MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eduction | 2025-12-06 19:15:50+00:00
Not really. It wasn’t audacious in service of anything innovative. Haskell takes functional programming to the nth degree, scala tried to be an advanced Java for example better at concurrency.

Perl was an early dynamic (garbage collected) “scripting language” but no more advanced than its contemporary python in this regard.

It had the weird sigils due to a poor design choice.

It had the many global cryptic variables and implicit variables due to a poor design choice.

It has the weird use of explicit references because of the bad design choice to flatten lists within lists to one giant list.

It actually was the one thing you said it wasn’t - a good practical general language at least within web and sysadmin worlds. At least until better competitors came along and built up library ecosystems.
by zahlman | 2025-12-06 19:15:52+00:00
TFA claims:

> This is shorter than the ffprobe code, and faster too – testing locally, this is about 3.5× faster than spawning an ffprobe process per file.

And the calls to the MediaInfo wrapper are not really harder to parallelize. `subprocess.check_output` is synchronous, so that code would have to be adapted to spawn in a loop and then collect the results in a queue or something. With the wrapper you basically end up doing the same thing, but with `multiprocessing` instead. And you can then just reuse a few worker processes for the entire job.
by creer | 2025-12-06 19:16:36+00:00
Which is (sadly) hilarious because that was the reason most people seem to have gone with python: they were told "this is what we use here" or they bought the "line noise" nonsense. They never put much effort into this.

But I also think that people who are truly interested in programming immediately learn that there are many different paradigms. And the net makes it dead easy for them to explore different directions and, I don't know, fall in love with haskell or something. Perl is plenty visible enough for THAT. I don't know about perl 6 / raku though.
by tenthirtyam | 2025-12-06 19:17:00+00:00
I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?

I'm imagining a future where you buy a smartphone and when you do the first configuration, it asks you which services provider you want to use. Google and Apple are probably at the top of the list, but at the bottom there is "custom..." where you can specify the IP or host.domain of your own self-hosted setup.

Then, when you download an app, the app informs the app provider of this configuration and so your notifications (messenger, social media, games, banking, whatever) get delivered to that services provider and your phone gets them from there accordingly.

Is there anything like that in the world today?
by johnthewise | 2025-12-06 19:17:12+00:00
Of course no one cares about random companies in Czechia or France getting pressured; it's not meant to sway public opinion in Sweden, otherwise it would have been a waste of influence (money). 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.

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.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170027#46174642
by totallykvothe | 2025-12-06 19:17:20+00:00
That's not super subtle any more than it's super subtle that "*" performs multiplication and "+" performs addition. Sometimes you just need to learn the language.

This is not a general defense of Perl, which is many times absolutely unreadable, but this example is perfectly comprehensible if you actually are trying to write Perl and not superimpose some other language on it.*
by hamdingers | 2025-12-06 19:17:23+00:00
In college I used a Slax (version 6 IIRC) SD card for schoolwork. I did my work across various junk laptops, a gaming PC, and lab computers, so it gave me consistency across all of those.

Booting a dedicated, tiny OS with no distractions helped me focus. Plus since the home directory was a FAT32 partition, I could access all my files on any machine without having to boot. A feature I used a lot when printing assignments at the library.
by maccard | 2025-12-06 19:17:53+00:00
That’s all my point was, yeah. Genuinely no extra snark intended.

> it is no longer reproducible

The problem I have with this is that most of the software I use isn’t reproducible, and reproducible isn’t something that is the be all and end all to me. If you want reproducible then yes nix is the only game in town, but if you want strong versioning with source controlled configuration, containers are 1000x easier and give you 95% of the benefit

> docker still needs to run on a system

This is a fair point but very little of that system impacts the app you’re running in a container, and if you’re regularly breaking running containers due to poking around in the host, you’re likely going to do it by running some similar command whether the OS wants you to do it or not.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-12-06 19:18:23+00:00
It's a recursive issue, and this is something that Reddit could potentially improve. Reddit preserves a deleted comment's space in the comments section as [deleted]. Users who see a graveyard of deleted comments will comment to wonder why, especially if they are unfamiliar with the subreddit rules. This may require the mods to delete more off-topic comments, which worsens the issue, etc. So the established "best practice" is to delete but leave a moderator comment with an explanation so there's a paper trail.
by popularrecluse | 2025-12-06 19:18:25+00:00
I guess I don't get what's wrong w/ using generated art if it looks good. Where was the rage about clip art in print & digital media? Stock photography? Are the people who are mad outraged on the behalf of artists? Are they artists themselves? I know artists who enjoy working with generative art and are finding new ways to use it.

Like I said, I guess I just don't get it.
by belorn | 2025-12-06 19:19:00+00:00
> I never thought a computer would pass the turing test in our lifetime

Are we talking about the single non-peer reviewed study that show that a random person might only be about 1/3 in guessing correctly that a GPT 4.5 text is a computer and not a human?

Learning to recognize the artifacts, style and logical nonsense of an LLM is a skill. People are slowly learning those and through that the turing results will natural drop, which strongly imply a major fault in how we measure turing completeness.
Tell HN: iOS 18.7.2 in Lockdown Mode is unable to load many websites
by HotGarbage | 2025-12-06 19:19:03+00:00
Since updating to iOS 18.7.2 many major websites fail to load with "A problem repeatedly occurred."

Disabling Lockdown Mode for the site fixes it but is annoying and defeats the purpose.

I'm not the only one experiencing this https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1ovvyj2/lockdown_mode_just_broke_browsing/ and I've opened a ticket via Feedback but I thought I'd try to get more visibility here.
by wrs | 2025-12-06 19:19:28+00:00
My concern here is the behavior of the official and their bosses, not the visitor. No one has a right to politeness or professionalism from the official either, but as a citizen paying their salary, and a citizen with pride in my country, I expect it from them.

“Rights” aren’t the point. I have a right to refuse entry to a police officer without a warrant, but if an officer puts me in the position of having to explicitly exercise that right, we should be disappointed in them and their chief, not me.
by asveikau | 2025-12-06 19:19:49+00:00
I have frequently walked by the "OG Huckleberry House" depicted in the photo near the bottom, and knew its history. It's near the stairwell and garden that connects Broderick St with Buena Vista East. You can actually see, on the northern side of that incline that is a steep ramp with no stairs, that the house goes pretty far back, probably had lots of room for boarders.
by immibis | 2025-12-06 19:20:10+00:00
Any one of us here could learn the skills to design a smartphone. It won't necessarily be good, but I remember that years ago, someone made one with a touchscreen hat and GSM hat atop a Raspberry Pi, rubber-banded to a power bank. I'm sure any one of us HN users could do this. And it worked. Quality only goes up from there.

The problem is it won't run any apps, so you'll need to carry this open-source secure phone in addition to your normal phone.
by lumb63 | 2025-12-06 19:20:24+00:00
That’s not what GP is saying. He’s saying that a term like “autism” is a lasso trying to capture a gigantic number of individual traits and symptoms. This is true of any other “psychiatric disorder” as well. There is no “autism”, there is no “ADHD”, there is no “OCD”, any more than there are tables or chairs.

Something being a table is a label we slap on it to abstract certain attributes, that allows us to reason about it without having to think about all of the non-table-attributes it has. What do tables do? What can we do with them? We can put things on, eat off them. We can’t feed them to our pets. We can’t use them as a trampoline. The object being “a table” is just a categorization we make to allow us to think about the object; it isn’t something that the object is.

Similarly, people aren’t “autistic”. They’re just people, who have certain traits, which psychiatrists have decided should be lumped into a category called “autism”, because they’ve noticed a cluster of other people who have similar traits. So, from this standpoint, someone “being autistic” does not tell us anything. We can already see that person’s traits or characteristics. That categorization might be helpful to some people, and it might be harmful to other people; and they should use or avoid using it accordingly. But they can choose to do that, because “autism” isn’t a “thing” - it’s a mental construct.
by zahlman | 2025-12-06 19:20:26+00:00
av1_videos = { p for p in glob.glob("**/*.mp4", recursive=True) if is_av1_video(p) } assert av1_videos == set()

Building a set just to check if it's empty is a bit more complexity than necessary. A more direct way that also bails out early:

assert not any(is_av1_video(p) for p in glob.glob("**/*.mp4", recursive=True))

Equivalently (de Morgan's law):

assert all(not is_av1_video(p) for p in glob.glob("**/*.mp4", recursive=True))
by cpgxiii | 2025-12-06 19:20:55+00:00
In Itanium's heyday, the compilers and libraries were pretty good at handling HPC workloads, which is really the closest anyone was running then to modern NN training/inference. The problem with Itanium and its compilers was that people obviously wanted to run workloads that looked nothing like HPC (databases, web servers, etc) and the architecture and compilers weren't very good at that. There have always been very successful VLIW-style architectures in more specialized domains (graphics, HPC, DSP, now NPU) it just hasn't worked out well for general-purpose processors.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-06 19:21:29+00:00
If the Unicode consortium would spend less time and effort on emoji and more on making the most common/important mathematical symbols and notations available/renderable in plain text, maybe we could move past the (LA)TeX/PDF marriage. OpenType and TrueType now (edit: for well over a decade, actually) support the necessary conditional rendering required to perform complicated rendering operations to get sequences of Unicode code points to display in the way needed (theoretically, anyway) and with fallback missing-glyph-only font family substitution support available pretty much everywhere allowing you to seamlessly display symbols not in your primary font from a fallback asset (something like Noto, with every Unicode symbol supported by design, or math-specific fonts like Cambria Math or TeX Gyre, etc), there are no technical restrictions.

I’ve actually dug into this in the past and it was never lack of technical ability that prevented them from even adding just proper superscript/subscript support before, but rather their opinion that this didn’t belong in the symbolic layer. But since emoji abuse/rely on ZWJ and modifiers left and right to display in one of a myriad of variations, there’s really no good reason not to allow the same, because 2 and the squares symbol are not semantically the same (so it’s not a design choice).

An interesting (complete) tangent is that Gemini 3 Pro is the only model I’ve tested (I do a lot of math-related stuff with LLMs) that absolutely will not under any circumstances respect (system/user) prompt requests to avoid inline math mode (aka LATeX) in the output, regardless of whether I asked for a blanket ban on TeX/MathJax/etc or when I insisted that it use extended unicode codes points to substitute all math formula rendering (I primarily use LLMs via the TUI where I don’t have MathJax support, and as familiar as I once was with raw TeX mathematical notations and symbols, it’s still quite easy to confuse unrendered raw output by missing something if you’re not careful). I shared my experiment and results here – Gemini 3 Pro would insist on even rendering single letter constants or variables as $k$ instead of just k (or k in markdown italics, etc) no matter how hard I asked it not to (which makes me think it may have been overfit against raw LATeX papers, and is also an interesting argument in favor of the “VL LLMs are the more natural construct”): https://x.com/NeoSmart/status/1995582721327071367?s=20
by chrisweekly | 2025-12-06 19:22:15+00:00
Whoops, mea culpa. I'm not personally very interested in desktop linux GUI apps, and hadn't realized that was out of scope for Orb's featureset. Given my narrower criteria for "linux support" (VMs for CLI-based operations), Orb has been amazing. Its capabilities exceed that of Docker4Mac beyond stability and performance. But, yeah, that may be moot in light of your desktop GUI purposes. I have no experience w Asahi.
by jasomill | 2025-12-06 19:22:25+00:00
Hulu "no ads" is even worse.

Live TV? Ads. Shows available as part of streaming packages for channels included in live TV? Ads. Random other stuff "due to streaming rights"? Ads.

At this point I pretty much assume any non-Disney programming that isn't a Hulu original will have ads, and access it by other means, partly as a minor act of civil disobedience, but mostly because I'm impatient (i.e., never in my life have I actually watched television advertising, even when forced to sit through it).
by oncallthrow | 2025-12-06 19:22:34+00:00
> also, it seems like everything in perl is a string?

It's actually somehow even worse than this. The Perl type system is honestly ridiculous. Most veteran Perl developers don't fully understand it.

https://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2025/02/a-deep-... is a good introduction.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-06 19:23:05+00:00
For me, that's probably jj undo, just because it makes everything else so nice to just give a try. I really don't worry about making mistakes.

But for me, it's not so much features that git doesn't have, it's that the core is factored in a way that's more focused and orthogonal. The stuff that I used to like to do with git is even easier and more straightforward with jj. This is more of the result of a bunch of different design decisions and how they fit together rather than just some specific feature that's great.
by Kirby64 | 2025-12-06 19:23:39+00:00
I'm not sure what that proves? Volumetric efficiency is just about air efficiency. Higher VE is better, yes, but you need to compensate for higher VE by adding more fuel to utilize the air, otherwise you run lean, which is bad. Turbocharging a car, for instance, directly increases VE.

None of this directly equates to fuel efficiency although it can be related, which is what the GP was asking about presumably. You still need to content with the fact that ethanol has ~30% less specific energy per gallon.
by immibis | 2025-12-06 19:23:43+00:00
In the ARM world, there isn't even a standard way to boot, and there are no standard hardware interfaces - except maybe the interrupt controller, since it's part of the CPU and only ARM designs the CPUs.

On any PC, you can still use BIOS/UEFI services to get a basic framebuffer and keyboard input. You cannot do that on embedded ARM devices - you need to get several layers into the graphics stack to have a framebuffer. I tried it on the PinePhone, using existing source code as a reference, and the furthest I got was sending commands from the video port to the LCD controller and then not having an oscilloscope to see if the LCD controller replied back.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-06 19:24:36+00:00
> Erm, heard of Spacex ?

Yes; they have yet to have a proper orbital launch with their new product; it's substantially behind schedule. The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done could surely do better.

> Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine.

I mean, I'd hope "the best engineering manager in terms of getting things done" would add up to more than "the service hasn't substantially changed in three years, except in that it is rather more unreliable and that the spam prevention, never wonderful, seems to have broken down entirely". That seems extremely unambitious. Wasn't it meant to be "the everything app" by now?

> The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering

Fundamentally it failed because it was ill-conceived, but it also had fairly severe quality and design defects. No amount of _marketing_ would have saved it.

Again, I'm just not seeing anything that makes me think "bestest engineering manager ever". Actually, I see no reason to think that he has any recent experience as any sort of engineering manager _at all_; he appears to spend most of his time spouting nonsense on Twitter and failing at ill-conceived joint ventures with Donald Trump. Neither of these are generally considered to be part of the core skill set for engineering managers.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-06 19:24:47+00:00
> So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments?

Because that's what customers want to buy. People are paying premium iPhone prices for hardware with mediocre specs and then the hardware sells out when someone like Purism or Fairphone actually makes an open one. How many sales would you get if you did the same thing on a phone that was actually price/performance competitive with the closed ones?

Meanwhile all of that "profit center" talk is MBA hopium. Nobody is actually using the Xiaomi App Store, least of all the people who would put a different OS on their phone.

The real problem here is Google. Hardware attestation needs to be an antitrust violation the same as Microsoft intentionally breaking software when you tried to run it on a competing version of DOS and for exactly the same reason.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-06 19:24:48+00:00
Get ChatGPT - or whichever model you like - to actually do what you're suggesting. Nobody is stopping you.

I do, all the time.

But if you take the best LLMs in the world, and ask them to make a working operating system, C compiler or web browser, they fail spectacularly.

Like almost any powerful tool, there are a few good ways to use LLM technology and countless bad ways. What kind of moron would expect "Write an operating system" or "Write a compiler" or "Write a web browser" to yield anything but plagiarized garbage? A high-quality program starts with a high-quality specification, same as always. Or at least with carefully-considered intent.

The difference is, given a sufficiently high-quality specification, an LLM can handle the specification->source step, just as a compiler or assembler relieves you of having to micromanage the source->object code step.

IMHO, the way it will shake out is that LLMs as we know them today will be only components, perhaps relatively small ones, of larger systems that translate human intent to machine function. What we call "programming" today is only one implementation of a larger abstraction.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-06 19:24:53+00:00
Don't underestimate the extent to which this is bothrsome to Elon. Elon went to great length to do a financially dubious deal in which investor-backed X.ai paid full price for Twitter. Rolling Twitter into an AI bubble valuation company saved Twitter investors from having to admit their investments were losing bets. You would think X.ai investors would be displeased. But everybody's looking real good on paper. Nobody wants to be reminded what a lousy deal the Twitter LBO was, especially when AI valuations look a bit vulnerable.
by KwanEsq | 2025-12-06 19:25:17+00:00
> A more direct way that also bails out early

If it bails out early it is of no use to them.

> This means that if the test fails, I can see all the affected videos at once. If the test failed on the first AV1 video, I’d only know about one video at a time, which would slow me down.
by hirvi74 | 2025-12-06 19:25:21+00:00
A lot of substances cause withdrawals/dependence and act of brain chemistry, e.g., the vast array of psychiatric drugs. However, I have never seen the word addiction used in the context of antidepressants, mood stabilizers, etc..

Even non-psychiatric drugs like NSAIDs, insulin, hypertension medication, etc. can have a withdrawal effect.

I might be mistaken, but I am under the impression that addiction is psychological in nature. Take gambling addiction, for example, I am not certain if there is any physical withdrawal effect, but there is definitely a psychological compulsion.
by dmitrygr | 2025-12-06 19:25:32+00:00
I can just imagine the report:

Hai there, kernel guys. Now... assuming you first rob a museum for a working ARM7TDMI-based board, then find a way to flash it with a kernel and a rootfs to boot it, and if your kernel has an obscure and not-used-anymore ABI enabled, and you then somehow give an untrusted party ability to run code on it, they could crash the kernel using this 8-byte userspace binary.

:)

It is academically cool, no more. Quite possibly some old industrial control stuff is still running on old ARM7 boards with OABI enabled, but (i hope) they are not exposed to third party code. I guess I could send in the one line patch, if i find the time. The fix is quite trivial, funnily enough. You simply mask off the bottom 2 bits instead of assuming that LR in ARM mode is 4-byte-aligned, since on ARM7 it might not be