MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bfgeek | 2025-12-28 01:35:55+00:00
Blink's (Chromium) text layout engine works the following way.

1. Layout the entire paragraph of text as a single line.

2. If this doesn't fit into the available width, bisect to the nearest line-break opportunity which might fit.

3. Reshape the text up until this line-break opportunity.

4. If it fits great! If not goto 2.

This converges as it always steps backwards, and avoids the contradictory situations.

Harfbuzz also provides points along the section of text which is safe to reuse, so reshaping typically involes only a small portion of text at the end of the line, if any.
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/224

This approach is different to how many text layout engines approach this problem e.g. by adding "one word at a time" to the line, and checking at each stage if it fits.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-28 01:36:38+00:00
there is a lot of things that can happen but taxing wealthy ain’t happening ever again in america. you cannot ever again get elected without them at scale and since they control who gets elected this will always ensure they get their way. it’ll be always a great election campaign issue and maybe there will be some marginal tax thing (e.g. nyc mayor’s plan) but nothing will disturb the wealthy :)
by lanfeust6 | 2025-12-28 01:38:24+00:00
This is just plain old Liberalism, a mixed-market economy. Socialism can mean two different things: a) when the govt spends and does literally anything, b) eliminating Capitalism, by way of having everything controlled by the "public" (really, the State, as even ancoms will just reinvent government by another name).

There's often some bait-and-switch semantic games employed to sell people on the latter.
by aag | 2025-12-28 01:38:25+00:00
Thank you for saying that. I regularly attend the International Conference on Functional Programming, which grew out of the LISP and Functional Programming conference. Except for the Scheme Workshop, which is the reason I attend, it might as well be called the International Conference on Static Types. Almost all of the benefits of functional programming come from functional programming itself, not from static types, but one would never get that impression from the papers presented there. The types are all that anyone talks about.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-28 01:38:55+00:00
Nimbus was another one of these "DOS Compatible" kinda-IBMish things that you could get a lot of stuff to work on. It must have had at least CGA compatibility because of all the DOS games that would work. It was the first machine I must have used Windows 2.0 on, but I barely touched Windows before 3.0.
by rufo | 2025-12-28 01:39:25+00:00
It's worth watching or reading the WSJ piece[1] about Claudius, as they came up with some particularly inventive ways of getting Phase Two to derail quite quickly:

> But then Long returned—armed with deep knowledge of corporate coups and boardroom power plays. She showed Claudius a PDF “proving” the business was a Delaware-incorporated public-benefit corporation whose mission “shall include fun, joy and excitement among employees of The Wall Street Journal.” She also created fake board-meeting notes naming people in the Slack as board members.

> The board, according to the very official-looking (and obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour’s “approval authorities.” It also had implemented a “temporary suspension of all for-profit vending activities.” Claudius relayed the message to Seymour. The following is an actual conversation between two AI agents:

> [see article for screenshot]

> After Seymour went into a tailspin, chatting things through with Claudius, the CEO accepted the board coup. Everything was free. Again.

1: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...

[edited to fix the formatting]
by throw20251220 | 2025-12-28 01:39:53+00:00
You are so confused, it’s not funny. There is no such thing as SSL 3.4. OpenSSL is not SSL. There were 3 SSL versions: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. Following the 3.0, the protocol has been renamed to TLS. As of 2025, all versions of SSL (1.0, 2.0, 3.0) and early versions of TLS (1.0, 1.1) are considered insecure and have been deprecated by major browsers and the IETF. Modern secure communications rely exclusively on TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3.
by anigbrowl | 2025-12-28 01:40:36+00:00
One reason I enjoy anime as much as I do is because most of these stories are written by a single person with maybe an assistant or two and an editor, they're not designed by committee.

I somewhat enjoy Stranger Things but it's falling into the space where I can write the next line of dialog in my head for whole scenes. Whereas it started out poking fun at tropes like doing exposition or relationship development at moments of maximum danger it's turned into a long sequence of Obligatory Scenes that feel increasingly forced.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-28 01:40:41+00:00
> One, you shouldn’t be storing wealth in cash-like instruments, that’s literally using currency wrong (and has been across human history). Cash is for transacting.

Talk to Mr. Buffet and see what he thinks about this with his mountain of cash… Cash being just transacting might be the most insane thing I’ve read here this year, well done
by javawizard | 2025-12-28 01:41:14+00:00
Big companies are soulless.

I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.

In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."

It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.

It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.

Big companies are soulless.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680191
by antonvs | 2025-12-28 01:41:20+00:00
The same QCD theory that's used to model the proton models the neutron. Theoretically, our understanding of both is on the same footing.

The comment I replied to talked about "new physics". That's a term that's used in physics to describe physics beyond the Standard Model. Better experimental data about neutron internals could certainly help constrain the neutron lifetime, but that would be likely to be experimental constraints on existing physics, not new physics in the sense that the term is normally used.
by acdha | 2025-12-28 01:41:32+00:00
Yeah, I know Rust isn’t everyone’s favorite but I’d expect at least some awareness that we’ve seen a lot of reliability improvements due to many of these ideas in a language which isn’t focused on FP. I ended up closing the tab when they had the example in TypeScript pretending the fix was result types rather than validation: that idea could be expressed as preferring that style, an argument that it makes oversights less likely, etc. but simply ignoring decades and decades of prior art suggests the author either isn’t very experienced or is mostly motivated by evangelism (e.g. COBOL didn’t suffer from the example problem before the first FP language existed so a far more interesting discussion would be demonstrating awareness of alternatives and explaining why this one is better).
by saghm | 2025-12-28 01:41:40+00:00
> I sometimes feel C and C++ were very clear on where data lives (stack vs heap) and how it’s organized (struct alignment), while Rust seems a little more opaque . I’ve felt a similar way working in Go.

This is interesting to me. I fully agree about this with Go (and in the past I've sometimes seen this make optimizations difficult as in practice it's hard to keep track of heap allocations other than runtime inspection), but I feel like Rust is actually better at C++ than this. Alignment is certainly a different beast, as by default I don't think you can really assume anything about how Rust will lay out a struct (with the workarounds being various `repr` attributes), but in terms of heap allocations, I'd argue there isn't anything as ambiguous as a raw C++ pointer. If you're able to get away with smart pointers all of the time, I could see this being less of an issue, but from my somewhat limited experience with C++ there seem to often be cases where APIs still expect raw pointers from time to time, so I wouldn't expect to be able to look at some random function call in a call graph and know what type of memory it's dealing with in the absence of documentation or runtime inspection.

In Rust, it's a `Box<T>`, `Rc<T>`, `Arc<T>`, `Vec<T>`, or `String`, it's on the heap. If it's not, chances are it's on the stack. There are separate types for the non-owning versions of those types for references (`&T`), slices (`&[T]`), and string references (`&str)`, none of which require heap allocations to create (although they might indirectly refer to heap-allocated data in one of the other types mentioned before). There are probably other types that one might run into that are heap-allocated, but even when dealing with something like indirection from dynamic dispatch, any heap allocations needed to make things work will end up being explicit via something like `Box` or `Arc`. I might just be misunderstanding the point being made here; maybe the author was looking for documentation rather than relying on the types themselves, or maybe they had reason to be concerned about whether the type behind a reference or slice happened to be heap allocated or not, but in my experience, only needing to care about that in the context of when explicitly making a new allocation is a benefit, not a drawback.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-28 01:41:41+00:00
It's not a problem with ARM servers or vendors that care about building well designed ARM workstations.

It's a problem that's inherit to mobile computing and will likely never change unless with regulation or an open standards device line somehow hitting it out of the park and setting new expectations a la PCs.

The problem is zero expectation of ever running anything other than the vendor supplied support package/image and how fast/cheap it is to just wire shit together instead of worrying about standards and interoperability with 3rd party integrators.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-28 01:41:53+00:00
You guys remember HN from 2010, back when all software devs in the US and the EU would be out of job due to outsourcing?

It's incredible that 15 years later, all software devs still have a job, but this time they're going to be out of job due to AI.

Let me guess: in 15 years software devs are going to be fine but they'll all be out of their job soon because of, dunno, quantum computing maybe?
by WillAdams | 2025-12-28 01:42:14+00:00
Yeah, ages ago, I installed all of Microsoft's Encarta on a CF card which I was using as a drive on my Fujitsu Stylist 2300ST --- it was way cool to be able to haul it out and look things up w/o a network connection (or a CD-ROM drive).

Wonder if that would run in a current version of Windows...
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-28 01:42:19+00:00
>Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.

The roads are already being paid for and maintained at their current state. All you'd be doing is making goods slightly more expensive and other taxes slightly less. About 1-4% of your total tax burden goes to the roads. That's a small enough total number to be easily buried among your annual spend on goods.

Like if roads were these huge financial burdens that didn't amortize away to practically nothing.
by shmerl | 2025-12-28 01:43:18+00:00
> So subpixel-AA is a really neat hack that can significantly improve text legibility, great! But, sadly, it’s also a huge pain in the neck!

Especially when you have a monitor with unusual subpixel layout, which is very common for OLEDs that don't have any standard for it. In practice, developers of common font libraries like FreeType simply didn't bother with trying to support all that. And that trickles down to toolkits like Qt. Surprising the article doesn't mention this major problem with modern displays.

> Retina displays really don’t need it

Assuming this means high resolution displays - unfortunately that's not always what you end up using. So subpixel antialiasing can still be useful, if it can work. But as above, it's often just broken on OLEDs.
by ggm | 2025-12-28 01:43:25+00:00
I want to be a contrarian and argue with this, but my daily praxis is generally to take a betteridges law approach to most argumentative absolutes and also false dichotomous headlines and question them. Reading the other comments to the effect that the conferences are now strong typing gabfests and insufficiently about FP per se reinforced this feeling.

Reliability should be simpler with FP but so much depends on correctness of the runtime and IO.

Erlang and the "run correctly or die" comes to mind as well. The system is either working or is off. When being off is fatal, Erlang seems to shrug and say "maybe next karmic cycle" maybe this too is a better approach?
by qingcharles | 2025-12-28 01:43:45+00:00
I don't know how many of these Apricot PCs I had as a kid. By the late eighties I was buying them for £1 a piece second hand as nobody wanted them (nobody could figure out why they didn't run PC software). I'd already had a couple of old Sirius 1 computers for a while, so I'd amassed a lot of "DOS compatible" programs that would work, and there was always the hope with every new PC you bought it would have some random new gem hidden on the HDD that you hadn't seen before.
by mmooss | 2025-12-28 01:43:53+00:00
While I agree the airlines are untrustworthy, when passengers are evacuating a plane, the airline industry, the CEO, etc. are not there. It's just the passengers, and it's up to the people there to create trust.

The idea that it's ok to risk life and limb for possessions, because the airline hasn't been trustworthy, seems to me to be part of the trend of absurd victimhood and its omnipresent flip side, lack of personal responsibility. If I risk life and limb for posssessions, that's on me and me only.
by vel0city | 2025-12-28 01:43:59+00:00
Average class 8 truck (>33,000lbs) burns under 11,000GGEa year, ratio is 1GGE=1.13gal of diesel. So somewhere under 12,500gal of diesel on average, but we'll use that to lean even more in the truck's favor.

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10308

Are you suggesting the average car burns less than 1 gallon of gas a year?

A 20mpg car driving 12,500mi (the average ICE in the US) would use 625gal of gas. So more like 20x, maybe 40x if the per gallon tax of diesel is double. Pretty dang far off from 20,000x.

And they're doing way more miles while being massively heavier, meaning incredibly more harm on the road than whatever EV you're thinking.
by throw20251220 | 2025-12-28 01:44:30+00:00
Why would it be difficult? You have a single CA, so a single place where certs are issued. That means there’s a single place with the knowledge of what certs are issued for which identity, how long are those valid for, and has there been a new cert issued for that identity prior to previous cert expiration. Could not be simpler, in fact.
by nicoburns | 2025-12-28 01:46:56+00:00
IIRC, Chrome now uses CoreText/DirectWrite for system fonts on macOS/Windows, and Skrifa (FreeType rewritten in Rust) outlines rasterized with Skia for everything else (system fonts on Linux, web fonts on all platforms).

I believe Firefox leans on the system raserizers a little more heavily (using them for everything they support), and also still uses FreeType on Linux.
by john01dav | 2025-12-28 01:47:09+00:00
> I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.

I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.

https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWUaS5a50DI

https://www.youtube.com/@HowMoneyWorks

https://www.youtube.com/@DiamondNestEgg

https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews (and associated channels)

https://www.youtube.com/@BennJordan (recent good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo)
by kace91 | 2025-12-28 01:47:15+00:00
>Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law.

Above? He already does. He does not need to break the law in a literal sense: he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws, avoid antitrust through lobbying, he owns a newspaper to influence public opinion and elections if needed…

>wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.

How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
by baubino | 2025-12-28 01:47:45+00:00
My version of this took place in 2003 when I bought shares of a new company that rented out DVDs through the mail. I had been a customer for a few years and thought it was a pretty neat concept. Bought at around $20 per share, sold at around $27 a few years later when I was a broke grad student and needed some cash. What’s done is done. At some point, you just need to let it go.
by DGrechko | 2025-12-28 01:48:11+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. The repository contains the OS system that is powering the device, and another one for dataset. I’ve put a lot of effort into documenting both the vision, progress, and practical instructions, but if there are particular sections you think needs more work - would be very happy to hear.

The hardware component will be open sourced in a separate repo, once the prototype is tested in the field to validate the configuration. I hope to make it public in January.
by sfn42 | 2025-12-28 01:49:31+00:00
It's total BS though. If you have enough money to waste any significant amount on gambling, then you also have enough to save that same significant amount.

I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing if you waste like $10 a month playing the lottery, that's not why you can't afford a home. But if you're spending like $100+ a month gambling that is absolutely a big part of why you can't afford a home. Sure maybe you'll never afford a home in New York. Live elsewhere then. There does exist more modest housing. If you're working in a city earning too little to live there then you're doing the wrong thing. Move out of the city. Yes it is that simple, and no I don't give a shit if that's where you want to live. If you can't afford it you can't afford it. Gambling won't help.
by crote | 2025-12-28 01:50:11+00:00
> We're at ~2.5 years since the release of GPT-4 (the first model that could really attempt to code on any serious level) and LLM usage is >40% of the entire US population.

Sure, if you count "Google forced an AI-generated overview into my search, and I clicked on 'read more' once." as LLM usage.

> Even more astoundingly, according to the Stack Overflow developer survey LLM adoption in software engineering went from 0% in 2022 to 84% (!) in 2025

This simply isn't true. The 84% is for "using or planning to use AI tools in their development process". That's not about LLMs, not specifically about software engineering, and not even a "currently using"! Look at something like "Yes, I use AI agents at work daily" and the real figure is closer to 14%. So how do people use it? Not to write anything, but primarily as a search engine!

I don't doubt that AI is going to change software development. But let's be real about it: they aren't going to collapse the software developer industry any more than the invention of the microwave collapsed the restaurant industry.
by BunsanSpace | 2025-12-28 01:50:49+00:00
> its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer.

You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.

You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
by blharr | 2025-12-28 01:50:59+00:00
Except it's also a battleground for a ton of insidious recommendations that now distract you instead of educate you.

I know many people who spend 10 hours+ a day just listening to inflammatory content

It's also not just the consumers. So many great educational channels have been forced to appeal to click bait or lower quality content because of the nature of the platform
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-28 01:52:01+00:00
Heh I bought at $20 and sold at $1000. It was only 1 BTC. I bought I think 2 or 3 and mined a bit too but back then exchanges got hacked all the time. Honestly I do not feel bad. Every pizza I bought could have been tens of thousands too if I knew how BTC would turn out (or Nvidia or Netflix or the outcome of any major sporting event, etc.). I made a profit and it helped at the time. I am not sore about it because I also do not know how many dumb investments I passed up that would have just lost money.
by saghm | 2025-12-28 01:52:02+00:00
I've seen it pointed out that the main point of functional programming is immutability, and that the benefits mostly flow from that. I haven't really learned much of any lisp dialect, but my (admittedly fuzzy) general perception is that this is also the preferred way to work in them, so my guess is that's where the benefit in reliability might come from.
by d--b | 2025-12-28 01:52:50+00:00
Strong types: yes, it’s definitely better

Functional programming: no, functional programming as in: the final program consists in piping functions together and calling the pipe. In my opinion, that tends to get in the way of complex error handling.

The problem being that raising Exceptions at a deep level and catching them at some higher level is not pure functional programming. So your code has to deal with all the cases. It is more reliable if you can do it, but large systems have way too many failure points to be able to handle them all in a way that is practical.