MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dusted | 2025-12-08 08:56:45+00:00
I recently used it to boot a ~1996 Compaq Presario from CD-Rom to image the hard-drive to a USB stick before wiping it for my retro-computer fun :)

It's kind of sad to hear "adult" people claim in all seriousness that it's reasonable that a kernel alone spends more memory than the minimum requirement for running Windows 95, the operating system with kernel, drivers, a graphical user interface and even a few graphical user-space applications.
by pbmonster | 2025-12-08 08:57:09+00:00
If we ever end up doing that it would mean terrible things for the state of our regulatory landscape.

A completely optimized high capacity cargo rail line can move 500 rail cars per hour. That's 1000 FEUs if we double stack containers. A lithium battery system in a FEU has around 2 MWh of storage. So that rail line has 2 GW transmission capacity if we saturate it with batteries - the same as a single high voltage transmission line. Being unable to build one of those in parallel to the rail line would be extremely sad.

Note that 500 rail cars per hour is actually an impressive feat of logistics. A normal rail yard at a port would be very happy with a sustained rate of 200 rail cars per hour, and will frequently drop below that.
Show HN: PolyBets – Prediction Market for Auctions (Bet on Auction Results)
by h100ker | 2025-12-08 08:57:37+00:00
So I'm a big car guy (as you can see), and my friends and I will not stop yapping about auction results. This is pretty common, not just amongst car people, but art, watches, collectibles, and more. So I got to working on a small, portable MVP that lets my friends and me settle these disputes on-chain via Polygon Mainnet (since this is what Polymarket also uses). Enter a link to any auction site, and PolyBets makes the market for you.

Enjoy!
by spwa4 | 2025-12-08 08:58:00+00:00
... and an equally long history of people "avoiding war", while refusing to be reasonable, right up to the point that a gigantic war becomes unavoidable. People will choose to go to war over a prolonged economic crisis. Such a crisis can easily be avoided by countries working together rather than push costs onto each other, but in any actual crisis they never do cooperate.

And of course, WWII would be an example of that. It was also far worse than WWI, including for Ireland. So there's even a very strong case that this is a self-destructive attitude for Ireland.

But if history teaches us anything, whether the example of the Weimar republic or anything else, it's that you can tell people this all you want. You can show how bad things are and how the situation cannot continue, people will NEVER accept what needs to be done, if it has to be done by them.

For example, right now it's pretty damn obvious European shared military presence in the East Sea and in Eastern European countries is a very desirable thing indeed. Every other EU country, and several others like Switzerland, have committed to put forward about 5% of GDP towards this (>10% of their total government budget) ... so it would seem only fair Ireland joins them, after all, without that presence Ireland's economy cannot keep working, because it cannot export or import freely. Ireland is letting other people pay for its safety, giving nothing in return, but Ireland is competing with them for the rewards of that safety. And your very comment shows that you're arguing to not do it, illustrating the problem. Of course, profiting economically of other countries while abandoning them militarily is exactly why Russia (and even China) think they can just conquer them. If that happens, it would be a total disaster for Ireland. But nobody cares.

And of course, Ireland is not currently in an economic crisis, quite the opposite, and could easily cooperate ... but doesn't. We can only imagine what will happen when inevitably, a crisis does come.

In fact Ireland currently has tax laws that let it essentially tax all of Europe (letting the FANG companies take profits out of Europe tax-free in return for jobs in Ireland, that are then heavily taxed by the Irish government. The employees of those companies are heavily taxed, btw, NOT the companies themselves). That's what the current Irish government actually prides itself on. Stealing tax revenue from it's main allies. Seriously.

So just so we're clear: Ireland is destroying corporate tax income in 30 EU countries, in trade for jobs, not filled by Irish people, in Dublin, so those can be taxed at >50%. This is, by the way, what the Irish government prides itself on, and it is why living in Dublin has basically become impossibly expensive.

It is also forcing the EU tax system to become 10x more complicated than it already is (the EU is working to have multinationals pay taxes in the countries where they make money, so any advantage of having a tax domicile in a specific country disappears. But of course, this will be complicated, to put it mildly)
by M95D | 2025-12-08 08:59:09+00:00
Couldn't read the article, only the summary, but it sounds like glitching by the description. I expect the ECU lowers 12V to 5V or 3.3V by using a buck converter which includes a filter capacitor. To glitch the CPU, the 12V would need to drop well below 5V to have any effect. I don't see how this could happen. If the battery is weak enough to drop below 9V under any conditions other than a short, that car won't even start. My suspicion is that they glitched the ECU power supply directly, not the 12V input - the summary doesn't say.

My conclusion is that it's mosty (scientific) clickbait.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-08 08:59:12+00:00
You'd need big batteries in the port to act as a buffer and enough energy to charge those in between when no ships are docked. But the ship would be there for quite some time (up to a day or even more). So a few tens/hundreds mw of power would go a long way.

You'd probably want to use a mix of local wind/solar power and a grid connection. Of course, harbors usually already have lots of infrastructure to power heavy industry (steel, refineries, etc.) and transport (e.g. rail). This just adds to that.

There are also other solutions including using container batteries and simply swapping in fresh ones. Which especially in a container harbor shouldn't be that big of a deal.
by anthk | 2025-12-08 08:59:37+00:00
We were there. It still was atrociously slow compared to most TCL/Tk stuff I've used. TCL and Tk improved a little on speed and it almost looks native on tons of software, meanwhile with Java if you have to run some biggie software on legacy machines you are doomed by watching the widgets redraw themselves in some cases.

And, on its Android cousin... pick any S60 based Symbian phone (or anything else)... and try telling us the same. The lag, the latency, the bullshit of Java we are suffering because, you know, for phone developers, switch from J2ME to another Java stack was pretty much an easy task, but hell for the user. Even Inferno would have been better if it were free and it had a mobile ecosystem developed for it.
by Ygg2 | 2025-12-08 08:59:48+00:00
> no-std disables features. It does not remove them from existence.

It's the other way around; standard library adds features. Because Rust features are designed to be additive.

Look into it. `std` library is nothing more than Rust-lang provided `core`, `alloc` and `os` crates.

> Nah.

You don't seem to know how features work, how std is made or how often RC is encountered in the wild. It's hard to argue when you don't know language you are discusing.

> Even rust-lang.org still confuses sum types and enums to this very day.

Rust lang is the starting point for new Rust programmers; why in the heck would they start philosophizing about a bikesheddy naming edge case?

That's like opening your car manual to see history and debates on what types of motors preceded your own, while you're trying to get the damn thing running again.

> What surface similarity does Pascal have to OO?

Dot operator as in (dot in `struct.method`). The guy I was arguing with unironically told me that any language using the dot operator is OO. Because the dot operator is a sign of accessing an object or a struct.

Much like you, he had very inflexible thoughts on what makes or does not make something OO; it reminds me so much of you saying C++ is a GC-language.

> Your idea is not well conceived.

My idea is to capture the colloquial meaning of GC-language. The original connotation is to capture languages like C#, Java, JS, etc. That comes with a (more or less) non-removable tracing garbage collector. In practice, what this term means is

- How hard is it to remove and/or not rely on GC? Defaults matter a lot.

- How heavy is the garbage collection GC? Is it just RC or ARC?

- How much of the ecosystem depends on GC?

And finally, how many people are likely to agree with it? I don't care if my name is closest to frequency of red, if no one else agrees.
by aoeusnth1 | 2025-12-08 09:00:28+00:00
Their math is just wrong. If they need to grow 15x over 25 years, they only need a modest 11.4% growth per year.

15^(1/35) = 1.11

1500^(1/35) = 1.34

Did the author maybe put a few extra zeros in their calculator when figuring out the annual revenue growth which would equal 15x over a 25 year span?
by hvb2 | 2025-12-08 09:00:29+00:00
The problem is that most of that work is not something anyone can pick up.

Regardless of the coding, one would first need to be familiar with git or VCS in general.

Also, you would want people to go back to normal jobs when they can. This would lead to short stints for all employees which I've always found to be one of the best predictors of bad outcomes
by lionkor | 2025-12-08 09:01:16+00:00
I had no issues at all running alpine with a UI on a simulated 128MB RAM machine with a few GB of storage (with simulated 2000's disk speeds). That's 128MB not counting memory for the BIOS, of course.

i3 and NetSurf made that extremely possible. Mind you, the only things that didn't work well were Firefox (wouldn't launch due to OOM) and compiling Rust projects. Single translation units in Rust would immediately OOM the system, whereas C, C++, etc. worked fine.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-08 09:01:35+00:00
ActiveX was its own special kind of terrible for many reasons, but so were Java, Flash, and Silverlight. At least ActiveX didn't hide the fact you were about to grant arbitrary code execution to a website, because you might as well have assumed that the second these plugins were loaded.

The only advantage to Java applets I can think of is that they had the advantage of freezing the browser so it could no longer be hacked.

The Java applet system was designed better than ActiveX but in practice I've always found it to be so much worse of an end user experience. This probably had to do with the fact most ActiveX components were rather small integrations rather than (badly fitted) full-page UIs.
by eep_social | 2025-12-08 09:02:21+00:00
I wasn’t in C++ style land but my recollection is that distilled experience would be backed up by extensive mailing list discussions. in case of contention the discussion might extend into case studies or other quantitative techniques atop google3. It’s difficult for me personally to describe the impact (outsized)of a super-resourced monorepo for this kind of thing. also as gp mentioned, it was sometimes possible to automate changes to comply with updated guidelines.
by mxfh | 2025-12-08 09:02:42+00:00
To me PE is just secondary effect of incentivizing private pension schemes over pay-as-you-go schemes in the last half century to me.

A huge wealth transfer in disguise providing capital to financial actors (not at last PE) that are usually not aligned with goals of regular employess: affordable housing and healtcare and reasonably safe jobs.

As Germany is on it's way to dismantle it's core of it's pay-as-you-go mandatory state pension insurance and shift towards private, and privat-by-proxy schemes via company pension plans. Europe might be also going that way some time in the near future, but without the comparably healthy demographics of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1978

Funny that all those charts eventually go back to Carter allowing for 401k not, Reagan, though that reuse only happened later.

My bigger hunch here is supplying the capital markets with that much additional money was a mistake, that ultimately lead to the current guilded age and accelarated existing trends of in the productivity–pay gap, social stratification and wealth inequality, if not solely being responsible for it.

It seems outright impossible for most to compete with a economic reality where the accrued value of like a third of your and everyone else's paycheck is actively working against your net quality of living, when you're not in the top 1 to 10% where the capital gains are a still a net positive over the increased cost of housing and wage stagflation etc.
by seec | 2025-12-08 09:02:44+00:00
Potato, potahto. I mean, I appreciate you putting in the effort to argue about precise categorization, but it is not terribly relevant to my perspective.

The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations).

There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse.

As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort.

Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free.

What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb.

I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
by habinero | 2025-12-08 09:03:51+00:00
Yeah. I have a half-cynical/half-serious pet theory that a decent fraction of humanity has a broken theory of mind and thinks everyone has the same thought patterns they do. If it talks like me, it thinks like me.

Whenever the comment section takes a long hit and goes "but what is thinking, really" I get slightly more cynical about it lol
by Gravityloss | 2025-12-08 09:05:19+00:00
In the 2000s, my bank was acquired by some bigger bank from another country. Their long standing, well working and fast banking application was replaced with a very dysfunctional Java applet thing. I was using Linux at the time and IIRC it either worked barely, or then not at all. I phoned the bank, and they told about a secret alternate 'mobile' url, that had a proper working service. I used that for a while before ultimately switching to another bank. The bank sent apology letters to customers and waived some fees also as they saw many of them leave. It made me really wake up that to the fact if the company can do these visible level blunders, what else is going on there, and also, how the customer is in such a vulnerable position.

On the other hand, NASA in the past had some really great Java applets to play with some technical concept and get updated diagrams, animations and graphs etc.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-12-08 09:05:52+00:00
Thanks for the link. For anyone interested, here's the process outlined in the document, I'm gonna try to apply and see where that leads.

# Steps to interoperate with Messenger or WhatsApp

Note: Separate documentation and applications are required for Messenger and/or WhatsApp

Review: Review the Reference Offer, Developer Documentation Overview, and Application Guidelines above. Apply: If you believe you qualify, complete the form that’s linked in the Application Guidelines. Review: If you meet eligibility requirements, we will send you our detailed Developer Documentation under NDA for review of the detailed technical requirements for interoperating. Sign: If you can fulfill the relevant terms and technical requirements set out in the Reference Offer and want to request interoperability, sign the Interoperability Agreement that we will provide to you. Build: Start building interoperability. Enable: Complete the milestones outlined in the detailed Developer Documentation to enable interoperability. Launch: Work with Messenger and/or WhatsApp on a joint plan to launch interoperability.
by pndy | 2025-12-08 09:06:06+00:00
Pick any instance and see the federated stream by yourself

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

https://lemmy.org/

Some instances blocked others and since lemmy is activitypub-based it's easy to do so. OP linked also a reddit thread where users mentions that one of the biggest lemmy instances is being ran by devs who don't hide their pro-russian attitudes.

There was a huge traction shortly after reddit decided to put api access behind payment but it quickly fizzled out - probably the concept of instances for majority of users just like in mastodon case, is too hard to understand.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-08 09:06:36+00:00
The alternatives to Java were just as bad. Flash and friends were fast but couldn't do anything more complicated than animation for most of its life. In the Java heydays, you were doing either Java or custom ActiveX plugins, and both led to security popups galore and random browser freezes.

However, ActiveX usually required you to install components, while Java could just run first time.
by Aardwolf | 2025-12-08 09:06:39+00:00
Flash is still a big loss imho, the ecosystem of games, movies and demonstration thingies was amazing and they were accessible to create by many. Unlike Java applets that slowed the main browser UI thread to a crawl if they didn't load they usually didn't), Flash didn't have such slowdowns.

One exception is early 2000s Runescape: that was Java in browser but always loaded, no gray screen and hanging browser. They knew what they were doing.
by ejflick | 2025-12-08 09:06:41+00:00
Was just looking at this article yesterday and it inspired me to try it myself. Trying it out today, my fingers became really sore from trying to navigate. Can't imagine using this for a modern development workflow where there's a lot of jumping around. To make it more ergonomic, I'd just be recreating configuration other window managers give me out of the box.

The author mentions in the footnotes he mostly uses this setup for note taking. That makes sense as he probably remains in one window for extended periods of time.
by kokau | 2025-12-08 09:07:26+00:00
I built Brandolia.io, an AI tool that generates complete brand identities in a few minutes. You enter the business name + description, and it creates:

A custom logo

A full color palette

Typography suggestions

A slogan & brand story

Social media content

A website draft

A downloadable brand book

The goal is simple: Help small businesses, Shopify sellers, and new founders get a professional brand identity without paying hundreds or waiting weeks.

Here’s a blog post that explains how it works and compares it to other tools: https://www.brandolia.io/blog-logo-maker-shopify-stores.html

Open to feedback from designers, founders or agency owners.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-08 09:07:43+00:00
Applets also had no view-source.

Spiritually the web ought to be more than an application development platform. We haven't been doing great about that (with heavily compiled js bundles), but there's still a lot of extensions that many users take for granted. I'm using a continual wordcount extension (50 words so far), and Dark Reader right now.

Applet's are the native app paradigm, where what the app-makers writes is what you get, never a drop more. It's not great. The internet, the land of protocols, deserved better. Is so interesting because it is better.
by kaluga | 2025-12-08 09:08:13+00:00
What’s funny about the “death of applets” is that it highlights a pattern we keep seeing: the browser killed plugins… and then reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time.

TeaVM and similar toolchains show that the original idea behind applets wasn’t wrong — the implementation model was. Moving Java to JS/WASM with tree-shaking, minification, and real browser APIs gives you all the benefits without the security nightmare.

The interesting takeaway isn’t nostalgia for applets, but how mature the web stack has become: the browser is finally the runtime applets always wanted.
by Closi | 2025-12-08 09:08:49+00:00
It's not bugs that is the barrier here. Maybe functionality is the wrong word as I'm talking about something higher level than individual features, and maybe 'user stories' better represents what I'm getting at...

What I mean is that 'old' software has focussed on giving users lots of tools for users to complete their tasks, and when we talk about UI's we are talking about how to arrange all those tools in a way that is easy for a user to navigate. Users usually have to learn about all the tools that are there, so they know which ones to use (and over time the ones that learn about the existence of all the tools become 'power users').

But 'new' software might be more about completing users tasks for them, and these higher level tasks are the ones that are hard to define because there are so many permutations of what a user might want to do. As the software is helping users more, end-users might not ever need to know about the existence of all of the tools as they are abstracted away.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-08 09:09:15+00:00
> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)

Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)

There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."