MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robomartin | 2025-12-28 21:30:09+00:00
This is a fantasy. OK, well, if the intent is to waste time and lose a lawsuit, sure, a few hundred dollars will give you that experience. In the real world, no way. A single deposition can cost many times that figure.

You can choose to disagree, of course. My guess is that you have never done this and you have never been involved in a nontrivial legal dispute outside, perhaps, small claims court. You probably don't even own a nontrivial business. Not one person running a business would ever suggest a lawsuit could cost a few hundred dollars.

Like I said, in the real world things are different. I know people who have burned through over $50K in seemingly simple cases (one of them self-represented) only to bow out once they realized they only scratched the surface. In one case they went broke, had to sell their home to pay for the losses and move to a lower cost state just to survive. Tragic. And, BTW, they didn't lose the case. They just got to a point, tens of thousands of dollars later, where they simply had to drop it or face ending-up in a far worse situation.

When I was much younger (and really stupid as most young know-it-alls are) I decided to go after a company that owed me $100K in contractually agreed-upon consulting fees. They had already paid me over a million dollars over a couple of years, so this was not about a little $100K contract.

There was a change in management and they simply decided not to pay vendors. They did this as the simplest method (aside from laying people off) to improve financials. The new CEO and his wife also happened to own a law practice.

So, I hired an attorney (no way to do this on your own for $400). $11K later I finally understood that the balance of power was not in my favor. I may have won. It may have cost me somewhere around $75K to do so.

However, then the other reality would kick in: Collecting. Yup. Collecting was probably going to cost money and maybe even another lawsuit. Not to mention the time, measured in years, for the full experience. Not to mention the real potential of them filing for bankruptcy to gift me the experience of using my judgement as rough toilet paper.

In fact, that is precisely what they did about 18 months later to other vendors, who, like me, where chasing payment. They took a year to transfer all assets to a new corporation. When the original corporation had no assets whatsoever, the went ahead and filed BK and told everyone to go shove their judgements (if any).

I was actually glad that I only burned $12K to learn an important lesson: The legal path is only viable when you are talking about going up against an equal. Like anything, there are exceptions to this, however, in general, this is the way the real world works.

Still don't believe me? If you happen to be a budding entrepreneur looking for investors, do this: During your meeting, tell them that you are not concerned about lawsuits because they can be sorted with $405. Don't blink or you'll miss to witness just how quickly they leave the room. Really.
by qaengineerfp | 2025-12-28 21:30:28+00:00
Hey everyone,

I wanted to share my side project, Weeklii. It's an iOS planner designed to be the opposite of complex calendar apps.

I realized I didn't need endless features. I just needed to see my week clearly.

The main idea:

One Week at a Time: Focuses strictly on the current week to reduce overwhelm.

Neon Aesthetic: Dark mode/neon design because standard white calendars are boring.

Privacy First: No login, no cloud, data stays on your device.

It’s free to try and I'd love to hear what you think of the design!
Thanks.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-28 21:30:29+00:00
A century ago, it was somewhat normal for any American town over 10,000 people to have at least one streetcar. Most towns also had an interurban connection to the next (larger) town, which would then have more streetcars, long-distance train connections, etc.

This is despite urbanization being lower then than it is now[1]. Some of that is because Americans became wealthier and demanded private alternatives to mass transit, but a lot of it is because we chose, as policy, to deprioritize effective mass transit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-28 21:31:58+00:00
Doesn't Apple routinely do the same thing? Reserve chip production for the leading-edge nodes, and sometimes enter into similar deals for other tech such as displays? I'm not seeing any evidence that this was intentional "warfare" on OpenAI's part: they're just making a high-stakes bet that they can ultimately find a better and higher-margin use for that raw DRAM than HNers' gaming battlestations, or whatever the next-best use was when they made that deal.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-28 21:32:44+00:00
OS/2 never had a chance. I was working at Radio Shack at the time that IBM was trying to sell Aptivas with OS/2. No one wanted. It was just weird to people. Microsoft did a big consumer push for Windows 95 and there were lines to buy it and a Bill Gates promoted it on the Jay Leno show.

Windows 95 almost killed Apple.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-28 21:33:10+00:00
because it is the same thing - just from a politically different point of view... you got your feeds telling you about what you believe is true and the opposite side has the same thing. asking ...just because maga people say something is true that it is actually true" is exactly the same as asking just because libs (or whatever we are derogatory called these days) say something about trump it is true?* which is why I am wondering if you are asking both? or just one-sided? :)
by chrisoverzero | 2025-12-28 21:33:13+00:00
Sure! Let’s say I want to enforce that a variable only ever holds an integer. Rather than put the conventional prefix and the name together, like this:

var intValue = 3;

…I separate the conventional prefix with a space:

int value = 3;

…so now my co-workers don’t need to remember the convention – it’s enforced by the language.

(I hope this makes the joke more obvious.)
by njitbew | 2025-12-28 21:33:31+00:00
I respect the maintainer's decision, but I don't understand the justification.

> but when it was communicated with Mockito I perceived it as "Mockito is holding the JVM ecosystem back by using dynamic attachment, please switch immediately and figure it out on your own".

Who did the communication? Why is dynamic attachment through a flag a problem, and what was the solution? Why is "enable a flag when running tests" not a satisfactory solution?

> While I fully understand the reasons that developers enjoy the feature richness of Kotlin as a programming language, its underlying implementation has significant downsides for projects like Mockito. Quite frankly, it's not fun to deal with.

Why support Kotlin in the first place? If it's a pain to deal with, perhaps the Kotlin user base is better served by a Kotlin-specific mocking framework, maintained by people who enjoy working on those Kotlin-specific code paths?
by xp84 | 2025-12-28 21:34:19+00:00
It’s clear how much Apple now hates the MacOS as we have known it… I think the concept of a computer which can run code outside a sandbox and without tollbooths that extract rents for Apple is abhorrent to them.

I think the vague plan is to iOSify it more and more until there is no real difference, including the lockdown and mandatory App Store requirement.
by sillyfluke | 2025-12-28 21:34:31+00:00
>it is less famous than the "happier" nocturne that follows it

Funny, despite the youtube numbers to me it always seemed to me like Op.1 b-flat minor was the one that would be overplayed left and right (movies and whatnot), maybe because people thought they fit be a moody scene or piece of art better.

>give them an attentive listen and play them on a high-quality audio system

I have no music background and I would like tips on this because I'm partial to the preludes (raindrop etc) for example and they have softer key and louder key parts and I want to blast the softer side without overblasting and distortion occuring when it gets to the louder end of the piece and I wish somebody would remaster a normalized version of the recordings. I don't know if this is idiotic since I have no idea how worse it would make the pieces...
by stackghost | 2025-12-28 21:34:35+00:00
>You cannot send someone a LUKS volume to decrypt one file, and backups of a mounted encrypted volume are plaintext unless you add another layer.

Veracrypt, and I'm sure others, allow you to do exactly this. You can create a disk image that lives in a file (like a .iso or .img) and mount/unmount it, share it, etc.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-28 21:34:36+00:00
Obviously not representative, but recently I installed the most recent release of the "user friendliest desktop Linux" and tried to get it to stop asking me for my password, or asking me to select the user, on startup.

Not only is the issue spread across more than one similar sounding system setting which interact in strange and mysterious ways, but nothing works as designed or described. It's a horrible mess.

Searching for an fix was great: forums were full of sanctimonious "you shouldn't be doing that, it's not secure" and no solution.

I gave up. The average user has no chance with desktop Linux is my experience is any guide.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-12-28 21:34:47+00:00
> It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second.

This is frequent, if not constant, on iOS for me. I never witnessed it before the 26 update.

How can it take an entire second or more to display an icon in list in the settings application? It was literally a solved problem for every iOS version I've ever used.
by vsgherzi | 2025-12-28 21:34:55+00:00
Nodejs and rust are the languages that I’m most familiar. I mostly mean that part to serve as a contrasting paragraph between the two paradigms. The amount of code is high in rust, even higher due to me writing the most pedantic error possible. If you really want a more try catch approach you can do that with something like dyn error or anyhow. The point is it gives you choice
by falcor84 | 2025-12-28 21:35:32+00:00
The "bubble" is in the financial investment, not in the technology. AI won't disappear after the bubble bursts, just like the web didn't disappear after 2000. If anything, bursting the financial bubble will most likely encourage researchers to experiment more, trying a larger range of cheaper approaches, and do more fundamental engineering rather than just scaling.

AI is here to stay, and the only thing that can stop it at this stage is a Butlerian jihad.
by dpedu | 2025-12-28 21:35:36+00:00
There could be hope for it, but it might be too late now. I dumped tea on my M1 Macbook air earlier this year. I managed to save it - sort of. I had to replace the battery. The screen was working but also had liquid damage so I replaced it as well.

Immediately after spilling tea on it I shut it off, took off the bottom plate, rinsed it with water, and rinsed it again with isopropyl alcohol. I think I waved a heat gun over it for a bit and then left it in front of a fan. This was about 8 months ago and it still works!

The only lingering problem is that when caps lock is off, the light on the key is slightly illuminated. Weird, but I can tolerate that!
by cyberax | 2025-12-28 21:35:55+00:00
Nothing I'm saying is actually scientifically controversial. I'm literally citing facts from urbanist textbooks. It's just that the way I'm telling them is unsettling for the people who have never questioned the social-engineered "consensus".

E.g. density doesn't decrease housing prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

The CO2 footprint question is a tricky one. The vehicle _itself_ is not the main source of pollution. Even if you compare the vehicles, the answer is not straightforward: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint The main source of pollution for transit are _drivers_. E.g. each bus needs around 3 drivers to function, resulting in driver-to-passenger ratio of just around 1:7.

So when computing true CO2 footprint, you need to look at a counter-factual scenario where bus drivers are doing something else. But this becomes extremely tricky extremely fast, as you can move into fantasyland where bus drivers are building CO2 scrubbers instead of driving CO2-emitting vehicles. Or where drivers are working on chopping forests for agricultural lands, resulting in huge CO2 increases.

The next best option is to look at different regions and compare them. E.g. Houston, TX with EVs would have smaller CO2 emissions than the current NYC, with climate corrections.
by Permik | 2025-12-28 21:36:44+00:00
This is false, recently the details element has gotten support for grouping them: the [name] attribute.
This effectively enforces tab-like semantics where only one of the grouped details elements can be open at a time.

This is a quite recent addition and the modern web is evolving too fast so I wouldn't put it past myself for missing this :)

Yay for progress and for JavaScript free solutions!
by wvenable | 2025-12-28 21:37:02+00:00
> We've gotten so far away from semantic documents so we could build "apps".

Exactly. We're still pretending that the browser is some kind of document display application when it's an application runtime. We keep adding more HTML tags and infinite number of CSS properties and features (that never get it right) when what we should have as a better application GUI API. Throw all the hardware acceleration and threading into that instead of @starting-style, transition-behavior: allow-discrete, interpolate-size: allow-keywords and ::details-content and breath some sanity into the platform.

We've effectively re-implemented that desktop/mobile GUI using a bunch of cobbled together technologies and continue to get more esoteric and complicated every year. Hell, I'm not even sold on JavaScript -- it's just as clunky and weird as everything else.

Move document rendering into high-level implementation on top of a better designed low-level API much like how PDF display in browsers is done with JavaScript.
by justin66 | 2025-12-28 21:37:12+00:00
> Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them. If there's a war over Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait will be a no-go zone for US warships.

Not to mention China's attack submarines, with their own anti-ship missiles as well as old-fashioned torpedoes. They have proven their ability to pop up and say "hello!" to US warships in the past. [0] Getting that close wouldn't be as easy when everyone is on a wartime footing, but then again, US ships would be steaming right towards them...

[0] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2007/january/worl...
by scarecrowbob | 2025-12-28 21:37:15+00:00
I am writing this comment from a 2019 i9. I have to charge it from the right hand ports. I think that is dumb, but it did solve the issue. I have no idea how I came to that conclusion (i almost certainly read about it somewhere), but there were certainly a couple of weeks where it was driving me crazy.

A dumb thing for sure. I still like macos better than windows and I'm heavily invested in a production workflow with logic. Moving to linux would be my next move, but after making that dumb change it's quite a functional machine.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-28 21:37:16+00:00
It was really nice. With the current linear design I organize desktops by theme (e.g. one for dev, one for research, etc) and with the 10.5/10.6 design I'd use vertical desktops for subcategories — so following the same example, on a single screen setup I might have desktops arranged something like:

│ Rails Docs/Search │ Backend Dev │ Music │
├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
│ UIKit Docs/Search │ iOS Dev │ Chat │
├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
│ MDN/Web Dev Search │ Web Dev │ Email/News │

With this, I quickly develop muscle/spatial memory for where each category "lives" and can navigate there in a flash. It also substantially reduces the need for individual programs like browsers to bear organizational load, so for example suddenly "just" single-tier vertical tabs become sufficient, making browser workspaces and tree style tabs much less necessary.
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-28 21:37:28+00:00
>The British Navy had a fad for light cruisers at one point, "eggshells armed with sledgehammers".

Do you mean 'battle cruisers'?

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

'Light cruisers' were different again.

>No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.

Bismark was finished off by surface ships after the initial air attack.

Tirpitz took many sorties to sink.

The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Japanese is probably a better example of how battleships became vulnerable to airpower.
by gala8y | 2025-12-28 21:37:32+00:00
I understand first example. That's one of many, tiny, little things in the area of automation, say like 'advanced scripting'. Your second example is indeed advanced.

What I can see myself trying to do is some new ways of working with body of text notes. Local RAG for chatting with documents is also interesting.

And yes, with 'subscription based computing' shreds of privacy we had are gone.
by osiris88 | 2025-12-28 21:37:46+00:00
> I wrote about how to do error handling without libraries literally the day Rust 1.0 was published: https://burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/
>
> That blog did include a recommendation for `failure` at one point, and now `anyhow`, but it's more of a footnote. The blog shows how to do error handling without any dependencies at all. You didn't have to jump on the error library treadmill. (Although I will say that `anyhow` and `thiserror` have been around for a number of years now and shows no signs of going away.)

Thank you -- I just wanna say, I read a lot of your writing and I love your work. I'm not sure if I read that blog post so many years ago but it looks like a good overview that has aged well.

> I happily downcast in ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/0a88cccd5188074de...
>
> That also shows the utility of an error chain.

Yeah, I mean, that looks pretty nice.

I still think the error chain abstraction should actually be a tree.

And I think they should never have stabilized an `std::error::Error` trait that was not in core. I think that itself was a mistake. And 8 years later we're only now maybe able to get there.

I actually said something on a github issue about this before rust 1.0 stabilization, and that it would cause an ecosystem split with embedded, and that this really should be fixed, but my comment was not well received, and obviously didn't have much impact. I'll see if I can find it, it's on github and I remember withoutboats responded to me.

Realistically the core team was under a lot of pressure to ship 1.0 and rust has been pretty successful -- I'm still using it for example, and a lot of embedded folks. But I do think I was right that it caused an ecosystem split with embedded and could have been avoided. And the benefit of shipping a janky version of `std::error::Error` however many years ago, almost all of which got deprecated, seems hard to put a finger on.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-28 21:38:00+00:00
not sure where you are getting that I am "unaware" of the corruption, just not sure where you are all getting "oh, the 'degree and magnitude' of corruption is now 'much worse' than it was before" when in fact this isn't something you can back up reasonably so it is just shooting the breeze without anything to back it up with. they are all the same mate, all the same ;)
by spike021 | 2025-12-28 21:38:42+00:00
honestly the issue i hate the most is how bad the keyboard has gotten over the past 3-5 years/major iOS releases.

on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.
by antisthenes | 2025-12-28 21:39:36+00:00
> There's been a vicious cycle of heavier software -> more RAM -> heavier software but if this RAM shortage is permanent, the cycle can't continue.

What do you mean it can't continue? You'll just have to deal with worse performance is all.

Revolutionary consumer-side performance gains like multi-core CPUs and switching to SSDs will be a thing of distant past. Enjoy your 2 second animations, peasant.
by macNchz | 2025-12-28 21:40:23+00:00
I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.

It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
by jesse__ | 2025-12-28 21:40:37+00:00
I owe iq so much; a living legend. Inigo, if you happen to ever read this, thanks so much for all the work you've published. Your Youtube videos (not to mention shadertoy) sparked an interest in graphics I never knew I had.

For anyone that's unfamiliar, his Youtube videos are extremely well put together, and well worth the handful of hours to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez
by avhception | 2025-12-28 21:40:51+00:00
Hello from Germany, and thanks for the blog post. Fascinating read. I liked how you intertwined the personal point of view with the bigger picture.

"Facing a complex past" is a big theme in Germany, too, of course, and I think it's the only proper way to deal with it. Direct witness accounts and retelling are important and add something that a dry history book can't provide. Keep up the good work!
by johnnyfived | 2025-12-28 21:41:06+00:00
I wonder how much of this is "getting too good that they can't ignore you anymore". If your content has great production and attention from a decent amount of viewers, will you get found by top-tier sponsors and agencies? Or will a mid podcast with outreach hustle outperform much higher? Seems like there exists gaps for popular content that's underutilized in sponsorship.
by Theoleff | 2025-12-28 21:41:10+00:00
Thanks for sharing that! It’s a super common story. Frontend patterns moved fast (especially for the last 3 years), and not always in a way that encouraged checking what the browser itself could already do.

If you want to improve a bit and discover more what CSS and HTML can do today, I also try to post daily on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theosoti/