MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-12-16 19:30:55+00:00
Canadian here.

I use American spellings wherever they make sense and don't gratuitously mess with the Latin roots.

Such as "behavior", "neighbor".

But: "centre" and not "center" (it's from Latin "centrum": the R goes after the T, and there is no need whatsoever to revise that.)

The shift to Z in the -ise Latin-derived suffix is not just in American English. European languages are split about it. For instance, let's look at "to synthesize"

German: synthetisieren

French: synthétiser

Dutch: syntetisere

But:

Polish: syntetyzować

Hungarian: szintetizálni

Italian: sintetizzare

Romanian: sintetiza

I think the sound is Z in all of them? It's partly a question of whether the orthography of the language uses S for a Z sound or not. If they don't have that feature in their orthography then they don't have the choice of retaining an S spelling with a Z sound.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-16 19:31:38+00:00
"In summary, you have a system that works ... well for the poor".

You don't actually know any poor people, do you? Their lives are not governed by your theoretical models.

And as the GP said, our healthcare - not the best of the best of our healthcare, as you cherrypicked, but the kind ordinary people have - is appalling overpriced for its mediocre quality.
by bsimpson | 2025-12-16 19:31:48+00:00
I get the point you're making (that standards evolve, and Apple will drag its feet again if it sees a profit), but that doesn't change that they've been gating functionality behind app-only APIs for decades to grow their walled garden and make the rest of us worse off for it.

You shouldn't have to install things on your phone. Most "apps" should just be websites, with a bookmark if you so choose.
by simag | 2025-12-16 19:31:52+00:00
This is a follow-up of the 2021 post: https://blog.kraken.com/product/engineering/oxidizing-kraken...

We originally introduced Rust (back in 2018) as a small experiment alongside existing systems, mostly to validate safety and performance assumptions under real production load.

Over time, the reduction in memory-related incidents and clearer failure modes led us to expand its use into increasingly critical paths. This post focuses less on “Rust is great” and more on the tradeoffs, mistakes, and organizational changes required to make that transition work in practice.

Happy to answer questions about what did not work, where Rust was a poor fit, or how we handled interop with existing systems.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-12-16 19:31:58+00:00
Hell, if anyone is still like "oh that's unlikely", this guy on youtube makes a living on police breaking the law and getting away with it.

This video here literally catches a K-9 officer faking a drug hit just to harass this guy over an expired inspection sticker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5kXxiJiMA
by louthy | 2025-12-16 19:32:15+00:00
> But not having to spend hours here and there getting up to speed on some mundane but unfamiliar aspect of the implementation

Red flag. In other words you don’t understand the implementation well enough to know if the AI has done a good job. So the work you have committed may work or it may have subtle artefacts/bugs that you’re not aware of, because doing the job properly isn’t of interest to you.

This is ‘phoning it in’, not professional software engineering.
by observationist | 2025-12-16 19:32:26+00:00
There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it might take longer to do it like that than just by doing it right the first time.

I'm not a professional SWE, I just know enough to understand what the right processes look like, and vibe coding is awesome but chaotic and messy.
by celeryd | 2025-12-16 19:32:37+00:00
Someone in a Scandinavian country is probably well informed of how terrible it is for the poorest and most vulnerable outside their country. The indexes are probably the same.

The person in the Scandinavian country, when asked this question, will think "hmm, well I am not in America, so I will add 3 steps to my answer" and, och se där, up they go to the top of the World Ranking.
Ask HN: Tech Interview Coaches Worth the Money?
by idontwantthis | 2025-12-16 19:32:54+00:00
Hey HN,

I currently have a job, but I'm hoping to find a better one. Trying to get senior software engineer roles at startups, and I'm getting lots of interviews, but even after making it to a few final rounds, it seems I'm not impressing them enough technically. I also don't really get any feedback, so I don't know what to improve. I leave each interview feeling like I satisfied them, but then not getting an offer. I'm not talking about l33tcode either. Either take home assignments or system design or just conversations.

Is there a company I can hire that would help me out with this that is worth the money? Willing to pay, but not willing to waste my money and time.
by dpark | 2025-12-16 19:32:58+00:00
Of course not. Probably more than 99% of online conversations are a complete and utter waste of time. I would assume there is literally nothing anyone could say to you that would make you get rid of your truck.

With that said, you admitted with your first comment that buying these trucks is based on feelings and not rational.

“Consumers buy what they like and feel like they need and can afford. They place an almost absurdly high value on convenience and not having to think about things like "oh I need to move this thing I need to go rent a truck because I only ever need to do this once every two years, making it irrational to buy one."
by tptacek | 2025-12-16 19:33:02+00:00
That's true if you define modern policing as a form of mass surveillance, but doing so stretches the dilutes the usefulness of the term. People see a difference between automatically flagging cars on a stolen car hotlist, and monitoring the comings and goings of every resident in their town. And they're right to see that difference, and to roll their eyes at people who don't.

That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-12-16 19:33:54+00:00
I think you are comparing apples to oranges here. Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.

Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product (and other even less known stuff) and gives it away for free.

If tomorrow Google pulls the plug, who will pay for the salaries of the engineers who maintain Firefox? The general public does not care if Firefox lives or dies. In my circle of friends and family, I am the only one who uses Firefox. Most people are on Chrome or Brave. That's it.

Someone in the comments above mentioned that Mozilla could release a paid version for Enterprise customers, imitating Red Hat in a way, but I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.

I guess we will have to wait and see.
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-16 19:33:55+00:00
Yes, it's necessary, and getting more so all the time: lately I've been seeing more and more commentary trying to tie happiness measurements to some political stance: "conservatives are happier than liberals", "women are happier after divorce", etc. And increasingly it's not coming just from random commenters, but from people with real power.

In such an environment it's vital to know if the methodology for measuring happiness is good or bunk.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-16 19:34:00+00:00
I'd also add that there's a socioeconomic component. In Missouri, at least up until 2025, you'd get your temp tags when you buy the car, and your actual metal plates once you paid sales and property tax and registered the vehicle with the DMV. This recently changed to make the sales and property tax apply at the time of the purchase so that you'd get your plates much more quickly after.

A car is a necessity in most of Missouri. Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than any other major city in the country (and maybe in the world); IIRC St. Louis is fourth-most highway miles per capita. Public transit has major gaps. Inability to drive is such an encumbrance that those convicted of DUI are allowed to petition courts for a hardship license allowing them to drive to work and other essential places because not allowing for this could fail under the Eighth Amendment.

All of this is to say that if you are able to pay for a car, but not the sales tax for the car, and you get pulled over for not registering after your temp tags expire, you are essentially under house arrest until you can put together the money to both pay the fine and to pay the tax on the car, which is now exponentially harder since you can't drive anywhere. Since that'd put disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage, it might be a "community relations" move by the PD to look the other way on these cases, at least until another blatant violation occurs.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-16 19:34:47+00:00
No I was just skeptical of the GPs assertion that tech hasn't produced anything "cool" in the last 5 years when it has been a nonstop barrage of insane shit that people are achieving with LLMs.

Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".
by gradientsrneat | 2025-12-16 19:34:49+00:00
"poetic justice" is the same mentality as people writing articles glorifying rich Chinese criminals for using South America's drug trade for money laundering because something something Opium War.

In either case, it's not the same. The United States benefits greatly in the short term from larger agricultural output, and herbicide manufacturing centers still create significant health risks for their local communities wherever they are located. So, whether you're the buyer or the seller, you're losing.
by sombragris | 2025-12-16 19:34:57+00:00
fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it:

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/

I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08

Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
by hamdingers | 2025-12-16 19:35:10+00:00
Yes exactly that. Either outright via "market adjustment fees" or through mandatory addons like $5,000 in paint protection film that's "already applied, so if you don't want it you'll have to wait until we get another one of this model and we're not sure when that will be..."

Then because of the monopolies the sibling comment mentions, you can't go elsewhere.
by j45 | 2025-12-16 19:35:19+00:00
fMRI can track oxygenation changes, and indirectly where the blood flow is, or isn't, and perhaps some ideas on where to get it.

All to say, this application might not fall in the 40%.

I just find articles like these can't help but feel like they have an agenda to undermine something instead of simply acknowledge the kinds of things it is and isn't working for.

There's no doubt these researchers have found something, but the need for sensationalistic headlines is well known in academia as well.

Sometimes it's noticeable where the research is specific in scope, but the findings are more general and broad.
by mothballed | 2025-12-16 19:35:21+00:00
This is basically a description of police in a nutshell. They are just ordinary civil servants, plus a gun, plus maybe a little less accountability if they mess up. People who get scared like you and me. People who are lazy like you and me. Imagine the clerk at the motor vehicle office or the secretary at the welfare office but asked to do something different today.

Do you, reader, want to have to confront a bunch of scary people for a $? Oh, you think having a gun makes it a bit less scary?

Almost no one wants to confront dangerous people day in and day out. Once in a while to flex the hero complex, maybe. But a few times of that will cure you of any particular desire to seek it out.

The people that want to do that are one in a thousand types. Basically criminals themselves, just on the right side of the law who use the 'criminal' mentality for good. Most police are not that.

They want to do a job, collect a paycheck, and do it in an easy way. Like how I like to drive to work rather than do a handstand and walk 5 miles on my hands and wrists. They get little to nothing for making their job harder.

The people with the most motivation to stop the criminal is the victim themselves. You are pretty much on your own. The state won't be coming to save you.
by physicles | 2025-12-16 19:35:22+00:00
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but since SpaceX is the only launch services provider that could actually put one of these in orbit, this smells a lot like hyperloop to me — an unserious proposal that serves as a distraction and furthers Musk’s aims, and benefits anyone who can get close enough to the piles of cash that VCs will drop on this.

You know what’s easier and cheaper than putting a data center in space? Putting one literally anywhere else other than space.
by masklinn | 2025-12-16 19:35:27+00:00
Yep, this mostly works fine (and can be necessary already in some setups anyway), the main issues are that each status update requires an API call (over v3, AFAIK updating statuses was never added to v4) so if you have a lot of statuses and PR traffic you can hit rate limits annoyingly quickly, and github will regularly fail to deliver or forward webhooks (also no ordering guarantees).
by locallost | 2025-12-16 19:35:29+00:00
Yeah, considering how poorly it went and how much market share they lost I also always thought it was outrageous... Also so many people laid off and projects shut down. I don't have any insight, and I could be way off, but it always felt like the company was captured by bureaucracy and drained as long as it was possible. Again I could be way off, as I don't have any personal connections to it. I was a regular user until around 10 years ago, but Chrome just leapfrogged them and that was it. There was at one point nothing left other than nostalgia.

edit: I still remember using Mozilla which was this "good thing" but somehow clunky, and then getting so excited when trying Phoenix for the first time, which was then renamed to Firebird, and lastly Firefox. It was so "obviously" the right thing to use.
by ndiddy | 2025-12-16 19:35:32+00:00
One of the most interesting things in this release IMO is the internal documents from Sega Channel management. For example, in this binder https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/ef6246e4-79be-4b02-b262... there's a bunch of research documents trying to figure out how to turn the service around after it began underperforming their expectations.

It seems like the main problem they ran into was that the service appealed mainly to the small minority of "heavy players" (who they defined as playing more than 14 hours per week). Their original projections were that they could target cable subscribers who own Genesis systems and play games more than 4 hours a week, but they found that most people who weren't gaming fanatics preferred to own a few games and rent games as needed rather than subscribe to Sega Channel.

The other big problem they ran into was parental resistance. A large amount of parents they talked to viewed Sega Channel as an "open tap" that would increase their child's time spent playing games. An ongoing subscription also was only a one-time "give" from the parent to the child, whereas buying/renting games was one "give" per occasion, which was more psychologically attractive to the parents.
by decimalenough | 2025-12-16 19:35:53+00:00
That seems to be working as intended? The unhappiness of both "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness" and the constant gnawing fear that this is a realistic outcome due to medical bankruptcy or whatever should pull down a country's happiness index.

I've always figured that this is in fact a big reason why the Nordic countries do so well on the survey: the average is lifted not by shiny happy people holding hands, but by the strong safety net ensuring that you can't fall into a pit of despair.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-16 19:36:05+00:00
I did alot of AI research around this (memory/finetuning)

Coolest bit of research I cam across was what the brain does during sleep. It basically reduces connection during this. But it also makes you hallucinate (sleep). This was found in researching fish and also training LLMs there's great value in "forgetting" for generalization.

After studying it in LLMs for awhile I also came to your same conclusion about my own brain. Problems are often so complex you must let your brain forget in order to handle the complexity in the same sense I also believe this is the path to AGI.
by agalunar | 2025-12-16 19:37:17+00:00
I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic. It’s strange that the name of the roman face specifically is always used; I’d suppose it’s merely because that’s how the digital fonts were inadvertently named? Times New Roman has been the name in dropdown menus, and most laypeople are unfamiliar with roman as a term of art, so there’s no reason people wouldn’t use that name. But I wonder how the digital fonts came to be named Times New Roman rather than Times New.
by robinhood | 2025-12-16 19:37:29+00:00
To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's. Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway.

I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it exists.
by waltbosz | 2025-12-16 19:37:59+00:00
> One reason developers are developers is the dopamine loop > You write code, it doesn’t work, you fix it, it works, great! Dopamine rush. Several dozens or a hundred times a day.

This statement resonates with me. Vibe coding gets the job done quickly, but without the same joy. I used to think that it was the finished product that I liked to create, but maybe it's the creative process of building. It's like LEGO kits, the fun is putting them together, not looking at the finished model.

On the flip side, coding sessions where I bang my head against the wall trying to figure out some black box were never enjoyable. Nor was writing POCOs, boilerplate, etc.
by caconym_ | 2025-12-16 19:38:23+00:00
Private entities surveil you to make money off you or protect their property. Law enforcement surveils you to arrest you and charge you with crimes. These are not the same, and that's why some people care more about surveillance by law enforcement.

As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care.

If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that.

See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-16 19:38:32+00:00
The point of mentioning the driving modes is the reverse of "baby the pedal", let software do that for you. EVs are software-defined cars. They have modes that say "don't worry about efficiency, just waste as much energy as I want" and modes that say "balance efficiency with raw performance". In both you can pedal about the same and the car determines how to balance raw torque versus battery efficiency and regen breaking versus friction braking for you.

Many EVs are just as fun to drive in "balanced" modes as they are in "sport" modes, but your efficiency goes way up. Rental cars seem to think you want "sport" modes that are more inefficient because you want to rev that 0-60 more than you want better trip range. That's maybe a good way to sell the EV as fun to drive, but it's not a great way to sell the EV as useful for long trips.

The trick is the EVs already offer both experiences in their software (because they can, because that's how they work), you just unfortunately need to learn the manufacturer-specific ways to change driving modes to get the most of what you want out of a rental car rather than what the last customer wanted or what the rental company thinks you want without asking you. (If you want both experiences knowing how and when to change modes is even more critical.)
by zahlman | 2025-12-16 19:39:06+00:00
> You don't trust devs to run things, to have git hooks installed, to have a clean environment, to not have uncommitted changes, to not have a diverging environment on their laptop.

... Is nobody in charge on the team?

Or is it not enough that devs adhere to a coding standard, work to APIs etc. but you expect them to follow a common process to get there (as opposed to what makes them individually most productive)?

> You can run periodic tests once a day like an hour long smoke test.

Which is great if you have multiple people expected to contribute on any given day. Quite a bit of development on GitHub, and in general, is not so... corporate.

I don't deny there are use cases for this sort of thing. But people on HN talking about "hosting things locally" seem to describe a culture utterly foreign to me. I don't, for example, use multiple computers throughout the house that I want to "sync". (I don't even use a smartphone.) I really feel strongly that most people in tech would be better served by questioning the existing complexity of their lives (and setups), than by questioning what they're missing out on.
by vblanco | 2025-12-16 19:39:13+00:00
This is a fantastic article that demonstrates how many parts of vulkan and DX12 are no longer needed.

I hope the IHVs have a look at it because current DX12 seems semi abandoned, with it not supporting buffer pointers even when every gpu made on the last 10 (or more!) years can do pointers just fine, and while Vulkan doesnt do a 2.0 release that cleans things, so it carries a lot of baggage, and specially, tons of drivers that dont implement the extensions that really improve things.

If this api existed, you could emulate openGL on top of this faster than current opengl to vulkan layers, and something like SDL3 gpu would get a 3x/4x boost too.