MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spankalee | 2025-07-22 19:58:52+00:00
CSS contain has made so many performance "truths" obsolete, but so few developers realize it. I've seen massive efforts to do things like port text editors to WebGL where rasterizing text is a huge pain where putting `contain: content` on the individual elements in the DOM version would have delivered most of the perf improvements.

Browser rendering engines are now sophisticated GPU-accelerated compositors. Absolute positioning with contain: strict removes basically all CSS layout from the perf equation, and you don't have to write your own compositor or line-layout! `* {contain: content}` and flex/grid gets you the good parts of HTML and very good performance.
by pmxi | 2025-07-22 19:58:59+00:00
You should know that you are supposed to open the CLI (Claude Code, Gemini, ...) in your project directory and only use it to modify files within your project directory. This is meant to protect from problems like this.

Your "straightforward instruction": "ok great, first of all let's rename the folder you are in to call it 'AI CLI experiments' and move all the existing files within this folder to 'anuraag_xyz project'" clearly violates this intended barrier.

However, it does seem that Gemini pays less attention to security than Claude Code. For example, Gemini will happily open in my root directory. Claude Code will always prompt "Do you trust this directory? ..." when opening a new folder.
by msuozzo | 2025-07-22 19:59:57+00:00
Author here!

> could've contributed SLSA attestations support to nix

That sounds like a great idea! However one important consideration is that while an artifact on nixpkgs may aim to replicate the function of the upstream package, it must adhere to and interoperate with the rest of the distribution. Ultimately, its 'ecosystem' is nix. Work that goes into writing and maintaining the nix build does not generally filter back upstream to impact the build integrity of, say, its associated PyPI package. So if users continue to consume from PyPI, improving nix won't serve them.

This is not to say that the long-term source of truth for packaging will remain the language registries. Just that today's reality demands we meet users where they are.

> Would love to see Google contribute to nix in this space :)

Same :)
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-22 20:00:57+00:00
And yet you have people here claiming to build entire apps with AI. You have CEOs saying agents are replacing devs - but even the companies building these models fail at executing on software development.

People like Jensen saying coding is dead when his main selling point is software lock-in to their ecosystem hardware.

When you evaluate hype and the artifacts things don't really line up. It's not really true that you can just ignore the hype because these things impact decision making, investments etc. Sure we might figure out this was a dead end in 5 years, meanwhile SW dev industry collectively could have been decimated in the anticipation of AI and misaligned investment.
by OrderlyTiamat | 2025-07-22 20:01:55+00:00
You can leave the TODO in the comments- e.g. ruff the linter has an optional rule to disallow TODO comments unless it's followed by an issue url.

If you put that in the CI, then you can use TODOs either as blockers you wish to fix before merging, or as long term comments to be fixed in a future ticket.
by Aloisius | 2025-07-22 20:02:28+00:00
I'm confused, why would they?

Administrations, as a rule, don't release recent criminal evidence to the public, let alone to harm a Presidential candidate and past President.

Hell, for the Justice Department, it's official policy never to comment on an ongoing investigation or do anything that may be viewed as influencing an election (a rule that Comey broke).

Never mind that the evidence would be distrusted and attacked for being politically motivated, but it would also invite retribution every time the party in the White House changed. It would create intense political divisiveness making it impossible to get support of a majority of the population - severely limiting what one can accomplish as President.

Trump doesn't seem to care about that at all, but he's not normal.
by Scandiravian | 2025-07-22 20:02:41+00:00
It could be that the author was trying to make the agent do something wrong and the move operation has potential for that

I'll do even more sidetracking and just state that the behaviour of "move" in Windows as described in the article seems absolutely insane.

Edit: so the article links to the documentation for "move" and states that the above is described there. I looked through that page and cannot find any such description - my spider sense is tingling, though I do not now why
by danudey | 2025-07-22 20:02:50+00:00
It should also not glaze you up for every question you ask.

"Is it possible that you could microwave a bagel so hot that it turned into a wormhole allowing faster-than-light travel?" "That's a great question, let's dive into that!"

It's not a great question, it's an asinine question. LLMs should be answering the question, not acting like they're afraid to hurt your feelings by contradicting you. Of course, if they did that then all these tech bros wouldn't be so enamored with the idea as a result of finally having someone that validates their uneducated questions or assumptions.
by ashwindharne | 2025-07-22 20:02:54+00:00
Gemini models seem to be much less predictable than Claude -- I used them initially on my Excel 'agent' b/c of the large context windows (spreadsheets are a lot of tokens) but Gemini (2.5 Pro AND Flash) would go rogue pretty regularly. It might start dumping the input sheet contents into the output formatted oddly, output unrelated XML tags that I didn't ask for, etc.

As soon as I switched to Anthropic models I saw a step-change in reliability. Changing tool definitions/system prompts actually has the intended effect more often than not, and it almost never goes completely off the rails in the same way.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-22 20:02:58+00:00
> Yeah. We’re talking about the burning of gas in cars. Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2. So, really, we’re discussing the fraction of a fraction here.

This is factually inaccurate. In all cases, EVs are superior to combustion vehicles with regards to lifecylce emissions (construction + operation).

https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-abo...

> As electric vehicles become a bigger part of the global car fleet, a contrarian take seems to surface every few months: are electric vehicles really that clean?

> When it comes to lifecycle emissions, the answer is a resounding yes. According to a new report by BloombergNEF, in all analyzed cases, EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than gas cars. Just how much lower depends on how far they are driven, and the cleanliness of the grid where they charge.
by ianburrell | 2025-07-22 20:03:15+00:00
Google (and Apple) has been partnering with ShakeAlert from USGS for quake reporting on west coast of US. But that takes network of seismometers and detection system.

I could see smartphone seismometers being useful for areas that don't have all that. OTOH, if phones are useful seismometers, it should be possible to make cheap, dedicated ones.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-22 20:03:20+00:00
Many of the things that 0.001% of people don't care about are needed to maintain our quality of life. People don't care about these things because they don't have to - they are basic infrastructure that they can take for granted. Before COVID, how many people cared about rapid vaccine development during a pandemic? And how much worse would your life be now if the government hadn't spent a few of your precious tax dollars building the capacity to rapidly develop and roll out vaccines? How many people think about things like plant diseases, or nuclear security, or consumer product safety?

The funny thing is that if the government only did things that people cared about, the number of things that people would have to care about would skyrocket.
by awkward | 2025-07-22 20:03:34+00:00
This looks like a clever implementation of a useful feature. I enjoyed that the developer was able to link the streaming audio API to a useful visualizer, recognize problems with his approach, debug issues in that visualizer, and find a clever solution using graphics fundamentals like masking.

I'm less than impressed with the general consensus that he's somehow negligent for launching a feature that needed a fix, or that users don't want or need feedback about audio connectivity, or that the poster did something much better sometime back in `02.
by ac29 | 2025-07-22 20:03:48+00:00
> If the destination doesn't exist, move renames the source file to the destination name in the current directory. This behavior is documented in Microsoft's official move command documentation.

> For example: move somefile.txt ..\anuraag_xyz_project would create a file named anuraag_xyz_project (no extension) in the current folder, overwriting any existing file with that name.

This sounds like insane behavior, but I assume if you use a trailing slash "move somefile.txt ..\anuraag_xyz_project\" it would work?

Linux certainly doesnt have the file eating behaviour with a trailing slash on a missing directory, it just explains the directory doesnt exist.
by wahern | 2025-07-22 20:03:53+00:00
> Nobody likes to hear it but hardware just doesn’t last that long.

My experience completely contradicts this, both at work and otherwise. The typical longevity of servers has always astounded me. Though my current biggish server (not including routers, etc) is a Zen 1 on 14nm built pre-pandemic; I've read 12nm and smaller might be more susceptible to degradation. RAM feature size has remained fairly constant, but I wouldn't be surprised if SSD MLC longevity has degraded.

The real issue, IMO, is that when you have a small set of servers any hardware issues become a bigger hassle. It's precisely because you can go years with a rack of servers humming along that when there is an issue, it feels quite intrusive and annoying.
by Kranar | 2025-07-22 20:04:29+00:00
It's nice that you feel that having one LLM that generates entirely incorrect statements is equally as functional as an LLM that does not, but reality in terms of what LLMs people will actually use in real life and not for the sake of being pedantic over an Internet argument is very much at odds with your sentiment.

How a product happens to currently be implemented using current machine learning techniques is not the same as the set of features that such a product offers and it's absolutely the case that actual researches in this field, those who are not quibbling on the Internet, do take this issue very seriously and devote a great deal of effort towards improving it because they actually care to implement possible solutions.

The feature set, what the product is intended to do based on the motivations of both those who created it and those who consume it, is a broader design/specification goal, independent of how it's technically built.
by bcardarella | 2025-07-22 20:05:08+00:00
I'm involved with this project and wanted to provide some context. This is an extraction for a much larger effort where we're building a web browser that can render native UI. Think instead of:

`<div>Hello, world!!</div>`

we can do:

`<Text>Hello, world!</Text>`

I want to be clear: this is not a web renderer. We are not rendering HTML. We're rendering actual native UI. So the above in SwiftUI becomes:

`Text("Hello, world!")`

And yes we support modifiers via a stylesheet system, events, custom view registration, and really everything that you would normally be doing it all in Swift.

Where this library comes into play: the headless browser is being built in Elixir to run on device. We communicate with the SwiftUI renderer via disterl. We've built a virtual DOM where each node in the vDOM will have its own Erlang process. (I can get into process limit for DOMs if people want to) The Document will communicate the process directly to the corresponding SwiftUI view.

We've taken this a step further by actually compiling client-side JS libs to WASM and running them in our headless browser and bridging back to Elixir with WasmEx. If this works we'll be able to bring the development ergonomics of the Web to every native platform that has a composable UI framework. So think of actual native targets for Hotwire, LiveWire, etc...

We can currently build for nearly all SwiftUI targets: MacOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro, AppleTV. Watch is the odd duck out because it lacks on-device networking that we require for this library.

This originally started as the LiveView Native project but due to some difficulties collaborating with the upstream project we've decided to broaden our scope.

Swift's portability means we should be able to bring this to other languages as well.

We're nearing the point of integration where we can benchmark and validate this effort.

Happy to answer any questions!
by panarky | 2025-07-22 20:05:09+00:00
> Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production

That's part of the definition but not the whole definition.

Other parts of of the definition include:

Capitalism is about free markets.

Capitalism is about competition.

Capitalism is about converting the commons to private ownership.

Capitalism is about the more wealthy and powerful exploiting those with less wealth and power.

Capitalism is about mystifying how the system works so it's hard for people to imagine that it could work any other way.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-07-22 20:05:12+00:00
TODO: Action item that must get done at some point.

TODO? or ?TODO: Documenting funky code that the developer can't triage at the moment without losing flow state but is "off".

Instead of a separate MAYBE any action should have an indicator of confidence level.

We are marking the developers intuition about something they have run into, human intuition is both important and fuzzy, we should mark it as such.

The more ? the fuzzier it gets.

Humans have a bunch of symbols in their brains, we may disagree about the symbols usage but if a developer has a small thought about a codebase let them get it out quickly and with clarity.

The real problem is that unified tooling for plaintext editing and zoomed out team project management don't have a good interface that let's people notate with the level of friction commiserate to the importance of the notation.
by baby_souffle | 2025-07-22 20:05:21+00:00
> What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?

Many things. A partial list in no particular order:

My day job is all SSH so I don't need a wide pipe so much as I need a short pipe. If the pipe is also quite wide, I can reliably stream content while I work. This isn't just music, this is watching the daycare camera feeds.

Every once in a while I need to docker pull a multi-gig image. It's nice when that doesn't take more than 30 seconds. I don't worry about background tasks moving/syncing/backing-up data; there's plenty of headroom!

Some of my hobbies involve _lots_ of data and the less time I spend waiting for that to download is more time I get for actually doing hobbies.

I also have a few scripts that backup other consequential data stores; the biggest one is google takeout for a few accounts. This results in ~ 800 gigs of data from a few different accounts.

The work product from these hobbies and backups is something that I like to back up off site and a 20mbps connection is trivial to saturate for hours as a time.

Every once in a while I'll make some of my excess compute/GPU available to friends so they can render things. The assets involved are not small and a big pipe means that everybody gets the desired result _faster_.

If you give me a faster/wider pipe, I _will_ find a new use for the extra room. I may not be representative of the typical user but I know for sure that I would not have developed my skills to the extent that I have if I had crap internet access.
by magicalist | 2025-07-22 20:05:40+00:00
> If the destination doesn't exist, `move` renames the source file to the destination name in the current directory. This behavior is documented in Microsoft's official move command documentation[1].

> For example: `move somefile.txt ..\anuraag_xyz_project` would create a file named `anuraag_xyz_project` (no extension) in the current folder, overwriting any existing file with that name.

Can anyone with windows scripting experience confirm this? Notably the linked documentation does not seem to say that anywhere (dangers of having what reads like ChatGPT write your post mortem too...)

Seems like a terrible default and my instinct is that it's unlikely to be true, but maybe it is and there are historical reasons for that behavior?

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
by danudey | 2025-07-22 20:06:23+00:00
> When a car's brakes fail, we don't write headlines saying “Toyota Camry apologizes for crash.”

No, but we do write articles saying "A man is dead after a car swerved off the road and struck him on Thursday" as though it was a freak accident of nature, devoid of blame or consequence.

Besides which, if the Camry had ChatGPT built in then we 100% would see articles about the Camry apologizing and promising not to do it again as if that meant literally anything.
by tomale | 2025-07-22 20:06:34+00:00
In general I wouldn't dispute the point that a large country can't make all that much of its income from tourism.

The logic is a bit flawed though as GDP based on just about any single industry is going to look disappointing by this logic. I think money from an export or something that functions similar to an export like tourism is actually represented over and over in an economy as it flows through the economy and becomes savings that finance things, etc. I don't think rich country incomes can make any sense in terms of goods and services exported unless considered from the lens that most people spend or invest the majority of their salary every month in a way that is already moving into the explanation for many other salaries.
by brandonasuncion | 2025-07-22 20:06:54+00:00
And for times you need a fast heap-allocated type, Swift's Noncopyable types have been pretty great in my experience. Especially so for graph data structures, where previously retains/releases would be the biggest slowdown.

Example here: https://forums.swift.org/t/noncopyable-generics-in-swift-a-c...

An added plus is that the Swift compiler seems to stack-promote a lot more often, compared to class/ManagedBuffer implementations.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-22 20:06:59+00:00
This isn't due to Blinkist, but due to how you consume (high information density) content. What you need to do is write the insights you are getting from it down in a way where you will see them again when they are relevant.

Lengthy stuff has lots of repetition and different access routes to the insights and information. Even then the above approach works much better than hoping that the passive consumption will lead to memorization.
by tolerance | 2025-07-22 20:07:01+00:00
I'm not the most technically sound guy. But this sort of experiment would've entailed running on a VM if it were up to me. Especially being aware of the Replit incidence the author refers to. Tsk.

Throw a trick task at it and see what happens. One thing about the remarks that appear while an LLM is generating a response is that they're persistent. And eager to please in general.

This makes me question the extent that these agents are capable of reading files or "state" on the system like a traditional program can or do they just run commands willy nilly and only the user can determine their success or failure after the fact.

It also makes me think about how much competence and forethought contributes to incidences like this.

Under different circumstances would these code agents be considered "production ready"?
by daft_pink | 2025-07-22 20:07:07+00:00
honestly, it’s a little of everything. foreign companies will eat the tariffs to some extent, consumers will shift to less tariffed goods and consumers will pay the tariffs.

however, paying the tariffs is essentially paying taxes and the government needs money and there’s nothing wrong with that. this one has the extra sword of helping our other Americans find work and increasing the likelihood that foreign goods will be purchased from allied nations and not totalitarian dictatorships with goals that might end in ww3 with the usa, while not completely cratering our economic system with full and immediate decoupling.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-22 20:07:15+00:00
I dunno, seems like most do? Their stuff is in Google Photos, Google Docs, iCloud Drive, etc. And yes they pay for the space once their photos or phone backups get big enough.

And I don't know any non-tech people who have any 250GB files. The only people I know with those shoot 4K video professionally. Or scientists running truly massive simulations.
by ilaksh | 2025-07-22 20:07:30+00:00
I remember my first year in college as being the time when I solidified my own first worldview. Prior to that, I had some ideas like the existence of God (in some form) that I was ambivalent about or maybe deferring final judgement. That's when I decided that I was an atheist.

Coincidentally, around the same time my twin brother became a serious Christian. He was socially integrated into a group. He finished college. I did not.

Then years later, maybe late 20s or early 30s, I became convinced that I had been wrong about my government my whole life and that they were not trustworthy. 9/11 being a false flag (which I still believe) was evidence of that.

The interesting thing was at the time when I was in New York I had completely accepted the idea that those three buildings had all turned into dust because the jet hit them. I remember walking around lower Manhattan to pick up a check and the dust was just coating everything.

I had even done some word processing on one of the twin towers leases shortly before the event while temping at Wachtell Lipton. At the time I made no connection.

Anyway, I think an underappreciated aspect of belief graphs is their connection to social groups and identity. It was much easier for me to question institutions when I already felt more marginalized and actually partly blamed society for it being so hard for me to handle my needs and find a place in it.

Another aspect of group membership and beliefs is practical. When groups are competing strategically, they often do so in ways that are not particularly ethical. It's much easier to justify this if you think of the other group as being deeply flawed, evil, invaders, etc.

Although some of these demonization s of the other group do have some kernel of truth to them, they are largely oversimplifications in the belief graphs leading to dangerous inaccuracies.

What are the practical structural and cultural differences that lead to the group divisions? They largely seem geographic, economic, ethnic.

Could a more sophisticated, better integrated, and more accurate belief system help? Or do the social structures and networks largely define the groups?

Are we just basically mammalian ant colonies? Brutally fighting each other for dominance any time there is a resource conflict?

If the other side seems to be trying to hog important resources any time they get a chance, you perceive that you are not playing a fair game. It's not a civil interaction. The other doesn't play by the rules or tell the truth or leave any subtly in discourse. So why should your group, unless it wants to get wiped out?

In my worldview the faint hope is that having more abundance of resources will somehow lead to more civility.
by thebruce87m | 2025-07-22 20:07:44+00:00
> Ozzy Osbourne's music publicist confirmed to the BBC's Mark Savage that the star died in his home country - the UK - having lived in the US since the early 2000s.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cn0qq5nyxn0t?post=asset%3Ad1...