MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by photonthug | 2025-07-16 19:14:03+00:00
Python is probably too awesome and versatile to go out of fashion, but as a long time user.. the ecosystem is frustrating. Dependencies and packaging have been, and still are a nightmare after thousands of years. Problems are fixable sure but the thing is that they never end. After you get plenty of practice fixing all the related problems, you'll have to keep fixing them for yourself, your less savvy teammates, and in third-party code pretty much forever. This is worth it in exchange for "import antigravity" for the first 100 years, but it's frustrating eventually.

Everyone will mention uv/pyenv/poetry/conda/virtualenvs, so fine, let's pretend it's not a problem that you tried each of those in desperation and they are all household names. Suppose the packaging wars actually ended and everyone uses what you use without you needing to tell them, and suppose further that every pypa problem isn't blaming debian maintainers for obvious regressions. Pypi will still yank[0] packages at the source to perhaps randomly break deterministic behaviour, smashing anything in the blast radius rather than only clients using a --strict flag or something. You can pin your own dependencies but who knows what they will pin (nothing, or the wrong stuff, or the wrong way probably!) or what they will yank. Now for repeatability you need to host a mirror for everything you use- which is fine for corporate but a nonstarter for the novice and annoying for FOSS projects.

If you have zero dependencies or a slowly changing environment that is receiving constant care and feeding, you'll probably never notice how bad things are. If you put down most projects for a month though and pick them back up, perhaps with a different environment, machine, or slightly different python version it's broken, bitrotted, and needs serious attention to be rehabilitated.

People might argue.. that's just software dev. Nope. I say it with lots of love and gratitude for the efforts of the community.. but most langs/ecosystems would never tolerate this level of instability. One has to eventually just admit that working, portable, and actually repeatable environments with python basically just require docker. Can we talk about how "--break-system-packages" is hilarious? After you retreat to docker you can type this a few times a day, push the container up, pull it down months/years later, and then realize that literally the only way to get a stable working environment is to request a broken one. QED

[0]: https://docs.pypi.org/project-management/yanking/
by munificent | 2025-07-16 19:14:14+00:00
> you could say the same thing about a dozen other languages

No, you could not. You could say it about maybe four others: PHP, C, C++, and C#.

No other languages have anywhere near the userbase size while being fairly quiet when it comes to online tech discussion.

I agree there are crusty old Java devs (as well as crusty old C, C++, PHP, etc. devs). In a decade or two, there will be crusty old TypeScript devs. It's just the nature of technology lifecycles and career paths. Some people get relatively tired of learning when they get older and just want to capitalize on what they already know for their remaining earning years.
by Expurple | 2025-07-16 19:15:04+00:00
> If someone posts a patch or submits a PR to a codebase written in C, it is easier to review than any other mainstream language. There is no spooky at a distance. [..] Changes are local.

Lol, wut? What about about race conditions, null pointers indirectly propagated into functions that don't expect null, aliased pointers indirectly propagated into `restrict` functions, and the other non-local UB causes? Sadly, C's explicit control flow isn't enough to actually enable local reasoning in the way that Rust (and some other functional languages) do.

I agree that Go is decent at this. But it's still not perfect, due to "downcast from interface{}", implicit nullability, and similar fragile runtime business.

I largely agree with the rest of the post! Although Rust enables better local reasoning, it definitely has more complexity and a steeper learning curve. I don't need its manual memory management most of the time, either.

Related post about a "higer-level Rust" with less memory management: https://without.boats/blog/notes-on-a-smaller-rust/
by allturtles | 2025-07-16 19:15:05+00:00
> I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers

Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum in high school is built around reading particular works by particular historical writers. The highlights of nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered in high school (and beyond - some of these people are seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember any works or authors from the nineteenth century would be equivalent to engineering major who can't remember any algebra.
by switchbak | 2025-07-16 19:15:13+00:00
Not a lot of love for Mill in these comments. I'm interested in what it has to offer.

I find SBT just has a lot of unnecessary abstractions and complexity. It's so opaque that I'm sure I'm leaving a lot of performance on the table with hidden antipatterns. Mill seems to solve that by being 'boring' (in a good way). Being able to trace what's happening in my IDE would be lovely - and something I don't have in SBT or Maven either.

Now that we also have fast running native CLI tooling, I think it's worth another look over SBT.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 19:16:16+00:00
>how modern Java doesn’t suck very much,

Given fact that Lombok is still pretty much widely used, with its under the hood functionality of essentially hacking the AST, or the fact that annotation processors write out Java code to files, or the fact that you could be using a standard library like Log4j and have a massive vulnerability on your system because someone decided that it would be a good idea if log statements could execute code and nobody said anything otherwise, or the fact that Kotlin and Groovy were literally made to address inefficiencies in Java, amongst other things....

Yeah not really sure how you came to that conclusion.
by miguel_martin | 2025-07-16 19:16:27+00:00
Python debugging is great when you're strictly debugging Python code. Placing a `breakpoint` or spinning up an IPython instance to investigate the issue via `import IPython; IPython.embed()` makes life breezy. For neovim, you can send code to the ipython REPL easily via vim-slime.

I've never found myself debugging the underlying C++ code unless developing a C++ extension. But is it really that hard? Just point lldb to the python process and run your script in lldb.

If the C++ is not yours & assuming it's a mature lib (e.g. PyTorch): it's probably an error caused by you in Python land.
by spiderxxxx | 2025-07-16 19:16:39+00:00
>From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins.

Yea, I was a sysadmin around 2000 (before that too) and I knew it as such.

>between 2005 and 2006, two important things happened:

Somewhat - I used it in 2001 for Plone which is based on Zope, which was somewhat popular around that time. Writing all the web stuff with Python made sense, since Plone provided a CMS and could include a wiki. Adding on some sql calls to it in python just made sense. The competition was between PHP and Python, though there were some other less popular choices. Ruby on Rails definitely was getting a lot more popular around those times. PHP didn't start getting popular around 2005, if anything, people started using Python more, and started criticizing the crappy code that was circulating in the PHP community.

In any case, it was a fun time, but what's the point of looking back like that?
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-16 19:18:07+00:00
You'd think a well placed billionaire (or even a "mere" 10s-100s millionaire) could do something interesting there. Buy up 10-20 vacant houses, renovate them, finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town. How much cash investment does it realistically take to make land appreciate even just enough to make it worth it?

And I'm not talking Baltimore, which has a population of 600k and just a lot more baked in problems, I'm talking declining European "villages".
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-16 19:18:09+00:00
there's not any genuine forks. They're all dependent on Google, see Vivaldi last year announcing they'll drop manifest v2 support. They're all pretty much cosmetic reskins. Whoever puts up the money for development makes the choices, regardless what license you slap on it.

And if there was a drastic mainstream adoption of linux, whatever implications that has for development focus, it would affect everyone because nobody is going to run a sincere kernel fork.

[1]https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/112633927397201824
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-07-16 19:18:30+00:00
I think that by now we shouldn’t take a .0 major release as a sign of what is really going to be present in macOS and what’s not. The OS stabilizes around .4 or so, and in the meantime some deprecated things may get removed, too.

They also have a habit of sometimes add or change some APIs mid-cycle, so you may see requirements for the latest Xcode being a mid-cycle version of the OS. Or how was it with Mac App Store, that not only itself, but the relevant APIs for programs distributed in it appeared in 10.6.4?
by kongolongo | 2025-07-16 19:19:30+00:00
Sure it might have an impact, but again the culpability of harm isn't on the consumer or advertiser. If people able to shop around for doctors to get any prescription then isn't that the problem, not the advertisement?

It doesn't matter if the adverts have an impact on sales, if it does then doctors are to blame, tv adverts cant prescribe people medication.
by 93po | 2025-07-16 19:19:34+00:00
Ghost of Kyiv was recognized by Ukraine itself as a myth. Snake Island "go fuck yourself" was misrepresented (they were killed vs captured), plenty of others:

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

There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test.

I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
by kayge | 2025-07-16 19:19:43+00:00
Thanks for this :) I had never heard of Elo until I noticed this morning that the new Chess course in Duolingo gives you an Elo ranking after a few rounds against Oscar. Probably would have skipped right over this story and comments otherwise, but now I have a fun bit of non-tech trivia to share if it ever comes up in small talk someday.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-16 19:20:36+00:00
Maybe I'm the only one that finds Python simultaneously verbose and lacking? Either you need 500 dependencies to do something in a simple way, or you need dozens (if not hundreds) of lines to do trivial things. I avoid writing Python because there's so much bullshit to add. Much prefer Perl, I can actually get things done quickly. Python feels like programming for the sake of programming.
by beloch | 2025-07-16 19:20:49+00:00
Click-bait longform is where things went wrong.

I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.

Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.

When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.
by pron | 2025-07-16 19:20:50+00:00
> And the very point of writing a native program in the first place is to make it feel solid.

What does that mean, and what is it about native programs (i.e. programs AOT-compiled to machine code) that makes them feel solid? BTW, such programs are often more, not less, sensitive to OS changes.

> realizing that I was just spawning complexity that is unrelated to the problem at hand

Wait till you use Rust for a while, then (you should try, though, if the language interests you).

For me, the benefit of languages with manual memory management is the significantly lower memory footprint (speed is no longer an issue; if you think Haskell and Go are good enough, try Java, which is faster). But this comes at a price. Manual memory management means, by necessity, a lower level of abstraction (i.e. the same abstraction can cover fewer implementations). The price is usually paid not when writing the first version, but when evolving the codebase over years. Sometimes this price is worth it, but it's there, and it's not small. That's why I only reach for low level languages when I absolutely must.
by horsawlarway | 2025-07-16 19:21:07+00:00
I thought we already had reasonably clear evidence that the output in the CoT does not actually indicate what the model "thinking" in any real sense, and it's mostly just appending context that may or may not be used, and may or may not be truthful.

Basically: https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say...
by gardnr | 2025-07-16 19:21:58+00:00
If you are looking for feedback:

The website invites users to sign up to get notified of the pre-beta release. Some people might refer to this as an "alpha release".

Your social buttons don't go anywhere. It really seems like you just asked Claude Code to build a website and then posted it to HN and then had a robot respond to all the comments.

Now I feel like I just spent 5 minutes looking at someone's AI slop. It feels fake.

I prefer bad English from a real person over "That’s a great point — and you’re absolutely right."
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 19:22:06+00:00
Comments like this basically should say "I want as much handholding as possible"

Lucky for you, LLMs are pretty good at that these days.

>And the types I can never trust. I've used all the tooling and you still get type errors in runtime. It's also ridiculously slow.

IDE integrated mypy checking does this in the background as you type. As for errors, it all has to do with how much typing you actually use. You can set the IDE to throw warning based around any types or lack of type annotation.

Again, handholding.
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-07-16 19:22:15+00:00
So you sincerely think it’s ok that everybody takes care of the kid but the father because he’s rich and can afford multiple nannies? There’s not much context to miss when TFA has this:

> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends.
by OmPatel5 | 2025-07-16 19:22:32+00:00
A few months ago, I came across this (now deleted) post about someone who worked at a hotel and noticed a flaw in the hotel's software. They ended up building a plugin to fix it... and made a nice side income from it. That got me thinking: How many other tiny or overlooked mobile app issues are lurking out there, waiting for a solution?

I wanted to help skip the guesswork so looking at negative reviews would highlight problems users would be having. If a solution was prominent enough, these users would likely convert or at least download an alternative app to make their life easier. I basically analyzed over 50k negative reviews across around 5000 mobile apps on the App Store and Play Store to find specific improvements that can be made on existing apps that can potentially be made into a competitor for existing mobile applications.

I used AI to analyze the negative reviews and find user problems and provide potential improvements to the existing apps as a competitor or even a better alternative.

I separated by categories and by app and highlight app/software specific problems users were having as well as category specific problems.

If you're building (or improving) a mobile app, this database might save you a ton of guesswork.

We scraped apps from 160 keywords (e.g. period tracker, meal planner, sleep sounds, travel journal, photo enhancer, news digest, coupon finder) to find what users hate about existing mobile software, and what we did was we analyzed these negative reviews to find improvements users can do to make a mobile app competitor.

Link to post that inspired me to do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/microsaas/comments/1h0c38i/i_built_...
by srkdaniel | 2025-07-16 19:22:36+00:00
The Product Brandiseer is an AI platform that generates a complete visual identity kit for startups, small businesses, and solo founders—logo, color palette, fonts, basic style guide, hero and social images, business card, icons, and mockups (16 assets total). Use case: For anyone who needs a professional, cohesive brand but can’t justify agency pricing or hours spent cobbling together assets from different tools.

Market Targeting indie founders, micro-SaaS, e-commerce, and hackathon teams. The branding market is massive (est. $60B+ globally), but for budget-conscious makers, existing options (logo generators, Fiverr, Canva) are either too limited or result in inconsistent branding. Brandiseer aims to fill that gap with instant, all-in-one kits.

Competition & Positioning Brandiseer: One brief, ~10 minutes, 16 coordinated assets, $9.99, every deliverable shares the same brand DNA.

Logo generators: Output one logo file—no guidance, no cohesion.

Agencies: Great results, but expensive and slow (weeks, $1k+).

Templates/Fiverr: Good for a single asset, but consistency falls apart quickly.

Stage V1 is live, fully bootstrapped, not raising funds at the moment.

Customer Strategy

Launching on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and founder communities on X/Twitter.

Targeting solo makers, SaaS, and e-commerce operators who need to look professional quickly.

$9.99 price point to remove friction; site demo shows exactly what you get.

Plan to iterate based on real user feedback and add paid upgrades for deeper style control and new export formats.

Why Me? Solo founder with a background in SaaS, design, and prompt engineering. Built Brandiseer to solve my own frustrations with fragmented, inconsistent branding for new projects.

Would appreciate your honest feedback:

Does this solve a real pain point for early-stage builders?

How does it compare to your current approach (Canva, Fiverr, logo generators)?

What would make you actually use a tool like this?

Is anything missing from the value prop or product experience?
by ashdev | 2025-07-16 19:23:19+00:00
This might work for B2C startups, but not so much for B2B. In B2B, people need to see a working product that clearly saves them time or money. The sales cycle is longer, and landing page tactics alone usually aren’t effective.

A better approach is to talk to as many potential customers as possible early on. Collect emails, show a rough prototype, get feedback, and iterate. Then, when you’re ready to launch, go back to those same people, email them, show what’s changed, and demo how the product delivers real value.
by toast0 | 2025-07-16 19:23:39+00:00
It would depend on how Cloudflare set up their systems. From this and other outages, I think it's pretty clear that they've set up their systems as a single failure domain. But it would be possible for them to have setup for 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 to have separate failure domains --- separate infrastructure, at least some sites running one but not the other.
by coldtea | 2025-07-16 19:24:13+00:00
Nobody argued it has already ended coding or at least coding as we know it.

We argue whether it will end it.

That said, "the workflow is the only thing changed so far" you omit that the workflow change includes the code being written automatically for you in large part. That's not batch compiling to personal compiler. That's not editor vs IDE. That's way bigger.
by kridsdale1 | 2025-07-16 19:24:25+00:00
I had a chance to join OpenAI 13 months ago too.

But I had a son 14 months ago.

There was absolutely no way I was going to miss any of a critical part in my baby’s life in order to be in an office at 2am managing a bad deployment.

Maybe I gave up my chance at PPU or RSU riches. But I know I chose a different kind of wealth that can never be replaced.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 19:24:47+00:00
Yeah, the entire presentation is a mess, I should've worked more on this side.

I see your concern about running it locally and then visiting a remotely hosted webapp. The way it works is that app.dataramen.xyz will call a localhost server (running on your machine, there is no remote code executed) to connect to the database. So all the data stay on your local machine, plus some webapp stuff stored in browser localstorage.

I went for this setup for essentially 2 reasons:

- I didn't want to ship webapp as part of the CLI tool due to the webapp size (it uses React, so the bundle is 800kb or so, while the entire local server code is 45kb).

- In the long term I want the users being able to connect to multiple servers from one webapp. For example you may have a local server running to interact with your local DB, but at the same time you might have configured a remote self hosted server within your company VPN.

It is a weird setup, but you end up doing weird things when you run an app on $0.00 budget
by consumer451 | 2025-07-16 19:24:54+00:00
The ghost of Kyiv was recognized as a myth at the time of it's spread. The Snake Island story is understandable. Every country makes mistakes about KIA vs. MIA.

I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
by tombert | 2025-07-16 19:24:58+00:00
That gets to my point though. For example, Lombok isn't really necessary for a lot of stuff now, because Records give you a lot of what you would use with Lombok.

Kotlin and Groovy did come and address problems with Java, you should use use them if your employer allows it. I'm just saying that Java 21 is actually kind of fun to write.

Yes, some of the libraries have been unsafe, but that's one example of the 30 years of Java.

I just feel like Java has improved in the last twenty years. It's the engineers that haven't.