MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-24 19:25:29+00:00
When I was a teenager, I imagined that after a decade or two of working with computers, I would be able to write a computer game over a weekend. Or maybe two weekends. I had a notebook full of ideas and sketches, so that when I am ready, I will make all those amazing games.

I even made a few (quite simple, from my today's perspective) games in Pascal during high school and university. I expected to become much more productive over years of practice.

That didn't happen, for several reasons.

First, my expectations for a good game have increased. I don't want to make the most complicated game possible; I am perfectly okay with 2D raster graphics and simple algorithms. But I expect a good game to have animations, sound effects, at least ten levels that feel different, and an option to save game progress. My old games barely had half of that (some were animated, some had ten or more levels, only one had both of that).

Second, things became more complicated. It is no longer "320 x 200 pixels, 256 colors". Windows are resizable; different screens have different sizes. Programs need to be aware that multiple threads exist. Sometimes there are many possible choices, and I get paralyzed by choosing between them. Programs are expect to have installers; it is no longer enough to have one EXE file, and optionally a few data files together in a ZIP file. It felt like every time I mastered something, a new problem appeared to be solved.

Third, as a teenager I didn't realize how much my everyday work would differ from the kind of work necessary to make a computer game. Some skills are transferable: I am more comfortable with using threads, parsing data files, writing algorithms, the program architecture in general. But many skills are not: if my dream is to make a desktop application, then e.g. all the web frameworks that I have learned over those years are useless for this purpose; and they have cost me a lot of time and effort. So from the perspective of making computer games, as an adult I maybe learn in five years as many relevant things as I have learned as a teenager in one year, when I had lots of free time that I could dedicate to this goal.

Fourth, life gets in the way. There is much less free time, and much more things that I need or want to do during that free time.

So here I am, after a few decades of IT jobs, and (a) I can't really make a complete computer game over a weekend, and (b) it's irrelevant, because until my kids grow up I probably won't get a free weekend anyway. Or rather, even the rare "free" weekend (when the kids are away) is spent on other things that have higher priority.
by PeterWhittaker | 2025-06-24 19:25:31+00:00
What am I missing? I went to the site, but I can find nothing to suggest why I might want to use this. Are there examples that I've missed, likely owing to having been heads down chasing a pernicious heisenbug all day?

Given that I do like my shiny prompt, which shows me:

The result of the last command (in green, red, or purple) user@host:currentDirectory current branch, if in a repo

with the last line showing summary git status, if in a repo, and background jobs, I suspect I might be their market, but I cannot see a why anywhere.

(Green: Last command good, e.g., exit 0) (Red: Last command non-zero exit, with a special indicator if it was interrupted) (Purple: Last command suspended, and few other things)
by epistasis | 2025-06-24 19:25:39+00:00
This is really great, and it seems that it's becoming more popular. I saw it first on simonw's blog:

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/

And there was a March discussion of a different blog post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43500124

I hope this stays on the front page for a while to help publicize it.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-24 19:25:48+00:00
Pretty much where I stand. Some speech is criminalized for good reason (for example, planning to commit a crime). However, barring that, no speech should penalized. In particular, speech criticizing actions of the government or a government official should be especially protected.

The bar for when speech should be criminalized/penalized by the government should be very high.

For private entities I'm far more tolerate of censorship especially since it cuts both ways. Allowing or banning speech can directly impact a company's bottom line and should be regulated by customers choosing to interact with or avoid platforms.
by stephenmac98 | 2025-06-24 19:25:54+00:00
How many people drive their car daily or near daily? How many people are good drivers?

The ratio of those two values shows, in my experience, that a lot of people are not very good at things they spend a lot of time doing, and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings

The average American spends 4.2 hours a week in the car. A typical 40 year old american has driven around 50,000 miles. For someone to continue to be bad at driving after that much experience, it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding. Drive to work any given day in Denver and you will see that a large number of people suffer from those fundamental limitations.

This article seems to present a world where most people the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic, and are interested in learning or improving themselves. I wish I lived where the author lives, because I have had multiple jobs across multiple countries and never encountered an average population like the author describes.
by hinkley | 2025-06-24 19:25:56+00:00
I ended up migrating to fixing things in the libraries I use because they piss me off.

Bad onboarding docs, broken or bent SDLC, major performance issues. I spent all day yesterday fixing perf issues in a library that competes with one I loathe for trying to complect an entire problem domain.

You probably have the same thing I do. Teamwork is a very different motivation than working on something either never intended for others or with a long MVP cycle that makes it too easy to get bogged down with side quests. "It would be way less tedious to deal with X if I did Y first. But now Y is blocked so I do nothing."

Versus 'someone is waiting for this.'
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-24 19:26:19+00:00
Right, that makes such a system unusable for normal people, so it is not a good thing to force it upon them. The benefit is not clearly there because anything that can manipulate local memory can also just use the key directly, or if there's some kind of physical button press required, wait for the user to log in and then do whatever they want with the session cookie or alter page contents or do anything else it wants. If the token doesn't display what it's authorizing (e.g. a yubikey), you could also watch for any usage, block that request to the device, and instead auth against their bank. If you need multiple button presses (e.g. they need to press again to confirm a transfer), say there was an error and ask them to try again.

Normal people are however not concerned with these Mission Impossible scenarios, and random passwords are good enough while being easy to use without an IT department to fix when it goes wrong. A password manager (which every browser has built in) already associates passwords to domains for phishing resistance. Users already should never need to enter a password manually unless the site did something stupid to try to block the password manager from working.
by tsenkov | 2025-06-24 19:26:28+00:00
Hey, thanks for the question(s)!

There are at least a couple points in your message that I wanna address.

> genuine insight is very rare and extremely hard to identify.

Insights capable of spawning billion-dollar companies are hard to come-by, indeed! But the smaller the scope of the idea - the bigger number of insights in existence that you can work on. When you can have a PMF on an idea with TAM of $100M in a matter of days, and you don't need VC money to make it happen, AND you can test it out with a rep of the target audience - isn't that something worth pursuing?

> How do you prevent Vibed from becoming a graveyard of half-baked ideas, I mean projects that are trivial, already solved, or fundamentally flawed?

I think people would genuinely not be incentivised to be posting projects for already solved problems, UNLESS the solutions are not exactly accessible to them, which in turn makes those project potentially a good idea still. We are just starting out so I'm not going to pretend I know rn how we would solve every problem we hit along the way (yet I hope we hit many and for a long time, haha), but one of the best ways for us to get the CONTENT we want - would be to work on getting the PEOPLE we need on the platform. We are also pretty well-versed with AI too, so we will be able to do a great moderation too (including a check for past projects that are similar -> thus to discourage repetition and plagiarism).

Hope that answers your question(s).
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-24 19:26:52+00:00
This is different than the question "Are you presuming most people are more stupid than you?"

It makes my skin crawl to say this*, but the answer for most people on HN is probably "yes, they are."

* both because people in tech are prone to Paul Graham style 'nerd martyr' arrogance, and because I often read views that disappoint me here and I do not like to admit that an intelligent person can hold them
by variadix | 2025-06-24 19:27:14+00:00
As I understand it, the physical FPGA layout and timing information used for placement and routing is proprietary, and the vendors don’t want to share it. They’ll let you specify constraints for connections, but it has to go through their opaque solver. And to be fair, they do have to try to solve an NP-complete problem, so the slowness isn’t unjustified compared to all the other slow buggy software people have to deal with nowadays.
by dredmorbius | 2025-06-24 19:27:15+00:00
Something I'd stumbled across a few years back:

First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.

The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original). These places were therefor understaffed. Moreover, the few teachers who were actually employed were completely "unfit for their work." The pupils therefore were so "wretchedly ill-taught" that they "did not ... even learn to read." And, said Mill with disgust, no attempt was "made to communicate ideas, or to call forth the mental faculties" of the children". (J.S. Mill, Public and Parliamentary Speeches, November 1850 - November 1868, p. 322 (1988). J.S. Mill, Essays on England Ireland, and the Empire, p. 200 (1982)).

Hans E. Jensen, "John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution" <https://web.archive.org/web/20190828233020/http://www.tandfo...>. Review of Social Economy. Pages 491-507. Published online: 05 Nov 2010.

Previously noted: <https://web.archive.org/web/20190828233020/https://old.reddi...>
by jjkaczor | 2025-06-24 19:28:09+00:00
Then why are all the border states, towns and cities (and their elected representatives) begging Canadian tourists to come back, with endless advertisements, appeals to our historic friendship, temporarily re-naming streets ("Canada Street", really? Can't wait for the photo-op of an ICE raid happening there) and even silly incentives (like a 3-pack of free golf balls in one case)...?

Yeah, good luck downplaying the 12+ billion the US tourism industry is about to lose this year.
by perihelions | 2025-06-24 19:28:14+00:00
I think the other story from earlier this week makes a better anchoring point for discussion[0], thought it's obvious why it was less successful (long-form New Yorker article vs. one funny picture—the funny picture *usually* wins. This is the internet). It's a lot clearer fact-pattern:

>"“Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam, though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said."

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/how-my-reporting-on-... ("How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44318330
by pentaphobe | 2025-06-24 19:28:20+00:00
Out of interest - What wasn't working for you?

I use Just inside (and outside) mise, almost exclusively with embedded shell/python scripts. Have used mise tasks a little, but didn't meaningfully add enough for me

Or do you mean justfiles with shebangs?

Either way, curious what problem you hit (and may be able to unblock ya)
by harmmonica | 2025-06-24 19:28:58+00:00
May be triggered by the three branches of government example, but I think those types of details matter, not in a vacuum of "oh there are three branches of gov in the US, how very nice!" but it seems pretty important when there are folks who talk about how great the US had been in the past, and how we should get back to being that country, and simultaneously think it's ok to ignore, for example, a judicial order (as if the checks and balances of the three branches aren't an important part of what used to (and still does?) make the country what it has been/is).

And people being knowledgeable about what they do day in and day out seems like a good example of people being really good at habituation, but that's not "not stupid." Stupid is when people do the same things day in and day out and then use that as a crutch to say there's no other way to do that thing even when there's evidence in front of them that contradicts what their habituation has led them to believe. I guess you can read the first example as a political statement, but I'm not trying to make one, and the second one applies to everything under the sun, I think.

All that said, I think the author is only saying that when someone uses "most people are stupid" as an excuse but I don't think most folks actually ever say "most" people are stupid. Instead they point out that a decent enough chunk of people are stupid and that's enough to cause some issues.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying I'm not one of the stupid ones. Sometimes I am for sure
by alkonaut | 2025-06-24 19:29:03+00:00
I suppose it may be related to the overall "looser" grip on who exists, and what counts as collateral. If I "default" on a loan, the lender is still pretty safe to get back most or all of it, since any loan is secured by my future income. So there's not as much need to prove my credit history - my income is public and always was, and my future income is collateral for any loan, including mortgages if my house is suddenly under water in a recession.

That means that barring any failures to service credit in the past, I don't need a history of successfully servicing credit in order to get credit.
by docmars | 2025-06-24 19:29:08+00:00
As a deplorable myself, I disagree with this decision and think it's ridiculous - but I do find the nature of it quite funny still.

Also remember that JD Vance himself has plenty of air time laughing at these memes, and they aren't considered threatening like calling out Biden's cognitive decline with memes making fun of it.

The overall response to memes of this nature are very different on either side. One side wants to censor the entire internet and penalize people for daring to share something politically incorrect, while the other caught an outsider who may harbor threatening sentiments about our nation, with the intent to harm - although I sincerely don't think that's the case here.

Part of the irony here is that you'll more likely find a right-winger with more JD Vance memes on their phone than this guy.

The mass-censorship has a much deeper weight to it than inconveniencing 1 tourist, and I think it's a little surprising this needs to be explained.
by Whoppertime | 2025-06-24 19:29:24+00:00
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/11/05/131105373/the-... I still remember an old Planet Money podcast they did covering a Rent or Buy calculator, It didn't allow for the possibility that the value of a house might fall over time. If you put a negative appreciation rate it would spit out an error. Which in the immediate aftermath of 2007 meant the tool was unable to capture reality.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-06-24 19:29:39+00:00
In all fairness, Congress is slow by design, and wars happen a lot faster than they used to. It would be insane if a hypothetical adversary could prevent the US from engaging in war just by preventing a Congressional quorum.

Presidential powers are certainly too broad and too deep, but I don't think a country can function in 2025 with the system the founders envisioned - shit just moves too fast these days.
by lapcat | 2025-06-24 19:29:52+00:00
> I'd interpreted GP's comment "parts of the US have weather/climate that is prohibitive for outdoor activity" as specifically referring to the South

To each their own, I guess, but I immediately thought of Midwest winters.

> borderline uninhabitable without air conditioning

The south was inhabited long before air conditioning was invented.

> In Massachusetts, the winters were cold and snowy, the summers are hot and humid, and you had about 3 weeks of good weather in the spring and 2 weeks in the fall

Minnesota is like that too, except the winters are colder and the summers hotter.

> you sucked it up and went outside anyway

Indeed, it's a choice. People exercise in all types of weather, hot and humid or cold and bitter.

> unless you're getting into your nice air conditioned car to drive to a nice air conditioned indoor place

Like the gym, for example?

> Nobody goes outside.

That's false, but in any case it's a choice.

> I'm fairly convinced that exercise or the lack thereof... is a major predictor of health outcomes.

Of course it is. But you completely ignored my statements about diet.

> and relatedly the rate at which people go outside

This is a different matter. Speaking personally, I almost always exercise indoors nowadays.
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-24 19:30:09+00:00
I don't buy that argument. The old sequence is part of vt100 and supported by xterm. The new sequence is only supported by Kitty. If the Kitty dev wanted to make feature detection easier then they wouldn't have duplicated a feature that has been a staple for terminals for literally decades.

Also the tool you shared has nothing to do with this. It’s just a 3rd party utility.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 19:30:16+00:00
Per the Bash `history` manpage:

int history_write_timestamps If non-zero, timestamps are written to the history file, so they can be preserved between sessions. The default value is 0, [...]

So this isn't true by default on many machines unless it is explicitly turned on. Once you do have it on, of course, then I agree.
by sunrunner | 2025-06-24 19:30:27+00:00
Is there something here about the role of (and lack of in this case) deliberate and intentional practice?

4.2 hours a week in a car doesn't imply that any of that time is spent doing things that may make one a better driver (by whatever standard we're measuring this), it's just repetion of the minimal amount of driving skill that's enough to get you by.

If it's not possible to increase one's skill in anything without practicing things that are just on the edge of capability then no amount of regular, unsupervisied driving without any critique targeted towards improvement is going to help.
by Waterluvian | 2025-06-24 19:30:31+00:00
A consequence of drawing the risk line that far to one end is that products end up having no soul. Perfectly valid for a business to decide that. But it just connects back to my main post and how 80s/90s apple had that vibe that today's apple lacks. They Risk Managed and/or Product Designed until they had a sterile, lifeless product.

I think it's what I pick up on when I feel annoyed at the emulated soul they try to instil with their design/branding/commercials.

I think another example, sibling to easter eggs, would be April Fools. Mind you I hate April Fools, but the soul was sterilized as they Risk Managed their way to jokes/pranks that were guaranteed to be safe.
by ngriffiths | 2025-06-24 19:30:56+00:00
I use it the same way. The feeling is that I'm back in ~2010 when Googling stuff felt like a superpower. I could find anything back then.

Of course, it didn't last long, and trying to Google now is an exercise in pain and frustration. Lots of people have complained about the various things Google and marketers have done to get there, idk, I just don't like how it works now.

Top LLMs feel amazingly good at rapidly surfacing info online, and as I go through the references they're usually pretty good. I guess the same forces as before will apply, and there will be some window of opportunity before it all goes away again.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-06-24 19:30:56+00:00
The idea of a beach closing at night-time was novel to me, when I first came to the US. In the UK beaches are ... just beaches, their status is that of "beach", and access is not controlled at all.

Generally there's a fine for being caught sleeping on the beach I think, but that's really to discourage people being swept away.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-24 19:31:04+00:00
People have been coming up with convoluted piracy loopholes since the invention of copyright.

If you xor some data with random numbers, both the result and the random numbers are indistinguishably random and there is no way to tell which one came out of a random number generator and which one is "derived" from a copyrighted work. But if you xor them together again the copyrighted work comes out. So if you have Alice distribute one of the random looking things and Bob distribute the other one and then Carol downloads them both and reconstructs the copyrighted work, have you created a scheme to copy whatever you want with no infringement occurring?

Of course not, at least Carol is reproducing an infringing work, and then there are going to be claims of contributory infringement etc. for the others if the scheme has no other purpose than to do this.

Meanwhile this problem is also boring because preventing anyone from being the source of infringing works isn't a thing anybody has been able to do since at least as long as the internet has allowed anyone to set up a server in another jurisdiction.