MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-06 18:51:03+00:00
The "capital creates pressure to fabricate progress" bit is painfully accurate. There's this weird dynamic where once you take money, the reporting relationship inverts your priorities. Instead of "what moves the business forward?" it becomes "what can I show on the next update call?"

I've seen this play out even at smaller scales with freelance retainers - the second you're accountable to external money, you start optimizing for visible activity over actual progress.

The 70% capital return is quietly remarkable though. Most founders in that position would've spent down to zero chasing pivots. Knowing when to fold and still having something to give back takes more backbone than people realize.
by rdiddly | 2025-12-06 18:51:21+00:00
> So the corporation can and will keep its secrets, even though what it is dealing in is information, even when its business is making knowledge accessible, open, free — the very opposite of keeping secrets.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten Google used to espouse that. Almost seems quaint now. Was it a ruse all along? Or an ideal later betrayed when they were seduced by the siren song of revenue? Or simply a double standard: making YOUR information freely available but OURS not so much?
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-06 18:51:32+00:00
They do, but for what ever reason they are not(or don't appear to be) using it to make machine readable maps.

From what I can work out, they are using the recorded data to create models that can identify road types in realtime, vaguely zero shot. I think musk has an aversion to "HD" maps, which explains a lot.

HD maps would solve a large number of issues for them (its how lyft and wayve do it, well partly. )
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-06 18:51:35+00:00
I've written a dozen flakes because I want some niche behavior that the home-manager impl didn't give me, and I just used an LLM and never opened Nix docs once.

It's just declarative configuration, so you also get a much better deliverable at the end than running terminal commands in Arch Linux, and it ends up being less work.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-06 18:52:08+00:00
> "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.

Perl lets every developer write Perl in their own idiosyncratic way.

And every developer does.

It makes for very un-fun times when I'm having to read a file that's been authored by ten developers over ten years, each of whom with varying opinions and skill levels.

I guess in 2026, it'll be 11 developers writing it over 11 years. My sincere apologies to those who come after me, and my sincere fuck-you to those who came before me. :)
by djoldman | 2025-12-06 18:53:00+00:00
In my experience "just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to" matches folks expectations.

However.

If you're ever on a project that doesn't turn out so well, it may suddenly become critical to account for all work done during every billed hour in detail.

I would advise all consultants to track their time diligently and completely.
by tguvot | 2025-12-06 18:53:11+00:00
I wrote php2 + msql before starting in that company (and a bit of php3). Like in your case it was essentially static site generator but the management part was HTA (application hosted in internet explorer. you could write one using whatever activex/language: vbscript, python, perl).

as backend we had oracle. at first we tried oracle/linux (just released). but we never managed make it work (oracle engineers that came to us failed as well). So we got dedicated sun server for it.

One day I was bored, installed mysql on my workstation, made a changes in couple of queries and all of sudden i got x20 performance of sun box with oracle. Lead developer said that it's bad solution as mysql doesn't properly supports referential integrity (we didn't actually used it in oracle iirc)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-06 18:54:31+00:00
> For me profitable means money_out > money_in, over the whole company history

One, this is a nonsense definition. Two, SpaceX meets it. It’s why it hasn’t fundraised for years.

> I've interviewed at Starlink and received a (pathetic) offer, which people on reddit claim was pretty typical. Which told me one thing: Starlink is already very aware of the need to drastically save money

Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.
by alevskaya | 2025-12-06 18:54:39+00:00
I do think it's a lot simpler than the problem Itanium was trying to solve. Neural nets are just way more regular in nature, even with block sparsity, compared to generic consumer pointer-hopping code. I wouldn't call it "easy", but we've found that writing performant NN kernels for a VLIW architecture chip is in practice a lot more straightforward than other architectures.

JAX/XLA does offer some really nice tools for doing automated sharding of models across devices, but for really large performance-optimized models we often handle the comms stuff manually, similar in spirit to MPI.
by hinkley | 2025-12-06 18:54:46+00:00
The big pearl of wisdom I took from Larry Wall seemed to be counter to the culture I experienced looking in from the outside. That always confused me a bit about Perl.

And that was, paraphrased: make the way you want something to be used be the most concise way to use it and make the more obscure features be wordy.

This could have been the backbone of an entire community but they diminished it to code golf.
by simonh | 2025-12-06 18:55:18+00:00
On what justification? You just want to take their stuff, because?

People shouldn’t lose their rights to what they own, just because they do so through a company.

I do think reasonable taxation and regulation is justifiable but on the understanding that it is an imposition. There is a give and take when it comes to rights and obligations, but this seems like overreach.
by athenot | 2025-12-06 18:55:41+00:00
In a similar vein, as the industry matured, we went from having teams of wizards building products, to teams of "good-enough" developers, interchangeable, easy to onboard. Perl culture was too much about craft-mastery which ended up being at odds with most corporate cultures.

Unfortunately, as a former Perl dev, it makes a lot of other environments feel bland. Often more productive yes, but bland nonetheless. Of the newer languages, Nim does have that non-bland feel. Whether it ends up with significant adoption when Rust and Golang are well established is a different story.
by xscott | 2025-12-06 18:56:13+00:00
> It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode.

They should've just used Python 2's strings as UTF-8. No need to break every existing program, just deprecate and discourage the old Python Unicode type. The new Unicode type (Python 3's string) is a complicated mess, and anyone who thinks it is simple and clean isn't aware of what's going on under the hood.

Having your strings be a simple array of bytes, which might be UTF-8 or WTF-8, seems to be working out pretty well for Go.
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-06 18:56:27+00:00
Open source never meant free to begin with and was never software specific, that’s a colloquialism and I’d love to say “language evolves” in favor of the software community’s use but open source is used in other still similar contexts, specifically legal and public policy ones

FOSS specifically means/meant free and open source software, the free and software words are there for a reason

so we don’t need another distinction like “source available” that people need to understand to convey an already shared concept

yes, companies abuse their community’s interest in something by blending open source legal term as a marketing term
by vokracko | 2025-12-06 18:56:31+00:00
> Financially almost never does

Can you support this claim by evidence? There are various sources [1] reaching the opposite conclusions:

> One thing is clear: renting your housing is not a waste of money, and it can even result in a greater accumulation of wealth over the long-term compared to owning

[1] https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2017-07-07...
by sansseriff | 2025-12-06 18:56:43+00:00
I admit it has dystopian elements. It’s worth deciding what specifically is scary though. The potential fallibility or mistakes of the models? Check back in a few months. The fact they’re run by giant corps which will steal and train on your data? Then run local models. Their potential to incorporate bias or persuade via misalignment with the reader’s goals? Trickier to resolve, but various labs and nonprofits are working on it.

In some ways I’m scared too. But that’s the way things are going because younger people far prefer the interface of chat and question answering to flipping through a textbook.

Even if AI makes more mistakes or is more misaligned with the reader’s intentions than a random human reviewer (which is debatable in certain fields since the latest models game out), the behavior of young people requires us to improve the reputability of these systems. (Make sure they use citations, make sure they don’t hallucinate, etc). I think the technology is so much more user friendly that fixing the engineering bugs will be easier than forcing new generations to use the older systems.
by roriau | 2025-12-06 18:57:04+00:00
Thanks — really appreciate you taking a look and sharing links.

Advent of Code is a great idea. I’ll try a few puzzles with SFX to exercise the stdlib and find awkward edges in the language and runtime.

Good call on the tooling approach. Emitting JSON for top-level names/types and scraping compiler errors sounds like a pragmatic first step before doing a full LSP. I’ll probably add that to the build output so editors can consume it easily.

I hadn’t thought to compare Situations to dynamic scoping/thread-locals that way — that’s a useful lens. My goal is to keep the behavior explicit enough that it doesn’t become mysterious, but your point about clarity is well taken; I’ll document the trade-offs more clearly.

1-based indexing has been a little surprising for folks (Lua vibes), and it does make some low-level tasks awkward. I’m keeping it because it simplifies some semantics, but I’ll watch for real usability problems and document where it trips people up.

About numbers — yes, FastNumber is available when you need IEEE performance. I want predictable defaults but not to lock users into one numeric model.

Thanks again for the pointers and the Discord link — I’ll check it out.
by akudha | 2025-12-06 18:57:23+00:00
And yet, there are so many people who have never written a line of code in their life building iOS apps, web apps etc with AI tools and making more money than a super smart software engineer.

Sure these apps could have serious security issues, might have inefficient implementation etc, but in the end they are still able to provide for their families. Not saying this is good or bad, just pointing out that there are at least a few people making a living with these tools
by neuroelectron | 2025-12-06 18:57:27+00:00
Perl being so old means it's extremely fast for what it's designed to do, process streams or pipes. In a few tasks, it's faster than C, but being much faster to create a script or program that is useful, and with the implicit syntactic sugar, and since it's so flexible, you can just do things in the one way you know how and that's usually good enough.

Python is pretty good too for this and because modern computers are so fast it doesn't matter that it's much slower than perl, but if you're doing something like processing terabytes of files, it's probably worth your time to find or vibe code a one-liner in perl and torture it into working for your task.
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-12-06 18:57:46+00:00
This is irrelevant to what OP said which is that it this should be the default. One anecdote of "with effort and technical expertise I returned the appliance to a workable state" doesn't mean things are ok.

edit: Im not trying to be snarky, I think your reply was genuinely trying to be helpful, but its not ok that we're being sold this crap
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-06 18:57:55+00:00
I'm pretty sure there is an existence proof that intelligence can be produced by quadrinary logic [1] running on a finite machine.

On the other hand, looking at the state of the world, some may have their doubts.

[1] (A,T,G,C) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_and_RNA_codon_tables#Stand...
by James_Gryphon | 2025-12-06 18:58:23+00:00
The ongoing issue that bothers me about this genre of article, and never seems to be addressed, is the lack of detail in defining the exact nature of the problem, and the apparent lack of curiosity in finding it out.

Speaking generally, whenever there is an article talking about the evil of 'screen time', I should like to know what that means. Are we saying that physical exposure to a screen is causing the difficulty (if so, what about digital ink displays)? Is it about icons and graphics vs. text? Or are we really just talking about social media? Most 'screen time' articles end up on the third subject by the third paragraph, and that is not helpful. If it is a software problem, so that we need to get rid of modern websites, or get rid of internet access, or get rid of graphical user interfaces, that is correctable. If it is a hardware problem, something that inevitably goes wrong whenever a human being uses an electronic device, from the Apple I all the way to the present, that's a completely different issue.

In regards to this particular article, it does speculate a little on fundamentals (like 'screen scrolling', though I suspect that is a correctable software issue), but it sounds like most of the problem involves students being distracted. The article even implicitly suggests, early on, that older machines, like Windows 95 computers, were not a problem back in the 1990s when these kids' parents were in school. If that's so, the issue isn't that it's a computer, the issue is everything that's running on it.

I'm personally in favour of getting rid of electronics from schools, but if we do so based on the grounds that "computers rot the brain", that isn't just a 'school rule', that's a reality that is applicable to every part of life. We are saying that these devices shouldn't be used anywhere, under any circumstances, no matter how they are configured or used. I'd like to have proof of that, lest we get rid of text editing based, ultimately, on the grounds that Facebook and TikTok damage mental health.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-06 18:59:08+00:00
With the benefit of hindsight, though, Python 3 could have been done as a non-breaking upgrade.

Imagine if the same interpreter supported both Python 3 and Python 2. Python 3 code could import a Python 2 module, or vice versa. Codebases could migrate somewhat more incrementally. Python 2 code's idea of a "string" would be bytes, and python 3's idea of a "string" would be unicode, but both can speak the other's language, they just have different names for things, so you can migrate.
by azeemba | 2025-12-06 18:59:21+00:00
Matlab and Mathematica are VERY different.

Matlab and Python are in the same ballpark. Easy syntax and large standard library. Matlab provides a lot more dedicated libraries for niche areas but the overall experience feels the same.

Mathematica doesn't really have a standard counterpart. Jupyter notebooks try to capture the experience but the support for symbolic expressions makes the Mathematica experience very different.
by acomjean | 2025-12-06 19:00:09+00:00
IBM was in a hurry.

From triumph of the nerds part 2 ( worth a watch.. they also explain how IBM ended up getting and operating system from Microsoft)

https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html

https://youtu.be/_cMtZFwqPHc

“In business, as in comedy, timing is everything, and time looked like it might be running out for an IBM PC. I'm visiting an IBMer who took up the challenge. In August 1979, as IBM's top management met to discuss their PC crisis, Bill Lowe ran a small lab in Boca Raton Florida.

Bill Lowe:

Hello Bob nice to see you. BOB: Nice to see you again. I tried to match the IBM dress code how did I do? BILL: That's terrific, that's terrific.

He knew the company was in a quandary. Wait another year and the PC industry would be too big even for IBM to take on. Chairman Frank Carey turned to the department heads and said HELP!!!

Bill Lowe Head, IBM IBM PC Development Team 1980:

He kind of said well, what should we do, and I said well, we think we know what we would like to do if we were going to proceed with our own product and he said no, he said at IBM it would take four years and three hundred people to do anything, I mean it's just a fact of life. And I said no sir, we can provide with product in a year. And he abruptly ended the meeting, he said you're on Lowe, come back in two weeks and tell me what you need.

An IBM product in a year! Ridiculous! Down in the basement Bill still has the plan. To save time, instead of building a computer from scratch, they would buy components off the shelf and assemble them -- what in IBM speak was called 'open architecture.' IBM never did this. Two weeks later Bill proposed his heresy to the Chairman.

Bill Lowe:

And frankly this is it. The key decisions were to go with an open architecture, non IBM technology, non IBM software, non IBM sales and non IBM service. And we probably spent a full half of the presentation carrying the corporate management committee into this concept. Because this was a new concept for IBM at that point. BOB: Was it a hard sell? BILL: Mr. Carey bought it. And as result of him buying it, we got through it.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-06 19:00:29+00:00
I'm a career IT guy who supports biz in my metro area. I've never used docker nor run into it with any of my customers vendors. My current clients are Windows shops across med, pharma, web retail and brick/mortar retail. Virtualization here is hyper-v.

And it this isn't a non-FOSS world. BSD powers firewalls and NAS. About a third of the VMs under my care are *nix.

And as curious as some might be at the lack of dockerism in my world, I'm equally confounded at the lack of compartmentalization in their browsing - using just one browser and that one w/o containers. Why on Earth do folks at this technical level let their internet instances constantly sniff at each other?

But we live where we live.
by Klonoar | 2025-12-06 19:01:15+00:00
One comment mentioned Jolla. Another currently available option is [FuriLabs](http://furilabs.com). It runs atop Hallium/etc but you are effectively still able to daily drive a mobile Linux shell and contribute to the ecosystem if you want to see it grow.

Now with that said: so much work has gone in to Android (and by extension, Graphene) to improve on power usage/security/etc that I'm not sure I'd bother to actually run a mobile Linux device. The juice just doesn't feel worth the squeeze.
by avidiax | 2025-12-06 19:01:31+00:00
My first question is, where is this guy getting AV1 videos? Never seen these on the high seas.

Also, given that these videos are going to be reencoded, which is tremendously expensive, I feel that any optimization in this step is basically premature. Naively launching ffprobe 10,000 times is probably still less heavyweight than 1 reencode.
by autoexec | 2025-12-06 19:02:07+00:00
The problem of course isn't the fact that government and laws exist. Most of us are happy that we have government and laws. The alternative is very ugly and doesn't lend itself to progress or prosperity.

The problem is that our government was allowed to be bribed/corrupted by corporate interests to pass bad laws designed to protect their profits and enforce control by taking freedom from consumers. The true villain here isn't government, government was just the tool they leveraged against us.

It's supposed to be our job to insist that our government work for the interests of "we the people" and we failed. The solution now is to get rid of corrupt politicians and the bad laws they passed and replace them with good ones that preserve our freedoms and don't put corporate interest ahead of the people's.

Sadly, our entire political system has been carefully refined over centuries to make it harder and harder to keep our government accountable to the people but hopefully it's not too late to change that situation within the democratic framework we've created.
Show HN: Pure – An interactive satire on the absurdity of 'Terms of Service'
by safakferhatkaya | 2025-12-06 19:03:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this last week after an experience at a bank branch that stuck with me. The rep literally said, “Don’t bother reading it, just scroll to the bottom so the button unlocks.”

It hit me how routine and meaningless “consent” has become, not a decision, just a UI step everyone knows they’re supposed to get through.

So I made PURE. It looks like a minimal fintech onboarding flow, but the ToS never actually ends. As you scroll, the text starts reacting to you, poking at the whole idea of blind agreement.

It’s intentionally simple, plain JS, some deliberately annoying UX patterns, and a bit of dark humor. Nothing fancy. Just an experiment to make people pause for a second.

Curious what you think.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-06 19:03:06+00:00
Meh, the main idea of one-shot is that you prompted it once and got a good impl when it decided it was done. As opposed to having to workshop yourself with additional prompts to fix things.

It doesn't do it in one-shot on the GPU either. It feeds outputs back into inputs over and over. By the time you see tokens as an end-user, the clanker has already made a bunch of iterations.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-06 19:03:11+00:00
I see people saying things like this all the time and then when I ask them for the specific text requiring them not to e.g. publish source code, nobody has been able to show me.

And a huge reason it seems like BS is this:

> PCs don't have that restriction.

There are obviously PCs with Wi-Fi and even cellular modems, so this can't be an excuse for a phone to not be at least as open as a PC.
by flatline | 2025-12-06 19:03:39+00:00
I have done a rigorous job of self diagnosis. I am autistic. I’ve also had the privilege of being able to pursue meditation, therapy, and other self development practices: I’m not as severely autistic as I was as a young man. I also have childhood trauma that I know contributes to many of my autistic presentations — see the last section on comorbidity. I also have some distinct ADHD symptoms but have never pursued that path because my hyperfocus tends to win out often enough that it’s not a hindrance to productivity. But it still causes problems elsewhere in my life.

For some people these diagnoses will be a very good fit with clear predictive outcomes. But many of us have a grab-bag of traits from several categories and still mostly get along in life, maybe with some assistance particular to one of these diagnosis but no more help overall than anyone else needs otherwise.

The diagnostic models suck. They are too broad here, too narrow there, misunderstood by professionals. I had a psychiatrist (mis)diagnose me as bipolar based on a 45 minute appointment when I was in some sort of crisis in my early 30s and that ended up haunting me years later when applying for a job with a security clearance. I didn’t even know about it at the time. This was one of the top rated doctors in a major metro area. What a sham.

The field is a mess. It has a terrible history of horrific abuse. Some autistic children still receive involuntary-to-them ECT. I think we should be supportive of research into these topics while also being critical of the very obvious problems with them.