MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benreesman | 2025-07-22 18:19:55+00:00
`pkg-config` works great in just about any standard scenario: it puts flags on a compile and link line that have been understood by every C compiler and linker since the 1970s.

Here's Bazel consuming it with zero problems, and if you have a nastier problem than a low-latency network system calling `liburing` on specific versions of the kernel built with Bazel? Stop playing.

The last thing we need is another failed standard further balkanizing an ecosystem that has worked fine if used correctly for 40+ years. I don't know what industry expert means, but I've done polyglot distributed builds at FAANG scale for a living, so my appeal to authority is as good as anyone's and I say `pkg-config` as a base for the vast majority of use cases with some special path for like, compiling `nginx` with it's zany extension mechanism is just fine.

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/316d18949ad508e15243ed4aa98c80d...
by procflora | 2025-07-22 18:20:00+00:00
Great example!

Another historical example I find myself thinking about is the huge number of objects that moved into a disposable category in the last century or so. What used to be built entirely by skilled hands is now the prerogative of the machine and thus a certain base level of maintainability is no longer guaranteed in even the worst-designed widget.

Yes, AI will mean more software is "written" than before, but more will be thrown away too. The allure of the re-write is nothing new, but now we'll do it not because we think we can do it better the second time, but because the original is too broken to keep using and starting over is just so much cheaper.

Soon at CRUD App HQ (if not already): "Last year's pg_dump is this year's prompt."
by lyu07282 | 2025-07-22 18:20:14+00:00
I saw an interesting interview on the subject: https://youtu.be/6Ibk5vJ-4-o?t=1678

It argues the way to engage with these people is to first understand the psychological manipulation tactics they have been subjected to. That what you should focus on is not their false beliefs, but the underlying reasons why they were vulnerable to that manipulation in the first place; and to realize that everybody can become a victim of such cults helps to empathize with them. Don't give up on your friend.
by SebastianKra | 2025-07-22 18:20:24+00:00
(I didn't say to not use classes)

Depends on the conventions of the project. Tailwind is acceptable (shadcn is a great starting point), but if I write them from scratch, I use css modules.

You don't write component styles that often so the context switching and repetition don't matter, and css modules are close to the standard while still being locally scoped.
by LoganDark | 2025-07-22 18:20:32+00:00
Psychedelics are known to occasionally activate schizophrenia in genetically predisposed individuals, so this is definitely not unheard of. Given how often I take LSD though, I'm fairly certain I'm not genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, otherwise I probably would've been in the 12th inner circle of schizophrenia by now.

(I've been trying to impact the stability of my brain for years. I just want a way to destroy rational thought but that isn't lethally addictive (benzos), or irreversibly neurotoxic (deliriants), or literal poison (alcohol). Harm reduction is such a drag, I just want to safely explore unsafety!!)
by fxtentacle | 2025-07-22 18:20:46+00:00
It seems I'm the only person who likes fonts that deliberately exaggerate their edges to better align with a pixel grid. All of these font comparisons always compare pretty smooth and round fonts to each other. Apart from minor details, the comparisons look the same. But I actually like this design most: https://hajo.me/images/HajoCode16px_hr.png On a 9x16 pixel grid, that'll have really sharp contrasts, just like good old Windows 98 before subpixel antialiasing.
by timr | 2025-07-22 18:21:13+00:00
That article doesn’t say what you’re asserting. It says that they’re cutting OAR, National Marine Fisheries Service, and some other things. The writer then goes on to say that OAR, in particular, does climate research. But it’s the research arm of NOAA, so that’s to be expected.

To go from this to “being shut down exactly and entirely because it is a station that performs climate research” is not a defensible statement.

I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.
by sorcercode | 2025-07-22 18:21:18+00:00
i appreciate the OP's take and insight but couldn't agree more with this comment.

> yet here I am more productive than ever thanks to it. i have first hand experience with most of the css frameworks. heck, even wrote a custom scss one at one point, but eventually there's a simplicity (admittedly to a fault at times) to tailwind that just makes you more productive.

> Plus people sticking to increments of 0.25rem ins this is another really good point that doesn't come through as much. Tailwind also does a fantastic job of picking the right defaults which 90% of the internet won't do.

from the OP's original piece

>> it demands the developer who installs it set up a config file that lays out all codebase-wide style constants: colors, margin sizes, fonts, border radii, etc.

... or importantly, it sets up a solid set of defaults.
by riku_iki | 2025-07-22 18:21:24+00:00
> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.

in your situation, if you would have good idea which solves real problem, you would see at least some people come to your site/app and try it, but looks like your idea is not that good, or you failed to contact your audience.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-22 18:21:29+00:00
The dead corpses of filmmakers and authors and actors are buried in unmarked graves out behind those companies' corporate headquarters. Unimaginable horror, that piracy. Why has no one intervened?

>If you're just a normal person you get to spend years in jail or worse.

Not that I'm a big fan of the criminalization of copyright infringement in the United States, but who has ever spent years in jail for this?

Besides, if it really bothered you, then we might not see this weird tone-switch from one sentence to the next, where you seem to think that piracy is shocking and "something should be done" and then "it's not good tht someone should spend time in jail for it". What gives?
by lxgr | 2025-07-22 18:21:51+00:00
> frustrate visitors into using email

Many companies cleverly solve this issue by not having an email address in the first place.

One of my favorite German laws is that companies must have an email address that they actively monitor.

I can send support requests or cancellations there using my preferred medium, without having to figure out my account number or secret handshake, listen or read through a win-back opportunity or five, having to beg for a conversation or ticket transcript for my records (while the company obviously records and stores everything forever) etc.
by oxavier | 2025-07-22 18:22:59+00:00
I will peruse your learning path when I am done with writing my master's thesis. Thanks for putting it together!

Lots of bullet points and keywords about the "What" : provable recursion, next-token prediction, and formal verification... and all items in "What makes it special". Can you provide a practical motivation, even speculative for people like me who have little time? Not necessarily "What use does it have right now", but "The qualitative difference with other models might enable use case XYZ in the future".

I have noticed it is low power and this is great in itself. What does the more rigorous formalism bring to the table? No snark at all, I am fascinated by formal methods, but still looking at them from afar.

Cheers
by cogman10 | 2025-07-22 18:23:05+00:00
> How is means testing (ie. reviewing some paperwork) going to be cheaper than running an actual public works program where you need to decide what needs to be done, plan the thing that needs to be done, recruit people to do the thing, procure equipment/material so those people can actually do the thing, supervise/train those people to do the thing, inspect their work, and remit payment for them?

Means testing is not just "reviewing some paperwork". It can be a quiet laborious effort up to and including enforcement actions. It doesn't just happen once; it has to happen frequently as salaries change. And further, because it's generally based on things like salaries/net worth, it requires background checks and verification that isn't necessarily readily on hand. There's also the need to review the work of the person doing the means testing.

I'll grant that it'd be a smaller portion of the cost for something like a CCC program. However, for other welfare programs such as heating assistance, the means testing can quickly outstrip the cost of just giving the assistance in the first place. Hiring a department of people to make sure someone doesn't get assistance costs money.

> If your argument is just that the government should tax more and use that money to spend on full time government jobs, that's just a generic "tax and spend" argument, not a "small jobs board" or whatever.

Yes, I believe tax and spend is in fact more beneficial to the economy and public good as I've outlined. Absolute government efficiency is not an absolute good.

The small jobs board, though, is something that we could actually do more efficiently in the modern environment. You could track that information far more efficiently then you could in the 1940s. That means you don't really need the full blown work camps of the 40s to get most of the same benefit that CCC provided.
by troupo | 2025-07-22 18:23:35+00:00
His "experiment" is literally filled with tweets like this:

--- start quote ---

Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it

It lied again in our unit tests, claiming they passed

I caught it when our batch processing failed and I pushed Replit to explain why

https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946070323285385688

He knew

https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946072038923530598

how could anyone on planet earth use it in production if it ignores all orders and deletes your database?

https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946076292736221267

Ok so I'm >totally< fried from this...

But it's because destoying a production database just took it out of me.

My bond to Replie is now broken. It won't come back.

https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946241186047676615

--- end quote ---

Does this sound like an educated experiment into the limits of LLMs to you? Or "this magical creature lied to me and I don't know what to do"?

To his credit he did eventually learn some valuable lessons: https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1947336187527471321 see 8/13, 9/13, 10/13
by ahazred8ta | 2025-07-22 18:23:42+00:00
There are several versions of "text steganography" with markov chain word sekection.

http://jthuraisamy.github.io/markovTextStego.js/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20889881

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=text+steganography+markov&ia=web
by DaveZale | 2025-07-22 18:23:54+00:00
This is very insightful, well thought out writing, thank you (this is coming from someone who has scored over 100k essays).

Well, how long did it take for tobacco companies to be held accountable for the harm caused by cigarettes? One answer would be that enough harm on a vast enough scale had to occur first, which could be directly attributable to smoking, and enough evidence that the tobacco companies were knowingly engineering a more addictive product, while knowing the dangers of the product.

And if you look at the UCSF repository on tobacco, you can see this evidence yourself.

Hundreds of years of evidence of damage by the use of tobacco products accumulated before action was taken. But even doctors weren't fully aware of it all until just several decades ago.

I've personally seen a few cases of really delusional behavior related to friends and family over the past year, who had been manipulated by social media to "shit post" by the "like" button validation of frequent posting. In one case the behavior was very extreme. Is AI to blame? Sure, if the algorithms that certain very large companies use to trap users into incessant posting can be called AI.

I sense an element of danger in tech companies that are motivated by profit-first behavioral manipulation. Humans are already falling victim to the greed of tech companies, and I've seen enough already.
Ask HN: How could OpenAPI documentation UIs (Swagger, Redoc, etc.) be improved?
by skeptrune | 2025-07-22 18:23:59+00:00
I'm wondering how OpenAPI documentation UIs (like Swagger, Redoc, etc.) could be improved. Even when you make sure your OpenAPI spec is clean (e.g. run Vacuuum linter, provide full descriptions), the documentation sites still often feel rough or lacking polish, especially compared to general developer docs. Now that we have advanced tooling and AI, I suspect there's room to do much better—maybe smarter interactions, more helpful examples, or even AI-assisted code snippets.

But I'm not sure what the "next step" looks like, especially with AI in the mix and new approaches to codegen/documentation coming out. Curious what concrete improvements others would like to see, or if you've solved these pain points in creative ways yourself.
by Kittensmittens3 | 2025-07-22 18:24:08+00:00
This is noted as a common and serious side effect that many people experience. Unfortunately it's also noted as a symptom of the common diseases these medications treat. It's seemingly a mess of figuring out what parts of suffering are medication related or disease related. This is why this discovery in the article is so fascinating - science doesn't even know what causes this in the first place, thus it's impossible to decipher which is which. We just know it can address some symptoms in some people and in general some feel the tradeoff is better.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-22 18:24:13+00:00
It is not AI generated and unlurker just finds articles with active conversations, it doesn't do any kind of comment automation. Upon reading it again, my comment in question maybe didn't add all that much; I just found the article interesting, so maybe I get where you are coming from.

As I mentioned in another reply, the weirdest thing about this comment chain is I saw this article on the front page, not unlurker (there wasn't much conversation yet when I posted so it would not have shown on the unlurker view I use).

Is "the author" a phrase AI prefers? Maybe I'll need to retire that along with "delve" and the em-dash and "you're absolutely right".
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-22 18:24:46+00:00
You originally mentioned chatGPT, not Nvidia, different story there. Also, for the 37%, sure, if we want to go to the extremes of deeply isolated or subsistence poor communities, or countries run by deeply totalitarian regimes, you'll see plenty of people who know little or nothing about chatGPT, google, etc. I was referring to any normal or even semi-developed context that at last has widespread internet use.

Example: I live in a country that still has a great deal of deep poverty, it's what's called a "developing economy" (sort of an odd phrase since aren't all economies always still developing at all times? but I digress) and even in all but the most deeply poor rural places here, most people frequently use the internet. And I know nobody who doesn't at least know of chatGPT or about how AI can now talk to you like a person would and answer all kinds of questions, let alone not knowing about things like Google and so forth.
by nobody9999 | 2025-07-22 18:25:15+00:00
>I think “logic lord” types are sometimes drawn to contrarian positions because they like the strong emotional reactions that stating those positions induces in other people.

Isn't that a pretty much the definition of an internet troll[0]? I don't disagree, but let's call a spade a spade, okay?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)
by aeonfr | 2025-07-22 18:25:17+00:00
The whole block about performance is just… not correct? Tailwind, and atomic CSS libraries, scale better, not worse! Look at how facebook leverages atomic CSS to reduce CSS by 80% https://devmohit.medium.com/facebook-generating-atomic-css-t...

Even if we consider small codebases, the examples OP shows seem to ignore Zip compression and how it works, which is ironic for someone who is arguing about performance as if it could be measured only in bundle size…
by benreesman | 2025-07-22 18:25:38+00:00
You reconcile a library set for your application. That's happening whether you realize it or not, and whether you want to or not.

The question is, do you want it to happen under your control in an organized way that produces fast, secure, portable artifacts, or do you want it to happen in some random way controlled by other people at some later date that will probably break or be insecure or both.

There's an analogy here to systems like `pip` and systems with solvers in them like `uv`: yeah, sometimes you can call `pip` repeatedly and get something that runs in that directory on that day. And neat, if you only have to run it once, fine.

But if you ship that, you're externalizing the costs to someone else, which is a dick move. `uv` tells you on the spot that there's no solution, and so you have to bump a version bound to get a "works here and everywhere and pretty much forever" guarantee that's respectful of other people.
by rgblambda | 2025-07-22 18:25:47+00:00
I suppose looking at it from the Israeli government's perspective, Ireland is a very safe place for Israelis and Jewish people in general, but the public and government are vocal on Israel's actions and there's no defence/intelligence links between the two countries. Trade links are on the European level.

There'll never be a reason for them to send a skilled diplomat, so may as well send a shit stirrer who's only good for causing controversy.
by lsdmtme | 2025-07-22 18:26:25+00:00
I had been using FireFox for 10+ years, but I find myself more and more using Edge. The Workspaces(0) feature is a killer feature that I have not been able to recreate with any FF extensions. If anyone knows of any it would be much appreciated.

0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspace...
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-22 18:27:15+00:00
The idea that people used to think the Earth was flat is a common misconception. Sometimes medieval painters would draw the Earth that way for artistic purposes, but nobody seriously thought it worked that way for real.

Why not? It's obvious to anyone who watched a ship sail over the horizon that the Earth must be a sphere because you see the body of the ship disappear before its sail mast does.
by zahlman | 2025-07-22 18:27:47+00:00
Strong agree. Pip doesn't really need Requests' functionality as far as I can tell, but the vendored transitive dependencies represent a considerable fraction (something like a quarter IIRC) of Pip's bulk. And a big fraction of that bulk (and it's much the same for Rich) at startup, even if ultimately it turns out that no web requests need to be made. Which in turn is the main reason why Pip on my machine takes longer than the https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/ to process `pip install` with no actual package specified. (A process that involves importing more than five hundred Python modules, of which almost a hundred are Requests and its dependencies.)

(Of the non-Requests imports, about two thirds of them occur before Pip even considers what's on the command line — which means that they will be repeated when you use the `--python` option. Of course, Requests isn't to blame for that, but it drives home the point about keeping dependencies under control.)
by hadlock | 2025-07-22 18:28:19+00:00
It's similar to logging INFO vs WARN.

//this is an info level comment

//TODO: change the downstream code so it's less brittle after we get to prod(WARN)

//TODO: don't hard code this variable, had to get prod up and running due to leap year

In my experience TODO are most commonly placed by either the guy doing a greenfield project, the code maintainer, or the guy getting production out of the ditch at 2am on a Saturday. I don't think I've ever seen a junior dev write one. My code has a few TODO sprinkled in but they're fairly rare, and call out where I had to make a decision due to constraints, and inform which direction I intended to take.
by LoganDark | 2025-07-22 18:28:22+00:00
> It is not possible, by definition

I use schizophrenia to refer to the experience, not to the diagnosis. I'm not sure what to call the experience of schizophrenia other than schizophrenia, given it's not synonymous with psychosis. (Though, granted, I would also want to try psychosis someday; even if it's a terrible experience and I never want to do it again, I want to truly know what it's like. Hopefully without permanent brain damage though. That stipulation heavily limits my options.)
by xp84 | 2025-07-22 18:28:49+00:00
Here's the part that makes me confused/angry: this is a flat style icon with maybe 4 or 8 colors displayed on a static flat green background. I could have built this 25 years ago with a single GIF with about 6 frames, that was a couple of kilobytes and would be performant on the (relative) potato computers we had then. With CSS you can easily make that GIF a background image and position it correctly in the <button> or whatever. Do it at 2x and scale it for retina sharpness.

But modern "web designers" feel the need to spend how long carefully crafting that CSS animation which adds dozens of lines of code to the codebase and burns a ton of CPU...why? Just because you can, I assume? The same reason the same people use embedded <svg> documents inside the HTML for simple icons like "edit pencil" or "close", wasting bandwidth instead of at least putting them into asset files that can be cached.

Frontend web "advancements" of the last 10-15 years, at least the way they are used, are mostly cancer in my opinion. I will allow for the usefulness of display: flex, and that's about it.
by wahern | 2025-07-22 18:29:21+00:00
> and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.

The church is and was a large, often heterogenous institution. For some the issue was about conflict with literal interpretations of the bible, not merely the predominate allegorical interpretations (a more widely held concern, at least as a pedagogic matter). AFAIU, while the pope wasn't of this mind, some of the clerics tapped to investigate were. See, e.g., the 1616 Consultant's Report,

> All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology.

https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/in...