MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anktor | 2025-08-30 14:24:14+00:00
Without any context of culture or country, just trying to be helpful: in my limited (<20 total interviews) experience, I would think about budget issues.

Meaning, what you ask for (or how expensive you are perceived, if you have that strong resumee) for the industry you apply, may be too different and leading to limited access.

Sometimes I feel junior people have it easier (I felt like I did, personally) since the expense in salary is pretty limited compared to either other roles or more senior people
by leoc | 2025-08-30 14:25:12+00:00
If you're already fairly comfortable with computer programming, The Little Schemer would be almost perfect for this. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560993/the-little-schemer/ It would be well worth reading some of the sequel The Seasoned Schemer https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561006/the-seasoned-schemer/ too. In theory TLS should be accessible to anyone, but I've seen a couple of non-programmers bounce off it pretty hard. In those cases HtDP (as mentioned by m-a-t-t-i https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45073156 ) should hopefully be slow enough to be accessible.
by hmottestad | 2025-08-30 14:25:24+00:00
Been playing with Codex CLI the past week and it really loves to create a fix for a bug by adding a special case for just that bug in the code. It couldn't see the patterns unless I pointed them out and asked it to create new abstractions.

It would just keep adding what it called "heuristics", which were just if statements that tested for a specific condition that arose during the bug. I could write 10 tests for a specific type of bug, and it would happily fix all of them. When I add another one test with the same kind of bug it obviously fails, because the fix that Codex came up with was a bunch of if statements that matched the first 10 tests.
by uxcolumbo | 2025-08-30 14:26:05+00:00
Compared to other industries, I’ve always held, perhaps a somewhat naive view that a game studio is a collective of talented artists, writers, composers, designers and developers working together to create something extraordinary.

Making money to keep the lights on is important, but I like to believe that for many studios, the collaborative process and the art of game creation matter more than maximizing profit at all costs.

So what’s is driving this move to outsource?

1. Greed by owners and investors?

2. Can't be profitable without outsourcing?

3. Other factors?

I get large publishers like EA or Ubisoft just focus on making money, but I do think there’s a strong case for greater solidarity or even unionization among smaller studios and suppliers. Look at an example from an adjacent sector -- Rhythm & Hues, the VFX studio that closed despite its creative success, largely because it lacked leverage against film production behemoths focused solely on profit.

What role do you think generative AI will play in this landscape?

Will it allow those folks who can't find jobs in the game industry to come together and create more smaller studios or empower existing smaller studios, those driven primarily by creativity and innovation, to compete more effectively and bring new kinds of games to life?
by snowe2010 | 2025-08-30 14:26:17+00:00
> rather "we are not liable for scams which are only possible on a rooted phone".

Who is going to prove that though? It’s much simpler and less stressful on our court systems if a bank just says “we don’t allow running on rooted phones” and then if a user takes them to court the burden is on proving whether the phone was rooted or not rather than proving if the exploit that affected them is only possible on a rooted phone.
by rapjr9 | 2025-08-30 14:26:34+00:00
That's actually the ROM Kernel Reference Manual (RKRM), not the Hardware Reference Manual. The RKRM was another great reference manual for the Amiga. Quoting from the preface:

The Amiga operating system is composed of libraries, devices and also resources, all of which provide APIs and data structures for shell commands and Workbench tools to make use of. The foundations on which everything else in the operating system rests are the Multitasking Executive (“exec.library”) and AmigaDOS (“dos.library”).

dos.library itself depends upon exec.library, it is “just” another operating system component after all. You might have expected that AmigaDOS plays a much greater part in the operating system, but the Amiga operating system is not constructed around its DOS component. Almost every Amiga program makes use of exec.library, such as for accessing libraries and devices, but not every Amiga program has need of what dos.library provides. Of course, also libraries and devices can make use of dos.library, such as by opening files on the context of the caller of a library function. Great care must be taken to verify that the caller is indeed a process.

AmigaDOS encompasses dos.library, the CON-Handler, the RAM disk implemented by the RAM- Handler, the default file system and the command line Shell, as well as the shell commands on disk. These components came, mostly, from TRIPOS (Trivially portable operating system) [11] where they were part of a much larger networked multitasking operating system . As one of the last pieces to fall into place in 1985, the components were specially adapted for the Amiga and were not written by the original Amiga and Commodore developers. Both the Amiga operating system and TRIPOS had in common that they were built around non-copying message passing in a shared memory space, which enabled AmigaDOS to work “hand in glove” with the architecture and the means provided by exec.library.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-30 14:26:53+00:00
> but the hallucinations still happen, and making things up (especially APIs) is unacceptable.

The new models are much better at reading the codebase first, and sticking to "use the APIs / libraries already included". Also, for new libraries there's context7 that brings in up-to-date docs. Again, newer models know how to use it (even gpt5-mini works fine with it).
Show HN: Stripe stole $800k, IGNORED LEGAL LETTERS
by solsbayissue | 2025-08-30 14:27:05+00:00
Hi Hn Since 2024 Nov, Stripe has been holding off to our funds $800k+ acct_1PH9EbFcbviG0Uct and since then we had 0 absolutely 0 disputes and $800k was stayed untouched. We were using Stripe Standard Connect to help companies to get customers through email marketing, and ads and charge % of sales and we were specifically using direct charges which means we are not liable for disputes of connected accounts either

Absolutely ignoring support tickets & legal letters sent

Here is how their support SCAM works: 1) You contact chat 2) They tell you bear with me while I am looking into your account 3) They explicitly make you wait around 40-50 mins so you don't try again 4) They say they will need to convert this chat to email because only specialist team can handle these cases 5) Once chat converted into email, they completely ignore you 6) In the dashboard, it is shown TICKET IS CLOSED few mins after getting opening

I kept contacting them like 40+ times during past 4-5 months and it is EXACTLY SAME THING, 0 exceptions ever

Then we also sent legal letter and they completely ignored it

Now I dont have enough money to sue them unless I take loans and etc but this is absolutely insane level stealing

So I tried again TODAY EXACTLY SAME THING HAPPENED: 1) You contact chat 2) They tell you bear with me while I am looking into your account 3) They explicitly make you wait around 40-50 mins so you don't try again 4) They say they will need to convert this chat to email because only specialist team can handle these cases 5) Once chat converted into email, they completely ignore you 6) In the dashboard, it is shown TICKET IS CLOSED few mins after getting opening

Please someone help me find a laywer who would do this for %, I need my funds back
by lstodd | 2025-08-30 14:27:22+00:00
I beg to disagree.

The 5210 was the best, it was indestructible, cheap, kept its charge and still was functional even if you rode over it in your bulldozer.

The 8110 was the second imo, but only for the style.

And the 3310-ish were the runners-up. Cheaper than 5k series, and almost as useful.
by api | 2025-08-30 14:28:17+00:00
Getting specific allows people to go after their specific problems with pragmatic solutions.

The top poster was highlighting the fact that there are societies that are just as unequal (or worse) but better on many of these fronts. That doesn’t mean inequality is good. It means that it’s not a single underlying cause, and it’s not that simple.

Refusing to get specific leads to hand wavey populist demagoguery. In this case it leads to a broad unfocused crusade against “elites” and “the rich” that history shows often morphs into fascism (lots of Bernie voters went MAGA) or results in policies that land broadly on the middle and upper middle class and often spare the truly rich. Usually the result is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, since it’s easy to be a demagogue and pound the table about vague “underlying causes” without doing anything but virtue signaling and dog whistling to the base. No specifics means no KPIs for politicians, nothing to hold them accountable.

If you elect someone on a platform of making housing, health care, and tuition affordable and those things don’t become affordable, it’s hard to weasel out of that with posturing and bullshit.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-30 14:28:49+00:00
Hey man, everything supports your point so I don't think I'm surprised by that.

ICE deportations without due process: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Massive and ongoing violations of the US constitution: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Immigrants and their descendants voting against immigration: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Troops deployed to cities that were doing no worse than other cities but happened to be run by democrats: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Taking a sledgehammer to the federal government without any consideration for the consequences: check -> supports Rayiner's point

I wonder at what moment - if ever - you will look around and say 'Hey, you know what, I'm co-responsible for this mess and I own up to it'. I don't know if you have a daughter or not but if not we'll substitute some other female relative. Let's imagine for the moment that you do and you get the choice of leaving her in a room for a couple of days with Trump, Biden or Harris which would you pick? And if not Trump, why not, after all, what's there to fear, he's an upstanding citizens that any self respecting lawyer would vote for. There are plenty of MAGA's who are just too stupid to know better after a couple of decades on FOX and AM talk radio, so they get a pass, in spite of all the damage that they do.

But guys that clerked for the US court of appeals are held to a higher standard.

There is this proverb: a country gets the government that it deserves. Now, I have a crap government here at the moment, but at least I'm not responsible for voting it in and cheering it on while they do their crap and I still feel responsible just by being from here and the fact that they - unfortunately - represent me too.
by evidencetamper | 2025-08-30 14:29:17+00:00
It is impossible to establish causality in complex economic systems to be able to have evidence based decisions.

The current economic direction is not a consensus. The Western democracies are increasingly politically polarized and economically volatile.

Between the many different crises (unaffordable real estate, populational collapse, unsustainable environmental practices and global warming, increasing inequality, hollowing out of small and medium sized cities, and the list goes on), it is very difficult to justify the status quo.
by manguy43 | 2025-08-30 14:29:30+00:00
My 18-year-old nephew built an app during his service to help his peers. He saw guys struggling with fitness, money, and the stress of training. Some came from really tough family situations. So he taught himself to code and created ORD+, an app that tracks milestones, health, and finances to make service life a little easier. It’s still early, but he’d love your feedback to make it better
by sjs382 | 2025-08-30 14:30:08+00:00
You can count your own with this snippet. Just replace my username with your own. My count before this comment was 46.

curl -s "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=comment,author_sjs382&hitsPerPage=10000" \ | jq -r '.hits[].comment_text' \ | grep -o "—" \ | wc -l
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-08-30 14:31:03+00:00
I don't care who agreed to what, it's bad engineering practice to take a working successfully launched product and throw out its entire working software stack no matter how inelegant it seems. To what end? What did Fuchsia offer? When it finally shipped -- what, 2, 3 years late? --- custmers couldn't even tell it happened.

And in order to make it happen it also required writing the already-launched HTML-based UI in Flutter/Dart. Again ... why? What for? There wasn't even a working "native" Flutter at the time, despite promises, and there certainly wasn't a working accessibility stack -- no screen reader, no magnification, nothing -- so that all had to be kludged in. It was everything wrong with the "rewrites considered harmful" distilled.

Not to mention terrible for morale, execution, planning, budget, customer satisfaction.

I was just a lowly SWE 3 "IC" just in the trenches, not nearly as "important" as all that, so my opinion mattered not at all. But to me it violated every sound engineering / project planning principle I'd learned in the 15 years of my career up to that point. Just another event that led to me becoming quite cynical about the ability of leadership at Google to actually manage anything of significant complexity that wasn't ads/search related.

Again, Fuchsia .. very neat. But it didn't belong there.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-30 14:31:08+00:00
In languages with strong compile-time checks (like say rust) the obvious problems can mostly be solved by having the agent try to compile the program as a last step, and most agents now do that on their own. In cases where that doesn't work (more permissive languages like python, or http APIs) you can have the AI write tests and execute them. Or ask the AI to prototype and test features separately before adding them to the codebase. Adding MCP servers with documentation also helps a ton.

The real issues I'm struggling with are more subtle, like unnecessary code duplication, code that seems useful but is never called, doing the right work but in the wrong place, security issues, performance issues, not implementing the prompt correctly when it's not straight forward, implementing the prompt verbatim when a closer inspection of the libraries and technologies used reveals a much better way, etc. Mostly things you will catch in code review if you really pay attention. But whether that's faster than doing the task yourself greatly depends on the task at hand
by svat | 2025-08-30 14:31:29+00:00
Try it here (you may have to create a Google Cloud project, but you don't have to enable billing or start the free trial):

https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...

Click on the `+` (white over blue background) in the tab bar at the top that says "SQL query" on popup, and type the following (I use the GoogleSQL pipe syntax (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sq... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347188) below, but you can also use standard SQL if you prefer):

FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` |> WHERE type = 'comment' AND timestamp < '2022-11-30' |> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) AS total, COUNTIF(text LIKE '%—%') AS with_em GROUP BY `by` |> EXTEND with_em / total AS fraction_with_em |> ORDER BY fraction_with_em DESC |> WHERE total > 100 AND fraction_with_em > 0.1

(I'm in place 47 of the 516 results, with 0.29 of my comments (258 of 875) having an em dash in them.)

Edit: As you also asked about timestamps:

FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` |> WHERE type = 'comment' AND timestamp < '2022-11-30' |> EXTEND text LIKE '%—%' AS has_em |> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) AS total, COUNTIF(has_em) AS with_em, MIN(timestamp) AS first_comment_timestamp, MIN(IF(has_em, timestamp, NULL)) AS first_em_timestamp, TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(CAST(AVG(time) AS INT64)) AS avg_comment_timestamp, TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(CAST(AVG(IF(has_em, time, NULL)) AS INT64)) AS avg_em_timestamp, GROUP BY `by` |> EXTEND with_em / total AS fraction_with_em |> ORDER BY fraction_with_em DESC |> WHERE total > 100 AND fraction_with_em > 0.1

for most people the average timestamp is just the midpoint of when they started posting (with em dashes) and the cutoff date of 2022-11-30, and the top-place user zmgsabst stands out for having started only in late January 2022.
by skeltoac | 2025-08-30 14:33:20+00:00
> I'm totally fine with people who usually write about tech and suddenly write about baking, it makes life in my RSS reader that much more fun.

:) I recently read something in my tech feed about avant-garde perfumes and it ignited a new interest for me. I used to hate perfumes but now I enjoy them. I’m still going down that fragrant rabbit hole and grateful to have one less thing to dislike in the world.
by alemanek | 2025-08-30 14:34:18+00:00
My point is that people choose to outsource the complexity of running a rate limiter and blocking bad actors to Cloudflare and others like them is not the issue you make it out to be.

Why is it good for me to do it myself but bad to pay Cloudflare $20 a month to do it for me. No one is forcing me to use their services. I still have the option to do it myself, or use someone else, or not use anything at all. Seems pretty free to me.

Many AI scraping bots are notoriously bad actors and are hammering sites. Please don’t pretend they are all or even mostly well behaved. We didn’t have this push with the search engine scraping bots as those were mostly well behaved.

You are setting up a straw man with a “hey why not let this hypothetical we’ll behaved bot in”. That isn’t the argument or reality. We didn’t have the need to block Google, Yahoo, or Bings bot because they respected robots.txt and had a reasonable frequency of visits.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-30 14:35:23+00:00
At some point, you just need to go with the flow. Worrying about the metacognitive consequences of your work and trying to actively manage this with technological policy will turn into a death spiral. You should always try to take advantage of the momentum in the things around you. Our profession has a reputation for going out of its way to do things like push for a rewrite of a company's codebase after having seen the legacy for 20 minutes. This isn't even a chesterson's fence conversation. This is crude, impulsive behavior that makes any kind of productive business infeasible.

Also, many developers are suffering from severe cognitive load that is incurred by technology and tooling tribalism. Every day on HN I see complaints about things like 5 RPS scrapers crippling my web app, error handling, et. al., and all I can think about is how smooth my experience is from my particular ivory tower. We've solved (i.e., completely and permanently) 95% of the problems HN complains about decades ago and you can find a nearly perfect vertical of these solutions with 2-3 vendors right now. Your ten man startup not using Microsoft or Oracle or IBM isn't going to make a single fucking difference to these companies. The only thing you win is a whole universe of new problems that you have to solve from scratch again.
by rootnod3 | 2025-08-30 14:35:44+00:00
It is a bit similar. The first versions in Lisp 1.0 and the Lisp 1.5 paper were working, but not fully refined. SICP and others later presented it a bit more refined in my opinion.

There's also version for the metacirculator interpreter written in full on M-expr, but they kinda break the spirit of things.

I think the version of eval that we have is already pretty terse for what it is. You could maybe code-golf it into something smaller, or you could code-golf it into something fully immutable.

My only gripe is that they all rely on an already existing reader that parses the expressions for you and represents them. Which is exactly what the book is about.

Finding a small enough interpretation that does ALL of it would be a dream, but I doubt it could be anywhere near as concise as the (modern) Maxwell equations.
Show HN: SelecTube – Curated YouTube for Kids
by calchris42 | 2025-08-30 14:36:39+00:00
Sharing a side project that was inspired by some here on Hacker News. Many parents realize that while YouTube does have some really good content (ie. Mark Rober), it also has a lot of junk. The YouTube Kids app was not better. My 8 year old would get sucked into watching mindless videos by the algorithm + autoplay. I don't mind some screen time, but want it limited and of quality and value.

Some HN commenters mentioned how they carefully manage exactly what YT content their kids can watch. I thought "that sounds like way too much work". So instead I did the obvious thing and spent 10-100x more time building an app for my kids :)

SelecTube is a curated set of quality YouTube creators that I'm ok with my kids watching. It doesn't autoplay and doesn't add any ads (totally ad-free with YT premium). It has worked well for my kids - they spend less time watching YT videos, and when they do it is typically educational.

My other motivation was to play with AI tools, which I don't do much in my day job. This was built using Cursor. The landing page is mostly AI generated. Overall, for someone like me who can code, but does it infrequently enough to be super slow, Cursor was a super power. There were silly time consuming things it couldn't figure out, but also massive things it could.

Now I'm trying to decide whether to leave this more or less as-is, as a tool serving my own kid vs. continue building. There is a lot I could make better: - Some actual design - Add accounts to enable things like watch history, parent customization of content - Add more content - Somehow improve discovery and personalization of content without just recreating the original problem :)

Thanks for taking a look! Appreciate any and all comments.
by al_borland | 2025-08-30 14:37:14+00:00
For the basics inside a single code base, like error handling, maintainability, race conditions, etc, I’m thinking about most of that.

It’s more about adding additional tools to the stack. I will fight hard not to add in additional layers of complexity that require more infrastructure and maintenance to manage. I want to eliminate as many points of failure as possible, and don’t want the stack to be so complex that other people can’t understand how it all fits together. If I win the lotto, or simply go on vacation, I want whoever has to take it over to be able to understand and support it.

The thing I’ll be working on next week has a lot of potential race conditions, and I need to find a simple solution that avoid them, without creating a support and maintainability burden on myself and the future team. Building a database would probably be the easy solution, but that’s one more dependency and thing to maintain, and also means I need to build a front end for people to access it. If I can do it without a database, that would be ideal.
by csmpltn | 2025-08-30 14:37:34+00:00
This is the wrong take.

There's a point beyond which LLMs are an overkill, where a simple script or a "classic" program can outdo the LLM across speed, accuracy, scalability, price and more. LLMs aren't supposed to solve "universal computing". They are another tool in the toolbox, and it's all about using the right tool for the problem.
by chongli | 2025-08-30 14:37:41+00:00
Keeping a count of how many views and comments a blog post gets is not analytics. Analytics is gathering deep data about the demographics of those numbers. It’s learning about the age, sex, race, income, country of origin, education, occupation, etc. of your readers.

This is information that’s irrelevant to a person who is merely passionate about a topic and wants to write and share about it. It’s information used solely for increasing engagement and making money.