MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-16 10:40:51+00:00
> There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.

It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux.

The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect.

Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).
by user____name | 2025-08-16 10:41:05+00:00
> Look back to the early 19th century if you want to know what it's like to live in a "world without plastic".

We're talking about reducing plastic use, which is crazy high nowadays, not full scale elimination. I remember going to the store in the eighties and nineties and sure, there was plastic, but the packaging wasn't three layers of plastics just to get the thing out. Use less, recycle what you do use, prevent it from getting into the environment and crumbling into microplastic pollution. PET can be recycled once of twice, but the other stuff is hopeless. Most other materials are just more recyclable, that's just a fact. rubber, cork, ceramic, plaster, tin, aluminum, paper, cartboard, glass, wax, etc... there's plenty of viable industrial scale materials depending on the usecase.
by troupo | 2025-08-16 10:41:14+00:00
Yes. Yes they are weird buffers in that you have to spend some (minor) effort remembering what exactly is in the "clipboard", "selection", and the difference of invoking them between apps (e.g. having to Ctrl+Shift+V in the terminal).

Oh, and the fact that selection buffer gets overwritten if you switch between apps with active selections.

Oh, usually there's also a cherry on top in that everyone's darling, vim, doesn't even interact with any of those and has its own buffers aka registers.

I'm sure if there was a way to track how many time you make and undo mistakes in copy-pasting the wrong thing from the wrong buffer, your assumptions would be seriously challenged.
by c0balt | 2025-08-16 10:41:20+00:00
1. Make the student(s) randomly have to present their results on a weekly basis. If you get caught for cheating at this point, at least in my uni with a zero tolerance policy, you instantly fail the course.

2. Make take home stuff only a requirement to be able to participate in the final exam. This effectively means cheating on them will only hinder you and not affect your grading directly.

3. Make take home stuff optional and completely detached from grading. Put everything into the final exam.

My uni does a mix them on different courses. Especially two and three though have a significant negative impact on passing rates as they tend to push everything onto one single exam instead of spread out work over the semester.
by keiferski | 2025-08-16 10:43:22+00:00
Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.)

The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct.

What actually seems to be happening, however, is this:

- obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market

- companies want writers that understand how to use AI tools to enhance productivity, but understand how to modify copy so that it doesn’t read as AI-written

- the meta-skill of knowing what to write in the first place becomes more valuable, because the AI is only going to give you a boilerplate plan at best

And so the only jobs that seem to have been replaced by AI directly, as of now, are the ones writing basically forgettable content, report-style tracking content, and other low level things. Not great for the jobs lost, but also not a death sentence for the entire profession of writing.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-16 10:43:57+00:00
You are not wrong. We tend to zoom in on on the wrong problems. Most of continental Europe produces a lot of waste. Almost none of that ends up in the oceans. The problem exists mostly in coastal areas with a lack of legislation and rules or just a generally a sloppy attitude to cleaning up. And shipping in international waters. Once you are in international waters, there are very little rules and essentially no enforcement. Most of the problems in our oceans come from very specific countries and shipping just dumping their waste directly in the oceans. The problem is not the oil industry but some countries not managing their waste effectively.

Of course the best thing is just not having one time use plastics to begin with. But we tend to over-emphasize the problem and focus on the wrong parts. People using e.g. straws in their drinks is maybe unnecessary but in tons of plastic it's a very minor part of the actual problem. Especially if most of it goes into the trash and ends up in a landfill or incinerator. E.g. People using plastic or paper straws in Berlin makes no measurable impact. It's all very symbolic. The Spree, the main river that runs through Berlin and the only way trash could physically make it to oceans, has been pretty clean since the DDR stopped dumping toxic waste into it a few decades ago. I don't think rule changes in recent years for one time use plastics made any measurable difference.

It's more of a problem on beaches and near coastal areas where some people can't be bothered to clean up after themselves. You see the same on public roads or train tracks where people just toss their crap out of the window. This is the root of the problem: too many people just do the wrong thing without even thinking about it.

IMHO littering fines and more effective enforcement would be very appropriate and should be fairly uncontroversial. If people are being jerks, just treat them as such. Shame them into doing the right thing. Inconvenience them. Etc. Littering is a choice. And it should have consequences. And when people know there might be consequences, they usually adapt. Other things that work are deposits on bottles and cans. Making people separate their trash.

And then go after the big polluters and force them via tariffs, trade restrictions, etc. to do better.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-16 10:44:40+00:00
Same for UML in the 90s: "in a few years programmers will be obsolete because a handful system architects will draw UML diagrams which will be synthesized into code", in the end the opposite happened, and the dedicated system architect role pretty much disappeared.

And UML even made a lot more sense to precisely describe a problem compared to human language prompts.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-16 10:45:40+00:00
GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: "Embrace AI or get out." (then proceeds to get out himself, 7 days later)

https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...

https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...

This industry is full of snake oil salesmen and false promises, it's reliant on hype and an army of fanboys trained on twitter to fan the flames and create the impression of a revolution that isn't there and might never be there, just to prop the valuations of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

It always follows the same playbook:

- The guru type e.g muskie, sama, adam neumann, elizabeth holmes, SBF, says something on twitter: "XYZ is the future"

- Army of same-thinkers lurkers start getting excited about it.

- VC fund bros who are also forming their opinion on vibes stalking twitter, also get excited about it.

- Big money poured in XYZ thing.

- Guru keeps claiming that XYZ version 2.0 is just behind the corner (AGI/Superintelligence, Autonomous Self Driving Cars, the Boring Tunnel, cure for whatever) projecting insane and out of touch with reality timelines.

- XYZ thing either becomes the future (not likely), or gets abandoned (remember when buying pixelized pics of apes on the internet was an "investment"?) and the collective amnesia of the fanbase doesn't keep the guru accountable. It's easy to make hundreds of claims if getting it right once, even by chance, makes you some kind of a prophet and all your wrong claims of the past are dismissed due to your fanbase's dog-like adoration for you.

- Cycle repeats.

The LLM craze reminds me of the NFT, web3, crypto grift all over again, but this time with a product that at least has some value.

Tom Renner wrote an excellent article on the "LLM inevitabilism" https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/
by poniko | 2025-08-16 10:46:22+00:00
Did some bigger admin tool to do search and matching datapoints etc and decided to only use claude code. First version was wow awesome this saved me so much time .. now 2 weeks later putting back code that was deleted several times, removing 3 copy's of the same code, way to complicated sqls, verbose code and looking how its mixing htmx with some wird own JavaScript. It really looks as a junior developer solutions, so I'm done using it for more then boiler plate things..

I will come back in 3-6 months and hope its better to understand its own limitations.

I'm guessing it would be less then a week for me to write it on my own.

The biggest issue is that I've now seen the shit it creates so I have zero trust in the code I now have from a security and stability standpoint. I know many have better experiences then mine.
by mustaphah | 2025-08-16 10:46:57+00:00
It would be awesome to have a newsletter highlighting the top X articles (fully automated). You could start with a simple scoring system (page views) and maybe later add an upvote button so the most-voted articles get sent out each week.

Sending emails isn't cost-free, but AFAIK, Buttondown [1] has a free plan for up to 100 subscribers. It's dead simple: they provide an issue archive [2] and handle subscription for you [3].

With their 100-subscriber free plan, you could limit this feature to a close circle. Maybe later monetize the newsletter feature to cover the ESP costs.

[1] https://buttondown.com

[2] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive

[3] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter
by latexr | 2025-08-16 10:47:14+00:00
I mean, clearly, that’s the whole point of the article. What I’m asking is how do you make a wallet pass from a static image. Is is difficult? Is it simple? What are the steps?

This is like if I asked “how do I boil an egg” and you had answered “you can boil an egg yourself”. Yes, I know that. That’s obvious but also unhelpful. The correct (short) answer would’ve been “bring water to a boil on the stove, lower an egg into it, wait around 10 minutes, turn it off and place the egg in cold water for an easier peel”. Or “here’s a link with instructions: <URL>”.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-16 10:47:46+00:00
The thing is that this is probably currently indeed happening. The bizarre output of LoC by LLMs probably now eclipses whatever humans write by hand. I don't believe 90% passes the reviews though; a lot more gets written and a lot more gets discarded. My fear is more that this will change, and code will pass because less and less people know what is good or not. Not yet, but soon-ish, EVEN if the output quality does not improve.
by flux1krea | 2025-08-16 10:47:49+00:00
My useful local stack: Ollama + Llama 3.1 8B (chat/RAG), VSCode + Continue.dev for coding, Qdrant for lightweight retrieval, 64 GB RAM desktop. Works offline with low latency; main gotcha is context blow-ups → chunking + token monitoring. Bonus: I A/B prompts/styles in the cloud first, then reproduce in local ComfyUI. Disclosure: I built flux1krea.app to baseline prompts/styles before moving local: https://www.flux1krea.app
by mattmanser | 2025-08-16 10:47:59+00:00
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but I think a big thing missing from the article is how you should isolate you business logic.

A great software design will separate all business logic into its own layer. That might be a distinct project, module, or namespace, depending on what your language supports. Keep business logic out of SQL and out of web server code (controllers, web helpers, middleware, etc.).

Then you're treating SQL as the data store it is designed to be. When you embed application logic in SQL, you're hiding core functionality in a place where most developers won't expect to find it. This approach also creates tight coupling between your application and your database provider, making it hard to switch as needs change/the application grows.
by thom | 2025-08-16 10:48:10+00:00
I suppose the question is whether the only way to educate good programmers is for them to spend time as a (possibly net-negative) apprentice in an enterprise job. Perhaps under the watchful and patient gaze of future AIs, they're able to blossom earlier, perfect their skills on open source, and enter into the workforce ready not to cause chaos. Personally I'd love the alternative version of the future where LLMs do all the bullshit (meetings, alignment, planning) and then seniors feel far less stress and pressure and rejoice in being able to spend time raising up their fellow humans.

Not sure either outcome is likely though.
by aembleton | 2025-08-16 10:48:28+00:00
If you check the source of the website that it links to [1], on line 168, we have this

<p>I'm on Mastodon as <a rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham">@simontatham@hachyderm.io</a>.</p>

If you trust that website, then you can be sure that this Mastodon account is the right one.

1. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/
by jakkos | 2025-08-16 10:48:29+00:00
> a loose umbrella for what are actually disparate problems

For me, the DSM-V & DIVA criteria are eerily accurate. I was diagnosed as an adult and it felt like a cruel cosmic joke reading through the psychiatrist report and realizing that most of my past and present issues were repeatedly-documented commonalities of a single condition. It was as if my life had just been playing out from a predetermined script.

I fully agree that that many distinct conditions are incorrectly swept under the "ADHD umbrella", but ADHD is not in any way a "loose" description of me.

> more helpful than the stimulants

My currently prescribed stimulants have been the only thing to ever make me feel consistently "okay", after having previously given up on medications ever helping. I'm sure they also enable me to write a few more lines of code per day, but I'd still be taking them even if they made me significantly worse at doing so.
by righthand | 2025-08-16 10:49:23+00:00
“This has gone too far” is the war cry of people enforcing that they refuse to educate themselves on the real meaning of the phrases and come to the table for discussion. It is a cop out and you will look back and think “why was I so unreasonable they weren’t asking for much”.

It is a sign that you aren’t really resistant to the ideas but looking for a way to resist because it’s change.

> if they had a committee focused on women’s health issues surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, should they include transgender women?

This is the entire problem with the “this has gone too far” crowd. You’re making up hypotheticals and claiming them as active truths. In your situation it’s pretty clear humans are capable of forming committee's relevant to the topic. You don’t have to over apply policy to make it fair. Furthermore, most of these types of committees are probably and have been historically staffed by white men. Why do they get a double standard?

Was anyone actually negatively affected by DEI policies? No. You just had a bunch of handwringing from “this is too far people” and executive leadership teams. No one has actually any proof of these so called negatives though. So much so they have black people saying “let the white man handle it again”.
by marstall | 2025-08-16 10:50:15+00:00
every software company i've ever worked with has an endless backlog of features it wants/needs to implement. Maybe AI just lets them move through these feature more quickly?

I mean most startups fail. And in software startups, the blame for that is usually at least shared by "software wasn't good enough". So that $20million seed investment is still going to go into "software development" - ie programmer salaries. they will be using the higher level language of ai much of the time, and be 2-5 times more efficient - but will it be enough? No. Most will still fail.
by StevenWaterman | 2025-08-16 10:51:04+00:00
What do you call system design, when it's referring to the design of systems in general, and not just computer services?

As in:

- writing a constitution

- designing API for good DX

- improving corporate culture

I intuitively want to call all of those system design, because they're all systems in the literal sense. But it seems like everyone else uses "system design" to mean distributed computer service design.

Any ideas what word or phrase I could use to mean "applying systems thinking to systems that include humans"
by moomin | 2025-08-16 10:52:26+00:00
Indeed, so famous it’s the subject of an entire OMM article (one of the guys behind OMM went on to write the script for Portal demonstrating he was a critic who could actually do the thing better than the people doing it). https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html

The absolute pinnacle of this idiocy? The person you are disguising yourself as _doesn’t have a moustache_.
by bboygravity | 2025-08-16 10:52:29+00:00
Really not that far off in the grand scheme of things IMO.

Ray Kurzweil was even more on the money in his 2006 book "The singularity is near". I remember reading some of the stuff in there that is now happening. From the top of my head he predicted 2030 for human-level AI hardware and software that could be bought for 1000 USD by anyone. I feel he's going to be very close.
by mrkeen | 2025-08-16 10:52:30+00:00
> but you can't do that many things wrong with a stateless application running in a container

> As long as you don't shred your dataset with a bad migration or some bad database code, most bad things at this level can be fixed in a few minutes with a few redeployments.

At some point between these statements you switched from stateless to stateful and I can't follow the rest of the argument.
by astrange | 2025-08-16 10:52:34+00:00
> I knew someone that worked for the tobacco industry where they had labs that constantly were looking for reasons that tobacco was good for you.

If you're implying publication bias, that's addressed by preregistration, though you either have to be careful about looking it up or else rely on meta-analysis.

Otherwise if they're publishing true results then there you go. Nicotine does have some benefits; it's basically the only effective nootropic and it's pretty effective for schizophrenia which is why almost all schizophrenic people are smokers. Of course the problem is it's super addictive and all the ways of taking it give you cancer.
by cma | 2025-08-16 10:54:46+00:00
That's already a domain name and a more complicated setup without a public static IP in home environments, and in corporate environments now you're dealing with a whole process etc. that might be easier to get through by.. paying out for github LFS.

I think it is a much bigger barrier than ssh and have seen it be one on short timeline projects where it's getting set up for the first time and they just end up paying github crazy per GB costs, or rat nests of tunnels vpn configurations for different repos to keep remote access with encryption with a whole lot more trouble than just an ssh path.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-16 10:54:59+00:00
Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt.

Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.
by jasonkester | 2025-08-16 10:56:11+00:00
This seems like it would work nicely if you removed the concept of pipes and pumps, and replaced them with containers and gravity.

I imagine a barrel of air at the surface with an osmosis filter at the opening and a big ass rock tied to it. Kick it off your barge, let it drop to the bottom and fill with filtered water. Then cut the string and let it float up for collection.

Seems like you could do that pretty cheaply.
by jhbadger | 2025-08-16 10:58:26+00:00
>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known.

But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical sets in favor of CGI was making movies worse. And it was! You had backgrounds and monsters that looked like they escaped from a video game. But that complaint has pretty much died out these days as the tech got better (although Nolan's Oppenheimer did weirdly hype the fact that its simulated Trinity blast was done by practical effects).
by traceroute66 | 2025-08-16 10:59:10+00:00
> You only access Dokploy through https, removing a whole class of attacks

Words such as the above on the blog post send shivers through my spine each time I read them.

They are, for example, a common sight on websites description of their security. "we use https so everything is ok" says the fluffy website description, carefully omitting to mention any of the stuff that really matters. Instead they just stop abruptly at the mention of the magical https. Shrug.

Or another classic example is all those people who think a dumb pass-through nginx/caddy https proxy infront of their backend suddenly makes the backend secure !

Coming back to this specific wording, I'm not sure what "whole class of attacks" they are expecting to suddenly thwart just because they are running over https ? I would suggest its a bit of a bold statement, to put it kindly.

I assume they are referring to the low-hanging-fruit like MITM etc, but as everyone knows that's not really where the real security concerns are in 2025 ...
by torginus | 2025-08-16 10:59:22+00:00
Are you sure about this?

Let's say you run a webshop and have two tables, one for orders with 5 fields, one for customers, with 20 fields.

Let's say you have 10k customers, and 1m orders.

A query performing a full join on this and getting all the data would result in 25 million fields transmitted, while 2 separate queries and a client side manual join would be just 5m for orders, and 200k for customers.
by mdavid626 | 2025-08-16 11:00:18+00:00
In some cases, it’s true.

But your thinking is rather limited. Even such data can be organized in a way, that joins are not necessarily in the db.

This kind of design always “starts” on the frontend - by choosing how and what data will be visible eg. on a table view.

Many people think, showing all data, all the time is the only way.
by mrkeen | 2025-08-16 11:00:29+00:00
And you get this part somewhat for free if you're actually testing as you're going.

When my service wants to store and retrieve as part of its behaviour, of course I'm going to back it with a hashmap first.

Once I know it fulfills its business logic I'll start fiddling with hard-to-change stuff like DB schemas and migrations.

And having finished and tested the logic, I'll have a much better idea of the actual access patterns so I can design good tables & indexes.