MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UltraLutra | 2025-07-23 18:21:38+00:00
It’s not bad for summarizing or translating.

I like categorize AI outputs by prompt + context input information size vs output information size.

Summaries: output < input. It’s pretty good at this for most low-to-medium stakes tasks.

Translate: output ≈ input but in different format/language. It’s decent at this, but requires more checking.

Generative expansion: output > input. This is where the danger is. Like asking for a cheeseburger and it infers a sesame seed bun because that matches its model of a cheeseburger. Generally that’s fine. Unless you’re deathly allergic to sesame seeds. Then it’s a big problem. So you have to be careful in these cases. And, at best, the anything inferred beyond the input is average by definition. Hence AI slop.
by pivo | 2025-07-23 18:21:58+00:00
To add to this, Erlang is a very simple language that you can learn in just a few days. I don't know Elixir but I assume that, as is the case with Erlang, the more difficult thing to learn is OTP and not the language itself.

For me Erlang was worth learning because it's so interestingly different to many other languages because of its Prolog roots.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-23 18:21:59+00:00
That was already a trend in software for a long time, unfortunately. Smartphones were largely responsible for this trend because they promoted disposable devices and vendor lock-in with endless new features that few people needed (I mean, needed in the sense of actually improving how they go about their daily life). And what about the web? Sophisticated javascript that prevents scrolling and that loads 100s of megabytes into your browser so that now a browser needs a new computer.

Software respecting user's time was a thing when computers were used by a minority, because the audience was discerning about such things. Nowadays, software is too complicated for the masses to understand, and so any advance will be adopted, whether it is ultimately a good thing or bad.

I feel like we need a second revolution in software, sort of like how open source provided the first.
by greenie_beans | 2025-07-23 18:22:01+00:00
bookhead started as my response to struggling with an indiecommerce site but now the product vision is different with some similarities. i have some ideas to collaborate with them if they are willing. it's a valuable product for some stores, but i agree that shopify is the best and i'm hoping to provide tools for stores to use shopify if they also feel that way.

> When it comes to books, there are a LOT of SKUs (think IC has 2-3 million on it's built-in catalog). 5 years ago, that was a big challenge for folks wanting to sell on Shopify (which is IMO the best eCommerce platform)

i have a blog post planned about this. i think the modern indie bookstore tech stack should be bookshop.org doing it's thing + a website with your local inventory. let bookshop sell all the inventory you don't have on hand but can easily get from ingram, and then your unique inventory will rise above in SEO. it doesn't make sense to me for 600+ IC stores to all have the exact same inventory, competing in SEO with the exact same metadata. but what does your local bookstore have? unique titles that only they carry.

> Bookweb

tells me you've been around for a while... if you are a bookseller, come find my table at winter institute 2026!
by chasil | 2025-07-23 18:23:10+00:00
Dear SQL Server user, welcome to the world of SQL/PSM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM

Within this ADA-esque world, packages, procedures, and functions may initiate DML.

Assuming these objects are in the default "definer rights" context, the DML runs with the full privilege of the owner of the code (this can be adjusted to "invoker rights" with a pragma).

Perhaps this is why Microsoft ignores it (as Sybase did before it).
by graemep | 2025-07-23 18:23:56+00:00
> The worst part is that you still have European governments who feel the need to give lessons of democracy to China et al.

They need to highlight that we are nothing like as bad a China. We look good in comparison.

> this proposal coming from the EU who is supposedly politically in the center

Is it? Its the only country in the world with a constitutional commitment to privatisation (its in the treaties, which are the constitution, and came close to being called a constitution).
by kjksf | 2025-07-23 18:24:23+00:00
It makes sense, historically.

They had AI features that were always on.

Some people complained so they introduced a flag to, wait for it, disable the ai features.

So they didn't think too deeply about it and named the flag "disable_ai" because it mapped into how they were thinking about it.

You overstate the problem with negative booleans. It's trivial for them to add a function:

fn isAiEnabled() { return !disable_ai }

and just use that.
by standardUser | 2025-07-23 18:24:28+00:00
I miss having my own little website. It wasn't a blog or even a weblog because those words didn't exist yet. I especially miss the mix of icons and widgets I'd curate at the bottom of the page, the most important of which was the counter (which was mostly counting my own visit to my own page). This was probably around 1994 when I was 12 or 13.
by keyserj | 2025-07-23 18:24:38+00:00
I'm a big fan of modeling causal structures like this - I think having a diagram is a really good way of getting on the same page and making conversations more constructively focused on points that each party can follow and precisely provide counterpoints for. I appreciate reading an article about this! I feel like our society would benefit a lot from investing more in this kind of information management, but it's not particularly flashy.

I'm working on an app[1] for building these structures, centered around problems and solutions, with the addition that each node or edge can have its own structured auxiliary information, e.g. scores for intuitions, argument trees for supporting/critiquing the claims implied by nodes/edges, questions for identifying unknowns. Here's an example[2] of the two diagrams in the article as they'd be in the app. I want it to be easier for our discussions to be constructive, and I think software can reduce the effort required for it.

[1] https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/facts-dont-change-minds-artic...
by rickydroll | 2025-07-23 18:24:39+00:00
I will argue that work should be just about a paycheck. The CEO/founder's vision is not your vision. It helps you be mindful of differences between your vision and your ethics versus the company's. You'll be able to see more clearly when the gap is too big and it's time to leave.

For me, when work became all about the paycheck, I took my ego out of my work. I remained engaged and performed the job as expected. Whenever I became "unsettled," I took that as a sign to work more on keeping my ego out of my work.

Another advantage of reducing your ego in your work is that you think more about what the customer needs, rather than what the company needs from the product. Doesn't mean you'll make it happen, but at least you know you tried.

To your point about people looking for community, when I reduced my ego at work, I found connection, satisfaction, etc. with communities outside of work.

Even if you're engaged in work, however, you should never lose sight of the fact that the company is making money off the backs of the exploited worker, and it should always remain part of the decision process of stay or go.
by rayiner | 2025-07-23 18:25:00+00:00
Why does it cost $4 million a year to service three dozen large vehicles? A huge part of the problem seems to be SF’s inability to provide services in a way that would be sustainable for low cost housing options absent immense subsidies.

My wife’s family is from Oregon and it’s full of people who don’t have any real job but live in a trailer and get by doing part time handyman work or the like. Somehow the state manages to provide them trash pickup.
by addaon | 2025-07-23 18:25:32+00:00
Memories. As a personal project back in... 2003?... I decided to do something similar, implement 4D Perlin Noise in Altivec assembly. The only problem was that I had a G3 iBook; so I would write one instruction of assembly, then write a C function to interpret that assembly, building an interpreter for a very selective subset of PPC w/ Altivec that ran (slooooowly) on the G3. As I recall I got it down to ~200 instructions, and it worked perfectly the first time I ran it on a G4, which was pretty rewarding. Took me more than half a day, though. On an unrelated note, I got an intership with Apple's performance team that summer.
by lbrito | 2025-07-23 18:25:56+00:00
>The concept of legal doesn’t apply to nation states.

So when the US government repeatedly calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine illegal, you are saying they are wrong, right?

"Two years ago, Russian forces launched an illegal and indefensible all-out invasion of Ukraine"

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/368495...
by rolph | 2025-07-23 18:26:11+00:00
i plead the 6th.

Generally, the right is to have a face-to-face confrontation with witnesses who are offering testimonial evidence against the accused in the form of cross-examination during a trial. The Fourteenth Amendment makes the right to confrontation applicable to the states and not just the federal government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right_to_confront_witness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
by zamadatix | 2025-07-23 18:27:31+00:00
It amuses me but maybe for the exact opposite reason: Phrase it to the median person as "for just a quarter per day" (queue sad music on a commercial) and we'll be worried about everything but the cost because it seems too low to think about. Say "For just 1 of less than 500 such choices you can afford to make in your lifetime" and suddenly we start wondering if it's something that makes the cut.

Of course that's median, most people on HN... probably should just get the system if the Radon levels are high.
by jasode | 2025-07-23 18:27:53+00:00
>, but I don't think this changes the legality of the discrimination against male independent contractors, because the riders are employing them.

Riders don't create a official "W-2 employee" relationship with a Uber driver as defined by the Internal Revenue Service. So the discrimination laws you're thinking of don't apply to riders.

It's the same legal status for Uber to offer a gender option just like the existing childcare platforms to find babysitters or medical provider directories to find doctors. Both the babysitter and doctor platforms are legally allowed to let customers filter on gender. Parents want to specify female-only for babysitters because they're afraid that males are more likely to be pedophiles.
by atoav | 2025-07-23 18:27:54+00:00
As a long year user of Windows (Windows 95 till Windows 11), MacOS and KDE Plasma, I have to say that KDE Plasma by this point is the best of the bunch.

What sucks in Windows is that you have multiple layers of old configuration editors none of which allow you to configure everything, want to change Network settings? There are literally 10 different places to do that and some haven't changed since Windows 98.

MacOS has this things where stuff you should be able to configure isn't or at least you can't rely on it being configurable next time. Just running a binary can be a challenge of remembering which obscure key you need to hold down so your OS treats you like a big boy. Every software update removes icons from my dock and I have to pray my audio interface still works (or roll back, which is a pain in the..)

The thing Windows and MacOS got going for them is that there is a lot more softeare for them, but since the enshittification-wave you can't really trust that something that works today, will work in a year.

KDE Plasma on the other hand just gets better, everything is configurable, the network settings alone put any other OS to shame easily. All the rest just seems to work, the desktop environment never once got into my way and when it did I could change it into not doing that ever again.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-23 18:28:02+00:00
Unfortunately a lot of people are basically just hoping that by the time the big bill is due, they have cashed out and left the bill on someone else

I also think that even with expertise, people relying too much on AI are going to erode their expertise

If you can lift heavy weights, but start to use machines to lift instead, your muscles will shrink and you won't be able to lift as much

The brain is a muscle it must be exercised to keep it strong too
by benrutter | 2025-07-23 18:28:08+00:00
I'm gonna ignore talking amount the abysmal current US administration and just share my immediate experience of using this site because it was funny to me:

- I open the site in android mobile: "swwwoooooosh" a big slow animation reveals the text

- After reading the the text I think I'll take a look at the home page: "swwooooooosh" the same animation rolls again as I load a very strange full screen image of Trump in black and white

- I click the hamburger menu icon: "swwoooooosh" the four menu items slowly slide into full screen

- There is visible no option to close the menu for me, I could probably refresh but decide I'm done here
by autoexec | 2025-07-23 18:28:40+00:00
Because of my job I end up browsing the web with JS disabled by default and 90% of the time I don't need JS at all. Most of the time there are features of websites that break/don't work (menus, search, videos, ads, etc) but the actual thing I went to the website to get works just fine. In fact, pages load much faster and look much cleaner!

There are some annoying websites that can't manage to display simple text or even a basic image without JS (which is just bad web designers doing bad web design) and some instances where the content I need is obscured by something that doesn't behave without JS (like an expanding menu spewed out all over the place because JS isn't there to hide what hasn't been selected/hovered over) but in those cases it's usually just 2 clicks to solve the issue (either for just that visit or for every visit to that domain in the future as well) so it's not really a big deal. I'm currently using HN without JS and it's great.
by jancsika | 2025-07-23 18:28:57+00:00
> it cost $13467 to leave Windows

I rather think it cost you $mac_mini to buy a mac mini, and $compulsion buying hardware for reasons I still do not understand.

Paul Davis has lurked here at least as long as you have, and it would have cost $0 just to ask if that card is currently supported in Linux.

I mean, for $13467 I bet I could buy a plane ticket to Shenzhen, hire a translator, and have them send an email to Collabora to quote a price to develop the firware/driver I can afford with the money I have left over.
by mikewarot | 2025-07-23 18:29:15+00:00
It's quite possible this is getting near the upper limit that is possible with current architectures for compute. Let's say the limit were 10k tokens/second with Qwen3-235B.

There's always going to be some latency in any compute architecture. Assume some insane billionaire cast the entire Qwen3-235B model into silicon, so it all ran in parallel, tokens going in one end, and the next token coming out the other end. This wafer (or likely, stack of interconnected wafers) would likely add up to a latency from end to end of 10 to 100 milliseconds.

If you then added pipelining, the latency might actually increase a millsecond or two, but the aggregate throughput would be N times the number of pipeline stages.

If you could increase N to the point that the clock cycle were a nanosecond... what would the economic value of this thing be? 100,000 separate streams at 10,000 tokens per second, multiplexing through it.

If you change it from cast in silicon, to a program to configure the silicon (line an FPGA, but far less clunky), I believe you get the future of LLM compute. Ever faster and wider lanes between compute and RAM is a dead end, a premature optimization.
by rickydroll | 2025-07-23 18:29:21+00:00
That's a little extreme. There are country mice and city mice. City mice want to live inside cities and eliminate cars. That's great for them. Country mice, like me and I suspect you, want city mice to stay in the city and not ruin the nicer, quieter living space outside.

Now, if we could just get cities to keep their light pollution within the city, it would be a nicer world.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-23 18:29:36+00:00
> Not sure why you added "but even so"

Because the "even so" was for the "self-motivated" part, not the "getting the PhD" part.

> I've learned enough to publish (well received) technical books in areas I've never taken a single course in,

I'm talking about pure math here, not other technical fields which are more hands on and don't require as much mentorship. Programming is easier to self-learn than math for sure, because it is not very abstract compared to math. It's also guided by whether the code works or not.
by echelon | 2025-07-23 18:29:51+00:00
I program mostly in Rust, so in theory Zed should be the perfect IDE for me. But I couldn't get past the design. It just put me in the wrong mind space.

As a data point for the Zed folks: JetBrains' RustRover with vim key bindings is still my go-to. It just "looks and feels" right to me.

I'm sure that they'll get there in time. They're playing the slow, careful, methodical game. Writing it in Rust was the right choice and it'll pay dividends.
by supertrope | 2025-07-23 18:29:59+00:00
The proportion of troublemakers is much higher in the very low socioeconomic status cohort. Heavily policing public spaces is too expensive so instead social moats are erected. House prices rise to unaffordable levels and this is cheered on by current residents and politicians. Nice neighborhoods are not connected with public transit and are inconveniently located so only residents will drive there.

In New York Columbia University Public Safety officers escort any non-community members off their campus.
by bsimpson | 2025-07-23 18:30:49+00:00
The personality cult of modern politics is so disgusting.

You have to scroll a couple pages just to get past the photo of Trump trying to look important. Then, you get to read the talking points, written with Trump's signature idiosyncratic capitalization.

(He's the worst offender, but it's not just him. Before him, everything the White House touched was signed "the Biden-Harris administration," which took the same gloating and added a "and Kamala is the inevitable heir" layer to it.)

It would be nice if policy was policy, not a form of ego-polishing for whoever is sitting in the chair.
Show HN: I Made a Tool to Detect Leaked API Keys on GitHub in Real Time
by zaim_abbasi | 2025-07-23 18:30:53+00:00
I built API Radar, a tool that scans public GitHub commits in real time to detect exposed API keys (OpenAI, Google, Claude, etc).

It’s fast, scalable, and tracks real leaks with contextual metadata and filtering. So far: 9,600+ repos scanned, 280+ leaks detected, all ethically surfaced from public code.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-07-23 18:31:21+00:00
> and all of which has historically been true in all kinds of ways. But precisely because of that, if you’re not thinking about what’s happening to boys and how they are being raised, then that can actually hurt women. … And I will say, as “progressives,” Democrats, progressive parents, enlightened ones, we’ve made that mistake sometimes in terms of our rhetoric.

And this is partially why young men have turned to toxic influences like Trump and Tate. They've been told they're "privileged" or somehow responsible and for acts commited by other men. Of course they will look in the other direction at the group of people saying the opposite.

This why Kamala lost the support of a lot of young men and by the time she tried to recoup it was far too late.
by chasil | 2025-07-23 18:32:07+00:00
No, a user that is only granted SELECT may write to the database.

The trivial example is sorting.

A more nuanced example, in the world of Oracle, is block cleanout. A block may be encountered that has been modified by a past transaction where the commit status is not immediately known; the query session is responsible for either updating the (confirmed) commit status, or rolling back the block from the UNDO/rollback disk image.

So readers always write, likely in every database to some degree.
by Demiurge | 2025-07-23 18:32:08+00:00
I agree. I couldn't get over any of the existing themes, they just seem so low contrast... So I spent a bunch of hours porting then favorite theme I've been using in Sublime Text, to Zed, named iPlastic. Sublime Text has a theme back of classic TextMate themes, and it came in that pack. I have to say, the porting process was not very easy, but it was worth it. Now, I prefer Zed to ST and VSCode because of the theme, not just the UI and other features :)
by dminik | 2025-07-23 18:32:24+00:00
Please, smalltalk and common lisp don't qualify as popular languages.

I don't want to look at TIOBE, so let's look at the stack overflow survey from 2024. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#admired-and-...

Strong + Static: TypeScript, Java, C#, C++, Go, Rust, Kotlin, Dart, Swift, Visual Basic, Scala

Weak + Static: C

Strong + Dynamic: Python, Lua, Ruby, R, GDScript(*)

Weak + Dynamic: JavaScript, PHP, Matlab, Perl

At this point I'm reaching into the low percentages. I think it's pretty clear that Strongly + Statically typed languages are massively over-represented on the list.

Both Strongly and Weakly Dynamically typed languages are similarly represented.

Note: I'm open to editing the comment to move languages from and to various categories. I haven't used many of them, so correct me if I'm wrong.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-07-23 18:32:31+00:00
In this case yes, absolutely. It would have basically been going back to doing what I was doing 20 years ago, and I've grown a lot since then. Though a mix of impostor syndrome, desperation, depression and medical reasons that stopped me making a complete career change after redundancy, I'd settled for something I would have quickly hated.

Most humans involved were just glad I was doing something though...
by malcolmgreaves | 2025-07-23 18:33:50+00:00
Yup -- this idea, championed by Regan and the Republicans at the request of billionaires -- is the reason why we have the disaster of Trump in the WH right now. Like any institution, it being helpful or not rests entirely on the kind of people that run it. If you have criminals running the show, it's unsurprisingly going to harm the population.

The Republicans pushed this idea so hard in the 80s. But it's so telling that government is only not here to help when the Republicans are in power. They keep repeating this cycle: they get into power by unscrupulous means, then they purposely make government worse, then they say that the government is ineffective and its only harmful, then they sell off pieces of the government's responsibility to their billionaire handlers, then they do an even worse job, providing fuel for another destructive cycle. And some folks *actually believe them*, even after 40+ years of this nefarious behavior.
by kbdiaz | 2025-07-23 18:34:05+00:00
This week, I remember giving it these tasks:

- Upgrade our NodeJS version because it just got deprecated

- Upgrade our linter to the newest version, add a new rule, and fix all instances of that rule in our code

- Make minor changes to our UI

- Fix small bugs that I know how to fix, and can tell it exactly what to do

The main pain point they're solving for me is that I have many small tasks I need to do. Coding them isn't the main bottleneck, but creating a new branch and then creating a new PR is the main bottleneck for me. With cursor specifically, I don't even have to check out the branch locally to verify the code.

For any significant work, I'd rather manually do it in editor.