MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goranmoomin | 2025-07-30 20:51:19+00:00
As someone who have tried upstreaming a patch for Emacs on macOS (to add a feature that already existed on Linux), I can bitterly say that at least some of the maintainers do have a disdain for non-free OSes and that it makes it contributing patches for macOS as miserable as possible.

The patch was adding xwidget webkit support for macOS Cocoa[0], which I iterated for the next few months[1], only to side-rail into a discussion on macOS/GCC and GNUStep support policy[2], and I fizzled out.

That was abt 5 years ago, and I’ve never touched on the Emacs codebase since.

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-05/msg00...

[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-07/threa...

[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-08/msg00...
by bobsomers | 2025-07-30 20:51:25+00:00
> I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much.

I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying.

For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.
by toast0 | 2025-07-30 20:52:07+00:00
> It’s a no brainer if you have a couple thousand dollars to spare for an estate lawyer to do some estate planning and spare your heirs probate court.

What I keep hearing from experienced estate attorneys is that California probate court is onerous and worth a lot of effort to avoid, but other state's have reasonable probate; it might still be worth it to avoid probate, but it's not such a big deal. OTOH, dealing with assets in a revocable trust can be a PITA while you're still alive and may not give much benefit while you're living either. If you're not in California, it's worth taking stock of the situation before you use California biased advice.

Having an estate in trust may not actually save on taxes either. Yes, you'll avoid probate fees in California, which is significant. But your estate will still pay estate tax. Otherwise, if an irrevocable trust holds the assets, it pays the taxes, and trusts have very abbreviated brackets; your heirs might well pay less income tax holding the property themselves.

When your heirs/beneficiaries die and their heirs become the new beneficiary, that's not subject to estate tax, which is great, but as a result it doesn't get a step up in basis. If the trust is large relative to the estate tax exemption, it's beneficial to not pay estate tax; if not, it's more beneficial to get a step up in basis.

Certainly, in some situations, trusts are more tax efficient, but you have to actually look at your situation to see. Default everyone should have a trust assumptions add a lot of senseless confusion and delay to the people who don't actually get a benefit from it. There are asset protection benefits from trusts as well, and it's reasonable to consider those depending on the situation as well.

Holding a farm in a trust or llc makes a lot of sense to me, because it makes it easier to split ownership without dividing the farm.
by arcticfox | 2025-07-30 20:52:16+00:00
I think all the testimonials are fake, if this wasn't clear to everyone. I thought they might be real at first but none of them exist. I actually thought that was kind of shitty to do, since they use real companies and media outlets.

(I don't really follow fonts but I do know there is a subculture crazy about them, so I thought it could be theoretically possible that people would write reviews of them).
by dismalaf | 2025-07-30 20:53:29+00:00
> Russian proxy? Where are you getting your propaganda from? Russia supports Israel and has only paid lip service to Hamas.

Maybe try paying attention to the world. Hamas leaders travelled to Moscow after October 7th and met with Putin.

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/russias-...

There's also plenty of evidence they provided support to Hamas prior to the attack.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4250708-putins-fin...

https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2023/1...

Israel was only cordial with Russia because they controlled Syria's airspace. With all of the Russian leadership's anti-Jewish rhetoric like calling Hitler a Jew, supporting Iran and Hamas, etc..., they're not exactly best friends...
by nojonestownpls | 2025-07-30 20:53:55+00:00
And yet far less attention than those in Ukraine got even at a time when the destruction and killing there was less than 1% of what Palestine has gone through. Within one week of the first attack, Ukraine got more mainstream support, on-air time, and geopolitical response, than Palestine got over a year of suffering through civilian murders and other clear war crimes.
by jiehong | 2025-07-30 20:54:25+00:00
This reminds me of the eye chart used in some countries, because it isn't based on reading letters, but on a direction.

For example [0], you should indicate the direction where the E points to.

[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MRfRwHwWL._SL1235_.jpg
by binary132 | 2025-07-30 20:55:06+00:00
I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody has ground to stand on in asserting that minors have a moral right to an “online life”. On the other hand, there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons. I’m not saying I necessarily support it in all cases, but I definitely don’t think it’s necessarily a bad or immoral thing either, and it’s a bit surprising that a bunch of extremely online tech jockeys seem to.
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-07-30 20:55:09+00:00
> What is the cap of throughput is due to these speed limitations is an exercise left for the author of the article.

They already did that exercise:

> 3-car trains running at 30-40 trains per hour (a normal peak frequency for automated or even some human-driven metro lines) reach a capacity of about 18,000 passengers per hour per direction, well above the expected demand of any American line that doesn’t go through Manhattan.
by deanmoriarty | 2025-07-30 20:55:09+00:00
> Over the decades, I have seen too many friends who have fallen for this story, 'hit their numbers' and loose their minds after 'retiring'. This is because the mind just unravels(unable to find meaning), if it doesn't have daily structure and purpose.

What specifically happened to them? I am one of those who cannot wait to quit my job (career altogether really) and I reached a good financial number, but don't have a clear future direction.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-30 20:55:10+00:00
Yeah, that rings true. I assumed when asking my question that this was something to do with culture, identity, and social status within a particular community. In this case the culture (rural America) is alien to me. But I can understand the idea of making economically "irrational" choices for reasons to do with pride or culture or identity, though in the world I grew up in it's more things like become a classical musician, environmental scientist, or spend 6 years doing a humanities PhD. On the other hand, none of those things involve the allocation of $5M of capital, so there does seem to be something different about this kind of life choice.
by unicornhose | 2025-07-30 20:55:36+00:00
I must admit that I am much more unsophisticated than this, and yet I "invested" in Oxide (by running my own projects off Oxide servers), and it is gratifying to see them continue to grow. My (naive) assessment: (a) agreed with Cantrill's opinions on software, (b) liked his willingness to put himself out there, and (c) felt the eng blogs showed a high level of (socio-)technical ability.

I think for the internet to break out of walled gardens, high-quality independent datacenters need to exist -- nobody wants to manage their own datacenters, and nobody wants to rely on Google/Amazon/Microsoft's platforms or (even worse) business products. I hope this continues.
by crote | 2025-07-30 20:55:49+00:00
The Netherlands and the United Kingdom (specifically, the Isles of Scilly) were at war from 1651 until 1986, with war declared by The Netherlands. In practice it only lasted for a few months during 1651, was bloodless, and they simply forgot about the formalities. A peace treaty was only signed after a historian asked the government whether they were still at war, and they discovered that they never got around to it so technically they still were!

Does that mean the United Kingdom would not be the aggressor if they were to bomb The Netherlands in 1985?
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-30 20:55:55+00:00
You can’t call negative things gaming. You can gamify anything, but if it’s negative you can’t call it gaming. Gaming is always good and never causes any problems. Plenty of research shows that gaming is good. Please stop villainizing gaming. Gaming is good. If it’s negative, just call it what it is. Gambling, addiction, radicalization, etc all are just that. They have nothing to do with gaming. Gaming is good. Media has no affect on people.
by fmbb | 2025-07-30 20:56:00+00:00
> This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.

Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any.

Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains.

Has anyone measured any improved productivity?

I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

> Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough.

I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
by goranmoomin | 2025-07-30 20:56:31+00:00
I have my own story over here[0], and I’m pretty sure that there’s going to be a lot of instances similar to what I’ve experienced — blocked from merging or just fizzling out due to the lack of push on features that work on non-free OSes. There’s a reason why there are so many forks and patches for Emacs on macOS that are maintained for years that are not getting upstreamed.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44739359
by snicky | 2025-07-30 20:56:39+00:00
This year I tend to ignore restaurants with rates lower than 4.7 as this usually means they are not really worth the money. I do the same evaluating places to stay on booking.com. If it's an apartment it has to be at least 9.5 and have more than 50 reviews. Otherwise the reviews could be just all fake. Good hotels usually start around 9.0 (I think people have higher expectations against hotels in general thus lower ratings).

I have to say re-building those internal scales takes a couple of brain cycles in my head every now and then, but I'm already used to those skewed ratings after checking IMDb reviews for years and learning that anything below 7.2 is a total crap and the rating above 8.0 usually marks a masterpiece.
by 9rx | 2025-07-30 20:57:23+00:00
The trouble is that "fast" doesn't mean anything without a point of comparison. If all you have is a slow web app, you have to assume that the web app is necessarily slow — already as fast as it can be. We like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so there is no reason to think that someone would make something slower than is necessary.

"Fast" is the feature people always wanted, but absent better information, they have to assume that is what they already got. That is why "fast" marketing works so well. It reveals that what they thought was pretty good actually wasn't. Adding the missing kitchen sink doesn't offer the same emotional reaction.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-30 20:57:24+00:00
> It’s not that they’re just learning codebases, they’re learning what working with code looks like.

Working in any not-in-training-set environment very quickly shows the shortcomings of this belief.

For example, Cloudflare Workers is V8 but it sure ain't Node, and the local sqlite in a Durable Object has a sync API with very different guarantees than a typical client-server SQL setup.

Even in a more standard setting, it's really hard to even get an LLM to use the current-stable APIs when its training data contains now-deprecated examples. Your local rules, llms.txt mentions, corrections etc slip out of the context pretty fast and it goes back to trained data.

The LLM can perhaps "read any code" but it really really prefers writing only code that was in its training set.
by foxrider | 2025-07-30 20:59:01+00:00
Adding to this - that's why I insist all my students should learn touch-typing, for at least 10 minutes per lesson. It really changes how you interact with your computer, and how much touch typing quickly makes you able to type as fast as you can think changes your approach to automating things in a quick script or doing some bash-fu. A very underrated skill in todays world.
by sofixa | 2025-07-30 20:59:21+00:00
> Tesla salespeople do not work on commission

I work with tech salespeople with a variety of former employers as tech sales people, and I've never heard of anyone having worked without a commission. I'm vaguely in tech sales myself (solutions architect) and I'm on commission too, and so is everyone who joins our division from similar employment (solutions engineers/architect, or even customer success folks).
Show HN: Learn Complete French Grammar for Free
by hn_amallick | 2025-07-30 20:59:40+00:00
As a part of my journey to learn french, I wanted to challenge myself to learn french to B2 in less time that it took me to learn spanish - around three years. Learning grammar is one of the fastest ways to get comfortable with a language and use it conversationally, but there's a problem here: it's also the most common approach. Every single school in America tries and fails to teach students french through cramming grammar. Every single online language course or app focuses on grammar and sells their knowledge behind a paywall, or are entirely ineffective at worst (looking at you, Duolingo).

The site I attribute the most to my success with spanish grammar is https://studyspanish.com/grammar, a completely free site with grammar lessons and corresponding exercises.

This website I created is my attempt at transpiling that site to french and democratizing french grammar knowledge in a logical, concise way following these principles:

- Active learning + recall: every single section has practice quizzes and exercises for you to test your knowledge. - Examples: there are ample pronunciation and sentence examples so you can learn words in context. - Goal-setting: Each level from A1-B2 has a "checklist" where if you can successfully translate a sentence from english to french or from french to english without any help, serves as an indicator that you have mastered those grammar concepts.

This project is meant to be a one-stop-shop for french grammar and practicing it, so you can then move on and learn languages through the strategies that actually matter: anki flashcards and comprehensible input.

The site is made with docusaurus and the exercises are based on JSON that I use AI to generate, from which quizzes can be easily made. Quiz progress and metrics are stored locally.

I completed most of the essential grammar, but I plan to continue adding on new lessons and exercises until the subjunctive tense, which would be B2 level.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-07-30 21:01:11+00:00
My 13yo wanted to install some dotnet disassembly or injection tool so he could download mods and inject new code into existing games on steam. All his friends were doing it and I'm the mean dad because I won't let him download any random code from the internet and run it.

They don't know what they are doing, but they know how to follow instructions on github.
by tguvot | 2025-07-30 21:02:08+00:00
a) not marginal. they are powerful enough to create "no-go zones" for PA and to attempt executing terror acts in Israel

b) i'll suggest you to take a look how many new settlements israel build in last 20 years or so. it may surprise you

c) Fatah didn't stop armed resistance. It military wings got wiped by Israel in second intifada. And it didn't fought off Hamas. It lost to Hamas in Gaza and survived in west bank because Israel is present there

d) west bank palestinians didn't went a more pacifist route [-1]. it's just western media doesn't cover palestinian violence in west bank. as i previously suggested, check out how many new settlements were build in last 20 years.

[-1] https://www.jns.org/over-6300-terror-attacks-against-jews-in...
by krapp | 2025-07-30 21:02:38+00:00
I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this.

The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.
by bluelightning2k | 2025-07-30 21:03:29+00:00
Claude Code and Gemini CLI (and OpenAI Codex) are first party from the respective companies. But also kind of products - in extreme cases people pay $200/month for Claude Code and get $thousands and thousands of usage. There's product bundling there beyond just the interface.

I think Claude Code specifically has a reputation for being a 1st class citizen - as in the model is trained and evalled on that specific toolcall syntax.
by kerkeslager | 2025-07-30 21:03:34+00:00
> Those writing parsers are disproportionately writing things like programming languages and language servers that are quite complex.

Sure, but adding the complexity of a parser generator doesn't help with that complexity in most cases.

[General purpose] programming languages are a quintessential example. Yes, a compiler or an interpreter is a very complex program. But unless your programming language needs to be parsed in multiple languages, you definitely do not need to generate the parser in many languages like SQLite does. That just adds complexity for no reason.

You can't just say "it's complex, therefore it needs a parser generator" if adding the parser generator doesn't address the complexity in any way.
by jldugger | 2025-07-30 21:04:07+00:00
> From that, using what you know about the area of the square and circle respectively, the ratio of "inside square but not in circle" and "inside circle" points can be used to set up an equation for the value of pi.

Back in like 9th grade, when Wikipedia did not yet exist (but MathWorld and IRC did) I did this with TI-Basic instead of paying attention in geometry class. It's cool, but converges hilariously slowly. The in versus out formula is basically distance from origin > 1, but you end up double sampling a lot using randomness.

I told a college roommate about it and he basically invented a calculus approach summing pixels in columns or something as an optimization. You could probably further optimize by finding upper and lower bounds of the "frontier" of the circle, or iteratively splitting rectangle slices in infinitum, but thats probably just reinventing state of the art. And all this skips the cool random sampling the monte carlo algorithm uses.
by glax | 2025-07-30 21:04:14+00:00
There were 6 domains that were bought by me in the last 12 years.

side project, business partnership, personal music streaming site, serverless blog.

It's hard to do if you have a regular 9 to 5 and also some other hobby(I'm into motorcycles :D).

Only remaining domain is of my name pusparaj.com (but it's in auction mode)

I have also lost ownership 2 times or more i think, because i tend to rotate registrars and forgot to renew it.

now 3 domains are remaining, will let them expire.
by alixanderwang | 2025-07-30 21:04:27+00:00
Played around with it for a serious task for 15 mins. Compared to Claude Code:

Pros:

- Beautiful UI

- Useful sidebar, keep track of changed files, cost

- Better UX for accepting changes (has hotkeys, shows nicer diff)

Cons:

- Can't combine models. Claude Code using a combination of Haiku for menial search stuff and Sonnet for thinking is nice.

- Adds a lot of unexplained junk binary files in your directory. It's probably in the docs somewhere I guess.

- The initial init makes some CHARM.md that tries to be helpful, but everything it had did not seem like helpful things I want the model to know. Simple stuff, like, my Go tests use PascalCasing, e.g. TestCompile.

- Ctrl+C to exit crashed my terminal.
by nu11ptr | 2025-07-30 21:04:31+00:00
And that leads to dependency hell once you realize that those dependencies all need different versions of the same crate. Most of the time this "just works" (at the cost of more dependencies, longer compile time, bigger binary)... until it doesn't then it can be tough to figure out.

In general, I like cargo a lot better than the Go tooling, but I do wish the Rust stdlib was a bit more "batteries included".
by asa400 | 2025-07-30 21:05:16+00:00
To a first approximation HN is a group of people who have convinced themselves that it's a high quality user experience to spend 11 seconds shipping 3.8 megabytes of Javascript to a user that's connected via a poor mobile connection on a cheap dual-core phone so that user can have a 12 second session where they read 150 words and view 1 image before closing the tab.

Fast is _absolutely not_ the only thing we care about. Not even top 5. We are addicted to _convenience_.
by rsyring | 2025-07-30 21:05:41+00:00
Actions reflect someone's priorities.

I don't want my son, who has narcolepsy, to be tired all the time.

But the medicine that helps him, Xyrem (GHB), is $20K a month.

Pay it, don't pay it, neither option truly reflects my priorities. It only reflects the hand I've been dealt by other people's priorities.
by sofixa | 2025-07-30 21:05:46+00:00
> cheaper than trains (and therefore lower environmental impact)

How does that work? For the same amount of capacity, vans are not and probably never will be cheaper. Steel wheels on rails, with massive capacity, is just drastically more efficient, even with 0 driver costs. You'll still have much more maintenance (the tires, breaks, road) to do with a much higher number of vehicles.
by saltcured | 2025-07-30 21:05:52+00:00
Does that bike lane go next to parked cars? You can imagine that even conscientious drivers could fail to see a bike approaching that fast and open their door into its path.

I admit I rode my bike up to 35-45 MPH sometimes in my youth, just with pedaling and gravity. But, I was wise enough to realize I belong in a normal traffic lane at that point, not flying along the edge near pedestrians, parked cars, etc. And I wasn't exceeding the posted speed limit for that road.

I had a less wise friend, with a very aerodynamic road bike, who hit ~60 MPH (in a 25 MPH zone) and T-boned a car because they did not consider unsafe it was with the limited sight lines. I felt sorry for the driver who, by all accounts, didn't do anything wrong.