MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw10920 | 2025-08-18 02:36:50+00:00
> Probably that's good?

Amigdala-hijacking, emotional manipulation, and categorical dismissiveness of others' criticisms are clearly not good.

> Look at this Nim thread

Yes, I'm looking at it, and I'm seeing a lot of good criticism (including the second-to-top comment[1], some of which is out of love for the language.

You cherry-picked a tiny subset of comments that are negative, over half of which aren't even about the topic of the post - which means that they're completely unrelated to my comment, and you either put them there because you didn't read my comment carefully before replying to it, or you intentionally put them there to try to dishonestly bolster your argument.

As an example of the effect I'm referring to, this recent thread on STG[2], the top comment of which starts with "Lots of bad takes in this thread" as a way of dismissing every single valid criticism in the rest of the submission.

> is it so bad to have a reminder that there's more to a discussion than shitting on things and people?

This is a dishonest portrayal of what's going on, which is that, instead of downvoting and flagging those empty put-downs, or responding to specific bad comments, malicious users post a sneering, value-less, emotionally manipulative comment at the toplevel of a submission that vaguely gestures to "negative" comments in the rest of the thread, that dismisses every legitimate criticism along with all of the bad ones. This is "sneering", and it's against the HN guidelines, as well as dishonest and value-less.

> So what? One can make correct criticism of anything. Just because you can think of a criticism doesn't make it useful, relevant, meaningful, interesting, or valuable. Some criticism might be, but not because it is criticism and accurate.

I never claimed that all criticism is "useful, relevant, meaningful, interesting, or valuable". Don't put words in my mouth.

> Are you seriously arguing that not posting a flood of every legitimate criticism means the reader's thinking skills must have been undermined? That the only time it's reasonable to be positive, optimistic, enthusiastic, or supportive, is for something which is literally perfect?

I never claimed this either.

It appears that, given the repeated misinterpretations of my points, and the malicious technique of trying to pretend that I made claims that I didn't, you're one of those dishonest people that resorts to emotional manipulation to try to get their way, because they know they can't actually make a coherent argument for it.

Ironic (or, perhaps not?) that someone defending emotional manipulation and dishonesty resorts to it themselves.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931674

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44447202
by physicles | 2025-08-18 02:36:52+00:00
The author wrote a book, for which RST is undoubtedly the better choice. ("I wrote a book in Markdown" would be a surprising headline!)

But it's overkill for light documentation. Just look at their first example of embedding an image:

> ![alttext](example.jpg)

vs

> .. image:: example.jpg

> :alt: alttext

In the first one, it's just the syntax for a hyperlink with ! in front.

In the second one, there are several bits of syntax to remember. We have .. and then whitespace, and not one but two colons after `image`, and it's not `alt:` but `:alt:`.

I don't have to try to remember Markdown syntax, because it's simpler and it's ubiquitous. I type Markdown directly into Slack and Obsidian every day. Most tech-adjacent people know some Markdown.

Many years back a developer on my team decided that all the readmes that live next to source code should be in RST, because it's Better(TM) and we could have nicely formatted generated docs. The result was that a lot less documentation got written, and nobody looked at the generated docs anyway. Eventually we transitioned back.
by theshackleford | 2025-08-18 02:37:24+00:00
> No different than how there was a period of time where UV light was considered this evil to avoid, and now we know it's actually pretty critical to get sunlight in moderation (and completely avoiding UV causes its own issues).

The real issue isn’t that we “didn’t know” sunlight has benefits, we’ve known that for ages. Just as we know too much sun has downsides. The problem is that people can’t (or won’t) tailor advice to their own context. What counts as “moderation” in one place looks very different in another.

That’s why I’m healthy and look a decade younger than my age, while my younger sister already looks older than me and has had five skin cancers cut out. Where I live, 5–10 minutes of sun a day is plenty. Where you live, you might need hours.

So “avoid the sun” means radically different things depending on where you are.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-18 02:39:27+00:00
There is a perspective that I think will crystalize the nature of this:

Try to have a device made without sourcing parts of China. Maybe an assembled PCB. Maybe it's a tool of some sort. You will find that this is impossible, or much more expensive/worse experience than sourcing from China.

Now, imagine a scenario where China collapses. (In the broadest sense). Whether it's a war as you say, or any other scenario. Imagine this happens in a few decades, after we (The world) has committed to this path. We will have lost so much of the tools we build our civilization on, and it will take generations to get this tacit knowledge back.

What's good: We (humanity) can build things cheaper, and higher quality than ever before, thanks to China's exquisite, vertically-integrated, and automated manufacturing capabilities.

What's bad: We are putting our eggs in one basket.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-18 02:39:28+00:00
This is neat, and I'll play with this later, but I'm immediately reminded of "infinite tic-tac-toe" - played on graph paper, nominally an infinite grid, where the play is identical to tic-tac-toe, but the objective is to get 5-in-a-row instead of 3-in-a-row.
by hodgesrm | 2025-08-18 02:40:20+00:00
> When was the last time that productivity gains translated directly into a quality of life increase for the workers?

It's easy to be cynical, but productivity gains in agriculture are the main reason why we have enough to eat. Less obviously, they led to a huge improvement in quality of life for workers across all levels of society. The effect played out over hundreds of years.

US farms produce more than enough food for the entire population with less than 2% of the work force. [0] Surpluses of capital as well as increases in available labor from improvements in agricultural productivity were among the many factors that enabled the industrial revolution. [1] The root causes of the English industrial revolution were many, but it's hard to escape the importance of agricultural productivity in the mix.

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Causes
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-18 02:41:51+00:00
Nobody in the world cares about US constitution or opinion of US courts. It is absolutely irrelevant. If American company does business somewhere and breaks local laws, that part of their business can be disrupted or shut down (by blocking traffic, restricting financial transactions to certain entities, blocking shipments), executives may be arrested on arrival, there may be secondary sanctions etc.

This is absolutely common practice happening everywhere. There is a firewall in every country. Think of malware servers that America blocks.
by to11mtm | 2025-08-18 02:42:31+00:00
Something's weird but there's so many factors it's hard to say exactly -what-.

e.x. In the 90s there was a lot of 'culling' of older workers especially if they didn't embrace tech I know my father was forced into retirement despite being a fully capable worker (heck he did database consulting work for a transit system after the forced retirement, before he became a floral delivery driver.)

In his case, he wanted to retire, but honestly he tried to give me and my siblings a better life so the consulting and part time jobs were something to help pay off PLUS loans while also letting him and my mom be able to do vacations and the like.

But I'm also thinking about the factor of a lot of folks had a lot of hits.

Also 25-54 is such a rough demographic.... Lots of ways to just keep that metric clean FBOW.
by dabinat | 2025-08-18 02:43:50+00:00
One thing not mentioned here is that Safari only supports AV1 video playback on devices with hardware decoding support (M3 and higher). So it will not play back AV1 videos at all on < M3 systems, even though those systems could probably easily play them back in software.

So Safari is the reason AV1 does not have universal support across modern browsers.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-18 02:43:54+00:00
Factories need the 10 nails a day option, because factory tooling is custom, and tooling for high-tech has extremely low tolerances, so those 10 nails need to be custom and perfect. Often they also need to be certified/constantly calibrated by the nail maker.

When I was in aerospace management decided to move our fixture guy to a part time contractor instead of meeting him on his salary increase request. Almost every step of the factory other than some sub-assemblies were dependant on the fixtures, the fixtures needed to be constantly re-calibrated, etc. And there was no other fixture guy in the area. We fired like the most important person in the entire factory and hoped he'd stick around for part time contract work. I was no longer working there before it happened, but the first time a fixture needed calibration but he had other contract work, that whole section of the line is down at like $200,000 a day until he can come in. Like OK you scheduled him for the normal maintenance, but what happens when a forklift hits a fixture and he's off at some new clients site for 3 weeks? Or the AC goes out and the heat takes everything out of tolerance before you get it cooled off again.

And with JIT manufacturing having fixtures down throws off the schedule AND you don't have capacity to catch back up because you have capacity for the barest minimum you can get away with. These guys are very very important and yes it is terrible if we don't have their skills available on demand.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-18 02:45:21+00:00
I have a lot more respect for pages that block me outright than those that try to circumvent my blocking or whine about it.

The standard on the internet is that people send what they want and the recipients render it however they want. That’s how it’s always been, and how it always will be. That includes the possibility that they won’t want to send me anything. But once it is sent, it is my bits in my RAM, to do with what I will.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-18 02:47:04+00:00
reST inline syntaxes are pretty much word-based, which doesn't work very well with agglutinative languages. For example if you want to apply a markup to "이 페이지" in "이 페이지는 ..." (lit. This page in This page is ...), you need to do `*이 페이지*\ 는 ...` AFAIK. That would happen every single time affixes are used, and affixes are extremely frequent in such languages.
by mannykannot | 2025-08-18 02:47:19+00:00
It is not primarily a matter of difficulty. The problem with choices like these is that they seem to be predicated on a rather simplistic, formulaic view of software development - a view that experienced developers will recognize as flawed.

In this case, one tacit assumption is that a given developer will typically adopt just one of these approaches. Another is that they can meaningfully and objectively be ordered along either of the axes purportedly being measured.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-08-18 02:48:31+00:00
Are you referring to PEG stock price or actual profit? Because their profits growth hasn’t really “greatly exceeded” inflation. Here is the last 30 years of profits[1] (you can change it to YoY to see how much their growth over the last 5 years is). They in fact posted a loss in 2021 and under performed 2022. They shot up in 2023 and then down to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.

They are not what I’d call a profitable company. I think their stock is reflecting the AI bubble as plenty of people are speculating on power companies

[1] https://www.roic.ai/quote/PEG/financials
by greenie_beans | 2025-08-18 02:49:14+00:00
the price of electricity only goes up, despite what techno optimists tell you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610

i'm curious why? like truly curious. libertarians would probably say "regulations" and anti-capitalists would probably say "capitalism" etc. you would think with solar costs going down that this trend would be different. market dogma would say that the demand went up? thinking out loud, somebody plz ELI5
by schneems | 2025-08-18 02:50:14+00:00
> Sure but if a luxury car is safer than any other car it’s not because it was regulated to be.

"Sure but" but what? I see zero people commenting on an article titled "Safety Today is a Luxury" arguing that the only reason luxury cars are safer is due to regulation.

>So having a market where rich people can buy greater safety in the end gives greater safety to everyone.

I think this is a great pipeline, and and it's worked really well when it's been coupled with a followup: strong consumer protection regulations that make sure the best features are in all the cars.
by theshackleford | 2025-08-18 02:50:17+00:00
> There is still studies that show that graduating in 2007-2009 permantly stunted your career earnings. Those gradutes were very much screwed, statistically speaking.

Sure, but that’s not the claim being made here, so it’s irrelevant. Also, my earnings are just fine. So again, seems like some made out ok, and others didnt. It certainly wasnt a permanent white collar apocalypse.

> Also there wasn't a narrative in 2008 about trying to automate your white collar work away.

That depends on where you were. Plenty of people I started with were automated out of their original roles and ended up in entirely different careers. In my industry, one person today can do what used to take ten.

> What's your interpretation then?

The same as it's always been. I'll live in reality and not a fantasty land sold by executives trying to sell me on their AI turd, or hide behind AI as a smokescreen for employment activities they were going to carry out either way.

> LLM crashes and burns and Google just goes back to using humans again?

It’ll settle into its place. Some jobs will get knocked out, the same way automation reshaped mine. But this idea that AI is about to replace the entire white collar workforce?

Come back to me when this stuff isn’t confidently spitting out nonsense half the time because until then as far as I can see, this stuff at best lets people do more, it doesnt magically replace a workforce.
by 4rt | 2025-08-18 02:50:36+00:00
i used to make 'leaflet websites' in the 90s, then shopping carts. it was an era where everybody wanted an online presence to make themselves seem legitimiate. i expect this is the normal progression of anybody born in the 80s who could do software dev.

it got to a point where people would say they needed a website and i'd say to them that a facebook page would meet their needs better or eventually that a shopify site met their needs better. my business obviously folded.
by nytesky | 2025-08-18 02:51:01+00:00
This was covered in mainstream press (maybe WSJ?) a couple years ago.

I think renewed interest because of its plot points in Materialists. https://www.gq.com/story/materialists-leg-lengthening

I forgot it was in Gattaca right? That was an outstanding movie, should watch again.

There has been a weird emphasis on height even greater than in the past, maybe from online dating?

Short kings have been featured in SNL. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2Wc-nLNHtl/?hl=en

I’m shorter than Frank, and I never thought it was that much of an impediment, but I wonder if culture has moved to prioritize it even more in dating and careers? Frank had a wife, so it’s interesting how it persists.
Show HN: ASCII Tree Editor
by novoreorx | 2025-08-18 02:52:29+00:00
Show HN: ASCII Tree Editor

I've created a web-based editor for ASCII file directory trees called asciitreeman. It's designed to make it easier to edit and reorganize the output of the tree command.

You can try it out here: https://reorx.github.io/asciitreeman/

And the source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/reorx/asciitreeman

Some of the key features include visual tree editing with drag-and-drop-like operations, real-time sync where changes are immediately reflected in the ASCII output, keyboard shortcuts for navigation (J/K or arrow keys), and auto-saving your work to local storage.

What's interesting is that I used Claude Code to "vibe-code" this project in a very short amount of time. It was a fun experiment in AI-assisted development. For those curious about the process, I've included the prompts and specifications I used in the source code. You can check them out in the spec.md and CLAUDE.md files in the repository.

Hop you find it useful!
by mdaniel | 2025-08-18 02:53:01+00:00
Yeah, sure, and thankfully everyone has already switched all their teams to superior languages

Anyway, I believe what you're referring to is the "?" syntax that annotates types in Kotlin but doesn't help the resulting bytecode, which means that every single library ever would need to convert to kotlin to benefit

fun doit() : java.io.InputStream? { return null } kotlinc test.kt javap -c test.class public final java.io.InputStream doit(); Code: 0: aconst_null 1: areturn

So even they didn't have the courtesy of marking the result of a known Optional result as Optional<java.io.InputStream> when interfacing with the existing Java ecosystem
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-18 02:54:45+00:00
Uncalled for attack.

I don't think nationalism should be re-enforced even for 'ends I like'. I think it's better to convince people to do something on the merits. So I asked if there was a reason to push 'but China' and if you look below, someone gave me that. Which is what makes HN powerful and worth visiting. Attacks, not so much.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-18 02:55:27+00:00
If that bagel shop will ship bagels to UK soil or accepting money from UK citizens who are currently in UK as 4chan does, it will be subject to UK laws regardless of whether it has legal presence, assets etc. This is not matter of jurisdiction as some of commenters here believe.

UK has limited enforcement options, of course, but it’s their sovereign right to prevent illegal activities and/or punish for them within their capabilities. This is why 4chan lawyers are asking for political response as if UK were a rogue American colony.
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-08-18 02:55:34+00:00
Well they usually just ignoring the patents and just copying it. The problem is when state actor, potentially, can fund applications for patents and act as a bad actor in the future. Application costs tens thousands of dollars. I actually came across this a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44911423. Prusa, the creator of 3D printers, mentioned that Chinese companies are filing patents on parts he and his team originally released as open source. Just another clear example of how, for some reason, we in the West keep tolerating if not indirectly supporting this kind of behavior.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-18 02:56:40+00:00
The people in the free countries don't have to physically go somewhere. You do this over the internet, e.g. writing code and publishing it for others to use.

If you live in one of the authoritarian countries and it pretends to be a democracy to a sufficient extent that voting can actually change things, try doing that. If not, your options are pretty much "apply for the passport" or "sharpen your weapons".
by schoen | 2025-08-18 02:57:17+00:00
I think this clue style has been used in published crosswords before, with the additional constraint that the removed letters are removed in order and only once. In the NYT Daily crossword, these are usually clued with "apt letters missing from ..." or "letters missing from ..., fittingly". If you do a bit of web searching for such clues, you should find many of them. A couple of real examples:

Apt letters missing from "Te_h_ology r_view si_e" (CNET)

Apt letters missing from "_tea_th_" (SLY)

Note that there are many radically different crossword clue conventions around the world, e.g. U.S. style is often a definition but made more difficult with puns or misdirection (trying to get you to misinterpret the clue in a plausible way), British style is often based on a formalized set of cryptic crossword rules involving the spelling of the answer, many Continental European crosswords are often more direct tests of general knowledge without deceptive clues...

The "apt letters missing from" style occurs in U.S. style crosswords but is considered rather odd (because it focuses attention on spelling, which is not a usual emphasis for U.S. crossword clues). For the NYT Daily I think it originated with their "Puns and Anagrams" crossword series, which sort of emulates Cryptic Crossword clues, but in a less formal (and less difficult) way.
by wirelessRice | 2025-08-18 02:57:46+00:00
The best programmer I worked with was the tech lead for my second job, at a startup consultancy firm.

He was brilliant. Could understand a very deep and complex business system and remember all the hundreds of table and convuluted logic built into the system, but it was a bit overwhelming listening to him talk since he would overload so much information in such a short time frame

Maybe the better word is clever or brilliant. I have also worked with other programmers who build such systems, I think the best programmer just builds simple things
by to11mtm | 2025-08-18 02:59:14+00:00
> There are 340 million or so people in the United States - what’s the human capital problem?

I'll be bold and suggest that the 'third rail' human capital problem that almost feels sidestepped by the Parent comment you're replying to (i.e. maybe that's what they are asking, but really is the question everyone should be asking,) is the question of how there will be enough jobs paying into the overall 'system' to sustain any of it.

> Even for agriculture or construction it’s not like America can’t issue seasonal work permits or something. We have plenty of levers there and plenty of folks who would come work here.

But those would be can kicks, and 'properly' implementing most of those levers would just increase the cost. On some level 'work permits' are a can-kick, we are saying we can't pay people inside our country enough to do the work which in itself indicates an imbalance somewhere.

> Agreed, but if both parties get behind it, I don’t think it would matter too much.

I feel like this ignores the second+ order effects. US Petrodollar hegemony has been for better or worse a sort of global constant despite Nixon Shock [0] and we IMO don't have the necessary infrastructure to handle another round of that, because this time around we've got way less manufacturing capacity to keep the circus running [1].

The biggest problem being, 'complacency via placation' has been too ingrained in folks for lots of reasons, and now we are in a situation where people aren't willing to give up simple things. I mean you imagine the reaction of your modern American[2] if they had to do something like deal with gas rations, let alone limitations on how much waste they could create...

[0] - I bet folks are watching what's going on with Yen Carry trade very closely

[1] - I will die on the hill that 'Ashtabula Cranks' are a benchmark of basic US Manufacturing capability tho.

[2] - I am, but also I saw what happened during covid
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-18 02:59:18+00:00
Well the upthread example was graduating with "tens of thousands" in debt, which really should be managable for anyone who completes a worthwhile degree. Again, that's a new car, something most people pay for in 4-6 years.

The fact that you can get easy loans into six digits to pay worthless schools for worthless degrees is a different problem. "Free money" never leads to wise purchases.