MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-06 19:41:34+00:00
I think what's most likely to happen here is that: * a developer that knew how it worked used it in code where he *wanted* to get the first line * someone just starting up copied it over and assumed that's the way to get the content of command into a variable

It's essentially complaining about using feature wrong on purpose, because the person that made mistake never learned the language.

my($var1, $var2...) is a way to multi-assign variables from an array.

and that makes perfect sense when you look at it. Perl have no multiple returns, but if you need a function that returns 2 variables it is very easy to make it work with:

my ($bandwidth, $latency) = speedtest($host)

Perl's feature for returning different type depending on caller is definitely a confusing part but

my @lines = `fortune`

returning lines makes perfect sense for the use case (you call external commands to parse its output, and if you do that you generally want it in lines, because then you can just do

foreach my $line (`fortune`) {}

and it "just works".

Now you might ask "why make such shortcuts?". Well, one of big mistakes when making Perl is that it was also aimed as replacement for sed/awk for the oneliners, so language is peppered with "clever short ways to do stuff", and it's a pleasure to use in quick ad-hoc oneliners for CLI.... but then people try to use same cleverness in the actual code and it ends up with the unreadable mess people know Perl for.

the fact you can do

my ($first_line, $second_line, ...) = `fortune`

is just the feature being.... consistent in its use "when you give it array, it will fill it with lines from the executed command"

you gave it array, and it just did what it does with arrays.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-06 19:42:32+00:00
Yes. When I first read about autism it really felt like me, but overstated. Then, years later, I ran into Asperger's--score way out there on the screening test and it very much feels like me. Still later, found the actual diagnostic criteria--comes down to at least 2 of 4--and I clearly have 1 yes, 2 no, and one hint of a yes that's impossible to confirm without a time machine. DSM V comes along, I do not feel the autism diagnosis fits me, but social communication disorder again comes down to 2 of 4, 1 yes, 2 no, 1 maybe that again can never be resolved. And it describes me to a T. But what benefit would there be to a diagnosis? As someone well into adulthood before I ever heard of any of this it's not going to change anything.
by fmjrey | 2025-12-06 19:42:36+00:00
I would not dismiss this as crank science so quickly, first and foremost because it's not claiming to be science, not theoretically at least. It's observation of likely correlation. Also I would not say tides are "quite well understood" because it's misleading. I'd say sufficiently understood so that models are precise enough to be useful, but they're still an approximation to a few cm. For now water levels, costal geography, terrain, and weather seem to be the main parameters they attribute to the small variations observed, but who can say there aren't more parameters to take into account? Also what doesn't help in having a "well understood" feeling is that you can find different explanation of the bulges on either side of the earth.

I don't have the scientific knowledge to assess all this. I'm not even sure how to understand properly the questions Jeanne Rousseau asks saying newtonian physics can't answer. What I hear however are competent people observing small variation in the properties of water and living systems that seems to be related to cosmic phenomenon, including moon phases. Variations we can also find in the atmosphere/ionosphere with more recent measurements of their ionic polarities. Adding to that are all the new discoveries that link weather phenomenon to electromagnetic influences from the sun, with water significantly influencing the electromagnetic properties of the atmosphere. Finally more people question the true molecular structure of water, as H2O seems to be a crude simplification over a dynamic mixture of isotopes and ions.

Overall the tidal theory is not a done deal, we only have approximate models, and this topic can be discussed for years to come. That's probably why she was told the tides is a phenomenon that is beyond us.
by mh- | 2025-12-06 19:42:41+00:00
I would say there's isn't an equivalent. Some people will probably tell you ComfyUI - you can expose workflows via API endpoints and parameterize them. This is how e.g. Krita AI Diffusion uses a ComfyUI backend.

For various reasons, I doubt there are any large scale SaaS-style providers operating this in production today.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-06 19:42:51+00:00
That’s part of the project management tracking but that’s not strictly hours.

Those traceability artifacts are in order

1. the signed statement of work - this is the contract that is legally binding.

2. The project kick off meeting where we agree on the mechanics of the project and a high level understanding of the expectations

3. Recorded, transcribed and these days using Gong to summarize the meetings, deep dive discovery sessions.

4. A video recorded approvals of the design proposals as I am walking through it.

5. A shared Jira backlog that I create and walk through them with it throughout the project

6. A shared decision log recording what decisions were made and who on the client side made them.

7. A handoff - also video recorded where the client says they are good going forward.

I lead 2-7 or do it all myself depending on the size of the project.

At no point am I going to say or expect anyone on my project to say they spent 4 hours on Tuesday writing Terraform.

But then again, my number one rule about consulting that I refuse to break is that I don’t do staff augmentation. I want to work on a contract with requirements and a “definition of done”. I control the execution of the project and the “how” within limits.

I want to be judged on outcomes not how many jira tickets I closed.

When I was at AWS I worked with a client that directly hired a former laid off ProServe L6 consultant. He was very much forced into staff augmentation where he did have to track everything he did by the hour.

You could tell he thought that was the fifth level of hell going from strategy consulting to staff augmentation. It paid decently. But he was definitely looking and I recommended him as a staff consultant at my current company (full time direct hire)

FWIW: I specialize in cloud + app dev - “application modernization”
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-06 19:43:10+00:00
> Citation heavily needed.

Have a look at the scatter plot for math and verbal SAT scores:

https://www.statcrunch.com/reports/view?reportid=21828&tab=p...

There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.

> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.

The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
by petre | 2025-12-06 19:43:21+00:00
Yup, Perl is something clearly out of Unseen University, err I mean Berkeley linguistics dept.

I liked it, thought the sigils were a cute way to singal that something is a variable. When you work with deeply nested data structures, dereferencing arrays and hashes that sort of changes and becomes kind of annoying. Nowadays I like Ruby. Compared to it, Perl does feel like spells mixed with C and Posix stuff. But if I want to feel smart, I'll write some code in Scheme, thank you.
by altairprime | 2025-12-06 19:43:55+00:00
> Autonomous vehicles don't impede transit advocacy.

Transit changes are not required to implement the safety changes made by other countries. The cause and effect is reversed here: safety changes make transit more appealing because safety changes tend to decrease peak vehicle capacity, but transit does not make safety more appealing to untrained and overconfident (or willfully unsafe) drivers. You can’t just focus on transit while ignoring drivers and expect people to stop dying.

I remember during the first days of Covid lockdown how 99% of the cars on the busy hill outside my apartment were replaced by transit, with a commute distance of zero miles. The people who liked to do downhill racing on that hill during the day sped up from their usual brake-screech limits of 40mph to as high as 70mph, in a 35mph residential with an unsignaled busy crosswalk. And they continued doing this until the end of the lockdown when other cars got in their way again. Transit might reduce total car volume but it would increase the mean kill rate per roadway vehicle without safety culture and spending shifts.
by konmok | 2025-12-06 19:43:59+00:00
Eh, that's not really the part of her arguments I have a problem with. I think she doesn't have a sensible answer to the bathrooms question (that doesn't just punish trans people) but I'm not sure what the right answer is either. I do have a problem with her doing stuff like this:

https://www.them.us/story/barbra-banda-jk-rowling-gender-att...

She's made a pattern of this behavior, and I think it clearly reveals her transphobia. (I also am not sure what the right solution is for trans people in competitive sports! I think that's a very tricky subject. But attacking cis women for looking too masculine is certainly not part of the answer.)

Also, her twitter rants about trans people are pretty shocking.
by autoexec | 2025-12-06 19:44:27+00:00
There wasn't pressure to write concise code exactly, but if you posted your code somewhere the odds were good that somebody would reply with a way to do the same thing with less code, followed by someone else who managed to shave several lines/characters off of that, etc.

While almost all of the time it was all just people having fun (perl is fun and play was encouraged) and not an admonishment of the code you'd posted or an example of how it should have been written I can see how some folks might have gotten that impression. Especially if they were new to perl and were more used to languages where TIMTOWTDI wasn't thing
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-06 19:45:08+00:00
Not necessarily. The problem may be as simple as the fact that LLMs do not see "dog legs" as objects independent of the dogs they're attached to.

The systems already absorb much more complex hierarchical relationships during training, just not that particular hierarchy. The notion that everything is made up of smaller components is among the most primitive in human philosophy, and is certainly generalizable by LLMs. It just may not be sufficiently motivated by the current pretraining and RL regimens.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-06 19:45:20+00:00
Ive experimented with several small distros for this when doing cross platform development.

In my experience, by the time you’re compiling and running code and installing dev dependencies on the remote machine, the size of the base OS isn’t a concern. I gained nothing from using smaller distros but lost a lot of time dealing with little issues and incompatibilities.

This won’t win me any hacker points, but now if I need a remote graphical Linux VM I go straight for the latest Ubuntu and call it day. Then I can get to work on my code and not chasing my tail with all of the little quirks that appear from using less popular distros.

The small distros have their place for specific use cases, especially automation, testing, or other things that need to scale. For one-offs where you’re already going to be installing a lot of other things and doing resource intensive work, it’s a safer bet to go with a popular full-size distro so you can focus on what matters.
by Veserv | 2025-12-06 19:45:27+00:00
To use the example provided by the anti-Monsanto upthread poster as a example of Monsanto being underhanded:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co

1. Bowman buys Monsanto soybeans as seeds agreeing to not replant the soybean harvest.

2. Bowman sells the soybean harvest to a food wholesaler who sells to retailers who sells to consumers for consumption.

3. Bowman buys soybeans back from that same food wholesaler (who normally only sells for consumption) intending to replant those food soybeans (which is abnormal).

4. Bowman then tests the seeds he bought to verify which ones were the ones he sold which had the Monsanto modifications (or his neighbors who were also using Monsanto seeds with the same contract) and which he was not allowed to replant as per the contract in 1.

5. Bowman then only replants the ones with the modifications and uses Roundup in those fields.

6. Bowman then repeatedly saves and replants seeds from that crop to amplify their quantity of modified crop and purchases more seeds from the food wholesaler.

It was about as premeditated and intentional a contract violation as you can get.
by watwut | 2025-12-06 19:45:40+00:00
I dont want default language. I understand multiple of them. And it is even ridiculous that I have to set it up.

Provide option to turn on that bad quality dubbing for those few people that want it.

And for crist sake, be transparent instead of auto translating titles so I dont even know the video was not made that badly by its original author.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-12-06 19:45:43+00:00
I'm in my late 40s, don't remember ever having chickenpox as a child, and I have a choice between getting the chickenpox vaccine now, or waiting til I'm eligible for Shingrix. Having seen friends get Shingles before turning 50 (and boy was it bad), plus watching some of their close family members get chickenpox from contact with them, I kind of want to avoid that stuff. But there's not a ton of expert guidance on whether the right move is to gamble on 50/Shingrix or to get vaccinated now! And when you toss in these dementia concerns, I'm even more confused. I think this would be a different calculation if I was younger, but I honestly don't know what the right move is for someone in my cohort. I decided to wait.

ETA: Someone in comments above points out that the data is still coming in on this question. It looks like the best move is not to ever be exposed to varicella (maybe me?), and the second best move is to be vaccinated with chickenpox, and possibly the ultimate best move is to get Shingrix, but there's a lot of missing data and some timing problems here.
by thih9 | 2025-12-06 19:46:14+00:00
Please write what you mean instead of making veiled implications. What is the point of beating around the bush here?

It's not clear to me what you mean either, especially since female models are overwhelmingly more popular in general[1].

[1]: "Female models make up about 70% of the modeling industry workforce worldwide" https://zipdo.co/modeling-industry-statistics/
by jacquesm | 2025-12-06 19:46:24+00:00
I ran it on a Via single board computer, a tiny board that sipped power and was still more than beefy enough to do real time control of 3 axis stepper motors and maintain a connection to the outside world. I cheated a bit by disabling interrupts during time critical sections and re-enabling the devices afterwards took some figuring out but overall the system was extremely reliable. I used it to cut up to 1/4" steel sheet for the windmill (it would cut up to 1" but then the kerf would be quite ugly), as well as much thinner sheet for the laminations. The latter was quite problematic because it tended to warp up towards the cutter nozzle while cutting and that would short out the arc. In the end we measured the voltage across the arc and then automatically had the nozzle back off in case of warping, which worked quite well, the resulting inaccuracies were very minor.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/dscn3995.jpg
by treis | 2025-12-06 19:46:43+00:00
I don't think there's much underlying relationship. True they will both impact social relationships. But it's more like how being blind or being deaf will impact social relationships. The mechanics might be the same but the cause is very different.

IMHO schizophrenia is a breakdown in the barrier between imagination and processing of reality.

Autism and the like is an inability to process social cues like a blind person might have a damaged visual cortex.
by iroddis | 2025-12-06 19:48:45+00:00
Congrats on the progress thus far! I love aspirational languages, so please keep going.

That being said, as someone who struggles with maintaining large amounts of context when I’m debugging, I’d find context-specific execution hard to follow and debug. As a concrete example, the switch to an Admin context could appear far away from the call to GetPermissions without any obvious way to figure that out. Contexts end up being a sort of global state.

If you continue with this route, it would be nice if there was a way to print out the stack of the current contexts in play and where they were set in the code.

Are contexts scoped at all? Can they be layered?
by skilled | 2025-12-06 19:49:31+00:00
It went dark earlier this year and from what I gather from German media is that he had a problem and was hospitalised.

The site is quite popular in Germany, last year or the year before a blog post of mine was linked from there and it had a similar pull to HN.

I distinctly remember wondering how many more such sites exist that have such strong communities but you’re unlikely to find these sites in the wild.
by creer | 2025-12-06 19:49:34+00:00
You COULD, if you wanted, and spent quite a bit of effort in the pursuit of that hobby, participate in one-liner, or obfuscation, or golfing friendly contests. Which were enabled by perl's expressiveness constructs. Nobody pushed anyone into that. On the contrary "there is more than one way to do it" was there to legitimize that getting the problem solved was the goal - instead of trying to force a one true way (like python).

After that, experts would often propose multiple ways to do something when they answered questions. THEY found that intellectually playful and exciting. They still do. And for the rest of us, that was an amazing way to learn more and understand more of that tool we were using daily. Still is.

You apparently saw viciousness in this and that certainly sucks.
by pengaru | 2025-12-06 19:49:59+00:00
Makes me wonder what's the Venn diagram of Stanford parents driving around with unjustified disabled person plates/parking placards and children exploiting "disabled person" college benefits like exceptional housing.

A former friend who was quite sociopathic would often parrot "if you're not cheating you're not competing"... There's plenty of evidence in plain sight supporting that trope.
by palmotea | 2025-12-06 19:50:10+00:00
> This seems to almost be mentioned off-hand, but isn't this a really bad and un-free market, and a much bigger issue? Korean companies are afraid of doing business with Chinese companies because of the US, because of retaliation? This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.

The globalized free market wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so 90s-era understandings of how things are "supposed" to be will need to be revised.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-06 19:50:25+00:00
You could, but using containers requires that your kernel directly provide and secure Android-compatible functionality, such as binder. A VM gives you more options for abstracting that functionality.

If you expect to be "essentially android, but a little different", containers make sense. If you want to build an entirely different mobile OS, but provide Android compatibility, I think a VM is much more likely to give you the flexibility to not defer to Android design decisions.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-06 19:50:48+00:00
OMSCS requires ten courses to graduate. I completed one course (with an A grade) before realizing that, even at a pace of one course per semester, it was not a high enough priority for me to devote the time required to do each course well.

That course was great, though, and I definitely learned some things I'm glad to have learned!

IMO the instructional materials are a small part of the value. The things that stood out to me were:

- the assignments

- the autograding of programming assignments

- giving and receiving peer feedback about written assignments

- learning some LaTeX for those assignments

- having an artificial reason (course grade) to persist in improving my algorithm and code [on the problems taught in that course, I wouldn't have been self-motivated enough if they were just things I came across during a random weekend]
by alephnerd | 2025-12-06 19:50:49+00:00
> Sorry for the bluntness, but I feel it is very much warranted

No worries. I think you misunderstood my post.

I used to work in the tech policy space, and I'm just bluntly explaining how we in the policymaking space view these discussions - especially with regards to negotiating with the EU.

> As a Swede, I can tell you that not a single person I know cares about random companies in Czechia, Luxembourg, Germany or France getting pressured

Well duh. You aren't the target for such an influence op. Leadership in (eg.) Czechia, Luxembourg, Germany or France are.

Much of the EU runs on unanimity, so all you need to do is pressure a single country and you have a veto.

This is what China has been doing with Sweden to a certain extent via Geely-owned Volvo Car Group and Polestar [0] and what we in the US have been doing with Ericcson [1][2][3]. Even the EU tries to use similar levers against the US [6].

To be brutally honest, this is how the game is played.

Most nations have now adopted the "elite-centric approach" to transnational negotiations [4], which makes it difficult for the EU, because the line between national soverignity and the EU with regards to foreign and economic affairs is not well defined. If you are not a veto player [5] your opinion does not matter.

Once you understand Political Science basics, a lot of stuff starts making sense. And I went to a college where heads of states would visit on a biweekly basis, and a large subset of European (and other regions) leaders attended or recruit from.

> What's your take on the next Gripen?

DoA if it depends on a GE power plant - the Volvo engine is a licensed version of the GE F404, so the US has final say on any Saab Gripen exports.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/02/china-volvo...

[1] - https://broadbandbreakfast.com/ericsson-ceo-calls-for-increa...

[2] - https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/ericsson-ceo-home-si...

[3] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/ericsson-emerges-as-5g-leader-a...

[4] - https://academic.oup.com/book/12848/chapter-abstract/1631276...

[5] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvv7

[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/business/economy/europe-t...
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-06 19:50:51+00:00
I worked with ARM boards, I know a bit about it. Booting into Linux is never hard, it's all about using uboot, sometimes with tiny patches on top. I think it's actually even easier with android phones, as you don't have access to the low level bootloader, you just use fastboot stuff.

Having basic framebuffer in BIOS/UEFI is neat for toy OSes, but not very relevant for something practical. You gotta need proper driver for GPU. And if you're just starting, UART console is actually more preferable way to interact with board, IMO.
by joecool1029 | 2025-12-06 19:50:59+00:00
Here’s an example of the radio firmware and vendor blobs required for a pixel 9 pro XL build: https://github.com/TheMuppets/proprietary_vendor_google_komo...

Nobody, including Graphene, is getting away with building their own modem firmware. The reduced blobs are on userspace and some HAL components.
by vunderba | 2025-12-06 19:51:12+00:00
In fact, the story of how Atari tried to circumvent the lockout chip on the original NES is a good example of this.

They had gotten surprisingly close to a complete decompilation, but then they tried to request a copy of the source code from the copyright office citing that they needed it as a result of ongoing unrelated litigation with Nintendo.

Later on this killed them in court.