MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-07-03 10:51:45+00:00
What does the term "man" mean in the assertion, "I am a man!"

Two interpretations:

1) It has a literal meaning: the speaker has the characteristics of adult human males.

2) It is has a social-asserting meaning: the speaker wants to be perceived as "the kind of person who makes those assertions"

For asserting-meanings like (2) to make sense, literal meanings (1) have to be available.

Consider, "I'm not a crook!"

For it to make sense to claim not to be a crook, it has to be literally possible not to be one (ie., to be innocent of crimes) independent of claiming to be one.

Many today want (2) to be the "primary" meaning of terms like man/woman, ie., we are told that we should always read them as social assertions. But we have to keep in mind that literal meanings (1) have to exist in order for (2) to even make any sense -- not least that in almost all historical cases (most of the law, medicine, etc.), the literal meaning is the intended meaning.

To say "I am a man!" cannot always mean, "I wish to be seen as having the characteristics of adult males". Just as saying "i am not a crook" cannot always mean, "i wish to be seen as innocent".

A person saying, "I am not a crook" is hoping to persuade the audience that they are innocent. They are "borrowing" from the literal meaning, hoping to persuade the audience that are innocent -- even if they are not.

People saying "I am a man" who are not literally men are likewise borrowing from "what would make this claim literally true" when the say it. If they arent, it wouldnt make any sense to say. The audience has to already know what men literally are before a person claims to be one.
by brokegrammer | 2025-07-03 10:52:04+00:00
For me, writing CSS and coming up with professional looking designs were huge bottlenecks. Now I delegate those tasks to LLMs.

I recently started working on a client's project where we were planning on hiring a designer to build the front-end UI. Turns out, Gemini can generate really good UIs. Now we're saving a lot of time because I don't have to wait on the designer to provide designs before I can start building. The cost savings are most welcome as well.

Coding is definitely a bottleneck because my client still needs my help to write code. In the future, non-programmers should be able to build products on their own.
by eadmund | 2025-07-03 10:52:06+00:00
This XML (from https://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml):

<note> <to>Tove</to> <from>Jani</from> <heading>Reminder</heading> <body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body> </note>

could be this S-expression:

(note (to Tove) (from Jani) (heading Reminder) (body "Don't forget me this weekend"))

But if every note must have a body, this might make even more sense:

(note (to Tove) (from Jani) (heading Reminder) "Don't forget me this weekend")
by alex-moon | 2025-07-03 10:52:18+00:00
I'm a sucker for these kinds of discussions. Evolution is way messier than you think it is, and evolutionary biologists get really heated about clades vs grades and so on and so forth. For fun, spend some time on the r/evolution and r/biology subreddits and you'll occasionally run into one of these heated debates. One of my favourites:

https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/o6yja1/serious_a...

If you ever meet an evolutionary biologist at a party, ask them if apes are monkeys. I think the closest thing for a Web developer like myself would be casually dropping into conversation the comment that "an Englishman invented the Internet".
by fhd2 | 2025-07-03 10:53:34+00:00
In my experience, it was. And if we're getting real for a moment, the vast majority of programmers gets paid by a company that is, first and foremost, interested in making more money. IMHO all technical decisions are business decisions in disguise.

Can the business afford to ship something that fails for 5% of their users? Can they afford to find out before they ship it or only after? What risks do they want to take? All business decisions. In my CTO jobs and fractional CTO work, I always focused on exposing these to the CEO. Never a "no", always a "here's what I think our options and their risks and consequences are".

If sound business decisions lead to vibe coding, then there's nothing wrong with it. It's not wrong to loose a bet where you understood the odds.

And don't worry about businesses that make uniformed bets. They can get lucky, but by and large, they will not survive against those making better informed bets. Law of averages. Just takes a while.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-07-03 10:54:02+00:00
The problem with all processes is that people aren’t interested in sticking with them.

Why is your team 20 people if the majority don’t do anything you’re remotely close to? Someone should have split the team or at least the standup.

Why doesn’t your lead enforce a time limit and script?

It can happen the other way round as well. My team is small but only I ever stick to the script. Every one else talks in detail for 2-3 minutes. Their updates could have been 20sec.

You wouldn’t be complaining if someone actually did something about it.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-03 10:54:09+00:00
It does not, but Perl is a much older language, and I have familiarized myself with it through actual discourses regarding its syntax, implementation details, and so forth. But in this thread? All I got was wrongful accusations and down-votes. I am done replying to this thread. Should have just let Walter reply, but that was not enough for you people, was it?

Funny though, because most of the things these people accuse me of are dead wrong, and my comment history is proof of that. In fact, I have been down-voted to oblivion for telling people to read the documentation. I guess we may have come full circle.

Glad we had this utterly pointless chat.
by gortok | 2025-07-03 10:55:07+00:00
Developers have always loved the new and shiny. Heck, getting developers not to rewrite an application in their new favorite framework is a tough sell.

LLM “vibe coding” is another continuation of this “new hotness”, and while the more seasoned developers may have learned to avoid it, that’s not the majority view.

CEOs and C-suites have always been disconnected from the first order effects of their cost-cutting edicts, and vibe coding is no different in that regard. They see the ten dollars an hour they spend on LLMs as a bargain if they can hire a $30 an hour junior programmer instead of a $150 an hour senior programmer.

They will continue to pursue cost-cutting, and the advent of vibe coding matches exactly what they care about: software produced for a fraction of the cost.

Our problem — or the problem of the professionals - is that we have not been successful in translating the inherent problems with the CEOs approach to a change in how the C-suite operates. We have not successfully pursuaded them that higher quality software = more sales, or lower liability, or lower cost maintenance, and that partially because we as an industry have eschewed those for “move fast and break things”. Vibe coding is “Move Fast and Break Things” writ large.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-03 10:55:09+00:00
The EU can claim whatever it wants (much like the US does at times) but in reality only those doing business within the EU markets fall under their legal jurisdiction. Which I assume is exactly why that clause is in the license - to protect the ability to do business within the EU in the future without unexpectedly suffering liability for their public AI research.

Conversely, I as an individual don't need to worry about it since I don't live there (similar stories for various other overly broad laws).

I agree with you that the usefulness of that clause is suspect given how broad the wording of that law is. How do other companies publishing open models deal with this? For example Meta.
by tim333 | 2025-07-03 10:55:17+00:00
Musk's new Tesla pitch is they are going to sell ten robots for every human. Just multiply some profit times 80bn robots and the stock is way underpriced!

In some ways the Tesla EV fantasy has worked - build a high priced car to finance a medium priced car to finance cheap cars and move the world to sustainable transport. The only difference is the cheap cars are being made by Chinese manufacturers rather than Tesla.

Which is actually in line with their thing on patents:

> Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. (2014)
by throw0101b | 2025-07-03 10:55:58+00:00
> I always ask "How do you destroy an M1 Abrams or F-35 with a licenced hunting rifle?". They usually say "Well at least they have that" then quickly move the discussion on to something else.

In a historical survey of ~600 movements between 1900 and ~2010, researchers found those that used violence succeeded in their goals ~25% of the time, while those that did not use violence succeeded ~40%:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...

You almost double your chances by eschewing violence. Further, they found those movement that used violence tended to then enact authoritarian structures (perhaps thinking that someone will come along later and do what they did in the same way).
by al_borland | 2025-07-03 10:55:58+00:00
My view with passkeys was basically that they force the use of a password manager (even if that manager is mostly invisible to the user). The password manager is something you have and you unlock it with something you know or something you are (biometrics).

That said, I don’t like them. I don’t really understand what happens when I run into edge cases, and that makes me nervous. That’s also true for 2FA in many cases.

So far my only passkey is for Amazon, I felt tricked into it, which I’m not happy about, though my password also still works. I’m opposed to this about as much as forced 2FA. I understand the security aspect, it Gmail randomly started to use their mobile app for 2FA, and now I’m afraid if I delete the app from my phone I’ll be locked out of my account, with the potential for excessive hoop jumping to get it back.

I read an article a while ago with the ultimately conclusion that passkeys don’t offer a major benefit to people who already use long, complex, unique passwords in a password manager. If this is the case, it seems this whole push is designed for people with terrible password habits, who definitely don’t understand what’s going on with passkeys, and I expect will find out once they hit an edge case and end up in a bad spot.
by PhilippGille | 2025-07-03 10:56:43+00:00
> Next claude code execute the plan, either with sonnet 3.7 or sonnet 4 depending on the complexity of the task. Because most of my day-to-day is in clojure I tend to use sonnet 4 to get the parens right.

This made me chuckle.

Perfect example of why heavily LLM-driven devs and processes might want to pick a popular programming language which the LLM had a ton of training data for. Or a strong point for specialized LLMs (e.g. here it could be a smaller/cheaper/faster Clojure-specialized model).
by ben_w | 2025-07-03 10:56:51+00:00
In addition to the other responses:

> The sole reason Russia invaded Ukraine was that it was flirting too much with NATO.

Which was only a problem for Putin because Putin's world view is that Great Powers (such as Russia, in his mind) should have a sphere of influence, whereas most everyone else thinks Ukraine is a sovereign nation who has the right to decide for itself which treaties it does or doesn't belong to.

Even then, more like begging than flirting; the invasion made it much more likely. Likewise EU membership.
by p0nce | 2025-07-03 10:57:23+00:00
Strangely my favourite feature after 18 years of D programming (!) is that could place keywords largely in the order you like. It is strangely liberating to be able to put:

pure nothrow @nogc:

or

pure: nothrow: @nogc:

or

pure nothrow @nogc { block }

Sometimes this helps readability.
by fitsumbelay | 2025-07-03 10:58:06+00:00
I would go to Gemini with specific questions I want answers to, while I'd go to Sinclair's JS blog for deep dives into topics I'm familiar with but don't thoroughly understand (or in some cases forget critical/helpful things that I once knew). They are different types of discovery and are both very valuable.

It might also help to know that this blog is well pre-chatgpt

I'm curious what's meant by "traditional media" here: do you mean specifically books? I can't imagine there are tv or radio broadcasts dedicated to web dev, at least not U.S.

Also, even before chatgpt you could bet that at any given time there are probably a couple of hundred blogs that are competently written by fairly smart people about the same topic. That wouldn't be pedagogical, it would just be a coupole of hundred blogs competently written by fairly smart people :shrugs:
by signal11 | 2025-07-03 10:59:05+00:00
1Password are working with Microsoft to integrate more with Windows’ passkey APIs.

The real test will be, how easy is it to move passkeys from say 1Password to Keepass XC (open source). It’s on my todo list.

For now, 1P’s passkey support appears to work quite well with all the sites I’ve tried. I’ve got multiple devices (Linuxes, macOS, Windows) and passkeys just work. I like the fact that 1P is cross platform, but after all it too is proprietary.
by smeej | 2025-07-03 11:00:15+00:00
I might be missing something, but I think this would be a lot more useful to me on mobile if I could hide or collapse the box. Instead, it takes up the entire screen and I can't really even see the effect behind it. I'm still interested enough that I'll probably try it again later on a larger screen, but I think some kind of option to hide the box would go a long way!
by sublimefire | 2025-07-03 11:00:18+00:00
A bit more interesting is slightly inverse to this. What will win in the next 10 years?

IMO expectations are now so high from users that you need to create websites, apps, auth, payment integration, customer supoort forums and chats. And this is to break the ice and have a good footing for the business to move forward. You could see how this is a problem for a non technical person. Nobody will hire someone to do all that as it will be prohibitively expensive. AI is not for the engineers, it is a “good enough” for folks that do not understand the code.

A lot depends on where the money will be invested, and what will consumers like as well. I bet the current wave of ai coding will morph into other spheres to try and improve efficiency.
by throw0101b | 2025-07-03 11:00:50+00:00
> An armed populace can stand up to a government. All you have to look at are the wars that the US has lost - Vietnam and Afghanistan come to mind.

The US did not 'lose' Vietnam to a bunch of citizens/people: it was fighting a proxy war against China and the Soviet Union.

Further, South Vietnam existed for many years and when the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, and for a further two years. When the South fell in 1975 it was not because the US was beaten, but because it had moved on in its priorities.

The Vietnam theatre achieved its larger goal of driving a wedge between the Soviets and Chinese in the Cold War. See this lecture from Sarah Paine of the US Naval War College, "Who Lost the Vietnam War?":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjXlvIBQmU0
by defrost | 2025-07-03 11:01:07+00:00
G'day again :-)

Just to clarify to all.

> Number of welfare recipients in Australia: about 5.4 million, or about the entire population of Melbourne.

That's the number of unique Australians who get any form of income support at least once in a full reporting year, and there are a number of one off and short term payment types.

It includes many people who are working, a number on pensions, likely children (I haven't dug deep, etc), students, and others.

It's not the case that there are 5 million dole bludgers spending the year on the piss at the TAB, pulling bongs on the couch, etc.

There's quite the list of support types here: https://www.dss.gov.au/income-support-payments

It includes assistance for real Job seekers and helps keep them from being a greater problem, assistence with starting small businesses, etc.
by throwaway63783 | 2025-07-03 11:01:07+00:00
I woke up saying “no” into my pillow over and over again this morning about this problem.

There are two ways forward:

- Those of us that have been vibing revert to having LLMs generate code in small bits that our brains are fast enough to analyze and process, but LLMs are increasingly optimized to create code that is better and better, making it seem like this is a poor use of time, since “LLMs will just rewrite it in a few months.”

- We just have a hell of a time, in a bad way, some of us losing our jobs, because the code looks well-thought out but wasn’t, at ever increasing scale.

I have wavered over the past months in my attitude after having used it to much success in some cases and having gotten in over my head in beautiful crap in the more important ones.

I have (too) many years of experience, and have existed on a combination of good enough, clear enough code with consideration for the future along with a decent level of understanding, trust in people, and distrust in scenarios.

But this situation is flogging what remains of me. Developers are being mentored by something that cannot mentor and yet it does, and there is no need for me, not in a way that matters to them.

I believe that I’ll be fired, and when I am, I may take one or both of two roads:

1. I’ll continue to use LLMs on my own hoping that something will be created that feeds my family and pays the bills, eventually taking another job where I get fired again, because my mind isn’t what it was.

2. I do one of the few manual labor jobs that require no reasoning and are accepting of a slow and unreliable neurodivergent, if there are any; I don’t think there truly are.

I’ve been close to #2 before. I learned that almost everything that is dear to you relies on your functioning a certain way. I believe that I can depend on God to be there for me, but beyond that, I know that it’s on me. I’m responsible for what I can do.

LLMs and those AIs that come after them to do the same- they can’t fill the hole in others’ lives the way that you can, even if you’re a piece of shit like I am.

So, maybe LLMs write puzzling code as they puzzle out our inane desires and needs. Maybe we lose our jobs. Maybe we hobble along slowly creating decent code. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you be you and be your best, and support others.
by inkyoto | 2025-07-03 11:01:24+00:00
Ah, so you are actually talking about the liposome encased ascorbic acid. I have seen a number of products that misrepresented ascorbyl palmitate as liposomal vitamin C, hence the enquiry.

Taking any form of vitamin C orally still confers statistically insignificant benefits for the skin due to having to propagate and get distributed throughout the entire body.

The article in question discusses the benefits of the topical application of vitamin C, the benefits of which have been extensively studied. Vitamin C (especially in combination with ferulic acid) is amongst very few skincare products that actually work – it has been known for a long time.
by djexjms | 2025-07-03 11:01:32+00:00
What about ignoring due process while doing so? Is that, in your view, in line with the constitution? If it is, what recourse does a US citizen detained by ICE (either accidentally or not) have? Also, how do you view Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship via Executive Order? Birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. If the president is allowed to arbitrarily redefine who is and is not a citizen, are constitutional protections anything more than ink on paper?
by joshstrange | 2025-07-03 11:01:33+00:00
I block AI note takers from my meetings. Show up or read the notes taken afterwards (by a human, me). I’m not going to waste my time explaining the mistake your AI note taker made (misheard or misunderstood). I’m not going to deal with a “Why are we doing X when we previously said Y” which could either be the AI misunderstanding or a legit change of decision we made in the meeting (which you would know and would have been able to weigh in on if you had attended).

I’ve tested these tools a number of times, and if you were in the meeting, it’s easy to look at the notes and be impressed but reading the notes as someone who’s not in the meeting does not give the full picture as it often makes major/minor mistakes. If you were in the meeting, it’s easy to overlook or shrug off, but would be entirely confusing if you didn’t attend.
by maypok86 | 2025-07-03 11:01:39+00:00
I believe `ExpiryCalculator` is fairly self-explanatory. For example, `ExpiryWriting` returns an `ExpiryCalculator` that specifies the entry should be automatically evicted from the cache after the given duration from either its creation or value update. The expiration time isn't refreshed on reads.

`Weigher` is also likely clear from its doc. Many developers are at least familiar with this concept from other languages or libraries like ristretto and ttlcache.

`GetEntryQuietly` retrieves the cache entry for a key without any side effects - it doesn't update statistics or influence eviction policies (unlike `GetEntry`). I genuinely think this is reasonably clear.

I'm completely baffled why `SetRefreshableAfter` made this list. If you understand refreshing, it's obviously just `SetTTL` but for the refresh policy.

Honestly, I mostly disagree about the options being unclear. I suspect `Executor` is the only one that might confuse users after reading the docs, and it's mainly for testing anyway. My core complaint is the first point in my comment - tuning the cache requires deep understanding of its internals. Take ristretto's `NumCounters` parameter: users don't understand it and often just set it to `maxCost * 10` like the README example. But this completely breaks when using custom per-entry costs (like byte sizes).

But as I mentioned when reviewing sturdyc, it probably comes down to personal preference.
by satyrun | 2025-07-03 11:02:11+00:00
The mistake you are making is believing people are interested in the truth and the assumption that humans are rational truth seeking agents.

People mostly consume news as a form of entertainment with a dopamine hit from having their prior beliefs confirmed or for gossip. It is why the "news" is so popular.

I have thought quite a bit about building "real" news outlets but it is hard to not conclude it is a waste of time.

Reinforcing priors and gossiping is just what humans do. In the west, we really get off on a simulation of truth seeking even when the slightest bit of analysis can show the simulation is ridiculous.

The Titan submersible news event is really a great lens to grasp this in retrospect considering anyone with domain knowledge knew right away the truth that the Titan had imploded.
by diggan | 2025-07-03 11:02:45+00:00
> how easy is it to move passkeys from say 1Password to Keepass XC (open source). It’s on my todo list.

AFAIK, there is no export from 1Password with Passkeys yet, so maybe better to put it in your calendar to check back in 6 months or so.

> passkeys just work

Yeah, I'm not doubting that, but I cannot reasonable base my core authentication on something that locks me to one service, that just feels to irresponsible. Hence the wait for proper import/export before spending any time on this :)