MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by specialist | 2025-05-03 15:11:52+00:00
> No inheritence.

Yup. Prefer composition over inheritance.

Such a hard sell during the heyday of OOAD. UML, Fusion, RUP, blahblahblah.

Having previous experience with LISP, it just seemed obvious, barely worth mentioning. Definitely set me apart from my colleagues.

FWIW: Our local design pattern study group tackled Arthur J. Riel's Object-Oriented Design Heuristics [1996] https://archive.org/details/objectorientedde0000riel https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Design-Heuristics-Art... Which might be the earliest published pushback against all that overwrought enterprisey ThoughtWorks-style brainrot.

> No ... dependency injection

Yes and: Mocks (mocking?) is a code stench. Just flip the ownership relationship(s). As Riel, and surely many others, have laboriously explained, to a mostly uncaring world.
by ThunderBee | 2025-05-03 15:12:24+00:00
The researchers are doing what nation states have been a̶t̶t̶e̶m̶p̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ doing for decades. People have no idea what’s c̶o̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ happened.

States have been astroturfing internet for a long time. It’s gotten exponentially worse since the Ukraine and Gaza wars though.
by somethingsome | 2025-05-03 15:12:26+00:00
I'm not an expert on this but IMO, from a language point of view, HTML is a markup language, it 'must' have no logic or processing. It is there to structure the information not to dynamically change it. Nor even to display it nicely.

The logic is performed elsewhere. If you were to have includes directly in HTML, it means that browsers must implement logic for HTML. So it is not 'just' a parser anymore.

Imagine for example that I create an infinite loop of includes, who is responsible to limit me? How to ensure that all other browsers implement it in the same way?

What happens if I perform an injection from another website? Then we start to have cors policy management to write. (iframes were bad for this)

Now imagine using Javascript I inject an include somewhere, should the website reload in some way? So we have a dynamic DOM in HTML?
by begemotz | 2025-05-03 15:12:54+00:00
For future me, I will add:

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

and one of the discussions of that article on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34796611
by jasongill | 2025-05-03 15:14:21+00:00
n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but not anything you're going to actually use.

The one frustration we have with n8n is trying to create custom "apps" (triggers or destinations for workflows). It's clear that the custom apps are an afterthought and have gone through multiple iterations of "here's the best way to do it", and you end up having to just keep trying until you get it to do what you want. Annoyingly, there's no way to manage custom apps in the interface itself - you have to create a Javascript module and then inject it into a .npm directory somewhere inside of the applications Docker container, which just doesn't feel very "professional".

If n8n would add some kind of admin interface for managing custom apps - especially just supporting basic use cases like specifying a REST API as a reusable custom app - it would be great, but still has a ways to go in terms of features (like better user permissions management as part of the lackluster SSO) before it's truly going to be an enterprise grade solution.

That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it and have heavily praised n8n once we created a custom app to let them integrate with our system.

Overall I would say n8n is worth trying if you need something like this, but expect to do some tinkering if you go beyond what it does out of the box.
by KomoD | 2025-05-03 15:14:26+00:00
It sounded interesting so I wanted to try it but I couldn't figure out how to actually use it.

It says "We need to know which languages you already know. At least one language needs to be selected as a reference (some symbol) language."

I couldn't figure out how to add that, I also couldn't see that symbol anywhere...

Checked settings, profile, home ("open search" and "create expression" do nothing), create, globe icon thingy... eventually gave up.
by aosaigh | 2025-05-03 15:14:35+00:00
I don’t understand what it is at first glance.

“Frictionless context switching” doesn’t really mean anything to me.

Spending a bit of time filling in the blanks, it appears it’s a presentation tool where you write slides via code?

You’re up against much more polished Markdown-based competition like iAPresenter, so you need to make the case for why markdown isn’t enough and a more expressive language is needed.
by AstroBen | 2025-05-03 15:15:09+00:00
> Startup investors often treat this like an odds game

Yeah, it's not free profit though. If you're not good at choosing investments you end up with 9 out of 10 failing, and 1 only making 2x. That's what I mean by there are no guarantees of it

It's very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair.. and miss the 9 other shots they took which lost money. Or hell the 90 other shots, and they're still in the hole overall

> When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.

Yeah these are definitely a different ballgame. Not sure where I stand on it - I don't know enough about the economics of that
by Henchman21 | 2025-05-03 15:15:32+00:00
Reading this the next day, my takeaway is that while you may not have intended to “diss”, you sure as fuck did it anyway.

You directly compared therapy to snake oil (palm reading). Then by implication determined that since you were average (and hence normal) no one else would need therapy unless they were, by implication abnormal.

I don’t believe I have ever been so thoroughly insulted online ever. Well done.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-03 15:15:49+00:00
I have started to use it recently, and I am finding it useful as a code assistant.

1) It has been doing a good job reviewing my code, and could suggest some interesting performance improvements in the past.

2) It is good to generate things such as simple REST endooints, that sort of thing. Saves you a bunch of typing, even if you have to do some finishing touches yourself.

3) I think it generally does a decent job writing tests as well.

4) Current models have gotten really good at helping me explore libraries I am not very familiar with.

The AI hype may be very annoying, and I am skeptical that in the long run it makes financial sense, but it is a productivity boost once you get the hang of it.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-03 15:16:05+00:00
The agricultural revolution has been very beneficial for feeding more people with less labor inputs, but I'm kind of skeptical of the claim that it led to weekends (and the 40hr workweek). Those seem to have come from the efforts of the labor movement on the manufacturing side of things (late 19th, early 20th century). Business interests would have continued to work people 12hrs a day 7 days a week (plus child labor) to maximize profits regardless of increasing agricultural efficiency.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-03 15:16:32+00:00
Inoculation rates are seldom going to be 100% as there's very good reasons for some people to not get a vaccine (e.g. immune-compromised individuals), so there's always going to be some level of the virus circulating and that's assuming that the vaccine is 100% effective which seems unlikely.

Of course, the vaccination levels are far less than 100%, but typically enough to prevent the virus spreading too far - the problem now seems to be that vaccination rates in some areas are dropping below the level that prevents it spreading.
by gokaygurcan | 2025-05-03 15:16:53+00:00
Before it was moved to GitHub Actions, we had a multiple-step deployment flow created in Node-Red, I believe you can achieve more or less the same thing with n8n. Never tried tho, it wasn't necessary anyway. If I really really simplify it's like, checkout, run some tests, deploy to a preview env, run some more tests, report back to slack.

On a personal level, I use it to automate booking a tennis court. It logs in, selects the date and time (pre-defined), adds a partner/opponent, books the court, pings a service that generates a calendar entry. If I decide to cancel the booking, it again pings the service and removes the calendar entry. I needed to bend some "nodes" to do what I need within the same workflow (such as create event runs once a day but update event runs in every 10 minutes).

In the past, I also used it to detect service interruptions with my ISP. I don't use that ISP anymore, so this workflow is redundant, but it was checking an API and if there's an entry, sending it as a push notification (via ntfy) to my phone.
by dimal | 2025-05-03 15:17:32+00:00
I know it’s possible to work around it, but that’s not the point. This is such a common use case that it seems worthwhile to pave the cowpath. We’ve paved a lot of cowpaths that are far less trodden than this one. This is practically a cow superhighway.

We’ve built an industry around solving this problem. What if, for some basic web publishing use cases, we could replace a complex web framework with one new tag?
by Mbwagava | 2025-05-03 15:18:22+00:00
Sure, but what does that have to do with AGI? I don't think anyone is proposing simulating an entire brain (yet, anyway).

Like you could have "AGI" if you simply virtualized the universe. I don't think we're any closer to that than we are to AGI; hell, something that looks like a human mouth output is a lot easier and cheaper to model than virtualize.
by Linux-Fan | 2025-05-03 15:18:39+00:00
Nowdays it is sometimes the other way around: Pages are all JavaScript so no good experience in the first place. I have encountered difficulty trying to get a proper “link” to something multiple times. Also, given that Browsers love to reduce/hide the address bar I wonder if it is really still that important a feature.

Of course "back then" this was an important feature and one of the reasons for getting rid of frames :)
by npteljes | 2025-05-03 15:19:16+00:00
>do any of my hard work actually matter?

Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself.

The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized.

But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-03 15:19:40+00:00
My experience tracks your experience. It seems as if there are a few different camps when it comes to LLMs, and that’s partly based on one’s job functions and/or context that available LLMs simply don’t handle.

I cannot, for example, rely on any available LLM to do most of my job, because most of my job is dependent on both technical and business specifics. The inputs to those contexts are things LLMs wouldn’t have consumed anywhere else. For example specific facts about a client’s technology environment. Or specific facts about my business and its needs. An LLM can’t tell me what I should charge for my company’s services.

It might be able to help someone figure out how to do that when starting out based on what it’s consumed from Internet sources. That doesn’t really help me though. I already know how to do the math. A spreadsheet or an analytical accounting package with my actual numbers is going to be faster and a better use of my time and money.

There are other areas where LLMs just aren’t “there yet” in general terms because of industry or technology specifics that they’re not trained on, or that require some actual cognition and nuance an LLM trained on random Internet sources aren’t going to have.

Heck, some vendors lock their product documentation behind logins you can only get if you’re a customer. If you’re trying to accomplish something with those kinds of products or services then generally available LLMs aren’t going to provide any kind of defensible guidance.

The widely available LLMs are better suited to things that can easily be checked in the public square, or to help an expert summarize huge amounts of information, and who can spot confabulations/hallucinations. Or if they’re trained on specific, well-vetted data sets for a particular use case.

People seem to forget or not understand that LLMs really do not think at all. They have no cognition and don’t handle nuance.
by yusina | 2025-05-03 15:20:25+00:00
The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both.

Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. There are many such examples and similar examples exist for wild ecosystems.

So, while it may seem cruel to kill a few hundred squirrels, the precaution is justified. The "guilt", if there is any, is with whoever didn't ensure all the paperwork is in order.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-03 15:20:48+00:00
Perhaps Zuckerberg envisioned this funding as a stopgap or "leg up" type of assistance that would eventually go away when the communities could be more self-supporting. I don't know the situation on the ground there.

But it seems that most philanthropies, if they intend to establish something enduring, especially a school or hospital, that they usually have an endowment and a board that will be self-sustaining, and it is not dependent on the ongoing largesse of the philanthropist himself. That seems fraught with peril in several ways.

I hope that the beneficiaries of these schools were informed in advance that their ongoing existence was not guaranteed, so that they could make appropriate contingency plans. I myself have been involved in plenty of projects which depended on ongoing grant proposals, and therefore we didn't bank on future years until the funds were all in place.
by neoecos | 2025-05-03 15:21:42+00:00
I got to know n8n from HN comments a couple year ago. I tried it and kinda liked it, it was really a tool for making quick PoC, trying remote APIs and building operations.

I was able to hack a MVP of a new product in just one or two days.

Now, the company uses n8n for a lot of stuff, out ops team and finance team is expected to automatize manual work using n8n. From billing to financial conciliation to customer support. Also in product/dev team we implement some parts as flows, for things we expect to change a lot of features that are more internal.

But n8n requires a lot of time and care. It's not intended for high loads, they make a lot of breaking changes (more like new bugs, but is not fun).

We do all this self hosting in a k8s cluster.

In general I like it, but I think is still intended for a personal o early adopter.

Funny, one of my biz co-founder, learned and created a new biz just teaching it.
by vik0 | 2025-05-03 15:21:53+00:00
>I read Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

I don't think you realize just how funny of a source that is

I will just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

and this: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pd...

And the following is from Pinker himself(https://web.archive.org/web/20201026010157/https://stevenpin...): "The upshot is that each of the following two assertions can be true: (1) the chances of war are lower than they were before, and (2) the damage caused by the most severe imaginable war is greater than it was before. That makes it meaningless—an issue of semantics—to speculate about whether the world is “safer” overall; in one sense it may be safer, in another sense, less safe. That is exactly why Better Angels does not claim, contra Taleb, that the world is “safer” across the board"
by 7thaccount | 2025-05-03 15:21:55+00:00
They did have a recent language update after awhile. That may have triggered some folks to look into it again. There is sometimes a HN effect where an initial post triggers some interest amongst enough users to get us new posts for a few weeks and then things tend to die off again. I've seen this with a lot of the more obscure languages like APL.

It would be cool to have a Tcl revival though (although I don't see it happening - I'm not in the community though so hopefully someone more informed can post). The language itself seems more capable than most give it credit for. I'm more of a Python fan myself, but can appreciate Tcl after reading through a book on it and writing a few scripts.
by tzs | 2025-05-03 15:22:24+00:00
Hail punches through solid coverings because they are rigid. They nearly instantaneously stop the hail which means they absorb all of the kinetic energy of the hail very quickly. They don't have a good way to dissipate that energy as rapidly and it goes into breaking the structure of the covering.

Nets are flexible. The energy of the collision goes into accelerating the net at the point of the collision. The net can quickly spread that energy into accelerating the surrounding areas of the net and so on. Unlike with a rigid cover this is not nearly instantaneous, so you don't have all the kinetic energy of the hail being poured into the net at once. That and the ability of the net to rapidly spread energy means that you don't get enough energy anywhere to break the net. It just stretches as it decelerates the hail.

You can see how this works by watching a soccer game and observing how the nets at the goals stop balls. Hailstones that weigh more than a soccer ball are extremely rare, as are hailstones that are falling faster than many strikes and penalty kicks in a professional soccer game, and you don't see many soccer balls breaking through the net.

People have calculated how fast a soccer ball would have to go to get through the net and found that it is over 220 mph. The largest recorded hailstone is estimated to have had a terminal velocity of 168 mph, based on size, mass, and atmospheric conditions. That hailstone had about 16% more kinetic energy than a 220 mph soccer ball and so might have broke the net, but soccer nets are by no means the strongest nets that can made. And remember that was the largest hailstone ever recorded--we are talking a once in decades event.
by Swizec | 2025-05-03 15:22:53+00:00
> What?? What do you think we’re doing instead of handwashing clothes exactly?

The average American spends almost 3 hours per day on social media. [1]

The average American spends 1.5 hours per day watching streaming media. [2]

That’s a lot washed clothes right there.

[1] https://soax.com/research/time-spent-on-social-media

[2] https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2024/time-spent-streamin...
by vunderba | 2025-05-03 15:23:19+00:00
That's not really why (at least in the U.S.) - it was due to strong labor laws otherwise post industrial revolution you'd still have people working 12 hours a day 7 days a week - though with minimum wage stagnation one could argue that many people have to do this anyway just to make ends meet.

https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...
by kwillets | 2025-05-03 15:24:47+00:00
That's an interesting reference. I came up with what may be a simpler case of that -- a structure that estimates the last time a key was seen. It's an upper bound, as collisions make the time more recent, but never the other way. Instead of a semi-order it's a simple ordering, but it may be similar to the compact approximator.

Rate limiters apparently use count-min over a fixed time interval, which is bursty, but I took the same hash structure and came up with "timestamp-min" that allows even pacing (also without "fill up"). The one-sided error is also useful for checking if a cache entry is too old.

It doesn't fix everything (eg DDOS), but it can prevent any single client from over-requesting, or stealing another client's requests (collisions can be made as hard as necessary).

https://github.com/KWillets/RecencySketch
by stackskipton | 2025-05-03 15:25:22+00:00
Actual accountability. Do not let companies be like "Well, we were SOC2 compliant, this breach is not our fault despite not updating Apache Struts! Tee Hee" When Equifax got away with what was InfoSec murder by 6 months of jail time suspended, Executives stopped caring. This is political problem, not technology one.

>So -- how do we get rid annoying checkboxes and ensure people do the right thing as a matter of course?

By actually having the power to enforce this, if you pull our SBOM, realize we have a vulnerability and get our Product Owner to prioritize fixing it even if takes 6 weeks because we did dumb thing 2 years ago and tech debt bill has come due. Otherwise, stop wasting my time with these exercises, I have work to do.

Not trying to be mean but that's my take with my infosec team right now. You are powerless outside your ability to get SOC2 and we all know this is theater, tell us what piece of set you want from me, take it and go away.
by nailer | 2025-05-03 15:25:53+00:00
> Left out of Microsoft’s announcement is that even after users create a passkey, they can’t go passwordless until they install the Microsoft Authenticator app on their phone. Microsoft has made Authy, Google Authenticator, and similar apps incompatible, a choice that needlessly inconveniences users

I was wondering how I managed to get locked out of my Microsoft account when using Authy. It just fails now.
by cantSpellSober | 2025-05-03 15:26:12+00:00
Well said this is many students' intro to PHP. Why not `<include src=header.html/>` though?

Some content is already loaded asynchronously such as images, content below the fold etc.

> HTML is really just a markup syntax, not a programming language

flamebait detected :) It's a declarative language, interpreted by each browser engine separately.
by jprokay13 | 2025-05-03 15:26:25+00:00
I went all in on using Caddy for rendering my website and blog, but I’m encountering a frustrating issue that I’m not sure how to solve. The feed on my site uses the listFiles feature to populate from a directory. I take care to name things so ordering is preserved. No problems on my machine getting the feed ordered correctly. However, when deployed to Railway via a container, the ordering is all wrong. Any thoughts on how to debug?