MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdpi | 2025-12-24 16:46:35+00:00
"Childlike wonder" is an interesting turn of phrase here, that reminds me of one specific game — Outer Wilds. The way I like to describe Outer Wilds is that you're exploring the star system in your grandma's back garden, escaping a blackhole just in time for dinner.

Everything about the game seems designed to elicit that response. The in-world technology is absolute jank, with wooden spaceships and patched-over spacesuits. Both groups of aliens in the game (the Hearthians and the Nomai) are intensely curious and driven by wanderlust. The story's stakes are simultaneously enormous and none at all, like a child playing make-believe.

Playing it genuinely gets me feeling like a child, and that's something truly special.
by johnfn | 2025-12-24 16:46:59+00:00
Really, you haven't found a single task they can't do? I like agents, but this seems a little unrealistic? Recently, I asked Codex and Claude both to "give me a single command to capture a performance profile while running a playwright test". Codex worked on this one for at least 2 hours and never succeeded, even though it really isn't that hard.
by pojntfx | 2025-12-24 16:47:02+00:00
I still wonder why my experience and the experience of my friends, community and family with Matrix has been so positive compared to what people describe all of the time. Maybe it's because something changed in ~2025 when I started using it again? Both Beeper (my main Matrix provider, the one that preconfigures WhatsApp, Signal, SMS etc. bridges) and Element (the new mobile app and EMS for hosting). I onboarded something like two dozend non-technical people to it, and they are all happily using it every day, mostly to use the bridges that come with Beeper. Haven't heard a single complaint, even switching devices just works now. Almost all communities I care about (GNOME and so on) have Matrix servers, and since the spaces feature launched it's been really competitive with Discord, even UX-wise thanks to the new apps on desktop and mobile. Yet all I hear on HN and elsewhere is people complaining about UX issues that just have not appeared a single time for myself. Maybe it's people using non-compliant clients, old servers, or some other strange configuration? It's a mystery to me.
by Arathorn | 2025-12-24 16:47:11+00:00
Because we didn't have enough people or cash to do a good job of simultaneously writing two servers, and as Synapse had gone into production across *.gouv.fr and other critical deployments, we instead frantically backported Dendrite's main novelties to Synapse - adding instead worker processes to Synapse so it could easily scale beyond the GIL: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapse-s-sc...

The hope was always that we would then get back to Dendrite and be able to invest in it and migrate over, but the cash situation got worse in 2022 due to Matrix being more and more successful (causing the available $ in the industry to be flow to integrators rather than the upstream project), and instead we had to essentially park Dendrite dev in 2023 other than for critical fixes.

Meanwhile, to try to fix the $ situation, we added Rust workers to Synapse as "Synapse Pro" to give customers a reason to actually route money to us as the upstream project, and nowadays Element is actually on a more economically sustainable path. However, at this point the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse and fix its resource usage. That said, others are of course very welcome to continue progressing Dendrite forwards, and I personally find it super depressing that we failed to progress both servers at the same time.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-12-24 16:47:58+00:00
I for one would be would be very interested in a Redbean[0] implementation with MicroQuickJS instead of Lua, though I lack the resources to create it myself.

[0] https://redbean.dev/ - the single-file distributable web server built with Cosmopolitan as an αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε
by stopandth1nk | 2025-12-24 16:48:17+00:00
I have used something similar but for a slightly different problem. A long time ago (at the start of my career) I started using a folder called “Curious George” where I put all those really interesting emails with new ideas, trends, etc. The problem is not so much death by a thousand cuts but falling down a rabbit hole of some cool idea and losing an hour of focus. I collect all those dangerous emails and then go through them periodically. The difference is that none of these really require a direct response but some of them will result in me starting one of those annoying email chains that will steal others time - so it is much better to allocate time to read thoughtfully so I am only sending along the useful bits.

For those daily thieves of attention (described here) my approach is to use my inbox itself rather than a new folder. I leave them unread and archive the other garbage. Then I go through the unreads at a scheduled time. How well does this work for me? - not great. It works well enough but maybe I should try this idea instead. The biggest challenge with any of these methods is to develop the discipline to actually schedule and keep the time to review these things.
by shagie | 2025-12-24 16:48:57+00:00
The first tax in the United States was in 1791...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_1791

> Tariff of 1791 or Excise Whiskey Tax of 1791 was a United States statute establishing a taxation policy to further reduce Colonial America public debt as assumed by the residuals of American Revolution. The Act of Congress imposed duties or tariffs on domestic and imported distilled spirits generating government revenue while fortifying the Federalist Era.

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1700s/The-17...

> After a spirited debate, the House passed, by a 35 to 21 majority, the Excise Whiskey Tax—legislation that proved wildly unpopular with farmers and eventually precipitated the “Whisky Rebellion.” The measure levied a federal tax on domestic and imported alcohol, earmarked to offset a portion of the federal government’s recent assumption of state debts. Southern and western farmers, whose grain crop was a chief ingredient in whiskey, loudly protested the tax. In 1794, farmers in western Pennsylvania attacked federal officials seeking to collect tax on the grain they had distilled into whiskey. The administration of President George Washington dispatched a force of nearly 13,000 militia to put down a feared revolt. Resistance, however, dissipated when the troops arrived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

> The Whiskey Rebellion (also known as the Whiskey Insurrection) was a violent tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791 and ending in 1794 during the presidency of George Washington. The so-called "whiskey tax" was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government. The "whiskey tax" became law in 1791, and was intended to generate revenue to pay the war debt incurred during the American Revolutionary War.

----

And today...

https://www.distillerytrail.com/blog/kentucky-gov-signs-hb5-...

> Kentucky, home to 95% of the world’s bourbon inventory, is the only state in the nation that charges a tax on aging bourbon barrels but that is about to change. Kentucky distillers paid a record $33 million in 2021, more than triple the $10.7 million paid in 2009. That $33 million is projected to more than double in the next six to seven years as bourbon barrel inventory is expected to swell as production increases.
by metabagel | 2025-12-24 16:49:10+00:00
I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.
by pak9rabid | 2025-12-24 16:49:19+00:00
This is kind of a complicated example, but here goes:

Say we want to create a report that determines how long a machine has been down, but we only want to count time during normal operational hours (aka operational downtime).

Normally this would be as simple as counting the time between when the machine was first reported down, to when it was reported to be back up. However, since we're only allowed to count certain time ranges within a day as operational downtime, we need a way to essentially "mask out" the non-operational hours. This can be done efficiently by finding the intersection of various time ranges and summing the duration of each of these intersections.

In the case of PostgreSQL, I would start by creating a tsrange (timestamp range) that encompases the entire time range that the machine was down. I would then create multiple tsranges (one for each day the machine was down), limited to each day's operational hours. For each one of these operational hour ranges I would then take the intersection of it against the entire downtime range, and sum the duration of each of these intersecting time ranges to get the amount of operational downtime for the machine.

PostgreSQL has a number of range functions and operators that can make this very easy and efficient. In this example I would make use of the '*' operator to determine what part of two time ranges intersect, and then subtract the upper-bound (using the upper() range function) of that range intersection with its lower-bound (using the lower() range function) to get the time duration of only the "overlapping" parts of the two time ranges.

Here's a list of functions and operators that can be used on range types:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/functions-range.html

Hope this helps.
by temp8830 | 2025-12-24 16:49:21+00:00
Here's something that might expand your view of the world. One of the agencies that saw major disruption was USAID. They don't just fund clean water for kids in Africa. They also fund regime change efforts worldwide. And these efforts have become social clubs for people who couldn't hack actual politics to meet and talk about how they are going to overthrow $DICTATOR. For years. Funded by the American taxpayer.

Here's an interview with one of the people who used to attend these dinners. He had to get a job as a plumber once the USAID funding dried up, and is happy about not having to lie anymore: https://meduza.io/amp/feature/2025/02/07/ya-ne-mogu-bolshe-y...

Use Google Translate. Meduza is heavily biased in favor of the EU, it is not a pro-US or Putin media outlet.

Now, this is just one guy who had to get a real job. Imagine how many others like him exist in the world. Now that USAID has been given a nice firm shake and a bunch of dead weight fell off - maybe funding can be focused on something new.

Without this kind of major disruption it would be impossible to effect this kind of change. Now think beyond USAID: could other departments have had just as many parasites? And remember: it's not just about saving money. It's also about sending the resources to a different place, and removing entrenched dead weight from power structures.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-24 16:49:42+00:00
> Browsers are designed to be the end user's self-service toolkit to combat our bad websites.

One of them "self-aware wolves", I see. How did the author wish things to work? That websites should be able to micromanage the user experience without restraint while indulging in whatever abusive behaviours they please, that the user should be powerless against?
by muzani | 2025-12-24 16:49:46+00:00
My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race) puts AIDS blood in our butter.

REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS regarding my daughters' exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes WhatsApp. Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.

The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like.

The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone, I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just block the gullible spammer uncle.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-24 16:49:57+00:00
Sort of. When I hear Nabokov speaking, he sounds like he has an unplaceable regional accent, as opposed to a "foreign" one. His writing in English is fluent, but can have a few tics in it — he repeats certain fancy words, and he tends to avoid slang.

By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
by fidotron | 2025-12-24 16:50:10+00:00
> The US president can't propose laws, only Congress can, yet he can "set the agenda".

Fantastic example of unintentional scare quotes.

> Only the EU Commission can propose laws, but the EU Council (composed of the heads of state or of government of the EU member states) sets the agenda.

Who has to nominate all the possible members of the EU Commission? Is it the EU Council?

Face it, the entire EU structure is designed to prevent little people from ever being able to get a law passed which would possibly benefit them except as populist measures inside the EU which stick it to the evil Americans again to promote internal support for the EU.
by EGG_CREAM | 2025-12-24 16:50:24+00:00
I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-24 16:50:28+00:00
Yeah, you can usually write a TCO based algorithm differently without recursion though it's often more messy of an implementation... In practice, with JS, I find that if I know I'm going to wind up more/less than 3-4 calls deep I'll optimize or not to avoid the stack overflow.

Also worth noting that some features in JS may rely on application/environment support and may raise errors that you cannot catch in JS code. This is often fun to discover and painful to try to work around.
by 0x1ch | 2025-12-24 16:51:00+00:00
Self hosting experience went well, but it was very confusing for people moving from Discord about a year ago. If it's still the same, there's literally no way to simply send a registration or channel invite link to someone, and have them onboard through your home server by default without the need to explain "Oh, you have to change this URL to that" etc.

My primary issue is that they changed the voice chat system, broke existing self hosted installs, and the new system was barely documented. I threw in the towel since I mostly hosted it for myself. Could never fix their livekit stuff.
by nabbed | 2025-12-24 16:52:07+00:00
CNN has an article claiming that the botched redaction work is the fault of the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office, not the Justice Department. From https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...:

"The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021."
by bluecalm | 2025-12-24 16:52:20+00:00
I disabled auto updates by pinning the target version in group policy and then finding some hacks on the web to make it always ask before download. I've run many other random scripts and then found Windhawk to remove more annoyances (taskbar and sections of start menu).

I then shut down more things and disabled Bluetooth on lock. It is now usable and doesn't crash but feels very fragile. I will soon face dilemma of allowing "feature" updates or be out of security ones.
by echelon | 2025-12-24 16:52:44+00:00
Despite city dwellers hating on cars and wanting complete streets, cars are poised to win even bigger when self driving becomes widespread.

Our roads and highways will metamorphose into logistics corridors and optimal public transit systems.

Everything will be delivered same hour. The cost of this will drop and entire new business models will be built on top of the "direct to you" model.

Self-driving cars will replace public transit. They connect every destination on demand. Short hops, cross-country long-haul. Waymo alikes will become cheaper than the city bus.

Van life will accelerate. People will live in their automated vans and SUVs. They'll become luxury and status items for knowledge workers who are constantly conveying themselves coast to coast, from cozy fire pits by the sea to hidden mountain getaways. Life in America will become one of constant travel, because we can take our life with us without lifting a finger. People will have large home bases in the affordable suburbs - possibly one on each coast. They'll wine and dine in the city, then be off to hike the next day.

Life will turn into adventure and it'll be accessible to almost everyone. Rich, poor. Young, old. Busy, retired.

Nobody will lift a finger for any of this.

We're going to want more roads.

Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.

Automated self driving cars will win.
by lenkite | 2025-12-24 16:52:47+00:00
Isn't that what Rust is attempting with Cranelift ? They had making Cranelift backend "production-ready" for development use as a goal for 2026. I am guessing it will be a few years beyond that before it is made available for general production-ready use.

I think Zig might possibly beat Rust's timeline here for a "No C/C++" toolchain. That is if its lead doesn't burn himself out.
by graypegg | 2025-12-24 16:53:13+00:00
The example that comes to my mind is apidock for Ruby!

https://apidock.com/ruby/String/split

Though, considering how much information tends to get centralized in these comments, I think the wiki-like direction is the way to go. (I know anyone can edit MDN, but it's via github PRs rather than being able to make quick edits on the site.)
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-24 16:53:13+00:00
> Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.

Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily getting worse with each update until this year when they switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot.

Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back to grumbling.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-12-24 16:53:16+00:00
I'm in the same boat. I manage my own server with tons of help from the ansible script(0) and it's generally been great for years.

I can only assume our experience in private servers is way different than people logging into the matrix.org server or in extremely populated rooms?

(0): https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-24 16:53:32+00:00
Yeah, more than anything, up until recently the WebKit team primarily worked on things that Apple cares about, which is why for example it’s generally been more battery friendly than Gecko or Blink — Apple sells an absurd number battery powered mobile devices, so they’ve got a powerful motivator to pay more mind to efficiency than most. Similarly, poor color space handling reflects badly on their devices’ displays and makes it more difficult to seamlessly blend WebViews in alongside native components.

Google and Mozilla by contrast don’t need to care as much about these things since they’re not going to take as much heat for poor battery life or color handling; on the platforms that most of their users are on, these are both the rule and not the exception so users don’t really protest.

Instead what Google cares the most about is asserting control over the web as a platform, which is directly reflected by the features they’ve prioritized.
by HNisCIS | 2025-12-24 16:53:56+00:00
I'll preface by saying that I would prefer fully decentralized/p2p systems to take over, that's said...

Their arguments against the middle ground (federation) made no sense. Yes, some current implementations are flawed in that you can poison caches with spam and csam, but that's not inherent to federation. In fact, it looked more like they were upset that you can't censor federated communities sufficiently to their liking (nuke them out of existence on a whim?). Their main, and really only, argument against Lemmy was group think but...it's a consensus platform, that's its purpose. There is a time and place for communities to build group consensus organically and it's a viral part of society, so while I can understand chafing at that from time to time, I wouldn't call it a protocol failure.