MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Towaway69 | 2025-12-07 08:45:48+00:00
I remember those days, Fvwm2[1] was brilliant with its multiple screens and controlling the mouse using arrow keys - good times. Amazingly difficult to config even if you could get Xconfig to support your setup (external refresh rates and supported screen sizes and drivers for video cards).

But over the years I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Mac. Initially it didn't even have multiple screens but you could install (I forget the name) an application that simulated the multiple screens of Fvwm2. Right from the start I was glad for the simplicity of just having everything work or it wasn't supported - there was no in-between.

Today I'm using Spaces with iTerm2 and Emacs as core development tools. Not much different from my Fvwm2, xterm and Emacs in xterm solution from 25 years ago. Pity really that nothing has fundamentally changed in code development.

[1]: https://www.fvwm.org/
by Closi | 2025-12-07 08:46:25+00:00
There is a trade off with simplicity though - usually it requires being highly opinionated about which software features make the cut. Users or sales teams often want more features, but if you included every one the app would become a mess.

But there is a possible world where you can have both - every 'feature' your users would ever want without overwhelming complexity or steep learning curves, but with the possible downside/cost of reducing consistency.
by mghackerlady | 2025-12-07 08:46:53+00:00
Different priorities I suppose but I'd absolutely hate using that laptop. I want something designed to last, not be thrown out in a few years. IDK when it became cool to just expect everyone to have the money or care to buy a new <thneed> every few years. I guess it makes more money but since that seems to be the only thing companies with a marketing budget do people have forgotten there's an actual market for well built electronics that will at least survive 5 years
by tor825gl | 2025-12-07 08:47:38+00:00
But you've selected one particular group. The thousands of groups and individuals who merged their way of life with that of farming/toolmaking/industrialised/modern human society do not have a name, they are just part of the human mainstream.

Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't. So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress, even at the cost of giving up their previous way of life, that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.
by darkwater | 2025-12-07 08:50:44+00:00
I'm sure I'm biased by my age (mid 40s) but I think you are onto something there. What if this constant decline in how people learn (on average) is not just a grumpy old man feeling? What if it's something real, that was smoothened out by the sheer increase of the student population between 1960 and 2010 and the improvements of tooling?
by asus386 | 2025-12-07 08:50:54+00:00
Well isn't that nice. The boxes I care most about are 32 bit. The perl I use is 5.0 circa 2008. May you amiga386, or anyone else, thank you in advance, may be able to tell me what do I need to upgrade to perl 5.8? Is it only perl 5.8 and whatever is the contemporaneous gcc? Will the rest of my Suse 11.1 circa 2008, crunch? May I have two gcc's on the same box/distro version, and give the path to the later one when I need it? The reason I am still with Suse 11.1, is later releases broke other earlier things I care about, and I could not fix.
by indubioprorubik | 2025-12-07 08:53:11+00:00
The green revolution was vitally dependent on oil-gas based fertilizer trade - which means, doing away with manchester-style centralized trade empires who used cutting off trade as a tool of suffocating opponents. The past never went away, it caught up to the present. All poverty is energy poverty - and exponential humanity, always fills that "gap" to the ressource roof with people.

The old, pre-harber-bosch world was a grim dark all against all where empires (themselves devices to keep civilization afloat in a few centralized places, while extracing at great missery elsewhere) fought wars of fertilizer and used one sided trading and food-exports to starve colonies out like vampires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon

the whole all against all, no free-trade madness culminated in the two new comer empires copy-pasting the concept dialed up to eleven in their "new colonies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan
by Itoldmyselfso | 2025-12-07 08:53:14+00:00
How can LOS's security be somewhat close to GOS if it's worse than OEM? LOS lacks verified boot, hardware security features, it's often behind is security patches.. With "advanced protection" enabled stock OEMs are even more secure, but GOS is even more secure still. When it comes to EOL devices, LOS may be more secure than OEM depending on your threat model.

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
by adrian_b | 2025-12-07 08:53:35+00:00
"Algae" is a term that is used for any living beings that have chloroplasts, thus they are able to capture solar light and produce free oxygen, except for the originally terrestrial plants (which descend from a certain group of green algae).

Most unicellular algae have flagella.

By phylogeny, there are several separate kinds of algae, which are not closely related and which have appeared as a consequence of separate symbiosis events.

After diatoms, dinoflagellates are among the most abundant unicellular algae. The chloroplasts of both diatoms and dinoflagellates have their origin in red algae that had been incorporated as intracellular symbionts in a distant past.
by refurb | 2025-12-07 08:54:24+00:00
Yup, it’s funny seeing people say how bad the past was without realizing people 100 years from now will say the exact same thing about today.

Not to mention the opinions and beliefs that people hold “as the right side of history” without realizing these things change and no doubt some view they hold will be seen as “barbaric” in the future.
by procaryote | 2025-12-07 08:54:56+00:00
I have a similar experience.

Interviews are pretty weird in that you meet a new person and then very soon need to have a really serious conversation about important things. It's also a social context which is inherently stressful for the candidate, and where being good at putting them at their ease gives you better results.

I even notice that during the times of my life when I hire a lot, I have a much easier time with being extrovert and social at parties and in everyday interactions.

During times I don't have to meet new people as often, I get worse at it.
by tasuki | 2025-12-07 08:55:15+00:00
> In the last years writing SQLAlchemy or Django ORM the teams I was on would write queries in SQL and then spend the rest of the day trying to make the ORM reproduce it.

Ah yes, good times! Not Django for me but similar general idea. I'm not a big fan of ORMs: give me a type safe query and I'm happy!
by thinkingemote | 2025-12-07 08:56:23+00:00
I love hoaxes. But this also neglects the social and viral aspect. If lets say if an aged local member for parliament sees an image of the bridge after coming back from the pub, he will call into the authorities responsible. Now you can think of many other people who, upon seeing this, and having an initial reaction to it, have the power to enforce an action.

Calling directly into the railroad bypasses an authority chain. It negates the virality of it. These viral images are viral because they get shared and spread on their own just like a virus.

Telephone calls into authorities were never viral, they could never be spread. Although they may well have caused the desired reaction without spreading first! Many hoaxes back in the day were somewhat viral and did get spread, but the hoax went to the newspapers or the community first and spread there. A well crafted press release, some additional letters to the traditional media etc. A believable image makes for more believability. The hoax got spread because it was hard to debunk it as it was distributed before the debunking. Bypassing the effort to spread the hoax removes chances of effects.

Edits: my initial thought was "no trains run after midnight anyhow" as except on a few main lines its hard to find trains in the UK at night - so the cost of the bridge closure may have been very small. That with the amount and quality of the staff operating at that time of night. Taken together this leads to less of a cost of reaction, more of a chance of a knee jerk reaction from staff, less ability to consult nearby awake engineers and survey damage IRL. So while the hoaxers cannot plan an earthquake(!) it probably wouldn't have succeeded if the earthquake happened at 11am.
by cm2187 | 2025-12-07 08:56:50+00:00
Actually more than 3y old. My servers are EPYC Gen 2 and Gen 3 mostly.

But I don't think it is a hardware thing, as I see in CrystalDiskMark (which I believe bypasses the Windows write cache) performances that are close to the SSD specs. But it is when I do windows copy, the performance goes down the drain.

And it's not just parallelism. If I copy one file from a fast nvme to fast nvme, it caps at about 1.5GB/s. If I copy two files in parallel, they seem to split that speed, even if file1 is copied from diskA to diskB while file2 is copied from diskC to diskD.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-07 08:57:22+00:00
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult in a healthcare system that doesn't consistently recognize and treat ADHD in adults. Many clinicians are unfamiliar with it and still believe in myths like ADHD being a disorder that only affects children, or who fail to recognize ADHD as the primary condition and waste years of people's lives on diagnosis and medications that don't work, so I was forced to largely figure it out myself to try to advocate for myself - DSM-5, ICD-11, research papers, personal experiences from other people.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-12-07 08:57:34+00:00
OP here, I looked into it. For legal reasons I will neither confirm nor deny any marketing claims here and let the experts decide. I will merely list the equipment I bought. [0] [1] [2] [3]

[0]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01EXDG2MO - "TP-Link TL-SG108 V3 8-ports Gigabit Network Switch"

[1]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07WG8TNDL - "CSL Cat 7 Network Cable, Gigabit, Ethernet, LAN Cable, PiMF Shielding With RJ 45 Connector, Switch, Router, Modem Access Point, White"

[2]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06XCYC4K7 - "deleyCON 5 x 0.5 m Cat7 Network Cables, Short, 10 Gigabit, RJ45 Patch Ethernet Cable, Copper, SFTP PiMF Shielding, LAN, DSL for Switches, Modems, Router, Patch Panels, Cat6, Cat5 Compatible, Black"

[3]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B089MF1LZN - "Amazon Basics 30.5m White Flat RJ45 CAT7 Gigabit Ethernet Patch Internet Cable"

One copy of each would run you around 75-85 euros in total by my napkin math. Sticking with standard CAT 6A would have probably been 10-15 euros cheaper, and since I'm only aiming for 1 Gbps, not 10, I might have been able to get away with CAT 5e, even.

I suspect that the additional hours of time I would have had to spend actually doing my research here to make a fully informed purchase would have made this a slightly net negative decision financially. But that's mostly because of the small size and modest needs of the network I was wiring up. If I were wiring up anything that scaled beyond my own apartment it would have been valuable to know this, so thank you, my career will go better as a result of this correction.
by mariusor | 2025-12-07 08:57:58+00:00
My experience to a T.

The "calm tech" concept works really well with the fediverse identities because it's such a niche concept that at the end of a day of browsing you'll get a handful of entries, but for something as ubiquitous as RSS you get a ton of useless feeds that are just. But I really, really like the basic idea, I'll see if I can apply it to the things I'm building. :)
by npsomaratna | 2025-12-07 08:58:18+00:00
That makes a lot of sense. After 30+ years of programming, I still have to do a search (or use an LLM) to do anything useful with sed, xargs, etc. Perl never really clicked with me either.

On the other hand, I was able to easily pick up just about any "tradional" language I tried--from Basic and C in the 80s all the way to Dart and Go more recently.
by breve | 2025-12-07 08:58:21+00:00
> I'm calling out the absurdity of adding it, analyzing it, removing it, and putting yet another approximation of it back in

Why is it absurd? The entire encoding process is an approximation of the original image. Lossy compression inevitably throws away information to make the file size smaller. And the creation of the original video is entirely separated from the distribution of it. It'll be stored losslessly for one thing.

The only question that matters is does the image look good enough after encoding. If it doesn't look good enough then no one will watch it. If it does look good enough then you've got a viable video distribution service that minimizes its bandwidth costs.
by _joel | 2025-12-07 08:58:33+00:00
It might have been pretty horrible but I hold Frontpage 97 with fond memories, it started my IT career, although not for HTML reasons.

The _vti_cnf dir left /etc/passwd downloadable, so I grabbed it from my school website. One Jack the Ripper later and the password was found.

I told the teacher resposible for the IT it was insecure and that ended up getting me some work experience. Ended up working the summer (waiting for my GCSE results) for ICL which immeasurably helped me when it was time to properly start working.

Did think about defacing, often wonder that things could have turned out very much differently!
by finaard | 2025-12-07 08:58:43+00:00
Maximum 32GB of RAM, which is a bad joke if you want to use it as developer system nowadays.

TL;DR: Waited for a decade for somebody to make a non-shitty notebook, went for macbook as the least bad option when the old one was falling apart.

Also the modern thinkpad keyboards are crap, and the trackpoint is unusable in the low profile style.

I switched to a macbook pro last year after having some contact with apple hardware in a customer project, from a thinkpad x230 with a x220 keyboard I've kept barely alive over the years. Now _some_ non-Apple notebooks (mostly from framework) can take sensible amount of memory, but at the time of purchase that was the only 14" notebook capable of taking a decent amount of RAM. The only other ones that could take RAM were some xeon workstation type builds - big display, shitty battery runtime, and same or more expensive than a fully specced out macbook.

Apple also seems to have put some effort into keyboards - with the current macbook pro keyboard being one of the best notebook keyboards currently out there. Not as good as the classic thinkpad keyboards, but better than anything lenovo made in over a decade. Dell never was that great, and did a massive step back in their latest model. HP is somewhat close, but still noticeable difference.
by Itoldmyselfso | 2025-12-07 08:59:19+00:00
It doesn't seem to be the entire project, just one dev (afaik) that's quite outspoken and does make accusations that they don't always seem to back with evidence. Also insofar as the actual "product" remains completely untouched by any spats it shouldn't be a dealbreaker for anyone wanting to use GOS, but of course it isn't ideal to have any drama attached.
by robocat | 2025-12-07 09:00:09+00:00
> Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves untold lives.

Type 1 is about 0.5% prevalence. Type 1 diabetes was a rapid death sentence before insulin discovery in the 1920s.

Type 2 is more common (maybe 10% but highly dependent on country) and it is a relatively modern problem

Infant mortality has dropped to 0.5% from 7% 100 years ago - so that's more significant.
by Yokolos | 2025-12-07 09:00:45+00:00
> I don’t care one bit about upgradability or customizability. After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one. It’s not like upgradability is a bad thing, but it usually comes with tradeoffs to weight and power draw, and I’d rather it all be in one solid package glued together. And I don’t like customizability because I like when all the testing and polish work is put into one configuration.

Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-07 09:01:25+00:00
> It’s such an academic word.

It's not even an early academic word; by its construction you can see that it postdates the period when scientists would have been expected to know Greek or Latin. etymonline dates it to 1909.

There are some interesting mentions in the "history" section of the wikipedia article:

> In 1920, the American zoologist E. Newton Harvey published a monograph, The Nature of Animal Light, summarizing early work on bioluminescence. Harvey notes that Aristotle mentions light produced by dead fish and flesh, and that both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) mention light from damp wood.

> He records that Robert Boyle experimented on these light sources, and showed that both they and the glowworm require air for light to be produced. Harvey notes that in 1753, J. Baker identified the flagellate Noctiluca "as a luminous animal" "just visible to the naked eye", and in 1854 Johann Florian Heller (1813–1871) identified strands (hyphae) of fungi as the source of light in dead wood.

Had there been a term in common use, it probably would have been adopted for scientific use too. But if for some reason that didn't happen, it looks like The Nature of Animal Light would be your best bet for finding out what peasants called it.

I suspect that Aristotle and Pliny the Elder both called it "light", and that would be my first guess for what English miners and fishermen called it too.
by defrost | 2025-12-07 09:03:05+00:00
> But

But?

> you've selected one particular group.

I used as examples some specific individuals of one named group, yes. I also had in mind other specific individuals of a few other families - all these groups share the same major language group.

There are other similar examples across the globe, of course, there's an entire island that famously prefers no contact- but I'm making a brief comment not writing a book.

> Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't.

If I were to pursue this I'd likely argue that a majority of adaptions happened with more force, less willingness, and at a pace faster than desired by the less technologically advanced side.

> So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress,

Indeed. Many are curious about water but didn't expect a hose shoved down their throats with a bucket load funnelled in endlessly with no off tap.

> that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.

I'm assuming this refers to those groups that want to retain autonomy but have difficulty doing so.

In many such cases that I'm aware of the problem stems less from former group members wanting to bring the outside in, more from outsiders (eg: loggers) wanting to clearfell habitat, miners wanting pits, etc.

eg: The entire West of PNG not wanting rule by Indonesia, various "Indonesians" not wanting their dense jungle homes cleared for palm oil plantations, various groups in Brazil, Native American Indians not wanting pipes to cross ther lands, giant copper mines on sacred grounds, etc.
by gregjor | 2025-12-07 09:03:43+00:00
> Activity is just a small part of how we assess their skills.

Nothing on your web site or in your HN post refers to anything other than analyzing git activity. Crunching commits -- artifacts of the software development process rather than the process itself -- seems the core of GitHired.

< Its more about the projects you've built- how complex they are, their architecture, frameworks etc.

While that may have some value it doesn't work for programmers who have all of their work unavailable in company-owned private repositories. 100% of my work, for example, and a large percentage for every professional programmer I know. Even hiring managers and recruiters understand that public repos and personal private repos mainly represent hobby projects and side hustles.

> The whole point is that candidates often tailor their resumes to fit keywords from job descriptions...

True enough, but that happens because of recruiting/screening tooling -- an arms race. Sending out applications, tailored or not, into the automated and so-called "AI" screening/ranking systems describes the least effective way to get a job. Recommendations and reputation work much better, for a reason: a good hiring manager will trust their own experience and instincts, and the opinions of people they trust, more than a dashboard of code commit metrics. Sadly good hiring managers seem even harder to come by than good programmers.

> ...we cut through all the bs to show what they've actually done, not what they say they can.

So a programmer fresh out of boot camp who knows one language and framework will score higher than a more experienced programmer with broader experience? A person who used PostgreSQL for a year gets ranked higher than the programmer with two decades of Oracle and SQL Server?

Programmers don't succeed or fail because of mastery (or lack of mastery) of specific languages and frameworks. Projects and teams succeed, or fail, mainly because of team dynamics, conceptual integrity (as Brooks called it), and management consistency and support. Learning a language or a framework amounts to a necessary but hardly sufficient part of software development, and not even a key part of the process. Domain expertise counts for much more: I would rather hire someone with years of experience in (for example) enterprise logistics and let them learn a programming language rather than the other way around. You can't infer that kind of expertise, or how a person works in a team, or if they can reliably implement requirements, from git repo activity.

I don't blame you for the degradation and frustration of the tech recruiting and job hunting process. Most of the blame falls on the class of managers and executives who don't know anything about managing people or projects, and nothing about software development. Falling back on some sciency-looking numbers at least lets them continue blaming their shortcomings on something else.
by 9rx | 2025-12-07 09:04:10+00:00
But as the parent comment suggests, if the adults were getting sick it is unlikely that they would be able to:

* Produce 5 kids in the first place.

* Take care of the kids that they were able to produce, making survival of even half them much less likely.

But in actuality, best we are able to determine hunter-gathers who made it into adulthood lived longer, healthier lives than those in agrarian lifestyles.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-07 09:05:36+00:00
Ideally we would have moved on into some Assembly glue + compiled managed high level languages by now, like Xerox PARC when then moved away from BCPL into Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, Mesa and Mesa/Cedar, but some folks and industry standards cannot let go of C, and those have to contend with that kind of life for C, exactly.
by somat | 2025-12-07 09:07:16+00:00
With regards to BEGIN

The only reason AWK needs a BEGIN is due to it's implied data loop. As far as I know perl has an explicit data loop and as such needs no BEGIN.

Oh god, perl has an implied data loop mode doesn't it. Sigh, now I am reading perl manpages to find out.

Update: of course it does, -n or -p