MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by revx | 2025-06-20 04:16:54+00:00
I appreciate the response! I really enjoy talking about this stuff so please take my long response as just me thinking out loud.

I forgot to mention that I'm an atheist. I call myself "religious but not spiritual". I was super reluctant to go to anything called "church" until my partner dragged me along 10 or so years ago, and the religion I belong to now has no particular theological creed. Reclaiming religious language (like "church") and disassociating it from the baggage of conservative organized religion is something very interesting to me. It's like the word "god", which can mean a big white dude in the sky, or it can just mean the way the universe works. (Aka monotheism and panentheism).

> A group I belong to has to fit me, not the other way around

I think this is one of the major sticking points a lot of progressives have that lead to shallow relationships. Deep community often takes work, change, and sacrifice. I don't mean changing who you are - just how you interact with others, how you open up, and how/what you are willing to give.

Without buy-in (monetary, skills, helping others, etc.), it's not really a community. It's just a social interest group, and that's not going to provide the kind of psychological safety and deep connection that contributes to well being.

I'm not saying you have to go to church, or that a makerspace or spicy setting can't be a community. And I do think a lot of them can foster relationships that turn into real community. But in my (biased) experience, there are few multigenerational progressive spaces designed to encourage kids, elders, adults, etc. to connect meaningfully. Contributing further to the lack of structure, wisdom, and leadership that can allow an organization to do big work.

I too hate hazing rituals and uniforms and authority, although I'm starting to soften on that last one (authority), as I find progressive spaces that vet and hold accountable their leadership. Without a web of trust and accountability we are all just off on our own, pulling in many different directions at the same time, while conservatives have figured out how to get everyone working on the same few problems, regardless of minor differences.

I'm obviously exaggerating and using metaphor, but what else makes a good story :)
by shadowgovt | 2025-06-20 04:17:05+00:00
Looking at the history of that doc, I was most annoyed not about what was added but what was removed: the random anti-DEI stuff was in place of the part that described what an X server is.

Like, my guy. If your goal is to provide a better solution than the existing one, telling people what you're making is step 1. No, the user can't be assumed to already know. You've already made your first mistake if you've made that assumption.
by rubyn00bie | 2025-06-20 04:18:15+00:00
I’m definitely not saying there aren’t loads of people who will have problems because of it— the games you listed are all popular with millions upon millions of people. I used to play League exclusively. With that said, there are likely that many who don’t play those competitive multiplayer games who could absolutely enjoy playing games on Linux with zero effort and have a better experience doing it. I gave up playing League for Linux, and I don’t regret that. I’ll never be good enough at it to really enjoy it.

My point is, more or less, if someone mostly plays solo games, or games that will never have professional players (because there won’t be enough money to pay someone to be a professional)—- Linux slaps. Use Linux. It’s free. It’s great. It’s stable it works.

Is it for literally everyone? No. But it is probably for a lot more people than realize it.

Additionally, if the market becomes big enough, those games that don’t work—- will be forced to. Money talks.
by drdaeman | 2025-06-20 04:18:52+00:00
> The type of people that would be embarrassed to not have an opinion on a topic or say "I don't know"

Is it really a rationality when folks are sort of out of touch with reality, replacing it with models that lack life's endless nuances, exceptions and gotchas? Being principled is a good thing, but if I correctly understand what you're talking about - surely ignoring something just because it doesn't fit some arbitrarily selected set of principles is different.

I'm no rationalist (I don't have any meaningful self-identification, although I like the idea of approaching things logically) but I've had enough episodes of being guilty of something like this - having an opinion on something, lacking the depth, but pretending it's fine because my simple mental model is based on some ideas I like and can bring order to the chaos. So maybe it's not rationalism at all, but something else masquerading as it, like probably being afraid of mismatching the expectations?
by psviderski | 2025-06-20 04:19:29+00:00
Hey Solomon, thank you for sharing your thoughts, love your work!

1. Yeah agreed, it's a bit of a mess that we have at least three different file system layouts for images and two image stores in the engine. I believe it's still not too late for Docker to achieve what you described without breaking the current model. Not sure if they care though, they're having hard times

2. Hm, push-to-cluster deployment sounds clever. I'm definitely thinking about a distributed image store, e.g. embedding unregistry in every node so that they can pull and share images between each other. But triggering a deployment on push is something I need to think through. Thanks for the idea!
by shadowgovt | 2025-06-20 04:19:46+00:00
Sometimes the end user actually suffers from too much choice.

Choice implies complexity, and there are some places less complexity is quite desirable. I still periodically, when setting up a new Linux machine, have to figure out why the audio frameworks are fighting, for example. The fact that "frameworks" is plural there makes everything harder for me, the end user.

(I compare Python and Node environment management frequently here. Python standardized the protocol for setting up an environment. Wise, better than nothing, but now I have to care whether something is using conda or poetry or some several other options I don't know. Node has npm. If there's a package, it's in npm. To setup a Node service, use npm. One thing to know, one thing to get good at, one thing to use. Environment management with Node is much easier than in Python).
by chironjit | 2025-06-20 04:21:15+00:00
Just posted my reply on the thread, to summarise:

1) Default sharing of code (only manual turn off)

2) Was an incident where I believe at least some versions would share your env files (without manual .cursorignore)

3) Agent mode is quiet bad for novel code

4) Agent mode either overshoots(overcomplicates code), mistakes context or refactors too much

The only benefit I get is:

a) Chatting in same window as my code

b) Ctrl+L shortcut

(edited for formatting)
by tptacek | 2025-06-20 04:21:15+00:00
The Lynn IQ data isn't so much "flawed" as it is "fraudulent". There has never been a global comparative study of IQ; Lynn exploited the fact that IQ is a common diagnostic tool, even in places that don't fund a lot of social science research and thus don't conduct their own internal cross-sectional studies, and so ended up comparing diagnostic tests done at hospitals in the developing world with research studies done of volunteers in the developed world.
by nilirl | 2025-06-20 04:21:28+00:00
I think that's the argument from some of the other commenters: making it predictable and repeatable is the engineering task at hand.

Some ways they're approaching it:

- Reduce the requirement from 100% predictable to something lower yet acceptable.

- continuously add layers of checks and balances until we consistently hit an acceptable ratio of success:failure

- Wait and see if this is all eventually cost-efficient
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-20 04:21:39+00:00
I use Copilot auto-complete in JetBrains IDEs and vscode. I use IDE at same time as terminals running Claude Code which I’ve found very helpful with simple stuff like “add command line flags that do these things” and “refactor this function to be in this other package instead”. I highly recommmend Claude Code as it works across all languages regardless of your preferred IDE.
by bloppe | 2025-06-20 04:21:43+00:00
It's really not an open source issue. It's a more general issue than that. The author provides as counterexamples MacOS and Windows, but that's a silly comparison. Apple nor Microsoft never coordinated with anybody else on their APIs. Closed source developers are never as good at coordinating with others as OSS developers are. Sure, they can invest more in their own products, but that's a different issue.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of standard this author is pining for. We have Wayland and freedesktop.org. Pretty much any Linux app can already run on pretty much any DE
by j_timberlake | 2025-06-20 04:23:18+00:00
I think these are all true and relevant, but the main problem is that their thesis that "ASI alignment will be extremely difficult" can only really be proven in hindsight.

It's like they're crying wolf but can't prove there's actually a wolf, only vague signs of one, but if the wolf ever becomes visible it will be way too late to do anything. Obviously no one is going to respect a group like that and many people will despise them.
by tomhow | 2025-06-20 04:24:41+00:00
Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.

Without expertise on the topic (and I am Australian, I don't have deep expertise on these topics, and it doesn't seem like other readers do either), the merit of those comments seem like a question of historical accuracy. If there's a way in which the content of these comments breach the guidelines (and no, the guidelines don't permit people to, say, support fascism or genocide as long as they're polite about it as it's been facetiously put in the past; anything that is unkind or abusive or oppressive to other people is against the guidelines here), you or anyone can explain that in a reply or an email to us. We understand that sometimes comments break the guidelines in ways that aren't obvious at face value (as you put it "dog whistles"), and in these cases people can, point this out in comments or emails to us. Positive contributors to HN do this all the time. Nobody has done that in this case, but you're welcome to do so, now or in any other similar situation.

Edit: I was reflecting as I took a walk that this discussion is almost a mirror image of one I had about a week ago with a user who seems to be on the other side of the political spectrum. Like you, their belief was that HN's discourse and moderation is biased against their political persuasion, and that this entitles them to disregard the guidelines and engage in battle against what they perceive as malevolent actors on the site. We've seen this effect forever here: the more strongly someone is focused on a particular ideological issue, the more keenly they notice anything that breaches their sensibilities about that topic. Dang has written about it and cited examples of it many times over the years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

And in this subthread just three months ago, a banned user insisting that there's a “hard liberal-progressive tilt to comments and post flagging”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43136198

The truth is we don't – and can't moderate in support of any particular ideological agenda. We just don't have time to pore through all the comments and manoeuvre things in a way that pushes things one way or another. All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
by SquidJack | 2025-06-20 04:24:46+00:00
Hey HN,

SR, co-founder of Kasp here.

The title isn't an exaggeration. A few months ago, i was working as full-stack developer for e-commerce company on the support ticket solution part. and I were drowning in support tickets & enquires day by day.

We were spending 6+ hours every day answering the same repetitive questions about pricing, features, and basic "how-to"s. It was killing our productivity and ability to build.

We looked at existing chatbot solutions, but found they were either glorified keyword-finders that frustrated users or complex enterprise tools that cost a fortune and took weeks to implement. So, we built our own solution. It's an AI chatbot that you can train on your own knowledge base, docs, or even just a simple FAQ page in under 5 minutes. Existing RAG solutions are not very good at complex answering we tried hundreds of different RAG techniques but most of them are good for simple questions and doesn't understand the context of the customer perspective.

The key is that it uses RAG with our our custom implementation on top to improve the accuracy and speed to find the actual answers within the customer context so users trust the responses.

For our own project, it's now accurately handling about 80% of inbound queries, freeing us up to focus on what matters.

We've just opened up the waitlist today and would love to get this community's feedback on the concept and the landing page.

Link: https://www.kasp.chat/

Happy to answer any questions Thanks!
by fr4nkr | 2025-06-20 04:25:25+00:00
The OP defeats his own argument. LSP was a collaborative effort that benefited from a degree of coordination that only hierarchical organizations can provide, yet it still sucks ass.

OP blames FOSS for not providing an IDE protocol a decade earlier, but doesn't ask the rather obvious question of why language-specific tooling is not only still around, but as market-viable as ever. I'd argue it's because what LSP tries to do is just stupid to begin with, or at least exceptionally hard to get right. All of the best language tooling I've used is ad-hoc and tailored to the specific strengths of a single language. LSP makes the same mistake Microsoft made with UWP: trying to cram the same peg into every hole.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still develops their proprietary Intellisense stuff because it actually works. They competed with themselves and won.

(Minor edit: I forgot that MS alone didn't standardize LSP.)
by timmytokyo | 2025-06-20 04:25:47+00:00
Below is a list of cult markers I posted here the last time this came up. It recaps some of the bullet points above.

1. Apocalyptic world view.

2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader.

3. Insularity.

4. Esoteric jargon.

5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance).

6. Communal living arrangements.

7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader.

8. Schismatic offshoots.

9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.
by hackyhacky | 2025-06-20 04:26:10+00:00
> If Emacs can run anywhere

Any desktop program needs to be programmed against some API. In the case of Emacs, it's probably raw Xlib or a wrapper library on top of it.

The problem with that is that (a) your dependency on X11, which is obsolete and has many documented inadequacies, (b) the lack of a modern widget library and toolkit makes extra, unnecessary work for the programmer, and (c) the lack of a cohesive visual language between programs makes the experience worse for the user.

Toolkits like GTK and Qt solve all these problems. By avoiding them, you're just reinventing the wheel, poorly, every time.
by throwanem | 2025-06-20 04:26:56+00:00
"It was eye-opening to see how little attention was paid to serious [people] vs hucksters," you said in a comment last week. That's a good start, and the right frame of thought in which to try to infer an answer to the question you didn't quite ask.

I also realize the insult you didn't quite offer, but while there are grounds for anyone with a Ph.D. to offer me offense, breadth of knowledge is really none of them. You are an expert specialist and I respect that as it deserves, which is less than you imagine but more than you fear.
by autarch | 2025-06-20 04:27:25+00:00
> And big multiplayer OSS platforms like GitHub didn't exist until 2008.

SourceForge launched in 1999. I think GitHub is better in many ways, but the basic building blocks of hosted repo, issue tracking, and discussions (via email lists) on Sourceforge. I collaborated with folks on a number of projects on SourceForge way back when.
by pabs3 | 2025-06-20 04:27:45+00:00
I don't, just speaking from experience helping one use an iPhone. Too many features can cause confusion, or accidental breakage with no way to revert. Not enough features is a problem too. Feature mechanisms can also cause emotion. So you need enough flexibility that you can customise the interface exactly to the person.

Some examples from iOS: The iPhone wallpaper change gesture is easy to trigger, losing that favorite photo, and needing assistance to go into the settings and fix it again. A big issue I saw was popup context menus can cause confusion when accidentally touching a message in the wrong way. Another was a regression in the latest iOS, in the messages app, when you write a long message, you can't scroll up to what you are replying to; previously you could minimise your draft at least and then scroll up. The photos app clip object feature with its silvery object outline caused delight, despite the feature itself not being used at all, just accidentally.
by iandanforth | 2025-06-20 04:28:08+00:00
Can I suggest, don't do this? The sustainable unit of code modification is the ticket, not the commit. When you're ready to merge to main, squash all commits into one that takes the ticket title as its commit message and appends the ticket description as its description. This aligns code changes with planned, scoped, and documented units of work. Anything more granular than that quickly becomes noise. By following the above pattern your main commit history becomes a clean, consistent log of tickets being completed, each linking directly back to your ticket management system.
Show HN: Resy Reservation Scalper Bot
by korbinschulz | 2025-06-20 04:28:39+00:00
URL is linked to the repo. I figured I'd make a quick post explaining how I created a scalper bot for dinner reservations in New York to resell them for profit.

Resy is a very interesting platform to mess around with. I still consider myself to be a noobish developer, but even I can see that there are many glaring flaws on the platform. The most annoying thing that I've encountered on their website though is that they misuse the 500 response and essentially throw it around for anything that isn't a 200 or 400.

Before making a full scalper bot, I created a scraper that would check the availability of the top restaurants in New York every 15 seconds or so. If a good reservation was available, the script would send me a discord webhook with the link to the restaurant so that I could go claim the dinner reservation manually. After doing this for a few months I figured I might as well try scaling things up since I was making a few thousand dollars a month from this stuff at that point.

I thought it would be hard to expand the scraper into a bot, but I quickly learned it wouldn't really be that bad. I already had the difficult logic figured out, all that was left was to automate the checkout process once I found a good reservation available. I used proxyman to see what http requests the browser would make and then I simply repeated that flow in my code, and to my surprise everything was working smoothly, but then I encountered captchas on some restaurants.

I am familiar with captchas, and quickly integrated a third party captcha solver, but I noticed that I was still too slow to get reservations, so I knew I was missing something. I messed around with postman for quite some time manipulating requests until I hit the jackpot, I figured out a way to bypass the captchas COMPLETELY on Resy's platform.

There was a post request that would be sent to Resy's server to finally check out a reservation. This request's body would contain information regarding the reservation, and after solving a captcha the captcha token would get included in here. I discovered though that if you convert the post request to a GET request and append the previous post's body to the url as parameters, then this will allow you to send the same request even with the captcha token missing. This discovery resulted in my bot becoming fast as fuck and helped me source a lot more reservations than I ever could before.

Unfortunately for me though, New York has made it illegal to resell dinner reservations, so I closed up shop a while ago and decided to make an open sourced version of my software so that other people can claim reservations for their personal use. I haven't even been to New York yet, but when I visit I'll be sure to use this to hit top the restaurants. Will gladly answer any questions regarding this too!

Also sorry if this isn't very readable. I am writing this post while working on a different agentic bot that I'll also use to wreak havoc.
by nilirl | 2025-06-20 04:29:21+00:00
I can see value in it, but I'm unsure how much more value it provides compared to building software with my own heuristics for solving these problems.

The LLM seems incredible at generating well-formatted text when I need it, like for the job description and emails.

But hardcoding which signals matter for a decision and what to do about them, seems faster, more understandable, and maybe not that far in effectiveness from a well trained AI agent.
by mroche | 2025-06-20 04:30:42+00:00
Tools like Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, Toolbox, and Distrobox can go a long way on relieving the end-user of the burden of trying to get things playing nice in those situations. Not always a silver bullet, but a useful tool to keep in the back pocket.

If it's FOSS, at least you have the option of trying to repackage it for your distribution. You're SOL if it's a proprietary application distributed in binary format. , though.
by CityOfThrowaway | 2025-06-20 04:30:49+00:00
I haven't tried this yet (though I plan to).

One thing I would love is if I could give it a hint and have it extract out certain types of changes into its own branch that could split into a new PR.

I often find myself adding a new, re-usable component or doing a small refactor in the middle of a project. When you're a few commits into a project and start doing side-quests, it's super annoying to untangle that work.

The options are one of:

1. A mega PR (which everybody hates) 2. Methodologically untangling the side quest post-hoc 3. Not doing it

In principle, the "right" thing to do would be to go checkout main, do the side quest, get it merged and then continue.

But that's annoying and I'd rather just jam through, have AI untangle it, and then stack the commits (ala Graphite).

It's easy to verbally explain what stuff is side-quest vs. main quest but it's super annoying to actually do the untangling.

Maybe this tool magically can do that... but I do wonder if some context hints from the dev would help / make it more effective.
by ninjin | 2025-06-20 04:32:13+00:00
"The reason why we have Linux, and BSDs, and XNU is that they all provide the same baseline API, which was defined from the outside [by POSIX]. The coordination problem was pre-solved, and what remained is just filling-in the implementation."

But that is not at all how Posix operates or has operated. Posix standardises common denominators between existing implementations. The fact that we now have strlcpy(3) and strlcat(3) in Posix 2024, is not because Posix designed and stipulated them. Rather, they appeared in OpenBSD in 1998, were found useful by other *nix-es over time, spread, and were finally taken aboard by Posix that standardised what was already out there and being used! This to me is the very opposite of the point the author is trying to make!