MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heikkilevanto | 2025-06-20 10:30:17+00:00
I have been using Linux both home and at work for the last couple of decades. I am thinking of degoogling my life, it is a bit harder, but I think I will get it done some day soon.

And meanwhile, at least one Danish ministry has decided to drop Microsoft Office, and more are likely to follow if that goes well.

So, there is some movement to the right direction, but big changes take a long time...
by m000 | 2025-06-20 10:30:55+00:00
> A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

US-style "supergrowth" of modern tech companies is arguably at the expense of public interest. If anything else, I'm glad the EU has the bureucracy in place to contain it.
by vidarh | 2025-06-20 10:31:56+00:00
I didn't say anything about whether free will exists or not, actually. The comment was specifically worded to explain why some people react to coming to believe there is no free will.

But, sure, I personally do not believe in free will. I'm saying there is no rational basis for thinking anyone has free will ever. I'm saying there is no evidence to suggest free will is possible. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that believing in free will is a religious belief with no support.

But that doesn't mean that events does not have effects on what happens next, just that we don't have agency. That an IF ... THEN ... ELSE ... statement is purely deterministic for deterministic inputs does not mean that changing the inputs won't affect the outputs.

If you "choose" to lay down and do nothing because you decide nothing matters because you don't have free will, you will still lose your job and starve. That it wasn't a "true" "free" choice does not change the fact that it has consequences.

One of the consequences of coming to accept that free will is an illusion is that you need to come to terms with what that means for your beliefs about a wide range of things.

Including that vengeance which might seem moral to some extent if the person who did something to you or others had agency suddenly become immoral. But we still have the feelings and impulses. Reconciling that is hard for a lot of people, and so a lot of people in my experience when faced with a claim like the one I made above that we have no free will tend to react emotionally to the idea of the consequences of it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-20 10:32:48+00:00
>An engineer who has appreciation for the art of the discipline.

That' sounds incredibly vague and useless. The problem is always communicating to management the value add of such a position. If they see money gets made without it, than why bother? The customers don't complain so it's a slam dunk. And most companies are customer focused.

>But since you don't value that and think that engineer is a spoiled brat, you won't hire him.

Like I said, the issue is budgets. Not every company is big-tech and can afford lavish salaries to attract SW shamans to bless your codebase with their appreciation for the craft. Most SW is a commodity, not an art. Some is, sure, but that's cherry-picking.
by vladms | 2025-06-20 10:33:19+00:00
I do agree on the points, but I think the root cause it's more connected to the use of the resources available. US has lots of resources and is willing to "bet" most of them on risky things. One implication is that they don't use them for other things - like trying to improve the life quality of their population.

Now, if I look at the evolution of tech, nowadays there is so much already possible with open source solutions (think 2000s - did you have an open source office solution? communication platforms? mobile os? etc.) that I think developing new solutions not relying on American companies will be orders of magnitude easier. Will it be efficient economically? Probably not. But if it is required it will work.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-20 10:33:45+00:00
>Good software might begat the need for more good and useful software.

Where's the proof for that? And what do you define "good SW"? For the management, "good SW' is whatever makes money fast. It's business.

SW isn't like building chruches or bridges, something to last 100+ years, but something with an incredibly limited lifespan, that will have to be rewritten anyway, so why bother investing too much in "good SW" if "OK SW" will do the same job anyway?
by Alghranokk | 2025-06-20 10:34:24+00:00
Have you considered that trans people just want to live their lives? As we all know, transitioning, social, hormonal, reduces incidence of suicide. This also applies to under 18 individuals. Should such options and approaches suddenly be revoked and discontinued, it will naturally follow that some will die who otherwise would not have.

How many do consider reasonable to sacrifice in the name of political expedience?
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-20 10:35:15+00:00
His reaction to this incident as being a sort of targeted hit piece towards him specifically was utter paranoid nonsense and just really made him look full of shit from an outside perspective. Further, authors of the piece received countless death threats from a mob of angry redditors with no real insight other than "someone got doxxed?!?! HOW DARE THEY!!!" (a narrative which I personally fell victim to before reading the actual article). Scott did nothing to remedy this situation and perhaps even fanned the flames a good deal.

More people should read the article, if anything because it provides interesting insight into Sam Altman's shady behavior.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
by brushfoot | 2025-06-20 10:35:46+00:00
> This isn’t evolution. It’s self-inflicted complexity.

> This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural.

> We’re not innovating. We’re rebuilding broken versions of tools the web already gave us – and doing it badly.

> We’re not iterating toward impact – we’re iterating just to stay afloat.

It's not X, it's Y? Dashes? Question fragments? This style isn't just tedious—it's a hallmark of LLM-generated content.

The whole article feels like low-effort LLM-generated clickbait to fan the eternal flamewar between web developers and web app developers. Yes, you might not need React for a static blog. Yes, React is useful for writing web applications. Can we talk about something else now?
by glutamate | 2025-06-20 10:35:49+00:00
the main reasons for my preference are that: gmail/fastmail are simple, I can use from multiple computers easily, have good defaults and most importantly, they almost always work. Outlook users seem to constantly have something broken.

I do realise that i am reaping the benefits of a centralised system, and in the case of gmail, monetised by advertising, surveillance and user lock-in. Probably the ideal for me would would be a self-hosted web client, e.g. Mailcow
by wffurr | 2025-06-20 10:37:05+00:00
I don’t know where you get this idea, at least about Scott. He has written extensively about flaws in science and misuse of statistics. My favorite is the one where he cries at the end “ Science! YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! It was said that you would destroy reliance on biased experts, not join them!”

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
by dgb23 | 2025-06-20 10:37:10+00:00
The separation of HTML and CSS is almost entirely arbitrary, which makes web development unnecessarily complex and requires way too much discipline to do right.

I disagree with SVG though. The format has a lot of problems when you look closely, but in principle it's great and there are a lot of benefits that you get from using it.

The main issue i have is that HTML itself stagnated. We still lack extremely basic UI components.

> Javascript is perfectly fine, actually.

The direction of JS went the wrong way quite a while ago. Keywords like class, let, const and import all break the dynamic nature of JS and the utility thereof.

When these things were decided, there was apparently nobody in the room who asked "Wait, what is the point of having a dynamic language again?"
by axiologist | 2025-06-20 10:37:23+00:00
While being instructive about TM as seen from the viewpoint of a 30+ year practicioner, the video's merit mainly consists of showing a specific facet of David Lynch's personality.

Other than that, i guess anything is spiritually more wholesome than the increasing bizarreness of christian nationalism or, more plainly, christofascism rising in the western world, especially in the USA.

The Absolute is beyond words and therefore beyond scripture.
by immibis | 2025-06-20 10:38:57+00:00
You might not be able to make your web app with zero, but chances are it needs a lot less.

Look at Old Reddit for example; it used Javascript for inline comment reply textboxes and for expanding sections of the tree. With it turned off, everything else still worked. Of course, that's gone now.

Do you really need three megabytes of JS to replace the whole page with the video player when I click on a video, or is <a href="/video/foo"> enough?
by intelVISA | 2025-06-20 10:38:59+00:00
Ownership means you have real skin in the corp, your payout goes up or down, hopefully somewhat proportional to your hard work.

'Ownership' is taking on those same stresses and responsibilities without any of the potential pay-offs... or at best a marginal rounding error.

It's not surprising that few people want to work as a founder but get compensated like an employee.
by GTP | 2025-06-20 10:39:32+00:00
> I agree DNA isn't that culturally relevant to an identity but that just seems to be due to anti-intellectualism

I think that the actual reason is that we know that a person isn't determined by their DNA alone, but there are many epigenetic factors at play, like the environment a person lives in while growing. Why you say it's due to anti-intellectualism?
by fleebee | 2025-06-20 10:40:58+00:00
It's hard to take this article seriously between the unfounded claims and hyperboles.

It's not because of JS that semantic HTML and accessibility are neglected: it's because of inexperienced developers. If anything, modern libraries, frameworks and tooling empower developers to build modern UIs that are accessible. Of course, with power comes responsibility, but that's like blaming the car for speeding.
by cchc | 2025-06-20 10:42:36+00:00
Hey all! I am a high school student from Hong Kong, and growing up in a traditional Asian family I have experienced all tiger parenting by my parents. It is surprisingly effective in how they can help control my screen time. Knowing lots of my friends with parents that are more 'chill', they personally want to be controlled as well on their screen time. Therefore, I built this app with a sassy mascot that mimics tiger parents they want.

I believe it has a unique approach to managing screen time. It uses a concept that’s similar to Duolingo’s mascot, our tiger mom mascot “Lok” provides similar encouragement in reducing screen time. It double downs on the stereotype of Asian tiger parenting, where people aren’t allowed their phones until they finished their tasks. Using such ways to gamify screen time is effective to all of the beta testers of this app, and I am sure that it will benefit you guys as well!
by al_borland | 2025-06-20 10:42:57+00:00
> In reality, it's almost always resume-driven development

This is what drives me crazy. I’ve been at my company for a couple decades. I want stability and long term health of the company.

The resume driven development isn’t even from the engineers, it’s from the leadership. An IT leader gets hired from the outside, starts a big project that will look good on the resume, then midway through the project, they are just far enough to try and call it a success and leverage it into a new position. Now we have a leadership change in the middle of a giant foundational shift of the infrastructure. The new leader comes in and does the same thing. I don’t see how a company can survive this long term. It creates such fragility. People like me, with little interest in job hopping, aren’t looking to resume build. I’m looking to have the company’s operations run smoothly so customers have a reliable service, so we retain them as customers… and for a little peace and stability myself. These resume building leaders make that difficult and seem to actively work against the long term health of the company. They aren’t interested in the next 10-20 years, they are only worried about their next job in 3-4 years, with no concern for the mess they leave behind.

I hope this is just a trend and it dies soon. The needless stress it has brought into my once simple life has been rather unpleasant.
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-06-20 10:43:18+00:00
> At the same time, JavaScript stopped being just a front-end language. With the rise of Node.js, JS moved server-side – and with it came a wave of app developers entering the web ecosystem. These weren’t web designers or content publishers. They were engineers, trained to build applications, not documents. And they brought with them an architecture-first mindset: patterns, state management, dependency injection, abstracted logic. The result? A slow cultural shift from building pages to engineering systems — even when all the user needed was to load an article.

Based on my experience, I think this is wrong. Node.js didn't open the web app gates to non-web devs (those devs more likely than not wouldn't even know JS), it was the other way round: it opened the backend gates to frontend devs, because suddenly they could use the language they know to run code in the server.
by diggan | 2025-06-20 10:43:27+00:00
Why do people keep having this reaction to something we're already used to? When you're developing against an API, you're already doing the same thing, planning for what happens when the request hangs, or fails completely, or gives a different response, and so on. Same for basically any IO.

It's almost not even new, just that it generates text instead of JSON, or whatever. But we've already been doing "indeterministic programming" for a long time, where you cannot always assume a function 100% returns what it should all the time.
by wahern | 2025-06-20 10:43:47+00:00
People are too quick to [ab]use GNU Make features. IME, learning how to make do with portable make constructs can help discipline oneself to avoid excessive complexity, especially when it comes to macro definitions where GNU Make's Lispy looping and eval constructs are heavily overused and quickly lead to obtuse, impenetrable code. POSIX pattern substitutions are quite powerful and often produce easier to read code than the GNU equivalent. I'm not sure if computed variable names/nested variable references are well-defined in POSIX (e.g. "$($(FOO))"), but they are widely supported nonetheless, and often more readable than $(eval ...). (They can also be used for portable conditional constructs; I wouldn't argue they're more readable, though I often find them so.)

Some GNU Make constructs, like pattern rules, are indispensable in all but the simplest projects, but can also be overused.

For some reason there's a strong urge to programmatically generate build rules. But like with SQL queries, going beyond the parameterization already built into the language can be counter productive. A good Makefile, like a good SQL query, should be easy to read on its face. Yes, it often means greater verbosity and even repetition, but that can be a benefit to be embraced (at least embraced more than is instinctively common).

EDIT: Computed variable references are well-defined as of POSIX-2024, including (AFAICT) on the left-hand side of a definition. In the discussion it was shown the semantics were already supported by all extant implementations.
by sensanaty | 2025-06-20 10:44:51+00:00
Again, none of this is down to SPA frameworks (other than back/forward history APIs, lot of people break this unfortunately, though I've never understood how they manage to as I've never had this problem on projects I worked on). What often happens also is that people embed a bunch of iframes, and history within iframes can act very weirdly.

Links in Vue Router at least are just regular <a> tags. Yes the framework handles navigation when clicking these, but nothing prevents anyone from wrapping anything they want in an <a> tag even with no JS. You could make an entire table be clickable as a link if you wanted to, framework or not. "Legacy" HTML will render these just fine and browsers will make it a regular link, even though HTML validators will fail it.

Literally the first element anyone makes in frameworks will be a generic Button element that is simply a <button> with some styling. People abuse divs as buttons with or without frameworks because again, nothing prevents you from making any arbitrary element in your DOM have an onclick handler and act as a button. Tabbing through can even work with the correct ARIA attributes, and can even be broken on regular plain <button>s if abused hard enough.

I would seriously suggest people try out Vue or especially Svelte, they're about as simple as you can possibly get (especially Svelte 4) while giving you a lot of power and flexibility. I've worked with plenty of server-rendered apps in the past, and trust me, people would butcher things just as badly and easily there.
by nicklaf | 2025-06-20 10:45:35+00:00
Rather amusingly, the author recently espoused the viewpoint that bloggers who wanted to stand out should avoid using tools like ChatGPT: https://youtu.be/avASDgtw9k0?t=678

It's not obvious to me that this blog post was synthesized whole cloth from an LLM. On the other hand, in that same interview, the author encourages the use of LLMs for idea exploration, and it's entirely possible that this is what he did.

In fact, using an LLM in this way may itself may be an SEO trick, in the sense that he simply wanted to boost his search rank (inasmuch as it's still the case that longer articles are more highly ranked) by beefing up what would have otherwise been a very short article.
by xhunmon | 2025-06-20 10:45:54+00:00
In HarmonyOS app development, properly encapsulating and using utility classes can greatly improve development efficiency and code quality. This article systematically summarizes the commonly used utility classes in the project, including device unique ID generation, global object caching, page navigation, and data persistence. All APIs and terminology strictly follow the Huawei Developer Official Documentation. 1. Device Unique ID Generation — DeviceUtil A unique device identifier is crucial for user behavior analysis and data isolation. It is recommended to use the @ohos.security.asset capability to generate a persistent ID (which does not change after uninstall/reinstall). If unavailable, fallback to AAID.

Permission configuration: { "name": "ohos.permission.STORE_PERSISTENT_DATA", ... } Main implementation ideas: Use asset.AssetStoreKit to query or generate a unique ID and persist it. If not supported, use AAID.getAAID(), but note that it changes after uninstalling or factory resetting the device. Typical usage: const deviceId = await DeviceUtil.getDeviceID(); 2. Global Object Caching — global The global object caching utility class can be used to store objects such as UI context and functions, making cross-module calls easier. It can also be used to prevent rapid repeated button clicks. ...
by donatj | 2025-06-20 10:46:37+00:00
Generally speaking, it would be nice if the examples had simple execution examples like

$ make foo Hello foo This ran too!

That's a contrived example, but some of these take a bit too much thought parsing the example Makefile alone to understand the execution order and rule selection.

It would just be very helpful to have clear examples of when I run this, I get this.
by addcommitpush | 2025-06-20 10:47:00+00:00
> workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now).

Note that, at least for France, it was not found to be illegal to use contract workers; rather the jobs-as-they-existed were really employment contracts according to the reality of the arrangement and not procurement contracts; merely not calling them "employment contract" does not absolve the parties of the obligation of a work contract.
by ben_w | 2025-06-20 10:47:07+00:00
Not necessarily.

I have an inner monologue that's my own actual voice*. But I also have a part of my mind which can generate complete ideas.

I know these are two separate things, because at one point I started to notice that I already had a complete idea before the words expressing the idea had been voiced by the inner voice. Indeed, a few times I tried to skip the wasted time/effort of letting the [inner] "voice" do the vocal equivalent of "imagine" those words, only to find that my overall subjective emotional response was annoyance, because apparently that bit of my brain getting annoyed can be felt by the rest of my brain.

* as I perceive it subjectively, not the impression other people get and which I only experience via microphones and playback.
by PhilippGille | 2025-06-20 10:47:14+00:00
Or:

- Task (Go): https://github.com/go-task/task

- Cake (C#): https://github.com/cake-build/cake

- Rake (Ruby): https://github.com/ruby/rake

Or an entirely different concept: Makedown, as discussed on HN 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41825344
by diggan | 2025-06-20 10:47:23+00:00
> It makes no sense at all, it's cuckooland, are you all on crazy pills?

First step towards understanding something you obviously have strong feelings about, is to try to avoid hitting those triggers while you think about the thing, otherwise it clouds you. Not a requirement by any measure, just a tip.

> are you telling me people will do three years university to learn to prompt?

Are people going to university for three years to write "1.0" or "2.0" software? I certainly didn't, and I don't think even the majority of software developers have done so, at least in my personal experience but YMMV.

> I do not understand where there is anything here to be "not sure" on?

They're not sure about the specific naming, not the concept or talk as a whole.

> LLMs making non-deterministic mistakes

Everything they do is non-deterministic when temperature is set to anything above 0.0, as that's the entire point. The "correct" answers are as non-deterministic as the "mistakes", although I'm not sure "mistake" is correct because it did chose the right/correct tokens, it's just that you didn't like/expect it to chose that particular tokens.
by anonzzzies | 2025-06-20 10:47:24+00:00
Nothing to do with the language, but yeah, js/py, becasue both popular, seem to attract the most worthless devs and that includes framework devs/authors. Ah well, we make money with systems crashing, being slow, losing money (literally, people are using floating point in js and others to do money and losing money that way, and it's not rare either), etc, so please the more js/py we see vs c#/java in enterprise systems, the more we make.