MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teiferer | 2025-08-24 08:01:32+00:00
> for me it seems like you have to actually run into problems over and over and figure out how to avoid the problems

This shows how immature the field of software engineering is. Imagine bridges or houses were built like that. Or your surgeon was trained like that.

Over time, we hopefully develop estblished norms, but at the moment, things are too much in flux. Put 5 sw engineers in a room, pose a problem and you will get not just 5 different solution proposals, but there will likely be strong disagreements on which approach is a good one.

"I recognize a good solution when I see it" is just not good enough for a serious engineering discipline.
by jaggederest | 2025-08-24 08:01:33+00:00
I generally work as openly as possible on github, and I am deliberately avoiding manual coding for a while to try to learn these (infuriating/wonderful) tools more thoroughly.

Unfortunately I can't always share all of my work, but everything on github after perhaps 2025-06-01 is as vibe-coded as I can get it to be. (I manually review commits before they're pushed, and PRs once in a complete state, but I always feed those reviews back into the tooling, not fix them manually, unless I get completely fed up.)
by rendx | 2025-08-24 08:03:13+00:00
> "We performed a prospective cohort study of a population-based sample of 2315 middle-aged (age range, 42-60 years) […] During a median follow-up of 20.7 years […] A total of 601, 1513, and 201 participants reported having a sauna bathing session 1 time per week, 2 to 3 times per week, and 4 to 7 times per week, respectively."

They are comparing the health differences of the number of sessions, using only people who claim to do sauna at least once a week over 20 years. They have nothing to say about lower frequency or no sauna at all.
by 9dev | 2025-08-24 08:03:22+00:00
Not sure about that. Think of Avi Loeb, for example, a brilliant astrophysicist and Harvard professor who recently became convinced that the interstellar objects traversing the solar system are actually alien probes scouting the solar system. He’s started a program called "Galileo" now to find the aliens and prepare people for the truth.

So I don’t think brilliance protects from derailing…
by hvb2 | 2025-08-24 08:05:53+00:00
> Imagine bridges or houses were built like that. Or your surgeon was trained like that.

While I don't disagree with you in general, this does feel a bit off.

By that logic you can call the field of music immature, and all of the arts. I think the difference is that its easy to experiment without high costs.

I genuinely think that if building bridges was cheap and quick, the fastest way to learn was to try...
by hobofan | 2025-08-24 08:06:08+00:00
I hate to do meta-commentary (the content is a decent beginner level introduction to the topic!), but this is some of the worst AI-slop-infused presentation I've seen with a blog post in a while.

Why the unnecessary generated AI pictures in between?

Why put everything that could have been a bullet point into it's own individual picture (even if it's not AI generated)? It's very visually distracting, breaks the flow of reading, and it's less accessible as all the picture lack alt-text.

---

I see that it's based on a conference talk, so it's possibly just 1:1 the slides. If that's the case please put it up in it's native conference format, rather than this.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-24 08:07:22+00:00
> with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it

You denied that deprivation was ever part of the term

Your statement was

> There is nothing in the word “theft” that implies depriving someone of physical property.

Where it’s literally there in dozens of definitions across the English language.

“Intellectual property” is a new legal construct, at most 500 years old, compared with physical ownership which dates back millennia. The term itself is a mere 200 years old, but mainly ignored in the US until just a few decades ago.
by jaza | 2025-08-24 08:08:51+00:00
Interesting! I didn't know about the London Overground, only visited London once (nearly 20 years ago).

I like our trains here in Sydney for similar reasons. The lines are almost all aboveground, you get to see plenty of neighbourhoods and plenty of sunshine out the windows (you also get the full panoramic scenery when going over the harbour bridge). And they're double decker and have lots of seating, so there's not nearly as much shoulder jostling as on typical metro trains (although there is frequent squeezing past peoples' knees to get out of a window seat).

Ironically, there is a brand new "metro" line here in Sydney (and they're building more metro lines), and many people prefer it - even though it has less seating, is often crowded, and is more underground - because it's faster and more reliable. Opposite of the situation in London. I guess the grass is always greener!
by pjmlp | 2025-08-24 08:09:06+00:00
To this day I would consider VB 6 the epitome of COM development tooling, neither .NET, nor the UWP trainwreck were as good, and C++ tooling only MFC is worth of mention, as something putting development experience first, instead of Windows division politics.

Quite awkward for what is such a key technology on Windows.
Show HN: Publish Markdown – A tool to publish Markdown file in one click
by dzky | 2025-08-24 08:09:16+00:00
Hi everyone!

I built this tool because I couldn't find a simpler solution to my problem (publish a markdown file and make it available online so other people can see). I hope you'll find it useful too!

Currently, what it does is only publish a markdown file, but I'm thinking of adding features like styling, custom URL, password-protected link, etc.

But I don't know whether people would find it useful.

Let me know what you think!
by elmolino89 | 2025-08-24 08:09:25+00:00
Small thing: keeping old books is a bit like a physical memory palace. Granted, it may be pointless/way to costly to cling to a collection of say outdated books read as an adolescent, but we tend to remember better if we can access at least the visual image of the cover.

So my advice is to take the pictures of book covers you have to get rid of. And organize them be it by the time period you have read them, topic or something else. One day you may be able to fish out memories you didn't think exist anymore.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-08-24 08:09:49+00:00
I've done this for years and swear by it.

Top 5 codebases for changing my mind about things:

Wietse Venema's Postfix mail server. Taught me tons about security posture, the architecture i'd describe as microservices before microservices was a thing, but contrary to the modern take on microservices (it's mostly a tool for decomposing work across large semi-isolated groups) this was primarily about security and simplicity.

Spring framework - this opened my eyes to ways of working that i hadn't really thought enough about before, the developers on that project have a culture of deeply considering the needs of their users (who are java developers often in an enterprise environment).

Git - the thing i like about the git code base is that once you've covered the objects database (e.g. blobs, trees and commits) and the implementation of refs, everything else just feels like additional incremental features. With those core concepts, everything else is kinda harmoniously built on top.

Varnish by Poul Henning-Kamp is another one - feels like he went to great lengths to make that code base a teaching tool despite the fact it's also a top tier reverse proxy.

Last one isn't a code base - but it will help with software design in the large; studying how the lieutenants model works in the linux kernel.

Thinking about my answers, i think i've highlighted something subtly different than "well designed codebases" it's more a list of codebases that left a notable long lasting impression on me because of design decisions they made.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-24 08:09:57+00:00
Wikipedia quotes Marcus Hammarberg:

> The basic concept of mob programming is simple: the entire team works as a team together on one task at the time. That is: one team – one (active) keyboard – one screen (projector of course).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_programming#Mob_program...

The website from this hn submission seems last updated 7 years ago, perhaps the term was more popular back then.
by Sesse__ | 2025-08-24 08:10:06+00:00
Well, like everything else: Is bandwidth your primary problem, or is CPU? Whenever I run apt now, download time is nearly nil but installation time is forever. Increasing installation time (and complexity, and disk space and cacheability on the mirrors) for saving some download time is unlikely to be a good tradeoff. Of course, if you are stuck with severely metered 2G somewhere in the woods, you may very well think differently. :-)

Similarly, I've turned off pdiffs everywhere; it just isn't worth it.
by polotics | 2025-08-24 08:10:47+00:00
Not having all the time in the world to learn, apply, and compare, each one of the many agentic offerings, it would be great if OpenHands would explain what distinguishes it, apart from being the "leading" option... What are the design choices, trade-offs and benchmark results? I must say it's great that AllHands releases specifically trained models for their tools-use, but then: how does that compare with the Harmony stuff eg with gpt-oss?
by iamthemonster | 2025-08-24 08:12:15+00:00
Absolutely superb. The 'hot bricks in a box' concept of very high temperature thermal energy storage has been really coming into its own with the fall of solar PV costs, and it's quite suitable for industrial consumers of medium temperature heat. There's also a heated granite storage silo in Scandinavia that's recently gone into operation. The rate of heat transfer in the heat storage material is a classic constraint.

I think this niche of 'very long duration, very constant slow rate of discharge' is clever, and it would suit industrial heat consumers but could also suit district heating for buildings in a climate that's predictably in need of heating all winter long (Canada for example).

They seem to have a decent grasp of the fundamentals, both of the technology and how to commercially carve a niche. I wish them well, and thank you for the post.
by nabla9 | 2025-08-24 08:13:06+00:00
There are old studies that did the same with LSD for normal religious folk before they attended mass. Control group got something else that just causes slight tingle.

The results were pretty much the same. Some people in the control group also had 'experiences', but they were not in the same direction as those who took psychedelics. Psychedelic spiritual experiences have common direction.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-24 08:13:28+00:00
Those of us coming from Turbo Vision on MS-DOS, OWL on Windows 3.x, and CSet++ on OS/2, saw it as an improvement over Win32, however a worse is better, the worse of all modern C++ GUI frameworks at the time.

Lets also add MFC was born as Application Framework, and dumbed down because hardcore Win16/Win32 C folks at Microsoft were against its original design.
by jjav | 2025-08-24 08:13:34+00:00
That is the best possible solution. That's how it works in my neighborhood and it is the best answer.

This neighborhood has a few amenities like soccer fields, tennis courts, bike/walk trails and exercise stations. In the early days of construction there was some debate about a HOA but that was fortunately shot down pretty quickly as far too toxic.

Instead, there is a property tax assessment on all houses in the area that covers for the city to maintain these common areas. Sure we pay for that, which is fair. The areas are maintained, they are open to all which is great, and there is no nasty HOA meddling in how people paint their houses or what flowers they plant or what car they buy. Best of all worlds.
by 2shortplanks | 2025-08-24 08:14:12+00:00
This article skips a few important steps - how a faster CPU will have a demonstrable improvement on developer performance.

I would agree with the idea that faster compile times can have a significant improvement in performance. 30s is long enough for a developer to get distracted and go off and check their email, look at social media, etc. Basically turning 30s into 3s can keep a developer in flow.

The critical thing we’re missing here is how increasing the CPU speed will decrease the compile time. What if the compiler is IO bound? Or memory bound? Removing one bottleneck will get you to the next bottleneck, not necessarily get you all the performance gains you want
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-24 08:14:40+00:00
There is literally a huge and prominent link entitled "Equal Earth Projection" in the middle, at the top, that when clicked take you to a description of what the intent of the projection was:

It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes. In addition to being rigorously equal-area throughout, other Equal Earth projection features include: • An overall shape similar to that of the Robinson projection. (The Robinson, although popular and pleasing to the eye, is not equal-area as is the Equal Earth projection). • The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth. • Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.

Perhaps that makes it clearer for you.
by PlunderBunny | 2025-08-24 08:16:22+00:00
Was I the only one that consistently experienced a crash when exiting Visual Studio 6 without first closing the solution? I think this was running on some flavour of Windows 98 in 1999 or 2000. So I got into the habit of closing the solution first.

To this day, I experience a very brief spasm of regret when I just exit Visual Studio without closing the solution first.
by wqaatwt | 2025-08-24 08:16:46+00:00
> convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.

Only way they could actually prove that is by demonstrating it empirically. i.e. by implementing the technology in products which consumers use.

Any government commission is inherently incapable of making a legitimate proactive decision is such case. You might as well use some sort of a lottery system at that point..
by wuschel | 2025-08-24 08:16:53+00:00
It is. Germany had to invest heavily in airport infrastructure and security.

One strong reason why Germany got a batch of F-35 instead of the very capable and EU manufactured Typhoon is the fact that the F-35 is certified to carry nuclear bombs, and the Typhoon need certification for this particular mission capability. (The ordonance in this case is US tech).

Source: Luftwaffe
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-24 08:17:06+00:00
> But being lax with docs and testing is not acceptable.

First: Those two things are not the same. The Zig stdlib and compiler have tons of tests, and it's actually quite rare to stumble over implementation bugs.

Second: I'd rather take no docs at all than per-function or per-type doc-headers which just repeat what the code does in natural language (and then may quickly get stale). Some parent wrote about generating docs with an LLM which is just a laughably bad idea, since even with perfect results you'll just get a redundant reiteration of what the code below does, just in imprecise human language, it would literally just be redundant noise.

Documentation mostly makes sense up on the systems level to explain high level concepts, not as 'this function does this and that...' level, this information already exists in much more precise form in the source code below the doc header.

But this sort of high level documentation doesn't make sense as long as a project is in the experimentation phase, and Zig is still one big experiment.
by aidanmorgan | 2025-08-24 08:17:57+00:00
AI systems are trained on and generate from vast amounts of web content—articles, code, images, datasets. These systems monetize at scale, but the creators whose work underpins them see no compensation. The concern is that without some mechanism of return, the open web risks becoming an unmaintained commons.

The Human Content Compensation Protocol (HCCP) is an early-stage proposal to address this. The principle is simple:

Human access remains free, content creators should monetise their work as they currently do.

Agentic AI systems that crawl, train on, or generate from content should be required to pay.

The draft outlines three layers:

1. Licensing — distinguishing human use from AI use.

2. Technical mechanisms — agent detection, request signing, decentralized identity.

3. Economic plumbing — micropayments, pooled settlements, bulk licensing.

This is very early, and that’s the point: protocols and standards only work if communities shape them. Like robots.txt or Creative Commons, the strength of HCCP will come from iteration, adoption, and feedback.

Request for support If you’re a developer, lawyer, economist, or creator:

Read and critique the proposal

Suggest improvements or alternatives

Contribute to the technical and legal design

Help test whether this can work in practice

The open web has always balanced openness with sustainability. The question is whether that balance will survive the AI era.
by keepamovin | 2025-08-24 08:18:40+00:00
This is so interesting. It’s suggests that a kind of thought sensing brain scanning technology could be used as training data for the nonverbal thought layer.

I guess smart people in big companies already consider this and are currently working on technologies for products That will include some form of electromagnetic brain sensing - Provided conveniently as an interface - but also usefully a source of this data.

It also suggests to me that AI/AGI is far more susceptible to traditional disruption than the narratives of established incumbents suggest. You could have a Kickstarter like killer product, including such a headset that would provide the data to bootstrap that startup’s super AI.

Exciting times!
by anthk | 2025-08-24 08:19:09+00:00
This current Jargon File it's full of innacuracies showed up by Eric S. Raymond which tries to set a Unix origin of hacker related words which actually belong to the MIT/ITS/Lisp environment.

I'd suggest everyone read the 1.5 version and forget any further release.

https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.5.0.dos.txt

If any, ESR should get its facts right and create a correct one under a big new version release.

Also tons of tropes from ESR are ridiculously wrong. Hackers can be really diverse on music genres and preferences. Millenials like me were born in a really 'slow' world so fast, progressive music was a reflection on how people needed instant access to data and facts from the world. Were were utterly bored, so, upbeat and fast Techno music was king.

Gen-Z ers are literally in the polar side. They already live 'accelerated', so what they actually are into it's slowed down tempos. If we were depicted as like travelling in a Ferrari at crazy speeds with Eurobeat, they would focus on drifting down curves and making a cool move.

And then there were the oddballs (jack of all trades) with really expanded down genres were crazy fusions were the norm, such as Diablo Swing Orchestra. You'll get the same behaviour on odd tastes, too. These kind of people didn't use neither Macs nor Arch+i3 combos, with fvwm/cwm and maybe some really different FVWM setup depicting real life papers sheets and whatnot. Instead of solving a problem analitically, they will get into crazy ways to solve someting, an actual hacked up way.

A gopher/IRC client inside a MUD? Done. Reading up HN by mail with a client quickly hacked up in Python? Yep. Writting down some CSS to mimic a newspaper? Sure. Reusing an RSS reader script to let flite to listen aloud (TTS) to your news sources while doing cleaning chores at home? Clever.

Also, on high IQ tropes, most hackers would be bored in seconds with any logic puzzle set to be solved easily with computers (such as the ones from SGT, the Putty guy), because most (if not all) of them can be solved analitically with Lisp/Haskell and whatnot in few minutes and call it a day.

Hackers hate doing the same task twice. I was never into Rubik puzzles. Once you can automate it, either with a computer or with Math with a simple pen and paper, there no puzzle anymore. Just different states.

Thus, lateral thinking puzzles (or maybe crime/mistery related riddles) would be a far greater challenge than solving Sudoku with a recursive algorythm which is a solved problem.
by avidiax | 2025-08-24 08:19:35+00:00
Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware.

Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation.

To be fair, I know plenty of people that would order the highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs, which is just a small fraction of one year's salary for a developer.
by wqaatwt | 2025-08-24 08:20:29+00:00
> We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.

Which is a fine? The industry eventually converged to just a handful of common standards on its own.

You can’t innovate without being able to experiment. Which is only possible if there are actual people using your product. Thinking that a committee of bureaucrats can replace that is silly.
by poink | 2025-08-24 08:20:52+00:00
I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible

If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-24 08:21:52+00:00
I'm not sure what do you mean by "whole file format", but if it refers to the write_file tool that overwrites the whole file, there is also the replace tool which is apparently inspired by a blog post [1] by Anthropic. It seems that Claude Code also supports the roughly identical tool (inferred from error messages), so editing tools can't be the reason why Claude Code is good.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/swe-bench-sonnet
by byronvickers | 2025-08-24 08:23:03+00:00
Yes, I strongly agree with all of this.

Relatedly, I am seriously considering getting a landline again so that I (and my young children) can once again live in a world where the barrier to a "quick chat" with friends or family is lowered.

I'd love for my daughter to be able to just pick up the phone, call her friend, and schedule a hangout for that afternoon. (Or for me to be able to do the same with her friend's parents).

And having a dedicated landline for this means none of this needs to involve the mobile phone intruding on our home life.
by njredar676 | 2025-08-24 08:23:45+00:00
Good point. We thought about this in advance.

The reason we chose to prioritize client support, then server, was replication. If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind. It would also allow us to make Librebox more practical for game development in its early stages.

We'd love to see how you could do the client-server model though. Perhaps, there is a new and more efficient way.