MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-12-08 10:58:19+00:00
Everything in Emacs exists under the “M-x” keybind (M stands for Meta which is usually Alt on linux and Option on macOS). Because everything you can do is a command (which are just normal functions that have been annotated). Then you have bindings to directly execute those functions instead of going through a prompt.

There’s some terminology to learn to make sense of the commands. And the default keybindings are also useful to learn (and you can find them in anything that uses the readline library and equivalent: Bash, zsh, psql,…. You can also find them in macOS text widgets).

But the thing is that Emacs have a lot of commands. They are assembled into packages and due to the nature of Elisp, can be edited and patched live. While it easy to get started (videos on youtube, the emacs documentation, the “Mastering Emacs” book), After a while, you config can become alien to anyone else. But it will stay discoverable as Emacs have a great help system.
by mort96 | 2025-12-08 10:59:05+00:00
A couple of points:

1. No, we don't have proof that there was one person who thought it was worth 3x GDP. We have proof that there was one person who thought a 0.001% share of the company was worth 0.003% of GDP or whatever. They could think it was worth that much for plenty of reasons; maybe they thought the share price would grow for a bit more before collapsing so that they could make some profit, maybe they invested in order to just be an investor and have a say in investor meetings or however things worked back then. Maybe it was a status thing.

2. Why are we using the opinion of one random person to determine the value of a company
by elric | 2025-12-08 10:59:35+00:00
I'm getting the impression you're conveniently ignoring how piss poor HTML/AJAX/JS capabilities were back then, or even how slow internet speeds were.

Applets could do things that JS could not. Some bank applets did client side crypto with keys that were on the device. Good luck doing that in JS back then. My bank's applet could cope with connection losses so I could queue a payment while dialup did it's thing.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-08 11:00:06+00:00
We did LOGO then some sort of watered down BASIC. Both were incredibly useless to my education because at no point was any serious attempt ever made to teach that these were the tip of any sort of computer programming iceberg. We were simply given lessons and assignments and told to things and we just did them without understanding what we were doing. At least with math they had some example applications for everything they taught us.

I have less than zero nostalgia for either.
by jll29 | 2025-12-08 11:00:16+00:00
A language should not be complicated. (Wish Odersky, capable as he is, kept working on his much-verlooked TurboModula).

Simple:

- Scheme

- C

- Pascal

- Go

- Lua

Complicated

- PL/1

- C++ 2024

- Scala 3

Still borderline or beyond?

- Rust

- Java (>850 pp. lang. specification...)
by redhale | 2025-12-08 11:00:23+00:00
> It would be a lie for me to say that I joined crypto without any financial motivation. As a reader, it may sound hypocritical to you that I decided to swear off the crypto industry, now that I have made enough money. Yes, maybe I am hypocritical. But maybe I also just feel sick about contributing to the cesspool of financialization and gamblification of the economy.

If they truly feel sick about it, they should donate the money they made (or the vast majority of it). Otherwise, hypocritical is right.

> Look at what they do, not what they say
by derrida | 2025-12-08 11:00:25+00:00
Hey this doesn’t work : first solution “ls -al” which I use all the time to list directories was rejected in the second question I used awk and was rejected it expected grep

I think a beginner could be doing it right but then be told they are wrong as you aren’t evaluating actual commands

Best would be to like actually run it* and then check solutions out with awk that it pattern matches

* aka give me a shell ok worth a try lol xD

Edit: also I was expecting something a bit more challenging (also that is correct) to like exercise the brain for those of us that use shell (this is hacker news) something that takes a few minutes and isn’t just commands used all the time
by graemep | 2025-12-08 11:00:44+00:00
I do not think the EU is critical. Palantir's potential market is global, so one region is not that important to them. They also sell to the private sector and this will increase, and EU countries will have different policies so losing a few EU governments business would not be that big a deal.

Right now 73% or their sales are to the US, and the next biggest source of revenue is the UK, far behind at 10%. The whole of the rest of the world, including the EU, adds up to 17%.
by DeadEarnest | 2025-12-08 11:02:44+00:00
If we approach the question as engineers, scientifically, with numbers and studies, not anecdotes and hand-waving, then Clojure is hands down the best language in terms of productivity and bug reduction.

To this day, I know of no study that was able to demonstrate superiority of statically-typed languages - [1].

What studies clearly show, is that both in terms of productivity [2] and bug reduction [3], expressivity reigns supreme.

And Clojure is the most expressive [4] out of languages that can leverage huge ecosystems (Java and JS, soon C++ through Jank dialect).

[1] https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ [2] PBX study from Economics of Software Quality by Caper Jones [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220 [4] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languag...
by globular-toast | 2025-12-08 11:03:33+00:00
Real professionals don't get to use the Nuremberg defence. A pharmacist cannot blindly give an absurd prescription, no matter what the doctor orders. A nurse is expected to double check dosages. An electrician can't just short circuit a fuse that keeps breaking just because you tell them to do it. These professionals can be held criminally liable if they don't follow regulations and good practice.

As an industry we need to grow up. The stuff we do has a real effect on people's lives. It's not just fun and games any more. Other industries have things like professional registers and regulators. We need to accept that being a software engineer is a powerful and privileged position and with that has to come responsibility. Privilege without responsibility is an injustice.

As for how to actually implement this I would start with ethics and safety being considered a primary concern in software engineering. Computer science is academic, but if you want to be software engineer you need to demonstrate some understanding of ethics and safety. I'm talking certifications, professional bodies and registers etc. Things other professions have had for decades.

The free market approach seems lovely in practice. Do you know what the definition of a free market is? Part of it is that consumers have perfect knowledge. That is, they know everything they need to be able to make the correct decision. How many people do you know with perfect knowledge of anything? You've already identified the other problem which is a free market requires low barriers to entry, which fridges and electronics do not. A free market is a theoretical concept. It's no more real than my hypothetical regulatory system.
by timeforcomputer | 2025-12-08 11:03:38+00:00
You can also use EXWM in Xephyr, so you can have an emacs window with its own controlled windows instead of replacing the whole DE/window-manager. I suppose this doesn't work with multiple frames though.

I have been experimenting with xdotool windowmap/windowunmap and override_redirect (and maybe LD_PRELOAD?) to try get something like EXWM to work without creating another X server, by capturing windows. I'm doing this in vim though.

By the way, neovim has an apparently working EXWM-like plugin, NXWM/nwm: https://github.com/altermo/nwm
by mettamage | 2025-12-08 11:03:51+00:00
The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.

I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.

Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.
by jevakallio | 2025-12-08 11:04:32+00:00
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by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 11:04:37+00:00
It was deeply embarassing for them either way, not figuring out where the leak originated from is much more embarrassing though.

At the very least blaming Russian intelligence would have tied right in with all the other election related hacking allegations.

Also, I think you may overestimate just how embarrassing this is relatively. USG regularly announces that they got owned, is the NSA getting owned worse than OPR getting owned? Maybe not.
by BoppreH | 2025-12-08 11:05:07+00:00
The most impressive "fuck off contact page" I've seen was from Trade Republic, an investment app. The support page has a QR code to the in-app FAQ and nothing else.

Turns out that a handful of FAQ answers have a chat widget (with a chatbot, of course) that can be coaxed into switching out to a human. But if your topic is not on the FAQ, the answer doesn't have a chat widget, or you don't randomly click around other topics, you'll never find a contact form.

Even the "complaints" email address found in their legally-mandated Impressum just auto-replies with instructions to use the app help. I've since closed my account, but I'm still amazed how a company holding people's money can shield itself so completely from customers.
by elric | 2025-12-08 11:05:20+00:00
> reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time

"Properly"? I'm not convinced. Browsers have grown incredibly large and complex. Every plugin it replaced by JS-based APIs has become a security nightmare in almost exactly the same way as the plugin based approach. Browsers have a lot of features, but if they were implemented "properly", the user would have far more control than they do now. The cynic in me thinks that many of these features are mostly there to facilitate ad-tech and user tracking. From fingerprintable canvas to access to devices.
by dubi_steinkek | 2025-12-08 11:05:27+00:00
Maybe they can with postinstall scripts, but they usually don't.

For the most part, installing packaged software simply extracts an archive to the filesystem, and you can uninstall using the standard method (apt remove, uv tool remove, ...).

Scripts are way less standardized. In this case it's not an argument about security, but about convenience and not messing up your system.
by theelous3 | 2025-12-08 11:06:30+00:00
All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time.

As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-08 11:06:50+00:00
> The difference is today we eat bland cherries around the year except for a couple of weeks when you get fresh local ones.

Speak for yourself. A lot of people don't want to take part in consumerism and only buy (or just not buy) fruits, when it is their time and don't buy stuff from more than 200km away out of principle.
by jononor | 2025-12-08 11:07:07+00:00
Grid Style Sheets / GSS was an implementation of this idea. https://gss.github.io/guides/ccss

I saw was because I do not think anyone has used or maintained it since the company behind went belly up. But the code is still out there as open source, probably can be learned from.

Disclaimer: I used to contract for them, but in other areas.
by ben_w | 2025-12-08 11:07:16+00:00
Not so: "Per example" is not "per wall clock".

To a limited degree, they can compensate for being such slow learners (by example) due to the transistors doing this learning being faster (by the wall clock) than biological synapses to the same degree to which you walk faster than continental drift. (Not a metaphor, it really is that scale difference).

However, this doesn't work on all domains. When there's not enough training data, when self-play isn't enough… well, this is why we don't have level-5 self-driving cars, just a whole bunch of anecdotes about various different self-driving cars that work for some people and don't work for other people: it didn't generalise, the edge cases are too many and it's too slow to learn from them.

So, are LLMs bad at… I dunno, making sure that all the references they use genuinely support the conclusions they make before declaring their task is complete, I think that's still a current failure mode… specifically because they're fundamentally different to us*, or because they are really slow learners?

* They *definitely are* fundamentally different to us, but is this causally why they make this kind of error?
by lou1306 | 2025-12-08 11:07:20+00:00
> variable names must not be longer than 6 characters

My memory might be lapsing here, but I don't think MISRA has such a rule. C89/C90 states that _external_ identifiers only matter up to their first 6 characters [1], while MISRA specifies uniqueness up to the first 31 characters [2].

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38035628/c-why-did-ansi-...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19905944/why-must-the-fi...
by serf | 2025-12-08 11:08:14+00:00
>What is the proof for that, especially considering events like Ariane 5?

Ariane 5 is a nice anti-ada catchphrase, but ada is probably the most used language for war machines in the United States.

now the argument can be whether or not the US military is superior to X; but the fact that the largest military in the world is filled to the brim with warmachines running ada code is testament itself to the effectiveness of the language/dod/grant structure around the language.

would it be better off in c++? I don't know about that one way or the other , but it's silly pretend ada isn't successful.
by lesostep | 2025-12-08 11:08:47+00:00
I think it's a sysadmin thing to have a little bit more wimsy in the code.

Administrative work by nature leaves you a bit bored, if you do it right. So you sometimes pick something up just to play with.

I can't speak about every sysad experience, but in mine a lot of scripts tend to be in a "make once, remember for ten years" category, and even a bit of creative naming can help a long way.

Working with a larger codebase with "creative" code, on the other hand, is frustrating. And if you don't have to write code, you might as well go take a walk, "monitoring" isn't in your job description.
by user34283 | 2025-12-08 11:10:05+00:00
The financial system being under government control is the only proposition consistent with reality.

We, the people, make the rules. Replacing our democratic processes with finance controlled by the one with the most computing power, control of the software, or having horded the most of the tokens, is in no way desirable or realistic.

Even if the proposition wasn't borderline idiotic in the first place, there is no clear explanation how such a system should reward early adopters and allow them to cash out at a profit many times exceeding inflation.

It's all a scam.
by atomicthumbs | 2025-12-08 11:11:09+00:00
> Virtually all successful existing sequence models rely on mean squared error (MSE) or dot-product similarity for both their bias and retention. This reliance can make models sensitive to outliers and limit their expressive power.

[...]

> MEMORA: This model focuses on achieving the best possible memory stability by forcing its memory to act like a strict probability map. By using this constraint, it ensures that every time the memory state is updated, the changes are controlled and balanced. This guarantees a clean, stable process for integrating new information.Virtually all successful existing sequence models rely on mean squared error (MSE) or dot-product similarity for both their bias and retention. This reliance can make models sensitive to outliers and limit their expressive power.

so did a Titans write this
by ignoramous | 2025-12-08 11:12:02+00:00
> Some teams vendor actions into their own repos. zizmor is excellent at scanning workflows and finding security issues. But these are workarounds for a system that lacks the basics.

Harsh given GitHub makes it very easy to setup attestations for Artifact (like build & sbom) provenances.

That said, Zizmor (static analyser for GitHub Actions) with Step Security's Harden Runner (a runtime analyser) [0] pair nicely, even if the latter is a bit of an involved setup.

[0] https://github.com/step-security/harden-runner

> The fix is a lockfile.

Hopefully, SLSA drafts in Hermetic build process as a requirement: https://slsa.dev/spec/v1.2/future-directions
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-08 11:12:05+00:00
If people making bad choices is a deal-breaker for someone, then I think they might not have been a very good libertarian/randian in the first place.

Also, my point against tfa was less "the author holds a bad opinion" and more "the piece claims to talk about one thing, but actually talks about a completely different thing, drawing bad conclusions as a result."
by IanCal | 2025-12-08 11:12:16+00:00
I think it depends on the roll. For two players against each other it’s a bit more fun, but dm/player feels imbalanced, even when it’s character based. Th player winning might feel more fun beating another character with wits but that doesn’t work as well imo for luck, strength, or against something inanimate. It also moves success into a personal skill of the player vs the dm. I don’t agree that it’s necessarily fair.

Perhaps it’s just the feeling of “I took a risk and it didn’t work” vs “I chose badly and was outsmarted by the dm” seem different to me in an important way.

You could reframe this all easily as well for “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 100, guess it within Y distance to succeed”. That’s mathematically equivalent I think, if you allow it rolling around.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-08 11:13:27+00:00
my naive self was just looking at a lot of what apps were doing:

- waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store) - sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too) - emit very small amount of data - struggle with security - reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network

somehow (and again, i'm naive and not knowledgeable) i felt that a lot of useful processing for society would be better if there was a global encrypted network that would enact the same simple things but without the human layer round trip. you get 24/7 operations, globally, open, encrypted.

in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it's 10pm, the system was ready to fire.

and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality..

but maybe it's really just a fools errand i don't know
by jll29 | 2025-12-08 11:15:26+00:00
Neat.

Perhaps it would be even nicer if the "advent" theme was more prominently present, e.g. using the Bible as the target data file to be used.

Here's three examples tasks from me:

(1) Write an sh script (using only POSIX standard commands) to create a Keywords in Context (KWIC) concordance of the new testament.

(2) Write a bash script that uses grep with regular expressions to extracts all literal quotes of what Jesus said in the New Testament. [Incidentally, doing this task manually marked the beginnings of philology and later automating it marked the beginning of what was later called literary and linguistic computing, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and digital humanities.]

(3) How many times is Jesus mentioned by each of the four accounts of his life (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)?

(You may begin by extracting the New Testament from the end of the Bible with a grep command.)

Dataset: https://openbible.com/textfiles/kjv.txt
by skepti2 | 2025-12-08 11:16:45+00:00
How do you define a better programming language, how do you judge whether one programming language is better than another, and how do you prevent corruption and cartels from taking over?

If Ada was "better" than C++, why did Ada not perform much better than C++, both in regards to safety and correctness (Ariane 5), and commercially regarding its niche and also generally? Lots of companies out there could have gotten a great competitive edge with a "better" programming language. Why did the free market not pick Ada?

You could then argue that C++ had free compilers, but that should have been counter-weighed somewhat by the Ada mandate. Why did businesses not pick up Ada?

Rust is much more popular than Ada, at least outside Ada's niche. Some of that is organic, for instance arguably due to Rust's nice pattern matching and modules and crates. And some of that is inorganic, like how Rust evangelists through force, threats[0], harassment[1] and organized and paid media spam force Rust.

I also tried Ada some time ago, trying to write a tiny example, and it seemed worse than C++ in some regards. Though I only spent a few hours or so on it.

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292

> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.

> Linus

https://archive.md/uLiWX

https://archive.md/rESxe
by derelicta | 2025-12-08 11:17:27+00:00
Oh yes, ofc, I have forgotten the 100mio who died of Communism. My bad! Funnily enough, the millions of soldiers who fought for it against nazism are counted as part of the death-by-communism. Same for the aborted babies, or the pedo and fascist filth who were rightfully imprisonned. Basically, everyone who dies under communism dies because of it, right? Unlike those who die under fascism, or of malnutrition, or of cold because they are unhoused by the West, those dont count towards death-by-capitalism, obviously.
by beardyw | 2025-12-08 11:17:35+00:00
As a developer I've been through 10 different languages and about the same number of operating systems, and I barely managed to remember any of them, even at the time. And I assume soon using natural language as the main interface will become commonplace, which will finally let me off the hook.

I will give this a go, but I doubt any of it will stick!