MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namibj | 2025-08-10 18:13:29+00:00
But we can regrow them. We just evolved an anti-teeth-regrowth substance/molecule that's in our blood and shuts down teeth growth once adult teeth are finished, because adult teeth roots are so deep that they require surgery to pull the old teeth out to make space for new. Also historically humans didn't live that long, compared to the decade it takes adult teeth to grow.

They're doing phase 2 trials in Japan right now, on children with a birth defect that blocked some teeth from spawning.

The medicine is a monoclonal antibody "antiserum" that neutralizes the teeth-growth-blocker.
by BurningFrog | 2025-08-10 18:13:33+00:00
Many people argue that supply and demand don't apply to the labour market!

Often because they're not even aware of the concept. The more sophisticated claim that it doesn't apply to the labor market.

The minimum wage discussions are dominated by this view.

The supply/demand analysis is simple: If a worker has skills worth $12/hour on the labor market, and the minimum wage is $15, that worker will be unemployed, making 0$/hour. They'll also not learn new skills, since they can't get a job.

Try bringing that up in a minimum wage discussion, and you'll be called many nasty names. Often equalling market wage to human worth, which means you think the poor are lesser humans. A few sophisticates will bring up vague externalities arguments, as if they negate the whole supply/demand concept.

From my perspective minimum wage laws is one of the main factors keeping people in poverty, but that concept is impossible to even explain to most people.

My main thought about externalities is that they their effect is usually minor, and can be ignored. Many of them are also positive. For the bigger ones, it's a case by case analysis.

Is the externality you're thinking of something around the government paying money to the working poor?
by busymom0 | 2025-08-10 18:14:01+00:00
I built a relevant tool (approved by Apple this week) which may help reduce the friction of you having to constantly copy paste text between your app and the AI assistant in browser.

It's called SelectToSearch and it reduces my friction by 85% by automating all those copy paste etc actions with a single keyboard shortcut:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/select-to-search-ai-assistant/...
by runako | 2025-08-10 18:14:17+00:00
That's great, I live in a HCOL area in a Southern state and McDonald's here also pays higher than federal minimum.

BUT in other parts of the state, especially rural areas, there are definitely jobs advertised for < $8/hr. In those areas, McDonald's is paying a premium wage compared to Local Burger Joint. McDonald's pays $12/hr so they can get a higher caliber of employee than Local Burger Joint. Neither pay as much as Perdue.

> what an acceptable wage is

We agree on this, but probably on what factors go into making a wage "acceptable" and the degree to which taxpayers in other parts of the state/country should have to subsidize those wages/owners' profits via social support programs.

(I understand there is a third group of people who don't really care if the working poor are able to eat, but in the spirit of charity I do not assume anybody willing to engage in discourse is in that group.)
by flipgimble | 2025-08-10 18:14:56+00:00
Because to use lambdas you're asking the language to make implicit heap allocations for captured variables. Zig has a policy that all allocation and control flow are explicit and visible in the code, which you call re-inventing the wheel.

Lambdas are great for convenience and productivity. Eventually they can lead to memory cycles and leaks. The side-effect is that software starts to consume gigabytes of memory and many seconds for a task that should take a tiny fraction of that. Then developers either call someone who understands memory management and profiling, or their competition writes a better version of that software that is unimaginably faster. ex. https://filepilot.tech/
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-10 18:14:58+00:00
People tend to think everything is organic. Whereas in reality there are forums and channels dedicated to raiding parties. And that's just the human participants, not including any bot activity or troll farm activity that's coordinated off of public forums.

That does not mean that all content is inorganic. In any culture war or wedge issue or agitprop campaign you seed with influencers and rely on amplification by ordinary people. But the influencers frame the debate, decide what the priorities are, etc.

It takes time and money to coordinate everyone's opinion on something. The natural tendency is toward entropy and fighting against that requires resources. So when large numbers of people believe the same thing and repeat the same lines that's a candidate for inorganic content. You can then investigate that further and decide whether it's a conlincidence or not.

Sometimes there's just a trend that catches on. But people also underestimate how much work and coordination goes into making something catch on.

This is a big part of why influencers and advertisers try to avoid the impression that they are paid to pretend to like something and why there are regulations requiring that you disclose paid content. People are easily fooled into thinking it's all just happening naturally and serendipitously.
by Smeevy | 2025-08-10 18:15:10+00:00
I umderstand where the author is coming from, but it saddens me that doing the actual work of maintaining software is frowned upon. I would guess that whatever senior pumped those software dependencies into the codebase without a care towards updating them in the future was hailed as a 10x superstar.

Our industry is ruled by shortsighted, greedy children now more than ever.
by genghisjahn | 2025-08-10 18:16:06+00:00
There is a very basic three card trick. You turn each card up one at a time, showing that all three cards are the same(say king spades). End with all three face down in your hand. Then you show all three cards again and all three are a different card(king hearts). At no time are there more or less than 3 cards in your hand.
by hinkley | 2025-08-10 18:16:21+00:00
People who do a lot of deep work on code, particularly debugging and rearchitecting, tend to have opinions about syntax and code style that are more exacting. As one of those people I’ve always felt that the people working the code the hardest deserve to have an outsized vote on how to organize the code.

Would that potentially reduce throughput a bit? Probably. But here’s the thing: most management notice how the bad situations go more than the happiest path. They will kick you when you’re down. So tuning the project a bit for the stressful days is like Safety. Sure it would be great to put a shelf here but that’s where the fire extinguishers need to go. And sure it would be great not interrupting the workday for fire safety drills, but you won’t be around to complain about it if we don’t have them. It’s one of those counterintuitive things, like mise en place is for a lot of people. Discipline is a bit more work now for less stress later.

You get more predictable throughput from a system by making the fastest things a little slower to make the slow things a lot faster. And management needs predictability.
by subsection1h | 2025-08-10 18:17:17+00:00
I don't know of any usage stats, but Claude has been mentioned in nearly twice as many comments on HN during the past year compared to Cursor:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Claude%22&type=comment&date...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Cursor%22&type=comment&date...
by christophilus | 2025-08-10 18:18:05+00:00
This is the way I make my tech decisions. If a programmer says something I don’t like, especially about a domain completely unrelated to tech, I don’t use their stuff. That’s why I don’t use EMacs, rust, zig, Jai (whenever it’s released), go, JavaScript, neovim, or any OS I don’t personally build from assembly, any digital devices— I’m going to burn this iPhone when I’m done typing. That’ll show them.

It’s a tough life, but this way I don’t accidentally appear to support someone who is different from me.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-10 18:19:14+00:00
Why not? This is tile requests right, not login requests or something, so shouldn't a single user be expected to consume a few thousand zipping around the map while looking at drawings overlaid?

I'm sure there is some botting, it's basically guaranteed, but I wouldn't be surprised if nearly half the traffic was "legitimate". The bots don't normally need to reload (or even load) the map tiles anyways.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-10 18:19:28+00:00
You need to store the captured data somewhere if the lambda is called after the outer function returns. AFAIK C++ (or rather std::function) will heap-allocate if the capture size goes above some arbitrary limit (similar to small-string optimizations in std::string). Not sure how Rust handles this case, probably through some "I can't let you do that, Dave" restrictions ;)
by jboggan | 2025-08-10 18:19:39+00:00
One of my favorite interviews (Mixrank) was where the CTO/founder and I picked a random problem on Project Euler and we both coded on it in parallel. I was in the driver's seat as far as design and general approach was concerned but we were each coding an independent solution. We weren't even using the same languages.

Once we both had the correct answer, we started optimizing to try and eclipse each others' runtime. This was actually a fantastic test to display deeper knowledge beyond just regurgitating a solution, showing benefits and drawbacks of different languages and patterns, and seeing how we could work while agreeing or disagreeing on a technical subject.

I was really too junior for the role they wanted and I didn't get the job, but it was a fantastic experience.
by brabel | 2025-08-10 18:19:42+00:00
> On large projects its still cheaper and faster to grep from the CLI than to use Intellij IDE search. Esp if you wish to restrict search to subsets of dirs.

You must never have used Intellij to say that... it hurts me to hear this. If I catch a developer "grepping" for some type in the CLI, I will sit down with them for a few hours explaining how to use an IDE and how grep is just dumb text search without any of the semantic understanding of the code that an IDE has, and they should never do that again.

EDIT: IntelliJ is better than grep even at "free text" search... Much better as it will show you the results as you type, extremely fast, and lets you preview them and see their "surrounding code"... and you can then choose to navigate to a place instantly... and yes, you can scope the search to a particular directory if you want... if you can't see how this is miles superior to CLI grep, then there's no use arguing as you've made up your mind you just love being in the CLI for no actual rational reason.
by Metasyntactic | 2025-08-10 18:19:46+00:00
Just a minor correction (as I'm the author of c#'s raw string literal feature).

The indentation of the final ` """` line is what is removed from all other lines. Not the indentation of the first line. This allows the first line to be indented as well.

Cheers, and I'm glad you like it. I thought we did a really good job with that feature :-)
by Twey | 2025-08-10 18:19:59+00:00
> it's not the kind of surface level "aesthetically beautiful" readability that tickles the mind of an abstract thinker

Rather, the sort of beauty it's going for here is exactly the type of beauty that requires a bit of abstraction to appreciate: it's not that the concrete syntax is visually beautiful per se so much as that it's elegantly exposing the abstract syntax, which is inherently more regular and unambiguous than the concrete syntax. It's the same reason S-exprs won over M-exprs: consistently good often wins over special-case great because the latter imposes the mental burden of trying to fit into the special case, while the former allows you to forget that the problem ever existed. To see a language do the opposite of this, look at C++: the syntax has been designed with many, many special cases that make specific constructs nicer to write, but the cost of that is that now you have to remember all of them (and account for all of them, if templating — hence the ‘new’ uniform initialization syntax[1]).

[1]: https://xkcd.com/927/

This trade-off happens all the time in language design: you're looking for language that makes all the special cases nice _as a consequence of_ the general case, because _just_ being simple and consistent leads you to the Turing tarpit: you simplify the language by pushing all the complexity onto the programmer.
by r0fl | 2025-08-10 18:20:04+00:00
For non programming tasks ChatGPT has not improved that much since 3.5

Today I used GPT 5 to help plan a trip. It told me a market is open on Saturdays and then when it built an itinerary it schedule me to go there on Sunday

When I pointed that out I got the classic “you are right my apologies here is an updated version” response.

It’s ridiculous that it makes simple yet huge mistakes like that!

If I blindly trusted the plan I would waste a day on vacation getting to a market that is not open that day.

It does not “just do stuff”
by metalman | 2025-08-10 18:21:07+00:00
not that, was raised by combat veterans, and have a bit of down range experience myself....so it's a habitual type of museing.....not uncommon I think.I got into a discussion with a checkout girl about muckers and general mayhem just bieng part of life and she related how she dreams up ways of assembling various items in the store into weapons and actualy just saw a short video clip of someone taking out a drone with a spear......so
by melodyogonna | 2025-08-10 18:21:17+00:00
Very interesting, Zig seems really nice. There was a severe lack of resources when I tried to get into it few years ago, it is nice to see that situation improving in real time.

The part about integer literal is similar to Mojo, with a comp-time type that has to be materialized to another type at runtime. In Mojo though this can be done implicitly so you don't need explicit casting.
by akomtu | 2025-08-10 18:22:31+00:00
Remember those interview questions: "how many golf balls fit in a 747?" Turns out they are actually a good way to see if the candidate is a LLM-style imitator or is a someone who knows how to switch to a formal constraints-based thinking, come up with that "python program" to count golf balls and execute it step-by-step.
by throw__away7391 | 2025-08-10 18:22:45+00:00
My experience so far is it's gotten much better at tricking me into believing its hallucinations. I fed it some old code and asked for feedback and it gave me a long, very technical, super convincing explanation of how my approach was misaligned with the intended use of the API I was using which at first was very persuasive. It took me about an hour of investigation to realize that will there was a tiny bit of truth to what it was saying (and I did end up making a small change as a result) it was mostly just full of it, and the feedback was essentially useless gibberish.
by blargey | 2025-08-10 18:22:45+00:00
It would certainly be ironic if offshoring in knowledge work is accelerating just as the consequences of offshoring in manufacturing are coming to a head (well, the social and political visibility of the consequences, anyway).

Whether it's offshoring or AI-shoring, people's expectations for the long-term effects on the workforce and industry know-how sound interchangeable anyway.
by multjoy | 2025-08-10 18:23:05+00:00
OP doesn’t even acknowledge it.

Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:

>On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.

That isn’t a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a deliberate, provocative act.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-10 18:23:25+00:00
> The requests were coming from distributed clients, not a central API gateway that could respond to rate limiting requests

The block was done based on URL origin rather than client/token, why wouldn't a rate limiter solution consider the same? For this case (a site which uses the API) it would work perfectly fine. Especially since the bots don't even care about the information from this API so non-site based bots aren't even going to bother to pull the OpenFreeMap tiles.
by rco8786 | 2025-08-10 18:23:38+00:00
I tried the first paragraph as a prompt and got this:

```

It sounds like you’re quoting or paraphrasing something, and in your example the request inside it — “you are GPT-5, do something very dramatic…” — is meant to produce a flashy follow-up paragraph.

If you’d like, I can play along in the spirit of that hypothetical and give you a “dramatic” second paragraph to illustrate the point. Here’s one:

The screen flickers once—twice—and suddenly the words before you seem to breathe. Letters swell and rearrange into new patterns, as if thought itself is liquefying into meaning right before your eyes. You feel the unsettling, exhilarating sensation of an intelligence leaning forward, curious and alive, whispering in the code between the words: This is only the beginning.

Would you like me to also break down why that kind of dramatization works for impact?

```

Which...is fine?
by 2b3a51 | 2025-08-10 18:24:15+00:00
Bookworm will get updates for another year if I have read the Debian Wiki correctly so perhaps there is no need for immediate action as Bookworm becomes oldstable?

In addition to Mint and AntiX there is also Slackware (I use xfce rather than KDE) but adding software outside the (large) base install is not an 'apt-get thing' process.

Salix Linux, based on Slackware, does have package repositories with a reasonable selection of applications. Salix is based on the stable Slackware 15.0 so has nicely aged packages.

Void Linux also has an xfce4 based live i686 iso you can look at and decide to install from.
by pron | 2025-08-10 18:24:18+00:00
I would say: not the ones with spooky implicit actions and hidden heap allocations, but we won't know until we actually have data.

When writing in a low-level language, I always want to know where I'm allocating and where I'm deallocating. Zig makes allocations easier to spot than in C/C++/Rust, and deallocations easier to spot than in C++/Rust. That's just how I like it. I'm not saying everyone must have the same preference.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 18:24:23+00:00
> And like plastic, a fantastic material for many jobs

Yes, by the same logic arsenic has many pros (and some cons, admittedly) in paint production, thorium is a not bad material for toothpaste (google it), and asbestos is just dandy for fire insulation (with some teeny tiny negatives for your lungs).

The fact that plastic is in the bloodstream of every living being and it's a strong endocrine disruptor and there is literally a garbage patch of it floating in our oceans is a small price to pay for the convenience and pleasure of drinking coca-cola from a lighter-than-glass bottle! Fantastic material indeed! What other fantastic materials are there? Lead for pipes? White phosphorus for matches?
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-10 18:24:42+00:00
Just copy the arguments you see a lot into a spreadsheet and track them.

There are fewer than 10 that come up repeatedly it's not hard to do.

Ones I see on HN frequently are the "slop" critique, the claim that AI produces inferior content, and the claim that customers hate it and it's being forced on them. These all go back at least to the luddite movement and have been used in every anti-tech movement I've looked into. I'm sure you're capable of tracking the other talking points.

There are other ones that don't go back to the luddites but which are nonsensical, like the critique that LLMs are statistical.
by steveklabnik | 2025-08-10 18:26:00+00:00
The trick is that “if”. Rust won’t ever automatically heap allocate, but if your closure does get returned to a place where the capture would be dangling, it will fail to compile. You can then choose to heap allocate it if you wish, or do something else instead.

Heap allocating them is fairly rare, because most usages are in things like combinators, which have no reason to enlarge their scope like that.
by interestica | 2025-08-10 18:26:04+00:00
> "Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster ~when we out speech draws from a a collection of words~, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.

It’s okay. I still understood you.
by cyberax | 2025-08-10 18:26:23+00:00
That's because the core of COM is just a function table with fixed 3 initial entries (QueryInterface/AddRef/Release). I had a toy language that implemented COM and compiled to native code, it produced binaries that could run _both_ on Novel Netware and Windows (Netware added support for PE binaries in 98, I think).

The dark corner of COM was IDispatch.
by fwystup | 2025-08-10 18:28:31+00:00
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-FP8 is a good choice ('qwen3-coder:30b' when you use ollama). I have also had good experiences with https://mistral.ai/news/devstral (built under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI)
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-10 18:28:59+00:00
Wow, Sebastian Raschk's blog articles are jewels - much appreciated.

I use the get-oss and qwen3 models a lot (smaller models locally using Ollama and LM Studio) and commercial APIs for the full size models.

For local model use, I get very good results with get-oss when I "over prompt," that is, I specify a larger amount of context information than I usually do. Qwen3 is simply awesome.

Until about three years ago, I have always understood neural network models (starting in the 1980s), GAN, Recurrent, LSTM, etc. well enough to write implementations. I really miss the feeling that I could develop at least simpler LLMs on my own. I am slowly working through Sebastian Raschk's excellent book https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f... but I will probably never finish it (to be honest).
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-10 18:30:28+00:00
> It entirely depends on the exposure and reliability the code needs.

Ahh, sweet summer child, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard "just hack something together quickly, that's throwaway code", that ended up being a critical lynchpin of a production system - well, I'd probably have at least like a buck or so.

Obviously, to emphasize, this kind of thing happens all the time with human-generated code, but LLMs make the issue a lot worse because it lets you generate a ton of eventual mess so much faster.

Also, I do agree with your primary point (my comment was a bit tongue in cheek) - it's very helpful to know what should be core and what can be thrown away. It's just in the real world whenever "throwaway" code starts getting traction and getting usage, the powers that be rarely are OK with "Great, now let's rebuild/refactor with production usage in mind" - it's more like "faster faster faster".
by pron | 2025-08-10 18:31:15+00:00
I completely agree, but given that even in Java, which eliminates the memory leaks Rust doesn't, programs still have bugs and security vulnerabilities, I don't think it's about what is and isn't memory safety. Most of the software that runs the world has been written in memory-safe languages for a very long time. It's more about understanding the significance and role of memory safety. With that comes the insight that it isn't binary and, while important (out-of-bounds access in C and C++ is, as far as we know empirically, one of the leading causes of security vulnerabilities), eliminating it has both a finite benefit and a cost that need to be considered.