MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-07-23 07:06:01+00:00
For me, what has solved definitively the pointing device problem, after experimenting for many years with various mice, trackballs, trackpoints or touchpads, is switching to the use of a stylus on a small Wacom tablet as the pointing device (under Linux).

I use the tablet configured in the "Relative" mode, where it behaves identically to a mouse. The tablet has about the same size or somewhat smaller than a traditional mouse pad.

In comparison with a mouse, holding and moving the very light stylus requires much less force than with a mouse, the hand position is much more comfortable and the speed and accuracy of the movements are much higher.

Because the stylus is extremely light, I can keep it between the fingers while touch-typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Therefore when I alternate between typing and pointing the transitions are faster and more comfortable than with a mouse, because I do not have to grasp the mouse every time.

When I type longer texts, I drop the stylus on the tablet. I configure the stylus so that touching the tablet causes left mouse click and the 2 buttons that are on the stylus cause respectively right mouse click and double left click.

Regarding your complaint about key shapes, many decades ago I had used a high-quality keyboard, with Hall sensors for the keys, and where each key had a different shape and height.

Unfortunately, after assembling my first IBM PC/AT compatible computer, I had to abandon that keyboard, because it was incompatible (it came from some kind of DEC-compatible video terminal). Otherwise, I have no doubt that this keyboard would have still worked finely even today, as it did not have any parts sensitive to wear, unlike modern keyboards.
by qalmakka | 2025-07-23 07:06:04+00:00
What's so hard to understand about "apparently illogical but standardised"? I never said it was beautiful, I said that despite being dumb [^1] at least there is a standard for it (https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html). So yeah here are nonsensical directories like /opt, but at least they have a clear purpose, compared to the "well who cares, chuck it in there" approach NeXT/Apple had when tossing stuff around (sure, they've now "improved" that with SIP nowadays, but it's still a mess IMHO)

[1]: for instance, "usr" contains libraries only due to the first PDP7 at bell labs having two disks, the first mounted as /, the second as /usr (user). When they ran out of space under /, they replicated the filesystem structure in their user disk, thus the birth of /usr/bin and the like. When /usr got too cluttered they created /home (or /usr/home, don't recall which)
by RumourRider | 2025-07-23 07:06:48+00:00
> So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?

No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.

I believe Freedom of Expression is weasel words to obfuscate the conversation as now you have an additional legal concept in the mix, with some nebulous definition that reads like a Terms and Conditions from one of the big tech players.

That is it.

> My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?

It is the fact that it is brought up at all is engaging in whataboutism.

Why are you even mentioning NK? Why do you care what old Kim Jong does? Really think about why you are even mentioning North Korea. I don't expect or want an answer BTW.

> I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!

I don't care about the left/right slop politics. I don't care who the "villian of the week" is. Most politics is presented to you in the same way as Scooby Doo.

Why do you care about what Donald Trump is doing in the US? Please actually think about why you are even mentioning it. I don't expect (or want) an answer BTW.

> I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue

The very fact that you are making this argument about gradients of freedom, and everyone has restrictions etc. Is literally the issue. The conversation about it has been obfuscated deliberately.

I don't care what restrictions they have in France, NK, China or anywhere else. That is their business.

I care about the restrictions in the UK, why they exist and whether they are valid.

As for the encryption back-doors, why do you think they actually want to do it? GCHQ just happens to be looking for more developers BTW! I know this for a fact because I had one of their recruiters phone me. I told him what I thought about the British state and not to ever call me again.
by defrost | 2025-07-23 07:07:19+00:00
The article (from the AFR) is from a right of Australian centre media source commenting on a right of centre study .. the article seems to overstate the study which itself paints a picture of Government waste.

The reality more like 30% of Australians work for the government directly or indirectly (on government funded projects, public infrastructure, flow jobs on from policing etc.) and 20% receive some form of income assistance (which mean as little as a one off funeral leave assistance payment or any number of other small occasional assists).

Missing from both (near as I can see so far) is any appreciation of the positive circular effects, those that work for government also pay taxes back into the system and mostly work in ways that grease the wheels for others to be more productive.

I won't deny there are issues in the Australian economy that need to be addressed, but both this article and the report on which it comments read more as opinion pieces from particular PoV.
by mittensc | 2025-07-23 07:07:25+00:00
> the only realistic nuclear defense is nonproliferation.

Russia would never accept that considering their conventional weakness...

And let's be real, without their nukes there would already be a desert storm russia edition.

So what other options are there?

The rest of your comment is pretty well thought out and yeah, it's probably still bad but better then it was in the cold war.

Only counterpoint is that same arguments were made when patriots were installed in estern europe... and in hindsight it was a great idea, patriots can intercept those kalibr missiles you mention.

So... add patriots along the coast and problem solved, it's a matter of cost. That can be solved when your life is on the line.

Which leads me to something else, in case of emergency/martial law, you can take over anything you want, including starlink. It's not a big issue as you note.

Alternatively, DoD can have a secret contract with enough money or court order forcing spacex to do anything. So carrot and stick.
by dzonga | 2025-07-23 07:08:05+00:00
JVM is probably the most impactful piece of software ever written.

our world literally runs on the JVM.

however - the "Java" ecosystem used to suffer from architecture astronauts & complexity merchants. Certain things like Quarkus & SpringBoot have helped reduce that.

if you keep Java simple, don't ingest too much OOP Kool-aid. You can literally make anything that will work today, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. that's reliability you won't get from Python, Ruby & Javascript.

Remember the JVM offers alternatives - Clojure, Kotlin. with a Kotlin a nice compromise.
by stingraycharles | 2025-07-23 07:08:11+00:00
Yeah I don’t understand why, it seems like people think that “everything should be in the model”, which is just not true. Tuning the system prompt and user prompts to your needs is absolutely required before you’ll have a great time with these tools.

Just take a look at zen-mcp to see what you can achieve with proper prompting and workflow management.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-23 07:08:28+00:00
If your team is very small then strictly creating feature branches and pressing the merge button immediately because there's nobody left to review it is silly. I like that it gracefully degenerates into just committing directly to the trunk when it makes sense.

This works with git (or DVCS in general) because your local "master" or whatever is a short lived branch. People seem to forget but with git you are branching every time you clone. Obviously committing broken stuff and WIPs directly to the trunk isn't going to work.
by oc1 | 2025-07-23 07:08:39+00:00
I'd take this Gemini personality every time over Sonnet. One more "You're absolutely right!" from this fucker and i'll throw out the computer. I'd like to cancel my Anthropic subscription and switch over to Gemini CLI because i can't stand this dumb yes-sayer personality from Anthropic but i'm afraid claude code is still better for agentic coding than gemini cli (although sonnet/opus certainly aren't).
by Corrado | 2025-07-23 07:08:54+00:00
His comments about Apple ring true to my ears. Apple is definitely lagging behind in the "AI" world, but that is really what they tend to do. They aren't the first company but they are usually the best. Historically, they wait until everyone else makes the mistakes and then introduce something better. I guess they felt like they couldn't wait for the "AI" trend to blow over; probably because Siri is just not very good.

I think that Apple will hold on to their "AI" stuff for a while longer and wait until it really dies down. Then they will introduce a much better Siri and get rid of the "summarize your email" and "re-write this sentence" bullshit.
by BlackFly | 2025-07-23 07:09:04+00:00
My reading of it is that the people furthering WASM aren't really associated with just browsers anymore and they are building a whole new VM ecosystem that the browser people aren't interested in. This is just my take since I am not internal to those organizations. But you have the whole web assembly component model and browsers just do not seem interested in picking that up at all.

So on the one side you have organizations that definitely don't want to easily give network/filesystem/etc. access to code and on the other side you have people wanting it to be easier to get this access. The browser is the main driving force for WASM, as I see it, because outside of the browser the need for sandboxing is limited to plugins (where LUA often gets used) since otherwise you can run a binary or a docker container. So WASM doesn't really have much impetus to improve beyond compute.
by jongjong | 2025-07-23 07:09:33+00:00
Can confirm, you can do some good vibe coding with JavaScript (or TypeScript) and Claude Code. I once vibe coded a test suite for a complex OAuth token expiry issue while working on someone else's TypeScript code.

Also, I had created a custom Node.js/JavaScript BaaS platform with custom Web Components and wanted to build apps with it, I gave it the documentation as attachment and surprisingly, it was able to modify an existing app to add entire new features. This app had multiple pages and Claude just knew where to make the changes. I was building a kind of marketplace app. One time it implemented the review/rating feature in the wrong place and I told it "This rating feature is meant for buyers to review sellers, not for sellers to review buyers" and it fixed it exactly right.

I think my second experience (plain JavaScript) was much more impressive and was essentially frictionless. I can't remember it making a single major mistake. I think only once it forgot to add the listener to handle the click event to highlight when a star icon was clicked but it fixed it perfectly when I mentioned this. With TypeScript, it sometimes got confused; I had to help it a lot more because I was trying to mock some functions; the fact that the TypeScript source code is separate from the build code created some confusion and it was struggling to grep the codebase at times. Though I guess the code was also more complicated and spread out over more files. My JavaScript web components are intended to be low-code so it's much more succinct.
by thesz | 2025-07-23 07:09:34+00:00
> Is this year 2000? Chinese cars are overwhelmingly tuned for much softer ride experience at expense of feeling performance / sporty.

It is year 2025 in a country that was flooded with Chinese cars last three years. You can guess which one.

There is nothing soft in ride of any Chinese car in my experience. These cars are in taxis here and you can experience ride in pretty much every model and brand, from basic to luxury. No Chinese car I've been driven in compensate for sudden rolls.

European cars have much softier ride than anything Chinese, even Chinese "luxury" brands sold here. As you mentioned that, then "sporty, firm and responsive" BMW 5series' are much more pleasant to be schoffered in than anything Chinese.

Chinese luxury car brand Hongqi put V6 turbocharged hybrid motors into their full sedan models [1], this is really a shame!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongqi_H9

This shows they do not understand what quality of ride is. What vibrations are, how they affect quality of ride, how electric motors exacerbate vibrations [2], how motor's torque output affect quality of ride, etc, etc.

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/ev-drivers-passengers-motion...
by onelli | 2025-07-23 07:10:05+00:00
Really like this direction: the pain of integrating multiple accounting systems is very real (especially when you’re building SaaS tools for global founders).

Quick question: how do you plan to deal with country-specific tax logic or weird edge cases (like German invoice sequencing or Singapore GST)?

Also, curious about auth: do you see most founders struggling with OAuth for all these platforms, or do you have plans for unified auth/session handling?

For us, data mapping and keeping invoice/customer objects in sync across platforms is always messy. Would love to hear how you’re thinking about this, especially re: long-term maintenance.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-23 07:10:49+00:00
If something costs too much, and you find a way to completely pay for it, that's not bikeshedding.

And it's not a thought experiment. It's a very real suggestion. If you're worried about the resource cost from your personal use, doing something to 100% offset it lets you stop worrying.

> become vegan

For one day per year. Replacing a day you would have otherwise eaten meat. That is an extremely attainable action for anyone that cares enough about LLM resource use enough to strongly consider avoiding them. It's not something that "will not change".

By the way, your goal of running efficiently on consumer hardware isn't as great as it sounds. One of the best ways to improve efficiency is batching multiple requests, and datacenter hardware generally uses more efficient nodes and runs at more efficient clock speeds. There's an efficiency sweet spot where models are moderately too big to run at home.

And it really undermines your argument when you throw in this stupid strawman about elon's toxic generators. You know j-pb was talking about typical datacenter resource use and not that. Get that insulting claim out of here.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-23 07:10:51+00:00
> They don't target the expensive cars.

US != everywhere.

They do target expensive cars in other counties.

As I said earlier, I have firsthand experience of this being the case.

> Thieves target what's easy to take and easy to chop up and sell, not luxury cars with high resale value.

You’re just proving my point here though. Thieves target cars that have the highest resale value.

Whether that’s as a whole, or for parts where the supply chain for genuine parts has become extremely expensive.

Organised crime happens for money.

Yeah there will there will be a subsection of society that steal cars for shits and giggles. But those also aren’t the sort of motives for hackers who’d go after Microsoft Sharepoint. So if we are to compare like-for-like, then you have to discuss organised crime rather than bored teenagers.

———

By the way, I love how your username is accidentally appropriate for this conversation :D
by internet_points | 2025-07-23 07:11:11+00:00
Wow. They really did the work, profiling and exploring by search, training GA/ML, ending up with what seems like a usable solution. Fingers crossed this is something that can end up in GHC (if the aptly named section 6.6.6 "Effect On Binary Size and Compilation Time" doesn't end up being too bad in practice)
by qalmakka | 2025-07-23 07:11:30+00:00
But at least there's a standard that specifies what the directories are supposed to mean: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

I won't argue with your point because you are right, I was arguing that at least Linux and the BSDs, despite their stupid hierarchy, at least have standards that assign those directories specific functions. This is in stark opposition with Windows and macOS, where across the years stuff has been chucked basically everywhere (especially on Windows, which is the worst offender in this regard) without a lot of care about what was being put where. On macOS you can find binaries inside frameworks, stuff in /usr/bin, stuff in /sbin, stuff under System, ... and for quite a long time there really wasn't any apparent logic behind it except that it was the most convenient place to put it, similarly on Windows where some 64-bit programs chuck stuff in the 32-bit program application directory just because
by ajuc | 2025-07-23 07:13:00+00:00
You can compile java aot into binary executable native to your platform. There's many options to do it.

You can do it with a fatjar so that all the dependencies are there. You have all the dependencies clearly stated and versioned (and they are referenced globally - so you don't need to remember where you downloaded that one library from or how to compile that weird dll).

Of course if you actually care about being able to run the code in 20 years - you're far better off leaving it as a fatjar instead of making it an executable.

I have java programs that I made 20 years ago when I was at university that still run on my modern linux machine.

I also wrote C++ programs back then and none of the executables work out of the box (even building one of them is a struggle because half the libraries I used were abandoned - RIP libparagui, some you can't even download from the internet anymore, and most that you can download - don't have versions working with the most recent libc).

That despite the fact I tried to make a static executable for linux when I compiled it back then. I just failed.

I spent a week like 10 years ago trying to make my master's thesis program run again. I basically had to port it to a different graphic library because of dependency hell.
by nradov | 2025-07-23 07:13:40+00:00
There are some theoretical advantages to a wealth tax but in practice it would be extremely difficult to implement. The issue is that much wealth isn't cash in a bank account or holdings of publicly traded securities but rather equity in illiquid private investments. And some of that is offshore, so would you only tax wealth held in the USA by American citizens or would it apply more broadly?

Like one person I know is a German citizen living and working in the USA with a permanent resident visa, and she owns some forestry land in Canada. Should that land be subject to a wealth tax and if so how would you value it? Does the IRS then need to hire an army of bureaucrats to calculate valuations on those assets?
by thecsw | 2025-07-23 07:14:32+00:00
Orgmode got me through college, research, and at work, it really is the perfected markup language that can do a lot more than just being a markup language. The extensibility and out of the box export to other formats makes it immediately useful for at least 80% of common tasks.

It has ingrained itself so deeply into my muscle memory that I built out a whole website builder [1] and extended the language to support all kinds of nice QoL things for my website [2].

Something that as the other commenter here noted—I can rely on orgmode for many decades to come.

[1] https://github.com/thecsw/darkness [2] https://sandyuraz.com
Ask HN: Is AI taking our jobs or just changing them?
by okoddcat | 2025-07-23 07:14:47+00:00
Everywhere I look, people are talking about AI replacing jobs—writing, designing, coding, customer support, and more.

But is this actually happening? Are people really losing their jobs because of AI, or is it just changing how we work?

If you’ve seen AI affect your job or your team in a real way, I’d love to hear your story. Are we at the beginning of something big, or is it mostly hype for now?
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-23 07:14:53+00:00
As I didn't see one correct definition of overfitting:

overfitting means that the model is too closely aligned to the test data, picked up noise and does not generalize well to *new, unseen* data. think students that learn to reproduce questions and their answers for a test instead of learning concepts and to transfer knowledge to new questions that include the same concepts.

while this sounds like overfitting, I'd just say it's garbage in, garbage out; wrong classification. the training data is shit and didn't have (enough) correct examples to learn from.
by lolive | 2025-07-23 07:15:28+00:00
As a senior Java developper, I would say the most important things you will learn from Java (beyond types) are:

stream on collections (the local functional implementation of map/reduce/…),

interfaces everywhere,

and more importantly safe function extraction by your favorite IDE.

Let me elaborate the last one: you write an horribly long spaghetti code (because you are a junior, or you are in a hurry). That’s ok because the “Extract method” instant feature of your IDE will help you safely extract each piece of code AFTERWARDS into its own small function (that can be tested in isolation, where local variables stays internal to the function, where the interface contract in term of input/output/sideEffect is clear, where the function naming is meaningful).

The IDE can even tell you that this code you are extracting as a function appears at several other locations that should also be replaced with a call to that new function.

I don’t know if Typescript support in IDEs reaches the same level of simplicity/safety in term of function extraction.

But that feature is absolutely critical to go from spaghetti code to clean modular code, when you are a junior/work with juniors.
by ricardobeat | 2025-07-23 07:15:48+00:00
This being downvoted only reflects how hard it is for us in the west to accept the current state of things. I suggest visiting the nearest Nio or Zeekr store for a little reality shock.

Meanwhile they praise Polestar, new Mini EVs, Smart, Volvo and others that are also being produced in joint ventures with Chinese manufacturers but don’t carry a chinese brand.
by saghm | 2025-07-23 07:16:16+00:00
I get the point you're trying to make, but there's something ironic about touting a language as "simple" immediately followed by mentioning that using the basic equality operator that's used by pretty much every other mainstream language is "madness". I know every language has warts, but that one is pretty egregious both in terms of how quickly people would run into it for the first time and how easily it could have been avoided (e.g. by using something else for the less commonly needed equality operator, like how Python uses `is`). Having things that look correct and compile fine but then fall for reasons that you have to explicitly learn isn't really "simple".