MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by __d | 2025-07-30 22:44:32+00:00
The problem was mostly that storage was expensive.

It’s difficult to understand in an era of cheap terabyte SSDs, but in the 1960s and 1970s, DASD (what IBM mainframes called hard drives) was relatively tiny and very expensive.

And so programmers did the best they could (in COBOL) to minimize the amount of data stored. Especially for things that there were lots of, like say, bank transactions. Two bytes here and two bytes there and soon enough you’re saving millions of dollars in hardware costs.

Twenty years later, and that general ledger system that underlies your entire bank’s operations just chugging along solidly 24/7/365 needs a complete audit and rewrite because those saved bytes are going to break everything in ten years.

But it was probably still cheaper than paying for the extra DASD in the first place.
by cptskippy | 2025-07-30 22:45:03+00:00
In the last 30 years the frequency of layoffs from major tech firms has been accelerating. Starting back in 1997 with Apple, through the dot-com bubble, recession, real-estate crisis, pandemic, and post-pandemic the justifications have varied from boom-bust cycles, post acquisition restructurings, to not meeting market expectations. These layoffs have been intermixed with major hiring booms, the most recent around AI.

Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall.

I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
by genewitch | 2025-07-30 22:45:10+00:00
We're seeking angel investors for our startup that does this, we train models with "assembly" that does specific things and also complete "programs"; the end goal to prompt and it outputs executables. It's farther along than quantum computing at solving real problems, for instance, it can factor "15".

this is like the third time i've mentioned this on HN (over a year.) Apparently everyone else is too busy complaining or defending Claude Code to notice.
by scubadude | 2025-07-30 22:46:34+00:00
It is absolutely not supported by the Greens [1].

"The Greens have also called for:

A ban on the targeting, harvesting and selling of young people's data A Digital Duty of Care on tech platforms EU-style guardrails to limit the toxicity of algorithms and extreme content The ability for users to turn down and opt-out of unwanted content The full release of the Online Safety Act review. Investment in education for young people and their families to help develop digital literacy and online safety skills, and equip them with the tools and resources they need for positive and responsible online use.

" [2]

[1] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/greens-condemn-pass...

[2] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/blunt-social-media-...
by al_borland | 2025-07-30 22:46:51+00:00
I actually remember telling my dad in the late 80s or early 90s that I thought I had ADD after I first heard about it. He simply said, “no son of mine has ADD,” without even breaking stride. That was that. I was never a problem in school, so no one had any reason to question it and I moved on.

Funny enough, when I told my dad about the diagnosis, within 90 seconds he said, “I think I might have that too.” Then he went off and did a bunch of research. He doesn’t feel it’s worth getting a diagnosis in his 70s, but is pretty sure he has it as well after the research. Funny how life works out. This actually helped me forgive some of the harder parts of my childhood, as I could better understand where he was coming from.
by tcwd | 2025-07-30 22:47:05+00:00
Thanks! Quite a few factors, here's a detailed post on the architecture: https://blog.withmeka.com/introducing-meka-an-open-source-fr...

IMO, the combination of having an "evaluator model" at the end to verify if the intent of the task was complete, and using multiple models that look over each other's work in every step was helpful - lots of human organization analogies there, like "trust but verify" and pair programming. Memory management was also very key.
by BurningFrog | 2025-07-30 22:47:32+00:00
Forgive me for being off topic, but I must say how astonished and happy I am that Soundgarden's nonsense song title from 1994 now is a real science concept:

https://youtu.be/3mbBbFH9fAg?si=cnB-WVsE9OLuF-GK
by CommenterPerson | 2025-07-30 22:47:51+00:00
We have a wooded area in the back, with small shallow pools of water that appear and disappear depending on rainfall. I tried mosquito dunks for a few years and gave up. Felt it needed too many to cover the area.

I will try again with buckets. The HW store actually has green buckets so it won't even look like a dump! Thanks for the posting!
by tptacek | 2025-07-30 22:47:59+00:00
Iraqi, Moroccan, Yemeni, Tunisian, Algerian, and Syrian Jewish citizens of Israel cannot in fact "simply pull their 2nd or 3rd passports and go back to where they came from", and this notion that every Israeli has a "3rd passport" (or, for that matter, a 2nd) is itself an ethnic slur.
by 9rx | 2025-07-30 22:48:31+00:00
> Anyone with 80 acres is buying used tractors.

You'd think, but you'd be surprised. In fact, one of the families I rent land from (aging couple who was looking to work less land) is still working around 50 of their acres themselves and they got a couple of new tractors recently.

> They are likely hiring someone else with a combine to harvest their fields

They even combine the crop themselves. But, to be fair, the combine is pretty old (IH 1420).
by abustamam | 2025-07-30 22:49:11+00:00
That's true, but I still consider 3-6mos emergency fund to be a basic necessity, since living in the startup world you never know when you may need to use it.

A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It was super early stage so that level of commitment was understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But that's the name of the game, right? When you're early stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up being more expensive in the long run.
by wahern | 2025-07-30 22:49:26+00:00
The quoted text is from the C standard. The poplar wisdom is that anything goes wrt bit-fields, but it's an exaggeration.

The original (?) DNS library used bit-fields to read and write the packet header status and flags fields, and that original code is still used today: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/include/arpa/name... It does rely on implementation-defined behavior--it swaps the order of fields based on whether the machine is little-, big-, or middle-endian--but even that behavior has remained remarkably consistent, at least on Unix ABIs.

I think the wisdom comes from dealing with niche compilers, especially from years ago, where bit-fields were one of the areas where standard adherence was less consistent; and in embedded and kernel contexts, where the implementation-defined and (implicit) undefined behavior, such as wrt atomicity or the intersection of bit-fields and (extension) packed pragmas, counseled against any usage of bit-fields.
by worldsayshi | 2025-07-30 22:50:00+00:00
I agree and we should be sceptical in ways we really aren't right now. But I also think that it is interesting to figure out when "vibe-like" coding works and how it can be made more useful.

It doesn't, as you say, work for large and complex contexts. But it can work really well for automating parts of your work flow that you otherwise wouldn't have bothered to automate. And I wonder if there are more ways where it can be useful where the context can be narrowed down enough.
by namibj | 2025-07-30 22:50:27+00:00
Freeway capacity chokes at the limit giving rise to basically overpacked lanes slumping from metastability; systemic control with ramp meters or I66 (within the Washington D.C. Metro area) style real-time dynamic pricing lets freeways flow properly around peak capacity if properly implemented.

There are roads that regularly suffer from acutely insufficient capacity in many metro areas; specifically, repeatedly at times _the dynamic pricing toll that would discourage enough people from using it to stay uncongested_ would overshadow the price of a rental-with-driver (Uber-style) during off-peak times. It's not that the people shouldn't get through; it's that most people won't need more than a backpack worth of luggage with them and could thus be packed 3~4 passengers for each driver. Splitting the toll would be the reason to do so.

Unfortunately only really dynamic congestion tolls would really fix the concept of rush hour traffic jams. And the necessary surveillance system would bring severe mass surveillance/tracking concerns with it at least in central Europe.
by tcwd | 2025-07-30 22:51:13+00:00
We explored using a containerized VM that exposed agentic controls in the open source version, but generally found that the cloud-based solutions were much faster to get started and easier to work with. Our repo contains adapters that work with several of the most popular cloud-hosted VM-as-a-service infra providers.

Definitely would be happy to be wrong and missed something here!
by kfajdsl | 2025-07-30 22:51:32+00:00
You mentioned grep-mode, which to my knowledge is just bringing up a buffer with all the matches for a regex and easily jumping to each point (I use rg.el myself). For the record, this is basically the same thing as VSCode's search tool.

Now, once you have that, to actually make edits, you have to record a macro to apply at each point or just manually do the edit yourself, no? I don't pretend LLMs are perfect, but I certainly think using one is a much better experience for this kind of refactoring than those two options.
by psanchez | 2025-07-30 22:51:57+00:00
Fast is a distinctive feature.

For what is worth I built myself a custom jira board last month, so I could instantly search, filter and group tickets (by title, status, assignee, version, ...)

Motivation: Running queries and finding tickets on JIRA kills me sometimes.

The board is not perfect, but works fast and I made it superlightweight. In case anybody wants to give it a try:

https://jetboard.pausanchez.com/

Don't dare to try on mobile, use desktop. Unfortunately it uses a proxy and requires an API key, but doesn't store anything in backend (just proxies the request because of CORS). Maybe there is an API or a way to query jira cloud instance directly from browser, I just tried first approach and moved on. It even crossed my mind to add it somehow to Jira marketplace...

Anyway, caches stuff locally and refreshes often. Filtering uses several tricks to feel instant.

UI can be improved, but uses a minimalistic interface on purpose, like HN.

If anybody tries it, I'll be glad to hear your thoughts.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-30 22:52:22+00:00
Slop in, Slop out...

In general, a good code base teaches future developers how to leverage a pragmatic solution in the context of the use-case. Often, "vibe" code relies on superfluous computational heuristics overhead to compensate for people that had zero notion of what they were doing in the first place.

To summarize, no one competent is fooled by low-value content farmed blogs, or the folks that rely on LLM. The age of Spam exceeding content is upon us. =3
by t0lo | 2025-07-30 22:52:30+00:00
Adding some context which is sorely missing:

Our government intends to spruik this at the UN and get other countries on board.

Our government has said there will always be a non id method

Youtube will still be accessible it is just the account making/usership which will be banned

Posting my threaded comment higher up:

I'm an australian who completed the esafety survey which helped guide this policy. I pushed for anonymous temporary age verification tokens generated through a government app.

Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies and destroying a whole generations emotional development and institutionalising a culture of infectious insecurity. I support this- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.

Watch the press conference from our PM and comms minister from yesterday to make up your mind on if this is coming from a place of compassion or control. They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured. I know there are flaws in that though. https://youtu.be/SCSMQUmrh38?feature=shared

It's interesting to see that the press conference felt so uniquely grounded in reality and authentically emotional- maybe that's because they are directly challenging the delegitimising impermanent reality of social media-

Yes they did bring families with children who had passed from social media abuse on stage but it felt genuine. Doesn't mean your privacy concerns aren't real but they don't always trump protecting a childs emotional development.
by ryandv | 2025-07-30 22:53:22+00:00
> It's about feeling.

This is equally unscientific.

> If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.

May as well, given the catastrophe that is the replication crisis [2]. Besides, psychology has grown divorced from its roots, which are found in religion as a proto-psychology of mind (which is the modern term for what would have classically been known as "the soul"). You can further investigate the correspondences between religion, mysticism, and psychology in Jung's "Psychology and Alchemy."

> Gender identity has always existed.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far there is no evidentiary basis for the "gender identity" in the body; some would even say that there cannot be a biological basis of gender, for this "holds the societal acceptance of transgenderism hostage to a biological account of sex-gender." [0]

Absent any biological or physical evidence I can only surmise that "gender identities" either do not exist, or are metaphysical; and to the scientifically-minded, these two statements are functionally equivalent.

In fact, I could even just as easily say "souls have always existed."

The paper [0] even continues on to state, essentially, that gender is an "intersubjectival" reality, which, ironically, is defined in an Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion:

Rejecting the notion that knowledge is purely empirical and cumulative, Gergen has argued that “truth” is always value laden and, therefore (drawing from critical theory), “reality” is not immutable, but always is understood via interpre- tation [3].

A rejection of empiricism is tantamount to a rejection of science, which is based on the former; so perhaps it's not surprising after all that the philosophical basis for gender is actually a psychological/religious concept.

> as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected.

Much of the LGBTQ+, almost by definition, cannot reproduce biologically and thus cannot have kids. Would you also claim that LGBTQ+'s survival probability, as a neo-religion complete with rebranded souls, is also affected? How does such an ideology reproduce, if not through indoctrination of children?

> But DEI is not affirmative action

At a layman's first glance this would appear to be the case from the SCOTUS syllabus:

More broadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that discrimination on the basis of race—often packaged as “af- firmative action” or “equity” programs—are based on the benighted notion “that it is possible to tell when discrimi- nation helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities.” Fisher I, 570 U. S., at 328 (THOMAS, J., concurring). [1]

[0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

[3] https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/referenceworken...
by anon84873628 | 2025-07-30 22:53:23+00:00
It doesn't have to be antisemitism, but just a regular double standard.

Israel is modern invention by educated people who themselves have a long history of displacement and oppression. The bottom line is people expect them to "do better" compared to Syria, Myanmar, or China for that matter.

In that sense you could say it's actually racism towards all those other countries because the world just expects them to be violent, genocidal, and uncivilized anyway.
by matt_cogito | 2025-07-30 22:54:23+00:00
All production code will be written by AI. The question is not if. It is WHEN.

What we are seeing right in front of our eyes is how the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of software programming has gone from AI/LLMs poorly writing simple scripts, to being able to "zero-shoot" and "vibe code" a complex system, with a set of instructions written in natural language.

What we might be seeing in 2025 is how programming, the way it has been for the last decades, be disappearing and becoming a rare artisanal craft, not meant for being productive, but for showing off skill, for intellectual entertainment of the programmer.

I know how hard this hits the real coders. I am one, too. But I cannot unsee, what I have seen. The progress is so undeniable, there is no doubt left in me.
by XorNot | 2025-07-30 22:54:31+00:00
It's going to be every website. There will be no place they will stop. You think a forum like this one where it's conceivably possible someone in a bad category could interact with someone under the age of 16, however unlikely, won't be regulated?

"But sir! The largest websites on the internet implement Government ID Age Check. Just federate with one of those, why are you complaining so much? Don't you want to protect the children or stop anti-Semitism or something?"
by quesera | 2025-07-30 22:54:45+00:00
I agree that there's no need, and that yours is the reasonable approach.

That said, I often have project/product ideas at times when I cannot work on them. In fact, always. But I enjoy noodling on names and branding, and if I come up with a really good name that's available in .com, I register it.

I have revived project ideas 15-20 years later, and have been happy to have a great domain for it which would absolutely not have been available "now".

Of course I have many more domains that are patiently awaiting their prioritization.

The registration fees add up (and I do feel bad about reserving them for myself, although I've given a few away to persuasive requesters, and I've sold a few which, in aggregate, more than cover all of the registration fees).
by deergomoo | 2025-07-30 22:54:47+00:00
One of these days I’m going to get around to writing a little bash script or something that will let me take a plain-ish text file and upload it into Jira via the API.

I should be able to create a Jira ticket in however long it takes me to type the acceptance criteria plus a second or two. Instead I’ve got slow loading pages, I’ve got spinners, I’ve got dropdowns populating asynchronously that steal focus from what I’m typing, I’ve got whatever I was typing then triggering god knows what shortcuts causing untold chaos.

For a system that is—at least how we use it at my job—a glorified todo list, it is infuriating. If I’m even remotely busy lately I just add “raise a ticket for x” to my actual todo list and do it some other time instead.
by r14c | 2025-07-30 22:55:03+00:00
i'm not saying that there are no biological differences between different groups of people. you're missing the key point here: race doesn't classify people into genetic groups, it classifies people based on phenotypes that appear in genetically distinct groups. you're also conflating race with heritable traits in general.

that's what I'm trying to point out with this example: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-onc...
by bluGill | 2025-07-30 22:55:19+00:00
You start with a few acres - general poor land that can only grow livestock. You raise a few cows/hogs/... per year on the land but you go to work in the nearest town doing something else full time to live. In 5 years you have a reputation with the bank and some of the land paid down so you can buy another lot when it goes on sale thus expanding the farm - but you are still working full time somewhere else to get money. After 20 years of this eventually you build up enough that you can support yourself farming - much of the land is bought at yesterdays prices - but it will be many more years before you can make more than if you stayed working.

Or you marry someone who will inherit land - this is often the best way in.
by zahlman | 2025-07-30 22:55:22+00:00
Maybe they're just using "experiment" as some kind of data-scientist jargon that I don't understand, but this reads to me like just a way to package Python code, and from the description I don't understand why or when I would prefer this to making an sdist or wheel with standard tools.

Edit: I guess the idea is that this is automatically discovering non-Python system dependencies and attempting to include them as well? Either way, the developers should probably get in touch with the people behind https://pypackaging-native.github.io/ which has been trying to identify and solve problems with using the standard Python ecosystem tools in the "PyData ecosystem". (This effort has led to proposals such as https://peps.python.org/pep-0725/.)
by bashkiddie | 2025-07-30 22:55:45+00:00
Munich is a counter example: It has many lines passing through (almost) 11 stations. They run at maximum speed of 40 trains per hour. It is a traditional block signal system with each block being shorter than a train - so they can run trains packed into tighter space. Each train opens left and right doors simultaneously so people can board and exit at the same time. Boarding still takes time. It is overcrowded at rushhour and brakes down regularily (a train being at a station for too long blocks all proceeding trains). And at Oktoberfest time, the stations are soo crowded that boarding takes longer.

Munich is planning on building a second subway route. It just does not have the money nor the space to build one. There has been discussion on building a second tunnel below the first, or on enabling the common train system for overflow by suburban trains -- by installing more signals to run more tightly packed.