MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gethly | 2025-12-23 17:23:53+00:00
it's not hard to make something without funding, even by yourself, as long as you have the time and skill. but problem of the internet of today is saturation. you can have the best service or tool, much better than the number one on the market, but if you have no cash to burn on ads, you won't get anywhere.

i have not read the history of this project but i would consider this as pure luck and nothing more(sadly). nothing wrong with that, but understand that this is a unicorn(not as in 1B company but as someone who was able to make profit).

---

Ah, here it is:

> DatoCMS started in 2015 as an internal tool for our italian web agency.

Yeah, almost every agency used to have its own system back then, before drupal, wordpress and other CMSs were more popular.
by thayne | 2025-12-23 17:24:14+00:00
No amount of good names will tell you why something was done a certain way, or just as importantly why it wasn't done a certain way.

A name and signature is often not sufficient to describe what a function does, including any assumptions it makes about the inputs or guarantees it makes about the outputs.

That isn't to say that it isn't necessary to have good names, but that isn't enough. You need good comments too.

And if you say that all of that information should be in your names, you end up with very unwieldy names, that will bitrot even worse than comments, because instead of updating a single comment, you now have to update every usage of the variable or function.
by jambutters | 2025-12-23 17:24:19+00:00
I used to have your viewpoint, but after reading Lee Kuan Yew, and after several hours of cross referencing various interviews with the pro-rioters/hk democracy, and pro-engagement/neutral hongkongers, I conclude that most of the pro-rioters like Joshua Wong/Jimmy Lai at large fail to articulate anything of value other than "I want to turn the system upside-down" , while pro-engagement/neutral people know they want upward social mobility and more government involvement in fixing the housing and employment crisis.
by mannyv | 2025-12-23 17:25:04+00:00
I'll check that out. The goal is to get to something that runs all night (or almost all night) with around 1kwh output using as little space as possible. I've just started poking around, but this'll help.

In the third world there's plenty of sunlight, but you don't need the power during the day necessarily. That price'll get to $400 for storage, $400 for panels, which is ballpark.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-12-23 17:25:05+00:00
Going all-in beats hedging your bets when the gravy train is running thick. But when times go sour, fortunes reverse. Unfortunately, that's when survivor bias shows up. Being diversified (almost) leads to being in the upper-middle, but if you only listen to those currently on top, you'll hear only the benefits of going all-in.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-23 17:25:34+00:00
After a certain point, I think "craft" becomes a meaningless and self-flattering scapegoat, similar to how people use "taste" or "courage" as an excuse to make boneheaded decisions. Most software customers aren't buying software because it's tasteful or impressively crafted, but because it fills a gap in their workflow. People who obsess over polish often end up missing the forest for the trees.

Plus, code-based meritocracy flat-out doesn't exist outside the FOSS circle. Many of the people you know are clocking-in at a job using a tech stack from 2004, they aren't paid to recognize good craftsmanship. They show up, close some tickets, play Xbox during on-call and collect their paycheck on Friday.

The people who care might be self-selecting for their own failure. It's hard to make money in tech if your passion for craft is your strongest attribute.
by dlubarov | 2025-12-23 17:25:43+00:00
It’s like saying that border control with Mexico is apartheid because the main motivation is racism against Mexicans. There’s a grain of truth (racism exists), but it’s not really the reason we have border control, and even if it was it still wouldn’t be apartheid.

To see why Israel ended up with the current system, we have to consider a bunch of possible alternatives (eg giving citizenship to all residents), each of which runs into legal and/or security problems.
by b_t_s | 2025-12-23 17:25:47+00:00
It's a weird hybrid. There is a connection to a persons earnings but it's far from what most people mean by a personal account(savings, 401k, IRA). It's closer to an annuity, but a very generous/flexible one that no private company would offer. The difference is minor for the never married but not for most people, and there are unusual cases. I know a guy who retired overseas, married a young wife and had kids. They get like 180% his benefit till the kids hit 18. Then assuming he's passed, the wife gets 100% survivor benefit at 60. I figure his SS account will probably pay out around 3x what it would if he was a bachelor, and that's strictly needs based not contribution based. If, instead, it was a 401k or a personal lifetime annuity at his personal benefit amount, their financial situation would be a whole lot uglier.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-23 17:26:02+00:00
> SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve

It seems like every time I read about this kind of stuff, it's being done by contractors. I think Proton is similar. Of course that makes it no less awesome, but it makes me wonder about the contractor to employee ratio at Valve. Do they pretty much stick to Steam/game development and contract out most of the rest?
by abrooks43 | 2025-12-23 17:26:04+00:00
Whether you are a forward deployed engineer, PMO, delivery, or any other project team member deploying technology, you know it all starts with discovery. But discovery still happens the same way it did 30 years ago.... not anymore!

We are launching ClearWork Automated Process Discovery to get the details out of your users heads and onto paper without the cost of internal labor or consultants.

Launching officially January 1 - reach out before then for a 50% discount on the first 6 months for the YC community.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-23 17:26:17+00:00
> For example, it's trivial from a web browser with a couple of clicks to go and find out all the downstream changes to a package.

How is this not also true for Git? Just put all the Debian commits "on top" and use an appropriate naming convention for your branches and tags.

> If everything gets merged in the same git tree it's way harder.

Yes, so don't merge, just rebase.

> Harder but doable with a rebase+force push workflow, which makes collaboration way harder.

No force pushes, just use new branch/tag names for new releases.

> Just impossible with a merge workflow.

Not impossible but dumb. Don't use merge workflows!

> As an upstream maintainer of several project, being able to tell at a glance and with a few clicks how one of my projects is patched in a distribution is immensely useful when bug reports are opened.

Git with a suitable web front-end gives you exactly that.

> In a past job it also literally saved a ton of money because we could show legal how various upstreams were customized by providing the content of a few .debian.tar.gz tarballs with a few small, detached patches that could be analyzed, instead of massive upstream trees that would take orders of magnitude more time to go through.

`git format-patch` and related can do the moral equivalent.
by electroly | 2025-12-23 17:26:21+00:00
This hasn't mattered in 20 years for me personally, but in 2003 I killed connectivity to a bunch of Siemens 505-CP2572 PLC ethernet cards by switching a hub from 10Mbps to 100Mbps mode. The button was right there, and even back then I assumed there wouldn't be anything requiring 10Mbps any more. The computers were fine but the PLCs were not. These things are still in use in production manufacturing facilities out there.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-23 17:27:11+00:00
> It is also painfully slow, the computational complexity of a + b, an operation so fast in CPU that it's literally an instant, is O(a + b), addition is linear in time to the added values instead of a constant operation.

To me, this reads as an insurmountably high hurdle for the application domain. We're talking about trying to verify systems which are produced very quickly by AIs. If the verification step is glacially slow (which, by any measure, a million cycles to add two integers is), I don't see how this could be considered a tractable solution.
by icedchai | 2025-12-23 17:27:26+00:00
None of us know what will happen in the future. All I can say is that currently, it is cheaper for a hobbyist to use a RIPE LIR than to use ARIN. If this changes in the future, I'll move to ARIN.

ARIN is lowering their costs gradually. When I first made the RIPE LIR or ARIN decision several years ago, ARIN wanted $500 just to register an ASN, on top of the yearly fees. I see they have removed that requirement.
by dripdry45 | 2025-12-23 17:27:33+00:00
Funny how this is timed with the Susie Wiles “I’m an insider trying to do good” nonsense in vanity fair. That coont has been instrumental in so much bad stuff since Reagan…

Looks to me like it’s all damage control/pressure valve release stuff designed to distract from any real change. Because SURELY we will get some real change finally, right?? /s
by isodev | 2025-12-23 17:27:41+00:00
The lesson being learned is that Apple could’ve avoided all this trouble if they had used or produced standards for the connection between their components. The whole concept of a gatekeeper was created in response to Apple-likes being difficult and simply hostile to interop opportunities even though they’re defacto the phone company and there is no way around them.

So if the solution is not optimal, that circles back to Apple who are responsible for coming up with a solution that works. Then choosing to prioritise platform lock-in is a business strategy, leaving regulation the only recourse.
by robtherobber | 2025-12-23 17:28:00+00:00
I believe it's always a good idea to scope out for projects and ask people about their challenges in such cases, and you're clearly already doing this.

However, I dislike the usual entrepreneur framing around this stuff. I'm absolutely not a fan of "find problems so you can extract money from them" as the starting motivation. If you treat other people's frustrations primarily as 'market signals', to use the HN lingo, you end up optimising for what generates profit, not what actually helps. The best tools I've seen come from taking the user's problem seriously, building with them, and caring whether the solution improves their day even if it never becomes a business.

If this directory nudges you towards that (listening first, then building something small that actually addresses real needs for real people) then it's already doing something useful. If it proves genuinely valuable and people keep coming back, monetisation can be a downstream choice. I'd rather see "make it work and make it useful" come first, and only then decide whether it needs to be paid for, funded, open, or just free because society doesn't need every helpful thing to be gated -- on the contrary.

To frame it more cynically, someone could read this as "I'm hunting for easy victims and monetisable pain" and then the obvious question is: why would anyone hand you the blueprint for how to rip them off?
by skywhopper | 2025-12-23 17:28:14+00:00
Yes! Julia is fantastic at explaining concepts, and creating ways to learn about them. She produces a great series of “zines” summarizing a bunch of technical topics, her blog archives are really fascinating, and she’s created really useful tools like Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) which gives you your own DNS subdomain and the means to update records so you can try things out in an easy, harmless way.
by anthk | 2025-12-23 17:28:43+00:00
If it uses Motif and IrisGL (now MESA3D) the amount of porting effort it's near NIL.

And, for purity/completeness, avoid Maxx Desktop and/or NSCDE; EMWM with XMToolbar
it's close enough to SGI's Irix desktop.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-23 17:28:44+00:00
Well, when something is flagged, users (or at least users with enough karma) can "vouch" for it. I'm not sure what happens then - whether it auto-unflags, or whether the mods get a notice to take a look, and make a decision whether to override the flags or not.

I think the mods do, at times, unflag things that are flagged outside the "vouch" mechanism. One way to trigger that is to email the mods and ask them to look at a particular article. They may look for more than just the content of the article (though I'm pretty sure they look at that). They may also look at their logs to see who flagged it and if there's any pattern of brigading.
by mannyv | 2025-12-23 17:28:45+00:00
During the day when nobody's home the panels are charging the battery.

Obviously more panels are better.

The goal is to be able to run a small window AC unit and various small appliances at night. That's a tremendous quality-of-life upgrade for a huge number of people. $1000 USD would make it somewhat affordable, in the window for a viable small business/NGO opportunity. There's obviously a whole lot more (installation, labor, maintenance, etc), but material cost needs to be low for it to work.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-23 17:29:28+00:00
If we all resorted to snarky replies on HN then the conversation would be in a sad state despite the posting in the guidelines saying not to. Of course the posting of the guidelines is not the source of their enforcement, it's just a notice of what will be corrected by the mods via means other than written notice or group encouragement towards the environment the guidelines create.

While that doesn't drive comments against the guidelines to 0, I think it does a better job than if we all took to being as a defense to snark instead.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-12-23 17:30:13+00:00
This blog post is out of its depth

- Lean will optimize peano arithmetic with binary bignums underneath the hood

- Property based checking and proof search already exist on a continuum, because counterexamples are a valid (dis)proof technique. This should surprise no writer of tactics.

- the lack of formal specs for existing software should become less a problem for greenfield software after these techniques go mainstream. People will be incentivized to actually figure out what they want, and successfully doing so vastly improves project management.

Finally, and most importantly, people thinking that there is a "big specification" and then "big implementation" are totally missing the mark. Remember tools like lean are just More Types. When we program with types, do we have a single big type and a single untyped term, paired together? Absolutely not.

As always, the key to productive software development is more and more libraries. Fancier types will allow writing more interesting libraries that tackle the "reusable core" of many tasks.

For example, do you want to write a "polymorphic web app" that can be instantiated with a arbitrary SQL Schema? Ideas like that become describable.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-23 17:30:13+00:00
I'm going to mildly disagree here.

NixOS is an improvement over RH et. al. even if you stray a small amount from the happy path; to use the GP example, if they couldn't do what they needed with the nixos LUKS options, they can click on a link from a related option definition and end up with https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/nixos/modu... which will describe much of how luks is configured. Often a small change there can widen the happy path, and with a PR, it can be made upstream in unstable relatively quickly and a release in the next several months.
by exceptione | 2025-12-23 17:30:28+00:00
Yes. It is so easy and cheap to refactor in a strongly typed language--no AI needed. And such a waste of electricity, chips, water and money to let some AI model give it a shot. This something we could reliable and correctly do for decades with serious tools and languages.

To this day people still 'refactor' by doing string replacement and hoping for the best. Any serious IDE should just say no to that.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-23 17:30:29+00:00
What, no. In a merge you have two parents and their histories. In a rebase you have... the same thing as-if you had merged a fast-forward-ready branch. It's the same thing.

If you insist you can add Merge commits to bracket fast-forward pushes, but arguably there is no need, and especially so for something like Debian packages where the convention would be that Debian's patches are "always on top", so you can see them by doing `git log ${base}..${debian_release_branch}` for any release. (And what's the base? Whatever upstream branch/tag the Debian release is based on, but you can add more tags with a Debian naming convention to denote the bases.)
by xp84 | 2025-12-23 17:30:48+00:00
I think that’s exactly a big part of why this scam was developed. If you aren’t that informed, don’t know your credit card terms by heart, but you’ve heard about those “foreign fees” it’s very plausible that this service would save you money. Not likely of course, since the scam is obfuscated and hidden in a dollar amount presented without the computation.
by sestep | 2025-12-23 17:31:27+00:00
This is correct; in Nix lingo these are referred to as "fixed output derivations". For some other interesting context, see this Nix forum post from last year in which they discussed deleting some stuff from cache.nixos.org to save money, but were clear that they'd keep all fixed output derivations and only delete other things that aren't derivable from those: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/upcoming-garbage-collection-fo...
by jcgl | 2025-12-23 17:31:33+00:00
Other than logging (journald is one of the few truly core systemd components), these are all basically independent programs chosen by your distro. As such, each is best evaluated independently. Let's give it an honest shot:

- resolv.conf: systemd-resolved is not unique here in providing a stub resolver and not just NSS functionality (it's been years, but isn't unbound often the same way?). And if you want to have systemd-resolved but not have its stub used in resolv.conf, you're free to do so! Just remove the symlink that is /etc/resolv.conf and replace its contents with whatever you choose.

- cron: systemd timers provide an alternative to cron. You're still allowed to create cron jobs and use cronie (or whatever traditional cron implementation) you like.

- ntpd: leaving aside the fact that most distros (I think?)
nowadays use chrony rather than ntpd or systemd-timesyncd, you're likely free to switch to chrony or ntpd depending on your distro. Afaik, this isn't a daemon with deep system integration, and you should be able to plug-and-play without much issue.

- network configuration scripts: What're you comparing systemd-networkd to? NetworkManager? Debian's ifupdown scripts? RH-family's network-scripts? In any case, network management systems tend to be pretty pluggable (much like in the case of your cron daemon). You can even have them live side-by-side, managing different interfaces, e.g. have NetworkManager do WLAN, while systemd-networkd does Ethernet interfaces.

I don't know any of the story behind timedatectl, so I'll avoid opining on that one.

But generally, it really seems like each of these components is as pluggable and freely-choosable by a distro as one could reasonably hope for. And, like you acknowledge, they end up likely getting chosen because it's easier for distro maintainers. Which is kind of a big deal, imo. But if you don't like your distro's choice, it makes sense to complain to your distro.

In general, I think your suggesting that these new-ish (most of which are no longer very new) components were just made for the hell of it, I'd encourage you to look a little deeper into what they offer compared to the incumbents. For starters, they generally work together pretty cohesively, e.g. systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved do some mutual coordination stuff that's pretty nice. Systemd timers have numerous nice properties compared to cron. Etc.

Again, you (or your distro) are free to take or leave these components, since they can be picked on their own. But an analysis of "these new components from the systemd project 1) are forced on me, 2) exist primarily for the sake of change" seems both incorrect and uncharitable.
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-23 17:32:08+00:00
It’s rampant. Launch anything these days and it’s bombarded with “vibe-coded” comments.

The issue of quality makes sense since it’s so easy to build these days, but when the product is open-source, these vibe coded comments make no sense. Users can literally go read the code or my favorite? Repomix it, pop it into AI Studio, and ask Gemini what this person has built, what value it brings, and does it solve the problem I have?

For vibe coded proprietary apps, you can’t do that so the comments are sort of justified.
by xiphias2 | 2025-12-23 17:32:10+00:00
This article is underselling of how much was achieved in proof formalizing for math in the last few years and how close it is to being solved.

If we disregard programming and just look at formalizing math (Christian Szegedy has been doing it for a long time now), the length of proofs that are being formalized are exponentially growing and there's a good chance that in 2026 close to 100% of human written big/important proofs will be translated to and verified by Lean.

Just as an example for programming / modelling cache lines and cycle counts: we have quite good models for lots of architectures (even quite good reverse engineered model for NVIDIA GPUs in some papers). The problem is that calculating exact numbers for cache reads / writes is boring with lots of constants in them, and whenever we change the model a little bit the calculations have to be remade.

It's a lot of boring constraints to solve, and the main bottleneck for me when I was trying to do it by hand was that I couldn't just trust the output of LLMs.
by jonahx | 2025-12-23 17:32:38+00:00
If the loop is so big it's scrollable, sure use row, col, etc.

That was my "vast majority" qualifier.

For most short or medium sized loops, though, renaming "i" to something "meaningful" can harm readability. And I don't buy the defensive programming argument that you should do it anyway because the loop "might grow bigger someday". If it does, you can consider updating the names then. It's not hard -- they're hyper local variables.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-12-23 17:33:27+00:00
> To me, panic is the most laziest and worst ways to put in a specification.

This why the "existing programs don't have specs!" Hand-ringing is entirely premature. Just about every code base today has error modes the authors think won't happen.

All you have to do is start proving they won't happen. And if you do this, you will begin a long journey that ends up with a formal spec for, at least, a good part of your program.

Proving the panics are dead code is a Socratic method, between you and the proof assistant / type checker, for figuring out what your program is and what you want it to be :).
by p3p2o | 2025-12-23 17:33:40+00:00
The sandwich shop on campus years ago always had a long (20+ people) line, for almost the entire time they were open. There would be a few lulls each day, where you could be one of two or three people waiting, especially during afternoon classes.
To reduce line sizes, the sandwich vendors created an app and call-in number for mobile orders, which were prioritized over the counter service. The result was you would be one of two people waiting at the counter during the afternoon lull, while fifty tickets printed and the 2-3 employees solely did online orders. How you prioritize mobile orders might be the biggest factor in keeping/eliminating counter service.