MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasode | 2025-07-20 15:10:06+00:00
The word "hype" is being used in 2 different ways.

definition #1 is about Java features : The original "Java is criminally underhyped" essay by Jackson Roberts is talking about "not over-hyped" in terms of Java's technical capabilities ... such as types and package manager, etc. E.g. Java has types which Javascript/Python do not and typing is a positive thing to help prevent errors -- therefore -- Java is "underhyped". The particular language capability not being used as much as the author thinks it should is the basis for defining what "hype" is.

definition #2 is about Java's marketplace effect: The "overhype" of Java in the 1990s was extrapolating and predicting Java's effect on the whole computing landscape. This type of "hype" is overestimating the benefits of Java and making bold proclamations. Examples:

- Java and JVM's WORA "Write Once Run Anywhere" will kill Microsoft's Evil Empire because it will render Windows irrelevant. (This didn't happen and MS Windows still has 70+% desktop market share today. 30 years later and Microsoft is one of the top 3 tech companies with a $3+ trillion dollar market cap while Sun Microsystems was acquired at a discount by Oracle.)

- Java will make lower level languages with manual memory allocation like C/C++ obsolete because CPUs are getting faster. Let the extra "unused" cpu cycles do automatic garbage collection in Java instead of C programmers manually managing memory with malloc()/free(). (C/C++ is still used today for games, and tight loops of machine learning libs underneath Python.)

- Java plugins will enable "rich" web experiences. (It turns out that Javascript and not Java plugins won the web. Java also didn't win on desktop apps. Javascript+Electron is more prevalent.)

That's the type of overhype that Java failed to deliver.

Same situation with today's AI. Some aspects of AI will absolutely be useful but some are making extravagant extrapolations (i.e. "AI LLM hype") that will not come true.
by peterfirefly | 2025-07-20 15:11:03+00:00
So, it doesn't "grow exponentially", you just wanted to express that there are "many".

> you know a dog hidden behind a car doesn't actually vanish nor remain stationary.

Computers can do that, too. It's not that different ... guessing missing words.

I think it was two years ago that Tesla told the public that they could do that.
by general1726 | 2025-07-20 15:11:15+00:00
Of course it can't scale. Putting 10000 cars with 1 human in them into a city is hard and just creates traffic. Putting 100 buses with 100 people in them is much easier.

Also why don't you use something what has less degrees of freedom like a train and thus is much easier to automate and also much easier to scale by just connecting more cars. You got that Loop thing, expand onto it and turn it into a subway...

Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state - buses, subways, trams. There is natural development behind it, it is not like somebody said that city people shall only sit next to a stranger - you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that. Unless you will use existing mass transportation solutions.
by beej71 | 2025-07-20 15:11:20+00:00
One potential future I could see with generative AI and fiction is a sort of infinite interactive fiction where the reader plays a more active role in exploring the space. Maybe they have some control, or maybe they can just ask the AI where to look next. And at least in that case, it would clearly be AI doing the work. Not that this would stop people from producing AI novels, or anything.

In my writing, I just go for it. If someone thinks it sounds like an AI, what can I do? (I don't use AI for any of my writing, for the record. What fun would that be?)

I also love using em dashes properly, so I guess that's points against. Vim: ^K-M gets you one.

But when I write something like a letter of recommendation or, heaven forbid, a cover letter, I do actually try to write it so that it sounds human. If someone suspects that the letter was AI generated, it becomes worthless. And I don't like to write worthless letters of recommendation.
by amy214 | 2025-07-20 15:11:33+00:00
>The challenge is that clearly stating things is and always has been the hard part.

I state things crystal clear in real life on the internets. Seems like most of the time, nobody has any idea what I'm saying. My direct reports too.

Anyway, my point is, if human confusion and lack of clarity is the training set for these things, what do you expect
by Saline9515 | 2025-07-20 15:11:50+00:00
Having worked for the French state and wrestled a few times with its IT services, I can tell you that the reason for choosing Microsoft isn't cost, or "efficiency".

It's that they only know Microsoft, they don't want to learn something else, and if there's a problem, it's Microsoft's fault, no theirs, so they don't have to deal with their own incompetence.

If you want an anecdote, we were working with SAS, a statistical software which required costly licences (more than a million € for a few dozens of workers). I suggested to switch to R or Python to the top director, who agreed.

First meeting with the service in charge, the chief opens with "ok, we are asked to change, but the goal here is to show that we tried, and found that it's not possible."

I resigned a few months after, as everything was in the same vein.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-07-20 15:12:37+00:00
This is cool. I really miss the eza coloring of the file permissions/ownership/size/dates. I've installed it anyway to try when eza -l is eating it because of a large number of files in the directory.

Side note: would something like this make ncdu faster? I run into large file counts = slow using that a lot more than the ls command.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-20 15:13:02+00:00
I suspect many today don't fuly appreciate the context of Java in the 1990s and how different the outlook was. A lot of what we take for granted now wasn't even imagined and even if it was, it wasn't certain. Java was hyuped on three fronts:

1. Desktop applications;

2. Server applications; and

3. Browser applications.

We had more platforms then. On the desktop front, Mac was in decline but still existed and was strong in certain niches. On the server front, there were many UNIX variants (eg Solaris, HP/UX, Digital Unix, etc). Cross-platform really was a big deal and much more relevant.

We still had desktop apps then. Being able to write a Swing app and run it "everywhere" was a big deal. Otherwise you wre writing things in thing slike Visual Basic (and thus Windows only) or I don't even know what Mac used at the time.

On the server, this was the very early days of Web servers. Netscape still existed and sold Web server software. The most common form of HTTP serving was CGI bin. These had a significant start up cost. There were other solutions like ISAPI/NSAPI. Java brought in servlets, which were persistent between requests. That was massive at the time.

It creates problems too but it's all tradeoffs.

And the last is Web applications. This was the newest area and had the most uncertain future. Java applets were pushed as a big deal and were ultimately displaced by Macromedia (then Adobe) Flash, which itself is now (thankfully) dead and we have Javascript applications. That future was far from certain in the 1990s.

I remember seeing demos of Java applets with animations and Microsoft doing the same thing with a movie player of all things.

Single page applications simply didn't exist yet. If you wanted that, and honestly nobody did, it was a Java applet or maybe a Flash app. The Web was still much more "document" oriented. Server a page, click something, server a page for that and so on.

I still wrote this form of Website in the 2000s and it could be incredibly fast. PHP5+MySQL and a load time sub-30ms. You could barely tell there was a server round trip at all.

So Java still exists but almost entirely in the server space. It's probably fallen away from other platforms like PHP, Python, Node.js, etc. But it absolutely changed the direction of tech. Java has left a lasting legacy.

I would go as far as saying that Java democratized the Internet. Prior to Java, every solution was commercial and proprietary.
by classichasclass | 2025-07-20 15:14:35+00:00
I run it on a SAIC Galaxy 1100 which is a Gecko in a MIL-SPEC portable workstation case, and it is a delight to use. It's snappy and slick. But I have a soft spot for PA-RISC anyway since working on a K250 midrange was my first job out of college.
by jstummbillig | 2025-07-20 15:14:39+00:00
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Since when? It starts with computers, the main tool and it's architecture not being free and goes from there. Major compilers used to not be free. Major IDEs used to not be free. For most things there were decent and (sometimes) superior free alternatives. The same is true for LLMs.

> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.

That "excuse" could exactly capture the issue. It does not, because you chose to make it a weirder issue. Just as before: You will be free to either not use LLMs, or use open-source LLMs, or use paid LLMs. Just as before in the many categories that pertain to programming. It all comes at a cost, that you might be willing to pay and somebody else is free to really does not care that much about.
by hinkley | 2025-07-20 15:14:54+00:00
Java, especially after generics were introduced, was a pain to use because of the type system. That’s not my opinion, I always found that claim a bit overwrought but it’s true that it was fairly widespread. Dealing with the type system got progressively a bit easier as the language evolved and certain types could be inferred. From the release notes I’ve seen I’ve gotten the impression that similar things have happened with the borrow checker. But people who have gone through the gauntlet have trouble reframing that experience and it’s always difficult to tell if the reputation is still accurate or not.

I am curious what the second language with a borrow checker will look like.
by lmeyerov | 2025-07-20 15:15:02+00:00
Totally

We do this ~daily for:

* Multitier webapps

* DevOps infrastructure: docker, aws, ci systems, shell scripts, ...

* Analytics & data processing

* AI investigations (logs, SIEMs, ..) <--- what we sell!

* GPU kernels

* Compilers

* Docs

* Test amplification

* Spec writing

I think ~half the code happening by professional software engineers fits into these, or other vibes friendly domains. The stuff antirez does with databases seems close to what we do with compilers, GPU kernels, and infra.

We are still not happy with production-grade frontend side of coding, though by being strong on API-first design and keeping logic vs UI seperated, most of our UI code is friendly to headless.
by blfr | 2025-07-20 15:15:04+00:00
Yes, you can't get the very same product (Levi's 501s) but you can absolutely get the same thing (straight cut jeans). I don't wear jeans or workwear but heard good things about Bronson Mfg and Red Tornado from enthusiasts.

The price is also quite reasonable (~100 USD) thanks to workwear revival and you can get them in heavier weights (15 oz).
by staplung | 2025-07-20 15:15:24+00:00
One potential problem might be that they have to treat the entire collection of 400,000 books at the same time (which makes sense because otherwise you risk rotating the beetles through the collection). So they'd have to find such an ultra-low temp freezer that was large enough to hold 400k books.

Also, although I assume this is a very rare ability among insects and probably not applicable to the "drugstore beetle" from this article, check out this insane fly species I found while looking for freeze tolerant insects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypedilum_vanderplanki It (or its larvae, anyway) can survive temperatures as low as 3K!
by deadbabe | 2025-07-20 15:15:54+00:00
Gems:

"AI help me write a regex. Now SQL Injections are valid passwords."

"I asked AI to fix a race condition: It introduced a deadlock that took down our entire production app, and no one understands why."

"AI did my taxes: Why I might be going to prison."

"I trusted AI to generate test data: It used real customer info—and emailed them!"
by shubhamg2208 | 2025-07-20 15:16:04+00:00
Part 2 of my Mojo GPU-puzzles series dives into the workhorse kernels of DL: sliding-window pooling, halo-aware 1-D/2-D convolutions, warp-level prefix sums, and more. Lots of diagrams + runnable kernels; builds directly on Part 1(https://shubhamg.in/posts/2025-07-06-gpu-puzzles-p1.html). Feedback & perf tips welcome!
Show HN: GitRanks – GitHub Profile Analytics and Rankings
by maslianok | 2025-07-20 15:16:10+00:00
Hi HN,

I built GitRanks because I’ve always wanted a clear, fun way to see how my open-source work compares - both globally and right here at home. The app pulls in GitHub data to give every developer an at-a-glance “scorecard”, then rolls those into live leaderboards so you can: - Track rankings by stars, contributions and followers - Filter worldwide vs. your own country - Refresh daily - no waiting weeks to see your progress - Discover rising devs you’ve never heard of and follow their work

Tech Stack: - Back: MongoDB | NestJS | BullMQ | GraphQL - Front: Next.js | Tailwind | Shadcn

Data: - 6.1M profiles - 0.7M organizations - 12.5M repositories

Try it https://gitranks.com/

GitHub repo https://github.com/gitranks/gitranks-ui

This is just v1, and I’d love your thoughts! What metrics or filters would make the leaderboards even more useful? Anything unclear or missing? I’ll be here answering questions and would really appreciate critical feedback. Thanks for checking it out!
by anonreeeeplor | 2025-07-20 15:17:02+00:00
In my area, there is a Tae Kwon Do school my kids go to. You can see every year the class picture. For the last 10 years it was almost all white kids then it made a dramatic change to almost 100% Indian. We live near Microsoft. Something very obviously is going on with immigration. To say Microsoft has simply been flooding the area with Indians is shown visually.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-20 15:17:09+00:00
You are definitely from a culture that doesn't guzzle cheese like Americans. So out of curiosity I went to your comment history and your previous comment was "Here in Korea".

Yeah, growing up in the US I ate more cheese than meat which is probably super common among US kids. I'd devour the whole bag of cheese sticks if I could. And you can look at restaurants like tex mex where the enchilada sits in a lake of cheese. Or go to Olive Garden and try to find someone who stopped at <10g of cheese when the waiter is asking you when you want him to stop shredding it over your pasta.

Anyways, I bet it can be hard to transition from this dairy-heavy lifestyle to a plant-based diet. I personally gave up the idea of a cheese substitute entirely except on vegan pizza where it's dominated by other ingredients. It's just not as good.

Since there is animal-free dairy milk (https://tryboredcow.com/) on the market I wonder when we'll see animal-free dairy cheese.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-07-20 15:17:18+00:00
There's simply no option for digital sovereignty other than cultivating a strong domestic software industry. As the source details, much of this exposure is being done with full understanding of the risks and costs.

The article also refers to some report claiming that European solutions are "wrongly judged to be too costly or inefficient". I'd be interested to read it if anyone has a translation. Even for something as basic as word processing software, every case I've seen so for the alternatives quickly lands on "you have to accept rough edges because that's the cost of data sovereignty" - much easier for a hobbyist or politician to say than an IT director charged with making sure your organization runs well.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-20 15:17:34+00:00
That boots model is fascinating compared the the actual boot market in the USA. I can get an excellent pair of made in America, vibrax/goodyear welted extremely sturdy boots for 200 USD - maybe less. Redwing, danger, etc other PNW brands all exist and sell at this price point.

Compare to popular fashion boots like timberlands which are also 200 USD and reasonably sturdy but no Goodyear welt or proper sole so they fail in 5 years or less of regular wear.
Tell HN: It feels weird and but oddly good
by stavarotti | 2025-07-20 15:17:59+00:00
I got access to Claude Max Pro few days ago with so I could use Claude Code to migrate a relatively complex app to a modern framework. I've tried various AI flows (ide/editor plugins, copy-paste chat windows, the usual), but I’d never tried the full "open a terminal and let her rip" approach.

I pieced together a workflow from half-remembered blog posts (there are too many ways to coerce the machine), and to my surprise it mostly worked. Once I got going, the weird part is that I felt more like an editor than a developer. Sure, I was steering the conversation (half paying attention and focused on other important things like letting the dog out) but mostly I was just pressing enter, not furiously typing out rebuttals like I've seen in many posts.

The strange part is that I tell the thinking machine what I want, hope for the best, and most of the time, I get what I want. Because I don't get what I want every time, the whole thing feels like the model is quietly saying "I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further". And when I'm surprised with with what I didn't ask for, I laugh and say to myself "this deal is getting worse all the time" and keep going.

Despite this, I'm enjoying Claude Code and will likely continue the subscription beyond my pilot period.
by rufius | 2025-07-20 15:18:15+00:00
Companies that don’t want to invest in new infrastructure.

That’ll always be the blocker with rail. Moving humans, even a lot of them, by rail isn’t cost effective by most company’s definition outside luxury pricing.

Rail wins when you need to move goods in bulk though.

Annoys the hell out of me. I much prefer train travel, even if it’s slower. But in the States, Amtrak is passable at best depending on the particular line. European rail was a lot more pleasant. Neither comes close to Japan though. Their high speed rail is a reason I’d consider living there long term.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-07-20 15:18:26+00:00
I am hesitant. On the one hand, visualization as presented might drive some interest ( and maybe adoption ), but XLST would definitely be useful for a person that would actually suggest it as a solution toa nything. Not to search very far, I myself found recently I have to not just massage XML data, but also 'sell it' to my various bosses.

I guess what I am saying is: I see your point. I am also saying ( as I dig in a little deeper ) that XLST would likely be helpful.
by codingdave | 2025-07-20 15:19:20+00:00
I've been in this industry now for 35 years, and while there is some tech from my starting point that is still around, works fine, and could still be used effectively today... few people know how to use it, so from a pragmatic perspective, it is useless.

So your starting point for this question needs to focus on that evolution of talent. Your app needs to be well-defined and compartmentalized so that each layer can be refactored when (not if) the talent pool dwindles to nothing. You need to develop a strong refactoring culture not only to handle the reality that the best thing you deliver today will be tech debt before the 50 years are up, but that whatever problem it is solving today will likewise evolve.

The durability you seek needs to be ironically focused on change management.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-20 15:19:47+00:00
Time[1] and time[2] again, the CJEU has ruled that the US stance of noncitizens having no standing on privacy issues is incompatible with EU law. Time[3] and time[4] again, the European Commission has negotiated a functionally identical agreement codified in executive orders and declared it “adequate” until the court could decide otherwise. Not even the Congress explicitly giving[5] the US government powers to compel (among others) EU subsidiaries of US multinationals, regardless of what EU law says, has changed the equation. Now there’s been a presidential election in the US that many in the EU are unhappy about. *Shocked Pikachu*

> [French MP Philippe] Latombe criticised the US-EU Data Privacy Framework (DPF) deal, saying it no longer served EU interests due to the US president’s “impulsive” nature.

Am I wrong to say that there’s something profoundly rotten in that statement with regards to the rule of law?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Data_Privacy_Fra...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
by hinkley | 2025-07-20 15:20:05+00:00
Battery and frame rate. There are a couple SteamOS boxes that have windows variants and the windows version is bad. Microsoft has been trying to manage the PR on this, last I heard they claimed the next update would have 2 GB more available memory.

2GB is not good news. That’s evidence that they did not give two shits about mobile before the bad press.
by Vetch | 2025-07-20 15:20:09+00:00
Compounding with learn and iterate, humans also build abstractions which significantly shorten the number of steps required. These are more expressive programming languages, compilers and toolchains. We also build engines, libraries, DSLs and invent appropriate data-structures to simplify the landscape or reuse existing work. Besides abstractions, we build tools like better type systems, error testing and borrow checkers to help eliminate certain classes of errors. Finally, after all is said and done, we still have QA teams and major bugs.
by elviejo | 2025-07-20 15:20:27+00:00
I applaud the idea of bringing back the Visual Basic model to the web. Again I don't expect people under 45 to remember how easy it was to develop a user interface that reacted to user actions.

I just don't see the need to create a new language to do it.

Firefox had XUL. And macromedia had Flex.

Flex was amazing it had an XML version and an OOP one.. that where two views of exactly the same language.
by api | 2025-07-20 15:20:43+00:00
There was so much work done in the 80s and 90s on RAD — rapid application development — that was all thrown in the trash when the web hit.

20+ years later we’ve managed to finally build up the right combination of hacks to make the web a passable application platform but it still feels like you’re forcing it. Because you are. The web was not designed to be an app platform and it shows. Still.
by beej71 | 2025-07-20 15:21:08+00:00
The thing is, I think it's possible to outdo AI.

Yes, it uses very professional and correct language, but the times I've asked it to help me improve something I've written, most of the suggestions just suck the work dry. It is ignorant of those subtleties of meaning that are so important for proper emotional impact.

Human goal: be a better writer than AI. It's been trained on some good stuff, but also a lot of crap. I'd expect its output to be fairly average.
by cafp12 | 2025-07-20 15:21:12+00:00
IMO It's not unlike all other "dev" tools we use at all. There are tons of free and open tools that usually lag a bit behind the paid versions. People pay for jetbrains, for mac os, and even to search the web (google ads).

You have very powerful open weight models, they are not the cutting edge. Even those you can't really run locally, so you'd have to pay a 3rd party to run it.

Also the competition is awesome to see, these companies are all trying hard to get customers and build the best model and driving prices down, and giving you options. No one company has all of the power, its great to see capitalism working.