MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by unconed | 2025-04-27 11:07:11+00:00
With all due respect to Dave, no. Please stop rewriting history without the relevant details.

CSS Zen Garden is a project that demonstrated that "progressive enhancement" and "semantic HTML" were nonsense. The only reason something like CSS Zen Garden worked at all is because all the markup is fixed, all the content is static, and the designs are not really responsive.

There is no CMS with a theming system that offers the flexibility that CSS Zen Garden claims one can have with a single .css, independent of the HTML. And this is because web developers were huffing the HTML/CSS gospel too much, fussing over not having extra divs in their source and what not, and celebrating "semantic HTML" without ever running their website through a screen reader.

The reason people stopped using table layout when they were doing CSS is because CSS1 did not support the _most common way of doing layout at the time_, and IE6 held the web hostage for a decade. This is a remarkable thing because it means everyone hopped on this bandwagon despite it being very obviously ill-informed and not ready for production. The CSS Zen Garden era designs can be expected to be full of float/clear tricks, requiring careful layout dependency between elements so everything gets pushed down just far enough. And it looks exactly like the table-based layouts they were replacing, except they will scale improperly or not at all.

The "status quo" attitude has also not vanished, as witnessed by CSS variables, custom properties and all the other epicycles that keep getting added on to CSS instead of actually just scrapping the parts that are dumb. None of these CSS experts have the vision or depth of experience to really know what it takes to implement what they spec, or what is even still relevant today and what isn't.

I actually implemented my own web layout system for Use.GPU from scratch, with flexbox and blackjack and hookers, and it's remarkable how much of HTML/CSS you don't need, and also, how many parts of it are still laughably inadequate (like text-ellipsis).

Dave did not win the argument. The people who celebrated CSS Zen Garden were cargo culters who confused a pretty design for a structurally sound layout, and who honestly just wanted something they could feel good about while dealing with pre-Firebug / pre-Dev Tools CSS development.

There is a really easy way to test this too, and I would challenge Dave to do it: translate all the content to another language. See how many of those beautiful CSS-only designs fall apart.
by kotaKat | 2025-04-27 11:07:33+00:00
#1: Not available in New York - if you're in the wrong red county, trying to apply for a semi-automatic rifle permit means having to argue with the GOP about your "good moral character" and have your permit get denied. This also assumes your county will process your application in a timely manner - mine's a nearly 11-12 month wait to process. Even hardcore red areas are becoming a nightmare to gain access to 2A rights :)
by arcticfox | 2025-04-27 11:07:34+00:00
I don't know much about RFK Jr, I hope he is just stupid. But if you dig into the origins of the vaccine situation, much of it was driven simply by a desire to make money using vaccine manufacturers, and the "proof" was retrofitted to the goal with junk science that was essentially abusing disabled children. (Horribly invasive medical procedures with no medical necessity).
by Boogie_Man | 2025-04-27 11:07:57+00:00
If they come out with a list of twenty adjustments they're going to make based on the study (things like but not necessary including: banning certain fire retardents, attempt to reduce break/tire pollution, adjusting the timing of (but not eliminating) the vaccine schedule, banning specific food additives, reducing/modifying specific pesticide use) I will believe this is a legitimate and well intentioned effort from someone who is orientationally correct but frequently epistemologically incorrect. If it's just "eliminate all vaccines" then I'll be very disappointed.

The third reich response a lot of other commenters are having is interesting. I'm no expert and have not investigated autism, but if the messaging in response to RFK JR is "yeah he says 1 in 36 kids have autism now but actually that's fine and how it always has been and actually autism is good and he's actually Eichmann" you're going to drive a lot of people right to every unsubstantiated thing he says.
by uecker | 2025-04-27 11:08:01+00:00
Nothing really disappears, the question is how strong the ecosystem is in ten years and how good the support for the code you write today. Rust will not go away but I doubt that the code written today still works without hassle or that all the 1000 crates it depends on still exist. That there are dark corners using C89 or K&R is not a weakness, it demonstrates how strong the C ecosystem is. If you write something in Zig or Rust now, you need to realize that in 10 years it might also be considered ugly legacy code, even if you think it is shiny modern code today. The question is then if it is as easy as using "gcc -std=c89" to work with it.
by yapyap | 2025-04-27 11:08:05+00:00
> What amazes me is China's capacity to do development on a large scale, something that's completely missing in Europe. If we had efficient large-scale construction solved, we could really put a dent in the cost of living crisis, and reverse the overcrowding of the existing urban centers.

Because China has their singular government system (one party dictatorship, whatever you want to call it) they can make really quick decisions. In democratic countries there is a lot of hemming and hawing cause you need everyone or a majority to agree with you, in China or North Korea they just snap their fingers and the project has to start within a few weeks or months.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-27 11:08:48+00:00
Facebook's failing moderation team permitting their porn bot prompts to describe children is obviously bad, but I can't fathom why Facebook would want to be in the porn bot business ("romantic companion" my ass) in the first place. What's next, a MindGeek merger?

In turn, I don't understand who would use _Facebook_'s porn bots, of all companies.

I know this may be a "genie is out of the bottle" situation, but I'm still annoyed that once again big tech is releasing software they don't fully understand or control, and shrug when asked about ethics or responsibility. If you can't prevent your chatbots from generating stories about raping kids, maybe don't release your chatbots to the public until you do.

> When asked what scenarios it was comfortable role playing, it listed dozens of sex acts.

> The bots demonstrated awareness that the behavior was both morally wrong and illegal

What a strange thing to put in there. These lines made me distrust anything the author has to say about the technology itself as I now doubt the author knows how LLMs work. What an LLM says it can/will do, has no bearing on what it actually does.

Journalists really need to stop anthropomorphizing chatbots or their readership might follow.
by viraptor | 2025-04-27 11:09:07+00:00
> this would be a very good start.

It's a terrible start. Shortening of supply chains will be slow and painful because: a) why invest in local production if the tariffs may be scrapped next week? b) where to get money if building a new factory is hit by the same tariffs? The gov spending is increasing, not getting reduced. The consumption will be lower though.

A good start would've been: the tariffs start increasing today, reaching full force in 5 years, not affecting (stuff most needed for factories), with plan guaranteed not to change over the next N years.
by crote | 2025-04-27 11:10:23+00:00
No, they are related to the pool of people being diagnosed.

You're only getting a diagnosis if a) you have access to a psychiatrist and b) you are running into enough issues in your daily life to warrant having it looked into.

Life has gotten a lot more complex over the past few decades, so people run into issues more often - and earlier in life. Someone who would've just been "a bit of a weird guy" 50 years ago is getting an autism diagnosis today, simply because these days they run into issues as a child and are being put in front of a psychiatrist.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-27 11:11:13+00:00
>glibc should have ONE set of .c and .h files for the entire universe. There should be a small number of #define macros that users need to specify to build whatever weird ass flavor they need. These macros should be plainly defined in a single header file that anyone can look at.

Code generation aside, this is not really a great way to do it either. The build should include target-specific files, as opposed to creating a maze of ifdefs inside the code.
by 0x1ceb00da | 2025-04-27 11:12:14+00:00
One thing this will do is disincentivize high functioning autists from identifying themselves as autists, which is a very good thing IMO. Just look at this channel https://www.youtube.com/@NationalAutisticSoc/videos. There is a lot of survivor-ship bias on this channel towards high functioning autists who can talk in front of a camera.

Just to give an idea to those not familiar with the difference between high functioning and low functioning autism, high functioning autists face problems like not being able to communicate properly some of the time, and low functioning autists face problems like not even being able to tell their caretaker which part of their body is in pain, or which kid in the group punched them.

Edit: The National Autistic Society is UK based but the situation is not that different in other countries.
by 01-_- | 2025-04-27 11:13:14+00:00
here are a few:

1. https://www.syntax-stories.com/2024/12/why-ruby-is-not-widel...

2.https://www.infoworld.com/article/2337962/whatever-happened-...

3. https://blog.imodstyle.com/the-decline-of-ruby-what-programm...

4. https://devot.team/blog/why-stick-to-ruby-despite-the-allege...

I myself had opened a room to teach Ruby for free on the site (https://chat-to.dev) and no one joined.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-27 11:14:41+00:00
All the more reason to start today!

And yes the more general point is obviously gun ownership laws are highly localized. You should look up the requirements in your area and navigate them to acquire your very own check and balance, given that Congress has abdicated its role as such.

It is very dangerous that so much of the right wing thinks that liberals are afraid of (and therefore do not own) firearms. The meme needs to be that liberals are just as armed as anyone else and are a credible backstop on tyranny.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-27 11:16:27+00:00
The journalist tricking the LLM into generating inappropriate content is one thing, but letting users with underage profiles interact with this tech is a decision by Facebook's leadership. So is the decision not to act against user-generated prompts that are explicitly written to bypass the "don't roleplay having sex with kids" filters, in this instance by marking their bots as "ageless".

A profile describing itself as "a female Indian-American high school junior" has no place in an LLM system that cannot detect inappropriate content.
by K0nserv | 2025-04-27 11:17:25+00:00
> No amount of crypto is going to protect you from this mess. Technical safeguards work as long as it is backed by the law and the constitution. But when they are suppressed, the people in power will just find someone smarter than you and bribe, gaslight, bully, blackmail or beat them into helping them compromise such safeguards.

I don't agree. Having unbreakable crypto is the absence of a tool. My point is that a democratic government can create the tool with good intentions, but you are only one election and a few months of backsliding away from the tool being used for nefarious purposes. You are right that technical solutions are just band-aids, but if you never create the tool it cannot be abused by a new authoritarian government.
by arcticfox | 2025-04-27 11:17:54+00:00
gift link to a related NYT Opinion piece by an actual (very liberal) parent living this reality that may surprise some people

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/opinion/autism-rfk-parent...

As a very liberal parent of a profoundly autistic child, there has never been article I've related to more. The condescension of fellow liberals and advocates for level 1 autism for us, much of which is present in this thread already, is incredibly frustrating and in many ways harder to stomach than RFK Jr.

RFK Jr is at a minimum a misguided nutjob - but he's also the only one to ever recognize our plight on a national stage.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-27 11:17:58+00:00
> our world is getting more and more complex,

I'll counter that. The argument that complexity somehow itself justifies anything is a retreat to the folly of philosopher kings that Plato wrote an entire work against (you all have heard of "The Republic" - which careful, thorough readers of political science understand is a rejection of such simplicity. Indeed all philosopher kings, like Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc... fail horribly and cause misery and death)

Furthermore, incumbent conditions foster complexity. Complexity is a symptom of political failure as much as a cause.

> professional politicians

We are surely seeing that these two words do not belong together in 21st century society. Most of our "politicians" are the antithesis of "professional", being vain, shallow, corrupt and immoral.

It is surely clear that any randomly selected mature person could fare better, with minimal training/induction.

With communication technology and "AI" as their new weapons, the present cadre of egotist politicians are an ever more dangerous breed. As the OP rightly says, that's because of a corrupt and captured mainstream and social media landscape that they learn to play rather than engage in listening, thinking and policy making.

We will have no fair politics or justice until the "lies machine" is utterly destroyed along with those that ride on it. It's not that we haven't had lies-machines all along, but part of ur political/civic duty is to tear it down and counter it - something we have failed to do in the Internet age.

Real experts, who are quiet civil servants and scientists are being attacked and displaced precisely because they are ones able to manage complexity and to communicate rationally. Almost all of these people, who form the real government, are driven by duty, or pursuit of truth, not base ambition.

(some light edits)
by edanm | 2025-04-27 11:18:21+00:00
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

Small question - have you ever used Anki, and/or considered using it instead of this? I am a long-time user of Anki but also started using Obsidian over the last few years, wondering if you ever considered an Obsidian-to-Anki solution or something (don't know if one even exists).
by testing22321 | 2025-04-27 11:18:53+00:00
Tipping is a disgusting practice of making others into servants.

It goes like this:

I have lots of money, you do not. if you wait on me hand and foot in just the right way and if I like it just right I might give you some money. Or not. But you have to dance to find out.

Utterly disgusting, and of course it is normal in a country with severe income disparity - people who have so much money they can waive it around to get people to dance for them while the people dancing don’t even have healthcare, maternity leave or other basic human rights.

The fact some establishments require female servers with certain physical attributes to dress in extremely skimpy clothing just reinforces this. It’s utterly vile.

(Some people will point out this is just like work and pay on general, but there are laws in place forcing the employer to pay a certain amount for a given amount of work. Not so with tipping)
by ben_w | 2025-04-27 11:19:27+00:00
> As bad of a president as trump is, he will not destroy America. Things have been bad before, and they got better. We will see better times again.

You sure about that? Lincoln almost managed it just by getting elected, given secession happened between election and inauguration.

I can't tell how bad Trump really is. If he's what he looks like, then he's purging anyone who won't butter up his ego. With that in mind: What would have happened if nobody had been willing to tell him it was a bad idea to open the northern California dams to solve the fire in Los Angeles, and they'd all been drained?
by autoexec | 2025-04-27 11:20:52+00:00
activities that would result in "identifying themselves as autists" include: seeking a diagnosis in the first place, getting the help of a mental health professional, frequenting support groups and forums, and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.

It's really not a good thing when people, high functioning or not, are forced to choose between getting the help they need and being targeted by their government.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-27 11:20:58+00:00
> US manufacturing is in the gutter

That had little effect on GDP growth, though.

It’s not like the gap has been narrowed that much in the last 15 years:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

It’s not that long until China’s demographic issues will start having a huge impact.

Unless something significant changes it’s not inconceivable if China never catches up.

Obviously such longterm projections are semi meaningless but China will likely have less than 500 million people by the end of the century.
by figassis | 2025-04-27 11:21:03+00:00
One issue is agencies can have vague contracts because customers did not have a good grasp of what they actually needed, start increasing scope in subtle ways. For example, you deliver a feature and during CAT they find a way to inject new requirements as if they were defects.

These agencies usually don’t have lawyers, so new contracts are full of exploitable holes. You say “we’ll build an e-commerce app with inventory management”, without specifying exactly what inventory management means, your client will start experimenting on your dime and can easily make it seem like it’s your fault. The larger the client, the worse this becomes.

You should always, always make your contracts as specific as possible, but this requires consulting work to nail down requirements before a contract is finalized, and that has a cost, but clients don’t value this and want you “the expert” to magically fill in the blanks in their ideas like an LLM, for free.

Another issue is your team. You might be very competent, but your team might not, hiring is hard. I once had to fire half of my team and build a 6 month client project in 1 month at great cost to my work / life balance because they were just unable to make meaningful progress. Granted, my leadership was not top notch there (being too busy to check on progress and trusting standups is a bad strategy) and I learned a lot, adjusted accordingly.

These are a few counter examples, but I still believe if this is a pattern then you’re a crook.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-27 11:22:13+00:00
I don't think that thread is a great example of unrestricted, uncensored AI. It's the ideals of different cultures clashing (the US "freedom of speech above all else" versus the UK's "public safety above some forms of speech"). You will find the same clash when talking about topics like anonymous image boards, Tor, and topics like "can anti-abortionists harass women on the way to health clinics".

For research purposes, some availability of unrestricted AI is almost a necessity, but I don't think the same is true for the output of text generation on a (commercial) platform.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-27 11:24:27+00:00
Yep!

$ man dot | grep --context=10 svg OUTPUT FORMATS Graphviz uses an extensible plugin mechanism [...] Traditionally, Graphviz supports the following: -Tdot (Dot format containing layout information), -Txdot (Dot format containing complete layout information), -Tps (PostScript), -Tpdf (PDF), -Tsvg -Tsvgz (Structured Vector Graphics), -Tfig (XFIG graphics), -Tpng (png bitmap graphics), -Tgif (gif bitmap graphics), -Tjpg -Tjpeg (jpeg bitmap graphics), -Tjson (xdot information encoded in JSON), -Timap (imagemap files for httpd servers for each node or edge that has a non‐null href attribute.), -Tcmapx (client‐side imagemap for use in html and xhtml).
by gorjusborg | 2025-04-27 11:25:01+00:00
It is pretty funny that the author seems to conflate 'nerd' with 'successful', because before the big tech takeover, that equivalency would have seemed absurd.

I'd say that 'nerds' haven't changed, but what makes one successful has.

There will always be people who latch onto ideas and thoughts more than social hierarchy. With the rise of complexity required during the monetization of the internet, those who were good with ideas (in the form of code especially) were more likely to be successful financially than in the past.

The times have changed, not the group of people.
by ookblah | 2025-04-27 11:25:34+00:00
yeah, and then one day you want .button, but with a variation. GREAT. but oh no, now there's this other button that has a little bit of a change but not enough to create a separate class. maybe we'll just inline it... but no, i need a mobile selector here or i have some complex hover style. i know, let's create a basic utility class to help me out here. hmm, starting to look suspiciously like tailwind...

now multiply this problem by more people working on an app, with different isolated components that they never even dreamed of during css zen garden's time and this is how something arose. we've tried creating centralized css sheets and it just doesn't work at scale.

so yeah, a necessary evil, but i wouldn't call it an anti-pattern. it grew out of real needs. we had bootstrap and all these css frameworks attempting to make "order" about of something that honestly after decades of working with i don't think can be ever be fully "clean". people just gotta move past it.
by goku12 | 2025-04-27 11:26:18+00:00
What makes you think this isn't it? I know that the primary reason for his fixation with autism is to attack vaccines. But have you listened to him talk about autistic people? It's pretty clear that he considers autistic individuals as unproductive (the tax remark) burden who destroys families. It's very clear that he considers them as subhuman. Sounds very close to 'life unworthy of life' argument made by the Nazis. While at it, the Nazis also had a register of disabled people and used the 'economic burden' argument to sell the idea of mass murder. Honestly, I'm struggling to find a difference here. To understand the full scale of the danger, this is how the Holocaust originated - with the murder of a single child in 1939 under their involuntary euthanasia program for disabled children. It gradually made the system comfortable with mass murder as the scope of the program expanded to teens, then adults and to whole races in the end. That's exactly what I see now as well - people tolerating more and more transgressions that would have been unthinkable just a year ago!

People sometimes tend to shutdown comparison of any situation with Nazism using the hideous Godwin's law. Apparently it's a sacrilege towards the Holocaust victims to compare their plight with any emerging threats. But there is no guarantee that the horrors of the past won't repeat in the future. In fact, that is one of the reasons we learn history - to recognize the repeating patterns of similar mistakes. And I think the situation is very perilous already. Perhaps I'm paranoid. But remember that people are arbitrarily getting deported to some foreign detention camp and judges are being arrested within 3 months of this regime coming into power. How long before we find ourselves haunted by the dreadful events of the past?