MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tabemann | 2025-08-10 20:01:59+00:00
At my day job (not going to name the company) they have been pushing AI coding, and frankly I have found it to be essentially useless.

As a simple test, I used Claude under GitHub Copilot to develop a simple program to blink an LED using a task under zeptoforth (my Forth implementation for ARM Cortex-M, which is on GitHub so it should have been in their training set) on a Pimoroni Pico Plus 2... which took a few hours to complete because it was constantly hallucinating my API's and getting minor points wrong that I had to tell it to fix... for it to only screw something else up the next time around... repeatedly.

Then the next day they had us do an "agentive AI training" where we were supposed to use "agentive AI" to program example stuff... and I found it worked to a point ─ until it didn't work, and I could never actually make it do what I really wanted it to no matter how hard I "vibed". It just hit a stopping point where no amount of prompting would make it work.

And then there's the actual use cases for AI at my day job ─ I have not seen any that apply to me. I write only limited amounts of code ─ I do not churn out the boilerplate that AI is sold as obviating ─ and the code I do write has to be correct, for values of correct where simply looking correct is not sufficient (and an AI won't know the underlying math behind things or how to avoid things like race conditions).

If I actually used AI I would be spending more time trying to understand its output and having to fix it than I actually spend developing code, and I would have a harder time trusting the resulting code. I know how my code works because I wrote it ─ the same would not be true if I had an AI write my code for me.

Sure, there are people at my day job who have gotten fully on-board with the AI thing, and who see it as being useful for things like, say, changing the C++ standard for a whole project at a time. However, I would not be able to trust the project after that point myself. Yes, it would take much more time to manually update the code, but then it would be much easier to trust afterwards, and would require far less fixing to handle all the cases where the AI screwed up.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-10 20:02:17+00:00
I’d point to cultural issues that persist even now making motherhood unenviable, such as the norm of men taking little to no part in child rearing and house duties.

Being expected to raise the children, keep the house clean, keep up with laundry, do the grocery shopping, and keep the family fed among other things all on your own while your partner’s day ends after coming home from his 9-to-5 doesn’t sound very pleasant, and a lot of young adult women (especially in East Asia) saw exactly this play out with their parents so it’s only natural if it’s led them to become avoidant.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-08-10 20:02:22+00:00
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.

French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.

So it's not about that at all.

What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"

Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.

It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
by gwd | 2025-08-10 20:02:27+00:00
> The actual new and non-traditional meaning of “literally” is as a generic intensifier

"Literally" is used as an intensifier in two situations:

1. When speaking neither figuratively nor hyperbolically -- i.e., when the thing you're saying is... er, literally true. (e.g., "The beach is literally a five-minute walk from my house"; "You literally fold the cravat like this")

2. When speaking either figuratively or hyperbolically (e.g., "My head literally exploded"; "The island was literally catapulted into the 21st century")

I have no problem with the first; I do it myself. It's the second I object to.

Why? The hint is in #1 -- right now, literally is the only word we have to say that this actually really happened, that what's being said is neither figurative nor hyperbolic.

That is, the first is not a generic intensifier. It intensifies it because it's actually true.

Loads of other words that used to perform the same function have become meaningless intensifiers: "really" (from "real"), "very" (from "verily" -> "in truth"), "truly".

I think language should be practical. Double negatives are perfectly understandable and feel to me more poetic (if less logically expressive). Using "they" for a single person of unspecified gender is a practical and long-standing solution to a real problem. "Megabyte" is a lot easier to say than "mebibyte".

And, we need a word to mean "I'm not speaking figuratively or hyperbolically"; we don't need Yet Another Meaningless Intensifier. We have "literally", let's keep it.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-10 20:02:50+00:00
> If you read the article it is pretty clear that they hired a lot of people who lied about their identities and were not in fact legal workers.

I read the article. What is clear is different. It is that US Gov validated each and every one of these workers. ICE's false identity claim (multiplied by 107 workers) were made within a PR statement, likely made in response to demands about this mass seizure. Those claims do not jibe with US Gov's own stronger validation claims. Given ICE's recent trend toward making disingenuous and evidentially false statements in it's reactive PR, I am not inclined to trust it without clear evidence from sources of strong integrity.
by Y_Y | 2025-08-10 20:03:11+00:00
Fair enough. I think it qualifies as "essential complexity" and in my limited experience it's not a common use case and so doesn't make sense to optimize for.

In fact in my academic and professional career most of the highly "functional" C that I've come across has been written by me, when I'd rather amuse myself than make something readable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_complexity
by dv_dt | 2025-08-10 20:03:42+00:00
I wonder if it is sort of back in the form fediverse/activity pub. It's interesting to me that fedi admins often use relay feeds to help in kick starting nodes. Fedi has a more distributed interaction model then usenet but I wonder if more fedi feeds will end up serving a similar purpose as usenet aggregations. I have been a user of both and an admin of neither so these may be incorrect observations.
by akshayka | 2025-08-10 20:03:43+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. We decided early on against having a “non-reactive” mode. It would negate many of our core benefits (including importing from other notebooks), and it would also lead to a fragmented ecosystem — if someone shared a notebook with you, your experience with it would depend on whether it was executed in “reactive” or “non-reactive” mode. Still I appreciate the kind words about our editor and file format, and am sorry we can’t accommodate your use case.

We describe why we opted against “disabling” the graph at the end of this blog: https://marimo.io/blog/lessons-learned
by Qem | 2025-08-10 20:05:00+00:00
> depending on rate of empowerment of women

People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
by godelski | 2025-08-10 20:06:37+00:00
Please operate in good faith[0,1]

I think any reasonable person can interpret that there is a meaningful difference between an hour of work and several. The same way you might drive your friend across town for free but you're probably going to ask them for gas money and some beers if they ask you to help them move across state. An hour of my time is just less valuable than my entire day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by kev009 | 2025-08-10 20:06:41+00:00
OS/2 had an evolving marketing claim of "better DOS than DOS" and "better Windows than Windows" and they both were believable for a time. The Windows one collapsed quickly with Win95 and sprawling APIs (DirectX, IE, etc).

It exists in that interesting but obsolete interstitial space alongside BeOS of very well done single user OS.
by latexr | 2025-08-10 20:07:56+00:00
We do need to take action, but be mindful the data as presented isn’t yet entirely accurate. Note the text on the website:

> Notice: The positions shown here are based on leaked documents from a July 11th, 2025 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (…) The icons next to each name show whether we are displaying their confirmed personal stance or their country's official Council position. This information is updated regularly as new responses come in.

In other words, take care to not harass an MEP whose position is unconfirmed. Be respectful in your opposition of the law but don’t be accusatory if you’re not certain of their stance.

Looking around the website, I can only find four MEPs whose stance was confirmed, all in Denmark. Even for the undecided and opposing countries, every listed stance is based on the stance of the country, not each individual. They should really make this clearer; displaying misinformation could really hurt the cause.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-08-10 20:07:57+00:00
I used Signal as an example.

People will use what is most convenient. If tomorrow Signal leaves the EU, WhatsApp will happily take its place and will happily enforce the scanning and everyone will just have to fall in line.

What good is it if you are the only one of your family who has the only "uncompromised" app on your phone? How will you talk to them? Any message you send will be scanned on the other end.

That also applies if you have friends overseas. Your friend from Japan/US will be compromised as well.
by madrox | 2025-08-10 20:08:07+00:00
You’re totally right, and that’s why I think this era will fail.

Web 2.0 failed because eventually people realized to make money they needed to serve ads, and to do that they needed to own the UI. Making it easy to exfiltrate data meant switching cost was low, too. Can’t have that when you’re trying to squeeze value out of users. Look at the evolution of the twitter API over the 2.0 era. That was entirely motivated by Twitter’s desperate need to make money through ads.

Only way we avoid that future is if we figure out new business models, but I doubt that will happen. Ads are too lucrative and people too resistant to pay for things.
by kilna | 2025-08-10 20:08:17+00:00
Perl was ahead of its time, and likely because of it's Borg-like capacity to absorb a little bit of everything... it was unfortunately nigh on impossible to refactor. This is why Perl6 (nee Raku) took nearly 2 decades to be "done". It's a crying shame that it lost momentum, because many of the techniques that the features of Raku enable are as clever/succinct/revolutionary as the Schwartzian Transform was back in its day... but because the developer community is so very small now, Raku will have a very hard time catching up to the performance of competing languages.
by michaelt | 2025-08-10 20:08:51+00:00
> Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses

But would it not also, for the same reasons be good if the rich and powerful were exposed to Native Americans, military veterans, wheelchair users, religious minorities, minority sects of religious majorities, young parents, trans folk, mature students, reformed convicts, people with mental health problems, and so on?
by pessimizer | 2025-08-10 20:09:35+00:00
> There's a side component of the mens right advocacy movement that tries introducing the idea that there's some flaw in woman's rights movements because they're not true gender equality movements: inter alia, famously, lawsuits over ladies nights at bars

It's not just men's rights. There is a massive part of the West who believes that to acknowledge that women are physically different than men is the real sexism. Erasing female as a distinct category entirely is supposed to be the anti-sexist option. Females are just weak men, too lazy to get taller and stronger. Or men are just big, sterile, extremely strong women. Now that I type it, I guess it is a men's rights movement.

Turning "woman-hating" into "misogynist" into "sexist" was as men's rights as turning Women's Studies into Gender Studies.

edit: always remember that the history of "sexism" is not a history of people hurting people, it's a history of men hurting women. Sexism is a euphemism. The reason only males are required to do military service in Korea is because men decided that's how it should be. If men decided otherwise, it would be changed.
by echelon | 2025-08-10 20:09:46+00:00
While we're talking about corrupt politicians, why is this all happening all at once?

America, Great Britain, and the EU are all creating tracking, monitoring, and censorship regulations. All at the same time.

We're turning the internet into the 1984 inevitability it was predicted to become.

We need a Bill of Rights against this. But the public is too lay to push for this. Bolstering or eroding privacy rights will never happen in the direction we want, only the one we don't. It's so frustrating.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-08-10 20:10:41+00:00
> I wish we had at least the same amount of discussions about those things I mentioned above as we have about whether Opus, Sonnet, GPT5 or Gemini is the best model.

I mean we do. I think programmers are more interested in long term maintainable software than its users are. Generally that makes sense, a user doesn't really care how much effort it takes to add features or fix bugs, these are things that programmers care about. Moreover the cost of mistakes of most software is so low that most people don't seem interested in paying extra for more reliable software. The few areas of software that require high reliability are the ones regulated or are sold by companies that offer SLAs or other such reliability agreements.

My observation over the years is that maintainability and reliability are much more important to programmers who comment in online forums than they are to users. It usually comes with the pride of work that programmers have but my observation is that this has little market demand.
by yosefk | 2025-08-10 20:10:47+00:00
Actually I forgive them those issues that stem from tokenization. I used to make fun at them for listing datum as a noun whose plural form ends with an i, but once I learned about how tokenization works, I no longer do it - it feels like mocking a person's intelligence because of a speech impediment or something... I am very kind to these things, I think
by shuweiwang | 2025-08-10 20:10:49+00:00
For the past 6 months, I’ve been building a tool to combine my stock and crypto research in one place. It started as a personal project, but now it’s got AI analysis, technical indicators, and news feeds — all without switching between multiple sites.

It’s still rough around the edges, so I’m looking for brutally honest feedback from other investors.

If you were using a research tool like this, what features would you have to see before you’d actually use it regularly?
by throwup238 | 2025-08-10 20:11:20+00:00
You would need a lot of catalyst because the water infrastructure to supply several hundred million people in the US is massive, let alone the rest of the world.

The problem with those catalysts is that the latter two are minor components of platinum and copper/nickel ores and despite how expensive they are, the extraction is only economically viable as part of other mining. Their supply can only grow as much as platinum extraction allows and demand is already pretty significant with environmental regulations often necessitating their use. Any more demand for them will cause their prices to rise dramatically and its a long way before they become profitable enough to mine on their own (flooding the platinum market in the process which has much higher yields from the ores).
by godelski | 2025-08-10 20:11:24+00:00
Okay, so it seems like for the most part we agree in concept but disagree about the words used to convey them? Do I have that right?

I laid out what __I__ consider different forms of passion and while explaining yourself you met some of that criteria. So I'm not sure where the anger is coming from. I hope you're doing okay and I really hope we can have fewer abusive employers. I'm really empathetic to that, and have quit several jobs because situations like you mention.
by will4274 | 2025-08-10 20:12:06+00:00
Inviting individual users is a good pattern. If you want to allow an entire tenant into your tenant (e.g. if your parent company has a subdivision that has their own tenant), Entra has cross tenant access [1] for that use case.

Generally, you should say "only this tenant" unless you're a SaaS provider. And if you're a SaaS provider, you should really already understand the need to keep your various customers data separate.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/external-id/cross-te...
by khazhoux | 2025-08-10 20:12:51+00:00
In one camp are the fast code slingers putting something quickly without long design and planning. They never get it just right the first few iterations.

So in the other camp you have seasoned engineers who will have a 5x longer design and planning process. But they also never get it right the first several iterations. And by the time their “properly-engineered” design gets its chance to shine, the business needs already changed.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-10 20:13:53+00:00
Instead of relying on a compiler to figure out when an abstract series of operations exactly matches the single operation of a SIMD instruction, I'd rather the language support operations that closer match SIMD instructions.

Instead of recognizing a loop that acts on each memory location in an array, a language that supports performing an operation on an array can much more easily compile to SIMD instructions.
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 20:14:47+00:00
> My claim is correct!

No, it is not.

More precisely: it is not justified by the evidence you chose to provide.

> A trend line calculated for any natural dataset will never be exactly zero. This doesn't mean humans need to speak in scientific notation as if we are robots. You are well aware of that, so please stop playing silly word games that don't advance the discussion. The phrase "No trend" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe storm data, which is why governments say the same thing:

You cannot say the opposite of what words mean, expect to not get called out on this (especially on a place like Hacker News), then when you are called out expect to get a positive reaction to saying "boo, stop playing word games".

The average for the first 50 years is 79.24 units. The average for the most recent 50 years is 106.64.
Show HN: SnapTime – Simple Time Tracking. Powerful Features
by jirithecreator | 2025-08-10 20:14:55+00:00
I’ve worked in teams where time tracking was either: 1. painful Excel spreadsheets, or 2. over-complicated SaaS tools with 100+ features nobody uses.

So I built SnapTime – a lightweight time tracking tool with a focus on speed and clarity.

Key features: - Drag & drop to reorder and adjust entries - Copy/paste whole weeks in seconds - Calendar-like editing - Works for solo freelancers and scales up to large teams - Free for solo users, $1.99/user for teams

Tech stack: - Next.js + TypeScript frontend - Serverless backend on Vercel - Postgres + Prisma ORM - Stripe for billing - Designed to be fast even with years of historical data

I’d love feedback — whether on UX, performance, or ideas for integrations.
by will4274 | 2025-08-10 20:14:55+00:00
It's ok to use Entra for AuthZ. Just click the box that says "Require users to be assigned to this application" and assign them [1]. However - that's really the only AuthZ feature Entra has. If you don't enable AuthZ, you should not expect Entra to just magically do AuthZ for you.

Edit: I would add - simple allow/deny authz is only relevant for the very simplest of apps (where all users have the same permissions). For any complex application, users will have different levels of access, which usually requires the application to do AuthZ.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/enterprise-...
by x775 | 2025-08-10 20:15:16+00:00
Ultimately, both the EU Council and the European Parliament must agree on legislation for it to pass. The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process, effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments. Both have to agree. In the case of Chat Control, Denmark, as the current EU Council Presidency, revived the proposal (after it previously failed to reach agreement during both the Belgian and Polish Presidency). In order for this to pass at the Council level, at least 15/27 member states must support it. If this were to happen, it would then reach the European Parliament and would have to be approved there as well. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level.
by marojejian | 2025-08-10 20:15:40+00:00
Yes, "not having order" was the definition I was using. And that definition implies "high entropy" where the many micro-states each are equivalent in function.

But it sounds like the evidence suggests the opposite: the many conformations we see these proteins taking in different contexts serve a function. The proteins are more like machines with moving parts, vs. static legos.
by m_sahaf | 2025-08-10 20:16:06+00:00
I imagine a pipeline between Calibre-Web[0] and audiobookshelf[1] going through Abogen, where Calibre-Web supplies the books, Abogen generates the audio version of it, and Audiobookshelf serves them. Great solution for the hearing impaired.

[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

[1] https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-10 20:16:14+00:00
It's neither neutral nor a statement of fact. Look at the grandparent comment:

But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing...

This makes a lot of deeply political assumptions about what a "german" is and whether an immigrant can be (or become) one. I'm not here to comment on whether these assumptions are correct and they're certainly common ones, but embedded political assumptions simply aren't neutral or factual.