MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moomoo11 | 2025-07-27 18:45:47+00:00
If you’re not a developer you might as well use AI to become one?

Back in my day we used learn x in y minutes to get up to speed on a new language and then a week to get comfortable.

Now I can do that for anything in like 15 minutes.

Of course, coding is the easy part and anyone can do it.

Software engineering (key word: engineering) is the hard part and requires that you understand the computer, design patterns, and how to build robust systems.
by ml- | 2025-07-27 18:45:48+00:00
Still on a sabbatical building things I enjoy, but it's summer here so have also spent much time in my hammock with cold beers.

Most effort on https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. Since last month I've added a couple of minor things like maps and "where to go next" sections for each venue.

I'm debating whether or not I should add user accounts, and let people maintain venue bucket lists, venue endorsements. Also planning to reach out to the venues and ask if they agree to monthly or quarterly one-click information verification emails from us.

Other projects that receive less love are:

- https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages, and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol)

- https://misplacy.com, just a dumb and wrong AI landing page for now but was thinking to work towards a drop-in solution for SMBs around lost/found management.

- A platform for helping voluntary associations with repetitive administrative tasks (non-english so not linking. Trying to rank the pain points currently)

- A platform for structuring national soccer club history (initial brain dump idea phase)

- A platform for structuring writing prompts and collaborative fiction writing (initial brain dump / mockups)

For the next month or so I think I need to prioritize what to focus on after summer

Always interesting to see what others are building and doing. So thanks for sharing!
by bigyabai | 2025-07-27 18:47:01+00:00
Sure, you could do that for any language/SDK if you're patient enough. You could scrap the abstraction layer altogether and litter the whole thing with ifdefs if you're really lazy.

We're definitely going to see people using higher-level libraries to abstract all this away in the future though. We knew this was going to happen a decade ago, so it's been frustrating watching GPU standards fragment while featureset demands consolidate. Nowadays there is basically no upside to writing a raster program with native GPU libraries when you could target a higher-level standard with oftentimes better performance.
by fsflover | 2025-07-27 18:47:07+00:00
> how does that differ from just using the Instagram "server"

1. You can move to another server if you don't like their rules, or to your own server. There is a competition between servers (and self-hosting!) making the network better for everyone.

2. There is no single point of failure for the whole network. Hackers and governments love single points of failure.

3. There's nobody who would forbid alternative clients or web access forcing you into a shitty app. There's no single entity owning everything and trying to extract as much money as possible from you. On Instagram, you're in a walled garden.
by kragen | 2025-07-27 18:47:39+00:00
He was a math professor, a secret government cryptographer, a comedian in technically challenging musical-theater forms, and reportedly the inventor of the Jell-O shot.

Stallman says in https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html:

> Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking. (...) It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

However:

> The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.

(So I think The Elements qualifies, if barely.)

And with respect to

> Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around.

perhaps we should mention mention the origin story of the Jell-O shot from https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives....:

> A rumor has circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs.

> "That's amazing how that got around! What happened was, I was in the Army for two years, and we were having a Christmas party on the naval base where I was working in Washington, D.C. The rules said no alcoholic beverages were allowed. And we wanted to have a little party, so this friend and I spent an evening experimenting with Jell-O. It wasn't a beverage," he says with a shrug.

> "And we finally decided that orange Jell-O and vodka was the best. We tried gin and vodka and various flavors and stuff -- of course you can't sample too much. So we went over to her apartment and we made all these little cups and we thought I would bring them in, hoping that the Marine guard would say, 'OK, what's in there?' And we'd say, 'Jell-O.' and then he'd say, 'Oh, OK.' But no, he didn't even ask. So it worked. I recommend it. Orange Jell-O."

So, yeah. Definitely a hacker.
by xerox13ster | 2025-07-27 18:48:09+00:00
I don’t have much to offer the conversation other than a linguistic alternative.

TAURUS: Torqued Accelerator Using Radiation Unleashed from the Sun.

Grammatically correct and it doesn’t drop a word just to mimic a sci-fi robot’s name in an incredibly awkward and stilted way. I like Interstellar as much as the next person, but that acronym felt like a stretch, and it leaves out (literally) useful information.
by jancsika | 2025-07-27 18:48:43+00:00
So just like for-profit health care customers must avoid rural regional hospitals hollowed out by VCs to be able to gain the better outcomes in a system hurdling toward catastrophe, space explorers must carefully avoid paths of a growing amount of space debris in a LEO system also hurdling toward catastrophe.

In both cases, I don't think the system works well without assuming spherical cows or something like that.

Edit: ah, I see it's "hurtling." Although I guess in both cases you have to dodge larger and larger geographic regions to claim success, so a bit like hurdling. :)
by iLemming | 2025-07-27 18:48:47+00:00
You seem to be making several interconnected points, but your writing style is making it somewhat difficult to follow.

It looks like you're mischaracterizing Hickey's talk. The distinction between "simple" (not intertwined) and "easy" (familiar) isn't "academic blabla' - it's fundamental to building maintainable systems.

Your NAND gate example actually supports his point: we build higher-level abstractions precisely because working at the lowest level isn't always optimal. That's what Clojure's immutable data structures do - they provide efficient abstractions over mutation.

As for "constructing complex data" being harder with immutability - have you ever heard about Clojure's transients or update-in, lenses or Specter? They make complex data manipulation both readable and efficient.

The ORM critique isn't about "bad coders" - it's about impedance mismatch between relational and object models. Even expert users hit fundamental limitations that require workarounds.

Calling dynamic typing an "unnecessary layer of problems" at this point is pretty much just your opinion, as it is clear that you have one-sided experience that contradicts everything I said. The choice between static and dynamic typing involves real tradeoffs; there isn't a clear winner for every situation, domain, team, and project, you can "state" whatever you want, but that's just fundamental truth.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-27 18:49:07+00:00
RIP Mr. Lehrer.

I'd only heard of him from a song of his, "Poisoning pigeons in the park", that has been available on DECtalk since way back.

Searching for this, I just found another of his, "I got it from Agnes", that has also been adapted for DECtalk. Similar dark humor!

https://chordify.net/chords/i-got-it-from-agnes-by-tom-lehre...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-27 18:49:30+00:00
For me, it was different.

A cardiologist told me (after a calcium test showed 95th percentile for calcium) that what I was looking for was a rapid drop in ability. Not over a decade, but over a couple weeks or a month. Well, I play ultimate, and one day I realized "I didn't get this winded a month ago". So I got a stress test, and it showed "abnormal motion of the heart wall under stress" (that is, not enough oxygen getting to all the heart muscles). They did a catheterization, and I wound up with two stents.

I mean, look, if you get the chest pains, don't ignore that. But it doesn't have to be that way. If you lose athletic ability, or wind, or endurance, in a short amount of time, get a stress test.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-27 18:50:16+00:00
I chuckled at "recovering sexp addict". What possible risk is there in over-indulging in sexp?! I simply don't see it.

Speaking of unconventional lisps, I enjoyed this recently:

https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp/blob/master/docs/lisp/lis...

from Chris Hinsley, author of the (very) cool Chrysalisp operating system. Same author who wrote this in 1995:

http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html
by mrighele | 2025-07-27 18:50:51+00:00
I remember doing something like this with Skype many years ago (at least 15, I guess).

The old Skype, the one that was a real p2p app and before it got bought by Microsoft, was very good slicing through firewalls and NATs and it offered a plugin api, so it was easy to implement a TCP tunnel with it.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-27 18:51:40+00:00
Unless there is willfull negligence (very difficult to prove) or malicious behavior I don't think putting people in jail will help. Most of this stuff happens by accident not by intent.

Financial consequences to the company might be a deterrent, of course then you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of people potentially unemployed because the company was bankrupted by something as simple as a mistake in a firewall somewhere or an employee falling victim to a social engineering trick.

I think the path is along the lines of admitting that cloud, SaaS and other internet-connected information systems cannot be made safe, and dramatically limiting their use.

Or, admitting that a lot of this information should be of no consequence if it is exposed. Imagine a world where knowing my name, SSN, DOB, address, mother's maiden name, and whatever else didn't mean anything.
by chrisnight | 2025-07-27 18:51:56+00:00
It is relevant because it wastes time and adds nothing of substance. An AI can only output as much information as was inputted into it. Using it to write a text then just makes it unnecessarily more verbose.

The last few sections could have been cut entirely and nothing would have been lost.

Edit: In the process of writing this comment, the author removed 2 sections (and added an LLM acknowledgement), of which I referred to in my previous statement. To the author, thank you for reducing the verbosity with that.
by wrs | 2025-07-27 18:52:15+00:00
Diagnostic labs are just for-profit companies. They’re happy to do tests as long as they get paid by somebody. The only practical restrictions are if you want to convince insurance to pay for it. If you’re paying cash, you can get anything from a simple blood test up to a full-body MRI scan [0].

I got a CT angiogram from a cardiologist here who started her own business specifically to do them. (It’s just her, a nurse, and a CT machine, in a trailer in a parking lot!) Insurance doesn’t pay for imaging like this until things have already gone very wrong, and she feels it should be used much earlier for people who have risk factors.

[0] https://prenuvo.com/
by woobar | 2025-07-27 18:53:17+00:00
What are your assumptions are based on?

NC outsourced safety inspections to private sector decades ago. And nothing you have described has happened.

- the service prices are all fixed ($30 or $13.60)

- tons of places to do your inspection, wait times are almost zero

- work is done in 10 minutes

- new reduced rate ($13.60) for newer vehicles was introduced some years ago

If they do something similar for driver license offices or vehicle registration offices it will be a giant leap in quality of service. Right now in bigger cities you cannot make an appointment 6 months in advance, and walk-in does not guarantee you will get any service even after spending whole day in line.
by barrell | 2025-07-27 18:53:31+00:00
Still working on https://phrasing.app - an app for polyglots to learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI. Just finished a onboarding flow, now updating the search and create experience to fall more in line with actual usage from users, then hopefully prepping for a more public launch :)

Had a fun week fixing up the application so it’s 100x faster on 5 different axes, and it’s starting to feel really well polished. Also started to move from reagent to preact/signals in a long slow migration hopefully to hsx.

I also moved the critical algorithm logic into an independent Clojure file that is compiled (and tested) with cherry-cljs — I’m hoping to expand this to ClojErl and jank so I can have isomorphic Clojure code running on the browser, BEAM server, and native swift app :D

It’s getting really close to done, I’m using it now to study 18 different languages, including some really minor ones like Maltese, Welsh, and Cantonese (not sure if Cantonese is really a minor language, but definitely low learner resourced) and it’s easy, slick, and surprisingly effective!
by aerostable_slug | 2025-07-27 18:53:41+00:00
We've had step one for decades in California. AAA does a portion of what the DMV does for their members. And they do it better and faster.

There's never been any step two (cynically, the organization does that themselves). Everyone has been doing step three since time immemorial which is why AAA lobbied to start providing DMV services to their members.

It is the best of both worlds. Nobody is denied service yet AAA members don't have to deal with poorly-incentivized government workers for many common bureaucratic tasks.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-07-27 18:54:14+00:00
Because AI isn't so hot on the "I" yet, and if you ask it to generate this kind of document it might just make stuff up. And there is too much content on the internet to delve deep on whatever you come across to understand the soundness of it. Obviously you need to do it at some point with some things, but few people do it all the time with everything.

Pretty much everyone has heuristics for content that feels like low quality garbage, and currently seeing the hallmarks of AI seems like a mostly reasonable one. Other heuristics are content filled with marketing speak, tons of typos, whatever.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-27 18:54:17+00:00
I think it's good form to mention it as a little disclaimer, just so people don't take it the wrong day. Just write (this post was originally written by me but formatted and corrected with LLM since English is not my primary language).

From what I've seen, people generally do not like reading a generated content, but every time I've seen the author come back and say "I used it because it isn't my main language" the community always takes back the criticism. So I'd just be upfront about it and get ahead of it.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-27 18:54:19+00:00
>> AI disrupts the process.

I completely agree when using synchronous tools like Windsurf and Cursor. This is why I much prefer the async workflow most of the time. Here you get a chance to think about how the AI should be constrained in order to have the highest probability of a "one shot" PR or at least something that would only require a few edits. I spend a lot of time on the AGENTS.md file and as well as thinking a lot about the prompt that I am going to use. I sometime converse with ChatGPT a little on the prompt as the feedback loop is very fast. Then, just send it and wait ~5 minutes for completion.

I still use synchronous tools sometime for UI and other things were it is hard to specify up front and iteration is required. But realistically, I use async 50:1 over sync.
by Latty | 2025-07-27 18:54:41+00:00
Part of the problems with using LLMs for translation is precisely that they alter the tone and structure of what you give it, writing using the LLM cliches and style, and it's unsurprising people see that and just assume completely generated slop. It's unfortunate, and I would probably try and use LLMs if English wasn't my first language, but I don't think it's as simple as "using translation software", I've not seen people called out in that way for dodgy Google Translate translations, for example, it's a problem specific to LLMs and the output they make having fundamental issues.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-27 18:54:53+00:00
> "Maybe I'm missing some details but I thought the entire purpose of first-stage rockets was to get a certain payload with certain max dimensions (what can fit inside a cylinder of a certain height and radius) to LEO, or the equivalent delta-V. At that point first stage is discarded anyway. So what exactly the payload is (beyond its dimensions) and you do with your payload after getting to LEO (or equiv delta V) that shouldn't really make a difference,"

It makes a difference because if you're designing a rocket for a mission then you'll have a rocket that's as close to optimal for the mission, given mission requirements, timelines and budgets as you can reasonably get it. That's not SLS, the Moon mission wasn't planned when SLS was designed and instead SLS is optimized to reuse Shuttle hardware.

Being stuck with a rocket that wasn't designed for the mission, as well as the political decision to use Orion, severely compromise the planning of Artemis. SLS lacks the power to get Orion into a proper lunar orbit, so instead they're going to use a highly elliptical NHRO lunar orbit with an orbital period of 7 days. This is extremely dangerous, it means that if there is any sort of emergency on the moon the astronauts may have to wait as long as a week to get back to Orion; which is probably a death sentence. It also means the lander has to be huge to make up for SLS's inadequacy, which means the Artemis program now relies on the success of Starship HLS and/or Blue Origin's HLS. This is going to delay Artemis and the entire reason this dependency exists is because Congress wanted a shuttle-derived rocket foremost, and then made the situation even worse by saddling it with their Boeing pork capsule.

What it comes down to is SLS is a rocket that ""works"" but isn't actually good at anything and therefore never should have been built.
by danielbln | 2025-07-27 18:54:55+00:00
Using an agentic coding assistant would be the first step (there are many, Cline, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and various others) as those can traverse the code base, execute tests, run queries or web search and feed the outputs back into itself to validate correctness of whatever the agent has created/done.

You won't need to set up this stuff for an hour every time, you set it up once and then you just give it commands.

The skill ceiling is deceptive, it feels very low at first (after all, it's just natural language, right?) but getting an intuition for where these tools work best and where they break down, how to task them, what to include in the instructions, it takes a bit of using them first.

That said, if you're a code maximalist, if you get most enjoyment out of hand crafting code or of you don't feel comfortable communicating effectively or delegating work, then maybe these tools aren't for you.

At this point in time I'm also pretty much over proselytizing anyone, I get a TON of value out of this stuff, but everbody has to find their own workflows.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-07-27 18:55:01+00:00
If those drives were short-stroked, they probably could have kept up with that SSD, though at a reduced capacity. SSD would probably have a lower power bill over its life, though. I did some calculations for an array of short-stroked 15k SAS disks to replace a consumer 4GB SSD for a write-intensive app that chews through SSDs, and its performance would be in spitting distance of the SSD. Ended up not doing it due to likely not having any parts availability for 15k SAS drives in the not too distant future.
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-27 18:55:30+00:00
If you're using good power supplies, name brand microSD cards, and don't hammer them with writes all day, you can have a Pi 2/3/4/5 running for years with no stability issues.

I think 99% of problems people have are related to one of those three things (same with most embedded devices, but people tend not to throw a cheap used phone charger and the SD card that came with an old cheap drone on more specialized devices).
by benreesman | 2025-07-27 18:56:09+00:00
I've been here since like 2008 and I still screw it up sometimes. I'd have a not do it but HN comments are one of my "zero AI" zones. To echo sibling, its time to support markdown, its a standard now and even in arc, a reasonable subset is a pittance on anyone's time budget. It doesn't need to match GH bug for bug, that's a real project, but code formatting `backticks` is table stakes.
by righthand | 2025-07-27 18:56:23+00:00
The US government isn’t a business. In fact the current attack on it by Magats is because businesses want part of their pie to turn into a business, not because it will help or empower the people or because the programs cost too much. They are doing it because they want to charge you more. They want to charge you for your comfortable American excess that you already paid for with tax dollars. They want to double dip, have the government subsidize the business with your tax dollars then charge you again to get the value out of it.

There is no sense in trying to treat the government like a business.
by survirtual | 2025-07-27 18:56:46+00:00
We need a system for digital identity that can be confidently connected to a singular living organism. That identity acts as a sort of credential. With that credential, you can anonymously take online action that is untraceable to the identity, besides knowing the anon identity is a real, singular human.

If you can follow that logic, you will see that this makes many, many things possible. Anonymous credentials are possible right now and extend to anything. It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law", etc. But this sort of mechanism starts with being able to say "this is a singular person, with identity verified by X mechanism".

It is absolutely foundational and the opposite of dystopian. It allows us to combat every current dystopian mechanism without creating any additional compared to what already exists.
by tptacek | 2025-07-27 18:56:56+00:00
She met Buffett herself, saw his genius, and made him her professor. He’d bring 20 annual reports to board meetings, teaching her line by line.

Yeah, uh, that's not all she did. She and Buffett apparently had a long-running (and public) affair, which in part led to Susan Buffett separating from him and moving to San Francisco.