
In the early 2000s Perl was godsend. A dynamic language that helped solve a lot of problems very quickly. But as soon as projects got larger and/or others joined your codebase you realized it does not scale. For me that was the moment when I slowly migrated to Python. So for me Perl‘s syntax (&@!#%), the easter eggs in the language, and the thousands of ways to be able to write things, killed it. It was just not maintainable.
Show HN: PackageLens MCP – search package registries across multiple ecosystems
by rakeshmenon | 2025-11-19 20:20:26+00:00
Search package registries across multiple ecosystems (npm, PyPI, RubyGems, Crates.io, Packagist, Hex) and fetch package context (README, downloads, GitHub info, usage snippets). It features smart ecosystem auto-detection, so your AI can find packages without needing to specify which ecosystem to search.
by ale42 | 2025-11-19 20:20:27+00:00
> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon?

For an end user maybe not much, but for tinkerers, a lot. Almost everything where you need/want customization, unique features, and so on. This said, you don't strictly need an Arduino for that, I actually (almost) never use them because their software library is so high level that it eats so much resources on the underlying microcontrollers and make things more complex when you want to do more advanced stuff (like handling interrupts). When I use them, is for some quick&dirty thing (e.g. I need to turn on a stripe of "smart" LEDs quickly), but never include them in finished things.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-11-19 20:20:41+00:00
I interviewed for Yahoo Mail in '05 - multiple rounds and they ghosted me. IIRC, it was all going to be perl stuff.. I'd done some out of necessity a few years earlier, and hated it.

In hindsight, glad they didn't respond - got a much nicer EDA startup job a month later working with Tcl/Tk (which I had already used for ~10 years at the time).
by ygjb | 2025-11-19 20:20:54+00:00
As a hobbyist, it's not about being able to buy it faster, cheaper, or better. It's about learning how to tinker, making something work, and building something that is effectively the artistic expression of my technical skills.

YMMV, but if you aren't loving the hobby element anymore and the itch can be scratched by reaching for a product, that's a shift in what you are enjoying, not an indictment of hobbies :)
by osigurdson | 2025-11-19 20:20:59+00:00
>> .NET should be the default choice for any non-trivial backend or non-GUI application

I personally wouldn't go that far. If you know well, it makes sense to use it, but you already know Java or Go, would the benefit delta isn't going to be that high.

Somewhat famously, even Anders Hejlsberg decided to use Go vs .NET for the new Typescript compiler. .NET is fine (and I have personally used it a lot) but that doesn't mean it is net better than other options out there.
by gcbirzan | 2025-11-19 20:21:09+00:00
> You run a merch store. You want to share with your suppliers order data so that you can get the right number of sizes/colors/etc. Is this PII under GDPR rules? Technically, yes!

Not at all. Your shirt size is not PII. Given this information, you couldn't be identified.

> Under the new proposal, sharing this data is okay, so long as you use pseudo-anonymous identifiers (customer-1234, customer-1235).

This was okay even before. Given this information (and your shirt size), you couldn't be identified.
by vednig | 2025-11-19 20:21:37+00:00
Semrush is the third or fourth largest database of collected internet knowledge including links ctc cta etc. combined with select business inputs

Any B2B company would immensely see value out of it immediately after acquiring

After Figma, Canva's Affinity deal, and Creator Backlash for Cancellation charges, Adobe needs a win to show for and increase investor confidence, that's what this is
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-19 20:22:17+00:00
> And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable

See, that's one of the things lots of people who enjoy Perl and/or Ruby in the comments around in this thread don't quite grasp: some languages require programmers possessing a somewhat special state of mind to read and write productively, and some languages allow pretty much every mediocre programmer to read and write, and still produce a manageable program.

The other thing is the information density. In my experience, most people after graduating high school have experience with reading mainstream fiction and school textbooks, and those things you can half-skim/half-read and still get out most of the meaning. Then those people hit the college-/university-level textbooks and screech and crash because those books, you have to read them sentence by sentence; not everyone can get get used to it (or even realize they have to do that in the first place). And similar observations hold for programming languages: Perl and APL are just way too dense compared to Go and Python; if you're used to reading code line-by-line (skimming over half of them), then it's really bloody annoying to switch to reading sigil-by-sigil (as for writing, well, we all know that typing speed was never really a bottleneck for programmers).
by benzguo | 2025-11-19 20:22:30+00:00
today we're announcing Zo. when we came up with the idea – giving everyone a personal server, powered by AI – it sounded crazy. but now, even my mom has a server of her own. and it's making her life better. she thinks of Zo as her personal assistant. she texts it to manage her busy schedule, using all the context from her notes and files. she no longer needs me for tech support. she also uses Zo as her intelligent workspace – she asks it to organize her files, edit documents, and do deep research. with Zo's help, she can run code from her graduate students and explore the data herself. Zo has given my mom a real feeling of agency – she can do so much more with her computer. we want everyone to have that same feeling. we want people to fall in love with making stuff for themselves. in the future we're building, we'll own our data, craft our own tools, and create personal APIs. owning an intelligent cloud computer will be just like owning a smartphone. and the internet will feel much more alive.
by pembrook | 2025-11-19 20:22:48+00:00
Ughhh here we go again.

Every time GDPR is brought up on HN, the same "it's super simple to comply, just read it yourself!" religious incantation gets repeated ad-nauseam.

I think it's because people love the idea of what they think GDPR actually represents (the fuzzy abstract idea of "privacy"), without ever diving into any of the implementation details.

Almost nobody on this forum has ever talked to a lawyer about this, and even less people have followed the actual court rulings that have determined what GDPR actually means in practice.

My favorite example, under GDPR over the last 5 years, regardless of whether you follow the spirit of GDPR to the letter...due to the various schrems rulings, back-and-forth on SCCs, data-transfers, and EU-US political spats...there's been multi-year periods where if you're using any service touching data in any part of your business even remotely connected to the US or any non-EU country (so, almost everything), it's been a violation that exposed you to massive fines should any EU resident have filed a complaint against you. This was recently resolved again, but will continue to go back and forth if GDPR remains as-is.

And this is just one of many weird situations the law has created for anyone running a business more complex than "a personal blog."
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-19 20:22:56+00:00
It’s literally in the same process as the router. Performance issues like the layer taking too long are handled differently than just timing out afaik. It’s possible it should time out but safe cancellation in Rust can be tricky depending on how this is architected. Timeouts are irrelevant to this outage and I wouldn’t classify it as a huge issue unless there’s a possibility that a layer has an indefinite blocking call as a misbehavior and forever hangs all requests. My hunch is that this is generally already handled - FL2 is not documented enough to speculate.
by broken-kebab | 2025-11-19 20:23:00+00:00
Yes, it would look and work better if presented with an explanation like "you can find any var description by using...". But as I commented already in another thread there was a widespread belief in 90s-00s that users who ask about already documented pieces are being uncivil, not vice versa. So it's not about Perl community per se. The same was norm in many Linux fora, for example.
by matthewmc3 | 2025-11-19 20:23:11+00:00
You forgot perhaps the most important one:

3. six

`six` was instrumental in repairing the Python schism by giving people a way to incrementally move their 2.7 code to Python 3, and write code that was compatible in both. The six project didn't exist at first and the path to Python 3 was too painful without it. Six solved all that by smoothing over built-in libraries with different casing between versions, incompatible core libraries, the addition of unicode strings, print changing to a function, etc, etc. Perl 5 to Perl 6 (aka Raku) never got that.
by btreesOfSpring | 2025-11-19 20:23:11+00:00
A shorter and consistent iteration cycle by meaningful working groups on the legislation until a long term workable legal framework is enacted from the lessons gathered. Something like, every four months, X working group will present updates to legal recommendations and they will be voted on at that time. Allow for public input throughout the process. Mistakes will be made but can be short lived with the correction cycle. They are trying to tightrope walk complex legislation for tech. Might as well take on a tech release cycle to get out of beta and into release version 1.0 of these laws.
by kachapopopow | 2025-11-19 20:23:39+00:00
not sure if I am actually using 5.1-codex-max or just normal 5.1-codex (is there even 5.1-codex?) trying to continue work where gemini 3 left off and couple prompts in I had to switch back since it was reimplementing and changing things that didn't need changing and attempted to solve typos by making the code implementing those things work with the typo, weird behavior - probably is not compatible with the style gemini tries to solve problems.
by hughdangus | 2025-11-19 20:23:47+00:00
You really shouldn’t be using Arduino over STM32. Low end STM boards that are price matched with Arduino are not only more powerful by almost a magnitude, but also have an excellent debugging IDE.

The only thing to watch out for are 3V3 vs 5V but then again if you’re doing anything worthwhile you’ve got a stash of buffers, op amps and MOSFETs.
by aerhardt | 2025-11-19 20:23:51+00:00
Well surely that's a good thing.

In my experience, for some reason adherence is not even close to 100%. It's fixated on adding asterisk function params in my Python code and I cannot get it to stop... Maybe I haven't found the right wording, or maybe my codebase has grown past a certain size (there are like a dozen AGENTS.md files dancing around).

I'm still very happy with the tool, though.
by nonethewiser | 2025-11-19 20:23:55+00:00
>Why?

I already specified why.

>It's basically just spending money to change the world into what you want.

Change isn't necessarily good. I think we can all rattle off a ton of missions to change throughout human history that were very bad, and did not even have good intentions. On top of that, even in less extreme cases, people have competing conceptions of the good. Resolving that is always going to include some messiness.
by apsurd | 2025-11-19 20:24:10+00:00
This means to me AI is rocket fuel for our post-truth reality.

Post-truth is a big deal and it was already happening pre-AI. AGI, post-scarcity, post-humanity are nerd snipes.

Post-truth on the other hand is just a mundane and nasty sociologically problem that we ran head-first into and we don't know how to deal with. I don't have any answers. Seems like it'll get worse before it gets better.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-19 20:24:28+00:00
Yep, it is exactly what the EU shouldn't do. This will actually further disadvantage EU companies, when US companies are left to run rampant. It also will take away any "made in EU" advantage that EU-local companies had over US competition. GDPR was exactly the right step. In fact it was not enforced strictly enough and should have been enforced much stricter, punishing all the shady businesses which employed dark pattern to extract personal data from citizen.