MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-27 17:50:07+00:00
I never imagined I'd see a black president, same sex marriage, or cannabis legalization in my lifetime!

Now would be a terrible time to become disillusioned and despairing, after winning all those important battles. It proves that idealism works, and we really need it for current and future battles! It's the nihilistic disillusioned people who are CAUSING all the problems.

In so many aspects of life, I've noticed how there's always something devastatingly discouraging that happens right before any major successful breakthrough.

It's as if God's being a dick, and always throws something profoundly disheartening at you right on the precipice of success, just so he can laugh at you for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I now recognize that as a sign I'm just about to succeed, and shouldn't give up no matter what.

We are living through that kind of historic transition right now, watching MAGA finally turn on Trump. Don't fuck it up by giving up now!
by escapecharacter | 2025-07-27 17:50:18+00:00
A helpful, and snarky, critique of the majestic rhetoric around “cloud computing” was to mentally replace “cloud” with “someone else’s computer”.

When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.
by sitkack | 2025-07-27 17:50:22+00:00
What a wonderful soul.

> Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”

To think he is only a couple years younger than Mel Brooks.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-27 17:50:41+00:00
I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more.

Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later.

I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.
by nine_k | 2025-07-27 17:50:43+00:00
I'd love to hear about examples.

Sweden tried to become more socialist in 1970s-80s, and it did not look pretty. (Then Mr. Palme was shot and killed.)

Venezuela... well, does not look like an enticing example either.

I would say that socialism as a state-imposed regime does not work, same as communism. BTW communism does work in communes of like-minded individuals, be it a bunch of hippies or a bunch of monks. The key is self-selecting people who subscribe to that way of living voluntarily. This can't work for a whole country.

OTOH what the TFA suggests does work, exactly because mission-driven open-source projects / foundations and non-profits attract the right kind of motivated people, while providing little to no incentive for entities seeking pure profit to take over. Debian is one example: it exists for decades in the normal capitalist economy, is going strong, and shows no signs (and no ways) of selling out.

This, to my mind, is the future. Maybe 50 years from now our grandchildren will be appalled by the fact that we kept giving our free labor and free time to for-profit entities which did not have our best interests aligned with theirs.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-07-27 17:50:57+00:00
A practical observations independent from the komoot future.

In the past I switched to komoot from osmand because it produced better trail running routes. In both apps you set some anchor points to get a gpx, but osmand often sticks to the shortest path between them (often boring roadways) while komoot chose scenic trails where available. Also osmand heats up my phone significantly both then when doing pathfinding and when just drawing a complicated piece of terrain.

I recently discovered a new feature in the Strava subscription: you just "draw" a route how you like it and the app glues it to the nearest available track. Even though komoot may have resolved ambiguities better, the strava ui is just faster to get what you want, so I switched to it.

IMO the Strava UX overall is not pleasant, I don't like their business model, and this is the second useful feature in the subscription ever since heatmaps. But it's genuinely good and I'll stick to it until a better alternative comes around. I still pay for osmand though and I hope it survives. Strava doesn't work offline for one thing so the first thing I do is exporting the gpx to osmand.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-27 17:50:58+00:00
One unpopular opinion I hold is that in recent times programming became a lot more about integrating libraries and frameworks vs writing your own thing. This was fine because if someone open sourced it, why repeat the same work. That ended up in cases where a lot of work was modifying the libraries to your use case.

With vibe coding, I suspect this is a group that has adapted to it really well (alongside hobby coders and non coders). The thrill comes from problem solving, and when you can try out the solution quickly and validate, it is just addictive. The other side is how open source frameworks have increased, and there are a lot of oss libraries for just about everything. (A personal experience is implementing Cmd bar (like linear) in react when i was just learning. It took me a week or so, and then i just inserted an oss thing for comparison. It was super smooth, but i did not know the assumptions. In production, i will prefer that, and dont always have time to learn and implement from scratch). We see this with langchain etc in LLMs too, and other agentic frameworks as well. The shift is not towards less code but getting the thing to work faster. Claude code accelerates that exponentially as well.
by quatonion | 2025-07-27 17:51:55+00:00
I have been programming since 1978 and thoroughly enjoy it.

Nothing more satisfying to me than thinking about nifty algorithms, how to wring out every last drop of performance from a system, or more recently train AI models or build agentic systems. From object models to back end, graphics to communications protocols, I love it all.

But that said, I am getting on a bit now and don't particularly enjoy all the typing. When AI rolled around back in 2022 I threw myself into seeing how far I could push it. Copy pasting code back and forth between the chat window and the editor. It was a very interesting experience that felt fresh, even if the results were not amazing.

Now I am a hundred percent using Claude Code with a mixture of other models in the mix. It's amazing.

Yesterday I worked with CC on a CLAP plugin for Bitwig written in C and C++. It did really well - with buffer management, worker threads and proper lock-free data structures and synchronization. It even hand rolled its own WebSocket client! I was totally blown away.

Sure, it needs some encouragement and help here and there, and having a lot of experience for this kind of stuff is important right now for success, but I can definitely see it won't be that way for much longer.

I'm just so happy I can finally get round to all these projects I have had on the back burner all these years.

The productivity is incredible, and things mostly just work. It really brings me a lot of joy and makes me happy.
by BobbyJo | 2025-07-27 17:52:03+00:00
Putting the first people on the moon, the first people on any foreign celestial body, as a show of power during the cold war isn't what I'd consider "token".

Putting people on the moon today is a lot less substantive, and doing it with decades old technology makes it even less so.

I see the correlation you're trying to draw: "neither is of any practical use", but I think even that ignores the very deliberate effects the first space race had on the USSR.
by tikotus | 2025-07-27 17:52:13+00:00
This is interesting. I've been playing with the idea of dynamic binding for my own scripting language (designed for gamedev). Though I keep coming back to the idea of passing an implicit context object instead, preferably immutable. It will cover all of my most common use cases. I'm especially a big consumer of coroutines, and it's seems unclear how dynamic binding would work with those. With a context object there are less surprises.
by ljm | 2025-07-27 17:52:33+00:00
Only 20 years since it started as a hobby. There is programming that I enjoy doing for the fun of it or for experimentation and I wouldn’t use AI for that (most likely because it’d be something that isn’t well known or documented).

If work wants me to use it for the job, then sure why not? That too is something new to learn how to do well, will possibly be important for future career growth, and is exciting in a different way. If anything, I’ve got spare mental compute by the end of the week and might even have energy to do my hobbyist stuff.

Win win for me.
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-07-27 17:52:35+00:00
This is my experience as well. Occasionally when using code tools - I do actually feel like a 10x engineer. I’ve got sufficient experience to know what I want and to correct course when needed. And I can dive into the code and help when needed.

It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
by EasyMark | 2025-07-27 17:52:51+00:00
China is most definitely an adversary, bordering on enemy, of the USA, other than trade we really are in a cold war with them by all measures and many aspects. Culture, education (attracting best students), Asian interests (Taiwan/Japan in particular), government styles (recently arguable however with Trump's actions moving us closer to autocracy), and the list goes on. Very little of that is going on between us and India.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-07-27 17:53:03+00:00
I have not seen it yet, however I have heard favorable responses about it. The responses have largely been that Dave's theory is basically a near-complete summary of science that doesn't include roughly the past 5ish years of scientific advancement, so it isn't entirely right, but a good deal of the way there. He's been shaping this theory for like a decade now. People who are more familiar with this (such as career research endocrinologists) have given favorable commentary about it, but it isn't perfect and has small gaps.

I have seen him speak about his theory on a few well known medical/science podcasts, so I am a little familiar with his work so far. I find it interesting that he isn't a career biologist in any way, but a software engineer. So, I imagine he'd fit in with the HN crowd quite well.

The major part of his theory I think that is interesting is people who have weird insulin responses (ie, have been or are insulin resistant; so, have, had, or will have Diabetes) have largely shaped what we consider normal cholesterol numbers. Also, people who are lean and eat low carb may just naturally have different ratios of cholesterol numbers; iirc part of his argument involves the LDL-P(articles) to LDL-C(holesterol in the particles) ratio or LDL-C to TG ratios, and how it may be that they have "bad" ratios that most doctors would try to treat with statins, but there is actually nothing wrong with them, as other biomarkers and CAC scans indicate there is no increase in arterial damage even though they have "bad" ratios.

So yeah, I'd consider it worth watching, but don't take it as gospel. If it shows up on a streaming service I have, I'll consider giving it a watch.
by crawshaw | 2025-07-27 17:53:12+00:00
I first got paid to code 25 years ago. I have been programming since I was a kid, and always will. I love making computers do things.

I definitely don't love the process: design docs, meetings, code review, CI, e2e tests working around infrastructure that acts too good to spin up in my test (postgres what are you doing, I used to init databases on machines less powerful than my watch, you can init in a millisecond in CI).

It is pretty clear to me agents are a key part of getting work done. Some 80% of my code changes are done by an agent. They are super frustrating, just like CI and E2E tests! Sometimes they work miracles, sometimes they turn into a game of wackamole. Like the flaky E2E test that keeps turning your CI red, but keeps finding critical bugs in your software, you cannot get rid of them.

But agents help me make computers do things, more. So I'm going to use them.
by andoando | 2025-07-27 17:53:32+00:00
If its any typical corporate job, as they said I imagine the coding is rather boring.

We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again.

Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work
by hinkley | 2025-07-27 17:53:37+00:00
What we know now is that lead’s effects are more pronounced as developmental issues. A little lead exposure as a child can lead to a violent temper. So once children were not born into a low grade cloud of lead contamination, they were set up for fewer mood disturbances as teenagers and young adults. Feeling like violence is your best avenue for conflict resolution leads to crime. So the change wasn’t over night, it was over 20 years.

I expect that whatever effect was going on in Rome if there was one, which seems to be up for debate, counted on pregnant women exposed to lead via alcohol and acidic foods, neither of which young children would normally encounter. Meanwhile lead dust from exhaust got -everywhere-, and paint a lot of places.
Show HN: Rainlayer: Authentic 3D rain audio app with Metal-rendered BG
by frbr | 2025-07-27 17:53:39+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been working on Rainlayer, a focus and sleep app built around authentic binaural 3D rain recordings. After a few weeks live, it's doing well in the US (3.7% conversion rate) and I'm looking for feedback, especially from founders who might be my target audience.

The backstory: I previously built the weather app Haze (2013) and Thunderspace (2014), both featuring a distinctive background effect rendered in OpenGL ES. For Rainlayer, I wanted to recreate that visual experience but modernized, in a semi-holographic way.

AI tools helped me port the rendering pipeline from OpenGL ES to Metal, which was a non-trivial process that probably would have taken me 10x longer. I used mostly NotebookLM for research and Windsurf for accelerated engineering, along with some custom-built CLIs that helped me craft specs more easily.

What makes Rainlayer different: All audio is genuine binaural 3D recorded from nature. There's no AI-generated content, no synthetic samples. I deliberately avoided gen AI here because I believe authenticity will become increasingly rare. The explorable sound field is designed without traditional "tracks", in a way that you get harmonious, natural transitions.

I'm particularly interested in feedback from startup founders who work under extreme pressure and who appreciate quality. My hypothesis is that founders dealing with constant context switching and decision fatigue might find this valuable, but I'm still validating that assumption. What features would make a focus/sleep tool more valuable to you?

The app is live on the App Store and you can try it without barriers. I haven't cracked distribution yet. This post is part of figuring that out, and I appreciate any pointers you might have.

What do you think? Open to any kind of constructive feedback.

Cheers, Franz
by tptacek | 2025-07-27 17:53:40+00:00
If you made all this work go away with a new functional programming language, like if finally someone contrived the perfect type system where you could just declaratively lay out all the rote bits and evaluate them to the imperative steps you wanted taken, everyone would be thrilled. There would be people going around dunking on all the developers who didn't use that language.

Instead, it's the opposite.
by ProfDreamer | 2025-07-27 17:54:22+00:00
There's at least some of the original ANSI Art of BitchX in there.

Here are some examples:

https://16colo.rs/pack/acid-100/ANSI-100.ANS

https://16colo.rs/pack/sense-19/logos-19.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/awe-20/MID-BX.ASC
by packetlost | 2025-07-27 17:54:26+00:00
> I can argue any language is interpreted because nothing compiles down to microcode

Not every processor architecture uses microcode, so this doesn't hold up.

> The point is you don't need janet-specific external dependencies in the environment

Sure.

> I don't differentiate between this and an inefficient compiler

A compiler is the general term here, but the target is not. Targeting the native architecture for a CPU vs targeting a bytecode VM are quite different and have pretty important implications for performance, portability, memory usage, etc.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-07-27 17:54:47+00:00
Who is the American elite? If you mean billionaires...they are all in on the take. If you mean big business, they are hoping for the destruction of the regulatory state, you know, the one that keeps citizens safe and healthy. If you mean the intelligentsia, they are being cowed, threatened, and fired into submission ... most will start looking for a clean exit to Europe very soon. So which elite do you mean?
by cess11 | 2025-07-27 17:55:30+00:00
I'm very into tight cadence and have a lot of options to choose from, doing most of my "pets" in Racket, Elixir, Picolisp and p5js, but I still sometimes generate a Maven project and start hacking in a unit test because libraries and performance are excellent and sometimes it requires less effort to brute a problem with imperative mutations.

Pharo is an alternative but documentation and libraries just aren't as good, and maybe never will be.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-27 17:56:03+00:00
Am I the only one who doesn't find CC makes me faster? I mean, it could, if I let it, but that means not reading or understanding what it's writing. Basically I just don't really believe anyone is writing software of the same quality in less time. But I can totally see how you can write software of lower quality in a fraction of the time.

The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable.

I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.
Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork
by segfault22 | 2025-07-27 17:57:06+00:00
Hi HN, I was evaluating IDEs for a personal project and decided to test Trae, ByteDance's fork of VSCode. I immediately noticed some significant performance and privacy issues that I felt were worth sharing. I've written up a full analysis with screenshots, network logs, and data payloads in the linked post.

Here are the key findings:

1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.

2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.

3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.

4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.

I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.
by segfault22 | 2025-07-27 17:57:06+00:00
Hi HN, I was evaluating IDEs for a personal project and decided to test Trae, ByteDance's fork of VSCode. I immediately noticed some significant performance and privacy issues that I felt were worth sharing. I've written up a full analysis with screenshots, network logs, and data payloads in the linked post.

Here are the key findings:

1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.

2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.

3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.

4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.

I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-27 17:57:06+00:00
Also age is huge so people shouldn't be reading much into a reading of 0 unless you're over 65. https://dirjournal.org/articles/coronary-artery-calcium-scor... (see table 2)

Imagine claiming "my diet is great, i got 0% on my calcium score" when that just means you have the same score as 95%+ of people at age 40.

By 55, 25% of people start showing some % of calcium and at 65, 75% of people have a reading on calcium score.

So anyone under 45 being proud of a zero score is just silly.
by bartblast | 2025-07-27 17:57:08+00:00
A user reported that the installation instructions were outdated after v0.5.0 removed redundant endpoint integration (which was simplified). If you’re getting errors during setup, just remove the use Hologram.Endpoint and hologram_socket/0 lines from your endpoint module and you should be good to go. https://github.com/bartblast/hologram/issues/223
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-27 17:57:16+00:00
I fall into the latter category and I’m a strong proponent of ai.

Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts?

Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine?

I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.