MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-01-24 14:51:55+00:00
Yes, it's saying that the string concatenation and other outside-of-SQL business logic took 22ms, running in their custom TH1 scripting language. In 2016.

Update: Actually it looks like I was wrong about TH1: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/tip/www/th1.md

The timeline appears to be constructed by C code instead: https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/file?name=src/timeline.c&ci=...
by e3bc54b2 | 2026-01-24 14:52:21+00:00
> How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?

Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-24 14:52:33+00:00
> If you do a 'view source' in Firefox on a completely valid XHTML 1.0/1.1 page, it'll redline the XML declaration like it's something wrong

Is the page actually being served as "application/xhtml+xml"? Most xhtml sites aren't, in which case the browser is indeed interpreting those as invalid declarations in a regular old html document
by io_eric | 2026-01-24 14:52:33+00:00
Fixed! The issue was specific to FreeBSD's clang setup. When compiling with --target=wasm32 and -nostdlib, clang on Linux/macOS still finds minimal freestanding headers for the wasm32 target, but FreeBSD's clang doesn't have these configured by default - even though stdint.h exists, it's not in the search path for cross-compilation targets.

The fix was adding freestanding stdint.h and stddef.h to webcc's compat layer using compiler built-ins (__SIZE_TYPE__, etc.). This makes webcc work consistently across all platforms without relying on platform-specific clang configurations.

I hope it works now for you - hit me up if there are still problems!
by Aurornis | 2026-01-24 14:52:37+00:00
> For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music

Android is just an operating system. I’ve developed and shipped Android based devices that have no screen at all.

Android and Linux are both used for a wide variety of embedded systems. Saying they’re all general purpose computing devices isn’t true.
Show HN: Built an AI powered image editor for IntelliJ
by erikpau | 2026-01-24 14:52:43+00:00
Hi all, I always missed having an image editor in the Jetbrains products (PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ), so I built a plugin to handle most image editing capabilities. Also added Gemini and OpenAI support, which lead to some surprising capabilities.

Not gonna lie, took a while to build, even with AI tools, and I have a long list of features to add, but I'm super happy its on the market place now, and I even did a first sale, and I'll probably never be able to express how happy that made me!
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-24 14:52:58+00:00
That's why full disk encryption was always a no-go for approximately all computer users, and recommending it to someone not highly versed in technology was borderline malicious.

"Tough luck, should have made a backup" is higher responsibility than securing anything in meatspace, including your passport or government ID. In the real world, there is always a recovery path. Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.

Microsoft has the right approach here with Bitlocker defaults. It's not merely about UX - it's about not setting up traps and footguns that could easily cause harm to people.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-24 14:53:31+00:00
I don't think there is a "scandal" here neither, companies lie and exaggerate all the time and it's becoming normalized. With that said, I think it's important to record when it happens and exactly how it happens, because not only does it help people in the future to know what to look out for, it also serves as a historical record to refer to when you start to see repeating patterns.

Agree to disagree about "all of them accurate", I've already made my case elsewhere and doesn't really help anyone to re-iterate here what's public already.
by eddyg | 2026-01-24 14:53:47+00:00
Which is a very good thing.

iCloud is much more secure than most people realize because most people don’t take the 30 minutes to learn how it is architected.

You can (and should) watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&t=1993s for all the details about how iCloud is protected, but especially the time-linked section. :)
by rpdillon | 2026-01-24 14:53:52+00:00
Agree. I think folks are romanticizing the iPod. It synced only with Mac via iTunes, had 5 GB of storage for $400 and had 10 hours of battery life and weighed 184 grams.

Today you can get a music player whose battery lasts five times as long, weighs one sixth as much, costs one-tenth the price, and stores 25 times as much, while also offering full wireless connectivity, supporting more audio formats, video playback, and reading books.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-24 14:54:09+00:00
Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance.

Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of all the corporatisms we hear everyday then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway. Like, please, I thought we just agreed this is all fluff.
by xrd | 2026-01-24 14:54:56+00:00
I came here to say this. I switched to forgejo after self hosting gitlab for years, and haven't missed anything.

The article mentions the container registry as a prime feature of gitab. Forgejo has this, btw.

In addition, speed (of everything) is so good with forgejo. The resource requirements (napkin math, but...) are 10% of gitlab.

I see no reason to ever use GitLab again.

There are two minor annoyances for me, but not deal breakers.
.
First, I actually prefer the GitLab CI syntax. "GitHub Actions" is a mess. I suppose it makes sense to use the dominant gorilla (github actions), but converting to this CI was more trouble than it should have been.

Also, the forgejo API: it is much less developed. I did like exploring with GraphQL which is totally missing in forgejo. But, you have access to the database directly (and can use sqlite or postgres, your choice) so you can really do whatever you want with a custom script. Forgejo API and their infrastructure around it is just a bit more clunky, but nothing that was a major problem.
by wffurr | 2026-01-24 14:55:15+00:00
When Consumer Reports tested ADAS systems in 2020 [1], they gave their highest rating to the Comma Two. I'm sure it's only gotten better since then.

I really like my 2017 Chevy Bolt except that it doesn't have ACC. I wish I was comfortable installing a Comma on it, but it requires a gas pedal interceptor [2], and I'm not willing to do that to a car that I transport my family in.

[1]: https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
[2]: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/wiki/comma-pedal
by kps | 2026-01-24 14:55:47+00:00
Lee died about a decade ago; I don't know whether they still have this policy. (One immediate change was that their stores started being open on Sunday.)

In ‘our’ field, HP, under founders Hewlett and Packard, ran into some trouble in 1970 and instituted a “9 day fortnight”: rather than lay anyone off, everyone took a 10% cut in pay and hours.
by dmurray | 2026-01-24 14:55:49+00:00
This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.

[Reads abstract]

They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?
by eddyg | 2026-01-24 14:55:55+00:00
Wrong.

You can (and should) watch all of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&t=1993s for the details about how iCloud is protected by HSMs and rate limits to understand why you’re wrong, but especially the time-linked section… instead of spreading FUD about something you know nothing about.
by xg15 | 2026-01-24 14:56:19+00:00
> JSON has no such mechanism built into the format. Yes, JSON Schema exists, but it is an afterthought, a third-party addition that never achieved universal adoption.

I don't see how this is in any way more of an afterthought than XML Schema was (except that it was designed by the same group as XML)

> Namespaces. XML allows you to compose documents from multiple schemas without collision.

It "allows" it in the extremely narrow sense that you can write a file with elements from different namespaces, parse it into a DOM with a schemaless parser and can still distinguish the elements.

It does not define any semantics about what an interaction between different namespaces means or which namespaces you can and which you can't combine.
by reconnecting | 2026-01-24 14:56:50+00:00
Thank you for asking.

XHTML Members(1):

Current websites that are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (or Transitional)

Back to tirreno website, it is transitional HTML 4.01 without JS or CSS, thus more or less same challenges to make it W3 valid (2) in 2025. Have a look.

1. https://xhtml.club/members.html

2. https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https://www.tirreno.com/&...
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-24 14:57:03+00:00
Circa '99 a high fraction (50%-ish) of HTML in the field was invalid, so if you were making a new web browser it had to parse invalid HTML the same way as Netscape which was one more reason we didn't get competitive web browsers.

HTML 5 specified exactly how "invalid" HTML is parsed so now there is no such thing as invalid HTML. XHTML was one of those things that never quite worked:

https://friendlybit.com/html/why-xhtml-is-a-bad-idea/
I need help finding VPNs for my Iranian friend
by pickeledLobe | 2026-01-24 14:57:04+00:00
We are at a desperate point rn looking for VPNs that can work in Iran that wont get instantly blocked. He looks for vpns on rinky dink telegram and those vpns basically stop working 24 hours after being released so we end up running aound like headless chickens to find a replacement. I just want to play dnd with my boy and I need help. y'all are hackers and shit right? website's name is "hacker news" so I imagine some budd chisled super hacker man is gonna teleport to my rescue or some shit PLEASE HELP
by beagle3 | 2026-01-24 14:57:10+00:00
scp works as long as the app is not making changes at the same time.

If there's a chance someone is writing to the database during the copy, you should "sqlite3 database.sqlite .backup" (or ".dump") first; Or, alternatively, on a new enough sqlite3, you have a builtin sqlite3_rsync that is like rsync except it interacts with the sqlite3 updates to guarantee a good copy at the other end.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-24 14:57:30+00:00
Absolutely you give up a lot of convenience of searching email content. After using it twice, I stopped using their Bridge and instead on my laptop set search to download and index locally. On mobile I live with just searching metadata, like subject lines.

The good news is that you use your own domain and there are a lot of good alternatives that support search of content for you where you can use your domain, like Apple Mail, FastMail, etc.
by tetha | 2026-01-24 14:57:34+00:00
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.

The most influential question from team lead trainings over the years has been: Do you trust your employee to want to complete the task and purpose they have, or do you need to control them? There are a few names for this, Theory X and Theory Y mainly.

And don't be snide and just say that the current economy forces you to work due to wages. A lot of people I know would just create their own creative work if they had all the money in the world. So yeah, I think if you frame a persons job and purpose in the company right, you can trust them to work. This may not work in all industries, but in tech it seems to hold.

An example where this is in my experience a good guidance: Someone starts slipping their metrics, whatever those are. Comes in late, is hard to reach remotely. Naturally they should get slapped with the book right? Nah. If you assume they want to work well, the first question should be: Why, what is going on?

In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.

Like one guy on the team recently had some trouble during the last legs of building a house and needed more flexible time. We could've been strict and told him to punch it and take their entire annual vacation to manage that, even if he just needs to be able to jump away for an hour or two here and there. Instead we made sure to schedule simple work for him and have him work with a higher focus on educating his sidekicks, tracked the total time away and then booked it as 3-4 days at the end. Now it's a fun story in the teams lore they are fond of having navigated that, instead of one guy sulking about having lost all of his vacation in that nonsense.
by bgribble | 2026-01-24 14:57:37+00:00
One thing I think is missing is an understanding of why there is such a top-down push for timelines: because saying "we aren't sure when this feature will be delivered" makes sales people look like they don't know what they are talking about. Which.... well.

They would much rather confidently repeat a date that is totally unfounded rubbish which will have to be rolled back later, because then they can blame the engineering team for not delivering to their estimate.
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-24 14:57:45+00:00
No cars to follow. No lane markings. Just a sheet of white with ditches on both side. Worse yet, no prior practice. Where you know the lanes are means little when the other cars are not respecting them. (As if lanes matter as nobody wants to drive that close together.) It isnt impossible but certainly a far more difficult problem than navigating an LA suburb.
Show HN: Doom running in OpenSCAD at 10-20 FPS
by mikeayles | 2026-01-24 14:57:54+00:00
Third entry in my series of running DOOM on engineering tools that weren't designed for games.

KiDoom rendered walls as PCB traces in KiCad. ScopeDoom piped vectors through a headphone jack to an oscilloscope. Now OpenSCAD-DOOM exports geometry to a parametric CAD tool in real-time.

It's a custom Python engine that reads WAD files and outputs OpenSCAD code. Pygame handles input and runs a parallel software renderer. The OpenSCAD side uses Animation mode to bypass the file watcher's 200ms debounce.

I actually started this in December intending to release it at Christmas, but couldn't get the performance above slideshow levels. Parked it. Then last week I had to fix OpenSCAD rendering for another project and discovered the npm openscad-wasm package was from 2022 and silently ignoring the Manifold flag. The fix (https://phaestus.app/blog/blog0031) took renders from 2 minutes to 2 seconds. Rolled that back to OpenSCAD-DOOM and suddenly it was playable. (FYI, the mainline version of openSCAD is 2021.01!)

Blog post: https://www.mikeayles.com/#openscad-doom

Code: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/openSCAD-DOOM

YouTube: https://youtu.be/l9nnV-mO4wY
by rhdunn | 2026-01-24 14:58:30+00:00
One of the annoying things about having a living standard is that it is difficult to implement a conforming version as additional updates means that you are no longer conforming.

Versioned standards allow you to know that you are compliant to that version of the specification, and track the changes between versions -- i.e. what additional functionality do I need to implement.

With "living standards" you need to track the date/commit you last checked and do a manual diff to work out what has changed.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 14:58:43+00:00
If only the repeated inline styles and abusively nested tables were the issue…

The dozens (or hundreds! have you tried GitHub recently??) HTTP requests.

The JavaScript bundles whose sizes are expressed in 10⁶ bytes.

The UIs that are fully recomputed and redrawn on each small interaction.

The auto playing videos. The images that are comparable to full res pictures (but usually empty of meaning because they are stock or AI generated).
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-24 14:58:47+00:00
The semantic web took on the XSD data types

https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/

even though a lot of tools and standards (I'm looking at you SPARQL) don't really support them. My favorite serialization for RDF is Turtle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax)
by jerf | 2026-01-24 14:59:47+00:00
So what is the solution? Is the author demanding that people work for them for free to do the sustainability for them? Because that sure sounds like the only way to "resolve" the complaint.

"start treating it as what it often is: a refusal to do the harder social work in #FOSS"

Your ending is missing something... "a refusal to do the harder social work that I want you to do in #FOSS".

But I didn't promise that. Nobody promised that. FOSS is an unparalleled gift of free work and not a single line of it has formed an obligation on my part to help anyone who wants to come along and make it do something different. You are welcome to do that, but I have no obligation on any level to come along and help you "sustain" your own work. No legal obligation, no moral obligation, no community obligation no reciprocal obligation, no Kantian imperative obligation, no obligation whatsoever. If anything, you owe them, not the other way around; any other read of the ethical situation is utterly absurd.

You want "more social work" done, you feel free to do it. Don't be shocked when I'm not interested in helping.

This is just a demand for more free work from people who have already handed you the result of more free work than any other collection of work in human history. It is deeply ungrateful to demand yet more.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-24 15:00:15+00:00
> Your view of western medicine is nonsense driven by antipathy.

The same could be said about your view of natural and traditional medicine.

> ‘Western’ doctors generally recommend things that work and are proven to work.

That's true of traditional medicine as well. The difference is how they are proven. Western medicines prove using a double blind study. It is expensive and you can't get funding for such studies unless an investor is assured of returns for their investment, which is only possible for novel, patentable medicines. And that means many natural medicines that work are ignored by the Western system. Traditional medicine on the other hand prove that something works not using double blind studies but 100s years of actual experience.

An example is magnesium. Doctors don't know that it works for muscle tightness and insomnia because no one has done a double blind study on it with thousands of patients. And nobody will because magnesium is not patentable. And so they prescribe Ambien CR. It is a very broken system, and you don't seem to want to acknowledge those limitations. (And no, no reliable tests exist for magnesium deficiency but that's a side point.)

> Naturopathy is a grab bag of unproven, alt-med bullshit and should be regarded as nothing more than charlatanry.

Yeah.. this attitude is the problem.

> They’re all far worse because they don’t even start with an evidence base.

They do, perhaps not in a way that satisfies you, but they do. The evidence is based on 100s of years of experience.
by krapp | 2026-01-24 15:00:47+00:00
What we need is to reform the culture that normalizes and rewards this sort of behavior.

That would require an admission that feminists are correct about toxic masculinity and patriarchy, at the very least, but in the current social climate of mens' rights grifters and toxic misogynists that doesn't seem possible.

Laws won't be enough. Look at Japan. They're extremely strict about this sort of thing to the point of having sex-separated train cars but harassment still happens there all the time because the culture (and by extension the politics) is extremely patriarchal.

Change has to happen from the ground up, not the top down.
by jordanb | 2026-01-24 15:01:02+00:00
The problem is mass-surveillance and dragnets. Obviously if the state wants to go after you no laws will protect you. As we've seen they can even illegally collect evidence and then do a parallel construction to "launder" the evidence.

But One-drive is essentially a mass-surveillance tool. It's a way to load the contents of every single person's computer into Palentir or similar tools and, say, for instance, "give me a list of everyone who harbors anti-ICE sentiments."
by martinald | 2026-01-24 15:01:21+00:00
Virgin actually have upgraded a huge swath of their footprint from cable to XGS-PON (probably coming up to 10million homes now, with the full program due to finish in a couple of years).

However, due to their comically bad billing systems (i believe they licensed a billing system off the cable modem headend provider) they do not allow their existing users to switch from DOCSIS cable to FTTH. This has been a problem for a couple of years now. They've spent billions on civil engineering work to blow fibre everywhere but existing customers can't order it because their billing system is tightly coupled to their cable modem system. They offer up to 2gig symmetrical over XGSPON FTTH.

Re openreach I think it's a bit of protecting leased line revenue, a bit of faster upload speeds actually being quite niche - the market is driven by headline download speeds - but most importantly they rolled out GPON not XGSPON.

GPON "only" has 2.5gbit/1.2gbit available to the entire network slice it's on, which can be up to 32 homes (theoretically many more but openreach have that as the maximum I've seen).

This means one gigabit uplink can nearly saturate the entire link for the network slice of 32 homes.

They do have plans to upgrade to XGSPON (though I suspect they may skip that and move to 50GPON instead). XGSPON has 10git/10gbit and 50GPON 50/50 available to the same 32 homes.

They are just about to start a pilot of XGSPON in Guildford which has up to 8gig symmetrical available.

It's not a huge amount of work to upgrade PON versions, it just requires new line cards, and new ONT boxes for each house and can run side by side with existing GPON.