MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonplackett | 2025-07-23 06:40:10+00:00
It’s not hard to estimate. The car is a sunk cost from 8 years ago.

I drive about 1000 miles a year. That’s about 250kg of co2 a year.

A new car uses something like 20 tonnes of co2 to make it.

So that’s 80 years of driving for me.

Obviously if I BUY a new car, it’ll be electric (but hopefully someone will have made a dumb electric car by then)
by arrowsmith | 2025-07-23 06:40:22+00:00
Ehhhh, a year ago I'd have agreed with you — LLMs were noticeably worse with Elixir than with bigger langs.

But I'm not noticing that anymore, at least with Elixir. The gap has closed; Claude 4 and Gemini 2.5 both write it excellently.

Otoh, if you wanted to create an entirely new programming language in 2025, you might be shit outta luck.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-23 06:40:26+00:00
You said it was limited to web projects, I said I had used it in non-web projects and it wasn’t limited to web projects, and you said “it definitely is”. How else am I meant to interpret that? You are directly saying that what I have personally experienced isn’t possible.

> The article is, again, NOT about TBD and the writer, most likely an overpriced consultant, is very confused about branching strategies, and most likely believe that a daily standup or some pair programming is part of that strategy.

This does not resemble the article we are commenting on.
by IanCal | 2025-07-23 06:40:26+00:00
> The idea that you can apply lower-quality engineering practices in some systems is totally wrong, I think.

But we obviously do this - practices are significantly different between beta release webapps and software on rivers we send to Mars. And that’s a good thing, the tradeoffs are wildly different.

> Isn't this just another representation of the fallacy that it's possible to deliver faster by cutting quality?

Do you think there’s anything that would increase quality on a project that you are on but also slow it down?

It’s not always true - more haste less speed - but it’s not always false either.
by overfl0w | 2025-07-23 06:40:27+00:00
It's unbelievable that the average human being has access to the lectures of some of the best universities in the world for free. 31 hours of in-depth mathematics by some of the best people in their field.

Although I have always been struggling with keeping up with long lecture playlists. I always try to find shorter videos which explain the concept faster (although probably lacking depth). And end up ditching it halfway as well. Perhaps the real motivation to keep up with the material comes from actually enrolling the university? Has anyone completed such type of lectures by themselves? How do you stay consistent and disciplined?

I find courses in some platforms (coursera/khanacademy) a bit more motivating because they kind of push me with deadlines. I guess I am used to deadline-oriented studying.

If anyone else is struggling with attention span and is looking for shorter lectures (although they may not have the same depth): https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorDaveExplains/playlists
by physicsguy | 2025-07-23 06:40:39+00:00
I've noticed this at work where I use Python frameworks like Flask/FastAPI/Django and Go, which has the standard library handlers but within that people are much less likely to follow specific patterns and where there are various composable bits as add ons.

If you ask an LLM to generate a Go handler for a REST endpoint, it often does something a bit out of step with the rest of the code base. If I do it in Python, it's more idiomatic.
by seec | 2025-07-23 06:41:02+00:00
Yep, in France we have a separate "subscription" fee that you have to pay no matter what, even if consumption is zero. It even has power levels and flexibility options that change the subscription prices, but also the electricity prices depending on the time of the day.

It makes perfect sense and I don't see why/how it should be different. Asking to pay just for electricity generation is crazy because it is the "easier" step, creating, maintaining and equilibrating the network is by far the more complicated endeavor.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-23 06:42:44+00:00
Law of question marks on headlines holds here: no / never seems to be the answer.

Article l also discussed ref types, which do exist and do provide... Something. Some ability to at least refer to host objects. It's not clear what that enables or what it's limitstions are.

Definitely some feeling of being rug-pulled in the shift here. It felt like there was a plan for good integration, but fast forward half a decade+ and there's been so so much progress and integration but it's still so unclear how WebAssembly is going to alloy the web, seems like we have reams of generated glue code doing so much work to bridge systems.

Very happy that Dan at least checked in here, with a state of the wasm for web people type post. It's been years of waiting and wondering, and I've been keeping my own tabs somewhat through twists and turns but having some historical artifact, some point in time recap to go look at like this: it's really crucial for the health of a community to have some check-ins with the world, to let people know what to expect. Particularly for the web, wasm has really needed an update State of the Web WebAssmebly.

I wish I felt a little better though! Jco is amazing but running a js engine in wasm to be able to use wasm-components is gnarly as hell. Maybe by 2030 wasm & wasm-components will be doing well enough that browsers will finally rejoin the party & start implementing new.
by neobrain | 2025-07-23 06:42:44+00:00
Also worth noting it's automatically disabled if telemetry ("Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla") is disabled.

Though even without disabling it, PPA is currently in limited rollout and only visible to Mozilla websites in the first place, so it would hardly cause any harm for now.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
by jonplackett | 2025-07-23 06:43:01+00:00
I think we are comparing different things here - I am talking about KEEPING a petrol car vs BUYING an electric car.

The stats from that article are about buying vs buying.

The cost of making a car are huge - something like 20 tonnes of c02. Vs my running cost of about 250kg per year.

If I BUY a new car it will of course be electric. But hopefully dumb. And definitely not a Volvo.
Open Source Aggregator API for Accounting Software – Feedback Wanted
by mathan_karthik | 2025-07-23 06:43:14+00:00
I’m planning to build an open source Python package that acts as an aggregator API for major accounting software (like QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, FreshBooks, etc). The goal is to provide a unified interface to create and update invoices, bills, customers, vendors, and credit notes across different platforms.

The idea is to simplify integrations for developers who need to work with multiple accounting systems, handling authentication, data mapping, and API differences under the hood.

Would this be helpful to you? Any suggestions, feature requests, or reasons why this might not be useful? Should I go ahead and build it, or is there something similar out there already?

All feedback appreciated!
by Tade0 | 2025-07-23 06:43:24+00:00
The further away you are from VC money, the more "boring" technologies like Java make sense.

Whole careers have been built on producing CRUD web applications with Java on the backend and Angular on the frontend.

It's not exciting, but so is life without income in countries where this line of work is something to aspire to. I should know, as I live in such a country.
by carlmr | 2025-07-23 06:43:27+00:00
>It cannot reason about the abstract moving parts in a way the human brain can.

Just found 3 race conditions in 100 lines of code. From the UTF-8 emojis in the comments I'm really certain it was AI generated. The "locking" was just abandoning the work if another thread had started something, the "locking" mechanism also had toctou issues, the "locking" also didn't actually lock concurrent access to the resource that actually needed it.
by mikepurvis | 2025-07-23 06:43:55+00:00
I miss that too. There’s so many little micro-improvements that are possible when you’re reading code— clarifying a variable name, expanding a comment, adding a test case, and it’s unfortunate when those things are lost under the inertia of it being a pain in the butt to create PRs and get them reviewed.

At the same time, I expect your PM is delighted that you’re not wasting time getting distracted with all that yak shaving nonsense and are instead working on the next burndown ticket that has been assigned a t-shirt size and the appropriate number of story points.
by tinylm | 2025-07-23 06:44:31+00:00
Video Operations 1. Format Conversion: Convert videos between formats (MP4, AVI, MKV, MOV, etc.)

- Video Trimming: Extract precise portions from videos

- Video Merging: Combine multiple video files into one

- Video Resizing: Change video dimensions to suit different platforms

- Subtitle Addition: Embed subtitles directly into videos

- Frame Extraction: Export frames as images

- Image to Video: Generate videos from a sequence of images

- Video Filters: Apply filters like blur, sharpen, rotate, and basic color adjustments

- Thumbnail Generation: Automatically generate video thumbnails

2. Audio Operations - Audio Extraction: Extract audio from video files

- Format Conversion: Convert audio between formats (MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, OGG)

- Audio Trimming: Trim audio files with precision

- Volume Normalization: Adjust audio levels for consistent output

3. Analysis Tools - Media Information: Extract metadata about media files (resolution, codecs, bitrate, etc.)
by worthless-trash | 2025-07-23 06:45:17+00:00
When I read this as an Australian tax payer, it frustrates me, I feel like my tax money is directed into paying peoples wages doing pointless jobs. Going into supporting systems and paying for things like NDIS which are frequently fraudulent.

How much of these positions and payments are needed I can't say. There has been times in the past where I was unable to get any assistance when I needed it badly, only to be hit with additional tax payments to pay when I had no money to give.

I am working my proverbial arse off, living frugally, not getting into trouble in a private sector role to get ahead, paying huge tax like a chump, getting zero financial assistance. Its days like this when I feel like I too should just scheme the system and not work, it sure would be less stressful and less work.

Maybe this article was designed to incite these exact feelings, if they did, well mission accomplished.
by kragen | 2025-07-23 06:45:38+00:00
I see that there's a [dead] reply by the kind of person who thinks "tryhard" is an insult and has applied it to me.

When I compare people I know about who tried hard to the people I know about who didn't try hard, literally every single person I would want to be like is one of the people who tried hard. I'm unable to imagine what it would be like to want to be like the other group.

I mean, I don't want to be like Michael Jordan, but I can imagine wanting to be like him, and in part this is because specifically what he's famous for is succeeding at something very difficult that he had to try unbelievably hard at.

So I'm delighted to declare myself a tryhard, or at least an aspiring tryhard.

Completely by coincidence, when I saw the tryhard comment, I happened to be reading https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/things-unlearned/:

> People don't really say this [that intelligence trumps expertise] explicitly, but it's conveyed by all the folk tales of the young college dropout prodigies revolutionizing everything they touch. They have some magic juice that makes them good at everything.

> If I think that's how the world works, then it's easy to completely fail to learn. Whatever the mainstream is doing is ancient history, whatever they're working on I could do it in a weekend, and there's no point listening to anyone with more than 3 years experience because they're out of touch and lost in the past.

> Similarly for programmers who go into other fields expecting to revolutionize everything with the application of software, without needing to spend any time learning about the actual problem or listening to the needs of the people who have been pushing the boulder up the hill for the last half century.

> This error dovetails neatly with many of the previous errors above eg [sic] no point learning how existing query planners work if I'm smart enough to arrive at a better answer from a standing start, no point learning to use a debugger if I'm smart enough to find the bug in my head.

> But a decade of mistakes later I find that I arrived at more or the less the point that I could have started at if I was willing to believe that the accumulated wisdom of tens of thousands of programmers over half a century was worth paying attention to.

> And the older I get, the more I notice that the people who actually make progress are the ones who are keenly aware of the bounds of their own knowledge, are intensely curious about the gaps and are willing to learn from others and from the past. One exemplar of this is Julia Evans, whose blog archives are a clear demonstration of how curiosity and lack of ego is a fast path to expertise.
by uludag | 2025-07-23 06:45:58+00:00
I'm on my seventh year of using org-mode for my task management. My system has slowly evolved over time but I'm pretty much still using the same single text file to manage everything. My main getting-things-done org-mode file is now at 6k lines long.

Before org-mode, I was always downloading different software to manage tasks and notes. The tool churn was very degrading to my productivity but I feel that commercial interests would keep turning the churn machine: new UI changes, enshitification, monthly subscriptions, etc.

It's such a refreshing feeling, sitting back, and feeling assured that for the next presumably 25 years of my career, and perhaps for the rest of my life, I can still be using org-mode, and it will always work as I learned it, but it's flexible enough to easily implement extensions.
by mikepurvis | 2025-07-23 06:46:50+00:00
GitLab is pretty decent; I like the reviewing a bit better than GitHub, for example how non-code comments still form threaded discussions, or how you can set it to block merge until all discussions are marked “resolved”.

Yes GitLab has a lot to it, but much of it is optional; you won’t be hurting if you just stick to the code repo part.
by antonvs | 2025-07-23 06:48:01+00:00
These days you'd typically use Spring Boot, which is a layer over Spring that simplifies its use significantly. As others have pointed out, none of this is JavaEE.

Frameworks like Spring are absolutely essential for many kinds of business software. Sure, there are slightly more focused alternatives like Micronaut (and Quarkus for that matter), but they tend to have more specific use cases.

In practice, teams that try to write real-world business systems without such frameworks end up with a spaghettified mess that just illustrates a variation of Greenspun's 10th rule: Any sufficiently complicated Java program without a framework contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of one-tenth of Spring.
by aoeusnth1 | 2025-07-23 06:48:08+00:00
I don’t understand why PRs are being discussed here at all – doesn’t anyone serious use trunk based development with code reviews? How is that different from a PR? Seems like we need to disentangle the discussion of whether code review is good from whether feature branches vs trunk based dev are good. Those are completely unrelated questions to me.

I think there are a lot of interesting questions about using feature flags (a baby branch) vs actual branches. Personally I’m pro flags and anti branches, after a lot of experience in developer tools and CI.
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-23 06:48:13+00:00
The stuff about the titular individual is amusing, but I'm more interested in some of the underlying issues this article touches on. I typically go to a handful of classical concerts in a year, and have been doing so (with occasional gaps) since college. As time passes my own age has approached the average age of the audiences, although I'm still probably a solid 20 years behind.

But I always wonder how this can be. When I was 20 I went to classical concerts where most of the audience seemed to be over 60. Now I'm going to concerts where the audience is still over 60. That means they were in their 40s twenty years ago. So where were they in the audiences I was in back then? It's as if classical music is a developmental stage or ailment, like menopause or arthritis, that consistently hits most people around the same age.

When I think about it, I sometimes feel a sense of dread for the future, because if old people don't keep liking classical music, attending concerts, and donating to orchestras and similar groups, there's the possibility that the whole remarkable apparatus that supports this art will wither away.
by PicassoCTs | 2025-07-23 06:49:11+00:00
Any MBA in the comments- those issue growths will make me look bad in front of my superior- we should delete all those issues once a year.

Thus introducing the ToDODOs - which is a attempt to hold memory of important tasks facing extinction through cooperate dementia, which those who hold idealistic views of the stakeholders while engineering processes have no living memory of due to job hoping.
by jrflowers | 2025-07-23 06:50:11+00:00
They just suggested a different bike shed — one for the purpose of their argument won’t ever get fixed. J-pb’s point is that running a bunch of generators 24/7 in Memphis is fine because people eat meat. Inefficient LLMs in the real world are okay because people could theoretically become vegan but have not. It’s just a thought experiment

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators
by rapjr9 | 2025-07-23 06:50:24+00:00
The CIA triad comes from an agency that spies on people so I wonder if it truly is a comprehensive philosophy of security. It might be an attempt to confuse those they spy on with the intent to encourage security gaps. Philosophies of any kind are notorious for not being comprehensive or provable. Is there any research that tries to verify this philosophy? I worked on computer security for a few decades and I've never seen a justification for the CIA triad. The security community used to say that advanced persistent threats were "out of scope" because "the cost to defend against them was too high", but today they obviously are not out of scope because APT's are everywhere. Possibly the triad is a false legacy assumption as well. It seemed cool because it came from the CIA, but is it true? Even if it is reasonably true, is it complete?

As an example, diplomacy, open source, shared interests, universal basic income, and education can reduce the desire for attacking. How do these factor into the CIA triad?
by mortos | 2025-07-23 06:50:34+00:00
Depending on your technical abilities, you can set up Frigate or maybe Scripted. Or possibly even just the Home Assistant integration. All of these would be self hosted options, accessible only by LAN if that's how you want it.

The Reolink doorbell camera is a typical recommendation and can work fully locally and supports well the common standards like RTSP. 2 way audio works as well.

I believe the NVR Reolink sells can also work fully locally as well. Which also can integrate to home assistant.
by kassner | 2025-07-23 06:50:48+00:00
I think I’ll never buy an electric car. They all have way too much more software than needed, most depend on touchscreens to access basic functionality, and I simply do not want that.

I have a 2010s VW, and I think it has the right amount of software. The screen has CarPlay, radio and some configurations, but 100% of the driving can be done without using it. Things like wipers, AC, cruise control, everything is manual. Yet the car even has the latest safety stuff like lane assist and BLIS.

Is there an EV out there with the same level of software? Can we essentially buy a 2019 Golf with the fuel tank gauge exchanged for a battery level indicator?
Run Half-Life Using HTML (and Counter-Strike 1.6)
by yohimik | 2025-07-23 06:50:49+00:00
No clickbait, just pure HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WASM

Simply copy and paste this HTML code and run Half-Life

https://www.npmjs.com/package/xash3d-fwgs

https://www.npmjs.com/package/cs16-client

https://www.npmjs.com/package/hlsdk-portable

https://github.com/yohimik/webxash3d-fwgs

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Loading</title> <style> canvas { width: 100vw; height: 100vh; top: 0; left: 0; position: fixed; }

body { margin: 0; } </style> <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/xash3d-fwgs@latest/dist/raw.js"></script>

</head> <body> <canvas id="canvas"></canvas> <script type="module"> import JSZip from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/jszip@3.10.1';

async function main() { const files = {} const res = await fetch('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/x8BitRain/webXash/main/public/hl/hldm.zip') const zip = await JSZip.loadAsync(await res.arrayBuffer()); await Promise.all(Object.keys(zip.files).map(async p => { const file = zip.files[p] if (file.dir) return; const path = `/rodir/${p}`; files[path] = await file.async("uint8array") })) Xash3D({ arguments: ['-windowed'], canvas: document.getElementById('canvas'), ctx: document.getElementById('canvas') .getContext('webgl2', { alpha: false, depth: true, stencil: true, antialias: true }), dynamicLibraries: [ "filesystem_stdio.wasm", "libref_gles3compat.wasm", "cl_dlls/menu_emscripten_wasm32.wasm", "dlls/hl_emscripten_wasm32.so", "cl_dlls/client_emscripten_wasm32.wasm", ], onRuntimeInitialized: function () { Object.keys(files) .forEach(k => { const dir = k.split('/') .slice(0, -1) .join('/'); this.FS.mkdirTree(dir); this.FS.writeFile(k, files[k]); }) this.FS.chdir('/rodir') }, locateFile: (p) => { switch (p) { case 'xash.wasm': return 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/xash3d-fwgs@latest/dist/xash.wasm' case 'filesystem_stdio.wasm': return 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/xash3d-fwgs@latest/dist/filesystem_stdio.wasm' case 'libref_gles3compat.wasm': return 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/xash3d-fwgs@latest/dist/libref_gles3compat.wasm' case 'cl_dlls/menu_emscripten_wasm32.wasm': return 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/xash3d-fwgs@latest/dist/cl_dll/menu_emscripten_wasm32.wasm' case 'dlls/hl_emscripten_wasm32.so': return 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hlsdk-portable@latest/dist/dlls/hl_emscripten_wasm32.so' case 'cl_dlls/client_emscripten_wasm32.wasm': return 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hlsdk-portable@latest/dist/cl_dll/client_emscripten_wasm32.wasm' default: return p } }, }) } main()

</script> </body> </html>
by iparaskev | 2025-07-23 06:50:59+00:00
> The real breakthrough came when I stopped thinking of AI as a code generator and started treating it as a pairing partner with complementary skills.

I think this is the most important thing mentioned in the post. In order for the AI to actually help you with languages you don't know you have to question its solutions. I have noticed that asking questions like why are we doing it like this and what will happen in the x,y,z scenario, really helps.
by ethagnawl | 2025-07-23 06:51:13+00:00
> because branches were so hard

They were also slow because, if memory serves, creating a branch involved creating a logical copy everything (files and history) instead of just tracking the delta using pointers/copy-on-write/whatever-clever-thing locally. It was on the order of tens of minutes in one project I worked on and, needless to say, we stopped doing it. Merging the branch was also (as noted) a headache when this all ran in reverse. Merge conflicts were also much more common, though I can't remember why just now -- presumably because synchronizing changes was equally slow and painful, rebasing was not an option and people couldn't be bothered.

It's hard to emphasize just what a leap forward Git and Mercurial were. In addition to quick and cheap branches, you could also commit changes while working offline! The distributed nature of these tools was also revelatory and is underutilized in the modern age.