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Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Affecting Usability

https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2025/stop-hiding-my-controls-hidden-interface-controls-are-affecting-usability
84•cxr•1h ago•25 comments

Local-first software (2019)

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
578•gasull•10h ago•185 comments

Cod Have Been Shrinking for Decades, Scientists Say They've Solved Mystery

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-cod-have-been-shrinking-dramatically-for-decades-now-scientists-say-theyve-solved-the-mystery-180986920/
100•littlexsparkee•5h ago•31 comments

Operators, Not Users and Programmers

https://jyn.dev/operators-not-users-and-programmers/
29•todsacerdoti•2h ago•6 comments

Optimizing Tool Selection for LLM Workflows with Differentiable Programming

https://viksit.substack.com/p/optimizing-tool-selection-for-llm
42•viksit•4h ago•11 comments

Techno-Feudalism and the Rise of AGI: A Future Without Economic Rights?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14283
30•lexandstuff•3h ago•5 comments

How to Network as an Introvert

https://aginfer.bearblog.dev/how-to-network-as-an-introvert/
29•agcat•3h ago•2 comments

Europe's first geostationary sounder satellite is launched

https://www.eumetsat.int/europes-first-geostationary-sounder-satellite-launched
161•diggan•10h ago•35 comments

What a Hacker Stole from Me

https://mynoise.net/blog.php
19•wonger_•2h ago•2 comments

macOS Icon History

https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history
126•ksec•9h ago•49 comments

Speeding up PostgreSQL dump/restore snapshots

https://xata.io/blog/behind-the-scenes-speeding-up-pgstream-snapshots-for-postgresql
89•tudorg•8h ago•16 comments

Atomic "Bomb" Ring from KiX (1947)

https://toytales.ca/atomic-bomb-ring-from-kix-1947/
55•gscott•3d ago•11 comments

X-Clacks-Overhead

https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
200•weinzierl•3d ago•43 comments

7-Zip 25.00

https://github.com/ip7z/7zip/releases/tag/25.00
28•pentagrama•2h ago•18 comments

The Calculator-on-a-Chip (2015)

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/the_calculator-on-a-chip.html
23•Bogdanp•8h ago•4 comments

The Right Way to Embed an LLM in a Group Chat

https://blog.tripjam.app/the-right-way-to-embed-an-llm-in-a-group-chat/
4•kenforthewin•2h ago•6 comments

WinUAE 6 Amiga Emulator

https://www.winuae.net/
37•doener•3h ago•5 comments

Haskell, Reverse Polish Notation, and Parsing

https://mattwills.bearblog.dev/haskell-postfix/
39•mw_1•3d ago•6 comments

Seine reopens to Paris swimmers after century-long ban

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/07/05/seine-reopens-to-paris-swimmers-after-century-long-ban_6743058_7.html
107•divbzero•7h ago•54 comments

The Hell of Tetra Master

https://xvw.lol/en/articles/tetra-master.html
4•zdw•3d ago•1 comments

Parametric shape optimization with differentiable FEM simulation

https://docs.pasteurlabs.ai/projects/tesseract-jax/latest/examples/fem-shapeopt/demo.html
12•dionhaefner•2d ago•2 comments

QSBS Limits Raised

https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2906/2025-06-25-qsbs-benefits-expanded-under-senate-finance-proposal
56•tomasreimers•13h ago•21 comments

What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon debate

https://blog.alexoglou.com/posts/database-decisions/
42•konsalexee•13h ago•66 comments

Gecode is an open source C++ toolkit for developing constraint-based systems (2019)

https://www.gecode.org/
60•gjvc•16h ago•13 comments

Solve high degree polynomials using Geode numbers

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00029890.2025.2460966
9•somethingsome•3d ago•2 comments

Is It Cake? How Our Brain Deciphers Materials

https://nautil.us/is-it-cake-how-our-brain-deciphers-materials-1222193/
15•dnetesn•2d ago•3 comments

Yet Another Zip Trick

https://hackarcana.com/article/yet-another-zip-trick
13•todsacerdoti•3d ago•2 comments

Pet ownership and cognitive functioning in later adulthood across pet types

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03727-9
57•bookofjoe•5h ago•16 comments

Build Systems à la Carte (2018) [pdf]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/build-systems.pdf
72•djoldman•3d ago•16 comments

Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

https://maalvika.substack.com/p/being-too-ambitious-is-a-clever-form
652•alihm•1d ago•183 comments
Open in hackernews

Path is a utility for working with paths

https://gitlab.com/SpyrjaGaldr/path
60•spyrja•2mo ago
A recent post here got me thinking about my own personal gripes with OS path handling offerings. So I've basically spent the passed couple of days working on a little project in an attempt to rectify the situation somewhat (in the spirit of cross-platform development). It should also work pretty well with existing tools. Let me know what you think, and feel free to open an issue or a pull-request if you have any problems getting it running it on your system. Enjoy!

Github link: https://github.com/SpyrjaGaldr/path

https://simonsafar.com/2025/path_as_system_call/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788728

Comments

vesinisa•2mo ago
What can this do that standard Unix find can not do?
autobodie•2mo ago
cross platform support, according to the description.
indemnity•2mo ago
fd exists https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
spyrja•2mo ago
Looks like it has a pretty good interface as well. It does however seem a just a bit too top-heavy (lot's of dependencies) not to mention a few more bugs than I particularly care for. But sheesh, 37K stars, it must be good for something!
blooalien•2mo ago
> ... "it must be good for something!"

It's good for finding files fast, and piping the resulting file paths into other tools for further action / handling. It does what it claims to do and does it well. :)

spyrja•2mo ago
I would say the default behaviour just isn't very ergonomic. Suppressing warnings for example requires piping to /dev/null (whereas `path` supresses permission warnings by default), if you want to limit the number of results you have to pipe the output to another command, getting xargs-like behaviour (obviously), or putting quotes around lines with embedded spaces, there are simply more hoops to jump through. It's much easier to type "path -sf .jpg .jpeg .png" than whatever would be required to get the `find` utility to do the same. (Or, say, finding all node_modules folders with "path -z n_m", it's just so much more satisfying.) But yes, these are mostly just syntactic-sugar kinds of issues. Aside from that (and perhaps the lack of cross-platform compatibility), I would say there is nothing inherently deficient about the `find` command. It's a work-horse which probably has more features than `path` does. But the latter really is growing on me. It is actually quite fun to use, if I may say so myself!
jimbokun•2mo ago
“A more ergonomic find command” is a nice elevator pitch.
pimlottc•2mo ago
From the name and description, I expected this to perform operations on file path strings, like convert relative to absolute (and vice versa), expand symlinks, convert unix paths to dos, etc. This is more like a find command.
spyrja•2mo ago
I don't see why it necessarily couldn't, my only question would be if there are really many actual use cases for such things? As far as symlinks go, I suppose being able to expand them (but not following them!) might be somewhat useful. But converting to DOS paths and vice-versa? That just doesn't seem very useful. Nevermind converting to-and-fro relative and absolute paths, I can't even imagine what the point of that would be. But perhaps I'm just not seeing the forest for the trees, as they say.
qrobit•2mo ago
As a rule of thumb I always make paths absolute when handling files in scripts. But then sometimes I need to copy a directory tree relative to $CWD somewhere else, so I convert them back to relative

Fish, being a great shell, provides this via `path` command[0]

[0]: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/path.html

jl6•2mo ago
> for the primary purpose of helping other programs know where to find stuff

Potential footgun to make a program rely on this to locate, say, a shared library (as in one of the examples), if there’s a possibility that someone has smuggled a malware’d version of it into, say, /tmp, since it defaults to searching the root directory.

spyrja•2mo ago
Kind of, but also kind of not. I mean if someone can smuggle a file into some random directory, chances are they have enough access to write directly to the "correct" folder to begin with. Personally I wouldn't execute or otherwise load any sort of executable content from a non-root directory (although certainly there are many people who wouldn't even think twice before doing such a thing). So it really just boils down to having a sane security-policy. Restrict searches with something like "path -d /usr *" and you are guaranteed not to scoop-up something that was world-writable in the first place. In fact in the example given in the README, that is precisely how that would have worked. Both /lib32 and /lib64 are owned by "root" and hence not a concern.
jl6•2mo ago
Naturally every footgun is guaranteed to be safe as long as you use it right :)

I wonder if a safer default would be to start searches at the current directory rather than the root directory?

spyrja•2mo ago
I did actually consider that at one point, but eventually decided against it because I felt would have meant a sacrifice in performance; first you'd do the local search, then start at the very top and recurse back down, checking every single entry against the local path to be sure that you don't do the local traversal all over again. Fortunately the code base is very clean and straight-forward, so it would be a fairly trivial excercise to just fork the repo and make those changes yourself to get that kind of behaviour.
spyrja•2mo ago
Well I ran a bunch of tests and it turns out that the performance wasn't actually impacted very much after all. So the changes are official. I also made some other adjustments to the default behaviour; if no pattern is specified then it just matches everything. In other words, "path -f" prints every regular file in the filesystem (starting in the current one). Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, otherwise I may not gone down that (decidedly satisfying) rabbit-hole!
account-5•2mo ago
I've been finding nushell's `ls` with a where clause is pretty good for this. There's also the `find` command too.