MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-12-06 20:59:47+00:00
This is very debatable. The courses look like they were recorded in the 90s.

The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a tutorial not a university course.

If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.
by konmok | 2025-12-06 20:59:56+00:00
You're conveniently designating Banda and Semenya as male for having male-typical testosterone levels, ignoring their sex characteristics, chromosomes, other hormones, etc. You specifically refer to them as "males". So, they should use only male bathrooms, right? That's JKR's whole thing, and earlier you said:

> women and girls need single-sex spaces

It follows that you should designate a person with female-typical testosterone and estrogen levels as female, whether or not they have XY or similar chromosomes, a penis, etc. Those people should then use female bathrooms, right? Including trans women taking hormonal treatment? And those trans women should be able to compete in women's sports, since they pass your hormone test?

Or maybe, just maybe, sex is more complicated than that.

I also wonder how women with minor hormone irregularities feel when people like you dismiss them as men in denial.
by u8vov8 | 2025-12-06 21:01:10+00:00
On the day Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, I started getting Youtube ads for silencers and tactical gear. I guess it follows that people were searching for those sort topics then and I fit some cohort (probably "angry young male"), but it was very unnerving.

Now Youtube mostly shows me ads for fake AI generated products and other scams.
by phil21 | 2025-12-06 21:01:43+00:00
Yep, first language I learned. And since I was somewhat early to the Internet thing, I found IRC when I was about 14 years old and actually learned from a lot of the folks who have authored books on Perl or are at least (were) well known in the community.

It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots!

Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz telling you to RTFM guides your early development in a certain manner.

I certainly have never considered myself a developer or programmer though. I can pick up enough syntax to get a quick hack done or start a MVP to demo my ideas, but I leave the “big boy” dev stuff to the professionals who can run circles around me.
by Asooka | 2025-12-06 21:01:45+00:00
I never interacted with any of that, to me Perl was always "Bash with text processing built-in and no string interpolation pitfalls". I reach for it when I need to write one to two page long utility scripts. Python is too willing to deprecate features (plus the whole 2 to 3 fiasco burned me badly), so I only use it for things I know I will maintain. Perl is for writing a shell script that will run unchanged in perpetuity.
by milesvp | 2025-12-06 21:02:06+00:00
Mics have a pretty standard look, and are hard to miss on the board. It would be more insideous if there were cheap film caps leading into a very expensive ADC. I work with with analogue audio, and it’s very important to design around the noise of cheap caps. They are for all intents and purposes microphones and if you were clever about different caps for different frequencies and good digital processing I have no doubt you could build something with comparable fidelity to some of the cheapers MICs in the vocal range.
by clickety_clack | 2025-12-06 21:02:32+00:00
If you’re using 10 services and 1 goes down, there’s a 9/10 chance you’re not using it and you can switch to work on something else. If all 10 go down you are actually blocked for an hour. Even 5 years ago, I can’t recall ever being actually impacted by an outtage to the extent that I was like “well, might as well just go get something to eat because everything is down”.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-12-06 21:03:36+00:00
To others: if you’re downvoting a link a massacre because it feels like the wrong kind of comment, I encourage you to at least read through about the event. I had not learned about this before. It’s perfectly interesting and I think the comment is worth considering in its intent.

“On 14 August 2013, the Egyptian police and to a lesser extent the armed forces, under the command of then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, used lethal force to clear two camps of protesters in Cairo. Estimates of those killed vary from 600 to 2,600.”
by petre | 2025-12-06 21:04:31+00:00
Well, it's quite different now after being in the EU for nearly two decades. What you recall is regular roads, that cannot be called highways, but those got fixed as well. The highway infra is still not countinous, but it exists. And Romanian drivers do >90 kph on normal roads as well. Romania and Bulgaria have the highest road fatalities per capita in the EU.
by krige | 2025-12-06 21:04:32+00:00
For OCS/ECS hardware 2bit HiRes - 640x256 or 640x200 depending on region - was default resolution for OS, and you could add interlacing or up color depth to 3 and 4 bit at cost of response lag; starting with OS2.0 the resolution setting was basically limited by chip memory and what your output device could actually display. I got my 1200 to display crisp 1440x550 on my LCD by just sliding screen parameters to max on default display driver.

Games used either 320h or 640h resolutions, 4 bit or fake 5 bit known as HalfBrite, because it was basically 4 bit with the other 16 colors being same but half brightness. The fabled 12-bit HAM mode was also used, even in some games, even for interactive content, but it wasn't too often.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-12-06 21:04:34+00:00
> defend itself from what ?"

The article addresses this unfortunate attitude: the whole premise of your question is, "well they'd have to go through these other countries first, so not our problem".

It's a bit like if Kansas refused to pay anything towards the defense budget because any hostile powers would have to go through all those other states first.

But, as the article also notes, air and sea power are things. If a hostile power decides to fuck with one of the many undersea Internet cables that make their way to and through Ireland, what's Ireland going to do about it?
by fooofw | 2025-12-06 21:04:40+00:00
It's kind of fun to compare this formulation with the seemingly contradictory official arXiv argument for submitting the TeX source [1]:

> 1. TeX has many advantages that make it ideal as a format for the archives: It is plain text, it is compact, it is freely available for all platforms, it produces extremely high-quality output, and it retains contextual information.

> 2. It is thus more likely to be a good source from which to generate newer formats, e.g., HTML, MathML, various ePub formats, etc. [...]

Not that I disagree with the effort and it surely is a unique challenge to, at scale, convert the Turing complete macro language TeX to something other than PDF. And, at the same time, the task would be monumentally more difficult if only the generated PDFs were available. So both are right at the same time.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html#contextual
by antonvs | 2025-12-06 21:05:04+00:00
It's not just fromJust, there many other partial functions, and they all have the same issue, such as head, tail, init, last, read, foldl1, maximum, minimum, etc.

It's an overstatement to say that these are "shunned by practically everybody". They're commonly used in scenarios where the author is confident that the failure condition can't happen due to e.g. a prior test or guard, or that failure can be reliably caught. For example, you can catch a `read` exception reliably in IO. They're also commonly used in GHCi or other interactive environments.

I disagree that the Rust perspective on unwrap is significantly different. Perhaps for beginning programmers in the language? But the same is often true of Haskell. Anyone with some experience should understand the risks of these functions, and if they don't, they'll eventually learn the hard way.

One pattern in Rust that may mislead beginners is that unwrap is often used on things like builders in example docs. The logic here is that if you're building some critical piece of infra that the rest of the program depends on, then if it fails to build the program is toast anyway, so letting it panic can make sense. These examples are also typically scenarios where builder failure is unusual. In that case, it's the author's choice whether to handle failure or just let it panic.
by dsvf | 2025-12-06 21:05:08+00:00
Immich manages to detect my kids faces much better than expected. I only have two years, but it is spot on with kid #1 from newborn to 2yo, and it manages to not mix up the new baby photos of #2 with the baby photos of #1. In my 44k photos there are zero statues face detected, the only flukes are a few photos from a restaurant with a celebrity picture wall.
by Keyframe | 2025-12-06 21:05:56+00:00
yeah that certainly does happen. Especially if you give it the context of the machine since 6502 itself and opcodes do you no good unless you know the memory layout/ map which is in a sense what machine you're on. NES and C64 are 6502, heck even SNES is but 6502 opcodes are nothing since action is in memory you're interacting with.

When you provide context and the memory map, it does help explaining what algos you're looking at and what's going on. I've had a bit more luck with gemini rather than claude on this vs in general claude codes better. ChatGPT is for the most part lost in hallucinations.
by alsetmusic | 2025-12-06 21:05:57+00:00
Not the person you replied to, but I thought the same thing. Perl was my first as well, and it certainly shaped the way I think about coding. It made Python feel too rigid and Ruby feel familiar. There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.

I'm sure there are people who started in a language and later found something that made more sense. I'm just reflecting on what I've found in my experience.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-12-06 21:06:30+00:00
As a business, dealing with Microsoft and Oracle is not a clean transactional sale.

They turned into legal-service-firms along the way, and stopped real software development/risk at some point in 2004.

These firms have been selling the same product for decades. Yet once they get their hooks into a business, few survive the incurred variable costs of the 3000lb mosquito. =3
by kstrauser | 2025-12-06 21:07:26+00:00
That split between bytes and unicode made better code. Bytes are what you get from the network. Is it a PNG? A paragraph of text? Who knows! But in Python 2, you treated them both as the same thing: a series of bytes.

Being more or less forced to decode that series into a string of text where appropriate made a huge number of bugs vanish. Oops, forget to run `value=incoming_data.decode()` before passing incoming data to a function that expects a string, not a series of bytes? Boom! Thing is, it was always broken, but now it's visibly broken. And there was no more having to remember if you'd already .decode()d a value or whether you still needed to, because the end result isn't the same datatype anymore. It was so annoying to have an internal function in a webserver, and the old sloppiness meant that sometimes you were calling it with decoded strings and sometimes the raw bytes coming in over the wire, so sometimes it processed non-ASCII characters incorrectly, and if you tried to fix it by making it decode passed-in values, it start started breaking previously-working callers. Ugh, what a mess!

I hated the schism for about the first month because it broke a lot of my old, crappy code. Well, it didn't actually. It just forced me to be aware of my old, crappy code, and do the hard, non-automatable work of actually fixing it. The end result was far better than what I'd started with.
by Duralias | 2025-12-06 21:07:28+00:00
My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point, but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient, even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.

Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.
by charcircuit | 2025-12-06 21:08:15+00:00
This just shows that the barrier of entry of a new phone OS is more than $0. You can pay app developers to port their apps off of play services, you can pay developers to add support for your attestation keys. Considering how many billions of dollars Android makes for Google, there is a room for a return on investment for an alternate OS to enable investments into a new OS.
by spjt | 2025-12-06 21:09:05+00:00
In my experience, having to track my hours absolutely destroys my performance. Thinking about how I need to pay attention to how long I spend on everything is a constant distraction in the back of my head while I try to do anything useful, and then I spend the rest of the day procrastinating having to fill out the paperwork. I know I'm not the only one because the entire dev staff was ready to mutiny the last time I was at a company that tried to get devs to start tracking their hours.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-06 21:10:49+00:00
One really-cool way to solve that problem is to embed a 7-segment LED under each keycap. You walk up to the keypad and the 0-9 digits appear in random order. No one can shoulder-surf, look for wear or IR emission from the buttons, or train on the click sounds.

Dell had those on every lab door in the building back in the early 90s. You felt like 007 every time you punched in your access code. I've never seen them anywhere since.
by josephg | 2025-12-06 21:11:10+00:00
Ah thanks for the clarification. That wasn’t clear to me reading your comment.

You’re right that rust forces you to explicitly decide what to do with Result::Err. But that’s exactly what we see here. .unwrap() is handling the error case explicitly. It says “if this is an error, crash the program. Otherwise give me the value”. It’s a very useful function that was used correctly here. And it functioned correctly by crashing the program.

I don’t see the problem in this code, beyond it not giving a good error message as it crashed. As the old joke goes, “Task failed successfully.”
by TulliusCicero | 2025-12-06 21:11:54+00:00
100% agreed with this article. The whole idea of Ireland's supposed neutrality is a farce. Does anyone really think that if a country like Russia decided to full-on invade Ireland, other European nations would just shrug it off? Of course not, and the Irish are well aware of that and rely on it (already they explicitly rely on the UK to help defend their country as a matter of policy).

So really it's a simple hypocrisy, a one-way street. You help us, but we don't help you. We're too principled to help others, you see.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-06 21:12:40+00:00
I'm only able to work on the DMD backend now and then, and so it has fallen behind compilers with a small army working solely on a backend.

Sadly, the number of people nerdly enough to want to work on a code generator is very, very small. Me, I find it quite enjoyable.

I cannot even think of anyone who wrote a full stack compiler these days.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-06 21:13:12+00:00
That last paragraph got me off Perl to Python. The first time I wrote Python like hash1[hash2]["key"] and it worked, then tried hash1[hash2]["array_name"][3] and it worked because that's the obvious way to write something, I fell in love and never looked back.

I never wanted to have to reason my way through chasing pointers through nested hashrefs again.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-12-06 21:13:31+00:00
> Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. Following the Separation of Discovery Global for a Total Enterprise Value of $82.7 Billion (Equity Value of $72.0 Billion)

I know this isn't the main point, but does anyone else find this sentence a nightmare to read? "Bros." makes me think we're in a new sentence; This would be fine if the next word wasn't arbitrarily capitalised. Why do people write like this? Why not just capitalise the proper nouns?
by aaravchen | 2025-12-06 21:14:46+00:00
It was discussed here when it was announced. I believe it was determined the hardware is an ultra-low-budget Aliexpress design that normally retails for ~$100 that they had custom built with a mic cutoff switch added to it (probably the cause of a large portion of the hardware price increase). I dont remember the specifics, but even thr most optimistic were pretty sure it won't get hardware vendor support for even a full year based on the specific processor it contains.
by butvacuum | 2025-12-06 21:15:52+00:00
I think you haven't gone far enough. Most of this thread is rampant ignorance and propaganda influenced bandwagoning.

1) It's from a company known for dev boards and SoCs- not consumer products.

2) The code is available on GitHub (nice!)

3) SiSpeed actively contributes to the mainline linux kernel for RISC-V in general as well as their SoCs.

4) Security in Embedded Applications is just... Bad. Amercian, Chinese, European, Russian, Indian- it doesn't matter.
by asa400 | 2025-12-06 21:15:54+00:00
> And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.

This is an amazing point that I haven't seen anyone else make about languages in this way.

As someone who got into the industry right after Perl's heyday and never learned or used it but learned programming from some former Perl power users, Perl has a pre-corporate/anarchic/punk feel about it that is completely opposite to something like Golang that feels like it was developed by a corporation, for a corporation. Perl is wacky, but it feels alive (the language itself, if not the community). By contrast, Golang feels dead, soulless.
by rtp4me | 2025-12-06 21:16:10+00:00
I have never been to one of these "fests" but wouldn't be easier to just bring a small PXE server with an SSD and 10G NIC with an 8-port switch for net booting/install? Are the machines so old they can't boot off the network? The PXE server could easily handle 5-6 install clients via the 10G NIC.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-06 21:16:53+00:00
There's a web site where different people share what they think of each course, and how many hours they devote per week: https://www.omscentral.com/

That might help you decide whether it's doable.

My first (and only) course was somewhere in the middle in terms of effort, and the courses I was most interested would have required another 50% on top, which wasn't going to work for me, between work, parenting, other learning etc.
by thayne | 2025-12-06 21:18:49+00:00
The physical world equivalent would be if Porsche didn't sell their cars, they only leased and rented them, and the lease terms didn't allow subleasing or renting it out, or even letting someone else drive it. And there were no wholesale or reseller agreements to allow other dealerships or rental companies to lease or rent them out.

If Porsche were to do that, a lot of customers would probably switch to BMW or Audi instead. But with Movies and TV, competing products are less fungible.
Goal-Setting App with Community Features
by lumi_ai | 2025-12-06 21:19:22+00:00
Hey everyone, I'm an alumni who's worked in corporate roles for the past 4 years, and I'm tired of it. I've always wanted to build something that actually helps people, and trusted that if I provide value to society, the money will follow. I have an idea for a startup: before I full send it (i.e., quit my job), I'd appreciate your feedback!

About me - I had a relatively smooth university experience: my grades were good enough to apply to most job; I was fortunate to land a summer internship, which turned into a full-time job. I attended my local university so my mentors and community came easier than my friends. Still, looking back I found there were so many gaps in my university experience.

I've always believed that university is the most important time of our lives: for a lot of us, we're learning how to live on our own, make new friends, and live a lot of firsts: first interview, first job, and all that. That's why, I've had this idea to create a startup that can help students get the most out of university; specifically, I want to build products that can you minimize study time, make more friends, and help you find your direction (what uni's really for).

The idea - I believe setting goals/milestones, and having friends and mentors who you can call on, to hold you accountable or give you suggestions, is why I had any success.

I want to build an app where each user sets their unique goals (with key milestones), then at any time, they can reach out to friends, mentors, or communities for advice.

Right away, me and my friend network (with good jobs) can provide free, unlimited mentor advice. As the user base grows, you can optionally be matched with other users who have similar goals as you, so you can make new friends and be on the journey together. Users can create private groups or join public communities where they can share opinions and resources.

If users like, they can optionally make their journeys public so others can follow you, and be notified of your progress.

I want to hear your thoughts - I know this sounds a bit crazy and it's an idea I've held inside for a while. I just know that I want to help others; I always accept coffee chats with students because my mentors are why I'm in this position to even write this post today.

I want to bring people together; I don't personally use social media because it just makes me feel Imposter Syndrome or worse about myself. I want to build a network where we actually share positivity, and help each other grow every day, one step at a time.

Conclusion - If this post receives strong comments, I'll legit have a reason to quit my corporate job and pursue my passion. You guys are the best - thanks for reading, if you've gotten this far!