skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was very much a "TCP/IP BBS". One unique feature was the "tracker", on which you could list your server. You could browse the servers, hop onto one (as long as guest access was on, or they'd have a login/pass in the server description), and there would be a user list, a chat window, a Files window, and a News window. Usually there would be people actively in discussion in the Chat. Indeed, many places require that you upload one of the "requests" to get an account with download privs. Others allowed guest download, but that became more rare over time. Each server had its own vibe/community.

There was an easter egg where you could press Ctrl-F12 and type in a "command" into the text entry box. These would unlock some special hidden functionality like changing your icon to one only available via that command (presumably for the devs of the software so they could have an exclusive user icon), or encipher your chat messages with a basic offset-substitution cipher. There were others that would restrict your chat to only saying "oink!" and turning your icon into a pig -- this was used as a prank to use on people "Hey dude if you press Ctrl-F12 and type fuelharp you'll get secret admin access!" (only to have them turn into a pig) :) Another Ctrl-F12 command would report your upload/download ratio into the chat - either a fun way to brag about your good ratio, or a good one to bait perennial leeches into typing so they'd inadvertantly reveal their pesky leeching ways!

Anyway, all in all a really fun place for a few years where it was "the" online destination for Mac users. I spent an ungodly amount of hours on there (and still hop on pretty often). :)
>You spent more time configuring Vim and Emacs than they saved you.

Yeah, ten years ago. Now I just use the damn thing and occasionally update my plugins.

At this point, I can hardly use nano, the vim bindings are so deep in my brain.
This is the thread that I read in high school that made me fall in love with software architecture. This was primarily because Tanenbaum’s position was so obviously correct, yet it was also clear to all that Linux was going to roll everyone, even at that early stage.

I still hand this out to younger software engineers to understand the true principle of architecture. I have a print off of it next to my book on how this great new operating system and SDK from Taligent was meant to be coded.
The brain doesn’t necessarily need the same exact hardware to do the same function, but in adults if it’s lost they will probably not regain the function without intervention. Neuroplasticity-inducing substances may very well enable the brain to create new connections and rebuild functionality even if the physical neuronal mass does not recover.

This paper suggests as much:
“Conversely, chemogenetic activation of ABINs without any change in neuron numbers mimics both the cellular and the behavioral effects of ketamine, indicating that increased activity of ABINs is sufficient for rapid antidepressant effects.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30386-5
I don’t think people like the principle behind it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Same reason why some people are adamantly against using closed source software though at least https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium exists.

That said, personally I use OSes like Windows or IDEs like JetBrains sometimes just because they help me get things done, it is what it is.
Schools are going to follow the same playbook they've been following since 2008 as state and federal funding has dried up.

They'll lean on international students first like they have for decades, but those numbers are going to be down. They'll follow that by leaning on undergrads, but those numbers are shrinking too because of cultural and demographic shifts. Then they'll cut graduate funding (again) to try and get more blood from the stone. Then they'll try cutting the "extraneous" departments that don't bring in money or grants (read: everything except engineering, medicine, law, and football) again. Then they'll cut the departments that do bring in money. Then they'll do the work to shoulder the costs directly.

If you want reform, cutting funding doesn't work. It hollows out the entire institution before it even starts addressing the administrative issues. Reform needs to come from a different direction.
Thank you!!!

Crystal instead of Opal? I didn't consider using Crystal because I specifically wanted to implement this in Ruby! As for using Opal instead of ruby.wasm for the web version, I haven't tried that approach yet, but it sounds like an intriguing possibility.
What happens when Linus retires (or god forbid dies)? He can't defuse those situations forever, there needs to be some sort of process.
I demanded he be in jail but somehow you voted for a convicted felon over a prosecutor.
Wow nice, are you familiar with one of the still-running servers also based out of BC, "Higher Intellect"? Does it ring a bell at all? It's one of the longest-running servers, started in 2001 or so, still up and active today with the same files since then.
Are there still any active usenet channels or servers around?
I think it's optimistic to think they'll be better off in the long term, personally. Other countries are ready to jump in as soon as the US appears deficient at something, even if it is a temporary deficiency. If the US ends up temporarily behind in AI research due to this, for example, it's unlikely they catch back up IMO. If you get behind, everybody is just going to start looking at whoever is ahead and the rich will get richer.
or KDX! :)
Uh, as the page says, these were cheap feature phones for emerging markets. In 2007 Nokia had smartphones vastly more capable than the original iPhone. They just didn’t have a large touchscreen.
I've contributed to a couple of projects that use email based workflows. I can customize my environment, but it takes a lot of time, and I would rather do something else than figure out how to filter the firehose of a mailing list to the few emails I actually care about, or learn how to use a new email client that is slightly better and handling patches.

The first few times, it took me longer to figure out how to send a patch than it did to fix the bug I was writing a patch for.
> This is 0.25% of the national deficit by cutting indirect expenses from 30%+ to 15%.

The federal budget (save DOD and entitlements) is stuff like this.

Saying “oh well, it’s just 0.25%” is the reason why nobody can tackle the deficit.

Do this 100x and you’ve suddenly reduced the deficit by 25%.
You end up getting what is basically spam from dickheads and their apologists.

And that's just the sociopath tech CEOs who're trying to "cast a wide net" wrt recruiting (i.e., lying in their email responses to you about how they "saw" your post and thought you might be "a good fit"). I still also get straight up junkmail sent to a single-use email address that I once posted in a "Who wants to be hired?" thread. Take appropriate precautions.
> If you know someone’s job, you can make a good guess of how much money they make.

Only in Canberra, where you'll probably meet public servants who will tell you they are an APS6 at the tax office.

A "lawyer" for example could be a junior solicitor (or government lawyer) earning $60k a year, or they could be a top barrister billing $10k a day.
And if you're going to make some kind of evolutionary argument to the tune of, "well if diverse teams were actually better then companies would be adopting them out of pure financial gain" then you're going to have to explain the whole situation with women in the workforce. If disruptions and interventions like these aren't part of the natural order and the means by which we collectively move forward then why does it keep requiring them? Why didn't it happen on its own?
That's called insider trading.
You are correct. I was more talking about the overall cost cutting "program" which is much closer to the burn it all down, but that isn't the case with this article and I apologize for incorrectly commenting overly broadly out of context.
The article also says the law was changed but it will take two months to take effect.
Zig brings developer velocity benefits over C, but developer velocity is not the reason R4L exists. Until Zig has an easily segmented part that is memory safe, there is no demand for its potential benefits in Linux. Memory safety is the only reason a new language was considered within Linux.
> And parental education, race, and household income are also all correlated with one another...

That's true.

> This is not the gotcha that you think it is.

But your point makes the guy I'm responding to look much worse. After controlling for parental education, the effect of parental income is radically diminished. Most of that 0.36 correlation is just confounding. Parental education isn't even a great indicator itself; it's a proxy for intelligence. It's just a much better proxy than parental income is.
Super love this as a project for departing from the grind of the day to day, but did you consider the name… Gem Boy?
Here is an archive link
https://archive.ph/ACL9Q
> TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when you'd maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just the specific pages that took a credit card.

Indeed, I had forgotten about this. You'd go from the regular site on HTTP to the credit card page on HTTPS and back again. For a time, it was important to check that the page that you were actually entering the card details on was on HTTPS before you clicked the submit, and that the target was also HTTPS.
> using Starlink in the islands continues to be illegal and is considered a criminal offence

What is wrong with this place? A criminal offense?

> protecting Sure International’s telecommunications monopoly

Ahh, that explains it. Mafia in power, essentially.
Market failure. Plain and simple. The claim that DEI "didn’t have to" happen ignores the fundamental nature of entrenched systems: they don’t change unless forced. The workforce didn’t diversify on its own for the same reason civil rights weren’t granted voluntarily—because those in power had no incentive to change a game they were winning.

The "if diverse teams were better, companies would’ve adopted them naturally" argument collapses on contact with reality. Evolution doesn’t work that way. Nothing optimizes itself without external pressure. Businesses didn’t modernize because they felt like it; they did it because the alternative was extinction.
I was hoping if this gets more traction on HN could lead to a discussion of pros and cons of Profits Shared vs Stock Options.
Hell yeah, it was the best. I still remember finding "Tempo/MacQuake Palace", which was the most glorious combinations of things I thought I could find - Mac OS Tempo[0] and the unauthorized Quake source port for Mac! Amazing stuff at the time.

(on that note, wow, I have not heard "zelifcam" in a very long time! haha)

[0] https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Mac_OS_Tempo_(pre-release)
“then” is definitely less intuitive
There is so much utterly cynical LARPing in that article. Apple was one of the earliest members to join PRISM. [1] And given the nature of the 5-eyes surveillance [2], The British government almost certainly already has access to 'encrypted' accounts from Apple. The difference is that that access is probably not lawful, which means they need to engage in parallel construction as is already regularly done in the US [3] if/when using it in court cases. All this change would likely do is enable them to use the data directly.

I felt an obligation to excessively site stuff here, because I find it bemusing anybody in tech can take such articles or topics at face value.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction#By_the_U...
Data Analysis Showdown: Comparing SQL, Python, and esProc SPL
> because everybody is using VSCode now

Maybe I'm living under the rock, but I know only 2-3 people that are using VSCode
Which has worse no real pattern matching like Java has?
Theia embraced the Monaco editor. Are extending it and now are trying to extinguish VS Code.
Easy Open Source Dev Opportunity
I created an Open Source REST API to validate/transform data with readable regex.
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Let's make data validation/transformation easy for once.

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well they accepted these people into their country in the first place
I gave the domain Wordpress.com to Matt 20 years ago. This domain is worth millions according to some estimators online, but I gave it to him for Free to support open source.

He then sued me and I lost my job, my house, and almost my marriage.

I do not think anyone could hate Matt more than I did. I went to therapy for years, but eventually learned forgiveness.

I am confused about what is going on with Wordpress. It does look like Matt is acting like a dick.

But I am not sure he is wrong.

Matt may have a right to protect Wordpress - FOR THE COMMUNITY.
It looks like Matt’s post is about being betrayed. I know how that feels.

I love open source. I am confident that we will learn from this, and hopefully Wordpress community will be able to move on.
> That table is saying that if you are an underrepresented minority, you are expected to do 40% worse on the SAT/ACT.

This is separate from the main point, but "underrepresented" minorities are defined by their lower performance on the SAT, so 0.4 isn't impressive at all for that cell.

Also, you've made a gross mathematical error; "you are expected to do 40% worse on the test" is a statement about the effect size, not the correlation.
After feeding the bear now threatning us with nuclear annihilation, Germany does not have any legitimacy when it comes to policing critical voices
Indeed. It’s somewhat funny (and sad) how the average educated person simply denies this or says it doesn’t matter.

For example, in the Dutch constitution, freedom of speech, religion, privacy et cetera are all qualified “except as restricted by law.” [0] That is to say: if the government passes a law restricting your speech, religion or privacy, that will typically be Constitutionally acceptable. Meanwhile, in the US, the Constitution is absolute, to rather extreme ends. The Dutch constitution is of course rather obvious in its weaknesses, but there are other signs for other countries aside from the text itself. One good method is to take a look at the mechanisms of enforcement of the Constitution and measures of Constitutionality. For a good laugh: https://www.advocatie.nl/nieuws/rechter-mag-wetten-langs-de-...

[0] https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2023-02-22 For example: “Ieder heeft, behoudens bij of krachtens de wet te stellen beperkingen, recht op onaantastbaarheid van zijn lichaam.” or “Everyone has, subject to restrictions under the law, the right to inviolability of his body.” Most other rights include such a provision.
And this might be the big issue with solar power and also EV's. If enough people switch to solar and are no longer paying into the grid at a certain point it will become unprofitable to maintain a large grid. The same is true at this point for EV's. Buying gas we pay road tax. So not buying gas is going to reduce that tax collected. At a certain point they will need to change the way that tax is collected. Probably some sort of tax on the distance an EV drives or perhaps some other method.
Whoa, I think I remember using something like this on BeOS a looong time ago

Quick googling, it might have been SilverWing: https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/

Super cool, downloaded and kinda lost now, but excited to explore
I'm curious how you get an AI to give you the code you want rather than the code it thinks you want.
Meta has an operating margin of 54%.

For comparison, the average tech company runs on far slimmer margins. How does Meta manage such an edge?

The answer lies in their own Annual Report—specifically, the litigation section. They’re facing accusations of regulatory arbitrage, avoiding compliance costs, tracking users outside their platform, over-extracting personal data, inflating ad prices, manipulating ad auctions, under-investing in human moderators, shifting blame to contractors and gig workers, and aggressive tax avoidance.

If you’re going to teach people about what’s possible—like the broken window parable—it's crucial to show the full picture. Otherwise, they remain blind to the choices being made to sustain their narrative.
I've been looking forward to doing that work, actually. Originally it was my impression that for instance FreeBSD required libc as the stable syscall ABI, however David Chisnall informed me that in fact, the syscall ABI is stable! That's great news as far as I'm concerned because it's quite handy for cross-compilation and static executable distribution.
> Many who advocate for cutting NIH’s indirect cost rate have long argued that universities are willing to accept lower rates from philanthropic foundations. Today’s NIH notice, for example, notes the Gates Foundation limits indirect costs to 10%, while the Packard Foundation sets the ceiling at 15%. But such reasoning is based on “perverse logic,” Corey says, because foundations use their funds to increase the productivity of research infrastructure already paid for by the federal government. And universities say they are often willing to accept foundation grants that carry low overhead rates because those grants amount to a relatively small fraction of their funding.

This detail is worth highlighting. NIH has traditionally borne the bulk of indirect costs, allowing non-profits to issue grants with low indirect costs. Slashing NIH’s indirect costs will force research institutions to seek funds elsewhere or become financially unviable.
I've heard of this debate but haven't heard an argument of adoption from a FOSS perspective. From Wikipedia on Minix [0]:

> MINIX was initially proprietary source-available, but was relicensed under the BSD 3-Clause to become free and open-source in 2000.

That is a full eight years after this post.

Also from Wikipedia on Linux becoming FOSS [1]:

> He [Linus Torvalds] first announced this decision in the release notes of version 0.12. In the middle of December 1992 he published version 0.99 using the GNU GPL.

So this post was essentially right at the cross roads of Linux going from some custom license to FOSS while MINIX would remain proprietary for another eight years, presumably long after it had lost to Linux.

I do wonder how much of an effect, subtle or otherwise, the licensing helped or hindered adoption of either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
I thought the same, but then I came across a post asking what happens when all the seniors retire?
It's betting that the size of Apple's UK market is larger than the impact Apple's privacy marketing has on its worldwide market. Those odds aren't obvious to me
Zhang – a plain text double-accounting tool which is compatible with beancount
Coincidentally that site you just linked also hosts one of the longest-running Hotline servers still online: https://preterhuman.net/server.php / https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php :)

(server address is hl.preterhuman.net )
It’s still not quite the same thing because it feels like you’re literally sitting at the remote machine; the code completion is there using an LSP that doesn’t have to pay a network cost, executables run locally which means you can be on a local Windows and remote Linux or vice-versa, and all in a super easy to use package that auto-restores the session whenever you come back even if you’ve put the machine to sleep.

By comparison, I’d say doing things over sshfs and terminals is the fiddling part.
You don't have the slightest clue what you're saying. He took over in 2012.
This is cool. If you haven't already, you might like to take a look at Du Chinese and The Chairman's Bao. They might provide ideas or inspiration.

Also the 'clip reader' feature in Pleco is decent.

Also, supporting simplified as well as traditional might increase your potential audience.
VSC allows to debug the remote program, set breakpoints etc. How can you do it with just the editor?
Gravitron: Gravity is your only weapon
I can't tell you how much I love that this post has generated 156 comments and I have nothing to rebut about any of them. I'm sure they're all right!
Consumers Are Flocking to Rent Chickens in Effort to Combat Rising Egg Prices
The red hat.
Huh, an arbitrary tax from a remote sovereign. Sounds familiar.
I think it's only necessary because extensions may need to run client side. Not sure if that means the extension needs to be published on their marketplace site.
That, or,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN1Foddvez8
People don't like repetitive topics - that's a much simpler explanation and things get flagged for repetitiveness all the time. The source doesn't really matter, after the Nth DOGE article, if Kabosu herself descended from doge heaven and wrote a DOGE article, it would probably get a lot of flags.
Ask HN: How do you make auto-graded coding screens that test humans (not AI)?
We're finally seeing that all of the answers to our company's top-of-the-funnel coding screen are nearly identical. It's fine that people are using LLMs, but it's clear that the value of our current screening questions are diminished. Once you have a small pool of candidates, you can interview them in person, ask questions that deal with ambiguity, etc. There are many opportunities to deconvolve the human from the AI.

But, what techniques are people using for automated screening to evaluate technical/programming skills?
Edit: paid internships
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As a point. It does not need to just be 80 old people in this equation. Welfare, unemployment and theft all play a part in this equation.
I love the name of this paper. It's a play on Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach
Station staff do it at EOL.
Amazing. Interesting file names on hl.preterhuman.net. Wow, Java games for Nokia phones! This is so cool. Thank you
I had luck with it. I was hired from the February 2022 HN post and enjoyed working there for three years before we were acquired. I posted last week in February 2025, hoping for similar results.
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Luckily, society broadly creates more than enough wealth and resources to provide for you, even when you are disabled or elderly.

In modern society, if you are a “sink,” it is solely because the system is designed to make you that way – perhaps the wealthiest among us are able to pay a bit less on taxes, in exchange for your caretaker not getting monetary support. For example. I reckon gutting social security would be very profitable to some.

The government’s job is to be useful, and supporting those who can’t support themselves – like the elderly and disabled – is very literally the most noble and useful thing it can do.