MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pcrh | 2025-12-10 05:06:00+00:00
Yes, I considered that. Someone using a horse-drawn wagon to deliver goods about town would likely not consider buying a truck until the cart horse needed replacing.

The working life of a horse may be shorter than the realistic lifespan. Searching for "horse depreciation" gives 7 years for a horse under age 12, the prime years for a horse being between 7 and 12 yrs old, depending on what it is used for.

I'm willing to accept the input of someone more knowledgeable about working horses, though!
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-10 05:06:57+00:00
> Is it something that can be fixed with editions? My guess is no, or at least not easily.

Assuming I'm reading these blog posts [0, 1] correctly, it seems that the size_of::<usize>() == size_of::<*mut u8>() assumption is changeable across editions.

Or at the very least, if that change (or a similarly workable one) isn't possible, both blog posts do a pretty good job of pointedly not saying so.

[0]: https://faultlore.com/blah/fix-rust-pointers/#redefining-usi...

[1]: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2022/making_rust_a_better_fit_...
by lmm | 2025-12-10 05:07:38+00:00
> There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.

No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.
by skissane | 2025-12-10 05:08:02+00:00
Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?
by bruce511 | 2025-12-10 05:08:11+00:00
In this line;

Tell a story. It might be "unrelated" to thd topic at hand (I based one on Shackleton's expedition, and another on a Robert Frost poem (two roads diverged.) Or it might be related, a "my journey" type, or it might be about the experience seen through the eyes of a customer. But a story helps the audience relate, and keeps a thread through it all.

If you can, be funny. Frankly this is hard if you're not a 'funny' person. Delivering a good joke, or line, well can be learned but if it's not your thing steer clear. Bad funny is worse than not funny.

If you're not funny naturally then get a funny person to help you script in "dry" humor lines. You can deliver them dry, in fact often the dryer the better.

"We founded our business in Jan 2020. Nothing could possibly go wrong".

But good funny is great. Learning while laughing really keeps the audience engaged.

Reacting to the audience engagement is also a skill worth developing. When they're bored, move on. When they hiss or boo or laugh or leave, these are all valuable feedback.

Enjoy yourself. If you're having fun, they will too.
by bccdee | 2025-12-10 05:09:55+00:00
I think you could argue teenagers have a right to discuss political issues in the public forum. That's basically the definition of good citizenship, and (for better or worse) social media is the public forum of the day. Kids don't go from zero rights at 17 to full rights at 18; minors' rights are limited, but they do have rights.

I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
by merpkz | 2025-12-10 05:10:01+00:00
As a sysadmin in 2020 - 2024 time frame I used to do that all the time at my previous job, got a strong openlssl cli game going whenever needed to generate a new csr for existing key or new key and shovel an exact amount of SANs into the CSR too. Lot of time wasted. There were also a certain set of customers for which we managed systems and they insisted for it to be done this way as something free on the internet is not to be trusted. Oh well, strange times.
by jborean93 | 2025-12-10 05:10:53+00:00
Maybe to you, I enjoy the fact that

> I don't knock it out of my head by having the wire catching on something > Dealing with the cable and having to pack it back up when I'm done > It auto connects to both my phone and laptop 99% of the time > It easily swap between the 2 as I change the focus

Now they aren't perfect, charging can be a bit fiddly over time but they certainly are nicer than the normal headphones. Maybe you just aren't the target audience but clearly they are popular enough for most people.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-10 05:13:03+00:00
> ($AI) suggests

Same logic still applies. If I gave a shit what it "thought" or suggests, I'd prompt the $AI in question, not HN users.

That said, I'm not against a monthly (or whatever regular periodic interval that the community agrees on) thread that discusses the subject, akin to "megathreads" on reddit. Like interesting prompts, or interesting results or cataloguing changes over time etc etc.

It's one of those things that can be useful to discuss in aggregate, but separated out into individual posts just feels like low effort spam to farm upvotes/karma on the back of the flavor of the month. Much in the same way that there's definitely value in the "Who's Hiring/Trying to get hired" monthly threads, but that value/interest drops precipitously if each comment/thread within them were each their own individual submission.
by rainonmoon | 2025-12-10 05:13:14+00:00
> It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation.

This is misinformation. The legislation does not specify a single particular implementation for age-based verification and there's absolutely no single "age verification service" that platforms are legislated to use. Instead they're required to verify users' ages based on several recommended methods, including age inference. https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2025/12/03/what-you-need-t...

Further, the Communications Minister herself regarding whether she's concerned about people bypassing authentication-based age verification checks: "If you’re an adult - you probably won’t need to do anything extra to prove your age, because like I said before, these platforms have plenty of data to infer your age." https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/speech/address-...
by DoctorOW | 2025-12-10 05:13:40+00:00
Backwards compatibility. If you host a lot of compressed video content, you probably didn't store the uncompressed versions so any new encoding is a loss of fidelity. Even if you were willing to take that gamble, you have to wait until all your users are on a modern enough browser to use the new codec. Frankly, the winner that takes all is H.264 because it's already everywhere.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-10 05:14:03+00:00
EV shuttles will come in lots of capacities. Vans, buses. But you won't need to worry about schedules or preset routes because it's all dynamic.

Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-10 05:14:09+00:00
That's not credit at all. If your strongest defense of AVP is "at least they're not Meta" then you've stopped making grounded observations and gone straight to ad-hominem.

I'd also go as far as to say that Apple knew they could have made the Vision Pro better. It should be running a real computer operating system like the headset Valve is making, and Apple knows that. The arbitrary insistence on iPad-tier software in a $3,500 headset guaranteed it was unlovable and dead-on-arrival.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-10 05:16:26+00:00
Actually it's the classic "inductive reasoning has to meet a set of strict criteria to be sound." Criteria which this does not meet. Extrapolation from a sample size of one? In a context without any LLM involvement? That's not sound, the conclusion does not follow. The point being, why bother making a statistical generalization? Rust's safety is formally known, deduction over concrete postulates was appropriate.

> it would be very surprising if the situation were completely reversed for LLMs

Lifetimes must be well-defined in safe Rust, which requires a deep degree of formal reasoning. The kind of complex problem analysis where it is known that LLMs produce worse results in than humans. Specifically in the context of security vulnerabilities, LLMs produce marginally less but significantly more severe issues in memory safe languages[1]. Still though, we might say LLMs will produce safer code with safe Rust, on the basis that 100,000 vibe coded lines will probably never compile.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/html/2501.16857v1
by amypetrik8 | 2025-12-10 05:17:24+00:00
I get gummies at 2000000000 IU and that's not even the final form of my vitamin

Also what's an IU. Apparently it's meant to normalize impact across vitamin D species of which there are multiple. Part of me can see the reasoning but it runs contrary to how much of medicine/pharma operates, generally in such form as either mg per time interval or mg/kg per time interval. It would be like taking the whole armada of blood pressure drugs and dictating their doses in mmHg instead of milligrams. If only things were so simple!
by frm88 | 2025-12-10 05:18:23+00:00
That would have severe economical impact, so nobody dares to go there which is why all these salami tactic solutions are being thrown around. Personally, I think your suggestion has merit, since we can observe that not only children's mental health is severely impacted. Another advantage I see with this is that clear lines allow for clear enforcement that would then get a lot less expensive. I mean, the overabundance of malicious ads should also go into this pot. Another idea would be to put social media companies under strict rules and compel them to install human moderators to enforce them, think dang or tomhow.

Edit: it works on HN (rule wise and moderation wise), so it could work on other platforms, too. Of course that would be expensive for the companies, but frankly, the companies are causing the current upset, so why not place the cost with the ones causing it instead of impacting everyone and even socialising the fallout like lawsuits.
by musicale | 2025-12-10 05:20:02+00:00
An easy-to-use end-user programming and hypertext system for the 68K Mac, with MacPaint-like visual layout and an English-like (AppleScript-like) scripting language (HyperTalk). [1]

Also a cult favorite on HN, as it was an end-user programming system that actually resulted in a million (or so) end users creating their own apps (perhaps foreshadowing the era of people creating their own web sites with html and javascript, or games using Flash and actionscript.) And famously used to create the game Myst.

HyperCard came out of a leave of absence that Bill Atkinson took from Apple after Microsoft had forced Apple to kill MacBASIC. Unfortunately the deal he made with Apple to distribute it for free with every Mac was only for two years, and Apple replaced it with a playback-only "HyperCard Player" while the authoring capability was sold as a separate product by Claris - effectively killing in-the-box end-user programming on the Mac. [2] (AppleScript resembled HyperTalk, but didn't include an easy-to-use authoring environment, perhaps to avoid competing with HyperCard). Development stagnated as well; no native PowerPC version was created, and HyperCard never evolved to run over a network, much less the internet (even though HyperCard influenced NCSA Mosaic and Apple was certainly aware of early networked hypertext systems like Intermedia, which ran on the Mac).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejdgTVj7ZG8
by Rogach | 2025-12-10 05:20:05+00:00
True, Scala (the language) offers lots of great functionality. And Scala 3 brought some important improvements.

But safety is not the only important aspect of a programming language. For me personally the community (libraries, tools, forums, blogs, etc) became much more important over the years, and I feel that Scala 3 really hurt the community angle.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-10 05:21:07+00:00
The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate. I cannot comment on it, I have no idea how good it is. AFAIK it is multiplayer only. I played Dune II, Warcraft II, C&C, Red Alert, Starcraft (didn't like, I never understood the hype), Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III as kid, but... only single player (at various difficulties). That is just how games were generally played in the 90s. I do remember using a null modem cable at some point, but IIRC was only to play Doom and Duke3d.

I believe the RTS genre at a whole got superseded by the MOBA genre (with DotA and LoL). A genre I tried once (HotS) and was terrible at. If you're shit and you're not improving (I didn't enjoy it either, I felt forced to do it for a reward in another game), stop trying. I never tried any other MOBA, except maybe a touchscreen one, Warcraft Rumble? Either way, I got burned by Hearthstone Mercs and fell once more in the trap with Rumble. After Blizzard announced removed of addons from combat, I've finally said goodbye to the Warcraft franchise and Blizzard in general.

There's one game I really do like which has a kind of RTS with map feeling to it: Total War: Warhammer series (though I laud their BS with DLCs and multiple game versions). I suppose the whole Total War series is as good, I just like the Warhammer universe. The other day, Settlers II was discussed on here, including a FOSS clone. Settlers II is also a game I liked (III not so much though artwork was nice, never played the orig.). Supposedly it isn't RTS, tho I am pretty sure back then it was called RTS.
by Rogach | 2025-12-10 05:21:36+00:00
I feel that I need to preface my answer with the defusing disclaimer: I understand that you love the language very much. And statements like the ones I make may hurt, because they say bad stuff about the thing you love. But getting defensive might detract from otherwise interesting discussion.

In fact, I also love Scala. I've dedicated lots of my time to working with it (almost 15 years at this point!), I've been with it since 2.8.x days. And I really lament that it fell out of favor and huge swaths of the community left.

> Stating this, which is not, and never was true creates the impression you're talking about things you have no clue about.

Of course it is possible that I have misremembered, so I went and checked. It was a mistake on my part to make such a statement and not to provide an actual link.

Not only it was that way, it actually still is. See the official Scala 3 reference: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/

All the code examples there use the new syntax. And I would guess that "Scala 3 reference" is the document that Scala 2 veterans (like myself) would have been using when learning about new features and contemplating migration to the new version.

> You need a degree to understand something such obvious? Never mind…

It might be obvious, but I felt that it wasn't obvious to some people (including the ones that were in charge of the documentation for Scala 3), so I wanted to expand a bit on that.

> The point is: New syntax is only new in the first few hours of contact with it.

Of course, but these "first few hours" are exactly the hours that were spent reading the documentation for the Scala 3, and I feel that making those hours harder wasn't the smart choice.

I think that Scala development team made a decision to chase growth, focusing on attracting new users and disregarding the old ones. Looks like they lost that bet - new users didn't come, and many old users were disappointed and left.

New syntax isn't the only problem of Scala 3, and probably it isn't even the biggest one. But it was the most glaring and visible issue - for me, almost every code example in the reference really felt like a spit in the face. Exactly this kind of off-hand dismissal of old-time users was one of the reasons some of the users started moving away from Scala (myself included).

> Braces in code are 100% redundant, useless noise.

The debate about "braces vs significant whitespace" is raging literally for decades. Like many similar debates, it seems that there's no "true solution" and no "true winner" - both sides have heaps of valid arguments.

I assume that both sides have their merits, and it's always a tradeoff between pros and cons of each approach. I use languages that have braces, and I use languages that use indentation - I see pros and cons of each approach. Outright dismissing the other side of the debate by saying that it's "100% useless" seems to be missing lots of nuance.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-10 05:24:02+00:00
> Hating nazis for the harm they've caused is, in fact, just fine.

Sure. Where did I say it isn't?

The problem is the author (and yourself) is okay with branding fully half the population, including the people you are pretending to speak on behalf off, as "having no business" being somewhere.

All thoughts are welcome, unless you have different thoughts.
by joegibbs | 2025-12-10 05:25:19+00:00
Not at all crazy. You could very easily get a game with the same art style, features, number of missions done now in a month but people want much more. QOL features, multiple platforms, high quality graphics - $50 (average game price back then) is $105 now - you can't sell any game for that price nowadays, and a game at WC2 level of features wouldn't be accepted by customers for more than $5. A full price $59.99 game now needs a billion different side quests, character customisation, full VA, multiplayer servers, an orchestral score, etc etc or people just won't buy it.
by notatoad | 2025-12-10 05:25:46+00:00
video decoding on a general-purpose cpu is difficult, so most devices that can play video include some sort of hardware video decoding chip. if you want your video to play well, you need to deliver it in a format that can be decoded by that chip, on all the devices that you want to serve.

so it takes a long time to transition to a new codec - new devices need to ship with support for your new codec, and then you have to wait until old devices get lifecycled out before you can fully drop support for old codecs.
by quadrifoliate | 2025-12-10 05:26:00+00:00
> To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.

I feel like this is a completely different conversation, but this is just as much a misunderstanding of what open source is as DHH's.

As long as the code is under BSD or GPL, you are free to take it as-is and do what you want with it. You could run your commercial service using it. You can certainly write patches and apply them to your own servers. You could even email the maintainers with them -- worst case is that they will ignore the emails!

Open Source does not guarantee that your contributions will be accepted or merged back to the project -- indeed, if you think about it, that would be absurd. I might want some random thing in the Linux kernel, but the maintainers will always have the final word on whether they want my patches or not.

The O'SaaSy license says that (essentially) 37Signals will sue you if you try to host this on your own servers, and try to sell it as a service. That's totally different, and a legal rather than a technical hurdle.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-10 05:27:53+00:00
> I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years.

Yeah. Releasing a project under a source-available proprietary license and calling it Open Source, or doing a rugpull and changing an established Open Source license to a source-available proprietary license, is the kind of thing that causes the most grief. If you release something under a source-available proprietary license and make no pretenses about it being something else, and the alternative was not releasing it at all, it's a (slight) improvement.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-10 05:27:55+00:00
There is a cost to having multiple language-level types that represent the exact same set of values, as C has (and is really noticeable in C++). Rust made an early, fairly explicit decision that a) usize is a distinct fundamental type from the other types, and not merely a target-specific typedef, and b) not to introduce more types for things like uindex or uaddr or uptr, which are the same as usize on nearly every platform.

Rust worded in its initial guarantee that usize was sufficient to roundtrip a pointer (making it effectively uptr), and there remains concern among several of the maintainers about breaking that guarantee, despite the fact that people on the only target that would be affected basically saying they'd rather see that guarantee broken. Sort of the more fundamental problem is that many crates are perfectly happy opting out of compiling for weirder platform--I've designed some stuff that relies on 64-bit system properties, and I'd rather like to have the ability to say "no compile for you on platform where usize-is-not-u64" and get impl From<usize> for u64 and impl From<u64> for usize. If you've got something like that, it also provides a neat way to say "I don't want to opt out of [or into] compiling for usize≠uptr" and keeping backwards compatibility.

If you want to see some long, gory debates on the topic, https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-usize-is-not-size-... is a good starting point.
by wvenable | 2025-12-10 05:27:58+00:00
> DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others.

If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software.

That being said; I have no issue with a developer choosing any license they want -- it's their software and therefore it's their right. But calling it "open source" when it specifically forbids certain use-cases is just wrong. DHH wants his cake (pretend it's real OSS) and eat it too (deny usages).