MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-06 19:26:34+00:00
Perl made a mistake, the language was invested in depth of expression and that, in a programming language, just leads to a 1000 ways to write same thing where like... 2 of them are actually nice to read.

Pyton was ("was" was used here on purpose) the opposite, the whole "one way to do a thing" and insisting on more clean code even if more verbose.

You could write nice looking Perl code but you had to choose to do it, while Python pushed you in that direction from the start.

As much as I dislike using whitespace as flow control it also does make sure the code is always indented reasonably even if it is a newbie just starting in the language.

It didn't help that Perl, just like other languages after (PHP, JS, Python too), had a "curse of the newbie language", with many people starting with it (as at the time it was kinda only sensible choice for webpages before mod_php did a revolution in how most webpages are hosted), with no training and just winging it, which in language that puts no limits on what user can do and no guidance on what they should do... leads to that ugly one liners and line noise as a code scripts.
by akerl_ | 2025-12-06 19:27:16+00:00
> The next administration will have their own core interests.

This is sort of the whole point of elections. The government's core interests are not static. When the article says "always", it's from the frame of reference of the current administration, and it's pretty standard for whoever is the current administration to speak as if their stance has always been correct and will always be correct.

The framing here is that "America" always holds these things to be true, and any past discrepancy from that was due to bad leadership. This writing style isn't unique to today's administration, you can find examples from basically any government across history.
by gtowey | 2025-12-06 19:27:30+00:00
Have you asked your DoorDash or Uber driver how they feel about their future? How about the Amazon warehouse workers and UPS drivers who deliver a mountain of cheap imported goods to your door. Or maybe ask the Walmart cashier if thier current and future projects in life give them a warm fuzzy feeling.

This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.
by anarticle | 2025-12-06 19:27:43+00:00
Perl was of a time, so it's important to remember when it was around. CPAN was legitimately one of the first package managers for a programming language that WORKED. Contextually, its references are bash, sed, awk, and other cli tools. There are too many ways to do things in perl because of the various flavors / takes on how to do things. It was also a fun way to write cgi apps in the era of C/C++. Is that the best way to do things today? No! It was one way to do something complex in few lines of code. It was the python of its day in many ways.

There are tons of quirks that are interesting that influenced language development today, for me the spaceship operator "<=>" was a fun one. You can have a flip through the camel book to see what kind of stunts were common in its era.

It is an auteur language that was not really done the way languages are today.

Perl 6 did massive damage to the community mainly because it was so different that it looked like a fantasy language. That along with Parrot really lost the plot for me, I had mostly stopped doing that kind of work and moved on to R for my bioinformatics things. Bioconductor was the bees knees.

I'm surprised at all the haterade, probably you're either <30, and/or being overly critical of a very nascent tech era. Perl was pre and post .bomb, and had one of the first online communities that I remember that shared tips and tricks at scale at perlmonks.org. It predated stackoverflow! It was a very different time to now.

This was also from a time when people still paid for compilers(!)

I am deeply biased, as I wrote a 3d distance calculator in Perl for small molecule drugs. We were looking for disulfiram analogs doing biopanning and then simulations. There was a great PDB library for structures at that time that saved me tons of time. This was circa 2005~, ages from now.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-06 19:28:05+00:00
Am I just wrong in thinking doing decompilation of copyrighted code via the cloud is a bad idea?

Like, if it ever leaks, or you were planning on releasing it, literally every step you took in your crime is uploaded to the cloud ready to send you to prison.

It's what's stopped me from using hosted LLMs for DMCA-legal RE. All it takes is for a prosecutor/attorney to spin a narrative based on uploaded evidence and your ass is in court.
by mindslight | 2025-12-06 19:28:09+00:00
Sorry no, you don't get to dredge up "context" of something bad someone else did to set an emotional stage of urgency for justifying another bad thing. That is how we get a race to the bottom where things keep getting worse and worse, as half of the useful idiots cheer it on at any given time.

FWIW I did not vote for Obama either time. If you want to talk about the evil things that he did, a much easier starting touchstone is the extrajudicial drone assassinations.

Also FWIW I don't have strong feelings on the actual immigration issue here! If people were being arrested in an orderly fashion based on good faith investigation per case, by officers with public identities and systems of accountability, given due process opportunity to possibly show they are a citizen or otherwise here legally, held in clean humane conditions, with all of this publicly documented to show the whole process was above board - I'd have very little problem! The problem is exactly the manner in which this is being done - masked paramilitary gangs wholesale assaulting civil society in American cities, using some God-knows-what dowsing rod app to scan people and declare them uncitizens (thereby not worthy of human rights), then being disappeared from interested people (eg family, attorneys), and held in concentration camps or shipped off to foreign countries. This destroys the rule of law and Constitutional rights for all of us. And if you really can't understand this, then you need a crash course in individual Liberty to get your head screwed on quick. The way I see it, the immigration issue is essentially just a pretext.
by phil21 | 2025-12-06 19:28:53+00:00
It’s interesting to me how brains work.

Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box.

I understand I’m the weird one, but man I miss Perl being an acceptable language to pound out a quick program in between “bash script” and “real developer”.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-06 19:29:00+00:00
> For example, he might personally support DSA/GDPR, but he says that the US generally views these as “non-tariff barriers” to US service companies[0] and doesn’t bother evaluating the policies themselves. essentially saying for the purposes of predicting how the US will react, it's sufficient to analyze how the US views them and the actual policy details lose relevance in that context. He also shared a detail[0] about how the US placed their lobbyists as commissioners on GDPR, which is an interesting operational detail that argues against the broad support argument you’re making. Another question is whether there would still be broad support for some policy after it has been enacted and its adverse effects have been felt.

This.

> I think alephnerd operates on a higher level of abstraction in his commentary, and you mistake this as him making specific validity claims about the policies. I think your grievances stem from this gap in abstraction.

This (but does make me sound kind of pretentious). I started my career in Tech Policy (and considered a career in academia for a hot second) before pivoting to being a technical IC and climbing the ladder. I am responding as I would when I was a TF.

--------

I am a supporter of multilateralism and do think the EU was a net benefit, but the EU's approach to unanimity should have been reformed during the 2004-07 expansion, and the Eurozone should have been decoupled from the political goals of the EU then unified. I'd probably say I lean closer to reformist academics like Draghi and Garicano.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-12-06 19:29:08+00:00
> Find ways to be partially available. Partial availability is being able to return some results even when parts of your system is failing.

Question for HN: how do you define "system is working" in microservices (think usual containers, some load balancers, some message broker, some external integrations, some web frontends)? I've found that this question verbatim cannot be answered. There are so many failure modes of a distributed system, and some of them not even easily noticeable, that we can have a system degraded 90% of the time and users will never notice.
by Astronaut3315 | 2025-12-06 19:29:45+00:00
I agree it should be the default, but this TV was readily placed into dumb mode at first powerup. Set your country & language, select dumb mode ("Basic TV"), skip WiFi and most would be satisfied with the result.

Some effort's needed to clean up the homescreen, but you never need to see it. Hand your grandparents a basic programmable remote without extras like the home button. They should be good to go.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-06 19:29:48+00:00
I'm reminded of a post on r/Factorio. (Factory builder game.)

(Paraphrase, I don't recall the words)

If you like Factorio you should be tested for autism because you might be autistic. If you like Pymods (a mod that adds an extreme number of hoops to the game) you should be tested for autism because there's a chance you don't have it.
by Animats | 2025-12-06 19:30:03+00:00
For Google, back in 2010, word order didn't matter much outside of quotes. So if you asked God is silence, the "is" is discarded, and you get a join of a search for "God" and "silence", sorted by rank. That probably won't help.

Try it today, and see what Google's AI turns up. It's amusing. It's still not what LeGuin is looking for. Search for "god is the silence of the universe" in quotes, and while Google does find a Saramago reference, the AI reframes the concept in Christian terms.

Now try

"god is the silence of the universe" atheist

Now you'll get what LeGuin was looking for. The Christian analysis is turned off.
by amluto | 2025-12-06 19:30:17+00:00
I once interned at a lab that used a piece of surely overpriced hardware that integrated with Simulink. You would make a Simulink model, and you’d click something and the computer would (IIRC) compile it to C and upload it to the hardware. On the bright side, you didn’t waste time bikeshedding about how to structure things. On the other hand, actually implementing any sort of nontrivial logic was incredibly unpleasant.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-06 19:30:55+00:00
> I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?

At this point? Reliable emulation that can run 99% of Android apps, to provide a bridge until the platform is interesting enough for people to develop for it "natively".

I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
by zzzeek | 2025-12-06 19:32:20+00:00
the agenda being pushed with the recent spate of articles to the effect of "people are saying they're autistic when they're really not, and should be classified differently" I think has mostly to do with RFKs overarching claim that people who are autistic are all suffering a horrible, debilitating disease, where in his words verbatim: “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date” [1] , which from there goes into his bigger goal which is to create a "database" of autistic people [2], for which no valid reason has ever been given. By redefining "autism" to be only those who we've decided are those severely disabled who "will never pay taxes or hold a job", then creating a catalog of exactly who these people are, the final step is quite obvious if you've studied the treatment of autistic people in Nazi Germany [3].

So I'm going to flag these posts for now because the goal in the current US climate is pure eugenics. RFK is at his core a eugenicist, as are all high-level anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers seek to blame the diseased for their disease, on such factors as "poor diet", "lack of exercise", or in the case of autism, "having your child vaccinated", against all scientific consensus, and would prefer people suffer and die of horrible and completely preventable diseases like measles and polio since they somehow "deserve it". Governments like the current one have plenty of plans for people they deem unworthy.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5256614-autism-communi...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5391310/kennedy-autism-...

[3] https://mjhnyc.org/blog/autism-and-disability-in-nazi-vienna...
by riffraff | 2025-12-06 19:32:22+00:00
I was never a perl programmer, but this was my impression of basically every perl programmer I have interacted with.

Also, I think Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, Humility"[0] is among my favourite articles about programming.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html
by akimbostrawman | 2025-12-06 19:32:59+00:00
that is simply wrong.

GrapheneOS is both in terms of security and privacy the best but currently only supports pixel phones.

LineageOS is trying to support as many devices as possible still with lot of google connections and missing security updates.

>Good news is that if you have a boot passphrase, it's security is somewhat close to GrapheneOS

its not anywhere close https://grapheneos.org/features
by rzerowan | 2025-12-06 19:34:09+00:00
There is also the option by well written professional wherer the startergy is to grab as much market share as they can by allowing the proliferation of their product to lockup market/mindshare and rleaget the $ enforcement for later - successfully used by MSWindows for the longest time and Photoshop .

Conversly i remenber Maya or Autodesk used to have a bounty program for whoever would turn in people using unlicensed/cracked versions of their product.Meanwhile Blender (from a commercial past) kept their free nature and have connsistently grown in popularity and quality without any such overtures.

Of course nowadays with Saas everything get segmented into wierd verticals and revenue upsells are across the board with the first hit usually also being free.
by Fuzzwah | 2025-12-06 19:35:00+00:00
> comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct.

True of every comment thread on HN.

Absorbing the thoughts of other humans on any topic you have deep knowledge of makes you see that all coverage of EVERY topic is subtly incorrect / poor / has an agenda.

It's sort of liberating when you realize.
by teemur | 2025-12-06 19:35:37+00:00
I think a decent middle ground would be to allow contextual advertising and ban personalized advertising. That is, it would be fine to show you ads based on where you are, what you are doing or what you are searching on the internet, but not based on what you did on another website or where you had lunch yesterday.

Of course this would add friction for finding the appropriate targets but it would still allow pretty decent business for adtech. it just would be a bit different.

(I'm pretty sure that the line between contextual and personalized ads is blurry, but I leave that to be solved by lawmakers and judges. Its kind of their core competence. And to be clear, what I personally think should be done would be much, much stricter ban, but this is a compromise proposal I think should be agreeable by all parties who are the slightest interested in the harm current adtech is doing)
by slim | 2025-12-06 19:35:58+00:00
Tiny Core also runs from ramdisk, uses a packaging systems based on tarballs mounted in a fusefs and can be installed on a dos formatted usb key. It also has a subdistro named dCore[1] which uses debian packages (which it unpacks and mounts in the fusefs) so you get access to the ~70K packages of debian.

It's documentation is a free book : http://www.tinycorelinux.net/book.html

[1] https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome
by breve | 2025-12-06 19:36:10+00:00
> I’ve saved some AV1-encoded videos that I can’t play on my iPhone.

Sure you can. Install VLC on your phone and you'll be able to play the AV1 videos. Even the iPhone 7 released in 2016 can play AV1 video.

Don't agonise over battery life. The dav1d decoder for AV1 is great:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1cf7eti/av1_dav1d_play...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1cg2wv4/dav1d_battery_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1cgyace/dav1d_battery_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1chpz2r/dav1d_battery_...
by altairprime | 2025-12-06 19:36:10+00:00
> Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered

It was an artefact of bursting out of those constraints, but honoring them still. The roots of perl as a “more capable, less restrictive” sed/awk means that it must support `perl -pi.bak -e oneliner file`, just like sed did — and so from that core requirement forward, everything it did, does. By the heyday of Perl5 era, conciseness was not a requirement, but the sed-compat roots remained a focus of the language’s creator.
by iambateman | 2025-12-06 19:36:19+00:00
That’s what I’m curious to hear from you and OP…does that make the autistic person less autistic? Or is it a mask?

I—-as a non-autistic person—-have lots of default tendencies which were socially discouraged as a child and which are now no longer part of my self concept. I’m not “repressing” a desire to be awkward, I’ve simply learned to be less awkward.

But my understanding of autism, which is I think backed by the article itself, is that autism exists as a fundamental cognitive process and tends to be pretty stable.

Btw the reason I ask is to learn…as a software dev and manager, several of the people I interact with could probably be diagnosed autistic and I’m always curious to try to understand what that’s like better.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-12-06 19:36:50+00:00
I like new work being done in editor space, but please please fix the demo video. You are literally not showing anything that Vim could not do 20y ago. Show me these

> tabs, scrollbars, 70 programming languages, clipboard history, modal and non-modal editing, editing large files

and I'd be really curious about your project.
by linkage | 2025-12-06 19:38:06+00:00
At least a year ago, Chromium-based browsers were significantly more secure than Firefox, as measured by the rate at which high severity vulnerabilities were discovered every month and the ease with which Firefox would be hacked in competitions.

The trouble with Chrome is that it is deliberately configured to maximize Google's ad revenue. The omnibar does not show you recently visited websites when you start typing something because they want you to do another Google search so they can serve you more ads. The new extension model deliberately neutered the most effective ad blockers available.

Brave is Chrome without the perverse incentives. Their developers take a security-first approach to everything, to the extent of explicitly _not_ having a centralized sync service for bookmarks, passwords, etc. They have an excellent content blocker built in, thereby doing an end-run around Chrome's new extension model. The crypto wallet and Brave ads are optional - you can disable both in the settings very easily. And since it's a Chromium variant, you can use all of the existing Chrome extensions for third party software like 1Password and the like.
by Supermancho | 2025-12-06 19:38:43+00:00
> There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous.

I lived it. I'm sure there's still some Mailing List archives and IRC snippets that still endure, demonstrating the utter vicious 1-upmanship of how to do something in Perl as succinctly as possible. Why do X and Y when you can just do Z? What are you really trying to do? etc.
by dangus | 2025-12-06 19:39:18+00:00
Yes she is. She wants it to be impossible for trans people to use the bathroom in public.

She literally wants it to be an impossible paradox.

Trans women can’t use the ladies room because they’re a “danger” to women. Trans women can’t use the men’s room because they look like women.

For people like JKR who hate trans women, trans men don’t exist, intersex people don’t exist, and non-binary people don’t exist. Trans women are just easy to hate for various psychological and political reasons.

She just wants them to be punished. That’s it. All of these other excuses that have to do with violence and crime are no different than when my MAGA relatives justify the ICE Gestapo’s illegal kidnappings by the supposed criminality of immigrants. We don’t need due process when they’re “illegals” who are “more likely to be criminals and are in gangs.” They “don’t have rights” for various stupid-ass reasons.

Again, it is a statistical and logical fallacy to consider a population so small to be a threat to women.

JKR has not proposed taking away any rights from men, only trans women.

Women aren’t surrendering anything. The list of things they’re surrendering has a length of 0.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-06 19:39:44+00:00
at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete

It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools.

Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.
by darrenf | 2025-12-06 19:40:46+00:00
> [TIMTOWTDI] literally means 'there is more than one way to do it in Perl' - and you can perhaps infer from that that there's little to no reason to do it using anything else

Not my experience at all, FWIW. For me, and the vast majority of Perl devs I’ve worked with over the past 30 years, TIMTOWTDI absolutely means some of the “ways to do it” don’t involve Perl, and that’s not only OK but expected. Of course Perl isn’t the be all/end all. It’s a lot of fun though!

(I’m a majority Perl coder to this day, it’s my favourite language by far. Hell, I even find it readable and easy/fun to debug)
by Terr_ | 2025-12-06 19:40:51+00:00
Just yesterday I took an old Motorola smartphone from 8 years ago (Android 9) and put LineageOS on it.

Poof, it's transformed from unusually-glitchy e-waste to a tool someone can actually benefit from.

> So if the bootloader can be relocked

Their website says they recommend against that and will not support it, because of a high chance the device will get bricked. :(
by kotaKat | 2025-12-06 19:40:55+00:00
That's the end result that's happened; Third Reality is now selling you a box to push the button on your own garage door opener. https://3reality.com/product/smartgarage-door-opener/

I find it absolutely absurd that they've removed the ability for dry contacts on the garage door opener itself. That feels a bit too scary to rely on the wireless completely alone to actuate a motor (especially one under heavy springs!)