MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsynnott | 2025-12-25 11:27:43+00:00
> but I can’t help but be frustrated by the constant lack of understanding of the core value proposition of framework both in this post and in many comments here on hn.

The thing is, it doesn’t _really_ excuse many of the issues they had. For a 2000 euro laptop, you should not be cheaping out on, say, speakers. Acceptable laptop speakers are not expensive. And coil whine, while a common problem with expensive laptops, is not IMO acceptable at this price point. Neither of these issues are even vaguely inherent to it being modular.
by nachopa | 2025-12-25 11:28:25+00:00
>about a couple of decades ago, there would have been immediate and sharp backlash if any hardware manufacturer pulled the tricks that they do today - soldered-on RAM modules, thermoplastic glue instead of screws, riveted keyboards, irreplaceable ICs...

That's when this trend started, with Apple's Macbook Pro leading the way, winding up one of the best-selling consumer laptop brands by targeting incoming college freshmen and their grandparents, focusing on cosmetic appeal over dollar cost for performance.

Most buyers don't even know what CPU model their laptop contains, let alone understand the difference between faster or slower processors from different generations. It will always be a tiny segment of the market that appreciates the value of Framework's features.
by Tyriar | 2025-12-25 11:30:33+00:00
Hi from the VS Code team - I recently went into detail about why we did this in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/282268#issuecomme.... We believe it'll be beneficial overall and go a long way in lowering the bar to make the terminal less intimidating for newcomers. Conflicts with muscle memory was always a big concern which is why we made extra effort to be able to turn it off, the comment below that one outlines some steps we're making to make it more easily configurable inline.

On the roll out side, this is what we observed:

- It was enabled in Insiders for several months, generally only very positive reactions
- It was surprising to me that we shipped this to 25% of our stable users and basically no one complained for 2 weeks before we rolled out to 100%
- After hitting 100% of users we did see some backlash like this comment
- Of course telemetry doesn't show the whole story, but we try to determine both whether the completion was modified and whether the command was successful after using it and both numbers stayed relatively stable since shipping in Insiders at what we consider pretty good numbers (both accept without editing and command success rate is ~80%).
by Rochus | 2025-12-25 11:32:26+00:00
> Kay's comments have always struck me as in line with Brad Cox's views

It is unlikely that the two would have agreed on this. Kay's view is actually based on messages, as implemented in Erlang, for example, and to some extent in Smalltalk-72. Cox, on the other hand, has implemented the object and dispatch model of Smalltalk 80, that Ingalls invented and published in 1978, almost exactly, even with the same method lookup caching.

> Cox's book uses this example a lot as a poor/insufficient substitute for dynamic dispatch.

The Wirth and Smalltalk approach are both fundamentally "late-bound search" mechanisms, differing mainly in whether the search state is optimizable by a central engine (VM) or fixed in the user's explicit control flow (Handler). This is a classic example of dualism in computer science, specifically the Expression Problem (or the Data/Operation duality). You are simply traversing a 2D matrix of (Types × Operations), just choosing a different axis as primary. It's mathematically isomorphic, both are performing a directed graph traversal to find the code that matches (CurrentType, CurrentMessage). Only the ergonomics and possibility for caching differ. Smalltalk hides the dispatch loop in the VM, which can do caching and the dispatch effort goes from O(N) to O(1) in time. Wirth exposes the dispatch loop in the WITH statements with a dispatch effort continuously O(N).
by aja12 | 2025-12-25 11:32:28+00:00
From someone who has not tried the software but might be interested if it gains traction:

You should decide whether you are building this for yourself or as a product to others. Each stance is perfectly valid but are somewhat not compatible, the software can be very opinionated or intuitive but attempts to be both seem to often fail.

If you are building opinionated software for yourself and are ok with alienating a part of the userbase: great, some great software are built this way! (Alacritty, Kakoune come to mind).
This should be clearly communicated to prospecting users though, it may need to convey "this software has strong opinions you may not agree with, that's fine but it may not suit you" somehow.

If you aim for maximum reach: expect your sense of what is "intuitive" to constantly be challenged, and to have to make many difficult compromises. You also need to take feedback from a more forgiving angle, and above all, assume good faith from your users. In this instance, GP stated their enthusiasm for your shared vision of the problem space, and your knee-jerk reaction was calling them a troll.

Builders of opinionated software should pay trolls no heed and refrain from engaging, and builders for maximum reach should think trolls don't exist.

footnote: `toad run` expecting a folder and not a command seems to fall in the "opinionated" ballpark
by crote | 2025-12-25 11:34:16+00:00
Most of his actions are, to the majority of the population, merely transient actions. A few letters on an arts center are trivial to remove, a cancelled wind turbine farm easy to forget. The CECOT stuff deeply impacts only a small part of the population, so it'll at most be a few lines in a history book.

But demolishing a third of the White House? That'll be clearly visible in every single aerial shot of the building during every single political event for years. It is, quite literally, a scar on the political face of the country.

It's like turning the Pentagon into a Square, or blowing Washington's face off Mount Rushmore, or selling Alaska back to Russia: you're not going to forget when you are constantly being reminded of it.
by jll29 | 2025-12-25 11:34:25+00:00
Merry Christmas, everyone!

Spread the love, please - try to give everyone around you a metaphorical "▲" (upvote), in HN-speak, to make this world a better place.

The Birth of Jesus

[Luke 2] In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register [in tax ledgers].

-- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%202&version=NIV
by nchmy | 2025-12-25 11:35:41+00:00
Sec fetch has 98% browser coverage now. You can fall back to origin, which has 100% coverage.

Non-browser clients can be either blocked or even just given a pass, since CSRF is about tricking someone into clicking a link that then sends their Auth cookie along with the request. Either the non-browser request includes a valid cookie in the request and is allowed to mutate state, or it doesn't and nothing happens as the request doesn't get authenticated.
by coder68 | 2025-12-25 11:37:55+00:00
As someone studying Polish, and making excellent progress, I mostly agree with your take. If you want to explore other languages, something like Spanish will get you much more mileage. Polish is difficult and the community of speakers isn't exactly warm to foreigners or people acquiring the language. On the other hand, if you truly enjoy languages and are passionate about them, I have found Polish to be really interesting and beautiful in its own way. Definitely not recommended, but still enjoyable to read/write/speak.
by cardanome | 2025-12-25 11:37:56+00:00
Please prioritize to keep accessibility features working.

This is really the main issue with wayland. Yes, it might be more stable these days and work fine for you. We can talk how how it makes writing you own WM needlessly complicated and all that but the one thing that makes wayland unacceptable is its lacking accessibility story. After so many years.

Accessibility is not something you can worry about adding later. It is the first thing you should think about when designing new software.
by wjnc | 2025-12-25 11:38:39+00:00
My parents once took a struggling man in. I think he stayed with them for about three years, up until the moment I was conceived and my mom started planning for a future for our family and helped him get into a housing project. For all of my life before adulthood this man would show up once in a while on his racing bike for coffee, talk and proceed to stay for dinner. He was kind, funny and a tidbit strange. His life's story had more drama than a soap opera, but you wouldn't know it. After my father died I proceeded to look for him, but never found him. I still search online for him once in a while, fully knowing he probably isn't alive anymore and probably wouldn't use online anyways. There is some story in my head that he probably showed up to my dads doorstep once on his racing bike to find other people living there, but was too shy to ask for details. A trace lost.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-25 11:38:44+00:00
Apple did not start anything.

PCs are the odd ones, all other 8 and 16 bit home computers were vertically integrated, most expansions were done via external buses connected into one of the sides, usually the back or right side.

With the race for thin margins at any cost, if anything thanks to Apple, is that OEMs realised going back to Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari ST kind of hardware designs payed off in their bank accounts.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-25 11:38:44+00:00
I don't think I'm disagreeing, just adding more colour.

> It very frequently "forgets" what is outside its view

This was the observations that I saw when we were testing it. My former lab was late to pivoting to robotics, so we were looking at the current state of play to see what machine perception stuff is out there for robotics.
by muzani | 2025-12-25 11:40:58+00:00
One of my favorite professors put it in a different way. The classic approach is that they are lecturers first, and not teachers.

The professor is the master in their field. They go into class. They lecture on things based on their experience, answer questions, then leave. Students are there to make use of the faculty and the department to achieve their goals. If someone wanted to invent YouTube, they would go to university to study under someone who had invented some complex video compression & streaming algorithm etc. This is where universities output the outstanding individuals.

But in the 21st century, many universities are simply teaching institutions. They make sure the student understands and guide the poor ones. They make mediocre engineers, but dams and highways are built and maintained by mediocre engineers. The government unis were funded per head; literally the goal is to fill the lecture hall with as many heads as possible.

So I don't entirely disagree. In the end, my mom was not promoted to the level everyone expected of her, probably due to things like this. I do believe she actually replied to the important or thoughtful emails and just built this image of inaccessibility to seem fair to everyone.
by Moldoteck | 2025-12-25 11:42:14+00:00
welp, since nowadays a lot of clothing is some synth garbage, it's not that critical compared to washing some quality woolens, especially if washing instructions are gone.
Expiry dates are still an indicator for food expiration, especially for animal products. Yes, for honey/salt it doesn't make sense.
These are nice to have things that i'm sure will eventually be implemented in some way. To me it sounds a bit similar with that dropbox meme - yes, you can do everything 'manually', but some automation will definitely help. And as always, with many products it's actually correct to assume people don't think that much about how to use it, the more intuitive and automated is the process, the more ppl will have it easier
Show HN: Play Riichi Mahjong Online
by cerpins | 2025-12-25 11:43:19+00:00
I'm presenting a website where you can play Riichi Mahjong (4p strategy and luck boardgame):

- Play Mahjong as a guest or registered user

- Invite other players or play against bots

- View your game history and publicly share it with others

- Use the hand calculator for scoring your offline games at https://online-riichi.com/score

The game client has been inspired by "online-go" which I really enjoyed playing on
- it's simplistic but feels tactile and remains true to the "feel" of the game. I would like to achieve the same thing.

As part of preparing to share on HN and reading the posting guide, I've added a "Play as guest" button so you don't need an account to play.

Finally, my own selfish goal is to gather a small player base which I can develop features for.
My question for HN is - how would you go about attracting users to this kind of project?

All is built with Postgres, Rust and Preact. Done as a pastime to work.
I'm sharing it now because I promised myself to do so before the end of the year!
I've added a discord link on the website, but you can also contact me at cerpinsmiks@gmail.com.

Merry Christmas!
by talkin | 2025-12-25 11:43:25+00:00
NO. Please don’t spread wrong solutions.

Your attempt has similarities to the idea behind Checking Sec-Fetch-Site. Implementing that header is the same amount of work. But this header is exactly meant for this purpose, and referer is haunted with problems.

So for officially intended protections, implementing this header and samesite cookies gets you a very long way without any complexity, assumptions, or tricks of old lore.
by muzani | 2025-12-25 11:44:54+00:00
Plenty of games did great. But crowdsourcing has changed a lot. It's no longer a place to raise funds for experimentation.

It's a place for someone who has built a prototype to raise funds to scale. Partly it's to gauge that a market exists.

ADOM was one of my favorite examples, a game that was fine, except it was all in ASCII, and the creator wanted to raise funds to make it a proper, pretty roguelike. It was epic by the time it got on Kickstarter, they were mostly trying to see if people cared enough to want to see an ASCII game with graphics.
by ruszki | 2025-12-25 11:47:38+00:00
First of all, basically nobody can know what you compare LLMs to. It’s possible that you claim AGI level consciousness, or that they are still utterly terrible. Nobody knows the baseline, ie your test writing capabilities.

Also, there is a difference between writing tests, and claiming that your product is good because the tests are green. The other day Claude simply mocked out everything from the real code of mine just to make tests good. On surface level everything was green. And no, don’t lie that people review their generated code, almost nobody did that even before LLMs, this hasn’t changed. I’ve seen enough LLM generated code, even some people who showed me how they work, to know that they don’t have a clue what’s generated. When I dug into some praised LLM code here, their quality was bad, sometimes mediocre, but mostly just bad. And the same way as in your case, you cannot know what I understand under “bad”, and there is a very high chance, that different levels of quality.
Ask HN: Would a nonprofit cloud storage service make sense?
by theaitch | 2025-12-25 11:47:45+00:00
I want to give people an alternative to Google Drive, iCloud, and other commercial products. It should be:
- Reliable: maybe using Google Cloud or AWS under the hood.
- Cheaper: maybe using Deep Archive.
- Easy to use: background backup like Google Photos.
- Private: client-side encryption.
I have a prototype to try (https://megafrost.cloud) but it would need to be part of a proper nonprofit organization rather than just an indy developer like me.
Do you think this makes sense? What would be the first steps?
by Izkata | 2025-12-25 11:49:57+00:00
> It feels like no one really wanted to do that: building something new from scratch that (in theory) didn't have all of the mistakes of X11 would be more fun, and more rewarding.

My understanding from the outside is that this didn't happen, that Wayland is a spec without a reference implementation - that they didn't actually build anything and are leaving the difficult part up to everyone else.
by gostsamo | 2025-12-25 11:51:17+00:00
So nice of you to teach me about the roma. I was sure to have never heard about them. /s

The history of gypsies and their segregation is much older though and the regimes inherited much of their attitude based on prior prejudices. The treatment differed in different times and locations. I've heard accounts of casual police brutality and of good integration in the local community and of a "leave everything as it is without engaging with hard problems". None of those was sanctioned on the bases of race theory and in fact the official stance was for equality. Compare it to the US where it was part of local and state legislation. On the other hand, the higher ups in the regimes were often repainted nationalists and common criminals of old so adherence to the ideals was often perfunctory and positive actions and outcomes were falling short of what was possible.
by whizzter | 2025-12-25 11:53:30+00:00
I think the claim might harken back to the days when programming was a new thing and mathematicians,physicists,etc were the ones most often getting started at it, if they had by training gotten used to 1 based indexing in mathematics it was probably a bit of a pain to adapt (and why R and Matlab,etc use 1-based indexing).

Thus, 1 probably wasn't "easier", it just adhered to an existing orthodoxy that "beginners" came from at the time.
by rramadass | 2025-12-25 11:53:37+00:00
> It pays pretty well ... I crave more purpose in life but understand the most rational choice is to keep going and saving for retirement.

"A bird in hand is always worth two in the bush" when it comes to Finances in today's uncertain world.

However, "Purpose in Life" != "Job Needs"; Disambiguate them in your head and pursue/manage each separately. Learn/Study whatever you find interesting and want to do. Whether you decide to make it a job to make money out of is a separate decision.

> Does it make sense to change direction at this point?

It may or may-not based on your financial/family situation and appetite for risk.

> I envy PhDs working on self-driving cars and rockets and AI.

Change that envy to inspiration so that you can study any of the above or other subjects that you find interesting. You can orient this towards getting a more satisfying job in the domain that you love or just do it for the intellectual enjoyment.

> But also question overall morality of the tech industry.

Don't go there unless you want to change everything about your life.

PS: Study Philosophy both the ideal and pragmatic kind.
by ralferoo | 2025-12-25 11:56:40+00:00
Having received a counter offer more than once, and accepting it once, I'd say that it's better at that point to just leave.

If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.

In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.

The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.

I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.

TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-25 11:57:55+00:00
Beautiful story but with a sad undertone.

A large percentage of the homeless have autism [1]. And that really sucks. If these people don't have support, their lives can turn miserable fast. And unfortunately it's just way too easy for these people to end up in abusive situations.

It's a lot of work to care for people with autism (moderate to severe). There is no standard for what they need, their capabilities can be all over the board. Some of them are capable like ronny in this story and they can hold down jobs. But others need 24/7 caregiving in order to survive. Unfortunately I don't think those with severe autism survive for long when they become homeless.

I hope this story at very least gets people to view the homeless a little differently. They aren't all there because of vices or failure. A large percentage are there because society does not care for those with mental disabilities. It was good on this story to highlight that Ron had problems with gambling. Autism does, in fact, make an individual more prone to various addictions.

My point in writing this, please have some humanity about the homeless. I get that they can be inconvenient. They are people and they aren't necessarily bad people due to their circumstances.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29633853/
by bluescrn | 2025-12-25 12:00:11+00:00
> Yeah, the lack of support for off-the-shelf hardware has been the doom of the Amiga revival since day one.

The Amiga was not just an OS. It was all about the custom chips that added such interesting and powerful capabilities to an otherwise unspectacular 68000. When combined with the OS, it created a system that was truly ahead of its time.

But I don't see the appeal of AmigaOS on modern hardware. Most Amiga fans are more interested in the games and demos that didn't use the OS, and used the blitter/copper etc directly.
by networked | 2025-12-25 12:01:54+00:00
> Adding static typing to a dynamic language mostly gives you the disadvantages of both, without a lot of benefits.

Can you elaborate? I don't share this experience, and I'm interested in bringing static typing to a language without static typing, so I'd like to understand. In new Python and JavaScript codebases, optional typing has had clear benefits for refactoring and correctness and low costs for me. Legacy codebases can be different.
by einpoklum | 2025-12-25 12:03:40+00:00
I'm not an Amiga'n. When I was a kid in the late 1980s, a friend of mine had some Amiga, and I enjoyed a couple of games he let me play on it, and that's about the extent of my experience since then.

So, I'm finding it difficult to understand what this project actually is: Is it hardware for running original Amiga games and apps, or has there been a continuing user community and SW development effort in Amiga-world that us PC-heads are just not aware of? And that is interesting and different than copycatting advances from non-Amiga environments?