MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PapstJL4U | 2025-07-18 13:28:42+00:00
It's although a lot less enjoyable in for many. I think the fun stories are all about "look what I have build" and not "look at my amazing code review".

For Boilerplate code we need an AI that is less creative and more secure and predictable. I have fun creative a system design with the right tables and I have implementing logic and interaction design. I don't have the biggest fun writing down dtos and entities.

I would need an AI, that can scan an image and just build me the right lego bricks. We are just getting back to an machine that can do UML from less precise sources.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-18 13:28:57+00:00
Yes I just checked it after installing strace

strace -c ls gave me this

100.00 0.002709 13 198 5 total

strace -c eza gave me this

100.00 0.006125 12 476 48 total

strace -c lsr gave me this

100.00 0.001277 33 38 total

So seeing the number of syscalls in the calls directory

198 : ls

476 : eza

33 : lsr

A meaningful difference indeed!
by scrapheap | 2025-07-18 13:29:41+00:00
I don't tend to use Caps Lock at all - I know a lot of people remap it to be escape, just like OuterVale has mentioned, but for me it's just a key that I never use. Then again I no longer use home, end, page up and page down keys either - I switched to a split keyboard that doesn't have them as separate keys and you need to press a Fn key with another key to get them and as I live in the terminal for all my real work I just switched to using the CTRL key combinations instead.
by mtlynch | 2025-07-18 13:30:07+00:00
>Instructive here is Tigerbeetle, a financial database written entirely with Vanilla Zig:

How does TigerBeetle's existence support the argument that rolling your own dependencies is better than using off-the-shelf tools?

TigerBeetle has existed as a company for less than three years, they haven't reached a 1.0 release, and they have a single-digit number of engineers. As far as I can tell, they haven't even reached the point of self-sufficiency, as they raised another round of VC funding a year ago.

The pain of rolling your own tools happens as you grow and your needs change. Rolling your own static site generator[0] is fine when you only have a handful of engineers, but I suspect over time, they'll burn more time on their homegrown HTML templating solution[1] than if they had just used a battle-tested, off-the-shelf solution like Hugo.

The only dependency TigerBeetle accepted is Zig, which also hasn't reached a stable 1.0 release and frequently forces developers to rewrite their code to deal with breaking changes, including a major one coming in Zig 0.15.0.[2]

I like TigerBeetle, but they're not proof of anything yet. For every TigerBeetle, there are a hundred profitable companies whose entire business depends on WordPress with 50 plugins they picked at random.

Aside from TigerBeetle, I find most of the arguments in this article weak. They sound like rationalization for a developer who enjoys rolling their own tools and seem not to consider actual business value.

The article also leaves out what I think is the most important consideration in evaluating dependencies: lock-in. How difficult is it to swap out this dependency later? Because if the answer is, "very easy" most of the other considerations don't matter.

There's no use doing an exhaustive survey of image processing libraries when you can swap out your choice with a few hours of dev work. But choosing something like a storage backend is very difficult to change later, so you want to put more thought into it.

[0] https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-02-27-why-we-designed-tige...

[1] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/86b85ab60395...

[2] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329
by runamuck | 2025-07-18 13:30:07+00:00
Please don't consider 38 years of age "old." I just turned 48 and thanks to boxing 6x a week for a year I lost about 50 pounds. I now clock in at 6'1", 168 pounds and love to go shirtless at the local public pool. I look and feel the best I ever did in my entire life.
by vorpalhex | 2025-07-18 13:30:22+00:00
Youtube can say you can't use them for political content, anything to do with cars, whatever they want.

You also have choices beyond using Youtube.

USPS is the only carrier for many situations. They MUST allow you to mail firearms, baby chickens and weird vials of stuff. They don't get to opt out.

Either the market is full of choices or the sole provider has to do business with everyone for everything and no longer gets opinions.
by ralferoo | 2025-07-18 13:30:24+00:00
Is the downhill section a cliff? Google informs me terminal velocity of a car is 200-300mph, so to fall a mile at 300mph, the car will need 12 seconds, so let's round up to 15 seconds to account for the time it's accelerating.

To cover the full 2 miles at an average of 30mph, we need to complete the entire journey in 4 minutes, leaving 225 seconds for the ascent.

We know that the old car was averaging 15 miles per hour, but the speedo on an old car is likely inaccurate, and we only need to assume a 6% margin of error for the car to show 15 miles per hour and cover the mile in 225 seconds. You probably couldn't even tell the difference between 15 and 16 on the speed anyway, but let's say that we also fitted out the car with brand new tyres (so the outer circumference will be more than old worn tyres), and it's entirely possible.

So, let's say 240mph. That's the average speed of our mile freefall in 15 seconds.
by travelalberta | 2025-07-18 13:31:45+00:00
I have a CS undergrad and a MSc in Computing, did either really prepare me for industry? Not really. But I made a lot of friends, drank a million beers, and overall had a good time. They look good on a resume too.

Even when I was in school I knew that CS as a field wasn't one where you could just get a degree and get a job (well outside of 2021 maybe). After one internship I realized there was a great divide between school and work, and this was at a work place with pretty low code quality.

'Self-taught' engineers is a bit of a funny term for me because while I technically have a CS degree, everything applicable I had to learn myself. Especially for a DE job where outside of some basic SQL and the general idea of a relational database a post-secondary degree doesn't exactly prepare you for such a role.
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-18 13:32:23+00:00
The thing about martial arts is that they work: if you do them properly, you're going to kill someone (or be killed). Every group that does stuff with swords, therefore, has to sacrifice something to ensure that everyone can have fun again next week.

In HEMA, it's the aesthetic that's sacrificed: we (I'm one of them) wear gear that makes us look like modern riot police, but the weapons are (at the very least) historically weighted, and the techniques are from historical fencing manuals. There's a lot of arguing over the interpretation of medieval manuscripts in the community.

Re-enactment groups wear historical clothing, so they have to reduce the scope of their combat: they typically disallow strikes to the head, for example.

The Society for Creative Anachronism dispense with everything but the aesthetic of history, and consequently have the most fun.
by aristofun | 2025-07-18 13:32:26+00:00
1. Test the outcomes (what), not implementation (how)

2. 1 good e2e test worth thousands unit tests (because unit tests tend to fall into "testing how" category).

3. Unit tests are more often useless than not, they give false sense of reliability.

4. Write explicit straightforward tests, avoid too sophisticated dynamic tests (unless specific requirements call for it). Tests are for people to maintain and fix quickly, not for machines to have fun.

5. Test coverage for the sake of it is a stupid metric. You better cover well 1% of the most important end user use cases than cover 99% of everything else.
by heymijo | 2025-07-18 13:32:29+00:00
Let me give the now defunct Internet History Podcast a shout out. Episode 100 - The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates? The Gary Kildall Story

A story with intrigue that chronicles the why and how Microsoft ended up extracting the most value from the PC revolution instead of the hardware makers and of course, why that was DOS instead of CP/M.

I liked the oral history nature of this podcast, walking me through things that preceded me in technology, and then things that I lived through like the 90's internet.

https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2016/03/the-man-who-c...
by avisser | 2025-07-18 13:32:33+00:00
Work bought me a VisionTek hub. I wanted the 1 cable life - unfortunately, it only does monitors via DisplayLink, aka compressed & streamed to & from my desk. It's noticeably fuzzy.

So now it's 2 cables: 1 from the hub, 1 from the monitor. Both USB-C.

WTF guys?

My Apple monitor from 2009 just worked with 1 cable (no power, but still).
by somat | 2025-07-18 13:32:38+00:00
MS did not "Have" to be involved. The problem is that doing it right is hard, not hard as in "it was tricky to figure it out but once we did everything works" but hard as in "every single user now has an additional impossible to remember key they have to keep track of or they get locked out of their system", basically the mother of all support nightmares. so Microsoft took the easy(perhaps realistically, the only) way out. they said "we are not going to have the end user own their keys, we will own the keys"

Honestly I wish they(where they is them that designed this whole broken system) did it it right. On first boot you would set up some keys, now you are your own trust root, and when you you want Microsoft to manage your system, perfectly reasonable, managing systems is scary, you sign their keys and add them to the store. The problem is at a low level it all sort of just works, but nobody want to design that user interface. nobody wants to write the documentation required to explain it to joe random user. Nobody wants to run the call center dealing 24/7 walking people through a complicated process, patiently getting them unstuck when they loose their keys, explaining what a trust root is and why they now have to jump through hoops to set one up.

I like to believe that had they done it right initially, the ui would have been molded into something that just works and the client base would also get molded into expecting these key generations steps. But I am also an optimist, so perhaps not and it is exactly as scary and thankless a task as I described above. But we will never know, Microsoft took the easy way out, said we will hold the keys. And now you are a serf on your own machine. Theoretically there is a method to install your own keys, and it may even work, but the process is awkward(never really being meant for mass use) and you are dependent on the vendor to care enough to enable it. Many don't.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-18 13:32:45+00:00
As someone that was around in the days of Apple before bankruptcy, the same, there is no Jobs more around, and is getting back to Gil Amelio kind of Apple.

Tim Cook might be better at squeezing the juice, but he is not a product person.

This time around they need another solution, otherwise regardless of how much money they have, they will stay as the iOS/iPad company, given the relevance of macOS on desktop market worldwide.
Show HN: Mark 1.0, a notation that unifies JSON, HTML, JSX, XML, YAML, and more
by henryluo | 2025-07-18 13:32:47+00:00
Author of Mark Notation here.

Mark is a unified notation for both object and markup data, combining the best of JSON, HTML, and XML with a clean syntax and succinct data model.

I'm glad to announce the 1.0 Release of Mark. This release is just the start of a long journey to make web a better platform to store and exchange data.

Your feedback welcome!
by anxoo | 2025-07-18 13:32:56+00:00
what is your goal? what do you expect would be the pros and cons of linux or mac?

personally, i tried macOS 2 years ago and got frustrated by all the restrictions and differences from linux. i remember wanting to uninstall the default "chess" program, searching around and learning that i literally couldn't without turning off the default security mode, just because there was an off chance that the chess program contained essential code.
by appsDev | 2025-07-18 13:33:04+00:00
Thanks for the link! That is along the lines of what I saw in my research - just like the first couple minutes of this video - https://youtu.be/XuQVbZ0wENE?si=ddSniQLcaP_Tuvmm

Caps lock has an amazing spot without being useful enough to deserve it. I think like another comment mentioned - having a shortcut for locking caps might be better than having a whole key for it..
by pseudocomposer | 2025-07-18 13:33:10+00:00
macOS will always show the user yellow/green notifications in the menu bar when apps access the microphone/camera, as far as I understand.

I keep Notion Desktop open pretty much all the time on my work laptop, and have not seen these.

I’m happy to be wrong (well, in this case, I’d be upset at a big privacy violation)… but it seems pretty unlikely the audio monitoring is happening on macOS.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-07-18 13:33:53+00:00
It is painful, but I have done the same thing: dropping any paid use of OpenAI. For years, basically since I retired from managing a deep learning team at Capital One, I have spent a ton of time experimenting with all LLM options.

Enough! I just paid for a year of Gemini Pro, I use gemini-cli for free for small sessions, turn on using my API key for longer sessions to avoid timeout, and most importantly: for API use I mostly just use Gemini 2.5-flash, sometimes -pro, and Moonshot’s Kimi K2. I also use local models on Ollama when they are sufficient (which is surprisingly often.)

I simply decided that I no longer wanted the hobby of always trying everything. I did look again at Mistral a few weeks ago, a good option, but Google was a good option for me.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-18 13:34:03+00:00
Most everything is "considered biased" by some people. In this case, Zuckerberg and the Bain employee who authored that report are indeed people -- 2 out of billions.

Consider an alternative framing, "fact checkers like Politifact are precisely what are considered UNbiased". It is at least as true (because at least 2 people consider it to be so).

Given that framing alternative to yours: what, if anything, should we do anything about the situation?

How do you think framing, rather than substance, affects that discussion?
by swader999 | 2025-07-18 13:34:33+00:00
I remember a few projects before all the AI where I would setup templates, little code generators, patterns to follow. Just make it really easy to do the right things. Was so easy to get things done. Was a small team, like minded, easy to row in the same direction. Your post reminded me of that.

I too notice this about Claude, I've written commands, massaged Claude.md, even hooks. Given it very precise feature guides. I see the same issues you do. Feels like Claude has a lazy lever built in to it.

I play GPT O3 off it constantly, it takes the spec, a repomix slice of the Claude work and gives a new gap.md for Claude to pursue. Rinse and repeat. It works but your cursor flow seems better.

My highest velocity was about 1.6 fib complexity points a day over thirty years, now it's 4.3 with Claude the last three weeks which is nuts. I'm a total hack, I think I could get it up to nine if I was a bit more organized. Probably won't have to, just wait for the next iteration of the Claude models.
by nmcfarl | 2025-07-18 13:34:59+00:00
My stepmom who retired five years ago, did COBOL dev as part of her banking job until 2002ish and then she was full-time management track. In her bank, most of the work had been integrated with Java, and the Java was done by outsourced Indian teams. At the time she retired she felt the Indian teams had been failing for years to meet objectives, and finally management was seeing it. Additionally everybody who knew the COBOL side of things was retiring at the same time as she was and she did not want to know what the system would look like in five years.
by adrianwaj | 2025-07-18 13:35:37+00:00
I just found Flashback Labs today, "Be among the first to train AI Privately and monetize your Data!" and I was thinking if I'd like to ask the HN hivemind a question, how would I do it, and how would the mods enable it?

Ask HN - imagine if the AI answered some of those questions.

Google has "Programmable Search Engine" - how about "Programmable AI" ? Then there's the whole monetization thing - can that revenue be somehow distributed back to sources?
by jtrn | 2025-07-18 13:36:11+00:00
Due to a small, self-selected sample, biased toward educated, prior hallucinogen users, inadequate blinding, p-hacking via uncorrected multiple tests on 17+ outcomes, and crossover design flaws that confound long-term effects with intensive therapy.

Similar psychedelic therapy claims—for LSD/psilocybin alleviating cancer-related anxiety/depression—have echoed since the 1950s-1970s, yet they've never panned out into practical, scalable clinical therapies. This alone should raise a MASSIVE Bayesian statistics red flag, due to prior discount: with decades of unfulfilled hype. At this point new evidence requires extraordinary proof to update our view.

If such massive effectiveness were true, it would blow what we already have out of the water, and I would be the first to promote it to my patients. But you know what they say when something sounds too good to be true.
Show HN: Discord bot that organizes your Gmail and prepares draft for you
by ziadhussein | 2025-07-18 13:36:12+00:00
Hey all, I built a Discord bot that organizes your Gmail and only sends you what you need to know (also prepares draft for you for important emails)

100% free during the public beta phase

Try it out: [Orby](https://try-orby.vercel.app)
by ashwindharne | 2025-07-18 13:38:30+00:00
'Agents' are just a design pattern for applications that leverage recent proper scientific breakthroughs. We now have models that are increasingly capable of reading arbitrary text and outputting valid json/xml. It seems like if we're careful about what text we feed them and what json/xml we ask for, we can get them to string together meaningful workflows and operations.

Obviously, this is working better in some problem spaces than others; seems to mainly depend on how in-distribution the data domain is to the LLM's training set. Choices about context selection and the API surface exposed in function calls seem to have a large effect on how well these models can do useful work as well.
by swader999 | 2025-07-18 13:39:16+00:00
My biggest problem at the moment is that I am more inclined to talk to Claude and GPT O3 than the other more junior devs on my team. I just get more done. I'm not being facetious here, I really don't like that about the way I've been the past few days. I have to use the new free time I have to work more with them I guess.
by LightBug1 | 2025-07-18 13:40:18+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYn090EvNBcinpVcrKNmY...

You're welcome. Just listened to the first chapter and the youtube version feels a tad slower than I remember. Perhaps that's just Gibson stoned. Audio versions are on the t0rr3nt sites also
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-18 13:40:24+00:00
I think it’s because a lot of people deeply misunderstand what the hard parts of software development actually are. Most of the time, programs won’t involve novel or complicated algorithms or whatnot. It’s mostly just gluing ideas together. But that all comes after the specification, design, architecture, planning, etc.

I think it can also be deceptive the same way it can be in basically any trade: it’s easy for the job to get “done” and work. It’s hard to do it properly in a way that it has a lasting durability. With A.I. we can spit out these programs that work and look done. And for prototypes or throwaways and such, that’s probably wonderful! But that’s not going to fly if you’re building a house to spec for people who are going to live in it for 30 years.
by ghaff | 2025-07-18 13:40:47+00:00
And/or ask the hotel. And if you're just casually backpacking, that probably means you know people (or are traveling with someone).

Frankly, probably reflects my computer background, but it sort of annoys me that my passport is more or less the one thing when traveling internationally that there is just no backup for beyond going to the embassy or consulate.

Domestically, you can have multiple forms of acceptable ID. One time I skipped that step on a last minute quick trip, I almost wasn't able to check into a hotel.
by pseudolus | 2025-07-18 13:41:28+00:00
"One of Farley Chevrier’s go-to books is a 1736 treatise by Pierre Jacques François Girard, a former French navy officer, which includes twelve essential tips on how to save one’s life. The book is part of seventy documents that were digitized and shared online by the French HEMA federation".

Link to a scan of 1736 treatise: https://www.ffamhe.fr/collectionpalas/nouveau-traite-girard.... (even if you don't read French, the text includes numerous diagrams)

Link to a directory listing the various texts digitized by the French HEMA federation: https://www.ffamhe.fr/collection_palas/ (clicking on any of the links will take you to a page with more detail. To download the document click on the link beside the text that says "Pour télécharger la numérisation, cliquez sur ce lien").
by Our_Benefactors | 2025-07-18 13:41:44+00:00
> E.g. if your first 3 functions are indented wrong, I'm going to write that they're indented wrong and not bother reading the rest of your PR until you've fixed that.

Just add a linter and precommit hook, it’s not a good use of anyone’s time to go back and forth over trivialities.
by jsumrall | 2025-07-18 13:41:51+00:00
This and Materialize seemed like great tools. I met some of the team of Rising Wave at the Kafka conference last year in London and was impressed by their work. It may be great if you need such a tool.

In the end, I went with ClickHouse and it's materialized views feature. It might not be quite as powerful as what these other tools are doing, but it works for us, and it's really easy to set up. Before we were using Timescale's continuous aggregates, which had good performance, but require some domain knowledge to setup. ClickHouse materialized views are great because you don't need to be an expert to use them. And even so, performance is still very good.

We wrote about it briefly here: https://blog.picnic.nl/building-a-real-time-analytics-platfo...
by dcow | 2025-07-18 13:42:03+00:00
No, you can’t without being a hypocrite. It sure is convenient to take a moral stance when it has no real impact on your life and just throws others under the bus. But try applying your morality consistently and you will find it’s effectively impossible. So ultimately you’re just picking issues to complain about based on the current political climate, not actually taking a fundamental principled moral stance on an issue—you’re not making the world a better place.

Add to that the value that good search provides humanity, even Ukrainians and Russians against the war, and it’s not even obvious that boycotting a company that does a minuscule amount of business with a Russian company is doing more good than harm. So you’re arguably actually perpetuating harm more than reducing it.
by lastcat743 | 2025-07-18 13:42:33+00:00
The Zoroastrians (and other ancient cultures) equated fire to the language of God for it is a language of Truth.

Illuminant flame, dispeller of darkness and delusion, ignorance and confusion. Revelation of existential Truths from the void of nothing in mind’s eye.

Say what you say of my Truth to fire. Men, through all their self professed wisdoms may deceive themselves very far. Let fire be a limit to how far you may scoff upon Truths in your haughty intellectual scheme.