MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-02-01 16:35:53+00:00
We must accept that most people are careless in their choice of words, so they frequently do not use the words in their strict sense but they use them in a broad sense, instead of using the most appropriate word.

However this is annoying, because especially with the modern fashion that linguistics shall be only descriptive and not prescriptive, like in the past, many words have become more and more ambiguous.

For this reason, misunderstandings have become more and more frequent, especially when using a medium like an Internet forum, which forces conciseness. Now, if you want to be certain that you will be understood correctly, more and more often you are forced to first define exactly many of the words that you intend to use, because the same words may be used by others with different meanings, even if in earlier literature everybody used only the meaning that you want.
by Someone | 2026-02-01 16:36:06+00:00
> product types have to be heap-allocated

Conceptually, that’s true, but a compiler is free to do things differently. For example, if escape analysis shows that an object allocated in a block never escapes the block, the optimizer can replace the object by local variables, one for each field in the object.

And that’s not theoretical. https://www.bettercodebytes.com/allocation-elimination-when-..., https://medium.com/@souvanik.saha/are-java-objects-always-cr... show that it (sometimes) does.
by xyst | 2026-02-01 16:36:14+00:00
headscale is an awesome project. And I love tailscale as a product.

But this is where netbird beats tailscale: coordinator server open sourced out/self hosted out the gate.

Headscale is currently maintained by a few tailscale employees on their spare time. Currently, Tailscale allows this to happen but clearly there’s some internal management of what gets downstreamed to headscale.

What I don’t like about headscale is that you can only host a single coordinator server as well. If I need to do maintenance on the server, it means an impact to the tailnet. It’s rare but annoying.
by steveklabnik | 2026-02-01 16:36:18+00:00
Rust tags every &mut T and every &T with the equivalent of restrict except for when the T transitively contains an UnsafeCell<T>. Types like Arc<T> and Rc<T> are built on top of UnsafeCell<T>.

Don’t use shared ownership? You get the semantics you want. It’s the norm for the vast majority of things.
by beng-nl | 2026-02-01 16:37:16+00:00
Oh hey, Pim de Witte!

For those unaware, this is a very interesting guy, because he stumbled on (creating, through his business Medal) a valuable AI dataset that - by offering to buy his company - reportedly OpenAI offered him 500M for. The dataset, I understand, is first person game video plus controller actions.

He then realized the value, which is in short a way to teach models real world and gui operation common sense. He can train a model to predict, from video, what a controller would have to do.

This is expected to lead in breakthroughs in robotics, gui controlling, self driving, and more.

He responded by learning deep learning, and starting a new company, general intuition.

I respect this guy a lot for teaching js this.

Absolutely fascinating and I take his opinion seriously.
by spijdar | 2026-02-01 16:37:55+00:00
If you count 70s and 80s "Unixes" then on its face it is a bit strange, but a lot of 70s and 80s "Unixes" don't exactly resemble what we think of as "Unix" anyway.

If instead you think of SysVR4 as the first "Unix", then Amiga Unix was indeed a very early Unix. I think this is a useful distinction, because de facto most of the software interfaces we associate with "Unix" are just System V (especially R4) in a trench coat. Note that POSIX and and SysVR4 released the same year (1988); they're technically unaffiliated efforts but represent a consolidation of a bunch of competing ideas into a ... tacit compromise.

Or, being more practical, SysVR4 is the absolute oldest "Unix" you're going to have a good chance of building modern (1990-2020s) software made "for unix" on. You can get a surprising amount of mileage out of a SysVR4 distribution -- but go any older, and you'll be in for a lot of "fun"!
by borroka | 2026-02-01 16:38:09+00:00
My knee-jerk reaction is that outsourcing thinking and writing to an LLM is a defeat of massive proportions, a loss of authenticity in an increasingly less authentic world.

On the other hand, before LLMs came along, didn't we ask a friend or colleague for their opinion on an email we were about to write to our boss about an important professional or personal matter?
I have been asked several times to give advice on the content and tone of emails or messages that some of my friends were about to send. On some occasions, I have written emails on their behalf.

Is it really any different to ask an LLM instead of me? Do I have a better understanding of the situation, the tone, the words, or the content to use?
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-02-01 16:38:55+00:00
> One area of discussion will be calls for the US to guarantee a minimum price for critical minerals and rare earths

Why is a minimum price more important that a maximum one with guaranteed supply quotas?

And who trusts the US for that?

> “This is about trust. You sign a deal and you trust it will apply,” said an EU source. “This constant threat of more tariffs, whether 10% because of Greenland or 200% on champagne because they don’t sign up to the ‘board of peace’ has to stop.”

Yea. I guess its just theater to calm trump and to guarantee profit margins.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-01 16:39:00+00:00
I like the idea of using a transparent background in the webview. That would compose really well.

The primary motivation for winforms was getting easy access to OS-native multiline input controls, clipboard, audio, image handling, etc. I could have just put kestrel in the console app and served it as a pure web app, but this is a bit more clunky from a UX perspective (separate browser window, permissions, etc.).
by michaelt | 2026-02-01 16:39:16+00:00
A few decades ago:

* People needed to be taught digital skills that were in growing demand in the workplace.

* The kids researching things online and word-processing their homework were doing well in class (because only upper-middle-class types could afford home PCs)

* Some trials of digital learning produced good results. Teaching by the world's greatest teachers, exactly the pace every student needs, with continuous feedback and infinite patience.

* Blocking distractions? How hard can that be?
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-01 16:39:18+00:00
Type inference is part of every modern language. Structural typing not so much, though.

Java has it through a compiler extension (https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/tree/master/man...) but I don't know many other languages that support this feature.

As much as I dislike the entire Javascript runtime environment, I find TypeScript to be the best typing system out there for any imperative language.
by lormayna | 2026-02-01 16:39:22+00:00
> And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional".

If you read the original article from Sciascia [1], you can understand that he was complaining about the risk of judge appointments drived by anti-mafia positions, more than competence.

> Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist.

If Saviano is only a specialized journalist, why is invited in many public talk-show where the topic is different from Mafia?

[1] https://www.archivioantimafia.org/sciascia.php
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-01 16:39:32+00:00
> the markings are mostly superfluous? You're basically doing the same motions in a regular intersection.

The image linked, yes. However I've never seen one quite like that in the US. Instead where I'm at we have a small circular barrier in the center of the intersection (and some very eye catching reflectors) that you actually have to drive around. It's a very good design (imo) because it physically forces vehicles to slow down and swerve so there's no way to inadvertently blow through it at speed the way that sometimes happens with a 4 way stop on a long straightaway in the dead of night.

The space requirement is only slightly higher than the one linked above, still much less than a proper full size roundabout. It's basically a cement barrier sticking 1/4 of the way into your lane.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-01 16:39:32+00:00
People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.

There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.

But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.

---

FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-01 16:39:47+00:00
Sure it can.

The face value of a coin may be driven down, based on the exchange value of the currency itself. A coin with a nominal value of 10 but, say, a specie value of 11, is literally worth more melted down than in exchange. This is the dynamic of the Law of Oresme, Copernicus, and Gresham (usually referenced simply as "Gresham's Law").

"The Law of Oresme, Copernicus and Gresham", Thomas Willing Balch
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 47, No. 188 (Jan. - Apr., 1908), pp. 18-29 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/983793>

More generally, when a product's exchange value differs from its production or use value, paradoxical results occur. Gresham's Law, Lakoff's "Market for Lemons", arguably the Jevons Paradox, the phenomena of wine and audio kit pricing divorced from any defensible consumer capacity at discrimination, and enshittification all seem to fit this with reasonable amounts of shoehorning. Also my own "tragedy of the minimum viable user".
by perrygeo | 2026-02-01 16:40:05+00:00
Having been in this situation more than once, recreating a concept from scratch when you've already coded it once takes ~20% of the time. This also tracks with my long term empirical observation that roughly 80% of a software project is maintenance, testing, debugging, monitoring, fixing bugs, planning, refactoring, etc.

Sitting down to an editor and typing out ascii charachters is the smallest and least consequential part of software development. And that was _before_ LLMs enter the equation - now it's not even strictly necessary. The software industry needs to get over its obsession with coding as an activity, and with code as an asset. Code is at best a necessary liability. Software systems are what we should be focused on.
by raincole | 2026-02-01 16:40:11+00:00
If textbooks weren't so expensive I'd be more cheering on them.

> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.

Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.
by ageitgey | 2026-02-01 16:40:21+00:00
> “Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.”

This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.

Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything.

This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?
by adrian_b | 2026-02-01 16:40:46+00:00
That it what I mean.

This old sense is encountered, like in your example, but much more often "fruits" is used in the culinary sense.

Many people perceive your example as a metaphor, the results of the labor being compared with the fruits of a tree, but in reality the direction of the metaphor has historically been opposite, the fruits of the tree being called thus because they were considered the useful results of its cultivation.
by creativeSlumber | 2026-02-01 16:40:48+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uep5zOrsAEA

Incredible documentary about the politics around EV's made before Tesla's became mainstream.

People were demanding and protesting asking GM to let time buy their EV'1 after the lease, but they destroyed all the cars. So did Toyota for the EV RAV4's.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-01 16:40:59+00:00
Python doesn't come with Radix sort, and Julia doesn't come with

[[deps.SuperDataStructures]]
git-tree-sha1 = "7222b821efcee6dcdc9e652455da09c665d8afc1"
repo-rev = "main"
repo-subdir = "SuperDataStructures.jl"
by thedanbob | 2026-02-01 16:41:01+00:00
I once encountered an intersection with a big "NO ENTRY" sign on the other side. I turned but google maps wouldn't give me another route, so I did a u-turn and came back to it from the side. Which meant I was close enough to read the small text underneath that said "vehicles under 10 tons excepted". I don't think I've ever been so angry at a road sign.
by wyldfire | 2026-02-01 16:41:15+00:00
The fact that you used the term "enforcement" here makes me presume you are thinking of criminal consequences. But the grandparent comment talks about civil liability. Certainly if there were injuries at this intersection and they knew who had altered the signage, attorneys would argue liability on the part of the vandal. They'd get settlements if not win cases this way.

In addition, if there were serious injuries here you should also expect some criminal consequences. But if your point was to suggest that they won't hunt you down just because someone said there was mischief here, I tend to agree.
by terrabitz | 2026-02-01 16:41:24+00:00
A while ago when I was working with PowerShell a lot, I got spoiled by the easy inclusion of `-DryRun` flags in all my scripts.

Nowadays I still use the technique for a lot of the tools I make. I typically do a Terraform-like approach: create a plan, validate the plan, render the plan to the user, exit early if we're in dry-run mode, and apply the plan as the final step. Whether dry-run is enabled by default depends on the risk of the operations and who will be using the tool.

This makes it exceedingly clear what actions the tool will do. Plus it has the added benefit of being able to split the plan and apply steps into two separate steps. For example, you can create a plan, serialize it to JSON, store it (e.g. in VCS, Jira ticket, whatever) then apply it during a change window.

plan = createPlan()
print(plan.string())
if (dryRun){
return
}

plan.apply()
by cosmicgadget | 2026-02-01 16:41:51+00:00
> After the 2015 Nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), people thought they can finally live normal lives and have normal relations with other countries (See how people celebrated the deal on the night it was finalized). At the time, I was even planning to assemble a new PC and thought it might be better to wait and buy parts from Amazon!

Alas, if even if Iran were to normalize relations with the West, he missed Amazon's good years. His video card would probably be a box with a rock in it.

> Some even claim that the protesters are violent rioters and the government has the right to shoot them with war ammunition.
by smashed | 2026-02-01 16:42:53+00:00
We evaluated it last August/Sept.

From memory: oAuth login flow
(browser based) was only supported on the windows client. For a Zero trust solution, having the only auth truly supported be a permanent JWT/Cert on the machine is doing device authentication, not user authentication, thus completely failing your primary objective.

UX was overall atrocious. Our users could not comprehend it at all. It was deemed that a custom client was required to be made.

The SDK first approach was an overall major plus point, allowing for a full customization to a specific use case.

Don't get me wrong we were overall impressed with the technology and the architecture choices. It's not a finished product, but something that does all the infra and you just need to apply the final veneer on top.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-01 16:43:36+00:00
Why not?

Here in the UK, we've got lots of roundabouts from tiny mini-roundabouts (some of which have four junctions) that could easily fit almost anywhere, all the way to gigantic multi-roundabout junctions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon) ).

I can't think of a situation where it's more efficient to have four vehicles all stop at a junction (busy four way stop) vs a roundabout which will allow one or two vehicles to join the roundabout without having to stop.
Show HN: A map of historical movies by narrative location and time period
by Ldorigo | 2026-02-01 16:43:43+00:00
A year ago I watched The Count of Monte Cristo, got curious about post-revolution France, and wondered which other movies depicted France in the same period.

I was disappointed to find no easy way to answer that question - the only information of this kind I could find was scattered on Wikipedia, unstructured and hard to find.

I thought that this would be a perfect use for LLMs. One year and a lot of tinkering later I'm proud to present to you the results - hoping you'll find it as entertaining as I do to wade through time, geography, and stories.

(P.S.: If you find me a more creative, evocative name I will instantly change the domain name and credit you for it :-) )
by digiown | 2026-02-01 16:43:48+00:00
> It's your choice

Ah, classic false choice. Do you know it is illegal to do cash transactions over a certain amount in most Western countries now? In my mind, if I have a right to do something (buy a home), and there is only one approved way to do it, then I automatically have the right to use the approved way.

Similarly, having a government ID might technically be a choice now, but it won't be soon with all these age verification BS rolling out. So no, this is not entitlement. Your argument would work for anticheat in online games or DRM media, but not banks or government services.
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-01 16:43:52+00:00
Because those systems are exorbitantly expensive and require digging up the road to install sensors. If there's a stop sign instead of lights, you need to dig up more private land to run power and set the utility poles to hang the lights from.

A stop sign costs like a hundred bucks, you stick it in the ground, job done. Installing an automated traffic system takes multiple days, a full crew, and heavy equipment.

Plus I'm sure that in today's capitalist hellscape it's also a subscription service that your tax money needs to pay monthly, likely for every individual intersection. Stop signs need maintaining every decade or two.

The answer is money and who's willing to part with it.
by sunshine-o | 2026-02-01 16:43:58+00:00
For those interested, I just found out that mycelium can, like yggdrasil [0], be used to create private overlay networks [1].

What could be used as an alternative to Tailscale, netbird, etc.

- [0] https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10478-easily-accessi...

- [1] https://github.com/threefoldtech/mycelium/blob/master/docs/p...
by steveklabnik | 2026-02-01 16:44:15+00:00
Pre commit hooks are complicated because jj just has a fundamentally different lifecycle than git does.

Tools that integrate with git specifically can be tough though, yeah. Some do Just Work, and some very much do not.

I’ve found a “we use jj not git for this project” in Claude.md makes falling back to git rare, but I also tend to incorporate version control into slash commands or skills directly rather than let Claude decide what to do.
by Majromax | 2026-02-01 16:44:55+00:00
> I'm just guessing, but seems the people who write these agent CLIs haven't found a good heuristic for allowing/disallowing/asking the user about permissions for commands, so instead of trying to sit down and actually figure it out, someone had the bright idea to let the LLM also manage that allowing/disallowing themselves. How that ever made sense, will probably forever be lost on me.

I don't think there is such a good heuristic. The user wants the agent to do the right thing and not to do the wrong thing, but the capabilities needed are identical.

> `chroot` is literally the first thing I used when I first installed a local agent, by intuition (later moved on to a container-wrapper), and now I'm reading about people who are giving these agents direct access to reply to their emails and more.

That's a good, safe, and sane default for project-focused agent use, but it seems like those playing it risky are using agents for general-purpose assistance and automation. The access required to do so chafes against strict sandboxing.
by sfRattan | 2026-02-01 16:45:26+00:00
The Apps in the home row on Apple TV will have fullscreen promotions when the home row is along the bottom of the screen. If you set your home row apps with care, the fullscreen previews will not be ads (i.e. Photos will do a slideshow of your photos, Jellyfin just pulls random images from its/your own movie library metadata, etc.).