MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattskr | 2025-04-11 13:47:05+00:00
I just want to pile in that the old netflix layout was top tier. I LOVED it and because of it, stumbled onto tons of awesome movies I never heard of at the time and were actually interesting. Their algorithm back then was the best. I never had a problem finding movies to ACTUALLY WATCH. The whole reason I quit my subscription a few years ago was for the fact I end up burning up time "looking" for something to watch. Then don't. I stopped paying for the "movie browsing simulator" a little after The Witcher 1st season. A few months ago, I got another month because I thought it might be better. Ha. No.

In this case, it's less "faster horse" and more "quit with the stupid fucking song and dance, and give me the damn thing I paid for without all this extra stupid bullshit that makes the experience worse."
by calvinmorrison | 2025-04-11 13:47:05+00:00
they're a order of magnitude higher for some reasons though. I work in consulting, and occasionally larger enterprises approach our firm. We almost always decline because their requirements from vendor screening, to change review boards, to just the amount of sheer meetings it takes to enact a change to a title change on the website home page - its not worth it.

A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away' number and they took it, and then i had to deal with the insanity of F500 business...
by qsort | 2025-04-11 13:48:08+00:00
Agreed, the article's perspective is much narrower and I think it makes total sense.

Previous no-code tools could work but required total buy-in. On the other hand you can have Claude generate a small throwaway frontend that relies on Web technologies you'd be using anyway.

My mental model for this is "Excel++". It has similar strengths (very powerful, users don't need developers to write every last line) and similar weaknesses (easy to make a mess or go down blind alleys if you don't know what you're doing).
by Pxtl | 2025-04-11 13:48:35+00:00
The former just aren't practical for small business and home consumers, though. Browsers just don't have good workflow for TOFU.

I agree on the latter, but that means your IoT devices being accessible through both networks and being able to discriminate which requests are coming from the insecure interface and which are coming from secure admin, which isn't practical for lay users to configure as well. I mean, a router admin screen can handle that but what about other devices?

I know it seems pedantic, but this UI problem is one of many reasons why everything goes through the Cloud instead of our own devices living on our own networks, and I don't like that controlling most IoT devices (except router admin screens) involves going out to the Internet and then back to my own network. It's insecure and stupid and violates basic privacy sensibilities.

Ideally I want end users to be able to buy a consumer device, plug it into their router, assign it a name and admin-user credentials (or notify it about their credential server if they've got one), and it's ready and secure without having to do elaborate network topology stuff or having to install a cert onto literally every LAN client who wants to access its public interface.
by jmull | 2025-04-11 13:48:52+00:00
If people can't find a sustainable business model around that thing you want, it's just not going to be widely available.

It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't seem to think so.

You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale businesses, which are always going to gravitate toward the center of large markets. It's great when it happens, but it's basically just luck when it does.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-11 13:49:39+00:00
I think the problem with vibe coding though is it’s not bi-directional, like if you have deep domain knowledge, unless you know how to code, how do you know that the code it just created actually does what you want it to, especially as it gets more complex and your new code changes old code. You could ask, but the devil is often in the details, especially if your domain is highly technical.
Show HN: GitHub Action to visualize ubiquitous language and share it with AI
by RyoMuramatsu | 2025-04-11 13:50:00+00:00
Ubi Doc is an open-source GitHub Action that automatically extracts ubiquitous language definitions from your code’s doc comments and generates an interactive HTML table.

Why Ubi Doc? In Domain-Driven Design (DDD), maintaining a shared understanding of domain terminology is crucial. However, keeping this language documented and synchronized across a team can be challenging.

Ubi Doc solves this by:

Visualizing your ubiquitous language using GitHub Actions to generate an easy-to-navigate HTML report.

Sharing your ubiquitous language with AI-powered tools like Cline and GitHub Copilot, enhancing code assistance and improving development efficiency.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-11 13:50:37+00:00
Current budget appears to be (via https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cut... )

> $5.3 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts (the combination of $3.8 trillion of tax cuts assumed to be “costless” under a current policy baseline plus $1.5 trillion in additional deficits permitted), deficit increases of $521 billion on defense and immigration spending, a minimum of $4 billion in spending cuts, and an increase in the debt limit of up to $5 trillion.

So savings plus new borrowing will be funded to tax cuts, which will likely prioritize those already on higher incomes, and corporations.
by mbirth | 2025-04-11 13:50:43+00:00
I’m someone that grew up with AltaVista and thus I’m pretty good with my search terms and modifiers. And I often remember specific phrases from the websites I’m looking for. However, Google is more and more optimised for people NOT knowing what they’re looking for and is now even ignoring “quotes” for exact terms unless you switch it to verbatim mode. Which is a shame.

I’m mostly using my personal SearXNG instance and am still finding what I’m looking for.

On systems where I don’t have access to that, I’m currently trying Mojeek and experiment with Marginalia. Both rather traditional search engines.

I’m not a big fan of using LLMs for this. I rather punch in 3-5 keywords instead of explaining to some LLM what I’m looking for.
by fourneau | 2025-04-11 13:51:08+00:00
To this point, I've been using Qobuz as an alternative and it's recommendation engine is laughably bad, but the experience is somehow better. I'll get the most random songs pop up in the list, and sometimes it's a very pleasant surprise.

In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.
by dwater | 2025-04-11 13:51:13+00:00
The trend for decades has been shrinking the public workforce and replacing them with contractors, because Republicans have said that the private sector is more efficient. So the average government office worker is not a tech, they are a contract officer. The government does not have these skills internally at the level necessary, if they want this work done they have to contract it out. And if these contracts get cancelled that money will get spent with another contractor, and given how this administration has been acting it will a contractor that bends the knee and not one that the president has publicly voiced animosity for.
by kshri24 | 2025-04-11 13:51:15+00:00
It is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Coined by author Michael Crichton:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
by seec | 2025-04-11 13:51:19+00:00
It's not really a problem of "resistance", it's more about purchasing power, common and avoiding feeling ripped off.

People buy stuff competitively and that's it. There are modifiers, notably being rich enough that regular items prices make no difference to you, so you can buy all from your own country without affecting you too much.

But even if you are middle class, buying most items at a higher price just because they are from your country is just a waste of money from an individual utilitarian point of view. It directly affects people and they always favor that, even if in the long run doing so might have a second order effect that will affect them in worse ways.

Tariffs, taxations and special legislation is actually the only way to make some product competitive for your own country. Especially when they are a participant in the trade willing to take a hit just to corner the market. This is basically what China did for many things, so here we are...
by saketsarin | 2025-04-11 13:51:28+00:00
debugging is hard man, especially when the codebase is getting bigger

I try to create and manage a well-structured documentation so it's easier both for me and AI (i use cursor) to understand the codebase even if I look back at something after a few days

I know that I created this tool to help for debugging only, but i think it's about time i extend its capabilities to debug itself. would be fun lol
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-11 13:52:25+00:00
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp...

https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t...

“Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for it, but a scrappy startup founder just trying to save the world and get to Mars when desperate for government or Capital market support and intervention.
by pjerem | 2025-04-11 13:52:30+00:00
Or you are like me and you love having ideas, you love solving business and technical problems but you don't like the "execution" part.

Because from my experiment at "vibe coding", LLMs for code are good at following the rules, not at being intelligent. They are especially bad at keeping the "big picture" in their context.

In fact you can talk to your IA at the level of abstraction you want :

1 - You can ask it to create an entire app and, for sure, that'll be a black box full of unknown bugs.

2 - Or you can just give it precise instructions : "create the model for x entity with exactly those characteristics". "Now let's create the controller for the API but pay attention to this or that".

If you are good at describing things, LLMs are excellent at doing what you are already good at. They'll write exactly the code you would have wrote, they'll take care of the boilerplate, they'll self correct if needed except they'll do it in seconds while it would have took you hours between just typing the whole thing, debugging your own mistakes, going back and forth files, refactoring your implementation ...

Sure it takes more time than just asking "make me a snake game in pygame" but it also takes so much less time than writing it yourself.

Also, but that's only my personal experience, working with LLMs, even with a lot of iterations helps me a lot with staying in flow.
by InDubioProRubio | 2025-04-11 13:53:18+00:00
Usually, they recruit government office workers into this? They acquire domain knowledge in endless drudgery, then get a pay upgrade and get rehired as consultant? The whole machinery becomes a whole level more inefficient.

Van der Leyen was famous for squandering german defense budget to mc kinsey and co - who poached heads from the german rearmament office. National Defense related industries should be in general forbidden to hire consultants.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-11 13:53:30+00:00
>The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones

It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones", meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same experience across multiple markets.

SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
by darkhorse222 | 2025-04-11 13:53:39+00:00
That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact on the effect of those metrics.

You cannot paint by numbers.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-11 13:54:10+00:00
> no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly => "optimising" for typical user.

ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part. We've had it since the 19th century. We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long as judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" can be trotted out to prove that the "free market" is working and prices are low.
by kmacdough | 2025-04-11 13:54:24+00:00
Sure, spotify has maintained a near-complete catalogue where Netflix hasnt.

But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music, beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.

For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content, etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with regularity that truly match the vibe.

Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the value Pandora has provided for years.
by cess11 | 2025-04-11 13:55:00+00:00
If you want something similar to Ruby but more functional, try Elixir. The similarities are superficial but might be enough to ease you in.

Haskell is weird. You can express well defined problems with relative ease and clarity, but performance can be kind of wonky and there's a lot more ceremony than your typical Lisp or Scheme or close relative of those. F# can give you a more lispish experience with a threshold about as low as Haskell, but comes with the close ties to an atrocious corporation and similar to Clojure it's not exactly a first class citizen in the environment.

Building stuff in Lisp-likes typically don't entail the double programming languages of the primary one and a second one to program the type system, in that way they're convenient in a way similar to Ruby. I like the parens and how they explicitly delimit portions that quite closely relate to the AST-step in compilation or whatever the interpreter sees, it helps with moving things around and molding the code quickly.
by wholinator2 | 2025-04-11 13:56:00+00:00
See, this is the thing that I, as a non-founder, have trouble understanding. Presumably the product is started by an enthusiast, an enthusiast _for the product_. Is it just hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm over time? Is the sum of possible money just too desirable? If feels like we're on this unending treadmill towards constant enshittification of literally every single thing that I interact with on a daily basis. All of the apps on my phone eventually turn into shit piles, all of the business/work software I use is constantly moving towards bullshit, even the houses that I rent, the newer construction is noticeably shittier than the old houses. Wifi got better for a while but now appears to be backsliding to the point of maximum frustration that the user will take (while given no viable second choice).

Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
by gmuslera | 2025-04-11 13:56:08+00:00
There is something that comes before democracy, that is the ability to make good (for some definition of good) decisions. In theory all the affected by a decision should have its voice or vote on it, but not all have independent, faithful and complete information on it, really critical thinking, and try to have an unbiased view on the topic. More than age, sex, skin colour, economic status and social, place of living or family, those are more useful criteria.

In the age of AI and worldwide information networks, some of this could be provided, but still it won't be enough. Is still easy to put a bias on source information, and in practice that won't be so different from manipulation of social sectors.
by darkhorse222 | 2025-04-11 13:56:15+00:00
The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.

I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
by nkozyra | 2025-04-11 13:56:17+00:00
> it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can".

I think it's a little deeper than that. It's the democratization of capability.

If few people have the tools, the craftsman is extremely valuable. He can make a lot of money without a glut of knowledge or real skill. In general the people don't have the tools and skills to catch up to where he is. He is wealthy with only frontloaded effort.

If everyone has the same tools, the craftsman still has value, because of the knowledge and skillset developed over time. He makes more money because his skills are valuable and remain scarce; he's incentivized to further this skillset to stay above the pack, continue to be in demand, and make more money.

If the tools do the job for you, the craftsman has limited value. He's an artifact. No matter how much he furthers his expertise, most people will just turn the tool on and get good enough product.

We're in between phase 2 and 3 at the moment. We still test for things like algorithm design and ask questions in interviews about the complexity of approaches. A lot of us still haven't moved on to the "ok but now what?" part of the transition.

The value now is less knowing how the automation works and improving our knowledge of the underlying design, but how to use the tools in ways that produce more value than the average Joe. It's a hard transition for people who grew up thinking this was all you needed to get a comfortable or even lucrative life.

I'm past my SDE interview phase of life now and in seeking engineers I'm looking less for people who know how to build a version of the tool and more people who operate in the present, have accepted the change, and want to use what they have access to and add human utility to make the sum of the whole greater than the parts.

To me the best part of building software was the creativity. That part hasn't changed. If anything it's more important than ever.

Ultimately we're building things to be consumed by consumers. That hasn't changed. The creek started flowing in a different direction and your job in this space is not to keep putting rocks where the water used to go, and more accepting that things are different and you have to adapt.
by Alex3917 | 2025-04-11 13:56:18+00:00
> Does the world-class acoustics lab earn so much money, it can upkeep the industrial facility its housed in?

Obviously not, but there isn't much else the space can be used for. Power plants are extremely polluted because the PCBs from the turbines and transformers drip into the concrete floors and stay there forever, so these spaces generally can't be repurposed in any meaningful way.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-11 13:56:23+00:00
To be fair even with modern software bloat the overall experience is a lot better now than it was in the XP days. I think it's mainly due to SSDs. They were a huge step change in performance and we fortunately haven't regressed back to the slowness of the HDD era.

At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(
by heisenbit | 2025-04-11 13:56:51+00:00
The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the original product architecture and some of its value. I also think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with Jobs.
by diggan | 2025-04-11 13:57:13+00:00
> Whenever I hear someone talking about purely functional programming, no side effects, I wonder what kind of programs they are writing

Where have you ever heard anyone talk about side-effect free programs, outside of academic exercises? The linked post certainly isn't about 100% side-effect/state free code.

Usually, people talk about minimizing side-effects as much as possible, but since we build programs to do something, sometimes connected to the real world, it's basically impossible to build a program that is both useful and 100% side-effect free, as you wouldn't be able to print anything to the screen, or communicate with other programs.

And minimizing side-effects (and minimizing state overall) have a real impact on how easy it is to reason about the program. Being really carefully about where you mutate things, leads to most of the code being very explicit about what it's doing, and code only affects data that is close to where the code itself is, compared to intertwined state mutation, where things everywhere in the codebase can affect state anywhere.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-11 13:57:39+00:00
> Who is "we", what was the price, and what was the imagined reward?

Slow down and re-read.

>> You get: the knowledge that your function's output will only depend on its input.

>> You pay: you gotta stop using those for-loops and [i]ndexes, and start using maps, folds, filters etc.