MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MoreQARespect | 2025-07-09 10:45:02+00:00
>Maybe I didn't explain properly. Say I create a component, and use snapshot testing to verify that "This is how it should look". Now next person changes something that makes that snapshot "old", and the person needs to look at the diff and new component, and say "Yeah, this is now how it should look". But there is a lot of things that are implicitly correct in that situation, instead of explicitly correct. How can we be sure the next person is mentally checking the same requirements as I did?

This is a problem that applies equally to code and all other tests to an even greater extent. For them it is a problem dealt with with code reviews.

The great thing about snapshots which doesn't apply to code and functional tests is that they can be reviewed by UX and the PM as well. In this respect they are actually more valuable - PM and UX can spot issues in the PR. The PM doesn't spot when you made a mistake interpreting the requirements that is only visible in the code of the functional test or when it's something the functional test didn't check.

>It seems to work fine for very small and obvious things, but for people make changes that affect a larger part of the codebase (which happens from time to time if you're multiple people working on a big codebase), it's hard to needing to implicitly understand what's correct everywhere

It should not be hard to ascertain if what you see is what should be expected. E.g. if text disappears from a window where there was text before and you only made a styling change then that's obviously a bug.

>I guess we need to compare "well done snapshot testing" with "well done unit/functional testing"

Snapshots are not a replacement for functional tests they are a part of good functional tests. You can write a functional test that logs in and cheaply checks some arbitrary quality of a dashboard (e.g. the div it goes in exists) or you can write a functional test that cheaply snapshots the dashboard.

The latter functional test can give confidence that nothing broke when you refactor the code underneath it and the snapshot hasn't changed. The former can give you confidence that there is still a div present where the dashboard was before. This is significantly less useful.
by delusional | 2025-07-09 10:48:07+00:00
Importantly for the discussion, this also doesn't mean the push for REST api's was a failure. Sure, we didn't end up with what was precisely envisioned from that paper, but we still got a whole lot better than CORBA and SOAP.

The lowest common denominator in the REST world is a lot better than the lowest common denominator in SOAP world, but you have to convince the technically literate and ideological bunch first.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-07-09 10:48:30+00:00
The sheer convenience of the SteamDeck is what has brought me back into gaming. It's so easy to pick it up whilst cooking etc. and play a few minutes of Blue Prince - the power button pause/resume is such a killer feature. (Also, 5-10 minutes is enough time for a CyberPunk 2077 mission)
by scrubs | 2025-07-09 10:48:47+00:00
There's a qualitative difference between ok transport and better transport vs AI.

If we're going to talk cars, I think what the Japanese did to the big three in the 1980s would have been far more on point.

AI is encumbered by AGI which is further encumbered by the delta between what is claimed possible (around the corner) and what is. That's a whole different ball game with wildly different risk/reward tradeoffs.

Learning about history post buggies didn't do much for me.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-09 10:48:48+00:00
I'll need to check again. Maybe it's my rusty Android skills, but last time I checked (circa a year ago), I got the impression it's going out of its way to stay fully opaque from the outside.

It's also notoriously the one popular app that intentionally doesn't offer any kind of API access for normal users - it only has one to allow companies to automate advertising bots.
by wuschel | 2025-07-09 10:49:13+00:00
Thank you for your interesting comment.

> In time things get more expensive much faster in countries that grow faster while incomes stay the same. This is a huge negative and this is on top of price increases happening on "day 1" due to rounding up during conversion.

Could you perhaps expand on this effect, ideally in a mechanistic manner, or point me towards a source that explains the influencing factors and outcomes? I am trying to understand the different processes at hand.
by lproven | 2025-07-09 10:49:22+00:00
I'm both. (Mac and Windows since 1988, before Linux existed.) The point of the start menu is that you can search; the point of Spotlight is that the computer searches.

With Spotlight, you're telling the computer to run something you know is there, without bothering looking for it. You need to know it's there.

With a dedicated app launcher, such as say the macOS Launchpad, you can explore what apps are available to you. Once you know, you can quickly open it with cmd+space and 2-3 letters.

You can't open things that aren't there. You need to find what's available.

They are different tools for different purposes, which is why Launchpad is also there.
by mort96 | 2025-07-09 10:49:39+00:00
> 1. Never said I'm going to tell them. It's on someone else. I'm just going to lower my expectation from such developers accordingly.

This doesn't seem like a useful line of conversation, so I will ignore it.

> 2. So just "HTTP API".

No! There are many kinds of HTTP APIs. I've both made and used "HTTP APIs" where HTTP is used as a transport and API semantics are wholly defined by the message types. I've seen APIs where every request is an HTTP POST with a protobuf-encoded request message and every response is a 200 OK with a protobuf-encoded response message (which might then indicate an error). I've seen GraphQL APIs. I've seen RPC-style APIs where every "RPC call" is a POST requset to an endpoint whose name looks like a function name. I've seen APIs where request and response data is encoded using multipart/form-data.

Hell, even gRPC APIs are "HTTP APIs": gRPC uses HTTP/2 as a transport.

Telling me that something is an "HTTP API" tells me pretty much nothing about how it works or how I'm expected to use it, other than that HTTP is in some way involved. On the other hand, if you tell me that something is a "REST API", I already have a very good idea about how to use it, and the documentation can assume a lot of pre-existing context because it can assume that I've used similar APIs before.
by LoganDark | 2025-07-09 10:49:50+00:00
This is why Assistive Access exists, yes :)

Other than that, Apple tends to lean a little elitist in certain areas, when they actually slightly over-estimate the competence of the average user. A lot of their thinking makes perfect sense to me now, but I am not an average user by any means, and even me in a wrong mindset could not make sense of it in the past.

This happens a lot on the Mac, where a lot of, say keyboard shortcuts, are just kinda there and no guide walks you through them, and no help page or documentation entry mentions them - you are just expected to learn and grow how you make use of them over time, from menu bar entries, the internet, or other operators directly.

It doesn't fit everyone, but Apple is one of the world's only havens for a very particular type of crazy, and that is exactly what Steve Jobs was all about.
by pimterry | 2025-07-09 10:49:56+00:00
Revolut along with quite a few other modern EU banks let you manage recurring billing directly - in Revolut I can pick any transaction in the app, click "Block future payments" and that vendor won't be able to bill my card again until I unblock them. That's separate from virtual/disposable cards - you can use your normal card and still block individual vendors.

Honestly this seems like a pretty obvious core banking feature nowadays, I'm surprised it's not more widespread (even in the US - reliable cancellation features across all recurring card payments would surely make people more comfortable with subscriptions). Under the hood all banks (AFAIK) are handle recurring payments by issuing an authorization token at first purchase, and validating it on later transactions. Allowing customers to see the list of active tokens that were recently used and then revoke them explicitly seems like a no brainer.
by dakiol | 2025-07-09 10:50:16+00:00
If only apple could work on a modern ipod replacement. I used to have an ipod shuffle (this tiny thing with a clip), and I was using it every day for sports.

How do people listen to music when doing sports? Iphones suck in this regard (you cannot run with it in your pocket or hands; and this band on your arm is just uncomfortable).
by api | 2025-07-09 10:50:26+00:00
This field (software) in general, and especially web stuff, has no memory. It’s a cascade of teens and twentysomethings rediscovering the same paradigms over and over again with different names.

I think we are overdue for a rediscovery of object oriented programming and OOP design patterns but it will be called something else. We just got through an era of rediscovering the mainframe and calling it “cloud native.”

Every now and then you do get a new thing like LLMs and diffusion models.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-07-09 10:51:12+00:00
I wonder if anyone has some insight...

a bit of a sensitive question, but I've noticed my indian colleagues (PhDs) have a much more limited vocabulary compared to American colleagues. To the point where slightly archaic word or literary words are completely unusable in conversation.

I have to consciously "talk simple"

However, as I understand, higher education is all conducted in English... so it feels like there shouldn't be as large of a gap as there is?

Is English language literature not widely read in school? Are people mostly reading in their local languages?

It's a bit similar to English in Malaysia/Singapore - but there I assume schooling is done in large part in Chinese/Malay and maybe people don't read as much in English
by jh_bv_london | 2025-07-09 10:51:40+00:00
Bazaarvoice | Belfast, UK | Hybrid | https://www.bazaarvoice.com/

Bazaarvoice creates smart shopping experiences by connecting thousands of brands and retailers with billions of consumers through our global network and enterprise technology. We enable brands to collect and syndicate user-generated content at a massive scale, providing valuable insights through real-time consumer feedback.

We're hiring for a Machine Learning Engineer to develop and enhance our AI-powered services, including AI Insights and AI Automated Answers using LLM/RAG architectures. This role involves hands-on model development and maintaining our mission-critical Machine Moderation system.

Machine Learning Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/bazaarvoice/7b66bada-3927-45a1-92b0-37...
by willyt | 2025-07-09 10:51:43+00:00
That is a common usage in British English as well. E.g “I will update the draft document and revert back to you”.

One of the most annoying things about Duolingo is that they haven’t spared a week of an intern’s time to come up with a way of substituting the British/Indian/Irish/Austrailian/New Zealand/South African… word for the American English word. OK there’s a lot of slang out there and you could really go down a rabbit hole but when the usage is well documented in e.g. Collins-Robert there’s no excuse really.
by kh_hk | 2025-07-09 10:51:51+00:00
To me no, it's not. It works well for some of the use cases, but if all you needed was offline rendering of your js in a build step to generate static html then you really didn't need all that js to begin with. islands work until they don't, and a lot of stuff gets inlined too. I guess it's fine if you stop caring about the final build.

I feel a lot of the hype around Astro has more to do with vite than anything else. And there yes, without doubt, vite is amazing.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-09 10:52:15+00:00
> Imagine if life had evolved on Earth or Theia prior to impact.

There's good reason why this first era of Earth's history is called the "Hadean eon" - as in the fires of hell.

> Throughout part of the eon, impacts from extraterrestrial bodies released enormous amounts of heat that likely prevented much of the rock from solidifying at the surface. As such, the name of the interval is a reference to Hades, a Greek translation of the Hebrew word for hell.

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

https://www.britannica.com/science/Hadean-Eon
by bsenftner | 2025-07-09 10:52:19+00:00
Sorry to interrupt here, but handfuloflight, see: this is what I mean by "it's like talking into a void"., my first statement in what started this whole thread. obirunda is doing exactly what you say here: projected some fiction in their imagination, and they are arguing against that, and not your statements which appear to be ignored, or not understood. obirunda is listening to the fictional narrative and not what you're writing.
by jh_bv_london | 2025-07-09 10:52:36+00:00
Bazaarvoice | Belfast, UK | Hybrid | https://www.bazaarvoice.com/

Bazaarvoice creates smart shopping experiences by connecting thousands of brands and retailers with billions of consumers through our global network and enterprise technology. We enable brands to collect and syndicate user-generated content at a massive scale, providing valuable insights through real-time consumer feedback.

We're hiring for a Machine Learning Engineer to develop and enhance our AI-powered services, including AI Insights and AI Automated Answers using LLM/RAG architectures. This role involves hands-on model development and maintaining our mission-critical Machine Moderation system.

Machine Learning Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/bazaarvoice/7b66bada-3927-45a1-92b0-37...
by throw0101a | 2025-07-09 10:53:33+00:00
> Even ignoring the real economic cost of having two currencies, there is no serious economist that would argue Poland joining the EUR zone is negative for Poland (as opposed to for stronger EU economies). Every single historic metric points in the other direction.

The inability to set monetary policy is a strong argument. Just ask Greece (and Spain):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_area_crisis
by ivan_gammel | 2025-07-09 10:54:02+00:00
This is wrong on many levels.

1. UX designers operate on every stage of software development lifecycle from product discovery to post-launch support (validation of UX hypotheses), they do not exercise control - they work within constraints as part of the team. The location of a specific action in UI and interaction triggering it is orthogonal to availability of this action. Availability is defined by the state. If state restricts certain actions, UX must reflect that.

2. From architectural point of view, once you encapsulate the checking state behavior, the following will work the same way: "if (state === something)" and "if (resource.links["action"] !== null)". The latter approach will be much better, because in most cases any state-changing actions will require validation on server and you can implement the logic only once (on server).

I have been developing HATEOAS applications for quite a while and maintain HAL4J library: there are some complexities in this approach, but UI design is certainly not THE problem.
by hnfong | 2025-07-09 10:54:09+00:00
In my native Cantonese (and this probably applies to a lesser extent to Mandarin as well), pronouns are inherently non-gendered, and when we speak in English we tend to randomly pick one (he/she) and thus occasionally get the gender wrong.

That said I think there are "levels" to so called "mental translation" -- I don't think I consciously mentally translate anything at all, but I guess sometimes the neural pathways or whatever are kinda repurposed/re-used even if there are some differences between languages.
by scrubs | 2025-07-09 10:54:54+00:00
That's an agi back handed complement by any measure. Well, by way of analogy, we made peace out of eden and so will agi.

Lying by the way is usually caught up in various ways to defray the threat to ego (self esteem) and defray or delay natural/social/legal consequences. The latter is caught up in body.

I'm not sure I would give llms the benefit of the doubt to have obtained those faculties.
by nijave | 2025-07-09 10:55:28+00:00
"Tell me the most common reasons for tickets"

"Find tickets involving feature X"

"Find tickets where the customer became angry or agitated"

We're doing something similar at work to analyze support cases. We have some structed fields but want to also do some natural language processing on the ticket to extract data that isn't captured in the structured fields.

Think topic extraction and sentiment analysis of ticket text

We're not using MCP but looking into LLM enrichment/feature extraction
by lproven | 2025-07-09 10:55:35+00:00
Lindows became Linspire.

Because Microsoft sued over the name:

https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/micr...

Linspire was paid-for, and later introduced Freespire as the free community version.

https://practical-tech.com/2007/08/05/linspire-ceo-kevin-car...

Remarkably enough, it is still available. I reviewed the then-latest version in 2023.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/15/freespire-95-breezes-...

It's a successor in name only; the company acquired the Freespire and Xandros brands. The product, sadly, is unrelated. (I say "sadly" because it had a pretty good desktop based on KDE 2.x.)

But -- yes, you're right, it sort of is.
by pimterry | 2025-07-09 10:55:54+00:00
The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.

When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.
by throw0101a | 2025-07-09 10:56:46+00:00
> Germany managed to set up a really independent central bank (which is a non- democratic, bureaucratic, etc… thingy) and inflation was at the target for decades.

And Germany being overzealous in fiscal and monetary policy has stagnated growth and limited policy options. Look at all the rigmarole that had to be done so that Germany could start considering military spending to deal with the new global situation.

(Heck, if Republicans would actually be interested in fiscal discipline, perhaps they should move to Germany.)
by motorest | 2025-07-09 10:56:59+00:00
> On the other hand, if you tell me that something is a "REST API", I already have a very good idea about how to use it (...)

Precisely this. The value of words is that they help communicate concepts. REST API or even RESTful API conveys a precise idea. To help keep pedantry in check, Richardson's maturity model provides value.

Everyone manages to work with this. Not those who feel the need to attack people with blanket accusations of mediocrity, though. They hold onto meaningless details.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-09 10:58:06+00:00
Sarcasm aside: wearing a helmet causes riders to take more risks, leading to more accidents.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136984781...

I’d still wear one, but also try to be more careful knowing that the helmet provides a false sense of security.

I do believe the analogy holds very true with programming habits.
by emil_sorensen | 2025-07-09 10:58:08+00:00
Docs bots like these are deceptively hard to get right in production. Retrieval is super sensitive to how you chunk/parse documentation and how you end up structuring documentation in the first place (see frontpage post from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44311217).

You want grounded RAG systems like Shopify's here to rely strongly on the underlying documents, but also still sprinkle a bit of the magic of the latent LLM knowledge too. The only way to get that balance right is evals. Lots of them. It gets even harder when you are dealing with GraphQL schema like Shopify has since most models struggle with that syntax moreso than REST APIs.

FYI I'm biased: Founder of kapa.ai here (we build docs AI assistants for +200 companies incl. Sentry, Grafana, Docker, the largest Apache projects etc).
by basilgohar | 2025-07-09 10:58:31+00:00
Very disappointing but not the least surprising given how much AI [0] has been used to support Israel's ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Nvidia joins (or was already on the list) of tech companies profiteering from the genocide. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G... [1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-...
by pazimzadeh | 2025-07-09 10:59:15+00:00
I serendipitously came across this today:

Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05754-w

"A key finding of this study is evidence of mixture at roughly AD 1000 between peoples of African and Persian ancestries [...]

This is consistent with the Kilwa Chronicle, which describes the arrival of Persians on the Swahili coast and interactions between them and coastal residents. Whether or not this history has a basis in an actual voyage, the ancient DNA provides direct evidence for Persian-associated ancestry being derived overwhelmingly from males and arriving on the eastern African coast by about AD 1000

This timing coincides with archaeological evidence for a substantial cultural transformation on the coast, including the widespread adoption of Islam [...]

Persian loanwords contribute up to 3% of Kiswahili, but it is unclear whether they are derived directly from Persian or through adoption into other Indian Ocean languages"
by WillAdams | 2025-07-09 10:59:30+00:00
Yeah, ages ago, when I was doing typesetting, it was disheartening how unaware authors were of the state of things in the fields which they were writing about --- I'm still annoyed that when I pointed out that an article in an "encyclopedia" on the history of spreadsheets failed to mention Javelin or Lotus Improv it was not updated to include those notable examples.

Magazines are even worse --- David Pogue claimed Steve Jobs used Windows 95 on a ThinkPad in one of his columns, when a moment's reflection, and a check of the approved models list at NeXT would have made it obvious it was running NeXTstep.

Even books aren't immune, a recent book on a tool cabinet held up as an example of perfection:

https://lostartpress.com/products/virtuoso

mis-spells H.O. Studley's name on the inside front cover "Henery" as well as making many other typos, myriad bad breaks, pedestrian typesetting which poorly presents numbers and dimensions (failing to use the multiplication symbol or primes) and that they are unwilling to fix a duplicated photo is enshrined in the excerpt which they publish online:

https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/vir...

where what should be photo of an iconic pair of jewelers pliers on pg. 70 is replaced with that of a pair of flat pliers from pg. 142. (any reputable publisher would have done a cancel and fixed that)

Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap, and I would be a far less grey, and far younger person if I had back all the time and energy I spent fixing files mangled by Adobe Illustrator, or where the wrong typesetting tool was used for the job (the six-weeks re-setting the book re-set by the vendor in Quark XPress when it needed to be in LaTeX was the longest of my life).

EDIT: by extension, I guess it's now 90% of everything is AI-generated crap, 90% of what's left is traditional crap, leaving 1% of worthwhile stuff.